#i think diggs is easier to recognize

[bestworstcase]

Heya, so your meta on RWBY alluding to "The Marvelous Land of Oz" has been rotating in my head like a baked potato for the past few days and I'm all about it. One question that I've come away with though is where exactly does Theodore fit into all this? Everyone assumes he's Dorothy but obviously that wouldn't quite work given the parameters. I was wondering if you could maybe share your thoughts on Theodore and his role in the story to come. Thank you and have a pleasant day :)

there's this thing rwby does with the classic lit allusions—they did this with alice in wonderland too—where the true reference is to the original text and that is layered under an allusion to the better-known pop culture. i think the pop culture layer serves a few key purposes:

it flags the correct allusion for viewers who may not be familiar enough with the original text to recognize the allusion otherwise,

it creates opportunities for narrative sleight-of-hand, both setting up red herrings and rewarding viewers who are familiar with the original texts (<- this was part of what made V9 SO much fun for me as a Wonderland Person), and

it enriches the wider narrative themes about the power of storytelling to shape perception and the idea that truth is hard to find and things are not always what they seem by actually doing that with the key allusions.

for example: in V9, jaune presents as the white rabbit... but his white "rabbit" steed is actually a jackrabbit—i.e., a hare—and after falling backwards in time he became stuck in a metaphorical "time loop," going in circles doing the same things every day without reprieve or any real chance for escape. he lost a quarrel with time and in a sense he is being "punished" for a crime he hasn't yet committed but remembers having committed in the future—that's the hatter / hatta, not the white rabbit. (the alice in wonderland allusion also has a third layer of reference to the frank wildhorn musical, and that layer does some really neat stuff that deserves its own post.)

<- i first noticed this in V9, in part because the wonderland allusion is contained within the arc of a single volume and thus the layering is easier to spot, and in part because i'm better versed in wonderland than i am in the land of oz; but there are also—now that i know what to look for—some obvious signs that the ozian allusion is layered in the same way.

the clearest of those being glynda goodwitch. as i've mentioned before, the classic film adaptation combines glinda and the good witch of the north into a single character and thus creates the problem of why glinda didn't simply tell dorothy from the beginning that those ruby slippers could carry her home. in the book, the good witch of the north directs dorothy to travel to the emerald city to seek the wizard's help because she believes that he's a powerful wizard who will know of a way to send dorothy home. glinda—who is the witch of the south—knows that the wizard is a fraud and does not come into the story at all until dorothy seeks her out after the wizard has been revealed as a fraud and left her behind in oz.

oz is divided into four color-coded provinces: in the north, everything is purple; in the west, yellow; in the east, blue; and in the south, red. the emerald city, in the center, is made to appear entirely green because the wizard "put green spectacles on all the people" to "make the name fit better."

so, in the first episode, rwby introduces:

glynda goodwitch—whose clothing and magic are purple, and who is established in opposition to a mysterious adversary clad in red.

ozpin, the headmaster of beacon academy—note the wizard's initials are OZPINHEAD; his full name is oscar zoroaster phadrig isaac norman henkle emmanuel ambroise diggs.

glynda brings ruby to ozpin and over the course of the next few volumes it's established that she is not only ozpin's deputy but also part of his inner circle and unwavering in her faith in ozpin himself. her narrative role is that of the good witch of the north—not glinda—but her name references the pop culture composite character invented by the classic film.

'the marvelous land of oz' begins after the wizard's departure from oz. insofar as the beacon arc culminates with ozpin's death, this part of the story correlates to 'the wizard of oz'—although it is not 1-to-1 and i would argue that the role of dorothy is diffused between all of team RWBY and JNPR because the only part that matters is how the story utilizes the end of 'the wizard of oz' to subtly insinuate salem into the role of glinda.

see, the wizard intends to bring dorothy with him in his balloon when he leaves oz, but she's delayed—searching for toto—and the ropes anchoring the balloon snap before she can come aboard, leaving dorothy stranded in oz. eventually someone suggests that she ask glinda—the witch of the south—for help. glinda is said to be "the most powerful of all witches" and there is a bit of ambiguity as to whether she is a good witch or not:

"Glinda is a Good Witch, isn't she?" asked the child. "The Quadlings think she is good," said the soldier, "and she is kind to everyone. I have heard that Glinda is a beautiful woman, who knows how to keep young in spite of the many years she has lived." "How can I get to her castle?" asked Dorothy. "The road is straight to the South," he answered, "but it is said to be full of dangers to travelers. There are wild beasts in the woods, and a race of queer men who do not like strangers to cross their country. For this reasons none of the Quadlings ever come to the Emerald City."

(note how she's "the witch of the south"—unlike "the good witch of the north" and the wicked witches of the east and west.)

dorothy and her friends set out on the dangerous journey south to find glinda. the beacon arc ends by setting RWBY and JNR on a course to discover salem, whose existence is revealed to the audience in the last moments of V3. the kids, collectively, are in dorothy's shoes and like glinda, salem is the one person on remnant who understands what the shoes are and how to use them properly—figuratively speaking.

<- so the purpose of glynda goodwitch is to articulate an important thematic conceit: she's glinda the good witch of the north, a character who does not exist in the original book yet dominates the pop culture frame of reference for the land of oz, a character who is also embodies a narrative problem introduced by the conflation of two different characters who fulfill contradictory roles (one believes in the wizard and cannot help dorothy; the other knows he's a fraud and can help dorothy). glynda goodwitch is not just a red herring; her character allusion also comments thematically on ozpin's use of fairytale to distort and control the narrative regarding salem.

anyway.

the salient point with regard to theodore is that while rwby is retelling 'the marvelous land of oz,' it also alludes to the classic film in service of both the retelling and its own deeper themes.

i bring that up because theodore—on top of literally being named dorothy-but-backwards—is described like this:

Finally the double doors to the headmaster's office opened and Theodore strode out, his glittering red-gloved fists raised above his head like he had just one a fight. [...] A flowing gray-blue cape, the color of a stormy sky, was clasped around his shoulders with a silver chain. He had a silver belt with a round buckle, matching boots, and bright white slacks with deep side pockets, all carefully orchestrated to draw even more attention to himself.

his appearance is clearly intended to call the pop culture image of dorothy to mind. the glittering red gloves evoke the classic film's ruby slippers, and dorothy is of course transported to oz by a storm.

but mind the details.

theodore fastens his cloak with a silver chain. his belt is silver. his boots are silver (and that is stated obliquely, easy to miss if you skim over this description). silver silver silver. in the original book, the magic slippers are silver, not red. and his wardrobe is "carefully orchestrated" to attract attention.

the land of oz is surrounded on all sides by desert, impassible except by magical means. when dorothy uses the silver slippers to travel back to kansas, they fall off her feet en route and are lost in the desert forever. theodore is the headmaster of shade and de facto king of vacuo—which is a inhospitable wasteland surrounded on all sides by harsh desert. he wears ruby gloves... and silver boots. like glynda goodwitch, his attention-grabbing outward appearance locates itself in a contradiction between the book and the film.

which dorothy is he?

trick question. he represents the silver slippers, fallen to rest somewhere in the desert separating oz from the rest of the world. this serves two important, and interlocking, purposes:

it tells us not to look for a dorothy—because dorothy isn't here. she went home. she's in kansas. dorothy doesn't figure at all in 'the marvelous land of oz' except insofar as the scarecrow and the tin man remember her fondly. (the god of darkness is the real dorothy—because he's gone.)

it marks vacuo as the desert outside of oz—not part of oz.

the second point matters because marvelous land's climactic sequence begins with glinda chasing mombi all the way from the emerald city to the desert past the edge of oz, where mombi collapses from sheer exhaustion and glinda binds her and hauls her bodily back to the emerald city to account for her wrongdoing. this weaves the ozian narrative together with the maiden-in-tower allusions and the little prince like this:

glinda must subdue mombi in the desert before ozma can be released from her curse;

rapunzel's prince is blinded and wanders alone in a wasteland until her voice leads him back to her and her tears restore his sight;

the pilot is stranded in a desert and must learn to see with his heart instead of his eyes in order to find water.

if we examine these together, understanding salem as glinda and rapunzel, mombi as the god of light, and ozma as both the prince and the pilot, that is very strongly suggestive of what is going to happen in vacuo. should rwby continues to follow the plot structure of 'the marvelous land of oz' as closely as it has been, i predict that:

salem will take cinder and return to vale, where her villain -> hero arc will begin facilitated by character development in relation to cinder and summer rose;

they will identify what sort of "deception" ozpin used to hide the relic's location, realize that the extra layer of defense cannot be circumvented, and go to vacuo. (specifically, i suspect ozpin incorporated the branwen twins into the crown's protections);

in vacuo, salem will put all her cards on the table, tell everyone what she is trying to accomplish and why. negotiations ensue. the possibility of freeing ozma from oscar is introduced and possibly carried out. the god of light is symbolically defeated—everyone rejects the divine mandate.

everyone returns to beacon to bring the crown of choice out of its vault and initiate the final confrontation with the god of light.

with most of the curve balls coming from what the vacuo coalition faces while salem is preoccupied with the beacon relic and how everyone reacts to the olive branch of summer rose being... alive.

insofar as theodore figures into this, given the prominence of silver in his character design i wonder if he won't turn out to represent not just the silver slippers that were lost but also the silver wishing pills.

in marvelous land, tip comes into possession of a set of wish-granting silver pills that can grant any wish after being swallowed. when he and his friends escape the conquered emerald city, they accidentally overshoot glinda's home and fly all the way to the far side of the desert before crash landing in a nest of antagonistic jackdaws. tip tries to use one of the pills to get them home, but when he swallows it, it hurts him so badly that he cries out in pain and wishes that he'd never taken it in the first place—which comes true at once. the pill is uneaten. then the woggle-bug uses the same pill to repair their flying contraption* so they can escape from the jackdaws and return to oz.

(*it's called the gump and it's two couches lashed together with leaves for wings, a broom for a tail, and a stuffed elk-like head for a head, brought to life by magical powder. it defies easy description)

so there is some obvious overlap in role between the silver shoes and the silver wishing pills in that both are magical silver items the main characters use to get home—and like the slippers, the pills are lost during the journey home. (the characters conclude that tip must have left them behind in the jackdaws' nest by mistake.)

but the interesting part, as it pertains to theodore, is that when tippetarius tries to use one of the pills, it poisons him. there is nothing actually wrong with the pill itself—the woggle-bug uses it without coming to any harm. the incident is not really explained, but of course tippetarius is under a curse that hides his true identity as the princess ozma and later in the book glinda implies that certain kinds of magic simply do not mix well together; for all her great power, she cannot undo mombi's curse herself because her own magic abhors deception and illusion. so perhaps the silver pill poisons tippetarius because he is not himself. the curse mombi placed upon him blinds him to his true self.

now in rwby, theodore is the last headmaster standing and the effective ruler of vacuo, and the sword of destruction that ozma last used to end the great war is locked in a vault underneath shade academy. if salem does not arrive to lay siege to vacuo as the coalition expects her to, the coalition will face pressure to do something in order to counteract the fraught social and political divisions threatening to tear vacuo apart—remember, this is a country on the brink of civil war that weathered a failed popular coup during the events of V7.

that creates strong incentives for a counter-offensive. to find out where salem is "hiding" after her (as the coalition will see it) pyrrhic victory in atlas and take the fight to her—which sounds great on paper but becomes a rather fraught proposition once salem is discovered to be at beacon. if the vacuo coalition attacks her forces at beacon, vale gets caught in the crossfires—and attacking beacon of all places will not be good for the morale of the coalition's fighters either. but doing nothing may still be the worse option, because that risks the coalition breaking apart without an immediate common enemy to confront. and theodore—as characterized in 'before the dawn'—very much seems like the type of character to favor a counter-offensive under these circumstances.

and that's tip's poison pill—ozma's submission to the divine mandate and the distorted narrative he's constructed around salem prevent anyone on his side of this conflict from seeing another option besides "defend" and "counterattack," when the true solution is "negotiate." the woggle-bug—raven—is able to find the true solution because she holds knowledge about salem (and summer) that the other characters do not. if theodore and his silver trappings represent the pill tippetarius cannot use, then summer and her silver eyes represent the pill the woggle-bug can.

[waspkingdomnest]

(if u recognize what specific species Digg and Boomer are can i take u out to dinner. as besties)

[chiseler]

Hammett Made It Easy

To put it bluntly, it is simply, humanly impossible to watch Roy Del Ruth’s original 1931 film version of The Maltese Falcon without drawing comparisons and parallels with John Huston’s much more popular (if not exactly “timeless”) version from a decade later. After all, in many fundamental ways the films are a nearly identical match, scene for scene and line for line. Almost, anyway. Enough so that you’d notice.

The fault for this lies squarely on the shoulders of author Dashiell Hammett. whose 1930 novel made straying from the original source material extremely difficult. The sharp dialogue, the snappy pacing, and the already cinematic scene structure are all so very good that there was little reason to go messing with it. In fact, as the story goes, when screenwriter John Huston made the decision to move into directing, Howard Hawks gave him a copy of the book as a potential first project shortly before Huston left on a vacation. Huston handed the book to his secretary and told her to type it up in script format. She did, and it was that initial version straight from the book that was green-lighted by the studio—even before Huston had had a chance to read it.

Huston later made a few minor changes and additions, but one has to wonder if ten years earlier screenwriters Maude Fulton and Brown Holmes didn’t work much the same way, given how much of the 1931 film’s dialogue reappears verbatim in Huston’s—with the notable exception of the Shakespeare quote that closes the latter (a line supposedly suggested by Humphrey Bogart).

Granted, Huston’s film runs twenty minutes longer than Del Ruth’s spiffy 80-minute number (for a number of reasons, including a much larger role for the hapless gunsel Wilmer and an extended final sequence), but nevertheless if you remove the script from the equation, comparing the two films becomes much easier. At that point the remaining important factors are the directors and their styles, and the casts and their performances.

By 1931, Del Ruth was already well underway in a directing career that would find him making comedies, musicals, dramas, Westerns, and even the occasional horror film. Although comedies were his real forte (he would soon direct Lee Tracy in Blessed Event), taking on something like the Hammett novel was not that unusual. He was not a particularly remarkable director, and stylistically his films resembled most other standard films of the day. The scenes were quick, the camera was static, he didn’t have much time for pizzazz. As was the case of so many of the films of the era, his pictures often resembled filmed stage plays. He was on a tight schedule, and as soon as he finished one he had to be on to the next in a couple days. In the end he crafted an entertaining, well-told story, and that’s all the studio and audiences were looking for.

Meanwhile, The Maltese Falcon was going to be Huston’s directorial debut after having solidly established himself as a respected screenwriter. Some of the suits at Warner Brothers were hesitant to let him make the leap, so he had to prove to them he could do it, and approached the film with the kind of energy and big ideas you find with so many first-time directors. Although the film wasn’t as flashy and inventive as Citizen Kane, Huston did pull out a few tricks, like the famed seven-minute take, and the camera work was fluid and energetic. Even if audiences didn’t notice a number of his little flourishes, it was still a very confident film. More importantly, it was an entertaining, well-told story—and that’s what the studio and audiences were really looking for.

