#but they still managed to keep cloud retainer a BIG focus which i loved

[electric-plants]

xianyun’s story quest cutscene was so so beautiful, the visuals, the message, reconnecting us to the traveler and their emotions like i’m just in awe of how much genshin has stepped it up lately omg

[bts-teaspoonff]

Fangirl pt. 3

Genre: Romance, Slow Burn, Idol A/U

Pairing: BTS OT7 x reader

Rating: PG

Summary: Y/N, being a huge fangirl, finally got her chance to work alongside her favorite idol group as a backup dancer. She gets to know each member personally and realizes that her feelings may be more than fangirl-idol attraction.

Word Count: 5.6K

Taglist: @nochujeonjk @i-like-puppy-mg @miyochan @satotakeru14​

PARTS: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | .... masterlist

So far, your week of waiting for the company’s response was uneventful to say the least. You exchanged contacts with some of the dancers and they have all been very friendly with everyone. You were busy with work at the gym and at the dance studio so that made you take off your mind from the backup dancer job at least for a while.

During those days that you were waiting, you took double shifts in the gym and twice the amount of classes in the dance studio. You wanted to push yourself just to ease your nerves. Also, you need to pay this month’s rent alone since your roommate and best friend is out on vacation.

Lisa, your bestfriend. She’s been with you ever since college. Both of you only started living together when your brother moved out but she used to always live near you. When she moved in with you, she would always leave to travel somewhere for at least a month then come back to you. That was now your routine with Lisa. She loves travelling so much that she promised to fulfill her bucketlist as soon as both of you graduated. Her family is pretty well-off and she manages this online clothing shop to finance her trips. You and Lisa constantly video call each other almost every day. Sometimes, you would even answer each other’s call even when you’re in the shower. Of course, you already informed her about your pending job in Big Hit. She almost exploded from happiness when she got the news. She was hiking that time and it almost gave you a heart attack when you saw her jumping from happiness near the ledge. You could say that she’s your #1 fan and you are hers too.

The day came when you received the email. You were eating your breakfast at that time, taking a big bite of your omelet sandwich. You choked on your glass of water as you read the email saying “Congratulations. You are now formally a part of Big Hit’s Dance Team.” You read the other contents of the email as you generously drink water once more. You are soon to be expected to start two days from now. You can’t contain your excitement as you feel your face beaming with happiness. You could just dance your ass off right now from joy. You walked to your room with a sandwich still in your mouth as you reach for your speakers. You blasted Anpanman by BTS on full volume and pranced around the room. You also took your RJ and Koya plushies, hugged it and twirled around. You buried yourself under big Chimmy, Tata, Cooky, Mang and Shooky plushies on your couch.

You nervously entered the Big Hit building once more and went straight to the practice room. You made sure not to order a big glass of coffee this time, even though it’s very tempting. You just made a small cup of coffee at home, a routine that greatly relaxed you. You enter the room with one hand tightly gripping the strap of your cross body bag. You saw familiar faces and was grinning from ear to ear. It turns out that everyone was accepted and no one was left behind. A few of them ran to you, hugged you and then pushed you to join some of them sitting on the floor.

The dance directors and choreographers gathered all of you to discuss the plans for the dance team. Everyone was then assigned to different artists to solely focus on their performances. They started calling out the names of the dancers and the artists who they will be working with. Our main dance director started with TXT and you were not on the dancer’s list. You silently chant each of the boys’ names one by one, as if you were having a ritual on your own, until the dance director mentioned BTS. Your ears were on full concentration mode as he calls the names of the dancers one by one. As if on cue as you were continuing to chant the boys’ name and imagining your name being called, you heard your name slip from the dance director’s lips. You really tried your best to not shout and celebrate. You feel like you won the lottery at this point from your chain of good luck lately.

Each dance team then went on to different practice rooms. You, along with other male and female backup dancers, were present in another practice room as your dance choreographer started informing everyone that BTS is planning an online concert months from now. Everyone will be performing a lot of new numbers, including new dance breaks that will be mainly composed of you with the other female backup dancers.

For the first week, everyone started the dance practices without the boys yet. Everyone would spend hours being taught group performances by different choreographers. Two of which are old songs from their old albums and two were from their latest album. At first, you struggled to keep up with the other dancers but all of them were nice in helping one another when one has a hard time with performing the steps. You also made friends with the male backup dancers especially those who were close to your age. All of you were quick to get acquainted with each other and that made work very fun. You would always be light on your feet when coming to work since you’re glad you could make new friends who share the same passion. Everyone was so nice to you too since you’re the youngest out of the female backup dancers but there are also two male dancers younger than you.

You were also excited for your new work since you would get to see Jiyong almost every day. When one of you are free, you would always eat together. Your heart is filled with happiness right now. Your mind is now at a place where you’re just sitting on cloud 9.

Your body couldn’t really handle three jobs at the same time so you chose to quit teaching dance classes at the dance studio. You informed the dance studio owner about your new job to which she congratulated you non-stop. She knows how much of a big fangirl you are to BTS so she couldn’t be more proud of you. She then proceeded to convince you that no one better than you should handle the BTS dance classes. She made good points that convinced you to stay but only if you handle selected classes that works around your schedule. Luckily, she agreed and gave you at least one class a month. You couldn’t really argue with her since she pays you generously per class that you teach.

You retained your work in the gym since your shifts works around your work in Big Hit. You could handle your new work schedule and you really need to earn money for the apartment fees and your BTS merchandises. You also informed the gym owner about your new day job and he congratulated you non-stop as well. He nicely let you adjust your shift to better work around your new schedule.

So far, everything is going into place. Your new job, new acquaintances at work, quality time with your brother, and Lisa will be returning soon from her trip. You could just sit down and inhale all the good air that’s surrounding you lately. You’re scared that given this amount of good luck around you will be soon replaced by strings of bad luck, but of course you’re highly hoping that will not happen.

You went home late one night from a hectic shift at the gym. One of your clients arrived late for her schedule but still came, coinciding with the timeslot for your other client. You still accommodated the two of them and went back and forth for them during their sessions. You had to be the one to close the gym that night also. You ate like there’s no tomorrow that night since you were so tired from dance practices and the sessions at the gym. You just went to sleep right after dinner, slamming yourself into the bed and into the sheets.

You didn’t wake up from your alarm the next morning. Good thing that you had already wash your hair last night so you just fashioned a bucket hat and hurriedly fix yourself before you went out in a rush to try to arrive on time for your dance practices. You arrived at the lobby entrance just in the nick of time with a few minutes to spare, rushed to the elevator and tried to catch your breath while you wait for the lift to arrive on the right floor. You hurriedly ran out the elevator and to the hallway when you heard your phone ping. You took out your phone in your pocket while rushing in the hallway. You saw Lisa’s name at the top of your notification screen but chose to read it later and kept your phone in your hands.

You were approaching a corner in the hallway so you decreased your pace but was still slightly running. As you were about to take a turn, your head bumped into something soft but obviously firm that was moving towards your direction. You were slightly pushed back but somebody’s hand caught your arms as you were about to fall backwards. You soon realized that your head bumped into someone’s chest, somebody who’s very tall. You look up and saw Namjoon. I really got to stop meeting the boys by bumping into them like this. Your mouth fall to the floor in shock and embarrassment.

His hands were big and his arms were tan and toned. He still excludes this gentle giant aura, the same way you pictured him every time you see him on social media and on the pictures in your phone. He still has his hands around your arms as you try to help yourself back up from almost falling to the ground. As if you could feel fire on your arms around his touch and time stood still. Both of you apologized to each other at the same time. You both chuckled as you withdraw your hands from each other. As you were about to introduce yourself, you noticed that your phone was on the floor and under his foot. He also soon notices this as you try to bend down to reach for your phone.

You took the phone under his foot and checked it. You stared at your phone screen and was shocked to see the screen cracked. You saw Namjoon looking at your phone as you check but quickly hid it realizing that your wallpaper was all of the members of BTS. You wouldn’t want to embarrass yourself more by letting him know that your lock screen and home screen are photos of them. Unfortunately, Namjoon has already noticed the crack on your phone screen even before you hid the phone away from his eyes.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t realize that I stepped on your phone.” Namjoon panicked at the sight of the cracked phone screen.

“No, it’s okay. It’s my fault also for not being careful.” You assure him but he clearly looks worried about the cracked phone. “Nice to meet you. I’m y/n. One of the new backup dancers assigned to BTS. I’m looking forward to working with you.” I bowed.

“Nice to meet you and looking forward to working with you as well.” He bowed as well. “I’m really sorry about your phone. Can I do something about it?”

“Honestly, it’s okay. It’s just a small crack.” No it’s not entirely okay because the crack almost encompasses the whole screen. It’s my fault anyways so he doesn’t have to feel bad about it. You don’t want to burden him about your phone. “Also, I’m sorry but I’m really in a rush for practice. See you around. Nice to meet you again.” You bowed and rushed towards the practice room.

“Wait.” Namjoon raises his hands while looking at you, rushing away from him. Although he was truly worried about your phone, he actually caught a glimpse of your lock screen. It amuses him to remember you trying to hide the phone from him. Of course he knows that their fans would have the members as their wallpapers but usually their staff wouldn’t really have the boys’ face plastered on their belongings.

You are still in disbelief that you met Namjoon. Your heart is still in disarray as you try to replay the scene in your mind. His hands are big and he’s so tall. His chest is so toned that even though your head bumped into him for a split second, you could almost remember the ridges of his chest.

…..

“Shit.” Namjoon exclaims as he slumps back on the couch of Hoseok’s studio with four other members in the room. Jimin, Taehyung, Hoseok and Jungkook all turn their heads as their leader enters the studio.

“What got you in a dump, hyung?” Jungkook asks in concern.

“I stepped on a phone and destroyed the screen.” Namjoon puts his hands on his face. He’s wondering how he can mend the cracked screen situation with you. Your face suddenly appeared at the back of his mind and honestly, a part of him find you adorable and beautiful. The way how your fringe falls perfectly on your forehead and on your long lashes. You were a little pale but still, he got a long look at your face and still finds you attractive. He never got interested with female staff members but there was something about you that piqued the leader’s attention.

“Whose phone?” Hoseok, seated in his chair in front of his equipments, turns his chair to face all the other members.

“One of our female backup dancers.” Namjoon groans out loud in frustration, breaking him from his daydream.

“How did you even step on her phone?” Jimin asks his leader, seated on the far corner of the couch beside Taehyung.

“I saved her from falling then I didn’t realize her phone was under my foot.” Namjoon sits straight up, shaking his head.

“You never disappoint, hyung.” Jimin laughs while reaching for Namjoon’s shoulder to pat it. Taehyung sits back to give access to Jimin’s hand to reach Namjoon.

“Give her one of our extra Samsung phones. I think we still have some of those. Go ask the staff.” Taehyung suggests.

“You really are the God of Destruction.” Hoseok chuckles at his good friend.

“I’m so embarrassed. I just want to bury my face right there and then.” Namjoon pouts in frustration.

“I think I can help you ease your frustration.” Hoseok turns his chair around back to his monitor. He pressed a few buttons and music started playing through the speakers. “How is it?” Hoseok plays the song that Namjoon, Taehyung and himself are working hard on. He glanced behind to look at Namjoon’s face. Namjoon stood up and walked to Hoseok’s chair.

…..

I am so tired. I think I’m pushing myself too far this time. You still have a few weeks before Lisa returns so you doubled your shift in the gym. You could really use the extra pay since you spent your extra savings on a few BTS merchandise and on repair fees for the air conditioner at home. The double shifts will only last until this week so you have no problem with it.

You came into the practice room, still groggy from lack of sleep. You glanced at the huge mirror across the room and saw your pale face and poor complexion. Gosh, you have never looked this bad since finals week in college. You tend to forget to take care of yourself when overworking or fatigued. You took a sip from the cup of iced Americano on your hands and sat on the floor with the other dancers.

A few minutes after, the choreographer came in and soon follows the 7 ethereal beautiful boys. They bowed one by one as they enter the room and thanked us for our hard work. You try to fix any unruly strands of hair on your sweaty forehead and straightened your back.

Namjoon entered the room first, greeting all the dancers with a smile. The leader exuding off a charismatic aura as he leads the group in the room. Jimin and Hoseok soon followed, both of them hand in hand giggling and skipping but released their hold on each other and laughed out loud after a few steps inside. The two main dancers eager to meet the dance team. Taehyung and Jungkook silently followed their hyungs, strutting like models with their hands in their pockets. I saw the maknae sporting a man bun that compliments his face and almost making him look like a Greek God, especially with how his tight black long sleeve shirt faintly gives a silhouette of his sculptured chest and back. Taehyung’s disheveled curly do accentuates his bear-like cuteness but still gives off a masculine appeal. Lastly, the two oldest entered the room greeting the dancers. Yoongi entered first with Jin’s hands on his other member’s back. The two of them silently entered the room, ensuring that they greet all of us first before joining the other members at the side.

Your eyes scanned the members one by one as the choreographer informs everyone about the dance practice for today. As you were admiring the amazing view in front of you that was gracing you this morning, your gaze met with Yoongi’s. He then slightly put his head down while looking at you. You couldn’t really paint his expression right now but you dare to say that he looks bothered. Like a puppy that chewed his toy and is being scolded by his owner. He then turns his head away to talk to the other boys when he saw you openly reading his face.  

You were so confused at Yoongi’s bothered expression when you caught him looking at you. You don’t remember bumping into him or meeting him today. Yet, his aura today is a lot softer than the day you met. For your first and second (may I say terrible) encounters, he would always look so irritated or pissed at you specifically. I mean who wouldn’t, you’re crazy clumsy ass kept on bumping into him.

Everybody’s in their respective blocking and is set to practice once more. The moment the music started, your heart kept doing somersaults. This is the moment you’ve been waiting for. You are now dancing with the 7 boys. The pinnacle of your fangirl chronicles. You could never imagine that someday you will share the same stage as them. You truly respect them for their art and passion so you give your all even on their first full dance practice with the dance team. Of course, Jimin and Hoseok doesn’t disappoint. The two energetic boys that came skipping inside the room just moments ago became two dancing machines. You couldn’t stop smiling that you could feel your face could tear off. Your fatigue went away as you savor this moment. Nothing matters right now, only this moment.

The music stopped. All took a minute before polishing the dance moves on a specific part of the song. One female backup dancer nudged you on the waist, giggling. “You happy?” She was one of your good friend on the dance team. She knows that you’re a big fangirl of BTS and how ecstatic you are about your new occupation.

“Dream come true but I’m still so far off from being perfect. I need to be at my best to be deserving of sharing the same stage with them.” You whispered to her while giggling. She pats my head in adoration and you looked at her.

“Don’t be too hard on yourself. You’re doing a good job.” You smiled back at her. Soon you heard the choreographer call out everyone to gather to start practicing again.

Two hours were spent in the practice room, dancing nonstop. Slowly, you could feel your fatigue catching up to you but you refuse to take a break. You could see everyone’s passion and hard work so you don’t think you deserve to take a breather. Everyone was giving their all from the boys and girls on the dance team, the 7 BTS members and even with the choreographers. A longer break was given after the two hour mark. All of the other dancers walked straight to their bags to get their water bottles. The 7 boys also went to the water dispenser at the corner of the room near the door to take a sip of water as they catch their breath. You walked towards the door, excusing yourself out to use the restroom. You saw Namjoon and Yoongi noticing you as their eyes follow you before I opened the door.

You took a few steps away from the dance practice room and was stopped in your tracks when you heard a familiar voice calling your name. “Hey!” you turned around and saw Jiyong walking through the hallway in the same direction as you.

“Hey. What’s up?” Jiyong walks up to you with a smile on his face.

“I’m on my way to the recording studio.” He turns his head and caught his eyes on the dance practice room. “Are you guys practicing right now?”

“We are on a break as of the moment.” You wiped your sweat off your forehead. “Who knew that even dance practices was this intense?” You saw Jiyong examining your face and he lifts up his hand to land on your cheek.

“Your complexion’s not good. Are you eating well?” You froze in place. Is my complexion really that bad? Actually, if I remember correctly, I only ate crackers this morning and haven’t got a chance to drink water since I was rushing to go to work.

“Oh. Jiyong-nim.” You and Jiyong quickly looked towards the practice room door when you saw Namjoon, Yoongi, Jimin, and Jungkook about to go out of the room. They saw Jiyong caress your cheek and their faces are painted with bashful expressions. They immediately thought that you might be in a relationship with Jiyong. “You guys know each other?” Namjoon asks your brother.

Jiyong quickly placed his arms on your shoulder and around your neck. He laughed as he rubbed your head. “What do you think?” He placed his hand under your chin to lift up your head straight to present to the boys. The four of them puzzled by your brother’s question and took them a few seconds before it registered to them that you and Jiyong are twins. You totally forgot that Jiyong mentioned that he was good friends with the boys. I want to hide right now.

“No wonder why she looks familiar. She reminds me of you, hyung.” Jimin exclaimed.

“You’re twins?” Yoongi asks Jiyong. Your brother nods his head while giving his boxy smile.

“Identical, in fact.” Jiyong proudly stated as he further rubbed my head, making a mess out of my hair.

“That’s amazing, Hyung. I didn’t know you had a twin.” Jungkook exclaims as well, in fascination. You were just quiet in your brother’s arm. He released his hands around you and you stood up straight. Taehyung and Jin noticed the commotion of the four boys and also peeked out the door. Jimin informs the two boys and you saw Jin opening his mouth in astonishment, releasing a loud gasp in his tiny comedic voice.

“Take care of my sister. If one of you mistreats her, I’ll give you a hard time in the studio booth.” Jiyong jokingly teases the boys.

“You know I’m older than you right?” You quickly hit him on the shoulder as the boys laugh.

“By two minutes.” He looks at you and laughed. He glanced back to the other boys. “Anyways, she’s a big fa…” You pinch his waist to stop him from talking. He cries out in pain but at least that stopped his mouth from rambling.

“Excuse my brother. He likes to tease me a lot.”

“Well, I have to go to the studio booth as well. If you’ll excuse me.” Jiyong finally excuses himself out. He walks away and left you out in the hallway with the 7 boys just standing outside the practice room. A short silence from all of you filled the hallway before they resumed from walking out of the practice room.

“I have to excuse myself too.” You bowed, turned around and continued walking away.

“Wait.” You heard Yoongi call out as his footsteps catch up to you. Not long, he caught up and stopped in front of you. He scratched the back of his head with his head down. “I owe you an apology.”

Yoongi was uneasy at the thought that he disrespected you twice at the expense of his mood that day. The last thing he wants is to never get the chance to apologize to you. He couldn’t really concentrate on the dance practice today as he could see you avoiding him. Whenever he would try to take the chance to apologize to you during breaks, you would always be around the other dancers.

“Apology? For what?” you froze in place out of shock and wonder from yoongi’s statement. You stare at the man in front of you with his head slightly down. The air between the two of you was so still.

“The day we met… I am aware that I was not at my best self and it turned out I was rude to you. Even if I was having a bad day, there’s no excuse for my lack of respect.” He lifts his head up and looked straight in your eyes. As much as you appreciate his apology, you couldn’t really respond to him as you realized that one of your idols is just an arm’s reach away. Never have you imagined that someone you just watch over and over again from the small screen of your phone would be humbling himself before you to apologize. You don’t really know how to handle the situation.

“It’s okay. It’s my fault as well. I guess I have to learn not to be as clumsy anymore.” You laughed as you placed your hands on your nape. His face slowly lit up and the air between both of you started getting lighter. “Here I thought you’re actually disliking the idea of working with me. You were wearing this irritated expression whenever our eyes would meet during practice.”

Yoongi got beet-red thinking that’s how he comes off to you when he was actually irritated by the fact that he can’t get a chance to talk to you alone. “No. I was just…. trying to find a chance to apologize to you.” You smiled so sweetly at the thought of occupying yoongi’s mind during practice and even made him worry on how we would approach you. Yoongi notices the change in your expression and his heart skipped a beat. There’s something so adorable with the way you smiled that caught Yoongi’s attention. He took a good look at you and realized that you were actually good looking despite being so sweaty from practice.

“I would like to begin again.” You held out your hand to Yoongi. He looks at your hand and back to you. “I’m y/n. It’s an honor to work with you. Let’s do our best to show everyone the best performances we could give.” You flashed a smile so big that made Yoongi pleased as well. Your passion to give your best performance fascinated him.

He shook your hand and his heart skipped another beat. A smile like that fits you so well. You almost remind him of Hoseok. Someone who embodies sunshine. Also, he admits that you really look beautiful. Not that he wants to compare you to the other female dancers but he can admit that you’re the most attractive out of all of them. He had his eyes on you the whole morning and was amazed by how you transform into a dancing machine when music starts.

…..

You just concluded your last session with a client at the gym. Despite having a chance to go home early, you kindly offered to the gym owner that you would stay until closing time. You asked permission to use the small studio in the gym. He gladly allowed you and you were ecstatic to finally have a space where you could freely practice. Back at home, the apartment that you share with Lisa is just the adequate space for living, but not so much to consider it as a space to practice. You own a floor length mirror but it’s beside your bed. Your arms and legs have bumped your bed so many times that you could almost file a physical abuse case against the innocent piece of furniture. The small studio in the gym may not be as big as the practice room in Big Hit but it has enough space for you to fly and dance around. Plus, there’s a huge mirror on the entire wall. You’re actually fortunate to have the studio by yourself.

As you start practicing the dance numbers inside the small studio, the gym owner quietly manned the reception area in your place. Only a handful of customers are now currently using the gym and usually at this time of night, influx of customers is at bare minimum. Suddenly, someone enters the gym and walks to the reception area. The gym owner turns his head towards the door.

“Hyung!” The gym owner was surprised by the sudden visit of his friend. He shoots up from his seat to welcome the person who just came through the door.

“Jungkook! What are you doing here?” Jungkook appeared in front of the gym owner wearing his huge black hoodie and a black cap to hide his face. The gym owner walks around the reception table and hugs Jungkook.

“I just tried a new route to run and I remembered your gym was along the way so I thought to pop in and say hello.” Jungkook hugged his friend tightly. They continued to chat as Jungkook quickly noticed the music that was coming from inside the gym. The gym owner also noticed Jungkook looking towards the direction of the sound.

“That’s coming from the studio… which reminds me, one of my employee just got in as your backup dancer. She’s so dedicated and diligent that she spends her extra time to practice here after her shift.” The gym owner offered to usher Jungkook towards the small studio. Jungkook was intrigued and fascinated that one of their backup dancer works at the same place as his close friend. The music gets loud as they get near the studio and he gets a glimpse of somebody dancing eagerly to one of the songs that they were just practicing to this morning. They look just outside the door and Jungkook’s eyes were glued to you as you dance.

He recognizes you immediately and was captivated by how you were working so hard this late at night. He noticed that you weren’t wearing the usual baggy cargo pants that you love to wear for dance practices. You were wearing tight gym leggings and a dri-fit shirt. Nevertheless, you still exude charm and power when you dance to their songs. Jungkook admits to himself that the sight of you in tights dancing to their powerful songs charmed him.

He opened the door and you were late to notice the sound of the creaking door. You were surprised to see Jungkook’s reflection behind you as you strut to the music. Jungkook jumps in surprise when you gasped out loud at his presence and you ran for the speakers.

“Noona, I didn’t mean to surprise you.” You bent down to stop the music. Quickly, you stood up and turned to face him. Jungkook was still walking towards you. He removed his cap and ran his hand through his hair. He was sweating a bit but still, the sight of him sweating makes him look like he’s sparkling. You wondered why in the world is he inside the same studio as you are now. “Hyung’s my friend and I happened to be in the same area so I dropped by. I didn’t expect Noona was working here.”

You peeked towards the door and the gym owner was smiling and waving his hand. He must’ve been the one who informed Jungkook that you were practicing here, you thought. Your attention came back to Jungkook. You admired how handsome Jungkook looks right now despite being barefaced. “May I help you with something?”

“Do you want to practice together? I mean if only you’re comfortable with it.” He offered. Suddenly, you felt like everything slowed down and the two of you remained. You want to slap your face in disbelief that Jungkook actually offered to practice with you. Jungkook slowly walk towards you and you react by stepping backwards.

“I’m having a hard time learning a specific part in the choreo so I may not be the ideal practice partner… for you right now.” You feel as though the space between the two of you has shrunk. Jungkook smirks at the sight of you slightly panicking as he steps closer. Jungkook has been eyeing you ever since the first practice session with them this morning. He saw how his hyungs, Namjoon and Suga, kept on looking at your direction. He discovered that you were the same girl that they were talking about. You were the one whose phone was destroyed by Namjoon, who caught the attention of Jimin and Jhope during the evaluation, and who constantly occupies Suga’s mind about when to apologize to you. You piqued his attention with the way you had these encounters with his hyungs. He also noticed your charm whenever you execute the intricate choreograph during practice, just as Jhope and Jimin describes. He’s determined to have this chance to dance with you.

“I’m sure I want to practice with you.”

Next part: 4

[adifferenttime]

Honest Hearts: A Rough Rewrite

Hey! I’ve been working on an Honest Hearts rewrite-type-thing for a bit and figured I’d solicit feedback/assemble a post to store some of these ideas.

A detailed explanation of the premise is under the cut, but I’ve made this as a more interesting reintroduction to major locations, along with the characters who live there. I also have some lore consisting of letters, scripture, and holotapes that’s still in the early stages, along with a complete companion wheel for Salt-Upon-Wounds (he’ll follow you around for a little if you decide to help him out). Endings are now finished as well. I’m not planning on expanding this into a full mod, but I’m assembling everything in Twine so I can utilize branching dialogue and mimic skill checks.

I want to keep adding to and editing this because I’m having fun with it, so if you have any input, let me know!

Essentially, the story proceeds as written up until the point where Daniel sends you to either kill the White Legs or destroy their war totems. You quickly realize that their camp is deserted, at which point Salt-Upon-Wounds ambushes you, convo-locks you, and tells you that there’s an entirely different side to things here that you might not have considered.

Factions

The Mormons have established a theocracy in the Utah called Deseret, with New Jerusalem - what was once Salt Lake City - as its capital. Large numbers of them survived the initial apocalypse due to their pre-War focus on strong community ties and disaster prepping; over time, they have returned to the model of self-sufficient agrarianism that characterized the historical Mormon state of Deseret that existed in Utah in the 1800s. Their President, who wields supreme executive power, is also their Prophet. The Mormons believe he communes directly with God, but there’s some discontent in New Jerusalem over his hands-off approach to foreign policy and unwillingness to assemble a standing army. The Elders of the Priesthood are pushing him to allow for some kind of formal military to oppose what they see as revived versions of their ancestral enemies: America, Rome, and the “Lamanites” (this is what Mormons call Indigenous Americans; the “Lamanite” idea has historically been used as a justification for racism, and I’m reflecting that here because it’d be kind of heinous not to). In more than a few respects, Deseret serves as a mirror to the Legion and an exploration of the other side of the coin re: the tactics utilized by colonial empires to present themselves as legitimate while still claiming territory and steamrolling the opposition.

