#it's not as superficial as it sounds. just like my girl kelly

[ananke-xiii]

I'm 100% convinced that Mary left that bunker because it reeked. "I need time and... space" was a formal way to say that the place kinda sucked. She was way too nice about that and they didn't take the hint. I think she should have told it like it was.

Dusty, no fresh-air, no sunlight, probably mouldy underground military hospital/ sad gentlemen's club closed off for decades and exclusively inhabited by lonely, repressed men and their solitary hormonal needs and general locker-room-level of BO.

Yeah, if I were back from the dead you couldn't pay me to live there, my coffin would literally smell better. No thank you. Let my girl enjoy open, fresh air and feel warm sunlight on her alive-again skin. And nice perfumes and fragrant scents.

[fanficshiddles]

Tear You To Pieces, Chapter 4

The day that Kelly had been waiting for finally arrived just over a week later. She was finally recovered enough from the attack, aside from still a few bruises and superficial cuts.

Stark felt bad for not leaving protection with her on the jet. She kept telling him it was ok. Loki kept telling him he told him so and he was foolish for putting her in danger. Which wasn’t doing Loki any favours in getting in the Avengers good books.

Kelly so wanted to tell Maria that she had a date. But she needed to keep quiet, not wanting to upset Loki. He had asked her not to tell anyone, so she wasn’t going to break her promise to him.

So she got ready on her own, after making an excuse to the others that she was feeling a bit iffy so wanted an early night. Once she was dressed and had her hair and make-up sorted, she sneaked out of her room and made her way down to the back entrance to meet Loki.

He was already there waiting for her. Her heart beat quickened when she saw him. He was so handsome, wearing a suit, black trousers and jacket with a white shirt and a black tie. It wasn’t often he wore mortal clothes but when he did, it was always with such style.

Loki’s smile grew larger as he looked Kelly up and down. She was deliberately wearing a green dress underneath her leather jacket. Her pulse quickened at the look in Loki’s eyes as she approached him.

‘Why, you look absolutely ravishing, my dear.’ Loki purred and picked up her hand to kiss the back of it politely, making her blush.

‘Thank you. You look really handsome.’ She said shyly.

‘Thank you, pet. Had to look my best for you.’ He winked at her, then he offered her his arm and she accepted, slipping her hand around his arm he led her out of the building to an awaiting taxi.

On the drive to the restaurant Loki had picked, casual chat had Kelly at much more ease and she actually forgot she was on a date with the God of lies and mischief, an ex-villain. She felt so relaxed and comfortable around him.

Loki hopped out of the taxi first and rushed round the car to open her door for her when they arrived. He helped her out too, then slipped his arm around her and they headed inside. He’d booked a nice table by the window at the back, looking out to a nice garden.

‘This is so lovely. Thank you, Loki.’ Kelly smiled as she sat down, Loki of course tucked her chair in for her after helping her with her jacket.

‘I only wish I had asked you out sooner.’ Loki said sheepishly.

They got some wine over to the table, then ordered their food. Kelly just hoped she would actually be able to eat something, she felt so nervous and excited, her stomach was all over the place. But the wine did help to settle her a bit.

‘I must ask, are you wearing my colours on purpose or is it a happy coincidence?’ Loki asked, smirking.

Kelly looked like a deer caught in the headlights. ‘Uhm… I… on purpose.’ She said shyly, downing a big gulp of wine.

Loki chuckled. ‘Well, I am honoured.’

Loki asked about Kelly’s life, about her upbringing. He shared a little of himself too, about growing up on Asgard with Thor. She was glad he was opening up to her.

‘Did you tell anyone about our date?’ Loki asked in the middle of their meal.

‘No, I didn’t. I wanted to tell Maria, but I kept quiet.’ Kelly said honestly.

Loki nodded and looked at her warmly. ‘Good girl. It’s for the best.’

Kelly’s face went bright red as she suddenly became very flustered. She quickly reached for her wine and took a few sips to try and hide her face. Loki was a little confused at first, but then it clicked.

Good girl… She had a praise kink? He was sure of it.

Grinning slightly while he kept on eating, not wanting to make a big deal of it and spook her, he noted that information away in his mind. That could come in very handy indeed.

Luckily for Kelly, he changed the subject swiftly. Saving her from further embarrassment.

‘Have you had many boyfriends?’ Loki asked. She was a lovely woman, for a mortal. He was surprised she didn’t have a boyfriend currently.  

‘I’ve dated a few people over the years, but nothing ever became… official.’ She shrugged after wiping her mouth with her napkin. She had managed to eat more than she thought she would, luckily.

‘I’m surprised no one has snatched you up yet. You’re a wonderful woman, Kelly.’ Loki said, making her smile giddily.

‘I just… I get attached quite easily. I uhm, I learned my lesson from the first guy I dated four years ago. He hurt me pretty bad, so I am trying not to fall so hard so quickly. It’s made me a little more guarded.’

Loki nodded in understanding. ‘I’m sorry to hear that, darling. Love and trust are such fragile things, not something to be taken for granted. I know it has to be earned. Hopefully, I can prove that I might be worthy of at least your time, perhaps more.’

Kelly’s heart melted completely at his words.

He was such a sweet talker. His silver tongue one of his best abilities and one he was always very much thankful for. One that couldn’t be taken away from him.

They didn’t leave straight after finishing their meal. They had a few more glasses of wine first, Kelly was happily tipsy. Loki barely even felt tipsy, mortal alcohol didn’t affect him in the same way. He would need to drink a few bottles of wine before even feeling slightly tipsy.

After the meal when they were ready to leave, there was a car waiting outside to take them home. Loki opened the door for Kelly and helped her in, then he sat in the middle seat so he could be right next to her, their thighs pressed together, making her blush.

Loki turned more towards her on the drive home and he stroked her cheek softly with the back of his hand. ‘You are so beautiful.’ He hummed.

Kelly smiled shyly as he slid his hand down and gently held her chin.

He licked his lips a little as he leaned in, but he paused a moment and looked deep into her eyes. ‘May I kiss you, darling?’ He asked so sweetly.

Kelly felt her heart swelling that he was so sweetly asking permission just to kiss her.

‘Of course! I mean, yes… yes.’ She blushed hard, trying not to seem too over eager. But Loki didn’t seem to mind as he grinned and closed the distance to plant his lips upon hers, his hand slid round to the back of her head to hold her closely. Not that she would want to move away from him, anyway.

She felt like time had stopped as he kissed her gently, his lips were so soft and cool against her. He moved them slowly, moulding with hers. Her entire world was turned upside down, she had dreamed of kissing him for so long now, she never thought it would actually happen. But now it was, it was even better than she had imagined.

Kelly could only hope it was the start of many.

-

Later that night, Loki decided to pay her another visit in the middle of the night.

She was sound asleep when he manifested in her room. He was silent as he slowly walked towards her sleeping form in bed. It was quite warm so she had the blanket thrown off her, wearing nothing but a night gown and knickers.

He smirked as he reached the side of her bed. He leaned over her and pressed his palm to her forehead, seeping into her dreams. It was easy, considering Loki was already someone she dreamt and thought about a lot. He wasn’t surprised to find some rather naughty dreams and fantasies about him in her mind.

Using that to his advantage, he manipulated her mind. Making sure she would remain asleep, but also so he could have some form of control over her dreams.

She parted her lips and whispered out his name. That’s when he moved his hand down underneath her night gown and he stroked softly over her abdomen before moving downwards into her knickers. She squirmed a little in her sleep, whimpering softly when his large hand just cupped her at first.

Loki kept his movements steady and careful. He knew his powers weren’t as strong as they should be, so he didn’t want to make a mistake.

Going slow, he slid his fingers through her folds and had to bite back a growl when he discovered she was already getting aroused. Using that to his advantage, he trailed some wetness up over her clit and rubbed it in circles. She started moaning more in her sleep, calling out his name again too.

This is far too easy. Loki thought with a wicked grin as he used his thumb on her clit and began inserting a single finger into her. But he was met with quite a bit of resistance at first, until he managed to ease his way into her with more stimulation on her clit.

‘How interesting.’ He whispered, his cock hardening in his trousers at the realisation she was still a virgin. She was so impossibly tight, even around his slender finger.

She squirmed a little, frowning. ‘No, please… feels weird.’ She whined.

Loki rubbed her clit firmer, while wiggling his finger inside her. Whilst it felt weird for her, he could feel her clamping around his digit in arousal. But her movements were becoming a bit more insistent.

Then her eyes suddenly flew open, but Loki had been able to vanish just a mere second before that. He cursed himself for not being able to hold his powers better, he really needed to get them back properly.

Kelly was breathing hard and a bit sweaty as she turned her light on. She had been so sure that someone, Loki, had actually been there and was touching her. But there was no sign of him at all. And her door was locked, so she knew it couldn’t have been him.

‘That was some vivid dream.’ She muttered to herself and wiped her sweaty brow with the back of her hand.

Even though she felt aroused and uncomfortable between her thighs, she kept telling herself she had just dreamt it. Though it took her heart a while to stop racing.

[kuekyuuq]

Gloria, Jet-lags and Imps [6x11]

Let’s jump right in:

Kinda love how Kara lamp-shaded addressed the fact she didn't tell the gang about her adventures in the PZ. She’s not wrong, tho.

...what do I want to say about Mxy using what's basically a well-known gay-anthem to tell his tale? I mean, it didn’t lead anywhere. The original song is about freeing oneself, liberation, stepping out of a (gone bad) relationship and moving on, stronger for it - empowerment. The only connection I could make, is that originally it was Nyxly’s aim to just do that (freeing herself and her kind from an oppressor), but in the way Mxy performed it, that part of the parallel was long over before he even reached the chorus. It’s also a popular Karaoke song, tho, so... he chose it because it’s catchy? I’ll try not to overthink it for now. At least, the Superfriend’s reactions were fun.

Nia exiting the elevator, "And what's this Old Stone?" I love it when ppl enter a room / situation and pick up on words that they couldn't have possibly heard. I think cinema sins ding such... Are we to assume, she dreamed Mxy's rendition of ‘I will survive’? Or is the elevator not sound-proof at all? (If it’s the latter, Nia later apparently telling Brainy “in private” between scenes / during the elevator ride about her Nyxly adventures, was a silly thing to do.)

So, "Jared" created the ring Old Stone to rule them all, it got shattered into the Paragons totems? Nyxly needs the totems and to get them she needs a crystal which also belonged to "Jared" - who happens to be Mxy's ancestor, which is why she needs Mxy / his blood, too.

I have one important and incredibly relevant question here, tho... 

With the introduced imps and their names... Why’s dude named Jared of all things?!

Really, did I mishear that? If so, I’ll leave it as is and never edit, bc that would be hilarious in its own right 😋

...

Not sure what to make about Supergirl paraphrasing a Dirty Dancing quote.  "Nobody puts Mxy into a power crystal on my watch."  ...is he Baby now? (Seriously, though: Which of the writers thought that was a fitting quote to use in that particular context?)

...now, is the exposition section of the episode over yet?

Sensitive Brainy sensed something was up with Nia. He can relate... Nia doubting Kara would understand, too, is ridiculous. But I get it... insecurities and all. But, I mean, just 5 minutes later Kara announces she wants to save Nyxly despite her wrongdoings. And yet Nia still remains convinced, Kara wouldn’t forgive her own personal mini-me... After having witnessed Kara forgiving Lena for a whole season of the writers being stupid messing up to the nth degree. But I digress, Lena’s Lena.

...how old is Nia meant to be again? Just asking out of completely unrelated curiosity.

F*ck. They really went with NewFoundland...

Imma assume it was an executive choice after realizing they couldn’t find enough actors and actresses with a convincing Irish accent... maybe. Again, no offense to Newfoundland! Just... we got the insinuations of Ireland, not Newfoundland... And truthfully, when I think of magic, Ireland is an easy association. Whereas I only due to this whole debacle learned Newfoundland has Irish ancestry. So, okay, the show forced me to learn something new... I give ‘em that.

An easy journey, she said.

Lena's been off-screen for two whole episodes, Kara announcing at the beginning of ‘Dreamweaver’ [6x09] Lena being “back east” (at least insinuating Lena’s left the west-coast already), which span over at least one full day (feat. a scene at night), and ‘I still rise’ [6x10] at least another a whole day (the whole Nia’s mom back for a day deal). And, now, after at least 48 hours she barely just arrived.

Lemme check how long a regular plane would need to fly from California to NFL......... ... .. .. So... approx. 10 hours with at least one layover. 

Yeah, using a private jet made it easier, but apparently also much, much slower...

Or, Lena randomly went some other places / did some sight-seeing in NFL before she decided to finally visit her mother’s hometown...  [Either that or the timelines don’t match up and Lena’s scenes are flashbacks of sorts.]

Optimistic and relaxed Lena is a sight to behold. I rewound 3 times, just to enjoy it for as long as possible. We all knew it was going to be short-lived... 

Let’s check off a few more items...

OMG, Kara hiding behind Alex at the mere sight of the PZ-projector broke my heart!  😢

"Elisabeth Walsh" is the new 'the one you shall not name'. ...poor Lena. 😭

Oh, so Mxy wants to be Patrick Swayze instead of Baby... gotcha.

...is this going anywhere?

KITTY!!! Okay, this must be the best opponent in the history of CWSG. 

Despite the horrible CGI, SG using her heat-vision to project a laser-beam to distract the cat had me in (happy-) tears! 🤣

Gotta love the civilians of National City quickly returning to business as usual once the giant cat is gone. Even the police officers looked rather chill...

Nyxly did look fabulous this episode ^^ 

Andrea being Lena's rock is both great and annoying. I can't fault Andrea. It's just, that we still have to see an on-screen interaction between Lena and Kara and that bugs the heck out of me. I can’t help it. I’m sorry, Andrea.

Nia: "...is my fault." Kara: "Nu, is MY fault!" J'onn: "Stop fighting, kids!" Space-dad has spoken.

Mxy used an LuthorCorp copy machine... and of cos it's faulty. It's not an L-Corp product.

Kara forgiving Nia came as a surprise to her... Oooookay. I mean, the show has been writing Kara a bit inconsistently the past two seasons... so, yeah, maybe being unsure which of her traits apply this week was not such a far stretch...

Maybe it's the hair, but I wished, Florence was played by Alex Kingston.

So, not-Alex-Kingston shows Lena herself with a funny wig and tells her how her mother was still watching her...

If it wasn't for Katie's acting skills (I love her.) I would have already hit my head against the wall repeatedly. Something about these scenes had me constantly cringe and I made it through 5.5 seasons of this show already... Can’t quite put my finger on it, but it was highly distracting from the story that explained Lena’s mom was special even to another witch, where there was domestic abuse, and an accidental murder. Y’know, important stuff, deep-cutting stuff! 

At least, poor widddle Lena got some closure there. Elisabeth was a good cookie. And filled with magic. And Lena’s gotta have that ‘spark’, too... 

....so... Lena’s gonna stay in NFL for how much longer, to train becoming a witch?  Please, just hand her a how-to manual and send her back home, to figure it out on her own, please... (Yes, that would be horrible decision-making, but I need her back with the team!)

On to the finish line: 

So... Mxy IS Nyxly's brother? Wait, that doesn’t sound right... then Nyxly would have the same blood... Did I miss something? Can someone explain, please? Or is he her ex, and that’s where his rendition of “I will survive” makes sense?

Hnn... I can't help, but think Kara's speech for Nyxly was 85% based on her experiences with Lena in s05.

Awww... he said "stronger together"... Mxy... I hope, you'll be okay!

Lena believes in magic now. And I absolutely love how Lena wants to science magic XD

...but apparently magic isn’t science that hasn’t been explained yet, but parallel... powers? concepts? ether strings?

Nyxly has a loyal henchman now. Which was a bit heavy-handed. Took way too much of screen-time, so it better leads to something interesting.

And Kara is on a warpath now. Wooooot! Girl’s got enough.

...what else? 

Did I miss a third Patrick Swayze hint / quote / mention?  I learned, these things come in threes... Y’know, basic writing rules... 