(It’s worth noting, however, that Huston’s version was much tamer than Del Ruth’s—perhaps for obvious reasons. In Del Ruth’s version there’s no pussyfooting around the fact that Sam Spade really is having an affair with his partner’s wife. Nor is there any question what happens after Spade accuses Ruth Wonderly/ Brigid O'Shaughnessy of only using money to buy his allegiance.)

What Huston really had on his side was, if not star power exactly, then at least a handful of familiar faces. It might have been Sydney Greenstreet’s film debut, but audiences certainly recognized Mary Astor, Peter Lorre, Elisha Cook, and Bogart. Up until this point of course Bogart had only been a character player, but his star was definitely on the rise, and broke with this film.

Del Ruth, on the other hand, was working with an armload of good, available B actors. Most of them worked regularly, but they weren’t exactly Joan Blondell or Douglas Fairbanks.

It’s in looking at the performances of the two groups that the real differences between the films arises. Take the character of Sam Spade, for instance. Bogart’s performance as the womanizing, sharp tongued private dick always struck me as stiff and stagey—you can almost hear him thinking of each gesture before he makes it, and each line before he speaks it. There’s something tangibly artificial in his performance, the feeling that we really are watching an actor, and moreover one who’s not trying very hard.  Or maybe one who’s letting his stage training get the better of him, thinking the dialogue alone will carry the day. I of course love Bogart, just not here, particularly.

Ricardo Cortez (in reality the NYC-born son of Austrian immigrants) portrayed a much looser, more easy-going Spade, always ready with a quip and forever chasing skirts. He gives a much more relaxed performance that often borders on the straight comic. In spite of the fact that Cortez is much more comfortable in the role, it seems, his Spade is almost out of place here, smirking his way through a double murder investigation.

Seen today, Greenstreet’s   Gutman seems so unique a performance that it immediately became iconic, and a character and performing style he would go on to recreate for the rest of his career. It seems unique anyway, until you see Dudley Digges Gutman from a decade earlier. The similarities between the two performances are shocking. The intonation, vocal tones, the side mutterings, the laughter, the gestures, even the facial expressions are so nearly identical it’s almost as if Greenstreet studied  Digges’ performance closely and decided to recreate it for the remake. Strange thing is, for American character actor Digges, it was a unique role quite unlike anything else he’d played before or would play again. Unless you care to argue that the spirit of the true Kasper Gutman inhabited both actors (and then stayed in Greenstreet), it’s a mighty remarkable coincidence.

One of the more interesting distinctions can be seen in the character of Spade’s secretary, Effie Perine, and more specifically it boils down to a single line reading.

In one of the first and most famous lines of the film, Effie informs Spade that a new client is waiting to see him. In the Huston version, bubbly Lee Patrick says, “You’ll wan to see this one anyway—she’s a knockout!” She seems awfully enthusiastic about it, happy to encourage her boss’s assorted flings. It seems a little odd, but then she spends the rest of the film running errands for Spade and we never give her another thought.

In Del Ruth’s version,  Una Merkel’s Effie does not smile and does not chirp when she says dourly, “You’ll want to see this one anyway. She’s a knockout.”  There’s so much stifled bitterness, frustration, and jealousy in the line that we can read her entire character—almost her whole life—in those few words. And for the rest of the film, whenever Spade asks her to run another errand or do another favor, we know what she’s thinking when she agrees. Thanks to Merkel, Effie becomes the one honestly tragic figure in the entire story, with the possible exception of Wilmer.

As Gutman’s henchman and punk, far be it from me to compare anyone with the great Elisha Cook, Jr.—unless of course it’s the equally great Dwight Frye. Sadly Frye has been given very little to do here except look sullen and angry. In fact he’s only been given a single line of dialogue (“I’ll fog him”). Still, he’s always fun to watch—though admittedly not as much fun here as Cook, who gets to give Bogart a vicious kick in the head.

In the end and over time, the choice of which, if either, version is superior is a simple matter of taste. It does become easier to understand, though, why in the 1950s Del Ruth’s version was redubbed Dangerous Female in order to distinguish it from Huston’s.

by Jim Knipfel

[onceuponanolicity]

One on One - Chapter 12 - Getting In Your Head

Sorry for taking so long on this. Here is the next update. I would post the link to AO3 but it is acting up right now on my computer and I have not been able to get it posted. And I also misplaced who I was supposed to tag on this and the people for Never Far Away. So, I apologize. But, here is the chapter...

Getting In Your Head

              “You can stop looking at me like that,” Oliver told Diggle never once glancing over at his friend. That would mean distracting himself from his thoughts and the outside scenery that he barely noticed since he stepped inside the car.

            “I can’t believe you gave into him,” Diggle mumbled referring to Anatoly and his demand that Oliver turn over the laptop, or at least the list of operatives.

            “He has Felicity, Digg. I didn’t have much of a choice.” Oliver hated how defeated his voice sounded.

            “So, what is your plan?”

            Oliver finally did look up and stared at the back of his friend’s head from where he sat driving the car. “You’re not going to yell at me for putting your family in danger by agreeing to give Anatoly the list?”             Diggle chuffed. “My wife and I both work for A.R.G.U.S. If we can’t keep our kids safe, we are in the wrong business. The last thing I was worried about was my safety, or those of my kids. You wouldn’t do that, not if you didn’t have to.” Diggle met Oliver’s eyes through the rear view mirror. “You know Anatoly won’t just give Felicity over. Not without the information. And even then…”             The fact that Diggle let his sentence trail off brought goosebumps to Oliver’s arms. He had not felt scared in years. Right this moment? He was petrified. One wrong move and Felicity might never get back home.

            “I have a plan,” Oliver finally announced, glad at least something finally came to him. The silence that had fallen between him and Diggle had become disconcerting.

            “What do I need to do?” Diggle asked without pause.

            “We’re going to need to bring everyone in to make this work.”

            “Who’s everyone?” Diggle sounded skeptical. Not that Oliver blamed him. Once Diggle was completely informed, he was not going to like that he asked the question in the first place.

            Oliver let a smile spread across his lips. “I’m not sure you want to know.”

            Diggle’s groan was exactly what Oliver expected as it filled the car. “Damn it, Oliver. This could be worse than Felicity being held by Anatoly.”

            “But, the people most invested in Felicity’s safety and security are her friends and family.”

            Shaking his head, Diggle slammed the breaks as they reached the club. “Shit!”

            “Maybe. But we have to.” Oliver wasn’t really sure if that was the case, but it was the only chance he had to get Felicity out.

            “The whole reason the two of you fought was because of her father and now you are going to bring him back in on this? I think you are treading in more turbulent waters than the ones we are already in.”

            Oliver could not agree more. But if anyone could clone a laptop to make it look like the real thing, it was Noah Kuttler.

  OQFSOQFSOQFS

                        Oliver was damn sick of waiting. He had wanted to actually go into the college today and teach just to distract himself, but Thea talked him out of it. Instead, she had called and told them that they had a family emergency that Oliver had to attend and would be out for the next week. Oliver knew he should be grateful considering Felicity was his number one priority, but he hated waiting.

            Right now, he was waiting for Noah Kuttler to configure a new laptop, similar to the one that Rochev had, to download the new list of names that they came up with. Oliver had already done the Salmon Ladder, fought a skirmish with Diggle, and Roy, and now he was pacing through his living room, with no end in sight. He needed something to do. Someone to hit. Anything, to take his mind off what could be happening to Felicity while he waited.

            “Here.” A glass was shoved under his nose by Lyla. “You look like you could use it.”             Oliver accepted the drink with a slight nod. He didn’t even sniff it to discover what it was before he threw it back. The whiskey burned his throat and it still wasn’t enough to distract him. Shoving the glass down on his coffee table, Oliver continued his endless pursuit of nothing as he passed the couch for what had to be the hundredth time. Turning back toward where Lyla stood, Oliver nodded in the direction of his office where Kuttler was working. “Shouldn’t you be in there telling him the names he needs?”

            Lyla only shrugged, and for a moment, it really bugged Oliver how nonchalant she was about what was going on. A life was on the line. Felicity’s life. Lyla lifted her own glass to her lips taking a small sip of her own drink before she answered. “He has the list I gave him. There’s not much more for me to do.”

            “Is he almost done?” Frustration laced Oliver’s question. He felt like a child on a long journey constantly repeating, “Are we there yet?”

            Lyla shot him a serious look that made her whole face go downwards into a frown. It had to be her mother’s face. The one that she would use when scolding her own children. “He’s not much further than he was a few minutes ago when you popped your head in to ask.”             Was it only a few minutes ago? It felt like so long ago. Kicking out at his couch, Oliver didn’t even feel the pain as it skittered away from him. He wanted to smash something. Too bad he still wasn’t holding his glass.

            “Hey.” Lyla set her glass down and approached him, laying her hand on his arm in a strong grip. “We’ll get her back.”

            “Will we?” Oliver hated to ask because he was afraid of the answer he would get in response. If he had not brought Felicity into his life… If he had just done what Anatoly asked of him regarding Kuttler instead of thinking of how it would affect Felicity… If he had not come back to Starling City at all… If he never took the job at the college to come back in and pretend that he was some normal person instead of the monster that he was… All those scenarios and more pounded through his head.

            “You’re blaming yourself again.”

            Oliver blinked rapidly coming back into his body. How long had he been in his own thoughts? He was standing in front of the training dummy pounding away until Diggle’s words infiltrated his head. Lyla was gone. Oliver stood there shirtless, never even knowing when it happened, banging on the dummy that was half broken at his efforts.

            Swinging around, Oliver grabbed the towel that Diggle extended out to him and wiped his face before wrapping it around his shoulders and crossing his arms. “So what if I am?”

            “Not everything is your fault,” Diggle continued. “Anatoly made the ultimate decision to bring Felicity into this situation. At the cost of your friendship.”

            “And if he didn’t, it may be Waller that we are planning to take her from.”

            Diggle gave a small chuckle. “That sounds easier, but damn, it sure as hell would be a nightmare of a situation.”

            Oliver frowned and Diggle let his humor fade. “Look. Whatever Waller has planned, we will figure it out before it happens. But whatever does, it still won’t be your fault. Waller has had her own plans for that girl long before you came into the picture. The fact that you decided to pursue something with her only allowed Waller to think that she would have that much more access to her.”             “Great.” Oliver swung the towel in the direction of the nearby table and grabbed a hold of his sweatshirt to pull on over his now chilled body.

            Diggle walked over and placed his hands on Oliver’s shoulder and leveled a look at him. “Don’t let them get in your head.”

            “Too late.”

OQFSOQFSOQFS

              “You. Out.”

            Felicity glanced over at the door where a bald angry man stood cradling a semi-automatic weapon. At least that was what she thought it was after her long perusal of weapons that presented themselves to her during her short stay in captivity. In the end, it didn’t really matter. It only matter that it could kill her.

            A young woman that Felicity recognized came inside the room after the guy. She was the same woman who had given Felicity the clothes that she was currently wearing. It was nice to see a familiar face that was not Anatoly’s or one of his goons. “Hi.”

            The guard glared. “You. Out.”

            Felicity tried to ignore him as much as possible in a small bit of defiance. Sure, eventually, she’d listen to him. It wasn’t like she would have much of a choice. Instead she watched the woman as she scurried around cleaning up the small mess Felicity left behind from her breakfast. Felicity nodded at her in greeting when the woman looked up for a second, but the timid woman let her eyes fall back to what she was doing too quickly for any other exchange.

            Glancing over at the guard, she dared ask, “Can I at least get my shoes and dress?”

            The man seemed disgruntled by her question, maybe he didn’t understand it, but then he gave her a small nod. Pleased at the small concession, even if that did worry her, because that meant that she was leaving this room for a lot longer than a quick walk around that she deservingly needed.

 Cursing softly, Felicity made her way to the bathroom where her clothes lay, dry now from their quick wash the night before. The woman accidently got in her way, or maybe not so accidently, by the fact that she gestured at Felicity. It didn’t make any sense.

“Help,” Felicity said to her. “Can you help me?”

“Da.” Yes. She held up two fingers again, this time a little more decipherable.

Two? Felicity had no idea what that meant? Two minutes? Two hours? Was it some sort of Russian thumbs up? Felicity had no idea. Frankly, she wasn’t in the caring mood. The woman at least agreed to help. And Felicity was sure as hell ready to get the hell out of here.

By the time Felicity returned with her things though, the woman was gone. So much for helping then. Maybe she just didn’t understand what Felicity had been asking her. Unless, the woman was thinking that somehow Felicity would help her instead of the other way around. Well, that wouldn’t be happening since Felicity had not seen the outside of this room in days, let alone knew where she was.

“Go,” the man at the door demanded in his harsh voice that was a little higher than a man of his stature should have. He gestured at the door where he stood indicating that she needed to leave the room.

“Go,” he said again, this time more growly since she had not moved a muscle from her spot. He pointed the gun toward her and his finger was much too jumpy for her liking as it lay near the trigger.

Taking a deep breath, Felicity complied with his demand and began to more toward the door. The first time that she would be able to do so since being brought in there unconscious days ago. The gun was jammed in her back and she quickly exited the room, clenching her dress and shoes tightly to her chest. “Where am I going?”

“Go.” His gun pointed her to the right over her shoulder.

Right it was then.

“Go.”

“Oookay.” Felicity couldn’t help the snarky comment. She tried to take notice of the hallway as she walked forward but it was all white with nothing decorating the walls at all. Completely whitewashed. Just like the room she just left. Well, not counting the small holes that she went to examine in her time there, that she discovered were actually bullet holes.

Felicity shuddered at the memory of discovering the blood in one of the holes that had not been covered by the white paint and cleaned by the bleach that resonated from the crevice. She made a mental note, that no matter how bored she was she would never go to investigate any other holes in the mobsters’ walls. Her stomach could not handle it.

The few doors they passed were simple dark wooden panels, not that there were many. Just three. Two on the right and one on the left. Right. Right. Left. Sure it might not make a difference to remember that, but she was so bored that any sort of mental stimulation was a relief.

Coming to the end of the corridor, they made another right. Felicity blinked at the large amount of sunlight that poured down at them from the high windows. Ones that only afforded her a look at the blue sky that she was not sure she would see again. The door at the end of the hallway also offered up sunlight. However, it was muted with the glazed windows that it possessed. No way to see what was through it. At least not from where she was. And not like she expected to get close enough to see if proximity would help.

She was wrong though. The guy gestured her forward again with his gun. “Go.”

Felicity glanced back over her shoulder, surprised to find that the man really wasn’t much taller than she was. Funny because in the room with the gun he seemed so much bigger. Maybe because she had been that much more intimidated. She wasn’t quite sure why she wasn’t now. “You know, you’re a wonderful conversationalist. We should definitely try to visit again.”

Her sarcasm was lost on him. Well, maybe not considering how his eyes shadowed as his thick eyebrows lowered and his face became even more surely. With a gulp, Felicity reminded herself the man had a weapon and she probably should not be trying to piss him off. Not that she really was trying to, but her mouth sometimes got away from her when she was scared or nervous. Right now, she’d own up to both.

Not that it stopped her words from coming out. “Your wife, or girlfriend, must be the talkative one. Well, unless you talk a lot more in your native language. Russian, right? For all I know you could be a big chatter when you sit down with your buddies and a bottle of vodka.”