The White Legs are now more explicitly Shoshone, and I’m relying most heavily on the Timpanagos Band for names and historical inspiration (apparently the question of whether they’re Ute or Shoshone is pretty controversial, but I’m sticking with what the Timpanagos have said about it until someone corrects me). After migrating south in the wake of the Great War, the White Legs eventually settled in Ogden, about a day north of New Jerusalem. Initial interactions with the Mormons were friendly, but as New Jerusalem grew and its need for farmland and resources increased, tensions rose before culminating in open violence in around ‘76 or ‘77. Deseret’s party line is that the White Legs conducted a “raid” on one of their settlements and had to be driven away from Ogden; the White Legs claim the violence was not a raid, but a revenge killing after a Mormon killed a young man and was found not guilty by Mormon legal authorities (this is a theocracy, so “legal authorities” here can be understood as indistinct from “the church”). The Mormons established a new settlement on the ruins of Ogden, which they called New Canaan, and the White Legs fled to Salt Lake, where they have been dwindling in number ever since. Salt-Upon-Wounds’ plan to seek entry to the Legion is a last-ditch attempt to save his people from eradication when their neighbors and the land itself seems intent on killing them (not that that makes all the war crimes ok, which is a sentiment you’ll be able to express to his face if you engage him in conversation).

The Dead Horses are a pastoral society from out of Dead Horse Point, and are split almost down the middle along political lines. The more conservative, religious side opposes intervention in Zion. Graham desecrates the corpses of his enemies as an intimidation tactic, and because the Dead Horses’ religion is so eschatological and heavily focused on properly cleaning, preparing, and interring the dead, a big chunk of the religious leadership opposes him on that basis - they think his tactics are ungodly. They’re also worried that any Dead Horses who die in Zion and are interred there will be severed from their connection to Dead Horse Point and doomed to a separate, lonely afterlife. The younger, more progressive elements of the tribe are less traditionalist, sometimes less religious, and overall not as concerned about Graham’s treatment of the dead because of the potential benefit they might be able to derive from him. Follows-Chalk is their de facto leader, and while the Dead Horses don’t formally allocate political power, he’s among the most influential people in the informal tribal leadership. Most of the Dead Horses who’ve come to Zion have done so either because they support Follows-Chalk politically, or for practical reasons - namely, Graham’s access to a dizzying number of guns and his willingness to give them to anyone who’ll fight for him.

The Sorrows are now a terrace-farming agrarian society instead of hunter-gatherers (Zion has a lot of agricultural potential, and there’s already a few farming plots in the Sorrows camp you see in-game, so it’s not a huge departure from the canon). I’m keeping their Mexican heritage, but I’d like to give them some Ainu influences as well - partially for selfish reasons, but also because bears are extremely important to our culture and theology, which gels well with the elements of Sorrows culture and religion that appear in the canon. I’d like to keep the Survivalist because I like him, but I want to expand on their faith. One of the ways I’m doing that is by deciding they can still read English, even though they no longer speak it; it’s basically their equivalent of liturgical Latin. They’re also rigidly matriarchal and in contrast to the Dead Horses (who eschew formal political hierarchies) or the White Legs (who elect a chief who serves until he dies, is deposed, or voluntarily abdicates), leadership positions are allocated through matrilineal primogeniture; Waking Cloud inherited her position from her mother. Religious leadership, likewise, is only available to women. You’ll be able to talk to Waking Cloud about some of the ways this framework is incompatible with the Mormon perspective, and can appeal to her desire to retain power.

Characters

Canon Characters

Joshua Graham and Daniel are largely unaltered except through the addition of lore that gives insight into their cultures, motives, and pasts.

All three tribal leaders (Follows-Chalk, Waking Cloud, and Salt-Upon-Wounds) are either given new backstories, a different set of motives, or different approaches to one another/Graham and Daniel. They’re also explicitly leaders now - what power Graham and Daniel have, they derive from whichever tribal leader they’ve managed to attach themselves to. Of those three, I’m altering Waking Cloud the least and Salt-Upon-Wounds the most. Like I mentioned, I have a companion wheel for him so far and the bones of two other conversations - one, where you meet him for the first time, and the second, where you speak to him before the final battle. Will link as I finish them.

Original Characters

Each tribal leader now has a rival or right hand within their tribe so I can reflect the different ways the values of a specific community can express themselves.

Follows-Chalk’s primary rival among the Dead Horses is a man who refuses to tell you his name. That’s because using someone’s name in casual conversation is considered unspeakably rude, and the fact that Follows-Chalk is willing to share his own with you is, to Mysteriously Named Old Man Character, yet another sign of how disrespectful and laissez-faire Follows-Chalk is about their shared traditions. Old Man Character is suspicious of you initially, but if you speak to him more he starts to warm to you. The goal is to give you a sense that this he’s pretty xenophobic but for good reasons, and despite his political conflicts with Follows-Chalk, has a lot of love for him. He just wants what’s best for his family, and Follows-Chalk is part of that, even if Mysteriously Named Old Man Character thinks he’s making the wrong choices.

Kiiki is Salt-Upon-Wounds’ right-hand woman and intended as a contrast re: the approach to war and its costs. Salt-Upon-Wounds has done some horrible things and gets a fair bit of dialogue about that, but Kiiki is willing to go even further than he has with very little prompting. Her chief copes with what he’s done by trying to assure himself that the ends of war are worth the cost; Kiiki deals with it by trying to convince herself that the means weren't so bad, actually, and that anyone who isn’t nailing corpses to walls is being naive. All of that makes her sound pretty shitty, but she’s nowhere near as devoted to the idea of a Legion alliance as Salt-Upon-Wounds is. It only takes one very low Speech check to convince her that going Legion is a bad move, and one of the paths involves assassinating Salt-Upon-Wounds and installing her as the new leader as a way to stop the White Legs from joining Caesar. I haven’t added this path to the ending Twine because I’d like to finish Kiiki’s dialogues before I do that.

I’m replacing White Bird as the Sorrow’s spiritual leader with a woman named Imekanu. She’s incredibly old, savvy, and knowledgeable - she’s never been outside Zion, but has a store of books in English, Spanish, and Japanese that have allowed her some insight into what caused the war, if not the current state of the world. She’s also aware of the Survivalist’s origins - not because she’s entered any of his hideouts, but because she’s read over the scriptures and has correctly identified them as letters. Her perspective is that the Father in the Caves was a human being, but that doesn’t diminish his religious value. She sees him as analogous to the Buddha or a Catholic saint: human, sure, but still with access to some deeper truths about the purpose of man and the nature of human goodness. You’ll discover that this idea (that the Survivalist was a holy man rather than a literal god) is the most common perspective among the Sorrows, and you can talk to her about how this departs from Daniel’s perspective that the archetypal Father is divine, not human.

Quests

Each tribe has a specific quest that will either lower or bypass some of the penultimate checks that will determine your ending (people are more likely to believe what you’re telling them if you’ve already won their trust).

The Dead Horses: Joshua Graham has been putting the heads of the fallen up on pikes across Zion. The Dead Horses’ religion is deeply concerned with proper treatment of the deceased, and Graham’s decision to desecrate the corpses of his enemies goes against virtually everything they believe. The old man who won’t tell you his name asks you to take the heads off of the pikes and bury them deep in Zion, and to bring Follows-Chalk with you so you’ll have someone to tell you how to treat them properly. Over the course of the quest, Follows-Chalk will share some of his own beliefs about death, and you’ll have the opportunity to share your own. If you complete this quest without sabotaging it, Follows-Chalk will be willing to betray Graham to the White Legs before the final battle.

The Sorrows: This is basically just Ghost of She, but after defeating the Yao Guai you’ll discover a holotape revealing that the girl wasn’t killed by the bear, but by one of the murderers from Vault 22. Waking Cloud will speculate that maybe the Yao Guai wasn’t the ghost of the little girl at all but some other force that wanted to push you to discover the truth. If you wait until the end to tell Waking Cloud about the death of her husband, you’ll have to pass a Speech check of 75 to convince her you’re telling her the truth; completing this quest drops the check to 50.

The White Legs: Salt-Upon-Wounds will ask you to help him sabotage the Mormons’ preparations for the battle. If you help him with this, it’ll drop the Speech check for you to convince him to leave from 100 to 80. It’s not necessary at all to get the tribal confederacy ending, but a new note will appear in your inventory if you finish it and meet a couple other requirements (asking him certain questions, not attempting that one Speech check about religion, etc).

Endings

I’m trying to incorporate as much variety as possible, but there are three main ending paths: siding with the White Legs, siding with the other two tribes, and peace. The basic idea is that the outcome is predicated less on your direct intervention, and more on how other people act based on the facts they have available to them. Most of your influence is through your choices to hide or reveal key pieces of information, and the skill checks you need to access certain endings are less you convincing a character to do something and more convincing a character to believe you’re telling them the truth. There’s one major exception to this, it requires maxed Speech, and the ending it gives you is markedly bittersweet because you’re trying to get a guy to act against his own best interest. I’m writing all the endings up here, and will probably edit them as things change. The post where I explain them in more depth can be found here.

And that’s the story so far! Thank you for reading, and again: if there’s anything here you think is poorly-conceived, let me know. Thank you to @baelpenrose, who’s a grad student in the history of the American West, for helping me workshop a lot of this stuff. If you’ve got expert knowledge on any of the concepts I touch on or are personally a member of any of the groups I’m describing, please feel free to hmu: anon is on, and you’re always welcome to DM me. I’m just doing this for fun, but I still want it to be as not-shit as possible.

