#just google if triplets are identical???

[demonpiratehuntress]

Good to know you're doing great, and that's fine (and Yes Inumake Toge 😍😍 🥺🥺) How about Zoro x reader (reader is the daughter of Gold Roger but uses a different last name she's two years older than Ace and her identity is a secret, she does tell Zoro in private after they get together) them having triplets together all look like Zoro (all have his sense of direction lol) just the shenanigans of reader having three lost Marimos 😂 she's very amused by it (it makes sense considering her sense of direction is non existent too 😂 the crew has five direction challenged members yikes) also she's a fighter (has Uzui Tengen's swords lol... I'm only adding this part cause I don't really like reader not being a fighter sorry if that's inconvenient you can remove it, I'm not asking for battle scenes just a note to point out) she's his height (the struggles of my tall ass constantly having to imagine how tall a character is for them to be taller than my 6'4 ass 😂) and kinda hot headed

i love the idea of Zoro's and reader's children being directionally challenged just like him lol. i can do this idea, because i am also directionally challenged :) i just don't know who Uzui Tengen is, but I did google him to make sure! i hope you enjoy this :) so sorry it took so long!

taglist - @kabloswrld

it runs in the family

Roronoa Zoro x F!Reader

summary - the ask ^-^

warnings - not proof read

It was hard enough having one lost soul to take care of. Watching Zoro was like watching a child, needing constant focus and attention to keep him from wandering off. Everyone takes turns watching him, but it ultimately ends up being your job most of the time because it's so exhausting.

"I'm going to that weapons store over there, be right back."

Your head snapped up when you heard him say that, eyes going wide as you immediately lunged forward to grab his wrist.

"It's right over there!" He protested, "I won't get lost."

You snorted and raised an eyebrow, "Babe I've seen you walk across the street and get lost. I don't believe you for a second. Sit down."

He grumbled and complained, but listened and took his seat next to you again. The two of you were waiting for the others to come back from their respective tasks, having finished your own (no thanks to Zoro, you had done it yourself). You swore you looked down for two seconds and when you turned to say something to him, he was not there. You shot up instantly, looking around for a mop of green hair.

"That idiot-"

You found him soon enough, and he was making his way to the weapons store just like he wanted. You were quick to scramble after him, knowing if you lost him now it would take you a whole day to find him. Maybe two.

"Zoro!"

The man grunted as you grabbed his ear, shooting you a pained glare as you twisted it and pulled him in the other direction.

"Dammit woman, at least let my ear go!"

"You need a leash!"

"..."

And that's pretty much how it goes every time you have to babysit your husband. It only got worse when you found out you were pregnant, and produced three exact copies of the swordsman. Three little menaces with his hair, his features, his personality, and your eyes. That's about the only thing they got from you.

To absolutely no one's surprise, they turned out to have a horrible sense of direction just like their father.

To be honest, you were a little relieved they hadn't inherited anything from you. As the daughter of the famed Gol D Roger, you were just as much at risk of being captured and locked up forever - or executed - just because of your parentage, like your younger brother. Only Zoro knew who your father was, as you kept the secret as possible. Even then, you only told him because you wanted no secrets between the two of you, which you'd promised each other on your wedding day. It seemed so long ago, with everything you'd been through, but you were more than grateful for the swordsman.

Not just for keeping your secret (you were pretty sure he forgot the day after you told him) but for protecting you to a point. He knew you could take care of yourself, he'd seen how skilled you were with your blades. He wasn't overbearing, because you were already a strong fighter, but he protected you in other ways, like keeping you from getting into dangerous situations that risked exposing who you were - like that one time in Water 7 when Garp absent-mindedly noted that you reminded him of Gol D Roger, Zoro quickly changed the conversation. He was dumb, but he was more perceptive than he led people to believe.

All these memories, of meeting him and dating him and eventually marrying him, flooded your mind as you gazed down at your sons. A soft smile on your face, you admired just how much they looked like their father, something you had hoped for but the others teased you for.

But you found out soon enough that although having three little kids running around was hard enough, it was made worse when you and the crew found out about their lack of directional sense.

"Zoro!"

You smacked the back of your husband's head hard, immediately waking him from his nap. He glared up at you for a moment before seeing the furious look on your face and immediately became nervous.

"Where are the boys?!"

"They were right over-" He pointed to the nearby swing, "-there."

"Uh huh, and where are they now?" You crossed your arms.

He scratched the back of his head, getting to his feet, "Uh..."

You smacked him again, "Dumbass. You're just lucky this island isn't as big as all the other ones we've been to!"

But as it turned out, searching for your lost children wasn't hard. They were only a block away from the small park Zoro had taken them to, huddled together on the side and looking around in confusion. In true Roronoa Zoro fashion.

One of them spotted you and yelled happily, dragging his siblings towards you and your sheepish husband. You smiled and scooped two of them up, leaving the third to be lifted into Zoro's arms.

