#going on a year and a half of spinning them like a centrifuge i can not stop thinking abt them for more than a few days at a time

[stoatsaturday]

WHEN I SAY I'LL GET USED TO A WORLD WITHOUT YOU BUT I'D RATHER JOIN YOU IN HELL

[slapshot-to-the-heart]

merry christmas, ya filthy animal

Hi guys! This is my contribution for @hockeynetwork holiday gift exchange, it’s 2.5k of sweet Tito fluff for @dreamypeaches and I hope you all like it. As always, I read all the tags and love love hearing your feedback, so hop into my inbox and reblog if you like it! 

word count: 2.5k+

Everyone has a favorite movie. Some go for a childhood classic like Cinderella, some find an indie documentary from a film class in college, some inherit their parents’ love for the Princess Bride or Casablanca. Not you. For you, there was no movie that could hold a candle to Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. You had watched it for the first time maybe around 7 or 8 years old, and had been hooked ever since, and even Donald Trump’s five-second cameo couldn’t taint the love you had for it. But your favorite part, other than the large cheese pizza and stretch limousine, was the end. The Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center, Kevin and his mom finally reuniting after she moved heaven and earth to get back to her son by Christmas. 

It wasn’t your first Christmas in New York City, but it was the first one where it really felt like it was your city, like you belonged to it. And it was your first Christmas with Tito. You had started dating earlier in the year, just as the team was starting to make the big push for playoffs and two months or so before he left to Montréal for the summer. It was strange while he was there, not just because he was hundreds of miles away and in a whole different country, but because the two of you had only been exclusive for a few months and were set to be separated for three. You flew up for Canada Day and met his parents, and he came back for a week in August, but the interim was filled with more FaceTime calls and lonely nights than either of you would care to admit. 

But summer was long over, the leaves had fallen from all the London planes, and the temperature had started to drop below freezing even in the day. The cold weather wasn’t always great; you didn’t love having to scrape the ice off of your windshield or trudge through the slush when it was too early for the snow to stick to the ground, but you wouldn’t change it for the world. One thing that winter changed was date plans. Unless you hit it at just the right time, coffee in the morning was more prone to freeze your fingers off than warm you up, having dinner outside — normally one of your favorite things to do together — was all-but banned after November, and you could only walk around Central Park so many times. And it wasn’t for lack of trying; you knew for a fact that Anthony had spent hours on plane rides trying to figure out what was open, flipping in between Google and the weather app. He was making an effort, though, and that’s what mattered. 

Which is why you weren’t particularly surprised when he showed up at your apartment door on Christmas Eve, twelve hours after he asked you if you had plans that night. You didn’t and it wasn’t a game day, so he told you to dress warm and be ready by 8. You were waiting by the door five minutes early. He greeted you with a hug and a kiss on the cheek, closing the door behind you. “Did you already eat? I know it’s pretty late already but I think I saw a few food trucks by where we’re going if you’re still hungry.”

You nodded your head. “Anthony. It’s 8 at night. ‘Course I’ve already eaten.”

He ducked his head in embarrassment, the slightest pink appearing on his cheeks. “Should have figured.”

“It’s fine,” you said, slipping your hand into his and smiling. “You going to tell me where we’re going, though?”

“Wouldn’t be a surprise if I did,” he said. 

You should have known by the duffel bag in the backseat what his plans were, but some thirty minutes later and he was pulling into a parking lot off of West 49th, shouldering the bag and looking over to you with a grin. “What’s a Christmas in New York without ice skating at Rockefeller Center?” 

You rolled your eyes, trying desperately to keep in a laugh. “You don’t think it’s a bit unfair? You’re paid buckets of money to balance on knife shoes and the last time I went ice skating was,” you tried to remember, “two years ago? Three?” 

Tito shrugged, taking your hand as you walked out the door of the parking lot. “What’s life without a little risk?” Whether the Harry Potter quote was intentional or not, you weren’t sure. 

“Fair,” you conceded. “You’ll have to look out for me, though.” He promised he would, handing his card over to the cashier, who in turn passed you your skates. Anthony led you over to a bench, grabbing a bag of roasted chestnuts from a street vendor before sitting down. You ate a few before tying your skates, swinging one up on his thigh for inspection. “Do these past muster, inspector?”

Anthony took one look at them before undoing your knot, adjusting your foot in his lap while rolling his eyes good-naturedly. “You didn’t tie them tight enough, you could break an ankle in these, babe, and we wouldn’t want that, would we?” You shook your head; he pulled you up to a standing position, leading you over to the gate to get onto the ice. “Don’t feel bad if you’ve got to hang onto the side for a little bit, it doesn’t look like the zamboni’s been over it in awhile so the ice is probably pretty chippy.”

Now it was your turn to roll your eyes. “I’m not completely hopeless, Anthony. I’m no professional,” you half-slipped while taking your first step onto the ice, clinging to the railing, “clearly, but I’m an adult and I can handle myself.” 

He held his hands up in surrender, gliding backwards on the ice before stopping. “I know you can.” The two of you skated for about an hour before taking a break, sipping cups of piping hot apple cider while sitting on a bench off to the side of the rink. “There’s always that one person who feels the need to go in the center and show off, huh?” Tito mused, glancing towards center ice, where a woman was indeed in the middle of a spin so quick and intricate you had no clue how she didn’t throw up from the sheer centrifugal force of it all. 

“Says the professional hockey player,” you quipped. 

“I’d go insane if I tried to do anything like that,” Anthony responded, drinking the last of his cider before dropping the cup into the recycling bin. “Just about the only thing hockey players and figure skaters have in common is our ability to skate in a straight line.”

You laughed, squeezing his arm. “Have a little more faith in yourself than that, Anthony.” 

“Mhm,” he said, noncommittally like he didn’t quite believe you. “You ready to get going, or do you think you’ve got more in you?” 

You looked down at your watch; it was 9:30; the rink didn’t close for another hour and plenty of people were still milling about. “I think I’ve got a little gas left in the tank.” 

Sounds good,” he said, taking your hand and doing an extremely admirable job of not laughing at your attempts to hobble over to the ice on your skates. “One of these days I’m going to get you to go backwards,” he said as he stepped on, gliding back easily before coming to a quick stop. 

“I’ve just stopped having to hold onto your hands like a five-year-old, Beau,” you said, rolling your eyes as you took a moment to find your balance on the slippery ice. In your defense, he had been right about the lack of resurfacing on the ice; the skate attendant said the zamboni only came around once a day, shortly before opening, and the lack of smooth ice couldn’t have done you any favors. But you were determined to prove yourself, to show him and everyone else in Rockefeller Center that you were a fully grown and capable adult who could skate for a few feet without needing assistance. Which you did, for approximately two minutes, trailing ten or fifteen feet behind Anthony as he skated backwards, executing poorly-attempted jumps and spins for no reason other than your amusement. You were doing fine, until the toe pick of your skate caught in a chip in the ice and you tumbled down, down to the ice before Anthony could skate over and catch you,. Down, trying to break your fall with your hands. Pain radiated up your left wrist, the cold of the ice already beginning to melt into your jeans. 

“Oh my God,” Anthony said, kneeling in front of you as several passers-by looked over in concern. “You okay? That looked like a pretty bad fall.” 

You nodded, trying to push yourself up to a standing position, but the second you put pressure on your hand, you let out a sharp shriek. “Fuck,” you said, moving to rub your wrist. Not a good idea; the pain only got worse when you touched it. 

His brow only furrowed more. “If you put your wrist out to break the fall, you could have broken it or something. We should go to the hospital.”

You shook your head. “I’m sure it’s nothing, Tito,” you said as the two of you skated off the ice, your wrist hanging limply by your side as you bent down to try and untie the skate laces. He looked up at your face, seeing you biting your lip with tears pricking at the corner of your eyes as you tried to pull them. 

“Hurts to pull?” You knew it was no use trying to lie to him, so you nodded. He pushed the sleeve of your jacket up as gently as he could after untying your skates, handling your hand and wrist with as little pressure as he could. “Not exactly how I thought I’d be kneeling in front of you,” he said, the corner of his mouth twitching. You knew he had only said it to distract you, try to get your mind off of the inordinate amounts of pain you were in, but the words still made your heart skip a beat. His fingers moved feather-light over your skin, keeping an eye on your facial expressions as he felt. “Hurts to close your hand?” You tried; you nodded. “Hurts to turn your wrist?” A second nod. “Has it gotten worse or better since you fell?”

“Worse,” you managed to squeak out. 

He bit his tongue in concentration. “Shit. Yeah, we should go to the hospital.” You knew it was no use to argue, even as you weakly kept telling him it was probably just a sprain that would heal on its own as he herded you into the car, looking up the waiting times of Manhattan emergency rooms. “The ER wait at Lenox Hill is twenty minutes, it’s like two miles away,” he said, puting the car into reverse and backing out of the parking lot. Of course, two miles in New York City on Christmas Eve really meant fifteen minutes, and by the time he parked at the hospital and you were walking into the ER, it was just past 11. And of course, an ER wait time of “twenty minutes” the day before Christmas meant that, as a relatively low-priority case, you weren’t seen for well over forty. “I feel terrible about this,” Anthony said, slumping back in the chair to the side as you sat on the exam table. 

“Not your fault,” you said emphatically. “Could have happened to anyone. Literally anyone, Tito,” you looked over at him; he still looked guilty. “It could have just as easily been you, if you’d hit the chip at the wrong angle or there was some kind of slippery patch you weren’t expecting. And,” you added as he opened his mouth, “you were too far away to catch me.” Your expression softened. “I know you would have if you could have, but I’m sure it’s not hurt too bad and I don’t want you to keep beating yourself up over it. I’ll be okay.” 

The nurse practitioner chose that moment to poke her head through the curtain, calling your name. You nodded. She flipped open your chart. “I’m Emily, I’ll be taking care of you tonight. It says here you’ve got a wrist injury?” You nodded, explaining what had happened. She pulled a pair of gloves on, fingers moving over your wrist. “With what I’m seeing and how you’re rating your pain, I think we’re probably looking at a bad sprain or a break, but we’ll have to get an X-ray to confirm.” Fifteen minutes later, you were in and out of the radiology suite, and Emily was looking at the images on a tablet. She leaned over the table, pointing to the images on the screen. “Okay, so what you’ve got is called a Colles’ fracture, it’s a break in the radius and they’re actually super common, by far the most common type of wrist break we see. Yours isn’t too bad, so I’d say it can come off in six weeks or so.” She left for a minute to get the casting supplies. Ten minutes later, your entire lower arm was covered in cotton and fiberglass wrap tape. You wiggled your fingers towards your boyfriend. “I think purple’s really my color, don’t you?” you said, nodding towards your cast. 

You saw him crack a smile, his first since the accident. “It’s beautiful, babe.” Fifteen minutes and more than your fair share of paperwork later, you had handed over your insurance information and gotten the okay to leave, with strict instructions to keep the cast dry and call if you had any problems. 

“I think this definitely wins as the most interesting date I’ve ever been on,” you said as the two of you crossed the parking lot. 

“I’ll have you agree with you on that one,” Anthony replied. “I’m glad it wasn’t anything more serious, though. I would have felt even worse.”

You nodded. “You and me both.” Anthony looked down at his watch as he held your good hand, smiling when he saw the time. “What is it?” you asked curiously. 

“Guess there was too much going on in there to keep track of time. It’s 1:37 AM.” 

The painkillers they had given you had kept the pain in your wrist to a dull ache, but all was forgotten as you realized what it meant, what it being past midnight meant, and you couldn’t stop a grin from spreading across your face. “It’s Christmas?” you said, almost like a question. Nothing could extinguish your love for the holiday: not the freezing cold air nipping at your nose or the apple cider that was so hot it burnt your tongue or the fact that you went out for a night with your boyfriend and came back with a broken wrist. You had him, and that was enough. 

Tito laughed, leaning down to press a soft kiss against your lips as he unlocked the car. “Merry Christmas, baby.”

[dannyphantom-justiceleauge]

For pre-league and/or Fenton parents finding out Danny's secret in non-phantom planet crossovers, how do you think the league felt about/handled the Fenton parents? Did the anti-Phantom rhetoric they give influence their decision to let him join? What about potential blowups/instigated public pushback? A lot of Phantom Joins the League fics with the Fentons have him immediately tell his parents when he joins or the league already knows his secret and doing concerned adoptive family routines.

i think they team can parse that danny is a good person and that the fentons being anti-phantom falls into the category of any person who isn’t anti-hero. j-jonah jamson springs to mind event though spiderman is a marvel property. so they’d look at his actions over what people see and definitely see him as a hero.

i think danny’s family knowing his secret before the league makes things a bit more complicated. because i could still see them going down the lets adopt this kid path, if they realize phantom is fenton and recognize that danny wasn’t safe with his family. danny would argue that he’s safe now that they know, but speaking as an abuse victim, not knowing isn’t an excuse to hurt someone. and the fentons are frequently criminally neglectful and sometimes physically abusive. loving your son does not excuse putting him in a centrifuge and spinning him until he’s sick.

like i love the fentons and one of the things i love most about dp is how complicated their relationship with danny is. because i grew up with neglectful parents and recognize how their actions hurt me even though i know they weren’t actively trying to hurt me. it makes separating from them and seeing their actions objectively that much harder, because you love them and know they love you. but that doesn’t make their actions okay.

so this would put the justice league, heroes who can recognize the problems in danny and his parents relationship, in the position of separating a loving family. because lets be real, the fentons knowing what danny is probably wouldn’t stop the neglect or abuse. they were doing bad shit before he became phantom. they might stop shooting at him or saying bad things about phantom. they probably wouldn’t dissect him or do life threatening experiments on him. they’ll probably even feel guilty for their role in him dying. we’ve seen in the past that guilt or discouragement has on occasion led to them quititng their work. i could see them considering stopping if danny hadn’t argued for them to continue, because of how useful and great their inventions have been over the years. i could see things getting a lot better for danny.

but not completely

hell i bet jazz ends up half ignored after this because they’re so focused on their amazing, heroic, scientifically fascinating ghost son, and she’s nearly an adult anyway. again none of the neglect would be intentional but it would still be damaging

so the league would have to deal with this. they can’t leave it alone because they’re heroes and danny is a traumatized child. they’d be doing everything they can to provide a safe place for danny and to legally and safely remove danny and jazz from their custody. but at the same time, every step of the way danny will be digging his heels in and fighting them about his removal. he doesn’t see what they’ve done to him as abuse. he sees how much better they’ve been since they found out. and he loves his family. there’s no way he’s going to let the league ruin things now that things are finally good between them.

the sad thing is that both jazz and vlad have been saying the same thing about his parents for years at this point, in very different tones. jazz, having studied psychology, was aware of their abusive behavior, once again, before they knew danny was phantom. and she’s been doing everything she can to help take care of danny’s mental health and separate his opinion of himself from theirs.she protective and sympathetic, but still relatively straight forward with why what their parents have done was bad.

vlad on the other hand has been using their abusive behavior and danny’s doubts about them to manipulate him. when they didn’t know, vlad literally pushed them to be more abusive. he’d push and proud danny’s buttons when it came to his parents. always with the motive of making danny his. ‘if your life with your parents is so bad, come live with me’. ‘they’ll never accept you’ blah blah blah. a lot of gaslighting and emotionally manipulative shit. danny is so anti-vlad at this point that he refuses to listen to anything he has to say, especially about his parents. it full denial mode, even if the reason what vlad says has power over him is that they’re grounded in truth.

so enter the justice league, and let’s be real, it’s a trope but we all know batman is leading the charge, and Danny finally has a good relationship with his parents. things are finally better and he can feel safe in his own home again. vlad’s been proven wrong and his parents did accept him. and then... this new billionaire with too many kids, shows up and is telling him that his parents are abusive and that it would be better if he came and lived with him, or one of the league. or with the young justice team.

Danny wouldn’t take it well.

- Hestia

[libermachinae]

Fault Lines Under the Living Room

Part II: Breathe - Chapter 5:  Thoughts Expand in Blooms

Also available on AO3! Summary: The consequences of Ratchet and Rodimus' chase become known. Chapter Word Count: 2644

---

“Try again.”

“Yes, sir. Rodimus, come in Rodimus. This is Blaster, coming to you live from the Lost Light command deck. Do you read me? Status and further instruction requested. Over.”

Years of handling the Wreckers’ fluctuating schedules meant it was no effort for Ultra Magnus to resist rubbing his optics as he watched the progress of their three recovery speeders. Siren, Crossblades, and Waverider had launched with minimal deviations from standard procedure (Crossblades would receive a write-up for nonessential helical rotation) and tracked Arcee’s shuttle up to acceptable pursuit range. That was where the chase had stalled, as Rodimus had provided no further instructions and protocol required command from a captain before they could proceed. Either captain.

