#he was against it because it ate up resources for HIS personal project

[short-wooloo]

Even if we take thrawn's claim that he's trying to protect his people at face value (personally I don't buy it, the so called "threat" of the grysk seems really exaggerated, I'll bet that thrawn's either playing up how dangerous they are and/or they're simply a local threat, dangerous to a regional power like the chiss sure, but to the whole galaxy? No), that does not make him a good person doing bad things for a good reason, morally grey, etc etc whatever

Because it doesn't matter

His alleged care (which never pops up in real canon) has lead him to support the empire, to keep it alive, to make it work

One way or another, thrawn is responsible (he's a grand admiral for crying out loud, he's pretty high up) for the atrocities the empire committed

How many billions were oppressed, suffered, and died under the empire because thrawn helped it?

I'll bet it's many more people than there are chiss

And that's a thing SW has always been clear about, sacrificing many to save a few is wrong, its bad, it's selfish, it is the dark side

Maybe thrawn had good intentions ("had" being the operative word there), but we know what road is paved with those

[eddiemunson-reader-shame]

Be My Wife: Eddie Munson x Fem!Reader

Summary: A “friend” freaks out when you split a Coke with Eddie the Freak.

Warnings: references to A Clockwork Orange, bullying, STI/STD mention, backwash drinking

A/N: So… I know this isn’t a Christmas fic. But I wrote this because I had those times in my youth where someone spread horrid rumors about either me or my friends, and I had to make those split second decisions to determine my loyalty. I always try to be loyal as best I can.

Thank you to @writhingg for giving the green light on this fic. And big thanks to @rxqueenotd and @melodymunson as well. And big thanks to viewers like you. Thank you. ❤️

Resources: @strangergraphics-archive for the dividers.

Taglist: @ali-r3n @melodymunson @twihard28

“Hey droogie, can I have a sip of your Coke?”

You looked up from where you were perched on the pony wall by the Seven Eleven bike rack. You had been chatting with a classmate, Chessie Hagar, about purchasing a purse from her mother’s Avon Colorworks catalog. It was a new collection for the year 1977. Said eye catching magazine with its spread of rainbow themed products was currently held between the two of you, and the pages began to rattle as Chessie shook in fear upon hearing the deep voice.

A flutter-smack sounded from the girl dropping the catalog when Eddie The Freak approached. His stride was casual as one could be, whilst battling both midwestern humidity and pit sweat in a white hand-me-down Jimi Hendrix shirt and sleeveless denim vest. As one of the middle schoolers who had been blessed with a growth spurt, his lanky height, shredded second hand clothes, and shaved head often made those in your grade— and some of those above— piss their pants.

You alone did not fear him.

The Fates had elected to weave you both in a tangled web of coincidences: you had been his project partner in every shared class since you started at Hawkins Middle School together, and you just so happened to live in the same neighborhood on occasion. The distance from Al Munson’s janky two bedroom home to yours was but a hop skip and a jump. Eddie used to ding dong ditch your house when he was six, until one day your mother caught him by the ear and brought him in to mend his tattered jeans and offer up a hot meal.

To any other rando, he was an unstable pariah. But to you, he was just Eddie Munson— the cute boy next door who sometimes ate at your place. And you had become his droog after spending winter 1972 sneaking into the Hawk Theater, and making Stanley Kubrick films your new big boy personalities.

Without thinking, you handed the soft drink over. His fingers brushed against yours as he took the Coke out of your grip and went for a swig, with plush pink lips wrapping around the transparent jade glass of the lip and neck. His protruding Adam’s apple was bobbing with the rhythmic gulping, and you couldn’t stop staring.

“Thanks.” He belched out.

“You said a sip, not half the goddamn bottle!” You whined.

Eddie grinned sheepishly and backwashed a good mouthful. Giving a half assed apology and a promise to pay you back mumbled under his breath, he handed the bottle back.

“Still up for doing last minute project prep?” You asked, swirling the leftovers he’d saved for you.

“Nah, let’s take a break from the train wreck brothers. Catch you tomorrow, though?” He said, scratching a blackhead off his nose and snorting a bit, “I had an idea for the oral report that might earn us a little extra credit. Think you can mimic a British accent?”

“Eh. Can’t do an accent without sounding like fucking Alex DeLarge.” You groused.

“We can work on that. Leave your milk-plus at home, though. Don’t want me own droog reenacting some Roman ultra violence on me.”

“Just don’t go popping out from behind your curtains at me again, that’s a good way to get stabbed in the neck with my mom’s kitchen scissors.” You snorted.

“Ahhh, the droog’s no fun. I guess I can tone down the surprise pop ups, though. If you insist. Catch you later?” Eddie said, waving.

“Later. Peace out, man.”

Chessie let out a shaky, sobbing exhale when you made to drink the dregs of your soda, and you turned and raised an eyebrow.

“Whassamatter?” You asked.

“Are you nuts?! You just shared your drink with the freak!” She blurted out.

… since when the hell was sharing with Eddie a crime?

“Yeah, so? It’s hot out. He looked thirsty.” You said.

“Did you seriously forget everything we’ve heard about him?!” She whisper-screamed, “Don’t you care what everyone talks about?!”

You rolled your eyes. Everyone talked about Eddie. If you hadn’t heard at least one rumor from a faceless student whenever he walked by, you were either stupid or living under a rock. They said he was a bad boy— yes, even with a full vocabulary of slurs and insults available, they still called him a bad boy. Like if he was still in diapers drawing with crayon on the wall, and needed a spanking.

Depending on who you asked, Eddie either did or sold drugs, it was never clear which. Some of the other trailer park kids said he was a mean scrapper when he went to his uncle’s on alternate weeks. Women’s restroom lore stated that he carried a switchblade in the back pocket of his Wrangler jeans, and that he used it to torture animals for his Satanic rituals.

A million and one things were said about him on the daily, but you knew none of them were true in the slightest. None of the talk deterred you from spending time with him. Sometimes he came to your house, more often than not you went to his.

Every other day found the two of you parked in front of his mom’s turntable, jamming to Deep Purple and putting together an elaborate poster board with some spray painted fake leaves made into laurel crowns, along with a block of text about your chosen co-emperor of the early Roman Empire.

You had wanted to write about Caligula so you could use the word ‘orgy’ in the report without getting in trouble, but Eddie had insisted he had a better idea when he discovered a two years tumultuous ruling of brothers from 209 AD to 211 AD.

“As much as I love a good sex party on paper, you just know that’s what everyone else is gonna write about. Let’s write about this nut job Caracalla instead! Dude killed his brother in the arms of his mother, and struck his name from the record. That’s like, the most metal shit ever! Also, here’s a better word for you to learn: fratricide. Apparently there’s a whole list of technical terms for when you kill a family member.”

“… what’s the rumor mill gotta do with my Coke?” You deadpanned.

“If you drink after him, you’re gonna get mono like Cindy! You gotta throw it out!”

Cindy Bishop in your science class had told everyone that had functional ears— swearing up and down on her life— that Eddie Munson had kissed her and given her mononucleosis. A dreaded affliction whose nickname to you sounded like one of the variations of sound formats for any sort of audio.

“Mono…?”

“Yes! Or the syph!”

You knew Eddie had to have heard Chessie’s vitriol. Turning around, you could see him staring at the two of you from across the parking lot, one leg over his bike. There was a stinging look of betrayal on his face. Telltale signs of a wet cherry nose and shameful red cheeks gave away his mistrust; as if he was expecting you to do as your friend told, and throw the bottle he drank from in the trash.

His imaginary affliction was just that: imaginary. You knew that to be gospel.

The kiss with Cindy was real, unfortunately. It happened way before Cindy was kept home with mono, and you remembered the incident well. Eddie had come running to your house just to brag that he’d finally gotten his first kiss, and that pretty soon he’d be popping girl’s cherries left and right.

Just learning about the simple kiss had pissed you off, because the closest you’d ever gotten to kissing Eddie was sharing the same fork whenever you both roasted Vienna sausages on the gas burner in his kitchen. Eddie hadn’t been sick when Cindy stayed home, he came faithfully to school to trap you on the playground and speculate about the thousand and one hidden meanings behind the kiss.

With all the excitement, he never noticed the smallest details like you did. One of the guys in your PE class had been sent home with a rash and a high fever, and it was only a month after Cindy was rumored to have also kissed the collapsed boy that she got sick. You had always shared cups, utensils, and other things requiring mouth use with Eddie and had been fine. Yet Cindy and Tommy Hagan swapped spit once, and both were out of commission.

But no one would ever say anything about Tommy Hagan getting mono. They’d always redirect every disease outbreak to the poor loser who split time between Cherry Street and Forest Hills Trailer Park. The same poor loser who had the misfortune of wasting his first kiss with Cindy; a girl who frenched behind the portable classrooms with anything that had a pulse. People could be so blind and stupid, they failed to notice the sickness timelines were not matching up.

No one deserved their first anything to be with Cindy. Not with the way she stabbed people in the back.

You took a long, hard pause as you stared into Eddie’s wet brown eyes. He was asking you a silent question you already knew the answer to: were you a stinking traitorous droog, or a loyal one? Were you, his one friend in the entire world, going to stand against him?

Without saying a word, you looked at Chessie, then looked back again at Eddie.

In a world of traitors— where brothers stabbed brothers in the arms of their mothers, or where violent men disowned each other with drug laced milk bottles to the face, you would always pick instead to be Eddie Munson’s loyal droog.

You lathed at the lip of the bottle and stuck your tongue down the neck, and shotgunned all of Eddie’s backwash.

Chessie’s mouth dropped open as she began to gag, and Eddie opened his mouth in an obnoxious and breathless laugh as you chugged the entirety of his germs. The carbonation caught up to you, so you let a belch rip before turning back around to face him.

“I GOT YOUR MONO NOW, MUNSON!” You screamed out to him, “NOW YOU GOTTA MARRY ME!”

“IS THAT HOW IT WORKS, DROOGIE?” He shouted back, a shit eating grin stretched across his face, “YOU SHOULD HAVE LET ME KNOW BEFORE I TOOK A SWIG, I WOULD HAVE MADE SURE I GOT YOU A RING POP FIRST!”

“IT'S GODDAMN ROMAN CONFARREATIO LAWS, EDDIE! YOU GAVE ME MONO INSTEAD OF SPELT BREAD, NOW YOU GOTTA MARRY ME!” You joked.

You noticed from the big, smart ass grin that he was about to do something outrageous, and your heart began to sing. He immediately got to his knee on the asphalt, everyone in the Seven Eleven parking lot watching as he began to scream like an orator in the colosseum. He used your full government name and everything when he called out to the small parking lot audience.

“HEAR ME, CITIZENS OF HAWKINS! I AM BUT A VESSEL FOR THE GODS, A BEARER, A MESSENGER OF THAT MOST HOLY WORD FROM MOUNT OLYMPUS! I HAVE SHARED OF THE COOTIE WITH A WOMAN, AND THUS OUR MARRIAGE BETWEEN EMPEROR AND DROOG IS SOLEMNIZED-…!”

“SHUT THE FUCK UP, FREAK!” Someone called out, immediately flinching back when Eddie rounded on him.

“THE GODS. HAVE. SPOKEN!” Eddie screeched, a glob of spit flying out of his mouth and onto the hot asphalt.

He was wide eyed. Deranged. Eddie lifted up the hem of his denim vest and held it out and to the side, to look like wings unfurling, screaming to the heavens as you began howling with him.

“YEAH!” You screamed out, raising your bottle and shouting every bit of nonsense you could think of, “GOD SANCTIONED DROOG MARRIAGE CO-RULER ULTRA-VIOLENCE! MAZEL TOV!”

“THE IMPERIAL HUSBAND NOW DEMANDS TO KISS THE DROOG BRIDE!” Eddie screamed, “PLANT ONE ON ME, GODDESS DIVINE OF THE REPUBLIC OF HAWKINS!!”

You looked at Chessie, who looked as if she was going to throw up or scream. It wasn’t immediately clear which. Instead of ending the joke, you grinned. Shrugged. The glossy magazine paper pages of the forgotten Avon Colorworks catalog ripped under the tread of your shoes when— without warning— you took off towards Eddie, and planted a fat wet kiss on his mouth. He froze for a moment, but returned the kiss with fervor, making an obnoxious hum and wet smack when you pulled away.

“Yum.” You gushed, licking your lips and changing your cadence to the unhinged Kubrick Cockney, “Them’s tasty cooties, they are, brother sir!”

“Yeah? Them false cytomegalovirus germs are what taste good to ya, droog?” He laughed, wrapping his arms around you and putting on his own terrible accent.

“That they are, sir, that’s what gives all me food and drink that plus flavor.” You grinned.

The two of you cackled, thoroughly enjoying throwing out random quotes and various insanities that to the normal person would put them off of your insanity and edge-lord humor. Chessie had long since taken off for the gated community of Loch Nora on her bike, but you didn’t care. You could live without a selection of eyeshadows, a rainbow tote purse, and all of your false friends if the choice came down to choosing them, or Eddie.

“Wanna go into the gas station and split another bottle of mono before we blow this joint?” You asked.

His grin could have rivaled that of Malcolm McDowell.

“Now, how can I say no to my new wife?” He grinned, holding out his arm for you to take, “But I am a man of my word, so you’re getting a new Coke, plus that Ring Pop so’s we can make this thing official.”

“Spare no expense, huh?” You grinned, and he pulled you in closer. Both of your hips knocking together.

“Hey… Only the best and finest gems and refreshments for Empress Droog the First of Hawkins, Indiana.” Eddie said with a confident smile.

You smiled at him, nudging one another with your bodies all the way into the gas station, until he pulled you in for another sloppy kiss in the middle of the snack aisle.

[shimizysam]

Miki's fanfic is completed!

I wrote a fanfic of Miki in Kyuushi.

If you’re interested, I hope you can read this!

This note contains afterward of my fic. That means you should read my fic before you proceed below the description, right?

Afterward

I wanted Miki to be spoiled by Yoshida and Bob.

Here is Miki’s backstory by Bon (even though that’s kinda au)

I read it and knew that Miki had a lot of hard experiences. I’ll say that’s an au again, however, it contains what original Miki actually experienced, like:

—He was grown up in poor conditions.

—He had only his gramma and his younger brother Nozomi, not having any parents, in his childhood.

—He became a workaholic after his bro got sick in his youth.

—He became a friend of Shinji when he was in high school.

—He was desperate when he realized that he was no longer needed by his bro and Shinji.

—He nearly died when he saw a hallucination of his father.

…that's why I can’t quit being one of Miki's fans, dude!!

Well then, after a several branches, he made himself as right now, like:

—He got a serious injury on his neck when he just started working as a vampire hunter.

—He read Shinji's manga, which encouraged him to create Mutsu in Aijyameshi (Shinji's famous manga in Shin-Yokohama).

—He was at home when his grandma collapsed.

—He was punched by Nozomi, who said, "Thanks for ever, but I'm an adult and I'm saying you don't give me money now. Rather, TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF, YOU IDIOT!!!!!!"

—He began living in a useful mobs' apartment with financial assistance.

—There was a person who could assist him when he chased a truck.

That's why I can’t quit being one of Miki's fans, dude!!!! (again)

These were said by Bon:

In my fic, I planned to write after Bob came to Yoshida's room, but the flow of the story didn't go so well and I didn't have motivation to write, I canceled the after story. Still, I guess they played video games, ate tasty dishes, and talked about trivial topics.

I forcefully solved any problems to say, "He was really tired." lmao

but I suppose his N-value is very low even now. In my headcanon, his N-value will be incredibly declining when he gets exhausted.

In my opinion, he felt severe guilt when he found he hurt his friend because caring for other people is his life. Thus, what he did to Yoshida was like a body blow or fatal scars to Miki's mind.

I didn't ever expect him to sob, that's the same as Miki himself and Bob thought. I didn't mean to make him cry since he is a 35-year-aged man, but I never regret it!!

He wouldn't be the way all the same if he was against other people or if he wasn't so shattered.

Yes, next: Yoshida.

He exists for real, but in Kyuushi, he is one of the mobs.

In real life, he allows himself to be a half-free resource. Thereby, Bon could get him to appear in his manga.

In Kyuushi, he is the boss of Vampire Passionate Kiss. His hobby is playing games and making giant dishes. He has three cats, maybe he is 40s.

In my fic, after he argued with Miki, he went home and fretted. He tried to distract himself from his concerns, taking care of his cats and making too many dishes. But he couldn't, so he left a kit.

I hope he has a habit of drinking in order to flee from his bad memories, but the fluency of the story was jammed, so I didn't write it.

Finally; Clergy.

He acted kind of the adviser of my fic since he is usually taught by Miki and Yoshida. He is somehow one of the old vampires, I guess he could deal with many problems he confronted in human age.

I haven't made a complete interpretation of his character yet, so if I can, I'd make a fic of him.

Anyways, thank you for reading it or my fic!

[xiaomoxu]

MLQC CN Victor - Chapter 37

SPOILER ALERT!!

A main story from CN server which hasn’t been released in EN server. REALLY contains detailed spoilers. A mixed feelings such angst, sweet and love-his-dummy by CEO Victor!

PART 1

Downstairs LFG, the film crew is still busy in an orderly manner.

A month ago, LFG launched an unprecedented charity project, mobilizing all the resources of the group, and watching the last moment before the arrival of the comet group with all mankind.

In addition to regular material donations, psychological counseling, and medical assistance, there is also a special item one wish list.

In the last issue of "Miracle Finders", we selected this subject for reporting.

Photographer: Everyone pay attention, go one first, and prepare the light for one-

Teenager: Ok, can I just say the words directly?

Willow: To put it straight, there is nothing to worry about, we can do it again, let's do it again!

The teenager was encouraged, and smiled and showed two small teeth.

Teenager: I am seventeen years old. I am an ordinary high school student. Although you can't see it now, I have lived in darkness for these seventeen years.

Teenager: Due to chromosomal abnormalities, I have suffered from congenital blindness since birth...

Teenager: The doctors all said that despite the advanced level of medical technology, they are still helpless against such diseases and hope that I will accept the reality.

Teenager: But I still don't give up. I don't want to usher in death without actually seeing the world, so I contacted LFG Group with the last hope!

Just as the teenager expected, LFG quickly found a Healer Evolver on the Island, and treated him so that he finally saw the light.

Teenager: Although I can only look at the world for a short time, how many times in a person's life can I witness miracles happen? I am very satisfied!

After he finished speaking, he gave everyone a young and a little embarrassed smile. The beautiful dark eyes are full of light, especially bright in the night.

MC: ... That's nice.

Until the last moment, miracles continued to happen.

I raised my head and looked at the towering LFG Building in front of me, thinking back to Victor when he started the project and jokingly said-

"I hope everyone can be like an idiot, as long as they fulfill their wishes, they will be happy." The tone couldn't help but felt a moment of surprise.

I hope that the last issue of "Miracle Finders" will produce satisfactory answers to him.

With emotion, I strode into the LFG Building.

--

At this time, most of LFG's staff has left, and most of the work spaces in the building have been vacated.

Even if some are still willing to suspend their posts and help Victor handle some charity projects, they are no longer sitting here and only exchange information via phone and email.

Goldman: I have been waiting for you for a long time!

I was still in a daze, and Goldman came over with aggrieved expression. Probably because I told him that I was almost there an hour ago, but I didn’t come up because shooting for most of the day in the downstairs town.

As soon as he saw me appear, he cast a "God finally" look.

Goldman: The CEO handed it to you, I'm going to prepare for the next meeting.

He hurriedly put the previously prepared contract into my hand, lightly approached the door of the CEO's office, and knocked the door.

Victor: Come in.

Hearing Victor's voice coming from behind the door, I quickly hid the hand holding the contract behind my back.

Goldman opened the door halfway and walked in.

Goldman: CEO, can we conduct an induction interview now?

Victor: Interview? When is it scheduled?

Goldman: Yesterday, I remember it was in your schedule.

After a short silence, Victor gave instructions indifferently.

Victor: Bring it in.

I strode forward, held back a sneer, and stood still in front of Victor. Before speaking, Goldman hurriedly took the door out, leaving a room of silence.

MC: Hello, CEO! I am the candidate for interview today!

I said hello to Victor very politely, and even bowed symbolically, with a sincere expression when I raised my head.

Victor: ....

Victor let out a sigh of relief, as if he had lifted his spirits from a long and exhausting work, and couldn't help but laugh when he met my sincere gaze.

MC: Reporting to the CEO, although I have limited work experience, I am active in doing things.

MC: The CEO of the most ruthless venture capital company in the industry has won a 500 million investment!

MC: Moreover, the level of stress resistance is first-rate, no matter how big the challenge is, how many plans are rejected, you can face the difficulties!

MC: In addition, I am quite familiar with LFG's business and can start working in a short time.

Victor sighed lightly, probably because I was too noisy.

Victor: Only you can make such boastful remarks without blushing at all. You come to LFG, don't care about your company?

MC: The final issue of "Discovering the Miracle" will soon be filmed, and sister Anna will be responsible for the remaining post-production work. I don't need to worry about it anymore.

MC: I always find a place to shine and heat, right?

MC: Or I have to be a rice bug for a month...

MC: In short, I am especially willing to share the worries and problems for the CEO

Victor touched his lips slightly, revealing a smile.

Victor: Didn't you often say that being a rice bug is your ultimate dream? Now that you have a chance to realize your dream, but you are not willing?

He was so eloquent, so that scenes of past scenes of bluffing and saying that I didn't want to go to work really appeared before me.

MC: But I have already changed my dreams.

I stepped forward two more steps, narrowed the distance with Victor, and stared quietly into his eyes

MC: My dream now is to be with you.

The outline of Victor's smile on the corners of his lips curled up, and his expression sank duplicity, and put out the CEO's frame in a serious manner.

Victor: LFG’s attendance system is strict, and the consequences of absence are serious. Be mentally prepared.

I walked up to him, took out the contract that had been hidden behind my back, and unfolded it on the table.

MC: I won't be absent, I will do what you say.

Speaking softly, pressing his usual fountain pen directly on the contract, it seemed to be "forcing the signing".

MC: If I can't do it... I will be punished.

Victor hastily flipped through the contract, which was only a few pages long, and paused as his gaze passed by the post.

Victor: Confirmed?

MC: Yes!

I deserved to be confident and without any explanation. Victor raised his head and looked at me with a clear smile in his eyes. He turned the contract another page.

Victor: The contract is valid for three years.

MC: Huh? It should be the contract template copied by Goldman, right? Renew after the three-year period expires!

Victor neatly signed his name on the last page, stood up and took my hand.

Victor: Let's go, the meeting is about to begin.

MC: What meeting? Wait, am I going to work as soon as I start?

Victor: According to the contract, every minute of yours belongs to me, and it takes effect immediately.

Is there such an unequal clause? Goldman's drafting of a contract is quite tricky

MC: You capitalists are squeezing employees too much!

Victor was slightly late to me, with a smile on his lips.

Victor: Well, capitalists are like this.

The conference room was already full of people, only the first two seats were still empty.

One of them is where Victor often sits.

I remember when I came to LFG for a meeting for the first time, I could only sit on the small bench in the corner and couldn't see his face even when I stretched out my head.

 Victor: let's start.

I sat down next to Victor, glanced across the crowd, and leaned silently on the back of the chair.

Goldman opened the prepared PPT and stood in front of us.

Goldman: Now carry out the relevant reports on the work of last week,

PART 2

A sign hung at the door of Souvenir, which said that today is the last day of the restaurant’s business.

MC: Thank you for your preference for this restaurant, Souvenir will permanently close the store

LFG provoked too heavy responsibility, and Victor had no time to take care of Souvenir. I raised my head and looked at the blue light on the TV tower.

During the eternal night, the TV tower is bright yellow during the day and blue at night, marking the day and night. These days, people have been accustomed to measuring time in this way.

It seems that no matter what kind of predicament they are in, as long as there is a moment of peace, people are willing to steal a moment of peace and delay satisfaction.

I am no exception.

With Victor in front of the wind and rain, I even occasionally forget the reality that I am about to face, can let go of all my worries, and be silly in front of him carefree.

If time can be reversed, I can go back to the first time I stood in front of Souvenir...

I lowered my gaze and pushed the door into the restaurant.

MC: Mr. Mills, I

Before I could say hello, I was stunned by the scene before me.

Souvenir, who had always been cold and cold, is now full of voices, all seats are full of seats, even those who have never been before, and he has added new chairs.

Mr. Mills was busy between the tables with a smile on his face.

I hurried over to ask if I need help.

MC: Mr. Mills, shall I do this?

I was about to take the tray from Mr. Mills, but he shook his head hurriedly.

Mr. Mills: No, no, it's going to close in a while, the manager is waiting for you inside.

MC: Alright!

I walked towards the kitchen, and along the way, I was surprised by the food on the guests' table.

Like what the customer wanted to eat, Victor made something for them.

At the last moment, Souvenir's rules are no longer important.

Girl: Mom, this one is delicious, so delicious!

Six or seven-year-old children ate the little cakes with all their faces, holding their little hands and sending the spoons to their mothers, wanting their mothers to taste them too.

The young mother cooperatively ate the cream in the sentence and smiled hesitantly. She gently touched her daughter's head, but her eyes were full of sighs.

The family at the table next door talked about the topic of the younger son's college entrance examination this year, and they were rushing to plan for his future. They seemed to believe that someone would come out to save the world.

I stepped into the restaurant and walked into the back kitchen.

MC: Victor....

He stood at the window with his back straight. There was a deep night outside. I dazzled my eyes to see his black suit melt into the darkness, lonely and silent.

I walked over and pulled his sleeve slightly.

MC: Have you been busy all night?

MC: You can call me over in advance, and I can give you a hand.

Victor: With your culinary skills, you can't match up with Souvenir's back kitchen.

Victor glanced at me from the corner of the light, smiled faintly, and closed the slightly open window.

The moment he raised his hand, I saw that the pointer on his wrist watch was already three o'clock in the morning, but everyone didn't realize that the night was deep.

The world freezes in the dark, making time lose all meaning.

MC: The guests outside all had a good time.

MC: By the way, there was a little cake that a kid ate, with a few blueberries on top, and a layer of soft stuff inside. I don't know if it's ice cream... it looks super delicious!

Faced with my vivid expressions, Victor looked helpless as expected.

Victor: Three year old are not as good as you in eat. A pair of eyes fixed on the food all day long.

MC: Isn't it great? I will eat everything you make clean and happy, and I will change my way to praise your superb cooking skills!

I used an exaggerated tone to learn the child's way of speaking, trying to make Victor smile, but he still looked calm.

Victor: Ah, very good.

Those eyes that met me were as light as water, and they saw an unspeakable feeling in my heart. After he came back, something changed in his eyes.

I can't be sure, but I just faintly feel that the person standing in front of me at this moment is stronger than before but also lonelier than before.

In the past, silence was due to work habits and character.

The silence now means that no matter what you face, you can be calm and calm. The calm is strange.

MC: Victor, seven of the travel coins you gave me have not been exchanged. You said before that you would do everything you promised me.

I changed the subject suddenly, and Victor was still indifferent.

Victor: Seven? Didn't you secretly put a lot in the box again?

MC: … you’re not paying attention.

Victor: Really, when I don't pay attention?

The silence of the night was always reflected in his eyes, brewing the silence deeper.

MC: So you won't break your promise, will you?

MC: Everything you promised me will be honored in the future, right?

