#had no clue what to do for this background so made an ugly little pattern ❤️❤️

[muppetoftheday]

guy who has only ever seen dhmis watching anything slightly spooky: getting a lot of dhmis vibes from this

[hivequest]

Taking a Risk » Mallek Adalov/Reader

Wordcount: 2.3k words

Warnings: Swearing, fluff, stressed out reader, chillboy Mallek. TYping quirk only used when texting cause I could not be bothered lmao Originally posted on AO3

A/N: One of my favorite things that I’ve written, ever. I love Mallek and he’s for sure one of my favorite Friendsim characters. When I wrote this I was really feeling those Quarantine Woes

You didn't know what you were doing here. You felt out of place in the worst possible ways. It was a weird, squidgy feeling like stepping on wet grass. But not like the fun kind where you were running around in a sprinkler on a hot-as-balls summer day. No, this was the bad kind of wet grass that you stepped on without knowing it was wet. Why weren't you wearing shoes?

This analogy is stupid. The point is, you're feeling bummed out.

And what better way to not have to deal with that than hang out with someone you knew wouldn't push you into talking about all the ways crashing on this planet sucked! The point is, you're on your way to see Mallek. Mallek is absolutely the kind of friend who can tell when you just need to sit down and veg out. You had been so caught up in everyone else's bullshit that you weren't looking after your own damn self. So now you were doing that.

All it took was a quick text, asking Mallek if he had any company. He texted back only a moment later with a no, obviously not. You asked him if he wanted any. Not really. You ask him if you can come over anyway. Obviously.

You smiled at the palmhusk in your, well, palm. You could already feel the chill vibes of your hacker friend. Friend? Was that the right word for it? You didn't know anymore. When you first met there were definitely some sparks there. You could still feel them now and it made weird butterflies flutter around in your stomach. When you slapped his phone out of his hand and he sent you ass over applecart into the slimy depths of sewer water and he saved you, tits out and all.

You shook off the weird wistful feeling of maybe possibly crossing the friendship barrier and told him you'd walk to his hive. You'd been moping in some bookhive, not your usual hang-out spot with Tagora or Tyzias. This was some upper caste bookhive with purple bloods and some indigos and definitely not where you were welcome if the looks you were getting were any indication. They ranged from snooty to downright murderous. Yeesh.

Your phone -palmhusk, stupid troll names- beeped again. You got another text from him and those cheery fucking butterflies were back. God, you had it bad.

yeah were not doing that lmao;

im not going to let my robobuddy walk out in the sun

do you even know what time of day it =

just stay put ive already got your location ill pick you up;

And like a good little friendsimp. You park your ass on a chair and wait. You hadn't released your moping had taken up most of the night. But with the quick look around, yeah, no, this place was nearly empty by now. Just some older bluebloods trying to cram before their Ordeals and get shipped off-planet. Again: Yeesh.

You kept your ears open for the telltale sound of Mallek's limo. It was a sound you were getting used to these days. He always seemed ready to drop whatever coding shit he was working on to come to see you. You tried not to think too hard on what that might mean. No need to get your hopes up now. It's probably just your bad mood making you imagine some context where there's nothing. Yeah.

Damn, that shit hurted.

Just as you were about to add that to the reasons you were considering just screaming your lungs out who cares whose listening? you heard the wonderfully familiar sound of an approaching elongated scuttlebuggy. If that wasn't enough of a clue as to who the ride was for the quiet of the bookhive was very abruptly disturbed by a series of rhythmic beeps.

Holy shit was that the Tetris theme?

You shoved your palmhusk into your hoodie pocket and yanked the hood over your head. Even if the sun was only out a little bit you didn't want it anywhere near your freshly healed skin. You had no kind cowgirl to nurse you back to health right now if you got your asscheeks baked by the flaming death orb. You peeked your head out and even with the blinding light of Alternia's suns you could Mallek had opened the door and was waiting for you.

Aw. No, shit. You're in a bad mood don't get all heart eyes at him. Don't make it weird.

You took a few steps back into the bookhive, ready to make a run for it. You turn to a sitting indigoblood, who is just staring at you disdainfully for keeping the door open. You give her a two-fingered salute. Godspeed young cosmonaut. She gives you a one-fingered salute. Close the door you insufferable bulgebiter. Fair.

Taking a running start, you book it out into the heat of the Alternian sun and dive for the open car door. It's then that you realize he's halfway parked on the sidewalk to lessen the amount of time you'd have to spend in the sun. Aw. That also means that you came barreling like a cannonball at something that was like two feet out of the door. FUck.

Your face meets carpet and you can already feel the rugburn starting to set in. You hear a startled wheezy laugh from above you, a sound you know better than anyone else on this planet. You smile. It's not like you had any dignity to begin with.

You say hello to him as you peel yourself off of the floor of his car.

"Hey, there robobuddy. You stuck the landing this time," He smiles down at you as he reaches over you to shut the door, closing the space out from natural light and leaving you both lit by his colorful LEDs. You shrug and tell him you've been getting a lot of practice landing on your face these days. The look he gives you is still smiling but there's some level of disbelief at the dumbassery that is your whole existence.

"I know you can get yourself into it. Nothing too bad this time, though, right? No drones or broken bones?" He sounds concerned which is nice but he doesn't drown you with his concern. He leans back on the bench of his limo, keeping an eye on you as the vehicle begins to move on its own. You've been staying out of big messes but the little messes are starting to mess with you. He makes a sound of understanding the sounds as it comes from deep in his chest. Whoa. "Believe me, I've been there. Glad you're not cracking under it though."

He smiles and you can see his little fang and you can feel your heart melt a little. And also you're getting a bit teary-eyed and now Mallek looks alarmed. Shit. You try to quickly explain that you're fine, just, alien allergies am I right? He must be using some new air freshener to mask the musty smell of his limo. Since doesn't use it enough. Ha ha?

He isn't buying it.

With a rare show of cerulean prowess, he lifts you up off of the shitty car rug and sets you on the seat beside him. He feels uncomfortable and you can tell. Ah, goddammit you made it weird. You didn't mean to. Fuck. Fuck now you're feeling even worse. You thought you were starting to balance out. You're with Mallek now, shouldn't everything start to quiet down like it always does? Fuck. He doesn't say anything at first, just leans back against the seat and stretches his arms across it, letting you lean on him if you choose to.

...You choose to.

Your head finds itself somewhere between his shoulder and his collarbone, and you just. Shove your face there. Then scream.

To his credit, Mallek doesn't even flinch. He doesn't wince or shy away from you as you let out every bit of anger, sadness, and frustration out against his sweater. He just sits quietly, staring straight at the blacked-out windshield. You get the feeling he's needed to do this more than once.

Screw this planet. Screw everything about it that makes all of your friends suffer. Why can't you just get them away from all this bullshit?! Why do you have to deal with everyone's bullshit! You love them, you do but holy fuck they're looking to you like you can undo all the damage this place has done to them when you've got literally no god damn idea what's happening at any point ever!

And then, just like that, it fades into the background. Your throat hurts. Your head hurts and you think you might be crying. But it feels lighter. Better now that you've gotten some of that aggression out. You aren't like the trolls on Alternia. You can't kill people when you experience an Emotion™. But that doesn't mean you don't get pent up with rage.

Mallek realizes that now. He lets out a breath he didn't realize he was holding and his left hand slowly moves down from the back of the seat the rest against your back. His thumb brushes against your back, the claw drawing little patterns against the fabric of your sweater. His sweater. He tries not to think his sign your chest. This isn't the time.

"Feeling any better?" He asks and you don't know how to answer. You kinda don't want to. But you nod anyways, and you feel some tension leave his body. You knew he was worried about you. You apologize for making him witness your meltdown but he just makes another deep-chested hum. "Nothing to apologize for. I got the feeling you weren't feeling great. I could tell from the texts, you didn't use nearly enough ugly emojis."

You scoff and smack a hand against his chest and once again you hear that wonderful laugh from him. Hey! Your purrbeast emojis are adorable, thank you very much! And you'll not hear another word of it or else you'll send him pictures of rocks and rocks exclusively. No more memes.

"Jokes on you I'm into that shit." You laugh and thump your head against his collarbone. You thank him for being with you when were needed it. And picking you up to make sure you didn't deal with it alone. You don't want to make it weird but...yeah.

He doesn't respond this time, just letting you both enjoy the silence and the comforting sound of the engine. You should almost be at Mallek's apartment by now. It's as you're settling in for the last bit of the drive that you notice that the limo isn't moving. And hasn't been for a while. Your head pops up in confusion and the little GPS display on the back of one of the seats says... yep.

You're already at Mallek's.

But then why is the engine still on? That can't be good for the environment. Do these things even run on gas or is it bugs? Bug gas? Gross.

You notice then that the rumbling is coming from behind you. Like. From where Mallek is sitting. He doesn't look away when you turn to him, just kind of tilting his head to the side with a little bit of a cerulean hue to his cheeks. Oh. Oh, the sound is coming from him. He's purring. That's.

That's adorable.

You feel yourself soften even more when he lifts his arms, silently offering a hug if you want it. Is this platonic? Is this more? You've never had too much trouble identifying what people wanted from you. (Debatable.) If was overtly flushed you could shut it down or divert it to something very much friends only. (Like your every exchange with Zebruh.) But did you even want to do that to your hackerman? You could feel yourself screaming, no, absolutely not. But at the same time, you didn't want things to change. You didn't want to make his issues any worse than they already were. He didn't have too much longer on the planet and you knew it would tear him apart.

But then he turned those blue eyes to you. He looked just as unsure as you were but he was willing to take the risk. He shoved himself so far out of his comfort zone for you and was asking you to be selfish. To want something for yourself and do something for yourself. Not put him or anyone else's wants first. Just your own. And so you did.

You crawled up into his lap, pressed yourself as close to him as you could and clung to him. His arms didn't hesitate to wrap around you and you could feel a shuddering breath from above you.

"We don't have to put a label on this... not yet. Or ever. Either way is chill with me. I just... yeah." He gave up with a little shrug of his shoulders but you knew what he meant. Unless you could find a way to fight fate he was going to go off-world. He was going to leave you and you doubted you'd be able to go with him. You'd probably get gored by a drone for even trying.

But even if it was just for now, just for a moment, you were going to take it. You were going to let yourself have something, have someone who would care for you no matter how long or short your time was. You'd take it. You had stomached some of the most horrible things on this planet but Mallek had always been a constant. And you got the feeling he thought the same way about you.

So, you'd take it. Whatever comes next, you'd take it. You listened to the sound of his purring, in no hurry to move to get inside the apartment. Mallek felt the same.

You exhaled.

You would be okay.

[collectsfallenstars]

WARNING: Absolutely long post

IN DEFENSE OF KIM EUN SOOK'S "THE KING: ETERNAL MONARCH"

The King: Eternal Monarch has been getting mixed reviews 10 episodes into the season and it has boggled my mind as to why this has been happening. It’s a grand project, has a robust storyline, beautiful cinematography the likes of which is done for full-length films, and has a love story between two adults who behave like adults and not in perpetual high school. It is very different from most Korean dramas I have come across, and that alone is reason enough to watch it.

 

Granted, I have not watched many of them so maybe I don’t really know what I’m talking about. But what I am sure of is that I get tired of things very easily when they’ve become predictable.

 

See, before watching The King: Eternal Monarch, the last Korean drama I watched was Something Happened in Bali back in 2004. Then coronavirus happened, billions of pesos were to the government but no mass-testing happened, ABS-CBN shut down, people speaking against the government were being put in jail, and I thought, hmm let’s go to Netflix to escape. K-dramas with beautiful autumn colors should do the trick.

 

I watched maybe one or two series in full but soon found myself giving up on the ones that came next. Watching them one after another made it clear that they were built like romance novels – no matter how different each premise was for a series, they always followed a pattern. And patterns, while they may be dependable, can sometimes be boring.

 

And then I decided to give The King: Eternal Monarch a try even though the binge-watching monster inside me disagreed with it. So there I was last week, Netflix open and a lunch of Sinigang na Baboy with rice laid out in front of me.

 

The series opened with a serene view of a bamboo forest, wind blowing gently through it, and the voice of a man talking about the legend of a bamboo flute back when monarchs ruled Korea. Oh, a historical series.

 

1 minute and 40 seconds later, it cuts to a man covered in blood, in a police interrogation room in modern day Korea. Oh, it’s also detective fiction. Gotta watch out for red herrings then. Oh but wait, the man covered in blood, Lee Lim, is supposed to be 70 years old but he doesn’t look a day over 30. I mean, yes Korean genes and skin care are magical but not to this extent. The idea of immortality is introduced which suggests that the series has supernatural elements too. This means world building for these magical elements and forming rules that govern them. (I mean, Bram Stoker and Anne Rice made their vampires perish under the sun and Stephanie Meyer chose to make them…sparkle.)

 

And then 4 minutes in, we get a flashback to winter of 1994 in the Kingdom of Corea. Uhm. Typo? No? Lee Lim, the bastard son of the former king, murders his half brother, the current king, in order to steal the bamboo flute that grants the owner much power. The king’s young son, 7 year old Lee Gon, witnesses his father’s murder, struggles with Lee Lim, splits the power laden bamboo flute in half, and nearly dies if it weren’t for a mysterious figure coming in to save him.  The mysterious figure drops an ID card with the name and picture of Lt. Jung Tae Eul on it and Lee Gon clutches it along with half of the bamboo flute. Lee Lim escapes to the forest with only a broken half of the bamboo flute. He comes upon a pair of obelisks, passes through it and lands in Korea with a K. Lee Lim comes face to face with the face of the person he had just murdered, except he isn’t a king anymore. He’s just an unkempt unemployed man. We now have the introduction of parallel worlds and doppelgangers. It had only been 18 minutes into the first episode.

 

I put it on pause, finished my lunch quickly, cleared the table, and settled down on the couch to watch. I did all that before resuming to watch it because it clearly wasn’t the kind of K-drama you could easily watch while eating, glancing up and down between the screen and your food, missing bits of the subtitle here and there and not paying any mind. Because of its structure, the kind of story it wants to tell and the breadth of its narrative, it demands your full attention.

