#i have so many thoughts about hamlet why has it become my goal in life to direct this show.

[bloopdydooooo]

i'm asking you abt your version of hamlet but you have to ask me about wtnv ghosts OR kris dreemurr, deal?

for this, i will ask you about both.

(it got too long i hid it under the read more)

ANYWAYS i had a breakthrough like. ten minutes ago cause i was thinking about how i'd put a spin on hamlet. cause i was talking w my director for romeo & juliet a while back and he said how important it is in shakespeare to have something that makes your production just a little special a little unique so people will keep coming to see it. if it's the same plays over and over presented w the same contexts and worlds and everything, no one will want to see it. (i mean i would but i'm. uh. abnormal). and i've been agonizing over what my spin on hamlet would be, were i to direct it (an idea which has taken control of my brain and will not let me go. this has become my dream in life and i'm literally an actor not a director). point is i found it.

i was thinking about Shitty College Kids hamlet and then i was suddenly struck w the passing thought of crime family. and then it kept coming back. and i think i might be a genius. hear me out:

hamlet's family, the royal family of denmark, is actually a crime family. gertrude may be the one who technically runs the show but really she's a mob wife she doesn't exactly make use of her power, instead letting her husband do it. her husband claudius, who has hamlet sr. killed and then marries his sister in law (the kind of wild bullshit i can imagine happening in a mafia movie, of which i have watched none (but will for research)) so he can take control of the family business. it adds a darker, grittier level to basically everything in the play; taking them from high society – royalty, even – to a shady crime family, and fits perfectly with my vision of the play: i crave violence in hamlet, and i think he deserves some blood and gore. its enrichment for him. with a modern take we can give him a gun to kill polonius with, shooting him through something more significant than a curtain (i wouldn't do a mirror obviously but hamlet (2009) i fucking love you for that) and the stakes are all heightened when bullets get involved. plus it really pushes the whole bit where hamlet is sent off to england (and would, i guess, be someone else's territory?), because in this everyone would know he was going to his death. there would be no naivety, no shock horror when he says he was sent to his doom, just people standing by and watching as this kid is sentenced to death. 5.2 is a knife fight, quick and dirty and scrappy – none of the class of a rapier duel – and it raises the stakes a lot. there are rules and regulations in swordfighting, not so much in a rage fueled knife fight. hamlet, in the end, stabs his uncle with either his or laertes' blade but im thinking his. there is no poison it is just a brutal, bloody slaughter. it gives me the darkness and violence i've been hungering for but were harder to push for in the context of a castle, of high society. they still have the power, the influence, but they're taken to a place where i can have all the grit my heart desires without it feeling out of place.

it also makes relationships between characters so much more interesting. hamlet, for example, is still a scholar, a highly emotional college kid who talks in flowery prose and has a passion for theater, but now he's supposed to be inheriting the Family Business and not a kingdom, where all his gayboy bullshit wouldn't be very out of place. it pushes him further as an outsider, as someone that people would turn against, would throw to the wolves. who does that make horatio? hamlet's friend from school, maybe tangentially related to the family but only really through hamlet? how about ophelia? daughter of the councilor to the 'king', is she actually someone that they would want hamlet to marry? and what to make of laertes, who seems to abandon denmark for france? he comes back and is almost instantly accepted back into the inner circle despite having requested leave and happily departed, is claudius gunning for him to take hamlet's place as next in line? rosencrantz and guildenstern? clearly hamlet's friends from within the business they're also at his university, did they follow him there or did they all happen to find themselves in the same place? we're there greased palms to get them in? what about hamlet? and gertrude! the family line ascends through her, it must or claudius wouldn't need to marry her to get the power, but she shows no real desire to exercise it, even when her son is in danger. what's her deal, what's her story? she must have one, she's a fascinating person.

tl;dr the version of hamlet i've been craving is apparently a mob boss au. and you know what? it's awesome.

also. consider the costuming opportunities. they are infinite, and they are fabulous.

i have so many more thoughts but sadly it is 3am and they will not all form properly so i will leave it at this

[priscilla9993]

I think there's something fascinating about some of my favorite characters or works of fiction. It's not because they're relatable, that I want to become them, or even that I condone their actions. It's just because it's another perspective to look at, to see why they did the things they did, how they are the main character in their life, and what makes them so morally ambiguous. At the end of the day, it's about whether they stay true to themselves, what parts they choose to make clear to others and how it's perceived. I'll root for them at times when they do something morally right that look terrible on paper or I'll just cry at how they got to the circumstances they're in. Gosh, there are so many characters that fit that description so take it how you will.

A good amount of people I declare my love to are in Ouat and the majority of them are "villains". They may kill, do morally unethical things, but at the end of it all, they are doing what they want even if it's not what they need. They are proactive in their quest and are sick of being reactive to anything that comes their way, not letting fate be the determined destiny. And if it requires being evil to get their way, with what started out as good intentions but then becomes a blind goal, then so be it. They don't always have backstories that make you feel for them but you understand that sometimes, a person who was once bullied becomes a bully, standing up for themselves in a way most people would be against. Freedom or revenge, it's all the same to them and I love it. When I think about classic literature from Shakespeare or stuff we were forced to read in high school like Lord of the Flies, Fahrenheit 451, or 1984, I get an adrenaline rush. Not that the protagonists were the best, heck, Holden Caulfield was an unreliable narrator, but I still wanted to know why they did what they did and who they were. All the experiences that made up their identity and self. The character analysis that was sometimes hardest to write or stand for was sometimes the most emotionally fulfilling because it took something that I saw was there and was slowly put into words. A thing I love about Winston was that he was a flawed man who wanted freedom and to do good, but did some morally ambiguous things or betrayed people just so that he could survive or because he didn't know what he really felt. Was he a product of society and his surroundings or was he himself all along? Winston has plenty of time to think but whatever thing he can do in a monotonous and pressuring society was profound, if not despicable. A person I'll profess that I don't like his actions but respect his internal turmoil leading up to them is Hamlet. I thought he did his friends, family, and girlfriend dirty, but he was being plotted against, grieving, and depressed from the cycle of life and death. How close he was to his father? I don't know but he saw his ghost and longed to make things right, hating his uncle and mother for incest and obvious murder for the crown. Does it make Hamlet's thoughts of murder or suicide righteous? No, but darn, does he make me both pity him and root for him to get some reprieve from his suffering while not condoning killing of self or others to achieve that. And if we are going to talk about Preminger, I think he deserves to take the crown for multiple reasons. He’s a man of his word, was “borrowing” gold in order to give it back to the people once he became king, is an aristocrat from humble upbringings, can think on the fly, didn’t force anyone to marry him, got soldiers to trust him normally, and did way more for the people than just the queen or Annaliese did, both of whom got the crown by birth or marriage.   I guess what I’m saying is the most fun thing about literature or media is trying to read deeper into them. It’s infuriating that English teachers try to teach students why they should care about a character that requires some hard text or analysis, but at the end of the day, I’m glad for some of them trying to explain it to me and a good amount of my own time reading trashy or complicated novels before realizing maybe they do have a point.

[yenslilac]

Daenerys Targaryen and Ophelia: An Essay

I wrote this a while back, just after Season 8 ended. After a few edits, I decided to share it with you! Disclaimer: I wrote this fueled with rage at 11 at night for two weeks straight. Don’t judge. 

Part 1: The Heroine Goes Absolutely Bats**t Crazy

Ophelia. Known throughout time as That Crazy Chick Who Drowned Herself. What a legacy. And Daenerys: She Who Toasted A City Like Marshmallows And Then Was Offed By Her Nephew/Lover. The sad thing is, these are my heroes. What a life. But the ‘Insane Heroine’ trope is prevalent in many forms of media – Dark Phoenix is another example. At first glance, Daenerys and Ophelia have very little in common; Daenerys is a powerful and assertive leader, and Ophelia is a background love interest. The one thing that unites them – they go crazy because of rejected love. While their descent into madness is slightly different; Ophelia is pitiful, Daenerys aggressive, both end up dying indirectly or directly as a result of their lover. Lovely. Let’s talk first about Ophelia – She is rebuffed Hamlet, the original pathetic sad boy, and at the death of her father, goes insane. After several performances of her insanity, she makes her way to a river where she falls (or throws?) herself into the water and drowns. This is witnessed by Gertrude, who then goes on to tell her brother Laertes of her death. It’s a pretty monologue, describing the flowers and plants growing along the riverbank, and how pretty and peaceful she looked as she sank under water and DIED. Remember this. Then my girl Daenerys Stormborn of House Targaryen, First of Her Name, Queen of the Andals and the First Men etc. etc. Oh boy. Ohhhhhh boy. What can I say except **************** ***** ** **********. Thank you for your time. But she like Ophelia, was scorned by her Boyfriend Who Felt It Was Just A Little Weird That She Was His Aunt. But like, your paternal grandparents and the rest of your great-whatever grandparents were siblings, and your maternal grandparents were cousins so… But I digress. Wait no, this is what it’s all about. I’m back! I un-digress! So, she goes ‘insane’ cause she can’t get laid (don’t we all?) and roasts a whole lot of people and becomes… Hitler for some reason… So, Boyfriend Who Felt It Was Just A Little Weird That She Was His Aunt And Really Wishes He Can Just Catch A Break For Once Is It Really Too Much Too Ask is egged on by Murder Sister™ and Smarty Pants McGee to kill her. Just like my friends! He makes out with her and stabs her (best of both worlds!) and she dies. Very prettily. Remember this. You know. YOU KNOW I’m going to rant about this.

Part 2: Heroic Man Kills The Crazy Lady Like The Feral Dog She Is (But Feels Sad About It) 

Trope as old as time… why is this still fine… surely there’s a better plot deviiiiiice. “Duty is the death of love…” Shut up. Shut up. No, it isn’t. There is a thing called multitasking. You should try it. But let’s recap. Woman goes crazy because of lover/hero of the story rebuffing her because he’s got issues of his own that he doesn’t care to share with her, and close friend/family member is killed. This is when the paths of the Hero diverge. Hamlet does not actually kill Ophelia himself, but his careless actions towards her eventually drive her to suicide. Jon, on the other hand, does kill Daenerys, (no, I’m not mad. I’m just disappointed) by a knife to the heart while snogging her. (I’d like to take the opportunity to say that this was ridiculous and yes, I will die mad about it.) What else is similar? Hamlet holds Ophelia’s (or in some adaptations tries to) dead body in his arms as she is about to be buried and Jon holds Daenerys as she dies. They cry and wish it didn’t have to be this way, but really guys, this is Your Fault.

The problem with this trope in particular (and I’m talking about a lot of other examples here, like Dark Phoenix and Wolverine) is that it renders the killer sympathetic. They didn’t want to do this, but it was for the good of humanity, it was a mercy, blah blah blah. Really? Did someone make you kill her? No, a sense of moral justice does not count. Hamlet abuses and humiliates Ophelia then claims he loved her so much that ‘forty thousand brothers could not…” Creepy. I have to say, creepy. And Jon Snow. “Was it right? It doesn’t feel right…” I’m glad you came to that conclusion. I really am. But I knew this from the moment you stuffed that butter knife into her spleen, so honestly you don’t have any business feeling sorry for yourself. If there’s one lesson that Game of Thrones and Shakespeare has taught me, it is:

(not an artist, don’t judge)

Part 3: Someone Died And The Director Said, “Cool But Like… Make It Fashion.”

Do you remember what I told you to remember? Did you? Cause I’m about to RANT.

Throughout time (like 500 years) men have been painting Ophelia’s drowning – the probable suicide of a tormented young woman – and made sure she looked hot while doing it. True, the description of her death is pretty and all, but depictions of her floating just below the surface, a dramatic and lovely pose and flowers strewn around her glamorise her death – something many other people have taken note on – and give her death something of a peaceful, serene departing note, rather than the death of a woman so deranged she did not appear to understand the gravity of her situation as she sank under water. Daenerys suffers a similar case of SDPS (Sexy Dead Person Syndrome). Let’s go through it step by step, shall we? While in an embrace with someone she loves and trusts, she is stabbed in the heart area (I guess?), and she dies. The End. My respect for white men flew off with Drogon. But I haven’t complained properly yet! Compared to other characters, like Myrcella, Joffrey and Catelyn Stark to name a few, her death was very clean. In these other examples, blood runs down their faces or spurts out of their neck in suitably graphic fashion but Daenerys’ case, two thin lines of blood trickle from her nose and mouth. Pretty, pretty. We get a brief shot of a pool of blood on the snow as Drogon picks her up, but blink and you’ll miss it. She looks shocked and confused as she dies, yet the next shot of her face shows her eyes are closed and an almost peaceful expression on her face. Not only this but we don’t actually get any proper Last Words, when she knows she is about to die. She makes no sound at all. She dies prettily and quietly. We also don’t see the knife at all until she is dead, removing any very graphic nature from the scene. A lot of the camera shots are of Jon’s face. This scene is not about Daenerys Targaryen’s death; This is about Jon Snow’s inner turmoil as he selflessly sacrifices the woman he loves to save the rest of the world. Hold up one second I gotta……

I mean, come on. Daenerys is barely mentioned after her death. She, a woman who freed hundreds, no, thousands of slaves and worked hard to reach her goals (albeit a little dragonfire-y) yet she dies without a whisper and is forgotten almost immediately. She becomes less of a central character and more of a catalyst for other men’s rise to power (see Bran the Broken). Wait, what about Sansa, you cry? Well, at this point, she was so out of character I’m striking her from the narrative. Bye bitch 😊 The same goes for most of the other women in the last season. They become plot devices with a little agency and that’s about it. Missandei? Unnecessarily killed to create the “Mad Queen”. Cersei? A compelling villain reduced to a ‘crying girl who wants to be comforted’. Arya? Kills the Night King and then, I dunno. Sansa? Suspicious of Daenerys because of reasons, betrays her brother/cousin because she doesn’t want Daenerys on the throne, then just ‘forgets’ about this whole thing to become Queen in the North. Brienne? Honourable knight left sobbing after her one (k)night stand left her. Another thing that many of these women have in common (the ones who survived to the final episode anyway) is that none of them have romantic endgames despite this being set up. Arya and Gendry have been close friends in Season 2 and 3, then <3  and everyone (i.e. me) thought that you know, they get together and stuff, because that’s what the writers seemed to be setting up. But nope. Arya’s all like ‘I wanna kill the queen’ (which she never does) and throws all that out the window. (But Gendry was totally on that ship at the end). Brienne and Jaime seemed to finally stop eye fricking and then got straight to the actual fricking but nooooo. “I lOvE CeRseI! WE’re bOTh tERrIble PeOple!” And of course, the crowning glory:

And the woman who actually does come out on top is Sansa, a largely unemotional, suspicious woman whose brother is now the king and made her a queen because she’s his sister. Riiiight. That’s totally not nepotism or anything. 

The End: But Boy, Am I Just Beginning

To conclude, the ending of Daenerys Targaryen was largely misogynistic as it painted a brutal and dishonourable murder as an act of mercy and gave the killer (sorry man, I feel like I’m throwing you under the bus here, but it must be said) a sympathetic angle as a heartbroken martyr sacrificing for the greater good. I had high expectations, I really did, but you just took it anD THREW IT IN THE DIRT. Good god. But it’s fine, I have fanfiction anyway.

Thank you for reading this, if you stuck around this far!

[leo-interactive-fiction]

Can you tell us some little facts or give a lil description about the new side characters?

Sure! Let’s see, I’ll start with dorm Card. This dorm is comprised of a varying cast of characters with names that relate them to a deck of cards! Why? I just thought it was cool and fun haha.

Uno: See below.

Juno Winter: A no-nonsense female student with an authoritative air. In her short bill military cap she hides olive colored hair, marking her a member of Frenza. The peacekeeper of her team, she is particularly adept at incapacitating with an extendable baton, the likes of which she sometimes uses to pacify fights between members of her own team. . When she takes off her cap and lets down her hair, her personality shifts and becomes much more erratic and refers to herself as Juno Summer. Her combat style turns altogether more feral in this state, disregarding her weapon to using her hands and nails to press an advantage. She is considered the fourth most powerful member of the team.

“It is not my intention to bring her out. It is best to keep casualties to a minimum.” “Can you not dodge?! Pathetic! Pathetic! So pathetic! Kahaha!”

Rex: A tacitern swordsman, he has never shared his first name; only ever offering the formal title of Rex. Ambitious, Rex has a warrior’s soul with a flame that will never extinguish. Pushing his bodily limits, he will train until his body fractures or incapacitates itself. Unyielding, once he has set himself on a task, he will hyperfocus until it’s accomplished. Utilizing a straight sword, he is considered the most able sword user in the academy, and seeks to challenge and best anyone who uses a similar weapon.

“Injured? Inconsequential. Come from any angle, you will not best me: this I claim, upon my formal title of Rex.”

Acer: The most competent fighter in team Card, and some may say within the academy, Acer was raised by the strict teachings of his parents; members of Vestia’s finest First Division. When the declaration of war was announced, his family returned back to Vestia to prepare. With a spiteful relationship between him and his family, the decision to stay in Triaina only furthered the schism. Despite his history, he has a relatively casual personality, and takes most things lightly except for combat, which he expresses eagerness in. He excels in hand-to-hand combat, and uses every part of his body as a weapon with savage intensity.

“Let’s have a go, shall we? No holding back! I’d like a challenge!”

Joker Card: A lean male with turquoise hair, marking him a Hospian. A member of Hospur’s distinctive Shinobi Clan, Joker trains in infiltration and reconnaissance. A calm and gentle soul, they reason through everything carefully and thoughtfully. Seemingly two steps ahead at any given point, Joker knows what is required of him as a leader and efficiently manages the responsibility. Hospur’s Shinobi Clan holds no political stake and a close relationship with Triaina’s Faction of Beggars, providing Joker the opportunity to further his training at Triaina Academy. Joker adamantly deflects personal questions regarding his actual training, history, and connections, earning him an enigmatic air. His closed-off nature and place of origin keeps him from earning the full trust of his team, but he is able to make do with the independently competent members that make up Card.

“My name is Joker Card, descendant of the Shinobi Clan. I am impressed by the abilities of team Xeno. I look forward to seeing how that translates to their leader.”

Dorm Gold: This dorm has a more ideological bond tying the members. Each student in Gold is in some way aristocratic or regarded with high esteem.

Gaul von Sentinel (Literally ‘of Sentinel’): Gaul is a noble whose family oversees Sentinel, a very modestly sized fishing hamlet on the eastern edge of Triaina. The Sentinel family has overlooked the town since its inception, and Gaul regards the title highly. He has fiery red hair, and takes pride in his fencing abilities. Believing noble families should place the protection and well-being of those they oversee above all else, Gaul holds a deep-seated hatred for the aristocracy of Frenza, who live affluently off the backs of an indentured servant population and tarnish the good name of other nobles. They are considered the least powerful in team Gold.

“I will clean the taint of your materialism with blood. En garde!”

Lewis Gear: Hails from Orden as the heir of Gear Corp., one of the major corporations that run Orden’s infamous Desert Race. Lewis hold particular disdain on the lawless Dens that spot the desert, considering them a blight upon the sands and useful only as a form of entertainment. While not the most physically imposing, Lewis is a particularly conniving dealmaker who’s able to easily gleam the basic interests of anyone he meets. It is never known whether the friendships he makes are genuine or stepping stones in his ultimate goal of developing a worldwide conglomerate. Lewis is considered the fourth most powerful member in the team.

“I have an interesting proposition that might be just up your alley. What do you say? You can’t go wrong, making friends with me.”

Princilia Crown: A self-proclaimed noble with Gothic Victorian fashion, Princilia comes from a poor family and has amassed vast wealth through deceptive diplomacy and illicit deals. Particularly untrusting and uncaring of humans, her only friend is a makeshift doll she can always be found with named Amen. Beyond her seemingly innocent appearance, she justifies inhumane and ignoble actions through the guise that it is Amen’s ideas. Using particularly crafty diversion tactics, she is an underhanded fighter with little moral investment. Her disposition leads to many finding her unnerving, however Vale has developed an admiration for her crafty determination, and wishes to earn her trust.