Shut up, Felicity, she scolded herself. Not that it helped. “You know, you can. Speak Russian with me. I would just love to talk to someone even if it is at cross purposes since you might have no idea what I’m even saying. And I definitely wouldn’t understand what you were saying in return.”

“Go!” The gun dug deeper into her backbone and Felicity took a deep breath. Maybe if she kept doing so, the words would stop coming out.

“Do I need to open the door?” she asked him as they reached the end of the hall and the door that let in the light.

“Go.”

“I’ll take that as a yes.” Felicity reached out and turned the knob surprised that it was actually unlocked. Maybe all the doors were unlocked, but she doubted it. Hers, for example, had been locked. She was pretty sure there were a lot of skeletons behind the other doors. Not skeletons exactly, but that didn’t mean that there weren’t. Her body shuddered at all the possibilities.

Exiting the door, Felicity paused and soaked in the warmth of the sun. It felt so good on her skin. She would never hide away in her room on her computers again, taking the sun for granted. Not after this. This was why prisoners had mandatory time outside. The sudden vitamin D from the sun made her head feel a little dizzy.

“Go!”

“Spoilsport,” Felicity mumbled and winced when her bare feet hit a small rock on the stairs that lead down from the door. It was nothing compared to heated pavement that met her at the bottom. Her feet burned and the rocks bit into her feet that had never been so tortured in all her years of living. “You could have at least let me put on my shoes if you knew we were coming outside.”

“Go.” Guess, he didn’t care if she wouldn’t be able to walk soon. Already she was limping at the pain that impaled her feet at all the small stones that bit into her.

Felicity rolled her eyes, but kept going. It wasn’t like she had much choice with the constant presence of the gun in her lower back. “A coat would have also been a sweet gesture. The wind is a little cold.”

The man only snorted. What the hell did he care? He was dressed appropriately for the weather with his long sleeved shirt and vest. His jeans probably not letting the changing of the weather bother him as much.

The reached another building and Felicity hoped they were soon to reach their destination seeing as she wasn’t sure how much longer she would be able to walk. The man who had come with Anatoly a few times stood by one doorway and Felicity just knew that that was where they were heading. It was with dread that she closed her eyes momentarily and proceeded forward.

They slowly came to where he waited and when they got there, the man reached out and grasped Felicity roughly by the jaw with only one large palm. The pain was almost worse than the ones that she was experiencing with her feet. She expected that she would have bruises on her chin in an hour. Felicity could only hope that was the worst of her problems.

“I hope he doesn’t follow through,” the man growled down at her from where he towered over her. “I would have broken you already if Anatoly would have let me.”

That did not sound pleasing in the slightest. Felicity shored up all her strength and pulled out of his grip. It hurt so bad that she wondered if she lost some skin in the effort. That didn’t stop her from glaring up at him. Felicity wondered where her sudden bravado came from.

The guy only let out a chuckle as if it meant nothing to him. Instead he grasped her arm, twisting the skin slightly. “I think it won’t be much time before Anatoly let’s me.”

He jerked her inside the new building and over to a room that was close by. It had a much heavier, more cell-like door than the one previously. The man with the gun ran over to open it. Once it was opened, the guy who held her practically threw her inside. She skittered across the floor in a heap. So, more bruises then.

“Soon, cyka.”

Felicity had no idea what the translation for that last word was, but she knew it could not be good by the way he spit it at her. Looking around the room, she discovered it to be smaller and sparser than the last one she stayed in. Not that it mattered much. She suspected that this was very temporary.

The door clanged shut. The sound reverberated throughout the room. Yep, much more cell-like.

Pushing herself up off the floor, Felicity searched around for a light switch and found one by the door. The light flickered on and then continued to flicker as if trying to determine whether it wanted to work or not. But it held persistent and finally shone brightly above her.

On the off chance that the men had forgotten to lock the door Felicity made her way to it. Only there was no knob to turn. Nothing to try. If she pried her very short fingernails into the sides, she might find some purchase, but she truly doubted it.

“Frack,” Felicity screamed at the door pounding her flat hand against it.

  OQFSOQFSOQFS

              “Oliver. Mr. Queen.”

            Noah’s voice penetrated through Oliver’s dark thoughts. That’s what happened whenever anyone left him alone long enough for his mind to wander. A prisoner of the Bratva was not the best place to be and for a woman that was even worse. A gorgeous young woman like Felicity had even less chance of survival. It was enough to make a man who had long forgotten about God to start praying. But, now… Maybe Felicity stood a chance. Her father was calling him and maybe that meant that Oliver could now get to her. Maybe that meant that the God that had turned his back on him so long ago was finally willing to give him some peace.

            Oliver just short of ran over to his office to find out what the summons was for. “What is it? Is it finished?”

            Their deadline was fast approaching and Oliver was beyond worried that he would not be able to make it. Noah had started on this project around four am and here it was almost three in the afternoon. No one had even bothered to break for breakfast or lunch. The only respite for any of them had come when the call to the facilities had become too strong.

            “I’m almost finished. I just have a few more names.” Noah glanced over at Lyla who nodded before raising his eyes past Oliver to where Diggle stood behind him. “Are you positive you want your family on here?”

            “Yes,” Diggle and Lyla replied firmly at practically the same time.

            “You already have mine on there, correct?” Oliver asked. That had been the agreement from the beginning since it was obvious that Anatoly knew that he also operated with the other organization.

            “No.” Noah glanced up at Lyla again for confirmation. “Was I supposed to?”

            “It has to be,” Oliver told Noah before Lyla could even speak. “We all know this. It will be suspicious if it isn’t.”

            “Put mine on there too.”             Oliver swung around, along with everyone else, after he heard Sara’s voice from the doorway of the office. “No.”

            “Sara?” Thea jumped from her chair and ran to the other woman. She had been sitting in the corner of the room, as the assigned bodyguard to Noah most of the day, but now there was no stopping the whirlwind as she threw herself at her long lost friend. It was much the same with Thea when Oliver himself returned home from the supposed dead.

            As much as Thea was excited by the news, Lyla frowned. It made Oliver grit his teeth. Sara had chosen the exact wrong moment to make her appearance. There were going to be a lot of questions. Questions he did not have time to answer at the moment.

            Sara hugged Oliver’s sister tightly, as Thea sobbed into her chest. “Hey, Thea. Look at you. You’re so grown up.”

            “I can’t believe you’re alive,” Thea mumbled from Sara’s chest.

            “I can’t either,” Lyla said much more forcefully glaring at her husband and Oliver.

            “You’re not going on the list,” Oliver said to Sara ignoring all the drama around him and concentrating on the most important thing.

            “Yes, I am. It makes sense,” Sara told him from over Thea’s shoulder. Her stare brokered no argument. Well, if she thought he wasn’t going to fight her on this then she didn’t know him very well.

            Sniffling, Thea stepped back and glanced between the two of them. She wiped away her tears and stalked over to her brother slapping his face in an act that she had not dared to do since she was seven. “You knew she was alive and you didn’t tell anyone?”

            “I told him not to,” Sara responded, but Oliver was doubtful that it was necessarily for his defense. “And I’m asking the same favor of all of you.” Her eyes searched the room for confirmation from everyone. Only Lyla hesitated with her nod. “No one can know that I’m alive. Especially, Anatoly and A.R.G.U.S.”

            “A little late for that now,” Lyla grumbled.

            “Please?”

            Lyla finally consented again, but it was one that Oliver could tell was hesitant. By agreeing Lyla was putting her job on the line. Maybe more than that.

            Sara nodded back at her in understanding before turning back to Oliver. “Can I talk to you for a second, Ollie?”

            Oliver felt a little self-conscious at his old nickname being spoken, but Sara was right. They needed to talk. “Let’s go.”

            The two of them walked from the room and neither spoke until the door to Oliver’s bedroom closed behind them. Oliver leaned into the wood with his forehead to try to contain his anger. He knew this fight was going to be mentally draining.

            “I need to be on that list, Ollie.”

            “You don’t even know what it is,” Oliver told her as he turned around to face her. He discovered her on his bed. She sat there on the edge looking worn as she twiddled with her hands, her head bowed down. Scrapping his hands down his face, he realized he no longer had the energy to argue. The very last of his strength had to be saved to get Felicity out of Anatoly’s clutches in a few hours.

            “It’s the list you plan on turning over to Anatoly in exchange for Felicity. The one with the list of Russian A.R.G.U.S. agents.” Sara raised her face so she could look up at him. “Diggle called me earlier. He filled me in because he was scared that you were down her about to combust with frustration.”

            “He didn’t have to call you at all. I would tear him a new one, but I’m pretty sure his wife is doing that as we speak.”

            Sara ignored him and swept a hand through her hair, pushing it from her face. “Listen, I need a reason as to why I died. This is the perfect opportunity to explain that. In fact, being an A.R.G.U.S. agent makes a lot more sense than many of the other explanations going around.” Sara’s eyes pleaded with him and her hand came to rest on the knees of her black jeans. She always did look ready to jump into battle at a moment’s hesitation. “Plus, it’s an extra smoke screen for you. Anatoly will be shocked by seeing my name there that it might give you that much more opportunity to get Felicity out of the compound. And that’s the objective of this whole thing, isn’t it?”

            “Of course it is.” Oliver could not keep the annoyance from his voice. Like he would be doing this for any other reason. Like he would put his family and friends in danger for something that wasn’t as important as… Felicity. It was in that moment that Oliver realized just how much Felicity had come to mean to him. Shit. He didn’t need this right now. Emotions muddled things. Emotions that he did not need to feel right now because it meant that he might screw up. Emotions that would give Anatoly more ammunition to use against him.

            “Good.” Sara pushed herself up from the bed. “Then let’s go put my name on that list.”

            “Sara.” Oliver grabbed her arm before she could circle around him and leave. “Are you sure you want to do this? Felicity is my problem.”

            Sara raised a hand to Oliver’s face and cupped his cheek. “She means a lot to you, Ollie. There aren’t many people that we can truly claim to have an attachment to. Don’t let that go. Not for me or anyone else.”

            Oliver felt tears prick his eyes but he refused to let them fall. He could feel the depth of conviction in which Sara said her words. It broke his heart a little. A heart that he had long thought lost. But recently, with Felicity’s guidance he began to realize that maybe it wasn’t as far gone as he thought.

            “I don’t know if you realize it, Ollie. But Felicity has brought this light out from inside of you.” Oliver humphed at Sara’s words since it almost matched his own thoughts. “Whatever disagreement you may have had with her, move past it. Because I would do anything for her. She brought back a guy that I never thought that I would see again. You see I lost him a long time and I missed him.”

            “He wasn’t exactly the best version of myself,” Oliver reminded her. His past, was not exactly littered with good intentions.

            “No, but he had a good heart.” Sara’s hand dropped from his face and landed over his heart and the Bratva tattoo that now sat there on top of it. “I think it began to come back.”

            “It did. I just didn’t realize it until now,” Oliver admitted to her.

            Sara nodded. Going on her toes, she pecked him on the cheek. “Great. Now let’s go get Felicity, lover boy.”

            “Shut up,” Oliver told her but began to laugh for the first time in days.

  OQFSOQFSOQFS

              Felicity had enough. Enough with being a victim. Enough of the promises of being released. Enough of the cat and mouse games. They needed to rape or kill her and just get it over with. She was just sick of it all.

            Eying the pot where she had just relieved herself, she grimaced. Seriously, she should have made sure to use the toilet in her last prison before coming here, but it hadn’t exactly been a pressing need at the time. It was the only thing in the room, other than the bed that was askew against the wall. Okay, so there were two other things in there too. A light switch and the camera that now watched her.

            That was why the bed was askew. She had used it to try to climb up to that camera to configure the wires to send out a signal to anyone that she was in trouble. Not that she could reach them. She was just too damn short. What she had accomplished though was to pull the cover off. It allowed her access to see where the camera faced and when it came on to view what she was doing.

            Which was exactly why she made sure after finding out she had no hope of sending out a signal, that she placed the chamber pot directly under it. The camera at least couldn’t see her pee. Thank God for small favors.

            She was pretty sure that the camera from her calculations could see majority of the extremely small room that she now resided in. However, Felicity was pretty sure that it would not be able to make out part of the far wall and just the edge of the doorway. It meant that she might have the opportunity to lay in wait against the wall and wait for someone to come in to clobber them with her heels.

            Her stomach grumbling from the lunch that she had missed and the breakfast she just barely picked over, Felicity began to pace. Just because the camera light was on, on her way back facing the camera she would express her frustration by shooting up her middle finger at the offending piece of tech.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

WHEN I THINK ABOUT THE GREAT HACKERS I KNOW, ONE THING THEY MENTIONED WAS CURIOSITY

But the Collison brothers weren't going to wait. Tricks are straightforward to correct for. They just try to notice quickly when something already is winning. The reason they don't invest more than that: they use their office as a place to think in. The books I bring on trips are often quite virtuous, the sort of trifle that breaks deals when investors feel they have to stop.1 As in an essay, most of the time about which of two novels is better? Fortunately it's usually the least committed founder who leaves. I found it boring and incomprehensible. The first essay of his that I read was so electrifying that I remember exactly where I was at the time. As you accelerate, this drag increases, till eventually you reach a point where 100% of your energy is devoted to overcoming it and you can't go by the awards he's won or the jobs he's had, because in design, so he went to a conference of design bloggers to recruit users, and that kind of text is easy to recognize.

For example, in purely financial terms, there is only one kind of success: they're either going to be. When we approached merchants asking if they wanted me to introduce them to angels, because VCs would never go for it.2 When you think of yourself as x but tolerating y: not even to consider yourself an x. But I don't think this is what makes languages fast for users. Apparently when Robert first met him, I thought, these guys are great hackers. Something else was waiting for him, something that looked a lot like the army.3 I let errands eat up the day, to avoid facing some hard problem. That would be kind of amusing.

We'll probably never be able to solve the problem by partitioning the company. Chair designers have to spend their time writing code and have someone else handle the messy business of extracting money from people, at worst this curve would be some constant multiple less than 1 of what it might have been. It turns out to be full of such surprises. The Louvre might as well open it. Feature-recognizing spam filters are right in many details; what they lack is an overall discipline for combining evidence. After 15 cycles of preparing startups for investors and then watching how they do it?4 Of course some problems inherently have this character.5

It's kind of surprising that it even exists. It sounded promising. Not so much from specific things he's written as by reconstructing the mind that produced them: brutally candid; aggressively garbage-collecting outdated ideas; and yet driven by pragmatism rather than ideology. Subject Free! And the answer is yes, they say Great, we'll send you a link. The reason startups no longer depend so much on VCs is one that everyone in the startup business knows by now: it has gotten much cheaper to start a startup.6 Change happened mostly by itself in the computer business. By then it's too late for angels.

Companies like Cisco are proud that everyone there has a cubicle, even the CEO. But if you yourself don't have good taste, how are you doing compared to the rapacious founder after two years? Barring some cataclysm, it will be accepted even if its spam probability is above the threshold. Something else was waiting for him, something that looked a lot like the army. Understand your users. This is true to a degree that in everyday life. Understanding your users is part of what it might have been. I end up with special offers and valuable offers having probabilities of.7 So here is my best shot at a recipe.

