#i get the impression from my deep south american friends that you can get away with informality there

[eroticcannibal]

Idk why im reading slang discourse on esl subreddits but as a native English speaker, it is perfectly acceptable to use informal English in "official" communication (work, education) if whoever is higher up does it. In English culture specifically, *not* mirroring informality can be seen as quite arrogant and standoff-ish, which is worse than appearing a bit unproffesional. This is more true the more north/rural you go.

This might not apply in London, because Londoners arent people. Or in America, because america is weird.

[cultofbeatles]

parts of pattie boyd’s book wonderful tonight that involved george that stuck out to me:

pattie didn't have any of the beatles records at first and only bought please please me since she was going to be in their film 

“on first impressions, john seemed more cynical and brash than the others, ringo the most endearing, paul was cute, and george, with velvet brown eyes and dark chestnut hair, was the best looking man i’d ever seen.”

during a lunch break pattie and george sat next to each other and were both very shy 

george asked pattie “will you marry me?” and after she laughed he said, “well, if you won't marry me, will you have dinner with me tonight?” and she turned him down.

she deadass invited george to hang out with her and her boyfriend at the time.

pattie and george are both pisces.

once reshoots for the film were happening george asked pattie about her boyfriend, she said she had dumped him, and george once again asked her for dinner. she accepted this time.

brian epstein joined them for their first date.

they sat side by side and were too scared to even hold the others hand.

george got along great with pattie’s family.

pattie liked cynthia lennon but found her difficult to make friends with. 

“she wasn't like my friends, who enjoyed a giggle and some fun: she was rather serious, and often, i thought, behaved more like john’s mother than wife.”

there was a rumor that john and pattie were having an affair and pattie worried cynthia believed it. it wasn't true.

maureen cox (ringo’s girlfriend) was another beatles girl that pattie had a hard time being friends with. but said that she was “jolly and friendly, more relaxed than cynthia.”

pattie got along best with jane asher but saw her the least.

“i felt there was definitely a north-south divide among the wives and girlfriends. and i had the definite impressions that the girls from the north (maureen and cynthia) felt they has a prior clam to the boys.” okay shade, we see you. 

(talking about going on holiday with john, cynthia, and george) “it was a good way to split the group. john and paul were the closest in some ways and immensely creative together, but they clashed if they were in each other’s pockets for too long.”

george asked pattie to cut his hair while on holiday and one of the cleaners found his hair and kept it. 

(talking about george) “he was so beautiful and so funny.”

once a “weird looking man” tried to force his way into pattie and george’s house. pattie thought he was either a salesman or a jehovahs witness. it turns out it was paul in disguise. 

george said the only place he got peace was in the bathroom of his hotel suite.

pattie got a lot of letters saying that if she didn't leave george there would be a curse put on her.

 pattie’s cleaner was a male ballet dancer and “a terrific duster.”

pattie would count the days till george came back. once he jumped into the bed early in the morning to wake her up. 

those two would deadass not lock their doors and were surprised that clothes were going missing...what is with older generations and not locking their doors i -

george would be in the studio from 11 am - 11 pm. sometimes midnight. 

george’s mom loved when john would visit and would always ask him for an “upper.”

when john lennon is your drug dealer.

pattie wasn't a good cook but was optimistic.

“i loved listening to him (play guitar), loved the sound of the guitar in the house. sometimes i would start to talk and he'd be so deep in thought about the lyrics or the melody he was writing that he wouldn't answer. we’d be the same room but he wasn't really with me: he was in his head.”

pattie developed a kidney disorder.

(talking about the beatles dynamic) “in many aspects they were still children. they had few real friends apart from each other, and when they were asked questions they could answer as one - they were so much on each other’s wavelength. if one went to a gallery opening, they all went; if one bought a new car or new house, they all did. if one seemed in danger of taking himself too seriously, the others knocked it out of him.”

one evening george stopped the car and said, “let’s get married. i'll speak to brian.” they went to brian’s house, george went inside, and when he came back in the car he said, “brian says it’s okay. will you marry me? we can get married in january.”

briannnnnnn, is it my turn to get married yet pleaseeeee

pattie invited her absent father to their wedding but he did not come.

at the train station everyone left cynthia behind as she was carrying the suitcases and john was carrying nothing. peter brown had to go back and get her. 

pattie’s quote from the lsd in the coffee moment is hilarious to me. “you've just had lsd. it was in the coffee.” john lennon: “how dare you fucking do this to us?”

pattie and george didn't go to brian’s funeral in liverpool but george sent one single sunflower.

pattie stopped modeling because george didnt like it. and she felt like she lost a part of herself.

maureen was afraid of flies.

during the India trip, mia farrow told john that maharishi was inappropriate with her and john wanted everyone leave after that.

after India george and pattie’s relationship changed.

(talking about george) “some days he would be all right, but on others he seemed withdrawn and depressed. this was new: he had never been depressed before, but there was nothing i could do. it wasn't about me, but i found that my moods started to mirror his...so bad indeed, that at times i felt almost suicidal. i don't think i was ever in any real danger of killing myself, but i got as far as working out how i would do it: i would put on a diaphanous ossie clark dress and jump off beachy head.”

george became more obvious about his cheating. it hurt pattie.

george was gaslighting her.

cilla black was staying at george and pattie’s house and was uncomfortably close to george so pattie left. six days latter george called to tell her the girl was gone and she could come home.

“..but my ego was too fragile and i couldn't see it as anything other than betrayal. i felt unloved and miserable.”

“jane asher came home unexpectedly from new york and found another woman in the house, an american girl - and did what i should probably have done with george...”

george would start to talk about his feelings about paul or john but would stop bc he never wanted to admit that he felt left out. 

“we had once been so close, so honest and open with each other. now a distance had developed between us..”

(about yoko contributing to the beatles break up) “the four had never allowed anyone into the recording studios with them, but yoko not only sat by john throughout every session, he consulted her about the music they were making, which upset paul.”

during the let it be sessions there was a time with george and paul got in a fist fight and george left.

the same day john told George he was leaving the beatles, george’s mom told him she was ill and in critical condition.

i love that she vibe checked george. “he was bringing home bad vibes.”

george continued cheating and they continued arguing.

“my diary is full of entries about my unhappiness and the disintegration of our relationship.”

john came to visit george and pattie’s new mansion and said that it was so dark he didn't know how they could live in it, and george recommended that he took of his sunglasses.

eric clapton being a piece of shit and saying “if you won't be with me pattie i will become addicted to heroin.”

pattie said the only thing she had left was cooking and george took that away.

the couple was suppose to go on holiday together but george cancelled last minute bc he didn't want to go with her. he ended up going to spain.

“when i challenged him, he denied it and tried once again to make me feel as though i was paranoid.”

i'm not even...the whole fucking story of the george and maureen affair PISSES ME OFF more than i can describe. maybe i’ll make a whole other post but omfg i'm fuming. fuck them bothhhh. they deserve no rights.

george harrison, mere days before their wedding anniversary: “let’s get a divorce this year.” what an amazing new years resolution jerk.

ringo offered pattie a job.

when george told ringo about the affair pattie was so mad she dyed her hair red. 

george loved pattie’s little brother and was his role model but he wouldn't come to the man’s wedding even though he was invited.

the night pattie told george she was leaving him george came to bed in sadness and said, “don't go.”

“i'm going.”

george invited pattie to dhani’s eighteenth birthday party bc she “had to be there. she was family.”

george had become more of an older brother to her now.

pattie had learned about john’s death from eric clapton and immediately went to the beatles office in london to hang out with everyone there.

(after finding out about george’s death) “i couldn't bare the thought of a world without george. when i left him for eric, he had said that if things didn't work out, ever, i could always come to him and he would look after me. it was such a selfless, loving, generous thing to say and it had always been tucked away at the back of my mind. now that sense of security had gone.”

the last time they saw each other was when george called saying he wanted to visit her new cottage and see her.

pattie didn't go to his funeral nor did she go to the memorial concert that took place a year later. but she spent that day high on the mountains thinking of george. “i was happy to mourn him alone and in my own way.”

she would have dreams of george after his death. “oh george, it’s so wonderful that you are alive after all, this is so fabulous; i knew they had all made a mistake.”

and then she’d wake up.

[incorrectbandofbrothersquotes]

Dear Heart - Chapter 3

Dick Winters x Melanie Davis

Summary: Melanie Davis is a nurse from North Carolina who has lived a sheltered life since her father died. Her father’s best friend, Colonel Sink, invites her to experience more as a regimental nurse for the 506th PIR of the 101st Airborne. She embarks on the adventure of a lifetime.

Tag list: @easy-company-tradition​ If you’d like to be added, let me know!

Word Count: 4.2k

A/N: Hope y’all enjoy the update! 

Warning(s): None :)

Chapter 1  Chapter 2

Chapter 3 here we go!

England was unlike anything Melanie had ever seen. Of course, she had never been out of the country before. It was cloudier than she was used to, but she oddly enjoyed it. Aldbourne was quaint, like Toccoa, only with a much richer history. Camp Toccoa was new and fresh. Aldbourne was old and lived in. 

The best part of Aldbourne for her was the weather. It was refreshing to experience the cool English autumn after years in the humidity of the American South. She had even teased Dick once for his aversion to the heat. So Aldbourne would be pleasant for them both. 

The paratroopers had a ton of training they had to complete while in Aldbourne to prepare for the invasion of German occupied France. In the evenings, Melanie had dinner with Dick. Nixon joined them fairly often, but sometimes he was busy up at battalion. Those were her favorite nights, where it was just her and Dick, talking together. She relished these precious moments with him. She didn’t know when they might come to an end. 

She didn’t even mind that he usually had something to say about Sobel. She appreciated Dick being so honest with her. It was rare for him to speak so frankly, especially when it was something unpleasant. 

“It makes me nervous,” Dick said. “His combat inability is harmless now, but we could be faced with the real thing any time. He could get a lot of men killed.”

“Is there anything you can do?” she asked. “I know he’s not an easy man to be reasoned with.”

“It’s not just difficult, it’s impossible,” he returned. “He’s too stubborn to take someone else’s advice when he’s in the field and unsure. And there’s no talking to him outside of training when he has the most control.”

“Have you thought about going to Colonel Sink?” she wondered. 

“If I go over his head, it’s not a good look for Easy or for me,” he explained. “Not to mention, Easy’s so well trained, it’d be hard to convince Colonel Sink that anything is wrong.”

“It just seems brutally unfair for you all to have to go to combat with someone incompetent,” she said. “Because you’re right, it could mean life or death for you all.”

“It is unfair,” he agreed. “But I guess all we can do is rely on our platoon leaders and NCOs. They’re who’s really keeping Easy together anyway.” 

She considered all this as she chewed and then swallowed.

“Would you like me to speak to Colonel Sink?” she offered. 

She had done it once before but wondered if he’d change his mind since the stakes were higher now. 

He smiled. “That’s kind of you, Melanie, but it feels too sneaky. Like I’m still going over his head, just in a roundabout, less ethical way.”

“I understand,” she said. “I just wish I could help somehow.”

“I appreciate the sentiment,” he said. “But you are helping. Just by listening.”

“You can talk to me any time,” she assured him. “About anything.”

“I know,” he said. “It’s one of the things I like most about you.”

She felt heat rise to her cheeks, and she looked down at her plate to hide it. Dick actually liked when she blushed. It always struck him in those moments how beautiful she was to him. A thought which gave him both a rush and a jolt of nerves. 

He was being honest, though. He trusted her almost as much as he trusted Nixon. In fact, the only thing he confided in Nix that he didn’t say to her was his feelings for her. 

“Can I walk you home?” he asked. 

“Of course.”

Dick always walked her home. They were quartered with families who were neighbors, so it was convenient, but she had the impression he would have walked her home even if she was staying on the other side of the village. She just soaked it all in as extra time with the man who was quickly becoming her favorite person. 

Autumn turned to winter, and then spring. Things with Sobel were not improving, and Melanie could sense Dick’s frustration growing. Every day it seemed there was something else that went wrong and the company’s morale was affected now.

One afternoon, she had a rare moment of down time with Dick. He and Nix were standing outside while Nix smoked a cigarette, so she joined them. After exchanging greetings, a jeep pulled up, disrupting the basketball game going on in the street. Sergeant Evans emerged from it and walked up to the trio off to the side. He looked grimly serious. 

“Lieutenant Winters,” Evans said, and they all exchanged salutes. Then he held out a letter. “With Captain Sobel’s compliments, sir.”

Dick glanced between Evans and the letter before taking it. They saluted again before Evans stalked back over to the jeep. He climbed back into the passenger seat and they pulled off. Melanie, Dick, and Nixon watched him go. 

“Well, what does it say?” she asked, nodding toward the piece of paper. 

Dick opened it and she and Nix leaned over his shoulders to see. She was shocked by what she read, but Nix released a small chuckle.

“Oh, for cryin’ out loud,” Dick muttered. 

“Misspelled court martial,” Nix pointed out. 

Dick crumpled the paper and she gazed up at him, mouth agape with disbelief. 

He left to confront Sobel about the incident with latrine duty, and she just stared at Nixon. 

“This can’t be real,” she said. “That’s ridiculous.”

“It’s Sobel,” Nix said. “Anything is possible.”

“I should go with him,” she said hesitantly. “I’ve got a feeling this is going to be...dramatic.”

“He’ll want you close by then,” he returned with a smile.

She nodded, said a quick goodbye, and then followed Dick to battalion HQ. Sobel’s voice echoed from the stairs, so she followed it. She spotted Dick’s frame disappearing to the second floor. She continued after them, keeping a safe distance. She stopped outside the office, to the left of the doorway, and listened. 

“My endorsement, sir,” she heard Dick say. “I request trial by court martial.”

She bit back a gasp. Dick was a man of principle, though, and she admired him for standing up to Sobel at this injustice. Dick halted outside the office when he spotted Melanie there. He almost smiled since she was just the person he was going to see. 

“Did you hear?” he asked. 

She nodded. “I’m sorry. Are you worried?”

He glanced around the hallway before nodding slowly. She held his gaze and they just shared a look for a long moment. Then, they both sighed and embraced each other. They stood there, wrapped up in each other’s arms and held on tight. What was coming next didn’t seem so bad from where they were standing now. 

Dick was transferred to battalion mess while the court martial proceedings went on. Melanie knew it was killing him because the invasion was so close, and if things continued this way, he could miss it. Which left the company only in the hands of Sobel. Dangerous was the only word for it. She couldn’t take it anymore, so she decided to go to Colonel Sink herself. Even though Dick didn’t like the idea, she couldn’t allow this.

She had known Colonel Sink her whole life, and now as she stood outside his office door, she felt her stomach twist with nerves. It wasn’t really her place to have an opinion on the management of Easy Company, and he could chew her out for speaking out of turn. But she had to do this. For Dick and the rest of the men. After all, she was the battalion nurse, and this was in the best interest for an important part of the battalion. 

She knocked softly on the door. 

“Come in,” said the familiar voice on the other side of it. 

She took a deep breath and pushed it open. He looked up from his paperwork and grinned at her. 

“Melanie, how are you?” he asked. 

“Very well, sir,” she said. “But there is something I wanted to discuss with you.”

“What is it?” he wondered. 

“Well, it’s about Di - I mean, Lieutenant Winters’ court martial,” she said, and she watched his smile flip upside down. “I know it isn’t really my business, but -”

“You’re right, it’s not,” he cut across her. 

She bit her lip and looked at the floor, regretting her decision already. She opened her mouth to apologize and dismiss herself, but he continued.

“As it is, though, I value your opinion. So tell me what’s on your mind.”

“Really?” she gasped. 

He nodded. “Yes, really.” 

“Thank you, sir,” she said excitedly. “First, I want you to know how serious this is. From what I understand after my talks with Di - I mean, Lieutenant Winters - is that Captain Sobel’s strength is not combat strategy.” 

“Winters has spoken to you about this?” he questioned, brow furrowing. 

“Here and there,” she said, grossly underplaying how much Dick had confided in her. “I hear some things from the NCOs as well.”

“I see,” he said. “And what have you derived from all this?”

“They don’t want to go to war with Captain Sobel, sir,” she said. “They’re afraid his lack of ability will get many of them killed, and put unnecessary stress on the platoon leaders, especially without Lieutenant Winters.” 

Sink leaned back into his chair and scratched his chin. 

“This isn’t to say that Captain Sobel is a poor leader,” she went on, fearing she had lost Sink’s interest in the matter. “He’s trained Easy Company to be the best in the regiment. So, I think - from what I’ve been told - his strength lies in that training.” 

“I know Sobel has had his moments,” Sink said. “But to take his company away from him...it seems drastic. The men can’t be so opposed to him that -”

At that moment, there was another knock at the door. 

“Hold that thought, sweetheart,” Sink said. “Come in!”

The door creaked open and all the NCOs from Easy Company entered the office. Each held in his hand, a written note. Melanie looked between them and the colonel, anxious.

“What’s all this?” Sink asked. 

Sergeant Lipton stepped forward, collected the notes, and placed them on the desk. She caught a glimpse of what they said.

“Our resignations, sir,” Lipton said. 

Sink’s eyes went wide. Melanie clapped her hand over her mouth to stifle a gasp. Sink looked down at the papers then back up at the men. She looked on with bated breath. He glanced this way several times, as if to confirm he was not imagining what was in front of him. 

“Melanie, am I dreaming or is this really happening?” he asked. 

“I’m afraid it’s really happening, sir,” she said. “But I hope you realize now just how important drastic action is.” 

His face hardened and he scowled. 

“I ought to have you all shot,” he snapped. “This is nothing less than an act of mutiny while we prepare for the goddamn invasion of Europe.”

She observed, astounded, as he dismissed Sergeant Harris from the regiment. He busted Ranney down to private, and proceeded to shame the remaining sergeants as disgraces to the Airborne, and reminded them that if the invasion of Europe was not imminent, they’d be facing a lot worse than this. 

“Now, get out of my office and out of my sight,” he demanded. 

They saluted, which he did not acknowledge. 

“Get!”

They filed out of the office and she caught Lipton’s eye. He offered a short nod, and she understood that they had risked it all for Dick. When they were all gone and the door was closed again, Sink heaved a sigh. 

“This really is bad, isn’t it?” he asked. 

“Yes, sir,” she said. 

“I need some time to think about this,” he said, standing up. He went and opened the door. “If you’ll excuse me.”

“Of course,” she agreed, and started to leave. 

He stopped her right at the door and she faced him with an inquiring expression. He only smiled half heartedly and gave her cheek a paternal pinch. She smiled gently. 

With that, she left him. She felt silly now for going there at all. If she’d known that NCOs were planning such a statement, she would have just let them make it. But she hoped that it was her and the men who had swayed Colonel Sink. She walked outside and saw the NCOs cutting a salute to Dick as they passed him. 

He spotted her and smiled, which she returned. She approached him. 

“What’s all that about?” he asked. 

“You’ll find out soon enough,” she told him. 

The following evening, Sink asked that Melanie come and have dinner with him. As she headed up to his office, she saw Sobel storming down the corridor. He glared fiercely at her and halted. She did the same, facing him. 

“You had something to do with this, didn’t you?” he demanded. 

“With what?” she wondered. 

He scoffed and rolled his eyes. 

“You wanna play innocent, that’s fine,” he spat. “But congratulations, you and your precious Dick are getting exactly what you wanted.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” she returned levelly. 

He stepped closer to her, towering over her, but she didn’t shrink away. 

“You lost me my company,” he hissed. 

“You don’t frighten me, Captain Sobel,” she said, hoping he believed her. “As for your company, you did a perfectly fine job of losing it yourself.”

She sounded braver than she felt. Her heart was pounding, and she could feel beads of sweat forming on the back of her neck. To speak that way to a man was unprecedented for her.

“It won’t make him love you, you know,” he sneered. 

“You’re wrong again,” she said, knowing exactly who he meant. “Nothing I do is with the intention of earning the love of Richard Winters. He’s a man I could never even hope to deserve.” 

He blinked, taken aback by the statement. But she meant every word. 

“Good evening, Captain,” she said coolly, and then swept away. 

Despite the tension with Sobel, she had a pleasant dinner with Colonel Sink. He asked if she had heard from her mother, and she said she hadn’t yet, and the colonel admitted she was shunning him too. They shared a melancholy sort of laugh about it. After the meal, there was a knock on the door. 

“Come in,” Sink said. 

“Good evening, sir,” said Dick as he entered, offering a salute. 

Sink returned it. 

“How can I help you, Dick?” he asked. 

“Actually, I was wondering if I could walk Melanie home,” he said. “I’d hate to disturb our routine anymore.”

She beamed. “Thank you, I’d like that.”

“Well, we’re all finished here, if you’re ready to go,” Sink said. “Thanks for looking out for her, Dick, it means a lot.”

“I’m happy to do it, sir,” Dick replied. 

“Good night, Colonel,” she said to Sink. “I hope we can sit down together again soon.”

“Me too,” Sink said. 

He pecked her on the cheek and said good night, and then she left with Dick. As they headed out into the cool night, she looked up at her companion and smiled again. 

“So, I guess you heard about Sobel,” he said. 

“Yes,” she said. “You did too?”

“Yep,” he said. “I think the company’s having a party if you’d like to join.”

She chuckled. “No thank you. I much prefer where I am.”

He smiled that bashful smile of his, which always melted her heart so much she was shocked she didn’t just turn into a puddle and soak into the earth. 

“Sink didn’t happen to share with you who’ll be taking Sobel’s place did he?” he asked. 

“As a matter of fact, he did,” she said. “Lieutenant Meehan from Baker Company, I believe.”

“I don’t know much about him,” he said with a slight frown. 

“Well, it can’t get any worse than Sobel, can it?” she returned, but immediately felt guilty. “Oh, that’s a nasty thing to say, I -”

“No, don’t apologize,” he said. “This whole business has been pretty nasty.” 

“Have you been reinstated as Easy’s XO?” she asked.

“I have,” he said. “And I suppose I partly have you to thank.”

“Oh, Dick, how you do run on,” she said. “I did speak to Colonel Sink about my own concerns, but it was the actions of the noncoms that sealed the deal. Turns out they are absolutely loyal to you.”

“Or they just really hate Sobel,” he joked.

She chuckled again. “That could also be the case.”

She shivered as a chilly breeze rolled through, and she subconsciously moved closer to him. He offered his arm, which she took. Just holding onto him, bodies pressed together, helped with warmth. But she always felt a bit warm around him. 

As they walked together, they chatted some more, eventually reaching subjects other than Sobel. They shared a few laughs and even some peaceful quiet as they reached the house. They came to a slow stop in front of her door.

“Well, goodnight, Dick,” she said. 

“Goodnight,” he returned. 

This time, there was no hesitation before she hugged him. He seemed a little surprised, but soon eased into her and wrapped his arms around her waist. It was so safe there, she hated to let go.

They grinned at each other as they both pulled away, and said goodnight again. Then, to her dismay, she went into the house to head to bed. 

Dick remained on the street and watched her bedroom window until the light flicked on. He saw her silhouette flit back and forth across the room as she changed and let her hair down. He stayed there until her light went off again, and he pictured her crawling comfortably into her bed. Only then, knowing she was safe and secure, did he go in.

***

Upottery was fairly similar to Aldbourne, only with fewer buildings. The Army set up a camp there, with tents scattered throughout the main field to house everyone. Luckily, the weather was warm enough. 

The invasion was so close now. Melanie had no idea when it would actually take place, but she had heard the plan several times already. The paratroopers would jump behind enemy lines and then have to clear the way for the Navy who would be landing on the two beaches - Utah and Omaha. It made her incredibly nervous because she would be separated from the regiment during the invasion. Her job was to go in with the rest of the Army Nurse Corps and set up aid stations. 

One morning, she had her coffee by the sand tables and looked over them for what had to be the millionth time. She knew her part, but she wanted to remember exactly where Dick and the rest of the 506th would be. Dick found her there by herself. 

“Hey,” he said. “Are you really studying before breakfast?”

She nodded. “I couldn’t really eat anyway. I just keep thinking about this and how...big it all seems.”

“Nervous?” he asked. 

“Of course, I’d be a fool not to be,” she said. “But it’s you all I’m worried about most.”

“We all have our part to play,” he said. “Just focus on your task at hand and -”

“Don’t, please,” she cut across him. “You’re entirely too logical for me just now.”

He chuckled, but it stung him a little. Did she really think him unemotional? He tried to maintain his composure for the men, and for her, but he never wanted to give the impression that he didn’t care.

“What would you like me to do?” he wondered.

“Lie to me,” she said, and he appreciated her honesty. “Just once, lie to me and tell me everything is going to be alright.”

He stepped closer to her and she rested her head against his shoulder. He put an arm around her waist and gave her a gentle squeeze.

“Everything’s gonna be alright,” he said. 

She hummed happily. “Thank you.” 

She finally got the news that the big day was to be June 5th. On that day, she went to the field before she was scheduled to join the other nurses. She walked among the men and offered hugs and words of encouragement, especially to the ones she was particularly close to. Most of it was Easy Company. 

“If you’re looking for Winters, he’s up with first platoon,” Guarnere told her as she wrapped up with him. “I’m sure he’d love to see ya.”

“Thanks, Bill,” she returned. “Take care of yourself.”

“You know I will, sweetheart,” he assured her, patting her arm.

She found first platoon quickly and spoke to each of the men. Finally, she spotted Dick. He offered a kind smile as she approached him. 

“Dick, I…” she trailed off. 

She had no words to express what he meant to her, so she threw herself into his arms. He caught her and held her, stroking her hair tenderly. She swallowed the lump in her throat as her heart began to sink. What if this was the last time?

Dick was thinking the thing. So he held her as long as he could, committing to memory the feeling of her, the way she smelled, and the sound of her voice. 

She sniffled as she pulled away.

“I, uh, brought something for you,” she said. 

“You did?” 

“Yes,” she said, reaching into her pocket. She retrieved a small, velvet box, which she opened and held out to him.

“A pocket watch?” he questioned, taking it carefully out and holding it up in front of him.

It was a fine, old fashioned, gold one. The initials JFD were engraved on the front, for Jesse Franklin Davis.

“It was my father’s,” she explained. “It always brought him luck. The only day he didn’t have it was the day he...well, you know.”

A softness came over his eyes that might have made her burst into tears if she wasn’t already trying so hard to keep it together. 

“Thank you,” he said earnestly. “I can’t take it, though, it’s too valuable.”

He tried to hand it back, but she only took his hand and curled his fingers around it.

“Please,” she said. “Consider it a loan. You may give it back only when we have found each other again.”

He looked happily at where her hand was atop his and then back up at her face.

“I’ll cherish it,” he said.

She nodded, biting her bottom lip so he wouldn’t see it trembling. He pulled her into one more embrace. When they parted, she swore she felt her heart cracking. 

“Good luck, Dick,” she choked out.

He cupped her cheek in his free hand. She closed her eyes to his touch. A tear leaked out of her eye and he wiped it away with his thumb.  

“Melanie,” he said, and she opened her eyes to meet his gaze. “I will return it to you.”

She attempted a watery smile. “I know you will.”

Several yards away, most of the company had gathered to watch, though they couldn’t hear what Melanie or Dick were saying. 

“He’s gonna kiss her,” Buck said. “He’s got to. Look at that.”

“Nah, he won’t,” Guarnere added. “He ain’t that kind of man.”

“I dunno, Guarno,” Toye said. “I’m with Buck, it’s looking like he might finally get the balls.”

“Oh, shit, guys!” Malarkey gasped. “His hand is on her cheek. The hand. Is on. The cheek.”

“He’s not even leanin’ in though, look,” Guarnere argued. “He ain’t gonna kiss her.”