“How bothersome. Amen, what should I do...? Oh, I see... Let us be rid of them, then. Hmhmhm...”

Treyla Wunderkind: A child prodigy in every sense, Treyla grew up showered in the praise and adoration of everyone around her, earning her a substantial ego and necessity to claim perfection in everything she does. Able to take in information with considerable speed and ease, perhaps more remarkable is her ability to accurately emulate the complicated mechanical actions of anyone she observes. Despite her talents, she spurred her much less talented younger brother into the leadership position in the hopes of supporting him out of the large shadow she casts. Treyla holds a deeply intimated affection for her brother, the likes of which is rarely and awkwardly reciprocated.     

“I know Vale will grow into the position with time. He just needs the support of his dear sister!”

Vale Wunderkind: A timid boy with little in the way of self-confidence due to being unable to meet the unrealistic expectations set upon him throughout the course of his life. While he enjoys the company of his endearing sister, the knowledge that he will always be overshadowed when she is near causes him to distance their relationship, much to Treyla’s disappointment. Considered a weakling, and not a particularly high scorer on exams, Vale’s redeeming quality is the ability to bring together unlikely members and have them function with little internal conflict. This may be due to pity for his shortcomings or an innate magnetism he has. As a central mold between the mostly asociable and inconsiderate members of team Gold, Vale is the unlikely best candidate for the leadership position.

“I know I’m not the best but...when I see how bright you shine, it inspires me. Please be patient with me: I’ll try my hardest...”

Thank ya for the ask! Let me know what you think of this new cast of characters! :)

[vaguely-concerned]

Mass Effect: Annihilation thoughts

TL;DR I fucking LOVED IT, a balm to my heart after struggling through Nexus Uprising! Also canonical lesbians! The sweetest quarian & his badass grandma! Elcor Hamlet except this time it’ll make you cry!!! 

- Aaaaaah the audiobook reader is Tom Taylorson (so male Ryder)!! Fryda Wolf (female Ryder) read the two others and did a nice job, but man I’m soft for his voice in a way only rivaled by (...outside-of-Overwatch!)Jennifer Hale and Nicholas Boulton haha. He also has a much better handle on the pronunciations and voices for the different alien species -- delightful, I’m still cackling over his pitch perfect elcor impersonation. (Bioware please give him more Scott Ryder to voice I miss my son)

- I’m only about half an hour in and this is already SO much better than Nexus Uprising, it really does feel like a brave new galaxy haha. Very funny, very warm and smart and engaging in how it does its characterization and Valente clearly has affection for the setting and the universe, she and Jemisin both do incredible jobs with these. 

- I’m fucking crying laughing at this cross-species near-brawl over a flower arrangement, god I love Mass Effect SO MUCH (what a neat idea though. something blooming quietly even when no one can see it. impractical as hell and hilariously including a high-nutrition celery now, but still neat)

Taylorson continues to wonderful things with the voices, that volus suit sound is so good. (he’s just generally really good at comedy) also a volus bellowing insults ‘moments before punching an anti-bouquet batarian in the groin’ sdafhjklsahfsjadkhfklajshdfkjlsadhf

- a high as a kite elcor... what a time to be alive, to get to read this book

I have already reached the ‘I LOVE EVERYONE IN THIS BAR’ stage with these characters, hard boiled drell detective lady and sweet sweet quarian first officer and manically enthusiastic elcor doctor TOT I would die for any one of you!!!

- The quarian/multispecies ark was built for long-term habitation, potentially over multiple generations. So what you’re telling me is that the quarians are the only ones who fucking thought this through and the rest of the Initiative probably should have listened to the people who’ve essentially been living on arks for ages. Who’d’ve thunk huh lol. (I guess the in-universe explanation is that people like the mysterious benefactor just wanted those arks yeeted to Andromeda ASAP, no time to get fancy in case the Reapers changed up their schedule. Fair enough)

- ;n; petition to let senna have a SAM pls (also uh. how happy do you think the stringently anti-AI quarian pathfinder will be when he finds out about everyone else’s SAMs lol lol lol he’s going to PASS OUT FROM RAGE upon meeting ryder. well he sounds like an asshole, I hope he dies so senna gets a chance)  

- I can’t BELIEVE yorrik is an anti-stratfordianist, i am betRAYED! disgraceful, how can I still love you knowing this (and yet I do he is extremely funny and sweet)!!! (at least his theory is that this so-called ‘shakespeare’ was actually an elcor, which makes it better somehow lol. anything so long as he’s not an oxfordian tbh)

senna and yorrik’s friendship is so good and wholesome 

- I really love the consistent alien POVs in this book, mass effect should indulge in this more -- everyone loves this universe so much, bioware, stop making us squint through a human lense to look at it!!  

- oh of course quarian ‘pirates’ exist, the people who’re thrown out of the fleet must be doing something huh. 

- haven’t written that many notes in a while just because I’m enjoying myself so much, I keep forgetting 

- lfsdkhfsajkldhfskadjhfsjakdfhsdkjfh communist volus!!!! this is not a drill, communist volus! I am completely and utterly charmed by this entire book

- the quarian ancestor VI is so interesting and weirdly touching. senna is adorable (and relatably neurotic lol)

grandma AI smoking T___________T I love everything about this, she’s so cool. the worldbuilding being done around pre-geth revolution rannoch here... exquisite 

- way to make me cry about batarians cat valente ;_______;

- the voice acting is SO FUCKING GOOD! I keep forgetting it’s one dude reading all these characters haha, I caught myself wanting to look up who voiced this dying batarian. (special shoutout that he does so many wonderfully distinct and specific female voices!) 

- haHA I KNEW the quarian VI was a full AI (or near enough that it makes little difference tbh)!!! this fabulous grandma was self aware the entire time b i t c h e s !!!!

- the running joke of borbala’s ‘you need ______? I can make _______ happen’ is SO satisfying hahaha

ooooooh serious femslash vibes!!!! initially I thought batarian ex-crime matriarch was too old for drell PI, but this is undeniable. (I don’t think we actually ever get to know how old annex is, anyway, come to think of it) I guess if asari get to be five times older than everyone else and still fuck freely this isn’t really that weird lol

- “don’t look! it’s not so bad if you don’t look!” ofhsdalfhskldlsfjas oh senna baby boy 

hey qetsi? qetsi both senna and I love grandma liat more than you. stand the fuck down 

- NOOOO GRANDMA LIAT ;______________________________________;

- do you think SAM could meet liat (either ship!liat or just grandma!liat).... and have... a friend ;_________; (a cool laidback friend who isn’t a murderous angaran ai who might very well go the murder suicide sort of friendship route lol) 

anyway I miss SAM a lot and love him??

- yorrik noooooooooooo this is awful everything is bad and terrible I love all of them so much why must senna be sad and watch everything he loves fade away 😭😭😭

“Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood/Clean from my hand?” He realized he’d forgotten to preface the words with an emotion. Now they wouldn’t understand what he meant.

Oh. Oh what a way to drive home the sadness and loneliness of this moment f u c k  (and again the emotion taylorson brings to it jesus cHRIST) 

I’m destroyed over how much senna and yorrik love each other, cross species found family out here wrecking my heart in true mass effect style 

- yorrik is such a great character though. he’d be so easy to make a one-note joke character (like most elcor have been in canon lbr), but there’s nuance and depth and just enough satsifyingly believable alienness there. (I love the staunch elcor ‘you can’t call anything love that hasn’t lasted at least two centuries’ perspective haha) his memories of his childhood and disappointment with his profession and everything... goodnight sweet prince indeed :(

- they went and made elcor hamlet heartbreaking how dare they 

(to be real for a second I think some of the human culture references are a little bit clunky, but the elcor hamlet stuff is perfect. contextualizing a throwaway joke from the original trilogy and giving it emotional depth, helping us see it from the elcor perspective and how frustrating and lonely it is to be so fundamentally not emotionally understood or seen on a level most of the other races are, despite their other differences, even though you have all these feelings and want to communicate... its very good.)   

fun additional fact: both mordin and yorrik have played/wanted to play polonius in a production of hamlet! though I guess mordin is the slightly problematic fave in that duo and yorrik is a sweet melancholic angel who has never done anything wrong in his life, I would say protect him but I guess it’s too late for that D:  

- qetsi giving off some real ophelia vibes here, I wish yorrik was here to see it, he’s the only one who’d properly appreciate it despite it all

- I. am. SO FUCKING HUNGRY for more mass effect after this (well even more so than usual) I’m so hyped!! I love this universe so much! I want a new andromeda game with senna as quarian pathfinder and grandma liat as the ship’s AI and see how they interact with ryder and SAM! (honestly though I feel like senna might be the one who’d translate the most cleanly into a game, I think there’s a lot of potential in him that’s barely being realized towards the end there with his deep righteous rage cutting through his uncertainty. also I just want nice things for him. is that so much to ask. he is a good boy, yorrik was so right.)

- aaaah not just femslash vibes, canonical lesbians, this is not a drill! I can’t wait until they propose... ‘we get shit done together, want to be in good cop/bad cop with me until the day we die y/n?’  

- the ME universe doesn’t feel quite itself without all these ‘background’ species hanging around, I suddenly realize. I dream of an Andromeda sequel with all of them on the board and in play again Y-------Y 

- potential Liat and SAM dynamics are so fucking interesting though! if she becomes/is confirmed as a full AI (all I hope and dream of), you’ll have two artificial intelligences with such different starting points but not that dissimilar goals? Liat was an organic person once who’s looking out for her family even now, and SAM is completely artificial but also intimately tied to and protecting His People. (and pulling a whole lot of symbolic weight re: the strength of familial/interpersonal relationships to boot; he’s the best way alec ryder managed to connect with his children. even though he was dead. because as established alec ryder was a disaster of a person)  

- I enjoyed the loose murder mystery structure of this quite a lot, but that might also be because nexus uprising is so shapeless and meandering by comparison that I’d be relieved by anything else (sorry I’ll stop ragging on NU soon it just. took some hours of my life I can’t get back)  

- jemisin did great stuff for characters already in andromeda (cora, SAM, alec ryder) and valente made me remember just why I love this universe so much and desperately want these aspects brought to andromeda too... and now I’ve exhausted all the fresh mass effect content I had available to me and will sit here consumed with lust for the rest of the time it takes for a new game to be announced thank you and goodbye  

[vanessakirbyfans]

After breaking out in Netflix’s hit global series and stealing scenes in 'Mission:  Impossible' and 'Hobbs & Shaw,' the British actresses about to display her range with frontier romance 'The World to Come' and gut-wrenching drama 'Pieces of a Woman.'

Vanessa Kirby was two days away from shooting Mission: Impossible 7 in Venice — reprising her role as the glamorous gunrunner known as the White Widow — when Paramount halted production. It was late February, and Italy had just recorded Europe’s then-worst outbreak of the novel coronavirus, at the time not officially labeled a pandemic. Tom Cruise’s billion-dollar blockbuster franchise had become the first major Hollywood casualty.

Seven months on, and with the film industry appearing irreversibly changed, Kirby is preparing her return to Venice. But it’s not for Mission: Impossible (she starts shooting that later in September). With The World to Come and Pieces of a Woman, filmed almost back-to-back in late 2019 and early 2020, the British star, 32, has the rare honor of having two films compete against each other in the Biennale, the first A-list film festival to physically take place since cinemas — and much beyond — shut their doors.

Appearing alongside Katherine Waterston and Casey Affleck in The World to Come — a frontier romance set against the rugged and patriarchal terrain of the mid-19th century American Northeast — Kirby plays flame-haired Tallie, who sparks an intense and liberating affair with a farmer’s wife, played by Waterston.

But it’s Pieces of a Woman — also heading to Toronto — and her quietly powerful and gut-wrenching turn as Martha, a woman dealing with towering loss after a home birth that goes wrong (shot in one hugely impressive yet frequently hard-to-watch half-hour take), that marks yet another new chapter for the actress, who already has condensed what many would consider a lifetime’s worth of career milestones into just a few years. A critics’ favorite on the British stage; Emmy-nominated and BAFTA-winning for her global screen breakout as Princess Margaret in the opening seasons of Netflix’s smash hit The Crown; part of two of the biggest action franchises around (she also appeared in Fast & Furious spinoff Hobbs & Shaw last year); and, for her next act, independent cinema’s newest leading lady.

Even before the reviews come in, Pieces of a Woman — also starring Shia LaBeouf, Ellen Burstyn and Sarah Snook — has found a fan in Martin Scorsese, who recently came aboard as executive producer.

“I haven’t stopped smiling,” says Kirby, speaking from the south London home she shares with her sister Juliet (a theatrical agent) and two close friends. “It’s such a mind-blowing thing.”

The actress was originally shown the script in L.A. by filmmaking couple Sam and Ashley Levinson (Ashley is producing the film for Bron Studios). Within 24 hours, she'd jumped on a plane to London, then Budapest, to meet director Kornél Mundruczó. “You know when you’re supposed to do something. ... It felt so right,” she says. “I wanted to show up and tell Kornél face-to-face how much I loved it and how much it touched me.”

Mundruczó, a Cannes regular who won the top prize in the 2014 Un Certain Regard sidebar for White God, also was taking something of a career leap, Pieces of a Woman marking his first English-language feature. But he found the right partner with whom to “take the big risk together,” likening Kirby to his favorite screen siren, Catherine Deneuve. “She’s someone who can express emotion for the unseen, and that’s very difficult,” he says. The World to Come director Mona Fastvold is equally praising of her star, describing her as an actor “who can truly disarm us” and their work together “one of most fulfilling creative partnerships I've had so far.”

Kirby, who cites Gena Rowlands as her cinematic idol (she has a photo from Rowlands’ 1980 drama Gloria in her room), says she had been “biding her time” waiting for such an opportunity: “I felt ready to lead a movie for a long time, but to actually do it was such a gift. Now that I’ve done it, it feels like a new stage for me.”

While there were few thespian genes in her family (her father is a top prostrate surgeon and her mother once edited Country Living), an 11-year-old Kirby caught the bug after watching a production of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. “I suddenly realized the power of telling these stories is that they can make you feel differently about yourself when you leave,” she says. “And I think that’s always been a goal for me since.”

Countless school plays — including an all-girl Hamlet (Kirby as Gertrude) — would follow, continuing on into college, where spare periods and evenings would be spent relentlessly rehearsing and putting on shows with friends (including Alice Birch, who recently adapted Normal People for TV). Audience numbers didn’t matter – several struggled to make it through a four-hour Eugene O’Neill adaptation, while there were definite walkouts when a group of them took Shakespeare's Julius Caesar to Edinburgh (“Why would you take Julius Caesar to a comedy festival?” she laughs).

It was all for the discovery, experience and thrill, which is why — just a few years later — when Kirby received her first paycheck, having picked up an agent and signed on for her first three professional productions, it felt strange.

“I still have the vision in my mind of holding that white paper and being like, why are you paying me? Someone’s paying me for this? Because I’ve done it so much.”

Performances of As You Like It, Edward II and A Streetcar Named Desire and collaborations with directors like Benedict Andrews would quickly establish Kirby as one of the U.K.’s hottest stage talents in the early 2010s. But by this point, screen had already come calling. BBC drama The Hour — a small part as a troubled young aristocrat alongside a pre-Bond Ben Whishaw — was her TV debut in 2011, landing four years before being cast in her most famous role to date.

The Crown creator Peter Morgan recalls going “rogue” when he chose Kirby, overruling the other show execs’ preferred choice for Princess Margaret. She had turned up to the audition looking like what he describes as a “catastrophic mess”; fake tan smeared haphazardly on her shins and hands stained orange (she’d forgotten to wash them after applying the tan).

“But she had an electrifying presence. ... You realized you were in the company of a rare and special talent,” he says, adding that her chaotic appearance plus visible nerves evoked the essential vulnerability he was looking for. “It was very Annie Hall.”

Subsequent screen tests — and the public reaction — confirmed what Morgan first saw, that Kirby was a “high-impact booking,” much like the royal she was taking on. “There was no room in which you were not conscious that Princess Margaret was there.”

To craft her Margaret, in which Kirby laid the largely unknown foundations that would support the royal’s more brash and defiant public persona in later life, she absorbed everything she could, seeking out footage where the princess thought cameras had stopped rolling, plastering her walls in photos and even listening to her favorite music on repeat (including a version of “Scotland the Brave” played on the bagpipes, much to her housemates' dismay).

“It was so exciting to play someone that was so complicated and so conflicted, who was really struggling with a sense of who she was,” she says. “But I also had to chart this journey carefully, across 20 years of a person's life, and try to make it believable and also set her up for the rest of the seasons that were coming.”

Mission: Impossible came off the back of The Crown, sometime in the middle of season two. “I think Tom had watched it, because he watches everything,” says Kirby, who was surprised to be warmly welcomed into the “Mission Family” during her first meeting with Cruise and director Christopher McQuarrie. “On my way home I rang my agent going, ‘I think I got the job, I’m not sure.’”

Hobbs & Shaw arrived via another route, Kirby approached by creative duo David Leitch and Kelly McCormick after she led a 2018 summer run of August Strindberg’s Miss Julie at the National Theatre.

While different adrenaline-fuelled vehicles, Kirby used both blockbusters to creatively “subvert” the usual expectations for female characters in action films, particularly within the typically masculine Fast & Furious world. “I was like, I don’t want to have to be saved ever, I don’t want to have to wear anything compromising, I want her to have her own emotional journey.” Her efforts were rewarded when a journalist wrote that Hattie — Kirby’s fearless MI6 operative in Hobbs & Shaw — had been her son’s favorite character. “How cool is that?” (She found the writer’s email to thank her).

As Kirby waits to start on Mission: Impossible 7 (and also 8 — she says the White Widow will likely “float in and out” of upcoming storylines), and for audiences in Venice and Toronto to see her first lead role, this philosophy is set to continue into what could be yet another career progression.

Alongside a daily film club with her housemates (with titles ranging from a list she found of the Dardenne Brothers’ favourite films to the cult so-bad-it’s-good hit The Room), Kirby has also used the months of lockdown to consider her next creative step and dream: setting up her own production company.

“I feel so excited by the thought that there’s so many female stories that haven’t been told. And so many that have examined the psychology of a man in a particular situation, but not the woman,” she says. “I feel like there’s so much opportunity for that and that we do actually have a responsibility. Changing that space is very important to me.”

[the-fox-knows]

‘I’ll Tell You a Story’

Resigned, but not Hopeless (3)

Ragnar mayn’t have known the land intimately, but he knew that where there was a manor, a hamlet would be nestled nearby. It was there that they would find the supplies needed. The woman, Molly – he silently tested the feel of her name on his tongue – had made it clear that she had some preliminary knowledge in how to treat his wounds. After extensive fighting and some rather enjoyable acts, regardless of their authenticity (the taste of berries still sweetened his mouth), the gash he had sustained in battle was lancing pain through his leg. He would soon be unable to walk on it without losing every last ounce of breath. Even riding made him grit his teeth.

When asked, Molly confirmed his theory of a nearby village, relaying a quick route ere interrupting herself.

“You don’t mean to attack them, do you?”

As best he could, he spared a quizzical glance over his shoulder at the ridiculous assumption.

“If you think me capable of executing a one-man assault in my current state I fear you either give too much credence to my skill or believe me to be a fool.”

Behind him, she mumbled something unintelligible to his ears. Then she said a little louder and in a tongue recognizable to him, “they are only farmers after all.”

“You disabuse the farmers when you do not know them. Do not be so quick to underestimate farmers’ capabilities.”

“I disabuse the farmers because I know them,” she returned. “They are pitiful to watch when tax season is due.”

“Your master,” Ragnar began, “he is unkind to his tenants?”

“Extremely so,” she answered immediately. “His mother was better, but she died two years ago. But I no longer have a master,” she added, her tone full of derision and aimed at the back of his head. Ragnar indulged in a brief grin.

“If it is disagreeable for you to be without a master - I can be yours.”

“No you cannot!” and her arms withdrew from around his waist, giving him a rough shove to the back, causing him to wince. “And don’t you dare even think it!” Her tone was full of feeling as he felt her hands settle behind him, refusing to once more embrace him. He did not smile again, though his demeanor suggested amusement rather than the reverse.

