#but that means he should totally be able to read OBJECTS at museums

[stealingpotatoes]

Cal in a natural history museum. Can he see the memories of the dinosaurs (or you know, insert Star Wars equivalent)?

I'm so sorry to be the one ruin ur new year like this but most dinosaur skeletons in museums are casts, not real skeletons ):

[legends-live-in-memories]

Downtown Detour

ayo its ya boi back with more timari and ignoring my wips cuz im plagued with timari brainrot

written in the same au as: 

Rooftop Rendezvous and��

Alleyway Altercation (NSFW)

AO3 link to the series

Timari 2.2K words, no warnings other than references to intimate relations

Summary:

“Red Robin makes a breakthrough in his investigation of the new Gotham Rogue and goes to confront her about it.”

without further ado

Tim could not believe this. The new Rogue, Karma—Marinette Dupain-Cheng— had been spotted a total of three times since their last encounter by either his brothers or the cops and none have been able to subdue her for more than fleeting seconds. She was caught breaking into a politician’s house when the man was away on another one of his exotic hunting trips; another artefact was stolen from the museum after that, one they were unable to retrieve; and finally she was last seen escaping from Robin by the mayor’s office, only no one know what was taken from there. All three times she was spotted and nothing to show for it other than bruised egos and missing items. 

During his little investigation into her supposed civilian name, he came across a series of interesting police reports from Paris, France of all places. A penchant for grand theft auto since her teenage years as well as a series of vandalism and reports of stolen student records from her high school at the time. There was even a rescinded expulsion, a litany of suspensions and a plethora of unexcused absences. She was a cookie cutter criminal in the making. But for Tim, it didn’t make sense. While all the evidence points to a child delinquent grown into an adult criminal, something about the situation set Tim’s teeth on edge. There was something missing. Something she wanted Tim to find out, if her giving him her name was anything to go by. But what?

She had no local address on file and the last piece of legal information that had any traceable location was a one-way ticket to Shanghai from four years ago. Immediately after her high school graduation. All her social media was deleted around the same time. She had effectively gone off the grid up until her emergence as a part of Gotham less than stellar night life. But why?

A closer look at her time in Paris led him to discover an interesting trend but it wasn’t anything concrete. Starting about when Karma—Marinette— was thirteen, her unexcused absences lined up with some of their infamous akuma attacks. While at first it could be argued that many children had unexcused absences in the beginning, and she had less than perfect attendance even before then, her disappearances also coincided with attacks far from her school which was where she should have been at those times. Then there were reports filed by police who spoke with her parents about her sneaking out at night which also lined up with notable akuma attacks. Either she was an overzealous fan of the city’s temporary heroes, or she was constantly in the thick of the action and kept it a secret from people close to her, letting her reputation suffer for it.

‘Trust me, I know all about acting in the name of the greater good. The good-girl act got tiring after a few years,’ she had said. ‘Much more rewarding to give into your own self-interests,’ she continued. ‘Something you could try emulating.’

Her words echoed in his mind. He never thought much of them before, his mind preoccupied with other things her mouth was doing that night. It could also be chalked up to everyone being the hero of their own story and she had just coloured her own experiences. But just maybe… 