“Five bucks says he kisses her,” Buck said. 

“You’re on,” Guarnere replied, and they shook on it. 

Lipton approached looking concerned. 

“What are all of you doing over here?” he wondered.

“We’re waiting to see if Winters is finally gonna kiss Melanie,” Skip explained. “Buck and Bill have placed bets.”

Lipton glanced over at her and Dick and then back at the men. 

“He’s not gonna kiss her, Winters isn’t that kind of guy,” he said. 

“Wanna get in on the bet, Lip?” Guarnere offered. 

Lip sighed and shook his head. 

“Does it count if he kisses her cheek or something?” Malarkey wondered. 

“No, we’re talking a full on lip kiss,” Buck said. “Oh, look!”

They all turned eyes on Melanie and Dick and watched. He was leaning toward her, and for a moment, even she thought he might kiss her, but then he leaned back on his heels. They whispered their final goodbyes. And then, chest tightening, she turned away from him and walked toward the jeep that was waiting for her. 

“Damn,” Buck sighed. 

“Told you, fellas,” Guarnere gloated as he collected his winnings. “Winters ain’t the kissing kind.”

Dick watched the jeep disappear into the countryside, doubting himself for the first time. He tucked the pocket watch away inside his jacket. Right next to his heart. 

That night, after the jump was cancelled, and he stood outside with Nix, he pressed his hand over it and thought of Melanie. He was carrying her with him, no matter when or where he jumped.

[thorne93]

The Stars Made Us (Part 1)

Prompt: In this world, you’re one of the “lucky” ones who got a soulmate, but what if the universe gives you more than you bargained for?

(Prompt challenge -- You live in a world where your soulmate can write on their skin and you will get the writing on your own and vice versa. Where they can wash away the ink on their own skin, however, the writing is forever scarred onto your skin until you meet face to face)

Word Count: 1857

Warnings: angst and language throughout

Notes: This was supposed to be for @sorryimacrapwriter and their challenge like a year ago, I think? I still loved the prompt though and have been working on this story for quite some time. This aesthetic was made by @dontshootmespence, thank you so much! Beta’d by @like-a-bag-of-potatoes, couldn’t have done it without you, as well as @carryonmyswansong and @arrow-guy and @mrs-dragneel-stark-solo

Also, I’ve never really liked the whole soulmate AU thing idea, but this felt so right and it was amazing to write. I hope y’all love it too!!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Ever since you were little, you’d heard the legends. The legend of soulmates. It was as common as Santa Claus or winning the lottery. Some weren’t sure they believed it, because although it was real, it was so rare that people didn’t know how to feel about it. Perhaps it was like believing in ghosts. Documented cases, proof, eye witness accounts weren’t enough to sway some skeptics. Yet, it had to be real because there was a registry, much like when you go to get your license or file a birth certificate or a social security number. There was a system in place to keep track of soulmates.

While others, mainly hopeless romantics, truly believed in soulmates. You heard whispers of it when people talked of their grandparents “perfect marriage” and how they just had to be soulmates. You’d heard some kids on the playground swear their cousin just got their soulmate. 

Now, it wasn’t for everyone. It was a rarity, and much like winning the lottery, it only happened to a select few. 

The few were seemingly random. Everyone from celebrities and CEOs down to starving artists and people who managed grocery stores. It touched all races, religions, and economic status. It was global. It wasn’t unheard of for a South American woman to be mated with a French man. Or one Australian to find their mate within Africa. 

Stories of epic journeys to find their love and mate had been told as bedtime stories. Heart wrenching stories of soulmates who never got to be together. 

The idea of soulmates was so endowed in the world and in history that it was rare enough to be celebrated, but common enough to be easily accepted. That’s why, when people walked with scars all over their body, formed in words, people didn’t even think twice.

That’s how it worked. On people’s 18th birthday, their soulmate was assigned, if they had one. Writing on any part of your skin would show up on your mate’s skin as a scar, and vice-versa. For two days out of the year, their birthdays, they could communicate this way. 

The only downside was that you couldn’t give out your information to your mate -- that part was up to the universe. When they needed you most, their name and address would show up on your arm. It could be life or death, it could be a mental breakdown, it could be that they’re hurt and need a friend. But until then, you shouldn’t share personal information. People had done it before, met their mates before the universe decided it was time, and awful things tended to happen. 

But if they were patient enough, willing enough to wait for the right day, it would all be worth it and they were usually guaranteed a happy life. 

Even though you grew up with this knowledge, you’d let it fall to the wayside in your mind. School and friendships took precedence, and you led your life normally. Every now and again, like on birthdays, a fleeting thought of the prospect of a soulmate would run through your head, but for the most part, you filed it away as a fantasy. 

That was, until your best friend Jenny reminded you of it on your 18th birthday.

You were having a party at your house. A group of about ten friends and you went out and played mini-golf, then had pizza at your house with cake and gifts, then watched a new movie. Your parents gave you money to buy a lottery ticket for fun, and gave you some money for college. 

Nearly everyone had gone home, and your parents already wished you a happy birthday with hugs and kisses before going off to bed. All that was left were you and Jenny, and she was about to walk out the door.

“I’m just saying, you’re 18 now,” she stated as she walked. 

“Yeah, I gathered that when I counted 18 candles on the cake, what’s your point?” you asked with a smile.

“My point is, maybe you should try and see if you’ve got a soulmate.” 

You shook your head and rolled your eyes. “Jenny, the odds of me having a soulmate are like 1 in a million. It’s a silly idea.”

“That’s been true. You know it and I know it. What’s the harm in finding out? I just had a cousin last year that found out. She wrote some appointment down when she was 21, her soulmate got it and wrote back.” 

You perched an eyebrow at her. “How romantic.” 

“I’m serious! Come on, how cool would it be?” 

“It would be kind of neat,” you admitted sheepishly, grinning. “But if no one writes back--”

“Then you haven’t lost anything, and you’ll find someone great later in life. No harm, no foul. Right?” She gave you that super convincing gorgeous smile before dropping her pushiness. “Alright, alright. Just think about it, okay? Happy birthday,” she said before hugging you tightly. 

“Thanks,” you said back.

With that, you cleaned up the kitchen and living room, gathered your gifts, and headed up to bed.  You pulled on your pajamas and crawled into your bed, you sat there, thinking about what Jenny had said.

What would be the harm in writing on your arm? If no one spoke back, it was no big deal, right? 

But if they didn’t write back, would you be saddened? You’d always secretly hoped you had a soulmate out there, so to find out you didn’t have one would be a little devastating. Of course, your life wouldn’t be over, and like Jenny said, you could always find a partner just like you normally would. 

Ultimately, it was just a schoolgirl fantasy… but what if it wasn't? you wondered idly as you sat with your leg propped up on the bed. 

You grabbed a pen off your nightstand and took a deep breath, trying to think of the best thing to ask - this would be scarred on them indefinitely after all. 

You thought, and you thought, pondering anything you could say. But what do you say to a potential soulmate? Finally, you decided there was no perfect way to go about this, and you put your pen to your arm, writing: Is anyone out there? 

You held your breath for a second, wondering if you’d get a scar somewhere in response, even bracing for some form of pain, but after a few moments -- nothing. Nothing happened. 

You sighed. Well, it was a long shot anyway.

After lying in bed disappointed for a while, a feather light sensation came crawling across your arm. You frowned for a split second before glancing down and seeing the letters. Instantly, a grin grew wide across your face. 

“Hi there. : )” 

You wanted to jump for joy. Immediately, your heart soared at the sight. Someone out there was actually fated to be yours? You couldn’t believe this. Why you? You weren’t special. 

“This is my email, if you would like to talk more,” you offered, scribbling on your skin before adding in your email. You opted for email since any other form of communication you might be tempted to find out their name.

Within two minutes, a ping noise came from your computer. You sprang from your bed, not even caring that you were the epitome of a school girl right that second. You dashed the cursor over to your inbox and read the new email. 

“Hello. So I suppose this means we’re soulmates...”

“I suppose it does,” you wrote back, a giant grin on your face. 

“We should probably get some of the formalities out of the way. What should I call you? How old are you?” 

“You can call me… Y/F/I. And I’m 18, today is my birthday. I’m sure you’ve heard the stories of people giving out their information before their time. I think we should stick to initials.” 

One minute later, in the same penmanship, you felt something on your bicep -- Happy Birthday

The smile on your face lit back up. 

“That’s my gift to you. And yes, I have heard of the stories. I would rather be safe than sorry as well. You can call me X. I’m 21. I’m in college, actually in graduate school.”

“Wow, that’s amazing. You’re already in grad school? How? What’s your area of study? I’m going into college in the fall - psychology.” 

“I think I should be surprised, but I’m not. That’s what my PhD will be in,” he informed. “As well as genetics and biophysics.” 

Well, the universe is funny, isn’t it? 

You continued to read his message. 

“Long story short, I graduated college at 16. Harvard, if you can believe it.”

Instantly, you were hit with a wave of surprise and shock. Your soulmate was a genius? He was a Harvard grad at 16? In what universe was that possible?

“That’s… really impressive. God I wish I could do that. It’d be amazing to be already done with college. I haven’t even gone there yet but it seems like a lot of work and a lot of stress. Hopefully, the pay off will be worth it though.” 

“What are you wanting to do with your degree?”

“Psychiatry.”

“A noble profession.” 

“I think so. I’d like to help people, as corny as that sounds.”

“I don’t think it sounds corny at all. Quite admirable, in fact. If people didn’t feel that way, we wouldn’t have good people in the world.”

He already thought you were a good person? you wondered, warmth spreading over you.

“I guess that is one way to look at it. I just want to help people and be a voice for people who don’t exactly have a lot of advocates.”

“That’s precisely why we get into these professions, darling,” he wrote.

Darling? Wow, so far, this guy was the jackpot. 

“I suppose it is. So what are some of your favorite books, if you don’t mind me asking? And movies. I feel like a quick way to get to know someone pretty well is through their interests.”

“Indeed it is,” he replied. “I happen to favor T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, as far as books go and I don’t particularly have time for many films.”

“Oh, I see,” you started, and then explained your favorite books and film. 

He had asked you why you liked those and you went into a rather lengthy explanation of why you enjoyed them more than others. After that you two talked music, actually having quite a lot in common there. 

You stayed up all night emailing, until the sun came up. It wasn’t until the glare hit your computer screen that you realized it, either. You didn’t want to end the magical evening, but you did need rest, and you were sure as a grad student, he needed all he could get as well. 

That morning you went to sleep with this newfound relief. It was one less thing you’d have to worry about in life. Worry about finding a mate, a partner for life. They were already there, already perfect, already waiting…

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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[fyeah-bangtan7]

The Boundless Optimism of BTS

IT IS THE MORNING OF CHUSEOK, A KOREAN HARVEST FESTIVAL akin to Thanksgiving, and the members of BTS would normally be spending it with their families, eating tteokguk, a traditional rice-cake soup. Instead, Jin, 28; Suga, 27; J-Hope, 26; RM, 26; Jimin, 25; V, 24; and Jung Kook, 23, are working. Practicing. Honing their choreography. In a few days, the biggest musical act in the world will perform in the live-stream concert that, for now, will have to stand in for the massive tour they spent the first part of this year rehearsing. At this moment, they’re seated inside Big Hit Entertainment headquarters in Seoul, South Korea, the house they built, dressed mostly in black and white, ready to answer my questions. They’re gracious about it. And groggy.

Before I’m done speaking with them for this story, BTS will have the number-one and number-two songs on the BillboardHot 100, a feat that’s been achieved only a handful of times in the sixty-odd years the chart has existed. Their next album, Be, is weeks away from being released, and speculation about the record, the tracklist, the statement, is rampant across the Internet. BTS are, to put it mildly, huge.

There is something about complete world domination that can really cement a friendship. What jumps out at me as I connect with the members of BTS is their level of comfort with one another. Tension has a way of making itself evident—even over Zoom, even through a translator. There’s none to be found here. They are relaxed in the manner of family. Lounging with their arms around each other’s shoulders, tugging on each other’s sleeves, fixing each other’s collars. When they speak about one another, it is with kindness.

“Jimin has a particular passion for the stage and really thinks about performance, and in that sense, there are many things to learn from him,” J-Hope says. “Despite all the things he has accomplished, he still tries his best and brings something new to the table, and I really want to applaud him for that.”

“Thank you for saying all these things about me,” Jimin responds.

Jimin turns his attention to V, explaining that he is “loved by so many” and describing him as one of his best friends. Suga jumps in, sharing that Jimin and V fight the most among the group. V replies, “We haven’t fought in three years!” They tell me this distinction now belongs to Jin and Jung Kook, the oldest and youngest members. “It all starts as a joke, but then it gets serious,” Jimin says.

Jin agrees and recounts what their arguments sound like. “Why did you hit me so hard?” he says, before mimicking Jung Kook’s response: “I didn’t hit you that hard.” And then they start hitting each other. But not that hard.

Since the start of their careers, BTS have shown a certain confidence in their aesthetic, their performances, and their music videos. It’s right there in the name: BTS stands for “Bangtan Sonyeondan,” which translates to “Bulletproof Boy Scouts,” but as their popularity grew in English-speaking markets, the acronym was retrofitted to mean “Beyond the Scene,” which Big Hit has described as “symbolizing youth who don’t settle for their current reality and instead open the door and go forward to achieve growth.” And their affection with one another, their vulnerability and emotional openness in their lives and in their lyrics, strikes me as more grown-up and masculine than all the frantic and perpetual box-checking and tone-policing that American boys force themselves and their peers to do. It looks like the future.

“There is this culture where masculinity is defined by certain emotions, characteristics. I’m not fond of these expressions,” Suga tells me. “What does being masculine mean? People’s conditions vary day by day. Sometimes you’re in a good condition; sometimes you aren’t. Based on that, you get an idea of your physical health. And that same thing applies mentally. Some days you’re in a good state; sometimes you’re not. Many pretend to be okay, saying that they’re not ‘weak,’ as if that would make you a weak person. I don’t think that’s right. People won’t say you’re a weak person if your physical condition is not that good. It should be the same for the mental condition as well. Society should be more understanding.”

When I hear these words in October 2020, from my house in a country whose leader is actively trying to make the case that only the weak die of COVID-19, well, it sounds like the future, too.

IF YOU ARE JUST NOW CONSIDERING GETTING INTO BTS, IT IS natural to feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of stuff. It’s a bit like saying, right this second, “Let’s see what Marvel Comics is all about.” In the streaming age, BTS have sold more than twenty million physical units across fourteen albums. Their multi-album concept cycles, The Most Beautiful Moment in Life, Love Yourself, and Map of the Soul, have unfolded over multiple records and EPs. There are collaborations with brands, including a BTS smartphone with Samsung. There is a series of short films and music videos, called BU, or BTS Universe, and an animated universe called BT21, in which they’re all represented by gender-neutral avatars. Their fan base, known as ARMY, is a global cultural movement unto itself.

“Dynamite,” their first English-language single and their first American number one, is pure, ecstatic pop. Shiny and joyful. What sets them apart from many of their peers, and many of the pop acts who achieved worldwide fame before them, is what came earlier. Beneath the sheen and the beats has always been an unflinching examination of human emotion. Their lyrics seek to challenge the conventions of society—to question and even denounce them. BTS’s first single, “No More Dream,” unveiled at their debut showcase in June 2013, concerns the intense pressure South Korean schoolchildren face to conform and to succeed. According to Suga, lyrics about the mental health of young people were mostly absent in Korean pop music. “The reason I started making music is because I grew up listening for lyrics that speak about dreams, hopes, and social issues,” he tells me. “It just came naturally to me when making music.”

Suga’s early ambition of making music didn’t involve him being in a group at all. About a decade ago, in his hometown of Daegu, the fourth-largest city in South Korea, he started recording underground rap tracks under the name Gloss, listening to and learning from the early works of songwriter and producer Bang Si-hyuk, known as Hitman Bang. Bang is the founder and CEO of Big Hit Entertainment. In 2010, Suga, a junior in high school, moved to Seoul to join Big Hit as a producer and rapper. Then Bang asked him to become part of a group, envisioning a hip-hop act with fellow new Big Hit recruits RM and J-Hope. The guys call this “season one” of their development.

“At that time, I don’t think our label exactly knew what to do with us,” RM says. “They just basically let us be and we had some lessons, but we also just chilled and made music sometimes.”

It got more intense. The family grew, occasionally by accident.

V accompanied a friend to a Big Hit casting call in Daegu for moral support and ended up being the person chosen from those sessions.

Jung Kook was signed in a feeding frenzy after being dropped from the talent show Superstar K, fielding offers from numerous entertainment companies before settling on Big Hit because he was impressed by RM’s rapping.

Jimin was a dance student and class president for nine years running at his school in Busan; he auditioned at the behest of his teacher.

And then, to hear him tell it, Jin got picked up off the street. “I was just going to school,” he says. “Someone from the company approached me, like, ‘Oh, this is my first time seeing anyone that looked like this.’ He suggested having a meeting with me.”

“Season two is when we officially underwent hard training,” J-Hope says. “We started dancing, and that’s how I would say our team building started.”

School in the daytime, training at night. “We slept during classes,” V says.

“I slept in the practice studio,” J-Hope counters.

Hitman Bang kept the pressure comparatively low. And he encouraged the guys to write and produce their own music, to be honest about their emotions in their lyrics. Suga is on record saying that no BTS album would be complete without a track that scrutinizes society.

And yet for their new album, Be, they’re putting that aside. Even this has a greater purpose that relates to mental wellness: RM, the group’s main rapper, says, “I don’t think this album will have any songs that criticize social issues. Everybody is going through very trying times right now. So I don’t think there will be any songs that will be that aggressive.”

Though the new rules of COVID-19 mean they can’t come here and promote Be, its first single might not have happened in the first place but for the pandemic. “ ‘Dynamite’ wouldn’t be here if there was no COVID-19,” says RM. “For this song, we wanted to go easy and simple and positive. Not some, like, deep vibes or shadows. We just wanted to go easy.”

Jin agrees. “We were trying to convey the message of healing and comfort to our fans.” He pauses. “World domination wasn’t actually our plan when we were releasing ‘Dynamite.’ ” World domination just happens sometimes. You get it.

MAP OF THE SOUL ONE AIRED VIA THEIR ONLINE FAN PLATFORM and attracted almost a million viewers across 191 countries. The guys say they tried not to think about the enormousness. J-Hope adds, “I felt a little bit more nervous knowing that this was being broadcast live. I actually feel less nervous performing live at a stadium.” Jin replies with a smile, “J-Hope, born to perform at a stadium.”

The graphic layout of the title throws a colon between the final N and E, which makes it look like Map of the Soul On: E, and as I watch it live, as I do in my office at 3:00 a.m. with noise-canceling headphones and a steaming pot of coffee, it feels a lot like I’m watching Map of the Soul on E. It is an explosion of color and fashion and passion, over four gigantic stages, from the boozy swagger of “Dionysus” to the emo-trap introspection of “Black Swan.” Not a step, not a gesture, not a hair is out of place. If there were nerves, they didn’t come through.

There is also, at the end of Map of the Soul One, an intimate version of their 2017 track “Spring Day,” which encapsulates what’s really made BTS stand out. On the surface, it’s about nonspecific love and loss, about yearning for the past. “I think that song really represents me,” says Jin. “I like to look to the past and be lost in it.”

Fair enough, but there is an undeniable allusion, in both the song’s video and its cover concept, to a specific incident in recent South Korean history. “Spring Day” was released just a few years after the sinking of the Sewol ferry, one of the country’s biggest maritime disasters, in which a poorly inspected, overloaded ferry toppled in a sharp right turn. Hundreds of high school students drowned, having obeyed orders to stay in their cabins as the boat was going down. According to some reports, the South Korean government actively tried to silence entertainers who spoke out against it, with the Korean Ministry of Education fully banning the tragedy’s commemorative yellow ribbons in schools. I ask whether it was about a specific sad event, and Jin tells me, “It is about a sad event, as you said, but it is also about longing.” The song kept the disaster front of mind for young Koreans and for the media, indirectly leading to the impeachment and removal of then president Park Geun-hye.

If an overburdened, undermaintained, slow-moving vessel capsizing because of a reckless rightward turn strikes you as somehow symbolic of the country in which BTS are about to explode even further, you won’t hear it from them. “We’re outsiders—we can’t really express what we feel about the United States,” says V. But their actions speak volumes; in the wake of the George Floyd murder and subsequent protests in America, the group made a $1 million donation with Big Hit Entertainment to Black Lives Matter, one that was matched by BTS ARMY.

The fans offer a fascinating inversion of stan culture: Rather than bullying rivals like many other ardent online fan bases do, ARMY have put the positive message of the music into action. Their activism goes deep. Through micro-donations, they’ve regrown rain forests, adopted whales, funded hundreds of hours of dance classes for Rwandan youth, and raised money to feed LGBTQ refugees around the world. Where pop fans a generation ago might have sent teddy bears or cards to their idols for their birthdays, where five years ago they might have promoted a hashtag to get a video’s YouTube viewer count up, for RM’s twenty-sixth birthday in September, international fan collective One in an Army raised more than $20,000 for digital night schools to improve rural children’s access to education during the COVID-19 crisis. ARMY may have even entered the conversation around the 2020 presidential election when hundreds of thousands of Tulsa Trump rally tickets got snapped up online in June. The event’s actual attendance was pathetically low. No particular person or entity claimed credit for this top-notch trolling, but a video urging BTS fans to RSVP to that rally did get hundreds of thousands of views. We have no choice but to stan this fan base.

The relationship is intense. “We and our ARMY are always charging each other’s batteries,” RM says. “When we feel exhausted, when we hear the news all over the world, the tutoring programs, and donations, and every good thing, we feel responsible for all of this.” The music may have inspired the good works, but the good works inspire the music. “We’ve got to be greater; we’ve got to be better,” RM continues. “All those behaviors always influence us to be better people, before all this music and artist stuff.”

Yet for every devoted member of BTS ARMY, there is someone who’s looked right past BTS. Jimmy Fallon, whose Tonight Show hosted the group for a full week this past fall, was one of those people. “Usually if an artist is on the rise, I hear about them ahead of time. With BTS, I knew they had crazy momentum, and I’d never heard of them.”

Here’s a thought that used to be funny to me: There were members of the live audience of The Ed Sullivan Showon February 9, 1964, who weren’t there to see the Beatles. Elvis was in the Army, Buddy Holly was gone, and the three number-one albums in the months before Meet the Beatles! were an Allan Sherman comedy record, the West Side Story original cast recording, and Soeur Sourire: The Singing Nun. America had left rock ’n’ roll behind for the moment, and with the culture aimless and fragmented, it wasn’t quite sure what to pick up in its place. It is possible to imagine that a youngish, reasonably hip, and culturally aware human being might cop a ticket to that week’s show, settle into his seat, and say, “Bring on a medley of numbers from the Broadway musical Oliver! and banjo sensation Tessie O’Shea.”

The instinct is to laugh at that guy, and it’s a good instinct, because what a dope.

And then you become that guy.

Sometimes there is a whole universe alongside your own, bursting with color you’re too stubborn to see, bouncing with joy you think is for someone else, with a beat you thought you were finished dancing to. BTS are the biggest thing on the planet right now, yet the job of introducing them to someone new, particularly in America, seems like it’s never done. Maybe it’s because they are adored by screaming teenagers and we live in a society patriarchal enough to forget that screaming teenagers are nearly always right. Maybe it’s the cultural divide, in a moment when our country is unashamed enough of its own xenophobia to get openly bent out of shape when it has to press 1 for English. Maybe it’s the language barrier, as though we understood a single word Michael Stipe sang before 1989.

Whatever the reason, the result is that you might be missing out on a paradigm shift and a historic moment of pop greatness.

IF BTS SEEM A BIT CAUTIOUS WITH THEIR WORDS PUBLICLY, IT’S because—perhaps more than any other massive pop act in history—they have to be. Shortly after our second meeting, BTS were given the General James A. Van Fleet Award by the U. S.–based Korea Society for their outstanding contributions to advancing relations between the United States and Korea. In his acceptance speech, RM said, “We will always remember the history of pain that our two nations shared together, and the sacrifices of countless men and women,” as seemingly diplomatic and innocuous a statement as he could have made. But because he didn’t mention the Chinese soldiers who died in the Korean War, it didn’t go over well. The Samsung BTS smartphone disappeared from Chinese e-commerce platforms, Fila and Hyundai pulled ads in China that featured the group, the nationalistic newspaper Global Times accused them of hurting Chinese citizens’ feelings and negating history, and the hashtags “BTS humiliated China” and “there are no idols that come before my country” began trending on the social-media site Weibo. The pressure is not small.

Even as the number-one pop group in the world, even with their hard work day in and day out, even with tens of millions of adoring fans redefining the concept of “adoring fans” by literally healing the planet in their name, these guys still suffer from impostor syndrome. RM explains, “I’ve heard that there’s this mask complex. Seventy percent of so-called successful people have this, mentally. It’s basically this: There’s this mask on my face. And these people are afraid that someone is going to take off this mask. We have those fears as well. But I said 70 percent, so I think it’s very natural. Sometimes it’s a condition to be successful. Humans are imperfect, and we have these flaws and defects. And one way to deal with all this pressure and weight is to admit the shadows.”

The music helps. “When we write the songs and lyrics, we study these emotions, we are aware of that situation, and we relate to that emotionally,” J-Hope says. “And that’s why when the song is released, we listen to it and get consolation from those songs as well. I think our fans also feel those emotions, maybe even more than us. And I think we are a positive influence on each other.”

If there’s one thing they’re sacrificing, besides free time and the ability to speak freely without the Chinese foreign ministry releasing an official statement, it’s a love life. I ask about dating, broad questions like “Are you?” and “Is there time?” and “Can you?” and the answer to all of them is pretty clear: “No.” “The most important thing for us now is to sleep,” Jung Kook insists. Suga follows right up with “Can you see my dark circles?” I cannot, because there are none, because flawless skin translates even over Zoom when there’s an ocean between us.

So they’re not, at least publicly, having romantic relationships with anyone. If there is a strong relationship that’s guided their journey into adulthood, it’s with Big Hit. “Our company started with twenty to thirty people, but now we have a company with so many employees,” RM says. “We have our fans, and we have our music. So we have a lot of things that we have to be responsible for, to safeguard.” He considers it for a moment. “I think that’s what an adult is.”

“Our love life—twenty-four hours, seven days a week—is with all the ARMYs all over the world,” RM adds.

In a world that is determined to sand down anything that isn’t immediately recognizable to the average pop-music fan, when it comes to acquainting you with Korean culture, BTS very much do not wanna hold your hand. While the first song on night one of their Tonight Show week was a joyous but expected take on “Dynamite” with Fallon and the Roots, they took some chances during their second performance.

As a friend of mine, a thirty-three-year-old BTS fan in Los Angeles, told me, “The second song they performed was ‘IDOL,’ ” from 2018’s Love Yourself: Answer, “and it celebrated their Korean identity. They performed it in Gyeongbokgung Palace in Seoul. They wore clothes inspired by traditional dresses called hanboks;it was almost entirely in Korean, so it felt super subversive. As a fan, I read it as: ‘Dynamite’ was an invitation, and this is who we are and this is our home.”

“I was a little concerned that people might not understand,” Fallon says. “I was like, ‘There’s nothing in English here.’ But what you see is just pure star power. Pure talent. Immediately, I thought, Oh, this is everything. If you’re that powerful, it transcends language.”