"You guys know you're not supposed to go anywhere without me or your father," you scolded, holding back a smile at how cute they looked glancing at each other before looking down.

"Sorry, mommy. It won't happen again."

And they sound so cute, so sad, you just have to smother their little faces with kisses until they're laughing and pushing your face away.

"Ew, mom!"

But of course, it does happen again. Because they're Roronoa Zoro's children, they always manage to get themselves lost. The next time it happened, you were visiting Vivi in Alabasta. As you and the others were caught up in greeting the princess, your overeager kids found some other kids to play with and went off with them without telling you or Zoro.

Your husband, bless him, tried to go after them but got himself lost in the process. How you know? Sanji found your kids and brought them back, but said he hasn't even SEEN the swordsman.

"Babe you are the LAST person who should go looking for lost people!" You sighed when you found him, shaking your head. "It always ends up like this."

"Those are MY kids-"

"Clearly," you pinched the bridge of your nose. "Anyway Sanji found them, so let's just go." You dragged him back to everyone else, ignoring the way his eye twitched at the mention of the cook.

That's not to say you were good with directions, because you were also bad with them. Sure, you had a better idea of direction than Zoro did, but the crew was still a little wary about sending you anywhere alone.

You and your family tended to butt heads about it, especially when you were all shopping for things you needed. Zoro would claim what you were looking for was in one aisle, while you asserted that it was in another.

It was quite funny for the crew actually, watching the five of you argue and then run off in different directions, only to forget which way you came from and struggle to get back. They had a blast when you took the kids to a carnival where there was a maze, because they found their way out relatively quickly. All the while you, your directionally-challenged kids and your even more directionally-challenged husband went in circles.

"I think it's this way."

"No, no, it's definitely this way!"

"Trust me, I know where I'm going!"

"So do I!"

You two were so busy arguing about where to go that you didn't notice your mischievous children sneaking off to try and find their own way out. Much like Zoro, they hated arguing and they wanted to just take action instead of thinking. By the time you realised it was too quiet, they were nowhere nearby.

"Oh my God, not again!" You face-palmed, then whirled on the swordsman, "This is your fault!"

"Mine?! You wanted to argue!"

Steam was practically coming out of your nose and ears, but you took a deep breath and calmed yourself. One of you had to be reasonable here. So without a word, you turned and walked in one direction while your thick-headed husband went in the other.

"(kid 1 name)! (kid 2 name)! (kid 3 name)!" You tried calling, hearing their voices call back out to you every time you did. But as soon as you thought you were getting close, you would call again and their voices would be even further away.

They were going in the opposite directions.

"Hey, kids!" You called again, "Just stay right there for mom, okay? Stay where you are."

Eventually you do find them, but now you have no idea where you came from so you have no idea where to go. Outside the maze, the rest of the crew is fast asleep as they wait for the five of you to figure it out, Nami being the only one staying awake just in case you made it out earlier than they expected.

You didn't.

"We can't take you guys anywhere," the redhead complained, making you laugh.

Yeah, that was pretty much what the Straw Hat crew had to deal with.

A/N: i hope this lived up to your expectations! i wasn't sure how to piece it all together so just tell me if i missed anything in your request, or if you're not satisfied with any of the parts! :) im open to criticism!

[no-stabbing-wednesdays]

The Conspiracy Job

I made a post about the “Eliot’s semi-famous identities” conspiracy here and @what---i-dated-a wanted a fic, which got my muse going. So, here it is, and also on AO3

An amazing version of the same concept by @copperbadge was linked in the notes and I recommend you all read that too! The Job Interview Job

The Conspiracy Job

“Oh, not again!”

The others, busy drawing up plans for their latest con, looked over at Hardison. 

“What is it?” Sophie asked.

He brought his display up on the large screen at the front of the room. 

“Someone’s just searched a bunch of Eliot’s old aliases, all at the same time.”

Parker frowned as she looked at the screen. “That doesn’t sound good.”

Eliot was on his feet immediately, concern clear on his face.

“Who is it? CIA? FBI? KGB? Mossad?”

“Give me a second,” Hardison said. “No, I don’t think so. They’re not being flagged on any databases. Someone’s just googling them.”

Eliot relaxed slightly and rolled his eyes. “It’s not those damn conspiracy forums, is it? I thought you got rid of those.”

“I did! They haven’t posted anything, they’re just looking. Oh, they’re here in Portland.”

Eliot tensed again at that, but Hardison shook his head.

“Relax, man. It’s a family house; a couple of dentists and a fifteen year old. If they post anything I’ll take it down, nothing to worry about.”

On the other side of Portland, Julia stepped into her friend Marcie’s bedroom and her eyes widened as she took in the scene before her. Marcie was connecting red threads between grainy, printed-out images on her corkboard and empty bottles of Gatorade littered the desk.

“You have to cool it with this, dude.”

Marcie turned to face her, her hair a mess and her eyes red from lack of sleep, and Julia sighed.

“You look like freaking Charlie Kelly!”

“There’s something here, Jules. I’m sure of it.”

