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autisticlancemcclain · 11 months ago

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Keith presses the heels of his palms to his eyes and exhales deeply. He lets all the air trickle out of his lungs until his chest feels concave, until spots dance behind his closed eyelids, until his lips start to go numb. Then he lets go and lets the air get sucked back into him like a vacuum.

“One more try,” he whispers to himself, conscious of Lance sleeping — finally — beside him. “One, and then we move on.”

He swipes the touchpad on his computer to wake it back up, dragging the blinking curser over the rarely-used blue ‘10’ under the Google logo. The page loads, and loads, and loads, and finally spits out the next few results.

Most of them he’s already seen before. Dozens of times. BARGAIN BALLET TICKET SUBSCRIPTION, reads one link, CLICK HERE FOR 20% OFF YOUR FIRST MONTH. Another reads, Rush Ticket Prices — Buy Now!

He’s been there. Clicked that. Priced it out. Looked at the worst possible, next-to-the-washrooms, garbage seats. Nothing. Not a single ticket within their limited budget — or even close to it.

Completely out of the realm of possibility even if they hadn’t agreed on a price limit for their Christmas gifts.

He keeps scrolling down a few pages that all advertise the same thing — a disgustingly costly subscription here, bargain-but-not-really tickets there, more scammy resell ads than one would believe possible. Even, notably, a still-active link from 1997 that Keith peruses for clicks and does not actually count towards his one-more-try limit. (It even tries to accept his Paypal, which is crazy and means that someone updated the site to accept modern payment for a show that is no longer running. Keith is so amused by the pure audacity that he has to fight the urge to buy one. Wild thing, ADHD.)

Just as he’s about to give up and buy his boyfriend yet another plant this year, a link catches his attention. It’s the very last result on page 13, with no description, no punctuation, hell, hardly even a sentence of text. Nutcracker ticket sales, it reads, for a website called ‘FeuillesBrillantAcademie.org’.

Keith shrugs. Might as well. Not like anything else has been promising.

He clicks the link and immediately wishes he hadn’t. The ugliest website he’s ever seen literally assaults his eyes — a bright blue and a neon purple, clashing in the worst possible way. It takes at least four solid seconds for his eyes to unblur enough to recognise the screen in front of him as having words rather than a solid wall of Bright And Bad. Even then, he has to squint, glasses practically touching his eyeballs.

Feuilles Brillant Academy is pleased to present the final performance of the hard-working dancers this season, is what he can finally make out. The show begins at 7 p.m. on December 23rd, tickets for $20 per person. In-person payment not accepted. Please pay via e-transfer using the link below. Call out administrative office if there are any difficulties.

Keith stares at the page for as long as his eyes can handle, then he looks up at the ceiling. (Where, he may add, he can still see the screen perfectly, because the damn thing has been burnt onto his retinae. He will never mock Matt for his web design degree again. Well, probably.)

This seems…too good to be true.

It’s outrageously cheap, for one. Keith has been looking for literal days and the cheapest he’s managed to find is $50 per person, for bad rush tickets. $20 is bonkers. For two, this is a perfect time, and nearby, as well. And there are still tickets left. Somehow.

Something is amiss.

Keith’s first thought is that it’s a prank page. But the page is buried so deeply — page thirteen of Google. The hidden archives, basically. If this is someone’s prank, it’s garbage. His second thought is that the link is a virus, which, while possible, is still kind of unlikely for the same reasons. Why on Earth would someone post something nefarious so obscurely? It doesn’t make sense. This might be one of those rare times when something isn’t too good to be true, it’s just good.

Then again. Keith just got his laptop back from the last time he fucked around and well and truly Found Out.

Time to get a second opinion.

Despite the disgustingly late hour, the phone picks up on the second ring.

“Hey, stinky,” says Pidge. Keith can hear the smile in her voice as clearly as the explosions and gunfire of Call of Duty in the background.

“Asshole.”

“Turd for brains.”

“Skidmark.”

“Rotting splatter of parking lot vomit at three in the afternoon in Arizona during high summer.”

“…Pidge, that’s disgusting.”

She snickers. “I win.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Keith freezes as Lance stirs next to him, curling his arm around Keith’s bent leg and muttering something in Spanish too fast for him to understand. Keith smiles, tucking a stray curl back under his fluffy frog-eye hairband, lingering over the scar on his temple from a skateboarding accident when they were fifteen. “I need your help.”

“Well, obviously. You’re calling me at three thirty four in the morning. Usually you’re in bed by nine because secretly you look up to Adam and emulate his habits.”

Keith flushes. “I don’t remember ordering a psych analysis, fucker.”

“Consider it a bonus! Tell Auntie Pidge about your troubles.” He can practically see the face she makes immediately after, and snorts. “Ignore that. My mouth is not attached to my brain. Carry on.”

“I need you to check out a link,” Keith says, choosing to be merciful. “It’s pretty buried and obscure, but honestly I think it’s fine —”

“Yeah, last time you thought a link was fine you fucked your shit up so bad I had to download another virus to cancel it out. I’ve never had to do that before. You fucked your laptop up so bad I’d actually never seen that kind of damage before, Kogane. And I do this for a living.”

Keith pouts. “No, you commit cyber crimes for a living.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about. I’m an angel and have never gotten so much as a speeding ticket. I am a law abiding citizen. Send over the link.”

Switching his phone to rest between his ear and shoulder, Keith does. “I need to know if the link does what it says it does.”

Pidge hums. He can hear the ding of her laptop as his e-mail goes through, and then the sounds of her clicking as she inspects the website, running it through her various programs that Keith cannot fathom for the life of him.

“What did you say you were looking for, again?”

Keith closes his eyes and tips his head back, letting it thunk gently on the thin wall under the big window, in the corner of the apartment where they’ve shoved their bed. He lets his eyes go blurry, lets the stars they stuck on the ceiling before they did anything else turn into bright green dots. They’re real constellations. The two of them spent hours on them; Lance on Keith’s shoulders, tripping and shouting and laughing.

“I need tickets,” Keith says quietly. He turns his gaze slowly to Lance, who is sleeping soundly again, who has bags under his eyes, whose hands twitch every few seconds, who frowns deeply. “And we can’t — these are the only ones I could find. That I can even pretend to afford. I need it to be —” He swallows. “I need you to tell me they’re real.”

Pidge is quiet for a moment. The only sound is her breathing, her nail tapping slowly on the edge of her screen.

“The link is exactly what it says it is.”

Keith sits up. “Yeah?”

“Yeah, man.”

Keith bites back a cheer so he doesn’t wake Lance up. Hell yeah! This is perfect! Exactly what they needed! Just — a little bit of luck. A little bit.

“Thank you, Pidge,” he gushes, hurrying to punch in his information. “Seriously.”

Pidge huffs fondly. “Okay, dweebus. Gross. Go be all affectionate somewhere else.” She pauses. “Take a picture when you tell him.”

Keith smiles. “I will.”

———

It takes every inch of Keith’s willpower to keep his mouth shut for a whole three weeks.

“I Know you are hiding something, Kogane,” Lance says while walking home from classes, while curling up into him as they watch TV, while cooking, while showering. “I see it in your face.”

“It’s nearly Christmas, you dweebus,” Keith says every time, and every time he softens it with an exaggerated kiss to Lance’s cheek, one to make him laugh despite himself and shove Keith’s face away. “Of course I’m hiding something.”

But it’s eating at them both. Lance’s blatant curiously makes it that much harder for Keith to keep things hidden, to stash the tickets between the pages of his corniest romance novel that Lance won’t touch with a ten foot pole. To wait, and wait, and wait, as they set up the three-foot high discounted Christmas tree and Lance changes their sheets to the flannel ones his mother gave them.

But the days pass. Finals come and go and so does the time. And finally, finally, it comes time to crawl onto the creaky mattress, knees on either side of Lance, nose kisses down his neck, and murmur, “We’ve got plans today.”

Lance groans. “No we do not.”

Keith smiles widely. He knows Lance can feel it, because he scowls harder, trying to hide his own fondness even as he melts into Keith’s affections.

“Yes, we do. I know. I planned them.”

“Well, then, un-plan them,” Lance grouches. He turns over so he’s facing Keith, now, trying hard to glare up at him, but late afternoon sunlight bleeds into his dark brown eyes and makes them shine golden, and they are as warm and bright as the rest of him, and his hands slide up Keith’s chest, over his shoulders, brushing through his hair, to rest on his cheeks. “Come nap with me.”

Keith turns his head to press a kiss to Lance’s palm, keeping his mouth there. Lance rolls his eyes, and can no longer hide his smile. “Later. I made plans. Dress up, I’m gonna pick us up some food for the way. We’ll leave in forty minutes.”

“Ugh.”

“I don’t know who you think you’re fooling, baby. I can see you eyeing the closet.”

“Shut up and get me a burrito.” He soothes the bite of his words by pulling Keith’s face closer to his, pressing their lips together softly. “Please.”

“Whatever you want.”

God, he’s whipped, and Lance knows it, because he grins, pleased, and pulls Keith even closer, kisses him stronger. It takes Keith a good five minutes to muster up the willpower to pull away, and Lance knows it, smirking.

He finally manages to yank himself away, stumbling backwards towards the kitchenette of their studio. Lance pouts at him.

“Menace,” Keith says sternly, deliberately turning away as he pulls on his boots and coat. He ignores his boyfriend’s grumbling and finally makes it out the door, hustling to their favourite bodega and hoping it isn’t too crowded.

Thirty-seven minutes later, burritos secured, Keith is shoving his frozen fingers around the door handle to jimmy it open. The bodega was indeed crowded and they are indeed late. The show starts in an hour. From what Keith remembers from Lance’s recitals — and he has been to many — people who are late are people who miss the show. The ballet does not fuck around with tardiness and disruptions; if you’re late, that’s tough shit for you. Plan better.

“You’re going to eat shit,” Lance says, amused, the fourth time Keith power walks right over black ice and nearly actually dies. “Slow down, babe.”

Keith does not.

“Can’t,” he huffs, keeping a half-eye on the pavement. A tourist walks into him, shoving him into Lance, who takes the opportunity to slide his hand into Keith’s back pocket and wink at him when his cheeks colour.

“Why can’t we slow down? Where are we going?”

“It’s like you don’t know what surprise means.”

“I do know. I also know that if I annoy anyone long enough they’ll snap so I’ll shut up.”

“Nah. I like it when you talk.”

He’d meant it as somewhat of a comeback, as a jab back to Lance’s teasing. But suddenly Lance stops, spine going rigid, something like shock flirting across his face for half a millisecond before he blinks it away and moves again. It happens so fast that Keith would almost be convinced he’d imagined it, except Lance’s cheeks are crimson.

Keith smiles. “Lance.”

“Shut up.”

“Babydoll.”

“Shut up.”

“I’m barely sayin’ anything, baby.”

“You are so fuckin — gay, you know that? God. Who fuckin — who says shit like that? Who on this Earth?”

Keith laughs, bending down to kiss right below Lance’s ear, to feel his flushed skin warm to frozen tip of his nose.

“You are so easily flattered.”

“Easily flatter this dick. How about that. Fuckin. Jerk.”

He lets Lance grouch at him, pleased and embarrassed about it, as he pulls them along the overcrowded streets. He checks his watch. Fifteen minutes ‘til the show starts, thirteen minutes ‘til they get there. Hopefully.

“Are we almost there? It’s cold and these shoes are pinchy.”

“I told you to wear comfortable shoes!”

“You told me to dress up! I can do one of those things, Akira!”

At the seven minute mark Keith starts running. Lance, surprisingly, doesn’t complain — a grin pulls at his sharp features, actually, and he wraps their hands together and runs faster, despite not knowing where they’re going. Every time they bump into someone in a suit he laughs. He laughs harder when they curse at him. Keith has to fight to keep his head in the game, to keep running, to not stop where he’s standing and watch Lance laugh for hours and hours and hours. It’s been too long.

He nearly pulls Lance’s arm out of his socket when he stops then abruptly, shouting “Here! Here! We’re here!” and pulling him inside a well-kept brownstone.

“Where’s…here?” Lance wonders, taking in the well-salted walkway and pretty red-and-green decorations all over the aged brick.

Keith doesn’t answer. “Close your eyes.”

Lance narrows his eyes. Keith makes his expression as wide and pleading as possible, and in seconds Lance caves, much to Keith’s satisfaction.

“You’re a pain in my neck.”

Keith kisses him quickly and chastely. “Thank you.”

“Yeah, yeah. Don’t let me walk into anything.”

Satisfied that Lance won’t peek, Keith shuffles them over to the box office, holding out their tickets. The stewardess smiles at him, scanning them, eyes twinkling at Keith wordless plea for her to keep the secret, and gestures towards a grand set of doors.

“Up the stairs, to your left, seat and row on your ticket,” she murmurs. “Enjoy the show.”

Keith nods his thanks and rushes them off.

“This sounds very fancy,” Lance observes as their shoes click on the — literally marble, how the hell were these tickets $20 — floors. “Dangerously so.”

Keith shrugs. “Perhaps.”

“…Not to be. A bummer. But please tell me you remembered our budget, Keith.”

“I did, Lance. I swear.”

Lance relaxes into him, and Keith realises for the first time how tense he was. He winces to himself. He probably could have made things a tad less stressful and still kept the surprise. He’ll remember that for next year.

“Okay, good. I trust you.”

They barely make it to their seats in time. Keith’s butt barely makes contact with the cushioned chair before the lights dim and the orchestra starts tuning, the rest of the audience lapsing into almost immediate silence.

Lance inhales sharply. “Keith…?”

“Open your eyes, sweetheart.”

Lance does, and they’re wide, and his mouth drops open, slightly, and for a moment he just stares, frozen, at the stage and the lights and the set, the familiar set, as the dim light casts shadows onto his face. The orchestra’s tuning note reaches its satisfying peak, harmonizing as one sound, and Keith’s full attention is on the lines of Lance’s face, the set of his jaw, the curves of his cheekbones.

“Merry Christmas,” he says quietly.

Before he can say anything else, before Lance can say anything else, the familiar sound of pointe shoes tapping delicately across the stage steals Keith’s attention. He turns his eyes to the stage, watching the dancers strut on the stage, and — stops.

He leans forward, squinting.

What?

Keith is…very familiar with the Nutcracker. He’s grown up alongside Lance’s family since he was eight years old. He’s been to more recitals than he can count. He’s been dragged to more performances than he can ever remember. Lance has lived and breathed and loved ballet his whole damn life, for the entire time Keith has known him, and that love bled well outside of the studio, has lasted even after he aged out of the program last year. Keith knows how the Nutcracker begins, and nothing about the program said this one was supposed to be any different.

Half of the dancers walking onstage are significantly shorter than they should be.

Now he knows damn well that there are kids in the Nutcracker. The main character is a kid. That’s the whole deal.

But there is not one adult on that stage right now. Hell, not even a teenager.

Keith looks down at the ticket — Feuilles Brillant Academy. He looks back at the stage. He looks at the other audience members — lots and lots of people with camcorders. And other small children.

Keith sinks into his chair, head in his hands.

His dumb ass bough a ticket to a children’s ballet recital.

Lord above.

“Lance, I am so sorry,” he whispers, “I was so caught up in the ticket being in budget I didn’t bother actually, like, looking deeper into things, this is totally — Lance?”

Keith leans forward in alarm, hands immediately falling on Lance’s knee, on his back. His shoulders shake and his hands are pressed to his eyes.

“Shit, babe, I’m sorry,” Keith says desperately, embarrassment replaced with panic. Everything feels like it’s crashing down around him, as dramatic as that is. He’d been so excited for this. Now it’s a whole mess. “I didn’t mean to — fuck things up, shit, we can leave.”

Lance shakes his head. Blindly, he reaches over the grasps Keith’s hand, holding tightly. His own hand is damp from his tears.

“No, no, it’s — perfect,” he whispers, voice hoarse. “I —”

His chin trembles, and more tears spill over his cheeks. As the music swells along to the climax of the first dance, Lance lifts the armrest separating their seats, half crawling over Keith until his head is tucked in the crook of Keith’s neck, arms folded between their chests, hands clutching at the fabric of his sweater. His voice is wet with tears and soaked in an emotion Keith can’t quite name, an almost — relief.

“It’s been so long. I didn’t want to — I thought I wouldn’t be able to do this again. I wouldn’t let myself think about it.”

Keith lets a huge, relieved exhale, sagging forward. He wraps himself more comfortably around Lance’s frame, squeezing him back, pressing a lingering kiss to his temple.

Growing up has been…hard. For the both of them.

They’d been told by everyone who knew them that they were being stupid and reckless. Keith has been promised that they won’t last more than two years by almost every grownup he’s ever known. Even his own brother had sighed his trepidation when Keith told him, stubborn and bold-faced, that he was moving in with Lance, that they were going to start their lives together the second they pulled off their caps and gowns, that they were ready for the next step. That they were eighteen and ready to face the world.

“Sacrifices,” Shiro had warned, “are going to be half your life now. It’s not that I think you can’t, Keith. I just. There’s a reason people don’t move in with their highschool sweetheart they summer after they graduate. Katy Perry wrote a whole song about it. It’s a banger.”

Keith hates it when his brother is right, and this time he was right about so many things in consecutive order. Living on your own is hard. Learning to live with someone else is harder. Doing it in a city far away from home, while balancing school and work and rent and groceries, is the hardest.

“I miss dance,” Lance croaks, and Keith closes his eyes and breathes deeply and holds Lance tighter.

He knows Lance misses dance. He knows that he hasn’t so much as listened to a ballet since they moved to New York, unless it’s in the dead of night, and he thinks Keith is asleep, and he puts in his headphones and moves their furniture as silently as he can to the edges of their tiny ass studio apartment and laces up his falling-to-pieces pointe shoes and dances like the very act of it is tearing him apart, and cries the whole time. And then stashes his shoes in the bottom of his gym bag and crawls back into bed and pretends again in the morning that he left his pointes back in Arizona. And Keith looks away and lets him because school is already twenty thousand a year and in no shape or form can they afford that and money to rent a studio.

But Keith can give him this. For a little bit, maybe, even if it’s little kids with handmade costumes pirouetting across a stage.

“I know, bluebell.”