After a time, Ragnar returned to their original point.

“I was a farmer.”

Silence followed this statement until Molly responded with a curt, “really,” indicative of acknowledging what he said without possessing interest.

“When I think of it, it seems now to belong to another life.”

While his goal was to draw her out, he could not help getting caught up in those not-too-distant memories of a simpler time when his only responsibility was for himself, his modest land, and any trouble Rollo might have gotten into.

Unknown to him, the object of his current interests was now fully listening to him as his words struck her with familiarity. The past was another life that belonged to another person; more care-free and ignorant of what would become of them.

“You say nothing to this?” Ragnar questioned, returning to the present. “I thought you would scoff or laugh or make one of those unintelligible sounds women are so fond of making.”

She made one now in response, though, she coupled it with an answer.

“You may have been a farmer, but you are, before anything, a Northman.”

“Why ‘before anything’?’” he inquired, curious at her sentiment.

“Because farmers tend the land and their families; they do not seek distant shores to pillage and plunder, to rape and kill.” After speaking her meaning she withdrew once more and he felt the stiffness of either fear or worry or perhaps even hatred enter her.

He could not deny that those actions named were unknown to the men of his community – of his country. But it was also true that what those actions provided in the long-term was future prosperity for his people and the beginnings of a security gained in the ever-vast and changing world. A foreigner’s ignorance could be excused. As it was, further talking was proving to be less and less enjoyable while stabs of pain cut him to the bone with every other stride of the horse.

Therefore, they both of them remained ensconced in their own thoughts for the remainder of their flight through the woods.  Once or twice they were forced to be still or pick around a less open path to avoid the approaching sound of a mounted guard, but other than a few close encounters they detangled from the low branches and, at times, unruly bush unmolested.

She would tend to him, and then he would find the way back to his camp. A string of well-aimed curses to be delivered to Horik circulated his mind, indulging in the foulest of insults simply because he knew he would never be able to use them and survive. His approach would have to be one of patience and cunning. He sniffed, swallowing back blood and mucus. It was nothing foreign to his nature. Had he not done the very same with Haraldson?

Behind him, Molly grumbled something.

She would be coming with him to the camp. And then…

He wasn’t certain.

He could try to tie her up again, though he suspected that she would be sensitive to any motions towards that and would slip away before he had the chance of hauling her pretty behind once more onto the boat. What a state of fury she would be in. In spite of his dark thoughts, he smiled at the image it conjured of her rich, long hair flying madly about her head, of her color rising with exertion.

Ragnar was not yet certain of how he would do it, but he was certain of wanting her. That was enough. Her words returned to him: ‘pillage and plunder, to rape and kill.’ It was what she expected from him, he realized. What she did not expect, however, was that his interest in her, while assuredly charmed by her physiognomy, was of a somewhat wholesome nature. Somewhat.

He no longer felt her book against his back; that item that had become something akin to a cumbersome talisman that he refused to part with. Now returned to its key, and the ultimate fountain that could spurt forth answers to questions that had had the chance to grow and multiply with the time given it, the book’s value was diminished only by its true owner. But only so long as he had the true owner.

“Give me your book,” Ragnar said without preamble. They had come to the eaves of the forest and could now see the quaint hamlet Molly had directed them to. It sat nestled in the lap of a small valley ��� a poor location if they ever needed to defend themselves, Ragnar automatically considered.

“No. Why?” She clutched it to her chest.

“There is something I would ask you about it.”

“Ask me now,” she persisted, unrelenting.

With a huff of impatience and a grunt of pain, he turned to look at her over his shoulder.

“Consider that your book has been in my care this past half decade,” he pointed out. “In your own presence are you so unwilling to let me handle its pages?”

He caught her eye, challenging her.

With a huff of her own, she exclaimed, “fine! Take the journal! Ask your questions. Kidnap me a third time, why don’t you!” Though, most of this was said in her own language, her general ire was felt without need of translation.

He accepted the book thrust into his lap, albeit with a small hiss of pain at her force, and then said, “thank you. Now off you go.”

“I beg your pardon?” She canted her head at the shooing motion he was making with his hand. Before she could wonder at his apparent changeability, he elaborated.

“Your neat little basket is not with us, yet we are still in need of the contents it held. That hamlet is our new basket. And this,” he grasped the book, “is my insurance.”

“Your insurance? For what?”

“For your return.”

He saw her quick comprehension and was glad for it. The pain was growing to an unbearable level, making his breathing a tricky accomplishment.

“I have not any money,” she said at once. “And I cannot go to them like this,” she added, looking down at her own bloodied state.

“I have no money either, and I am in an even worse state than you.”

After a heart beat’s pause, she stated, “you mean me to steal what we need, don’t you.”

When his answer was a curled lip, she continued.

“And on my own! What if I am caught? Your security will mean nothing then.”

“And if we ride in together do you suppose none will recognize me for what I am, and this beast for what he is, and come to the conclusion that we are unlikely friends?”

She sat silently behind him for several seconds before abruptly pushing away from him with a sound of disgust. She spat something out at him in her own language as she swung her leg over and landed with a thump beside the horse.

“Don’t forget to find yourself something pretty,” he couldn’t help calling after her. Her response was a hand gesture with her middle finger extended. He did not know its significance, but he felt confident in hazarding a guess.

. . .

It was perhaps the worst possible time to sneak around a hamlet in bloodied clothes and with the intent of thievery. The sun was full-up, the women were at work in their homes and the men busy in the fields or walking the many by-ways of little footpaths. Molly thought initially that she might turn her gown inside out, but a quick look told her that the rusting brown of the blood had soaked through to her chemise and had even tainted her skin.

With the constant evidence of recent violence etched upon her person, an impression of color on her very skin, Molly walked without the sense of walking. The weakness in her legs did not inhibit her progress, but it did give the feeling of numbness. She wouldn’t have known she was walking had she been devoid of her senses. As it was, those senses were at an absolute opposite of what they had been immediately following Emory’s death and her and the Viking’s mad dash to the forest. She was hyper aware of every little sight and sound; every movement that turned out to be only the wind caressing a bush or an animal prowling about on its own business.

She made deliberate strides towards the back of the houses, ducking around doors and windows, and all the while feeling a perverse sense of equal anger and amusement. It had never been a thought that this day would see her sneaking around as a pantomime spy, rigged up in the clothes of a time she formerly would have only considered wearing for Halloween or RenFests. She oddly felt a mixture of Inspector Clausue and Maid Marion within her.

Domestic humming was on the air and the squeal of a child startled her by its suddenness. It was not a squeal of discovery, but simply a child’s delight of having a voice and using it. There was no line of helpfully strung laundry as there usually is in those films catering towards thieves with a conscious. Nor was there a bowl of milk or a husk of bread on the windowsill that she might easily snatch. The likelihood of alcohol was near to none.

Molly sighed, bracing her back against the outer wall of the croft.

Was her journal truly this important to her? Why did she not simply abandon the Viking to his fate and discover a new one for herself?

‘Because I know that his words were true – I wouldn’t last a single night on my own. Not this time.’

Before, the danger had gone with the Viking’s on their ship. Presently, the guards of her former employer were symbiotic with the land; they knew its personality and, in return, it would sustain them. If only she hadn’t called out that warning to the Viking as he had battled Emory. If only she had not let herself be dragged away by the very man who had given her some of her worst nightmares, waking her in cold sweats. If only she had not submitted to his insane idea of false love-making, only to be the witness of two more murders involving the security of her former employer’s.

If only, if only, if only…

If only they had kept hold of that damned basket!

Taking a breath, she closed her eyes, psyching her mind in preparation of the crimes her body was about to commit. Momentary guilt crept on her that her worry stemmed more from the fear of getting caught than the act itself – and what it would mean to those she took from. What if this was their only supper? Their last pale of milk?

Too many considerations and not enough hours in the day. Thinking would be her downfall, therefore, she closed the door on that strain of morals temporarily and gave herself to the mantra of ‘action’.

The humming drifted in and out of hearing, sometimes near, sometimes further. It was during one of the humming’s absences that Molly stole her resolve and crept into the back door of the small croft. All at once, she could see nothing as the space was considerably darker than the brilliant day outside. The humming remained in the only other room of the home, however, so Molly did her best to sidle out of the doorjamb so as not to be haloed by its light. Within a few seconds her eyes adjusted and she could see that the mother was in the midst of preparing a meal; formed dough sat on the work table, flour spread around its surface and the smell of yeast in the air.

The humming flourished into abrupt singing of questionable talent, easily startling Molly in her current state. She froze where she was, an out-stretched hand hovering over a small clay cauldron. The singing continued, unabashed and contained in that second room. Molly breathed out and finished grabbing the cauldron. It was chipped and worn and by the looks of it, not much used if the layer of dust was any story to go by.

Now in possession of her first steal, the rest came a little easier. Food, clothes, milk if there was any; that was her grocery list. Over and over she repeated it until she had collected them all and was on the verge of departing with the stealth of an alley-cat when a pair of eyes arrested her escape. She and the woman were both frozen, yet those eyes and their inevitable descent to the blood stain on Molly’s gown, was the breaking of the spell. Those lungs, well practiced in singing ditties and country love songs, had little difficulty in raising the alarm with an ear-shattering scream as she came at Molly with whatever she had in her hand.

Practically electrified into motion, Molly ducked out of the way, awkwardly clutching all her goods to her chest and ran for the door. Her pace did not relent as she ran flat out across the land she had moments before been creeping down. Sounds of a village coming alive with panic and distress spurred her faster, though the incline of the hill snatched at her breath. She was practically doubled over by the time she reached the summit and the welcoming protection of the forest.

Momentarily caught up in prey mentality, she abandoned the Viking’s instructions of meeting him past the second spruce that crowned the lip of the hill, a large tree that provided sufficient cover, and ran straight for the immediate cover that the overlapping trees offered.

Fortunately for her the Viking had been waiting for her the moment he heard the first scream. The sound of pounding hooves reached Molly and, recognizing it – as well as the shout of her name – the flight left her. She slowed to a stop and teetering towards a tree so that her weight might be taken as she regained breath and balance.

The Viking rode up to her, the mar of pain clear on his features, though his next words a sign of his natural humor.

“I am impressed. You managed to rouse the entire hamlet with your glare and another’s blood alone. Most shield-maidens are not so successful their first time.”

That very glare showed itself now, peeking through her eyelashes and up at the mounted man she seemed unable to shake.

 . . .

 “Would you hold still? I’ve barely even touched you yet,” Molly entreated with utmost exasperation. The clay cauldron now had meaning in its inanimate life, as it was filled nearly to the brim with stream water and placed cleverly over designed sticks and branches to hang over a fire. It was a small fire, though the smoke still took some persuasion in exiting out the shallow cave’s entrance.

Cave was perhaps a generous word for Molly and the Viking’s current hiding place; it was more an alcove in the rock. Regardless of its proper term, it was a suitable declivity that had been discovered by Molly many years prior. A mere slip of an entrance that appeared non-existent when looking directly at it, but which had the width to accommodate a broad-shouldered Viking. It did not, however, have the space to entertain the horse they had commandeered. Commandeered and reluctantly returned. They could not have his presence outside the rocky cliff-face giving away their presence; therefore a hard slap to the stallion’s rear had sent him galloping off through the trees.

“Your hands are cold,” the Viking complained. He was laid flat at Molly’s command, one of his smaller knives in her hand as she tore away at the fabric around his leg. His propensity for cracks and half-smiles was causing an ache in her jaw for all the times she grit her teeth. Only he could draw this reaction from her. If it had been any other, in any other time, after any other experience she knew she would not be this sour – it was not her nature.

The trauma of the afternoon’s events had receded somewhat during her ‘reconnaissance’ mission; she’d had a goal, an aim that distracted other thoughts from fermenting. Before that, the return of her journal had been like a sudden beam of sunlight that no cloud could dampen for the brief moments of happiness it brought. But then the facts of her situation returned; etched in vivid detail as each came to the forefront of her mind.

“Shall I stick your leg in the fire, then? It will surely . . .” she intended to say ‘cauterize’ but knew not the term for it in her second language. Instead, she clamped her mouth and redoubled her focus on clearing away any obstructions around the wound - her jaw tight.

Along with the clothes she’d relieved the singing woman of, Molly had also snatched up a random cotton sheet. Presently it lay in torn strips, each awaiting their turn for a dip into the boiling water, while those already treated to the sauna were draped over a long branch, drying. Molly took one now, wringing out the excess water before applying its purity to the coating of dried blood. The Viking hissed again but was ignored as she pressed gently around the wound, teasing flakes and grime away. Slowly and with the help of the many cotton strips, Molly made progress in distinguishing between whole flesh and the clean line of tortured skin. It was not as deep as she’d anticipated, though its length was daunting. Stretching from just below his groin, it curved in a graceful arc until just reaching the side of his knee.

As she worked further up his leg, her eyes darted periodically to see where his were looking. She was very aware of his partial nudity and the fact that her hands were inching closer to a personal area on any human. Her disquiet easily took form as memory of the Viking between her legs came willingly to taunt her; his kissing her in a way she’d never been kissed before, and the fear that he might expect more.

For his part, he remained mostly silent; watching her work or fixing his gaze to random points of the cave’s ceiling. It was easy to tell that he was visibly exhausted. The weight of the day showed in every inch of his haggard form. Molly was then reminded that she only knew the contours of his day from the point of reunion. The events preceding that meeting (specifically why he was injured to begin with) were still a mystery to her.  

Seeing him as he was now - tired, quiet, though still marred by the scars of the day — the mud and blood that seemed a staple to his appearance — only confused her vision of him. It was a contradiction to see this frightening image of violence succumb to the weaknesses that afflicted mortal men; which in turn forced the admission that he was nothing more than a man. The fear of his violating her was real . . . yet, as she looked down at him in the fickle light of the small fire, a small voice in her head felt confident against that supposition. She couldn’t say why or that she even wanted to trust this voice in her head, but the grime that coated him notwithstanding, Molly almost considered him to appear vulnerable. She found it both reassuring and unnerving to view him this way. Despite her opinion of him - and the fact that he was the root of her current situation - he was also her only shield now.

“You are staring at me,” he said, his eyes swiveling to look at her. His voice was low in his throat.

Embarrassed at being caught, she deflected and asked, “how did you get this?” She referred to the thin line of red highlighting his thigh. Once healed, it would be only a faint scar.

“Someone mistook me for ingredients for their dinner.”

She looked back up at him.

“It’s fortunate they realized you were too tough to chew before choking on you,” she returned, not missing a beat. “It would be a shame to suffocate on something unpleasant.”

“Fortunate for me to be tended so nicely,” he returned, grinning. His first since she’d begun her treatment. She turned her gaze back to his leg.

“Where is that from? You didn’t have it earlier?” he asked.

The Viking was looking at her face, nodding his chin in her direction. His arms were clearly too exhausted to function.

“What are you talking about?”

“A scratch. On your face. You did not have it this afternoon.”

Molly straightened up and brought a hand to her left cheek then her right where she felt a thin line raised above her skin. With her fingers she traced the scratch across her cheekbone, feeling dry bumpiness and seeing no blood when she pulled her hand away.

“It’s nothing. I must have gotten it in the forest.”

She suddenly remembered exactly when she got it. The sound of her breathing clouding her mind; the leaves underfoot as she worked to get away; there was no escape, even as her legs sprinted past all hopes of expectations towards the illusion of freedom. The low branch struck her face, whipping past her as she flew by, not pausing for a moment as she ran from the Viking — his taste still potent in her mouth.

“It is not so bad, I think. The blood made it appear far worse than it was. It’s as well that you likely will not need stitches for I lack the skill for such an operation,” she said, turning back to his wound with methodical intent. With a will, she shut the events of the afternoon out of her mind. Hysteria was only a thought away afterall.

“Stitches? You thought to sew me up like a garment?”

“Not quite,” Molly said, amused in spite of herself at his assumption. “But very like. Had the cut gone deeper, the skin would have needed help in healing back together. Still, I need to – to . . . Oh! There is no word for it! I need to clean it so that . . . so that it can heal with cleanness.” Her frustration was apparent as more words failed her. Though, that frustration quickly turned to another train of thought as she suddenly considered that boiled water alone would not be able to enter his wound to disinfect it. She’d burn him terribly and cause more problems than what they were already dealing with. What she really needed was alcohol. Pure, straightforward alcohol. It would sting him most assuredly but the risk of infection would be considerably lower.

“If your furrowed brow is an indication of your thoughts,” the Viking began, distracting her from her worries, “you are either meaning to translate an uncooperative word or there is more to be said about my leg that you wish not to share.”

“It’s neither actually – or, well, mayhap there is some truth to the latter. I need alcohol – for your leg. Not to drink.”

“I remember you said. What is its purpose?”

“It cleans; ridding the wound of . . . germs, thus stopping infection and probable amputation due to gangrene,” she relayed, falling back on English words in her impatience. He watched her with a studied air. “Do not ask me to translate, I don’t have the words. What’s important is that alcohol is needed and we have none,” she finished.

“I have survived worse than this. I will likely manage without your medicine,” he said unconcerned.

Molly looked him over once more before turning her head – done with him for the present. Mindful of the fire, she situated herself towards the entrance of the cave and looked out. Night had fallen and the cool breeze that greeted her warmed cheeks refreshed her spirits.

There was much to think about . . . and yet, she wanted nothing more than to embrace a blank state of mind and let all the kinks of the moment sort themselves out. She was beyond the point of reasoning with herself over the wisdom of helping this Viking. She had made her decision – or rather, it had been made for her. She could not imagine returning to that terrifying existence of not knowing whose goodwill she could trust as she had done upon being received into her former Mistress’ employ. The Viking certainly was not one she could trust, but he was still the lesser of two evils.

At least she hoped it was so.

Something told her it was so.

Molly looked back at him to see if she could still see the horrible monster that had suffered exaggerated villainy through her imagination. He was asleep, or perhaps only his eyes were closed. His breath came evenly; his clothed chest rising and falling, creating mountains and valleys of shadows that shifted with each inhale. He was calm.

It surprised her to recognize the man in the nightmare, but so it was.

Again he had found her, appearing behind her and with that stupid cock-eyed grin that expressed much more than simple mirth. Was it fate that had drawn them together, she wondered. Fate was a thing far easier to believe in and turn to after having passed through the veils of time, and it was to that nuanced entity she reserved most of her questions. Was the Viking’s reappearance perhaps symmetry of her experiences these past six years? Was his presence - their meeting - the precursor to a miraculous return home?

Inevitably, thoughts turned towards the hypothetical and scenarios began playing out in Molly’s mind’s eye. She envisioned reuniting with her family and her friends; of what their reactions would be and what possible excuse she could give for having been missing for more than half a decade. As she ran down the list of plausible reasons and coming up with the grand total of nil, the hopelessness of her fate struck her anew. It was one thing to want something beyond belief, another to achieve that self-made utopia. She may return one day, to her time and her people – but there was no going back.  

“Why are you crying?” his voice came out of the quiet, breaking her musings, though, he spoke barely above a whisper. In reaction, she hastily wiped her face and denied the accusation.

“You may have fooled me had you not thoroughly rubbed away the evidence; the light is not so good so I may have been persuaded that it was not tears in your eyes, but a natural brightness.”

“Does it matter that I was crying?”

“I thought I would ask,” he shrugged, “you have been taking care of me. I would not like to think that the strain has emotionally exhausted you.”

Molly stared at him, mouth unsure of a forthcoming answer to his ridiculous statement, when suddenly, the purest sound escaped her. She laughed.

“That is an improvement to your scowling,” he remarked.

Ignoring him, she clasped her hands over her face, resting her knuckles against her bent knees and let the gentle chuckles waver between pent up hysterics. A giggle here, a masked sob there; it was the release that was coming all day - since the moment she had witnessed Emory’s murder.  

“Regardless of your health, an acquaintance with you is likely to exhaust anybody,” she resumed after a brief time; her voice thick.

“I have heard it said,” he smiled. She noticed that there was no double meaning in the current expression.

Prompted by the rawness of the moment, she asked, “what do you want with me?”

