#her identity wasn’t completely gone in the way joels was

[mariatesstruther]

MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEGGGGG

me thinking about sarah, that one shot of her on the bus looking so beautiful and serene, and just

what did such a beautiful, amazing little soul leave behind? What was her legacy? For twenty years it was just. A devastated father. A man undone.

Idk. Like obviously what she deserved was to LIVE, but if she couldnt live then i feel like she deserved a legacy better than her fathers agony and rage. (But thats all joel had to give, until ellie.)

maybe this is why maria founded jackson. She grit her teeth against her grief and said ABSOLUTELY not, my baby boy’s worth adds up to more than my sorrow and rage, his footprint on this earth is going to be more than a dead mama, im going to build something GOOD and it will all be for him

just. Tommy lighting sarah and kevin’s candles. Tommy sending up a prayer to sarah, saying sorry, im sorry i couldnt save you. Im sorry i couldnt save your daddy. I think of you all the time. I remember you, and the memory of your face makes me smile.

[cdtrin]

Similarities between TLOU 1 & 2 and Arcane.

Beginning first with plot elements and environment, then to overlaps between characters.

Potential spoilers for season one and two of Arcane and The Last of Us Part One and Part Two. But I did my best to skirt around them.

The QZs and Piltover.

The quarantine zones of the TLOU are the remains left of the United States government after martial law was declared in response to the outbreak. And they are run in the same way as martial law, where force is used to control the population.

Food rations are controlled and hoarded. Resources are scare. But your option otherwise is to risk roughing it on your own against infected and nature.

It is a terribly repressive system, which sparks the emergence of the Fireflies.

Similar, to Piltover. Mostly through the lens of residence of the under city.

Enforces stomping through the streets, imprisoning your neighbors, breaking up families, using violence as a tool for control.

Furthermore, Piltover ignores the lack of resources in the undercity, has no member of the council who’s from the undercity to represent them (until the end of the series), and exploits there weaknesses for profit.

The Fireflies and The Firelights.

Both the Fireflies and the Firelights exist to do the same thing: challenge an oppressive government and bring hope for the future. And they both use any means necessary to achieve their goals.

Although, the Firelights also have the added challenge of Silco’s control of the Undercity.

Additional, they’re pretty much named the same things. Firelights are just the Arcane universes version of fireflies (or lightning bugs, whatever your preferred name for them)

“When you’re lost in the darkness, look for the light.”

Spores and Toxic Gas (The Gray)

I also can’t help but draw parallels between airborne spores from TLOU and the gas from the mines in Arcane.

Both result in coughing and choking initially. Spores lead always to infection and death, unless your Ellie. The Gray, as it’s referred to in the show, is shown to have numerous side effects, if you don’t suffocate from exposure to its gas form. Most notable examples, Viktor and Silco. The disease Viktor has, I’d guess leukemia, seems to be a result of exposure to pollution in his childhood. And Silco’s left eye is left in a constant battle of corruption after a wound he receives there is exposed to polluted river water. Both of which would lead to death if treatment wasn’t possible (Shimmer).

Violet and Ellie

I’ll start with a silly point first before the heartbreak: both are gay. Neither give a specific identity, but for generally purpose, and because of only seeing romantic relations between them and other woman, lesbian is what we’ll call it.

Here we have too powerful, strong willed, quick witted, lesbian woman as main characters in a narrative about overcoming hardships and heartbreak.

Now the overlaps in those hardships and heartbreaks.

Both are orphaned at a young age. Vi after an uprising gone wrong. Ellie’s is never revealed in the games. And then both are adopted by a new father figure. Vander and Joel respectively.

Both are taught survival and fighting techniques from them. Both see the adoptive father as their real father. Then both of them lose said father. Both of them feel responsible for that death.

Vi eventually heals from this loss by the end of the series, and while she definitely carries the grief of that loss through the show, she doesn’t follow the same kind revenge plot that Ellie does. What Ellie does belongs in a completely different post.

Abby and Jinx

I almost didn’t include this because at first I thought the only narrative similarity between the two would be the responsibility of the previous mentioned death of the father figures. Abby kills Joel. Jinx (Powder) (accidentally) kills Vander.

Especially because I consider Vander Jinx’s father, too. Regardless of her relationship Silco after his passing.

But then I thought about Lev and Isha. Abby and Lev relationship in the game exists to mirror the relationship between Ellie and Joel.

And while I could see an argument that Isha is meant to help Jinx heal, especially heal the relationship between herself and Vi, I still place her in a role of motherhood or caregiver for Isha.

Jinx learns so much about love, forgiveness, and hope from Isha. Similar to how Abby found forgiveness for Joel actions once she finally experienced what it means to live for someone else.

Jinx sees herself in Isha, just as Abby saw herself in Lev.

Joel and Vander

As you could probably gather from the previous two points, both these characters are father figures.

Joel takes Ellie under his wing after circumstances lead the to travel across the country in hopes Ellie’s immunity will lead to a cure. But at the end of the game, when complications arise, he saved Ellie, leaving body after body in his wake.

Vander, friends with their mother and father, already knew Violet and Powder. He in fact lead the uprising against Piltover that would result in the death of their parents. He adopts them then, and shifts focus into making the holding the Undercity together the best he can, even alliancing himself with enforcers to try and keeps his daughters as safe as he can.

I’m not gonna spoil anything, but the point is these two men would do anything, and I mean anything, for the safety of their daughters.

Bombs

Maybe a dumb point, but bomb mechanics in TLOU is one of the most fun aspects of the gameplay. And Jinx’s most infamous for her bombs.

If I missed anything or got something wrong, please let me know!

Also, enjoy an tik tok edit of them. @violetswifes.

[tloujm]

Part XXV: Night at the Museum

Author’s Notes: A direct continuation of the previous chapter. I was going to do the science museum thing all in one, but it turned out really long, so I figured I’d split it up. Ngl, didn’t proof read it yet, but I wanted to upload it. Will do later. 

Genre: Fluff & Angst

Summary: The three of you spend the night inside the museum and continue with scavenging the next day. Things are still a bit tense between you and Joel. Kiddo has a few lines and her identity is revealed at the end. 

Ship: Joel Miller x Fem!Reader

The three of you began to walk down another hallway, no longer illuminated by whatever sunlight came through the windows. Kiddo was first to turn on her flashlight. A Walk Through the Stars , you read the title of the next exhibit in your head. Abruptly, she stopped right before entering the room completely. 

Joel walked around her motionless body and noticed her widened eyes. “You don’t like it. We can...umm…(Y/N) can stay in the other room with you while I clear this one, then we can---”

“Are you kidding?” Kiddo finally spoke. Though soft, her voice emanated throughout the room and traveled to your ears. You couldn’t believe it.

She proceeded to take in the space exhibit in all its glory. You and Joel exchanged glances before looking back at her. She was so preoccupied with the artifacts lining the display cases that she forgot about clearing the room. Joel watched her have fun for a moment longer before following you as you swept the area. 

He signalled you an all-clear and you nodded. The two of you joined in and enjoyed the artifacts as if you were guests. 

“(Y/N), C’mere” He waved you over to where he was standing. “You think they could use this back home?” He waved his light on the array of solar panel prototypes against the wall.

You shrugged. “Probably. It would definitely help, but I don’t know who’d know how to make it work.”

“I’m sure Tommy knows somebody who can.” He replied. He looked over at you, but you refused to look back. You could feel his eyes on you. Finally, he tore them away to watch Kiddo climb onto a rover replica that was further into the room. “Listen (Y/N), I’m sorry about what I said back there.” His voice lowered.

“Now’s not the time.” You responded flatly.

“She can’t hear us.” He nodded back at Kiddo.

“I don’t care. I’m not doing this now. We can talk about this when we get home.” With that, you left him to stand there alone as you walked over to the rover display. He let his head fall and sighed before following you. 

“Where’s the steering wheel on this thing?” Joel asked out loud.

“They use joysticks.” Kiddo explained in brevity. She moved it around for Joel to see. 

He began to examine the small vehicle. “Huh...hang on! Is this the real one?”

A dry chuckle left your lips. “Considering they left the real ones on the moon, I would say no.” He glanced up at your reply. Kiddo obliviously made engine noises with her mouth as she steered the joy stick. 

“Can we make camp here?” She spoke up again.

“I don’t see why not.” Joel answered. You began to barricade the entrance to the exhibit while Joel prepped the area for sleep. A metallic knocking sound echoed through the room. He turned to see Kiddo messing with a small cabin capsule. She peered through the tiny window before attempting to open its door. With a grunt, Joel got up and opened it for her; the metal screeched as he did. She peered her head in with the flashlight and deemed it safe. “I want to sleep in here tonight.” She looked up at him, her eyes asking if it were ok.

“You sure you want to? It looks mighty cramped in there.” She nodded. He glanced inside to see two seats. “S’pose you’d fit in there just fine.” He nodded before walking away. “Looks like it’s just the two of us.” He said to your back as you faced the barricade. You let out a sigh and prepped an area between him and the capsule to sleep on. 

Joel’s body naturally woke. Being in a windowless room, he had no sense of time. Reflexively, he looked down at his watch. He would do that from time to time before remembering that it wasn’t going to give him an answer. He laid his head back on the backpack that he used as a pillow while his thumb brushed over the cracked face of the watch. Thinking of Sarah made him think of Kiddo. Quietly, as to not wake you, he walked over to the capsule and peered through the tiny window. He barely saw you, but he could tell she was still sleeping too.

Regardless of the time, Joel decided to start his day. He went back to the janitor’s closet he stumbled upon yesterday and grabbed a tool bag. The sun beamed down on him as he walked the distance back to where he left the truck. 

*****

Joel removed the screwdriver he used as a key from the ignition. He took a deep breath in front of the museum entrance as he thought about you. He knew you’d be awake by now. Deservingly, he was sure you’d still give him the cold shoulder. He decided to focus his energy on bringing one of those solar panels down and give you space. Thinking about it, you were right; last night was not the time. 

*****

Back at home, the three of you unloaded the pickup truck full of scavenged goodies. Joel had to admit, he did not think you guys would find so much stuff of use from a museum. Tommy and another guy helped him move the solar panel while you and Kiddo delivered some farming tools to the gardeners. The scavenge also produced books for the library and school, medical texts for the infirmary and seeds for new crops amongst other things. 

He had no idea where you were after the truck was cleared out and returned to the garage. You were not at home, so he was on his way to the daycare. Surely, you were there with Kiddo. He was both ready and not ready to have this talk with you. He knew how he felt, but wasn’t sure how to express it. He also didn’t want to have this dragging on unresolved any longer. While it was a trip with the purpose of acquiring supplies and training Kiddo, he also wanted to have a good time. He reminded himself to count his blessings: there were no run-ins with any infected or otherwise. Things could have gone worse. As he wondered whether he overreacted or not, he felt a hand fall on his shoulder. 

“Joel, I’m glad I caught you.” Wendy said.

“I came to see if (Y/N) was here.” He replied. “Why, what’s wrong?”

“Oh, nothing’s wrong. You just missed (Y/N). The girl too. She took her and some of the other kids on an impromptu field trip to the library to see some of the new stuff you guys brought over. I’m sure they’ll be back later on this evening. But what I wanted to see you about was this.” She handed him a folded sheet of paper. The edges were ragged on the left side as if it were torn out of a book. “She wanted me to give this to you just in case she didn’t get the chance today.”

It was a homemade card. On the cover was a drawing of a bright green T-Rex with a brown, wide brimmed hat on its head. His lips curled up in a smile before he opened the card. In colorful letters, it simply said Thank You and at the very bottom, it was signed with her name.

His eyebrows raised as he scratched his beard. “Ellie.” He breathed out her name. 

[horizondawn]

I got so much more from my experience playing The Last of Us Part II than "revenge is bad". It's something I've literally and heavily been dealing with just this past month. I have a lot of deep thoughts here, so here we go. This isn’t saying you’re horrible if you didn’t like the game, but after sitting on it for a while after finishing, these are my thoughts of the series from my perspective through my real life experiences and own personal morals/beliefs and how I try to grow as a person. Key word: Try.

