#i read a crazy stat a couple days ago that even though they only did SIX shows in jan 2020

[sanstropfremir]

hii! I was watching some aespa stages recently and had a very odd feeling about them in regards of stage presence, or lack of it to be honest. I know you've talked about 4th gen and their need to look pretty and effortless while doing hard choreo and for a while I tried to associate that with the girls but honestly it's not even that. Karina is the only one who sometimes gives me sassy or some very toned down emotion I can't point out, the other ones just look almost robotic-like (maybe they're taking the concept too far lol). which I guess is an A+ when it comes to making the choreo and song feel easy to perform, but also its boring to see. now, I do want to know if I'm being too picky on them and what you think about their stage presence, as well as see if you think there could be a correlation to that and the fact they debuted during the pandemic and thus the lack of an audience makes it harder for them specifically to grow that on stage persona. I know more groups have debuted after music shows stopped having audiences, and pretty much the entire kpop industry is still serving through only online contents, but there could be a chance that once aespa feeds off the energy of a crowd, their performance will reach another level (pun intended)

hi hello!! as far as aespa goes, i think there are a couple of factors. one is yes, you're right, there's going to be a change in their presence when they actually get a chance to perform at length in front of an audience. this is definitely an sm specific thing though, since their mode of training is for stadium shows. tours are where sm groups really shine and they tailor their idols for that kind performance, which means strong vocals + stamina first, and then any charm and charisma takes a little longer to develop and usually comes out more in concert. you can see it in any live clips of sm artists, back when not online concerts where a thing. i think aespa is likely to have a similar trajectory as red velvet, where their music show performances are fine, but the live shows are where it's at. i also think aespa is also sm's experiment in order to try and catch gen z/the tiktok crowd, so they're adopting a slightly different method. remember, sm hasn't actually debuted a new group since 2016, where kpop was a very different environment than late 2020. i went back and watched some black mamba stages and i don't find them that uninteresting, but there is a slight change between their debut and next level/savage. there's a marked increase in small hand and head movements in the choreo and dramatic camera choreography, which are both common to tiktok style dancing, where you can actually have those kind of movements and focus because you have a narrower eye and better control. sm even released a 'camera guide for creators' for savage, which.....telling. to be fair they also did this for sticker but i don't think it worked the same since that isn't really the ncity bag. but i think it's working for aespa. however they haven't made the leap as well as they could have, because sm has trained such strict resting model faces on them that now that we're seeing their faces up close a lot, we can see there's not a lot going on (where it was a little more disguised with black mamba). again - this is definitely an sm specific training technique, where they want their idols to have flawless straight resting faces and that they have to maintain that flawlessness through anything. sm has been in this game the longest and they're going to be very reluctant to bend their tried and true methods, especially because they are the gold standard, even though the trend has been heavily listing to 'relatable' (read: ability to make semi-stupid expressions) idols for the last couple of years. if i were to hazard a guess as to what the sm training program looks like, i would say their order of skills priorities are:

vocals

media/face/body language training

specialist skills (dance/rap)

group dance + cohesion

-> debut

settlement period

development of personality/charisma

aespa is still in this settlement period, as it hasn't even been a year yet, and i bet their coaches have been saying the same things about 'how it will all change' when they get in front of an audience.

so yes? i guess i could say that you're being too picky on them? but also if they aren't vibing with you that's also very fine. however, i will say that the whole no audience music shows situation has actually produced some new groups that i think have a lot of stage presence/character and promise, and will likely only improve if they manage to stick around. purple kiss had a fantastic debut and an even better first comeback (also both their eps are no skips which is ILLEGAL for a group that only has two eps). i found blitzers by youtube algorithm chance and their debut is pretty good (and ridiculous) but their first comeback is excellent and you can see the improvement even in four months (teenage boys really are sponges). also see my previous post about e'last, they debuted at i think the same time as aespa (late 2020) and although there's so many of them, they have a pretty strong group presence already.

[lo-55]

Playing With Fire Ch. 3

Ignition

@emrysaf

You’ve decided. You’re going to marry Maki. 

You’re going to marry her and adopt Sputter and Flare, and you’ll all live happily ever after in the cathedral and- 

You’re broken out of your thoughts when Maki smacks you so hard you literally see stars and throws you on the ground. 

“... owe.”

If everything else hadn’t cemented the fact that you were really living inside Fire Force, the pain of Maki’s fist and the hard concrete under your cheek sure would have. Holy hell, how was she so strong?

You roll over on your back to look up at her. 

“I bet,” you begin, “that you could bench press me if you really wanted to.”

Maki’s cheeks pink and she huffs down at you. “Why aren’t you using your pyrokinesis? Do you think I can’t handle it?”

I have no idea how to do that! 

“Nope, Nope! I’m sure you could wipe the floor with me, it’s not that miss!” You said quickly. “I was just in awe of you, sorry,” you salute quickly, and watch pink crawl across Maki’s face. 

So cute!! 

“H-honestly! At least use your spear!” 

You perk up. Spear? The Sun Spear? Is that what you have here? An answer! Finally! An answer! 

Maki takes your surprise for something else. “No one told you that they’d sent it over ahead of you? You should really keep better of your gear.” 

You dip your head quickly. “Yes, yes. Sorry. Can you show me where it is, please?” 

“Sure,” Maki smiles at you, “We’re about done for now, anyhow. Let’s go back inside and wash up. Sister Iris and Shinra should be waiting.” 

Maki takes you back into the cathedral, away from the training area on the roof. The cathedral really is pretty run down. The walls could use a good scrubbing, the floor boards either need to be replaced or are missing entirely, and there’s a lot of cracks in the tile and missing corners. The windows are fine, if not dusty, and the stained glass pieces are really beautiful. The whole place smells faintly of burnt wood and gun oil. It’s not bad, but its certainly unfamiliar. Everything is so vivid. The way it smells. The sound of the building settling, and the birds outside, and the voices of your new comrades. 

It’s amazing. 

Kinda terrifying, but crazy cool too. 

After a quick shower for each of you Maki shows you to the weapons room, where a long, thin case is rested against a wall between two racks of guns. Obi’s shield is propped up in one corner, along with a couple of his weird stabbing things that he puts infernals to rest with. You’ve been here two days now, and you’ve seen him use it twice.

You don’t know how, but you know instinctively that that case belongs to you. 

You go to it. There’s a strap along the back, like the kind on a violin case. You carefully set it on a table, mindful of the bullets stacked on top of it. With a few clicks you undo the buttons on either end and open up the case. Inside is a long staff, deep red in color and capped at the bottom with copper colored metal that curves into a diamond point. On the opposite end is a thin band of the same metal, that reveals the inside to be hollow. 

You pick it up carefully, testing its weight in your hands. It feels natural. Even though you’ve never actually fought with a spear before your body knows where to hold it, and how to spin it around elegantly until you’re facing Maki again. Your body knows how much space you’re taking up, and how not to hit the walls, while your brain geeks out over the fact that you’re actually holding the Sun Lance. 

So cool! 

Is it conceited to say that you’re super cool? Or that this was hella badass? 

You were almost bouncing on your toes you were so excited. 

“Wow, I didn’t know you missed your spear this much,” Maki smiled at you. “You look good with it.” 

“Aha, you think so? It’s just nice to have it I guess. This has been, I dunno. An adventure already. I’m in a strange place, with strange people, and I’m in an awfully dangerous situation. It’s been an adjustment, ya know?” 

You feel like a fool for rambling, but Maki smiles at you kindly. 

“I understand. Even though I was raised in a military family, it took me a while to get used to life as a fire soldier too. Don’t worry too much about it, and you know, we’re always here to help. It’s not like you have to go it alone.” 

You’re heart warms with her words. “Yeah. Thank you, Maki. You’re really a nice person.” 

Once the Sun Lance is safe in its case the two of you leave the armory, and make your way to the dorm rooms. 

Since the company is so small, each person gets their own room. In bigger companies you would be in actually dorms, or barracks, but the eighth only has Obi, Hinawa, Maki, Sister Iris, Shinra, and yourself. Arthur will be here soon too, and Tamaki. Your small company will grow soon. 

Your own room ended up being at the top of one of the towers on the west side of the cathedral, opposite of the garage. Which meant that last night, when the alarm had gone off, you’d been the last to arrive at the Matchbox. Near the garage are the locker rooms, and the communal showers, although there’s more bathrooms scattered through the base. 

In the center of the cathedral is the courtyard where Sister Iris purifies herself, and grows flowers. 

It’s really a nice place. 

“Thank you,” you say again, and Maki nods to you and leaves you to climb the steps on your own. You shut the door and lock it behind you. 

Your room is scant, all things considered. A bunk bed it pushed into each corner, with a desk underneath it. You’ve claimed the one nearest to the window. There’s a wardrobe on the opposite side, and a small, stocky book shelf. 

You need to hang up some pictures or get a rug or something. It’s entirely impersonal. 

You rest your Sun Lance up against the corner by the window and go to sit at the desk under your bed. You’ve already unpacked your few belongings into the wardrobe and the drawers of the desk, including the diary from ‘Fuyuki’. 

Your ‘sister’. The game honestly hadn’t told you a whole lot about her. Just that she disappeared, and what few flashbacks you would have now and again. Like the one you got when you touched your ring and the lighter.  

You open it up with careful hands. 

Inside the handwriting is familiar, even if the words aren’t. There’s no mistaking your hand writing. It looks like a serial killer in a movie has left a ransom note made out of letters cut out of magazines. 

I wonder if there’s cereal in the kitchen. 

You always think better when you’re snacking. 

To keep your thoughts in order, you scatterbrain.

<3 Fuyuki 

 The first entry is dated for 193 AC. After the Cataclysm. It’s 198 now, so this was given to MAIN (to you?) five years ago. That would have been right before she graduated the fire academy and joined her company. A year before she disappeared, around 194. 

It feels invasive to read the diary of the person whos life you’ve taken over, but you need answers and you don’t have a lot of options here. 

I can’t believe Fuyuki gave me a diary! That’s so lame, and super girly. I don’t really want to write in it, but she gave it to me so I guess I should? Even if I am kinda mad at her. She left to go to school years ago and she never comes home! She’s so mean but then she’s nice and its so frustrating! Not fair. Stupid sister. 

But i’ll try i guess. There’s not much else to do in the house. None of the other kids really wanna play with me, and the Yagi’s are busy watching the littler kids. And maybe i’ll have kids and their kids will have kids will have kids will have kids and i’ll be their super cool ancestor and they’ll read this for inspiration or something. 

Good god, how old were they when they started writing this? Twelve? How old even were you? 

Fuck it. 

You kept reading. They/you weren’t a regular writer, with long months going between entries. Some of them were sad, some of them were happy, most of them were angry. They had a lot of complicated feelings on the sister who had abandoned them to what was basically a group home outside Asakusa, and then bitterness at themselves for being so angry when she disappeared. But most of it wasn’t that useful. It was about grades and teachers, and grief. They got into a lot of fights, and they were something of a scrapper. They were briefly enrolled in martial arts classes, but they had to quit because they were too rough with the other kids. So they were a scrapper, but that wasn’t anything related to fire. 

You rubbed your temples and glared at the diary. How did it answer your questions but leave you with more? 

Why is this my life now? 

So much here didn’t make sense, nonetheleast the fact that you were here to begin with. Well. At least you finally knew what your pyrokinesis was right? Even if using it was nearly impossible, and you couldn’t make sense of everything. 

Of course, there were plenty of things in this world that didn’t make sense. Like how sound could turn fire into ice. 

Bringing back the dead made more sense than that! 

You cross your arms and glare at the diary. So far the only useful bit is the part where you’ve had some decent training. Everything else is just the most vague information about the investigation into her sister’s disappearance. That much you already knew, although you didn’t have time to read everything in it. There were big gaps that you just knew were holding important information! 

At a loss, you flipped to the very last written on page, halfway through, and froze. 

Staring back at you was your own face. A small picture. It was your resume for the squad assignments, with your own check boxes and preferences listed. Underneath it was the list you had written before, of Everything You Knew. It was short, with little screen caps here and there. You flipped the page and found it filling itself in with ink that didn’t come from a pen, finishing up what it started on the page before. 

A new page started, this one listed your stats. 

In game there were a hundred levels. You had gotten maybe halfway through? A third if you rounded down. And it listed your level at 40. Underneath had your attack power, defense, stamina, agility, and your special moves. 

You were weirdly well rounded. Three out of five bars for everything, except the SM, which only had one. 

But, you hadn’t put that there! 

You quickly flipped it back and forth before you went to the very, very last page in the diary. On the back cover the ink finally finished filling out. A progress bar. 

You stared at it for a long, long time, trying to work over everything was happening. 

So. 

Now you knew what you could do. Just not how to do it. 

You were out of options at this point. You were just going to have to suck it up. 

You were going to have to ask someone for help directly. 

 ~

Shinra looks up from his work when you plop into the seat across from him, your arms crossed across your chest. It would be a lie to say you’re not nervous. You’re not even totally sure how you’re supposed to ask these questions, but you don’t have any other way to go about this any more. 

You tried the diary. You’ve spent two and a half days trying to get your ignition ability to work without help. Admittedly, you hadn’t even know how your ability was meant to manifest at the time, but even now you can’t get it to work.  

“Oh, hey there,” Shinra offers you an awkward smile. You grin right back, trying to project as much happy-go-lucky-nothing-wrong-here-!-  as you can. It’s made easier by the fact that prior to a few days ago, no one here had known you as anything more than a passing acquaintance. 

“Hi Shinra. I’ve got a weird question for you,” you announce bluntly. 

Shinra looks a little more wary, and he’s starting to smile. 

“Oh yeah? What is it?” 

“Ah, it’s pretty simple actually. How do you activate your abilities?” 

“Huh?” 

“How do you-” 

“No, I heard you,” he holds up his hand to cup you off. “It’s just a weird question.” 

“Hey man, I told you it was gonna be one.” 

You stare at each other for a long minute before Shinra huffs and looks towards the ceiling. He might not be the best person to ask. Maybe you should ask Maki, but Shinra makes you feel secure and you trust him more than anyone else just yet. 

“How do I activate my abilities? I dunno. I guess for me it’s more like I have to turn it off.” 

You tilt your head, listening intently to Shinra. 

“When I was a kid… I had a hard time controlling my flames. They started up suddenly, and burned through my shoes and pants. I ended up wearing these extinguisher boots, and shorts, so I wouldn’t destroy everything around me. It took a long time to figure out what was going on, but someone finally explained it to me. For a lot of third generation pyrokinetics, the thing that triggers out ability is the memory of the first time they happened.” 

You falter. “But, wait. Didn’t yours activate when-” 

“Yeah,” he cuts in, shooting you a grin that’s anything but happy. Your heart clenches in your chest. 

“Oh god, Shinra…” That meant that every time he used his powers, he had to remember his mother’s ‘death’ and his brother's disappearance. He had to think of pain and fear and grief, and he used his flames so often-

“It’s okay,” he cuts in. You can’t imagine what kind of face you’re making. “It was painful at first, and it still is, but it’s a good reminder for what I’m fighting for, and why I’m working so hard towards that goal. I will find a way to stop human combustion. I will make sure no one else ever has to grieve the way I did.”  

“Shinra,” you say softly. “You really are something.” 

Shinra tries to shrug off your words, but his smile is a little more genuine. “I just wanna be a hero.” 

“You will be,” you promise him. It’s all you can do not to tell him the truth then and there. His mother is alive, and suffering. His brother is alive, and suffering. 

They need help. 

But you hold your tongue. You don’t have any way of proving it to him, and there’s already so many things that are different here than they were in the game, or the show. Your presence being one of them. 

You let out a breath. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to bring up something so painful.” 

Shinra shakes his head. “What made you ask?” 

“Honestly?” you rubbed the back of your neck, “I’ve been having trouble using my abilities since we left the academy. I thought maybe if I asked you how you do it, I might be able to figure it out.” 

Shinra looks startled. “Really? I guess that explains why you haven’t used them in the last few days. You never really held back when we were training.” 

“Sorry to disappoint?” you offer lamely. “I just can’t figure it out.” 

“Well… Have you thought about when you first activated your powers?” 

“That’s just it,” you say sadly. “I don’t remember when it happened at all. So that’s not really an option for me.” 

“Oh.” 

You frown, and draw in on yourself. You can’t help it. You have no way to activate the powers you now know you have, and you’re in a bad place to be powerless in general. Not to mention these people are going to expect you to help, and you can’t help, and if you can’t help then- 

Shinra’s hands land on your shoulders, startling you. It’s a warm touch, one that sinks into you with comfort and kindness. Shinra looks seriously at you, his red eyes bright and intent. 

“Whatever happens, I know you’ll figure it out, and I’ll help you as much as I can. Even if I have to protect you in missions for now. So put your trust in me for now, okay?” 

Your heart thumps hard in your chest and heat spreads through your body. It grows hotter and hotter, centering somewhere in your chest and your back. 

Light blooms behind you and you barely turn your head to see a flicker of white fire over your shoulders, wings stretching over your back. They’re small, going no further down than you’re elbows and no further up than your jaw, pale and white and glowing. 

You recognize the feeling in your chest with a start. 

