#i finally picked up my tablet again so naturally i had to doodle her

[fruitsfox]

local merfae has decided you're cute ( run )

[kuiperblog]

The first 1% is always the hardest

Usually, the hardest part of acquiring a new skill is starting it for the first time.

When you’re at an intermediate level of progression, you can usually just increase your skill level by incrementing up the difficulty linearly.  If you’re a novice weightlifter and your best overhead press is 125 lbs, try adding 5 lbs to the bar and see if you can overhead press 130 lbs. (If not, keep lifting 125 lbs every few days until that becomes “easy,” then challenge yourself with 130 lbs again.)  If you can do 10 push-ups, you will probably reach the point where you can do 11 push-ups, and 12 push-ups, and 15 push-ups, and 25 push-ups, and so on.  The hardest part of lifting is day 1, when you might be performing certain motions for the first time in your life, and challenging your body to work muscles that you didn’t even realize existed.

I imagine the same is true of other fitness regimens: once you’re able to run a 9 minute mile, you probably have what it takes to run a 8:30 mile, or a 8 minute mile, if you keep at it.  Eventually you’ll hit a plateau and the limits of human performance, but the first day in the gym is always the hardest.

This is sort of how the trajectory of my writing career went.  And having talked to artist friends, and musicians, it seems like all of them followed a similar trend: they found a thing, they stuck with it, and over time found themselves advancing along that path bit by bit.  It became a hobby or a routine such that over time, by  by investing a bit more time, or a bit more effort, or challenging themselves a tiny bit more, they got better at it.  And over years, the compounding returns of that meant that the girl who got a drawing tablet at age 14 found that by the time she was 22 years old, she had enough artistic skill to make enough money from her art to make a living.

I think that in a lot of cases, people were able to start down that path of gradual self-improvement in part because they were able to somehow bypass the hardest part of it -- they blazed right through the initial difficulty without even realizing it.  They couldn’t even really answer the question of “When did you start drawing,” because they’ve always been drawing since the days that they were just doodling with pencil in paper at school. Maybe they just really enjoyed playing outdoors as a kid, and played soccer because it was fun, and made the seamless transition to being a high school athlete. In my case, I spent a lot of time writing long-winded forum posts explaining the finer points of topics I was passionate about (which, at age 13, was mostly Pokemon and Final Fantasy), and somehow by my 20′s I had enough of a penchant for explaining things that I was able to parley that into a writing career (so I can get paid for my long-winded explanations of Pokemon-related topics).

The early days of learning to write kind of sucked and were difficult.  (For starters, remember how unintuitive that QWERTY keyboard was the first time that you learned to type? Remember how painful it was to hunt-and-peck your way through sentences at an effective rate of <10 words per minute?)  But my desire to talk about Pokemon on message boards overwhelmed any difficulty or “suckiness” involved with learning to express my ideas through text, and so the suckiness of those early days wasn’t really much of an obstacle.

More and more, I’ve come to believe that the most important part of learning a new skill is finding a way to get over that initial difficulty hump -- of finding a way to survive the first day, and then the first week, and then the first month, and eventually reach a point where inertia carries you forward on a gradual upward slope of self-improvement where you’re not even consciously thinking too hard about improvement; you just randomly muse to yourself one day, “Oh yeah, this barbell I’m picking up weighs about 100 lbs more than the barbell I was lifting a year ago. Fancy that.” The longer you keep at it, the easier it is to stick with it.

In many corners of the internet, there’s an oft-repeated adage that “Watching anime won’t teach you to speak or understand Japanese.”  And sure, that’s obviously true on some level. If someone is thinking they’re going to spend a thousand hours watching subtitled anime, and then one day flip off the subtitles and be able to follow everything without missing a beat, they’re probably a bit delusional. If you want to actually achieve anything approaching Japanese fluency, you’re probably going to have to take a Japanese learning course, and engaged in spaced repetition to pick up and retain vocabulary, and all of the other stuff that goes into learning any language.

But I think that watching anime does provide you with one big advantage: it goes a long way toward helping you cross that “day 1″ hump. Because the first day is always the hardest. Going from 0 to 1 is harder than increasing your vocabulary by a few new words every week.  Before you can get the compounding returns from incrementally improving at a skill, you have to have a starting principle.  And I think that watching anime is actually quite good for that, because only knowing “weeaboo Japanese” will give you 20-30% of the vocabulary that’s included in your first couple Japanese lessons.