Lance exhales, shaky, breath ghosting across Keith’s collarbones, and finally turns back towards the stage, keeping tucked under Keith’s chin. The kids dancing as the Snow Queen’s ladies-in-waiting are — three years old, maybe. At most four. They keep twirling right into each other like clumsy little bumblebees. It’s maybe the cutest thing Keith has ever seen in his entire life, and what’s better is the tiny smile that graces Lance’s face, despite the tears, growing bigger every time one of them wobbles back up to their feet and prances on, oblivious.

They watch the rest of the play in silence, Lance hands entwining with his sometime around the Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy and holding fast. They stand and clap as loudly as the gathered parents, louder even, at curtain call, as each kid jumps and twirls across the stage to thrown roses and cheering. It’s adorable.

They’re among the first to walk out, because the majority of the crowd surges towards backstage to collect their kid, so the walk is blessedly unrushed. They take their time, observing the pictures of grinning ballerinas that line the walls and numerous awards on endless shelves. Keith is filled with a deep and strong longing, a strange feeling of coming home — years of waiting on plastic chairs for Lance to finish solo practice when they were thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. Of taking his boots off at the door and quietly sneaking in the back of the studio, ducking away from other dancers’ boring stares, to watch Lance shine under the studio lights, reflected a thousand times by mirrored walls. Of the smell of lemon cleaner and polished hardwood floors and satin.

He notices a poster on the wall, among dozens of drawings and pictures of intricate sets, and freezes.

“Lance,” he says, tilting his head, “look.”

At the end of a hallway, right next to a door, is a hand-painted banner, reading: WE’LL MISS YOU, MISS RAULA! HAPPY RETIREMENT!

He squeezes Lance’s hand. “I bet they’re looking for a replacement.”

Lance stares at the poster for a long time. “You think?”

“I think it wouldn’t hurt to shoot them an e-mail.”

Smiling, Lance stops them in the hallway, puts his hands on Keith’s shoulders, stands on his tiptoes, and kisses him, long and sweet and loving.

“I’m already in a pretty tight spot now,” he murmurs, still standing so close to Keith and smelling so sweet that he has trouble focusing on his words, “‘cause this is already kind of the best Christmas gift ever. If that ends up being true I’m never topping you again.”

Keith laughs, suddenly, not expecting the turn, and Lance grins, pulling Keith down to him and kissing him again. It’s less of a kiss and more of a press of smiles, a clack of teeth, a shared laugh.

“I love you, Lance. Merry Christmas. I will be the Gift Giving King forever.”

“Shut up, goober.” He lifts Keith’s arm, tucking himself under it as they walk back out into the snowy December night. “I love you too.”

———

based on this post (third slide)

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ladyloveandjustice · 5 months ago

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Anime Expo Final Day: Q & A and Live Draw with Witch Hat Atelier's Kamome Shirahama

Sunday was not as bad as Saturday crowd wise, but still a bit hard to deal with.

I got into the second Witch Hat Atelier panel, which was a live draw with Kamome Shirahama! We weren't allowed to take pics of her of course, and she came in the Iguin cosplay and somehow managed to draw in it, but I did get to take a pic of the brush buddy:

And here's the live drawing she did (Quifrey by audience demand) which we were allowed to photograph.

I was taking notes throughout the panel but then the notes app just decided to stop working and I lost it all. But I did write down everything I remembered immediately after, so here we go:

When asked, Shirahama said her influences were American and French comics in addition to manga. She mentioned Akira and the French comic Mobius, as well as a French comic with "cities" in the title I couldn't catch.

EDIT: (According to gaston26 in the comments: "I think she talked about French comics artist Moebius and the french comics with cities in the title is most likely 'Les Cités obscures'. ;)" That sounds right!)

She says she was inspired by the art style and diversity of American comics. She was also inspired by children’s literature like The Neverending Story.

When asked about the diversity in her story, she quickly said that the diversity was intentional and the fact that its even a question shows that we need more diversity. She said, "Nobody would ask this if it was just a romance between a boy and a girl or something like that, so it shows there needs to be more".

When asked how she feels about Quifrey being so popular, she mentioned that Quifrey was going to be a villain but his design was so good she promoted him to a main character.

She stated that she tries to write a story her younger self would read, but she says she was a “twisted kid” so as a child she’d be saying things like “a Pegasus with those feathers wouldn’t be able to fly!”

When asked about the magic system she said she was still actually trying to learn the magic system herself.

She talked about magic as a metaphor for creativity and said her audience is very creative so she feels they could relate. She always wanted to write a fantasy. She mentioned again that she had a mangaka friend early on and that it really made her appreciate what goes into making art and got her thinking in that direction.

She stated that there are no real villains in her story, just people.

When asked about how she comes up with names, she said she “asks Google”. She wanted names where her character would be the only one that comes up in the google search. Early on, with names like Coco and Agott, she didn’t do this, but it made her mad when other things would come up in the google search. When asked if she was inspired by any sort of ethnicity/culture for characters, she asked to pick one, and was asked about Kustas. She said that was a tough question and eventually said she took inspiration from Rome and also indigenous Japanese cultures for him.

She said she doesn’t use screentone because she’s "lazy" and prefers to work with her ink pen. When asked about her assistants she said they are the best ones at doing speed lines, which she’s "bad" at.

She said Quifrey and Olruggio were partly inspired by people she knows- not in looks, but in personality. She said traits like being strict on the outside and sweet on the inside (I imagine she's referring to Olruggio there) were inspired by those people she used as models.

She also mentioned that she draws very fast!

And that's about all I got down.

After that, the day was kind of rough, as I temporarily lost my wallet but fortunately someone eventually turned it in to lost and found. I went to Little Tokyo and attended the pop up Akiba Maid War café there. I got a Ranko cookie! The maid who served us mentioned the cafe's rivals like the poison the drinks and did the spell thing. We got a singing performance where both our maid and the woman playing Manager danced, with Manager intentionally doing it very badly. It was fun!

And that's all for my con report! Hope there was some interesting info! I'll be posting cosplay I saw and art and merch I got later.

#anime expo #anime expo 2024 #witch hat atelier #quifrey #olruggio #kamome shirahama #shirahama kamome #akiba maid war #conventions #life of a nev #kustas

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moonyasnow · 1 month ago

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Brief Guide to Briar Valley Fashion

[ for the purposes of this post I'll be ignoring the 'they can just magic the clothes from thin air' argument because that's boring and doesn't let me infodump about historical clothing materials ]

Hey you!

🫵

Do you want to dress (or draw your OCs dressing) like you're from Briar Valley, but also don't wanna just 100% copy one of the in-game outfits? Well you're in luck, because I made a chart thing about it to show you how to copy the style!

[ TL;DR: be a billionaire ]

SO yeah, here are all the common design elements I've been able to spot in the fashion, from what we can see of the few designs we've gotten

First off I'm gonna share what a potential Briar Valley design COULD end up looking like— a more high-end dress, at least

I don't share W.I.Ps on my blog like…EVER, but this once, as a special treat, I'm gonna share this wedding dress I've been working on for my OC Irina

I am NOT done with the colors yet— this is just my 'first draft' of what I'd want the colors to look like

This was my biggest inspiration:

A dress here illustrated to apparently have been worn by Catherine De Medici

Catherine de Medici is in the right time period, though this illustration does also look to be Victorian, so take it with a grain of salt if you're just judging historical accuracy— but it certainly gets the vibe across. For more references I recommend going to the Wikipedia list of 'Henry the 2nd of France' going to the 'Children' section, and pasting one of their names + 'portrait' into google

And keep in mind that this is just what nobility would wear. So if you wanna design something more commoner-y, I recommend looking at what French peasants wore around the 1500s, since fashion for common people didn't tend to change as quickly back then as it does now.

And for color, I recommend the sort of moss green you see Lilia and Baul wear.

I wouldn't recommend black though if you're going for accuracy, since pure black was also quite expensive to color something back in the day— it was less expensive with a dark shade of another color, like quite dark blue, or dark red, or green, or even brown.

Another two for Veronica— though theses ones are more in the 'inspired by' section, and more ENGLISH late 1500s than French

Now onto the 'Moony yaps about some random obscure knowledge they have on a niche topic' part of the post

If you seriously wanted to dress like you're from Briar Valley I hope you have a MASSIVE bank account because this is going to COST YOU.

Now, contrary to what I myself expected, velvet isn't actually all THAT expensive— at least compared to the other materials I outlined in the image.

But don't be fooled, this is NOT because velvet is just not that expensive.

The other materials are just somehow way more expensive.

Now. The biggest reason for that would be the color purple.

Purple has always been the most expensive shade you can get ANYTHING in, because purple dye used to be stupid hard to actually acquire, due to how difficult it is to procure.

The color could only be procured from snails from the Mediterranean sea. First, they had to be harvested. And you'd need to harvest THOUSANDS for just one ounce of purple dye.

Then you'd need to remove the glands from the snails, and place them in a lead pot filled with brine, after which they were very slowly heated over a course of around ten days.

And this SMELLED. Smelled so bad, in fact, that the places which made the dyes had to be located downwind of cities.

And needle lace....

Is EXPENSIVE.

It requires someone to have strong, steady hands, but also small enough fingers to be the right size for the small needles used for this kind of lace.

So then…

PURPLE NEEDLE-LACE??

And pure blavk fabric!!! Back in the day, pure black was also quite hard to dye; it would be more common with a dark shade of some other color, like dark green, or dark blue, etc.

Maleanor is REALLY showing off her 'Queen' status here because if she were an actual renaissance ruler that would be worth an absolute fortune!

Purple anything and needle-lace are already difficult to make on their own. But put the two together and you'd need to make sure only the best of the best of craftsmen would be working with it, adding yet another layer of 'expensive'.

But yeah anyway.

Hope you found this useful/interesting!

Tagging @chillygourami since you seemed interested 👍

And @babyghoul138 bc VERONICA MENTION

#twst #twisted wonderland #disney twst #briar valley #twst wonderland #twst template #twst fanart #diasomnia #saving for future writing use

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syyskirjat · 9 months ago

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Sueños de piedra (ch1)

Okay, I promised (to myself) to check out whatever media won the ultimate obscure blorbo tournament ( @who-do-i-know-this-man (I wasn't sure whether to tag you or not but in the end I figured I might as well, hope you don't mind I guess))

Turns out that it's a guy from a 2015 Spanish YA fantasy book

And turns out there's a free sample available! Which is lucky for me because I'm currently very broke

Sueños de piedra by Iria G. Parente and Selene M. Pascual

I don't speak Spanish so I'm gonna rely on the translator quite a lot lmao (well I understand some Spanish actually, but definitely not enough to read a whole book)

The title translates to something like "Dreams of Stone" I think?

Once upon a time in a kingdom far, far away, a prince rewarded a wizard for helping rescue a young girl in trouble. Charming. Too bad none of this is true. In reality, the prince dreams of glory and revenge; the magician, with her spells not always being a disaster and the young woman in trouble, with fleeing from a past that torments her... and from the memory of the man she has killed. Once upon a time...

(Yes this is just Google Translate, sorry)

Okay so, prince, magician and a damsel in distress? Prince wants revenge for something, who knows what, magician is having trouble doing the magic, and the damsel is in fact a killer? Ok ok

The dedication goes as follows:

To all those who embark on a direct journey towards their dreams every day. May you always reach your destination.

Okay so Marabilia is a place? That's apparently also the name of this book series. Is this like the kingdom then? So it consists of three islands, two small ones and one big? Or is it supposed to be a continent? It definitely seems too small to be a continent

I know the blorbo is called Arthmael de Silfos so I'm guessing he's from the Silfos area in the north of the big island then. I can see what's probably a city called Duan and a forest called "Merlon Forest". We also have different towers around the big island, one of which seems to be called the Tower of Black Magic. (I didn't even need to use the translator for those yay xD)

Okay the first chapter is called Arthmael so I guess we're meeting our blorbo already, which is nice

— Let me make it clear: are you going to give my crown to a bastard?

Okay..... the very first line and I already think Arthmael might be a bit of a spoiled brat (I assume he's in fact the prince)

Apparently Arthmael just found out that he has an illegitimate older brother but I guess this brother's mother is noble anyway so it's legit? I dunno yet. Arthmael thinks this guy is blackmailing his father somehow and is already considering poison as a solution

And anyway, what kind of a name is Jacques for a king?

lmao, so much shade to all the kings called Jacques

Okay so Jacques's family is very powerful and loved by the people of Silfos and the king fears a civil war if he disrespects his claim to the throne. Alright. Kinda weird since based on Arthmael's thoughts, this society has a similar attitude to bastards as in European history, but okay then. I wonder if Jacques is even actually the king's son or is this some kind of a ruse?

Arthmael is very cheeky and even references his dad's love life directly to his face, his dad is not very happy

The king tells him to just be a good boy and hopefully they'll find him some crown princess to marry so he'll get a kingdom that way

I guess these different areas on the map are kingdoms then, that makes sense. They look like very small kingdoms but this is a small place in general.

Arthmael doesn't seem to mind this idea except that there's only one possible princess like that in Marabilia and that's Ivy de Dione. Not sure what's wrong with her.

Well, who knows? Maybe, if I wait a few moons, some other bastard, in Verves or Idyll, will come out from under a rock and come offer me her hand.

Somebody's very snarky, that's cute

Arthmael is very haughty about how the people have always known him as the crown prince and accepted him as such, Jacques laughs and asks what has he even done for the people. He's like well he hasn't really done much yet because he was planning to do things once he became king, but he's been supporting the local business (taverns) and employing servants (lmao). Also apparently there are some girls he's seeing...

Apparently Jacques's family are big traders and business people (despite being noblemen) and create lots of jobs, and also big on charity, so everybody loves them

Arthmael is jealous of how proud his dad looks when Jacques says this, and how he's never looked at him like that

Well, I guess you're kind of a little shit so it makes sense, Arthmael

— If the smartest thing is to become the idol of a few starving people in order to be king, I can do it too.

Oh my god, this little brat

He declares that he's going to be a hero, to overshadow the charity of Jacques' family, because heroes are remembered by history while philanthropist aren't

So he plans to become a storybook Prince Charming, saving damsels in distress etc.

Jacques finds this understandably hilarious, the king is not amused

Once Jacques leaves, the king again offers to arrange a marriage to Arthmael, specifically with the princess of Dione

I'm almost tempted. I have never been to Dione, but they say that their ships are the lightest and fastest, and that sailors come to their shores from the other side of the sea, speaking strange languages that only they understand. Who come from lands where women wear short dresses, if they wear anything at all. Places where war is so normal that, as soon as a child is strong enough to pick up a sword, they push him to the front lines.

Alright then, I see what he fixates on

Was there anything wrong with the princess then or?

Barbarians. I remove the thought from my mind.

Oh okay. What a charming young man /s

Dione is like right next to Silfos according to the map btw, is this like one of those neighbourly feuds?

Okay he says it's because he doesn't want a foreign kingdom, he wants to keep his home, which is fair I guess

The king is like what do you want me to do, kill Jacques and his pregnant wife? And Arthmael is just like yeah great idea, because he's a dumbass. The king is like wtf

Apparently Jacques' family is from that Duan city that I noted earlier, and his mother died a few days ago and apparently "her loss is greatly felt"

The king regrets spoiling Arthmael too much, and talks about how Arthmael doesn't understand anything about suffering or anything and only cares about girls

Arthmael is already considering faking his death to make them all feel sorry, because of course he is, he's exactly that kind of guy

He says he doesn't want to go try to charm the princess, he'd rather just go off on his own (also there's a whole bit about how only a man can rule Dione or something and the king of Dione won't accept his daughter to become a ruler)

His dad tells him no, just stay here and be a good boy, don't make everybody gossip about drama in the royal family

Arthmael is like hey you managed to hide your bastard son for years, you can hide my disappearance

They fight a bit more but then Arthmael just storms out, grabs a few things from his room and leaves

a change of clothes, a bag of coins, my sword, and my favourite cloak. I do not need anything else.

Okay then, good luck I guess

To be a hero you only need a brave heart. Or so they say.

I feel like you also need to not be a selfish prick but maybe that's optional

Okay end of first chapter!

Our blorbo seems like a real brat!

But I guess the point is probably that he needs to learn some lessons along the way, or something like that, idk. I'm sure there's a reason for why whoever entered him into the tournament likes him so much

I'm guessing the damsel in distress is not the princess? Probably? She wasn't called a princess anyway. TBH she's the character I'm currently the most curious about. The next chapter is from the point of view of someone called Lynne and I hope that's her. Could be the magician too though I guess? No wait, I think the magician is a guy. Altho idk maybe Lynne could be a guy's name, I don't fucking know.

I'm guessing that Arthmael will try to rescue the damsel so he can be a hero, because that's what heroes are supposed to do, but then it'll go wrong somehow? And then the magician will get involved somehow, I have no clue.

That's all my predictions I suppose. Altho I'm guessing that Jacques might turn out to be a villain somehow, I didn't get the vibe that he was particularly great either, just not as much of a brat as Arthmael, and it would then be something for Arthmael to do when he gets back home. Then again maybe the book will surprise me, who knows. To be honest, it would feel a bit like a cop out if it turns out that the guy he hates actually is evil, but it could be handled well, and it's not like I like Jacques either so far. He seems extremely sus too

No guesses as to what the title refers to yet, it could be anything

Idk, like I said, the damsel's storyline is the one that interests me the most rn, it might actually get me to read further (good job, blurb, you got me)

I still have a surprisingly good amount of the free sample left, there's actually nine chapters here, so idk, maybe I'll keep going? We'll see

I'm pretty happy with how much I was able to follow the text even on my own, altho I definitely had to rely on the translator. I would not have had the patience to try to translate all of this myself. But I definitely understood multiple full sentences! Yaaay xD

Apologies to fans of this book series, I hope I didn't seem too rude

#sueños de piedra

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mymoonagedaydream · 2 years ago

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Summary: You thought that dying of exposure was the worst thing that could happen to you out in the desert. You were wrong.

Pairing: Mechanic!Bucky x y/n

Word Count: 6k

Warnings: Language, some very PG 13 smut

Author’s Note: Yes this oneshot was partially inspired by Before He Cheats by Carrie Underwood and yes, I'm British so I had to Google what a slugger was. Everyday's a school day folks. It was also partially inspired by that one photo from a movie I've never seen that I used in the banner okthanksbye.

There was nothing coming. Not a single other vehicle had passed since you broke down over two hours ago. The roof of your car was getting pretty unbearably hot now, even through the layers of clothes you were using as a makeshift picnic blanket you could feel it starting to burn your legs. You considered trying to sit inside for a while again, but you had to give up last time because it became like a fucking sauna, and at least up here you were clearly visible to anyone passing.

