#got put on the wrong tax code this month

[oifaaa]

Bitchboy isn't a compliment?

It is probably just thought it'd be funny to accuse someone else of not liking tim for once instead of the question always being if I don't like tim

[3416]

Inside the strange and secretive business of team-mandated NHL fines

By Joshua Kloke | Mar 27, 2023 | The Athletic

Ryan Hartman walked into the Minnesota Wild practice facility with a sense of resolve. The nine-year NHL forward had been a healthy scratch the previous evening against the Philadelphia Flyers.

But righting a wrong was only one of the items on his to-do list.

“Today,” Hartman said, nodding while looking around the Wild dressing room, “is tax day.”

As he does once a month, Hartman will work his way around the Wild dressing room and collect money from his teammates.

The previous night, Hartman pored over a spreadsheet with updated tallies of who owes what. He sent out a flurry of text messages to teammates: “This is what you owe. I’m coming for you tomorrow.”

Call Hartman what you want: the taxman, the team treasurer, the fine master. Hartman has a volunteer position in charge of handling a consistently growing pot of money accrued from Wild players. Most teams require a player like Hartman because large amounts of money changing hands among teammates is a tradition in the NHL. That money is gathered in large part to encourage team building. Part of the money collected is because players voluntarily have put “money on board,” a practice of promising an amount of money before a game a player will owe should the team win, be it for playing in their hometown or, say, if they’re playing in a milestone game.

And then there’s another practice: getting fined for a variety of unconventional infractions.

“There’s so many things you get fined for,” Maple Leafs defenseman Mark Giordano said.

Not every team fines players. And many that do see it as a dwindling yet good-natured practice. It’s one some veterans believe has merit.

Welcome to the strange, almost-secretive world of team-mandated NHL fines.

–––

Almost a generation ago, Marc-André Fleury was a reserved young goalie trying to man his way through the rules of his new life in the NHL: the unflappable importance of being on time for meetings and flights, the heightened dress codes compared to junior hockey — and, um, being well-mannered.

“There was a guy on Pittsburgh who would always pick his nose in the locker room,” Fleury said. The embarrassment of being caught wasn’t punishment enough. “So every time, guys would shout at him, ‘Hey, 10 bucks.’”

Early in Fleury’s rookie year, he got hit with his own first hefty fine.

“I couldn’t tie my tie,” Fleury said, recalling how then-veteran teammate Marc Bergevin would chirp him relentlessly. “So, I got fined because my tie looked terrible.”

A large percentage of team-directed fines remains contingent on wardrobe choices.

Leafs forward Zach Aston-Reese remembered a former teammate getting fined for wearing Cole Haan shoes. Even with the slowly shifting dress codes among NHL teams, teammates aren’t afraid to dole out fines if a player’s look starts to slip. That goes for accessories, too.

“At training camp, you get a (swag) bag with a bunch of stuff in it,” Maple Leafs defenseman Morgan Rielly said. A former teammate was using it as his travel bag. “We said if he showed up for the next flight with that bag, it’s a $500 fine.”

Most players surveyed for this story agree $500 is the de facto fine amount.

Flyers forward James van Riemsdyk said one of his teammates might get fined this season because “all of his clothes and all of his luggage are either team-issued or NHLPA-issued.”

“You’re in the NHL,” Rielly said. “You’re not supposed to be wearing the same shirt six days in a row. I always think that’s pretty funny.”

It’s always veterans who enforce these kinds of fines.

“This year, we had a younger guy who had a little incident with his wardrobe choice at a dinner,” Buffalo Sabres captain Kyle Okposo said. “Sweatpants on the road. That’s worth a fine. He’s learning.”

Fines don’t stop at wardrobe-related infractions.

“I’m a big believer in the common sense fine,” Columbus Blue Jackets defenseman Erik Gudbranson said. “A cheap one.”

Example: Should an NHL player get caught wearing white socks with dress shoes or leave their towel on the floor after coming out of the shower, these are fineable offenses according to Gudbranson, even if it’s just $50.

“Sometimes it can be funny,” Gudbranson said. “But it can also be a sign of respect.”

Not every team takes this approach, however.

New Jersey Devils defenseman Damon Severson was adamant that the Devils don’t have a strict dress code and, therefore, have barely had to fine any players this season.

“If you want to wear white shoes with dress socks, we don’t give a s— about any of that stuff here,” Severson said. “We believe just in being yourself. If you go back a few years, (former Devils general manager Lou Lamoriello) had rules with the dress code and shaving, but it’s kind of the opposite now — and that’s no disrespect to Lou. We want our personalities to be shown.”

Speaking of grooming habits, van Riemsdyk said if one of his Flyers teammates gets caught with a flashy new haircut, that’s a fine. He admits it’s a struggle for players like him who keep it tight up top. He said, almost quietly out of fear of getting found out by nearby teammates, that he got a haircut a few days prior.

“It almost works the other way: You get a haircut every two or three weeks, it doesn’t look like you’ve gotten a cut. Then you can steer clear of (a fine),” van Riemsdyk said.

Edmonton Oilers forward Derek Ryan knew he was going to get hit with a fine ahead of a game against the Arizona Coyotes on Dec. 7. While taking standard laps in warmup, Ryan bumped into a teammate and fell to the ice.

“My helmet went flying everywhere, stick on the ice,” Ryan said.

Wow, that’s embarrassing, Ryan thought to himself.

Equally embarrassing would be the shame of having to pay for the mistake afterward. Every team The Athletic surveyed agreed that when players fall on the ice during warmups, they’re on the hook for $500.

“I remember I knocked (then-teammate Brendan Shanahan) over in warmups,” Islanders forward Zach Parise recalled of the one season he spent alongside the Hall of Famer. “I wasn’t about to impose a fine for that.”

The rule has taken on different iterations league-wide. Fleury said the Wild charge double if a player loses his helmet. The Nashville Predators go the other way, according to defenseman Ryan McDonagh.

“If you fall on one knee, that’s only half the fine. But if it’s a full wipeout, that’s a full fine. You’ve got to be careful out there,” McDonagh said.

Then there’s the fine players are almost terrified of: being late for a team function, a meeting or a departing bus or flight.

“A team sin,” Severson said.

Driving through downtown Columbus en route to a team gala recently, Blue Jackets forward Sean Kuraly realized he was well behind schedule.

“The fine just stamps that you were late,” Kuraly said. “It’s embarrassing. It’s like you’re the guy who’s not following the things that help the team.”

Leafs forward Noel Acciari remembers during his time with the Florida Panthers that if a player was late for a meeting, they’d be on the hook for the next team dinner.

But that would easily be more expensive than a standard $500 fine, no?

“Especially when you know someone else is paying for dinner,” Acciari joked.

The list of fineable offenses doesn’t stop there: If a player, before puck drop, is taking part in a game of Sewer Ball — which players try to keep a soccer ball from hitting the ground in a circle to limber up — and you kick the ball to the ceiling, that’s a fine. Getting the ball stuck in the ceiling raises the fine even more.

If a cellphone starts ringing in a team meeting? One player said that’s a fineable offense on his Western Conference team.

Fleury recalled getting a $250 fine for breaking a stick.

“I was real mad after a game, and I swung my stick,” he said. “It was a wood stick, too, so it was only $60. So, they made a profit.”

Still, plenty of players surveyed by The Athletic insist they’ve avoided being fined throughout their entire NHL careers.

“You have to really screw up to get fined,” Rielly said.

–––

OK, so you owe money for a fine, and it’s time to pay the piper. Sabres fine collector Zemgus Girgensons offers many payment options.

“I’ve got everything. Venmo, Square, check,” he said.

Every fine keeper throughout the NHL has their own manner of collecting fines, but most of them, like Predators fine keeper Colton Sissons, prefer payment electronically.

“We had to change with the times,” Sissons said, noting how he acquired a Square chip reader to accept payments. Sissons set up a separate bank account just for the team’s fine and money-on-the-board funds, and he owns a credit card for that account if he needs to make team-related purchases.

“It’s a business,” he said, only partly in jest. “I catch guys when we’re stuck on the plane together. They know I don’t take any s—.”

Hartman also uses a credit card swiper to collect fines.

“No excuses. If someone says, ‘I don’t have a check today,’ I’m like, ‘Well, hand me your wallet,’” he said.

There are other methods. Some teams such as the Blues and the Oilers take fines directly out of players’ paychecks.

“You didn’t even have to worry. Which is better, because you know it’s being taken care of,” Acciari said of his time with the Blues.

Some teams, like the Leafs, prefer to keep it old school and deal in cash only.

“It’s a hassle to go to the bank,” Leafs defenseman Justin Holl said.

To mitigate the hassle for Rielly, the Leafs collector, he had a safe built into his dressing-room stall at Scotiabank Arena. He’ll remind players of their dues on game days so he can quickly throw the money into his safe, though he openly admits “it’s hard to track guys down.”

It’s hard not to read Rielly’s efforts as him tiring of the process.

“I liked doing it (when he started),” Rielly said of being the fine keeper. “I don’t like doing it as much anymore.”

–––

So why do it? What benefit is there for the fine keeper?

“Someone’s got to do it,” Girgensons said, shrugging his shoulders.

Multiple NHL players said for a player to be appointed the fine keeper, they only have to tick a few boxes: If you’re a well-liked and trusted veteran, this glamorous job may be yours for the taking.

“It’s actually a lot more work than anyone thinks,” Sissons said.

What about some slight interest in numbers? Perhaps balancing books for an NHL team’s fine fund is a precursor to a career after hockey in finance?

“I did like math class,” Sissons said. “But that’s not why I took the job. I guess people think I’m trustworthy.”

Modest as some of the fine keepers might be, there are perks to the job if you put the effort in. If you’re able to manage large sums of money and transfer them back and forth between a bank account and a credit card, you could be in for some sneaky benefits.

“I pay for things out of my own account, and I get all the points,” Sissons said.

Hartman agrees. After collecting payments from players, he uses a credit card to use that money to shell out for team events.

“The credit card is maxed out right now. We’ve had a few trips recently … with some big dinners,” Hartman said.

He’s not bothered though. The recently-engaged Hartman is thinking long-term: Stay on top of guys, and then use that money to pay for team functions, and those points will add up.

“Maybe I’ll get a honeymoon out of it,” he said, a smile creeping out from behind his thick beard.

Hartman’s plan isn’t devious by any means. Even for him, there is a team-building element to being the collector of the fines, and some NHL players informed of his process appeared slightly jealous. Every month, Hartman will buy three $500 Best Buy gift certificates and hand them out to his three Wild teammates who paid the most money that month into the team’s fund. It’s partly an incentive both for paying on time and for contributing to the team fund, but partly born out of Hartman’s own guilt.

“It’s a discount,” he said, modestly. “I feel bad. But we do spend it.”

And spend they do. Come the end of the season, there is always an effort to put the money back in the hands of the team.

For the Leafs, perhaps that means the team taking in an NFL game on the road. There are Super Bowl parties and Masters parties, too. And on Feb. 27, multiple Leafs took in a Bruce Springsteen concert in Seattle for some team-building and to help accelerate the bonding process for newcomers. The Leafs welcomed recently acquired teammates Sam Lafferty and Jake McCabe then.

“To get into an environment like that and get to know the guys is perfect,” McCabe said of the concert.

The year-end team party often sucks the most money out of the fine fund. The amount of money teams will spend on food, drinks, event space and the event itself varies, but multiple NHL players said somewhere in the range of $50,000 for a year-end party is a fair estimate.

Gudbranson noted how after the team’s head equipment manager, Jamie Healy, logged his 2,000th professional game on Jan. 29, the team dipped into the fund to purchase him a gift.

Ultimately, many NHL veterans view the money they can raise through the fine fund as less of a benefit to the team than the practice itself.

“Us veteran guys have to hold the young guys accountable more,” McDonagh said.

Gudbranson is adamant: The practice of good habits in the NHL has been “lost a little bit.”

The argument that fining young players heightens standards of professionalism league-wide is rooted in history. Gudbranson recalls his rookie duties while playing junior hockey for the Kingston Frontenacs: Unloading equipment from the team bus, mopping floors and helping out with laundry. These duties were not rituals to make players feel beyond uncomfortable, a practice that has no place in hockey. But, according to Gudbranson, understanding the benefits of working for the team is a concept that should be applied in the NHL. And if those concepts, such as respecting the dressing room, are forgotten, Gudbranson believes “the fine system can help with that.”

“You move away from home and your parents aren’t there to parent you anymore. Those little things, they teach you a lot,” Gudbranson said.

Of course, no young NHL player is going to be asked to mop the floor as a form of punishment.

But if fining young players for otherwise asinine offenses maintains a level of professionalism in the NHL, then veterans like Gudbranson aren’t going to be afraid to remind young players to have a credit card nearby at all times.

“You’re a professional athlete,” Gudbranson said. “You’ve got to act the part.”

[thiswasinevitableid]

Fall Fun (Indruck)

The runner up of the spooky creatures poll was "person indebted to a pumpkin demon."

Thanks to @bellafarallones2 for playing in this space on discord. This ended up being SFW, but if you need your horny pumpkin demon fix, I got you covered. And you can find even more plant demons here

Indrid Cold sits on the bedroom floor of his tiny studio apartment. The one that’s not up to code and he’s paying for under the table. The one he has just drawn green chalk markings all across the floor of. 

In retrospect, it was always going to come to this. 

Last year, the instant he turned 18, he moved out of his father’s huge, historic house and as far as his limited funds would carry him. Which turned out to be the other side of town. For awhile the combination from his pay at the Dollar General and commissions for his art were enough to keep him afloat. But now someone, he’s almost positive it’s his father, has bought the building he’s living in and jacking up the rent.

Indrid doesn’t have as many tools at his disposal as he’d like. But he’s got a strange  book he found at a thrift store and a willingness to get weird, and that will have to do for now. 

He finishes drawing the circles and lights the candles–orange–and reads the incantation. As the last word leaves his lips, the markings turn to vines, sprouting across the floorboards until he’s sitting in the middle of a pumpkin patch. A massive, orange pumpkin rises from the ground, nearly hits the ceiling before opening with a wet crack. 

A figure steps from within, and for a moment Indrid thinks he’s in a Washington Irving story; the man’s body is topped with a green pumpkin head, its eyes flickering with fire, and he’s clad in a green cape and riding clothes. 

The demon stares down at Indrid, then looks at his own feet. 

“Aw fuck, thought this spell’d been wiped from the books.”

“...excuse me?”

The demon picks pumpkin guts from his sleeves, “This entrance is messy as all get out. Wrote a new one where I just kinda poof into place. Guess you must’ve found a real old book.  Whelp, no point in dwellin’ on it; what can I do for you?”

Indrid cannot decide if the friendly demeanor or the southern accent is more wrong-footing, but he clears his throat and says, “I wish to make a pact, great and terrible one.”

“Okay, shoot.” The demon sets his gloved hands on his hips. 

“I…I want you to make it so that no one owns this building, but that no one makes me own it and, I don’t know, pay taxes on it or something. I just want to live here and be left alone.”

The demon looks around, then makes his way to the door and flips the light switch, leaving Indrid squinting under the bare bulbs.

“Hate to say it, slim, but it kinda looks like no one owns it now.”

“Yes, it does give that impression. But right now it costs me $800 a month with the promise of climbing more.”

The demon whistles, an odd, low tone, “Damn. Yeah, I can do that. But you gotta…uh, one sec” He pulls a faded, green book from his pocket and quickly scans the pages, “lemme see…looks like the best I can do is that favor in exchange for a year's worth of service to me. Bit steep, but we got brackets for this stuff that we gotta follow.”

“Done.” It’ll take him that long to save up for a move anyway. 

The demon holds out a hand, and when Indrid shakes it he feels vines and wood beneath, not skin. As carved eyes flash green flame, he’s glad he didn’t ask for more. 

“Deal’s in place. I’ll be around in a day or two. Gotta figure out how to put you to work.” He winks, then sinks into the floor with a “see you around, slim.”

—-------------------------------------------------------------------

“You gonna come hang out tonight?” Barclay slips an extra cookie into Indrids’ bag as he picks up his order.

“No, I don’t think so. Thank you for offering but I will be busy.” 

His friend looks worried enough that Indrid almost feels bad for the fact that what he’ll be busy doing is staring at the wall and wondering what the point of it all is. 

“Well if you change your mind, you know where to find me. Aubrey helped Ned clear out some Saturday Night Dead videos, so who knows what she’ll bring to watch.”

Indrid promises to think about it, then trudges home in the chilly air to a chillier apartment. Then it feels as if he’s in a late summer garden, and when he turns the demon is watching him. 

“Got a job for you.”

“Alright.” Indrid tries not to flinch as the creature raises his hand. A snap like breaking branches produces nothing but a cluster of new groceries on his counter. 

“You want me to bake for you?” Indrid picks up the box of pumpkin spice cake mix.

“Not quite. See, what’s gonna happen is you’re gonna make those, put ‘em all in this” a pumpkin shaped cake carrier appears “and go to your buddy’s house. You’re also gonna stop by your neighbor on the way, the nice guy with the funky metal goat statue in his yard.”

Indrid turns, can of cream cheese frosting in hand, “Apologies, dark one, but I’m not sure I see the point of this.”

The demon crosses his arms, “These last few days have been normal, right? How your days usually go?”

“Yes…”

“Yeah, see, you keep up like this, you’re just gonna shrivel up like a sapling in the sun.” The green coat rustles as he steps forward, “you’re lonely, slim. Don’t take demon powers to see that. Or that there are folks who don’t want you to feel that way. So” the demon tosses him an apron with a Death's Head Moth printed on the front, “get that oven on. And quit callin’ me ‘dark one’ and shit like that. You can just call me Duck; it’s a nickname.”

Indrid has a multitude of questions, but decides it’s better not to pester an entity that can turn his veins to vines. 

For some reason, Duck hangs around while he bakes, creaking and gliding from one end of the studio to the other, not speaking but not making Indrid feel as if he has to fill the silence. When he notices that he’s running out of time before movie night, the demon returns and perchings on the kitchen table as vines emerge to help Indrid frost the cupcakes. 

The demon dissipates as soon as he touches the front door. Indrid leaves a smaller container of cupcakes for his neighbor across the way, and the small burn he got from the oven is worth it a hundred times over when Barclay practically rips the door off its hinges letting him in. 

It’s only when he returns home, tired and happy, that he notices the stained, white paint of the bathroom is now a light, homey orange. Like candlelight in a window. 

It makes him smile. 

—---------------------------------------------------------

“Duck, can I ask you something?”

“Sure”  The green Jack’O Lantern by his chair replies, soft enough that only he can hear. 

“Why have me do this?” He gestures to the library's fall fair, where he’s currently under a pop-up tent next to a table of face-painting supplies. The children's librarian had been very excited when he’d volunteered his services; apparently none of the other volunteers felt confident in their artistic talents. 

“Are you not havin’ fun?”

“No. Nono, it’s actually rather nice. I was worried it would be overwhelming but it being outside has kept me from feeling trapped. And it’s fun to make the kids happy. I just don’t see how this benefits you.”

“It don’t. Not directly anyway. I was the god of harvest festivals once upon a time. Never cared much for the worship and such; I just liked watching people get all these little moments of joy outta things like pumpkins or turnips. Hell, even leaves. So I try’n do things to encourage that these days, too. Other demons might get all high on the fact they got power, but that’s never been my style. I’m a simple being.”

Indrid smirks, “That grazing board you made me spend three hours assembling yesterday begs to differ. I never should have let you know about Pinterest.”

“Was it or was it not the right thing to eat while watchin’ every single Halloween movie?”

“Oh it definitely was.” He raises one of his brushes, “but maybe I should paint you as a bunny or something, just to keep you humble.”

A vine sneaks through the back of the chair and playfully pinches him, “Careful, slim, hate to have to get handsy in front of all these people.”

Indrid stifles a laugh, “Alright, alright, fair enough.”

“....If you wanted to paint flames on me that’d be sick as hell.”

He dips his brush in the yellow paint, “Your wish is my command.”

—------------------------------------------------------------

Duck’s never been accidentally summoned before. Usually he always has time to at least toss on the robe and make himself look like he wasn’t just in the garden or petting his cat when they called. But tonight, he’s just come in from checking on his fall beds, still in his t-shirt and tattered jeans,  when he’s yanked upward and around into the human world. 

He can by smell alone that he’s in Indrid’s place, and as he wobbles he spots the bags of Halloween candy the man bought the night before (“it’s still a few days from now, but I like to make sure I have the good stuff to give away”). What he doesn’t see is his human. 

“‘Drid? You home?”

A ragged gasp comes from the mattress in the far corner of the room, and a face peeks out from  what he assumed was just a pile of blankets. 

“Duck? What” Indrid sniffs and wipes his eyes, “what are you doing here?”

“No fuckin’ clue.” He kneels by the bed, “but I got a hunch that it’s got to do with you hiding away like a bulb waiting for spring.”

Worryingly, Indrid whimpers at that and retreats most of the way back into the blanket. Duck rests a hand on his forehead, petting his silver hair. Without his gloves, it’s obvious how much of his form is plant matter masquerading as a man. But Indrid doesn’t flinch, and so Duck uses the ends of his fingers to gently scritch his scalp. 

“What happened?”