“It’s a couple of athletes and a singer who happen to look similar. It’s hardly the scoop of the century.”

“Look similar? Look similar? Julia, they are completely identical! There are exactly three possibilities.” She held up three fingers in her friend’s face as she counted them off. “Triplets, clones or one ridiculously talented guy.”

“Okaaay, and which one do you think it is?”

“I don’t know,” Marcie answered, turning back to her board. “Triplets? Why would they have different names and hide it? One guy? He’d have to be able to sing and play guitar, baseball and hockey. Why wouldn’t you own up to having that kind of talent? Why go to different places with different names? Clones? I’m leaning clones.”

“Clones? Come on, Marcie.” 

“It’s the most logical explanation.”

“You think someone cloned a human being just to create a one-hit-wonder country singer and some short lived athletes?”

Marcie shrugged. “It could be a trial run or an experiment or something. And you remember that anything I ever said on the forums would mysteriously vanish? I went to look after Jacques Labert turned up and every single forum post was gone! Every one! Doesn’t that sound like a government conspiracy to you?”

“It’s weird,” Julia admitted. “But I think you might be taking this a little too far. If the government were making clones, why would they let them get famous so people could discover it?”

“But they weren’t that famous. Think about it, what were the chances that someone would connect them? There were only ever a couple of us posting on the forums. If I hadn’t happened to be visiting my uncle in Palmerston when Roy Chappell was playing and then gone to Saddle and Spurs for my birthday, I’d never have known.” 

Her eyes widened as a horrifying thought occurred to her . “Then Jacques Labert turned up in my city! What if I’m the connection?”

She swung back to the board and began to write her own name. Julia grabbed her hand.

“Marcie! You’re not the center of a government conspiracy! Besides, who’s this fourth guy again?” She asked, tapping one of the photos in the corner. “You didn’t have anything to do with him, did you?”

“No,” Marcie conceded. “And I told you about him, remember? He’s an animal rights activist who was on the news in San Lorenzo a couple of years ago, talking about dog fights in the Presidential Palace. And he’s Canadian. That’s why it’s so exciting that, after almost two years of nothing new, Jacques Labert, Canadian hockey player, suddenly appears. Was the guy on the news Jacques Labert? If there really is more than one of them in the first place!”

Julia grimaced, increasingly worried about Marcie’s obsession with this wild conspiracy. “He was on the news where?”

“San Lorenzo. It’s this tiny European country. Here look.” Marcie sat at her desk, tapped the name into Google and turned her laptop towards Julia. 

Julia scrolled through a few pictures of the idyllic Mediterranean island, then stopped suddenly and pointed at one of them. 

“Wait, who’s that?”

“Oh, that’s Rebecca Ibañez. It’s a tragic story,” Marcie explained, as she clicked on the link and showed her some clearer pictures. “A couple of years ago, the same time maybe-Jacques Labert was there, there was an election and her fiancé won. But, just as the results were announced, supporters of the former president tried to assassinate him and Rebecca stepped in front and took the bullet for him.”

“She was assassinated?”

“Yes, isn’t it awful?”

Julia shook her head. “She can’t have been.”

“What?”

“She’s my brother Zachary’s acting teacher.”

“What?”

“Yeah, I went to see his play last week and I met her. Her name’s Sophie Devereaux and she’s definitely not dead.”

Marcie looked at her in amazement, a grin breaking out across her face . “And she was in San Lorenzo at the same time as Jacques-Roy-Kenneth! There might be even more to this than I thought!”

Julia, almost as invested as Marcie now that her brother’s odd director was mixed up in this, pulled up a chair and looked on excitedly as her friend brought up another google search. 

Back at the Brewpub, the crew were working out the kinks in their plan while waiting for any sign of the internet sleuth trying to share their ideas about Eliot’s multiple identities.

When the computer pinged again, they all turned to see which of his aliases had been flagged this time, only for their eyes to widen in horror as the search term flashed on the screen.

“Rebecca Ibañez” “Sophie Devereaux”

Sophie gave a gasp that almost turned into a choke. “Wha- wha- what?”

Eliot turned to Hardison, furious. “Oh sure, just dentists and a teenager! Fix. This.”

“I’m trying!” Hardison said. “I can’t find any connections to anything. They look clean.”

“Then look harder!”

Wait, I have something. It’s the kid’s computer.”

“Who’s the kid?” Nate asked.

Hardison pulled up a Facebook page. “Marcie Taylor. She’s a sophomore. She used to post on those stupid Eliot forums that I had to take down every week after Memphis. It was pretty harmless, but I’ve no idea why she’s suddenly looking at Sophie’s aliases.”

He scrolled down the page looking for any kind of hint, when Sophie called out to him to stop.

“Who’s that with her? She looks familiar.”

A few more clicks and Hardison had a name.

“Julia Gutmann. She’s in the same class.”

Gutmann?” Sophie groaned. “I know why she’s familiar. That’s Zachary’s little sister.”