---

This isn’t how you thought you were going to die. Granted, you’d never actually spent a great deal of time considering it before, but there wasn’t much else to occupy your mind while you slowly baked underneath the midday sun. You looked up and down the road once more, still only able to see a few feet clearly before the rising hot air started to blur and obscure the view. The brown, cracked landscape stretched on and on before bending over the horizon and disappearing out of sight.

You checked your phone once more but, unsurprisingly, service had not magically descended upon you. Glancing over your shoulder at the bonnet, propped open and somehow still smoking, you wondered whether it was a bad idea to be this close to an engine that could probably explode at any second. At least a quick death would be less painful than slowly being cooked alive.

Leaning your head back and squeezing your eyes closed, a new sound caught your attention. Something whirring in the distance. Your head snapped towards it, eyes straining at the horizon, heart jumping when it came into view. A pickup truck.

A sudden burst of energy hit and you scrambled onto your feet, balancing precariously and frantically waving your arms above your head. As it moved closer you started to smile to yourself, overjoyed thinking that you’d soon be somewhere with shade and cold water, somewhere with air conditioning.

Your face dropped, however, when you realised that it wasn’t slowing down. You waved your arms faster. Nothing. You started to jump up and down, shouting as loud as you could.

“Hey! Stop, I need help!”

Your voice cracked as it drew closer. Your arms dropped and you watched, helplessly, as it sped past, too fast for you to even make out the face of the driver. Jumping down to the ground and running into the middle of the road, you screamed after it.

“Fuck you, motherfucker! ”

Bursting with anger, you pathetically kicked a rock, barely managing to muster the energy to move it more than a few feet. That was it, your one chance at rescue, gone. You squatted down, needing to rest but knowing the asphalt would be hot enough to fry an egg. You could feel the sunburn starting to prickle on your arms.

There was nothing else for it now, you’d have to walk. Either you’d come across civilization eventually or you’d just die, both were better options than being found out here as a sun-bleached skeleton in three weeks' time. You grabbed your backpack and all of your remaining water from the car, setting off in the direction you’d been heading before the breakdown. You knew there was nothing for miles in the direction you’d come from, so this was your best bet.

You’d been walking for over an hour when the vague shape of a building appeared on the horizon. You were half-convinced it was a mirage but, once you picked up your pace, the blurred outline started becoming clearer. The rusty old roadside sign eventually came into view and you saw that it was a baseball themed diner called The Slugger’s Dugout . You looked around, there wasn’t a blade of grass in sight. Strange place to play baseball.

You practically ran the final stretch towards it, the taste of dry baked earth caking your throat and tongue as you kicked up clouds of dust. You stopped dead, however, when you reached the edge of the parking lot and noticed that there was just one car sitting outside. The fucking pickup truck. This would be interesting.

You burst through the door and threw yourself at the counter, making the elderly server jump out of her skin and almost drop a pot of steaming coffee.

“Are you alright, dear?”

“I broke down,” your throat was so dry that your words were coming out horse and sticky, “do you have a phone? And water?”

She kicked into gear a lot faster than you’d expected after hearing that. She filled a tall glass with tap water and placed it in front of you, patiently waiting for you to gulp it down before reaching three quarters out of the tip jar and pointing out the payphone on the far wall.

“There’s a card over there for a towing company, they should be able to help you out.”

You thanked her profusely, returning the glass and sliding the change into your palm.

You only then realised that, in all the excitement around finally quenching your thirst, you’d briefly forgotten that the person you now hated most in the world was somewhere inside this building. Was it the elderly server who’d abandoned you on the side of the road? Well, the door said they opened at 8am and she was the only employee here, so either she’d been very late for her shift or there was someone else skulking around.

You gave her a suspicious side-eye while you wandered towards the phone but you instantly felt bad about it. The coins clinked as you dropped them into the slot, the dial tone sounding through the receiver. You pressed in the number from the faded business card taped up on the wall. A lady with a thick accent answered the call and, as you were explaining your situation to her, you spotted someone walk out of the bathroom and take a seat in one of the booths.

He looked like a fucking pickup truck driver. Flannel shirt rolled up to his elbows, old blue jeans, dirty brown hair slicked back. You could feel anger rising in your stomach as you watched him begin to eat. You were so distracted giving him daggers that you almost missed the lady on the other end of the phone telling you that they wouldn’t be with you until 7pm.

That was the final straw.

You slammed down the receiver, making the poor server jump once again, and marched over to his table, bracing yourself against the seat opposite him.

“Thanks for the help back there, asshole.”

He looked up from his plate and eyed you calmly, staying silent. That just riled you up even more.

“Seriously? I could’ve fucking died out there, you couldn’t have stopped for just a few minutes? What, were you in a rush to get to the bacon pancakes before they sold out? Were you late for the ignorant cunt convention?”

“No.” There was a clatter as he dropped his fork on the table.

“There was another incredibly good reason then, was there?”

“Yeah, actually, cause the last time I picked up a hitchhiker she started smoking crack in the passenger seat then robbed me.”

“I'm not a fucking hitchhiker. My car broke down, did you not see the tower of smoke?”

“No.”

He was lying, the piece of shit was definitely lying.

“Fuck you.”

“Hey, it’s not my fault you got yourself into a situation you weren’t prepared for, sweetheart. Play with fire, get burned.”

You sucked your teeth in frustration and began to storm out, but got distracted by something just beside the door. It was a little area designed for kids to take pictures in, with a backdrop of a baseball field and a wooden bat propped up against the wall. The sign above it read:

Take a swing and make a memory at The Slugger’s Dugout!

Well, if they insisted.

You casually picked up the bat and pushed the door open, waltzing over to the lovely shiny pickup truck glinting under the sun.

Batter up.

With one swift movement, you connected the end of the weapon with one of the tail lights, shattering the glass and watching it splinter onto the floor. It was gloriously fucking satisfying. You heard the sound of the door swinging open behind you almost immediately.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

You twisted around, pointed the baseball bat at him with a smile and winked. “Play with fire, get burned asshole.”

He started yelling wildly but you tuned out, dragging the bat across the floor as you walked away, preparing yourself for the hour-long trek back to the car.

At least you’d be in a better mood for this one.

---

You could only have been walking for ten minutes when you heard a sputtering engine approaching from behind. You didn’t turn to look, you knew exactly who it would be. Your hand tightened around the weapon you were still holding.

The truck pulled up beside you and the passenger window slid down, but you didn’t break stride, walking straight past it without so much as a sideways glance. Out the corner of your eye you saw it begin to slowly roll forwards, eventually matching your pace and cruising beside you

“Hey, Babe Ruth.” You ignored him. “Look, I’m sorry, alright? I should’a helped. Can I give you a ride?”

Well, that wasn’t what you were expecting. You stopped abruptly and turned towards the window, prompting him to slam on the brakes.

“You really shouldn't be driving with a tail light out, y’know. It’s dangerous.”

“You shouldn't be messing with strange men out in the desert.”

“Is that a threat?”

“No,” a hint of a smirk crept over his mouth, “but there's bigger assholes than me out here.”

“Doubt it.”

You considered for a second. On the one hand, you didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of accepting his help but, on the other, it’d be pretty fucking stupid to decline when there was still a slim chance you could die out here. The sun was searing hot now, sweat rolling down your forehead and aches starting in all your joints.

With the bat still gripped firmly in your hand, you reluctantly swung the door open and climbed in. The blasting air-con was annoyingly refreshing. A candy wrapper crunched under your foot as you got comfortable, the faint smell of stale cigarettes mixed with cheap aftershave seeping out of the seat beside you. He offered you a bottle of water, which you eagerly accepted, finishing off half of it without taking a breath.

As the truck rolled away, he turned towards you.

“I’m Bucky, by the way.” You nodded. “So where you headed?”

“Let's not small talk.”

“Suit yourself.”

He reached over to the centre console and switched on the radio, turning the volume up offensively loud when he heard whatever generic, god-awful country song was playing. You lost it when he started tapping along on the steering wheel.

“This is worse.”

“You just keep gettin’ burned today, don’t you?”

You rolled your eyes. You had to sit through three whole banjo-plucking, pickup-trucking, cousin-fucking slow jams before you saw your poor little car approaching in the distance. It had stopped smoking, at least, but you had no idea if that was a good sign.

Your driver pulled off the road and parked up directly in front of the wreckage, giving it a dubious frown.

“How long did they say for a tow truck?”

“Six hours.”

He burst out laughing and opened his door, climbing out of the car. You sat for a few seconds and watched him approaching the open bonnet, very confused, before following suit and exiting the truck.

“Can I help you?”

“No,” he flashed you a smile, “but I can help you.”

After properly securing the hood, he leaned over the front of the car and started tinkering with god knows what, tutting occasionally. You loitered behind him and watched suspiciously. It looked like he knew what he was doing but you didn’t trust him at all.

"You wanna back off a little? I can feel you breathing down my neck."

“What are you doing?”

“Look, I can stand here and try to explain it or I can try to fix it, your choice.”

"Fine," you slinked backwards, "but if this is some kind of eye for an eye, car for a car revenge plan you've hatched, I will fucking come for you."

"That a promise?"

His unexpectedly flirty tone caught you off guard for a second. You tried to think of a witty retort, but all attempts just seemed to die on your tongue. That had never happened before.

It only occurred to you then that, in your new position standing a few feet behind him, you'd gained a pretty impressive view. You tilted your head slightly. Those blue jeans were really working overtime.

"Everything alright back there?"

You snapped out of your daze. "Yeah, what, why?"

"You haven't insulted me in over a minute, thought you might've fainted or somethin'." He stood up and turned towards you with a smile, wiping his hands down the front of his shirt. "You wanna make yourself useful and try to start her up?"

With a brief scowl in his direction, you climbed into the driver's seat and tried the ignition. A slightly smug smile settled on your face when it sputtered for a few seconds and died.

"Try again."

"Might be time to admit defeat my guy." You turned the key once more, it worked. "Holy shit."

"Not bad, huh?"

You were actually incredibly impressed, but there was no way in hell he was going to find that out.

"That depends, will it last?"

He strolled over and leaned over the open driver's side door, shrugging. "Would help if I knew how far you were going."

"About two hundred more miles."

He laughed. "Not a chance."

"Brilliant."

You didn't care. As long as he'd done enough to get you off this godforsaken stretch of road, that was enough. You jumped out and retrieved your backpack and weapon from his truck, pleased that you’d taken a gamble and accepted his help, but even more pleased that you could now drive away and never have to see him again.

Why did god have to give such great asses to such awful people? What a waste.

"Here," he stopped you before you got back into your car and pulled out his wallet, grabbing a slip of paper and holding it towards you, "stop at this workshop. They'll help you out."

"I don’t have any money."

"Well, maybe just tell 'em that after they’ve fixed it up."

"Alright."

You plucked it from his fingers, climbed in behind the steering wheel and slammed the door, so ready for this shit chapter to be behind you. Asshole only moved out of the way after you revved at him a few times, holding his arms out in annoyance and shouting.

"You're welcome!"

You ignored him and drove off. He'd helped you out but, after the shit he'd pulled earlier, you figured this just made you even. No need for thanks.

---

You pulled into The Slugger's Dugout on your way past, intending to apologise, return the bat and pick up the broken glass you'd left scattered in the parking lot. When you got out of the car, however, you couldn't seem to find a single piece of it. He must’ve beat you to it. That explains why it took him ten fucking minutes to come pick you up.

A car horn blared from the road and you looked up to see the hick truck whiz past, probably too fast to clock the middle finger you stuck up at it.

You pulled the stolen baseball bat out of your car and timidly wandered inside, unsurprised at the hostile look that the poor old dear behind the counter greeted you with.

"Just… returning this."

You placed it back where you found it and gave her an awkward smile. Before you could escape, however, she leaned over the counter looking like she was ready to unleash a verbal thrashing.

"Now you look here, miss. I understand that you were upset, I would be too, but he is a good man and he didn't deserve that."

You winced slightly, trying not to come across too argumentative. "A good man who left me on the side of the road to die?"

"I'm sure he had his reasons."

You nodded, too intimidated by her strict demeanour to argue back anymore. Why was she so much scarier than the broad-chested tower of a man you just spent the last hour laying into?

"Do you know him?"

"Not very well, but he used to come in here every single Sunday with his father. Every week I watched him help that old man out of the car and to a table, watched them talk and laugh together for hours. I don't think I've ever seen someone of his age look so happy," her expression changed, "but I haven't seen the two of them for months now. That was the first time he's ever been here alone, I didn’t like to ask what happened."

You nodded again, figuring both of you could guess exactly what happened. If she was trying to make you feel like a guilty piece of shit then she was doing a cracking job.

Personal tragedy aside, however, he still acted like an ass.

After thanking her again for her help earlier, you headed out. There wasn't much more you needed to know about a guy you were probably never going to see again.

---

The garage you’d been recommended was just over an hour away, there was weak service outside the diner so you managed to scope it out on maps. To your great relief, as you drove, the stretching desert started to gradually give way to actual civilization, a small, dilapidated town springing up around you. It seemed like the kind of place where people were born, lived and died without ever leaving. You dreaded how they’d react to a broke stranger turning up and begging for free help.

Eventually reaching your destination, you pulled up into the forecourt, cringing at the sound your engine made as it powered down. There was no way in hell that any self-respecting mechanic would come near this thing without a hefty down payment. Still, all you could do was try.

You left the rustbucket and wandered through the open shutter, looking around for any signs of life, preferably someone in coveralls who looked easily manipulated. There was only one person inside. You couldn’t believe it.

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

He spun round, a clang sounding when he dropped whatever complicated tool he was holding onto a nearby table. “Hey, firecracker. I thought you’d ignored some great advice there for a second.”

“And I thought I’d finally got rid of you,” you scanned your eyes around desperately for anyone else who looked vaguely useful, “but hey, at least one of us is happy.”

“It’s just me here, darlin’. The other guys are on lunch.”

“Fantastic.”

He met your unimpressed scowl with a wink as he strolled past. “The shitbox out front?”

“Mhmm.”

You weren’t too sure what was happening here. He already knew you couldn’t pay, and he knew how much work that fucking thing needed, so what was his plan? There was very little you could do to repay any kind of debt to him, and even less that you were actually willing to do. You wondered how easy it would be to just do a runner with the car once it was back in working order.

He opened up the bonnet again but barely even glanced over it before turning back towards you.

“It’s gonna be a few hours at least. There’s a bar just around the corner,” he pointed down the street, “if you wait there I’ll come find you when it’s done.”

“Look, when I said I had no money, I wasn’t exaggerating. Apart from a little gas money I think I’ve got about fifteen dollars to my name right now. A beer would cost me over a third of my net worth.”

You were half-expecting him to slam the hood down and tell you to get lost after that, but he didn’t. He just chuckled and shook his head.

“Start a tab, give ‘em my name. They know I’m good for it.”

“That’s a risky offer.”

“Nah,” he pulled a dirty rag from his back pocket and used it to wipe down his hands, “surely the crazy broad who called me a cunt and busted my tail light can’t also have a drinking problem, right?”

You shrugged.

---

The door to the bar was unexpectedly heavy, almost tugging your shoulder out of its socket when you tried to yank it open. You felt a little embarrassed when you noticed a couple heads turning in the direction of the pathetic stranger wrestling with the slab of wood. Once inside, you apprehensively looked around, forcing down a dry gulp. This place was seedy as hell, maybe Bucky really did want you dead.

His idea worked, though, and you managed to set up a tab without any qualms. He must send ladies in here with that line all the time.

You decided to settle yourself on a stool at the end of the bar, reasoning that it might be marginally safer to stick as close as you could to the only staff member in the building. The hours passed slowly. It was almost five thirty when Bucky eventually trudged through the door and planted himself on the stool beside you.

He pointed to your glass. “What’re you drinking?”

“Just soda water, got a long drive tonight.”

“No you don't,” he hailed the bartender, “two double scotches, no ice.”

“What?”

“That thing ain’t gonna be ready ‘till at least tomorrow, midday.”

“You’re fucking with me.”

“Nope. Your suspension is more rust than metal.”

“Where the fuck am I supposed to sleep, then?”

He shrugged, picking up one of the glasses that the bartender had deposited in front of you and taking a quick nip. You leaned forward and let your head collapse onto the bar as a wave of hopelessness passed over you.

“Bucky, I am so exhausted. I’ve slept in my car for over a week and I haven’t had a proper shower in twice that.” Your words started to crack as tears welled in your eyes. “I don’t think I can handle this.”

“Woah, hey, don’t cry. It’ll be alright.”

“How? In what fucking world is it going to be alright?”

“Look, you can stay at my place tonight.”

You lifted your head to shoot daggers at him, in disbelief at how he was trying to engineer this situation. “You can’t be serious.”

“I didn’t mean it like that. I’ll sleep on the couch, you can take the bed.”

“Why would you do that?”

“Cause then we’d be even, right? Surely a smashed tail light, a fixed-up car and a place to stay balances out leaving you to die in the desert?” You raised an eyebrow in faint agreement. “Plus I can’t handle it when women cry, if this’ll make you stop then it’s worth it.”

You smiled at him, which was a new experience. Grabbing your glass of golden liquid from the bar, you drank it all down in one, immediately regretting your decision when it kicked you in the back of the throat like a pissed off mule. Bucky laughed at you before standing up gesturing for you to follow him out.

The two of you walked in silence for a few minutes before he hesitantly piped up.

“So, you gonna tell me why the hell you’re driving through the desert on your own, or am I still in the doghouse?”

“You’re still in the doghouse.” A prompting look in your direction somehow swayed you a little, you were getting too soft. “It’s really not exciting, I just got kicked out of my apartment. I used to have some family out here but we lost touch, now tracking them down is my only shot at avoiding living in my car full-time.”

“I wondered why there was so much crap piled in the back of that thing.”

“Mhmm, everything I own in the world is in that car. Had to sell most of my stuff for gas money, though.”

“That sucks.”

“Yep.” You glanced at him out of the corner of your eye, for some reason now experiencing some pangs of curiosity about your host. “How about you?”

“Me? What d’you mean?”

“Well, the lady at that diner said she used to see you with your dad a lot, but that you hadn’t been in for a while.”

“You two were talking about me?”

“She was talking at me, trying to convince me that I was the asshole.”