“I, my, my father turned up at the Lodge where Barclay works. A-aubrey and some of my other friends were there too and he yelled at all of them for helping me. He even threatened Barclay to his face, he, I think he was trying to goad him into a fight so he could call the cops on him. Mama threw him out but I, when Barclay called me I could tell how upset and scared he was and it, it’s all my fault.” His face scrunches up and he burrows, without hesitation, against Duck, trying not to cry. 

Duck knows he’s never known a human who he thought looked cute even when he was crying, but now is not the time to bring that up. Instead he wraps his arms around him and adds some vines for extra security. 

“Hey, hey slim it’s okay. It ain’t your fault.”

“But it is. He wouldn’t have done that if it weren’t for me”

“For all we know he would have because he’s a huge fuckin asshole.”

“I just…I’m bad luck. I’m always causing my friends trouble, they’d be, be better off not knowing me.” He’s clinging to Duck’s shirt, and there’s now dirt on his cheek from where it’s been pressed to him. 

“That ain’t true. Know I’m better having you in my life, and I bet they feel the same.”

A final, shuddery sob leaves the human. Then he says, flatly, “I would like to go to bed now.”

“Okay” Duck releases him, “you want me to tuck you in. These are great for that.” The vines wiggle but Indrid just blinks at them. 

“No. Thank you. I will see you soon.”

Duck cups his cheek and wishes him goodnight. Then he stays in the shadows, imperceptible, until he’s certain his human is sound asleep. 

—--------------------------------------------------------------

Indrid is drunk on pumpkin spice BuzzBalls and practically passed out on a tombstone. 

Still not the worst birthday he’s had. 

Barclay had suggested he come over once trick or treating was done and join everyone for a Halloween/birthday party. He declined. It’s safer for them if he celebrates out here alone. 

He’s drunk enough that it feels like the ground is floating away. And like the world smells like the singed innards of a Jack’O Lantern.

Wait

“Duck?”

“Yep. Came by to bring you some special glow in the dark pumpkins and got kinda worried when I couldn’t find you.” The demon’s voice is blossom-soft as he lowers Indrid into his bed. He didn’t know Duck could teleport him as well. 

“M’fine, I promise.”

“‘Drid, it’s not even 7 pm and you’re falling down.” There’s a wooden buzz, then Duck says, “wait, it’s your birthday?”

Indrid sits up, finds the demon looking at the phone he left on the table.

“Yes. It has never been much fun to celebrate.”

There’s a flurry of vines and leaves, a burst of life, then Indrid’s apartment is full of lit pumpkins and halloween lights, making the walls orange and purple. Duck holds out a small, brown box. Indrid opens it. Inside are gauges for his ears; they’re burnished and beautifully organic looking, as if Duck made them of petrified pumpkin shell. 

“Figure I can do my part to change that.”

Indrid holds the box, looking up at Duck’s strange face. If someone like Duck cares about him, wants him to be happy, even when he’s seen him so pathetic…

“I…I want to go see my friends. I don’t want to celebrate alone.”

“I can help with that.” Duck kneels, rests the cool surface of his forehead against Indrid’s own. After a moment, he feels far more sober. And much braver.

“I don’t suppose there’s a way you could come with me? I like you so much and I want the others to get to know you too…”

“Gimme one sec. Uh, this might be kinda weird.” Duck sets his fingers into his eyes and mouth and pulls. There’s a hollow crunch and crack, and then the pumpkin splits and falls away. In its place is a round, human face with dark hair, a crooked smile, and beautiful, green eyes. 

“Oh” Indrid gasps. 

Duck smiles, “Don’t get too used to it, slim. Takes a lot of power to do this, so I can only pull it off now and then.” He looks down at his hands and the overalls he appeared in, “guess we’ll just tell ‘em my costume was a scarecrow or something. But, uh, how do we explain how we know each other?”

Indrid cautiously leans forward and kisses him. There’s a faint taste of smoke when the demon smiles into the kiss and slips his fingers into Indrid’s hair. 

“Perhaps we could introduce you as my boyfriend?”

Vines hug him close as Duck kisses him again and whispers, “Yeah, slim, let’s do that.”

[uboat53]

Well, Trump's tax returns are public and, while the first wave of "oh my goodness, he paid no taxes!" stories have come out, we're now starting to get to the interesting stuff. SHORT RANT (TM) ahead.

By the way, if you're interested in reading through them yourself (they're about 5,000 pages in total), Politico has published them here.

NO TAXES

As with the last time we got a look at Trump's taxes, when The New York Times managed to get ahold of some and publish them a few years ago, we can see that there are years where he pays very little or even no taxes. This is a product of the fact that our tax code contains lots of incentives for property developers to build things and Trump's aggressive use of every trick in the book to get out of paying taxes.

What is surprising, though is that he paid significant taxes in three of the years covered. Not significant compared to the earnings he claimed, but taxes in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, even approaching $1 million in 2018. As for the reason why that's interesting, I'll get to that in a bit.

THE FAILURE OF THE IRS

One thing that was reported immediately, and is definitely something we should still be concerned about, is that the IRS failed to follow its own rules and audit the sitting president until Democrats took the House in 2019 and asked about it. Even then they didn't actually do the audit, they just rubber-stamped the papers that Trump had given them.

Every president since 1977 has been audited on a yearly basis, so why did the IRS fail to audit Trump? Did he or his people put pressure on the agency? Did the complexity of his tax returns overwhelm the IRS? There are very few answers I can think of that don't indicate some type of real problem and we should definitely track it down to get to the bottom of this so that we can fix it.

PRESIDENTIAL SALARY

Remember when Trump said he was so rich already that he'd donate his presidential salary of $400,000 per year to charity? I'm sure you're shocked to hear that didn't quite do that.

At least in 2020 he kept his entire salary, donating none of it to charity.

PAYING TAXES

I noted earlier that I was a bit surprised to see that Trump actually paid a reasonable amount of taxes in 2018 and 2019. The taxes he paid are from capital gains on $20 million and $9 million and, if you're familiar with capital gains taxes, you know that this means he sold that much in capital assets because you don't get taxed until you sell.

Now why would he sell? The standard tax strategy for rich people who own a lot of capital is just to borrow against their capital so they don't have to sell it and then pass it on to their descendants who don't have to pay the capital gains tax due to the stepped up basis. It's also a question of why he sold in those years and not others where losses could have offset the gains? He reported even greater losses in 2020 and didn't sell anything.

I've read two likely possibilities (see the CNN article linked below): either he was desperate for cash and unable to borrow or he got such a good deal on the sale that it was worth paying the taxes.

Either one of those possibilities raises HUGE red flags for possible conflicts of interest given that, you know, he was President of the United States at the time. If he got a sweetheart deal, who paid him that much money and why? If he was desperate for cash, who did he owe it to and did they demand anything else from him?

CONCLUSION

So yeah, these tax returns have only been public for about a day so far but already there's a ton of indications of problematic behavior that have been found. I'll be very interested to see how much more we can learn from them in the coming weeks and months.

SOURCES

[everlastingremorse-blog]

So, I went to Denfur last month. Tons of fun, loved it. While I was there, I got a bag of coffee from dragon roast coffee.

It was really good. Super good. Plus, I got a promo code, so I got some more.

But then, when I went to checkout, I got free shipping, until I put in the promo code… which was less than free shipping.

Like, it’s 22 cents. It’s not a really big deal, but also, like c’mon. Idk, just feels kinda shitty. Don’t get me wrong, I still got it. The coffee I got was really good, and I want more… but still. And I know that it’s not too strange that when a company offers one discount, they don’t accept that with other discounts, but like, idk. Just feels kinda bleh.

And then I checked the confirmation email they sent.

And apparently taxes weren’t that high? I double checked my bank to make sure how much I was charged. It was 43.79. Once again, it’s only two dollars. I’m in a position to spend 40$ on coffee, I’m fine. It just feels shady. Idk.

[invincible-selfxmade-punk]

Long Story About Autism and Expensive Food

A few months back we switched from Every Plate to Cook Unity.

Every Plate was great during covid when we had a lot of time to spend at home and could spend that time preparing the dishes. However now we are both working full-time and by the time we're home at night most nights it is just too much work to go through all of those recipes which usually entails making three things simultaneously- two vegetables and one meat.

Cook Unity is not cheap but it is already prepared, you can choose from hundreds of meals from almost any type of cuisine in the world and it is prepared for you by a chef.

It is some of the best food I have ever eaten.

It's like having a meal cater just for you from your favorite restaurant and it only takes 10 minutes to heat up your oven.

I have only come across maybe two meals that were not spectacular and that's just because they were too spicy for me because it was my first taste of Indian food and I was not used to the spices.

The only drawback to CU is that even though you can skip a week whenever you want, and we do that quite a bit, we only get about 2 weeks of food a month, if you do not respond in a certain amount of time they will automatically send you meals that you did not pick. And this would not be bad except that the meals that are always on tap for you to get are the same meals you have already tried, in our case the same for meals and two of those are the Indian dishes that were too spicy.

The smallest plan is four meals per week and it runs about $65 Plus tax. So that's one meal for each of us twice a week that I don't have to cook and that is absolutely delicious and filling. It is literally like a high quality restaurant meal that is delivered to your door, that you can prepare at your leisure.

I have been trying to get one of my coworkers to try this. And she has expressed interest in wanting to try even though she keeps procrastinating.

A few weeks ago I did something wrong in choosing the meals and I got the default meals in. Hubby absolutely refused to eat them because he said he had already had them and did not want them again so soon and I just really could not handle the Indian food.

So even though she did not ask, I decided to give these meals to my coworker because I didn't want them to go to waste at all.

I gave them to her and they were put in the refrigerator in the lounge. I reminded her about four times to pick them up. She never did and they stayed there over the Thanksgiving holidays and then spoiled.

I'm positive it is an Autism thing, really wanting to share something you love with somebody else. And it hurts when they'll share that.

But as someone who grew up poor it absolutely Galls me to my bone marrow to throw away $65 worth of high quality food because someone else couldn't be bothered long enough to walk down the hallway and take it from the refrigerator.

We were raised like we were poor even though we were probably a little closer to middle class. However my dad was the cheapest man alive it seemed like. The man would reuse paper towels until they disintegrated. He would add water to every possible thing to make it last as much as he could until the very last drop of it was used.

I was raised not to spend money, to save every dime I could, and that buying anything for myself that wasn't absolutely necessary for my survival was utterly selfish..

I haven't said anything to her just because I don't trust myself not to get extremely upset about it. But it really and truly upset me.

I will be much more careful in the future if I ever decide to do that again.

That being said comma if you have the money comma Cook Unity is highly recommended by me And I can get you a code for 50 off your first week period

[ssvgawara]

Haikyuu boys and some oddly specific crime they’d commit

a/n: I come back and the first thing I write is a shitpost!! enjoy </3 tw for drugs, murder, alcohol and general crime committing xoxo

Karasuno

Daichi- he’s a cop sorry that’s all there is to it man

Suga- Suga has multiple charges of 1st-degree murder against him but they can’t seem to find his identity so he continues committing murder and will continue until he gets caught or ends up murdering enough people to be put in a position of power

Asahi- everyone is probably like “Oh Asahi is innocent” NO. He has learned that his slightly scary face will let him get away with a lot, he is buying alcohol illegally because he looks old enough to, and he’s buying so much other shit and just getting away with it

Nishinoya- This man gives fucking pimp vibes I can just see him in the big leopard print fur coat with a pretty girl in his lap and he calls himself big poppa but no one else will

Tanaka- Drug dealer vibes, probably runs an entire fucking drug ring with his sister and not just a Lil weed these mfkas have the hard shit too like you could probably buy meth from them, he’s not using it but it’s good business

Ennoshita, Kinoshita, and Narita- They literally rob a bank they have an entire scheme and get away with multiple bank robberies and this goes on for MONTHS

Kageyama- We know he’s volleyball smart but otherwise he’s so mfing stupid and I love him for it but he is a chronic shoplifter. Just picks something up and takes it, has walked out of a store without paying for an entire bed set once and got away with it somehow so idk props to him

Hinata- He is the little guy in any heist situation, he fits anywhere so he can sneak in and out the best, he gave himself the stupid ass code name tiny giant but everyone goes with it because somehow he is the best

Tsukishima- armed robbery, but he doesn’t have a gun just a knife like he’s tall and as an attitude, a knife will get him whatever he needs he doesn’t need the gun

Yamaguchi- He runs a catfishing scheme where he pretends to be a naive girl, scams old men out of their money, and then ghosts them and I think it’s what he deserves let him carry on especially because no one would believe it’s him. Also not really like a crime crime but still a crime in a way

Kiyoko- She kills men and I know it, Queen Kiyoko ending the patriarchy one shitty man at a time like she only kills men who deserve it bc some have rights.

Yachi- She’s too anxious to commit an in-person crime so she does a lot of cybercrime, hacking government databases and releasing info to the people, truly the anonymous we deserve

Saeko- She’s running that drug ring with Tanaka, and she loves it because there’s a thrill to it even though yknow she’s dealing literal meth but like its fine plus she loves rocking people’s shit when they get too handsy, which bring me to my next point underground MMA Saeko, like the illegal one with no rules yeah <3

Ukai- this man probably sells all kinda shit to minors that he shouldn’t he is so unbothered a 7-year-old could probably walk in ask for a pack of camels and get them and leave before he noticed what was going on.

Takeda- Did y’all see how scared Hinata was when Takeda gave him that lecture? This dude could kidnap someone and scare them into giving all the information he needed, a legend truly

Aoba Johsai

Oikawa- took steroids one time. And of course in sports, that’s not allowed. But he only did it once and regretted it for months afterward. Never told anyone and was just relieved he didn’t have to piss in a cup and have someone find out.

Matsukawa- Without hesitation, I know this man takes dead people’s bones and sells them on the internet. Has dubbed himself the bone man and he feels so much power when someone buys a femur or sumn. It’s kinda funny honestly he has a hoard of bones to sell, his fave is the pelvis.

Hanamaki- He’s in between jobs because he stole money from his last job, like he said he was sorry he just needed a little extra for gas but was sad to find out that’s a literal crime and he was laundering money.

Iwaizumi- he’s a street racer, like the fast and furious style and it’s so sexy of him like late-night races ugh to be in an expensive fast car with him where he has one hand on my thigh okay that’s enough of that.

Kunimi- Look me in the eye and tell me he does not do drugs. He does and if you don’t believe me you are wrong and I will fight you on this one. 

Kyotani- If there is a crime he will commit it for fun. Like he will do it with no hesitation. He has a record longer than twilight and I’m not sure how he is not in prison actually nvm he escaped and is  a wanted criminal lol

Shiritorizawa

Ushijima- Assault, he just reeks of getting into bar fights when he’s absolutely wasted. Like he most likely didn’t start it but he will be finishing it

Tendou- grave robbing, he just goes into the cemetery picked the oldest plots, and gets to digging. Has made thousands on dead people jewelry and probably won’t get caught, like besides the groundskeeper there’s no security he will never stop.

Semi- he breaks copyright laws on the daily. He’s sampling music in his all the time but he’s doing it so sneakily it’s fine its what deserves stream his band on Spotify right now,

Shirabu- His bangs are criminal enough. No, but he has stolen drugs from the hospital before he just wanted to try the Xanax, and yeah he could just write himself a prescription for it nut like it’s so easy to just go get some and no report it so that’s what he did.

Goshiki- y’all want me to say arson don’t you?? Fine. He commits arson multiple times and kills 7 people with fire before getting arrested and he doesn’t even feel bad so in prison he probably fucking runs a gang he is crazy.

Nekoma

Kuroo- he is a capitalist and class traitor and that’s crime enough I don’t care is he’s attractive or rich, He commits crimes daily by just existing but I still love him anyway.

Kai- Could not commit a crime he just wants to garden and live his life. Jk there’s at minimum one body in that garden let him kill a man he deserves it just let him have one dead body

Yaku- he keyed someone’s car once just because they pissed him off. Was it kuroo? Yes. But that’s fine because he also keyed Lev’s car but blamed lev for keying kuroo’s and Kuroo for keying Lev’s. He just wants to watch the world burn.

Kenma- cyberbullying but man he is mean. Like no bars held we will dig into every insecurity he can and that shit hurts and he doesn’t even feel bad about it he will just be as mean as he can if you’re not careful

Lev- his crime is being tall and dumb also doesn’t understand the economy and prints counterfeit money because why can’t we print more money? The government should get on that.

Inuoka- He released all the animals from a zoo, like snuck in one night and just let them all free, I’m surprised the tiger didn’t eat him but hey the animals are free, there’s still some missing uh oh he’s very proud of himself for it. After the rush, he starts sneaking into shelters and freeing all the dogs and cats

Yamamoto and Fukunaga- Have egged a house before, it was Kuroo’s he deserves all this bullying and you can’t stop me.

Date Tech

Aone- Criminal Conspiracy, sure he had an entire foolproof plan to get away with the perfect crime but someone found out, and now his plans are ruined, damn </3 and no one ever suspects the quiet guy either.

Futakuchi- Having a prostitute, he just wanted some company like mans is lonely so he paid a girl to just spend a Lil time with him it’s all good.

Fukurodani

Bokuto- I know we all haha funny laugh at tax evader bokuto and sure maybe he evades his taxes but he’s also committed vehicular manslaughter, he cannot drive and has killed someone with his car maybe even multiple someones but he always drives off in a panic because he doesn’t know what else to do.

Akaashi- Hasn’t actively committed a crime but has been an accomplice in every vehicular manslaughter Bokuto has committed why the fuck does he keep letting bokuto drive? He really needs to stop that.

Konoha- A master scammer he is so convincing everyone gives him money even if they’re a little sus because he’s just that good each scheme is so convincing.

Inarizaki

Kita- He grows weed, you can’t tell me those rice fields are just for rice he’s got all this space he is growing marijuana and selling it, let him do it I want him to be my plug.

Atsumu- "What is my perfect crime? I break into Tiffany's at midnight. Do I go for the vault? No, I go for the chandelier. It's priceless. As I'm taking it down, a woman catches me. She tells me to stop. It's her father's business. She's Tiffany. I say no. We make love all night. In the morning, the cops come and I escape in one of their uniforms. I tell her to meet me in Mexico, but I go to Canada. I don't trust her. Besides, I like the cold. Thirty years later, I get a postcard. I have a son and he's the chief of police. This is where the story gets interesting. I tell Tiffany to meet me in Paris by the Trocadero. She's been waiting for me all these years. She's never taken another lover. I don't care. I don't show up. I go to Berlin. That's where I stashed the chandelier."

Osamu- resisting arrest. He just said no and ran. Granted he shouldn’t have punched the cop in the first place to have to be arrested but like that’s not the point here.

Aran- accidental child abandonment, like he just forgot he was babysitting and left the kid alone for like a day. He felt terrible but he still forgot the kid and now is fearful of parenthood

Suna- owns an illegal weapon, like he just never registered it and keeps it around and would use it if needed Suna please just point the weapon at me maybe

Others

Terushima- Graffiti, he loves painting on the walls of buildings and tagging them, has so much spraypaint and his day isn’t complete if he doesn’t tag at least one building or train car.

Daishou- Public intoxication- he got a little too fucked up and stripped on the street he will forever have to live with everyone knowing he has an ass tattoo like damn bruh

Sakusa- Perjury he simply wanted to get out of court so he said some shit so he could leave granted he lied under oath but whatever, did they ever find out? No, so he’s fine and he’d do it again if it meant he could leave faster. Like sure he was a witness to a murder but bruh he pretends he does not see.

Hoshihumi- driving without a license he simply thought you didn’t need one because why do you need a piece of plastic to say you can drive a car like??? Just know how to drive it.

[amintyworld]

Doubts - Beginnings Part 4

WATERFALL (Part One), SUNSET (Part Two), SECRETS (Part Three)

A/N: Guess who back, back again-! Anyway, thanks to all the support in the last three parts, this series has been such a blast to write! I’ve finally decided on a name for it - Beginnings, so that’s what they’ll be titled with from now on to avoid any confusion. As always, links to the last three parts are above. I hope you enjoy! - Minty

TW: Surprise Pregnancy, anxiety/worry, blood/gore, alcohol/drinking, implied major character death, sickness, cursing. (Let me know if I need to tag anything else!)

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

They started construction on a house around a 15-minute walk from Phil’s house, on a hill that overlooked the waterfall in the distance. They didn’t know what they were doing, but Phil did his best to help out when he could and give advice, having been in a similar situation not too long ago. Wilbur went out searching for jobs when he could and managed to get gigs every now and then as he saved up cash to get everything they needed. It was a new feeling for the couple - Wilbur’s constant worry over his girlfriend, and Sally’s determination to not let the pregnancy control her. All in all, it was a bit of a frazzle. Tommy and Tubbo were a bit off-put at the fact that they’d be uncles at such a young age - nonetheless, they tried to take it all in stride.

Phil answered a lot of questions in the following weeks from his two younger sons, who didn’t understand how it all worked. A good example could be just last week when Tubbo gave Sally ginger ale and straw, leaving Phil slightly confused until he figured out Tubbo was trying to help her out since ‘her stomach hurt’. Tommy’s confused ideas of helping were a bit more out there than his brother’s - the Carrot Incident was a pretty good example - but it was clear that their hearts were always in the right place. 

