#exposes a lot of corruption and behind-the-scenes stuff

[serxinns]

Platonic Yandere EraserMic fam dealing with a fem teen that's an anti-hero? Like the couple is tasked with watching the wayward adolescent, because she was really close with taking down the hero commission ( let's not pretend to not know how shady they are ). But before she can fully execute her plan she was taken down by the Pros, the couple in question included. Now the two heroes and their family has to play babysitter/ temporary foster family to the little rebel. Because even though they've done more good than harm in most cases, taking down villains and corrupt heroes a like. Most of the main figure heads can admit that her taking down something as big as the hero commission will cause a major wave of distrust for the hero society. Which compared to the little ripples of distrust their vigilante causes by exposing the corrupt heroes that dwells behind the scenes of the hero society, taking down something as big as the hero commission will possibly cause a tsunami and leave behind collateral damage. So to stop the carnage before it happened, they caught their darling slipping last minute and used it to stop them. Ever since then the vigilante has be under near constant surveillance by the two heroes ( and possibly more-- ). But enough about that, what's life like with the EraserMic fam and their little anti-hero?

P.S. If you can't tell, the darling quirk has a lot to do with water. She can manipulate water, her voice can enchant and control others, and she can even turn into a mermaid.

Yandere Erasermic family x Reader!

Tw: Blood, mentions of Abuse, Threats of violence, graphic violence, mentioned cheating, unhealthy obsessions, Death, Murder scenes, and more if you aren't comfortable with these types of stuff don't read, please

"THEYRE RIGHT THERE" one Hero ordered the police as they chased down the person with the white fox mask down the alleyway carrying a suitcase, not long before they found the body of Fire Ranger The famous pro hero that can shoot fireballs out of his body

he was discovered in what recently seemed to be a flooded basement hands and feet chained up connected to a ball and his skin was covered in blisters and scald burns, the only thing the culprit left out was a single video posted on his phone on his Social media labeled "the truth of a filthy hero" Aizawa grabbed his phone and searched up video and decided to watch it

the video showed the hero, hitting his poor girlfriend until bruises showed yelling at her calling her cruel and disgusting names, saying awful and pretty offensive statements in public at times, and a video of him with multiple women touching and flirting with him while they all make cruel jokes about his girlfriend the video was labeled "is this the hero you root for?" With a single smile

the smell and the video were so sickening that the cops had to run outside the house to puke it was such a disturbing site...

Aizawa couldn't believe his eyes who would've done such a horrific act he didn't care for heroes ofc but was making up theories of who could've been, it quickly stopped when he saw a figure running from the crime scene with a suitcase in hand and that's how they ended up here

Shouta aimed their capture weapon towards them and shot but the focus mask completely dodged it with their swift movement, the chase went on and on until the perpetrator later climbed onto the roof and sprinted away he watched I'm shocked and angry "crap..." he said simply irritated "Sir what should do now we have to follow them!" A female officer spoke out to the hero whilst replying with a huff, "retreat they got away" he nonchalantly said as he slowly walked past them defeated once again

Later that night Aizawa was in his office observing the files of the now 5 cases in his hands he looked closely to see every one of them all single their deaths it's been their 5th top hero death in the past 6 months and nobody seemed to be knowing who would've done it observes more trying to see the pattern of these deaths and why they were killing top pro heroes ever since the 3 pro hero's has been confirmed dead publicly the hero society started to collapse...

You watched from above on a roof with chaotic glee, popcorn in hand while some kids started to vandalize the statue of Striker, another pro hero who got killed a month ago, drawing dick shapes onto its forehead, the word liar onto its chest, and a clown makeup planted straight onto their face while making cruel jokes at her, after a while they walked away proud of their work

You climbed down to examine the masterpiece the boys did "It's such a shame how such a pretty face was just a mask to hide what you are~" you teased at the statue as If she was standing right there glaring daggers at you, oh how you remembered the way her prideful smile dropped as you showed her pictures of her bullying and harassing her employers, never giving the hardest worker the deserved pay, and overworking them to the core where some of them committed suicide due to the constant bullying.

The way she pleaded with her life the same way her victims did when she was all high and mighty as you kept dunking her head into the water until the point she was coughing and throwing up water the way she finally took her last breath looking at you with the fear in those eyes it made your spirit flare up in some sort of sickening and gleefully sensation

After that, you decided it was time to go back to your hideout so you went to plan your next attack after all a big day was waiting for you! And you needed to get ready!

Days after Fire Ranger got exposed for his wrongdoings and announced dead, the citizens grew more suspicious and resentful of the heroes..., most of them would shame them for "hiring such disgusting people", you giggled at the fact that citizens were now making up rumors and theories that the hero commission was only hiring people with higher power and look it became so bad that the citizens were now Booimg harassing other famous heroes to the point they had to take a long mental break and on the brint to quitting

"Shouta, baby you've been in your office for the whole afternoon hour, Eri has been worried about ya, " Hizashi said with a plate of a cream baegal and some dark coffee with a cream heart on top just the way he likes it, he planted a kiss on the man's cheek he looked over and formed a small smile and sighed "It's just that it's been months and the culprit hasn't been found yet, 5 deaths in six months and we don't even have any evidence, clues or even a single suspect of who's doing it"

Aizawa laid his head on the desk in exhaustion mic was about to say something but noticed something like some sort of pattern...he moved shouta grabbed the files and looked closely and his eyes widened "Hizashi I know what the killer goal is..." hiszaahi looked up at him strangely his eyebrow raised "You know how every time every victim isn't innocent here right ?" Hiszashi nodded interested to hear him out "And every time we get there a video is posted on their account showing their true colors and dark intentions right?"

They both stared at eachother intensity when shouta said the final part

"The killer isn't after Heros just innocent heroes... They're after the corrupted ones. ...And they're getting their background information"

...

"COME BACK HERE YOU BITCH!" The villain shouted as he and other groups of criminals chased after her, woman shuddered at the booming voice as she ran, turning and twisting in any direction while panting heavily and sobbing she shakenly grabbed her phone trying to ring the police but a bullet shot the phone making the glass shatter in her face She yelped, bits if glass piercing through her face but continued running as her legs ache and her remaining adrenaline supported her

She quickly ran to the alley where she was met with a dead-end she frustrating cried out as she dropped to her knees the villain leader and his goons chuckled darkly as they cornered her she scattered and backed away, the villain then grabbed her harshly by the arm meeting an evil grin plastered on his face, "you gave us quite the chase there kid I must admit" his other hand grabbed her chin harshly and yanked it making her look at him "but you and father already made a deal and you belong to me now" "FUCK YOU!" The girl spit at the villain's face

In anger, he threw the girl down hard making her sprain her arm and grabbed a knife in his pocket and pinned her by her neck against the wall shoving the knife into her mouth "I had enough of that filthy mouth of yours why don't we cut off that little tongue of yours the girl's eyes widen as she closed her eyes ready for the pain coming to her...

until she suddenly felt his grip loosen and a thud seeing a hole in his chest as he collapsed lifelessly, the other goons started freaking out aiming their weapons and quirks waving them everywhere until another water-like arrow shot another goon in the head, "WHAT THE WHATS GOING ON!?" As one goon question as the others started panicking out there minds, "I should be asking the same thing you scums"

Behind them was a fox-masked figure holding what seemed to be a spear made of water, the goons backed up and aimed their weapons at them but the fox-masked giggled "This was way too easy your leader was such a pain I swear wish I could've tortured him..." she said as she rolled her eyes "but Oh well! Anyways can you hand me that girl please just throw her towards me and no one gets hurt"

the goons all glared daggered until one goon signal another and decided to be extreme and grabbed the injured girl and put a knife around her neck she squealed in pain as the knife pressed into her neck "TAKE ONE MOVE AND THE BITCH GETS IT" he grinned sadistically the fox masked yawned unamused at the man's threat "can you villains say anything original these days? Thats such a cringe statement"

You then disappeared into a puddle of water, the goon was confused and alarmed they all aimed their weapons in every direction, the fox-masked jumped out of another puddle, and stab the goon behind holding the girl she was then dropped onto the floor and scattered towards the wall behind you with all her energy, goons started getting angry and started to attack out of fear and anger charging towards you but a bullet has met their heads before they could even touch you, up on the roof was a rabbit-masked person with a sniper,

you and Homura then savagely killed each of the goons one by one trying to leave no one behind a goon then tackled you from behind and pulled off your mask "Y/N!" Homura called out and aimed her gun at the goon and shot the man directly in the head falling on top of you, "thanks" you pushed the body off, quickly putting back on your mask and cleaning yourself up, all there was left was 2 shivering goons and a shivering injured girl Homura went up to the scared girl and started confronting her while you could take care the last two "and then there was two~" the two goons flinched at your teasing voice you smiled sadistically as you held your weapon up ready to attack them until you heard footstep...

Hero footsteps

"THIS IS THE HERO ASSOCIATION GROUP PUT YOUR HANDS UP"

"Fuck.. and I was having the best for last..." you whined feeling defeated "COME ON WE DONT HAVE ANY TIME" Homura yelled you quickly put on your mask as Homura summoned a portal and the two of you disappeared,

when the pros and police went around the corner they were all met with a very gruesome scene..they later arrested the two goons and let the teenage girl call her grandma while the police investigating one of the police found a hair...

A single h/c hair...

"Whew, that was fun!" You said exciting out the portal and into your and Homura's secret hideout, you and Homura decorated the hideout that used to be an abandoned modern house everyone ignored the two of you stayed and lived in that hideout for years making plans and more the hideout "and dangerous you could've gotten us caught you know that right that villain pulled off your mask revealing your identity!" You rolled her eyes at her "But we killed the dude and the other two goons are in jail so they can't do anything we'll be fine" You brushed her off but she was still glaring at you anyways I'm gonna go plan another assassination!

"We already took down 5 isn't that enough?!" Homura glared as you were once again researching for your next victim "I know but I'm feeling a bit confident these past months they haven't caught us now and they never will" Homura groaned at her friend's stupidity checking who were you gonna target next untill you heard a faint knock on the door

The Both of you froze and stared at each then back at the door Homura signaled you to the portal she summoned when you were about to take the 1st step the door was smashed open revealing a few pro heroes and police officers yelling at the two of you to put your hands in the air you were about to activate your quirk until a red-winged hero held a leather like sword on your neck "I wouldn't do that if I were you kid~" you glanced at the man and suddenly started smiling

"Ah you right I should have I'm sorry" You caught the hero off guard in time to turn around and kick him in his groin he grunted in pain while you started running towards the exit Homura urged you to come on but you were wrapped around in strong like fabric on you, "ILL COME BACK Y/N!" Homura said as she quickly went into the portal you watched sadly but were glad she escaped "y/n you are now being detained the handled by the police you're coming with us" the man with long black and red eyes said as you were escorted with quirk cancelation cuffs and into the police car

At the police station, you were questioned by a lot of police officers, they were surprised when they found out about your age "A fourteen-year-old!?" One police officer examined the picture making sure that was true "How can a 14-year-old be able to kill 5 of our top heroes in 6 months!?!" Another said shocked "And their quirk is really strong so their skills are above average than the average teenager"

officer Tsukaucki and his colleagues started talking and bickering about what were they gonna do with you while they investigated, they couldn't put you in jail the hero society would've gone on a hunting spree to try and free someone as young as you, and villains would've tracked you down so their hands were tied at the moment, so they had one remaining option...

While you were sitting in one of the waiting rooms for criminals hawks were in charge of watching you which you disliked but kept quiet you noticed how the red-winged hero was staring at you for a long time "I'll be right back" as he went to the vending machine getting two drinks one some iced coffee and an f/d (fav drink) walked over and handed the Drink to you, you stared for a moment as he calm smiled at you, you silently thanked him and slowly took opened it taking a sip,

it was refreshing at least..

the two of you started making conversation about goals dreams weird stuff just anything honestly keigo noticed how you were very secretive with certain stuff but he didn't care it was kinda of nice talking to people and it feels kinda nice honestly...

"Y/n l/n" a voice called the two hawks escorted you out of the waiting room there you met a giant rat or mouse creature wearing a suit and tie with a permanent scar on his eye he smiled warmly at you "So is this the culprit? She seemed so young mr Tsukauchi?"

"Yes, this a the culprit behind the deaths Mr Nezu we are still under investigation at the moment and we dont know what to do with the girl " Tsukauchi exclaimed nezu walked closer to you and examined you for a moment looking you for a moment and writing something down "now tell me what is her quirk? " "Water manipulation sir she can also change the temperature of the water and add pressure onto it and can make weapons out of her water"

Mr. Nezu smiled brightly as he was impressed "ok I think I may my decision" he said as you looked up at him "L/n San I'm gonna give you two choices on what to do with you" You glanced up at him with a blank expression "you'll be in watchful of the pro heroes pro heroes with having to go to UA for your rehabilitation process or you can go to juvie that's islands away from Tokyo with very great security until you are trailed as an adult choose wisely my dear" he said still in a gentle bright tone

You glared at him you wanted to protest how you were doing the right thing but you knew you weren't gonna have any freedom if you picked the 2nd option so in a quiet tone

"I pick the 1st choice" Nezu smiled brightly again "Wonderful! I'll go make a quick phone with a dear friend Of mine they already have 2 wonderful children you won't be that lonely! while the police will gather up your stuff! See you next week!" Nezu gave you a quick wave as you were escorted into the waiting room again

While you waited for your fate to come to started making conversation with Hawks more he was a pretty chill guy in your opinion kinda funny too but you didn't trust him at all just wanted company

"Eraserhead! So pleasure to meet you!" Nezu greeted the tried underground hero "It better be good nezu" Aizawa said "Well we caught the culprit! And it's a 14-year-old teen" Aizawa's eyes widen choking on his drink "A what?" "Yes yes, a 14-year-old They are very skilled and their quirk is fairly powerful water manipulation was their quirk" Aizawa couldn't believe his ears at the moment how could someone that young take down 5 of the best pro heroes? "And we decided they're going to stay with you and your family for the time being!"

"What..."

After a bit of convicting and deals with Nezu he reluctantly agreed he called Mic and asked if they had a spare bedroom and thank God they did, after signing some papers and agreement forms they gave you your stuff and gave you to him you were his and his husband's responsibility now...

The drive back to your new "home" was silent Aizawa processing everything like he just decided to take care of a vigilante teenager when they pulled up at the house he broke the silence "We're here" You glanced outside of the car window, outside was a fairly big house not so big but not small either just big enough to keep like a family of 5 in there and there was a small little garden in the front with pretty flowers

When the two of you walked to the doorstep you could hear a little girl giggling inside with cats meowing "You have cats?" You glanced at the pro "Yes 4 of them 2 girls and 2 boys is there a problem are you allergic?" You nodded your head sideways the two of you made it to the front door he glanced at you for a moment "You ready?" You took a deep breath and nodded

The door slowly opened and you were meeting with a very cozy environment the house looked very clean and tidy the living room was filled with some dolls a console under the TV stand and a cat sleeping on the couch "Shouta!! Your home" you were then met with a man with long blonde hair tied into a bun with an apron with cats on it the man over and kissed shouta on the cheek and then he met your gaze "Oh hello! You must be y/n aren't you?" He then a warm smile plastered on his face he took his hand out to shake as you were a bit hesitant to

"I... I know you might be a bit nervous cause you're going to be living with a bunch of random people for a "different" reason" but that doesn't mean me and my husband are gonna treat you any different than my kids!" he reassured you making you calmed down a bit "speaking of the kids! Hitoshi Eri come down here for a second!" Two kids were later revealed to you one with long white hair and red eyes with a red dress and boots and another kid that was close to your age with lavender hair with a white t-shirt and pants

"Now this little lady right here is y/n she will be living with us from now on!" Eri then did a small little wave with a shy smile as you did the same while Hitoshi lazily waved at you as well "Hi!" "Hey.." they both said as you did the same "now why don't you give y/n a house tour! While me and your father make dinner " The girl smiled brightly as she took your hand and excitedly leading you up the stairs shinsou following behind them as the couple chuckled to themselves

For the past 5 days you have been living with the eraser-mic family your bonds with each other got stronger each day

Aizawa can relate to you on a certain level so he doesn't judge you completely, honestly the more he spends time with you the more he thinks you are his kid, Aizawa would watch detective movies or investigation channels when everyone else sleeps on the couch with a half sleep dad and his very talkative child talking over the show and making theories but he doesn't mind, he prob would teach you a thing or two about the types of flowers in their backyard are they and do little scavenger hunts for you Shinso and eri to make yall bond a bit, he would also throw in random cat facts of the day whether be weird, funny or even disgusting

When your walk out the street if anyone looks at you the wrong way or talking he's sends a death glare in there way, when you comfortable enough he would give you hat pats here and there and

Hizashi would make you watch him cook and even let you help him at times! Which makes his heart warm he would practically do group hugs with his children always including you in it no leaving you out he loves to watch over each of his children whether be playing dolls with Eri or gaming with Shinsou even if you just doing nothing he watches over you and never gets bored he's the type of parent to even watch his children when he sleeps, he teaches you how to garden certain stuff like strawberries, raspberries, just anything you like!