I’m speaking from personal experience: it’s incredibly heartening to go through a lesson and encounter words that I’m already familiar with.  Even if my fluency in “weeaboo Japanese” only covers 10% of what’s introduced in a given lesson, having a head start gives me an intangible confidence boost which makes it easier for me to focus on and retain the other 90%.

I don’t want to understate the importance of that intangible confidence boost: a lot of language acquisition is getting comfortable with a language, and repeating something so much that you do it without even thinking about it. For example, in English, sometimes sometimes someone might ask you “how’s it going?” and you might answer “fine” before your brain has even consciously registered the meaning of what you were hearing, or saying. And I’m enough of a weeb that I can hear i tenki desu ne and immediately reflexively respond with sou desu ne, before my brain has even consciously registered the question being asked (sometimes taking several seconds to mentally backtrack and realize, “Oh right, the “i tenki” part means “nice weather.”).  But years and years of listening and pattern recognition have taught me that when someone ends a sentence in desu ne? with the sort of inflection that says “I’m asking you a rhetorical question,” the proper response is probably sou desu ne, and my brain produces that response just as reflexively as it spits out “I’m doing fine, how about you?” any time someone asks “How’s it going?”)

One thing I’ve come to notice is that every lesson begins with some of some amount of review, giving you that spaced repetition, and providing context for the new words and concepts that the lesson is about to introduce, and generally provide a foundation for the new material.  Day 1 is, by necessity, the exception -- how can you “review” material that you’ve never covered before?  But for me, the day 1 lessons on how to say nihongo and arigato and watashi and anata were already “review” of topics that I picked up through years of being a weeb.

Besides that, there’s the fact that the structural elements of Japanese are something that my brain was naturally able to grok in a way that is intuitive to me after spending years listening to spoken Japanese even though most of it is contextual. (Like, I’m not sure when this happened, but at a certain point I think my brain just kind of learned, when listening to Japanese sentences, to approximate which parts were the verb and where certain clauses landed in the sentence, if only because when watching anime with subtitles you become consciously aware of when a character’s name appears in the dialog.) I’m not really consciously thinking about it, which kind of feels like the “natural” way to learn a language.  (After all, it’s not as if native English speakers, as toddlers, consciously think to themselves, “Ah, it seems as though English typically follows a subject-verb-object grammar structure.” Kids just listen to adults speaking English and form sentences that way without really having to be formally taught.)

It’s highly likely that at some point in my internet career that I have at one point been the cynical message board poster telling someone that, contrary to their fantasies, watching anime isn’t going to help them learn Japanese in any real or material way, and if I’ve ever suggested that, it’s time for me to eat crow.  Because while the advantage that “weeaboo-level Japanese” gives you might be small, and only help you on the first few days of Japanese class, those are the most important days, because the first 1% is always the hardest.

My familiarity with “weeaboo-level Japanese” has only given me one disadvantage, and that is that years of memes have poisoned my brain to the point where the first I was prompted with “say ‘excuse me’ in Japanese,” my brain (and mouth) immediately spat out “sorrymasen,” and I wish I could say it only happened once, but it wasn’t until around day 3 that I managed to fully train this habit out of myself.

[hollandandi]

“i think i’m falling in love with you.”

an entry in @underoosbws’ 3k writing challenge! go give her a follow!!💓💗💞💥

peter or tom?

word count; 1.7k

type; total fluff!

warnings; none!

w/n; sorry this is only short, but family drama is stopping me from spilling my thoughts all night anymore!

permanent tag list; @therealme13posts @space-starz @crxssourbones @tshquackson @aliceinwhateverland @thothollandd @kilieria @spideyjlaw @spideyboyx @augustus-did-not-get-stabbed

——

Beneath your bodies was a large, tartan blanket with frayed edges, protecting your bodies from the slightly damp grass that laid amongst the park floor. There were several cushions from home resting randomly at different sections of the fabric, and two backpacks full to the brim with food. Yours, had a couple of homemade sandwiches, bottles of water and a plastic container of handmade chocolate chip cookies. Peter’s, on the other hand, had several packets of chocolate, two doughnuts, two cans of Coke, and two subs from Delmar’s, that today had cost him twenty dollars instead of ten.

Placed beside your two bags were a stack of activities - ranging from a pack of cards, to a kind of dodgy-looking board game, to your tablet with ‘Heads Up’ flashing on the screen. Right now, however, you were sat facing each other with a drawing pad in each of your hands - you had chosen to sit with your knees close to your chest, the pad resting on-top of your stomach while shielding your drawings from the brunette in-front of you. Peter had chosen a less secretive position at first, simply laying backwards on the blanket with the pad on the floor.