It’s care. Friendship. You want to help them. You want to fight for them and earn and keep their trust. The flickering embers of love bloom into a fire across your shoulders and flutter with undistinguished feather’s. 

~ ~

A/N So! Phoenix is my favorite power, but everyone else seemed inclined towards the Sun Lance, so I smashed them both together!

If you’re so inclined, let me know what you think :D

[threeletterslife]

Hey chana, just wanted to drop by and say thank you for all your hard work this year too!! Sorry this is going to be a long message, too LOL. It's been such a hectic year and reading your stories always made my days better, especially new uploads because each and every of your story is just so unique and intriguing!! I always say your works are amazing, but I cannot say and emphasise it enough!! I remember dying in the middle of preparing for my national exams and often just going on tumblr during my break to read your stories for a while LOL they really helped me get through tough times and keep my mind off of mundane, yet draining work😵😵 thank you so much for putting out such enjoyable reads for us and putting in so much effort!

Also omg the year has gone by so quickly!! It feels like it was only yesterday when you updated your 'works in progress' about your plans for your future works to be uploaded omgg I remember thinking about how I was so excited for your works to be up, and how long it was before LOD would be up in December. I can't believe it's almost here already and all the other works have already been completed😭😭 it feels so surreal when I think back to the time when you announced on wattpad you were moving to tumblr and it's already near the end of 2021 JSJDJDJDJ time flies so quickly it's scary 😞✋ but i find you will always still my favourite writer no matter how much time passes 😌😌 PLS I am really thankful to have found your platform back then on wattpad 💜 I hope the rest of the year goes well for you!! Also, all the best for your finals!

i have reread this message a BILLION times the past day, but i didn't have good wifi/a long enough time to type out a response

i do not have WORDS. it makes me unbelievably happy for someone to say that my stories have somehow made their day better. i can never fathom how much of an impact my stories can have on someone. it's just crazy to me that people are even reading what i'm putting out there! i do really try hard to work with interesting concepts—and recently, i've been researching a lot about how we see math in nature (as your resident stats major), so expect some stories in the future about that! there's no limit to how many ideas i can get, so my end goal is to really put my thoughts into words. i never thought people would actually read it though. my end goal is to publish one day, and i'm just so glad to see that my words can have an impact

it makes me happy that my stories somehow gave you solace when you were preparing for your national exams. (i hope that went superb! and if you didn't take them yet, know that you'll do amazing!) i'll continue to work hard so that i can make a positive impact! if i can just make one more person happy with what i put out there, i can basically say that my life's complete LOL

I FEEL YOU SO HARD WHEN YOU SAY THE YEAR WENT BY SO QUICKLY. i remember it like just yesterday preparing my mega-list of wips???? (although i did end up trashing like half of it 💀) i still can't believe that LOD will be out in a couple of weeks. it feels like just yesterday when i came up with the idea. I STILL CAN'T BELIEVE THAT I COMPLETED MY TWO OTHER SERIES TOO??? (the glossary series and society series REALLY feel like the end of an era—only because i've left them incomplete for so long.) it almost feels like my blog is coming to an end with all these completions 💀BUT I PROMISE I WILL WRITE UNTIL I STOP HAVING IDEAS!! (and that's not anytime soon)

i cannot believe you found me through wattpad. just four?-ish years ago, i can't even call myself a writer, much less a good one. it amazes me that you've tracked my progress for this long! (though my wattpad days make me want to cringe, i'm glad that they're there because i learned a lot from them)

i'm so, so grateful to have a reader like you. to be called someone's favorite writer... whew! it's like... the highest compliment. i really don't think i could've improved as a writer without readers. it's thanks to you that i've been in the game for this long. i'm beyond words of how thankful i am to have this platform. i hope you also have an amazing rest of the year. please take care of yourself; stay happy and healthy!

[into-september]

I was t agged by @marrys-dream-world, thanks a lot! I've never been one to ignore the chance to talk about myself. 

I think all the MLB people I know to write fic have been tagged, so I’m passing this on to @subdee and @aella-a:)

1. How many works do you have on AO3? 20

2. What’s your total AO3 word count? 55980

3. How many fandoms have you written for and what are they? 13, if you count the Digimon series separately: Pokémon, Digimon 02, Digimon Tamers, Digimon Frontier, Digimon Data Squad, Gravitation, Hikaru no Go, Cardcaptor Sakura, Fullmetal Alchemist, Hetalia, Kyo Kara Maoh, No. 6, FAKE, Miraculous Ladybug, 

4. What are your top five fics by kudos?

Vagary

I Shall Never Know That Second Death

Baking Soda

Skinless

Homeward Bound

5. Do you respond to comments, why or why not? I’m about to be politically incorrect, but here goes: Yes, I do, or at least I try my best to remember to. Sometimes because I honestly have things I want to discuss with the reader and chatting with my friends is always fun, but sometimes because I hung out at Fandomsecrets for long enough to know that there are a lot of people who get butthurt by authors who don’t appreciate the effort it took them to write a four word comment. Forgetting to reply for three weeks is bad enough; I don’t want a reputation of being an arrogant snot on top of it even though I personally don’t expect authors to reply to “omg this was so cute ^_^”

6. What’s the fic you’ve written with the angstiest ending?

FUN STORY a year ago I sat down and rated the angst level of nearly every fic I’ve written, and did the stats and posted a graph and everything. 

The fic that prompted that particular embodiment of procrastination is currently the winner if we go by number of comments informing me that the reader is now crying in the middle of the night, but that has more to do with the size of the fandom and that kids these days apparently don’t go to Sunday school. 

My personal nomination is Sugar Sickness, because it is raw and desperate and hopeful and he finally understands that the person he truly wants is the boy and then bam, final line, he chose the girl anyway. (warning: I wrote that in high school and I am ESL and both kinda show, ngl)

7. What’s the fic you’ve written with the happiest ending? idk the one with the literal happy ending hur hur

Another Digimon Tamers fic with a saccharine title - Cotton Candy Kisses. ESL high school warning applies here too and the opening is super messy and I’m 98% certain that no Japanese person would get into some public kissing contest. I still really like the way I managed to take something so externally insignificant and turn it into not only a monumental narrative win, but one that twists from cynical to sincere and leaves everything changed in its wake.  

8. Do you write crossovers? If yes, what’s the craziest thing you’ve written? No amount of crazy can top Ace Attorney canon, and as of SoJ I maintain that it is completely on brand for Apollo Justice to have been adopted by a couple of intrepid Belgian journalists whose black-and-yellow fantasy monkey is innocently accused of manslaughter (no, I never finished it. Blackquill was the prosecutor because obviously Klavier was too much of a fanboy and he and Athena spent the entire investigation marveling at how Apollo never told them about his famous dads)

9. Have you ever received hate on a fic? I wouldn’t count it as hate myself, but you know. Someone who read a summary and still saw fit to read the story and comment to inform me that kink is harmful and please think of the children. On a kink meme fill. 

10. Do you write smut? If so what kind? Yes, but almost all of was for kink memes in fandoms I weirdly didn’t write other fic for. No, I’m not hunting down those links. 

11. Have you ever had a fic stolen? Not fic, to my knowledge, but I remember that there was an apprenticeshipping fic that used the same situation and narrative device a few weeks after I wrote Awake (HS ESL yadda yadda why am I linking to these stories). It was more flattering than anything, haha 

12. Have you ever had a fic translated? No

13. Have you ever co-written a fic? No

14. What’s your all time favourite ship? I can’t name just one. At the moment it’s the Love Square (four ships for the price of one!), but if history is anything to go by, there will come a day when someone else has all my attention

15. What’s a WIP you want to finish but don’t think you ever will? I geneally only write oneshots and don’t post WIP, but honestly - the epic Kyo Kara Maoh fic I wrote maybe half of for Nanowrimo a decade ago because I really wanted that 50% discount for Scrivener. It started with Conrad becoming the king of Big Cimaron and went on to have Yuri kicked off the Demon King Throne because he never got his powers back, Wolfram reluctantly taking over, plotting to have Saralegui take over BC so Conrad could go home, and it ended with an epic display of brotherly love during the epic final battle. 

The real fun part was that I just added characters from other anime into the sizeable background cast. There was The Demon Queen from Maoyu as an intrepid academic, Rosette Christopher as a hypocrically demon-hating noble, The Samezuka High School relay swimming team as Conrad’s personal guard, Oscar Francois de Jarjayes as Wolfram’s right hand woman and Juliet Fiamatta Ars di Capulet as a Blue Wind copycat and his star-crossed love of which nobody ever spoke (not to worry, Romeo Candore van di Montague was the noble son driven to patricide of the story’s big bad). Also including: Kanba, Shouma and Himari Takakura as the victims of someone’s evil magical scheeming and Ed and Al Elric as the kids who escaped it but not unscarred. 

The funnies part was that I got to give all these characters German names thanks to the setting. Shouma Takakura became Johannes Habicht, because Shouma --> Shaun --> Jean --> Jehan, which in German is “Johannes”. 

It was years later that I learned that Shouma and Kanba are allusions to a children’s story wherein the two main characters are Giovanni and Campanella. 

“Giovanni” is the Italian version of Johannes, and I’m still not over that. 

So yeah. I put a lot of work and love into that fic, and the main reason I’m not putting any more is that there’se like five people left on the internet who would be interested in reading it. 

16. What’s your writing strengths? The irony is that I’m really great at smut, if I dare say so myself. (note: the above happy ending is not smut by my standards). I’ve als got a knack for capturing characters’ voices, though for some reason I struggle with this with MLB

17. What’s your writing weaknesses? Plot. I’m very good at having characters talk at each other and carry out lengthy introspective. Having them interacting with their environment and making decisions with consequences? no please

18. What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in fic? You don’t look clever doing it, so cut it out. Using honorifics for Japanese dialogue is okay. 

19. What was the first fandom you wrote for? Pokémon

20. What’s your favourite fic you’ve written? Here’s a story: 

I am not a fan of FAKE. It’s an okay manga - very trash, much garbage, but the chemistry between Ryo and Dee is REAL even though the rest of it is utterly useless. I could have forgiven that if I wasn’t alive in a time where people were misreading Gravitation in tragic attempts at what we later would call “performing woke”. I was very much a fan of Gravitation, and the way people would accuse it of ew evil uke seme and rape glorification and whatnot while simultaneously praising FAKE for not being that (sure jan) and also for having “great female characters” (uh huh) and everything else that was good and sacred in 2005...

yeah, I had very little patience with FAKE. 

That did not stop me from writing one thousand words of quiet, life-changing epiphany set in that universe. 

It’s not the best story I’ve written, but that epiphany feels like the most important thing I’ve told yet. 

[sabbystarlight]

2020 Fic Year In Review

 I was tagged by @nade2308 and @impossiblepluto

Total number of completed stories: Counting each Whumptober chapter as an individual fic, 97.  Which is just... woah.  (Though the little OCD voice in my head is now upset that I didn't managed to make it a solid 100)

Total word count: 246,083.  Again.  Woah.  

Fandoms written in: For the first time since I started writing for this fandom four years ago, MacGyver only!  I think it's safe to say this is officially my emotional support fandom.  

Looking back, did you write more fic than you thought you would this year, less, or about what you’d expected? Way more.  Even though there were fics I wanted to get finished that I didn't.  This is actually the first time I've looked at my stats page this year and I gotta say, I'm pretty proud of myself.  

What’s your own favourite story of the year?  How am I supposed to pick just one?!  Of Vision and Vulnerabilities-which is 12k words of Jack without his sight has to be one of them.  Of Comas, Found Families, and the Literal Nightmare that is Season Four-which is nothing more than me projecting my issues with Season 4 onto Jack and trying to fix it.  Of Nightmares, Late Nights, and Nitrogen is maybe the fluffiest, softest thing I've ever written.  And there are a couple Whumptober chapters for Mac and Jack both that I'm really fond of.  

Did you take any writing risks this year?  Not so much with writing, I tend to stick to my lane, but the challenge I set for myself with Whumptober was a huge deal for me.  I don't know if I've ever felt such pressure from myself as when I shared my plans to write 62 fics in a single month without knowing if I was going to be able to make it happen.  And it almost didn't.  We're talking down to a couple hours left of the month and I was still writing, y'all.  But I did it.  

Do you have any fanfic goals for the new year?  (Not gonna lie, the first thing that popped into my head was "Hit the 100 fics mark!!!"  But I don't know if that's realistic.)  I'd love to be able to participate in all the challenges this amazing fandom creates.  Every day, of every challenge.  That's a little intimidating, but I would love to be a part of them all.  Maybe my actual goal should be not being too hard on myself if reaching that goal doesn't happen?  

Most popular story of the year: Without question, Mac's set of Whumptober fics, with Jack's coming in a close second.  

My most under appreciated story, in my opinion:  This is a tough one to answer, because I honestly just write what I want to read.  So it's kinda difficult to call any of my fics under appreciated because I don't post them expecting anyone to actually read them.  But I will say that looking through the fics from this year, I was a little surprised that Of Improvised Plans and Impaled Hands wasn't more popular seeing as how it was one of the only Murdoc fics I wrote all year.  

Most fun story to write:  Anything with Jack and Harper is always so much fun and I loved getting to expand on that for several different occasions this year.  But as for single fic?  Of Birthdays, Manequins, and Shotguns, simply because it was so entertaining to take my phone's weird autocorrect suggestions and turn them into an actual fic.  

Biggest disappointment:  I always feel like I wanted to do more.  There were a couple challenges I just didn't have it in me to crank out a fic for.  Or that I only managed to do one day of.  And I'm well aware I haven't posted anything in a while, so that's still weighing heavy on my mind.  (But I'm hoping to have more to share soon!)  

Biggest surprise:  The Season Four tags!  I actually wrote more tags for that season than I watched episodes of it!  And being able to pull off two fics a day for the entire month of October.  Still not quite sure how that happened.  But the biggest surprise-though I guess it shouldn't surprise me any more-is how much love there is in this little fandom.  The fact that people actually want to read what I write still amazes me and I'm so thankful for all the love and support, especially during this crazy time we're in.  

Thanks for tagging me, y'all!  If you see this and want to play, I'd love to hear all about your own writing adventures of this year!  

[bourbon-ontherocks]

Writer Asks

Tagged by @nottonyharrison​ (thank you dear!!)

I tag @mego42, @inyoursheets, @elise-jupiterstyle, @mrslackles

ao3 name: BourbonOnTheRocks. I mean, what did you expect? And I was extremely disappointed that it was already taken here so I had to add a middle dash!

fandoms: I’m a little bit intimidated when I see everyone here sharing war stories about other fandoms, but Good Girls is my first and only fandom! And I literally got signed up on tumblr 6 weeks ago!!

I did go through an obsessive phase about Emma Peel from the 60s TV show The Avengers a few years ago though, and it’s the only other fandom that I barely approached (I read a couple of fanfictions, but I wouldn’t say that I was involved in the fandom).

Oh no, wait! I did read some Crazy Ex Girlfriend fanfics too and share memes about that show once in a while, does it count?

number of fics: 12! But that’s mainly because of my season 3 one-shots series tbh.

fic i spent the most time on: Mhhhh.... Tough question! I was gonna say Love and War because in my memory it lasted for months and months, but actually... not at all!! It’s currently Love of the Game, which took me 4 months to finish, but It’s All Coming Back To Me will soon celebrate its 4 months of existence and is not finished yet... Gosh, my writing reaaaaaaally slowed down!!

fic i spent the least amount of time on: Probably one from my one-shots series, I remember that I wrote He’s not Dumb over a lazy morning at work and had it posted by noon so it’s probably the quickest I’ve ever been haha!!

most hits: Love and War, but probably because it’s the oldest one. It’s All Coming Back To Me is the one with the highest growth rate at the moment (I love datas and stats comparisons...) and it has already broken a few records so I wouldn’t be surprised that it’ll eventually end with the most hits too.

most kudos: While Your Lips Are Still Red (which also has the second highest hits number). Turns out people are more eager to leave kudos on cute flirtatious fake-dating Brio than angsty shooting aftermath. I don’t understand that.

most comment threads:  Love and War, but It’s All Coming Back To Me is currently two comments away from taking the first place, and since there are still at least two chapters to be added to the latter, I’m pretty confident that it will end up as the most commented (please don’t take it as a challenge and boycott my comment section on It’s All Coming Back To Me from now on, okay??!!)

most bookmarks: It’s All Coming Back To Me recently stole that record to While Your Lips Are Still Red. I told you this baby is breaking records!!

highest total word count: Love and War, logically because it has the largest number of chapters, but also because I tend to write now in a more concise style than I used to? I’m trying anyway!

favorite fic i wrote: I kinda love them all!! But I have a special fondness for A Reason To Fight because the Rio POV in the third chapter is still one of the things I wrote that I’m the most proud of. And also it was my catharsis fic that I wrote in a moment when I was really stressed out before season 3 and I really like, you know, put all my feelings inside and then I felt better?