 

I get why people find it difficult. I found it difficult. But it was infinitely exciting. It’s as if someone laid out a puzzle with a thousand pieces, a maze, Connect the Dots, Spot the Difference in front of me and told me to play with them all at the same time.

 

What kind of story did the writer, Kim Eun Sook, want to tell? She began with the murder of the parents of Lee Gon by his bastard uncle, Lee Lim, who feels he has been deprived of power for too long and intends to take it all for himself. It becomes a story of both sides seeking justice for their own separate tragedies. To flesh out this story, she has to give Lee Lim a plan for world domination and give Lee Gon a defense strategy in place, as well as an active pursuit to entrap his uncle. She has to give them motivations, conflicts, moments of doubt and triumph. If this were the only story she wanted to tell, a linear storyline with flashbacks and flash-forwards should be enough. Throw in a romance, love triangle, one final obstacle, 2 chaste kisses, 1 passionate kiss, 1 tearful kiss, 1 reunion kiss and you will arrive at your happy ending.

 

But Kim Eun Sook wanted to do more. She expanded Lee Lim’s plan for world domination into two parallel worlds. Adding science fiction to the mix complicates matters because you will have to build another world that is visibly different from the other even if they are parallel to each other. Audiences should be able to tell one apart from the other quickly in order to keep up with the story. The difficulty that The King: Eternal Monarch faces is that the Kingdom of Corea and the Republic of Korea look almost exactly alike. It takes almost a few seconds to recognize the Royal Seal, or the European inspired trams running in the background to ascertain that the scene is in the Kingdom of Corea. But once the characters appear, it becomes easier to tell which world we’re dealing with. Jung Tae Eul and the police force belong to Korea. The Royal Staff and family, Prime Minister Koo and cabinet members belong to Corea. The only ones to traverse between both worlds are Lee Gon and his uncle.

 

Therein lies one of the criticisms for Kim Eun Sook’s work – the pace is too slow. I would argue though that the pace is just right when you’re creating two worlds, with very different characters in each, whose stories run parallel to and interweave with each other. It is very easy to place all evil characters in World A and all good characters in World B. But that’s lazy writing, and also ugly.

 

Kim Eun Sook humanizes and fleshes out a significant amount of the supporting cast with such care, developing them alongside the major characters. Usually in dramas, the side characters will get hints of a back story in an episode or two, and then have just one episode dedicated to them. Kim Eun Sook did so much more and in effect, her two parallel worlds became so concrete, with real, moving characters contributing their bit into the two separate forces of Lee Gon and Lee Lim that are about to clash. It creates anticipation, excitement, and spreads your heart out amongst many characters instead of investing your emotions into just the main leads.

 

But aside from the science fiction element, Kim Eun Sook also takes on the task of writing detective fiction into her already robust narrative. Lee Lim is essentially building an army of doppelgangers from the Republic of Korea and planting them in key positions in the Kingdom of Corea. He then takes the dead bodies of these Corean citizens and dumps them in the Republic of Korea, leaving Lt. Jung Tae Eul and her squad in the police force with a trail of unsolved cases. Detective stories are by themselves difficult enough. You begin with a dead body, a search for clues, weeding out which clues are significant, chasing a lead, failing, planting and then ignoring red herrings, closing in on a suspect, interrogation, a surprise turn of events, and so on until the murder is solved.

 

But Lee Lim didn’t leave just one dead body in Korea. There’s an entire army of them and Jung Tae Eul has to be on the trail for some of them in order for her to work with Lee Gon in order to solve them and in turn, help him uncover his uncle’s evil plans.

 

This brings us to one of the major criticisms of this drama – the romance between Lt. Jung Tae Eul and King Lee Gon. Apparently, there’s not much of it as it has taken a backseat to the struggle for power in Corea by the Prime Minister, Lee Lim’s murderous spree and body switching between the two worlds in a bid for a two-world domination, and murder investigations that Jung Tae Eul and her squad must carry out in Korea.

 

Would I like to see more of the actors Lee Min Ho and Kim Go Eun on screen? Why, yes of course! But as early as the 1st episode, it was already apparent that this was not going to be the usual K-drama. They weren’t going to meet cute, fall in love, fight their feelings, work on a murder mystery on the side, finally confess, become a couple, fight the final boss side by side, and then live happily ever after. Fantasy, science fiction, and detective fiction all seem bear equal weight with romance. It was different, and I found that absolutely interesting. And just because romance doesn’t dominate 80% of the story does not mean that the romance is lacking.

 

The first episode tricks you into thinking that there is very little romance in this drama. The lead characters of Lt. Jung Tae Eul and King Lee Gon meeting each other for the first time in the last 6 minutes of an episode that was 1 hour, 12 minutes, and 15 seconds long. What can possibly develop and deepen in 6 minutes? Not much, right?

 

But what happened in the last 6 minutes? Lee Gon rides into Gwanghwamun Square on his white horse after having crossed over from Corea and into the parallel world of Korea. He creates a slight commotion what with his royal handsomeness and almost ethereal white horse. Lt. Jung Tae Eul reprimands him. Lee Gon recognizes her as the woman on the ID card his savior had left behind 25 years ago. And in dramatic fashion, he alights from his horse, walks towards her, stops, and then engulfs her in a tight hug. He tells her, “I’ve finally met you” and the episode ends with a shocked Jung Tae Eul in the arms of an almost reverent Lee Gon.

 

In Kim Eun Sook’s other, wildly popular work, Goblin: The Lonely and Great God the first meeting between Kim Shin and Eun Tak also had that moment of finally finding the one they’ve been searching for. But for the Goblin, his bride’s existence was merely functional, as he needed her so he can finally die in peace. So their first meeting was your typical first meeting in K-dramas. There were no feelings yet, but they develop from there. So the whole drama then became a stage to establish the growth of their relationship that would give him the will to live instead of dreaming of death all the time.

 

But now, in The King: Eternal Monarch, the first meeting isn’t an easy blank canvas.

Lee Gon bursts into the first episode, already halfway in love with Jung Tae Eul long before he’s even met her. As a child, Lee Gon had held on to Jung Tae Eul’s image as his a savior. There is deep gratitude.  As a young orphaned monarch, he held on to the idea of her to ease his loneliness. His first duty as a king was to bury his father and learned to cry only in the privacy of his own room when he was 7 years old. But somewhere out there, there was someone who had cared for enough for him to have saved him. This thought sustained him as he grew up.

 

And at this point in the first episode, we’re working with the idea that time travel hasn’t been introduced yet. Which means we’re treating time as a straight line, allowing Lee Gon and Jong Tae Eul to age at the same time. So if Jong Tae Eul had been 25 years old when Lee Gon was 7 in 1994, then she would be 50 years old and he would be 32 in the present year, 2019.

 

Then, as a man in his 30’s, he still keeps on searching for her. But in his head she is frozen in time as the 29 year old woman in her ID picture, and at this point he might possibly be half in love with her already. And when he finally meets her in the flesh, he had spent nearly all his life loving her in different iterations. Finding out that she hadn’t aged as he thought she would have gives him another possibility of loving her as a man would a woman.

 

Now the audience has to grapple with this idea, that he had loved her for 25 years already, prior to seeing her in the flesh. But then if you add the idea of time travel as hinted at by the 10th episode, then this first meeting becomes heavier. Not only would he have loved her for 25 years, but he also would have loved her for 25 years multiplied by the number of timelines he had crossed as a time traveller.

 

That’s why their first meeting had to happen in the last 6 minutes of the first episode. Everything that happened in that first hour and 6 minutes, all the murders, plotting, collision of worlds, and clash of doppelgangers in the past 25 years had to happen in order to bring Lee Gon and Jung Tae Eul to that fated meeting at Gwanghwamun Square. Kim Eun Sook had played with the idea of destiny with Goblin: The Lonely and Great God’s Kim Shin and Eun Tak. Now she takes the same idea of a fated meeting between two souls, Lee Gon and Jung Tae Eul, and proceeds to tear them apart with time loops, parallel worlds, and a frozen dimension to test how their love can endure all of that.

 

There can be no slow burn; there is no chase that starts with attraction, denial, bickering, jealousy, no you-make-me-worry-so-much love confession that is so often found in K-dramas. The lovers don’t even have that poor girl-rich boy/immortal-mortal or whatever uneven power dynamic that’s so popular in dramas. I guess that's what most people inevitably look for because these things were built to be formulaic.

 

But now you have a writer who is trying to build a bigger, more ambitious story, who is willing to take some risks with that formula in order to tell a love story that can transcend time and universes.  The stakes had to be raised higher, the backdrop made grander, in order to hold a love story as epic as this.   How can this not be romantic enough?

 

There are six more episodes left in this series.  Quarantine has been extended. Give this series a chance. 

[a-ratt]

MLB Fanfic: Sins of the Past Chapter I: Not-so-Normal

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Marinette Dupain-Cheng sat alone atop her balcony, knees tucked to her chest and face buried in her arms. Sobs wracked her body as dark clouds rumbled over Paris. The forecasted rainfall hadn’t started yet, but amidst her tears and snot, she could smell the moisture in the air. It was warm. Tense.

She’d been up here for an hour, maybe longer. Her parents hadn’t heard her come in, seeing as she was supposed to be at school. But being in that place… with her? That monster?

Her fingers dragged along her jeans and she curled them into fists. An angry fire burned in the pit of her stomach and she grit her teeth to bar any venomous words from spilling out. That didn’t stop them from pooling in her head, bouncing around her mind as today’s events replayed in her head.

Usually, she was able to endure the entire school day before coming home to vent. Today, however, things had gone farther than ever before.

“What did I tell you? All your friends are mine.”

Lila had cornered her in the classroom during lunch. She’d forgotten her journal, or at least she thought she did. Separated from the others, she found Lila holding it, sifting through the pages. She’d frozen at first, shocked and horrified. Her nemesis had pulled at a few pages, taunting her with a smirk.

“You’ve got one more chance, Marinette. Give up or get lost.”

She’d stood her ground. They were alone, no one would see them. This wasn’t outing her, just reaffirming her stance. She could back down and not rile her up, like Adrien said, but she had to do this. Because the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing.

So, she did something, she stood her ground. Then, Lila took her journal and smacked herself in the face.

She remembered staring, stunned, and then hearing her class gasp when they walked in on them. Alya had run over, shoving her aside to get to Lila, who feigned agony as she teared up. Kim and Alix pulled her back while everyone glared. Her ears rang as they bombarded her with crass remarks and demands.

“What’s wrong with you?”

“How could you hurt Lila?”

“What has she ever done to you?”

“I thought you were supposed to be our Everyday Ladybug?”

In the end, it’d been too much to handle and she ran. She pushed them out of the way, barreling down the walkway and the stairs. She left her book bag behind, along with her courage and integrity. She couldn’t handle it anymore.

She didn’t stop running until she was at the bottom of the front steps and a hand grabbed her wrist. She didn’t hear Adrien until he turned her around to face him.

“Marinette, what happened?” He’d held her face, wiping away a tear. Though it was a gentle touch, a chill ran up her spine. “Did something happen?”

She told him everything. The confrontation. The threats, before and now. The lengths Lila was willing to go to make sure she destroyed her. But what did Adrien do? What did he do besides harden his gaze and ask her why she had riled her up. Why had she stood up to Lila? It was only going to get her akumatized.

Marinette dug her nails into her arms, threatening to draw blood. She choked on a sob as her heart cracked again, the love she’d felt now revealing its ugly truth. The obsession she’d held leaving her as its roots ripped themselves out from nearly every facet of her being.

“You’re just another bully, Marinette.”

The hand she’d used to slap him still stung, but the pain felt… good. Right. She clenched her hand and held the burning heat in her palm. Thunder rumbled above her and lightning clapped in the far distance.

She held onto that memory of lost innocence as a drop of rain touched her head. Looking up, she watched the rain fall. It was cold and wet, but she couldn't be bothered to move. Instead, she sat there, face raised to the heavens, as the rain washed her pain away. In the end, she was left cold and empty, the only thing left inside of her hollow heart being a revelation.

"So, this is what happens when good people do nothing…."

In that moment, amidst the calming chaos of the storm, she felt the cold touch of fingertips on the surface of her mind.

“Bonjour, little bug.”

-

Fifteen Years Later

It was just another normal day in Paris. The sun was shining, the birds were singing, and the city was bustling. Cars drove past green lights, stopped at reds, and slowed up to yellow ones. Pedestrians walked to and from work, making their way through their daily lives. Meanwhile, kids filtered into their schools, prepared for another day of learning. Well, almost all of them.

One teen, dressed in worn jeans and a baggy hoodie, paced anxiously before the front steps of Collège Françoise Dupont. Her hands were jammed in her pockets and her hood was drawn up, hiding her dark-skinned face as she bounced muttered to herself.

“Nobody’s going to notice you. You’re just the totally normal, new kid.” She stopped and looked up at the front doors. A dozen possible disastrous futures played out in her head and she grimaced. “But what if someone does recognize me?”

She debated her options, balancing the pros and cons. In the end, however, it was the bell that made the decision for her.

The sudden, shrill ringing jump started her fight or flight instincts and, between going home or facing her parents’ wrath, she flew up the stairs to class. She only slowed down when she got inside, finding herself in a large courtyard. Apparently, the second floor was accessible by walkway instead of a whole, walled off stairs and hallway. Weird.

Whipping out her schedule, she checked her room number and then glanced around at the tags next to each door, trying to find a pattern. Figuring it out, she made her way to the right and up the steps, then down the walkway to the room at the far end.

"Adale-"

She barged through the classroom door, cutting off the blonde adult calling attendance. The moment every eye in the room focused on her, she went rigid. The teacher gave her a quick once over before checking the clipboard in his hand and then scanning the classroom.

"Oh, you must be number fourteen." He scribbled something with his pen, then pointed it at an empty seat. "There's an open seat up front for you right there."