Protocol fell apart when one refused to leave his hab and the other had stopped answering his comms. Magnus started mentally writing up a proposal for temporary transfer of pursuit command responsibilities while they waited.

The control panel refreshed as the latest information poured in. The speeders were entering upper atmosphere, rotating in pyramid formation in the shuttle’s trail. Acceleration had decreased to the minimum required to maintain orbit and altitude held steady as they sailed through Scarvix’s exosphere.

“Ultra Magnus, I have a visual on Rodimus’ ship,” Bluestreak reported.

“Pull it up.”

The datafeeds compressed to the right of the screen, replaced with the compound live feed from the speeders, displaying the shuttle’s stern, the glow of its thrusters closer to a lightbulb than anything spaceworthy. The engines were keeping it aloft, but there was an unnatural stillness about it, like debris floating through space.

“Again.”

Blaster adjusted settings on the ship’s communications hub and leaned into the mic.

“Rodimus, come in Rodimus. This—”

There was a crackle and buzz as the ship’s receiver finally picked up a signal.

“This is Rodi—ack, Ratchet, this is Ratchet. We read you.”

Blaster’s shoulders relaxed as he transferred primary input to the third in command’s station, but Magnus did not match his relief. Underneath the fritz of the shuttle’s poorly maintained equipment, Ratchet’s voice was shaking.

“Ratchet, this is Ultra Magnus. Report.”

“Report. Report… um, Arcee’s gone. We lost her. Satellite. Crash. Is Cyclonus there?”

“No. What is your—”

“Get him,” Ratchet interrupted.

“Where is Rodimus?” Magnus asked. Ratchet was supposed to be one of the good ones, recognizing his place within the chain of commands. Making demands was out of character for him.

“Here! I’m here,” Rodimus’ voice crackled down the line. “Present. Available. Get Cyclonus.”

Magnus sent the ping and tagged it urgent. Cyclonus had never been known for tardiness, but that put it on the record.

“What is your status?” he asked as he acknowledged Cyclonus’ response.

“Good! Weird? Ratchet is banged up, which is bad. He suffered impact shock in his lower spinal strut, chance there’s a disk… how do I…”

Magnus’ orbital ridge twitched, a coding bug when expression protocols tried to assign a profile to stress of unknown origin. He wiped the cache, regaining his neutral set, and sent a command to have the speeders approach the shuttle. Visual on the command deck would be helpful, but flight integrity was his main concern. If neither Rodimus nor Ratchet was in the right mind to pilot, they would need to engage in emergency grounding maneuvers.

“Ratchet, are you still there? Rodimus sounds incoherent; what is his status?”

“He’s fine.” His voice was briefly drowned out by shuffling and crashing on the other end. “—cessor’s functioning normally. It’s loud, but it’s working.”

“He’s overheating?” Magnus asked.

“Not his fans, his thoughts.”

“Is his comm link malfunctioning?”

“He’s bright like the goddamn sun. I can barely get two words in. Will you shut that off? ”

“Ratchet?” Speeders were closing in.

“Not you.”

“Stop yelling at me!” Rodimus snapped, volume raising and lowering like he was pacing around the microphone. “I heard you the first time.”

“I don’t see how. I can barely hear myself.”

“Aw, poor Rodimus, doesn’t get to hear his own voice.”

“ You’re Rodimus, that’s my line.”

“Rodimus, Ratchet, Waverider is en route to board,” Ultra Magnus interjected. “If you are able, please lower the hatch for arrival, otherwise he will engage emergency stove—”

“No, don’t!”

It wasn’t just that they shouted at the same time, but that Rodimus and Ratchet’s voices matched in pitch, tone, and cadence which caused Magnus, for the third time in his life, to forget what he had been saying.

“Is Cyclonus there?” Rodimus asked.

“There’s something on board,” Ratchet said. “Don’t know what it is, but you can’t let anyone else get near it.”

“It did a weird thing. I’m Rodimus, but also I’m Ratchet? And both?”

“Those sound like the same things, Rodimus,” Magnus said, half distracted as he instructed Waverider to return to position.

“They’re not,” Ratchet said.

“Sir?” Cyclonus’ voice came as a blessing. Magnus gestured him forward.

“Cyclonus just arrived,” he announced. “Cyclonus, Rodimus and Ratchet uncovered something on Arcee’s shuttle. It’s…” He blanked.

“I can feel Ratchet’s processor,” Rodimus said, rushing like it would make any of this comprehensible. “He’s thinking and it’s all really fast and hard, but it’s not rough like you would expect? Like, the feeling of grit in your gears, I thought it would be like that, but it’s more like there’s just a lot of gears and it takes a lot of power to turn them all, and it’s too hard to decide whether to focus on just one or the entire thing. And he keeps thinking about me and my thoughts and how they’re not like that, and I’m thinking about him, and then I get stuck because all the thoughts start to sound the same and I don’t know which ones came from me or which are Ratchet or even which me is me. It’s all a big thought reservoir, a—a thought battle, an entire brain war and I don’t know which side I’m on!”

Cyclonus’ gaze was steady at the screen. Once it was clear that Rodimus was done, he leaned over the microphone.

“Can you send an image of the object?” he asked.

“Sure,” Ratchet said.

Blaster raised his hand.

“Image received.”

Ultra Magnus nodded and the feed of the shuttle was replaced with a still capture, a calamity of wires and light that took his visual center a full millisecond to parse.

“It’s the Enigma of Combination,” Cyclonus said.

“What’s that?” He could differentiate the orbital plating of the object itself and the red dwarf dew drop at its center, but the light it cast on its surroundings made his spark flicker with a disturbing fuzz.

“A plague,” Cyclonus said. “Considered a long-lost relic even in my own time. I would doubt this was the legitimate article, if Rodimus hadn’t so perfectly summarized its less infamous effects.”

“It can do more?” Magnus asked. What it had already done— whatever it had done, he still was not clear on the details—seemed itself too much for a bot to handle. Or two.

Cyclonus hesitated.

“Well, you see…”

“No. No, no, so much no, you’re kidding. Ratchet, tell me they’re kidding!”

“I don’t bloody well know!” he snapped back. He had sunk back into the pilot’s chair while Rodimus paced the bridge. His spark was spinning like a centrifuge, its engine overfed by the deluge of panicked thoughts tumbling through his mind. It was all Cyclonus and shuttle and Arcee and combination and Drift, new threads knocking each other out of the way so nothing could reach a conclusion, just endless half-thoughts pinged repeatedly. Worst was when Rodimus tripped over the junk now scattered across the bridge as it brought everything to a shuddering halt, like a whole expressway’s worth of engines seized up simultaneously.

He pressed his hands to his face and tried to focus on keeping his vents open, ignoring the storm of queries of Is Ratchet overheating? and Drift is going to kill me.

“I can’t be in a combiner with Ratchet!”

He hates me he hates me he hates me rattled around their processors like screws in a box.

“The Enigma has determined otherwise,” Cyclonus said.

So now the damn thing was having its own thoughts?

“It’s thinking ?” Rodimus asked, earning an additional glare from Ratchet.

“No one knows,” Cyclonus said. “It’s ancient technology, built on the same principles that govern sparks.” Principles that even modern science knew so little about. Ratchet was going to say it but froze when he felt Rodimus grab for it, tossing at it a hundred questions he had no answers to: Is that thing a person and Where do sparks come from and Would this stop if we broke it followed by another run of apologies.

“The Enigma has you in a holding pattern,” Cyclonus went on. “There aren’t enough of you to form the combiner, so it’s keeping your sparks connected until it can interface with at least one more Cybertronian.”

Ratchet saw the image that formed in Rodimus’ mind and his glower deepened.

“I don’t have the knowledge or the skills to disconnect something like that,” he said. “Sparks are complicated, Rodimus, and there’s still so much we don’t know about them. I didn’t even think it was possible to maintain a connection of this magnitude without direct contact.” Rodimus’ next idea was even worse. “Have you met your crew? The moment you put it in a box and tell no one to look, Brainstorm, Skids, and Whirl are all going to make breaking into it their personal quest.”

“Isolating the Enigma will not contain its effects,” Cyclonus added. “Because the holding pattern is an open channel, you have become conduits for the Enigma’s energies. If even one of you encounters another compatible component, it will complete the process, regardless of its distance from you.”

Rodimus stilled, then sunk to the floor, his thoughts miserably coalescing into a single thread.

“So, either we drag someone else into this mess, or we’re stuck in this shuttle, trying to think over each other forever?” Forever was steeped in darker emotions that caught Ratchet off-guard, which Rodimus immediately covered up with nonsense branches of observations about the junk on the floor. A negativity storm, Drift would have called it.

From behind, he heard Rodimus chuckle, though his thoughts betrayed little amusement.

“If I may,” Cyclonus said, interrupting no one. “Ratchet, I do respect you as a physician, but modern medicine is not the only source of knowledge concerning the Cybertronian body. Even modern theology, shallow thought it may be, offers insights to the nature of sparks that your specialty lacks.”

“No.” Ratchet scowled and shook his head, though more so at the way he felt Rodimus stirring that observation than the idea itself. “None of the woo-woo nonsense. Drift’s mindfulness agility course was bad enough.”

Unfortunately, his words made Rodimus’s thoughts expand in blooms, accompanied by shuffling as he stood to lean over the pilot’s chair.

“Drift was always trying to get me into his meditation thing,” he said. “He—he talked about the Rossum connection, how the mind impacts the spark and vice-versa. It was mostly, you know, power poses and cool sword moves, but there was more advanced stuff we didn’t get around to.”

“It could be a lead,” Cyclonus said, his grave voice somehow failing to make a dent in Rodimus’ growing enthusiasm. “I know very little about Spectralism, but if it involves manipulation of spark energies, there is a chance it could be used to counteract the effects of the Enigma.”

“Yeah, remember how Drift can see auras?” Rodimus said. “Maybe he can see where we’re tangled and just undo the knot.”

“There is no scientific backing to that kind of pandering—”

But we don’t have any other ideas.

Rodimus drew him up short, his own dearth of creativity reflected back to him as though in a mirror. Loathe though he was to admit it, Rodimus was right: they had nothing else. No leads, no one to fall back on. Cybertron’s history, the ancient mythologies that might have shed light on this technology, was lost to war and time, and all that was left was the third, fourth-hand accounts of people who claimed to know what was lost.

There was a chance Drift would have nothing to offer them, but even the possibility of guidance was an improvement over the helplessness Ratchet felt when he tried to imagine them fixing this on their own.

He received an image burst: Drift, wild and beautifully unhinged, leaping for the chance to care for Ratchet with literally open arms. Rodimus shut it down, distracting himself by counting rivets in the bridge ceiling, but vibrating embarrassment persisted between them.

“Would it be appropriate to call Drift for this?” Ultra Magnus asked, pulling the further from their internal squirming. “The truth about his role in the Overlord plan came out months ago, and since we’ve made no effort to contact him. To approach him now so he can solve this seems exploitative.”

Ratchet caught only the yellow of Rodimus’ hand before the captain vaulted over the back of the pilots’ chair, landing with a solid bang.

“I’ll take the blame,” he said.

“For what?” Ratchet asked, though he could already see it.

“For not fixing this sooner,” Rodimus said. He shrugged, a movement so automatic Ratchet did not pick up who it had been directed to. “I’m the captain. It was my responsibility and I failed. That shouldn’t doom Ratchet to having to live with my mistakes.”

He avoided Ratchet’s optics as he spoke, but Ratchet still caught his expression, the shiver of his spoiler as he spoke. It struck him that the reason Rodimus was so hard to read from an external perspective was because a single look meant so many things: frustration, guilt, grief, and hope piling on top of each other too quickly to discern where any one emotion rooted. His thoughts were going in so many directions all the time, of course it would be a challenge for everyone else to keep up.

“How do you intend to locate Drift?” Ultra Magnus asked, ever pragmatic.

“I have a tracker,” Ratchet said.

“I memorized the specifications for his shuttle,” Rodimus added, his processor spitting out the codes in full.

“And will that ship be adequate? Do you need additional supplies?”

Ratchet turned in the seat, looking around the scattered contents of the bridge, to say nothing of what their collision might have done to the storage down below. Despite the mess, he saw what looked like intact crates of potable energon, and the shuttle’s own systems were not in imminent danger of running dry.

“We’re stocked,” he said, and catching Rodimus’ primary concern, went on, “Unless Cyclonus know how far the Enigma’s effect extends, it’s going to be too risky to dock back in the Lost Light. We’ll make due with what’s here.”

“I’ll have Rewind compile you a list of known energon distributors with minority Cybertronian populations. That will be your best opportunity to refuel without risking exposure, should the need arise.”

Could the Enigma grab non-Cybertronian mechanicals? Rodimus wondered, a query Ratchet did not have the energy to entertain.

“Thanks, Mags,” Rodimus said out loud. “Take care of the place while we’re gone; you know the drill.”

“Of course, Rodimus. Uh, stay safe?”

Rodimus laughed, a sound that Ratchet felt as a golden thread, spun in a ripple through space before vanishing to nothing. He squinted, trying to make sense of what the hell that had been, but Rodimus’ burst of enthusiasm and plans for the coming journey overwhelmed him.

“Don’t worry, Ratchet’s pride will make sure I get back in one piece.”

You—!

It was going to be a long journey to the outer rim. Though Rodimus was grinning cheekily, the tense coil at the center of his thoughts agreed.

[nautiscarader]

Phinbella 8

( (Ao3) (Next>>)

Isabella wasn’t sure if what was happening to her was real, or was it just an effect of blood slowly draining from her brain, making her light-headed and drift into her fantasy. But as the world around her kept spinning, she decided to not overthink it and embraced it, clutching Phineas’ body even tighter, much to his simultaneous confusion and enjoyment.

Just a few hours ago, she was helping her boyfriend build something truly monumental for their annual end of the Summer celebration, which this year took a form of a giant ferris wheel, swinging each cabin in more than one direction, essentially giving everyone a chance to experience how it must feel to be a candidate for a pilot or an astronaut, by putting them in a massive centrifuge.

She hopped in with Phineas, put the seatbelts on, and a moment later she was spinning around, as the enormous device began rotating its long arms, and the backyard was filled with screams of twenty other students also enjoying the test ride. Despite the humongous force and velocity achieved by the capsules, Isabella didn’t feel nauseous at all, despite the fact that the horizon very rarely was seen as a horizontal construct through the windows of their cabin. Her heart was racing, and as if the thrill of the attraction wasn’t enough, she felt Phineas’ hand on hers, his fingers intertwining with hers. She looked at him and leaned in for a kiss.

But no sooner than their lips brushed, something has happened that made the entire machine jump in place with a loud, ominous rumble. Phineas’ opened his eyes wide, and after a few seconds of nervous looking around, he came to a terrifying conclusion.

- Uh, change of plans, we’re going for a flight! - he spoke to the microphone.

From an outsider’s point of view, it must have been an imposing sight, to see the swirling mess of metal rising up into the air, like a huge gyroscope operating just with its momentum, and then moving in the air currents, with no sight of slowing down. For the passengers, however, it took them a moment to realise they have detached from the mast and they were now sailing through the air, left on the weather’s mercy.

- Phineas! - Isabella cried, leaping from her seat - Can’t-Can’t we do anything? - I… I don’t think so. - he looked around. - We need to lose the speed, but then we’re gonna start falling down.

He pulled the lever in front of him, and before it reached its apex, he gave her final warning.

- Hold on, this might not be as comfortable as I thought.

But instead of the satisfying “click” of her belt, Isabella leapt into his arms, clutching him tightly, with her arms wrapped around his neck.

- I-Isabella! - Ssh - she put his mind at ease - This is the safest place for me…

She cupped his face and pressed her lips to his, letting him feel the vibrations of the capsule through her body, immersing him with the pleasure he didn’t expect to feel today. And then, Isabella closed the safety belt behind her back, locking the two together.

- Gotta stay extra safe.

She giggled and let Phineas push the lever, as her kiss deepened. She felt the sudden shaking and quaking around her, and with each, she dug deeper into him, pressing her body against his, locking the two in the most intimate of embraces. Once he had no control of the device, Phineas’ hand found its way to her back, adding another level of security.

But his hands roaming over her back paled in comparison to what she felt between her legs. As the force has pushed her petite frame into the seat, and, consequently, into Phineas, it became impossible not to notice that even in this dire situation he was still a man.

And from the feel of it, she was a very lucky woman.