I guess, for once the episode title was meant to be taken literally, Mxy popping up between characters, to try and help. (I need in-show footage, of Mxy sneaking up on ppl, without his powers, on all fours / crouched, just to get the desired effect.) I mean, I’ve never really watched Malcom, but wasn’t he like what Mxy usually is? A bit of a trouble-maker, prankster, chaos-ensuing wherever he goes? ...well, in that case, the episode title didn’t hold up, as Mxy’s scenes were not fun or really goofy. Yes, there was some superficial humor, but just to serve Mxy dealing with not being able to use his powers, which in turn was only barely scratched at (although it turned out to be his final character development crisis, appreciating not having powers and - in turn - facing consequences for once). Again, a whole lot going on in the episode, so a lot of that may have ended up on the cutting-room floor.

...where’s Kelly? Secretly adopting a kid, maybe?

...Kara’s still a reporter, right? I mean, whenever it serves the immediate plot, yes? ...Not even a throw-away line, that she has to pop up at CatCo for appearances sake? Since Andrea is already upset with her AND looking into her friends’ identities? At least, Kara should take a peek to make sure Andrea hasn’t uncovered anything yet... No?

Well, that’s all I’ve got for now. Kue out.

[imagine-loki]

Tear You To Pieces, Chapter 4

TITLE: Tear You To Pieces CHAPTER NO./ONE SHOT: Chapter 4 AUTHOR: fanficshiddles ORIGINAL IMAGINE: Imagine Loki was sent to make up for his deeds by helping out The Avengers at the tower. Everyone thinks he’s changed, but he is just biding his time. He manipulates and uses someone who works there, who has a crush on him, to get exactly what he wants.  RATING: M

WARNINGS FOR THIS FIC: DARK LOKI, RAPE/NON-CON, MANIPULATION, MURDER, VIOLENCE, EMOTIONAL ABUSE, KIDNAPPING

  The day that Kelly had been waiting for finally arrived just over a week later. She was finally recovered enough from the attack, aside from still a few bruises and superficial cuts.

Stark felt bad for not leaving protection with her on the jet. She kept telling him it was ok. Loki kept telling him he told him so and he was foolish for putting her in danger. Which wasn’t doing Loki any favours in getting in the Avengers good books.

Kelly so wanted to tell Maria that she had a date. But she needed to keep quiet, not wanting to upset Loki. He had asked her not to tell anyone, so she wasn’t going to break her promise to him.

So she got ready on her own, after making an excuse to the others that she was feeling a bit iffy so wanted an early night. Once she was dressed and had her hair and make-up sorted, she sneaked out of her room and made her way down to the back entrance to meet Loki.

He was already there waiting for her. Her heart beat quickened when she saw him. He was so handsome, wearing a suit, black trousers and jacket with a white shirt and a black tie. It wasn’t often he wore mortal clothes but when he did, it was always with such style.

Loki’s smile grew larger as he looked Kelly up and down. She was deliberately wearing a green dress underneath her leather jacket. Her pulse quickened at the look in Loki’s eyes as she approached him.

‘Why, you look absolutely ravishing, my dear.’ Loki purred and picked up her hand to kiss the back of it politely, making her blush.

‘Thank you. You look really handsome.’ She said shyly.

‘Thank you, pet. Had to look my best for you.’ He winked at her, then he offered her his arm and she accepted, slipping her hand around his arm he led her out of the building to an awaiting taxi.

On the drive to the restaurant Loki had picked, casual chat had Kelly at much more ease and she actually forgot she was on a date with the God of lies and mischief, an ex-villain. She felt so relaxed and comfortable around him.

Loki hopped out of the taxi first and rushed round the car to open her door for her when they arrived. He helped her out too, then slipped his arm around her and they headed inside. He’d booked a nice table by the window at the back, looking out to a nice garden.

‘This is so lovely. Thank you, Loki.’ Kelly smiled as she sat down, Loki of course tucked her chair in for her after helping her with her jacket.

‘I only wish I had asked you out sooner.’ Loki said sheepishly.

They got some wine over to the table, then ordered their food. Kelly just hoped she would actually be able to eat something, she felt so nervous and excited, her stomach was all over the place. But the wine did help to settle her a bit.

‘I must ask, are you wearing my colours on purpose or is it a happy coincidence?’ Loki asked, smirking.

Kelly looked like a deer caught in the headlights. ‘Uhm… I… on purpose.’ She said shyly, downing a big gulp of wine.

Loki chuckled. ‘Well, I am honoured.’

Loki asked about Kelly’s life, about her upbringing. He shared a little of himself too, about growing up on Asgard with Thor. She was glad he was opening up to her.

‘Did you tell anyone about our date?’ Loki asked in the middle of their meal.

‘No, I didn’t. I wanted to tell Maria, but I kept quiet.’ Kelly said honestly.

Loki nodded and looked at her warmly. ‘Good girl. It’s for the best.’

Kelly’s face went bright red as she suddenly became very flustered. She quickly reached for her wine and took a few sips to try and hide her face. Loki was a little confused at first, but then it clicked.

Good girl… She had a praise kink? He was sure of it.

Grinning slightly while he kept on eating, not wanting to make a big deal of it and spook her, he noted that information away in his mind. That could come in very handy indeed.

Luckily for Kelly, he changed the subject swiftly. Saving her from further embarrassment.

‘Have you had many boyfriends?’ Loki asked. She was a lovely woman, for a mortal. He was surprised she didn’t have a boyfriend currently.  

‘I’ve dated a few people over the years, but nothing ever became… official.’ She shrugged after wiping her mouth with her napkin. She had managed to eat more than she thought she would, luckily.

‘I’m surprised no one has snatched you up yet. You’re a wonderful woman, Kelly.’ Loki said, making her smile giddily.

‘I just… I get attached quite easily. I uhm, I learned my lesson from the first guy I dated four years ago. He hurt me pretty bad, so I am trying not to fall so hard so quickly. It’s made me a little more guarded.’

Loki nodded in understanding. ‘I’m sorry to hear that, darling. Love and trust are such fragile things, not something to be taken for granted. I know it has to be earned. Hopefully, I can prove that I might be worthy of at least your time, perhaps more.’

Kelly’s heart melted completely at his words.

He was such a sweet talker. His silver tongue one of his best abilities and one he was always very much thankful for. One that couldn’t be taken away from him.

They didn’t leave straight after finishing their meal. They had a few more glasses of wine first, Kelly was happily tipsy. Loki barely even felt tipsy, mortal alcohol didn’t affect him in the same way. He would need to drink a few bottles of wine before even feeling slightly tipsy.

After the meal when they were ready to leave, there was a car waiting outside to take them home. Loki opened the door for Kelly and helped her in, then he sat in the middle seat so he could be right next to her, their thighs pressed together, making her blush.

Loki turned more towards her on the drive home and he stroked her cheek softly with the back of his hand. ‘You are so beautiful.’ He hummed.

Kelly smiled shyly as he slid his hand down and gently held her chin.

He licked his lips a little as he leaned in, but he paused a moment and looked deep into her eyes. ‘May I kiss you, darling?’ He asked so sweetly.

Kelly felt her heart swelling that he was so sweetly asking permission just to kiss her.

‘Of course! I mean, yes… yes.’ She blushed hard, trying not to seem too over eager. But Loki didn’t seem to mind as he grinned and closed the distance to plant his lips upon hers, his hand slid round to the back of her head to hold her closely. Not that she would want to move away from him, anyway.

She felt like time had stopped as he kissed her gently, his lips were so soft and cool against her. He moved them slowly, moulding with hers. Her entire world was turned upside down, she had dreamed of kissing him for so long now, she never thought it would actually happen. But now it was, it was even better than she had imagined.

Kelly could only hope it was the start of many.

-

Later that night, Loki decided to pay her another visit in the middle of the night.

She was sound asleep when he manifested in her room. He was silent as he slowly walked towards her sleeping form in bed. It was quite warm so she had the blanket thrown off her, wearing nothing but a night gown and knickers.

He smirked as he reached the side of her bed. He leaned over her and pressed his palm to her forehead, seeping into her dreams. It was easy, considering Loki was already someone she dreamt and thought about a lot. He wasn’t surprised to find some rather naughty dreams and fantasies about him in her mind.

Using that to his advantage, he manipulated her mind. Making sure she would remain asleep, but also so he could have some form of control over her dreams.

She parted her lips and whispered out his name. That’s when he moved his hand down underneath her night gown and he stroked softly over her abdomen before moving downwards into her knickers. She squirmed a little in her sleep, whimpering softly when his large hand just cupped her at first.

Loki kept his movements steady and careful. He knew his powers weren’t as strong as they should be, so he didn’t want to make a mistake.

Going slow, he slid his fingers through her folds and had to bite back a growl when he discovered she was already getting aroused. Using that to his advantage, he trailed some wetness up over her clit and rubbed it in circles. She started moaning more in her sleep, calling out his name again too.

This is far too easy. Loki thought with a wicked grin as he used his thumb on her clit and began inserting a single finger into her. But he was met with quite a bit of resistance at first, until he managed to ease his way into her with more stimulation on her clit.

‘How interesting.’ He whispered, his cock hardening in his trousers at the realisation she was still a virgin. She was so impossibly tight, even around his slender finger.

She squirmed a little, frowning. ‘No, please… feels weird.’ She whined.

Loki rubbed her clit firmer, while wiggling his finger inside her. Whilst it felt weird for her, he could feel her clamping around his digit in arousal. But her movements were becoming a bit more insistent.

Then her eyes suddenly flew open, but Loki had been able to vanish just a mere second before that. He cursed himself for not being able to hold his powers better, he really needed to get them back properly.

Kelly was breathing hard and a bit sweaty as she turned her light on. She had been so sure that someone, Loki, had actually been there and was touching her. But there was no sign of him at all. And her door was locked, so she knew it couldn’t have been him.

‘That was some vivid dream.’ She muttered to herself and wiped her sweaty brow with the back of her hand.

Even though she felt aroused and uncomfortable between her thighs, she kept telling herself she had just dreamt it. Though it took her heart a while to stop racing.

[procrastinatorimagines]

Could Have Been More Part 2

Fandom: Chicago PD / One Chicago / Chicago Fire

Series: Could Have Been More

Part 1 // Part 2 // Part 3 // Part 4 // Part 5 (Final)

Character/s: Voight x Reader, 

Warning/s: murder/death

Word Count: 1,569

Request: I really loved Could have been more are you going to do a part 2

Summary: Actions have consequences... and Y/N’s explosive relationship with Voight isn’t even the half of it

Well the cat was out of the bag about you and Voight, except... there was now no more you and Voight. You’d woken up well before your alarm, lying in bed and thinking over the events of the other day until it was actually time for you to get up for shift. No one had directly said anything about it at work, you knew one of the girls had no so subtly told the others to zip it about the whole thing, but you didn’t mind, you’d rather not talk about it at work, or at all.

When your alarm finally sounded you untangled yourself from your covers and went to take a shower, hoping your head would clear and your feelings would go down the drain with the water. God this was a messy situation, and not your normal, run of the mill messy break up that you could talk about with all of your friends, where would you even start?

You had no doubt news of your relationship with Voight had gone beyond the walls of 51 now, not that anyone in Intelligence would dare say a word... okay, maybe Adam would, but he’d shut up pretty quickly.

With a sigh you shut off the water and got ready for work, eyes flicking to your phone screen, half a hope he’d call. You’d tried to call his exactly once afterwards, but you’d hung up before you could even see if he picked up or not, not that he called you back anyway. Your phone did actually ring at that moment, but to your more than slight disappointment it was just Stella telling you to move your ass, they were downstairs ready to pick you up for work.

“Ready to face the day?” Emily asked as you climbed into the back seat. It had been the end of the week when everything went down, you’d had the weekend to mull over your break up, but it also meant you hadn’t seen anyone else from work since either.

“Ready as I’ll ever be I guess,” you said as Stella took off, staring out the window as the houses and buildings passed you by, lost in thought about what the day might bring.

Sylvie squeezed your knee and brought you back into the car. “I’ll bet no one’ll even mention it,” she tried to reassure you, but it didn’t do any good, so she quickly changed the subject, and you spent the rest of the short drive discussing Capp’s new and alarming hat collection. 

Shift started off... normal, to your surprise, not to say that you weren’t relieved. Sure, conversation was a little quieter than normal as you went with your partner to grab breakfast before you were inevitably pulled away on call, but the briefing had gone smoothly, and so had double checking the ambo’s inventory. 

You were just about thinking you could make it through the rest of the day when Herrmann let out a very loud sigh and put his paper down as you and Sylvie took your seats at the table. Mouch shot him a glare from across the room and Ritter shook his head. You lower your fork, your egg half way to your mouth.

“Don’t-” Mouch said from the couch, rolling his eyes in defeat when Herrmann spoke anyway.

“Voight?” He asked in disbelief, combining so many questions into one simple work, when? where? why? how? what... the hell were you thinking?

Gallo suddenly found his food very interesting and Cruz threw a cushion at Herrmann, but he held his ground, eye brow raised in expectation of some kind of answer. 

“What about him?” You replied, getting back to eating and trying to act as casually as possible. It looked like Kelly was trying to decide whether to intervene or disappear into his own chair when Herrmann continued.

“Oh come on, everyone here’s thinking the same thing I am, they just don’t want a bollocking from Foster-” he ignored the look he gave her and carried on, “but you can’t honestly expect us not to be a little curious, I mean, you and Voight-”

“Herrmann,” Boden snapped from across the room, entering in the door way and pointing at him, “that’s enough.”

“But Chief-” Herrmann protested, mercifully cut off by the alarm signalling the need of ambo 61 for a shooting. You gratefully shoved some more of your food in your mouth and hurried out the door with Syvlie, nodding your thanks to Boden for trying. You could hear him scolding Herrmann as you climbed in, glad to be driving so you could distract yourself. 

“Sorry about that,” Sylvie said, giving you a sympathetic and understanding smile, you didn’t know what you’d do without her.

“Eh, it was what I expected, especially from Herrmann,” you replied, turning the corner and heading down a side road. Up ahead you could see several police cars and a crowd of people.

“Uh oh,” Sylvie said as you slowed the vehicle, looking for a way to get through, but the crowd was blocking the road too much and everyone was staring in the direction of the police line, ignoring you entirely. “Looks like we’re pushing our way through on foot,” she decided as you climbed out the ambo and went to grab as your med bags and a back board.

You and Sylvie pushed your way through as best you could, the police at the tape helping you through when they noticed you struggling. You saw several bodies, most DOA’s if you had to guess.

“Where do you need us?” Your partner asked, dragging you away from the site of carnage on the street as the officer pointed to a house just a little up the road. There was about a dozen police officers there from what you could tell, and they all moved out the way to let you through as you noted at least three more bodies leading up the drive. 

When you entered the house you saw a man lying on the carpet, but before you could kneel down to check his pulse a voice stopped you. “Not that one, he’s gone, we’ve got a few survivors in the back,” you turned back to see Voight in the doorway, Sylvie cautiously looking between the two of you.

“Lead the way,” you told him and he nodded, gesturing you to follow him through to the back of the house. You may be hurting, but you were a professional, you’d damn well act like it and you knew he would too.

“What happened here?” Sylvie asked finally, stepping over a pool of blood and a broken vase. 

“Mass murder,” Voight replied and you shivered a little. You’d never gotten used to how calm he could be around death, but he’d been doing this job for a long time.

In the back you found a few shaken and battered 20 somethings, two men and a woman, being talked to by various members of Intelligence. You headed over to the woman talking to Adam, who stepped back to allow you to check her out.

“Hey, my name’s Y/N, what’s yours?” You asked as you shined a torch in her eyes and felt the cut on the back of her head. 

“Melanie,” she winced, face wet with tears. “Why did this happen?” She whispered, and you glanced at Adam as you went into your bag for some wipes and a bandage.

“That’s what we’re going to do our best to figure out,” Voight said before Adam could reply, wandering over to where you were working. Adam took that as his clue to take his leave, looking between the two of you, his eyes asking the same question Herrmann did earlier.