[lakinda5654]

~~~~A Girl and A God~~~~ Chapter 30- 30,000 Feet High

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A Girl and A God is a RATED M Loki Fanfic with an original character, Alexa, who is taken in by Tony Stark after the revelation of abilities of her own. There’s sex, romance, heartbreak, action, fluff, angst, all that good stuff. Full description in blog, and a jump-to-chapter list if you just want the smut or the cuteness bits. Enjoy <3

Chapter Summary: Loki finds a hero name for Alexa, and gives her a surprise in the middle of the night on their plane ride to India...

Contains: Smut. All the Smut. So much smut. Dirty talk, dom/sub

Word Count: 2,126

~Previous Chapter~~Next Chapter~

~~Beginning of Story~~

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Halo. It was a beautiful and perfect name. She was so glad Loki had thought of it too. It somehow made her feel more like she belonged to him. She peered back out her window and took in the beauty of the large bright ring surrounding the moon.

“It suits you, darling. It’s a perfect hero name for you. You’ll be an angel, a Midguardian Valkyrie.” He said, gesturing as though it would bring her fame and glory.

She blushed at his compliments, and they gave her confidence. Halo. It did sound like a hero name, like Hawkeye or Hulk, but more feminine.

The plane ride was long, and many of the team members were asleep at this point. The lights were dimmed and there wasn’t much to see out the window anymore but clouds.

Loki had gone back to reading again, and Alexa lied her head onto his shoulder, peering at the words in his book. This made him smile, and he turned and pressed his lips onto her head. Then, his demeanor changed. She could feel it and see it with her soul sight, he was very suddenly mischievous. Very mischievous. He had an idea?

She was about to sit up to look at him when instead she let out a small gasp. The warmth under her blanket was taken from her as his cold fingers delicately ran over her thigh, making their way under her loose shorts. She looked around for anyone who would have heard her, but everyone seemed to be asleep.

Loki wasn’t wasting any time. His fingertips slipped past the brim of her panties along her leg, and he watched her struggle to hold back her reaction. Alexa had closed her eyes and he saw her bite her lip, which drove him mad. As his hand further invaded her underwear, she sat up a bit to where she could see him. She gave him a skeptical look, raising her eyebrows. A look of “what the fuck do you think you’re doing”

A mischievous grin spread over his face, and in one swift motion, 2 fingers were inside her. Her eyes went wide, and she looked at him in shock, as he began to lean over her.

“Something wrong, my pet?”

He breathed the words into her ear, before biting some of the smooth skin along the side of her neck.

Alexa’s eyes rolled as she tried to keep her composure. Then, he made it impossible. Loki began working his fingers inside her as if his life depended on it. He was suddenly going so hard and fast, she couldn’t take it. She threw her hand over her mouth to stop her cries of pleasure from escaping her lips.

Her eyes were begging him to stop. But he didn’t. He was relentless. He leaned his face back down to her neck. 

“Oh darling, how does that feel?” He whispered into her skin and nibbled at her ear, still pleasuring her relentlessly. His hair tickled the side of her face as he ran his lips over her skin. She couldn’t muster the strength to respond, and he hadn’t expected her to. “ We were so rudely interrupted last time when you’d told me this is what you wanted.” He said in his sultry tone. “You are my personal whore, love. It doesn’t matter how much you plead or beg. I won’t stop. Not until I’m done with you.” 

He paused to glance around and ensure no one was aware of his actions, then leaned back over her and used his free hand to pull her hair back sharply, causing her head to tilt up. “And I know if I did your body would beg to have me back. You’d be hopelessly craving for me to pleasure you… with my fingers, my tongue...” it was at this point she heard his voice tremble a bit as if he was struggling to keep control of himself.

He was still fingering her relentlessly when he suddenly stopped. The sudden removal of him when she was nearing the edge made her clench her stomach. She looked up at him desperately and opened her mouth to speak. 

Instead of letting her, he slid his fingers in her mouth. His eyes were filled with lust and hers with surprise.

 “Taste yourself and clean up your mess.” He was so tense like his eyes would drill a hole through her. Alexa obediently followed his command and sucked on his fingers. He watched her every movement, then pulled his hand back. He leaned into her ear once more. “Good girl.”

Then, as if nothing had happened, he returned to his book, lightly wiping his fingers on the blanket. She was left a mess, staring at him in shock. Why did he have to have so much self-control? It was infuriating. She wanted him to take her into the bathroom and claim her as his own, but she knew they couldn’t. But yet here he was, back at his book as if he was so unaffected. Enjoying how desperate he left her.

No. She refused to let him have all this power over her. So, she sat up and composed herself. After a moment, she began to crawl her hand up and around his hip, towards the brim of his pants. 

Loki, wanting to retain power, didn’t do anything. Didn’t even look at her to acknowledge her advances. She ran her fingertips along his skin, allowing her fingers to barely reach under his clothes. He still sat there, as if she was doing nothing. Then, she allowed her hands to explore and immediately felt the bulge in his pants. She felt her heart racing; she’d never done this before.

Loki was still remarkably composed but was almost refusing to look at her, as if when he did it would expose his desperation. But he didn’t need to. She could see it with her soul sight, he was bursting with lust, and her agonizingly slow movements were torture.

She sort of tightened her grip and ran her hand along his clothed shaft. He was big. At least, she thought. She really had nothing to compare to, but it had to be at the least ten inches, and the average was like 6…right?

It was also a lot harder than she expected. It didn’t even really feel like flesh, he was hard as a fucking rock.

When she ran her hand along him and tightened her grip, he finally lost his composure a bit. He let out a heavy sigh but kept his mouth closed, and she saw him blink several times, probably to hide his eyes that were rolling back out of his control.

She began running her hand, gripped around him as much as she could be through his clothes, up and down his length.

She noticed he was no longer looking at his book, as it was slowly falling towards his knees as he lost focus. His eyes were closed now, and his breathing was heavy.

Slowly, just to torture him as he did her, she began to slip her hand under his clothes. When she first touched the most sensitive part of him, she used only her fingertips, allowing herself to gently explore his shape.

Finally, he had leaned his head back against the seat and was pushing into her hand, grinding his hips.

They were still under the blanket, and he swiftly used some magic to unbutton and pull his pants down to just above his knees.

Now she began to stroke him, she had space now to do so. She did it slowly, but Loki was clearly losing his mind and had other desires. Now he looked over at her for the first time. He had a look of power in his eyes. “faster, my pet.” He whispered.

Alexa decided to not let him have this power. She simply looked to the side, and shrugged, continuing to slowly torture him.

“Oh? What have we here?” Loki said, raising his eyebrows and suddenly becoming extremely composed. “You’re disobeying?” 

Suddenly Alexa felt her heart drop to her stomach as he leaned over her. Still, she tried to keep her composure, raising her eyebrows at him.

“Your defiance is amusing, pet. What do you think the consequences will be? Shall I keep you from release for weeks? Months? Or shall I choose another punishment…” he trailed off as he ran his fingers down the side of her face, stopping at the bottom of her chin to tilt it up. “What do you think pet?” How he managed to whisper so sexily she could never understand. 

Alexa was struggling to keep herself in this attitude now, it took an extreme amount of effort. Why was she like this? She wanted power, but the moment Loki acted this way it was as if she melted, turning into a mindless girl with no inhibitions, all for him to play with.

He watched her as she attempted to keep her defiant attitude. She even removed her hand from him entirely. 

“My my…” his voice cooed in a whisper. “What a stubborn little thing you are. No matter… I do so love a challenge.”

It was now that he slipped his cold hands under her shirt. “So truly dear I want to know what you think would be a suitable punishment…” and his fingers got to her sensitive nipple. 

Alexa didn’t say anything, and could only focus on not releasing her whines of pleasure for the entire plane to hear. After a moment when she didn’t respond, Loki continued. “Well if you cannot muster the strength to speak…” he breathed the words into her neck. “I suppose I’ll have to choose for you.” Then he simultaneously pinched her nipple painfully hard and bit her ear. That time she did let out a gasp, and her hand flew over her mouth. 

“Keep quiet, my little whore, or this will only get worse for you.” He let out the sexiest chuckle she’d ever heard, while somehow still staying at the volume of a whisper. 

That did it. All self-control was out the window. She reached over, fumbling through the blanket to reach his hard cock, wrapped her small hand around it, and stroked it as fast as she could. For a moment, Loki smiled. “That’s a good girl…” it looked like he was going to continue, but the pleasure was overwhelming and he looked into her desperate eyes before closing his own and leaning his head back against the seat.

She continued this until her arm was sore. It didn’t take long though, and Loki was breathing heavily. He looked to her, and for a moment, he appreciated her submissive nature and the way she looked at him. The way her eyes stared into his, the way her mouth was fallen slightly open. The way she breathed him, every breath was for him, every movement and every word, was for him. She belonged to him. In an instant, this caused him to unravel.

Alexa saw his mouth fall open, and his eyes roll back and he arched his back against the seat. Then, she felt her hand getting wet. She slowed down a bit, but continued, twisting her hand with each stroke. He desperately was trying to stay quiet, that was clear.

Finally, after she saw his body relax, she stopped. He turned his head to her once more, and reached under the blanket, grabbing her wrist. She just kept looking at him with the most submissive look she could muster, and god she loved looking this way for him.

He removed her hand from under the blanket, and she saw his cum all over her hands. “Clean your mess pet.” He growled. For a moment, she reached with her other hand for a napkin, but then he pushed her hand to her mouth, and she began licking and cleaning off all of him from her skin. He tasted sort of salty, but it wasn’t in a bad way. Once her hand was clean, Loki began to use napkins under the blanket to clean up his area, and she saw his pants return to their place.

He then motioned for her to lean on him, and she obeyed. He let her rest on his shoulder, while he rested on her head. Both of them were out of breath from the encounter. As Alexa drifted to sleep, she couldn’t help but process what just happened, smiling as she recalled the things he’d said. And just above her, he did the same.

[thebandcampdiaries]

AP Project introducing brand new EP: "Out Of The Blue."

A kaleidoscopic collection of 8 tracks, each exploring different ideas and breaking the usual genre definitions.

One of the most amazing things about music as a form of expression is that it is more than the sum of its parts. Music is not notes, instruments, and people. Music is about elevation. It involves mastering a craft to tell a story, and share feelings with the world. AP Project's new release, "Out Of The Blue," is an exemplary personification of this remarkable attitude towards creativity and music. With their sound, the Italian combo set out to explore many different genres and ideas. The EP unfolds gently, but surely, from the sophistication of jazz to the warmth of R&B and the lush textures of ambient.

Neapolitan guitarist and composer Arcangelo Pezzella, the mastermind behind the project, had an ambitious vision. He wanted to push his limits as an artist, and he wanted to accomplish something special with his songwriting. The expression "Out Of The Blue" is a rather elegant name for an album with such a distinctive flair. On one hand, the title could be intended as something happening all of a sudden, perhaps something that you wouldn't expect. On the other, it could represent a passage from a state of mind to another. Much like clouds floating in the summer sky, these songs are malleable and extremely eclectic, each bringing something different to the album.

Arcangelo joined forces with Guido Foi (piano and keyboards), Alessandro Petricciuolo (bass), and Francesco Pellegrino (drums), as well as vocalist Angela Addezio. These musicians developed undeniable chemistry and the ability to seamlessly bounce off each other's different influences and musical upbringings. The opening number, "Hi. Ro. Mi." kicks off with a silky piano melody and an understated drum part. However, the song quickly morphs into a sophisticated modern jazz composition. It combines complex playing with minimalistic melodies and beautifully restrained lead guitar work. Arcangelo knows not to overplay, letting each note be more expressive and eloquent. "Brighter" has a one-of-a-kind flavor, which makes me think of artists as diverse as Marc Ribot and Julian Lage. This song tips the hat off to tango, while still retaining strong jazz foundations. "Dancing In The Dark" is the first song on the album to feature vocals. Angela Addezio has a deep and sultry tone, which matches the candle-lit atmosphere of this song.

Later, the title track brings a touch of rock to the EP. The swell sound at the beginning, as well as the epic progressive guitar parts, might remind you of iconic acts such as King Crimson. The challenging tempo, as well as the sustained guitar notes, showcase the band's edgier side, while still retaining its nuanced feel. "Memories" is perhaps one of the most introspective songs on the record, and it also features Angela on vocals. The drumbeat is the star here, incorporating influences as diverse as jazz, funk, and neo-soul. The track makes me think of what it might sound like if TOE, D'Angelo, and Sam Prekop had a massive jam session!

"Desperate Love" will take you back in time with its more traditional flavor. This is a stunningly romantic track, with an impeccable feel and a touching vocal performance from Angela.

"Miss Bibi" starts with a lonely, beautifully emotional guitar segment, combining lead phrasing with suspended chords and various effects to achieve an emotional sound. The rest of the band joins in seamlessly, with a very dreamy beat and one of the coolest bass lines on the EP.

Last, but not least, "Before You Leave" serves as a perfect curtain closer for this release. The song's introduction features some tasty overdriven electric guitar leads, and after a tense moment of silence, it delves into a bittersweet melody. Although you can hear the band's jazz influences, the sound of this release reminds me of seminal math rock groups such as American Football, as well as Owls and This Town Needs Guns, only to mention a few. I love the somber atmosphere of this song, as well as the progressive nature of its structure.

Ultimately, what I love about this EP is the fact that it's not trying to be anything specific. From the get-go, the band will tell you that this isn't an attempt to fit into any given genre, but rather the culmination of a desire to make music that matters, unrestrained by the usual constraints. Who says that you cannot have a rock guitar in a jazz album? Why can't you feature songs with vocals, as well as instrumentals? This EP pushes all the right buttons and it stands out as a big statement against musical stiffness. Somewhere between the avant-garde and the traditional, the songs on this EP have one thing in common: they feel like a spontaneous flow of music. From the moment you hit the play button, you can't help but notice the excellent care and attention to detail, which went into the making of this composition. Today, genre barriers don't mean much anymore, and this is a trend that is even affecting music on a mainstream level (just think of artists like Billie Eilish, who can't be thrown into an easy category). In Fact, it would not be a stretch to say that "diversity" is definitely a strong keyword when it comes to describing the sound of this release from Italy's AP Project.

This is a must-listen for any fan of spontaneous music that will keep you on the edge of your seat. The album's setlist is also well-arranged, with every song sitting exactly where it should be to transport the listener someplace else.

Find out more about AP Project, and listen to "Out Of The Blue," which is now available through the web's major streaming platforms:

https://open.spotify.com/album/7MoaTvTBfJdelCcoOlJ46p

https://music.apple.com/it/album/out-of-the-blue/1466879464?l=en

https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/approject/out-of-the-blue

We also had the chance to catch up with AP Project for a few questions: keep reading to learn more.

I love how you manage to render your tracks so personal and organic. Does the melody come first, or do you focus on the beat the most?

Answer: There’s not really a difference when it comes to my personal way of composing. During the writing process of Out Of The Blue, it was sometimes a melody, sometimes a groove and other times a particular harmonic progression! It depends on how I feel the very moment of composing.

Do you perform live? If so, do you feel more comfortable on a stage or within the walls of the recording studio?

Answer: Yes, we have. I must say that the thrill of the stage makes everything more interesting, both for the audience and us musicians. On the other hand, being in the warmth of the studio has also its charms and benefits on the music we play.

If you could only pick one song to make a “first impression” on a new listener, which song would you pick and why?

Answer: I would definitively choose Hi. Ro. Mi., but Memories would be a good choice as well. As for the first one, I feel that it reflects the beginning of the journey the album/EP represents: having the listener accepted to embark in it, no part of it will have been spoiled and every track will feel like a new stop, an end, and a new beginning.

What does it take to be “innovative” in music?

Answer: I suppose that innovation is all about using already used materials and forging new music, delivering renewed emotions, as well as exploring new sonic territories, possibly by defying genre-related boundaries.

Any upcoming release or tour your way?

Answer: I’m currently working on finding someone to help us organize a series of concerts and possibly a tour. On the other hand, I’m already working on new music, trying to push myself even more into experimentation.

Anywhere online where curious fans can listen to your music and find out more about you?

Answer: You can find us on IG, Facebook, and Twitter, while our music is on every streaming platform!

https://www.instagram.com/_ap.project_/

https://twitter.com/arcangelo_ap

https://www.facebook.com/AP-Project-476824673056590/

Releases (choose your streaming platform through the link): https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/approject/out-of-the-blue

[flyswhumpcenter]

Bad Things Happen Bingo! The event where you send me requests according to this marvelous card! (Red cross is the completed prompt, dark red crosses are already completed fics and mint lambda-ish signs are prompts I’ve gotten requests for already).

Good news: my friend @nehamerchant123 still has my back and still sends in the good prompts in. Love ya friend.

This is officially a follow-up to a 2018 fic of mine named Clé de Voûte. It's not mandatory to read CdV to read this one (it's in English, btw, not French), but it's still advised as to get some context. This may have gotten a bit too angsty considering what I was going for, but man it was a blast to write (and really quick to), I love this association so let's all give a big round of applause for good ol' Neha who knows me and my tastes very well!

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Singed Snowdrops

Summary: Iori is kind of a failure and he knows that. Someone doesn't agree with this idea.

Fandom: IDOLiSH7 (Part 1 spoilers) Ship: IoTsumu (pre-relationship, more implied than anything)

Wordcount: 2K words

Event hosted by @badthingshappenbingo

AO3 version available here.

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It’s with a pounding headache, shifting temperatures, sweat pearling down his bangs and ragged breathing that Iori realizes something: he’s kind of a failure. A kind of a dull failure.

“Kind of”, because he still has skills and talents for a wide variety of things. He’s still good at accounting, at singing, at managing stuff here and there. “Dull”, because there’s nothing noteworthy about him compared to literally everyone else around him, because he can’t surprise anyone from how boring he is. “Failure”, because that’s what he is no matter what everyone says: he failed twice in a row. Someone like him shouldn’t have forgotten to sing on stage, then collapsed during a live for the unit’s fans. It soured the mood and killed their momentum back to fame, despite everyone’s efforts. It’s simply something he shouldn’t have allowed to happen, no matter what. There’s no excuse for it, that’s it. How hard is it for everyone else around him to accept that?

Maybe they’re doing that because his brother is here, fretting over him like he’s always done. They shouldn’t, to be honest: he’s not worth it. He’s not worth their care, their precious attention. They should give that to people who are actually worth it, like Mitsuki, like Nanase and his condition, like MEZZO” and their rocky beginnings. He shouldn’t be at the centre of anyone’s attention, right now, or ever in fact: there’s always a point where he’ll mess up and ruin everything for everyone because he wasn’t capable of handling things correctly. That’s it, that’s the truth nobody wants to admit.

Not to mention, they’re losing their time on him. He’s never been a full piece of puzzle, merely a keystone that’s not truly needed to keep the building up. He’s no Atlas like he thought he was before yesterday’s live; but Atlas wouldn’t have made people worry for him over a thing as little as some insomnia-induced sleep deprivation. Atlas wouldn’t have panicked on set and had his vision twirling and twirling around him because he was too stupid and incompetent to deal with things efficiently.

Atlas’s shoulders never gave in, but his couldn’t bear the weight of just an unit’s co-management. He’s a damn failure.

 He’s useless, right now. He’s not allowed to leave his bed and help with anything. Maybe they have noticed he’s a failure, after all: if he wasn’t, they would allow him to participate in practice with them, their manager would have allowed him to speak with her about the management of the unit. They’re in a time of crisis and, before, he’d have believed he was able to handle it flawlessly: but he isn’t perfect. In fact, he’s never been, he’s always known that; yet it’s easier to pretend that he is, easier to ignore all that he’s failed before that live concert, before the live show on the Web.

He doesn’t want to cry, since it’d be pointless to weep in silence while everyone around him shines like a bright star, while all he’s ever been is a black hole mercilessly trapping the chances of anyone he’s ever cared about to succeed in life, wasting their opportunities and destroying their hopes like a crushing machine whose jaw is uncontrollable. That’s happened to his brother before, it’s happening to IDOLiSH7 now, and that’s all his fault.

 Even then, Iori cries, because he’s exhausted, because he’s weak, because he’s stuck here with his black clouds and cannot see a shooting star in the sky that is his bedroom’s ceiling.

 He doesn’t want to worry anyone: really, he’s just not worth it. He’s not worth anyone’s commotion. He simply doesn’t want to be a burden to his friends, to the people he loves: his parents shouldn’t be concerned about their son. His brother shouldn’t be fretting about him when he could be working on his next show, their next song, the next step in the career he’s finally gotten a chance to start. His unit mates shouldn’t be thinking of him when they should focus on what’s truly mattered: their future, their fans, their image, their debut.

The debut his inability to make things blossom to their true potential before withering away under his malevolent influence killed in the egg.

 Iori cannot stop crying and it’s an issue. He’s not a kid anymore, he needs to handle his stuff correctly and not sob like a toddler whenever things don’t go his way. It’s all his fault anyway, so he better swallow his misery in soon and stop being such a weakling. He won’t get anywhere in life if he does.

Nobody around him is ever going to need him, to want to stay with him if he keeps messing things up, if he keeps dragging the ones he wants to help in the mud, making them fall backward and fail in the end. That’s a fact he cannot brush aside, a fact he cannot bring his overexerted mind to get over. He’s broken, he’s down the drain.

 Someone like him doesn’t deserve to share an unit as luminous as IDOLiSH7, doesn’t deserve a brother like Mitsuki Izumi and doesn’t deserve a manager as good and motivated as Takanashi Tsumugi. All he deserves is to be left behind until he can handle something right.

Which he’ll never do, obviously. If he could, he’d have done that when it mattered and not messed up on stage twice in a row.

 He’s too caught up in his own pity party to hear the manager enter his room, after he assumed the soft knock on his door was only his elbow or knee hitting the wall or an edge of the bed.

 “Iori?”

Her voice is soothing. Too much, in fact: here’s one more thing he shouldn’t be allowed to hear.

“Manager…?” His is rough around the edges and he wants to cough his lungs out so he not to speak anymore. He’s rotting her ears by speaking to her anyway.

“Are you… are you alright, Iori?!”

She panics and climbs the ladder of his bed at an unbelievable speed and, until she’s safely on his level, he’s afraid she’s going to slip every step of the way. He’s not sure if his reflexes could catch her in case she’d fall. If he ever could, that is.

 “I’m…” He hates lying. “…fine.”

Tsumugi’s face doesn’t show anything that isn’t doubt at what he’s just told her. Should have seen it coming: he’s a terrible liar on top of being a terrible idol with no capacity to react to happenings.

“Be honest, please. You’re always so frank, Iori, I hate seeing you lie all of a sudden…” Her face changes drastically as soon as she focuses on his. “Wait, have you been crying all this time?! I should’ve noticed that earlier, please excuse me!”

She’s about to get something from her pocket, but she stops midway through her gesture and instead looks on the side.

“…can I climb to you?”

“If you want, I guess…”

 In a swift move, albeit not without almost falling, Tsumugi gets right on top of him, her legs by the sides of his chest. It’s awkward, but it’s amusing at the same time, so he retains a giggle in as not to look stupid or mocking. He doesn’t deserve her light and warmth, of course he knows that; but that part of him that’s always been craving for validation and attention caves into the touch.

She looks more like a nurse than a manager for a moment. She hands him her adorable embroidered handkerchief which smells like red bean paste to dry his ugly tears, he hesitates to use it, but she insists, “I mean it, please don’t cry, Iori!”. He can’t refuse her much, not when she looks at him with these eyes, not when she knows better than him, so he delicately taps it against the water flowing down his cheeks. She presses a hand against her forehead, then his, exhales a sigh of relief when she realizes out loud that his fever has lowered.

 When he’s near her, without any exception, he feels like he’s worth something – but it’s a feeling still so foreign to him. Maybe he’s worth a lot in her eyes, but in his, he’s still the scum of the earth abusing from her kindness and patience, and he wants to cry again at that. He doesn’t deserve her, that’s it. He doesn’t deserve much, of course, but he especially doesn’t deserve her.

Still, her hand lands on his, and she smiles at him, like sun brushing a dead tree. He’s crying in all the ugliness he could display, physically beaten by his own dark thoughts and trapped in the middle of wallowing in his misery when he should have been doing something to mend his errors and fix what he’s broken. But they don’t allow him to do that, so what’s the point of this circus routine?

 “I’m sure you feel bad about everything that’s happened, Iori, but you need to understand it’s not a big deal! We’d rather have you in good health than push you to the edge like you’ve done… You don’t even know how much we’ve been worried for you!”

That’s no pleasant to hear, but that’s also not surprising to listen to her say. Her tone just makes it sound better than it is, that’s it. That’s… it. It’s not like it could be true, right?

“But that’s normal, isn’t it? You worry about the people you care about. I’ve been worried every day of my life for you guys ever since I’ve met you, and it hurts me to see you in such a state… But I also can’t tell you to recover quickly, because that’s a thing that can take a long time. It’s something you have to do alone, and we can only help you if you allow us to. So, if you need it, don’t hesitate telling us, okay? We’re your comrades, Iori.”

She has a disappointed look on her face, biting nervously on her lip.

“So… Remember that, okay? We’re here to support you. We don’t hold anything against you, so don’t isolate yourself, I beg of you…!”

 She looks like she wants to cry, and that makes him feel even guiltier.

“I… just want you to understand that it’s alright if you’re under the weather, sometimes. It happens to us all, and while I know you’ve always wanted everything to be perfect for us all, it’s also okay to mess up. I’ve done so before, but you’ve always forgiven me after scolding me, so why can’t you forgive yourself, Iori?”

The tears are back, his vision blurs, and he clutches her against his chest before she can see it, arms wrapping around her like he won’t ever see this warm smile of her again.

“It’s… It’ll be fine. Give yourself time and peace of mind, vent to us if you have to. We don’t hate you. Ainana isn’t Ainana if you’re not with us, so lean on us from now on, okay?”

“I…”

No. Yes. No, you shouldn’t give in. Yes, she’s right, it’s useless to cry over it and not do anything about. No, you don’t deserve the happiness she brings you. Yes, you deserve a second chance, a means to save everything from rotting.

“I’ll try…”

 He lets go of their weird embrace, admiring her slightly comforted features before she has to go back to her regular life. She’s red all over, but his own face is burning, so he doesn’t dare comment on that, even to tease her. He wishes he could, but it doesn’t come to her; and even if he already misses her gentle warmth, he knows she’s needed somewhere else, so it’s the least he can do to see her fly away. She’s beautiful either way.

Instead, he lets go of some of his guilt as much as possible and focuses on what’s to come, with the bitterness of their aborted debut remaining in the back of his throat despite the honey. Only time will tell, sadly so he lies back down and lets his eyes close, as staying awake is only detrimental, today.

 He’s just in a bad phase, right?

[app-thoughts]

A New Time for a New Era

NewDay is an alternative to Google calendar for the creators economy.

Current calendars are optimized for the manager schedule. A maker’s schedule is different; it requires consistent long blocks of focused time to generate output. Having the right schedule/structure to support this workflow is increasingly important for the new economy.

Problem with current calendars:

For makers working on creative projects, the amount of time it takes is unknown or hard to define.

When inspiration strikes, I don’t know how long my creative flow will last. When running into bugs, I don’t know how long it’ll take me to fix. Time is undefined. I don’t have a defined time to slot into Google calendar. I also don’t know how creative blocks will affect my cadence.

I’ve tried blocking chunks of time into Google calendar and they get stale or inaccurate; it’s not adjustable according to how my day or energy is going and the variances that come up.

Creators don’t really work on standard schedule. Creators at some point all find different schedules that work for themselves. Times they work throughout the day and peak energy varies. What’s consistent is the long chunks of hours needed.

Opportunity

We are evolving into a creators economy, a passion economy. We now have a convergence of nomadic ways of working, self-learning, self-doing, self-governance to create output. This is the future of work.

With this comes new philosophies on living life, changing values and governance. A new way of working needs a new time.

Time is the most pervasive form of governance and standardized system. It dictates our lives and outputs in the world. The output we produce over time chains us and promotes us. But is this output even healthy for the world? Manufacturing more units in less time. The variables that construct our existence, governance, and output no longer work. If people are suffering and not producing healthy outputs for society, change a variable, time, to change the output. How can we reconstruct time for healthier outputs and lifestyles?

Challenges and Assumptions

Redesigning time through a calendar has significant consequences for how we govern ourselves as a society. The revolutionary potential of a new time system is still nascent in NewDay, and needs to be teased out, sculpted with careful execution.

It’s a big undertaking to move people out of the current boundaries of time; it’s so engrained in the fabric of society. Here are a few ideas to start doing this.

User adoption concerns: Standardized time. High switching cost. Low incentive to switch.

Can adapt it more to scientifically proven ways of how our brain focuses and does its best work, so there’s more of a convincing argument for changing time and increasing user adoption. Eg X # of minutes of intense focus followed by Y # of minutes of relaxation increases productivity/learning retention/problem solving. The slicing of time was invented before we had an understanding of how the brain works most productively. The interesting insight NewDay taps into is designing time to be more conducive to how our brain works. For example, it can take up to 30 minutes of undivided attention focusing on a task to hit flow state, so giving more wiggle room than 60 minutes for a chunk of work makes sense. But, currently it is a calendar based on an individual’s experimentation and subjective experience. It would be interesting to look into more studies of time to achieve flow state, how long average flow sessions last, optimal times to get into flow state, so this model can be adapted to how a human brain works at its highest potential rather than based on one person’s schedule.

Questions: Is 100 min proven to work for many more makers? Does time stretch? Would they want flexibility to stretch or reduce the boundaries of time to pieces that work for them, based on their own peak energy and flow states?

Solution

What’s working so far:

Love the flexibility of adjusting start time, so the intentions and schedule stays relevant if you run behind your day.

I like the word choice of intention.

What’s not working so far:

I dropped off due to repeated copying and pasting of intentions over chunks of time.

I would appreciate an intention word bank (word cloud of intentions) where I can dump in all my intentions first, then map out intentions by hour or day. Ability to autocomplete, clone intention, or set as daily habit.

Perhaps there’s a way to extend intentions onto next chunks for longer periods of focus and so user does not feel the need to fill out every single hour with the same thing.

Current time exists to manage a process that has a beginning and end, this app introduces more fluid time:

I’m calling NewDay (or hoping for it to be) a deep flow management tracker. On a personal utility level, the pivotal concept here is mapping out large chunks of time that’s more conducive to how our brain works for problem solving and creative endeavors where the timeframe and endpoint can be unknown or uncertain.

An interesting long-term value is in finding peak energy productive times so a user can find the rhythm that works for themselves and maintain that cadence. Potential for each user to find and maximize their flow state.

Here’s how we can flow through time:

A vision board for users to connect their intentions to the creation of value. Help them get to where they want to go, or become who they want to be.

On the hourly basis, give option to close the feedback loop on intentions: enable users to check off if intention was completed.

Ability to assign intention to a category from the vision board (can extend the templated categories for customization).

Colored labels/categories connect intentions across time to vision.

Connect the dots over time to see how intentions manifested into visions.

If not manifested, this realization informs the user to change something or explore another path, and set new intentions for further alignment.

Just a thought: I find using if conditionals in todo lists offers focus. If complete: do this; else: do that. Not sure how this fits in or if needed.

Current time exists to coordinate concurrent communication:

Shared calendars where friends can see each other’s free time to chat enables a better way to ping/keep in touch without interrupting flow.

Fun idea: Live voice chat drop-ins can reduce the need for scheduling time. Public, close friends, or specific person settings.

The concept of time starts to melt away as we flow through time.

The Possibilities

Redesigning time with code is so subtly brilliant and overlooked it’s like a ticking time bomb.

The revolutionary potential of NewDay is so subtle, it’s easy to write off since we assume everyone is so engrained in existing timezone and calendars. Time needs to evolve with the way we work. There are fundamental shifts in society that lead to a need for fluid time. By targeting early adopters who are already on fluid time, offer enough value and results to retain them, the ripple effect has profound implications for the future of society. A society, I hope, with more naturally productive people guided by passion to create value, in constant flow states that lead to more happiness and bigger problems solved.

Just like the analog clock popularized a time system which guided the way we’ve worked for centuries, NewDay can be the time system for the new era. I look forward to what Evan does with NewDay.

[best-left-hook-jones]

It Is Not Yet Evening (10/?)

Summary: Historical AU. It is 1917, and with the Russian empire on the verge of collapse, Emma - a former maid for the Imperial family - means to escape the imminent revolution and start a new life in London. Desperately fleeing the Bolsheviks and armed with fake documents and a new identity, she sets out to find the mysterious man with the power to grant her her freedom. But the road to Moscow is a treacherous one, and a chance encounter with a wealthy British businessman may change her life forever.

Words: 45,003

Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 6, Chapter 7, Chapter 8, Chapter 9, Chapter 10

Redkino Station; March 15th, 1917. 8:03am.

Miss Swan?

The words seemed to echo through her sleep addled brain. Who was ‘Miss Swan’? She shrugged it off, still clinging to the lingering remnants of a good dream. Something about ocean blue irises and dark hair. A stubbled jaw line and a slight scar on one cheek, perhaps too? She scrunched her eyes shut tighter and tried to remember. The image had shattered at the intrusion and her mind frantically grasped at the shards, hoping to reassemble the pieces. She had just about managed to remember something about a roguish smile when the voice came again.

Swan?

Why couldn’t the voice just leave her alone? She was exhausted. After everything that had happened, all she wanted to do was rest, to snuggle into the warmth of the body that was cozied up next to her. Ah yes, that was what the dream had been. She knew it was a dream, but the light brush of fingertips across her cheek felt as real as anything, as did the light breath that puffed against her hair. She let out a deep sigh. Why couldn’t they just let her rest?

Emma!

That was enough to breach the surface and she awoke with a gasp, her eyes flying open wide in surprise. The man from her dream - whose limbs Emma could have sworn had been tangled with hers only moments before - was inches away from her face, his face filled with worry as he hovered over her. Emma instinctively recoiled back further into the seat to put some distance between them, which Killian copied, leaning away from her.

“My apologies, lass,” he started, his voice quieter that it had been in the dream. “I did not want to wake you, but I thought you should know that we have stopped.”

Emma blinked, trying to focus.

Stopped? Again?

“Why?”

Killian looked almost embarrassed, a hand rising to scratch behind one ear. “I am afraid I cannot understand the attendant’s instructions. I would not have awoken you otherwise.”  

Emma nodded once, her brain catching up to the situation. She ran a hand across her face to brush away any sleep or - God forbid - drool that might be there, before slipping into her shoes. Other than a quick run through with her fingers, there was very little she could do about the knots that had accumulated in her hair. That would have to wait. She pulled on her coat and hat as Killian did the same, leaving her possessions stashed away in the same hiding spot they had been in when they had gone for dinner. Killian hadn’t mentioned seeing any soldiers, but they both took their papers, just in case.

They made their way into the narrow corridor, Killian turning to shut the cabin door tightly behind them. The entrance at the end of the carriage was open, letting in small flurries of snow and the sounds of mixed chatter from the platform. Killian took her hand as she descended down the slick metal steps to the platform. Her balance wavered for a moment on the bottom step, but a second later she felt the soft crunch of snow beneath her feet.

There was a large group of passengers already waiting on the platform, most wrapped in heavy coats and scarves, and all demanding answers from the heavy set attendant standing in the middle of the masses. The attendant, for his part, appeared exhausted as he repeated the same announcement in a booming voice that was still barely audible over the crowd.

A fallen tree on the tracks up ahead, blown down by the strong winds that had swept through in the night. A half hour at most, the attendant promised, his bushy mustache twitching as he spoke, though he kept looking anxiously down the platform as if he were looking for reassurance that the workers that had been sent were on task. Emma sighed and relayed the message to Killian. The businessman looked relieved at the words and it occurred to Emma that he might have also been anxious about the reason for the delay.

‘I am afraid there is no way to know how long we will be stalled here,” Emma finished, sighing.

Her companion only hummed, not appearing to be particularly concerned that they were effectively stuck in the middle of tracks, with no discernable time frame for departure.  

“Perhaps a stroll, then,” Killian suggested, glancing around to the platform around them. “To stretch our legs.”

Emma looked around as well. Some passengers had given up on waiting for updates on the delay and had begun making their way through the station doors to wait it out. The station was small, consisting only of a pale blue structure with three archways, a flat peaked roof that seemed barely strong enough to support the weight of the heavy snow covering it, and a rather modest yellow sign announcing in blocky letters their arrival at ‘Redkino’. Despite the town’s obviously small size and lack of any visible landmarks, the name seemed vaguely familiar. Emma thought fleetingly that she had heard of a fire devastating the area years prior, but she couldn’t be sure.

She turned her attention back to Killian, who was still waiting patiently for her answer. The thought of being cooped up in the cabin when they were not moving was not entirely appealing, especially when they still had another few hours left of actual travel time until they reached Moscow. Having to sit for that much longer would surely have her tearing at the walls by the end. Besides, being outside meant that she would receive word immediately if the plans were to change.

Or if guards were to arrive.

“Alright.”

Killian let her lead the way, turning his collar up against the wind and pulling his cap lower on his head. It was mid morning, and though the sun was well above the horizon, the sunshine was dimmed behind the heavy layer of cloud and snow, leaving a sharp bite in the air. Granny had been right; despite the heavier garments, the cold was already seeping through her shawl and coat. Her toes were curling in her shoes and she wanted to curse her forgetfulness for leaving her gloves in her bag. She dragged the edges of her sleeve over her fingers and crossed her arms tightly to her chest.

It was too much to ask that her companion not notice.

“Are you cold?” Killian asked.

“No,” she replied, knowing full well that she was being stubborn.

“Here.”

He stopped and pulled off his black leather gloves using his teeth.

“I cannot take your gloves,” Emma protested immediately. “You need them.”

He raised an eyebrow at her. “I only need one,” he reminded her, holding up his wooden hand.

Fair point. Was she really so ridiculous as to refuse the gloves of a man who hadn’t need of one? It was a generous offer and as she was nearly freezing in her boots, the rational - and slightly less stubborn- portion of her brain won out.

Emma reached out and took the gloves from his outstretched hand. They were expensive, their quality reflected in the buttery feel of the goat skin. They were unlined and far too big, but Emma supposed she couldn’t be too disappointed given that he had graciously offered up his gloves to her in the first place. The heat from the previous owner lingered in the right hand glove, and she flexed her fingers into it, hoping to retain some of it.

“Better?”

Emma nodded. “Much. Thank you.”

He smiled and offered her his arm, shoving his ungloved hand into a pocket. She took it gratefully, treasuring the warmth that radiated where their arms met. Killian set the pace, and together they began their slow walk down the long platform.

Although Emma was sure that Killian was likely as exhausted as she was, but the brisk morning air seemed to slowly be reviving the pair. Being a maid for the Tsarina, Emma had not been allowed to go on such strolls with any men from the palace, the Tsarina preferring to keep her ladies separate from the male staff. The rule had been largely obeyed over the years, but even the monarch herself was unable to be everywhere at once to enforce it. Being in public, and strolling along now with Killian Jones - a wealthy businessman, of all things - made Emma feel oddly rebellious. Ruby would have been proud of her, she thought. It was satisfying, knowing that if a few heads turned to gawk at them, it was surely due to the handsome gentleman who had her arm.  

“You carry yourself as a true gentleman, Killian,” she noted, making sure to use his first name alone.

Killian’s eyebrows shot up in mock surprise. “Was that a compliment I heard, Miss Swan?”

Of course she would give him a rope and he would immediately hang himself with it.

“Yes. Now do not let it go to your head,” she chastised.  

“You wound me, love.”

“Good,” she teased. “It might help to ease some of your ego.”

“Are you suggesting that I have an inflated ego?” He asked, feigning offense.

“You are the man who awarded himself a prostitute in his cover story,” she pointed out. The lie hadn’t bothered her at the time - not really - but now that the adrenaline had worn away, the ease with which the story had come to him had raised questions for her.  

Killian’s smirk only widened. “Did I offend you with that quick thinking?”

Emma rolled her eyes. “I am sure you could have thought of something else.”

“Ah, but would it have been as convincing?”

“ What are you implying ?”

“Fear not, Miss Swan,” he chuckled. “I am not suggesting anything. You are far too cruel to be a prostitute anyhow.”

“Acquainted with many prostitutes then, are you?” Emma grumbled. If she were honest, she didn't truly believe he was the type of man who would ever need to pay a woman to spend the night with him, but the words had come out all the same. For some reason, she needed to hear him say it.

“Not entirely, no,” Killian answered hesitantly. “I assure you that I am a loyal husband.”

Emma nearly scoffed. “You are not married. Have you forgotten? I have read your documents.”

She glanced up at him then and was surprised to see that the happiness had faded from his expression. He seemed almost sad.

“Perhaps not. But I have been engaged, and I would like to think that I would have made a fair and loving husband.”

Emma nearly lost her footing. “You were engaged?”

Killian almost regained his smile at her incredulous expression. Almost.

“Does that surprise you?”

Emma looked at him then - really looked - as she pondered his question.

“No,” she admitted slowly. “I suppose that it does not surprise me.”

Truthfully, it wasn’t difficult to imagine the man in front of her as a husband. He was kind, honourable, and he had already proved himself to be loyal to an almost ridiculous extent. And that was all on top of his handsome appearance and clear abundance of wealth. Men such as him were rare - if not impossible - to find and he surely would have had his pick of any woman he fancied. Any woman would be lucky to have him by her side, Emma thought.

But to think that he had already found someone he had cared for enough to propose had her stomach fluttering in ways that she didn’t quite understand. It was also no hard guess as to the identity of his lost love - Killian was a man who quite literally wore his heart on his sleeve. Perhaps it was time to learn more about the mysterious woman who had laid claim to Killian’s right arm.

“It was Milah, was it not?” Emma prompted, trying to sound casual. It didn’t work, and she immediately felt Killian stiffen beside her.

“You are very perceptive, aren’t you?”  

A partial answer, but not what Emma had wanted. She pressed on, not willing to let the elephant that had been in the room for far too long to settle itself back between them. It was time.

“Is she…?”

“She died a long time ago,” he answered hurriedly, as though he were ripping off a bandage by getting the words out. “Smallpox.”

Emma had had a feeling that the mysterious woman had died, but hearing the truth confirmed for her did her no favours. She only barely repressed a shiver as she recalled the photographs that Dr. Whale had kept in his diary of those that had contracted the disease. The image of a young child covered in the tell-tale rash had haunted her dreams for weeks afterwards. It had been the last time that Emma had sat with the royal doctor during his studies. There were some things that she just didn’t have the stomach for. Emma was only grateful that Killian’s memories of his fiance did not seem tainted by the brutal illness.

“Smallpox is a terrible disease.”

“Indeed,” Killian agreed sadly. ”They say that those who survive the disease are left with horrible scars, but I cannot imagine my Milah as anything other than beautiful.”

It must have been a strong gust of wind that had Emma cringing at the words. Of course she would have been beautiful. It only made sense for a man as handsome as him to be with someone beautiful. Was that not what beautiful people did? Marry other beautiful people and have beautiful children and live beautiful lives?

Yes, it must have been the chill of the wind that had her clenching her teeth.

“How long was your engagement?”

Killian let out a breath as he thought, the warm air turning into a cloud of white against the hazy sky.

“I met her when I was seventeen, and we saw each other for just over two years. Milah was older, but I knew that she was the one from the very beginning. She was gorgeous and strong, and I was head over heels in love with her.”

Emma nodded. Young love was a powerful thing. “You miss her,” she stated simply. It wasn’t a question.  

He gave a sad smile, one too many for the early morning.

“All the time.”

All the time . The more Emma thought about it, the more everything began to make sense. For every gentle touch and flirtatious smile he gave, there was always a look of wariness and uncertainty that followed. Emma wasn’t even sure if he was aware that he did it, but it was there all the same, reminding her that his mind was elsewhere. That in those moments, he was with someone else. She was sure now that his mind had gone to her in the moment before their near kiss.

Just my luck to be infatuated with a man whose heart is already somewhere else.

Emma immediately banished the thought. She was not competing with anyone, let alone a dead woman. The mere suggestion of it made her flush with guilt. Killian had revealed a moment of sadness and turmoil in his life, and here she stood feeling jealous , of all things. No, not jealous. Something else. It had to be.

She was so caught up in her own thoughts that she almost didn’t notice when Killian began to speak again.

“Although some days it does not feel as though she has gone far,” he continued. “She… gives me advice, I believe. Sends me messages that I am meant to decipher.”

Emma furrowed her brow, confused. “What sort of messages?”

“It could be anything,” he shrugged. “They are not always obvious, but I believe that they are there all the same.” He paused, thinking. “She was a lot like you are, in that way, I think.”

“How do you mean?” Emma failed to keep the surprise from her voice. Like her?

“Stubborn, mostly.” He attempted a smile, but it lacked warmth and faded quickly. “She was secretive, too. Milah always played things so close to the chest and it used to drive me mad, trying to figure her out. At the beginning, she never even told me that she was sick.”

“That sounds rather reckless. You could have become infected.”

Another wry smile crossed his features. “She was hoping it was morning sickness.”

“Oh.” Emma’s stomach twisted in knots. Of course. “Was she..?”

“No,” Killian shook his head. “She had gone to see a physician to check. It was only after they told her of the contagion that she finally told me that she had been feeling unwell. But by then, of course, it was too late.”

The reassurance felt like anything but. Of course Milah would have hoped for the best, believing that the nausea and malaise were signs of a bright future with her doting husband-to-be. Emma wouldn’t even be surprised if she had passed off the fever as a side effect. What a terrible moment, Emma thought, to be so close to happiness and to have it all ripped away. She couldn’t begin to imagine it.

His face was scrunched in pain as though he were reliving the experience.

“I was not permitted to see her after she was admitted into hospital,” he continued. “She must have known that too, I think, but she knew that I would never have left her side if I had known.”

Killian paused, taking a breath to steady himself. Emma felt useless as she watched him be pulled into darker times, unable to find anything to soothe his hurt. She had never been the one to provide comfort to her small handful of friends in the palace - that responsibility had always fallen squarely on Ruby’s shoulders. And besides, how was she meant to say kind and thoughtful words for a woman she had never met? Surely anything she said in that regard would seem false and insincere, making matters worse.

In the end, Emma settled on the words that she knew must have been true.

“She must have loved you very much.”  

It wasn't much, but Killian gave an appreciative nod for the effort. She could see the guilt in his eyes, and though Emma had never lost anyone to illness before, it wasn’t difficult to imagine where his thoughts had gone. He had wanted to be with her during her final moments, and he hadn’t been able to. It was common, Emma thought, to want that, but she couldn’t help but think that Killian had been spared a particularly cruel fate. For as horrible as the memories of Milah’s illness were for him now, Emma imagined that the images of her diseased ravaged body lying cold in his arms would have been far more difficult to purge. She only prayed that he could find at least some peace and comfort in that.

They had reached the end of the platform, the drop off in the path revealing where the station hands had given up clearing the walkway of snow. The area was deserted of other passengers, the far walk likely too tedious for most to make. They stood at the edge in silence and peered down the long tracks to where they disappeared in the distance. It wasn’t the loveliest of sights; the grey sky, bare knobbled trees, and pale snow gave the entire area a gloomy feel. They had many weeks left until the land would thaw and life would return to the town.

Emma looked down to see what appeared to be a thin, red book partially protruding from a small pile that had been brushed into the side of a pillar. Taking care not to get her borrowed gloves covered in snow, she tugged the package loose.

It was a magazine - a satirical one - folded open to a page that contained a pair of drawings. The words were smudged and unreadable, but even through the wet of the snow that had seeped through the thin paper, the grotesque caricatures were unmistakeable; a hefty man carrying a cigar and a money box sat astride a crawling and pitiful looking Rasputin, while another man carrying a large pencil and several cartoonish drawings of the the head monarch rode a bridled Tsar Nicholas II.  

Killian, who had been examining the pages over her shoulder, spoke up.

“What does it say?”

“Does it matter?” Emma snapped. Her tone came off more harsh than she had intended, but she couldn’t help the anger that was boiling inside her.  

Killian only hummed noncommittally. It was innocent enough, but it was more than enough to set her on edge. It was irritating that he did not - could not - share her outrage at the defamatory images. Caricatures were not uncommon and Emma was not so naive as to think that they did not have similar drawings of royal families in Britain and elsewhere, but it was not the same. Emma knew these people, knew what was truly in their hearts in a way that all of the artists and critics would never understand. In a way that the Bolsheviks would never understand.

She crunched the magazine between her gloved hands and jammed it back underneath the snow. It was petty, and Emma knew that there were likely plenty more copies on the kitchen tables of the dissidents, but at least there was one less. It didn’t matter if anyone else came across it; the paper was nearly ruined as it was. She only prayed that it would rot in the coming spring slush.

Killian hadn’t said a word as he had watched her bury the pages in the snow, and Emma was sure that he must think she was mad. Given his comments about the Imperial family earlier, Emma doubted he would understand her wish to protect the dishonoured royals. They weren’t worth her tears, he probably thought, and they were certainly not worth digging in the snow for. Perhaps he was even right a bit, but it didn’t matter. She didn’t need him to say it.

Without looking at her companion, Emma stood up and began patting the snow off of the gloves and brushing the clumps of snow from the skirt of her dress. The wind had picked up a bit and Emma tugged her coat tighter around her, fixing her long hair around her shoulders to keep her neck warm.

Killian leaned his back against one of the pillars, crossing his arms across his chest. His cheeks and nose were flushed pink from the cold, and it made Emma briefly wonder if he would even tell her if he was feeling the cold as she was. Given that he seemed to be as stubborn as her in that regard, she thought not.

“What was it like?”

Emma frowned, confused. “I beg your pardon?”

“To live in the palace. What was it like?”

Emma paused, not expecting such a question. Indeed, it was never a question she had ever been asked before. Anyone she had ever really known had worked in the palace, so the question would have been ridiculous. What had it been like? It was strange, but Emma found herself woefully unprepared to answer. She considered brushing off the answer, of giving a quick shrug and changing the subject, but the look of genuine curiosity on Killian’s face made her waver. It seemed unfair to give him nothing when he had given her so much.

“It was lovely,” she said after a moment. “At least, I thought so.”

Killian raised an eyebrow. “I take it the Tsar did not?”

“Not the Winter Palace, no,” Emma admitted. “It is strange to think, I know, given its beauty but they hated that palace. They found it a blessing to leave there.”

She would never admit it to anyone, but she had once heard the Tsar announce in front of a room full of guests the night before they had left for holidays that he pitied anyone who had to remain in the “bog” that was Petrograd.

“How old were you when you came into their employ?”

“I was fourteen.”

Killian gave a low whistle. “That is quite a young age to be so close with royalty.”

Emma laughed. “It was not that terrible, I assure you. I was working in the kitchens at the time. It was not anything particularly special, but I would help prepare the food for the chefs. There was an older woman there - Cora - who hated me desperately though.”

“She sounds like a witch.”

“She was.” Emma wrinkled her nose at the memory. “She had a daughter who was just slightly older than I was, and I believe Cora was convinced that she had more royal blood in her than the entire Romanov family combined.”

“That is quite bold of her. I always imagined that anyone who spoke against the family would be put to death.”

“Yes, well, unfortunately for me, I was the only one who ever heard her speak that way. My mother used to tell me that she would receive only what she was owed.” Emma thought for a moment. “I suppose that it exactly what she got, in the end.”

Killian tilted his head to look at her. “And what was that?”

“Nothing.” Emma shrugged, moving a wisp of blond hair from where in caught in the corner of her mouth. “Granny was the personal maid to the Tsarina, and when the Tsarina expressed interest in a new, young maid, she recommended me.”

“A child?” Killian raised his eyebrows in surprise.

“Someone who was near her daughter’s age,” Emma explained. “I was only five years older than the eldest daughter and the Tsarina believed it would be best to have someone her own age to play with.”

“I mean no offence, Miss Swan, but surely the Romanov family has connections to plenty of children with more, er, well, favourable backgrounds than yours.”

“The Tsarina hated them all. She never did like the royal lifestyle anyhow. She thought it was insincere and self-glamorizing. She did not want her children to be raised like that. Hence why they brought me in.”

“I am sure the old witch was pleased with that decision.”      

Emma shrugged. “She threatened me, and she threatened my parents. She even threatened Granny. I am sure it was the last one that had her and her daughter thrown from the castle.”

“As they should have been,” Killian stressed firmly. “It serves them right.”

“Perhaps, but not the daughter - Regina. I am certain she would have been a kind and loving child if it were not for her mother. It was awful.”

Killian seemed to think about that for a moment. He removed his hat and lazily brushed off the snow that had gathered in a light dusting over it. His expression was unreadable, but Emma preferred it to the look of haunting and sadness that had marred his features when he talked about his fiance.

“Indeed. Wounds made when we are young tend to linger. The sins of the father become the sins of the children. Or mothers to their daughters, in this case.”

There was a tone in his voice that was unmistakeable.

“You sound as though you speak from experience,” she noted.  

“A tale for another time, perhaps.” His smile was likely meant to be reassuring, but Emma saw past it. Still, she would not push. He would surely tell her in his own time. “You were saying, Miss Swan?”

“Yes, of course,” she continued, returning back to her own memories. “Well, needless to say that the family were more than pleased to move to the palace in Tsarskoe Selo. It was calmer and less formal that before. It was really quite comfortable.”

“I am sure that any palace that the Tsar chose would be comfortable,” Killian pointed out.

“Maybe, but I believe that it makes a difference. It, well, it feels different when you are away from the city, when it is only the family and the closest staff. They were never unkind, or cruel towards us. They treated me as though I were one of their own.” She was nearly whispering by then. “They were my family.”  

“If I am correct, then, Miss Swan,” he began, his tone becoming more playful again, “that would make you a princess.”

“And what if I were?” She smiled back, tilting her head. “Would that be more believable than my story about being a palace maid, running away to Britain to escape a possible revolution?”  

Killian paused, thinking. “If that were the real truth, I think I would know it and I would believe you.”

Emma snorted. “You keep saying that but I am not sure what I have done to earn your trust.”

“Do you trust me?” Killian was looking at her again with his piercing blue eyes.

“Yes.”

She answered immediately, almost without thinking. It was nearly shocking that it was the truth, but she did trust him.

Killian shrugged. “Then that is enough,” he replied simply.

He said it with such confidence, as though there weren’t any other factors to consider, as though it really could be that simple as to just trust someone implicitly. He was able to stand on a platform in a foreign train station, after lying to Imperial soldiers, and trust her. Emma had never been that way with anyone before. Perhaps she never would. But in that moment, Emma felt proud to have someone like Killian Jones on her side.

No, Killian , she corrected.

Perhaps it was because she was examining him so closely, but Emma caught the exact moment a shiver broke free from his body. It was gone in an instant, but it was enough.

Knowing that he would never admit his discomfort to her, let alone ask for his gloves back, Emma took a few steps forward to close the distance between them. Surprise flickered across his face as she curled up into his side, letting the heat of their bodies combine between them.  

And once again, it didn’t bother her that she was practically wrapped in the arms of a stranger in plain daylight, for all the world to see. He wasn’t a stranger, he was Killian. Killian, who in the short span of a few hours, had become both her friend and ally. It was an unconventional friendship, so say the least, but then again, it was more than she had ever hoped for after leaving her only friends and family behind. Perhaps Killian was right. Perhaps, even, it was more than enough.    

“What will happen to them?” He asked then, his voice quiet. “The Imperial family, that is.”

What will happen to you?

He hadn’t said it, but she had heard them lingering behind his words. His never ending concern for her, as always.

“I do not know,” she answered honestly.

His adam’s apple bobbed as he processed her words. He had been so kind to her, and it hurt that she couldn’t reassure him that his efforts weren’t all for naught. There was still a very real chance that they would be caught - that she would be caught - and there would be nothing that either of them would be able to do about it. It was the price that she had agreed to pay all those years ago when she had entered into the Imperial family’s service, back when talks of war and revolution had been merely hypothetical gossip. It was a cruel bargain, but Emma was certain that she would choose it again every time if she were given the chance.

She looked up and found him watching her, his expression warm. There was a slight smile on his face, and now that she was up close and out of the dim light of the cabin, Emma could swear that his eyes were more blue than she had ever seen them.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” She asked, only half teasing. It didn’t seem to deter him, his gaze tender.

“Nothing, love. Only that you have some snow caught in your hair,” he murmured almost absently, never breaking his gaze away from her face.

He reached out and delicately brushed the hair just above her left ear, tucking the strands behind as he did so. His fingertips were cold where they brushed against her cheekbone, and Emma felt a momentary pang of guilt at knowing that she had made them that way. She wanted to return them then, insist that she would be fine without the extra layer, but she found that she couldn’t speak. Not with the way that his eyes were staring into hers, captivating her.

Emma wasn’t sure who had moved, but suddenly, they were closer than they had been moments earlier. He was close enough that she could feel the warmth of his breath on her face, his nose inches away from her own. It was only the fact that she wasn’t able to see her own breath in the cold air that made her realize she had been holding it, waiting to see what he would do. His pupils were blown wide, and she was sure that if she let herself go, she could press herself into him and find out if any rum lingered on his lips from the night before. He would let her, she thought, and in moments they could find themselves tangled in a passionate embrace, the cold forgotten and the black iron train a distant memory.

But Emma had done this before, been caught in this exact position only hours before, and she knew what would happen next. And it wasn’t that. In a second, he would begin to pull away again, just as he had in the corridor. In another second, she would have to hear his apologies, hear how he couldn’t handle it, how his heart belonged to another. It would be the same as before, she was sure. At least now she knew why.

And she knew that there was only one way their journey together would end.

“Perhaps…” Killian began, his voice barely a whisper.

“Perhaps we should go back inside now,” she finished for him, just as quietly. She took a step away from him then, moving her hair back to cover her ears and wrapping her arms around her. “I am feeling a bit cold.”

His eyes flickered between hers for a moment, and Emma thought that he looked almost disappointed. But then again, Emma knew better than that.

This. This is why boundaries were needed, why rules were made to be followed.

Emma was only fortunate that she hadn’t let herself indulge. There was still time to return to their original agreement. The momentary regret he felt would turn into guilt at having lusted over her and they would return to normal, just as it had before.

He nodded, looking anywhere but at her, and Emma took that as a cue to leave. She spun on her heels and made her way back to their cabin, the soft crunch of snow behind her the only indication that he was following.

[meltingalphabet]

The Reunion

This happened two years ago, yet, I can still remember it as if it were yesterday. I’ve told the cops what happened, I’ve told reporters and friends, my therapist... But I feel like I’ve never been able to tell the whole story to them. These people weren’t just victims, they were my friends. They were a huge part of my life. Their deaths weren’t simply the visceral manifestation of insanity, but an accumulation of the lives they had lead, ending prematurely at the hands of someone who misguidedly felt betrayed. I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me start, not at the beginning, but in the middle.

When you’re in your late thirties, you find that you’ve become distant from friends you were once really close with. In college, my wife Victoria (my friend and soon-to-be girlfriend at the time), and I were part of a tight-knit group of undergrads: Nick, Addison, Heather, Leann, Jacob, Ricky, Bianca, and Tom. The last time all ten of us were together, before the incident two years ago, was at Victoria and my’s wedding, back in 2012.

Nick and Jacob lived together in New York City. Nick moved there to be a big shot on Wall Street. He worked at some company named after three old white men, making much more than any of the rest of us. Jacob was focusing on his music, performing as lead guitarist in a Heavy Metal band that, based on social media, was actually gaining some notoriety in the city. Jacob and Nick had been best friends in college, and were still best friends. They had one of those bromances you see on television. They met in college when Nick passed Jacob’s open dorm and heard the sound of guitar. Nick ran to his room to grab his bass, and the rest, as they say, is history.

The other pair of best friends, Heather and Leann, had moved to the Bay Area after college, but unlike the guys, they eventually moved apart. Both were still on the west coast, Heather had moved to a smaller town outside of the city where she worked in publishing, and Leann had moved to Portland to work as a social justice lawyer.