Flushed red and unable to get anything besides a meek "merci" out, she scurried over to her seat. The teacher continued calling out names, and those who didn't call present gossiped and snickered. Sitting herself down, she kept her head low and hood up, concealing her burning face.

So far, so terrible. She'd been late, interrupted attendance, and gotten a front row seat, meaning there was no way she was going to go unnoticed now-

"Pst." Someone nudged her left arm. "Hey."

Lifting her head up and glancing past her hood, she looked at the girl next to her. She was a tall, modestly dressed teen, with black hair and blue eyes. One of her hands was held out, offered along with a bright smile.

"Bonjour," she whispered, "I'm Amicia."

She stared at her hand, then at the girl. Caught off-guard, she stared before shifting her attention away awkwardly. 

"Kamala." She crossed her arms and propped them on the desk.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the girl's offered hand wilt and her friendly expression turn into one of disappointment.

"Kamala Lavillant-Couffaine?"

Kamala sat up straight. Her neighbor coughed. The class gave mixed reactions of gasps or quiet looks. A second passed as the teacher looked around.

She could hear other kids whispering to each other. Sharing opinions and remarks. The girl next to her elbowed her again and she shot her a glare.

Her neighbor gave her a surprised look. Then gestured at their teacher with a nod. He was about to scribble on his clipboard.

Kamala swallowed. "Um, present!"

She felt her classmates' eyes burning holes in the back of her head. Suddenly, it felt hotter. Stuffier. She was suffocating in her hoodie but taking it off would make her feel even more exposed.

"So, you're Rose and Juleka's?" He looked up from his clipboard and frowned. "Could you take off your hood please? The school doesn't allow anything covering your head on in class."

Before she could argue, he was already moving onto the next student. Her head sank between her shoulders as her classmates gossiped in the background. Without much choice, she drew back her hood and let it fall.

Her brunette hair fell out and the classroom's cool air hit her head. She felt naked. Vulnerable. The girl next to her, Amicia, kept popping up out of the corner of her eye, stealing looks and sharing whispers with their classmates behind them.

"Amicia Lécuyer?"

Her desk partner raised her hand. "Here!"

The teacher gave her a smile and a nod, then scribbled on his clipboard. He moved onto someone else, leaving Kamala to try and ignore the other girl. However, it wasn't long before the other teen was elbowing her again.

"So..." she said quietly, eyes darting between her and the teacher, "your parents are rock stars, right?"

She frowned and turned her head away again. "Yeah."

"Awesome."

"Mmhm."

She crossed her arms and held them over her chest. Amicia seemed to get the clue and pulled back to her side of the desk. They sat together awkwardly while attendance finished up.

"Alright, class." Their teacher stepped back and leaned against his desk. "So… welcome to troisième."

Excited chattering filled the classroom as old friends shared cheers and new kids, like her, shifted anxiously beneath the celebrations.

"Anyways, I should probably introduce myself." Their teacher set down his clipboard and took off his glasses. "My name is Adrien Agreste, and I'll be your homeroom teacher for the year."

-

Walking out of school felt a whole lot better than walking in. With the day over, she was free to finally escape that hell, where everyone wanted to know here and everyone wanted a piece of her, all for the sake of knowing her parents.

Adjusting the straps of her backpack, Kamala hopped down the school’s front steps. At the curb, a silver SUV was parked, its driver and passenger both waving at her.

“Kamala!” her maman called, arm sticking out the window. “Over here!”

Her mom wiped a hand over her face. “She can see us, Rose.”

Kamala stared at them, red-faced, and sighed before making the rest of the trip to the car. Other teens pouring out of Françoise Dupont looked on in shock and awe. A few of them were whispering while others rummaged in their bags for something to get signed.

Quickening her pace, she scurried to her parents’ car and climbed into the back.

“So, how was school?” Her maman looked over her seat, big blue eyes sparkling with wonder. “Did you have a lot of fun?”

She looked at her, arms crossed and face burning. “It was alright.”

Someone knocked on the window and Kamala’s eye twitched. If it was actually one of her classmates, she was going to ask to get home-schooled again-

“Mon dieu, Adrien!”

Kamala jumped at her maman’s squeal. She had to dig a finger into her ear to try and suppress the ringing in her ear. Looking up, she found her mom giggling and her maman hastily clambering out of the car to hug her teacher.

Unable to process everything at once, she just sat there and stared. Meanwhile, her mom stepped out to join her maman outside, and they both embraced M. Agreste.

“It’s great to see you guys again,” he said, stepping back. “When I saw your daughter’s name on my roster, I thought I might check and see if you were picking her up.”

“Were you expecting us to send a limo?” Her mom laughed and M. Agreste shared it timidly. “Sorry, I know that’s kind of a sore spot for you.”

He shrugged. “It’s alright. I mean, I drive myself everywhere now. Sometimes, I take Gorilla with me too.”

“How the turns table.”

He laughed. “Right?”

They shared the laughter again, this time with more fervor. Beside them, her maman bounced on her heels, waiting to speak up. When their laughter died down, M. Agreste turned to her.

“So, you’re going to be teaching our daughter?”

He shrugged. “Technically, I’m just her homeroom teacher, but I’m also teaching science. Well, general sciences.”

The trio of adults continued chatting for a while, catching up and swapping stories, as well as jokes and laughter. Around them, teens and adults alike looked on at the gathered celebrities, which only prompted Kamala to sink lower in her seat, hoping people wouldn’t see her.

She only looked around a few times, not wanting to make eye contact with anyone. Most of the school had cleared out, but a chunk of the population had gathered in the front courtyard. Some were taking pictures of her parents and M. Agreste, others were just talking to each other. She noticed a few of her classmates walking around, most just leaving while a few stayed.

Nearby, in the park across the street, she spied her desk partner, that tall girl named Amicia. She had a whole clique with her, laughing with them and stealing glances in her direction, or rather, her parents’ direction. She narrowed her eyes and sat back in her seat, giving a huff of frustration.

“Hey, you know what!” M. Agreste snapped his fingers and she looked out the window at the adults. “I’m having a get-together with Alya and Nino tonight. I know they invited Ivan, Mylène, and Nathaniel. Alix might even show up too.”

Her maman clasped her hands and gasped. “That sounds amazing! We can have a class reunion!”

“I think Kim and Ondine are also off tonight,” her mom said. “We can give them a call and see if they want to show up.”

Her maman dug out her phone from her purse as they considered their old classmates, a few being family friends.

“I wonder if Max is free too. I’ll text him.” Her maman looked up from her phone. “Who else do you want to invite?”

M. Agreste rubbed his chin, then smiled. “You know what, just invite everyone.”

[sufferingsthegame]

The Pictures Were Beautiful

General warning  for a super abusive and toxic relationship , trigger warnings for drugging and violence.

Please let me know what you think or if any tags need to be added 

Jax knew he should trust Marina. He knew she wouldn’t cheat on him. She knew what she was doing. But here he was being fucking angry over all of it again. It was pointless. Stupid and pointless. She shouldn’t be out there at these stupid clubs and parties. Jax was blaming Marina, even he could recognize that all the anger he had gathered throughout the day was being pinned on her. Like a bug in a web. The spider won’t look elsewhere for food if they know they already have a bug trapped. He hated it. Hated how easy it was to snap and push at everything little thing he didn’t like about her. If no one else told her who would? besides she could get over it. Ryder was right as always putting your anger on someone else makes it easier for you.

The door opened and already Marina was putting down her bag, taking off her heels, and putting her hair up. Her normal routine after things like this. Jax put on a smile looking over she was high or drunk, possibly both. Marina giggled and went over sitting on his lap.

“hiya miss me ?“ The slurred words came to her easily. She was used to it the rush of the drugs and that thick layer that so easily coated her brain.

“Of course I did been waiting for you all day “ Jax continued smiling wrapping his arm around Marina.

“ all day sa' long time “Marina smiled softly watching him, eyes still unfocused.

“Mhm exactly, you wanna do something fun with me?” Jax smiled. he already knew that she’d say yes, had said yes countless of times. Not that she remembered.

Marina giggled wrapping her arms around his neck “ of course we can! Ummm whatcha wanna do ?”

Jax smiled and kissed her for a moment before detaching from her “ just a fun little game.. you trust me right?”

Marina nodded, smiling “I do”

Jax nodded and got up, grabbing a thing of rope and holding it up “ think you can be good for me tonight?”

Marina giggled and bit her lip, nodding “When am I not?”

Jax rolled his eyes and smiled, walking back over and pulling Marinas arms behind her. She let him make sure that she was still enough that it wouldn’t mess up Jax. She ignored that annoying feeling of deja vu, letting him put whatever fancy knots and patterns in the ropes and when he was done she turned to look at him, simply waiting.

Jax laughed watching her and tilted her head up by her chin “guess you were right, you are always good for me “

“Try my best” Marina listened, smiling. God, she was always fucking smiling. Until she wasn’t. Until she was sobbing and begging for him to stop, to think about what he was doing, that he was hurting her. He never did. He had quickly learned that you should tune out comments like those. They’re useless. Meant to trick you so she could get him to do what she wanted, and Jax was done doing what other people wanted.

He smiled walking over to a drawer, pulling out syringe “ can you name your own drugs marina? This one should feel familiar to you “

That’s when Marina felt her blood run cold. She had no clue what Jax was holding. Never seen it before and never saw him take it before. Why would he want her on more? He knew she was already high. She didn’t want more

“No? Besides I don’t think I should take anything else..?” Marina shook her head and suddenly dreaded the feeling of the rope around her arms. She wanted them off and she couldn’t even tell why. Something was wrong. Jax was closer now brushing her hair behind her ear. Then the syringe was in her neck and she could feel the sharp pain that quickly faded to a dull throbbing.

“Sorry babe, just stay calm okay? You can do that for me. Know you can .” She wasn’t smiling anymore.. just twisting her wrists desperately

“Jax .. Jax what was that I-I told you I didn’t want it … what the fuck was that..?”

Jax didn’t say anything, playing with her hair “it’ll be fine, just gonna have my fun and you won’t remember it at all tomorrow “

Then slowly the tears started rolling down her face. She wanted whatever this was to stop. This wasn’t Jax, he wouldn’t do this to her. Why would he ever do this to her? Everything was spinning and blurry and Marina was struggling to focus. Why wouldn’t it stop?

Jax picked up Marina smiling as she didn’t squirm or try and move away, instead just closing her eyes and pressing her head against his chest, presumably trying to stop the ‘spinning’. She was mumbling something again but he continued to ignore whatever the hell she was saying. Placing her down on the floor and rolling down the white background.

The pictures were simply so Jax could use them as a reference when he later painted the scene. Painting and sketching took to long and paint took forever to dry. The pictures were fast and easy to use as a reference later. he kept all of it locked in one of the small cabinets built into the stairs. marina never even tried looking in them anyway.

“You gonna pose for me? Put on a pretty smile?” Jax smiled watching her, not expecting much of a response. Sometimes Marina was talkative and other times she’d just glare and cry.

“ fuck you..” marina whimpered, still trying to focus and stop the stupid headache that was quickly approaching.

“Awww baby I’m sure that’s what you wanted. But we can’t always get what we want, and right now it’s my turn”

Marina didn’t say anything for a moment “m’ fucken done with you.. gonna.. gonna go to the police... tell someone..”

Jax rolled his eyes. he could feel his anger rising “and what are you gonna tell them Rina’?” he soon was kicking her, harder than he wanted to. Marina was crying again, trying to move away or curl up

“in fact who are you gonna tell, it’s not like your friends and family are gonna come to your rescue. You won’t even remember what to say? I’m fucken smarter than you and you know it .” He kicked her again before stopping just staring at her. this was her fault. she shouldn’t have gotten on his nerves. Shouldn’t have gone to that party. Shouldn’t have been so stupid. Stupid people get hurt. Jax rolled his eyes watching her “ you look pretty crying... I wish I could say the same about when you're smiling.”

Marina just watched him as he walked over to the cabinet, pulling out a camera and then walking back to her.

then the photos started. He’d take a few, move her, and then repeat. Marina just stayed still completely miserable. Jax was going on about how there was ‘fire in her eyes’ and that it was pissing him off.

“ your ruining the photo, looks shitty as always. You look shitty yourself. So fucking fix your face or I’ll drug you again.” Jax held back the urge to kick her again. Wasn’t worth it, besides he wasn’t supposed to leave marks on her. She’d get suspicious.

“I-I’m sorry, please.. I-I don’t mean to-to ruin it .. i-I’m s-so sorry..” she was bullshiting the whole thing, or at least that’s Jaxs messed up head was assuming. She knew she was making the pictures ugly. She needs to knock it off.

By the time he was finished, Marina was barely awake, her eyes blotchy and puffy. Jax smiled watching her before carefully undoing the ropes “you did so good babe, look so much better now.” Marina nodded slightly just completely exhausted. She wanted it to be over, for him to go back to loving her. So she let him hug her and kiss her, telling her that she had done so well and the pictures were beautiful.

The pictures were beautiful.. not her. She knew that’s what he was thinking. Knew she was only there for whatever sick game he was playing with her. And it hurt, a lot. Jax carefully picked her up and placed her on his bed “I’ll get you some ice and you can sleep” Jax smiled, kissing her forehead before doing exactly that.

When the next day came, Marina woke up with a killer headache. She just further curled up on Jax “side burns .. my heads killing me.”

Jax pulled her closer “ I know you came home completely wasted. Made sure you drank water and put ice on your side “

Marina just smiled and kissed his cheek “thank you, love you so much “

“Love you to Rina’ “ Jax smiled, watching her

And just like that, they went back to normal.