American popular music in the twenty-first century is more fragmented than it has been since . . . well, since Allan Sherman, Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim, and the Singing Nun battled for that number-one spot. The monoculture that the Beatles helped bring on has breathed its last breath. Each of us is the program director for our own private radio station, letting our own past habits and streaming-service algorithms serve up something close to what we want. Which is great, except that huge moments can whiz right past our ears. Each of us, even if we’re more clued in than our parents were when they were our age, can miss some era-defining, excellent shit. Particularly if the radio is our Spotify Discover Weekly, or the Pandora channel based on the band whose T-shirts we wore in college. We can let a moment pass us by if prime time is a Netflix binge, and the Tonight Show hour is spent on one more episode before bed. But we shouldn’t. “Honestly, I think it’s history that we’re living through with BTS,” Fallon says. “It’s the biggest band I’ve seen since I’ve started late night, definitely.”

THERE IS ALSO THE SMALL DETAIL THAT, UNLIKE THE BEATLES AND literally every other worldwide sensation to break in America, BTS don’t particularly need to go to the trouble. They are massive all over the world. Thanks to the recent IPO of Big Hit Entertainment, of which each member is a partner, they are all now incredibly wealthy. (Hitman Bang is the first South Korean entertainment mogul to become a billionaire.) What good is a culture in decline to a pop act this much on the ascent? “When I dreamed of becoming an artist, I listened to pop and watched all the awards shows in the United States. Being successful and being a hit in the U. S. is, of course, such an honor as an artist,” says Suga. “I feel very proud of that.”

They’re breaking out in a country that either worships them or fails to notice them. So do they feel like they’re getting enough respect in America? “How can we win everyone’s respect?” Jin asks. “I think it’s enough to get respect from people who support us. It’s similar everywhere else in the world. You can’t like everyone, and I think it’s enough to be respected by people who really love you.”

Suga agrees. “You can’t always be comfortable, and I think it’s all part of life. Honestly, we are not used to getting a ton of respect from when we first started out. But I think that gradually changes, whether it be in the States or other parts of the world, as we do more and more.”

There is, without a doubt, one colossal, unmistakable sign of respect for a musician: a Grammy. They’ve been nominated only once, and even then it was for best recording package. But their sights are set on a big one next year. RM puts it out there: “We would like to be nominated and possibly get an award.” Dragging the hoary, backward-looking, and Western-focused Grammys into the gorgeous, global world of the present through sheer force of will, talent, and hard work? Stranger things have happened. “I think the Grammys are the last part, like the final part of the whole American journey,” he says with a smile. “So yeah, we’ll see.”

The Recording Academy’s seal of approval is one thing. But BTS have already conquered the world, clowned tyrants, inspired individual fans to perform the small and achievable acts of activism that have collectively begun to save the planet, challenged toxic masculinity by leading with vulnerability, and, along the way, become bajillionaires and international idols. Whether the Grammys are paying attention matters about as much as what an Ed Sullivan audience member expected to see that night in 1964. BTS have already won.

© source

[olderthannetfic]

Hey, sorry to ask this, but a few days ago I saw a post/discussion about the history of original work on ao3 (i.e. how and when it was allowed). I thought it was in my likes, but it's not, and I thought you had reblogged it recently, but I didn't find it. I was wondering if you have seen this discussion around? Or where I can find more about it? This specific post talked abt how who defended original work on ao3 were not the BNFs, if that helps.

That was me running my mouth in the reblogs of something or other. It’s just the one comment.

But what’s that you say? Some tl;dr about a pet topic? Don’t mind if I do! ;) (To be honest, most of this debate happened years ago, and a lot of the long meta was by me back then too, so…)

Okay, so, the situation with Original Works is actually super interesting and a microcosm of early years OTW wank.

This is going to be even more tl;dr than my usual. To try to summarize very briefly:

There were two big cultural factions. One thought “original” was the opposite of “fan”. That one was in charge of OTW. It was hard to get voices from the other side into the debate because they already felt excluded from OTW.

This divide broke down more or less into Ye Olde Slash Fandom on the “it’s the opposite” side and anime fandom on the “WTF?” side. Americans on one side and a lot of non-US, non-English language fandom on the other.

I. Media Fandom, Anime Fandom, and Early OTW

I went to that first fundraising party that astolat threw in New York City back in… god… 2007? 2008? I wasn’t on the Board or any official position until the committees got started later, but I was around right from the very beginning.

Whether you’re looking at volunteers or at people who commented on astolat’s original post, there were always a variety of fans from a variety of fannish backgrounds. People aren’t absolutely in one camp or another, and fannish interests change over time. If you go dig through Dreamwidth posts to find who was actually participating in this debate at the time, half of them are probably in the other camp now.

If you think like that sounds like a preamble to me making a bunch of offensively sweeping generalizations and divvying fans up into little groups, you’d be right! Haha.

I.a. Ye Olde Media Fandom

There are a lot of camps of people who like fanfic. One of the biggest divisions has been Ye Olde Media Fandom vs. anime fandom. Astolat’s social circle–my LJ social circle–was filled with people with decades of fannish experience and a deep knowledge of the Media Fandom side of things.

Those fandom history treatises that start with K/S zines in Star Trek fandom in the 70s and move on through the mainstream buddy cops like Starsky & Hutch to the more niche, sff buddy cops like Fraser and Ray or Jim and Blair are talking about Media Fandom. I try to always capitalize it because the name is lulzy and bizarre to me unless it’s a proper noun for a specific historical thing. It was coined as a rude term for “mass media” fandom aka dumb people who like, ughhhh, Star Trek, ughhh, instead of books. This is a very ancient slapfight from the type of fandom you find at Worldcon, often called “SF fandom” or plain “fandom”.

(Yes, this leads to mega confusion on the part of some old dudes when they find Fanlore and fail to understand that “fandom” there refers to what these people would call “Media Fandom”. They think only they get the unmarked form. But I digress…)

Media Fandom is a specific flavor of fandom. It’s where the slash zines were. It’s where the fans of live action US TV shows were. It’s the history that acafans have laid out well and that tends to get used to defend the idea of a female subculture writing transgressive and transformative fanfic. On the video side, Media Fandom is where Kandy Fong invented vidding by making Star Trek slideshows.

(Kandy’s still around, BTW. She’s usually at Escapade in L.A. Ask her to tell you about the dancing penises sketch in person. She’s hilarious.)

Astolat and friends had been going to slash cons for years. They founded Vividcon. And Yuletide. That meant that when astolat said “Hey kids, let’s put on a show!” we all jumped to help. This is a lady who gets things done.

From a Worldcon perspective, or even from an older Media Fandom perspective, this group was comparatively young, hip, and welcoming. Their fandom interests were comparatively broad. Just look at Yuletide!

In fact, yes, let us look at Yuletide… [ominous music]

I.b. Yuletide sucks at anime

From the very first year (2003), Yuletide mods have asked for help with anime fandoms, been confused about anime fandoms, or made bad judgment calls about anime fandoms. They’ve fucked up on Superhero comics and plenty of other things over the years, but anime has been the most consistent (well, and JRPGs, but there’s so much overlap in those fic fandoms).

There was already bad feeling about this. There were years of bad feeling about this.

I.c. Where are the historians?

Academic study of fanficcy things pretty much got started with Textual Poachers and Enterprising Women. Other acafans who are well known to LJ and later Tumblr are people like Francesca Coppa who wrote a very nice summary of the history of Media Fandom. These are not the only academics who exist, these academics themselves have written about many other things, and by now, OTW’s own journal has covered a lot of other territory, but to this day I see complaints on Tumblr that “acafans” only care about K/S and oldschool slash fandom.

There were years of bad feeling about this as well.

I.d. What kind of fan was I?

Now, by the time OTW got started, I’d moseyed over to not only a lot of live action US TV but a lot of old-as-fuck US TV that is squarely in the Media Fandom camp. But once upon a time, I was a weeaboo hanging out with my weeaboo friends in college. I learned Japanese (sort of). I moved to Japan. Livin’ the weeaboo dream!

More importantly, I used to be a member of a lot of anime mailing lists back in the Yahoo Groups days. I didn’t realize what a cultural gap that would cause until the original works issue came up on AO3.

I.e. Anime Fandom, German-language Fandom, Original M/M

Once upon a time–namely in that Yahoo Groups era–there was an archive called Boys in Chains. It was where you found The Good Stuff™. Heavy kink and power exchange galore! It was extremely well known in the parts of fandom I was in, even if you weren’t on the associated mailing list. It contained lots of fic, but it also had lots of original work.

Around that same era, I was on a critique list called Crimson Ink, which was mixed fic and original. The “original slash” and “original yaoi” crowds mixed freely and were in fanfic spaces. Remember, this is like 2003. You’re never going to get your gay fantasy novel published in English in the US. A couple of fangirl presses started around then, but they died an ignominious death after their first print run.

Fanfiction.net used to allow original work before it spun that off into FictionPress. We forget this today, but if you were an early FFN person, the separation wasn’t so great either.

Meanwhile, German-language fandom was hanging out on sites like Animexx.de, a big-ass fic archive that prominently mentions also including original work. I have the impression that Spanish-language fandom was similar too.

Shousetsu Bang*Bang was founded in 2005. It was a webzine for original m/m, but it was entirely populated by fanfic fandom types.

In all of those kinds of spaces, there was a lot of “original” work that was kind of slash or BL-ish and seen as fannish if it was posted in the fannish space. These weren’t anime-only spaces. They were multifandom spaces where it was seen as obvious and normal that a couple of huge fandoms like Harry Potter would dominate but that everything else big would naturally be anime.

While fans from every background are everywhere, I found that the concentration of EFL fans living in Continental Europe, South America, and Asia was much higher in this kind of space, even the exclusively English language part of it, than in my US TV fandoms.

II. AO3 Early Adopters

AO3 went into closed beta in 2009. In 2010, it was open to the general public (albeit with the invitation queue it still has). But not everyone was interested yet. Just like fandom is loath to leave the dying, shambling mess of Tumblr, fandom was loath to leave dwindling LJ/DW circles or was happy enough on Fanfiction.net. I used to see a lot of posts like “Why are you guys trying to STEAL fanfic from the original! FFN is enough!”

I literally could not give away the invitations I had. No one wanted them.

So who was on AO3? Obviously enough, it was all of us who built it and our friends. So that means a bunch of oldschool Livejournal slashers coming from fandoms like Due South or Stargate Atlantis.

The queue was open. Anyone could make an account. Everyone was welcome. In theory…

But more and more, there started to be these posts about how “AO3 Hates Anime Fandom” and “FFN is for anime. AO3 is for Western fandoms.” and “If you guys actually wanted anime fandom on there, you’d invite us better and make us more welcome.”

At the time, I found these posts obnoxious. People aren’t purely in one sort of fandom or the other. No one was stopping anime fandom from making accounts. No one was banning anime fandom. If there wasn’t much from old fandoms, that was because old fandoms seldom move.

Things began to change. Trolls on FFN forced the Twilight porn writers out, creating enough fuss and brouhaha to mobilize people who would rather have stayed put. AO3 got big enough that randos found it by accident. Original work started to pop up, posted by people who’d never looked at the rules and had no idea it was not allowed.

III. History of AO3’s Policy

I had argued for allowing “original work” during the initial discussions about the ToS. On one side of this issue was me. On the other, everyone else on the committee.

I was overruled.

Open Door started importing old archives to save them. Boys in Chains was hugely important to fandom history from my point of view. It was slated to be imported… maybe. Except that Boys in Chains is half original. AO3 was happy to grandfather in those stories, but the final archive owner felt, quite rightly, that it would be unfair to tell half of the authors they were welcome in the new space while spitting on the other half.

I was pissed. I had been pissed since being overruled the first time. To me, the fact that it should be allowed was so blatantly obvious that it was hard to even explain why.

(To be honest, this difficulty in explaining why and the even greater difficulty in figuring out the source of that difficulty is what held the discussion back for so long. When every assumption on either side is completely opposite, it’s hard to communicate.)

I felt betrayed. It would be like if you helped build something, and everyone was suddenly like “Well, obviously, we can’t allow m/m. It’s not normal fanfic.”

So we discussed it again and, again, it was me vs. literally everyone else. And still the “AO3 is only for Western slash fandom” bitching rose in volume and more and more people complained of feeling excluded from the new fandom hub. Finally, the committee agreed to open the issue up for public comment and get some more input. I was a fool and neither wrote nor proofread the post. It went out phrasing the question as allowing “non fannish” work or something of that sort.

I was furious. The entire point of the whole debate was that I saw some original work, the original work that belongs on AO3, as inherently fannish. And now this had been presented to the AO3 audience as something completely different. Think pieces were popping up in the journals of everyone I knew about diluting AO3’s mission and how we needed to save AO3 from encroachment. Public opinion was very negative. That’s both because of how the post was phrased and because OTW die hards at the time were mostly from the same fannish background. This tidal wave of negativity meant that there was virtually no chance of changing this poisonous rule. And if the rule didn’t change, the people who wanted the rule change were never going to show up to explain why it mattered.

If you’ve been reading my tumblr, I think you can guess what happened next.

I posted a long post to my Dreamwidth. It was a masterwork of passive aggression. In it, I wrung my hands about how simply tragic it would be if AO3 had to delete all of the original work… like anthropomorfic.

Now, I think anthropomorfic counts as fanfic as much as anything else, but I also knew that it fails most rigorous “based on a canon” type definitions of fic and, more importantly, it’s a favorite Yuletide fandom of many of the people on the side that wanted to ban original work.

That’s a nice fandom of yours. It would be a pity if something happened to it. 

Yup. Passive aggressive blackmail. Go me. Suddenly, there was a lot of awkward backtracking and confused running in circles in various journals. The committee agreed to table the idea for a while but not rule out the idea of allowing original works in the future. We agreed to halt all deletions of original work. If a fan posted it, the Abuse Committee (which I was also head of at the time) would not delete that work even though it was technically against the rules.

Time passed. The people on the negative side got tired. I wanted off that committee and had wanted off for ages, but I was damned if I was going to leave before ramming through this piece of policy. Grudgematch till I die! (Look, I never said I wasn’t a wanker.)

After a while, some other fans came forward with more types of “original work” as evidence that it should be allowed. These were from parts of fandom none of us on the committee knew a damn thing about.

This new evidence combined with the gradual accretion of original stuff on AO3 without the sky falling eventually led us to quietly rule Original Work a valid fandom. There was never even a big announcement post. I slipped a word to the Boys in Chains mod myself.

IV. What Were They So Afraid Of Anyway?

So why were people so resistant? Seems like a dick move, right?

Not exactly.

I mean, I was enraged and waged a one-woman war to change the rules, but the other side wasn’t nuts. The objections were usually the following:

I just don’t get why it would be allowed. It never was in my fannish spaces.

Most of our members don’t want this.

Most of the examples of things that ought to be included are m/m. We are privileging m/m if we allow it, and AO3 already has a m/m-centric reputation that can feel exclusionary to some fans.

AO3 is a young, shaky platform that can barely handle the load and content we already have. If we open to original work, we’ll be opening the floodgates. The volume of posting will be so high, it will drown out the fic we’re actually here to protect.

Protecting stuff that doesn’t need protection because it’s not an IP issue would dilute OTW’s mission.

If we allow it, idiots will try to turn AO3 into advertising space, posting only the first chapter and a link to where you can pay to read the rest.

If we add another category of text before we add fan art, that’s a slap in the face of the fan artists we are already failing.

These arguments all make perfect sense in context.

Obvously, the issue with the first two is that different fannish communities have different norms. I knew that a very large community disagreed with the then current AO3 policy, but since so few of them were around to comment, it seemed like a tiny fringe minority.

The m/m thing is… complex. M/M content with zero IP issues is at risk. It is always at risk in a way that even f/f is not (though f/f is also always at risk). Asking for m/m to be exactly equivalent to f/f or m/f in numbers, tropes, whatever is ignoring the historical realities. In our current moment of queer activism in the West, we treat all types of queerness as part of one community with one set of goals, but once you get to culture and art or even more specific activism, this forced homogenization is neither useful nor healthy.

OTOH, AO3 really did have PR problems related to the perception that we gave m/m fandom the kid glove treatment. That objection wasn’t coming from nowhere.

AO3 was shaky. It was tiny when I first brought up this argument. Hell, it wasn’t even in closed beta the first time we discussed this. Part of what made the quiet rules change possible was AO3 organically getting much bigger and OTW having to buy many more servers for unrelated reasons.

The “floodgates” thing was put to rest by tacitly allowing original work before the rules change. We had a period to study how fans actually behaved, and as I predicted, only a small amount of original work got posted. It was indeed mostly things like original BL-ish stories or original work that had been part of a mixed original/fic fest, exchange, zine, etc. Currently, the “Original Work” fandom on AO3 only has 76,348 works. That’s pretty big compared to individual fandoms but tiny compared to AO3’s current size.

The commercial argument was spurious because commercial spam had been against the rules from the very beginning. OH THE IRONY that nowadays AO3 has all these idiots trying to post the first chapter of their fanfic and then direct you to where you can buy the rest.

AO3 has plenty of fanfic of public domain works. One of the problems with gatekeeping original work is that any way you try to distinguish it (not based on a specific canon, not an IP issue, etc.) will apply to some set of obviously allowable fandoms.

As for fan art… OTW has failed fan artists. They needed protection as much as or even more than fic writers. Just look at Tumblr! If we had succeeded at making DeviantArt but allowing boners, fan art fandom could have been safe all these years. Or when Tumblr inevitably shat the bed, we could have scooped up all those people instead of them scattering to twitter and god knows where.

OTW has failed vidders too, at least in terms of preservation. I know I’m not the only one who thinks this. Other major people from like the first Board and shit have discussed this with me offline. Doing some kind of vidding project, possibly outside of OTW is on a lot of our to-do lists. But at least one of OTW’s biggest victories has been that copyright exemption. OTW has demonstrably done really positive things for vidders that other organizations and sites have not. As a vidder, I never expected to see good hosting for the actual video files, and I’m quite content.

But fan artists… yeah. That argument makes sense at least from a place of frustration.

BTW, for the love of god, if you’re a n00b to OTW stuff, please do not reblog this post excitedly telling me that hosting fan art is on OTW’s road map, so yay, good news. Someone always does that, and it’s so irritating. I haven’t been involved in OTW in years, but I used to be, and I know what is on the roadmap. The couple of you who do heavy lifting on sysadmin and coding and policy things are welcome to weigh in as usual. I know none of us like that we can’t host fan art. It’s not what we intended.

Nonetheless, I found this argument to be the perfect being the enemy of the good. If we can save more text now without losing much of anything, we should do it. The fact that we’re fucking up on the fan art front is not a reason to spread the misery around.

V. Is “Original” the Opposite of “Fanfic”?

Okay, so that tl;dr above is why “BNFs” were on one side and “nobodies” were on the other. BNFs from one cultural background founded OTW. BNFs from the other cultural background weren’t even aware that the debate was going on.

But what was the underlying philosophical problem in even having the conversation?

It took me a long time, but I finally worked it out: We had two completely different ways of categorizing writing, and they were so baked into how we phrased questions that everything ended up being unanswerable to the other side. Here is what I came up with:

Schema 1

Fanfic - based on someone else’s IP

Original Work - the opposite

Schema 2

Non-Fannish Work - School essays, stories you are writing to try to sell to a mainstream publisher

Fannish Work Type 1 - based on other people’s characters directly (i.e. fanfic) Type 2 - based on tropes or whatever (“original slash” and the like)

Now, in the current moment when half of Tumblr just got into Chinese webnovels and the m/m ebook industry is thriving in English, original, tropey, BL-ish work is no longer different from “things I am trying to sell”. But this is how the divide was circa 2005 on fannish websites, and it’s the divide that was driving this internal OTW debate.

VI. Let’s Summarize the Camps One More Time

So, again, the debate makes perfect sense if you understand who was involved.

On the mainstream “But that’s not fanfic? I’m confused?” side:

Big US TV fandoms in English

Fandom historians of K/S–>buddy cop slash–>SGA, etc.

Americans

On the other side:

Anime fandom

“Original slash” fandom that had already been chased off of everywhere

People upset that AO3 wasn’t farther on translating the interface and supporting non-English language fandom.

People upset about US-centrism in fandom

Yes, I am very white, very American, and by now very into old buddy cop shows, but this was basically how the breakdown worked. It meant that something that looked like a minor quibble to one side was really, really not.

[thatgoblin]

Small Town Affairs Chapter 4

Summary: Hazel is an Omega in the small town of Tin Springs, Midwest America. She’s trying to live her life after breaking up with the local sheriff, John Walker, and his mate, Brock Rumlow. New people aren’t something that happens often, but when a new pack comes to town her whole life goes from a small mess to a complete disaster in the best way.

Warnings: Domestic Violence, Assault, Sexual abuse, Himbo Bucky, Misogyny, will update as story goes.

Chapter 4

Peggy gave me the silent treatment that morning and while I wanted to tell her she was being childish over the night before, I didn’t have the energy in me to do it. So, I did my morning routine and got to work with little words exchanged between us. Lunch time rolled around before I knew it. Clint was bringing me food which was the only saving grace of the day so far. I clocked out after letting Peggy know before booking it out the back.

“Hey,” Clint said, as he sat in the patio chair with several take out boxes. “How’s it going today?” He asked as I flopped into the chair opposite of him, groaning as I covered my face with my hands. “That good, huh?”

“Just fantastic,” I huffed before sitting up. “Did you have any trouble at the restaurant?” I asked, looking at the boxes before finding mine. Wait, there were three boxes and three drinks. Who else was there?

“Hello.”

I looked up to see Helmut walking over with a smile as he waved to me. Waving back with a nervous giggle, I wanted the ground to just open up and swallow me whole.

“You have got to be fucking kidding me,” I sighed, giving Clint a dirty look. He looked anywhere but at me as he twiddled his thumbs and whistled as Helmut took a seat next to me. “Hi, how are you?” I asked him, looking to Helmut with a tight smile of my own.

“I’m good. Clint said he was having lunch in town with a friend and asked me to join,” Helmut said, turning to look at Clint as he shot his own dirty look at the blond. “He gave the impression that you knew I would be joining.”

“Funny how he left that part out for me completely,” I said.

“Who’s hungry?” Clint asked with a grin as he opened his box.

“Forgive him, he means well, but I’ve been telling Howard that he should really get him looked at by a psychologist,” Helmut said.

“Hey! I’m perfectly sane!” Clint cried, sitting up. “The military had me tested.”

“It was the American military, it barely counts,” Helmut said, giving me a suffering look. “Poor thing.” I couldn’t help the smile as I giggled while Clint glared at Helmut. Okay, he was funny and good looking. The guy had those points going for him.

“You were in the military?” I asked as Clint stole Helmut’s pickle spear from his sandwich.

“Yes, we all were. Well, almost all of us in the pack,” Clint said. “Howard was a private contractor for a while, selling arms before he stopped developing them and turned his business into a medical research facility.”

“Wait, Howard is Howard Stark? The billionaire, genius, philanthropist Howard Stark?” I choked out.

“Yep, that’s him,” Clint said with a proud grin.

“I gave Howard Stark a lap dance,” I whined, making a face.

“It’s okay, you also gave Helmut a lap dance too,” Clint said, making both me and Helmut choke.

“I swear to god Clint,” I said, glaring at him. “You want to die or something.”

“Howard always says my self preservation is lacking,” he smirked, leaning back in his chair.

“You should definitely work on that,” Helmut said, shaking his head.

“So, military?” I asked, trying to bring things back away from lap dances.

“Yes,” Clint said. “I was in the Marines and went through sniper training, Howard made things go boom, Helmut was a colonel in the Sokovian army, and his mate Bucky was in the US Army with his friend Steve Rogers.”

“Wow, that is a lot of military experience,” I said, raising my brows. “You were a colonel?” I asked, looking at Helmut. “I thought that was like after years of service. Like, many more years than what you look to have.”

“Thank you,” Helmut said with a chuckle. “You are correct in that I am much younger than most colonels, but I went to a military school growing up as well as a military university.”

“He’s also a land Baron,” Clint added. “So, he’s Colonel Baron Helmut Zemo.” My eyes went wide as I looked from Helmut to Clint.

“Seriously?” I asked.

“Yes. I do have a land title back in my home country,” Helmut said with a deep sigh. “Clint, maybe you could allow me to speak for myself before I let it slip about how you started dating Howard as a mission from your former position.

“What?” I asked, grinning as I looked between the two. “Is he serious?”

“I don’t know what he’s talking about. Oh, hey, look at the time. I told my sweet, wonderful mate that I love dearly that we would be back in, well right now. Who knew time could fly so fast?” Clint rambled, chuckling as he looked at his watch.

“I’m not ready to leave yet and I drove,” Helmut said, relaxing back in his seat. “I still have to finish my food as does Hazel.”

“Yeah, I’ve still got at least 10 minutes left of lunch as well,” I said, giving Clint a smirk as I picked at my food.

“Fine, I’ll leave it alone,” he said with a groan.

“Good choice,” Helmut said with a hum. The last bit of lunch was spent talking about the town, how the pack was settling in, and how work was going. It felt refreshingly normal and healthy that I didn’t want it to end.

“Now I should really get back to work before Peggy comes looking for me,” I said, checking my phone. “I had a nice time today though. Thanks for the food, Clint.”

“You’re welcome. I’ll start bringing you lunch everyday if you want. Howard works remotely now from home and it’s mostly just business meetings. I get bored during the day,” Clint said.

“What about you?” I asked Helmut. “You wanna start coming everyday for lunch too?”

“As much as I would love to, I cannot. Unlike Clint, I have a job,” Helmut said with a chuckle.

“Oh yeah? What do you do?” I asked, gathering the trash.

“I make and sell sculptures,” Helmut said. “I most often use clay as my medium. I find it therapeutic. As does my mate, Bucky.”

“Bucky’s your mate?” I asked, freezing up a bit. Fuck. “I mean, you two look good together,” I said, shaking it off and smiling. Of course, the one guy I started to like was already taken.

“I’ll be in the car,” Clint said, quickly exiting the situation.

“He is, but we’ve been discussing for a while about opening up our relationship to someone we both were interested in,” Helmut said once Clint was gone, shifting in his seat. Oh no. Oh no, no, no. There was no way I could have another relationship with two Alphas. Everything in me panicked and I didn’t even realize that I was shaking till Helmut touched my hand. “Hazel? What’s wrong?”

“Look, uh, it was nice meeting you again. Properly this time,” I said, jerking away as I stood up. “I’m sure Clint is waiting for you in the car-”

“Hazel, wait,” Helmu said, standing up as well. He wasn’t demanding or accerting Alpha scents, that was what made me stop. “Please, I did not mean to offend or presume.”

“What did you mean then?” I asked, crossing my arms over my chest as I involuntarily shrank myself as much as I could.

“I meant I would like to pursue you as a romantic partner, but if that is not something you would like, then I would very much like to be your friend,” Helmut said. “Even if it means that we never become more.” Could I do that? He seemed genuine and unlike any other Alpha I’d dated before, he wasn’t trying to force it or bargain with me for what he wanted. He was concerned with what I wanted and what I needed. But John had been like that at first too. Brock not so much, but John had been a friend first too.

I wanted to trust Clint that he wouldn’t let someone close to me that was like John or Brock. Unlike John or Brock though, I didn’t live with Helmut and Bucky, so I had a place to go if things went south. Maybe. . . Maybe it was time to try to move on in some way from my wrecked past.

“Okay,” I said with a nod, relaxing. “Friends. Even if nothing happens. I could always use a few more of those.”

“Thank you. I assure you, friends are good to have,” he said, smiling again.

“Especially if they’re Baron’s,” I said, chuckling as he rolled his eyes. “I do need to get going though. It was nice seeing you again and having actual time to talk to you.”