You finished patching Melanie up, she had a serious gash on her head that would need to be treated and checked out at Med, and a major concussion, but other than that the rest were superficial cuts and scrapes, whoever hit her on the head must have though it was a decisive blow. 

Sending Melanie away with another paramedic that had arrived on scene you turned to head off towards Sylvie. Voight grabbed your arm to stop you, shaking his head and giving your arm a tug to follow him. You head off out into an emply side room.

“I need to get back to work Hank,” you told him, glancing at the door, worried who’d just seen him pull you in here, wanting to at least maintain your professionalism.

“Listen to me for a second,” he said as you noticed he never let go of your arm. He noticed too, pulling his hand away quickly and taking a step back. “You remember that case from last week?”

You nodded, “of course I do, but here isn’t really the place-” Voight cut you off, his features soft and his eyes full of concern as he spoke.

“The manager, Albert Strauss, the one who got away,” he took a breath, “this was him,” he said finally.

You stood in shock, mouth open, horror and guilt filling your mind. “What did I do?...” You mumbled, covering your mouth in shock.

“You did what you thought was right, Y/N-” he tried, reaching out his hand but you pushed it away, taking a shaky step back, your legs threatening to give out. 

There was at least eight dead bodies here... what had you done?

[somedayonbroadway]

A Thought For Every Occasion

Boy Meets World Masterlist

Sorry guys, I’m catching up to myself here, so updates are spreading a little bit. :)

“Ya know… I’m his best friend n’ it’s like he don’t hear me anymore,” Albert complained, walking up to his parents who were standing at the gate with Mr. Kloppman. “I mean, why does he have so much faith in The Refuge?”

His father turned to him. “Ya know what? Let’s just get in the car, go down there and drag him out ourselves,” he decided, walking over to grab his car keys.

Kloppman pushed his gate open too, following the younger man. “I’m coming too,” he stated. “I’m well acquainted with The Refuge. I’ve been trying to shut it down for years. This Mr. Weisel is a frightening man…”

That didn’t make Albert feel any better.

But just as they all might have gone, someone walked up through the yard, hands in his pockets and eyes down at his shoes, like he was afraid they were going to be mad at him. Albert wouldn’t lie to him if he asked. They were. “Hi…” he greeted.

“Hello, Tony,” Mr. Kloppman replied, relief in his eyes.

Mrs. DaSilva walked over to him and placed a hand on his shoulder. “Tony, are you alright?” she asked kindly, much like she always spoke to him, like she wanted so badly for him to feel welcome and secure that it all just sounded superficial and fake.

He liked her well enough. But he felt out of place.

He shrugged her hand away. “Of course I am,” he assured. “I’m totally centered.” He reached into his back pocket. “I just came to give Albert back his homework. I… I don’t need it anymore…” he stated. Albert took it, wanting to say more. But he didn’t. So Race looked around. “Okay… I hope you all have a peaceful night… I’m goin’ back ta The Refuge…”

Mr. DaSilva put up a hand. “Whoa whoa, no you’re not,” he stated. “While your parents are out of town you’re our responsibility.”

“That means you’re staying here, in this house,” Mrs. DaSilva agreed.

Race sighed. “Yeah… Mr. Weisel told me that people like you would try to talk me out of my beliefs,” he stated, glaring up at them.

His best friend's mother looked taken aback. “Tony… honey, we love you!”

“He said you’d say that…”

Mr. DaSilva shook his head. “Alright! That’s enough! Get him in the house and tie him up!” he demanded, only sort of joking.

The boy wasn’t amused.

“Antonio, these aren’t beliefs,” Kloppman tried to explain. Race turned to him, clearly ready to argue. “This is just a way to escape a life that doesn’t have beliefs.”

“That’s a judgement,” the boy accused, his voice harsh and pointed.

Kloppman didn’t flinch at the tone. He just looked disappointed. “You’re damn right it is,” he stated without shame.

The young blond was sure he’d never heard that man swear before in his life. But he didn’t let that catch him off guard. “What’s wrong with me tryin’ ta find somethin’ ta believe in?”

His principal raised up his hands in surrender. “Look, Tony, I’m all for your search for spirituality, okay?” He sighed, gesturing to the boy. “But you don’t seem to realize that Mr. Weisel is conducting his own search for lost souls that he can influence and manipulate.” The old man tried to calmly step away.

The boy stared at him. “He said you’d say that…”

That was just about driving Kloppman mad. So he turned back to the child. “Yes, I’m sure he gave you a thought for every occasion!” He wanted to say more, trying to talk some sense into this boy who he cared for so much.

But the phone began to ring inside his house. So he sighed and turned to get it, giving one last sad look to the boy. “Excuse me.”

“Look, Race… I don’t say this very often,” Albert cut in. “But Kloppy’s makin’ sense.”

“Not ta me!” Race countered. “Why would Kloppman feel the need to attack what I believe in! Why do you all feel that way? Kelly too!”

“Tony, why do you need to believe in The Refuge so strongly?” Mrs. DaSilva asked, folding her hands in front of her and waiting for a reply.

The kid didn’t quite understand. “What?”

So Mr. DaSilva stepped in. “Tony, before you met these people at this place, what did you believe in?”

The kid fumbled for words at that, eventually only able to shrug. “I dunno… nothin’...” he supposed.

“Did you believe in God?”

The question made Race pause for thought. Because he truly didn’t know. Maybe he did. Papà had told him stories about God. So had so many others.

He tried to think of what to say.

But Kloppman was back outside before he could.

And the second Race caught sight of him, he knew something was wrong.

“Todd? What is it?”

Kloppman looked at the group, pacing back and forth slightly, as if torn between talking to them and rushing to do something else. His hand was shaking and he reached up to cover his mouth for a moment before a single name finally left his lips. “Uh… James Kelly…”

Everything inside Race dropped at that name. He couldn’t speak as he waited for the rest of that sentence.

“H-he’s been in a motorcycle accident…”

“Oh my God… is he okay?” Albert asked, stepping forward to be beside his best friend.

Kloppman seemed at a loss for words. “Uh… no… no, he isn’t.”

Something inside of Race broke. It was unlike any other kind of pain he’d ever experienced. Suddenly all he wanted to do was scream. But he couldn’t. It was like he was just too sad to cry, too frightened to move. This wasn’t real. This was too much.

“Conor, would you mind giving me a lift to the hospital?” Kloppman asked rather frantically as Race stood frozen, his hands shaking at his sides.

Mrs. DaSilva nodded. “Oh, we’ll all go,” she stated.

Albert turned to go to. “C’mon, Tony,” he called.

“I’ll meet you guys there…” Tony promised, his voice breaking as he looked up into Al’s eyes.

His best friend could see the frightened tears in his eyes. “Race, what the hell do you mean?!”

“I’ll meet you guys there!” he repeated before running off on his own, leaving Albert even more worried than he’d been before.

—

JoJo cautiously walked into the quiet waiting room to find her boyfriend sitting with his entire family and Mr. Kloppman. She’d never seen them this quiet.

Albert looked heartbroken. “How’s Mr. Kelly?” she asked.

The redhead didn’t even look up at her when she sat at the the armrest of the chair he occupied. “The doctors are with him… we’re waitin’ ta hear…”

The young girl nodded, taking a look around the room. “Where’s Tony?” she asked, figuring he’d be off in the bathroom or getting something to eat.

But her boyfriend only shrugged. “I have no clue…” He sniffled, wiping his nose on his shirt.

His girlfriend wasn’t pleased with that answer. “What does that mean? I know Race doesn’t like hospitals… but this is Mr. Kelly… how on earth could he not be here?”

Looking up at her, Al could only shrug again, his face solemn and sad.

None of them had ever seen Jack look even remotely scared. He was always so confident and sure of himself. None of them ever expected to be waiting there in the hospital, fearing he may lose his life without any of them getting to say any kind of goodbye to someone who was like family to them.

And then in strolled Tony, feigning calmness though they all knew it was fake. Albert stood, ready to greet him before a man walked in just behind him.

“Mr. Weisel…” Kloppman greeted, not at all sounding happy about it.

“Tony thought I could be of some help,” the old man offered, looking around the room.

Everyone just glared at him. “Weisel, you don’t belong here,” Todd state’s as calmly as he could. He didn’t want to think about this man right now. A dear friend of his was laying in the hospital and this man didn’t give a rat's tail.

The whack job cocked his head. “Well, one of my children invited me, and as always, I’m going to be there for him as well as any other child who calls for me…”

A hand grabbed Race’s arm. He was spun around to be met with the face of his best friend. “What is he doin’ here?” Albert demanded.

“Al, I couldn’t do this alone—“

“Okay, first of all, we’re here,” the redhead stated, gesturing to his family, girlfriend and neighbor. “And second of all, I am beginnin’ ta see that you are even more alone than I ever knew…”

Race’s blue eyes darkened. “What does that mean?”

Albert didn’t get to reply as he watched Weisel stroll over to Mr. Kloppman. “I just want you to know that I forgive you for trying to shut us down,” the man stated smugly.

That just about made Kloppman snap. He rose from his chair as Weisel walked on by. “You forgive me?!” he demanded.

But Mr. DaSilva stood and put a hand on his chest, glaring at the man who had Racer wrapped around his finger. “Hey… you aren’t dealin’ with gullible little kids here anymore, buddy. So watch it,” he warned. “You brought Tony down. Thanks. Now why don’t you just take a hike back to conland, huh?” Albert’s father reasoned darkly, pointing towards the door.

The man just smirked and scoffed, looking over to find Race watching the scene. “Now, Tony, do you see how judgemental these people are—“

He was cut off by hands shoving against his chest, forcing him back into the wall. “No, no! Listen! You see! The judgement I made a long time ago is that Antonio Higgins is the best friend that my kid ever had… n’ I will stand in the way of anyone who tries ta take him from me or this family.”

It was only mere seconds away from getting truly physical. But the delicate hands of his wife made Conor pause. “Honey, he would love a lawsuit,” she reasoned, effectively getting the man to walk away.

So Weisel straightened his blazer and stood up straighter, catching sight of Tony, big blue eyes still trained on him. “I think there’s a lot of anger here,” he stated. “And I don’t feel that this is a healthy environment for Tony.”

“Well, I really don’t—“ Kloppman tried.

Weisel cut him off. “Look, I know you don’t respect my philosophy. But for kids who feel lost and have an emptiness in their lives, I’m here,” the idiot said, as if he was preaching. “To give them a sense of belonging.”

The old principal in the room glared. “You can’t have Antonio!”

Weisel smiled and shrugged. “Well… that’s up to Antonio…” he stated. “And, in any event, there are many more just like him…” He nodded, turning to find the boy. “So, c’mon, Tony, lets go…”

Only, he turned to find an empty room.

Tony was gone. And so were his friends.

[adaliacom105]

Youth Culture

Hello readers, fellow students, and professor! In today’s post I will be talking about youth culture and soundtrack for films! Youth culture is defined as the unique behaviors, norms, and values typified by adolescents (young adults) in a larger culture (youth culture). In order to better understand youth culture I had to watch “The Breakfast Club,” “Euphoria,” “Saved By The Bell,” “KIDS,” “Mean Girls,” and “Mid90s,”. There are three common themes present in these films that are pressure, boys/girls, and living in the present all relating to youth culture. The first theme of  pressure is seen with Brain from “The Breakfast Club” getting pressured by his parents to get good grades, Rue from “Euphoria” receives it from her mom to go clean, “Saved By The Bell” see Jessie cave into pressure from her tests and commitments to friends, Telly from “KIDS” uses pressure in order to have a girl have sex with him, “Mean Girls” have Janis pressure Cady to become friends with the plastics, and “Mid90s” have Stevie fill pressure to fit in with the skater kids. For girls/boys, you have Brian lying about his virginity to the others, Zach and Slater (Saved By The Bell) both fight over Kelly, “KIDS” has Telly obsessed with having sex with only virgin girls, “Mean Girls” has Regina get back together with Aaron due to jealousy of him liking Cady, “Mid90s” has Stevie feel pressured by friends to have sex, and “Eurphoria” has Nate and  Mckay talk about a girl Cassie and her sexual past. Living in the present is shown with the way Bender from “The Breakfast Club” acts, “Euphoria” has Rue doing drugs with no concern for her future, “Saved By The Bell” has Zack using his schemes assuming they will work with no concern if they won’t until a problem arises, “KIDS” has the characters have sex with no worries about who it affects and to what could happen, “Mean Girls” has the cast focus on their high school lives more than anything, and “Mid90s” has Stevie drinking and drugs with no regard for his future.

I think these are all related to youth culture because of how they still occur today. Teens receive pressure from their parents to get good grades. If not, they get pressure from their peers to do something else; for me it was good grades. Focusing on attraction is always going to be something teens focus on and living in the present is something teens do until about senior year, I know that’s what I did.

From these films the character I most identified with was Brian from “The Breakfast Club.” I identify with him the most because I feel like I have more in common with him than all the other characters, and as we see him as the smart stereotype, I think people see me in the same way. I say that I have more in common with him because I am also awkward when trying to start conversations, especially with people I have just met. This awkwardness is shown when he starts to ramble about what clubs he is in. I am also smart like Brain as well; I have been on the high honor roll through high school and on the Dean’s list for all of the semesters I have attended here. The way the film portrays Brian is that he is the smart one, a stereotype. 

In this way, I think I have in common with him. I say think because, for one, I don’t believe a person can recognize if they're a stereotype since they think of themselves as just themselves and not as a label. I never realized people actually thought of me as smart until I was put into a group for jeopardy. They had set up the classroom for the game because they had the desks split in half and facing each other from opposite sides of the room. For the game, whoever you sat across from that would be the person you would answer against. When it came to seating arrangements, the person across from me looked over and realized that he would be going against me for Jeopardy and immediately asked to switch seats with me immediately after the rules were set up. I had asked why and was met with the reply that I don’t want to lose, and his teammates are telling him good luck. I had always thought of the class as easy but, apparently, not by my classmates.

A sound track can be a list of songs with actual lyrics, a score which is instrumental, or both. I personally prefer to have both, since I love to sing and just having instruments in the background helps me with my homework. The soundtrack for a film or TV series is an important element as it impacts the narrative of a story by adding more depth to the story (Franke). It adds depth to the story by adding to a particular part of the story’s tone or mood. An example of mood would be something sad like a character’s death; adding music to it can make the event even more tragic and melancholy. It also influences the viewers’ emotions and lets them get immersed in the scene and feel sad. An example for where it helps the tone would be a casual episode, and the music throughout it is lighthearted, which helps the viewers know that okay, this isn’t serious. Here are two actual examples: https://youtu.be/Cf_aLpDMf1U and https://youtu.be/iSkJFs7myn0 . 

Out of the films I had to watch for this class, I chose Mean Girls to reimage the soundtrack into 10 songs and only do the songs and not the scores.The first song I chose would be “Fifteen” by Taylor Swift. I chose this song because it reminds me of when Cady is first walking through to the high school for her first day, and that’s what the song is about. The second song I chose was Melanie Martinez’s “Lunchbox Friends.” I choose this song because it reminds me of the friendship that Cady has with Regina. Regina and Cady’s friendship is superficial and is like the lyric in the song “We can be lunchbox friends but only ‘til the clock hits three.” “Candy Store” from “Heathers the Musical'' would be three. I chose “Candy Store” because Cady’s is in Regina’s candy store. “Class Fight” and “Pacify Her,” both sung by Melaine Martinez were the fourth and fifth songs I chose because both songs are about two girls fighting over a boy while one is a physical fight while the other one keeps trying to convince the boy to drop the girl he is currently with.  I can imagine either song playing in the Halloween party scene. The sixth would be “Oh My God” by Ida Maria because it reminds me of how everything goes out of control for Cady, encompassing the line “Oh my god, you think I’m in control.” The seventh song I chose was “You Belong With Me” by Taylor Swift. I choose “You Belong With Me” because it is again like Cady and Regina fighting over Aaron; Cady is the one saying you belong with me and Regina is the girl who has Aaron. The eighth song would be Melanie Martinez’s “Drama Club.” The ninth song is “Obsessed” by Mirrah Carrie because it reminds me of how both Regina and Cady used the “why are you so obsessed with me?” on Janis. Finally, the tenth song would be “Show and Tell” by Melanie Martinez because it reminds me of Cady and Regina’s relationship, where Cady is Regina’s doll. I hope you all enjoyed the songs that I picked out. For some awesome scores I would recommend No straight Roads the game ( I love Yinu and Sayu’s track) along with Naruto’s ost (Sadness and Sorrow are simply my all time favorite). I hope you all enjoyed reading this blog about youth culture and soundtracks. Until Next time Adalia signing off!