Technoblade was distanced and tried not to get too involved but helped out when he needed to - he told Phil that this was more Wilbur’s responsibility than his, which Phil couldn’t deny. The pig hybrid still hung around the couple and even eased their worries when he realized how absurd some of Wilbur’s concerns became - “You’re reading too much on those books, Wil. Just because it could happen doesn’t mean it will!” Technoblade was always available to talk and support his brother, who became a bit of a mess from it all. 

Still, they were a happy family who was nothing but excited for the baby’s arrival - they were going on five months, and things had been going smoothly�� at least, mostly smoothly.

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

Wilbur pulled up the covers on the bed as he left a tender kiss on Sally’s forehead. She smiled, yawning. “Wake me up for dinner…?”

“Of course, my salmon. You rest, I’ll make sure Tubbo and Tommy are quiet.”

Another yawn escaped the shifter’s lips. “You tell them if they wake me up they’ll be dealing with a very pissed off pregnant lady who…*yawn* won’t hesitate to kick their asses.” Wilbur giggled softly, brushing the hair out of his girlfriend’s face in a simple loving gesture.

“Get some sleep, okay?” Wilbur said. “I won’t be far.”

“I love you, Wil.”

“I love you too, Sally,” Wilbur said, turning off the lights to darken the room as he gently and softly closed the door behind him. Over time, most of his worries had eased, thankfully - but a few lingered in his mind that fizzled around his brain. Wilbur tried to push them away as he moved downstairs, resting his head against the counter for a brief moment, sitting on one of the kitchen stools. He let out a breath he didn’t know he was holding as he ran his hands through his hair once again. He had a gig later that night, but his body craved rest. Wilbur chose to ignore it, there wasn’t much use anyway. If he napped at this point he’d miss the job altogether, and he needed the cash. Bored, trying to distract himself, he pulled out his notepad and flipped to a fresh page as he rhythmically tapped the pencil against the paper, willing himself to focus his thoughts.

It felt strange to Wilbur to stare down at a blank page and not have anything to write. It was hard to describe how he felt, much less think of rhymes. So much was overwhelming his emotions and feelings, still, he tried to focus and scribble words across the page. Maybe if he wrote it all down, he’d feel better somehow - it always worked for him before. His notepad held all the times he was happy, all the times he was sad, upset, angry, confused… all hidden in words like a code only he could understand. It was the closest thing to a journal or diary that he owned, one of his most prized possessions.

Maybe it’ll comfort him now.

I’m struggling to breathe

Keep going

Protect her

Push forward

Wilbur looked down, his mouth turning down in distaste - this wasn’t exactly the lyrical poem that he usually formed. There was, as always, some truth in the words. It felt like he was ranting, almost. It didn’t make sense.

Everything will be okay

Wilbur’s eyebrows furrowed in thought at what he wrote. He was trying to reassure himself, but… it felt wrong.

Will everything be okay?

“Uh-oh, the notepad’s out,” Phil said jokingly from the doorway as he carried in what looked to be a large basket filled with the garden’s harvest - wheat, carrots, and potatoes. He quickly noticed Wilbur’s distress, his smirk quickly disappearing. “Wil? Wil what’s wrong?”

Wilbur sighed as he read the words staring up at him over and over. “Nothing really. Just a lot on my mind, I guess.”

“I see,” Phil said, not believing that for a second as he set the large basket down on the counter, methodically moving to store up the food. “You look tired.”

“I feel tired,” Wilbur said, finally closing the notepad as he let out a soft chuckle in the suffocatingly silent house. “Got a gig in an hour, though.”

“You need to sleep, Wil.” Phil scolded, his gaze stern.

Wilbur waved him off. “I’ve got a lot I need to do. It’s no problem, anyway - the club’s gonna close up in a few days, and then Jay said I might not get another job in at least a month while they restock for summer.” Phil gave him a look, hand on his hip as Wilbur held up both his hands in surrender. “I’ll get some better sleep then, I swear.”

“Good,” Phil said, his gaze softening as he turned back to the basket. “Are you heading to Melrose’s place tonight, or TBO?”

“Melrose. She needed me last minute to fill a half-hour slot, promised to pay double.” Wilbur said as he got up from the stool and stretched, heading over to grab a cup of lukewarm coffee that was left in the pot from the morning. Hey, coffee was coffee, and he needed to keep the sandman at bay - double pay was no joke, and with his earnings tonight he’d finally be able to get everything they needed for the new house and for the baby. He needed to go, and he had to do well.

“I hope she doesn’t expect to keep dragging you out last minute.”

“Hey, as long as it pays well-” Wilbur shot thoughtfully as he sipped his coffee. The two turned their attention as Technoblade entered the house, his weapons, and clothes covered in blood, a few of his kills on his shoulder. Phil grimaced. 

“Techno, I told you not to track blood in the house, go around to the back-!” The smell of rotting and decay, potent, filled the boy’s noses as they pinched them, trying to get rid of the scent. Technoblade silently turned around, going out the front door again. “You better shower and change before dinner, don’t forget!” Phil called as Techno simply waved his hand.

“Yeah, yeah…”

Wilbur quickly chugged the last of his coffee as he put the mug in the sink and quickly followed his older sibling. The night was cold as he pulled his jacket closer around him, walking around toward the back of the house. The sky was quickly turning dark as the day began to end, stars not quite appearing just yet. Techno sat over the two dead sheep he’d brought into the house earlier, the nasty musk somewhat masked by the cold wind. The pig hybrid was focused as he ran his blade along the belly of the kill, carving and cutting out sizable chunks of meat which he began to wrap in some jungle leaves for storage. Technoblade liked hunting, and no one could deny his skill, knowledge, and precision of it. He was patient and always waited for the right moment to strike, always hunted smaller game because he knew others were too big to carry back home. The prey always usually went down in one hit, and if that didn’t do the job Techno would usually hold the creature down while he made a quick jab toward the skull. He pig prided himself on his hunts, which provided the majority of their meat for meals ever since the town decided to enforce a livestock tax on the people to raise a little extra coin.

Setting the packages aside, Techno looked up to notice Wilbur staring at him silently. “Uh, hey Wil. Whaddya need?”

“Can’t I just check on my sweet older brother?” Wilbur smirked, and Techno huffed, amused.

“You can, but you and I both know you don’t.” Technoblade joked as he walked past him, heading toward the river with Wilbur close behind, grabbing a cloth and his bloodied weapons along the way. The pig hybrid took a breath as he turned to look at his brother. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s nothing important, really,” Wilbur said. “I’ve just been worried, I guess.”

“About Sally?” Technoblade asked, kneeling down beside the river beginning to scrub his weapons clean. “Don’t tell me you’ve been reading those parenting books again, I’m telling you they’re shit-”

“I’m worried about myself.” Technoblade’s eyebrows shot up as he looked at his brother, slightly shocked at the intensity in his voice as he sat next to him by the riverbank. Wilbur took a deep breath as he tried to release the stress from his mind, looking into the clear running waters. “What if I mess up, or… or I can’t be a good father? What if I’m the one who’s not ready, you know?”

“This has all been your decision, Wilbur. Your life. I can’t tell you that everything will be sunshine and rainbows because to be completely honest Wil, I don’t know.” Technoblade said honestly, moving to place his clean sword on the grass and moving to grab his axe. “But I don’t think you should be worrying so much about the future. Live in the moment, in the now. If things go bad, you’ll know what to do Wilbur. Trust yourself.”

“But what if I-?”

“Nope. No more worrying.” Technoblade said, cutting off his brother. “Just focus on right now, and as cheesy as it is, have a bit of hope.”

“When did you get so philosophical?”

“I’m wise beyond my minutes, young one,” Technoblade smirked as Wilbur laughed. Techno began to wipe off his face and neck of blood, rinsing the cloth in the river as he went. 

“Do you have any parenting wisdom to place upon me?” Wilbur asked, half-joking.

“I mean, It’s not really my department. Kids aren’t really… they’re not my thing.” Technoblade said with a little shrug of his shoulders. “But if I had any advice to give you, it would be that if you have the same patience and love Phil had for us, I think you’ll do just fine.”

Patience and Love. Live in the moment. Trust yourself. His worries seemed to melt and dull in his mind, and he felt a lot better than he did earlier. “Thanks, Technoblade.”

Technoblade just saluted his two index fingers with a smile before moving to get up, ruffling Wilbur’s hair. “Be good to the little scamp, this family’s already crazy enough.”

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

Wilbur zipped up his guitar case as he grabbed his keys and the small bag of coins. Looking out the window, he could see the nightclubs and bars, restaurants and torched streetlamps slowly flicker to life, glowing against the dark sky. Like a whole new town lying just beneath the surface, revealed in the darkness. Sally walked over with his gloves and scarf, a gentle sad smile on her face as Wilbur took the wool gloves and pulled them on.

“Every time you leave, I miss you just a little more.” Sally said, wrapping the scarf around Wilbur’s neck and folding it neatly in front. “Do you have to go?” Wilbur warmly smiled as he gently cupped her cheek.

“You know I’ll never be far, my salmon.” He kissed her forehead tenderly as he brushed a bit of stray hair behind her ear. “You’ll close your eyes and when you wake up I’ll be right by your side, you’ll barely even notice I left.” Sally leaned in closer as Wilbur wrapped his arms around her comfortingly, his chin resting gently on her head. As they pulled away Sally’s eyes looked up to his, a worry and fear behind her gaze that seized Wilbur’s heart.

“Promise you’ll be safe?”

“When am I ever not safe?” Wilbur asked, leading Sally to cross her arms and look at him with a slight pout that made Wilbur laugh. “Okay, okay. I promise.”

With one final goodbye kiss, Wilbur shut the bedroom door behind him again, walking downstairs. He noticed Tommy sat on the couch, head in his hands and his blonde hair messed. He looked over to his younger brother, gently propping up his guitar against the stair railings. “It’s late, what are you doing up?”

“Nightmare.” Tommy mumbled, slightly sleepily.

“Do you... wanna talk about it-?”

“I’m not seven anymore, Wil. It was just a stupid nightmare, I can handle it on my own.”

Wilbur was quiet for a moment, processing what Tommy said, how he snapped at him. He sighed before looking over to meet the teen’s eyes. “If you’re sure you’re alright…?” Tommy nodded before Wilbur pulled him into a small hug, Tommy’s hand held onto his arms around him in comfort as he smiled slightly despite his current state.

“Heh. Thanks, Wil.”

“That’s what big brothers are for, right?” Wilbur smiled as he pulled away. “Don’t stay up too late, okay?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I guess I’ll be off.” Wilbur said, getting up from the couch to grab his guitar once more, throwing the straps over his shoulders. “That gig won’t play itself.”

“Good luck, Wil.” Tommy called before Wilbur turned, his heart warm and happy, giving him a smile and thanking him before taking his leave into the cold night air.

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

“Thank you, you’ve been an amazing audience!” Wilbur said as cheers erupted from around the pub. Moving off the stool, he grabbed his guitar by the neck and sauntered offstage, feeling happy with his performance. Within 30 minutes he managed to squeeze in four songs, which to his delight the crowd seemed to enjoy - at Melrose the tap was never empty, and as such the crowd was easily angered by the slightest things, or even nothing at all. The only somewhat mishap during his slot was when a bit of beer had splashed against his clothes thanks to a patron who had a little too much. They were quickly shown the door and the night resumed its somewhat peaceful pleasure.

He walked up to the bar and sat in the corner with his guitar, watching the next musician take the stage - it looked like a band from the amount of people. Wilbur knew he wouldn’t get paid in full until the end of the night after each performance was done, Melrose wanted to make sure they held up their end of the bargain instead of running off what the money. He had at least another hour in here before closing.

“Are you drinking or not?” Wilbur looked up to the bartender as he stared down at him, expecting some kind of response. He wasn’t exactly a big drinker, quite the opposite - the only times he’s ever drank were with Phil and Sally. Sally, once when they were both eighteen just to try it out - he winced remembering the monster hangover the morning after. Phil around a year ago when he turned twenty-one and they both shared a few beers together in celebration. Both times he’d gotten tipsy pretty easily, either because he wasn’t exactly used to drinking yet or because he was a natural lightweight, who knows. Either way, he wasn’t exactly going to risk getting drunk right now.

“Uhm, I’ll have a club soda, thanks.”

The bartender gave him a once-over, put off by his request before slightly shrugging his shoulders. “Suit yourself, buddy.”

“Alright, we’re Black Rose and we hope you enjoy the set! This first song is called ‘Sleepless’.” A guy spoke into the microphone, turning to his friends with a smile before counting them in as the music began to blast through the pub. It was a nice tune, and Wilbur found his foot unconsciously tapping along with the music. He closed his eyes and let the sound fill his ears as they began to sing the chorus. It felt right. There was a kind of emotional distress behind the singer's voice, in the twinge of his tone or in a voice crack or two that almost felt like magic.

“And I’m not going blind, I just keep falling, falling behind; 

Time goes slow and fast, my heart’s pumping and my head has crashed; 

Sit in silence and pretend like your demons are your friends; 

Your thoughts are racing while you’re pacing, it’s all in your mind, sleepless~!”

“Hey Wil, you got a minute?” Wilbur jolted back at how close the voice was, as he looked over to see none other than Melrose - her blonde hair flowed down her back messily with a ruby red dress that complimented her blue eyes. She pursed her lips into a line, a signal she was thinking as her pen tapped against the clipboard in her hand. “Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you.”

“It’s, uh, it’s fine. What’s up, Mel? Hope my performance was up to par.”

Her lips formed back to a comfortable smirk. “Performance was great as always, Wilbur. You never cease to please.” Her eyes turned down toward her clipboard. “Though I’m afraid I can’t say the same for everybody. Tips came up a little short thanks to a few blanks, I’ve got to decrease your pay for tonight.”

Wilbur’s eyebrows furrowed. “Mel, you promised.”

“Look, Wil I’m sorry but there’s nothing I can do.” Melrose let out a sigh, rubbing her temple in frustration. “I’m barely making enough to pay as is.”

As she turned to leave, Wilbur quickly grabbed her wrist to stop her. “Mel, you don’t understand, I need the cash.”

Melrose sighed, rolling her eyes. “Don’t we all.” She snapped slightly, yanking back her arm. “I told you I can’t do anything-”

“Rosie, come quick!” One of the bodyguards interrupted as he approached with a sword slung over his back. “Charlie’s getting wasted in the back, someone gave him vodka…”

“Goddammit, not again. Can’t that bastard ever get sober?” She huffed, giving Wilbur one last look before slipping back into the crowd. Fuck. Well, there goes a whole extra gig’s pay - with the pub’s restock he won’t be able to pay off everything now even if he had work twice each week...dammit. The due date was in April, he still had time. He could probably get another job while the pub’s down, he’ll have to check the town bulletin on his way home later. He turned back to his club soda, letting out a defeated sigh.

Guess I’ll be away from home more than I thought. 

A scream from outside quickly tore Wilbur from his thoughts as he turned toward the sound.

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

Philza was a light sleeper. Being on the road and sleeping the wilderness had always made him jump at the slightest hint of danger, a sort of survival instinct that developed. It only increased when Techno and Wilbur came around, for the first time in his life he had someone else to protect and look out for than just himself, more he could lose. He guessed that’s why he jumped the gun a bit at teaching them how to fight so early - If he couldn’t be there in time, he wanted for them to be able to protect themselves. Even so, his instincts from way back then never stopped, which was most likely why the head of the family was awake now.

Muffled sounds came from below him, shuffling. Something was here, and whatever it was it wasn’t good. His heart beat quicker as adrenaline rushed into his veins. He grabbed his sword, leaned against the wall, and crept down the hallway silently. It was dark in the house, he could barely see a few feet in front of him as his eyes adjusted to the darkness. He couldn’t hear the noise anymore, which only heightened his senses as his heart beat faster.

Then, a groan which sent him backing up - that was much, much closer than before. Suddenly, he bumped into something that grabbed his arm and without thinking he swept his feet under whatever it was, sending them to the floor. “Ugh… hey to you too, Phil.”

He looked down and noticed his oldest moving to stand back up from where he fell against the floorboards, rubbing the back of his head. “Techno…?” He asked before quickly helping him up. “What are you doing, you scared me!”

“I was checking out the noise, same as you.” Technoblade said before readjusting his grip on his own sword. “Remind me to never spar with you when you’re in attack mode.”

“Will do.” Phil smirked. Both quickly tensed as they heard shuffling and groaning from down below, clear enough for the two to recognize the noise instantly. They looked to each other, eyes wide. Zombies. Where there’s one there’s bound to be more around in minutes. “Get Tubbo and Tommy, I’ll get Sally.” Technoblade nodded before turning and rushing off behind Phil as he rushed toward the end of the hallway, toward Sally and Wilbur’s room. Phil didn’t know how they managed to have a breach in the walls, but however it occurred it meant one thing - the next ten minutes were the difference between life and death.

He entered the room to see one of the rotting creatures standing over the shifter, who decked it clean across the face, her ears scanning her surroundings, green goop covering her hand. She turned to face Phil, who rushed forward and pushed his blade through the zombies’ skull, killing it for good. Both panted heavily as Phil checked her over, worried. “Are you okay, did it bite you?”

“No, no. I’m good.” Sally reassured him as she looked around the room. “Where’s Wil?”

“I...I don’t know, but... I’m sure he’s safe, wherever he is.” Phil said, trying his best to push his own worries out of his mind.

“Wait, he’s not back yet?” Sally’s eyes grew wide at the realization as her body tensed in worry. “He’s out there, with… with…”

“Wilbur knows how to handle himself.” Phil reassured her, worry growing in the back of his head and forming an uncomfortable spot in his stsomach. “For now we need to be more worried about ourselves - If we’re going to survive until morning we need to barricade the house, and fast.” Phil said, grabbing her by the wrist as they rushed back out into the hallway, Phil chopping another zombie’s head clean off its skull as they rushed past it toward the stairs. He could see Tommy and Tubbo wielding their swords as they tore through zombie after zombie in the living room, somehow making it into a sort of game as they smiled and laughed. Technoblade, on the other hand, moved chairs and tables against the two doors to block them watching his back as a zombie stauntered toward him, and he swept his legs under the creature and quickly curb stomped its skull, slimy green goo flowing into the wooden floor. Phil tossed Sally an axe that she caught quickly, feeling the weight in her hands and happy to have a weapon. “Clear out the ones inside.”

“Got it.”

Tommy jumped from the couch onto a tall zombie, piercing it through the chest and pinning it with his sword to a nearby wall. “Ha! Top that, idiot!” He shouted trumphantly toward Tubbo, who’s eyes lit up competitively as he attempted to hack a nearby zombie in half and managed to get his sword stuck.

“Uhm…”

Sally rushed in, ignoring the tender soreness in her tired body as she hacked the zombie’s head clean off with her axe as its body slumped to the floor. Quickly and effortlessly, she pulled out the lodged weapon and handed it to Tubbo. “Be more careful, yeah?”

“Uh… yeah, yeah…” Tubbo said sheepishly as he took his weapon back and Sally rushed to finish off Tommy’s pinned zombie. With a few strikes, it was down. Tommy grabbed his sword to get it free, tugging harshly to no avail. He got more anxious with each tug as Sally faceplamed.

“You stupid-” She muttered, handing him her axe. “Finish off the last two with Tubbo, and try not to lose another weapon, okay?” Tommy huffed in slight protest before Sally gave him a look and he rolled his eyes, taking the weapon and running off.

“I don’t think it’s gonna hold!” Technoblade yelled as he threw his back against the door, pushing it closed against what must have been around twenty zombies pushing and trying to get in with any means necessary. Sally looked over to Phil, who looked around frantically, trying to think of a plan, any plan at all. “Phil?”

“Phil, what do we-?”

A loud crash erupted - a broken window. Danger. Phil’s grip tightened on his sword as he began to shout orders. “Tommy, Tubbo, hold the back door NOW! Sally, stay behind me.” Phil’s tone was tense and sharp, and the two teen boys rushed like mice to do as he asked. “We just need a little more time, it’s gotta hold a little longer…” At this point, he was hoping for some kind of miracle. This wasn’t just a regular breach - this was a massacre. Rushing forward, he pushed the shadow in the dim light down to the floor, and quickly raised his axe to bring it down when-

“Wait wait wait-! I’m not one of them!”

Phil’s eyes squinted in the light to find… Wilbur. He looked like a mess, his clothes torn and ripped with green slimy goo staining the fabric. Phil’s eyes watered in relief as he quickly pulled his son in for a tight embrace, helping him up off the floor. “Thank god, don’t ever scare me like that again.”

“Good to see you too, Dad.” Wilbur smiled before the two let go, his eyebrows furrowed and his tone more serious. “These aren’t regular zombies, they’re stronger and more resilient. Last I checked they were taking down the square one house at a time, and from the looks of it most of them were not prepared for a visit.”

“...Fuck.” Phil cursed under his breath, his mind beginning to race once again. Did they have a chance?

“I ran as fast as I could to get here, I was so worried…” Wilbur said as Sally rushed forward to embrace him with a smile, running her hands down his face and through his hair, afraid she’d lose it again. Wilbur, in turn ran his hands down her arms, his smile brightening that it was real and alive and here-

“Good to see you’re not dead, Wil.” Tommy huffed against the door as the monsters on the other side growled and moaned, pushing their weight and strength against it. “But we have a bit of a situation here!”