Four Seasons In One Day is also one of my favourite because it was the first time I was trying to really find a unique voice for a character and build a whole character study around it. And maybe it’s because of the crossover with Graceland (although I feel like the whole gg fandom is familiar with that show now), or maybe I posted it with a bad timing, or it’s because it doesn’t contain a lot of Brio, idk, but remember when I said that It’s All Coming Back To Me was breaking records? Well, Four Seasons In One Day is the EXACT opposite of that, it holds the lowest record in every category!! I mean even my s3 one-shots had at least three times more hits! So y’know, I have this specific fondness for the unloved child with this fic because I’m actually proud of it, and I’m okay with the fact that not so many people read it, it just makes me love that fic even more.

fic i want to rewrite/expand on: Probably the ending of Love of the Game. This fic was a nightmare and it got so difficult to write that at some point I just wanted to get finished with it before S3 started because I wasn’t sure I could finish it once the season would air. So I rushed myself, a lot, and the epilogue tastes a bit like botched? So maybe sometime I’ll get back to it and flesh out this fic with the proper ending it deserves.

I’ve also been recently toying with the idea of adding a 5th chapter to A Reason To Fight too. This fic has always been conceived as a four-parts work and I would hate to destroy the balance I found for it (also I love the ending I gave it) but I’ve got something drafted already so I’ll see where it takes me.

share a bit of a wip or story idea you’re working on: So I guess that now is a good time to tease a bit about my crossover idea with Crazy Ex Girlfriend haha!! I had actually started to write it, but then season 3 came and punched me in the face and I need a specific light and funny headspace to write this, but basically it would be a story with loosely connected chapters starting with Rebecca needing money for her pretzel shop and ending up working for Rio’s gang. Eventually all the characters would meet and it would be a merry mess. (and distance is fake so travels between West Covina and Detroit are like, not an issue...)

Want a little sneak peek?

He squints when he parks his car, checks the address like three times but there's no mistake. Da fuck? A pretzel shop? Is that a joke? He clenches his jaw, hard, his time is fuckin' valuable, he ain't comin’ all the way here to eat ironic SoCal pretzels. His annoyance slightly flows down, though. Meh, he shrugs. He's here now, he might as well get in.

He definitely wasn't ready for the busty brunette who lets out a high-pitched squeal when he enters the shop. She literally jumps at him like a flying squirrel or some shit, her face quite not hiding her over-excitement.

"Oh my God, this is real, this is happening, I can't believe this is happening, are you...?" she asks without even breathing once.

Christ, what now? He's had enough crazy suburban bitches shit with Elizabeth and her stupid crew for the rest of his life. He ain't going back there, no way. But right now he needs a new distribution system. And it's not like there aren't a couple of miles separating Detroit from this crappy place. Luckily, he won't have to physically interact with this loon no more. That's what his boys are for. So he tries to keep his cool, even risks a slightly amused chuckle.

"Am I what?" he drawls, putting a whole show in the dangerous gangbanger style, the one that always make Elizabeth roll her eyes cuz she knows, well, the other side of him.

"The gangbanger," she loudly hisses with a conspirator glance all around her.

Which is terribly useless since the shop is completely empty except for the two of them. He resists his urge to yawn, bored already. That juvenile excitement somehow reminds him of Elizabeth's young sister, and having to endure one of these on a regular basis is more than enough. He rolls his eyes.

"Yeah, you know what? I think this was a mistake. I don't deal with bitches who think this is a kids game."

He spins around on his toes but she immediately grabs his arm, her voice switching to an anxious mood quicker than he thought was humanly possible.

"Wait wait wait! I'm sorry, I don't know how that... thing works, but I really need the money. Also, we should really have a talk about offensive terms describing women. But my point is, can we... start over? I'll make it profesh this time."

He glances at her with curiosity while she takes a few steps back, closes her eyes and inhales deeply before she reopens them.

"Okay," she mutters under her breath before she placates a corporate smile on her face and goes for a handshake, "Hi! I'm Rebecca Bunch. You must be Rio."

[nowplayingblog-main]

Chapter 2 is finally here!

read under the cut

...”C’mon kid, just a few more steps”...

...”I know, I know it’s too hot”...

...”Shhh... I know it hurts, I know”...

...”You’re gonna be alright, Peter, It’ll be okay”...

Peter’s eyes snapped open to the blinding lights of a white room. He felt his face scrunch underneath a plastic mask placed over his nose and mouth, blowing soothingly cold air across his face. His eyes had squeezed shut in an effort to shield him from the harmful light above his eyes.

“Can we have the lights dimmed, please?” a feminine voice called out.

The orange glow behind his eyelids dimmed, and Peter braved blinking a little, to let his eyes adjust to the room. It was blurry at first, and while the darkness soothed his eyes, it made it hard to see the room. Then, slowly, everything came into focus, and Peter eyes settled on the woman who was sitting at his bedside.

She was clearly a doctor of some form. She wore a long white lab coat over a pale pink scrubs, and a stethoscope around her neck. Her skin was a few shades darker than his, and she had long, medium brown, wavy hair. Peter remembered all those medical dramas his mom watched before their trip to Afghanistan; this lady would have fit right into the cast.

“Hello, Peter,” The woman said. “My name is Dr. Sullivan.”

“Hi,” He responded meekly, his voice weak from lack of use and muffled by the oxygen mask over his mouth.

Dr. Sullivan gave him a small smile. “It’s okay to take that off, if you want. Just don’t leave it off for too long. You should be fine, but I’m not quite willing to risk anything yet.”

The coordination in Peter’s arms was lacking extremely, but eventually his left arm found the mask on his face and pulled it away as gently as possible.

“Where am I?” His voice was just barely above a whisper.

“You’re at Thousand Oaks Surgical Hospital, in Malibu California,” Dr. Sullivan explained. “You and Mr. Stark were found two day ago in the middle of a desert in Afghanistan. You suffered a heat stroke shortly before you were found by the United States Air Force. Not to mention an infection due to your various wounds, including the bullet that was still lodged in your stomach. The surrounding skin healed remarkably fast, most likely due to your altered DNA.”

Peter’s heart rate picked up in fear. His monitor beeped loudly, and blood pulsed in his ears. She knew? She knew.

Dr. Sullivan raised her hands in surrender. “It’s okay, I won’t tell anyone. I can’t really. Patient privacy, as well as the fact that Tony Stark himself had me and my entire team sign a non-disclosure agreement. We only know because we need to know, Peter.”

“Why do you need to know?” Peter insisted, his voice cracking. He wasn't exactly sure why he was so defensive about this. He just felt embarrassed, ashamed,  almost dirty. Like everything about him now, after what those... those... monsters did to him. He had always felt that way but his emotions were muted under the influence of the drugs they kept him on. Besides, in the cave no one was there to judge him, until Mr. Stark was brought in.

“We need to know so that we know how to take care of you, Peter. You’re enhanced, we need to know that so that we don’t try to treat you like a normal person, because it wouldn’t work the same way with you -”

“I am a normal person!” Peter was almost at the brink of screaming, and, god, his voice sounded awful.

“I know that, Peter,” Dr. Sullivan tried to calm him. “But biologically, you are different, and I don’t want to accidentally hurt you because of that, that’s why we need to know -”

“You don’t! There’s nothing wrong with me! I’m normal! So what if my DNA is different now! I’m still normal! I’m still normal!”

Peter didn’t acknowledge much beyond the screaming. He didn’t notice the doctors filtering into the room as his heart monitors went crazy. He didn’t notice them shouting orders, didn’t even notice the needle filled with an enhanced sedative. All he knew was lab coats. Lab coats meant pain, and god he never wanted pain again. Haven't they done enough? They already changed him forever. Why were the lab coats back to hurt him? Peter was supposed to be safe! He was supposed to be safe! He was supposed to be -

...white lab coats...

...a man with graying hair leans over him...

...he’s being restrained, he can’t move, the drugs altering his sense of reality...

...“- the world is not ready for him-”...

...“Sleep tight, my little pest”...

Peter woke up later that day. The sky was dark outside his window, and his eyes took less time to adjust to his surroundings, the voices of his nightmare echoed in his head.

The oxygen mask was over his nose again, and Peter reached up to pull it down, not realizing he had now caught the attention of Mr. Stark, who was sitting where Dr. Sullivan was earlier that day.

“Hey kid,” He said as a means of greeting.

“Hey,” Peter said plainly.

“Heard you had a little freak out earlier.”

Peter blinked. “I did?”

“Dr. Sullivan said it was a panic attack. You were breathing too fast, and you kept yelling at the staff until you got so worked up they had to sedate you.”

“I’m sorry,” Peter apologized. He remembered now, and he was recalled the look on every panicked doctors face while Peter did nothing but yell and scream. Deep guilt stirred inside his chest.

“Don’t apologize,” Tony said. “She said it was expected, considering everything you’ve gone through in the recent past. I still don’t understand what triggered it though-”

Peter opened his mouth, whether it was to tell Tony what had triggered him, or to refute that he had been triggered at all, Peter himself would never know, because Tony cut him off. “Nevermind. I’m not willing to put you through that again if you got so worked up about it the last time.”

They sat in awkward silence for a moment.

“I held a press conference today,” Tony announced.

“What’s a press conference?” Peter asked innocently.

“It’s a big, boring meeting where I can tell reporters what I want them to hear. Helps me control what information gets out to the public,” Tony gave him a strange look. “How is it that you can help me create a miniaturized ARC reactor, and a mechanized suit of armor in a cave with nothing but scraps, when you’re - how old are you?”

“Thirteen”

“Really? God, I feel old. Anyway, how is it that you can do all that, but you don’t know what a press conference is?”

Peter shrugged. “I don’t think press conferences have a whole lot to do with mechanics, Mr. Stark.”

“True,” Tony shrugged. “I guess you and I were just raised in extremely different circumstances. What did you say you’re parents were? Geneticists?”

Peter’s smile, which has been slowly pushing his cheeks upward suddenly fell. He nodded mutely.

Mr. Stark winced. “Sorry, kid. Probably wasn’t a good idea to bring that up.”

They were silent for a while after that. Peter focused on the way the individual threads on his blanket were woven together.

“You’ll be living with me from now on,” Tony said softly. “I promise not to bring it up again if you don’t want me too, but we looked into your family, Pete, and you were right. You don’t have any surviving relatives. But I’m not going to let you slide into that broken government system of tossing poor kids around. Not after everything you and I have gone through, especially after...” Tony trailed off. “After your DNA has been altered so much...” he said carefully, eyeing Peter for a reaction before carrying on. “I just don’t think it’s the best idea, and neither does anybody hear at the hospital, so I signed for temporary guardianship, and you’ll be living with me from now on. So there’s that.”

Peter nodded, not looking up from where he stared at the blanket, playing with the material between his fingers.

“Well, I won’t bore you any longer, is there some kind of movie that you really like? It might help you to take your mind off of everything.” Tony stood up and walked over to a pile of DVD cases, still wrapped in plastic as though they had just been purchased. “I didn’t know what you would like, so I got a little bit of everything.

Tony handed Peter a stack to shift through, until Peter felt his heart lift upon seeing his favorite movie of all time - Star Wars: A New Hope.

“I knew you had to be a bit of nerd,” Tony mused, standing up to insert the DVD.

They didn’t talk for the entire run of the movie, but Tony didn’t leave Peter’s side either, which Peter felt was enough.

Peter was signed out of the hospital the next day.

“Shouldn’t he be here a couple more days?” Tony questioned. When we brought him in a few days ago you insisted that he was in critical condition, and now he’s right as rain?”

Dr. Sullivan shrugged. “His tests came back clear of any infection, and his stats have been within a healthy range for over 24 hours now. He is completely fine to leave. Welcome to taking care of an enhanced.”

Tony tilted his head. “And how do you know so much about enhanced people?”

“I have my sources. Have a good day Mr. Stark.”

And with that, Dr. Sullivan whisked out of the room with a flourish of her lab coat, and disappeared from Peter’s line of vision. Which was fine in Peter’s opinion,. Since his anxiety levels had been through the roof ever since she had stepped in the room.

Peter had begun to notice that when the medical professionals were around, he couldn’t seem to keep himself calm. His palms felt sweaty, and the rate of his breathing began to pick up. If they came too close to him without warning, or if they touched him, Peter would flinch, as though he was expecting to be hurt.

Peter himself found this ridiculous. He knew the doctors weren't there to hurt him, they were there to help him. He had never been afraid of doctors in his life, not before the cave.

He always felt better when Mr. Stark was around, however, though he couldn’t quite explain why. He made him feel safe, even though Peter knew that him even being around Tony made the man feel uncomfortable, at least at first. He guessed it had to do with the fact that Mr. Stark hadn’t ever had to deal with someone Peter’s age. Besides, now that they were free, there wasn’t much that they could talk about. They didn’t have a lot of common ground, at least not any that they knew about, and they didn’t have a common goal or a common enemy anymore. Their relationship had grown while they were in the cave, but to what extent?

To his credit, Tony always did seem to ease up after talking to Peter for a while, and eventually the two did find some common interests.

“Just you wait until we get to the house, kid.” Tony had told them on their ride to his Malibu home. Tony was driving, which Peter found somewhat surprising. “You’ll love the lab. It has so many fun toys. My bots are there, though they’re somewhat antiques at this point - those stupid pieces of scrap metal.”

“Why don’t you just get rid of them?” Peter asked.

Mr. Stark turned to him, with a frown on his face, which quickly melted into a smile. “I couldn’t do that! I love them too much. Just don’t tell them I said that.”

When they arrived at Tony's mansion, Peter was shocked at the sheet size of it. Growing up in New York City, Peter had seen some pretty big buildings. Correction. Some pretty tall buildings. Peter didn't think that Mr. Stark's house was more than three stories, but it stretched across the shore of the Pacific almost endlessly. Peter could wrap his head around why anyone would need a house that was this big.

The inside of the house felt like a maze. After the walked in, Peter found it hard to keep his bearings. Once they moved away from the door, he couldn't tell which way was which, and he had the feeling that if Peter lost Mr. Stark in one of the winding corridors, he could be lost in the house forever.

When they finally reached a room that Peter recognized to be some sort of living room or sitting room, there was a woman with strawberry blonde hair wearing a white blouse and a gray pencil skirt, sitting on the couch, watching something on the television.

“...allow me to introduce you to the new Stark Industries business plan!” The voice on the TV said, followed by the sound of something shattering. “Look, that's a weapons company that doesn't make weapons!”

The woman looked up, noticing them, and shut off the TV with a static click. “Welcome home, Mr. Stark.”

“Hello, Ms. Potts,” Tony said, stepping in front of Peter. “I'll be in my lab for the rest of the day, if you need me.”

“Alright, I'll be sure to come get you. Will that be all, Mr. Stark?”

“That'll be all Ms. Potts.”

Then Tony turned and motioned for Peter to follow him. They went downstairs, down a winding, circular staircase, until they reached the bottom floor, which left to a room behind a big, glass wall, with a glowing pin pad by the door.

“I'll take you to see your room in a second, kid, I just thought I would show you the lab first.”

The door opened, and Tony held it open to let Peter in. He walked in and was greeted by an echoing voice.

“Unidentified personnel.” Said a voice seemingly coming from everywhere. Peter jumped at the unexpected noise, looking around for where it may have been coming from.

“Oh, calm down JARVIS,” Tony said, “He’s with me, and he’s going to be around here quite a bit. Log him as Peter...” Mr. Stark turned to look at him. “Parker right? I thought I saw that name of the guardianship forms.”

Peter nodded silently. Tony spent the next half hour showing Peter around the lab, introducing him to his robots, and showing him how to operate certain types of equipment. Mr. Stark rambled on and on, talking about everything under the sun, while Peter remained uncharacteristically quiet, thinking back to what he had heard in the living room.

“You’re a quiet thing today, aren’t you?” Tony remarked. “Haven’t spoken a word since we got to the house. Usually you’re talking a mile a minute.”

Peter turned to look at the man. He stayed silent.

“You got something on your mind?”

Peter took a deep breath. “What... What was Ms. Potts watching? When we came in?”

“One of those broadcasts or TV shows that advises people on where to invest their money.”

“It said you were a weapons company that doesn’t make weapons.”

Tony sighed. “That’s because as of a couple of days ago, Stark Industries announced - or rather, I announced, quite unexpectedly - that we were shutting down our weapons department.”

Peter blinked. “What made you decide to do that?”

“You did,” The mechanic sat down and began fiddling with some sort of circuit board. “You told me in the cave that weapons won’t just stop working when someone I don’t want to have them gets ahold of them. I realized then that I had become part of a broken system,” Tony looked up at him. “I don’t want to make weapons anymore. Stark Industries whole mission is to make the world a better, safer, and more peaceful place. Making weapons isn’t working. We can do better. I just need to figure out what I want to do.”

Peter smiled softly. “Do you have any ideas?”

“Well, I initially wanted to look more into ARC reactor technology,” He tapped on the glowing blue light under his shirt for emphasis. “But Obie shot that down, he’s still married to the idea that we’re only good for making weapons. Then I thought... maybe...” Tony eyed Peter carefully. “Maybe if I couldn’t control who had the guns... I could make sure they were in the rights hands...my own...”

The teen tilted his head in confusion. “What do you mean?”

Tony pulled up a couple of displays, maneuvering things through the air on his holographic projections, before pulling up an image of a suit of armor. Peter looked at it for a few moments, before he began to recognize certain elements of it. His eyes widened in shock. Yes, Peter definitely recognized this. How could he not? He had helped build this.