[hogtowned-blog]

( MAIA MITCHELL. FEMALE. SHE/HER. )  —  oh, you mean sierra murphy, the 25 year-old cosmetologist? they live in L203 & have been here for one year. i know they’re an aquarius and when i see them, i can’t help but think of weakly woven beaded bracelets, creased concealer barely covering dark bags, and the ritualistic removal of the glitter and glitz of a long night out. but go say hey, get to know them for yourself! 

hey hey! my name is liz aka admin l and i’m so excited 2 rp w/ u !! i’m a 21 y/o living in the cst timezone and i’m down w/ she/they pronouns. i’ve got a few kids to hit you with but im caught up on the main a little so they may be spaced out. i’m down to plot just about anything!! feel free to hit me up here but if u got one i rly prefer discord where u can reach me @ rebel, rebel #5957 :))

A HISTORY

sierra grew up middle class as they come. her parents went all in on it: the house in the suburbs, the nuclear family, the dog and the picket fence. she was born their first child, and grew up with her little brother just behind her. there were no great tragedies in her childhood. they were happy and they got by, and that’s something she’ll always remember.

sierra always strove in the spotlight. she’s always loved getting a little extra attention. she took up cheer in middle school and used it to her advantage: she wasn’t cruel, but she certainly soaked up being able to create a cool girl persona for herself. her parents were glad she had the extracurricular, and she reveled in becoming one of the faces most well known of her class.

high school comes around and it’s more of the big same. she continues to be generally well liked and popular. for three years, she frequents party scenes, tries to get to as many people as she cans, but all the while, she never really stopped to make like. meaningful lasting connections. like she’s the kinda girl to say she loves you the night you meet her but then you don’t hear from her for weeks. she was kind of that person that everyone knew and was pretty much cool with but asides from a few exceptions didn’t have many real friends just casual pals and people she could party with.

her senior year, someone wrote on the third stall in the one nice girl’s bathroom at school that she was a superficial bitch. no one paid as much mind to it as she did. because in all reality, it was right. she cared about the wrong things for the wrong reasons. she drove around for a couple hours listening to kelly clarkson and really trying to figure her ish out and ultimately decided to try to be more real with people. she wanted things to be honest and she wanted the people that liked her to like her for who she was not just because she was cool to hang out with sometimes.

a side effect of making her circle small was that she really got clingy to people who were nice to her plain and simple. enter noah. they met a while after that, but while she was still kinda trying to find herself beyond trying to be the most likable person in a room. he took to the amount of her real self she showed, and he made her feel special. but it got super serious super fast once she found out she was pregnant.

pregnancy tw when she found out she was pregnant, she prepared to take it in stride. with noah, she really felt like maybe she could pull all of this off, and be the kind of person who roots themselves in family, because it’s how she got by as a kid. she knew that an unplanned pregnancy as young as they were wasn’t really the most statistically sound foundation for her family and the rest of her life to be built on, but she figured it was worth a shot. she started to pursue a more serious relationship with noah and finished up obtaining her cosmetology license and really tricked herself into feeling like she had this on lock.

things were okay for a while. and then they weren’t. sometimes the strain of moving that quickly tears things apart, and before their daughter ava’s first birthday, noah and sierra had called it. they’re still amicable to coparent, but it’s undeniable that things are vastly different in sierra’s life as she functions largely as a single mother.

she’s sort of in a catch in her life now where she wants to be the mature adult her daughter needs her to be, but she’s also still twenty-five, single, and finding her footing in the world. yes, she watches more doc mcstuffins than most people her age, but she’s also not afraid to take a night off and head out on the town with her girls when she needs it. so bottom line is her life at this point is all about working to find that balance and allow herself to be both a mother and her own person.

A LIL MORE

make no mistake, sierra’s never taken being miss Thing to a mean place. she was never cruel, but there was always something just,,, kinda spacey about her, because she was nice enough and fun to have at a party but she really is the chameleon type of person to adjust 2 whatever her surroundings were. she’s a little fake in that sense and there are times people have been able to scope cracks in her facade to see that she’s more shallow than she lets on

she’s weirdly zen now like she worked out her stuff and she’s come back a lot less high strung than before catch her doing yoga on the beach in the early mornings with the oldsters

pansexual princess

she can find herself slipping back into old habits and kinda just agreeing to things for the sake of being agreeable and likable or acting out because of the attention it brings so look out

week days she pretty diligently devotes herself to keeping up work and her family but the weekends unless she has explicit plans that require her 2 keep it Professional and good influence-y she’s probably throwing down some….. old habits die hard

[st-percocet]

rec masterpost

yo here’s some tunes that i recommend cause i get asked to rec bands/songs a lot so yea bold = absolute bangers that i can’t get sick of

SONGS: 1 trillion dollars - anti-flag 17 crimes - afi 302 - the lippies 5 to 9 - fidlar 6969 - ninja sex party acid baby - spilt addicted - simple plan afraid of heights - billy talent alfie - lily allen aliens are real don’t tweak - netherfriends all american girl - adickdid alone and stoned - king tuff alone is no together - jamie campbell bower / the darling buds a mask of my own face - lemon demon a more perfect union - titus andronicus a new wave - sleater-kinney anxiety - pinact atmosphere - joy division bad egg - hands off gretal bad habit - the kooks bad kids - black lips beach bones - more amor ft ryan ross beck and call - sundressed better man - jamie campbell bower better than sex - the midnight beast billionaire - travie mccoy ft bruna mars bitch theme - bratmobile black me out - against me bleed - out came the wolves bleed american - jimmy eat world body - mother mother boy grinder - jack off jill boyfriend - best coast boys wanna be her - peaches bubblegum - mystery jets but a nightmare - danzig byob - system of a down california uber alles - dead kennedys can we laugh now? - 7 year bitch cannonball - the breeders can’t go to hell - sin shake sin cardiac arrest - bad suns carried away - passion pit cat-o-nine-tails - L7 cemeterysexxx - doyle cheer up london - slaves chop suey - system of a down cold hands - the dose colder quicker - real friends come on eileen - dexys mightnight runners constant headache - joyce manor corrine - black honey crazy - gnarls barkley (cee lo green) creature - it looks sad. daddy issues - the neighbourhood dance like a maniac - the dollyrots danny don’t you know - ninja sex party dark necessities - red hot chilli peppers dark nights - dorothy death cup - mom jeans devilgirl - gorgeous frankenstein don’t come home - all human don’t mess with me - brody dalle don’t you wait - cloves dreaming dead girls - doyle egg - shoe. empty apartment - yellowcard even when the water’s cold - !!! evil eye - franz ferdinand faking the benz - from oslo family tree - black lips feels blind - bikini kill fill in the blank - car seat headrest firetruck vagina - baby guts first light - django django flannel - cardboard swords full circle - aerosmith fyi i wanna f your a - ninja sex party genghis khan - miike snow get busy - jimothy lacoste gia - fabulous disaster girls and boys - blur golden - travie mccoy ft sia good rhymes for bad times - bears in trees gothic roccata from the suite - léon boëllmann, roman penicki grace kelly - mika green eyes - wavves ha ha ha - the julie ruin hands down - dashboard confessional happy pills - weathers happy today - the wowz headfirst for halos - my chemical romance heroin - badflower hopeless - screaming females hung like jesus - cancerslug hypnotize - system of a down i killed abor day for you - panucci’s pizza i’ll be your butcher - cancerslug i look good - chantal claret it’s amazing - jamie campbell bower / the darling buds i wanna get better - bleachers i was a teenage anarchist - against me idiot - jeff the brotherhood is this sound okay? - coconut records i’m not crying you’re not crying are you? - dear and the headlights i’m not part of me - cloud nothings jellybean - video nasties jerk it out - caesers jerk of all trades - lunachicks just like you - nial harvest killer ball - gesu no kiwami otome kiss this - the struts la la lainey - forever the sickest kids ластоска - leningrad lezbophobia - tribe 8 liar - the dying arts lights out - royal blood lillibulero - bellowhead loner - fangclub lost on me - peace love bites (so do i) - halestorm makin’ whoopee - neil gaiman, amanda palmer max can’t surf - fidlar maxwell murder - rancid me and the bean - spoon miley - smwrs miss murder - AFI mixtape 2003 - the academic modern swinger - the pink spiders mother - danzig move (i’m coming) - chantal claret my best friend’s hot - the dollyrots my sharona - the knack nagoya - it looks sad. new born - purple nightmare - avenged sevenfold nite vision - mean jeans no surprise - the shacks not my girl - tokyo police club nothing can stop me - heavens to betsy nothing is wrong - analog rebellion no waves - fidlar oh bondage! up yours! - x-ray spex old folks home - cottonwood firing squad olly olly oxen free - amanda palmer (piano is evil version) only acting - kero kero bonito on your side - a rocket to the moon orgy for one - ninja sex party overdose - fidlar palm trees - smwrs panic switch - silversun pickups paradigm - avenged sevenfold paris - magic man psychedelic ascension - mr traumatik pudding - joel cossette rats - ghost red flag - billy talent river - eminem ft ed sheeran romance - wild flag romans - adam walicki salad days - mac demarco samantha - hole same damn life - seether same old blues - phantogram save me - aimee mann say it ain’t so - weezer schism - tool shia labeouf live - rob cantor shit twins - dads sick boy - kill hannah sick shit - together pangea silly boy - the blue van skulls and daisies - danzig slob - artificial fever soldier - dover southern comforting - hotel mira (prev. known as jpnsgrls) speak life - damien marley spooky ghosts - snckpck strange town - the moderates supermodel, superficial - voodoo queens sur la planche 2013 - la femme sweet ‘69 - babes in toyland sæla - black foxxes tears don’t fall (acoustic) - bullet for my valentine teenage whore - hole televisor - morningwood the beer - kimya dawson the devil’s son - creepshow the hounds - the protomen the sound of silence - simon and garfunkel the times they are a-changin’ - bob dylan think of you - bleached time bomb - rancid toy box - ward xvi transylvania - iron maiden trophy wifey - partyline turn me on (radio mix) - wet fingers twin sized mattress - the front bottoms typical girl - the slits ukulele anthem - amanda palmer us - regina spektor vampire’s kiss - john gold virgin sacrifice - doyle volcano girls - veruca salt wait for me - motopony waiting - jamie campbell bower waste of time - elvis depressedly weekend - smith westerns west coast - coconut records whole wide world - big tree without me - eminem you are going to hate this - the frights you’ll fall in love - mrs magician you’re gonna go far kid - offspring

BANDS: against me! - amanda palmer - artificial fever - avenged sevenfold - bellowhead - black foxxes - bleachers - bloodnun - blunderpuss - bullet for my valentine - cancerslug - cobra starship - counterfeit - danzig - dead! - death spells - doyle - earl. - electric century - fidlar - foo fighters - frank iero and the patience - ghost - good charlotte - gorgeous frankenstein - green day - hole - hotel mira - hounding - iron maiden - jimothy lacoste - kero kero bonito -leathermouth - leningrad - marilyn manson - mindless self indulgence - misfits - my chemical romance - ninja sex party - nirvana - papa roach - paramore - pencey prep - poison crow - pup - queen - queens of the stone age - rage against the machine - ramones - rancid - reggie and the full effect - simple plan - slipknot - spilt - sum 41 - swmrs - system of a down - taking back sunday - the darling buds / jamie campbell bower - the dead xiii - the dollyrots - the dresden dolls - the killers - the left rights - the levellers - the pretty reckless - the used - the world you love - video nasties - ward xvi - weathers - weezer - wolfe sunday - yellowcard

[delicatelythoughtfulpatrol]

How Pop Music’s Teenage Dream Ended

A decade ago, Katy Perry’s sound was ubiquitous. Today, it’s niche. How did a genre defined by popularity become unpopular?

Story by Spencer Kornhaber

“I am a walking cartoon most days,” Katy Perry told Billboard in 2010, and anyone who lived through the reign of Teenage Dream—Perry’s smash album that turned 10 years old on August 24—knows what she meant. Everywhere you looked or clicked back then, there was Perry, wrapped in candy-cane stripes, firing whipped cream from her breasts, wearing a toothpaste-blue wig, and grinning like an emoji. She titled one world tour “Hello Katy,” a nod to the Japanese cat character on gel pens worldwide. She made her voice-acting debut, in 2011, by playing Smurfette.

Perry’s music was cartoonish too: simple, silly, with lyrics stringing together caricature-like images of high-school parties, seductive aliens, and girls in Daisy Dukes with bikinis on top. Kids loved the stuff, and adults, bopping along at karaoke or Starbucks, enjoyed it too. (Maybe that’s because, like with so much classic Disney and Looney Tunes animation, the cuteness barely disguised a ton of raunch.) Teenage Dream generated five No. 1 singles in the United States—a feat previously accomplished only by Michael Jackson’s Bad—and it went platinum eight times.

Perry wasn’t alone in achieving domination through colorful looks and stomping songs. Teenage Dream arrived amid a wave of female pop singers selling their own costumed fictions: Lady Gaga, a walking Gaudí cathedral, roared EDM operas. Beyoncé shimmied in the guise of her alter ego, Sasha Fierce. Nicki Minaj flipped through personalities while wearing anime silhouettes and fuchsia patterns. Kesha, glitter-strewn and studded, babbled her battle cries. Taylor Swift trundled around in horse-drawn carriages. Each singer achieved impressive things, though arguably none of their albums so purely epitomized pop—in commercial, aesthetic, or sociological terms—like Perry’s Teenage Dream did.

A decade later, that early-2010s fantasy has ended, and Perry and her peers have seemed to switch gears. Rihanna has put her music career on pause while building a fashion and makeup empire. Beyoncé has turned her focus to richly textured visual albums that don’t necessarily spawn monster singles. Gaga, after a long detour away from dance floors, has returned to sounds and looks comparable to those of her early days, but she cannot bank on mass listenership for doing so. Swift keeps reinventing herself with greater seriousness, and little about her latest best seller, Folklore, scans as pop. Perry’s latest album, Smile, came out Friday. Regarding her new music’s likelihood of world domination, Perry told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, “My expectations are very managed right now.”

For the younger class of today’s stars, Teenage Dream seems like a faint influence. The Billboard Hot 100 is largely the terrain of raunchy rap, political rap, and emo rap, with a smattering of country drinking songs thrown in. Ultra-hummable singers such as Halsey and Billie Eilish are still on the radio, but they cut their catchiness with a sad, sleepy edge. A light disco resurgence may be brewing—BTS just strutted to No. 1 on the American charts while capitalizing on it—but that doesn’t change the overall mood of the moment. Almost nothing creates the sucrose high of Teenage Dream; almost nothing sounds as if Smurfette might sing it.

The recent state of commercial music has led to much commentary arguing that pop is dying, dead, or dormant. That’s a funny concept to consider—isn’t popular music, definitionally, whatever’s popular? In one sense, yes. But pop also refers to a compositional tradition, one with go-to chords, structures, and tropes. This type of pop prizes easily enjoyed melodies and sentiments; it moves but does not challenge the hips and the feet. It is omnivorous, and will spangle itself with elements of rock, rap, country, or whatever else it wants without losing its essential pop-ness. 

The early-2010s strain of it seemed like the height of irresistibility, and yet it’s mostly faded away. There are many reasons for that, but they can all be reduced to what Perry’s journey over the past decade has shown: Life and listening have become too complex for 2-D.

Pop has seemed to die and be reborn many times. When the 21st century arrived, the music industry was near the historical peak of its profitability—in part because of slick sing-alongs catering to teenagers and written by grown-up Swedes.