“I always liked her.” He smirked slightly, but it faded as he carried on. “My dad died a few months back. It was pretty hard, he was a good guy, helped me out a lot. More than I deserved, anyway."

“Go on.”

“Well, I was kind of an idiot a few years back. I let some shitty friends talk me into some stupid ideas and wound up inside for a few months.”

“Shit.”

“It was, I pretty much lost everything. When I got out I was pretty depressed, so all I wanted to do was get high and sleep, but he didn’t let me. He got me the job at the garage and gave me enough money for a couple month’s rent, to be honest I’d probably be dead now without him.”

“He sounds great.” The two of you exchanged warm glances for a second, but you didn’t want to give him any untoward ideas about the evening, so you continued. “It’s nice when people don’t leave others to die.”

“You have to let that go at some point.”

“I really don’t.”

When the two of you reached his apartment, you jumped straight into the shower, triple checking that the ensuite door was firmly locked before doing so. The place wasn’t nearly as dirty or bachelor pad-esque as you’d expected. Yeah, it was half-empty and hardly decorated, but that was to be expected of any man living on his own. At least it didn’t smell like ass.

Bucky was already knocked out on the couch when you came out of the bathroom, his neck folded in half and his feet dangling over the edge. It was his own fault for only buying a two-seater.

You changed into the t-shirt and gym shorts he’d left out for you, just hoping to god they were clean, and jumped into bed. It was far from perfect but, compared to the backseat of your car, it could’ve been a five star hotel. You drifted off almost instantly.

---

You were woken by a few loud raps on the bedroom door. It took you a few seconds of panic to remember where the hell you were, your head falling back into the pillow once you did so.

“What?”

“Are you all covered and stuff?” The low voice came through the wood. “I really need to pee.”

You let out a groggy laugh. “Go ahead.”

Bucky burst into the room and sprinted over to the bathroom, holding onto his junk like a child about to pee their pants. You would’ve laughed even harder at that sight, but you found yourself a little distracted by the fact that he was also shirtless. You only got a brief glance but, fucking hell, he was build like a brick wall. Suddenly you were wide awake.

You could hear him pissing like a firehose through the bathroom door and sighing audibly when he was finished. He wandered back through after a minute and paused at the foot of the bed.

“How’d you sleep?”

You were trying your very best to stay composed under the circumstances. “Mhmm, good, thanks.”

“Were the clothes I left out okay?”

“Yeah, yep, all good.”

“You alright?”

“Fine. Why?”

“You’re acting weird. Did something happen?” He grabbed a fistful of the duvet and tried to yank it out of your grip. “Did you piss the bed?”

“No I didn’t piss the fucking bed, Jesus.”

“What’s up then?”

You sat up, looking from his face, down to his chest, then back up to his face with a confused expression. He quickly cottoned on to what you were getting at.

“Oh, yeah, sorry. I made myself a coffee but spilled it down my shirt, and all my clothes are in here.”

He gestured over to the chest of drawers. You weren’t super convinced by that explanation, it sounded like he was making it up on the spot, but you nodded anyway.

“It’s fine.”

“It is?”

“Mhmm.”

“Good.”

His expression changed. Your heart started thudding, the look he was giving you making you start to break out in a sweat, your toes curling under the covers.

Reaching down, he grabbed hold of the duvet again but, this time, he tore it away and dropped it onto the floor with one swift movement. Moving slowly, cautiously, he climbed onto the bed on his knees, making his way forwards and carefully lowering himself down over you.

Well, you certainly hadn’t expected this. Just a few minutes later the two of you were tangled together so closely that you didn’t know where his body stopped and yours began. The skin on his face and hands felt rough as it grazed over yours, the sensation making you gasp each time you felt it, the deep chuckle that sounded right beside your ear in response making your stomach flutter wildly. As he panted, his warm breath spread over the side of your neck, sending an electric tingle all the way down your spine. This felt good, really fucking good. This might’ve been exactly what you needed.

What felt like hours later, he rolled over and landed with a thud on the mattress beside you, both of your chests rapidly rising and falling in unison. Lulling his head in your direction, he gave you a smile.

“Y’know,” he pushed his words out between deep breaths, “you could stay here for a while, if you wanted to. While you figure things out.”

“Was it that good?”

“Hell yeah it was.”

You laughed at his corny ass. “So, what you’re saying is that you’d be willing to give me a place to stay in exchange for sex? Sounds dangerously close to prostitution.”

“That’s not what I meant.” He rolled onto his side, resting his head on his hand so he could look you in the face. “You can stay with or without sex, I just like your company. No point sleeping in a crappy car when there’s a perfectly good bed right here.”

You gave him a smile. “I’ll think about it.”

---

After breakfast, Bucky gave you a ride to the garage in the pickup truck, now complete with a duct tape covered tail light. He said he could finish off the final touches on your car while you waited in the office, apparently the bar wasn’t open this early and there was nothing else to do in town apart from a shitty cafe and a gun range.

The two of you ducked under the half-open shutter and he headed into the back, telling you to wait by your car for a few minutes while he tidied up. The place was pretty small, just one other car being worked on aside from yours. You wondered how Bucky’s dad got him the job here, whether he had an in with the owner or whether he was just that easy a guy to trust. Running your fingers over the tools lined up on the workbench, you thought that maybe you could be happy with a life here, maybe it was exactly what you’d been looking for.

You almost jumped out of your skin when an older, grey-bearded man in coveralls suddenly appeared beside you. He gestured toward the rustbucket.

“This yours?” You nodded politely. “Here.”

He was trying to hand you the keys, eyes glued to the clipboard he was holding.

“Oh, Bucky said it still needed some work.”

He looked confused. “This one? Nah, this was ready to go yesterday. He said you were out of town or something.”

“He said what?”

Grey beard replied but you didn’t hear it, too busy piecing together the events of last night and becoming increasingly more pissed off as you did so. Bucky had lied to you for a quick lay, of course he fucking had. You felt like such an idiot. You snatched the keys and asked the now very puzzled looking man to open the shutter for you, climbing in and firing up the engine as he did so.

Bucky appeared at your window. “What are you doing?”

“Ask your friend over there.”

You gestured over to the other employee, who just shrugged while yanking on the shutter chain, and a wave of realisation washed over Bucky’s face.

“Let me explain.”

“I’m good, thanks.”

He banged his hand on the side of the car in frustration, quickly moving round to stand between it and its route to freedom.

You honked the horn. “Move, asshole.”

“Not until you hear me out.”

“Why should I? I don’t fucking know you, I don’t owe you shit.”

“Right.” Moving at a lightning pace, Bucky somehow managed to sprint around the side of the car, yank open your door and pull the keys from the ignition before you could even register what was happening. “Get out.”

“Go fuck yourself.”

With a frustrated sigh, he hurled the keys as hard as he could out onto the forecourt. “What’s your plan now, huh?”

You grunted loudly, narrowed your eyes at him and stepped out, marching straight past him and heading outside. He caught your arm before you reached the keys.

“Just stop for a second.”

“I don’t want to hear it.”

“Tough shit. I’m going to talk and you’re going to fucking listen, alright?” His firm tone shocked you a little, it was enough to make you relent just for a second. “Look, I’m sorry, okay? I shouldn’t have lied. I just wanted to spend some more time with you.”

“Well you pulled that off, so congrats, but now that you’ve had what you were after I’d like to go.”

“It wasn’t like that, I wanted more than that.” He rubbed his forehead. “I want more than that.”

“I’ve heard it all before, Buck. You barely even know me, just let me leave and we can both move on.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Cause you’re the only fucking thing that hasn’t depressed or bored me since I lost my dad, alright? I know it sounds stupid, but watching you take out my tail light was the first time I’d actually felt alive in months,” he slid his grip on your arm down, taking your hand in his, “and, maybe I’m out of line here, but I think you feel the same.”

You thought back.

Jesus, he was right. That was the first time you’d actually been in a good mood since leaving your apartment. Surely it can’t be healthy to base any kind of relationship on the joy you get from destroying each other’s property and screaming at each other, though? Can it?

In all fairness, he was the only person you’d even met that actually kept you on your toes, and you quite liked that. Usually people just responded to your insults with offence or tears.

“I don’t know. I mean, I guess, but I’m just not sure that-”

Your train of thought derailed completely when his mouth crashed against yours, your words getting swallowed as all of the breath left your lungs at once. You were hesitant at first, but you soon relented, relaxing, wrapping your arms around his neck and smiling against him, which he reciprocated.

He pulled away, looking incredibly pleased with himself. “So that’s how to shut you up.”

“Won’t work every time.”

“Worth a try, though.”

---

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artydonsgf · 6 months ago

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pleeaassee need your thoughts on their individual cooking skills. i think art is good at it and very methodical (househusband) but he's also relied on protein slop for his career so who knows. arttashi have prolly had personal chefs/nutritionists for a long time so i can't gauge them much. patrick... conflicted bc he doesn't rely on others but he also doesn't have a kitchen to do shit in 😭 i think he can't cook but knows the BEST local restaurants/food trucks in every town. lmk what u think!!!

omg hiii! i’m so used to starting these off with “hey anon!” but it’s nice to not have to! i thought i’d just respond rather than make it a post because im too eager to ramble.

i think that art had to make a conscious effort to learn how to cook. as a teenager/young adult he was an absolute disaster in the kitchen and as he grew older he kinda thought to himself “i want to cook without nearly burning the house down”. so he gets himself a little apron, a cookbook, and buys every cooking/baking gadget possible. he is the nara smith of his time essentially. and YESSS art donaldson house husband is REAL! he knows how to clean (when he’s with patrick, he kinda just forgets) but cooking took him actual effort. he’s really proud of his dishes and he’s always trying something new.

tashi knows how to cook too. she didn’t come from money so she didn’t have cooks growing up. she has the basic skills down and i bet she’s really good at baking. the thing is, she cannot cook if someone else is in the kitchen. the minute either of the boys try to hover she’s tweaking. she’s telling them to move before she loses her mind😭 she also can’t teach people for shit, she tried to teach patrick but his complete lack of abilities was irking her real bad. “no patrick, use a teaspoon of that…. WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU USED A FUCKING TABLESPOON GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE”. even when he calls her asking for advice she asks him to use google or she’ll get annoyed all over again.

patrick has never met a dish he can cook😭 bro is an absolute DISASTER in the kitchen. it’s not from a lack of trying either, every time he goes over to art’s and tries something he made, he goes back home determined to learn properly. his body is just not doing what needs to be done. tashi refused to after he set pasta on fire (didn’t use enough water???) and art has tried so many times but patrick is just not getting it and he’s tired. patrick has resorted to become the foodie of the group. you can say “im craving a very obscure dish found in the most obscure country in the world” and he will have a place for you to go. he is a serial reviewer, people have begun to recognize him. he’s basically keith lee. he’s a harsh critic for a mf who can’t cook too.

#challengers #challengers rant

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disabled-dragoon · 2 years ago

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Me and a friend are attending a con together. They have mobility issues and chronic pain so standing can be painful. usually they use crutches but they are worried that the standing required at a con would cause issues.

Good new i have access to a wheelchair they could use for the day. Bad new parents arnt supportive at all. during the con it will just be and friend but their parents will drop them of to meet with me and see the wheel chair if i just bring it for them. parents know they want wheelchair and will know its for them.

I was thinking of hiding the chair by claiming it as part of my cosplay (character is obscure enough they wouldn’t know). I see you use wheelchair. i was wondering if you could suggest a way i could make the chair look incidental to a cosplay whilst still being viable to use long term.

[ID: A standard black manual wheelchair on a white background. The footplates are down. /end ID]

Hm. I've never done wheelchair cosplay before so if anyone else has any suggestions they would be very much appreciated.

However!

Going off the fact that I do not know your character, your friends character or your budget, I would say cable/zip ties and cardboard, specifically cardboard boxes and/or tubes but any cardboard is fine.

There is a lot you can do with cardboard- fold, flatten, paint, cut, etc.- and it's cheap too. Cable ties help with the more fiddly parts, and they can easily be cut off, but, ideally, if it's measured right, you might not have to remove anything at all.

Sheets or old blankets might also be worth considering. And they would have another usage in that your friend has something to cover themselves with if they get cold.

Now if you're still batting around actual costume designs for the wheelchair, bearing in mind I do not know your character so these are purely for inspiration purposes, there's a lot you could do:

Vehicles- Name a vehicle and you can probably turn a wheelchair into it. Car, train, tractor, boat/ship, plane, rocket, digger, roller, van, bus etc. Even a cart (like a market cart, or a racing cart like in Mario). My personal favourite is a horse-drawn/princess carriage. This is probably the most popular option, and you'll find a bunch of examples with a quick google search.

Wheeled character- like a Dalek, or R2D2, WALL-E etc. etc.

Or simply a character that moves very very smoothly/glides (I can't think of an example)

Clouds or bushes

A moving throne

A trolley of some kind (you could also fold it for this, then fold it out when it's needed)

Horse (with space for rider)

Creature of some kind- dragon, spider etc. etc.

You don't have to go too OTT either, which is the beauty of it. You can paint/decorate two sheets of card and attach them to either side of the chair (ensuring the wheels aren't blocked) and/or throw a sheet over or a cushion etc.

Unfortunately that's all I've got really. Like I said, I've never cosplayed before, but I have occasionally considered doing it since using the chair, so I've got a couple of ideas. If anyone reading (and anyone more experienced in cosplay) has any additions they are welcome.

I hope you find something that works, and enjoy your con!

#ask box #disability #wheelchair #wheelchair user #cosplay #wheelchair cosplay #help and advice #open to suggestions #disability community #image #image description

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zombiepuke · 2 years ago

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it’s emetophilia ask anon again (the one who pointed out Ellie behaving like a dog/cat does when they’re about to vomit hehe - if you’ve never seen a dog vomit before, try looking it up on YouTube/Google or somethin so you can see what I mean. they do these whole body movements where they like arch their backs up n down for like 10 seconds or so before they actually puke - i guess that’s how they physically bring the vomit up? but yeh that’s exactly how ellie moves in that brief moment when she’s still on all fours before puking the first time)

anywayyyyys… i’m sending another ask ‘cause it’s rare to find anyone into/interested in emeto stuff! but it definitely makes sense in the horror community hehe

so this is more about you and your personal interests in this topic than anything.. i was wondering what sorta stuff you’re into emetophilia-wise. like what do you enjoy? obviously with emeto stuff there’s a few different aspects to it, and some people only enjoy certain parts, or enjoy certain parts more than others, y’know.. like the general feeling of nausea, and that awful feeling of knowing you need to puke, and the actual moment before puking, and the actual act of puking, and the puke itself.

like.. some people enjoy being the puker, some people like being puked on, some people like both? some people don’t care about the actual act of puking and are just all about the puke itself.. some people have very specific likes/dislikes for their personal enjoyment with emetophilia. so I wanna know what you’re into haha!

also you said you’ve written some real fucked up shit before so im obviously now super interested to hear all about it!😁

but also what would you love to write about regarding ellie + emeto? like forget about what anyone else wants.. what would you love to write for your enjoyment?

OOF so sorry nonnie it took a bit to answer this, i have been super busy this weekend with birthday stuff but everything should be calming down!

Talk of emetophilia stuff below y'all be warned!!!!!

but yes - i have 3 kitties myself and have definitely witnessed some unfortunate puke accidents lmao. i love love love how animalistic they made the deadites in EDR - especially Ellie. and i appreciate you asking - i love talking about my obscure interests and finding others who share them!

when it comes to actual emeto, the actual puke itself isn't really what does it for me. it's everything else, especially the time leading up to the act of puking. it's such a gross feeling (and i actually have meds prescribed for nausea because i get really bad migraines rip) but i secretly love it. i also secretly love the feeling of being ill/sick with the flu or a cold in general but something about feeling the need to throw up was always like, intriguing to me. it's one of those feelings as a human that we get that is so animalistic and instinctive, like the way our bodies prepare us to help us pass anything it didn't like via vomiting, it's kinda sweet in a way. and as for actually vomiting, it's this strange feeling of not being able to breath, and i always get overheated and overwhelmed and it's uncomfortable but exciting - same way i feel about going to the dentist but that is a whole other converation LMAO i adore teeth and anything dealing with teeth. odontophilia is another vice of mine.

i would say i'm more akin to the acts of puking rather than the physical puke itself. in terms of Ellie i would prefer being the one being puked on, but both is good for me. i like anything oral-related and i think that adds a lot to the emeto stuff - as does tooth stuff too. usually any fic i write involving teeth also involve vomit - and a looooot of my writing focuses on teeth and puke and general seepage from bodies (if you haven't noticed lol)

it's allllllllll about the divide from human to inhuman - zombies, deadites, etc all have that in common, and vomit is a really big part of zombie/infection type horror. the idea of a human body being overtaken by a sickness or virus, possession, anything - the physical acts of your body degrading and decomposing, giving into the sickness, the fevers and symptoms of being infected, it's all super interesting (and arousing shhhhh) to me. Ellie is no different, an innocent human body suddenly taken control of and forcibly violent, a normal looking person suddenly getting extremely sick, throwing up, bleeding, eyes transforming, covered in blood, attacking and biting and eating, UGH. that's why i'm treading the waters here and testing how far i can go in a body-horror aspect with Ellie - i want to get super deranged and fucked up but still in a consensual way ofc - reader is based on my own mindset so ofc they're 10000000% willing for the deadite based body horror puke extravaganza lol

so basically i adore zombie-ism and transformation and the grossness that pursues that. Ellie is a perfect mix of it all. i really am so excited to explore her in my writing; inhumanity and her nastiness and gore and how awful she would realistically be - as much as i would love a sweet cuddle moment with her, i want there to be blood and guts and vomit and her manipulation, her evilness, her true nature, and just revel in it. she would fucking torture you, and you would love it.

love ya nonnie always always ask me stuff about gross shit and Ellie doing gross shit and zombies and all of that :)

#evil dead #evil dead rise #ellie evil dead #so more gross ellie in my fics #ellie vomiting on you or making you vomit #force feeding you weird shit to make you want to puke but never letting you til you're desperate #shit like that

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obxfiles · 2 years ago

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ooh new tag game!

tagged by the ever-lovely @pjm-1 thank you so much!! <3

🎄What book are you currently reading?

-> i just punk 57 by penelope douglas and i’ve just started archer’s voice by mia sheridan

🎄 What’s your favorite movie you saw in theaters this year?