“I’m changing up the design a little, trying to change the form to increase the aerodynamics to help it to sustain prolonged flight - kinda similar to the way we’re shaping cars to be able to move faster. The original model was never meant to fly for very long, that’s why it ended up crashing so badly in the desert, I’m trying to figure out how to use less energy to achieve flight, because with our last model it was a bit overkill -”

“Hold on,” Peter cut him off. “You’re building another suit?”

“Well, I was hoping you could help me. You did so well the last time.”

“No, I mean,” Peter sighed, “You’re going to stop making weapons for your company, but you’re going to make an even bigger weapon for yourself.”

“It’s not like that, kid.” Tony got up from where he was sitting a moved to stand beside Peter. “It’s not a weapon. It’s a method of keeping the peace.”

“By having a bigger stick than the other guy?”

Tony paused. “Where did you hear that?”

“I read it in a magazine.”

“In the hospital?”

“I got bored.”

Mr. Stark turned to face him. “Listen, kid. This thing isn’t meant to be a weapon. Or, maybe it is, but I’m going to be the one in the suit. I’m going to make sure no one else gets their hands on this, and I’m only going to go after the people who hurt others. This suit isn’t going to have big guns or cause massive explosions like the first one did.”

Peter was struggling to understand. “So, you want to become a superhero?”

Tony blinked. “What? No.”

“You just said that you wanted to go after the bad guys and protect people.”

“What? Kid, that’s not - Well... I guess maybe it is. Sure, let’s go with that. I’m going to become a superhero.”

Peter smiled. “Well, in that case, I’m in.”

The billionaire chuckled and looked back at his designs for the new suit. “I should have known all I had to say to get you on board was something extremely dorky like ‘I’m going to become a superhero’”

“I just think that you made something that could really help people, or could really hurt people,” Peter explained. “My dad used to tell me about his brother, Ben. He died when my dad was in college, but he used to say ‘With great power comes great responsibility.’ It’s super cheesy, but I think it’s the truth. You have a lot of power, Mr. Stark, and you want to use it to help people. That’s something I can get behind.”

Tony smiled at the kid. “You know kid, you’re pretty wise for a thirteen-year-old.”

“Well, I’ve been through a lot.”

“Yeah kid. Too much.”

Later that day, Tony showed Peter his room. It was a bit of a blank slate. A guest room which hadn’t really been converted to become Peter’s room, but Mr. Stark said that he could decorate it however he wanted to.

Now, Peter was laying in his bed, staring up at the ceiling. The bed felt too soft, like he was laying on marshmallows. He supposed that was because He had gotten used to a beat down mattress on a wire frame, and even after that he had been stuck in a hospital bed, which was a huge improvement, but nowhere near the comfort levels Peter found in this bed.

Ever since waking up after their escape, Peter found it hard to sleep. Before, Peter had been on drugs virtually all the time. Sleeping wasn’t something he had done on his own for quite some time, he always just dozed off after receiving another dose.

His lack of sleep wasn’t the only thing that the drugs did to him. Walking around, and viewing the world was completely different now. Everything was so much more vibrant and vivid than Peter had ever remembered it being. The world was louder, and brighter, and more three-dimensional.

It wasn’t as though Peter wanted the drugs, in fact it kind of surprised him that he didn’t find himself addicted to the substance because of how much he was forced to use it. He suspected the doctors had weaned him off of it while he was still unconscious. It was just that everything felt so different now. Like he was living in a dream. A happy dream that couldn’t possibly be his reality.

There was no way Peter could truly be free. No way he could have been taken in by the infamous Tony Stark. It just wasn't possible.

And yet, here he was. Free at last.

And at some point that night while he stared up at the ceiling, Peter had the most peaceful night of sleep in his life.

[high-queen-margo]

Echoes

Summary:  Margo confronts her new feelings for Kady/Sam after recovering her memories. Pairing: Margo/Kady Length: 1,968

 Read on AO3

Margo. Her name was Margo Hanson. Her memories—her real memories—entwined with those she’d had just hours ago, appending but not rewriting. Her name was High King Margo Hanson the Destroyer, not Janet Pluchinsky the fashion editor.

And Sam Cunningham was still Sam Cunningham, not Kady Orloff-Diaz. She squinted at Margo and looked her up and down, her eyes lingering on the eyepatch in her hand.

“…Janet?”

Margo nodded.

Sam let her breath out and pulled her into a hug. “We were so worried; you just fucking disappeared off the face of the earth.” She pulled back. “What happened? Is this…you? The real you?”

“Yeah, it is,” Margo said. “You were worried? We barely know each other.” You don’t actually know me at all, she thought. Not right now. You don’t even know yourself.

But then, Margo hadn’t lost her memories of being Janet. She remembered perfectly well how quickly she’d taken to Sam, how, despite having just met each other, Sam had made her feel safe and protected and less lonely than she’d ever been in her life.

In Janet’s life.

She had to keep reminding herself that she hadn’t really lived it, that any memories she had beyond a couple months ago were entirely fabricated. Still, though, they felt real, and honestly, the loneliness wasn’t exclusive to that life. For the most part, Margo was just as lonely as Janet.

“Yeah, well. We’re in an entirely unique situation,” Sam said. “That tends to bring people together.”

“Yeah, I guess it does,” Margo said. “As for what happened, the clone of a dead god from a parallel universe pulled me into said universe, and the people there fixed my identity. Because I’m their king, and they need me to fix their shit.”

Sam blinked. “I’m sorry, what?”

“Yeah, crazy, I know,” Margo said. “I’d go into more detail, but I don’t have the patience and it’ll be faster to just get you guys all fixed up too. Have you found anyone else since I’ve been gone?”

Sam shook her head. No,” she said, “it’s only been a couple days; we haven’t managed to track anyone down. And Marina hasn’t really made any progress getting through whatever’s blocking us, either.”

“Okay, that’s fine,” Margo said. “It’s fine. We can find the others; I just need you back to help me. The real you.”

“Janet—”

“It’s Margo, actually.”

Sam reached out and squeezed Margo’s shoulder. “Margo,” she said. “It’s going to be okay. I promise.”

Margo stared up at her, at the face both familiar and unfamiliar, and she could tell Sam meant it. Maybe Kady wouldn’t have, had she been herself and had she known who Margo really was—they never had gotten along particularly well—but Sam wanted nothing more in that moment than to soothe her. Tears prickled in Margo’s eyes.

“They’re my friends,” she whispered. “And yours. Quentin, Julia…Eliot. And they’re missing. They aren’t supposed to be missing.”

Sam brushed Margo’s hair away from her face and gently moved her thumb over her cheek to wipe a tear away. “We were—are—pretty close, aren’t we? All of us?”

Some of us, Margo thought, but she nodded. There was no point in telling the truth and driving her away when her real memories would do it soon enough. Sam slid her hands down Margo’s arms and took her hands in her own, and Margo tried to see through Sam’s face to Kady’s. They looked similar in a way: the strong jawline, the sharp eyes. She could even imagine the words in Kady’s voice. Maybe this is what Kady would have been like if she’d had a better life, and maybe Janet was what Margo would have been like if she’d had one herself.

“Well,” Sam said, snapping her out of it, “everyone’s in the other room. We can get them and head over to…where are we going?”

“Fillory.”

***

Margo watched as the glamour lifted first from Penny, then Josh, then Kady. They blinked and glanced around as if waking from a dream.

“Wow,” Josh said. “Just…wow.”

“Holy shit.” Kady yanked her hair out of its bun and ran her fingers through it to shake it out. “God, how long were we under that fucking spell? I can’t even tell.”

“A couple months, I think,” Margo said. “Good news is I doubt they were expecting us to break out of it. Ever. So we should be able to fly under the radar for a while. Bad news is half our posse is gone, so if we can go find them now, that would be great; I have a country with a year’s worth of problems to solve and our own world is getting double-tapped by the Library and that McAllistair bitch. We need a plan, stat.”

“Right,” Penny said. “I swear to god, if this timeline gets to be as fucked as mine…”

Kady’s eyes lingered on Penny for a moment before flicking up to meet Margo’s. She looked away and made for the door.

“Let’s get back to the portal.”

It was a longer trip than Margo would have liked; even in the carriages, it took a good hour to get there, and she wanted to busy herself as much as possible. She had to scrub Janet out of her mind; Janet wasn’t real, but her missing friends were, and Fillory was, and the things that happened while she thought she was Janet didn’t matter.

Those things would have been easier to ignore if Kady hadn’t climbed into her carriage and forced Penny and Josh together into the other one. Margo folded her hands in her lap and looked out the window as the horses lurched forward, drawing them away from Castle Whitespire.

“Can we talk?”

Margo reluctantly turned back toward Kady. “About?”

“Okay,” Kady said, “I know this is really fucking weird. I don’t know how to talk about it either, but…You know, you feel it too, right? That life?”

Margo sighed. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, you remember being Janet, don’t you? Every little thing, like you really lived it.”

“Those memories are fake.”

“They feel real, though,” Kady said. “The personality, too. I feel like I’m…” Kady shook her head and crossed her arms. “It’s stupid. I feel like I’m still her, a little bit. Sam.”

Margo nodded slowly. “Yeah,” she said, “I know what you mean.”

“Listen,” Kady said. “Those things you said to me, right before we left to come here? I’ve never seen you that vulnerable before, and—”

“Janet can keep the vulnerability,” Margo said. “It was a slip. I can’t afford to be vulnerable right now.”

“You slipped because I was still Sam,” Kady said. “I’m good at reading people, Margo, and I was even better at it as a detective. I know you’re worried about your image or whatever, and I won’t tell anyone, but I wanted you to know that if you ever need to talk…like that…you can come to me.”

Margo studied Kady’s face. “There’s no way you would have offered that before,” she said. “You’re as closed off as I am. You were.”

“Yeah,” Kady said, “I was. But like I said, that person they put inside me is still there. Do you know what I remember?”

Margo shook her head.

“I remember busting a twelve-year-old kid for heroin possession. I don’t know if he was real. But he cried the whole way to the station, and I could tell how scared he was. I sat him down next to me while my partner called his parents, and he held my hand and kept crying. And he said he did it because his dad always did it, and he wanted his attention, and he didn’t know he wouldn’t be able to stop. He asked me to help him stop.”

Kady paused and looked down at her hands clasped between her knees.

“I wrapped my arm around him and told him it would be okay, but I didn’t really know. I knew we would send him to drug counseling, and I knew it doesn’t always work. I knew we’d have to investigate his dad, take him away if we found anything. He fell asleep on me waiting for his mom to come and hugged me before they took him away.

And the worst part is that it wasn’t unusual. It happened so many times, and I…I had to have a soft heart to do that. I had to believe those kids would get better and lead full lives. So yeah, I was a closed-off person. I still am, I think. But I can’t remember things like that and pretend I don’t want to help people.”

“Jesus,” Margo murmured. “Well, now I feel like a shitty person; all I remember is spitting on people to get what I wanted. I guess I wasn’t all that different no matter which name I was using.”

“My point is,” Kady said, “I’m here for you if you want.”

Margo nodded and tried to wipe tears out of her eyes before Kady could notice. “There aren’t many things I really love,” she said quietly. “Both of those things are people, and now they’re just…gone. If anything happened to them—Fuck, they’ve scared me before, and every single time I lose my mind thinking I’ll have to keep going without them, and I don’t know how. I really don’t. But we were brainwashed for so long, who knows whether they’re okay.”

“See?” Kady smiled softly. “You’re not a shitty person. You just care so much about the people who matter to you that you’d do anything to keep them safe, and when you don’t have those people, you have to keep yourself safe. I get it. What you are is strong.”

“You know, I’m not really sure I like you being able to read into me like this. I think you were better as the broody and silent type.”

Kady laughed and shrugged. “I’m only so good at it because I relate, but I can stop.”

“No,” Margo said, and the corners of her mouth twitched up. “It’s kind of hot in a scary sort of way.” She sighed. “You know, if we’re being totally transparent right now, I…well, I think I kind of had a thing for you. For Sam.”

“When you were Janet.”

“Well…after, too,” Margo said. “And I thought it would be a nonissue once you got your memories back; I mean, we never really talked before, and sure, I thought you were hot and powerful, but I was also pretty sure you didn’t exactly think of me as a friend. Not that I’d blame you.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying I have feelings for you, all right?” Margo said. “It’s gross; I’m used to sex-only relationships. But something about you just…” She took a deep breath and let it out. “Something about you makes me feel safe. And protected. Cared for.”

Kady stared at her for a moment, and Margo couldn’t place the look in her eyes. Then, she leaned across the carriage aisle and kissed her, balancing herself with her hand on Margo’s knee. It wasn’t anything Margo had ever experienced before; it wasn’t hot and breathy and full of lust and desire. It was meaningful.

Kady pulled away for a moment, as if she hadn’t realized what she was doing, and then they met again in the middle. This was what Margo knew how to do. This was a kiss full of lust and desire, but backed by the previous one, and it made her chest ache with the weight of those feelings.

Maybe, Margo thought, this wouldn’t be too bad. Maybe, for once, she could have something real and good, and maybe she could give that to Kady too.

[andrewuttaro]

New Look Sabres: 2019 Offseason Retrospective

Some offseasons are over in a hurry. All the action is done by Independence Day and Hockey goes into hibernation for two months. Then there are offseasons like this one: hurry up and wait because something else is about to happen. That said Jeff Skinner is our Stanley Cup. In the Season Retrospective back in April I said the Buffalo Sabres’ Stanley Cup for the 2019 Offseason would be resigning Jeff Skinner. The team didn’t qualify for the playoffs so what’s the next most important thing for the team? Jeff Skinner. If you said anything other than Jeff Skinner you either thought the Sabres were going to trade up in the draft or you think Jack Eichel is a bum… or both. Either way I think you’re fooling yourself. Jeff Skinner proved to be the ideal left wing for Jack Eichel, even after the wheels flew off in the second half. Lose a guy like him and you’re in the same spot we’d been in for three years prior putting Eichel with left wingers like… Zemgus Girgensons? Yikes. Looking back at last year’s Offseason retrospective its kinda funny that I was so pumped for Conor Sheary. The guy does an important job but he’s really just a middle six wing. That left side was so barren for years that it seemed impossible we’d ever get a guy capable of skating wing with Jack Eichel. The crazy thing about the offseason the Sabres have had is that now they have… dare I say it: a very good top six! Don’t worry, we have all of Training Camp to debate roster deployment and we certainly will! The next great offseason accomplishment, our secondary Stanley Cup, is ROYAL FUCKING BLUE! On August 15th, 2019 shortly after 3 in the afternoon years of waiting came to an end. One little tweet ended years- YEARS of our bitching and moaning for the best incarnation of the Sabres look. Honestly it overshadowed the reveal of the 50th Anniversary third jerseys the following day for me. Coupled with an implied return to the original Sabres logo without the silly silver lining all over it, it’s not exaggeration, and certainly not out of place on this blog, to say Buffalo now once again hosts one of the best logo/color combinations in sports. Either way, those were the two big defibrillators taken to the chest of an exhausted Sabres fanbase this offseason.

The hurry up and wait of this offseason was Rasmus Ristolainen. That trade seemed inevitable and then it wasn’t for most of the summer. Then Chad DeDomincis spoke about his secret sources and put the likelihood of a trade at 70%. Just as we had feared the move was held up by a string of dominos that can best be described as cowardly General Managers waiting for the market to be set on restricted free agents. As of the posting of this article there is no resolution of the Ristolainen situation making any in-out section somewhat hard to do. I still believe the trade will happen before opening night, but we’ll just have to wait and see. For me its not worth getting wound up about what he said in a Finnish newspaper. It’s been clear he’s not been entirely happy here for months if not years. Does it hurt the potential trade? Idk, does it hurt more than his shitty advanced stats already do? This is already more time than its worth spending on a hypothetical trade. The moment that trade happens there will be a heartfelt goodbye from me, Risto is a guy I loved a lot. Let’s talk about the moves that did happen! Going out is Matt Tennyson, Sean Malone, Danny O’Regan, Matt Moulson (finally officially gone), Scott Wedgewood, Jason Pominville and Alex Nylander. The out list could be longer than that, but I tried to keep it to folks who were or could’ve been NHL players. That list is very scant on big names but more importantly its shorter than the coming-in list (particularly on defense): Henri Jokiharju, Marcus Johansson, Curtis Lazar, Andrew Hammond, Jimmy Vesey, Colin Miller, Arttu Ruotsalainen and… I know it was technically a resigning but Jeff Skinner because we resigned Jeff Skinner!!! Before Matt Hunwick’s neck injury unfortunately sent him to Robidas Island (LTIR for all of this upcoming season) there was not only a surplus of defenseman on the right side but there was so many that the team was going to be over the salary cap. This was what made us all think a Ristolainen trade is inevitable... and now September is knocking on our door. Once again, talking about the outs and ins of the Sabres offseason is kinda hard with this big, pending, hypothetical trade hanging over our heads. Nonetheless, plenty did happen.