Addison was living with her elderly parents in Boston while she worked on her nursing degree. She had recently divorced her husband of six years, and had become a bit elusive, so that was all I knew, really.

Ricky had moved the furthest, leaving the U.S. all together and living in London with his wife, where he became a fairly successful television writer for the BBC. I had watched all of his shows, though Victoria avoided them. They were filled with suspense, illicit affairs, and kidnapping. She preferred romantic stories or the Great British Bake Off.

Bianca and Tom got married a year before we did. They stayed in Hanover, not too far from Dartmouth, where we all went to school. Bianca owned her own pilates and yoga studio, and Tom, unable to leave college life, worked in the Administrative Department of the school.

Victoria and I moved to Connecticut after graduation so I could work at my father’s architecture firm. Victoria had been working in web development, but was taking a few years off to focus on our daughter, Molly. We had been dating for almost twenty years, cohabitating for fifteen, and married for ten. In that time, the two of us had grown from just two adults, to two adults, a three year old, a loveable, bossy Corgi named Rufus, two fluffy and infuriating cats named Ham and Cheese, and our most recent addition: a curious rabbit named Princess Twinkle (Molly had chosen that name).

Two years ago on a frosty February morning, I opened my email to find an invitation to a weekend get-together from Tom:

Hey Chuckster!

Long time no talk, man. Hope you guys are faring this hellish winter alright. We moved into our new house a few weeks ago (sidenote: I would not recommend moving in January), and we’re already having issues with the roof. Bianca has been busy renovating this baby since last May! She promised me it’ll be habitable any day now. This place is much too large for the two of us, but we’re hoping to fill it soon, if you know what I mean ;)

Speaking of kids, I saw the pictures you posted online last week of Molly opening her Christmas gifts. Man, she is huge! I hope Bianca and I get down to your neck of the woods soon to finally meet the little bugger.

Anyway, I’m emailing you because Ricky called last night and he’s going to be in town this March, from the 23rd to the 30th. I guess he’s doing a few guest lectures at Dartmouth. He asked if he could stay with us, and of course we were thrilled at the idea. Ricky and I got to talking, and we decided it was the perfect opportunity to try and organize a little college reunion! We’re thinking an old fashioned shindig, Saturday the 28th.

I sent an email out to the usual suspects. We’d love it if you and Victoria could make it up! We have guest rooms to spare, so you can spend the night. Hell, stay the whole weekend!

Feel free to bring the kiddo, though keep in mind she’d be the only one under thirty since the rest of us have yet to reproduce.

Love you man,

Hope to see you soon!

Tom

Victoria and I didn’t have any other plans for that weekend, and my mom and dad happily agreed to babysit. The next night, I sent Tom a response saying we’d be there.

For the next couple of weeks, Tom would send me regular updates on the party. Heather and Leann were the next two to agree to the plan. They decided to make the trip together. Heather was going to fly to Portland, stay with Leann for the night, and then the two of them would fly to Boston, where they would pick up Addison and the three would drive up to New Hampshire. A week later, Jacob finally convinced Nick to take the bus up from New York with him.

By early March, we were all booked and ready. Victoria and I were ecstatic. We hadn’t seen anyone since the wedding, which at that time, had been three years ago. Not to mention, as the bride and groom, we really didn’t get much time to catch up with old friends. This would be the first time we all hung out, just us, in almost a decade.

Victoria and I left home early Saturday, dropping Molly off with her grandparents before heading out. The weather report told us to expect some nasty rain that night, so we wanted to get to New England before visibility on the road was bad. We were pulling into Tom and Bianca’s driveway at a little after one in the afternoon, the New England sun high above us, trying to warm the chilly New Hampshire air. It looked so nice, so calm and peaceful. But I could see dark clouds crawling menacingly towards us when I lowered my head to the steering wheel to look up at the distant sky past the edge of my car’s roof.

Tom and Bianca’s home was quite large. It was a classic New England Colonial home, painted a light sky blue with white trim and shutters. A wrap around porch, an addition that was tastefully designed to not contrast the classic structure, stretched from the front door to the side. We grabbed our weekend bags from the trunk, and walked up the front steps. The large white door greeting us warmly.

Victoria’s hand hovered in front of the doorbell, and she looked at me, a huge excited smile stretching from ear to ear. “Ready?”

I laughed at her giddiness, “just ring it, weirdo.”

She pushed, a large chime filling the inside of the house. We waited a few seconds before the door burst open, and Tom stood in front of us wearing khakis and a pink polo. His dirty blonde hair shaggy, yet neat, just like it had been ten years ago. His smiled was crooked on his face, but I noticed a few lines tracing the sides of his mouth. Otherwise, he looked the same: young and cocky. Ego and self-esteem in abundance. His skin was tanned with time spent playing and lounging outside, and the beer bottle between his right thumb and forefinger was as much a part of him as his kind, intelligent brown eyes. I thought of the slight gut forming under my sweater as I noticed that Tom had retained, not only the confidence, but the lean athletic body of his youth.

“Fuck yeah! The adult supervision has arrived!” He hollered before embracing both of us in a warm hug. I could hear a female whooping come from deep in the house, which I instantly recognized as Bianca. Tom and Bianca had always been the partiers, while everyone else joked that Victoria and I were the group’s official old folks. Victoria’s obsession with knitting and my bizarre love of creamed corn helped solidify that reputation fairly early on in our freshman year.

“Come on, come on, the party's already started!” Tom ushered us inside. We followed him into the living room where Bianca and Ricky were sitting, drinking beers. Several hands of cards lay forgotten on the coffee table in front of them.

Bianca jumped up squealing before proceeding to attack my wife with a huge hug. She wore her long light blonde hair in a messy bun on top of her head, and was dressed in dark blue yoga pants and a white t-shirt. Her lips were a light shade of pink, that suited her pale complexion well. Like Tom, she managed to maintain the fit body from her successful cheerleading career in High School and College.

Tom left towards the kitchen while Ricky stood, extending his hand to me. I laughed at the gesture, and pulled him into a warm embrace. As we parted, I eyed him from top to bottom. A wannabe-novelist in his youth, selling out his craft for television had not affected his style much at all. He wore the clothes of a writer: dark jeans and a mustard yellow cardigan that played well with his rich mocha skin, but Ricky was not your usual poet. While one might expect the writer of our group to be lean and frail looking, the clean-cut clothing looked strained again the large muscular body underneath.

“Oh my god! I’m so excited you guys could make it!” Bianca said, finally able to speak intelligible words as she released Victoria from her grasp and hugged me.

“We wouldn’t have missed it for the world! And thanks, Ricky, for visiting and getting this going!” I said over her shoulder.

“I am the proverbial snowball that lead to the avalanche.” Ricky said, bowing jokingly to me. Tom reentered, arms full of cold beers.

Victoria snorted, taking a beer from Tom’s outstretched hand, “poetic, but I don’t think that’s a common idiom.”

Ricky gave her a silent half smile in return, the closest thing he had to a friendly chuckle.

“Fucking English majors.” Tom rolled his eyes, smirking.

“I know, right? We suck.” Victoria retorted and pushed Tom’s shoulder playfully. I tensed slightly. Tom and Victoria had dated for a hot minute freshman year, before quickly realizing their incompatibility. And by that, I mean Tom dumped her after a month because he didn’t want something serious. It didn’t take long for Tom and Bianca to drunkenly hook up at a frat party, and ironically, the two became pretty inseparable for the remainder of our college years, and beyond.

It took Victoria almost a year to recover from the break up. I was waiting in the wings, though. I spent nights comforting her, bringing her ice cream, listening to her lament the loss of another guy. It was worth it in the end, but it still made me uneasy when they flirted like this, even if it was just friendly, and even after all these years. I tried to shrug it off. Tom did flirt with everyone.

I grabbed the beer Tom offered and took a swig. My body loosened instinctively at the familiar ice cold taste.

Looking down at my watch, I saw that it was now two. “When does everybody else get in?” I asked.

“Any minute now!” Tom said excitedly, turning away from my wife to face me. “I just got a text from Heather that they decided to meet Nick and Jacob at the bus stop. Their bus was scheduled to come in…” he checked the time on his phone, “now, I guess. The girls got there twenty minutes ago. According to Heather, she talked to Nick and figured they might as well give the guys a ride instead of forcing them to take a cab.” I smiled, Heather was always the planner of the bunch. If it wasn't for her organization and leadership, our group probably wouldn't have survived long. “With that many bodies, they’re lucky Addison owns an SUV instead of tiny sedan like you guys.” Tom laughed, as if our twelve year old Accord was a joke everyone was in on. “If everything's going according to schedule, they should be here in half an hour,” he finished.

The doorbell rang fifty minutes later. “Bolla bolla bolla!” Tom yelled, throwing both arms into the air excitedly, spilling at least half of a beer in the process. I chuckled. I hadn’t heard anyone say that since college, when we were dumb drunk kids. I wasn’t sure Tom had ever stopped being a dumb drunk kid.

Bianca went to the door, Tom following her, continuing his juvenile call, which echoed off of the high ceilings.

Ricky, Victoria, and I listened to the door open, followed by both male and female voices joining in. “Bolla bolla bolla!” the cries reverberated to the living room. Ricky rolled his eyes, beaming, and Victoria snorted with laughter. I looked at my wife’s face, glowing with a carefree happiness I hadn’t seen since Molly was born. I smiled at her.

Suddenly, a gaggle of late thirty year olds flooded the room with high-pitched squeals and hugs. “Sorry we’re late!” Heather called out, “Nick had to fail at getting the digits of a cute girl from the bus, and we had to watch!” Heather, Leann, and Addison fell into a fit of giggling at this. Nick scowled.

I greeted my old friends, shocked at how much they had changed. Minus Jacob, who, like Tom and Bianca, looked exactly as he had in college. He still wore those round glasses that only artists with oval faces can pull off, or Harry Potter. He didn’t even look like he had aged. He was wearing a band shirt for some band I had never heard of and his long blonde hair was cut exactly like it had years ago. He always had a very Cobain air about him.

I had seen photos of Leann, Nick, and Addison on facebook, and had noticed the subtle changes over the years, but in person, they took my breath away.

The stress of divorce and taking care of her parents while getting her Masters seemed to be taking a lot out of Addison. She had been the nerd of the group: smart, focused, shy, but now she also looked tired, as if she was fraying at the edges. In college, she’d often abandon parties long before the rest of us were ready to go home. She prefered movie nights to frat houses, art exhibits to ragers, museums to bars. She had always been a bit sloppy, but now she just looked… frumpy. Her face old and lined, her brown hair already slowly turning silver.

Contrarily, it was startling to see Leann, Nick, and Heather as polished, successful adults.

Leann, who had always been a bit of a hippie with her long flowing brown hair, unshaved legs, and long skirts, now wore a shorter bob, her hair cut close to the bottom of her jaw, and with much less frizz. She wore some makeup, though very subtle, and her jeans and t-shirt were neat, clean, and fitted.

Nick still looked like he was trying too hard to be cool, but now he had an air of wealth that had never surrounded him in college. His baggy t-shirt with holes at the armpits was now a form fitting striped sweater. He still wore his hair chin length, but instead of looking greasy with unwash, it was neatly cut, combed, and, most importantly, clean. His beard was trimmed close to his face, and he smelled like soap and a very subdued cologne.

Heather was the most drastic. She had never embraced the trend of social media which began late in our college years, and so I did not have any hint about her physical transformation until now. She was never grossly overweight in college, but she was definitely not what you would call skinny. Bianca always had, and still had, the body of a cheerleader. Victoria, even after having Holly, was a naturally very slim person, with a small frame. Heather was much broader and taller. Her hobby of weightlifting always contributing to her feminine but strong physique, her love of fast food giving her some extra weight. Heather was still tall and broad, but now her body was lean with muscle and little fat.

I hugged the slim Heather.

“Wow, Heather, you look fantastic!” I said, releasing her.

She blushed, “heh, thanks.”

She turned to Tom, who winked while handing her a beer. The red of her cheeks deepened, and I noticed Bianca roll her eyes.

“The whole gang, back together! This is insane!” Jacob exclaimed.  

Leann broke away from her hug with Bianca, “Damn, Bianca! Everytime I see you, I’m amazed at how young you still look!”

“Oh stop!” Bianca cried, waving her away.

“So, are you going to give us a tour of this ridiculously amazing home of yours?” asked Leann, gesturing to her surroundings.

Bianca smiled, pleased with the invitation, “of course! Follow me!” She and Tom led us from the living room into the large, modern kitchen, which shined with new chrome appliances.

Nick whistled. “Holy shit, this must have cost a fortune!”

Tom shrugged, “oh this? This was nothing.” He laughed. “This was all the beautiful Bianca’s doing!” He bowed to his wife, who beamed back. “Wait till you see the master bedroom!” And with that he bounded off.

“No, but really, Tom. How did you guys afford this?” Nick’s voice trailed behind him as he followed, leaving the kitchen behind, the rest of us slowly making our own way to the stairs.

“It might have taken a credit card or two to get this place up to snuff.” Tom admitted at the head of the migration.

Heather groaned, never one to hide how she really felt, “you know that's just asking for trouble, right?”

Bianca giggled, “oh, don’t worry about it, Heather. I’ve got it taken care of. Soon, Tom and I won’t have to worry about any of that.”

Jacob looked at Tom inquisitively, but he just shrugged.

Victoria leaned into my side, and I tilted my ear to her mouth as we walked behind the rest of the group. “This place is incredible.” She whispered, her eyes locking on mine. I felt a small twin pang of jealousy in the pit of my stomach. The place was fancy, clean, and immaculate. It was beyond impressive. Our own home was small, decorated in furniture that, if it didn’t start out as used, was now after ten years and a kid. Victoria and my’s love of animals and children made us give up on interior design, organization, and cleanliness years ago. Seeing homes like this always reminded us of our failings.

I put my arm around Victoria, squeezed her closer, and kissed her forehead. “Their place might be a palace, but we’re the ones lucky enough to be woken up at 7am every Saturday and Sunday morning by a small, bossy child and her equally small, bossy Corgi pal.” My wife snorted and pushed me away as we walked into the bedroom.

The room was almost as large as the kitchen. Hell, it might have been larger. The focal point was a large four post bed, draped with white silks. The furniture surrounding it was large, and made of a polished dark wood. In the middle of the ceiling was a small, but still quite grand chandelier. There was even a dark blue velvet chaise lounge in the corner.

“Check out the jacuzzi tub!” Tom cried, throwing open the french doors into the bathroom. Inside was a large round bathtub, with a glass shower next to it, containing many more shower nozzles than I ever thought would be necessary. Both the tub and the shower were surrounded with rich light brown marble.

Tom beamed at me expectantly. I nodded slowly, and said the only thing that came to mind, “wow.” Tom clapped me on the back, and then proceeded to jump onto the steps leading up to the tub. He raised his arms like a dictator about to give a speech.

“And this, ladies and gents, will be where the party ends tonight.” He winked again at Heather, who looked away, pretending not to notice.

“Sure thing, T-bone.” Victoria said sarcastically. “Can we like, not hang out in your bathroom anymore? It’s kind of weird.” Jacob laughed and we walked into the bedroom. Ricky, Nick, and Leann continued to lead us towards the bedroom door, but Tom interrupted the procession.

“Before we leave the luxury of the master bedroom, who wants to play the phone game?” Tom asked in a excessively sensual tone, an eyebrow raised.

“You mean that game kids play in preschool? You want us to get in a circle and whisper a sentence into each other’s ears until it’s gibberish?” Victoria asked, incredulously.  

Tom laughed at this, the alcohol making his gestures and sounds grander than usual. “Not that one, though I guess we can try that later. Seems like Vicky and Chuck’s party games have changed slightly since having a kid.” Everyone laughed and Tom continued, “No, this is a different game.” He walked over and opened the door at the side of the room to reveal a large walk-in closet, complete with a middle island. Possibly for shoe storage? Or something similarly unnecessary and ridiculous.

He walked to a large safe set into the wall, and began spinning the front dial, stopping and reversing it occasionally as he entered the combination. “This is the no-distractions-at-the-party cell phone game,” Tom said. There was a large click, and he stepped to the side, opening the safe door in the process. The door swung heavily, revealing a large dark space. “Everyone who wants to participate in the best reunion ever, put your cell phones inside!” Tom beamed mischievously at us.

“Fuck no.” Victoria said, crossing her arms sternly.

“Yeah, I’m not doing that.” Leann agreed.

“Can you maybe explain the point of this game, Tom?” Nick asked.

“Isn’t it obvious? It’s to ensure our fun night isn’t interrupted. No work, no other friends, no family. Tonight, this house is our world and nothing exists beyond it.” He grabbed his phone from his pocket, and placed it inside the safe.

“I think it’s a good idea.” Bianca said, and handed him her phone.

Tom laughed, “yeah, cause it was yours, babe. Remember? You suggested it at breakfast yesterday.”

Bianca thought back, “was it?”

Tom chuckled and kissed her affectionately on the cheek. He turned to Ricky, “the memory on this one,” he said gesturing to her with his thumb.

“Who needs brains when you’ve got a body like that, am I right?!” Nick whispered loudly to Tom, as he elbowed him in the chest knowingly. Bianca smiled sarcastically at him and I heard Victoria groan quietly beside me. Nick could be an ass sometimes. Heather gave him a small smack to the back of the head, glowering at him. Nick shrugged at her sheepishly.

“Eh, yeah.” Tom said as he put Bianca's phone with his. “Anyway,” he turned to the rest of us, quickly forgetting Nick’s comment and continuing, “haven’t you ever played that game, when going out to dinner where everyone puts their cell phone in the middle of the table, face down, and the first one to check theirs has to pay?”

“Ugh, fine.” Leann put her phone onto the pile.

Heather reluctantly pulled hers out of her pocket, and turned to Tom, “but you better write that combination down somewhere so when someone injures themselves while you’re passed out, we can get a phone.”

“Don’t worry,” Bianca reassured, “we’ve still got a landline in case of emergencies.”

Heather put her phone into the safe, followed shortly by Nick, Jacob, and Ricky. Addison twisted her mouth in frustration, looking from face to face, and begrudgingly handed Tom her phone. Everyone turned expectantly to Victoria and I, neither of us reaching towards our cell phones.

“What if something happens to Molly? What if my parents need to get in touch with us?” I asked.

“You gave them our number, right?”

I looked at Victoria, who nodded at me. Tom saw and continued, “see, they’ll be able to reach you. I promise!” I looked at my watch. It was three thirty.

“Alright.” I sighed and handed Tom my phone. I had texted my parents when we got in, and everything seemed to be going well. I didn’t see any harm in the situation. Victoria followed my lead, begrudgingly.

With all the phones accounted for in the safe, Tom swung the door closed with a loud click. “Trust me, we’ll have so much fun tonight, you guys won’t even notice you don’t have your phones.”

Everyone started out into the hall to continue the tour. I turned to Victoria, and winked, pointing to my smartwatch. She smiled, relief washing over her face. Even with my phone locked away, I’d know if someone was trying to get in touch with me.

Hours later, the beers swished and sloshed inside my stomach while heavy rain beat down on the glass doors beside us. I stood in the kitchen, arguing over the finer details of the most recent fan theory of Game of Thrones with Nick and Heather. Addison stood off to the side, listening to the argument while pulling on the sleeves of her oversized sweatshirt. Leann, Ricky, and Victoria were making a giant dish of nachos while Bianca whipped up a batch of margaritas. Tom danced behind her, trying his best to distract her from her task. She giggled as she leaned back into his body. They swayed to the music - a playlist of their own devising, made up entirely of music that was popular during our years in college. They had speakers set up in each room of the house, all connected to a master stereo in the living room, so no matter where you went, you couldn’t get away. But at least we could no longer hear the wind howling against the house. I watched Bianca move her hips side to side, her pilates-assisted ass pressing into Tom, whose smile was cheser-cat wide. They looked like teenagers. Even with this giant fancy home surrounding them, they acted like they were horny, nineteen, and in love. Just like I remembered.

“He is obviously only half Lannister and half Targaryen! Does he look like any of the Lannisters to you!?!” Nick gestured into the air enthusiastically while staring wide eyed at Heather.

“But does he really look like a Targaryen??” Heather asked, dubious of Nick’s argument.

“That’s because you only watch the show! You got to read the books!” Nick yelled, his face turning red with frustration.

“I have to go to the bathroom.” Addison whispered to the group, obviously uncomfortable with the heated debate, and left towards the stairs.

Nick rolled his eyes, and turned to Heather. “Oh look, we made overly sensitive Addison uncomfortable.”

“Shut up, Nick!” Bianca scolded, and turned to follow her.

He blew a raspberry and continued his lecture on true bloodlines.

Bianca returned several moments later, while Nick was describing the real heir to the Iron Throne in great detail. I turned to her, and she shook her head with a small smile, a sign I interpreted as meaning that Addison needed some space from the group for a moment. I nodded and returned the smile.

Once the nachos were done, we all went into the living room. Bianca placed a wide-brimmed margarita glass in front of me, full to the top with green slushy alcohol, the brim rimmed with salt. There was even a little yellow paper umbrella resting in it.

“Thank you, but I think I’ll pass on this round, Bianca.” I said politely, passing her back the large unbalanced glass, careful not to spill the contents. Bianca looked hurt, so I added “It looks amazing, but I’ve had a lot of beer. I don’t want to overdo it.” She reached for the drink.

Tom appeared behind her, “dude, come on! It’s a party!” He leaned towards me and lowered his voice, “Just one margarita won’t hurt, and Bianca put a lot of effort into them.”

I smiled, and brought my arm, and the margarita, back towards me. “Alright, alright!” I lifted my left hand up in surrender, “I’ll have a margarita.” Bianca’s face lit up. “But just one!” I said, raising my finger warningly at Tom, who smiled in return.

I brought the drink to my lips, and was pleasantly surprised. The margarita was sweet, but not too sweet like most fruity drinks. It was good, but after my first sip, I left the glass mostly untouched beside me as I joined the conversation of the rest of the group.

The years apart were long forgotten as old jokes were dredged up from the past, and shit talk passed from old friends without hurt feelings or damaged egos. We were just a group of carefree kids once again.

“Alright, piss break.” Nick slurred as he slowly got to his feet, stood for a moment, swaying slightly, and shuffled to the bathroom.

Ricky snickered, “wowzers, someone can’t hold his liquor anymore.”

The small black speakers above us began playing a pop song I recognized, but couldn’t name. “Oh shit!” Tom exclaimed, standing up and reaching for Heather, “this was my jam!”

Heather took his hand, and he pulled her up towards him. Ricky jumped off the couch, and shoved it towards the wall, creating more space for the impromptu dance floor. He offered his hand to Leann, bowing to her playfully, and she joined him. I turned to Victoria, who was sitting beside me on the other, larger couch. She smiled, and we joined in the party.

While Leann and Ricky danced awkwardly facing each other, but with an appropriate distance between them, Tom was hugging Heather to him, moving his body with hers to the beat of the music, much as he had earlier with his wife, but his face held a serious concentration that it hadn't before. Heather’s face was locked on Tom’s, her cheeks red.

I cringed internally at the way she was staring at him. It wasn’t unknown within our group that Heather had had a huge crush on Tom in college, but he never returned her affection.

I saw Bianca walk in from the kitchen. She stood, watching them dance for a moment, her face completely blank. Then, without warning, she turned and locked eyes with me. I felt the color rise in my face, and turned away. I figured that, along with all the jokes from the past, the drama was beginning to creep back into the group dynamic as well. We were all drunk, hanging out with people that defined our youth. It was to be expected that the juvenile feelings that marked these relationships in our memories would manifest tonight.

Tom and Heather’s faces were, at this point, only an inch or so apart, their eyes locked. I was about to suggest we kill the dance party when Ricky’s voice rose over the music, “man, Nick’s been in the bathroom for a really long time.”

I looked around, and noticed he was right, Nick was still gone. And so was Addison. Heather and Tom broke away. Tom’s eyes fell on his wife’s expressionless face, and he looked down in what looked like guilt. Uncomfortable, I thought Nick was a good excuse to separate myself from the situation. “I’ll go check on him. Make sure he’s not passed out in there.”

I let go of my wife and walked into the hallway next to the living room. If I remembered the tour accurately, there was a small powder room opposite the kitchen. Tom and Bianca had the decency to not but speakers in the hallway, so while I could still hear the music clearly, it was dulled by the wall. The hallway was dark, so I ran my hand along the wall searching for a light switch, but without luck. There was a thin stream of light coming from a thin, slightly ajar, door. The door I remembered as the small bathroom. Giving up on the light switch, I walked towards the light. I listened for a moment at the door, trying to pick up the sounds of urination, or the dull sounds of drunken snoring, but heard neither. In fact, other than my own breathing and the dull music, I heard nothing at all.

I knocked lightly on the door frame, “Nick? You ok, buddy?” There was no response. I reached my hand up, and pushed the door into the room. The door stuck on something. I pushed a little harder, but still it resisted. I leaned my shoulder into the space between the door and the wall, and craned my neck to look inside.

The door was stuck on Nick, who was sitting, passed out cold, on the toilet, his pants to the ground.

“Jesus, dude. Seriously?” I said, trying to force his feet back towards him so I could open the door wider, but I quickly stopped when I noticed that Nick’s eyes weren’t closed. He was staring at me. Staring at me with blank, glassy eyes. My heartbeat quickened, and I examined the rest of him: his face was bloated and purple, his tongue swollen, pushing his mouth ajar.

“Oh fuck, oh fuck!” I whispered under my breath, as I reached my hand out towards his neck. I tried to find a pulse, but it was useless. Nick was dead.

I pulled myself sharply out from where I had squeezed myself, bruising my arm as I did. I ignored the pain, and walked into the living room, past Tom, Heather, and Victoria, to the sound system, and turned it off. The sound of the storm surrounded us instantly, finally free of restriction. The wind and rain filled the air, thunder echoing into every corner.

“What the fuck, dude?” Tom asked. I could feel their eyes on my back as I tried to blink the burning tears away. I turned to face them, and breathed deeply, preparing myself.

“Nick is… Nick… Something happened to Nick.” I finally said.

They stared at me.

I felt frustration heating my body from the inside, “Nick’s fucking dead guys. He’s on the fucking toilet, and he’s fucking dead.” My voice cracked as tears began to flow freely down my cheeks.

Without a word, Jacob stood and ran out into the hall. Tom, Bianca, Heather, Leann and Victoria followed. I waited there, standing in the living room, alone. Where the fuck was Addison?

Last I had seen Addison was in the kitchen. But then she left to go use the bathroom. And she hadn’t been in the small bathroom, so she must be in the Master bathroom. I ran into the entrance way, turned up the stairs, and climb briskly, taking two steps at a time.

I ran into the bedroom. The room was just as it had been moments before, the french doors still open. I walked to them, and the view inside the bathroom made my stomach lurch with shock and horror.

Addison was in the tub, fully clothed. Her forearms rested on each side of the porcelain basin, her legs bent in front of her. She looked like she could be taking a bath, but the tub was dry except for the small line of blood leading from her body to the drain. Her face was twisted with horror. I felt myself begin to shake as I noticed the huge gash in her head, spreading from her forehead to behind her ear. I could see white skull through her injury. I looked down and saw blood, hair, and flesh on the corner of the lower step to the tub.

I stepped closer, my hand outstretched hesitantly to check a pulse, despite the obvious futility of the act. I had to check. I had to be certain. I placed my hand on her wrist. I tried to keep my face as far from her as possible, yet I couldn’t keep my eyes off of the crack in her head. From there, I could see the split in the skull itself, her pink brain visible under the blood that clumped into the roots of her hair. Her wrist was silent. There was no pulse, no life.

I looked at my friend. Shy, sweet, intelligent Addison. Her body limb. I stepped back and hastened to the sink, where I vomited. Nachos and beer splashed in the shallow bowl, falling on the counter and mirror. But I didn’t care. This was no time to worry about being a polite guest. I vomited again, then straightened and wiped my mouth.

Without turning back, thoughts raced through my mind. Maybe she slipped and hit her head? But the chances that both Addison and Nick died in horrible accidents was hard to believe. Plus, how could she have fallen to her death, then crawled into the bathtub to position herself like that? If this was an accident, she’d still be on the floor.

I turned away from the gruesome scene, and ran down the stairs. Everyone was in the living room. At least, everyone still left alive. Jacob sat on the floor, rocking back and forward, shaking his head in disbelief. Victoria crouched over him, her arms around his shoulders as she cooed words of comfort to him, but he didn’t seem to hear her. His platonic life partner was gone.

Leann had the cordless phone in her hand, tears streaming down her cheeks. She was frantically pressing buttons on the phone, getting more and more frustrated with every attempt.

“Goddammit!” She screamed, “what the fuck is wrong with this thing!?!”

I looked down, and saw that the base had been unplugged from the wall. “It’s dead.” I said, my voice sounded emotionless to my ears. I grabbed the cord, hanging uselessly from the phone’s base, and plugged it in. Leann placed the phone back down and the display lit up. I lifted the wireless phone, but it immediately went dead again. I put it back, and looked at Leann.

“We can't dial while it's in it’s base.”

Leann started sobbing harder. “We need to call an ambulance!” She cried at me, her body shaking uncontrollably.

“We need to call the police.” Leann’s son caught in her throat. She stared at me, her eyes wet and red. I swallowed. “I don’t think Nick died of natural causes.”

The sound of wind, rain, and thunder filled the room as everyone waited for me to continue.

“Addison was murdered. Her body’s in the bathroom upstairs.” I said, as calmly as I could despite my stomach performing somersaults inside of me and my brain shooting electricity through the sides of my head.

I turned to Tom and Bianca. Bianca looked ill and Tom was as white as a ghost. “We need the fucking cell phones.”

Tom nodded solemnly, and turned towards the front of the house.  

“There’s another landline in the office.” Bianca said quietly. She walked to Leann, placing a calming hand on her shoulder. “Come on, I know that one’s plugged in. Let’s go call the cops.”

Leann sniffled loudly and Bianca lead her towards the kitchen. The office was a sunroom extension at the corner of the house.

Heather leaned towards me and Ricky, her face between ours. “Do you know what this means?” Heather said, her voice lowered and horse.

I shook my head, looking at my wife and Jacob, who were still on the floor. Victoria's face was drawn into a pained mask, her lower lip trembling as it did when she was distraught. Jacob’s eyes were wide, but unseeing.

I felt Ricky shift his weight beside me.

“Someone has broken in, and is killing us, one by one.” Heather answered her own question.

Realization dawned on me. I completed the thought out loud, “there’s a killer in the house.”

Heather nodded and we stood in shock at what was happening. The large house loomed above and around us like a great weight. It had morphed from a luxurious suburban home into a death trap.

Our stupor was broken by loud music blasting through the speakers throughout the house. I looked at the stereo, but no one was even close to it.

“What the fuck??” Victoria asked, looking around.

I walked over and pressed the power button, the sound dimming quickly as the lights faded off. Instantly it sprung to life again, music pouring out around us.

“Fuck!” I yelled. The killer must be controlling it somehow.

“Leann and Bianca!” Heather screamed over the music.

Ricky ran out into the kitchen, the girls following. I looked down at Jacob, who hadn’t moved.

“Come on, we can’t leave you here alone.” I said, reaching my hand down to him. Jacob looked up at me, his eyes wide and empty. He shook his head slowly. I bent down and grabbed his hand with mine, forcing him up. He didn’t resist.

I dragged Jacob behind me as we ran to the office door. I saw Ricky throw himself at the white wood door. A loud crack of muscle hitting wood exploded into the kitchen and the door burst open into the room. A metallic scent hit my nose immediately. Ricky’s form took up most of the door, blocking the light from reaching me. Victoria and Heather stopped short behind him and simultaneously started screaming, the sounds harmonizing and mixing with the song playing over our heads. I put my hands on my wife’s shoulders, and looked over her to see the scene, the smell hitting my nose stronger. I recognized it then. It was the smell of blood. Lots and lots of blood.