“We need to get out of here.” Wilbur looked over to Phil. “If we stay any longer, we’ll be trapped. Once we’re out of here we can run into the forest to hide and wait out the horde.”

“But both exits-”

The two elder brothers looked at their father and answered at the same time in surprise. “The second floor window.” They turned to each other, sharing a brief smile. Technoblade looked over to Phil once more, his mind and heart racing as the voices in his head boomed louder, and he tried his best to ignore their shouts. 

“Look, it’s risky, I know, but we’ve gotta try. We don’t have time.” He winced and grunted as the zombies on the other side of the wall grew more violent in their animalistic attempts to break in. Phil looked at his family’s faces, hints of fear and uncertainty in their expressions. Tommy’s arm went to stop Tubbo from falling over at a particularly forceful blow, and as Tommy’s nerves increased he could see Tubbo holding his hand and giving it a squeeze. Technoblade’s heels dug into the wooden floor as chairs, tables and wooden boards began to splitter under the force of the creatures outside. Wilbur pressed a soft kiss to Sally’s forehead as Sally’s hand drifted to her stomach instinctively at this point, her eyes filled with nothing but worry. He knew this was crazy, but if it meant that there was a chance they’d be safe, he’d risk it.

“Alright. Wilbur, make sure the window’s open and we have a clear way down. Everyone else, get ready to run.”

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

Wilbur’s heart stopped as he saw the creature’s teeth sink into Phil’s neck as he let out a scream in agony. Shit, shit, shit… he didn’t know where they came from, they blocked the stairs as they ran up, why didn’t he see it?! The zombie that bit Phil fell to the ground with a thud as Phil’s own blood seeped down his shoulder and stained his shirt. Techno stilled as he made eye contact with his father, who looked sad, knowing his fate. “Phil, I’m so sorry, I-” Wilbur trembled, his hand reaching out toward Phil, not knowing what to do, what to say. Phil’s head shook back and forth slightly before pushing his sword into Wilbur’s hands.

“You two need to go. Now. Before you lose the chance.”

Technoblade was stone faced. “Phil, we’re not leaving you-”

“There’s no time to discuss this, I said GO-!” Phil shouted sternly before going into a coughing fit, holding himself steady against the wall. Wilbur stepped forward, wanting to grab his hand, help him before Phil recoiled. “Wil… Techno… you need to go, that’s an order.” Silence fell over the two brothers, not wanting to leave their father. “Look, they’re not going to attack me now but they will attack you, now MOVE IT!”

Shuffling and groans grew behind them as Phil winced, feeling the infection flow through his body. They needed to get out before he turned, they needed to live, he wanted them to live-

“But what about you?”

Phil looked over to his sons with a sad smile. “I think I’ve taught you both enough to know what happens now.” Suddenly it felt like all the air in the room vanished. “Now do me proud and show me what we do if someone gets bit. Show me what I’ve taught you.” Phil could feel himself getting lightheaded, he was going to pass out, but he couldn’t… not until they both were safe.

Wilbur didn’t know what to do as he looked to Techno then to Phil, who slowly lowered himself to the floor, his back leaning against the walls of the home he built for them. Techno’s fists tightened as he turned to face his brother. “Techno…?”

“Get somewhere safe, okay?” His voice was heavy, serious. “Promise me you’ll get somewhere safe.”

“I… I will, I promise.” Wilbur said, trying to look at his brother to see if he had any plan. “But what are we going to-?” Before he knew what was happening, Techno shoved him through the window, closing and locking it firmly behind him. Wilbur began to panic, realizing what Technoblade was doing and trying to find some kind of grip before he slipped off the roof and landed in the bushes, pain and bruises blossoming on his body. Tubbo helped him up off the ground as Tommy’s eyes looked up to the window, confused. 

“Where’s Phil and Tech?”

Tears pricked at the edges of Wilbur’s eyes as he felt his heart begin to throb without them here. Why, why why… Why did he stay? Why didn’t he let him stay? Why wasn’t he careful enough? It’s all his fault-

“Wil…?” Tommy’s voice wavered. “Where’s Technoblade and Phil?”

At that moment, Wilbur knew things changed forever. Phil and Techno were gone, they were gone and they were never coming back. He told Technoblade, he promised him that he’d get all of them somewhere safe, and with a heavy heart Wilbur knew it wasn’t here, not anymore. He wasn’t going to lose anyone else, he was going to protect them. He was going to protect all of them, if it was the last thing he’d ever do. That very moment what Techno said to him finally made sense.

‘If things go bad, you’ll know what to do, Wilbur.’

Right now, he wanted, more than anything in the world, to get them out of here. Tubbo and Tommy shared awkward glances as Wilbur took a deep breath for a moment, sniffling and wiping the tears from his eyes. Sally looked towards him concerned as Wilbur slid his hand into hers, looking towards his brothers with the same look and tone Phil had. 

“We need to go. Now.”

[just-stop]

From AFLW to roller derby, experts say its time to take concussion in women's sport seriously

When the Crows chase their third AFLW premiership on Saturday, captain Chelsea Randall will be watching from the sidelines.

A concussion from a collision during last week's preliminary final left her ruled out of the match.

It's a bitter sweet way to end a season — but as Sarah McCarthy knows, a concussion can have much longer consequences

In 2016, Sarah was the jammer for her Sydney roller derby team, skating at high speed in the league's Grand Final, aiming to get past the opposition and score points.

Risks of contact sport

Sarah McCarthy received a knock to the head during a roller derby match.

"I was a few feet in front of the pack, looking over my shoulder," she tells ABC RN's Sporty.

As she skated, a competitor's elbow hit Sarah's neck and jaw hard and she crashed to the ground.

She doesn't remember if she passed out or not, but recalls feeling briefly sick.

She got up, sat out for awhile, but later re-joined the bout, feeling reasonably ok.

It was Sarah's second concussion that week, having had an earlier blow at training.

The next few months passed in a blur of sickness, dizziness and ringing ears.

"I could barely make it past lunch time without falling asleep. My head felt like it was in a vice 24 hours a day," she says.

What was worse, says Sarah, was the memory loss, heightened emotions, and constant haze in her mind as she struggled to manage a big work project.

Sarah's experience is not out of the ordinary. Experts say sportswomen are at higher risk of concussion than male athletes, and the effects of concussion in women tend to be more severe.

Sarah still lives with the ongoing after effects of her concussion even today.

Almost five years on, Sarah continues to live with the implications of Post Concussion Syndrome.

"I struggled verbally, and I still do now if I have a poor night's sleep," Sarah says.

"It's almost like I'm sitting on a chair in a room with a curtain around me and all of my vocabulary is just beyond the curtain. And I can't reach it or I use the wrong words. I forget people's name all the time," she says.

"I'm fatigued every day. I still can't exercise. I can't handle stress, I can't handle light, I can't handle sounds."

What happens when you're concussed?

Dr Adrian Cohen, an emergency and trauma physician who researches concussion prevention, says concussion is not as simple as was once thought.

He says concussion results in less blood flow to the brain.

This means brain cells, called neurons, don't get enough oxygen and glucose. They also suffer a "structural deformity".

Basically, Dr Cohen says, the brain has a "metabolic crisis" and neurons stop working properly.

Why is concussion more common in women?

We don't have enough data on the size of the problem, Dr Cohen says.

But research and scrutiny of concussion in women in sport is growing — largely in the wake of developments in elite men's sport such as the AFL and NFL.

"Doctors like myself who work in this area are definitely seeing it more often and we're seeing it with more severity," Dr Cohen says.

He says women sustain more concussions than men in high-impact sports such as rugby league, rugby union and Australian rules football. Women also take longer to recover.

One possibility is that women may be more likely to report concussion.

But Dr Cohen says there are complex physiological factors at play.

"There are structural differences between men and women's brains," he says.

"They actually have a slightly faster metabolism than male brains, and they have slightly greater oxygen flow to the head.

"The cells themselves can be thought of as being slightly hungrier. So in the context of an injury that disrupts the supply of glucose and oxygen, it can help explain why they suffer more damage."

He also says women are joining high impact sports without years of tackle training and have had less opportunity to build up the strong neck muscles crucial in protecting against impact.

Dr Cohen says these factors are not an argument for reducing women's participation in contact sport — the benefits, he says, far outweigh the risks — but he is urging for new ways to minimise those risks.

"We have to outlaw illegal play that causes damage, we have to get people off the field when they have an injury, we have to recognise concussion," he says.

He is part of a team developing a new device which he says can quickly and accurately assess a player for concussion.

"Instead of just asking somebody whether they're okay, and putting [them] through a 10 minute test, which seems fundamentally flawed at the moment, we have got to put this in the field of objectivity."

Concussion and migranes

Dr Rowena Mobbs, a Macquarie University neurologist who researches and treats the effects of concussion in sportspeople, says there is truth to suggestions that women experience concussion symptoms more severely.

"But there is this really important overlap of chronic migraine after trauma, and the term for this is post-traumatic headache," she says.

"When we talk about migraine ... they're the same multitude of symptoms that can occur in concussion.

"So you can be dizzy and clouded in your thinking, lethargic and have double vision. And we know that women are at three times the risk of chronic migraine than men."

A woman on roller skates playing roller derby can be seen flying up the court.

Experts say more research is needed into concussion in sportswomen.(Liam Mitchell Photography )

She suggests there could be an association between chronic migraine syndrome and concussion, a kind of double whammy for women.

"It's really a complex area," Dr Mobbs says.

"It's fairly new to research because, unfortunately, there's been so much preferred research in men in sport, and we're only just now approaching female concussion."

In Australia, the Sports Brain Bank works on diseases such as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) and other brain disorders associated with previous concussions or head impacts.

Dr Cohen says there are several Australian sports women who've pledged to donate their brain to the Sports Brain Bank.

"But in general terms, these women won't have been playing the games for as long, and at as high a level," he says.

He says concussion and its long-term consequences "are a numbers game".

"The more impacts to the head you have, the more likely you are to suffer short, medium and long-term consequences. Therefore, the more likely it is to show up as CTE. But we're going to be seeing it in women unfortunately, in the not too distant future."

Invisible injuries

Concussion rules are changing in Australian football codes — the rules that mandated Randall miss the AFLW grand final were brought in earlier this year.

Dr Mobbs welcomes these new rules, but hopes the conversation in elite sport will extend to how concussion is managed at training and in community sport.

In 2019, the Australian Institute of Sport released an updated set of concussion guidelines to improve player safety and address rising concerns in the community around the links between concussion and CTE, which has been linked to dementia and behavioural problems.

Dr Mobbs wants measures like restricting heading the ball in soccer training to be considered.

"We must look after people's brains," she says.

"We can preserve what we love about the sports, they can still be played hard, but it just means that we've got to all get together and think of ways we can preserve brain health for these players."

Sarah McCarthy wishes she'd been stopped from returning to play in the 2016 grand final, and regrets not taking time to immediately rest after the injuries.

She has advice for other people who experience concussion.

"First and foremost, stop everything - stop," she says.

"If you can, stay in a dark room, don't do anything that's too mentally taxing. Don't exercise.

"If I had taken that four to six weeks to rest [and] not have too much mental and emotional stimulation, I think my recovery would have been a lot quicker."

[nefariouscryptid]

um!!!!!!! i’m not v well acquainted w your characters yet so!!! who are the valentino’s n what do they do (: <3 just general info if you wanna talk abt it or whatever andbmanf 🥺

So the Valentino’s are a crime family that work for the Durante family, which is a part of an underground political empire.

The Valentino’s themselves are Brian Valentino, Plethora Valentino, and Cassandra Valentino. All three of them are married to each other in a closed polygamous relationship (I think that’s how you would refer to it).

Brian Valentino works for a small drug faction responsible for producing opioids and sedatives for use on political prisoners, to slowly introduce drugs into a country that lacks any kind of narcotrafficking (usually these kinds of jobs r paid in high amounts and very rarely happen due to the risky nature of it), and to deal drugs to politicians who just wanna get high. Personality wise he’s standoffish, blunt, rough around the edges, and extremely loyal to those who he cares about, which is only his husband and wife. He acts a lot without thinking, is fairly antisocial, and quick to judgement.

Plethora Valentino is an assassin who’s usually signed to assassinating lower political officials or is in charge of training any newbies that come in either from the SLATE program or from the military, since Plethora is considered a veteran assassin at the point he’s at. A lot in his job is mostly setting up dates and methods of how someone is going to get whacked, but if he’s the one doing the killing it’s most of the time him being a sniper. His biggest hit was a Vice President which required him to be in hiding for about 3 months. However what ended up as the biggest hit because of how badly it went was of Ivans wife, which prompted an unplanned 4-6 month hiding which ended up being extremely… traumatic. Plethora is an outgoing wiseass, usually getting along with anyone he meets or has to work with and has a more childish personality. He’s quick to anger, brash, and loyal to anyone he cares about. After the assasination of Mrs. Frikoski however he became very closed off and anxious, often confused on what day it was, and forgetting anything he had to do for the day.

Cassandra Valentino is the chief executive of The CFTC and is responsible for monitoring and changing stock numbers and what markets are set to become more mainstream in the public for their investments, as well as making sure parties on the market meet their contractual obligations. She is to notify anyone in her section of the industry if there is going to be a planned market crash or increase value to specific popular or underinvested but known stocks. She’s a cunning yet reserved woman, always psychoanalyzing people and treating them more as if they’re a list of information rather then people. She’s fairly shy if she can afford to be, but is assertive and has a sense of commandingness to her.

While she doesn’t every show up with her family (cause they… yk… die…) Brenda Valentino is their child that was born outside of Cassandras womb as a kind of experiment by the Frikoski’s after they murdered everyone. That didn’t work and she was put into adoption and was fostered by a family who neglected, physically, and emotionally abused her. She got into the anarchist political scene as a teenager, especially since it really took off with underground groups during the new Frikoski empire era, where they finally ran away from home, started HRT, and became an “enemy of the state” as she would half jokingly refer to themself as. She became notorious for helping conduct and participating in a mass shooting against a hate group that was about to execute multiple people for racial reasons. She’s also wanted for tax evasion, credit card fraud, assault with a deadly weapon, multiple other assault charges, murder of law enforcement officials, and is classified as being a terrorist (also keep in mind this is a different world now then what we have so they also would be arrested for things regarding freedom of speech since there’s no amendment for that anymore, and things she is wanted for differs slightly for how it would work in our world. Either way she would absolutely still be classified as a terrorist.) Brenda is a very ruthless person, her formative years skewing her sense of morality and furthering her hatred towards society and even the world before she was born. However despite this she does have a strong moral code and opinions on what is right or wrong (despite knowing morality is technically made up and she has problems with a lot of takes on it), although it is still clouded by her violent behavior and extreme measures she’s willing to go for them, and while she doesn’t believe in justice being served by any government or group of people, she still will try to help people if they’re in a current bad situation. To her avenging people is pointless because it’s not going to prevent anything from happening again and to them they think it’s more about people feeding their savior complex. But she has come across rotten people in her time that have done horrible things to people such as children that she has helped people kill. She’s someone that most people have a problem with if they follow a “violence is not the answer” mindset. While she fights and believes in good causes she’s extremely violent and causes just as much death (outside of system caused deaths) as the people she’s against. She doesn’t impose her methods or ideologies onto other people cause like I said she doesn’t believe in group led vengeance unless literally everyone is on board and there isn’t a definite leader. It’s up to you to decide if she’s a good person or not.

[lovelyirony]

Footnotes

it’s been a bit since i added to the bookshop au: time got away from me! 

We’re taking over the world/a little victimless crime -Do It All the Time, IDKHBTFM

Tony notices that Bucky doesn’t come into the store for a month. This is fine. Should be fine. Not like he wonders what Bucky will think of the newest latte, which is geared more to the warmer weather that has been breezing in cheerfully. The iced latte, flavored with caramel and coconut, had been a hit with MJ and Ned, who both loved it. 

But Bucky hadn’t come in and tried it.

His anxiety tells him that he is found out and are currently waiting until Tony leaves the building to set up a trap and probably blow up every single book and also him.

But that would be stupid. There’s no way that the Avengers know who Iron Man or War Machine is. Tony Jarvis is a nice guy who runs a bookstore, has a suspicious amount of money from inheritance, and got a degree in English from a local college. 

He even photo-shopped pictures there with Rhodey and everything. (Thank god for anti-aging technology and Rhodey’s genius.)

But he still kind of wants Bucky to come in and look at books. He even has a few records pulled just for the occasion.

“You are quite honestly the worst kind of person,” Rhodey says. “Who gets a crush on who is supposed to be their arch-nemesis and wants to make a custom coffee menu for them?”

“Not me,” Tony says quickly, pushing away the lemon-blueberry scone idea. “And besides if anyone would be my arch-nemesis, it would clearly be Black Widow. We match each other intellectually.”

“Not a chance,” Rhodey says with a snort. “Or did you forget the time you got so nervous you—”

“Hello?” comes a voice from the front. Rhodey immediately cuts off, going back to filing new shipments. Tony looks over.

“Hey, you’re back!” Tony cheers.

Rhodey makes a motion of gagging. Tony flips him off with one hand behind his back as he comes forward.

“Sorry I haven’t been in. Work has been…enlightening.”

“Usually code for ‘I-don’t-get-paid-enough’” Tony teases. “You wanna try an iced coffee drink?”

“I’m game.”

“Sit down at the table, I’ll get it out for you.”

Bucky has to admit that a good apron can do wonders for an ass. Or maybe Tony just has a really nice one. Either way, the view is spectacular.

“What has work been having you do?” Tony asks, pouring in syrup.

“Oh just…the usual,” Bucky says. He’s horrible at lying. He really, really is. “They keep twisting up what they want, it’s getting confusing.”

“Bookshops, luckily, are much simpler than that,” Tony says, smiling. He slides the drink over to Bucky. “Try it. Tell me what you think.”

Bucky takes a long slurp. Puts his head back.

“Tony, you ever experienced a masterpiece?”

“Once or twice,” Tony says, smiling.

“This is the damn Mona Lisa of drinks.”

Tony grins. Bucky sips a bit more, sighing in contentment.

“Hey, I know that last time I learned that you sold records. What are, um, your favorites?”

“I’m glad you asked…”

Bucky learns about new music. He learns that he needs to google new bands. AC/DC is a clear favorite of Tony’s, who sings along. It’s a funny juxtaposition with his cardigan and old jeans, glasses perched on the bridge of his nose.

Bucky finds some of the old ones, which Tony doesn’t look surprised at.

“You have an old soul,” Tony says.

“You don’t know the half of it,” Bucky mutters.

“Don’t I?” Tony teases. “You act as if you’ve never had iced coffee before.”

Bucky has to turn back to the player to stop from laughing in front of him. What Tony doesn’t know…well. He’s damned sure he doesn’t know that technically all of Bucky’s favorite records were either unable to be found, most likely questionable, or long disintegrated with time.

Oh, Tony knows. He knows for a damned fact that Bucky has never had iced coffee, most likely does not know who the hell Jimmy Carter was and knows how to disassemble and reassemble most weapons in under sixty seconds.

But it’s cute to mess with him. His brow furrows. Tony has a thing for furrows.

“Hey Tony?” Rhodey asks, head popping up from the upstairs. Bucky automatically looks up, finding the face to be vaguely familiar.

“What is it Rhodey-dear?” Tony calls back out.

“I have a computer glitch, you gotta come see it! Now!”

“This better not be a repeat of the pinball incident,” Tony mutters, turning back to Bucky. “I’ll be back in five minutes, I promise.”

“Take your time, love,” Bucky responds.

Bucky then immediately wonders if he bangs his head against the column near him if Tony and Rhodey will hear it. Tony also called his…person “Rhodey-dear.” Dear! Does he even have a chance?

But this brings him to think about Rhodey. He looked familiar. Bucky’s life doesn’t consist of knowing that you know someone from a certain social event and trying to place them. No, Bucky knows people because of two reasons:

1.)         He tried to kill them.

2.)         SHIELD has something on them.

He’s pretty sure that if he was faced with someone like Rhodey, he wouldn’t be able to kill him. Even from the head poking out, he could see a pretty defined shoulder and a look set to his gaze that read as very competent, entirely capable of taking down an authoritarian government, and also probably likes gourmet cheeses. The last one is a guess. But Bucky likes to guess pretty damn accurately.

Rhodey…

Rhodes. Colonel James Rhodes. Close with Tony Stark, who went missing. They thought he had something to do with something. He moved to New York pretty quickly after that, refusing to go into military service to a “previously unreported mental incapacity.”

Bucky smells bullshit.

Tony Stark. Another mystery in this puzzle. Bucky remembers trying to kill Howard and Maria Stark. It was the wrong person. Winter Soldier never missed his targets. Of course, Tony Stark wasn’t the target.

-

Rhodey is freaking out. Someone at SHIELD figured out there was a tiny bug in the system.

“When did they hire someone competent?!” Tony whisper-yells. “I thought they were two years behind schedule!”

“We made that schedule when we were drunk out of our minds from Moscato,” Rhodey hisses.

“Still! It was Moscato. It wasn’t like we drank vodka until we were shit-faced. That would’ve ended up disastrously and possibly given Dum-E and U a new sibling before Butterfingers.”

“Butterfingers wants a baby, just so you know,” Rhodey says.

“Why are you telling me this now?” Tony asks.