“Okay, first, I challenge you to draw...the Hulk!” You smiled widely, before grabbing one of two green markers from the selection on the patterned floor and furrowing your eyebrows as your pencil glided across the fresh piece of paper. He rolled his eyes playfully, knowing that the end result would likely not be very good, but continued regardless. He occasionally glanced at you to take in your expressions, each one making him smile to himself. Your face switched from ease, to frustration, to confusion and finally to a fairly content look with a light laugh, before looking to Peter to see if he was complete too.

He caught your gaze after a moment, dropping the now-lidded marker onto the blanket and nodding to you, before speaking. “It’s your turn to show first.” He reminded with a smile plastered onto his face - it had been like this since he first suggested the idea and you had replied with utter excitement and positivity towards it. You nodded in response to his comment, before dropping your pens also and turning the paper around - showing a green smudge with a rough pen outline of the beloved avenger drawn pretty terribly. “Okay, so maybe I shouldn’t have suggested a difficult one. I kind of forgot I was drawing it too.” You laughed, before flipping over the page, resting the pad on your legs again and looking towards your boyfriend that was ready to show his creation after seeing your fairly bad attempt. Waiting for your attention, he turned his pad upwards so you had a clear view on his scribbles - it made you smile, and laugh a little bit, before complimenting a feature and asking him for another prompt.

Over the next twenty minutes, you had drawn awful creations on ten pages over your sketchpads and broken three pencils by throwing them at each other and snapping the lead accidentally. His best had been a penguin, whilst you had drawn a pretty impressive flower - however, it was only ‘good’ because it was the same one you had doodled since the beginning of school, and he pretended he hadn’t seen it hundreds of times in your notebook during class. Instead he smiled, complimented you greatly and placed down all the coloured pens he had used thus far - before glancing at the one marker neither of you had touched - red. He grinned, picking it up and speaking confidently. “Let’s draw me, I mean, Spider-Man, me as Spider-Man, or just Spider-Man, whichever you prefer.” He uttered, and threw the other red marker in your general direction, except when he looked back up, his gaze became trapped onto you.

He watched how your face lit up at the suggestion, ounces of pride and excitement rushing up your face as you quickly gripped the marker in your hand and began thinking about what you would soon draw on the paper. He watched how your hands were warm, blood rushing through them freely in the summer air that passed by the both of you. He watched how your hair rested on your shoulders gently, getting the occasional strand blown by the gentle breeze, and he watched how your eyebrows fumbled together as you tried to perfectly convey your thoughts onto paper - except this didn’t work out very often. And finally, he watched your smile; he watched the corners of your lips remain permanently curled, and watched the natural redness of them light up consistently. He watched how big it was, how happy you were in the moment, and it was more than enough to plaster a grin onto his face, before flipping over to a fresh page of his sketch pad and getting to work.

His idea was solid, and he was frantically sprawling it out onto the paper that lay before him. However - his heart was beating just as frantically. Nerves lit up in his veins; and his hands shook slightly as he drew with the red and black markers - he knew that he wanted to tell you something, but he was still so worried if you would feel the same; but he decided he had to tell you, he couldn’t hide it any longer. That didn’t help, though - the last two months of your relationship had been the physical interpretation of perfect. He had finally worked up the courage to invite you out after Ned wouldn’t stop nagging him about it; there was constant, “Come on man, grow balls!”, “She’s gonna move on, if you don’t hurry up,” and “Dude, you’re Spider-Man, act like it!,” and he had eventually given in and waited by your locker until you had come out of class on a Thursday afternoon.

“Oh, um, hey Y/N!” He smiled nervously, but happiness was beginning to emerge throughout his face. “Hi, Peter. What can I do for you?” You shyly responded - in slight disbelief that the biggest crush of your school experience was now standing by your metal locker. You tucked a loose strand of hair behind your ear, before looking up to give him your complete attention, encouraging him to continue with the reason he chose to come in the first place. “Well, uh, basically - I just wanted to know if, you, um, you maybe wanted to watch a film with me next week? Maybe we could get some food afterwards?” He suggested politely, but confidence grew as he continued to speak as he noticed your face brighten with each word that left his lips.

“I would love that, Peter.” You smiled widely, nodding your head a few times before looking back up to him. You watched Thor, Ragnarok that weekend, and while the film rolled, his hands somehow found his way into yours, intertwining gently as the movie continued to play.