[expensiveminimalist]

It Took One Night - William Nylander (Part 3)

A/N: Here’s Part 3! Posting Part 4 in a couple of days (hopefully) 

Word Count: 2.6k 

Warnings: Swearing, talk of/about sex, talk about friends with benefit, mentions of vomiting (if there’s anything I’ve missed please let me know) 

Part One  Part Two 

Despite what you’d told both yourself and William, the two of you did have sex again that night. Although, for the next week that he spent in your bed, it was strictly anything but sex. You did stuff, there was no doubt about that, but most nights you just snuggled into each other, listening to the other talk and watching Netflix, until eventually you both fell asleep. This new arrangement helped a little, as you were finding it harder and harder to make up excuses for Madison to buy (not that she believed them anyway) as to why William would walk out of your room every morning.

You were enjoying spending time with him, and he was so easy to talk to. He made you feel like you could talk about anything and everything, and you did as you continued to spill your guts about your family a little bit more each night. In a matter of weeks, William had learned that your parents belonged in the 70s, your brother was an insufferable moron who thought everything that came out of your parents mouths deserved a standing ovation and, as a mother’s day present, your sister had left a bag of dogshit on the front step.

Regardless of how much you felt you were rambling and that there were much better things you could be doing together, William never once judged you or ignored you. It felt so therapeutic, getting it all off your chest but it confused you as well – you’d hardly told anyone about the saga of your family, and yet here was William, someone you’d only ever said a few words to, and you told him every ugly detail. He reassured you and most importantly, he listened. He didn’t make you feel like you were boring him or that he wasn’t interested, he genuinely seemed to care about everything you’d been through. You weren’t used to getting that reaction, but it felt nice. And, while things got deep at times, you managed to have a lot of fun with him, wrapped up in your sheets, the sound of whatever show you had on simply background noise to the laughter that he got out of you so easily. Everything was so easy, and you’d be lying if it didn’t scare you a bit. It was like you were waiting for the bad, that inevitable moment where everything became a challenge. For some reason, you could never entirely let yourself enjoy being happy. Your childhood had taught you that was foolish, but for now at least, you were determined to turn a blind eye to the doubt creeping into your mind.

Lately, you’d found yourself getting busier at work. Honestly it was great because it meant more money in the bank and less time to think about your future, the one that you conveniently kept putting on hold since you were clueless about what you wanted to do. You enjoyed working as a barista, you loved being around people and it was the perfect job for that, but it wasn’t what you wanted to do with the rest of your life. You knew you wanted to travel and establish a career, you just hadn’t figured out where or what that was yet. To say your parents were disappointed was an understatement (not as much as your sister, obviously). Almost immediately after you graduated, you’d upped and followed Madison to Toronto, not having a clue what you were doing. The only thing you were sure of was that you wanted to get far away from your overbearing parents and their anguish that you weren’t following your peers (definitely not your friends) to ivy league schools. You’d wanted to get away from that, and Toronto gave you that opportunity.

So, while you would bitch and moan about the rude customers you had to deal with on a daily basis, you’d much rather be here enjoying your independence than living under your parents thumb. Besides, not all the customers were horrible. Although, you weren’t particularly fond of the group of toddlers you’d been continuously cleaning up after for the past hour. One of them had also stomped on your fingers as you tried to pick up a squashed piece of cake off the floor, and it had taken every ounce of restraint for you to not swear at the top of your lungs. As you stood at the sink, scrubbing the dirt from the lovely child’s shoes off your fingers, you looked up to see William standing there, smiling at you.

You didn’t even know that he knew where you worked.

“I’m not stalking you, don’t worry. Mads told me you’d be here” he said, jokingly holding his hands up, trying to sell his innocence.

You laughed at him, “of course she did”.

“Thought we could have some lunch if you’re not too busy?”

You cleared your throat, getting the attention of your boss who was in the middle of making that bratty child a milkshake. You shot her a pleading look, before she sighed and said “go on then”.

William led you outside where you found a quieter spot to sit in the sun, enjoying the fresh air that didn’t have one hint of caffeine in it.

“So, what’s good here? Besides yourself of course”

Rolling your eyes, you replied “Not to sound biased but everything is pretty decent here”.

“What do you feel like? My shout of course”

“Honestly, I could murder a bowl of fries right now. Seriously I’ve been craving fries and ketchup all morning”

“Wow, big spender” he teased, as you playfully swatted at him, feeling slightly embarrassed as your boss came over to take your order.

“What can I get for you two?” Mandy asked, winking at you after she’d looked William up and down, clearly thinking this was a date not just a friendly lunch.

You glared at her while William ordered two bowls of fries, and you realised you didn’t exactly sell the food here well.

“You know you could’ve ordered something nicer right?” you said, as Mandy walk away with a smirk on her face.

He poked his tongue out at you, “hey the fries must be really good here if you felt like killing for them”

“Obviously I wasn’t being serious. But yeah, they are pretty incredible” you shot back.

William just laughed at you, while you couldn’t help but just stare at him. Why did he have to be so good looking? Seriously, the way the sunlight hit him wasn’t fair.

You weren’t sure how long you were staring at him, but you were grateful that Mandy had fast-tracked your order and was on the way with your fries and ketchup.

God they smelt so good. Better than normal, actually.

It didn’t take long for you to dive into the bowl of fries, savouring every lick of ketchup that came along with them. If it was an option, you’d genuinely consider marrying fries on account of the fact that they always made you stupidly happy.

“Enjoying yourself there?”

Shit. You’d actually forgotten William was there, that’s how wrapped up you were in your food.

“Mhmm” you mumbled through a mouthful of potato. How ladylike.

“So, have you got any plans tonight?”

You knew where he was going with this.

“Honestly, I’m surprised you’re even asking considering you’ve invited yourself over every night for the past couple of weeks” you teased.

“Hey I was just being polite, don’t want to overstay my welcome” he said, winking at you.

“Don’t you have a place to live? Cause last time I checked you did, and it was a hell of a lot nicer than the dump that Madi and I live in”

“Um I do, but there isn’t a gorgeous girl there that likes to watch shit tv shows and cuddle up to me every night” he chirped.

“Insulting my tv shows is not gonna get you another invite into my bed”

William smirked at you, “ok, I’m sorry for telling the truth”.

“Yeah ok, you can come over tonight but just so I can make you suffer through hours of my ‘shit shows’. Unless you have a problem with that?”

“Not at all”.

It’d been almost another whole week of William staying over every night, and you were starting to question what was actually going on with the two of you. Since the night of the party you’d only slept together a handful of times, but every night he was snuggled up in bed with you. If you were being honest, you weren’t interested in a relationship right now and, for some reason, you didn’t think William would be either. He had a lot going on his life, as did you, and, after the failure of your last relationship, you weren’t in the mood to be anyone’s girlfriend for a while. It was becoming clear to you that you needed to talk to William, make it clear to him where you stood and how you felt. Maybe you could just be friends with benefits?

So, when William came over to spend yet another night with you, after having sex again, you decided to just spit it out.

“So, what is this?” you asked, tracing patterns on his bare chest.

“What is what?” William asked, a bemused look on his face.

For fucksake.

“I mean, what are we doing?”

“Well we just had sex which I personally thought was pretty fucking amazing, but if you’re not sure what it was” William chirped at you.

“No not that, trust me I knowwhat that was. I just mean, what is this thing going on between you and me?” hoping he’d finally understand what you were getting at.

William wrapped his arms around your shoulders, squeezing you tightly as he replied “well, I guess you can say that we’re getting to knoweach other”

“Can you be serious for one second please?” you said, the lack of patience showing in your voice.

William looked at you, finally realising you weren’t in the mood for joking around.

“Ok, I’m sorry. Look I don’t know what this is but I’m really enjoying hanging out with you. Seriously, you’re pretty fucking awesome”.

You couldn’t help but blush.

“I’m really enjoying hanging out with you too, it’s just…” you trailed off.

“What?”

You took a deep breath and sat up so you were leaning on your elbow, looking William in the eyes.

“I’m probably getting too far ahead of myself but I just need to put this out there”.

William nodded, albeit looking slightly concerned.

“I’m not ready to be someone’s girlfriend ok? And it’s totally fine if you weren’t even thinking along those lines but, I need you to know that I need a break from relationships, I just want to enjoy being single for a while. It’s nothing to do with you seriously, and I meant it when I said I’m really enjoying spending time with you, but I just want it to stay like this, I guess?”

“Stay like this?”

“The talking, and the cuddling, and the sex. Not having any strings attached”

The confusion on William’s face was obvious, and clearly hard for him to hide.

“So, are you saying that you want to see other people as well as this?”

Shit. You’d never actually thought about how you’d answer that.

“I mean it’s not something that I’ve thought about but if you wanted to then, honestly I wouldn’t mind”.

“Ok then”

You looked at William, noticing the tone change in his voice.

“I’m sorry if that’s not what you wanted to hear but I just wanted to be honest with you. You deserve that” you said, entwining his hand with yours.

“Seriously, it’s not a big deal. Don’t stress about it”.

Evidently, it was a big deal since as soon as you’d finished talking he rolled over and went to sleep, ignoring you for the rest of the night.

When you woke up in the morning, you rolled over to find the other half of the bed empty. William always waited for you to wake up until he left.

Jesus Christ.

You weren’t in the mood to deal with him being pissed off because he didn’t a) get what he wanted or b) actually tell you what he wanted.

When you came home from work that night, you hadn’t heard from William once the entire day. So, you spent the night in bed alone, furious that he was off sulking like a child. You couldn’t deal with men sometimes. Why is it always that men say women are moody? Have they met themselves?

But, that’s how it was for the rest of the week.

You ended up texting him, deciding to be the bigger person and invite him over to watch some movies with you, Madison and Lyla. Surprisingly, you got a response but all he said was that he already had plans with friends. Whether it was true or not, he couldn’t have made it anymore obvious that he didn’t want to see you - or so you thought.

On your lunchbreak the next day, you scrolled through your Instagram as you usually did only to see that William was with Madi and Lyla at your flat. Correction, nowhe couldn’t have made it anymore obvious.

Fuck it. If he wanted to act like a child, then two could play at that game and you’d always been an expert at ghosting on people. So you decided that for now, you didn’t know anybody called William. If Madison or Lyla mentioned that name, you’d assume they were talking about Prince William. There was no way in hell you were going to go and grovel at his feet just because you didn’t tell him what he was obviously hoping to hear. Besides, you’d said you wanted to enjoy being single so that’s exactly what you were going to do. You could set up your tinder profile again, try going on a few harmless, one off dates. Treat yourself, go wild.

Except, the universe was making it hard for you to schedule any dates. You’d been working overtime since one of the other barista’s, Kim, had gone on maternity leave and Mandy still hadn’t found anyone that she liked to take over her shifts.

On top of that, you were feeling incredibly tired. You were always tired after a long day on your feet but this was a new level of exhaustion. Plus, your breasts were hurting a lot, to the point where in the middle of serving a customer, all you wanted to do was massage your breasts to stop the soreness. You would’ve, if it wouldn’t have meant trying to explain yourself to both the customer and Mandy. You being you, deciding to ignore it, figuring that it would stop after a while anyway.

It didn’t.

At the start of your morning shift, you got a whiff of fried bacon and the next thing you knew, you were in the bathroom puking your guts out. Aromas of food never made you throw up, generally they brought you joy and made you feel light on your feet. Surely it couldn’t have been the smell of bacon that made you sick, so you wracked your brain trying to recall what you’d eaten for dinner the night before. Bingo. Madi had cooked something with chicken in it, so you probably had food poisoning. It was definitely that. Madi had cooked you both dinner, and the food she made was questionable at the best of times so it made sense.

It did make sense. Only, you’d forgotten one thing.

You were very, very late.

[jiveammunition]

Title: Peppermint Bark Rating: General Characters: Jesse McCree, Sombra, Gabriel Reyes, Jack Morrison Tags: Family AU, Christmas Fluff Summary:

No one could ever accuse Jesse of lacking holiday spirit. If anything, Jesse had it in spades just like his fathers, as evidenced by his excited shouting at six in the morning on Christmas day, yelling for everyone in the house to wake up to open presents.

A Very Merry Christmas at the Reyes-Morrison household.

A commissioned fic for @lifewhatisthat​‘s Family AU! Please check out their lovely art, the basis and inspiration for this work!

If there was ever a thing that simultaneously boggled Jesse beyond belief and also made him more excited than a kid in a candy store, it was the Morrison-Reyes’ household's attitude towards holidays. Whenever any holiday that involved festivities of some sort rolled around, without fail, the house would be covered from floor to ceiling with enough decorations to rival even seasonal shops. And it wasn't just the decorations that embodied the holidays either, Jack and Gabriel themselves would go full out in their celebrations, cheerful and excitable and dressed to the nines in whatever apparel was most fitting. Hell, Gabriel even went so far as to hand-make costumes for the entire family for Halloween, each and every one just as detailed and elaborate as the next; they even had a dedicated shelf for all of the awards for Best Halloween Costumes Gabriel had won over the years — many of them earned before even Jesse and Sombra were adopted.

Nevertheless, despite the somewhat jaded attitudes Jesse and Sombra held about the various holidays thanks to their years spent at the orphanage, Jack and Gabriel's collective holiday spirit was simply too contagious to fight, and after a rather rocky first year in the Reyes-Morrison household, Sombra and Jesse found themselves just as excited about seasonal festivities and holiday celebrations as their adoptive fathers.

For certain, no one could ever accuse Jesse of lacking holiday spirit. If anything, Jesse had it in spades just like his fathers, as evidenced by his excited shouting at six in the morning on Christmas day, yelling for everyone in the house to wake up to open presents. Sombra wasn't quite as keen on waking up so early, but after a rather excitable shake that jolted her to full alertness, the two children all but hurtled themselves into their parents’ bed like twin wrecking balls.

“WAKE UP! IT'S CHRISTMAS!!” they squealed, slapping loudly on the comforter and playfully bapping the sleeping figures with pillows they had taken from their own rooms. “WAKE UP! PRESENTS! MERRY CHRISTMAS!”

After several moments with no response, the two children looked at each other with concern and stopped. Jesse pulled down the covers, wary of what he'd find, and to his and Sombra's surprise, what laid beneath the blankets weren't their fathers at all, but piles of pillows along with a rather sizeable stuffed purple rabbit — Jesse reckoned it was almost the same size as Sombra — with a bow on its head and a gift tag on its ear that read “ Sombra ”.