But there are times when he can be overbearing when one of the sassy cats accidentally scratches you and Hizashi kinda freaks out running to get a band-aid and kissing it, he LOVES to spoil his kids so don't be surprised when he comes back with your favorite things!, Is very clingy he would give you big bear hugs

Shinsou was a bit suspicious of you at 1st didn't trust you at 1st but when you found out he was playing your favorite video game that's how the two of you bonded over each other, Shinsou and you would pull small pranks at the family, like swapping salt with sugar, making hizaahi accidentally dyed your hair and recording and the both of you laughed, he's very protective of his sister so seeing you and Eri get a lot makes his heart warm, if you ever tried to sneak and do something he would be a snitch or not it depends, very protective of you as well will glare at anyone you talked to

Eri is just the cutest of all she is just so excited that another girl is in the house she would beg you to wear her dresses (even tho they're too small) and do little tea parties with caramel(one of the cats) Shinsou and her, she loves to go put the garden and tells you all about the flowers and how pretty they are, heck even one day she saw a flower that looks just like you and said your as beautiful as this flower (it was a weed) but let's just say you kept it in your room for a while

And then there was the 1st day of school you had to wear a different type of uniform (basically a UA uniform but a bit darker like a darker gray basically)

Aizawa and Hizashi wanted to make your 1st day of school amazing so Hizashi made you your favorite lunch and snack with a sticky note saying "Have a great 1st day of school!" While Aizawa was giving you some simple rules-a-day tips about his classmates

1. No talking about vigilante stuff infront of them

2. No dating untill 34

3. Stay with Shinso at all times

4. Don't ever try to talk off the quirk canceling cuffs unless you have training (but don't worry you have good combat training even without your quirk)

5. If any of the classmates start bothering you let him know and etc

6. When we go in this building reframe to me and Hizashi as Mic and Mr. Aizawa or Sensei or present Mic

"And no dissing the Ua security system or telling anyone how to hack them," he said sternly looking at you "Aw but Mr shouta they do suck-" "I know the w kid but just brace with me here" he huffed "Fineeeee" You whined Mr Shouta wasn't any fun

Shinsou sadly couldn't walk you to your class because the two of you were gonna be in different classes but he told you to let him know if a grape dude came up to you flirting with you

When you arrived at the school you were gawked about how big the school was and groaned when you realized you had to walk "do this school have any elevators?" "No unfortunately we're gonna have to walk" "UGHHHUUH-"

When the rest of you got out of the car Nezu was in front of the entrance with a smile that looked a bit too excited "Ah y/n welcome! Why dont you follow me to your class" Nezu said leading you and Aizawa away, Eri, Hizashi, and Shinsou waved bye to you while eri held mic's hand

When the 3 of you were heading to class a couple of students looked at you with mixed expressions, some scared, some in envy, and some in awe at your appearance, but you didn't think any about it and just kept walking, you arrived at your class you stared up at the sign for a bit ignoring nezu's guide to the school untill he gently put a hand on your shoulder

"You ready to come in?" Nezu and Aizawa both stared at you for your answer You mentally prepared yourself and nodded, the door slid open as you walked into the class, the classmates were now silent and were now on you "Class please welcome our newest addition to the class please introduce yourself" you mentally rolled your eyes and placed yourself in the middle

"Hello my name is y/n l/n and im a proud vigilante and my quirk is water manipulation" "Wonderful! Now you go have a seat behind yaoyorozu san!" Then a girl with a ponytail raised her hand up as you walked towards your seat you felt every eye on you which made you uncomfortable momo gave you a little wave and you did the same

At lunch, you searched around to sit and you saw Shinso you walked towards him and sat at his table "Hey loser have fun " he teased you rolled your eyes "Ugh no class was so boring, I met with a couple of students a green hair, a frog girl, some girl with pink skin and some hot head blonde, was annoying me trying to me it was so overwhelming and your dad (hizashi) was so embarrassed waving to me with that cheesy grin on his face" shinso chuckled laughing at your "suffering "Well dad can be embrassing but he means well just at the wrong time"

It was training time and it was probably one of your favorite class periods, exercising was a piece of cake, and sparing oh SPARRING was the absolute favor you were up against the the boy who fried his brain every time he used his quirk named Denki he gave you a little wink which you rolled your eyes, everyone else staring at the two of you wondering what was gonna happen

"Sorry if I hurt you too bad princess~," he said as he blew a kiss at you, you faked a gag finding it funny while Aizawa glared at him causing Denki to gulp nervously, as the sparing began you lifted Denki the air and slammed him down you saw put him in several positions making him plead for mercy everyone else eyes were admired and were mesmerized by your skills that's when they all knew they wanted to get to know you by the end of the day

Timeskip cause I'm damn lazy asf

At the end of class, you quickly went into Aizawas car where the rest were waiting for you "Hey y/n how was school" You looked over to the two heroes Eri smiling at you with a candy apple in hand while Shinsou smiled eating up all the cute expressions you were making (as siblings shinsou is platonic) "...it was crazy"

Shouta, Hizashi, and Shinsou all snickered while you glared at all of them and eri was munching away at her treat "so how about we go out huh? "To celebrate your 1st day at school" eri smiled as she clapped her hands excitedly in her car seat "I wanna go to the {preferred restaurant}!" "Ah ah eri you picked last week lets give y/n a go!, so y/n what kind of restaurant you wanna go"

You stopped for a second and thought about it now realizing this was your fate for now you were gonna stay with a crazy family with a bunch of crazy students from now on you then blur out the answer "yea that restaurant seems nice.."

Shouta and Hizashi already had a strong bond with you, they already considered you as part of the family even Shinsou and Eri agreed they loved their new sister/daughter you were the family light in their life!

[shippingdragons]

Interview: Unpacking Corruption, With Stars Saffron Burrows and Toby Stephens

Stephens and Burrows star in the latest play from dramatist J.T. Rogers and director Bartlett Sher at Lincoln Center Theater.

David Gordon Off-Broadway March 25, 2024

Following up on the massive, international success of Oslo, playwright J.T. Rogers and longtime director Bartlett Sher have turned to another socio-political subject for their newest theatrical collaboration at Lincoln Center Theater. Corruption, running through April 14 at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, tells the story behind the 2011 phone-hacking scandal that upended British politics and almost brought Rupert Murdoch’s media empire down.

The David-and-Goliath story, which Rogers presents in customarily epic form, follows Parliament member Tom Watson as he takes on News of the World editor Rebekah Brooks, not only risking his career, but also his life, to expose the nefarious goings on. Taking on these two roles are esteemed actors Toby Stephens (who last collaborated with Rogers and Sher in the National Theatre production of Oslo) and Saffron Burrows, a film and tv regular making her New York stage debut.

Both Burrows and Stephens recognize the importance of this particular story — they lived it in their native England, after all — and also the controversy that could come with it. Here are excerpts from a recent coversation we had with them.

Toby Stephens and Saffron Burrows © Tricia Baron

Having lived through this case in real time, what was it like when you first read the play? At times it felt like watching a Shakespearean history play.

Toby Stephens: Bart and J.T. kept on comparing it to Shakespeare plays, and I always slightly wince when things are compared to Shakespeare. It’s like the history plays because it moves around so much; you’re suddenly in all these different locations and following different characters with disparate interests, and they’re politically and morally complex. In that regard, it’s true. We’re dealing with an incredibly complex story and the morality is very interesting. Tom Watson is slightly ambiguous in a sense: he’s done bad things in the past, but he is obsessed by bringing down this woman because he has been hurt by that machine.

Personally, I think it’s about time somebody wrote about this. It was such a massive story and there are so many different parts of this thing, and they were getting away with it. But everyone was so terrified of attacking them because then they would become a target themselves. So, it’s about time somebody wrote a play, but you understand the fear. An American writer can do this, but if you were a British playwright, you’d probably think twice, because they’re still very influential and powerful.

Tom Watson and Toby Stephens © Tricia Baron

Saffron, your character, Rebekah Brooks, is obviously the “villain” of the piece. How did you find your way into that?

Saffron Burrows: It’s tricky terrain to navigate. Clearly, there are about four white cis men running the world right now, and I didn’t want it to just be that the woman’s the demon, you know? Because there’s a whole mechanism at play. In rehearsals, we talked about how this is a story about what happens when capitalism starts to eat itself and ravages society. The writing became more and more nuanced. J.T. refined and refined it, so there’s now a scene where it becomes evident that Rebekah, too, is part of an order of things. There’s some subtle stuff at play between her and her superior now, which helped me a lot because she too has her adversaries that she has to tackle.

Bart and J.T. have obviously worked together for decades now. As actors, what is it like to be welcomed into their collaboration? I know, Toby, you did Oslo in the West End.

Saffron: I was struck by how truly collaborative Bart and J.T. are. It’s a new play and it was evolving throughout the rehearsal period, and I loved that part of the process. They’ve got huge creative confidence about their own skills, which made it all the more collaborative. Members of our company would bring in stories and things they read, so it was evolving daily. It’s a lovely, exciting way to work.

Toby: Oslo, in a way, was an inherited play. The great people who did it in the Mitzi Newhouse handed it onto us and we got that script and did our own thing with it. One of the reasons I wanted to do Corruption was because it’s a new play, not yet another revival, and it’s about something that’s really important. It was very collaborative. It’s really exciting when you’re working on something that is still finding where it wants to go, as they figured out how to tell this incredibly complicated story in a way that not only an American audience will follow, but will draw their own parallels with. The Oslo experience was different because we got something they knew works. The interesting thing about this is that it’s not a particularly optimistic play. There are optimistic parts about it, in that it’s about people who are fighting against the system and care about that, but at the moment, the system is winning.

What do you think audiences in England would make of this play?

Toby: I really don’t know. I think it would be hugely controversial. There’s a huge amount of vested interest there in people who were part of that system and who are part of the story. Doing it here is almost safe, in a way, because you’re doing it in a different country.

Saffron: I had a friend come to opening who, not to name names, but she’d been hacked, and then she reminded me that I’d had someone go through my bins in the early 2000s, and then went to my grandmother’s house when my mom was walking my five-year-old brother to school. That was a bad period, but when my friend reminded me of the details I thought “Jesus.” I’m sure it happened to Toby, too. It’s absurd how low the bar was in terms of what you’d expect from “journalists” — journalists in quotes. So I agree, Toby, I think it would be very close to the bone in London. Some people who are in power now are depicted in the play, so it’s present-day, relevant, and powerful. It would be quite electric having it there.

Toby: I had a friend, he’s not even famous, he was just going out with somebody moderately successful and she was going through a divorce, and his father, who was 80, found these so-called journalists on their doorsteps saying “What do you say about your son?” It was deeply upsetting for him because dad was so confused by the whole thing. He didn’t understand why it was happening. That’s just a minor, minor case. This is a discussion that’s still going on. Doing it in London, in the heart of this whole system, I would imagine would be really, really chilling and scary, to some degree.

[lesbianneopolitan]

How will Neo get away with murder and deal with loose ties?

(also am i reading too much alex cross, help)

First of all, couldn't help thinking of this song after reading the first part:

I actually have a lot of thoughts about Neo's process to commit crimes, so let's see if I can order them without forgetting stuff or writing down a mess-

She's absolutely paranoid about leaving clues behind, so no fingertips, either because of gloves, a cover with her Semblance to make proof very misleading (aka, changing her fingertips to something random- thanks god her illusions are physical) or in the worst case, the fact my interpretation of Neo burnt her own fingertips to not be easy to identify via those.

I'm sure she enters the scenes with the appearance of someone else. If there are cameras, she eventually destroys or disconnects them with the faux appearance. If we pay attention to canon, Roman has always been the face of the crimes, and Neo doesn't seem to appear anywhere, not even after the Vytal Festival when Cinder's group is wanted by the authorities. So she's good at hiding her true identity.

I'm sure she would even try to let the blame fall on someone else by taking the appearance of citizens of Vale when more 'exposed'. Take for sure she's too good with identity theft. Seeing how easily she just took over the damn Atlesian ship to free Roman that one time, this bitch knows what she's doing.

Like, come on, she entered a high security military airship, made a cleansing before freeing Roman, and then they had the airship for themselves.

Being a fighter that mainly works by counter-attacking or blocking attacks, I'm sure she rarely makes a mess when it comes to murder. I want to believe in a normal situation, her last hit to kill a person is always with the unsheathed blade of Hush, but only if you've 'entertained' her enough. Otherwise, if you don't have the pleasure of amusing her, I can see her just cutting necks with a broken piece of glass made with the Semblance (to not leave any weapon proof behind), so they either die from blood loss or choke with their blood.

She actually carries a Swiss knife in her back pocket, but that thought aside...

So, you usually can get from her either a person that died from a profound stab wound (if she used the rapier from Hush), or a cut to the neck (that, adding as a side note, I can see it being kind of like her 'mark'- going for the neck on her victims because of the lack of her own voice).

It doesn't help that I can actually see her using her Semblance to add extra misleading clues at the crime's scene (on top on the fingertip trick) when the limit is only her imagination, because I'm sure she loves to play around with the cops or Huntsmen so they go crazy trying to figure everything out.

Crimes of theft alongside Roman are another story, but if she can get away with murder, she can get away with petty theft.

I also wonder how easy it's to corrupt the cops by bribing them, seeing as how Jimmy Vanille paid them to stay shut about Trivia's first crimes, or knowing Huntsmen on the 'other side of the law' also exist.

To remove blood off her clothes? Oxygen-producing detergent. With her being a trained assassin (and seeing how skillful she is), I can imagine that the crimes she usually commits or, the murders, in this case, hardly make her sweat, and even less bleed because you gotta get over her Aura first.

With some extras on crime activity:

Would she get rid of the corpses? Maybe sometimes, if she feels like it.

Would she torture people if Roman needs someone to 'sing'? Definitely. I even headcanon she plays this song in the background whenever she has to torture for info, she has a lot of fun, if they survive they will be left traumatized. She usually starts with removing the nails off people's hands.

Idk, many thoughts, if she hasn't been caught yet, it says a lot.

Mafia shit.

[the-cat-and-the-birdie]

I'm currently thinking up of a Spiderwoman Oc. She's physically disabled so she goes around on mechanical spider legs that she "borrowed" (wink wink) from her father's job at Alchemax. They were originally her father's design but Alchemax stole them and fired her father. Also she's not much of a on the scene punch bad guys type spiderman. She's more behind the scenes taking down large corporations by exposing them to the public type beat. (You ever seen leverage like that but a one woman team.)

I just thought this up as I was typing this but her name is probably going to be taken from that African folklore about the trickster spider Anansi. (I looked up the name so I could spell it and now I'm sold.) Her name is now Ansi.

A lot of people look down on her because of her disability and she uses it to her advantage.

This is all I have out so far. I just thought her up and now I want to expand this and maybe even write about her (ignores wip pile). I'd be happy to hear any thoughts you had.

Okay, I LOVE THIS because it also goes into one of the aspects of Spider-man that sometimes gets put on the backburner which is technology! I love the idea that across the multiverse all spidersonas have a knack for mechanical stuff and I think the connection to Alchemax with her father is brilliant!! It opens up so much story and I'd love to hear how it connects to her relationship with her dad!

Cause by stealing back stuff she's technically getting even (lets break those generational curses yesss)

Plus by exposing corrupt assholes to the public, her J.Jonah must be pressed! She's using press for good unlike him AND IM SO HYPE FOR TRADITIONAL NAMES! Thank you so much for sharing this this is so interesting to me to read

Let me know if you develop or write something for her! It'd be so cool :)

[liampaynemysteriousdeath]

Hi! Thank you so much for answering my ask about the boys' old tumblrs... I too wanted to say thank you for your amazing work compiling stuff about Liam. My hope is for justice to be served, and Liam and his family to regain the dignity they have lost due to the press. I can see you've actually been around tumblr for quite a while, having even msged some of the boys! I myself am quite new here... I wanted to ask your thoughts on Larry? Of course, you don't have to answer if you wish! Thank you for all your hard work love, I visit your site every day! Lots of love

hey yw :) and thank you:) yeah I hope justice is served as well. But there is so much corruption. I heard a rumor that the reason the police didn't raid the hotel at the beginning was because geoff was still in country. 🤷‍♂️

Im actually gonna post like about 90 screenshots right now from a Twitter I recently found who has been doing some deep dives. They talk about how mayas family supposedly has ties to abcfamily and who was the first outlet to report the autopsy of pink cocaine?Abc. But also i think tmz reported it as well. Idk it's a big mess hopefully the screenshots clear it up. I'm still working on adding some notes to them.

Yeah it's so unfortunate that they just wanted to frame liam as just some druggie. Like a hate smear campaign, but also so people wouldn't look into the truth. Idk if you saw an old post of mine where I talked about how celebs can be victims of crimes as well. Like how demi had laced drugs from her drug dealer and was r3p3d :/(idk if tumvlr will flag if I out the rest word here? I know other sites have strict rules and filters) and that's just the stuff that has been shown. I'm sure there are lots of crimes behind the scenes as well.

Actually that reminds me I saw an e! Hollywood investigates documentary a long tume ago about this one dude called "the fixer" and it was a dude you could call if you're a celebrity. They gave the example of a hypothetical celebrity beating someone up at a bat and there being witnesses, but one call to the fixer would make it all go away. Although idk how far that would go these days with everyone videotaping everyone plus social media. I assume that only worked in the 90s be flre technology became more accessible and mainstream.

Lol yeah I used to lurk mostly, but had one for a short time when harry was online lol.

That reminds me, did you find zayns tumblr, if not come off anon and I'll tell you. Dm me for details.

For larry, i mean i feel like it was probably real at some point. If you read that exposing/abuse management link I just posted about how louis was removed during week 5, and then the rumors of them first meeting in bathroom, plus a bunch of other management shenanigans. Plus this post.

https://stoponedirectionsmanagement.tumblr.com/post/75203700182/a-small-post-about-modest-management-and-one

^that tumlblr has a LOT of good info, not just onLarry, but on all the crap the boys had to go through.

Plus I like your skirt Mary videos on YT. And some ziam stuff too.

It freaked me out at first, so I kinda just closed the door on that haha. I mean I love the boys regardless of their orientation, so it didn't really matter to me, but it was overwhelming and my brain couldn't handle it. It freaked me out haha. I think it mostly freaked me out bevause of the shock factor of, if that is what management is hiding, imagine what else is going on behind the scenes...

So I shut the door on that lol. Maybe one day I'll revisit, but I'm mostly focused on liam for now.

And aww thanks for your support. It means a lot ♥ *virtual hug* 🤗 lol

[theunvanquishedzims]

Calming my post-election anxiety with sweet sweet logic

So Trump is a wannabe dictator with crazy screaming fans who are headed toward violent armed meltdowns. What’s to stop him from going full dictator and refusing to leave office?

I’m glad you asked!

You see, the major difference between wannabe dictators and actual dictators is ALLIES. Dictators are surrounded with tight security, aided by the military, cheered on by media that they control, and are either helped, encouraged, or just ignored by other countries with the power to stop them.

Trump has charged the Secret Service money for the privilege of protecting him and his family since day one. You remember the first year, when his wife and son refused to move to the White House so the Secret Service had to RENT FLOORS in TRUMP’S BUILDING to be close to them? And how his extended family went globetrotting and the Secret Service had to accompany them? And when Trump himself insisted on hosting people at his golf club, he made the Secret Service RENT GOLF CARTS from TRUMP’S CLUB to follow him while he went golfing?

The end result was that halfway through the first year of his presidency, the Secret Service could not pay their own wages. Because half their yearly budget had gone straight to Trump’s pockets. And that’s just financially. I think we all remember how the White House came down with Covid and Trump still insisted on Secret Service agents driving him around to wave at people. He has not been kind to the people who are sworn to protect him. These people have had a front-row seat to his circus since 2016. When the time comes from Trump to leave the White House and Biden to take over, I doubt they’ll betray the country out of loyalty to Trump. If anything, they’ll be the ones to drag him out.

As for the military, Trump insulted and fired four generals from his administration staff. He said on multiple occasions that soldiers who get captured or killed are suckers and losers. He refused to visit a cemetery to honor the dead because it was raining. He tries to pander to the military by massive increases in defense spending, but that money goes to capitalists who make weapons and war technology, not the soldiers or veterans. (He also hypocritically accused military officials of being in bed with those same companies.) In a poll of 1000 service members 50% said they disliked Trump. Overall, he doesn’t act like a leader, and the way he skirts responsibility (like taking charge during the pandemic) doesn’t appeal to a group that functions on trust in their leadership.

A proper dictator would have spent the last four years cozying up to his generals and making sure they knew the financial and social benefits of answering to him personally, not the office of the President. And while Trump did adhere to the adage “find a foreign foe” to unite people against, he badly misjudged what most US citizens consider “foreign.” He hasn’t found a villain that we would root for the military taking down, and the people he targets (Latinx, Blacks, immigrants, and people in countries our military has already devastated) are not a minority he can turn the majority of the country against, especially with how many of the former two serve in the military themselves. When the time comes for him to leave office, the military might be the first to cut ties with the wannabe Dictator-in-Chief.