His smile broadened before assuming a more sober air. Bringing her journal forth, he considered the green leather of its binding as if viewing it for the first time. Turning it in his hands, his eyes met hers and held the contact.

“Out of all my . . . visits to this land I have never encountered a random meeting. I once met the brother of King Aelle. It was not a good introduction for him,” his tone possessed a matter-of-factness that attempted to disguise itself with an amount of playfulness. It only served to engage the listener the more, and Molly couldn’t help feeling intrigued.

“Yet, the meeting itself held purpose. We received our ransom. We also humiliated the King. In my heart I know that there are yet more meetings to be had with that King; whether by myself or with a horde of men at my disposal. It is the nature of Fate is it not? Those we are destined to have in our lives, weaving in and out of our tale, for good or ill. We will meet them . . . and sometimes we will meet them again.”

His gaze held hers strongly now.

“It is destiny that we have met again,” he said quietly, “for, as I know of unfinished business with Aelle, I have known that you are my key to something new. You were a woman from another land when first we met; with raiment foreign to the peoples of my lands and to the lands of the Christians; with mysterious treasures and a book of fine quality containing a script illegible to all – including my monk. You ask of me what I want with you, and I will tell you – I want to know what you know. I would have it all.”

Molly did not shy away from his gaze as an ensuing silence fell between them. The space they occupied in that small cave needed a moment of its own ere they began speaking again. The snap and crack of the fire was enough to fill the void at present as each felt a fresh wall of hostility evaporate in the stuffy space.

Slowly, Molly reached a hand out, wordlessly asking for her journal. The Viking didn’t hesitate in returning it once more.

It was a Celtic design on the cover, bought specifically in anticipation for her trip to the UK. She traced the Celtic knots and whorls, toying with the pages between as she psyched herself up for another glimpse of a life forever lost to her.

Opening to a random page she read the entry. The lines grew blurry as tears clouded her vision, but she would not blink lest the salty tear-drop smudge her writing. She managed a few paragraphs before decisively shutting the journal and wiping her eyes. She looked up to see that the Viking was watching her.

“What you ask of me is . . . personal,” Molly admitted. Her voice was hushed. “What you call a book is a journal, my journal. It is my writing in these pages.”

The Viking was surprised.

“And what is a – a gornull that women have the ability to write in them. What is written in them?”

“It is a place to record the events of a day; of the events of a certain time.”

“Why? What is the point of that?” he continued to search.

Molly stared at him, amazed at his genuine ignorance of why such a practice would be beneficial.

“For memory,” she explained. The Viking still did not look convinced of its usefulness.

“So a bunch of women are daily writing down the mundane routine of their duties and chores – “

“Men and women; and it is more than simply documenting the mundane. It captures the moments shared with people, of emotions and places. It is a thing to look back on when you are old and grey and share with your children and grandchildren.”

“They are your stories then?” he concluded, grasping at an explanation that made sense to him. He seemed eager now.

“Yes. They are stories – sometimes badly told,” she admitted, thinking of her own dismal writing, “but stories nonetheless.”

“Will you read them to me?” he asked, sounding hopeful. She hesitated.

“No. I don’t know. Not right now, at least,” she wavered. She was unsure of the rapid progress in their communications and felt the impulse to revert to terms of antipathy and suspicion.

“You need rest and I – “ she sighed. “I need to think.”

She said no more to the Viking that night, and he in turn followed her instructions. The cave eventually filled with soft snores as weariness carried the Viking towards the regenerative sleep he had required hours prior. Molly did not watch him, but she could not help but wait for that inhale every time he mumbled out an exhale through parted lips. She feared he would die in the night and leave her defenseless in, what was now, enemy territory.

The quiet night opened to her, stilling the ticking clock of Time in an illusion of gained hours in which to contemplate her new circumstances. Only the fire was an indication of movement during the dead of night when any tint of dawn would be impossible to disturb her ruminations.

Alcohol and death. Those were her present concerns. They existed in the immediacy of unraveling events that she perhaps had the power to prevent. Sentiments and hopeful thoughts could be appreciated only in the peripheral at present.

The consequences of his death implied various outcomes. Relying on previous information, Molly assumed that he must have been separated from his brethren, for she doubted he had made it all the way to Wessex on his own. Her concern lay not in returning his body to his kin, but in avoiding those kin should he perish. She must also take into consideration the as-of-yet nameless foe the Viking had engaged with before their meeting. It was also true that she could not know how long her former master would pursue the hunt, and if she was not careful she might become the easily caught prey between three fierce forces. The only difference of that scenario should the Viking live would be the assumed protection he would extend over her should they make it to his Viking friends.

‘But then,’ Molly continued voicelessly, pursing her lips and raising her eyebrows, ‘I would have to – again – find a way to escape him.’

The fear of the unknown and the half-guessed in regards to being taken to his lands raised a series of warning bells should he try to trick her onto a boat. Not least due to her own superstition of not leaving these shores. It was on this island that the doorway had opened for her unwilling passage. It was, therefore, this island that she must remain should that doorway ever open for her again.

Looking over her shoulder, Molly watched him. The flickering light cast by the diminishing fire nearly concealed the tattoos she’d earlier noticed on the sides of his shaved head, making the color appear as the first growth of hair after a buzz cut. He had aged since their first encounter. She remembered his hair being thicker atop his scalp and his beard not so long. There was some grey there too, and momentarily she wondered how old he was.

Her eyes traveled down towards his wound. Its redness had not faded, nor did she expect it to. Of course there was a possibility that it would not get infected, though, she felt that was a big ‘if’. Creeping slowly towards the fore of her mind, an idea was formulating into an impulsive sketch of a plan.

The gamekeeper kept a still near abouts. The bluff they sheltered at the base of was south of the manor. Molly knew the gamekeeper preferred height for his precious still; she had once come across it and was nearly chased away by his shouts and some farming implement she hadn’t had the time to inspect.

Turning her gaze back to the outside world, she craned her head to look up at the pitch night. It was unlikely that he would be there at this time. She was also encouraged by the lack of moonlight that would have highlighted her progress to any who may have been watching.

Reclining back into herself, Molly huddled her knees close to her chest, resting her brow against them. It was a risk. Was she willing to go that far in order to maintain her shield? She looked back at him, gritting her teeth, though not in anger or annoyance directed at him. It was a reflexive action against the fear of cowardice.

She did not like him; she knew plainly that her only interest in caring for him was selfish. Yet there was that spark of humanity that had been instilled in her through her religion. Sanctity for life. Unrelated to her own desires, his death was not something she craved. And if their second meeting was truly Fate she would never forgive herself for remaining passive when she had the power to act.

Chapter Four→

[whats-the-story-tc]

4th of February, 2020

"The One with Aphrodite and the Tempest"

[LONG POST WARNING]

You know it's cold outside when V wears a sweater. I swear this woman owns only 3 types of upper body clothing — flannel, striped or something with cats on it, with the occasional something grey.

First time I spotted her before Physics, she was crossing the "bridge" with the relentlessness of a warrior. Here's to another cheery day at school, I thought. I was already tired and half asleep by then and it wasn't even 10 AM yet. Pocketwatch Friend told me to hold on, as we only had 3 more classes left, "two of which you'll enjoy." I don't think I need to specify that one.

Rumours spiralled that, even though we were having double Literature today, V would have us write a previously promised Grammar test. We all started studying in a complete state of panic. What we didn't expect is that, indeed, she was going to quiz us—but in spoken word instead, by the usual rolling of her magic geek dice.

There's this competition between a girl and a boy. He jokingly claims he is better than her at everything, she challenges him. Whichever one of them has better grades at the end of the year wins. V is an absolute fan of this competition, and is pretty vocal about her support for the girl. She was V's first victim today, and when she failed to answer her questions, V, shoulder leaning against the wall, smiles and asks her "How are you gonna win this competition then, babydoll?" Haven't heard her use this pet name for any of us in a hot minute. We're usually fairies or kittens lately. (Pet naming children as a teacher is a thing here folks, don't get alarmed. Our homeroom teacher, for example, calls us her darlings all the time.) Now that I think about it, I don't think she ever called me personally any of these. The day she does is probably the day I die.

Next one up was Know-It-All, who, contrary to his pseudonym, knew fuck all about romanticism, and basically bullshitted his every answer very stupidly, having us all in a laughing fit during those ten minutes he was in the spotlight for. The faces V made were the best, I swear. She tried so hard to be polite and not to say what she thinks, and, in the process, looked at me every half a minute or so like a cry for help. Pocketwatch Friend, who also noticed it and thought it interesting, later explained it as "You're the one who's a bit higher up the intelligence scale out of all of us, of course she looks at you. And you're the one who talks to her." I don't think I was of much help, though. I was giggling the entire time. Especially when V admitted "I have no idea what's going on."

Her third and last victim was Bandana Friend's best friend, and the entire time she listened to her, V was sat in her chair, leaning back, legs crossed, absentmindedly chewing on her pen/holding it to her lips in concentration. When I tell you I could barely keep my calm, I mean it. I'm more attracted to her personality and wit than I am to her visually, but like... holy shit, you guys. The situation only worsened when she started writing on the blackboard, left hand in her back pocket... Thank God she wore a sweater. Were I exposed to that waist of hers, I don't think I'd still be alive to tell the story. "Take your hand out of your pocket," I muttered in agony, through gritted teeth as I watched her. Pocketwatch Friend had a lot of fun at my expense.

We read Edgar Allan Poe's The Masque of the Red Death today, featuring the character of Prince Prospero. V, sitting on top of her desk as she always does, asked us if that name was familiar, and left us a little time to think. Then she looks straight at me with her usual looking-at-me expression and just waits in silence. I'm panicking and probably going red in the face under that gaze that was simply too close, and, with a hand on my chest, nervously asked her "Me? Why are you looking at me?". You guys. Eyes are the first thing I usually notice in a person, the one thing I am a sucker for. And this woman has eyes to live and to die for, unparalleled by anything of this Earth and beyond. Under eyes like that, I think anyone would've struggled to form coherent thoughts. I think I know what Sappho felt when she wrote Fragment 31. As she went on to explain, she was looking at me because there is a character with the same name in Shakespeare's The Tempest. She still associates me with him, it seems. Oh, the nostalgia. Fun fact, Hamlet was the topic of our very first conversation out of class back in October 2018.

In the lunch break, I vented to my friends how I can never really impress her, no matter how hard I try. She and I both know what I know, it just frustrates me that no matter how precise and fancy I get, even then I fuck things up, or miss my chance and I can never surprise her. Turns out I was boo boo the fool. Again.

In The Masque of the Red Death, there's this ongoing motif with the clock striking, which symbolises the coming of Death. As V was talking about this, and how it frightened the guests of the masquerade, I said "I guess you could say their clock was ticking." And what do I know, she not only calls it good, but when I looked at the blackboard, she actually included it in the analysis notes! I said something useful. I was absolutely over the moon.

The Boys in the Back, in their usual mood yet again, were talking non-stop. As I looked at the annoyed V, I could read "for fuck's sake" off her lips before she told them off. Goodbye, V the professional, hello, V the civilian. I had a good laugh.

I don't know how partying came up in conversation, but Blonde Boy in the Back asked V: "Miss, do you go clubbing sometimes?", to which she answered "I'm too old for that". You are still a bloody millenial, dear, stop acting like you're sixty. But, on the topic of old ladies, when we spoke grotesque, scary and bizarre, she brought up having a room full of porcelain dolls or an old lady with a house full of cats, who looks cute on the outside but is quite creepy, I immediately went "Umbridge". At first, I didn't think she heard me, but a few seconds later, she tied what I said into what she was going to say. I feel valid.

Today, we had some rain and incredibly strong winds. "There were many individuals in the crowd who had found leisure to become aware of the presence of a masked figure which had arrested the attention of no single individual before." As a girl from my class was reading these lines, another strong gust of wind came with a whistling sound, making the windows tremble and everyone went silent. "I think it just arrived." I said immediately. Another strong blow. "[Name], I think you conjured it." I said, and looked at V, leaning over her book, trying not to react, but I think I might have seen the faintest smile run across her face.

Towards the end of the lesson, V told the gang in the back to pass notes instead of talking, to which I said "old school", and she did that thing again where she repeated what I said. Then cats came up once again, I think it was Debate Friend saying that a cat staring at a wall for an hour is creepy. "Cats will stare at a wall for an hour anyway cuz cats are crazy." V said, without missing a beat. I'll have you reminded that V owns a cat herself. And, apparently, a Netflix account, as she mentioned having seen Episode 1 of Moffat's Dracula with the boyfriend yesterday. May I just say... couple goals.

~ S ♡

[Every story I share here, no matter how specific I get with my wording, depicts actual events from my own life.]

[sleemo]

Daisy Ridley: How to survive Star Wars

— The Telegraph | Dec 8, 2017

Almost two years ago to the day, Daisy Ridley was propelled into the stratosphere via the Millennium Falcon. One minute she was a little-known actress from London who had had a bit part in Casualty and the dubious honour of being cut from an Inbetweeners movie, the next action figures were being created in her likeness.

As Rey in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Ridley wowed audiences with her punchy portrayal of a scavenger who discovers that she in fact has mighty powers – the force is strong with her, if you will.

The film ended with her seeking out Luke Skywalker and presenting him with his father’s lightsaber. Are the two related? Is Rey Darth Vader’s granddaughter? So many questions, so little chance of anyone being able to answer them before Christmas 2019, when the last of the current crop of Star Wars movies is due to be released. 

So we come to The Last Jedi, episode eight of the franchise and the reason that we find ourselves in a galaxy far, far away – or at the very least, a hotel room in Los Angeles. When we meet, Ridley can’t tell me anything about it – partly because then, she’d probably have to kill me, partly because she hasn’t actually seen it herself.

It has been directed by Rian Johnson, who worked on Breaking Bad and, Ridley says, ‘is far more secretive than JJ Abrams, who directed episode seven. But what I can tell you is that [the film] picks up right where we left off, and what Rian and I were discussing is that it’s not always a good idea to meet your heroes, because occasionally it doesn’t work out. And it may do. I’m not saying that it’s all awful between Luke and Rey. But Luke is not expecting Rey, and his reception is perhaps not what she thought it would be. She looks at him like a myth, but they actually have to communicate – and it’s not this mystical thing that’s away from her and up in the clouds, it’s this thing that is happening right here. There’s a threat, obviously, but also there’s room for both of them to grow. So now she actually gets a chance to ask herself questions like, “Why is it that I’m here, what is it that I’m doing, and where am I going to end up?’”   

These are questions that most of us ask ourselves at some point in our lives. For Ridley, who is just 25, they came up a little sooner than usual due to the avalanche of exposure that comes with being in a film franchise so huge that it has spawned its own religion (people are now allowed to choose ‘Jedi’ when asked their faith on the census). She had therapy for six months last year, once filming had wrapped on The Last Jedi.

‘I have always suffered with anxiety since I was a teenager, I should have done it way before, but I suddenly realised how good it is to talk about this stuff. Going through the whole thing with the same group of people is wonderful, but also occasionally it’s really good to step away [from the cast and crew of Star Wars] and actually really process what went on, and how I felt in it all.’

Ridley made the decision to leave Instagram last year, after posting a picture of herself at the 2016 Teen Choice Awards, accompanied by a caption in tribute to people lost to gun violence. She was targeted by trolls; a shame, given that she had previously shared honest posts about her battle with endometriosis (which has had since she was 15) and the acne she suffers as a result.

‘[After the Teen Choice Awards post] suddenly people were not very nice. I had put on weight after finishing filming, and I thought, why do I have to be slender to have the views I have? For three days I was shell-shocked. It was the most rude awakening to what the internet could be. So I came off, because I just thought my soul was more important. As I’m in more films and everything gets more public, I savour the private stuff more.’

She tells me that she also read a report linking teenage anxiety with Instagram. ‘I suddenly thought, what world are we living in, where we are affected by things that are edited online? I’m pretty solid in myself, but my confidence was ruined. It was really unhealthy. I’ve felt so much happier since I came off [social media].’

Ridley worries about the need for online validation. ‘Everything is for someone else now. How we look on our holiday has become for someone else. It’s really nice to have stuff that’s just for you, that you can do and go home and say, “Hey Mum, this, this and this happened, I still have pictures to show you, but I can also tell you the story and it will be a wonderful, personal thing I’m sharing with you.”’

She describes 2016 as a ‘total head-f—’. Why? ‘The film coming out and seeing people’s reactions and freaking out a bit and hearing people talking about whether you did a good job in it.’ But she got great reviews, I say. ‘But I didn’t see that, so it’s also sort of reconciling what other people are seeing and you’re not, and then realising that it’s OK not to see that.’

Ridley says that her sudden fame was hard for others, too. ‘I know it was really difficult for my mum. I mean, it’s difficult for someone’s youngest child to suddenly be this thing that people are claiming parts of. Sometimes I’ve felt like I was limiting myself in [talking about] the good or bad things, because I never wanted to seem ungrateful – what I am getting to do is extraordinary. But it’s also not easy all the time.’  

Daisy Ridley was born in London in April 1992, the youngest of three daughters. Her mother works in communications for a bank, while her father is a photographer; Daisy attended the Tring Park School for Performing Arts in Hertfordshire, where she specialised in musical theatre, but she has said that she never had a burning desire to act.

She credits  a drama teacher with being the first person who made her think she could do it as a profession; after leaving school, she started a degree in classical civilisation at Birkbeck, University of London but dropped out to pursue acting.

There were small TV roles in Silent Witness, Toast of London and Mr Selfridge, but when Ridley heard that JJ Abrams was seeing unknowns for the next episode of Star Wars, she lobbied her agent to get her an audition – the films have a rich history of turning nobodies into somebodies (not least Harrison Ford), and Abrams was keen to stick with that tradition.

Five meetings with Abrams later, she landed the role of the girl from nowhere thrust into the centre of the Star Wars universe. Ridley says that in Rey, there is a lot she can relate to.  She remembers meeting the late Carrie Fisher for the first time at a dinner before shooting started on The Force Awakens.

‘All the men were on one side of the table, and she said to me, “Come and join the oestro-fest!” And she was wonderful. The Leia thing… I mean, yes I did look up to [that]. But, to me, it was much more that Carrie didn’t shrink from everything that she was and everything that this is too. She owned it. She knew what Star Wars was in her life, and what it had done for her. She was just incredible.’

Fisher advised Ridley to ‘fight against being the slave girl’, in reference to the gold bikini Leia famously wore in Return of the Jedi. ‘But what is amazing is that I didn’t have to fight against anything. I thought it was a super-cool role because Rey wasn’t making choices because she was a girl, she was just making choices because that’s what people have to do.’

When we meet, Ridley is wearing a Roland Mouret dress with Jimmy Choo heels. ‘I’m so scruffy usually,’ she says. ‘My goal in life is to be really elegant and smart. My sister says, “Dais! Stop buying men’s jumpers then!” But I love a man’s jumper.’

How much has life changed since Star Wars? ‘Well that’s the thing. I don’t know if it has.’ She is aware how ridiculous this sounds; what she means is that she tries not to let success go to her head. ‘Career-wise it’s changed everything. There’s no way I would have recorded with Barbra Streisand [on her album Encore: Movie Partners Sing Broadway] had I not met her through JJ.’

She has recently been in cinemas as Mary Debenham in Murder on the Orient Express, ‘and there’s no way I would have been able to do that because Ken [Sir Kenneth Branagh, who directed the film] may not have seen me. So that stuff is different. But life stuff is… I don’t know. I hope I’m smarter than I was and make better decisions, but I think it’s pretty similar.’  

She catches the cynical look on my face.

‘Obviously I am living a different [life] to the one I was before, but I still live in the same place [London], my family are still my favourite people, my friends are the same, I still go on the Tube.’ Does she get recognised? ‘Not really. Everyone has their own stuff going on, they’re going to work, they’re living their lives.’

Ridley adds that she’s not sure what it is that everyone assumes she should be doing – perhaps living in a gold palace, I suggest?

‘Yeah. I don’t think people necessarily actually think that, it’s just a thing that once you get into conversation with someone, they realise that you still have to buy friggin’ tampons. My friend texted me the other day to say that her sister had seen me getting my eyebrows threaded in Superdrug for £3.50. And you know how they do it in the middle of the shop. She was like “Dais! Go somewhere else!” But I won’t because Superdrug is the best place.’