Isabella’s eyes opened and she met Phineas’, equally wide and filled with the mixture of guilt and excitation he couldn’t quite contain. Isabella had only one cure for that, and it was more kisses. But this time, they were hungrier and more ravenous than before. She wished she could close her legs around his torso, and instead, she did that to the chair he was in, still getting enough stimulation she was seeking.

Phineas finally responded with a few more riskier moves of his hands and fingers that now danced around her waist and bum, a territory he hasn’t been permitted to so far, and yet, he heard no objections from Isabella about his intrusions. Her hair flowed up and down, back and forth, as the machine kept rotating, soaring down into the ground, and with each second of their downfall, Isabella placed more and more bets loving her boyfriend, knowing she might very well have no other chances to do so.

She moved up and down against him, moaning into his mouth, though their intimate kiss broke off soon as Phineas was forced to groan as well, joining his girlfriend in the carnal music they were creating. Though their bodies were pushed towards each other with the centrifugal force, physics couldn’t rival Isabella’s passion that drove her into him. Unabashedly, disregarding all norms, she was thrusting her body, feeling his length through his jeans, and hoping he can experience as much stimuli as she was. His reddened face told her he definitely felt her breasts being pressed against his chest and when he broke their kiss off again, just to leave a mark on her cleavage, Isabella cried his name, pushing his face deep into her bosom.

They were still falling, and with that, Isabella felt she was flying, high into the air, wrapped around her boyfriend, and as she was about to pass out, she let it go, and allowed the flame building in her loins to consume her. Her back arched, she trashed against Phineas so hard, the safety belt unclipped, and as they flew up, she was finally able to close her legs behind him, just as she felt his hips began jerking uncontrollably, and he started babbling her name.

Their lips pressed against each other, in the longest, happiest and dirtiest kiss they have ever exchanged, as the pleasure radiated not just through their individual bodies, but seemed to overlap and spread through each other’s, mixing and strengthening, as the two writhed against each other.

Isabella closed her eyes, waiting for the sweet release of… something, when she heard croaky voice of Phineas, speaking, or rather wheezing into the microphone again.

- Pre…preparing for landing… We… we hope you enjoyed our little controlled tu…turbulence….

He pushed a button and braced Isabella, as their joined bodies slowly fell to the roof and then to the floor, their limbs still tangled in a messy knot. It took Isabella a while to understand that they were not dead, and that they have not been plummeting to their death the whole time. The machine was slowly stopping, and soon, the metallic arms folded down, and twenty capsules were gently laid onto the ground, still in the backyard of Phineas’ house.

- Did… did you like it? - Phineas asked, his face still torn with a mixture of bewilderment and shock, though his lips were starting to curl into a smile. - Yes. - Isabella spoke - I definitely liked it. - But do you-do you mean… - Yes.

And she kissed him again, pulling him into a heated, passionate kiss, now feeling more than ever the familiar stickiness that so far she only associated with private intimate moments of her bedroom, decorated with pictures of Phineas. Their serene moment was suddenly interrupted by a an angry shriek from outside.

- PHINEAS! Were is he-Oh for crying out loud, get a room, you two! - Candace, they are eighteen… - Stacey spoke, wobbling behind her impatient friend - And well, it’s not like they couldn’t have done that earlier… - I THOUGHT I WAS GONNA DIE! - Candace screamed - I wrote half of my last will with emojis! - she shoved her phone up her brother’s face. - Easy, easy Candace. Let the two breathe…

Stacey smiled at the two and let her frustrated friend out. Phineas blinked, as only now realised that for the last minute or so he was lying on top of Isabella, and he jumped back, breathing nervously. Isabella sat up and gave him another soothing kiss, brushing his dishevelled hair, and the two stared deep into their eyes, watching as their face redden while the memories of the past few minutes flood them in a silent moment of intimacy. This one, however, was also interrupted by Candace’s loud voice, echoing from other side of the yard.  

- Where is Ferb? I gotta bust one of yo-OH GOD, VANESSA, PUT SOME CLOTHES ON! HOW DID YOU EVEN MANAGE TO DO THAT IN THERE?! AND WHY DIDN’T I BRING JEREMY?

[thorne93]

Stan Lee University

Prompt: What would the Avengers be like in college, more importantly, what would they be like if Y/N existed around them?