“Zachary? Your acting student Zachary?” Nate asked disbelievingly.

“Yes, she came to our play last week.”

Nate shook his head. “I told you to use an alias at that theater.”

“But I wanted to do this as me,” Sophie protested.

Eliot turned back to Hardison. “So, let me get this straight. The aliases and digital trail that you set up to be uncrackable by international governmental organizations are about to be blown apart by a couple of high schoolers?”

Hardison glowered at him. “They’re only looking at old aliases and they were all burnt when we had to leave Boston anyway. It’s not that bad.”

“Sophie’s still using Sophie,” Eliot argued, nearly yelling now. “And I was only just Jacques Labert and in this city. Now they’ve tied me and her together. How did they even do that? That’s way more than some fifteen year old girls should be able to accomplish on Google.”

“Okay, okay. Don’t panic. They were looking at photos of San Lorenzo. That’s how they found a picture of Sophie."

Sophie glared at him.

"Hey!" he protested. "You're the one who jumped in front of the cameras! I can't control the entire internet you know, and I think the people of San Lorenzo would have noticed if every image of their martyred heroine suddenly vanished.

“It’s just bad luck that Julia had met you. But why were they looking at…” Hardison groaned. “They found that video of Eliot and the puppy somehow.”

“Why didn’t you take that down?” Eliot snapped.

“It’s a thirty second feature on the news from two years ago in a country smaller than Iceland! It wasn’t my top priority!”

“Dammit, Hardison!”

“So, our cover’s going to get blown by kids?” Parker asked, incredulously. 

“No,” Nate insisted. “Well, maybe. But we can manage this. Hardison, don't let them post anything. Sophie, call Zachary. Let’s go steal ourselves some silence.”

[ichorshrooms]

hello!!! tell me about ur ocs!!! who are they?? what do they look like?? do they have anything quirky about ‘em??

hOOO BOY OK I HAVE A LOT OF THEM. no joke i probably have like 30 characters. maybe more! most likely more! i have never counted! i have... a Lot. i’m gonna try to tell you about as many as i can before i start to lose all hope. the things you asked are actually a good short list of intro questions so.

On to the characters! (Ooh, grammar and syntax! Joy! I’m getting serious now askjlfjklsa)

Israfil Bashir | Israfil is a man of science! He’s a recently out gay man in his 40s who has a lot of baggage about his father. He’s the head of a company that researches advancements in prosthesis -- something he has been passionate about since the loss of his left leg in a near-fatal wreck. He’s active -- a little less so since he developed chronic fatigue, but he still tries to get out there and bike regularly! And he has a child named Misha who he loves and cherishes! Israfil is of Pakistani and Indian descent. He has neatly-cropped dark hair, beautiful honey brown eyes, and he usually wears his beard in a short goatee (he feels like he looks too young if he shaves it off, and he’s sensitive about it). His skintone is light brown with a warm undertone. 

His face is fairly angular, his body lean and immaculately toned (for the most part). He has a hooked nose with a slight deviation from a decades-old break that wasn’t set quite right. As I said before, he lost his left leg in an accident, so he wears a prosthetic! His prosthetic is not patterned or matched to his skin. It’s the color of the metal that was used to make it.

His... quirk... hmm... oh right, he’s telepathic. I almost told you about the secret lab under his prosthesis research facility that has developed identical-to-human sentient machines! Phew, that was close! I almost spilled the beans!

Misha Bashir | Misha is Israfil Bashir’s child! They’re just a couple of years old, but they’ve been given the intelligence of a very, very smart teenager -- and the body of one too! They’re a living, breathing machine. They’re also extremely naive and curious, as most new-ish androids tend to be. It’s not often that they leave the safety of their home, as Israfil has developed a pattern of strictness due to his fear that the government will disappear Misha from the streets and do experiments on them.

Misha is extremely lifelike. They’re modeled in part after their creator/father Israfil, but some... design cues... have been taken from a certain CSO of a rival R&D company who Israfil may have an on-and-off non-romance with. Misha inherited their skin tone, the shape of their eyes and their mouth from Israfil. The rest, though... Misha has bright white hair, blue-green eyes, an aquiline nose and -- perhaps most peculiarly -- a very slight Russian accent. 

I think Misha’s existence as a sort of pseudo-lovechild of two embittered ex lovers counts as a quirk. That weird shit aside, though, they’re a robot! That’s pretty quirky! Oh and they may or may not be part of a research program that endeavors to find out if it is possible to teach a machine to read minds. And they’re nonebinery... they dont have any binery... thats ise so cool.........

Eleanor Louise French | Eleanor is a 15 year old witch who just loves to make it known that her middle name is Louise. It’s one of her most favorite things about herself. At the tender age of 14, she set out on her own (as all young witches do) to do some independent study and learn the ways of the world. 