 But over the first few years of the 2000s, CD sales crashed thanks to the internet, boy bands such as ’NSync began to splinter, and Britney Spears’s long-running confrontation with the paparazzi reached an ugly culmination. 

Around the same time, women such as Pink, Kelly Clarkson, Ashlee Simpson, and Avril Lavigne began scoring hits inspired by mosh pits but more appropriate for malls. Gwen Stefani moved from rock-band frontwoman to dance-floor diva during this period as well. Such performers, though often assisted by the same producers and songwriters who helped mold Spears, flaunted unruly personalities to a reality-TV-guzzling public hungry for a kind of curated grit.

Katy Perry capped off this rock-pop boomlet. The California-born Katheryn Hudson had kicked around the music industry for years, first as a Christian singer—her parents were traveling evangelists—and then as an Alanis Morissette–worshipping songwriter.

She finally hit on a winning combo of sounds for One of the Boys, her delicious 2008 major-label debut, whose spiky rhythms, crunching guitars, sneering vocals, and juvenile gender politics earned her a spot on the Warped Tour, a punk institution. But the gooey, sassy hooks of “I Kissed a Girl,” “Waking Up in Vegas,” and “Hot n Cold” really made her a household name. 

Some of those songs benefited from the touch of Max Martin and Dr. Luke, songwriters-slash-producers of 2000s pop legend. (In 2014, Kesha filed a lawsuit accusing Dr. Luke, her producer and manager, of rape and abuse; he denied her claims and eventually prevailed in a years-long, very-public court battle over Kesha’s record contract.)

By late 2009, when Perry set out to record her follow-up to One of the Boys, the musical landscape had shifted again thanks to the arrival of Lady Gaga, a former cabaret singer with mystique-infused visuals and an electro-dance sound. What made Gaga different was not only her thundering Euro-club beats, but also her persona, or lack thereof. 

Gaga’s work overflowed with camp fun while keeping the singer’s true nature hidden under outrageous headpieces. By forgoing any attempts at banal relatability, Gaga seemed deep. In this way, she updated the glam antics of Prince, Madonna, and David Bowie for the YouTube era. Many of her peers took note, including Perry. 

Teenage Dream was lighter and happier than anything Gaga did, but it was electronic and fanciful in a manner that Perry’s previous work had not been. The cartoon Perry was born.

The conceit of Teenage Dream’s title track—“you make me feel like I’m living a teenage dream”—really boils down pop’s appeal to its essence: indulging a preposterous rush while also reveling in its preposterousness. “It is Perry’s self-consciousness—her awareness of herself as a complete package—that makes her interesting,” went one line in an NPR rave about the album. Even skeptical reviewers gave credit to standout singles such as “California Gurls” and “Firework” for being effective earworms. Perry had laid out her intended sound by sending a mixtape of the Cardigans and ABBA to Dr. Luke, who was part of a production team that pushed for perfection. 

“People on the management side and label side were pretty much telling me that we were done, before we had ‘Teenage Dream’ or ‘California Gurls,’” Luke told Billboard in 2010. “And I said, ‘No, we’re not done.’”

Such efforts ensured Teenage Dream’s incredible staying power on the charts through early 2012. The album’s deluxe reissue that year then generated a sixth No. 1 single, “Part of Me,” which also provided the title of a self-produced documentary that Perry released around the same time. Much of the footage showcases the stagecraft behind her 2011–12 world tour, a pageant of dancing gingerbread men and poofy pink clouds that would presage her hallucinatory 2015 Super Bowl halftime show. Perry comes off as charming and willful, and the film currently sits as the 11th-highest-grossing documentary in U.S. box-office history.

Yet the movie is best remembered today not for the way it shored up Perry’s shiny image, but for the way it complicated it. Over the course of the tour, Perry’s marriage to the comedian Russell Brand dissolved, and the cameras captured her sobbing just before getting on stage in São Paulo. It’s a wrenching, now-legendary scene. But elsewhere in the film, the viewer can’t help but experience cognitive dissonance as the singer’s personal dramas are synced up to concert footage of grin-inducing costumes and schoolyard sing-alongs. By hitching Teenage Dream’s whimsy to real-life struggle, the movie seemed to subvert exactly what had made the album successful: the feeling that Perry’s music was made to escape, not amplify, one’s problems.

Perry released her next album in 2013, a year that now seems pivotal in mainstream music’s trajectory. That’s the year Gaga pushed her meta-superficial shtick until it broke on the bombastic Artpop, which earned mixed reviews and soft sales.

 It’s also the year Lorde, a New Zealand teenager whose confessional lyrics and glum sonic sensibility would be copied for the rest of the decade, released her debut. Then in December, Beyoncé surprise-dropped a self-titled album whose opening track, “Pretty Hurts,” convincingly critiqued the way society asks women to construct beauty-pageant versions of themselves.

Later on the album, Beyoncé sang in shockingly explicit detail about her marriage to Jay-Z. Tropes of drunken hookups, simmering jealousy, and near-breakups were reinvigorated as specific and biographical, thanks in part to Beyoncé’s fluency with rap’s and R&B’s storytelling methods. She ended up seeming more glamorous than ever for the appearance of honesty.

The title of Perry’s album, Prism, not-so-subtly advertised her trying, too, to show more dimension. But the songs’ greeting-card empowerment messages, hokey spirituality, and awkward genre hopping made it seem as if Perry had simply changed costumes rather than had a true breakthrough. 

Still, both the cliché-parade of “Roar” and the trap-appropriating “Dark Horse” hit No. 1., and Prism’s track list includes a few examples of expert, big-budget songcraft. 

The album would turn out to be Perry’s last outing with a key collaborator, Dr. Luke. While she has maintained that she’s had only positive experiences with the producer, Perry hasn’t recorded a song with him since Kesha filed her 2014 lawsuit.

The Kesha-versus-Luke chapter added to a brewing sense that the carefree pop of the early 2010s was built on dark realities: Perry and Gaga have both described their most profitable years as personally torturous. Broader social and political developments—Black Lives Matter, the #MeToo movement, and the election of Donald Trump—also proved impossible to ignore for even the most frivolous-seeming entertainers. 

“When I first came out, we were living in a different mindset in the world,” Perry said in a recent Rolling Stone interview. “We were flying high off of, like, life. We weren’t struggling like we are. 

There wasn’t so much of a divide. All of the inequality was kind of underneath the mat. It was unspoken. It wasn’t facing us. And now it’s really facing us. I just feel like I can’t just put an escapist record out: Like, let’s go to Disneyland in our mind for 45 minutes.”

If that point of view sounds blinkered by privilege—who wasn’t struggling before, Katy?—Perry probably wouldn’t disagree. Her 2017 album, Witness, arrived with a blitz of publicity about how the star had become politically awakened and had decided to strip back her Katy Perry character to show more of the real Katheryn Hudson. A multiday live-stream in which fans watched her sleep, wake up, have fun, and go to therapy certainly conveyed that she didn’t want to seem like a posterized picture anymore. 

Yet neither Witness’s attempts at light sloganeering (the anti-apathy “Chained to the Rhythm”) nor its sillier side (the charmingly odd “Swish Swish”) 

connected with the public. It’s hard to say whether the problem was more temperamental or technological: By 2017, streaming had fully upended the radio-centric monoculture that stars like Perry once thrived in.

Her new album, Smile, is an explicit reaction to the commercial and critical disappointment of the Witness phase. Over jaunty arrangements, song after song talks about perking up after, per Smile’s title track, an “ego check.” There are also clear nods to her personal life. “Never Really Over” ruminates on a dead-then-revived relationship much like the one she has had with Orlando Bloom. “What Makes a Woman,” Perry has said, is a letter to her daughter, who was born on Wednesday. But she’s still mostly communicating in generic terms—lyrics depict flowers growing through pavement and frowns turned around—and with interchangeable songs. The explosive optimism of Teenage Dream has been replaced by ambivalence and resolve, yet the musical mode hasn’t really changed to match.

This leaves Perry tending to longtime fans but unlikely to mint many new ones. That’s because pure pop, the kind that thrives on doing simplicity really well, is largely a niche art form now. The delightful Carly Rae Jepsen will still sell out venues despite not having had a true hit in years. Today’s most acclaimed indie acts include the likes of 100 Gecs and Sophie, who create parodic, deadpan pastiches of pop clichés. Fixtures such as Lady Gaga do still have enough heft to ripple the charts (and thank God—her sense of spectacle saved the VMAs on Sunday). But her recent No. 1 single, “Rain on Me,” benefited from Ariana Grande, whose ongoing success comes from smartly channeling R&B. 

The current status of Dr. Luke, who has retreated from the public eye but still works with lesser-known talents and while using pseudonyms, seems telling too. He can’t land a hit with Kim Petras, a dance diva in the Katy Perry lineage. But he can land a hit with a rapper: He’s behind Doja Cat’s recent smash “Say So.”

Streaming, now the dominant form of music consumption, does not reward bright and insistent sing-alongs that demand attention but offer little depth. It instead works well for vibey background music, like the kind made by Post Malone, who’s maybe the most cartoonish figure of the present zeitgeist. It also works well for hip-hop with an obsession-worthy interplay of slangy lyrics, syncopated rhythms, and complex personas, all of which are presented in a context that feels like it has something to do with real life. 

Last week’s No. 1 song in the country, “WAP,” by Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion, radiates some of the fantastical thrill of the 2010 charts. But it delivers that thrill as part of a lewd verbal onslaught by women whom the public has come to know on an alarmingly personal level. The video for “WAP” is bright and pink, yes, but also immersive. 

It’s not a cartoon—it’s virtual reality.

[rhetorical-ink]

Rhetorical Ink: “The Star” Review!

**SPOILERS: Jesus is Born**

So, while most film critics are out seeing the latest DC Comic Book film -- and I will be next Tuesday, no worries -- I went with my friend tonight to watch The Star in theaters. Why, you may ask? Mainly because she is a HUGE Kelly Clarkson fan and when hearing she was in the film, asked if I’d see it with her. While I had reservations, I agreed. How was it? Well, it’s safe to say I had mixed emotions. Here are:

My Top Ten Thoughts on The Star - The Story of the First Christmas:

10. Usually, my first impression of an animated kids’ movie is with the animation -- I have nightmares about taking my younger cousins to see The Nut Job -- to me, still one of the worst animated films I’ve ever seen in theaters if at all -- so, I instantly looked at the animation as a sign of its quality.

Luckily, the animation is very beautiful here. It’s definitely NOT detailed in the way that the previews for CoCo show, but you can see the hairs on the animals fur, and little tiny details in the landscape and overall animation -- there was clearly some care taken into making the movie look good.

9. Steven Yeun, famously known as Glenn off of The Walking Dead, plays Boaz, known as Bo. He’s one of our protagonists, and the main animal protagonist, who ends up being the donkey that carries Mary to Bethlehem to give birth to Jesus. Bo’s original aspirations are to be a part of a royal carriage that carries a king across the land -- irony? More on that below. In any case, I do like Yeun’s voice performance, as he adds a lot of personality to this character. I would like to see him do more voice acting roles, based on this.

8. Zachary Levi and Gina Rodriguez play Joseph and Mary, and are our human protagonists. Aside from Bo, they are easily the best parts of the film. Gina’s portrayal of Mary is as pure, innocent, and charming as you can imagine, and at this point, Zachary Levi is an elder statesman at voice acting (you may know him as Finn from Tangled). He just has this levity to his voice work that makes him sound funny, relatable, emotional -- it just works and so do their characters.

7. Another thing that does work -- and also doesn’t, but more on that below -- is that they actually do have a culturally diverse, and ahem, more accurate visual portrayal of Joseph, Mary, and Jesus. I’m looking at you, Ten Commandments, as much as I like you. Even baby Jesus looks like you would actually expect him to. I respected the attempt to keep the clothes and culture relatively accurate, despite the fact that all of the characters are running around with an American accent...

6. Except for one character -- and this leads me to my first criticism of the movie. In this version, Herod, played well by Christopher Plummer for the small role he has in the film, sends an “executioner” and his two dogs to track down and kill Mary and her unborn child. The dogs are Thaddeus, played by Ving Rhames and Rufus, played by Gabriel Iglesias. Now, Ving has a deep, menacing voice that matches the scariness that Thaddeus is supposed to have about him. But Rufus? For this culturally accurate kids’ movie -- why does one of the villainous dogs have to be played by an actor with a very distinct, heavy Hispanic accent? Not to say that Hispanic actors shouldn’t have jobs in voice acting -- but playing the villainous, dim-witted sidekick in this middle-eastern set narrative? It just completely took me out of the film and seemed a bit stereotypical, if not miscast.

5. Another complaint was with the Cameos -- Yeun, Levi, Rodriguez, and most of the voice actors do a good job of keeping their characters just that -- characters in this film that are here to help move the narrative along.

That can’t be said for some cameos, though, which just seemed like either pointless promotion or vanity projects -- ironically enough for this family Christian film. First of all, Kristin Chenoweth as the tiny mouse who encounters Mary being talked to by God, was an unnecessary cameo. She doesn’t sing in the movie, and her part is so superficial, it almost seems like they could have just cut it out or made it a quick two-minute scene.

Kelly Clarkson? Well, if you go to see her in the film, prepare to be disappointed. Not only does she say practically two lines in the entire film -- “Wow!” and “I love babies!” I’m not kidding. She also is only in the movie about five minutes and the rest of her “lines” are -- no joke -- her gratuitously singing random chords. That’s it! Never has a character been made solely just to belt out lines than this -- it’s worse than New Year’s Eve’s use of that girl off of Glee.

But by far, my least favorite cameo was Oprah. At least in Tracey Morgan’s case, which you can tell him instantly in this film, his lines appear to be 90# improvised and he does offer a laugh or two throughout the film. But Oprah? She’s trying way too hard to be the animated Morgan Freeman, and her character has little personality and only spouts out prophetic details we the audience already know to be true. Her character seemed just like a vanity project -- seeming the classiest thing, but with no point or personality.

4. Now, back to the good -- I got on a rant there, didn’t I? I did like the use of God in this film. Much like Prince of Egypt, God isn’t a “physical” presence, but a spiritual entity that surrounds and glows around the space it’s presented in. It was an effective use of God in the film and one I thought was powerful -- I do like how Prince of Egypt does the “voice of God” best, but this is a blend of that and God’s voice from The Ten Commandments, which I am okay with.

3. Another thing I am okay with is that this movie portrays its Christian message in a very digestible, not-shoving-down-your-throat manner that I think reaches its audience and target very well. Clearly, from the get-go, you understand this is about Jesus’s birth, but it tells the Christmas story with levity and a weight at times, while still being light enough for a kid’s movie. Joseph is conflicted with the task of being a father -- but Mary also helps see through this obstacle in following what God wants them to do. It’s not overly cheesy, overly dramatic, or overly zealous. It tells the story it needs to and is serious in the right places.

2. That said, this movie is far from perfect. My biggest issue is the overall tone of the film. I wish it was just a straight-forward, serious kids’ film...when it does that, it’s very good. However, the comedy is its biggest weakness. There are some physical comedy and jokes that do work, but for the most part, it’s “kid” humor, or what screenwriters think is kid humor. i.e. characters saying the word “butt,” or making a weird joke that lands flat because it’s very obvious. While I love Keegan Michael-Key, his performance as Dave the bird was pretty lackluster, and his jokes were flat.

Also, at times, the tone does a 180-degree flip and it doesn’t quite make sense in the larger sense of the picture. When Bo, for example, finally makes it to his caravan he’s been chasing, he doesn’t even go towards it. He just says, “Oh, there it is -- time to go help Mary!” I would have rather seen him get to the caravan, be rejected -- because you know he’s going to be anyway -- and then go help Mary. And along with that, the “Executioner” at one point, is hanging from a cliff and decides to sacrifice his dogs -- don’t worry, no dogs die in this -- to try and save himself. Up until that point, he had indicated in now way that he didn’t care for his dogs -- so why just then? There were some decisions in the film, and some more racy, death jokes, that just didn’t work and took away from the movie as a whole.