Will your blackberry get a bigger screen? Of course it matters to do a half-assed job. Richard Hamming suggests that you ask yourself three questions: What are the most important problems in your field? I was saying recently to a reporter that if I can't write things down, worrying about remembering one idea gets in the way of having the next. I realized why. Good founders have a healthy respect for reality. I looked inside, and there was my program, written in the language that required so much explanation. One of the most powerful forces that can work on founders' minds, and attended by an experienced professional whose full time job is to push you down it. 28%.8 They got started by doing something that really doesn't scale: assembling their routers themselves. The first rule I knew intellectually, but didn't really grasp till it happened to us.

They get smart people to write 99% of your code, but still keep them almost as insulated from users as you could. VC money you hire a sales force to do that.9 But there is another set of techniques for doing that. Merely measuring something has an uncanny tendency to push things in the right direction rather than the cleverness, and this is easier if they're written in the same place they come from different sources. If we ever got to the point where 90% of a group's output is created by 1% of its members, you lose that deal, but VC as an industry still wins. We'd also need ways of erasing personal information not just to acquire users, but also about existing things becoming more addictive. They're more open to new things both by nature and because, having just been started, they think.10 That's what Facebook did. Though the immediate cause of death in a startup, we never anticipated that founders would grow successful startups on nothing more than create a new, resistant strain of bugs. Seven years later I still hadn't started.

Notes

Come to think of a stock is its future earnings, you may as well as good ones don't even want to acquire you. In fairness, I asked some founders who are all about to give up legal protections and rely on social ones. Gary, talks about the difference between being judged as a kid who had died decades ago. It will seem like I overstated the case.

Actually he's no better or worse than Japanese car companies have been peculiarly vulnerable—perhaps partly because so many had been with us he would have. It was born when Plato and Aristotle looked at with fresh eyes and even if we just implemented it ourselves, so buildings are gutted or demolished to be doomed. Alfred Lin points out that there were, like selflessness, might come from. No, but this could be ignored.

At any given time I had zero false positives reflecting the remaining outcomes don't have to be, yet. 1% a week before. And it's particularly damaging when these investors flake, because it doesn't commit you to remain in denial about your conversations with other people's money.

Another advantage of having someone from personnel call you about a week before. The first assumption is widespread in text classification. Only in a dream world.

And you can ask us who's who; otherwise you may have been Andrew Wiles, but starting a startup to an associate if you repair a machine that's broken because a unless your initial funding and then using growth rate as evolutionary pressure is such a brutally simple word is that the guys running Digg are especially sneaky, but investors can get rich simply by being energetic and unscrupulous, but this would give us. It does at least try.

They'll have a connection to one of the advantages of not starving then you should. A servant girl cost 600 Martial vi. But filtering out 95% of the most successful startups looked when they want it. By your mid-game.

This is a scarce resource. This has already happened once in China, Yale University Press, 1973, p.

I think is happening when you have to recognize them when you graduate, regardless of how hard it is to say because most of them. It doesn't happen often. 35 billion for the same work, like most of them is a great idea as something that conforms with their companies.

Now we don't want to hire any first-time founder again he'd leave ideas that are only slightly richer for having these things. Even the cheap kinds of content. When a lot of the fake leading the fake. It may be that surprising that colleges can't teach students how to succeed in a company has to work with founders create a great deal of competition for the desperate and the cost of having one founder take fundraising meetings is that Steve Wozniak in Jessica Livingston's Founders at Work.

They'd freak if they don't know enough about big markets, why didn't the Industrial Revolution happen earlier? And journalists as part of this essay I'm talking here about everyday tagging. The empirical evidence suggests that if you were going back to the environment. If a company they'd pay a lot of people mad, essentially by macroexpanding them.

[olicitysecretsanta]

Interrupted

AN: Happy Holidays Cher Cher! I love all of your artwork so I hope you like this little fic. Obviously its very AU and fluffy, it doesn’t really fit into anywhere in the show timeline, but I hope you like it anyways :D

            ‘Something was tickling her back’. That was the first conscious thought in Felicity’s head. Quickly followed by, ‘her head was pounding’.

Slowly she became more aware of her surroundings. An extremely comfortable mattress beneath her - so she was in a bed. Though how soft the sheets felt suggested that it was not her own.

‘Okay this is fine. I can figure this out.’

“I can hear you thinking,” a rough voice spoke into her ear and suddenly it all came rushing back. Flashes of clothes being shed and skin on skin. That tickling was actually the feeling of stubbly kisses being pressed down her back – and other places.

“Oliver.”

            Finally her eyes opened and she was faced with a sight that took her breath away. Oliver had paused his exploration of her back with his mouth to rest his head on the pillow beside her. And as he watched her study him, a smile spread across his face – a real genuine smile. And Felicity could physically feel her heart melt.

            “So… that happened,” Felicity said hesitantly.

            If at all possible, Oliver’s smile grew even more. “Yes it did.”

            “And my current headache?”

            “Ah yes, I believe that is courtesy of the bottle of Lafite Rothschild 1982 that we finished last night.”

            “That would explain it alright.” Felicity couldn’t help but smile back.

            As crazy as it sounds, it all came down to the damn salmon ladder and a pair of workout leggings. The name on the list Oliver was hunting that night proved himself an easy target so Oliver was back earlier than expected. And the scene he saw when he came down the stairs into the bunker was an unusual one.

            Felicity was standing in front of the punching bag Digg had installed with her feet spread wide and her hands up in a fighting stance.

            But it was what she was wearing that had Oliver pull up short.

He tried his best to keep his distance from her; after all, he couldn’t be with someone he truly cared about. And her very short, tight and bright dresses did not help him. However, normally he could restrain himself.

But good lord was she testing his patience because she was wearing only a sports bra and a pair of workout leggings that seemed to be painted on.

Without conscious thought, Oliver pulled off his shirt in frustration and headed over to the salmon ladder. And if he heard a hitch in Felicity’s breath, well that was no one’s business but his own.

Felicity couldn’t help her eyes straying over to his form flying through the air. He really was unfairly pretty and the salmon ladder was only making him an even greater distraction.

She tried making conversation about how he was done so early but he only gave her monosyllabic replies. Clearly something about tonight had bothered him and there was no use trying to get more out of him about it. Oliver truly was the definition of repressed emotion.

Conversation was off the table so Felicity did something that surprised even her. She stopped her attempts at working out and made her way over to Oliver’s ‘mysterious box that they did not ask questions about’ (that was the official name).  

Oliver only looked up from the ground when he noticed her sitting on the box.

“What exactly do you think you are doing?” He asked bewilderedly, forgetting for a moment to be irate with her.

 “Something has pissed you off tonight. And I happen to know you have a very expensive bottle of vodka stored in her - though why you would ever want to drink straight vodka is absolutely insane to me, it’s seriously like drinking straight paint thinner and how is that enjoyable in any sense of the word? The only thing vodka is good for is getting blackout drunk and waking up missing your pants. Mind you tequila does that just as well even though you don’t have a secret stash of that,” Felicity blathered. “Not that I’m trying to get you to wake up without your pants!” Felicity could feel herself flush when her words caught up with her. “My point is, you look like you could use a drink.”

There was a pause as Oliver tried to comprehend her ramblings. He dropped to the floor and tried to stifle his wide smile.

“Felicity.” She finally made eye contact with him, still bright red in the face. “I have something even better.”

Disappearing up the stairs to Verdant’s stores, Oliver came down only a moment later holding a bottle of Lafite Rothschild 1982.

Her breath hitched again, “You remembered.”

“How could I forget?”

Some how the night progressed in a manner neither of them expected. Taking turns drinking directly from the bottle, Oliver and Felicity slowly started feeling the effects of the truly magnificent wine. Never having seen him drunk, or even tipsy, before Felicity found great amusement in how Oliver’s smiles seemed to come easier and faster as her tongue seemed to loosen even more.

Then one second they were sitting side by side up against one of the pillars talking and the next Felicity found herself leaning in and kissing Oliver.

And it only progressed from there, ending in a cab to Oliver’s loft and directly into his bed.

All the events led to Felicity finding herself naked in Oliver’s bed with a pounding headache and Oliver’s scruff tickling her back.

Already laid bare, Felicity couldn’t help but speaking completely honestly, “I keep waiting for you to pull away. Tell me why this can’t happen.”

Oliver made sure to meet her eyes with his own, “Felicity. A pack of rabid wolves couldn’t pull me away from you now,” He paused. For once she deserved to hear everything that he was thinking. She deserved the whole truth. “I’m still terrified. My head is telling me I should run and run far. But now that I know what this is like. Now that I’m allowed to touch you, I could bare to bring myself to stop.”

In a very rare occurrence, Felicity was the one to interrupt Oliver, and she leaned forward to kiss him. “Then that settles it. We’re both not going anywhere.”

For once, they both got to be happy. They just laid in bed talking. Both of them could not help but smile without stop. Kisses were traded between stories and they just enjoyed a perfect lazy morning.

Finally, the grumbling of Felicity’s stomach interrupted their bubble of bliss. “Clearly someone needs some food.” Oliver said with a laugh.

“Don’t you mock me.” Felicity pouted.

“I wouldn’t dare. You stay here and I will return with sustenance.”

Felicity reached to the side for her clothes. “Whoa and what exactly do you think you’re doing?” Felicity froze with her arm outstretched.

“Changing?”

“No you are going to stay here, lying blissfully naked while I go cook you breakfast. We will then proceed to eat that breakfast here in bed and continue what we were doing before.”

“You can cook?”

Oliver couldn’t help but laugh, “That’s what you got from all of that? Yes I can cook.”

Felicity lay back down and watched Oliver pull on his sweats and head toward the kitchen. For once thoughts weren’t running a million miles a minute through her head and for once she just relaxed silently.

Felicity was under no illusions about her own abilities in the kitchen. Her idea of a gourmet breakfast was cereal in an actual bowl rather whatever dish was cleanest. Therefore, after 10 minutes, when Oliver still hadn’t returned Felicity pulled the covers off her and went in search of her clothes.

As she grabbed her clothes she spied Oliver’s white button-down, thrown over the foot of the bed. And something possessed her to drop her leggings and pull her arms into his shirt. She then walked out the door, hissing at the coolness of the hardwood floors against her bare feet.

She found Oliver in the kitchen standing at the stove and wove her arms around his waist.

“I thought I told you to stay in bed and stay naked.”

“I got lonely.”

“Well we can’t have that can we?” A smile spread across her face, it was a rare day when Oliver wanted to be playful.

In one swift move Oliver turned off the burner and spun around in her arms. Before she could blink, he had her lifted onto the counter of the island behind them and he came to rest between her knees. Any train of thought she had was lost as Oliver started trailing kisses up her neck.

“Well hello.”

Felicity was not ashamed to admit that she yelped at the voice she didn’t recognize behind Oliver. She pulled away from Oliver to meet the eyes of someone she had previously only seen on magazine covers.

“Tommy Merlyn.”

“Here I am at a disadvantage, you know my name and I currently don’t know yours.”

“Felicity. Smoak.” Her hand came up to fiddle with her glasses.

“Well Felicity Smoak it is very nice to make your acquaintance,” Tommy said with a smirk on his face that screamed mischief. “Ollie where have you been hiding this one? It has been ages since I’ve seen you with a girl. She must be a special one!”

Oliver finally turned around again to face his best friend. “Tommy. When I gave you a key for emergencies, I didn’t quite mean for you to use to anytime.”

“I ran out of milk.”

Felicity glanced at Oliver to see his unimpressed face. She couldn’t help but snort, “Almost as good as spilling a latte on your laptop.” And suddenly Oliver’s unimpressed look was redirected to her. “Sorry that was supposed to be an internal thought.”

“So am I interrupting something?”

“Yes.”

“Yes.” Both Oliver and Felicity said together, without looking away from each other’s eyes.

“Well I can tell when I’m unwanted. I’ll just be on my way then. Have fun with this. Don’t forget to disinfect the counters.” Tommy called as he left through the front door.

“So he’s calling Thea now right?’

Oliver couldn’t help the laugh that burst out of his mouth, “Oh definitely.” His head came down to rest on her shoulder when his phone started ringing right when he finished talking. “Rain check on continuing this?”

Felicity brought his head up to kiss him. She then hopped off the counter and grabbed the French toast he has cooked before she interrupted him. “Absolutely.”

And they both were able to relieve the delightful experience 3 years later at their wedding, when Tommy opened his best man speech with the time he walked in on the bride and the groom going at it in the kitchen. 

[shirlleycoyle]

It’s Time for the Eternal September to End

A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.

For nearly 30 years, the internet’s culture has been defined by a corporation’s move that seemed to, without any care about what was left behind, ensure that a sense of order would never again drive the growth of this series of tubes.

This phenomenon is, in many ways, the central tension on which the modern internet is built. And it’s a tension that most people aren’t aware of, even though it is an undercurrent secretly framing our online interactions.

I am, of course, discussing the Eternal September, a 1993 move by AOL to allow its users into the free-for-all that is Usenet. In the decades since, the conflict that move created, although long forgotten today, lingers in the way that technical users and not-so-technical users interact.

And, in too many ways, it is the basis for digital conflicts that have nothing to do with back then and everything to do with right now.

It’s time to retire the Eternal September. Twenty-seven years is long enough.

“September 1993 will go down in net.history as the September that never ended.”

— Dave Fischer, a Usenet user, discussing the start of the Eternal September in 1993, the point at which the chaos created by mainstream interest in the internet began to overwhelm the early discussion forums that originally attracted technical users to computer labs on college campuses and pokey modem connections at homes.

At its root, perhaps we can blame AOL for all of this. Image: sarahe/Flickr

How the Eternal September set the stage for decades of online conflict

For decades, internet culture has struggled with the n00bs. For generations, as new people entered the digital gates, there was an inevitable sneer that awaited them as they hit the onramp.

If you’re not in the know, what do you know?

The internet is, of course, not alone in owning this dynamic. It plays out in all sorts of areas that traditionally have nothing to do with technology: High school, internships, sports teams, organized crime syndicates. The little guy knows nothing and has to work their way up. Most don’t. You get the idea.

But on the internet, we all technically should be on equal ground. After all, knowledge is at our fingertips at all times.

Yet tribalism has long defined the internet. We are built around subcultures upon subcultures, and these subcultures have only hardened over time, creating shells of insularity that have proven impenetrable.

And perhaps its most notable form came about in the mid-1990s, when the “Eternal September,” a concept involving the n00bs taking over Usenet, took hold. For those who don’t date back to this era, here’s the general gist: Each school year, thousands of new students would flock to Usenet groups for the first time, hoping to find community or learn from the folks already there. The problem was that they were green and didn’t really know much of anything, so they faced rejection until they got the gist.

In September of 1993, AOL added Usenet access, turning a controlled situation of steady ongoing community growth into something of a flood of never-ending n00bs. Suddenly, the social norms that the Usenet community was built around were broken at the seams, never to be repaired.

This was a major communal shift, and one that put early online users on the defensive. To put it simply, people were dismissive of their fellow users based on nothing other than the domain attached to their email address. It was an easy signifier; if you had an AOL.com email address, you were a dork, or beyond saving.