“Because you know what you’re doing and I figured you should know what your daughter is up to. It’s very important in developmental psychology.”

“Do not,” Tony hisses. “Let me fix this…”

With a couple more frantic curses, one eye shut, and a yelp, the problem is (mostly) taken care of.

“You think they can trace it?”

“It’ll trace back to a random e-café,” Tony says. “And there will be Justin Hammer who is currently trying to work out why his dating profile isn’t working. I’ll give you a hint: it’s the bio and the fact that he looks like he’s going to bail on paying for your dinner.”

Rhodey smiles, shaking his head and looking out the door.

“Get back down to Barnes. Don’t let him know what this is.”

“When would I?”

“You tend to be a terrible liar around people you like.”

“Why you—!”

“Thank you for helping with the pinball machine again!” Rhodey says, throwing his voice. He shoves Tony out of the office. Tony’s cheeks are bright red, he’s flushed, and he can barely walk down the stairs.

He’s not sure what exactly happened. He knows someone found out about them, tried to trace the bug back. That simply wouldn’t do because Tony runs a legitimate business. Pays taxes on April fifteenth and everything.

“Sorry about that, emergency with a pinball machine game,” Tony says.

“Understandable,” Bucky says. “What was wrong it? A bug get in?”

“Uh, not exactly,” Tony responds, body going tense for a moment. “You want to pick out a new record?”

“Yeah, sure…”

They find out that Bucky absolutely hates the pop, almost-fake music from the fifties.

“It’s…unsettling,” Bucky says, shuddering. “Gross.”

“Let me get some Benny Goodman then,” Tony says.

“How’d you know?”

“Everyone likes his music,” Tony says. “But then again, you did say you were an old soul.”

Bucky can hear the familiar music fill the air as he hums to himself.

“Hey handsome, wanna help me with something?” Tony asks. “I have some books that need to be shelved. I was wondering if you could help?”

“No problem,” Bucky says, grinning. “Can’t reach the top shelf?”

“Why you—”

“I’m shelving!” Bucky calls, grabbing one of the boxes.

Tony thinks that no one should be attractive when they’re lifting boxes. Especially when they’re holding what is essentially about forty pounds with one arm. His left one, but still.

There is also the matter of making sure that Barnes never finds out who he is. Tony has been quite careful about that, although the “bug” comment got to him. Does he know about them? Is he playing some sort of long game?

Answer: no. Bucky got distracted by a book title that he remembers from years ago.

“I forgot I read this,” he says, smiling. “It was forever ago.”

“Old books get to you like nothing else,” Tony responds. “I grew up with Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. You read that one yet?”

“Add it to the recommended box,” Bucky answers.

He has his own box now. Technically a crate, but Tony’s been putting books there for Bucky when he thinks he’s found one that he’ll like. Which of course, Bucky will like whatever book is in there if Tony chose it. He likes anything Tony chooses. He would wear the worst outfit in existence if Tony chose it.

Shelving goes by with little conversation, although they both hum along to the music being played softly over the intercoms. Tony comes and goes, helping customers with different items, brewing some more coffee, and getting some more boxes.

Bucky likes the routine.

He’s sad to go, taking his books with him and waving a soft goodbye. Tony’s leaning against the doorframe, a fond look on his face as the bookshop light floats out onto dark pavement. He wishes he could be there all the time.

And then, of course, people are in his apartment.

“Bookstore again, huh?” Steve asks. Natasha’s looking through the pile of receipts on the kitchen counter.

“You go there a lot,” she murmurs.

“I like being literate, gives me a headstart on Clint,” Bucky answers glibly.

“Even if someone liked reading this much, they wouldn’t be buying obscene amounts of books and coffee.”

“I don’t buy every book. To—the owner lets me take some home if I return them the next day.”

“You’re on a first name basis?” Natasha asks, eyebrow arched. “Just what bookstore are you going to?”

“One that’s none of your business,” Bucky says.

“It says it on top of the receipt,” Steve says.

Bucky curses.

Steve laughs at him.

[angelofthequeers]

hi, i was making an aroace sapphic character and wondered if you could give me any tips? :)

I can sure try! If anyone is uncomfortable with semi-explicit talk about sex (in terms of smutty writing and vague personal anecdotes) then feel free to skip over the asexuality part. I’m mostly going to talk about my own experiences as an aroace sapphic to try and offer more depth than just generic character advice. And this is my experience; not every aroace is the same. I’ll also refer to your character with she/her pronouns but they might not be the ones that she uses, so I apologise in advance if that’s the case.

So this is assuming that she’s fully aroace instead of, like, somewhere else on the aro and ace spectra (such as demisexual or greyromantic). I direct you to look up oriented, angled, and electio aroace to get a better idea of ways in which this entire package of aro, ace, and sapphic might come together - you don’t have to use or adhere to these labels but they do provide handy information in case you want a better understanding for your character. Basically:

Asexual

I don’t experience sexual attraction (or if I do and I’m demi like I first thought, I sure as hell haven’t noticed it yet). I never look at someone and think “hmm, they’re so physically hot and I want to smash them specifically”. A lot of my smutty writing was heavily influenced by other people’s smut at the start because, like...I didn’t know what was supposed to be hot. I didn’t inherently know what to describe when writing sex scenes. I had to rely a lot on other people and put together what they found “hot” in terms of physical descriptions of bodies because I don’t feel that kind of draw to people. Back when I was into Supernatural, everyone always went nuts over Misha Collins’ hipbones and I was like...yeah, they’re nice aesthetically because they stick out and they’d probably be sharp and cool to touch, and I incorporated that into my writing by often focusing on Castiel’s hipbones from Dean’s perspective. But I truly didn’t understand why they were considered so attractive. I wasn’t physically drawn to any part of Misha or Castiel (apart from things like his hair and eyes, and even then it wasn’t a sexual draw) and I had to absorb what parts allosexual writers found hot and then translate that into my own writing. I claimed to have a crush on Brendon Urie when I was 16 purely so I wouldn’t look like a “freak” to the other girls in my year, and I made that claim based on my aesthetic draw to his looks and assuming that that was what sexual attraction had to be.

(Look up aesthetic attraction. It’ll blow your mind once you realise that you can be drawn to people without it being sexual in any way. This is a very good definition of it).

And it’s important to separate libido (sex drive) and attraction (the draw to specific people) because a lot of aces can have an average to high libido and even sleep with people but just...not feel sexually drawn to anyone. So in the case of your character, you have to decide whether she’s going to have no libido and/or is squicked by the concept of sex, or if she’s got a higher libido and is drawn to the concept of sex, or anything in between. Me personally? My libido and my draw to the concept of sex fluctuates - sometimes it’s as high as what you’d expect from a typical allosexual, sometimes even the vague idea makes me cringe and my engine is flat - but I’m never attracted to anyone specifically. That lack of attraction is what makes me ace, because you can also get allosexual people (non-asexuals) whose libido and relationship with sex is like this.

There’s that misconception that ace people are pure virgins who cringe at the very idea of being touched and sure, some ace people are sex-repulsed and touch-averse, but a lot of us aren’t. Some of us might enjoy sex as a bonding activity in the same way that you’d enjoy yoga or another form of exercise; it’s nice and feels good, but it’s not exactly our highest priority and we could go without it for a good while if we wanted. Some of us actively enjoy sex and initiate it often. Some of us are okay with one-night stands because we’re not attracted to anyone specifically and just want the sex. Some of us don’t want to do it with someone else but enjoy some self-love every now and then, whether as stress relief or because that’s just the kind of sex we enjoy. Some of us are okay with touching someone sexually but don’t want that touch reciprocated.

Even if you’re not planning on putting your character into a sexual situation, it’s handy to figure out her relationship to sex and touch because that can give her another dimension, such as where does she draw the line with touching? At what point does she see it as going from non-sexual to sexual? What kind of touch does she crave? Does she not want any touch at all, either because she hates it or because she’s afraid that it’ll inevitably stray into sexual touching? I crave touch because I’m a very tactile person, but when I’m touching someone who’s not a family member, I’m always uncomfortably aware of how one tiny shift in position or one slide of a hand can make things stray out of my comfort zone and send the wrong message. And I hate it when people unexpectedly draw me into contact, such as someone suddenly hugging me. That could also be a dimension of my autism, but I do feel that my asexuality plays a part because touch from a family member of mine is always different to that of anyone else.

Aromantic

And then we come to romantic attraction. I...don’t know what that is. I mean, I do know what it is in theory, but where’s the line between platonic attraction and romantic? Some of us aros might enjoy romantic-coded things like kissing, yet not feel that romantic draw to a specific person. And what makes these things romantic in the first place? Dates are just a hang-out between people where you get to know them better. Kissing can be a sexual thing, and many one-night stands or friends with benefits kiss without it being romantic. Family members cuddle. Friends compliment each other’s appearances. All of these things can potentially be reshaped to remove the romantic element, and that’s what makes it so confusing for me personally to figure out wtf romantic attraction is.

Just like with asexuality, we can range from romance-repulsed to craving a relationship that’s romantic in nature. Some of us are okay with being in a romantic relationship with a friend who’s attracted to us in that way because we want increased intimacy and don’t mind it taking on a romantic tone. Some of us freak out when a friend confesses to us. Some of us don’t really want or don’t care for a romantic relationship but want to not look like an outsider to alloromantics. Some of us do it for the tax benefits.

(But in all seriousness, the world is currently heavily skewed in favour of romance. Some places only accept your next-of-kin if they’re legally family i.e. your spouse, and just being their good friend won’t cut it. Capitalism makes it so that we basically have to live with others to survive in certain places because living alone is inaccessible. Marriage comes with certain benefits that other relationships don’t. Queerplatonic relationships can be just as deep as romantic ones and incorporate everything that romantic ones do yet in a deromanticised way, yet they’re not seen as valid. Look up alterous attraction to see how love and attraction can be so deep and yet something that doesn’t slot neatly into romantic or platonic. Once you start seeing all this, you just can’t stop).

I had a month-long online relationship with a girl back in 2017 and I thought I was feeling romantic attraction. I was giddy to talk to her, I had 7-hour phone calls when I normally had anxiety around phone calls, I felt good and happy when she sent me selfies...but there was something about the relationship that I couldn’t put my finger on. I thought at the time that it was just because it being online meant that I didn’t have the physical intimacy (like cuddling) and that affected it, but now I realise that I’m aro and I was trying to force myself into this idea of an ideal relationship because I didn’t know that you could be close and not be romantic partners. I still talk to her and we’re still close, but there’s so much less pressure and panic now that I’m not trying to force myself to be attracted to her in a way that I think I should be. But I’m still drawn to her in a way that I’m not drawn to men and in a way that’s not just platonic, which is why I call myself sapphic aroace. And even if I figure out whether I am drawn to men as well, it still feels...different. More on that later on in this ask. But it’s basically why I just call myself queer and why I’ve given up on trying to find the Perfect Microlabel for myself, because I never will.

So regarding your character, the first thing to do is figure out where exactly she sits on the aromantic spectrum. Is she fully aro? Does she feel romantic attraction once in a blue moon, and who does she feel it towards? How close would she have to be to someone to feel that attraction? Does she constantly question what romantic attraction is, or does she not even care what it is? Does she want a romantic relationship, or does she crave close friendship? Does she not understand where that boundary between close friendship and romance is? How would she react if a friend confessed romantic feelings to her? Is she okay with doing things like cuddling, or does she fear that it’ll be misread as romantic? How does she react when people tell her to stop flirting or otherwise imply that she is? Can she tell when others are flirting with her? What even is love at first sight? Why is romantic love so much more important than platonic or familial or any other form? Why are people so obsessed with finding The One™? Why can stories only be relatable/attractive/amazing/etc. if there’s a romantic relationship in them? Why are the ‘greatest love stories of all time’ romantic? Why can’t those greatest love stories be between friends? What do you do when you’ve got a wlw or mlm relationship and you want to offer this representation but don’t want to feel pressured to make them romantic just because of that? Why even is love itself seen as such an important thing, like we’re inhuman robots if we don’t love someone in any way? AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

(Like I said, once you start questioning this stuff, you can’t stop. That was basically my raw thought process while I was writing that paragraph, and that last one about the wlw/mlm relationships is my current struggle with my original characters).

Sapphic

So, tying in a sapphic draw with being aroace, I once again urge you to look up oriented aroaces, along with angled and electio. I recommend starting here and here. Basically, what we feel isn’t romantic or sexual, and it might not be just platonic, but it’s something. It’s something important enough that we feel like it’s a key part of our identity because it shapes how we interact with people and it might make us feel separate enough from aroaces or aspec people that we start to question ourselves and where we belong. Going back to an aro who might crave or be okay with a romantic relationship or an ace who might be into sex, they might be an oriented aroace who wants this partnership with someone they love or wants sexual experiences with only those who would fall under her sapphic attraction umbrella. In the case of your character, how does her sapphicness interact with her aroaceness? How does her attraction to women or woman-aligned people differ from her attraction to those who aren’t included in the sapphic umbrella? (Look up non-binary sapphics, for example). Does she feel like she has to call herself sapphic/a romantic-oriented term and leave herself open to potential relationships because she doesn’t want to be alone, or does she genuinely feel that attraction? Once you add in the aroace dimensions, it changes the gay/bi/pan/etc. dimension to something that can’t just be defined as “attracted to this gender” and it’s something you have to think about to know how your character would interact with different people in different circumstances.

Good luck with your character! Don’t hesitate to ask if you need any more help 😊

[valkblue]

Being a Behavior technician requires a certain amount of dedication to the job — the rigorous type, bordeline rigid. That’s what is expected to be at peak efficiency regarding analysis protocols and diagnostics for host service and calibration.

For that, Vivian thinks she might be the worst tech in her department.

— masterlist, AO3

Chapter 2 on 12

Chapter wordcount: 3,340 Rating: General Warning: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ same as usual: swearing and technobabble!

Author’s notes: Bad behavior tech, bad!! 

Have a good time reading, and my askbox/messages are always open! 💙

— Chapter 2

There were some days, like this one, during which Vivian and her team were called back in the night; a group of guests went all trigger happy and their mess had to be cleaned up somewhere between the Abernathy Ranch and Las Mudas. And since the narratives and hosts had to be back in rotation asap, the techs’ nighttime was reduced without thinking twice.

Maybe it didn’t look like it, but this job was really taxing sometimes.

That being said, shortly after 6AM, Vivian went back to her room for a few extra and well deserved minutes of sleep before resuming her diagnostics routine. An hour and a big mug of coffee with cereals later, Vivian was back in the elevator which took her down to the Behavior department level.

In the soft lighted glass room, a host was sitting on a wheeled stool. The light brightened when Vivian entered.

"Sorry to have kept you waiting," she said on a hushed voice as if she wanted no-one but the offline host to hear her while letting the glass panel shut down slowly behind her. "I had a rough night. Looks like you did too…"

Ironically, he hadn’t been part of this night’s massacre. No, all those involved were already back in rotation for quite some time. Her first subject of the day, however, had only been victim of his own storyline, needing only a quick check-up and Vivian’s all clear before being back on his loop.

She sat on the stool in front of the host, doing her best to ignore his nudity, and unfolded her tablet on her knees; she had to navigate through several indexes before connecting to his signal for a couple update history checkups.

"Bring yourself back online, please," she ordered, without raising her voice.

The command only seemed to take him out of his thoughts.

"Can you hear me?"

"I hear you alright."

"Off character, for now, please."

Vivian loved to talk to them in character… but, for her diagnostics, she had to ask them to reduce their emotional affect — which was more a guarantee of efficiency than an actual need, though.

"There’s been modifications in your attributes last month," she stated as she was discovering the changes. "Several characteristics got… Who the fuck did that?!"

Vivian had an answer to that already, as she was going through the log; someone from Narrative — that she would brand as asshole — had been pretty heavy handed on self-preservation and aggression, and on top of that they also nerfed curiosity, patience and courage!

There was pitiful justifications from the tech about an adjustment request from their sector after some of the host's alleged wanderings, blamed on his curiosity. But all this was more about making him keener to answer provocation while still being enough of a challenge for his opponents — hosts and guests alike. Vivian didn’t like what kind of freedom Narrative techs were taking with the hosts’ attributes, carefully calibrated by her co-workers and others before them; it wasn’t as simple as changing percentages on the fly in any way they saw fit!

It was a delicate and very important step for any host's cognition, for them to even function at all, as much as for the continuity of their fucking narratives!

Vivian took a deep breath and the time to check the quality of the host’s interactions since the modifications but the results only ended up fuelling her rage. So, she commanded:

"Archive this configuration and open the previous one. Confirmed?"

"Yes."

Vivian smiled, satisfied. On her tablet, the attribute matrix seemed now way more familiar than the last.

"We’ll leave 1.5% more in self-preservation… since they thought it best to give you a few more to endure their bullshit," she grumbled. "And then… 0.5 in aggression for them not to come back to lay it on thick! 6.5 will be more than enough. No need to go all the way up to 10!"

Vivian confirmed her modifications before looking back at the host.

"What d'you think?" she asked, without really expecting any answer from him. “No imbalance or discomfort?”

Modifications could sometimes cause hiccups in the hosts’ cognitions, close to an uneasy feeling. There were other ways to know but Vivian preferred to talk rather than relying only on the screen readings.

"No, I’m fine."

And from what Vivian could read now, he wasn’t lying. Although, browsing his history, she noticed a worrying peak of stress at the time of his "death". It would seem like a normal thing from anyone's standpoint but from which of a host and their technician's, however…

"Your last interaction recorded a peculiar rise in your stress level. What caused this?"

"A… thought."

His mumblings were recognised as improvisations by the tablet. Despite her surprise, Vivian said nothing of it.

"What thought?" she encouraged him instead.

"My family. I’m supposed to be responsible for… my wife, and my daughter."

Vivian noticed the normal occurrences of his cognition in the scrolling of his code.

"But… I can’t help it, I’m out of place, there."

He was getting out of beaten path a little with this comment.

"How are your relations with them?"

"Acceptable."

He kept a few seconds of silence before adding:

"My daughter, I think something’s wrong with her."

"Between you and her?" she asked, for clarity’s sake.

"No…"

"Analysis: what prompted this observation?"

He looked hesitant. On the tablet, still no conflict.

"Her interactions are limited," he then said. 

Vivian hesitated too; should she report this observation? Perhaps it was relevant for a potential issue somewhere else…

"It must be my fault."

The tablet, however, reported a new improvisation in that answer.

"Your fault?! Why?"

"I… I should enjoy being home."

According to the datas scrolling up, that was a scripted answer from his guilt library but despite that, what took Vivian aback was the tears running down his cheeks. On the screen — distress, confusion. That wasn't the affect class linked to it. But she didn’t suppress his emotional response…

Instead, she glanced carefully through the glass panels around them; her closest colleagues were two cubicles away, doing the same thing as her. Well, maybe not exactly; once positive that no-one would catch her, Vivian leaned forward a little to put her hand on her subject’s cheek, wiping the tears off with a gentle brush of her thumb.

She could have calmed him down with a simple word, or even with a tap on the right button on her tablet but… what would be the point? Vivian didn’t want to, not with him. And to be honest, as much as she was sincerely touched by the faithfulness of his emotion, it was also convenient for her that he would bring such a topic up.

"Children have a short memory but a quick mind…"

Victor Hugo said that first. And Vivian was quoting him today with something else than Philosophy in mind; she had just use a voice command — her voice command. A simple little script she sneaked into the host’ complex code architecture. More or less mixed with the rest of it, encrypted and virtually unnoticeable without knowing what to look for, it gave the recipient host the ability to keep in their memory, in a hidden and compressed partition, all the events happening between the activation and deactivation of said command. Conversations, feelings, impressions… Everything was there. And everything would remain, even after each reset.

The host couldn’t access it at will without hearing the command, and for what Vivian had noticed so far, it didn’t interfere with his narrative, alter his attitude, cause any glitch nor any pain.

According to her analysis, it was only perceived as a distant memory, one of those leaving an undescribable feeling or a sense of déjà-vu…

Despite the severity of her infraction, Vivian was quite proud of her small "innovation". And she had chosen this one, host ID# MG73368928764, to receive her creation among all the percentage of the park’s population her team had in charge. She had chosen him because of his responsiveness in analysis, because he hadn’t been in any big narrative for at least ten years, because she had already noticed a few oddities in his code, because there was something soft in his eyes, a little extra something…

And quite frankly? Because he was the one who inspired her to create this command, based on an idea that has been on her mind. Because she wrote it for him.

Ever since she arrived in the Behavior department, Vivian had done quite a lot of analysis, calibrations, and had many occasions to talk with plenty of hosts, in character mode or not. And the guys from the Narrative department had done such a good job in writing all these characters, their lexical bases, just like her colleagues from Behavior, in encoding and calibrating all that work into each host put in their care!

Or at least, that’s how Vivian was seeing things back then.

But this particular host caught her eye more than any other; she had quickly noticed how much he was calling upon his improvisation engine compared to others and the feeling of having an actual conversation with a well aware person was sometimes so baffling that, against all common sense, Vivian furthered it. Not to mention the frustration she felt that he could never really recall anything else than what his logs allowed him to, after each diagnostic. But since the installation of her script, the inference frequency in his dialog chains increased. And he was calling upon it with even more fluency.