Soon afterwards, you were spending most days together, many of them accompanied by Ned and MJ, but evenings were usually reserved for the company of just the two of you. There was a great friend-girlfriend balance, a big approval from Mary-Jane, acceptance of Peter’s secret (and a lot of excitement) and pure happiness between you - it was truly the physical interpretation of perfect, and he really, did not want to mess it up.

However, he chose to continue with the leap of faith - scribbling the eight words he desperately wished to reveal to you in the top left corner of his paper. After making final touches with his red marker, he dropped his tools and let out a sigh of relief, accompanied by a smile, as he looked at his drawing. As you glanced over, hearing the noise from his lips, you noticed his posture was completely different - instead, it was mirroring yours. His position was secretive, and you were unsure why, but you shrugged it off as perhaps he found the previous choice uncomfortable, and took a final glance at your paper before nodding towards him with a small smile on your lips. It was his turn to go first, and he was well aware of the fact, as he dropped his knees and looked at you with a large smile once he noticed your attention was captivated by him.

He slowly turned his sketch-pad around, gripping the sides tightly as he did, being very careful not to drop the creation onto the floor, where it could potentially be smudged. Your eyes dropped to the paper that he was showing, waiting for the full image to be revealed - your hands tucked into your lap as your fingers fumbled together - they quickly froze, though, once the doodle from your boyfriend was in full view of your gaze. A drawing of your beloved boyfriend in his suit grazed majority of the page, but the top corner was the most important to you, as the sentence, “I think I’m falling in love with you,” rested, sunken into the pad. Your breath hitched a little bit, your eyebrows raising slightly as your grin grew further, if that was even possible.

Your eyes jumped to his after you had fully taken in the image that lay before you; happiness beaming out of yours and matching a similar reaction in his. You placed your sketch-pad beside you, before pushing yourself up onto your knees and rushing over to the boy sat in-front of you, and pushing your lips to his with a fair bit of force. Your lips worked in motion with his, him kissing back with equal force and passion as his free hand moved to the back of your neck. You pulled back gently, looking at him innocently as your lips parted, a smile still plastered across both of your faces.

You took his sketch-pad from his hands slowly, gripping it gently with yours as you looked at it again, falling for the drawing just like you had fallen for him as words finally escaped your lips - Peter watching you consistently, waiting for a positive response from you.

“I think I’m falling in love with you, too.”

[ultimatetcgplayer]