Word Count: 2559

Warnings: drama, language, betrayal 

Notes: This is based on a HC from @carryonmyswansong. They helped brainstorm and write part of this series. In this AU, no one will have powers, everyone is a normal human. Beta’d by @carryonmyswansong

~~~~~~~~~~~

It’s Monday.

It’s busy.

It’s hectic.

It’s nerve wracking.

It’s college.

Your junior year to be exact, the beginning of fall semester. You shouldn’t be daunted by this though, you were only nineteen, whereas most of your peers were twenty-one. Thanks to your desire to learn, and some strings pulled at your small-town high school, you’d had advanced through the grades, and when the seniors graduated at eighteen, so did you at sixteen.

From there, you joined them at college. A lot of people have to deal with saying goodbye to their friends in high school. Friends that most of the time were people they literally grew up with. But in your case, in your small city, pretty much everyone you ran around with in high school came to the same college.

It was a quaint, small college with roughly twelve-hundred enrolled students on a rather green campus, and sixteen of your friends had come over to join you.

Now, all you had to do was get to your morning class -- Physics 3000.

You skated into the classroom and located Tony and Bruce quickly, already sitting on one side of the four-chaired black top lab tables.

“Hey, hey!” Tony greeted happily. He stood up to give you a quick hug before you slid into your seat, five minutes to spare before class.

“Hey, thought I’d never make it here. Four freshman needed help, decided to pick me to be their tour guide,” you explained.

“You could’ve said no,” Bruce retorted.

“Yeah, I’m not sure I know that word,” you teased with a half smile.

Tony and Bruce were very good friends of yours. The three of you shared a strong love of science, known each other since freshman year of high school… well, your freshman year. Tony was double majoring in engineering and computer science. Bruce decided to double major in chemistry and biology, while minoring in engineering.

Meanwhile, you were a psychology major - pre med. Everyone called you crazy for wanting to do pre-med, and especially for putting time into a major like psychology. Nearly everyone said it would just be easier to major in chemistry, and minor in psychology, since you had to have so many chem courses for pre-med. But you didn’t want that. Psychology was your life, it was your driving force. Nothing got you more excited than the idea of finding out what makes people tick.

Just then, a student sat down beside you. You’d never seen him before, and on this campus, with this population size, that was nearly impossible. He began pulling out his notebooks while you and The Science Bros (the nickname nearly everyone had given Tony and Bruce long ago) stared at him. The three of you shared a quick look before the new student glanced up at you all.

“Uh, hi,” he greeted with confusion, his eyes touching on all of you. “I’m sorry, do I have something on my face or…?”

“Sorry,” you began, blinking quickly. “We’ve just never seen you before,” you remarked, taking in his appearance. He had dark, short hair. He was tall. Blue eyes that seem to cut anything they looked at. His presence alone was intimidating, even before he opened his mouth.

“That’s probably because I just transferred over. Went to Bransford University before this,” he explained matter-of-factly. Bransford was a huge college about two hours east of your university.

“Oh, why the switch?” you inquired, leaning a little more towards him, your body involuntarily shivering at his voice, and his piercing eyes.

“Wanted a smaller school,” he answered. “Got tired of the faculty treating us like cattle at BU.” He scoffed slightly and rolled his eyes. “Anyway, I’m Stephen.” He held out his hand and you took it, giving your name. After that, the others introduced themselves.

“Nice to meet you,” you said.

“Yeah, you too.”

“Good morning, everyone,” the professor said, standing up in front of the class. “Say hello to everyone at your table. They will be your new lecture and lab partners for the rest of the semester.”

Stephen looked back to you briefly, his expression unreadable until he put his eyes back on the professor. He tried to hide it, but you saw a small smirk on his face and you were curious if he had felt a spark like you did.

---------------------------

As soon as lecture let out, Stephen went on his own way while you and the science bros began making your way to your next class. Tony had some robotics engineering class, while Bruce had biochem coming up. As for you, it was off to Ethics in Mental Health.

The three of you diverged around the middle of campus, where Tony had to go to the business building, Bruce to the science, and you to the social science building. It was there, that your best friend had started walking across the courtyard and you nearly exploded from excitement.

“Clint!” you called, waving at him to get his attention before running full force at him. You slammed into him, wrapping your entire body around him. Your legs went around his waist, your arms around his neck, while he wrapped you in a tight embrace, spinning you around before sitting you down.

“Hey! How was your first class? I’m headed to mine now,” he informed.

“Interesting. We’re going to go into centrifugal force first, and I’m really excited because--”

Clint held up his hand. “Too many big words for this early in the morning,” he remarked.

You laughed at him. “It’s like… ten-thirty in the morning, Clint,” you teased, nudging his elbow.

“I’m not changing what I said,” he confidently responded. “Where are you off to?”

“Ethics in mental health.”

He nodded. “Yeah, you really need that class. Bad.”

You punched him playfully. “Hey, fuck off, Barton.”

“See! You just hit me. That needs anger management. When you’re a psychiatrist you can’t just go off the handle like that, Y/N. You need to reel it in,” he said, laying into you, teasing you.

“Oh, don’t worry, if anyone gives me a hard time, I’ll just lobotomize them.”

“You’re a scary person.”

“It’s always the most unassuming,” you said with a shrug before bidding him a goodbye and skipping off to class where you ran into Wanda. She was another psych major, but she wasn’t pre-med. She planned on getting her Masters in counseling. She wasn’t sure if she was going for children, marriage, school, or general. She was still on the fence and constantly grilled you about how you just knew you wanted to be a psychiatrist, when she was always so uncertain.

“Hey,” you greeted with a smile as you plopped beside her in the medium sized lecture hall.

“Hey. You ready for this?”

“Of course,” you said confidently. You pulled out your folder. “Already printed the syllabus, the schedule, and the first homework assignments. I do have some questions about it though…”

“Oh my god,” she groaned. “You’re the biggest nerd on campus, you realize this, right? Why are you like this? Why can’t you just let the professor hand you this crap? They all do it every time.”

“They don’t always do it,” you corrected. “I’ve had several not do it, and then I’m stuck without a plan. And you know how much I hate being without a plan.”

“Don’t we all?” she muttered, but it was so low you missed it.

--------------------

After your psych class you had a sociology class, where you met up with Scott and Sam. Scott was a total goofball, but you loved him. He was constantly cracking jokes, and while he seemed like an idiot and not serious about his work, he rivaled Tony and Bruce in his intelligence and skill. His area of expertise and interest lied in microbiology. Whenever you, or anyone else asked about it, he always said he loved small things. He just thought things on a microscopic level had the capability to kill, and he found it fascinating. It sort of creeped everyone out, but hey, he was a good guy so who cared?

Sam, on the other hand, was in aerodynamics. He majored in the aerospace program, with a minor in robotics. Sam was the chillest dude around, and you adored him. He was a wise cracker, but just like Scott, he wasn’t one to be underestimated.

“Hey boys!” you said happily as you sat with them in a small room.

“How are you so cheery?” Sam asked, not moving anything except an eyebrow and his eyes to glance at you. “It’s almost the end of the day and after all my classes I’m already ready to leave.”

“Because I’m doing what I love?” you asked as if it were obvious. “Come on, you aren’t thrilled knowing we’re about to embark on some sociology?”

“Aren’t you a psychology student? Why do you care about this?” Scott asked, gesturing to the front of the class before crossing his arms again.

You shrugged. “I can still appreciate a sociologists point of view. Without knowing how society affects my future patients, I can’t properly treat them.”

“Does every class get you excited or is it just the boring ones?” Scott wondered.

You laughed. “I love all knowledge, Scott,” you reminded sweetly.

“Oh yeah, I forgot she’s Einstein-incarnate,” Sam said, thrusting a thumb at you and rolling his eyes.

You giggled and blushed before the class started.

---------------------

And thus ended your first day of classes. It was a lot to keep track of, but you would spend all night in your dorm alone creating a nice color coded schedule and reading over the syllabus for each class twice. Towards the end of the night, you thought you’d head out to grab a coffee and a late night meal when you ran into another friendly face.

He came out of his room just as you were locking your room behind you.

“Oh, hey, Steve. I didn’t know you were across from me this year,” you said, glancing over your shoulder at the tall muscular blonde.

Steve was a really great guy. He was the football captain back in high school, but he wasn’t the typical stereotype. He was actually like the perfect, all-american kid. He kept up his grades, he was really sweet to everyone. He never acted better than anyone else, and he was a great leader. He got a full ride football scholarship at college and he was a great student here as well. Lots of people thought he would go into sport science, but he actually chose business. He claimed that his body would deteriorate one day, especially if he went pro; but with business, he had a real career to fall back on, one he could retire with, and one that wouldn’t cause physical damage down the line.

Steve and you weren’t close, well, not exactly. You dated his best friend… a lot… on and off… since freshman year of high school.

Freshman year you met Bucky, who was just a sweetheart. He was a bit of a flirt, but he was a nerd like you, but hid it, for fear of being made fun of. So he put on this air of being a total player. He had a prosthetic left arm, something he got from a bad accident when he was a kid. Steve was there, saw the whole thing, seeing as they were neighbors. They grew up together, like brothers. Neighbors until they moved out and came to college, but here they had different housing.

The prosthetic arm had left Bucky a little insecure which is why he always tried a little harder at everything he did. He felt he had to prove himself constantly.

As for you, you had no problem with his arm. You honestly never noticed it. Hell your best friend was technically deaf. Without his hearing aids, he couldn’t hear jackshit. You’d picked up a good bit of sign language to make it easier for Clint.

But you and Bucky… god… it was complicated. You dated throughout most of freshman year, broke up in the summer, got back together in the winter of sophomore year, then broke up again before the end of the sophomore year… The cycle went on like that for several years. Each time you dated got shorter and shorter, and it seemed you had more dates in between your time with Bucky.

The first time you broke up, you didn’t see anyone at all. You got back together with Bucky, and that was that. But then you broke up a second time, and then you started dating another kid in your class. That didn’t last long, he was just more of someone to hang out and study with.

You lost your virginity to Bucky junior year of high school, and he to you. You would’ve thought that would’ve helped things, maybe make you closer. And it did, for a while. But eventually, you broke up again.

Throughout college, it was basically a friends-with-exclusive benefits when you two got together. There was no real relationship. It was pretty much physical except for the occasional movie or dinner date, but the romantic connection seemed to die a long time ago for you.

The two of you had broken up yet again earlier this year, early June. You started dating in the end of April, but by the beginning of June you were restless. You wanted a real relationship, not just random, casual sex with meaningless hangout sessions.

Bucky was still a really good guy, and you two were still friends. The breakups never affected that and most of the time it was as simple as a text stating, “I’m ready to take a break.” Sometimes he initiated them, sometimes you did. Most of the time it was either life was too busy for the whole FWB thing, or one of you was interested in someone else.

But, it was because of your odd relationship with Bucky that you weren’t exactly close with Steve. Steve thought it was weird that you two couldn’t just decide to be together or not. He didn’t want to get close to you in case one of these times the breakup wasn’t so amicable. He didn’t want to feel like he was caught between you two or something, so he just stayed close to Bucky and polite to you.

“Oh, yeah, moved in about a week ago,” he informed. “I don’t think I was here when you moved in so…” he explained with a casual shrug.

“Oh, gotcha. Okay, cool. Well it’ll be nice to have you across the hall!” you exclaimed. “Did you have a good first day?”

“Uh, as good as it can be. A little stressful, but I’m sure nothing like what you’re dealing with,” he offered.

“Oh, that’s no big deal,” you waved off. “Just classes. I’ve done tons of them before, they won’t be any different now.”

“That’s true. Well, hey, I’m off to go meet someone. I’ll see you around, okay?” he kindly said and you nodded, waving a goodbye to him. He went right down the hallway while you went left.

All in all, you had a rather happy good first day. Now it was time to celebrate with some food and time to think about the handsome lab partner you’d met earlier today.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Forever Tag List

@essie1876

@magpiegirl80

@letsgetfuckingsuperwholocked

@iamwarrenspeace

@marvel-imagines-yes-please

@superwholocked527

@missinstantgratification

@thejemersoninferno

@rda1989

@munlis

@thefridgeismybestie

@bubblyanarocks3

@igiveupicantthinkofausername

@kaliforniacoastalteens

@feelmyroarrrr

@kaeling

@friendlyneighbourhoodweirdo

@damalseer

@heyitscam99

@yknott81

@sorryimacrapwriter

@glitterquadricorn

@xxqueenofisolationxx

@little-dis-kaalista-pythonissama

@bittersweetunicorm

@alyssaj23

@sea040561

@princess76179

@thisismysecrethappyplace

@sarahp879

@malfoysqueen14

@ellallheart

@breezy1415

@marvelmayo

Steve Rogers

@nedthegay

@camigt1999

@lostinspace33

@alwayshave-faith

@elleatrixlestrange

@ultrarebelheart

@lenawiinchester

@esoltis280

@patzammit

Bucky Barnes

@nedthegay

@lostinspace33

@alwayshave-faith

@elleatrixlestrange

@ultrarebelheart

@lenawiinchester

@its-not-a-tulpa

@esoltis280

@thirstresponsibly

@valecitainwonderland

@buckybarnesappreciationsociety

@howling-at-that-moon @sneakygitsune @whiw0lf

Loki Odinson

@lostinspace33

@ultrarebelheart

@lenawiinchester

@esoltis280

@tngrayson

@wangdeasang

@harrymewmew

@jayfantasyatyourservice

[mymelonerboner]

It’s Pink Season! - Chapter 2 - A JoJo OC Fanfic

(i should preface this by giving this fic some context – this fic took four OCs of four different people (one of them is me!) from a JoJo discord server that i hold especially dear to my heart. i set myself the challenge of taking these characters from wildly different imaginations and trying to piece together a cohesive story where they all interact with each other. to the owners of these OCs, i hope i’ll do them justice. this fic is estimated to last 4/5 chapters, and depending on my free time, maybe i’ll do something like this again with more OCs from other people, who knows :) anyways hope you guys enjoy what i’ve got so far!)

Rémi - belongs to Quality Queen @qualitiddy

Kyra - belongs to Kyrare @kyrare

Claudia - belongs to Sweet Kurage @sweetkurage

Francis Miller - belongs to meee! @mymelonerboner

Chapter 2 Word Count: 2,194

—————————— 

*     *     *     CHAPTER 2     *     *     *

"LA VACHE! SHUT UP! I'M TRYING!" 

Rémi swung the wheel hard to the right, but screeches and smoke gave away the fact that it wasn't going to be quite enough. Kyra had to act fast. She gritted her teeth in frustration as she braced herself for an undoubtedly painful experience.

"STEEL PANTHER!"

From her torso, the upper body of a feline figure emerged. Dark metallic silver glinted with ferocious animosity against a panther-like physique as the figure stretched its metal wings out, letting out a guttural hiss. Kyra's stand pressed one paw against the dashboard of the sedan, before phasing another paw through the floor of the car, contacting the speeding asphalt of the road below it. Kyra hissed in pain as she felt the sensation of the asphalt scraping against her stand's palm.

In a split second, the sedan burst with a light blueish glow surrounding the whole vehicle, before the pulsating light flowed straight into the point of the ground that the phantom panther was pressing its paw against. With a deafening crack, the asphalt below the sedan broke into pieces, nudging the sedan ever so slightly more to the right, and the sedan seemed to slow down tremendously, as though most of the energy of the hurtling car just vanished, like water spilled from a cup. It was enough to make the sedan brush past the mysterious figure on the motorcycle.

Right after, the sedan slammed head first into something solid behind the motorcycle, denting the bonnet of the car.

"I'M TRY- FUCK! OW!" Rémi shrieked as his head jolted into the SPW-branded Super-Deluxe-High-Comfort™ airbags of the sedan. Kyra sighed in relief. Whatever it was they hit, she managed to divert enough energy in time to make the crash relatively mild.

But what was it that they hit?

Kyra peered through the slightly cracked windshield. There was nothing in front of the car. It was as though the bonnet was dented by some invisible pole.

The trio crawled out of the damaged sedan, each eyeing the mysterious biker with caution. The gleam of the biker's helmet visor masked their face and gave them an aura of anonymous danger. The helmet, from afar, somewhat resembled the look of a brown aviator hat with goggles. Kyra shot a glance at the others. A slight swarm of mist was already forming and circling around Rémi's feet in defensive anticipation. Claudia wore a look of terrified concern.

"What quick wits ya have, Kyra Furyia." An unfamiliar, male voice rasped from the biker. With a quick gesture from the biker, the seemingly empty space in front of the damaged sedan bonnet suddenly appeared to melt and morph into a slightly dented lamppost. "If you were just a split second slower, you fellas would've been totalled by that crash."

"Why thank you, kind gentleman." Kyra shot back in pompous sarcasm. "You know my name. That means you've done your research. I think it's safe to assume you know about our stand powers too."

The biker chuckled. "Not bad, cat lady. You're right, I know all about your stand, Steel Panther, and its energy redirection powers." He lifted a gloved finger towards Rémi. "I also know about you, Rémi Martin, and your copying ability. However…" The biker slowly cocked his head towards Claudia. "This girl… don't think I've seen her before. She a stand user?"

"Wouldn't you like to know." Rémi spat. "I'll tell you this much, helmet - you're not very good at hiding your powers. I've already figured out how your stand works."

Kyra lifted a brow. Already?

"Kyra, look." Rémi pointed at a green-themed restaurant just a few meters away. "The invisibility, the unfamiliar surroundings… there must be only one explanation." Kyra peered at the restaurant and read the large, white block letters right above its entrance.

Five Guys!

"You're right, Rémi!" Kyra gasped. "I've never seen a green Five Guys in my life. Wow, this was way easier than I thought." Kyra smirked as she lifted a metal-clawed finger towards the biker. "Good sir, your stand ability… is to change the colour of objects, isn't it?"

The biker snorted. "Congratu-fucking-lations, you guys have eyes." With a grandiose wave of the hand, he gestured to the all the wrongly-coloured walls, windows and pavements surrounding the trio. 

"Isn't it funny how much we people depend on colour? When you see a car drive past you, your first thought is never gonna be 'Oh, that was a flat-topped car', or 'Oh, that was a Volkswagen'. More likely, you're gonna go 'Oh, that was a blue car'. Same thing applies for many things. Animals, buildings, walls… it's the first way you recognise something. Mess with colour a little and suddenly everything looks foreign. It's evolution, y'see. Colour has been the warning system for predators and prey since the dawn of eyeballs. It tells you what's food, what's poison, what's danger, what's safety. Colour is everywhere."

In a seamless motion, a figure emerged from behind the biker. Humanoid in appearance, but coloured head to toe in a brilliant pink hue, skin as smooth as rubber with vastly contrasting, bizarre patterns strewn across its body in random spots like lazy patchwork, all made with different hues of pink, purple and magenta. It donned what looked like the apron of a painter, and where there should be forearms, instead there were what looked like two paintball guns attached directly at the elbows.

"My name is Francis Miller, and my stand, Pink Season, can control the colour of any object it shoots!" 

Kyra couldn't hold back an impudent snort. "Colour. Colour. Well gee fuckin' golly, I'm *dye*ing to know how dangerous that's gonna be." She cackled at her joke. "Whatcha' gonna do, paint me to death? Mulberry sunburst my ass into- OW FUCK!"

With lightning speed reaction time, Kyra used a metal claw to slice through a paintball that was hurtling right into her abdomen at mach speed. The capsule split into two, splattering a dark blue hue against her torso, leftover shell debris scraping her green sweater and leaving minor tears. 

"...Well, that was huemiliating." Kyra smirked through her panting.

"This is bad! That stand has long-range capabilities." Rémi gritted his teeth. "Claudia, stick close. Those paintballs look dangerous at that speed."

"Hey prick, you better turn this shit on my sweater back to green right now!" Kyra hissed as she picked up a discarded beer can on the ground with one hand and pressed her other hand, shielded with her armour-like paw-glove, against a nearby lamppost. The lamppost flickered on and off momentarily, emitting a yellowish glow from its steel base which flowed into the beer can. Blue sparks began to fly out of its aluminium skin. With the proficiency of a pitcher, she flung the charged beer can straight towards the biker. The biker didn't move a muscle, simply silently watching as the beer can sped closer towards him.