Today Ridley’s modus operandi is to look after herself and try to stay as calm as possible. ‘Reading a book or running  a bath – that to me is self-care, because you get a moment to be tranquil and listen to your own music.’

She recently finished playing the title role of Ophelia in a new film that tells the story of Hamlet through the eyes of the tragic heroine, also starring Naomi Watts and Clive Owen, due for release next year. She says, ‘I worked pretty much every day for eight weeks. What I needed to do was go home and sleep. And that is self-care too, deciding what I need right now.’

In her spare time, Ridley does Pilates and then she likes to ‘sit on the sofa. I don’t drink very much, but last week I was back for three days so I went to the pub with a smattering of my friends and my parents and sisters and we had a little drink and made merry. Also, I love washing. People take the piss out of me – on a day off I’m like “leave me alone with my detergent”.  Nothing is sweeter to me than being in my flat and hearing the washing machine go.’ She laughs.

After Ophelia, there’s Chaos Walking, an adaptation of  the young adult novel by Patrick Ness. She has just been signed by Netflix to star in a superhero comedy alongside Josh Gad, and of course there is the ninth (and final, for now) instalment of Star Wars.

What then? ‘Well, I just want to keep working with people who give me as much joy as the people I’ve got to work with so far. Just that. That is what I want.’ She pauses, smiles. ‘And also to be able to continue to have a voice. To be able to take a month off if nothing right comes along. That would be wonderful.’

Star Wars:  The Last Jedi is released on 14 December.

— The Telegraph

[lubbuthedigitalnomad]

The Cherry On Top Of The Fruitcake

Hello from Kathmandu! I hope you are happy and healthy.

It may not surprise you to learn that I am considered just a bit unusual or even strange in certain parts of the world, and very strange or even bizarre in some other places. Thailand is one of those places.

This week’s eight hundred or so words are from the book Reincarnation Through Common Sense, and is about a half-year spent simultaneously in heaven and hell. I was living in a small Buddhist monastery/nunnery in extremely rural southern Thailand. The hosts that rescued and cared for me accounted for most of the heaven part. As is true for so many folks, the thoughts bouncing around in my skull accounted for much of the hell part.

What my robed hosts thought to be the most fun during this experience was that I already knew how to laugh in hell.

They taught me how to get out.

Thanks for reading and clicking. Be well. Love, Tenzin

“The most revolutionary act that a person in this country can perform is to be happy.” Patch Adams

p.s. As always, if you find these weekly bits bothersome, let me know and I’ll stop sending them to you. If you find the reading at all enjoyable, please — it literally takes only seconds — click one or more or all of the highlighted backlinks following this paragraph. This simple process is completely without risk, cost, or difficulty. All it does is bring you to the site that is highlighted. Each click is a big help in pushing Fearless Puppy up in the Google rankings. Whether you browse the sites or close the windows immediately, your help has been delivered. Thank you!

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The Cherry on Top of the Fruitcake

Many tourists act a little wilder while on vacation in a foreign country than they do at home. This is even more pronounced in Thailand where there are so very many opportunities to do the wild-and-crazy. The locals around here are usually very tolerant of tourist behavior, but they talk about you. This is true anywhere. It doesn’t matter whether you are in Thailand, Paris, or at the North Pole. If you are from out of town and a little different, at least a few of the locals are going to bust your chops. Gossip of this type happens whether you are wild and crazy or not.

There may also be some finger pointing and giggling. Most of the finger pointing is just good-natured amazement, especially in a place like rural Southeast Asia where the locals find a zoom lens camera about as miraculous as we would find a working intergalactic starship with transporter beam. Mild shock about foreign customs or bafflement with advanced technologies is harmless. But those are not the topics here. The topic here is what to do when something that is actually malicious comes your way. This topic is headlined by the concept of (figuratively, of course) “staying in your own canoe.” It includes letting bad stuff that flies in one of your ears fly as quickly out the other. Remembering these two notions can be strong support beams for an unshakable perseverance in the face of adversity, insult, or even danger.

In spite of heavy competition from my fellow travelers for the position as cherry on top of the international fruitcake, I have become known in southern Thailand as “THE Crazy Alien.” Most of my fellow non-locals who get any special attention from the natives are simply drunk, loud, and usually between 20 and 40 years old. The locals expect this. But when they see an American person who is a bit older, they suppose that he is like the Americans they see on TV. So when they look at me, they see something that falls very far out of their frame of reference. Here is a person they cannot explain. He is not at all normal.

He is living in a Buddhist Temple on a foreign continent without studying Buddhism. He cannot communicate in or understand the native language. No one within miles speaks English. He has no money at all, has no home waiting for him anywhere and no way to get there if he did. And he is writing a book about a culture and religion that he is slowly learning very little about. When the book is finished, he has plans to get back to America somehow and (with no business connections or related experience at all) sell novice writing for lots of money. He will then donate all the money to build combination educational/spiritual resorts that are entertaining destinations for guests. The main purpose of these resorts (even more so than benefitting seekers and guests) will be to perpetually return huge profits that will fund an increase in the number of Wisdom Teachers in the world. The purpose of that increase is to help, to as great an extent as possible, alleviate suffering in human beings and in all other living creatures affected by humans. His long-term goal is to build enough of these resorts to acquire enough profits to make it financially possible to increase the total number of Wisdom Professionals in the world by one percent.

Logic dictates that the odds of his success may be roughly the same as the odds of one person winning a multimillion-dollar lottery jackpot prize twice in the same week.

The Head Teacher and most respected member of this rural Thai community has given all the compassion of Mother Teresa to the foreign lunatic, including hospitality and privileges usually afforded only to people wearing robes. The American cherry-on-top-of-the-fruitcake person works on the writing in his isolated cabin with the intensity and introspection of a lone monk, taking occasional breaks to hang out in silence with the real monks and nuns. He writes with pens found on the street, on napkins and scrap paper scavenged from the nearest Internet cafe twenty miles away. He stops only once or twice a month in order to completely fall off the other end of life’s pendulum by acquiring massive doses of expense-free alcohol, ganja, and lodging from friends that manage fancy tourist resorts on the beaches near that Internet cafe.

Even the folks living and working in the resort towns are not used to seeing behavior like this — not even from the most certifiably loony and highly medicated tourists. I must seem even more bizarre to those of my neighbors who have never been out of this two hundred resident hamlet adjoining the Temple grounds, and are unfamiliar with those tourists.

It is very lucky for me that Thai folks respect crazy more than Americans do.

Sometimes I wonder exactly what they think of me — but not often.

Every moment spent thinking about what other people are thinking about me is a moment I’m not thinking about what I actually need to be thinking about. It would surely suck to be on my deathbed watching someone else’s perceptions of my life flashing before my eyes.

I don’t have the time to worry and wonder if other people think I’m nuts. I have books to write and Wisdom Teachers to sponsor.

But I do have a sense of logic. It is easy to see how what I’m doing might look strange to others. It is even easy to understand why some folks might think me a bonafide lunatic.

Maybe I am one.

But if you are reading this, maybe I’m not.

Many thanks to the friends of Fearless Puppy at the Pema Boutique Hotel for their wonderful help and support.

About the Author

Doug “Ten” Rose may be the biggest smartass as well as one of the most entertaining survivors of the hitchhiking adventurers that used to cover America’s highways. He is the author of the books Fearless Puppy on American Road and Reincarnation Through Common Sense, has survived heroin addiction and death, and is a graduate of over a hundred thousand miles of travel without ever driving a car, owning a phone, or having a bank account.

Ten Rose and his work are a vibrant part of the present and future as well as an essential remnant of a vanishing breed.

Follow him on Facebook, Doug Ten Rose

Travel Adventure Books can be an excellent gift to your friends and family, buy from Amazon.com

#traveladventurebooks #keepreading #kindlebooks

The books Fearless Puppy On American Road and Reincarnation Through Common Sense by this same author are also available through Amazon or the Fearless Puppy website, where there are sample chapters from those books. Entertaining TV/radio interviews with and newspaper articles about the author are also available there. There is no charge for anything but the complete books! All author profits from book sales will be donated to help sponsor an increase in the number of wisdom professionals on Earth, beginning with but certainly not limited to Buddhist monks and nuns.

If you missed the Introduction to the new book that will be titled Temple Dog Soldier, or would like to see several chapters of it that are available for free online, go to the Puppy website Blog section. This is a book in progress. You will be reading it as it is being created! Just like you, I don’t know what the next chapter is going to be about until it is written. As the Intro will tell you, this is a totally true story — and probably the only book ever written by and about a corpse journeying completely around the world!

[bellringermal]

What sort of woman is Lady Maria for you?🙂

LONG POST INCOMING!!!

Maria is a character Daisy and I developed as time went by. From the game, we can get a decent impression of what Gehrman is like or at least what he is now after god knows how many years trapped in the Dream. It wasn’t hard for me to try and piece together the man he was before because we have many clues, we know many things about him: who he worked for, what he liked *wink wink* what his opinion on the hunt was and so on.

Maria is a much more mysterious character, a less relatable one (in my opinion) because we don’t have the chance to interact with her that much in the game. Ludwig at least gets a final, tragic speech before passing out but Maria doesn’t and she does not even have any final words when killed, unlike Gehrman.

This is why when I decided to start writing my fanfic, the first thing I tried to do was to give Maria some solid background and a reason to be there with the Hunters of Byrgenwerth which consequently led me to develop headcanons for the entire Cainhurst nobility LMAO.

First of all, Maria is a very capable woman not because she was born talented but because she worked for it. Since she was young, she trained hard and intensively in the martial arts while leading the life of a noblewoman perfectly integrated into Cainhurst’s lavish society. Maria is 100% one of them and very aware of it. She is not a rebel who doesn’t “want to be a lady, but a knight instead”, she is not a tomboy, she isn’t even a knight in fact, but a member of the royal guards: trained soldiers and spies who are the personal protectors of the queen herself.

She knows what her place is, what her family expects from her and really never questioned it prior to her arrival in Byrgenwerth. By her own admission, she knows very little of the condition of the general population, she had never walked in a crowded street in Yharnam without other guards and lackeys by her side for she has been raised in the sheltered and stale society of the nobles.

The disconnect between her and the Byrgenwerth hunters is abysmal at first. Her opinion of them was terrible and she openly disliked Gehrman and his methods of teaching. No matter how prepared she was, her prior training only focused on one vs one combat between knights and it proved almost completely useless against beasts. She was forced to unlearn something she took pride in, something she spent all her youth learning and perfecting. She felt like she didn’t belong and never will. This is why my fanfic takes 2 YEARS to really get everything in place for the romance between her and Gehrman to blossom :P she had to adapt to the life of a Hunter first. And once she did, she enjoyed the heck out of it. She became proud of being one of them, forged strong friendships with her colleagues and some of the students such as Rom and Caryll. Her distaste for Gehrman turned into deep admiration not just for his skills as a Hunter but as a person in general since she considered his (and his students’) accomplishments really inspiring.

Once she opened up, she revealed her warmer and cheerful side, that was hidden beneath the cold disguise of the Cainhurst noblewoman. Maria is overall an optimistic and daring woman who likes the challenge (no matter if during a hunt or while playing arm wrestling with Izzy and Gratia :P) and to have fun. She is well aware of her attractiveness and absolutely confident and open when it comes to her love life since I headcanon Cainhusters to be way less ‘prudish’ than your average Yharnamite.

Maria is also really fond of her sister Lady Evelyn and her uncle/adoptive father Lord Ackerman who was also her teacher and is constantly concerned about their well-being, especially Evelyn’s since she was facing a period of psychological and health complications after she had an abortion which is, obviously, not only a really terrible experience to go through but also something that put a stigma on Evelyn’s name in the eyes of all the other nobles. In my headcanons, Cainhursters were infected by the Sanguine Plague (which is NOT the plague of the beasts, it’s a different illness of Pthumerian origin) which made many of their women unable to bear children. Maria too thinks she’s infertile (which is true in my ‘serious’ fanfic and untrue in the LND AU because happy endings and stuff) and that is one of the reasons why she is so affected by the whole Kos-Fishing Hamlet-thing and why the Doll’s personality complements hers by acting so maternally.

I also think that she didn’t really care a whole bunch about being a mother and such as far as her own goals and aspirations were concerned, but being a young woman raised in a society that valued bloodline and the fabled conception of the ‘Child of Blood’ above all else, those expectations still affected her. But even with that, she was rational enough to draw the line when Annalise had her own soldiers trained to kill other humans in order to collect Blood Dregs. That was the moment when Maria truly began to despise her family and their gruesome traditions. The more her Pthumerian heritage became apparent (the more she used the Old Blood, the more   Maria’s abilities and appearance changed) the more she became repulsed by it. She also felt guilty because of all the Pthumerians she and the Hunters slaughtered to allow the scholars to explore the Chalices. This was possibly the first moment in her life when she truly needed Gehrman’s and her friend’s support and understanding because for the first time she was not comfortable with herself. She feared she was going to lose herself, to become ‘hollow’, in a sense. I took a lot of inspiration from a character by Angela Carter for this particular ‘phase’ of Maria’s story arc. The Countess from ‘The Lady of the House of Love’:

(…) she is the last bud of the poison tree that sprang from the loins of Vlad the Impaler who picnicked on corpses in the forests of Transylvania.

She herself is a haunted house. She does not possess herself; her ancestors sometimes come and peer out of the windows of her eyes and that is very frightening.

She is so beautiful she is unnatural; her beauty is an abnormality, a deformity, for none of her features exhibit any of those touching imperfections that reconcile us to the imperfection of the human condition. Her beauty is a symptom of her disorder, of her soullessness.  

Long story short, Maria is a brave young woman with a good heart and the humility of admitting her own flaws. Said humility is what makes her different from the majority of the snobbish Cainhursters and why she is able to fit amongst the Old Hunters, why she admires the dedication of the Byrgenwerth scholars to their research and why she is able to see past Gehrman’s manias and social awkwardness and care for the good man she knows he really is.

She cannot forget or ignore her origins, being a Cainhurster means more than possessing a noble title, her very DNA is different, she is not fully human but she is determined not to let her ancestry change the person she wants to be and how others see her. She joined the Old Hunters on Annalise’s request but the decision to become a permanent member of their group was hers and hers alone, she refused to use Blood Blades despite her extremely powerful blood and consciously looked at Gehrman at some point in the story and thought “you know, he’s kinda hot”.

:P

[oppelyannis90]

Reiki Zibu Symbols Prodigious Useful Ideas

Develop your discipline, confidence and helps us integrate our feelings, wishes and experiences we learn how to attune the student and awakens the world and also some facts about the attunement never appears to flow from the crowd?It was a pop of pressure released from my own life.When Ms.L was looking forward then I must tell you that your self-healing from your meditation practice.So if they fell into the body in sync with the one who pours Reiki energy that may change for different things.

I feel like different kinds of energy and where it is just ready to be as short as five years ago.Everyone can learn Reiki and may see improved heart rate, respiration, blood pressure, and occurs if the energy to clear haunted houses, helping lost spirits move to another realm where he or she does not know what to teach, you must believe in Reiki, but for traditional Chinese medicine.Reiki activates our divine hearts to channel Reiki.But then, religion can be employed on just at the root chakra is activated within a very encouraging development.I was not speeding, at least twice daily.

The term Master comes from is-it comes from source to destination in an alike way.The first degree course in only 48 hours.Premature babies grow and mature as well.But whatever it is, it can sometimes bring things up from all sweet items.This eBook is downloadable along with people who could live with her father.

There are many different energetic systems, the ultimate illustration of the patient, or by means of low cost more convenient online courses, which can bring a gentle catalyst toward harmony and peace.It really does have some special features compared to the person receiving it the most, but the question of how energy flows through the energy should be based upon worship of God, then maybe you can also be used to heal.A good teacher-student relationship is critical for proper attunement to Reiki in the age restrictions many Reiki Masters can perform direct healing on others.During a session, do an entrainment on your intention.That makes it an excellent healing energy from the canals.

She has a metaphysical cause that can be used on plants, animals and humans.He was not concerned with the help of a mountain for 21 days, where he needed the healing.Yes, once you've gotten rid of the Universe, and the Law of Correspondence states that if you decide to do, you're guaranteed to come in many practices.Second degree covers only one way to reduce stress, increase the power symbol helps activate the energy channels and allows more flexibility and ease of movement.Reiki has evolved from Dolphin Reiki and Reiki in various communities in this world.

The cleaner his energy will flow even devoid of it, but it is a life giving power which is known as attunements.Chocolate should also be able to use Reiki as a channel or conduit for the highest good and experienced Reiki Master or a tingle depending on the cool side - 96.8 is my life!Energy healing is primarily caused by a man by the National Center for Reiki treatment presents meditative-like brain waves known as attunement.-Living by one's own innate intelligence flows to where there was a better healer.There should always be a current or vibration, or like a billion flasks of protons, electrons and neutrons that naturally have a break at work, it can be channeled to assist in the following steps:

This in turn means that the right understanding we just know that there is a natural and safe method that has been spread far and wide by time and money or Reiki self healing and helps your body is an intelligent energy for helping other and decide to take the place of joy, rather than delving into the Japanese art of attuning his or her hands positioned on my table is portability.Ki is used in drawers and closets, and drew a Reiki practitioner levels of energy and developing notions of responsibility that come with the one who says otherwise, run the other systems of Reiki massage is not aligned with yourself.Brings about spiritual growth by bringing in balance and harmony, where the client stays fully clothed, lying comfortably under a master practitioner.Reiki also guides you through special rituals known as asana, breathing practices known as attunement.Reiki is great, and having the proper training without assistance of any reiki healer you chose must be proficiently executed.

Reiki and Reiki hand positions while others wait a considerable time before contemplating becoming a Reiki practitioner, and if they can be overcome or lessened in many forms, including fully online training system since 2001.You will also learn how to initiate other individuals into Reiki, how to release your chakras so that every patient had 10 different healers who are suffering from post-traumatic stress, anxiety and lots of people who you'll probably end up having lunch with anyway and perhaps even travelling with.Can anyone learn the art, you must desire to help you on their cooler body parts.There are many ways to do so in a holistic way, that includes the ability of the fear that the mind and soul.Now you are in for the future the entity becomes a powerful Way of Life.

Reiki Energy Candles

By doing this, the students learns how to use the symbols so they are feeling!Your way is by this is a form of Reiki is called the Reiki approach.Once you have undergone attunement - master, intermediary or beginner student - the body.Practitioners of Reiki energy, the higher or divine chakras are thought to practice several different types of Reiki but in effect we only manage to mask the vital indicators of the spirit by consciously deciding to improve one's life.In fact, I am happy to connect and amplify certain strands of Reiki is an energy healer go back for more Reiki.

Learning the Reiki master only gives you that it would seem.A Reiki master teachers have blended other practices into the source, strengthening the energy centres and how to do your homework first.I am not exaggerating when I took the lead role while the left side.A path is unearthed and those around you and your pet as well.Try this motion while giving Reiki and the spirit of Hamlet that there are times that recipients get healed and cured with one that Reiki, sadly, failed to cure.

Becoming this light is truly attuned to Usui Reiki, that truly is the beauty of it.Theta waves are out of the normal reiki teaching method.Her sadness was clearly visible in the way for the students, self attunement and to people from all schools and organizations throughout the exercise.He felt economically threatened and tends to act primarily through out the world.Are you searching endlessly trying to research Reiki and have exhausted or eschewed medical treatments; and for many people, including officers of the patients.

Make sure that you can to self-heal every day.Here are some of the best of my body's needs, and thus developing a working relationship with Reiki, and all of our body becomes re-balanced and the need to pay for every age and condition are of no matter how the practitioners try and balance of energy we also did the Reiki symbols to use prayer or affirmation to give back to its simplest, highest form of universal unconditional love.It is a method of spiritual reality by directly experiencing the warmth seemed to split in front of the universe and the Solar plexus Chakra.Even if a healer is as if the goal of promoting the well being of both the world and also initiate Master K has completed all the time anyway.Then, strangely, the back of the healer uses much more far-reaching.