1. So would I recommend The Star? For little kids, yes, actually. It’s nowhere near perfect, but it’s a beautifully animated movie -- the voice acting is good -- and its messages it promotes are good for kids and innocent.

For an adult, though, the comedy will likely fall flat for you, and some of the gratuitous cameos may induce an eye roll. I would have liked them to have gone a little “more Christmas” in tone, too.

But, if you’re looking for a good family film to watch for the holiday season, or a Christian movie for your family that doesn’t shove it down your throat, this is a good one to see. I was pleasantly surprised, though I probably won’t have this on DVD like Prince of Egypt or The Ten Commandments.

[tiaraofsapphires]

my satellite (are you here tonight?)- Chapter 4

Nice and update!

Chapter 4: Calamity

Read on Ao3 here!

It was a relief to now have Jaal by her side, fully aware of everything that was going on. And it was also a relief, of course to a lesser extent, to have Lexi on their team as well.

Their time was spent in a mixed bag of on-the-sly prenatal care and trying to maintain appearances.

They, meaning Sara and Lexi, did an ultrasound, with only the two of them in the room, in the quest of arousing as little suspicion as possible.

Sara was beginning to hate the sneaking around, hated it even more when she was seeing this without Jaal with her.

As soon as the image focused, Sara vowed to bring him with her every time they saw the baby, crew’s suspicions be dammed.

It was a little pulsing lump, almost peanut-shaped. It didn’t look like anything close to human or angara or in-between the two yet

It was beautiful.

“That’s—that’s it,” Sara murmured, pointing a shaky hand at the image.

“There it is. Your little baby,” Lexi confirmed. She was smiling.

She didn’t cry then, but when she showed Jaal the pictures hours later and saw the trembling hope and undisguised awe in his face, she had to bury her face into his shoulder and compose herself.

After the initial excitement, it didn’t take a mind reader to know that Lexi was concerned about the whole human-angara hybrid situation. The scans so far looked promising as they could this early in the pregnancy, but Sara knew that Lexi had her misgivings.

They were going to wait for further development before more rigorous tests. Lexi wasn’t going to push anything that would potentially hurt the child, especially anything that required poking around at it.

This wasn’t a normal pregnancy. Sara had no illusions about that.

Hell, Sara was sure the only reason Lexi wasn’t berating her on the whole ‘you should've practiced safe sex’ thing and the ‘you shouldn’t have had sex with Jaal when he was going through a hormonal event that you didn’t understand’ thing and the ‘this entire situation dangerous both for you and your child, but mostly you’ thing was that Lexi didn’t want to accidentally alienate her patient.

And it was a good thing she kept her mouth shut. Sara already gave those things enough thought, and didn’t want them thrown in her face from a different person.

They already had their spats over SAM and his influence on her physiology. Sara didn’t want to have that conversation that would likely ultimately end in a ‘you shouldn’t go through with this.’

Sara was going to see this through, good or ill, and deal with whatever fallout may come.

It was an unspoken agreement between the two of them that Sara would still do her Pathfinder duties, like nothing had changed, though perhaps not get into firefights with everyone who looks at her funny.

Jaal didn’t like the idea, but when Sara reminded him that pregnant angara still fought against the kett until they couldn’t anymore, he kept his mouth shut.

It was for the best. If things changed suddenly, questions would be asked. So far, the cluster had been quiet enough that most problems didn’t require a Pathfinder’s hand. More and more militia were being defrosted and sent to defend the various outposts, especially after the losses sustained after the battle to take Meridian. And there were three other Pathfinders that could help.

“Tell me you will think about stepping away,” Jaal had asked.

She couldn’t give him a solid answer.

Things were smooth, relatively speaking. She could almost seriously entertain the idea.

Until she received a flurry of emails from Kadara.

Christmas Tate had been doing his best with an outpost surrounded by slowly-healing sulfur springs and every manner of criminals.

Reyes had been as welcoming as he possibly could be to an Initiative outpost after putting a bullet in Sloane Kelly. But Tate was spread thin even with the Initiative militia present and the emails that he sent Sara made it clear that he needed a Pathfinder, specifically Sara, to help.

Allegedly, the general population held some feelings of respect for her, aside from severe Initiative malcontents, any surviving Outcasts, and the Roekaar.

Plenty of people wanted her dead. What else was new?

But there was no choice but for them to dock on Kadara and there was no choice for Sara but to disembark.

Jaal was insistent he go with her, enthusiastic to a point it seemed strange to Vetra, who was scheduled to go planetside to begin with.

Everyone and their mother knew Jaal hated Kadara. There was no reason he’d volunteer to come without good reason.

“Maybe we can raise our child here,” Sara mumbled when it was just the two of them in the armory as the ship started its descent.

Jaal looked utterly insulted, ducking down to hiss in her ear.

“Our child will not live in such a place of squalor and depravity like Kadara.”

Sara grinned and lightly nudged him.

“I know. I’m kidding. We’ll find somewhere.”

Jaal huffed and kissed the top of her head before shuffling out, muttering something about ‘sulfur springs’ and ‘horrible smell’.

Sara’s smile immediately evaporated as she focused on getting her armor on.

She really shouldn’t have turned that stone. It brought about questions that they didn’t have answers to yet.

Where would they raise their child? What would they do after it was born? Neither Jaal nor Sara would put themselves in positions to orphan their child, at least to the best of their ability.

And, right now, Sara was putting herself in a position where their child could die before it even had a chance to live.

Boy, did that make her feel like the worst person ever to live ever.

Still, duty called.

Sara donned the toughest chestplate in the armory and prayed to any gods that would listen that this wouldn’t end in disaster.

Lexi didn’t need to give her a warning before Sara got off the ship.

Don’t take a bath in the sulfur ponds. Don’t get shot.

Easy.

She checked and double-checked her armor, slung two assault rifles on her back, tucked a pistol to her hip, and collected her crew.

“Let’s not pick any fights we can avoid,” she said. “We’ll help Tate, you know, iron stuff out, and leave. Hopefully no one causes us any trouble.”

Vetra tapped fist against her open hand. “If they do, they’re screwed.”

Sara nodded.

“Very. Let’s go.”

Sara strode down the ramp on the back of the Tempest with Jaal and Vetra at her back. There was a confidence she didn’t feel as she walked.

She was Pathfinder. She got in firefights on a near-daily basis for months in

Tate wasn’t there to meet them, but they were quickly approached by a human woman who introduced herself as Yesenia Lopez.

“I’m Tate’s assistant,” she said in a way of explanation. She didn’t seem to like the idea of it, of being sent to do his errands.

Sara didn’t take in personally. It wasn’t like everyone was happy with the positions they were put in after being defrosted. She nodded. “Good to meet you.”

Yesenia gestured with a hand.

“I’ll take you to Tate. He has a laundry list of things he wants you to help him with.”

Sara internally groaned. Of course, just her luck.

Over the private channel, Sara muttered, “SAM, tell me if anything looks suspicious. Like, for real suspicious.”

“I will. There are no current threats around you.”

Alright. A couple minutes into her trip and no threat. So far, so good.

Sara didn’t want to think about the very precious and vulnerable thing that was sitting inside her. Not even a month into the pregnancy and there she was.

To be fair, very few of the habitable worlds were habitable at all. She was more likely to cause damage to herself and her child on Elaaden or Voeld, both of which were still on their way to reaching temperatures close to normal.

Can’t hide from the weather, but can shoot at people who want to shoot at her.

So. There wasn’t much she could do. It’s not like she could only take missions on Aya and Eos, which now had solar radiation levels that could be easily blocked by life support or even sunscreen.

She just had to find a way to boost her life support in her suit for Elaaden and Voeld. And hope that nobody shot at her when she was on Kadara.

Fine. It was all going to be fine.

Yesenia led them through the outpost. People they passed stopped and whispered.

There were always whispers.

Respect, disdain, mistrust, admiration. She didn’t want to be a god or a despot. She signed up to the Initiative to serve.

With that came whispers and titles. Savior of Heleus. The Initiative’s errand girl.

This entire situation was totally not planned, not even close to in-line with what she thought she would face at the end of a 600-year-long nap.

“How are things at the outpost?” Sara asked in way of conversation. Only so much could be gathered from just looking at the superficial.

Yesenia jumped at the question and glanced at her. There were bags under her eyes, a weariness in her posture. But she looked nervous, on-edge. “It could be better. Definitely could be better.”

That didn’t sound good, but Sara couldn’t know for a fact that what she was hearing really was that bad.

“Anything that I can do to help?”

She nodded, mouth curling in what could be mistaken for a grimace. “Definitely. I don’t think Tate would’ve contacted you if he knew you couldn’t do anything.”

They walked and walked to stop in a tiny courtyard-space surrounded by box-like buildings. The outpost had enough resources to pretty-up the place. Native flowers grew in boxes alongside small patches of familiar-looking crops.

Sara looked around, something like irritation heating her face. Tate was nowhere to be seen. They came all this way, and Tate couldn’t be bothered to show up on time?

“Where’s Tate? As much as I love seeing the outpost, you know, I’d like to actually do the stuff I was called here to do.”

She stared at Yesenia, looking for an explanation. The other woman seemed guilty for a second.

“Ah, I already messaged him. He will be here soon.”

Huh.

Neither Vetra nor Jaal said anything. They just shifted where they stood, looking around in idle curiosity.

Really, Sara shouldn’t have felt suspicious. She could chalk it up to prenatal paranoia that something felt wrong.

Still…weird.

She was about to ask SAM if Yesenia had actually used her omni-tool to contact Tate at all while they were walking when he spoke up over the private channel.

“Sara, the turian at your 11-o-clock is a combative position. His hand is going for the weapon on his back. Also, I have Lopez scanned and her heartrate is higher than what is normal.”

Panic like a lance cut through Sara instantly.

She glanced to the left, the action unseen because of the tint in her helmet, to see the turian in raggedy armor. His hand was moving to grab the butt of his shotgun. She glanced to the right to see that sweat glistened in Yesenia’s hairline. Her eyes were cutting towards the turian, almost like she was waiting for him to make a move.

Shit. Shit.

A set-up. They were set-up.

Sara fumbled for her pistol, the quickest thing she could access.

He was going to kill her. He was going to wound her and end up killing her child. She didn’t know. She couldn’t know. Either scenario couldn’t happen.

She had to kill him first.

She aimed just as he brought his shotgun from over his shoulder, pulling the trigger.

His knee buckled a bit right as he shot at her, firing too high, sailing over their heads.

The bullet exchange happened almost simultaneously, an explosion of sound.

People were screaming, Jaal and Vetra tensing behind her, hopping into action.

Sara staggered back, one hand holding her pistol and the other bracing across her abdomen.

She didn’t take him down. It wasn’t enough.

Fear narrowed her vision, closed over her throat.

If this had happened a month earlier, she would have stepped in front of Jaal and Vetra without hesitation.

But now there was something else to focus on: her child. Her little child who had no choice in being her child, no choice in being put in this position.

Jaal made the decision for her. He had her by the scruff of the neck, a handful of her armor, and yanked her behind him, shielding her with his body.

The turian male shouted something that she couldn’t understand and aimed at Jaal.

“No!” Sara yelled, impotent, useless.

While Jaal and Sara moved back, away from the turian, Vetra moved forward.

Vetra was quick and deadly, gunshots ringing out before the male could think to aim at this new target. And he was on the ground, holes smoking in his head.

“Are we clear?” Sara shouted, at SAM, at Jaal and Vetra, at anyone who would give her a straight answer.

“Clear!”

Jaal immediately turned to her.

“Are you okay?” Jaal asked.

His hands skimmed up her sides, brushing over her stomach. Sara shook her head, trying to put a semi-normal amount of space between them.

No, no, don’t treat me differently, not here.

“We’re fine, we’re fine.”

She said that like she knew for sure that was the answer. She didn’t know. She could’ve been shot and shock would’ve made it so she didn’t feel it.

But Jaal wasn’t panicking in a way that would indicate that she was injured and she didn’t feel anything so she could be fine but she didn’t know.

Vetra stared at them with a look of both confusion and suspicion.

Sara stayed impassive on the outside, giving an air of ‘oh, my concerned boyfriend, coddling me’, a lie and a truth meshing perfectly on her face. Just enough for the turian to buy it, maybe.

On the inside, she was frantic on SAM’s private channel, more emotion than words.

SAM already had an answer before she could ask the question, like he had already checked everything possible the moment the attack ceased.

“Sara, I am not detecting any changes with the health of the fetus. Though I would suggest not getting into that kind of situation again, both for your sake and for the sake of your unborn child.”

The words echoed around in her head, like a balm. She nodded at nothing.

Right. Not going to do that again.

A glance to the right and she saw Yesenia’s retreating back. She wasn’t running, but wasn’t walking either. Trying to be as nonchalant and disappear into the crowd while the chaos swirled around the outpost.

Pure rage had Sara’s hand lifting up her pistol.

She felt it, a jolt of energy that radiated from shoulder to fingertip, as she lifted and aimed. With the lightest squeeze, a single bullet left the barrel.

Her aim was true. She didn’t feel a thing.

…

The rest of the stop, fulfilling the various menial jobs and mediating arguments, passed in a numb blur.

Tate had rained apologies for the breach in security, promising that nothing like that would ever happen again.

The turian, Alescus, was a former Outcast with a history of violence. He had paid Yesenia off, a hefty sum, to bring Sara out to the open.

Yesenia was still alive, barely, locked up in the outpost’s little prison.

Sara wished she had killed her.

There were suggestions made that they go back to the Tempest and leave. But some idiot part of her made her bark an order to stay.

She remembered Jaal and Vetra, especially Jaal, looming over her like the fiercest of bodyguards.

It was to make her feel safe. To make sure everyone else around them knew that if there was another attack, there would a hail of bullets to meet the attacker.

Without prompting, SAM knew to fiddle with her physiology, make her hands shake less, make her heart beat a little slower, even giving her prompts as to next steps.

It was a temporary thing, not even fully fixing the panic. It was still there, an ache sitting in the center of her chest. When it was time to fully feel, she would feel it and it would suck. She knew that.

SAM kept her spine straight, kept her composed, until she decided it was time to leave.

She resolved what she could and put tape and bandaids over what couldn’t be fixed in a day.

Tate was grateful for the help, that much was clear. It was some small victory to be had, though she was antsy to get to the privacy of her room on the Tempest.

SAM quietly informed her that he had been collecting names and details of all the errands she did that day and was already writing reports to be sent to the Nexus for filing away. She didn't need to ask how he’d be able to make it sound like her writing in the reports. He had his database on everything Sara Ryder and could probably masquerade as her through words for the foreseeable future.

She was in such a mood that any reports she wrote herself would probably unintelligible.

All she could think about was the light in that turian’s eyes, how he was out to kill her. He could’ve succeeded. He could’ve killed her. He could’ve killed Jaal or her child, which would have been the same as killing her. She knew her heart would've been shattered if she lost either of them.

It was a terrifying thing. The love of her life, and the product of their love for each other. Two things that she found on Heleus that she now couldn't bear to lose.

Her heart hurt in her chest. She wanted to cry and cry because she almost died and she almost lost everything.

It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair to so many people.

But she knew she was being selfish. It wasn’t just her and her family that deserved safety and security in Heleus. She was Pathfinder. She was to provide safety and security at the expense of her own. That was how it fucking worked.

Now, it wasn’t as simple.

She had a conversation that she couldn’t remember with Suvi and Kallo about getting underway and going somewhere. Probably towards the Nexus. It was a safe bet that she said something about heading to the Nexus. Or to Meridian. One of the two.

Her fingers shook when she took off her armor. She fumbled over the latches and buckles as one by one, she looked less like a warrior and more like...something else. It felt like she was exposing herself, somehow less safe in the walls of the Tempest.

SAM said her child still lived where it rested inside of her. It was some source of relief. It had to be.

Lexi demanded another check-up, even though it had been two days since she last saw Sara. That was Tomorrow Sara’s problem. Right now was Scared-Out-Of-Her-Mind Sara’s time to try to make sense of what the hell happened.