She is very gay, very short and very smart. Her hot-headed temper lands her in a metric fuckton of trouble on a daily basis, but she manages to escape dire consequences most of the time! She is narcoleptic, frog-obsessed (like all gays are) and is all about that baby-pink-and-blue aesthetic. She has some serious trauma from a werewolf attack, so wolves and ghouls and other “scary” magical creatures are not typically welcome in her alchemy shop. She will serve them, but it is very draining for her -- just as all trauma is. Spoiler alert: she eventually recovers, but that’s like! the main thing in her story! so! it takes time for her to get there.

She is fair-skinned with a cool undertone. Her hair is light blonde and straight as a board (which she claims is completely natural, but sometimes she forgets to drag a brush through her hair in the morning and it gets all frizzy and wavy hMMM CURIOUS). She has a grecian nose, a round baby face and bright blue eyes. Her scowl is so powerful it’s enough to strike the fear of god in... idk a lumberjack or something. Her fashion sense is a bit... conservative. She’s a little insecure and likes to cover up. Being a teenager kind of sucks sometimes!

Her Big Quirk (TM) is her ability to effortlessly turn people into frogs. She does it when she’s annoyed, and she has a frog collection. If you are bad enough, she will literally keep you in a terrarium until she decides you’ve learned your lesson. She has a couple of forever frogs and the reason is because they’re bad people (and decent frogs).

I have a lot more characters, but this is already quite long and I don’t want to write a profile for literally every character ‘cause then you’d be like “dude what the fuck.” I have demons, angels, superpowered villains in varying degrees of villainy, a ballet dancer, a park ranger, a televangelist, a fashion designer, an immortal who has seen the horrors of war, a haunted pianist, triplet thieves, princes, a princess, an embittered king, monsters of all sorts and a billion more types of characters that I honestly cannot think of off the top of my head. There is a massive list to get through! And that’s not counting some of my one-off projects involving characters I haven’t roleplayed with! You should see the state of my google docs. I have 50+ projects I’m currently working on.

I have too many characters. If you’re curious about anything on the list, I will elaborate!

[honeypiehotchner]

Trust -- part thirty-five

It’s been a moment, hello! My mood took one of worse turns it has in a while the past couple weeks, but I think I’m back on track now (go to therapy, kids).

Also! I move into college in three weeks, and I won’t have as much free time. My goal is to finish this story before I move, though, so this is your warning that the end is near. Love you guys xx.

(Listen I don’t really like this part and idk if it’s my brain still in the weird mood or if it genuinely does suck, so be gentle lol)

“Sherlock,” you call, tucking your legs underneath you on the sofa.

           “Hm.”

           “When was the last time you went out?”

           He gives his violin a strange look – he’s tuning it before he plays – but you know that look was meant for you if he wasn’t preoccupied. “What do you mean?”

           “A case,” you clarify for him. “When was the last time you and John went out on a case together?”

           “We just did a case last week.”

           “No, that wasn’t a case, that was a small outing and you solved it in five minutes,” you reply tiredly. “I mean an actual case.”

           “Oh,” he hums, lifting his violin to his chin. “I don’t know.”

           “I thought you didn’t like not knowing.”

           A glare is the next expression sent your way as he picks up his bow and begins to play. He’s been working on a waltz for John and Mary. He’s told them (promised, more like) he’ll play it for their first dance at the wedding, which, again you try not to think about the dreams you had. But it’s incredibly hard when life is appearing to imitate them in the smallest of ways.

           “I’m just saying,” you speak over his playing. “I think it’d be good if the two of you got out and did a case together.”

           The violin falls from his neck as he gives you a pointed stare. “What’s wrong?”

           “Nothing’s wrong,” you chuckle. “I just don’t want to be the reason you’re stuck in this flat for the rest of your life.”

           “You’re not,” he replies firmly, lifting his instrument once more. “If I wanted to leave, I would. My brother’s security won’t be reason to stop me.”

           “I know that,” you breathe. “Speaking of, if you were to go out, I’m sure Mycroft would send an extra guard. Or I could ask Mary to come over. Speaking of Mary, what time did they say they were coming over?”

           “Noon,” comes Sherlock’s short reply.

           It’s barely ten now. This is one of the rare mornings where you and Sherlock are actually awake in the morning.

           “Well,” you heave out a sigh, standing to your feet. “I’m going to get dressed. Try not to make the waltz minor. I can hear it drifting that way.”

           You’re not trying to annoy Sherlock necessarily, but you’d be lying if you said you aren’t trying to push his buttons a little more.

           He’s been cooped up in this flat with you for two weeks now. Yes, you’ve gone out occasionally, but after one instance of cameras swarming the two of you in a café, you’ve kept the outings to a bare minimum. The “case” last week was less hectic, you’re assuming because reporters didn’t want Lestrade arresting them, but it was short lived.

           You’ve both become somewhat of a celebrity couple since returning from the hospital. It became known that Sherlock and his girlfriend – that’s you, even though, again, you and Sherlock still haven’t discussed labels – investigated and brought down a religious cult right here in London.