As always take my enthusiasm with a grain of salt. Last offseason retrospective I was amped for Patrik Berglund and that ended in a way no one could’ve predicted. Nonetheless, I am pretty excited for Colin Miller and Marcus Johansson. Miller will be an excellent top 4 d-man once he filters into that role and Johansson is the kind of role player at left wing this team needs more of. Side note: I’m just really happy we’ve got a GM who knows how to take advantage of cap strapped teams like we saw in the Miller move. If “Trader Tim” was dumb enough to waste a draft pick on negotiating rights for Vesey three years ago, “Poppin Botts” is smart enough to poach playoff performers. Speaking of three years ago Jimmy Vesey probably doesn’t need to be in the top six, but his acquisition is low-key brilliant and if you ask me he’ll look like a steal by November. When it comes to the forwards I know we could still use a right wing, but I don’t think there are many offensively bad incarnations of this top six anymore. Pending that hypothetical Risto trade, the closest thing to a blockbuster this offseason was Alex Nylander for Henri Jokiharju. It was a one-for-one trade and pretty immediately called as a win for the Sabres; as fans we thought Nylander would go as part of a package but there it is! The steal of the summer! For one, whatever switch was flipped in Nylander’s motivational subconscious toward the end of last year’s training camp was fleeting. I’m not suggesting anything dubious but LMFAO had a longer run of quality play than Nylander. I apologized for calling him the lesser Nylander brother last year though that is plainly correct. I think the words of a Chicago blog really have the best words to form my new, final burn of the 2016 first rounder: piss-poor motivation. We may never know what he could’ve been had he given a shit, Chicago isn’t exactly where you go for quality development these days, but the return for him was way more than we could’ve hoped. While I normally struggle to wrap my head around prospect trades this one was a quick learn. Henri Jokiharju is the kind of young defenseman you can’t really put a ceiling on. He could’ve been a regular on Chicago’s blueline had Joel Quenneville not lost his job there. Keeping guys like Marco Scandella and Rasmus Ristolainen around decreases the likelihood Jokiharju starts in Buffalo but he deserves the spot whether he gets it or not. Lawrence Pilut and Zach Bogosian starting the season injured throws some more wrinkles in that story, but we’ll just have to wait and see.

Before we wrap up I want to reiterate how hawkish I am on Linus Ullmark. Both him and Carter Hutton fell off a cliff in December and never recovered last season. Those two guys are the main reasons we got a ten-game winning streak. I am crazy enough to say they’re good play early in the season was not a fluke and Ullmark specifically I think will make a compelling case for the starter role. Next up in the world of New Look Sabres is a blog on the Prospect Tournament next weekend. I’ll be in Delaware that weekend but nonetheless you’ll get a post on that as the final appetizer before Training Camp starts and we’re really off to the races! Like, share and comment. New Look Sabres is now a part of my broader Uttaro Sports Plus blog so there’s other stuff to enjoy while you wait for more Sabres content. We don’t have to wait much longer. Football season is here and I’m back in graduate classes so it can’t be too much longer! Enjoy your Labor Day weekend!

Thanks for reading.

P.S. I wrote a full-fledged Farewell Jeff Skinner piece that was never published because we were blessed enough to keep him. If there is enough interest I can post it or parts of it. Let me know what you think.

[lololollywrites]

thoughts about being 29 on the internet that i just had in the shower...

...and had to write down. they were all basically just about how f**king - NEW. and surreal. the internet, its capabilities, and its fandoms can still be to me sometimes. i feel like i forget this a lot. but when i think about it, i can easily recall my wonder at discovering that it all existed in waves of smaller finds. and because i know there are others like me, i thought i’d share some of my own experiences. because honestly, i’ve had fewer years on tumblr and sites like it than some people much younger than me. i’m catching up and enjoying it.

firstly, i know i’m old to some of you, but i’m not really old. not really. i’m still a millennial, screwed over by student loans and old white men and viewed as part of the technological generation. i’m a phd student, and because i’m always on a college campus, i’ve been mistaken as a freshman. a few times. but it’s been fascinating to witness actual freshman and other college students and consider just how different things are for them and honestly? i’m sort of jealous. 

because...

i can remember when i first discovered that fanfiction existed. i was in third period tech skills as a junior in high school - 16 years old - and got a little off-topic and searched for spoilers for a new supernatural episode. this was in 2005 and the show had just come out (yes i still watch, i can’t escape).

and what did i find? somehow? fanfiction.net. i was, no exaggeration, shocked. i sat and read a full-length chaptered fic in episodic format. my mouth was hanging open. i saw thousands more fics in hundreds of fandoms and suddenly felt less strange for envisioning full-scale episode re-imaginings in my head as i laid in bed, dissatisfied with what i had just watched. (btw, i watched new supernatural episodes the sunday after they used to originally air on the wb on thursdays, at my mom’s house where i had my own room and own tiny tv, because no one at my dad’s house wanted to watch and streaming episodes wasn’t something i could even imagine. plus i didn’t have internet at my dad’s house. i know.)

not only that, but i was impressed as hell. here was me, not even aware that you could somehow upload your own text to the internet, and people were not simply writing polished stories in private but posting them somewhere that allowed for chapters. that allowed for people all over the world to read their words. that categorized everything into a huge virtual library. and, most incredibly to me, that allowed for reviews from people around the world.

i couldn’t believe that this new world was open to me. that people would be so generous as to offer amazing stories to me to read FOR FREE. that i had a limitless supply of content to read and review. i barely had functioning internet at home, so i had been sheltered. i told the people sitting next to me in class about it and encouraged them to check it out, mostly to blank stares. i may have even told the teacher, but no one cared. i didn’t understand. who wouldn’t be interested? i told my dad and my sister about it when i got home from school. i was mind-blown.

months in and many reads and written reviews later, i wrote my first fic. it was for smallville. 6 chapters, with updates every few days, that received 14 reviews in total. i read them all multiple times. i showed my sister. i checked the story stats every half hour. i cried. i wrote on the family computer secretly in the evening when most of my family had gone upstairs, because i was about half a year away from owning my first laptop. i wrote more stories sporadically for about 6 years, gradually getting better, but also gradually becoming more stressed and aware of negativity, online arguments, and the embarrassment and shame i suddenly felt about having an online presence. i found a supernatural forum at tv.com (the forums sadly no longer exist), learned about fandom, and immersed myself in posting and being part of a community that i thought understood me more than my friends. like a secret life.

during my first year of college, in 2007, i was in a friend’s dorm when he asked everyone if we wanted to watch an episode of scrubs. i laughed. surely he was joking. “how can we just watch an episode? it’s not on now and you don’t have the dvds.” i literally didn’t consider that there may have been a way. he excitedly told us that he had found some website that had episodes just... pre-uploaded. and that you could just click. i didn’t believe him. the stress of having to be at the tv at a certain time each week for fear of missing an episode entirely and forever was just part of being a fan, right? buying the tv guide and checking listings was necessary. but he found the episode. and clicked. it only took a few full minutes to load and there it was. again, i was astounded. this memory is so shockingly clear to me. it changed how i spent much of my free time, for one. just that moment.

sometime during this first year of college, i was home for break and came across a video on youtube, this new website i had started to use. it reminded me of ebaum’s world, which my friend would show me at her house sometimes because her computer was faster than mine. it was called “cat soup”, and by two guys that called themselves smosh. it had more views than i could comprehend - probably not much more than 5 digits, but still. they were just two kids i could have gone to school with who could create a funny video and get famous. again, i was shocked. mind-blown.

i showed my sister, my mom, and all my friends. they appreciated it a bit more than the fanfiction, but no one seemed to grasp how incredible and revolutionary it was. they all liked “shoes”, with the kelly persona by liam kyle sullivan (we still quote it today), probably because its budget and effects made it a bit more familiarly professional and it appeared less homemade (though it definitely was). but i couldn’t forget smosh. i was so impressed by them. i watched more videos and eventually found communitychannel and jenna marbles and eviliguana and shane dawson. i even found fan edits for my faves, buffy (maybe i saw one of phil’s, lol) and supernatural and smallville, and tried making my own. i freaked in 2009 or so when fred reached a million subscribers. a million. i couldn’t wrap my head around that. again, i told my sister and friends, expecting them to see the enormity of something so crazy happening, and they just... didn’t.

back in 2008, after watching “stick it” again, i recalled the name of a gymnast my cousin used to always talk about when we were kids - from the 1996 olympics - and looked her up on youtube. i realized that all gymnastics competitions imaginable had been uploaded. again - not to be repetitive - but i was shocked. there’s no better word. i gave myself a thorough education on the sport, traveling through time. i am still so grateful that i was able to do that.

sometime in 2009, my friends started pestering me to create a facebook account. i was a junior in college. 20 years old already. it sounded weird - pictures of me online? why? but i gave into pressure and made one. my mom had never allowed us to make a myspace; we were a bit young, and she hated the idea (now, she’s on facebook more than i am). around the same time i got my fanciest phone yet - an LG Env3. i figured out that it could access the internet and that i could use songs to create ringtones. again, sufficiently mind-blown. considering my first cell phone had been a flip phone with no camera that i shared with my sister during emergencies when i was 13, i felt that technology was coming along fast. 

smart phones were foreign to me for a long long time, until recently actually. i thought they were unnecessary for quite a while. i don’t even remember what phones i had at the end of college and through grad school, but i’m pretty sure they consisted of a series of cheap pay-as-you-go phones from walmart. in 2013, i went to china for a year to teach. i got a cheap phone there and used it for about 7 months. one day, a friend of mine gave me his old htc smartphone because he was getting a new one. i didn’t know how to use it, but i played one app on repeat before class and snapped some low-quality photos. after that, i almost immediately went to indonesia for another 9 months to teach high school (2014-2015). the htc phone died very quickly, so i used the nokia brick phone given to me by the organization. it was fine. i had never even used my old smartphone to access the internet, aside from wechat, thanks to china’s internet blocks. it wasn’t until i got home, in the summer of 2015, that i finally got an iphone. it was a huge deal and a big learning curve. it was also around this time that i found dan and phil and tumblr. i only got my macbook two years ago and finally think i have some things figured out.

so i may be old in some ways and remember floppy disks and the card catalog and using encyclopedias to write my middle school papers and huge computers with black screens and green text that displayed math problems in elementary school. i may be able to remember the sound of ancient, huge printers that used reams of paper with perforated, tearable strips down each side. i may remember aol red, dial-up, and not being able to connect if someone was on the phone. but i can also remember watching technology evolve in front of me, discovering fandom and the huge world of content and friendship that lay ahead. and when people try to say i’m too old to like dan and phil, i remind them that dan and phil can also remember. we’re the same age. i relate to them and their stories. to phil’s buffy obsession. to dan’s love of smosh. i’ve only had about 10 fully-cognizant years here on the internet, and only a couple in the world of tumblr and iphones and mobile apps. i’m young in those ways. and i look young enough that strangers sometimes think i’m a teenager. 

that’s laughable to me in some ways, because i’ve lived so much since my teen years. so much has happened. but in others, i don’t feel much different. there’s no age where you just feel grown up. that your interests vanish. that things suddenly seem childish and dumb. yes, i cringe about some things i wrote or did back then and i think i’ve matured, but my interests are all still relatively similar and i can finally explore them in ways that i just couldn’t before.

i hope that this has made sense. and i hope that some can relate.

[jibrillenyan]

Eldarya Valentine Event Review

So, as everyone who reads the guide blog knows, I try my best to stay 400% neutral there; I don't want to impose my opinions on people who just want to know what the right answers are and, to be honest, I tend to keep to myself anyway. But I've often been asked to share my opinions at least on this Tumblr (there was actually a poll a few years ago, where I asked if people wanted that and I just realized I never started posting opinions anyway. XD sorry, I'm so terribad at this) so here I am, being asked my thoughts on the matter and answering, for once. I also noticed I suck at tagging; blame the fact that this is just an info-blog about the guide website, I promise I'll go back and sort them out. I will tag Personal opinion posts or the ones about myself with "Purrsonal" so you can skip them if you want. (All) that being said, the Valentine event... under the cut because it’s extra long.

As usual, it started with bugs. Yeah, ok, let's move on, there is nothing new to say. I really wish they tested this stuff a bit before tossing it on us. 

"Victim of its own success" my @$$.

Outfits: Truth be told, I overall don't like them. There are some pieces that I find absolutely great but that is it. Valkyon's especially is really weird to look at, more like a chastity device than date outfit, even if I do like the boots, and the shoulderpads aren't that bad I guess. Hopefully people have better taste than me and can appreciate them more, but for me, having to pay potentially so much more than usual for outfits that I like far less was a bit of a disappointment.

Money: In that regard, yes you do pay more, a lot more, it's not just you, it's a fact. On average (there was some market involved, plus the occasional energy potion... blablabla) the 2017 event, assuming optimal completion (not spending more than strictly necessary) cost a whole 80 maana (or less!) for 3 outfits. The 2018 event? 0. Yep, all free. 2019? We are talking about 1200 maana (optimal completion) and we all know many of us didn't optimally complete. It sucked.

True, this is the only event you can finish early without spending a single gold coin (2017 and 2018 required gold coins if you made mistakes or skipped some days that didn't depend on knowing the answers), but it's also the only event where if you want the companion you have to pay. 2017? present from Leiftan, free. 2018, Completion Prize, free.

Companion: As someone who watched My Little Pony as a toddler, it's simply adorable. Diabetes-inducing adorable, but still adorable. Plus, it's animated (but it kinda looks like it's having a seizure...)! Is it the start of a trend? Stats are really not great (unless puberty hits reaaally hard and the adult is a half-miracle), but I caved in and bought it at least on the Italian version. It sucks that it's not free. :( The fact that the companion could only be obtained by paying for it was the biggest downside of this event for me, and I think that it was also the first time this happened outside an episode since the game came out internationally. /Sadpanda.

Background: I love backgrounds, and this is very sugary, but beautiful; I just wish it didn't replace the companion as completion reward, because if I HAD to choose between the 2, I would have preferred the latter, as much as I wish we had more event backgrounds, companions are just more useful, especially for newbies.

Mechanics: My biggest complain here is the cost, too high. We had all foreseen the use of the newly acquired alchemy minigame as the engine for this event, and while some don't like it, I was ok with that. It's just too expensive to be likable. We never had to pay so much for a Valentine event and I hope it won't repeat itself. On the bright side, it's not a skill minigame, so it's not something we can fail. Considering the issues many had during the last events, perahps at least THAT is a good thing. It's nice that you can find the ingredients everywhere, including the low energy areas, but I would have preferred if they had split the loot pool among them instead of everything dropping everywhere; finding everything you need for a specific outfit, especially the scrolls, is extremely hard with these chances, and the scrolls are 100 maana. Which brings me to the next point: the final questions. While I like the idea of a tiny-mini-episode inside the event with its answers to guess, God Bless the guides, because I'd like to see people complete this event using no extra maana or gold, without relying on people who paid to advance faster. If you try to do it staying in those 1200 maana, the optimal completion, you submit yourselves to the the RNGesus, and it could take DAYS to complete a route. Now, imagine getting a couple of answers wrong, and having to wait a DAY to retry... get them all wrong and you take 13 days JUST for the answers... it's a bit crazy. Cant we have, I don't know, an attempt every 4-6 hours? It's like they are really trying hard to make us spend money this time around.

Story: Well, can't say that I liked seeing Gardienne "Unable to control herself" and cheating on her boyfriend, mostly because I don't think it was necessary. If you haven't played episode 19 yet, the boyfriend is not mentioned, as you are in that weird out-of-time situation where there is no boyfriend yet, and it doesn't feel as terrible. Yes, "you" are still kissing someone you may not like for the sake of the outfit/illustration with no option to opt out, but at the same time, it's quite mild and it is just a dream... I wish it had been like that for accounts past episode 19 as well. This version leaves a sour taste in my mouth and knocks my Erika LOM meter down a few notches. Yes, I understand it's a dream, and I'm fully aware people dream really weird stuff sometimes, where you do things you'd never do in real life and have no control over yourself, but she doesn't even show any embarassment or regret upon waking up. I also do not identify with the MC in this kind of game so I'm mighty fine with disliking her or her actions (not the first time~~~); I would probably not have minded a situation like this for the story's sake. It would have been interesting to explore (although, I'm always a bit scared about trusting Beemoov with this stuff, they can't handle it very well). But it is supposed to be a cute valentine event, and it would have taken so little to make this more palatable for everyone. Was it really necessary to add this tiny bit of angst?

Overall opinion: I know I criticized a lot, this event was probably among the ones I've liked the least, mostly for the excessive cost and some debatable choices on the story. I did like some things though, including using the alchemy minigame (I know I'm in the minority here :p), mostly because it requires no skill, something that has caused issues in the past - minigames hard to play on touch screens, color impairments, etc., etc. - and I liked the fact that they removed Daily gates - the fact you couldn't advance past the missions of the day unless you paid. This event could be completed in a day if you wanted, and with a bit of luck without spending a single gold coin, that was nice. I'm not sure I would like another event like this, but there was some potential that I hope won't be immediately discarded.