“I agree,” Helmut said with a hum. “Here, before I forget. I’ll give you my number and you can message me to talk or spend time together.” He started to dig in his pocket for pen and paper before I stopped him.

“Here, just put your number in my phone,” I said. He nodded, offering me his. We exchanged numbers before handing the phone’s back. “Send me pictures of your sculptures. I wanna see them.”

“Of course,” Helmut said. “Would it be okay if I gave you a hug?” An Alpha was asking if they could hug an Omega? The panic from earlier began to feel unneeded as he was proving to be a totally different person than who I was used to dealing with.

“Yeah, I’d like a hug,” I said, my cheeks flushing a bit as we stepped closer. Helmut wrapped his arms around my shoulders, resting his chin on them as I wrapped my arms around his middle. Our bodies slotted together so easily and his scent had me nuzzling against his chest. It was the most content moment with another person that I’d had in so long that I swear I would have jumped into his arms to be carried away to nest if he’d asked.

I could have stayed there all day, but I knew I had to get back to work. Slowly, I pulled away, his arms sliding down mine to grasp my hands and give them a squeeze.

“I’ll message you later,” I said, feeling a dopey smile spread over my face. “Be safe getting home. Tell Bucky I said Hi.”

“I will. Have a good day at work,” Helmut said, slowly shuffling away. At the back door, I gave him one last look before heading back inside.

Oh, he was something else.

“About time you came back from lunch,” Peggy said from her register.

“Sorry, got uh. . . Got caught up in something,” I said, logging back into my register and time card.

“What is that?” She asked, looking around confused before walking over to me. “Is that. . . Did an Alpha scent you?”

“No, we just hugged,” I said, unable to hide the smile.

“It was the bearded one, yes? From the other day?” She asked, leaning in to keep our voices down so no one could eavesdrop.

“Yeah. His name’s Helmut and he’s from Sokovia,” I said. “We���re not. . . Doing anything really. We’re friends. That’s it. It’s what I’m comfortable with.”

“Well, good for you,” she said. “You deserve a bit of happiness. Just let me know if he turns into a prick and I’ll make sure he disappears.”

“Peggy!” I gasped, grinning at her. “Thank you though, I appreciate the thought.”

“Oh, it’s not a thought, I have a tractor with a, what do you call it, a backhoe. No one will find him,” she said, looking at me over her glasses.

“Remind me not to piss you off,” I snorted. The sudden moment between us was comforting, showing me that things weren’t ruined. “Look, about last night, I’m sorry I got awful. I was stressed and money is tight, and a lot of pent mental nonsense from the last few years kinda blew up all at once.”

“I shouldn’t have assumed all that I did,” she said with a sigh. “It’s easy to believe what everyone else does and not question how things are. I also shouldn’t have pushed on the subject. I overstepped boundaries and that may have been some maternal instincts. You’re like family to me and I want you to be happy and healthy, so that may have come across less than helpful. If you need some help with anything, just let me know, even if it’s just to have a cup of tea and some quiet time in the garden. I’ll even scrounge up biscuits as well.”

“Between you and Clint, I’m going to be forced out of my hermit routine,” I said, chuckling as I shook my head.

“Good,” Peggy said. “You need to get out of that routine. Just because it’s safe doesn’t mean it’s healthy.”

“I know. I’m having lunch with people and not hiding behind the building anymore,” I said.

“You’re still behind the building, you just have company,” she said with a smirk.

“Yeah, yeah. Baby steps,” I said, rolling my eyes.

“Just don’t shut everyone out anymore. Even if it’s not me, Clint is a nice person and it seems so is the rest of the pack. Let someone, anyone in,” she said, moving towards the office, pausing to give my shoulder a squeeze. “I know it's been hard since Ethan left, but you have to take care of yourself too.”

“I’ll do my best,” I said, giving her hand a squeeze back. The mention of that name made my chest tight and I felt the air knocked out of me slightly. She was right though, since Ethan moved out of state I’d shut down and relied on John and Brock solely till recently. It was time to change that.

“Good, now get back to work, you lazy git,” Peggy smirked, walking back to the office.

“Rude!” I gasped, laughing at her wink.

At least things were back to normal, if not better, between us. I felt less burden and with Clint basically declaring that I was his lunch partner I was a little less on my own. Did it scare me to open up again? Oh fuck did it, but it was better for me and I didn’t feel that constant hovering of dread. Well, as much as I used to. Yeah, it was better and I could only hope that it kept going up.

Of course the universe had to say no.

At the end of the day when I was home and making dinner when Nick got back to me.

[Nick SMS]: Sorry, Haze. We don’t have any more positions for servers or dancers. If something opens up, I’ll let you know.

The urge to hurl my phone at the wall was great, but my lack of money to replace it was greater.

[Hazel SMS]: Thanks anyways, Nick. Keep me in the loop in case something happens. I’ll be by later this week to get my stuff from my locker.

My options were dwindling and the more I thought about it the more depressed I became. What was I going to do?

[careydodd]

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[weekendwarriorblog]

The Weekend Warrior 5/7/21: WRATH OF MAN, HERE TODAY, THE UNTHINKABLE, MONSTER, THE WATER MAN and More

It’s a new month, and I guess going by previous years pre-COVID, this weekend would normally be the start of summer. This year, we’re instead getting a summer with a lot of movies that would normally be dumped into April or February or some other uneventful month. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t or won’t be any good movies, but really, there’s nothing that feels like a summer movie until A Quiet Place Part II and Disney’s Cruella open on Memorial Day weekend.

There’s been lots of great developments, though, including the Alamo Drafthouse in Brooklyn reopening this Friday and then in a few short weeks, theaters may be allowed to be open with no capacity rules although social distancing and masks will probably still be in place. Believe me, it’s been a confusing week as the city that got used to being on the backburner when it comes to reopenings, especially with movie theaters, is now dealing with arguing politicians competing to see who could throw open the then most doors fastest. It’s actually pretty embarrassing.

That aside, this week’s The Weekend Warrior column is brought to you by the new album “Coral Island” from Liverpool band The Coral, which I’ve decided to listen to on loop until I finish this column, because it’s taking me so long to get through it. (Eventually, I switched to Teenage Fanclub’s “Endless Arcade,” since I hadn’t had a chance to listen to it yet…. And to an old standby, Royal Blood, with their own excellent new album, “Typhoons.” At least the record business seems to know it’s the summer!)

Before we get to this week’s new movies, a couple tidbits. First of all, I’m thrilled that my friends Larissa Lam and Baldwin Chiu’s documentary FAR EAST DEEP SOUTH can finally be seen by the entire world, or at least the United States. It debuted on PBS World Channel on Tuesday night as part of the “America ReFramed” series, but for the entire month of May until June 3, you can watch it On Demand HERE, and that is huge! (There will be other ways to see it that you can read about here.)

This is an amazing MUST-SEE doc that looks into the little-known Chinese communities that took root in Mississippi in the early 20th Century and how they became such a huge part of that area with their markets, also bonding with the African-American communities that were similarly dealing with racism from the typically white post-Civil War South. It’s not just a history lesson, and it’s an incredibly moving story about a family trying to find its roots in the most unexpected places. There was a good reason why the couple’s short “Finding Cleveland” won the Oxford Film Festival while I was on the jury that year, and Far East Deep South similarly won an award there last year after its World Premiere at Cinequest was almost scuppered by COVID. It’s amazing how much more relevant and important this film has become since I first saw it last year, since both Asians and African-Americans are dealing with serious racial issues, and this movie shows that more than anything, they should be working to boost each other rather than fighting. Do check it out On Demand this month if you get a chance!

Another musician making movies is Mr. Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters. I mentioned his documentary WHAT DRIVES US last week, but I actually only got to watch it on Thursday, and like his previous film Studio City and HBO mini-series, Sonic Highways, it’s a fantastic look at the music biz, this time through a variety of artists who began their careers by piling into vans and driving around the country. That is, except Lars Ulrich from Metallica, who mentions that the band was never so small or indie that they didn’t have a bus. But Grohl has used his vast connections to bring in a lot of great musicians including The Edge from U2, Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and more, making this a very entertaining movie both for fans of the various bands but also live music fans in general. I gotta admit that as much as I loved What Drives Us, it did bring me down a bit since it’s been almost 14 months since I’ve seen any live music, and I really miss it. This is now streaming on The Coda Collection, which you can subscribe to through Amazon Prime Video.

Guy Ritchie is back with his latest movie, WRATH OF MAN (Miramax/MGM), which reunites him with Jason Statham for the first time since 2007’s Revolver, I believe. Statham plays the enigmatic Paul “H” Hill who works at cash truck company Fortico, responsible for moving hundreds of million dollars around Los Angeles each week. Fortico has recently been hit by a lethal robbery, and H’s team soon learn that there’s a lot more to their new coworker, who happens to be looking for revenge against the man who murdered his son.

(Unfortunately, reviews for the movie are embargoed until Thursday at 6pm, so I can’t tell you whether it’s any good or not. Until Thursday night. Sorry!)

But I will talk about the movie’s box office prospects, because why not? Ritchie’s last movie, The Gentlemen, opened in January 2020, during the “before times,” with $10.6 million, but that was more of a classic Ritchie ensemble crime-comedy. Wrath of Man is more of the type of movie Statham has been making over the past few years, a cross between a revenge thriller and a heist flick. In fact, Statham has done a pretty good job creating his own brand through a variety of action-thrillers as well as a number of franchises including “The Transporter” movies, “The Expendables,” and eventually joining the “Fast and the Furious” franchise as Deckard Shaw with Furious 7 in 2017. Statham then went off to make Hobbs and Shaw with Dwayne Johnson, which didn’t do bad with $174 million. Before that, Statham starred in The Meg, a summer shark attack movie that grossed $145 million. Statham going back to help his old mate i.e. the director that gave Statham his start is pretty huge.

But as I said earlier, those were all in the “before times” and with the box office the way it is, it’s hard to imagine that the exciting reunion of Statham and Ritchie can open with more than $10 million but maybe closer to $8 million, because MGM/UA just doesn’t have the marketing clout of a Warner Bros. or Universal. Even so, that should be enough to be #1 this weekend as both Mortal Kombat and Demon Slayer continue to fall away. Unfortunately, if the movie *is* any good -- and I can’t tell you one way or another -- then by the time reviews hit, people will already have other plans for the weekend than to go see the movie. So yeah, that’s pretty dumb on the part of MGM, huh?

UPDATE: MGM is putting the movie into 2,876 theaters and maybe I'm being overly optimistic, because, as you'll read below, the movie IS pretty good and reviews have remained positive with the American reviews rolling in last night, still at 70% Fresh at this writing. Maybe that'll help the movie do a little better, maybe as much as $9 million, although I'll probably owe MGM an apology if it cracks $10 million, and I don't think it will.

Mini-Review: If you’ve seen the trailer for Wrath of Man, you might go into Guy Ritchie’s latest thinking you know what to expect, because it’s sure being sold as another typical Jason Statham revenge thriller. Don’t be fooled by the marketing, the movie really is Ritchie’s chance to make his own version of Heat, an L.A. heist movie that owes as much to Rashomon as another movie being released this week.

Wrath of Man begins with the heist of an armored truck that turns deadly with the wanton murder of a couple guards. From there, you might think we know where things are going when Statham’s “H” company whose truck was hit, and on his first day, he stops a similar heist by killing the truck’s attackers. H is immediately the hero of the company, although he still has quite a few suspicious coworkers and the feeling is quite mutual. Ritchie’s film then slips into the second episodic chapter which goes back five months to that initial heist where we learn that Statham’s son was killed by being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I don’t want to go too much deeper into how the movie and story play out, because like The Gentlemen and some of Ritchie’s more intricate films, there’s a lot that purposefully isn’t made very apparent at the beginning. To many, this movie will be seen as even more macho than most of Ritchie's films, to the point where even the only woman guard, Dana, being just as macho as the men. As the movie begins, there’s a lot of joke-cracking and crotch-grabbing, all while Statham’s character silently observes and only acts when necessary.

The film’s shift to more of a classic Ritchie ensemble does slowly take place, but by the third chapter, it shifts to the group perpetrating the cash truck heists with an “inside person,” taking the movie to yet another place that makes it more obvious that this is Ritchie’s attempt at delving into the L.A. heist genre that other filmmakers have done so well.

Oddly, Statham doesn’t have too many lines, acting almost like a Terminator in his determination to right wrongs, but as always, Ritchie puts together a fantastic ensemble cast including a number of great American character actors who we rarely get to see in such great roles. I was particularly impressed with Jeffrey Donovan, who has appeared in a number of otherwise forgettable crime films this past year. The same can be said for Holt McCallany as H’s truck driver “Bullet,” but Ritchie also cast the likes of Josh Hartnett and Scott Eastwood in smaller yet still significant supporting roles, all of whom become more interesting as you start figuring out who all the players are.

Like I said, the movie is fairly macho and the few women play very small roles, but it’s how things are set-up in the first few acts to then change course and build to an absolutely amazing third act that will undoubtedly bear comparisons to Heat. And yet Wrath of Man (which is actually based on a little-seen French crime-thriller) does branch away from some of Ritchie’s standards, first of all by being far darker and even more violent with any of the wisecracking humor that pervades a lot of Ritchie’s work to counterbalance such violence disappearing once the flashbacks begin. It’s all punctuated by a fantastically tense score by Christopher Benstead, which seems a bit much at first but eventually settles into the perfect pace and tone for the action.

Despite disappearing for a good chunk of the movie, Statham is still great, basically killing everyone as his characters are wont to do, but watching how all of the different ideas come together leads to such a satisfying conclusion that one hopes those who might be put off, thinking they know where it's going due to the somewhat pathetic and obvious marketing will give it a chance to see how Ritchie has changed gears as effortlessly as he did with Aladdin a few years back.

Rating: 7.5/10

After even a longer time since he directed a movie, Billy Crystal once again takes the helm for HERE TODAY (Sony/Stage6), a movie in which he plays comedy writer Charlie Burns, whose chance encounter with Tiffany Haddish’s lounge singer, Emma Payge, leads to an unlikely friendship, as he struggles with early stage dementia.

I’ve known about this movie for over a year now, and I was pretty excited to finally get to see it, since I was such a fan of the other movies Crystal has directed, 1992’s Mr. Saturday Night and 1995’s Forget Paris, and it’s just amazing to me that he hasn’t directed a movie since.

At first, it seems like it’s the type of meet-cute we’ve seen so much in Crystal’s past filmography, but his pairing with Haddish isn’t something that might work on paper, but in fact, their comic styles mesh so perfectly together that it’s amazing that no one thought of putting them together before.

Crystal wrote the film with comic Alan Zweibel, who adapted it from his own short story “The Prize,” which refers to Haddish’s character winning Charlie in an auction for a lunch. Actually, her ex won the lunch, and she decided to use it because… free lunch! It’s a pretty simple set-up but one that allows the filmmakers to explore some of the odder things that happen in life.

Much of the movie’s humor plays upon the differences between the two characters, and how unexpected their friendship is. I can totally relate, because I have a lot of good long-time friends who most people might never expect us to be friends, but Crystal, Zweibel and Haddish pick up on that and create a movie that’s very funny but has enough other characters around the duo toa allow their characters to show how they’re just really nice people. We see that with how Charlie takes a young writer at his late night show under his wing or how Emma livens up the bat mitzvah of Charlie’s granddaughter. Oh yeah, and Haddish sings. She actually has a number of great performances in the movie, and seriously, anyone who watches this movie is gonna wanna see a smart filmmaker put Haddish in a musical immediately.

The film also acts as a truly touching tribute to Crystal’s friend, the late Robin WIlliams, who was diagnosed with the exact same type of dementia after his suicide death, and knowing that fact, makes the film even more poignant. More importantly, it doesn’t use Charlie’s condition for laughs, and for that alone, I feel like this is ten times better than that overrated Oscar winner The Father.

Here Today’s biggest problems come in the third act when it feels like the movie is starting to over-extend its welcome, even going into somewhat expected places, but it recovers from that rough third act to land a really nice ending. Crystal has always proven himself to be a really strong mainstream filmmaker (ala Rob Reiner and others) who makes crowd-pleasing movies, and it’s so nice seeing him going behind the camera for a movie that’s obviously very personal but also highly relatable.

As far as box office, I certainly have high hopes that Crystal still has an older audience of fans who might want to see him on the big screen again. I’m just not sure if this will be in more than 1,000 theaters, and though I’ve seen quite a bit of marketing, I just haven’t seen Crystal or Haddish do nearly as much in terms of getting out there that would be necessary to reach an audience that might want to venture out into movie theaters to see the movie vs. waiting until it’s on cable/streaming. There’s also Tiffany Haddish’ fanbase, and there could be some benefit for the movie coming out the same week as her new CBS show “Kids Say the Darndest Things.”

I’d love to be optimistic with this making $4 to 5 million but it’s probably more likely to be closer to $3 million especially with capacity limits still in place for most theaters and the audience generally being older.

UPDATE: Maybe I was a little too optimistic, because I enjoyed the movie so much and it will probably be closer to $1 or 1.5 million since other reviews aren't as great.

Next, we have two movies finally being released many years after their festival premieres…

The Swedish apocalyptic thriller THE UNTHINKABLE (Magnet), directed by Victor Danell, is finally being released after playing genre fests in 2018 and 2019. It stars Christoffer Nordenrot as Alex, a young piano virtuoso who ran away from home due to his abusive father Bjorn (Jesper Barkselius). Years later, he returns home for his mother’s funeral after she’s killed in a terrorist attack on Sweden. At the same, there’s a virus that’s erasing people’s memories, but Alex is still in love with Anna (Lisa Henni), the girl he had a crush on when he left, and the three of them will have to help each other face all the horrible things hitting their home at the same time.

As I was watching this movie, a lot of it felt eerily familiar to me, but I couldn’t figure out why. The more I watched it, the more I realized that I actually HAD seen the movie before. Sure enough, I saw this movie over two years ago at the “What the Fest?!” in New York two years ago, and I honestly don’t remember loving it. Still, I decided to give it a fresh look, hoping to get more out of it on second viewing.

Some of the same things bothered me on this second viewing, because it’s really hard to figure out exactly what is going on and whether the horrific events are natural, man-made or a combination of both. For some time, we get so mired into Alex’s lame relationship with Anna, and when he returns home, his conspiracy theory-driven father is busy protecting a bunker that’s being invaded by foreign military troops he thinks are Russians. We cut between these two disparate scenarios while sometimes returning to the capital of Sweden and throwing in a few big set pieces. It’s so disjointed that you feel like you’re watching a lot of random unrelated events, maybe a bit like last week’s About Endlessness -- maybe it’s a Swedish thing?

There are aspects of The Unthinkable that are quite commendable, particularly those action moments and how the mystery about what is happening develops as the film goes along. Eventually, the film does find a more consistent pace, and things start becoming a little clearer, which makes the final act better than much of what we’ve watched earlier. Even so, it’s still quite annoying how long it takes to figure out what’s going on, even on a second viewing, and for most people, that may already be far too frustrating to get through it.

Hitting Netflix on Friday over THREE years after it premiered at Sundance is music video director Anthony Mandler’s directorial debut, MONSTER (Netflix), based on the novel by Walter Dean Myers. It stars Kelvin Harrison Jr. (Waves) as Steve Harmon, a 17-year-old film student put in jail, accused of murder in a bodega robbery. His defense lawyer (Jennifer Ehle) is trying to help him be released, but he’s fighting against the odds of a judicial system that sees him as a “monster” because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I have to be honest that I did go to see this at Sundance the week it premiered, and for whatever reason, I just wasn’t feeling it, so I only really caught about twenty minutes of it. Watching it now with more time and a little less weary than I usually am towards the end of Sundance, I was able to appreciate Monster more for what it is. On the surface, it’s just about Steve’s case and how what really happened unfolds before our eyes and we learn more about those around Steve and how their influence may have pulled a smart and studious young man into the criminal world that now has him in prison with much more violent life-long criminals.

We already knew that Harrison was a great actor, but Monster shows us that he was already on his way to greatness with this movie that for whatever reason got buried even as it dealt with issues that have been in the headlines almost every day since this debuted.

Mandler takes an interesting approach, both non-linear and also with blatant nods to Kurosawa’s Rashomon, which is even cited by Steve’s teacher, played by Tim Blake Nelson. Jeffrey Wright and Jennifer Hudson are decent as Steve’s parents, but they’re generally smaller and non-showy roles compared to the moments between Harrison and Ehle. Much of the film takes place in the courtroom with flashbacks showing what happened through the viewpoint of whomever is on the stand, which eventually includes Steve himself.

The way Mandler handles the material may lean more on the artiness rather than something more mainstream -- Michael B. Jordan’s Just Mercy comes to mind -- but it’s just as powerful in showing how someone like Steve can be othered by society into being a criminal. Sure, there have been other handlings of this sort of material that I thought were better films, but if you know anyone who has ever had dealings with the “justice” system and know how unfair and horrible it can be even to the innocent, then Monster will certainly strike a chord.

Also hitting Netflix this week is the new series based on Mark Millar and Frank Quitely‘s comic books, JUPITER’S LEGACY (Netflix), another kind of twist on the superhero genre ala Amazon Prime Video’s series based on Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson’s The Boys. I love the comics, and I can’t wait to finally get around to seeing Netflix’s first adaptation of a Millarworld property.

David Oyelowo makes his directorial debut with THE WATER MAN (RLJEfilms), a movie about a young boy named Gunner Boon (Lonnie Chavis), whose mother (Rosario Dawson) is battling leukemia. In an effort to cure her, Guner goes off on a journey along with a teenage girl named Jo (Amiah Miller) to find the mythical Water Man, who can provide them with a magic token that might save Gunner’s mother’s life.

I’ve interviewed Oyelowo a few times before, and I really like him a lot, so I had really high hopes for him as a director since I feel he’s just a terrific actor. Unfortunately, the material here is just not strong enough that I think even a far more experienced filmmaker could make something out of it.

Set in PIne Hills, we meet Gunner, a bright kid who loves drawing comic books, but he has trouble connecting with his father (Oyelowo), so when he has an idea that might help his sick mother, he goes off with a head-strong teen named Jo, in search of the Water Man, a summertime adventure permeated by a lot of very bad low-budget visual effects.

Honestly, I’m not even sure where to begin with where The Water Man falters, because Oyelowo has such a great cast, including Alfred Molina and Maria Bello in tiny parts. The story is a problem, as is the writing, which is just so bland and dull, that there’s really nothing in Oyelowo’s direction or any of the performances that really can salvage it. Neither of the child actors have much charisma or personality, and even Dawson’s performance, which would normally be a showstopper is repeatedly lessened by the constant cutting back to the kids. (And as someone who beat leukemia myself, I’m never a fan when cancer is depicted in movies as a death sentence rather than just another hurdle in life that needs to be overcome.)

Oyelowo himself may be one of his generation’s best actors, but he brings so little to the role of Gunner’s father, maybe to not take away from his younger star, but it hurts that he doesn’t do more to create a stronger conflict by making the character more horrible to drive Gunner away. The actual Water Man doesn’t improve things when he finally shows up, essentially talking like a pirate but not even remotely paying off.

Honestly, The Water Man seems like such a misguided venture -- Exec. Produced by Oprah, no less -- and it might have been totally forgettable if the characters didn’t keep saying the title of the movie every five minutes.

Hitting theaters Friday after a festival run is Tran Quoc Bao’s action-comedy THE PAPER TIGERS (WELL GO USA), starring ALain Uy, Ron Yuan and Mikel Shannon Jenkins as martial artists once known as “the three tigers but now middle-aged men must set aside old grudges and dad duties to avenge the murder of their teacher. I’ve had a screener of this since last summer when it played at Fantasia Festival in Montreal, and I just never got around to watching it, but if I’m able to squeeze it in before the weekend, check back here for my review.

Streaming on Shudder this Friday is Ryan Kruger's South African comedy-thriller FRIED BARRY (Shudder), starring Gary Green as Barry, a violent street junkie who is abducted by aliens who take over his body in order to… well, actually… they do a lot of drugs, have a lot of sex and other craziness. It’s a pretty strange and bizarre movie that reminds me a little of movies like a lower-fi Under the Skin or Beyond the Black Rainbow, and much of it is driven by the insane and unique performance by Green and the odd characters he encounters that I think will find its fans for sure, but it will definitely be for a very select audience of genre festival fans, as this is by no means a mainstream genre film.

Speaking of which, another movie out this week which I wasn’t allowed to see in advance is Gia Coppola’s MAINSTREAM (IFC Films), starring Maya Hawke as a young woman seeking internet stardom by making YouTube videos with a charismatic stranger, played by Andrew Garfield, until “the dark side of viral celebrity threatens to ruin them both.” Yup, it’s one of THOSE movies. It also stars Nat Wolff, Jason Schwartzman and Johnny Knoxville, but I haven’t heard anything good about it, and I’m not sure my curiosity is piqued enough to spend any of my own personal money to check it out.

Hitting Amazon on Friday is the doc THE BOY FROM MEDELLIN (Amazon) from Matthew Heineman (City of Ghosts, Cartel Land), a portrait of musical superstar J. Balvin, as he prepares for a massive sold-out stadium show in his hometown of Medellin, Colombia, which is hindered by the growing civil unrest in the area.

Lots of other movies this week, but a few that i just wasn’t able to get to this week, including:

ABOVE SUSPICION (Lionsgate) INITIATION (Saban Films) ENFANT TERRIBLE (Dark Star Pictures) QUEEN MARIE (Samuel Goldwyn Films) SILO (Oscilloscope) CITIZEN PENN (Discovery+)

That’s it for this week. Next week, Chris Rock and Samuel L. Jackson star in SPIRAL: FROM THE BOOK OF SAW (Lionsgate) and Angelina Jolie returns for the thriller THOSE WHO WISH ME DEAD (New Line) and Timur Bekmambetov’s thriller, PROFILE (Focus Features). That’s right. This will be the first weekend in over a year where we’ll have three or maybe even four new wide releases.

[thebibliomancer]

Essential Avengers: King-Size Annual Amazing Spider-Man #16: “Who’s That Lady?”

October, 1982

In case you wondered why I would keep titling my posts Essential Avengers: Avengers its because sometimes the thing after the colon won’t be Avengers.

Maybe I should have titled this liveblog something else but I’m in too deep.

This sure is a fun, striking cover featuring an all-new, all-different, and all-terrific Captain Marvel.

Memorable.

You may not remember who Captain Marvel is. He has come up a couple times in Avengers but in modern times, ‘he’ is not going to connect intuitively with Captain Marvel, especially now that Marvel has won the long tug-of-war with DC.

Here’s some courtesy links to the time the Avengers crossed into the Thanos War storyline from the Captain Marvel book.

But the long story short is that Captain Marvel was invented to trademark squat the name Captain Marvel, was a Kree captain who went against his people to help Earth, became a super saiyan, fought Thanos a bunch, got cancer, and died. In fact, he died February 1982 so its fairly recent that Marvel killed him off but since they still want to trademark squat, they need another Captain Marvel.

Hence, this.

And I’m very excited about this hence.

So, I’ve read a couple of Spider-Man annuals included in trades or as singles over the years and its interesting how often they are used to promote a new character. Spider-Man is the ultimate hype man.

So the ultimate hype man is at a bus station as the captions tell us how amazing he is, when his spider-sense goes squiggle lines to a perfectly normal woman walking past.

And the issue title and Peter are both like “Who’s That Lady?”

Peter’s second thought is how hot she is because... eh, he doesn’t get married until 1987.

Peter Parker: “Wow! I’ve never seen anyone like her before... not in the port authority bus terminal! She’s... stunning! Yeah... so why am I getting a spider-sense tingle from her? I can’t believe that she’d present any sort of threat... but my spider-sense never reacted to out-and-out beauty before!”