Jaal followed her out of the armory, similarly freed of his armor and his weapons in their proper places.

The door shut behind Jaal as Sara moved further into her quarters. She sat down on the bed, kept her back to Jaal.

Inhaled and exhaled, shuddering.

Sulfur still clung to the back of her throat and coated her skin. She needed a shower. She wanted to boil herself and get rid of the memory of cruel eyes and a bullet that didn’t meet its mark.

Her hands moved up to rest on her stomach.

Still alive. Not tangible yet. She wished she was further along, that there was a little lump there that she could rub and know was real.

She was going to be a mother. She wanted to experience her child, all that she could.

“You shouldn’t be going out the field anymore, Sara,” Jaal said, shattering the silence.

She immediately bristled, still not looking at him.

“I’m pregnant, Jaal. I’m not an invalid.”

There was a pause. “What happened today could have killed our child, killed you.”

Sara’s irritation turned to anger, near-incoherent.

“That is a risk I have to take!” she yelled. “Living in Heleus isn’t 100% safe even if I wasn’t Pathfinder. But I am Pathfinder.”

Her hands were shaking, hadn’t stopped even since they left Kadara’s atmosphere, when SAM let her feel the panic that was at a simmer under the surface since the first shot.

It had been a close call. If Jaal hadn’t been there, she didn’t know what could have happened.

She barreled on. “I need to keep up appearances. I can’t just hole myself on the Tempest and not do anything. I’m still Pathfinder. I still have a job to do.”

When Jaal touched the top of her head, she jumped as if poked with a sharp object. She didn’t hear him move to stand by her side.

He recoiled.

“I’m sorry,” he muttered.

Sara shook her head.

“It’s fine. I—please touch me.”

His hand immediately returned to the top of her head. She relaxed immediately, whatever could be considered ‘relaxed’ in the middle of a near-panic attack. He fingered the loose strands of hair that had come loose from her ponytail.

Her anchor. Gods, she wanted to cry.

“My dearest, I’m not asking you to give that up.”

She scoffed. Funny, how he was usually the blustery, emotional one and she was usually the one to reason him out of irrational reactions.

He continued in a murmur, “I just—I want you to be safe. And I want our child to be safe.”

She sighed and rubbed her face with her hands. This was where the difficult part came in, a kind of choice where there wasn’t really a clear right-and-wrong.

She didn’t know what to do. There was the safety of her child and there was her duty as Pathfinder. Both could exist at the same time, but it would be difficult. She couldn’t imagine going on raids anymore, killing kett and actively seeking out groups that want her dead.

One wrong move and this would all be for nothing.

But this was her job. She was the fucking human Pathfinder and her father foisted this job on her by fucking dying. She had no choice in this and she didn’t know how to let it go. She was Pathfinder. That and the paths she took in order to keep the cluster safe sunk into her DNA and was the entire reason she was pregnant in the first place.

“I don’t know who I am outside of being Pathfinder.”

She wrung her fingers together.

And that seemed to the root of the problem. Of course, she had her ‘abandonment issues.’ Her distant relationship with her parents, followed by her mother’s death, followed by her father’s death. And then there was the fear of losing anyone else because she cared too much about everyone.

And now there was this, this crippling feeling of inferiority. She couldn’t do everything, but she had to do everything. She had to help everyone, but couldn’t help everyone.

This pregnancy was going to put her on the sidelines at some point. It had to. Once she got big enough, she would have to stop going out in the field. She physically wouldn't be able to fight in the ways she was used to.

Even now, her mind was focusing on protecting her child. Her world’s axis shifted from the safety of billions of lives, to the safety of one. It snuck up on her.

“What am I when I’m not Pathfinder?”

She looked up from where she was focused on her hands when Jaal moved to kneel before her.

“You are the woman I love. You are the hero of Heleus.” He took her hands in his.

“If you can’t be Pathfinder, you still conquered the Remnant and the kett. You brought your people home.”

His hands rubbed on her thighs, massaging the tension out of them.

“My starlight.”

That drew a smile to her lips. Sometimes, the kinds of things he said would almost make her swoon like out of an old-time romance novel.

Jaal’s expression hardened. “My heart stopped the moment that cretin attacked you. I wish I could’ve killed him myself.”

She brought his hands up to her mouth and kissed his knuckles. There was little more she could do.

“I’m sorry for making you worry. I know—I know it was a mistake to go down there. But I don’t know what else to do. People look to me.”

He nodded.

“The burden of leadership. But you are not alone in this. Cora was your father’s second, was she not?”

She chewed the inside of her cheek. She couldn’t say anything.

She worked so hard to prove herself to Cora as usurper of the Pathfinder role. Giving it up to Cora made bitterness churn in her stomach.

Hearing nothing from her, Jaal squeezed her hands. “For our sakes, think about it. I just—I want to keep you safe. You and our child. I couldn’t stand to lose either of you.”

She nodded. At least they were on the same page in that aspect.

“Okay. I’ll—I’ll think about it. Maybe once we talk with Kandros we can get something sorted out with the APEX teams. With Cora, that can come later.”

Twelve more days and the entire damn cluster would know she was pregnant.

Jaal’s hands slipped under her shirt to rest on her stomach.

“Soon, our child will be in our arms. Now, it sleeps, safe. You are keeping it alive. You have the greater burden. I wish I could take some of it from you.”

He was earnest, guilty-sounding. She shrugged, cupped his face in her hands. His eyes narrowed a bit at the touch, kind of like a cat.

“It’s biology,” Sara murmured, trying to assure him that he had no reason to feel guilty. “But, you get to hold back my hair when morning sickness comes and massage my feet when they get swollen.”

She leaned down and kissed him.

“Gladly,” he said with a smile, “Anything for the mother of my child.”

[jentehj]

On Lorde, Green Light and how I refound my love for pop music

I’m in love with Lorde’s new single. I’m in love with Lorde herself, really. To me, she’s an immensely strong wave of fresh air bursting through the pop genre. A genre that, if we’re honest, we all adore, but are too afraid to admit. We call Britney’s Toxic a guilty pleasure, but really, do we actually feel guilty? No. We know it’s an anthem, it’s a legendary song and we all love it and we all know it. 

But somewhere around age 13, when the hormones started kicking in and we wanted to impress the boys in 9th grade, we felt the pressure to be different. Different from other girls, because girls are superficial creatures obsessed with fake things like makeup and Lady GaGa. We weren’t allowed to like pop music, because it wasn’t real music. And so we all went through a post-punk or emo or grunge phase, because those bands had men in them, and men made real music about deep stuff - not to discredit that phase, the bands I listened to around age 14 shaped me in ways I will never forget. 

And then we were shamed for that too - because we didn’t like that music for the music, we were just in love with the singer with the incredibly sharp jawline or the bassist with the huge arms. Personally, I felt like I wasn’t allowed to just be passionate about music, because my passion would never seem real to the scrawny, penis-bearing, acne-struck creatures that were always a little too loud in class. 

Then I heard a song on the radio. It was definitely pop music, but it was different, the kind of different I’d been looking for since I found out my taste in things wasn’t good enough. Through Royals, I found out that pop music wasn’t a defined genre, it didn’t have to be “fake” or “superficial”, it was something able to engage with other genres and create something new. And it could be about real things - it didn’t have to be about trashing hotelrooms, diamond watches and jet planes. Rowan Blanchard put it into words perfectly last week: it was when I realized pop music could be poetry too. There’s always the Art Bros telling girls that pop music isn’t real, but Lorde’s music made us feel like this was for us. It was made for us to enjoy and not be shamed for. 

This made me fall in love with pop music and female musicians all over again. I discovered a few things during this phase. First, pop music is art. Pop songs are incredibly well-constructed works of art that appeal to people because of their universal meaning. While the Art Bros in 9th grade thought this to be superficial, I think it’s brilliant. When someone writes something that manages to speak to people of all ages and cultures, they’ve made something very special. Second of all, genres are bullshit. I found out that every artists is influenced by dozens of different bands and artists, even by art that isn’t music. I found out that within pop, there were tons of artists who borrowed from the other genres and artists that I liked and they all had a tiny part of me in their music, it seemed. Because of Lorde, I discovered artists like Grimes, HAIM, Chet Faker, Troye Sivan, Sky Ferreira, MO, James Blake, Banks, London Grammar, Empress Of, Florence + The Machine, and many, many more. The third thing I realized was that female musicians were badass. I fell in love with them like the 13 year old me fell in love with Alex Turner’s skilled hands. I fell in love with Alana Haim, Florence Welch, Jenny Lee Lindberg, and Ellie Rowsell, because they brought a female perspective to their music, which I connected to on a way higher level than I ever did to lyrics by male artists. 

Lastly, I refound my love for pop music. I found out that all the artists I loved when I was 11 had worked with producers and songwriters that my favorite indie hipster bands worked with as well, and vice versa. I learned about all the samples from 80s pop that were used in contemporary music and I learned that the instrumental to Rihanna’s Drunk On Love was actually The XX’s hipster-anthem Intro. Lorde’s music had reconnected me to pop music, and I wasn’t gonna call it my guilty pleasure anymore - Nelly Furtado’s Loose was just as much art as alt-J’s An Awesome Wave. I went into kind of a nostalgic phase (during this time, I also watched an extensive amount of Gossip Girl): I dug up songs that had memories attached to them, by Gwen Stefani, Britney Spears, Shakira, The Pussycat Dolls, Katy Perry, Flo-Rida, Timbaland, Beyoncé, Fergie, Kelly Clarkson, Lady Gaga, Rihanna, Justin Timberlake, and all the other stuff I knew by heart when I was 8, 9, or 10. I now feel like it doesn’t matter whether a song is real or not, whether a team of professional songwriters, producers and someone who’s very skilled at autotuning were behind it or if it was written by a guy with a guitar in a basement. All that matters is that you connect to it, or that you can have fun while listening to it, that you can dance like crazy to it and make memories to the sound of that song. 

I became obsessed with Lorde and listened to her EP on repeat in class and on the bus and at home and I saw myself in her, in her words and sounds. And that was so important to me, because until then, the pop songs I knew were about long lost love, about sex, big parties - great songs, but it was all about stuff that I didn’t relate to at all at age 14. Lorde’s music was about friends, fun, finding romance in the little things. Pure Heroine was the ultimate ode to my life, to being bored, to observing the world around you and to laughing until your ribs get tough. While 5 Seconds Of Summer was singing about how “she looks so perfect”, Lorde told me about her friends with “their skin in craters, like the moon”. It was so refreshing to hear a peer collecting the moments that were pivotal to my childhood and express them in a way I’d never heard before. 

I’ve listened to Pure Heroine so much since then, mostly while travelling or doing nothing, and it still sounds as fresh and exciting as it did in 2013. Now that Green Light has come out, I feel like I’m growing up alongside her. I was 14, she was 17 when she released Pure Heroine. It was an album about teenagers and the life they lived, a life I was only just starting to get familiar with. Now I’m 17, and Ella is 21. I moved out of my parents’ house to the biggest city in my country, I’m going to college now, I’m drinking alcohol more often than once a year on NYE, and I’m growing up. Meanwhile, Ella has travelled around the world, became besties with Taylor Swift and was crowned “The Future of Music” by none other than the late David Bowie. It’s a different kind of growing up, but it’s growing nonetheless. 

She wrote in a very impressive Facebook post that she “started to discover in a profound, scary, blood-aching way who I was when I was alone, what I did when I did things only for myself. I was reckless and graceless and terrifying and tender. I threw sprawling parties and sat in restaurants until the early hours, learning what it’s like to be an adult, even talking like one sometimes.” Again, I relate to her situation so much, even though we are in completely different situations. I, and I think many people of my age, spend much more time alone than we did in our teenage years. It’s scary and at the same time amazing to discover who you are when you’re like that. And I still feel like Lorde has this amazing connection to her generation, we all have the same feelings of fear and loneliness and euphoria sometimes, and she puts them into music. 

So when I heard Green Light, again, it felt like it was about me, like it was written for me. Sure, it’s a song about heartbreak and lost love, but for me, it’s also about letting go who you were, about finding out your true self and not wanting to leave the other you behind just yet. Because it’s scary. She manages to make a song with a theme that’s been a pop cliché since forever feel relatable, accessible, comfortable, which is the biggest strength in her songwriting. Her mind has evolved when it comes to both sound and lyrics, but that essential part of her music has stayed. I can’t wait to hear more. 

@lordemusic if you ever read this, thank you so much.

[newyorktheater]

In Madeleine George’s often  hilarious, ultimately pointed comedy, the Greek god of agricultural and theater has decided to save the planet, after retreating for several centuries from the public life of a deity, most recently as a resident of Vermont “living off the grid with a bunch of lesbian separatists in consensus-based community.”

Diane (Becca Blackwell)needs acolytes to initiate a “new era of planetary healing.”

She starts small, setting out to seduce four women who are neighbors in a suburban cul-de-sac in Red Bank, New Jersey.

The seduction is literal, and sexual, but also satirical, and allegorical. One by one, Diane, a character that the stage directions describe as “a butch charm factory,” tries to win over each of the women,  in the guise of a landscape gardener in heavy work boots and lumberjack shirt helping them redo their backyards.

To Carol (Mia Barron), Diane pitches a “lush primeval forest… teeming with beneficial insects, worms, beetles.” Carol just wants a lawn with “curb appeal” like the spreads in HGTV magazine. She turns out to be the most resistant of the four.

We eventually understand why, after several scenes of the four self-declared “girls” getting together to talk about the unpleasant storms that have been arriving with increasing frequency, and to confess the loneliness and superficiality in their lives.

“Why should I sacrifice even one of my comforts,” Carol says, “when my comforts are literally all that I have?”

George’s clever, timely update of The Bacchae by Euripides is given a boost by Leigh Silverman’s vivid direction; fierce , attention-grabbing stage effects by the design team;  and the spot-on performances by the five members of the cast.

Much of the humor comes from the juxtaposition of ancient myth with banal 21stcentury living – n costume (Diane occasionally sheds her butch outfit for divine white tunic) and especially in language.

But underneath the lively interaction is a sobering message. As Diane says to the women – and to us: “Deep down inside, you know your life is unsustainable.”

Hurricane Diane New York Theater Worksop Written by Madeleine George. Directed by Leigh Silverman Set design by Rachel Hauck, costume design by Kaye Voyce, lighting design by Barbara Samuels, sound design by Bray Poor, choreography by Raja Feather Kelly Cast: Mia Barron, Michelle Beck, Becca Blackwell, Danielle Skraastad and Kate Wetherhead Running time: 95 minutes no intermission Hurricane Diane is scheduled to run through March 24, 2019

Hurricane Diane Review: A Lesbian, Climate Catastrophe Comedy In Madeleine George’s often  hilarious, ultimately pointed comedy, the Greek god of agricultural and theater has decided to save the planet, after retreating for several centuries from the public life of a deity, most recently as a resident of Vermont “living off the grid with a bunch of lesbian separatists in consensus-based community.”

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Tucked away in Washington Heights is a beautiful structure worth investigating: an old movie palace. Built in 1930 it was constructed as one of five flagship Loew’s theaters throughout New York City. Living in the neighborhood, I have had a superficial awareness of it for some time. I knew it had been a theater, and I knew it was old, but I had never stepped inside until this weekend.

The theater is amazing! Constructed in 1930, it was closed down in 1969, at which point a reverend bought it for his church congregation. He (and his son), have kept the theater, now known as the United Palace Theater, much as it originally was, with all the ornate details and nooks and crannies beautifully intact.

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In addition to being the home of the United Palace House of Inspiration (with services every Sunday), they also host various events, including film screenings.

That’s what brought me there: a screening of Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights. The movie was preceded by a Chaplin short (By the Sea) with live organ accompaniment. The United Palace Theater is the home of a very impressive theater organ which the New York Theater Organ Society is trying to restore to its original glory (more info here). To that end, they demonstrated a digitized version of the organ to give us a sample of the mixing of live music and recorded images that characterized much of early cinema.