Loved the best (ranked 1st to 4th + Bonus to be fair since I listed 5 things I dislike XD): 1. I LOVE THE TIMER ON THE CORNER, underappreciated little bastard *heart* 2. No daily gates, you could finish the entire event in one day or in 12, without spending extra money. 2. The mini-episode at the end. The idea of it at least, I've already said I don't like some of the... content. 3. No luck with explorations? You can finish the event with maana. It's nice that you can use maana (and not gold coins) to finish the event if you are unlucky or don't have enough time. 4. No hard-to-do minigames (I've never had an issue with them, but I've heard of hundreds of people who did.) 5. The background and the companion were overly cute.

Hated the beast (ranked 1st to 4th + Special guest star): 1. Companion in Gold coins only, my biggest disappointment 2. The whole cheating thing. Why? Was it needed? 3. Having to pay maana for an event, when the ones before were all free 4. Disregarding personal taste, I don't think Valkyon outfit was suited for a Valentine day date. 5. And once again, the bugs. I just... don't... have... any polite words left for it. It's last only because it's featured in every single event, so it has lost the novelty effect.

[clumsyclifford]

hello!! i am back and on desktop this time. the blog is just as pretty. alex + yellow = v v attractive jfc. this is a long one so buckle in.

to begin: i hope you have the most fun on your day road trip and sing your heart out to atl and taylor swift. i love driving long distances and idk just driving in general is fun. have the absolute best time MWAH

my birthday is in november!! november 23 to be specific. i share it with miley cyrus which is something i always found to be very cool when i was growing up and watching hannah montana. it also means i am a sagittarius and funny little fact i realized is that my best friend is a gemini. alex and jack are also a sagittarius and a gemini. from being 13 i know that tyler and josh from twenty one pilots are also a sagittarius and a gemini. something about sagittarius and gemini besties idk.

also yeah!! ao3 year in review!! it's a bit complicated to figure out at first and if you read a lot the finding pages thing can be pretty tedious, but it's def worth it once you figure it out. it gives you a lot of different stats about everything you read and it's pretty cool. now i am going to go look at your fics to remember my favs. you deserve the praise so i am willing to offer it. jeez you write a lot i respect the motivation sm. you write quite a bit of angst and i won't lie i try to stay away from angst so i haven't read your fics that seem super angst-y based on the tags. BUT there are still so many i recall reading and loving nonetheless. on a quick scroll-through: i usually don't read high school AUs but "paint me in trust (i'll be your best friend)" was super adorable and lovely. "thank god i'm yours" is one of my favs iirc. also i love love love "it's not always easy (but i'm here forever)" like yes please romanticize alex gaskarth i love it sm. "i won't be silent (and i won't let go)" and "i fell asleep in a city that doesn't" are both super fluffy and romantic and are favs of mine. in case you haven't picked up on it i adore very fluffy and romantic fics lmao. alright i am continuing to scroll and there are so many more i could list that i love but this section is getting quite long. just know if it's about a kitchen or hotel rooms being for lovers i probably read it and adored it and that pov is so valid.

waterparks!! will not lie i only really started listening to them about 6 months ago having been distantly aware of their existence for several years by being a fan of bands in the same genre. listen as long as you let yourself be vaguely annoyed by awsten is prevents you from being in love with him. follow him on any social media platform for like a day and you'll be sick of him typing in nothing but all caps within hours. simply do not romanticize him and you can keep yourself from falling!! so this is coming from a slightly fake parx fan, but some of my favs by them have been peach (lobotomy), crave, numb, fuzzy, violet!, you'd be paranoid too, and lowkey as hell. that is a very songs-from-their-most-recent-album-heavy rec, but whatever. i did give the disclaimer about being a fake parx fan.

yeah hayley does have 2 solo albums now!! petals for armor and flowers for vases / descansos. pfa is the one i didn't really like upon first listen but has grown on me. i haven't even listened to the second one in its entirety oops but we won't mention it. dead horse is good but simmer (pretty sure that was the other single??) just ain't it for me. the album has some lovely songs but it's just a hit or miss album all the way through. some favs of mine on it include pure love, taken, crystal clear, watch me while i bloom, and why we ever. it's sorta a storyline album about healing if that adds anything to it?? but anyways. i started listening to paramore around the time after laughter dropped and it grew to be one of my fav albums in existence. idle worship is probably one of my fav songs like ever. i def understand being slightly put off by bands with songs that make religious references (me with twenty one pilots' earlier music that makes a lot more religious references considering i'm not religious whatsoever) but i think i am blinded by being in love with hayley williams and just ignore it. idk that she's like super religious?? she's addressed believing in god and stuff a few times but she's def not the "rub it in your face" type and if she's making refs in music more recently then they're subtle enough i'm not noticing them. ik albums like brand new eyes had a lot more because it was shortly after that the band split and the songwriting process was essentially her and ex-bandmate co-songwriter arguing about their religious beliefs (turns out he ended up being super homophobic and transphobic all based on his religion so do with that what u will and thank the clown for leaving). i feel u on the "i meant to start listening to them" because that's essentially how i started listening to them. i told myself i was going to and then finally forced myself to do it. fuck falling for awsten knight what's more risky is falling in love with hayley </3

also yeah!! you've articulated my feelings towards tde. every song is so vastly different that it's hard to like it all. #1 fan is pretty decent though, and that's not just my bias about finding both ross and his gf hot and a cute couple and getting to see them together and ross half naked in a mirror in the video nope not at all. he's my fav himbo!! he has no personality!! no thoughts head empty!! i still love him and his strawberry-growing saga on twitter tho <3 the hazard of being in love with ross lynch since i was 12. girlfriend better be a fucking banger and there's quite a few already released singles in the tracklist so i have hope. i believe my show is in chicago on november 19 which is a thursday. kinda sucks since i intentionally bought the chicago tix nearly two years ago (the show was originally supposed to be april 25 2020. lol.) because the show was on a saturday and i have to drive 3 hours to get there. obviously i can't speak for them as tde but r5 shows always fucking slapped and i can vouch for them (realized i haven't seem them live since 2016?? 5 YEARS?? wtf) so if u genuinely like them. would recommend going to see them.

anyways. i have not listened to luke's solo album yet. i plan on it. this has gotten so long but i tried to respond in all areas and even organized it in different paragraphs this time (thanks being on desktop!!). hope you are well. hope you have a lovely day. hmm what's a little "going on in my life" fact. i got new glasses a few days ago and my eyes essentially said fuck off because adjusting to the new prescription has left me with eyes that hurt and occasionally slightly nauseous. here is to hoping my eyes get their shit together. mwah LOVE YOU TOO - the other bella/cubs anon/idk

okay hi hello. i have put this off because holy hell it's long but let's do it. i am putting a cut because this whole thing is long even without my answer

first: the road trip was super fun thank you!!! i am intrigued by this information regarding sags and geminis, we should do some scientific inquiry. enquiry. i don't know if there's a difference between those words.

aha! well i tried the ao3 year in review thing and i would say it had about 55% accuracy but still i agree it's fun to look back at that kind of stuff. and i feel you on the angst thing i go through phases of writing angst-heavy stuff and then writing very fluffy stuff and it is entirely based on my mental state buuuut i have lots of fluff and i'm glad you found it all and that you liked it yay <333 KITCHENS ARE FOR LOVERS i will die on that fuckin hill. hotel rooms as well but primarily kitchens.

dfgjhgdlfkhgdfmj honestly i dont use twitter enough that i would see his tweets enough that that would bother me also the fact that he tweets in all caps means that i just picture him yelling everything he tweets which i find absolutely hysterical so i don't think that would help. i have added these parx songs to my listen asap playlist and will get to them when i get a chance thank you i am excited also i already know lowkey as hell and it slaps super hard so im very much lookin forward to the rest of these. merci merci

YEAH simmer was the one i didnt vibe with. and honestly i feel zero compulsion to get into hayley williams as a solo artist. i just don't vibe enough to want to do that so i doubt i'll be listening to her anytime soon but maybe if i hear the songs in passing or get super bored one night, idk who can really say. but yeah christianity typically puts me off of music (speaking as a very jewish bitch) although there are notable exceptions in the cases of thomas rhett and the driver era. i'm just not attached to hayley enough to be like ehhh this doesnt matter. does that make sense

FAVORITE HIMBO PLEASE HGSDFGDFGKLFGJ i dont follow him on twitter but i have seen some interviews of ross and rocky and tbh they're great i love the way ross speaks like i like his speech mannerisms and i like his FACE and HAIR and. yeah. i think hes pretty. and i think he and 5sos SHOULD collab i think that would be sexy as hell. can you imagine that. oh my god can you imagine a ross lynch/luke hemmings collab. i'm not even really talking to you anymore bella because i know you haven't listened to luke yet and don't have a stake in it but if anyone else is reading this long ass answer. ross & luke collab. okay im going to move on and not think about that now. but i probably won't see tde unless i get a job this semester because i'm trying to stop spending so much money on big indulgent things like concerts likeee i was in a really good habit of not spending that much and then suddenly i got paid for one summer and i was just goin Crazy and i need to dial it back. plus i wanna see ajr and noah kahan equally bad so like. i have to make some calls about priorities here. it's Much to think about

good luck to your eyes i'm sure your new glasses are hella cute tho!!! LOVE YOUUUUUUU

[mrevaunit42]

Character creation notes: Connor (Nova vs)

Hey everyone, E here with some more creation notes! Haha something I promised forever and a half ago. Time just flies you know and I'm sorry if you were expecting this sooner but things got away from me. So if you were curious about some insight into Connor in this case and my thought process behind creating the character, I hope this helps out a little? Maybe like a little guideline on how to construct your own ocs, couple ideas you can try out all that jazz.

So when I was originally working on the story, back when it was an inspired by the star vs original concept and not the future au it is now, I created Nova first because she was going to be the lead. I find it easier to start with the lead so you know what to build around them: The world, their friends, their allies, their enemies, rivals, challenges that would affect them because no matter what, it is their story and their story, their goals, their ambitions drive the plot. Once I got the basic concept of Nova down, I started working on her love interest because I like romance. I love a good, deep love story.. Lead or main character first followed by their interest if I go the whole romance route so I can create a couple that would work. So all the times I say Nova and Connor were literally built for each other, it's because I literally did build them first and specifically to be romantic love interests. Haha I'm not being cheeky.

So I made Connor this very independent, self sufficient guy who kinda just wanted to live a normal life. He disliked all forms of attention, he just wanted get through the day and he just wanted to do what what he loved. In the original, he's actual runs this little cafe in his small town that his parents own but aren't ever around to really run it but he's a level headed guy who knows how to fix things which is actually where a part of the inventor aspect came from.

When it came to transferring all this to the star vs universe, I made it a personal mission not to have Connor be Marco 2.0 (though in some ways I failed as he accidentally has a lot of love interests haha whoops) because that's not what I like to do. There's a difference between acting like a character and basically being another version of that character which is a reason I was pretty nervous about Nova because I wasn't sure if I had made her different enough because I noticed, even now, I do have some habits from my parents and that was just because I grew up around that and I kinda just picked it up and I noticed it happened a lot to my friends too so I did that with Nova.

I decided that I wanted Connor to be the one that had original characters as parents because it would allow me to use him as a kinda stand in for the reader so that in universe when something needed to be explained, it was only logical that the new kid and his parents in Echo Creek, relatively speaking, would be the one that needed the explanation because they haven't dealt with that kind of story as long as the others have. Also, because he is the secondary protagonist, this allowed me create his own unique problem, his personal story arc that wouldn't be restricted by canon or at least the canon that was available at the time. I like doing this opposing problem with my leads. It's a kinda habit I have that their biggest issues are the opposite of the other lead. In this case Nova, who is trying to live up to her family's legacy and questioning her validity in being a true Butterfly to Connor's problem that he doesn't know his family's legacy. In fact until a few chapters into the main story, he didn't even know he had a family beyond his mother and father and where Nova is trying her best to be what she thinks a Butterfly is, Connor is trying to figure it out what it means to be a Sinclair and if that's what he truly wants to be.

Originally Connor still had the messy black hair but he actually had brown eyes and no glasses. I wanted him to stand out a bit from the other characters so I changed the eyes to green. The glasses were kinda a comfort thing for me. By the time I actually started putting together the nova vs series as it is, I had to get glasses because of a condition I have and it was a big blow to my pride because until that point, I was perfectly 'healthy' like no major problems. And I was like why should I feel bad about this? This is normal. This isn't the worst thing in the world. So in honor of my glasses, I gave Connor glasses. I am not as bad as him so yeah but I did not realize I accidentally made him Harry Potter until someone pointed it out haha. Whoops.

The inventing thing was pulled from OG Connor where he had to learn how to fix things because he didn't have the money to pay someone to do it all the time and he didn't have to time to let it stay broken. I am a sucker for inventors and wacky gadgets. I love games where I can customize everything with different stats and effects and all that jazz and I love those inventor archetypes that just build fantastical machines and items that are so creative especially when they have that whole cobbled together with random junk vibe. Love it.

Connor's personality was ironically pretty straight forward. He kept  the uncomfortable with any forms of attention and his general intelligence. He's very much an introvert which some people find ironic but hopefully I wrote it right, do you notice that he actually doesn't leave the house if he doesn't have to. Like every time he leaves , it is because A. someone came to his house and got him or B. It is a previously planned event that someone else planned. He would very much remain locked up in his room if left alone. Connor is also very responsible because of the dangerous nature of inventing. You have to be or else you could cause a lot of dangerous issues and situations. Connor's general passiveness and calm attitude stem from the fact that for the last 7 years, he has seen a lot of magical stuff. Unlike Marco, who is awe inspired and amazed by all these cool, magical things that occur to him, Connor is still impressed and awed but he's used to it's all stuff he's seen since he was a little kid and given how impulsive and let's be real, crazy Jack and Nova are, he's used to be being the one that has to basically fix everything or find a solution as that's what he does as an inventor. Another aspect of his personality is his general view on himself which isn't poor but he downplays a lot of his successes and achievements and everything that would stand out as 'normal' and I tried to write it in a way that it wasn't because he had low self esteem but rather to him, at least, everyone else was just more impressive. Nova is a magical princess who would one day rule an entire other dimension. Jack is this half demon who is utterly charming and talented with a firm grasp on who he is and what he wants to do. And his magic tricks are cool. So in Connor eyes, he's just a human. That's it. Nothing more compared to the princess of mewni and the literal prince of the underworld. I did not want him to know how to fight in the traditional sense. I didn't want him to be throwing expertly trained punches and kicks and all that because like I said he's not Marco. He's Connor and he doesn't know how to fight in conventional battle which is why he uses his brain, tactics and basically whatever he can to help rather than be an actual combatant if he can help it. He comes from a family of inventors. Which is why most of the time he's providing some sort of distraction or covering fire or even just running and avoiding everything because hanging out with demons and magical beings teaches you if you don't know how to fight, get good at getting out of the way.

And the random fun fact of Connor is that his middle name is actually mine and no I will never reveal it.

So that's some insight into Connor. I hope you enjoyed it. I really just planned for him and nova which you can find the link below (Warning some spoilers at the end) but if you would like more inform on them or even a thought process behind another character, let me know and I shall see what I can do. Thank you for reading and have an awesome day!

https://nova-friends.tumblr.com/post/156897207986/the-creation-of-nova

[junker-town]

The 10 least consequential athletes of the decade

Some rules before we begin:

This list is arranged in no particular order, because my definition of “inconsequential” is somewhat arbitrary and varies from case to case. It might mean that the athlete’s career was a meaningless blip on the radar, or brilliantly brief and terrible, or impressively invisible. If you take issue with anything you read here, I pledge to rewrite it to your satisfaction and mail you $100.

This list is nearly entirely made up of athletes competing at the top echelon of their sport, as fun as it would be to mock four-year-old T-ball first basemen who stood directly on top of the base, wore their glove on the wrong hand and cried.

This list is entirely made up of men. Women’s sports made enormous strides in the 2010s, and even those who played, say, two career minutes of WNBA basketball still contributed to something meaningful. None of the guys below were doing anything important.

If you’re one of the guys on this list, and you read this, please take some satisfaction in the knowledge that in 2012, I had to seek medical attention after injuring my knee playing Wiffle ball.

Chris Pettit

Pinch runner, Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, 2011

In this decade, Chris Pettit came tantalizingly close to playing the least amount of baseball a Major League Baseball player can possibly play.

Pettit appeared in exactly one 2010s game. On April 8, 2011, the Angels trailed the Blue Jays by a run with two out in the bottom of the ninth. After slow-footed catcher Hank Conger singled, Pettit, who had shown impressive speed in the minors, was sent in as his pinch runner. Up next was 24-year-old Peter Bourjos, by no means a power hitter. In this situation, Pettis likely took a fairly conservative lead off first.

Bourjos struck out on four pitches. Pettis walked off the field and was never seen in the major leagues again.

Baseball’s classic cup-of-coffee story is that of Moonlight Graham, the rookie who famously trotted out to right field, never saw anything hit his way, and ended his career without ever getting to bat or field a baseball. In his farewell game, Pettit did even less: he walked fewer steps to take his position, he was only out there for a minute or so, and he never once wore a glove or held a bat.

Hypothetically, we can imagine an appearance less meaningful than this one, but only barely. Changing Bourjos’ result to a line-out on the first pitch is no good, because if that happens, our man Pettit becomes a baserunner with a ball in play, if only for a second or two. His heart rate probably spikes. Can’t have that. No, this needs to be a strikeout. The only tragedy, then, is that Bourjos struck out on four pitches and not three.