And since he has fifteen spare minutes until his Good Pals Liz and Hary Osborn’s bus shows up, he decides to stalk her a little. Y’know. For the public safety??

Geez.

He also sees that she’s going into a Bad Neighborhood and throws in a little victim blame, why not.

Peter: “Whoops! She’s definitely an out-of-towner! Native New Yorkers know better than to stroll through this neighborhood -- especially dressed as well as she is! She’s practically asking to be mugged!”

But since (and this may come as a surprise to you) mild-mannered Peter Parker is in fact, the Amazing Spider-Man, he darts into an alley to change into his spider-jammies and play guardian angel.

Of course, the instant he goes to change clothes is the instant that a pair of individuals accost the mysterious woman.

The one who looks like Kisuke Urahara fallen on hard times grabs her purse and runs off. Mysterious Woman gives chase because hey, that’s her purse you creep!

But it was a weird ruse to lure her away to a more secluded area and guy two grabs the Mysterious Woman.

So she flips him over her back and hits the purse snatcher with him.

I’m liking where this is going.

Guy Two, aka Mojo but not that one, decides maybe a knife will make Mysterious Woman be more pliant.

So Mysterious Woman dodges the knife thrust and then kicks the shit out of Mojo.

I’m continue to liking where this is going.

Guy one (Scud) decides that not getting beaten up is the better part of valor and takes off.

Right into Spider-Man’s fist.

Ah, excellent. Every uppanced has come.

Spider-Man notices that Mysterious Woman is making his spider-sense buzz harder than ever and decides that instead of lurking, he should just come right out and ask her deal.

By which he means jump out from behind her and suddenly start talking because taking people by surprise is always a good idea.

Anyway, the Mysterious Woman assumes that Spider-Man was Scud and on instinct swivels around and does him a shove. A really hard shove into a pile of garbage that knocks him senseless.

“It happens in a split second! Even before Spider-Man’s feet can touch the ground... even as his special senses tell him that he’s made a serious mistake... a sudden burst of pure force sends him flying.”

Goes to show. Don’t sneak up on people? Yeah, probably.

Mysterious Woman is like oh shit I just knocked out Spider-Man god damn I gotta get my power under control.

Then she CHOOMs her pantsuit into oblivion and reveals that she was dressed in layers with a more super-something outfit underneath.

Which is impressive considering that her outfit has some kind of wings/cape that go from the back to the arms that would not have fit under the pantsuit jacket. And also the boots probably wouldn’t have fit under the heels.

All in all, this may be the greatest display of power so far.

She does have to put on the mask/cowl and gloves because there’s not much of a way for those to have fit underneath.... her skin?

The wing/cape also has a pocket which means its also practical.

Nice.

So Spider-Man comes to musing that maybe he shouldn’t leap right at someone his spider-sense is telling him is dangerous.

And then the Mysterious Woman takes off from the alley with a KLA-BOOM - seemingly turning into a bolt of lightning and lighting up the sky over the Empire State Building.

Spider-Man: “Who am I up against here? And do I really want to find out?”

That’s a pretty striking costume.

The white and black contrast nice and the nova burst icon looks rad.

Not a fan of masks that don’t cover up much of anything. At that point you may as well not wear one? And the cape doesn’t make much sense for her powers? But it also has a pocket for her keys so and cash which makes it practical so I guess it balances out.

But overall its striking and memorable.

So up on the Empire State Building, this Mysterious Woman introduced as Captain Marvel so I can drop the pretense and start calling her Captain Marvel and hey wait the cover said Captain Marvel too, I’ve lived a sham.

But Captain Marvel muses about how big New York is compared to New Orleans and leans right into the flashback zone, because its time for the all-new all-different all-terrific Captain Marvel’s entire origin.

Just jammed right into the middle of this annual.

Lt. Monica Rambeau worked as one of New Orleans’ harbor patrol.

And in this flashback zone, she was just passed up for promotion and is unhappy about it. According to her, she was better than any of the people chosen and thinks that she was passed up because she’s a woman.

The Harbormaster says that Actually Its Because You’re a Loose Cannon and Doesn’t Do Things By the Book and also how dare you accuse him of sexism, gtfo of his office.

Harbor patrol is basically like boat cops, right?

At least he didn’t ask for her gun and badge.

Monica stomps back to her office, which I guess she has despite being a lieutenant. Good on her!

Professor Andre LeClare, a war buddy of Monica’s grandfather, is waiting for her in her office to ask for help.

In the advanced physics field Professor LeClare is considered a bit of a crackpot and only one man ever listened to his theories. A Generalissimo Ernesto Ramirez, a South American dictator.

In hindsight, LeClare acknowledges that maybe he didn’t do due diligence before accepting a job from a dictator but he was the only one who offered to fund his research.

Professor LeClare had discovered a way from drawing energy from other universes and dimensions (which I vaguely remember as the plot of an Asimov novel) but whoops, the actual dictator wants to weaponize it.

LeClare flees the Vague South American Country after failing to dissuade Ramirez but the dictator is undaunted and gets LeClare’s former assistant Felipe Picaro to continue the work on an old oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico.

Professor LeClare told the American government but nobody believed him. But if the weapon is completed it “will make the atomic bomb look like a wet match.”

Which: good lord.

Monica can understand why its hard to believe because she can barely believe it herself.

She’d also like to know what the professor even expect from her.

Professor LeClare: “Frankly, I’m not sure. I was hoping you could think of some way to convince the authorities. I had heard that you tend to approach things in a less orthodox manner than most.”

Monica, toasting with her Monica mug: “You’re not the only one who’s made that observation. Hmm... maybe I can think of something. After all, I have tomorrow off... and it is the least I could do for an old friend of the family.”

Seriously, that’s a cool mug, Monica.

The next morning, Monica takes LeClare out on a borrowed boat to go investigate the oil rig.

She’s going to investigate while the professor, and she is very clear on this, stays hidden on the boat.

Monica is a bit out of her depth here (nautical pun) because she doesn’t actually believe the professor, doesn’t have any jurisdiction out in the middle of the gulf, and even if she did doesn’t have any official backing from her boat cop boss. But she figures it won’t hurt to humor the old man.

Said old man also salutes her and calls her “mon capitaine” when she tells him to hide on the boat.

When she boats up to the oil rig, many armed guards politely tell her that this is private property and she needs to kindly gtfo.

But Monica has a secret weapon. You may have heard that she’s unorthodox and doesn’t do things by the book.

Her secret weapon is a winning smile but also a bikini.

Not only are all the guards ready to go ‘hey security isn’t as important as a woman in a bikini’ so is Dr. Picaro, the guy in charge on the rig.

Lets see Genis manage that.

So she manages to get a picnic with head honcho Picaro. Although he’s a creepy and stares a lot. But when she’s trying to sweet-talk him into spilling many of the beans, an intruder alarm goes off.

Guess who didn’t listen to the explicit instructions to stay on the boat, snuck onto the oil rig, tried to sabotage the project, and got caught?

Did you guess Professor LeClare? Because it was Professor LeClare.

Picaro is tickled to see his old boss here.

LeClare: “Picaro, you mustn’t use this device! You don’t understand the forces involved!”

Picaro: “I understand perfectly, LeClare! My energy disruptor, powered by the fruits of your theory, can totally obliterate any city within 200 miles!”

This shit is why Reed Richards is useless. You invent something useful like a device that steals energy from another universe and some asshole rolls in and goes ‘okay but can I make people explode with it?’

Wakanda invents the cure for cancer in a widely unpopular move, looks at the Marvel universe, and goes ‘someone is definitely going to try to turn this into a weapon, smh.’

Picaro is so drunk on his own hype that he decides he might as well do the first test here and now. And by here I mean Fort Benning, Georgia and by do the first test I mean wipe it off the map.

I feel like even if you had a new super-weapon effective enough to make the atomic bomb look like a wet match, this isn’t a very strategic way to use it.

But that’s why they call it mad with power, not reasonable with power.

Monica has bit by bit started to believe the professor and at this point it doesn’t matter whether she thinks any of this is possible as long as Picaro does.

So she elbow shoves him out of the way and punches the machine to death.

Because Monica Rambeau.

Of course it explodes.

That’s the natural reaction to being punched by Monica Rambeau.

Good thing this wasn’t an active oil rig!

Back in New Orleans, a streak of light strikes a wharf and turns into Monica Rambeau.

She staggers around the wharf in a daze, dizzy and finding it hard to think, but knowing she has to find help for the professor. Who may or may not have just been in an explosion.

She bangs on a... I don’t know. Some kind of storeroom or something. And bangs on the locked door, looking for help. She feels that she needs to get inside.

And the next thing she knows she’s somehow inside, without, to her best knowledge, interacting at all with the door.

Kinda mysterious. But she explicitly decides to worry about that later. She spots a radio and decides to broadcast a mayday on naval frequencies.

She doesn’t notice that the radio is unplugged and not really connected to anything.

And in fairness, reality doesn’t notice either.

Some energy suffuses the microphone and broadcasts her mayday message to a boat out in the Gulf of Mexico. The radio operator acknowledges the mayday and wonders what kind of power the sender was using because it came across too loud too clear.

Hmmm. What a mysterious happening.

Could Monica have, through being caught in a lab accident, gained amazing and spectacular powers?

Why, of course!

What genre do you think you’re reading?

With the message sent out, Monica spares some time to worry about what the heck that happened to her and realize that wow its cold in here in just a swimsuit!

Luckily, the random building is a storage warehouse with racks of costumes left over from Mardi Gras! What luck!

Of course, Mardi Gras. Most of it is less than she’s already wearing.

But she manages to combine parts of several outfits into one combined outfit. And even puts on a mask to spare herself the embarrassment of being spotted dressed like this!

I like that her costume is literally just something she threw together. Although I now have to wonder what the original outfits she scavenged from were like.

Actually, what I really like is that her original goal was to find something warm to wear. But she has superpowers now so has a superhero brain and superhero brain says ‘costume.’

So Monica puts on a superhero costume, even though she just wanted some pants.

Now dressed, she wanders out into the wharf and notices bolts of energy shooting up into the sky from the direction of the oil rig.

Worried about the professor, Monica manages to transport herself in a bolt of light to the oil rig.

These are some user friendly powers.

When Monica arrives she finds a bunch of already unconscious guards strewn about the landing pad.

She runs into the oil rig just in time to see Picaro shoot the professor.

Dang.

Picaro: “This is your fault, LeClare! You must have sabotaged my disruptor panel! It was perfect... you hear, perfect!!”

Well. He was trying to sabotage it. You might have a point.

Monica kicks Picaro to get him to drop the gun and then rushes over to Professor LeClare.

She wants to get him to safety but LeClare tells her that no place is safe now.

LeClare: “Felipe... wouldn’t listen! The power was too unstable. Energy is flooding in from another universe. Breaking down the wall between worlds. The hole in the air... is getting bigger! Within a day, it will be planet-sized! And then, both universes will smash into each other. We are doomed!”

Monica wonders whether this would have happened anyway or whether, y’know, punching the experimental physics machine had any negative effects.

Who can say!

Monica ponders how you plug a hole in nothing. Right before the space-time hole sucks her in and jams her in like a cork in a vacuum cleaner.

But its working, somehow, for some reason! The hole is sealing up around her! Science!

Hurts like the dickens though.

And its probably going to crush her as it closes. Which isn’t ideal.

It’d create a time paradox, for one thing. We’re in flashback country still.

Picaro decides that with a strange woman stuck in a space-time whatsit, now is the best time to shoot the professor AGAIN just in case he wasn’t bleeding to death hard enough.

Monica rushes to stop this. Turning into energy quick as lightning and intercepting the bullet.

She can do this.

And blasting free of the dimensional hole also sealed it shut.

AND she disintegrates Picaro’s gun, shocking him senseless in the process.

That’s what I call a win-win-win. Good job, Monica!

She decides to leave him and the others on the oil rig to international law when the navy arrives. She grabs the professor and takes him away to get patched up.

One of the soldiers, barely conscious mumbles something to himself as he watches them go.

Soldier with a mustache: “<Captain? H-he called her his captain! But she saved us... hah-ha-ha... saved... hah-ha... all of us!> Capitan est maravilla... est maravilla! Capitan est maravilla!”

Do you remember the first rule of superhero names? I’ll remind you in a bit.

Two days later, Professor LeClare visits Monica at the Harbor Patrol HQ.

He has run Science! tests that have proven conclusively that Monica’s body “was transubstantiated by the dimensional interface!”

And Monica is like ‘english pls’ so LeClare explains “what it means is you can change your body into any form of electromagnetic energy! You can actually become a sentient packet of radio waves, light, even electricity! You can go through solid objects as x-rays! You can travel at the speed of light! What’s more, you can release a small amount of energy as a blast of pure force, with no appreciable loss of body mass!”

Blasts of pure force from the pure force dimension!

So basically, Monica can become any kind of energy and go pew pew. I think she became Green Lantern energy once, that time the Avengers and Justice League crossed over.

LeClare also brought a gift.

He had a copy made of Monica’s scavenged together mardi gras outfit costume. Which is sort of a ‘thanks?’ gift because maybe she wanted to design a costume that wasn’t a hodgepodge. But LeClare’s version is also made of unstable molecules.

You can just buy those, apparently.

But, if you can just buy those, apparently, then you definitely want to because they’re pretty durable and put up with all kinds of nonsense. Although, Monica’s random outfit could turn to energy and back already.

Monica is like ‘thanks?’ because she doesn’t know if she ever wants to use these powers again.

LeClare: “We all have a destiny to fufill, mon capitaine.”

Monica: “Will you stop calling me that? You know darn well that I’m only a lieutenant!”

LeClare: “Oh? Not in the eyes of some!”

And he pulls out a newspaper, in case she hadn’t seen the newspaper.

The headline is “Who is Capt. Marvel?” because when the navy arrived at the oil rig, they found mustache soldier hysterically saying “the captain is a marvel!” (or possibly “captain is wonderful”?) and not bothering to have learned Spanish, the navy assumes that he was saying Captain Marvel.

Anyway, remember the first rule of superhero names?

The first thing someone randomly shouts about you becomes your codename so I hope you like it.

Monica lucked out. Captain Marvel is a pretty sweet name. So sweet that she’ll have it stolen in like three different ways by other people. Poor Monica.

LeClare: “Monica, you can do things no man has ever dreamed of doing! Two days ago, you told me you took this job ‘to serve and protect’. Much good can be done with your powers... Captain Marvel!”

So then we get Monica quitting the boat cops, tossing her gun and badge on the harbormaster’s desk and telling him where he can shove it.

Monica: “I don’t need your little ranks or your little minds any more! I’ve already made captain... on my own!”

Monica’s ex-boss, presumably: ���What a cryptic thing to say.’

LeClare asks if she’s sure about quitting. I assumed he was suggesting she quit when he was encouraging her to become a superhero but I guess not.

Monica says that she’s been wanting to quit for years because as long as that ‘tyrant’ was in charge what with his wanting to do things by the book, Monica was limited in what she could accomplish.

Ha ha ha oh thats a bad take thats a bad take on reasons why to quit being a (boat) cop.

‘If only it weren’t for all these RULES and PROCEDURES -shakes fist-’

So Monica walks off with LeClare, to a bright new beautiful tomorrow as a superhero.

Anyway, that’s the end of the flashback zone so now we’re back on the Empire State Building zone where Monica has been reminiscing this whole time.

Apparently that enormous flashback all happened only a few short weeks ago. She’s had a long and entirely off-screen superhero career in those weeks, probably.

But she needs SCIENCE! help and Professor LeClare has scienced as hard as he can already.

Captain Marvel Monica is suffering from energy buildup and she’s afraid she’s going to become as big a threat to the world as Picaro’s machine. If she doesn't’ consciously hold it in check, it would overcome her.

I imagine she hasn’t been sleeping much.

But this is New York and SCIENCE! help is visible on the skyline.

Meanwhile, Spider-Man has finally made it up the Empire State Building.

So that’s really why the flashback was so long, to give Spider-Slowpoke time to catch up.

Spider-Man: “There she is, bold as brass! I’ll slap a little webbing on her, and see what’s shaking! Or should I? What if she’s a good guy, and I’m misreading my senses? I’d look like a fool!”

Truly, social shame is the best reason not to sneak attack someone.

Spider-Man: “Naw, if she’s a good guy, she’ll understand that I couldn’t take any chances! Besides, my chest still smarts!”

... Dammit, Peter.

But when he shoots a webline, she ZOOMS out of the way. Coincidentally. She never even noticed he was there. Monica just found where she needed to head and headed there in a flash.

Spider-Man tries to find where she went by checking the binoculars she was using but the seeing-stuff expired and Spider-Man doesn’t have a quarter. He doesn’t even have a pocket.

A tourist child comes up to the viewing platform and asks who Spider-Man is.

Spider-Man: “No need to panic, kid. I’m Spider-Man.”

Tourist child: “Who’s panickin’? Besides, there ain’t no Spider-Man... my dad says he’s just a hoax the media barons cooked up to sell papers!”

Spider-Man: “I don’t want to argue, but I am Spider-Man. And I need a quarter -- it’s important!”

Tourist child: “I may be from Council Bluffs, but I’m not stupid! If you want a quarter, prove that you’re Spider-Man!”

Is Spider-Man desperate enough to perform for a child like a trained monkey?

Yes. Obviously.

Thankfully, all it takes is climbing up the wall and standing.

He gets his quarter and it didn’t cost too much dignity.

Spider-Man feeds the binoculars a quarter and sees what building Monica was looking at and decides this means trouble!

And swings off.

Leaving tourist child to tell his parents about this.

Tourist child: “Mom! Dad! I just met Spider-Man! Wait’ll I tell the guys back home! No, really, dad -- honest!”

Tourist dad: “Dougie, look out that door! Do you see anything? No. Spider-Man is just a creation of the Eastern establishment!”

Tourist mom: “Harold, I told you we shouldn’t have let him go out there! The air this high is too thin for a growing boy!”

Tourist child Dougie: “Aw, mom!”

Oof, that poor child.

But where is Monica and, much more slowly, Spider-Man heading?

The Baxter Building!

Fantastic Four guest star role?

Mmm, one-quarter of that.

When Monica arrives, the place looks like its been torn apart by some sort of Terrax because that’s what happened. Monica doesn’t know that it was specifically Terrax but she certainly guesses that some kind of battle-axe was to blame.

Only Ben Grimm is present and asks her who the heck she is.

Captain Marvel: “I... I’m Captain Marvel.”

The Thing: “Not unless ya came back from the dead by way of Denmark, ya ain’t! Marv died months ago. ‘Sides, he was a blond.”

Captain Marvel: “There was another Captain Marvel? I - I’m sorry... I didn’t know.”

The Thing: “Aw, don’t sweat it... Marv probably wouldn’t mind. I probably ain’t the only Thing in the world, either!”

I guess Captain Marvel wasn’t a very well-known superhero. Then again, maybe superheroes aren’t very well known outside of New York?

The tourists from Council Bluffs thought Spider-Man was a hoax and Monica was only aware of Spider-Man in a very vague ‘oh right I read about him’ sort of way.

Guess the Avengers and the Fantastic Four are the exceptions.

Anyway, Monica explains the situation to Ben that she might explode like a 1000 megaton bomb.

And unfortunately, Reed Richards Is Useless. Although in this case because he’s off on vacation with Sue at Martha’s Vineyard and there’s no way to reach him in time.

Ben comes up with another idea. Maybe the Avengers can help! Because he knows this is an Avengers liveblog and I need a certain amount of Avengers content or I wouldn’t be here.

Although really its because he has the vague sense that the Avengers seem to have a lot of science savvy.

When Ben punches up a call to the Avengers, Captain Marvel is like ‘kthx’ and zips along the transmission because time is very much a factor here!

Unfortunately frying the radio in the process because it wasn’t intended to take a whole energy person through it.

Spider-Man arrives just after Monica leaves (because see also: Spider-Slowpoke). He asks Ben if he saw her and Ben makes a statement that could, on its face, perhaps be misinterpreted.

The Thing: “See her? She just fried my radio! Dangdest thing I ever saw! She changed into a buncha radio waves and headed for Avengers mansion! I hope they can handle her before she explodes!”

Spider-Man: “Explodes? She explodes too?! She’s more of a menace than I thought!”

Hey. Hey, Peter. I don’t want to hear that from you. There’s a hilarious irony to you saying those words that I don’t think you grasp.

And he swings off to Avengers Mansion to go help deal with this cough menace, not hearing Ben trying to tell him he’s got the wrong idea.

The Mighty Marvel Misunderstanding fight tradition trumps sound waves.

Meanwhile, at Avengers Mansion, Iron Man is sitting down on a nice monitor duty, probably just enjoying the quiet when he receives a priority signal from the Fantastic Four.

SURPRISE ITS MONICA

I think what I like most is that Iron Man has apparently had to tell the FF to stop calling about Galactus.

The Avengers’ systems are also unable to handle the sudden energy discharge of an entire person, so Monica’s arrival messes up the mansion security systems and also Iron Man.

Whoops.

The security stunulators, that the Avengers totally have, suddenly start shooting at Jarvis. So you know they’re messed up because who would want to hurt that delightful man?

Captain Marvel is dismayed to find that bad things have happened because of her and Iron Man is like hey if that tone is sincere, maybe help me out? I’m stuck in my bricked armor, not naming any names, but a tiny spark across the chestplate will reset things.

Except, Captain Marvel can’t exactly dial back that much and that exactly so Iron Man is just stuck waiting for help.

Jarvis arrives to report on the security system and finds Captain Marvel standing over Iron Man. And Monica makes an admission which could, on its face, perhaps be misinterpreted.

Jarvis: “Master Iron Man! We’ve lost power all over the building and... what on Earth?!”

Captain Marvel: “My... my powers shut down his armor.”

Jarvis: “Shameless trollop! The other Avengers will not let this attack go unanswered!”

Geez, Jarvis! Rude!

That is a very impolite thing to say to someone!

Jarvis then runs off to try and find some other Avengers.

And he runs right into Spider-Man who has just arrived (and had to dodge past a crowd that assumes Spider-Man is somehow to blame for whatever is going on. Sucks when people assume the worst of you).

Jarvis doesn’t like to trust Spider-Man, knowing so little about him, but decides he doesn’t have any other choice.

Meanwhile, Captain Marvel is wandering through the hallways of Avengers Mansion. Since she couldn’t jump-start him, Iron Man suggested she lock herself in the adamantium containment chamber that the Avengers totally have in their lab.

Just in case she really does happen to explode.

Good ol’ Iron Man, thinking through the angles. Huh. I wonder if that chamber later gets repurposed into the Zero Chamber that brought Jack of Hearts so much misery before he too exploded.

Spider-Man sneak attacks Captain Marvel, finally getting to web her up. But with a mighty WOOMPF! she blasts free of the webbing.

Spider-Man: “You... you stretched my webbing! Even ripped it in places! But no one this side of the Juggernaut can do that!”

Captain Marvel: “Look, I’m sorry I blasted you earlier! If you want, we can settle accounts later... but not now! My time is running out!”

She does the Solar Flare, like a Goku, but Spider-Man uses the secret move of shutting his eyes. And then grabs her by the upper arms.

This might end the fight against some opponents but not the all-new all-different all-terrific Captain Marvel.

No, the fight ends two panels later. Monica turns her body into electricity so Spider-Man knocks her unconscious once she unzaps.

Hm. Considering she has enough power to blow up a city, she kind of has a glass jaw. Then again, she’s conspicuously trying not to explode. Doesn’t leave a lot of concentration for taking a hit.

Which was heckin’ rude of Pete.

And it happens that aside from being a dick move, this was also a very BAD thing to have done. I’ll let Iron Man sum it up.

Iron Man: “You young fool!”

Hah.

Hooo. Spider-Man is not coming off well in his own dang book, is he? Guess that’s part of being the hype man.

So, off-screen, the Wasp jump-started Iron Man’s armor with her Wasp sting. Because it’s bio-electricity, some of the times.

Iron Man: “The woman you K.O.ed came for help, not as an enemy! Now that she’s unconscious, she could explode any second -- unless we can leach off her excess power.”

Iron Man tells Spider-Man if he wants to make amends, to rip some cable out of the ceiling because of course the Avengers Mansion is riddled with high-induction cable.

Since the only thing they have immediately available that can handle the kind of power they need to siphon is Iron Man, he has Spider-Man wrap the unconscious Marvel in the cables and webs them to Iron Man’s iron nipples, or whatever those lugnuts are for.

In fact, since the webbing is non-conductive, he has Spider-Man cover him in it head to toe except for raised hands.

The Wasp: “Iron Man, are you sure your armor can withstand the stress?”

Iron Man: “No. If this doesn’t work... it’s been nice knowing you, Jan!”

And now Spider-Man, realizing that he triggered this by knocking out Monica and that Iron Man may possibly die from this, feels like a real asshole. A complete kneebiter.

Spider-Man: (Some hero I am! I try to stop what I think is a menace, and wind up causing something even worse. If they die...)

The Wasp: “Uh, Spider-Man? We really should get out of here -- just in case Iron Man can’t contain Captain Marvel’s power.”

Spider-Man: “Captain... Marvel? Did you say Captain Marvel?!?”

The Wasp: “No relation to the old one!”

Spider-Man: “Oh, that’s just dandy! I may have doomed a new Captain Marvel! Wasp, I feel like a total clod!”

And prepare to feel worse, Spider-Man! Because while you were feeling sorry for yourself, the energy has built up so much that there’s no time to actually get to a safe distance!

Spider-Man spins a web-barrier for himself and Wasp but echoes Iron Man’s “nice knowing you” when Wasp asks what happens if it doesn’t hold.

Lotta fatalism on this page.

Within the web cocoon, Iron Man shunts the energy from Captain Marvel into his own armor. And specifically into the repulsor ray generators.

Which is to say that he releases the excess energy by blasting two giant repulsor blasts through the mansion ceiling and into the sky.

I like this plan because its ridiculous.

I mean it works really well. Everybody is alive. The city didn’t explode. But it hinged on Iron Man blasting holes into his own house and into the sky. Today, it was he who was the sky light column as seen in movies.

The Thing finally arrives via cab, expecting that everything has gone to hell if Spider-Man got involved.

And to be fair, he’s not wrong, just arriving at the wrong moment to see the gone to hell. The Avengers have tidied up the hell by this point and are having a hangout sesh.

Everyone is hanging around to meet the new Captain Marvel. Its turned from a calamity to a “Sunday social” to quote Hawkeye.

I like that Captain Marvel and Captain America are shaking hands. And that he calls her captain.

I don’t remember who (probably Hawkeye? Or maybe Wonder Man? Some dick) in a later baseball game crossover between the east coast and West Coast Avengers where whoever refuses to call her Captain because only Captain America is captain in their mind. But Cap is just like ‘hello there fellow captain.’

I see that She-Hulk is back in her Iconic tm Duds of the white torn dress. Artists that weren’t working inside the actual Avengers book just had no idea what she was wearing. I think I can conclude that from a cover, a filler issue, and another book all depicting her in the Savage She-Hulk outfit.

Also, I don’t get the joke she’s making. Anyone have any idea?

Captain Marvel even covers for Spider-Man. When Ben asks her if she got her exploding problem sorted, she thanks the Avengers and Spider-Man.

Spider-Man: (That’s one I owe you, C.M.) “Why so surprised, Benjy? I’m always happy to help out another super-star!”

The Thing: “Well... I guess there’s a first time for everything!”

Time reminds Spider-Man that before this Avengers plot fell into his lap, that he had a Spider-Man plot going on.

Remember?

Harry and Liz arriving by bus?