Perhaps it was because my words were too impatient to be too direct, Victor finally touched my hair as if calming down, and stepped forward to get closer to me.

The familiar temperature fell on the front of my forehead, which made my panic feelings find support.

Victor: Don't worry, I won't break my promise. Not now, and not in the future.

At this moment, I saw a slight surge of joy in his eyes.

Mr. Mills: Mr. Victor.

Mr. Mills walked in slowly, smiling.

Mr. Mills: Mr. Victor, after proofing today, I would like to continue to look after the restaurant. Please allow me.

Victor: Mr. Mills

Victor took two steps forward and solemnly nodded to Mr. Mills.

Victor : Of course. Over the years, thank you very much for taking care of Souvenir.

Mr. Mills turned to look outside the kitchen.

Mr. Mills: The guests all had a nice evening, and they hoped that I would convey my thanks to the chef.

Victor: It is..

Victor paused slightly and thought of something.

Victor: Excuse me, please take out all the wine in the cellar and give it to the guests tonight.

Mr. Mills: .... I understand. Do you need any congratulations?

Victor turned his head and looked at me, raising the corners of his lips indifferently

Victor: Just thank time for giving us abundant food and accumulated wine... With the feelings that have passed through the years.

Outside the window, the silent snow fell slowly in the dark night. In the cool night breeze in midsummer, a layer of untimely coolness blows off.

PART 3

Victor: Is this your specialty?

MC: Do you look down on tomato scrambled eggs?

Victor did not speak, but frowned slightly to express affirmation.

MC: The scrambled eggs with tomatoes are delicious. You can't judge the taste of a dish by its difficulty. I feel wronged for him.

When the Haikou that I once boasted was fulfilled, I vowed to make a rich meal for Victor.

Victor probably feels a headache for me to prepare a home-cooked meal and have to put out ten kinds of kitchen utensils...

He has been standing in the kitchen supervising the work since the beginning, and I don't know if he's afraid of what would happen to the kitchen or what'd happen to me .

MC: Can you stop staring at me like this, I'm nervous.

Victor: What is the guilty conscience?

MC: It feels like waiting for you to approve the plan.

MC: I dropped the eggshells into the bowl when I was beating the eggs just now, I was thinking that you must spit me out.

Victor took out a bottle of red wine from the wine cabinet and unsealed it skillfully.

Victor: I'm used to it as you are.

I dealt with the ingredients in my hand and smiled without saying a word.

In the fireplace in the living room, the wood made a snapping sound under the lick of the tongue of fire, and it sang softly to the piano music from the record.

The fine snow outside the window disappeared into the night as soon as it fell to the ground, and time seemed extremely long at this moment.

I carefully handled the ingredients in my hand, and did not notice Victor's gaze.

He put down the wine glass, the glass collided with the marble countertop, and there was a pleasant sound.

At this moment, the night snow stopped in the air, and the fire and the record were speechless. The whole world stopped, and everything was quiet.

Victor: If I let time eternally stop at this moment, would you think I am selfish?

He murmured, as if asking himself or answering himself.

Staring silently at her profile for a while, he stretched out his hand and silently hugged her in his arms.

This is an overly tender hug, without a trace of strong attitude, even the palms that are close to the back appear cautious

MC: Victor...

I stretched out my hand and hugged him tightly without leaving any gap.

Victor took a breath, as if he didn't expect that I would break away from his Evol, but didn't say anything.

MC: If I were not the dignified Queen, I would be completely controlled by you. Your Evol is stronger than I imagined.

He laughed and teased me helplessly.

Victor: It's amazing.

Although he was smiling, I heard a dumb sigh in his voice, so I opened my arms as much as possible to hold him tighter.

MC: Not even...

I stayed securely in his arms, with no intention of leaving this embrace.

MC: It’s just that I always remember the reason why I want to fully awaken, because I don’t want to let you bear everything. Always remember.

This dinner took longer than expected. When we sat down on the sofa in front of the fireplace with red wine, the night was already almost reaching the sky.

For all this time, I have a lot to say to him.

Whether it is the heated discussions in the recent issues of "Discover Myself" or the process of LFG helping people realize their wishes one after another, I am deeply moved.

A couple wanted to go to a very famous sea island to watch the sunset before the end. Unexpectedly, before the trip, the island disappeared overnight.

MC: In fact, I also feel that it was a pity that I couldn't help them realize their wishes. I had seen that island before on the Internet.

MC: At that time, it was also selected as one of the "Top Ten Scenic Spots to Go to Before the End", I did not expect to be submerged by the sea so soon...

Victor: This is what you often say, do what you think of, and don't leave any regrets for yourself. Sometimes impatient fools can do things that many people can't.

I listened to every detail and smile in his voice, and my fingertips drew across the texture of the leather on the sofa.

The more I get to this kind of time, the more I feel that even his laughter seems precious.

MC: But I was a little surprised. The wishes that everyone wants to achieve before the end are so simple.

MC: Look at the light, look at the world, eat a delicious meal with the most important person.

Victor: What people really want has always been very simple. Before that, it was only controlled by desire.

Victor: No matter how long this moment of tranquility can last, for many people, it is enough to enjoy the life they still have.

MC: It is not easy to find the true desire in the heart.

Victor put the empty glass on the coffee table.

Victor: What about you? What is your wish?

After drinking a few glasses of wine, my thoughts were empty. I only heard his low and hoarse voice falling in my ears, and many pictures flashed before my eyes.

MC: I want to see your heart.

I turned to Victor and wanted to find the answer to this question very seriously.

MC: I want to see the real Victor. Without the burden of the CEO, there is no need to worry about the world...

MC: I can put down all the responsibilities on my shoulders, just be yourself... In this way Victor, What will it be like?

He paused for a few seconds, but quickly laughed faintly.

Victor: People cannot put aside all the past and responsibilities independently. In front of you, Victor will always be the most true.

I turned to him, stared at his deep eyes carefully, then stretched out my hand and slowly touched the position of his heart.

When the five fingers fell slowly, I already felt the warmth under his shirt.

A little closer, and the fingertips rubbed the texture of the shirt, and soon, my palm felt the rhythm of his heartbeat warm and powerful.

Victor: ...

With a sigh, Victor reached out and held my fingertips lightly.

Suddenly, the scene before me changed.

PART 4

This is a space I have never seen before.

The solitary galaxy and the dazzling sunlight are constantly flashing in front of my eyes, just like every ray of time that has been inscribed in memory, the brilliance of the moment only flashes, making it impossible to capture.

MC: Victor

He was sitting in the seat directly in front of me, proud and lonely.

All the changes in the stars passed through his silent and deep eyes, and he just stared lightly.

Time passed, he had been sitting like this, his back was straight, his eyes were firm, and he was silent without a word, yet he caught every light and shadow in his eyes.

He seemed to had been sitting here for thousands of years.

For a while, my heart felt like being held down by a deep sea-like loneliness, which made me breathless. After a slight pause, I walked along the long carpet to him.

I squatted down in front of him and looked up at him.

He lowered his head and met my gaze, as if waking up from a long wait, with loose eyebrows at the corners of his eyes.

I stretched out my hand, my fingertips slowly climbed over the edge of his slender finger, and squeezed him from the gap between the slightly bent fingers.

At this moment, I recovered, seeing Victor's eyes reflected in the fire of the fireplace.

We don't know since when we clasp our fingers together and hold our hands together.

In a silent night, only the firewood was still snapping.

MC: Victor, are you tired?

Victor: What do you mean?

MC: Everything.

*All the fatigue of endlessly walking through the timeline, all the tragedy you had to witness, all the pain that you had to bear, all the hopes that you've repeatedly dashed countless times .

MC: You said that it is enough to enjoy your current life before the end. You already know the ending, understand the truth, or do you want to move on?

Victor: Not enough.

Victor spoke softly, but every word made a sound.

Victor: I am not someone who can transcend desires, I also have my own desires.

He doesn't need to say anything, I already know everything.

I curled up on the sofa, silently nestled in his arms, clasped his waist tightly with my hands, and fell on his sturdy chest.

Victor pulled the blanket and put a light hand on my shoulder.

With fire light and falling snow, the sound of two hearts beating is clear.

I know that I am embracing the most real Victor, the extremely real Victor.

PART 5

Time passed quietly, and it came to the last moment.

The whole city is shining bright neon under our feet. Busy and calm-as usual, as if we can wait for every night in the morning light.

MC: Victor, when you brought me here for the first time, did you expect the world to become like this?

Victor shook his head.

MC: So what was the anxiety in your heart when you stood here?

Victor turned his head and looked at me, then smiled.

Victor: It is impossible to completely hold a fool in his hand, hold it tightly, and keep her from leaving.

MC: Did I make you worry a lot? I know you have been looking for me for a long time.

Victor: Not long.

Victor: After experiencing real time, I only feel that the years when I found you were as short as you went to buy me a cup of coffee

Heard what he said, I couldn't help being reminded of memories long ago.

MC: I just thought you were really harsh and annoying. There were so many conditions for asking me to buy a coffee.

MC: .. Now, I really want to buy it for you again

MC: No matter how many weird conditions you have, I will never get it wrong again.

Victor looked towards the boundless sky with emotion. In the night, countless meteors slowly fell, dazzling light across the blue to dark night sky.

It's not long since 19:17.

MC: Victor, I want to do something very important.

Victor: I know.

MC: But I just want to be your dummy and live the most ordinary and ordinary life.

MC: Let you have endless heart and endless planning plans every day, and bring you all kinds of trivial troubles.

MC: Then in the blink of an eye, you can...

With tears in my eyes, crying was already entrained in my voice, so I refused to continue.

Victor: She also said that she didn't like crying anymore.

I took a few breaths and stubbornly held my voice.

MC: I didn't cry!

Victor stepped forward and held me tightly in his arms. Surrounded by the familiar smell, I closed my eyes and gripped the corner of his suit with my hands.

My only wish is to be with him.

It’s okay to laugh and being embraced in his arms like this, I don’t want others.

But more important than this wish...

It's him. He can't just usher in the ending like this.

MC: When I come back, I will bring you a cup of coffee.

I grab his arms and made a promise, and he softly responded by caressing my hair.

Victor: Alright.

MC: That’s all? Don’t you have anything else to say?

MC: In the past, you always remind me about the deadline of my proposal, you would remind me not to oversleep like an elementary school kids for the meeting the next day.

MC: At this important moment, don’t you have something else to say?

MC: I’m going to do something big this time.

Victor loosened his arms around me slightly and looked at me.

Victor: I know.

Victor: But you’re no longer a dummy you used to be, there’s nothing you can’t do.

I have already understood his calmness from his eyes. As expected, I can’t still beat him. 

I want to say something, but I felt something. There were snow-white feathers on my fingertips.

There is no time.

I subconsciously grabbed Victor’s hand--  

MC: Victor..

My heart was overwhelmed by the huge perseverance, I almost called his name from the deepest part of my throat.

As he was holding me, there’s deep complex look between his brows.

Victor: Are you afraid?

I kept shaking my head, shaking my head anxiously!

It is not fear, nor regret, no matter what is waiting for me in front of me, at this moment I will walk firmly.

But even so, I still want to stop for another moment, a moment is enough for me to call his name again, to look at him again. .

Even... hoping that time can stop at this time.

I don't want to let go of his hand.

Victor hugged me with one hand, lifted my chin, and dropped a deep lingering kiss. 

During the exchange of our breathing, I looked into his squinted eyes & saw a love that I had never seen before.

The tears that kept spinning in my eyelids were still drawn from the corners of my eyes when I was on my post. I gripped his shirt tightly, very tightly.

Aware of my silent choking, Victor clapped his hands and wiped the tears from the corners of my eyes with his index fingers.

Victor: Don't be afraid. No matter how difficult things are in front of you in the past, can't you always do well?

Victor: This time, there will be no exception.

The scene in front of me and his voice were slowly dissipating, and I looked at him deeply, unable to say a word.

I clearly felt that Victor held my hand tighter, tighter than ever, as if he wanted to keep me too.

Like he didn't want to leave me alone.

He opened his mouth, what he was saying, but I couldn't hear anything and my senses were blurred.

Victor: ...Remember, to get me back.

MC: What?

I vaguely heard something, but couldn't be sure.

The white wings spread out in the dark night, and the sky is connected one after another, and the scattered white wings sit on the tall buildings together with the meteor, and fall into the street...

Victor let go of my hand and stepped back half a step, his eyes showed unprecedented joy.

MC: Victor!

Victor: I....

He was telling me something. His deep voice was mixed with a firmness that I've never heard before, but I could only vaguely recognize the words that I wanted to hear the most from his mouth. After that she calls his name

MC: Victor...

The sight was finally dark, and Victor's deep gaze disappeared in front of me.

The city fell into the night amidst the noisy shouts-

Victor slowly opened his hand and caught a piece of pure white feather in the air. The corners of his lips were gentle, his eyes drooping slightly.

That feather just lay quietly on his palm, soaked in moonlight, as slender as she looked at him at the last moment.

---- END ----

I’m sorry if there’s some mistranslation. Kindly tell me if you found some :) thank you for read it~ ^^

[sockablock]

in light of the truly heartwarming response I got to part one of this story, please enjoy: How To Build a Magic School, Chapter 2

—

It took a special kind of mind to follow the Mighty Nein’s conversations once they really got heated. It helped, at least, that they were seated in close proximity, sprawled across a ring of crates in the main tent, but the fact of the matter was that trying to pay attention to seven people all chiming in at once was already giving Essek a mild headache. And minor neck pain.

“—kind of disguise,” Veth was saying. “I know it’s been a couple years, but folks here…they might not be happy to see a…a...”

“A foreigner,” Fjord said, diplomatically.

“A Xhorhastian,” Yasha tried.

“A drow,” Essek came to their rescue. “No, she is right.”

There was a sharp and semi-affronted exhale from Jester. “Did you get any funny looks when you arrived? Did anyone say anything to you?”

“And do you remember which ones they were?” Caleb added quietly.

Essek hesitated, trying to remember, but through the bright haze of sunlight and hot summer, the furious clamor of construction outside—

“I…do not think anyone saw my arrival.”

“You’re wearing full black and carrying a pink umbrella,” Beau grunted. “Are you sure?”

He hesitated again. “Ah…no.”

“All sorts of interesting people have visited us since the school project started,” Caduceus said. In line with the conventions of his personal narrative, he was attempting to make tea over a tiny, portable burner. “You probably won’t be the strangest thing they’ve seen or will see, working here.”

“They’ve already seen Fjord—”

“Hey! That—why—”

“The people of Felderwin can be touchy though,” Veth continued, smugly ignoring Fjord. “I don’t really think you can blame them, either. If it wasn’t the goblin attacks for years before that, it was the, well, the huge invasion where a purple worm ate the ground and half the town caught on fire.”

She maintained eye contact with Essek as she said this. Her gaze intensified when he shrugged. 

“That is…fair enough,” Caleb cut in. “But I would feel…ill at ease to force you, Essek, to hide if you did, ah, did not wish to…”

Essek gestured vaguely at his appearance. “Actually, I had assumed I would be needing to disguise myself. I have masqueraded as a high elf before, and it would not be difficult to do so again.”

“Isn’t that a lot of spells wasted?” Fjord asked. “Won’t it be annoying to have to keep that up?”

“It’s not that hard,” said Veth, under her breath.

“Oh, oh, I could Polymorph you!” Jester clapped her hands together, enthused. “I can make you anything! You could be an elf, or a tiefling, or a firbolg or a—”

“I appreciate the offer,” Essek said smoothly, “but I do have a few resources at hand. A simple ring of illusion would do the trick.”

“What are we gonna say about you, though?” Beauregard asked. All heads turned toward her. “If the court wants to know about you, a random mage and one of the first hires of the magic school, what are we supposed to tell them?”

They considered this.

“He’s a…family friend?”

“Whose family?”

“Well, I’d like to think of us as a family—”

“Why don’t we say he’s from Nicodranas?” Jester suggested. “We could say he’s, um…oh! That he was recommended by Yussa!”

“Yussa?” Essek echoed.

“Actually…that doesn’t sound half-bad,” Fjord mused. “Master Yussa is a mage that the king recognizes, yes?”

“Ah, he is a mage?”

“He’s a friend of ours!” Jester beamed. “A super powerful wizard that lives in the Open Quay. He’s pretty powerful, Essek. Maybe even more powerful than you!”

This was delivered with a winning smile. Caleb sighed. “From what I gather, Master Yussa is much older, and has had quite a few lifetimes’ worth of practice. He is also…quite reclusive, and therefore not exactly what we had in mind for this school.

“And he said no,” Beauregard muttered.

“Yes, danke, and he also turned us down. The point is, we can pretend you are acquainted with him. That should be enough to assuage the court.”

“Will this…Master Yussa agree to such a thing?” Essek asked.

Caleb answer with a faint grin. “He is a wizard who feels he is…not so beholden to court pressures. Also, he owes us a favor, as is.”

Essek couldn’t help but match Caleb’s expression. “Is that so? Then I find I quite admire this man.”

“We saved him from the Happy Fun Ball,” Yasha supplied, a collection of syllables that no betting man would have ever predicted to come from her. “He likes us.”

“He loves us,” Jester corrected. “He has our Little Willi and his assistant Wensforth practically worships us and everything!”

After the pertinent information had been properly located, Essek nodded. “That is, er, lovely. I owe him my thanks.”

“Now we just gave to give you a new name,” said Veth. “I don’t think we can keep calling you ‘Thelyss,��� unless we want the idiots on the Committee getting suspicious.”

“The…excuse me?”

“The Arcane Restoration Supervisory Committee,” Caleb sighed, “is a group of concerned officials—”

“—nosy dillweeds—"

“—that was formed to manage—”

“—micromanage—”

“—to oversee our current rebuilding efforts. It is very likely,” he continued, giving Beau a look, “that this is the court’s way of reconciling with the fact that an unknown quantity has been handed the reigns of the Dwendalian Empire’s arcane future.”

“I know that,” Beau countered, “I just don’t like them.”

“Caleb is the unknown quantity,” Caduceus added.

“…I see,” said Essek, eventually. “Should I, ah, be concerned about them?”

“Probably not,” Beau said. “They’re just a bunch of nobles who think they understand the first thing about magic.”

“You being an expert on the subject, of course,” was what Essek did not say, because self-preservation interrupted just in time. Instead, what left his mouth was:

“I had also anticipated concern about my involvement—that is, Shadowhand Essek Thelyss’s involvement—in this matter. If necessary, I can masquerade as someone else. I, ah, will still need an umbrella during the daylight hours, though. Or perhaps a large hat?”

The elongated squeal from Jester atop the milk crate filled him with regret.

“What was the name you used last time?” Fjord asked. “Desden…Desbin…”

“‘Dezran Thain,’” Essek supplied. “Actually, I could employ that title again.”

“Uh…is that a good idea?” Veth asked. “Wasn’t Dezran a friend of the Assembly’s?”

Essek shook his head. “Strictly speaking, Thain was just a very minor lord that lived in Nicodranas. When the peace talks began, he was called upon by Da’leth to play tour guide and host due to his interest in magic and local familiarity. Only he, de Rogna, and Tversky knew who I really was.”

“It is…not bad, as far as our plans go,” Caleb said after a while. “It aligns with the story that you are Nicodranian, and it might actually sit well with the court members that had favored the Assembly. As for those who supported us against them…”

Beau rolled her eyes when Caleb’s gaze fell on her. “Yeah, yeah, an Expositor will vouch for him.”

“An Expositor?”

“Gods, fine, this Expositor.”

“Thank you.” Then he gave Essek a nod. “That about covers it then, ja? This story, we can tell the court, and then—"

“Wait, hang on—” And this was Beauregard again, leaning forward, staring directly at Essek.

“Yes?” he said.

“What did you tell your court?” she asked.

—

Mother had spoken to the Bright Queen alone. This was not technically out of the ordinary, as the Umavis of Rosohna frequently met to discuss state matters too selective for anyone else. But Essek was unused to being considered “anyone else,” which was why the situation still rankled, in his mind.

“Tell me again,” he turned to face his mother, floating clothes and books drifting past his head. “Is that all you said?”

“Whatever do you mean?”

At his still-annoyed expression, his mother sighed. “Yes, dear. I just told Leylas that this was a unique opportunity for you to integrate yourself within the Empire and gain ample information that would otherwise be inaccessible. We all saw how abruptly the war ended, and how quickly the Assembly seemed to fall afterwards. No one can blame her for being curious.”

A small inkwell drifted across the room as Essek resumed packing. “And then?” he prompted.

His mother sighed again.

“And then I reassured her Majesty that there were plenty of souls that could temporarily come together to fill the void you would leave behind—”

No doubt all from Den Thelyss, Essek thought.

“—and that even in absentia, you would still be serving as a valuable font of information for the Dynasty. Which, after all, is what the Shadowhand is meant to do. And of course, should it ever be required, you could always be called home.”

“…indeed.”

“Indeed,” his mother smiled. “Though, of course, this is all under the assumption that aside from your prospective employer, nobody else will know who you truly are.”

Essek gave this due consideration.

“I have a feeling that the rest of the Mighty Nein will be told, Mother.”

The Umavi of Den Thelyss was not an easy woman to read. Her expression gave nothing away as she said, “I see.”

“But,” Essek added, because he felt he needed to, “I don’t think anyone else has to know.”

She reached out slowly and plucked a mirror from the air.

“I have more faith in you than that, my dear. I am confident you will ensure it is so.”

—

“—temporary leave of absence,” said Essek, now, to the Mighty Nein. “I have been the Shadowhand for most of my life, and a diligent scholar of the nation before that. I was owed some vacation days.”

“Vacation days—” began Fjord.

“But how temporary?” asked Beau, cutting him off. “I thought it’d be hard for you—you know, as you said, the Shadowhand—to just up and leave, after all. How long can you stay here?”

Essek gave her a wry smile. “Fortunately, I expect my definition of ‘temporary’ is somewhat different than yours.”

“Longer,” said Caduceus.

“Longer,” he agreed. “It is very safe to assume that I can stay for at least a decade, if I wish.”

“And I certainly hope you do wish,” said Caleb quickly. “There are many things we will need to accomplish, after all, not just today during construction, but in the future. And, ah,” he added, a little more pointedly, “I do feel as if I should thank you again. For everything you have done for us, and now today in volunteering your expertise.”

“Man, we’re really going to need it,” Jester groaned, throwing herself back across the milk crate. “The Committee keeps telling us to go faster, hire this person, that person, build the school different—everything.”

“Really?”

Caleb chuckled. “Yes, but that all can be explained tomorrow,” he said. “For now, though,” and he stood, crouching to avoid the ceiling of the tent, “let me show you to where we are staying. I expect you must be tired, ja? If not by the travel, then at least the time difference.”

For just a moment, Essek thought about saying otherwise. But there was something in Caleb’s hopeful expression that made him pause.

He yawned very minutely, and smiled. “It would be nice to put my things away,” he admitted. “And, ah, perhaps have a short rest.”

“Of course, of course,” Caleb gestured to the door, but did stop to address the group at large. “I’m sure I’ll be back soon,” he added, “but if anyone needs me…Jester?”

She saluted cheerfully, for the spirit of it. “Got it!”

“And of course, Veth, you are the Professor in charge.”

This was answered with an expansive wave, and a grin.

“Of course, Headmaster! Leave everything to us!”

—

“So…Headmaster, eh?” One pair of footsteps—and then sheepishly, another—began to crunch through the freshly-dewed grass. All around them, spanning the entirety of the field, a legion of masons and stonecutters and workmen cut, sawed, hammered, and hefted the thick wooden frame of an enormous building in its first stages. A group of surveyors stood at the center, arguing as more lumber was lugged into view, directing the flow of Construction and Progress.

“Apparently so,” Caleb said, “though I have to admit, I am not quite used to that title yet.”

Something enormous soared overhead, momentarily blotting out the sun.

“Would you prefer Professor Widogast?”

Caleb sighed as the shadow vanished.

“I prefer ‘Caleb,’ to be truly honest.”

Essek chuckled. “Then for now at least, I will oblige.”

He glanced up as the next shadow approached, squinting to see in the bright morning light. After rubbing his eyes and blinking a few times, he could make out the shape of a massive carpet, carrying sacks of sand and brick.

“Spoils from the remnants of Soltryce,” Caleb explained, before Essek could ask. “We found quite a number of things in the basement of that school, some…well.” His expression went dark, and not just because of the shadow overhead. “Many of those things we managed to release. Some, ultimately, had to be destroyed.” But then he gestured to the enormous architectural undertaking around them and added in a lighter tone, “Some things, though, ended up being rather useful. Like the, ah, look, over there—”

Essek blinked again, and this time spotted what appeared to be twelve hulking stone statues, moving slowly between a line of workers. Each had gait like rock grinding on steel, and were lifting whole logs like they weighed nothing.

“Guardian constructs,” Caleb said. “They were a nuisance to battle, but once de Rogna was gone, they went dormant and stopped fighting. We figured out how to pilot them later.”

Essek looked suitably impressed by this. He shifted his umbrella into his other hand.

“Really?” he said. “And are you now their master?”

“Oh no, nein,” Caleb quickly shook his head. “Honestly, it was suggested, but I…there was something that bothered me about the idea of having control of them. And not just I, but…it felt wrong to let any single person control a fleet of sleepless warriors. So Beauregard got creative.”

“Indeed?”

Caleb pointed to a wooden sign that was nailed into the ground a few feet from their path. A handful of workers was crouching next to it, carefully reciting what was scrawled across its surface. After a moment, to Essek’s genuine surprise, he realized they were practicing an arcane incantation.

“How do—”

“A pronunciation guide,” Caleb said. He was—yes, he was smiling about this. “We managed to translate enough verbal commands to make them usable for anyone who can read Common.”

“But…but…that’s everyone,” Essek said, hurrying a bit to catch back up. It took him some effort to tear his gaze from the sign. “Are you not…are you not concerned about this information falling into the wrong hands?”

“Ah, but if anyone can use them, then there is no problem. The playing field, as they say, has evened out. That was Beauregard’s idea, anyhow.” At the silence that followed, Caleb tilted his head and said, “Think of it this way, ja? A magic sword controlled by an evil person is not so dangerous if even a peasant can tell it to stop. What is the use of a weapon of war that listens to everyone’s commands?”

“Yes, but…” Essek struggled to find the right words. “Now…now…right, but now the sword is a, a, a butter knife! What would be the point of that?”

Caleb was quiet for a moment. Then he managed a trying smile. “That…depends on what you need though, no? Right now, what we are looking for is not war. It is toast. Er…that is, a metaphorical toast.”

“But…still, if that is the case, anyone could steal your constructs,” Essek said, somewhat subdued. “Should they not be guarded? As you would protect a prized tool?”

Caleb actually snorted at this. “If anybody attempted to do so,” he said, “they would receive quite an earful from the Chief Surveyor. They would not dare.”

And then Caleb turned, met Essek’s gaze, and it looked like he was waiting for cheerful agreement.

Neither response felt appropriate. Something about this still bothered Essek, almost like trying an ill-fitting sock.

“I think, ah, that I prefer jam,” he managed eventually. “On my toast, that is. And perhaps, a cup of tea?”

Blessedly, this elicited a chuckle from Caleb. “Of course, of course. That I can provide. We are quite close to the tavern, as is.”

And indeed, after only a few more minutes, they passed through a thin line of trees and arrived at the edge of a small, but bustling town.