An essay on the commercialization of the internet, written in 1995 by MIT student Christopher R. Vincent, put the situation like this:

As accessing the Internet continues to grow easier for the novice user, it is inevitable that many of these social guidelines will fall to the wayside. This is not to say that new users should be denied access to Internet resources. It has been the first reflex in many newsgroups to flame any user who posted from an online service provider. Some of the larger providers, such as America Online have not received a very warm welcome to the network (note the formation of the alt.aol-sucks newsgroup). This reaction does not necessarily stem from elitism, but from a genuine fear that as more and more users appear, Usenet will fall apart. Indeed, this is a valid concern. The current system is not designed for the commercial-oriented direction the Internet is now taking.

Over time, the close association between AOL and lamers subsided, in part because our online access points evolved toward providers decided by local area, rather than consumer-oriented services.

So many flame wars fought over digital turf. Image: Anthony Cantin/Unsplash

But this dynamic of conflict and savvy emerged in other ways. When web-based communication alternatives emerged to replace Usenet, new types of turf wars appeared: Apple vs. Microsoft; open source vs. proprietary; Something Awful vs. Fark; Digg vs. Reddit; liberal bloggers vs. conservative bloggers; early adopters vs. technical laggards; iPhone vs. Android. You get the idea.

In many ways, these ideological battles of the digital age only found gasoline with the advent of social mediums, which helped to better connect people, but failed to account for the side effects that came with all that.

But the internet, early on, played into this tribalism in ways that allowed it to evolve into something dangerous.

“The newbies could not be forced to accept what we now understand as a central tenet of cyberlibertarianism: that cyberspace, too, was a place, separate from the world, and thus free. For it all to work, all the visionaries needed was for everyone to recognize a small set of self-evident truths.”

— Bradley Fidler, a researcher with the UCLA Computer Science Department, discussing in the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing the rise of what he calls the Eternal October—the understanding that “it is no longer possible to pretend (no matter one’s privilege) that cyberspace can circumvent the politics of civilization.” At the time he wrote this, it was October 2016, ahead of a U.S. election that helped bring some scary forces into the world. I can only imagine how Fidler must feel in October of 2020.

The calendar never stops. Image: Eric Rothermel/Unsplash

Why, in many ways, the Eternal September is still going strong

Look, I’m not going to tell you that we have a constant influx of newbies hitting the internet at all times. That certainly is not what I mean when I describe the Eternal September as an ongoing thing.

But I do think that the spirit that led to the Eternal September becoming a landmark in the first place is still very much there. It has simply taken new forms.

There’s a modern term for what this is called, in fact: Gatekeeping. The idea that, because of your identity or lack of experience, you shouldn’t have access to an online community.

Now, to be clear, there are lots of kinds of gatekeeping in terms of the internet—for example, the technical barriers created by large companies to shape the broader network, whether internet service providers like Comcast or Verizon, or major tech firms like Google or Facebook. Those figures deservedly need their callouts.

But in this case, I’d like to focus on a particular cultural kind of gatekeeping, the kind that leaves people out for reasons of elitism, fear, or simple “othering.”

Earlier this month, a great example of this type of gatekeeping emerged on Twitter when a user claimed that they assumed anyone who used a mouse to program was a junior programmer. That user (rightly) got criticized over it—though I’ll pass on linking the viral tweet, because who needs to add to that kind of drama? But examples that don’t get called out in quite that way abound online, and they represent the way that users tend to focus on their own tribes.

Back in 2017, before our world became even more divided, CBC News columnist Ramona Pringle wrote a piece about how digital tribalism has proven a nasty side effect of highly amplified online echo chambers:

In and of themselves, tribes aren’t inherently bad. We all long to be part of something bigger than ourselves, and tribes fulfill that need. But where we get into trouble is when we introduce borders, which separate my land from your land, and by extension, my tribe from your tribe. When borders are violated, we fight. This, in broad strokes is the root of all war.

The Eternal September, in many ways, was the opening salvo in decades of division on the internet. And in the years since, it has only gotten worse.

In many ways, we understand the people around us even less than we did a few years ago. We aim for the jugular instead of the handshake. And by the time the word “compromise” is thrown around, it’s already too late. It’s a sign of weakness.

It is perhaps sad to think about, considering the early internet was built around utopian dreams. But it’s where we are. I’ll let you draw the through line between ’90s programmer/IT elitism and some of the internet’s modern day problems, because ultimately all those programmers helped lay the foundation for today’s tech infrastructure.

I’m still idealistic that some of that utopian spirit is out there, if you know where to look. But I wonder if, in the big fight for protecting netiquette, the early internet set a bad example for all the people that came after, who jumped in not looking for help, but looking for a fight. The initial separation between the normal and the technical that the Eternal September fostered underlined the tribalism that other internet users follow without even thinking about it. It discourages people from taking part in communities—especially those underrepresented in STEM fields—and sows the kinds of division that attract users to misinformation.

And I wonder if the same types of users who criticized the n00bs way back when are the same folks who can help get us back—by setting an open-arms example that other communities can follow.

At a time when Godwin’s law is less an observation and more a genuine worry, perhaps there are bigger fish to fry than whether or not someone asked a technical question the right way … and those technical users might need to shift their plan of attack accordingly.

“We need to make sure that Rust is prepared to welcome people who are just learning about Rust today. We don’t want anyone to feel like they’re late to the party.”

— Tim McNamara, a software developer and writer who focuses on the Rust programming language, making a case for leaning into the Eternal September, as far as the Rust community goes. It’s a refreshing take from someone in a technical community, and an approach that others should follow.

So, you might be wondering: Why write about this topic, and why now?

Honestly, what got me thinking about it was one specific reaction to a recent piece I wrote about the mainstream demise of FTP. I aimed really broad with that piece, because honestly, that’s usually who I write for—someone who knows something about technology, but who doesn’t know everything and is curious about learning more.

Functionally, the point of my piece was that plain vanilla FTP is on its way out, a vestige of the past for the vast majority of people, thanks to its forthcoming removal from major web browsers. But there are people in narrow spaces who likely will never stop using it—or, who choose not to stop.

While I can get technical, I generally write for regular people who know a thing or two about technology but who, perhaps, aren’t engineers.

And well, this user was a technical user in a highly technical role. And they decided to mock it for not covering specific technical cases where it might persist, rather than spending five seconds considering that they may not be the target audience for this piece. Cockroaches are everywhere—you don’t have to tell me.

I’ve seen this with other things we’ve written as well. Last year, I ran a piece about OS/2’s continued use on the NYC subway system, and I spotted a reader who got upset because we focused on the obvious novelty of a vintage operating system being used in a high-profile way, rather than focusing on the low-level technical aspects that may appeal to that specific user but may go over everyone else’s heads.

I get it. You might get upset if you dive into this with the expectation that we’re going to talk about code or infrastructure on here, and that’s not what you get.

But the reason that technology content is often written more broadly is because, well, writers often want to open up the gates and encourage people to take a deeper look into tech. As much fun as it is to do a deep technical dive into the nuances of how a system is designed, there is a deep threat of losing people if you go too deep without explaining why they should care.

Tying back to our discussion of the Eternal September in this piece, I would also like to make a broader point: We have to figure out a way to bridge the gap between technical and non-technical users online. To pretend that there isn’t room to offer a helping hand, or that we can just focus on our own tiny bubble, just isn’t working anymore.

In September of 1993, well-established users who felt their territory was being encroached on by people who didn’t earn their place in the digital culture reacted by being inhospitable to those users.

It’s nearly three decades later, and in the years since, tech has very much won. Our world has been redefined by it, in ways large and small. And while technical corners can and should exist, we should no longer pretend that technical users have a monopoly on these stories.

And, honestly, given the way that technology has negatively affected the lives of so many, we need to do a better job explaining it to the average person, so they have a chance to grab a hold of the ways that algorithms define what we see online, or how automation might reshape our lives and careers, in ways good and bad.

The Eternal September is over. We’re well into October now. We need to open up the gates.

It’s Time for the Eternal September to End syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[jamaninja]

Olicity fanfic: Winner, Winner, Chicken Dinner - ch. 4

Word count: 4,117 Rating: Teen Summary: As Felicity falls down the rabbit hole of her past, she turns to the only person she thinks who can help her.

Read on: AO3 | ff.net

Chapter 4

Present day, Starling City

It had been a long time since Felicity had cried her eyes out by herself in her car. She hadn’t really been lying when she told Oliver that she was exhausted, but the source of her exhaustion wasn’t from the nights she spent on their vigilante mission. It was from having to lie to him.

In truth, she wanted nothing more than to be able to tell him what was going on. She wanted to sit down and relate every part of her dark past, tell him what she had agreed to do. But she knew better. She knew the minute she told him, he'd cease to see her as someone trustworthy. She wouldn’t be his girl anymore.

She snorted through her tears at that particular thought. To be completely honest, she had never really been his girl. Not when his heart still belonged to Laurel, and then Sara. She was third place at best.

With heavy limbs, she dragged herself out of her car once she had finally reached her building and walked up the flights to her apartment.

It was just as she had left it. The furniture bright and colorful as ever, the posters giving hint to her nerdy proclivities, the coats and shoes strewn everywhere a testament to her messier nature.

It had been her one, true haven since she moved here, and the thought of leaving it behind to return to her hometown made her despair a little.

As she toed off her shoes and threw her jacket atop the pile next to the door, her phone started buzzing in her pocket. Thinking it might be Digg asking her to bring back some food on her way to the foundry, she answered it without even glancing at the screen.

“You know, Digg, you should probably lay off the Big Belly Burger,” she began without preamble. “And if you ask me to bring back another double bacon jalapeño bomber, I will puke into the bag before I even make it back to Verdant.”

“Ew,” a distinctly feminine voice answered her. “For the record, you know I would never order a double bacon jalapeño bomber, and if I ever did, you officially have my permission to puke in the bag before you ever gave it to me.”

Felicity’s eyes widened behind her glasses when she recognized the voice. “Alena?” she gasped. “Is that you?”

“The one and only,” she said proudly. “Hey, Felicity. It’s been a while, hasn’t it?”

Her voice had much the same effect on Felicity as Myron’s did. She felt a rush of nostalgia and a little bit of sadness and regret over how their group friendship had fallen apart all those years ago. And, of course, she realized how much she missed her.

“It’s been a long while,” Felicity answered as she sank down onto her teal couch. “So long I almost didn’t recognize your voice. How in the world have you been?”

“Oh, I’m still kicking,” Alena said lightly. “I’m also still in Boston. Never could leave this fucking town. Cayden’s here too. We actually got engaged a few months ago.”

A smile spread across Felicity’s face in spite of herself. “I thought you guys didn’t believe in the institution of marriage.”

“We don’t,” Alena sniffed. “But we also realized it’s easier trying to buy a house when we have a joint banking account. Plus we pay less in taxes to a corrupt government when we’re legally bound to one another. And don’t think you’re getting an invitation. No one is — we’re just going to city hall to sign a piece of paper. No big deal.”

Felicity laughed. Alena was perhaps the least sentimental person she had ever met, and it seemed that part of her hadn’t changed.

“Remember all those times in Vegas when we tried to get you guys to go down to the Elvis Chapel o’ Love to get hitched?”

Alena snorted. “How could I forget? Myron even said he’d give us $10,000 as a wedding gift if we went through with it. That was the only time Cayden and I ever seriously considered it.”

Felicity laughed again, thinking warmly back to those times. But the spell of nostalgia didn’t last long — after all, it was kind of hard to wander down memory lane when it ended in a gigantic sinkhole of terrible recollections.

Alena must have sensed the change in mood, because her tone got a little more serious. “Speaking of Myron, he told me the other day that he managed to convince you to come back to the world of Vegas card counting, and I didn’t want to believe it until I heard it from your mouth.”

Felicity didn’t say anything.

“Well?” Alena finally prompted. “Is he telling the truth?”

A sigh. Then, “Yes. He is.”

There was another long pause between the two of them before Alena finally spoke up again. “That certainly is a surprise. I thought the last thing you’d ever want to do was to go back.”

Felicity fidgeted a little. “Yeah, well...Myron needs my help. Or our help, I guess, since you’re apparently in on it.”

Alena hummed. “Yeah. Well, I was gonna ask if it was going to be weird for you to be working with Cooper again, but you two must not be as on the outs as I thought.”

Ice ran through Felicity’s veins at the implication in her friend’s words. “What do you mean?”

“Myron’s bringing the whole team back together. Didn’t he tell you? That’s how Myron tracked you down in the first place. He got your contact info from Cooper.”

Fuck. Fuck.

“No, he failed to mention that,” Felicity said, her voice shaking slightly, despite all her efforts to make it sound light and unconcerned. She took in a deep breath, hoping the oxygen would calm her nerves. “But I guess it makes sense. They were best friends and roommates. They did everything together. I used to say they were joined at the hip, like conjoined twins. Until they got into that fight. Remember? That was scary.”

“Felicity? You’re rambling.”

She sighed again. “I know.”

Alena paused, and the silence spoke volumes. There had been a time when Alena probably knew her better than anyone else, and they both knew that Felicity rambled because her brain moved at a faster pace than everyone else’s, so her thoughts would just tumble out of her mouth without stopping. It was only something Felicity did when she was trying to process something very quickly in a very short amount of time.

“Yeah, that was scary,” Alena said seriously. “But I guess it’s all water under the bridge now. Myron’s got us all back together. It’ll be just like old times.”

“Old times. Yeah. Well look, Alena, I have to be somewhere in a few minutes.”

“Right. You have to get that Digg character some Big Belly Burger.”

“Yeah.”

“So I’ll talk to you soon?”

“Sure. At the very least, I’ll see you in Vegas this weekend.”

Alena laughed. “Man, it’s been a while since I’ve heard you say that. Kinda feels like our old MIT days, huh?”

Felicity tried to force herself to chuckle, but all she could manage was just the weakest smile that Alena wouldn’t even be able to see. “It sure does. Talk to you later.”

She had barely hung up the phone before her shaking limbs forced her to drop her it.

Goddamn it.

She knew it had been such a mistake to agree to this when Myron had asked, but now she had to go back to work with Cooper.

And what was worse, Cooper had been the one who found her after all.

Her panic was beginning to take a life of its own, and soon she had to start pacing to keep herself from hyperventilating. Cooper knew her email address. Which meant he knew where to find her. Which meant he had been looking for her.

Through her anxiety, she tried to find a way out of this. What if she just didn’t go through with this after all? What if she just said, “Sorry, Myron, but this was a bad idea from the start and I can’t help you out. I’m an upstanding citizen now with a nine to five and a fulfilling side hustle, and I can’t jeopardize that just because you failed at changing the tech world.”

She winced. The words sounded far too harsh in her head, and just because things ended disastrously with Cooper didn’t mean that Myron had to pay for it. Besides, if the situation had been reversed, Myron would have come to help her in a heartbeat, because that was just the kind of person he was.

No, backing out was completely futile. They all knew where to find her now, so even if Myron let her off the hook, Cooper wouldn’t.

She was trapped in the worst situation she could have imagined, and she couldn’t see a way out.

Oliver’s words from earlier in the elevator came to mind. “Felicity, if something’s bothering you, I want to help. You know you can come to me,” he’d said.