Now, the media. They’ve been treating him like a joke candidate since day one, but after he was actually elected and took office they’ve started to take him more seriously. He’s gotten his catchphrase “fake news!” to catch on, but that doesn’t change the fact that under his administration news reporters have been harassed, illegally arrested, and generally poorly treated by Trump, especially if they’re women. He’s trashed talked everyone, with Fox News being the last bastion of semi-legitimate news that openly supports him (and their credibility has taken a big hit over it.)

Despite this support, in recently months Trump has been increasingly dumping on Fox, even throwing the mediator they provided for the debate under the bus, and risking alienating them in the process. If his supporters listen to him and start considering Fox part of Big Fake News, it might possibly be the death of Fox, leaving most of his supporters adrift and isolated from their source of right-wing news, and sending the more extreme fringes into the arms of conspiracy theory websites. (I’m not saying this is bad, being cut off from Fox and its toxic stream of “information” can actually help rehabilitate the right.)

Honestly, I don’t think Trump ever had a shot at controlling the media like a dictator would, mainly because of social media. He’s in love with attention, and Twitter has provided him a nonstop stream of it. No other President has threatened, insulted, promoted, or hinted at war over social media the way Trump has, and he gets so much direct feedback and interaction with the public and the world as a result. He could have leveraged that by buying the company (through a shell corporation, obviously) and setting it up as The One True Source of Information, manipulating public perception of him and his administration by keeping a tight grip on what information he let out.

But he’s just. Not. That. Clever. He blurts out everything that crosses his mind, leaving his administration to play clean-up on his messes, put out fires he keeps pouring gasoline on, and claim he’s joking when everyone knows he’s testing the limits on what he can get away with saying. He took advantage of the direct communication with legions of supporters, but seemed to forget that his detractors had equal access and would absolutely call him out on things he definitely said, it’s right there on his Twitter account, they have the Tweet pulled up on their phone right now. Instead of operating a single state-run media outlet while crushing all free press and limiting internet access like other dictators, he’s mooned the world’s cameras and acted surprised when they put his saggy butt on tv. “Fake news! That’s not my butt! THIS is my butt! [image attached]” he tweets. “Twitter is so biased, they haven’t censored any of Sleepy Joe’s photos!” he later tweets.

And lastly. The key to a dictatorship’s success. To prevent outside intervention, the country a dictator runs must be unimportant and ignored, wealthy and well-connected, or scary and well-armed. Minor warlords are the former, Putin is the latter, Trump might have weaseled his way into being the middle. But at the end of the day, America’s whole thing is new leadership every four years. It was revolutionary to replace a lineage of kings and queens stretching generations with a non-royal elected leader who only held office for four to eight years, but we’ve stuck to that for 200 years and everyone’s used to it by now. It would take a charismatic and powerful person to move the American people towards abolishing such a basic tenant of our democracy, and despite the mob mentality that lead a small portion of his supporters to chant “sixteen more years!” in the heat of the moment, Trump is not that charismatic. He’s not that smart. He’s not that well-connected. He’s not that savvy. He’s not that good at politics. And he’s not that powerful.

(I was going to say something here about him being the laughingstock of the world’s leaders and shouldn’t expect any outsiders to help him stay in power, especially since his tax returns came out and showed he owes people a ton of money that he doesn’t have, but this post is long enough so let’s cut to the chase.)

Trump is a greedy, small-minded man that has clung to power by appealing to the worst in humanity and scraping away at the best. But he hasn’t succeeded. He’s a sad old man who will say anything to be loved, and I don’t think he even knows what love is, so he’ll settle for attention. He doesn’t have money, he doesn’t have an army, and the only allies he has are using him as a political pawn to further their own interests. They will cut him loose the minute he stops being useful.

Now, the bad part: crazy screaming fans. Fringe groups on the internet. Mobs chanting “sixteen more years!” Men with guns and bombs and kidnapping plots, men trying to get into voting centers to destroy the election, men driving trucks with black flags that say FUCK YOUR FEELINGS, TRUMP 2020 (available on Amazon for $11.99, I wish I was joking.) I have no idea how many people in this country genuinely love Trump. It is hopefully significantly less than voted for him. There are some big issues in this country that are make-or-break, and unfortunately by reason of running Republican Trump has aligned himself with some of them.

There are people who hate everything about Trump, but he put a pro-life judge on the Supreme Court so they’re voting for him. There are people who are uncomfortable with Trump, but they’ve forgiven their grandpa for saying worse at Thanksgiving dinner, so they’ll vote for him. There are people who don’t know a single thing about Donald Trump, but they see (Republican) next to his name on the ballot, so they vote for him. None of that means those people will side with him if he tries to make a move towards dictatorship.

Now there are people who love Trump. They’ve heard and seen the vile things he’s said and done, and are genuinely okay with it, because they are full of hate and rage and want to change the world to put themselves on top. I do not know how many of these people there are. I know they exist all over the country, not just in red states. I know some of them have guns and want a reason to use them, because they’ve been talking about it for decades. I don’t know if we can trust the police to side with us over them if fights start breaking out. (And I pray pray PRAY people de-escalate any fights, because monkey see monkey do, and one news report of a MAGA extremist shooting someone can inspire a hundred copycats can lead to full-on civil war like we've never seen.) I know we need to be careful the next few months, to take care of ourselves and watch out for the more vulnerable in our communities.

And above all, I know this: Trump is not going to keep this country. He got it through trickery and deceit and foreign influence and national indifference and people not taking him seriously. We’ve learned. We’ve grown. We’re taking him seriously now, and we will not let him take what we’ve already told him he can’t have. The election is over. He’s a loser. He’d better start packing his bags. Because he’s not staying in office.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Countervailing power

It’s hard not to feel powerless. The rich are getting richer, the middle class is disappearing, and poor people are evermore exposed to labor abuses, predatory finance, police violence, and food-, fuel- and housing-insecurity. Our cities are increasingly segregated into the haves and have-nots, and the haves hoard the parks, schools and clean air:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/06/us/economic-segregation-income.html

The rich don’t just own all the good stuff, they also own the political process. The now-classic 2014 paper “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” finds that “ordinary citizens… get the policies they favor, but only because those policies happen also to be preferred by the economically-elite citizens who wield the actual influence.”

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B

How do material wealth and political power relate to each other? Well, on the one hand, it’s obvious that if you have more wealth, you have more to spend on lobbying, both to the public and to lawmakers. As the leaks in Propublica’s IRS Files show, just having a lot of money can scare off regulators and legal enforcers, who know you’ll be able to hire more lawyers than they can.

https://www.propublica.org/article/irs-now-audits-poor-americans-at-about-the-same-rate-as-the-top-1-percent

But the secret to oligarchy isn’t (just) outspending the rest of us. Oligarchs wield a far more important weapon: class solidarity. There is so much solidarity among billionaires, centimillionaires, decimillionaires and even ordinary millionaires, who may jockey with one another for the right to financialize your rent and suppress your wages, but come together with admirable discipline when their collective interests are at stake.

Take taxes. In a major new Propublica IRS Files story, Paul Kiel and Mick Dumke document the behind-the-scenes spending that defeated Illinois’s state referendum on a progressive state tax comparable to the system in 32 other states:

https://www.propublica.org/article/ken-griffin-illinois-graduated-income-tax

Led by the hedge-fund billionaire Ken Griffin of Citadel (the richest man in the state) the ultra-rich of Illinois unleashed a blizzard of money on deceptive ads that ultimately defeated the measure. That spending was a bargain! Propublica calculates that Griffin’s $54,000,000 contribution saved him $51,000,000 per year thereafter (the IRS Files show Griffin’s average income to be about $2.9 billion per year).

Griffin led the “investment” in starving Illinois’s tax coffers, but he had a lot of co-investors: there’s Richard Uihlein, the billionaire behind Iline, who kicked in $100k. Uihlein’s a shrewd investor in political corruption, having spent $20m on Ron Johnson’s campaign, only to have Johnson insert a last-minute amendment to the Trump tax cuts that saved him $215m in the first year alone:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/11/the-canada-variant/#shitty-man-of-history-theory

Sam Zell, whose leveraged buyout of the Chicago Tribune led the newspaper into bankruptcy, kicked in $1.1m and got $1.6m/year in savings every year thereafter. The Tribune now operates out of a windowless cinderblock bunker the size of a Chipotle:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/16/sociopathic-monsters/#all-the-news-thats-fit-to-print

Patrick Ryan gave $1m to realize a return of $2.1m/year. Richard Colburn’s $500k nets him $5.5m/year. He told Propublica that the spending was an investment “to limit the temptation on me to relocate.” Donald Wilson gave $250k to get back $3.5m/year.

Richard Stephenson, who made his nut with a chain of for-profit cancer hospitals and was executive producer on two Ayn Rand film adaptations (you literally can’t make this shit up), gave $300k through his trust.

Another trust spend came from Philip M Friedmann, who cashed out his family’s greeting card business by selling to private equity looters. Friedmann’s trust is a “personal” one, which makes his $25k investment illegal, according to three tax experts that Propublica consulted.

The campaign to raise Illinois’ 5% flat tax to an 8% tax for the richest people in the state was a rare example of billionaire-on-billionaire violence. Democrat Governor JB Pritzker — scion of the Hyatt Hotel fortune — won office by promising to raise taxes on the rich. This sparked a political bidding war, pitting former GOP governor Bruce Rauner (another private equity looter) in a race that ultimately cost more than $250m.

Though the billionaire low-tax coalition lost the battle for the governor’s mansion, they won the war, thanks to $63m in ads that convinced the people of Illinois that they would see higher taxes as a result (the vast majority of Illinoisians would not have seen their tax bills go up).

While Pritzker is a rare class traitor, he still maintained some loyalty to his cohort, continuing to milk his grandfather’s fortune through a system of secret trusts typical of dynastic wealth, which seeks to ensure that merely emerging from a very lucky orifice guarantees you the power to impact the lives of millions of people who lost the orifice lottery:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/19/dynastic-wealth/#caste

When even the “good” billionaires favor the eugenic proposition that being descended from someone who made a lot of money makes you suited to leadership and influence, it’s no wonder that this proposition is so durable in our political system.

Now, it’s obvious why rich people would favor a system that increased and perpetuated their wealth and power, but self-interest alone doesn’t explain the rock-solid solidarity of the oligarchs. The other crucial element is in their numbers: when your bloc is small, it’s easier to come to agreement on how it should mobilize.

This is how monopolies rot our society and politics. When an industry is composed of hundreds of companies, they’ll struggle to agree on the catering for their annual meeting. Reduce the number of firms until all their CEOs will fit around a board-room table, and they’ll be able to agree on far more ambitious issues, like whether to raise prices in unison and blame “inflation”:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/02/its-the-economy-stupid/#overinflated

Collective action problems are some of the hardest challenges we face as a species. Solving collective action problems are why we build institutions: from the Mafia to the Catholic Church, from trade unions to federal governments, from the UN to the Cali cartel, organizations exist to find ways to let groups of people coordinate their activities to do more than any individual could do on their own:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm

Oligarchs benefit from having a lot of money to spend, but even more important is that their numbers are so low that they can agree on how to spend it. Every time the rich figure out how to coordinate better, they clean up. Take this NBER working paper that shows that when giant funds become company shareholders, worker wages go down:

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w30203/w30203.pdf

Once the power of the wealthy is gathered into the hands of a few fund managers, they’re able to direct that power to pick managers who’ll endure the internal strife from slashing wages, benefits and staffing levels. Workers, by contrast, are atomized and can be divided and pitted against one another.

Now, obviously if real wages are declining, then there must have been a time when forces drove them up, when workers were able to hold the line against the power of the owning class. The most familiar tool workers used to exercise this power was unionization, which is why oligarchs hate unions and spend millions to keep their workers from organizing.

Though unions are having a renaissance, they are still far weaker than they were during the period in which workers built and expanded power — and oligarchs are far stronger (richer, more coordinated). Oligarchs have built a flywheel, where more power gives them more money which gives them more power.

To brake the flywheel, we have to come up with our own virtuous cycle of systems, laws and tactics that build one atop another. “Countervailing Power” is a new series from The American Prospect and The Forge that systematically explores how to build that system:

https://prospect.org/topics/countervailing-power/

The debut article is “Laws That Create Countervailing Power,” a discussion between ACORN’s Steve Kest and Benjamin Sachs and Kate Andrias, facilitated by Robert Kuttner:

https://prospect.org/power/laws-that-create-countervailing-power/

The discussion is framed by “Constructing Countervailing Power: Law and Organizing in an Era of Political Inequality,” a Yale Law Review article by Sachs and Andrias about laws that can be used to build, fortify and expand worker power:

https://www.yalelawjournal.org/article/constructing-countervailing-power-law-and-organizing-in-an-era-of-political-inequality

They propose that there are six categories of law that build countervailing power:

Laws that “grant collective rights in an explicit and direct way to create a frame that encourages organizing”

Laws that “provide for financial, human, and other resources,” including money, but also “information that helps direct the work of the organization and inform its leadership”

Laws that create “free spaces in which movement organizing can occur, free from surveillance and control,” both physical and digital

Laws that “remove barriers to participation both by protecting people involved in organizing efforts from retaliation and also by removing material obstacles that make it difficult for people to organize”

Laws that “provide organizations with ways to make material change in their members’ lives” by “creating ways to engage in bargaining with private and public actors that actually correspond to the way political and economic power is organized”

Laws that “enable contestation and disruptive collective action” including “strikes and protests and other kinds of disruptive activity”

The article and the discussion give good examples of all six, but I’m more interested in how they play into one another — like how the New Deal electrification co-ops created enduring institutions that organized people, incubated leaders, and turned into telephone co-ops. Some of these are around today, providing blazing-fast co-op internet (AKA, the “free spaces” mentioned above) to poor people:

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-one-traffic-light-town-with-some-of-the-fastest-internet-in-the-us

I was recently on an organizing tactics call about the housing crisis, and we got to talking about the wicked panoply of problems that drive people to oppose affordable housing. With the elimination of unions — and thus work — as a path to social mobility, we’ve told working people that everything depends on their house appreciating.

Unless their family home goes up in value, they will not be able to afford retirement, their kids’ college education or emergency medical bills. They certainly won’t be able to put down a deposit for their own kids’ homes.

https://gen.medium.com/the-rents-too-damned-high-520f958d5ec5

All of this drives people to want to limit the supply of housing, and also to hoard the benefits of housing, supporting nakedly inequitable policies like funding schools through local taxes, so richer neighborhoods get better schools.

It also drives people to with homes to favor policies that make life worse for people without homes. The worse things are for tenants, the more landlords can extract from them, and the more all houses are worth, because everyone is bidding against landlords who can raise rents, evict, and pass on maintenance costs.

On the one hand, this is dismal, because maybe it means that we can’t improve our housing system until we fix pensions, student debt, for-profit healthcare, and tenants’ rights.

But on the other hand, you can think of each of these issues as a loose end in the gnarly knot of housing dysfunction, a place where we can start unpicking the problem. Like, if we fix student debt, a major part of the reason to favor anti-tenancy policies will disappear (the parents who want to use home equity to send their kids to college also realized that their kids will be tenants, after all).

In other words, the entanglement of all our social problems means that any battle where we can eke out a victory produces tactical benefits for all the other fronts in the war. It means we can build victory upon victory. It means we can tear apart the countersolidaristic coalitions (say, homeowners) by addressing the material conditions that lead people to fight against the human right to shelter.

Uncoupling a dignified retirement, or a decent education, or lifesaving medical treatment, from the need to immiserate others is a powerful tool to build up countervailing power — to create coalitions like the ones that suppressed oligarchy from the New Deal until the Reagan Revolution.

[Image ID: A mountain village that is being trampled under the feet of a tailcoat-wearing giant. The giant is about to be felled by a giant fist made out of the combined raised arms of hundreds of ordinary workers and farmers. The meta-fist is haloed with an aura of red light.]

[twiceasfrustrating]

Out in the Countryside

Rating: Teen and Up

Archive Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply

Category: F/M

Fandom: Shall We Date?: Obey Me!

Relationship: Lucifer/Main Character (Shall We Date?: Obey Me!), Lucifer (Shall We Date?: Obey Me!)/Reader, Main Character/Mammon (Shall We Date?: Obey Me!), Mammon (Shall We Date?: Obey Me!)/Reader, Leviathan/Main Character (Shall We Date?: Obey Me!), Leviathan (Shall We Date?: Obey Me!)/Reader, Main Character/Satan (Shall We Date?: Obey Me!), Satan (Shall We Date?: Obey Me!)/Reader, Asmodeus/Main Character (Shall We Date?: Obey Me!), Asmodeus (Shall We Date?: Obey Me!)/Reader, Beelzebub/Main Character (Shall We Date?: Obey Me!), Beelzebub (Shall We Date?: Obey Me!)/Reader, Belphegor/Main Character (Shall We Date?: Obey Me!), Belphegor (Shall We Date?: Obey Me!)/Reader

Characters: Lucifer (Shall We Date?: Obey Me!), Mammon (Shall We Date?: Obey Me!), Leviathan (Shall We Date?: Obey Me!), Satan (Shall We Date?: Obey Me!), Asmodeus (Shall We Date?: Obey Me!), Beelzebub (Shall We Date?: Obey Me!), Belphegor (Shall We Date?: Obey Me!), Main Character (Shall We Date?: Obey Me!)

Additional Tags: Poly!MC, Picnic, fluff, hand-holding, implied drinking, Beel carries you, kissing these idiots being dumb but lovable

Summary: Sometimes you just wanted to have a nice day out with all of your boyfriends. You had the brilliant idea to go out for a picnic and enjoy some time away from the usual busy life you all lived. The brothers decided to indulge your wish, so into the equivalent of the Devildom countryside you go.

There was a lot of walking involved with picnics. You had never realized before how much walking really went into getting away from civilization. Not even a city, just some form of civilization. Then again, you had never seen the countryside in the Devildom before, so it wasn't fair to expect yourself to know that information beforehand. Well, maybe you should have, considering the human realm wasn't that different.

You had been left in charge of carrying the blanket, even after insisting you could carry something else. The brothers refused to let you, sitting that the baskets (yes, multiple) were heavy because they had to bring enough for eight people (one of which was Beel and his bottomless stomach) and one was full of dishes. They were objectively stronger than you, so there was no reason to have you exercise your limited human strength. The only brother not in charge of carrying a basket was Belphegor, who they worried would fall asleep on the spot if he had to use too much energy. Even Beel was allowed a basket of food in addition to the one for dishes (granted, it was one that had specifically been made so that he could eat it while walking because you all knew that was going to happen, but still).

The choice not to burden Belphie quickly proved to be a smart one, because he was soon yawning as he walked and you worried he would start literally sleeping walking.

You held the blanket against you in much the same way he did his pillow and went up to him, "Are you going to be okay?"