Before he could entertain that train of thinking, his phone alarm was alerting him of his scheduled patrol. Hopefully he could catch a hold of his current person of interest and get some more answers. And perhaps get a read on what her intentions are in this city. With him.

~~~~~~~~

The skyline was a welcoming sight as he flung himself from building to building. The wind beneath him carried him across the sky like an actual bird and the thrill of the freefall lit his nerves on fire. His route was quiet but his appearance should coax out a certain thief. Red Hood was investigating a weapons smuggling deal that was set to take place by the Gotham Harbour. Nightwing was back in Bludhaven with Signal, introducing him to nighttime patrol. Robin and Black Bat were tracking a drug deal that was rumoured to disrupt the balance of the Narrows. Spoiler was with Batman doing their regular routes and Batwoman was doing her own thing somewhere. Oracle, as always, was on standby on comms and monitoring everything. This was the perfect opportunity for Karma to strike so Red Robin just had to be patient. The night was young.

An hour into his sweep of the city and Oracle was patching him into a radio call about a break-in in some pawnshop back in the Fashion District. It wasn’t on his route tonight but Oracle figured that with their likely suspect, and his arrangement with her, he was their best shot at apprehending her. If only temporarily. 

He arrived at the pawnshop without fanfare and found the storefront window broken into. Further inspection led him face to face with the object of his affection. Karma was posed calmly behind the cashier counter rifling through an assortment of jewelry that was left on display in the glass cases. It was only the faint twitch in her eyebrow that indicated her awareness of his presence. Other than that he went completely ignored. That won’t do. Not tonight. He approached her slowly and stopped on the other side of the counter, leaning into her space. He could faintly smell her rose-scented perfume. Her strawberry shampoo. Even the cherry lip gloss she wears under the mask. He’s tasted it enough times to know how strong it was. For a vision clad in black she was rather fond of red flavours. 

“Can I help you, Tweety Bird?” her voice was soft, sprinkled with faux indifference, not wanting to disrupt the background noise of rings and necklaces clanking together. She hasn’t looked at him once.

“Breaking and entering and attempted theft are serious crimes, Karma.” He saw a faint twitch of amusement in her eyebrow but her posture was relaxed and non-assuming.

“That’s not why you’re here. That’s not why I’m here either.” Her eyes sweep up to him as she stops searching the jewelry. She’s staring intently at him as if he’s to understand the meaning behind the words she’s not saying. He does. They’ve played this back and forth before. Danced their little tango of push and pull. 

“You wanted to see me then? Thought this was the best way to get my attention, hmm?” He leaned in, pressing his weight more into the counter. She matched his advance and propped her face in the palm of her hand. Her finger tapped on her mask. He figured if the accessory wasn’t there she’d be biting that finger instead. 

“Well it worked. Didn’t it? You’re here after plenty of time to conduct a rather thorough investigation into who I am. Or was.” She took off the mask, finally, and he was right. Her lips were shining in the dim light of the night with the familiar hues of her lip gloss. He presses on to not let himself get distracted by the slight smile on her face.

“Marinette Dupain-Cheng, daughter of Tom Dupain and Sabine Cheng. Paris, born and raised. Above average student in terms of grades but a disciplinary streak about a hundred miles wide.” At this her head tilts in amusement. Her faint nod encourages him to divulge all the aspects of his research. “Absences and tardies more often than any recorded presences. About twelve suspensions in the span of three years and a rescinded expulsion when you were about fourteen. A couple run-ins with the police in regards to charges of theft and property destruction.” Her face scrunched in an adorable pout at that as if it were a reminder of an embarrassing moment and not outlines of criminal offenses.  

“Definitely not my finer moments, I assure, but keep going. You’re doing so well,” she interrupted him. She had shifted so that she could jump over the counter and sit atop it, her legs crossed and her arms bearing her weight behind her. Red Robin was temporarily silenced by the arch in her back and the lean lines of her exposed neck. He rose to his full height; just barely reaching her shoulder, due to her new vantage point. 

“You disappeared after your high school graduation, my investigation says you ran off to Shanghai but I believe there’s more to it than that.” She had uncrossed her legs to accommodate him between them and drew him closer by his shoulders. Acting on instinct, his arms found purchase on her waist and he was brushing the pad of his gloved thumb across the exposed skin. It was uncharacteristically soft but neither heeded mind to it.

“You think there’s more to me than that?” She leans in, almost breathing the same air as him. “You’d be the first,” she continued while snaking a hand up his neck to scratch lightly at his scalp. The touch sent shivers down his spine and had his toes curling in anticipation.

“So tell me then,” he licked his lips and stared at her through the film of his mask. “What is Paris’s Lady Luck doing here causing mischief in Gotham?” The question was a gamble and could upset the rapport he had with Karma. He was the team’s only lead on her, for better or worse, and he didn’t want to ruin whatever it was between them.

It was probably the right thing to say though, because she hasn’t left him yet but instead was staring at him with something indescribable in her eyes. Excitement? Approval? Affection? Red Robin wasn’t sure what to make of the glimmer of emotion in her eyes other than to take it as a good sign.

“You got this far in your investigation, Tweety Bird,” she leaned in closer, just a hair’s width away. “Why ruin the chase and tell you everything now?” Her lips were brushing against his as she spoke and the cherry flavour was almost distracting. His tongue peaked out to swipe a stronger taste. The arms around her waist tightened and he pulled her to the edge of the counter, her legs wrapping around him on instinct.

“Surely you could reward me for figuring out this much, right?” His voice was pitched so low if she wasn’t already breathing in his words he would have worried that she didn’t hear him. “After all, it’s not everyday someone discovers the identity of the allusive Ladybug.”

“The bird wants a reward, does he?” She finally sealed his lips with hers, stealing any half-baked retort he might have had. This kiss was different from the multitude they’ve exchanged in their times together, carrying over the unanswered emotions from their last encounter and introducing new ones into the mix. The air felt still and cool on his face and the fingers in his hair tightened even further. 

They were like that for what felt like hours but was merely a few minutes; just calmly exchanging kisses, nothing straying beyond that silently defined line. They didn’t need anymore for tonight. Karma had taken to progress this further by trailing her lips to the sharp cut of his jaw. She alternated between small kisses and even smaller bites as she made her way up to his ear. Her breath was warm against the shell of his ear and he leaned into the faint contact. A lick and a bite later, her lips were curled up into a smirk as her hand in his hair held him in place. 

They stayed like that for moments lost to time. Neither making the next move, nerves buzzing with anticipation. He felt an itch for more that only she could scratch and she was denying him that satisfaction. Despite that he made no inclination to instigate more, letting the ball stay in her court. After more silent minutes he felt rather than heard her chuckle against his ear. She jumped off the counter, pressing every curve of her body against his. Even then, he unconsciously tried to pull her closer, pressing her against his front and the tempered glass of the counter. Before he could do as he pleased with his new leverage, she wiggled out of his grasp and moved towards the broken storefront window, mask in hand. 

“It was great to see you tonight,” she throws a glance over her shoulder, readjusting the mask over the lower half of her face. “And I’m glad my assumptions of you were right.”

“What assumptions? What do you mean?” The confusion was almost palpable beneath the traces of cherries. He moved to reach for her, to keep her here for a bit longer. To explain herself. To not leave him. She evaded his grasp and leapt out the broken window. From outside the building she turned to him and aimed what was clearly Red Robin’s grappling hook out to the nearest building.

Instead of answering him she chuckled and tilted her head in amusement at his growing distress. 

“See you around, Tim.” Her parting words were lost to the air as she shot off with the grapple into the night. Red Robin stood frozen, rooted in place at the use of his civilian name. How did she know? Who exactly did he decide to get entangled with? Among the cacophony of new questions one thing was for certain.

He was utterly fucked.

[historic-old-guard-lover]

What are your thoughts on the old guards and literacy ( past and present ) ?

I've reblogged some posts here (on why anything goes for literacy in medieval Europe), here (which touches upon oral history), here (a heartwarming take on reading aloud), and here (a humorous take), but I'd love to go in depth for you! As usual, the mega-post with pictures and more detailed explanations is below the cut-off.

TL;DR Summary of Literacy for Each Member:

Lykon: never needed to read or write, probably did neither

Andy: we see her read in the film, but might have only picked up reading in the last few centuries; doesn’t necessarily know how to write but would also be a fairly recent skill*

Quynh: may read or write, but similar to Andy would have been “recent” in the terms of her lifespan*

Yusuf: likely can read and write Arabic before his death, values literacy

Nicolo: total wild-card for either reading or writing, but we see him reading silently in the film so he has learned to read at some point; unclear whether he values it

Booker: very background-dependent for reading and writing, but values literacy as a social status symbol and clearly enjoys books from the film

Nile: can read and write and views it as an essential skill, but likely knows people who are illiterate and understands the socio-economics behind US literacy

*This is based on the fact that they never needed literacy to go about their lives, but they could have learned to read and write by the time that Yusuf and Nicolo die if they enjoyed it.

First off, what is literacy? If you ask someone or google it, chances are you’ll encounter the definition along the lines of “you can read and write.” This is a definition of literacy. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) defines it as “ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate and compute, using printed and written materials associated with varying contexts.” To summarize academic arguments, “literacy” could mean anything from “is able to read a newspaper” to “understands internet meme language” to “understands the doctor’s write-up after a visit.” For this post, I’ll broadly address the ability to read and the ability to write in an character system since that is what I imagine you are asking.

You can’t have someone read something if you don’t have someone to write in a mutually-intelligible language, so let’s start with the history of writing. The invention of writing has been awarded to Sumerian Cuneiform in ~3,100 BCE in southern Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq and Iran near the Persian Gulf). It was done on clay tablets by trained scribes, primarily for boring things like business and government. Below is a picture of a tablet so you can see what cuneiform looked like. They eventually settled on writing left-to-right and didn’t have any punctuation (not even spaces between words!).

[ID: “Sumerian cuneiform tablet, probably from Erech (Uruk), Mesopotamia, c. 3100–2900 BCE; in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City” from here. The Met attributes it as “administrative account of barley distribution with cylinder seal impression of a male figure, hunting dogs, and boars.”]

Another notable old language is (Old) Egyptian. The first complete sentence dates back to 2690 BCE and was done using hieroglyphs (shown below). This language was used throughout Egypt and Nubia, which translates to modern-day Egypt and Sudan. The language didn’t really pick up, from what archaeologists can tell, until around 2600 BCE where writing starts proliferating...and then is soon replaced with Middle Egyptian. Fun fact: the word “hieroglyphs” comes from the Greeks, but the Egyptians referred to their script as (transliterated) “medu-netjer” or “the god's words” because it was a gift from Thoth (yes, that guy with the falcon head who may also be accredited as Thot).

[ID: picture of a seal impression from the tomb of Seth-Peribsen. It reads “The Ombite (i.e. Set) has given the Two Lands to his son, Dual King Peribsen.”]

Skipping over a few more writing systems developed in the Middle East and surrounding regions, we finally get to the first records of Old Chinese in 1250 BCE with the inscription on oracle bones shown below. From the get-go, there were at least three different scripts of Old Chinese: oracle bone, bronze, and seal. I’ve also added a bronze script so that you can see the differences.

[ID: ox scapula oracle bone from the reign of King Wu Din. The fragments read “ ...divined: in the next ten days there will be no disasters...  (day 40) Zheng divined: in the next ten days there will be no disasters. (day 41) ... cleaved to (day 42) ... fifth month, in Dun...  (day 50) Zheng divined: in the next ten days there will be no disasters. ...   (day 50) Zheng divined: in the next ten days there will be no disasters. Third day, (day 52) ... (day 54) ... The Gui will also have sickness ...” ]

[ID: Rubbing of an engraving found on multiple objects which notes the appointment of a man named Song as supervisor of the storehouses in Chengzhou.]

As you can see, early writing would not have interested the earliest members of the Old Guard. The things that were being written down were things that were important to those governing and those in business. I really don’t think that Lykon, Andy, or Quynh would have cared much about the barely distribution or who’s in charge of the storehouse, and they wouldn’t have been important enough to keep their own oracle on retainer. If we use the timeline I developed for my history of language asks (~8,000BCE - 7,000BCE Horn of Africa Lykon, ~5,000BCE - 4,000BCE Caucauses Andy, and ~3,500BCE - 2,500BCE Southeast Asia Quynh), then they all predate the invention of writing excluding the younger range of Quynh’s possible birth which places her after the invention but still culturally separated from it. Lykon could have died without ever having to learn how to read or write, Andy was old before it was invented let alone became popular, and Quynh is from a time where writing was not common. This is a hot take, but there is a non-zero chance that if Quynh disliked reading/writing and resisted learning it, she could have been locked in the coffin without being solidly literate. Imagine the first language you really have to read after 500 years now that literacy is a requisite for society is French, which doesn’t even sound how it looks (I’m looking at you, silent -ent at the end of most present-tense verbs). Painful.

This brings us to the next question we should answer for these older members: when would reading or writing have become useful and important to them? This is obviously much more difficult to answer. Because of oral history traditions, they wouldn’t need to read for entertainment (that whole concept must be mind-boggling). Because they probably didn’t do much large-scale trade coordination, they wouldn’t need to write for business. I can’t see any of them working for the government. As much as I love the joke about Quynh recognizing wanted posters, that wasn’t a thing until right before the 19th century in Europe. Quite frankly, I don’t think Andy or Quynh has a compelling interest in learning to read until the 1700s at the earliest unless they want to and enjoy the idea of writing (perhaps introduced by the younger immortal couple?).

Yusuf and Nicolo are a different story altogether, as they were both born after the invention of writing had become fairly common (ie. books were a thing and people used them, though they were rare and expensive). A longer and far better post than I could write explains that literacy in medieval Italy was in no way uniform: Nicolo is a total toss-up. He might have only known how to write, only known how to read, done both, or done neither even if he was a monastic priest or even a scribe who copied manuscripts. As a member of a merchant family, this still holds because 1) he might not have been the child raised to take over the business; and 2) you could pay people to do that pesky writing thing for you if it was absolutely necessary.

Yusuf came from a society which valued reading, especially in religious contexts. It’s called the Islamic Golden Age for a reason! Young children were schooled in Arabic and the Quran, though it might have been memorization-based. Older students would be taught to read and possibly to write as well in order to engage in scholarship around their sacred texts. He is from the beginning of the creation and popularity of madrasa (literally just “place of study”) as institutions of learning. He probably had an entire curriculum he studied, like modern schooling. Given that we can all agree that Yusuf comes from a wealthy background, it is a safe assumption that Yusuf can read Arabic and it is probably also safe to assume that he can write in it. I’d say that, if you are writing him as particularly wealthy or scholarly, he is probably even trained in the art of calligraphy (see an example below) which is to say he can write BEAUTIFULLY. The example picture is simply words on paper like we’d expect of a modern book, but calligraphy would be integrated into architecture and pictures. Don’t tempt me to make another post on this beautiful art form.

[ID: Maghrebi script from a 13th-century northern African Quran, thanks to Wikipedia.]

Moving on to 1770s France, literacy was becoming common but still varied with social class (especially before the Revolution) and it’s not clear whether Booker would have learned to read and write. It’s ironic that many areas of the country did not have had more than 40% MEN’S literacy while at the same time the country was considered a hub of the Enlightenment with it’s institutions of higher learning. The North/South cultural divide that I’ve hinted at here and here, shows up in the literacy rates as well. As a Southern sharecropper or laborer, he would be very likely illiterate. As a Southern peasant, we approach a 50/50 chance as he becomes more wealthy. As an artisan (if anyone headcannons this), he most likely is literate though the extent varies with wealth. Whether Booker knows how to read and write before his death is closely linked to class and wealth, but he would value literacy as a major social status signifier and be motivated to learn if he didn’t already.

[ID: four maps depicting “men” and “women” literacy rates for the period of 1686-1690 versus the period of 1786-1790. Adapted from "Reading and Writing: Literacy in France from Calvin to Jules Ferry, 1982."]

This brings us to modern history for Nile. Compulsory schooling for children is present in the US and being illiterate is (unfairly) associated with being unlearned. She was definitely taught to read and write in school, and literacy has been an essential skill throughout her entire life. This doesn’t mean that she is necessarily disrespectful of any illiteracy, because thirty percent of Chicago adults would “benefit” from literacy instruction. Literacy is still tied to class (and thus race) for a lot of Americans, though less strikingly for 1770s France. Nile probably knows some adults in her life who are illiterate or struggle with literacy and would understand that this is tied to socio-economics.

[scentedsongrebel]

CHASE (1)

Pairings: Thief! Bucky Barnes * Thief! Reader (female)

Summary:“Mr. ‘B’ world renounced thief, they call him an artist you see.” He laughs, one devoid of humor and pushes his hair off his forehead as he brings his hand in front of his face, all his fingers touch his thumb to make the ‘fox’ shape from them.

“The beauty with which he crafts his muse. Every robbery a new piece of art. Every stroke careful and planned. Every scheme drawn with precision. He takes pride in his master pieces”.

He shakes his head, his lips setting in a firm line.“For me, well he is just a pity thief. And who better to know a thief than one herself”

Word Count: 3197

Warnings: Robbery, mentions of robbery, Violence, Gun shooting, some cursing…. maybe? 

Chapter 1

Dressed in formal this time, he moves through the airport crowd smoothly, without garnering any attention.

He runs his hand through his dark hair, cut short this time to blend in. He also has a little stubble going on which he thinks makes him look years older as he catches a glimpse in one of the design mirrors on the airport walls.

His flight isn’t scheduled for another 3 hours but he likes to be early, prepared and out of the main city as soon as possible.

He hears a young boy arguing over at the check-in counter for a possibility to get a flight before 7 am to which the lady shakes her head telling him the earliest they have available is for 10 am.

The boy runs his hands through his hair roughly as he pulls at the roots moving out of the line.

James (today Robert) moves forward and hands over his ticket and id card getting himself a pass.

He moves to sit on one of the chairs as he waits for the time of his flight that leaves at 4 am. Its 1:00 right now.

As he gets comfortable to read with smugness the article about his achievement and yet another failure of the police, his eyes drift to the news going on on the television.

“Mr. ‘B’ informs CNN of his next target” it reads and James’ eyebrow raises in amusement.

“Just right now” the lady on the news channel says as she sits on the desk at her office “We got a call from the famous thief Mr. ‘B’ informing our news channel of his next target right here in the city-

James folds his newspaper as a smile graces his lips. This is interesting. And while he knows this is a bad idea, he stills looks around.

He always did love a challenge.

—————————

The young boy is suddenly informed of a last minute cancellation and availability on the 4 am flight.

He won’t miss The tennis match.

God bless whoever cancelled last minute.

_——————

Darkness and excess of security. A swap here and running behind the pillar before a guard can turn around, you navigate yourself through the museum before making way towards your target through the AC vents that have been closed for a while but you have your ways. The tiny particles of dust dance around as you navigate through the narrow tunnels.You would have been a sneezing mess if it weren’t for your face mask.

As you wipe the bead of sweat flowing down your chin under your black face mask, you smile at the ease with which you secured your target.

You jump down almost from the top of the room skillfully and look towards the target you were here for.

She’s beautiful. They say she belonged to Cleopetra herself. Gifted to her by one of her lovers. They say her beauty is nothing compared to her owner and suddenly you understand the egyptian men’s attraction for her.

The green diamond shines in the dimly lit room emanating a beautiful glow. For a minute you stay in your position just admiring the beauty before yourself. 

The moment last only a short while before you realize your mission and rush you get your hands on the diamond.

“You don’t want to do that”

You quickly whip your head to the source of the voice and look straight at him. Clad in full black shealth suit and a face mask different from yours. While your covers your entire face only leaving a long patch for the eyes, his is more revealing like an eye mask people wear at those fancy parties. His head in covered in a black hat matching both your suits.

He seems to be eating a sandwich. Which he quickly finishes and wipes his mouth with a tissue paper

He stands up pocketing the napkin

“Motion detectors” he points towards the necklace. He then produces a pair of sunglasses “Wanna see?” He asks as he places the sunglasses on your nose so you can see through it

Just as he said red laser lines run parallel to each other around the necklace

“Infra red rays” he takes his sunglasses back “the moment you go to touch the necklace, an alarm would be set off and” he points towards the several gates lining the walls “Atleast three guards from each door would come rushing”

You look at him raising your eyebrows but realize he probably won’t be able to see them because of your mask but he somehow knows you figure going by his smile

“I’m a professional” he stretches his arms “I know how these security dudes think”

You look at him trying to gauge your next move but he is quicker

“You wanna steel it” he shrugs “it’s yours to steel”

You raise your eyebrow again

“Nah this thing is not even on my list” he starts to move closer to you and produces something from the pocket of his skin tight black vest

You quickly take up a defencive stance preparing to reach out for your knife but then he raises his arms in front of you and you realize it’s just a chocolate. He tears the wrapper from his gloved hands and takes a bite

“Oh no need for weapons dude” he says as he takes another bite “I’m just hungry” he brings it towards you “protein bar?”

You shake your head and look back towards the thing trying to decipher your next move. He continues eating

“When you’re done with the analysis just thought I’d tell you, the moment you touch the object, 12 mili-ampere current beams would shoot throught those holes in the walk” he points all around the room “one hit and BOOM paralysis” your eyes widened and he smiles at you taking another bite of his protein bar “temporary hopefully”

You look at the thing again not out of options. This was more difficult than you anticipated. Time to think of something new

He smiles as he observes you going through an internal debate

“Confused” he mocks and you glare at him “you should be, its really a difficult position, I can help”

You look at him with furrowed brows

“Well honey” he mocks “This seems to be a highly one sided conversation. How am I supposed to work this if you won’t talk to me”

You only glare and he finishes the last of his protein bar pocketing the wrapper and zipping his pocket close

He adjusts his mask that only covers his eyes and rubs his hands

“Okay so here’s how this goes” he seems serious suddenly “You tell me why you used my name, I help steel this and its mine cause you used my name and its kinda the main rule of this profession 'you steel it in my name its mine”

He tilts his head and gives you a dark smile that screams trouble and you feel your heart increase its speed

“You may wanna start talking”

You look around amd your eyes suddenly lock on the cctv camera on the top of the room

“Hacked” he says and you turn to look at him “all they can see is this sword undisturbed and right here without us in the frame, we have approximately” he looks at his wrist watch “ 15 mins before they figure it out, so you better get talking”

You look around trying to find a way to catch him off guard but he is faster as he pins you to one of the walls

“Why did you use my name”

His face is really close to yours and you feel your heart rate increase trying to look around but he forces your face to look at him right in the ocean blue eyes

“I-I ” you try to say and he smiles again. You suddenly hate the curve of his lips.

“You?” He mocks and there is a sudden jolt of anger in you at him

You kick him in the shin and catch him off guard moving away from him. He tries to get back at you removing his gun from his thigh holster but you stop him

“Stop threatning and I will talk” he smirks and signals you to continue. You run your hand over your face and continue “I just knew you would be hot and right now, I feel you are hoter than I thought”

He makes a face and you’re sure his eyebrows are raised under that mask

“I mean dude” you move your hands around suddenly excited “You are like the Merly Streep of our world, I mean like totally top, top of the charts”

He smirks at that

“I have always looked up to you” you smile but you’re sure he can’t see it through your mask “I kinda really wanted to meet you and I have a preposition for you and you can’t say no to”

His smirks widens and he crosses his arms “Go on”

“You see like Sherlock needs Dr. Watson, like Cory Mattews and Shawn Hunter, like Chandler Bing and Joey Tribianni, like - like” you click your fingers as you try to come up with more “like like Tom and Jerry everyone needs a partner in crime. You know a little help indeed and well” You motion towards him from both your hands then at yourself “What about a literal partner in actual crime”

He actually lets out a laugh at that and shakes his head

“No thanks”

“What no dude listen” you move towards him “you need me, you maybe famous world-wide but me” you smile “The best of the best locally. Brooklyn has never seen a talent like me”

“I’m just fine by myself” he shakes his head and then moves towards you and bends down so you two are nose to nose “A theif is brilliant only by himself, no threats of betrayal”

Your heart suddenly starts accelerating its speed and you are not sure if it is because of his words or his closeness

“I-I” he turns around and looks at the item

“5 mins left Brooklyn’s best theif” he smirks “Maybe you can show me how good a partner you can make”

You smile at his words and move your hand in through the holes for your eyes in your mask and reach your hand to your hair to pull out a hair pin

“Duck” you scream quickly and he is fast to follow as you both get down on your knees and you throw the hair pin towards the artifact. Several alarms start blazing and just as he said 3 guards each enter running towards the room with huge guns

They corner you both from all sides and you make eye-contact with your fellow theif before you smirk and you are pretty sure he knows you are beneath the mask as you ignore the warnings of the guards to stay on your knees and hands behind your back as you reach for the artefact, clicking the button on your belt that pulls you up towards the vents through the ropes you hand installed and you barely get a glimpse of the guards falling down as the laser beams shoot out and hit them.

You don’t see what happened with the other before you make your way through a different path in the vents you came from and get down towards the back of the museum quickly. Just as you pocket the diamond you hear footsteps running towards you from your right and make eyecontact with a red-head woman not in her uniform but clearly a police inspector

She produces her gun and speaks in her ear-pieve “Steve I have him in the C corridor” She slowly moves towards you with the gun raised “Hands up”

You move your hands up in surrender before there is a gun shot from behind you that hits the red-head right in her hands and she drops the gun screaming in pain.

Before you know it, you body is pushed against thick arms and engulfed and being pulled thorugh the corridors. More officers run down the halls and try to shoot at the teo of you but he is faster and is anticipating each and every move and none even get a glimpse of you both.

Suddenly you are dropped in a corner and and you hear footsteps run away from you. Did he just leave you to run away? What the hell. You feel your pockets and the diamond is gone. Great.

Just as more officers almost reach you, you stand up and decide if you should run before someone has a gun pointed at your back.

“Got him” this guy says to those in front of you through the dark and moves your hand behinx your back and handcuffing “Though he had another one with him, shot officer romanoff, you might wanna catch that one I think he has the diamond”

“You got this?” One if the officer asks him

“Ya” he says “this one seems the weaker one” there is a playfullness in his voice and you immediately recognize that voice and your eyes widen. He moves his head toward your ear and whispers “Be quiet”

The other guys leave to chase 'your partner’ and he guides you through an exit you hand no idea even existed and before you know it you are out of there and quickly pushed in the passenger seat of a car, hands still in hand-cuffs.

Just as he starts the car you get a good look at the guy and your eyes widen as you get a look at the guy in his police uniform and thick mustach. He smiles at you and moves through the traffic. Leaving behind the sirens and commotion around the museum.

“The robbery was brilliant” he says as you hit the highway after a while “perfect in all sense except the running away part, need'ta work on that, you know most important part of being a theif, execution is important and all but if you get caught,everything is in vain.”

“O-okay?” You say now actually really scared and trying to decipher where he was taking you

“Well I’m known for my running away skills and as my partner, you will be too soon”

He genuinely smiles at you and you smile back trying really hard to mask the fear you actually feel in the moment and try to appear excited.

“Also Tom and Jerry were kinda enemies rather than partners in crime”

A small short lived laugh escapes your lips.

————–

“I really thought you betrayed me” The blonde says as he stands besides you at the concert, the music blazing through the speakers

“And go where” you glare at him “not many places left where I could go and your men are not around”

“Kinda need to do that” he shrugs “can never fully trust you not to run away”

“Great makes me feel so special” you say and wince as the rapper takes some verse and the girl besides you loses it, screaming her love for him

“Did we really have to meet here” you ask covering your ears as he continues looking forward and shakes his head

“Crowded places reduce the risk of him seeing you with me and getting suspious”

You nod

“So what is his plan” officer Rogers then asks folding his arms on his chest

“Plans?” You shrug “I don’t know. It has been just 2 days since we met you really think he will tell me every one of his plans?”

He sighs and shakes his head

“And it is all your fault” you hiss through the noice “You were supposed to catch him there I did everything.” You move your hands around exasperated “distracted him with the partner proposal, took the diamond and ran the way you told me to and was even surrendering to your officer”