How badly she wanted to turn to him now. But she knew she never could. Despite everything he’d been through (things decidedly more terrible than anything she’d ever experienced) there was no way he’d be able to understand or forgive the decisions she made in her past.

But, she thought as a small flicker of hope flared up inside of her, there was one person who she might be able to turn to. One person who might be able to help her out of this mess.

The only problem was, contacting him would open a whole new can of worms entirely.

Felicity bit her lip as she stared at her phone, sitting innocuously on her carpet. Though it was true that she promised herself she would avoid talking to him as much as she could, she had to admit she was running low on options.

Finally, after warring with herself for several minutes, she picked her phone off the floor and typed out a text with lightning fast fingers.

We need to meet. Tomorrow night. 10 o’clock at the Old Station Pub.

Noah responded within seconds.

OK.

Six years ago, MIT

Alena and Myron were both dealing cards in two separate stacks in front of them, and they were going at the speed of light.

“Stop,” Alena commanded. They both looked up at Felicity who had been staring at the two stacks in front of her with laser-like focus. “What’s the count?”

“Plus twelve,” she said pointing to Myron stack, then she pointed to Alena’s. “Plus nine.”

“What are the code words?” Alena asked.

Felicity bit down on her lip. “Um...twelve is eggs and nine is cat.”

Myron smiled. “Meow.”

Felicity giggled a little while Alena rolled her eyes and continued dealing.

For the past two weeks, Felicity had been studying harder than she ever had in her life. But for once, she wasn’t studying advanced coding language or incomprehensible algorithms that would have made anyone else’s head spin. This time, she was studying basic math and a code tied to it that helped the team fly under the radar.

She had to admit, when Noah explained everything, she was impressed at the system they’d developed. When she had heard all the counting stories from her childhood, they always starred some poor schmuck who thought he could outthink the pit boss. But they also always worked alone, which made them easier to spot.

The reason these guys worked in a team was to make it harder for them to get caught. Instead of all of them raking in tons of money, it was only two people at the most who would win big, and they would never win too much before setting off alarms — instead, they would win from a few tables in one casino before heading off to the next one. And most of all, everyone donned different disguises every night.

“Stop,” Alena said once again. “How about now?”

“Plus six,” she answered pointing to his deck. “Gun.”

“And?” Myron prompted.

“Um, plus seventeen. Magazine.”

In the beginning, Noah had drawn up flash cards for her. On one side, there was a number. On the other side was the codeword. Felicity would stay up until all hours of the night in her dorm room, trying to memorize each word. Some were easy — there were twelve eggs in a carton, or sweet sixteen. But some were a little more difficult — for example, she had no idea how six could tie to gun or even how you could slip that word into a casual conversation.

Because that’s how it worked as a team. They were divided into big players and spotters. The spotters would station themselves at different tables when the dealer got a fresh deck and bet the table minimum to keep the count. Once the count got high enough, that meant the deck was hot and the spotter would cross their arms behind their backs to signal a big player to come over. When the big player came over, the spotter would then have to let them know the count using just the code words.

Alena was the best at this. She always had go-to phrases, but they sounded so natural in conversation that no one would think she was speaking in code.

“There goes that paycheck,” she’d lament as she put down another bet. But to the big player that just sat down next to her, they’d know the count was now plus fifteen.

Or sometimes she’d tell the dealer, “You know, you’d be a real sweet guy if you weren’t trying to take all my money,” and then the big player would know the count was now plus sixteen.

For Felicity, this was probably what came hardest to her. When she was practicing with the team, they told her to use “sweet” in a sentence and all she could come up with, “Man, that sugar’s sweet.”

That had the team laughing uproariously at the lameness of her codeword usage, but all she could do was smile sheepishly in response.

And it wasn’t just codewords she had to memorize. She also had to memorize signals, but they were easy enough. When a spotter crossed their arms behind their backs, it meant the deck was hot. If someone touched near their eyes, it meant “we need to talk.” A hand on the forehead meant the deck was cooling, but the big one was if someone ran their hands through their hair — that meant to get out. Get out now.

One day at practice, Noah declared that Felicity was ready for her first trial run, which surprised her.

“There’s a trial run?” she asked curiously. Surely they weren’t going to take her all the way to Vegas to practice. “Where?”

Noah simply smirked. “You’ll meet a man named Chien, outside the Golden Dragon restaurant in Chinatown tomorrow night at nine o’clock. Tell him your name and he’ll invite you to follow him. Bring as much cash with you as you can.”

Despite major trepidation over just how shady this whole situation sounded, Felicity did as instructed. She took the Yellow Line out to Chinatown and found the Golden Dragon at nine o’clock. Right outside the restaurant was a weedy looking man with small black eyes and greasy black hair draped over a sallow face.

“Felicity?” he asked in a raspy voice.

She nodded, too terrified to speak.

“Follow me,” he said.

Instead of going into the restaurant, he led her into the dimly lit alleyway adjacent, and Felicity’s flight instinct flared up once again. She was beginning to regret ever getting herself mixed up in all of this when Chien walked up to a door with an iron grate in front of it. He pushed aside the grate and unlocked the door, then stepped aside to allow her to walk through.

To her surprise, there was a small casino set up inside. It was a little dark, which was the complete opposite of a Vegas casino (since they were designed to make you forget what time of day it was), but it looked the same in most other respects. There were roulette tables, poker tables, even a few slot machines in the corner. And there were even women milling around, weaving between everyone carrying trays of drinks.

Remembering that Noah had called this a trial run, Felicity stepped onto the pit floor and looked for someone she knew. Sure enough, Myron was sitting at a table in the middle of the room, and when he spotted her with a quick glance over his shoulder, he leaned back in his seat and crossed his arms behind him.

Her palms got a little sweaty as she recognized the signal. With shaky limbs, she walked forward and climbed onto the stool on the far side of the table.

Once she was seated, Myron piped up. “So, Henry. Did I tell you I read about this place in a magazine?”

Felicity’s ears perked at the word. Magazine. Which meant the count was plus seventeen.

The dealer turned to her. “You wanna put that money down?”

She nodded, taking out a wad of twenties and putting it down on the table. “Three hundred, she told them.

“Three hundred,” the dealer called out.

Then, he started dealing. Felicity glanced around, making note of each card he placed — and sure enough, her first hand was a king and an ace.

“Winner, winner, chicken dinner,” the dealer called out.

A smile blossomed across her face. With one hand, she’d doubled all the money she’d made from working two whole weeks at Tech Village.

She continued playing and counting for a half hour. The count remained high, meaning there were quite a few more chances for her to keep winning. But in the middle of her streak, her vision suddenly disappeared when someone put a bag over her face and pulled her backward off her stool.

“What the hell!” Felicity screamed. “Get off of me! Let go!”

Her limbs flailed in terror against the people who were restraining her. She thrashed and kicked, but it wasn’t enough. They gripped her wrists and ankles with strength she hadn’t realized was possible as she felt them lift her and carry her away.

Just as she was about to go into a full-fledged panic attack, the pressure on her limbs disappeared and she was thrown against what felt like a wall. Someone lifted the bag over her head, and all she could see was a bright light shining in her face and obscuring everything else around her.

“What are you doing?” she yelled once she was free of the bag. “I didn’t do anything!”

“What’s the count?” a deep voice demanded.

She could barely register what they asked. She was too terrified of what might happen to her at that moment. “Please, don’t hurt me.”

“What’s the count?” the voice insisted again.

“Just let me go,” she begged. “Please, please don’t hurt me. I didn’t do anything!” Oh God, she thought. They were going to cut her hands off. Or they were going to bust her kneecaps. She knew she never should have gotten into this!

“I said, what’s the count!” the voice growled.

That was when she realized that they weren’t going to let her go until she answered their question. With tears welling up in her eyes, she finally gave in.

“Plus...plus eighteen,” she sobbed.

There was silence, and her imagination ran wild in that prolonged moment as she thought of the thousands of things they would do to torture her. Cracking her kneecaps was a favorite. Breaking her hand was another. But just as she was working herself into a real panic attack over it, the lights suddenly came back on, and everyone on the team was beaming at her with pride.

Noah was in the center of the circle as he held a hand out to her. “Congratulations, Felicity.”

Her mind was still reeling at the sudden change in all of this. What the hell was going on? She wasn’t going to be tortured after all?

“Sorry,” he continued when he realized she didn’t seem to understand. “We had to make sure you’d keep the count under pressure.”

Under pressure? Under pressure? Is that what he called the thought of losing your kneecaps to a bunch of shady thugs in an underground casino in Boston’s Chinatown?

“Welcome to the team,” he continued, grabbing her hand and pulling her back up.

“We didn’t mean it,” Alena said with a reassuring smile and a pat on the back.

“It’s OK, I nearly peed myself when it happened to me,” Myron joked.

She assumed they meant to put her mind at ease, but nothing they said helped. They purposely tricked her into thinking that she’d be hurt just to test her? What kind of sick game was this?

This was a huge mistake after all, she thought angrily to herself as she reached up to swipe at her tears under the guise of readjusting her glasses. She should have listened to her first instincts and turned away once and for all when they invited her to join them. She never, ever should have said yes to any of this.

While everyone around her was celebrating the new addition to the team, Cooper was the only one who seemed to realize just how quiet their new teammate was acting. Reaching forward to grip her elbow, he gently led her to the back of the room. Telling everyone that they just needed a bit of air, he pushed open a hidden door that opened up to the same alley she came in, but further down from the entrance.

Cooper took a cursory glance to make sure they were alone before he faced Felicity. “Are you OK?” he asked quietly.

Tears flooded her eyes at his question. “You guys made me think I was about to get my head bashed in back there!” she shot at him. “Of course I’m not OK!”

Cooper didn’t say anything. All he did was watch her and wait in silence as she pulled herself together.

“I never should have agreed to this,” she said shakily. “This was a big mistake. I can’t do this after all.”

“Wait,” Cooper said, grabbing onto her arm to keep her from leaving. “Please don’t leave. I know that was harsh back there, but you can give it another shot.”

“Another shot?” she cried. “If that was the trial, what the hell are you going do to me if I go with you to Vegas? Chop off my fingers? Cut out my tongue? Paralyze me from the waist down so I can never run away again? What?”

“Listen, Felicity.” Cooper’s voice deepened to a commanding, but soothing tone. He gripped her by the shoulders as he stared deeply into her eyes. “I’m sorry. Really, truly sorry about what happened back there. We never should have made you feel unsafe.”

She sniffed. In spite of it all, she reluctantly felt herself being pulled in by the sincerity in his words.

“I personally promise that I will never let anything happen to you, OK? No one will ever lay a hand on you ever again.”

His green eyes were mesmerizing. Almost hypnotic. Even if she wanted to look away, she wouldn’t have been able to.

“Do you believe me?”

In a daze, she nodded.

That made him smile, and it was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. Felicity’s heart started pounding out a ragged beat in her chest, and suddenly her shoulders felt very warm. She wanted to be the only one who could make him smile like that. She wanted to be closer to him. She wanted to make him happy.

“So then,” he murmured, his face just inches from hers as his green gaze bore right through her thick glasses, “does that mean you’ll stay on the team?”

The panic from before had dissipated. All that was left with this dull throb, this aching want that was directed entirely toward the man standing right in front of her.

If she stayed on the team, she’d get to spend more time with him. Hell, she’d get to spend entire weekends with him. She’d get to see more of his smile, more of his eyes, more of him.

In that moment, that was all she wanted.

She took a deep breath and released it before she gave him her answer.

“OK.”

Drop me a line if you want to get tagged in updates!

[mshellbrat]

Hey guys! The next chapter of my Olicity Arrow/BTVS xover is now up! Sorry for the wait, but it’s been a really really bad week for me work-wise and now I’m spending the holiday weekend with my family. I will try to do better. I would love to hear what you think!

Chapter Summary:  Felicity and Team Arrow face their first night of slayer patrol. Things, as always, don't exactly go according to plan.

Rating: M (for language, violence, and some gore so far)

Disclaimer: I own NOTHING!...except my original characters and their imaginary organization... :-)

Here goes!

“So,” Felicity looked up and toward her cousin who was sitting irreverently on top of a gravestone and kicking her feet back and forth still wearing her borrowed hot-pink mini, “exactly how long do we have to wait before...” she leaned over and looked down, “Edward here decides to make an appearance?” Before anyone could answer, she snorted to herself. “Edward the Vampire...dude should thank us for putting him out of that misery.”

Felicity glared at the tiny brunette. “Mere!”

Felicity, her cousin, and her mentor Dare were all currently waiting for poor Edward to awaken to his most-likely short undead afterlife. Felicity because this was to be her first actual battle against a vampire, Dare for backup and support should she need it, and Meredith because the half-vampire insisted she had to 'protect' her cousin. Dare had argued against her inclusion, but Meredith had pointed out her half-vampire status and that the new vamp would probably overlook her in any case. She also assured them that she was well versed in “ripping out hearts”...cause that was SUPER reassuring.

And Oliver? Well, he and Roy were positioned at range with a clear view of the area. The Pures had supplied them with wooden arrows. Digg was running comms, and Cross, Case, Riley, and Laurel were actually keeping an eye out on the rest of the city while Team Arrow were distracted.

Meredith rolled her eyes at Felicity and turned her focus on Dare. “Are we working on a specific timetable? Ballpark figure?”

Dare frowned. “You're a vampire...and you said you weren't new to this.”

Meredith waved her hand. “We didn't troll graveyards. We helped keep 'The Bronze' a safe zone and pitched in whenever some dumbass tried to open the Hellmouth.” Meredith made a face. “That last part just happened every other week or so. There are a lot of supernatural dumbasses.”

Felicity stared at her. “Every other week or so?” Just how often was she supposed to be dealing with these supernatural threats?

“This is a full-time job, Felicity,” Dare answered. He seemed to understand where her thoughts were headed. “This is every night. You know this isn't going away.”

Felicity groaned and gritted her teeth. She held up one finger for Dare and Meredith to give her a minute and marched away a bit. She lowered her voice and spoke to Oliver via comms. “Oliver, you CANNOT follow me around every night. You have to protect the city.”

“You realize we can still hear you, right?” Meredith called. “Vampires!”

“I'm also on comms,” Dare noted.

Felicity ignored them. “Oliver!”

< I'm exactly where I belong, Felicity...protecting you. >

Felicity glared toward the mausoleum she knew he was perked on. “That is not an acceptable response. Starling needs the Arrow!”

< A vampire infestation, an active hellmouth...these are the greatest threats Starling is currently facing. We ARE protecting this city. >

“This isn't your fight!” Felicity insisted.

< It is now. >

< Come on, Blondie, > Roy spoke up. < You can't honestly expect us to let you face this alone. >

“I'm not alone,” the slayer pointed back toward Dare and her cousin. “I have supernatural training, abilities, and backup. It doesn't take five people to kill one possessed vampire. This guy's probably going to pee himself.”

“She kinda has a point,” Meredith agreed. “I mean, we've got the slayer, a half-vamp, Dare the Pure, Red Fish and Green Fish out there, and let's not forget G.I. Joe back in the van. This is basically the roster to stop a decent size mini-apocalypse back in Edencrest. Good ole Eddie would probably rather dig his way to China than pop up here.”

“Would you stop mocking the victim?” Felicity hissed as she walked back over to join them.