“Welcome—well, welcome back to Feldwerin,” Caleb corrected. “Though this time, I expect, you will be staying longer.”

—

When the war ended, Felderwin Tillage had been left in a state of utter chaos. Purple worms had torn apart acres of land, fields had been razed by advancing soldiers, and scores of houses, stables, and shops had been burned to the ground when the invasion began.

And then, the Cerberus Assembly had fallen, and more information flooded the populous. They’d been told, virtually overnight, that the Archmages had been secretly using this town as a testing ground. They’d unleashed uncontrolled magic here for generations, tricking and abusing the townsfolk for their experiments, forcing a local lad—the widower—to work for them, and when people fell ill, they’d blamed it all on molded fruit.

Suddenly, the villagers felt quite foolish. And then, they’d started to get angry.

So it came as a genuine shock to Caleb that when the time came to build their campus, Veth had stepped forward and said it should be in Felderwin.

“But…they’d never agree,” he’d said. “Why should they?”

But she’d shaken her head. “They will.”

And so, the next morning, Veth marched through the village center with Luc and Yeza following behind, the Mighty Nein scrambling to keep up. She’d stormed up the stairs of the Town Hall, looked the Starosta dead in his eye, and informed him that everything was about to change.

All they’d need, she said, was a swath of land outside town, far enough away that it wouldn’t interfere with the calm that this village had been so denied, but close enough that it was still in the tillage. She’d told him, when he’d protested, that yes, there would be mages, but there would also be student mages, young, burgeoning minds that would spend quite a long time at the school. They’d be trained there, fed and housed and cared for, and eventually, once they grew up and graduated, when they looked back fondly on their younger years, it’d be in Felderwin.

Besides, she’d added, tapping the side of her nose, now the King would have to protect this place. After all, it’d be right next to the Empire’s arcane center, and wouldn’t it be nice to finally have some proper defenses? Not to mention, if you needed to borrow any of the bright young masons and stonecutters we’d hired, well. That could be arranged, easy.    

Sometimes, she’d said, it doesn’t hurt to be on the map. Because then the world pays attention to what happens to you.

And then the mayor had said, Aren’t you dead?

And then Veth had informed him, I got better.

And so it was now, a few months later, that Caleb led Essek past the newly-rebuilt Brenatto Apothecary, toward the Glassy Grass Inn. It had become the go-to tavern for the Mighty Nein, not because they were unwelcome in Veth’s house, per say, but more due to a gentle conversation that Yeza had had with his wife about work-life balance after Caduceus had walked into the center of the shop during its busiest hours in nothing but a towel and a toothbrush.

After that, they agreed to at least sleep next door.

The bell overhead rang as they entered, though the sound was lost in the din of voices. Essek had barely shut his parasol before a burly man in an apron rushed past, carrying tray upon tray of drink and food.

“It’s gotten rather busy since we moved in,” Caleb explained. “Word got around, and apparently people quite like staying in the same pub as us. That, and old Littlebottle agreed to let our workers take meals and rooms at a discount. The barkeep.”

“Really?” Essek raised an eyebrow. “How generous of him.”

“Well, apparently he is grateful for the business. And, I expect, grateful that our project has kept his neighbor preoccupied. Apparently Veth and Yeza were responsible for quite a number of the scorch marks at the edge of his lawn.”

“Is that so?” Essek chuckled. “I find it easy to believe.” Then he added, as he watched Caleb wave to a face in the crowd, “It seems you have taken well to your new assignment. And life in this town.”

He was caught off-guard when he noticed the faintest coloring of Caleb’s ear.

“Oh, er…is that so? Have I?”

“Well, I…just meant it seems you have made friends with the locals. And you, ah, move through the village with purpose, and had quite a lot to say about your endeavor.”

“Is that—scheisse, was I annoy—”

“Oh! No, no, not at all. I just, er…”

They stopped in the doorway leading up to the second floor, laughter and conversation winding slowly all around them.

“I just meant, ah…it is nice to see you so relaxed,” Essek finished lamely. “Retirement from adventuring seems to suit you.”

Caleb seemed to relax. “Well,” he murmured, “I am glad you think so. Though I must say, my retirement has certainly been eventful.”

“Better still than the typical hero’s retirement, no?”

“Ha! Lucky for me, eh?”

They stood there for a moment longer, as if neither were sure who should go first. But after a short pause, Caleb stepped back and began rummaging through his pockets. “Here, ah, here, take this,” he said, and pressed a small silver key into Essek’s hand. “It leads to my bedroom, but you can rest there while I see about getting you a room. And some tea.”

Eseek turned it over, looped a finger through the cord. “Oh, but I can’t just leave you to—”

“No, nein, I insist,” said Caleb. “I do not mind—”

“Are you sure—”

“Of course.” And with the air of someone playing a trump card in a social encounter, he added, “After all, you have travelled quite a distance, my friend. Please. I will join you in a moment.”

—

The Mighty Nein ate their sandwiches peacefully in the meadow outside their tent.

Then:

“I thought he’d be wearing different clothes.”

“What?”

“I dunno. I just thought he’d look…less shadowy.”

“Like he wouldn’t be wearing that creepy mantle, or something?”

“Yeah! Like I thought he’d be in, like, summery clothes! Like a flowy shirt and regular pants and short sleeves and straw sandals. He is taking a break from being a spymaster, after all.”

There a pause as they pondered the likelihood of this.

“He…could be wearing that under the mantle,” Caduceus said.

“Sandals? Really?” said Fjord.

“But his skin, he probably could not wear those if he wanted to,” Yasha said.

“Hmm…that is a good point,” Jester conceded. “But still, all black? In the summer? That’s

“Not if he’s got, I dunno, ice under there,” said Veth. “What if he has a bunch of ice strapped to his chest?”

“Ice? Now, really…” said Fjord, but everyone else had started to ruminate on this.

“No stains,” said Beau eventually.

“What?”

“No stains,” she repeated “If there was ice, there’d be stains. From it melting, right?”

“Or he’d be—ugh, gross—he’d be leaking,” said Veth. “Like there’d be puddles underneath him and stuff.”

Three of them snickered delightedly at this. Then Caduceus passed around more juice, and more sandwiches.

—

There was a cat on the bed when Essek walked in, sprawled out as if it owned the place.

Disguised drow and disguised fey regarded each other for a moment. Then Frumpkin stretched lazily, and yawned.

It occurred to Essek, as he continued to stand in the doorway, that this might be some kind of test. Minutes passed as he struggled to find the right thing to say—this was a familiar, was it not? And then he realized that anything he did end up saying would probably come across as rather silly. He decided to err on caution and simply nodded to the cat before sitting down on a worn wooden chair.

It ignored him completely. Essek twisted at his sleeve.

And finally, by the Grace of the Luxon, there was a polite knock at the door.

“Come in, come i—Caleb, that is much too much food.”

“Nonsense,” said Caleb, who had closed the door behind him rather inelegantly with a foot. Carefully balanced across his arms were two wooden trays absolutely laden with breads, cheeses, sliced meats and fruits that Essek at a first glance couldn’t name. A third tray floated behind Caleb, supported by a faintly-shimmering Unseen Servant, carrying drinks and utensils.

Not to be outdone, Essek gave a faint smile and flicked his wrist with a flourish. The trays rose out of Caleb’s grasp and drifted toward the table.

“I had it,” but his former student was now smiling as well. “Though I have missed seeing an esteemed Gravaturgist at work.”

The food came to a gentle rest between them. “I have also missed showing off,” Essek said wryly. “It is hard to find someone in the Dynasty unfamiliar enough with Dunamancy to appreciate my skills quite as much as you d—you alldid.”

“We did make you teleport us around quite a bit,” Caleb chuckled. He picked up a small piece of bread and split it in two, offering half to Essek. “I do not think we ever repaid you properly, either.”

Essek examined the bread in his hands. “Well, if I remember the contents of your letter correctly, it is the world that should be trying to repay you. The Chained Oblivion? Really, Caleb?”

“Oh, ah…” The man actually had the nerve to sound bashful. “That was mostly an accident, as it were.”

“You…sorry, you accidentally defeated the Chained God? Is that what you are telling me?”

“Well, er, no, not exactly.” He picked up one of the small round fruits and held it between his fingers. “It was sort of an accident that we found it…or rather, we did not know what we were looking for.”

This sounded like the Mighty Nein that Essek knew. He motioned for Caleb to go on.

“We had been…following a dream of Yasha’s,” Caleb said. “She had received it from the Storm Lord ages ago, but with one thing and another, we had never had time to pursue this. There was…a place, an island in the sea, she had felt it was a place of great importance. We weren’t sure why, until we arrived and found…”

A place of starlight and iron chains, buried in the heart of a dead volcano. A chamber, a ritual-site, fading incense and chalk, ensnaring an obelisk and a shattered crystal and at its center, a pulsating, churning darkness—

A hole in reality, Essek would remember, lying awake that night. The bastards had found a hole in reality and then they’d jumped in—

And found themselves standing in a pocket dimension…or at least, that’s what they’d thought. The air swirled with dark mist, the sky alive and churning. The walls of the world seemed to lurch and expand and it was Caduceus who realized that the whole plane was breathing. Jester shifted them out, returning them to the chamber, and they began to pour through the notes left behind. They realized that someone had found a Divine Shackle, then turned it in on itself, re-directed the ritual, created a bridge that would grant them access to the very being of Tharizdun, the most ancient and chaotic of forces—

“But who?” Essek breathed. He held a gooseberry, though he didn’t know it yet. “Who was responsible?”

Caleb scowled. “They left their notes behind. Who else would it be?”

As far as the Cobalt Soul could tell, the archmages themselves had not originally been involved in any actual cult. But after Vence’s capture, and Tasithar’s transfer, a spark of interest had been ignited in the minds of some of the nation’s brightest.

“It is like your metaphor,” Caleb said. “Before, they were simply sailing on a boat—"

Essek hesitated. The horrible sourness of the fruit might’ve been muddying his concentration. “It is what?”

“Like they were sailing,” Caleb repeated. “And every so often, they could lean over the edge and skim the sea for knowledge from relative safety. But capturing the cultists had…inspired the Academy to instead, go for a dive. And so they dove, down into the deeps, plumbing the darkest tides for secrets. And of course, they ultimately encountered the monster of all monsters…”

From there, it had been a matter of getting the proof—about this, about everything else they’d done—into the hands of Cobalt Soul. But word got out, and whispers travelled, and more people than the Nein could ever have imagined rose up, demanded justice and retribution—

Essek remembered the reports he’d received on the morning of the fall of the Cerberus Assembly. The casualties had been extreme, but what happened afterwards, even more so.  

“You arrested them,” he murmured. “The ones that survived, anyway.”

“And still, quite a few of them escaped,” Caleb sighed. “That is of course not even including the fact that not all of them were guilty enough to fully imprison to start with. As I understand, Hass has left to see the world, and Lord Uludan is still a diplomat for the king.”

Essek glanced at a slice of cured ham. He wondered if it would be enough to counter the taste in his mouth.

“With the…Assembly gone,” he said carefully, “there will not be a council of mages to balance the rule of the king, anymore. The nation has lost a powerful governing body and a source of great strength. What do you suppose this means for Dwendal?”

Caleb raised an eyebrow at Essek. “I certainly do not think the Assembly was doing much balancing to begin with,” he said, almost as slowly. “As for the King, well…the man is quite old, and very paranoid. He will be tricky to manage, and yet there are a number of good people surrounding him. In fact, the elimination of the Assembly could allow them to finally step up. That, and this nation has now witnessed a historic uprising of the people. For the first time in a long time, citizens are trying to make their voices heard. And unless the royal court wants more chaos, or to fall in the way that the Assembly did, for once, I think they will have to listen.”

Essek lowered his hand. He stared at Caleb. “But…they are just people,” he said, astonished. “How could they know what is best for the nation?”

Caleb’s expression changed, slightly. He was silent for quite a long stretch of time.

“My dear friend…they are the nation.”

—

“No,” said Fjord.

“But—”

“No, Jester. I will not let you tape ice cubes to my armpit.”

There was a pause. Then a huff.

“Fine, I’ll ask Beau.”

—

After lunch, Essek was shown to a room slightly farther down the hall.

“It will likely be some time before we will be able to move into the school grounds,” Caleb said, “so I recommend you make yourself comfortable here.”

Essek was given another small key, tied to a leather cord.

He felt like something needed to be said. Gods, if he could just figure out what.

“I, ah…thank you,” he tried. “For…lunch, for everything, the room, and, ah, if you need gold—"

Caleb shook his hand. “Nein, please, no. It is, as they say, on the house. More accurately, on the dime of the royal treasury.”

There was another hesitation. Essek sought desperately for a solution, but when nothing came, he sighed. And gave up.

“I, um…am sorry,” he said. “If I…made a statement that was…incorrect.”

Caleb studied his expression. Then, he seemed to sigh as well.

“A school is for learning, is it not? Maybe we will be surprised by who teaches.”

“Er…”

“I just mean,” Caleb murmured, “that we do truly come from different worlds. That are, in many odd ways, rather the same. I just hope it will not be too much.”

Essek was not a stupid man. He opened his mouth again, to protest, but stopped when a hand brushed against his arm.

“You should get some rest,” Caleb said. “Unpack, adjust to our time zone, relax. Then tomorrow,” and here there was the faintest hint of smile, “I will give you a real tour of the school. You should have a voice in some of our plans, too, for the curriculum and into the future. And,” he added, almost as an afterthought, “it will be better to have everyone around when we finish the story. Yasha does very good sound effects for the Chained Oblivion.”

There was another pause. Not nearly as tense, but still quite bewildered.

“She does…what?”

“You did not think that was the end of the story, did you?” Caleb grinned. “That we toppled the Assembly and the Maw that Devours just vanished?”

Essek recalled the other reports.

“Ah,” he said. “More the fool I.”

Caleb gave him a friendly pat. “Once a bridge is built, it goes both ways,” he said. “It is funny how often we wizards forget that.”

Then, in the warmth of the hallway, he nodded.

“Have a rest, Essek Thelyss. I will be down the hall. Let me know if you need anything.”

Then he nodded, and turned around, and left.

—

“Jester, I—oh gods, that’s cold.”

“Hold still, silly! You have to hold still.”

“But I—ah—oh, oh gods.”

—

And later that evening, alone in his room, Essek summoned an exquisite onyx chest. He popped it open, and slowly all his worldly possessions began to drift out. Clothes, papers, books and components slowly floated across the room, settling into the proper drawers or hanging themselves in the closet.

And then, Essek collapsed into bed. With a wave of his hand, a small mirror appeared.

It was black, made from polished volcanic glass and set into a twisted metal frame. It had been a gift, and as far as mirrors went, it was rather lacking, but—

He sighed.

It would get the job done.

—

[Part 1] - [Writing Tag] - [The Bail Project] - [National Bail Fund Network]

[everybodyscupoftea]

sober up

jj maybank x reader

word count: 2151

warnings: mentions of substance use (vyvanse, alcohol, weed); mention of anxiety; nothing too angsty though i promise

synopsis: based on the song sober up by ajr

When Sarah and John B. disappeared, it rocked the Outer Banks, and no one could think or talk about anything else. Reporters from the mainland flooded both the Cut and Figure Eight looking to talk to the people closest to the ‘Missing Star-Crossed Lovers’ as they’d been dubbed. Neither the Pogues nor the Kooks were safe.

Everyone coped as best they could. You couldn’t speak for the Pogues, you hadn’t run with them for years, but the coping could best be described as destructive spiraling. Rafe, who was arguably off the rails already, went further; Topper retreated into a shell you weren’t sure if he could ever leave; Wheezie, once outgoing and loud, became the quietest person in every room; and you, you just had to watch, stuck in a rut of your own.

Basically, the disappearance stopped the world as everyone knew it, and you weren’t sure it could ever right itself.

Hello hello; I’m not where I’m supposed to be; I hope that you’re missing me; ‘cause it makes me feel young

Sometimes it got too much. Being on Figure Eight, at school, where memories of your friendship with Sarah were especially strong. You usually liked the feeling Vyvanse gave you. The intense focus you could pour into other things to forget about The Disappearance, at least for a few hours. But sometimes, it backfired, and you were hyper focused on it.

In those moments you found yourself wandering back to the Cut, back to your elementary school, to sit on the swings. You liked the back and forth feeling and staring up at the sky. It made you dizzy, but it wasn’t unpleasant. Usually you were alone there. Not this time. This time JJ Maybank beat you there.

“Long time no see,” he said to you, the smile he gave not anywhere close to real.

You didn’t really know what to say. The friendship ended years ago when your mom married up and you both moved off the Cut. It wasn’t explosive, it wasn’t a brawl, it just fizzled. JJ Maybank, your childhood crush, and John B, your biggest defender. You looked for them sometimes, but they were never looking back.

“I like to think out here.”

JJ laughed, “That makes two of us.”

You wanted to ask how he was, but you knew. It really wasn’t worth asking. No need to cheaply fill the silence. Normally you were filled with crushing sadness on the swings. Mourning relationships lost and waiting for the drugs to finally wear off. This time you felt refreshed. Sitting in silence with this now stranger, you felt young again. You forgot how JJ made you feel.

Hello hello; last time that I saw your face, was recess in second grade; and it made me feel young

To your surprise, JJ broke the silence first.

“How’s your mom?”

They had always been close, a surrogate mother to him when his Dad threw him out.

“She’s good.”

“Still up to all that hippie shit?” he asked with a quiet laugh.

“Of course, the day my mother stops harping on the environment is the day we bury her.”

You fell into silence again, unsure if you should ask about his dad. It was nice to be here with him, and you didn’t want to push him away.

Before you could make a decision on asking, JJ pushed off with his feet and started swinging higher, effectively ending the conversation. For lack of anything better to do, you followed suit.

It was bittersweet, one of the last things you did with him before moving was swing at recess. You knew about the engagement and what it meant, but your friends didn’t, and you didn’t know how to tell them.

You remember JJ was always braver than you, swinging higher, jumping from the swing more recklessly, and telling the truth as soon as he found it out. You were always more scared.

Maybe this was the chance to finally be brave.

“JJ, about second grade and the engagement- “ but he cut you off before you could finish.

“It’s in the past. I was mad, but I understand now.”

“Right.”

Goodbye, goodbye; I said to my bestest buds; we said that we’d keep in touch; and we did our best

You had every intention of staying friends with the boys when you transferred schools, but your new dad had other ideas. He never had kids of his own, you were his new project. Your free time became his time where he taught you the ins and outs of the upper class.

He had plenty of connections, plenty of new friends for you to play with. Your mom felt bad, she didn’t realize moving you would also separate you from your closest friends the way it did. She hated seeing you sad, but what could she do?

JJ and John B visited you a lot in the early days. Then, one day, your new dad started answering the door instead of you, and he always said no. They finally caught you one afternoon, but you already had plans with the Cameron’s, and you couldn’t play with the boys. That was the final straw.

There was no fight, just a general, melancholy consensus that this would be the new normal. Rafe and Sarah instead of JJ and John B.

All my new friends, we smile at party time; but soon we forget to smile at anything else

Growing up with the Kooks was hard. Sure, you didn’t want for much, money wasn’t an issue and you had all the educational resources you could possibly need, but the pressure to even keep up, not even to stand out, was immense.

Your stepdad had high hopes, your mom wanted you to fit in and be happy. There was no best of both worlds unfortunately. No one quite understood like the Cameron siblings, your closest friends. Rafe understood the pressure to succeed from your dad, and Sarah understood the pressure to fit in from your mom.

The hangouts you used to have were fun. Full of laughter and actual joy during childhood. Games and picnics, afternoons at the country club pool and tea parties. Finally, you’d found your people after a lonely few years without JJ and John B. You depended on each other as you grew up and moved into high school.

Sarah kept you sane, she invited you to parties, hung out when you were especially struggling, and kept your mom out of your personal life. You owed a lot to her. Rafe kept you medicated. He sold you cheap Vyvanse to help you focus on schoolwork to appease your dad.

It was a delicate balance, the medication and the partying, but you made it work. The Vyvanse made you anxious but the alcohol helped you relax. Soon enough, you were more anxious than relaxed, and you could feel the smiles coming fewer and far between. Childhood was over.

And then Sarah disappeared, taking with her the last of your smiles.

Won’t you help me sober up; growing up, it made me numb; and I want to feel something again

You couldn’t stop it, sitting on the swings with JJ, the sob that broke out of your chest. It was like poking a hole in a balloon. From nothing to everything leaving at once.

“Fuck,” JJ muttered, using his feet to stop his swing as you sobbed, still gently rocking.

“I don’t want to live like this anymore,” you told the ground, refusing to look at him, even as he squatted in front of you.

“Like what?” he asked gently, hand tracing slow circles on your knee.

You shuddered a few times, fighting the anxious wave in your chest fueled by the medicine, “Numb,” you finally responded.

The pitying look on his face broke the numbness. You felt bitter, you didn’t need his pity. It was as if he could sense a wave of anger rising in you, and he backed up. JJ said with a small sigh, “I sure as hell don’t know what you’ve been through, but I have an idea of what you’re going through, so maybe, we can get through this together.”

His words put out the flames and you slouched forward, biting your lip, “You think?”

JJ didn’t answer for a few minutes, and when he did, it wasn’t to your question, “I’m hungry, want to grab some dinner at The Wreck?”

And suddenly, food sounded like the best idea in the world. You stood up and held your hand out for him to take, “My treat.”

Won’t you help me sober up; all the big kids, they got drunk; and I want to feel something again; won’t you help me feel something again

Kiara wasn’t at The Wreck when you and JJ ate. He said there was a party at the Boneyard, she and Pope were there, and invited you. While you weren’t particularly in a partying mood, you didn’t really want to be alone, so you went. It was…weird.

Sarah was your party crutch, the someone around who would always talk to you. The idea of going out and not having that made you feel a little alienated and wary. To your surprise, JJ stayed with you.

Neither of you made any moves to drink. JJ had his dab pen, and you had your juul, but otherwise you sat on a log together in silence. It wasn’t awkward, but it was a little heavy. You watched people dance around the bonfire, totally wasted and carefree, while taking occasional hits from your juul. It didn’t draw you in the same way it used to.

You couldn’t speak for JJ, he may have been itching to join the party, but he didn’t. Together you sat as the sun set and the wind picked up. He eventually handed over his sweatshirt when you started shivering and scooted closer for body heat.

The two of you sat and watched for at least three hours, not really moving or talking. You felt hyper aware of how close his thigh was to pressing against yours and how close your pinkies were from linking. It was something new to focus on. Something that broke through the water you felt had been clogging your brain for the past month.

You and JJ spent weeks together, slowly healing. There would always be a scar, empty air after quoting the first half of an inside joke or a missing t-shirt you’ll never find because you’d lent it out, but you were getting better. Part of that process was finding something new to hyper focus on. One night, both high, JJ revealed that he liked to think in color, and why not try.

My favorite color is you; you’re vibrating out my frequency

JJ was blue, his eyes, the waves he loved to surf, and all of the pens he used were blue ink. He remembered you loved to surf together as kids, so he brought you out there one afternoon. It felt good to have common interests with someone again, constructive rather than destructive common interests at least. You’d been trying to replace ‘numb’ with ‘good’ and it was hard, but it was working

My favorite color is you; you keep me young and that’s how I wanna be

JJ was also red. The same hat he’d kept his entire life, all through childhood and into his teenage years. His dad gave it to him before the abuse started. JJ clutched onto it in his darkest moments. It reminded you of your childhood, he always wore the same damn hat. You liked being able to be there for him when he held the hat instead of wearing it.

My favorite color is you; you’re vibrating out my frequency

For JJ, you were green. Your school sweatshirt that you wore so much and your favorite headband. He liked the steadiness of knowing that you’d come back to him every day, pretty much unchanged. With the violent upheaval of their lives after the disappearance, the steadiness of green was good. Green wasn’t his favorite color, but it was growing on him.

My favorite color is you; you keep me young and that’s how I wanna be

You were also yellow, your smile like sunshine. He felt like he hadn’t seen it in so long. It’d been years since he’d really looked. He’d seen you around, of course, but he hadn’t taken notice. He hadn’t seen you shrink into yourself with hollowed out eyes. JJ cursed himself for missing it. But the smiles, they were coming back, back like they used to be when you were kids.

And I want to feel something again, I just want to feel something again.

Nothing beat the feeling of JJ kissing you. Maybe, despite the circumstances, despite the path it took you to get here. You could finally sober up.

[96thdayofrage]

Clyde Kerr was a good cop and, unfortunately, this system is set up in a way that it drives good cops from its ranks. Before going to work yesterday, Kerr recorded a video “suicide note” to let the world know why he did what he did.

“I can no longer serve a system that doesn’t give a damn about me or people like me.”

With a calm yet deliberate tone, Clyde described the broken system he has been a part of for nearly two decades. He left nothing off the table. Mentioning Botham Jean, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Trayford Pellerin (who was killed in Lafayette), Clyde described how cops can kill and face very little consequences.

He then went on to call for an end to the drug war, lambasting the fact that police will kidnap, cage, and kill people “for a plant.”

“The countless people who are doing time for [the war on drugs]… how do you make amends for that?” Clyde said rhetorically. “You can’t. You can’t.”

“If this feels right to you as a person, then something is wrong with you,” he said. “Y’all are radicalizing people and then when they get upset and end up going against the system, you come down on them with a hammer.”

Clyde then goes on to describe how the job of policing needs to change — specifically in regards to mental health. His death is a chilling reminder of this dire need.

“You have one psychological eval as a cop, and that is when they hire you. That is not enough,” he said. “We need at least an annual, every six months, or maybe even quarterly. The stigma on this needs to stop.”

For the second half of the video, just hours before he would end his own life, Clyde lists a number of solutions that he says could fix so many of the problems. He started out by saying police need better training in regards to dealing with the public. Just because this job is difficult, he says, doesn’t mean you get to be a monster.

He then calls for society to come together and put aside their political differences.

“So many people in this country are so caught up in whether they are a Republican or a Democrat that they forgot how to be a decent human being.”

In a follow up video, Clyde assured people that he is not “crazy” or “on drugs” and that he feels like this act of self-immolation is necessary to change the paradigm within the system. He took his own life to attempt to change the system which drove him to this point.

“I know what people will say but I am in my right state of mind. I need to do this to protest this broken system. If I don’t do this, who will?” he said.

Hopefully, we make sure Clyde’s death is not in vain and people heed his advice. While we certainly do not advocate for self harm, Clyde clearly felt like this was the only way he could force change. If people really care about cops, then it’s incumbent upon them to focus on the words Clyde says below.

The public must realize the dire situation, and extreme scope of the mental health epidemic currently facing law enforcement. There’s an extremely high rate of suicide, a domestic violence crisis and much higher rates of addiction in policing than the general public. It’s clear that the mental health issues affecting law enforcement should be a top priority if we hope to stem the number of citizens and cops being killed by police in America.

In an interview with The Free Thought Project, former LAPD officer Alex Salazar pointed out why many of his friends ended their own lives:

People are tired of being killed by these cops. They operate with a gang-like mentality similar to the military, in that they are pawns in a larger game, but perceive themselves as warriors for a righteous cause. Cops often turn to suicide after they lose control of their personal lives. They are taught to be control freaks and to be always be in control and it often ends in tragedy.

When I was a LAPD officer I had at least 6 partners and supervisors included who “ate” their guns. 