He glares back “you got her shot, Agent Romanoff is one of my best officers and now she has to go through all these physiotherapies before she can even hold a gun”

“I got her shot??” you look at him disbelievingly “he shot her and took me”

He just shakes his head and you sigh

“Listen he is coming here today so just catch him and let me off this”

“Ya right arrest him for making friends with you cause that is a real crime” he shakes his head “Listen to me carefully Y/N you cannot catch a theif without proof and theifs like him, leave no proof, unless we actually catch him during the robbery we have nothing against him”

You shake your head “What am I supposed to do now after you failed so miraculously”

“Be his partner” your eyes widen “report his every move, his plans, everything back and help us catch him”

“No- I-I can’t do that” you yell through the youngsters singing the rap with the rapper

“Yes you can and you will” he says sternly “Listen I know its hard but now you are deep in it and you are my best chance, also you have to do this if you really want to avoid the atleast 10 year prison sentence which would come if I by mistake provide the jury with your file. Just saying”

His threat almost causes tears to form in your eyes but you hold it in as you cross your arms

“What will he do to me if he finds out” you whisper and even through the noice he hears you

“He will kill you” BOOM the loud screeches of the drum signalling the end of the song accompany his words and you nod trying to hold back the tears.

“Stay in contact” he says and then he’s gone. You don’t even try to see where he went, instead trying to calm your racing heart

It is another song that has kids in front of you going crazy as the singer- you don’t even remember the name- of removes his shirt and throws it to the audience”

A body pushes against yours and this hippy guy with shoulder length hair in just a halve sleeved jacket shimmering in some design opened up to reveal his shirt-less torse (which btw is swoon worthy), his arms bathed in different bracelets and rings smiles at you through his teeth to reveal his lip piercing.

You frown and turn back to look at the stage before he tries to gather your attention again

“Hey its me” your eyes widen and you look at him again and he smiles. You can recognize that voice anywhere

“You changed your look again” you scream as you look around

“Kinda my thing” he shrugs and then offers you the plastic glass in his hand

“No thanks” you shake your head

“Take it” he forces the glass in your hands and you look inside to find no drink in it instead a paper of some sort “Ticket, for the plane and the passport is beneath it, don’t be late”

And with that he is gone just as the singer bids his goodbye.

—————————-

[chemicalmagecraft]

The Gamer Hero, Deku Chapter 27

A/N: Completely totally random fun fact: Five-card Mao is a fun card game where you're not supposed to tell people the rules, except for, I believe, the fact that if you win a round of Five-card Mao you may create a new rule for the game.

xoxoxo

After getting back from Yuuei, the first thing I did was show my mom the paperwork Shuzenji-sensei gave me. We cried tears of joy together and hugged, then she signed it and I decided to go talk to Kacchan. I figured it'd be a good idea to fill him in on my new powers.

"You can what?" Kacchan asked.

"I can copy Quirks now," I answered. He stared at me for a while. "Are you okay?"

He sighed very loudly. "You know what, why not? You can copy Quirks now. Cool." He stuck out his hand. "How do you do it?"

I grinned and made sparks from my hand. "It's a little finicky, though a bit less thanks to an exploit I found out about, but if I fulfill the right conditions I get a copy of a person's Quirk that I can 'buy' from a new menu."

"And those are?"

"I think it's supposed to be just from either beating someone in a fight or potentially from quest rewards, but one of the rewards for the sports festival quest I got was a choice of two Quirks from a pool limited to people from Yuuei. One of the Quirks I picked was a copying Quirk, which thankfully gives me a copy too."

Kacchan nodded. "Yeah I remember that guy. Kind of an asshole. So what was the other one?"

I felt a sting in my eyes as I activated it. My hair felt weird, and while I couldn't see them I assumed my eyes were glowing red. "Try to use your Quirk."

He snorted. "I know what Aizawa-sensei's Quirk looks like, asshole." I laughed and turned it back off. "So you just... have a bunch of Quirks now?"

I shrugged. "There's a limitation. If I have too many Quirks out then it lowers their effectiveness. But yeah, I have a bunch of Quirks now. I got the Quirks of the past One For All users, there are the two I just said, Super Regeneration from that Nomu thing that I bought because it's a passive boost to healing, the Quirks of everyone I beat in the tournament as another quest reward, and my cat's Quirk, which I tested Copy on."

"Damn. And knowing you, you got some other stupid good thing during the sports festival."

I nodded and pulled out my phone, using Technomancy to turn it on and open my pictures without actually pressing any buttons.

"Showoff," Kacchan muttered, then looked at the picture I took earlier. "Is that a fucking tower?"

"Yup. I got a new spell called Imaginary Architect after that last attack in our fight."

"When you threw fucking swords at me?" Kacchan asked.

"Because I threw fucking swords at you. It's an improved version."

"How the fuck is an entire tower an improved version over being able to make some swords?"

"Now I can make anything out of magic, if I have enough power."

He thought for a moment. "Yeah I guess that makes sense."

I switched to the second photo where the tower was dissolving, the only indication that I was interacting with my phone the blue, circuit-like lines that glowed to life on it and my hand when I did. "And this is what happened when I stopped using Imaginary Architect. Pretty, right?"

Kacchan nodded. "Yeah, it kinda is. Don't suppose you've got enough of an understanding of it to teach it to me yet?"

I shrugged and made a small sphere. I tossed it into the air a bit, then dissolved it mid-throw and replaced it with a small cube. I tossed that cube around a bit, added spikes to it, then dissolved it. Next I made a lab coat with a lot more concentration due to how complicated it actually was, actually making it around my body. I managed to make it a lighter shade of blue than the other IA constructs, but in the end it was only almost white. It did, however, behave exactly like a lab coat made of cloth should, down to how it ripped when I pulled one of the sleeves off. Even breaking a part of the construct didn't destabilize it, which was a failing in most Quirks and spells that made temporary objects. Even my Skill Grimoir worked like that. It was that self-contained... "Yeah, I think I should have a good enough grasp on it now. It's a bit complicated, though."

"This isn't gonna be like Meditation where it just doesn't work, is it?"

I shook my head. "No, from what Todoroki told me Meditation has an aspect to it that my Quirk reproduces automatically."

"How the hell'd he know that?"

"Apparently he can sense magic."

Kacchan twitched. "How the shit does he do that?"

"Beats me. Still, the biggest hurdle to you learning Imaginary Architect should just be that it's really complex. You might want to start out with Bound Blade first."

He sighed. "Ugh, fine."

xoxoxo

I spent the rest of the day (and night) switching between grinding both Imaginary Architect and Item Enchantment and reading up on basic architecture. Around midnight, I decided to check out the hero news. I opened up the website I normally used for hero news (not even using my hands, Technomancy was fun) and scrolled through the articles. One caught my eye.

Pro Hero Ingenium Critically Injured by Hero Killer Stain

"That was what you overheard, wasn't it Sonia?" I asked. She nodded quietly. "Well, thanks for giving me a heads up. Come to think of it, I don't suppose you'd be willing to tell me anything you hear about that you think I might need to know? Nothing personal about other people, unless you think they're going to get hurt or something, but stuff like explosions or villainous plotting?"

She smiled. "Yeah, I'll do that!"

"Thanks." I clicked on the article. Yeah it did not look good. "I don't need to tell you to keep an eye on Iida, do I?"

"Nope."

"Thanks..."

I was glad that I was using Technomancy to use the computer, because that freed up both of my hands. My left hand started to glow green with Healing Hands and my right hand glowed purple with Draining Hands to give it something to heal. While I was at it I switched Super Regeneration off. I didn't know if I would be able to help with Iida's brother at all, but it was a reminder of why I got Healing Hands in the first place. I wanted to heal people, and Healing Hands still had its limits even in the nineties.

xoxoxo

I stopped practicing my new skills around noon of the next day to check out one final thing that I had gotten recently that I wanted to mess with. Enlightenment had recently leveled up enough to unlock its next ability:

Allows the user to access their own subconscious mindscape through Meditation.

It would probably be more obviously useful if not for the fact that The Gamer already prevented any form of tampering to my mind, but at the very least it changed Enlightenment from (Passive) to (Active and Passive), meaning that I could hopefully level Enlightenment up at least slightly easier by exploring my mindscape.

I created a perfectly generic object with Imaginary Architect, automatically enchanted with that one slowfall enchantment I'd stumbled upon earlier (though not the floating one), and used Singularity on it. I floated over the construct with my legs crossed in the stereotypical meditation pose and pulled it into the air, adjusting my pull on it when it was halfway between me and the ground so that it just hung there, my 'gravity' pulling on it as much as Earth's. I closed my eyes and let my skills guide me deeper within my own mind.

xoxoxo

I felt like I was falling backwards for what somehow felt like both an instant and an eternity at the same time, scenes from my life flickering in and out of my vision. After that interminable time, I found myself in the foyer of what looked like a hero museum. It felt familiar, and from the looks of it combined some elements from some of the hero museums I'd been in before, though maybe with some other aspects as well. I suppose that made sense, it was my mindscape after all...

The central figure of the foyer was a larger-than-life statue of All Might in a triumphant pose raised on a pedestal.

...

...

Fair enough...

The statue had a spiderweb of large cracks on it, exactly where the real All Might's wound was. "I know this is my mindscape, but is everything in here going to be so on the nose?" I muttered. I shrugged and picked one of the hallways leading out of the foyer at random, one labeled 'Magic,' and walked through it.

"Whoa," I said. The giant room on the other side looked something like the library of a medieval fantasy magic school, instead of the museum theme of the foyer. The walls were lined floor to ceiling with bookshelves packed with books, there were moving models of various moments scattered around the room, an ornate pedestal with a large book in the middle with a large spiral staircase around it, and balls of light floated around the ceiling to provide light. I walked over to the closest model. It was the tower that I'd made yesterday. As I watched it dissolved like it had when I stopped supplying it with energy, then reappeared after a few moments. I walked away as it looped itself and examined another one. This time it was the flurry of blades that I'd used to finish off Kacchan. Not all of the models were mine, though most of them were, but every example was an example of magic that I was impressed or amazed by. For example, Kacchan and Uraraka's fight, the time I destroyed Todoroki's iceberg, the cavalry battle, the first time I cast Halcyon Wing, those shenanigans with Yang, the Wild, Wild Pussycats' cat spells I'd seen on TV that one time, my fight with Nomu, that one time Kacchan pulled me out of Illusion Barrier to punch me in the face, my first time using the elements with Kacchan, and the first Mana Bolt that started it all were among them. It was nice to see them all memorialized like that, even if it was only in my own head.

After I was done looking at the pretty displays, I checked out a section of one of the bookshelves. It had a label on it, 'Lightning,' with little lightning bolts on it. I pulled a book out at random and opened it to a random page. Most of the text was garbled for some odd reason, but I could make out one passage.

Lightning Bolt

A simple lightning spell. The user gathers electrical energy with lightning mana and shoots it in a burst at the target.

It was almost exactly what my own skill entry for Lightning Bolt said, but without the cost and everything. I frowned and flipped through the pages. I couldn't make out any of the other entries, but to be fair I didn't know too many lightning spells. I really needed to fix that, and with the other elements too. I closed the book and it flew back into its spot with just my intention to return it. I thought about Lightning Aura and Lightning Embodiment, and a dash-like lightning spell I'd made with the hope of creating a flying lightning spell called Arc Step. Those were my other three major lightning spells, so they should probably be somewhere in the lightning bookshelf. Again, my thoughts caused the books to move on their own. Two books pulled themselves out of the bookshelf and floated in front of me.

I plucked one of them out of the air and opened it to a random page. It had Lightning Aura and Lightning Embodiment on it, with one spell in between them. I stared at the passage. It was almost like it was constantly shifting, like some sort of selective but cripplingly bad dyslexia, but I felt like I should know what it was. I almost caught a glimpse of it... I checked one of the other passages that I couldn't read. I didn't have that feeling of recognition, but I still caught a flash of what it might be. Filing that away for later, I turned my attention back to the familiar passage. What could it...

Maybe a lightning version of Kacchan's Fire Ignition? As I thought it, the shifting of the slowed to a stop. The description was still a blur, but I could at least read that I was right.

Lightning Ignition

Maybe it was because I knew what the spell was, but didn't know it? If that was the case... I put the lightning books back and summoned an air book. Yup, Air Aura and Air Embodiment were there with their descriptions, but with a passage for Air Ignition in the middle that I couldn't read the description of. I put them back and looked at some of the other sections of the bookshelves. Aside from the elements, there were several books on healing, enchantment (apparently Elemental Aura and Elemental Ignition, but not Elemental Embodiment, were enchantment-type, plus my buff spells), illusion, offensive, defensive, sensory, movement, mind, summoning, and even more books of magic. There were so many books, most of them almost completely indecipherable. I supposed it represented the sheer scale of what magic could do. Heck, there were even a few bookshelves that I couldn't read the titles of.

After looking through a few books, I decided to check out the book on the pedestal in the middle. For it to be in the middle of a library full of magic, it had to be something impressive, right? I approached the pedestal and... it was just an oversized version of the Skill Grimoir. The pedestal had a counter on it that looked like it was showing me how many Skill Fragments I had at the moment. "Status," I said to check.

The menu didn't open. I frowned. "Menu." Nothing. "Skills." Nothing. "Skill Grimoir?" The giant Skill Grimoir was summoned to my hands, not the one that I could make from my Quirk. I guess it made sense, Quirks being a part of the body, that even if part of my Quirk affected my mind I couldn't use some parts of my Quirk within my own mindscape. Heck, now that I thought about it the only part of my UI that was still was the minimap. "Does that mean my magic won't work?" I asked myself. I created a simple little Magelight and added it to the floating lights. I cast the spell, yes, but even though it felt almost exactly like it did when I did it in real life, it didn't feel like I used any energy in it. "Weird."

I shrugged and looked at my Skill Grimoir. I wondered what it would look like to use it in here. I clearly could, otherwise why would the pedestal have an SF count on it to make up for the fact that I couldn't check my status screen? I flipped through the book for a skill that I wouldn't mind using SF on. There was a decently cheap skill called Shock Sphere that I was fine with. I confirmed the purchase. The words peeled off the page as usual, but when they dissolved into light they didn't go directly to me. Instead, the light split and streaked over to books in the lightning and offensive bookshelves. There were no text boxes, but I knew how to use Shock Sphere when the last of the light entered the books. I summoned both books to see that yes, there was a completed passage for Shock Sphere in them.

"That's... something..." I muttered. I guess that the books were a representation of my skill list? I moved onto the last feature of the room, the staircase. It was made out of floating strips of the same stone-like material as the flooring, but with small bits of red carpet on them. I walked up the staircase to see what was up there. The staircase was long and the tower that it went up was hollow, meaning that I could fly around there with a lot of room if I felt like it. The room at the top of the staircase looked like... maybe it was supposed to be the top of a wizard tower? The large room was circular, with eight large windows that lined up with the cardinal and ordinal directions on my minimap. There was an empty bookshelf, some tables, and a few training dummies and targets by the walls in between the windows. Creepily enough, the space outside the windows was just a blank white void...

I jumped out the window to see what the outside looked like, but realized when I tried to use Float that my copied Quirks weren't working either. I fell for a few meters in surprise before casting Halcyon Wing. The base of the tower was just a part of the circular staircase, instead of the library at the bottom. I tried to fly under the tower to see what would happen, but bonked into a perfectly white floor. There weren't even any shadows, which made sense when you considered the fact that there was also no light. I looked around the white void.

"I wonder what this is supposed to be?" I muttered. "Maybe it's supposed to be something like visualization of magic? I can use my magic in here, plus there were those dummies, so maybe I can use this place like a training ground for my magic. It'd be a bit nicer if it wasn't just this blank white void..." I had an idea. "If this is all in my head..." I closed my eyes and imagined the forest I used to play in as a kid. Soon the image in my head felt almost real and I realized that my eyes had opened at some point. I flew back up and surveyed the new forest. It probably wasn't exactly accurate, even aside from the giant wizard tower that stayed in there when I replaced the void, but it was still a forest in my head.

I flew around the forest for a bit, seeing how it looked. It kind of looked like it was randomly generated with my memories of the forest, because it didn't look like it was exactly the same as the real thing. Certain areas seemed to repeat too. I also checked what would happen if I destroyed a tree or something. It just smashed like a normal tree. Not sure what I expected to happen there. After that, I wondered if I could create NPCs in there. I imagined a ring of bokoblins, like from Breath of the Wild, around me. Before they could attack me I tested out my new skill on them. Shock Sphere, fittingly enough, reminded me a bit of the electric lizalfos from Breath of the Wild. At least, that electrical explosion that they could do. A sphere of lighting magic centered on me enveloped the bokoblins, causing them to convulse. When I ended the spell (which seemed like I could continue it just by supplying more MP), they all fell down and faded out of existence. I hoped it wasn't that deadly in reality...

With the training grounds tested out, I flew back into the tower and jumped down the stairwell. I didn't even feel any impact when I fell on the floor, and the floor didn't look damaged either. I got up and finally walked through the exit hallway of the magic room. I suddenly found myself back at the foyer of the 'museum,' standing exactly where I had been when I first entered my mindscape like I'd teleported there.

"That was interesting. Let's see another room." I walked up to a hallway, which had a sign that said 'Memory Lane.' This time, the room was just a long hallway with paintings hung all along both sides. On the left side I saw memories that were, generally speaking, negative. Fear, anger, sadness, every picture evoked emotions like that in me. Meanwhile every memory on the right was positive. When I looked at the left side it felt like it was longer than the right side, but when I looked at the right side it felt like it was longer than the left. Only when I didn't focus on either side and just stared down the middle did I see that the two sides were equal.

Does that count as a metaphor? I feel like that's a metaphor.

I kept my hand on the wall of happy memories as I walked down the hallway. My hope was that it'd serve as a reminder not to linger on the bad memories. As I walked down the hallway reminiscing, I noticed that some of the memories on the happy side were also on the negative side, just in a different light. I got to the end of the hallway having only cried a few times. Like the last room, exiting it brought me back to the beginning.

I looked at the hallways around the foyer, wondering what else could be in them. "One more," I promised myself, and went through a hallway labeled 'Heroes.' The large room was filled with statues and pictures of various pro heroes. The ones I admired more had more prominent statues, with All Might's being the centerpiece of the room. I noticed with pride that while there was a statue for Endeavor, it was destroyed. Only the legs were intact, with the rest of him just being a pile of rubble with demeaning graffiti on it.

However, I quickly noticed that there was something completely out of place near the All Might statue. A party of seven, who by the way I had never seen any of before, sat at a cheap folding table in cheap folding chairs. And because this was in my mindscape I apparently couldn't see their titles. There was a man with long white hair, a woman with a short, spiky ponytail that kinda reminded me of a pineapple, a blonde man with red eyes, a white-haired man with a large scar over his left eye, a bald man wearing an opened leather jacket with no shirt under it and a pair of goggles on his forehead, a black-haired man in a coat with a collar so high it covered his mouth, and a motherly-looking woman with a beauty mark under her mouth. It looked like they were about to play some sort of card game.

The man with long white hair, who looked like he was the dealer, shouted "Five-card Mao is not in session!" and threw a card at the man in the coat, who was the only one holding his cards. The man picked the card up and added it to his hand, which was currently about twice the size of the others'. The long-haired man said "Five-card Mao is not in session!" again, and threw another card at the other man. They repeated this several more times, the white-haired man's shouting getting more exasperated each time. Soon the man in the coat was holding all the cards.

"I win," he said smugly.

"That's not how Five-card Mao works!" the white-haired man protested.

"How does it work, then?" The man looked through his numerous cards.

The white-haired man slammed his hands on the table, rattling his five cards. "I'M NOT SUPPOSED TO TELL YOU!"

"Then how are we to play the game?" the man asked smugly as he set most of the deck down.

The white-haired man sighed. "You figure it out. That's supposed to be part of the fun..."

"Um..." I said, and all seven of them turned to stare at me in unison. "What are you people doing in my head?" I asked.

"The kid's here," the bald man said. "How is the kid here?"

The motherly-looking woman got up. "I suppose some introductions are in order. Sorry for alarming you, Midoriya. We're... the past users of One For All, the Quirk you have now. My name is Shimura Nana."

"Oh," I said. "So I guess One For All takes some kind of copy of the user's mind?"

The bald man shrugged. "Probably something like that. Name's Daigoro Banjo. Sup."

The man in the jacket nodded. "Hikiishi Jiroku."

"Hello, Midoriya," the scarred man said. "My name is Honenuki Shikotsu."

The blonde man waved at me. "Hello," he said with a small Russian accent. "I am Sokolov Kyousan."

The woman with the ponytail smiled at me. "Hello, Midoriya. My name is Kaizen Futaba. It's nice to meet you."

Finally, the white-haired man got up and shook my hand with an apologetic grin. "And I'm the reason you're in this whole mess, sorry. Shigaraki Ichigo." I gasped. Come to think of it, he looked a bit like that hand guy, Shigaraki Tomura, if he wasn't so... crusty. He winced. "Yeah, like that hand kid you fought. I think he might be my nephew, but I kinda don't like the idea of my brother procreating. He wasn't a very good brother and I doubt he'd make a great father either. You can call me Ichigo, by the way. I understand if you wouldn't want to call me Shigaraki."

"Um... So if you're all here then where's All Might?" I asked.

"Oh, he's in the closet," Shimura said.

"I knew it!" I said.

"Oh no, I meant that closet," she said, pointing to a literal broom closet in one corner of the room. Why was that even there? "Toshinori's openly bi, or at least he was in school."

"Oh, so did you know him when he was in school?" I asked. "Or I guess you would know anyway if you were in his head too..."

She nodded. "I did end up in his head eventually, but I was his teacher at Yuuei."

"Wait, why is he in the broom closet? I asked.

"See, the thing about that is..." Daigoro said. "Maybe it's best if you see for yourself."

I shrugged and walked over to the closet door. I could see something under the crack, but it didn't look like a pair of human feet... I opened the door, revealing a hazy yellow silhouette that was roughly All Might-shaped, but didn't look like an actual person. He didn't react to me opening the door. "Oh," I said.

"Yeah, he kinda creeped us out after a while, so we just stuck him in the closet," Ichigo said.

I waved my hand in front of his face. He didn't react at all... "Is he... conscious?"

"We don't think so, or at least we hope not," Honenuki said.

"We don't remember our times as that strange half-shadow, but at the same time most of ours were short," Hikiishi informed me. "At the very least, he doesn't react to anything and won't until the real Toshinori dies."

"I see," I said. That was kind of disturbing... "So are your real souls in here? Is that how it works?"

Sokolov shrugged. "It's best if you don't think think about it, existentially."

"Okay," I said, closing the door. "Would it be possible to get another chair for me?" I asked. "Actually how did you get those chairs?" I turned around to see that there was an extra chair right next to Ichigo. "Right, mindscape." Ichigo patted the empty chair.

I sat down as Ichigo shuffled his cards really fancily. I didn't even know you could do some of those those things to shuffle a deck of cards.

Or it was just mindscape logic...

"So do you wanna play too, Midoriya?" Ichigo asked me.

I nodded. "Yeah, thanks." When he dealt my cards I almost picked them up, but remembered the whole thing with Hikiishi and stopped myself.

"Five-card Mao is now in session!" Ichigo said as he flipped the top card of the deck over, the two of hearts. "I figured we'd do this in the order of what bearer we were, and we could say a bit about ourselves to Midoriya. I'll start." He placed the eight of hearts down on top of the first card. "I was the first bearer. Our enemy, All For One, is.. was my brother. He kinda snapped when our father killed our mother, which to be fair was pretty dang traumatic, but that doesn't really make anything he did cool. We had a few arguments, he locked me in a room for months, then he tried to control me by giving me a powerful Quirk. Still don't get what his plan was there, even with the chance of brain damage. Plus I mean even then we already knew that Quirks could be genetic, so he should've figured I could've been even a little bit more compatible with his Quirk than some random schmuck, so-"

"You're rambling again, Ichigo," Kaizen interrupted him.

"Right. Thanks, Futaba-chan," he said. I guess they knew each other. "So yeah, I used the Quirk he gave me to escape him and join what may have been a precursor to those pro hero organization things, though obviously without the overt government support. Speaking of, I think that's when you come in, Futaba-chan."

Kaizen nodded. She put down the eight of diamonds before speaking. "I was Ichigo's sidekick. He took me under his wing after he couldn't dissuade me from being a hero and showed me ways to use my Quirk that I would have never thought of. When he was on his deathbed I promised to continue the fight against his brother and was the first to have One For All passed to me. If I may, Midoriya, I would like to advise you to not underestimate the power of my Quirk, Mending."

Sokolov nodded. "My turn." He put down the three of spades.

Ichigo picked up the card, took a card off the top of the deck, and tossed them both to Sokolov. "Bad move. Try again."

Sokolov grunted. "What about this, then?" He put down the seven of diamonds. "My mom lost her Quirk to that bastard Hisa-"

Hikiishi threw a card at him. "Watch your language, there's a kid present."

Before Sokolov could pick up the card Ichigo swiped it up and threw it and another card at Hikiishi. "That's not a rule," he said.

Hikiishi picked the cards up, took another one from the deck, and threw all three at Ichigo. "You said can make new rules if you win."

Ichigo glared at him. "I'll give you that one, but only because I agree with the rule." He turned to Sokolov. "Continue."

Sokolov nodded. "My mom lost her Quirk, so I decided to melt the brain of the person responsible. I suppose if we're saying what our Quirks are, I should say mine's Fear. Luckily Kaizen got to me before I could get to him, and she made me her successor."

Honenuki threw his card down next. Seven of spades. "Believe it or not, but I used to be one of All For One's allies. Was born into it, actually. In fact, the Quirk you got from me, Skeletal, was a combination of my birth Quirk, Spike Growth, and a Quirk called Bone Armor. One day, though, I made the... well, not mistake, but I questioned him." He tapped his scar. "How I got this. Kyousan saved my as- life and I didn't really have anywhere else to go, so he basically adopted me."

Banjo slammed down the jack of spades. He shrugged. "Honestly I became a hero because I was bored and liked using Blackwhip. Don't know what Honenuki saw in me, but to be fair he was dying and the other guy was an even bigger jerk. Not really much to say."

Hikiishi looked at his cards for a bit. "I was always good at using my Quirk, Magnetize. I was heavily encouraged to become a hero, so I went with it." He put down the jack of diamonds. "I suppose Banjo saw promise in me when we worked together, because he gave me One For All."

Shimura played the queen of diamonds. "I also became a pro hero because of my Quirk, Float. Well, I really did want to help people too, but having a Quirk that let me fly played a factor in my becoming a hero too. I only ever met Hikiishi a few times before I... well, when he gave me One For all he was about to die. I became a teacher after that, hoping that maybe my successor would be spared the traumatic circumstances of my getting One For All." She laughed wryly. "I'm honestly not too sure I was able to do that for Toshinori..."

"For what it's worth, I'm sorry," Hikiishi muttered.

"I don't blame you," Shimura assured him. "Now it's your turn Midoriya."

"Okay," I said. I looked at my cards. If I understood the rules right, the only card I had that would work was the queen of hearts, so I placed it on Shimura's card. "My name is Midoriya Izuku, as you know. I think the Quirk I was born with was actually Singularity, but it's really weird and didn't even show any sign of being there until a few months ago, when I got The Gamer. I know I'm not very experienced, but I hope to make you all proud."

Banjo grinned at me. "You're doin' great already, kid!" he shouted.

"Yes, I'm proud to call you my successor," Ichigo added with a grin.

The rest of the former bearers echoed the sentiment. I laughed and rubbed at my suddenly wet eyes. "Thank you."

xoxoxo

A/N: Sorry about dumping a bunch of names on you at once, bit that was kinda the only way I though of for how this could go down...

Also sorry for the kinda long wait. I had writers' block for a bit with the OFA scene and then had an awesome idea for the card game that unfortunately involved reading a lot about the minor tarot arcana (I know it was a minor detail, but I thought it was really cool and I just kinda go wild for tarot motifs okay). By the way if anyone's looking things up, remember that most playing cards are the same rightside-up as upside-down so it could be either upright or reversed ;3. Plus I had a lot more irons in the fire that I had to tend to.

Elemental list: Midoriya: Halitus, Dune, Rayne, Blaise, Juniper, Mifuyu, Raimon, Iggy, Sonia, and Claude Bakugou: Pyra and Leaf Tokoyami: Corvo Uraraka: Nebula and Ion Hagakure: Lucy Tsu: Bubbles Aizawa: Charlie and Cassiopeia All Might: Seth O'Scope

[cocoanovel9]

Jameswritesbest On HubPages

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[optikes]

Bruce Nauman (b 1941) USA

The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths (Window or Wall Sign)   (1967) neon tubing 149.9x139.7x5.1cm

A      theartstory.org      Much of Nauman's work reflects the disappearance of the old modernist belief in the ability of the artist to express his ideas clearly and powerfully. Art, for him, is a haphazard system of codes and signs, just like any other form of communication. Aside from informing his use of words, it has also encouraged him to use readymade objects - objects that, unlike paintings or traditional sculptures, already carry meanings and associations from their use in the world - and to make casts of objects ranging from the space underneath chairs to human body parts.

Speaking of high art in the materials of low culture and advertising, it sets up a clash that prompts us to question old assumptions about the purpose of art and artists. Might artists be ordinary salesmen, just like so many others?