Leann’s body was sprawled on the floor. I could only recognize her from the shirt she was wearing tonight. Her face was sunken, blood and bone protruding from broken flesh. Lines of red were splattered along the floor and walls, stretching out from her body like a twisted spiderweb. On the floor next to her was an old golfing trophy, I assumed from Tom’s more competitive athletic days. The tiny gold man, frozen in a perpetual swing, was smeared with blood from the violent hand the broke Leann’s body, over and over again.

Victoria turned away from the gruesome scene and rested her head on my shoulder as she sobbed. I hugged her, turning my face from the bloody office. I held my wife tight to me, comforted, if only slightly, by her physical touch. A terrible pop song from our youth ended, and the room was filled with the sound of the raging storm. Thunder cackled and I shook with the sound. Lightning illuminated the window beside me as a one hit wonder came on over the speakers.

Ricky stepped back from the doorway, and faced us. His face stoic, but with a hint of pained disgust. Ricky had always been a quiet lumbering giant. In college, our hockey coach, Coach Hutchinson, was practically stalking the guy to get him to try out for the team. Not for skill, but for his appearance/size alone. But Ricky always refused. He never excelled in his studies either - don’t get me wrong, the man’s not dumb at all, he’s just not interested in anything that isn’t writing. And it’s easy to see why, his short stories and poetry were amazing. I was always fascinated with him, this giant man who could write anyone to tears, love, or terror. If he hadn’t been an English major, I’m not sure how he would’ve graduated.

Victoria was always jealous of his skills. They were the first ones of the group to become friends. Victoria introduced herself to him on the first day of Introduction to Literature. Ricky didn’t talk much, but he seemed to enjoy her company, and Victoria enjoyed silence. They’d spend a lot of nights for those four years, studying and writing together. But while Victoria would spend days on a paper or story, only to receive a B, Ricky would whip something up the night before and get an A as well as public praise. She loved Ricky, but was frustrated by his effortless success. When we all graduated, Victoria tried to make a go of it as a writer, but it never worked out. Luckily, she had minored in computer information technology. When she realized her life as an author would be a long and tireless one without much success, she decided to take some additional classes in programming and web development. She was quite good with computers and that had always been her fallback option, but it wasn’t her dream. Ricky, on the other hand, was offered a professional writing gig immediately out of school.

I remember watching his hulking frame in the doorway and a part of my mind wondering what he’d write about after that night. Would the traumatic evening become a memoir? Or would that night influence a best selling novel? Maybe a new television show?

If he survived, that was.

I scanned the room behind him, trying to avoid looking directly at Leann. “Where the fuck is the other phone?” I asked.

Victoria looked around, “Bianca must have it!” She exclaimed, looking up at me, her eyes filling with hope.

I nodded, “I pray she was able to call for help.”

Victoria nodded, the hope petering slightly from her face.

“We need to search the house.” Heather said, her voice flat. I looked up. Heather’s face was stoic as she stared at Leann. They had been best friends. I untangled an arm from my wife, and reached my hand out, placing it on her shoulder. Pulling away and locking eyes with me, she repeated herself, “we need to search the house.”

Victoria stepped back and wiped her eyes. “You’re right,” she sniffled, “we need to find whoever’s doing this to us and find Bianca. God, I hope she’s ok. I don’t want to imagine what he might… what he might be doing to her.” Her voice cracked with a fresh sob, and she wrapped her arms protectively around herself. I rubbed her back, trying to push the same thoughts and violent images from my mind.

“Chuck and Victoria, you should check the upstairs. See if Tom has the phones. Ricky and I will check the basement, and then we’ll meet here and check the main floor.” Heather instructed.

I nodded, and turned to face the empty kitchen. “Where’s Jacob? He was here a second ago.”

“Goddammit!” Heather exclaimed, “we don’t have time for this. We have to get this situation under control!” Heather stormed off towards the basement door, Ricky following.

I gulped, and, using my hand still on her back, lead Victoria through the kitchen into the living room. The living room felt colder than it had when we first arrive. Even with the lights above us illuminating the room in a yellow glow, it seemed dark, like the corners were hiding secrets that threatened our very lives. I walked to the stereo and hit the large rectangular on/off button. The button popped up from the face of the stereo and the music faded. I breathed a sigh of relief, and we continued upstairs.

The two guest rooms were empty. We had checked the closets and under the bed, and even a large wardrobe in the larger of the rooms, but there was no sign of life. The rooms seemed oddly empty and void of the extravagance the other rooms possessed.

We walked into the exercise room, but the room was just a bunch of exercise equipment and an empty space for yoga and pilates. The closet was full of only yoga mats, bricks, and other assorted items I didn’t recognize.

Finally, we got to the bedroom. I wanted to make sure Tom was ok, but still my legs slowed as we approached the door, the image of Addison, dead in the tub, her skull and brains exposed making my feet heavier with each approaching step. If Victoria hadn’t been at my side, I don’t think I’d be able to go on. I pushed through the emotional quicksand, forcing my feet forward until I was at the open door. I looked in the room and noticed the closet door open and the light on. Straining my ears, I could hear Tom frantically muttering to himself, his voice wet with tears.

Trying to forget the bathroom, I ran to the closet. Tom was desperately spinning the dial of the safe. He looked at me, his face red with tears.

“It won’t fucking open!” He screamed, kicking the wall in front of him hard enough to leave a dent.

“Are you putting the combination in correctly?” I asked.

“Yes, I’m putting the fucking combination in correctly! Of course I am! It’s our fucking wedding anniversary! I wouldn’t fucking forget that!” The corner of Tom’s mouth were white with frothy spit.

I step up to the safe, “What’s was the date, again? I’ll try.”

Tom breathed deeply, and exhaled loudly, trying to calm himself. “It’s June 19th, 2006.” He said. “It’s a five number combination, left right left right. It was 61906.”

I turned the dial to the left till it reached 6, and heard a slight click within the safe mechanism. Then turned the dial to the right to 1, with a slight click. I repeated this until the small black arrow on the dial reached 6, once again. There was no click.

“Well the rest of the combination seems to be working, it’s just that last number. Maybe it’s no longer 6? Either way, it won’t take too long to try the nine other numbers.” I said. Tom nodded, slowly calming himself. I stepped back so he could reach the dial and begin the process all over again.

I lifted my wrist and looked at my watch. The menu had an option to send a text to one of my recent contacts. I could send a text to my mom and ask her to send help. I began to travel through the menu, looking for the option when suddenly loud rock music flowed from the speakers in the bedroom, making me jump.

“What the fuck!” I screamed. I ran out into the bedroom. Victoria was staring at the bathtub, her hand over her mouth, tears flooding down her face. She looked at me, her eyes wide with terror.

“We need to check on the others. We’ll come figure this out afterwards. Someone could be dying as we speak.”

I ran past my horrified wife, Tom following behind me. We flew down the stairs, and into the living room. It was empty. I slammed the on/off button on the stereo. Screams echoed throughout the house. It was coming from the other side of the stairs.

“The dining room!” Tom yelled, and ran, Victoria catching up to us and following. I listened closer. It wasn’t coming from this floor though. It was coming from upstairs. The floor Victoria and I just checked from top to bottom.

I ran to the top of the steps. The sound was coming from the exercise room. I ran in, my eyes registering Bianca and Jacob immediately. But the scene wasn’t right.

My brain tried to interpret the image before me, but it wouldn’t compute. Jacob was on the floor, Bianca above him. Both of them, along with the room, were covered in blood.

“Bianca! Are you ok?” I asked, “is Jacob!?!”

Bianca shook her head, “I’m ok, but… I think… I think Jacob’s dead.”

I rested my hand on my knees, my breath was coming in short gasps. I recognized the uncomfortable sensation as hyperventilating. How could this be happening to us? How could something so fucked up happen to us?

Bianca took a step towards me and I looked up. I noticed a bloodied weight in her hand. The murder weapon. But why was Bianca holding the murder weapon? Had she fought the killer for it?

She took a step towards me. Her face was twisted, not in horror or disgust, but in pleasure.

“Wh… What… what’s going... on?” I said between breaths.

She didn’t answer, but took another step towards me, her smile spreading across her face.

“I’m going to enjoy killing you, Chuck.” She said.

I shook my head in disbelief, stepping backwards.

“Don’t go, Charles.” She cooed. “Poor little pathetic Charles. How does it feel to have married Tom’s leftovers? Do you wake up every morning and remember comforting the love of your life over a basic douche like Tom?”

She took another step closer. My breathing was slowly returning to normal and my brain was clearing. I checked my peripheral for a potential weapon, but saw nothing. The house was immaculate, to the point of resembling a show house. There were no objects, I realized. I was surrounded by giant equipment I couldn’t lift, but no weights, not even a plastic water bottle I could use to defend myself against the petite blood-covered blonde slowly approaching me.

“You were such a miserable dope that first year. Pathetically waiting hand and foot on that stupid whore.”

Bianca took a step towards me, and I turned and ran. I ran down the stairs as fast as I could. I felt like I would fall forward with each step I whizzed by. I could hear Bianca running behind me, her breath ragged and sharp. Her footsteps pounding on the old wood, causing it to creak and groan under her weight. I jumped the last few steps, not looking behind me, not wanting to know how close she was, or to slow myself down. I slid towards the front door, hitting my shoulder into it with a thud. Pain shot through me, but I didn’t care. I twisted the knob, and pulled, but it wouldn’t budge. I threw the deadbolt, and pulled again, but to no avail. I felt a light hand on my shoulder, and the sweat on my forehead turned cold. I looked down and saw four long pink manicured fingernails.

“You’re not getting out that way, Chuck.” Bianca’s voice was calm and dark. I turned slowly to face her. She was only an inch away. I could feel her warm breath and I could see the glint of metal in her hand. A splatter of Jacob’s blood ran through the middle of Bianca’s face. She drew her face towards mine, passing me, till her lips rested against my ear.

“At least I’m beautiful, right?” She whispered.

“What’s going on!?!” My heart lept at the sound of my wife’s voice. Bianca turned, and I could see Tom, Victoria, Heather, and Ricky standing behind her, their faces twisted in confusion and shock. Victoria stepped back with the recognition of blood on Bianca’s face and shirt. “What the fuck is going on!?!” Victoria’s voice filled with disgust and fear.

Realizing what I had to do, I grabbed Bianca’s arms and held them behind her. She squirmed against my grip, “get off me!” She screamed.

“She killed Addison! And Leann! And Nick!” I yelled to Victoria, who looked at me uneasily. “I just caught her! She was standing over Jacob's body!”

“Let. Go.” Bianca cried between attempts to pull away from me.

“Body?” Heather asked hesitantly.

Victoria put her hand over her mouth, as if she might be sick.

Bianca dropped her right hand, the one holding the weight, hard. I jumped back without letting go, just in time to avoid having my hip smashed.

Tom was shaking his head in disbelief, his face lacking all of its usual charm and chipperness. He looked like he was in shock.

“She's still holding the bloody weight! Go look, if you don’t believe me.” I said, my voice strained with the effort of restraining Bianca. “He's in the gym.”

Tom turned and walked slowly up the stairs, hesitantly dragging his body towards the fourth of his dead friends. Victoria followed and Heather, not losing her go-getter attitude during the unreal friend-turned-homicidal-lunatic situation, ran past them and into the exercise room.

Her scream filled the hallway and entrance where I stood, trying to keep the Bianca from killing the rest of us.

Ricky, seeing my struggle, came and grabbed Bianca from me. I allowed him to take her.

“What should we do with her?” He asked.

I shrugged. What does one do when your friend becomes a psycho without reason?

I could hear the group return from upstairs, and I turned away from Bianca and Ricky. Heather looked ill, all of the blood completely drained from her face. Victoria ran to me, and began to sob into my shoulder. I hugged her tightly.

Tom was shaking his head, staring at his wife, who was still being restrained, in disbelief. “Sweetheart.” The word trailed out of his mouth slowly, “did you really?” A tear fell from his eye. Bianca glared at him silently in response. “But why?” He asked, his voice strained and weak.

Bianca stood, her arms held behind her, the bloodied weight still in her grasp. “Why?” She asked, “why!?!” She screamed. She pulled her arms easily out from Ricky’s hold. She stepped towards Tom, and threw the weight at his head. He ducked, and it landed against the wall and fell heavily on the steps, then rolled onto the floor behind us. There was a sizeable hole in the plaster where it had landed. We all stood in shock as Bianca ran into the living room.

I turned to Ricky, “what the fuck?” I exclaimed. Ricky shrugged, and turned to follow her. We could do nothing but watch him leave.

With both out of view, I shook my head clear and ran to the front door. I tried it again, pulling at the knob with all my strength, but it wouldn’t budge. I ran into the living room, luckily devoid of either Bianca or Ricky, and fell on the large window facing the front yard. It was barren of any lock mechanisms and wouldn't even budge when I tried to open it. I growled in frustration, completely losing what little rational thought I had been able to maintain. I grabbed a lamp from the side table and threw it against the window, but it bounced off harmlessly.

“What the fuck!?” I screamed, my voice rough with fear and desperation. My throat was tight and I had to force myself to swallow. I turned to Tom, Heather, and Victoria.

“I told you,” Tom said quietly, looking at the window behind me, “Bianca was in charge of the renovations. She redid the windows and door too. I guess…” He trailed off. But we knew what he was thinking. She didn’t just renovate the house, she created a cage. She planned to murder all of us.

“But why?” I asked. “So she could run away with Ricky?”

“I always thought he had feelings for her.” Tom said, his voice cold and distant. He was lost. Too overwhelmed and in too much shock to feel emotions anymore. 

“Jesus.” Victoria said. “What the fuck do we do now?”

“The most logical thing is to stay here, together.” Heather said, her voice calm and filled with the authority of one often in charge. “The phone will be charged enough for me to call 9-1-1 soon. Until then, we should stand in a circle, with our backs together. That way, we can see if they try to attack us. We outnumber them, they can’t kill all of us at once. That’s the safest thing we can do right now.”

We stood in silence for a second, thinking about the situation and mulling over what needed to be done to survive. A loud burst of thunder filled the room, and lighting illuminated the yard from outside. It was followed by a deafening crack, and the house was plunged into darkness.

“Oh fuck me!” I screamed, my eyes falling on where I remembered the now black phone was behind Tom.

I looked to the window, but the streetlights had gone out outside as well. We were shrouded in utter blackness.

“The cell phones!” Tom’s voice pierced the darkness beside me, “that bitch was the one that suggested we lock them up!” I felt him move beside me, and heard his footsteps as he ran towards the stairs.

“Fuck! Tom, stop!” Victoria called after him, but it was too late. We could hear the thud of heavy footsteps running up the stairs.

Realization hit me. “That fucking bitch must have changed the combination!”

“Probably after she killed Addison.” Heather's voice came from beside me, terror threatening to break the calm she had, till then, successfully forced into her tone.

“We know the combination is mostly the same. Tom just has to try the nine remaining numbers to figure it out. If we're lucky, it'll be one of the first numbers he tries.” Victoria reasoned.

I nodded, uselessly. “Worst case scenario, it won't take him forever to try nIne combinations.” I thought for a moment, surrounded in darkness, and added “I hope he has a flashlight up there.”

“Alright, whatever,” Heather said, “as long as the rest of us stay here, together, we still outnumber them.”

The house wheezed, and shook with the weight of the storm. We stood there in silence, desperately straining our ears to hear any sound around us in the black room. I reached my hand out tentatively to the spot I had last heard Victoria’s voice come from. I found her soft, small hand, and grabbed it. She squeezed my hand in return. I held my breath, the sounds of the storm were overpowering the loud pounding of my blood through my ears.

A crash echoed around us, followed by a streak of lightning which illuminated the room. Behind Heather stood Bianca, her arm raised, the stained trophy from the office hovering above her.

Victoria screamed as darkness descended around us once more. Despite thunder stretching across the sky with a low grumble that echoed in my chest, I could hear the impact clearly. There was a wet thud, and a crack that sent shivers down my spine. A thick warm substance landed on my face and arm. Something heavy began to fall beside me, and I heard the sickening snap of Heather’s bones as she landed, hard, in front of us on the wooden floor.

“That’s the original wood you know.” Bianca’s voice danced around in the dark, and I brought Victoria closer to me, wrapping my wet arm around her shoulders. Her body was shaking, and I could her her breath burdened with heavy tears.

With a sharp snap, electricity flooded the house once more. As the lights came on around us, I felt my stomach lurch and bile rise to the top of my throat: Bianca’s face was mere inches from my own, and she was smiling. Her arm raised above her head once more.

Without time to think or process much of what was around me, I pushed my wife away from me, balled my fist, and punched Bianca as hard as I could in the stomach. Her breath left her instantly, and her hand dropped as she curled into herself, hitting the side of my arm with the trophy as it descended. It stung, but the force behind it was weak and the direction off enough to cause little damage.

Bianca turned in pain, and I saw Heather. She lay on the ground, her limbs twisted around her. As with Addison, her head was split with a crack, but this one was much larger and more ragged than Addison’s. Blood and brains had exploded out of her skull, as if Bianca had destroyed a mere pinata. The room, as well as Victoria and I were covered in the remains of our friend.

I looked to Victoria, who stood motionless, staring at Bianca, her mouth wide open and a splash of blood staining her shirt and pants. Her face was pale, and I saw that she was now shaking more violently, her body trembling at the sight. I reached out towards her. “Victoria.” I said. I looked from her to Bianca, who was trying to stand up straight, her hands over her stomach protectively. She was looking from me to Victoria and back. My hand was almost to my wife’s arm. Victoria shook her head, and stepped back out of my reach. I knew what she was going to do, and I had to stop her with my voice. “Victoria.” I said again. Tears streamed down her face as she shook her head harder.

“No, no, no, no.” She said, the words barely leaving her lips, turning into sobs by the last “no.” She turned and ran to the kitchen. Bianca straightened, shot me a quick glare, and followed.

I stepped forward and grab her arm, “like hell I’m going to let you murder my wife!”

She snorted, “Oh yes, your wife.” She elongated the last word mockingly.

I tightened my grip around her arm and tried to swing her into the wall behind me, but she resisted, digging her feet into the floor and pulling on her trapped arm. I saw her look down at where the trophy had dropped next to Heather’s body, and I kicked her hard in the shin.

She screamed out as the leg fell underneath her, but she continued to reach towards the murder weapon.

Lifting my leg to stomp on her now bent leg in front of me, hoping to break her ankle as my foot landed on her thigh, I felt a hard thud against my head. I fell to my knees, barely missing Heather’s face, and looked up to see Ricky, standing behind me, lowering the weight that killed Jacob to his side. He returned my gaze, his face barely revealing a look of concern before straightening back into apathetic coldness.

Tears welled in my eyes uncontrollably. My head stinging where I was hit. Warm blood began to trickle behind my ear. “Why?” I asked, my voice strained with pain and confusion.

He didn’t answer. Recovering herself, Bianca stood. She looked down at me with disgust, then up at Ricky. In an annoyed tone, she said, “you didn’t fucking kill him, asshole!”

Ricky shrugged at her, “you’re the murderer in all this, not me.”

Bianca scoffed, and lowered herself so that she was level with my ear. “Do you ever think about Tom fucking your perfect wife? Do you ever look at him, goofing off and flirting with even tubbo here,” she gestured to Heather, “and remember with horror and shame that he was the idiot who took your precious Victoria’s virginity?” I could feel an old anger growing inside me, rising from beneath me until my body was alight with its heat. “Does it haunt you, to know that she told him she loved him, and he broke up with her in reply? The woman you were infatuated with, the woman you loved beyond all reason, was used and abused by an idiot. Her heart was torn and all Tom did was go and immediately fuck me. You know why?” She pressed her lips closer to my ear and continued, whispering, “because he thought of her as just a pussy to fuck. He never cared about her. He just liked having that pretty mouth around his cock.” I was shaking with rage. Bianca smiled. “You know, I’ve always suspected that, if Tom propositioned her, she fuck him in a heartbeat. I bet, if Tom asked her to leave you for him, she wouldn’t even pack her bags. She’d grab his arm and run out the door before you even finished taking a shit.”

My rage exploded and I swung the trophy my fingers had found as Bianca made her speech. Despite not aiming, I hit her squarely in the side of the head. Bianca fell to the side. Ricky lunged for me and I raised my arm and swung down, missing his head but hitting his left shoulder hard enough to slow him down.

I jumped up, the sudden movement making me dizzy. I swallowed and ran to the kitchen. Victoria was at the door leading into the backyard, desperately clawing at the sides, trying to peel them free of whatever Bianca had used to seal them. The white door frame was stained with red marks, my wife’s fingertips covered in blood. I noticed with a sickening feeling that one of her nails was missing.

I heard Bianca and Ricky getting up with groans. I grabbed Victoria’s shoulder, “quick, we have to get out of here! That door isn’t going to open, we have to try another way!”

Victoria looked at me, not stopping her attempts to open the door. Her eyes were wide with panic, her face barely recognizable. She was in a manic frenzy, and I realized reason wasn’t going to work. I wrapped my arms around her waist and began pulling her towards the garage door.

Victoria shoot out from my grasp, both of us slippery with our friends’ blood, and ran towards the office.

I went to follow her, but at that moment, Bianca came into the room. I froze and stared at her as she smiled wickedly at me. The trophy was in her hand again. She turned her head, smiled at me, and began to run to where I had just watched my wife disappear.

I lunged towards her, my heart pounding, and reached out, fast. My hand found blonde hair. I clenched my fist. Bianca kept running, but was stopped short by my grip. She screamed as her feet continued to move under her while her head and shoulders stayed where they were. Her legs shot out in front of her and she fell with a crash. I could feel the pull of her hair in my fist as the rest of her body fell too far away. A ripping sound echoed in the room as some of the hair grew slack in my hand. I let go, chunks of bloody flesh falling from my hand where they had pulled free from her scalp.

I bent down to grab her. She rolled out of my reach. I dove at her, but she was standing before I could keep her on the ground. Damn that pilates.

She raised the trophy once again. Instead of wasting time trying to stand, I cowered beneath her, raising my arms to protect my face. A choked sob escaped my mouth as I prepared for the pain. For death.

There was a dull whack, and Bianca’s body fell on top me like a thick heavy sack. I instinctively reached for her as she rolled off, stopping her from falling to the floor, and slowly lowered her. She landed with a soft thud and moaned in pain, putting a hand to the back of her head. I realized I was crying, and wiped my face with the sleeve of my shirt. I looked up to see Victoria, eyes wide, a pan in her hands.

“Are you ok?” Victoria asked. I nodded, relieved to see my wife shaken out of her panic. Hearing my cries and realizing I was in danger had snapped her back to reality and I had my strong Victoria back, but only for a second. Recovering quickly, Bianca reached out and grabbed Victoria’s leg. The back of Bianca’s head, only inches from my face, was bleeding quite badly, from both the pan and losing so much of her hair. Her arm was shaky, but still she was able to find the force she needed to pull her down to the floor.

I kicked at Bianca, and wrapped my arms around her shoulders to stop her, but I was suddenly aware of my body being lifted from the ground, Bianca sliding from my hold. I screamed and kicked as my arms were held behind my back. I felt the large bulk of Ricky behind me, and  I looked over my shoulder at him. His face was oddly calm.

I twisted in his clutch, but he just stared at Bianca in front of him, wrestling with Victoria as she tried to stand while keeping Victoria down. I kicked at his shin, but I felt like a child fighting against a parent, my feeble attempts to harm completely unnoticed.

“What the fuck are you doing, man?” I screamed at him, looking from his face to my wife’s losing battle with the murderer. “You’re married, you’re successful, you’re happy! Why are you helping this psychobitch!?!”

Ricky smiled slightly at Bianca, “because she’s all I ever wanted.” He answered.

I turned away in disgust, and watched Bianca. Despite Victoria being much less injured, she was struggling to overcome Bianca. I tried to pull my arms from Ricky, but his grip was too tight, too firm. Steeling myself, I pulled forward while raising my leg, determined to put every inch of power I had into saving my wife. I kicked back hard, trying to land the blow on his knee and force him down, but he moved back just in time, and twisted my arm tight. I fell to the floor with a scream. He lowered his knee onto my back, pinning me to the linoleum floor. I continued to fight fruitlessly, my eyes glued to my wife.

Bianca was now standing above her, smiling in glorious victory. Despite her efforts, Victoria couldn’t seem to keep her eyes open. I hadn’t witnessed Bianca hurt her yet, or heard any heavy blow. I couldn’t comprehend why Victoria was struggling so much. I watched her body fall limp as all her strength disappeared.

“What’s wrong with her!?” I yelled at Bianca. She looked at me, a small expression of disappointment on her face.

“You’re still looking quite perky…” She said, “you really should have had more of your margarita.” My stomach sank. No wonder she seemed to be recovering so much faster than anyone else.

Bianca raised the trophy, and I screamed, thrashing against Ricky.

“Please, no!” Tears stung my eyes. “Don’t hurt her! We have a child! Please! Stop!”

Bianca looked at me, and winked. Her arms began to descend down and I screamed, the pain and fear exploding out of my violently as I felt the weight of true ineffectiveness.

The trophy come down on Victoria with a wet heavy thump. Blood squirted above her, and fell in a line that connected me to her one last time. Bianca raised her arms and dropped them, over and over again. The sound of the metal hitting Victoria’s face and head made me vomit onto the floor between desperate sobs. She was so drugged up, she didn’t even scream, and soon the room was silent except for the dull thud of the trophy hitting her dead flesh, and the spray of blood against the wall and us. Some part of my mind reach out through the fog of shock and pain to realize that the storm outside had stopped. I fell, the struggle to win, to survive, dying inside me. I watched, sobbing, as my wife’s face was pounded into a mess of flesh, bone, and blood. She was soon unrecognizable.

“Why?” I asked, the word spitting from my mouth as a choked sob.

Bianca turned to me, dropping the trophy at her feet with a clash that rang in the quiet room. “Why? Why!? Why!?!” She repeated, each why growing louder until she was screaming. Her arms were covered in blood, all the way to her elbows, and her face and hair were now wet it. Bits of my wife’s tissue were falling from her clothes, and she took a step towards me, her feet sticking slightly to the blood on the floor. She curled her lip into a snarl as she brought her face to mine.

“Because, I am not just a body.” Her voice was low, almost like a growl. “I have spent my whole life being called dumb, but pretty. Useless, but gorgeous.” She spun away from me, gesturing to the empty room, yelling, “Simple, but at least I’m fuckable!” She turned back to me, “but look! Look at me now!” She yelled, raising her arms to the air. “Am I useless now? Am I nothing but a body now, Chuck? Look at me, look at what I’m capable of!” She lowered her arms, and locked eyes with me, “Now I’ll be remembered for more than being beautiful, more than just a nice pair of tits, more than an ass.” She lowered her face to mine again, and whispered, “I have affected you. Your life is ruined, because of me. You will die at my hands. Could just a body do that?” She smiled, and stood.

Walking towards the kitchen counter, she continued, “None of you ever thought much of me. Don’t try to tell me otherwise. I’m sick of listening to lies. I’m just the pretty face of the group. And for that, each and every one of you will pay.” She pulled a knife out of a drawer, and turned back to me, stepping over my wife’s mutilated body. “And now it’s your turn.” She looked up at Ricky, “pick him up.”

I began to fight, screaming, as Ricky lifted me back to standing. Bianca raised the knife.

A loud bang echoed off the glass surrounding us, making the room resonate with the sound. My ears felt as if they had begun to bleed, and a loud ringing noise filled my hearing. Bianca fell with a heavy solid thud. I felt Ricky’s grasp fall away and I dove to the side. Another bang and I turned to watch Ricky fall backwards, hitting his already bleeding head on the window behind him.

I looked towards the door to the living room. Tom stood holding a shotgun up to his eye. His arm fell, and the gun hung uselessly beside him. He looked from my dead wife to his, and then to the dead Ricky. His eyes locked on mine and I saw an intense determination within them. His jaw was locked in a stern expression I had never seen before. Slowly, a deranged smile grew on his face.

“That cunt didn’t know about Janet here!” He threw his head back and laughed maniacally to the ceiling. Tom had always enjoyed traditionally manly sports and activities. I wasn’t surprised hunting would be one of them. I guess Bianca hadn’t approved. Thank god that didn’t stop him.

“But… she drugged the margaritas… How are you still standing?” I stammered.

“I spilled mine before even getting a sip. And here I was, worried she’d be pissed I stained the couch!” Deep barks of laughter spewed from his body uncontrollably.

I jumped up, and ran to the living room where I had plugged in the phone, but it was gone. Tom was still laughing like a psychopath in the kitchen.

“Jesus, Tom. Shut the fuck up, will yea?”

Tom stopped laughing, his face falling to a frown. He walked to the couch beside me and sat down. All the energy that was there seconds ago drained from him. I didn’t care, I just wanted to get out of that damn house.

“Did you get into the safe?” I asked.

Tom shook his head solemnly.

“Was there any window or door she didn’t replace in the renovations?” Tom shook his head hopelessly. I clutched my head, trying to force the images of what remained of my wife in the kitchen from my mind. “Fucking hell, Tom, just shot the damn door open!” I growled.

“No more bullets.” He said, blankly.

I screamed in frustration, and sat heavily beside him. Putting my elbows on my thighs, I dropped my head into my hands, and began to sob. The salty liquid flowed out as waves of emotion washed over me. All of the stress, fear, and shock of the night was drowning me, and I had decided to let it.

And then my watch buzzed. I sniffled, blinking away the tears, and looked down at my wrist.

My smartwatch. It was 9:08pm.

The screen was illuminated, and in small font it read:

MOM:

Hope you guys are having fun!

Finally got Holly to bed.

She misses you!!

Xoxox

I sat there, dumbfounded for a moment. I hit the right button on the watch, and selected the Reply option.

From there, I had the option of Voice, Canned messages, or Emoji. I looked at the options for a moment mulling them over..

A scene floated in front of me, an image of me sending a kissy emoji, then going into the kitchen, turning on the gas, and kneeling in the oven until this pain was permanently erased. But then I thought of Molly. I thought of her smile, and her laugh. I thought of her red tear stained face as I put a band-aid on yet another skinned knee. I thought of her sleeping beside me, the look of innocence and peace. She had so much to learn, so much life ahead of her. A life of pain, loss, love, discovery. A full life, a life of value.

I breathed in, and selected Voice. A little icon of a microphone displayed.

“Send help.” My watch thought for a moment, and then the two words displayed on the screen. I selected the ok button.

Sent.

[topicprinter]