I have a family member who was murdered over 3 decades ago, and it still haunts me and my family to this day. I've had night terrors similar to the ones Ellie had in the game, even if I didn’t see the actual act, so I can only imagine how traumatizing it is for her. The murderer has been locked up and on death row ever since, and for a while I was set on going to the eventual execution. My anger fueled me for an awfully long time, but it wasn't until a few years ago I realized that is not me. Killing him (or in my case wanting satisfaction by watching a live execution) won't bring that family member back, and I would lose a part of myself if I actually went through with what I intended and held onto those feelings. And that was identical to what was happening to Ellie. I didn't want her to lose herself, because going down that destructive path means you come out in the worse possible way. Even worse than the ending we got. I was frustrated with Ellie because I understand her pain to an extent even if the situations are nothing alike, and that is the reason why I bonded, cared, and loved her even more, and I didn't think that was possible. The killing we committed as Joel didn't bother me as much in the first game because they were a bunch of hunters we never really understood. The one time I sat there unable to pull the trigger for a good while was when I was forced to shoot the surgeon, who was later revealed to be Abby’s father. I didn’t want to do it, but I had to in order to finish the game. In Part II we saw so many perspectives on top of knowing Ellie was losing it by deliberately going after these groups of people. The further on I played, even before getting to Abby's perspective when I hated her, I still didn't want Ellie to go through with it. From the very beginning, even though it was going to be brutal, I absolutely did not want Ellie to accomplish this goal. That’s mainly because I know the feeling, and it really does consume you.

It fucking hurt and I was so frustrated with Ellie when she left Dina, JJ, and their life together, but it was because I care so much for her and desperately wanted her to let her anger go rather than the actual writing. I felt for her as a real person rather than just a character who was written. Even if she has lost everything she ever had though, Ellie didn't lose herself or her humanity and ability to care in the end, and that sliver of hope made me feel relieved. The symbolism of her leaving the guitar Joel gifted her, that she could no longer play properly, was a sign of her forgiving him, and letting go.

And that's only from Ellie's perspective. I had to stop playing for a bit the moment I had to start playing as Abby, the biggest emotional whiplash ever. Holy hell though did my perspective change and I eventually loved her as a character. Even if I still hated her I love getting to see different perspectives. Seeing Abby’s story as well contributed to why that final fight made me sob. I stopped controlling Ellie and had her just standing there on the beach because I knew what was about to happen, and I did not want that. I really didn’t know if Ellie was actually going to kill Abby or not. And I cannot describe how many of the tears that were shed were from relief when she didn’t. I would literally love to play a game just focused on Abby and Lev though and see where they go as their dynamic was absolutely amazing and I will fight anyone who hates on Lev; he is such a treasure. And even though I will never forgive Abby for what she did, I’m tired of hanging onto that kind of anger, even if it’s for a fictional character. I want to understand everyone better in reality, because we are all human, and that makes things so very complicated. Add a fallen society after a world wide pandemic that has wiped out most of humanity and it makes it even more complicated. The human experience is insane and no one will ever be able to understand everyone else’s experiences and pain, and that’s what makes individual lives so vast and important. 

I didn’t know any of the spoilers aside from Abby killing Joel, but I didn’t know the specifics, and I didn’t see a single screenshot spoiler. I still have no idea what the spoilers were beyond that. The moment it was announced a sequel was coming out I had a very big feeling Joel was going to die though, so I was okay with that if it happened from a narrative perspective. And you know why? Because the world of The Last of Us is cruel, and people are taken from Ellie in the blink of an eye. One moment Ellie confessed her love to Riley while sharing a sweet kiss and dancing and the next she’s bitten and we know what happened from there. One moment she’s travelling with Joel and Tess and Tess is gone. One moment she’s sharing a wonderful moment with Sam and Henry, and then they’re both gone. In the most brutal and cruel manner that fed her survival’s guilt. And that is why she was so upset with Joel. She lost so many people literally right in front of her. Then she learns the Fireflies are gone because of the one person she was able to grow to love as family, something she never ever had in her life, which also means her previous guardian, Marlene, her mother’s close friend, is gone as well because of him. As Tess quoted, “Guess what, we’re shitty people Joel; it’s been like that for a long time”. Tess was right. Joel was not a good person, and that is what made him unbelievably fascinating as a playable protagonist. But the player grew to know him from Ellie’s direct influence, not from the hardened person he became after 20 years of emotional distance from anyone following the death of Sarah. And that sudden harsh cruelty is exactly what I was expecting in the sequel, even if I wasn’t mentally or emotionally prepared for it. I certainly still got upset with every death there was: Joel, Jesse, Mel, Owen, Yara, everyone. The Last of Us is not focused on happy endings. At all. Of course we wish for that, and the new menu after completing the game shows that there was definitely some hope following what happened on that beach, but the world is more about human emotion and the crazy things we do for the people we love, even if it’s in the worse possible way, and it gives us that bit of questioning wonder with a tiny dash of hope for Ellie and her humanity. That’s exactly what Joel’s actions were for his love for Ellie at the end of the first game. This was Ellie doing the same for her love for him. And what Abby did for her love for her father. And the thing is some people wish we understood Abby from a different order, and I totally understand and respect that. But again, in real life we don’t get the background knowledge of everyone’s pasts either if not for research of some kind, which is why we need to make an effort to learn if possible. That’s all The Last of Us really has to offer, no matter which character’s story we are following, and that is what makes it so special. The second game isn’t driven by hatred alone. It’s about the other gruesome side of things for love.

Now gameplay wise, yes, I do believe structure could have been improved or done differently to help with the flow of the narrative here and there. And there were some moments that felt dragged. But that’s gameplay, not the story itself. I thought The Last of Us was emotional whiplash. That was just preparation to the roller coaster Part II would bring. And I’m not saying Part II is better. Both games are very different stories with very different perspectives, so I honestly can’t compare them. The original game brings the bond of two characters we all grew to fearlessly love. Part II brings what exists outside of the world of those two characters, and that they aren’t the only ones on this teeter totter of having done horrific things in the name of love in this cruel world they live in. Because we’re all only human. In game as Ellie, Joel, and Abby we pick up all of these letters throughout both games about these characters we don’t even see, let alone meet, and yet I want to know more about what happened to them. What are their stories during all of this? And even if you still hate Abby in the end, which is fine, there was that chance of seeing someone else’s story as well that intertwines with Ellie. I personally LOVE it when this happens. And all of us, no matter how horrible the world seems to fall apart, are capable of learning through the knowledge of other’s experiences.

[captain-mcdavid]

(pt.1) (pt.2) (pt.3)

smut: yes | no

word count: 5.1k

warnings: smut, swearing, angst, unprotected sex, *age difference (disclaimer: this is fiction, i am in no way suggesting that these are colton’s preferences. if you are uncomfortable with a slight age difference, the one in this story is six years, then this is probably not a good piece for you.)

The hours after Colton left were mostly a blur.

You were so overwhelmed with emotions that the only thing that felt rational was hopping on a plane. 

When you showed up with bags messily packed at midnight, the next flight out was at 10:45. There was plenty of time for Colton to realize you were gone and come after you, but you knew he wouldn’t. Not after how things ended. There was also plenty of time for you to leave and go back, but the only thing about eleven hours in an airport... It gives you lot of time to think. It was basically eleven hours for you to dwell on the fact that Colton tried to replace you. By hour one you were upset. Hour two you were mad. Hour three, you were infuriated. And there aren’t enough synonyms for angry to get through the other eight hours. You were so angry you started to calculate time, how many hours you were here, how many hours since you’ve eaten, how many hours since you’d slept, anything to take your mind off of him. 

You were so mad you couldn’t even begin to think about his side of things. 

Which is why you got on the three hour plane ride home, and why you’re getting into a cab at the Edmonton airport. Three hours was enough for you to convince yourself that it was for the best, it would have ended anyway. 

Fourteen hours later, you’re still calculating time, you haven’t slept, and you’re so emotionally exhausted that you can’t even be bothered to take off your coat or clothes when you walk through your front door.

It’s about 5 in the evening when you fall asleep for the first time in forty eight hours, and when you’re woken up by Lauren storming into your apartment it doesn’t feel like you’ve gathered enough rest for what’s about to come.You almost forgot that you texted her before you left. 

“What time is it?” Wiping your eyes you speak with a groggy voice. 

“Ten thirty,” She says shortly, opening the curtains to let in the light behind them. “What the hell are you doing here?” 

You shrug at her and she rolls her eyes. “This is what was always going to happen, we weren’t gonna work out right? So it’s done. For real this time.”

She scans your body sprawled out on the couch, while you rub your temples to soothe the aching in your head. Stalking to the end of the couch where your feet are, she yanks off one of your boots, and then the other before saying, “You’re a fucking idiot.”

The clear mad tone to her voice is like a trigger for you, and you shut your eyes tight, because you know that all fourteen hours of built up anger are gonna come out of you at once. Before you can stammer out a response she’s talking again. “No, don’t. You need some tough love right now. I thought you’d figure this out on your own but obviously you’re so dense that you can’t.”

She swipes your legs off the couch and you sit up, trying not to look at her. 

“You’re self sabotaging.” She states firmly. “Stop it.”

“I’m self sabotaging because it’s never going to work out, Lauren!” You’ve never actually yelled at her before, but there’s a first time for everything. “I don’t need to hear another speech about how I’m the one walking away all the time because I know that now, but I was just doing the inevitable!”

“You don’t know that!” Lauren fights back, raising her voice just as much. “You won’t even try for more than five fucking days cause you’re so scared of being rejected again!”

“And what that’s not a rational fear? Are you sure about that cause the second he left Edmonton last season he found a replacement who looked exactly like me, only thing is, she was his age!”

Her eyes soften when you tell her, and just like that you’re back to tears again. They’re angry tears though now, and you’re not ready to stop yelling it. It feels good to get it all out. “Don’t tell me that I’m stupid for being scared of what would have eventually happened, because he would have realized soon enough that six years was too much, and I would have been brokenhearted again.” You finish, getting to your feet to walk away, but Lauren stands.

“It is an irrational fear. And you’re so blinded by it that you can’t see that he is so fucking in love with you!”

“Oh my god! I’m not gonna do this again,” You’re trying to walk away but Lauren grabs your wrist and pulls you back.

“If you won’t listen to him, listen to me.” It’s a plea, her voice has quieted significantly, and you don’t want to hear it but you know she won’t leave until you do. “Listen to me.” She says again.

You pull your wrist from her grasp, folding your arms over your chest, waiting for her to continue. 

“Your replacement? This girl that you’re so hung up on? Where is she now?” Lauren asks, and you furrow your eyebrows. “No idea, right?” She continues, “Exactly, she’s gone because even though she looked just like you and she was his age and all that bullshit, she wasn’t you. You’re so butt hurt by him trying to move on that you’re forgetting that he didn’t actually move on. He came back to you.” 

Lauren is literally out of breath from her rant, and you look on stunned. You’d be lying if you said that her words weren’t hitting home. 

“He has come back to you so many times.”

Especially those ones. 

“I have one more question okay? One more. Then you can make your final decision.” She speaks softly and you’re not sure if you’re ready for what’s coming?

“It’s a six year difference, and people will tell you it’s wrong, but has it ever felt wrong?”

You find yourself shaking your head immediately, and Lauren smiles a sad smile. “I’ve been rooting for you guys from the start, and now you need to start too. Fight for what’s right.” She finishes with a chuckle at her cheesy comment and for the first time in you’re not even sure how many hours, you smile too. 

“I’m a fucking idiot aren’t I?”

“Oh totally.” She laughs, “We could have had this argument over the phone, because you’re about to get on another plane.”

You lift your hand to your forehead with a sigh, “I’m getting on another plane,”

“You’re getting on another plane!” Lauren yells again, making you laugh. “Go take a shower and get your shit together, I’ll book you a flight.” 

This time you didn’t actually have to wait at all, Lauren practically yanked you out of the shower, yelling about a flight leaving in an hour and a half. When you touch down in St Louis it’s 3:30 their time, and it’s been 36 hours since you left, and you’re still calculating time for some stupid reason. 

You haven’t even thought about what you’re going to say to him when you see him, and the closer you get to his house, the more nervous you feel. The underlying fear of rejection is still there no matter how confident you go into this.

When he said he was done, he might have meant it in a way that you can’t change. But you’re the one who needs to take strides to keep him in your life now, and you know you can’t let the fear of heartbreak stop you from trying. 

When you walk into the lobby of his building, suitcase strolling behind you, the last person you expect to see is yourself...

She’s about three inches taller than you, her shoulders a little bit more broad, but she’s most definitely the twenty five year old you... Your faces aren’t identical, but she looks like she could be your sister for sure. 

The wind feels like it’s been knocked out of you, and you can only stare while she sits on the couches, scrolling through something on her phone. 

Your mind goes so blank that you can’t even feel your limbs as they turn you right around and bullet you towards the doors. There’s someone coming towards you but you’re so unfocused on what you’re doing that you don’t even look at who it is until they’ve grabbed your upper arm. 

Your neck cranes up to see the tall man that’s stopped you. He looks at you and then back towards where twenty five year old you was sitting. It takes him about point five of a second to realize what’s just happened before he’s stepping in front of you, blocking your way out completely. 

“Joel,” You say weakly, your head getting a little less foggy. “I need to go,” Tears are already starting to slide down your cheeks and you really don’t want him to see this. 