           The case alone was intriguing enough for people to praise Sherlock, but throw in the fact that this seemingly emotionless human being has a romantic partner? Everyone is all over that now, and it hasn’t died down like John had hoped.

           Which is why Mycroft still has security stationed at the bottom of the stairs, and eyes all on Baker Street at all times. You’re – meaning you and Sherlock – are no longer allowed to take cabs. Mycroft has a driver – his name is Ed, he’s nice – for the both of you and that is how you are supposed to get around. You think the only reason Sherlock doesn’t protest is because he knows how much of a concern your safety is – especially to him.

           But still. You and Mary have been talking. Even John is a little antsy. The wedding planning is in the final stages, and the last thing really to tackle is seating and fitting for the bridesmaid dresses. Mary has her wedding dress, John has his tux, as does Sherlock, but the bridesmaids – you included as Maid of Honor – don’t. You’ve got the color, at least.

           The point is, you and Mary have seen that both of your boys need to go out and work a case together. Just to get them out. And to give you two some girl time, but that’s irrelevant. You need to get them out of the house again, like they used to do.

           And you’ve got a plan.

~~~

“Need to work on your half of the church, Mary. Looking a bit thin.”

           You roll your eyes at Sherlock’s statement as Mary answers him. “Ah, orphan’s lot. Friends, that’s all I have. Lots of friends.”

           You reach over and squeeze her hand gently, earning a small smile. Mary’s past has always been a sore subject, and one that isn’t brought up often – except by Sherlock, in moments like these.

           “We should have the organ music to begin at precisely 11:48—”

           “But the rehearsal’s not for another two weeks, just calm down.”

           “Calm? I am calm. I’m extremely calm.”

           “Sherlock, love,” you chime in, ignoring the way your brother’s eyebrows raise at your use of the word love. “I’ve never seen you more stressed. Just – take a deep breath.”

           “Let’s get back to the reception, come on,” Mary suggests, ushering him over.

           You nod your head, urging him to join her. You sit curled up in his chair with a book, planning to help Mary after Sherlock and John leave, but of course neither of them know they’re going to be leaving just yet.

           “John’s cousin, top table?”

           Sherlock scrunches his nose. “Hm. Hates you. Can’t even bear to think about you.”

           “Seriously?”

           “Second-class post. Cheap card. Bought at a petrol station. Look at the stamp. Three attempts at licking. She’s obviously unconsciously retaining saliva.”

           “Aw, let’s stick her by the bogs.”

           “Oh yes.”

           You watch at Mary discreetly looks over her should, clearing her throat before asking, “Who else hates me?”

           And of course, Sherlock being Sherlock, he hands her a list.

           “Oh great, thanks.”

           You snicker at Mary’s way of dealing with family troubles, not that John cares either way. He’s been scrolling through his phone the entire time.

           “‘Priceless painting nicked.’ Looks interesting.”

           “Table four?” Mary continues.

           “Done,” Sherlock replies quickly.

           John chuckles. “‘My husband is three people.’”

           “Table five?”

           “Major James Sholto. Who he?”

           “Oh, John’s old commanding officer. I don’t think he’s coming.”

           Your ears perk up at the mention of him. You’ve always known John was in the military, but he never talks about it all that much. And he’s especially never mentioned an old commanding officer before.

           “He’ll be there,” John speaks up, so he’s clearly listening.

           “Well, he needs to RSVP, then,” Mary counters.

           “He’ll be there,” John assures her once more, still gazing at his phone.

           Sherlock looks about as confused as you feel. He’s clearly curious about this and you’re almost certain you’ll find him Googling Major Sholto later.

           “‘My husband is three people.’ It’s interesting.”

           You give John a strange look.

           “Says he has three distinct patterns of moles on his skin.”

           “Identical triplets. One in half a million births. Solved it without leaving the flat,” Sherlock speaks quickly as he suddenly stands and floats (as you like to say) down to the floor. “Now, serviettes. Swan or Sydney Opera House?”

           “Where’d you learn to do that?” Mary’s excitement and surprise is clearly written all over her face as Sherlock proudly displays the napkins. You even crane your neck to see.

           “Many unexpected skills required in the field of criminal investigation—”

           “Fibbing, love,” you call out, shaking your head.

           He sighs. “I once broke an alibi by demonstrating the exact severity of…”

           “We’re not John, we can tell when you’re fibbing,” Mary interrupts.

           “Okay, I learnt it on YouTube.”

           You snicker. “That’s more like it.”

           “Opera House, please,” Mary chooses, satisfied that she got the truth. “Oh, hang on, I’m buzzing.”

           Your eyebrows raise slightly. That’s the first code phrase.

           “Oh, hi, Beth!”

           And there’s the other.

           You close your book, standing and following Mary into the kitchen. Sherlock is too busy folding serviettes to notice you’ve gone, and you smack John lightly on the shoulder as you pass.