Salazar says that suicides are not the only problem caused by this mentality. On the TFTP podcast, Salazar pointed out that many cops have PTSD and symptoms from the stress causes them to act out violently against the citizens they are tasked with policing. This is exactly what Clyde was talking about.

Like Clyde, we want to purge this critical sickness from U.S. policing in an effort make the streets a safer place for citizens and police alike.

We need to start looking at this increasing rate of officer suicides and realize the underlying problems attributing to them. If we can begin to correct those problems, the cops shooting citizens rate may start to fall too.

According to other experts in the field, cumulative exposure to trauma, horrific accidents and shootings can lead to mental health struggles that too often go untreated. A report by Blue H.E.L.P. reveals the rate of PTSD and depression for police and firefighters is five times higher than the civilian population. Clyde wants this to change by getting mental health help to be a part of the police department.

Critics believe the lack of resources for mental health also adds to lives being lost. Clyde is a perfect example. Mental health experts have echoed the sentiment of Clyde in the videos below, saying the barrier that keeps officers from seeking help are shame, fear of being off the job and the stigma behind it. Perhaps if cops were better trained at dealing with their own mental health issues, they’d be less likely to kill those with similar problems and this pillar of the community would still be alive today — pushing for change with his life, rather than his death.

If you know a police officer who is experiencing this, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline can be reached at 1-800-273-8255. Police officers can also text the word “blue” to 741741 or simply text “talk” to 741741.

[all-the-words-i-dare-to-say]

Christian Justice and the White Church in the Age of Black Lives Matter

Jesus didn’t come to this earth so that when our Black neighbors are murdered in racist attacks by their own police departments, we can go on living our privileged White Christian lives and pretend like nothing is happening. Jesus didn’t come to maintain the status quo; he didn’t come so that things could continue as they’ve always been. Jesus changed the world forever, radically, unapologetically. He spoke to the Samaritan woman, healed the lepers, and ate with tax collectors. He stood specifically and intentionally with those whose lives had been overlooked and devalued. You should, too--and I must say, your silence, White Church, is deafening. I ask you to use your voice. Affirm to your relatives and your friends, Black and White, that Black lives matter, unequivocally and without hesitation. I can assure you that your Black friends are definitely watching you. I know I am. 

I know some of you will say “Jesus wasn’t political” or “politics and religion don’t mix.” The fallacy here is that human rights are not about politics; they are fundamentally about morals and human dignity. If we must talk about politics, though, it’s worth noting that Jesus also automatically politicized himself when he spoke and acted in opposition to those in power in his day. The Sadducees, those presiding over the Temple and the Sanhedrin (the Jewish legal/political system), had the backing of the Roman government, and he spoke out against them multiple times. The Sadducees and Pharisees usually didn’t get along, but Jesus threatened their order enough that they cooperated to get rid of Jesus. They both hated him for what he did. What was he thinking, healing people on the Sabbath? What was he thinking, preaching that he was the Son of God? Who was he to publicly turn the tables in the Temple and disrupt the status quo? The Sadducees and Pharisees plotted to have him killed, and he died on the cross because he challenged the political establishment of that time. Please don’t tell me that Jesus wasn’t political. The established political system made him so. 

Along that same vein, I’ve heard some of you say, “Well...we don’t want to alienate anyone.” I would submit to you that though Jesus loved everyone and was willing to forgive, he also wasn’t afraid to make people uncomfortable in speaking out for what was right--and when he did, the Jewish leaders alienated him in the most brutal way imaginable. The net effect of this was that his actions distanced him from those comfortably siloed in their power and privilege and drew him toward those crying out to him from the margins. It was for Christian justice that Jesus died at the hands of the powerful Jewish aristocrats. As followers of Jesus, we are called to draw near our marginalized neighbors in the same way that he did. We are called to do the uncomfortable work of challenging racist systems. We are called to educate ourselves, speak up, and act for justice. If we lose friends, so be it. So did Jesus. Christianity isn’t always comfortable. Jesus certainly wasn’t comfortable on the cross.

If we have not moved toward justice yet, know that there is hope for us. In Luke 19, Jesus visits the home of Zaccheus, a tax collector. Zaccheus had been comfortable in his position of power and privilege; as a tax collector, he worked the system in his favor by charging citizens much more than they owed the government. But when Jesus came to his house, Zaccheus repented of his sin, saying “Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor; and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much.” When Jesus saw that Zaccheus was willing to make an uncomfortable sacrifice for his faith (as Abraham had in offering up his son Isaac as sacrifice) he rejoiced and forgave Zaccheus’ sin: “Today salvation has come to this house, because he too is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost.” 

The racist oppression perpetuated by the White Church, particularly in the form of silence and non-action, may not always have been intentional and calculated as in the case of Zaccheus' unjust tax-collecting, but there has been an injustice committed, all the same, for which we as the White Church must repent and make sacrifices. The White Church needn’t feel guilty. It need only speak up, repent, and move forward, embracing this new discomfort in the name of the sacrificial Christian justice begun by the Son Himself, who died for the lost on the cross. Jesus will forgive us, but we must act. Faith without works is dead: 

What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you? If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,’ and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.

But someone will say, ‘You have faith and I have works.’ Show me your faith apart from your works, and I by my works will show you my faith. You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe—and shudder. Do you want to be shown, you senseless person, that faith apart from works is barren? Was not our ancestor Abraham justified by works when he offered his son Isaac on the altar? You see that faith was active along with his works, and faith was brought to completion by the works. Thus the scripture was fulfilled that says, ‘Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness,’ and he was called the friend of God. You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone. Likewise, was not Rahab the prostitute also justified by works when she welcomed the messengers and sent them out by another road? For just as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is also dead (James 2:14-26, NRSV).

This passage is a powerful exhortation for our time. Faith is made complete with works toward justice. So what are we to do, as White Christians, in this age of widespread affirmation that Black lives matter? We can start by educating ourselves. I recommend the following resources, both Christian and secular: 

The 1619 Project, an interactive website with resources and an excellent podcast from the New York Times put together by Nikole Hannah-Jones on the legacy of slavery and Black history in this country

13th, a Netflix documentary about the 13th amendment and the racist problem of mass incarceration in the United States

This list of scaffolded anti-racist educational resources put together by some divinity students

Sojourners, a Christian social justice magazine and website

We can continue by not only educating ourselves, but also taking action. Here are some starting resources I recommend towards that end:

This list of anti-racist educational and social action resources for White people

This list of 75 anti-racist things White people can do to further their anti-racist work

A list of bail funds across the country. Read about bail funds

This is our time, White Church, to learn and do better. Act, in the name of Jesus. 

[sandersidess]

Two of Us

Ship: Romantic Prinxiety

tw: death, funeral, vehicular manslaughter, ask to tag

a/n: I hope you enjoy and sorry if it seems rushed. I would love feedback, so enjoy!

-

“Come on!”

“I’m going!”

“It’s about to happen! Hurry up slowpoke!”

“You’re too fast for me!”

“It’s happening!”

-

Virgil wipes his tears as he stood alone, holding onto his flowers. Red and yellow roses. He places a hand on the wood, stroking it slowly, more tears streaming down. He looks at the picture, eliciting a sob out of him and he covers his mouth. That smile. It was the last time he saw it in person, the last smile he got out of him that horrible day.

“Please come back,” Virgil whimpers out and cries, falling down to his knees, a hand still on the coffin.

-

“Isn’t it beautiful?”

“It sure is. Wow.”

“They sure are beautiful creatures, and they do so much to help us.”

“You’re a nerd like Logan.”

“But I’m better looking, duh.”

-

Virgil keeps a hand over his mouth, not even listening to the words said by the pastor. He didn’t want to accept what was happening. He couldn’t accept it. That was his husband. His husband that they were...that they were burying underground.

-

“My name is Roman, nice to meet you.”

“Virgil. You come here a lot, don’t you?”

“What can I say, you make me the best lattes ever.”

“Flattering, But I have a long line.”

“I came to ask you out.”

“I’ll think about it, now move please.”

-

Virgil sat at home, their home, on their couch. He stared ahead, tears spilling out as he stayed silent, a tissue in hand. People were in their house to remember Roman, to talk about when he was alive. Their mutual friends look at Virgil worryingly, only one of them going to sit next to him, and stayed with him until it was time to sleep.

“Get some rest, Virge. God knows you need it.”

Virgil nods numbly, laying down on his side of the bed and placed a hand on Roman’s pillow.

-

“This is your idea of a date? A field?”

“It’s called a picnic, and it’s not just any field.”

“Why is it so special?”

“Just watch.”

“Woah! Butterflies are everywhere! Roman!”

“Beautiful sight, isn’t it?”

-

The days passed, and the numbness was still there. The weeks passed, and he went to court to see what was happening with the case of the driver. The months passed, and he clears his throat as he gave his victim impact statement.

“My husband,” Virgil clears his throat as he felt a knot, “my husband did not deserve to leave this pitiful world so early. We had plans, from buying a house across the seas, to adopting our first child and settling into retirement while surrounded by many grandchildren. You...you took away those plans with your foolish mistake that night. That night was our fifth anniversary of being married and our eighth anniversary of being together as a couple,” Virgil whimpers and tears welled up, Patton placing a hand on his back,

“You took away my husband. You took away my rock, my reason to live. He was a loving husband, friend, volunteer, teacher and person. He deserved a long life and to die of old age. He deserved nothing but the best. I am not a forgiving person when it comes to the ones who harm my people, but my husband is. I forgive you in his part, because he would want me to forgive you. He would want me to forgive you for killing him because you decided to drive while intoxicated,” Virgil says disgusted, not caring for the tears of the felon, “He wouldn’t want me to live with hate. So I forgive you because of him. But to be honest, I hope you rot in prison and that you get nothing but malice in there. I hate you, I hate you so much that it makes me want to throw up. Also, in response to your apology, you can shove it.”

Virgil was crying and shaking by the end, gripping his paper and was led away by Patton. He sat down and cried in his hands, letting Logan hug him and Patton rubbing his back.

“You killed four innocent people that night of your intoxication...despicable...with intent...forty years...”

-

“You’re too kind, Roman!”

“I was taught that I should respect, and to smile because they hate seeing the person they despise smile.”

“You are not implementing that on our future children. They need to fight back! But, that is also one thing they can do. I’ll think about it.”

“...”

“What?”

“You want kids?”

“With you.”

“My whole dream is coming together.”

-

After the trial, Virgil felt empty. He felt like had no purpose in the world, he felt alone. Roman was gone. He couldn’t bring him back. So he slept, worked, ate, and slept again. He would cry himself to sleep, screaming into his pillow as the pain in his heart would grow. One night he fell asleep after crying, gripping onto Roman’s pillow.

“Virgil? Dark prince?”

Virgil opened his eyes and he let out a strangled gasp, seeing Roman standing there in front of him. He was now frozen, telling himself this was a dream, nothing but a dream.

“My Virgil,” Roman whispers and caresses Virgil’s cheek.

“Roman,” Virgil chokes out and leans into his hand, feeling fresh tears well up.

“Oh Virgil, my lovely dark prince,” Roman whispers and kisses his head, making Virgil cry.

“Oh my, Roman please don’t leave me,” Virgil begs and places a hand over Roman’s, being able to feel his warmth.

“I’m right here, corazón,” Roman says hushed, wiping Virgil’s tears, “Now now, don’t cry. I miss your smile.”

Virgil looks up at him, seeing that dopey smile Roman would have when he said that. Virgil gave a shaky smile in response, which Roman chuckles at.

“I miss you,” Virgil whispers, not letting go of Roman.

“I miss you too,” Roman sighs and leans his forehead against Virgil’s, “But it is not your time yet. You have many more years to live. Many more things to do.”

“How can I do it without you at my side?” Virgil asks, his voice broken and it made Roman’s heart ache.

“I’ll always be at your side, even when you don’t see me. I’m always there for you, mi amor,” Roman kisses his hand and strokes back his hair.

Virgil nods slowly, not believing it, but he was too happy of having Roman at his side.

“I love you.”

“And I love you too. Always and forever.”

When Virgil woke up, he was disappointed it was a dream, but he felt able to do more that day. He felt like he could do something in Roman’s memory.

So he did.

-

“Will you marry me?”

“Roman! Of course I will!”

“You make me the happiest man in the world.”

“And so do you. No regrets here?”

“None at all, amor.”

-

After a long day of work, he called up Patton and Logan, saying he had an idea. Even if they were both concerned this was just sudden, they agreed and supported Virgil. It was a lot of work, but had Logan and Patton. They started brainstorming, they started planning. The process was long, it was tiring and draining for all three parties, but with the money Virgil got in compensation and that he had saved up, they did it.

The Roman Prince Arts Foundation.

A foundation and resource for kids wanting to enter theater arts, also scholarships for those deciding to major in theater arts. Roman was invested in theater arts, mostly acting, and this was a way to keep his memory alive. A legacy.

Not many took it seriously, but Virgil didn’t let that keep him down. He’s been down for months, almost a year, but not anymore. He had to live on for Roman, to keep moving on. Though he struggled everyday to even get up, he could remember Roman’s words.

“You have many years to live. Many more things to do...I’ll always be at your side, even when you don’t see me.”

Not only did Virgil invest his time at the foundation, he also worked with the Trevor Project, where Roman always volunteered and helped out. Roman was a known volunteer in their community, and they held a memorial in his honor. Virgil spoke, talking about not only his struggles but Roman’s too. He felt at peace after the talk, closing his eyes and just knew Roman was always at his side.

Virgil smiles proudly at the first annual celebration of the foundation, which helped bring back programs and also handed out their first twenty scholarships (Logan suggested starting off small and slowly grow if all went well). People came to thank Virgil for bringing back their programs, many children from varying ages also thanked Virgil for giving them an opportunity to express themselves. Virgil felt his heart soar, and he stared at the picture he had of Roman above his fire place. He excused himself and went over, setting down his cup and picked up the picture.

“We did it, prince,” Virgil chuckles and wipes away his tears, “I love you, Roman. I’ll see you one day.”

-

“I love you.”

“What?”

“I love you!”

“It’s too early!”

“But I do! I have since our first date.”

“...”

“Virgil?”

“I love you too, you idiot.”

[uzumaki-rebellion]

“Stark’s New Intern” Chp. 9

Summary:   

Erik wants to learn all he can about the vibranium he found...

"Children of nature from another culture

Had to survive living in the light

Stolen from the center of the world

Untimely departure

Somehow survived living in the light…"

Caron Wheeler—"Livin' In The Light"

Erik held the flame from his lighter up to the smooth cool blue metal in his palm.

"You made it back!" Maria said.

Maria stood outside of his closed bedroom door.

"Yeah."

"Are you hungry, I'm going to head over to the spot for a chicken bowl."

"Nah, I'm good."

"Want me to bring you something back for later?"

"I'm good Maria."

He heard her milling around outside his door a little longer and then she left. He focused on the metal.

Vibranium.

The notes from his father's old journals could only convey the slightest bit of wonderment he imagined when he was younger. Vague memories of toying with his father's kimoyo beads and opening up a world of wonder when he activated it on his own. Slivers of images came back, images that revealed the use of vibranium in that futuristic world that his father came from. The world he was trying to get to himself.

In his hand, he held a component to deliver him justice.

The flame from the lighter didn't melt or activate anything from the metal. He could still feel the tickling irritation on his tattooed gums. The itchiness he could live with easily. Turning it over in his fingers Erik tried to figure out a way to get the vibranium into the Stark labs secretly so he could test its properties. His father's notes gave no clues as to what it could do. From what Erik could gather, it was a powerful energy source that had to be hidden. It was also an energy source that his Baba was going to use to help the diaspora and his mother.

Erik closed his eyes.

A man named Klaue betrayed his father for this metal. Ulysses Klaue.

Some of his father's notes were cryptic and also written in his own language. But there was one part of the three journals his father kept that his Uncle Bakari and grandfather had saved for him that Erik memorized by heart. Direct coordinates into Wakanda. Erik just had to find out how to use this metal to his advantage. It was the cause of his father's murder. But it would soon become the cause of Erik's rightful revenge. Against Wakanda. And Klaue.

He pocketed the metal in his pants and walked out of his room. Maria was gone and he had the apartment to himself. Making himself a pot of ramen in the kitchen, Erik thought about Stark. Was that man aware of vibranium? Tony went everywhere in the world, had access to arms dealers both legit, and Erik was pretty sure, illegitimate too. A man and his family didn't become billionaires without doing some dirt in the world. Billionaires were hoarders and they would know all the outlets to increase their selfish intake of resources. Most of their outlets were dirty. In Erik's eyes, Tony was a dirty mofo. No doubt about it. It wasn't a huge leap for Erik to assume that Tony knew who Klaue was. One thing Erik knew for sure, Klaue remained off the grid. Scant evidence existed that the man was still alive. Erik only knew that South Africa was that man's home base.

Erik went to get his laptop and sat in the living room slurping up noodles and looking up anything new he could find on vibranium. All he found were vague references to it being a rare if not fictional metal, probably a metal alloy mixture rumored to have mystical properties as a joke because of its natural glowing blue color. Small amounts were found in the arctic before World War 1 and its value was estimated to be astronomical if found in large amounts.

That explained a lot about why Wakanda looked the way it did from the glimpse he had as a child.

The fire alarm set off in the kitchen and Erik felt a strong hot vibratory shock inside of his pants pocket when he leaped up to turn off the pot of ramen he left on the stove that was now burning. He forgot to turn it off all the way. Erik shut down the alarm above the kitchen sink and when he reached inside of his pocket and pulled out the vibranium, it glowed brighter and he could feel the metal pulsing in his hand. Like a heartbeat.

Sound.

Erik turned the pot back on and let the rest of the ramen broth burn once more. The alarm gave another piercing shriek and Erik dropped the vibranium this time when the vibratory shock was too much for his fingers to handle.

He quickly moved the pot off the stove and shut down the alarm once more.

With great caution, he handled the metal again and could still feel the surge of power within it, along with the heat emanating from its brighter hue.

He smiled.

Who would've thought a burning pot of cheap noodles would help him learn an observational scientific fact?

Vibranium. The light of his father's world.

Now it was his light. And he would bring it to the Lost Tribe.

His tribe.

###

Erik worked diligently at the Stark computer lab.

He completed assigned tasks on time and kept to himself mostly. Tony had been traveling for a couple of weeks and there was a noticeable difference in how the office energy changed when he was gone. It was dull. Not quite listless, but when the head man was away, the mice didn't play, they just became…boring.

Standing at his comp screen, Erik strung lines of code together to input and received a vid screen message from Devika.

"Please come to Mr. Stark's office."

No reason was given. Erik knew he hadn't fucked up anything because Janine hadn't said anything to him directly. Shutting down his work station, Erik left the lab and headed to the bank of elevators whisking other employees around.

He saw Giselle inside the elevator he picked to take him up top. She held a fresh salad encased in a plastic container.

"Hey stranger," she said making room for him along with four other people.

"W'sup?"

"Where you headed?"

"Up top."

Erik could feel ears straining to eavesdrop as always whenever he was around.

"You have lunch yet?" Giselle asked.

He glanced at his watch. It was past one. He hadn't even thought of lunch. He'd been so busy coding and trying to get access to another lab that would permit him to test the vibranium in private. That wasn't working out too well.

"I'll eat later. Gotta see what they want first."

The elevator doors swished open and Giselle stepped out.

"See ya later!" she said.

Cheery. The day must've been going well for her.

Eventually, Erik was the only person on the elevator as he made the lone journey to the executive suites.

Devika handed him a donut the moment she saw him.

"I know you skipped lunch again," she said.

Erik ate the chocolate glazed treat to be polite. He used the hand sanitizer on her desk to clean his fingers.

"What's poppin'?" he said.

"Stark wants you to ride in the service car to pick him up."

"He's back?"

"Flight arrives in ninety minutes. You need to leave now. The car is out front waiting for you."

"Why does he want me to come there?"

Devika stared at him.

"He didn't mention any reason?" Erik asked.

Devika handed him another donut. A regular glazed one this time.

"Get going," she said gently pushing him toward the exit.

"You could've just told me on the phone or in a vid chat."

"But how would you get the donuts?" she said.

He grinned and left the office.

A sleek black S.U.V. awaited Erik in front of the office and he watched the crowded L.A. traffic as the car took him to L.A.X.

Tony Stark stood at the curb looking fashionable with his roller bag. Next to him was a statuesque Black woman with short curls and abundant curves filling out a white dress that made Erik's mouth get tight for a moment.

Erik hopped out of the front passenger seat and opened up the back passenger door for Tony and the woman as the driver grabbed their bags and placed them in the trunk.

"Stevens! Meet Athena Robinson. New addition. She'll be working in your department."

"Hi," Erik said and his voice came out with such a flat affect that Tony stared at him.

"What's wrong with your voice?" Tony asked.

"Nothing," Erik said, his voice still coming out strange.

Athena blessed him with a smile and held out her hand. Erik took it and the soft warmth made him feel giddy.

"Hi, Erik. Great to meet you," Athena said.

Erik stayed in the front as Athena and Tony sat in the back.

"Stevens, I want you to show Athena around, get her up to speed in your department. I also need you to prep for New York this weekend—" "Prep?"

"Yeah, you're coming with me to the Expo. Athena is too—"

"Janine wants me to finish—"

"Valentina will take over that project for you. Be packed and ready. Get a new suit too. We'll be meeting some new investors for the European offices and if all goes well, we'll be flying to Monaco in a few weeks."

Erik tried to process everything quickly.

He didn't want to leave the vibranium unattended in L.A., but he didn't want to take it with him to New York because metal detectors would give him away.

"Stevens?"

"Yeah?"

"Athena was asking you a question," Tony said.

Erik turned his head to look at her in the back.

"I just wondered where the best places were to eat. Mr. Stark said you were a foodie and would know," she said.

"I can hook you up. What do you like?"

"Everything," she said. Athena's eyes looked game for anything and Erik turned away quickly. She was as fine as frog hairs as his grandpop would say. He'd seen fine women all over L.A., but this one was a little different. He was digging the vibe she exuded.

"Hey this is the cut!" she exclaimed.

Erik realized he still had the radio on to the local R & B station. Return of the Mack blared from the speakers up front. Erik found his head bobbing along to it too, and when he glanced back to look at Athena, she was popping her fingers, not even caring that Tony was watching them both with amusement.

"Get into it Mr. Stark!" she said, nudging his arm.

"I'm not familiar with this song," he said.

"Old classic British soul," she said, "turn it up, Erik."

Erik did what she told him and the S.U.V. was rocking. He was really liking this woman already. She wasn't beholden with Tony at all. He was also really liking the idea that they would be in New York together.

Shit New York.

He might be able to see his Uncle and Aunt and a few homies from the DMV since he was so close.

The song ended and Erik turned off the R&B and switched to a classic rock station that he knew Tony loved. Steely Dan's "Peg" came on. Tony started rocking his shoulders.

"Wait. You two can't get into this?" Tony asked.

"It's hittin'," Erik said.

"Turn that up," Tony said.

Athena laughed at Tony as he made his hands wave in time to the beat.

"Haters," Tony said.

Erik laughed.

They arrived back at the Stark offices in good spirits.

"Show Athena around and then meet me in my suite around five?"

Erik nodded.

Stark had Athena's bags taken to the apartment she would stay in at Oakwood.

Athena followed Erik as he did the essential tour of the premises. She was impressed and asked plenty of questions. Especially about how being an intern there was fairing with him.

"Stark is an interesting dude. He can be a little out there, but you seem to have him figured out."

"That's only because he knows my father."

"Word?"

Athena's eyes lit up at his voice.

"My Dad works in the State Department. We've known Tony for a long time."

Erik kept that little tidbit in the back of his mind as he watched Athena take in the world of Stark Industries HQ.

"So, where do we work?" she asked.

Erik led her to another bank of elevators. When an express one opened, Erik rushed over to take it. Athena was on his heels. They stepped into the space and Giselle was there again. She smiled when she saw Erik again.

"Did you hear that we're going to New York?" Giselle said almost breathless.

Giselle's excited energy faded the moment she saw Athena.

"Athena," Giselle said.

"Giselle," Athena said.

No claws came out, but Erik could swear there were deep scratches somewhere from the sour tone that came from both of them.

"Athena is a new intern," Erik said.

The elevator doors closed and Erik stood between them both.

It was a good thing he did.

He knew for sure that if he weren't there, these two would probably be duking it out.

What the hell?

The tension was so thick on the ride up. He wasn't in the mood to make small talk to help ease the situation.

The doors opened and Erik was grateful to see Tony once more.

"Hey! How'd the tour go?"

Tony stepped onto the elevator and stood in front of Athena. Within seconds, Tony also caught the brittle vibe.

Erik gave Tony a look that was equal parts "Help" and "Wtf?"

"I have an idea, why don't we all go to dinner and talk about New York?" Tony said.

This was surely going to be the meal from hell.

Erik hung his head. Going to New York with two women that caught his eye along with his boss?

Trouble.

###

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@tyees @eye-raq

[misternygmasir]

Glitch

“It was broken, and he had no want or need for broken things. “

A little drabble about the Riddler’s greatest failure.

It took him longer than he would have liked to admit to compile the code, if truth be told.  He had thought it would be a relatively simple task for a mind as brilliant as his, but as things turn out, teaching something how to think was a bit more difficult than he had anticipated.  Only a bit. Nothing was ever, ever too challenging for him.

This was to be his first foray into artificial intelligence, the precursor to something far greater.  As soon as he knew that this worked, that he had ironed out all the bugs, he could move on to the project he really wanted to tackle.  He glanced at the lines upon lines of code, compiled over countless hours, glanced once more at the robotic figure on the ground next to him, and began the upload.

The process was slow going.  He expected it to be.  The massive amount of data being transferred from one processor to another took time, and while he didn't have a ton of that, he certainly had enough for this.  He let the upload run its course, and he went about the rest of his day, working on deathtraps, adjusting blueprints, the usual odd jobs.  He even found time to dust off his chess board and play a game of chess against himself-- he won, of course.

By the time the transfer was complete, the initial excitement had waned somewhat.  He no longer had to be worried about his computer or the processor in the new machine overheating or catching fire, so all that was left was to boot the thing up...  And he knew that would work.  He wasn't a moron, after all.

It took almost a minute for the robot to flare to life, he noted with some annoyance-- perhaps he should have installed another processor after all...  Would it be able to keep up with organic impulses with the processing power it had now?  But then the machine began moving, righting itself from where it lay on its side on the floor, eyes searching the area, standing on all four legs...  It took a few steps, then turned to face him and--

SCREECH.

Well. That was unexpected.  He sighed, one hand coming up so fingers could pinch the bridge of his nose.  He should have used a better audio card.  He hadn't expected the thing to actually try to meow of its own accord, he had thought it would only do it when commanded.  Then again...  It was a cat.  Well, a robotic cat.  And since he had programmed it to be as close to an organic feline as possible, he supposed it should act with a certain...  Disregard.

He sat and watched it explore while he ate dinner, watched as it found the the “food” dish he had left out for it in a moment of whimsy, filled with spare nuts and bolts he couldn't foresee using anytime soon.  From there, it wandered over to the cat bed he had built as a wireless charging dock for it, then turned and pounced on one of the toys he had fashioned for it to play with.  It seemed he had succeeded in doing exactly what he set out to do-- creating an artificially intelligent cat.  Minus the small error with the voice, of course, but he could fix that just as soon as he ordered new parts.

It wasn't until later that night that things soured.  The cat-- he hadn't bothered to name it, because why should he-- was sitting in his lap, purring quietly, then it looked up at him, still purring, and...