“It's a bunny!!” Sombra shouted gleefully, pulling the stuffed animal from under the covers and squeezing it in a tight hug. Though happy his sister got something she'd wanted, Jesse was still confused as to where his parents had gone to, and began to look around for clues.

He didn't have to wait for long, however, as the deep sound of someone clearing their throat rumbled from the door and immediately drew his attention. Sure enough, in the doorway stood Gabriel, dressed in an almost obnoxious amount of Christmas-themed clothes: a poofy Santa hat on his head, the ugly laughing reindeer sweater that read  “You SLEIGH me”,  flannel pajama pants patterned with elves and presents and trees all over, and slippers in the shape of Santas covering each foot.

“It's Christmas,” Gabriel said, “What are you kids still in bed for?” He snorted at his own joke, and turned to make his way down the hall, but not before nodding his head in a gesture for the children to follow. The two scrambled from the mess of pillows and covers, shouting in delight as they followed their father downstairs into the living room, nearly tripping over themselves in glee.

The smell of pancakes and cookies and bread greeted them the moment their small slippered feet crossed the doorway, and they immediately plopped themselves down on the couch and on the floor in front of the coffee table to tuck into the traditional Reyes-Morrison Christmas breakfast. Neither of them wasted any time digging into their meal, the two of them rumbling in content and happy noises as they stuffed their faces with the fluffiest pancakes ever known to man and the sweetest fruit preserves courtesy of the Morrison family farm.

“Where's daddy?” Sombra asked, after cutting into her second pancake. Suddenly realizing Jack was nowhere to be found — he hadn't even heard a single sound from the kitchen since he'd woken up — Jesse too swiveled his head around to look.

“He had to do a quick errand,” Gabriel answered smoothly, taking a sip from his coffee.

“For eggs again?” Sombra asked, knowing Jack's almost chronic issue of running out of eggs every Christmas due to his overzealous amount of baking on those mornings. Not that anyone in the house could complain about it, though, what with the piles and piles of baked goodies that lasted them through the entire week and into the new year — even after losing half to the guests at the holiday party they hosted at their own home.

“Something like that,” came the somewhat cryptic answer. Jesse eyed Gabriel suspiciously, and as if to distract him from investigating any further, Gabriel added, “He'll be back any minute now, so after you finish stuffing your faces, each of you figure out which present you're gonna open. Remember, only one for now. You'll get to open the rest later at the party, okay?”

All suspicion went out the window, as just like that, a switch was flipped and Sombra and Jesse began to chew furiously through their food, motivated by their one-track minds now focused on the colorfully-wrapped mysteries beneath the trees.

“Pace yourselves, for crying out loud! I raise children, not animals!” Gabriel playfully scolded, trying not to laugh at his children's excitement, “If either of you choke, I'm gonna take your presents for myself, y’hear? And then neither of you will-”

Before he could even finish his sentence,noises at the door interrupted him, followed by the sound of a familiar voice calling out.

“Babe, I’m home!” came Jack’s voice, echoing from the foyer. “Come help me?”

“Yup! Coming!” Gabriel called back, getting up from his place on the couch. Jesse and Sombra moved to follow, but Gabriel shook his head and said, “Nah, you two finish your breakfast first.  Slowly , please. Your father and I would rather not come back in here to see the two of you passed out because you gluttons couldn’t pace yourselves,” before leaving the room.

The words  “No peeking,”   didn’t need to be said, as Jesse and Sombra knew very well of the repercussions that would occur if they did, and neither of them had the gumption to take Jack’s   “I’m-not-mad-at-you-just-very-disappointed”  face head on, which somehow had the power of Grandma Morrison’s and Ana Amari’s combined with the power of a sad puppy. Not even Gabriel himself could brave such a look for more than a few seconds before crumbling like the tops of one of Jack’s famous Christmas coffee cakes.

The two children watched as Gabriel walked down the hall to greet Jack at the door, smiling that tender smile of his that he always had on whenever the two of them were together, and pulled him into an embrace.

“Gross! Get a room!” Jesse called out playfully.

Jack merely stuck his tongue out at Jesse from over Gabriel’s shoulder, making a show of hugging his husband even tighter and rocking side to side in place to emphasize the embrace. Gabriel played along, as usual, even going so far as to say, “Look, Jackie, mistletoe!” as he pointed up to the flowery sprig hanging from the light hanging in the foyer before kissing his husband sweetly on the lips, the both of them making exaggerated “Muah muah muah!” kissing noises to taunt their children even further.

The noises of laugher and exaggerated affection continued for a little longer until the two men disappeared back out the door to collect what Jack had brought home in the car, and the children went back to their breakfast, eating slowly and methodically as Gabriel had requested of them.

After finishing their meal, the two watched the Christmas movie Gabriel had originally put onto the television for background noise, barely cognizant of the noises and clamoring of their fathers in the kitchen.

“Jesse? Sombra? Could you two come to the kitchen, please?” they heard Jack call to them suddenly. The two looked at each other questioningly, as if the other had the answer as to what their father would possibly be calling them for. When they both could only respond to the other with an equally confused shrug, they figured it would be best to heed Jack’s request as quickly as possible.

They padded to the kitchen, wary and clueless until the distinct and curious sounds of yapping called their attention.

Immediately, Jesse broke into an excited run at the sound, so eager to confirm his suspicions as to the noises’ origins that he nearly slipped and fell face first onto the hardwood floor had it not been for his clever little sister on his heels pulling him upright before he toppled over. Not a split second after he got his bearings back did the two of them break back into a run, barrelling towards the kitchen in their curious glee.

The sight of their fathers standing behind a waist-high gate in the kitchen doorway that had never been there before greeted them, and the two children stood in awe and anticipation as to what that could only mean.

“Merry Christmas, Jesse!” Jack and Gabriel called out, stepping aside with flourish and waving hands to reveal a very large box with a bow stuck to the side.

As if on cue, a furry head poked up from inside the box, letting out a happy yelp as if greeting the sight of the two children. Though the dog seemed to be missing an eye, that didn’t put any sort of damper onto the children’s spirits.

“A pupper!” “A dog!” Sombra and Jesse both cried out in unison, bouncing in place with excitement. Jesse clambored to unlatch the gate, hands shaking in excitement at the prospect of meeting his present face-to-face. He’d always wanted a dog, but had never even thought to ask for one - let alone even put it on his Christmas wish list. After several moments of fumbling, Gabriel moved to assist, only for the both of them to be brushed aside as Sombra competently opened the gate and all but forced her brother into the kitchen before her.

Just as the gate clicked shut behind them, Jack tugged on the ribbon and undid a hidden latch on the side of the large box, letting the front flop forward down onto the floor and freeing the golden retriever — which seemed much larger now that Jesse was up close — of its confines. Without any hesitation at all, the dog rushed forward, just as eager to meet the children as they were to meet her, and all but knocked Jesse to the floor as she bounced up to lick his face.

“Oh my goodness!” Jesse exclaimed happily, laughing as the dog covered him with wet, sloppy licks, barking happily all the while. His hands rubbed at her all over, petting and stroking the soft fur with just as much affection, if not even more so. “Thank you! Thank you! I love it! Thank you!” he cried to his fathers, tears of happiness forming at the corners of his eyes. How could they have possibly known?

“Sombra overheard you talking to Genji about your dog-walking one day,” Gabriel spoke up, as if to answer Jesse’s unasked question, “And made a case for us to get you a dog for Christmas.”

“We were thinking of getting you one anyway,” Jack chimed in, “I mean, what dog-loving 12-year-old boy doesn’t deserve a dog of his own?”

“So,” Gabriel gestured to the furry bundle of joy still piling Jesse with affection, “Merry Christmas, Jesse.”

“You’re welcome,” Sombra said smugly, taking a sugar cookie from the pile on the kitchen island.

“Thank you all so much,” Jesse replied, nearly in tears at how grateful he was, “I love it! Thank you!”

“Her,” Gabriel corrected, “We got her from the pound and kept her at Ana’s for the last week or so-”

“We still need to thank her for that,” Jack interrupted.

“Isn’t that what the limited edition tea set we got her is for?”

“No, that’s just her normal Christmas present, babe.”

“Anyway,” Gabriel shook his head at Jack, pulling the conversation back to the original topic, “They said her name’s Peppermint, but I don’t think she’ll mind if you give her a different name, do you?”

“What do you want to name her, Jesse?” Jack asked.

“Don’t pick something stupid,” Sombra scolded, stuffing the rest of the cookie into her mouth and reaching for another.

Jesse paused for a second in thought, hands resting idly on the dog’s neck. As if to give him the chance to think, the dog pulled back sat down, panting happily as she waited for Jesse’s hands to resume.

After a bit of thinking, Jesse looked to the dog, and confidently announced, “I’m gonna call you Deadeye.”

[foodfilmaboutus]

The Full Interview

Michael Roulier and Philippe Lhomme, directors of foodfilm Interview:

1. Could you introduce the work experience of both of you? When did you two begin to form the team to work together on creativity?

We both have quite a long advertising background, and one thing we have in common is that when we started we did not take advertisement very seriously, at least at first, being more interested into art creation.

In the nineties, if you aspired to exhibit artwork in galleries, it had to stay "secret". So both of us entered the advertising world almost "by accident". After finishing his studies at Penninghen art school, Philippe started painting and installed his atelier in Mesnilmontant district in Paris with no heating. Living and breathing only for his art. Still today he is the one who draws all our scripts, and it is important for us to keep it that way since it is the very first contact we have with clients to seduce them with our stories.

I take care of the writing. I started as a photographer hesitating between photo- journalism and fine arts after having passed a master in Philosophy, but absolutely passionate by all forms of photography. We where both introduced to the advertisement world almost by chance. We did not know each other at that time. It was a golden age for advertisers.Ten years later Philippe was a Creative Director at DDB mainly in charge of an iconic French award winning food brand that French people loved because of the quality of communication and visuals.

On my side I had become a studio still life photographer working mainly for luxury brands and cosmetics subjects. One day Philippe called me and asked if I was interested to do some "food tests" for the brand, and I must admit I was not too excited about it.

Food was not really glamorous in those days...it was called "alimentary photography". Restaurant Chefs where not considered like the Rock Stars they are today, and I cared more about my personal research considering advertisement like a lovely job, but not like a finality, even though I was lucky enough to work for beautiful brands like Hermes, Gallery Lafayette etc... In the end it was a revelation. I discovered a completely new world into which I had a total creative freedom, which was not at all the case for others kind of advertised subjects. Usually Art directors had no clue about what to do with food, and it was very much 'comedy' orientated as they felt more confortable doing that. It was not the case of Philippe who already believed that there was a lot do in this field and really tried to bring the visuals to a very artistic level. We inspired a lot of other food brands with our images, and the brand became a real visual reference for food. Finally we ended up becoming food specialists, but it had never been our initial projects. We collaborated together for 15 years always trying to focus as much as possible on textures. Food can be naturally ugly and somehow you need quite a lot of experience to master it. We noticed at that time that the food film industry was still surfing on a quite archaic imagery, where the heroes where definitely not the food. In parallel amazing cook books where being printed as editors understood there was a huge market in selling this very artistic food approach. I did 36 books and had the chance to meet these amazing Michelin star chefs who where all desiring to do their proper "food manifesto". It was part of their "business plan" to do such books. A necessity for them that made photographers very happy.

The brand we where working for was only doing print, but one day they asked us to film some recipes for viral videos. They where short on budget but we where given "carte blanche". We just loved doing them, and applied our print workflow to this new experience. We where both passionate about films in our personal life. I was interested in doing experimental research around cinematic experiences inspired by people like Stan Brakhage or Maya Deren. Philippe was spending a lot of time in contemporary art galleries watching artists using video as a medium. Strangely the brand hardly used these film recipes we did for them, and it stayed completely confidential until we decided to post them all in one batch on Vimeo. It became like a tsunami: phones started ringing all the time, and many production companies scouting on Vimeo made us tons of propositions. It all went really quickly, and a year later, Philippe naturally quit his job as creative director at DDB, and on my side I switched from still-life photography to film directing.

2. Which clients do you serve currently?

Our website is built like a simple blog, so the very first page represents our actuality and the clients we lately served.

We have a lot of different clients, and we have enlarged our "film perspective" in exploring other field like the cosmetic world.

Usually cosmetic brands would hire purely still life directors specialized in jewelry, watches, or shooting very "static" items. They had a very "contemplative" approach. Almost robotic. We brought "life" and action, avoiding the 3d representations mainly used at that time. Agencies where seduced by our food background and tried to apply this "spirit" to selling cosmetics...they where seduced by our organic approach.

We love also working for cosmetic brands (L'Oréal, Garnier, Yves Rocher, Décleor, Neutrogena) because the visual grammar has to be very metaphoric, so there is a lot of creativity involved in the process, and they are really expecting this from us: "unseen ideas" to illustrate the benefit of the products....

As far as food it stays our main subjects. Our clients are very eclectic. When you shoot food films you have to collaborate with the big agri-food groups like Neslté, Lactalis, Mondelez etc...and the creative validation process tends to be quite heavy. We can vigorously defend our ideas until a certain point, but at one stage "the big machine" can easily "laminate" your creativity. We are used to that. So what's really remains is the quality of the CRAFT. Our background in print photography really helped us here. I have always been passionate by the digital world and started working early with computers. We try to control in-house as much as we can: compositing, post production and coloring. Our workflow is very direct and since we don't have "a complex post-production pipeline" our approach is very "boutique" in a way. We do hire some digital artists, but they come to work in our studio under our supervision before the film presentation.

We do a lot of this post production job directly on the set: we have great people around us helping us to achieve "live" what is usually done a few weeks later, which is quite an unusual workflow, and spend the nights coloring the clips to be able to show them the next day.

2bis. What’s your core concept of making creativity for clients?