Ludwig Wittgenstein's ideas about language have been an important influence on his work, shaping his interest in the way words succeed or fail in referring to objects in the world. The philosopher's outlook has also no doubt influenced the tone of some of Nauman's work, which sometimes has comic, absurdist touches, employing jokes and word play, and yet also touches on obsessive behavior and frustration.

B   Lucina Ward   nga.gov.au      

The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths (Window or Wall Sign)    was made in the winter of 1966–67 at a time when Bruce Nauman had established his studio in a disused grocery store in San Francisco. The work was designed for a large shop window at the front of the studio, rather like the neon advertising signs that hung in the shopfronts nearby, although with quite a different message. Referring to the conception of Window or wall sign, Nauman stated:

I had the idea that I could make art that would kind of disappear—an art that was supposed to not quite look like art. In that case, you wouldn’t really notice it until you paid attention. Then, when you read it, you would have to think about it ... The most difficult thing about the whole piece for me was the statement. It was a kind of test—like when you say something out loud to see if you believe it.

Once written down, I could see that the statement, ‘The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths’ was on the one hand a totally silly idea and yet, on the other hand, I believed it. It’s true and it’s not true at the same time. It depends on how you interpret it and how seriously you take yourself. For me it’s still a very strong thought.

Nauman’s use of neon, a commercially-produced, non-art material associated with motels, bars or advertising, seems to counteract his lofty statement. The dualism of his ideas is enhanced by the colour, form and structure of the work. At a distance the red spiral reads as the number six while the dense, more elaborate blue lettering provides a counterpoint: the strength of the numeric graphic sign is thrown into relief by the twists, turns and rhythm of the cursive shapes. Moreover, the message and promise to reveal ‘mystic truths’ is likewise complemented by the spiral form, a symbol often interpreted as the notion of journey, growth and evolution. Indeed, Joan Simon has linked Nauman’s interest in solving or revealing ‘impossible��� problems to his training as a mathematician. Elsewhere, such as Eleven color photographs (1966–67) he composes images that undermine the idea of words as a means of communication, treating ‘linguistic fragments and material issues as interchangeable’.

The success of Nauman’s first New York exhibition at Leo Castelli Gallery in early 1968 prompted Castelli to suggest that works by the artist using fluorescent tubing should be issued in small editions; Nauman authorised Window or Wall Sign to be produced in an edition of three. The idea that an artist should advertise or promote his ability to see beyond everyday matters, and then distribute ‘evidence’ of this faculty in the form of an elegantly scripted, coloured sign seems at once self-evident and wryly humorous. Nauman continued to work with text and neon, most intensely in the 1980s, and Window or Wall Sign remains one of his most enduring and influential works.

 C  Shaune Lakin     nga.gov.au     Bruce Nauman started using photography around 1966, in part following his experience that year of the work of the American-born Surrealist photographer Man Ray at the LA County Museum of Art. Eleven color photographs 1966–67, released by New York gallerist Leo Castelli in 1970, brought wide critical and public attention and represented a radical rearticulation of photography as an ‘artistic’ medium and a source of meaning. It is one of the first instances of an artist engaging with the opportunities offered by colour photography, which until the early 1970s remained the province of commercial and snapshot photography.

Taking the appearance of documentary photographs, the works depict either an action or an ephemeral ‘sculpture’ created by Nauman in his studio, each involving a pun or word game. Nauman has said of the photographs:

I suppose I might have made them as paintings if I had been able to make paintings at the time … Perhaps if I had been a good enough painter I could have made realistic paintings. I don’t know, it just seemed easier to make the works as photographs.

It seems that, in this instance, Nauman’s interest in colour photography was in its capacity to ‘realistically’ (and readily) convey the subject. All the same, the works have come to assume great significance in the history of photography. Indeed, the series was a harbinger of sorts for much of the great American and European photography of the 1970s, when for the first time artists began to use colour processes in a critical and sustained way.

[totaldramafan-lauri]

I know I haven’t updated in a few days......but I actually HAVE been playing a lot! It’s just that, well......I wasn’t emotionally in a good place, and didn’t feel up to making a post. Don’t worry, it’s nothing serious, and I’m healing.

But anyway, yeah, quite a bit has happened, and since it took place over multiple days, there are a few points to hit here, so.....cue the Read More

Deli and Bianca

My fourth and fifth villagers moved in, one after the other! As expected, they didn’t make as big of an impression as the adorable Margie did, but I do like them, and I already know what they’re like....well, kinda! Bianca is very cheery and full of energy! Also I love her color scheme, it kinda makes me think of a snow leopard or something like that. Deli goes to sleep early so I haven’t seen as much of him yet, but he talk about snacks a lot.

Apparently I have a good house

The HHA ranked my tiny little house an S!? This was.....kinda a shock. XD I don’t know if that’s really THAT impressive.....but, going by Splatoon logic, S is the highest rank, and I’m not sure if that’s true here as well....Nevertheless, I got a reward for it, some bronze decoration (which lets me know that there ARE steps above that), which I displayed in my house cuz....bragging rights? XD

Swindled!

So, like I said before, the museum expanded to add an art exhibit (which it really should’ve started with). This means that I got my first visit from this, er, friendly face-

-who invited me to visit his collection. It took me a bit to find his boat, which is kinda embarrassing.....but once I was there, I was initially very cautious. Going off of what he did in New Leaf, I knew not to trust him completely, buuuuut......at the same time, I really wanted to give Blathers some art, and I had no idea to tell the right from the wrong, if you know what I mean.....So, after mulling it over, I bought a statue. XD I knew it probably wasn’t the smartest choice, but I’m completely in the dark about most art pieces and was too lazy to look stuff up, so....I just hoped that either I was lucky, or his gimmick was different in this game that it was in New Leaf.

.......Weeeeeell, turns out that the statue was a total fake. WELP. I sure felt like an idiot after that! XD Yeeeeaaaah, I’m probably not gonna be throwing Bells at this guy all willy-nilly again after that. Eh, I deserve it. Shows me to ignore the obvious warning signs!

The wonders of coloring stuff

I’m now able to customize furniture, which I immediately put to good use! You’ll be seeing that in the next house update. Also, remember the shell lamp I was gonna give Margie? I customized it before giving it to her. I gave it a shiny pearl-like color. Cuz I just adore Margie so much already! I’ll try not to spoil her, but still.....you could say that I’ve taken a shine to her....C-cuz....lamp, shiny....moving on.

Gigajolt

Hazel, the funny lil sassmaster that she is, came up with a nickname for me......Gigajolt. I.....literally have no idea where it came from, it has nothing to do with my name......and I like it. I like it because it’s like Hazel herself - quirky, yet I can’t help but love it.

This flower doesn’t go here!

Remember my flowerbed? Well, after it rained, naturally, more flowers started growing around it. I anticipated this, and was prepared to relocate any new tulips to that the flowerbed will keep its....sh-shape......I’ve done this a few times, but....guess what happened yesterday? A different color tulip started growing! I thought that could only happen if two colors bred, but....no, all I had was red tulips! Just red! But this new one looks like it’s gonna be BLACK!? How did that happen? Well, after it grows, I’m certainly keeping some souvenirs.....O__O

Also, while I’m talking about flowers, I’ve planted another bed recently, this one fenced in, of red and while lilies (as an experiment), as well as planting some lilies outside of each villager’s house (cuz I wanna show them I care).

Striking gold

This one’s pretty simple - I found my first gold nugget, completely at random! I’ve been so used to hitting rocks everyday, collecting iron and clay.....and I was NOT expecting something new like that! I wonder how rare it is.....Maybe it’s really rare, or maybe it’s not and I’ve just been unlucky up till now. Either way, it was a pleasant surprise. XD Now to find out what it could be used for....

Plans for the future

I still haven’t found the time to plant my orchard, and I really should get on that! That should be my next big thing to do! ......If I don’t get distracted again, and it really seems like this game keeps throwing new objectives at me. XD For example, my newest problem is that my storage is full. Taking all the fruit out WILL help that, but not enough. This means that.....yup, I’m gonna have to expand my house soon. Not complaining, since I do have a lot of stuff. I REALLY like saving things for later, or even hanging on to things I’ll never use just because they were gifs. XD I’m.....sentimental like that, I guess.

[toransuretaa]

Diabolik Lovers Zero Floor Vol. 1 Drama CD English Translation [Progress 2/6]

Track 1 - Chased away by a thunder storm

*Thunder strikes as running footsteps splatter on the ground*

Ayato: Geez, what a bad timing. To suddenly pour down like this, what a bad joke.

Ayato: Hey, are you alright?

*you nod*

Ayato: If that’s the case, we’re gonna continue running like this.

Ayato: Geez, there doesn’t seem to be any place around here were we could rest. At least make a resting place in the middle of the forest, people.

Ayato: Oh! Let’s take shelter from the rain there. There’s some kind of building at the front right?

*you ask whos house it is*

Ayato: How would I know? It doesn’t matter who’s house it is. Let’s go inside.

*the creaking door closes as your steps echo through the hall*

Ayato: Eeh, I got wet. You too look completely drenched. You can see through your clothes you know.

*you hide yourself in embarasment*

Ayato: Idiot, it was lie. Besides, there’s no reason to hide anything there.

*you pout*

Ayato: Hahaha, dont sulk over it. Though, you’re really gonna catch a cold like that. You need to dry your body.

Ayato: Hey! If someone’s there come out!

Ayato: No answer, and no presence huh. Does no one live here?

*he looks around*

Ayato: Hm? Hey look. Is that a map?

*you walk towards it and Ayato starts to read it out loud*

Ayato: Including the basement, there’s a total of 13 exhibition rooms. Paintings and sculptures.

Ayato: Oh, I was wondering why it’s so big, but this is a museum huh. No wonder no one is here. It probably closed down a long time ago. It’s a wonder that this hidden run-down building hasn’t collapsed yet. Oh well, I guess it’s perfect for sheltering from the rain. And it’s also good for some time killing. Let’s stay here until it stops raining.

*you tell him you guys should return to the castle*

Ayato: Huh? You’re gonna object me even though you’re chichinashi? We’re not returning to the castle. It’s boring there, and even if we sneak out to stroll around no one’s gonna complain. Besides, just because my dad called us, it’s a homecoming with all the siblings you know. Am I a little kid to him? I‘m done with it.

*he takes a step as he continues*

Ayato: Instead, let’s explore inside. There seems to be something interesting, don’t you think? What’s more, we need to do something about your lame appearance. We should be able to find an alternative to a towel or something hanging around somwhere. Even if it’ll probably be covered in dust.

*you tell him off for calling you lame*

Ayato: Hah? Ayato-sama is looking out for you. Stop complaining. It’ll be bad if your body get’s cold. See, your hand is colder than normal. We need to do something to warm you up.

Ayato: Hm? Heh. Ah, so it’s like that. Then you gotta say it clearly...

*he bends over and whispers in your ear*

Ayato: like: “I want to get hot by getting my blood sucked.”

Ayato: I’m fine with that too, since it’ll warm your body up.

*kisses*

Ayato: You got hotter with only this. Hehe. You’re so obvious. I got thirsty from the running, so if you really ask for it, I’ll suck for you.

*you struggle*

Ayato: You know, this is the part where you should honestly hold out your neck. To reject wihout reservation, haven’t you become arrogant since you’ve become mine?

*you continue struggling*

Ayato: Tch. Well, I’ll only let it this slide this once. So, let’s go explore.

*a heavy door opens as you two walk inside*

Ayato: There is a huge number of them. What are these paintings with a person on them called again?

*you answer*

Ayato: Yes. Yes that’s it. Portraits. Wherever I look, there’re only faces. They did a good job at collecting all these huh. Look. They even got that big one hanging. With this number of paintings, you’ll really start to think something is off. What a nasty hobby.

*you grab his sleeve*

Ayato: What? By any chance, are you scared? Ehehe. I feel like I’ll get to see something interesting if I left you alone here. (T/N: idk gizari?)

Ayato: Hey, what would you do if the paintings started to move?

*you tell him not to joke around like that*

Ayato: It’s not a joke! Look behind you, isn’t that man looking at us?

*a thunderstrike catches you off guard, and you desperately cling to Ayato*

Ayato: Whoa, what are you doing, hugging me like that? Of course it’s a lie.

*you step away*

Ayato: Ahaha. You look really dumb. Falling for this kind of thing, how lame.

*you try to hit him*

Ayato: Whoa, if you want to get back at me, see if you can catch me. Well, I suppose that’s impossible for the stupid chichinashi.

*a weird painting catches your eye*

Ayato: Huh? What’s wrong? You’re making a weird face.

*you point towards it, and Ayato goes to take a closer look*

Ayato: Huh? What is this? Doesn’t this portrait... kinda look like me?

*you nod*

Ayato: You think so too?

*he steps next to it*

Ayato: When I line up like this, it looks pretty similar right?

Ayato: But, who is it that drew me without my permission? And they even hung it up in this run-down museum. Right? Don’t you think it’s mean, chichinashi?

*suddenly, you see the painting move*

Ayato: Hm? What’s wrong?

*you point at the painting and tell him it moved*

Ayato: Idiot. What are you saying? There’s no way a painting could move. Are you still taking that joke from earlier serious?

*it moves again and you tell ayato to look*

Ayato: Like I’m saying, there’s no way that something like that—

*he looks back at the painting*

Ayato: ?!

Ayato’s voice: Haha. So you finally noticed huh.

*the paint comes out of the canvas*

Ayato’s voice: Geez, it was so boring inside the canvas.

Ayato: ... It came out...

Ayato 2: What are you making that stupid face for? Coming out or doing whatever, that’s for me to decide.

Ayato: As if! There’s no way a painting can move or come out. And even taking on the same appearance as me. You make me feel super weird.

Ayato 2: Well sorry about that. But what can I do about it. I’m you’re portrait after all.

Ayato: It’s even able to talk normally... What’s going on here?

*you ask him what’s happening*

Ayato: Even if you ask me, I have no clue. Let me tell you, it’s not like I’ve done anything okay? That thing just started moving on its own accord.

*Ayato faces his copy again*

Ayato: I mean, if you’re a painting then stay in your painting! It’s a headache if you come out.

Ayato 2: You’re the one who’s a headache. Entering without even paying the entrance fee.

Ayato: Entrance fee? Heh. There’s nothing in this shabby museum to pay for. There’re only faces wherever you look, there’s nothing interesting at all.

*you call out to him*

Ayato: What? It’s the truth! It’s just looking at damn boring faces, what’s there to enjoy about?

Ayato 2: Tch. What a vexing bastard. Don’t enter if you don’t even undestand art. Well, I guess it can’t be helped if you’re already inside. But, I can’t just let you go back for free. Since you’ve already stepped inside, you’ll have to pay the right price for it. Which is yourself.

Ayato: What?

Ayato 2: So, I’m saying, I’m taking your lives as the entrance fee. Get eaten by this museum.

Ayato: What?

Ayato 2: You’re arrogant so you look distasteful, but that woman looks super delicious.

Ayato: Tch. So you’re a man-eating painting. I don’t know what kind of moster you are, but I know now that you’re a up to no good.

Ayato: Chichinashi. We’re getting out immediately.

Ayato 2: As if I’d let you escape!

*the door through which you came closes shut*

Ayato: ?! The exit!

Ayato 2: You’re for later. Firstly...

*teleports to you*

Ayato 2: I’ll start with this woman.

Ayato 2: Now, you’ll be coming with me.

Ayato: ?! Hold up you bastard!

Ayato 2: As if I’d wait, idiot.

*a door creaks open and the fake ayato pulls you through as he talks to you*

Ayato 2: You too don’t shout. Let’s enjoy ourselves to the fullest. Just the two of us.

T/N: ��Koko ni omae wo gizari ni shitara, omoshiroi mon ga mirare sou dana.” I can’t figure out what gizari means. Maybe I’m mishearing it. By all means tell me if you know.

————————————————————

Track 2 - Aggressive fangs pierce

*Thunder and running footsteps echo through the hallway*

Ayato: Shit. No matter what door I open, they’re all similar floors. No matter where I look, portraits, portraits. Are they ridiculing me?

Ayato: That sadistic bastard, where did he go? Kidnapping her like that, I’ll never forgive him!

*he punches a portrait that then falls on the ground*

Ayato: If something happens to her I will not show any mercy!

——————

*a punch is heard somewhere else*

Ayato 2: Tch. That bastard, going wild inside. What’s he doing to the valuable exhibitions?

*you struggle*

Ayato 2: You too, till when are you gonna struggle. Do you think you can get away from me?

*you struggle*

Ayato 2: Shut up, you lowly prey.

*you tell him you’re not prey*

Ayato 2: Heh. If you’re not prey then what is this smell? The moment you came in here, there was a strong strange smell spreading around. A very delicious and sweet smell. It’s like asking to please eat me. Now I’m closer I can really tell. The flowing blood under this thin skin, it's special isn't it? I'm looking forward to see what it tastes like.

*you beg him not to take your blood*

Ayato 2: What? My objective isn't just blood. I told you right? I'm taking your life as entrance fee. I'm gonna eat your whole body, without leaving behind the meat and bones.

*you struggle*

Ayato 2: He~ You're making a nice expression. The face of despair, I can't get enough of it. I planned to eat you immediately, but I changed my mind. It's boring to just finish my meal quickly, so let's enjoy this a little.

*he steps closer*

Ayato 2: As you wish, I'll suck your blood.

*you protest*

Ayato 2: It's like a little taste testing before eating. Feel honoured, you'll be able to feel ore-sama's fangs.

*you struggle to get away*

Ayato 2: Is that supposed to be a protest? It only seems to me that you're looking forward to it. Sure, struggle as much as you like. But...

*he steps closer to close the gap again*

Ayato 2: If I’ll be rough with my fangs, it won’t be my problem.

*he bites and sucks your blood*

Ayato 2: What is this? It’s super delicious. You, you’re not some ordinary human, are you? I won’t let you go until I’ve sucked you dry.

*you struggle*

Ayato 2: Tch. You’re still gonna resist? Even though you’re never gonna win from me.

*he pins you down*

Ayato 2: See, try to run away now. If you can do that while being pinned down that is.

*you try to get out of his grip*

Ayato 2: Hehe. What are you wriggling around for? Are you inviting me?

*he whispers into your left ear*

Ayato 2: Now you understand, right? You can’t run away. You have no choice but to be devoured by me.

Ayato 2: ?! The smell changed? Perhaps, are you feeling good by being driven into a corner? Ha. To feel this, are you a masochist? So you’ve been trained by that vampire. Well, that’s what I thought first, but it’s probably always been a trait of yours. See? Just by licking your throat...

*he licks you*

Ayato 2: Hehe. You’re too sensitive. Interesting. What will happen if I touch other places?

*you tell him to stop*

Ayato 2: Don’t tell me to stop. I’m telling you I will play with you. Stay still.

Ayato 2: I get it. I just have to immobilise you. Hey, face this way.

*he kisses you*

Ayato 2: Ah. Well, I’m sorry that my kiss tastes like paint. I’m a portrait after all. Even so, I’m not an ordinary paint. The accumulation of magic inside the canvas, my body is made out if magic. A part of that flowed into you. Do you know what will happen?

*you start to lose control of you body*

Ayato 2: Ah, so it’s already spread throughout your body. You’re restraint now and can’t move right? With my power, I’ve gotten control of your body from the inside. You like this kind of stuff right? I’ll make it so your mouth can move so tell me: “Getting the freedom of my body stolen by force makes me happy”.

*you refuse and stay silent*

Ayato 2: Tch. What are you keeping silent for? Do you even understand the situation you’re in? Because I didn’t receive a proper entrance fee, you’re now exposing your neck, you know. Ah. I guess your neck isn’t enough. Show me the other easy places to bite.

*he moves some of your clothes out of the way*

Ayato 2: A nice voice finally came out. But it only has an opposite effect. Prey that scream only makes me want to take my time to torture them more. See? You look great.

*he comes closer*

Ayato 2: While you act like you dislike it, the sweet smell has grown stronger. It seems intoxicating. Now, where shall I sink my fangs in? Your lower side or so may be nice. If I penetrate you really deeply it’ll be very painful. I won’t show mercy to some prey.

*he kisses your skin*

Ayato 2: Hehe. What are you getting scared for? Did you think you would suddenly get bitten? As if I’d do something so wasteful. Such an inviting person is really rare, so I’ll take my time to dote on you.

*you glare at him*

Ayato 2: Even if you glare at me like that, I’m telling you it’s useless. Your whole body has become sensitive right? Just by tracing your arm like this, you start to shiver. As you start to get scared, your expression has become nice. What’s more, despite being scared, you’re feeling it. What a woman. You’ve become impatient by now right? Try saying: “Please suck my blood”.

*you refuse*

Ayato 2: What a conceited one. It seems like you don’t understand your place as a prey. If you want get treated meanly that badly, I’ll be stricter. I’ll let you fully enjoy the taste of my fangs.

*he bites you and sucks your blood*

Ayato 2: Drinking blood like this is good too huh. Let’s see how much you’ll cry out.

*he bites you again as you struggle*

Ayato 2: That’s right. Be more afraid. Entertain me. When I’m bored with playing with you I’ll eat your whole body.

*a loud bang went through the room as glass shattered to the floor*

Ayato: *panting heavily* Finally... found you! You sadistic bastard!

*Ayato throws a big piece of glass at the fake Ayato*

Ayato 2: Argh!

*Ayato lunges forward to attack the paint Ayato and they start to fight*

Ayato 2: You bastard, how dare you do that! You’ve destroyed the exhibition!

Ayato: Heh. The one who left it randomly in the corridor is at fault.

*Ayato turns to you*

Ayato: Chichinashi, you’re alive right?

*you were barely able to give a response*

Ayato: Geez, don’t give me trouble like that. Hurry up and wake up.

*you can’t move*

Ayato: Shit. Then stay put.

*he picks you up*

Ayato: I’m gonna carry you like this and run!

*Ayato runs away with you*

Ayato 2: That bastard, like I’d let you escape!

*the fake Ayato teleports*

[bittysvalentines]

From: @redneterp

To: @leftwinglibrarian

Rated T, 3K, no significant warnings apply (Canon-typical content, and story contains a very vague spoiler for the ending of a piece of media released 6 or 7 years ago)

Gift for: LeftWingLibrarian, who asked for “Fake dating, bed sharing, first kiss, friends to lovers, basically any fluffy tropes.” I think I hit 3 out of 4 of the above, and got a couple more ideas from your tumblr. I hope I guessed correctly and that you enjoy! Happy Valentines day!

***

“The giant Christmas tree at Rockefeller Plaza?” Adam guessed. “Oooh, or the 30 Rock Tour! Wait, would that still open by the time we got to NYC? Or the observation deck?”

“No, no, and no,” Justin replied. “And those totally count as 3 guesses, so you only have two left.”

“Bro, objection!”

“Overruled, you know the rules. It’s two questions left or game over. Those are your options.”

*

The guesses had begun as they’d left Haus 2.0 earlier that afternoon, as Adam tried unsuccessfully to identify their mystery destination. Justin had kept his plans secret for months, only to have the surprise nearly ruined by Sandeep-From-Coding the day prior. He’d joined them in the Nutrition Nook (yes, that was the actual name their employer used, there was even a distressed-wood chalkboard sign with that name overhanging the corner) during afternoon coffee break, and extended an invite to join the Coding Bros at “the sports bar with the good wings” to watch the Bruins’ game. Justin had declined, citing previously-set plans for Saturday afternoon, then was later forced to admit to Adam that he wasn’t just trying to avoid an intra-office rivalry with Coding by preventing Adam from both arguing the superiority of Buffalo wings to those from any other city and pronouncing that the Sabres would kick the Bruins’ asses, but that he really had made plans he couldn’t divulge. Justin was able to appeal to the D-Man Code to secure 24 hours free from questioning, but as they left Haus 2.0 on foot Adam insisted time was up.

“Dude, all you’ve told me is to ‘dress nice, but not formal,’ you’ve got to tell me more. You’d better not be dragging me to work on our day off.”

Justin swore they weren’t heading to the office, and eventually agreed to Twenty Questions regarding their destination. Adam had tossed out a few wildly varying suggestions as they rode the T downtown (Science Museum. Brewery tour. Aquarium.) and waited for the train at South Station (Going to Samwell to decorate the Haus in epic style while SMH was off on their C&C roadtrip weekend). He pulled out the puppy-dog eyes as they settled into their seats on the train, begging Justin for some scrap of information, and Justin relented to admit “Fine, I can tell you that this is an early Chrismukkah gift since we won’t be together on the 24th.”

After a soliloquy on the importance of the character of Seth Cohen to young-Adam that earned them a glare from the woman seated across from them, the hint led Adam to speculate about Christmas or Hanukkah-related events along the Northeast corridor, ending with the trio of Rockefeller-related guesses.

With the final-questions warning, Adam turned to the window, apparently deep in thought trying to make his final guesses count. The last of the golden-yellow light from the sunset streamed through the window, highlighting his jaw and creating a halo around his blond hair. Fuck, Justin thought, had Holtzy always been this gorgeous? He spent a few minutes appreciating his best bro’s face, momentarily distracting himself from worrying that Adam might not enjoy the surprise after all, as none of his guesses had been remotely correct. Had he misjudged his bro?

As the train briefly stopped at the Samwell station, Justin returned his thoughts to the present and distracted Adam with a conversation about SMH’s season to-date which carried them through until the train approached Providence Station. As they slowed to a stop he stood and grabbed Adam by the arm, tugging him off the train.

“Providence? Are we visiting Jack?” Adam asked as they emerged from the station and headed towards the river.

“The Falcs are in Edmonton tonight. And that was number nineteen. One left.” Justin replied with a smirk before leading them across the river and through the park, following a route he’d carefully chosen on Google Maps to keep their final destination secret. In the dim gap between streetlights Justin surreptitiously patted his jacket pocket, triple-checking that the tickets were still there. They continued to banter as Justin led them through downtown, arriving at the restaurant a few minutes early, though it was already packed. The hostess confirmed their 5:45 reservation, but noted that the table wasn’t yet free before offering them a seat at the bar while they waited.

“So, this coal-fired pizza must be really good to warrant a trip from Boston.” Adam noted after they’d each ordered a beer.

“Google says so,” Justin replied. “And was that your final question?”

“Objection, that was a statement, not a question. I reserve my right to my final question.”

“Sustained. Shitty’s taught you well.”

“Who knew that sharing a Haus with a law-student would come with so many unexpected benefits? And before you ask, that was a rhetorical question unrelated to today’s plans and still doesn’t count for the total.”

Justin laughed and nodded in agreement, before the TV behind the bar caught his attention. The station was replaying Premier League highlights from earlier in the day, and soon they were engrossed in a conversation about Chelsea’s chances for the season. They leaned close together to be heard above the din in the restaurant, and Justin felt a warmth inside, reminded of how lucky he was to have such an amazing BestBroTM.

*

An hour later, Adam leaned back in his chair. “I’m stuffed,” he said, patting his stomach. Together they’d polished off a starter and an entire pizza. “Google was right, Rans, that was amazing.”

“Definitely,” Justin agreed.

“I might order another beer, though. Do you want one, too?” Adam asked.

“That might not be the best idea.”

“For you, or both of us? Wait, was that a clue? Do you have something planned beyond dinner?”

“That’s three questions again, which puts you beyond twenty, so I’ll just answer the first - I meant for both of us.” Justin guessed they’d both lost their tolerance since graduating, as they’d only made it to one Kegster the whole semester, and he didn’t want to risk either of them dozing off midway through the main event. “Maybe coffee would be a better idea?”

“Are we pulling an all-nighter? And I will qualify that question with the note that I am not asking about the surprise itself, merely a health-and-safety question about appropriate beverage consumption. I am, as you know, very safety-conscious.” Adam finished, pressing his right hand over his heart.

Justin laughed. “Sure Holtzy, I believe you. And let the record note,” he continued, trying to match Adam’s serious tone, “that an exemption has been granted. No, I do not anticipate that an all-nighter will be required.”

Adam stroked his chin. “Hmm…”

Justin pulled out his phone as subtly as he could, tapping to check the time, surprised that it was already past 7pm. The time had flown by, as always, as they’d discussed everything from the prospects of their favourite teams in three different leagues to the sitcoms that Adam insisted needed to be moved to the top of their Netflix queue. “However, we do need to head out shortly, so if you do want coffee we should order it soon.”

“Are you getting one?”

“Nah, I’m fine without.” Justin replied. Checking the time had made his anxiety regarding whether Adam would actually enjoy the surprise return with a vengeance and he could already feel his leg twitching; adding caffeine to the mix would not end well.

“Then I’m good, too. Should we get the bill?” Adam asked as he reached for his wallet.

“I got it, bro. It is Chrismukkah, after all.”

*

“Thanks, man,” Adam said, slinging his arm around Justin’s shoulder as they stepped out of the restaurant.

“Got your back, dude,” Justin confirmed, returning the gesture as he wrapped an arm around Adam’s waist and directing their path the remaining few blocks to the PPAC.

As they rounded the final corner and the lights of the marquee came into view, Justin couldn’t resist peeking out of the corner of his eye at Adam. The reflection of the lights sparkled on his glasses, behind which his eyes grew wide as they got close enough to see the crowd in line outside the doors. As they neared the end of the line and were close enough to read the stylized script, Adam stopped abruptly.

“Once? You’re taking me to a musical?”

Justin couldn’t parse Adam’s tone, and his suddenly his heart was racing. “Is that ok? I hoped you’d like it, from the reviews it sounded like a musical rom-com so I thought you would, but I realize now I’ve never heard you sing songs from it so maybe I was wrong?”

“Dude, not wrong.” Adam turned and crushed Justin to himself in a tight hug. “I’ve only seen clips from when it won all those Tony’s, but that doesn’t mean I don’t already love it.” His voice dropped to a near-whisper in Justin’s ear, “Best Chrismukkah gift ever. Really.”

Justin let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding as he relaxed in Adam’s arms. After months of anticipation and planning and keeping this a secret (even doing all of his research in incognito mode so that his browser history and targeted ads couldn’t give things away if Adam borrowed his laptop), everything had worked out. They were at the theatre, his Best Bro was happy. It was all worth it, and the show hadn’t even started.

Adam relaxed his hold on Justin. “I can’t believe you kept this secret from me! I never would have guessed, really, even if it was Sixty Questions.”

Justin smirked and waggled his eyebrows as they joined the line of excited patrons.

*

Ten minutes later, they’d made their way inside, visited the washrooms, and found their seats.

“These are amazing seats, Rans, we’re so close to the stage! Wait, is that an actual bar on the stage?”

“Yup. Still want that beer? We can go up and grab drinks if you’d like.”

“Tempting, but I don’t want to forget a second of this. Did you know I’ve only seen one live musical before, not counting my sisters’ school productions, which do not count.”

“I might have heard something about the life-changing experience of seeing Rent when you were in grade 11…” Justin said with a smirk.

“Grade 11? What is this foreign language I hear? I was a junior, and …” Adam’s argument trailed off as one person after another wandered to centre-stage holding instruments and beginning to play. “Wha…?”

Justin nodded. “Pre-show music, that’s why I may have rushed to get us here.”

“How did you know about this?”

“Dude, how dare you doubt my research abilities!”