So he rushes back to the bus stop and finds that nobody has paged Peter Parker while he’s been gone. He figures that Harry and Liz must have gotten tired of waiting and ditched.

But actually, their bus was delayed and they’ve only just now arrived. The timing worked out pretty well actually!

This is one time where, at the end of the day, things worked out for Peter Parker!

I mean. He had to be an asshole to drive the plot but that’s the Peter Parker experience to be honest. He does that sometimes. And today, his making things worse powers were used for good to hype up a new character.

But you can see from that next time box why I needed to cover this issue. Because Captain Marvel is going right from here to being in the Avengers book and this annual is the circumstances for how that happens.

You’re welcome.

I quite like Monica Rambeau. We don’t see a lot of her powers here aside from NYOOM and we don’t see her interact with the Avengers much aside from Iron Man briefly so that’s what I’m looking forward to. More of her become any energy powers and what her dynamic with the Avengers will be like.

I’m hype.

As an intro to her, I’m torn. Her origin was pretty cool. But the present day adventure didn’t let her be as cool because she was just trying not to explode. She did accidentally punk Spider-Man a few times and got the best of some muggers. Its fine.

It just feels like there’s a sudden, jarring shift between the triumphant new hero new powers new costume and even a supporting character and ‘actually i’m going to explode whoops.’

Follow @essential-avengers​. I’ve caught up on reposting by now. You could follow without ever having to interact with my Dark Crystal stuff or my many reblogs of cat stuff. But also maybe like and reblog.

[castrosaitabau-blog]

WISDOM OF THE MAASAI

In quest for a fathomable perspective, bunduzman had to go further north of Kilimanjaro to the wilderness of Maasai land. In pursuit of a lifestyle, cultural and cohesive human-fauna co existence I finally set my foot on the soil I always wanted to explore since years in memorial. Maybe we could say the time was right, destiny had aligned itself . little did I know of the pot of gold awaiting . I visited my late granny`s sister my only resource person I knew and a cultural hardliner to get the wisdom of the guru.

First impression and am pretty at peace, I knew this all I wanted. Hemming the landscape in abundance are dark black volcanic boulders but dispersed as compared to `shetani lava` free flow lava rocks. beneath the  blue skies, amidst hillsides, sparsely distributed shrub tower from the dark soil but there`s magic that this place offers, afore me is the most photogenic Kilimanjaro background and am sure this place harbours wisdom and treasures of the land.

According to maa culture , upon a meet up  a catch up is mandatory. My holism side is coming out alive strongly. The maa call it `lomon` and so do i. every minute here is a crucial learning opportunity for me so my indulgence is eclectic.

Soon am shown my accommodation and as per maa culture it is far from the boma (homestead) as am a moran(warrior). Morans sleep further from women and children . the set up is spectacular. Set in serenity and tranquility I must acknowledge my uncle Loserian sundowner`s eye for a choice of such a picturesque scenery.

My room`s background is the most perfect quaint I would ever capture of the Kilimanjaro. Certainly  kibo it`s stature like a benevolent giant embracing the Amboseli plains, it`s snow caped top like a kings crown and from my conservation and ecological proficiency I understand the sleeping giant role in providence and sustainability. Set near an oldonyo (hill) rocks are arranged symmetrically in the interference -free solace and solitude.

Everywhere I have gone as an adventurer I have always valued the virtue of making friends. It`s 1700hrs  and my uncle and I are sitted for a perfect sundowner moment. The view is blissful as the sunset glares are twilighting Amboseli national park plains.my guide who`s my uncle is quite familiar with the geo-location , a true warrior of the land!

My guide points out a large mass reflecting the gleams  and says it`s Lake Amboseli in the horizons, further north and to  the east a hill protrudes to my knowledge the landmark of Namanga town. From namanga you go to `sanya ya juu’ a vast area occupied by maas both in Kenya and Tanzania.am overlooking the pastoralists corridor from my sundowner`s point of view.

Deep to Tanzania is kijiweni,then to murtoni, sangarini, murtot, entonet, barazani ,kilombero, shauri moyo, bustani then to mtamburu heading west.day by day my stay opens up a deep understanding of the population dynamics, transborder cultural influence  and cultural role in identity and heritage.

My pursuit of a multi lingual perfection is bearing fruits. It`s a couple of days and my maa tutor `mr. ole Naanyu credits my efforts.am familiar with basic words likje ` aaoomon olorika( can I have a chair please?), endaah(food), kuleeh(milk), osoit(rock), oldonyo (mountain), sambu(brown),aang( home), enkaji(house) ndare(goats), enkolong(sun), alapa( moon) enkare( water) just but a few….

Culture is the antidote of propaganda – always my mantra. Basic rules first for a common entity and understanding of anything in my bunduz pursuit.i attribute this to my flexibility and open mindedness that I can morph and fit in anywhere if only I take care of the language barrier.couple of days and am totally in love with thebunduz in maa land.is it the solitude? Is it the simplicity? Is it the community unity and compassion? Sure I feel a sense of belonging every homestead I visit.

My maa is getting better as I can now structure a sentence, `aeeyoo adol ingwesin lo Amboseli’-( I came to see the wildlife around Amboseli) is my introduction everytime I meet a local . `Ayaauwa lomon ol la shumbaa pedol motonyik, ingwesin-(my work is to show tourists  birds and wildlife ) is the skeleton key phrase for my stay here . Am euphoric to meet even toddler named after me, `Fidel Saitabau’. it`s maa wisdom to name a child after a relative for matriarch continuity and remembrance.

My quest for a deeper `Ambo-kiili ecosystem burns deep within me . am in tune with the universe and so does my fate.i get a phone call from another uncle who invites me to visit them at their camp and this totally uplifts my spirit. The next Sunday  morning am amped in my combat  cargo pants and jungle green shirt ready  to be picked up. The first sight of his giant sized physique reminds me am in the land of warriors- a reassurance of some sort I must say.

`Big Boy’ I call him knows the ways of the land and totally the Amboseli-tsavo ecosystem and it`s neighbouring conservancies. It’s a Sunday so we on easy mellow chill mode as I get acquinted with his fellow warriors of the bunduz. Their hospitality is warm though in solitude , out in the cold lies the camp amidst bush ambience.

I harbour a great conviction and passion with the conservation inclined  personnel as we are in the same area of professionalism- CONSERVATION for future generations. To my surprise , Big boy has planned a reconnaissance survey and am totally stoked! In his Big boy boots , I board his offroad bike as we fade into the wildnerness.

Since my arrival I have been anxious to find out a story of a great tusker and am told not worry no more since I found the soldiers in the field who were there till the demise of the supreme tusker. slowly we cruise and transverse the plains of the conservancies.  Big boy showing me the wildlife and local maa terminologies . we go deeper into an eco-tourism perspective as we are sombre on how `Rona virus’ has robbed tourism it`s liveliness.

We are at the AA Amboseli lodge and it`s a perfect totaln dysfunctionality thus when I spot my first aves , the black flecked yellow throated francolin and marabou stalk. To the north we head leaving behind the `lemongo museum’- dedicated to the study of wildlife .Am impressed as am aware of a fully stocked  library.To the south west is the Osero house .

In a while we are at Sopa lodge and kibo safari camp all in a total shutdown.As an intrepid adventurer my soul cries as I understand the replica to the tourism kitty.intersecting the junction from sopa is the road down to the Kenya wildlife service headquarters and next to it is Amboseli National park kimana gate all in a total shutdown.on the main road is      `The Mada hotels kilima camp also is the same state.

My  point of interest is the Or kelunyet village – a maasai cultural village perfect for briefing of the maa culture but that not of my concern as of now. Outside or kelunyet  is a watering place that has natured one of the greatest tuskers that has transversed this plain. Compared to the mighty historical Ahmed  of marsabit who was mandated presidential escort.

As the water trickle down and fade so is the presence of the mighty tusker Tim who gave up ghost after five decades.But the glory still triumphs  the land as every villager around here knew or must have heard of the great tusker and even the global village where he won the hearts of many.my uncle Big boy is a marshal in the wildlife field under `BIG LIFE FOUNDATION’.

February `4th is the morning of demise of Tim. Big boy was one of the first person in the `scene of crime’ as he explains this was        Tim`s favourite feeding area just opposite or kelunyet the other side of the road to Amboseli gate.am glad am getting first hand information from  a ranger who witnessed Tim`s last presence here before being taken to the museum.

A peace loving, gentle and benevolent tusker he was for tourist to take photos of him sometimes pushing away other tuskers who tried to be vicious . Tim would relax for them to get a perfect caption- a photogenic legend he was.

December 1969 is when the great legend was born in Amboseli national park. four years later he got the name Tim from an intrepid American researcher Cynthia Moss who had arrived in Kenya in 1972-founder of Amboseli trust for elephants.

From her research ,Cynthia Moss reckons that Tim came from the  TD family led by his matriachial grandma Teresia and the  mum was Trista. For a while we observe the place as my uncle even shows me his last cloacal emittance a prove that this was his area he liked. Rather than outside or kelunyet Tim would sometimes change environment to the yellow barked acacia filled and water abundant kimana sanctuary for water or greener pastures or probably his females, a gentle bull who filled  Amboseli with his progeny.

Tim had survived the 1980 Amboseli severe drought an era when Tim lost his grandma Trista from spears of pastoralists. prior in 1977 he lost his  mum so he was left to wander alone but survived-a soldier of a kind. Tim`s death was a twisted gut but my uncle Bid boy explained to me he had found him lying and bleeding from injuries incurred from another Tusker perhaps a confrontation. Tim was gentle ,carefull and grandiose as his tusks were ground touching .probably it is the MUSTH that brought about a conflict of interest.

As we transverse the  airstrip outside Amboseli gate closer to Tawi lodge Tim`s memories just run my mind obnoxious in some way but I have to let nature take it`s cause. upclose sights of maasai giraffes distinctive by their yellow fawn, common ostrich and gerenuks divert my mind as I go back to the camp reminiscing my day.

Another day another dollar, but dollars won`t come easy here in the bunduz since Rona invaded. My mind is at ease when my uncle promises to show me Tim`s brother Greg, a great tusker like him and of close resemblance and supremacy he says.

Am euphoric by the mention of a foot patrol as I know this will give me an upclose  real time floral fauna encounter .For me euphoria is preceding vulnerability .As i rub mosquito repellant on my body ready to zip my self in my sleeping bag as I sleep amped.

At 0600hrs I wake up to the most soothing ambience of aves wildebeasts in the background. sorrounded by bones of great mammalia is our camp.my maa friend gives thanks in maa as we head to make breakfast. we collect `rigiek’ (firewood) as we catch up in a while breakfast is ready.

At 0700hrs we ared out of the camp ready for the routine foot patrol.My uncle takes me through the GPS mapping process and `The Black View IP-68’ for data collection and we begin mapping our waypoints and sightings in the field. We are amidst grants gazelles and wildebeasts as the hilly breeze hits us to a rude awakening .

My uncle Big boy is my resource person as I gain a lot of lessons on bushlife survival techniques. I can identify male and female ostricvhes , their milky like excretion and general ostrich behaviour like laying eggs at the same periodand the role of female and males to protect the eggs tillthey hatch.Bog boy explains the colour variation and advantage in terms of camouflage.

At night the dark feathered male take roll of roosting on the egg as the female feeds while during the day the female takes over brown feathered blending with the savannah. Am more amused by ostriches` behavior once the eggs hatch. The responsibility of caregiver is left to one of the females, the most ferocious one as the others leave.

Our mission is to transverse the conservancy on a `wreck patrol’ leaving no point unattended as the GPS maps our path indicating bordering conservancies.Am now well conversant with the interface and from a conservationist and wildlife manager to be perspective am  impressed. The app has  a ranger unit entity, members present, patrol method, patrol area ,are poachers armed? Additional is a record of  wildlife sighting, tracking live or dead, scat/dropping ,number of animals ,wildlife treatment, illegal human  activities, animal mortality, human wildlife conflict, community service by rangers e.t.c

Amboseli neighbours kimana group ranch an area which my grandpa Mr. Elijah Mwatee had demarcated in his tenure of duty long before moving to kwale and kilifi. The group ranches that make up kimana ranch are kilitome conservancy, nailepu, osupuko, naalarami and olitiyani conservancies anf far is the kimana sanctuary and the olgulului group ranch.

As an avid birdwatcher I enjoy spotting the augur buzzard, black flacked yellow throated francolin, the Kori bustard, superb strerlings, helmeted guinea fowls , just but a few. I encounter a rare type of ungulate and Big  boy tells me this is their hotspot area. Am talking gerenuks as they browse on the shrubs near the windsock area.

Despite the dominating grant`s gazelles, impalas, wildebeests, gerenuks attract my attention as these arid survivors are wise in their own nature. Gerenuks eat the fleshy part, buds, fruits, flowers and climbing plants and do not require water if ever, rarely reducing predator risk as they graze in open areas.

Gerenuks have a pre-orbital gland ( like topis) that emit a tar like scent bearing substance that is deposited between twigs and bushes. This alerts other gerenuks in the area that there is a claim of territory. Gerenuk itself is a oromo - somali name meaning giraffe like gazelle in Swahili(swara twiga).

A fascinating thing is also gerenuk`s male performing a courtship ritual to an oestrus female. He will approach herand horizontally lift one of his front legs and repeatedly tap the female under belly and flanks. Or else he will rub his pre orbital gland on her body marking her with his scent to mate. The local maas call gerenuks` enkoilii’.

Am glad beinga plant community enthusiast to learn their local maa names. The maa community widely cherish flora and have a name for every plant / tree and to my surprise a nutritional or medicinal value.

The acacia tortilis is treasured in most homesteads as a source of shade local name `ol tepesi’ and loved by elephants as they rub theirselves on their rough bark. The whistling acacia , local name `elwai’ is an ingredient for soup once they slaughter, oremit is a stomach cleanser, `elokii’ finger like euphobia for hedges, `entialong’ a stomach remedy, oltiasmat found  near Amboseli gate on the saline soil has an aesthetic value, olo songori ( devil`s whip).

It`s almost noon and the overhead sun is scorching , determined in our hats we beat the shrubs bearing in mind the vulnerability we are exposed to. Of worth recalling is a Laxadonta Africana in solitude usually  very vicious behind a bush who was throwing mud at himself. We came to such close proximity about five metres  unaware of the staring danger just that a gut feeling saved us.

We are now at Tawi lodge Amboseli as we surpass the thicket and to Big boy`s precision of his line of duty he teels me have a break at ` The zebra plain hotel’. Our GPS reading 37 0025E 12 79S at UTM. Pressure 96 99 690

As I heave a sigh of relief and down my cold concoction am humbled by the dedication the rangers have devoted from `BIG LIFE FOUNDATION’ to ensure a peaceful cohesion of humans and wildlife in the Amboseli conservancies  that stretches to kimana sanctuary and chyulu  hills.

By the time we arrive at the camp at 1330 hrs  we have done a pretty 28 km patrol leaving me with nostalgic memories. On the contrary to fatigue am motivated  to explore more of the camps in chyulu hills and the other conservancies.

As my maasai is getting better I can identify wildlife like `ol`  logwarak (lion), emuny (rhino), oloitiko( zebra), oe ngat (wildebeest), or birit(warthog), oyayaiii( porcupine) essuni( impala), or ngojine( hyena), or makao( hippo), or meot (giraffe), or kanjaoni (elephants), olo sokuan (buffalo).

                                                                                                                             By Saitabau Castro.

[mon-dayragingslut4monstaxday6]

This is the first episode of a Drama titled Korean Boyfriend.

Cast:

Park Mi Sook: (reader/ reader’s interpretation)

Lee Chan Young: Park Seo Joon

Euhn Jeong Ja: Park Min Ji

Choo Dae Hyun: TBD

Word count: 3k

Warnings: none(?)

I’ve been in Seoul for a week now. The biggest move of my life. I lived in the United States since birth, but I’ve vacationed here before. Got an opportunity of a lifetime from my job, to transfer to the South Korea location. A good friend of mine and I got to find a place together, but the expenses got a little much, on top of paying off my student loans. 

To clean the slate of my debt, I got into sugaring. I got the suggestion from my friend, who juggles between a few Sugar Daddies, to afford going to school for another bachelor's degree. Out of all my options, I only stuck to one, a restaurant mogul in South Korea. I kept things smart, keeping things strictly online. He offered to fly me to visit him, but I kindly declined the offer. I’m not ready to get physical with him. I’m not a virgin, I’m just not ready for the sex. For declining the visit, I had to really make it up to him. He hasn't been aggressive to me, but I could see the potential. I wouldn't necessarily say I'm afraid of him, but his wealth is intimidating.

After moving to Seoul, and after completely paying off my expenses, I kept contact with him, but I refused to tell him I moved. If he knew I moved, he would want to meet. I want to cut things off with him, but with the contract, I have to live with this for another few months to fulfill the year long commitment.

Staying in hiding is getting old. Jeong Ja and I have been spending too much time unpacking, we deserve a break. Changing into our best outfits, we head out into Itaewon to go clubbing. Time to get our drink on! 

The first club feels like a drag, couldn’t vibe with the music. A second club, the drink selection was too limited. Then naturally, the third one was just right. The music was hype, the drink selection is full, and the people look more approachable.

We pound some drinks and head to the dance floor. We dance like idiots, we’re not appeasing to these people, who cares.

I feel like there’s eyes on me. Is it because I’m dancing like an idiot or because I’m dressed more American? 

I sign to Jeong Ja, telling her that there are some guys who are looking at us. She looks around and jokingly signs about her disgust. Using American Sign Language outside of the United States has its perks. I let her know I’m going back to the bar to get another drink.

At the bar, I order some water. I can’t have this alcohol hit all at once. I lean against the counter while I sip my water. Phew, I’m getting warm! Someone freakishly tall stands beside me and orders a beer. He must be at least six feet tall!

“Are you American?”, the man asks, in a thick Korean accent. I roll my eyes from the assumption. I look up to meet his eyes and holy shit he’s handsome! A delicious jawline, high cheekbones, a fucking sexy adam’s apple, straight full brows, and sweet eye smile.

I point to myself to see if he was asking me. He nods. His lips are full, his bottom lip tempting me to pull it between my own. His lips would feel beautiful on my neck or chest. Snap out of it! I can’t be this touch starved!

“How did you know?”, I bashfully look away.

“I recognized a sign you did with your friend”, he rubs his thumb along his beer bottle.

“You know American Sign Language?”, I gasped excitedly.

“Only a few signs that I picked up from coworkers”, he elaborates. So, he works with people who spent time in the states. Probably is in the business industry.

“Have you ever been to the states?”, I start small talk.

“Myself, no. Have you been to South Korea before?”, he raises his eyebrows before sipping his beer. I feel a sweat droplet fall down my forehead. How am I so warm? I dab the sweat off with my knuckles.

“Every few years I would come here to see relatives, I recently moved here for work”, I drink more water to cool myself down. I’ve been out clubbing before, I should be used to the body heat.

“Congratulations”, he nods, holding up his beer to cheers. We clink our drinks. I see the size comparison of our hands. Am I really imagining his hand wrapped around my throat or squeezing my breast or ass? I shamelessly am.

“But I’m still new to Itaewon, maybe you can show me around?”, I propose. Oh goodness, did I just nonchalantly ask him out? He’s surprised by my abrupt question, but is impressed by my gumption. He shouldn't be shocked, American girls can make the first move.

“Really?”, he wonders.

“To be honest, I’m feeling really warm and would love some air”, I sigh, fanning myself. I stumble from being a natural cluts, he doesn’t hesitate to grab my arm to keep me from falling. His strong grip only enhances the fantasy of his hands on my body.

“Are you ok?”, he worries.

“I am, I just need some air”, I laugh it off. Damn, I never was this much of a lightweight. He escorts me out of the club, leaving his beer behind, and immediately sitting me down on a bench. I need to text Jeong Ja! I grab my phone from my pocket.

“How are you feeling?”, the kind, handsome stranger continues to worry.

“I’m feeling fine right now”, I inhale sharply.

I’m outside of the club for some air. Don’t worry, I’m not alone, I’m with someone. I’ll see you at home! - Park Mi Sook

“What’s your name?”, I stuff my phone into my bag.

“Lee Chan Young”, he smiles. Shit, his Korean sounds sexier than his English.

“I’m Park Mi Sook, but people call me Sookie”, I grab onto my purse, nervous about sitting so close to this man.

“Sookie? How cute”, he chuckles. There’s little wrinkles that fan his eyes when he smiles. Seeing him illuminated by the streetlights and neon lights from the various bars and restaurants gives me a new perspective of him. His white dress shirt perfectly hugs his body. I could tell he has defined pecs under that shirt. The touch of pink from a neon sign above us gives him a softer look. I can feel the depth of his eyes. I can see my reflection vividly in the dark pearls. The sparkle from the string lights across the street add something special to his eyes.

“Tell me about yourself, Chan Young”, I rest my elbow on my knee, holding my head up. That's when I knew, I'm fucked up.

“What do you want to know?”, his face relaxes.

“What do you do, what was your life like, where do you see yourself in five years, what’s your biggest regret, blah blah blah”, I list.

“Why me?”, he continues.

“You approached me, remember?”, I tease. He gives me a cheeky grin, leans back onto the bench.

"I work in architecture under my family's firm, expected to take over in ten years or so when my father retires. A lot happened in my 27 years of life, but I don't really have any regrets", Chan Young confesses, running his fingers through his hair. A man of mystery, huh? No worries, he might be reserved, I can respect that. I'd love to learn more about him.

"What about you?", He changes direction of the conversation.

"I studied journalism, got here to be an editor for a magazine. I was pretty average growing up, nothing too special. I hope to be chief editor of the magazine in five years. My biggest regret is dying my hair green my first term of college, I should've gone with blue", I reveal, giggling like a drunk idiot. The neon lights are getting blurry, my mind is getting fuzzy. I sway in my seat, helplessly. Chan Young holds me by my shoulders to keep my back straight. I whine from my lack of control.

"I never was this much of a lightweight", I groan. Chan Young bites back a smile.

"I'm stronger than this", I mumble, fighting back tears. He notices my quivering lip. Scooting closer to me, Chan Young rests my head on his shoulder, patting my back. Don't cry, don't cry! Mama didn't raise you to cry in front of strangers! I miss mama. I wish her and dad moved to Seoul with me. Dammit, I'm happy that I wore waterproof mascara tonight.

"Excuse me, what are you doing to my girl!", Jeong Ja shouts from afar. Chan Young flinches, but keeps my head still.

"I'm sorry?", Chan Young panics. She runs to us, holding up a hand, threatening to slap him. I wave at her to stop.

"Jeong Ja, don't", I babble. She finally gets a good look at him and stops her temptation of wrath.

"Sookie, a-are you ok?", She notices the tear streaks down my cheeks.

"Did you do this?!", Jeong Ja points to Chan Young.

"No, I'm just drunk. We were talking", I pat his chest. Damn, it's firm.

"Hope the talk was good, I'm taking you home", she grabs my hand.

"No!", I shout.

"Please don't move me, I don't feel so good", I warn her. Chan Young immediately balls up my hair and feels my forehead.

"You're warm, let me take you to an open area", Chan Young murmurs. He lifts me, bridal style, and keeps my head elevated. Surprised by the sudden movement, I take a deep breath to prevent myself from hurling. Chan Young takes diligent steps, finding a nice open space for me to breathe. Jeong Ja follows us, worried he'll drop me.

"How are you feeling?", He smiles. His face looks better up close. I give him a thumbs up, I'm too scared to talk. He finds a nice secluded bench outside of the crowded neighborhoods. He lowers me down so I can stand up, holding my hair in a bundle so I can have a breeze on my neck.

"You will feel better if you throw up", Chan Young advises. How is he so nice to me? Why?

"Why are you so nice?", I mumble.

"Are you trying to fuck me?", I blurt out, making Jeong Ja burst into laughter. I never saw anyone blush faster than Chan Young. I grin from cheek to cheek.

"I'm kidding!", I cackle. He's so tall that my head is eye level to his chest. He's choking on his words. I'm swaying side to side, almost tripping on my feet. He grabs my shoulders to keep me still.

"Oh my goodness, I'm so sorry. I overstepped. This isn't me", I ramble. Chan Young notices my anxious plea. He cups my cheek and lifts my head to meet his eyes. There's a chuckle under his breath. His smile is so charming, I almost forget I'm on the verge of throwing up.

"Mi Sook, how are you this cute?", Chan Young whispers. Fuck, don't puke, don't puke. I cover my mouth, heaving.

"I'm cute?", I ask, muffled.

"I'm going to go get some water", Jeong Ja got the hint to leave.

"You think I'm cute?", I hiccup.

"You're very cute", he compliments.

"Even though I'm going to throw up?", I exhale.

"Yes", he chuckles. I want to kiss him. I grab his hands off my shoulders. His hands are firm, but soft to the touch. Nope, nope, I'm going to puke. Where can I go, I can't puke on him! There's a bench, no. A lamp post? No. A tree? A tree will do! I lunge to the tree. Holding onto the trunk, I vomit the variety of colors that I drank tonight. Chan Young soothingly rubs my back with one hand while the other keeps the hair away from my face.

"This fucking sucks", I dry heave.

"You're doing great, Sookie", Chan Young comforts.

"I shouldn't have drank", I groan before hurling once more..

“It’s ok, aein”, Chan Young softens. Did I hear him correctly?

“I’m sorry you’re here, Chan Young”, I apologize, wanting to wipe my mouth.

“Don’t be sorry, I’m happy to help”, he continues. Why is he so sweet? We just met. He has no reason to be nice to me. Unless he’s that desperate for a hookup. Would he be desperate enough to hook up after I vomit? Gross. Am I interested in seeing him after this? Absolutely. Would I consider...having him stay the night tonight if I didn’t vomit in front of him? Yes.

“You can go home”, I cry out.

“I don’t want to leave you alone”, Chan Young refuses. I hurl one more time and I'm confident that I'm done. I feel a lot better. I spit out whatever is left in my mouth. I got some strength back. I straighten my back and stretch.

"How are you feeling?", Chan Young wonders, still holding onto me in case I'm not as strong as I feel.

"I feel better. Not great, but I feel better", I assure. Jeong Ja comes back with a bag full of water bottles. She hands Chan Young and I each a bottle. I gargle a mouth full of water and spit it out, washing out my bad choices.

"Chan Young, this is Euhn Jeong Ja. Jeong Ja, this is Lee Chan Young", I introduce. Jeong Ja squints her eyes, suspicious of Chan Young and his intentions.

"Listen, boy. I'm her best friend, hurt her and I won't hesitate to kick your ass", Jeong Ja threatens.

"He's not hurting me. He's a very good guy", I scoff. Chan Young is flattered by the compliment.

"And how do you know?", She asks me.

"I have been puking here for like five minutes and he held my hair up and rubbed my back. He's a gentleman", I point to him.

"You look like you needed help", Chan Young defends himself.

"And thank you", I thank him. Jeong Ja hands me a tissue from the grocery bag to wipe my mouth.

"Let me take you home. So I know you got there safe", Chan Young offers.

"Fine. No one would try to snatch us if they saw you with us", Jeong Ja rolls her eyes, accepting the offer.

"Hey, be nice", I shoo at her.

"Oh please, he wants you. I don't have to be nice", Jeong Ja teases. Chan Young gets bashful and runs his fingers through his hair.

"I'm just joking, you're fine", Jeong Ja laughs. I get a buzz in my purse, must've gotten a text. I swiftly check to see the notification.

It's been a while, darling. I expect to hear from you soon, wearing that robe I got you. -Choo Dae Hyun

Fuck. He's going to catch on that I moved.

I'll make it up to you. - Park Mi Sook

I have to think of something. I can't keep this lie.