-> the only thing i’ve seen in theaters in the last two, three? years is the bts concert

🎄What do you usually wear?

-> usually these really comfy black pants with a pretty blouse or an artsy tee with a cardigan but lately it’s been so, so cold you can usually find me in my heavy windbreaker lol

🎄How tall are you?

-> 157cm

🎄What’s your Star Sign? Do you share a birthday with a celebrity or a historical event?

->i’m a capricorn, and uhhh...according to google, chr*stopher col*mbus “discovered” manatees that day. i’ve honestly just spent far too much time on “today in history” scrolling and there’s so much dark stuff and obscure music history, so i’ll go with the manatee fact.

🎄Do you go by your name or a nick-name?

-> usually just my name

🎄Did you grow up to become what you wanted to be when you were a child?

-> lmao nope but that’s okay! things don’t always work out the way we plan, and sometimes better things are in store.

🎄Are you in a relationship? If not, who is your crush if you have one?

-> no, and currently right now just celebrity and fictional crushes. anthony bridgerton i’m lookin’ at you.

🎄What’s something you’re good at vs. something you’re bad at?

-> Good - i’m a fast reader, and a pretty good writer when i actually try. i’m bad at managing my time and getting myself motivated and kicking adhd in the ass lol

🎄Dogs or cats? both, but i have three cats.

🎄If you draw/write, or create in any way, what’s your favorite picture/favorite line/favorite etc. from something you created this year?

-> i don’t really share my writing here currently and i don’t really post anything either beyond just me rambling in text posts lol

🎄What’s something you would like to create content for?

-> bts, the book i’m working on (slowly).

🎄What’s something you’re currently obsessed with?

-> bridgerton, as problematic as it is. and trashy romance novels. i’m kind of in my trashy romance era and absolutely thriving in it lol as long as you can be critical of what you consume i think it’s okay to embrace some of these things. there’s just something i find fun in fully embracing stuff i previously cringed away from.

🎄What’s something you were excited about that turned out to be disappointing this year?

-> i guess the bts concert movie. not that it in itself was disappointing but i found the whole movie theater experience really upsetting since everything. i haven’t been to the movies in years because of it all and when i went, my sensory overload was in overdrive and i had to step away and leave because of it so that was really upsetting because i’d been so excited for it!!

🎄What’s a hidden talent of yours?

-> reading fast and being able to actually take in what i read. i realized today i’ve read five books this week and i can sit down and read one an evening, depending on what it is. and not just skim it, but actually really take it in.

🎄Are you religious?

-> i grew up very religious but i’ve kind of been trying to figure out my own thing.

🎄What’s something you wish to have at this moment?

-> i want to find a perfect little job for myself that i’ll be capable of doing and that will be understanding of me and my needs. i want to work on my writing more, and feel more confident in sharing it with the world.

thank you so much lovely!

i’m tagging @sunshineggukie @minieggukie @fandomfairyuniverse @thoresque @starlostjimin @thornedswan @boopskoo @stay7 and anyone else that wants to do this <3

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gikairan · 1 year ago

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Man, there are people actually excited about this stupid Apple Vision thing and just....

why? 🙃

Its literally Google Glass, but worse. It will fail for the same reasons Google Glass never got off the ground. From privacy concerns about the cameras on someones face, to people finding out that staring at a screen SO close to your face is an actually Awful experience.

I've seen people go "Theyre not the same!!!" and like... they are. They really are. They are both designed to do very similar things, except ones got an Apple logo on it. If anything, Apple Vision is worse because its got the form factor of a VR headset. Something already considered bulky and uncomfortable for long-term use. The form factor of VR is one of the major reasons it is likely to remain niche.

I've seen people say "you poo-pooed the iPad and the Watch and now look!" And like... okay i get it. Everyone really did poo-poo on the iPad. But i'd argue the original presentation focused more on "you can do everything on your phone, but on a bigger device!" rather than "hey, heres a smaller, thinner device that will replace your laptop, that runs the apps your phone does". Like, i remember people making fun of it because it was an oversized iPhone. Who wants a giant face-sized device to make phone calls? No-one. And thats why it was ridiculed. And i dont remember people making fun of the Watch, because.... by the point the Watch was released (2015)... the Pebble Smartwatch was already around (Kickstarter was in 2012, release was 2013). It hadn't just done well on crowdfunding, its still in the top 10 highest grossing kickstarters of all time.

These things have proven their use since their release. I really doubt Apple Vision is ever going to justify its use to the normal consumer.

It will absolutely have niche applications, dont get me wrong. The Hololens already exists, but most regular normal people likely didnt know it released. Because its not tech for the general public. The Kinect isn't actually dead- its got its use in some very niche applications, and Microsoft just tried to force the tech into gaming to make it more widespread (probably to justify actually creating it?). There will likely be industries that find AR extremely useful (I keep hearing about surgeons and AR. Though i also think architecture and construction might find a lot of use for this)

In terms of the video Apple showed off, theres very little I can see on it that will actually improve someones life.... Sure you can relive your memories in 3d.... but you've got to wear a bulky pair of ski goggles to record it in the first place. You can relive the memories of your children after the divorce!! .... And you lost that human connection during the actual moment itself, because you obscured the top half of your face for a giant screen. The best "use" i thought was obscuring the view of a busy plane around you. ... Except in reality, obscuring such view would likely be awful.... So the thing only has about 2 hours of battery life and needs to be plugged into an external battery with a wire. Given the bulky nature of the device, thats... really bad. The video showed a woman on a plane watching Everything Everywhere All At Once. The film is 2 hours and 19 minutes long. .... You cannot watch that entire film on a single charge. Then theres the fact we see most of her field of vision obscured by pretty sunset clouds. And the idea of getting rid of a peripheral vision of A Flight sure sounds nice. ... Until you realise how much you rely on that vision during a flight.... For a long flight - you'll need to see when the flight attendants are coming around for drinks, food etc. You'll need to know when people sitting around you might want to get up. Obscuring 100% of your vision is maybe not the best idea? Even for a short flight, obscuring all your vision might cause you to miss important announcements. Or, you know, your neighbour who just wants to pee? Then theres how the movie window is going to work full stop. We see earlier in the video that you can put a window in front of you, and a window to the side that you move your head to look at. Are you going to be able to put windows in a 360 degree circle around your head, and you just spin around in real space to see them all? ... If so, will the movie player stay in one space in "real space", or will it stay in the same place according to the screen? Imagine if a movie player on a small screen in front of your eyes stayed in the same place relative to real space, and every time you adjusted yourself in your seat... you had to physically move the window to see it. And think about how often you do minor changes to how you sit, how your head is positioned etc etc....

Most of the rest of the announcement seems to just be office related stuff. Controlled by hand gestures.

... You know why hand gesture devices have never caught on? People hate using them (: Have you ever used a Kinect before? You'll find your body got tired quite quickly trying to just navigate menus. We dont like holding our hands/ arms up all the time to navigate digital menus. It feels worse than a mouse, a controller, or just tapping a screen. Its just awkward. People will try it for work and then go "wow just using my mouse & keyboard is way easier" and then never put on the stupid goggles again.

All in all, this thing is just... bad. Its not good. It wont catch on. It'll be an extremely niche product that will only every really have a handful of uses. And none of them will be for the general public.

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soleminisanction · 2 years ago

Note

You’ve mentioned Steph having black girl sidekicks other than Nell Little. Do you know who they are and where they appear? I’ve never heard of any of them before

Understandable -- to be clear, it's not that I think this is a deliberate thing, it's just something they've done accidentally often enough that if they do it again it's officially going to be creepy.

In addition to Nell, it's happened twice. The most recent was Tiffany Fox from Batgirl: Futures End (2014). She's the least egregious one because she at least got to be in an ensemble and was created by Gail Simone, who actually knows how to write women, but she is shown to be closer to Steph than Cass, including this emotional moment where she and Steph are hugging while Babs says goodbye and it stands out.

The first time they did is really obscure, because it seems like everybody but me has forgotten the Robin/Spoiler Special from 2008. But I bought that damn thing new, it's one of my first experiences feeling ripped off by a comic I paid money for, and I have kept it bagged and boarded for 15 goddamn years out of spite and also to occasionally remind people that Chuck Dixon is a reactionary racist.

As part of the very bad and also very racist flashback story explaining (badly) why Stephanie decided to come back from Africa to be Spoiler again, they give Steph a widdle black girl sidekick named Efia.

All we really know about Efia is that she has a little dog named Buni, and that she looks up to "Miss Brown" enough to ask her to go out and look for him. She also gushes about how wonderful America sounds, expresses her desire to go there, and tells Steph about a "devil" who comes out at night to hunt.

Katavi, btw, just means "thorn" in Swahili. It's the name of region in Tanzania and also a national park. Chuck Dixon pulled this "devil" out of his ass so that Stephanie has something to cosplay as while saving Leslie Tompkins from his poorly-researched and deeply offensive portrayal of modern Tanzanian witch-hunts, which are a real thing that have killed thousands of people.

In this fight, Steph blows a man up with a gas can molotov, gets Leslie Tompkins shot, and abandons her little friend after destabilizing the village and fixing nothing, because the bad guy seems to remain in-power in the end and the narrative does nothing to imply that the locals have somehow lost their racistly-portrayed ignorance.

Fun fact: according to Google Translate, "Mimi ni katavi" is Swahili for, "I'm a bitch!" Dead serious.

This, according to Dixon, is what inspires Stephanie to go back to Gotham and be a superhero again. Because, quote, "I can never really stop being Spoiler. And I never want to again."

So yeah, there you go. The good news is, Nell Little got reclaimed in the DC Bombshells universe, where she's one of the founding members of the Batgirls little league baseball/vigilante crime-fighting team, is portrayed as both their expert get-away driver and their mechanical genius (she creates the Batmobile!), and eventually hooks up with Alysia Yeoh. I prefer to think of that as her canon version.

#nell little #batgirls #batgirl 2009 #robin/spoiler special #robin dc #dc comics #tw racism #seriously I cut out the worst of it but I cannot stress enough how racist this story is #chuck dixon should never be allowed to write black people #especially not black people who aren't american #he's always embarassingly racist about it #you know he wrote a fucking QAnon comic??? dude deserves to be forgotten #anyway read bombshells it's great #and progressive and actively anti-racist

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other-peoples-coats · 3 years ago

Text

Notes on Mando'a in BTMYBW

Ok! so, the next chapter of Be that monster you been wanting is about to go up, and it contains like, so much fucking mando'a I kitbashed into existence. This post goes into more about the specifics of word choices, what I actually did, and the sort of world building navel gazing I suspect only one or two people might care about.

You do not need to read this to understand the next chapter; everything you need to understand what's happening in the chapter is on Ao3. This is notes on translation choice, some of which make things slightly more nuanced, none of which alter the story or actual meaning of the chapter.

A disclaimer: I am not a linguist. I don't even play one on tv. My grasp of grammar was formed by the Australian schooling system, which is so notoriously bad at teaching grammar that novels that have been published in Australian markets often get automatically re-edited by overseas publishing houses when they acquire the rights because the grammatical standards here are so comparatively low.

What I am saying is: I might have fucked this up terribly, and I am in no means an expert at anything here. I've been writing in mando'a for [checks notes] uh about just over two weeks, so, y'know. Baby's first nonfunctional conlang. That said: under the cut be spoilers for chapter 10 of be that monster you been wanting, some wider spoilers for the world (though none of them are very specific and honestly shouldn't be that surprising), and kind of a lot of thought about mandalorian cultural differences, at least as I'm making them up for this particular AU.

Also, so much made up Mando'a.

So, the major resource I used while kitbashing this nightmare language together was the great big google spreadsheet of doom, with a little from mando'a.org.

One of the main sort of ideas that I leant heavily on is that Mando'a uses a lot of words for both military use and for civilian use, and it's heavily contextually dependent.

The New Mandalorians, being pacifists, are mostly ditching a lot of those meanings and/or making new ones, or just not needing to make a distinction between, say, putting your armour on, and putting on clothing. Qui-gon would have learnt the New Mandolorain / Kalevalan dialect of Mando'a — so he translates, say, 'comms unit' (which I have rendered as jorhaa'ur, from talk [jorhaa'ir] + 'ur for performer of the action) as talker, like person who is talking, instead of the more accurate (to the context) translation as radio or comms unit.

In context, the word is pulling double duty and is dependant on said context to differentiate between 'person who is talking' and 'helmet radio, aka thing you do the talking with'.

One of the other major things I kind of tossed out was that Mando'a doesn't use anything but simple tenses, because…well, that's not really functional for me. That's it, it's easier to have progressive tenses and past tenses and past progressive tenses to tell the story I'm telling, and the idea that you might never ever hear them is nuts to me.

In world, I'm going to call that one of the major differences between dialects — on the sliding scale of Modern to Archaic As Fuck, the three major dialects I'm making up (New Mando'a aka Kalevalan, what I'll call Common Mando'a which is everyone else, Death Watch Mando'a which is…death watch) sit basically:

-New Mandalorian: most modern, lots of complicated verb structures and much less contextually dependent words, very few uses for meanings of words pulling double duty of military and civilian.

-Common Mando'a: somewhat modern, more context dependent but still uses some complex verb forms when needed, many words pull double duty as military terms and civilian ones

-Death Watch Mando'a: Intentionally obscure, highly context dependant, and a fuck load of very old words literally no one else uses anymore. Almost no complex verb structures. This is not really a natural dialect, but something made up by a cult and used exclusively by a cult. Shit loads of jargon pretending to be a sentence, basically.

In general, the more modern your base dialect, the more complicated your sentence and grammar becomes, but the less ambiguous your words are. There would be sub dialects, but: I ain't fucking with that.

Yes, this does mean that Death Watch — a literal cult — are out there talking in a very closed off, kind of nearly incomprehensible and hugely context dependent sentence structure that is at least a bit alienating to everyone else. This is on purpose, because, again, it's a cult. That's how cults work, making themselves more closed off to outsiders helps reinforce Stay With The Cult.

They're also prone to using more archaic words and phrases, because…uh, they're very much into the whole The Good Old Days (when we were Conquering Warlords), which includes things like we used to say it like THIS. "man's out here trying to chat with the taung empire" is the sort of thing mean teens might say, if it was safe to make fun of death watch, who are doing the equivalent of wandering around being like FORSOOTH and VERRILY instead of, y'know, modern english.

Ok! I think that's all the like, base world assumptions, more or less. Let's get down to the word choices. So, the first sentences of Mando'a is from Satine (Kalevalan by birth though now speaks mostly Common Mando'a, so she's got complex grammar coming out of her ears).

Ogir shi sol'tan jet'entye'tsad ni ven'nari ruusiir'an Manda'yaim ne'ja'hailir. Ru'ca'nara jetii taabir rud Manda'yaim, ner buir cu'kyrun'amu, shi jorcu jor kih'paklalat bac ner kih'vod balyc ni nu'mirshe'vi'tayc.

Literally, this translates as "There's only one of those who have jedi-duty I'd trust (on) mandalore not-observed. Time(past) Jedi march around mandalore, my parent was soul killed, only because-why little silver tongue that my little sibling and I not-mind-collared."

Which, uh, is a pretty nonsense sentence.

Functionally, though, I've translated it as "There's only one who follows the Jedi code I'd trust on Mandalore unwatched. The last time a Jedi wandered around here, my father was killed, and it's only because of little silver tongue that I and my sister aren't mindless slaves too".

To break down the word choices a bit more:

Sol'tan is direct from the spreadsheet, and means one, but in the sense of like, unique or one of a kind. Satine's doing the verbal equivalent of saying the one (1) [jedi] she trusts.

jet'entye'tsad is a kitbashed word from jetii (jedi) + the archaic word for duty, specifically the debt a mandalorian owes to mandalorian society (Mand'entye) + group ('tsad).

Functionally, Satine's approaching this from a slightly different perspective than just those who are Currently Part Of The Order — she's talking about anyone who follows the Jedi Code and/or acts as a Jedi, basically.

As an example based in canon, post order 66, the Order (jetiise) doesn't exist, but the jedi-duty (jet'entye) will, and those who follow it are jet'entye'tsad, even if they're not jetiise.

ven'nari ruusiir'an is the future progressive (I think) of trust — so, functionally, it's I (would) trust.

ne'ja'hailir is ne' (negative) + observe/watch over, so. unwatched/unobserved. Qui-gon is missing the negative, but is still getting…roughly the right translation, as spotty as it is. (he translates it as observed rather than unobserved.)

ne'cara is time, ru' is the prefix for past tense. Time-(past), which is a very rough sort of last time or the time (in the past).

taabir is technically foot+verb ending (ir), so like, footed. The spreadsheet has it as marched, but since I'm pulling this mando'a into doing double duty, it's functioning here as a general word for moved around — everything from like, marched to walked to wandered.

cu'kyrun'amu - this is a big kitbash. cu' is the passive (was, in this case) + ky'runi is soul killed +'amu seems to be the suffix attached to murder or like, killed rather than just died.

Spoilery sidebar about ky'runi — the spreadsheet has it listed as very rarely used, mostly about someone who is completely destroyed and unwilling to live on, "killed soul".

Functionally, in this case, Satine is talking about her father having been had his mind fucked with so badly and extensively over that year on the run that he wasn't, functionally, a person any more, just a puppet for the Sith. The man who her father was was dead, and his body just happened to still be moving around. Or at least, that's how she conceptualised it.

kih'paklalat is functioning here as a nickname. Literally, it means small-silver tongue, but I'm using it as a nickname, and also sort of as a call sign. OPSEC is no joke, and sure, Qui-gon doesn't speak Mando'a as far as they know, but saying who it really is would make it pretty obvious to him anyway. Some of this is habit from the year on the run. Names have power.

last kitbashed word of the sentence! nu'mirshe'vi'tayc - not-mind-collared. nu' is, again, negative, mirshe is actually technically brain rather than mind, and vi'tayc is collared, like of an animal or very derogatory for a slave. This is a word that would probably more accurately translate as brainwashed in normal use, but, uh, given they're talking about a sith, it's a far more literal 'collar on the mind' kind of deal.

Sentence two.

Ranov'saan ru'jorhaa'ir kil'yc Jetiise nu'cuyi sa'ibacir. Literally, this translates as Secret-reliable said some jedi not-be like-that. Functionally, I've translated this as Ranov'saan said that at least some of the order wasn't like that.

Ranov'saan comes from secret (ranov'la) + reliable (saan), and is a play on an apparently common Mandalorian name, ruusaan (reliable one). Another nickname/callsign, this one much easier to slip into conversation.