Hey - Pat from StarterStory.com here with another interview.Today's interview is with Yaniv Masjedi (u/nextiva) of Nextiva, a brand that makes business communications tools.Some stats:Product: business communications tools.Revenue/mo: $10,000,000Started: May 2008Location: Scottsdale, AZFounders: 2Employees: 1000Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?Hi, Everyone! My name is Yaniv Masjedi and I’m the CMO of Nextiva, a leading business communications company based in Scottsdale, Arizona. I’ve been with the company since the very beginning (spring 2008) when we signed our first customer.Our co-founder and CEO, Tomas Gorny, came up with the idea for Nextiva after experiencing a ton of inefficiencies in the business phone service and business communication market. He wanted to solve for those and create a company that was focused on continually innovating and delivering the best customer experience the industry had ever seen.imageIt’s been a really fun ride. We’ve actually evolved within the last year from a business providing primarily business phone services to one that solves all communication challenges for companies. Now we combine CRM tools, team collaboration tools and business communication tools all on one platform called NextOS.We’ve also grown exponentially since those early days in 2008. While we started with a few people in a windowless conference room, we now have more than 1,000 team members spread out across offices across the world.What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?The idea for Nextiva came from Tomas. He is an amazing entrepreneur, and after founding several phenomenal companies over the years, in 2008, he decided to take a crack at reforming the inefficient and antiquated business communications industry. He and I had worked together previously; I actually started in sales roles at another one of his companies. When he told me of his idea for Nextiva, I jumped at the opportunity to join him and the team.The team was so small at the time -just a few of us- and there was a need for marketing right away. Even though I’d never worked in the business communication industry, I dove right in. Now, more than a decade later, I’ve loved what I do every day. Marketing is such a dynamic field; it’s been fun to come up with ideas to help Nextiva grow and work with some of the brightest minds in the business.Nextiva itself launched as basically the tiniest player in the VoIP industry. We were surrounded by giants, and those giants were highly skeptical of our ability to stand on our own and compete with them. We welcomed this challenge and decided to do things differently. We never accepted outside funding; Nextiva is entirely self-funded. We focused on listening to our customers, developing solutions customized to their needs and moving forward. We developed authentic relationships with customers and designed a customer experience model we were so excited about that we even trademarked the term Amazing Service.It was a confluence of all of those things that have helped us grow as fast as we have. Amazing Service has been the backbone of everything we’ve done -every product decision, every interaction, even how we treat one another on the Nextiva team. Instead of only focusing on delivering excellent service externally, we’ve made it our mission to also deliver service internally by treating our team members as well as possible. This has helped us earn many awards for company culture, and keep our retention rates high. Some of Nextiva’s early employees are still with us today.imageBeyond our Amazing Service and the delivery of great business VoIP products, as time went on we started to notice our customers struggle with their business communications as a whole, beyond phone service. Customers were sharing stories of struggle around customer relationship management, of not being able to afford the same tools available to massive corporations, of missed opportunities in team collaboration, of their inability to track various forms of communication, and their constant struggle to keep up with dozens of communication applications that would monitor everything from phone to email to text to social media to chat.Tomas saw this as an opportunity to deliver better service than ever, and over the course of several years, our engineering team worked to create a never-before-seen software tool that would be both affordable and take away the need for so much communication confusion. We named that tool NextOS and launched it in spring 2018, right around our 10th anniversary in business.imageThe announcement has changed the game for Nextiva. With it, we’ve transformed from a business offering VoIP services to a business communications company that, while still offering VoIP, is now helping businesses more holistically. The reception from the industry has been overwhelmingly positive, and it has changed our company in profound ways.I think Tomas speaks to this transformation best, saying, “VoIP is to Nextiva as books are to Amazon.” That quote captures it all. It also illustrates that even 11 years in, we are still just getting started.Take us through the process of designing, prototyping, and manufacturing your first product.Our process of design to prototype to market was pretty simple. We knew of many VoIP services out there and knew the types of phones required to deliver that kind of service. The founding team, as part of other companies, had been VoIP customers previously, so we were aware of what worked and what desperately needed to be improved. This helped a lot when designing our first product.Really early, we partnered with a company that made technology for cloud phone systems. Our engineers worked closely with them to create the design we had in mind, and then we were off to market.Describe the process of launching the business.Launching Nextiva was incredibly exciting, especially since our small team knew what kind of potential the idea had and how much the market needed what we would offer.The issue, though, was that no one knew we existed.I remember our team-building nextiva.com (we did it by ourselves) and then brainstorming as to how to get the word out to potential customers. Facebook was tiny back then; digital advertising had hardly taken off in 2008. But Google was big, so we created a few ads on Google.What’s amazing is that the first day we posted an ad to Google was the same day we signed our first customer. That fast of response was an early sign of things to come; that the market needed what we were providing and that customers were ready to jump ship from some of our larger competitors and take a chance on us.Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?There are so many factors that have gone into us attracting and retaining customers. First and foremost it has been our commitment to listening to our clients and responding to their needs; to really caring about their challenges. Our innovative products and Amazing Service promise had also gone hand-in-hand with this.I believe that happy team members attract happy customers. Our commitment to serving our team members and making Nextiva a really fun, inclusive, supportive and positive place to work has also been integral to retaining customers. This also goes back to hiring. We are very strategic when it comes to bringing on new team members to make sure they are both cultural fit in our offices and have the drive to move Nextiva forward. This has been a huge focus for us, and it has paid off.On the marketing side, we’ve done some fun things to bring in new customers, too. I remember a few years back when we were invited to exhibit at a major industry conference. All of our biggest competitors were there, and tons of potential customers were going to be walking the expo hall. To stand out, we hired former basketball star Dennis Rodman to shoot hoops for a few hours in front of our booth. It was a spectacle (check out the video here). I mean, he’s a character as it is, which added a ton of flair to the experience, but people also love him and wanted pics and selfies with him. It was a huge hit; I don’t think the other booths got a single visitor for the time he was there.imageA few years into our business, we wanted to thank our customers personally for their business, so we created short (5-10 second) videos and posted them to social media (here’s a fun clip from 2018). A team member would call out a customer by name in the video. Customers ended up sharing these videos widely with their networks, thereby spreading goodwill about Nextiva and attracting even more great customers.Speaking of goodwill, I think our customers also appreciate that Nextiva is civically minded. We have an entire philanthropic arm to our company called Nextiva Cares. This arm is dedicated to empowering our team members to volunteer at non-profits that serve our communities. We also give money to worthy causes on a regular basis. During our yearly NextCon conference (this year scheduled for Nov. 3-5, 2019 in Scottsdale), we’ve initiated hashtag/social media challenges in exchange for donations to amazing charities. During our NextCon conferences alone, we’ve donated more than $50,000.imageHow are you doing today and what does the future look like?Things are going great right now. We’ve grown so much since our early days and have a ton of growing still to do. We started with just a few people in a small room and today we have more than 1,000 team members across the world (most of them based in our Scottsdale office).I think we’ve built an amazing foundation, and we have an incredible group of people on board with us. We also have a ton of opportunities to expand and really change the world of business communications. It’s an exciting time.Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?We’ve learned so many things! I’ll focus on some internal topics, here, though. We’ve learned a lot as it relates to company culture. Starting out, we did like many tech companies do and provided free snacks and a game room in the office. Our team members loved these perks, but as we grew we realized that company culture isn’t built on snacks (I wrote about this learning for Entrepreneur a few years back).While people appreciated the free food, what they really wanted was a career path and a listening ear from their supervisors. People wanted to have the freedom to give the company feedback, talk about their motivations for coming to work and develop authentic relationships with their colleagues.We took this to heart and have shifted our culture accordingly. Now, team members will regularly meet on-on-one with managers to discuss their career trajectories, how things are going for them and provide ideas and honest feedback. It’s been a profound shift that our team members have appreciated.Hiring has also been a big learning. I’ll say that from day one we knew we wanted to mindfully build our team, but like many other companies in high-growth mode, we of course made some missteps along the way. We’ve learned from them, and now hire people who are doers, who have amazing attitudes and who are fun to be around. Our hiring process is very in-depth, and we’ve found that that increased attention has resulted in tons of fabulous new team members on board.What platform/tools do you use for your business?It might be a plug, but it’s true: internally we use NextOS on a daily basis. Just like our customers, we’ve found it to dramatically help our team track, manage, collaborate and analyze all communications. It’s significantly helped our internal processes become more streamlined, and has helped in our customer relationship management.imageWe also use Asana and Jira to help with project management.What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?I’m a fan of the Marketing School with Neil Patel & Eric Siu podcast. I’ve actually become friends with those guys; I’m continually amazed at their depth of knowledge in the marketing field. The episodes are great and super informative.Two books I’m loving right now are The Power of Noticing: What The Best Leaders See, by Max Bazerman; and Sidetracked: Why Our Decisions Get Derailed and How We Can Stick To The Plan, by Francesca Gino. Both authors are professors at Harvard Business School. I’ve found the takeaways in each book so powerful that I come back to them over and over.Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?Nextiva has been experiencing double and triple-digit growth over the past several years, and with that growth has come tons of open positions.We are always looking for great people to join our team. The best places to find open positions are on our careers page and on our listings on LinkedIn.Where can we go to learn more?WebsiteFacebookTwitterInstagramLinkedInLinkedIn for YanivTwitter for YanivEmailIf you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!Liked this text interview? Check out the full interview with photos, tools, books, and other data.For more interviews, check out r/starter_story - I post new stories there daily.Interested in sharing your own story? Send me a PM

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Measuring and benchmarking the four vital signs of SaaS

Rory O’Driscoll Contributor

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Rory O’Driscoll is a partner at Scale Venture Partners.

More posts by this contributor

Understanding the Mendoza Line for SaaS growth

Tech Valuations In 2016: The End Of The Line For Sloppy Growth

SaaS metrics should be to a management team what patient vital signs are to an emergency room doctor: a simple set of universally understood numbers that allow a doctor to quickly know how ill a patient is and what needs fixing first.

Heart rate, blood pressure, respiratory rate and temperature are the big four vital signs in the ER. Everyone knows what they are, what they mean, and what good and bad looks like. When a patient is wheeled in, the doctor does not start by asking the EMT, “How exactly are we defining heart rate?” This shared understanding allows for rapid evaluation, then fast, focused action.

Not so much in SaaS, where discussions about definitions are all you hear. There are too many metrics, too many things to measure and too many useful but incompatible ways to measure them. This results in a loss of clarity, comprehension, and — most importantly — comparability across different companies.

At Scale we’ve spent the last 20 years evaluating investments in SaaS and other subscription companies. We have built an internal shared belief of what the Four Vital Signs of SaaS are, and how exactly to measure them. We have opted for simplicity over complexity in selecting these metrics. This has allowed us to benchmark accurately across companies and to know what a realistic version of “good” looks like.

Scale recently launched Scale Studio, an open-to-anyone tool that gives cloud and SaaS companies performance benchmarks based on these vital signs and 20 years of data across more than 300 companies.

The four vital signs of SaaS

The vital signs of SaaS are Revenue Growth, Sales Efficiency, Revenue Churn and Cash Burn. Almost everything that matters about the financial performance of a SaaS business is captured in these four metrics.

Revenue Growth matters because growth is the central purpose of a startup, and thus for an investor the most important driver of if value can be created at all. We have found that at each stage of a company’s development there is a minimum required level of growth below which a startup will struggle to attract venture capital. We’ve analyzed this Mendoza Line for SaaS growth previously on TechCrunch.

Sales Efficiency matters because software at scale is all about distribution, and thus the relationship between dollars invested in sales and marketing and dollars back via revenue is the key determinant of how much value is created per dollar invested. In a perfect world I would call this Distribution Efficiency, because calling it Sales Efficiency tends wrongly to narrow the focus on this metric to just sales, but that ship has sailed.

Revenue Churn matters because as growth slows the impact of churn escalates and provides an upper bound on how big a company can become. More fundamentally, high churn is just the financial evidence of a product that is not delivering value to customers. Products that do not deliver value cannot build value for their investors, which is why my former board colleague at Box, Mamoon Hamid, is right in saying that every company needs a non-financial north star.

And of course, Cash Burn matters because, well, duh — try running a company without it.

Measuring and benchmarking the four vital signs of SaaS

Vital Sign No. 1: Revenue Growth

There are multiple ways to measure revenue and thus Revenue Growth. ARR-based metrics are more forward-looking, but GAAP revenue tends to be calculated more accurately and is thus more comparable across companies. It typically lags ARR by about a quarter, and for simplicity we have not excluded services revenue. The simplest measure of Revenue Growth is the quarterly GAAP revenue run rate compared to the same quarter GAAP revenue one year ago (or a year from now for a forward-growth estimate). We also measure revenue growth using the ARR Growth Rate and a forward-looking measure of ARR growth that we call iCAGR.

We benchmark Revenue Growth by looking at companies at a comparable revenue run rate because revenue growth rates decline fairly predictably as absolute revenue scale increases (as is clear in the chart below). This means that the top quartile Revenue Growth rate of 123 percent at a $20 million revenue run rate would represent bottom quartile growth at a $2 million revenue run rate.

The chart and table below show, for various revenue run rates, which revenue growth rates represent top, median and bottom quartile performance. The Scale Studio data set has 300+ public and private SaaS companies, some of which have become public, many of which have not and most of which have raised at least some venture capital.

Using this table, a team can quickly benchmark their company’s performance. For example, a company that grew last year 80 percent from $11 million to $20 million is growing at just above 50th percentile growth for SaaS companies at that stage, which is 78 percent. We can also generate a separate table showing the same data on a forward-revenue basis, to allow a company to answer the related question: If I am at a $20 million run rate now, and I grow next year at 50 percent, how will I be doing relative to other SaaS companies?

It is also interesting to see that the data here broadly agrees with a separate calculation we did recently around the Mendoza Line for SaaS growth that tracks at or just above the bottom quartile of growth rate. The Mendoza Line was derived by math; this table was generated from real data — it is good to see both estimates roughly agree.

Another way to look at the same data is to think about the revenue trajectory over time, or “how many years to $100 million.”  The graph and table below show for a consistent top, median or bottom quartile company (at the cutoff points) how long it takes to grow from $1 million to $100 million. A company that grows consistently, just at the top quartile cutoff growth rate, takes six years to get to a $100 million run rate, a median performer takes eight years and a bottom quartile performer does not yet get there in 10 years. This is a calculation with all sorts of survivorship bias problems, because the slow growth companies tend to get acquired and not make it all the way to $100 million, but the analysis is roughly right.

This data also matches well to various rules of thumb. An example is the T2D3 (triple-triple-double-double-double) rule, which is also shown in the table above. T2D3 matches top quartile performance for the first four years and becomes just a little aspirational in year five. If you fail to double from year four to year five and only grow at 90 percent, we would still be glad to talk to you! (The data also roughly matches the Bessemer State of the Cloud Report, which shows an estimate of times to $100 million for best-in-class companies).

Vital Sign No. 2: Sales Efficiency

Sales Efficiency metrics (and again the reminder to think of this more broadly as Distribution Efficiency!) measure the relationship between dollars in (spent on Sales & Marketing) and dollars out (in the form of new revenue). For a recurring revenue business, by far the most intuitive way to measure this concept is by dividing the Gross or Net New ARR for the quarter by the fully loaded Sales & Marketing spend for the same quarter. The Gross SE metric measures the effectiveness of the company in generating new ARR, and the Net SE metric measures the overall effectiveness of the business in both generating and retaining revenue.

We love the simplicity of this calculation and its direct actionability. It can be explained in 30 seconds at a Sales Kick-Off meeting in a way that no other measure can. “We gave you this money, you gave us this ARR.” We are not a fan of putting lags in this method (comparing this quarter’s Net New ARR with last quarter’s S&M spend). There is some logic to the idea that there is lag between spend and results, but once you start to adjust, you end up with all sorts of special pleading. Keep it simple.

For a vital signs diagnosis, we prefer this metric to the complexity of the LTV/CAC calculation. An LTV to CAC works really well for consumer businesses and for B2B businesses that have fairly consistent deal size and low net churn. A former Scale portfolio company, HubSpot, did a brilliant job of orienting their business around this metric. However, for enterprise businesses with highly variable deal sizes and strong positive net cohort growth over time, the calculation becomes arbitrary. The underlying idea is real, namely that enterprise customers can have lower Gross SE but higher ultimate value as the cohorts grow, but trying to track and explain quarterly fluctuations is hard.

Another complexity we choose to avoid is using Gross Margin instead of Revenue. It is of course more correct to use Gross Margin, but especially at the early stages of a SaaS company, Gross Margin fluctuates based on fixed cost recovery issues that significantly distort the calculation.

The problem with an ARR-based Sales Efficiency metric is it doesn’t allow easy comparison across companies. ARR is not reported by public companies and private company ARR numbers are often suspect. Our workaround was to slightly tweak the calculation for Net SE, replacing the numerator (Net New ARR) with the intra-quarter difference in GAAP revenue multiplied by 4 (annualized). We call this formula using GAAP instead of ARR the Magic Number and it should be equal to Net Sales Efficiency with a one quarter lag (to allow ARR to convert to GAAP).

As a rule of thumb: When you’re talking to your team and want to keep it simple, talk Gross and Net Sales Efficiency; when you want to do benchmarking against other companies, use Magic Number.

The benchmarking results here are very different. Unlike Revenue Growth, which clearly declines as absolute revenue increases, we have found Sales Efficiency to be fairly consistent across the entire SaaS universe. The median Magic Number for our data set is between .8x and .7x, and the range from top quartile to bottom quartile is between .5x and 1.5x. This matches the public company data set where the median is .7x today.

Payback (on a revenue not a gross margin basis) is simply the inverse of this number, which implies that the average SaaS company is earning back in revenue what it spends in sales and marketing in one divided by .7 years — 17 months — with a top/bottom quartile range of eight months to two years.

We have also observed something that does not come in this table, which is that Sales Efficiency tends to be persistent over time for a given company, especially after $10 million. A good go-to-market model at a $10 million run rate tends to still be a good model at $100 million. And bad sales efficiency at $10 million is hard to change later.

The high top-quartile Magic Number for the $1 million revenue run rate represents an anomaly early on, as often founders are doing the selling themselves (and probably not allocating their costs to Sales & Marketing!). Pretty quickly top quartile Magic Number falls to 1.4x and then to 1.0x at scale.

Vital Sign No. 3: Revenue Churn

The simplest way to measure Gross and Net Churn is by taking Churned ARR (Gross) and Churned less Upsell ARR (Net) and dividing it by opening ARR for the period, usually a quarter. In the tables below, we show Gross Churn by quarter and annualized.

We acknowledge that this metric is a horrible oversimplification. For the Sales Efficiency calculation above, the simple method is also, we believe, the best method, but for the churn calculation this simplification comes at a significant cost in terms of being able to diagnosis underlying issues. At high growth rates especially, this measure understates actual churn. However, the vital signs framework calls for simplicity to allow consistent, relevant benchmarking across companies. If this simple benchmarking exercise exposes a churn problem, then a deeper dive using retention analysis and a cohort analysis is an absolutely required next step.

The data above shows Darwinian selection at work. Early on some companies have huge churn but they have to either improve or die. At a $20 million revenue run rate, even bottom quartile companies have annualized Gross Churn hovering around -22 percent.

Vital Sign No. 4: Cash Burn / Operating Income

Internally, we measure cash burn by looking at free cash flow for a quarter (operating cash flow less capex) and compare it to cash on the balance sheet to calculate a cash out date. For confidentiality reasons, we do not ask for cash balances in Scale Studio. A reasonable proxy for cash burn is Operating Income, and the chart and table below show Operating Income as a percent of Revenue at different revenue run rates.

To illustrate what this metric means, at a $20 million revenue run rate the median company in the data set is losing 63 percent of revenue, $12.7 million dollars, or colloquially “burning $1 million a month.” In Scale Studio you can also further benchmark total operating expenses one level down, across each of Gross Margin, Sales/Marketing, R&D and G&A.

The most important point to make about this metric is that in a recurring revenue business, operating income, or “burn,” however calculated is not a measure of efficiency. Instead it is a measure of how aggressively a company is investing. A high operating loss coupled with a high growth rate and high sales efficiency is an aggressive but probably sensible strategy provided of course the company has access to capital. A high burn, low growth company is a disaster in the making.

Exactly how much burn for exactly how much growth will be the subject for another post, but any comment that tries to link burn rate to value creation, without taking growth rate into account, is simply wrong. Many of the most successful SaaS companies were in the bottom quartile on this metric at $100 million in run rate revenue, but were also in the top quartile on revenue growth. Worth highlighting again is the proviso regarding access to capital. If the cash runs, out even the best business dies.

The very best companies are those such as Veeva and Atlassian where a high Sales Efficiency allowed them to simultaneously be top quartile on growth, and top quartile on operating income profitability. It is no accident that companies with these characteristics get premium public valuations.

What are your company’s vital signs?

Getting started with Scale Studio is simple: you enter nine basic data points for each of your trailing eight quarters then generate a benchmark report. The benchmarks use a sample set consisting of companies at the same revenue stage as yours. This allows for much more accurate benchmarking, especially for Revenue Growth and Operating Income which, as we have said, are a direct function of revenue run rate. The benchmarks give you a sense of your performance that is clear, concise, and comparable. Your report might say something like:

“At your current revenue run rate of $5 million, your Y/Y Revenue Growth rate of 150 percent is in the second quartile for companies of your size, your Magic Number of 0.8 is in the second quartile, your Gross Churn of -1 percent is in the top quartile, and your Operating Income of -152 percent of revenue is in the second quartile.”

Vital signs don’t cure patients, doctors do. SaaS vital signs don’t fix companies, management teams do. But realistic benchmarking metrics do what ER vital signs do: pinpoint issues, provide actionable context and allow you to get to work.

Jeremy Kaufmann contributed to this article.

source https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/26/measuring-and-benchmarking-the-four-vital-signs-of-saas/

[fmservers]

Measuring and benchmarking the four vital signs of SaaS

Rory O’Driscoll Contributor

Share on Twitter

Rory O’Driscoll is a partner at Scale Venture Partners.

More posts by this contributor

Understanding the Mendoza Line for SaaS growth

Tech Valuations In 2016: The End Of The Line For Sloppy Growth

SaaS metrics should be to a management team what patient vital signs are to an emergency room doctor: a simple set of universally understood numbers that allow a doctor to quickly know how ill a patient is and what needs fixing first.

Heart rate, blood pressure, respiratory rate and temperature are the big four vital signs in the ER. Everyone knows what they are, what they mean, and what good and bad looks like. When a patient is wheeled in, the doctor does not start by asking the EMT, “How exactly are we defining heart rate?” This shared understanding allows for rapid evaluation, then fast, focused action.

Not so much in SaaS, where discussions about definitions are all you hear. There are too many metrics, too many things to measure and too many useful but incompatible ways to measure them. This results in a loss of clarity, comprehension, and — most importantly — comparability across different companies.

At Scale we’ve spent the last 20 years evaluating investments in SaaS and other subscription companies. We have built an internal shared belief of what the Four Vital Signs of SaaS are, and how exactly to measure them. We have opted for simplicity over complexity in selecting these metrics. This has allowed us to benchmark accurately across companies and to know what a realistic version of “good” looks like.

Scale recently launched Scale Studio, an open-to-anyone tool that gives cloud and SaaS companies performance benchmarks based on these vital signs and 20 years of data across more than 300 companies.

The four vital signs of SaaS

The vital signs of SaaS are Revenue Growth, Sales Efficiency, Revenue Churn and Cash Burn. Almost everything that matters about the financial performance of a SaaS business is captured in these four metrics.

Revenue Growth matters because growth is the central purpose of a startup, and thus for an investor the most important driver of if value can be created at all. We have found that at each stage of a company’s development there is a minimum required level of growth below which a startup will struggle to attract venture capital. We’ve analyzed this Mendoza Line for SaaS growth previously on TechCrunch.

Sales Efficiency matters because software at scale is all about distribution, and thus the relationship between dollars invested in sales and marketing and dollars back via revenue is the key determinant of how much value is created per dollar invested. In a perfect world I would call this Distribution Efficiency, because calling it Sales Efficiency tends wrongly to narrow the focus on this metric to just sales, but that ship has sailed.

Revenue Churn matters because as growth slows the impact of churn escalates and provides an upper bound on how big a company can become. More fundamentally, high churn is just the financial evidence of a product that is not delivering value to customers. Products that do not deliver value cannot build value for their investors, which is why my former board colleague at Box, Mamoon Hamid, is right in saying that every company needs a non-financial north star.

And of course, Cash Burn matters because, well, duh — try running a company without it.

Measuring and benchmarking the four vital signs of SaaS

Vital Sign No. 1: Revenue Growth

There are multiple ways to measure revenue and thus Revenue Growth. ARR-based metrics are more forward-looking, but GAAP revenue tends to be calculated more accurately and is thus more comparable across companies. It typically lags ARR by about a quarter, and for simplicity we have not excluded services revenue. The simplest measure of Revenue Growth is the quarterly GAAP revenue run rate compared to the same quarter GAAP revenue one year ago (or a year from now for a forward-growth estimate). We also measure revenue growth using the ARR Growth Rate and a forward-looking measure of ARR growth that we call iCAGR.

We benchmark Revenue Growth by looking at companies at a comparable revenue run rate because revenue growth rates decline fairly predictably as absolute revenue scale increases (as is clear in the chart below). This means that the top quartile Revenue Growth rate of 123 percent at a $20 million revenue run rate would represent bottom quartile growth at a $2 million revenue run rate.

The chart and table below show, for various revenue run rates, which revenue growth rates represent top, median and bottom quartile performance. The Scale Studio data set has 300+ public and private SaaS companies, some of which have become public, many of which have not and most of which have raised at least some venture capital.

Using this table, a team can quickly benchmark their company’s performance. For example, a company that grew last year 80 percent from $11 million to $20 million is growing at just above 50th percentile growth for SaaS companies at that stage, which is 78 percent. We can also generate a separate table showing the same data on a forward-revenue basis, to allow a company to answer the related question: If I am at a $20 million run rate now, and I grow next year at 50 percent, how will I be doing relative to other SaaS companies?

It is also interesting to see that the data here broadly agrees with a separate calculation we did recently around the Mendoza Line for SaaS growth that tracks at or just above the bottom quartile of growth rate. The Mendoza Line was derived by math; this table was generated from real data — it is good to see both estimates roughly agree.

Another way to look at the same data is to think about the revenue trajectory over time, or “how many years to $100 million.”  The graph and table below show for a consistent top, median or bottom quartile company (at the cutoff points) how long it takes to grow from $1 million to $100 million. A company that grows consistently, just at the top quartile cutoff growth rate, takes six years to get to a $100 million run rate, a median performer takes eight years and a bottom quartile performer does not yet get there in 10 years. This is a calculation with all sorts of survivorship bias problems, because the slow growth companies tend to get acquired and not make it all the way to $100 million, but the analysis is roughly right.

This data also matches well to various rules of thumb. An example is the T2D3 (triple-triple-double-double-double) rule, which is also shown in the table above. T2D3 matches top quartile performance for the first four years and becomes just a little aspirational in year five. If you fail to double from year four to year five and only grow at 90 percent, we would still be glad to talk to you! (The data also roughly matches the Bessemer State of the Cloud Report, which shows an estimate of times to $100 million for best-in-class companies).

Vital Sign No. 2: Sales Efficiency

Sales Efficiency metrics (and again the reminder to think of this more broadly as Distribution Efficiency!) measure the relationship between dollars in (spent on Sales & Marketing) and dollars out (in the form of new revenue). For a recurring revenue business, by far the most intuitive way to measure this concept is by dividing the Gross or Net New ARR for the quarter by the fully loaded Sales & Marketing spend for the same quarter. The Gross SE metric measures the effectiveness of the company in generating new ARR, and the Net SE metric measures the overall effectiveness of the business in both generating and retaining revenue.

We love the simplicity of this calculation and its direct actionability. It can be explained in 30 seconds at a Sales Kick-Off meeting in a way that no other measure can. “We gave you this money, you gave us this ARR.” We are not a fan of putting lags in this method (comparing this quarter’s Net New ARR with last quarter’s S&M spend). There is some logic to the idea that there is lag between spend and results, but once you start to adjust, you end up with all sorts of special pleading. Keep it simple.

For a vital signs diagnosis, we prefer this metric to the complexity of the LTV/CAC calculation. An LTV to CAC works really well for consumer businesses and for B2B businesses that have fairly consistent deal size and low net churn. A former Scale portfolio company, HubSpot, did a brilliant job of orienting their business around this metric. However, for enterprise businesses with highly variable deal sizes and strong positive net cohort growth over time, the calculation becomes arbitrary. The underlying idea is real, namely that enterprise customers can have lower Gross SE but higher ultimate value as the cohorts grow, but trying to track and explain quarterly fluctuations is hard.

Another complexity we choose to avoid is using Gross Margin instead of Revenue. It is of course more correct to use Gross Margin, but especially at the early stages of a SaaS company, Gross Margin fluctuates based on fixed cost recovery issues that significantly distort the calculation.

The problem with an ARR-based Sales Efficiency metric is it doesn’t allow easy comparison across companies. ARR is not reported by public companies and private company ARR numbers are often suspect. Our workaround was to slightly tweak the calculation for Net SE, replacing the numerator (Net New ARR) with the intra-quarter difference in GAAP revenue multiplied by 4 (annualized). We call this formula using GAAP instead of ARR the Magic Number and it should be equal to Net Sales Efficiency with a one quarter lag (to allow ARR to convert to GAAP).