"Jus' tired..." His words slurred together, showing just how true that statement was.

"Yeah, this walk is pretty exhausting." At least one person agreed with you. Everyone else seemed to be doing just fine. It almost made you angry because that meant they had been right about you carrying extra weight and how it would have been taxing on you. Stupid correct logic, "Hey? After we all eat, would you like to take a nap?"

The look he gave you told you that was a definite yes, but he clearly missed your intentions.

"I meant, would you like to take a nap with me? Maybe I can let you use my lap as a pillow?" You knew how much he enjoyed doing that, and you did too.

His eyes turned to you and a little "Mhm" left him. He could never turn down a chance to take a nap with you.

Still, he looked tired enough that you worried about him, so you reached out your hand to hold his and make sure that he wouldn't wander away if he did start sleepwalking. He gladly entwined his fingers with your own as you both walked along.

You both stayed like that until Lucifer spoke up, "This is our destination."

Your attention shifted, looking out ahead of you rather than on making sure Belphie was still awake. All you could do was stare in awe. It is so powerful that you find yourself letting go of the youngest brother's hand and stepping forward to get a better look at what lies before you.

The Devildom countryside was nothing like what you expected. You weren't sure what it was you expected, but it wasn't flowers. Actual flowers! Not that you recognized whatever type of flora they were, but here they were. The scene of the meadow against the pale red sky was hauntingly beautiful and all you could think of was enacting the scene straight out of a movie where you frolicked in the field. You looked at the brothers with wide eyes, begging to be allowed to go enact your plan.

Lucifer nodded, "They're safe for humans." He held out his hand to take the blanket from you, which you gladly let him.

With a twinkle in your eyes, you ran away from them and toward the field of flowers, immediately feeling how the petals softly brushed against your exposed legs. Upon closer inspection, something about them reminded you of multicolored spider flowers dripping with morning dew and dandelions with exaggeratedly large puffs. As you danced through the meadow, the dandelion puffs broke free from their stems and floated off into the sky. You stared in wonder as they flew in the wind and were carried off somewhere far away. It was moments like these where it was the clearest that the human realm and the Devildom had many similarities you never had time to think about.

The brothers watched you from the place you had split off from them, seeing how you enjoyed your first exposure to wild Devildom flowers. Your blue sundress fluttered in the same wind that carried away the puffs, making you stand out against the brilliant sky behind you. Each of them found it hard to look away and help set up the picnic like they had planned. The contrast in color made you look like a painting.

Satan paused from helping lay down the blanket to watch the wonder unfold on your face. He looked over to his next youngest brother, "Asmo, you helped her pick the outfit for today, didn't you?"

"Only the parts you can see." But those parts were still divine, "She insisted the rest of it be a surprise."

"You did well." He added before going back to helping spread the blanket.

Everyone else nodded in agreement. It was a simple outfit, but it gave them all terrible ideas about what to do with you. How else was a demon supposed to react to seeing such an innocent-looking human other than wanting to corrupt them?

"Can someone set out the food?" Beel wanted to do it himself, but he knew he was likely to eat it before anyone else could enjoy it.

Belphegor looked at him in sympathy, feeling how hungry his twin was in his own stomach, "We need to finish setting up first." He wanted to sleep though. The walk over had been exhausting and it was hitting him the hardest, "You should go check on her." He suggested, since keeping Beel away from the food was the smartest option.

"Huh? Why does he get to be the one to check on her?" Mammon burst into the conversation, "I mean- Ya should leave that kinda stuff to yer big brother. No reason ya gotta go out of yer way."

"Lmao. You're dating her and you still act like a tsun." The third-born couldn't help but laugh at how much of a trope his brother was.

He placed his hands on his hips, "Shad'up. No one understands that otaku talk of yers anyway."

"Then why are you so offended?" Levi mocked, not missing the fact that his brother clearly understood the jab well enough to know it was insulting.

"Enough." Lucifer ended the conversation before their bickering could draw your attention, "Unless one of you wants to play guard between Beel and the food, I think letting him go is the best option."

They looked at each other, knowing neither of them wanted that particular responsibility. Levi turned back to his job dejectedly while Mammon grumbled a "whatever" under his breath.

Belphie gave Beel a sly smile, knowing exactly what he had done. The redhead gave him a grateful nod before looking out to where you were now sitting among the flowers and walking toward you. He found you stroking the petals of the flowers, trying to understand how they felt soft to the touch even though they grew in a harsh environment. He sat beside you, drawing your attention to him instead.

"Oh, Beel." You pulled away from the petals and leaned against his towering frame, "Am I taking too long?"

"No." His gaze drifted down to you, seeing how peaceful your face was looking out across the field, "They're almost done getting everything ready."

You balk at his words, "Done? I didn't even help."

"Well, you looked like you were having fun. None of us wanted to bother you."

"But I should still help." You felt bad that you had left them to do all the work when you were the one that suggested a picnic in the first place.

"No one minds." They loved watching you enjoy yourself so freely. It had quickly become something akin to a hobby to them.

"I mind." It made you feel lazy to not help them set everything up. This was a relationship, so you should contribute to it as much as they did.

He didn't really know how to comment on that without undermining your feelings. It was clear you were upset about being allowed to walk away without contributing anything. You probably shouldn't have assumed they would wait for you to come back to set up, this was their date too, after all.

He couldn't think of anything to say to you, especially with your face as sour as it was. Instead of trying to use words, he reached out for a flower and plucked it from the ground. With a smile in his eyes, he placed it behind your ear.

"Watching you is nice." He gently stroked your cheek with the back of his fingers as he lowered his hand again, "Seeing you happy is the best part of a date."

The heat that rose in your body and up your face felt like it would cook you alive. You buried yourself into his shirt to hide the giddy, embarrassed smile that you were now wearing, "You can't just say stuff like that."

"Why not? Did I say something wrong?" The worry in his voice was saddening.

"Never." You shake your head and sit up ever so slightly so you can place a peck against his cheek, "Do you think they're done?"

His hand moved to his stomach, realizing for the first time since he joined you just how hungry he really was, "I hope so."

"Well then," you raise to standing and brush the dirt and pollen from your dress, "Shall we go back now?"

Nodding once again, he shifts in his spot so he can stand up. However, as he gets to his knees, he stops and looks up at you. His arms open wide And you know exactly what he's thinking about. With a shy smirk, you fall into his arms, sitting awkwardly on his bicep and trying to balance yourself.

Beel places his other hand against your knees to keep you steady as he stands up and lifts you straight into the sky. You giggle widely as you raise higher and higher, seeing how more of the area unfolds before you with height. Now you can see how the sea of colors you were just sitting in weaves together and how far it seems to stretch out.

Your eyes widen in awe, "It's amazing..." You can't really explain how beautiful the meadow is. It's not like the ones in the human realm that look delicate and fair. No. This one looks dangerous, those dew stricken petals reaching out to link each flower to its neighbor.

"You like it?"

"I love it." You couldn't imagine seeing this in the human realm. The flowers were just too unique.

"Whaddya think yer doing over there?"

You both turn to look toward Mammon, who is yelling at you from where the picnic has been fully set up. Clearly, he isn't a fan of being left out from a single intimate moment.

"I think that's our cue." You tell him, looking down but holding on tightly.

"Uhn." He turns on his heels, carefully keeping you perched on his arm and listening to you laugh at the unusual way to travel.

As you near everyone else, you both get a few looks of confusion, some of jealousy, and one from Belphie that lets you know that whatever just happened was all according to his plans. Of course, it was. The youngest brother couldn't go a day without planning something. At least it wasn't nefarious this time.

"I'm glad you both decided to join us." Lucifer said, glance drifting from Beel you, "Do you need help getting down?"

You debate for a moment of you can get down by yourself. You figure Beel would set you down if you asked, but that's not as fun as having to make Lucifer reach up to you for once, "Please?"

Stepping forward, the eldest brother places his hands against your waist and slowly lifts you back to the ground. As your feet touch the dirt below, he notices the flower in your hair, placing a gloved hand under your chin and lifting your head so he can get a better look at it.

"Yes?" You ask, wondering what he could be thinking about.

"Nothing." He bends down at the waist and presses his lips against yours, his tongue quickly assaulting your own and making your head swim before pulling away, "You look beautiful."

The haze is short-lived as he pulls away and you can only admonish him, "Lucifer! This is a group date. None of that." Quick kisses and pecks were one thing, but trying to rile you up was off-limits.

The grin that crosses his face is fully aware of what he did, but uncaring because he got what he wanted, "Of course." Even if you complained, the goal was that he wouldn't be outdone by his younger brother in your eyes. Of course, some of the others saw through him, but the only opinion that mattered on the issue was yours.

Asmo took the opportunity to skip up to you from behind and wrap his arm around your own, "Sit next to me, Darling~" He tugged at you gently to try and lead you to a spot on the blanket.

Of course, he was the first one to actually ask you to sit with them. He had no compunctions over trying to get you to pick him first and foremost. He would respect your boundaries, but he still wanted you as much as everyone else.

"Gladly." You let him guide you to the blanket and sat down where he indicated. That still left your other side open though. You pay the spot next to you and looked up, "Levi? Will you join me?"

His orange eyes sparkled so much that it almost looked like he was going to cry. Why would you ever choose a disgusting otaku like him? That was probably what he was thinking. That was also exactly why you had to explicitly choose him. You loved him as much as the rest of his brothers, but he didn't seem to believe you. Every now and again, he needed a reminder that you had chosen him just as much as anyone else.

He gladly sat on your other side and the rest of the brothers fell into different places around the small banquet. Beel looked uncomfortable as he was forced to only look at the food in front of him. Belphie, ever the good brother, passed him an entire basket of food and told him to start with that while everyone else took the chance to grab from the pile in the middle. That basket lasted about as long as it took everyone to make their first plate.

"We brought wine if you would like." Satan held up the deep red, unopened bottle for you to see.

You looked at him skeptically, "Didn't we learn that I can't handle that stuff already?" That was kind of how this entire mess started in the first place. Not that you regretted it in the long run, even if it was a nightmare to deal with at the time.

He shook his head, "This is from the human realm. At least, I assume you have some tolerance for it." Although, none of the brothers would mind another incident like the one from that night. In retrospect, some of them found the memory endearing and were mildly curious how much further it could go now that you weren't confused about your feelings anymore.

But... this wine wouldn't do that to you, "Please pour a glass." It really was the ideal of a picnic date. Not that anything about this date was traditional, but it was definitely your ideal. There was nothing better than just getting to spend a day with your boyfriends and enjoying each of them. They really did find ways to spoil you and make you so very happy that this was your life now.

[iphoenixrising]

DickTim Week 2021: Day 5 Winged!Talon Tim au

So. another dual prompt and I really regret nothing about this one tbh. I took tomorrow’s Talon and today’s Wings and made a Winged!Talon!Tim fic. Of course, I talked to the wonderful babes on Capes & Coffee about a what if combination and this just, whew. Careful, it might break your heart a little, but damn if it isn’t an interesting idea.

Not beta read, so don't be a hater :D

Previous Talon!Tim universe posts: The initial idea, Babe and I talking it out, Talon Training Ask, Ra’s vs the Court, Talon and Ra’s, Talon and Ra’s take 2, Talon and Shiva short.

**

Watching B take on the new and improved Talon is really the entertainment of the year.

Once upon a time it had taken all of them plus more to take down as much of the Court of Owls as humanly possible. Of course, like rats, the Bats knew there would be no way to get the entire Court or all the Talons, not when the upper echelons of Gotham had spent the better part of 200 years creating, storing, training, and obtaining more.

Politicians were investigated, corrupt cops removed, and criminals burrowed underground once word of what the capes did to save the day got passed around.

For the first time in years, crime in Gotham was at an all time low.

But, as the coin flip dictates, nothing good lasts forever. Trouble is always brewing below the surface to eventually rise to the top and try to take over.

Case in point:

The Bats of Gotham have come up against a new threat wearing the signature Talon armor, and the call goes out to all available capes for help taking on the undead mercenary before another crime family ends up in the Obituaries rather than Blackgate.

The fact the Court is still up and running after the Batfamily took them down in a fiery blaze that ended with all their Talons gone, Sensei exposed, and most the ruling families imprisoned or poisoned by Lincoln March, is like a kick to the abdomen after they closed that particular book. Worse, with a new Talon soldier is sighted running around Gotham, another circus kid has been kidnapped and turned into the right hand of the Court of Owls. Dick, with his absolute survivors guilt, is the one to make going after the Talon and whoever is still behind the scenes a top priority.

Which is how they find themselves in the middle of Knight’s Stadium facing down a Talon that is too short to be March. Red Hood, Nightwing, Robin, Batgirl, and Black Bat pretty much got their asses handed to them in the first twelve minutes. Pretty hard to understand until you take into account the new and improved Talon facing them now is terrifying in a completely different way than most undead assassins are.

He knows them.

He knows them in ways that lets him fight fast and furious with vicious accuracy, striking at weaknesses few of the vigilantes of Gotham realized they even had.

He isn't as big as Lincoln or even Cobb, not nearly as old. He hasn't been kept in cryostasis waiting for the next generation to need his skills. He doesn't have creaks in his joints from being put on deep freeze too many times.

This one is silent and efficient, obviously trained in multiple types of martial arts, is highly proficient with or without the standard Talon knives, is a master tactician, counters the majority of their moves with alarming consistency–

and the fucking Talon has wings.

Honest-to-God wings.

Everyone had assumed the metal monstrosities on his back were weapons of some kind, but the glint of steel in the streetlight flash a warning before the lumps moved in an arch, extending far out past his shoulder blades, slicing into Red Hood’s body suit with a razor-sharp edge, shredding the armor like paper.

It’s not enough he’s got weapons obviously made specifically for his skill set, it’s not enough he’s an assassin and doesn’t hold to the same standards of non-lethal combat, it’s not enough that he can use his wings to fly or to fight like he’s using another limb to kick the shit out of them, and it’s not enough that he effortlessly counters so many of their attacks that he has to have some kind of inside information on all of them and their fighting styles.

The knives are definitely a thing when the Talon can throw them hard enough to penetrate parts of their suits in between armored plating, which further drives the theory that this is a person they’ve dealt with before. Intimately. Few people in the world know how their suits are made. Even more, few people know particulars enough when their suits are constantly reconstructed.

The only thing on their side that tipped the scales in their favor–

–the Batman.

The wings threw him off his game, obviously, but not enough to stop B from holding his own with swift and merciless force.

It's like watching a dance of fast and furious fists, blades in Talon's hands glinting deadly in the night, finding B's suit over and over and over until he's made it to blood and bone. He takes every hit the Batman can dish out, head snapping back, left, and right with the volley of jaw-breaking blows and bone-shattering kicks.

None of it gives the Talon pause. When a move makes him drop a blade, another is already in hand, cutting into their body suits, wings flipping out to defend or distract, sweeping moves and well coordinated attacks.

The unnatural appendages are like another arm, another leg, an extension working on the same central nervous system, regardless as to how the Court managed to make it happen.

A jump kick off a trash can is a lucky shot as a wing catches B in the ribs hard enough to knock him into the wall of Mike's Famous Hotdogs. The only thing saving the Dark Knight from a concussion or permanent brain damage is the plating in his cowl.

It gives the Talon enough time to make a final bid for a battered Nightwing, Red Hood, and Robin struggling to their feet again, eyes for their fallen mentor.

Before he can lunge forward to start the attack yet again, the Talon just stops, pauses like he’s stuck or something, and in the span of a breath, both wings extend fully, flap powerfully once to propel him up into the Gotham night.

O tries her best to track his flight through the city, but no one’s arms are working well enough to toss a tracker on him.

She loses him over Cape Carmine, slams her palms against her system in frustration, makes sure she gets as much footage from the confrontation as possible.

After some sleep and a whole lot of bandages and ice packs, the Bat family meets in the Cave to watch the footage, breakdown the Talon’s fighting style, his weaponry, and make theories on his identity.

O helps out with readings she has of electronic pulses she managed to capture coming from the armor over his wings. She thinks she might be able to use it to track him if they can get close enough for her equipment to ping the signal again.

B makes a trip to Arkham since Freeze apparently hasn’t stopped producing the formula used to put Talons in cryostasis.

It’s not until Gotham’s power grid has a massive surge that O and the Bats can pinpoint a possible location, all of them invested in one hell of a fight to get the last rats still scurrying in the underground.

The plan of attack comes together smoothly once they’ve scoped out the location, seen the shady activity, and together, they make one hell of a plan.

**

And because, you know, Gotham, it is completely normal for the Court of Owl's headquarters to have a skylight.

Natch.

For this one, they've got Batgirl and Black Bat, Red Hood and Robin, Nightwing and B, a real family affair.

O's quiet voice over comms leading them through the maze of traps and empty rooms, abandoned libraries and spooky ball rooms. The laboratory isn't the most horrific they've all ever seen (because the Joker's summer place is literally the stuff of nightmares), but a few of them do gag on the smell alone.

The plan, however, goes horribly awry when the clear sounds of tormented screaming echoes from right under their reinforced bootheels.

Black Bat's fists clench hard, her breathing wheezes out when the tone, the utter agony goes right through her.

A shudder slides up Robin's spine as all of them turn toward the noise.

Without a flicker or a word, the Batman moves, strafing in the shadows toward the sound. He can't assume it's an innocent civilian with something the Court wants, but he's betting on the fact that scream will lead them to whoever is running the show.

The medieval room has bars and reinforced locks, implements hanging on the wall. The cement brick is stained rust colored with old blood, the vestiges of training, and the awful realization they've found another hidden niche in the city that always existed right under their noses is punctuated with the abrupt drop in temperature, with the sudden charge in the air, with the zzzzcrack snapping beyond the door, replaced with a muted buzzing Robin can feel in his back teeth.

B is already on his way to the roof, Batgirl down through the floor vent while Nightwing picks the locks with fast precision, knocking the tumblers around.

Robin and Red Hood stay close to the reinforced door, balancing on the balls of their feet, katana and .45s at the ready.

Black Bat takes the high road, ceiling tiles giving way under her Bat-a-rang. She gives a sharp nod before she's up and gone.

"All right. Ready?" Nightwing stands, cracks his neck, flips his escrimas in both hands, works his shoulders to prepare for the strain of each blow he plans to give.

"Ya betcha ass," Hood murmurs low, a cut figure with both guns at his sides, gloved fingers on the trigger guard.

"Don't disappoint," Robin snarls, "either of you."

"Nice pep talk, squirt," Nightwing snickers.

"Tt, back up your mouth with action."

"Better shuddap, Demon. Golden Boy ain't fuckin' 'round. Neither is the Bat. We get one more chance a' this asshole. We ain't gonna blow it again, ya feel me?"

"Finally, something we agree on, Hood."

"Other than N's shitty mullet?"

Nightwing swiftly glares at them both over his shoulder, unconsciously putting himself front and center of the trio, ready to be the first in once they get the signal.

– which is the sound of the glass raining down from the heavens.