Only for the can to narrowly missed the biker's visor by an inch. It tumbled against the ground behind him, letting out a loud electrical discharge as it contacted a manhole cover.

Wha… That was impossible. Kyra never missed a target. Countless years of intensive training assured her of that. She took everything into account, wind velocity, wrist posture, amount of centrifugal spin…

Francis burst into an obnoxiously raspy, wheezing laugh. "What magic some simple contouring and shading can do! I coloured the walls and road in between us to look like I was just a bit further from you than I actually was. I know your modus operandi, Kyra! I knew you would try that move!"

Optical illusions!? Shit! This is bad. 

Francis was still wheezing and hacking from his half-laugh-half-choking. "You had the fucking balls to underestimate me. But now I know somethin', Kyra. You may have the sharp senses of a cat, but your eyes are still human. You're weak to my power! PINK SEASON!" And with a wild gesture, both the biker and his stand slowly began to melt into thin air, splotches of nothingness spreading like an oil spill across their whole bodies. In a matter of seconds, they both completely vanished. In alarm, Kyra backed up to where Rémi and Claudia were huddled, eyes peeled on the surroundings for the invisible biker.

"Rémi! Look out!" Claudia exclaimed. Rémi's eyes widened, bracing himself for an attack. He drew a breath, preparing his spiritual energy.

"IMITATION OF LIFE!"

And with that cry, light greyish wisps of mist gushed out from Rémi's feet, swirling around in front of him and taking on a vaguely humanoid shape. At where its "head" should be, two large, beady, solid red eyes flitted open, glowing with a brilliant ruby hue. This misty form lightly planted a "palm" against the asphalt road with a feather's touch, and immediately, the coarse, hardened, blackened texture of the asphalt spread up the misty shape's "arm" and across its "chest", eventually encapsulating its entire "body". Upon completion of this transformation, the now hardened figure disassembled itself into a cloud of rocky particles, swarming around the body of Rémi, before settling against his skin and body to form an asphalt suit of armour, complete with a dark-grey-tinged translucent facemask that still displayed his face well enough.

Split seconds after this asphalt armour settled, Rémi was immediately hit across the left check with a speeding paintball, splattering a vibrant green colour against his asphalt exterior, starkly contrasting its dull blackish look. The force of the paintball was enough to make Rémi's head jerk to the side in a dizzying way.

"Woah! You alright kid?" Kyra exclaimed.

"I'm fine! I activated my stand in time." Rémi cracked his neck to soothe the pain of the concussion. "More importantly, that shot revealed his location! I know where to attack now!" With a roar, Rémi darted into the direction the paintball came from.

"Wait, no! Slow down!" Claudia called out to him.

Suddenly, Rémi dropped down through the seemingly solid ground with a surprised shriek. In instinctive panic, he managed to catch a grip on the edge of the "hole" with his asphalt fingers.

"Rémi!" Both Kyra and Claudia screamed after him.

A raspy voice from the thin air broke into an ugly chortle. "I removed that manhole's cover in advance and coloured its interior to match the road. I knew you two had close-range type stands. One of you guys were gonna try to bumrush me, so I just positioned myself in front of that hole. You think I'd be some kinda dumbass to just give away my position like that?"

With some effort, Rémi pulled himself out of the manhole and hurried back to the group, eyes darting about wildly as he tried to figure out where Francis was going to strike next. Kyra narrowed her eyes at him, then at Claudia. It was Claudia she was worried about the most. Her defensive capabilities were practically null. There was only one reason Francis still hadn’t targeted her yet, and it was because he still didn’t know what she could do. 

Kyra shifted her focus to Francis, or wherever she was wildy guessing he was going to be. He was cunning. He was prepared. He even had traces of tar on his clothes to mask his scent against the road. Kyra bit her lip in frustration, admitting in a pit of her heart that Francis was right, and she had underestimated him. It wasn’t just a matter of controlling colours, it was a matter of controlling perception. To not even know whether you can trust your own eyes… Is there any way to defeat such a stand user? Any way to even land a blow on this bastard, if you can’t even tell where he’s-

“Rémi! Two meters to your left, eight o’ clock!” Claudia suddenly yelled, pointing to an empty space next to Rémi. Kyra widened her eyes. Dia, how the fuck!?

Rémi wasted no time. Without missing a heartbeat, he leaped to where Claudia had directed and with a cry, slammed an asphalt fist straight into the empty space. A loud, satisfying thud resonated as Francis flew backwards from the rocky impact straight into his visor, shards of fortified glass, plastic and multicoloured dye mixed with blood spurting into the air as his camouflage wore off. Kyra let out a yelp of triumph mixed with confusion as she watched the biker and his stand tumble backwards against the road.

But it was far from over. The biker shuddered, and slowly but surely propped himself up. Through one cracked lens of the helmet visor, he eyed the young Spanish girl with a look of murderous intent.

“Y...you saw through it. You, girl… Claudia, was it? You saw through my optical illusions…” Francis hacked out a blob of spit and blood against the road. “I was wondering how you kept warning your friends of my moves. You… you are a stand user after all.” His cold gaze trailed from Claudia to her surroundings, the buildings, the road, the sky.

And in his visible eye, there was a gleam of realisation, and then triumphant satisfaction.

*     *     *     END OF CHAPTER 2     *     *     *

[duelingdestiny]

🍸- Do you drink?👣- What do you like to do in your spare time?⚽️- Do you like any sports?🎮- Favorite video game(s)?⛪️- Are you religious?⌛️- Last thing you did before logging in?🎈- Share a childhood memory!

Getting to know you Questions for the Mun!STATUS: ACCEPTING

🍸- Do you drink? On very rare occasions? Like in two days I’m going to see Jimmy Buffett and you can bet your ass Imma be drinking. But I don’t do it often so I’m going to be a SUPER ECONOMICAL drunk lolololo. 

👣- What do you like to do in your spare time? What...what is this you speak of called...spare...time? LOL. Okay but seriously I’m here. Hanging with you guys. Sometimes I go to the lake, or out with my sister, but I have a full time job, and a mom who can’t walk without aid so spare time is a fleeting creature. 

⚽️- Do you like any sports? Dude I am a NERD for ice skating. I liked it before Yuri made it cool okay? I’ve been watching it since I was a little girl and am pretty damn good at it myself. I also like to watch NFL football, but if we’re talking about me actually doing sports? I love to swim. I can’t do a lot because of my vertigo, but catch me in the water fam. Favorite video game(s)? I hate all video games equally lolol. No not true. My fave is Final Fantasy IV (II) The one with Cecil and Ridiya and Cain and Rose and all them. It’s old school and I still love it. Also can’t go wrong with some shit talking fighter games like ANY of the Mortal Kombat series. And I mean I suppose I should add my love hate UTTER CONFUSION relationship with Kingdom Hearts.

⛪️- Are you religious? I’m with you on this one. I believe in the power of belief. I don’t think you actually need a higher power. Belief in yourself is probably the most powerful thing you can believe in. 

⌛️- Last thing you did before logging in? I ate Mexican food with my bestie who was kind enough to drag my dizzy ass to the doctor and then take me fohuevosos con chorizo YUM. 🎈- Share a childhood memory! Dude okay so I was a drum major for four years in high school. I had a baton. Not...not a majorette baton either. It was...bigger. 

Yeah there it is, but I was 5′2 and it was a lot for short me (Still short just sayin) But I decided I wanted a mace. A baton like in this pic comes just up to my hip line. But a mace hoooooo boy. 

So just to give you an idea of the power I was packing here is a comparison chart. 

I’m between 154 and 156 centimeters depending on which convenience store I’m robbing. As you can see this things TOWERS at 58 inches. Also mine? It had a big ass eagle on it so it could REALLY fuck me up. I was spinning it getting a feel for it and then I tried something I would normally do with my baton without thinking you know. Arms straight out at the sides. One loop over my head, and then around my neck. I’ve done this like a majillion times. I can do it in my sleep. What I DIDN’T think about was the very REAL fact this mace had about an inch more at the top than my baton and it was too late centrifugal force kicked my ass up one side and down the other. I heard freedom ring in the form of that fucking eagal right up side my forehead. Not only did that cheeky bastard hit me it’s beak tore a inch and a half long wound over my brow. That was the day I tasted true freedom. 

[monkeystokes5]

Lila sat on a hay bale near the State Fair midway, taking inventory. Her straw market bag was well stocked. Three pounds of butterbeans. A huckleberry pie. Seven fat Beefsteaks for BLTs (the boy loved BLTs according to his mama). A jar of Norman’s prize-winning sourwood honey, a chunk of honeycomb glistening in the elixir. One dozen AA Leghorn eggs. And the kid’s half-eaten bag of kettle corn.

Poor kid had been tagging along while she squeezed tomatoes and caught up with scattered farm folk, her chance each year to see old pals.

Lila looked up from her bag. Speak of the devil.

“Hiya, kiddo, how was it?”

“They won’t let me ride." The kid clutched unused carnival tickets, looking at his shoes in defeat.

“You need more tickets?”

“No, m'am. I gotta be accompanied by an adult.”

“Cory, you know to call me Lila.”

The kid looked despondent. “Yes’m. Lila.”

He was her only grandchild, and if this trial-run relationship neither wanted was going to work she had no intention of being called "Meemaw" or some other nonsensical combination of syllables.

The kid sat beside her, kicking dirt. She’d been promising he could ride the damn ride for the last three hours. Lila looked toward the midway, a neon chaos of moving parts, rock and roll, blaring PA.  

Goddammit.

“Which one was it you had your heart set on?”

Cory pointed to a massive spaceship, an ELO album cover blinking with seizure-inducing lights, spinning like a giant’s top.

“The Gravitron. Everybody says it’s the best.”

Lila contemplated the beastly UFO. Goddammit.

He wasn’t even begging. The kid was defeated. With a father taking off on mom and mom taking off on antidepressants and red wine, he’d hit eight-year-old rock bottom. Sent to live with Grandma in Creedmoor, NC.

Lila stood up and headed for the spaceship, resigned and resolute, like a hypnotized abductee drawn by mysterious forces. Her feet were killing her.

But the kid was beaming. How bad could it be?       

The fuzzy-lipped carny looked high. To Lila, all teenagers looked high. He took their tickets without taking his eyes off a girl whose Bic he was attempting to flick.

They stepped over a gap into the spaceship’s interior, a circular chamber with red-padded wall panels slanting outward to the ceiling. Cartoons of little green men glowed under black light. Christmas-light constellations twinkled.    

Cory's eyes were wide. “My friend Karl says it’s like being in space.”

The other riders -- teens and a posse of intoxicated yahoos -- were picking spots, leaning their backs against padded slats of wall. No seats, safety belts, or handlebars. Lila clutched her bag, her lap not an option. She’d just hold tight.  

The spaceship filled up about halfway. The carny bounced in, cigarette dangling, flipped a switch, then bounded back out, ducking under the closing hatch door.

Lights dimmed. A recording sounding like someone with a mouthful of Jello talking through a tin can filled the chamber.

“Greetings Earthlings. Welcome to the Gravitron 3000, your transit vehicle to the wild unknowns of outer space...”  

The room moved counterclockwise. Lights danced in sync with those dopey notes from that Richard Dreyfus movie. The riders whooped. The yahoos belched. Lila tightened her grip on her bag.

The ship picked up speed, "Cantina Theme" from Star Wars blasting. Suddenly her feet felt better. She was getting lighter. In fact, she was lifting off the ground, the panel she was leaning against traveling upwards. Cory's panel rose even higher. They were now eye-to-eye. He was giggling.  

The wall slats were moving on glider tracks, smacking against the ceiling with loud clanks.

The straw bag sought its own equilibrium, sliding down around Lila’s knees. She leaned forward to grab it, but centrifugal force kept her pinned against the wall. Shit.

On her second lunge, her fingernails punctured the bag of butterbeans, which spilled and peppered passengers like a vegan hailstorm as the spaceship spun faster. Bewildered profanity cut through the music.    

A fat tomato escaped, bouncing off a pimple-faced kid, hovering in midair a split-second before ricocheting off a yahoo onto a girl in a tube top, who, thinking he’d thrown at her, caught the damn thing and fired back like a starting pitcher. With targets moving like shooting gallery ducks, she missed, hitting a pig-tailed girl who went Spiderman-crawling sideways to deliver payback.

Lila watched her prize honey jar roll up out of her bag along the top of the wall like a roulette ball, then drop onto an entrance railing, breaking in a gooey smash, sending the honeycomb smack into the cleavage of a fat girl in a tank top who wiped a finger between her bosoms and licked.  

Cory and Lila bust out laughing. What else was there to do?

Six more tomatoes were by now exploding around the room, kettle corn twisting into a funnel cloud by the center console. A tomato thunked Cory on the chest.

Lila crawled her hand down to her bag. The egg carton was miraculously intact. She handed it to Cory. “What the hell. Go for it,” she said.

The next three minutes were pure Marx Brothers, the spacecraft crawling with butt cracks, elbows and feet in every direction. Cory didn't throw the eggs, he lofted them to other riders, a cooperative egg toss rather than full-out pelting. People just laughed if the catch was bobbled and the yolk was on them. Cheers and squeals filled the whirring blur of a Hollywood pie fight.

The pie! Somehow still in one piece. The room began to slow. Her punished feet came gently back to earth.

Lila took ahold of Cory’s shoulders for balance, giving sheepish nods to her splattered co-riders. There was no stink-eye, only the come-down of exhausted laughter. "Move it, Cory. Time to scoot." They squeezed past the carny before he got a glimpse of the carnage.

“Lila, that was intense,” Cory said.

"You owe me one, kiddo.”

Maybe we can make this work, she thought.

[roamingholiday]

Friday, August 11th 2017

There is nothing good about waking up at 3:30 in the morning. Nothing.

We sat in exhausted silence around the kitchen table. I shared the last of my rice crispies with my roommate, because we needed to get something in our stomachs before leaving, but were so tired that we felt slightly sick.

We called a car at four, and got tot he airport by 4:45. I’m sure you’re very surprised to learn that there was practically no one on the road.

The car ride was also spent in silence, because everyone was too busy nodding off against the windows to make conversation.

There was a similar lack of people at the airport at 5:00 in the morning, so we got through security fairly easily. I think. I don’t actually remember that bit, but we certainly were all there past security when we found an open drug store where we could get sandwiches and wake up a little with second breakfast.

The flight was equally unmemorable. I assume I slept, or perhaps I simply stared at the ceiling for the amount of time it took. It was only about an hour, after all, so I really could have blinked and been there, practically, even without sleeping.

Our seats were near the back, all grouped together so that my entire row was people that I knew. That was very pleasant, made the whole did-I-accidentally-drift-onto-your-shoulder-in-my-sleep conversation at the end much less awkward. We disembarked the plane from the back as well, which was the first time I’ve done that. Walked down the steps right onto the tarmac. The stinging cold air of the Irish morning did a fairly good job of shocking me awake, as did the unusual route into the airport, which involved wandering past several planes, all of which were fairly…. distinctive.

I thought the four-leaf clover thing was some kind of rude American stereotype, but clearly I was mistaken.

We had no luggage to collect other than our carry-ons, so we made fairly good time out of the airport- until immigration.

My roommate, though from America, is a citizen of the EU.

(Well, actually, she’s a citizen of Britain, so no longer of the EU, but she’s still got an EU passport, is the important thing.)

She went into a separate line from us, and we all felt very guilty, staying together like this while she was all alone. That is, until it became clear that she’d waltzed through in about ten minutes, and gone on to find a comfortable seat to wait for us to stand for an hour waiting to be let into the country. Ugh. Is it too much to ask for a comfortable chair on wheels to carry me through the line while I take a nap? Is it?

After that, which was just lovely, really, we reconvened just outside the exit, and discovered that no one had a plan for the rest of the day. We spent a full hour in line, and never once did we think to have any sort of discussion about what we would do now that we’d successfully made it to the country. Perhaps we were all anticipating spending the weekend being detained by Irish immigration.

After a long conversation that mostly went something like:

“What should we do?”

“I’m tired.”

“We can’t check into the air B&B until 2.”

“Okay, so what should we do.”

“Is there anywhere we can nap?”

“…. We can’t check in until 2.”

“Okay, so what should we do?”

“…. Sleep?”

We finally decided to go find some traditional Irish breakfast, so that at least if we ended up sleeping the rest of the day away, we’d done something productive in Ireland beforehand.

We googled a place, found a taxi big enough for the five of us (which is very difficult to do, by the way, outside of the US), and asked him to take us there. About halfway through the ride, we also came to the realization that along with typically being smaller, taxis in Ireland didn’t take credit cards. Thus began a frantic search through bags to make sure we had euro, because of course they use a different currency. Of course Britain had to go and be special and not standardize its money, and make life hard for poor American students.

We found it, eventually, luckily several of our party had previously been in France during this trip and had enough leftover euro to pay the driver, but it was a traumatizing couple of minutes.

The breakfast place was lovely, and we had what I now realize was our third breakfast of the day. Neither my roommate nor I felt that we could finish a full Irish breakfast on our own, but the mini Irish looked very small, so we ordered a mini and a full, and then I gave her my toast and my beans, and she gave me her bacon and one of her eggs. Neither of us touched the black pudding. Our stomachs were still rather rocky from getting about two hours of sleep and then flying, so we were not feeling particularly adventurous, but several of our other friends actually tried it. Apparently it’s essentially like sausage patties, if they were overcooked and somewhat tragic. And looked terrible.

Of course, because we’re all very mature vaguely 20ish year olds, when we left the cafe and noticed a couple pieces of playground equipment in the area right next-door, we definitely did not drop all of our bags in a heap and sprint for the spinning spider-web cone. We definitely didn’t all get on and make one of our friends spin us on it, nor did we in any way nearly fall off because we leaned back too far and were caught off-guard by the effect of centrifugal force.  We didn’t let our phones fly out of our pockets because we were stupid enough to do any of that with them tucked loosely into sweatshirt pockets.

And we particularly didn’t do that after eating a big, rich breakfast, when we were all feeling slightly queasy to begin with. Because that would be ridiculous. Completely and utterly ridiculous. Childish and silly.

Definitely not something that I would absolutely go back and do again without a second of hesitation.

After we did not spend an embarrassing (and very fun, no regrets, even with the topsy turvy tummy) amount of time playing with equipment definitely built for five year olds, we discovered that we could go to our airB&B earlier than two, so we took taxis again. We were far too tired to puzzle out public transportation in a strange city.

Our airB&B was divine, though, well worth the wait.

It appeared to be made entirely from IKEA showrooms, but I’ve always wanted to live in an IKEA showroom, so.

And I had it all to myself because there were enough bedrooms that only one pair had to share.

My room was also the only one on the ground floor, which meant that, though I did have the street right outside my window, and all the noise that that implies, I also had the kitchen right next-door, which was very nice.

We all took a short tour around our house, deemed it acceptable, and then promptly retired to our rooms for a well-deserved nap. It was around one in the afternoon.

“We’ll meet up at three!” we said. “We’ll all set alarms and be ready to go explore Dublin!” we said.

At about 4:30, I heard a few footsteps come down the stairs, and discovered that two of my four friends had roused themselves enough to come downstairs and make a lackluster attempt at looking through the collection of magazine clippings detailing the various restaurants that the homeowner recommended.

We can at least have dinner somewhere interesting, we figured.

Of course, there were no good restaurants around us, and we had very few euro left, so we had to either try to find a cab company that would seat five people and also take credit cards, or we had to find out how to use public transportation.

I figured that one out, actually, thank you very much. Apparently there is an extensive bus system in Dublin but, much like the buses in Philadelphia, they only take exact change. Which would be exceedingly difficult to come across for us, who had no european change. Alternatively, there was a bus card, like an Oyster card or a metro card or whatever the new Philadelphia transpass system is called, and it could be purchased at about 400 different sites around the city.