SCREECH.

But it didn't just make that horrific excuse for a meow.  It was still purring-- or trying to, and he could literally see the green lights that served as its eyes flicker as its whole body stiffened and extended, and it literally toppled off his lap.

Oh.

That was a problem.

He let out a defeated sigh and turned back to his laptop, opening up the code to peer at it again.  He was tempted to kick the machine, send it flying across the room, but he didn't want to scuff his shoes.  He couldn't have made a mistake, there was simply no plausible way, and he knew cats didn't naturally purr and meow at the same time, so maybe it was a virus?

But how could it have gotten a virus?  It wasn't even Wi-Fi enabled, and there definitely wasn't a virus on his laptop-- he had specifically designed it and built it to make that nigh-impossible.  The only person who could possibly dream of getting past his firewall was, well, him. He couldn't have made a mistake.  He had spent hours, no, days working on this programming.  He had checked it and re-checked it, there was absolutely no possible way there was an error that caused that to happen....

The robotic feline as back on it's feet, purring and rubbing against his legs, but he ignored it.  He had to figure this out.  He had to know what he'd done.  Or hadn't done.  He had to fix this, and fix it now.

He thought he found the error at one point, about an hour later.  He made an adjustment, plugged the cat back into his computer, re-uploaded everything...  And now the damned thing couldn't even walk.  It moved one leg, then another, then another, then the last, giving it some sort of strange, stunted hobble...  He reverted to the previous programming and went back to work.

It wasn't until he woke up with his cheek pressed into the keys of his laptop that he decided to give up.  He had been at it for...  Oh, hell.  If the clock on his computer was right (and he knew for a fact that it was), and judging by the way his body felt, he had slept for maybe four hours, which left thirty-six hours of unaccounted-for time in which he must have been frantically trying to fix this stupid cat.  Thirty-six hours, and not a single thing had helped.  Quite the contrary, everything he had thought may be a fix served only to cause another problem, or make the thing shut down completely...  All that work, wasted, all those materials, wasted....

Purr.

And there was the damned thing again, up on his desk, nuzzling his face and purring, pawing at his hand.  He reached out automatically and rubbed its head, which only made the purring intensify.  Maybe this stupid glitch was a problem for another day.  After all, it seemed as though the feline did function as intended, apart from this strange glitch and the horrific shriek that resulted from him not bothering to program in a proper meow...Maybe some decent sleep would help the solution appear more readily.

He spent the better part of a week working off-and-on on attempting to find a solution for this stupid glitch.  The cat, however, seemed unbothered, and spent the time prowling his safe house, doing what he could only assume were cat things, interrupted only by the need to charge its battery and that damned glitch, which he quickly noted seemed to happen more often when the battery was running low.  In fact, it happened so often in the hour immediately preceding it retreating to its charging dock that he began referring to it as a glitch instead of a cat-- and it was at that point that the robot, however unintentionally, gained a name. And yes, Glitch was a stupid name, but this was a stupid cat.  He would fix the problem and get rid of it, and if he couldn't fix it, he would just deactivate it and move on.

He made it as far as deactivating it one day, a few weeks later. Believing himself to be at his limit, all his resources exhausted, he turned the thing off and gathered up its supplies, leaving it in a corner to be forgotten.  He had failed.  He had failed, and no one could know about it.  He would destroy it, get rid of it before anyone ever even knew it existed, and try again with something different, something less stupid, something that wouldn't bother him at inopportune moments, looking for attention, something that wouldn't insist on curling up at the foot of his bed every night, or deliberately worm its way into his lap while he was trying to work...

The house seemed quiet.  Had he actually gotten attached to the stupid thing?  No, he couldn't have.  It was broken, and he had no want or need for broken things.  There was absolutely no reason he was staring at it now, no reason he was walking over to the corner where it lay discarded, definitely no reason he was gently scratching the deactivated machine's chin...

Damn it.

He sighed.  “This changes nothing, Glitch.  I still don't like you.”

But even as he hooked the machine to his laptop once more to reinstall the programming he had wiped from it, he knew that the statement was a lie.

[northofsomewhererp]

Your Name, Age (17+), & Timezone: Meg, too old, EDT

Zephyrine Oriana Bowie turned 17 years old on March 14th. She’s a junior at Greensville High School. Her faceclaim is Billie Eilish.

Bio:

As a lover of all things strange, you could guess that Zephyrine Bowie tends to stand out in a crowd. From her peculiar fashion sense down to her creepy obsession with the dead, she was never one to fit in.

When Mélissandre Thibert, her biological mother, passed away due to some post-birth complications, no one really knew what to do with the little girl. Her father was a one night stand: he’d never even pretended that he’d be a part of that child’s life, and Mélissandre didn’t expect him to be, either. Her life had been on a steady decline: she lost her job, was battling addiction and had just gotten dumped by whom she thought to be the love of her life. In some ways, Zephyrine was her saving grace, her one reason to try and get better. And for a while, it worked. But ultimately, she was in too poor a condition previously to be salvaged by 9 months of self-care.

When it all came down to it, the only person who stepped up to the task and wanted that child was Makani Bowie. He’d been a pen-pal of Mélissandre’s for nearly 10 years now, and although they hadn’t met more than 5 times, they made sure to talk every day and video chat weekly. It was nothing if not platonic, but nonetheless he was all she had left. With him residing in America and little Zephyrine being in France, it wasn’t an easy task. But after a long, strenuous process, he was finally able to adopt the little girl and bring her back to his home, in Greensville. Makani’s mother often referred to her as a demon, recalled seeing something ‘wicked’ in the little girl’s eyes the moment she was first brought into the family. Eff grew up alone with Makani and his son, Lazarus. Even without a mother, she never lacked anything: she’s forever grateful for that.

In elementary school, Bowie started to display an explosive character. She didn’t have a good relationship with her classmates. From the get-go, she was an easy target for kids to pick on. It didn’t help that at any given chances, Zephyrine would go on about how she believed in fairies, mystical creatures and witchcraft. But in all honesty, she couldn’t give a flying fuck about what others thought of her, she liked to embrace who she was and her beliefs. What were these kids to her anyway but mere classmates? When they started to spread vile rumors about her and her family, she started to lash out at them. Especially at girls. She’d decapitate their dolls and pick up fights. Pull, scratch and bite. During this time, she often found herself in the principal’s or the counselor’s office, and this carried on into her high school career. Needless to say she didn’t have many friends, still doesn’t. But she likes it that way. Now a junior in high school, it seems as if most of the kids she went to elementary with forgot about her. In fact, it was during the summer before her freshman year that her appearance took a drastic turn and she’s basically unrecognizable anymore. Zephyrine started getting inked and dyed her hair all sorts of fantasy colors. Her peculiar sense of fashion draws attention, but the good one this time. Eff is usually quiet, for the simple reason that she prefers discussing with the dead rather than the living. Yet she’s not afraid to speak her mind. It comes pouring out of her without any effort. In that sense, she’s incredibly blunt and lacks a filter. Some have called her rude, but she doesn’t care. Regardless, Bowie is a very smart and articulate young lady. What most people admire about her is obviously her open-mindedness. She’s also a big fan of DIY projects and any sort of crafts, which makes her somewhat resourceful. She’s someone that although you may need some time getting in their good books, once you’re in her circle you can always count on her.

Activity (1-10): 5

Have you read the rules?: removed

In the event that you leave, can we keep your biography for future use? *grabs zephyrine* no she my baby

Any comments/questions?: no thank u ♥

Sample( 2+ paragraphs):

Night had always been Zephyrine’s favorite time of day for as long as she could remember. The starry sky, chilly breeze and complete silence were only a few things she enjoyed. But tonight, she found herself in a totally opposite setting.

When her brother, Lazarus, asked her to tag along to a gathering on the beach, Zephyrine didn’t think twice about it. Their Meemaw was coming over, and no opportunity to be as far away from the woman as possible were taken for granted. What she hadn’t taken into consideration when blindly accepting was the amount of people that would actually attend, or how Laz was bound to dump her to go french some random person at some point in the night.

Zephyrine’s currently sitting in front of the bonfire, throwing anything she can find into the flame and watching it burn. She hasn’t spoken to a single soul, and Lazarus, of course, is nowhere in sight. It wouldn’t be as bad if the bonfire wasn’t surrounded by couples practically fucking right then and there. She hadn’t expected this big a turnout, and the crowd was starting to make her feel antsy. Throwing one last empty can of beer into the fire, Bowie decides to get up and head towards the shore.

The further away she gets from the crowd, the lighter her steps feel. It’s not that she was afraid of people, not at all. She was just very picky with people she allowed close to her. Eff held everyone to a higher standard due to past hurt, which made getting close to her very difficult. And Lazarus’ friends? They definitely weren’t her type. Funny how her brother was the person she got along with best, but his choice in friends was so poor. When she reaches the shoreline, Zephyrine crouches down and drags her finger against the damp sand. She isn’t drawing anything in particular, just letting her hands wander around and she finds herself way more entertained than she’d been the entire night. That is, before someone pulls her out from her bubble.

“Boo!” Lazarus startles his sister, bursting into laughs when she topples over face first into an incoming wave. Now drenched in ice cold water, Eff wipes a hand down her face.

“You motherfucker!” she exclaims, springing up into action and staring at him with wide eyes. She tries so hard to keep her angry act, but a smile can’t help to pull at the corner of her lips. This just amuses Laz further.

“I didn’t think you were so fucking clumsy, chill out Eff”, he rolls his eyes, and that earns him a hard shove from his sister. He stumbles but his feet remain planted into the ground. “Nice try, sissy.”

“Yeah, yeah, whatever. I’m gonna catch a cold because of your dumb ass”, Bowie sighs. She grabs a handful of her hair and twists it so drain the water out. A slight rustling sound catches her attention and when she looks up, Lazarus is draping his jacket over her shoulders.

“Here. Are you having fun? Except the possible hypothermia, I mean”, he asks with a sheepish smile. He picks up a beer bottle, presumably his, and takes a long swig as he awaits her answer.

“Are you seriously asking me this, Laz?” Zephyrine retorts. “I thought you knew me better than that, wow”, she puts a hand over her heart, dramatizing the situation and that manages to make her brother chuckle.

“I know you’re dying on the inside, sue me for being hopeful. Y’wanna go home, then?”

“Your unbuttoned shirt and raw lips tell me you don’t”, she crosses her arms over her chest, an eyebrow quirking up as she eyes him from head to toe.

“Ah, shut the fuck up. It’s a party, what did you expect?” Lazarus counterattacks, visibly taken aback by the comment, flustered even.

“For you not to dip your dick in the first chick you see, maybe?”

“To be fair, I dipped it.. but in her mou-”

“Ah ah! Stop talking, TMI, Laz… TMI!” the girl interrupts him, nose wrinkled in disgust.

“Fine, okay. Still doesn’t answer my question. You wanna go?” Zephyrine bites her lip, avoiding his gaze as she shrugs. “Zephyrine…” he warns, and that makes her snap her head up to finally look at him.

“…yeah, this sucks. And I’m cold. I just know you’re having fun and I don’t wanna force you to leave. But if Dad picks me up, then Meemaw’s gonna-”

“Zephyrine, calm down, it’s okay. This is getting boring, anyway. We ran out of beer, I’m good with leaving”, he reassures her, stepping closer and pulling her into a hug. He sways them from side to side, purposefully making them tip over as if to almost fall, but he catches them back every single time. They both laugh in unison, and that’s the first real laugh Effy let out tonight. Lazarus moves back only enough to look at her. “Even if I didn’t wanna leave, I’d leave for you”, he presses a soft kiss to her forehead, but she pushes him away.

“Gross, you’re drunk”, she states as she wipes away the spot on her forehead he’d kissed.

“Maybe I am, so what?”

“Don’t kiss me, period. Especially not when you ate pussy, you reek of it!” That comment makes Lazarus burst into giggles, almost falling over his sister. “God, you’re done, let’s go”, she wraps an arm around his waist and starts walking away.

A comfortable silence settles between them, and that’s something she always appreciated from her brother. There wasn’t a need for small talk, they could just revel in each other’s presence without a word spoken. And so, the entire walk home was spent without a word being exchanged. Zephyrine was cold, slightly buzzed and tired, but as they strolled through Greensville together, she couldn’t help but think maybe this night wasn’t so bad after all.

[bldgrelationshipwgod]

Narrow Is the Gate: What Did Jesus Mean?

Several times Christ gave advice that seemingly discourages rather than encourages people to become Christians. Why did He do this?

Surprisingly, all but a relatively small number of disciples turned away from Jesus by the end of His ministry!

The thousands that once chased our Savior like a celebrity apparently dwindled away to a few hundred after His death [Acts 1:15; 1 Corinthians 15:6].

How strikingly different the true picture is from the supposedly easy path to becoming a Christian by just giving your heart to the Lord.

Acts 1:15 | In those days Peter stood up among the fellow believers (a gathering of about a hundred & twenty) & said,

1 Corinthians 15:6 | After that, He appeared to more than five hundred fellow believers at once, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep.

In Matthew 7:13-14 we read of Jesus saying, “Enter by the narrow gate; for wide is the gate & broad is the way that leads to destruction, & there are many who go in by it. Because narrow is the gate & difficult is the way which leads to life, & there are few who find it” [emphasis added throughout].

Matthew 7:13-14 | Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate & broad is the way that leads to destruction, & many enter through it. But small is the gate & narrow the way that leads to life, & only a few find it.** [**omits “difficult” in following versions: Berean, NIV, NASB, KJV, ERV]

1.] Narrow gate, difficult path

The phrase “narrow is the gate” is fairly easy to understand.

A narrow gate is harder to pass through than one that is wide, & only a few people can go through a narrow gate at once.

In saying “difficult is the way which leads to life,” Jesus was explaining how hard being a Christian really is.

“Difficult” is from the Greek word thlibo, which means: “To press [as grapes], press hard upon; a compressed way; narrow straitened, contracted” [New Testament Greek Lexicon].

The lexicon adds that the word can be used metaphorically to mean “trouble, afflict, distress.” If Jesus wanted to draw people to follow Him, why did He tell prospective disciples that doing so would bring them grief?

To understand what He meant, let’s examine a few of the passages where He seemingly discouraged people from following Him.

2.] Advice to would-be followers

Luke writes of three encounters Jesus had with would-be Christians as He & His disciples were traveling.

One of them made a dramatic statement of commitment, saying to Christ: “Lord, I will follow You wherever You go” [Luke 9:57].

Luke 9:57 | As they were walking along the road, someone said to Jesus, “I will follow You wherever You go.”

Jesus didn’t reply, “Wonderful! Please join us!”

Instead, He said something that, at the least, would have caused a person to have second thoughts.

At the most, would have turned them away completely: “Foxes have holes & birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head” [v.58].

Jesus was conveying the uncertainty that could accompany the life of a true Christian.

Luke’s narrative continues with Jesus turning to another person & telling Him, “Follow Me” [v.59].

Luke 9:58 | Jesus replied, “Foxes have dens & birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay His head.”

Luke 9:59 | Then He said to another man, “Follow Me.” The man replied, “Lord, first let me go & bury my father.”

The person begged off, asking to be allowed to first bury His father. Since Jewish custom was to bury the dead ASAP, it is unlikely the person was out with the crowd around Christ with a dead father at home.

More likely, the person was asking to spend whatever remaining time he might have with an aging or perhaps ill father—an open-ended request actually.

The blunt record of Luke has Jesus responding to this man’s excuse, “Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go & preach the kingdom of God” [v.60].

Obviously, dead people do not bury anyone.

Here, Jesus was referring to those who were spiritually dead—people who had not responded to His teaching.

Jesus was telling the potential Christian that His calling was infinitely more important.

Then a third person, who was committed to becoming a disciple, made a seemingly reasonable request to first return home to say goodbye to whoever was at his house, whether family or guests we do not know [v.61].

To this person, Jesus responded: “No one, having put His hand to the plow, & looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God” [v.62].

We cannot know with certainty, but this person may not have been as committed as his Words make it sound. The Bible records only the essence of the exchange—what we need to know to understand the main point.

All 3 of these responses add clarity to Christ’s teaching that “narrow is the gate.”

In this third example, the added lesson was that Christians must continue to keep their eyes on the goal—God’s Kingdom.

An experienced plowman immediately recognizes the point of this analogy. When plowing, the farmer fixes his eyes on a rock, a hill or some other marker, so that he will plow straight furrows.

Although modern farmers with vast fields often use GPS equipment to accomplish this, the principle remains the same!

                    _____________________________________________________

3.] More little-known advice

A few CHs later, we find another insightful account about what we must do to become followers of Jesus Christ.

With a huge number of people crowding around to hear Jesus’ every word, He gave more examples not of how easy it is to give your heart to the Lord, but how heavy the obligation of becoming a Christian is.

     3a.] “Hate” those closest to you?

In Luke 14:26 Jesus said, “If anyone comes to Me & does not hate their father & mother, wife & children, brothers & sisters, yes, & their own life also, s/he cannot be My disciple.”

      This instruction seems strange until we understand the meaning of the        original language.

      The NKJV Study Bible explains: “To ‘hate’ one’s family & even one’s life is       rhetorical. It refers to desiring something less than something else”       [2007, notes on Luke 14:26].

      In other words, a Christian’s love for living God’s way of life has to be       greater than the love s/he has for any human relationship, as well as for self.

      Even clarified, the statement is rather unexpected.

3b.] Endure trials

      The next example was extremely graphic.

Jesus said, “And whoever does not bear their cross & come after Me cannot be My disciple” [v.27].

      Just as condemned criminals were made to carry the crosses upon which       they would be executed..

we must be willing to endure whatever trials we may face for being Christians.

3c.] “Count the cost”

      Next, Jesus spoke of a construction project.

      He pointed out that any responsible builder would consider the cost of the       entire project from start to finish & then make sure s/he had the       necessary funding to complete the project before s/he would even start.

      Beginning a construction project without considering funding could result in       an abandoned, partially complete building—a visual symbol of the builder’s       lack of judgment [v. 28-30].

This principle can also be applied to becoming a Christian.

We need to understand the challenges & hardships—that are sure to come when we begin living God’s way of life.

3d.] Consider your resources

      Jesus then gave an illustration about going to war.

      Quite simply, Jesus said that a king or general counts His troops before       engaging an enemy. Know in advance that victory is possible.

      Insufficient resources to win, makes peace instead of going to war       [v. 31-32].

      >> As for Christians, our battles are spiritual in nature.

      In reality, it is impossible for us to win this war by ourselves.

      Upon becoming a Christian, we need help of God’s great power—His       Holy Spirit—to achieve victory against overwhelming odds.

3e.] “Forsake all”

      Concluding His teaching on this occasion, Jesus said,       “So likewise, whoever of you does not forsake all that s/he has       cannot be My disciple” [v.33].

      The lesson here is that in order to truly follow Christ,          >> this must become the most important thing in our lives.

      Why would Jesus tell people that unless they met these undeniably       stringent standards, they could not become His disciples, Christians?

He was simply further expounding upon the principle that “narrow is the gate.”

                    _____________________________________________________

4.] John’s account

Another insightful passage of Jesus’ teaching on becoming a Christian is found in John 6:25-66. This section of Scripture is a composite of interactions with a variety of people.

Some wanted Jesus to repeat the miracle of producing food.

Some were in audiences of synagogues at which Christ spoke.

And some were Jewish leaders critical of Jesus.

John 6:25-66 | When they found Him on the other side of the sea, they asked Him, “Rabbi, when did You get here?”

Jesus replied, “Truly, truly, I tell you, it is not because you saw these signs that you are looking for Me, but because you ate the loaves & had your fill. Do not work for food that perishes, but for food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you.

For on Him God the Father has placed His seal of approval.”

Then they inquired, “What must we do to perform the works of God?” Jesus replied, “The work of God is this: to believe in the One He has sent.”

So they asked Him, “What sign then will You perform, so that we may see it & believe You? What will You do? Our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, as it is written: ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’”

Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I tell you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but it is My Father who gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is He who comes down from heaven & gives life to the world.”

“Sir,” they said, “give us this bread at all times.”

Jesus answered, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to Me will never hunger, & whoever believes in Me will never thirst. But as I told you, you have seen Me & still you do not believe.

Everyone the Father gives Me will come to Me, & the one who comes to Me I will never drive away.

For I have come down from heaven, not to do My own will, but to do the will of Him who sent Me.

And this is the will of Him who sent Me, that I shall lose none of those He has given Me, but raise them up at the last day.

For it is My Father’s will that everyone who looks to the Son & believes in Him shall have eternal life, & I will raise them up at the last day.”

Christ began talking about physical manna & then explained that He was the true manna & that the way to salvation was by “eat[ing] My flesh & drink[ing] My blood” [v. 53-56].

Not understanding that He was talking about the Passover symbols of bread & wine, which represented His flesh & blood, many people abruptly stopped following Him [v.66].

On the surface, it again appears that Christ’s approach seemed illogical, because His words did not entice people to join Him.

Clearly, Christ did not want just numbers.

He wanted all who became His disciples—students or learners & members of the spiritual body called in Scripture “the Church of God” [Acts 20:28]—to make it through to the end.

They needed to know they would encounter the most difficult challenges of their lives. He would have been irresponsible had He failed to prepare the disciples.

Acts 20:28 | Keep watch over yourselves & the entire flock of which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers. Be shepherds of the church of God, which He purchased with His own blood.

By analogy, failing to counsel them on the challenges they would face if they became Christians would be like taking a group of average citizens & sending them on a military mission meant for an expert team such as the U.S. Navy SEALS or the British SAS.

Without proper training, the people would not likely survive such a mission. And it would be disastrous for the mission itself.

God wants all to achieve their potential, & He wants Christians to understand the serious nature of their commitment to follow Him.

                    _____________________________________________________

5.] Christ never leaves those who commit

Of course, warnings about the challenge of becoming a Christian is not the only counsel Christ gave.

He also promised those who did commit to this way of life, “I will never leave you nor forsake you” [Hebrews 13:5].

The NKJV Study Bible comments, “This quotation is one of the most emphatic statements in the NT. In Greek it contains two double negatives, similar to saying in English, ‘I will never, ever, ever forsake you.’ Jesus uses the same technique to express the certainty of eternal life for believers [John 10:28].”

Hebrews 13:5 | Keep your lives free from the love of money & be content with what you have, for God has said: “Never will I leave you, never will I forsake you.”

John 10:28 | I give them eternal life, & they will never perish. No one can snatch them out of My hand.

You may have heard the military saying “Never leave a person behind!” Similarly, the Father & the Son are fully committed to those who respond to God’s calling.

Jesus made a similar promise at the end of Matthew 28:18-20 saying He would never stop being with Church members at any time throughout the ages.

Matthew 28:18-20 | Then Jesus came to them & said, “All authority in heaven & on earth has been given to Me.

Therefore go & make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, & of the Son, & of the Holy Spirit, & teaching them to obey all that I have commanded you.

And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”

                    _____________________________________________________

6.] What path are you choosing?

So why would anyone choose the narrow gate, symbolizing the way Christians must live, when it is such a difficult path compared to the smooth, easy way of the world?

Because there are often adventures, thrills & vistas available only to those who take the difficult path.

The difficult way brings rewards that those who remain on the smooth & easy way will never know!

Similarly, the experience of being in the Church is incomparably rewarding to those who are called of God.

They become part of the family of God now.

They serve in His work.

They are energized by interacting with people of like mind.

They anticipate reigning with Christ in the coming Kingdom of God.

They deeply appreciate being led by the Holy Spirit & understand that godliness has benefits for “the life that now is” & “that which is to come” [1 Timothy 4:8].

                   _____________________________________________________

Conclusion

Look at your level of commitment, which you can judge by:

>> how much you put into practice what you know God would have you do.

Would “narrow is the gate” describe the way you are choosing to live? Or, Are you choosing the smooth way, the way that meets the least resistance?

To learn more about becoming a Christian, be sure to read the articles in the “Change” section of this website.

Source: lifehopeandtruth via wisdomfish

[thecoliverlibrary]

Whatever Happened To Fay Wray?

Gift Type: Fan Fiction Title: Whatever Happened To Fay Wray? Author: @martianspyder Recipient: @awkwardbabyseal​ Rating: Mature Warnings: implied underage drinking, allusion to underage sex Word Count: 1376 Summary: Combining the prompts - Connor finds a pics of Oliver’s twink years and a sexy costume from Rocky Horror Picture Show. Author’s Note: Unbeta’d and rewritten on the fly after Open Office ate the original.

Of course it all started with Connor’s laptop dying.

It was during the full on madness of midterms and Connor had been overworking his already severely under maintained laptop well beyond its limits. So Oliver had done what any responsible boyfriend would do in that situation – he loaned him his laptop.

Not the one he kept for work with his collection of essential applications, hacking shortcuts and Minecraft mods. Nope. He was a good boyfriend but not a saint. Plus he’d witnessed Connor torturing one computer to death already. When all attempts at resuscitation had failed and Oliver had declared Connor’s laptop to be deceased, an ex-laptop if you will; the law student had turned frantic, pleading eyes in his direction.

Oliver had sighed, reached into the hall closet and brought out his second laptop. It was an older model that he only kept around in case his main one failed. It was really more of a glorified storage drive but it would give Connor access to his email and a search engine and Middleton’s online resources. Connor had been exuberantly, athletically grateful. When Oliver limped off to work the next morning, the love of his life was already ensconced on the couch amid various notes, textbooks and his old laptop.

Of course Oliver had severely underestimated his bright, inquisitive, nosy, boyfriend’s innate curiosity about all things Oliver-related.

Connor had come up for air at some point and had taken the opportunity to dig through some of the pictures of Oliver Hampton: The Awkward College Years that were backed up to this computer.

I’m a good person, I don’t deserve this, Oliver thought.

“Ollie!” Connor turned the full force of his smile on him. Oliver didn’t trust that smile at all. That was the smile that promised trouble and crumbled defenses. That was the smile that convinced him to skinny dip in his apartment building’s heated pool at three in the morning.

Helen of Troy had nothing on Connor Walsh.

Connor turned the laptop around so he could see the screen and look, there was twenty year old Oliver dressed in a hot pink mesh shirt and black leather pants ready for his first disastrous foray into the Philly club scene.

“I found all these pictures of this hot, nerdy twink.” Connor grinned playfully and flipped through more pics. There were pictures Oliver wearing his old glasses and a Yoda t-shirt at the PhilaU library, Oliver wearing safety goggles and a lab coat as he worked on a class project, Oliver with his old LARP buddies in homemade chainmail.

“Shouldn’t you be studying?” Oliver tried to deflect.

Oliver sat on the couch and pulled the laptop closer. Connor settled against him and hooked his sharp chin over Oliver’s shoulder.

“I mean, you’ve only gotten hotter,” Connor kissed his ear, “But can you imagine if we’d met back then?”

Oliver scoffed and rolled his eyes. “You would have been underage and I wouldn’t have touched you.”

Connor gave him a strangely somber look. “No, you wouldn’t have.” 

Oliver could almost see the moment that Connor shut down that train of thought, like a vault door slamming shut. It made Oliver’s fingers itch to track down all of Connor’s old boarding school hookups. It would be so easy.

Connor turned a flirty, seductive smile to Oliver and it was like the sun shining through a storm cloud. Oliver was so distracted by that smile, he failed to notice that Connor was clicking open the folder marked Dragon Con 2004 until it was too late. 