Three booted feet kick the door hard enough to take it off the hinges, lying against the faded stains like a fallen body.

First step in the room is the complete opposite to what they'd all been expecting.

The two Owl masks aren't the usual, but a perversion of the originals, crudely drawn yawning mouths complete with fangs dripping blood.

But.

The boy on his knees, arms in a binder holding the appendages hostage at a painful angle, is dripping the real thing. Rivulets down his chest and where his back is partially visible. Some from the base of the wings going into the back of his shoulder blades where the skin is torn and raw.

The bar gag shoved in his mouth doesn't take away from the splatters on his chin, the bruising on his face, the swollen eye. But it's his wings that makes the Bats falter from the initial rushing attack.

His wings are without the armor, are bound straight up above his restrained body with hooks grotesquely puncturing through the downy softness, desecrating the beauty with blood and gore. The angle makes the pull to his back where the wings are part of him just another agony on top of atrocity.

"Fuck," from the first Owl mask, and a swift move frees the Talon's bound arms, the appendages flopping uselessly to the floor, only his trapped, tortured wings keeping him up on his knees.

The second Owl shoves the first back, "let him take care of them. Let's get out of here!"

The first Owl snarls out something low and foreign, the phrases rolling off his tongue.

The words lock into place, and the Talon's head snaps up, snarling around the gag in his mouth.

When his face is finally, finally visible, the protectors of Gotham are frozen in their tracks.

Familiar violet-blue eyes, too-long blue-black hair, cut jawline and pointed nose. Tiny scar on his right cheek from the time he caught Ra's al Ghul's ring across the face.

"Jesus Fucking Christ," is barely heard through the Red Hood's synths and in no way fully expresses his utter horror at what these dirty motherfuckers have done.

Robin wretches, bile burning the back of his throat once those eyes swing up to the masked parody of the Owls and his bare upper body is visible through the blood and sweat on his chest, when the scars peeking through on his collar bones form a half-visible Y-incision, when the coloring of the bared wings now makes sense (robin's wings, Damian Wayne thinks with his heart beating pitter patter fast, and his stomach in knots, they put robin's wings on him...).

And the hurt, agonized noise coming out of Nightwing's chest is the only noise he can make when those dimmed, dazed eyes swing from the Owls back to the vigilantes frozen in their spots, when there's no spark of joy or fondness or stubbornness he's so used to seeing staring him down.

The errant thought, the first instinct, is the only humane way to deal with this new Talon is to put him down for good wars with the man behind the mask that only wants to reach out, wants to pull the Talon into his body and curve over, to scream at the injustice of it all, to rail at himself for not even suspecting.

Another switch flipped and the hooks release his wings, blood splattering on top the old stains.

"Get them! Don't fuck it up this time or you won't get another chance," the second Owl shoves the Talon's injured shoulder in the direction of the horrified vigilantes.

They don't even bother to take the gag out of his mouth before setting him on his target.

A flap of wings, and the Talon is on his feet again, swaying only slightly. He's in the boots and pants from earlier, the rest of his uniform tossed carelessly behind him by his tormentors. A sweep of his feet and the knives glint in bare palms, a whisper of a sound.

The curved, clawed blade glints in the overhead light when the Talon raises it and cuts the strap of the bar gag in his bloody mouth, turns his head to spit it out without looking away from the vigilantes.

The Batman, grim and stoic in the face of this surprising turn of events, gives the barest nod. From her hiding spot behind the complex machinery, Black Bat takes off after the running Owl members, leaving the rest of the family to deal with their former third Robin.

The wings flinchingly flare out and their former bird hunches over, ready for the attack.

“Wait! Wait, wait, wait,” the Red Hood removes the helmet, leaves the domino underneath. He keeps one hand out in peace, slowly dipping down to put his helmet on the ground. “Is us, Tim. Timmy. Baby Bird. Is us. Yer family. Gotta lookit us, yeah?”

For the first time, the Talon speaks, “who’s Tim?”

And then he lunges.

**

The fight happens very differently this time.

The former power behind the punches is obviously dulled with the Talon’s identity reveal. He doesn’t hold back, is utterly ruthless with his attacks. He takes out B’s right knee, puts Hood down on the stained floor, knocks Robin into the wall with crushing force, and slams Batgirl’s head off the operating table.

He stands over Nightwing, wicked blade in hand and robin’s wings spread wide. He takes a knee, the sharp edge right above N’s adam’s apple, staring down impassively into the whiteouts.

“Timmy,” N spits blood, grunting when one knee pins his arm down. “Timmy, please. I’m sorry. I’m so so sorry. I love you and I’m sorry they did this to you.”

Those eyes don’t change in the slightest. “You should not have tried to oppose the Owls.”

“We beat them once,” Nightwing gasps, “and you helped us, Baby Bird. You were with us then, don’t you remember.”

“I was nothing before the Court perfected me,” the Talon replies emotionlessly.

“You were perfect before they ever touched you.”

“No,” and the Talon leans down, puts them a breath away. “The only thing you and those others do is put the criminals back in prison, back in Arkham for them to escape again, for them to kill and destroy over and over again. Like this, I can stop them permanently.”

“Oh Timmy,” and behind the whiteouts, Nightwing’s eyes spill over, his vision wavery. “Timmy–”

“Don’t call me that. Stop calling me that.”

“You know me, you know us. You have to remember–”

“Lies. All of it lies!”

Nightwing’s chest stutters, his fist clenching, “it’s not. None of it is. Not even this–”

And he’s fast enough to grab the back of the Talon’s neck, to lean up enough against the blade pressed against his throat, can bring their mouths together, can kiss him like he’s dying and the Talon is the only thing that can save him.

It’s sloppy and awkward because the Talon doesn’t know what’s happening, gasps against the vigilante’s mouth. The tongue sliding over his, the muffled moan in his mouth sparks something in the back of his brain where the Court of Owls could never touch.

When Nightwing pulls back, stares up at wide violet-blue eyes, when the blade falls away to clatter against the block, when the Talon’s mouth trembles and tears fill his eyes, when his wings flutter and falter, fold in on them both, when his voice goes hoarse with, “D-Dick?” Nightwing throws both arms around his waist and holds on.

[shadowed-dancer]

BNHA Theory: Why Aoyama Isn’t the Traitor

Debunking common claims because I love my boy and don’t want him to be evil. This is all for fun, and if you still want to believe he’s the traitor then I'm not stopping you.

This will be spoiler free, and will only cover stuff we see in the anime.

“We don’t know where he was during the USJ attack”

Ok, very fair point. However, have you ever considered that the USJ attack doesn’t actually matter when it comes to the traitor? Whether it’s Aoyama or not, I don't think this is a solid place to look for clues.

We know how the villains got the class schedule, there was no need for a traitor. Shigaraki noticed the press was desperate to get in, he disintegrated the barrier, and let them storm the campus

Then, while all the students were trying to evacuate, the teachers were also busy dealing with the reporters.

We only see Aizawa and Present Mic, but we can assume the others were dealing with the security breach too (and if not, then perhaps a teacher is the traitor? it doesn’t really matter, but the point is: it’s not a student).

Now, it’s possible that Aoyama was not affected by the rush of students, as he usually eats in the classroom, but he’s still pretty innocent. Students likely didn’t know the schedule, and had no idea All Might would be taking them to the USJ. I doubt the traitor would go through all this trouble if they weren’t absolutely sure that All Might would be taking them off campus sometime soon. Shigaraki could risk coming up empty (as in, finding a schedule where All Might never leaves campus) because he just doesn’t know what to expect, but a STUDENT risking themselves is a lot less unlikely. They’d risk getting caught and possibly expelled, or worse.

As for the USJ attack itself, Aoyama was most likely hiding. I’ll talk about this more in just a second, but in scenarios where he’s put in danger, Aoyama gives up and hides (even if there’s no one around).

So why’d he call attention to his absence? Well, to figure that out we need to look at...

Aoyama’s goals, personality, and motivations

Aoyama’s shtick is that he wants to stand out and be the centre of attention, yet is constantly pushed to the background.

His costume and hero name are meant to stand out, and the way he constantly talks about how wonderful he is is an attempt to get attention. He’s also obsessed with his appearance (as shown when Mina ruins his cape). None is this proves he’s a traitor, it’s just a form of comic relief.

When he asks if anyone wanted to know where he was, only to say “it’s a secret”, he was most likely trying to garner attention and make himself seem more cool and mysterious in the eyes of his classmates, but as an audience, it’s a lighthearted moment to ease us out of the heavier storyline. Again, he was probably hiding in fear, but wanted others to THINK he was bravely fighting like everyone else, which takes us to our next point to break down...

“Dabi didn’t attack him during the training camp”

This is probably the most damning piece of evidence.. If you need a brief refresher, Aoyama is hiding behind a bush, peaks his head out, and is almost immediately noticed by Dabi (it’s unclear if the villain sees who is behind the bush or not, but Aoyama says, “he saw me”. Even if Dabi didn’t see his face, he saw that there was a person). He goes to check but is immediately sidetracked by Twice, who reminds him to call back the Nomu he sent out. Dabi proceeds to forget about the student behind the bush.

Here’s the thing; this scene says more about Dabi than it does Aoyama. People tend to forget, but at this point in the story Dabi has not killed anyone. Heck, he’s not even in the criminal data base. Maybe he’s just sneaky, but Giran specifically calls out the fact that, “he hasn’t done any flashy crimes”. If he’s a criminal, he’s never been caught.

Back to that comment about the criminal data base, it’s a detail a lot of people overlook. When Tsukauchi is taking statements from Aizawa and Vlad King, he tells All Might that they ran a search through the CRIMINAL data base, looking for a man that matched Dabi’s description, and they came up empty handed. Not the quirk registry, they were specifically looking for criminals.

Dabi’s appearance is distinct, to say the least, so even if he was caught for petty theft, they’d be almost certain to catch and identify him. But no, he’s not a criminal at this point.

That being said, let’s look at how Dabi acts during the rest of this arc. For the most part, the real Dabi isn’t attacking unless he’s provoked first. When Deku, Shoto, and Shoji fall from the sky, he attacks to protect his teammate (since the boys had just jumped Mr. Compress). The exception is when Dabi’s clones goes after Aizawa and Vlad King, but in these situations he is very much aware that the two are pro heroes and will protect their students. Aizawa says it best, they’re trying to keep the pros distracted.

This isn’t meant to be defending Dabi, but instead to point out that, at this moment, he’s not very experienced in being a criminal. No spoilers but it’s obvious that CURRENT Dabi has no hesitations about killing people (see: those thugs in the alley and the hero Snatch). But, in this arc, he didn’t seem to want to cause any unnecessary violence. For these reasons, I believe he would have spared ANY kid behind that bush, not just Aoyama (forgetting to go back after Twice distracted him was a conscious choice, it would have taken literally no time out of his day to go check who it was, and instead he decides to let the kid live). Dabi’s purpose is to seem intimidating and distract the pros, not to attack recklessly.

Whoops, I went on a tangent. Back to my twinkling boy!

Aoyama is a coward

(meant in the most loving way possible)

Aoyama is a coward. I brought it up with the USJ that he was probably hiding, and we saw it with Dabi when he was cowering behind a bush. But the important thing is that, at the training camp, he actually does get the courage to attack (specifically when he sees Deku and the others fighting back).

We see this again during the license exam

During the test, he was scared to fail, so he hid until Iida found him. And, once again, the courage of his classmates gives him the strength to act. Aoyama is just scared. Some people point to this as evidence that he’s the traitor, since he doesn’t have the character of a hero, but actually think about it. Hero society is corrupt; people are becoming heroes for a whole host of other reasons. Almost no one has the motivations of a hero out of Class 1A.

Bakugo wants to be the best, Todoroki wants to stick it to his dad, Uraraka wants to make money, Iida is carrying on his family business, and Mineta wants girls. And hey, Mineta is also a coward, so take that as you will. Not everyone becomes in the hero course is suited to becoming a hero, and that’s the whole point (it’s the entire motivation behind Stain and his followers).

“How about the secret message?”

Ah yes, the secret message. "il faut se méfier de l'eau qui dort", literally translated to "beware the water that sleeps". It basically amounts to “there’s more than meets the eye” or “watch out for the quiet ones”.

Would a traitor expose himself? Probably not, the only reason I could say yes is if the traitor was helping the villains against his will and needed to tell someone, but what’s more likely is that Aoyama knows who the traitor is.

This next little theory isn’t really based on anything, but it’s possible that, while he was hiding from Dabi and Twice, the villains mentioned who the traitor was. Twice seems like the kind of dude who’d accidentally let it slip, or if he didn’t say a name, maybe he mentioned that SOMEONE at UA is a traitor and Aoyama is trying to get Midoriya’s help in figuring it out. Either way, he may be trying to alert Midoriya that someone can’t be trusted.

Alternatively, he could be referring to both him and Midoriya, and may not be talking about the traitor at all! When Aoyama wrote “I know” in cheese, he specifies that it was meant to say, “I know you have a quirk like mine” or “I know what you’re going through”. This could be similar, attempting to tell Deku “we are the same, there’s more to us than people know because we go through things that others do not.”

But wait, “the water that SLEEPS?” Mr Aizawa sleeps! Is Mr Aizawa the traitor?!?!?!

Tangent: Is Mr Aizawa the traitor?

No. This dude puts himself at risk for his kids more times than I can count. It makes no sense for him to go so out of his way to protect his kids (like at the USJ) only to be the traitor. As well, Aizawa could have easily texted Shigaraki and been like “yo change of plans, All Might isn’t here, don't bother showing up”.

In addition, Dabi actually DOES attack Aizawa at the training camp. No one is around to see it, so it’s not like it’s for show, and Aizawa is deliberately shown to not know what Dabi’s power is. (As seen when he says, “the fire wasn’t his quirk?” when the clone melts).

So yeah, “the water that sleeps” isn’t referring to Aizawa.

Some final thoughts about the traitor

I personally don’t believe there is one. In one chapter of the manga, the teachers are talking with the principal and mention how the dorms have revealed nothing suspicious from the students. As well, when Present Mic first brings up the idea of a traitor, he actually points to a STAFF MEMBER before bringing up the possibility of a student.

He mentions that only the teachers and first years knew where the training camp was, and then says, “I guess a student could have used their phone”. He says it like an afterthought, as if the possibility of it being a student hadn’t even crossed his mind until he said it out loud.

So yeah, I don’t think a student is the traitor. I am also hesitant to think it’s a teacher since Nezu says he can trust everyone in the room during their meeting. I think the traitor theory was just an excuse to get the kids living in dorm rooms for all the goofy teenage moments that could arise from that.

Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed! And I hope all Aoyama fans can feel a little more at ease, knowing their boy (probably) isn’t the traitor.

[secret-engima]

nammuellyll

@secret-engima congrats, you woke the monster. ardyn in my hero academia. there. go wild.

Me: MWAHAHAHAHA. You say that like I regret it >:DDD

-Ardyn in this wakes up post The Great Stabbing and is ... more than a little annoyed. Hello. He wanted the afterlife experience. HELLO WHAT HAPPENED TO HIS DESTINY OF FADING TO COSMIC DUST.

-But no. Apparently he gets to have a “second chance” to “be a hero”.

-Just let one of the Astrals show themselves, he’ll show where to put that “second chance”-.

-Anyway. Ardyn is Ardyn, he looks like he did in canon but he’s sane again. Oddly enough he’s still got both his armiger magic, his super healing, and some of his scourge-like abilities (scary face included). He’s not corrupted tho. Ardyn isn’t sure what to make of that.

-Goes and hobos around for a while, getting used to this world and the fact that everyone looks like a storybook encounter with cursed items gone wrong. Picks up a Smol Traumatized Child that can disintegrate things with his fingers off the streets because Why Not, Let’s Both Be Homeless Together Kiddo, then in short order gets himself known as a Major Villain when he finds a trafficking ring and, since Ardyn is Not Exactly Moral Even If Arguably Sane, he slaughters them to the last man.

-Ardyn is known on the news via grainy footage that only catches glimpses of his scourge face and a lot of rumor, he laughs his head off when the ONE soundbite they manage to get from the scene leads to his being named Adagium. AGAIN. Okay he walked into that one.

-Uses the resources of the no-longer-operational trafficking ring to set up a nice restaurant bar with a secret (illegal) clinic in the back. He makes dishes exclusively from his original time period and so the food is known as very eccentric but good. Ardyn rapidly gets the wackiest duel rep in history. To the mainstream/police/pro heroes he’s a shadowy super-murderer named Adagium. To the underworld and the homeless, the quirkless and the children, Adagium is a name that means hope and shelter, healing and comfort and a monster that protects its own rather than giving meaningless promises, all in exchange for simple favors like clothes and information and school books for his child.

-Ardyn makes special one-finger gloves for Tenko so that he can touch touch stuff without worrying about destroying it. He also, at some point, picks up the rest of the not-LoV by pure happenstance. Toga comes into his clinic hunting a patient, he scolds her, puts her in time-out, then gives her a lolli with heavy iron supplement because clearly if the girl has a blood craving she needs more iron in her system. Don’t you heathens know anything about the meaning behind cravings. Spinner gets into a fight in Ardyn’s territory, Ardyn patches him up and gently informs him that if he’s going to pick fights, at least fight dirty enough to win them. Twice comes there often for a meal and company that won’t look at him funny for talking to himself, Mr. Compress is bound and determined to get Ardyn to be surprised by one of his magic tricks (never works, because unlike Compress Ardyn can do LITERAL MAGIC). Magne is not a regular, but still shows up once in a blue moon because Ardyn’s illegal clinic is probably better stocked than most legal ones at this point (people tend to trade his treatment for actual medicine and equipment, Ardyn never asks where they get it).

-Dabi is the last to be picked up. He is also how Ardyn’s increasing collection of strays first learn about Ardyn’s superhealing factor when he TAKES Dabi’s fresh, weeping burns onto himself and they heal over in minutes, leaving both of them unscarred (or mostly so, Ardyn’s skin will always have faint ripple marks where the burns were). It is also around this time that, coincidentally, people start gunning for Endeavor and trying to make his life miserable. Because Adagium hates him and is plotting to end him, so clearly that’s their cue, right?

-The rest of Endeavor’s kids vanish in the middle of the night. No one in the police or pro heroes can find them.

-Far away in a little, unnoticed restaurant bar, Dabi holds his siblings tight and promises they are never going to have to suffer That Man again. Ardyn rests gentle hands on Shōto’s face and whispers that everything will be okay even as his skin bubbles and boils into an ugly burn before healing over with the faintest scars.

-Moving on from Ardyn’s growing collection of strays (that will keep growing so keep an eye on that):

-Ardyn doesn’t get the whole quirk thing. Or the whole superhero society thing. If something needs doing and it suits him then he shall do it, none of this Symbol of Peace nonsense.

-Yes, he said nonsense. The Symbol of Peace is nonsense and only setting society up to fall apart when this All Might fellow either gets too powerful and is made to take a fall or when he finally picks a fight he can’t win.