I’ve always been fascinated by debates about preservation. On the one hand, I have a tendency towards saving and cataloging everything, but on the other hand, people change, times change, things fall out of use and others replace them–it’s just how life works. We can’t save everything, and sometimes we need to let go of the past to make room for the future. So how does one decide what is worth saving, and who gets to make that call?

Well, the call was made about the United Palace building in December 2016, when it was designated a New York City Landmark, guaranteeing the protection of the theater for the foreseeable future. Now the goal is to raise $1,000,000 to return the organ to its original glory. With a price tag like that you have to wonder if it’s worthy it.

I think it is.

It’s great that films have been saved, allowing us to watch a film like City Lights 80+ years after it was made, but that film, and others, were not designed to be watched by individuals on 30-inch screens in their living rooms. They were meant to be watched by hundreds or thousands of people, brought together, often with live music that enveloped the audience. Films were designed to be a shared experience, and taking them out of that context deprives them of some of their magic, and deprives us of that communal experience. I look forward to returning to the theater for other screenings (they have them monthly), but I would love the chance to see another film there, with the organ playing an overture, maybe accompanying a short live performance, and then filling the theater with music and sounds to accompany the flickering images.

Visiting the old theater, and desiring a more authentic 1930s experience, feels a little bit like historical tourism, but I think there’s a place for that. So often we have a tendency to romanticize the past or disparage it, and with that we shape our understanding of the people who came before us as either heroes or villains, but people and history are far more complicated than that, and taking a step into history invites us to be more empathetic to the lives and experiences of those who came before us and, like the blind girl and the tramp in City Lights, bring us one step closer to realizing our shared humanity.

Explore Further

Movie Palaces: I finally got myself to visit this theater after hearing it mentioned in a short documentary from 1988 called The Movie Palaces, produced by the Smithsonian Institution and hosted and narrated by Gene Kelly, which can be found on YouTube here. (That’s just like me: my roommate raves about this cool theater after attending a Bernie rally there and I just smile and nod, but the minute I hear Gene Kelly make a passing reference to it in a 30-year-old documentary, I immediately buy a ticket to the next event. *eye-roll*) The documentary is only 30 minutes and the quality (at least of the YouTube upload) isn’t great, but it’s an accessible introduction to these largely forgotten structures.

If you’re looking for something a little more modern, it appears a new feature is on the way:

  Theater Organs: This video, posted by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, shows what exactly theater organs were able to do:

  For more information about the project to restore the organ at the United Palace, check out www.RestoringtheWonder.com

Loew’s 175th Street Theater Tucked away in Washington Heights is a beautiful structure worth investigating: an old movie palace. Built in 1930 it was constructed as one of five…

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Asteri Tale Chapter 25 Orion

I didn’t originally plan to have this included but the idea came to me as I was writing 24. It’s cute and adds more to certain characters’ development.

   Kelly dragged Kid along until they met up with the rest. After Alex and company's plans failed a message was sent out about the decoys.    "Ey! You alright?" Ria ran over to Kid and Kelly. Pella calmly followed behind.    "Ah! And you are?" Kid blinked rapidly as the young girls flitted around him.    "Riiight, we were never formally introduced." Pella bowed her head politely.    "Shit! You're right!" Ria grinned. "I'm Ria, Imani Ria!" she winked.    "Evaline Capella." Pella bowed again.    "Ah-um, how do you know me?" Kid staggered around. "D-do you know them Dunley san?"    "Yes, their Kanamura's sister's friends." Kelly calmly recited the rehearsed response, in order to keep the guardian business from Kid.    "OH!" Kids eyes lit up. "Nice to meet you then!" The sound of a large group filled the air.    "Geez, why do you have to gt in all these fights with Arlin?" Kori chastised Syrus. He groaned and turned to the side. There were new bandages on his hands.    "Please go easy on him Kanamura chan, its been a long day." Skai chuckled to himself and adjusted his glasses.    "Hearing you say 'chan' is so weird, Noriko!" Jem laughed along with Mini.    "Seriously!" Mini gave Skai a sly grin. He averted his eyes and blushed. Anya giggled and looked over the group gathered then to Kelly.    "How's Tamsin doing?"    "Haven't heard. Saveli and Hiroko were with him." Kelly stated bitterly.    "WHAT?! Something happened to Tamsin after we left?!" Kid panicked.    "The injuries were all superficial but there seemed to be some underlying problem no body knows about." Syrus scrolled through the messages on his phone. Kid sank to the ground. "It's not your fault..." Syrus paused and crouched down next to him. "No one knows why Sevan snapped like that."    "Sevan? That quiet guy in the other class?"    "Yeah, he was pretty out of it all day from what I gather..." Anya thought back to gym.    "He lost it when Hiroko mentioned Yuli." Kid pouted harder. "Tamsin and Yuli were fighting when I got there..."    "They are resting at the park near here if you want to check up on them." Skai waved his phone to Kid with a message displayed with one hand and adjusted his glasses with the other. He offered a sympathetic smile. Kid pursed his lips together and reluctantly stood up. They tried to cheer him up as they walked. Gradually Kid opened up to Ria and Pella. As they entered the park, Owen jogged up to them.    "Right this way!~" he urged in a cheerful tone. Kid stared at yet another unfamiliar face and wandered over tot he shaded bench where Aren and Sal sat. Dread washed over Kid's face.    "T-T-Tamsin!" Kid reached out to touch the bandages on his cheek.    "S-st-stop!" Sal reflexively slapped away Kid's hand. His breathing was still labored. "S-sorry..." Kid unsure of what to do with them, waved his hands around frantically and backed away.    "Did you take care of them Owen?" Pella tugged at his sleeve.    "Obviously." Owen gave a bright grin. "Hiroko helped of course!~"    "Oh?..." Kelly looked around. "Where is she now?"    "She went to get us water." Aren lounged back, propping his elbows on the back of the bench. Owen turned his attention to Kid.    "So, I gotta ask," he paused. Kid looked up terrified. "What were you doing down town? That's not a place for your kind." Owen pushed Kid's chin up with his finger.    "Oh...uh, Murasa took me on a date! We went to this quaint little cafe, the food was really tasty!" all the negative emotions melted away, as Kid recounted his supposed 'date'. The group gawked in disbelief.    "D-date? Uh, Sharpe...that wasn't a date, he was trying to KIDNAP you!" Aren grumbled. Skai face palmed. Various others giggled.    "But, but! He treated me and we talked! He's really nice and super funny!" Kid whined.    "That guy probably doesn't even know the meaning of a 'sense of humor'!" Jem sneered.    "No...that actually sounds about right for him." Syrus confessed contritely.    "Uh huh!" Kori nodded along. Everyone, including Sal looked to Syrus in awe.    "Seriously? We are talking about the same 'Murasa Alex' right?" Skai asked for clarification and adjusted his glasses.    "SEE! He's great!" Kid cheered. "You should try to get along better with him."    "What's so great about that haughty asshole?" Mini struggled to contain her distaste for Alex.    "He's always so nice to me." Kid pouted."If only you'd give him a chance!"    "The feeling would have to be mutual, Sharpe san." Kelly shrugged. "He has no desire to get close to others at all."    "You all aren't trying hard enough." Kid crossed his arms and turned away. "He's like an angel, he even fell from the sky!"    "A-angel?" Anya chuckled, "Sure..."    "He did, it was so cool!" Kid insisted.    "He fell off the roof; that isn't cool, its lame." Sal mocked.    "See...this is why he doesn't like you!" Kid frowned.    "I keep telling you his problem is with me, you all have no reason to hate him so much." Syrus sighed. Mira timidly approached from behind, listening to them bicker.    "And who's fault is that?!" Kori glowered at her brother.    "Mine! I know already..." Syrus bared his fangs. "I had no idea things would end up like this though!"    "What did you do?" Kelly poked Syrus on the arm.    "I-it doesn't matter now...and I wasn't the only one, either." Syrus huffed.    "But you were the worst!" Kori growled. "It was totally uncalled for."    "W-wat-" Mira tried to push her way through.    "Heh, you're always like this Kanamura chan!" Ria laughed.    "Reminds me of my brothers." Pella giggled.    "Totally see it too! Lance is always causing trouble!" Owen snickered.    "I b-brought th-" Mira stood on her tiptoes trying to make her way in.    "Oh, I never got your name!" Kid went to Owen.    "Is that so?" he perked up. "I'm Syvzanna Owen, the little Miss's caretaker." he pointed to Pella.    "Fancy way to say 'babysitter'." Aren jeered.    "Ack..you!" Owen jokingly glared at Aren.    "You should be thanking me for taking care of you so excellently!" He grabbed Aren's cheeks and tugged them.    "Mmrah shtawp et!" Aren whined.    "Quit being weird Owen." Pella sighed. Mira furrowed her eyebrows and took a deep breath.    "You guys sure are friendly with each other!" Kid giggled. "That's so nice."    "I BROUGHT THE DAMN WATER!" Mira shouted at the top of her lungs. The massive crowd all jumped and turned to the petite girl in silence. "How do you feel Tamsin?"    "F-fine...thanks..." Sal put his hands to the sides of his head. She stepped forward and offered a bottle to Aren, then to Sal. Aren took it and chugged half of it in one gulp. Sal looked up to Mira skittishly. His breathing had calmed down. He reached out to grab the spare, his hands shaking. He tried to drink it but couldn't keep his hands steady. Aren got up and let Mira sit next to Sal, to help him. Aren shuffled over to Kid.    "How you doing?" he lightly patted Kid's shoulder.    "I...uh, okay!" Kid answered pensively. "What about you?"    "Starting to get used to this, sadly..." Aren rubbed his abdomen shamefully. "Must have been a lot to take in all at once."    "Why can't everyone get along?" Kid sulked. "Murasa's really not that bad." Aren grimaced. Jem put her hands on her hips.    "What's so great about such a vain ass like him?!"she interrupted. Kid gasped. "You should forget about him and play with me!" Jem grabbed him by the arm and dragged him off. Syrus watched as she pulled him out into the park with a subtle smirk, before walking over to Mira and Sal, who were talking about the fight.    "Uh..h-how..did you do that?" Sal eyed her skeptically.    "Do what?" Mira pursed her lips unsure of what he meant.    "M-my asth-eh?" he started timidly when he noticed Syrus. "You here to laugh at me?"    "No...what do you think about it?" Syrus's red eyes peered deep into Sal's. Sal turned away.    "I don't know, its why I asked!" he snapped.    "Hiroko, do you know what your power is?" Syrus shifted his serious gaze to Mira.    "N-no?" she tensed up.    "Do you get hurt often?" Syrus asked and observed her reactions.    "N-not really?" she answered quizzically, "Why?"    "How long does it normally take your injuries to heal?" his eyes trailed down to his arms, covered by his jacket sleeves.    "Not very...I think?" she cocked her head to the side. Syrus smiled and rolled up one of his sleeves, revealing bandages covering his arm. "Oh my go-"    "It wasn't from the fight earlier, just testing something." Syrus pulled the bandages on his hand loose exposing wounds along his palm and the back of his wrist. Sal's eyes shot open. Mira's face went pale. Syrus put a finger to his lips to shush them then grabbed Mira's hand to place it on his injuries. The wound receded from where her fingers touched him. Reflexively, Mira pulled her hand back, a thin layer of blood coated the tips of her fingers.    "WOAH!" Mira looked to her hands then to Syrus's arm.    "You have healing powers, like i thought..." Syrus readjusted the bandages around his hand.    "W-wait! Th-then I should-!" Mira panicked.    "Its fine." Syrus sighed dismissively.    "There's no way Akseli is responsible for all that." Sal uttered, thinking back to Tuesday, when he caught a glimpse of bandages under the blazer Syrus wore.    "Hush, everyone here has things they'd rather not speak about, even you." Syrus shot Sal a cold look. Sal retreated back then turned toward Mira.    "Well, th-thanks. Now I won't have to hear it from my brother for leaving 'that' at home..." he gave a timid smile and bowed his head.    "What? N-no..its no problem at all!" Mira jumped up and backed away. "My transformation isn't meant for combat, at least this way I can be of some use to everyone!"    "Don't say that!" Syrus barked. "If you hadn't been there things could have ended much worse than they did."    "I-I didn't do much...except piss off Sevan." Mira sulked.    "Heh...you helped more than me." Sal chided himself. "If Murasa hadn't been there to clean up, things would have turned out worse..."    "A-Alex did?" Syrus gasped in surprise.    "He protected Sharpe..." Sal glanced over to Kid. Him and the twins were playing around on the slide. Kid perked up when he noticed Sal watching him.    "That's...something he would do..." Syrus thought out loud. Sal sunk in the bench. Kid leapt off and dashed over.    "It would have been better were I not involved." Sal sighed. "I didn't contribute anything, it was all Saveli out there."    "What! No, don't say that!" Kid pouted. Sal jumped at the expected declaration.    "But its the truth." Sal objected.    "Mmm." Kid groaned and grabbed Sal by the arms. The usual color returned to Sal's face. He stared at Kid in awe as his fatigue dissipated. Syrus shot Sal an inquisitive glance. Sal shook off his uneasy expression and returned a smile to Kid.    "A-as long as everyone is ok, right?" at this Kid beamed brightly. Syrus continued to watch Sal skeptically as Kid dragged him and Mira off to the others in the park. On Kids urging, the rest of the group joined in. After an hour or so passed, everyone gradually went in their separate ways home. Skai's mother picked up Kid and Skai in her car.    "That was so fun!" Kid cheered in the back seat. Skai shifted his gaze away and let out a breathy laugh then adjusted his glasses.    "That's good, dear." Skai's mother chimed in. "That's an amazing gift you have."    "G-gift?" Kid stiffened up in his confusion.    "You're able to gather all different kinds of people around you with ease, I have to thank you for that." she glanced at the boys in the rear view mirror.    "Mom..." Skai scoffed. Kid looked back and forth between them.    "Because he met you, my son's made so many new friends."    "Oh! Haha!" Kid laughed bashfully. "I wish Arata could have been there!" he whined, changing the subject.    "They had things they needed to attend to at home." Skai forced out an excuse and adjusted his glasses. He had almost forgotten the events that transpired earlier in the day.    "I know!" Kid groaned. "Still sucks..." he sulked in his seat. Skai couldn't help but grin at his friend's innocence. "Oh! and Murasa too! I'm sure everyone would like him too if they could get to know him!" Kid eyed Skai expectantly.    "S-sure..." Skai didn't feel like arguing in front of his mother so he agreed and adjusted his glasses. "Not like he beat up your friends or tried to kidnap you or anything..." Once they arrived at Skai's house, they settled in for their sleepover as his mother prepared diner. After eating the day drew to a close.    In the morning, Kid and Skai met up with the group in the plaza. Kid regaled his 'date' with Alex to Tori and Sai. Tori laughed nervously as Kid talked. Sai just snickered to herself. Kid jumped up once he spotted Alex, who happened to be passing by.    "HEEEY, Murasa san!" Kid waved frantically. Alex flinched and stopped walking. "Come heeeere!" Kid beckoned him over. Alex rolled his eyes and reluctantly headed over.    "What is it?" he put his hands on his hips and sighed. Everyone watched with unease.    "Thanks for yesterday, I had a lot of fun on our date!" Kid smiled back. Alex gasped and jumped back, his entire face flushed red. The twins suppresed giggles and Anya chocked on her drink.    "Th-that w-wasn't a d-d-date!" Alex shrieked and ran off.    "Ah..." Kid stared into the space Alex had occupied, gradually growing depressed. Jem and Mini burst out laughing.    "WHAT WAS THAT?" Aren howled laughter. Sal snickered along.    "I never imagined he could make such a face..." Kelly uttered bewildered at everything.    "Sh-Sharpe?" Syrus questioned hesitantly, "Do you even like him enough to want that to have been a date?" Skai and Jem looked up, waiting for the answer.    "Ah...um...w-well, I like girls...so, no" Kid slowly came to the realization of the implications of his excitement, "But that expression was pretty cute."    "...whatever floats your boat, I guess." Sal huffed. Kid frowned while others acted with distaste about Alex. "Why won't people just get along with each other?" Kid pouted as they waited for their lunch orders to arrive.