“I was wondering about this.” Connor started a video. A video of a 20 year old Oliver in full costume drunkenly performing the finale from Rocky Horror Picture Show. Accompanied by his equally drunk and costumed college friends. 

“Come on, “Nomi had said, “you’ll make a perfect Brad! You have a great singing voice and you already have the glasses.”

Oliver had though at first that opting to play Brad would get him out of having to wear some of the more revealing RHPS costumes.  

Then they had decided to do the song and dance routine from the finale. The one where all the characters, including Brad, were wearing matching corsets, stockings and feather boas. 

“Don’t worry dude,” Charlie had reassured him, “what happens at Dragon Con stays at Dragon Con.”

Then she had made sure to get the whole thing on video. Jesus, he needed new friends.

Connor had gone oddly quiet and was entranced by the video playing out on the laptop screen. 

“Do you think you still have that outfit stashed away somewhere?” He asked without tearing his gaze away from the screen. 

Oliver instinctively braced himself for mockery before he really looked at Connor. His eyes were wide and his skin slightly flushed. Not the demeanor of someone who was gearing up to mock his boyfriend’s odder sartorial choices. 

“Do you think you still have that outfit stashed somewhere?” Huh. “I didn’t realize that this was something you were into,” Oliver said with a smile. 

“I’m into you.”  

Connor batted his eyes in that way that showed that he already knew that he was going to get his way. Oliver couldn’t even find it in himself to be upset, because it was true. 

“Nope.” He kissed him before Connor could plead his case. “You know that was ten years ago, right? It wouldn’t fit me, even if I still had it.”

He was no Nate Lahey but Oliver had worked very hard and was no longer the skinny geek he’d been in college. Unable to stand the disappointment in Connor’s expression, he added. “ Why don’t you concentrate on making it through the week without collapsing and I’ll see what I can put together.”

“Now - since you’re obviously taking a break from studying, maybe I can interest you in dinner and some company?” He leaned forward and sniffed in a deliberately obnoxious way. “But first, you should shower. Have you even moved from this couch all day?”

Connor moved to comply with a gratifying quickness, while casually throwing out an invitation to join him. 

“I’ll be right there.” Oliver chuckled as he took a quick look at the video paused on his laptop. He had a look to recreate.

Two weeks later.

“Honey I’m home!” Connor called out as he tossed his keys onto the counter. 

“Are you alone?” a familiar voice called out. 

“That sounds ominous” 

Connor stopped short of the entrance way to their bedroom and just stared. “You remembered.”

There - lounging on their bed was his amazing, gorgeous boyfriend. He was dressed in a close approximation of the promised Rocky Horror outfit. The corset top - lacy instead of sequins - accentuating a smoothly muscled torso, fishnet stockings and spiked heels making his legs look even longer. Oliver stood up and stalked toward Connor, more graceful than anyone should be on balanced on stiletto heels. 

Connor was still standing quietly with a somewhat pole-axed expression. Oliver put a hand up to touch his face, concerned that he somehow managed to break his boyfriend. He leaned forward and kissed him softly, the heels giving him a pleasant height advantage. “Everything okay?”

Connor stretched up and deepened the kiss before pulling back and throwing him a heated look. 

“I really need to you to fuck me now.”

Connor found himself pressed back against the wall, Oliver’s palm coming up to cradle the back of his head before it bumped into the wall. From there it was a haphazard journey across the room to the bed, slamming into the dresser, nearly knocking over the mirror. Connor shedding clothing like a snake shedding its skin with every step. 

Somehow Connor ended up pressed face down on their bed, the stiff lace of the corset scratching against his back and fishnets rubbing the inside of his thighs with every thrust of Oliver’s hips. He had been moaning almost continuously since they’d started against the wall and now he let out a hoarse scream as he felt Oliver sink teeth into his shoulder to stifle his own cries as he filled him up.

Later on they curled together, grinning at each other like idiots before falling asleep wrapped up in each other.

[63824peace]

Tuesday, 22nd of november 2005

A friend pulled me into conversation this morning without even saying hello. "I saw a Quake-Cloud last week. It was terrible, frightful... just awful."

He claimed to have clearly seen a cloud shaped like an arrow, pointing from the sky to Roppongi Hills. He said it was obviously a Quake-Cloud... a premonition that Roppongi would suffer tremors.

The sight had shocked him so severely that he couldn't tell anyone about it until today.

"Last week?" I said. "But when? Which day?"

"I don't remember... perhaps Thursday."

"I hadn't heard any news of this."

"No, there's no mistaking it!" he insisted. "I saw a Quake-Cloud!"

He usually watches all sorts of television programs related to these matters. He's probably an expert by now.

"A Quake-Cloud, eh?"

What do Quake-Clouds even look like? Are they magnetic fields created from seismic distortions in the bedrock? I'm clueless on these matters.

I listened to him doubtfully, and he seemed to lose patience. The prophet muttered his forecast: "A huge earthquake will hit within two weeks." He appeared somehow relieved, and then he hastily tottered away.

A big earthquake, huh... maybe it'll come, and maybe it won't. If I start to worry about something as small as this, I might as well worry forever.

I should still prepare for the worst though. I have readied myself for the reality that a huge earthquake will hit someday.

I relayed the story as a joke to Matsuhanan, and he reacted with a serious expression.

"What's wrong?" I said.

Matsuhanan lowered his voice. "I'm not saying this to scare you, but--" His voice cut on the word. He leaned closely and hardened his expression. "I dreamed of an earthquake over the weekend."

"So?" I said. "What about it?"

"I had a dream, and in it we all got hit by an earthquake."

"Hmm. Well, still, that's just the sort of thing you'd expect from a dream, right?"

"However," he said. "On top of that, my wife also dreamed of an earthquake that very same morning."

Two similar events can happen, and we can still dismiss them as coincidences. Something more enormous than mere coincidence emerges when three similar events occur. How ominous....

Everyone who had not paid attention to our conversation earlier now listened intently. The air thickened, and the very atmosphere changed immediately.

Matsuhanan and I had both experienced the Kobe Earthquake. Memories from that time bubbled to the surface of my thoughts. I don't ever want to experience or see anything like that again. I decided to shut off these negative emotions as soon as possible.

"So you and your wife both dreamed of earthquakes? The answer's pretty simple here--you must have been on top of your wife without knowing it!"

"H-hey! That's not true!"

"Sexy Matsuhanan!"

"Oh, be serious."

I managed to ease the tense, nervous atmosphere with a little juvenile obscenity. We settled the matter with laughter.

We've seen some pretty scandalous problems lately regarding cover-ups of some buildings' vulnerability to earthquakes. The news broke when everyone concerned themselves with earthquake preparations. "How can we prepare for the big earthquake?" they asked. "And what will we do after the earthquake actually hits?"

I heard that some buildings can topple even under a small earthquake. If a building will collapse under just a small one, what will we do when the big one hits?

Dangers fill our world.

An earthquake will definitely hit us one day. No one knows when, of course, but Tokyo can't avoid its fate. It may hit tomorrow, within ten years, or even fifty years from now.

Still, we can't squander time worrying. We live in Tokyo, and we can't leave it. We certainly won't abandon it. We live with the possibility of disaster every day. Most importantly, we must avoid panic while also keeping ourselves prepared for our future quake.

A long time ago, Toho produced a movie called Jishin Retto (1980). Kaneto Shindo wrote the film's scenario; he's one of my favorite directors. The last scene disappointed me because it was just a rehash of the famous panic movie, Earthquake (1974).

The film's contents aside, the advertisement copy was great. It went something like this: "I knew it would hit one day... but I never thought it would hit today."

Over the past weekend I finally got to watch the bonus disc's extra footage from War of the Worlds. It lasted a total of 165 minutes.

They presented the Previsualization Method developed by Industrial Light & Magic (ILM). The method draws out the full potential of scenes that use a lot of CG and CGI.

Film-makers traditionally edited the CGI and V/A composition into the film after they had finished shooting. There's a problem with that method though. According to these traditional methods, we needed to shoot the film against a blue screen background. We could have a hard time feeling out where the non-existent objects, scenery, and atmosphere belonged in the shooting studio.

Each person's imagination differs from other people's imaginations. We have a lot of room for miscommunication and misunderstandings. The shooting studio only becomes more chaotic when everyone on the set works out of sync with the total scenario conveyed on the blue screen.

ILM invented Previsualization to solve this problem. Think of it as a storyboard transferred into 3D images.

Each person can coordinate himself with the total scenario when he examines the Previsualized images in the shooting studio. People can arrive at a consensus understanding among themselves before they shoot... the actors, the special effects team, the stuntmen, and the CG team.

We can use this to determine how all the visual elements will correlate. We'll also work more efficiently with ILM's Previsualization Method. Production costs will drop. Talk about killing two birds with one stone.

James Cameron made a small model of his set while working on Terminator 2 in order to shorten his production period. He used a small camera to test various angles, and then he started to shoot. He cut back on the time needed to make his set that way.

Previsualization uses the same idea. We can decide how to adjust our special effects and our camera placement by moving character models through scenery in 3D space. We can decide how to handle our set, visual characteristics, props, and CGI usage after selecting the camera location.

This is how they produced War of the Worlds so quickly. Spielberg is known for a quick turnaround on his films, but Previsualization made this one possible.

I thought about how similar Previsualization seems to resemble our own development methods when I saw it in motion. We naturally used those methods when games became 3D in the late 1990s. We didn't pick it up from anyone... it's simply necessary to make our games.

We first construct the game using simple models and scenery. We treat the cutscenes the same way because they require cinematic effects. We test the module while minimizing all our resources, such as processing speed, MGS-defining characteristics, camera, and general operations. We must reduce everything to its bare qualities in our Previsualization Phase.

Once we fix everything using trial and error, we move on to full-scale production. The film industry's shooting phase equates to this.

Likewise, we don't use the older methods of making the game's map. Instead of drawing it directly, we structure the game according to the script team's provisional map. Once we've done that, we hand everything over to the designers. The pre-production period always lasts the longest while making a game.

The film industry could only have realized its Previsualization Method through digital technology. Film has finally evened out with the game-making process. Some aspects of game-making are behind the times. Other parts, however, are well ahead.

I ate lunch at the Nishi Azabu restaurant La Brace. I ordered spaghetti with ground chicken and Chinese cabbage. I wanted a drink of wine, but I controlled myself. Customers all around me wet their throats.

It's only on the lunch menu, but that was a big salad.

The pasta tasted delicious too. I paid a cheap price considering how much I ate.

We held our hiring interviews in the afternoon. After that we worked on our projects for MGS4 until evening, just like yesterday.

The project certainly is fun. I'd love to work on it twenty-four hours a day. I only want to create.

I'll totally shift my focus onto MGS4 once our new PSP project gets off the ground. I'll try to avoid entanglements such as interviews, clients, meetings, or lectures. I have to focus on my work during the pre-production and Previsualization periods.

At the bookstore I bought the fifth volume of Complete Cobra. I buy manga to read at a later date these days. I haven't got time to read any of them now, and the same really goes for novels. I finished reading Mr. Kurokawa's book Ansho, and I have started reading Parker's latest, Melancholy Baby.

I received my copy of NewWORDS, an entertainment magazine for mature adults. Kadokawa Publishing will release it November 25.

The cover really impacts the reader. It's a shot of Natalie Portman with her head entirely shaved! It will catch the attention of people in the bookstore. The magazine's first issue comes with a UMD Video that contains an episode of Blood+. I think it's really hip that they're not just including a regular DVD.

I wish this mature entertainment magazine great success.

I am actually helping NewWORDS by giving them an interview and writing introductions to movies. I'd like many adults to read it.

People in the past used to call Otaku a new type of subculture. Now we have all become adults. These Otaku now work as members of society, and they pay the usual taxes. They register to vote, and they participate in politics. They have married and now take care of families with children. They have become aware of their larger human community.

The Otaku's loneliness has disappeared, but his responsibilities have increased. These Otaku swore never to grow up -- yet they grew up without even noticing.

Nonetheless, games and anime still mean a lot to them.

People started calling manga "graphic novels." Manga became acceptable as dignified adult entertainment as time moved on. We also ought to have anime and games made specifically for adults.

But here's the question: will supply or demand come first?

Nothing will happen if we just wait for an answer. We're not looking at an issue of "When will it happen?" We're dealing with an issue of ‘Who will do it?’"

Who will innovate products to serve this market?

Now that I think on it, people in the last century used to call Otaku a new type of human being or an alien race. I think that Otaku should take a lesson from War of the Worlds -- they should return as adults from underground.

Our bodies retain the sturdy weight of our time's residue. As adults at last, we shall shed the filth on our own.

[katebushwick]

Indeterminacy has a rich legacy in human appreciation of mushrooms.

American composer John Cage wrote a set of short performance

pieces called Indeterminacy, many of which celebrate encounters with

mushrooms.1 Hunting wild mushrooms, for Cage, required a particular

kind of attention: attention to the here and now of encounter, in all its

contingencies and surprises. Cage’s music was all about this “always different”

here and now, which he contrasted to the enduring “sameness”

of classical composition; he composed to get the audience to listen as

much to ambient sounds as composed music. In one famous composition,

4'33", no music is played at all, and the audience is forced to just

listen. Cage’s attention to listening as things occurred brought him to

appreciate indeterminacy. The Cage quotation with which I began this

chapter is his translation of seventeenth-century

Japanese poet Matsuo

Basho’s haiku, “matsutake ya shiranu ki no ha no hebari tsuku,” which

I have seen translated as “Matsutake; And on it stuck / The leaf of some

unknown tree.”2 Cage decided that the indeterminacy of encounter was

not clear enough in such translations. First he settled on “That that’s

unknown brings mushroom and leaf together,” which nicely expresses

the indeterminacy of encounter. But, he thought, it is too ponderous.