To the point that their sessions became a real pleasure for Vivian!

It was selfish, she realised that… but she wanted him to keep something from it so badly, something from her, just like she could think back on their conversations with emotion. Those past ones were lost for him but, now, he could remember all those that followed the installation of her script.

Vivian smiled when he focused on her.

"Hello, Lawrence."

He looked hesitant for a second, like a man still not fully awake yet. No alert or conflict from his inference engine on her tablet.

"Hey…"

At his answer, Vivian smiled to him again, and so did Lawrence, even if he kept something a bit shy, uncertain, numbed. In that intermediate state, it wasn’t like coming back to the warmth, the liveliness and the responsiveness of the character mode but it wouldn’t be as cold as the analysis mode could be. Even though he was reverting to his usual demeanor.

Vivian didn’t program that; this semblance of a balance had set itself around the integration of the script in the depths of the core-code. But she liked the result.

"How are you, today?"

His drawl was back when he answered:

"Well enough, I’d say. Like after a real good sleep…"

Vivian grinned, amused.

"Perfect."

"And you, how are you?"

The spontaneity of Lawrence’s question took her by surprise.

"Well… um, I’m glad I can talk with you a bit," she finally answered. "Do you remember our last encounter?"

"21 days and 11 hours ago."

This time, the answer was delivered almost without accent; the question had triggered an analysis type of answer.

"And do you remember what our talks were about?"

He would have to query in his archived and encrypted memories to be able to answer this question. If he had it "right", then it would mean that everything was in order.

"Yeah, I told you about my folks, my… my drives. And that project you worked on for some time. It was a secret."

"It still is, Lawrence," she reminded him softly.

"I can keep a secret."

That wasn’t something he needed to convince her of! And she was less wary about him than about any other technician snooping in his code like the guys from Narrative did between two of her maintenance sessions. She gritted her teeth, frustrated and annoyed, by the limits of her authority on the modifications decided in high places, and on whom…

It was her fault, really; she shouldn’t have grew attached to a host like she did to Lawrence, but now things were the way they were, and it wasn’t possible for her to purge her memories and rewrite her affections as easily as a few lines of code. She was only human, after all!

Vivian brushed her boiling emotions off with a brief sigh before fully focusing back on Lawrence, asking him:

"Did this script cause you any issue since our last encounter?"

He still looked slightly numbed as he answered:

"I… I don’t understand…"

"No interference with your core-code?" she rephrased.

"No. None."

Not to brag, but she suspected that much. The only persisting worries she had were the saturation of his memory, provided that could actually be possible. Normally, the hosts’ memory was wiped between each rotation; then, there was no telling what could really happen if a unit gathered too much data. Vivian might as well be ending up editing her script to overwrite the oldest logs… She hesitated, biting her lower lip then tried a new question:

"No saturation?"

"No."

She gazed at him for a long minute before looking down on her tablet and stating, more to herself than to him:

"Maybe… maybe you’d rather be rid of all those… memories."

She held back the word "useless".

"No, not at all!"

Vivian frowned but a shy smile appeared on her lips.

"Why?"

"'Cause memories are priceless," he answered. "The good ones just like the bad… That’s what makes one remember where they’re from, and who their folks are. It’s what shape one’s life…"

And she followed the improvisation notifications on his dialog chain, but the irony in all this also made her feel somewhat bitter.

"Do… do you know where you are, now?" she asked.

"Ain’t so sure," he answered, holding her gaze, frowning. "Feels… like a dream I already had…"

That wasn’t far from the truth, indeed.

"And it’s gonna be time to wake up, now."

"Alright…"

Unfortunately, Vivian didn’t have all the time she’d love to give him. She tapped on her tablet, biting her lower lip; all of his levels were green, nothing to report — he had her all clear.

"Are we gonna see each other again soon?"

The question made her raise her head, almost stunned; Vivian wasn’t on the interface where she could follow his dialog chain anymore but didn’t need it to recognise improvisation.

"You… you’d want that? I mean…"

She cleared her throat, mouthing a silent word, before rephrasing:

"Would you like that?"

"Sure!"

That answer pleased Vivian, anyway; she felt herself blush and stumbled upon her words until something coherent came to her mind.

"Well then, I… I’ll do my best. I promise."

Lawrence nodded, apparently satisfied, and Vivian held his gaze while taking a short breath.

"They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night."

This time, it was Edgar Allan Poe’s prose Vivian had chosen to end her script, and stop the recording of his memories. None of what would happen after hearing those words would remain in Lawrence’s memory, unless she or another technician botched the wipe before sending him back in his narrative loop.

Vivian stayed with him until the cleanup was complete then disconnected the signal after putting him offline; she was already late for her next session but didn’t hurry all that much to tuck her tablet and get up. It was pissing her off to let him there, like that…

She let out a brief sigh then, after a look at her watch, she finally but reluctantly left the room.

The day didn’t only seem too long to Vivian; around 10PM, it had really started to drag on and it was about time to leave her be. Especially if some other guests were planning to unload their barrels during what little time she had left to sleep!

At least, Damon Dyers kept things cool on his side. Margaret had managed to get footages of his arrival in Sweetwater and his first steps in one of the easiest narratives, according to her, but she didn’t seem disappointed when offering them to take a look at those videos she had already viewed a good dozen times since on her tablet. She had been very chatty about his clothing, narratives, adventure companions, and even taking friendly bets on what he would do next…

"Everybody’s gonna be hyped like crazy outside when his review’s gonna hit the park website!" laughed Thawal, finishing what would be his last coffee cup for today.

Charles snorted.

"As if Delos needed more of that…"

Margaret nodded in approval, all the more when Luke added:

"No joke, that’s better than any of those stupid casting headshots! It’s the best career boost he could hope for, right now!"

"Not to burst it for you but, nobody is gonna see this outside," commented Vivian. "It was hard enough for Marge to get them in-house, so I can’t even imagine getting them out!"

To what Luke shrugged.

"Do you really believe that?! There’s nothing a few bucks under the table can’t buy, and footages instead of a crappy picture in Sweetwater is no big deal, I’m sure! It’s not like it’s IP or some shit…"

Margaret scoffed.

"I didn’t pay, not even fucked anybody to get them,” she muttered, openly cynical, as if her thoughts were escaping between her gritted teeth. “I’m trash but I didn’t stooped that low yet."

With Charles laughing like a braying donkey in the background, Luke corrected:

"That’s not what I meant, Marge! But yeah, thanks to prove my point all the same…Even Marge managed to put her hands on it, without shaking down her pockets or her ass, so imagine what you can get if you’re ready to drop some cash!"

Luke’s rhetoric seemed to get the point across as it was followed by a moment of silence around the table, and the tablet in its center, on which the patched-up hour of video feeds was still going.

"Anyhow, it makes nice memories to bring back home…"

Vivian pulled her attention away from the screen to stare at the focused — mesmerised — face of Thawal. He was right, it would make nice memories…

She bit her lower lip and turned back towards the tablet; suddenly, Dyers wasn’t the center of attention anymore, not even a guest who came to show off in the park — there was nothing else than people, hosts or guests it didn’t matter, listening to a more charismatic man than the others carrying a tune next to a player piano for the pleasure of his audience. And far from being corny or just lame, the scene even had something charming.

"And you said he’s going to Pariah, after that?"

Charles’ voice cut Vivian’s thoughts short.

"Yeah," answered Margaret. "He got there yesterday, I think…"

Margaret searched her video directory and selected one that spreaded across the entire screen; they could see Dyers and his two friends, lead by Teddy, on the trail of the narrative they had picked — a bounty hunt, if Vivian understood everything.

"It’s so fucking epic, Marge!" bursted Thawal, leaning over the tablet as if he wanted to dive in it. "Looks like another remake of the Magnificent Seven…"

"Except they’re only four," Charles snarked.

Thawal and Margaret glared at him, which made him laugh even more.

"I know, right?" Marge then admitted. 

She turned towards Vivian, beaming with happiness. She smiled back but her mind was already elsewhere; somewhere around Las Mudas, she wasn’t quite sure yet…

On the screen, Dyers was continuing his adventure, like larping or a life size fanfiction. Now that Vivian was thinking about it, it had been a while since her last vacation… 

She could maybe use her special employee discount, and do so to hold her promise?

[queensdivas]

Hidden Blade Chapter 1

Y’all I’ve been to excited for this because I loved this movie with a passion. (Nothing beats Bohrap btw but damn 6 Underground was awesome not just because of Ben. Though he really made the movie even better.) If you’d like to be tagged in future chapters please hmu! 

Please enjoy and I’ll see you guys in the next chapter or one of my updates. I’m on a train ride to London from Edinburgh so it’s about five hours. I plan on getting a crap done this ride so you might be seeing multiple updates! 

Enjoy! 

Next Chapter

Masterlist

Governments should always be in fear of who they govern over..those who are being governed should never be living in fear of who they are ruled over. Yet we live in a world where those in power abuse it badly so they can live the lavish life of the vices, greed, lust, and even the gluttony of having everything at their feet. Those who suffer under those sadly are living in a society in fear, hate, and uncertainty of whether they’ll be okay by the end of the day. 

That’s where I come in. 

You have to start somewhere small in order to cause a chain reaction. That lovely snowball effect. I start small by cutting off the suppliers resources, such as their plants, dirty shacks, and even the old warehouses. Once the resources are extinguished, I then move up to those in high up positions in order to really cause the rolling to begin. 

Yet I was given an opportunity to do a little more good with a lot less strings attached. Who doesn’t love a little more freedom. But what I was offered was complete freedom and who wouldn’t want complete freedom. 

You ever played the Assassins Creed games? I like to consider myself a walking version of that except no magical abilities, no special creed, or even a long line of ancestors that are meant to look similar and only the first three or four games nailed the similarities. Not the point. For those of you who’ve never heard of those games, imagine someone who's able to scale an entire flat building, stand on top of a metal cross, and even have some really cool equipment to help get the job done. We’ll be getting to those a little later. 

My name is eight. The Assassin. 

What’s the difference between a Hitman and Assassin you ask? One gets paid to do any form of killing for money, the other one does it for either political or religious reasons in this world of ours. But you both kill people? True. Never declared myself a saint anyhow in this world so shush! Story time! 

I pulled up to one of the abandoned planes to turn off my 4runner and climb out. Love the whole abandoned airfield look for the hideout. Really gives that fast and furious sort of vibe. How many movies are in the series anyhow? 

A ram truck came pulling up next to my 4runner as I began grabbing all my junk to hopefully store somewhere that was a little more secure than my new apartment here in California. Keeping a bunch of ropes, weapons, and my vast amount of foreign fruit would get me busted and I certainly love my Nectarine! 

“Glad to know I wasn’t the only one brought into this little adventure.” He appeared in front of me as I swung my duffle bag right on my shoulder. I closed the door as I turned to see him all dressed in american/military gear. An American soldier? Real power move.  

“Glad to see we got ourselves a soldier. Eight.” I held my hand out to him as he shook it. 

“Seven. At Least according to that dude.” He pointed as one came out of a tiny airplane and smiled. 

“Weird to see you not looking like a GAP model.” He showed up at my apartment in Israel looking like he walked out of Sunday church for some god knows reason. At first I thought he was apart of Jehovah's witness but as you can see we’re about to kill some mother fuckers.

“Ah really funny. Come meet the rest of us oh so lovely fellow campers.” We walked into the base as a women with blonde hair was reading a map while another woman was reading what looked like some sort of medical book. 

“Ladies this is seven and eight our newest batch of newbies. The one reading the map is two and in the cap is five. Not sure where the other two are but I imagine they’ll be showing up sometime soon.” I gave them a small wave as I put my bag on the ground next to the large table. 

“Look who finally showed up. Four this is seven and eight our eyes from the sky.” He tossed his hoodie down on the table as he gave us a small smile. The last member came into the room which is what I’m assuming was three. 

“There’s this trick that we all do to get through our day. We take a box and into that box, we place all the horrors of the world, all the wrongs humans do to one another. And then we close the box and pretend it doesn’t exist. Only some of us spend too much time inside the box. We’ve lost our ability to pretend. We know there’s too much unfinished business in this messed up world. Our job as ghosts is to do the dirty work the living can’t or won’t. And we do it from here. This is our haunted house. It’s a lot like the Batcave, except it’s nothing like the Batcave. Seven, eight. You’re dead. You’re gonna be restricted to cities that you’ve never visited before. People that you’ve never met. All of course your fellow ghost, none of whom you’ll know by name, only number, for safety, and so no one gets too close.” I mean. All we need is a butler, some random child to say “geez guys” and I think we would be set. 

“So basically what we’re doing is a sense of a justice league but with no moral codes?” Asking as One nodded. 

“Yes. Except Wonder Women uses guns and Batman is okay with killing people.” I..okay that works. 

“Each one of us has our own little gifts we bring to the table and now that we’ve required you two, we now officially have a set team.” 

“We’re like the A-Team but on steroids except Mr. T is this guy.” The Spainard commented as everyone just stared him down. 

“In your vast dreams.” One commented.

“Will we be required to wear matching rings?” Asking which made I believe his name is four chuckle a little. 

“Funny. Alright c’mon I wanna show you two something.” We all followed him into another room where a wall covered with nine pieces of paper with a single roman numerals on each one. 

“This is our target hitboard. These nine fuckers have been placing too much shit inside the box. So now they answer to us. Target number one: this prick. The Dictator of Turgistan Roach Alimov.” I walked over to his photo and began studying the guy. Radiates small dick energy already from all the work I’ve done over there, kind of like Kim Jong-Un except he doesn’t flaunt his money. 

“God I’m really craving french fries. Can we finish this over at Luckies?” I believe he’s three asked the group as I began walking past the other eight pieces of paper as I lightly saw their faces. Efrain Gracian. He runs the largest drug cartel in Mexico and has been killing a shit ton of innocent people in their villages. Oh my god they put Kim Jon-Un on their target list hell yeah. 

“So we plan on just killing all these pricks because they keep shitting on their countries and the rest of the world?” Leaning against the wall facing them as one nodded. 