If we want to get greedy, we can imagine the Angels as the visiting team. Playing at home, their dugout was on the left side of the field, meaning Pettit had to jog all the way across the diamond to take his place at first. As the visitor, first base would have been just a few steps away from the bench.

Pettit stood there for a minute with bare and empty hands. That was his Major League Baseball decade. It might very well be the most meaningless decade a major league baseball player has ever experienced.

Darius Johnson-Odom

Shooting guard, Los Angeles Lakers and Philadelphia 76ers, 2012-2014

In contrast to Darius Johnson-Odom’s storied career at Marquette and his years in China and Italy, his NBA life lasted 21 minutes. They were a very, very busy 21 minutes. His 11 shot attempts came from everywhere on the floor — a layup, a scattering of mid-range shots, and a couple of heaves from at least 26 feet out. All 11 of them missed. He was once sent to the stripe for a pair of free-throw attempts, and he missed both of those as well.

Across NBA history, 14 players have attempted at least three field goals and ended their career with zero points. Johnson-Odom left them all in the dust.

He did everything else, from rebounding to stealing to assisting to fouling. He was all over the floor. In the end, his career usage rate stood at 28.4 percent, higher than that of Patrick Ewing, Blake Griffin, and Damian Lillard.

This is perhaps the greatest testament to the inconsequential nature of Johnson-Odom’s career: even if we decided to rewrite the record books and rule that every one of his 11 shots went in, it would not change the result of a single game. He never even attempted a shot that mattered.

His full name, Darius Earvin Johnson-Odom, sneaks in the names of two fellow Lakers with considerably more notable careers. The two names appear to have canceled one another out entirely, a phenomenon we also see in a man named ...

JamesOn Curry

Point guard, Los Angeles Clippers, 2010

In the 2010s, the NBA revolved around LeBron James and Stephen Curry. The two megastars spent four consecutive Finals smashing their teams against one another. Before the opening tip of every season, at least one of them was correctly presumed destined for the Finals as though they were sitting presidents running for a second term.

“James on Curry” sounds like the god of the NBA guarding the other god of the NBA. “JamesOn Curry” is the name of a guy whose entire career can fit in a GIF. Welcome to the start of JamesOn Curry’s NBA career.

Welcome to the end of JamesOn Curry’s NBA career. It lasted 3.9 seconds, making it the shortest in the history of the league.

Curry had been through it all just to get here, and now lives a life as a youth basketball instructor that makes him happier than he guesses an NBA career would have. We’re free to laugh at these 3.9 seconds all we want. God knows I am. Curry has better things to do. Besides, as he pointed out, he probably got paid more per second than anyone else in NBA history.

Glenn Winston

Running back, Cleveland Browns, 2014-2015

After assaulting a hockey player while in college, spending six months in jail, and going undrafted, Glenn Winston had found his way into the NFL. A running back by trade, he appeared mostly as a special-teamer for the Browns before finally receiving his first career carry on Dec. 13, 2015.

Some GIFs make a sound. This one says, “bloop!”

The 49ers’ Ian Williams doesn’t just strip the ball, he punches it out like a golfer trying to negotiate a sand trap. It shot eight yards downfield. Fumbling away one’s first career carry is bad enough, but this ensured an extra indignity. Because the ball wasn’t recovered until it was eight yards downfield, this play went in the books as a negative-eight-yard run, a result that usually implies a ball carrier unwilling to cut his losses or a catastrophic jet sweep. Winston didn’t even get the satisfaction of trying something crazy. He bet $10 and lost $100.

Winston never carried the ball again, cementing his career line: one carry, negative-8 yards, one fumble. Among pure running backs, it is the lowest career yardage total in the 100-year history of the NFL.

Also among pure running backs, Winston is one of just four players to fumble away their only career rushing attempt. Another of those four, incredibly, was Winston’s teammate. Fullback Malcolm Johnson had been placed on injured reserve a few days prior, and would go on to drop his only carry the following season.

This was a meaningless late-season game featuring two teams that finished last in their respective divisions.

It was reported Winston suffered a concussion on this play.

Baxter Price

Guard, Mississippi State, 2010-2013

The fans in Starkville wanted so, so badly for Baxter Price to take a shot. He would not.

“I think it goes without saying, when I get out there on the court, I’m not there to score.”

In basketball, the box score practically begs a player to somehow register, to prove you did indeed exist at some point and weren’t a mere bookkeeping error. Some can’t or won’t. “Club Trillion,” popularized by Ohio State’s Mark Titus, is a fraternity of players who have finished a game with 1 in the minutes column and 0 in every other, forming a box score that reads 1000000000000, or one trillion. Many can claim membership in this club, but Baxter Price is an especially valued shopper. In the 2010s, he finished with:

17 one-trillion games,

four two-trillion games (in other words, two minutes played and no other stats),

a three-trillion game,

a five-trillion game,

a six-trillion game, and

an eight-trillion game.

That eight-trillion game fell on Feb. 13, 2013, during a 78-36 clobbering at the hands of Missouri. Price, a walk-on on his home court with a cult following, had every reason to attempt a shot; the Bulldogs were down 34-10 at halftime and none of his teammates could hit a bucket to save their lives. If a guy named Craig Sword is permitted to go 0-for-8, surely Price is allowed that indulgence. Instead, he spent eight garbage minutes — 480 seconds — on the floor without notching a shot attempt, assist, rebound, steal, block, foul, or turnover. Did he at least touch the ball at some point? Probably, but we have no evidence of it.

Price did score one bucket in 2009, but in this decade, he was almost entirely invisible. He spent 118 minutes on the floor and totaled 30 basketball things (six shot attempts, six rebounds, two assists, one block, nine turnovers, six fouls, and zero points).

That’s one basketball act every four minutes or so. It’s the faint signal of a distant star we will never visit. Price played basketball billions of years ago and billions of light-years away, but we are nearly certain that at one point, he was there.

Joel Rechlicz

Right winger, New York Islanders and Washington Capitals, 2010-2012

Thank heavens for arbitrary cutoff dates. Take stock of Joel Rechlicz’s career as a whole, and you find an enforcer who played a scattering of games. But if we focus specifically on his 2010s, we find something really special.

It was his job to start fights, and he did it with flair. His first fight, in April 2010, resembles a video game with poor collision detection.

Rechlicz earned five minutes in the penalty box for this one; later that night, he would receive another 15 minutes for a much more boring fight against Eric Godard.

It would be nearly two years until Rechlicz appeared in another NHL game. In 2012, he was quiet during a couple of brief appearances for the Capitals on Jan. 31 and Feb. 1. On Feb. 13, he hit the ice for 90 seconds, drew a 10-minute misconduct penalty, and left the NHL for good.

In the 2010s, he totaled 30 minutes in the penalty box and just nine and a half minutes on the ice playing actual hockey. That is absolutely as bizarre as it sounds.

This decade, NHL players spent a combined 12 years and change on the ice playing regular-season hockey, and they spent a combined 151 days in the penalty box, yielding a ratio of 3.2 percent. Behold the penalty minutes ratio of Rechlicz:

This man spent the vast majority of his 2010s NHL career sitting in a little room by himself. They shouldn’t have bothered to issue him a hockey stick. He was not a hockey player. He was a brave wanderer. He did not play the sport he played, and I celebrate him for that.

Joseph Sandoval

Bantamweight fighter, UFC, 2011-2012

Sandoval went 6-2 as a fighter, with both losses handed to him in the Ultimate Fighting Championship. Forty-five seconds into his UFC career, Joseph Sandoval got kicked in his penis and balls. It was an accidental low blow from Walel Watson, and things like this just happen from time to time, but the broadcast heaped on an extra indignity. You might wonder why in the world this is captured in slow motion:

Well, during the stoppage, they pulled up a slo-mo replay just so announcers Joe Rogan and Mike Goldberg could laugh at him.

ROGAN: A replay, because America loves these. There you go, folks.

GOLDBERG: [laughing] We show it ‘cause we can.

ROGAN. Yes. Sit at home on your couch and be happy that’s not you.

GOLDBERG: [laughing]

Seconds later, Sandoval took a dozen hammers to the face and was knocked out just over a minute into the fight. He returned to the octagon in 2012 for a prelim bout against Nick Denis, who threw some devastating elbows at his head and knocked him out in just 22 seconds. That was it for his UFC career.

Typically, entry-level UFC prelim fighters get $10,000 to show up and fight and an additional $10,000 if they win, which is an absurdly low level of compensation. Accounting for the gym fees, training, licensing, nutrition, and everything else a fighter like Sandoval has to pony up for, he quite possibly actually lost money on this venture, essentially paying for the privilege of taking a thrashing in the octagon, getting kicked in the wiener, and being made fun of by the Fear Factor man.

Mike Trout

Outfielder, Los Angeles Angels, 2011-2019

Don’t get mad at me. This is exactly what he wants.

I recently set up a poll of my Twitter followers to ask them whether they know who Mike Trout is. These people, of course, are far more likely to be sports fans than the average person. Even then, of the approximately 7,000 responses, a full third — 33.8 percent — responded that they’re either only vaguely aware of him, or they have no idea of who he is.

The same people who are unfamiliar with Trout are certainly also unfamiliar with Wins Above Replacement, or WAR. This baseball metric is an effort to estimate how many more wins a team won with a given player than they would have with a replacement-level player in his place. Remember that this is a counting statistic, like home runs or RBI:

Trout is only 28 years old. Even if he retired today, his WAR of 72.5 would eclipse 68 percent of all players in the Hall of Fame. Earlier this year he surpassed Derek Jeter, who played until age 40. If his next season is anything like his last eight seasons, he’ll sail past Frank Thomas, Reggie Jackson, Joe DiMaggio, and Pete Rose before his 30th birthday. The season after that, he’s very likely to pass Nolan Ryan, Ken Griffey, Jr., and Chipper Jones.

Forecasting WAR is a pretty stupid game to play, so let’s at least stay conservative. If Trout immediately regresses to playing 5.0 WAR seasons, rather than his usual 9.0, and retires 10 years from now, he’ll move just barely above Lou Gehrig. Babe Ruth is probably the only guy out of reach. Apart from him, there’s no telling where he’ll end up, but we’re headed for a future in which Mike Trout is considered one of the very greatest baseball players who ever lived.

He is not as well-known as Tim Tebow, who hit .163 in triple-A last season, has never appeared in the major leagues, and is probably the most well-known active baseball player in America.

This is a triumph for Trout, who is getting exactly what he wants. MLB commissioner Rob Manfred recently took the unusual step of criticizing Trout for not putting in the effort to market himself, but Trout responded with one of my favorite character traits: genial, kind, and yet absolutely, immovably stubborn. All good, man! Cool! I like to play baseball and spend time with my family. Good luck with your business ventures.

He’s accomplished the impossible. He’s the greatest player of his generation, he’s played in Los Angeles for nearly a decade, and he’s less famous than every member of the Kars 4 Kids band.

Trout’s career is also a case study in how little individual greatness can matter in baseball. In terms of ability, he stands above his peers like Lamar Jackson and LeBron James do. Jackson has transformed his team into the best in the NFL. The NBA orbits around James. Nine years into the Trout era, the Angels have never won a playoff game, and have finished with a losing record in each of the last four seasons.

Many great athletes have been thought of as godlike, but being great is only half the idea. To be a god, you must also be invisible.

Maurice Simpkins

Special teams, Green Bay Packers, 2010

Maurice Simpkins was a computer programmer who made some extra cash playing linebacker for the Green Bay Blizzard, an Indoor Football League team. A block up the street, the Packers were plagued by injuries. Desperate to shore up their special teams unit, they signed Simpkins. “He was added to camp as just a body, basically,” explained Joe Buck, just after Simpkins registered one of the unlikeliest kick returns ever.

It’s unclear exactly how many plays Simpkins was on the field for. He was certainly never meant to touch the ball. Near halftime on Oct. 10, 2010, Washington kicker Graham Gano squared up and kicked the ball right at A.J. Hawk’s helmet.

Whether he did so intentionally, I can’t say, but it’s what allowed Simpkins to go into the books as a kick returner.

He did the smart thing, which was to fall on the ball and lie there until tagged. Simpkins never touched the ball again. He now runs a tech consulting firm, and I hope to God that when those 2010 Packers went on to win the Super Bowl, they gave him a ring.

Rico Richardson

Wide receiver, Tennessee Titans, 2014-2015

In football, a “target” refers to an instance of a player being thrown the ball, whether or not he catches it. It’s been tracked as an NFL statistic since 1992. In the decades since, only 11 players have ever received five or more targets without ever actually catching the ball once in their entire career.

For most of these men, this wasn’t such a big deal. Micah Ross, Isaiah Burse, Mitchell Galloway, and Terrence Warren were listed as receivers, but really spent most of their time as kick and/or punt returners. Dominique Davis, Kion Wilson, Khreem Smith, Jeff Smith and Tim Johnson played other positions entirely, and were largely targeted in gimmick plays. The only true receivers ever to suffer this fate are the Patriots’ Anthony Ladd, who played briefly in 1998, and the hero of our story, Rico Richardson.

Richardson was a former high school track and field champion who ran an impressive 4.38 40-yard dash at an NFL Combine. After going undrafted in 2013, he became a practice-squad regular who bounced from team to team. In 2014, he landed on the Titans’ roster, and on Nov. 1, 2015, he was thrown his first-ever NFL football.

Fourth-and-4. The Titans are down by two scores with just under five minutes left in the game. Their quarterback, Zach Mettenberger, puts it on the money, but when the Texans’ Johnathan Joseph swoops in to knock it out of the way, there isn’t much Richardson can do about it.

Minutes later, with the game all but conceded, Mettenberger leads Richardson straight into double-coverage. He has zero chance of hauling this in, and is clobbered.

Two weeks later, the Titans are once again wrapping up a loss in the final minutes, this time with Marcus Mariota behind center. Wideout Justin Hunter is injured, pressing Richardson into action. Mariota tries to find him deep, but sails an uncatchable ball way over his head.

It’s now Nov. 19. Titans at Jaguars. It’s the last NFL game Richardson will ever play. Near halftime, Mariota drops back into his own end zone on third-and-14. Richardson has shaken his man and set the table for a wide-open first down.

Mariota puts it even further over his head, and the Titans punt.

We’re late in the fourth quarter now. The Titans trail by six. With 1:10 remaining, Mariota is forced to scramble out of the pocket. Since Richardson is within 20 miles of the throw, he goes in the books as the targeted receiver, but he can do nothing but watch as a nameless staffer catches the ball several steps out of bounds.

Five seconds remaining, Titans still down by six. Richardson is about to get an opportunity no one like him ever, ever gets. Titans head coach Mike Mularkey calls a play that specifically calls for the ball to be thrown to the wideout on the right side.

That’s Richardson.

A timeout is called before the play, giving Mularkey every opportunity to switch him out for any one of his other receivers. He doesn’t! On the play that will decide the game, Mularkey is sticking with a guy who has never caught an NFL pass.

Richardson’s odds aren’t great. The Jaguars have pulled seven guys all the way back, essentially making this a short Hail Mary. What’s important is that he has a chance. There would be no better way to establish his place on an NFL roster than to haul in the game-winning touchdown.

This time figures to be different. Every other ball he’s ever been thrown has been impossible to catch, whether out of bounds, 1- feet over his head, or directly into double-coverage. We can say this much about the Hail Mary: it’s almost certainly going to be inbounds, with a high, slow arc that will give Richardson enough time to make a play on it. No matter what happens, no matter how much traffic there is in the end zone, he will finally have a chance. That is all we, his biggest fans, are asking for. A chance.

Mariota takes the snap. Richardson races upfield, hits the goal line, breaks left, and turns to see that the Jaguars’ four-man rush has somehow eaten the Titans’ line alive. Mariota is looking, looking, looking, and chased down from behind.

He didn’t even make a throw.

At the end, the coaches’ camera catches Richardson in the corner. He’s standing bolt upright, arms at his sides and feet right next to each other like a toy soldier, watching his career arrive at its end.

The Jaguars, a bad team that will finish 5-11, have beaten the Titans, another bad team that will finish 3-13, in a game immediately forgotten.

[lostinbrooklyn]

airports .

One of my favorite places in all of the world is a place that causes most people stress. A chaotic hollow building full of hurry and the familiar sound of luggage rolling on shiny linoleum. I’ve never been more inspired anywhere than I am in an airport.

A few years ago, I visited my friend who lives in Los Angeles for a couple of weeks. When my trip was over, I left LAX with a quick stop in Dallas on my way home. I’d seen movies with people running past gates in panic of missing their flight, I never thought I’d be one of them. Face red, a subtle run-walk, worry buried in my eyes. I didn’t make it in time. It seems as though the Dallas airport is nearly as big as the state it’s nestled in. The next flight home to the Charlotte airport wasn’t until the following day. This was the first time I had traveled alone, I was nineteen. I called my mom, in tears, not wanting to sleep at the airport. I went to Chili’s near my gate while my mom helped me book a room at a nearby motel over the phone. It turned out, staying in the motel was kind of liberating. I felt like a real adult until I couldn’t figure out how to work the coffee machine, so instead I called my best friend and then fell asleep.