Team Fenrir Leader: Log 1

((To those that are about to read this log, I want to say two things. First, I’m sorry you made the choice to read this. Second, do know that this is how Rune would in character write a log such as this. This isn’t reflective of how I wo uld write this kind of thing myself so. Yeah.)) Captain’s log, I have no fucking clue what the date is. In troubled times it’s only natural that most would gravitate to the main character. I mean, shit, we all found ourselves in a creepy little room without a clue of how we got there or where we actually were, the formation of Team Fenrir wasn’t just bound to happen, it was destiny! Or maybe it was just pure chance, but destiny will sound way cooler for when I finally get out of here and turn these logs into an epic anime. Then again, there’s a chance I’m going to have to give up my life in an amazing heroic sacrifice which the audience will find both heartbreaking and beautiful at the same time, so maybe I shouldn’t assume that I’m going to be the one making that anime. I mean, it is going to get made, but just in case someone else finds this after I take down those birds in a heroic final showdown, giving up my life for the greater good in the process. This is the journal of Rune Fukuyo, wielder of the chains of Mjolnir, Ultimate TCG Player, motherfucking protaganist and now the leader of the newly formed Team Fenrir. Where to start… I mean I guess we could start in medias res, but nothing really cool happened that could be used as a starting scene if we do that. While it’s cool thrope, in this kinda story, I think it might be best if we really start from the beginning. I found myself in a weird little room surrounded by a bunch of unconscious people. Now while I wasn’t scared or anything, I was confused and later pissed off when I found that most of my shit had been stolen. But I tried my best to remain calm. Shaking up each of the people around me one by one didn’t seem like a good idea at the time and it later turned out that my gut feeling was right once again… Or I could say the necklace told me that shit. Yeah, let’s change it to that. Anyway, like a good protaganist does, I began to monologue and introduce myself and the situation I was in. If I don’t end up voice acting myself, make sure my voice actor puts some real fucking emotion and excitement into my name. I don’t do calm introductions, I’m motherfucking Rune Fukuyo! Anyway so, my monologuing woke up the people around me, who I later found out were a bunch of Ultimates. I hadn’t really taken a good look at all of them, but I was pretty sure I recognized at least a few faces. Now, this seemed like the perfect time to do introductions, have me meet each character one by one, show off their main character trait or gimmick so the audience has atleast a minor understanding of who everyone is before we delve deeper into their personalities later. But sadly, the others didn’t seem to have gotten their scripts as only a few properly introduced themselves to me. At the time, I was kinda bummed out by this. Now the audience would be left confused on who was important and who wasn’t, but luckily, I found two other main characters! I know, I’m pretty lucky, but if I wasn’t, I wouldn’t be the protaganist~ A little doodle is drawn here of Rune winking to the audience. It’s… Okay. Our first other main character is Rikka, who’s the main inspiration behind the name ‘Fenrir’. Now, if you look at it from the right way, we technically weren’t wrong when we both suggested the whole thing might just be one big escape room. I mean, it was? It’s just that we didn’t have all the facts at the time. But just the fact he agreed with me on the escape room idea and was so cool about it showed that I could trust him. I picked him to join the first version of Team Fenrir for that very reason. Second, there’s Flerida… Fleur.. Gremlin… I’ll just stick to Fleur for now since I’m pretty sure the audience isn’t going to like it if we keep calling her gremlin in the anime. We should probably just leave that out entirely. Anyway, I picked her because she was easy to pick up and drag away with Rikka. I later found out she’s actually pretty talented and smart as well, so, my luck saved the day again. Fleur’s talent is the Ultimate Illustrator, which is pretty cool, but the talent that I love the most is Rikka’s. Dude’s the Ultimate Vaper and can do some really fucking cool stuff with his smoke…? Yeah, let’s call it smoke. Anyway, dude can do like clouds and shapes and different colours, like art but floating. It kinda reminded me of Fenrir, so when we started working together as a team, I, our amazing team leader, came up with the idea of Team Fenrir. It’s a name that’ll probably go down in history as one of the best team names ever, you’re welcome future historians, I just made your job a whole lot cooler. Anyway, while Team Fenrir weren’t the ones to actually find the stupid code which I still think is stupid, we were instrumental in leading people onto the right path and finally getting us out of that damn room. But that only made things worse as we soon found out who had captured us. Now, consider this, I’m me and I got caught, so these robotic birds were pretty powerful. But they also look really stupid, since when are tits a kind of bird? For whoever ends up making the character designs for this anime, if you could just do me a big one and change them from fucked up pigeons to intimidating ravens, that would be great~ Anyway so, apparently we have to kill someone to get out of here and then not get voted as the killer in some courtroom anime kinda shit? I think I heard of something along the lines of that before, something about a Phoenix? I dunno, it was a game my ex played. Not the redhead, the other one. You can keep them out of the anime, they’re not really important. Maybe have them pop up in the manga for like a chapter or two? I like anime more than manga anyway so I don’t care what you do with the manga. We got some tablets and… Just ask some of the others about that scene, focus on their reactions instead of mine. Thanks. I just don’t want him to have to have to suffer anymore because of this shit. So… Just leave him out, okay? Anyway, after that ended and the birds fucked off to wherever the hell they went, I decided that as the amazing main character I should use my powers to give the spotlight to some of the lesser known characters and make them feel safe and welcome in our amazing team. So, I picked 3 others to join us! The angel with a beautiful voice Shizuka, the unlucky but big hearted Atsu and the amazing Hasanobu! Hasanobu’s title might change, just calling him amazing is a little boring but I can’t think of anything else at the moment. Our group went out to explore after we finally did some proper introductions for the sake of the audience. I found some interesting stuff in the kitchen, which I shared with my new friends, because friendship is the most important thing in the universe after all. We found a code but uh, for some reason, my protaganist powers kinda failed me because I had no idea what the code was. I think this might be a hint that I need to find someone who does understand the code and add them to my group? Or maybe find a mentor kinda character that can teach me. Seichou and Setsuko seem like the kind that would know how to do this, so I’ll go try and recruit them into team Fenrir. I mean, how could they say no with such an awesome cast already? I think that’s enough for today. I’ll try and find a schedule for these logs but, adventure is more important than keeping logs, so I might be late sometimes. Yours truly, the one and only -Rune Fukuyo

[oceanofinsanity]

RebelCaptain: Soulmates AU

 Thank you for the prompt!  I looked through my AUs tag for a specific soulmates AU, and this one came out a bit longer than intended...I had the idea of writing out the entire movie, but figured taht would be long af.  If you like it, however, please let me know, and I’ll do my best to do a rewrite and basically elongate this fic to last throughout the premise of Rogue One.