(yes, Qui-gon is ...kind of right about it being a variation on Ruusaan, if not quite like a john/jon situation)

ru'jorhaa'ir is just talk/speak but past tense.

Kil'yc and jetiise are both from the spreadsheet. Bo-katan is using jedi here, not people who follow the order's duty, because she's specifically talking about, well, Jedi, and in the context that dooku was a "jedi" at the point he was on mandalore and mindfucked their dad. This is part of the reason I came up with that differential — I figure mandalorians, of all people, would have a way to draw a line between [part of group] and [part of culture which mostly overlaps with group]

cuyi is the catch all verb for to be — eg he is/ they are/I am — and, as said earlier, nu' is a negative. therefore, not-to-be, or he isn't / they aren't / I am not etc.

sa is like, and ibac is that, ir is the verb modifier suffix, therefore, kitbashed it's like-that, as in, 'George is a dickhead, I'm so glad sally isn't like that.'

Sentence (chunk) three! and the comparative linguistics associated with it.

Solacabur cuyi kar'tyc meg kebbur pel'tigaanur kaden'edee meh kaysh mirdir ru'sur trikar'la, ne'sushir meg duur'shupuur bah kaysh. Atin en'naryc shabuir.

Literally, this is Lonely-protector is softhearted who try soft-touch angry-teeth if he think looked sad, ignore what might-injure to him. Stubborn dutiful bastard.

Functionally, I translated this as Solacabur's a softie who'd try and pet a rancor if he thought it looked sad, and never mind what damage it did to him. Stubborn dutiful bastard.

Solacabur is, again, a nickname/callsign. Literally it translates as lonely protector or isolated guardian (Sola = single/lonely/isolated, cabur = guardian/protector), but, y'know, smashed together like that it's more obviously a callsign.

Having multiple callsigns is not usually useful or even a good idea, at least all in use at once within the same group — normally one would be retired before the next one was used, so kih'paklalat THEN Ranov'saan THEN Solacabur— but given uh, the Year on the Run is basically when Satine and Bo developed their OPSEC standards, they are very into redundancies and making it as difficult as possible to tell who they're talking about or even how many people.

(Yes there are reasons for this that are maybe obvious but will be in more detail in the side fic still currently Satine Wins Worst Gap Year Award).

cuyi is often dropped in conversational sentences in mando'a, but I'm using it here as a sort of emphasis — not just that Solacabur's got a soft heart, but that they're a softie. Not derogatory, but the sort of — resigned fondness. the difference between "He'll do [x]" and "He will do [x]" — both are grammatically correct, but one's a bit more…emphasised, I suppose.

pel'tigaanur is kitbashed - pel is soft and tigaanur is touch, thus, to pet something rather than just, y'know, touch it however.

kaden'edee is also kit-bashed to be rancor, given, uh, they're angry and have so many teeth(kaden = angry, edee = teeth/jaws).

Mando'a seems to mostly go in for false naming things, rather than having a specific name — like the gentle folk instead of fae or bear instead of the unknown word bear replaced, the specific phrase for this sort of thing escapes me at the moment — so angry-teeth seemed like it fit in with the other mando'a animal names (wind-bird and iron-teeth, etc).

mirdir is actually 'think' (direct from the spreadsheet), but contextually it's thought, in the sort of indefinite [whenever] time frame. If they were speaking only following Kalevalan dialectal norms Bo would probably use ru'mirdir, which is more precise and grammatically consistent. But accents are fuckin wild and so is dialect, so. mirdir it is.

sur is sight/the thing you're looking at, and ru' is once again past tense. Thus, looked as opposed to looks. In less Kalevalan influenced Mando'a this would probably just be sur, and the looked would be contextual, but Satine and Bo are chatting to each other and doing the equivalent of somewhat sliding into their shared childhood accent/dialect.

duur'shupuur is more kitbash - duur is may, and shupuur is injure. duur' seems to be a prefix, and if it's not, well, mando'a probably has a word for [thing/situation] that might hurt (you/anyone).

kaysh is the one (1) mando'a pronoun. Not super common in conversational Common Mando'a, far more common in Kalevalan dialect, used here both as a dialectal habit to specify and as emphasis, because it's about how Solacabur specifically might get hurt (and wouldn't care if it meant they helped someone).

en'naryc is en'nar (duty) + the yc suffix because it's an adjective/adverb - the [stubborn bastard] is dutiful.

Shabuir is bastard. Like the sheet says it means jerk but stronger, but come on. Buir is parent. It's mando'a for bastard.

kih'kaden is a kitbash - kih' is the prefix for small, and kaden is angry. So, annoying is small-angry.

Which means, yes, the New Mandalorians he was staying with and helping negotiate grain and fibre standards called Qui-gon a stubborn annoying bastard.

Sentence (chunk) four!

Ne'miit'akaan. Ni ru'ogir, partaylir. Ni ru'jahailir dini'la shu'shuk bes'haarir buy'ce tatugir'tuur balyc banar troan be'haaran ru'nari dinuir'an kaysh ge kyr'nuhoy mirshe'jehavey'irne, jorcu vencuyanir mhi haaranovor mirshe'jurkadur Jetii'cabur balyc Kyr'tsad.

This one's a fucking doozy.

Literally, it says:

No argument. I was there, remember. I saw (that) crazy disaster put on helmet repeated day also happen face covering kept giving him almost coma brain ambush(the most), because sustain us hide (from) his brain-rapist jedi-guardian also deathwatch.

Less literally:

Won't argue with that. I was there too, remember. I watched that insane disaster put that helmet on every day even though having anything over his face just about sent him catatonic with trauma, cause it would keep us hidden from his mind rapist teacher and deathwatch.

So, breaking it down into words, skipping those that are either covered or already in the spreadsheet and don't need more explanation:

miit'akaan is argument, nu' is negative, this is pretty simple. Sliding a little away from Kalevean dialectal norms here, because Bo's talking about something that happened during the year on the run, where she was Very Much Not talking like a Kalevalan. (Memory is wild, and it is 100% a real thing that sometimes people will talk differently from their current usual accent just from recalling a memory of when they used different accents or dialect.)

Ni ru'ogir is literally I there (Ni ogir), functionally I [was] there, and ru' is, again, past tense. Therefore, I was there instead of I am there.

Ni ru'jahailir is again, I (past tense) + observe (jahailir). Jahailir is pulling double duty here — in a civilian context it is watch like I watch birds, in a military context it's more like observe like we are observing the patrol schedule before infiltrating the base. Sliding a bit further down the scale away from Kalevalan dialectal norms.

Deathwatch Mando'a would use jahailir exclusively. Common Mando'a would use it as well as several other options. Kalevalan Mando'a would use it mostly as a very specific sort of meaning akin to observe like scientifically observe rather than common phrasing.

dini'la shu'shuk - literally, it means insane/crazy disaster, but functionally, it's the sort of — that mad bastard, where you're half admiring and half holy shit what the fuck are you DOING mate?! On the one hand, Bo-katan is thankful, obviously. On the other hand, it was the kind of thing that's so far beyond the line of what's expected that you just have to be like 'holy fuck dude you are going way harder for this than anyone would — should, does — expect of you'.

bes'haarir buy'ce this is partially kitbash! haarir is put on/dress up/etc, and bes' seems to be the root word fragment for anything to do with iron/armour. Thus, bes'haarir is to specifically put on armour, as distinct from put on, say, your tunic. New Mando'a does not use this word; the other two dialects do, because they actually have a need to specify between putting on armour and putting on, like, Things What Make You Not Be Naked In Public.

Buy'ce is helmet. I'm pretty sure if you've read one fic in star wars that uses Mando'a you know this word. It's paired with the above because…well, that's what makes Bo say bes'haarir rather than just haarir, for all that Common Mando'a would probably count both as 'correct' phrasing, given the unambiguous context.

tatugir'tuur is literally repeat day kitbashed together. Mando'a does not seem to have a word for every day, but given the structure of some of the other time words, repeat day seemed…close enough.

Also, yes, Bo-katan is drifting even further from Kalevalan dialectal norms — contextually, this word is an indefinite length of repeats, and also should be past tense. Neither of which Bo has used.

balyc banar - again, literally this is also happen. Contextually, this is [doing x for y reason] also (caused) [z thing] (to) happen. Functionally… this is not how the more modern dialects of Mando'a would phrase it. It's heavily contextual, the grammar is a fucking mess, and there's just… less convouluted ways to say that.

troan'be haaran - kitbash. Dialectal phrase that has ossified in use in Common Mando'a despite being wildly archaic in structure, is in heavy use in Deathwatch Mando'a because it's wildly archaic in structure, and is not used at all in Kalevalan Mando'a because a) archaic and b) no helmets in common use. Troan is face, haaran is cover/clothes/suit. 'be is the archaic version of a possessive prefix - the modern possessive goes at the start of the proper noun. (thus, haaran be'troan, or face's cover).

ru'nari dinuir'an here's where we get in the weeds. dinuir is give, ru'nari [word]'an is past progressive tense. Thus, we get something kind of like kept giving.

Is the grammar here correct in any way for any dialect? No, not really. Death Watch Mando'a doesn't use past progressive tense explicitly and just lets it sit as contextual, Kalevalan Mando'a does use past progressive but wouldn't phrase the rest of the sentence like this, ditto for Common Mando'a. Bo-Katan is doing the thing where you know a phrase in one language but can't remember what it is in the language you're speaking, and end up with like 'mat on be the cat was sit', which…is intelligible, but also, not…really correct.

kyr'nuhoy - coma. Literally, death-sleep — this is straight from the sheet, but is grammatically…uh, wrong. It's wrong. Bo-katan should be saying comatose or, honestly, catatonic, but, again, dialectal slipping etc etc. She's sort of letting the past progressive plus the almost (ge) carry the context here, which isn't actually right for any dialect but does make sense from a mixed dialectal stance. I mean, kind of, it's nonsense strictly grammatically speaking.

As an aside - disorganised speech is in fact a semi-common trauma response, even without dialectal differences making it much easier. (also like, non-neurotypical etc etc, but. y'know. It's trauma, here.)

mirshe'jehavey'irne - full kitbash. mirshe(brain)+ jehavey'ir (ambush) + ne (superlative suffix). Literally, this is most brain ambush, but I'm using it as a sort of catch all trauma trigger/flashback/etc. The superlative is like, emphasising that the trauma flashbacks/fallout were fucking intense.

Piled together with the preceding phrase, you get nearly catatonic [from] trauma.

vencuyanir is actually sustain, like keep alive, but given the rest of the context, it's functionally both keep (us hidden, as in the progressive tense of continuing to be hidden) and also keep (us alive, as in the action caused them to stay alive/hidden). Lot of double duty here — this is kind of a double meaning/double entendre in Mando'a, except instead of sex it's, y'know, not being murdered or worse.

mhi haaranovor - mhi is us, and haaranovor is actually hide — again, dialectal slip and disorganised speech is fucking with the tense here. Functionally in the sentence it is clearly, from context, hidden, but that's not actually a direct translation, just the actual meaning. Someone who spoke Common Mando'a would probably find it kind of awkward phrasing but not, like, unintelligible; someone who only spoke Kalevaen would be pretty weirded out and may or may not even understand what the whole sentence meant, just because of the baffling tense changes.

mirshe'jurkadur - this is another kitbash. mirshe is again, brain. jurkad is assault. rape is baar'jurkad (body-assult), so brain-assault is mind-rape. -ur is the suffix to make a verb into a noun for the performer of the action (so like, to run -> runner), and making a noun into a verb in the first place is …any vowel + r as a suffix. Thus, brain-rapist.

Jetii'cabur - kitbash, but a fairly standard one. Jedi-guardian. In this particular case, Bo-katan is using jetii like the organisation, since at that point Dooku was part of the Jedi Order, even if he was, y'know….not really a Jedi.

balyc Kyr'tsad - and Death Watch. Grammar's still a little weird, but it's carried by the rest of the sentence.

ok. Sentence five. Which, thank fuck, is a short thing.

Kotep utreekov'ika, which is literally brave little empty-head.

Qui-gon translates this as brave little fool, which isn't wrong, but doesn't quite capture the idiot(affectionate) vibe. And also that Satine is sort of questioning just how much actual thinking was going on in that ginger head, rather than, y'know, self sacrificial duty.

Sentence six.

Shaadlar kaysh at yamika jillane ranov'saan ven'arir tra'olaror!

Literally, this is move them to rooms immediately secret-reliable will do sky-arrive!

Functionally, it's Get him to his rooms right now Ranov'saan's about to land!

jillane - jiila is immediately, and -ne is, again, the superlative intensifier. So it's RIGHT NOW, instead of just right now. This mando is telling everyone to drop whatever the hell they are doing and hop to.

ven'narir - ven' is the future tense, narir is do. Therefore, will do, or, contextually, is (about to)

tra'olaror - kitbash. Mando'a doesn't have a word for land, like from a (space) ship. But they do have a word for sky, and tra' shows up a few times in other space/flight related words, so, sky arrive being land (your space ship) seems to fit in.

Sentence seven

Jorhaa'ur shukycne, ru'nukyrir gotali'an a'ni n'tabalhar pirebu chakaaryc Jetii ti ner mirda n'aranar.

Literally, this is Talker's most broken, was-not-finished repairing but-I not-patrol near rotten Jedi with my mind not-defend.

Functionally; comms unit's busted, I was repairing it but I'm not going near a damn Jedi with my mind undefended.

Mando'a doesn't have a word for comms, apparently, because…mando'a doesn't have any useful words at all, basically.

Thus: like I said way up in the beginning of the post, I called it pulling double duty based on context, and used talker as both person who is talking, and as thing you do the talking with. Qui-gon speaks (at a rudimentary level) Kalevean Mando'a, which doesn't have comms as a phrase he would have run into, and even if he had likely would have used a different word, since Kalevean is far more precise and doesn't do nearly so much context dependant phrasing.

ru'nukyrir gotali'an is, say it with me since this has come up a few times now, the past progressive (ru'[word]'an) of a negative (nu'[word]), and the word in question is…actually a phrase. kyrir gotal is finish repair, but given all the other modifiers, it's finished (there's the past) repairing (and the progressive), in the negative (so. not finished repairing).

a' is literally the but prefix, and ni is I. Therefore, but I [whatever].

n'tabalhar - negative n' + patrol (tabalhar). This is leaning very heavy on double duty linguistics - patrol as it's used here is more like walking, or physically moving to [place]. New Mando'a would not use this. Common Mando'a does, particularly since, in this case, the mando in question is following orders from the Mand'alor, and thus is acting under orders (like…they would be if they were told by their captain to patrol around camp or whatever).

chakaaryc - so, mando'a doesn't really have functional infixes, either (like fucking, as in abso-fucking-lutly or good fucking god no), but chakaar seems to be a sort of …criminal/dubious ethics term of abuse, which kind of lines up with damn, like as in damned (to hell because it's bad). Thus, we end up with damned jedi, which is mostly the mando expressing that jedi(generic) can't be trusted because they have terrible morals.

Mirda is mind! this is the more common, less specific to physical brain and more, like, your…mind, personality, whatever. Contrast this with Satine and Bo, who are both very much on the actual literal brain end of the scale when they walk about mindtricks, which is partially dialect and partially, like, just a difference in word choices. Sometimes you say brain and sometimes you say mind and it means the same thing.

n'aranar - negative of defend, thus, undefended. Helmet off = mind tricks work. Helmet on = no mind tricks.

There is very much a reason Qui-gon was told to stay the hell away from any mando's not in full kit, and it's because they don't want to give him the opportunity to do some mind tricks.

This is less about Qui-gon — Satine and Bo don't yet know him from a hole in the dirt — and more about the last Jedi who was on Mandalore.

Sentence eight or, thank god, the last bit of mando'a in the chapter.

Miit'akaanir ven'jii, jetii banaar ne'mav jiila. Mand'alor ke'gyce.

Literally, this is: Argue later, jedi happen not-free right away. Mandalor order.

Functionally, Argue about it later, get the Jedi locked down now. Mand'alor's orders.

Miit'akaanir ven'jii is literally just scraped straight from the spreadsheet. the [about it] is implied from context, more than actually said — Kalevalan Mando'a might say it, but then, argue later is a perfectly reasonable sentence fragment as it is.

ne'mav is literally not-free, but is working as a sort of — secured, rather than locked up or imprisoned. They're not locking Qui-gon in a cell, they're just getting him back to his rooms asap and he will not leave them for a bit. The difference between a prisoner and a temporarily detained guest.

ke'gyce is rule/orders/command — Kalevean Mando'a uses it like rule, like it's a rule you can't draw on the teacher's desk, and thus Qui-gon is missing the context that it's a new order, as in one that was just issued because Ranov'saan is about to land.

So, that's, uh, all the Mando'a in that chapter, plus why I chose the words I did and what I was sort of thinking about as I did that. If you've made it to the end, congratulations and also I'm so sorry.

If you have questions, do feel free to drop a line in the ol' ask box or whatever. I am by no means saying this is The One True Mando'a, I'm not even saying this is correct mando'a, but for two weeks intermittent work I'm calling it good enough pending someone being like 'dude you said [x] when it should be [y]'.

#Star wars #Mando'a #mandalorian culture #qui-gon jinn #satine kryze #bo-katan kyrze #coats originals #coats chats #btmybw #anyway yes here is the result of the last couple weeks banging my head against the wall of mando'a #is it all correct? fuck no #is it close enough? yeah.#now I just gotta poke html and hopefully it works #long post

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maverick-werewolf · 4 years ago

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Werewolf Fact #63 - Werewolf Women

There’s a common - and very silly - misconception that there are “no female werewolves” in folklore. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Yes, there are certainly far more werewolf men than women, but let’s go over the why of that and also cover how there are certainly werewolf women, too.

I’ve given a few talks about this, as a woman who loves werewolf legends, so you might imagine it’s pretty important to me for people to understand that a werewolf woman isn’t a uniquely modern concept.

There are actual arguments out there claiming that all werewolves are male and, oh no, there’s never been any female werewolves in folklore so we have to make our own in popular culture. That’s a ridiculous statement made by people who clearly have never bothered reading the legends.

The werewolf curse is in itself defined as “a man or a woman who turns into a wolf” in some of our oldest sources. There’s no exclusion of women.