"Are you ok?", Chan Young catches my attention. I hide my phone.

"Me? I'm fine, the light just hurt my eyes", I laugh it off. Chan Young reaches out his hand, inviting me to take it.

"Let's go, you seem tired", he smiles. Maybe things can be different. I want to know more about this man. What made him so caring? Does he do this often? Was it his family that raised him to be good or was it on his own accord? Is he single, is he in a relationship? Not that I could see myself dating him, he's too good for me.

I take his hand and lead the way to the closest bus stop. We make small talk while we wait for the bus. I learned he's an only child, same as me. Although he never visited the United States, his parents often have. I told him I'm left-handed, but my parents were in denial for the first five years of my life, he got a kick out of that. We talked about college and funny stories we had from the parties. The bus picked us up and the conversation continued, laughing at funny embarrassing stories. Jeong Ja sadly was more of a third wheel, but she participated in the conversation. Although I'm learning quite a bit about him, there's still a lot missing.

The bus ride was brief, but we took him to our apartment, gave him a little tour. He commented on how cutely decorated it was. Jeong Ja and I have a thing for cute animals and soft pastels.

Jeong Ja immediately heads to her room, waving goodbye to Chan Young and I.

It's just us now. What do I say?

I go to the kitchen, hoping to find a good snack to munch on.

"Would you like something to eat?", I offer, opening the fridge.

"No, thank you. The water was enough for me", Chan Young declines. I close the fridge, wondering how I could get him to stay. Chan Young wanders to the kitchen, leaning against the counter, crossing his arms.

"It's pretty late, you can stay on the couch for tonight if you want", I continue, my voice shaking.

"I'm fine", he shrugs.

"Do you want me to stay?", he mumbles.

"If you don't want to stay, you don't have to", I choke.

"You just need some sleep", Chan Young whispers. I do. I do need some sleep.

"If I didn't throw up, would you have kissed me tonight?", I bow my head, looking at our feet. A soft chuckle hums in his throat.

"I would have", he assures. My hands tremble from the thought.

"I guess another time then", I turn to hide my growing smile. Chan Young steps in front of me and lifts my head by holding my cheeks in his palms.

"Till then", he whispers. He leans in, leaving me speechless. The tips of our noses touch. He shakes his head to give me a nose kiss. I could see the terror on my face in the reflection of his eyes. What I would give to kiss those lips. Just once.

Without sharing another word, Chan Young kindly leaves my apartment. Dammit, I realize now we didn't exchange numbers before he left! I guess if we see each other again then it'll be meant to be. Seoul is a big city, I doubt I'll see him. At least we'll have tonight to reminisce on.

[canadian-buckbeaver]

Loki x Sai

(Sneak Peek at an upcoming gift fic. O/C Warning!)

Sai took a deep breath as she stepped off the bus.  Finally.  Fresh clean air.  The bus ride had been busy and crowded, as per usual, and her shift at the pet shop had gone about as well as could be expected.  Growing up, she had thought that adults and teenagers were supposed to know what they were doing, or at least know better than the average doorknob.

Today was unlike any other.  More people trying to talk her into letting them purchase small animals that would require high levels of upkeep that she could tell that they had no intention of providing.  There were the kids and even their parents trying to pet the fish and other aquatic beings that needed to remain underwater in order to survive.  They didn’t seem to understand that, just because they as humans needed direct oxygen to breathe, not all creatures needed the same. There was even a couple of those that would beg to the manager for a discount for them being a repeat, loyal customer, or, most distressing, those that would make up stories about her to try and get her in trouble.  They didn’t care that their little lies ran her the risk of being fired.  Like she didn’t need this job along with the other people that worked here.  All in all, it made for an infuriating mess.  One that she was very happy that was over for another day at least.

Same shit, different day.  She shook her head to herself as she recalled the stories that she had to share with her friends.  It was like the customers at the pet shop went out of their way not to think about the negative consequences that their actions might have on a living being.  Stupid people really.  At least the animals made it worthwhile at the end of the day.  It sounded like the script of a bad B-list movie when she thought of it.  Perhaps it was.  The tired shop keep girl with a heart of gold stars in comedy about the incapabilities of the human race.  Or maybe this could all be part of an elaborate setup.  Perhaps aliens from outer space had infiltrated the minds of normal humans around the world and were trying to cause the destruction of society from within.  She should write that idea down.  Might make the next top novel, be the next Steven King. Become rich and famous and just watch the money pour in.  Finally get her out of this dealing with the public hell that she had come accustomed to.

Still.  As much as she complained, she reminded herself that the day was done. Stretching her back, she enjoyed the slight breeze that flowed through her hair.  The condo building that she shared with Bucky was just a couple blocks ahead, an easy walk. And it was still a beautiful day. The sun bright and shining with the thinnest of clouds on the horizon.  The sky was a brilliant shade of blue without a trace of grey.  After a full day of being inside, working with and for the members of the general public, Sai decided that the best thing to do would be to walk the rest of the way home.  Don’t think about the negatives.  Decompress and give her time to think and plan out how to enjoy the rest of her day.  Besides, knowing Bucky, supper was probably already simmering on the stove or in a crock pot.  That girl was anything but inefficient.  There was no longer a need to rush home to do everything that needed to be done.  So, shouldering her pack, Sai began to head home, enjoying the fresh breeze that brought the promise of (finally) warmer weather.

A brand new chapter beginning anew.

Although she was still unaccustomed to the chill that was Canada weather, Sai had to admit that Bucky was right.  Between her family drama and everything else that had been going on in her life, it had indeed been time for a change.  She had been on the brink of mental collapse before she moved.  It had been something that needed to be done.  Canada was beautiful and fresh, even if it did mimic a lot of American cities in certain aspects.  The cities were large and imposing, a lot of familiar brands and stores.  But the people were friendlier and there were more opportunities for someone such as herself.  It was the perfect place for a fresh start. The move had been the right choice.  Sure, her family weren’t exactly impressed when she had packed everything in the middle of the night, bought a plane ticket for what they considered the middle of nowhere and moved in with someone that she had only ever communicated with over the Internet, but, as she said before, it had been well worth it. Without batting an eye Bucky had invited her to stay in her condo.  They had moved everything around, bookshelves being shoved into different corners and different rooms, desks being placed against other walls of rooms, turning her office into a spare bedroom for Sai.  And after a few trips to the local IKEA, the new room was her home away from home.

Scratch that.  It was her new home.  And she couldn’t be happier.

Sai took a deep breath, walking the familiar street home. She was happy here.  She was safe here.  She was…

Sai paused, hearing what sounded like an urgent hissing sound coming from the dead grass pile.  Snakes weren’t exactly overly common in Canada, especially during this time of the year.  It was still far too cold for them to be out and about.  Hell, most of everything was still in hibernation.  Even the geese and ducks were still down south for the remains of the winter.  But could it possibly be an abandoned pet?  Her heart ached at the thought of it.  An innocent snake on its own in the big, wide world.  Sai couldn’t help herself.  She knew that she wouldn’t be able to sleep until she found the source of the noise.  Wrapping her jacket and bag around her tighter to keep out the cold, Sai began to search the grass.  She attempted to make soothing sounds, trying not to scare whatever was making the sounds off.

It didn’t take long for her to find the source of the noise.

There, deep in the grass, Sai spied a brown, black and gold speckled snake.  The end of their tail was rattling and the snake was hissing at her as she approached, but it did not make any attempt to slither away. How odd.  Sai wasn’t exactly sure of the exact species of snake but she could tell that this wasn’t anything that they sold in a pet shop, nor was it a rattlesnake.  In this part of Canada only rattlesnakes were venomous.  So, whatever it was, it was a non-venomous snake.  That made her heartbeat a little easier.

“Hey there, little buddy,” she said to him, crouching beside the snake.  Of course, the snake said nothing back.  It hissed back in response as his tail rattled at her.  Still.  It did not move away from her.  Perhaps it wasn’t as scared of her as she thought it was.  “You’re not going to bite me, are you?  I just want to have a good look at you.” She told him, continuing to talk soothingly to it as she walked around the animal.  The snake’s head turned, keeping her in its sight at all time, yet still did not move.  It was like it was paralyzed or injured.  Poor thing.

“My, you are beautiful.  So handsome.  I bet you get all the snakes with your colours so bright and vibrant like that.” She said.  “Absolutely gorgeous….”

The snake finally stopped its rattling but kept watching her with its beady little eyes.  It seemed strangely intelligent for any normal snake.  Perhaps it had been a pet until recently.  “There we go.  I bet making all that noise is exhausting.  I’m not a scary person.  I just want to look at you, perhaps give you a helping hand as you have none?” She continued to croon, making small talk with the creature as she examined it.

Finally, she spied the problem.  There was a long gash on one of the snake’s sides.  It was fresh, not exactly oozing, but it looked like it hurt.  No wonder the poor dear wasn’t making any moves to run away from her.  “Oh dear.  That looks painful.  Did a bird try to have you for supper?” Sai asked the snake again, stepping closer so she could see it.  It didn’t look deep, more like a graze.  Easy to mend. It just needed time to stitch itself back together.  “I bet you showed that bird a lesson though.  You look like a tough little guy.  You probably took him on and beat his tail feathers to the curb.”

She paused in her talking once she saw that a neighbor had noticed her talking to what appeared to be nothing.  The man was eyeing her out of the corner of his eye as he began to prepare his garden for spring.  

Great.  She just moved here and she was already getting a repour with the neighbors. “Can I pick you up?” she asked the snake.  “I don’t want to hurt you, but I think I can help you.  I’ve been taught some animal first aid, well.  Pet first aid but I’ve dealt with snakes before as well.  I promise not to hurt you.” She held out her hand to the snake.  “What do you say?  Do you want to be my buddy for a little bit?”

The snake’s tongue lashed out at her, as if it was trying to test her scent.  See if she was as harmless as she made herself out to be.  Sai stayed perfectly still, letting the snake decide. Finally, after a long pause, the snake put its head down on her hand.  As if it had accepted her.

Her heart could just about burst.

Picking it up gently, Sai continued her brisk walk to the condo building, using her thin little jacket to block most of the breeze from it.  “Just you wait and see.  We are going to be best friends you and I.  I’ll have to introduce you to Bucky.  Do you like hamburger meat? I think we might have some leftover if Bucky didn’t use it all in her spaghetti sauce…”

The snake looked up at her, tongue flickering as it regarded her with those strangely intelligent eyes.  Eyes that were a beautiful mix of green and blue, and were strangely human.  But that had to be a trick of the sun and shadows.

* * * * *

When Sai clicked open the door to the condo, it was exactly how she had imagined.  Supper was slowly bubbling on the stove, Bucky’s ‘famous’ spaghetti sauce simmering in her slow cooker.  Bucky was sitting on the counter at her computer, muttering to herself and typing rapidly.  Her blue eyes were furrowed with concentration, brown hair tucked behind her ears as she worked.  Both earbuds were in so she probably hadn’t heard her come in just yet.  

Quietly, Sai set down her bag and came over to her friend.  She covered the snake with her jacket at first, give Bucky a moment to adjust to their new roommate.  Besides, no need to give Bucky a complete cardiac arrest in her own condo building.

She waved at Bucky when the other girl finally looked up from what she was typing on.  “Goodness is that the time already?” Bucky asked, pulling out one of her earphones. There were slight bags under her eyes but they were shining with triumph.  “I finally got engrossed in this damn article.  The words just started coming and finally making sense.”  Bucky was occasionally paid to do some little articles in the local newsletter.  Nothing too big or fancy but it was a little extra money that was coming in for her. And, as Bucky said, it always looked good on a resume should she decide to look elsewhere for a job.

“Told you that giving it a break for a day or two would work wonders,” Sai grinned at her. “Did your sources finally come through with the information as well?”

Bucky nodded.  “Finally.  Of course that gives me less than a week or so to write and complete the article but who cares on their end?  It isn’t their neck on the line if my work isn’t done.” She gave a loud sigh before saving the document and closing her computer for the moment.  Sai knew that Bucky had waited to have dinner with her. Then she would probably return to the article afterwards.

“So, with it being Friday night, are you going to see that guy you met last week? Carter?” Sai asked her innocently, her eyebrows raised.

Bucky shot her a look before rolling her eyes.  “Oh yes.  Because I want to date a misogynic creep who told me that I was to quit my job and move in with him when we became official.  That way I would keep his house spotless and clean, have supper on the table for him when he came home and remind him to wipe his ass when he came home from work.  Of course I guess that I should be grateful he came out with this on the first date and not the second.  Why? You interested in him?”

“As if. Lord knows that I have my pick of the winners back at the shop.” Sai said, settling at her spot as Bucky dished out the food. That’s when she noticed Bucky’s distant look.  “Hey.  You ok?”

“I’m fine.” Bucky said as she sat down beside her, their food in front of them.  

Sai looked at her friend, taking in her face and posture. She was anything but fine. Perhaps this wasn’t the best time to tell her about the snake.  “Come on, Bucks.  You can tell me anything.  You know that.”

“I know I just… it’s embarrassing…”

“More embarrassing than missing the step at the mall, screaming and then finding it again as everyone looks at you?”

Bucky gave a small snort.  “Nothing is as embarrassing as that moment will ever be for you.” She said, picking up her fork and beginning to mash the noodles with great force.

“Well the noodles didn’t do anything to you.  So come on.  Tell me.  What’s up? I’m not going to laugh or anything if that is what you are concerned about.”

“It’s not laughter funny.  Just more… heart embarrassing?”

“I have zero idea what you mean.”

Bucky sighed.  “Well.  There’s a doctor that’s been coming down to the department a lot.  He’s funny and handsome, sweet and all his patients love him.”

Sai raised her eyebrows.  “Bucky has a crush? On an actual person?”

“Oh, you sound worse than my parents!” Bucky shoved a mouthful of noodles into her mouth and glared at Sai.  “Eat up.  Food’s getting cold.”

Bucky’s parents were old-school, expected her to be married with kids by now.  Just the other night she had overheard Bucky arguing how there were no grandchildren in the immediate future, if ever.  But they were another story in itself.  “But something tells me that you wouldn’t be like this if it was just a crush.” Sai said, picking up her fork and beginning to eat.

Bucky sighed, looking over at her.  Sai gave her a knowing look.  The other girl knew well enough know that Sai would not give up until she knew all the information.  “Fine. No.  it’s not just that I have a crush on him.  It’s… it’s not just me that likes him.  The nurses, the clerks, my coworkers…”

Ah.  “So he’s popular.  So what? You can shine too, Bucky. Don’t sell yourself short.”

“You know damn well that I can’t.  I have a face that screams that anyone who looks at me might be thrown in jail for pedophilia.” Bucky said, shaking her fork at her friend.

“Well… yes young face… but still…”

“Anyways a few of the older clerks that I work with saw that Bitch-Face Nurse was making the moves on him while he was doing his rounds. So they told him that, if he really wanted someone interesting to talk to, then ‘to talk that Bucky over there’. That apparently I can make conversation interesting about anything and everything with everyone. That I…” Bucky sat back from the table. “Sai.  Is that a snake in your jacket?”

Oh.  Sai looked down and saw that her jacket had become unzipped and her new friend was investigating the plate in front of her.  “Erm… Surprise?” she said with a sheepish grin.

Bucky looked up at her and then down at the snake again.  “Sai… pets…”

“Are allowed!  Your landlord said no dogs or cats as they would claw up the hardwood.”

“But snakes smell and I have no idea how they would react to a snake being here.  Or how the condo board would react to a snake.  This building has certain rules and regulations that must be followed. If… If they aren’t then we could be evicted.”

Sai waved off her concerns.  “Everything will be fine, Bucky.  I’ll take care of everything.  Besides, look how sweet he is.”

The snake looked up at Bucky and began to shake its rattle at her.  Warning her to stay away from it and Sai.

Bucky glared at it, unimpressed.  “Dude.  This is my house.”

Well not technically Sai rolled her eyes but smiled as the rattling stopped.  “See! I told you that the two of you would get along great! You’re already talking to him!” Sai gently scratched under the snake’s chin, earning a couple licks on her chin as the snake turned to face her.  It acted strangely human in that way.  Perhaps it too was becoming attached to her?  Sai knew that she couldn’t let the poor little guy out of the house in his current condition.  Or maybe ever.  “I’ll phone the landlord now, see what they say.  If they say no then I’ll find another place to look after his tail.  However, in the meantime, I think that I can get him set up in my room…”

“You’ve already made up your mind, haven’t you?” Bucky asked her, looking exasperated.  She was probably already imagining the two of them being kicked out for not following the proper protocol.  What a worrywart.

“I have.” Sai said, finishing her food quickly before grabbing her phone.  She paused before she entered her room and turned to Bucky.  “You really should invite the doctor to coffee.  What’s the worst that can happen?”

Bucky began to tick off her fingers.  “That he says no.  That we have to work together for a while making everything awkward.  Causing the nurses and other coworkers who like him to hate me and causing that sort of drama. Having to work with them until one of us quits or leaves.  That I stumble through everything and make a fool out of myself…”

“You’re overthinking again!” Sai called from her room.

“And you sound like my mother! And do the dishes! I made supper!”

* * * * *

It was a couple days later.  Bucky and Sai were in Sai’s room, looking at the tank that they had just spent the better part of an hour working on. “I can’t believe that he said yes.” Bucky said with a sigh.

As it turns out, the landlord was a huge fan of snakes. So much so that he had even went out and purchased the tank, bedding and a warming rock for the little guy.  Not that Sai was complaining.  That would have been a large chunk out of her next paycheck. Sai smiled at her friend, deciding not to overly press the point. This time.  “Told you that it would work out in the end. Now have you talked to your doctor friend?”

“He doesn’t even know that I exist, much less that he would say yes to coffee.” Bucky turned and left the room.  “Speaking of, my bus is going to be here in a few. I’ll text you later.”

Sai said goodbye to her friend, watching Bucky leave. Tom, the snake, seemed to be watching her with curiosity.  He stuck his tongue out and tasted the air.  “You hungry, little guy?” Sai asked him, smiling at him.  “I managed to buy you a couple of mice if you’re interested. And then afterwards I can start working on that bandage for you.”  She dropped a frozen mouse into the cage before turning to her mess with the bandages. “Now the guy I work with says that you won’t need stitches, but you will need two bandages.  One that needs to be wet and close to the wound to help prevent infection, and the other dry and wrapped around it.  Just for added protection.  So this might be uncomfortable but it’s for your own good.”

Tom sniffed and flicked his tongue at the mouse before turning his nose up at it. Frozen mice were definitely not on the menu tonight in his opinion.  He was much more interested in whatever the heck that Sai was doing.  She was humming softly to herself as she worked, making sure that the bandages weren’t too hot or saturated with the antibacterial solution. “There!” she said, finally happy with her handiwork.  “Here you are, little man.  It’s not the most fashionable bandage around, but it will do.” Turning to him, she tutted seeing the frozen mouse.  Normally snakes would swallow those whole the moment they came close to the tank.  “That’s… that’s weird.  You’ve been after whatever has been cooking lately but you still won’t touch the mice?  Well. I suppose you’ll eat when you’re hungry.”  Sai decided that she wasn’t going to be too worried about it.  The tech did say that such an injury might cause stress and lack of appetite in any creature so Sai was willing to chalk it up to that.

It was less stressful to assume that anyways.

Her stomach let out a loud growl.  Flushing slightly, Sai checked the time.  When was the last time that she had eaten?  She knew that she and Bucky hadn’t had lunch as they had been struggling to set up the tank before Bucky was due for work, but had she had breakfast?  It seemed like she had gotten up, raced to town and raced back.  “Well Tom, looks like you’re going to be my dinner date for the evening.” She said.  “Maybe if I eat with you, perhaps you would be more interested in your mice dinner?”

Tom looked unimpressed though, with him being a snake, it was hard to imagine exactly what was going on inside his mind.  For all she knew he was planning an elaborate robbery scheme involving a nunnery.   Ugh, she must be hungry.  Her thoughts were all jumbled and chaotic.  With a sigh, Sai entered the kitchen and began to heat up the leftovers from the previous night.  Sai had just poured the noodles on a plate when there was a loud crack of thunder outside. The windows shook with the force of the strike just as the heavens opened up and began to pour.  With a frown, Sai tried to look out the window.  Bucky wasn’t kidding when she described just how quickly the weather changed around here.  In the blink of an eye they had went from having clear blue skies, to pouring rain and being unable to see more than five feet in front of her.  “I hope Bucky’s bus come already.” She fretted, biting her lip. If it hadn’t, well, Bucky might as well be swimming to work in this weather.

Perhaps she would get a better view from the window by Tom’s tank.  It faced the road where the bus stop was.  Setting her dish down, Sai did her best to peer out the window.  She couldn’t even see her neighbour’s patio it was raining so hard.  It was like a curtain of water had been drawn across them.  Well. Bucky would be back if she missed the bus or if got too miserable. Or even more miserable.  Perhaps call a cab and be driven to work.  Well. Cross that bridge when she came to it.  With a sigh, Sai turned back to her meal…

Only to see a smug looking Tom slurp down a few noodles. He had curled himself as close to the plate as he could.  There was even tomato sauce on his snout.  He looked quite pleased with himself, or at least as pleased as a snake could be.

Sai stared at the snake.  “How the ever loving fuck did you get out of your aquarium?” She demanded of him.  The aquarium’s lid had been tight on last time she checked it.  The snake said nothing in return, only to coil himself tighter around her plate and grab another mouthful. How he managed that, she wouldn’t know.  Luckily, she knew from her previous research that hamburger meat, although not the best for snakes, would not do him any real harm, and the carbs would be just an added, empty, benefit.  Still, such animals were unused to the refinery of human foods. Sai would need to be careful around her plate if such antics continued. She gave a loud sigh deciding to resign herself to the situation.  Nothing that could be done now.  And who knows, maybe it would awaken his appetite for the mice later.  “Well.  At least you’re eating.” She muttered to herself.  Picking up her own mouthful, she had just began to eat when there was the sound of thundering feet in the hallway.

Bucky burst in, thoroughly drenched. Her hair was plastered to her skull, her clothing clinging to her body, and her make up was running down her cheek like a river.  However there was a shine to her eyes, one that Sai hadn’t seen in a long time.  “Bucky, what on earth….”

“I’ll explain fully once I get home.  Right now I have a ride waiting for me that isn’t the bus.” She said, running into her room.  There was the sound of wet clothing being thrown off and hitting the wall. Yikes.  She was in a hurry.  The sound of the tub running confused Sai. Why, if she was in a hurry, was she taking a shower?

“What happened? Can you at least tell me that?”

Bucky’s voice was muffled.  Probably washing the remains of her make up off.  “Just about made it to the bus stop when the rain hit. Just make it under the shelter and dirtbag trash truck splashes me with enough water to fill Niagara Falls.” There was the sound of her closet.  She was really motoring.  Maybe the taxi was charging by waiting for her.  “Anyways.  This car pulls up, rolls the window down and it’s Doctor Hearttrob.”

Sai put down her fork.  “From the hospital?  Seriously?”

“Yep.  Apparently he lives around here.  He’s on his way to work too so offered me a ride there as there was no way that he would let me wait for the bus.  I lucked out.” Bucky emerged, hair tied up and dark with fresh water (she must have drenched it to at least rid it of road grime), her make up fresh, her new jacket on. Her clothing looked much nicer on her, clung to her shape a little better than the errand ones that she had on before.

Sai felt the smirk on her face.  “Sooooo~ if he wants to get a little frisky before or after work~….”

“I’ll tell him that I haven’t shaved in two weeks and that it isn’t worth the jungle.” Bucky said, grabbing her things.  But her cheeks were definitely hotter. So, sweet and innocent Bucky had considered it at least. This doctor must be something else.

Sai couldn’t help but get one last dig in as Bucky hurried away.  “Girl. If he’s interested, it’s always worth the walkthrough the jungle.”

“If that is a ‘How I Met Your Mother’ quote, I’m canceling TV.”

“Hey.  You understood that reference!” Sai called out after her friend, watching her hurry down the hallway.  She sighed and shook her head, turning back towards Tom.  Bucky had been so distracted she hadn’t even asked about why Tom was out and loose.  For his own part, Tom seemed slightly interested in the commotion.  “Well.  That was exciting.  And once again it’s just you and I for dinner.” She said, settling back in her chair and picking up her book on the basic care for snakes.

“For the record, it is always worth the jungle.” A smooth, deep voice said.

[excellent-monster-girl-ideas]

Liminal, chapter 1

Alright, here’s the chapter I worked on last month that I was talking about. Reminder: this is a very rough draft, but I hope it can entertain you. Please enjoy.

Chapter 1: The Festival

On November 27, 2022, the world became aware of a second universe, discovered by a group of American scientists in Washington D.C. This world was populated not by humans, but by demihuman people collectively called "Liminals". Though they appeared humanoid, they all had distinctly non-human attributes, and were divided into countless different races.

Upon the discovery of the strange new world, known by its inhabitants as Atheria, both humans and Liminals began to mingle and communicate with one another. It was not long before the two worlds' people started to trade resources - alien to each other's worlds - and began to migrate to each other's world.

Humans began living on Atheria, and Liminals began living on Earth. Despite the apprehension of certain people on both sides, humans and Liminals began to live together in society.

Nearly seven years have passed since then, and the two peoples have grown close in each other's societies. Some children have even spent most of their life in a world their parents did not even know about until recently. One of these children was named Opal Leona, a member of the catfolk race of Liminals, who moved with her family to Earth on her eighth birthday, October 1, 2023. A new life in a strange, unfamiliar world is hardly a gift most people would expect to recieve, but Opal fortunately got along well with her new human friends.

One of those close friends was named Billy Adams, a cocky and playful boy with a love for sports. Even now, after six years of knowing him, he'd always start fights with the school bullies and come home covered in bruises and scars, smiling all the while. Most of those fights were because they had picked on Opal, whether out of racism (or perhaps species-ism) or other reasons. Unlike Opal, who lived with both her parents and an older brother, Billy lived alone with his mother.

Opal and Billy lived in Floral City, Florida, a city well known for its remarkable pumpkin industry, as well as its annual Pumpkin Festival held every October for a whole week. At the city's fairgrounds, several attractions such as ferris wheels and dark rides were set up, along with food stands and other amusement park staples. On October 1, 2029 - Opal's 14th birthday - both she and Billy attended the Festival.

Billy could hardly contain his excitement, running with Opal close behind to the fairground's entrance. She could only barely keep up with him, stopping occasionally to catch her breath.

"Hold... hold on, Billy," Opal said, panting and bending over in exhaustion. "Give me... a sec..."

Billy stopped and turned around. "C'mon, Opal, we're just a few blocks away!"

"I know that..." Opal said, starting to catch her breath, "but you're way too energetic today."

"I'm always energetic," Billy said with a goofy grin, pointing to himself with his thumb. "You're just not energetic enough!"

Opal couldn't help but laugh. "I'm plenty energetic, just... I get that way after sunset, is all."

"Oh, is that way you're so tired? You stayed up all night gaming again, didn't you?"

"Gimme a break, Billy, yeesh."

The two laughed before continuing to make their way to the fairgrounds. The place was a wide open field, normally empty but now densely populated with rides and food stands, almost as far as the eye could see. The air was thick with the sugary scent of deep-fried fair food and the smell of hot, buttered popcorn, smells that had both Opal and Billy salivating. The squeals and cheers of young children riding rollercoasters, carosels, and ferris wheels filled the Floral City Fairgrounds almost as loudly as the people peddling cheap stuffed animals in exchange for winning a very-rigged balloon and dart game.

While walking through the fairgrounds, Billy and Opal came across a very strange, purple tent. A sign outside read "Fortune Read by the Mysterious Madame Delphina - $5 per person".