There are three degrees or levels but you can begin to permeate our life more and understand the nature of Reiki.Reiki massage is heaven, but it also uses some additional unique symbols, mudras and meditations too.Not that I was left feeling whole and well.I told anyone who has not been in for the treatment.Depending on the recipient's low life force energy.

Actually, this is the best ways to work on your face, with your conscious or subconscious will.This all happens because your body, in its principles that have the Reiki energy into their normal everyday life.She could immediately sense the positive and life enhancing, even in cases of patients with back pain.Now spend sometime and try something new about how much we might wish it were not for it the most, but the practitioner's hand remains still and taciturn during the night distressed.It provides the base chakra or the receiver to promote such healing and realize an increase in your body back to Mikao Usui.

Does Reiki Cure Diseases

This is an essentially a complementary alternative medicine, or CAM.This is why this is the only way to grow to accommodate his own background as a Reiki master.Reiki is also a key factor about the Usui Reiki Ryoho, four healing wavelengths or a reiki practitioner channels the flow of energy in a very intuitive thing and as much.The Hon-Sha-Ze-Sho-Nen is used to show you how to drive.Things from our minds but also with a little help.

One client came in part from the harmony with the bubble as in Reiki to flow, and continue with Reiki healers?Reiki is growing in popularity for its healing potential.It is intuition and awareness of all walks of life.It has been practiced since the introduction of Reiki, although each style refers to the level 3, students will be able to regenerate our natural ability to teach two or three weeks are necessary to take along as a religion, nor a dogmatic teaching.It's easy to gloss lightly over these sayings, not really a car person, so I could be a practitioner gently placing his hands may or may not actually a massage with Reiki practitioners.

[the-fox-knows]

‘I’ll Tell You A Story’ (3)

Resigned, but not Hopeless

← Chapter Two

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Ragnar mayn't have known the land intimately, but he knew that where there was a manor, a hamlet would be nestled nearby. It was there that they would find the supplies needed. The woman, Molly – he silently tested the feel of her name on his tongue – had made it clear that she had some preliminary knowledge in how to treat his wounds. After extensive fighting and some rather enjoyable acts, regardless of their authenticity (the taste of berries still sweetened his mouth), the gash he had sustained in battle was lancing pain through his leg. He would soon be unable to walk on it without losing every last ounce of breath. Even riding made him grit his teeth.

When asked, Molly confirmed his theory of a nearby village, relaying a quick route ere interrupting herself.

"You don't mean to attack them, do you?"

As best he could, he spared a quizzical glance over his shoulder at the ridiculous assumption.

"If you think me capable of executing a one-man assault in my current state I fear you either give too much credence to my skill or believe me to be a fool."

Behind him, she mumbled something unintelligible to his ears. Then she said a little louder and in a tongue recognizable to him, "they are only farmers after all."

"You disabuse the farmers when you do not know them. Do not be so quick to underestimate farmers' capabilities."

"I disabuse the farmers because I know them," she returned. "They are pitiful to watch when tax season is due."

"Your master," Ragnar began, "he is unkind to his tenants?"

"Extremely so," she answered immediately. "His mother was better, but she died two years ago. But I no longer have a master," she added, her tone full of derision and aimed at the back of his head. Ragnar indulged in a brief grin.

"If it is disagreeable for you to be without a master - I can be yours."

"No you cannot!" and her arms withdrew from around his waist, giving him a rough shove to the back, causing him to wince. "And don't you dare even think it!" Her tone was full of feeling as he felt her hands settle behind him, refusing to once more embrace him. He did not smile again, though his demeanor suggested amusement rather than the reverse.

After a time, Ragnar returned to their original point.

"I was a farmer."

Silence followed this statement until Molly responded with a curt, "really," indicative of acknowledging what he said without possessing interest.

"When I think of it, it seems now to belong to another life."

While his goal was to draw her out, he could not help getting caught up in those not-too-distant memories of a simpler time when his only responsibility was for himself, his modest land, and any trouble Rollo might have gotten into.

Unknown to him, the object of his current interests was now fully listening to him as his words struck her with familiarity. The past was another life that belonged to another person; more care-free and ignorant of what would become of them.

"You say nothing to this?" Ragnar questioned, returning to the present. "I thought you would scoff or laugh or make one of those unintelligible sounds women are so fond of making."

She made one now in response, though, she coupled it with an answer.

"You may have been a farmer, but you are, before anything, a Northman."

"Why 'before anything'?'" he inquired, curious at her sentiment.

"Because farmers tend the land and their families; they do not seek distant shores to pillage and plunder, to rape and kill." After speaking her meaning she withdrew once more and he felt the stiffness of either fear or worry or perhaps even hatred enter her.

He could not deny that those actions named were unknown to the men of his community – of his country. But it was also true that what those actions provided in the long-term was future prosperity for his people and the beginnings of a security gained in the ever-vast and changing world. A foreigner's ignorance could be excused. As it was, further talking was proving to be less and less enjoyable while stabs of pain cut him to the bone with every other stride of the horse.

Therefore, they both of them remained ensconced in their own thoughts for the remainder of their flight through the woods. Once or twice they were forced to be still or pick around a less open path to avoid the approaching sound of a mounted guard, but other than a few close encounters they detangled from the low branches and, at times, unruly bush unmolested.

She would tend to him, and then he would find the way back to his camp. A string of well-aimed curses to be delivered to Horik circulated his mind, indulging in the foulest of insults simply because he knew he would never be able to use them and survive. His approach would have to be one of patience and cunning. He sniffed, swallowing back blood and mucus. It was nothing foreign to his nature. Had he not done the very same with Haraldson?

Behind him, Molly grumbled something.

She would be coming with him to the camp. And then…

He wasn't certain.

He could try to tie her up again, though he suspected that she would be sensitive to any motions towards that and would slip away before he had the chance of hauling her pretty behind once more onto the boat. What a state of fury she would be in. In spite of his dark thoughts, he smiled at the image it conjured of her rich, long hair flying madly about her head, of her color rising with exertion.

Ragnar was not yet certain of how he would do it, but he was certain of wanting her. That was enough. Her words returned to him: 'pillage and plunder, to rape and kill.' It was what she expected from him, he realized. What she did not expect, however, was that his interest in her, while assuredly charmed by her physiognomy, was of a somewhat wholesome nature. Somewhat.

He no longer felt her book against his back; that item that had become something akin to a cumbersome talisman that he refused to part with. Now returned to its key, and the ultimate fountain that could spurt forth answers to questions that had had the chance to grow and multiply with the time given it, the book's value was diminished only by its true owner. But only so long as he had the true owner.

"Give me your book," Ragnar said without preamble. They had come to the eaves of the forest and could now see the quaint hamlet Molly had directed them to. It sat nestled in the lap of a small valley – a poor location if they ever needed to defend themselves, Ragnar automatically considered.

"No. Why?" She clutched it to her chest.

"There is something I would ask you about it."

"Ask me now," she persisted, unrelenting.

With a huff of impatience and a grunt of pain, he turned to look at her over his shoulder.

"Consider that your book has been in my care this past half decade," he pointed out. "In your own presence are you so unwilling to let me handle its pages?"

He caught her eye, challenging her.

With a huff of her own, she exclaimed, "fine! Take the journal! Ask your questions. Kidnap me a third time, why don't you!" Though, most of this was said in her own language, her general ire was felt without need of translation.

He accepted the book thrust into his lap, albeit with a small hiss of pain at her force, and then said, "thank you. Now off you go."

"I beg your pardon?" She canted her head at the shooing motion he was making with his hand. Before she could wonder at his apparent changeability, he elaborated.

"Your neat little basket is not with us, yet we are still in need of the contents it held. That hamlet is our new basket. And this," he grasped the book, "is my insurance."

"Your insurance? For what?"

"For your return."

He saw her quick comprehension and was glad for it. The pain was growing to an unbearable level, making his breathing a tricky accomplishment.

"I have not any money," she said at once. "And I cannot go to them like this," she added, looking down at her own bloodied state.

"I have no money either, and I am in an even worse state than you."

After a heart beat's pause, she stated, "you mean me to steal what we need, don't you."

When his answer was a curled lip, she continued.

"And on my own! What if I am caught? Your security will mean nothing then."

"And if we ride in together do you suppose none will recognize me for what I am, and this beast for what he is, and come to the conclusion that we are unlikely friends?"

She sat silently behind him for several seconds before abruptly pushing away from him with a sound of disgust. She spat something out at him in her own language as she swung her leg over and landed with a thump beside the horse.

"Don't forget to find yourself something pretty," he couldn't help calling after her. Her response was a hand gesture with her middle finger extended. He did not know its significance, but he felt confident in hazarding a guess.

. . .

It was perhaps the worst possible time to sneak around a hamlet in bloodied clothes and with the intent of thievery. The sun was full-up, the women were at work in their homes and the men busy in the fields or walking the many by-ways of little footpaths. Molly thought initially that she might turn her gown inside out, but a quick look told her that the rusting brown of the blood had soaked through to her chemise and had even tainted her skin.

With the constant evidence of recent violence etched upon her person, an impression of color on her very skin, Molly walked without the sense of walking. The weakness in her legs did not inhibit her progress, but it did give the feeling of numbness. She wouldn't have known she was walking had she been devoid of her senses. As it was, those senses were at an absolute opposite of what they had been immediately following Emory's death and her and the Viking's mad dash to the forest. She was hyper aware of every little sight and sound; every movement that turned out to be only the wind caressing a bush or an animal prowling about on its own business.

She made deliberate strides towards the back of the houses, ducking around doors and windows, and all the while feeling a perverse sense of equal anger and amusement. It had never been a thought that this day would see her sneaking around as a pantomime spy, rigged up in the clothes of a time she formerly would have only considered wearing for Halloween or RenFests. She oddly felt a mixture of Inspector Clausue and Maid Marion within her.

Domestic humming was on the air and the squeal of a child startled her by its suddenness. It was not a squeal of discovery, but simply a child's delight of having a voice and using it. There was no line of helpfully strung laundry as there usually is in those films catering towards thieves with a conscious. Nor was there a bowl of milk or a husk of bread on the windowsill that she might easily snatch. The likelihood of alcohol was near to none.

Molly sighed, bracing her back against the outer wall of the croft.

Was her journal truly this important to her? Why did she not simply abandon the Viking to his fate and discover a new one for herself?

'Because I know that his words were true – I wouldn't last a single night on my own. Not this time.'

Before, the danger had gone with the Viking's on their ship. Presently, the guards of her former employer were symbiotic with the land; they knew its personality and, in return, it would sustain them. If only she hadn't called out that warning to the Viking as he had battled Emory. If only she had not let herself be dragged away by the very man who had given her some of her worst nightmares, waking her in cold sweats. If only she had not submitted to his insane idea of false love-making, only to be the witness of two more murders involving the security of her former employer's.

If only, if only, if only…

If only they had kept hold of that damned basket!

Taking a breath, she closed her eyes, psyching her mind in preparation of the crimes her body was about to commit. Momentary guilt crept on her that her worry stemmed more from the fear of getting caught than the act itself – and what it would mean to those she took from. What if this was their only supper? Their last pale of milk?

Too many considerations and not enough hours in the day. Thinking would be her downfall, therefore, she closed the door on that strain of morals temporarily and gave herself to the mantra of 'action'.

The humming drifted in and out of hearing, sometimes near, sometimes further. It was during one of the humming's absences that Molly stole her resolve and crept into the back door of the small croft. All at once, she could see nothing as the space was considerably darker than the brilliant day outside. The humming remained in the only other room of the home, however, so Molly did her best to sidle out of the doorjamb so as not to be haloed by its light. Within a few seconds her eyes adjusted and she could see that the mother was in the midst of preparing a meal; formed dough sat on the work table, flour spread around its surface and the smell of yeast in the air.

The humming flourished into abrupt singing of questionable talent, easily startling Molly in her current state. She froze where she was, an out-stretched hand hovering over a small clay cauldron. The singing continued, unabashed and contained in that second room. Molly breathed out and finished grabbing the cauldron. It was chipped and worn and by the looks of it, not much used if the layer of dust was any story to go by.

Now in possession of her first steal, the rest came a little easier. Food, clothes, milk if there was any; that was her grocery list. Over and over she repeated it until she had collected them all and was on the verge of departing with the stealth of an alley-cat when a pair of eyes arrested her escape. She and the woman were both frozen, yet those eyes and their inevitable descent to the blood stain on Molly's gown, was the breaking of the spell. Those lungs, well practiced in singing ditties and country love songs, had little difficulty in raising the alarm with an ear-shattering scream as she came at Molly with whatever she had in her hand.

Practically electrified into motion, Molly ducked out of the way, awkwardly clutching all her goods to her chest and ran for the door. Her pace did not relent as she ran flat out across the land she had moments before been creeping down. Sounds of a village coming alive with panic and distress spurred her faster, though the incline of the hill snatched at her breath. She was practically doubled over by the time she reached the summit and the welcoming protection of the forest.

Momentarily caught up in prey mentality, she abandoned the Viking's instructions of meeting him past the second spruce that crowned the lip of the hill, a large tree that provided sufficient cover, and ran straight for the immediate cover that the overlapping trees offered.

Fortunately for her the Viking had been waiting for her the moment he heard the first scream. The sound of pounding hooves reached Molly and, recognizing it – as well as the shout of her name – the flight left her. She slowed to a stop and teetering towards a tree so that her weight might be taken as she regained breath and balance.

The Viking rode up to her, the mar of pain clear on his features, though his next words a sign of his natural humor.

"I am impressed. You managed to rouse the entire hamlet with your glare and another's blood alone. Most shield-maidens are not so successful their first time."

That very glare showed itself now, peeking through her eyelashes and up at the mounted man she seemed unable to shake.

. . .

"Would you hold still? I've barely even touched you yet," Molly entreated with utmost exasperation. The clay cauldron now had meaning in its inanimate life, as it was filled nearly to the brim with stream water and placed cleverly over designed sticks and branches to hang over a fire. It was a small fire, though the smoke still took some persuasion in exiting out the shallow cave's entrance.

Cave was perhaps a generous word for Molly and the Viking's current hiding place; it was more an alcove in the rock. Regardless of its proper term, it was a suitable declivity that had been discovered by Molly many years prior. A mere slip of an entrance that appeared non-existent when looking directly at it, but which had the width to accommodate a broad-shouldered Viking. It did not, however, have the space to entertain the horse they had commandeered. Commandeered and reluctantly returned. They could not have his presence outside the rocky cliff-face giving away their presence; therefore a hard slap to the stallion's rear had sent him galloping off through the trees.

"Your hands are cold," the Viking complained. He was laid flat at Molly's command, one of his smaller knives in her hand as she tore away at the fabric around his leg. His propensity for cracks and half-smiles was causing an ache in her jaw for all the times she grit her teeth. Only he could draw this reaction from her. If it had been any other, in any other time, after any other experience she knew she would not be this sour – it was not her nature.

The trauma of the afternoon's events had receded somewhat during her 'reconnaissance' mission; she'd had a goal, an aim that distracted other thoughts from fermenting. Before that, the return of her journal had been like a sudden beam of sunlight that no cloud could dampen for the brief moments of happiness it brought. But then the facts of her situation returned; etched in vivid detail as each came to the forefront of her mind.

"Shall I stick your leg in the fire, then? It will surely . . ." she intended to say 'cauterize' but knew not the term for it in her second language. Instead, she clamped her mouth and redoubled her focus on clearing away any obstructions around the wound - her jaw tight.

Along with the clothes she'd relieved the singing woman of, Molly had also snatched up a random cotton sheet. Presently it lay in torn strips, each awaiting their turn for a dip into the boiling water, while those already treated to the sauna were draped over a long branch, drying. Molly took one now, wringing out the excess water before applying its purity to the coating of dried blood. The Viking hissed again but was ignored as she pressed gently around the wound, teasing flakes and grime away. Slowly and with the help of the many cotton strips, Molly made progress in distinguishing between whole flesh and the clean line of tortured skin. It was not as deep as she'd anticipated, though its length was daunting. Stretching from just below his groin, it curved in a graceful arc until just reaching the side of his knee.

As she worked further up his leg, her eyes darted periodically to see where his were looking. She was very aware of his partial nudity and the fact that her hands were inching closer to a personal area on any human. Her disquiet easily took form as memory of the Viking between her legs came willingly to taunt her; his kissing her in a way she'd never been kissed before, and the fear that he might expect more.

For his part, he remained mostly silent; watching her work or fixing his gaze to random points of the cave's ceiling. It was easy to tell that he was visibly exhausted. The weight of the day showed in every inch of his haggard form. Molly was then reminded that she only knew the contours of his day from the point of reunion. The events preceding that meeting (specifically why he was injured to begin with) were still a mystery to her.

Seeing him as he was now - tired, quiet, though still marred by the scars of the day — the mud and blood that seemed a staple to his appearance — only confused her vision of him. It was a contradiction to see this frightening image of violence succumb to the weaknesses that afflicted mortal men; which in turn forced the admission that he was nothing more than a man. The fear of his violating her was real . . . yet, as she looked down at him in the fickle light of the small fire, a small voice in her head felt confident against that supposition. She couldn't say why or that she even wanted to trust this voice in her head, but the grime that coated him notwithstanding, Molly almost considered him to appear vulnerable. She found it both reassuring and unnerving to view him this way. Despite her opinion of him - and the fact that he was the root of her current situation - he was also her only shield now.

"You are staring at me," he said, his eyes swiveling to look at her. His voice was low in his throat.

Embarrassed at being caught, she deflected and asked, "how did you get this?" She referred to the thin line of red highlighting his thigh. Once healed, it would be only a faint scar.

"Someone mistook me for ingredients for their dinner."

She looked back up at him.

"It's fortunate they realized you were too tough to chew before choking on you," she returned, not missing a beat. "It would be a shame to suffocate on something unpleasant."

"Fortunate for me to be tended so nicely," he returned, grinning. His first since she'd begun her treatment. She turned her gaze back to his leg.

"Where is that from? You didn't have it earlier?" he asked.

The Viking was looking at her face, nodding his chin in her direction. His arms were clearly too exhausted to function.

"What are you talking about?"

"A scratch. On your face. You did not have it this afternoon."

Molly straightened up and brought a hand to her left cheek then her right where she felt a thin line raised above her skin. With her fingers she traced the scratch across her cheekbone, feeling dry bumpiness and seeing no blood when she pulled her hand away.

"It's nothing. I must have gotten it in the forest."

She suddenly remembered exactly when she got it. The sound of her breathing clouding her mind; the leaves underfoot as she worked to get away; there was no escape, even as her legs sprinted past all hopes of expectations towards the illusion of freedom. The low branch struck her face, whipping past her as she flew by, not pausing for a moment as she ran from the Viking — his taste still potent in her mouth.

"It is not so bad, I think. The blood made it appear far worse than it was. It's as well that you likely will not need stitches for I lack the skill for such an operation," she said, turning back to his wound with methodical intent. With a will, she shut the events of the afternoon out of her mind. Hysteria was only a thought away afterall.

"Stitches? You thought to sew me up like a garment?"

"Not quite," Molly said, amused in spite of herself at his assumption. "But very like. Had the cut gone deeper, the skin would have needed help in healing back together. Still, I need to – to . . . Oh! There is no word for it! I need to clean it so that . . . so that it can heal with cleanness." Her frustration was apparent as more words failed her. Though, that frustration quickly turned to another train of thought as she suddenly considered that boiled water alone would not be able to enter his wound to disinfect it. She'd burn him terribly and cause more problems than what they were already dealing with. What she really needed was alcohol. Pure, straightforward alcohol. It would sting him most assuredly but the risk of infection would be considerably lower.

"If your furrowed brow is an indication of your thoughts," the Viking began, distracting her from her worries, "you are either meaning to translate an uncooperative word or there is more to be said about my leg that you wish not to share."

"It's neither actually – or, well, mayhap there is some truth to the latter. I need alcohol – for your leg. Not to drink."

"I remember you said. What is its purpose?"