“What leaf? What mushroom?” can also take us into that open-endedness

that Cage so valued in learning from mushrooms.3

Indeterminacy has been equally important in what scientists learn

from mushrooms. Mycologist Alan Rayner finds the indeterminacy of fungal growth one of the most exciting things about fungi.4 Human bodies achieve a determinate form early in our lives. Barring injury, we’ll never be all that different in shape than we were as adolescents. We can’t grow extra limbs, and we’re stuck with the one brain we’ve each got. In contrast, fungi keep growing and changing form all their lives. Fungi are famous for changing shape in relation to their encounters and environments. Many are “potentially immortal,” meaning they die from disease, injury, or lack of resources, but not from old age. Even this little fact can alert us to how much our thoughts about knowledge and existence just assume determinate life form and old age. We rarely imagine life without such limits—and when we do we stray into magic. Rayner challenges us to think with mushrooms, otherwise. Some aspects of our lives are more comparable to fungal indeterminacy, he points out. Our daily habits are repetitive, but they are also open-ended, responding to opportunity and encounter. What if our indeterminate life form was not the shape of our bodies but rather the shape of our motions over time? Such indeterminacy expands our concept of human life, showing us how we are transformed by encounter. Humans and fungi share such here-and-now transformations through encounter. Sometimes they encounter each other. As another seventeenth-century haiku put it: “Matsutake / Taken by someone else / Right in front of my nose.”5 What person? What mushroom? The smell of matsutake transformed me in a physical way. The first time I cooked them, they ruined an otherwise lovely stir-fry. The smell was overwhelming. I couldn’t eat it; I couldn’t even pick out the other vegetables without encountering the smell. I threw the whole pan away and ate my rice plain. After that I was cautious, collecting but not eating. Finally, one day, I brought the whole load to a Japanese colleague, who was head over heels in delight. She had never seen so much matsutake in her life. Of course she prepared some for dinner. First, she showed me how she tore apart each mushroom, not touching it with a knife. The metal of the knife changes the flavor, she said, and, besides, her mother told her that the spirit of the mushroom doesn’t like it. Then she grilled the matsutake on a hot pan without oil. Oil changes the smell, she explained. Worse yet, butter, with its strong smell. Matsutake must be dry grilled or put into a soup; oil or butter ruins it. She served the grilled matsutake with a bit of lime juice. It was marvelous! The smell had begun to delight me. 48 Interlude Over the next few weeks, my senses changed. It was an amazing year for matsutake, and they were everywhere. Now, when I caught a whiff, I felt happy. I lived for several years in Borneo, where I had had a similar experience with durian, that marvelously stinky tropical fruit. The first time I was served durian I thought I would vomit. But it was a good year for durian, and the smell was everywhere. Before long I found myself thrilled by the smell; I couldn’t remember what had sickened me. Similarly, matsutake: I could no longer remember what I had found so disturbing. Now it smelled like joy. I’m not the only one who has that reaction. Koji Ueda runs a beautifully trim vegetable shop in Kyoto’s traditional market. During the matsutake season, he explained, most people who come into the store don’t want to buy (his matsutake are expensive); they want to smell. Just coming into the store makes people happy, he said. That’s why he sells matsutake, he said: for the sheer pleasure it gives people. Perhaps the happiness factor in smelling matsutake is what pressed Japanese odor engineers to manufacture an artificial matsutake smell. Now you can buy matsutake-flavored potato chips and matsutake-flavored instant miso soup. I’ve tried them, and I can sense a distant memory of matsutake at the edge of my tongue, but it’s nothing like encountering a mushroom. Still, many Japanese have only known matsutake in this form, or as the frozen mushrooms used in matsutake rice or matsutake pizza. They wonder what the fuss is all about and feel indulgently critical toward those who go on and on about matsutake. Nothing can smell all that good. Matsutake lovers in Japan know this scorn and cultivate a defensive exuberance about the mushroom. The smell of matsutake, they say, recalls times past that these young people never knew, much to their detriment. Matsutake, they say, smells like village life and a childhood visiting grandparents and chasing dragonflies. It recalls open pinewoods, now crowded out and dying. Many small memories come together in the smell. It brings to mind the paper dividers on village interior doors, one woman explained; her grandmother would change the papers every New Year and use them to wrap the next year’s mushrooms. It was an easier time, before nature became degraded and poisonous. Nostalgia can be put to good uses. Or so explained Makoto Ogawa, the elder statesman of matsutake science in Kyoto. When I met him, he Smelling 49 had just retired. Worse yet, he had cleaned out his office and thrown away books and scientific articles. But he was a walking library of matsutake science and history. Retirement had made it easier for him to talk about his passions. His matsutake science, he explained, had always involved advocacy for both people and nature. He had dreamed that showing people how to nurture matsutake forests might revitalize connections between city and countryside—as urban people became interested in rural life, and villagers had a valuable product to sell. Meanwhile, even as matsutake research could be funded by economic excitement, it had many benefits for basic science, especially in understanding relations among living things in changing ecologies. If nostalgia was a part of this project, so much the better. This was his nostalgia too. He took my research team to see what once was a thriving matsutake forest behind an old temple. Now the hill was alternately dark with planted conifers and choked with evergreen broadleaf trees, with only a few dying pines. We found no matsutake. Once, he recalled, that hillside was teeming with mushrooms. Like Proust’s madeleines, matsutake are redolent with temps perdu. Dr. Ogawa savors nostalgia with considerable irony and laughter. As we stood in the rain beside the matsutake-less temple forest, he explained the Korean origin of Japanese regard for matsutake. Before you hear the story, consider that there is no love lost between Japanese nationalists and Koreans. For Dr. Ogawa to remind us that Korean aristocrats started Japanese civilization works against the grain of Japanese desire. Besides, civilization, in his tale, is not all for the good. Long before they came to central Japan, Dr. Ogawa related, Koreans had cut down their forests to build temples and fuel iron forging. They had developed in their homeland the human-disturbed open pine forests in which matsutake grow long before such forests emerged in Japan. When Koreans expanded to Japan in the eighth century, they cut down forests. Pine forests sprung up from such deforestation, and with them matsutake. Koreans smelled the matsutake—and they thought of home. The first nostalgia: the first love of matsutake. It was in longing for Korea that Japan’s new aristocracy first glorified the now famous autumn aroma, Dr. Ogawa told us. No wonder, too, that Japanese abroad are so obsessed with matsutake, he added. He ended with a funny story about a Japanese American matsutake hunter he met in Oregon who, in 50 Interlude a badly garbled mixture of Japanese and English, saluted Dr. Ogawa’s research, saying, “We Japanese are matsutake crazy!” Dr. Ogawa’s stories tickled me because they situated nostalgia, but they also drove home another point: matsutake grows only in deeply disturbed forests. Matsutake and red pine are partners in central Japan, and both grow only where people have caused significant deforestation. All over the world, indeed, matsutake are associated with the most disturbed kinds of forests: places where glaciers, volcanoes, sand dunes—or human actions—have done away with other trees and even organic soil. The pumice flats I walked in central Oregon are in some ways typical of the kind of land matsutake knows how to inhabit: land on which most plants and other fungi can find no hold. On such impoverished landscapes, the indeterminacies of encounter loom. What pioneer has found its way here, and how can it live? Even the hardiest of seedlings is unlikely to make it unless it finds a partner in an equally hardy fungus to draw nutrients from the rocky ground. (What leaf? What mushroom?) The indeterminacy of fungal growth matters too. Might it encounter the roots of a receptive tree? A change in substrate or potential nutrition? Through its indeterminate growth, the fungus learns the landscape. There are humans to encounter as well. Will they inadvertently nurture the fungus while cutting firewood and gathering green manure? Or will they introduce hostile plantings, import exotic diseases, or pave the area for suburban development? Humans matter on these landscapes. And humans (like fungi and trees) bring histories with them to meet the challenges of the encounter. These histories, both human and not human, are never robotic programs but rather condensations in the indeterminate here and now; the past we grasp, as philosopher Walter Benjamin puts it, is a memory “that flashes in a moment of danger.”6 We enact history, Benjamin writes, as “a tiger’s leap into that which has gone before.”7 Science studies scholar Helen Verran offers another image: Among Australia’s Yolngu people, she relates, the recollection of the ancestors’ dreaming is condensed for present challenges in a rite at the climax of which a spear is thrown into the center of the storytellers’ circle. The toss of the spear merges the past in the here and now.8 Through smell, all of us know that spear’s throw, that tiger’s leap. The past we bring to encounters is condensed in smell. To smell childhood visits with one’s grandparents condenses a great chunk of Japanese history, Smelling 51 not just the vitality of village life in the mid-twentieth century, but the nineteenth-century deforestation that came before, denuding the landscape, and the urbanization and abandonment of the forests that later followed. While some Japanese may smell nostalgia in the forests made by their disturbances, this is not, of course, the only feeling that people bring to such wild places. Consider the smell of matsutake again. It is time to tell you that most people of European origin can’t stand the smell. A Norwegian gave the Eurasian species its first scientific name, Tricholoma nauseosum, the nauseating Trich. (In recent years, taxonomists made an exception to usual rules of precedence to rename the mushroom, acknowledging Japanese tastes, as Tricholoma matsutake.) Americans of European descent tend to be equally unimpressed by the smell of the Pacific Northwest’s Tricholoma magnivelare. “Mold,” “turpentine,” “mud,” white pickers said, when I asked them to characterize the smell. More than one moved our conversation to the foul smell of rotting fungi. Some were familiar with California mycologist David Arora’s characterization of the smell as “a provocative compromise between ‘red hots’ and dirty socks.”9 Not exactly something you would want to eat. When Oregon’s white pickers prepare the mushroom as food, they pickle it or smoke it. The processing masks the smell, making the mushroom anonymous. It is not surprising, perhaps, that U.S. scientists have studied the smell of matsutake to see what it repels (slugs), but Japanese scientists have studied the smell to consider what it attracts (some flying insects).10 Is it the “same” smell if people bring such different sensibilities to the encounter? Does that problem stretch to slugs and gnats as well as people? What if noses—as in my experience—change? What if the mushroom too can change through its encounters? Matsutake in Oregon associate with many host trees. Oregon pickers can distinguish the host tree with which a particular matsutake has grown—partly from the size and shape, but partly from the smell. The subject came up one day when I examined some truly bad-smelling matsutake being offered for sale. The picker explained that he found these mushrooms under white fir, an unusual host tree for matsutake. Loggers, he said, call white fir “piss fir” because of the bad smell the wood emits when you cut it. The mushrooms smelled as bad as a wounded fir. 52 Interlude To me, they did not smell like matsutake at all. But wasn’t this smell some piss fir–matsutake combination, made in the encounter? There is an intriguing nature-culture knot in such indeterminacies. Different ways of smelling and different qualities of smell are wrapped up together. It seems impossible to describe the smell of matsutake without telling all the cultural-and-natural histories condensed together in it. Any attempt at definitive untangling—perhaps like artificial matsutake scent—is likely to lose the point: the indeterminate experience of encounter, with its tiger’s leap into history. What else is smell? The smell of matsutake wraps and tangles memory and history— and not just for humans. It assembles many ways of being in an affectladen knot that packs its own punch. Emerging from encounter, it shows us history-in-the-making. Smell it. I first heard of matsutake from mycologis t David Arora, who studied matsutake camps in Oregon between 1993 and 1998. I was looking for a culturally colorful global commodity, and Arora’s stories of matsutake intrigued me. He told me of the buyers set up tents by the side of the highway to buy mushrooms at night. “They have nothing to do all day, so they’ll have plenty of time to talk to you,” he ventured. And there the buyers were—but so much more! In the big camp, I seemed to have stepped into rural Southeast Asia. Mien wearing sarongs boiled water in kerosene cans over stone tripods and hung strips of game and fish over the stove to dry. Hmong all the way from North Carolina brought home-canned bamboo shoots for sale. Lao noodle tents sold not only pho but also the most authentic laap I had eaten in the United States, all raw blood, chilies, and intestines. Lao karaoke blared from battery-powered speakers. I even met a Cham picker, although he did not speak Cham, which I thought perhaps I could manage from its closeness to Malay. Mocking my linguistic limitations, a Khmer teenager wearing grunge boasted that he spoke four languages: Khmer, Lao, English, and Ebonics. Local Native Americans sometimes 58 Part II came to sell their mushrooms. There were also both whites and Latinos, although most avoided the official camp, staying in the woods alone or in small groups. And visitors: A Sacramento Filipino followed Mien friends up here one year, although he said he never got the point. A Portland Korean thought maybe he might join. Yet there was something not at all cosmopolitan about the scene as well: A rift separated these pickers and buyers from shops and consumers in Japan. Everyone knew that the mushrooms (except for a small percentage bought for Japanese American markets) were going to Japan. Every buyer and bulker longed to sell directly to Japan—but none had any idea how. Misconceptions about the matsutake trade both in Japan and in other supply sites proliferated. White pickers swore that the value of the mushrooms in Japan was as an aphrodisiac. (While matsutake in Japan do have phallic connotations, no one eats them as a drug.) Some complained about the Chinese Red Army, which, they said, drafted people to pick, which depressed global prices. (Pickers in China are independent, just as in Oregon.) When someone discovered extremely high prices in Tokyo on the Internet, no one realized that these prices referred to Japanese matsutake. One exceptional bulker, of Chinese origin and fluent in Japanese, whispered to me about these misunderstandings—but he was an outsider. Except for this man, Oregon pickers, buyers, and bulkers were completely in the dark about the Japanese side of the trade. They made up fantasy landscapes of Japan, and they did not know how to assess them. They had their own matsutake world: a patch of practices and meanings that brought them together as matsutake suppliers—but did not inform the mushrooms’ further passage. This rift between U.S. and Japanese segments of the commodity chain guided my search. Different processes for making and accessing value characterized each segment. Given this diversity, what makes this part of that global economy we call capitalism? It may seem odd to want to tackle capi talis m with a theory that stresses ephemeral assemblages and multidirectional histories. After all, the global economy has been the centerpiece of progress, and even radical critics have described its forward-looking motion as filling up the world. Like a giant bulldozer, capitalism appears to flatten the earth to its specifications. But all this only raises the stakes for asking what else is going on—not in some protected enclave, but rather everywhere, both inside and out. Impressed by the rise of factories in the nineteenth century, Marx showed us forms of capitalism that required the rationalization of wage labor and raw materials. Most analysts have followed this precedent, imagining a factory-driven system with a coherent governance structure, built in cooperation with nation-states. Yet today—as then—much of the economy takes place in radically different scenes. Supply chains snake back and forth not only across continents but also across standards; it would be hard to identify a single rationality across the chain. Yet assets are still amassed for further investment. How does this work? Capitalist edge effects, Oregon. Pickers line up to sell matsutake to a roadside buyer. Precarious livelihoods show themselves at the edges of capitalist governance. Precarity is that here and now in which pasts may not lead to futures. 62 Chapter 4 A supply chain is a particular kind of commodity chain: one in which lead firms direct commodity traffic.1 Throughout this part, I explore the supply chain linking matsutake pickers in the forests of Oregon with those who eat the mushrooms in Japan. The chain is surprising and full of cultural variety. The factory work through which we know capitalism is mainly missing. But the chain illuminates something important about capitalism today: Amassing wealth is possible without rationalizing labor and raw materials. Instead, it requires acts of translation across varied social and political spaces, which, borrowing from ecologists’ usage, I call “patches.” Translation, in Shiho Satsuka’s sense, is the drawing of one world-making project into another.2 While the term draws attention to language, it can also refer to other forms of partial attunement. Translations across sites of difference are capitalism: they make it possible for investors to accumulate wealth. How do mushrooms foraged as trophies of freedom become capitalist assets—and later, exemplary Japanese gifts? Answering this question requires attention to the unexpected assemblages of the chain’s component links, as well as the translation processes that draw the links together into a transnational circuit. Capitalism is a system for concentrating wealth, which makes possible new investments, which further concentrate wealth. This process is accumulation. Classic models take us to the factory: factory owners concentrate wealth by paying workers less than the value of the goods that the workers produce each day. Owners “accumulate” investment assets from this extra value. Even in factories, however, there are other elements of accumulation. In the nineteenth century, when capitalism first became an object of inquiry, raw materials were imagined as an infinite bequest from Nature to Man. Raw materials can no longer be taken for granted. In our food procurement system, for example, capitalists exploit ecologies not only by reshaping them but also by taking advantage of their capacities. Even in industrial farms, farmers depend on life processes outside their control, such as photosynthesis and animal digestion. In capitalist farms, living things made within ecological processes are coopted for Working the Edge 63 the concentration of wealth. This is what I call “salvage,” that is, taking advantage of value produced without capitalist control. Many capitalist raw materials (consider coal and oil) came into existence long before capitalism. Capitalists also cannot produce human life, the prerequisite of labor. “Salvage accumulation” is the process through which lead firms amass capital without controlling the conditions under which commodities are produced. Salvage is not an ornament on ordinary capitalist processes; it is a feature of how capitalism works.3 Sites for salvage are simultaneously inside and outside capitalism; I call them “pericapitalist.”4 All kinds of goods and services produced by pericapitalist activities, human and nonhuman, are salvaged for capitalist accumulation. If a peasant family produces a crop that enters capitalist food chains, capital accumulation is possible through salvaging the value created in peasant farming. Now that global supply chains have come to characterize world capitalism, we see this process everywhere. “Supply chains” are commodity chains that translate value to the benefit of dominant firms; translation between noncapitalist and capitalist value systems is what they do. Salvage accumulation through global supply chains is not new, and some well-known earlier examples can clarify how it works. Consider the nineteenth-century ivory supply chain connecting central Africa and Europe as told in Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness. 5 The story turns around the narrator’s discovery that the European trader he much admired has turned to savagery to procure his ivory. The savagery is a surprise because everyone expects the European presence in Africa to be a force for civilization and progress. Instead, civilization and progress turn out to be cover-ups and translation mechanisms for getting access to value procured through violence: classic salvage. For a brighter view of supply-chain translation, consider Herman Melville’s account of the nineteenth-century procurement of whale oil for Yankee investors.6 Moby-Dick tells of a ship of whalers whose rowdy cosmopolitanism contrasts sharply with our stereotypes of factory discipline; yet the oil they obtain from killing whales around the world enters a U.S.-based capitalist supply chain. Strangely, all the harpooners on the Pequod are unassimilated indigenous people from Asia, Africa, America, and the Pacific. The ship is unable to kill a single whale without the expertise of people who are completely untrained in U.S. 64 Chapter 4 industrial discipline. But the products of this work must eventually be translated into capitalist value forms; the ship sails only because of capitalist financing. The conversion of indigenous knowledge into capitalist returns is salvage accumulation. So too is the conversion of whale life into investments. Before you conclude that salvage accumulation is archaic, let me turn to a contemporary example. Technological advances in managing inventory have energized today’s global supply chains; inventory management allows lead firms to source their products from all kinds of economic arrangements, capitalist and otherwise. One firm that helped put such innovations in place is the retail giant Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart pioneered the required use of universal product codes (UPCs), the blackand-white bars that allow computers to know these products as inventory.7 The legibility of inventory, in turn, means that Wal-Mart is able to ignore the labor and environmental conditions through which its products are made: pericapitalist methods, including theft and violence, may be part of the production process. With a nod to Woody Guthrie, we might think about the contrast between production and accounting through the two sides of the UPC tag.8 One side of the tag, the side with the black-and-white bars, allows the product to be minutely tracked and assessed. The other side of the tag is blank, indexing Wal-Mart’s total lack of concern with how the product is made, since value can be translated through accounting. Wal-Mart has become famous for forcing its suppliers to make products ever more cheaply, thus encouraging savage labor and destructive environmental practices.9 Savage and salvage are often twins: Salvage translates violence and pollution into profit. As inventory moves increasingly under control, the requirement to control labor and raw materials recedes; supply chains make value from translating values produced in quite varied circumstances into capitalist inventory. One way of thinking about this is through scalability, the technical feat of creating expansion without the distortion of changing relations. The legibility of inventory allows scalable retail expansion for Wal-Mart without requiring that production be scalable. Production is left to the riotous diversity of nonscalability, with its relationally particular dreams and schemes. We know this best in “the race to the bottom”: the role of global supply chains in promoting coerced labor, dangerous sweatshops, poisonous substitute ingredients, and irresponsible Working the Edge 65 environmental gouging and dumping. Where lead firms pressure suppliers to provide cheaper and cheaper products, such production conditions are predictable outcomes. As in Heart of Darkness, unregulated production is translated in the commodity chain, and even reimagined as progress. This is frightening. At the same time, as J. K. Gibson-Graham argue in their optimistic reach toward a “postcapitalist politics,” economic diversity can be hopeful.10 Pericapitalist economic forms can be sites for rethinking the unquestioned authority of capitalism in our lives. At the very least, diversity offers a chance for multiple ways forward—not just one. In her insightful comparison between the supply chains for French green beans (haricots verts) that link West Africa with France and East Africa with Great Britain, respectively, geographer Susanne Freidberg offers a sense of how supply chains, drawing variously on colonial and national histories, may encourage quite different economic forms.11 French neocolonial schemes mobilize peasant cooperatives; British supermarket standards encourage expatriate scam operations.12 Within and across differences such as these, there is room for building a politics to confront and navigate salvage accumulation. But following GibsonGraham to call this politics “postcapitalist” seems to me premature. Through salvage accumulation, lives and products move back and forth between noncapitalist and capitalist forms; these forms shape each other and interpenetrate. The term “pericapitalist” acknowledges that those of us caught in such translations are never fully shielded from capitalism; pericapitalist spaces are unlikely platforms for a safe defense and recuperation. At the same time, the more prominent critical alternative—shutting one’s eyes to economic diversity—seems even more ridiculous in these times. Most critics of capitalism insist on the unity and homogeneity of the capitalist system; many, like Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, argue that there is no longer a space outside of capitalism’s empire.13 Everything is ruled by a singular capitalist logic. As for Gibson-Graham, this claim is an attempt to build a critical political position: the possibility of transcending capitalism. Critics who stress the uniformity of capitalism’s hold on the world want to overcome it through a singular solidarity. But what blinders this hope requires! Why not instead admit to economic diversity? 66 Chapter 4 My goal in bringing up Gibson-Graham and Hardt and Negri is not to dismiss them; indeed, I think they are perhaps the early twenty-first century’s most trenchant anticapitalist critics. Furthermore, by setting out strongly contrasting goal posts between which we might think and play, they jointly do us an important service. Is capitalism a single, overarching system that conquers all, or one segregated economic form among many?14 Between these two positions, we might see how capitalist and noncapitalist forms interact in pericapitalist spaces. Gibson-Graham advise us, quite correctly I think, that what they call “noncapitalist” forms can be found everywhere in the midst of capitalist worlds—rather than just in archaic backwaters. But they see such forms as alternatives to capitalism. Instead, I would look for the noncapitalist elements on which capitalism depends. Thus, for example, when Jane Collins reports that workers in Mexican garment assembly factories are expected to know how to sew before they begin their jobs, because they are women, we are offered a glimpse of noncapitalist and capitalist economic forms working together.15 Women learn to sew growing up at home; salvage accumulation is the process that brings this skill into the factory to the benefit of owners. To understand capitalism (and not just its alternatives), then, we can’t stay inside the logics of capitalists; we need an ethnographic eye to see the economic diversity through which accumulation is possible. It takes concrete histories to make any concept come to life. And isn’t mushroom collecting a place to look, after progress? The rifts and bridges of the Oregon-to-Japan matsutake commodity chain show capitalism achieved through economic diversity. Matsutake foraged and sold in pericapitalist performances become capitalist inventory as they are sent to Japan a day later. Such translation is the central problem of many global supply chains. Let me begin by describing the first part of the chain.16 Americans don’t like middlemen, who, they say, just rip off value. But middlemen are consummate translators; their presence directs us to salvage accumulation. Consider the North American side of the commodity chain that brings matsutake from Oregon to Japan. (The Japanese side—with its many middlemen—will be considered later.) Indepen- Working the Edge 67 dent foragers pick the mushrooms in national forests. They sell to independent buyers, who sell, in turn, to bulkers’ field agents, who sell to other bulkers or to exporters, who sell and ship, at last, to importers in Japan. Why so many middlemen? The best answer may be a history. Japanese traders began importing matsutake in the 1980s, when the scarcity of matsutake in Japan first became clear. Japan was bursting with investment capital, and matsutake were prime luxuries, equally suitable as perks, gifts, or bribes. American matsutake were still an expensive novelty in Tokyo, and restaurants competed to get some. Emerging matsutake traders in Japan were like other Japanese traders of that time, ready to use their capital to organize supply chains. The mushrooms were expensive, so the incentives for suppliers were good. North American traders remember the 1990s as a time of extraordinary prices—and high-risk gambling. If a supplier was able to hit the Japanese markets correctly, the payoff was huge. But with an inconsistent and easy-to-spoil forest product and rapidly changing demand, the possibilities for total wipeout were also great. Everyone spoke of those days in casino metaphors. One Japanese trader compared the importers then to the Mafia in international ports after World War I: It was not just that the importers were gambling but that they were also catalyzing gambling—and keeping the gambling going. Japanese importers needed local know-how, and they began through alliances with exporters. In the Pacific Northwest, the first exporters were Asian Canadians in Vancouver—and because of their precedent, most U.S. matsutake continue to be exported by their firms. These exporters were not interested only in matsutake. They shipped seafood, or cherries, or log homes to Japan; matsutake were added to those activities. Some—especially the Japanese immigrants—told me they added matsutake to sweeten long-term relations with importers. They were willing to ship matsutake at a loss, they said, to keep their relations intact. Alliances between exporters and importers formed a basis for the transpacific trade. But the exporters—experts in fish, or fruit, or timber— knew nothing about how to get the mushrooms. In Japan, matsutake come to the market via an agricultural cooperative, or from individual farmers. In North America, matsutake are scattered across enormous national (U.S.) or commonwealth (Canadian) forests. This is where the small companies that I call “bulkers” come in; bulkers gather mushrooms 68 Chapter 4 to sell to exporters. Bulkers’ field agents buy mushrooms from “buyers” who buy from pickers. Field agents, like buyers, must know the terrain and the people likely to search it. In the earliest days of the U.S. Pacific Northwest matsutake trade, most field agents, buyers, and pickers were white men who found solace in the mountains, such as Vietnam veterans, displaced loggers, and rural “traditionalists” who rejected liberal urban society. After 1989, an increasing number of refugees from Laos and Cambodia came to pick, and field agents had to stretch their abilities to work with Southeast Asians. Southeast Asians eventually became buyers, and a few became field agents. Working around each other, the whites and Southeast Asians found a common vocabulary in “freedom,” which could mean many things dear to each group, even if they were not the same. Native Americans found resonance, but Latino pickers did not share the rhetoric of freedom. Despite this variation, the overlapping concerns of self-exiled whites and Southeast Asian refugees became the heartbeat of the trade; freedom brought out the matsutake. Through shared concerns with freedom, the U.S. Pacific Northwest became one of the world’s great matsutake exporting areas. Yet this way of life was segregated from the rest of the commodity chain. Bulkers and buyers longed to export matsutake directly to Japan but did not succeed. Neither buyers nor bulkers could get beyond the already difficult exchange with Canadian exporters of Asian origin, for whom English was not often a first language. They complained about unfair practices, but in fact they were useless at the cultural translation necessary for the making of inventory. For it is not just language that separates pickers, buyers, and bulkers in Oregon from Japanese traders; it is the conditions of production. Oregon mushrooms are contaminated with the cultural practices of “freedom.” The story of an exception makes the point. “Wei” first went to Japan from his native China to study music; when he found he could not make a living, he entered the Japanese vegetable import trade. He became fluent in Japanese, although still prickly about some features of life in Japan. When his company wanted someone to go to North America, he volunteered. This is how he became an idiosyncratic combination of field agent, bulker, and exporter. He goes to the matsutake area to watch the buying, just like other field agents, but he has a direct line Working the Edge 69 to Japan. Unlike the other field agents, he is constantly on the phone with Japanese traders, gauging opportunities and prices. He also talks to Japanese Canadian exporters, although he does not sell his mushrooms through them; because he can talk to them in Japanese, they constantly ask him to explain conditions in the field, including the behavior of the field agents whose mushrooms they buy. Meanwhile, the other field agents refuse to include him in their company and conspire against his buyers. He is not welcomed into their discussions, and, indeed, is shunned by the freedom-loving mountain men. Unlike the other field agents, Wei pays his buyers a salary, rather than a commission. He demands the loyalty and discipline of employees, refusing them the freewheeling independence of the other buyers. He buys matsutake for particular shipments, with particular characteristics, rather than buying for the pleasure and prowess of free competition, as the others do. He is already making inventory in the buying tents. His difference highlights the distinctiveness of the freedom assemblage as a patch. As international matsutake commerce entered the twenty-first century, regularization was afoot in Japan. Prices there stabilized as supply chains in many countries developed, as rankings of foreign matsutake congealed, and as perk-money in Japan diminished and the demand for matsutake became more specialized. The prices of Oregon matsutake in Japan became relatively stable—considering, of course, that matsutake is still a wild product with an irregular supply. However, this stability was not reflected in Oregon, where prices continued to roller-coaster, even if never returning to 1990s’ highs. When I talked to Japanese importers about this discrepancy, they explained it as a matter of American “psychology.” An importer who specialized in Oregon matsutake was thrilled to show me photographs from his visits and reminisce about his Wild West experiences in Oregon. White and Southeast Asian pickers and buyers, he explained, would not produce mushrooms without the excitement of what he called an “auction,” and the more the price fluctuated, the better the buying. (In contrast, he said, Mexican pickers in Oregon were willing to accept a constant price, but the others dominated the trade.) His job was to facilitate American peculiarities; his company had a parallel specialist in Chinese matsutake, whose job was to accommodate Chinese quirks. By facilitating varied cultural economies, his 70 Chapter 4 company could build its business through mushrooms from around the world. It was this man’s expectation of the necessity of cultural translation that first alerted me to the problem of salvage accumulation. In the 1970s, Americans expected the globalization of capital to mean the spread of U.S. business standards all over the world. In contrast, Japanese traders had become specialists in building international supply chains and using them as mechanisms of translation to bring goods into Japan without Japanese production facilities or employment standards. As long as these goods could be made into legible inventory in their transit to Japan, Japanese traders could use them to accumulate capital. By the end of the century, Japanese economic power had slipped, and twentieth-century Japanese business innovations were eclipsed by neoliberal reforms. But no one cares to reform the matsutake commodity chain; it is too small and too “Japanese.” Here is a place, then, to look for the Japanese trading strategies that rocked the world. At their center is translation between diverse economies. Traders as translators become masters of salvage accumulation. Before taking on translation, however, I need to visit the freedom assemblage. One cold October night in the late 1990s, three Hmong American matsutake pickers huddled in their tent. Shivering, they brought their gas cooking stove inside to provide a little warmth. They went to sleep with the stove on. It went out. The next morning, all three were dead, asphyxiated by the fumes. Their deaths left the campground vulnerable, haunted by their ghosts. Ghosts can paralyze you, taking away your ability to move or speak. The Hmong pickers moved away, and the others soon moved too. The U.S. Forest Service did not know about the ghosts. They wanted to rationalize the pickers’ camping area, to make it accessible to police and emergency services, and easier for campground hosts to enforce rules and fees. In the early 1990s, Southeast Asian pickers had camped where they pleased, like everyone else who visits the national forests. But whites complained that Southeast Asians left too much litter. The Forest Communal agendas, Oregon. A Mien pickers’ encampment. Here Mien recalled village life and escaped the confinements of California cities. 