Happy reading!

Jyn had never been the artistic type.  

 All of her drawings are doodles on her tablets while SawGuerrera tried to teach her the basics of every language he’d come acrossduring his time in the Alliance.  Theinformation had come in handy a few times; Jyn wished she’d paid moreattention, but who could blame a six year old kid?

 She had liked drawing circles in the corners of her pages,paper suns illuminating her dark world.

 Therefore, when the first drawing appeared on her leg, shestared at it for a full five minutes.

 It was a flower.  Andnot just any flower.  It was a drawing ofa flower that she had never seen before.  Its petals were long and sharp, breaking outinto a circular format.  She wished therewere color, and right in front of her eyes droplets of color began appearing onher leg.  Each petal became a vibrantshade of red, and for a split second Jyn thought she was bleeding.

 When the colors stopped appearing, she gently traced herfingers over the pattern.  

 “Where are you from,” she muttered.  She’d heard of such stories, soulmates comingtogether through drawings.  She’d heardthese stories from the older women, the ones who remembered the fall of theRepublic, stories of the before.  BeforeLord Vader, before darkness, before.

 Jyn blinked, and grabbed a nearby pen.  She paused for a moment, and then begandrawing.

 Cassian jumped at the sensation of a slight tickle on hispalm.

 He’d left the tattoo parlor fifty credits lighter, butsatisfied with the result.  He had neverseen these types of flowers anywhere except on his home planet; it wasn’thomesickness, not quite, but there was something peaceful about seeing thatflower engraved forever upon his skin.  

 That is, until words began appearing on his palm.  

 For a second, Cassian thought he was cursed.  His culture, he could recall, frowned upontattoos and any kinds of permanent markings that could be made on the humanbody.  He whispered a quick prayer in hisnative tongue, then squinted.

 The words that were appearing on his hand did not resemble acurse at all, or even any form of punishment. Instead, they looked like…scrawls.

 “H…e…l..l..o,” he muttered aloud as each letter appeared ina short, cursive text.  “What the…”

 The phase ended at hello, as though waiting for him tocontinue.  He looked around through thecrowd, wondering if someone were playing a practical joke on him.  No one paid him any attention, except toshove him out of the way.

 So, Cassian did the first thing he could think of.  He went back to his ship.  

 “K-2!”  He called out,almost immediately upon entering.  Theink on his palm had yet to leave his skin. ‘K-2, where are you?”

 “Here, oh great Captain,” K-2SO responded, coming out fromaround a corner.  “This ship is turninginto a wreck-“

 “Explain this!” Cassian thrust his palm into the droid’s face.  

 “Captain Andor, this is a palm.  It is a section of the human body-“

 “No, not the body part, you idiot.  The writing. It just appeared.”  K-2SOinspected the single word with a closer scan.

 “Writing that just appeared – interesting.”  He paused for a moment, his white eyesflickering as his circuits went through his databanks.  “There are a few options.  One is a strange disease located only onVenir 6, but my memory does not recall you being there.”  

 Cassian shook his head. “It wasn’t painful at all. Ticklish, if anything.  It feltlike someone was writing something on my hand.”

 “An invisible person?”

 “Not likely…I was in the middle of a crowd, and moving myhand a lot.”

 K-2SO paused for another second.  “This next option seems unlikely but…thereare stories of happenings similar to this. A type of soulmate, if you will.”

 Cassian snorted, and lowered his palm.  “Soulmates. That disease is more likely.”

 K-2SO’s eyes continued to flicker.  “There are many stories of theseaccounts.  They are old, yes, but theywere uploaded into my memory for some reason – perhaps one of the Imperialguards had enjoyed a relaxing story before bedtime.”

 “How human of them,” Cassian quipped with a sigh beforesitting back down in his pilot’s seat. “The tattoo’s done, now let’s get back to-“

 “Your tattoo.” K-2SO’s voice sounded as close to an exclamation as Cassian supposed itever would.  “Now it makes sense.  You were never allowed to write on your skinbefore, but now that you have, the other person can feel it, too.”

 Cassian had to admit it to himself; these stories had capturedhis interested.

 “Old wives’ tales, no more than that, but there were storiesof soulmates discovering each other through writing.  One would write something on their body, andit would appear on their soulmates’.”  

 “What about when I’m fighting, and get cut?”