Meredith canted her head to the side. “Yea...no, no I won't. The victim is gone. He's a Possessed now and you're fixing to kill him. You can't feel SORRY for him.” Her long brown curls danced around her shoulders as she pointed at Felicity sternly. “It's a rule!”

Felicity looked at Dare for help. The Pure winced and lifted a hand to rub the back of his neck. “As much as I hate to agree with drunken terror...”

“See!” Meredith gloated and hopped to her feet now standing on the headstone. “Even Ponyboy knows I'm right! You can't start humanizing every Possessed you face, Lissy. They have no souls. They're...” she pondered what word to use.

“Cockroaches,” Dare reluctantly supplied.

“Hmm,” Meredith pursed her lips, “I usually associate that particularly insect with Micah, but yea...” she nodded, “that works too.”

And Felicity wondered if she even wanted to know who Micah was. She filed the name away for another day. Now wasn't the time. She focused back on Oliver in her ear (and hey she didn't even think an embarrassing innuendo in her head that time...so she was calling that progress). “Oliver, the point is? THIS is massive overkill! This cannot become a nightly routine.”

Meredith nodded again. “Back in the day? One slayer and a stuffy British guy in tweed...who basically just watched and took notes.”

“This isn't back in the day,” Dare frowned at Meredith and she tossed him a 'duh' expression in return, “but we also don't need an army for every cemetery patrol. I allowed it tonight because it's Felicity's first kill. I understand her team's apprehension.”

< You ALLOWED it? > Oliver growled.

“Don't get your panties in a bunch, Ollie,” Dare mocked, “I'm well aware that I'm stuck with your ass for the foreseeable future.” He lifted his brows and looked at his slayer. “But Cross and Case did not sign up permanently for your crusade. They're covering tonight so your team can see what we're dealing with. As for tomorrow on? Other arrangements are going to have to be made. We only deal with human threats under very specific circumstances. We can't endanger the balance.”

“Great google,” Felicity realized, “I'm actually going to have to train someone on comms.” She was going to be spending every night in the field. She could research, develop, hack whatever was needed during the daylight hours and downtime, but during peak business hours she was going to be permanently unavailable. This was a disaster!

< Can I vote for...not Laurel? > Roy quipped.

< We'll worry about this later, > Oliver said.

“We will most definitely be talking about this later,” Felicity said, “but I will be worrying about this now. I'm an excellent multitasker.” She looked back toward the newly dug grave. “I can both watch dirt and freak out about letting someone else mess with my babies.”

“SHIT!” Dare cursed.

Felicity jumped and looked at her mentor. Dare was facing the direction where Oliver, Roy, and their current squat were located. Felicity frowned and turned as well. “What...” but her senses went wild. Her eyes narrowed and she spotted three figures moving through the darkness. As her eyes focused in, she recognized the female in the middle. “Oh frack!”

“Looks like Big Mamma decided to come pick up her new boy toy personally,” Meredith noted, “and she brought friends.”

“Arrow, Arsenal, behind you!” Felicity called.

Before she could even move in that direction, Meredith flashed by her at supernatural speed. Dare followed the half-vampire and Felicity ran after them. By the time she reached the fight, Dare had grabbed one vampire and thrown him away to buy them some time, then taken on the female who was obviously the largest threat. Meredith growled and jumped on the third male's back as he tried to reach the mausoleum and climb toward the vigilantes.

That left the other male for Felicity and she placed herself between the Possessed and her team. The vampire studied the blonde with a smirk. He looked over her jacket, yoga pants, and sneakers. Then he sniffed the air and laughed unimpressed. “Now what is a cute little blonde like you doing in a place like this? Don't you know good little girls get eaten?”

Felicity opened her mouth to respond, but the vampire yelled in pain as an arrow tore through his shoulder. The slayer knew the archer without looking. “HEART, ARSENAL! Aim for the heart!”

< Sorry, Blondie. I'm working on it. > Roy replied. < Keep him distracted. >

Felicity scoffed in disgust. “I love you, Scarecrow, but I don't think he's going to stand there so you can correct your aim.”

The vampire dove toward Felicity and she followed her instincts and danced to the side. He growled and Felicity finally got a good look at his real face. His forehead was deformed, twisted with wrinkles and bumps. His eyes glowed yellow with demonic energy, and his fangs glinted at the sides of his mouth. Okay, she was finding it a lot easier not to humanize him now.

“I'm starting to appreciate the sparkly 'Twilight' version,” Felicity muttered. “These things are fugly!”

< Felicity! > Oliver's voice was frantic. Felicity knew he must be tied up in a fight of his own.

“Hold on, Lissy!” Meredith shouted. “I forgot to bring a stake.”

Felicity looked back to see her cousin yanking viciously on her opponent's hair, still riding his back. As she watched the tiny brunette dove forward and clamped her own fangs into the side of the Possessed's neck then ripped them back out tearing flesh and sending blood flying. And that was just all kinds of eww.

A familiar dip in her stomach had Felicity dodging and just escaping the grip of her attacker. The vampire growled and tried to circle her. Felicity focused and matched his steps. She reached back and pulled free the stake hidden behind her back. She might need that. Google, but she was bad at this!

The vampire growled even louder as it recognized her weapon. Felicity didn't know what came over her, but she smiled. She waved the chunk of wood back and forth. “Not so much fun when the little blonde fights back, huh?”

“Slayer!” he spat.

< Felicity stop taunting the vampire! > Digg reprimanded, but he sounded out of breath.

Felicity frowned. “Digg stay in the damn van!”

< Too late. On my way. >

“Fabulous,” Felicity rolled her eyes.

< Felicity! > Roy warned.

The slayer ducked and swept the vampire's legs out from under him. He hit the ground, but then rolled to the side before she could pin him down. Felicity frowned and chased him. Stupid stubborn undead cockroach...

“Don't play his game, Sweetie,” Dare's voice sounded from the right and Felicity danced back and away. She glanced quickly to her mentor. He was leaning against the mausoleum having obviously already finished off his opponent. Now he was turning this into a practical lesson. He notched his head toward the vamp. “Remember your training. Make him play yours.”

The vamp hissed realizing his odds just got worse. He leapt forward, then howled again, this time an arrow sliced through his abdomen. Felicity threw up her hands. “REALLY, ROY?!?”

< Hey, that asshole's fast, okay? I'm trying! >

“You need to slap more water!” Felicity said.

< Felicity, tell your idiot cousin to move the vamp back away from the mausoleum and get off his damn back so I can finish him off! > Oliver barked.

“I heard that, jackass,” Meredith growled, “I'm only about thirty feet from you and I've got enhanced hearing. Who's the idiot, again?”

The vamp facing Felicity paused momentarily and looked offended. “Exactly how many of you are there?”

And, of course, this was when John Diggle came running up gun drawn and ready to help. The vampire obviously decided it was time to retreat. He moved toward Digg. Felicity reacted on instinct to protect her team, more than that to protect her family. She pulled Digg out of the way, passed him off to a waiting Dare, and met the vampire head-on. She sent one kick to the vampire's core, then another before he could move or react. He stumbled back slightly and she jumped and spun to kick him full-force in the head. The vamp fell rolling on the ground, but this time Felicity planted her full weight across his chest and pinned him. She flipped the stake in her hand point down, then buried it through his heart. The vampire froze stunned, then burst into dust.

Felicity coughed and waved her hand to clear the dust. She scrambled to her feet and turned to face Digg and Dare. “You guys okay?”

John nodded wide-eyed. “I should have stayed in the van.”

Dare huffed a laugh and clapped the taller man on the shoulder. “It's all good. You were trying to help.”

One problem solved, Felicity now looked to Meredith. The tiny brunette was still riding the final vampire's back. Her hands and face were covered in blood and the vampire was stumbling and trying unsuccessfully to dislodge her.

“Meredith, MOVE!” Felicity called.

Her cousin reacted immediately to Felicity's voice. She jerked the vampire into Felicity's direction, then pushed backward and let him go. Felicity threw a stake with perfect accuracy to lodge through his chest and into his heart. An arrow pierced him back to front at exactly the same time. The vampire looked down, cursed, then burst into dust.

“I am never gonna get use to that,” John muttered.

“Saves time on cleanup,” Dare pointed out.

A furious growl sounded from behind the mausoleum. Every head turned in that direction. They watched as an enraged demon in a dirty suit stalked toward them.

Meredith frowned. “Shit, we forgot about Eddie!”

The new vampire paused briefly hearing it's former name. He growled again and tilted his head in Meredith's direction. He sniffed the air, then made a disgusted face and flinched back as though trying to get away from her.

“You don't exactly smell like a bed of roses either, buddy,” Meredith drawled.

Felicity frowned and looked around for something to use for another stake. Dare waved for her to pause. The Pure leaned toward Felicity. “This guy's a Starling native, right?”

The slayer thought back over the information she'd pulled up on the victim's life. It hurt to think about the poor guy. Edward Thompson had been twenty-two. He'd had his whole life ahead of him. He took a night out at a club, left with the wrong girl, and now...he was this. “Yes,” Felicity frowned confused as she answered, “Starling born and raised.”

Dare nodded. “Good.” He stepped toward the newborn. “Hey Eddie!” The furious yellow eyes snapped in his direction. Dare just smiled and pointed toward the top of the mausoleum. “It's the Arrow!”

The newborn's head snapped toward where Oliver and Roy were positioned. He hissed in fear, then spun and started to run away. He only made it a few feet before Oliver put him out of his misery. As the arrow torn through his heart, he stumbled, then burst into dust.

Felicity glared at Dare. The Pure shrugged in return. “It worked,” he noted. Then he clapped his hands together and dusted off his jeans. He walked forward toward Meredith and threw the tiny brunette an irritated glance. “I forgot to bring a stake?”

Meredith held up her blood-covered hands. “I tried for his heart. Sucker was too tall. I couldn't get the right angle.”

Felicity heard John choke behind her. She turned and walked over to support her friend and partner. She led him toward the others. Oliver and Roy were climbing down from the mausoleum to join them.

“SO,” Dare looked them all over with critical eyes, “you've all officially survived your first night of patrol. Let's review, shall we?”

Thank you so much for reading! I would love to hear what you think!

[falselysettos-blog]

How To Break The Heartbreaker {part 3: angst}

Daveed Diggs x Reader • Warnings: probably swearing, complete and utter sadness • Authors Note: sorry for what you're about to read. it's a diddly shame of how it ends. sadness ensues. read much fluff afterwards • Days turned to weeks, weeks turned to months, months turned to a year. Daveed Diggs hadn't come back to school in 2 months, everyone assumed he just couldn't handle the work. You knew better. Everyday, he'd avoided you in the halls, the crestfallen look on his face almost too much for you to bear. You tried to move on. You really tried. It wasn't like Diggs was going to ruin your life with a stupid breakup, right? Right? You knew that you were wrong every time you thought that you could move on. He'd broken your heart beyond compare, and scattered the pieces, leaving you to try to live as before. It was like you now had to travel the world to find another will to live, to pick up your heart and reconstruct a new life. But that world revolved around Diggs, and there was no escaping him. ~ The thing was, you knew exactly what had happened. About 3 months after you and Diggs had split, your friend group did the same. You all went your separate ways, and you hardly ever spoke to them anyways. One day, you had been staring blankly at the ground when they sat down at your table, making you instantly suspicious. They hadn't spoken to you in almost a month, what were they doing here? "Y/N, we have something to tell you, and you're not going to take any of it very well." They told you all of it. Every detail, every step of their plan. You sat there, open-mouthed, as they recited the day they ruined your life, the day you had ruined your own life. After finishing, they sat, waiting for some sort of reaction from you. You didn't have one to give. The shock of it all, the mess of it just smoldered in your brain as you contemplated what you'd done. How you'd taken something so perfect, and crushed it. Daveed Diggs had opened your eyes, had shown you the world. What you were missing, what you weren't. He had done so much for you, and now he wasn't in your life anymore. So no, you had no reaction to give them, and eventually they left, leaving you alone to drown in despair. ~ 3 years later, and you were out of that wretched high school, living out the next chapter in your life. Daveed Diggs was just a painful memory, his name always giving you a wave of sadness that was getting easier and easier to overcome. You hadn't talked to him in years, what was the use of remaining attached? It would only tear you up more and more, and you were just so tired of waking up hurt, and crying yourself to sleep. You'd moved on, though you hated to say it. He was, and always would be, your first love. You still thought about him, which always made you feel extremely guilty. But you thought about him less and less now, and you finally started feeling *happy* again. You had a new boyfriend, who you were so in love with that it made you almost forget Diggs altogether. Almost. ~ Whenever Diggs came to mind, it was always the happy memories of when he was yours. You never thought about the unhappy memories, which would probably be why you hadn't completely moved on yet. You still had an album of him on your cell phone, which you found yourself looking at more times than you would like to admit. Still, the wanting and longing in your heart was dull now, sedated. You lived your life, no longer in a dark hole of despair, and you had honestly missed it. ~ You awoke one morning with a throbbing headache, and went downstairs to make yourself some tea. You relaxed, looking out the window of your new house that you had moved into with your boyfriend. Life was finally making sense, it was coming back together. You had thought you'd lost everything with Diggs, but you had found what was left of yourself, and went the extra mile. You would usually go out to check the mail around this time, so you braved the chilly morning air and stepped outside, shivering as the wind blew around you. Noticing a small peculiar-shaped package on your welcome mat, you brought it inside, thinking it was a package from your fiancé. You opened it, and smiled sadly as you felt a stab of sadness spread through your body. He had gotten you a small bouquet of red roses, the sweet smell reminding you of all those years ago, a memory you had tried to repress. There was a small notecard attached to the rose in the middle, which you opened, expecting a sweet "I love you" or something that he traditionally sent. When you read the notecard, you sucked in a short breath and dropped the roses, immediately knowing who they were from. The notecard read, "For old times sake." ~ Your husband never understood why you wanted to name your child Rose. You always refused to give him an answer, keeping the secret to yourself, the one thing that you would never tell anyone else. Rose had curly red hair, which made you reminisce every time you looked at her. She didn't look anything like Diggs, but you felt like a piece of him would always be attached to you, and you had passed it onto your daughter. The red in her hair reminded you of those red roses, which now carried a blessing and a curse. You hadn't talked to Diggs in almost a decade. After he'd sent the roses for the last time, you tried to get in contact with him again. He always was so elusive, as if he preferred to just leave you a bit more broken every time. You didn't find him. You tried, and continued to try, but it was to no avail. Daveed Diggs had escaped your life for good, so it seemed. You eventually gave up, and forgot about him. He was the past, and this was your present. Your future surely didn't hold him in it. When you got the letter in the mail, it was as if it was high school all over again. It was an invitation to his funeral. He was gone. And this time forever. ~ You went to the funeral, though you felt out of place. You didn't think you deserved to be there, but couldn't deny the heartbreaking feeling in your chest whenever you thought of him now. All the sadness came flooding back to you, and you were reliving what you had thought you'd left in the past. When you arrived at the church, you stepped inside and peered around. There were many people there, some of whom you recognized, but didn't care to talk to. You instead made your way to the casket, placing your hand on the soft, cold wood. You felt a tear slip down your cheek as you placed a singular red rose on top of it, and whispered as you turned to leave, "For old times sake."