“I know how this looks, okay?” He starts, “But nothing happened.” 

You scoff, trying to move past him, but he bends down to make eye contact, “Y/N, if you were going up there to do what we’re all hoping you are, you can’t let this stop you,” 

“It looks like he went for her right after I left, again.” You cry, throwing a hand up. 

“He was hurt, you left and he was hurt so yeah he phoned her, and then he got drunk off his ass and passed out. I promise you, nothing happened. I was just up there and he could barely even put his suit on without having three shots of espresso. He’s so hungover, the amount he drank? He would have been debilitated last night, nothing could have happened, and it was all whiskey so he probably couldn’t even get it-”

“Is this supposed to make me feel better?” You interrupt, hoping he won’t go any further. 

“Yeah? Maybe, I don’t know, it’s supposed to stop you from leaving again.” He says. You study his eyes and it warms your heart that he actually looks so genuinely scared for his teammate.

“Is he okay?” You watch Joel’s face when you ask, and that’s enough to tell you it was a stupid question. 

“No,” He says. “Not at all.” 

You pause, just looking at him, trying to figure out what’s going through your head because everything feels so strange. 

“Just at least go up and talk to him, we have to leave soon, but he’s still up there.”

He looks at you expectingly, and you realize he’s not gonna leave until you agree, so you nod. He gives you a small smile before he turns and walks out of the building. 

You watch him leave and you think about calling Lauren, but you know exactly what she’ll tell you to do, so you decide to skip the conversation and trust Joel. He said nothing happened. 

You turn around and you feel deflated all over again when you see that she’s still there. You don’t have much time but you’re unable to stop yourself from sitting down across from her. Her eyes catch on you and she gives a small smile before looking back down at her phone. 

You can’t imagine how you must look right now, because you literally can’t take your eyes off her. You’re blatantly staring, and she’s definitely starting to notice. Her line of sight flashes quickly back and forth between you, the creepy staring stranger, and her phone.  

“Uber’s take forever sometimes,” She says with a uncomfortable chuckle. It’s clear that she’s trying to make the situation less awkward, so you try too, responding with a nod and a smile. 

Your gaze shifts to your feet and you realize how dumb you are for doing this. You want answers from her, but you can’t exactly say, “Hey, did you sleep with my sort of boyfriend last night?” Her eyes are trained on you now while you shift uncomfortably. 

You shake your head, getting ready to stand up when she speaks again. 

“You’re her aren’t you?” 

You’re not totally sure how to answer, so you just raise your eyebrows. 

“We do look alike, wow. I was really hoping you weren’t prettier than me, but you are. Damn.” She shoves her phone in her purse as she sizes you up, and even next to Colton you’ve never felt smaller. “You want to know if I slept with him right?” 

Well, she definitely wasn’t you personality wise...

You’re totally shocked into silence, so you just look at your feet, not sure if you should answer that or not. 

“I’m not gonna lie, I’m really tempted to tell you that I did just because I feel threatened...” Your heart nearly stops and you look back up at her. 

“But Colton is literally the nicest guy I’ve ever met, and he deserves to be happy, so I’m not gonna ruin that for him. Nothing happened last night.” 

You lift a hand to your face to swipe away the single tear that rolls own your cheek. You feel so relieved that you could sprint for the elevator right now. 

“He loves you a lot,” She gives you a gentle smile and you smile back. “I thought I was coming over to get laid but I spent the entire night listening to him talk about you.” She laughs and rolls her eyes at the same time, and you literally think you feel your heart clench. “I really wish he felt that way about me, but after all of that-” She motions backwards with an blown out look on her face and you laugh. “It’s clear that he won’t, you guys have something special. An age gap doesn’t change that.”

“Thank you,” You whisper, standing up. You think she’s done so you start to walk away, but she speaks again. 

“You know you’re a lucky girl...” Her eyes flicker downward and you furrow your eyebrows. “To be loved by someone like him. He’s amazing.”

You can see in her eyes that she has real feelings for him too, and even though you know it’d be super weird, you feel the urge to go back and give her a hug. But you have the feeling that’d be a little out of bounds so you just smile and say, “I am. Really lucky.”

The elevator doesn’t seem fast enough, so you opt for the stairs, going as fast as your legs will let you. You do the awkward walk jog down his hall as you pass people, all of them give you weird looks, but you can’t be bothered to care.

You shove the key he gave you into the door, swinging it open with way more force than needed while you shout, “Colton?” 

But there’s no response. 

You wander aimlessly around the house, hoping he’s somewhere and he just didn’t hear you, but it’s obvious that he’s not here anymore. You missed him. 

He must have been in the elevator while you were going up the stairs, and it literally feels like such a blow, because wow, what are the odds of that happening?

You don’t want to wait to see him, but you know you’re going to have to, so you make yourself some supper and watch some reruns of friends. The time before his game goes by so slowly, and once you finally see him on the ice, the minutes go by a little faster. 

He’s not playing well, his minutes are significantly lower than usual, and every time he steps out onto the ice he looks slow, and tired. You know him well enough to know that this will make him angry. You weren’t expecting him to come home happy but you weren’t thinking he would be mad either. 

When the game is done, you’re trying to think over what you’re gonna say, but at some point, you end up passed out on the couch. 

When you wake up there’s a blanket on you that wasn’t there before, and you can’t even pin point when you fell asleep but obviously you did. Colton’s suit jacket is laid over the back of the chair across the room, and his shoes are by the front door. The excitement you feel knowing he’s home makes you scramble off the couch, searching the rooms to find out where he is. 

When you step into his room and hear the shower running, you debate waiting again, but you decide you’ve waited long enough. At least those are your thoughts until all your clothes are off. 

Now you just feel nervous, and you end up counting to three four times over before you finally have the guts to open the door, and now your legs are shaking as you wobble towards his figure behind the curtain.

It’s pathetic really, how afraid you are of admitting that this is your fault. You don’t know why blame is such a hard thing for you to own, but it just is.

He must have heard you already cause he doesn’t startle when you pull back the curtain. He’s facing you, hands rubbing through his hair. He only meets your eyes for a moment before his gaze drops to his feet. You lift a leg over the barrier, your tail between your legs. It’s impossible to tell what his reaction to your touch will be right now, but you try anyway, gliding your hands up his chest and up to his collarbones. He looks at you again, and you stare back, trying to gain back the courage you had a few minutes ago, but all you can see is the anger and sadness in his eyes, and it breaks you all over again. Tears are slipping out now, of course, and you’re frozen in the moment, unable to speak.

Colton’s line of sight drops a little lower, pausing at your mouth. You’re not sure why, or what he’s thinking, but it’s probably not the same thing that you are. You hesitate for a second before standing on your tip toes to press your lips to his.

This isn’t what you came here to do, and this isn’t going to make anything better, but you just need some type of comfort from him even though you don’t exactly deserve it. 

Kissing him usually makes all your problems go away. His affections help you forget everything wrong with your relationship, you’re hoping for that again but you realize you’re not going to get it when Colton’s hands land on your hips. You know what he’s about to do, and everything inside of you hurts. He’s pushing you away. Physically but it feels emotional too.

You try your best to hang on, to keep yourself close to him but he’s too strong, and you give up, sobbing when you land back on flat feet. With a last attempt your hands scramble down to keep his touch on your waist. You hold his hands there, looking down as the water soaks your hair.

You have to own up to this.

That’s the only way you’re going to keep him.

When you feel like you’ve gained back the ability to speak, the first words that make it out are, “I’m sorry,”

You don’t expect him to say anything, but you still pause for a second before continuing.

“I want you in my life,” More tears. Fuck, of course there’s more tears. “I want you in my life so badly, but I’ve been so afraid of rejection. And I know that it’s been me leaving, I realize that now and I’m sorry I blamed this on you.”

He’s finally looking back at you again, and for a second you think that maybe that will be enough. Maybe you won’t have to bare your entire soul, but when there’s nothing once again on his end you know you have to keep going. You’ve completely forgotten everything you had rehearsed, so you’re just gonna have to wing it. 

“It’s been 48 hours since I last saw you,” You start, and his eyebrows furrow. Really? That’s what you’ve come up with all of the sudden? More time calculations? “When I left, I needed eleven hours to fully convince myself that leaving you was the right idea. And I needed three hours to convince myself that it was for the best. But I didn’t even need one hour to convince myself to come back.” 

This is so off topic, and it sounds so ridiculous, so you try your best to reel it in. “God, this sounds so stupid.” You mumble, lifting a hand to swipe your tears away. 

Colton lifts his hand from under yours and interlocks your fingers, and that’s all you need to keep going. 

“What I’m trying to say is, I didn’t ever think I would meet the love of my life at nineteen years old. I didn’t think I would fall in love with you at a fucking beer pong table right when I looked at you. It all happened so fast, and I didn’t expect any of it. And I sure as hell didn’t expect to love you as much as I do now.”

You’re crying so much that you can’t even look at him anymore, dropping your head you continue, tangling your hands together and picking at your nails. “The first time, when you told me this wouldn’t work, I was absolutely destroyed, because after knowing you for just one month I knew I would never love another person like I loved you. The pain I felt after that was indescribable. And every time since then, I’ve pushed you away because of it. I’ve walked out on you because I didn’t want you to walk out on me first, and I’m sorry. I was so scared of rejection that I couldn’t see what you were trying to do when you brought me here. I thought that I was protecting my heart, because I felt like you were eventually going to realize that six years was too much, but it’s not. Six years is nothing compared to how much I love you, and I’m not going to let others decide that we’re wrong because we’re not, everything about this, about us, is right, and I’m just so fucking sorry,” Your sobbing is probably prohibiting your speech at this point, but you try to choke out the rest while you’re on a roll. “I know my faults now, and I’m not gonna leave again unless you tell me to,”

He’s silent still, while you stare at the ground, and it feels like forever has passed before he crooks his index finger under your chin, gently pulling your head up. 

“I love you.” He whispers, “More than anything.” Then he presses his lips to yours and it’s like everything falls back into place. He pulls your body against his and you’re finally allowing yourself to feel how right everything between the two of you is. He feels like everything to you and you swear your heart is actually bursting inside of you. 

He pulls back, but keeps you close, closing his eyes while he rests his forehead on yours. “I’m sorry too.” 

“Don’t Colton-” You start but he stops you.

“No, I am. I’m sorry for what I put you through. And I’m sorry for everything today that happened with Joel, I’m sorry that I called her. That I ever even met her. I shouldn’t have done that. Fuck, it was unfair to her. I’m so in love with you there was no room for anything else. You’re it. You’re all there is for me.”

“I don’t wanna hear anymore apologies.” You sigh, placing a small kiss to his lips. 

“I don’t wanna see you walk out that door ever again.” He lifts you up to wrap your legs around his waist and you smile, pushing his hair back. 

You lean in for one more kiss before whispering against his lips, “Never ever.”

He kisses you back, harder his time and you run your hands through his hair arching your back to get even closer to him. He turns to press you against the wall and you can’t help but smile, cause you know exactly where this is going. 

It takes you by surprise though when he flings back the shower curtain, turning off the water before walking you out of the bathroom. 

“Colton, we’re soaked!” You squeal, but his lips just trail down your neck. His kiss is about to make you forget that you’re dripping all over the floor, but then you’re being launched into the air. 

You suck in a breath when you land on the bed, eyes locking on Colton as he hovers over you. He kisses you again and you let him, before turning your head. “How are we supposed to sleep here? The bed is gonna be all wet,” 

“There’s a guest room,” He murmurs, nibbling on your ear. 

“We’re gonna get towels before we bang in that one right?” You laugh, but it mixes with a moan when his free hand grazes your nipple. 

“Okay, I like where your head is it, with round two in the guest room-” He starts with a grin, “And yes we’re gonna get towels, but can you just shut up and let me kiss you?” 

You nod, connecting your lips while he reaches down to hook his hand underneath your knee, he pushes up while he slides down, his lips following his movements down your body. 

He places a delicate kiss on your mound before licking firmly up your slit, stopping to circle his tongue around your clit. He sucks hard, pushing your other leg up to spread you wider. He licks into your entrance and you arch off the bed with an inhumane noise, grabbing at his arm. He lifts onto his elbow, licking back up at your clit while he teases your entrance with one of his fingers. He pushes it slowly in and your grip on his other hand gets tighter.

“Colton,” You moan out and he groans against you. “I need you inside me,”

He slides his finger out of you and sucks it into his mouth before scaling back up the bed to hover over you. You start to roll onto your side, knowing he likes taking you from the back but he pushes you back over easily, shaking his head. 