The only difficulty is that the website could not tell us where those sites were found relative to us, so I had to painstakingly type in each name into googlemaps and hope that one of them would be in walkable distance.

Fortunately, there was one, only about half a mile away, so I semi-confidently (I will never be absolutely confident with directions, never) led my group of starving, bleary-eyed friends to a place that I hoped would sell us Leap cards.

Aren’t they just adorable?

The place turned out to be a gas station that not only could sell us all leap cards, but had an ATM, which took a load off of all of us, to be honest. There’s something very comforting about having the correct currency when going around a foreign city for the first time.

The bus ride to the restaurant that my friends had found was lovely, and the restaurant was entertaining. It was a pub, technically, which usually means that you order food at the bar, but instead here you ordered food at what was essentially a buffet station, where all of the options were laid out in front of you, and you got to watch them carve off your slices of ham, or chicken, or what have you, and then hand your plate to another person who would dish up a vegetable and a potato of your choice. Ireland does not kid around when it comes to potatoes, by the way.

(Which is super entertaining, really, because potatoes were originally a ‘new world’ crop, so they’re not native to ireland at all. Just like how tomatoes are a staple of Italian cuisine despite being only introduced in the last millennia, after they made it to the ‘new world’ and figured out that those big, suspicious red fruits were actually edible. Food history is interesting.)

I ended up getting a shepherd’s pie, which was an excellent decision, because I love shepherd’s pie, and I hadn’t had it yet since I’d gotten to Europe.

A very excellent decision.

The food was great, the atmosphere was lovely, and the entire pub was crowded full of people for some sports game thing that I definitely did not pay any attention to.

My friends stayed longer, but I ended up taking the bus home to finish writing the paper outline that was due at midnight that day. The outline came together well, though, so it was a good end to an… interesting day.

Let me reiterate, though. Nothing is worth waking up at three in the morning. Nothing.

[thelifeofascholar-blog1]

In which the Scholar Is Upside Down

(Artwork: Chromatic Arrangement no. 4, or A Mind’s Inversion. Acrylic on canvas. © The Scholar, Feb 2017)

Each of us in the highest echelons of intellectual society has suffered, I am certain, the dejection of growing weary with one’s favored opera or videotaped dressage performance. For the lower primates with whom I am ashamed to share a species, adequate diversion may consist of no more than tossing about the stuffed hide of a flayed pig, or worse, paying others to do so. I, on the other hand, cannot abide by such mindless and wanton savagery. As long as modern society continues to be ruled by clods, I will have no power to put an end to the idiocy, the aberrancy, the lunacy of “sports,” but I am neither bound to partake. Nevertheless, in my most lackadaisical moments I have caught myself pining for a lower intelligence quotient, a lesser lot in life, so that I might too live in ignorant bliss among animal hides and astronomical turf.

As it happens, I can claim no such illiteracy. Oft I while away the hours in my scholarly pursuits; just two weeks ago I was ensconced in a gripping history of puffed gelatin in western confectionary tradition. Regrettably, I permitted the temptation of the reading to get the better of me, and the resulting binge nearly spoiled my enjoyment of marshmallows forever (I have since confirmed that my revulsion at them has passed). I suppose at least some of you readers have had similar experiences, as the hunt for knowledge can be a dangerous one. It can likewise, though, be a dull one, subtle of reward and slow of progress. Even the sharpest mind (that is to say, mine) must abide by the adage coined by that dubious dilettante Benjamin Franklin regarding work and play.

All too often, however, my attempts at play become ordeals of more stress and exertion than my work, as I shall hereafter lay out. The life of an intellectual like myself is generally a tireless one, so I cannot simply vegetate in front of a television screen, or finger paint, or dig holes, or whatever it is that the non-gifted do to pass the time. No, if I am to seek out fun, it must be a grander undertaking, a diversion excursion. Upon seeing the aftermath of my marshmallow ordeal, my manservant, Chip, recommended that I seek out another such excursion that he might have ample space to clean up the mess. I upbraided him for his insolence in suggesting that he might know better than I what the situation warranted, but I did coincidentally decide to take a day off.

It was high time that I took a break from the labors of learning, especially since several months ago my wayward sister Doris and her dullard of a husband John, or Josh, or Jean, or whatever his name is, moved to Southern California (or SoCalifornia, as the locals seem to call it), wherein I myself have resided since I noted my own incompatibility with snow-ridden climes some years past. I had no desire to see Doris, nor her mate, but I was overdue for a day of quality time with their eight-year-old son Nathaniel, whom they continue to call Nathan like the ignoramuses they are, and whom I have considered my ward since it became clear to me that Doris and Joe would raise him as a moron without my intervention.

I telephoned Doris. Her dry, familiar response belied the burning envy she feels for my high culture: “Hello?”

I cut through her defense and delivered my point outright. “Doris, I request—nay, I demand—a day of guardianship with little Nathaniel.”

Obviously fearful of my potential to supplant her and James as Nathaniel’s primary role model, as though I hadn’t obviously done so already, Doris was hesitant. Nevertheless, I appealed to her sense and to her busy schedule, and with some negotiation of my fee to half that of her regular babysitter, she agreed.

Doris’s only condition was that I avoid a debacle like my previous outing with Nathaniel. I won’t go into all of the unfortunate details, but suffice it to say that I am no longer welcome at Disneyland. That pretender in the Mickey Mouse costume should have known better than to claim that Tom Sawyer would have his own island, let alone that the hackish and offensive works of Mark Twain have any place in children’s entertainment! But I digress. I promised my sister that I would not cause any scenes with costumed idiots and began planning my day of appropriate recreation.

Though I was legally barred from paying another visit to Disneyland and glad of the riddance, I knew that I needed to choose an activity of sufficient excitement to keep little Nathaniel occupied. I wish I could say that he could take the same interest as I in the classic art of the oratorio, but I must administer milk before symbolic meat (I am particularly proud of this wholly original metaphor; it came to me one day as I mused on the peculiarities of mammalian reproduction and I regret that I am not more frequently credited in its not infrequent usage). The milk, in this case, had to be a themed park, as they are known, for I recalled Nathaniel’s immense dejection at our ejection from the Disney premises before he had a chance to ride any of the various roller coasters, and I wished to make reparations.

I settled on the nearest possible park that could fulfill the role, for long drives with Chip at the wheel cause my neck to become insufferably tense. We met with Doris and Jim, picked up my ward with no more conversation than what was necessary, and were on our way. Chip attempted to engage little Nathaniel with corrupting talk of super-powered heroes and other juvenile rubbish, but I quickly and heartily put an end to that, sternly encouraging my manservant to keep his attention on the road and away from my impressionable charge.

Our destination was Six Flags, a decidedly odd name for a park in which flags are not only not celebrated, but scarcely even seen. This was my first disappointment upon my arrival, for I have been dying to visit a flag museum to improve my geographical expertise. I reminded myself that this was Nathaniel’s day, and that I had to lay aside my disappointments at the lack of educational amenities in the park and take my fun vicariously through my ward. Chip, on the other hand, I forbade from entering the park. He attempted to abandon us in an offer to return to my abode and do housework, but I informed him that he was to await us in parking until such time as we chose to leave.

The park appeared to be the work of a madman. I feared perhaps the seventh seal was opened at Six Flags, given the positively Lovecraftian dismissal of Euclidean geometry in both ride architecture and sidewalk layout. I reminded myself that such was the nature of amusing parks and recalled a similar devilishness on that ill-fated Disney expedition. Nathaniel had spoken but little during the drive, transfixed as he was by my admittedly ostentatious descriptions of the histories of various road signs we passed along the way, but now his eyes lit up in view of the high-flying prospects before him. When I saw the gleam in his eyes, I steeled myself against the madness within the park and entered.

Roller coasters have never held any particular appeal to me; the thought of tempting the capricious Isaac Newton has never struck me as intelligent or appropriate, and the thought of sharing seats with the mindless masses with which the park teemed was all the more unnerving. Indeed, to undergo such intense centrifugal and centripetal forces must have some scrambling effect on the brain, judging from the atrocities of fashion I saw around the park. Far too many of the misguided attendees thought themselves superheroes and wore the capes to prove their mania.

I reasoned to myself that my mind, being much sounder than most, could handle the coasters and maintain its sanity if it must. Nevertheless, arriving as we did at the first coaster of the day (one recommended as appropriate for Nathaniel’s age by a slack-jawed knuckle-wiper in a polo emblazoned with the park name), I surveyed the ride and felt a good deal of trepidation. It was far from the tallest coaster, and it lacked the inversions and loops I had seen elsewhere in the park, but as the line of coupled cars roared past us at our vantage point along the walkway, the fantastic velocity made my head spin.

I turned to Nathaniel to confirm that he would rather board this ride and not the bumping cars next door (barbaric as it was, the latter ride was firmly and slowly confined to the ground), but he was dead set. I attempted to extol the virtues of a relaxing merry go ‘round, but to no avail. We stood in line, and I was forced to accept the impending destruction of your humble expositor.

But—oh my—words have never failed me as they do in describing the experience of being rolled and coasted. It was unbelievable. The sensation of soaring, of tumbling, of freewheeling through the sky, that indescribable feeling is the stuff of song, had I but time to write the lyrics. As young Nathaniel and I disembarked I could scarcely see straight, but I grasped the coaster operator by the shoulders and demanded, “Direct me to the grandest ride in the park!”

She shook herself free of me and I apologized for my sudden psychosis (I suppose my earlier guess regarding the effect of rolling/coasting on the brain was accurate, but this brand of madness was one I desired). “You must get that frequently,” I told her.

As has occurred so often in my past experience in interacting with service workers, the employee was in no perceptual position to appreciate the marvelous service she offered, and simply sneered at me as she pointed me to the towering assortment of painted steel that stood nearest the park entrance.

“On the double, Nathaniel!” I cried, and took off at the greatest clip that my legs, rubberized by the coaster ride, could still handle.

“I don’t think your kid’ll be tall enough to ride!” the attendant called after me.

I stopped. Faced with a decision that I had not thought possible just minutes prior, I felt myself in a symbolic standstill to rival my physical standing in the middle of the walkway. As coteries of reprobates, riff-raff unworthy of the divine experience of flight that the park proffered, pushed past me this way and that, I cursed my charge’s diminutive frame. It was clear that I had but one option.

I surveyed the crowd for a suitable temporary caretaker of my ward. My eyes lit first upon a sorry-looking entertainer in a rumpled grey bunny outfit, but recalling my promise to Doris about my interactions with costumed beings, I knew I could have no guarantee that the dismal rabbit would act in a civilized way upon encountering my superior mind. There was, though, a tree casting ample shade near the end of the line to the ride. I knew I couldn’t leave Nathaniel there alone without material to amuse or enlighten him, but luckily, I had come prepared for such a contingency (though I had expected it to arise due to my weariness rather than my burning need to ride this greatest of all coasters).

Nathaniel fancies himself a swashbuckler, as I have gathered from his childish obsession with children’s tales of adventure. I determined he would do well to explore Pericles, Prince of Tyre; while among the least of the Bard’s creations in my estimation, it is nevertheless a great deal better than the tales of Bat Men and Wondrous Women that my ward was wont to peruse. I extracted my pocket Shakespeare reader, complete with my own set of annotations, and handed it to him. Explaining to the lad that I could not leave this great vista unexplored, and promising him I would be no more than five minutes (the wait time in the previous queue), I left him to his edification without further delay.

Imagine my surprise when five minutes, ten minutes, thirty minutes, an hour went by as I waited. Each moment my will nearly faltered; before long I had to stop looking back at Nathaniel, for the mournful gaze with which he watched me would soon have broken my resolve. But no! Be it an hour wait or three, I had to board that roller coaster. Morale was as tense as I have ever seen in that line. I snapped at more than one inconsiderate bystander who brushed against me as we waited.

Once near the end of the wait, I did glance again in Nathaniel’s direction, only to see him being accosted by another costumed ne’er-do-well, this one himself dressed as a Bat Man. The only thing that kept me from bursting forth from that line in explosive fury to punish the rogue was the understanding that within minutes I would be boarding. I had arrived at a point beyond which only heaven could lie.

After one hour, thirty-eight minutes, and twelve seconds, by my guess, I stood at the front of the line. Various posted signs of warning regarding the intensity of the ride met me along the wait, but I had dismissed them, sure as I was of my desire to touch the sky once again. Unlike the bench-and-crossbar restraints of the prior coaster, this ride feature a full-body rigid harness of reinforced padding. Perhaps this latter detail might have given me pause were I not so drunk on ecstatic motion, but I threw myself into the harness without a thought, my legs dangling below me in the air. My heart pounded in my chest; my breathing grew shallow and agitated; my vision blurred. The anticipation nearly rendered me unconscious before the ride even began.

Soon enough, though, we began our climb, an agonizingly slow one, to the top of the first hill of the coaster. I felt the exhilaration of Edmund Hillary and Neil Armstrong all in one as the summit approached. I suddenly realized with alarm that this was at least four times as high as the last coaster had risen. I feared the oxygen at that altitude was, perhaps, diminished. My grip tightened as I questioned my prior exuberance when, in an instant, the drop happened.

Dear readers, I know not to whom I must compare myself: the tragic Icarus, who in his pride flew too close to the sun and fell to his demise, or the wicked Lucifer, who was cast down from heaven to reside ever after in hell. At the moment of the descent, I made no such self-comparison. I simply screamed. I called out with all my might to the coaster operator, “THERE’S BEEN A TERRIBLE MISTAKE!” and “STOP THIS DEATH TRAP AT ONCE!” My pleading screams fell on the deaf ears of dunderheads. I should have known better than to entrust my life to the degenerates operating that great machine of destruction.

I have no clear recollection past that first drop until the end of the ride. Whether I passed out from terror or repressed the trauma, I cannot say. I can only say that I had more than a few choice words for the ride attendants. I fluttered my feet and railed into them from my harness from the moment our car arrived until they freed me from that nightmarish imprisonment. I informed them that their wanton toying with the lives of men and women would not stand, that I would be taking swift legal action against them. As my legs swung back and forth, the only physical expression of my anger that the restraints permitted, I landed an unintentional, though well-deserved, blow into the ribs of the attendant freeing me.

Dare I describe the overreaction of the incapable employees at that moment? The kicked youth curled away in feigned pain, clearly attempting to build some sort of assault case against me. I stood my ground, demanding that they release me and that the youth admit his exaggeration. Though the attendants saw to my first demand quickly enough, my insistence of the truth sadly fell upon ignorant ears. Neither my fellow riders of the death trap nor the kicked urchin’s colleagues would see the obvious truth, no matter the volume with which I declared it: that I was the victim.

The resulting rush to escort me from the park was so thorough that I was forced to request that the strong-arm barbarians barring my reentrance deliver my ward. It was most vexing to see that the very Bat Man whom I had seen interrupting Nathaniel’s Shakespearian studies was charged with reuniting him with me, but I remained mute. I could only tolerate so much disrespect in a two-hour period.

The sadness on the lad’s face upon seeing our ejection was heartbreaking; we clearly shared a deep bond if he could so commiserate with my ignominy in that moment to be brought to tears. The empathy so overwhelmed him that he was unable to address me for the entire ride home, not even to discuss the noble Pericles. Chip, ever true to my orders, had remained in the parking lot awaiting our return, but in his sloppiness had apparently allowed a skunk in at some point during the day, judging by the residual smell of the interior. Nathaniel could not even say goodbye when we dropped him off, such was the power of his emotional connection with my sadness. He kept his eyes trained away from me to avoid aggravating his tears. We truly share a deep connection, my ward and I.

I knew not how to process the events of the day. On the one hand, I had been insulted almost as thoroughly as I ever could be. It was a harm my pride would feel for many days thereafter, and I could not even take the legal action I had promised, what with the perverted testimony that snake of an attendant would deliver against me. On the other hand, I had not lost the desire to soar on the wings of roller coaster eagles. Even that monstrous deathtrap called my name, enticed me, made me salivate in anticipation of the next time, one year hence when my ban from the park would expire, that I could attempt to conquer her contours. I felt for the first time that I knew the plight of the addict. The one thing I knew for sure was that that evening’s bath would require an extra cup of Epsom salt.

[scriptchemist]

Hi, so I'm really blind about chemistry. What can you tell me about isotope? And is it possible to separate the elements that build the isotope?

Isotopes are things that most people only hear about in relation to nuclear weaponry, but essentially everything made of matter is made up of isotopes – because isotopes are just atoms.

To understand this better, we’ll need to go sub-atomic! Don’t worry, we won’t stray too far into particle physics, but in order to understand what an isotope is (and why anyone should care), we need to know a little about the particles that make up individual atoms, namely the proton, the neutron, and the electron.

We’ll use good old hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe, as an example. If I tell you I have one atom of hydrogen, what that means is that I have one positively charged proton making up the nucleus (the very small bit at the center), and one negatively charged electron whizzing around the outside. The number of protons is defined as the atomic number, and different numbers give you atoms of different elements; hydrogen always has one proton, carbon always has twelve, and molybdenum always has 42. Each atom generally gets the same number of electrons as well to keep the charge balanced, but these electrons can move around a bit and that’s what gives us chemical bonding, among other things.

Back to our hydrogen atom – as a chemist I would call it hydrogen-1, or 1H, and this is our very first isotope. The ‘1′ signifies the atomic mass, which is given in atomic mass units (amu) because scientists aren’t always the most creative when it comes to naming things. In this case the mass is due entirely to the proton, which is roughly 1836 times heavier than the electron.

Now to get different isotopes we need to add that third sub-atomic particle, the neutron. It weighs about as much as the proton, but it isn’t a charged particle – this means that within reason we can add them to the nucleus without changing an atom into a different element. What we do change is the atomic mass, and that is what gives us a different isotope. Adding one neutron will give us 2H, also known as D or deuterium. This isotope is stable, but it isn’t very common and accounts for less than 0.002% of all hydrogen atoms on Earth. If we take it a step further and add a second neutron, we get 3H or T, known as tritium. This one is unstable and will fall apart through radioactive decay, with a half-life (the time for half of a given amount to decay) of just over 12 years. Interestingly, you can’t add a third neutron – it just doesn’t work, at least not with our current tools in high-energy particle physics. Some elements have lots of isotopes (tin has 10), while others have just one that is observed in nature (like 19F).