-Ardyn says as much to Toshinori Yagi, the nice civilian man who wandered into Ardyn’s bar without knowing who is running it. The man sputters a bit and asks why he thinks so, Ardyn just laughs and laughs and laughs until there is something unnerving about the sound and Ardyn has to stop and catch his breath. Blue eyes flicker gold as Ardyn murmurs that he’s seen it happen before.

-Somehow, Toshinori thinks this strange, eccentric barkeep doesn’t mean as a bystander.

-Ardyn meets Aizawa while Aizawa is on the hunt for Adagium, they eyeball each other like wary cats before Ardyn decides that this angry hobo hero is His Now and invites the man over for food. Aizawa declines. Ardyn casually slings Aizawa over his shoulder and carts him in anyway before Aizawa can think to retaliate.

-Ardyn is highly amused to learn that Hobo Man is after the Adagium. Good luck with that, truly, best of fortune.

-So, for those of you paying attention, Ardyn’s count of Heroes He Has Adopted is officially up to 2, even if he pretends not to notice the first one (pretends. Because he knows exactly who Toshi is, come ON it’s not that hard, they have the same voice and smile and everything).

-Ardyn’s kids grow up with his scathing political commentary and one foot in both legal and illegal worlds. Some of them (Tenko, Dabi, Toga, Spinner) decide that they’re gonna make a League to show the world how dumb its being. A League of Villains! (”League of Vigilante’s sounds more appropriate for your chosen activities, Tenko Mine-” “VILLAINS. WE ARE VILLAINS NOW.” “Alright then, will all villains in the room please wash up for supper?”)

-Ardyn finds Hitoshi and decides he’s not quite qualified for this one.

-Aizawa wakes up from another rare session of being black-out to find Ardyn cheerfully tearing up his apartment to make it more “child suitable”. Child WHAT. Child suitable. For your child.

-MY WHAT.

-Ardyn calmly holds out the adoption papers that have Aizawa’s signature on all of them, perfectly legible because the man is a little too good at pretending he isn’t stone drunk, and then gestures to the sad-eyed, skeptical boy with purple hair in the corner. Ardyn smiles (reads: threatens with killing intent) and says that he’s sure Aizawa will take his new responsibilities seriously (read: you’d better or you’re next on my hitlist).

-Aizawa, never one to go back on his word, has a kid now I guess.

-Shōto comes home one day with a bby Izuku in tow and Ardyn is charmed beyond all words over the boy. He’s so Smol! And Smart! Lookit his little brain firing away! Upon hearing the boy is developing All The Esteem Issues because of his bullying and quirklessness, Ardyn stares off into space for a long time, acknowledges that he’s a sap, and then soothingly tells Izuku that some quirks just come in late, why, Ardyn’s came in late too! Just give it a few days. Then he pats Izuku on the head and uses the motion to disguise the teeny tiny fragment of magic he splits off from his own and gives to this boy who deserves better.

-Izuku comes back two days later, crying for joy and with sparkling green magic dripping from his fingertips. Ardyn exclaims in “surprise” over the similarity of their quirks and offers to teach him. Izuku accepts and after some sweet-talking to Inko, Ardyn gets to mold this tiny genius boi as he pleases to both be proud of himself and his “quirk” AND to fight quirkless as much as possible because “tactics, my boy, take them by surprise!”

-Also then he figures out that he didn’t just lend Izuku magic because this world is funky like that, he genuinely gave it away which counts as LC adoption rituals so OOPS GUESS WHO HAS A BLOOD SON NOW.

-Oh well.

-Toshi and Izuku get along like a house on fire whenever Toshi comes over for a hot meal and Ardyn is pretty content with his brood and his handiwork against Endeavor (who by this point has been exposed as an abuser and put in jail for a long time HAH). Toshi ... pointedly doesn’t ask why several of his kids look like Endeavor. Nope. Not asking. They get their red hair from Ardyn, clearly.

-Of course, all of this casual wrecking of canon attracts the attention of AfO, who is not happy about the competition. He shows up at one point, all suave and intimidating because he is immortal and older than anyone alive and smarter too and-

-Ardyn laughs in his face.

-Baby.

-Bby playing at immortal.

-You think two centuries or so makes you hot stuff? You think stolen quirks makes you special? You think you can come into Ardyn’s territory and threaten his kids and get away with it because you’re ... a little older than the average human being? Ardyn leans close and smiles as AfO tries and fails to steal a quirk that doesn’t exist to be stolen, his Scourge face leaking into existence as he purrs that AfO should’ve minded his own business a little more than he minded others.

-AfO came prepared for a quirk. He did not come prepared for the combined might of 2k year old LC magic and abilities of a Scourge the world has never, and will never, see.

-It’s not even a fight.

-Adagium makes the news again when a body is found hanging from a high tower, torn apart as if by dozens upon dozens of blades, the corpse pinned in place by a spear that dissolves into red sparks upon the police touching it, leaving behind only a note that gets leaked to the media and goes viral.

-Dear World, refrain from touching my stuff, and you won’t end up like this man. Sincerely, Adagium.

-Not the most menacing letter until you considering the delivery method.

-Toshinori has to sit there and have a Moment upon the news that the man who murdered Nana is already dead by someone else’s hand and they have no idea when the fight went down. Because surely there was a fight, right? AfO had been centuries old and with dozens upon dozens of quirks. Who could possibly have brought him down when Nana, the then-wielder of OfA could not???

-Ardyn gently pats Toshi’s shoulder through the breakdown. There there. I’m sure you’ll figure out the culprit eventually, you’re a smart man Toshi. There there.

-Also Kurogiri shows up not long after that entire debacle looking for a new job because his old one got murdered and Adagium seems like an efficient dude. Ardyn is always happy for more hands on deck in wrangling the kids, and this one has warping powers. Welcome aboard Kurogiri.

[vagrantblvrd]

Got any jeremwood ideas rattling around your brain? I've been craving battle buddies (lately, but also always), smooches ideally

You know, friend? I’ve had Battle Buddies in the back of my brain a lot recently and like nothing for them to do? But then in the shower this morning I had an Idea.

These two idiots working for their respective agencies or units and have the Worst Bosses whether through sheer incompetence or design. (Laziness or greed and not their problem if some asshole agents/operatives bit it on their watch. Hell, might be for the best if they do, if the WB is corrupt or working for the Enemy whoever that is.)

Ryan, well he’s in a Bad Place because some missions that Went Wrong and his name’s not worth much in their world anymore, right? Everyone thinks he’s either the worst kind of jinx with how many missions/operations go to shit when he’s around or he’s on the Enemy’s payroll. (Whoever that may be.)

Jeremy?

Young and stupid and got into some shit he shouldn’t have and it was this or jail and for whatever reason this seemed like the better deal. (Tell that to his scars or nightmares or shortened life-span whenever that shitball mission that gets him killed way before his time rolls around, though.)

They’re both stuck where they are and (more or less) resigned to it.

Ryan’s got Plans, though, on how to get out of his situation. Intel and Secrets he’s been gathering for years hoping to expose the people behind whatever gave him a bad reputation. (He spins it like that in his head sometimes, tries to make it about himself and not the others, the good people he’s known, who got killed by these assholes because otherwise he might abandon the long game he’s been playing for years and go in guns blazing. (OR the equivalent.)

Jeremy’s got an idea or two, but they keep reassigning him or the people he trusts to help him and he’s not sure what the safest way to do this is anymore. (Oh, he’s not worried for himself, but Matt and Trevor? Yeah. Big, big worries about those two assholes and how easy it would be for them to have “accidents” if he fucks up, so. Yeah.)

ANYWAY.

Their bosses have been working them hard for a few months (months, years, it all blurs together you know?) and they get some downtime before a Big Mission.

Conveniently (Plot Reasons) they’re in the same city at the time, because of course they are. Last stop coming back from a shitty mission to go to HQ to brief for the next shitty mission and their flight isn’t until the next day or something along those lines. (PLOT REASONS.)

Ryan gets a message telling him to meet a contact who might be able to help him with his own secret mission at a shady club somewhere. Jeremy – fuck.

He just wants a drink, and if he runs into someone to spend the night with that’s a bonus. (All this stress from the last however long and knowing he’s probably going to be dead by the end of the week, and why the fuck not, right?)

SO.

They both end up at the same club (PLOT REASONS) and Ryan’s contact never shows, so he just. Fuck, he’s already there and the diet soda’s flowing and just.

He doesn’t even know, is the thing.

Doesn’t want to go back to the shithole he’s been staying at because it’s bugged to high hell and it’s always entertaining to people watch. (Entertaining and keeps his skills sharp, two birds and all that.)

After a while he notices this one guy, right? Short as hell but there’s just something about him that makes you forget that – might be the fact he’s about to get into a fucking fight with some asshole hassling a couple of women. (Young, college age or thereabouts and looking around for the bouncer who’s been MIA for a while now.)

No one else seems willing to get involved, deescalate things or back the short fucker up, so Ryan tosses back the last of his drink (and fuck, fuck, don’t do that again because oh, God, the carbonation,) and goes over to help.

He doesn’t catch what the drunk asshole says – music’s too loud and there are people all over the fucking place – but he hears the short guy laugh. This bark, really, sounds like he’s heard the best damn joke ever – and hauls back and decks the drunk asshole without dropping that bright, friendly smile of his.

Fucking goes for it, you know? Perfect form and in the back of Ryan’s head he knows it’s weird to be hung up on that, but he’s too busy watching the short bastard turn to handle the drunk asshole’s friend to be bothered by that. (Also, making his way through the crowd to help, all “Pardon me,” and, “Passing through, don’t mind me, ladies,” and so on.

By the time he reaches the short bastard (of course it’s Jeremy) Jeremy’s taken care of two more assholes and all that’s left for Ryan to do is trip the last idiot running into the fight so he falls on his face and just kind of stays there, too drunk to realize what just happened and overall just dumb.

Jeremy’s got all this adrenaline running through him and turns to face Ryan, thinking he’s just another asshole (he’s not wrong on that one, but Ryan’s a different kind of asshole, so…) and Ryan gives him this dumb smile and holds his hands up.

“Whoa, hey,” he says, and he’s laughing a little because Jeremy looks like he’s about to go for his damn throat. “I was going to lend you a hand with these idiots, but it looks like you have everything under control.”

Jeremy stares at him because what? After a moment what Ryan says actually registers and he looks around at the drunk assholes picking themselves up off the ground (or helping their buddies who Jeremy knocked the fuck out) scurry off with their tails between their legs.

And then it’s mutual staring because Idiots, and the women Jeremy helped clear their throats and thank him before wandering off.

More staring?

Jeremy looking Ryan over like hey, okay, not bad on the eyes, and he doesn’t seem like an asshole? Meanwhile Ryan’s like oh, no because Jeremy’s also not hard on the eyes and it’s been a while for him and how do social interaction with someone who’s not a contact or target or WB?

Thankfully Jeremy is less of a human disaster (not by much, but it’s enough) and they wander off to a quiet table somewhere. Ryan gets another diet soda and Jeremy gets his drink and they chitchat for a while, Jeremy getting a wee bit tipsy and Ryan getting a wee bit more oh, no because Jeremy’s nice and funny and laughs at Ryan’s dumb jokes even though they’re both well aware how terrible they are?

And then!

Just when they’re about to maybe get around to the your place or mine bit of the conversation, they both notice some Shady Dealings going on.

Too well-trained not to notice, and Ryan’s like well, shit and makes up some lame excuse to go check on things, not knowing he beat Jeremy to it by mere seconds.

Ryan goes all Sekrit Agent/operative with the stealthily following/eavesdropping whatever while Jeremy does the same. (Due to Plot Reasons they don’t spot one another right away because Plot Reasons.)

The stalking continues long enough for them to realize some serious shit is going down – maybe ties into their respective missions, maybe not.

Shenanigans in which they lose the guy’s they’re tailing and round a corner to run into one another and don’t recognize one another at first, just think they’re baddies?

Some hand-to-hand Sekrit Agent fighty stuff until Ryan manages to pin Jeremy (height/weight advantage or something, and Jeremy’s still got that alcohol slowing his reflexes and just, yes) and then Ryan’s like - !!! because it’s the guy from the club?

Jeremy totally gave him a fake name – old habits and Ryan still doesn’t believe anyone would be so cruel to name their kid Rimmy Tim, but whatever.

ANYWAY.

Jeremy is likewise !!! because what are the odds, right? (Ryan also gave him a fake name, and no one names their kid Reggie or whatever, but the hell does he know?)

Some Suspicion because what are the odds, indeed. Also, their respective situations and career choice make trust a hard thing to earn and all that, but before they can get too deeply into the do they or don’t they of trusting one another the actual baddies find them.

Thought they were being followed and better check it out, and anyway, there’s the usual shootout/hide behind cover and snark back and forth before one of them gets a flesh wound and they manage to escape.

Go to some cheap motel – God knows wherever they’ve been staying isn’t safe or secure – bugged to hell and who the fuck knows what else – to patch one another up. Offer some truth – sekrit agent/operatives and (technically) on the same side and the baddies are definitely NOT on their side and too much Good Guys NOT to look into things even if they’re on their own?

And wouldn’t you know it, they both know where to get their hands on the weapons gear they’re going to need to deal with things in the city and it’s just.

The two of them working together – and totally flirting because there are no rules tonight, you know? They’re probably (definitely) going to get themselves killed doing this and no WB breathing down their necks and their next mission probably would have killed them anyway.

Super competent sekrit agent/operative stuff with the track jig down the baddies and finding out what they’re doing (weapons trades or national secrets, something blah, blah, blah,) and being all oh no, that’s hot when one of them shows their competence or does some cool sekrit agent/operative thing?

Also bantering and realizing that while this is the worst idea either of them has ever had, it’s also the most fun?

(Which is sad because wow, they’ve wasted a lot of their lives working for assholes, but whatever.)

Before they go in for the climactic fight or whatever, they’re like, fuck it and kiss because might as well at this point, right?

Probably going to die, and if they don’t it’s not going to hurt. (They were thinking about the whole one-night stand thing before the sekrit agent/operative shit happened, so yeah.)

Action scene like whoa in which there is shooting and yelling and (flesh wounds on Ryan and Jeremy’s part because I’m a sucker for those, sorry friend) and one of them being held at gunpoint, because of course they are.

The thing where their eyes meet and the one being held at gunpoint by the Head Baddy (Jeremy, it’s totally Jeremy) is all “Do it,” or “This isn’t your fault,” or something else the Good Guy always says in this situation? And  Ryan starts to lower his gun because he can’t let the HB kill him?

And just when the HB is all gloaty mcgloaterson, Ryan whips out a throwing knife and gets him in the throat, saving Jeremy’s life and making the HB super dead.

The !!! moment of realizing wow, he’s not dead? And Ryan being like wow, it actually worked? Neat! And then the two of them staring at one another like what now?

Which, of course, is when the sekrit agents/operatives who have been watching HB and their cronies this whole time show up.

Geoff and his idiots and just. The fuck did you two do? (~Ruined months of work on Gavin and Michael’s part, since they’ve been working on getting HB and their people with the weapons trade/national secret thing and goddamn, what the fuck you two?)

Ryan and Jeremy being all ??? while Geoff’s people swarm the area and get shunted off to a little gray room somewhere for debriefing/interrogation thinking they’re really fucked this time? Sit there for hours and hours and hours. (Chitchat and banter and try not to think about what’s going to happen to them now.)

But of course not. (Because Plot Reasons.)

Geoff sweeps in with Jack and they have a nice chat about things.

The shit Ryan and Jeremy did with HB and their people, and their respective situations with their agencies/units and what do they say about working for Geoff instead?

“Uh,” and “What?”, and “Are you high?”

Because look.

No way their respective agencies/units are going to let them go knowing what they do, right? Shady as hell and corrupt and they’d rather see Ryan and Jeremy dead than let them tell anyone what’s been going on. (Have been trying for a while, actually, but they’re stubborn bastards.)

Geoff rolling his eyes and asking them if they’d like to work for him if he helped them take care of their respective agencies/units because he’s had his people looking into things since Ryan and Jeremy stumbled into their operation and the things they found, you know?

Still.

Best deal they’ve been offered – and who knows, they might live through it – so they say yes.

Geoff is delighted because he’s been meaning to deal with their agencies/units but hasn’t had the time with other shit going on. But with them on board it’ll go faster, or something?

Whatever.

Jeremy won’t do it unless Geoff gets Matt and Trevor out of his agency/unit – which he does because they’re useful bastards. (Also, like hell would he have left them there once he found out what was going on.)

Ryan’s own people (the ones still alive) were out of the line of fire before now, so he’s good to go.

Geoff (who doesn’t realize what he’s done, but when he does? ALL the regret) introduces them to Gavin and Michael and everyone else and it’s pretty much a disaster in the best way.

They get teamed up because everyone's impressed with what they managed to do and all that. Work together for a few months with the flirting and banter before they finally go on a date-thing?

Like.

Flirting’s easy, comes with the territory, but actual FEELINGs and whatnot are complicated and stupid hard. (...that’s what she said.)

Takes a close call to make them realize they’re wasting time better spent NOT being dumbasses (and maybe one of the others says as much) and then it’s some blurted invitation to coffee or burgers or whatever and this date...thing.

It gets ruined, of course, because enemies from their past pop up and shoot at them and then shenanigans? But they smooch somewhere in there and get other the awkward stage of being them and not knowing how to do FEELINGS and like. Save the day, but also smooch, idk, you know how these things go.

And then everyone makes fun of them for forever for not figuring their shit out before then, and also a lot of death-defying shenanigans and explosions and sekrit agent/operative fun-times???

[mxrlin-writes]

I had an idea in mind for Star Wars! The reader works with resistance alongside Leia. Leia organizes a work party for everyone and manages to get Kylo to come when she tells him the reader is going to be there.!The reader, being best friends with Poe, Finn, and Rey, decide to put on a fun little skit. (You can find this on YouTube. It’s a Studio C video titled Darth Sidious roommates.) The reader has the lead role and gives the other three the next main roles. Kylo watches and laughs at some

(2/2)  parts finding it entertaining. At the end of it, they all got a lot of compliments and Kylo was telling the reader how much he enjoyed watching it. He even quotes it back to her and she finds it cute.

I love this idea so so much, I changed it a tad so it’s become a college!AU set at Christmas, hope you don’t mind

EDIT: I loved this idea so much that I just straight up wrote 2,500 words. That’s like, the length of my literature coursework.

WARNING: for those who want to watch it, the sketch contains some “yo mama so fat” jokes - please bear this in mind if you have body image issues and remember, all of you are beautiful

STRIKE ME DOWN - BEN SOLO x READER

Kylo Ren x female!reader

warnings: she/her pronouns, alcohol mentions (fruit punch), swearing,

Leia throws a winter party for her work colleagues and sends an invite to her son Ben, the poster-boy for Poe and Finn’s rival hockey team.  Initially unsure about wanting to come, Ben is finally convinced when Leia tells him that (Y/N) will be there, his childhood crush. Maybe his feelings for her haven’t disappeared yet…

“I’ll get it!” you yelled into the kitchen as the doorbell rang, pushing your way past the Resistance staff who had decided that the hallway was a good place to congregate. Before today, you’d had no idea that the Resistance Newspaper had so many people working for it - initially, you’d thought it had just been Leia as editor as Poe as delivery boy. But then college drop-out Finn arrived - the First Order frat group had been way too much for him - and shortly after that, Rey had arrived. She’d been ridiculously good with writing articles and had a knack for exposing corrupt individuals.  Of course, Leia had decided that she would be the investigative journalist.