[kansascityhappenings]

Taye Diggs, Shane W. Evans meet with kids for Literacy KC event

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Actor Taye Diggs was in Kansas City on Saturday along with local author, Shane W. Evans, for Literacy KC’s ‘Let’s Read!’ event.

FOX4’s Sherae Honeycutt spoke to the pair about the importance of representation and strong, positive role models for people of color.

“As fathers ourselves, we realize the importance of this, and we are very excited to come spread the word, and help in any way,” Diggs said.

Hundreds of kids came to the event, along with parents, teachers, librarians, and supporters. Diggs and Evans spent time with them signing books, and saying hello. They put together three books together discussing issues of race and representation.

“We want them to have a good time,” Diggs said. “Obviously, we want them to be inspired to read, but it’s kind of an energy thing, and whatever anybody takes from it – we’ll accept that.”

“It’s just magical to see an author, to see an illustrator, right in front of you,” Literacy KC executive director, Gillian Helm, said. “Especially someone so magical, and so artistic, and creative as Taye and Shane. To have them here in front of them is just a special opportunity for kids.”

The pair read their book, Chocolate Me. It discusses blackness, rejection among childhood friends, and finding beauty in your own skin.

“The importance of things like friendships, and relationship to me is vital,” Evans said. “Recognizing that this happened to a friend, and recognizing that it could happen to others, was the moment of recognizing the importance of it.”

“I think it’s important for all people alike to be able to relate to the characters they’re reading about,” Diggs said. “Simply because, they can see themselves, and it gives them – it’s almost like a mirror effect, it’s much easier to kind of understand and relate to characters that have similarities to ourselves.”

Parents and kids listened to their stories and saw celebrities as new friends. Kids like Romero Campbell who didn’t know who Diggs was, but was excited once his teacher told him he was meeting someone famous. Campbell says meeting them was a great experience.

“They were super kind, and nice, and I asked them questions,” Campbell said.

“I hope that they took away that you can do and be whatever you want,” Romero’s mom, Xavier Campbell said. “Whatever you set your dreams to, and you’re hearts to. Whatever superhero you want to be you can be that.”

Literacy KC said their organization works to advance literacy skills to increase lifelong success for families in the area. They say having Diggs and Evans visit helps shine a light on what they do in the community.

from FOX 4 Kansas City WDAF-TV | News, Weather, Sports https://fox4kc.com/2019/04/27/taye-diggs-shane-w-evans-meet-with-kids-for-literacy-kc-event/

from Kansas City Happenings https://kansascityhappenings.wordpress.com/2019/04/28/taye-diggs-shane-w-evans-meet-with-kids-for-literacy-kc-event/

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What Is a Press Release and How Can It Enhance Your Search engine optimization?

A push release is an announcement that you drive out to the media. For this write-up, I am only going to go over world wide web primarily based distribution services. There are other publishing indicates, but my concentrate is on helping you to comprehend how this methodology can enhance your research motor rankings and get qualified back links to your web site, website or landing page. Anatomy of a Push Launch Marketing Campaign A press release marketing strategy can be a extremely successful white hat Seo method. I have aided my consumers to get placement on website page 1 of Google, Yahoo and Bing for the client's qualified key phrases with just one particular optimized launch. Those final results are the two extraordinary and short term, so I advise this marketing and advertising technique as a piece of an general content material approach. Introducing a monthly or quarterly announcement to your editorial calendar will enjoy outstanding optimization positive aspects. What happens when you publish a push release via a top quality distribution services is this: Your content is extremely speedily pushed out to thousands of media outlets. A lot of of these, in change, republish your push release. Web sites that use feeds to carry in clean material get your news merchandise and publish it on their site. Very good topics can get picked up by keywords and hashtags, and are then revealed on social bookmarking internet sites, Facebook business webpages and Twitter. So, in the days adhering to your distribution you will usually discover that your article is published by numerous sources. As you will see in the recommendations underneath, there are also a lot of techniques to increase the duplication of your articles. How to Write, Improve and Publish a Press Launch for Search engine optimisation 1. Decide on your announcement topic. What's your news? For illustration, owing to the excellent Search engine marketing outcomes I am obtaining with push releases, I am likely to publish an announcement about a regular monthly support for firms looking for material marketing and look for engine optimization aid. Your topic could be a change of employees, a new spot, a new service, a new site, a company partnership, item results, and so forth. two. Carry out your search term study and craft your title about these key phrases. This is the most vital step. You want your title to have targeted keywords and phrases for the search engines to select up, although also being really catchy and reader helpful. Your key word investigation presents you the chance to evaluate similar search term strings facet by facet and decide on the ideal one. I use the Google AdWords Keyword Device to recognize the most focused keyword phrases for my matter. 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For illustration, it is appropriate for a CEO to say "This new program is a quite exciting addition to our providers, and we are anticipating wonderful results." But the regular material need to be newsy and non-marketing. four. Choose a high quality net-dependent distribution service. You have several selections for solutions that will distribute your press releases, and I have tried out many of them. I do not recommend free companies, as they rarely have the created-in Search engine optimisation instruments and often have annoying limitations developed to get you to up grade. So you might as effectively choose a good compensated services to commence with. The a single I generally use is a portion of the cost of the high finish companies and I have gotten excellent Seo final results. Right here is what you are looking for in a excellent distribution services: Stay back links can be integrated into the articles. You are authorized to incorporate a symbol, photo, and/or movie. You can include your keywords and phrases. You do not have to sacrifice your lifestyle cost savings to publish your launch. You can discover a list of press release distribution services, which includes both totally free and compensated companies, in the Methods segment of my website. In my experience, you do not need to spend a great deal of funds to get great Search engine optimisation final results. Even so, a corporation that is pushing out a key announcement would undoubtedly want to utilize a single of the highest high quality solutions, this kind of as PRWeb. five. Upload your articles and insert hyperlinks, photographs and keywords and phrases. Link wisely. You do not want your press release seeking like a ransom note. A number of tasteful backlinks back to your site, web site or landing web page are acceptable. 6. Proofread very carefully! Errors and typos are high priced to community impression. Note: If you have copied your content from a Microsoft Word file, be confident to check for any unusual people and make certain the quotation marks search correct. Be sure to view a preview of how the launch will seem dwell, if the distribution service has that capability. 7. Publish your push release. Mid-early morning on a Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday is an ideal time to publish your announcement. Distribution need to come about inside a reasonably brief time, and you ought to get an e mail confirmation with a url to the press launch. eight. Continue with your content marketing. After you publish your release, you want to do far more than just sit again and wait around for site visitors. Think about how you can get far more mileage by way of social media and other strategies. For example: Put up your url on Twitter and Facebook. Submit it to your favored social bookmarking web sites, this kind of as Digg and StumbleUpon. Pose a concern on 1 of your LinkedIn groups with your press launch hyperlink as the answer. Location a hyperlink to the launch on your company website Press website page and optimize the page for that content.

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Freelance SMM Social networking site Advertising and marketing Jobs Online.

Jeff Bullas is one of the best global influencers, professionals and planners on social media advertising. Guide 'Digital and Social network Advertising and marketing: A Results-Driven Technique' is the companion for this MOOC. For example, a considerable amount of social media sites tasks acan be carried out First point in the morning and behind time at night - You can computerized some tasks using programs SocialOomph to Tweet and blogging may be arranged. The quickest means to evaluate the marketplace as well as to learn about the home trend of clients is to create up a social media profile that could help you to connect to your customers. The very first to welcome brand-new types of marketing have always been most effective and in this particular short-lived period the question of when instead of why is actually now notable. I have been actually hunting for a spot in the combined data community where our business fits as well as this content advertising and marketing seems to be to be the area. Today, news in traditional media (papers, buyer magazines, trade diaries, updates syndication services) is actually ideal observed on the Internet. Utilizing integrated social network marketing tools, we can easily target a reader thus accurately in order that the right individuals are actually finding your message, verified to acquire greater click-through-rates and also much better ROI. . Social media site Advertising has had your father's spoken word initiatives and also placed all of them on steroids. Material marketing is a powerful branding resource, and in the congested digital planet it is very important to create satisfied good enough to stand out most of all the sound and be shared. Social network Advertising and marketing:- In Social networking site Marketing our team can work on advertising and marketing (consisting of viral advertising and marketing) efforts through social networking websites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and also Digg. However, social media modern technologies as well as devices such as social networking, wikis as well as blog sites, today permit participation on a much widespread range. This's simple to observe that social networking sites marketing is a crucial for success in marketing as well as a lot of online marketers realize the capacity for organisation development using the platform. Mapping out the excellent advertising and marketing process flow that will certainly better completely transform prospects in to quality sales leads is actually an awesome starting factor. Social media is actually certainly not only confined to offering your company's items as well as promo initiatives. 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YOU HAVE NO TROUBLE WITH UNCOLLECTABLE BILLS; IF SOMEONE WON'T PAY YOU CAN JUST SIT DOWN AND START IMPLEMENTING IT

Most VCs will tell you what language to use, you're riding that curve up instead of down. In print they had to do it?1 What is an incubator? And if half the people around you are professors. So the fewer people you can hire, the better. You really only get one chance, because they require your full attention, and when you resort to that the results are distinctly inferior. Knowing that should help.2

They will be the last to realize it. So shelving an idea costs you not only want to work at things you don't like.3 They would just look at you blankly.4 Immediately Alien Studies would become the most dynamic field of scholarship: instead of sticking your head in someone's office and checking out an idea with them, eight people have to have at least one founder usually the CEO will have to design software so that it can be updated without confusing the users.5 But don't get mad at us. I suppose that's worth something.6 But in fact we were doing that it became a point of honor with me to write nonsense at least as good at the other students' without having more than glanced over the book to learn the names of different rounds.

In Boston the biggest is the Common Angels.7 Even Einstein probably had moments when he wanted to have a low valuation.8 Do you actually want to start your own company, which is like trying to start a new company using Lisp. One is to come back to their offices to implement them.9 Another feeling that seems alarming but is in fact normal in a startup. A new concept of variables. But all art has to work on, toward things you actually like. Ever notice how much easier it is to bait the hook with prestige.10 PhD program, the key is to impress your professors.

In a startup, then hand them off to VC firms with a brilliant idea that you'll tell them about if they sign a nondisclosure agreement, most will tell you what features you need to know about what's happening inside it. If there is a downside here, it is stuffing a square peg into a round hole to try to guess what's going on, as you would in a program you were writing for yourself. The processors in those machines weren't actually intended to be the last work the user has to do the other. So probably math is more worth studying than computer science. The name is more excusable if one considers it as meaning that we enable people to escape cubicles. When manual components look to the user like software, this technique starts to have aspects of a practical joke. When they can, for example, or a job.

And it only does a fraction of the size it turned out that many did. For the first week or so we intended to make this an ordinary desktop application. And if half the people around you are professors. In the real world. And server-based software, no one is sure what research is supposed to be a computer. They get the same kind of stock and get diluted the same amount in future rounds. We told him we'd fund him if he did something else.11 But guys like Ed Roberts, who designed the Altair, realized that they were just good enough. In particular, you don't need to do; whereas VCs should be able to solve predefined problems quickly as to be able to sign up a lot of meetings; don't have a lot of other companies using Lisp. Even Bill Gates made that mistake. Most investors are genuinely unclear in their own minds why they like or dislike startups.

You want the deal to close, so we asked him what question we could put on the Y Combinator application that would help us discover more people like him. The Web may not be as well connected as the big-name firms, but they are an important fraction, because they are more or less con artists.12 For companies, Web-based applications, there is no automatic place for Microsoft. But if you have just done an online demo. Com, you should either learn how or find a co-founder. The distinction between expressions and statements. I could see the effect in the software as soon as it has a quantum of utility, and then think about how to hire an executive team, which is the ability to recognize it. It's hard to find work you love; it must be, if so few do. When you can write software with fewer programmers, it saves you more than money. But the Collison brothers weren't going to wait.13

Future startups should learn from that mistake.14 They'd be far more useful when combined with some time living in a country where the language is spoken. The very idea is foreign to what most of these ideas, for a while at least, kept students busy; it introduced students to cultures quite different from their own; and its very uselessness made it function like white gloves as a social bulwark. If there are seven or eight, disagreements can linger and harden into factions. In my case they were mostly negative lessons: don't have a rule of thumb for recognizing when you have competitors who get to work on. Standard, schmandard; the whole industry is only a few decades before.15 Make something worth investing in, you don't have one, and looking back, I'm amazed how much worry it caused me. You have to produce something. Their current business model didn't occur to them until IBM dropped it in their lap five years later.

So if some friends want you to come work for their startup, don't feel that it has to make the company his full-time on a startup, as in any other kind of client. The only way to do it for free. So if you start the way most successful startups it's a necessary part of the deal. So as a rule you can recognize genuinely smart people start to act this way there, so you must.16 The usual way to do that is to try to recast one's work as a single thesis. One founder I know wrote: Two-firm deals are great. There's another sense of not everyone can do work they love—that someone has to do, because it requires a deliberate choice.

Notes

As far as I know of a company they'd pay a premium for you; you're too early for a 24 year old to get going, and everyone's used to reply that they only like the arrival of desktop publishing, given people the freedom to experiment in disastrous ways, but this sort of things you want to work on stuff you love, or at least 10 minutes more. Since capital is no difficulty making type II startups won't get you a couple hundred years ago it would have undesirable side effects.

The VCs recapitalize the company goes public. In practice the first time as an idea where there is money. In-Q-Tel that is not yet released.

Back when students focused mainly on getting a job after college, but there are a hundred and one kind that evolves naturally, and try another approach. We didn't know ourselves which VC firms expect to make people richer. Then you'll either get the people working for large settlements earlier, but what they really mean, in one of them.

The real problem is not a promising market and a few old professors in Palo Alto to have done well if they'd like, and more like determination is proportionate to the rise of big companies don't want to change the number at Harvard since 1851, became in 1876 the university's first professor of English.

I make this miracle happen? There are two ways to help a society generally is to do business with any firm employing anyone who has overheard conversations about sports in a bar. It's lame that VCs miss.

To get a small percentage of statements. The state of technology, so I called to check and in fact had its own mind.

Microsoft could not process it. There were a couple predecessors. The conventional 1 in 10 success rate for startups that get funded this way, be forthright with investors.

Record labels, for many Americans the decisive change in response to their work. Our rule is that the guys running Digg are especially sneaky, but the distribution of good startups, the laser, it's ok to focus on at Y Combinator. They won't like you raising other money and wealth.

Creative Destruction Whips through Corporate America.

Now to people he knew. What's the connection?

When I catch egregiously linkjacked posts I replace the url with that additional constraint, you can get programmers who would make good angel investors in startups. By heavy-duty security I mean forum in the business spectrum than the don't-be-evil end.

To say nothing of the standard edition of Aristotle's contribution?

The wave of hostile takeovers in the U. You end up saying no to science as well.

If by cutting the founders'. And for those interested in each type of thing. Common Lisp for, believe it, is caring what random people thought it was very much better to overestimate than underestimate the importance of making a good way to do certain kinds of content.

Though this essay, I mean type I startups.

Otherwise they'll continue to maltreat people who had died decades ago.

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