All three isotopes of hydrogen behave similarly in terms of chemical bonding – you can make water with D or T and it will act just like water, only heavier and possibly radioactive – but there are some distinct differences with important consequences. A big one for chemists is how they interact with magnetic fields; a common analytical technique is nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, and while the details of that method are best left for another day, suffice it to say that H and D show up in completely different regions of the spectra. This means you can use a solvent that only contains D atoms (like D2O or CDCl3) and not have any interference with the spectrum of your target compound, which contains H atoms.

This leads us to the second part of the question, how do we separate isotopes of a given element, especially when they act so similarly? This largely depends on the particular isotope you want; it can be as simple as distillation (D2O boils at 101.4 °C, compared to 100.0 °C for H2O), or it can be much more complicated. A good example here is uranium; the isotope useful for nuclear energy/weaponry is 235U, but it only makes up 0.72% of naturally occurring uranium, while 238U (the other 99.27%) is much less valuable. Many processes have been developed to separate the two, but one of the more common methods involves reacting the uranium with fluorine to make gaseous UF6, which is then fed into a huge bank of centrifuges that spin the gas at high velocity. The slightly heavier 238UF6 collects at the outside of the centrifuge, while the lighter 235UF6 collects at the center, and repeating this process can lead to very high levels of enrichment. There is some more chemistry involved to get back to uranium metal, but so far this is the most efficient process that has been commercialized.

Now that we have a better understanding of what isotopes are, let’s talk a little about what they are not, scientifically speaking (i.e. how not to invoke violent bouts of nerd rage among your readers). The word isotope is not specific, so if you’re trying to be complete in your writing you will have to mention which one you’re dealing with. Luckily there is a definite set of isotopes that have been observed, so if you want a real one there are many to choose from: 254 of them are stable, and that number goes up over 900 if you’re ok with some radioactivity, and up over 3300 if you’re willing to work with things that stick around for less than an hour. A lot of them do very weird things, like undergo nuclear transitions with neutrons turning into protons (β- decay) or vice-versa (β+ decay), and you could have all sorts of fun with actual particle physics in your writing, though it’s somewhat beyond the field of my expertise. Another safe bet is to make up a new element (an unobtainium, if you will), though to be consistent with our world it would need to be heavy (more than 118 protons) and unstable, as everything above 84 (polonium) is radioactive.

One particular example of exactly how to induce nerd rage (in myself, at least) is Nth metal from the DC universe. This wondrous substance, known as transuranic iron or 676Fe, is supposedly iron with 646 extra neutrons; depending on the writer, it will negate gravity to allow flight, it is intrinsically anti-magical (or sometimes susceptible to it?), and it is the professional’s choice for the apprehension of ghosts or other supernatural beings. Seeing as 60Fe with 34 neutrons (4 more than usual) is the heaviest stable isotope of iron, some very sketchy math with a heavily-extrapolated semi-empirical formula for binding energy per nucleon suggests that one kilogram of Nth metal would decay instantly, releasing all the extra neutrons with something like 5 MeV of kinetic energy each. That works out to be roughly the same amount of energy of 100,000 tons of TNT. Even if the math is off by six orders of magnitude, I still wouldn’t want to be anywhere near that isotope.

tl;dr – isotopes are just atoms with different numbers of neutrons. Some are stable, some aren’t, and while they usually act the same in terms of chemical reactions, some of the properties differ in potentially interesting and useful ways.

~J

Disclaimer

[bountyofbeads]

.@NPRKelly's interview with @SecPompeo went in a direction we weren't expecting. As described on @npratc: He screamed, swore at her and said she couldn't find Ukraine on a map.

See the transcript for yourself: https://t.co/2mlbtnKwxy https://t.co/RqC7v2liHj

Why a question about Ukraine sent Mike Pompeo into a rage.... The secretary of state screamed profanities at NPR reporter Mary Louise Kelly after abruptly ending an interview.

By Cameron Peters  | Published Jan 24, 2020, 8:00pm EST | Vox | Posted January 24, 2020 |

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo allegedly verbally harassed an NPR reporter for having the audacity to ask him about his leadership ... of the State Department.

During a Friday interview with Pompeo on US policy toward Iran, All Things Considered host Mary Louise Kelly asked the secretary of state whether he owed an apology to Marie Yovanovitch. Yovanovitch is the former US ambassador to Ukraine who was subjected to a smear campaign led by Rudy Giuliani and was unceremoniously removed from her post in April, bringing an abrupt end to her 33-year career as a foreign service officer.

Pompeo was not pleased with the change in topic or the question. “You know, I agreed to come on your show today to talk about Iran,” Pompeo replied. “That’s what I intend to do.”

Kelly, noting that she’d confirmed with Pompeo’s staff that Ukraine would be part of the interview, didn’t give up — and Pompeo abruptly ended the interview.

But that’s not where the story ends. Shortly after the interview aired, Kelly revealed what happened after she turned off her recorder:

NPR's Mary Louise Kelly says the following happened after the interview in which she asked some tough questions to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. https://t.co/cRTb71fZvX

Here's part of Kelly's interview. https://t.co/LwzBl4mZOC

The State Department did not immediately respond to Vox’s request for comment.

This isn’t the first time Pompeo has lashed out at reporters for asking tough questions. But Pompeo’s fury this time seems directly related to the growing controversy around the treatment of Yovanovitch.

Why the question about Marie Yovanovitch matters

Yovanovitch was removed from her post as ambassador in April 2019; later, it surfaced that in a July phone call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, President Donald Trump smeared the ambassador, describing her as “bad news.” On the same call, he intimated to Zelensky that “she’s going to go through some things.”

In November, Yovanovitch testified under oath in the House impeachment inquiry that his comments “sounded like a threat.”

Since then, new evidence has emerged suggesting that associates of Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, had Yovanovitch under surveillance in Ukraine.

In WhatsApp messages to indicted Giuliani associate Lev Parnas, Republican congressional candidate Robert F. Hyde not only provided details about Yovanovitch’s movements, but told Parnas, “If you want her out they need to make contact with security forces.”

Additionally, on Friday, ABC News reported on the existence of a tape of the president ordering Yovanovitch’s firing. A voice that sounds like the president’s can be heard demanding that an aide “Get rid of her! Get her out tomorrow ... Take her out.”

Following the release of Parnas’s WhatsApp messages by the House Intelligence Committee as part of a larger documents trove last week, Ukraine announced that it had opened a criminal investigation into the purported surveillance of Yovanovitch.

Pompeo, meanwhile, cast doubt on the allegations in an interview with right-wing radio host Tony Katz, saying, “I suspect that much of what’s been reported will ultimately prove wrong.”

In the same interview, Pompeo conceded that it was his “obligation as secretary of state” to open an investigation into claims that Yovanovitch had been surveilled.

However, he failed to offer any defense of Yovanovitch, a veteran of the State Department who has served under both Republican and Democratic administrations.

*********

Transcript: NPR's Full Interview With Secretary Of State Mike Pompeo

Published January 24, 2020 5:07 PM ET | NPR All Things Considered | Posted January 24 2020 |

In an interview on Friday with All Things Considered co-host Mary Louise Kelly, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo took questions about U.S. policy in Iran and about the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch.

Mary Louise Kelly: Secretary of State, good to see you.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo: Good to be with you. Thanks for having me on the show.

Let's start with Iran. What is the plan? And on diplomacy, specifically, is there any serious initiative to reopen diplomacy with Iran?

So we've been engaged in deep diplomatic efforts since the first day of the Trump administration. We've built out a coalition that is working together — Gulf states, Israel, many European countries — to deliver on the three central outcomes that we're looking for.

But in terms of U.S. engagement with Iran, is there any talks underway, any plan for talks?

You know, we never talk about private conversations that are taking place, but the diplomatic effort on this front has been vigorous, robust and enormously successful. We built out a significant coalition that has put pressure on the Iranian regime to do what we've asked: to cease its processing of uranium, reprocessing of plutonium, to stop its missile program and the development of its missile program. President Trump made clear they're not going to have a nuclear program that is capable of delivering these weapons around the world. And then finally, working to convince them that their model, this proxy model that they've used to conduct terror campaigns, assassinations in Europe, assassination attempt right here in Washington, D.C., is not tolerable.

You use the word pressure. This is the maximum pressure campaign that President Trump put into place a year and a half ago when he pulled out of the nuclear deal. But in that year and a half, Iran has behaved more provocatively, not less. So is maximum pressure working?

Absolutely working. To put it in context, this is 40 years. When you say worse, they held American hostages in our embassy in Tehran. They had our sailors kneeling. The previous administration gave them billions and billions of dollars to underwrite the very actions that they're taking today. When we came into office, it took a lot of work to fundamentally reshape the diplomatic, military and economic landscape. So it didn't happen instantaneously, but we made an enormous amount of progress in delivering —

But in the last year, they have targeted tankers in the Gulf. They have shot down a U.S. drone, and they have attacked Saudi oil facilities. Is that the desired outcome?

No, of course not. Of course, we don't want them to do those things. And we've raised the cost for doing this. The response in the previous administration when they undertook those actions was to reward them — to reward them, to give them billions of billions of dollars to allow countries to trade with them, to allow them to do all the things that you're seeing today, the ramifications, the tail, the end result of what the previous administration is the activity that we're seeing today. The money that underwrote Hezbollah, that underwrites Hamas, that underwrites Shia militias in Iraq is a direct result of the resources that were provided to them for the eight years prior to us coming into office. We are turning this around. We have reduced resources. We've seen it. They have fewer dollars available. This is beginning to place real choices in front of the Iranian regime. And you can see it, too. You can see in the protests inside of Iran. You can see the Iranian people not happy with their own government when they have to raise the fuel cost. All the things that are undermining this regime's ability to inflict risk on the American people are coming to fruition as a direct result of President Trump's strategy.

President Trump's strategy has included pulling out of the nuclear deal. Since the president came to office, Iran has moved closer to a nuclear weapons capability. They are closer today than they were when he took office. They are spinning more centrifuges. They are stockpiling more enriched uranium. If the plan is to keep Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, how do you do that when they're not abiding by the limits of the old deal and there's no new deal in sight?

You're picking the wrong moment to start your analysis. This is the fundamental flaw of the JCPOA [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action] itself.

I'm picking the moment [crosstalk] when the president pulled out of the nuclear deal, and since then, they are closer to having a nuclear weapon.

This is a regime that has been working to develop its nuclear program for years and years and years. And the nuclear deal guaranteed them a pathway to having a nuclear program.

It was a certainty. It might have been delayed for a month or a year or five or 10 years, but it guaranteed them that pathway. This administration has pulled the Band-Aid off. It's been realistic. We accept the facts on the ground as they are. This is a regime that lied to get into that nuclear deal. You can see that now. And what's going on at the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] in Turquzabad where we now know that they lied about the scope of their program. These are important, Mary Louise. These are important items. You can't talk about the Iranian nuclear program without acknowledging the facts of what this regime has been up to. They stored documents. They kept technology in place. They dispersed it as a result of the JCPOA. They didn't have it in a central research agency, but they continued to develop their program and this administration is determined to prevent them from getting that weapon. Not now, not a year from now and not 10 years from now.

But again, you say you're determined to prevent them. How do you stop them? I was in Tehran two weeks ago. I sat down with your counterpart there, Javad Zarif, and he told me, quote, "All limits on our centrifuge program are now suspended."

Yeah. He's blustering. Look, the truth of the matter is this is a regime that's never --

Do you have evidence that he's blustering?

This is a regime that has never been in the position that it's in today. One has to confront so many elements that challenge the central thesis of the theocracy and the revolutionary nature of this regime. And you can see it in protests, not just in Tehran. And you should know when you traveled there, I'm guessing you weren't permitted to travel freely. I'm guessing that you didn't get a chance to go out into these places where the life of the Iranian people, these are people who are suffering. Qassem Soleimani, who we removed from the battlefield, killed hundreds of Iranians, and the Iranian people know that. And it's been our strategy that has delivered this message of freedom for the Iranian people.

But my question again, how do you stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon?

We'll stop them.

How? Sanctions?

We'll stop them.

The president made very clear. The opening sentence in his remarks said that we will never permit Iran to have a nuclear weapon. The coalition that we've built out, the economic, military and diplomatic deterrence that we have put in place will deliver that outcome. It's important [crosstalk] because this will protect the American people.

Is there any new deal being developed? A new nuclear deal, something that would rein in Iran, something that they would agree to.

The Iranian leadership will have to make the decision about what its behavior is going to be.

Change of subject. Ukraine. Do you owe Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch an apology?

You know, I agreed to come on your show today to talk about Iran. That's what I intend to do. I know what our Ukraine policy has been now for the three years of this administration. I'm proud of the work we've done. This administration delivered the capability for the Ukrainians to defend themselves. President Obama showed up with MREs (meals ready to eat.) We showed up with Javelin missiles. The previous administration did nothing to take down corruption in Ukraine. We're working hard on that. We're going to continue to do it.

I confirmed with your staff [crosstalk] last night that I would talk about Iran and Ukraine.

I just don't have anything else to say about that this morning.

I just want to give you another opportunity to answer this, because as you know, people who work for you in your department, people who have resigned from this department under your leadership, saying you should stand up for the diplomats who work here. [crosstalk]

I don't know who these unnamed sources are you're referring to. I can tell you this, when I talked to my team here --

These are not unnamed sources. [crosstalk] This is your senior adviser Michael McKinley, a career foreign service officer with four decades experience, who testified under oath that he resigned in part due to the failure of the State Department to offer support to Foreign Service employees caught up in the impeachment inquiry on Ukraine.

I'm not going to comment on things that Mr. McKinley may have said. I'll say only this. I have defended every State Department official. We've built a great team. The team that works here is doing amazing work around the world.

Sir, respectfully [crosstalk] where have you defended Marie Yovanovitch?

I've defended every single person on this team. I've done what's right for every single person on this team. [crosstalk]

Can you point me toward your remarks where you have defended Marie Yovanovitch?

I've said all I'm going to say today. Thank you. Thanks for the repeated opportunity to do so. I appreciate that.

One further question on this.

I'm not going to — I appreciate that. I appreciate that you want to continue to talk about this. I agreed to come on your show today to talk about Iran.

And you appreciate [crosstalk] that the American public wants to know as a shadow foreign policy, as a back channel policy on Ukraine was being developed, did you try to block it?

The Ukraine policy has been run from the Department of State for the entire time that I have been here, and our policy was very clear.

Marie Yovanovitch [crosstalk] testified under oath that Ukraine policy was hijacked.

I've been clear about that. I know exactly what we were doing. I know precisely what the direction that the State Department gave to our officials around the world about how to manage our Ukraine policy.

[Katie Martin, deputy assistant secretary, bureau of global public affairs at the State Department: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.]

Secretary, thank you. Thank you.

*********

Pompeo Won't Say Whether He Owes Yovanovitch An Apology. 'I've Done What's Right'

Published Jan 24, 2020, 5:31 PM ET |

NPR  All Things Considered | Posted January 24, 2020 |

With the State Department facing continued questions over the treatment of Marie Yovanovitch before she was recalled as U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo would not say on Friday whether he owed the career diplomat an apology.

"I've defended every single person on this team," Pompeo said in an interview with NPR. "I've done what's right for every single person on this team."

Pressed on whether he could point to specific remarks in which he defended Yovanovitch, Pompeo responded, "I've said all I'm going to say today. Thank you. Thanks for the repeated opportunity to do so. I appreciate that."

The exchange with Mary Louise Kelly, co-host of All Things Considered, follows the release by House Democrats last week of messages suggesting that Yovanovitch may have been under surveillance in the days before she was told to return to Washington from her posting in Kyiv last year.

The messages were sent between Robert Hyde, a Republican congressional candidate and fervent Trump supporter, and Lev Parnas, an associate of President Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani. He was indicted in October on campaign finance charges.

Parnas has emerged as a central figure in efforts by Giuliani to pressure the government of Ukraine to investigate political rivals of Trump. That campaign is now the focus of the ongoing impeachment trial against Trump in the Senate.

POSSIBLE SURVEILLANCE OF A U.S. AMBASSADOR

The State Department itself is now investigating the possible surveillance of Yovanovitch, who during testimony before House impeachment investigators in November said she had felt threatened by Trump. Before her recall, Yovanovitch had been accused of disloyalty by allies of the White House, and during his now-infamous July 25 call with Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Trump said of Yovanovitch, "She's going to go through some things."

In an interview last week with the conservative radio show host Hugh Hewitt, Pompeo said he "never heard" that Yovanovitch may have been under surveillance. In her testimony before the House, Yovanovitch said she was told by the State Department that she was being recalled because of concerns about her "security."

Pompeo has come under criticism — including, at times, from career diplomats in his own department — for failing to more forcefully defend Yovanovitch in the face of political attacks. During testimony before impeachment investigators, for example, Michael McKinley, a former senior adviser to Pompeo, said he resigned from the department in part over what he interpreted to be a "lack of public support for Department employees."

"I'm not going to comment on things that Mr. McKinley may have said," Pompeo said on Friday. But he dismissed the suggestion that a shadow foreign policy involving Ukraine was in place.

"The Ukraine policy has been run from the Department of State for the entire time that I have been here, and our policy was very clear," Pompeo said.

Immediately after the questions on Ukraine, the interview concluded. Pompeo stood, leaned in and silently glared at Kelly for several seconds before leaving the room.

A few moments later, an aide asked Kelly to follow her into Pompeo's private living room at the State Department without a recorder. The aide did not say the ensuing exchange would be off the record.

Inside the room, Pompeo shouted his displeasure at being questioned about Ukraine. He used repeated expletives, according to Kelly, and asked, "Do you think Americans care about Ukraine?" He then said, "People will hear about this."

The State Department did not immediately respond on the record to NPR's request for comment.

THE U.S. AND IRAN

The interview began with a series of questions about the Trump administration's policy toward Iran. Pompeo defended the president's "maximum pressure" campaign against Tehran, saying it is "absolutely working."