What inspires us most is graphics, architecture, contemporary art, constructivism, Bauhaus, Melies (a French director of the beginning of the century creating illusion) and I am forgetting a lot of other things. Being two "brains" enlarges the perspectives and the approaches. We don't use any DOP, so it's really a duo work.

Philippe and I have very different personalities and skills, and strangely it works really well. But what really unifies us is a desire for elegance and fluidity. A lot of food studios sometimes lack this little something related to external input. Our respective personal passions in life keep enriching our professional work.To resume, it's about "good taste" as we say in France.

We have been too much categorized as "graphic" directors, and that saddens us a bit because we are very much about filming "sensuality". This is probably due to our long collaboration for Marks & Spencer, and to the number of films we did for them.

Our camera angles are usually very simple, frontal and direct. We do have an in-house Kuka robot, but actually don't use it so much, considering that the most important part of our job is composition, more than just a robotic technical achievement.

The editing is the other part into which we have put a lot of energy. The rhythm is not only achieved by the editing skills, but also by the use of visual patterns within the individual clips. We don't "contemplate" too much with long travellings, our work is all about action and the smart ways we have to find in order to animate our textures. And finally the transitions within clips are to our eyes as important as the clips themselves, and we always look for little tricks in order to help the editor's work.

3. Why do you want to be specialized in food films and why began? What’s the benefits of working in this specialized area? How is this area special among creative films?

Food was up to quite recently an unexplored territory. This is what makes it fascinating for us. We are artists using food as our playground. Being French also means that we have a cultural respect for it. Colors, shape, complexity of textures, infinite visual associations and concatenation, and in a certain way "porn".

Pornfood meaning that we can induce by the visuals the viewer to "drool" when we film organoleptic textures that provoque desire and satisfaction.

The other challenge was to totally erase human beings. It's more a philosophical and artistic choice than a necessity for us, and every time we are asked to shoot actors we are happy to do it. But to be able to captivate audience without the acting support is a really an interesting direction. The concept of no-hands-films has led us those last years, but we are in constant evolution, and I am sure it will change.

Being specialized in food give us more freedom than working for other subjects. Everybody has to say something about fashion, cloths, talent acting etc...but very few can have a clear vision about how to stage food, and it gives us a real license for creativity. It's a niche, and that's what's great about it.

4. What kind of experience can you share about food films making? What is the critical thing when making them? Could you explain with 1-2 examples?

One of the critical point is always Time management. When you work with textures you are always surprised by the fact that you cannot really know in advance what shots are going to take more time than others. When you have a long shooting on multiple days your can "deal" with a certain time-elasticity, much better than a single day shoot, when you know that in the same day, whatever happens, you have to "deliver".

We have to obtain the "visual miracle" in a very short time and sometimes it just does not happens, and you can feel the production team and clients become stressed. We learned how to deal with that quite well. Experience will help of course, but sometimes a simple action like just filling a glass of wine in front of the camera can become a nightmare. Of course one could rely on robotics to do that, but then you might lose all the beautiful accidents that can make the quality of the shot. So it's all about making the right choices at the right time.

The same critical point goes when writing the scripts. We have to constantly evaluate the "is-this-going-to-be-possible?". It's great to have ideas, but they have to be somehow realistic and credible, and sometimes we are not really sure of way the texture will behave. There is a lot of randomness that we don't control. We often start over and over again to get the right movement or action. We do work with some great SFX teams that we constantly challenge with our crazy ideas, as we took an ideological posture with Philippe not use 3D, and to always film everything for real. Many people think we use 3D, but I can assure that we don't. We do composite a lot though.

5. Why do you think your work is attractive to the audience and help the brand grow? Can you share one of your favorite works?

I think that what attracts people to our work is that we are often "on the edge of credibility".

We play a lot with illusion, like a magician who will suddenly speed up a gesture to hide the tricks. The rhythm will help us to create this magic. For example we also very often defy gravity, or normality, in order to give a sense of quirkiness. Make it a bit "weird" to get more appeal or unexpectedness. We also try to show details that people usually don't really see, emphasizing a certain playfulness with our camera. The slow motion Phantom camera really helps the observation of the unseen.

The other attractive thing is that our scenes are always "in action". The common question for us is "how are we going to activate this image". No time to contemplate, the textures are always animated in order to keep the tension of the viewer.

6. How’s film creativity different from the general creativity making?

To accept to work as a team with other people. Even more, to admit the power of a team, like a football player.

It is much easier for Philippe who is an ex Creative Director used to commission other artists. I am a bit of "a control freak" and that makes me makes me suffer more than him, and probably others too. This is where we are really complementary.

Nevertheless our team is much smaller than a conventional cinema team, and we try to keep this "boutique" home-made atmosphere. The idea is to never lose the "primal vision" of the film, and keep an eye on everything. We always work with the same team, and we all know each other really well, and that gives a lot of fluidity to our relations. When there is a difficulty, we naturally team up all together to find solutions. It's very democratic!

A good team is like a good wine and it's years of maturation. We where lucky to achieve this.

7. How do you usually allocate work between you two and collaborate with other members in your company? How’s your creativity making process usually?

We both do everything, it's democracy again. We try to put our ego's on the side of our relation.

We do fight a lot though to defend our personal vision of the film, but this is what makes our treatments so rich.

We usually take two days to write a script. The first day is only dedicated to brainstorming, and we throw as much as ideas as we can. Phillipe does quick drawings as we

speak to keep it as a memo. The next day he does the drawings, always in black and white. I love the simplicity of his style, and he really has a camera in the eyes. His drawing treatment is very different of what would provide a rough-man or illustrator . I take care of the writing, and I am extremely precise in our explanations. It's the main secret to win bids. We also try to control as much as we can the art direction of the treatment, and exchange a lot with the creative team doing the lay-outs in the production house. Same goes for the mood boards.

8. Could you tell me an unforgettable thing during you two’s collaboration?

Sometimes the shape of an object, a texture or anything else can slowly become sexually evocative. We remember this time when breaking a poached egg was really reminding a close up of a "very different" scene that could have been extracted from an X-rated movie. Nobody was saying anything, but everybody was thinking the same thing. It was at the same time really evident, and somehow quite understated. At one point the producer "played" his job, and said it, which meant that we had to reshoot the whole scene. It was a good laugh for everybody. It's foodporn after all !

We have hundred of anecdotes with our job, but that's another interview.

9. How will Foodfilm or you personally partner with Stink? What do you think you will bring to Stink’s team through this partnership?

We are very excited with this new partnership, and as we are quite easygoing, it should work really well.

Being represented by Stink is a caution of creativity, so we might have to fight less to defend bold ideas. I don't really know if Stink represents a lot of other table top directors in their international "spiderweb"? I think that the food film market is really huge, and still

growing. So if we can fill this gap for them it's really a great win-win association. Let's talk again about it in a year time!

[mnemememory]

Love your writing!!! If you're still taking prompts, how about trini's mom walking in on trini and Kim during a tender moment like Kim's holding Trini's hand and Trini's mom is like *raises eyebrows* what's going on here?? Idk if this makes any sense or anything to go off of. Hope you have a great day!!

cross-posted on ao3

Summary: Kim wants to come over, and Trini regrets everything

mild trini/kim

A/N: thanks so much for the prompts, sweetheart! I’m sorry this took so long, but it kind of got away from me :P

Trini knows this is a bad idea.

Things involving Kim always seemed like bad ideas, though, so she just figured it was her usual mantra of ‘don’t say yes to the pretty girl don’t say yes to the pretty girl oh man are you stupid’ and just went along with it anyway. Because apparently saying no to pretty girls was something she found difficult.

So when Kim says, “Hey, Trini, I don’t think I’ve ever been to your place” – well. Trini had put up a token protest (because there is no way this wasn’t going to blow up in her face) but ultimately had caved, because hey, maybe it would be nice to bring a friend – a friend, Zach – home. It’d stop her parents from worrying so much, wouldn’t it? This was what they wanted. Win-win.

Except Zach wouldn’t shut up about it. “You’re introducing her to your parents!” he says, grinning up at her. She’s taken to hanging out near the abandoned gold mine, letting the height soothe the way her muscles stretched too much beneath her skin. “You haven’t even been on a second date yet! Wow, someone is moving fast.”

“I could kick you off and watch you bleed out,” Trini says. “I’d laugh.”

Zach isn’t deterred, which is more than a little bit annoying. She misses the times where intimidating people had been as easy as breathing. “I’m sure you would,” he says, hopping around from one rock to the other like a rabbit on speed. Trini’s been waiting impatiently for his heart to explode for the past ten minutes, but so far, no dice. “And I’m sure it would be suitably entertaining.”

Trini’s brain catches up to his earlier comment. “And we aren’t dating! Have not been dating! Why are you like this?”

“What do you call that time you went to Krispy Kreme –”

“We were training.”

“With donuts,” Zach says. “By yourselves. Eating.”

“I will kill you, it will be painful, you will scream by the end of –”

“Calm down, calm down,” Zach says, laughing as he dodges out from one of her airborne attacks. Trini lands on all fours, fingers gripping into the rock as easily as anything she’s ever done. It feels almost like cheating, the way her body responds to things in ways that shouldn’t be possible. All that work, all those stretches, all that time and energy – now, with her little yellow hunk of rock pressed against the lining of her pocket, she’s all but invincible.

“That wasn’t a date,” Trini repeats, turning around to glare at him. “And this isn’t one, either. My parents have been begging me to make friends, in any case. This will get them off my back.”

“Whatever you say, Trini dearest,” Zach crows, and then dodges back once again as Trini hauls a well-aimed rock at him. “Hey, ow, you don’t need to go that far –”

“Is it okay if I bring a friend over tomorrow?”

The table cuts silent.

Trini inwardly cringes, and then steels herself and glances up. Her mother is staring at her, face paler than she’s seen in a while. Her family is smiling, like he’s proud, but also like he has no clue what’s going on. It’s not an unfamiliar smile.

Her brothers break first.

“Do you have a boyfriend?” one of them crows, stretching out over the table to grin at her.

“What’s his name?” the other one says, eyes blown wide with delight. He doesn’t wait for her to answer. “Trini and new guy sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N –”

“Boys!” her mother snaps, and then both snap their mouths shut. Trini glares at them wrathfully from across the table, and then turns to fully face her mother. “Is it a boy?”

“No!” Trini says, and she wishes her voice doesn’t sound so defensive. They don’t know, she thinks. “No, it’s one of my friends. Kim.”

“Kim,” her mother says, like she’s tasting the name on her tongue. Trini feels to abrupt urge to leave. “I guess so, as long as you’ve finished all your homework.”

Homework, yes. Trini loves homework. She loves that she doesn’t need to do it to pass.

“We’ll just be studying,” Trini says, and the words feel hollow in her mouth. Studying, right. She wonders if Kim even bothers to study. Why did Kim even want to come over, anyway? It’s not like they don’t see each other enough, even outside of school and Power Rangers training. This is the most social that Trini’s ever been, and it’s starting to freak her out, the way she’s fallen so easily into a pattern.

“Well, that should be fine,” her mother says. “Do you share classes, then? How did you meet?”

Trini sinks lower into her chair, feeling her shoulders bunch up. “Mum.”

“What’s her last name?” her mother continues, relentless. “Do we know her parents?”

“I doubt it,” Trini says, skin itching. She wants to be outside, stretching out over the rocks and rocketing towards the stars. She’s fast; faster than she’s ever been before. If she starts running, though, she doesn’t think she’s ever going to stop. “Mum, how many friends do you have here?”

There’s a brief, ugly silence.

“Trini,” her father says, but Trini’s done. This is a horrible idea. She’ll just tell Kim that her parents don’t want her to have friends over – it should be easy enough. Of course, she has an awful vision of Kim telling her, Oh, okay, I’ll swing by in the middle of the night and just take a look at your place then, which. Is less than helpful.

Trini shakes her head and shoves her chair back, almost tripping in her haste to leave the table. “I’ll wash the dishes,” she says, grabbing her plate and shuffling towards the kitchen. It’s almost physically painful, keeping her speed normal and human. I’m fast, she thinks, and then wonders if she’s really fast enough.

“Bring her here,” her mother says the next morning, when Trini’s trying to bolt outside the door before anyone else is awake. Her mother is sitting at the kitchen table, nursing a mug of coffee so strong that Trini is getting a second-hand caffeine hit just from the smell alone. “I want to meet her.”

“Maybe I don’t want her to meet you,” Trini says, and then regrets it.

Her mother glances up, face old. It’s strange to think of her that way, but there are lines, there. Bags. Without her makeup on, she looks tired. Trini has to glance away before she says anything else that she’s going to regret.

“Bring her here,” she repeats.

“I’ll think about it,” Trini says, and then curses herself. A deal is a deal. She’ll think about it, and then she’ll tell Kim, and then Kim is going to want to come anyway. No amount of saying ‘I don’t think this is a good idea’ has made her change her mind yet.

“See you later,” Trini says gruffly, and then backs out of the house and closes the door.

“Hey, are you okay?”

Trini releases the death-grip she has on her backpack strap, forcibly turning her neck so give Kim a smile. Kim arches her eyebrow and silently reiterates the question.

“I’m fine,” Trini forces out, and she’s not lying. “Let’s just get this over with.”

Kim gives her a look. “Are you sure?” she says. “I don’t have to come over, you know.”

“No, no,” Trini says. She’s already let the cat out of the bag on this one; Kim wanted to know what her family was like, and if she doesn’t get this over this, it’s just going to escalate. Best get it done quickly and with as little pain as possible. Like ripping off a band-aid.

As a kid, Trini had hated ripping off band-aids.

Everyone’s home; she can already hear the boys running screaming down the hallway, can already hear her mother yelling in the background. Her father isn’t being obvious about it, but he should be there, too. Trini inhales sharply and reaches towards the doorknob, before hesitating.

“Is there something wrong, Trini?” Kim says.

“Oh, they’re going to love you,” Trini says, grabbing her hand and pulling her forward.