           “Yeah, yeah, I don’t see why not,” Mary continues the act.

           You stand over by the kettle, actually putting it on because you would like some tea, which gives you a plausible excuse for being in here.

           “Actually, if that’s Beth, it’s probably for me, too. Hang on.”

           John walks into the kitchen a second later, giving both you and Mary a tired look.

           “He knows we don’t have a friend called Beth. He’s gonna figure out that it’s code.”

           “He’s YouTubing serviettes,” Mary hisses.

           “He’s thorough.”

           “He’s terrified!”

           “Of course he’s not.”

           “He is,” you mutter from the kettle, looking up to John. “He is.”

           “Right, you know when you’re scared of something, you start wishing it sooner just to get it all going? That’s what he’s doing.”

           “Why would he be scared that we’re getting married?”

           You leave the couple to continue bickering, part of you wanting a small private moment with Sherlock while they’re occupied.

           You walk over to Sherlock where he’s quickly folding, and you make him pause, your hand smoothing over his shoulder. He turns his head to look up at you, his free hand bringing your knuckles to his lips.

           “Would you fold me a swan?” You ask.

           “Of course,” comes his reply, and you didn’t exactly mean for him to fold it for you right then, but he does, and a few seconds later, he’s handing you a swan.

           “Thank you,” you chuckle. “I love it.” You carry it gingerly over to the mantle and place it next to where he’s got something stabbed onto the wood. “What is it now, love?” Upon closer inspection you see it’s a note. “Another one?” You ask.

           Sherlock barely nods and hums.

           You sigh. “And how long has this one been up here?”

           “Two days.”

           “Where did you get it?”

           “Homeless network.”

           “Someone in your homeless network handed you a note with ‘I O U’ written on it? Are you joking?”

           “No,” Sherlock replies. “But Mycroft has them now.”

           “So, your brother knew, too,” you mutter. “Lovely.”

           “Don’t be cross. It’s only out of—”

           “Sherlock Holmes,” you turn around to glare at him. “If you tell me you’re trying to protect me, I’m going to throw you out that window.”

           He smirks as he stands, ushering you to come over to him, which you do. He’s like a damn magnet, this man.

           “No need to throw me out the window,” he murmurs, tilting your head back to look in his eyes. “I only didn’t want you to worry.”

           “You realize to me it seems like you’re keeping things from me.”

           “I apologize.”

           “Hm,” You fight back a smile. “Not good enough.”

           He hears what you’re implying, so he leans down, pressing his lips to yours. “Better?”

           You nod. “Better. One more.”

           He grants your wish, pressing a kiss to your lips once again, pulling your body up against his in a way that would promise something more if John and Mary weren’t in the kitchen.

           But they are, so you pull away, grinning. “I forgive you.”

           “Seriously?”

           “No,” you shake your head. “But you are a good kisser.”

           He hums again, getting interrupted by Mary practically shoving John out of the kitchen. Your older brother stumbles into the room, giving you and Sherlock a weird – but not disgusted for the first time – look.

           “Uh, kettle’s just boiled.”

           You nod. “I’ll go help Mary with the tea.”

           Leaving Sherlock and John in the living area, you disappear into the kitchen to help Mary with tea. When you round the corner, she’s sitting at the table, sipping tea and looking through a newspaper.

           “They’re talking,” you whisper. “Fingers crossed.”

           After a few minutes, Mary taps you on the arm. Time to see if they ever decided on anything.

           You wrap your hands around the warm mug, raising your eyebrows expectantly as Sherlock and John fumble through an explanation on where they’re heading.

           “Why don’t you go with socks?” You ask.

           “You’ve gotta get the right ones,” Mary adds, earning a serious nod from both men. “It’ll take a while, right?”

           “Yeah, my coat…”

           “In there,” you nod. You flash Sherlock a smile that he returns. “Have fun.”

           “Text me if you need me.”

           “Mary is going to be here with me, Sherlock. Go out and have fun. And don’t come back for a while. We need some girl time.”

           “Okay. The guard is just downstairs, and Mycroft—”

           “I know!” You laugh. “Now get out of here.”

           Sherlock and John disappear down the stairs for what seems like the first time in absolute ages. You and Mary let out of a shared sigh of relief as the front door closes.

           “Now,” Mary begins, giving you a look. “Now that he’s gone, I have to ask, how are you doing?”

           “I’m fine,” you reply, sipping your tea as you sit down on the couch. “Why do you ask?”

           “Well, with all this marriage talk, I just wondered how that head of yours was dealing,” she moves to sit next to you. “Have you mentioned it to him?”

           “No, God no,” you laugh. “We haven’t even talked about whether or not we’re ‘dating,’ which sounds ridiculous. The papers say I’m his girlfriend, but he and I haven’t even talked about it.”

           “I think it’s safe to say he is your boyfriend.”