The next morning, I took a bus back to the airport and to my not-so-surprise, my flight was delayed for a few hours due to a thunderstorm. Of course. Still not as annoyed as most people would have been, I waited. I was in no hurry. While waiting, I met a girl around my age or a little older who had missed the same flight the previous night back to Charlotte. To this day, this encounter remains one of the biggest coincidences to ever happen to me and one of my favorite stories to tell.

As an antisocial person who doesn’t talk to strangers often, the fact that we started speaking at all still bewilders me, but we did and somehow we got to talking about our lives, jobs, families. I told her I was visiting a friend, she told me she was training for a new job. She was a new mom and she showed me her suitcase full of baby clothes, diapers, and bottles. Confused because she was alone, I asked why she had it all with her. She explained that when she landed in Charlotte, she had to go home immediately to her daughter because her husband had to work. Home, however, puzzled me. I asked where she was from and she said the name of my hometown. North Carolina isn’t exactly a small place, but in that moment I realized that the world certainly is. Both of us still perplexed, we ended up discussing things we both knew about. How we wished our mall was bigger, how jobs were hard to find, cheap gas and where to find it, how delicious a local restaurant is.

Meanwhile I kept thinking about how we had both missed the same flight in the middle of Texas and we were from the same town. What a small world, until it got smaller. She continued to tell me some of the reasons she needed this new job and one of those reasons was because her husband had recently been involved in a car accident. She told me how he had been visiting his grandmother in the hospital, and as he turned right out of the parking lot, an elderly woman driving an Oldsmobile struck the side of his car so hard that it knocked his car sideways and into the middle of a busy road. The entire scene played out in my head as if I had seen it… because I had. I asked her if the car was silver, if her daughters black car seat was in the back of the car, and if his grandmother was staying at Grace Hospital. Confused and I’m sure a bit disturbed that I knew the details she hadn’t provided, she nodded and looked at me as if I were crazy.

A few months before meeting this girl, I had been working as an employee at an Arby’s. It was located on a busy road right off of the main highway, and right next to a hospital, the same one I was born in. One day, while cleaning, I looked out the window and in an instant saw a silver car get hit from the side, pushing it sideways and into the middle lane. I froze. I’d never seen anything occur so quickly. It happened so close to the store that no one could come into our parking lot, it being blocked by police cars and an ambulance. People had stopped to help, there were so many people. So my coworkers and I watched, we watched people help a man crawl out of the window facing the sky, and then we saw a policeman hastily pull a black car seat from the back, but we couldn’t tell if it was occupied or not. The only thing on my mind was if the baby that could be in that car seat was okay, because the wreck was so bad. This is when we stopped watching, not wanting to see anything we shouldn’t. At the time, it just got us out of work for a few hours, and we forgot about it.

Now, three months later, I had met the wife of this man I witnessed wreck his car, in the middle of an airport and in the middle of the country. I was able to ask her if the baby I had worried about that day was okay, and thankfully she told me the baby wasn’t in the car at all, but she was at a daycare safe and sound. A relief I didn’t know I needed exited my body. I wish we had stayed in touch; I don’t even remember her name. I still can’t fully comprehend how strangely the world works and how it even turns at all. From that moment on, airports have been my favorite place that isn’t a destination. It’s like that old saying, “it isn’t the destination but the journey that gets your there,” and for many people, besides the crowed airplanes and complimentary stale chips, the airport is the journey. Stepping through the doors to check in, dawdling to security where you strategically plan which hand will hold your bag and which will hold your shoes. Bare feet on cold floors and the moderately terrifying spinning x-ray machine. Being cleared of anything dangerous and quickly collecting your belongings, shoving your bag of three ounce liquids back into your suitcase while simultaneously pulling your shoes back on. Leisurely lingering in the part-snack part-magazine shops to find something to read, buying things you don’t really need out of boredom. Searching for a seat close enough to the wall of phone chargers, but far enough away from other people so you have the privacy to read your magazine. Then not reading it at all because you’re too busy people-watching.

You look around and notice a soldier in full uniform appear through the doors of the airplane tunnel and wonder why no one is there to greet him, and the compassion you feel when someone walks up to him and shakes his hand, thanking him. Spotting separated parents handing their children off to one another, questioning what makes love run dry sometimes. To the right, hearing a businessman shouting into his Blackberry about stats and stocks. To your left, an entire team of football players looking exhausted in their khakis, asleep with their heads on their helmets, and wondering if they won or not.

Airports are a strange middle ground where people may be in a hurry but it’s also where life is lived in a way that it isn’t lived elsewhere, you see existence here for what it truly is. You see the good parents reading their kids stories, you see the bad ones glued to their phones ignoring theirs. It’s exhilarating, upsetting, and inspiring. There’s something about knowing that everyone is trying to get somewhere and waiting on an escape of sorts. And that without this one place, it would be significantly more challenging. 

Whether the destination is the vacation someone has been happily anticipating or a trip someone else has been desperately dreading. Realizing how easy it is to meet new people from every walk of life and thinking about how great of a story can come of it, how enlightened you are from their stories. But mostly, my favorite part about airports is knowing that home is on the other side of it all, or maybe even somewhere better.

[juliebeanbook]

seven: we’re gonna rattle this ghost town

The start of second year crept up on us; one day we were all bumming around Dex’s backyard, Cal barbequing burgers to a blackened crisp and Emmy blasting power ballads on the big radio, and the next we were back on campus, with textbooks to be bought and new classes to try and stay awake in. As a health studies major, by the end of the first week I was already neck-deep in cell bio, stats, and the nervous system. Friday afternoon I got off the bus at the end of our street laden down with four new textbooks; I threw them on the kitchen table and collapsed onto the couch, calculating how much reading I could fit in before the show tonight.

Andy burst in just as I finished the first chapter of my readings on neurons. “Hey Jules!” she called out as she came into the main room.

“The sections between myelin sheaths are called nodes of Ranvier,” I replied.

“Nerd.” Andy was studying to be a social worker; she called me a nerd all the time, but she didn’t take a single science or math course so I hadn’t thought of a good comeback yet. “Oh, shit!” she cried as something dropped to the ground.

I jerked around on the couch and saw Andy crouching over a box full of streamers, Christmas lights, and banners. “What the hell is all that?” I asked her.

“Oh, I got these from that shady party store on Clover,” she said. “You know, the one we’re pretty sure is running a back door drug business? Anyway, they were throwing out all these old decorations and I said I wanted to take them, and they said sure. So I got them all for free!”

“Andy, these are shit,” I said, holding up a flimsy plastic banner. “This one says Happy Retirement.”

“Yeah, well, it’s better than nothing, right?” Andy said. “It’ll still look festive!”

“Baby’s first birthday,” I muttered, digging through the cast-off decorations. “First communion. Welcome home, Chucky. Andy, this one is personalized, it literally has someone else’s name on it.”

She grabbed the Chucky banner from me. “This is my favourite one!” she said. “It’s perfect. It’ll go in a place of honour.”

“Wait, what are these even for? Who are you throwing a party for?” I asked.

“Oh, I’m throwing a surprise party for Dex!” Andy said, packing the last roll of crepe paper streamers into the box and hoisting it onto the kitchen table.

“When?”

“Tonight. Do you know if we have any cake mix?”

“What? Tonight? Why am I just hearing about this now?”

Andy shrugged as she rummaged through the cupboards. “It’s a surprise party.”

“It’s not supposed to be a surprise for the guests, Andy. Besides, what about the show?”

“There is no show tonight. It was cancelled like a month ago. By me.”

I checked my calendar; sure enough, there was a hole in the show schedule, which until now had been a mystery.

“Aha!” She pulled a box of chocolate cake mix out of the back of the pantry and held it over her head triumphantly like the Lion King. “I knew it. Now, I need your opinion, do you think he would like a cake better or cupcakes? Cupcakes are a fun novelty, but Dex is a man, you know? I feel like he might feel threatened in his masculinity if I made him cupcakes.”

I sighed and went over to lean on the counter. “Make a cake then. A man cake.”

“Did you mean for that to sound like pancake?” Andy said, pointing a wooden spoon at me and winking. “You punny kid.”

I accepted that I wouldn’t be doing any more reading tonight and helped Andy put the cake together. “Where’s the cake pan?” I asked her when I couldn’t find it in the drawer under the oven.

“Oh, I was using it to hold my jewellery. It’s on my room, on top of my filing cabinet.”

The pan was indeed on top of what Andy called her filing cabinet, which was actually three plastic milk crates stacked on top of each other to act like cubbies. I decided not to question why Andy felt like she needed to use a cake pan to hold jewellery as I emptied a tangle of necklaces and earrings onto her desk.

//

The party was held in Dex’s backyard; an admittedly terrible place to throw a surprise party for Dex, but he was the only one of our friends who had an acceptable yard. (Although the house Emmy lived in had a backyard, she shared it with the people who lived in the attached house, and we were all a little scared of them and their feral cat.) Andy went in to distract Dex for a while (how, I didn’t want to know) while I enlisted the help of Emmy, Cal, and some of our friends from school. We ran around the lawn hanging bright-coloured crepe paper from trees, stapling the inappropriate banners onto the fence, draping Christmas lights over the picnic table.

Stepping back to admire our handiwork, the yard was a colourful hodgepodge of celebration. Andy was right; at least it looked festive.

Dex was pretty surprised for someone whose girlfriend had probably been dropping hints for weeks. We dined on ice-fresh cans of lemonade and Andy’s rich chocolate cake, sitting on and around the picnic table, with its greying wood and cigarette stains. Emmy disappeared around the house and came back with her guitar and her fiddle. She passed me the guitar. “Her name is Bridget O’Malley,” she said, stroking her hand around the curves of her instrument. “And if you hurt her, I will end you.”

“I appreciate your confidence, Em,” I said, and she gave me a cheeky grin as she started playing a slow pretty song on her fiddle. “Key?”

I played along with her music and we invented our own duet in the key of C. It made the party go all relaxed and loose, and then someone brought out a couple cases of beer, and everyone got a lot looser.

By the time the yard was dark and the Christmas lights sparkled above our heads, Emmy was laughing at everything I said, Dex was singing loudly in Italian, and Cal was explaining something in an angry tone to our friend Beth while she nodded emphatically. Emmy and I were passing another beer back and forth. “Jules,” she said, “I’ve got to tell you, Kathleen’s in a bad place. She’s three months along. Three fucking months along.”

“I thought she was going to get an abortion?” I asked her, taking the beer from her and sipping.

Emmy shook her head, drawn-out and lazy. “She backed out last-minute. Too freaked out. It would’ve been over by now though. Now we’re still in shit. Fuck this.” She grabbed the beer from me and gulped some down.

“Is she going to keep it? Or her. Him. Whatever.”

“Hell if I know. She can’t raise a kid though. She just turned seventeen, man.”

“Jesus,” I said. “Fuck no she can’t.”

Sometimes when I was drunk, my brain worked slower than usual, taking three times as long to fit words together and make sentences. But sometimes it worked startlingly quickly, spiralling out of control like a car speeding around a tight corner. “Hey, Em,” I said. “I have a really crazy idea. Hear me out, okay?”

“I’m hearing you,” she said. “Loud and clear. Lay it on me.”

“Okay,” I said, conscious of how slurred my speech was, but not caring enough to stop talking. “So here’s the thing. Your sister has a baby that she doesn’t want, right?”

“Right.”

“Well, my sister wants a baby. So you do the math, Einstein.”

“So what are you saying, we do a sister-baby swap?”

I started laughing at the sheer absurdity of the phrase. Emmy began to giggle uncontrollably. She threw the empty beer bottle into the grass and got up, turning up the volume on Dex’s massive radio. “Come on,” she said, grabbing my hand and pulling me towards where a group of our friends were dancing in the uncut grass. “I fucking love this song.”

Em’s dancing was completely ridiculous, her limbs flailing like someone was tugging her around against her will, but she danced with such abandon, such drunken disregard for what anyone would think, that it was somehow infectious. I went and danced with her, shimmying to some awful sample of 90s white boy rap, laughing as Em sang along to every word.

Andy was sitting on Dex’s lap at the picnic table, grooving along to the beat. “Come on, Andy!” I called out to her, reaching out my hand and beckoning her.

She tumbled off Dex’s lap with both hands in the air as she shouted “God bless America!” and launched herself into my arms.

“God bless fucking America,” Emmy echoed, ripping a Fourth of July banner off the fence and holding it up like a spoil of war, and we all cheered.

I’d never felt so goddamn patriotic.

//

I woke up on Dex’s couch late the next morning, midday sun coming in through his living room windows. A throw blanket was draped haphazardly over me; I was still in my skirt from last night but my shirt had disappeared. I covered my bra with the blanket and blinked, my eyes heavy, trying to adjust to the bright light.

A groan came from under me. I looked down and saw Emmy curled up on the floor, a quilt covering everything except for a spill of red curls emerging at the edge. She pressed the blanket down, uncovering her face and rubbing her hand over it.

“Hey, Em?”

I got a curt grunt in reply.

“Have you seen my shirt?”

She felt around on the carpet around her and pulled my shirt out from under the couch. “How the hell did it get down there?” I asked, and she made a sort of shrugging motion as she hid back underneath the quilt, shrinking back like a turtle into its shell. I sat up and pulled the shirt on, fighting some mad head rush.

“Julie?” Her voice was muffled underneath the quilt.

“Yeah?” I said, my voice sounding croaky. I looked over the back of the couch into Dex’s kitchen and compared the benefits of going to get water versus the physical exertion it would take to do so.

“I’m remembering some weird shit that went down last night and I’m not sure if it was, like, a dream I had or if it actually happened. Something about our sisters…and Kathleen’s baby…”

“Oh. Right.” I groaned as I got up, deciding thirst ruled over all. “We were gonna do, like…a baby swap? Like, Kathleen was going to give her kid to Jamie?”

“Yes. That was it. So that actually happened?” Emmy sat up, scrunching her face, the strap of her tank top falling down her shoulder.

“Well, no actual baby swap happened,” I said, looking through Dex’s cupboards to find the one with glasses in it. “Yet, anyway.”

Em laughed. “Thank God.”

I poured us each a glass of tap water, and handed one to Emmy, who took it and proceeded to chug three-quarters of it in one go.

“You know,” she started.

“Em, no. That’s your plotting voice.”

“I don’t have a plotting voice.”

“Yes you do, you have a cartoon villain voice, like you’re in your evil lair in a cave and you just came up with a plan for world domination.”

Emmy squinted at me. “That’s not a thing. Anyway. I feel like…is it crazy that I feel like our weird little drunk plan is actually sort of a good idea?”

I burst into laughter as I slumped back onto the couch. “You’re kidding, right? See, Em, here’s the thing. I get these crazy ideas sometimes, but they never work. They never work.”

“This one might!” she insisted.

“No. No it won’t,” I repeated, rubbing my head. “You know how in movies, there’s always that guy who everybody thinks is crazy and he has this crazy genius idea and no one believes him but then in the end he’s right, and he proves everyone wrong? Well, I’m not that guy! I have these crazy ideas, and then in the end, it turns out I’m just crazy! Just like everyone thought!”

I stopped talking, sipped my water. Emmy wrapped the quilt around her shoulders snugly, like a mother tucking her child in at night. “It makes sense,” she said quietly, after a while. “I don’t know what your other ideas were, or why they didn’t work, but this one makes sense. My sister doesn’t want a baby, but she has one. Your sister doesn’t have a baby, but she wants one. It’s just a displacement, one family to another.”

I had to admit, it did make sense. But all I could think of was all the times I’d tried to help Jamie before, all the ways I’d tried to salvage the shitshow that was her relationship with our parents, and how they had all failed, every time. Jamie was right; it wasn’t up to her to fix things, and it wasn’t up to me, either.

But this was something my parents hadn’t broken yet. So I didn’t need to fix it, but maybe I could make it better.

Dex came down the stairs then, Andy in tow. “Morning,” Dex called out, his loud voice too loud in our hungover ears. “Julie, you found your shirt!”

“Yeah, what happened to it?”

“I think I took it off you,” Andy said, “but I’m not a hundred percent sure of the context.”

“Pancakes!” Dex announced, brief and to the point.

Soon there was lumpy batter sizzling in the frying pan, and Andy was pouring orange juice into glasses, and the smell of butter and syrup were enough to tempt us over to the kitchen. Emmy kept the quilt wrapped around her shoulders as we sat down on the stools at the counter, pouring way too much sugar-sweet syrup onto pancakes that melted on our tongues.

“Did we sing the Star-Spangled Banner last night?” Andy wondered. She scraped the last of the batter out of the bowl and dropped it into the pan to make one last tiny pancake. “I feel like we did.”

“We definitely did,” Emmy confirmed. “We did a lot of random shit last night. Said a lot of random shit.” She looked at me out of the corner of her eye; quick, but I didn’t miss it.

“You never know when you might come up with something kind of great out of that random shit though,” I mumbled. Emmy wandered back to the living room, but not before bumping into my shoulder hard enough to hurt. I turned toward her, and she smiled at me; the smile of a cartoon villain, the smile of someone with a plan.