“Apologies. You are now, and forevermore, the king of research and spreadsheets,” Adam acknowledged with a head bow and hand flourish, before turning to watch the pub party breaking out on-stage. Musicians congregated amidst the crowds hovering around the bar, dancing and playing folk tunes. Adam watched, a giant grin on his face. “I’ve heard there’s no orchestra, all the music is played on-stage by the cast. Can you imagine?”

“Yeah!” Justin nodded. Adam’s enthusiasm was infectious.

After several rousing songs, the lights dimmed, and the audience returned to their seats. Soon the stage was dark, with the light focused on a single musician strumming his guitar. The show had begun.

Throughout the first act, Justin felt his attention split between the amazing performance on stage and Adam’s reactions. He watched out of the corner of his eye as Adam tapped his feet along with the performers dancing on tables, laughed along with their jokes, or wiped a tear away as the Girl sang a wistful solo alone at the piano. As the lights rose again at intermission, Justin turned to see Adam staring at the stage, still mesmerized after the whole cast of musicians had joined a group song-and-dance number at the pub. “So? Enjoying the show so far?”

Adam took a deep breath, as if his pulling his soul to rejoin his body, before turning to Justin. “Enjoying it? Rans, there are not enough words to express how I feel about the power of music to stir human emotion.”

“That good, eh?”

“Good enough that I won’t mock you for saying ‘eh.’”

“How about the power of cookies?” Justin asked as he recognized the smell of baked goods wafting through the theatre. “The internet says that getting a chocolate chip cookie during intermission here is, like, required.”

Adam lauged, “Well, if it’s a requirement. We can’t let the internet down, after all.”

“Never!” Justin agreed.

*

An hour and a bit later, after the auditorium had erupted in applause and the cast took their final bows, Justin sat in silence, staring at the stage. Was that how it ended, no magical reconnection but a bittersweet parting? He couldn’t explain it to himself, but it felt like a personal loss. A loud sniff to his left caught his attention, and he turned in time to see Adam wiping his eyes on the sleeve of his button-down. Justin dug the cookie-napkin from his pocket and passed it over so that Adam could blow his nose properly.

“Thank you, Rans.”

“No problem.”

“No, man. Not for the napkin, or, well, not just for that, but for all of this,” Adam waved his hand about. “Dinner. The show. Everything. This was one of the best nights of my life, Justin.” Adam fixed him with an intense look that Justin couldn’t interpret before reaching to grab his hand in a firm grasp.

“You’re welcome … got your back … always.” Justin squeezed Adam’s hand back, hoping it would express some of the feeling that he couldn’t put into words.

They sat like that for a few beats before Adam pulled back. “I could sit here forever, but I guess the ushers wouldn’t appreciate that.” He looked around, just noticing that most of the audience in their section had already cleared out. “Wait, do we need to get to the station? Isn’t the last train soon?”

“It leaves in five minutes,” Justin replied. “But I didn’t want to rush you, so Jack said we could spend the night at his place.”

“Bro, you’re the best,” Adam said, leaning over the armrest to rest his head on Justin’s shoulder for a minute longer, before they stood and un-pretzeled themselves from the tiny seats. “Dude, these seats were not made for D-men. Were people in 1920-whatever a lot shorter?”

Mood lightened, they shrugged into their jackets and left the theatre. The temperature had dropped to just above freezing, but both preferred to walk, so they tucked their hands in their pockets and headed towards Jack’s building. They were quieter than their usual, rarely speaking but occasionally bumping shoulders or elbows, each lost in thought.

*

Justin was glad to see DeShawn was the doorman on duty when they arrived, as he’d met them often and was unlikely to create a fuss about non-residents asking for admittance. Sure enough, he greeted them warmly and handed over the keyfob Jack had left at the desk in Justin’s name. They rode the elevator in silence, and let themselves into Jack’s apartment, before dropping their shoes and jackets in the hallway closet.

“Do you want anything to eat?” Justin asked, waving a note he’d found on the pool table. “Jack says there are muffins and mini-pies from Bitty in the freezer, and to help ourselves.”

“I’m good, thanks, maybe in the morning?” Adam said. “But go ahead if you’re hungry.”

“Nah, man, I’m still full of pizza. What happened to us? Less than a year away from competitive hockey and our stomachs must have shrunk, now that we aren’t burning thousands of calories a day skating.”

Adam rolled his eyes and let out a half-hearted laugh.

“Are you tired, bro? I stashed some of our stuff here last time,” Justin said, as he led the way into the guest room, dug the duffle bag out of the closet, and dropped it on the bed. He pulled out a bundle of his clothes and toiletries and passed the rest of the bag to Adam.

Adam dug through the bag. “My old Bruins shirt, I wondered where I’d left that.” He then pulled out the small bag of toiletries. “You even packed my spare contact case? Bro!”

“Excel said there was a 30% chance you’d wear contacts today, so ..” Justin shrugged, “Got your back.”

“You always do. And I’ve got yours. Always,” Adam said, quiet and intense. It sounded like a vow, Justin thought, before Adam broke their fixed look with a shake of his head, and turned to the bathroom.

Moments later, Justin returned to drop his clothes on the guest room chair, and found Adam was already settled against the pillows, glasses propped on the bedside table. Justin hovered at the foot of the bed, suddenly uncertain. He realized then that as he’d planned this weekend, without making a conscious decision he’d visualized the two of them sharing the guest bed, but was that ok to want? To ask for?

Adam interrupted before his thoughts could spiral, “Dude, get in here.”

“Is that ok, bro? I could crash on the couch.”

“How many times did we share the bottom bunk when the Haus ghosts interrupted your dreams? I think there’s room in a Queen bed for us both, comfortably. But you’re getting the lights.You know the rules, you’re the last one standing.”

“Ghosts aren’t real!” Justin shot back automatically, yet he still moved as fast as he could across the dark floor to hop into the warm bed. He shuffled, determining the most comfortable spot on a new mattress as he listened to Adam’s steady breathing next to him. It felt so good to share a room again, as if a piece of himself that was missing slotted back into place. This was home, he realized, and he didn’t ever want to leave or grow apart. But what if they did, he thought. Isn’t that what happens to college friends, they eventually grow apart? Unbidden, a lyric from the show came to mind “you’ll be just a man, once I used to know…” and he knew he didn’t want that to be true. He didn’t need to run the pros and cons or compile spreadsheets, it was an immutable fact. He wanted to spend the rest of his life right here, Ransom-and-Holster, together. Before he could get lost in questioning what to say, Justin took the plunge, turning on his side.

“Holtzy … Adam? I’ve gotta say something.” He reached out, tentatively reaching out until his fingers hit what felt like Adam’s elbow. He took a deep breath and continued, “You’re the most important person in my life, and I think you always will be. I don’t want us to grow apart, or for you to be that guy I once knew that I tell stories about. You’re my person. Wait, is that a line from one of your shows? Nevermind, don’t answer that, because if I stop I might not be able to say what I need to say, and that is that I love you. Like, I am in love with you. And I may have only just realized that, but it’s the absolute truth.” In the faint glow created by the lights from the city below he could see Adam’s eyes widening as Justin spoke, mouth gaping like a fish. “Is that okay? Did I just ruin everything?”

“No!” Adam flipped towards him, clutching onto Justin’s sleeve. “You didn’t ruin anything. Did  - do - do you really mean that?”

Justin nodded, tilting his head closer, “I really do.”

“Because I’ve been in love with you forever, but I didn’t think you would ever feel that way, so I kept it to myself.” Adam shrugged, causing his arm to move under Justin’s hand.

“I’m sorry I kept you waiting. But I’m here now,” Justin added, trailing his fingertips up Adam’s arm until he reached his jaw. Their faces were only centimetres apart now. He slid his hand further along the side of Adam’s head, thumb stroking his cheek. “Can I?”

Adam bridged the remaining gap between them, pressing their lips together in a soft kiss. One kiss became another as they melted into one another, Adam’s arm reaching across Justin’s back to pull him close. Soft and sweet became deep and passionate before ebbing back again like a tide. This feels right, Justin thought, pulling back just enough so they could look at one another again in the dim light. His hands cradled Adam’s face, thumbs brushing against the stubble on his jaw as he felt the warmth of his cheeks and wondered if Adam’s face looked as flushed as it felt. That was an appealing thought, Justin realized, as he dipped forward again to plant a soft kiss on one cheek. “Ok?”

“So very ok,” Adam confirmed as he shifted onto his back, tugging Justin with him.

Justin happily snuggled into place, his nose pressed against Adam’s neck with Adam’s arm warm across his back. I’m home, was his last thought as he drifted into a peaceful sleep.

** 

[soveryanon]

Four weeks later, reviewing time for MAG139 /o/

-I’m still crying over how the first time Tim ever spoke on tape, he pointed out so many mistakes/typos/misreadings from statements that were faaar from being one-liner but actually… Big Mysteries that are still relevant now. Amongst those:

(MAG033) TIM: Um… oh, and here, in Miss Montauk’s statement about her father’s killings. You refer to case, um, 9220611 as case, um, 1106922. Oh, and don’t get me started on the other case numbers around the Hill Top hauntings, they’re a mess! […] So, in case 8163103… it isn’t clear if Albrecht’s wife is called “Clara” or “Carla”, ‘cause you keep switching back and forth…

Aaaand it was in that episode that we heard about “Peter Lukas” for the first time ever. I miss Tim and gdi, he had a good nose…

- I want to say a word about Jon’s reading of the statement in itself: “Jon, what the FUCK.” Part of why it was so sneakily terrifying was… how much Jon was into it? He totally ran with the sheer glee and cruelty, especially, I felt, in these moments:

(MAG139, Eugene Vanderstock) “It’s hard to say how much I’ve got left in me; how much longer my sacrifices can buy me. But when I go… you better believe I’m going big – and it is going to hurt. […] And I hurt so very many people… A building fire is a dreadful thing – but so much more dreadful when it’s shining out into that night. It was the first of my crimes, but not the last, and arson has always been my thing. It’s such a simple way to destroy everything someone has built, both literally, and figuratively. […] I was to secure her sacrifices. I would spare you the details, but I do not wish to~”

Presumably, the dramatic reading is still a Jon Thing and not intrinsically spooky, but w o w Jon, you didn’t have to take that edge for a sadistic serial killer.

- YEAH OKAY, and Eugene was terrifying per se. Why are all Desolation people Like That. And Eugene started… very young:

(MAG139, Eugene Vanderstock) “So, me? I was born in ’36 […]. But now, staggering through the ruins of his life, the look I saw on his face… it woke something in me. Something… truly awful… Anyone who talks about “the Blitz spirit” wasn’t there, or wants to paper over their fear with nostalgia. Terrible things happened in the Blackout, and we hurt each other just as much as the Germans hurt us. And I hurt so very many people…”

He… wasn’t even ten, back then…

;; Aaaand once again, demonstration that spooks tend to go for the easy, vulnerable targets:

(MAG139, Eugene Vanderstock) “I took foreign workers, mostly. Those with the fewest immediate connections to complicate matters, and the most hopeful dreams of what their life might be. They were the ones that provided Agnes the most satisfying nourishment. I would wait for them to be alone, and then I would catch them unawares.”

Gerry had commented about the fact that the world becoming a Factory Farm for a Fear God would mean being able to snatch everything (MAG111: “right now all the entities have to act like a hunter, they pick off the weak ones around the edges, the ones that wander too close, and the rest of the time they have to just graze on whatever fear we all passively give away.”) but it’s always upsetting when we get Spooks describing their preferred targets… ;;

Eugene said that he was already seventy, he’s now eighty, Jon had found hints that he was probably still active (MAG139, Jon: “looking at the details for the British Steel Plant in Scunthorpe, it does seem like Eugene is still around. So I can only assume… some sort of equilibrium was found. Given what happened when I met Jude Perry, I’m not in any rush to track him or… any of them down myself.”), but given how Eugene had promised that he would be “going big” at the end of his life, it… probably won’t be pretty.

(And I totally understand that Jon feels like it’s not his own battle! But at every little concession, my heart breaks a bit. There are still people in the coffin; Eugene is probably still taking foreign workers even after Agnes’s death, for his own sacrifices… and it’s true that it’s not the Archive team’s role to save them, that they have bigger things to focus on? But they know what is happening, and that still means that innocents are getting killed and/or consumed and they… let it happen. It feels so Beholding, to know and to allow it, feeding from the scraps of the surviving witnesses’ tales…? They’re not actively allowing these terrible things to happen but they take advantage of that whole system…)

Eugene also highlighted how in the end, the cults/clusters/congregations of people worshipping the same concept are… human-made. There doesn’t seem to be any special instructions or a divine revelation about how they should proceed; they scramble and try things out, but it’s mostly coming from punctual decisions, in the same way that Robert Smirke made arbitrary decisions regarding his Architecture of the Fears.

(MAG139, Eugene Vanderstock) “I found my God through my own path, served It in my own way; and when Arthur and Diego found me, told me there were others that shared my devotion… Well, I can’t say it doesn’t feel nice to belong. Even if we do have our… little disagreements. […] But a longing… is not the same thing as an instruction. We’d all been touched and warped by proximity to the holy Burning Fire, but none of us had any special knowledge, no matter what Diego claims he might have read. […] Some objected, said that unless the child was conceived of the Flame, it could never be a true incarnation. But they had no idea of how such a conception could possibly even work, so it was decided that it would have to be enough to birth the child by fire. […] There was some… division amongst us as to the best course of action, something that will surely not surprise you at this stage.”

It’s kind of impressive that the Lightless Flame managed to be a small cult, that Rayner attracted people around his own “religion”, and that the Magnus Institute apparently managed to establish itself around something its people shared (given that there are the international canals, the Usher Foundation and the Pu Songling Research Centre, who knew about the Archivist’s powers, and Jon was identified in Beijing, Elias was clearly familiar to Xiaolin, etc.). It makes sense, in that regard, that even when feeling like they “belong” and are worshipping the same concept, spooks tend to give their same patrons so many different names – like different aspects of it. I wonder if there are also divisions amongst the Beholding people about their ritual and how they should try to go about it? Outside of the fact that some (Jon…? Please, Jon, confirm that you still don’t want That.) might refuse to partake in it altogether because they’re satisfied with the world as is, like Jared demonstrated in MAG131 in his refusal to join in The Last Feast.

- I wonder to which extent we’re going to hear about the history of the Lightless Flame again, because… it sounds like there are still so many mysteries (even more than before this episode?) and I have no idea if they’ll fall into the left-in-the-air-for-us-to-guess/wonder category (Jonny did promise that we won’t get spoon-fed all the answers, iirc?), or if this will all get cleared up later.

* First, everything around Diego Molina (Malina? Not the first time his name has popped up, but each of his episodes are floating in the no-official-transcript void): 

(MAG139, Eugene Vanderstock) “We all felt the calling, the dreams, pulling us ever closer to a world of fire and loss, a place of burning, and agony, when we remade the world in the image of the Lightless Flame, the one Diego called “Asag”. […] none of us had any special knowledge, no matter what Diego claims he might have read. […] Arthur has told us not to harm you yet, but this whole thing has really rather weakened his authority, and many of us are now looking towards Diego for leadership. But we shall see, I suppose.”

[…] ARCHIVIST: “Diego”, I assume to be Diego Molina, who Basira crossed paths with back in her Section’d days, and “Arthur”… could be Arthur Nolan – though, going from… the head of a cult to watching over Jane Prentiss as a landlord… does seem like something of a demotion. … God knows. It’s not like I don’t have my own office politics to keep track of.

Jon remembered Basira’s account of her encounter with Diego (when she had been able to tell his name), from MAG043, which gave us an official description of him. He had been involved in the case which got her to sign her first Section 31 form, regarding a fire near Clapham in August 2011, and resulting in the death of a fellow (racist) officer:

(MAG043) BASIRA: He was… a Hispanic male. Probably mid to late forties, heavyset with a completely shaved head. […] I realised for the first time the bald guy’s saying something. Not loud, but intensely. I mean, this was years ago so I don’t remember exactly what he was saying, but it definitely involved the words “cleansing fire”, “all shall be ash”, and the name “Asag”? Which, I later learned, is some kind of Sumerian demon. So that’s fun. […] Our arsonist’s name was Diego Molina. He was assistant curator at some Mexican museum, come over with a loan to the Natural History Museum, but… they hadn’t heard from him for a few weeks. […] The only thing Diego Molina had on him, when we brought him in, was a small book, bound in red leather. They caught Spencer in storage, trying to destroy it with a zippo lighter. […] They told me he killed himself when he got home. Apparently, he’d somehow filled the bath full of boiling water and just… just got in. Official story was he’d somehow done it using a kettle, which… that’s, that’s just about the weakest cover-up I ever heard.

And the description she gave, and the focus on “Asag”, is of course putting to mind the mysterious man from MAG012 who was transported to Lesere Saraki’s service on the night of the 23rd December of 2011 (so six months after Basira’s case), and who had apparently been fighting with Gerry Keay, before Gerry killed him for good in the hospital:

(MAG012, Lesere Saraki) “Apparently the fire brigade had responded to reports of a blaze in a building site near St Mary’s churchyard, and had turned up to find the two men lying unconscious. There had been no fire, although the ground they lay on showed several burn marks and a metal bar that had been lying nearby appeared to have bent slightly as if from great heat. […] the more I heard, the more it sounded like most of them weren’t in English. The first sounded like “Asak” or “Asag”, then “Veepalach” and finally in English “The Lightless Flame”. The last part was very clear, and I assumed he was talking about whatever burned him, but he said it with such intensity that the words made me feel quite uncomfortable.”

[…] ARCHIVIST: As far as the mystery man’s chanting goes, if it was indeed “Asag” that he was saying, then that’s quite interesting. Asag is the name of a demon in Sumerian mythology associated with disease and corruption, which doesn’t really seem to have much relevance to this statement except that it was also fabled that Asag was able to boil fish alive in their rivers. Admittedly in Sumerian myth this was because he was monstrously ugly but a curious coincidence nonetheless. “Veepalach” might also be a mishearing of the Polish word “wypalać”, according to Martin, which means to cauterize or brand. Admittedly, if Martin speaks Polish in the same way he “speaks Latin” then he might be talking nonsense again, but I’ve looked it up and it appears to check out.

* Tangent about Gerry but mMMmm, there is one item I had absolutely forgotten about that was mentioned in this episode?

(MAG012, Lesere Saraki) “He was in almost identical shape to the first, except for the fact that the burns seemed to stop at his neck, along a clear line. It was as though he’d been wearing a choker that the damage couldn’t get above but his neck was bare. […] Like the first, he was completely covered in almost uniform second-degree burns, except for what at first I thought were small black scorch marks. Looking closer, I saw that they were eyes. Small, tattooed eyes on every one of his joints: his knees, his elbows and even his knuckles, as well as just over his heart. I would have expected the burns to have almost destroyed tattoos that small but instead they were unblemished and the skin about a centimetre around each one also didn’t seem to have been affected. […] After a few seconds of awkward silence, Gerard spoke. He asked me if the paramedics had brought any items in with them. Specifically, he was after a small book bound in red leather and a brass pendant he had been wearing. He didn’t say what design had been on the pendant but I guessed it had been an eye. I told him that neither of those things had been brought in with him, and he was quiet for a long time.”

With the descriptions of his wounds and how the Eyes had apparently protected him from the burning, and how there was specifically a clear delimitation after his neck, and how he had lost a pendant… it looks like he had a(n Eye?) pendant acting as a protection, which was pretty efficient? Given Gerry’s reaction, was it actually… from Eric’s…? (I doubt he would have been apparently stunned into silence like this if it had just been something from Mary?)

Plus, I’m not sure about a few things but they’re quite interesting to think about: Why had Gerry apparently been fighting against Diego? In MAG111, he mainly described his activities around Leitner books at the time, and we spotted him casually saving or giving hints to a few statement-givers here and there, helping them to survive, but this was the only time we heard of him him… actively fighting and killing a Spook. Had they been fighting over the “small book bound in red leather”? Given how Eugene mentioned Diego’s reading in MAG139, that Basira remembered they had retrieved a book on him in MAG043, and that Gerry was after one that matched its description in MAG012, he was tied to at least that one, so… I would say it was either a (proto)Leitner, either a Smirke book covering some thoughts about the rituals? Did Diego become a Spook thanks to it, à la Mike Crew and Jared Hopworth? (Though in their cases, they got rid of their own books once they acquired their powers…)

(Given Gertrude’s personal history with the Lightless Flame, I first thought, very excitedly, that Gerry had tried to neutralise someone who was threatening direct harm to Gertrude. Technically, unless small retcon, it can’t be the case: Mary Keay was stated to have died in September 2008 (MAG004), Gerry explained that she had “haunted” him for five years after that (MAG111) until Gertrude found him and got rid of Mary, and that Gerry had only begun working with her after that. There is a very small discrepancy here (that would mean that Gertrude made Mary disappear in 2013 and Gerry said he then proceeded to work with her “for a few years”… but he died in late 2014) but, technically, with the information we’ve got, Mary was still haunting Gerry at the time of his hospitalisation in 2011… and sadly, was probably indeed the person who came to fetch Gerry (MAG012, Lesere Saraki: “Gerard Keay was treated for a further four days in the hospital before being discharged into the care of his mother.”). When Jon had highlighted how he had the feeling that Gertrude drew a sick pleasure from pretending to be Gerry’s mom (MAG107), my first instinct was to scream “gERTRUDE…” about MAG012… but nop, doesn’t appear to work. Damnit.)

* Anyway, back to Diego: he was apparently the Scholar-like of the group (was the one calling their god “Asag”, was the one to tell the others that their ideal world was called “The Scoured Earth”), and he was definitely tied to that book in red leather, and Basira did mention that John Spencer hadn’t managed to burn it, and HUUUU, I remembered having thought, with “They caught Spencer in storage, trying to destroy it with a zippo lighter.” (MAG043) that there were lots of lighters involved (Gerry’s, Jon’s…) but… specifically there, given the Very Tense relationship between The Web and The Desolation, I wonder if this might have in fact been the same one with the web design that would later end up in Jon’s hands – the Web trying to use someone to get rid of a Desolation-related item, to put another dent into the Lightless Flame’s activities, a few years after Agnes’s death?

* It’s REALLY interesting that Diego was obsessed with calling their god “Asag”, given how Jon highlighted that it was more linked to “corruption” (MAG012: “Asag is the name of a demon in Sumerian mythology associated with disease and corruption, which doesn’t really seem to have much relevance to this statement except that it was also fabled that Asag was able to boil fish alive in their rivers.”)… and how Arthur Nolan was apparently punished, or cast away, stuck with the Hive:

(MAG032, Jane Prentiss) “I don’t know how long the nest has been there. It’s not even my house, I just live there. Some sweaty old man thinks he owns it, taking money for my presence as though it will save him. […] Now I know that whatever the old man thinks, as he passes about the house with brow crinkled and mouth puckered in disapproval, it is not his. It has a thousand truer owners who shift and live and sing within the very walls of the building. He does not even know about the wasps’ nest. I wonder how long he has not known. How many years it has been there. Have you ever heard of the filarial worm? Mosquitoes gift it with their kiss and it grows and grows. It stops water moving round the human body right, makes limbs and bellies swell and sag with fluid. Now, when I look at that fat, sweaty sack, I think about it, and the voice sings of showing him what a real parasite can do.”

(MAG055) JORDAN: […] a couple of years ago, I was called in to deal with a wasps’ nest. […] The landlord’s name was Arthur Nolan. He was a short man with a constant scowl, thinning white hair and a well-chewed cigar. It looked like his denim shirt once contained quite an athletic build, but it long since settled. […] After he hit me with a look of disappointment, he nodded and began to walk down the hall. I followed him, desperate for answers, but he ignored my questions about what the hell was going on and kept walking down the stairs towards his flat. At one point, he shook his head and mumbled something about hoping it wouldn’t get this far, but he didn’t seem to be saying it to me.”

(Jane Prentiss gave her statement on February 23rd 2014, and Jordan Kennedy mentioned that he had met Arthur shortly after, in February or March 2014.)

Was there a prior “architecture” of the Fears where the Desolation and Corruption might have been lumped in together, through the name “Asag”…? The Hive, at least, sounded very, uh, eager to show how Special it was (to Arthur, in the same way that it was hissing at Beholding in Jane’s statement). Was Arthur tied to The Hive, given how he immolated himself right after Jordan “killed” the nest…? (Jon mentioned that they found Arthur’s body after the fire, in MAG032’s post-statement.) Was he supposed to be punished by getting consummated by it, and tried to throw Jane to it as fodder instead…? Given how there was apparently that Diego-Arthur rivalry and how Arthur (unlike Eugene) knew what had happened to Agnes at Hill Top Road, I wouldn’t be surprised if we end up finding a statement left by Arthur somewhere, when he was “demoted”…?

- Alright, so we got official confirmation that Hill Top Road initially belonged to The Web:

(MAG139, Eugene Vanderstock) “The compromise we came to… was Hill Top Road. We knew it was a stronghold of The Web, full of other children Agnes’s age […], though if we’d known exactly how powerful The Web was in that place, perhaps we would have reconsidered. […] it seems the fight scarred the place in a way far deeper than simple fire. A scar in reality, that I believe has since been compounded by the interferences of other powers.”

Sarah Baldwin had described the taxidermy shop as a “place of power” for The Stranger, Breekon had referred to the Institute as The Eye’s “pedestal”, Elias pointed out Ny-Ålesund as a “stronghold” of The Dark.

(MAG096) ARCHIVIST: There are, er… there, there are dozens of deliveries recorded here by Breekon and Hope. What were they delivering? What is the significance of this place? SARAH: Nothing, except what people give it. But they give it a lot, make it a place of power for us. Enough to keep certain items here.

(MAG128, Breekon) “That was the first time we saw what would become this place, The Eye’s Pedestal.”

(MAG135) ELIAS: I don’t know the details. Ny-Ålesund is a stronghold of The Dark, meaning I can’t see inside.

(Plus, potentially: somewhere in the sea and/or the graveyard Naomi encountered in MAG013 for The Lonely, given Carter Chilcott’s dreams in MAG057; Point Nemo for The End?; the remains of The Maria Fairchild encountered in MAG051 for The Vast?)

Interestingly, Eugene used “stronghold” and Elias referred to Ny-Ålesund for The Dark in the same way, so it seems to be the Right Word to describe the concept, no need to beat around the bush. Hill Top Road used to be Web, and, as we got a glimpse in MAG008, at least The Desolation (the glimpses of Agnes’s ghost, the burning) and most likely The Spiral (through Ivo Lensik, Father Edwin Burroughs, and/or Anya Villette) have been around that place – is it still powerful, but too chaotic to be definitely claimed…? Jon had said that he didn’t think it would be wise to go there (MAG114: “I’ve half a mind to just go down and have a look at it myself, but… I don’t know. Ever since it first came up I’ve felt like it would be… just a very bad idea.”), but. Was that genuine concern because he Learned From Poking Into Danger (which sounds ludicrous, it’s Jon we’re talking about), or the spiders nudging him to not go because ~obviously, he doesn’t want to go, he’s absolutely not being held by strings, what do you mean~.

- You fucked up a perfectly simple place, is what you did, Agnes. Look. You gave it reality bending.

(MAG139, Eugene Vanderstock) “I was… not one of those assigned to watch our chosen one, so I can’t say much about exactly what happened within the walls of that house, but it seems the fight scarred the place in a way far deeper than simple fire. A scar in reality, that I believe has since been compounded by the interferences of other powers.”

Since then, there had been at least, uuh… Desolation and Spiral which have been spotted there (MAG008) + some timeline problems, with Ray and Agnes’s ghosts appearing. Anya Villette (MAG114) seemed to say that The Web might possibly be re-emerging? And there is the problem of Anya Villette herself – was the reality-getting-messed-up-around-her an effect of The Spiral, did she come from a parallel dimension, did she ever exist at all, etc.

- There is something fundamentally hilarious about the fact that the cultists of the Lightless Flame tried to guess how to raise Agnes and failed utterly, because she was… a child. No, wait, it was sad and heartbreaking.

But the fact that they sent her to Hill Top Road because it “was a stronghold of The Web, full of other children Agnes’s age” when they were late teenagers, and she was ten-to-eleven? What a bunch of idiots, holy Mew. (I’m sad for Agnes but also covering my face snickering at these idiots trying to raise a Messiah and having no idea how to deal with a child. No wonder she was “prone to fits of violent rage”, you weren’t giving her the environment she needed……………)

- Iiiiii don’t know what to think about Jack Barnabas. On the one hand:

(MAG139, Eugene Vanderstock) “That stupid coffeeshop twit. I honestly don’t know why Arthur allowed it, or why Jude didn’t step in – she’s usually so jealous! But Agnes… [SIGH] Maybe Agnes asked them to leave him alone…! Or maybe they were just surprised by her interest in this… boring, unremarkable fool. […] We have allowed Jude free rein on what happens to the coffeeshop boy, though Agnes asked her… not to interfere. She has not yet harmed him, but I cannot imagine what is going through her mind. The misery, and pain, he has brought upon himself. For all her anger, she is not rash, and I fear her quiet consideration far more than I worry about her temper. It may be he lives the remainder of his natural life – but she will make sure he is never happy, and never without pain.”

Eugene was sure that he would be getting hell. And it is indeed what Jack lived… for a while, right after the events (March 2007):

(MAG067, Jack Barnabas) “I lost almost everything after that. I never had much to begin with, and after I was let go at the café, I couldn’t afford to keep my home. They didn’t even try to pretend it wasn’t because my burned face would scare away customers. I’ve ended up living with my father again, who has been… understanding about the situation though… even he can’t bring himself to meet my eye most days.”

But Jon had also mentioned in his post-statement (January 2017) that his situation had gotten much better:

(MAG067) ARCHIVIST: […] Martin has been able to make contact with Mr. Barnabas by email. He’s apparently been doing much better in the years since his statement, having received some reasonably successful plastic surgery.

;; I had assumed it was a genuine improvement, I really hope it is… and not, like, a small respite before Jude comes after him again to strip him of what he managed to get back.

- Eugene was probably That One Guy With The Candles spotted by Jack Barnabas the night of Agnes’s death:

(MAG067, Jack Barnabas) “They were all dressed in rough work clothes and wore severe expressions. One of them, a big guy with a shaved head, was holding an unlit lantern, and speaking to the others that I think was Spanish or Portuguese. Another held a bag that seemed to be full of candles, while a third had a clear plastic container filled with hundred of tiny spiders. None of them paid me any attention, and I was rapidly feeling like I was falling into something that I really didn’t want to.”

Diego Molina, Eugene Vanderstock and… probably Arthur Nolan with the spiders? Jon had identified Arthur in the group but without tangential proof (though MAG055 had associated him with burning and fire):

(MAG067) ARCHIVIST: […] If the bald man with the lantern is as I suspect Diego Molina, it would indicate a link between his notable obsession with burning, and… Agnes, who apparently had not inconsiderable abilities in that area. I can’t help but wonder if Arthur Nolan, The Hive’s landlord, was one of the other members of that little group.

* Small fuuuunny thing: there had been a few mentions here and there that Agnes didn’t eat regular food, before Eugene confirmed that she needed another kind of sustenance:

(MAG059, Ronald Sinclair) “She never came to church, though; never sat around the dinner table when it was uncovered.”

(MAG067, Jack Barnabas) “She never actually put any milk in it. She never even drank it. […] What was her life, that every Tuesday at 3’ in the afternoon, she came into the same café, and didn’t drink a black coffee? […] We went to the park a couple more times; had a meal in an Italian restaurant where she didn’t eat anything; we even went to see a film.”

(MAG139, Eugene Vanderstock) “I took foreign workers, mostly. Those with the fewest immediate connections to complicate matters, and the most hopeful dreams of what their life might be. They were the ones that provided Agnes the most satisfying nourishment. […] Agnes would take them to her small, empty flat, lay them on the floor and light them. Over the many hours these candles burned, she would crane over them, so Arthur tells me, inhaling all the agony, suffering, and loss from which they were created. Or he could’ve been lying to me, just keeping me busy with torture and murder so I didn’t get in the way of anything. I don’t think I’d have minded that, actually. At least, I felt useful.”

- HEY, YOU KNOW WHAT WAS ABSOLUTELY ABSENT OF EUGENE’S STATEMENT REGARDING AGNES’S DEATH? SPIDERS. Probably-Arthur had been bringing some on the night of her death. There were SPIDERS in Jack’s flat (that Agnes’s presence burned):

(MAG067, Jack Barnabas) “It was as I was doing this, I noticed kind of an odd smell? Like when you turn on an electric heater for the first time in a while and you get a whiff of all the burning dust. I looked up, and noticed within the corner of the room, where there had been a spider’s web this morning, there was just a faint wisp of smoke. It was weird, but I had more important things on my mind.”

And also, THE FUCKING TREE at Hill Top Road, which prompted Agnes’s death on November 23rd 2006. Eugene made it sound like Agnes had slowly come to the conclusion that she couldn’t carry out the ritual because of her “doubt” but… we know that her death was tied to the tree at Hill Top Road, the night Ivo Lensik was compelled to unroot it (and to free spiders):

(MAG067, Jack Barnabas) “[…] I heard Agnes gasp. I turned to see her gripping her chest as though in sudden pain, and she told me we had to go. I followed her as she… staggered out of the park and over to a phone booth where she made a panicked call. She said something about a tree falling, and that they… had to finish something. Then she hung up. She leaned on my arm as we walked back to her flat. […] Agnes turned to me and apologized, told me goodbye, and thank you. There was such a sense of finality to it that I felt like my heart stopped.”

Eugene knew that Hill Top Road had been a stronghold of The Web, but I’m not sure that he understood how much The Web might have possibly been still hanging around? It had struck me, in MAG067, how Jack… had suddenly decided to go talk to Agnes, and how he had described her:

(MAG067, Jack Barnabas) “But she was so beautiful, she… she was tall, with long straight auburn hair, and these eyes that… when they looked at you, it didn’t feel like she was seeing you so much as… was trapping you. […] I was… drawn to her in a way I can’t… even explain. […] That was the moment I decided to try and talk to Agnes. Seeing her interact with someone else, even in such a weird way, unblocked something in my mind. The following Tuesday, when she came in and ordered her coffee, I asked her name. She looked at me in surprise and, for a second, I felt like I’d made a terrible mistake, but then she… told me, very matter-of-factly. And then I asked her out on a date. I don’t know how it happened, it just… tumbled out of my mouth before I could stop it. […] I worried I was boring her, but every time I looked over, she had that same expression on, which… by then I was pretty sure was a smile. I’d catch her eye and that feeling would flood though me – I… I still don’t know quite how to describe it, but whatever it was, it was powerful. […] I… I don’t know if I would have had it in me to resist. I just couldn’t avoid being drawn in, like a moth to the flame.”

Except for that last image, the way Agnes was attracting him… sounds super Webby to me? And as mentioned above, we know there were spiders in Jack’s flat. I don’t think that his crush was Web-induced, but his decision to go talk to her could perhaps have been due to a string…? (I’m really not sure but one my personal takes would be: The Web’s presence at Hill Top Road was diminished because of the tree, but it eroded over time and/or something made the seal weaken; the spiders used Jack’s crush and pushed him to confess, humouring Agnes and/or giving her a pretext to officialise that she wouldn’t do the ritual (making it sound like she couldn’t, rather than admitting that she didn’t want to); the spiders got Ivo Lensik to “kill” the tree, freeing The Web’s influence… and it was back as a contender for the ownership of the place. Possibly: it’s also what allowed Annabelle to be born as an avatar, a few years later, as Raymond Fielding had been dead for a long while and Neil Lagorio was growing old and incapacitated?)

- Regarding Agnes’s timeline, some bits are now a bit clearer, others still blurry:

* Agnes was sent to Hill Top Road to deal with The Web sometime around 1965, when Ronald Sinclair was turning 18 (he said he was born in the late 40s). Agnes was described as “younger than the other kids, maybe ten or eleven years old, and didn’t talk much”. She (playfully) freed Ronald from Raymond Fielding’s influence. (MAG059)

* The house got slowly depopulated until only Agnes and Raymond remained; Raymond disappeared when Agnes “must have been 18 or 19”, Agnes claiming that “he had gone away and that the house was hers” (Ivo Lensik, MAG008).

* In 1974, a five-year-old boy goes missing in the area. People are suspicious of Agnes, the house burns, Ray’s body is found, missing his right hand, and there is no sign of Agnes. (MAG008)

* Agnes apparently got stuck in the place (MAG139: “As far as we could tell, she had destroyed the place utterly. And yet, she remained bound to it, tied to it in some vital way. I knew, when Arthur told she had kept Raymond Fielding’s hand, that he was worried.”)

* In 1989, Jude met Agnes and the others. (MAG089)

* Gertrude did something tying Agnes to the place (MAG139, Eugene: “Jude simply flies into a rage when it’s brought up. I assume it’s why we were waiting, biding our time for decades, unable to bring our designs to any culmination. Jude had only just joined at the time”), Agnes kept Ray’s hand.

* Agnes began to frequent the Canyon Café in the 90s as, by November 2006, she had been visiting for “a decade and a half” (MAG067). She waited, they all waited.

* In autumn 2006, Jack Barnabas confessed to Agnes and they went on a few dates. (MAG067)

* On November 23rd 2006, Ivo Lensik uprooted the tree at Hill Top Road, freeing spiders from the apple buried under it; Agnes felt it, said that she had to finish something, gathered the members of the cult, and at her request, they hanged her, with Ray’s hand tied to her waist. (MAG008/MAG067/MAG139)

The Web binds and traps, so it might have been its way to get back at Agnes, before Gertrude did… something, fifteen years later? I would have assumed that Gertrude had struck around the time of Ray’s death, but no, Eugene said that it was around the time Jude had joined them, and Jude was absolutely crystal clear that she joined in 1989.

- … I’m still side-eying (ha) a loooot Agnes’s stance on the candles, given that Eugene never actually saw her inhaling them (it was more of a Jude thing, to like incense?), and that Arthur was the one to say she was using them. It sounds like there is room for her to… not have used them at all. And, actually, to not have been that much into serving the Desolation in the first place.

It’s impressive how much Agnes herself still remains a Mystery, despite the fact that we’ve now learned about her birth and how she was raised. Interestingly (and I really doubt it was a coincidence), all the titbits we got about her were people who were either infatuated with her (Jude, Jack), either barely knew her and were unable to decipher her (Ronald), either saw her as a symbol more than a person (Eugene). The only time we heard about what she might have thought or felt was through Jack, and very briefly:

(MAG067, Jack Barnabas) “She was talking about… some sort of job, and whether Agnes was going to be able to do it. At first, I thought it was a job interview, and… then she started talking about Agnes being released from something. Agnes just… said something softly, and shook her head. She looked sad, an expression I’d never seen on her face before. The other woman sighed, clearly unhappy with the answer, and stood up to leave. Before she went, she took out a brown paper envelope and handed it over; said that she’d give it to her now so she didn’t forget later. She called it “a collection”, and it looked like the envelope might have been full of money. Agnes put it in her jacket and returned to staring out the window, as her intimidating companion left with a frustrated expression.”

(And we still don’t know what was in that envelope! You could technically put small candles in an envelope but they would still be too big for a jacket…? (Were there spiders inside of it.) Was the other woman Jude, since it was “a collection” and Eugene mentioned she might come “to collect” after Gertrude…? Perhaps he wasn’t being metaphorical.)

(MAG067, Jack Barnabas) “We sat on a bench as the sun went down, watching the sky redden, and Agnes asked me a question. It was the first time she’d said anything more than a few words since we left my flat. [STATIC:] She asked me if I had a destiny. [/STATIC] I don’t need to tell you the question caught me off-guard. I don’t know if I’ve given the impression clearly enough yet, being a single guy in my early thirties still working the tiller to Sheffield Café, but I don’t really see myself as having much of a destiny. Hell, I’m not even sure I believe in destiny. I certainly don’t believe in God, and I feel that’s… kind of linked. So I told her this. She looked at me with the same sadness I had seen on her face before. “That must be nice,” she said, and went back to staring into the sunset.”

It sounds like Agnes might have been much more reluctant about The Lightless Flame’s ritual than Eugene wanted to believe…? Whether or not we get a statement left by Arthur, I’m pretty confident that we might have one left by Agnes herself – or possibly a recording of her talking with Gertrude. There have been lots of people talking about Agnes without us getting to hear Agnes’s voice and intentions directly, and I doubt that this has been a coincidence? Eugene explicitly said that Gertrude did something to Agnes – is it possible that they agreed on something together, with Agnes more or less trying to spare her extended family’s feelings while ensuring that she couldn’t get used by them…?

(It would sound super positive for the series, which tends to give characters darker sides too, but… Agnes’s story has sounded very tragic so far? Just like Gerry – being programmed to be Something by their own mother, getting involved with spooks and fundamentally twisted, unable to escape, until they would reach their bitter end?)

(- There is something very poetic in the idea that… we’ll see about it, but maybe Agnes, whose whole life was programmed, who had a “Destiny” inflicted to her, actually gained agency for the first time in the house of the Web, which is known for its mind-control?)

- … Okay, so the Fears/Dread Powers/Outer Gods definitely are able to touch people more easily through their dreams.

(MAG139, Eugene Vanderstock) “We all felt the calling, the dreams, pulling us ever closer to a world of fire and loss, a place of burning, and agony, when we remade the world in the image of the Lightless Flame, the one Diego called “Asag”. We all felt it. Longed for it.”

Jane mentioned her “crawling and many-legged” dreams (MAG032), Annabelle had reported “several unsettling dreams about spiders” (MAG069); there were Oliver’s dreams (MAG011, MAG121); Adelard mentioned his own nightmares (MAG113); Lucia was pursued by some (MAG130); it’s unclear how Garland Hillier got his “revelations” but it could have happened through his dreams (MAG134); Robert Smirke had seen the Fears, and ultimately Beholding, in his dreams (MAG138); and of course, there are Jon’s dreams, which… seem more active than most of the others (given that Daisy confirmed that she was seeing him back, and that the way Elias described them in MAG120, Jon was inflicting anguish on the victims and was identified as the cause of their suffering).

- Regarding how the Lightless Flame proceeded and how Manuela designed The Dark’s ritual… the overall guidelines seem to be to Believe In It Very Hard, And It Will Happen?

(MAG135, Manuela Dominguez) “Scientifically, it was nonsense of course. Dark energy and the like don’t work like that, not even remotely. But that wasn’t important. What mattered was that it felt like science, and that was all I needed. To do my work, to create the Black Star would need a parody, an aping mockery of science. But it would also need the deepest of darknesses. When I told Maxwell what I actually needed, he told me such a thing was impossible, but I insisted. And so he began his work on the Daedalus. […] My experiments continued largely uninterrupted, pushing the boundaries of light, darkness and fear. It was dangerous work and more than once, I got too close to the light and it almost destroyed me. But it didn’t. I could regale you with the technical terms or scientific disciplines I played with and rendered meaningless, but in the end all you actually need to know is that I succeeded. A tiny, terrible sun of the pitchest black, shining beautiful Darkness all around it.”

(MAG139, Eugene Vanderstock) “But a longing… is not the same thing as an instruction. We’d all been touched and warped by proximity to the holy Burning Fire, but none of us had any special knowledge, no matter what Diego claims he might have read. He wanted a Grand Inferno, a ritual of apocalyptic burning that would make the firebombing of Dresden look like a sparkler. Which sounded… amazing! […] And that’s when Arthur proposed his own plan: a Chosen One. We would create a messiah, the Flame Incarnate, one who could usher in this new world and lead us in what Diego called “The Scoured Earth”. […] Some objected, said that unless the child was conceived of the Flame, it could never be a true incarnation. But they had no idea of how such a conception could possibly even work, so it was decided that it would have to be enough to birth the child by fire. […] And in the centre of the pyre, a hollow, where Eileen was to lay. We prayed, and sacrificed, and anointed her body with holy oil and a crown of kindling. I protested the last one, felt we could do better than to ape the Christians, but I was shouted down.”

It looks like The Lightless Flame improvised… basically everything, by picking here and there symbols and ritualistic gestures that belonged to other cults – so the baffling thing is that it worked, and it’s probably because they thought/hoped/believed it would.

- Whiiiich directly raises the question of The Rite of the Watcher’s Crown, as Jon implicitly seemed to think – or, at least, he has been shown voicing some interrogations about why he was there.

(MAG139) ARCHIVIST: Why were we chosen? Agnes was created – crafted with a specific purpose so finely tuned that even a grain of uncertainty threatened the entirety of her being. [CHORTLING] But I’m so full of doubt it feels like there’s no room for anything else, and… I’m sure Martin is the same…! Is there “destiny” here? B–bloodlines and… prophecies, or did we just… stumble into this? Maybe we’re the opposite of Agnes; maybe our doubts are exactly what we need. I–if that’s the case, I’m a… an amazing chosen one. … [LONG EXHALE] Don’t know how that would work, though.

And indeed: how is this ritual meant to work, if the Archivists tend to not be so keen to see the world warped…? Elias pointed out in MAG092 how fitting Jon is for the role and, indeed, his personality matches his powers, which seem to be… compensating for things he is lacking: compulsion means getting the truth out of people (while Jon is prone to paranoia), Knowing comes in handy given that he has so many questions, being able to get formatted statements help to satiate his curiosity… And precisely, because Jon is prone to doubt, he’ll push forward to know. But that doesn’t mean that he would be ready to doom the world and inflict fears on people, especially when Elias pushed him to stop another apocalypse (MAG102, “I should have thought preventing the horrific transformation of our world is not solely my concern!” YEAH, DEFINE WHAT IS AND ISN’T “HORRIFIC”, ELIAS). So what is it Elias saw in Jon that led him to think that Jon might be up for it, if his plans are indeed to carry out The Watcher’s Crown…?

I’m surprised that Jon would mention “bloodlines” in the list of potential reasons for them to be here, given how… it hasn’t been the case for any of the characters we’ve met so far, except Gerry – who, precisely, told Jon that blood didn’t matter (except if you’re a Lukas and use family structure as a tool to shape more believers)?

Overall, there is a non-systematic but still notable trend, amongst the Archival staff, to have encountered Spooks before joining the Institute in order to try and find out more about it:

(* Michael Shelley: lost a friend to The Spiral when he was young, which pushed him to join the Institute to understand what had happened, according to MAG101.)

* Jon had met The Web as a kid, probably never truly got away from it even though he did not die right away. Georgie highlighted how, personality-wise, he was perfect for the job:

(MAG093) GEORGIE: That does at least explain why he picked you. ARCHIVIST: Uh? GEORGIE: If your job is asking questions, I mean. You were always the one who pushed too far, and asked smart-arse, awkward questions. I always was surprised you never got punched.

* We heard Melanie’s recruitment live, though the reasons are still a bit unclear:

(MAG084) ELIAS: Do you want the job, Melanie? MELANIE: Oh… Um, I…Well, it’s, it’s rather sudden, but… er, I mean, sure. Yes. Yes, I do.

(MAG106) MELANIE: Threaten, then. I’ve got nothing. ELIAS: That’s… almost true. Your life is indeed shockingly absent of any meaningful connections. That’s actually one of the reasons I chose you for this job.

(Melanie had had various Spooky encounters at this point: she witnessed a fight between agents of the Stranger and of the… Flesh? Slaughter? (MAG028), got wounded on the shoulder by a Slaughter ghost (MAG076), and was already infected by a bullet from another Slaugher ghost (MAG117) when Elias recruited her. Static was even heard when he was talking to her, so he definitely did something, whether it was… seeing the bullet, or compelling her to think about the reasons for accepting? But why did he want her in the team – was it because she was leaning towards Beholding, in her quest for seeing things that could destroy her/being a witness overall/working with cameras and recording supernatural events? Was it because of the Slaughter wounds, set-up for Jon?)

* Same for Basira and Daisy: officially, Elias needed to neutralise Daisy and to be able to use her “competences” in dealing with Spooks, hence the trapping of Basira as blackmail material. Both had large amounts of Spooky encounters beforehand, as Section 31-signee officers (including the showdown with Rayner). Given recent development, it’s possible that Elias mostly just wanted Basira in the team, but her being good at investigating and “suit[ing] the academic life” (MAG102) might also just have been a happy coincidence – unlike the other Beholding folks, Basira has demonstrated that she’s able to call things quit when she is done with them, such as with her quitting the police.

* It’s unclear whether Jon had personally asked Sasha to be transferred to the Archives when he was appointed as Head Archivist (he liked Sasha a lot! She was getting a free pass on everything!). He did mention that “her working here seems the natural progression of her lifelong interest in the paranormal (MAG048), but it’s unclear whether that bit was Sasha-Sasha… or something rewritten by the Not!Them ;; (Since from what we knew it season 1, Sasha was pretty short on money and even hated Artefact Storage when she was working there but “couldn’t afford to quit”… so it might be that the real Sasha had just been desperate for a job, like Martin.)

* We know, however, quite a lot about Tim: he followed Danny and became an unwilling spectator to Grimaldi/Nikola’s skinning and dancing; he joined the Institute shortly afterwards in order to try and track down the Circus and get answers about what had happened to his brother (he even became a Smirke specialist in just two years!). We know that Jon specifically asked him to come with him to the Archives:

(MAG065) TIM: No. No, you listen for once. I was fine in research, happy. Then you asked me to be transferred here, and suddenly it’s all monsters and killers and secret passages, oh my!

(Plus, the whole thing with how he hadn’t managed to move but only watch in the Covent Garden theatre (MAG104) sounded verrryy much like Jon watching his bully disappear behind the door. Watching until the end, unable to do anything to stop events – but not closing their eyes either. Beholding-compatible.)

* AND MARTIN IS STILL OUR BIG MYSTERY, but of all things, we know that Elias was the one to interview him when he was applied with a fake CV, which UHOH.

(MAG056) MARTIN: I… … I lied on my CV. ARCHIVIST: … What? MARTIN: I don’t have a Master’s in parapsychology, I don’t even have a degree. […] So I… I just kinda started to lie on my applications, sending them out to just about anywhere. For some reason, my lie about parapsychology got me an interview with Elias and, and then a job here. M–most of my employment details are made up, I’m only 29!

(Unclear whether this happened when Martin was 17 or a little later, but he was at any rate already employed at the Institute in 2009, at age 22.) More specifically about working in the Archives, it doesn’t sound like Jon asked Martin to follow him there – firstly, Jon was super dismissive of him in season 1, and secondly, there was Martin’s awkward silence when he and Tim discussed that:

(MAG098) MARTIN: […] [Jon] said he doesn’t want to lose anyone else. Like, y’know, it’s his fault. TIM: Isn’t it? MARTIN: No! No, it isn’t! I mean, you heard Elias… We never really stood a chance. TIM: Yeah. Maybe. But Elias wasn’t actually the one who offered me the job down here. MARTIN: No, I– Sure. …

So either he volunteered, either he might have been sent down there by Elias… which just raises another “why”. It was a bit weird how Jon, in MAG139, immediately segued from Martin to the question of why they had been “chosen” to be there (why did thinking about Martin prompt that?), but on the other hand, it’s still an enigma why Elias hired Martin. Could be that everything was absolutely accidental, could be the Spiders at work, could be that Elias did have specific plans about Martin (because Elias didn’t especially like Martin…? He’s always very casually talking him down), who knows.

*SHAKES ELIAS AGAIN, SPIT WHAT YOU KNOW YOU INSUFFERABLE GRINNING EX-HEAD*

(Other option of why they were chosen: their isolation. Jon’s parents died when he was a kid, and his grandmother died around the time he began working at the Institute, in 2012; Tim’s only family member mentioned was his brother, who had died before he joined the Institute; Martin’s only family member mentioned around him was his mother, and given that he had to care for her when he was only 17, it is implied that he might not have had many family members around or close; Basira only mentioned her father, and in past tense; Melanie’s parents are both dead and Elias pointed out she didn’t have any real anchor anymore; Daisy’s “last connection to humanity” was stated to be Basira. Could be Elias being a vulture, or a bit of classism, targeting people in need/from poor upbringings, assuming that they would be more influenceable and easy to handle?)

- À propos of Martin, this episode also reminded of One Big Important Question:

(MAG139, Eugene Vanderstock) “And that’s when Arthur proposed his own plan: a Chosen One. We would create a messiah, the Flame Incarnate […]. When we finally decided, it was Eileen Montague who came forward as a volunteer. She was five months pregnant at the time, and had already taken care of the father in the usual manner of our little congregation. […] We baptized her with the boiling water of Asag and named her… “Agnes”, as had been her mother’s final request.”

IS THERE A SINGLE GOOD MOTHER IN TMA. I’m snorting and weeping over the fact that:

(MAG067) ARCHIVIST: […] [Jack Barnabas] was unable to provide much more information on the above but, upon Martin’s asking if Agnes had mentioned her childhood at all, he did recall her briefly alluding to being adopted.

L-O-L YES, SHE WAS ADOPTED… by so many different people. By the cult of the Lightless Flame after her birth, and then by Raymond Fielding (kind of) when they sent her off to fight the Spiders as a kid.

We don’t have Stellar Parenting overall, very true, but I can still think of a few fathers who sacrificed themselves to save a child – Jason North was implied to have immolated himself to save his son from his own curse in MAG037, and YEAH OKAY, ROBERT MONTAUK WAS A SERIAL KILLER but he was also good towards Julia in MAG009 (and we will probably hear a bit more about their family’s story, about Julia’s mother… but I had gotten the feeling that Robert probably did what he did in order to avenge his wife and/or to protect Julia from the same fate?). Plus, Gerry mentioned that he thinks that his father might have wanted to help raise, him before Mary decided to get rid of the problem. Not role models, sure, but not-failing-as-parents. Meanwhile, almost every time we see a mother or hear about her feelings (ie, excluding for example Andrea Nunis’s mother, who was an anchor to her, but who wasn’t a character in herself), it’s Bad News. As MAG139 demonstrated, Agnes’s mother imposed the Destiny on her daughter before she was even born. See also: Mary friggin’ Keay to Gerry, and not-his-mother-but-was-apparently-getting-a-kick-out-of-being-mistaken-for-it Gertrude. Do I need to mention Martin’s mother.

It’s a great subversion of the idea that mothers are inherently nurturing and kind but they’re also… the Rarest Species in this series, uh.

- Hey hey hey, alright, I deserve tomatoes to be thrown at me, but on the subject of Martin Lukas Keay von Closen Son Of Puppets Blackwood. So. Martin and spiders have a loving relationship, but this episode also reminded me that another of his loves is also…

(MAG117) MARTIN: This way I finally get to do something. It’s gonna hurt, but… I’m ready. And I want to. Also, I get to burn some stuff, so that cool!

(MAG118) ELIAS: Tell me what you’re doing, and why. MARTIN: I just thought I’d, y’know, drop a couple of ideas in the old suggestion box! Turns out my suggestion is… fire! [LIGHTER ON]

… arson, so on the list of “what the heck is Martin Blackwood”, what about Unholy Grandchild of Web and Desolation or something through his dad.)

- Gertrude’s death was sneakily pushed back to the forefront again:

(MAG139, Eugene Vanderstock) “And he’s probably right. Just as well you are not here. Smart move on your part. But they always are, aren’t they? Smart moves. Someday, you’re gonna push your luck too far, and when you do… Well, you just better hope it isn’t Jude who comes to collect. […] As for you… Whatever you did, and whatever protection it might have afforded you is severed, with Agnes’s death. Arthur has told us not to harm you yet, but this whole thing has really rather weakened his authority, and many of us are now looking towards Diego for leadership. But we shall see, I suppose. I hope, when it is time, we may burn you forever, Gertrude.

[…] ARCHIVIST: […] Nice to see Gertrude [EXHALE] also used to get a lot of threats. So far it doesn’t seem that any went… desperately well. Except for Elias, of course. But he didn’t threaten, did he? He just… did it.

And I still feel like we might be missing a few things about the circumstances surrounding it – if Gertrude was pursued by so many people and so cautious about it, how come Elias managed to get rid of her in the end…? Is it because he was kind of a blind spot (ha) and she had been underestimating him…? Is it because, so focused on Spooks, she didn’t consider mundane means…? But she was well-aware of the power of regular, non-paranormal weapons! She used so many explosives…

I wonder if the Reminder that Gertrude had a long list of would-be killers, that she had managed to avoid for so long until Elias got to her, is supposed to mean that we’ll hear more about the Elias-Gertrude relationship… Oliver had mentioned that she had many things going after her, in MAG121; Peter mentioned that he wouldn’t have been against offing her himself in MAG134; and now, again, we’re getting another mention in MAG139…

- Jon is still gathering information about past rituals and we can add another name for the Desolation: “The Scoured Earth”, which should have been carried out by Agnes… and was left on standby and/or cancelled entirely for this round. We’re only missing the name and description for The Lonely (though we know from MAG134 that Gertrude successfully derailed it already), The Corruption (was it whatever Jane tried against the Institute?), and everything about The Vast. Jon didn’t say how and where and why he found Eugene’s statement in particular: whether he was drawn to this one, or found it cobwebs-wrapped, or Knew he had to read it?

(And The Corruption still hasn’t had any statement in season 4! Oh worms.)

- Jon gave us updates on the Archival staff, and it is various shades of sob. Chronologically, by order of mentions:

* Basira still hasn’t spilled the beannnns ;_;

(MAG139) ARCHIVIST: The others are doing… better, I think. Basira’s busy doing research for something secretive, unsurprisingly. But she seems to be adjusting to, uh… the new Daisy.

So, on the one hand: Basira is still Hiding Everything from Jon… but on the other hand, it sounds like it’s going better between her and Daisy? … but WELP, if their relationship is pacifying, it means that it’s becoming Something That Could Be Taken Away from us and from them / it’s giving Jonny an opportunity to hurt us a whole lot if one of them dies. Let me be happy about them, gdi?!

* I Have Reclamations To Make About Jon’s mentions of Daisy:

(MAG139) ARCHIVIST: I actually like Daisy now, which is a… really weird feeling. [INHALE]

Like, on the one hand, I get that becoming kind of bff with Daisy is throwing you off, Jon, but don’t you dare lie to Us/The Tape Recorder: you liked Daisy and sharing your fantastic shitty sense of humour with her, I Have Receipts:

(MAG096) DAISY: Come on. Before the Met get here. ARCHIVIST: Whatever you say~ DAISY: And wipe that grin off your face.

Plus, you’ve been listening to THE ARCHERS in her company, probably to indulge her, and you went out for drinks with her; there are limits to pity, you’ve been way into Friendship territory for a while now, don’t try to bluff!! :w

Also, a bit saddened that he’s describing her as “the new Daisy” because… it doesn’t really seem accurate? According to Daisy, this was her all along/her true self, and we indeed could see glimpses of it in season 3, like how she gladly accepted the nickname “Daisy” (MAG082, Elias: “Everyone calls me Daisy. I like that because it sounds so gentle […] It makes me feel strong, to know that the soft nickname everyone calls me comes from a bloody wound.”) (But at the same time… ;; It’s very easy to picture Elias waltzing in at some point to highlight that ahah, but the rabid dog was the real you all along, too…)

* Melanie is “quiet”.

(MAG139) ARCHIVIST: Melanie’s quiet, but I think therapy’s helping.

And given that the identity of her therapist is still undetermined, I’m filled with dread… The Web is known for making people come off as “quiet”……………

(MAG059, Ronald Sinclair) “The other kids living there were the same – at least, I think they were. I remember them being kind of dull, not that they were… boring, exactly, […] but there was something about them, as though… there were some things that they said and did without anything behind them. Occasionally there would be flashes of something. […] mostly they were quiet, almost placid. I’m sure they’d have said the same things about me, but at the time, nothing seemed amiss. I did what I did because it was what I was supposed to do, and it never struck me to question it. I’m not sure I really recognise who I became while living at that house.”

Please, be just fine and healing, Melanie…? ;;

* Helen is… *LOUD SOB*

(MAG139) ARCHIVIST: Haven’t seen Helen much. The door is… sometimes there, sometimes not. … I haven’t knocked. I’m never going to trust it. Trust… her. … Trust it. [DRY EXHALE] And I shouldn’t. Whatever its relationship to the person who was or is Helen… assuming that I can ever know its motivations is a mistake.

Damniiiiiiiiiiiiiit… Extra-aouch that Helen directly told Jon that she wasn’t super-fond of the “it” in MAG131 (and given how Melanie, who seems to be the closest to Helen?, used “she”), and that Jon is… very pointedly choosing to still using “It” anyway after some hesitation (reflex to call The Distortion “it”, then remembering his discussion with Helen and going for “she”, then reaffirming his distrust with “it”?).

I’m really not surprised that Jon is having trouble with her door (Jon has a History of doors that should stay closed, and specifically got bad experiences with Michael’s), I’m saddened that he is choosing to not trust Helen, although… I can imagine why. But is it through an intrinsically personal decision (The Distortion is supposed to lie and deceive; maybe it’s currently trustworthy only because of his lack of trust? Is it because he still feels guilty over what happened to the human Helen Richardson, who got snatched right before him? Is it because he still resents Michael?), or is it also because of the Beholding in him – pushing him to not trust what he can’t know…?