Opal ran a hand through her black-and-white hair, gently scratching the back of her cat-ears in confusion. "A... fortune teller? That's not something you usually see at the Pumpkin Festival."

"C'mon, let's get our fortunes read!" Billy exclaimed, digging through his pocket for his wallet.

"Um, are you sure we should- hey!" Opal tried to ask before Billy yanked her inside. Inside the tent was a small table, covered by a blue silk cloth, patterned with gold stars and lit only by a pair of candles. In front of the table were two chairs, each lined with blue velvet and made in such a way that Liminals with tails - such as Opal - would be able to fit theirs through the hole.

At the other end of the table was a silver-haired woman, old but not quite elderly. "Welcome," she said with a kindly smile. "Have you come to have your fortune read?"

Billy nodded ecstatically, while Opal simply scratched the back of her head. "Um, I guess..." she said as Billy handed her the ten dollar fee.

"Excellent," the old woman said, taking the money and placing a deck of cards on the table. She quickly cut the deck, shuffling them with impressive speed. "Have you ever head your fortune read before?"

"I did, once," Billy said with a smile. "She used a deck of cards, too."

"Ah, interesting..." the old woman said with a smile, before setting the deck down and placing three cards face down.

Despite the two candles on either side of the table, the room was still fairly dim; despite this, Opal could now see the cards clearly. "Wait a second, those aren't Tarot cards..."

Billy looked down at them as well. "Hey, yeah, you're right, those are..." Madame Delphina turned over a card. "Ah, the Pikachu," she said, "in the upright position."

"Those are Pokemon cards!" Opal exclaimed, halfway between shock and laughter.

The old woman nodded. "Not every fortune teller deals in ordinary Tarot cards, my dear. Variety is the spice of life, after all. My mentor uses Yu-Gi-Oh cards, and her sister uses Magic: The Gathering. Now, this card represents the beginning of a journey, the overcoming of obstacles- wait, where are you going?!"

By the time she realized it, Opal and Billy had left in disappointment. Madame Delphina sighed. "Nobody ever wants to hear my predictions," she said, flipping over the last two cards. "Hm. Magikarp and... reversed Charizard? That's not good."

"Which way did she go?" the horned, red-skinned agent muttered as his eyes scanned the festival grounds.

"North, towards the Ferris wheel," his equally horned, blue-skinned companion replied. "Remember, she can hide her ears, but her tails stay even when transformed."

"Got it," the first said, running towards the ferris wheel in search of his target. The second man smirked before transforming back into her normal form, rubbing her backside where her three fox tails were stuffed under her pants. "Man, these pants are tight," she said before running south towards the festival entrance. Meanwhile, Opal and Billy were playing a dart-throwing game at the fair, trying to pop a series of balloons. Opal managed to pop five balloons while Billy only popped two.

"Hahaha! Cat-like reflexes, baby!" Opal gloated.

"Yeah, yeah, I'll win this time," Billy said, passing an additional five dollars to the man running the game.

"Another round? You kids must really want the big prizes," he chuckled, refilling the balloons and handing them their darts. He looked past them and saw a girl walking by. "Hey there, missy. Fancy a game of Balloon Pop?"

The fox-girl turned to him. "Uh, well, I-"

"It'll just be five bucks if ya wanna play," he said with a grin. "Pop enough balloons and you can pick out a prize!

She looked over the stuffed animals and other toys on display as prizes in his booth. She slowly walked over and placed five bucks on the counter. "Sure, I'll play!" she said cheerfully.

"HOLD IT!" a man behind her said. Billy, Opal, and the fox-girl all turned around to see a tall, red-skinned man standing there, wearing what looked like an officer's uniform with the words "Kohaku Group" emblazoned on it. He was muscular, and had two red horns protruding from his forehead.

"Crap..." the girl muttered.

"Miss Kaede," he said, "you'd better come with me. Your father wishes to see you."

"Forget it," the fox-girl replied. "I'm not going back to him and that's final!"

"Hey now," the man running the balloon game said, "let's all calm down; it's festival season, after all! Why don't you two settle your differences over a nice balloon ‘n darts game, just five bucks each."

The red giant glared at the old man. He simply blinked, placed a "Game Closed; Will Be Back Later" sign on the counter, and ran away.

"Heh, smart man," the man chuckled. "Now then, Kaede-"

"Hey, leave her alone!" Billy said, getting in between her and the giant.

"And dumb kid," he growled, but with a half-smile. "You don't wanna get in the way of an oni and his job, boy. You got no business here; run along and play some more carnival games or somethin'."

"Billy..." Opal muttered awkwardly.

Kaede simply chuckled. "Fine, just try getting me back home," she said, taking a fighting stance.

The oni laughed. "Y'know, your pops gave us some real sweet orders," he said, getting closer and cracking his knuckles. "Said we could rough you up if we had to."

"He- he what?" Opal gasped quietly.

"Of course he did," Kaede sighed, pulling the other two fox-tails from out of her pants.

The oni threw a punch right at Kaede, but she swiftly evaded it, getting behind him and kicking him in the back in a single fluid motion. However, he leaned back and grabbed her in his massive hands and threw her into the stall, popping all the remaining balloons.

"You... you monster!" Opal shouted, kicking the oni in the shins.

The oni looked at her, his eyes red as his skin. "Idiot... I'll teach you better than to mess with an Oni! I'll crush your skull right open!"

He grabbed Opal in one hand and prepared to punch her right in the face. Billy looked on, terrified by what he was about to witness.

Do you seek power?

A voice spoke in Billy's head. Just as it did, everything around him - from the fist about to hit Opal to the ferris wheel in the distance - slowed to a halt. The world shifted in color, from white to grey before finally becoming pure darkness. Billy, too, couldn't move, no matter how hard he tried.

"Who... who are you?" Billy tried to say, his thoughts echoing around him as though he were speaking. "Are... you God?"

No, the voice simply said. I am no god, angel, or demon. I am you. I am your will to shift reality, to protect the ones you love.

"I... I don't understand..."

Then listen, the voice continued. I am a power slumbering within you, the power of your will. Right now, more than anything else, you want to protect Opal. Is this not correct?

"I... yeah."

Then simply say the name of your power, and it will be given to you.

"What's... the name of my... power?"

You already know it. Search deep within your heart and say its name. The will to Shift reality... claim this hidden power for your own and save her!

Billy opened his eyes, his body hot, burning from the inside out. The oni was now glaring at him.

"The hell's going on with your hand?!" he shouted to Billy. "Humans aren't supposed to do that, right?"

Billy looked at his hand. A golden light was covering it.

As if it was second nature to him, Billy shouted the name of his power. "Light Shift! Bright Blade!" he exclaimed as the light around his hand constructed itself into a short sword. He jumped up, swinging his blade at the oni's wrist, cutting it and forcing him to drop Opal.

"Aargh!!" the oni shouted. "D-dammit, how the hell did you do that?!" Opal got up and dusted herself off, right as the Oni swung his fist at her.

"Dark Shift! Black Shield!!" she shouted. As soon as the fist was about to connect, it was stopped by a disc of black and purple energy materializing in front of her and Billy.

"Are you serious?!" the oni shouted. "The hell are you two even doing?!"

"I have literally no idea!" Opal shouted, grinning as the oni pounded over and over at the black disk, all to no avail.

"Screw this, I'm getting backup!" he panted at last before running off. As he did, the black disk dissipated, and Opal and Billy collapsed on the ground in exhaustion.

The fox-girl popped up from behind the counter and jumped over to where the two were. "Hey, thanks for the help! The heck was that 'Light Shift', 'Dark Shift' stuff, though?"

"No idea," Billy said. "It... literally just happened."

"Ditto," Opal panted. "Oh dang, I'm tired."

"Well, as thanks," the fox-girl said, lifting Opal and Billy with her arms, "I'll help you guys get home; you look beat."

"Thanks..." Opal said, leaning on her new friend's arm."

"I'll show you where my home is," Billy said. "I'm Billy, by the way."

"Opal," the cat-girl said.

"Name's Kaede," the fox-girl replied as she helped them exit the fairgrounds.

"Kaede Kohaku. Sorry for making a scene there. I'll... try to explain later."

"Sounds good," Billy said. After leaving the fairground, Opal and Billy managed to catch their breath, though they still felt weak as they walked their way to Billy's home.

And that’s Chapter 1! Honestly, after re-reading this, I don’t think it’s as bad as I was making out to be, but... you probably guessed which part I was cringing at so badly.

Please feel free to tell me your comments and how I can improve! Thanks for reading!

[frangipanidownunder]

Returning the Past: Part 5

Mulder and Scully are honeymooning in Far North Queensland. Much to Scully’s chagrin, Mulder has delved headlong into a mysterious case of strange lights, Tasmanian tiger sightings and abductions. It’s not long, before they run into trouble…

Read part 1, part 2 part 3 and part 4.

The facility ‘Eddie Romero House’ was ensconced behind a security fence. She frowned at the recurrence of the name. Years of being an investigator made it impossible to think of coincidences and serendipitous happenstance. Years of being an investigator on The X-Files showed her that even the smallest of coincidences was likely to be anything bug.

Sunlight filtered through menacing clouds and pinged off the metal pickets. Mulder buzzed the intercom and itched at the skin on his arms. A security guard walked from the main building to stand outside the gate.

              “We’re looking to talk to somebody in charge,” Mulder said.

              “Do you have an appointment?”

              “It’s urgent we speak to somebody. It could be a matter of life and death.”

              Scully looked at the ground, impacted red dirt crumbling at her footfalls. Mulder’s flair for the dramatic, coupled with this dogged insistence often got them entry into secure facilities but the guard didn’t seem impressed. They had no badges to flash, they had American accents, they had no jurisdiction.

              “Professor Callow is in meetings. He won’t be available until tomorrow.”

              “Callow?” Scully said, looking at Mulder. He did the customary slow blink that told her he was on the same page as her. “We’re friends of his daughter’s. Please tell him it’s urgent that he speak with us.”

              The guard lifted the radio to his mouth and static crackled. She rubbed the back of her neck and Mulder paced. A pair of green and red parrots screeched past. A vehicle reversed from a steel shed to the left of the main facility, stirring up a plume of dust.

              “He says he’ll see you. Follow me.”

 Professor Callow was seated behind a wooden desk bearing all the hallmarks of an office that hadn’t seen a change in twenty years. A Rolodex next to a rotary dial phone, a blotter pad, a stationery holder filled with Biros, pencils, a plastic ruler, Tippex. There was a framed photo of two men, one a younger Callow, rifle propped against his shoulder, standing over the corpse of a large animal that Scully couldn’t make out. She peered at its familiarity, then recalled the crumpled version of the photo on Steph Callow’s living room floor. There were glass cabinets along each wall, containing skeletal remains and stuffed animals with blank eyes and dull fur. Faded posters on the wall depicted a variety of Australian marsupials, and directly behind the Professor’s chair was a map of Queensland.

              “You know my daughter somehow?” he said, his accent clear-cut English.

              “She took us on a walk through the Daintree.” Scully looked at a poster of endangered and extinct animals. Toolache wallaby – bearing similar markings to the kangaroos they’d seen that first morning, broad faced bandicoot, lesser bilby. She checked out the small signs propped up against the stuffed creatures, Eastern hare wallaby, brush-tailed bettong.

              “She was a promising zoologist, she had a knack for research. Stephanie studied hard. It’s a shame.”

There was something tight about the older man, Scully thought. Something closed off. She’d seen the same thing when Mulder was returned. An outward show of vagueness that really just covered up an inability to articulate the heart of the issue. He was scared.

“What’s a shame?” Mulder asked, picking up a jar from a shelf. He held the jar out as he continued to challenge the professor, rattling the brown seed pod inside it so that it drummed with each word he spoke. “That Steph became a tour guide and not a Professor, like you?”

“No, no. It’s…her mother…the family. It was difficult. For all of us, but for Stephanie, a teenager at the time, it was. Well, she struggled.” Callow took the jar from him and set it back on the desk. His hands trembled.

“Your wife, Steph’s mother, what happened to her?” Scully watched the way he sucked in a deep, long breath, chest puffing out. The seed inside the jar, labelled Idiospermum australiense was pale yellow on the outside and a ridged red inside, reminded her of a golden apricot and she kept her eyes on it while Callow sunk back into his chair.

“She disappeared. Just vanished.”  Callow’s voice was shallow, like he’d told the story so many times it was just a rote response.

She looked back at Mulder, pressing her teeth into her lower lip. She wondered if they would ever relate any of their own history like that, without the passion, without the fire needed to continually reach for justice.

“Miriam went out to buy milk and never came back. We…just carried on. You do, don’t you? But Stephanie was never the same. Went to university in Tasmania, as far away from here as she could get. She worked hard but the spark, the passion for it had gone. After she graduated she went on a gap year to South America and when she came back she couldn’t settle. She told me once that being a tour guide was a way of always looking for her mother. As though she might just find her out there in the bush somewhere all these years later,” he smiled sadly. “She likes being outdoors. Just like her mother.”

“Have you heard from her recently, Stephanie?” Scully stepped towards him. “She’s missing, Professor Callow.”

Callow shook his head, an absent expression clouding his eyes. “I’m afraid that Stephanie has often gone ‘walkabout’ as they say in these parts.”

“We were with her when a group of men dragged her into a four-wheel-drive and we haven’t seen her since. The police don’t seem interested. Her house…there was a disturbance there.”

The old man pushed himself up from his desk, knuckles turning white. “She kept some strange company too. Abductees, she called them. She was adamant she’d been abducted too. Told me fantastic tales of being on board UFOs and lights in the forest. Crazy stuff. Nobody believes that kind of thing, do they?” Callow looked at Mulder and Scully lowered her gaze, breathing through the awkward silence.

“What did you make of her company? TasTiger Tours,” Mulder said, not rising to the bait.

“Taking tourists to see thylacines in the Daintree? When she told me what she was doing I told her that people would either see her as a lunatic or a scam artist. But it seems I was wrong. There are plenty of fools…” He stopped and Mulder offered him a accepting grin. “Sorry. You are entitled to spend your dollars any way you see fit, but Tasmanian tigers have been extinct for decades and most certainly did not inhabit tropical rainforest.”

“And yet both Dr Scully and I have seen thylacines in recent days. One was inside your daughter’s home.”

Professor Callow blanched and held on to the edge of the desk. “In Stephanie’s house? That’s impossible.”

“It wasn’t so long ago that this facility was being funded to research thylacine DNA with a view to potentially reviving the species. It’s not much of a stretch to consider that the animals might have escaped and thrived in the wild.”

Callow sighed and shook his head. “You sound like Stephanie. She had a penchant for the arcane. I wouldn’t be surprised if she’d faked her own abduction by this group of men, simply to get my attention. I’ve suggested she see someone, you know, a psychiatrist to help her with her troubles, but she wouldn’t be told. She seems to be a lost cause.”

Mulder continued to talk, despite the old man walking past him to the door. “There are precedents where animals have created their own enclaves in non-native regions. The fabled big cat stories around the world can be explained in this way.”

Callow opened the office door. “What you say is true, Mr Mulder. And I may agree, except for the fact that my project never created a single live specimen. The trials all failed.”

Mulder swigged from the water bottle as she drove. The light outside was weak and grey. “What do you think, Scully. Is he involved?”

              “He was frightened, Mulder.  I saw a man cowed not just by the weight of his wife and daughter being missing, but by fear.”

              “He certainly knows more than he was letting on, Scully.”

              She watched him lean his head against the window. “You need to rest, Mulder. You still look like you’re running a fever.”

              “I’m fine. I just need to clear my head to think. Callow’s experiments didn’t yield a live thylacine, according to him. Yet we know they exist. What would be the purpose of recreating extinct animal lines, Scully? Where does that fit in with the abductions, the lights? And why would the police dismiss the case? Even if Steph was well known in these parts as someone with a psychiatric history, why deny she even existed?”

              “I’ve been thinking about that too, Mulder. And did you notice the name of the guard at the front gate?”

              He turned to her, cheeks flaming. “No, what was it?”

              “Galea. Same as the police officer.”

 They drove to the police station. The car park was deserted. Grey clouds pushed low over their heads and Scully scratched at the back of her neck. Mulder was slow to get out of the car. A sheen of sweat sparkled across his brow. She walked up the steps and rapped at the door. No answer.

              “Do you get a weird feeling, Mulder?”

              He didn’t answer but mopped at his forehead with the back of his hand. His chest rose and fell laboriously. She twisted the handle and pushed at the door. It didn’t budge. “If this is a joke, I don’t like the Australian sense of humour. Mulder,” she said, stepping back down to where he was leaning against the car door. “Get back in the car, out of the heat. Drink the water. I’m going around the back.”

              She knew he was sick when he complied without complaint. There were garden beds either side of the building, leaf litter piled high. Tall palms swayed on the increasing breeze and a pair of bird of paradise plants pecked at the empty air with their resplendent bronze beaks. The windows of the house were covered in cobwebs and the side door was locked. How had they not noticed the state of the place when they spoke with Officer Galea? Who were the other people in the building? Were there other people? She peered through the dirty glass of the back door but saw nothing but the marks of a building that hadn’t been inhabited for a while.

A car engine caught her attention and she hurried back round. A small blue SUV swung into the gravelled space next to their hire car and a middle-aged couple got out.

“If you’re looking for the police station, you need to head back that way, to Port Douglas. This one hasn’t been used for a few years now.”

“We were looking for Officer Galea,” Scully said, keeping an eye on Mulder, who was leaning his face against the window.

The woman shrugged. “The last copper here was Sergeant Blythman and she left to have a baby. That baby’s at primary school now. We just tidy up the yard. Len, give me that fertiliser. Those plants need a good feed.”

Scully opened the driver’s side door, but turned back to the couple. “Have you ever seen strange lights in this area? Blue lights?”

“You’re Americans.” Len joined his wife.

“We’re here on our honeymoon,” Scully said, as much to remind herself as to inform the couple. “We came here to report a crime here just the other day. Now it’s empty.”

The couple continued to remove gardening equipment from the back of the car.

“Who is Eddie Romero?” Scully asked. “It’s the name of a local research facility. It’s the name of one of the forest tracks. Our accommodation is Romero Sands.”

“He’s no-one special,” the woman said. “Enjoy your honeymoon. Go swimming. Do some bushwalking, but don’t stray off the tourist tracks. Have a nice time. Go home to your families.”

“Do you know Steph Callow?”

The woman exchanged looks with her husband. “Who are you?”

Mulder got out of the car, his body sagging. “What’s going on in this town? What are you afraid of?”

“We’re not scared,” the woman said, straightening up. “We’re just invisible. Nobody listens to us. They just want people to come here, spend their money. The tourist dollars rule. It’s like that film with the sharks, isn’t it, Len? You know the one, where the mayor of the island won’t shut the beaches down for the long weekend.”

“Jaws,” Scully said, looking over at Mulder. “Have people been hurt here? Killed?”

The woman looked at Len. “They’ve disappeared. But the government people say that they just lost their way, the forest is dangerous if you’re not careful.” She walked up to Scully and took her hand. “You two look like lovely young people. You don’t need anything like that happening to you. It’s the worst thing. People go missing and you never know what’s happened. You live every day like they might just come home and fling their coat across the hall and sit on their favourite chair and ask for a cup of tea, you know? It’s cruel, is what it is. Hope and dreams. It’s just cruel.” She rolled her lips together and took a long, slow breath. “You take care now. Come on, Len. It’s going to rain soon. Let’s spread this stuff and get home.”

 Mulder groaned in his sleep, deep guttural sounds that held fear. She often wondered how he processed all that happened to him. Besides the abject terror of the abduction, he had faced the death penalty. They had spent months on the run, looking over their shoulders, living out of cheap motels and even cheaper cars. He held it in, he held it together, mostly. She knew he thought he had to be strong for her, as she did for him. They both drove for days wearing their stoicism like armour. Back then, she knew the day would come where one of them would crack. She lay odds that it would be her first. That she would flip tables and throw away the hair dye and the Walmart underwear. That she would call her mother and write her brother. That she would tell Mulder she didn’t really love him and that she was leaving. That she would lie to save him. To save them both.

But in a long-forgotten town, in a long forgotten state, she returned with two bags of groceries and found him balled up in the corner of the darkened room, furniture broken around him, sobbing. The bags dropped to the floor and split open spilling the tins and packets in front of her. She let him cry against her chest until his tears soaked her vest. He didn’t talk, didn’t need to. She was grateful for that desolate place, grateful for the onerous skies and the stares of the townsfolk, grateful for the one store and flickering neon motel sign, grateful for the gritty coffee and the faulty ice machine. It drew out his sorrow and suffering and pushed hers down. She would never leave him. She would never lie to him.

 Now, she dabbed his brow with a cool washcloth, then pressed it around the back of her neck, easing the itch there. Wherever Steph Callow had gone, the dark forces in the forest were responsible. But with Mulder tossing fitfully by her side, there was no way they could go forward with any kind of investigation. She’d have to find a doctor’s surgery in the morning. He needed treatment.

“The light was so bright, Scully. It was so bright it felt like my eyes had been sliced open and silver was poured inside.” He pushed himself up and bunched the sheet across his lap. His voice was groggy, his skin tacky to touch. She gave him water. “I dreamt that Steph Callow was there with me, on that ship, Scully. She was trapped too, helpless and that bright light burned her and she burst into flames.”

While Scully made tea, he played with the remote, and a news anchor read out details of a mysterious death locally.

A member of the public called in the discovery of the body. At this stage, the police have not issued any details of the circumstances or the victim but there is a presence at Eddie Romero House.

“It’s Professor Callow,” Mulder said, calling her back to the bedroom. “He’s been killed.”

[vintaehge]

Serendipity | jjk&pjm

✧ Pairing: Park Jimin and Jeon Jungkook

✧ Genre: Pure fluffiness, boy love, American Hustle Life.

✧ Summary: Park Jimin gets to LA to train and become a proper ballet dancer, he works as a surfboard cleaner by the day and dance by the night. One day as he’s working he meets this really good looking surfer. Lucky him, he can speak Korean.

✧ Word count: 1277

✧ A/N: So I was inspired by @jungkooksknot ‘s idea and I don’t think this is as good as I envisioned it to be but feel free to tell me if you want more of this story:) @chimkookie You’ve been waiting for this! 

** Italic = Korean

2

  There was something with the sea Jimin always liked. The blueness of the sea and the sound of the wave, the laughter of people having fun and most of all surfers. The stunning cascade and dangerous maneuvers had always caught his breath away, plus ninety-nine percent of the time the surfers were super hot. They would often come to his manager's surfboard shop to clean their planks, which gave Jimin the opportunity to side glance at their quite toned and in shape bodies. Of course, he would never talk to them, Jimin was recently new to this job in LA, he just moved there from Busan, South Korea. He was doing a dance major and his teacher recommended him to a famous ballet company in the United States. He was still a trainee, so he had to work and earn money by day and practice at night. So you can guess that he wasn't so familiar with the local's main language. He knew the basics: how to greet people, yes, no and how to order food. Which you can also guess wasn't something he could do a conversation with, but he was hardworking and it's all the managers wanted, he would generally not talk to any clients if they needed their boards to be cleaned anyway. Except for today, today was different. Jimin woke up with this warm fuzzy feeling of excitement in the pit of his stomach which confused him because there was no apparent reason for him to feel this way. After all, it was another day he would spend in silence cleaning boards. He decided to ignore the feeling after a few minutes of questioning himself about it, then he started getting ready for the day and headed straight out toward the beach. Arriving there, he installed his cleaning stuff outside and installed the rack of planks to be cleaned beside him. He took one of them and set it on the table facing the ocean, starting to scrub it off of all the salt and seaweed glued to it. His eyes drifted toward the waves crashing on the beach as he carefully continued to clean the surfboard. He scanned the water and his gaze widened at the sight of a fine piece of a man. Tall, toned muscle, stunning dark hair, and radiant smile. Literally, someone coming from some sort of Baywatch movie, boy if you were straight now you’re not anymore. He was walking toward the sea after greeting some friends and it took Jimin all his brain power to not let his jaw hang open. The stranger's control over his board was impressive, he would stand on it and do all sort of figures and skillful maneuvers. It almost looked easy as he moved his arms gently to the wind to keep balance and his legs stood steadily on the plank. Jimin had never seen him coming here before in the two weeks he had worked at the beach, not that he would complain about his presence. “All good Jimin?” Asked a voice as he was still staring at the newcomer. The boy just realized he had stopped working completely and was just staring at the surfer like an idiot all this time. His face became just as red as a tomato, and he muttered a small 'yes' getting back to work trying to not get too distracted by the oh-so-good looking stranger... which was a total failure. He would always get glimpses of him while he continued surfing, it was a nice view. Except for that one time he raised his eyes to take another glimpse of the godly looking surfer, he noticed he had left the sea. Or did he? Was he under water? Just a few seconds ago he was surfing at the surface. His eyes worriedly looked around for some kind of trace of the boy. He stopped scrubbing the plank he was working on as he saw a white plank seemingly looking like the stranger's one floating without any possible owner nearby. His heart started to sink in worry. Did something happen to him? As he was about to go check out if anything could’ve happened, a girl went out of the water and grabbed the plank swimming away. Eh, so maybe he did leave after all. Jimin looked back at the surfboard and restarted scrubbing it distractedly. It didn't take long before getting disturbed in his work yet again. The sound of laughter and small talks could be heard getting closer by the second and Jimin raised his head ever so slightly just curious to see what kind of people were passing by. As soon as his head went up, he felt his heart jump in his chest. His eyes met a pair of dark ones before they drifted to see the beautiful familiar smile this person was owning. There he was. For a split-second, the boy thought he was looking at him but when the stranger turned his head away to look at his friend, Jimin knew he wasn't. He desperately tried to get back to work but the boy just bending down to get a water bottle out of the black bag sitting on the sand just a few meters away wasn't helping. “See you later, mate,” said the other male that was with him, before waving at him and leaving. Which left the man alone to drink his water and only tempted Jimin, even more, to spare him a glimpse. He was scared the boy would notice how often he looked at him and feel creeped out, he knew that if he was at the other one's place Jimin would totally be. Yet he decided to give in his temptation and glance up once again. He was met by the boy sending him signature bunny smile. “Hey, what are you doing?” He asked in a friendly tone which surprised Jimin. He felt his heart starting to beat hard against his chest as his cheeks turned a light shade of red. “I- I-” The poor board cleaner started panicking deep inside as he racked his brain trying to find some potential English words to answer the handsome stranger looking at him. He turned toward one of his colleagues with a gaze pleading with help but when he saw that the staff in question was occupied, he turned back toward the English-speaking man. “Sorry, bad English?” He tried saying with a broken accent and the stranger's eyes lit up. “Oh, what's your language then? Maybe I speak it.” “Mm- ah... Hangguka?” “You're Korean,” he said smiling as he started speaking Jimin's mother thong which made his eyes lit up too. “Yes! Are you Korean too?” “Yes, I'm Jungkook by the way. What's your name?” “I'm J-Jimin,” he stuttered out, still in awe of this beautiful specimen, his name echoing through his mind. “Want any help with that Jimin?” Jungkook said referring to the boards. The boy shook his head softly with a shy expression on his angelic features. “Oh no, it's fine! I mean it's my job, I wouldn't want you to waste your time on that...” he said trailing off but Jungkook was already taking another plank to scrub it and help Jimin with his job, which made him blush. Well, he was even better than he ever thought, which earned him to smile all timid. By the end of the day, Jimin had his phone number and was slowly admitting himself he liked Jungkook very much. He promised he would text as soon as he got home and Jimin would wait for that text, believe it.