 “Must be like a sort of fail-safe – the writing only appearsif it is delivered painlessly.”

 Cassian felt suddenly grateful that this other person, ifK-2SO’s theory was even slightly correct, had not had to suffer the same scarsthat he had had to go through for the Rebellion.

 “So if I write back…do you think they will get it?”

 “Your vocal shift indicates that you might be starting tobelieve these tales.”

 Cassian chuckled.  “Itwouldn’t hurt to have some…magic in this world that we can see.  Or perhaps it’s just the Force acting in adifferent light.”

 He grabbed a pen before the adrenaline could leave him, andstarted to write on his palm.

  Jyn twirled her pen around her fingers. I was so stupidto believe those tales, she thought to herself, staring straight past hercell door.  

 But the flower-

 Probably a curse, with my luck, she thought toherself.  She’d been lucky enough to finda pen in a prisoner’s contraband, but I should never have traded my meal-

 She gasped, and opened her palm.  It was tingling.  

 Her “hello” had begun to fade; a bit of a cheesyintroduction, but she had no idea what else she could’ve written to begin.  The new scrawl was much messier than hers,with fewer loops and more jagged edges.  

 “Are…you…r…real?”  Shefinally managed to read, with a lot of squinting.  She blinked, and tried again.  

 Well that’s a lovely introduction, but grabbed herpen nonetheless.  She wrote out her loopyscrawl, then paused, unsure how much more she should reveal.  He could be an Imperial officer, for all sheknew.  Or worse – someone from SawGuerrera’s company, a group of people who abandoned her and left her to fendfor herself.  She frowned, mentally goingthrough everyone in the group.

 If any of them end up being my soul mate, perhaps Ishould just rot in this cell, Jyn thought ruefully, and decided to keep heranswer to its one-word length.

  “Yes,” Cassian read aloud, his heart beating.  It had been written very clearly, slightlybelow his wrist.  

 “That’s it?”  K-2SOasked.  “Very disappointing.”

 “They might have been interrupted,” Cassian responded, witha bit more anger in his tone than he’d expected.  

 “Interrupted?  What ifthey’re part of the Empire, or some weird-“

 “Always jumping to conclusions, K,” Cassian replied, turningback to the ship’s control panel, and wondering in the back of his mind if thiswas all some spice-induced hallucination. He shook his head, as if that would have made the effects wear off anyfaster, but when he opened his eyes the words were still on his wrist and palm,clear as day.

 Pulled by his curiosity, Cassian grabbed his pen again.

 “Cassian, the Senator is waiting for you.”  K-2SO said, flipping a few switches.  “StarForge Station was supposed to be a shortdetour-“

 “Hold on, K,” Cassian growled, his pen moving all thefaster.  He threw it down when hefinished, and pulled the accelerator.

 “There, happy?  We’reoff.”

  Jyn felt a small tickle once again as she was being herdedto her new cell.  Her roommate lookedabout as kind as the other one, although she supposed that she herself did notlook very approachable, covered in dirt and wearing a scowl that seemed to fitmore naturally onto her face than a smile.

 She sat down onto her cot and gave her roommate an angrystare, one which was promptly returned for a moment, and then dropped.

 Clearly her new roommate did not wish to fight for dominanceas much as her previous one.  Perfect.  Jyn sat on the edge of her cot, careful tokeep one eye focused on her cellmate, and lifted up her sleeve.  

 Do you think this has happened before?

 Jyn read the words in her head, and then read themagain.  It sounded like the question of achild, tugging on his mother’s sleeve and asking if the fairytales she read tohim at night contained any sort of reality. This scrawl was incredibly messy, as though the other person hadscribbled it down in a rush.  

 She gently shook out her pen from where she’d hidden it in apocket in her sleeve.  

 Do you think this has happened before?

 The words rang in her brain. She had never allowed toherself to think about the before. That dark time contained memories of her father, her late mother,whatever the hell Saw had been in her eyes…no, there could only be the now.

 Jyn pursed her lips, and picked up her pen again as memoriesof the stories came flooding back.  Sherecalled her mother’s voice, so soothing and low, whispering beside her bed asshe drifted off to sleep.  She wondered,briefly, if her parents had been soulmates. If they had met by drawing on their own skin.

 She heard the footsteps of an approaching Stormtrooper, andscribbled out an answer as fast as her cramping hand would allow.

  Cassian grimaced, and almost jerked the wheel of the X-wing,but managed to steady himself.  If K-2SOhad eyebrows, Cassian imagined he’d be raising them at his actions.