I wonder how Helen being around will end up causing harm (because surely, it will): will it be because Jon will finally decide to trust her because he has no choice left, and immediately be given reason to regret? Is it because Jon will adamantly refuse to trust her when she could be preventing another disaster…?

* And theeeeeeeeeeeeen…

(MAG139) ARCHIVIST: And that just leaves Martin, which…

[SAD PAUSE OF ARCHIVIST DESPERATELY PINING] Jon, p l z. If you’re beginning to reach Martin Level of concern/pining/worrying, then Oh No.

(MAG117) MARTIN: I suppose you can get used to anything, but… [PAUSE] It feels different. I need them to be safe. I need him to be okay. … So–sorry, hum. I–I’m not afraid for me, though. Isn’t that weird…? […] I just… really hope everyone makes it back. … And I want to win on my own. Oh, and I hope the world doesn’t end. Obviously. [SIGH] Just… [SIGH] Just don't die, Jon. … O–or Tim, or Basira, or… Daisy, I guess. Just… just everyone please, make it back home…?

(MAG139) ARCHIVIST: … [SIGH] I’m just worried about Martin. … Christ… Every other Avatar gets to have their feelings… burned right out of them, but me? I’ve… just got to sit in mine. … I know he said he had everything under control. I need… to trust him; whatever he’s doing with Peter, he’s… he knows what he’s doing. Probably. I just– … [VERY FAST] I need him to be okay. I just do.

(I’m still not sure whether the “I need him to be okay” was a conscious reference to MAG117 from him, or just a coincidence to convey that these two tragic idiots are reaching the same point independently. We have clues that Jon had heard Tim’s testament from that episode, potentially Melanie’s as well since she gave her statement about the Ghost Bullet; but they weren’t dated from the same day, and not on the same tapes if the official description (“A-F”) is any indication, so…)

Anyway. Please, Jon, don’t wish for your feelings to disappear. There is something very delicious and entertaining about Jon complaining that he has FEELINGS, URK, IT SUCKS, but at the same time, This Is That Kind Of Series. Please, enjoy your sad pining and your concern and your worrying, Jon. (;wwwwwwwww; for Jon still trying to put some reason in his own mind; explaining what is the problem, and at the same time still holding to his decision to trust Martin…)

(- There was something very… “SO WHO IS HAVING A CRUSH, NOW, UH.” with that Martin mention, given that Eugene’s statement referred to Jack Barnabas and… back in MAG067, Jon hadn’t been fundamentally kind towards the latter’s story:

(MAG067) ARCHIVIST: Statement of Jack Barnabas, regarding a short-lived courtship with Agnes Montague in the autumn of 2006. […] A rather different perspective on the woman known as Agnes Montague or… Agnes Fielding, depending on who you ask. Although hardly a reliable account, steeped as it is in messy obsessions and confusion.

HEY JON, WHAT’S GOOD, and who is the one pining, now.

(Although of course, more seriously: there is kind of an echo between Jack and Agnes, and Martin and Jon…? Someone Normal harbouring feelings for an avatar who was Chosen and burdened with a specific role in their little society and who had met The Web in their youth, and after a while, the avatar growing fondness in return – though the nature of their feelings is unclear. In Jon’s case, not sure whether his worries and concern for Martin are derailing anything Beholding-related or… just part of the Bigger Plan. Though Jack&Agnes, and Martin&Jon, could also all be… part of The Web’s plans overall. Too many spiders.))

(Following: bits typed down before MAG140 was released:)

- Big question is what happened at the end of the episode exactly?

(MAG139) ARCHIVIST: … If I… Knew… what his plan was… If I knew what Peter was doing, if I just– [WHISPERING] … Can I…? [LOW RUMBLING SOUND, STATIC RISES] [CRIES OF PAIN] [VERY SHARP SQUEAL OF DISTORTION STEADILY RISING] [NOISE OF SOMETHING-OR-JON FALLING] [SQUEAL OF DISTORTION DECREASES] [MUMBLING] End… E–end recording…! [CLICK.]

1°) See, Jon: assuming you’re on a first name basis with “Peter” is a bad idea, and karma went right back at you.

2°) Re: the noise of something falling. Was it Jon falling off his chair AGAIN, JON, YOU ALREADY DID THAT IN MAG128. Did Jon manage to get a concussion by trying to Know too hard. Does it count as his Lonely scar. Is Elias laughing hysterically in his cell because Jon is such an Embarrassment.

3°) Okay, so, unlike the other times Jon got to Know about something or purposely used that power… there was, on top of the usual static, Peter’s trademark “squeal of distortion” (I am using the way the official transcript introduced it, in MAG100, and it’s been the same sound surrounding Peter’s appearances since then). So, whatever happened was definitely Lonely-related, but: was it because Jon can’t pierce through the Lonely, in the same way he didn’t manage to peak through The Dark in MAG135? Was it Peter hiding himself a bit deeper in reaction to Jon’s attempt, feeling (or SEEING, if he was… right in the room with Jon) what Jon was trying to do? … Another possibility is that it was that Jon couldn’t access Martin because of MARTIN himself (ie: he’s a bit too much into the Lonely, or worse… is beginning to use Lonely powers), but I’m leaning towards Peter here. With The Dark and now The Lonely, that makes a lot of Power Walls that Jon isn’t yet able to bypass…

4°) Did Jon manage to Know something through the experience, or… not at all? I got the impression that he had just hit the wall of squealing sounds, bounced back, and… didn’t get anything at all.

5°) Obligatory “JON used Beholding powers! JON’s attack missed. JON hurt himself in his confusion. JON fainted!” joke here.

Speculation for MAG140 based on the title (20/05/19):

A PRETTY ONE, and uuuuh, smells of… alchemy? JOHN FLAMSTEED? So either about another way of interpreting the powers before Smirke, in general (Gerry had put them on the same level in MAG111), either, more specifically… about The Dark, and its previous ritual attempt (and then, could also be about Edmond Halley, since Basira had linked the two in MAG108)? Or could be about The Vast? Second meaning… could be about a ~sky~, so Basira explaining her current activities/researches…? Will she finally tell Jon about the fact that The Dark is potentially planning something in Svalbard…?

(17/06/19: AHAHAHA sob.)

[purplesurveys]

1100

[created by: vyvyan86]  

If someone's laughing, do you instantly think they're laughing at you? I mean, not automatically? People can be laughing for many reasons. But if they’re laughing near me and if I even catch them looking at me from time to time, then it can definitely make me feel paranoid.

What is the strangest thing you've been asked? I’ve said this before, but a masseuse who came to the house a couple of years ago once looked at me intently and asked if I’ve gotten pregnant before. When I asked my mom about her, she explained that that particular masseuse has a third eye. Of course I didn’t buy it, but it was a fascinating scenario nonetheless and I still liked the fact that out of everyone in the family, she had only ~sensed something with me.

What’s the weirdest thing about life that people just accept as normal? Homelessness.

What was your favorite game as a child? I liked playing Diner Dash, Insaniquarium, and Cake Mania on my dad’s laptop. Our parents didn’t keep a strict eye on us as well and we were allowed access to Grand Theft Auto games at a young age, which ended up being one of my all-time favorite video game series.

What’s the stupidest thing you've ever heard? There’s a lot of crazy fake news that have come out over the last few years; I can’t really tell which one is stupidest, but they all are to some extent.

What's the most random thing you've done out of boredom? Make spreadsheets about stuff I will never have to refer to. It’s a great way to be distracted/occupied, so I don’t shy away from starting one whenever I feel the need to.

What show did your parents not let you watch as a kid? Mr. Bean. My mom didn’t like the character’s antics and she especially hated how he technically doesn’t talk, since she felt like it would have an effect on how we learned language (we mainly learned English from the TV) and the way we speak.

What is your personal catchphrase? I say, “Awesome!” when I’m pleased with something, which is a habit I picked up from Gabie. I also tend to say “For real?” whenever I’m surprised.

What is the most pleasurable feeling that doesn't involve anything sexual? I like being given lazy scratches on my wrist or leg. It’s also nice when someone plays with my hair, but it depends on who’s doing it; sometimes I’ll find it too invasive.

What was your 'Oops, wrong person' moment? This doesn’t happen a lot to me, fortunately. For the most part, it’s only been instances from childhood when I mistakenly held on to a stranger’s hand instead of either of my parents’.

What do you find attractive that isn't considered 'normal' attraction? I’m not particularly attracted to muscles or fit bodies in general; a little bit of flab or what the internet calls ~dad bod~ has always been more than alright with me.

What’s the dumbest thing you’ve done drunk? Nearly fall asleep in a swimming pool, or go on a loud rant about someone while that someone was still within earshot.

What's your proudest moment in the bathroom? I have no idea what this means, and I don’t want to ask.

What’s something you own that gets you lots of compliments? Some clothes/shoes I have. Also, my car back when I placed reindeer antlers and a red nose on it a few Christmases ago haha.

If money was no object, where would you want to live? If that was the case, I’d be in New York City right now.

Who is your favorite mythological character? I never took a liking to mythology and the creatures associated with it.

What's something that's happened which couldn't happen at a worse time? My breakup. We were also recently informed that my mom has been retrenched sooooooo life isn’t particularly dandy at the moment. I’ve stopped complaining about my heavy daily workload and have instead felt grateful for it, because at least it keeps me occupied enough and not think about the stuff happening at home.

What is the best pickup line you've ever heard? I don’t like pickup lines.

What did aging ruin for you? My back and my eyesight.

What is the most hilarious thing you’ve ever heard? Ugh, questions like these are impossible to answer. Off the top of my head, I’ll go with this video.

What is the darkest thing you have seen on the internet? Crime scene photos, beheading videos, and corpses. There have also been other stuff but they’d be too triggering if I tried to describe what they are.

What's something you really enjoy, but can't have? I can’t have milkshakes unless I’m fine with the stomachaches I will inevitably get after.

What Wikipedia article have you recently read? So I watched Royal Rumble yesterday (I haven’t kept up with wrestling in years, but I always come back for the big pay-per-views) and there’s this female wrestlerI think I’ll soon develop a full-blown crush on. I wanted to look her up and I learned that she’s Rhea Ripley, so I briefly read up on her life and career.

What's a book you were made to read in school that you really liked? Without Seeing the Dawn will always be my favorite. Taking it up in English class was never a chore for me. Number the Stars was a great read too, as was Dekada ‘70.

What objective did you fail to complete this week? I haven’t worked out at all this week, which I should’ve been able to do twice already according to the workout plan I’m currently subscribed to. But it’s fine, I’ll just try to catch up.

What could have gotten worse for you but it didn't? Work. I kept making a million mistakes during my first two months and thought I’d never get the hang of it, and I was just waiting to get fired immediately lol. But everything’s going smoothly now - I’m not as lost as I used to be, and I’ve even taken to tutoring some of the newer hires.

What subject should be taught at schools, but isn't? I’d have appreciated it if we had been taught or at least briefed on how to obtain crucial government IDs and documents. I didn’t exactly enjoy walking through everything by myself and being expected to know what to do.

What is the best thing about having a Significant Other? Oh my god, everything. I loved and treasured being in a relationship. I appreciated even the arguments because it made me get better at communicating, know how and when to apologize, and how to be more in tune with another person’s feelings. But my favorite part about it would probably be having a person to share everything about yourself and your life to. I’ve learned to be okay being by myself, but I feel the loneliness the hardest when I’m going through a rough patch and remembering that I no longer having someone to turn to.

What makes you unusually uncomfortable? Injections, blood tests, anaesthesia, anything that’s meant to prick my skin.

What is an upcoming purchase you're excited about? I don’t plan on making any purchases soon. Maybe a couple boxes of macarons with 25 pieces each for my birthday to treat myself?? but that’s the only one I’ve been planning.

What is the worst game you've ever played? When I was still taking PE, I dreaded it every time we had to play basketball or water polo.

What’s the oddest thing you like to do? I really like doing tedious tasks, like inputting things into a spreadsheet or writing out lists. I think I’d be a great secretary. < Yeah same. Literally what I said earlier about the spreadsheets.

What's the funniest news story you've seen in the past few weeks? Some fixers at the LTO who approached the mayor of a nearby city to convince him that they can fast-track whatever business he’s in for there, not knowing he’s the fucking mayor. What a mess lmfao.

What do you really really want right now? For things to go back to normal. My parents are very secretive about finances - probably because they don’t want us to worry - but I hate not knowing if I could even turn on the fan or any of our lights anymore. I also hate that I feel guilty whenever I buy things for myself knowing that both my parents are in sticky situations.

What do you hide from people? Things going on in my personal life. I will refer to my problems in social media posts occasionally, but would never provide enough context for people to know more about my life than I’m comfortable with.

What was the first sign you knew you had a crush on someone? I got increasingly nervous around them and I just wanted to be with them all day and listen to their stories and buy them food and stuff. Also, I knew when I started crying over them. Hahahaha man this just made me feel so nostalgic. I miss that feeling of first falling in love with someone.

What's the best lemonade you've made from the lemons life gave you? The self-love, self-acceptance, and self-validation I gained after my breakup felt and continues to feel wonderful. I never realized how much of myself I sacrificed and gave away. I will never do that again and will always make sure to leave more than enough room for myself in the future.

Who was your cartoon crush while growing up? Sam from Totally Spies and Shego from Kim Possible.

What's the best way to deal with religious door knockers? We don’t have those here. But I imagine just telling them “No thanks” and closing my door.

What’s the most hypocritical thing you’ve ever seen or heard? My mom is a big hypocrite in general; she exhibits some behaviors that she would typically chew me out for. But she would never admit to that; that, or she wouldl use mental gymnastics to convince me that the way I’m doing the thing is wrong and that her version is the acceptable one.

Who’s the most interesting person you’ve ever met? Probably one of the artists at Pinto Museum. Every time I’ve gone there, he’s always standing at the first gallery - he looks like your typical visitor, but I’ve come to realize he actually scans the museum looking for people who are genuinely into the artworks and not just there to shoot photos. I know, because he has always ended up approaching me and whoever I’m with at the time so that he can explain every single painting. He’s done the same thing with me - I think he keeps forgetting me, but it’s fine - 2-3 times, with the same spiels and same interesting explanations and anecdotes. In the end he always reveals that he painted a number of the works in the museum and for his sake I will always try to act surprised, haha. Anyway, he’s brilliant and very talented, and always has great stories to tell.

What just doesn't impress you? Certain movies that are meant to be hailed as one of the greats.

What’s the worst possible way to introduce yourself? By being an ass from the get-go, I suppose.

What makes you wish that you were born in the past or the future? I hate missing out on things when I’m already around, which is why I often wish I could live long enough to see what advancs and developments we could be capable of reaching in the future. Would we find a cure for cancer? Will I get to see my country get richer and more developed like it has always deserved to? Will travel to outer space be a thing? It’s stuff like that I’d love to see happen and the idea of potentially missing out on them because maybe they’re not meant to happen in my lifetime kinda bums me out.

What tragic event was coincidentally beneficial to you? I started loving the shit out of myself from my breakup. I thought I was already comfortable with who I was and where I was in life, but I soon learned that I could be doing so much more for myself, self-esteem-wise.

What's something people are proud of, but it doesn't impress you? Wealth, usually, especially if it’s generational. < True. Also, fucking watches? I’ll never understand the need for watches that cost a million pesos when I could easily stomp on them lmao.

What's the worst possible moment to go and play on a bouncy castle? Doing it with an upset stomach.

Who is the greatest ever comedian? I don’t know about greatest. I certainly don’t watch enough comedians to make such a choice.

What’s your irrational fear? Sometimes I’ll get an irrational urge to do something stupid and/or dangerous. For instance I was in Tagaytay last weekend, on the 20th floor of a condo and to my surprise, the windows could be opened and they didn’t have any bars either. As I opened a window I thought about jumping and it freaked me out, so much so I immediately closed it and never went back to it. I believe there’s a word for this phenomenon in a foreign language; I just can’t remember what it is now.

What's your oldest memory? Waking up inside a Winnie the Pooh tent with my sister when I was 3, she 1. My parents let us go ‘camping,’ even though the tent was simply set up on the floor of our bedroom.

What can you not wake up without? Greeting my dogs.

What did you think was cool when you were younger that you now think isn’t? Side bangs.

What are your favorite or most memorable lines from any movie/show? “I would ask you to consider your response in light of the respect that my rank and office deserve, not that which my age and gender might suggest.” from The Crown. Holy shit that line was so good. I’ll need to rewatch this showagain.

What's something people love to hate? Mainstream culture. < Very true.

What’s something that is underrated but extremely useful? Car adaptors have saved my ass so many times while driving long distances and needing to constantly use data to have access to Waze.

[brexitbenefits]

Battle over fisheries and sovereignty

Both the UK and the EU have set out their negotiating positions for when trade talks start next week, however, key divisions remain and as Macron has said, each other are set to rip each other apart in the negotiations.

The EU had nothing new, or startling to add to the negotiations. (just reading from the EU law books and paragraphing it a bit) What was a surprise though is that one of the proposal’s ambitions is to allow the UK access to the Galileo project. There is a catch though, the UK will be forbidden to participate in the development of the technologies behind it, which is a blow to the UK as the UK has invested £1.4bn, a total of 14% of the projects budget, playing a crucial role, having built most, if not all of the satellites for the system.1 The EU has also proposed that cultural objects(museum collections), be returned back to the EU.

Summary of EU position

In the EU’s mandate they stated that If there is an extension to the transition period, it will be a minimum of 1 year, and a deal on fisheries must be agreed by 1 July 2020.

Furthermore, the EU has stated that the “envisaged partnership might evolve over time”, hinting at dynamic alignment. “Both parties must reaffirm the … commitment to work … to … ensure a balance of rights and obligations, and a level playing field that will stand the test of time. This balance must ensure the autonomy of the Union’s decision-making and legal order, ensure the protection of the Union’s financial interests and be consistent with the other Union principles set out in the relevant European Council guidelines, in particular with respect to the integrity of the Single Market and the Customs Union and the indivisibility of the four freedoms;”

“The negotiations will be conducted in a way that ensures parallelism among the various sectoral tracks of the negotiation.”

All of the following clauses must be agreed in the future relationship

1. Non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction

2. Prosecution of those accused of the most serious crimes to the international community

3. UK must be bound by the European Court of Human Rights, and have to abide by The European Court of Justice rulings*, and the application of relevant Council of Europe conventions **

4. Continued commitment to the Paris Agreement and United Nations Conventions on climate Change

5. Commitment to promoting effective and rule-based multilateralism

*The European Court of Human Rights is a joke as there have been cases when terrorists have been able to bypass justice2, or even more ridiculous than that, a row over a cake in a bakery has landed at the high court.3

**paragraph 160 states that “. Should a dispute raise a question of interpretation of Union law, which may also be indicated by either Party, the arbitration panel should refer the question to the CJEU as the sole arbiter of Union law, for a binding ruling.” As the whole basis of this agreement is based on European Law, it means that ultimately, the CJEU will have ultimate say on most matters.

Furthermore, the EU wants the UK to adhere to the EU’s rulings on data protection law. As good as GDPR sounds, it actually benefits ransomware attackers as it is often cheaper for a company to pay the ransomware attacker money, instead of facing fines from the EU on data protection. In addition to this, a number of American companies block some webpages from European users, because of concerns that the EU could potentially fine the company billions of pounds for breaching GDPR regulations. ” Large fines from the EU are not uncommon, with Google recently fined over €8 billion.4 The UK wants to come up with it’s own revised data protection rules, but it’s basically mirroring GDPR as it wants the EU to check whether the new rules are “adequate.”

The EU has said it will respect the UK’S “regulatory and decision-making autonomy”, however, “equivalence mechanisms and decisions remain defined and implemented on a unilateral basis by the European Union” and ensure “administrative cooperation and mutual assistance in customs and value added tax (VAT) matters”

The EU wants the UK to “uphold existing reciprocal access conditions, quota shares and the traditional activity of the Union fleet,” which will be detrimental to the UK fishermen that voted leave. The EU currently own 60% of the UK fishing water quotas.

Instead the UK has proposed that:

“The UK is ready to consider an agreement on fisheries that reflects the fact that the UK will be an independent coastal state at the end of 2020. It should provide a framework for our future relationship on matters relating to fisheries with the EU. This would be in line with precedent for EU fisheries agreements with other independent coastal states. Trade in fisheries products should be covered by the CFTA. Overall, the framework agreement on fisheries should provide a clear basis for an on-going relationship with the EU, akin to the EU’s relationship with other coastal states, one that respects the UK’s status as an independent coastal state and the associated rights and obligations that come with this.

The UK will no longer accept the ‘relative stability’ mechanism for sharing fishing quotas, which is outdated, based on historical fishing activity from the 1970s. This means that future fishing opportunities should be based on the principle of zonal attachment, which better reflects where the fish live, and is the basis for the EU’s fisheries agreement with Norway.

Any EU vessels granted access to fish in UK waters in annual negotiations would be required to comply with UK rules and would be subject to licensing requirements including reporting obligations. New fisheries management measures will be notified in good time”, adhering to the North East Atlantic Fisheries Commission and International Council for Exploration of the Seas instead.

While enforcing a level playing field and “fair” competition rules, the EU is in reality trying to minimise the UK’S competitiveness post Brexit, and hamper it’s ability to negotiate preferential trade deals with other countries. Furthermore the EU wants to enforce it’s rules on state aid.

Although the EU’s non-regression clause is signed with any country it has struck a trade deal with, the UK will be the big loser in this one as the majority of the UK’s standards are higher than the EU, including having among the highest animal welfare standards in the world, with Austria the only EU country matching the UK’s A status on the Animal Protection Index.5

The UK position

Sovereignty and control of British fishing waters were the main themes of the UK’s response, stating that “The UK wants to remain able to protect it’s “regulatory, security and financial interests, and the Government will not negotiate any arrangement in which the UK does not have control of its own laws and political life. That means that we will not agree to any obligations for our laws to be aligned with the EU's, or for the EU's institutions, including the Court of Justice, to have any jurisdiction in the UK.”

Furthermore, “the Government will work hard to agree arrangements on these lines. However, if it is not possible to negotiate a satisfactory outcome, then the trading relationship with the EU will rest on the 2019 Withdrawal Agreement and will look similar to Australia's.”

The UK also said that the agreement should “recognise the right of each party to set its labour priorities and adopt or modify its labour laws.“

A key point underpinning the EU is that the UK has said “the Agreement should tackle bureaucracy and unnecessary regulatory measures. “

The UK has also enforced it will maintain full control over state aid subsidies.

The UK want audio-visual services included in the agreement, but the EU has ruled it out.

The UK seeks fair arbitration and wants to establish a UK / EU Joint Committee,provide for commitments to transparency, and set out exceptions, for example on national security.

“The arrangements will reflect the regulatory and judicial autonomy of the UK and accordingly there will be no role for the Court of Justice of the European Union in the dispute resolution mechanism.”

You’ve heard Boris say, “We are leaving the EU on October 31”. Months later he said “We are leaving the EU on January 31” Well, as no surprise, his mandate reads “The UK has insisted it will not extend the transition beyond December 31, 2020.” Another deadline, will he cross the line?

What they agree on

l Both want continued road haulage and public transport

l Both agree on Intellectual property rights

l Both the EU and the UK agree on climate change

l Both committed to the PEACE PLUS programme

l Both want cooperation between UK and Europol and Eurojust, but the UK does not seek membership

Downfalls

l The UK wants to join a number of EU organisations. The problem is, will it cost £8bn? One significant origination it wants to join is the £100bn EU Horizon 2020 project

l The UK wants to keep unilateral equivalence in financial services, which means the UK can’t turn London into a highly developed free market like Singapore.

1https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07734-x

2https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-24047097

3https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-49350891

4https://www.zdnet.com/video/google-hit-with-eur1-49-billion-antitrust-fine-by-europe-over-online-advertising/

5https://www.worldanimalprotection.org/news/ground-breaking-animal-protection-index-assesses-animal-welfare-around-world

[swirlingdisobedience]

Scores

Based on excerpts from the text: Keeping Score: Notation, Embodiment, and Liveness By Hendrik Folkerts. 

“To approach a definition: the score is a notational device that connects the material of a ­discipline—ranging from music, dance, and performance to architecture, linguistics, mathematics, physics—and its systems of knowledge to a language that produces description, transmission, and signification, in order to be read, enacted, or executed in whatever form desir­able.”  

Exercise:

Make a score of your performance

think of:

1. Acts / scenes / chapters - how do the following take part in these and where?:

2. Characters

3. Movements

4. Outfits

5. Sound / video - amplified voice? lights?

6. Props - are they activated? How do these move or change?

Cornelius Cardew

Cornelius Cardew, Treatise (1963–67), EP 7560, musical score (excerpt), assigned 1970 to Peters Edition Limited, London

English experimental music composer, and founder (with Howard Skempton and Michael Parsons) of the Scratch Orchestra, an experimental performing ensemble. He later rejected experimental music, explaining why he had "discontinued composing in an avantgarde idiom" in his own programme notes to his Piano Album 1973[full citation needed] in favour of a politically motivated "people's liberation music". (wikipedia)

“Cardew’s method was premised on a dissolution of the hierarchies and boundaries between composer and interpreter, as well as between performers active in different fields of performance, from music to visual art. The Scratch Orchestra had no fixed leader or conductor; rather, everyone was equally involved and implicated in the enactment of the score. The orchestra consisted of both musicians and nonmusicians acting as one “assembly” in a collective state of continuous training and research. The name of the orchestra refers to each member notating their accompaniments (understood as “music that allows a solo”) in a musician’s scratch book, in whatever notational language they see fit: “verbal, graphic, musical, collage, etc.,” as Cardew put it in his “constitution” for the group.”

Scratch Orchestra link here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8-4yl3Zvdo&feature=emb_title

Treatise (1963–67), Musical score. 

“The show, curated by Barbara Held and Pilar Subirà (Possibility of Action: The Life of the Score at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona Study Center in 2008), reversed the conventional understanding of a score as an abstract representation of tone, taking instead as their starting point Cage’s contrary notion of the score as a representation of action with a unique and unpredictable result. The score is a generator of an action, they wrote, “to be performed, the outcome of which is unknown, and an end result that can never be repeated.”3 This view adheres to a typical chronology in which the score precedes the live enactment, standing as a precursor for a future iteration. The “unknown outcome” indicates the importance of chance and singularity assigned to the enactment of the score (particularly with respect to Cage), claiming it as the site of origin and performance as the site of singular presence, effect, and changeability.” (...) In the case of the Scratch Orchestra, its political dimensions include the democratic way its members developed a language for the score, in which they took a written instruction by Cardew and each developed it into myriad methods and forms of notation.”  

Jani Christou

Greek composer. 

Strychnine Lady (1967)

This work belongs to Christou’s last compositional period, during which he experimented with a personal art form that involves stage performance, mythical archetypes, dramatic elements and avant-garde materials and means. At this time, he also introduced new concepts, such as metapraxis and protoperformance, in order to engage with elements of the unconscious, influenced, in particular, by the field of analytical psychology as shaped by the Swiss psychologist, Carl Jung (1875–1961). (From: https://llllllll.co/t/experimental-music-notation-resources/149/367)

Strichnine Lady Link here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVSTUR6uBSI

Epicycle, 1968.  

“The score for his late piece Epicycle (1968) includes both written instructions and drawn images that describe how to spatialize and time the performance, all of which lead to the execution of a “continuum”—that is, a continuous space for performance that participants could step in and out of and where, potentially, every observer could be cast as a performer” 

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuPHwdazjSs

(...) The interpreter becomes as much the “author” of the score or composition as the composer, if not more so, and the prevalent dialectics of origin(al) and result should be abandoned. Through the transaction of interpretation and subsequent execution (or in the case of Cardew’s Scratch Orchestra, the fabrication of score within a ­collective), the score becomes part of its own iteration. Within the language systems that are produced, the relationship between score and performance evolves as interdependent, and meaning is produced through a process of transaction, iteration, and repetition, akin to the notion of iterability that Jacques Derrida discusses in “Signature Event Context.”  

John Cage 

John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was an American composer, music theorist, artist, and philosopher. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde. Critics have lauded him as one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. (wikipedia)

4′33′’ - Silent piece

Fontana Mix, 1958

«Fontana Mix» consists of a total of 20 pages of graphic materials: ten pages covered with six curved lines each, and ten sheets of transparent film covered with randomly-placed points. In accordance with a specific system, and using the intersecting points of a raster screen, two of the pages produce connecting lines and measurements that can be freely assigned to musical occurrences such as volume, tone color, and pitch. The interpreter no longer finds a score in the customary sense, but rather a treatment manual for the notation of a composition.