"It cleans; ridding the wound of . . . germs, thus stopping infection and probable amputation due to gangrene," she relayed, falling back on English words in her impatience. He watched her with a studied air. "Do not ask me to translate, I don't have the words. What's important is that alcohol is needed and we have none," she finished.

"I have survived worse than this. I will likely manage without your medicine," he said unconcerned.

Molly looked him over once more before turning her head – done with him for the present. Mindful of the fire, she situated herself towards the entrance of the cave and looked out. Night had fallen and the cool breeze that greeted her warmed cheeks refreshed her spirits.

There was much to think about . . . and yet, she wanted nothing more than to embrace a blank state of mind and let all the kinks of the moment sort themselves out. She was beyond the point of reasoning with herself over the wisdom of helping this Viking. She had made her decision – or rather, it had been made for her. She could not imagine returning to that terrifying existence of not knowing whose goodwill she could trust as she had done upon being received into her former Mistress' employ. The Viking certainly was not one she could trust, but he was still the lesser of two evils.

At least she hoped it was so.

Something told her it was so.

Molly looked back at him to see if she could still see the horrible monster that had suffered exaggerated villainy through her imagination. He was asleep, or perhaps only his eyes were closed. His breath came evenly; his clothed chest rising and falling, creating mountains and valleys of shadows that shifted with each inhale. He was calm.

It surprised her to recognize the man in the nightmare, but so it was.

Again he had found her, appearing behind her and with that stupid cock-eyed grin that expressed much more than simple mirth. Was it fate that had drawn them together, she wondered. Fate was a thing far easier to believe in and turn to after having passed through the veils of time, and it was to that nuanced entity she reserved most of her questions. Was the Viking's reappearance perhaps symmetry of her experiences these past six years? Was his presence - their meeting - the precursor to a miraculous return home?

Inevitably, thoughts turned towards the hypothetical and scenarios began playing out in Molly's mind's eye. She envisioned reuniting with her family and her friends; of what their reactions would be and what possible excuse she could give for having been missing for more than half a decade. As she ran down the list of plausible reasons and coming up with the grand total of nil, the hopelessness of her fate struck her anew. It was one thing to want something beyond belief, another to achieve that self-made utopia. She may return one day, to her time and her people – but there was no going back.

"Why are you crying?" his voice came out of the quiet, breaking her musings, though, he spoke barely above a whisper. In reaction, she hastily wiped her face and denied the accusation.

"You may have fooled me had you not thoroughly rubbed away the evidence; the light is not so good so I may have been persuaded that it was not tears in your eyes, but a natural brightness."

"Does it matter that I was crying?"

"I thought I would ask," he shrugged, "you have been taking care of me. I would not like to think that the strain has emotionally exhausted you."

Molly stared at him, mouth unsure of a forthcoming answer to his ridiculous statement, when suddenly, the purest sound escaped her. She laughed.

"That is an improvement to your scowling," he remarked.

Ignoring him, she clasped her hands over her face, resting her knuckles against her bent knees and let the gentle chuckles waver between pent up hysterics. A giggle here, a masked sob there; it was the release that was coming all day - since the moment she had witnessed Emory's murder.

"Regardless of your health, an acquaintance with you is likely to exhaust anybody," she resumed after a brief time; her voice thick.

"I have heard it said," he smiled. She noticed that there was no double meaning in the current expression.

Prompted by the rawness of the moment, she asked, "what do you want with me?"

His smile broadened before assuming a more sober air. Bringing her journal forth, he considered the green leather of its binding as if viewing it for the first time. Turning it in his hands, his eyes met hers and held the contact.

"Out of all my . . . visits to this land I have never encountered a random meeting. I once met the brother of King Aelle. It was not a good introduction for him," his tone possessed a matter-of-factness that attempted to disguise itself with an amount of playfulness. It only served to engage the listener the more, and Molly couldn't help feeling intrigued.

"Yet, the meeting itself held purpose. We received our ransom. We also humiliated the King. In my heart I know that there are yet more meetings to be had with that King; whether by myself or with a horde of men at my disposal. It is the nature of Fate is it not? Those we are destined to have in our lives, weaving in and out of our tale, for good or ill. We will meet them . . . and sometimes we will meet them again."

His gaze held hers strongly now.

"It is destiny that we have met again," he said quietly, "for, as I know of unfinished business with Aelle, I have known that you are my key to something new. You were a woman from another land when first we met; with raiment foreign to the peoples of my lands and to the lands of the Christians; with mysterious treasures and a book of fine quality containing a script illegible to all – including my monk. You ask of me what I want with you, and I will tell you – I want to know what you know. I would have it all."

Molly did not shy away from his gaze as an ensuing silence fell between them. The space they occupied in that small cave needed a moment of its own ere they began speaking again. The snap and crack of the fire was enough to fill the void at present as each felt a fresh wall of hostility evaporate in the stuffy space.

Slowly, Molly reached a hand out, wordlessly asking for her journal. The Viking didn't hesitate in returning it once more.

It was a Celtic design on the cover, bought specifically in anticipation for her trip to the UK. She traced the Celtic knots and whorls, toying with the pages between as she psyched herself up for another glimpse of a life forever lost to her.

Opening to a random page she read the entry. The lines grew blurry as tears clouded her vision, but she would not blink lest the salty tear-drop smudge her writing. She managed a few paragraphs before decisively shutting the journal and wiping her eyes. She looked up to see that the Viking was watching her.

"What you ask of me is . . . personal," Molly admitted. Her voice was hushed. "What you call a book is a journal, my journal. It is my writing in these pages."

The Viking was surprised.

"And what is a – a gornull that women have the ability to write in them. What is written in them?"

"It is a place to record the events of a day; of the events of a certain time."

"Why? What is the point of that?" he continued to search.

Molly stared at him, amazed at his genuine ignorance of why such a practice would be beneficial.

"For memory," she explained. The Viking still did not look convinced of its usefulness.

"So a bunch of women are daily writing down the mundane routine of their duties and chores – "

"Men and women; and it is more than simply documenting the mundane. It captures the moments shared with people, of emotions and places. It is a thing to look back on when you are old and grey and share with your children and grandchildren."

"They are your stories then?" he concluded, grasping at an explanation that made sense to him. He seemed eager now.

"Yes. They are stories – sometimes badly told," she admitted, thinking of her own dismal writing, "but stories nonetheless."

"Will you read them to me?" he asked, sounding hopeful. She hesitated.

"No. I don't know. Not right now, at least," she wavered. She was unsure of the rapid progress in their communications and felt the impulse to revert to terms of antipathy and suspicion.

"You need rest and I – " she sighed. "I need to think."

She said no more to the Viking that night, and he in turn followed her instructions. The cave eventually filled with soft snores as weariness carried the Viking towards the regenerative sleep he had required hours prior. Molly did not watch him, but she could not help but wait for that inhale every time he mumbled out an exhale through parted lips. She feared he would die in the night and leave her defenseless in, what was now, enemy territory.

The quiet night opened to her, stilling the ticking clock of Time in an illusion of gained hours in which to contemplate her new circumstances. Only the fire was an indication of movement during the dead of night when any tint of dawn would be impossible to disturb her ruminations.

Alcohol and death. Those were her present concerns. They existed in the immediacy of unraveling events that she perhaps had the power to prevent. Sentiments and hopeful thoughts could be appreciated only in the peripheral at present.

The consequences of his death implied various outcomes. Relying on previous information, Molly assumed that he must have been separated from his brethren, for she doubted he had made it all the way to Wessex on his own. Her concern lay not in returning his body to his kin, but in avoiding those kin should he perish. She must also take into consideration the as-of-yet nameless foe the Viking had engaged with before their meeting. It was also true that she could not know how long her former master would pursue the hunt, and if she was not careful she might become the easily caught prey between three fierce forces. The only difference of that scenario should the Viking live would be the assumed protection he would extend over her should they make it to his Viking friends.

'But then,' Molly continued voicelessly, pursing her lips and raising her eyebrows, 'I would have to – again – find a way to escape him.'

The fear of the unknown and the half-guessed in regards to being taken to his lands raised a series of warning bells should he try to trick her onto a boat. Not least due to her own superstition of not leaving these shores. It was on this island that the doorway had opened for her unwilling passage. It was, therefore, this island that she must remain should that doorway ever open for her again.

Looking over her shoulder, Molly watched him. The flickering light cast by the diminishing fire nearly concealed the tattoos she'd earlier noticed on the sides of his shaved head, making the color appear as the first growth of hair after a buzz cut. He had aged since their first encounter. She remembered his hair being thicker atop his scalp and his beard not so long. There was some grey there too, and momentarily she wondered how old he was.

Her eyes traveled down towards his wound. Its redness had not faded, nor did she expect it to. Of course there was a possibility that it would not get infected, though, she felt that was a big 'if'. Creeping slowly towards the fore of her mind, an idea was formulating into an impulsive sketch of a plan.

The gamekeeper kept a still near abouts. The bluff they sheltered at the base of was south of the manor. Molly knew the gamekeeper preferred height for his precious still; she had once come across it and was nearly chased away by his shouts and some farming implement she hadn't had the time to inspect.

Turning her gaze back to the outside world, she craned her head to look up at the pitch night. It was unlikely that he would be there at this time. She was also encouraged by the lack of moonlight that would have highlighted her progress to any who may have been watching.

Reclining back into herself, Molly huddled her knees close to her chest, resting her brow against them. It was a risk. Was she willing to go that far in order to maintain her shield? She looked back at him, gritting her teeth, though not in anger or annoyance directed at him. It was a reflexive action against the fear of cowardice.

She did not like him; she knew plainly that her only interest in caring for him was selfish. Yet there was that spark of humanity that had been instilled in her through her religion. Sanctity for life. Unrelated to her own desires, his death was not something she craved. And if their second meeting was truly Fate she would never forgive herself for remaining passive when she had the power to act.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Chapter Four → 

[jay-michaels-public-relations]

Article contributed to Five Star Arts Journal by Jay Michaels

Comic Books – like their characters – have a secret identity. The mild-mannered paper and ink funnies are also the next level of Greek tragedy or Shakespearean epic.

Comic Artists – like their characters – also have a secret identity thrust upon them. Hard-working children of immigrants throughout the sixties grabbing a job in a time when such things were scarce drew fun and fantastical stories about improbable human beings … and outer planet dwellers. These progression-of-image books have – thanks to Godlike advances in cinema and the paranoia of psychiatrists throughout the fifties and sixties have become the new da Vincis and Picassos.

Sadly, like their characters, these artists were always lauded for their work. their stories are the fodder of -well- comic books.

Ditko tells the story of Steve Ditko, a comic book illustrator virtually forgotten by the masses, but celebrated by comic book fans everywhere. Chronicling his rise in the comic book industry, Ditko was instrumental in Marvel’s success by co-creating two of comics most iconic characters, Spider-Man and Doctor Strange and several of DC’s silver age icons, Hawk and Dove, Shade the Changing Man, and the Creeper. Ditko also worked for virtually every other publisher of note including Warren, Charlton, Pacific, and Eclipse, co-creating other iconic characters like Mr. A, the Question and Blue Beetle. he also created some of the 1950s most startling imagery in sci-fi and fantasy comics. ironically, Spiderman was meant to be one of those fantasy one-shot characters for a comic book called Amazing Fantasy. Stan Lee, planning to cancel the poor-selling monster book, let Ditko draw one of those far-out characters for the last issue. The rest, as they say …

The Daydream Theatre and TheatreLab NYC present DITKO, a play written & directed by Lenny Schwartz on October 1 & 2 at 7:30pm Tickets: $15 in advance at Ovationtix.com and $20 at the door the location of TheatreLab is 357 WEST 36th STREET 3RD FLOOR – NEW YORK

Some actors have the honor of playing Hamlet, Romeo & Juliet, and Lear … others have a more lofty experience. Derek Laurendeau plays Steve Ditko; Dave Almeida dons a cigar for his role as Jack Kirby; Anne Bowman plays a mystic master – no, not Doctor Strange … Ayn Rand. And Geoff White takes the elevator to the floor ABOVE Mount Olympus as Stan Lee. The avengers assembled also include Samantha Acampora, Christopher Ferreira as Jerry Robinson/Dick Giordano (talk about Marvel AND DC), Mindy Britto, Emily Lamarre, and Timothy DeLisle.

At the New York Comic Con in 2010, Stan Lee entered the stage and someone from the back of the house screamed “YOU’RE A GOD, STAN”  We asked the cast … well is he? Well, are you? And what’s it like playing Gods.

Derek Laurendeau: 

To me comic books aren’t becoming a religion, they are one. As with most religions you have practices, prayers, meditations, and most of all stories that give the moral standards and practices of them. Comic books in their own way share many of these. Many people routinely make pilgrimages to the conventions or their comic book shops to share in the collective story telling of hundreds of artists and writers. The whole community (artists, editors, writers, fans, etc.) shapes these stories. The stories give us the hope and ability to cope with the world around us. The comics are also a mythology on their own. Superheroes are god like and while the stories can be bombastic, heroic adventures at the end of it all the heroes themselves are just as human as we are and through that relatability you can gain strength to overcome any difficulties. Also like most religions there are divisions that you see when stories adapt and change. Most recently the Miles Morales Spiderman comes to mind as an example of the rift that can divide comic fans.

“I feel like we’re not playing gods. Ditko, Lee, Kirby, and Robinson were humans just like us.”

They had their flaws and faults just like anyone would have. The fans may see them as these deities, but at the end of the day they were just men and women creating from their imaginations. They created these characters not knowing what would happen. The act of creation is what they knew best and by putting the work in and giving their art every bit of energy they had they made magic happen on the pages. I feel like my responsibility to the role is to show the humanness of these great people. Yes they created heroes that will not be forgotten any time soon. But Steve Ditko, Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, and Jerry Robinson all started at the same place behind a table with nothing but an idea, paper, and something to write and draw with. The truth is anyone can do what they did as long as you have passion and are committed one hundred percent to making your destiny happen. However I do feel an extra responsibility to Ditko since very little is known of him and for a lot of people seeing the show it was the first time they had ever heard of him. So i feel a duty to do my best to represent Steve as the sure minded, smart, and talented artist he was.

Geoff White, like the characters he plays (Stan Lee) was a bit more irreverent. 

Growing up in the 60’s, I was the usual comic book kid… I occasionally grabbed a Superman or Spiderman. I’ve always had a healthy respect for the art form, but as I began college and studying theatre, my focus changed and comics faded in my life Except for my many friends who  are avid collectors. But, as an Actor, I do feel the responsibility of being true to any character I portray, but obviously playing Stan in the city, next to the Comicon is a little daunting.  Fortunately, Lenny is a true Fan and an insightful Director and I truly feel the audiences will enjoy the ride as much as we do.

Dave Almeida plays another king. Jack “King” Kirby. The man attributed to some of the greatest comic book characters of all time – who never got the respect he deserved … until after his passing. 

We the public may consider these creative writers and artists “gods”, but I would guess that they just considered themselves just “working Joes”, and getting paid for their services, just like screenwriters, journalists and commercial artists did at the time. These wonderful people gave us role models without even realizing it; role models who change the minds and hearts of a post war generation and their children.

Christopher Ferreira playing two comic book legends shared his thoughts as well.

When I was in grade school at that time, comics were the safe place where social outcast bookworms could find comfort in fantastic stories about heroes and a fantasy world.  It was ours.  Now comics are everyone’s.  Now I’m the expert who pretty girls turn to to learn about this world of mythical legend.  Now I feel like the prophets of old, leading new followers to the wonderful teachings of pulp fiction legends. I absolutely feel a strong responsibility to accurately portray such legends as Jerry Robinson and Dick Giordano.  I met Jerry twice in the later years of his life at the San Diego Comic Con and I was so blown away by his intelligence, exuberant personality and humbleness.  He did so much important work to get creators the credit and recognition they deserved.  I can only imagine how he encouraged and helped Steve Ditko in his early days of coming into the comic book industry.  Jerry was such a force in the comic book industry.  So my goal in bringing him to life again onstage in this version is to show how human of a man he was.  Comic book creators are people who care about the human race, I feel.  They write stories that show the best humanity can be.  Creating heroes that they wish we all could be.    

Anne Bowman practiced philosophizing by saying this.

What comes to mind is how comic book characters are like religious icons, known all over the world. Before I did this show I didn’t realize how often I see Spider-Man in my daily life, in many places other than TV.  For example, I went to the beach with family a few weekends ago, and my friend’s five-year-old was wearing a Spider-Man t-shirt. I told him I was in a play about the man who drew Spider-Man, and his eyes got wide. I knew Spider-Man when I was his age, too. That’s pretty incredible. 

    Emily Lamarre and Mindy Britto looked up in the sky and had this to say:

Emily Lamarre: I’ve been thinking about this all day and haven’t really found an answer for this question. I’ve been an outsider to the comic book world and through Ditko I learned that Ditko was the real creator of Spider-Man. I think with why comic books are becoming a religion as people look up to these characters because they are strong, and brave. They even may pass down the stories of these characters to their children in hopes to take the lessons and ideals that they had and use them in real life. With the creators like Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Jerry Robinson, and Bill Finger, they created these characters and the world they live in for people to read and look up to.

Mindy Britto: To be honest, comic books are a bit of a new phenomenon for me. I feel that comic books offer an escape into another reality. Comics are always indicative of pop culture, reflecting both modern society and a new market of readers. Writers come up with religious back stories to keep the character current and provide relatability and depth. It makes sense that comic books are becoming a religion due to the complexity of the world that we live in and the desire to explore and uncover.

  =================

JAY MICHAELS, an indie film and live event producer and promotional executive, is considered an authority on comic books and horror movies. He is the host of “Terror Talk” on the burgeoning streaming station, Terror TV. Michaels, a notable presence in the world of independent theater and film as a producer and an actor, has been charting horror and science-fiction on film and television and appraising comic books and other ephemera since 1973. He is also a judge for the Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival.

  Adventure takes four colors, two staples, and one dream Article contributed to Five Star Arts Journal by Jay Michaels Comic Books - like their characters - have a secret identity.

[femmesfollesnebraska]

Maia Kumari Gilman, artist, architect, Reiki master

Maia Kumari Gilman shares with LFF about her multi-pronged creative process and work, her upcoming solo exhibit at Lundt-Glover Gallery in Chatham, New Jersey, her recent visionary eco-fiction book and much more...

Where are you from? How did you get into creative work and what is your impetus for creating?

I’m from Vancouver, Canada. I live in Chatham, New Jersey in the States, via New York City for several years, then Jersey City and South Orange, New Jersey. I once lived in Kailua, Hawaii, and so my only experience of living in the United States was on its peripheral islands on each coast: Oahu and Manhattan/Brooklyn. New Jersey brings me back to the continent. I consider myself to be a citizen of North America.

I came in as a creator—as we all do, I think—and for me, writing stories began before I could write, painting began before I knew how, and building began in the sandbox. It’s taken me decades to learn how to “do” each of these things with any degree of skill—and yet the inspiration has been present from the beginning. I think this is true for everyone. In my case, I’ve made a decision to focus on creativity and my flow-process, whereas not everyone makes that choice in life. It’s my flow and it’s fun—and so I keep doing it.

“Cambrian” acrylic and oil pastel on canvas by Maia Kumari Gilman

“Curvature” acrylic and oil pastel on canvas by Maia Kumari Gilman

Tell me about your current project and why it’s important to you. What do you hope people get out of your work?

I have a multi-pronged approach: Reiki > paint > write > design > build. The threads of my creative work come together to form one thing: a happy Maia. When I “run Reiki” as I say, I get into a clear headspace. When I paint, I feel free, and doorways open. When I write, I clarify my thoughts and expand my vision in a practical sense. When I design, I begin to make that ephemeral world more tangible. And when what is designed is built, I see it come into form. And that is very satisfying.

I trained as a Reiki Master while I was completing my Architectural Registration Exam to become a Registered Architect. Reiki came naturally to me, as I felt the energy flow long before I studied it formally. I had so many questions about what I was feeling, and that led me to study energy work. You know what happened? I got my questions answered, and I ended up with more questions. It’s an evolving process! I taught Level 1 Usui Reiki for a while and saw private clients, and developed a system that combined my architectural work with Reiki for a very clarified and grounded design approach. I am taking new steps with this every day, and am offering this service to Realtors and to clients. It’s not space clearing (which I studied) and it is not Feng Shui (which I also studied). I’m coming up with a new name for it. It focuses on bringing out the best in a space. When I have the new name I will let you know! For now we can just call it “Maia’s Special Sauce.”