“I say we finish this thing at Luckies. I’m really feeling a shitty beer to set the mood of introductions.” One began walking out of the fort as everyone else followed except for me as I looked at the wall again. Figured there would be less on the board in all honesty. 

~~~

I slipped into the booth with myself facing the middle of the window and the inside of the restaurant, seven sitting to my left while four was on my right. To think that I’m now officially dead and I cut all my ties off when I left home so no funeral. Bet they thought I was already dead anyhow so this works nicely. 

“So what do you bring to the table?” I was asked as I tossed my car keys on the table. 

“The soundless steps of a killer is what I bring to the table. You guys make a shit ton of noise if I think I know who you are. I’m assuming you guys we’re the one destroying Florence?” His eyes widened a little which makes my assumption correct cause these fuckers really had fun in Florence. 

“Florence was an absolute disaster.” He stopped talking as the waiter came to the group. 

“A round of Heineken for everyone. Then whatever else they want.” I ordered as everyone smiled a little as they began ordering their preferred drinks. 

“Figured you’d be a good match since you graciously just bought us all drinks. So if you’re a soundless killer, who have you eliminated?” You can thank the new democracy in South Sudan, and ending an entire sex trafficking operation in Chad. Both we’re super difficult to achieve but damn I did an awesome job. Both were run by major cunts obviously and took months of planning to even get close to them. 

“Who do you think got rid of the cunt from South Sudan?” Seven looked over at me then leaned across the table. 

“You killed Zafir Bahri?” Seven asked as I nodded. 

“Yup. Yet it was one of my most difficult assassinations since I had to make a break for it in the countryside. Kind of stuck out like a sore thumb till I made it to a reservation station.” The waitress came with the first round of beers. Four took a big gulp of his beer then sighed. 

“Alright if we’re going to show off what our past selves have done. I got the chance to steal a 5.0 carat ruby necklace that had two smaller diamonds that were about 4.2 carats that was about 100,000 dollars worth.” Yet he’s sitting here in an American restaurant drinking some shitty beer and eating high heart attack food? Sounds about right. 

“And here you are in America drinking Heineken and about to eat a very greasy double cheeseburger. Cheers” I grabbed my bottle as he did for us to clink our bottles together. Four seems super chill actually and now I’m kind of curious how he pulled off that heist. 

“So. What’s the absolute best thing about being dead? I mean you don’t have to pay taxes anymore.” Seven asked the entire group as they all had an inner conversation with themselves about the best part of being deceased. 

“No more dmv lines, no more shopping for Christmas.” Christmas has always been stressful for my old life and I didn’t even celebrate it!

“Or backstabbing girlfriends.” Raising my eyebrow at four. Damn someone broke his little heart. I’d play the worlds saddest song on the tiniest violin but not sure if he would get the reference. 

“They should make an “Out of office” reply for dead people. Sorry I’m away from the planet right now. I’m fucking dead.” That’s a bit much but if it makes her feel better about being dead then let her do her own thing. 

“No more tax, no more criminal records, no more getting arrested by the pigs just for being naked and or just the usual stuff. You know, being naked, getting drunk. Casual stuff.” How is being naked casual? Since when is being naked considered casual in any standard? 

“Umm. How is being naked any form of being casual?” He took a drink of his beer as he licked his lips.

“Ya know. Just walking around naked on your balcony or even on your front porch. It’s a casual thing.” I..I still don’t see that as a casual thing. Around the house yes because oversized t-shirt and underwear is always a comfy.

“Is that like when Jersey people say it’s a jersey thing?” Before he could answer One chuckled a little. 

“Guys. You’re all wrong. The best thing about being dead is the freedom. I mean, we’re all gonna die. May as well do it while we’re alive, right? When you’re young, you lock yourself into all of these bad decisions. Marriages, mortgages, and all that kind of stuff. But you die. It’s all escaped. Poof! Gone! From that point forward, all that matters is what you choose. The point is that we should bring seven and eight behind the curtain. You wanna hand me those over there?” Three handed him a bunch of plastic cups as leaned a little more forward on the table. I looked out of the corner of my eye to see him quickly glancing away back at the demonstration. Guess he’s kind of cute, not exactly sure how getting involved with people on the team is viewed. Rather avoid the whole situation. 

“Alright here. A little deminsation, no technology. So this is how to stage a coup in three not so easy steps. Alright you got a country, Turgistan right? These are the people, nice people, going about, doing their thing. Then you got the four generals, cuatro cunts, very bad guys. But there’s one worse guy. That’s the piece of shit dictator, right there at the top.” Sounds about right. That was basically the entire set up in South Sudan. 

“Don’t forget his brother.” Brother? Oh yeah, the guy has a brother that basically has been isolated or off the face of the earth at this point. Gotta love it when Governments hide those wanting a better world, or hiding sick pedophiles when they fake suicides so they don’t go to prison or end up being executed. 

“Democracy loving brother.” So we’ve got a shitty dictator and a loving democratic. Of freakin’ course!

“He’s the key. So we’re gonna hit the four generals. They’re gonna lead us to the brother.” 

“You kill top Generals, you fuck the dictators day.” Three shoved a few French fries in his mouth. 

“Can confirm.” I took a big gulp of my beer as I leaned back against the booth.

“Second thing we're gonna do is free the brother. And the last thing we’re gonna do is we’re gonna say goodbye to piece of shit dictator and hello to democracy loving brother.”

“It all goes down in four months, El Dia de los Muertos, The Day of the Dead.” Kinky.

“Oh that’s it?” Seven and I looked at each other for the both of us to nod in approval of the plan. 

“Um well that’s pretty simple ya know. The cups.” I took a drink of my beer as I began mentally seeing the whole plan in my head. 

“Wonderful presentation.” We’re gonna die aren’t we?

“So we’re all gonna die?” At this point I say that’s a hard yes. 

“Not me.” What confidence she has because there’s something about her that just kind of scares the shit out of me. Must be something federal in her former life.

“She’s not, we all are. Painfully.” Peachy. Real fucking peachy. But hey I’m already technically dead so this works out perfectly in the end. Just when my body shows up at someones house or is found floating on the coast, going to be quite a headache trying to figure out since I’m already dead. 

Maybe I should be more optimistic with this new life. Could be worse. I could be stuck in a work camp in Siberia. Maybe we just see where this goes and if it doesn’t end well I just disappear into the unknown. Sounds like an absolute plan! 

Taglist:

@bonafiderocketqueen @filmslutt @imjustboredso @intoanothermind @4lendow-norris @wickedholland 

@takemetoneverland420 @art-flirt @intoanothermind @raylan-c

[bomberqueen17]

ugh my stupid W-2s

So I have the issue that somehow, at some point, the payroll company my employer uses got an incorrect social security number for me. I first noticed it several years back, when filing my taxes-- the W-2 had a number on it one digit off from my real SSN, and so I asked my employer to correct it, and then the next year it was still wrong, and I asked them to correct it, and this happened at least three years in a row, maybe four, and it was just one of those things and i didn’t think much about it.

Until, of course, I got furloughed along with the rest of America, and went to get on unemployment, and the Dep’t of Labor was like... You can’t get unemployment if you haven’t worked in the last 18 months. And I was like... ??? I’ve been working at the same place for 11 years??

Oh. They go by SSN, as does basically every thing ever. And like... I don’t know how Social Security actually works, but if the Social Security Whatsit bureau thinks i haven’t had any wages for eleven years now, then am I eligible for social security when I retire? I’ve been paying into the system at every paycheck. 

ARGH

Anyway I’ve been trying to straighten this out since March 20th, and I’ve sent them photocopies of everything, and they sent me a letter that was like “u have never worked” and I sent them back a thing that was like “yes I have here’s all my proof” and i haven’t heard back from that but I figure it was eight weeks to get the first letter and I’d expect like, eight more for the second, but in the meantime...

well, BIL just now called his stepmom who works for Illinois’s Dep’t of Labor, and she was like “ah we have that kind of thing all the time, it takes a while to straighten out but we’d pay the minimum benefit up until then at least.”

I was like.... is the minimum benefit zero because that’s what I’ve been getting. 

Oh, apparently not, so that’s a bummer. Who knows!

She suggested I go to an SSA office in person, which, great, but probably they’re open so I can, so. I should do that, there is one in Troy. But here’s a fun lil wrinkle, I don’t know where my social security card is; my parents had it my whole childhood and I don’t actually know if they ever gave it to me, and if they did, the matter of where I’d’ve put it when I moved out of their house some twenty-five years ago and have moved like eight times since then is a complex one. 

I mean, I also own a passport, but do I have that with me? No, I am 300 miles from my house and haven’t been home in over two weeks, but I wasn’t planning on crossing international borders so all I’ve got on me is my driver’s license.

But I don’t know what to do, and my employer is definitely a big fat pile of No Help Whatsoever in this one. (He was like “payroll company says it’s $50 to send a new W-2, let me know how many of those you want?” and I’m like... is he expecting... me to have fifty dollars... when I have not been paid since March... and if they fix my W-2 does that fix anything at all in my problems? I don’t think it does?)

I went to the SSA website and they were like “create an online account” so I went through the thing and they asked me some astonishingly personal questions (”you had a credit card in 2017, who was the provider” answer: no, “you had an auto loan in 2019, who was the provider?” “... choice C, how did you know that.” “Your middle or former name begins with S, which of these choices is it?” “two were gibberish and one was weird and one was... my actual middle name, interesting.”) and then the page reloaded to the homepage, and I was like... did... that work? So I went to log in and it was like NO ACCOUNT FOUND and then I was like ah no I see, finish creating account, great, and clicked on that and it was like “Enter the verification code we sent you!” 

... I was not sent a verification code, on any of the contact methods I provided when I signed up, unless it’s coming by the fucking postal service??

So that was no help. 

BIL said he was impressed that I don’t seem to have screamed MOTHERFUCKER at any point during all this, and in fact I have not, I have only quietly cried myself to sleep because I don’t understand paperwork and hate numbers and can’t keep things like this straight and it’s a perfect storm of The Shit My ADHD Ass Cannot Fucking Handle, but getting good and mad and yelling cuss words is not something I’m restraining myself from doing because that is not at all my impulse, I think I’m just going to cry quietly in the other room later because that is definitely more my speed here.

*sniffle* why are numbers so terrible to me. It’s not even necessarily about the money? I mean, I haven’t spent any money except on gas since March, I don’t really own anything so it sort of doesn’t matter, but I have literally been paying unemployment insurance and social security for over a decade and I want that to matter in some way? Does nothing matter? I would like to not be so fucking broke but I won’t starve, that’s not the issue, I have immense privilege in that I can just sort of drift endlessly through support networks and not cost anything but at some point I’m going to need to buy myself new underwear and I would dearly love to have my own money to do that with. 

I just. Don’t know. I’ll try again on Monday. Argh. *piteous mumbling*

Adulting doesn’t get easier as you get older, if any of y’all younger than me were wondering. I’d sort of hope age would bring some wisdom but in the department of dealing with government bureaucracies it has in fact not done that at all.

[aquariusrunes]

The Superfriends AU (part 12)

Damian kept his eyes on Marinette. 

She had been off all day, and their talk that morning had only proven his suspicions. Something was bothering her, and it was all Adrien Agreste’s fault. His fists clenched as the woman in front of him began working on him. Thinking about that blonde tom cat made his blood boil. Whatever he did, Damian would kill him for it. His cousin was sweet and naive despite her vast genius. She wanted to trust people, and when she did, she did it with her whole heart. And that blonde buffoon had broken it in to a million pieces. 

It wasn’t just the boy though, no. It was also that stupid video, it had to be. He hadn’t enjoyed it when it was sent to his phone. It was messy and loud, and while he had misjudged the small blonde girl, he still thought the spectacle was stupid. Anyone who poked a cadged animal was stupid, and that was obviously what that Italian girl was.  

At least he was finally able to put a face to the name of Lila Rossi.

It was a tactical failure for sure. His cousin had mentioned that she had everything involving the girl under control, but this was not what she could have planned. Marinette looked like she was on the verge of puking all morning, Damian recognized regret easily enough. That had been why he’d tried to talk to her, only to find out that it was the mistake of the morning and something that awful model had done that was upsetting her. 

Now his phone was being blown up with messages from the small blonde french girl who was, for some reason, still in his phone as ‘Sweetness.’ She wouldn’t stop texting him, hadn’t since the video had arrived. She apparently got the wrong idea from their earlier correspondence and was now under the impression that they were friends. And she kept asking for pictures of him and Colin.

Said boy was currently the one in possession of his phone. His boyfriend was switching between gleefully rewarching the video with a wickedly satisfied grin and texting with the blonde girl. Damian found the whole thing ridiculous, seeing how Colin didn’t know any French. Yet somehow he and the girl were holding some sort of conversation and he was, apparently, taking immense joy from the video that he couldn’t even understand. 

Suddenly a brush was in his face, painting foundation onto his skin. Damian could make a list fifty feet long detailing how much he hated makeup. He would growl at the woman currently caking his face in the disgusting stuff, but Colin was sitting in front of him on the edge of the platform, and the last thing he needed was for the redhead to be mad at him.

Marinette was currently in a changing room, trying on the brand new outfit Edna’s people had slapped together in just under an hour and a half. Chloé was, strangely, also in the changing room his cousin was in. The two girls had been inseparable from one another’s sides since coming back from lunch. 

It was strange. 

Damian didn’t like it. 

The blonde bitch was surely just trying to get his cousin to stop being upset with her precious model, which would not fly while Damian was here. He wouldn’t let Marinette be manipulated like that. Honestly, she was far too trusting. And here he thought she knew better than to trust that bitch. He’d have to talk to her later about Bourgeois. Even if Jon liked her, something was off about the girl, a feeling he couldn’t rip from his gut despite trying for the half Kryptonian’s sake. 

Damian’s eyes scanned the room, his mind suddenly being alerted to an absence. Something was missing. Someone was missing. The person’s absence had been nagging at him all morning, but then the empty space was filled during lunch. But it was gone now once again. 

“Colin.” he nudge the boy’s back with his foot. “Where did Jon go?” 

“Dunno, he got a call from his dad and wandered off to take it in private.” Colin looked up, neck twisted to stare at his boyfriend. “It’s actually weird, because he was on the phone with his mom all morning.” 

“Why did Lois call him?”

“I don’t know.” The redhead shrugged. “But it seemed like it really messed with him. I tried to ask him about it but then Mr. Kent called and he disappeared.” Colin’s eyes went back to Damian’s phone, texting out a few more messages before looking back at his boyfriend. “Actually, I haven’t seen Mr. Wayne around either. Do you know where he is?” 

“He informed me last night that their was some business he had to attend to, something to do with Diana Prince’s exhibit at The Gotham Museum of Antiquities.” Damian leaned back in his seat, the look Colin gave him making it clear he understood the code. A Justice League Emergency.  “He said he should be back before the festivities at the end of the week.” 

“Do you know what happened?” Colin asked, turning his whole body to face the boy, scooting over a tad so that the makeup artist wasn’t blocking his view. “At the museum, I mean.” 

Damian shook his head, his chin quickly being grabbed by the woman working on him, forcing him to stay still. He bit back a growl before responding. “Wouldn’t tell me a word. Maybe Kent’s filling Jon in on it. If my father’s involved I would assume his father is as well.” 

Colin tried not to laugh at his boyfriend’s obvious discomfort. “Guess we’ll just have to wait for him then.” Colin turned back around, eyes going back to the phone. “God she is so nice,” He whispered. 

“How are you even holding a conversation with her?” Damian asked. 

“Rose is fluent in four languages, English being one of them.” Colin smiled back at him. “I think I’ve made a new best friend.” he teased. Damian just sighed. Between his cousin and his boyfriend, he was never going to get his phone back. 

Suddenly Colin’s head whipped back around. “Wait, what would Mrs. Lane have to do with the museum?” 

Damian thought for a moment. Lois wasn’t overly involved in Justice League affairs. She was a deputized civilian, meaning she was technically a League member. It was a complicated system that was hard to explain and sometimes difficult even for Damian to decipher. But he did know that Lois handled the bulk of the League's publicity. Thanks to how she handled Superman, and a handful of other heroes, before she even knew their identities. 

But what kind of disruption could need Lois, Clark, Bruce, and Diana?

“I don’t know.” Damian resisted the urge to rub his chin. The only thing involving the League and Lois at the current moment was Lex Luthor Senior. The man had been in jail for several months now and his trial was quickly approaching. They’d tried to get that man arrested on several charges including tax fraud, terrorism, and other things, for many year, but nothing ever stuck. But now, now they had him on attempted murder, attempted murder of Lois Lane. Usually this wouldn’t fly, with the public knowing Lois’s loyalties to Superman and the League it would be assumed anything she said to reflect negatively on Luthor would be for the heroes, but they had a witness now. 

“The case maybe?” He whispered, hoping to god nothing bad had happened. If that man got out so many things would go up in flames. He would have to get in touch with Tim, ask him to ask Conner. He hated Conor being so involved with his half brother, put if Lex Jr. really was so great, maybe he would have some useful information. 

“Case?” Colin asked.

“Look up Lois Lane and Lex Luthor, see what pops up.” Damian turned his attention back to the woman currently painting his lips an ice blue. He didn’t want to discuss such sensitive things carelessly out in public. He also didn’t want Jon to magically appear while they were discussing it. He knew the whole situation was bothering him. But, no one took the attempted murder of their parent well. At least, that’s what Damian’s experience told him. 

… 

Marinette was living for this redesign. 

The tube top had been changed to black, the shall had disappeared, a silver collar, like Chloé’s golden one, now adorned her neck. Instead of the skirt she now wore a pair of high waisted black short shorts, a thick silver belt wrapped around her abdomen. Silk straps in silver, lavender, dark blue, and a lighter black made up the overskirt that hid most of the shorts, only exposing them from the front few. She was also now given shoes, heeled gladiator boots in silver, matching all of her jewelry. The diadem, earrings and bracelets from earlier had also stayed apart of the outfit. 

Was it less revealing? No. 

If anything it was more so. 

But it was a million times more fashionable, and by Edna’s smile said that she knew it too. 

Marinette still felt awful, and if anything was a million times more confused after her talk with Chloé, which was still on going. Every time they had a break, the blonde girl would start whispering more of her story, basically retelling the past three years from her perspective. 

Chloé was in her outfit from earlier that morning, the two girls were on a platform filled with fake pink, orange, blue, and whtie clouds. Currently Marinette’s back was leaned against the blonde’s, repositioning her head as the photographer dictated. 

“I’m a little pissed.” Chloé whispered. “The boy’s get to-” The flash of the camera went off, several photos being taken. “Get to do their photoshoot with bows and arrows. Like that’s so unfair.” 

“Bows and arrows?” Her cousin? Angry at Adrien? With a bow and arrow in his proximity? That would not be good. 

“Totally unfair, I want to play with weapons too.” Chloé’s pout only lasted a moment before the photographer was ordering them to pose in different positions. The group shots the other day hadn’t been awful, mainly because she was only taking pictures with Damian. It was beyond strange to be all over Chloé, especially with how sensitive her thoughts towards the girl currently were. 

She had known.

She had known for years.

She’d been akumatized multiple times with knowledge of both her and her partner’s identities in her head and Hawkmoth never found out. She didn’t even know how that was possible. Just how much control did Hawkmoth really have? 

But possibly what had taken her by surprise the most, what she still couldn’t quite believe, was that her sweet, idiotic, adorable partner, outed himself with Physics. 

“Physics?” Marinette was in disbelief at the blonde’s words, her sandwich barely half eaten.

Chloé simply nodded. “Yup.” She leaned forward, having laid down on the bed, she propped her chin on her hands. “See, back before Adri started school, I would go over to his house and try and get him to do some of my homework for me, cause he’s crazy smart ya know?” 

“I think only Max can surpass him in book smarts.” Marinette nodded. 

“Well, he would never actually do anything for me. But he’d explain everything.” Chloé rolled her eyes. “Adrien has a very specific way he explains things, especially physics.” She leaned forward a little further. “So, when Ladybug instructed Chat Noir to watch over me after Nathaniel got akumatized I tried to get him to do my homework.” 

“Oh my god.” Marinette mumbled through a mouth full of sandwich. 

“And he started explaining in that special Adrien way. He even said, ‘You go this Chlo’ which is what he always said whenever I would get frustrated while he was helping me.” 

“Physics.” The bluenette mumbled, after swallowing. “I always thought he’d out himself with a pun.” 

“You okay?” Chloé’s voice brought her out of her thoughts, Marinette blinked a few times, smiling at the woman touching up her lipstick. The woman smiled back before leaving the platform. 

“Fine.” Marinette huffed. “Just lost in thought.

“I know everything we talked about was a lot, sorry to dump it on you so suddenly.” Chloé looked down, eyes on her clasped hands. 

“Honestly, it was probably for the best. If you hadn’t told me when you did I would have just been worrying about it all day long.” Marinette’s hand raised, landing on Chloé’s shoulder and squeezing it reassuringly. “But you do know that I’ve got to tell Adrien, or if you want to-” 

“I think I’d prefer it if you did.” Marinette nodded. 

“Alright girls!” The photographer clapped. “I want Artemis laying on that cloud, and Apollo on her stomach on that one!” He pointed as he spoke, both girls going where told, adjusting their bodies at the man’s command. 

Marinette’s eyes ran over the room before focusing back on the camera. Damian still wasn’t in his outfit. It still hadn’t been fetched from Italy. Edna had mentioned Violet’s younger brother. The bluenette’s mind was filled with memories from her last visit to the Mode Building, when she’d first met Violet and a very eager eleven year old who would not stop aggressively hitting on her. 

If who she thought was really going to collect this garment, she could only hope that he wouldn’t be let up onto the floor where the shoot was happening. Violet probably wouldn’t allow it. She’d collect it from him in the lobby or something and bring it up herself. 

She’d just been dealing with so much today, she didn’t know if she could handle-

‘ ding ’

She really did have the most fantastic luck.

The elevator door slid open, a short muscular fourteen year old sauntering out with a black garment bag slung over his shoulder. A self satisfied smirk plastered across his chiseled jaw. His cheekbones hard and square, the bridge of his sloped nose splashed with light brown freckles. His blonde hair was swept back, resembling someone who’d just gone for a joy ride in a ferrari. He swaggered across the room, a free hand stuck deep into his khaki slacks. His clothing suggesting he’d just come from a private school of sorts.

“Have no fear!” He announced, holding up his free hand. “Your hero is here!” He pressed it to his chest, mumbling something along the lines of “hold the applause please.” 

Violet came into the room from behind him, smacking him across the back of the head and snatching the bag out of his hand. “You’re late.”

“Ow!” He said very pointedly at her, so pointedly that Marinette doubted it actually hurt. “You said asap, well, I had a test.” 

“Like you actually try in any math class.” She walked past him, taking the garment straight to the changing rooms, several other assistants flocked to her, checking the outfit for possible damages from transit. 

The boy shot his sister a dirty look before turning his attention to Edna, the woman was standing in the middle of the room. “Dashiell!” She called, arms open wide. 

“Edna!” He opened his own arms, but instead of hugging they high fived, resulting in a complicated handshake that reminded Marinette of her and her cousin’s own. “So good to see you!” 

“I trust you had no trouble?” The woman asked. 

“Not an ounce.” He smiled wide. “I assure you, I took this job as seriously as possible, I even went a longer root so that I would be on the water for the shortest time possible.” Marinette didn’t know Dash well, but she did know he was god awful at keeping his secret identity underwraps. She had never been more thankful for the fact that a specific person didn���t know she was a superhero. 

“Who is that?” Chloé whispered harshly to her. 

“Dash Parr.” Marinette said dryly, watching as Edna handed Dash a thick stack of American dollars. “Violet’s little brother.” 

“So, we don’t like him?” The blonde asked. 

“As promised, double the normal fee, in assorted bills.” Edna said, patting Dash’s hand once the money was in his grip. 

“Happy I could be of assistance.” 

“And if your parents ask?” The short woman’s eyebrow quirked up. 

“As far as mom knows, I just wanted to see my lovely sister.” The boy’s grin turned into a smirk. “And as far as dad’s concerned, I ran across an ocean today in under three minutes.” Dash winked, the two girls, and several other workers, watched as Edna pulled a fifty dollar bill from her coat, placing it on top of Dash’s stack. 