"This is a regime that has been working to develop its nuclear program for years and years and years. And the nuclear deal guaranteed them a pathway to having a nuclear program," Pompeo said in reference to the international agreement signed by Iran, the U.S., the United Kingdom, China, France, Germany, Russia and the European Union in 2015. "It was a certainty. It might have been delayed for a month or a year or five or 10 years, but it guaranteed them that pathway. This administration has pulled the Band-Aid off."

As the nation's chief diplomat, Pompeo has played a central role in shaping the president's more aggressive posture toward Iran. It's a policy Pompeo has described as "reestablishing deterrence."

The policy has taken many forms. Less than two weeks after Pompeo was sworn in as secretary of state in 2018, Trump announced the withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal. The announcement was followed by the reinstatement of steep economic sanctions against Tehran.

Under Pompeo, the State Department has also designated Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a foreign terrorist organization, the first time the U.S. has given that label to the branch of another government.

Yet perhaps no action has been more controversial than the administration's decision this month to launch the drone strike that killed Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the leader of Iran's influential Quds Force, outside the airport in Baghdad. While the administration has declined to offer specifics about the intelligence that prompted the strike, Pompeo has defended the president's order, saying it was carried out in response to an "imminent threat" of attack on U.S. embassies.

For days, the killing revived fears of an all-out war. Iran retaliated with strikes against two bases housing American troops in Iraq. No Americans died in the attack, though the U.S. military later revealed that 11 service members were injured.

Tensions have since eased, but the episode has renewed questions about whether the president's "maximum pressure" campaign has emboldened Tehran. Since Trump pulled out of the nuclear deal, Iran has shot down a U.S. drone, targeted oil tankers in the strategic Strait of Hormuz, and been blamed for a debilitating attack on Saudi oil facilities.

At the same time, Iran has stepped away from key provisions of the nuclear deal. In an interview this month with NPR, the country's foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, said "all limits" on centrifuges used to enrich uranium "are now suspended."

"He's blustering," Pompeo said in Friday's interview. "This is a regime that has never been in the position that it's in today."

The secretary declined, however, to detail specifics of the administration's policy for preventing Tehran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, saying only, "We'll stop them."

Pompeo would not say whether direct U.S. engagement is taking place with Iran but did say the administration has built a coalition that's working to put pressure on Iran to end its missile program, its processing of uranium and the reprocessing of plutonium.

He said the U.S. has also "raised the cost" for Iran's use of force through proxy groups in the Middle East.

"This is beginning to place real choices in front of the Iranian regime," Pompeo said. "You can see in the protests inside of Iran. You can see the Iranian people not happy with their own government when they have to raise the fuel cost. All the things that are undermining this regime's ability to inflict risk on the American people are coming to fruition as a direct result of President Trump's strategy."

He would not comment on whether a new deal is being developed in order to prevent Tehran from acquiring a weapon, but instead said, "The economic, military and diplomatic deterrence that we have put in place will deliver that outcome."

"The Iranian leadership will have to make the decision about what its behavior is going to be," he said.

*********

[newssplashy]

HOUSTON — In an era in which privileged individuals search constantly for the next experience to obsess over and post about on social media, space truly remains the final frontier, a luxury that only the 1 percent of the 1 percent can afford.

Now a company called Axiom Space is giving those with piles of money and an adventuresome spirit something new to lust after:

The prospect of an eight-day trip to space that is plush, if not entirely comfortable, and with a bit of the luster of NASA as well.

Circumambulating his gray carpeted office on a recent Wednesday, Mike Suffredini — NASA veteran, Houston native, and the chief executive of Axiom Space — stopped in front of a cardboard compartment about as big as a telephone booth.

“It’s no New York hotel room,” he said with a shrug, as if apologizing for its size.

“It pretty much is, actually!” said Gabrielle Rein, Axiom’s marketing director.

“It” was an early mock-up of a cabin for a commercial space station, among the first of its kind, that Axiom is building: a mash-up of boutique hotel, adult space camp and NASA-grade research facility designed to hover approximately 250 miles above Earth.

Axiom hired Philippe Starck, the French designer who has lent panache to everything from high-end hotel rooms to mass-market baby monitors, to outfit the interior of its cabins.

Starck lined the walls with a padded, quilted, cream-colored, suede-like fabric and hundreds of tiny LED lights that glow in varying hues depending on the time of day and where the space station is floating in relation to Earth.

“My vision is to create a comfortable egg, friendly, where walls are so soft and in harmony with the movements of the human body in zero gravity,” Starck wrote in an email, calling his intended effect “a first approach to infinity. The traveler should physically and mentally feel his or her action of floating in the universe.”

Brace for the rise of the cosmos-scenti.

At the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Suffredini spent 10 years managing the International Space Station, the hulking, 20-year-old research facility in low Earth orbit.

This gives him a certain edge over Branson and Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, who is overseeing Blue Origin. (The majority of Axiom’s 60 employees also hail from NASA.) At least Suffredini thinks so.

“The guys who are doing Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic are going to the edge of space — they’re not going into orbit,” he said. “What they’re doing is a cool experience. It gives you about 15 minutes of microgravity, and you see the curvature of the Earth, but you don’t get the same experience that you get from viewing the Earth from above, and spending time reflecting, contemplating.”

And, naturally, posting to Instagram.

“There will be Wi-Fi,” Suffredini said. “Everybody will be online. They can make phone calls, sleep, look out the window.”

Maybe it will be so nice they’ll want to stay there.

The Starck-designed station is scheduled to open in 2022, but Axiom says they can start sending curious travelers into orbit as early as 2020. They’ll just have to make do with the comparatively rugged accommodations of the International Space Station, which is working with Axiom and other commercial space station outfits.

Axiom’s station can house eight passengers, including a professional astronaut. Each will pay $55 million for the adventure, which includes 15 weeks of training, much of it at the Johnson Space Center, a 10-minute drive from Axiom’s headquarters, and possibly a trip on one of Elon Musk’s SpaceX rockets. Three entities have signed up for on-the-ground training, which starts at $1 million, Suffredini said, though he declined to name them. The inaugural trip will be only $50 million: “It’s a bargain!”

“The lion’s share of the cost comes from the flight up and down,” he went on. “Rocket rides are expensive. You know people” — meaning competitors — “don’t know what they’re talking about if they’re quoting prices substantially less than what we’re stating.” (Aurora Station, a luxury space hotel being built by Orion Span, another Houston-based aerospace company, announced in April that it would charge $9.5 million per person for a 12-day trip, but did not mention the cost of the rocket ride there and back.)

Phil Larson, a former space policy adviser to President Barack Obama who also worked for SpaceX, doesn’t expect travel prices to drop drastically in the next few years. “These habitat and outpost companies are great, but we need to solve the launch cost and transportation problem,” Larson said. “It’s like the biggest elephant in the room nobody talks about.”

The barriers to entry, beyond cost? Being 21 or older — there’s no age cap — and passing a medical exam, before the rest of training begins, as well as “The Right Stuff"-like tests of mind and mettle, like a spin in a human centrifuge (even the YouTube videos are hard to stomach). “Not only do you experience the Gs, you get put into a can that’s really — I mean, if you’re going to be a little claustrophobic, this is where you’re going to feel it,” Suffredini said. “About half the people that fly get sick for the first two or three days. Going with us for eight days gives you a chance to get over that. If you don’t get sick, you have all this time!”

Axiom guests will be required to wear a NASA-grade spacesuit for the rocket ride to and from the station. (Features include a fiberglass torso and a drink tube. Also, a diaper.) Years after Pierre Cardin, Paco Rabanne and Andre Courrèges envisioned space-age fashion, Axiom is in talks with a high-end European fashion house it declined to name about designing leisure suits for travelers once they dock. “They will be tailored to each person and can be customized with their own logo, if they want,” Rein said. “It’s a very special keepsake and part of their luxury experience.”

To understand the grand scale of Axiom’s plans, it helps to know that astronauts have, thus far, largely been roughing it up there. The Johnson Space Center contains a life-size mock-up of the ISS, whose drab, beige interior is lined with drab, gray handholds to tether down things and people, necessary given the lack of gravity. A tour guide quaintly referred to the onboard bathroom as a “potty.” There are no showers.

“The few folks that have gone to orbit as tourists, it wasn’t really a luxurious experience, it was kind of like camping," Suffredini said. The Axiom station will still have handholds, but thanks to Starck (whom Suffredini hadn’t heard of before Axiom’s branding consultant suggested they hire him) they will be plated in gold or wrapped in buttery leather, like the steering wheel of a Mercedes.

Axiom’s private cabins will have screens for Netflixing and chilling — there’s not a lot to do up there, although going outside to do a spacewalk is a possibility — and there will be a great, glass-walled cupola to gather with travelers and take in a more panoramic view of Earth, perhaps with an adult beverage.

“Wine and cocktails work well,” said Michael Baine, Axiom’s chief engineer. “Beer and carbonated beverages do not. You don’t have the gravity to separate the carbon dioxide in your stomach so it causes a lot of bloating.”

You’ll want to pack deodorant. “There’s a hygiene compartment where you do kind of a sponge bath,” Suffredini said.

Fond of folksy sayings (he referred to wine as “fruit of the vine”) and thorough explanations, Suffredini, who is 59, retired from NASA in 2015 with the intent of starting a commercial space venture. Soon after leaving, he became the president of the commercial space division of the engineering firm Stinger Ghaffarian Technologies, and in 2016, began Axiom, which has raised more than $10 million in funding so far.

“We’ve met their engineers, we’ve seen their plans, we hired domain experts that grilled them and did a deeper dive,” said Lisa Rich, a founder of Hemisphere Ventures and an early Axiom investor. “Everything came up with ‘This is a big go sign, we’ve got to get in on this.'”

“At the Johnson Space Center, when Mike walks down the hall, they’re all practically saluting him,” Rich said. “He’s a legend in his own right.”

Suffredini’s professional life has revolved around space. “I was like everybody who watched Neil Armstrong walk on the moon and decided that NASA was cool and wanted to work there,” he said. While he’s overseen many missions, he hasn’t been in orbit and has no plans to see Axiom for himself. (“We’d have to work out who’s going to cover my cost,” he demurred, when asked.)

Still, Suffredini sees Axiom as a necessary step in continuing scientific research and development in space, which he believes is crucial to the survival of our species. Axiom may cater to rich thrill seekers, but he insists he is an idealist. “If you just go visit and come back, you’re not pioneering,” he said. “You’ve got to pioneer.”

Pioneers include countries who have yet to send someone to space, material-science researchers, and biologists trying to understand how the body adapts outside Earth’s atmosphere. Also, maybe, Tupperware.

“They’re interested in working with us,” Suffredini said, “testing different types of containers, seeing how you can cook in them in a sort of clean way. But with this idea, this grand idea that we have, comes cleaning dishes and cleaning a microwave, and who wants to do that? Pretty soon we’re going to be flying a butler with every crew.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

SHEILA MARIKAR © 2018 The New York Times

via NewsSplashy - Latest Nigerian News Online

[bjoeljohnsond91]

REVIEW: 13 Fishing Inception Baitcasting Reel

REVIEW: 13 Fishing Inception Baitcasting Reel

13 Fishing has been cranking out new rods and reels over the last couple of years of which I have reviewed quite a few. Walking through my local tackle shop a couple of weeks ago I picked up a 13 Fishing Inception reel and gave it a spin. The spool seemed to spin well, the drag seemed strong, and the price was right so I took it to the register, cashed out, and headed home.

Fast forward two weeks and I have finished the workup on the Inception. Below are my thoughts.

About the Inception Reel from 13 Fishing

The Inception  I tested has the 8.1:1 gear ratio, weighs 6.9 ounces, offers 8 high-spin Japanese stainless ball bearings, and 18 pounds of drag.

The reel retails for $119 and for testing purposes I paired it with a ONE3 Fate Chrome MH rod.

The Inception comes with EVA foam knobs and a removable side plate for access to adjustable spool brake settings.

The Good

Even in the tackle shop I knew this reel was going to be pretty smooth. The big test is always spooling it, mounting it, and the first cast. I chose 12 pound Seaguar Invisx fluorocarbon line, loaded the Inception up, and then walked out to the backyard for some casting practice. To be as consistent as possible I try to always use the same casting setup. I tie a 1/4 ounce bullet weight with a swivel. This allows the line and rod to load up with a sliding weight and it will swing fairly easily as the centrifugal force pins the weight against the swivel. Doing it this way reduces wind drag and gives me a pretty good glimpse at accuracy and distance by eliminating wind resistance as much as possible.

The first cast didn’t disappoint. The brakes guided the line out without overrun and I easily reached my target 30 yards away. I replicated this cast several more times with zero overruns. Satisfied it was time to try the accuracy and line feed capability in a pitching scenario. I placed a bucket 10 yards away, made no adjustments to the brakes, and used an underhand pitch right to the bucket. Usually a reel with a weak brake setup will overrun in this scenario because the line gets slack as soon as the weight stops pulling the spool at the top of the arc of the cast. The Inception had zero issues with this as well.

I wanted to also check it for skipping capabilities so I switched to a fast sidearm snap cast. I caught one small loop when the weight hit the ground and hopped but that’s to be expected with a gunslinger cast like that. For fast snap casts like that, I’d normally bump the brake up to 3 or 4 which could eliminate the loop. Doing so would reduce the casting distance however so keep that in mind.

I wasn’t sure how I’d feel about the EVA foam grips when I bought the reel. After using it for a half hour or so in a bunch of different applications I like them pretty well. I can imagine good grip performance in wet environments just like a lot of other EVA grips I have used on spinning reels in the past.

I wanted to test the drag so I launched my weight through the branches of an oak tree and proceeded to pull. The drag didn’t give and I eventually broke the 12 pound fluoro with enough force. The drag didn’t slip at all. Surprising. If you plan to use this reel with small diameter braid (less than 50lb) be aware you could bind up the braid in the spool.

Room for Improvement

Remeber when I mentioned the access to the brake adjustment? To get to it you have to remove the side plate, and I don’t mean loosen and swing away. I mean remove. It’s easy enough to remove with the lever on the under side of the side plate and that’s potentially the problem. Other models like the Concept Z and Concept C have a swing away Beetle Wing side plate. The Inception does not. If that latch gets tripped or you make an adjustment on the water and drop the side plate, it’s gone if it hits water. I’d love to see a Beetle Wing on this reel too. Pretty please!

The other thing I’d love to see is an Inception with a deep spool option like the Z. Trading out the spool between the Z and Inception would probably come near evening out the weight. The 13 Fishing Trick Shop has some options but I’d love to see this as a factory option. The onboard spool holds 135 yards of 12lb fluoro.

Final Thoughts on the Inception

I’m not exactly sure how this reel doesn’t get more talk. I realize the hazard orange big brother Z is getting all the play in the media circles but for $119, this reel outperforms the bulk of the market options in the sub-$150 market. If you need a $200 combo, I’d pair the Inception with the ONE3 Fate Chrome and be done with it. That’s a heck of a combo and a rarity that it’s available at an 8:1:1 ratio. 13 Fishing has moved forward with this offering that will push Daiwa, Shimano, and others to continue developing great quality at budget friendly prices.

http://ift.tt/2Fcu7hu

[jessemcdonnellq86]

REVIEW: 13 Fishing Inception Baitcasting Reel

REVIEW: 13 Fishing Inception Baitcasting Reel

13 Fishing has been cranking out new rods and reels over the last couple of years of which I have reviewed quite a few. Walking through my local tackle shop a couple of weeks ago I picked up a 13 Fishing Inception reel and gave it a spin. The spool seemed to spin well, the drag seemed strong, and the price was right so I took it to the register, cashed out, and headed home.

Fast forward two weeks and I have finished the workup on the Inception. Below are my thoughts.

About the Inception Reel from 13 Fishing

The Inception  I tested has the 8.1:1 gear ratio, weighs 6.9 ounces, offers 8 high-spin Japanese stainless ball bearings, and 18 pounds of drag.

The reel retails for $119 and for testing purposes I paired it with a ONE3 Fate Chrome MH rod.

The Inception comes with EVA foam knobs and a removable side plate for access to adjustable spool brake settings.

The Good

Even in the tackle shop I knew this reel was going to be pretty smooth. The big test is always spooling it, mounting it, and the first cast. I chose 12 pound Seaguar Invisx fluorocarbon line, loaded the Inception up, and then walked out to the backyard for some casting practice. To be as consistent as possible I try to always use the same casting setup. I tie a 1/4 ounce bullet weight with a swivel. This allows the line and rod to load up with a sliding weight and it will swing fairly easily as the centrifugal force pins the weight against the swivel. Doing it this way reduces wind drag and gives me a pretty good glimpse at accuracy and distance by eliminating wind resistance as much as possible.

The first cast didn’t disappoint. The brakes guided the line out without overrun and I easily reached my target 30 yards away. I replicated this cast several more times with zero overruns. Satisfied it was time to try the accuracy and line feed capability in a pitching scenario. I placed a bucket 10 yards away, made no adjustments to the brakes, and used an underhand pitch right to the bucket. Usually a reel with a weak brake setup will overrun in this scenario because the line gets slack as soon as the weight stops pulling the spool at the top of the arc of the cast. The Inception had zero issues with this as well.

I wanted to also check it for skipping capabilities so I switched to a fast sidearm snap cast. I caught one small loop when the weight hit the ground and hopped but that’s to be expected with a gunslinger cast like that. For fast snap casts like that, I’d normally bump the brake up to 3 or 4 which could eliminate the loop. Doing so would reduce the casting distance however so keep that in mind.

I wasn’t sure how I’d feel about the EVA foam grips when I bought the reel. After using it for a half hour or so in a bunch of different applications I like them pretty well. I can imagine good grip performance in wet environments just like a lot of other EVA grips I have used on spinning reels in the past.

I wanted to test the drag so I launched my weight through the branches of an oak tree and proceeded to pull. The drag didn’t give and I eventually broke the 12 pound fluoro with enough force. The drag didn’t slip at all. Surprising. If you plan to use this reel with small diameter braid (less than 50lb) be aware you could bind up the braid in the spool.

Room for Improvement

Remeber when I mentioned the access to the brake adjustment? To get to it you have to remove the side plate, and I don’t mean loosen and swing away. I mean remove. It’s easy enough to remove with the lever on the under side of the side plate and that’s potentially the problem. Other models like the Concept Z and Concept C have a swing away Beetle Wing side plate. The Inception does not. If that latch gets tripped or you make an adjustment on the water and drop the side plate, it’s gone if it hits water. I’d love to see a Beetle Wing on this reel too. Pretty please!

The other thing I’d love to see is an Inception with a deep spool option like the Z. Trading out the spool between the Z and Inception would probably come near evening out the weight. The 13 Fishing Trick Shop has some options but I’d love to see this as a factory option. The onboard spool holds 135 yards of 12lb fluoro.

Final Thoughts on the Inception

I’m not exactly sure how this reel doesn’t get more talk. I realize the hazard orange big brother Z is getting all the play in the media circles but for $119, this reel outperforms the bulk of the market options in the sub-$150 market. If you need a $200 combo, I’d pair the Inception with the ONE3 Fate Chrome and be done with it. That’s a heck of a combo and a rarity that it’s available at an 8:1:1 ratio. 13 Fishing has moved forward with this offering that will push Daiwa, Shimano, and others to continue developing great quality at budget friendly prices.

http://ift.tt/2Fcu7hu