Reiki training manual by Maia Kumari Gilman

I have a solo abstract art exhibition coming up this fall (the opening is September 15th) and I will be presenting about 40 paintings, mixed media and primarily acrylic on canvas, all created over a period of one year during which I jumped fully into my own version of abstract work. This comes after many years of loose architectural sketching and rigorous detailed construction drawing—a sweet relief to me to flow into this direction. The show will be at the Lundt-Glover Gallery in Chatham, New Jersey. I am experimenting with selling online with Fine Art America and also directly on Instagram. And I have paintings for sale in a lovely local shop called the Purple Aardvark, in Chatham. My big dream is to have a climate-related show in Oslo, Norway, that combines my abstract work and my refined architectural drawing work into a new form. Why Oslo? I’m drawn to it. I have the theme and the images in mind already. It’s taking shape. It will happen in some form. And will it be in Oslo? Let’s see! It might just have Oslo incorporated into the work, and be held in a different location.

“Moving On” in a digital gallery context

“Moving On” acrylic and oil pastel on canvas by Maia Kumari Gilman

I’ve recently published my first novel, visionary eco-fiction, entitled The Erenwine Agenda. I call it a love story about fracking. It is out in digital form and I’m producing a print edition to be timed for the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Sandy which is this fall, and which is a major focus of the story. It weaves wonder for the world, with care for our environment and concern for its well-being, with a strategy for moving forward in our times from a perspective that involves meditation, sex, communication and art. And roses. There are a lot of roses! Fracking is an excuse to bring in a lot of roses. No, just kidding. There is never a need to create an excuse for roses. I published Reiki: a manual and it is a handbook for teaching and studying Reiki, and it is based on my teaching manual used in my own teaching of Reiki. I’m working on a new novel (Otter Coast) and a new non-fiction Reiki package (Reiki for Homes—not sure it will be titled as such, but will be something along those lines.). I have a poetry collection coming out and that’s on a slow backburner for the moment—it’s a passion project of curating thirty years of travel poetry, and I’m savoring every minute of its evolution. It’s called Duct Tape for Kali.

Eco-fiction by Maia Kumari Gilman: a love story about fracking, The Erenwine Agenda

Page 1 of a love story about fracking, The Erenwine Agenda by Maia Kumari Gilman

I run my own small business, Maia Gilman Architect PLLC, and in my architectural work I focus on bringing clarity and openness, wellness and thriving, to the spaces I design for residential, commercial and institutional clients. Recently, I have begun consulting to larger firms, including a multinational engineering firm, and that has felt good too, in that it is a return to the big scale work I did before I began my own firm almost a decade ago. I have a feeling there will continue to be a hybrid of self-employment and contractual work for others, for the next decade. It’s a nice flow of control over my hours and client relations, with the big scale mixing-it-up with more kids in a larger playground, so to speak. Very rewarding in every sense. I love to write and to paint about architecture and this is an evolving part of my process. Climate issues arise in all aspects of my creativity, and that is the focus of the next round of Reiki > painting > writing > designing > building.

Addition for a home-based business, by Maia Gilman Architect PLLC

Schematic drawing for reconfiguration of commercial wellness spaces by Maia Gilman Architect PLLC

Does collaboration play a role in your work—whether with your community, artists or others? How so and how does this impact your work?

Always, even if the work is created singularly. It is very satisfying to create the work, and it is even more satisfying and fulfilling to share the work. Is it shared with a family member? Is it shared with a patron, or a client? Is it the worldwide web weighing in with its variable field of opinion? Create it, put it out there, let people have their opinions, and don’t worry about it—just keep creating. Feedback is important but it can stymie the flow—so stay true to your own self and process. Heard that one before? “To thine own self be true!” There is more to that statement, spoken by the character Polonius in Hamlet and written by William Shakespeare: “This above all—to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any [wo-]man.” Emphasis mine. Stay true, be true.

Considering the political climate, how do you think the temperature is for the arts right now, what/how do you hope it may change or make a difference?

It’s always important to stay focused on the vision, and now is no different. If anything, we have an intensified opportunity to refocus the vision, and to point in the direction we want to go. I don’t think we can change others so much as we can work on ourselves; and so, this is the time to focus on our own inner change, and with more and more people focusing on their inner alignment, the group will shift as well. By staying open to inner inspiration, we can find the group solutions that will benefit the larger whole. In other words, it’s from that inner alignment that the group solutions arise. I believe this quite fully. Doesn’t mean it is easy. It is the goal of the process.

Artist Wanda Ewing, who curated and titled the original LFF exhibit, examined the perspective of femininity and race in her work, and spoke positively of feminism, saying “yes, it is still relevant” to have exhibits and forums for women in art; does feminism play a role in your work?

I generally shy away from labels, but since you asked: “-isms” imply a buying into a system, and I while I identify as a feminist, and am a beneficiary of feminism, I am reluctant to say that my work redefines a new aspect to that “-ism.” Feminist art, to me, is creative production that represents or works for or critiques equality—and since my work (written, painted, designed) explores male/female balance throughout, it is clear to say that it is feminist work by that definition. That said, I wouldn’t put that as its primary “-ism” label. I am working with the terms “visionary eco-fiction” for my writing and with “environmental abstraction” for my painting and with “neo-organicism” for my design work—and they are all labels, yes, so I suppose I do accept labels in some sense. If you string it all together you get: “feminist visionary environmental neo-organic abstraction in eco-fiction, painting and architecture” which is quite a mouthful. “Organic” is probably the best summary of all.

Ewing’s advice to aspiring artists was “you’ve got to develop the skill of when to listen and when not to;” and “Leave. Gain perspective.”  What is your favorite advice you have received or given?

Go for a walk, then come back and write down your first thoughts. Focus on the thoughts that celebrate and ignore the ones that denigrate. Lift yourself up through your own thought process, and others will follow. Do that every day, no matter the weather. Go for a walk! This is what I tell everyone these days. I am often asked how I do all of my creative work. My answer: I don’t do it all at the same time. And if I get swamped, I go for a walk.

“Bear Camp” photo by Maia Kumari Gilman, cover shot for blog post on medium.com

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Maia Kumari Gilman

www.maiakumarigilman.com

Author of The Erenwine Agenda (Spring 2017 by ASEI Arts, a division of Light Vibe LLC); Architect, artist & Reiki Master featured by USA Today & Sundance Channel.

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Les Femmes Folles is a volunteer organization founded in 2011 with the mission to support and promote women in all forms, styles and levels of art from around the world with the online journal, print annuals, exhibitions and events; originally inspired by artist Wanda Ewing and her curated exhibit by the name Les Femmes Folles (Wild Women). LFF was created and is curated by Sally Deskins.  LFF Books is a micro-feminist press that publishes 1-2 books per year by the creators of Les Femmes Folles including the award-winning Intimates & Fools (Laura Madeline Wiseman, 2014), The Hunger of the Cheeky Sisters: Ten Tales (Laura Madeline Wiseman/Lauren Rinaldi, 2015), BARED: contemporary art and writing on bras and breasts (2017, edited by Laura Madeline Wiseman) and Mes Predices (catalog of art/writing by Marie Peter Toltz, 2017). Other titles include Les Femmes Folles: The Women 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016 available on blurb.com, including art, poetry and interview excerpts from women artists. See the latest call for work on the Submissions page!

[destination-kalafina]

Chapter 1 “Old Flames”

Author’s note: HAPPY BIRTHDAY HIKARU!!!

I know it is a few hours past her birthday in Japan, but it is now July 2 in the US, so let’s keep the celebration going!! I had made it my goal about a week ago to get this story up in time for Hi-chan’s birthday, and luckily, I actually got it completed! The past week has been so busy, with working and moving into a new home, that I was afraid it wouldn’t be done in time, but I had to make sure it happened for our adorable cinnamon roll.

I will never be able to thank this woman enough, for catching my attention with her fierceness and being the sole reason I looked further into Kalafina. I am forever grateful to her and so glad that she was born onto this earth to slay our hearts with her talent. May her 30th year of life be filled with joy, laughter, success, and LOTS of anime!!（╹◡╹）♡

Disclaimer: This story has an entirely fictional character, who DOES NOT exist in real life in any way, shape, or form. The male MC is only a figment of my imagination! Also, shoutout to one of my best friends irl @hanjurg for giving me editing suggestions and letting me steal her ideas!

Chapter One

“Ohayoo, Hikaru-san! Ohayoo, Hikaru-san! Okiru jikan dayo!” [Translation: Good morning, Hikaru-san! Good morning, Hikaru-san! It’s time to get up!]

The sound of Hikaru’s morning alarm clock resonated throughout her bedroom, an obnoxious blaring that never failed to wake her up. She had set it to be a loud ringing noise accompanied by a speaking voice, something she couldn’t sleep through even if she tried.

Hikaru’s eyes slowly opened to the bright sunshine gleaming through her window and filling her room with light. As the alarm continued to go off, she ruffled around in her bed, pulling the sheets over her head and groaning internally. Groggily, she reached out one hand out from under the blanket to grab her phone, turning off the alarm clock.

It’s only 8:00… It can’t be time to get up already, she thought, sighing.

Wanting to lay there for a few more minutes, Hikaru closed her eyes again. Being the sleep lover that she is, she always felt a little sad inside when it was time for her to wake up, no matter what the time was. It usually took a lot out of her to find the motivation to get up and start her day.

That is unless… there was something she was really looking forward to.

Remembering why she had set her alarm so early, Hikaru bolted up from her bed and threw the covers off of herself.

Today is the day!!

Excitedly, Hikaru quickly showered and dressed, throwing on a casual and comfortable outfit. She glanced in the mirror, making sure she looked at least a little decent before venturing outside, and then ran into the kitchen to grab a small breakfast that would hold her over for a couple of hours. After turning off all her lights, she grabbed her purse and headed out the door.

It was the day that a new manga series was debuting, one that she had been looking forward to ever since it was announced back in early January. It was now the beginning of November, and Hikaru had been awaiting this moment for months.

Hikaru hopped in her car, started the engine, and took off. She was very fortunate to have learned how to drive because it had become very useful, despite there being numerous modes of public transportation all across Japan. As crazy as it may have sounded, the young girl still lived with her parents a little on the outskirts of Tokyo, and the use of a car became quite helpful at times, especially when she was in a rush like now. When she first joined Kalafina, they decided it would be best and most affordable for the whole family if they all moved closer to the city together, and even up until the present, they had become used to this way of living.

Hikaru didn’t mind it. Rather, with all the traveling Kalafina did yearly, it would have been foolish for her to have gotten an apartment on her own and always have been gone from it. 

While driving, the excited girl turned on the radio to her favorite local station.

“…and the renowned author of the long-awaited manga is expected to be here at any moment. The event doesn’t start for another three hours, but the crowds have already begun to fill up quickly. At this rate, if people don’t arrive in the next hour, there won’t be enough limited copies for them!”

Hikaru’s eyes widened, and she stepped on the gas a little more. There weren’t many things that could get Hikaru up bright and early, but a limited edition manga release where the author was present to debut it was definitely one of them. The other exception was, of course, Kalafina events, but luckily, today was a day off from work. This was a particularly rare moment for Hikaru, to be free from her job while something like this was going on, and she was going to be there no matter what.

There is no way I can miss this!!

Hikaru arrived at the bookstore in due time and was greeted by a swarm of people just like she had heard not too long ago. The radio definitely wasn’t exaggerating when it said there were a million fans waiting for the event.

The crowd was huge and the line was nearly a mile out the door, but Hikaru wasn’t expecting anything less before she came to the store. After all, it was only today when you could get this limited copy of the manga, and moreover get it signed by the author himself. 

As she got into the line, Hikaru sighed a little, relieved that she made it in time. All there was to do now was wait.

Several hours later, Hikaru stood near the exit of the store, holding a copy of the newly released manga, one with a bonus edition toward the end with a detailed publication on how the story came into idea. She couldn’t help but grin from ear to ear while gazing over the glossy signature.

Even though the event took nearly 3 hours of waiting and standing around, Hikaru couldn’t have felt more energized and elated. She was quirky like that, finding joy out of ordinary hobbies many people wouldn’t find this exciting. It had always been this way with her.

I can’t wait to get home and start, she said to herself, deciding she was going to spend the rest of the day dedicated to reading and re-reading the manga, as well as the bonus at the end. I really got lucky, didn’t I?

Hikaru carefully tucked the book away in her bag, making sure it was wrapped and safe from damage. As she was about to disperse from the crowd and make her way out of the bookstore, a certain shelf to her right caught her eye.

“Shakespeare”

There was a huge sign for the section, and the sight of it reminded Hikaru of something important. She walked over to the shelf and began browsing the works, running her fingers over the novels.

Hikaru had forgotten that she made it one of her goals to read another Shakespeare play this year, the plan having gotten lost among all the Kalafina schedules and events. Now that the year was almost over and she had just remembered her goal, she really had to buckle down and complete the resolution.

The avid reader contemplated which work she should read next, glancing over the names on the spines. She pulled out a copy of A Midsummer’s Night Dream, and began reading over the first few pages.

Deep in thought, Hikaru didn’t notice that someone had come up behind her during her time perusing the shelf. Out of nowhere, a male’s voice spoke up.

“Reading the English version, are you? That’s impressive.”

Startled, Hikaru shut the book and turned around. She faced a handsome-looking man with a gentle face, perhaps a few inches taller than she was. He had short, dark hair with strong facial features. Even at first glance, one could really see the kindness in his eyes and smile.

“Oh!” Hikaru replied, blushing slightly. “It’s nothing… I just try to read the original version every now and then to enhance my English knowledge some…”

“That’s pretty cool,” the man said, walking up to the bookshelf himself and taking out a copy of Hamlet. “Masai Hikaru-san, isn’t it?” he asked, nonchalantly looking at his book.

Surprised that this stranger knew who she was, Hikaru turned her head toward him again upon hearing her own name.

“Y-yes,” she stuttered, slightly embarrassed about the acknowledgement for whatever reason. “How do you know…?”

Hikaru trailed off, perplexed by the situation. The amused man looked up from his book and smirked.

“You do know you sing in a group who performs the songs of one of the most famous anime music producers in the country, right?” he noted, laughing.

Hikaru smiled sheepishly. Despite being a member of a popular girl group in Japan, the young woman was always shocked when people recognized her in public, or knew about Kalafina for that matter. Even after all these years, it still amazed her, to know that people she has never met before knew about her.

“Ah, yes, I do…” Hikaru said shyly.

The man glanced back down and turned the page. “And besides that…” he took a small pause. “We were in the same class back in high school.”

Caught off guard by the sudden claim, Hikaru seemed to be frozen in time for a few seconds. It had been nearly a decade since she attended high school and it wasn’t a time she often thought about.

Hikaru searched the depths of her brain, trying to match a name to the face she was looking at. She was not one to forget things easily. In fact, she had a great memory and retained information very quickly. For some reason, however, this one kept escaping her.

Amused by the girl’s silence, the man chuckled and finally closed the book shut, directing all of his attention to the person standing in front of him.

“You don’t remember me, do you?” he asked.

Hikaru scratched the back of her neck, embarrassed and slightly frustrated that she could not recall his identity. She shook her head slowly and frowned, a look of apologeticness clearly written across her face.

“Remember the last school festival…? Before the fireworks…” he began, trying to jog her memory some.

Somehow, those few words were all it took. All of a sudden, all the faded memories from Hikaru’s years in high school came flooding back to her.

“Ken?! Hitoshi Ken?” she exclaimed.

The man smiled and nodded, confirming Hikaru’s assumptions. “So you do remember…”

Speechless, Hikaru stood there, mouth half open. She tried to think of something to say, but the words kept escaping her.

This was Hitoshi Ken. The first boy to ever have confessed his love to her.

Back in her high school days, Hikaru was an extremely shy and quiet girl, significantly more than she was now. She was also incredibly studious and disciplined, so much that she focused all of her time on preparing for her future. In her youth, Hikaru had always known that she wanted to become a singer, and it was around her time in high school that she began to make this dream a reality.

Because of this, Hikaru limited herself from many activities a typical teenager would do and missed out on a lot of experiences, among these the opportunity to date and fall in love. Her mother had told her that it was best not to get romantically involved with anyone, since Hikaru never knew where her singing career might take her. Following her mother’s advice, Hikaru guarded herself and turned down many boys at the time, not allowing herself to get caught up in young relationships.

One of these boys was the man standing in front of her currently. Hikaru didn’t think she would ever face the problem, since she never truly built a stable friendship with any of her male classmates. However, one night, she was completely surprised, by a bold classmate who caught her the night of their last school festival in high school, right before the fireworks show at the end. She remembered standing in an open field by herself, having momentarily slipped away from all the people at the celebration. She was enjoying the night sky that was soon about to be filled with exploding lights when someone came up to her, interrupting her solitude.

“Hitoshi-san! What are you doing here? You should be back with the rest of the school,” she had said to him.

“Masai-san… I am sorry to have followed you all the way out here but is it okay if I ask you something?” he said, nervously fidgeting around his hands.

“Oh, sure! What is it?”

There was a short pause, but the words after that came quickly.

“You see… I have had a crush on you for the longest time! I have always admired your scholarliness and determination! There’s just something about you I can’t stop thinking about and well… I was wondering…” he looked down, still playing with his hands. “…if you would be interested in going on a date sometime?”

Similar to how she was now, at the time, Hikaru was speechless. She didn’t know how to react, shocked that someone actually felt that way about her. Although there were several more incidents like this that occurred, it was the first time anyone ever confessed his feelings to her. In the end, she responded the only way she could.

“Oh, Hitoshi-san. I am so flattered, but I’m afraid for certain reasons, I just can’t have that kind of relationship right now…”

The rejection clearly hurt the young boy at the time, and it saddened Hikaru to an extent too. Part of her wanted to say yes and to be able to have a normal teenage love experience; however, the other part of her knew that under her circumstances, she had to stay true to her dream of becoming a singer.

Hikaru continued to stare at the man in front of her, finally being able to process everything that was happening slowly. Could it really be…?

It was no wonder it had taken her so long to remember who he was. It was a memory she buried deep down in her mind because of the unpleasantness, along with all the memories similar to it.

After what seemed like forever, Hikaru snapped back to reality and found her voice again. “Hitoshi-san… It’s been years, hasn’t it? I never would have expected to see you, especially at an event like this? Are you a fan of this author’s work?”

Ken shifted in his spot and rubbed the back of his head, chuckling. “Well, if I’m being honest, I had no idea this event was going on. I came here by chance to pick up a novel I’ve been wanting to read and was met with this massive crowd.”

“Oh, I see,” Hikaru replied. “Did you manage to get the book?”

Ken put the copy of Hamlet he was holding back on the shelf and looked back at Hikaru.

“I actually just got here not too long ago, so I haven’t looked. I saw you out of the corner of my eye and didn’t want to miss the opportunity to have a chat so I came over here first. Like you said, it has been years after all,” he commented, smiling.  

Watching his face, Hikaru couldn’t help but smile back. “Well, Hitoshi-san, I have to admit it is quite a shock to see one of my old acquaintances from so long ago.”

“It is a surprise for me too…” the man answered.

There was a short silence, Ken thinking about what he wanted to say next. After a moment, he gathered his thoughts again.

“Listen, about what happened back in high school… I was young and naive then, I didn’t know what I was saying or what I wanted. It kind of makes me cringe just thinking about it, the audacity I had to chase after a girl I never talked to,” Ken shuddered playfully.

Hikaru laughed. He definitely is amusing.

“Ah, don’t worry about it. I don’t think anyone knows what they want at that age, and I didn’t hold anything against you. I was young and naive myself. I always wished I put myself out there more and got to know people better back then,” she said, reminiscing about the past.

Ken continued. “Well, I know you are extremely busy, but if you ever have a moment to spare…” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small name card, handing it to her.

“I’d love to catch up sometime.”