 “Is it your soulmate again?” The captain could practically feel the droid smirking.

 “It’s the ghostwriter, yes,” Cassian responded.  “Soulmates only exist in stories, K.”

 Cassian stared out at the stars.  No asteroids in sight, no planets, noImperial ships.  Just darkness and pinpricksof light.  He sighed, and rolled up hissleeve.  The words written on his skinmade him chuckle.

 “Only in stories,” he muttered aloud.  “So what does that make us?”

 Even the reprogrammed droid couldn’t come up with a responseto that question.  

 “We’re almost back at Yavin IV,” Cassian remarked, pullingdown his sleeve.  “If the extraction wentwell, pretty soon we’ll be meeting with the famous Jyn Erso.”

 “Do you really suppose she’ll help us find her father?”

 Cassian shrugged. He’d stopped the pretense at empathy along time ago.  “One can only hope.”

 He looked at the stars once more.  They seemed to wink at him.  He sighed, and tugged at his sleeve oncemore.  He took out his pen, and scribbleddown a sentence.

 “Stories always have a spot of truth in them,” K-2SOremarked.

 Cassian sighed.  “Ithought you were a droid, not a storyteller.”

 “I’m just saying, for someone who doesn’t believe instories, you seem to be going along with this one.”  The droid’s white, flashing eyes stared straightahead, as bright as the stars.

 “Let’s just focus on meeting this Erso, alright?”  

 Almost immediately, he gasped in pain, and pulled his achingpalm away from the wheel.  Evidently, theirconnection had strengthened enough for pain to pass through.

  Jyn stared straight ahead as she felt a tickle on her upperarm.  She was quickly running out ofspace to write, and in shackles, one can only move one’s arms so much.  With some difficult maneuvering, she managedto pull up her sleeve to her elbow, and read the new words.

 What’s your story?

 She supposed the other writer must be some kind of hopefulnovelist, whiling away his hours on some long-lost planet.

 Perhaps he’ll write a story in which I break out of thishellhole, she thought.  She took aquick glance around.  No one was payingattention to her, but there was no way she was going to risk pulling out whatcould be considered contraband on the shuttle headed to a grueling day oflabor.

 Jyn’s eyes caught sight of a stray screw, lying carelesslyin the open.  As nonchalantly as shecould, she grabbed it with one hand, and started scribbling onto her freepalm.  The marks she was making were deepenough to make her wince, but she had long ago learned to suppress her facialexpressions.

 Perhaps blood will travel across as well as pen, shethought briefly before the shuttle suddenly stopped and her entire world wasblown apart.

  Cassian stared at the young woman standing defiantly infront of him.  Despite her strongdemeanor, there was something gentle hidden deep within her green eyes.

 His palm still ached from the last, short message.  Jail. What kind of story starts in a jail? Damn K-2, I should reprogram him to get all of those stupid tales out ofhis head…

 And yet, his mind wandered. He blinked, and realized the senator had been gesturing to him.  He eyed Jyn up and down, and came closer.

 “What do you know of Saw Guerrera?”  His interrogations had never been anything,if not straightforward.

 “Nothing, except that he abandoned me when I was a teenager.  Haven’t seen him since.”  A very matter-of-fact tone for someonewith nothing left to lose.  

 It’s like looking in a mirror.

 “A pilot defected from the Imperial army.  We have information that he was sent to Sawby your father.”

 Something flickered in Jyn’s eyes.  A distant memory, perhaps, that she’d triedall these years to keep locked up.

 “Would he recognize you if he saw you now?”  Hope. This entire mission relying on an old man’s memory being even slightlyfunctional.  

 Jyn shrugged.  “Whatdo I get if I come with you?”

 “Your freedom.” Senator Mon Mothma responded before Cassian even had time to open hismouth.  Jyn smiled.

 “Sounds good to me,” she replied.  She stuck out her bare hand, and Cassiancould feel his eyes widen.

 The markings on Jyn’s palm were the exact same as the oneson his.

 Wordlessly, he held up his own hand.  Soulmates, he couldn’t help but think,as his brown eyes met her green ones.  Soulmatescaught in a crossfire.

 To him, it seemed as, suddenly, he was thrown into a storyof his own.  Something deep within himstirred, and Cassian wondered if their story could have a happy ending.

 Jyn took his hand and shook it, a look of pure disbeliefpainted upon her face.  

 Soulmates, she thought, and, in spite of a gutfeeling that something bad was going to happen, she smiled.