She doesn’t announce their presence inside, because that would be too abnormal for anyone to cope with. Instead, Trini drags Kim upstairs as fast as she can, almost tripping over the stairs in her haste to get out of the firing zone.

“Trini?” her mother calls, and Trini freezes with her hand on her door. Damn. So close. “Trini, are you home?”

Kim is a silent wall at her back, and Trini’s words stick in her throat. Respond, damn you, she tells herself. C’mon, just – respond!

“Yeah,” she says, and then clears her throat and breathes in deeper. “Yeah!”

“Is your friend with you?”

“We’ll be studying in my room,” Trini shouts, and then shoves Kim into her room and closes the door with a slam. She closes her eyes, steels her shoulders, and then turns to give Kim a wide smile. “So.”

Kim doesn’t look impressed. “So,” she parrots. “Trini, just how many friends do you actually have?”

Trini rolls her eyes. “Come on, I’ll show you around.”

Kim ignores her and flops onto Tirni’s bed, splaying out dramatically across the duvet. Trini averts her eyes from the way Kim’s shirt rides up over her stomach and rests herself against the wall. Everything’s clean, if a little dusty – she’s taken to sneaking out via her window every night and just curling up wherever she finds someplace comfortable. Rita’s attack left her more than a little leery of sleeping – well, anywhere.

“This is nice,” Kim says, eyeing the plastered-over cracks on the far wall. Trini hasn’t had the time to paint over them, but she’s planning on it. “Very neat.”

Trini huffs a laugh under her breath, reaching up to link her fingers between Kim’s. Kim rolls over and grins at Trini from above, face almost heartbreakingly beautiful.

Trini knows that this isn’t what Kim wants, she knows that she doesn’t – that she can’t – that this isn’t –

There’s a knock on the door, and then Trini’s mother is opening the door and is looking at them before Trini has time to let go.

“Studying,” her mother says, arching her eyebrow.

Kim steps in before Trini can start an argument. It’s handy, having friends. Friends. “We were just about to get started,” she says, sitting up and smiling. She doesn’t let go of Trini’s hand. “School was pretty gruelling, so we decided to take a break beforehand.”

Trini’s mother smiles, but there’s something fake about it. She’s showing too many teeth. “You must be Kim.”

“That’s me,” Kim says, straightening. “Kimberly Hart. It’s a pleasure meeting you, ma’am. I’ve heard a lot about you.”

Trini squeezes Kim’s hand in warning. “Is there something you wanted, Mum?”

“I came to see if you wanted anything to eat, or drink,” her mother says. “You didn’t even come into the kitchen to say hello.”

“We’re fine, Mum,” Trini says, clipping off her words. “Anything else?”

“Dinner’s at seven, if your friend wants to stay,” her mother says. She doesn’t move away from the doorway, and Trini feels herself gripping Kim’s fingers with too much force. She tries to relax her hand, but she finds that she’s locked her arm up all the way to the shoulder.

“Mum,” Trini says.

“Come say hello properly before your friend leaves,” her mother says, and then exits the room. She doesn’t close the door. There’s a brief silence as Kim doesn’t talk and Trini just waits for it, just waits for her to say something. There’s a reason that Trini never brings anyone home, and her mother is 70% of it.

With her father claiming at least 10%, the remaining 20% proceed to hurtle into her room without even having the grace to knock. Trini leaps up and makes a grab for her brothers as they start shouting questions at Kim, but Kim just laughs and sits up.

“You didn’t mention you had brothers,” she says.

Trini freezes, and her brothers give her identical looks of betrayal. “You haven’t mentioned us?”

“You’re cute,” Kim says with a grin. “But we’re busy, so scram.”

With starry eyes, one of her brothers drops to the ground and opens up his arms. “Marry me.”

Trini grabs each by an arm and herds them into the hallway. “Get out,” she hisses, face red and heart beating fast enough to kill her. “I’ll kill you later.”

“I’m going to marry your friend,” one of them says, eyes gleaming. “She’s pretty and mean and –”

“You need better standards,” Trini mutters, slamming the door shut.

“I’m glad you’re making friends, Trini,” her father says that night. Kim’s gone home – Trini had almost had to beg her; C’mon, Kim, please don’t do this to me, you’ve seen enough – but her parents won’t stop talking about it. We’re so happy for you, they say, This is great, you need to branch out more and stretch your wings and –

“Can’t you find anyone better, though?” her mother says. “She seems a bit…”

Trini closes her eyes. Don’t do this to me. Please.

“Kim’s great,” she says, but the words feel dry and hollow. Everything feels dry and hollow; her lungs aren’t working properly, but she’s breathing just fine.

“Oh, I know, honey,” her mother says. “And I know that you’re trying to fit in – and she seems sweet, but –”

“But what?” Trini says. “You saw her for like two minutes.”

“You two seemed awfully –”

Please, PLEASE don’t do this.

“She’s a friend from school. I thought you wanted me to make friends,” Trini says, lounging back. She’s faced Rita Repulsa down. She’s driven an alien mecha sabre tooth tiger, this can’t be that difficult – this isn’t that –

“We know, honey, we just don’t want you hanging out with the wrong people.”

“She seemed nice to me,” her father says.

Her mother shoots him a glare. “You didn’t exactly talk to her, now, did you? Kim Hart, was it? I think I’ve heard that name –”

“Are you serious?” Trini says, glaring. “You cannot be serious, this is ridiculous, I can’t believe that you’re –”

“Wait, Trini, where are you –”

Trini sits on the top of the gold mine and breathes; in and out, in and out. The stars stretch out overhead and devour the darkness, the jagged edges of the horizon silhouetted black.

She’s free, she’s free, she’s free –

[ciathyzareposts]

Shadow of the Comet – Final Rating

By limbeck

The first time I played Shadow of the Comet was probably some time in the late ’90s or early 2000s. I was relatively fresh in RPGs and the Cthulhu Mythos, and still at university. So, a Cthulhu Mythos inspired adventure game definitely looked like just what I needed to fill my appetite for relevant pop culture.

I don’t remember much from that playthrough, but I sure as hell remember being impressed by the fact that I could face some of the Great Old Ones (GOOs) and frantically looking for walkthroughs through my brave dial-up connection to get through the final stages.

“Frantic” is a word perfectly associated with some parts of the game

This time around, I had a mixed bag experience, though I think that my gameplay posts mostly focused on the negatives and contained quite a few rants. I am a man of small patience it seems. Nevertheless, the playthrough was by no means a negative experience. There were many things I enjoyed in the game, namely the setting, some of the character interactions and the story, cheesy as it was. However, as Ilmari and Vetinari commented in the introduction post, the clunky interface, along with some sanity breaking puzzles broke my immersion.

I am talking about you, dark chamber puzzle

But let’s see how fair I am to the game using the PISSED rating. This is my first time, so please bear with me.

Puzzles and Solvability

We start with what frustrated me most in the game. It is an adventure game and puzzles are essential for the player’s enjoyment. Unfortunately, many of the puzzles in the game were bad. They were bad in many ways. I may be overreacting, as I am a soft adventure gamer. I play the games mostly for the stories and, as mentioned above, I lose patience with an obscure puzzle easily. I hope you will agree with me though, when I say that these features do not make good puzzles:

Timed sequences when the time you have at your disposal is very little. I like it when the game gives you time to think and I prefer it if that time is not during a reload. There were way too many puzzles that I only had a few seconds to think of something before I died. At least I died with variety. Examples include the scene at the forest clearing at night, the temple of Dagon, all encounters with cultists and that damned JONAS chase.

Action sequences that do not involve clever thinking but just being able to press the right buttons at the right time. As above, I want to play the game at my leisure. I can understand that such fast paced encounters add to the atmosphere of the game. My fleeing from JONAS fits with the horror theme of the game, but it was not enjoyable at all.

Lack of clues and feedback. There were many puzzles when I felt I was stumbling blind. Sometimes, I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing and sometimes I knew what I had to do, but the options were so broad that it practically forced you to bruteforce it. What made it worse was that sometimes items that were completely unresponsive in one scene held vital clues after an event took place.

Pixel hunting. There were many puzzles when I had to be standing in a specific point, such as the one with the key to the Necronomicon under the carpet in JUGG’s house. 

JUGG sure hid it well

Mini games. Sliding tile puzzle.

Dead ends. I only encountered one, when I forgot to refill my naphtha bucket, and Charles mentioned another one with BISHOP and the cemetery key. I think that in 1993, there was enough experience in design to avoid dead ends. Still not a big problem if you save regularly, as you were not walking dead for too long.

On the good side, though there were some clever puzzles, like the last one at the stone circle or the one with the wings at the top of the lighthouse, even if the latter made no sense at all. The UI did not allow you to directly combine items in your inventory, so the designers had to find other ways to challenge the player. Some of them were clever and they make sense, but most of the time, they make sense only retrospectively. I understand their intention of pushing the player to think logically and consider what he could see in the room, but they mostly relied on visual cues. I also liked the fact that you could reuse some of your items and you didn’t have to throw them away after use.

I will keep that magnifying glass until I die

Overall, I must say I am not satisfied with the quality of the puzzles in the game, but there were good moments and many missed chances.

Score: 3

Interface and Inventory

This is another category where the game could have done a lot better. The tools were there, but they seem to have been only partially implemented. You may remember that in my first session I misunderstood the “laser sight” to work with any object I could interact with. I was wrong. It turns out that it was about what I could pick up. This made the whole game a lot harder. It meant that I had to be standing at the correct place to interact with something and the lack of feedback meant that I couldn’t know if I was meant to be standing at a different pixel or that there was indeed nothing there. This is indeed a missed opportunity to improve user friendliness.

That lack of feedback annoyed me many times. My laptop’s L (Look) key would be worn out if it was made of a slightly less durable plastic. I think I can see the letter fading away. And yet, in most cases I would never get a description (see my rant about the naphtha pool). It wouldn’t hurt to have a description of the room and something more helpful or even just some flavour text.

That rifle on the wall holds a vital clue, but it took me some time to really look at it. Maybe that’s my fault after all.

Another problem was the clunkiness of movement. I played the floppy version and there was only keyboard support. That’s not a bad thing per se. The game was well designed around it, but it always felt that it was responding too slowly. That was a real problem when I had to act quickly, such as when being chased by JONAS. I did not have the courage to try the same in the CD-ROM version, but I remember moving with the mouse was much clunkier.

Other than that, inventory management and controls were very simple and intuitive. There was no way to combine objects at will, but that may have hurt the variety of the puzzles, not the interface.

Score: 4

Story and Setting

The story of the game is based on what is considered a typical Lovecraftian story (I think some of the best of his stories do not follow that pattern, but that’s not for this post). A small, quiet town which hides a disturbing secret, usually a cult to some horrific extradimensional beings with unpronouncable names. The protagonist is slowly introduced to the underground of the town and the story reaches a frantic conclusion, usually in a short time span, which is sufficient to kill or drive the protagonist mad.

In this game, kill more often than turn mad

Seen in that setting, the story is a bit cliché, but it works. The writers may have been a bit too excited and included too many GOOs too close together, but for someone not so much into the Cthulhu Mythos, it should not be a problem. What could be a problem, though was the way that I was railroaded into some situations, without really having any idea why I should be doing it. The whole storylet with the lighthouse and the gypsies is my pet peeve here.

The motives of the characters are explained in a satisfactory way. Each character has a small background story and their relationships are shown through your conversations with them. I empathised with some of them, particularly poor, tragic CURTIS and even BISHOP, while at the same time, could not help getting annoyed by Miss PICOTT and ZEKE. Regarding the villains, for most of the time they remained distant and I only had second-hand information.

A nice example of unnecessary, but entertaining, background fluff

In summary, it is a passable, but cliché, story, with memorable, but cliché, characters in a nicely fleshed out little town.

Score: 7

Sound and Graphics

I am torn with this one, particularly about the graphics. So, let’s start with the sound first.

In the floppy version, which I played, there were only two or three different background music scores, which they repeated a few times after loading or after some scenes, but there were long periods with no music at all. The themes were very nice and fitting to the atmosphere. If they had more storage, they could do better. I want to believe that the CD-ROM version had more variety.

Sound effects consisted entirely of digitised recordings and they were annoying for the most part. They would usually play once when you entered a new screen. For example, the same bird chirp would play every time a forest screen loaded and the same very annoying cat meowing would repeatedly play in all cemetery screens.

There was no speech in the floppy version, but the little I saw of the CD-ROM version did not leave me much impressed. MorpheusKitami’s comment in the first gameplay post seems to imply that there is much to be desired from the speech in the CD-ROM.

Now to the graphics. As I mentioned above, I am torn. The technique used to digitise photos for the exterior of the buildings gave some nice realism and added to the atmosphere of the town. Another thing that struck me as ugly were the cutscenes. It was a mix of faux-3D and 2D animations, with too sharp angles and very flat colours. That dived quite deeply into the uncanny valley.

The interiors were almost entirely hand-drawn though and this was a mixed bag. Drawing was clear. You could understand that a desk was a desk and that there was a lamp on the mantelpiece. However, sometimes the proportions were overblown, as someone commented early on.

My room is a good example. It would be impossible to warm it up in winter and the door is twice my height

I need to praise some of the locations that were very nicely drawn and coloured appropriately to enhance the atmosphere of the particular location. That goes for the cemetery at night, the crypt of the HAMBLETON family and even JONAS’s maze. I think the colours and drawings were just right there.

Anyway, all things considered, I am sorry, but I cannot go very high on this one.

Score: 5

Environment and Atmosphere

Reading previous reviews, it seems that this criterion is the one that presents the most difficulty to reviewers. I count myself to be on the lucky side. Looking at a Lovecraftian horror-themed game like Shadow of the Comet, I believe I knew what sort of atmosphere I should experience. I was expecting a slow burn at first and a flood of horrific revelations at the end. What started as a quiet stroll in the park would end as a frantic dash through a dark forest with clawed hands reaching for you.