You crept into the porch, shivering slightly from the cold - it didn’t normally snow in the D’Qar neighborhood, but this winter was an exception. Temperature records were being broken nearly every day, much to the annoyance of Poe. He only had one coat, and it had been stolen by his boyfriend Finn. You gingerly reached for the door handle, opening it to see Ben Solo stood awkwardly on the threshold.

It must have been three or four years since you’d seen him last. He’d grown taller, and his silky raven hair was longer. He wore a black turtleneck and matching black jeans, a look that you’d never seen on him before. Whilst he was at the academy, he’d favored the more neutral colors in an attempt to imitate Luke. You kind of liked this new look, he looked much more grown-up than before. 

Ben cleared his throat, casting you an awkward smile - it was only then that you realised you’d been staring. “Oh, shit, yes, sorry, come in,” you said, your sentence fractured as you moved out of the way so that he could step inside the house. The porch was too small for the both of you, and you were pressed up against the wall as he removed his shoes, a rosy tint on your face that you were unsure if it was a blush or because of the cold temperature.

You eased open the door to the house and stepped in with Ben in tow. The hallway quietened as people noticed the new guest - he had a tiny bit of a reputation. Okay, understatement - he was infamous. He was the hockey captain at the Vader Academy and the second in command of the First Order frat group - he was known for being ruthless on the ice rink and was notoriously picky when it came to selecting new brothers (or troopers, as he called them) for the frat. He was the sworn enemy of those who had studied at the Republic University, particularly those who were on the hockey team. Namely, Poe. But he was still Leia’s son.

The tension was palpable and was only dissolved when Leia appeared in the kitchen doorframe to announce that food was ready. Most of the guests filed into the kitchen and the noise resumed. You met Ben’s gaze and smiled an apology before guiding him into the living room. Inside the homely room were your three friends - Rey, Finn and Poe. Rey was admiring the decorations on the Christmas tree, whilst Finn and Poe were chuckling over the family photos that decorated Leia’s mantlepiece. 

Rey looked up, grinning. “Hey Ben!” she chirped, shaking his hand. She wasn’t from the area and didn’t really have any idea about Ben’s reputation. She knew a little, of course, but not the full extent. Upon hearing Ben’s name, Finn and Poe both whipped their heads to face the door. Poe scowled, his grip tightening on the glass of fruit punch in his hand, whilst Finn looked towards the floor, pulling Poe’s jacket closer to his body. There was an awkward silence for a bit as Ben sat down. Rey looked confusedly between all of her friends, probing you with a quizzical look. “Guys, can I have a word? I know Leia said we’re not supposed to talk shop at her house but Artoo found something really cool today and I’ve only just remembered,” you said in an attempt to get the three of them out of the room. Poe grunted and stormed out of the room in two strides with Finn in tow. Rey rolled her eyes at the boys before following. “It will only take a couple of seconds, help yourself to the stuff on the table… apart from that bit of pizza, that’s mine,” you told Ben, raising your hands to your face in a “I’m watching you” gesture. He grinned, shaking his head - you really hadn’t changed.

You closed the door to the living room behind you and leaned against it. Almost immediately, Poe was on a rant. “Who the fuck invited him?” he whisper-yelled, gesturing through the wall to where Ben was presumably sat. You winced, gesturing for him to quieten down, worried that Ben would hear. “Look, I know you’re angry but-” you tried to calm Poe down whilst Finn reached a hand up to his boyfriend’s shoulder, but you were interrupted and Finn’s hand was swatted away. “Angry? Angry is the fucking understatement of the year, (Y/N)!” Poe hissed, reaching his hand up to rub his brow in frustration. “Poe, please, he’s really changed. After what happened at the Starkiller match, he’s really been trying to get himself back together. Leia said he’s working through his anger issues… please just give him a chance,” you whispered, hands still pressed against the door. 

Finn nodded in agreement with you. “It’s true, Poe. You know Poncho? The trooper I made friends with? He said that he’s a lot quieter now. He got Snoke removed as the frat leader, and since then he’s been a different person.” Still nothing from Poe’s end. Finn sighed and grabbed Poe by the shoulders, gently kissing his forehead. “I’m not saying you have to like him, I’m just asking you to give him a chance, please…” he murmured, and Poe sighed, his tense muscles dropping. Rey grinned, knowing that this meant Poe would try his best to be nice.

“Okay, you guys know the Darth Sidious roommates sketch, huh? We’re gonna perform that. Dibs on Sidious,” you grinned, and Poe rolled his eyes. Ben had quite a good sense of humour when you got to know him, and you’d figured that this would be a great bonding exercise. “I love this one,” Rey beamed as you moved out of the way so that she could open the door.

Rey waltzed in, delivering her line. “Yesterday, Sid got me to try and throw a broomstick in between someone’s tire spokes,” you watched as she flopped down on the sofa, followed by Finn with his hands in his pockets as he slumped beside her. “Okay, that’s messed up man…” he murmured. You’d have killed to see Ben’s expression - probably complete and utter confusion. “Seriously, the kid was like, five years old!” Rey said, exasperated. Poe took this as his time to join the duo on the sofa, kicking his legs over the arm of the burgundy settee and shaking his head as a reaction to what Rey had said.

You shoved the door open, now sporting your black jacket over your head. Ben practically choked in amusement, biting his bottom lip to stay quiet as you winked at him. “Good evening… roommates…” you said, putting on your best impression of the former mayor. You heard Poe stifle a laugh from the sofa and found yourself trying hard not to grin.

“How was your day?” Rey asked, trying her best to sound indifferent. “Exactly as I had foreseen,” you replied, noticing Ben grinning out of the corner of your eye as he raised his glass of orange juice to his lips and staring intently, wondering where the scene would go next. “I don’t know why I ask him anymore…” Rey shook her head and Poe nodded along.

“I can feeeeel your frustration! Frustration is a path to the dark side… take my weapon! Strikeee meee dowwwwnnn!” you tried your best at melodrama, which made Rey break character completely as she melted into hysterical laughter.

The scene continued, and Ben’s previously muted laughter became more obvious. You loved the dulcet sound of it - it sounded like honey, much deeper than when you’d had a childhood crush on him. The warm feeling of a rekindled love almost threw you off balance, but you continued to hide it, hoping that the pink at the top of your ears was not visible to anyone else in the room. It wasn’t real, you hadn’t seen Ben for four years. You stuffed the feeling back down into your chest, attempting to ignore it.

As the sketch finished, you heard Rey’s stomach rumble. “I’m gonna raid the kitchen… boys, join me!” she clapped her hands to her knees and stood, and inclined her head towards the kitchen. “’Bout time,” agreed Poe, before casting his gaze towards you and Ben, nodding towards the latter. The last shreds of tension evaporated at this gesture, and you almost breathed a sigh of relief. Finn grinned, clasping Poe’s hand and ushering him out off the room, closing the door behind him.

There was a comfortable silence for a few moments as Ben took a sip of his fruit punch, placing it down on the table with a small clink at the same time as you reached for your coffee. The result was you accidentally grazed against his skin, somehow still cold from the outdoors. A blush spread across your face, which you tried to hide with the wide rim of your mug.

“Do you want anything from the kitchen?” you asked, kicking your legs up so that you sat crosslegged on the armchair opposite Ben. He shook his head. “I’ve already eaten. Coming here was a split-second decision,” he added, his countenance darkening as if he felt guilty. 

“Why’d’ya change your mind?” you asked in a gentle tone, and he looked up. “You.” he answered bluntly, and it took a second for it to register in your brain. You were the reason for him coming to the party. “Leia told me you were coming, and I wanted to see you again, so I came too,” he added upon seeing the blank expression on your face. This time, you couldn’t hide the blush - it spread all across your cheeks and forced you to smile.

“Are you flirting with me, Ben Solo?”

“Depends. Do you want me to?” he smirked. You hadn’t seen him smirk like that for ages. Your heart was threatening to burst through your chest and your face must have looked like a tomato as you lowered your voice to a whisper to answer. “Maybe…” you murmured, biting your top lip. Ben leaned towards you across the table so that your faces were only inches apart. He studied your cheeks and you watched his hazel eyes flit across your face. You couldn’t hear any noise other than the two of you breathing and the crackle of the fireplace - the droning of chatter from the kitchen had drowned out. His hand reached up and cupped your face, and you leaned into it involuntarily. His face came closer, and closer and then-

Poe burst in. Ben practically flew backwards and you looked down. Suddenly, the table was a very interesting object to you. Ben was clearly having the same sudden fascination, but this time with the Christmas tree. “Nice decorations,” he nodded, inclining his head towards you and catching your eye in a cheeky glance.

“I would say that we’d go elsewhere, but, uh… Leia kinda kicked us out of the kitchen. I couldn’t stop eating the mince pies,” Poe said, throwing himself down on the sofa and staring towards Ben. “Sorry if we interrupted something,” he grinned wickedly, crossing his arms.

The rest of the party continued without a hitch. Rey was the first to leave - she had to be up early for her Jedi training the next day. Finn and Poe were amongst the last to leave - Finn proclaimed that he was not ready for the four hour drive the next day to visit Poe’s parents in Yavin. There had been some jokes about in-laws and when the two of them were going to finally get married, and then they’d retreated out into the snowy night.

Eventually, the guests had become Leia’s editing circle - who occupied the kitchen - and you and Ben, who occupied the sitting room. The two of you chattered about anything and everything, and you felt the familiar feeling form in your chest once more - this time, you let it grow. Ben was perfect - the two of you got along so well, it was almost as if you’d never been apart. He was witty and knew exactly how to come back to your quips and jokes, only adding to their humour. 

It was nearing midnight, and you were starting to tire. You weren’t bored of Ben’s company, your fatigue was more to do with the fact that you’d been up at 6am with Rey making paper chains to decorate the house. Ben seemed to notice this and glanced towards the watch on his wrist. “I should probably get going,” he stood, and you mimicked him, swaying slightly as the fatigue really hit. Ben caught you before you fell with a hand around your waist, gently holding you in place whilst you reorientated yourself. “Thanks,” you murmured breathlessly, feeling the red tint cross your face for what seemed like the millionth time that night.

You walked him to the door, leaning against the doorframe as you watched him shrug his thick black coat on. Once finished, he looked towards you, and beckoned you in for a hug. You wrapped your arms around him, breathing in the scent of black coffee and fire smoke. He placed a gentle kiss to the top of your head. “I meant what I said about the flirting earlier,” he murmured against your hair, leaning away from you so that he could meet your eyes. “We should go for a date, sometime soon,” he continued.

You smiled bashfully, watching him turn around and grab a piece of paper and a pen from the porch windowsill so that he could write down his number. “Text me,” he said, pressing the paper into your hand. You pocketed his number, staring back up at him as he opened the front door to leave. He stepped out, shivering slightly against the cold. You hid your body behind the door in an attempt to shield yourself from the cold, but found yourself squinting your eyes against the freezing breeze.

He made his way down the cobbled path that ran down Leia’s front garden. Just as you were about to close the door, he whipped around and called out your name. You titlted your head, wondering what he had to say.

Ben gestured to the two frozen bottles of milk at the bottom of the mailbox and erupted into the best impression of Sidious that you’d ever heard. “Take the milk jug and strike me down!” he quoted your line from the sketch that you had performed earlier that evening. You giggled, rolling you eyes in mock exasperation.

He raised a hand in a gesture of goodbye, and then left into the wintery darkness. You closed the door, leaning against it and squealing with joy. 

Ben freaking Solo. 

[datingsimreviews]

Steam prison is genuinely a good game. Like the world and fantasy of the whole thing really immerses you, and each of the love interests are complex well written characters. Not only that but each of the endings adds more to the story and some of the “none good endings” can even be seen as better if you’re more interested in the world’s politics instead of smooching some guys.

Plot:

The plot is as follows. 400 years ago there was a big flood. All of the scientists made a tower in the sky to escape the flood. They left for their new country and didn’t allow the rest of the people to join them because they didn’t have enough room. The flood came and killed most of the people, their culture and animals, but they managed to rise up anyway and create steam punk land.

The main character Cyrus is from the heights (the tower), one of the descendants of those scientists that left. She’s a police officer and people only descend to the lower level nowadays if they’ve committed a crime. They’re exiled to the “depths”.

After checking out the depths on an observation mission after passing a police exam, (Because police are required to look at the sanctuary district in the depths if they move up in rank) Cyrus’s parents are murdered and she is charged with the crime of their murder. She’s immediately exiled with no formal investigation into the depths.

Each route focuses on her exile in a little different way uncovering a little bit more of why her parents were murdered and about this world.

  Ines:

Usually I firmly advocate for players to choose their first character to play and not get a set of guidelines or something. However in this case I really like playing Ines’s route first because he’s the only route that lets you truly punch your parent’s murders face (besides just uncovering who ordered it or why).

Ines is the second in command of the HOUNDS, the police who monitor the criminals in the sanctuary district. The HOUNDS are basically the definition of police brutality, killing and hunting their criminal victims as much as they want and beating people up. Ines follows the Head’s orders knowing it’s evil under hope that he can go back to the Heights someday and investigate the crime his partner was charged with.

The Hounds don’t come to the depths themselves out of choice, they’re moved dishonorabley there too, making most of them very very bitter. In the Heights Police work in pairs and if one police officer commits a crime and is exiled their pair isn’t reassigned they’re moved discharged and moved into the Hounds. But Ines never believed his partner committed a crime and thinks it was falsified charges sort of like what’s happening with you.

He’s lowered himself into a monster in hopes that he can get justice for the dead.

The romance in Ines’s route makes a fair bit of sense, given that Cyrus (the protagonist) becomes his teacher in the ways of nobility and is just given time to sit around all day thinking about him so her feelings develop. I don’t know why Ines loves her but the romance in this game isn’t as great as the story and that’s honestly okay.

Ines also has the added bonus of being the police officer who inspired Cyrus to become a police officer.

Also he’s one of the few good Fins paths (more on Fins later.)

 Adage:

Adage is another criminal in the depths, but he gets by a lot better than the rest because he’s a doctor so he has a lot of money and doesn’t starve as much as the rest of the criminals. He’s rather cold and cynical and Cyrus becomes his assistant because she needs a job to get money for food.

Adage has no bedside manner refusing to help patients he believes he can’t save, but he’s still a good person trying his best to save the ones he does think he can save. A lot of other reviewers said that his path was terrible romantic wise, but I think his path was honestly a lot cuter and fluffier when it came to romance. Adage’s a big fan of romance novels so even though most people who come from the heights don’t know what love is, Adage does (Despite romance novels being banned because love is a crime there and arranged marriages prevail)

His route focuses on why Cyrus was convicted of a crime she didn’t commit, his father the HOUNDS doctor saw her during her observation and wanted to use her in his experiments because of her rare blood type.

Adage and Cyrus have to confront his father together and take him out. Which his father rightfully deserves. He’s been killed and dismembering people to make a Frankenstein child.

I was shocked by Adage’s evil father because he was a good guy on the previous route except at the very end where he randomly went to jail. I always wondered what he did. It was cool to get more of the world.

 Ulrik:

Ulrik is the only character who’s actually Cyrus’s age so that’s a plus. (they’re both 18). However he’s also the only character that fits into a normal otome cliché personality of “the tsundere”

Ulrik isn’t from the Heights. He’s from deeper in the Depths and is not one of the criminals. Past the sanctuary district wall are the survivors of the original flood and steam punk town. He is one of those survivors.

It turns out that Ulrik’s father was one of the main people who built the Heights but decided to stay behind despite being offered the position because he didn’t want to abandon his family. Through the generations this story has been twisted over and over again to say that the heights abandoned him and Ulrik’s family now hates the heights and anyone who comes here, causing him to initially hate the protagonist.

Still he eventually comes to understand that the heights just has people in it just like the Depths and realizes the truth of his family.

The protagonist never learns about why she was sent to the depths instead focusing on just surviving in this route but it tells us more about the flood.

Eltwood:

The ruler of one of the districts in the depths. This guy is your classic rich playboy businessman, but he still had an air of eccentricness that made him fun. He’s enamored with the heights despite not being from there and immediately falls in love with Cyrus’s knight like ways and makes her his bodyguard. This route had a lot of knight/prince or bodyguard/person they’re guarding vibes.

Eltwood’s route focused more on the relationship the depths had with the sanctuary district with the criminals and the other districts. It had an epic conclusion and was genuinely very cool.

I didn’t like the romance in his route as much as the other routes though. Probably because he immediately convinced Cyrus to kiss him instead of hours of build up and although Cyrus consented she didn’t really know what kissing was due to the harsh censorship of the Heights and situational consent ain’t cool. I mean I was happy she consented but it felt off to me.

Still the only scene that made me cry in this dating sim happened in his route. It was in one of his not good ends, where he ends up talking about his backstory and how his father and him were invited to the heights to celebrate the saint’s 400th anniversary. His father was enamored with the heights just like him and was so excited. He finally got to the Heights and everybody made fun of him and pranked him into doing embarrassing things in front of the saint and spoke behind his back. On the way back down in the lift to the depths his father cried for the first time and through out all stuff about the heights after.

It was just such a sad scene.

 Yune:

I was really excited for Yune’s route because Yune had saved me a few times in the other routes reforming the government and exposing that Cyrus had been exiled due to false charges. Yune himself is a saint and is worshipped like a religion. He’s immortal and nobody can hurt him. Both the depths and the heights love him even though he’s only in the heights.

Yune’s route….I had some problems with the good ending maybe because I wanted Cyrus to stay in the heights. But the other endings were very good. Less a dating sim and more political intrigue in the other ends. But I love immortal characters.

Yune saves Cyrus from exile in his route to hire her as his personal attendant instead. Not because he believes she’s innocent unfortunately but because he wants her to figure out a way to kill him because he’s grown tired of immortality and nothing he does can harm him.

Over time because he’s able to be his true self with his hired assassin he grows to love her and soon realizes that the only thing that can stop his god like heart is love and when he’s close to her he grows closer to dying. Various endings do different things with this and in the good ending he’s able to take out the god rock from his chest (Because he’s like a mechanical doll it turns out and a magical rock has been put in him which requires a key to remove that’s in the depths) and restart his aging just enough so that he can live with Cyrus like a normal human.

I like the endings a lot more where Cyrus ends a relationship with him, he doesn’t die but he does reform the government to take out all the corruption that caused Cyrus to have a false crime. But if you want good things for Cyrus just wait until the Grand Ending.