“Not yet,” He whispers, sliding his forearms under the backs of your shoulders. You wind your arms around him and then he slides in slowly, groaning when he bottoms out. He stays like that for a minute, eyes clenched shut while he waits for you to get used to him. You lift up slightly to press your lips to his and he sighs, breathing into your mouth. 

“I love you so much,” He whispers, kissing you gently. 

“I love you,” You repeat, stammering slightly when he rolls his hips against yours. He keeps his mouth on yours while he rocks into you, licking into your mouth.

He disconnects and raises up a bit, sliding an arm out from underneath you to reach down to where your connected. “You’re absolutely stunning,” He breathes, rubbing at your clit. You arch off the bed and he groans watching you, loving the way you feel clenched around him. “Here, baby.” He pulls out and you can’t help but whine while he guides you to roll over. 

You get up onto your knees and elbows, and he pushes your leg further out to spread you more for him. He pushes into your from behind and you cry out at how good the different angle feels. He rocks into you a few times before his hands travel up, resting on your rib cage to pull you off your elbows until your resting against his chest. He swipes your hair off your shoulder and you crane your neck around to kiss him quickly. 

His lips slide down to your neck and collarbone where he gently bites the skin. You moan, your head lulling back to rest against his shoulder when his hands grip at your breasts. One stays there, and he rolls your nipple in between his fingers while his other hand falls down to rub at your clit. 

“Colton,” You cry, jerking against him when you grazes your g spot. 

“I’m right here, baby.” He coaxes, rocking into you again. He hits the spot again and your head falls forward but he holds you still against him, rubbing harder at your clit to get you there. 

“Colton, I’m so close,” You whisper, grabbing onto his forearm. 

“Come on, sweetheart, let go,” His lips slide up and down your shoulder and your breathing gets heavier as he carries you closer and closer to your orgasm. 

He’s rocking into you faster and you can tell he’s getting close too. One last roll of his rips has him pressing into your g spot, and you’re over the edge just like that, jerking against him when he rubs at your oversensitive clit. You clench around him and he growls deep in his chest, cock twitching inside you before you feel his warmth spreading. 

He holds you still against him so you don’t fall flat on your face, gently leading your body down to the mattress. He slips out of you and you roll over, giving him a lazy smile while he folds in beside you. “Fuck, I love you.” He whispers.

“You’ve said that a few times,” You grin. “But I love you too.”

“Stay with me,” He whispers, his grip on your waist getting tighter. You look back and up at him when you answer so he knows that you mean it. 

“I’m not going anywhere,” 

Then he kisses you hard, and your heart clenches in your chest, warmth exploding everywhere in your body. 

You slide out of the bed with a smirk and he sits up on his elbow, furrowing his brows with a grin. 

“I’m not going anywhere expect the guestroom, cause that bed is cold and wet. You’re welcome to come,” Backing out of the room Colton laughs, getting out of the soaked sheets. 

“You’re welcome to cum, cause I’m gonna eat mine out of you.” 

“Jesus christ!” You stammer, not expecting those words to come out of polite Colton’s mouth. “Where did that come from?”

He laughs and lifts you slightly to set you on the bed. “We’ve got a lot to learn about each other still,” He pauses to kiss you before continuing. 

“And there’s lots more where that came from.”

[shall-we-imagine]

A Liz in wonderland. (Part 1)

Yes, I'm shamelessly proud of that title.

Genre: Light hearted messing around but that's not a genre what even is a genre anymore I-

Summary: Imagine falling into an alternate universe where everything you never believed in is actually real- and vice versa. Or an alice in wonderland inspired story lol.

(First person point of view)

I tried. I really did, but the more he talked the harder it was to keep my eyelids from reuniting and sending me off to a deep sleep.

"Excuse me? May I use the bathroom?" I make sure not to use "can", considering I was in no mood to discuss the differences between may and can. We get it: you speak perfect English; now let us be.

Mr. Stuck up or whatever his name is sighs before mumbling a sure and turning back to explaining his love for Charles Dickens's A tale of two cities.

I take my sweet, sweet time, fully enjoying the silence of the normally bustling hallways. Plus, of course, the lack of lectures about Charles Dickens. Unsurprisingly, the bathroom too is completely empty: convenient for me, a person that's only here to scroll through her phone for a bit and doesn't want to be stared at cuz she's as awkward as could be.

Quiet murmurs distract me from my screen in hand; looking up, however, I find no one else in the bathroom. A stranger thing is how distant the voice felt, plus the fact that it came from a specifically strange direction...

"Huh? Was that always there?" I mumble to myself. The mirror that I'd previously assumed to be squeaky clean was decorated with about a billion tiny hearts and a giant one in the middle with the words GO OUT WITH ME? spelled in a neat handwriting inside. There's no way I missed this lipstick confession on the mirror, right?

More murmurs follow, but I still can't figure out what's being said, and at this point, I'm ready to just bolt out in fear rather than understand. However, as my eyes dart around in panic, I catch sight of some hearts being erased and redrawn.

"Is this a prank?" I hesitantly ask in a shaky voice, reaching to touch the thick, red lines.

A scream violently rips through my throat the second my fingertips come in contact with the glass. No, I wish it had made contact with the mirror. That's the thing, though: it didn't. My fingers slipped right through it.

No, it couldn't have. I imagined it; I must've.

With trembling hands, I once again reach for the mirror. I can't explain it. I don't know why it's happening, but I'm wrist deep into the supposedly solid barrier.

As I was trying to make sense of it, something latched onto my hand, aggressively pulling me towards my reflection. I scream and pull away as hard as I can; I grip the granite edge with my left hand, silently cursing myself for eliminating my dominant hand. Next time I wanna throw a hand into the unknown, I'll make sure to remember I do so with my left hand instead.

You'd think at this point someone would just burst in and save the day, right? Yeah, somehow I was left to fend for myself.

My hand is already getting weaker (curse you, (Y/N), for not exercising enough!), and with a sudden surge of power, I find myself thrust towards whatever was pulling me. I half-hoped I'd just slam into the mirror then stand back up normally, and everything would be okay, but instead I open my eyes to find myself on top of some brunette.

"Uh, hi." She laughs nervously.

"Who are you?!" I straighten my elbows but remain on top of her, mainly to corner her but also because I could barely find any power in me to even move an inch.

She slides herself backwards a few centimeters, just to prop herself up on her elbows. "Who are you? You're the one who reached out my mirror! ...Well, maybe not my mirror, but you get the point." She pauses for a moment then brings her face closer to mine, observing me intently and curiously. "What are you anyway? At first, I thought you were a ghost, but you're very...solid and...opaque...hmm.." She places her hand beneath my jaw, fingers pressing tightly towards the end of my cheeks. Unable to withstand the pressure, I open my mouth to relieve the pain.

"I don't get it." She frowns and releases me.

I rub my face in agony, "Don't get what?" By now, I'd sat up straight, maybe subconsciously I'm scared of the unexpectedly strong weirdo and needed to create more distance between us, who knows?

"You're not a demon either...these are the only creatures that can transport through mirro-" Her eyes widen. She pushes me away and quickly takes a fighting stance, cat ears shooting open from the top of her head. "Are you a witch?"

"Are you insane?!" I stand up, adjusting my clothes.

"I won't fall for this, witch! I'm not gonna be anyone's pet!" Thick claws spring out of her fingers, replacing her previously less intimidating painted nails.

Staring into her glowing green eyes in fear, I sputter out the first coherent thought that forms in the midst of my panicking mind, "Dude, what the fuck?!"

"Hmm?" Her glowing eyes take their earlier human-like form. She begins sniffing around, closing the distance between us. "Doesn't smell very witch-y...oh, silly me, I jumped to conclusions! Sorry about that!" She giggles.

I heave a sigh of relief, "Ha ha, yeah, silly you..."

Her cat ears suddenly perk up, as if picking up something interesting from a distance. Judging by her expression, I'm right. "What's-"

"You have to leave; you'll ruin my confession!" She tries to push me back into the mirror, but when that fails, she kicks me out the bathroom. What? Does she own the bathroom or something?! Who confesses in a bathroom anyway?!

The door slams shut behind me. I sigh. Probably useless to fight her anyway; she's completely bonkers. Perhaps I should come back later and try to understand whatever the fuck happened with that mirror...

"You seen Amelia?" A tall blonde blocks my way, (possibly) a fox tail swinging calmly behind her. "Cat hybrid. 'Bout this tall.." She holds her palm, facing downwards, near her chest.

"Uh, yeah, I think she's inside." I point to the bathroom door, stepping aside to make way for the girl, who I assume is the one Amelia is waiting for. Poor girl is getting a bathroom confession.

"Thanks!" She smiles and walks inside the bathroom.

Well, where am I supposed to go until their little love scene is over? I sigh, trudging away from the bathroom door- unsure where I'm headed to.

"Hey, newbie!" A voice calls, directing my attention to a green-haired male with a dangling earring in one ear.

I tilt my head in confusion. "How do you know about me?"

"Saw it in my crystal ball earlier." He shrugs.

"Ha ha. Very funny." I roll my eyes. "What do you want anyway?"

"Very rude. Tsk tsk. Well, I was going to help you get back into that mirror you came out of, but I guess this isn't what you want, so I'll be off then." He smirks and begins walking away, hands casually shoved in his pockets.

"What?! How do you know about that?!" He doesn't budge. "Hey! Wait!" I call and rush after him, but the second I quicken my pace, he takes off running. "What's wrong with you?! Are you insane?! Stop!" Yelling isn't the solution I guess, but at least I'm taking out my irritation on something, right?

He reaches an intersection, and I pay close attention to make sure I know which direction he takes. It doesn't help at all, however, when he takes all three directions.

I saw him with my own two eyes split into three identical forms and take off running in each of the three directions.

Unable to comprehend the scene, I subconsciously stop in my tracks, head jerking to each side to make sure I actually saw what I saw. "What the fuck?" I breathe out.

"Luca?" A voice questions from behind me.

I turn around to face a blue haired boy with an eye patch. "Who?"

"The green haired guy. Annoying. Show off. Barely understandable. You know, the one that just ran off." He says in a semi-monotone.

"Uh, yeah? Did- did you see the way he.." I trail off. Do I want this person to think I'm insane? Probably not. Should I be telling him I saw this Luca dude split in three? Again, Probably not.

"Yeah. Luca's a witch." The guy informs me, seemingly unimpressed by the fact.

My mind takes me back to the moment Amelia freaked out at the mere thought of a witch. It made me wonder if this Luca guy ever tried anything on her. I wouldn't be surprised.

"Is that..common?"

"Witches? At this specific school, not really. In general, yeah, kinda." He responds.

Unable to get Amelia's reaction out of my head, I find myself asking for more information. "Are they evil?"

The stranger stares into my eyes for a few moments, but I suspected he wasn't staring at me at all, that he was staring into something beyond that- beyond me. "There's evil within anything and everything."

His eyes flicker back to present life. "But no. Not all of them are what you would label as evil. They're just mischievous, mostly harmless."

"Oh." I don't comment on his sudden disconnection with the real world; something told me it was better not to, anyway.

"Well, do you know if he can actually help me get back to where I came from?"

"Can? More likely. Will? I doubt it." The boy shrugs, "Unless you can offer him something interesting, I suppose. That's just a witch type of thing, I'm guessing." He places his fingers around his chin thoughtfully. And for the first time, I notice the tail swaying lightly behind him.

"A wolf?! You're a wolf hybrid!" I exclaim, as if I just made a life-changing discovery, but he just nods while staring at me like I'd gone insane.

He shakes off my exclamations and proceeds, "As I was saying...even though Luca might not be of too much help, there's another witch who is also known to be very good in this school." He reaches into his backpack to pull out some newspaper; it appeared to be the school's newspaper. He flips through it, eyes scanning the pages for whatever he was looking for. "Aha!"

He hands it over, pointing to a specific photo of a dark-haired guy with beautifully mismatched eyes. Class 6F-777's Joel Crawford wins yet another magic tournament! read the headline. The class assortment confused me, but I paid it no attention; this Joel person seems to know what they're doing. "Is it okay if I burrow this?"

"Yeah, no problem!" He smiles.

"Thank you so much! I'm (Y/N), by the way." I take hold of the newspaper and hug it tightly to my chest, like it was the map to a treasure I so desperately needed to find, which it is. I need to leave this place.

"Yukiya." He nods.

"Well, I'm gonna go try to find this Joel. Thank you again for helping me, Yukiya!" I wave as I walk off, but he hesitantly interrupts me.

"I can help you if you want." He offers, to which I immediately agree to.

"Okay, so we can start by checking Class 6F-777." He marches forward, me tailing behind. I take in the corridors as I walk; it looks like a normal school, yet somehow it's home to creatures I thought never existed. Part of me believed it would be interesting to spend some more time here, but I couldn't. I had to go back home.