74 Chapter 5 Service responded by shunting the pickers to a lonely access road. At the time of the deaths, the pickers were camped all along the road. But soon afterward, the Forest Service built a great grid, with numbered camping spaces, scattered portable toilets, and, after many complaints, a large tank of water at the (rather distant) campground entrance. The campsites had no amenities, but the pickers��escaping from the ghosts—quickly made them their own. Mimicking the structure of the refugee camps in Thailand where many had spent more than a decade, they segregated themselves into ethnic groups: on one end, Mien and then those Hmong willing to stay; half a mile away, Lao and then Khmer; in an isolated hollow, way back, a few whites. The Southeast Asians built structures of slim pine poles and tarps and put their tents inside, sometimes with the addition of wood stoves. As in rural Southeast Asia, possessions were hung from the rafters, and an enclosure gave privacy for dip baths. In the center of the camp, a big tent sold hot bowls of pho. Eating the food, listening to the music, and observing the material culture, I thought I was in the hills of Southeast Asia, not the forests of Oregon. The Forest Service’s idea about emergency access did not work out as it imagined. A few years later, someone called emergency services in behalf of a critically wounded picker. Regulations aimed only at the mushroom camp required the ambulance to wait for police escort before entering. The ambulance waited for hours. When the police finally showed up, the man was dead. Emergency access had not been limited by terrain but by discrimination. This man, too, left a dangerous ghost, and no one slept near his campsite except Oscar, a white man and one of the few local residents to seek out Southeast Asians, who did it once, drunk, on a dare. Oscar’s success in getting through the night led him to try picking mushrooms on a nearby mountain, sacred to local Native Americans and the home of their ghosts. But the Southeast Asians I knew stayed away from that mountain. They knew about ghosts. Oregon’s center of matsutake commerce in the first decade of the twenty-first century was a place not marked on any map, “in the middle of nowhere.” Everyone in the trade knew where it was, but it wasn’t a Open Ticket, Oregon 75 town or a recreation site; it was officially invisible. Buyers had established a cluster of tents along the highway, and every evening pickers, buyers, and field agents gathered there, turning it into a theater of lively suspense and action. Because the place is self-consciously off the map, I decided to make up a name to protect people’s privacy, and to add some characters from the up-and-coming matsutake trading spot down the road. My composite field site is “Open Ticket, Oregon.” “Open ticket” is actually the name of a mushroom-buying practice. In the evening after returning from the woods, pickers sell their mushrooms for the buyer’s price per pound, adjusted in relation to the mushroom’s size and maturity, its “grade.” Most wild mushrooms carry a stable price. But the price of matsutake shoots up and down. Within the night, the price may easily shift by $10 per pound or more. Within the season, price shifts are much greater. Between 2004 and 2008, prices shifted between $2 and $60 per pound for the best mushrooms—and this range is nothing compared with earlier years. “Open ticket” means that a picker may return to the buyer for the difference between the original price paid and a higher price offered on the same night. Buyers— who earn a commission based on the poundage they buy—offer open ticket to entice pickers to sell early in the evening, rather than waiting to see if prices will rise. Open ticket is testimony to the unspoken power of pickers to negotiate buying conditions. It also illustrates the strategies of buyers, who continually try to put each other out of business. Open ticket is a practice of making and affirming freedom for both pickers and buyers. It seems an apt name for a site of freedom’s performance. For what is exchanged every evening is not just mushrooms and money. Pickers, buyers, and field agents are engaged in dramatic enactments of freedom, as they separately understand it, and they exchange these, encouraging each other, along with their trophies: money and mushrooms. Sometimes, indeed, it seemed to me that the really important exchange was the freedom, with the mushroom-and-money trophies as extensions—proofs, as it were—of the performance. After all, it was the feeling of freedom, galvanizing “mushroom fever,” that energized buyers to put on their best shows and pressed pickers to get up the next dawn to search for mushrooms again. But what is this freedom about which pickers spoke? The more I asked about it, the more unfamiliar it became to me. This is not the 76 Chapter 5 freedom imagined by economists, who use that term to talk about the regularities of individual rational choice. Nor is it political liberalism. This mushroomers’ freedom is irregular and outside rationalization; it is performative, communally varied, and effervescent. It has something to do with the rowdy cosmopolitanism of the place; freedom emerges from open-ended cultural interplay, full of potential conflict and misunderstanding. I think it exists only in relation to ghosts. Freedom is the negotiation of ghosts on a haunted landscape; it does not exorcise the haunting but works to survive and negotiate it with flair. Open Ticket is haunted by many ghosts: not only the “green” ghosts of pickers who died untimely deaths; not only the Native American communities removed by U.S. laws and armies; not only the stumps of great trees cut down by reckless loggers, never to be replaced; not only the haunting memories of war that will not seem to go away; but also the ghostly appearance of forms of power—held in abeyance—that enter the everyday work of picking and buying. Some kinds of power are there, but not there; this haunting is a place from which to begin to understand this multiply culturally layered enactment of freedom. Consider these absences that make Open Ticket what it is: Open Ticket is far from the concentration of power; it is the opposite of a city. It is missing social order. As Seng, a Lao picker, put it, “Buddha is not here.” Pickers are selfish and greedy, he said; he was impatient to return to the temple where things were properly arranged. But, meanwhile, Dara, a Khmer teenager, explained that this is the only place she can grow up away from the violence of gangs. Yet Thong is a (former?) Lao gang member; I think he is getting away from warrants for his arrest. Open Ticket is a hodgepodge of flights from the city. White Vietnam vets told me they wanted to be away from crowds, which sparked flashbacks from the war and uncontrollable panic attacks. Hmong and Mien told me they were disappointed in America, which had promised them freedom but instead crowded them into tiny urban apartments; only in the mountains could they find the freedom they remembered from Southeast Asia. Mien in particular hoped to reconstitute a remembered village life in the matsutake forest. Matsutake picking was a time to see dispersed friends and to be away from the constraints of crowded families. Nai Tong, a Mien grandmother, explained that her daughter called her every day to beg her to come home to take care of the grandchildren. But Open Ticket, Oregon 77 she calmly repeated that she had at least to make up the money for her picking permit; she could not go back yet. The important bits were left unsaid in those calls: Escaping from apartment life, she had the freedom of the hills. The money was less important than the freedom. Matsutake picking is not the city, although haunted by it. Picking is also not labor—or even “work.” Sai, a Lao picker, explained that “work” means obeying your boss, doing what he tells you to. In contrast, matsutake picking is “searching.” It is looking for your fortune, not doing your job. When a white campground owner, sympathetic to the pickers, talked to me about how the pickers deserved more because they work so hard, getting up at dawn and staying through sun and snow, something nagged at me about her view. I had never heard a picker talk like that. No pickers I met imagined the money they gained from matsutake as a return on their labor. Even Nai Tong’s time babysitting was more akin to work than mushroom picking. Tom, a white field agent who had spent years as a picker, was particularly clear about rejecting labor. He had been an employee of a big timber company, but one day he put his equipment in his locker, walked out the door, and never looked back. He moved his family into the woods and earned from what the land would give him. He has gathered cones for seed companies and trapped beaver for skins. He has picked all kinds of mushrooms—not to eat but to sell, and he has taken his skills into the buying scene. Tom tells me how liberals have ruined American society; men no longer know how to be men. The best answer is to reject what liberals think of as “standard employment.” Tom goes to great lengths to explain to me that the buyers he works with are not employees but independent businessmen. Even though he gives them large amounts of cash every day to buy mushrooms, they can sell to any field agent—and I know they do. It’s an all cash business, too, without contracts, so if a buyer decides to abscond with his cash, he says, there is nothing he can do about it. (Amazingly, buyers who abscond often come back to deal with another field agent.) But the scales he lends buyers for weighing mushrooms, he points out, are his; he could call the police about the scales. He tells the story of a recent buyer who absconded with several thousand dollars—but made the mistake of taking the scale. Tom drove down the road in the direction he believed the buyer took, and, sure enough, there was the scale abandoned 78 Chapter 5 by the side of the road. The cash was gone of course; but that was the risk of independent business. Pickers bring many kinds of cultural heritage to their rejection of labor. Mad Jim celebrates his Native American ancestors in matsutake picking. After many jobs, he said, he was working as a bartender on the coast. A Native woman walked in with a $100 bill; shocked, he asked where she got it. “Picking mushrooms,” she told him. Jim went out the next day. It wasn’t easy to learn: he crawled through the brush; he followed animals. Now he knows how to stalk the dunes for the matsutake buried deep in the sand. He knows where to look under tangled rhododendron roots in the mountains. He has never gone back to wage work. Lao-Su works in a Wal-Mart warehouse in California when he is not picking matsutake, making $11.50 an hour. To get that pay rate, however, he had to agree to work without medical benefits. When he hurt his back on the job and was unable to lift merchandise, he was given a long leave to recover. While he hopes the company will take him back, he says he gets more money from matsutake picking than from Wal-Mart anyway, despite the fact that the mushroom season is only two months long. Besides, he and his wife look forward to joining the vibrant Mien community in Open Ticket every year. They consider it a vacation; on weekends, their children and grandchildren sometimes come up to join them in picking. Matsutake picking is not “labor,” but it is haunted by labor. So, too, property: Matsutake pickers act as if the forest was an extensive commons. The land is not officially a commons. It is mainly national forest, with some adjacent private land, all fully protected by the state. But the pickers do their best to ignore questions of property. White pickers are particularly aggravated by federal property and do their best to thwart restrictions on using it. Southeast Asian pickers are generally warmer to government, expressing wishes that it would do more. Unlike white pickers, many of whom are proud of picking without a permit, most Southeast Asians register with the Forest Service for permission to pick. However, the fact that law enforcement tends to single out Asians for infractions even without evidence—as one Khmer buyer put it, “driving while being Asian”—makes it seem less worth the effort to stay within the law. Not many do. Open Ticket, Oregon 79 Vast lands without boundary markers makes staying in approved picking zones quite difficult, as I found from my own experience. Once, a sheriff staked out my car to catch me without a permit when I returned with mushrooms. Even as an avid reader of maps, I had been unable to tell whether this place was on or off limits.1 I was lucky; I was just at the border. But it wasn’t marked. Once, too, after I had pleaded with a Lao family for days to take me picking, they agreed, if I would drive. We chugged through forest on unmarked dirt roads for what seemed hours before they told me we had arrived at the place they wanted to pick. When I pulled over, they asked me why I wasn’t trying to hide the car. Only then did I realize that we were surely trespassing. The fines are steep. During my fieldwork, the fine for picking in a national park was $2,000 on the first offense. But law enforcement is thin on the ground, and the roads and trails are many. The national forest is crisscrossed with abandoned logging roads; these make it possible for pickers to travel across extensive forestland. Young men, too, are willing to hike many miles, looking for the most isolated mushroom patches—perhaps on forbidden lands, perhaps not. When the mushrooms get to the buyers, no one asks.2 But what is “public property” if not an oxymoron? Certainly, the Forest Service has trouble with it in these times. Legislation requires that public forests be thinned for fire protection for a square mile around private inholdings; this requires a lot of public funds to save a few private assets.3 Meanwhile, private timber companies do that thinning, making further profits from public forests. And, while logging is allowed within Late Successional Reserves, pickers are forbidden— because no one has found funds for an environmental impact assessment. If pickers have trouble sorting out which kinds of lands are offlimits, they are not alone in their confusion. The difference between the two kinds of confusion is also instructive. The Forest Service is asked to uphold property, even if it means neglecting the public. The pickers do their best to hold property in abeyance as they pursue a commons haunted by the possibility of their own exclusion. Freedom/haunting: two sides of the same experience. Conjuring a future full of pasts, a ghost-ridden freedom is both a way to move on and a way to remember. In its fever, picking escapes the separation of persons and things so dear to industrial production. The mushrooms 80 Chapter 5 are not yet alienated commodities; they are effects of the pickers’ freedom. Yet this scene only exists because the two-sided experience has purchase in a strange sort of commerce. Buyers translate freedom trophies into trade through dramatic performances of “free market competition.” Thus market freedom enters freedom’s jumble, making the holding in abeyance of concentrated power, labor, property, and alienation seem strong and effective. It’s time to get back to the buying in Open Ticket. It’s late afternoon, and some of the white field agents are sitting around joking. They accuse each other of lying and call each other “vultures” and “Wile E. Coyote.” They are right. They agree to open at the price of $10 a pound for number one mushrooms, but almost no one does. The minute the tents open, the competition is on. The field agents call their buyers to offer opening prices—perhaps $12 or even $15 if they agreed on $10. It is up to the buyers to report back about what is happening in the buying tents. Pickers come in and ask about the prices. But the price is a secret—unless you are a regular seller, or, alternatively, you are already showing your mushrooms. Other buyers send their friends, disguised as pickers, to find the price, so it is not something to tell just anyone. Then, when a buyer wants to raise prices, to beat the competition, he or she is supposed to call the field agent. If not, the buyer will have to pay the price difference from his or her commission—but this is a tactic many are willing to try. Soon enough, calls ricochet between pickers, buyers, and field agents. The prices are shifting. “It’s dangerous!” one field agent would tell me as he stalked around the buying area, watching the scene. He could not talk to me during the buying; it demanded his full attention. Barking commands into his cell phone, each tried to stay ahead—and to trip up the others. Meanwhile, field agents are on the phone to their bulking companies and exporters, learning how high they can go. It’s exciting and exacting work to put the others out of business as well as one can. “Imagine the time before cell phones!” one field agent reminisced. Everyone lined up at the two public phone booths, trying to get through as the prices changed. Even now, every field agent surveys the buying field like a general on an old-fashioned battlefield, his phone, like a field Open Ticket, Oregon 81 radio, constantly at his ear. He sends out spies. He must react quickly. If he raises the price at the right time, his buyers will get the best mushrooms. Better yet, he might push a competitor to raise the price too high, forcing him to buy too many mushrooms, and, if all goes really right, to close down for a few days. There are all kinds of tricks. If the price spikes, a buyer can get pickers to take his mushrooms to sell to other buyers: Better the money than the mushrooms. There will be rude laughter for days, fuel for another round of calling the others liars—and yet, no one goes out of business despite all these efforts.4 This is a performance of competition—not a necessity of business. The point is the drama. Let’s say it’s dark now, and pickers are lined up to sell at a buying tent. They have picked this buyer not only because of his prices, but because they know he is a skilled sorter. Sorting is just as important as basic prices, because a buyer assigns a grade to each mushroom, and the price depends on the grade. And what an art sorting is! Sorting is an eye-catching, rapid-fire dance of the arms with the legs held still. White men make it look like juggling; Lao women—the other champion buyers—make it look like Royal Lao dancing. A good sorter knows a lot about the mushrooms just from touching them. Matsutake with insect larvae will spoil the batch before it arrives in Japan; it is essential that the buyer refuse them. But only an inexperienced buyer cuts into the mushroom to look for larvae. Good buyers know from the feel. They can also smell the provenance of the mushroom: its host tree; the region it comes from; other plants, such as rhododendron, which affect the size and shape. Everyone enjoys watching a good buyer sort. It is a public performance full of prowess. Sometimes pickers photograph the sorting. Sometimes they also photograph their best mushrooms, or the money, especially when it is hundred dollar bills. These are trophies of the chase. Buyers try to assemble “crews,” that is, loyal pickers, but pickers do not feel the obligation to continue selling to any buyer. So buyers court pickers, using ties of kinship, language, and ethnicity, or special bonuses. Buyers offer pickers food and coffee—or, sometimes, stronger beverages, such as alcoholic tonics laced with herbs and scorpions. Pickers sit around eating and drinking outside buyers’ tents; where they share common war experiences with the buyers, the camaraderie may last until late at night. But such groups are evanescent; all it takes is a rumor of a 82 Chapter 5 high price or a special deal, and pickers are off to another tent, another circle. Yet the prices are not so different. Might performance be part of the point? Competition and independence mean freedom for all. Sometimes pickers have been known to wait, sitting in their pickup trucks with their mushrooms, because they are dissatisfied with everyone’s prices. But they must sell before the evening is over; they cannot keep the mushrooms. Waiting too is part of the performance of freedom: freedom to search wherever one pleases—holding propriety, labor, and property at arm’s length; freedom to bring one’s mushrooms to any buyer, and for the buyers, to any field agent; freedom to put the other buyers out of business; freedom to make a killing or lose it all. Once I told an economist about this buying scene, and he was excited, telling me this was the true and basic form of capitalism, without the pollution of powerful interests and inequalities. This was real capitalism, he said, where the playing field was level, as it should be. But is Open Ticket’s picking and buying capitalism? The problem is that there isn’t any capital. There is a lot of money changing hands, but it slips away, never forming an investment. The only accumulation is happening downstream, in Vancouver, Tokyo, and Kobe, where exporters and importers use the matsutake trade to build their firms. Open Ticket’s mushrooms join streams of capital there, but they are not procured in what seems to me a capitalist formation. But there are clearly “market mechanisms”: or are there? The whole point of competitive markets, according to economists, is to lower prices, forcing suppliers to procure goods in more efficient ways. But Open Ticket’s buying competition has the explicit goal of raising prices. Everyone says so: pickers, buyers, bulkers. The purpose of playing with prices is to see if the price can be increased, so that everyone at Open Ticket benefits. Many seem to think that there is an ever-flowing spring of money in Japan, and the goal of competitive theater is to force open the pipes so that the money will flow to Open Ticket. Old timers all remember 1993, when the price of matsutake in Open Ticket rose briefly to $600 a pound in the hands of pickers. All you had to do was find one fat button, and you had $300!5 Even after that high, they say, in the 1990s a single picker could make several thousand dollars in one day. How might access to that flow of money be opened again? Open Ticket buyers and bulkers stake their bets on competition to raise prices. Open Ticket, Oregon 83 It seems to me that there are two framing circumstances that allow this set of beliefs and practices to flourish. First, American businessmen have naturalized the expectation that the U.S. government will apply muscle in their behalf: As long as they perform “competition,” the government will twist the arms of foreign business partners to make sure American companies get the prices and market share they want.6 Open Ticket matsutake trading is much too small and inconspicuous to get that kind of government attention. Still, it is within this national expectation that buyers and bulkers engage in competitive performances to get the Japanese to offer them the best prices. As long as they show themselves properly “American,” they expect to succeed. Second, Japanese traders are willing to put up with such displays as signs of what the importer I mentioned called “American psychology.” Japanese traders expect to work in and around strange performances; if this is what brings in the goods, it should be encouraged. Later, exporters and importers can translate the exotic products of American freedom into Japanese inventory—and, through inventory, accumulation. What is this “American psychology” then? There are too many people and histories in Open Ticket to plunge directly into the coherence through which we usually imagine “culture.” The concept of assemblage—an open-ended entanglement of ways of being—is more useful. In an assemblage, varied trajectories gain a hold on each other, but indeterminacy matters. To learn about an assemblage, one unravels its knots. Open Ticket’s performances of freedom require following histories that stretch far beyond Oregon but show how Open Ticket’s entanglements might have come into being. In France they have two kinds, freedom and communist. In the U.S. they just have one kind: freedom. —Open Ticket Lao buyer, explaining why he came to the United States, not France The freedom about which so many pickers and buyers speak has far-flung referents as well as local ones. In Open Ticket, most explain their commitments to freedom as stemming from terrifying and tragic experiences in the U.S.-Indochina War and the civil wars that followed. When pickers talk about what shaped their lives, including their mushroom picking, most talk about surviving war. They are willing to brave the considerable dangers of the matsutake forest because it extends their living survival of war, a form of haunted freedom that goes everywhere with them. Yet engagements with war are culturally, nationally, and racially specific. The landscapes pickers construct vary with their legacies of Communal agendas, Oregon. Foraging with a rifle. Most pickers have terrible stories of surviving war. The freedom of the mushroom camps emerges out of varied histories of trauma and displacement. 86 Chapter 6 engagement with war. Some pickers wrap themselves in war stories without ever having lived through war. One wry Lao elder explained why even young Lao pickers wear camouflage: “These people weren’t soldiers; they’re just pretending to be soldiers.” When I asked about the dangers of being invisible to white deer hunters, a Hmong picker evoked a different imaginary: “We wear camouflage so we can hide if we see the hunters first.” If they saw him, hunters might hunt him, he implied. Pickers navigate the freedom of the forest through a maze of differences. Freedom as they described it is both an axis of commonality and a point from which communally specific agendas divide. Despite further differences within such agendas, a few portraits can suggest the varied ways the matsutake hunt is energized by freedom. This chapter extends my exploration of what pickers and buyers meant by freedom by turning to the stories they told about war. Frontier romanticism runs high in the mountains and forests of the Pacific Northwest. It is common for whites to glorify Native Americans and identify with the settlers who tried to wipe them out. Self-sufficiency, rugged individualism, and the aesthetic force of white masculinity are points of pride. Many white mushroom pickers are advocates of U.S. conquest abroad, limited government, and white supremacy. Yet the rural northwest has also gathered hippies and iconoclasts. White veterans of the U.S.-Indochina War bring their war experiences into this rough and independent mix, adding a distinctive mixture of resentment and patriotism, trauma and threat. War memories are simultaneously disturbing and productive in forming this niche. War is damaging, they tell us, but it also makes men. Freedom can be found in war as well as against war. Two white veterans suggest the range of how freedom is expressed. Alan felt lucky when an aggravated childhood injury caused him to be sent home from Indochina. For the next six months he served as a driver on an American base. One day he received orders to return to Vietnam. He drove his jeep back to the depot and walked out of the base, AWOL. He spent the next four years hiding in the Oregon mountains, where he gained a new goal: to live in the woods and never pay rent. Later, when War Stories 87 the matsutake rush came, it suited him perfectly. Alan imagines himself as a gentle hippie who works against the combat culture of other vets. Once he went to Las Vegas and had a terrible flashback when surrounded by Asians at the casino. Life in the forest is his way of keeping clear of psychological danger. Not all war experience is so benign. When I first met Geoff I was overjoyed to find someone with so much knowledge about the forest. Telling me of the pleasures of his childhood in eastern Washington, he described the countryside with a passionate eye for detail. My enthusiasm to work with Geoff was transformed, however, when I talked with Tim, who explained that Geoff had served a long and difficult tour in Vietnam. Once, his group had jumped from a helicopter into an ambush. Many of the men were killed, and Geoff was shot through the neck but, miraculously, survived. When Geoff came home, he screamed so much at night that he could not stay home, and so he returned to the woods. But his war years were not over. Tim described a time when he and Geoff had surprised a group of Cambodian pickers on a mushroom patch Geoff thought of as one of his special places. Geoff had opened fire, and the Cambodians scrambled into the bushes to get away. Once Tim and Geoff shared a cabin, but Geoff spent the night brooding and sharpening his knife. “Do you know how many men I killed in Vietnam?” he asked Tim. “One more wouldn’t make a bit of difference.” White pickers imagine themselves not only as violent vets but also as self-sufficient mountain men: loners, tough, and resourceful. One point of connection with those who did not fight is hunting. One white buyer, too old for Vietnam but a strong supporter of U.S. wars, explained that hunting, like war, builds character. We spoke of then Vice President Cheney, who had shot a friend while bird hunting; it was through the ordinariness of accidents such as this that hunting makes men, he said. Through hunting, even noncombatants can experience the forest landscape as a site for making freedom. Cambodian refugees cannot easily join established Pacific Northwest legacies; they have had to make up their own histories of freedom in the United States. Such histories are guided not only by U.S. bombardment 88 Chapter 6 and the subsequent terrors of the Khmer Rouge regime and civil war, but also by their moment of entry into the United States: the shutting down of the U.S. welfare state in the 1980s. No one offered Cambodians stable jobs with benefits. Like other Southeast Asian refugees, they had to make something from what they had—including their war experiences. The matsutake boom made forest foraging, with its opportunities for making a living through sheer intrepidness, an appealing option. What then is freedom? One white field agent, exalting the pleasures of war, suggested I speak with Ven, a Cambodian who, the field agent said, would show me that even Asians love U.S. imperial war. Given that Ven spoke to me with this introduction, I was not surprised by his endorsement of American freedom as a military quest. Yet our conversation took turns that I don’t imagine the field agent would have expected, and yet it echoed other Cambodians in the forest. First, in the confusions of the Cambodian civil war, it was never quite clear on which side one was fighting. Where white vets imagined freedom on a starkly divided racial landscape, Cambodians told stories in which war bounced one from one side to the other without one’s knowledge. Second, where white vets sometimes took to the hills to live out war’s traumatic freedom, Cambodians offered a more optimistic vision of recovery in the forests of American freedom. At the age of thirteen, Ven left his village to join an armed struggle. His goal was to repel Vietnamese invaders. He says he did not know the national affiliations of his group; he later found it to be a Khmer Rouge affiliate. Because of his youth, the commander befriended him and he was kept safe, close to the leaders. Later, however, the commander fell out of favor, and Ven became a political detainee. His group of detainees was sent to the jungle to fend for themselves. By chance, this turned out to be an area Ven knew from his fighting days. Where others saw empty jungle, he knew the concealed paths and forest resources. At this point in the story, I expected him to say that he escaped, especially since he was beaming with pride about his jungle knowledge. But no: He showed the group a hidden spring, without which they would not have had fresh water. Perhaps there was something empowering about this forest detention, even in its coercions. Returning to the forest draws from this spark—but only, he explained, in the safety of American imperial freedom. War Stories 89 Other Cambodians spoke about mushroom foraging as healing from war. One woman described how weak she was when she first came to the United States; her legs were so frail that she could hardly walk. Mushroom foraging has brought back her health. Her freedom, she explained, is freedom of motion. Heng told me about his experiences in a Cambodian militia. He was the leader of thirty men. But while patrolling one day he stepped on a land mine, which blew off his leg. He begged his comrades to shoot him, since the life of a one-legged man in Cambodia was beyond what he imagined as human. Through luck, however, he was picked up by a UN mission and transported to Thailand. In the United States he gets along well on his artificial leg. Still, when he told his relatives that he would pick mushrooms in the forest, they scoffed. They refused to take him with them, since, they said, he would never be able to keep up. Finally, an aunt dropped him off at the base of a mountain, telling him to find his own way. He found mushrooms! Ever since, the matsutake harvest has been an affirmation of his mobility. Another of his buddies is missing the other leg, and he jokes that together in the mountains, they are “complete.” The Oregon mountains are both a cure for and a connection to old habits and dreams. I was startled into seeing this one day when I asked Heng about deer hunters. I had been picking by myself that afternoon when suddenly shots rang out nearby. I was terrified; I didn’t know which way to run. I asked Heng about it later. “Don’t run!” he said. “To run shows that you are afraid. I would never run. That’s why I am a leader of men.” The woods are still full of war, and hunting is its reminder. The fact that almost all the hunters are white, and that they tend to be contemptuous of Asians, makes the parallels to war yet more apparent. This theme was even more consequential for Hmong pickers, who, unlike most Cambodians, identify as hunters as well as hunted. During the U.S.-Indochina War, the Hmong became the front line of the U.S. invasion of Laos. Recruited by General Vang Pao, whole villages gave up agriculture to subsist on CIA airdrops of food. The men called in U.S. bombers, putting their bodies on the line so that Americans 90 Chapter 6 could destroy the country from the skies.1 It is not surprising that this policy exacerbated tensions between the Lao targets of the bombing and the Hmong. Hmong refugees have done relatively well in the United States, but war memories run strong. The landscapes of wartime Laos are very much alive for Hmong refugees, and this shapes both the politics of freedom and freedom’s everyday activities. Consider the case of Hmong hunter and U.S. Army sharpshooter Chai Soua Vang. In November 2004, he climbed into a deer blind in a Wisconsin forest just as the white landowners were touring the property. The landowners confronted him, telling him to leave. It seems they shouted racial epithets, and someone shot at him. In response, he shot eight of them with his semiautomatic rifle, killing six. The story was news, and the main tenor in which it was told was outrage. CBS News quoted local Deputy Tim Zeigle, who said Vang was “chasing after [the landowners] and killing them. He hunted them down.”2 Hmong community spokesmen immediately took their distance from Vang and focused on saving the reputation of the Hmong people. Although younger Hmong spoke up against racism in the trial that followed Vang’s arrest, no one publicly suggested why Vang might have assumed a sharpshooter’s stance to eliminate his adversaries. The Hmong I spoke with in Oregon all seemed to know, and to empathize. What Vang did appeared utterly familiar; he could have been a brother or a father. Although Vang was too young to have participated in the U.S.-Indochina War, his actions showed how well he was socialized in the landscapes of that war. There every man who was not a comrade was an enemy, and war meant to kill or be killed. The elder men of the Hmong community still live very much in the world of these battles; at Hmong gatherings, the logistics of particular battles—the topography, timing, and surprises—are the subject of men’s conversations. One Hmong elder whom I had asked about his life used the opportunity to tell me about how to throw back grenades and what to do if you are shot. The logistics of wartime survival were the substance of his life. Hunting recalls the familiarity of Laos for Hmong in the United States. The Hmong elder explained his coming of age in Laos: as a boy, he had learned to hunt, and he used his hunting skills in jungle fighting. Now in the United States, he teaches his sons how to hunt. Hunting brings Hmong men into a world of tracking, survival, and manhood. War Stories 91 Hmong mushroom pickers are comfortable in the forest because of hunting. Hmong rarely get lost; they use the forest-navigation skills they know from hunting. The forest landscape reminds older men of Laos: Much is different, but there are wild hills and the necessity of keeping your wits about you. Such familiarity brings the older generation back to pick each year; like hunting, this is a chance to remember forest landscapes. Without the sounds and smells of the forest, the elder told me, a man dwindles. Mushroom picking layers together Laos and Oregon, war and hunting. The landscapes of war-torn Laos suffuse present experience. What seemed to me nonsequiturs shocked me into awareness of such layers: I asked about mushrooms, and Hmong pickers answered by telling me of Laos, of hunting, or of war. Tou and his son Ger kindly took my assistant Lue and me for many a matsutake hunt. Ger was an exuberant teacher, but Tou was a quiet elder. As a result, I valued the things he said all the more. One afternoon after a long and pleasurable forage, Tou collapsed into the front seat of the car with a sigh. Lue translated from Hmong. “It’s just like Laos,” Tou said, telling us of his home. His next comment made no sense to me: “But it’s important to have insurance.” It took me the next half hour to figure out what he meant. He offered a story: A relative of his had gone back to Laos for a visit, and the hills had so drawn him that he left one of his souls behind when he returned to the United States. He soon died as a result. Nostalgia can cause death, and then it’s important to have life insurance, because that allows the family to buy the oxen for a proper funeral. Tou was experiencing the nostalgia of a landscape made familiar by hiking and foraging. This is also the landscape of hunting—and of war. As Buddhists, ethnic Lao tend to object to hunting. Instead, Lao are the businessmen of the mushroom camps. Most Southeast Asian mushroom buyers are Lao. In the campgrounds, Lao have opened noodle tents, gambling, karaoke, and barbeque shops. Many of the Lao pickers I met originated from or were displaced to Laotian cities. They are often lost in the woods. But they enjoy the risks of mushroom picking and explain it as an entrepreneurial sport. 92 Chapter 6 I first started thinking about cultural engagements with war when I was hanging out with Lao pickers. Camouflage is popular among Lao men. Most are further covered by protective tattoos—some gained in the army, some in gangs, and some in martial arts. Lao rowdiness is the justification for Forest Service rules that disallow gunfire in the campgrounds. Compared with other picker groups, the Lao I met seemed less wounded by the actual moment of war—and yet more involved in its simulation in the forest. But what is a wound? U.S. bombing in Laos displaced 25 percent of the rural population, forcing fleeing refugees into cities—and, when possible, abroad.3 If Lao refugees in the United States have some characteristics of camp followers, is this not also a wound? Some Lao pickers grew up in army families. Sam’s father served in the Royal Lao Army; he was set to follow in his father’s footsteps by enlisting in the U.S. Army. The fall before his recruitment he joined some friends for a last hurrah—picking mushrooms. He made so much money that he called off his army plans. He even brought his parents to pick. He also discovered the pleasures of illegal picking one season when he made $3,000 in one day by trespassing on national park lands. Like white pickers, the Lao I knew looked for out-of-bounds and hidden matsutake patches. (In contrast, Cambodian, Hmong, and Mien pickers more often used careful observation in well-known common spots.) Lao pickers also—again like whites—took pleasure in boasting of their forays outside the law and their ability to get out of scrapes. (Other pickers went outside the law more quietly.) As entrepreneurs, Lao were mediators, with all the pleasures and dangers of mediation. In my own inexperience, I found the entrepreneurial grasp of combat readiness a confusing set of juxtapositions. Yet I could tell it somehow worked as advocacy for high-risk enterprise. Thong, a strong and handsome man in his mid-thirties, seemed to me a man of contradictions: a fighter, a fine dancer, a reflective thinker, a judgmental critic. Because of his strength, Thong picks in high, inaccessible places. He told of his encounter with a policeman who stopped him for speeding one night more than forty miles from the mushroom camp. He told the policeman to go ahead and impound his car; he would walk through the frozen night. The policeman gave in, he said, and let him go. When Thong said that mushroom pickers are in the War Stories 93 forest to escape warrants, I thought he might be speaking for himself. So, too, until quite recently he was married. In the process of getting a divorce, he quit a well-paying job to pick mushrooms. At the least, I believe he aimed to escape the obligations of child support. The contradictions multiply. He went out of his way to express contempt for pickers who abandon their children for the forest. He is not in touch with his children. Meta thinks a lot about Buddhism. Meta spent two years in a monastery; returned to the world, he works to renounce material things. Mushroom picking is a way to do this work of renunciation. Most of his belongings are in his car. Money comes to him easily but disappears just as easily. He does not mire himself in possession. This does not mean he is ascetic in a Western sense. When he is drunk, he sings a tender tenor karaoke. Only among Lao pickers did I meet children of mushroom pickers who, as adults, became mushroom pickers themselves. Paula first came picking with her parents, who later moved to Alaska. But she maintains her parents’ social networks in the Oregon forests, thus earning the room for maneuver claimed by much more seasoned pickers. Paula is daring. She and her husband arrived ready to pick ten days before the U.S. Forest Service opened the season. When the police caught them with mushrooms in their truck, her husband pretended that he couldn’t speak English, while Paula berated the officials. Paula is cute and looks like a child; she can get away with more sass than others. Still, I was surprised at the chutzpah she claimed. She said she dared the police to interfere with her activities. They asked her where she found the mushrooms. “Under green trees.” Where were these green trees? “All trees are green trees,” she insisted. Then she pulled out her cell phone and started calling her supporters. What is freedom? U.S. immigration policy differentiates “political refugees” from “economic refugees,” granting asylum only to the former. This requires immigrants to endorse “freedom” as a condition of their entry. Southeast Asian Americans had the opportunity to learn such endorsements in refugee camps in Thailand, where many spent years preparing themselves for U.S. immigration. As the Lao buyer quoted at the beginning of this chapter quipped in explaining why he picked the United States rather than France: “In France they have two 94 Chapter 6 kinds, freedom and communist. In the U.S. they just have one kind: freedom.” He went on to say that he prefers mushroom picking to a steady job with a good income—he has been a welder—because of the freedom. Lao strategies for enacting freedom contrast sharply with those of the other picker group that vies for the title “most harassed by the law”: Latinos. Latino pickers tend to be undocumented migrants who fit mushroom foraging into a year-round schedule of outdoor work. During mushroom season many live hidden in the forest instead of in the legally required industrial camps and motels where identification and picking permits might be checked. Those I knew had multiple names, addresses, and papers. Mushroom arrests could lead not just to fines but also to loss of vehicles (for faulty papers) and deportation. Instead of sassing the law, Latino pickers tried to stay out of the way, and, if caught, juggle papers and sources of legitimation and support. In contrast, most Lao pickers, as refugees, are citizens and, embracing freedom, hustle for more room. Contrasts such as these motivated my search to understand the cultural engagements with war that shape the practices of freedom of white veterans and Cambodian, Hmong, and Lao refugees. Veterans and refugees negotiate American citizenship through endorsing and enacting freedom. In this practice, militarism is internalized; it infuses the landscape; it inspires strategies of foraging and entrepreneurship. Among commercial matsutake pickers in Oregon, freedom is a “boundary object,” that is, a shared concern that yet takes on many meanings and leads in varied directions.4 Pickers arrive every year to search out matsutake for Japanese-sponsored supply chains because of their overlapping yet diverging commitments to the freedom of the forest. Pickers’ war experiences motivate them to come back year after year to extend their living survival. White vets enact trauma; Khmer heal war wounds; Hmong remember fighting landscapes; Lao push the envelope. Each of these historical currents mobilizes the practice of picking mushrooms as the practice of freedom. Thus, without any corporate recruitment, training, or discipline, mountains of mushrooms are gathered and shipped to Japan.