________________________________

“(...) the score can easily remain within the autonomy of its own materiality, but it may also manifest as or lead to the production of another object or live enactment, sketched out by the parameters of the score’s language.”

Greta Bratescu

Atelierul—scenariul (The Studio—the film script) (1978), charcoal, colored pencil, and pastel on paper, 89.5 x 116.8 cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York

Script developed for the performance film The Studio (1978)

“The script for The Studio, which consists of written instructions accompanied by miniature drawings of Brătescu’s studio, invokes this space as a stage that is literally inscribed with the actions of the artist: lie down, wake up, walk around, sit, lie down, etc. In the film, the transition between the first two scenes (“The Sleep” and “The Awakening”) and the third sequence (“The Game”) marks the passage from Brătescu’s purely private experience—sleeping and awakening, unaware of any external presence—to a situation in which the artist is conscious of the camera’s gaze and starts to perform. Brătescu is both the subject that performs and the object that is observed by herself as the one operating the camera; her studio is both a private and a public space. The script for The Studio is an important interlocutor between the subjectivity and objectivity that is enacted in the simultaneously private and public atmo­sphere of the artist’s studio. The figures she draws to represent herself in the score, abstractions of her own body, constitute a rudimentary style of self-portraiture. The text that accompanies and is superimposed on these drawings, in turn, references the actions of her body that manifest in the space of the studio as well as on film. The score highlights Brătescu’s role as author, interpreter, actor, and spectator in her work as it moves between self-portraiture, auto-instruction, and enactment. “

Film Still from The Studio, 1978. 

“(...) operations of chance, the relationship between language (as score) and event, and what Lucy Lippard described as the “dematerialization of the art object” in the American art context of the 1960s and 1970s: The curators’ selections included Yoko Ono’s instructional scores, Ian Wilson and Robert Barry’s conversation pieces, and Lawrence Weiner’s instructions for wall drawings, to name a few examples. Lippard’s notion of the dematerialized encompasses a wide range of media in which “the idea is paramount and the material form is secondary” and that “stress the acceptively open-ended.”

Yoko Ono

Instructional Scores

Conversation Piece, an event score from Grapefruit, 1964.

Joseph Beuys 

Joseph Beuys (12 May 1921 – 23 January 1986) was a German Fluxus, happening, and performance artist as well as a painter, sculptor, medallist, installation artist, graphic artist, art theorist, and pedagogue. (wikipedia)

Score for Action with Transmitter (Felt) Receiver in the Mountains, 1973

Fluxus

Founded in 1960 by the Lithuanian/American artist George Maciunas, Fluxus began as a small but international network of artists and composers, and was characterised as a shared attitude rather than a movement. Rooted in experimental music, it was named after a magazine which featured the work of musicians and artists centred around avant-garde composer John Cage.

The Latin word Fluxus means flowing, in English a flux is a flowing out. Fluxus founder Maciunas said that the purpose of Fluxus was to ‘promote a revolutionary flood and tide in art, promote living art, anti-art’. This has strong echoes of dada, the early twentieth century art movement.

Fluxus played an important role in opening up the definitions of what art can be. It has profoundly influenced the nature of art production since the 1960s, which has seen a diverse range of art forms and approaches existing and flourishing side-by-side.

Fluxus had no single unifying style. Artists used a range of media and processes adopting a ‘do-it-yourself’ attitude to creative activity, often staging random performances and using whatever materials were at hand to make art. Seeing themselves as an alternative to academic art and music, Fluxus was a democratic form of creativity open to anyone. Collaborations were encouraged between artists and across artforms, and also with the audience or spectator. It valued simplicity and anti-commercialism, with chance and accident playing a big part in the creation of works, and humour also being an important element.

Many key avant-garde artists in the 60s took part in Fluxus, including Joseph Beuys, Dick Higgins, Alice Hutchins, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Ben Vautier, Robert Watts, Benjamin Patterson and Emmett Williams. (https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/f/fluxus)

Intentionally uncategorizable, Fluxus projects were wide-ranging and often multidisciplinary, humorous, and based in everyday, inexpensive materials and experiences—including everything from breathing to answering the telephone. When asked to define Fluxus, Maciunas would often respond by playing recordings of barking dogs and honking geese, perhaps confounding his questioner but also demonstrating the experimentation and embrace of absurdity at its core. Performances—which Fluxus artists called “Events,” in order to distinguish them fromHappenings and other forms of performance-based art—were a significant part of the movement. These were largely based on sets of written instructions, called “scores,” referencing the fact that they were derived from musical compositions. Following a score would result in an action, event, performance, or one of the many other kinds of experiences that were generated out of this vibrant movement. (https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-fluxus-movement-art-museums-galleries)

Fluxus scores

In many ways, most Fluxus ‘scores’ (for music or other kinds of performance and/or composition) are fairly legible as scripts for performance/enactment; i.e. the text comes first and the performance after (if at all). Certainly, one of the interventions (and charms) of Fluxus scores were the openness of the scores, where interpretation and chance were much more important than following the letter of the law, as one might in traditional sheet music, for example. As such, reading Fluxus scores as performance texts allows us to see how writing can activate art/life works that writing cannot contain or control. (https://jacket2.org/commentary/how-make-us-flux-scoresscriptsinstructions) 

Toshi Ichiyanagi. Music for Electric Metronome. 1960 (Fluxus Edition announced 1963). Score. Master for the Fluxus Edition, typed and drawn by George Maciunas, New York. Ink and typewriting on transparentized paper, 11 3/16 x 15 3/16″ (28.4 x 38.5 cm)

Yasunao Tone. Anagram for Strings. 1961 (Fluxus Edition released 1963). Score. Master for the Fluxus Edition, typed and drawn by George Maciunas, New York. Ink and typewriting on transparentized paper, 8 1/4 x 11 11/16 (21 x 29.6 cm)

“While these scores can be enacted, their producers considered them stand-alone art objects and often exhibited them in galleries to be experienced for their visual qualities, for example in Tokyo’s Minami Gallery, where the 1962 Exhibition of World Graphic Scores introduced works by Fluxus artists George Brecht, Dick Higgins, and La Monte Young to a Japanese audience.” (https://www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/2012/12/21/exhibiting-fluxus-keeping-score-in-tokyo-1955-1970-a-new-avant-garde/)

“(...) the score can easily remain within the autonomy of its own materiality, but it may also manifest as or lead to the production of another object or live enactment, sketched out by the parameters of the score’s language.” 

(...)

To wade into the muddy waters of the score as an “original,” it is key to look more closely at the score’s relationship to temporality and chronology. In the traditional musicological sense, the score acts as a precursor to an event. Each live enactment can be traced back to the score as a kind of “core material,” so that in the score future performances—and thus temporalities—are latent. Additionally, a score can emerge from a live iteration, or, at the least, may be adapted according to it. Though highly unstable in terms of representation, the score has a documentary aspect—and in turn becomes a forecast of future performances—thus further augmenting the complex multi-chronicities that the score conjures.

José Maceda

Filipino composer José Maceda. Trained as a concert pianist in the 1930s and later obtaining degrees in musicology, anthropology, and ethnomusicology in the United States, Maceda started composing his major works in the 1960s. 

(...) Maceda’s lifelong endeavor (he died in 2004): a dissimulation of the cultural hegemony of Occidental music and its core principles of logic and causality in favor of researching a set of values indigenous to the eco-social relations, oral and mystical traditions, production of musical instruments from natural materials, and concepts of time in Southeast Asian culture26—in short, a decolonization of Filipino music and its forms of notation in the context of Southeast Asia.

One of Maceda’s most ambitious works, entitled Ugnayan (Correlation, 1974), is a composition of Filipino village music that was scored and recorded on twenty channels that were then broadcast simultaneously on twenty of Manila’s radio stations. Hundreds of thousands of the city’s residents gathered in public spaces with portable transistor radios to listen to the different tracks created for each station, with the citizenry collectively assembling the composition in a massive public ritual of converging indigenous history, time, and space in the urban fabric.

----- 

“Performance, as an act that exists momentarily, has been generally discussed within an archival logic that privileges materiality over immateriality, celebrating its ephemerality, impermanence, and ontological unicity—“performance’s being … becomes itself through disappearance,” as Peggy Phelan initially put it.32 In his catalogue essay for the 1998 exhibition Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949–1979 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Paul Schimmel even goes so far to say that performance is constituted by a drive towards destruction, marking an “underlying darkness” in performative work that is informed by a seemingly Freudian death drive.33 The definition of performance as that which cannot remain and thus “disappears” relies on a rationale that considers performance as antithetical to history, memory, and the archive, an unjust fate it shares with other immaterial practices, such as oral histories, storytelling, and gestural practices, that are also always incomplete, always reconstructive, and thus escape lineage to a singular original.”

“Under this new understanding of the archive as including the corporeal, the body is no longer the object on which a choreographic notational device is projected. The flesh becomes the score, the muscle, and the tissue—the languages through which a work is interpreted, transmitted, embodied, and then performed. This paradigm defies an understanding of the archive as an architecture of objects or documents and opens up ways to think about it anew, as reflecting movement and sound, bodies and waves, time and variations. Within this archive structure, the flesh is activated as a “physicalized relational field of interaction, intensities, techniques, histories, traces, and relicts of experienced information … with its own history and genealogy,” as Van Imschoot argues.38 This position paves the way for a different understanding of the score, away from the terms of a material object to something that can be held in the human body, or, at the very least, exists always in connection with embodiment through enactment.”

Katalin Ladik

From the late 1960s on Ladik started to publish her poems and, subsequently, to perform and record them as speech acts. During these performances, which often included music and choreographed movement, she transformed the language of her written poetry, which necessarily adhered to a linguistic system of regulation. Vowel prolongation, repetition of consonants, words that seem to come from her gut, her throat, her mouth; such techniques became an early repertoire that was often performed as a shamanistic ritual, enacting the poems through the artist’s body, as an extension of her voice and her language. Sentences became embodiments, words produced their meaning through ritualized gestures, letters were spat out or swallowed—a corporeal manifestation of language.

UFO Party, 1969.

Pauline Oliveros

1932-2016   Pauline Oliveros' life as a composer, performer and humanitarian was about opening her own and others' sensibilities to the universe and facets of sounds.    Her career spanned fifty years of boundary dissolving music making.  In the '50s she was part of a circle of iconoclastic composers, artists, poets gathered together in San Francisco. In the 1960's she influenced American music profoundly through her work with improvisation, meditation, electronic music, myth and ritual.

She founded "Deep Listening ®,"  which came from her childhood fascination with sounds and from her works in concert music with composition, improvisation and electro-acoustics.  She described Deep Listening as a way of listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what you are doing.  Such intense listening includes the sounds of daily life, of nature, of one's own thoughts as well as musical sounds. (https://paulineoliveros.us/about.html)

sonic meditations (1974)

Published in 1974, Pauline Oliveros’ Sonic Meditations is one of the most seminal, if not under-recognized, works in late 20th century avant-garde musical thought. Within it, the grande-dame of American Minimalism not only departs from standard musical notation, but with the entire conception of where music grows from, and how it can be realized. Her focus lies on the cognition of sound – largely through the practice of meditation, and group participation. She highlights the virtues of meditation for making sounds, imagining sounds, listening to, and remember sounds, and sets into action twelve text scores to help practitioners realize these new relationships. Sonic Meditations is as much a workshop for use, as it is a series of pieces. (https://blogthehum.com/2016/09/13/pauline-oliveros-sonic-meditations-1974-the-complete-text-and-scores/)

Guillermo Galindo

(b. 1960, Mexico City) is an experimental composer, sonic architect and performance artist.

Score for War Map (2017) 

Acrylic on polyester military blanket 152.4 × 208.3 cm (detail)

In War Map, Galindo uses a military-green blanket as the substrate for a printed composition drawn from collaged and overlayed representations of immigration patterns as digitally mapped on the website Lucify.com. The blanket was donated by Mr. Kurt Heldmann, who works in the reception camp for refugees in Calden, Germany. By combining the visual languages of maps and graphs; musical notation; and more organic, natural motifs suggesting proliferation and motion, the artist skillfully demonstrates that these strategies for visually representing movement through time and space have much in common, and that all movements — even tragic or difficult migrations of people — can be represented such that their own subtle rhythms and musicality are revealed. Galindo describes the digital representations of migration patterns as “surprisingly archaeological” in their look, yielding the sense of a surreal, Borgesian map, and explains that he manipulated the work’s various shades of blue in an effort to mimic the Aegean Sea. (http://www.magnoliaeditions.com/artworks/we_all_have_a_place_at_the_table/)

Score for We All Have a Place at the Table (2017) 

Acrylic on cotton tablecloth 54.2 × 157.5 cm (detail)

His third work, We All Have a Place at the Table, is printed on a found tablecloth that still bears stains from meals at the refugee camp. All of the abstract patterns and shapes printed upon its surface were derived from the modest but sophisticated embroidery that already adorned the tablecloth – a simple pattern of repeated small modules whose uncanny resemblance to systems of notation and representation used in music or mathematics appealed immediately to the artist.

(http://www.magnoliaeditions.com/artworks/we_all_have_a_place_at_the_table/)

[ursafilms]

Owen Wilson to the Rescue!

A few weeks after Leonard Nimoy Professional Debacle 2.0 ended, Jodie called me.

Jodie: “I take it you’ve gotten over the Leonard Nimoy incident?”

Me: “Which one? And you would be wrong.”

Jodie: “I understand, but you have to make this situation right.”

Me: “And why is that?”

Jodie: “Because I have to provide the voice-over talent now, and I haven’t got anywhere near the contacts you have. You have to do this for me.”

Guilt doesn’t work on me. Usually. But Jodie Marko was and is one of the most hard-working and brilliant people I worked with in San Francisco, despite the fact that she was from Canada. She had done a lot for me and had always been a reliable colleague. Doing something for her is a legitimate ask on her part.

Me: “Any suggestions? Other than Leonard Nimoy?”

Jodie: “Yes. Didn’t you help get Vince Vaughan’s movie, The Internship, onto the Google campus?”

Me: “Yes. His producer, Sandra Smith, is a friend of a friend. I made the introductions, but make no mistake, she did the heavy lifting.”

Jodie: “You always say that, and it’s not true.”

Me: “Sure it is. I have no marketable skills. I don’t actually do anything. I just know lots of people who have marketable skills and actually do things. That’s all. Maybe that’s what producing is. If that’s the case, that is kind of depressing, don’t you think?”

Jodie sighed.

Me: “Okay. Okay. Okay. I’ll stop. What’s your idea?”

Jodie: “Owen Wilson.”

Me: “Let me unpack this for you, you conniving little twerp. You want me to call in a favor from a woman that I know via a friend of mine, to bail out The Stupid Museum People?”

Jodie: “If you’re going to put it that way.”

Me: “How else should I put it? They blew a huge opportunity to work with a man synonymous with science. No knock on Owen, who was lovely to work with on the movie, but Leonard Nimoy was, oh, how can I say this? Perfect?”

Jodie: “I know. But will you talk to Sandra?”

Me: “For you, yes, but I don’t want anyone from The Stupid Museum People involved in the negotiation. This is you and me, and you don’t know I’m doing this. Got it?”

Jodie: “Yes.”

****

Sandra Smith, Vince Vaughan's producer at Wild West Picture Show Productions and a total babe, accommodated my request to submit the script to Owen Wilson, who liked it enough to agree to let his voice be used for the video. In order to record, though, we would have to go to him during the filming of the location work on The Internship.

And, of course, the location where he could do the voice-over? The Marin Headlands. Not hard to get to, but the scheduling issue had to do with Owen being able to carve out an hour to read the script, a five minute snoozer about the birth of the universe. 

The deal broke down to Sandra’s assistant, Amy calling me and giving me a couple hours to get over the Headlands with my sound engineer. What time and what day? Anyone’s guess. The production would be there for about a week. I waited. And waited. And waited.

And of course my phone rang the day before I scheduled a trip back to clean out my parent’s house in the over-55 community where my father had spent his last days and from which my mother had recently moved. 

Amy: “George, tomorrow afternoon at 3pm is the only day and time that will work for Owen. And even then I’ll have to call you to confirm in the late morning.”

Me: “That’s fine. I’ll call you when I get there with my sound engineer. Would you object to Jodie Marko, my co-producer coming with me?”

Amy: “Not at all. But text me when you arrive. If I get one more phone call.”

Me: “I understand.”

I called Jodie to give her a heads up.

Jodie: “I can go!? Really!?”

She paused.

Jodie: “The director is going to want to go.”

Me: “Is that right? Some corporate video director with a list of credits as long as a nose hair is going to direct Owen Wilson’s reading of some insomnia-curing copy? I don’t think so. You’re lucky I got you in there. Nobody else.”

Jodie: “He’s not going to be happy about this.”

Me: “Oh well, then by all means. I wouldn’t want someone to be unhappy on one of my jobs.”

Jodie: “Point taken.”

Me: “Oh, and I have to change my flight back to New Jersey. The production company is picking up the tab.”

Jodie: “I’ll submit an expense report. Just don’t upgrade yourself.”

Me: “Count on it.”

****

Next day found Jodie, me, and Ted Ver Valen, fab sound recordist, in the crew parking lot of The Internship at the base of the Marin Headlands. Windy. Cold. Overcast. I texted Amy who turned us over to Owen’s personal assistant, a jittery young man who could not have been nicer. He led us to Owen’s trailer, introduced us to his boss, and then left us alone. We set up quickly as Owen sat down in a chair and reviewed the copy once more with Jodie, who just would not shut up.

Jodie: “This is so great. Thank you for doing this. I hear you’re from Texas. I hear your mother is from Texas. That makes sense. You know, both of you being from the same state. That would be odd if you weren’t.”

Me: “Jodie.”

Jodie: “Odd’s not the right word. I’m sure there are people from the same family who live in different states. So, maybe not so odd? I don’t know. How are you? Do you have any questions? I like the script. Do you like it?”

Me: “Jodie.”

She managed to compose herself and Owen read through the script. There’s something about professional actors. Something they’ve got that the next level down of what might be referred to as somewhat talented and very hard working just don’t have. I listened to him read it and knew he had saved the copy.

The script was a safe, corporate attempt at describing the birth of the universe. Had anyone else read it, you’d nod off in about a minute. I listened to the full five minutes of Owen’s read and knew how the universe was born and why.

Owen: “How is that?”

Me: “Only outstanding.”

Owen: “Why don’t I read it through again in pieces. I’ll start and stop every half page or so.”

Jodie: “That’s a really good idea. Don’t you think? Start and stop. Read it in chunks. Is that how they do that in Texas? If so, that’s really smart. Is everyone in Texas really smart? If not, they should be.”

Me: “Jodie.”

Owen read through it again. I still have the memory card with the original recording.

****

Of the many pet peeves I developed regarding the film industry, my favorite is a riff on the “Let no good deed go unpunished.” This particular job for The Stupid Museum People had this in spades. And since it happened towards the tail end of my career, I, obviously didn’t hesitate to call the ungrateful on their various character flaws.

In addition to embarrassing myself during the second failed Leonard Nimoy attempt, not only did I score Owen Wilson to voice the opening video, but I also found more than 30 minutes of finished 3D animation of artists renderings of the universe and its beginnings. I also convinced some Unabomber type time-lapse expert to sell us three shots of his night sky work for the price of one. 

To follow are the total number of thank yous I received from the director, who would have to have used hand-puppets for his Birth of the Universe video had it not been for Yours truly:

ZERO.

What did I get? I got the following email when the director received the raw takes of Owen Wilson’s brilliant read.

To: George Young  

From: Herr Director

Re: Owen Wilson V.O. for The Birth of the Universe

Hey George;Listened to the Owen Wilson voice-over. I should have been included in the recording since there are different ways I would have had him read certain parts of the script.

Is there a reason I was not scheduled as part of the team?

Herr Director

****

I’d gotten to the age where I waited until I responded to emails such as this. Obviously, in one of  her few lapses, Jodie had not called Herr Director to explain to him why we couldn’t cram one more body into Owen Wilson’s trailer. Remember, I was no longer, technically, on the project.

To: Herr Director 

 From: George Young

Re:Re: Owen Wilson V.O. for The Birth of the Universe

Herr Director;

Why you’re welcome! Glad you liked the tracks, and the scoring of a Hollywood Star for this little POS video. And your continued gratitude for the 3D animation freebies, the recently released Hubble Telescope photography, and the three for the price of one time-lapse photos, is just overwhelming. It makes all the grief I normally get from narcissistic, ungrateful, self-centered jerks fade in oblivion. Good luck with the edit. Given what you have to work with, I’m sure that even a one of those narcissistic, ungrateful, self-centered jerks of a director couldn’t screw it up.

George

****

A few weeks later, after I returned from cleaning out my parent’s house, Jodie called to fill me in on just how much my response had bent Herr Director out of shape. 

Me: “A simple thank you would have been nice. The guy writes a substitute for Sominex. Owen throws a 10,000 Volt charge into it, and I’m the bad guy? How does that work?”

Jodie: “He felt left out.”

Me: “That’s because we left him out. This wasn’t the type of situation where we schedule an hour at One Union Recording and put Owen Wilson in a cab. We’re lucky we got him. You’re lucky you got me to get him, because after that Leonard Nimoy fiasco, I should not have done anything to help the project. I did it for you, as you requested.”

Jodie: “I get it. But now I have to listen to him for the rest of the project.”

Me: “Jodie, just do what I do.”

Jodie: “Not a chance. I still have to work with the guy.”

Me: “What if I apologized?”

Jodie noticeably brightened her tone.

Jodie: “You would do that?”

Me: “Sure would. Just as soon as the ungrateful jerk thanks me for turning his unwatchable video into something worthwhile.”

Jodie: “That’s a long way of saying ‘No.’”

Me: “Yes.”

[wildlyhardphilosopher-blog]

puppy training for kids | potty training dogs

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puppy training for kids | potty training dogs

9 See also BOBO Shiba Inu If you can’t walk the puppy outside right away — perhaps she hasn’t had all of her vaccinations yet — then you need to create an acceptable space for her to go by using puppy pads. You also need to crate train her so that she doesn’t have the run of the house. Uploaded 2 weeks ago At spcaLA, we limit our group classes to between 4 and 8 dogs. This “semi-private” setting allows you to work with spcaLA’s expert trainers to set you and your dog up for a lifetime of happiness. Not only are spcaLA group classes affordable, but our techniques focus on positive reinforcement and fun with your dog! This can help keep your dog safe when his curiosity gets the better of him, like if he smells something intriguing but possibly dangerous on the ground! The goal is to teach your pup that he gets something even better for ignoring the other item. Until what age do puppies usually need a play pen, the layout of our house means we can’t ‘puppy proof’ a room? When To Start And Stop Using A Schedule And Diary? Step 1: 952-476-2023 Equipment needed: Nothing but stacks of old newspapers! A very cost-effective method. I think you’ll agree with me when I say: 1- Get your dog on a schedule. Feed him at set times (what goes in on a schedule, will eventually start to come out on a schedule as well!), walk him at set times and take him out to do his business at set times. This makes it easier for the dog to know when he will be able to relieve himself, which can get him holding it better in the meantime. Like PageLiked Earthquake Tracker Learn the basic skills that all “civilized canines” should know Vote Up1Vote Down  Reply Other product-related feedback Story Tools Conformation showing Find a Hospital Go from Training A Puppy To Walk On A Leash An older dog that has developed this behavior should not be treated as above but should be referred to a professional trainer/behaviorist. Puppy Problems? What Issues Are You Having With Your Puppy, Right Now? … You may have an unexpected visitor or need to visit A&E in an emergency. Whatever the reason, there just WILL be times you cannot supervise your puppy. Set a watch alarm or timer to remind you of potty breaks. Schools My mission is to help you have a wonderful relationship with your dog. Learn how to teach good manners, to decode canine behaviors, and have a really great time. Total Care Bark Control Also check out: ↑ http://www.hartz.com/Dogs/Training_and_Play/Training/how_to_housetrain_your_dog.aspx Search Rover Blog Other Ways Life Skills For Puppies Greenies PILL POCKETS Soft Dog … For this reason, it’s not as effective as crate training and will take longer, certainly resulting in more ‘accidents’ along the way. ABOUT US You cannot punish a dog after the accident has happened. Most dogs only follow one step of causality, that means what “happened right before this moment.” If you come home and scream or get upset at your puppy for having an accident inside, all your puppy knows is that you came home and were mad at him or her. Research shows that dogs do not feel guilty. This study investigated 14 dogs. The dogs had the option to disobey their owners and eat the treat or not. The owners did not know if the dog ate the treat or if the scientist took the treat away. Even if the dog did not misbehave, he still “acted” guilty when the owner was upset. The research showed that the so-called guilty look was a response to cues from the owner rather than the appreciation of a misdeed.

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fbq('track', 'ViewContent', content_ids: 'dogtraining.dknol', ); Shop All 9. Obedience Training For Puppies Learning About Sirius Puppy Training Cat food by brand Annual Report Be patient. If nothing happens after 10 minutes or so, come back in, keep the dog on leash and go back out 10 to 15 minutes later. Repeat as needed. For the past 16 years, I have been teaching puppy kindergarten and adolescent-dog classes at The Canine Connection, my training center in Chico, California. The number of graduates of my classes is likely more than 1,000 puppies – but it feels like I’ve answered client questions about potty training at least a million times. What’s one more time, if it helps someone live more happily and harmoniously with their new dog or puppy? Starmark (5) Shop Petrainer 998DRU Remote Controlled Dog Training Collar System “All of my complaints were brushed off or disregarded,” the former employee told Patch. “It’s beyond bothering that I’ve turned in all my evidence to animal control and nothing came out of everything I sent it.” Another option for those with unfenced yards is to have a chain or tie-out to keep your dog close to home when you’re not outside with him. Start the on-leash part of his potty training as outlined above. Bioactive Recipe Dog Training & Behavior Ten Dog Care Essentials Pup-Peroni Original Filet Mignon & Bacon Flavor Dog Snacks, 25-Ounce You’ll have a different word like ‘walkies‘ for other more fun times outside and your dog will eventually learn the difference and set their expectations of their time outside accordingly. Ingenuity Awards A den (a crate or bed = den) within a confinement area Submit No longer boarding cats Appreciate and love your Dog when he does it right! A little encouragement will work wonders for your Dog. Problem solving Pro-Sense (1) Login 10 Most Popular Dog Breeds Stay Pets at Home is the UK’s largest pet supplies store. From toys and bedding to tailored food and in-store veterinary clinics, it’s the first place to go for any pet need. Lucky Dog Lessons: Train Your Dog in 7 Days Kindle Edition Find Your Community How to potty train your puppy Stage 3 Wirehaired Pointing Griffon 5.2 Understanding Advanced Dog Obedience and Canine Good Citizenship Jump up ^ Clothier, Suzanne (2009). “Relationship Based Approach to Training”. Retrieved 2 December 2012.[permanent dead link] And when it comes to house training, you’re going to love schedules and routine too! While you’re housetraining your puppy, you’ll need a place to put them when you can’t be watching for accidents. This confinement space should be comfortable, with soft bedding, water, and toys, and have a floor that’s easy to clean up or potty pads in case of an accident. Up your game by using a crate for short periods of time. For ease of use, I recommend simply keeping a written diary with good old-fashioned pen and paper. Hill’s® Prescription Diet® k/d® + Mobility Canine Puppy Training: How to Housebreak Your Puppy In Just 7 Days (puppy training, dog training, puppy house breaking, puppy housetraining, house training a puppy,) Our technique and philosophy No Command pop-up content starts All Ears Reading® As temperatures rise, follow our guide to keeping your dog safe and having fun in the summer sun… Heatstroke in… We will introduce you to the way dogs think and learn. We will focus on basic cues like sit, down, stay, off, drop-it, walking on a loose leash, plus much more. We will discuss common behavior challenges and provide management and training solutions. Please, no dogs the first night of class, humans only! PetCareRx Blog Platinum Pets (2) Search Waste Management & Training wait Traveling With Your Pet Tuffy Charging the Clicker German Shepherd Dog Learn at your own pace, through 7 lessons and 20 coordinated learning goals, with many videos and hands-on exercises―in as little as six weeks. Your teacher and classmates are there to support you all along the way! “We have lots of things that bring, by their very nature, bugs or pests with them,” Katie Getchell, chief brand officer and deputy director of the Museum of Fine Arts, explains in an interview with Annear. “If [Riley] can be trained to sit down in front of an object that he smells a bug in, that we can’t smell or see, then we could take that object, inspect it, and figure out what’s going on — that would be remarkable in terms of preserving objects.” Equipment needed: A quick release collar and a house line / leash. Dogtra Company (2) Copyright © 2018 · Puppy In Training · Privacy Policy· Sitemap · 10:00 AM: Walk/water When can I start potty training? Let us see how……. Teach your puppy to be gentle when interacting with people. He must not nip or chew on people’s hands. If your dog is older than 16 weeks and has already developed some unfavorable potty habits, it is still very possible to train them using this method. The results might take a few days (or weeks) longer to see, depending on the dog. Read More Rules & Regulations Home Labrador Puppies Articles How To Potty Train A Puppy Automatic Litter Boxes I can’t figure out why she waits to get back inside to go when we have just taken her out, and we always praise her for going outside, but ignore it if she goes inside. Any ideas? Our Service Area crate train puppy | how to train my puppy crate train puppy | training puppies not to bite crate train puppy | training puppy not to bite Legal | Sitemap