As a rule of thumb: When you’re talking to your team and want to keep it simple, talk Gross and Net Sales Efficiency; when you want to do benchmarking against other companies, use Magic Number.

The benchmarking results here are very different. Unlike Revenue Growth, which clearly declines as absolute revenue increases, we have found Sales Efficiency to be fairly consistent across the entire SaaS universe. The median Magic Number for our data set is between .8x and .7x, and the range from top quartile to bottom quartile is between .5x and 1.5x. This matches the public company data set where the median is .7x today.

Payback (on a revenue not a gross margin basis) is simply the inverse of this number, which implies that the average SaaS company is earning back in revenue what it spends in sales and marketing in one divided by .7 years — 17 months — with a top/bottom quartile range of eight months to two years.

We have also observed something that does not come in this table, which is that Sales Efficiency tends to be persistent over time for a given company, especially after $10 million. A good go-to-market model at a $10 million run rate tends to still be a good model at $100 million. And bad sales efficiency at $10 million is hard to change later.

The high top-quartile Magic Number for the $1 million revenue run rate represents an anomaly early on, as often founders are doing the selling themselves (and probably not allocating their costs to Sales & Marketing!). Pretty quickly top quartile Magic Number falls to 1.4x and then to 1.0x at scale.

Vital Sign No. 3: Revenue Churn

The simplest way to measure Gross and Net Churn is by taking Churned ARR (Gross) and Churned less Upsell ARR (Net) and dividing it by opening ARR for the period, usually a quarter. In the tables below, we show Gross Churn by quarter and annualized.

We acknowledge that this metric is a horrible oversimplification. For the Sales Efficiency calculation above, the simple method is also, we believe, the best method, but for the churn calculation this simplification comes at a significant cost in terms of being able to diagnosis underlying issues. At high growth rates especially, this measure understates actual churn. However, the vital signs framework calls for simplicity to allow consistent, relevant benchmarking across companies. If this simple benchmarking exercise exposes a churn problem, then a deeper dive using retention analysis and a cohort analysis is an absolutely required next step.

The data above shows Darwinian selection at work. Early on some companies have huge churn but they have to either improve or die. At a $20 million revenue run rate, even bottom quartile companies have annualized Gross Churn hovering around -22 percent.

Vital Sign No. 4: Cash Burn / Operating Income

Internally, we measure cash burn by looking at free cash flow for a quarter (operating cash flow less capex) and compare it to cash on the balance sheet to calculate a cash out date. For confidentiality reasons, we do not ask for cash balances in Scale Studio. A reasonable proxy for cash burn is Operating Income, and the chart and table below show Operating Income as a percent of Revenue at different revenue run rates.

To illustrate what this metric means, at a $20 million revenue run rate the median company in the data set is losing 63 percent of revenue, $12.7 million dollars, or colloquially “burning $1 million a month.” In Scale Studio you can also further benchmark total operating expenses one level down, across each of Gross Margin, Sales/Marketing, R&D and G&A.

The most important point to make about this metric is that in a recurring revenue business, operating income, or “burn,” however calculated is not a measure of efficiency. Instead it is a measure of how aggressively a company is investing. A high operating loss coupled with a high growth rate and high sales efficiency is an aggressive but probably sensible strategy provided of course the company has access to capital. A high burn, low growth company is a disaster in the making.

Exactly how much burn for exactly how much growth will be the subject for another post, but any comment that tries to link burn rate to value creation, without taking growth rate into account, is simply wrong. Many of the most successful SaaS companies were in the bottom quartile on this metric at $100 million in run rate revenue, but were also in the top quartile on revenue growth. Worth highlighting again is the proviso regarding access to capital. If the cash runs, out even the best business dies.

The very best companies are those such as Veeva and Atlassian where a high Sales Efficiency allowed them to simultaneously be top quartile on growth, and top quartile on operating income profitability. It is no accident that companies with these characteristics get premium public valuations.

What are your company’s vital signs?

Getting started with Scale Studio is simple: you enter nine basic data points for each of your trailing eight quarters then generate a benchmark report. The benchmarks use a sample set consisting of companies at the same revenue stage as yours. This allows for much more accurate benchmarking, especially for Revenue Growth and Operating Income which, as we have said, are a direct function of revenue run rate. The benchmarks give you a sense of your performance that is clear, concise, and comparable. Your report might say something like:

“At your current revenue run rate of $5 million, your Y/Y Revenue Growth rate of 150 percent is in the second quartile for companies of your size, your Magic Number of 0.8 is in the second quartile, your Gross Churn of -1 percent is in the top quartile, and your Operating Income of -152 percent of revenue is in the second quartile.”

Vital signs don’t cure patients, doctors do. SaaS vital signs don’t fix companies, management teams do. But realistic benchmarking metrics do what ER vital signs do: pinpoint issues, provide actionable context and allow you to get to work.

Jeremy Kaufmann contributed to this article.

Via David Riggs https://techcrunch.com

[awesomecolorfulcollectorwombat]

General Electric: Expect A Big 2019

New Post has been published on http://www.1701host.com/cloud-hosting/general-electric-expect-a-big-2019/

General Electric: Expect A Big 2019

To call 2018 a bad year for shareholders of General Electric (GE) would be a grave understatement. Throughout the year, the company has undergone expanded investigations by the government, shuffled top management, sold off various assets, and, on multiple occasions, revise down performance expectations before ultimately eliminating them for the foreseeable future. By practically all accounts, the industrial conglomerate has been hit harder, and in almost every way possible, more than it has ever been hit before in its more than 100-year history. Now, as 2019 approaches, the big question facing shareholders is “what’s next?” While it’s possible 2019 will bring with it even more pain than 2018 has, the more likely scenario is that the firm will use the New Year to restructure its operations (out of bankruptcy) and will, if all appropriate steps are taken, prepare for a turnaround that could bring to shareholders significant value.

Expect the breakup to occur

One thing that very few people will disagree with, I think, is that a breakup of General Electric must occur. The business has become so large that it is, from a management and capital allocation perspective, inefficient. When you have so many divisions, figuring out where and how to deploy limited capital can be hard, while as separate entities, the fact of the matter is that individual management teams can focus on their core operations. By breaking up, the firm will also, for the most part, rid itself of GE Capital, which is likely where any currently undisclosed problems probably reside.

As management indicated while John Flannery was still General Electric’s top dog, I fully expect the company to divest of itself its GE Healthcare segment in some way, shape, or form. Management has indicated that this will take place through an IPO, but it’s expected that shareholders might still retain some of the business, though all of this could change over time. We already know thanks to an announcement earlier this year that the firm is likely to continue winding down its ownership in Baker Hughes, a GE Company (BHGE), by selling off its stake in the firm, but a big question here might relate to timing. Since the end of September, shares of the oilfield services firm have plummeted 34.6%, so while the company has struck a deal for a sale of some of its stock, I suspect that additional sales will only happen following a recovery in unit price.

Following the spinoff of its Transportation segment into a commanding interest in Westinghouse Air Brake Technologies Corporation (WAB), also known as Wabtec, next year, I believe management will likely begin monetizing its interests there as well. Personally, I see monetizing both Wabtec and Baker Hughes further as a sizable mistake given the future outlook I have for both energy and transportation in the US, but the cash generated from these deals will allow management to reduce debt and/or to invest further into what operations are left.

One thing I would love to see transpire is the sale or spinning off of General Electric’s Power segment. At this time, the firm intends to separate that into two different sets of operations, which may be setting the stage to sell or spin off at least one of them. I see this new decision under CEO Culp as a sign that he understands Power is General Electric’s most significant problem at the moment, and since plans to retain power occurred while Flannery was still in charge, I have modest hope that management will divest of the segment or at least part of it.

Don’t expect a distribution hike

During its third quarter earnings release earlier this year, management made a significant change to General Electric’s dividend policy. They said that, effective this month, the company would only pay out $0.01 per share each quarter as a distribution, down from $0.12 per quarter previously. This decision, though controversial, will result in the firm’s annual distribution falling from $4.175 billion per year to just $347.925 million per year. While I would have loved to see it cut all the way to zero so that management would have even more cash to put toward debt reduction and investing in core assets, the savings seen are material regardless.

Investors hoping for the distribution to recover in the near future are, I think, engaging in wishful thinking. As of the end of its latest quarter, General Electric had cash, cash equivalents, restricted cash, and marketable securities worth $61.69 billion, which is a lot to work with, but it also had $114.97 billion worth of debt (inclusive of $2.70 billion of non-recourse debt). Admittedly, debt was down from the $134.59 billion the firm had at the end of its 2016 fiscal year, but as assets come off the books, debt also must be reduced. Some of this could be taken off by spinning off various assets (for instance, the firm could probably spin in the low tens of billions of dollars off with its Healthcare segment if it so decided), but it’s likely that a lot of the work toward reducing debt will be tied to asset sales and the cash that otherwise would have been allocated toward its quarterly dividends. Until management can reduce debt, it’s unlikely we’ll see a hike, and that probably won’t occur until, at the very best, late next year.

*Taken from Moody’s

Where does debt need to be in order for management to consider raising its distribution again? The short answer is that it’s anybody’s guess, but more likely than not, it’s by whatever amount would allow the firm’s credit rating to rise back into the As. As you can see in the image above, the firm’s credit rating, as calculated by Moody’s (MCO), used to be Aaa until it fell in 2009. Since then, the rating has fallen further and, today, the firm’s long-term debt rating is Baa1. This still places it in a category known as “investment grade,” as the image below illustrates, but the drop, even though it’s not on watch for a further downgrade at this time, will weigh on financing options until the situation can be improved.

*Taken from Moody’s

A lot of cost-cutting and wheeling-and-dealing

If General Electric is going to not only survive but thrive for the long haul, there’s no doubt the firm will need to cut costs. This is especially true if the company elects to keep its Power segment, but irrespective of it, certain corporate costs will need to be slashed as the firm works to spin off its assets. Although management has, in recent times, done well to push for cost cutting, when the company actually starts to break up, we will know whether, and to what extent, this is actually true. One strategy that could work quite well could be what the firm struck with Baker Hughes. As part of its share divestiture, the two companies have entered into a series of joint agreements that will keep their operations intertwined through things like guaranteed low pricing and joint buying of key assets. I suspect this kind of wheeling-and-dealing to continue as the conglomerate sells off more of itself.

Takeaway

Based on the data provided, it’s clear that 2018 has been awful for General Electric, but investors who are expecting more pain to follow through 2019 might be on the wrong side of the bet. If 2018 was the crash for the business, 2019 will likely be the start of a true recovery for the firm, especially if management can work to restructure the entity in the way that they should. Obviously, whether the firm is successful or not, investors should expect a tremendous amount of volatility during the process, but that could present opportunities to buy and sell at attractive prices for the emotionally-detached investor.

A community of oil and natural gas investors with a hankering for the E&P space: Crude Value Insights is an exclusive community of investors who have a taste for oil and natural gas firms. Our main interest is on cash flow and the value and growth prospects that generate the strongest potential for investors. You get access to a 50+ stock model account, in-depth cash flow analyses of E&P firms, and a Live Chat where members can share their knowledge and experiences with one another. Sign up now and your first two weeks are free!

Disclosure: I/we have no positions in any stocks mentioned, and no plans to initiate any positions within the next 72 hours. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha). I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.

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[lazilysillyprince]

General Electric: Expect A Big 2019

New Post has been published on http://www.1701host.com/cloud-hosting/general-electric-expect-a-big-2019/

General Electric: Expect A Big 2019

To call 2018 a bad year for shareholders of General Electric (GE) would be a grave understatement. Throughout the year, the company has undergone expanded investigations by the government, shuffled top management, sold off various assets, and, on multiple occasions, revise down performance expectations before ultimately eliminating them for the foreseeable future. By practically all accounts, the industrial conglomerate has been hit harder, and in almost every way possible, more than it has ever been hit before in its more than 100-year history. Now, as 2019 approaches, the big question facing shareholders is “what’s next?” While it’s possible 2019 will bring with it even more pain than 2018 has, the more likely scenario is that the firm will use the New Year to restructure its operations (out of bankruptcy) and will, if all appropriate steps are taken, prepare for a turnaround that could bring to shareholders significant value.

Expect the breakup to occur

One thing that very few people will disagree with, I think, is that a breakup of General Electric must occur. The business has become so large that it is, from a management and capital allocation perspective, inefficient. When you have so many divisions, figuring out where and how to deploy limited capital can be hard, while as separate entities, the fact of the matter is that individual management teams can focus on their core operations. By breaking up, the firm will also, for the most part, rid itself of GE Capital, which is likely where any currently undisclosed problems probably reside.

As management indicated while John Flannery was still General Electric’s top dog, I fully expect the company to divest of itself its GE Healthcare segment in some way, shape, or form. Management has indicated that this will take place through an IPO, but it’s expected that shareholders might still retain some of the business, though all of this could change over time. We already know thanks to an announcement earlier this year that the firm is likely to continue winding down its ownership in Baker Hughes, a GE Company (BHGE), by selling off its stake in the firm, but a big question here might relate to timing. Since the end of September, shares of the oilfield services firm have plummeted 34.6%, so while the company has struck a deal for a sale of some of its stock, I suspect that additional sales will only happen following a recovery in unit price.

Following the spinoff of its Transportation segment into a commanding interest in Westinghouse Air Brake Technologies Corporation (WAB), also known as Wabtec, next year, I believe management will likely begin monetizing its interests there as well. Personally, I see monetizing both Wabtec and Baker Hughes further as a sizable mistake given the future outlook I have for both energy and transportation in the US, but the cash generated from these deals will allow management to reduce debt and/or to invest further into what operations are left.

One thing I would love to see transpire is the sale or spinning off of General Electric’s Power segment. At this time, the firm intends to separate that into two different sets of operations, which may be setting the stage to sell or spin off at least one of them. I see this new decision under CEO Culp as a sign that he understands Power is General Electric’s most significant problem at the moment, and since plans to retain power occurred while Flannery was still in charge, I have modest hope that management will divest of the segment or at least part of it.

Don’t expect a distribution hike

During its third quarter earnings release earlier this year, management made a significant change to General Electric’s dividend policy. They said that, effective this month, the company would only pay out $0.01 per share each quarter as a distribution, down from $0.12 per quarter previously. This decision, though controversial, will result in the firm’s annual distribution falling from $4.175 billion per year to just $347.925 million per year. While I would have loved to see it cut all the way to zero so that management would have even more cash to put toward debt reduction and investing in core assets, the savings seen are material regardless.

Investors hoping for the distribution to recover in the near future are, I think, engaging in wishful thinking. As of the end of its latest quarter, General Electric had cash, cash equivalents, restricted cash, and marketable securities worth $61.69 billion, which is a lot to work with, but it also had $114.97 billion worth of debt (inclusive of $2.70 billion of non-recourse debt). Admittedly, debt was down from the $134.59 billion the firm had at the end of its 2016 fiscal year, but as assets come off the books, debt also must be reduced. Some of this could be taken off by spinning off various assets (for instance, the firm could probably spin in the low tens of billions of dollars off with its Healthcare segment if it so decided), but it’s likely that a lot of the work toward reducing debt will be tied to asset sales and the cash that otherwise would have been allocated toward its quarterly dividends. Until management can reduce debt, it’s unlikely we’ll see a hike, and that probably won’t occur until, at the very best, late next year.

*Taken from Moody’s

Where does debt need to be in order for management to consider raising its distribution again? The short answer is that it’s anybody’s guess, but more likely than not, it’s by whatever amount would allow the firm’s credit rating to rise back into the As. As you can see in the image above, the firm’s credit rating, as calculated by Moody’s (MCO), used to be Aaa until it fell in 2009. Since then, the rating has fallen further and, today, the firm’s long-term debt rating is Baa1. This still places it in a category known as “investment grade,” as the image below illustrates, but the drop, even though it’s not on watch for a further downgrade at this time, will weigh on financing options until the situation can be improved.

*Taken from Moody’s

A lot of cost-cutting and wheeling-and-dealing

If General Electric is going to not only survive but thrive for the long haul, there’s no doubt the firm will need to cut costs. This is especially true if the company elects to keep its Power segment, but irrespective of it, certain corporate costs will need to be slashed as the firm works to spin off its assets. Although management has, in recent times, done well to push for cost cutting, when the company actually starts to break up, we will know whether, and to what extent, this is actually true. One strategy that could work quite well could be what the firm struck with Baker Hughes. As part of its share divestiture, the two companies have entered into a series of joint agreements that will keep their operations intertwined through things like guaranteed low pricing and joint buying of key assets. I suspect this kind of wheeling-and-dealing to continue as the conglomerate sells off more of itself.

Takeaway

Based on the data provided, it’s clear that 2018 has been awful for General Electric, but investors who are expecting more pain to follow through 2019 might be on the wrong side of the bet. If 2018 was the crash for the business, 2019 will likely be the start of a true recovery for the firm, especially if management can work to restructure the entity in the way that they should. Obviously, whether the firm is successful or not, investors should expect a tremendous amount of volatility during the process, but that could present opportunities to buy and sell at attractive prices for the emotionally-detached investor.

A community of oil and natural gas investors with a hankering for the E&P space: Crude Value Insights is an exclusive community of investors who have a taste for oil and natural gas firms. Our main interest is on cash flow and the value and growth prospects that generate the strongest potential for investors. You get access to a 50+ stock model account, in-depth cash flow analyses of E&P firms, and a Live Chat where members can share their knowledge and experiences with one another. Sign up now and your first two weeks are free!

Disclosure: I/we have no positions in any stocks mentioned, and no plans to initiate any positions within the next 72 hours. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha). I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.

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[hostingnewsfeed]

General Electric: Expect A Big 2019

New Post has been published on http://www.1701host.com/cloud-hosting/general-electric-expect-a-big-2019/

General Electric: Expect A Big 2019

To call 2018 a bad year for shareholders of General Electric (GE) would be a grave understatement. Throughout the year, the company has undergone expanded investigations by the government, shuffled top management, sold off various assets, and, on multiple occasions, revise down performance expectations before ultimately eliminating them for the foreseeable future. By practically all accounts, the industrial conglomerate has been hit harder, and in almost every way possible, more than it has ever been hit before in its more than 100-year history. Now, as 2019 approaches, the big question facing shareholders is “what’s next?” While it’s possible 2019 will bring with it even more pain than 2018 has, the more likely scenario is that the firm will use the New Year to restructure its operations (out of bankruptcy) and will, if all appropriate steps are taken, prepare for a turnaround that could bring to shareholders significant value.

Expect the breakup to occur

One thing that very few people will disagree with, I think, is that a breakup of General Electric must occur. The business has become so large that it is, from a management and capital allocation perspective, inefficient. When you have so many divisions, figuring out where and how to deploy limited capital can be hard, while as separate entities, the fact of the matter is that individual management teams can focus on their core operations. By breaking up, the firm will also, for the most part, rid itself of GE Capital, which is likely where any currently undisclosed problems probably reside.

As management indicated while John Flannery was still General Electric’s top dog, I fully expect the company to divest of itself its GE Healthcare segment in some way, shape, or form. Management has indicated that this will take place through an IPO, but it’s expected that shareholders might still retain some of the business, though all of this could change over time. We already know thanks to an announcement earlier this year that the firm is likely to continue winding down its ownership in Baker Hughes, a GE Company (BHGE), by selling off its stake in the firm, but a big question here might relate to timing. Since the end of September, shares of the oilfield services firm have plummeted 34.6%, so while the company has struck a deal for a sale of some of its stock, I suspect that additional sales will only happen following a recovery in unit price.

Following the spinoff of its Transportation segment into a commanding interest in Westinghouse Air Brake Technologies Corporation (WAB), also known as Wabtec, next year, I believe management will likely begin monetizing its interests there as well. Personally, I see monetizing both Wabtec and Baker Hughes further as a sizable mistake given the future outlook I have for both energy and transportation in the US, but the cash generated from these deals will allow management to reduce debt and/or to invest further into what operations are left.

One thing I would love to see transpire is the sale or spinning off of General Electric’s Power segment. At this time, the firm intends to separate that into two different sets of operations, which may be setting the stage to sell or spin off at least one of them. I see this new decision under CEO Culp as a sign that he understands Power is General Electric’s most significant problem at the moment, and since plans to retain power occurred while Flannery was still in charge, I have modest hope that management will divest of the segment or at least part of it.

Don’t expect a distribution hike

During its third quarter earnings release earlier this year, management made a significant change to General Electric’s dividend policy. They said that, effective this month, the company would only pay out $0.01 per share each quarter as a distribution, down from $0.12 per quarter previously. This decision, though controversial, will result in the firm’s annual distribution falling from $4.175 billion per year to just $347.925 million per year. While I would have loved to see it cut all the way to zero so that management would have even more cash to put toward debt reduction and investing in core assets, the savings seen are material regardless.

Investors hoping for the distribution to recover in the near future are, I think, engaging in wishful thinking. As of the end of its latest quarter, General Electric had cash, cash equivalents, restricted cash, and marketable securities worth $61.69 billion, which is a lot to work with, but it also had $114.97 billion worth of debt (inclusive of $2.70 billion of non-recourse debt). Admittedly, debt was down from the $134.59 billion the firm had at the end of its 2016 fiscal year, but as assets come off the books, debt also must be reduced. Some of this could be taken off by spinning off various assets (for instance, the firm could probably spin in the low tens of billions of dollars off with its Healthcare segment if it so decided), but it’s likely that a lot of the work toward reducing debt will be tied to asset sales and the cash that otherwise would have been allocated toward its quarterly dividends. Until management can reduce debt, it’s unlikely we’ll see a hike, and that probably won’t occur until, at the very best, late next year.

*Taken from Moody’s

Where does debt need to be in order for management to consider raising its distribution again? The short answer is that it’s anybody’s guess, but more likely than not, it’s by whatever amount would allow the firm’s credit rating to rise back into the As. As you can see in the image above, the firm’s credit rating, as calculated by Moody’s (MCO), used to be Aaa until it fell in 2009. Since then, the rating has fallen further and, today, the firm’s long-term debt rating is Baa1. This still places it in a category known as “investment grade,” as the image below illustrates, but the drop, even though it’s not on watch for a further downgrade at this time, will weigh on financing options until the situation can be improved.

*Taken from Moody’s

A lot of cost-cutting and wheeling-and-dealing

If General Electric is going to not only survive but thrive for the long haul, there’s no doubt the firm will need to cut costs. This is especially true if the company elects to keep its Power segment, but irrespective of it, certain corporate costs will need to be slashed as the firm works to spin off its assets. Although management has, in recent times, done well to push for cost cutting, when the company actually starts to break up, we will know whether, and to what extent, this is actually true. One strategy that could work quite well could be what the firm struck with Baker Hughes. As part of its share divestiture, the two companies have entered into a series of joint agreements that will keep their operations intertwined through things like guaranteed low pricing and joint buying of key assets. I suspect this kind of wheeling-and-dealing to continue as the conglomerate sells off more of itself.

Takeaway

Based on the data provided, it’s clear that 2018 has been awful for General Electric, but investors who are expecting more pain to follow through 2019 might be on the wrong side of the bet. If 2018 was the crash for the business, 2019 will likely be the start of a true recovery for the firm, especially if management can work to restructure the entity in the way that they should. Obviously, whether the firm is successful or not, investors should expect a tremendous amount of volatility during the process, but that could present opportunities to buy and sell at attractive prices for the emotionally-detached investor.

A community of oil and natural gas investors with a hankering for the E&P space: Crude Value Insights is an exclusive community of investors who have a taste for oil and natural gas firms. Our main interest is on cash flow and the value and growth prospects that generate the strongest potential for investors. You get access to a 50+ stock model account, in-depth cash flow analyses of E&P firms, and a Live Chat where members can share their knowledge and experiences with one another. Sign up now and your first two weeks are free!

Disclosure: I/we have no positions in any stocks mentioned, and no plans to initiate any positions within the next 72 hours. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha). I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.

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[bythebayio]

Michelle Casbon at Scale By the Bay: “I love being steeped in so much Scala expertise”

A Senior Engineer on the Google Cloud Platform Developer Relations team, Michelle Casbon focuses on open source contributions and community engagement for machine learning and big data tools. Before that, she built and shipped machine learning products on distributed platforms using both AWS and Google Cloud Platform within her Senior Engineer and Director of Data Science roles at several San Francisco-based startups.

In advance of “Data Engineering and AI” panel discussion at Scale By the Bay on November 16 where Michelle is speaking alongside Richard Socher (Salesforce), Lukas Biewald (Weights and Biases), Ruchir Puri (IBM), Pete Skomoroch (Workday) and Peter Bailis (Sisu and Stanford CS), we spoke to Michelle about her developer journey, the hardest challenges of scale and the upcoming panel discussion at Scale By the Bay.

How did your data work lead you through the startups of Silicon Valley to Google? It turns out, building Machine Learning (ML) applications is hard. At Idibon, I spent my time building them on AWS. At Qordoba, I tried out Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and discovered Kubernetes Engine, which helped tremendously. As soon as I heard about Kubeflow, I was on board. It was exactly what I needed instead of building ML apps from scratch. I love that I can contribute to the project with a decade of data engineering under my belt because engineers who build platforms don't always have that perspective and really value it.

What did you learn about ML/NLP adoption along the way? There is a ton of interest, both from the business and engineering sides, but it's still very challenging to pull off. Tooling in the space has been very low-level, which isn't conducive to training new developers or maintaining production code over time. It's something that needs to change, similarly to the way higher-level tools were developed for traditional software development. As tooling in the space improves, we will see much more adoption of ML.

How does Google Cloud Platform help you and what are the hardest challenges of scale? When I was building ML products from scratch, I really appreciated the bootstrapping that I got in GCP. So many best practices are baked into the Kubernetes framework, which meant that I didn't have to spend time defining them. I was blown away at the declarative yaml approach to deploying predictive models and Kubernetes Engine meant that I didn't have to maintain a cluster of distributed compute nodes. These paradigms are foundational to Kubeflow, which makes a lot of sense to me. The idea is that the framework does the hard work of distributing training and packaging disparate components together, which keeps application code simple.

Another important aspect is access to hardware accelerators like Tensor Processing Units (TPUs). GCP provides the hardware & Kubeflow makes it easier to use that hardware from within application code. And because Kubeflow supports any hardware configuration that runs Kubernetes, you can run the same application within GCP, locally, or on another cloud (sans TPUs). These are the hardest challenges of scale: keeping application code simple, maintaining it over time, and retaining flexibility in terms of physical environment.

You’ve been at our Data events and now this is the Engineering one. How do you see these two cultures, Data Science (ML/AI) and Software Engineering work together at GCP? What’s your advice to a data scientist who needs web-scale performance and software engineering chops to solve their problems? Tools and APIs on GCP are designed to deliver best practices by default. There are fundamental building blocks like computing, storage, and event streaming, but GCP really shines when it comes to ML tooling. These are the shortcuts that make it possible to build ML products quickly and maintain them more easily over time. My advice is to use a managed service or high-level API whenever possible and automate everything else. A good CI/CD setup means that data scientists can focus on the code and everything after a PR merge is deployed automatically. Projects like Kubeflow that support this type of workflow are where I see the two sides coming together, especially since you can combine managed services and from-scratch models in any combination.

What’s the most exciting for you about the AI panel? I love the combination of panelists. Lukas & Pete (Lukas Biewald and Pete Skomoroch - note from the editor) are two people that I've looked up to for years and always enjoy spending time with. I've learned many things from them over the years.

What do you like about By the Bay community and what are you looking forward to the most? I love being steeped in so much Scala expertise. It's inspiring! I'm most looking forward to hearing the types of challenges people have in building ML pipelines. I can't wait to see how these problems have evolved and what some of the newer ones are.

Also, it's always great to hear Martin Odersky in real-time at 1x speed!

Do not miss Michelle Casbon at “Data Engineering and AI” panel discussion at Scale By the Bay conference at Twitter HQ in San Francisco on November 16. Last few tickets are available, so book yours now.