"Ow!" Coming to a sudden halt after bumping into someone, I pause to take in the lack of anything for me to bump into.

"Watch where you're going!" The person who fades into existence in a matter of seconds glares at me as he leaves.

"That's Lucious. Don't mind him; he gets like when he argues with his girlfriend, but he's actually a very sweet guy. Ghosts can phase through everything, including other bodies; he just chose to bump into you on purpose, but as I said- don't mind him." A blond steps forward, resting an arm on Yukiya's shoulder while keeping his sparkling purple eyes on me.

He finally turns to the wolf hybrid, "Who's your friend, Yukiya?"

Yukiya glances at me, as if to say oh, this one? and looks back to his friend, "(Y/N). She's a human."

"No way!" The blond gasps, "Are you sure?"

"It's a scent I've never smelled before, Elias."

"Still- that could mean a lot of other things! Humans can't be real..."

"I'm right here." I finally announce my presence, though I didn't think I'd need to.

"Oh, I'm so sorry. I'm Elias Goldstein." The blond blushes and holds his hand out for me to shake, which I do.

Before the conversation could pursue, a loud crash catches everyone's attention, eyes quickly searching for the source of the disaster.

"Serge! I told you not to do that here!" A voice growls, as a pink-haired guy rushes outside a classroom in absolute terror.

[sexydeathparty]

Jennifer Grey Opens Up On Nose Job That Made Her ‘Completely Invisible’

Jennifer Grey was not having the time of her life after her rhinoplasty. 

In interviews published on Monday, the actor — who is releasing her memoir Out of the Corner on next month — told The New York Timesand People about the two nose jobs she got after she starred in the 1987 smash hit Dirty Dancing and how they drastically changed her appearance. 

“After Dirty Dancing, I was America’s sweetheart, which you would think would be the key to unlocking all my hopes and dreams,” she writes in her memoir, according to the Times. “But it didn’t go down that way.” 

Jennifer Grey attends the premiere of Dirty Dancing in 1987

In the memoir, Jennifer recalls that after Dirty Dancing, there were still not “a surplus of parts for actresses who looked like me.” She was apparently told that her nose was “a problem.” 

“My so-called ‘problem’ wasn’t really a problem for me, but since it seemed to be a problem for other people, and it didn’t appear to be going away anytime soon, by default it became my problem,” she writes, according to the Times. “It was as plain as the nose on my face.”

Jennifer told People that she was “completely anti-rhinoplasty” and “resisted” the surgery most of her life. 

“I really thought it meant surrendering to the enemy camp,” Jennifer said. “I just thought, ‘I’m good enough. I shouldn’t have to do this.’ That’s really what I felt. ‘I’m beautiful enough.’”

Jennifer noted that her mother, actor Jo Wilder, had gotten the surgery, as did her father, Oscar-winning actor Joel Grey, and that the Ferris Bueller’s Day Off star sympathised with her parents’ reasons.

“I understand it was the 50s. I understand they were assimilating,” Jennifer told People of her Jewish parents. “I understood that you had to change your name and you had to do certain things, and it was just normalised, right? … You can’t be Jewish. You know, you can’t look Jewish. You’re just trying to fit into whatever is the group think.”

Jennifer says her mom loved her but suggested she get a rhinoplasty for the sake of her acting career.

After consulting with her mother and three plastic surgeons, Jennifer underwent two surgeries to “fine-tune” her nose. The second surgery was meant to correct an irregularity caused by the first, but she said it left her nose “truncated” and “dwarfed,” according to the Times. 

Grey during the 1999 ABC Network Summer TCA press tour.

Jennifer told People she knew she had made a mistake — she refers to it as “schnozzageddon” — when she ran into actor Michael Douglas at a premiere after her second surgery and he didn’t recognise her.

“That was the first time I had gone out in public. And it became the thing, the idea of being completely invisible, from one day to the next. In the world’s eyes, I was no longer me.”

Jennifer also recalled when an airline employee looked at her driver’s license, didn’t recognise her, but noted she had the same name as Jennifer Grey … the actor. 

Grey attends the L.A. Dance Project Annual Gala in 2021.

When Jennifer told the employee, “Actually, it is me,” she said that the woman responded: “I’ve seen ‘Dirty Dancing’ a dozen times. I know Jennifer Grey. And you are not her.” 

“Overnight I lose my identity and my career,” Jennifer wrote in her memoir, according to the Times.

But the actor — who is arguably as famous for her plastic surgery as her beloved role as Baby Houseman in Dirty Dancing — says she’s tired of others controlling her narrative and is ready to claim it for herself.

“That’s a new feeling,” she told People. “To take myself out of the corner — and to recognise that I have been putting myself there, through story, through narratives that weren’t giving me the best life. The story I was telling myself about how I got here was not a great story. And not entirely true. I hadn’t seen the ways in which I’d made choices.”

Read Grey’s full interviews at The New York Times and People.

READ MORE:

11 Times The Sequel Was Actually Better Than The Original Film

Prepare To Have The Time Of Your Life (Again) As Dirty Dancing Is Getting A Sequel

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[donaldscene98-blog]

What is USC doing to care for LA’s most important architecture?

In 2000, the University of Southern California’s architecture school began work to restore the Freeman House, a 1924 Frank Lloyd Wright house perched on a hillside in Hollywood that had been heavily damaged by the 1994 Northridge earthquake.

Many of the home’s signature textile blocks were carefully removed, dutifully inventoried in a 1,000-page report, and placed in a South LA storage room inside a former power plant. Several pieces of custom furniture designed especially for the house by Wright as well as Rudolph Schindler were also stored in the room.

Somehow, at least three of those furniture pieces went missing and their theft went unreported for more than six years, as the Los Angeles Times reported last week, amplifying concerns raised by architects and preservationists that the school—which also operates Pasadena’s iconic Gamble House—is mismanaging two of LA’s most innovative homes.

Los Angeles is home to some of the world’s legendary experimental residential architecture, but very few of these important houses are open to the public. USC has a remarkable opportunity to ensure these prized cultural assets remain intact and accessible to the community, preservationists say.

“When an institution is gifted historical objects, archives or properties, that is a sacred trust. People donate rather than sell their treasures because they want them to be protected and made available for scholars and future generations,” says Kim Cooper, a historian and author who runs Esotouric, a local tour company. “If USC has lost sight of this obligation, the university needs to find it again, and fast.”

An interior photo of the Freeman House in 1953, including furniture designed by Schindler. The floor lamp designed by Wright to the right of the fireplace is one of the items reported stolen from USC’s warehouse.

Photo by Julius Shulman. © J. Paul Getty Trust. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles

Since 1986, USC has owned the Freeman House, one of only four textile-block homes designed by Wright that used patterned cast-concrete as a building material. (Wright’s three other textile-block homes are privately owned.) In addition to as-yet-unfinished repairs following the earthquake 25 years ago, the residence is still without a full-time director after more than 30 years in USC’s possession. And despite decades of promises, the property has never been opened to the public.

In a statement to Curbed, USC called the Freeman House an “important architectural asset” and notes that the school is “providing regular maintenance and onsite monitoring of the property” while fundraising for future repairs.

The university also operates the Gamble House in Pasadena, a 1909 Craftsman bungalow by Greene and Greene that is widely considered one of the foremost architect-designed houses in America.

In August 2018, the Gamble House’s longtime director Ted Bosley resigned, citing “differences of approach between himself and USC School of Architecture leaders over the future of the Craftsman icon.” A USC spokesperson says “nothing has changed in terms of day-to-day operations” at the Gamble House since curator Jennifer Trotoux took over as interim director in January.

Unlike the Gamble House, which was opened for tours in 1966, USC’s stewardship of the Freeman House has oscillated between surges of attention and periods of neglect. In the years during the restoration work, designer Tim Champ lived one house over in the Schindler-designed DeKeyser House.

“The Freeman House was often left open and unsecured,” Champ said via Twitter. “I’m surprised it wasn’t completely looted or worse.”

“I would go by there myself and the front door was wide open,” says Champ, who notes to Curbed that a fence he shared with the house was also frequently open. “I imagine the porous nature of the fence may have contributed to the site-access issues at Freeman.”

By 2000, much of the furniture had been moved to the storage room, and by 2004, USC graduate students were occupying the home as caretakers.

In 2012, according to the Los Angeles Times, a facilities staffer reported that several Freeman House items were missing from USC’s storage room. The thefts were not made public until last week, when the paper published its story, based on an anonymous tip that triggered an internal USC investigation, and eventually a police report.

A spokesperson for the LAPD art theft division would not confirm descriptions or share photos of the stolen items, saying the pieces “can be confused with similar items in the market.”

A former USC associate with knowledge of the storage room’s contents who asked to remain anonymous tells Curbed that the theft was well-known to people at the school at the time, and that no photos have been shared because the school does not know exactly how many pieces have disappeared.

In addition, at least two textile blocks were known to have been taken from the house as the Freeman House sat empty, including two blocks prominently absent from the home’s entrance that can be seen in current photos.

A Freeman House textile block that was put up at auction at the Chicago-based Wright auction house, where it sold in June for $5,000, motivated the anonymous tipster to alert the Los Angeles Times about the 2012 furniture theft—and the lack of response from USC about the missing pieces.

The Chicago collector who consigned the block with Wright tells Curbed they bought the textile block in an eBay auction on May 12, 2012 .

That listing is no longer online, but the collector remembers the seller saying the textile block was taken during a time that renovations were being made to the Freeman House garage—and there was a “free for all” for “several” blocks stacked on the sidewalk.

The collector says that discarded fragments of buildings are relatively easy to purchase because these works are not seen as valuable by museums and galleries—or even to the owners of the buildings themselves. “The general attitude is when it comes to architectural ornament, when you have stuff like this, honestly, they don’t give a shit,” the collector tells Curbed. “Architectural ornament is not appreciated or handled the way it should be—end of story.”

The collector decided to stop collecting Frank Lloyd Wright works last year and approached the Wright auction house about selling the block.

“We’re certainly not trying to hide our involvement,” says Richard Wright, president of Wright, but he says he wishes USC had revealed information about the missing items sooner. “If they had gone to the police to publicize the loss, that would have been the best way to get to the bottom of it.”

In 2016, Wright sold a Frank Lloyd Wright floor lamp for $100,000 which was reportedly nearly identical to the two missing Freeman House lamps. The lamp Richard Wright sold came from the Storer House in Hollywood, another textile-block house from the same period, which had been bought and sold by film director Joel Silver. Wright confirms Silver as the seller of the lamp.

Although there are online forums to report and track stolen art pieces, the provenance of design and decorative artifacts is left largely up to sellers and collectors to provide. In this case, not only the police, but various Frank Lloyd Wright associations should have been alerted about all the losses immediately, says Wright.

“This really truly relies on the community,” he says. “There’s not a centralized database.”

The way the thefts remained unreported by USC leadership is only one concern that has surfaced about the way the architecture school is overseeing its showpiece homes.

Bosley’s departure from the Gamble House after 28 years has left an uncertain relationship between the school and the city of Pasadena, which owns the home. Only the second director of the home since it was opened to the public in 1966, Bosley was a well-respected leader and a fundraising juggernaut who raised millions of dollars for critical repairs.

The timing of his departure has even led some to publicly muse if Bosley had dispatched the whistleblowing email to the Los Angeles Times. Bosley confirms to Curbed that he did not.

A USC employee who is not authorized to speak on behalf of the architecture school noted that Bosley’s vision for the house was at odds with the vision of Milton S. F. Curry, who was named dean in 2017. Curry has reoriented the school around a “citizen architect” mission focused more on community and social issues, explains the employee, which may not prioritize the operations of historic properties.

“The last two deans haven’t had that mindset, and it shows,” says Elizabeth Timme, co-principal of LA-Más, and daughter of Robert Timme, the USC architecture school dean who raised $1.3 million for the Freeman House’s restoration in the 1990s.

“These properties are an extension of the school and it’s the dean’s job to lobby for more resources to take care of them,” she says. Her father, whose legacy had become intertwined with the home by the time he died in 2005, had even floated an idea to sell the house as a means to that goal, as evidenced in a 1998 letter to the Los Angeles Times.

USC’s School of Architecture has since made a deal to acquire a third historic home, a modern masterpiece beneath the arches of the Colorado Street Bridge in Pasadena.

In 2007, USC was named as the primary beneficiary in the will of Carol Soucek King, owner of Arroyo del Rey, a 1979 home by Conrad Buff and Donald Hensman. Upon her death, the home originally designed for her and her husband—including personal objects like serviceware, books, and art—will be given to the school, creating the Carol Soucek King and Richard King Center for Architecture, Arts, and the Humanities. (Richard King died in 2017.)