There are two big reasons why most werewolf stories are about men: first of all, stories of these various time periods focused on men more than women. Women appeared in many, many werewolf legends, but they were not often the werewolf in question, as they were usually reactionary instead of being the protagonist. This is because werewolves were generally someone in the role of a warrior, a knight, a guardian, a ruler/king, an outlaw, etc., roles at that point in time not regularly attributed to women (though some of these were too, at times! But we won’t get into historical discussion beyond the matter at hand).

Is it true that some werewolf legends were quite unfair to women, as were many stories and legends of all these time periods? Yes. Take the “werewolf husband” folklore element, for example. These stories are all about the treachery of unfaithful wives, like Bisclavret (no one can make me dislike Bisclavret, though, despite that), Melion, Arthur and Gorlagon, etc.

Anyway, getting back on track, let’s talk about actual werewolf women...

In the werewolves of Ossory story, which I detailed here, one of the werewolves who talks to the priest is an old woman.

There are plenty of werewolf grandmas out there, as detailed here.

There are other Chinese werewolf women; a good source on them is this book here, which is a translation of stories instead of retellings or someone’s interpretation, which is always preferable. One of my personal favorites features a werewolf woman betrothed to a guy, turns out she doesn’t like him, so she eats him and her entire werewolf entourage eats his entourage and all their horses and they get away scot free.

There’s one obscure Armenian story in which the werewolf is specified to be a woman who wears a wolf skin. You can find it mentioned in one of my favorite werewolf sources, The Book of Werewolves by Sabine Baring-Gould.

A 1615 treatise by Jean de Nynauld mentions a story about a woodsman who was attacked by a wolf, cut off its paw, and then later found a woman missing a hand - that woman was then burned alive for being a werewolf (bearing in mind this was during the time when werewolves were now seen as evil, as I discuss at length in various werewolf facts). This story was retold and adapted in various forms in various places. You can find Nynauld’s variant of the story in Baring-Gould’s book as well.

I’ve been asked before about good sources for female werewolves. Truth is, you need to just use the same sources as you do for all werewolf folklore. Here are many good sources. These are absolutely the ones I recommend.

‘Cause the fact is, there are no good sources specifically on female werewolves. If you find one that claims to be, it’s almost certainly going to be a gimmick. Just being honest. There are so many people out there right now trying to get in on the werewolf fever that started really going after Twilight was first ��published. I remember loving werewolves for so long and them being obscure, I was so “weird” for being so passionate about them, then suddenly they became mainstream. They even became a subgenre of romance fiction. It was all very weird and sudden to me.

At any rate, as a result, there are tons of trashy little books out there with non-information in them that are sold based purely on gimmicks, and you really need to watch out for those. The writers of said books basically just googled werewolves and compiled all the bad nonsense “information” and somehow got it published. Or else it’s literally just a parody piece where it pretends to be written by a monster hunter and talks about their weird werewolf headcanons with no real-world folklore involved at all. And then people made an actual Wikipedia article called “Werewoman.” What is even-- “were” means “man.” It has nothing to do with “being a shapeshifter.” You can’t just cut the prefix off werewolf and have a thing that means “shapeshifter,” that removes all connotation of actually turning into something else. If you say “weres” to refer to werewolves, or “werewomen” to refer to werewolf women, you are effectively removing any sense of shapeshifting or animal of any kind. “Were” means “man” so... man-women? Human-women. They are people women. So they are... ordinary women! That doesn’t work at all. Just like how if you say “weres,” you are just saying “people,” with no concept of shapeshifting involved whatsoever.

Anyway! Pet peeves galore.

If you were ever under the impression that there were no werewolf women in folklore, I hope this set you down the path of clearing that up! There are more out there, of course, but these are some of the prime examples in my opinion.

(If you like my werewolf blog, be sure to check out my other stuff and consider supporting me on Patreon!

Patreon — Wulfgard — Werewolf Fact Masterlist — Twitter --- Vampire Fact Masterlist )

#werewolf #werewolves #werewolf fact #werewolf wednesday #werewolfwednesday #wolf man #wolf-man #wolfmen #mythology #folklore #lycanthropy #lycanthrope #lycanthropes #werewolf facts #folklore fact #werewolf women #female werewolf

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shoichee · 4 years ago

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Rose-Tinted

Craving for angst with kise please!! Like both are afraid to act on their feelings which ends up hurting the both of them unconsciously. Idk, maybe kise is trying to “test” the girl, but went a bit too far i guess. Whatever floats your boat!! I just want angst but maybe hopefully still HEA in the end (or whichever your muse takes you) ;-; thank youu ❤️

Kise x Reader

Word Count: 6975

Note: oh my GOD, HELP THIS WAS 17 PAGES ON MY GOOGLE DOC I COULDNT STOP MYSELF………. angst, happy ending, fake dating!au, mean old kise ….. girl idk WHAT I WROTE I HOPE YOU ENJOY IT ????? reader POV first half and kise POV second half~

@knb-kreations

»»—————　☼　—————««

He holds you so gently, the touch so feather-light as he cradles your head and dips his own head in for a soft peck. The warmth of his lips makes you feel things you shouldn’t feel, things that you still chased for more in a never-ending cycle. You hold onto his hands thumbing your temples to try to anchor yourself further into the bliss, but it ends all too soon when he separates from you and gives you a radiant smile.

You were rudely pulled out of your rose-tinted trance when you heard gasps and chatter amongst the gawking students nearby, particularly Kise’s fans. He doesn’t pay any mind to their reactions and turns his friendly demeanor towards them.

“So you see everyone,” he cheerfully says. “I’m sorry I can’t accept any of your affections, as much as it flatters me so… after all, I have my dear (y/n)-cchi by my side!”

Groans and cries rung throughout the campus as most wail about missing out the opportunity to be Kise’s romantic partner, but before you can listen to their laments, Kise hurriedly tugs you away to the privacy of the back of a building nearby, away from prying eyes and ears. He drops your wrist just as fast and yawns with a stretch.

“What time should we meet up tomorrow?” he casually says, taking out his phone from his pocket.

“Huh?”

“Well, we can’t exactly sell our image of us being a couple unless we walk to and from school together consistently, right (y/n)?”

The rose-tinted lenses on your self-indulgent fantasy shatters to the ground instantly. You gulp, the swallowed spit hitting down to your stomach in heavy dread, where it was previously occupied by fluttering butterflies just moments prior.

This isn’t real.

“Ah… um,” you hesitated, thinking of a reasonable time, so you can wake up and get ready accordingly. “How about this time…”

“Yeah, that sounds good,” he replies, shutting off his phone before he walks a few steps away from you but then stopping. “Huh, uh… should I walk you home first? There might be some nosy people around, and we might as well get some practice in as an official couple.”

“W-Why don’t we start tomorrow morning instead?” you suggest. “A lot’s happened today, and well, I wanna have some time to myself.” Kise impassively stares at you for a couple of seconds before he forms a grin.

“Ah ha, well then, (y/n)-cchi,” he shouts jovially, making sure that his voice rang throughout the area for anyone nearby to hear. “I’ll be waiting for you tomorrow morning, my love!”

“Y-Yeah…” you mumbled, your hand held up in a half-hearted wave. “See you…”

With that parting, you turned to the opposite direction to exit through the side gates to get to your home. Your mind scrambles to recall the impulsive decisions you decided to take on a whim today. The grip on your bag tightens as you finally realized what sort of situation you got yourself into.

You like Kise, plain and simple. You’ve always gazed longingly at him whenever his presence entered within your line of vision. You couldn’t even fault his fans for being so whipped for the basketball player in the first place, not when you felt like you were more enthralled by him than anyone else. So what does a love-stricken fool like you do when the source of attraction directly asks you to partake in a “relationship?” You immediately accept his conditional proposal on auto-pilot before he barely finishes his sentence.

It felt so wrong, yet so right. How can you hate this arrangement when you enjoyed that first kiss you shared with Kise earlier? But how can you love this arrangement when you knew Kise only kissed you to drive everyone off? You stopped on the sidewalk and heaved a huge exhale, and you continued to walk again, the action not even remotely able to clear your head. Your mind continues to swirl and race.

You agreed to this. He even laid out his intentions very clearly to you, and he was more than ready to leave you alone if you didn’t consent to this. But stupid, desperate you did. You were ashamed to feel even a shred of flattery when he told you that you were the only one he can ask to drive off his fans in this only effective method: a relationship.

“Why me?” you said, looking up at his casual posture. “Don’t you have someone you like to ask to be in a relationship? I’m sure they’d be more than happy to accept you…”

“Well,” he mumbled. “I don’t really have someone in mind… you’re kinda the only one who doesn’t drool over me whenever I’m near, and I just ought to ask for your help.”

“W-Well,” you slightly stammered. “I’m okay with helping you, right, so…”

“This isn’t something to accept so readily, you know,” he said, raising a brow. “I know this is super sudden, and it wouldn’t be fair for me to force an answer out of you right at this moment. Besides, I don’t think there’s any incentive for you to be in this either? It’s okay if you don’t want to.”

“N-No!” you interrupted, but you coughed to regain your composure. “I mean, I do have something in this… maybe if I got with you, people would stop trying to harass and tease me if I had someone like you by my side.” That was a half-truth, but you knew there was no way you could reveal your crush to him… not when he believed you were “different” from the others. But can anyone blame you for sticking up for Kise when someone was talking about him like a piece of meat rather than a normal person? “Besides, for you to get to this point, things must’ve gotten too chaotic to simply tell them to stop, right?”

“Huh… is that so,” he said, stretching his neck, but you didn’t know whether or not he intentionally ignored your last question. “Well, if you’re fine with this, I’m letting you know now that we’ll be doing actual couple stuff, like…” He pauses for a second to gauge your reaction. “Hugging, hand-holding… probably kissing too…”

“Y-Yeah,” you nodded. “That’s fine with me! And we’ll have a code word in case either of us overstep our boundaries in any way… maybe…”

“Unagi,” he said.

“Huh? Why?”

“Because they’re the bane of evil…”

“It’s just a dish, but…” you laughed, giddy at how he already showed a different side to you apart from his cool persona. “Alright, let’s go with that.”

How long were you able to keep this up? You pat yourself on the cheeks to dismiss the rest of your fantasies. If you keep this up, Kise will soon notice how you actually were head-over-heels for him all this time, and surely you’ll lose any future chance with him. Besides, maybe you can use this unique arrangement to learn about Kise and his hobbies other than basketball. Yes, you tell yourself, jogging the rest of the way home. It won’t be so bad, after all.

———

Starting today, you’ll be officially dating Kise.

That’s how it is on paper, anyways.

How are you supposed to act while dating the Kise Ryōta? Equally cool and flamboyant? Athletically capable? Would you weird out Kise if you were the one initiating physical affection?

“(y/n)!”

You flinch, not expecting anyone to call for you so early in the morning, and your walking route to school was never shared with another student as far as you were concerned. After all, your path was a little more obscured and unorthodox compared to the majority of students traversing the main neighborhood paths.

“Sorry… did I scare you?” You stop and turn to the source of the voice, only to be surprised when you see Kise himself. “Why do you look so surprised? Didn’t we agree on the time to meet up and walk to school together?”

“Oh… yeah…” In the midst of your thoughts, it seems that you forgot the arrangements you made with him yesterday evening. “My bad?”

“Oh, come on,” he gives a mock-hurt face with a hand to his chest. “Am I that forgettable, (y/n)?”

“N-No!” you immediately deny. You knew it was more like the other way around, the way constant thoughts of Kise preoccupy in your head too much. How can you ever forget him when he constantly runs through your mind everyday for so long? Kise merely gives a good-natured sigh before he changes the subject.

“Kidding,” he says, holding out a hand to you. “Seriously though, get your act together. We gotta start acting the part if we want this to work.” You stare at his hand, hesitating for a split moment before you put your own hand on top. His large hand easily encompasses yours, and the warmth makes you widen your eyes. It… felt nice.

You were so entranced by your linked hands that you failed to notice how Kise was staring at your face with a sharp glint in his eyes, but when you look up back to his face, he easily morphs his expression into his signature grin. He swings your hands around like an excited kid and turns to walk ahead to tug you along.

“Alrighty!~ Let’s hurry together before I get chewed out by Kasamatsu-senpai!”

“Kise, have you ever considered that it’s not really your tardiness that gets the captain mad but more so about the way you seem to irritate him with the way you skip around?”

“(y/n),” he says with a pout, “you know you’re not being convincing when you use my last name to address me as your boyfriend.”

“R-Right,” you stammer, still not used to the entire situation. “Ah… wait. Don’t you uh… call people who are close to you with -cchi?”

“Huh…” he mumbles, looking up at the cloudy sky before looking ahead of the path. “Not necessarily people who are close, just people who I really admire. I guess I addressed you like that yesterday without really thinking.”

“U-Uh, right… sorry.” He stops walking with your hand still in tow, and you almost bumped into his back at his sudden movement. He turns to you with a quite serious look.

“Do you want me to call you that?”

It was a normal question, but for some reason it felt like the next sentence coming from your mouth would make a huge impact on the way the two of you would interact in the future. From the way Kise looks at you with such a scrutinizing gaze, it feels like a trick question, and you’re not sure how to answer it. Your mouth goes dry when you try to reply.

“I… I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?” Kise’s eyes widen a fraction before he gives an unexpected chortle. “Pfft… how do you not know what you want to be addressed as?”

“Arrgh, oh shut it!” you frown, hitting his arm in a fluster before stalking off ahead. You remember that you were supposed to go to school together, and you begrudgingly stop and turn back to wait for him to catch up. “Ryōta, just call me whatever you want. You’re already calling me by my first name, so I doubt anyone would care if you added -cchi or not.” Still, your cheeks turn pink at the realization that Kise would be uttering your first name for the next couple… whenever this relationship will last.

“You… wait up!” Kise wheezes dramatically, despite the both of you knowing full well how easily he can catch up to your stride. “You really shouldn’t be treating your boyfriend like that! Especially on the first day!” Kise holds your hand again to lead you to the rest of the way to school.

All the while, you’ve been staring at his back, your heartstrings being tugged so mercilessly at the cacophony of emotions you were feeling the whole time. He felt so warm, so inviting, but the way he held your hands felt cold and transactional.

———

You’re not sure how to react whenever Kise introduced himself as your “boyfriend” to everyone or whenever nosy students inquired about your new “boyfriend.” All you could do was gulp and manage the most convincing act you could do within different contexts. Smile, laugh, get bashful, be modest in talking about how Kise managed to “like” you, pretend you know many embarrassing stories and sides to him that no one else did. Truthfully, you were just as in the dark as anybody else.

You think the only reason why everyone bought the couple-act was due to how enamored you were in talking about him. This was the only response you could be truthful about. At least you could use your huge crush to your advantage in portraying yourself as the “lovey-dovey” half of the couple. Yet it feels unbelievably wrong.

You knew you had to prepare yourself some preset answers for curious students, but you didn’t expect yourself to be participating in neverending “interviews” in these social settings. You thought this relationship would entail a closer access to Kise’s true self, but things suggest otherwise.

“Ryōta,” you say, peering up at his face as the both of you walk down the hallway to your designated spot for lunch together. Even as you two walk, he puts a reasonable distance between the two of you when there is no one in close proximity. Even when you two are together, he only grabs your hand when it’s socially convenient. Even when Kise approaches you to talk, you know it’s never anything beyond for the sake of acting. And you agreed to this entire thing.

“Hm?” He spares a glance to your figure before returning his gaze ahead.

“Uh, I brought extra food today,” you say, trying to use this situation to try to express your genuine feelings to him in small increments. “I brought an extra bento box too… in case, you don’t wanna actually share one…” He was about to reply before a pair of students turned around the corner to head towards your direction. Kise narrows his eyes at the unexpected turn of events, and immediately turns to you brightly.

“(y/n)! You really thought that I wouldn’t like the idea?” he pouts. “Of course I wanna share a bento with you! Silly…” He slightly bends to your level to place a chaste peck on your forehead.

“Ah…” you freeze at his soft touch, your legs stiff in place as you stop walking. Kise, in response, moves his lips to your ears, and you slightly shiver at the unexpected intimacy… it was the closest he’s gotten to you ever since that public stunt when he kissed you in front of everyone the other day.

“Hey, don’t just stand there… you can’t overreact like this over something couples do everyday.” You bit your lip in an attempt to stop your heart from sinking from disappointment, but in turning your face to him to spill an apology, your face ended up right in front of his. Your eyes widen but he only stares at you with such an intensity that makes you hold your breath in anticipation.

But he immediately draws away and stretches with a yawn. “Looks like those people left right after they thought they intruded on a private moment between us,” he says. “Sheesh, people really do the most to be so nosy nowadays.” You wonder how he can be so casual about this all. Perhaps it was a mistake to be here like this when you were so in love with him, overthinking every single thing he did.

Why didn’t he kiss you this time? Did he not find you the teensiest attractive enough to want to kiss you even without an audience nearby?

“Come on,” he mumbles, waving a hand through your face. “Quit making that face. I won’t be doing that to you without warning anytime soon. My bad, okay?” Kise sheepishly holds out a hand for a handshake to make peace, and you wordlessly take his hand. One day, you’ll stop being his special someone to savor his warmth…

No, you thought, you’re an idiot… he’s never considered you as someone special.

You debated in telling him that you were fine with him kissing you, but you hold your tongue, afraid that he’ll realize your true feelings about him. Besides, were you really okay with him kissing you when he didn’t reciprocate the same feelings?

“It… wasn’t like what you think,” you hesitate. “It just caught me off guard.”

“Well,” he laughs. “That’s a relief! By the way…” He stops to settle himself on the bench. “What’s exactly your lunch? Since you went through the effort to bring extras, I guess I’ll eat them.”

“I packed salmon from leftovers I had from home,” you reply, taking out your bento box and utensils. You decide to shake off your negative thoughts and shove them to the back of your mind. He makes a horrified face at the lunchbox. “Kise, what’s wrong?”

“Do you… happen to have anything else packed?”

“Rice?”

“Well,” he coughs. “I’m not a fan of dishes with boned fish.”

“Didn’t you say you hated unagi too?” Kise shyly averts his gaze before he reluctantly confirms it so. “They’re delicious though! Especially when they’re grilled!” At first, he refused to answer, but the more you tried to poke and prod (literally too, at his ribs), he finally gave in.

“Alright, alright! But I swear, you better not tell anyone!… I choked on a fish bone one time…”

“… And?”

“And yeah.”