The game managed to achieve this feeling quite well, provided that you would not get stuck in puzzles for too long, but maybe that was part of the horror experience. Illsmouth I think is the perfect little town, with its inhabitants following their daily patterns and only speaking to you if they feel like doing so. I come from a large city, but have spent far too many summers in my parents’ village on the island. I can see the similarities and hope that my village is not built over a forgotten temple of Dagon.

I believe I would have noticed

The horror part is also well presented, but less so. There are scenes and locations that take you in, but many times it feels forced. The appeal of Lovecraft’s stories is that you do not really know what you are dealing with until the very end. Here, you are fed with a lot of exposition and are immersed in lore. I understand that this is an adventure game and not a horror story, which is also why it is not easy to get the atmosphere just right.

Still, there were scenes which worked very well, and I will mention again the discovery of CURTIS’s corpse and the section in the cemetery and in the crypt. One could say that the chase by JONAS also works towards the horror atmosphere, but I died too many times to appreciate it.

Score: 7

Dialogue and Acting

The game has a lot of dialogue, but less than half of it offered multiple options. In most cases, dialogue played as a cutscene and my only contribution was to hit enter and read the next line. The designers introduced dialogue options when they considered them critical for a puzzle or to lead me to a different branch of the story, usually my death.

Exhibit A

I believe this approach worked quite well in the building up of the setting of the game. Illsmouth locals got their life through these chats, either with PARKER or among themselves. I also enjoyed the dialogue puzzle at the town hall which opened the path to the Mayor’s office. In most other cases, however, my options seemed inconsequential, even though some answers seemed clearly more appropriate than others. A potential dead end via dialogue was reported in the comments, with BISHOP potentially leaving without ever giving me the cemetery key, but I did not have a saved game before that to verify. I am willing to give the game the benefit of doubt, but other design choices make this benefit very small.

The quality of the dialogue is adequate and mostly appropriate for the type of game. Some horrible one-liners aside (“Say hello to SATAN”), the dialogues were written keeping the characters and overall story in mind and were not too cheesy (SATAN line aside).

I cannot say much about the voice acting of the CD-ROM version. The little that I saw seemed awkward and there were problems with the synchronisation with the speaker’s sprite. May be too much to ask from a game of that era, but I think the Case of the Serrated Scalpel did it better (if it did not, I apologise. I played most of the game with sound off because of a bug).

Score: 5

So, that gives us a PISSED of 31 / 0.6 = 51.666, rounded up to 52. There was a wide range of guesses, as high as 62, but ShaddamIVth guessed correctly. That makes it two games in a row, after the Journeyman Project.

  I hope you enjoyed the game and the review and that I’ll be able to write something more before Prisoner of Ice in 2025 or so.

CAP Distribution

100 points to limbeck

Blogger award – 100 CAPs – For blogging through this game for our enjoyment

32 points to TBD

True Companion Award – 25 CAPs – For playing along with most of the game and providing useful commentary

Obscure music reference Award – 5 CAPs – For putting monster mash in my radar

Adam West Award – 2 points – For knowing how hard it is to get rid of a bomb

28 points to Charles

True Companion Award – 25 CAPs – For playing along with most of the game and providing useful commentary

Superhero mashup Award – 3 CAPs – For the mental image of Bruce Wayne changing into his Batman uniform in a Gotham City phone booth

25 points to MorpheusKitami

True Companion Award – 25 CAPs – For playing along with most of the game and providing useful commentary

15 points to Laukku

Free betting cash Award – 15 CAPs – For guessing that I would not be able to solve the photo development puzzle and almost getting it right.

13 points to ShaddamIVth

Psychic Prediction Award – 10 CAPs – For guessing the final rating for Shadow of the Comet

Pipe Master Award – 3 CAPs – For enlightening all of us on the functionality of a sprague (totally unrelated to Prague)

5 points to Vetinari

TLDR Award – 5 CAPs – For summarising my review in less than 50 words

5 points to Andy Panthro

Nicholas Cage Fan Club Award – 5 CAPs – For reminding me that there Colour out of Space is now a movie

5 points to Patryk

Miskatonic Theology Professor Award – 5 CAPs – For debating the position of world religions in the otherworldly mythology of the Ancient Ones, as described by H.P. Lovecraft and the curators of his works

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/shadow-of-the-comet-final-rating/

[borderlinethoughts123-blog]

Feb 10/2019

These long night shifts give me lots of time to think. I think about everything I hate in my life, everything I am dis-satisfied with, everything I failed to accomplish during the light hours, every plan I made and then did not fulfill . When I am at work is when I am the least satisfied with my life outside of work. I wonder why that is. 

I wonder why failure seems to be the only thing I am good at. I wonder why I won't allow myself to do better. I wonder lots. Its like my brain never stops. Thats why I love being high or drunk. Because it helps calm the background noise in my head. Once I get home I don't want the thoughts to take over. So I get drunk or high as soon as I can and then I eat whatever my body craves at that moment. Maybe its the substances that are blocking me from accomplishment. Maybe if I let the thoughts happen then they would lead me to better things and a better life.

What is a better life though you may ask. I wish I fuckin knew, Life always had a next step for me. And then after I got college and my career sorted out I had no fucking clue what was next. And I still don't. I have some ideas, maybe id go back to school, maybe id meet someone special, maybe id finally stick to a routine like I always wanted.

I have been able to stick to a routine before, but not for very long.I don't know why my brain connects having a good solid routine in life with success but it does. and when my thoughts are at their worst, its normally surrounding my inability to stick to a routine. It never sticks for long. I don't know why, maybe the hint of anorexia I was suffering with at the time gave me something to live for.

Its weird how sometimes the things that you are living for are the things that are killing you. Jobs, hobbies, relationships, habits, etc. Being anorexic gave me something to think about, something to put my time into, something to accomplish. Once I saw the numbers on the scale go down and saw the side by side Instagram pictures getting more and more drastic in differences, it was hard to stop. Hard to not feel guilty about every single thing I ate. And for someone like me, guilt turns into extreme self hatred. Even if the 200 calorie serving of pirogies was all I ate that day, I still wanted to vomit at the thought of my fat self ingesting them. 

But I failed at being anorexic too. I did it for awhile, lost a good amount of weight, and then something happened. I don't remember exactly what it was. Probably a break up of some sort or major life change. And thats the pattern with me. I get SOME motivation or SOME success 

Once 1 little tiny thing happens I immediately shut down and go back to square one. heres what square 1 looks like for me: no routine, no goals, no real plan other than when I'm working next, eat like shit, no exercise what so ever, no self care, no hygienic care, lots of drinking or smoking weed to fill the time and calm the racing thoughts. just floating by. I am surviving. And somedays I don't even want to do that.

Ive read a lot online about BPD. And I think I've come to the conclusion that it will be this way forever. well parts of it. some I hope will go away. but the ones I hate the most will stay. forever. my happiness will forever be in cycles. my happiness will forever be influenced by the bullshit my brain is manufacturing. my happiness will forever be dependant on the relationships I have with people (or lack of). my happiness will forever have a cloud of deep depression and self hatred lingering over it. and this isn't any normal depression. this is deep depression. you can feel the pain and unhappiness deep inside of you. as if it is a part of you that you can never get rid of. like an ugly huge hate filled scar but instead of the world seeing it, only you do.  it takes your soul, your will to live, your hopes and dreams, your relationships, your sanity, everything. It will stop at nothing to ruin everything in your life. and you are expected to keep it all under control, to contain yourself and your emotions, to carry on even when every fibre of your being is screaming at you to just give up. it turns you into a completely different person. I used to be someone so completely different.

 I used to be a use perfectionist. and at heart I still am. I have high expectations and rules I believe everyone should follow. I will never live up to the expectations in my head. I never have and I never will. because even if I have the most wonderful day anyone could ever imagine; I follow every rule, every expectation and every plan, it will never be enough. I will not follow it strictly enough, I will do it in the wrong order, I could have done better, etc. I will never be enough for myself. And you'd think I would at least try, but I don't. because the pressure to be what my brain wants of me is so great it may kill me.

[murasaki-murasame]

So earlier today I decided to bring in some boxes of my old childhood books I had stored away, to see once and for all what stuff I want to keep and what stuff I want to donate.

It’s such a weird feeling to get a concentrated dose of nostalgia like this. Wow. I’d kinda forgotten about a lot of these books, and honestly I don’t think these are even the entirety of what I read as a kid. It makes me kinda sad that I fell out of reading for so long, and then kinda fall back out of it yet again at the start of this year. I’ve at least gotten into reading manga though.

Anyway this is gonna get long and rambly so I’m gonna put it under a cut. I kinda wonder if I should even bother posting this, but I guess it’d be good to write down my feelings on at least some of them, for posterity.

I’m not gonna go over EVERYTHING I found, at least not in much detail, since there’s like two or three boxes full of books.

There’s only two series I decided to keep, for now, since I genuinely want to reread them eventually even if I know they won’t hold up. Those being the Deltora Quest series, and the Keys to the Kingdom series. I remember really enjoying both of them, though I’m not sure if I ever even finished the latter. Maybe I’ll finally get around to that. I’m kinda surprised I have the complete collections of both of them. I thought some of them were missing. I can’t really explain why exactly I want to reread them, but I do. I want to at least reread SOME of my childhood books.

I’m almost surprised at how many action-y, adventure-y books I read as a kid. Statistically speaking most of the books in general were probably fantasy, but I also had stuff like the Cherub series, which was all about young teenagers doing surprisingly dark, adult stuff as part of some sort of undercover spy/military organization, and some stuff by Anthony Horowitz. I think I always gravitated more towards fantasy, but I guess I also enjoyed those sorts of books too. Huh.

There were also some old kid’s mystery books, and some weird D&D-esque RPG book things that I think were things my dad had from his own childhood that he gave to me. I never really enjoyed them.

I also had a surprising amount of comedy book things that probably had lots of gross humour in them. I’d need to look over them again, but I can’t remember if they were a series of actual novels, or if they were short story collections. I remember having at least one short story collection as a kid that had some surprisingly good and memorable stuff in them, but I don’t know if that’s the same thing or something entirely different I don’t have anymore.

Apparently I had some weird phase as a kid where I tried to get into Twilight and apparently gave up after book two, so that’s . . . interesting. Huh.

Looks like I also tried to get into Eragon at one point. I don’t think I even got through the first book of that, lol.

I found like three random Narnia books not not any of the others so who even knows if I ever had the full set of that. I don’t really intend on rereading it, though, even if I do.

I forgot I had a few random kid’s books set in or involving New Zealand. Huh. I think there’s some I read as a kid but never owned. I wish I’d read more books like that. It’s sorta depressing how few books I’ve read that are actually set in the country I live in. I feel like I’m so used to consuming media set in either America, Europe, or Japan, that something set in my own home country would somehow feel MORE foreign than those ones.

I completely forgot that I actually have one of those first-edition versions of Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief with the stupid, ugly cover. That goddamn winged shoe and the gaudy gold patterns and the stormy background image will haunt my nightmares forever. I can’t even remember if I liked the book itself when I read it, but I think the cover probably put me off reading any more. Which is a bit funny to consider, given that a few years ago I got REALLY into the series and binge-read the first two main series in a row, and now I’m a bit of a diehard Rick Riordan fan. I wonder what would have happened if I had have stuck with the series from the very start. Would I have been part of it’s fandom since the beginning??? That’s a weird thought. I’m not even involved in the fandom NOW. Well, mostly because I haven’t gotten around to reading the last few books that have come out, but still.

On the note of Rick Riordan, it doesn’t have to do with the boxes of stuff I bought in since these are already on my shelves in my room, but he also made the 39 Clues, which was basically one of the first few things where I actually got involved in the fandom for it, and even did my own weird self-insert fan-fic things on internet forums back when I was like 10. So in a lot of ways, Rick Riordan was one of the things that got me into fandom culture in the first place. It’s weird to consider. If only I had positive memories of that series that weren’t irreparably tainted by the godawful cash grab second series they put out. That sure would be great. I think that was my first ever experience with feeling viscerally disappointed and enraged at a franchise.

This is getting into slightly more embarrassing territory, but I was also into some REALLY ‘girly’ things when I was a kid. Probably closer to seven or eight or so, though. Like, I must have had some period of time of being REALLY into Care Bears as a franchise, since I have, like, several DVDs related to the cartoon franchise of it they had. I’ve also had basically a billion plushies of them over the years. Mostly as a kid, but I still keep one of my giant ones at the corner of my bed. I never really bothered to get rid of it, I guess, since it doesn’t really get in my way, and nobody goes in my room anyway. I think I’ve owned my giant one, and one little one I guess, for over a decade now. And to further put into perspective how obsessed I was with them as a kid, one of the photos of me as a kid that’s on display in our living room is of me sitting in a pile of all the Care Bears I had at the time. I’d completely forgotten that photo existed and now I’m kinda horrified about how many people who’ve visited my house might have seen it.

And then right next to the giant one I have on my bed, I have a Scalemate plushie, which I guess goes a long way to represent one of my more recent fandoms, lol.

God I have an absurd amount of Homestuck merchandise, come to think of it. It mostly comes from one single session of buying tons of stuff, though. Off the top of my head, I think I have two posters [which I think are still in storage and may have been thrown away], a Scalamte plushie, a John figurine, a deck of themed tarot cards, a Cancer sign necklace, a Breath t-shirt, a Hope hoodie, and a custom-made Breath windsock hoodie that I had a family friend made for me. I might not have ever gone out in public with it, but I have my own shitty home-made John Egbert cosplay get-up so that sure is something I can say about myself. I’m also probably going to buy Hiveswap as it comes out, and I’ll probably buy the Homestuck books as Viz puts them out, because in the end I will never truly be free of Homestuck.

Oh, and I almost forgot, I also have my original UK editions of Harry Potter, which are all super beat up and ugly now. For some reason I remember disliking the series as a child, and yet I read all of it, saw most of the movies, and I remember dressing up as Harry once or twice for Halloween. I also played a surprising amount of the video games for it. But even my mum can confirm that I was never super into it. It’s weird. I have no idea how I felt about it as a kid. It’s just a mystery now, I guess.