 Grand Ending:

The grand ending is the route with no depths that is unlocked after you play the other five routes. I loved it despite the fact that it had no romance. Cyrus’s parents don’t die because she stops the person who tried to kill them with her fighter skills (who turns out to be her ex-fiance). Yune helps root out that he won’t be charged properly because his father is a rich noble and that he needs to reform the government so he sends Cyrus to the depths to bring back delegates so that the depths can be represented and so that the two communities can work with each other and share their various technology.

She brings back all four of the other love interests who all fight off the evil police force and reform the government.

And there is no Fins death unlike most of the other routes.

 And finally:

Fins:

Oh poor Fins. Fins is Cyrus’s partner in the police force who gets sent down to the depths to be a HOUND because she committed a crime.  He was a good boy before that.

I didn’t really understand all the love towards a side character who wasn’t romancable but…This game seriously should have just made him into a main character. He’s a romancable character in the Japanese exclusive psvita version but alas I can not speak Japanese.

The reason I think why Fins is so beloved is that during the common route after you beat one route it skips to Fins being tortured just at random moments. I just had to be like “poor buddy why am I in this POV?”

Because Fins was such a good boy he didn’t gel with the police brutality so the head of the hounds beat him up, didn’t let the doctor give him pain medicine as they healed him and then beat him up again until he was a loyal dog. And instead of just telling us that they show us that…Over and over again.

Luckily Fins believes in one thing! That Cyrus the protagonist will save him or that she’s still the only good light in his life that he’ll find someday and then he’ll be happy and whole again. Unfortunately he’s not romancable in English so that never happens.

There are a lot of bad endings that involves this guy going full yandere but in most of the canon love interest ends he dies. Brutally. Before confessing his love to Cyrus and then dying to protect her.

Fins you see was always in love with Cyrus. The game makes sure to remind you of that in all the routes he dies in brutally (Adage, Eltwood’s and Yune’s. He makes no appearance in Urrik and come in the very end of Ines’s to be Cyrus’s good friend) It continues to switch to his pov throughout other guys routes just to remind you “hey!!! Your friend is suffering and there’s nothing you can do about it!”

It was good writing but harsh. I think it would have felt a lot more whole if his route was included in the English version. And a lot of other people agree.

Luckily he never gets tortured in the Grand Ending and he and Cyrus remain police officers and he tries unsuccessfully to confess to her but she’s just too dense.

 This game had some great writing but I truly recommend playing it not for the characters but the world. The dystopian Heights doesn’t feel truly like a dystopia and I love the world about the clouds sort of thing. It’s a really cool game and the art, music and interface all make it just a lot more beautiful.

[duhragonball]

Dragon Ball Z 011

Hot damn!   It’s time for Terror on Arlia!   This is probably one of the best filler episodes ever.   It’s like, the driver’s ed episode, the Goku vs. Pikkon fight, and this.    I’m not sure how I’d rank them, but maybe I’ll work on that sometime later.

First off, some time has passed once again since the last episode.  Now, Gohan is strong enough that the dinosaur that keeps attacking him is no longer a threat.  

Gohan just calmly runs away from it, then jumps right before he runs into a boulder, and the dinosaur hits it instead.

Then he hacks off a piece of the dinosaur’s tail while it’s stunned.   Again.   Gohan’s apparently been doing this for a while now, and he warns the dinosaur that it’ll run out of tail at the rate they’re going.   The message is simple: Don’t eat Gohan’s friends.

Gohan has also figured out how to make his own ki blasts, which is pretty high-level stuff.   His ki may only be powerful enough to start a fire, but it’s way more than most of the other characters could have done at age four.

Meanwhile, Bulam, Krillin, and Yamcha are looking for Tien and Chiaotzu.   Or maybe they’re just talking about looking for them now that they have Yamcha.   I’m pretty sure the Gohan scenes are taking place over the course of several weeks, while these Z-Warrior scenes are supposed to be playing out over the course of a single day.  Even if it really is taking this long to find Tien, why would Krillin and Yamcha be with her for the whole search?   They’d be better off heading to Kami’s Lookout, so they can start training for the Saiyans.

Speaking of Tien, Launch is on the run from the cops for stealing a bunch of money for Tien.

She eludes the police with a grenade launcher.

So she escapes with the loot.   Most of it anyway, a lot spilled out of the back while she was being chased.

But never mind that, here comes Vegeta.   He and Nappa are on their way to Earth, and they set their space pods to put them in stasis for the year-long journey, but Vegeta programmed it to wake them up at a certain point along the way, so they could get out and stretch their legs. 

Seems he found a planet along their course for Earth, and since the Saiyans conquer planets to sell for profit, he sees this as a way to make some nice profit on the side.  This seems a bit out of character for Vegeta, given what we learn about him later on.   I would think that the Planet Trade business is just something he puts up with until he can find a way to get out of it.    So it’s not that he wouldn’t want to take a pit stop on the way to Earth, but I doubt it would be to score some extra cash.

Anyway, Nappa just wants to get out of the pod and move around a bit, so he’s up for anything.   

And here’s the lucky planet they’re going to.   It’s called Arlia, and it looks really crappy, even from a distance.  There was an episode of Mythbusters where they tested the futility of polishing a turd, and it ended up with them making piles of dung into spheres.    That’s what Arlia looks like. 

The planet actually manages to look even worse up close.   I don’t know if the boys meant to set down in a desolate area like this, but I always got the impression that most of the planet looks like this, so they didn’t have much choice.   Vegeta concedes that they probably won’t find a buyer for Arlia after all.   I figure this is the sort of planet a Space Trillionaire would buy, but only because he wants to feel like a Space Quadrillionaire.

Suddenly these big bug people show up.    I don’t know why they’re so much bigger than Nappa, when the rest of the Arlians we see are not.   There’s a lot we don’t know about the Arlians, and we’ll probably never know.    They threaten to arrest the Saiyans and take them to King Moai.

Nappa’s eager to fight them, but Vegeta orders him to stand down for the moment, since he wants to see this Moai guy for himself.    I guess he figures the planets’ leader would be in a more advance (read: valuable) location, which would give Vegeta a better idea of what Arlia has to offer. 

Notable, this is the first indication of Saiyans using telepathy.   Goku uses it later on, and we’ve already seen Master Roshi, Crane Hermit, Korin, and Kami use it, but it always seemed to be this mystical thing that only wise old martial artists could do.    Oh yeah, and King Piccolo could telepathically communicate with his offspring.  

I guess what I find interesting about this instance is that Vegeta uses it rather casually, when he could just as easily whisper to Nappa, or maybe use some nonverbal gesture to get his point across.    The point here may be to indicate just how scary-powerful Vegeta is, but the thing about Vegeta is that anything we see him do can be applied to every other Saiyan character.   If Master Roshi can read minds, it sort of stops there.   If Vegeta can communicate telepathically, that means Nappa, Raditz, Goku, and Gohan can too, along with every other Saiyan character that hasn’t been introduced yet.   Vegeta might be the only one who knows how at this point, but that’s just a matter of skill.

So here’s Moai’s stronghold, and guess what, it’s also a dump.   I’m not complaining about the artwork, mind you.    This scenery is breathtaking.   The twin suns sort of make this look like a face, with the clouds forming a furrowed brow.   It’s like the Arlians’ god is looking down on the castle, and he’s not happy with what he’s seeing.  

Also, while Moai’s fortress looks moderately impessive, it’s surrounded by absolutely nothing.   What happened on this planet?   My guess is that it was ruined by centuries of war, but it’s also possible that the Arlians prefer it like this. 

Vegeta and Nappa are taken to a dungeon, which looks like something from a Prince Valiant comic.    This is the paradox of Arlia, because it looks like the Arlians are generally familiar with alien visitors, implying that they’ve been exposed to advanced technologies, but their own world is backward and medieval.    They don’t even seem interested in the Saiyans’ ships or their scouters.   And they lock them up behind a wooden gate.    And why do they carry swords when they all seem to have some sort of red mouth laser? 

While they wait, the Saiyans meet Atla, one of the native Arlians who’s been imprisoned by Moai.   Well, “meet” may not be the right word.   Atla just starts introducing himself and explaining the backstory while they stand silently and face in his general direction.  

From Atla’s words, it sounds to me like Moai took over the planet fairly recently, perhaps after a long civil war that killed anyone more qualified to rule.  Unconcerned with actually governing his people, Moai just does whatever he pleases, using his unlimited power to enforce his whims.   So there’s a good chance that the planet looks like a dump because of his indifference. 

I dig this sort of thing, because it reminds me of the decline of the Western Roman Empire, where the emperors eventually became little more than figureheads backed by strong military leaders.   Over time, the Roman armies became supplemented by foreign mercenaries, until eventually the top generals were all foreign mercenaries, and eventually they just dispensed with the figureheads and started ruling Italy outright.    I get the impression that the emperors didn’t particularly care that their domain was being usurped by outsiders, because as long as they were comfortable in their palaces then everything was fine. 

There’s kind of a similar pattern in the Bible, where you see David and Solomon’s descendants slowly letting the Kingdom of Israel decline.    Rehoboam’s arrogance caused the kingdom to split in two, and while there were a few good kings who embraced piety and reform, a lot of wicked kings abandoned the principles that made their reigns possible.   They worshipped idols and did whatever they liked, and then eventually they found themselves surrounded by powerful enemies.   The later kings were reduced to vassals, but they didn’t seem too concerned about that as long they got to sit in their palaces and pretend everything was okay.

Atla laments that now Moai is capturing space aliens on top of oppressing his own people, which suggests that Moai only sees his rule as a right to oppress other people for his own amusement.  

I wrote about this episode some time back, comparing Arlia to Westeros from Game of Thrones, or A Song of Ice and Fire or whatever the hell it’s supposed to be called.   I’ve never read the books because I need that time to liveblog anime, but everything I’ve heard about it suggests that the whole story is about some backwater planet full of medieval fantasy tropes, and all the leaders are corrupt, venal idiots who only stay in charge because they’re protected by bullshit laws and traditions, or because they’re better at the endless palace intrigue that goes on in the story.   There’s one kingdom that was ruled by a Draco Malfoy clone, and another run by a guy who hunts naked women for sport, and I think some character keeps fetuses in jars for no apparent reason.    I get the impression that a lot of the books is just George R.R. Martin trying to use shock value to pad things out.   That and lore.   If Tom Clancy and Howard Stern co-wrote Lord of the Rings, you might have something pretty similar to Game of Thrones. 

What I’m trying to say here is that Moai seems to just sit around all day watching his subjects fight each other for his own amusment.   He forced Atla’s betrothed, Lemlia, to be his queen (she’s the pink bug lady in the back), and he has soldiers just roaming the wastelands in search of new prisoners to mess with.   His men captured real live space aliens and he’s like “Oh goody!   Bring them before me, because I actually believe they’ll respect the idiotic rules that keep me in power.”    I’m pretty sure this is exactly what King Draco Malfoy Clone would do in this situation.

He looks and talks and acts like a complete buffoon, and he’s just begging for some hero to come along and punch him in the mouthparts.    Except Atla’s in the dungeon, and some other, more competent hero must have gotten killed off three books ago (cf. A Sleet of Testicles).

And this is what I love about this episode.    Vegeta (along with Nappa, of course) are sort of being put into this role of traveling heroes who enter a tyrant’s domain and set things right.    They’re certainly powerful enough to do it, but we already know that’s not what they’re here for.  

Vegeta kills all the gladiators and informs Moai that he only let himself be captured just to get this close to the king.    It astonishes me that Moai needs to have this explained to him.    He’s so used to having his own way that it never dawned on him that anyone could use his arrogance against him.

Nappa strikes his classic pose and kills all the guards.

Then Moai summons an even bigger bug creature named Yedi.  Nappa asks permission from Vegeta to handle this one, which I think is a nice touch. 

Nappa rips off Yedi’s finger and licks the monster blood off his face.    Nappa’s awesome.   He’s just havin’ a good old time.

I forget why now, but rocks start falling, probably because Vegeta’s powers cause the ceiling to break apart.    Moai takes cover behind his throne...

...but a rock ends up killing him anyway.  I woudn’t think that’s a vital area, but what do I know about Arlian anatomy?    It’s kind of fitting that Moai should die like this, in his own throne room/gladiator arena, cowering behind his throne.   He thought it would protect him like it always had done in the past, but in the end he met a power that didn’t respect anything he had accomplished.   The Saiyans ignored his royal robes and saw only a fool, and so he died a fool.

Atla shows up and praises the Saiyans or liberating his planet from Moai’s tyranny.   You know, he could have followed them up here and helped out.   They were all in the same cell, and Vegeta and Nappa destroyed the door and killed all the guards, so what took him so long?

The Saiyans just sort of look at him, and then they get back in their spaceships.

I’m not sure why they even bother flying across the surface.   Maybe they’re still surveying the planet, but it’s a crappy planet no matter what angle you view it from.    At last, Vegeta gives up and they head back into space.

But before they leave, he gets out of his ship and decides to leave a going-away present.    How does Vegeta breathe in space?  That’s one way you can tell which ones are filler scenes.   They usually play faster and looser with this sort of thing.   

On the surface, Atla and Lemlia are reunited at last, and it looks like everything’s going to be okay from now on, thanks to those two heroic aliens who...

LOL JK, Vegeta blew up the whole planet.  

What’s so great about this is that Arlia kind of deserved to die.   Not in the strictest narrative sense, but from a metanarrative viewpoint, it was just a really dumb planet.   Any world that could fall under Moai’s rule probably didn’t have much longer to live anyway, and it’s almost like Vegeta put it out of it’s misery.    I’m not suggesting any of this rationalizes Vegeta’s actions.    This is a horrible, horrible crime, and Vegeta did it like it was nothing to him.   He’s done far worse things with even less compunction.

Even so, he’s not Arlia’s villain, he’s Dragon Ball’s villain, so it’s just satisfying to watch him squash some crappy filler planet that had no redeeming value to the story.   It’s like watching your favorite bad guy wrestler clobber your least favorite good guy wrestler.  

And the narrator sums it up very neatly.    This is what’s headed for Earth.    The Saiyans destroyed Arlia like it was nothing, and what can Earth do to avoid a similar fate?    Z stands for The End.  

But not yet.   Not yet.

[peekaboohq]

*/ 𝓮𝓿𝓮𝓷𝓽 001.

this event is in partnership with @bubblehq ~ please follow/reblog your intros for the members that liked/replied to this post and plot interactions with them!

the bikini bottom was always a place filled with laughter and enjoyment, but what happens when our three gangs come to shake things up? if anyone asked, they were simply on a vacation...but what is going on behind closed doors? everyone is on a mission, and it can only be achieved if they work together. although they can blend in easily, who knows what obstacles to avoid along the way? the biki museum, home to many famous paintings and artifacts, is the target. to achieve a mission without getting caught, they need to avoid suspicion, and know the ins and outs of the town almost immediately. 

like this once you’ve read it ! 

and make starters with the tags: pabevent01, pabstarter, bubblestart, bubbleevent. , lov y’all

the story goes as this: all the other museums around the world hold fake paintings and precious artifacts. the biki museum is the only standing place with real valuable pieces of art. there are skulls, mummies, and even the true mona lisa all in this one location. how could this be? well, since this location isn’t known well around the world, it’s ultimately the safest place to store these prized possessions. duplicates have been spread across the globe, and only a closed circle of people have the knowledge of this establishment. 

the question arrises: how did the gangs figure out the world’s biggest secret?

from the beginning, the higher-ups had knowledge about this. there were countless people on this case, and when the truth was revealed it was almost impossible to keep people’s mouths shut. they organized a plan to get the most out of this heist. this is why the new gangs are far ahead of the older ones, they aren’t fixated on one place to get their riches. 

where is the bikini bottom?: on an island called namkanda, where kim namjoon is president. this small town is located on the coast and has a lot of new residents coming in, but it hasn’t gotten as crazy yet. 

the mission: steal as much as possible, and get rid of anyone standing in the way. there will be also special assignments for people as well!

something to remember: not to get caught and have basic knowledge about the residents! interact with them to make their agenda go unnoticed. 

the schedule: 

first three days is ONLY interacting with residents. the heist is getting set up.

the last four days is for the HEIST interactions between residents can still occur though!

*/ groups + objective = 09/18/18 @ 1am est begins the heist ! 

one: retrieve a necklace worn by royalty that is locked in an underground safe

li: safe expert

chan: spy, get a job there&infiltrate??

iseul: hack into computer system to alter cameras

two: get into the bikini bottom city hall and steal secret file about the museum 

birdie: steal the key to the safe, it’s in the mayor’s office

camila: infiltrate city hall, hack into their system to alter cameras

reece: it’s unclear of any fail-safes the office may have, get ready for a speedy exit

three: the security guards on the east wing

eunha: there are three last defense fighters, take them out

kai: make sure to get the doors open while the other team members get rid of obstacles

four: rooftop madness

minjae: find a way to get inside through the vent system, leading other members

yoojin: get information about the fastest routes to the art hall

moonsuk: follow with the bags to carry the paintings (don’t forget a flashlight!)

sunmin: make sure to keep an eye out for any guards! in charge of safety

five: bikini bottom has a huge weapons export center, steal their list of connections

kyunghee: infiltrate and be on lookout 

taehan: be there for back up in case things go down 

hela: an expert on weapons, find the best ones to take

six: take out the owner of the museum

minsun: set up sniper take out guards for fai

fai: assassinate the owner

naeun: once minsun begins shooting, they have 10 minutes max. get ready for action.

seven: north side mummy action

saerom: get to the egyptian hall without stepping on a laser/wire

jamie: make sure to stay on guard, and find the most valuable pieces

eight: an opposing government official is currently staying in the neighboring city near bikini bottom for an event, kill them. they're about to spill about our operation and members

yubin: the event will have a lot of media coverage, cover our tracks

cleo: get into the waiting staff, slip poison into their drink

noi: get into the waiting staff, get ready to drive yubin and cleo away

nine: you were supposed to stay in the car

tae: original plan was to be lookout in the car with your team, but what happened?

easy: try to get everyone in the car and out

hyeri: single mission, but the getaway car is having issues, how do we fix this situation?

ten: make the bikini bottom bank to let us store some of our money, rob it

lei: talk to the guards, distract them

arden: get inside with the proper materials

jinhai: figure out how to open the vault

jay: get ready to begin grabbin' stuff and runnin' 

eleven: a corrupt official dr. hong is running for office, get on their good side (work together super hard for this one!)

hana: get intel on dr. hong, inform hyeju. once the meeting takes place be on lookout

sooji: find a hiding spot. once the meeting takes place be on lookout

hyeju: tell them about how much money they can make with a gang connection

jinah: help hyeju convince dr. hong

twelve: we found the location of an old acquaintance who vanished after exposing some of our secrets to a news outlet. he is curently going by joon byun. we need him quietly put down. 

 angel: joon frequences a local strip club, act like a worker and have him take you to his place. keep his door unlocked. 

junha: survey joon’s home until angel returns with him, wait for angel’s signal before entering and taking joon out. 

inguk: make it look like joon left town and clean the scene.