“You choked on a bone once and you got scared out of eating fish—”

“Shhhh!” he hushes, emphasizing his hiss with a finger to his lips. At this very moment, you saw a glimpse into who Kise really is, and you can’t help but bust out a genuine, carefree laugh for the first time in front of him. In embarrassment, he bonks your head with his fist to get you to stop laughing, but it only makes you more conscious of how close he is to you.

But just as quickly and telepathically, Kise puts some distance between the two of you, sitting closer to the edge of the bench. He opts to hunch over casually and keenly watch you scarf down your meal in minutes without a care.

You wonder if you should feel guilty for enjoying this moment with Kise, even if he was only waiting with you out of obligation of being your “boyfriend,” but right now, you allowed yourself to indulge, letting your heart beat sporadically without guilt and fear for once. You continue to savor your lunch in silence, concentrating on munching around the fish bones, while Kise sat in contemplation all the while.

———

“You should come watch our practice game today, (y/n).”

“Eh?”

You tilt your head at him in confusion. It’s been two weeks since you started this arrangement with him, but nothing extraordinary or groundbreaking happened between the two of you, much to your despondency. But you knew, you shouldn’t be asking for too much when you already have the once-in-a-lifetime chance to be close to him like this.

“There’s going to be a lot of people coming,” he explains. “Even if it’s just a practice game… it’d be weird if you weren’t there, because, you know, we’re dating.”

“I don’t mind going,” you reply. “It sounds fun.”

“You know, you’ve been agreeing to everything I’ve been suggesting the entire time,” he mumbles to himself, but he zips his mouth shut when he sees you instinctively moving closer to try to catch what he said. “Uh, in any case… just stop by the gym whenever you can.”

So here you are a few hours later, being the first person to settle yourself on top of the 2nd floor of the gym. You rest your arms on the railway, fascinated by the Kaijō basketball team and their skills. As they warm up on the courts, it’s the first time you see Kise truly at ease and happy with the people he cares about, and your heart pangs in jealousy seeing his genuine smile. You were pulled out of your thoughts when you realized the gym became completely crowded, the constant chattering announcing huge crowds along the entrance and the lucky watchers at the 2nd floor with you.

You didn’t mind the onlookers when all you were focused on was Kise throughout the entire game with a smitten look, and you weren’t surprised when his team easily won against the other local school.

“That’s Kise isn’t it?” You were about to turn to leave the higher floor to wait outside the gym when you heard his name. You stop to eavesdrop on the conversation next to you.

“Yeah, I’ve been hearing about him way too much. Something about him dating now?”

“He’s dating (l/n) right now, which is super weird because they never even talked… and all of the sudden, they’re dating? I didn’t think of him to be into short-term flings.”

“You think he’s using (l/n) in some way? What an asshole.”

“Yikes. You’re probably not even that far off the bulls-eye. He’s a really heartless guy, from what I’ve heard.”

“Hey,” you interrupt, scaring the two girls out of their wits before they turn to you. “I don’t think you should talk about Kise like that when all you know of him is through speculation.”

“Ugh, here we go again with his fans…” one of them groans, rolling her eyes. “Look, I get it, he’s good-looking and all, but I don’t understand how you can defend him to death when he doesn’t even spare a glance at you… ah… shit, you’re (l/n)?” A flash of hurt was visible on your face for a split second before you frowned. Their words unintentionally hit the nail in the coffin.

“Whether I’m (l/n) or not doesn’t really matter,” you say angrily. “Gossiping about anyone like that isn’t something you should make a habit out of.”

“Jeez, let’s just leave,” the other girl whispers, dragging the first girl along.

You simply stand there watching them leave, but you can’t shake off what they said. They were right… how could you be so whipped for him when you know he’ll never see you the same way?

“Oy!”

Kise’s voice brings you back to your consciousness as he waves at you from the court. “You’ve been standing there for a while! Hurry up, or I’ll leave you behind, (y/n)-cchi!”

“Coming!” You race from the 2nd floor to the ground level to catch up to him, your heart pounding all the while. Did he… did he just…?

You shake your head before you reunite with him to walk home together. Stop it… don’t overthink it.

———

Kise waits at his usual spot to wait for you before walking to school together. It’s been three weeks since he’s approached you to “date.” He’s grown quite comfortable with this arrangement, being close to you and backing off when it’s convenient. After all, if you somehow showed a gruesome true self of yours, he’d be able to separate himself from you with no consequences… even if his heart would cry out not to.

“Ryōta!” There you are, running down the path towards him so cheerfully. Could you really be an awful person when you have such a pure smile like that?

“Ah, (y/n)-cchi,” he says. “We should hurry if we wanna be inside campus. It’s a little chilly today, so being indoors sounds really nice right now.” He peers over to your face to see your nose slightly red from the cold, and he huffs out a chuckle, noting the warm puff of air escaping from his own lips.

“I guess it’s a little cold today,” you say, looking up at Kise with a slight childish wonder. “Hey, that’s a pretty cool cloud that you puffed out.”

“You have some clouds around you too.” He gently smiles, and he notes that your eyes widen at the sight of him. “Wha? Is my face that horrific, (y/n)-cchi?” You avert your gaze as your cheeks grow just as red as your nose.

“Nah… i-it’s nothing…ah—” He holds your cheeks to turn your face back to him, and he draws near with a serious gaze, bumping his forehead against yours.

“You’re actually really cold…”

“Uh, um… I don’t think I’m c-cold anymore—” you stammer, your eyes darting to look everywhere but his face, and Kise’s eyes only scrutinize your behavior further.

“Hm, if you say so…” he mumbles. Your eyes flutter close at the anticipation, and he feels the pull towards your lips, closing his own lids shut…

Wait, what was he thinking? He snaps his lids open and slightly draws himself away to look at you, still vulnerable with your closed eyes. It’s only when he drops his hands from your cheeks and turns to walk ahead when you flutter your eyes open again. Don’t let your feelings for (y/n) blind you into figuring out who they really are.

“Come on,” Kise calls out to you. “We should get going… we don’t wanna be late.” Besides, what if there’s a possibility that you don’t really like him at all?

“Y-Yeah…”

The rest of the walk was in silence, with Kise slightly ahead of you. Perhaps if he turned around at least once to check on you, he would’ve seen the consequences of his actions.

You were silently crying the entire walk.

———

Nothing seems to change much for the entire month. The way the two of you dance and sway around each other, while never being too close, never being too affectionate, never being completely honest. In this shared rose-tinted world, the frail glass that holds these moments together threatens to break with every fickle interaction. Every shared kiss constitutes another small crack to the rose-tinted crystal.

And both of you are content with just the way things are.

Or that’s what you both mutter to yourselves like a mantra.

“Ryōta!” you call out to him. “Did you wait long?”

“Not really,” he says. “I just barely got out too… the teacher was really lenient on dismissal today, actually.” His heart swells at the sight of you as usual, but just as quickly, he’s always managed to quash his emotions in check.

For the first time, you initiate physical touch with him without hesitation, linking your hands with his and snuggling up to him. He flinches, not fast enough to process the sudden warmth of your body, and he immediately separates himself from you. Do you actually like him after all?… No, something is up, right?

“Ryōta…?” You flinch just as severely from the sudden reaction, and he turns to avoid looking at your face, knowing that his resolve would crumble right in front of you. He’s a coward, and he fucking knows it.

“S-Sorry, (y/n)-cchi! I don’t know what came over me like that, but you know you don’t have to force yourself to do things like that, right? There’s no one here, so let’s just walk home together like we always do, yeah?”

He turns to already walk ahead, too afraid of hearing your response and hoping you would follow and catch up to him… like you always do.

You simply stood there for a few moments, anguish clear as the sky above you as you keep telling yourself to manage your own expectations. Still, your voice croaks out quietly to respond to him, even if you knew he wasn’t going to hear it.

“… But I wanted to do these things with you, Ryōta.”

———

It’s been several days since that incident.

It was very awkward for the most part, the walks to and from school silent and suffocating. He’s not quite sure how to go about it while trying not to sound disingenuous about it. Nonetheless, even through his quiet apology, your face still lights up, and he’s confused about why you would ever be so forgiving of him.

Although today, lines have been crossed and this shared secretive world between the two of you have completely shattered to the point of no return.

It was quite a blur, an instinct that Kise has developed over the course of this relationship. Every time a group of students drew near, he was always ready to tug you close for a kiss until they left and carry on with their day. Today was usually no exception.

Another group of students was hanging around the corner, presumably spying on you two, and Kise did what he’s always done, grabbing your hand and embracing you for a kiss. Your eyes were blown open in surprise, but when you saw Kise’s eyes elsewhere, something finally snapped inside.

You push him away at his chest.

“U-Unagi… unagi…” Your voice trembles, and you use your arms to cover up the fresh tears. The code word sounds unbelievably stupid out of context, but at this moment, the word alone stabs Kise in his chest. “I-I… just stop… please.” Kise stares dumbly at you, processing the fact that you just used the agreed safe word against him.

“… (y/n)-cchi?” Kise asks with a confused smile. “You’ve never objected to kissing before… I’ve even told you what we’ll be doing if you agreed to this…?”

“How…” you choke on tears. “H-How can you kiss me like that while your eyes are on someone else…?”

“I don’t understand—”

“A-Am I that atrocious to kiss unless you stare at something else or there’s some convenience?”

“I don’t get it, (y/n)-cchi,” he frowns. “Did you expect more out of this or am I missing something?”

“There was no reason to kiss me like that,” you softly wail. “Everyone already knows we’re a thing for… o-over a month now. There’s no reason to kiss me around people anymore when they won’t suspect us anyways…”

“So you don’t want me to kiss you anymore?” Kise’s heart sinks in thinking about where this is going.

“No!—you don’t… you don’t fucking get it! I don’t get it—! Why are we doing this anymore—I just, I see no reason to continue this anymore… you already shooed off your fans, right? Why haven’t you ended this?!”

“(y/n)-cchi—I…” He reaches out for you, but you immediately recoil.

“No—please… no more, I can’t do this anymore!” you sniffle. “I can’t fucking do this… I’m done, I’m tired—please… just look for another person to take my place… I… I’m done—I can’t pretend with you anymore when I always expect more out of it like a love-stricken fool!”

“I…”

“Look—see,” you choke. “I’m just like everyone else who’s in love with you, I’m no different than everyone else R-Ryōta… so that’s why, I-I… can’t do this anymore!”

Kise stands there, staring at you running away from him. It was like everything had gone silent, save for the sound of his blood pounding in his ears.

“You think he’s using (l/n) in some way? What an asshole.”

“Yikes. You’re probably not even that far off the bulls-eye. He’s a really heartless guy, from what I’ve heard.”

He hated rumors, he really did… but for the first time, he feels like he deserves every word thrown at him around the hallways and classrooms. His memory flits to the time when he felt warm from seeing you standing up for him, even if he wasn’t bothered by them before. Now, the warmth is replaced by agonizing regret and guilt wracking through his entire body. His hands feel cold with you gone from his side.

What has he done?

———

He’s grown quiet for the next week.

It’s been a week since you ran from him, and it’s been a week since he last talked to you.

Even his teammates were concerned about his reserved behavior, but just as always, he’s managed to shoot them a convincing smile. Kasamatsu was more persistent about this but eventually dropped it seeing Kise’s refusal to talk about it.

That day when you pushed him away, he couldn’t sleep, his thoughts keeping him awake the entire night. He resolved himself to talk to you the next day… but he changed his mind the last minute… and then he told himself he’d do it the next day… and then he changed his mind again.

He tells himself that it’s because you rightfully hate him, with the way you’d surround yourself with other crowds and groups to prevent him from walking up to you when you were alone. He tells himself that it’s because both you and him needed space to cool off and go back to the way you two were. He refuses to tell himself that it’s because he’s an honest-to-god coward.

He misses you. He misses you damn badly. Why the fuck did he go through such lengths instead of confessing to you straight up? He tells himself that he was being cautious. He tells himself that he doesn’t want his heart to be broken again. He refuses to conclude that it’s because he’s a fucking coward.

“I don’t know what’s been on your mind, idiot,” Kasamatsu says. “But you better solve this yourself quickly if you’re not opening up to me about this. We can’t have your performance quality be dropping even in practice. Hurry up and fix this shit with (l/n)-san already.”

“H-How’d you know?!” Kise raises his head from his desk in astonishment.

“Tch, idiot,” he glowers, chopping Kise’s head with a swift hand. “It’s too obvious from the way you’re moping around… from the way you two stuck together all this time, who wouldn’t notice something happened from the way you’re at your desk watching (l/n)-san like that?”

“O-Ow…” Kise grumbles rubbing his head. Ironically, his captain’s hit cleared up his doubts and he took a deep breath before exhaling. “Got it, senpai.”

“You better.” Kasamatsu goes back to talking to his classmates during break, and even despite not knowing the truth of the relationship, he manages to give solid advice as usual.

Tomorrow. He’ll find you tomorrow.

———

He doesn’t know where else to find you alone other than the place he’s always waited for you before you two used to walk to school together. So he stands there, almost an hour earlier in case you had the idea to walk to school extremely early to avoid him at all costs.

He was right.

Here you are, shuffling your feet as you trudged yourself along the path and looking down at your feet. You even manage to walk past by him without noticing his presence.

Even if you’ve grown to hate him, he’s willed himself to come completely clean about his feelings to you for once. But a part of him is thinking to change his mind again and just let you slip away from his fingers. It’d spare the both of you the inevitable, right?

“R-Ryōta…?”

He was pulled from his thoughts, startled to see you staring at him from a short distance away. Apparently you did notice him after all.

“… (y/n)-cchi…” He swallows his words, knowing full well that his stupid words might blow this up for him again, his words responsible for all the rumors at school, his words responsible for hurting you and will hurt you again.

He wordlessly walks up to you and holds your cheek, and waits. He waits for you to push him away again. He waits for you to say the code word to let him know that you don’t want him near you again. The thought of you running away from him nearly brings him to tears, but he gulps his emotions down and stares at you calmly, with only his upturned brows hinting to his inner turmoil.

“Ryō—”

He swiftly brings his head down and kisses you. In feeling the warmth for the first time in a while, he greedily drinks from your lips, holding your temples more firmly as he searches for more, more, more.

You push him away.

Kise immediately lets go and stares at you like a lost child, unable to mask the devastation from the implications of your actions. But you’re still gripping his uniform tightly, almost as if you didn’t want to let go.

“W-Why…?” you croak, biting your lips to stop any tears from breaking through. “There’s no reason to kiss me. Don’t you know that we’re done? There’s no one to watch us here, no reason for you to walk me to school anymore. You know that, Ryōta. After all, we haven’t talked since a week ago, and you have the audacity to come here and kiss me like everything is okay—”

“… I want to kiss you, because there’s no one around, because there’s no other reason for me to.”

“Why…?” your voice softens to a whisper. “Don’t you hate anyone who likes you in that way? I… I already told you that I see you in that light, like many of your fans do. Don’t you hate me? Don’t you hate me for using this arrangement to get closer to you? Don’t you hate me for expecting something real out of this?”

“I already had an inkling of suspicion that you liked me, (y/n)-cchi,” Kise turns away to look at the bright morning sky. “I just didn’t know if I was wrong or not.”

“Then… why did you ask me to do this whole thing with you…?”

“Because I’m a coward,” he says, looking back to you. You were stunned into silence. For the first time, he finally admits what’s been weighing on his mind for weeks out loud, and his eyes, while drenched in shame, were full of resoluteness. “I liked you, but I was too afraid for the day when you ended up being not like the person I ended up liking. I liked you, but I was afraid of a real relationship that would tie me down. I liked you, but I was afraid of making huge decisions that involved another person into my life. I didn’t want to end the fake relationship because I was too fucking selfish… if I ended it, I’d lose the only connection I had with you… I’m sorry.”

Both of you went silent, bathed in the light of the rising sun. Kise drops to a squat to hide his face from you, and you knew he was trying to stop himself from tearing up. He knows how uncool he looks, but he had no right to cry when you were the one who got hurt the most.

“Ryōta, did you really find it difficult to kiss me…? Just… be honest.”

“Yes,” he looks up from his squat to stare at you with an intense look, even despite his puffy eyes. “Everytime I kissed you, I found it hard to control myself. I thought, what if you were using me to somehow get a kiss from me? or what if I couldn’t stop myself from kissing you and I ended up taking things too far? Looking anywhere but you at least stopped me from getting too invested…”

By now, both of you had turned completely red at his honesty, but he still found you frankly stunning even with your red, puffy eyes. “Look, (y/n)-cchi, don’t you hate me? I used you. The rumors are right—I’m a complete asshole. Just… I won’t blame you if you walk away right now.”

“You do know that I used this opportunity to get closer to you, right?… I wasn’t a saint about this either, so… I’m sorry too.” Both of you go silent again, and you slowly drop yourself to his level in a squat of your own in front of him.

“… C-Can we… can we start over?” you whisper, your warm breath tickling his chilled nose.

“(y/n)-cchi, I don’t think I’m capable of continuing this arrangement…”

“No,” you huff, before you tentatively press a chaste kiss to his lips. “I mean… can we… start over, but this time, as a real couple? I… want this relationship to be substantial. I really do like you, Ryōta.” You murmur against his lips with your hands on top of your knees, waiting for him to rebuke you away with an easygoing comment or a plastered smile.

But he doesn’t do any of that.

“I… guess we can try that,” Kise mumbles, gaze averted as his cheeks flame brighter than his nose and ears.

“Can you kiss me again?” you ask, your voice cracking at the end out of fear he’d turn down your request. Kise flicks his gaze back to you to see you equally red with a hesitant expression.

“Could you… close your eyes?” he asks with a frown.

“H-Huh?”

“Y-You don’t need to see me looking like a mess, I don’t look charming right now.”

“I… guess…” After a few moments of hesitation, you flutter your eyes shut, waiting apprehensively for his lips to descend onto yours again. Kise holds your cheeks and takes the time to admire your features for the first time, and his smile grows wider with every passing second.

‘R-Ryōta…?” Afraid of the fact that he actually may not like kissing you after all, you worriedly open your eyes, only to be greeted by the most brilliant smile from Kise, his figure illuminated by the sunshine hitting the back of his head at the perfect angle.

“(y/n)-cchi,” he teases with a small pout. “Didn’t I tell you to close your eyes?”

Who needs a rose-tinted lens when the sight before you is already so radiant to behold?

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