Reached by phone, Carol Soucek King tells Curbed she had learned of the Freeman House thefts from the Los Angeles Times story last week.

“It sounded like a discussion I might be concerned with,” she says. But she noted that she had taken measures to avoid similar issues.

“Much of this is specified in my will,” she says. “There needs to be a director overseeing the property, always.”

The Freemans left $200,000 for maintenance when the house transferred ownership to the school in 1986. Contrast that figure with a “bare bones” rehabilitation estimate provided to Curbed by USC’s historic conservation specialist, Trudi Sandmeier, in 2017: at least $2.5 million.

In comparison, a single capital campaign for the Gamble House completed in 2004 raised more than $3.6 million. The Gamble House also has a partnership with the Huntington Library to display artifacts, and a secured, climate-controlled storage facility.

King has arranged a maintenance endowment, but she says the school promised some additional fundraising as part of a lecture series, plans for which “have not been carried forward as quickly as I’d wished them to be.”

Like King, who also hosts salons in her home, the Freemans’ wish for their home was to be used the same way they used it—as a cultural space for the community, not necessarily as a museum.

AIA Pasadena and Foothill executive director Zelda Wong has seen the homes’ benefits to the school first-hand, both while working at USC for seven years and as a docent at the Gamble House. “It is a good tool for learning, it’s a laboratory for students,” she says.

But she wonders why USC has not committed to making the Freeman House a hub for architectural education that could serve all of Los Angeles. “USC uses these houses for recruitment and for marketing—and these are masterpieces, how can you not talk about them?” Wong says. “But it would be great if there was more programming and even more involvement. I just want the public to be able to enjoy them.”

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Source: https://la.curbed.com/2019/2/11/18217152/freeman-house-usc-frank-lloyd-wright-gamble-house

[tinseltine]

Tinsel & Tine's Look at :

The 27th Annual

PHILADELPHIA Film Festival

By Le Anne Lindsay, Editor Every year I have an excuse as to why I didn't get to as many films as I wanted and intended during the festival, so I won't bore you with that story, let's just get into who I interviewed, what I saw and attended... I'm going to highlight the last first CLICK HERE to jump below to my interview with director OLIVIA LICHTENSTEIN & producer NICK BEDU of the closing night film TEDDY PENDERGRASS: IF YOU DON'T KNOW ME Film Trailer:

Day 1 (10/18) The Festival Opened with BEN IS BACK directed by PETER HEDGES who was in attendance. It stars Julia Roberts as a mother of four, two children from her first marriage and two from her current husband played by Courtney B. Vance, which doesn’t really impact the story which Hedges said he intended; that he likes to normalize things once considered noteworthy or taboo. Anyway, her son from her first marriage has been away in rehab, but shows up the day before Christmas Eve. As a mom she's ecstatic, but the rest of the family has severe reservations and without needing the use of flashbacks, it becomes truly obvious the hell this boy, played by the director’s son, Lucas Hedges (Manchester By the Seas) has put this family through leading up to his rehab. It hits theaters Dec 7th. Peter Hedges is also the screenwriter for one of my favorite movies About a Boy, so I got to ask him a questions about his time spent with the novelist Nick Hornby also captured excerpts of the Q&A post screening of Ben is Back.  See video embedded below :  or click HERE to go to YouTube

Day 2 (10/19) GREEN BOOK (director Peter Farrelly | Cast: Viggo Mortensen, Mahershala Ali, Linda Cardellini | Production/Distribution Universal Pictures, DreamWorks Pictures, Amblin Partners, Participant Media) In theaters November 16, 2018

Since I had the opportunity to visit the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture when it opened in October of 2016, I knew about the significance of the Green Book; but I'm assuming this movie will be the first time a lot of people my generation and younger will have knowledge of its existence and history.

Day 2 (10/19) WRITE WHEN YOU GET WORK (director Stacy Cochran)

Day 3 (10/20) THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND  a mocumentary, inside a biography, inside a documentary, inside an art film, inside Hollywood circa 1950-1970. The man, the myth, the legend ORSON WELLES co-wrote this film with his muse Croatian actress, writer, director Oja Kodar. Shooting began in 1970 and kept going off and on for 7 years by 1979 40-50 minutes of the film had been edited. But the project was beset by investor issues, one backer was Mehdi Bushehri, the brother-in-Law to the overthrown Shah of Iran, which through a series of complex events left The Other Side of the Wind on the other side of a Paris Vault for 40 years. During those ensuing years many legal battles took place between Oja Kodar, Orson Welles' daughter, Beatrice, Bushehri and I believe one other party. 1998 was a turning point in the film's release and settling of many legal battles. Before his death, Welles beseeched director/actor Peter Bogdanovich, who originally was to do an authorized Orson Welles biography, and played a major role in the movie, to complete The Other Side of the Wind should anything happen to him. So in the early 2000's he was set to direct the unfinished "masterpiece", but ultimately, Hollywood producer Frank Marshall, whose first jobs in the film business was as Production Manager on the film, got the full rights in 2014, finished editing in 2016. Netflix then came aboard, so that in 2018, just shy of 50 years in the making, The Other Side of the Wind got its premiere at the 75th Venice International Film Festival and a screening at the 27th Annual Philadelphia Film Festival. This is just a small summation of the trajectory of "The Other Side of the Wind", there's so, so much more to tell about Orson Welles' later years while making this film, which brings us to THEY'LL LOVE ME WHEN I'M DEAD by famed documentarian Morgan Neville ("Won't You Be My Neighbor", "20 Ft from Stardom") his making of doc, screened back to back on #PFF27 Day 3, but all I needed to see was Neville's film, which is as compelling and informative as his other docs; and shows enough of The Other Side of the Wind to satisfy your curiosity about that long awaited piece of cinema - which was not only too avant garde for my taste, but once you become adjusted to the disjointed rhythm, mockumentary style and who all the player are and represent, it becomes quite tedious and tiresome. After 5 hours of Orson I couldn't wait to head to the Film Festival Lounge for a little R&R.

#PFF27 Enjoying The @dietzandwatson FESTIVAL LOUNGE @jollyspianobar greats snack lively movie discussions!#FilmFestival @gpfo_phillyfilm @AlliedPhilly @PhillyFilmSoc #movietalk #betweenscreenings #dietzandwatson #marvelousmoviemaven #PhillyCalendar pic.twitter.com/Qb6SzI3kD2

— Tinsel & Tine (@tinseltine) October 21, 2018

Day 3 (10/20) WIDOWS (director Steve McQueen 12 Years a Slave co-written by Gillian Flynn Gone Girl & Sharp Objects) a story about three women who must take up where their criminal husbands left off in order to survive after their deaths. Viola Davis is of course the driving force of the film, extremely no nonsense, she tells one of the other women at one point “We have a lot to do — crying isn’t on the list”. But her cohorts are strong too - Michelle Rodriguez as a mother of two who finds out after her husband’s death that he had gambled away her business. And Elizabeth Debicki as an abused wife and daughter, she has the biggest character arc. I think she's going to be the next Margot Robbie, remember after her breakout roll in Wolf of Wall Street Robbie was a sought-after actress; I’d be surprised if that doesn’t happen with Debicki. There are interesting side characters too that all get weaved into the fabric of the main story even if it’s just a small payoff at the end. I was impressed with a long tracking shot that I think other filmmakers will probably borrow - Colin Firth’s character, a 2nd generation politician is in a particularly urban neighborhood for a PR type event - gets in his car and carries on a conversation with his assistant, but the camera is on the outside of the car the whole time, the angle both continuously on the vehicle, while also showing the severe change of scenery from that downtrodden section of town, to his wealthy home in a beautiful neighborhood. All these things make me wonder why from the trailer, Widows looks like a mediocre heist movie, a 2nd class Oceans 8. I should have known it wasn’t, because Steve McQueen doesn’t just direct movies, he takes on projects, (Widows is based on a British Mini Series) and makes social commentary, this one about economic inequality, the politics and corruption of Chicago and riding the female empowerment movement. But you’re not hit over the head with any agenda; at its heart, it’s a quick moving, super entertaining movie that towards the end will have you talking back to the screen and clapping in excitement.

Day 4 (10/21) STUDIO 54 (director: Matt Tyrnauer) A look back on the phenomenon that was a disco, a night club, a theater performance, a constant party, Sodom and Gomorrah, celebrity filled ... basically an experience that captured the zeitgeist of the moment, and sadly, a moment is all it really had. The club was famously created by two men, Steve Rubell the face of the business, the schmoozer, loved being photographed with every celebrity of the day (whose death sadly in 1989 was due to complications resulting from AIDS) and Ian Schrager, the introverted, creative one with the vision to make the idea more than just a place to dance. The doc is told from Schrager's point of view, who, for the first time since Studio 54 closed down, was willing to tell its story. These two were cunning showmen who spent $400,000 to build the club in six weeks, from an abandoned space on W. 54th St., which had been part of CBS television, but was originally built as an Opera House in 1927. The first mistake they made however,  was getting so swept up in opening and becoming a success that they never applied for a liqueur license. The second, skimming so much money off the nightly take (and not being quiet about it) that it was only a matter of time before the IRS came down on them. There was a group of 5 or 6 of us after the screening, talking in the Film Festival Lounge, and most felt Rubell & Schrager got what they deserved. That there was too much excess, they did things illegally and they made people feel horrible about themselves, waiting hours and hours outside the velvet ropes, most with no hopes of ever getting inside. But I didn't see it that way at all. I think it was fantastic that the LGBTQ community got to be in their element, experiencing more than total acceptance, they set the tone and everyone else entered their world. And I love to see people's dreams exceed their expectations! Okay, they got a little sloppy, but to send these guys to jail and rob an era of all that magic, that was the true crime.

Day 4 (10/21) AT FIRST LIGHT (director: Jason Stone) Sci-fi indie, a teenage boy puts everything on the line to protect his longtime crush after she comes in contact with other-worldly forces.  I was really looking forward to this one, as it sounded up my alley. It's got some nice Sci-fi bones here & there, and an almost compelling teen romance. If I had reviewed it right away, like I always intend to do during a film festival, I'd have more to impart, but now, in thinking back over it in my mind, there wasn't enough spark and wonder to take the time at this point.

Day 4 (10/21) BOY ERASED (director: Joel Edgerton ) starring Nicole Kidman, Lucas Hedges and Russel Crowe true story of one young man's struggle to find himself while being forced to question every aspect of his identity when he agrees to attend a conversion therapy program - or be permanently exiled and shunned by his family, friends, and faith. It's a big year for Kidman & Hedges they each have several movies out and coming out. If I had to choose which long-standing actress, Julia Roberts (Ben is Back) or Nicole Kidman (Boy Erased) had the better mother/son chemistry with Hedges, I think I'd have to give it to Nicole, although, it would be very close. But there's a scene in this film where she chooses what's right for her son over the wishes of her husband that I just found so touching and true. Boy Erased is a nice directorial debut for Edgerton, but much of the material isn't that compelling, or perhaps just intentionally restrained. To clarify, I'm certain if you were at this conversion camp having to submit to these nutz trying to Jesus the gay out of you, it would be a horribly traumatic experience, but from the audience's perspective, it doesn't feel that damaging - cinematically speaking, not in actuality. Actor/Director JOEL EDGERTON was in attendance for the screening and I got to ask him about what he feels as an actor he brings to being a director, and if there will be a sequel to BRIGHT.  Watch Red Carpet Video below: or Click HERE to watch on YouTube

Day 5 (10/22) THE UPSIDE (director Neil Burger) A friendship develops between a wealthy quadriplegic (Bryan Cranston) and the ex-con (Kevin Hart) who becomes his caregiver. Also starring Nicole Kidman The movie is based on the 2011 French film "The Intouchables", which I've always meant to see, it was very well reviewed and bandied about during that year's awards season.