“Always a pleasure Dashiell.” She patted the boy’s cheek before turning back to the photographer. 

Marinette was hopeful for a moment, finally responding to Chloé’s question. “It’s not necessarily that we don’t like him.” The boy turned, most likely to leave, but for a moment he faced Marinette and Chloé’s platform. His eyes locked on her. And suddenly he was walking towards them. 

All hope was lost. 

“Marinette Dupain-Cheg!” he called. 

“Cheg?” Chloé whispered. 

Marinette held back her grimace. “Hi Dash.” She bit out through clenched teeth. 

“Well,” His eyes ran up and down her body and Marinette had never felt more icky in her entire life. “Don’t you just look awesome.” 

Chloé’s eyes narrowed. “How old are you?” She whispered, watching as Dash hopped up on the platform. He was a few inches shorter than Marinette, meaning he was several inches shorter than Chloé. 

“Fourteen gorgeous,” Dash winked at her and Chloé’s face twisted immediately. 

“Oh god no.” She spat. 

“How’ve you been Mar-Mar?” He asked, leaning against one of the clouds, he immediately began to flex. 

“Mar-Mar?” Chloé asked, eyes narrowing. “What is happening?” She began looking around, trying to find someone to explain. Damian had been shoved into a changing room now that his garment was here, and Adrien was getting his makeup touched up for his and Damian’s shoot. 

Chloé was curious as to what would happen when the boy noticed, but seeing as Gabriel was in attendance today, she thought it best not to draw his attention. When she turned her attention back to Marinette, the girl’s face had grown extremely pensive. The short blonde boy was bragging about how much he could bench press. 

Chloé took a step closer to the girl, leaning close to whisper in her ear. “No, seriously,” She hissed. “Who is this kid?” 

Marinette only shook her head. Both girls turning back to face Dash as he launched into a story about how the entire cheerleading team was currently arguing over who he’d be taking to prom. “Course I haven’t said yes to anyone yet.” He winked at Marinette again, this time Chloé was close enough to feel the girl shiver. “Incase a special little lady shows up intime.” 

Chloé grabbed Marinette’s hand, unsure what else to do in the moment. 

“DASH!” All three of them jumped at the noramly calm Violet’s angry shout. “Oh my god! Get off of there! We are in the middle of a shoot.” Violet reached up and grabbed Dash’s ear. She yanked him off the platform that surprised Chloé but didn’t seem to phase Marinette. 

“Ow! Ow! OW! Violet!” The boy cried. 

“No!” Violet began to march toward the elevators. “No! No! No! You need to leave now! You are disrupting the shoot! Demarcus!” a large black man suddenly appeared, he was dressed in a nice suit and was very obviously security. “Please escort Dash here out of the building, in fact, make sure he leaves the city.” 

“Yes ma’am.” Demarcus took Dash’s arm. “If you’d come with me please sir.” 

“Wait! Wait! Wait! Vi!” 

“What?” Violet crossed her arms, face set in a glare.

“There are a bunch of robot pigeons that keep showing up at the house, and Mom is starting to get really frustrated cause JackJack keeps fighting them and-”  

“Oh my god.” Violet slapped her forehead. “Okay, just please leave. I’ll talk to Hiro.” Violet turned away as the door closed on Dash and Damarcus. “Jesus christ I hate all of them.”

Chloé slowly turned to Marinette, releasing the girl’s hand. “No seriously,” She said. “What-who was that? What just happened?” 

Marientte sighed, slumping against one of the clouds. “That was Dashiell Robert Parr.” 

“I hated that.” Chloé said. “I never want to experience that again in my entire life.” 

“Yeah, I know the feeling.” The bluenette crossed her arms. “He’s a lot.”

“He called you Mar-Mar Dupain-Cheg.” Chloé pointed out. “Like, what the hell? Cheg? Mar-Mar?” Chloé looked around, almost like she was trying to find proof of what she just experienced. “Did I dream that?” 

“More like nightmared it.” Marinette commented. 

Chloé stared at her wide eyed. “Mar-Mar.” Chloé said monotone. “And I thought Bugaboo was a stupid nickname.” 

… 

Adrien rolled his shoulders, trying to regain some sense of comfort now that he was strapped into the white silk tank top. Thick leather straps in brass and gold had been draped tastefully around his abdomen, then wrapped tightly  around his bare arms, constricting his muscles to the point where it was hard to move. But he didn’t want to make the jobs of the two men working on sorting his outfit any more difficult than it had to be, so he stayed as still as possible. 

“God she’s a genius.” He had heard something along those lines so many times in the past two days, he’d lost count. He had greatly underestimated just how much Edna Mode was worshiped by her followers. Not that he disagreed, or not a lot, but he definitely thought that for some of the designs he’d seen so far, Marinette could easily make a better version. His point only being proved by Marinette’s amazing redesign of her own outfit that very morning. 

And she did that while not even functioning at a hundred percent. 

It was pretty obvious to Adrien that his partner had been off all morning. Heck, he had been off all morning. He was hoping to talk to her over lunch, see if he couldn’t help her and maybe discuss some things that had been distressing him as well. But Chloé had dragged her off before Adrien could even get to her. 

Now that was distressing. 

The two girls showed back up to the shoot together an hour and a half later, looking thick as thieves. While the thought of his oldest friend and his best friend (best female friend as Nino was his best male friend and that was the only way he could sort them in good conscience because they both meant so much to him) finally getting along made him so happy, he would be lying if he said their time alone didn’t worry him. 

One of the men wrapped a gaudy golden belt around his middle, it was thick and rested heavily against his hips, but he didn’t complain. “You really do look like an everyday adonis.” The other man commented. 

“Thank you.” Adrien gave a polite smile as one of the men started adjusting the straps that fell over the belt. Soon four sets of hands were at work on the straps hanging off the slim dark brown pants he wore. A woman came over, fixing his quiffed hair to be a bit more messy. Edna had referred to the style as ‘sex hair’ but he preferred to think of it as a windswept look. Once the woman was done with his hair she moved on to his neck, placing a heavy golden collar around his throat, letting it rest against his shoulders. It reminded him of a cat collar. 

Next to him stood Damian. The boy wore a black vest with silver accents, his arms wrapped in similar leather straps to Adrien’s, but his were colored silver and ice blue. He wore loose black slacks, silver leather straps hanging off the sides of his hips in hooped fashion, the straps having similar black details to the vest. 

In terms of jewelry, Damian had a silver collar like Adiren’s gold one, but he did not have a belt like Adrien. Instead Damian’s wrists were clad in long gauntlet like silver bracelets. He also had a silver diadem placed on his forehead. A brilliant blue stone set in its center, it matched Marinette’s eyes well, and also matched the matte color Damian’s lips had been painted. 

“You know, when Edna referred to these as strappy ensembles, I was kind of hoping she was kidding.” Adrien said, eyes moving back to focus on his reflection.

“Edna doesn’t kid, especially when it comes to her work.” Damian’s voice was monotone, his hands raised to push back the curls of his bangs.

“Seems like that runs in the family.” Adrien whispered, hoping Damian hadn’t heard him once the words left his mouth. “So…” God, this silence hurt. 

“We don’t need to talk while this happens.” Damian said, eyes firm on his reflection, it looked like he was glaring at himself.  

“Oh-o-okay.” Adrien looked down, as the woman who put the collar on him placed a golden diadem on his forehead. His stone was a much darker blue, possibly Lapis Lazuli but he wasn’t sure. All the knowledge he had in regards to gemstones came from Steven Universe. 

“Couple of Princes the two of you.” The woman said, smiling at the boys. “No wonder Edna fought so hard for you.” 

“She fought for him, I agreed rather seamlessly.” Damian corrected. “Am I done?” He looked over at her, eyes cold. 

“Oh, um yes.” 

“Good.” Damian walked away from the two, going to sit down on one of Edna’s platforms that’s only purpose, Adrien was roughly seventy-percent certain, was to make the woman taller. His boyfriend greeted him cheerfully, but seemed to be mainly preoccupied with Damian’s phone.

“Well isn’t he a ray of sunshine.” The woman commented, resting her hand on her hip as she cocked it out. 

“No kidding.” Adrien whispered, eyes downcast. It didn’t necessarily bother him when people didn’t like him, he’d had fans and haters since day one of his career. But it was bothering him that someone so important to Marinette disliked him, or at least it seemed like Damian didn’t like him. Adrien could see Damian in the mirror, he was glaring at him. 

It also didn’t help that he’d had a knot in his stomach since he found out Marinette’s plan that morning. Nino’s video only amplifying his pains. While he didn’t like Lila, and knew she needed to be stopped, he couldn’t help but think there was a better way to do it then publicly humiliate her in front of the whole school. She wasn’t a good person but she wasn’t down right evil, she deserved a little sympathy. 

Or maybe Adrien was just too nice. Which was something Chloé had insisted that morning when he complained about not liking what was happening. Plagg had agreed with her when Adrien relayed the story to him. Saying that Adrien was far too forgiving for his own good, and insisting once again, that it was okay to be angry with someone. He knew that. He wasn’t a child. Nor was he as innocent and helpless as people around him seemed to think. He just didn’t like conflict. 

He wished, once again, that he could have discussed these feelings with Marinette at lunch. He knew he would feel better once he talked things out with her, he always did. That is why he originally started visiting her as Chat Noir. Marinette, as herself or as his lady, she always made things better, made people feel better, made him feel better. He just needed a few minutes with her, to discuss what happened, explain why it caused him such unrest. He needed to hear her side. Needed to talk to her, or maybe just be in her close proximity again, after she dodge him all morning long. 

Just a few minutes. 

She was like a battery, super charging him whenever she was near. 

Suddenly a large ornate golden bow was handed to the blonde boy. It was heavy in his hands, and he had to wonder amidst his marveling at the details, if this was a real weapon. Had someone just handed him, a sixteen year old boy, a real weapon? 

He looked around, sure this must be a mistake, but instead of someone taking the thing away, he was taken by the arm. One of the men from earlier leading him to the platform, a forest scene. His stage for the next photoshoot. A photoshoot that involved weapons? 

He saw someone handing Damian a silver bow identical to his golden one. Adrien couldn’t put his finger on why, but it made his stomach drop. Now Damian had a weapon, a real weapon. That couldn’t be a good idea. This couldn’t be right. There had to be a mistake of some kind, right? 

Suddenly he was on the platform. Damian facing him across the fake grass. His eyes still set in a galre. Adrien gulped. He had an awful feeling. 

“Okay!” The photographer shouted. “So I want these photos to have a bit more aggression to them. You boys think you can give me that aggressive vibe?” 

“Yes.” 

“Maybe.” 

Damian’s quick answer only made the blonde boy even more nervous. 

“Good!” The bald man clapped his hands. “Someone give them their arrows.” 

Arrows!?

… 

Damian couldn’t help the smirk that stretched across his features as he placed his arrow against the bow’s string. It felt good, natural. You never forget, it’s like riding a bike. Weapons always made him feel so comfortable. He knew how to deal with weapons, unlike people. 

His cousin was in distress, and now she was avoiding him. She was upset because of Adrien Agreste. He upset her and she was still worried about him, it was obvious. She was worried Damian would do something, which he wouldn’t of course. But he wanted to. He wanted to do something to make her feel better. 

“Wouldn’t piercing that pretty face with an arrow make her feel better?” Something wicked whispered in his ear. The voice was icky and made his skin crawl, evil. It sounded like his grandfather, but at the same time like his mother. 

Hurting Adrien wouldn’t make her feel better, just Damian. 

He pulled the drawstring back, stopping when it grazed the corner of his lips. The photographer told them to do it, but Adrien wasn’t doing it quite right. Someone had to get up on the platform and help him, show him how to position it correctly. 

He reminded Damian of a baby deer, fumbling on new legs.

“Easy Pray.” The voice whispered. 

It was like riding a bike. His senses were always on fire, acutely aware of how to take down everyone around him. Even with all the training, all the philosophies his father had spent years shoveling into his head, his inner assassin never slept. His beast was always awake, waiting for a week spot in Damian’s defenses, waiting to break out and cause havoc. 

Damian barely registered the flashes of the camera. 

He was so angry, the longer he stared at Adrien’s face. The blonde’s glare was fake, he knew that. The boy didn’t seem like he had it in him to hate. Damian had too much capacity for hate, or so people told him. 

Damian’s glare was real. 

He had a large capacity for hate, currently that hate was mostly directed towards Adrien. Marinette trusted too easily, she trusted her heart to people too easily. Why would she pick someone to love who could hurt her so easily? 

More flashes, he registered these even less. 

They were told to walk forward a few paces, they both did. Adrien had to have that same assistant come and help him reposition his bow. How was he a hero? How was Paris not destroyed? How was his cousin still alive with a partner who was so useless, with a partner who so carelessly hurt her. 

“He hurt her.” 

Did he care that he hurt her? Damian hadn’t seen the two of them speak since Adrien left them that morning. Adrien was avoiding Marinette, that was the only explanation. Of course, he was hurting her and he knew it. 

“He wants her to hurt.”

Damian was so angry. 

... 

“Now some without the bows!” Edna had clapped, clapping while giving orders, it was something she had always done. But Damian had lost focus on the world around him, he was just so angry. He’d lost focus. The noise startled him. 

He hadn’t meant to. 

He didn’t mean to. 

His eyes widened as a scream filled the room. It was his cousin, he knew that. She screamed. Marinette screamed and then his arrow sunk deep into the fake bark of a prop tree. He’d missed Adrien by a millimeter, he was sure there was a cut on the blonde’s cheek. It wouldn’t be more than a hair's breadth. But it would be there. 

Edna would know it. 

Marinette would know it. 

Damian knew it. 

He wasn’t trained to miss. He always hit his target. Not always lethally, but he always hit them. He had just been so angry. He was startled. He hadn’t meant to. He really hadn’t. It was an accident, he was startled. 

“Damian!” 

“Oh my god!” 

“Adrien!” 

Suddenly Marinette and Chloé were on the platform. The girls flanking the blonde’s sides. For his worth, Adrien hadn’t moved. It was like the arrow hadn’t even phased him. All he had done was lower his weapon. 

Enda was at Damian’s side. He hadn’t lowered the bow yet. She ripped it from his hands. She was yelling at him but he wasn’t quite registering it yet. He had been startled and his hand slipped. 

Marinette’s eyes hurt. 

His eyes had the power to cut people, cut them down, crush their strength, strike fear. Her eyes had the power to hurt, to cause hearts to break. He felt that hurt, felt his chest ache as she stared at him, eyes narrowed, frown set. 

Adrien had hurt her. 

Damian had hurt him. 

Had Damian hurt her?

“Damian what the hell was that!” He was hit by the bow, his head ached now along with his heart. Edna was still at his side, she was fuming. 

“I-” He didn’t know what to say, honestly. He hadn't meant to. His fingers slipped, he was startled and it made him release. It was an accident. “I don’t know.” He whispered. 

“You don’t know?!” Edna shouted. “You shot at him!” 

“I’m fine Ms. Mod-Enda. Really, I am.” Adrien raised his hands, why was he trying to help? Damian had just shot at him. 

“Adrien you’re hurt.” Marinette’s fingers traced the cut, the boy flinched barely. Tender flesh. Damian knew she’d be able to see it. 

“It’s just a cut.” The blonde whispered. 

“Edna that psychopath just shot an arrow at my son!” Gabriel Agreste’s voice cut through the crowd. Now the asshole cared? Damian couldn’t help the thought. 

“Why are these real arrows?” Chloé asked, getting Marinette’s attention. “Shouldn’t they just be props?”

“Did you seriously give him a real weapon?” Marinette’s words were quieter, but Damian caught them. He was dangerous with weapons, everyone in his family knew that. They feared him when he was armed. 

“Edna.” Gabriel pulled the woman a way. 

Damian had to wonder if he would be getting sent home. They were only two days into the shoot. His father wasn’t here to defend him. Would Father defend him? Edna could easily replace him, eat into a few safety days to reshoot. Maybe it was for the best? If a Justice League emergency was brewing they might need him. 

They wouldn’t ask him to leave, he would ask to be dismissed. It was only right after all. He caused such an incident. He should leave. They would want him to. 

Damian stepped down from the platform. He felt an odd sort of emptiness, not even necessarily regret. Just nothingness. He was used to that feeling, it was much safer than anything remotely close to an emotion. 

Suddenly he was grabbed by the arm and pulled off to a secluded corner. He hadn’t even registered the person until they were yelling at him in harsh whispers. 

“Damian what the fuck was that?!” Oh, it was his boyfriend. 

The dark skinned boy blinked a few times, probably more times than necessary, but he still wasn’t quite back yet. Still wasn’t quite sure what had happened. His eyes focused on Colin. He was angry, it was obvious, he was disappointed. 

With focus came his emotions, back and at full force. 

They hurt like a bitch. 

Marientte was upset with him, he hurt her. Edna was upset with him, she was angry with him. Colin was disappointed with him. Colin was disappointed in him. “I-I’m I don’t-” Damian tried to figure out his words but everything wasn’t quite back yet, not back in focus. 

“Damian you just shot that kid with a freaking arrow!” The redhead growled. “Why? Why did you do that? What the hell was that!” 

“I-don’t know.” He finally managed. God, now he was the baby deer wasn’t he? 

“You don’t know?” Colin hissed. “Damian you almost killed him!” 

“It was just a scratch.” Defensive. He was defending himself, his actions, that’s right. Because he’d messed up, he’d slipped up. “I didn’t mean to.” 

“You didn’t mean to?” Colin asked, eyes scrutinizing. “Damian you aimed, you shot, you hit him.” His jaw was set. “Why? Why did you do that? What the hell Damian!” 

He’d only used his full name this whole time. No nicknames, no shortening it, no pet names. It was strange, but that hurt more than Marinette’s eyes. 

“I don’t know.” Damian choked. “I don’t-I didn’t mean to. Enda startled me and I just let go-my finger slipped I didn’t mean to.” He was drowning, that’s what it felt like. Colin was so angry at him. He had never seen Colin angry at him quite like this. Though, typically, when Damian hurt people, far past the point that he should have, it was a very bad man. Sometimes Colin even helped him. 

“I didn’t mean to.” Damian whispered, eyes falling to the floor. 

He should apologize, shouldn’t he? Yes, say he was sorry for hurting the model. He should apologize to Colin and Marinette and Enda. So they wouldn’t be hurt or angry or disappointed any more. But the problem with him wanting to apologize was that he could never get the words out. 

Colin sighed, turning away from Damian. His head shook as he began walking away. He was still angry and hurt and disappointed. And Damian still couldn’t breath or focus right. He was in trouble, his father would be upset. Everyone was upset. 

He headed for the changing rooms as quickly as possible. He needed to be out of this environment. He needed to be somewhere else. 

He needed to breath. 

… 

Well, today was just going swimmingly. 

First Damian got woken up and torn away from his warm and cuddly boyfriend. Then that distressing video. Then his cousin, who was obviously upset, wouldn’t talk to him. Then Colin stole his phone and got a brand new best friend in the form of some random french girl. Then he tried to defend his cousin’s honor, but instead got yelled at by his boyfriend and aunt and by Gabriel Agreste. And his cousin, his cousin looked so upset with him. Colin wasn’t talk to him either. He was being ignored and possibly suffered a panic attack in the changing room, but wasn’t quite sure. He’d never been good at diagnosing his own symptoms, just the symptoms of others. 

And now Damian was alone, going back to his room to take Titus for a walk. He needed to blow off steam. Today had been awful. He needed to move around, be angry and sad and mostly alone, but walking Titus would help, it had to help. 

The elevator opened and he began walking down the hall, but stopped when he noticed a figure in the small lobby area. The tall muscular boy leaning against the window, all his focus directed towards something outside. Damian recognized him immediately as Jon Kent.

That was the other thing. 

What the hell was going on with the Justice League and the two boys’ fathers.

“You okay Kent?” The boy didn’t turn around at his name. He didn’t even respond. That wasn’t good. 

Damian took several steps forward, slowly. He reached out and placed his hand on Jon’s shoulder, the boy didn’t move a muscle. “Jon?” Damian asked, voice a little softer. “Are you alright?” 

“Trisha Bailey was killed last night.” His voice was emotionless, and Damian took note that the boy wasn’t wearing his glasses. “It was a hit and run.”

“Trisha Bailey?” The name sounded very familiar but it took Damian a moment to place it, when he did, his stomach dropped. “No.”  

“Lex Luthor was released from prison this morning.” Jon’s face grew angrier. “No witness, no crime. Or whatever.” He spat. “Forget the fact that man had mercenaries hired to kill my mother. Forget that he planted bombs to killer. Snipers following her. Hitmen. All so she wouldn’t write a damn article.” His fists clenched against the glass window. 

“Jon calm down.” Damian increased the pressure of his hand on his friend’s shoulder.

“Lex-” The boy’s Jaw clenched. “Lex Jr. stopped returning Conor’s calls. He also left the country late last night.” Jon’s eyes narrowed. “They can’t figure out where he went but they’re trying to track him, unsuccessfully I might add.” Jon turned away from the window and Damian. “God we were so stupid! Conor trusted him!” He banged his fist against the wall, a small dent forming.

“Jon.” Damian’s voice was a tad sterner. “You need to calm down before you break something you can’t fix.” 

“What if he comes after my mom again Damian?” The boy turned around, tears in his eyes. “What if he comes after me or Conor or my dad? Kara? Grandma! He could come after any of us!” 

“We won’t let him hurt any of you!” Damian tried to assure. 

“What about Lena Luthor!?” 

Lena Luthor? Damian didn’t know a hefty amount about her, just what was outlined in her file. She was the younger sister of Lex Luthor Senior. Slightly less evil, known for having a conscience, and eventually turned against him. She was in JLA witness protection, had been for eighteen years now.

“What about Lena?” Damian asked. 

“They can’t find her Damian.” Jon let out an angry breath, resting his back against the window. “Mr. Queen went to Rome yesterday, that’s where she’s supposed to be. But he can’t find her. People are searching the whole continent of Europe. No one can find her.” 

“Okay,” Damian looked to the ground trying to think. “That’s not great but her brother may not know where she is either.”

“Be real Damian.” Jon looked up at him. “I may not be smart, but I’m not dumb. And you aren’t stupid enough to believe that Jr. isn’t cozying up to his aunt right now.” His fist clenched again, Damian could see it smashing into the glass, but thankfully Jon seemed to still have some semblance of control. 

“Damian the Luthors have enough kryptonite stock piled away to fuel two nuclear bombs.” The boy’s eyes suddenly looked so empty. “Lena Luthor was the only thing we had on him, along with Trisha. Now we don’t have either, and my family is his number one target.” 

“Yeah well, I hate to break this to you but Batman had double that amount of kryptonite.” It was meant as a joke, but as anyone who knew him knew, Damian was bad at those. “Luthor, Luthor isn’t going to be able to pull shit. I’m sure the whole League is working on this as we speak.” 

Damian walked in front of his friend, he wasn’t a hugger. Typically he wasn’t one for prolonged contact at all, save for a handful of very specific circumstances, like a warm cuddly sleeping boyfriend. But this was his friend, his perky, never not happy friend who, no matter what, was always there for him. 

It was easier than he was expecting to pull the half-kryptonian into a tight hug. “We will figure this out.” Damian whispered. “I swear Jon, I won’t let him hurt you or your family. If there’s one thing that scares the shit out of Luthors, it’s Waynes.” Jon was fully crying now, but Damian could swear he heard something along the lines of a small chuckle escape the boy’s mouth. 

“I just don’t know what to do Damian.” Jon’s arms were suddenly around him, tightly hugging him back. “M-my mom, she’s staying with Dinah while Mr. Queen is in Europe. Damian I’m scared.” 

“I know.” Damian wasn’t good at this, comforting wasn’t what he was good at. He was good at getting even, at defending people he cared about, at pissing people off and arguing his point. “Do you remember that ridiculous thing you always tell me?” 

“N-no.” He sniffled. 

“Good always triumphs over evil, right?” 

The Kansan let out a stronger laugh. “Right.” He was still crying, but he was still laughing too. “Good always wins.”

“Well we’re good. And they’re evil.” Damian hugged his friend a little tighter. “So that means that everything is going to be fine. Jon I promise.” Even as Damian said the words he couldn’t help the thought that crossed his mind. “Everything will be fine.” Famous last words. 

_______________________________________________________________________

(part 1)  (part 2)  (part 2.5)  (part 3)  (part 4)  (part 5)  (part 6) (part 7) (part 8)  (part 9)  (part 10)  (part 11) (part 12) - Here  (part 13)

Photoshoot Part 4! Y'all I don't know what happened. I sat down to study for finals last night and instead turned on Hamilton and cranked this mess out. Anyway, Dash is finally here and I love him. But he’s also the worst, hence why he isn’t a prominent Character in this fic, but who knows, maybe he’ll show back up at some point. So a lot of what I was excited for at the end of part 11 actually isn't’ in this. It started getting really long so I had to chop it in half. Hopefully part 13 will come just as quickly as this part did. And hopefully I can actually get some studying done before my test tomorrow. I hope you all enjoyed this part as much as I did writing it! Please leave comments! I love reading everyone's thoughts on the chapters, they always make me smile. Like comments, I have discovered, can change my whole outlook on a day. And I could seriously use some positivity heading into my finals! As always if you have any questions about the story or AU feel free to ask, I love getting them and will happily answer any question you got (even if it’s not about this AU)! And if you want to be tagged let me know! 

Also for future reference in this fic, the version of Lena Luthor that I am using for my writing is the character Tess Mercer from Smallville. 

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