The Upside is a movie that relies heavily on chemistry, which Cranston and Hart seemed to have genuinely felt on and off screen; you expect Cranston to deliver his usual tour de force performance, but who knew Hart could meet him toe to toe, without relying on big laughs; which this movie does not aim to impart, instead it succeeds by expressing a light touch of humor in unexpected places. Producer JASON BLUMENTHAL attended, moderated by Philadelphia Film Society Producing Director Andrew Greenblatt. Check out the Q&A video below:  Or click HERE to watch on YouTube

Day 6 (10/23) WILDLIFE director PAUL DANO attended Synopsis: Fourteen-year-old Joe (Ed Oxenbould) is the only child of Jeanette (Carey Mulligan) and Jerry (Jake Gyllenhaal ) -- a housewife and a golf pro -- in a small town in 1960s Montana. Nearby, an uncontrolled forest fire rages close to the Canadian border, and when Jerry loses his job -- and his sense of purpose -- he decides to join the cause of fighting the fire, leaving his wife and son to fend for themselves. Suddenly forced into the role of an adult, Joe witnesses his mother's struggle as she tries to keep her head above water.(writen by Paul Dano & Zoe Kazan)

#PFF27 Day 6 actor/writer/director PAUL DANO attended for @WildlifeTheFilm starring Carey Mulligan & Jake Gyllenhaal. Q&A excerpts to be posted soon. Dano was also given @PhillyFilmSoc  award for Artistic Achievement in Independent Film pic.twitter.com/3ew34hKf8X

— Tinsel & Tine (@tinseltine) October 24, 2018

"Actor Paul Dano makes an impressive debut as a filmmaker and—along with co-writer Zoe Kazan—elegantly adapts Richard Ford’s novel of the same name. Carey Mulligan delivers one of her finest performances as a complex woman whose self-determination and self-involvement disrupts the values and expectations of the 1960s nuclear family. With precise details and textures of its specific time and place, Wildlife commits to the viewpoint of a teenage boy observing the gradual dissolution of his parents’ marriage". Day 6 (10/23) I missed all the foodie films :(

#PFF27 #foodandfilm great FEAST films screening during @PhillyFilmSoc Philadelphia Film Festival: THE BIGGEST LITTLE FARM10/23 7pm & 10/27 12pm | CHEF FLYNN 10/23 2:40pm & 10/25 5:50pm | RAMEN SHOP 10/24 12:20pm & 10/24 8pm https://t.co/67ROwrO95f pic.twitter.com/3caXLmE8re

— Tinsel & Tine (@tinseltine) October 23, 2018

Day 7 (10/24) CAN YOU EVER FORGIVE ME? (director Marielle Heller) creates a wonderfully drawn character study, and a wonderfully wild, I can't believe this really happened story. It’s based on the memoir of real-life biographer Lee Israel (Melissa McCarthy), a grouchy, misanthrope and misfit who’d had some early success writing biographies on Tallullah Bankhead and Dorothy Kilgallen, but things fell apart after her biography on Estee Lauder was panned and Lauder put out her own biography about the same time. After that, Lee got writer’s block, drank too much and was on the verge of destitution when she discovered she could sell forged personal letters of famous people, such as Louise Brooks, Dorothy Parker, Ernest Hemingway and Noel Coward among others, writing in their style and witticism, in fact years later after her crimes were well-known, one of her forgeries wound up in a famous book celebrating the letters of Noel Coward. Over all, she forged 400 letters and figured out how to bait and switch by getting letters out of museums and libraries, copying them, putting her copies in their place and selling the originals. It may sound like pretty tame stuff for a movie, but Melissa McCarthy has a way of making this cantankerous old woman funny, and interesting enough that you really root for her schemes; particularly as she’s joined by a new friend, a somewhat preposterous, old queen trying to hold onto his former lifestyle, played by Richard E. Grant. The two together are highly amusing and heartbreakingly sad. It’s a small, lovely movie and a more dramatic turn for McCarthy. (10/24) BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY(director Bryan Singer) This was not part of #PFF27, but I took a night off from the festival to see this preview screening.  See T&T's Facebook #MiniMovieReview below:

Day 8 (10/25) Interview with director OLIVIA LICHTENSTEIN & producer NICK BEDU of TEDDY PENDERGRASS: IF YOU DON'T KNOW ME

This was the Closing Night film at the 27th Annual Philadelphia Film Festival – a documentary detailing the extraordinary life and career of Philly’s own Teddy Pendergrass. The night before I got a chance to chat with Olivia and Nick about the making of the doc., how much time they spent in Philly, the darker side of Teddy, the music, the tragedy and the come back of this sexy and soulful entertainer gone too soon.  SEE BELOW FOR INTERVIEW VIDEO or Click HERE to view on YouTube. Be sure to be on the look out for this documentary "Teddy Pendergrass: If You Don't Know Me" which tied for #PFF27 Audience Award, to be available soon on Showtime. The film brings you back to a time when the sound of Philadelphia ruled the radio, thanks in great part to Gamble & Huff, who along with Manager Shep Gordon, past girlfriends, wives, family members, and members of The Teddy Bear Orchestra, along with found audio diary of Teddy himself, are all weaved together to tell this story of extraordinary highs, lows and timeless music. I've been trying to find a videographer willing to work with me gratis for these types of interviews; perhaps someone working on their reel looking to gain some experience, unfortunately, I'm still looking. However, an editor did contact me to lend her services. Her name is REETU SHAH she's an aspiring music video director and editor. I sent her my interview with Olivia Lichtenstein and Nick Bedu, which I shot on my DSLR camera, along with video from the post screening Q&A, the performance by The Teddy Bear Orchestra (musicians who used to play with Pendergrass performed after the screening) and the film's trailer, to cut together. Check out the video below:

You can also check out Reetu's Reel, she can also be found on Facebook | YouTube

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(@get_repost) ・・・ The Philadelphia Film Society would like to thank all that attended the 27th Philadelphia Film Festival. We are proud to announce an unprecedented tie for the coveted Audience Award. Winners are TEDDY PENDERGRASS: IF YOU DON'T KNOW ME and GREEN BOOK. - - - #teddypendegrass #greenbook #greenbookmovie #PhillyFilmFestival #Philadelphia #IndieFilm #SupportFilm #SupportIndieFilm @alliedphilly #PhiladelphiaFilmFestival #WhatToDo #WhatToDoInPhilly #FallFestival #FallInPhilly #mahershalaali #viggomortensen

A post shared by LeAnne Lindsay (@tinsel_tine) on Nov 1, 2018 at 5:40pm PDT

Day 9 (10/26) BODIED (director JOSEPH KAHN) Synopsis: A progressive graduate student finds success and sparks outrage when his interest in battle rap as a thesis subject turns into a competitive obsession.  I was invited to interview the director along with 2 cast members, Jackie Long and Calum Worthy, then the night before, I caught a bad cold. Thank goodness Philly Music Producer, CARL MADISON, Stone Perspective Media (@carl_mad IG | @carlmadison Twitter | "I'm da Producer, He's da Rapper" - https://carlmadison.bandcamp.com) was available and agreed do the interview as a Tinsel & Tine contributor. He did a super job, as you'll see. Hope he'll agree to do more! Kahn: Here's the reality, as much as we don't want to admit it, everyone's a little racist, a little misogynistic, because ultimately people are all different, and our differences can be funny to each other, and that's what battle rap is, making fun of these differences. But the beautiful thing about battle rap is you're putting it out in the open, you're not hiding your concept of differences in an echo chamber and talking to people exactly like yourselves, it's a way to confront each other and say 'You eat a dog, you eat fried chicken, let's talk about it', right? And I feel like at the end of the process people get to know each other a little bit more. So I think having an open dialogue in a context where we know that we can talk and laugh at it is a healthy discussion...  SEE BELOW VIDEO FOR THE FULL INTERVIEW or click HERE to watch on YouTube

Day 10 (10/27) VOX LUX (written and directed by actor Brady Corbet original songs by SIA) starring Natalie Portman. The film is broken up into 3 distinct acts and Portman’s only in the last one. It starts out with a school shooting in which one of the victims, Celeste (Raffey Cassidy Tomorrowland ), winds up writing a song with the help of her sister, which goes viral and makes her a pop sensation at the age of 15. Because she was shot in the neck she always wears a collar or choker which becomes her signature look, but is never really spoken of in the movie. Willem DaFoe narrates in places, then it will dissolve into a lot of fast paced montages to advance time.  Like I said about Bohemian Rhapsody, whether it be fictional or documentary, I do love a rise and fall musician story; and of course, this young girl starts spinning out of control, by the time she's her older self, she's feeling somewhat trapped - the camera feels very invasive and there’s a lot of long walking tracking shots, which are quite effective. It's a watchable movie, but feels more like a straight to Netflix.

Day 10 (10/27) HER SMELL (directed by Alex Ross Perry) the third collab (“Listen Up Philip” and “Queen of Earth”) with Elisabeth Moss (Handmaids Tale, Mad Men), in this film she plays a strung out, feral, pudgy, rock legend spiraling out of control. We meet the band Something She, led by Becky Something (Moss) at her most manic point, when she’s just destructive and ugly to everyone around her, particularly her two band mates and her Record Producer, played by a very changed, completely gray, Eric Stolz. Her ex-boyfriend played by Dan Stevens is mainly raising their baby daughter and really shouldn't ever bring her any where near her mother. There’s a few brief flashback to when the band used to have some fun together, but most details in general are vague. I suppose this added to the film’s overall tension which is totally there, but I would have appreciated a few more lines drawn in; particularly because Becky is obviously not just scared or living the life of a Rock Star, she’s visibly angry, but you don’t really know why. There’s a moment when her mother (Virginia Madsen) stupidly tries to get her to look at some papers from her either dead or estranged father or perhaps estranged and now dead father, that Becky doesn’t want to deal with, which adds more fuel to the impossible task of trying to get her on stage. Basically, the movie really relies on the audience pulling for this chick to get her sh*%  together, but really, if it was any other actress, we wouldn’t care at all about this person, it’s only due to the likability, familiarity and talent of Elisabeth Moss which keeps you involved. Release Date: March 29th, 2019. Day 11 (10/28) I sat it out.  I was still fighting a cold and needed one down day before going back to work, but I am sorry I missed a few things on Sunday. Particularly RAFIKI

312) RAFIKI. This was an appropriately bittersweet way to end the film festival for me. It's a beautiful Kenyan film about two young women falling in love despite all the forces pulling them apart. #DLMChallenge #PFF27 pic.twitter.com/3CMyJba7ie

— Keith🍕🤺 (@PhillyFilmFan) October 29, 2018

(10/21 & 10/25) COLD WAR (written and directed by Pawel Pawlikowski)  I didn't see this during the festival, but have seen it in previews, so decided to add it to the coverage:

CONGRATS TO THE WINNING FILMS: Best Documentary Feature - SHIRKERS Honorable Mention for Call to Action - THE DEVIL WE KNOW Best Narrative Feature - AN ELEPHANT SITTING STILL Honorable Mention - DIAMANTINO Pinkenson Award for Best Local Feature - THE PRICE OF EVERYTHING Honorable Mention for Best Direction - HER SMELL Archie Award for Best First Feature - DEAD PIGS Honorable Mention- THE GUILTY Best Short Film - CAROLINE Honorable Mention for Best Documentary Short - ALL INCLUSIVE Audience Awards - tie - GREEN BOOK & TEDDY PENDERGRASS: IF YOU DON'T KNOW ME

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[childrenofhypnos]

Chapter 24: Research

The second half of October settled over the Sleeping City in a blanket of dark clouds and cold winds. The sun crept late over the skyline in the mornings, and at night the ever-burning lights of the city seemed far away in the gloom, despite the skyscrapers surrounding the campus on all sides. The great glowing sign—FIND HOME HERE, CHILDREN OF HYPNOS—that overlooked the city became a great white will-o’-the-wisp in the sky, unreadable and untethered from the earth.

In the days following the visit to the Sandman, the hairs on the back of Emery’s neck prickled for every possible reason. Small sounds behind her. Movements in the corner of her eyes. The heater beneath her dorm room window turning off suddenly in the middle of the night, just as it always had. Most of the time she could tell herself she was paranoid, that her doppelgänger—if it was even actually active—would not yet be outside the Dream. But even when she knew that beyond a doubt, she still hurried a little faster to somewhere that she could press her back in a corner.

If her doppelgänger wasn’t active now, it would be after all this. When she wasn’t paranoid, she was wondering if this was part of the reason the Insanity Prime began so soon: because so many dreamhunters feared it. Because they’d grown up fearing it, and it wore on them until it became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Wes, on the other hand, had gone about his days as if nothing had changed. He’d always been stone-faced, but this was a new level. He faced their classes, their classmates, and their teachers with the same frown he always had. He had no reason to be paranoid about a doppelgänger, but it was like he wasn’t worried about the other things Klaus had said, either, and whether or not those were true. The dreamkiller coup. The cover-ups. The withholding of information they should be learning. He sat with her and Edgar during breakfast, sometimes joined her and Joel and Jacqueline for lunch, but at dinner she caught him always walking back to Kirkland from the Crossing with a boxed dinner, watching his feet instead of the path ahead, eyebrows furrowed together.

Marcia had returned to teaching classes. She was angrier than ever, and was taking it out on the students by running them into the ground during fitness training and yelling in their ears during weapons work. Emery tried to catch her after class like she had before, to ask how many of Klaus’s claims she believed was real, but Marcia disappeared before Emery had a chance, and every other time Emery saw her, she was in the Crossing, surrounded by too many people to get her alone or to speak privately.

Emery was extra glad now that she’d pushed to include Joel, Jacqueline, Kris, and Lewis in on the research. They were the only ones she could talk to about it now. She hadn’t told Edgar anything new they’d found out; he didn’t need to know, he wouldn’t be able to help, and there was a chance—much bigger now than Emery would have guessed a month or two ago—that he would spill everything to Grandpa Al. The others didn’t have the same allegiance to Grandpa Al, not more than any other student on campus, and all of them knew it was important enough not to tell anyone else.

“We still don’t know how much of what he said is true.” Emery sat on her bed, back in the corner, hugging her pillow, while Joel sat close enough to hold her ankles. Kris sat in her desk chair, Lewis leaned on the desk beside her, and Jacqueline paced the room.

“He sounds like a conspiracy theorist,” Jacqueline said. She was in full Vice President mode, which meant zero nonsense taken and her complete focus set on solving the problem at hand.

“So you don’t believe him?” Lewis said.

“Oh, no.” Jacqueline snapped to a stop, hand raised. “I completely believe him. The dreamkillers lied and feared the possibility of their own powerlessness so much they overthrew an efficient dreamseeker government? Seems legit to me. I have no idea what the dreamseekers might have known about doppelgängers that caused all of this, but I believe it one hundred percent.”

“Jacqueline Fenhallow, conspiracy theorist,” Lewis said.

Kris gently hit his knee. “Jacqueline isn’t a conspiracy theorist.”

“If Jacqueline believes it, I believe it,” Emery added.

Lewis held both hands up. “So do I. Have I ever bet against her?”

“But what about your doppelgänger?” Kris said, her voice small and her eyes huge, and Emery just wanted to hug her. “Will you need help with that?”

“If it’s active, I can’t have help with it. Doppelgängers tear apart people who get between them and their hunter, the same way a normal nightmare will attack someone who gets between them and their dreamer.”

“It’s not supposed to happen until later, though,” Lewis said. “Isn’t this too early?”

“Yep.”

“So you don’t know what’s going on at all.”

“Not really, no.”

“And the plan is…?”

“Try to find what Klaus was talking about with the dreamseeker notes about doppelgängers. See if we can figure out what might have been cut out, then figure out if it has anything to do with why my doppelgänger is active.”

Joel, who had been quiet until then, looked up suddenly. “When?”

“Well…as soon as I told you guys.”

“So we’re helping.” It wasn’t a question; Joel said it with relief.

“Wait.” Lewis looked from Emery to Jacqueline, as if Jacqueline had some other answers for him. “Does this—your doppelgänger isn’t going to come after us for this, right? Because we’re helping you.”

Jacqueline shot him a nasty look.

“No,” Emery said. “At least, I’m pretty sure. Klaus said it hasn’t left the Dream yet, and even if it had, it’s more like…you have to physically put yourself between it and me. I don’t think doppelgängers care if you help me look some stuff up in a library.”

“Oh. Well. Good.”

“Let’s go, then,” Joel said, standing up and pulling Emery’s ankles.

Sliding off the bed, Emery glanced at her phone. “It’s nine thirty. You really want to start researching this late?”

“We’ve already wasted a lot of time,” he said.

Jacqueline was tapping away at her own phone. “I’m telling Ver that I can’t hang out tonight. Already texted Jager to meet us at the library, too. Kris, you’re in charge of snacks.”

“As always,” Kris said, beaming.

“Lewis, you get coffee.”

“As always,” Lewis replied, rolling his eyes.

The three of them marched out the door, not looking back to see if Emery and Joel were following. Joel had stopped tugging on Emery’s ankles, so she gently pulled her legs from his grasp and stood up, too.

“I figured you would help, but I didn’t think you’d be so…eager,” she said.

Joel rubbed the back of his head. “I don’t really care about the cover-ups and whatever happened with the Hypnos State. I mean, it’s interesting, and I want to know the truth, but if I don’t know, it won’t bother me. But I don’t want your doppelgänger to be—I don’t want you to have to—” He groaned. “All I’m trying to say is I always thought I was going to be useless when it came to your doppelgänger, but now I can actually help.”

“Seriously?”

“Yes. Wait, seriously about the helping? Why wouldn’t I be serious about the helping?”

“No, are you serious about always thinking you were going to be useless.”

“What else would I have thought?”

Emery put her head in her hands and laughed. “It wasn’t what you thought. I didn’t know you thought about this at all. I thought the day division students never really thought about Insanity Primes or doppelgängers or anything.”

“Oh.” There was a pause. “You do when you care about someone who has to think about them. You’re my best friend, Em—I want you to be around for a long time. I know you’re awesome and nothing’s ever going to beat you, but if I can keep you safe, I’ll do whatever I have to.”

Order keeps us safe.

Emery hugged him, pressing her face into his shoulder. He put his arms around her immediately.

“You know I love you, right?” she said.

“I had a guess.” Joel trapped her head in the crook of his arm and kissed the side of her head. “I love you too. Let’s go be nerds.”

~

When they got to the library, Wes was waiting for them inside the front door with Ridley. She was holding an armful of banana nut muffins from the Crossing, carrying a backpack twice the size of her torso, and smiling like they were about to have a sleepover. Emery shot Wes a look; he shrugged and said, “You brought your friends, I brought mine.”

They found a table on the third floor, near the windows, where no one could sneak up on them behind a bookshelf. Kris, Lewis, and Joel had Fenhallow’s databases pulled up on their laptops while Emery, Wes, and Jacqueline amassed a stack of reference books. Ridley flitted between the books and the computers, unable to stay in her seat for more than a few minutes, taking breaks to make sure everyone always had a muffin or one of the sandwiches Kris made, or enough to drink.

“Has anyone found anything yet?” Emery said, head in one hand and a book as thick as her arm open in front of her. “All I’ve got is A History of the Hypnos State, Then and Now, and by ‘Now’ they mean the 1940s and world powers trying to recruit dreamhunters to fight in World War II. Back then everything they knew about doppelgängers was all like, carnival science. Phrenology and stuff.” She pushed the book aside.

“I haven’t found anything beyond what we already know,” Joel said. “Floating hair, bad temper, shows up during the Insanity Prime.”

Emery kicked Wes under the table. “What are you reading all frowny like that?”

Wes lifted the book. The front said Dreamseeking: The Pioneers of the Mind’s Frontier. “The first person to open a gateway was a dreamseeker.” He began to read. “‘One eyewitness reported Guinard holding her hands out, fingers clawed, as if to pry open the air. When she drew her hands apart, the fabric of the waking world followed her fingers, like curtains drawn back, leaving between them a dark entrance flanked by columns identical to those outside the justice building in the square she walked through each morning.’ This was in eighteen seventy-three, in France. According to this, Marie Guinard opening the first gateway was the inspiration for most of Fabian Fenhallow’s teachings. She was the one who taught him how.”

Jacqueline sighed. “I could have told you that.”

“And it doesn’t help us much,” Emery said.

“In class, Professor Lenton said it was a dreamhunter.” Wes flipped through a few more pages of the book. “Jonathan Arrington.”

“So either he lied or he was misinformed.”

Lewis shook his head. “Lenton doesn’t lie about facts. He would have been misinformed.”

“Then he’d have to be misinformed by the Hypnos State.” Wes said. “Why would they lie?”

“You mean besides because he was a dreamhunter, and the whole curriculum here is cherry-picked? Probably because Jonathan Arrington was an aristocratic white guy and Marie Guinard was a black woman and the daughter of slaves.” Jacqueline spit venom at her computer screen, never looking up. “History loves white guys.”

“It’s a start,” Emery said. “What we’re taught doesn’t match up to what we find. I’m surprised they didn’t take that book out of here completely.”

“They have to leave some things here, or else it would look too suspicious,” Wes said.

Kris raised her hand.

Emery said, “Kris, you can just talk, you don’t have to be called on.”

Kris jumped in. “The day division students, especially the ones in sleep research, have to use books like those for essay and project references. The dreamseekers are a big topic because of their immunity to the Dream’s mental pressure. If they removed books like that, we would notice.”

Emery sat up. “Klaus mentioned references! He said there were references in some articles or essays that didn’t lead back to anything, like their sources didn’t exist. He was trying to find more material on doppelgängers and that’s why he couldn’t. Look through the sources on the articles, not the articles themselves. Find the ones that are about doppelgängers or the Dream, or are written by dreamseekers, and try to locate those.”

They went back to work. Emery abandoned the dustier books she’d found for more recent essays and anthologies. Some of them had pages and pages of references, printed close together and in tiny font. Most, thankfully, weren’t by dreamseekers. Emery copied them down anyway, the names of the articles and the names of the authors, handing them over to Joel, Kris, and Lewis so they could try to look up the articles.

After nearly another hour of looking—during which Ridley got out of her seat fourteen times, and Kris and Joel alone made it through the rest of the snacks—Lewis went still, staring at his computer screen.

“I can’t find this one.” He held up the paper with Wes’s scrawled handwriting and tapped a title near the bottom. Hunting the Hunters: The Origins and Effects of the Manifestations of the Dreamhunter Subconscious. “I’ve looked through the library’s online database and their catalogue of physical copies, and then I went and Googled it just in case it was never in the collection. It didn’t come up at all. Anywhere. The Google results didn’t return anything remotely close to what we needed—it was like they were scrubbed clean.”

Jacqueline took the paper from him. “Gabriel Fenhallow. This was written by my dad.”

Her voice was very small and quiet when she said it, and they all looked at her. Wes glanced at the paper. “I thought he was probably related, but I didn’t know the date on that article.”

Jacqueline nodded, tossing the paper quickly back to Lewis and returning to her book. “Yeah, he was a scholar, or whatever. After they took the school from us he got really into researching the Dream. Well, he was always into researching the Dream, he published things before they took the school, but…” Jacqueline rubbed her forehead. Emery had never heard her ramble so much. Emery had never heard her ramble at all. Jacqueline didn’t ramble. She spoke, and she demanded.

A moment of quiet passed before she seemed to gather herself, and said, “So, this one is missing. One instance doesn’t make a trend.”

Over another hour and a half, they found over a dozen sources that led back to empty space on the internet and a blank library catalogue. All written by dreamseekers, all with titles relating to manifestation of the Dream. The information in the essays and books in which they’d been cited amounted to little; none of it was about doppelgängers, which Emery suspected was the reason those texts themselves hadn’t been pulled. One instance didn’t make a trend, but twelve could.

“I get that we’re students,” Emery said, glancing at Wes, “and most of us aren’t going to amount to much more than cannon fodder, but there’s a lot more going on that they’re not telling us about.”

“Well, yeah.” Ridley stood at the end of the table, paused in the process of picking apart a banana nut muffin. She hadn’t sat down once in the last half hour. Her eyebrows were furrowed, putting her in a surprisingly close imitation of Wes’s natural expression. She’d definitely spoken, though Emery didn’t immediately put the words to her. They weren’t perky enough.

“What does that mean?” Emery said.

“Most governments operate like that. Transparency seems like it’d be nice, but I don’t know…I’m sure there’s a lot of stuff going on that I don’t want or need to know about.”

“You sound like my grandpa. Heirarchy is there for a reason. Order keeps us safe.” Emery mimed her hands up and fingers spread, like a fanatic at a revival. She slumped in her chair. “You’re probably right. If everything knew Klaus had taken the sand, that even one doppelgänger was active before it should be, that the dreamseekers might have known something and the dreamkillers chased them all out…there’d be hysteria.”

Especially if it got out past the Sleeping City. There were so many other Hypnos State training facilities across the world, not to mention the Hypnos Centers in every major city. If there was hysteria, if something happened—if dreamhunters tried to revolt—what would happen to everyone else? What would happen when there were no dreamhunters to hunt dreams?

They all went quiet. It was easy to believe lies were necessary when Emery wasn’t involved, but whatever had happened with the dreamseekers, and the doppelgängers, and the dreamkillers—that affected her life, now. It affected Wes. It affected Jacqueline.

“Everyone doesn’t need to know, but I do.” Emery took a deep breath, trying to still the panicking of her heart in her chest. “I’m going to go find my doppelgänger. I need to know for sure that it’s real, and if it is, I need to kill it. As soon as I learn how to open a gateway.”

“I can help with that,” Jacqueline said. Her eyes were bright, her fists clenched on the table. All that rambling had vanished.

“And we’ll have to find a place to practice that no one will sense what we’re doing. A den mother passing by my dorm room will be able to feel a gateway open inside.”

“I can help with that,” Joel said. “I already have an idea. Just have to check a few things.”

Kris nudged Lewis in the arm. “We can’t do much, but we’re a good cheering squad.”

Ridley kept picking at her muffin.

Emery looked at Wes. He shrugged.

“I’m in,” he said.

It was all she needed to hear.

(Next time on The Children of Hypnos --> The God Of War Comes To Town)