           “It sounds so primary school when you say it like that,” you grimace.

           “Well the two of you act like you’re in primary school because you haven’t talked about it!”

           “Okay,” you give her a look. “I don’t mind that we haven’t talked about it.”

           “You don’t want clarity?”

           “Maybe?” You shrug. “And maybe when I do, I’ll ask him, but right now, I’m happy with where we are. I’m content just being with him.”

           “Alright,” she pats my leg. “I can tell he makes you happy. And I think John is coming around.”

           “I think so, too,” you smile. “Or I hope he is, at least.”

           “No, I think he is,” Mary nods firmly. “I’ve talked with him about it and I think he sees how protective Sherlock is and he values that. John wants someone that’ll keep you safe. And Sherlock does.”

           “I feel safer than I ever have when I’m with him,” you admit quietly. “I felt safe with Tony, sure, but never like this.”

           “And that’s what I like to hear,” she smiles brightly. “Now, what’s for lunch?”

           You sigh. “I might be able to convince the guard to let us out.”

           She grins, a bit mischievously. “Let’s do it.”

[im-keefe-now]

I ask all of the kotlc questions

As requested:

1: My OTP - LINH AND SOPHIE. SOPHIE AND LINH. SOLINH. They’re both adorable angels who deserve the WORLD.

2: My BROTP - I love a lot of the friendships but honestly, Keefex. The way they got closer after Keefe found out Dex’s ability? Truly iconic. The way they joked about sharing air and punching Keefe, iconic. Their whole friendship in general? Iconic.

- I’ve already answered 3, thank goodness -

4: If I had a special talent what would I want and what do I think I’d actually get - Probably an unpopular opinion but a Mesmer or Pyrokinetic. A Mesmer because I don’t want to get up to get my water? Well now my sister can do it for me. A Pyrokinetic because I can make cookies, toast, and s’mores SO FAST. I’d probably end up with like Empathy because 1. Life hates me and 2. I’m actually really good at knowing how/what people feel, yikes.

5: If I could meet one character who would it be? - This is so obvious, but KEEFE THE BEEF SENCEN. I need hair advice (if you have any, that’d be greatly appreciated because my hair kinda sucks)

- I’ve also already done six -

7: I’d probably do the same (not because of Fitz eyes (if anything it’d be Linhs eyes that get me there)) but if I never fit in and I finally found somewhere where I did, it’d be worth it.

8: Ach this is taking forever but it’s okay! My favorite book is either Keeper 1 or Nightfall. Keeper one by default because it’s the first one to introduce you to everything which is great. Nightfall because SOKEEFE IS THRIVING IN NIGHTFALL. THE PICTURE KEEFE DREW? ICONIC. GRADY FINALLY REALIZING KEEFE ISNT TOO BAD? ICONIC.

- I’ve done nine, thank the Lord -

10: I don’t hate much (seeing as I haven’t been here to long) but sometimes...sometimes you just see something and your like...wow, I hate this. Can’t believe I had to read this with my own two eyes. And that is called SoForkle. (also, what’s his main identity anyway, huh Shannon???) The thing I love the most is probably all the canons you come with. Everything about Edaline being a mother to Keefe? Iconic.

11: I don’t write any because my thoughts are just a big jumble of crap that I can’t string into words. (However, if anyone needed a new suggestion, I highly recommend Keeper of the Lost Memories by @marellasthetic on Instagram because it’s amazing)

12: I am a huge crybaby when it comes to fictional characters, so honestly I can’t remember but if I think about it, it was probably either Calla dying or Keefe joining the Neverseen (what a crybaby).

13: The worst death to read? Wow @project-moonlark is really trying to expose me with these questions. Probably Kenric (look at me contradicting my previous statement) because I absolutely hated how broken Oralie was over that.

14: What is one item from KOTLC you’d like to have the most? This is really hard because they have great technology and such but they also don’t. Like, no google? How do I finish my homework (whoops). I’d probably want clean, FRESH air because humans suck and wasted all of ours.

15: Kesler Dizznee. Stick it to the stuffy nobles? Yes, sir. He’s literally the sweetest and, evidently, he’s great at naming kids. Favorite character, by far.

16: This is hard because I dislike a lot of characters (lol). Maybe Gisela because you know, the whole evil thing. But also she’s a b-word to Keefe. Like what’d he do to you? Besides be born??

17: First of all, how dare you. Second of all (is this like the main group or any main character?) sorry Alden, but uh, had to do it to ‘em. I know this doesn’t make sense but in my head it makes sense.

18: I don’t agree with a lot of what the Black Swan does (who messes with the genetics of an unborn child??) but I would join. I mean, the Elvin world is good but it’s not great. And the Black Swan is working to make it better.

19: The Universe. Space is cool, bro (or sis or pal depending on your preferred pronouns). And it’d be fun to go look at stars for homework (date ideas??).

20: If I could meet Shannon (which I might be doing in November!) I would most definitely demand (politely because I don’t want to be rude to her) more Dex and the triplets content because they deserve it.

@nervousnightcollector87 thank you for the ask!

[another-dork]

  Oh, cool! I’m usually never tagged for these things, so it was a fun surprise! Thanks for tagging me 😊

Tagged by: @southerncloud

Rules: Answer 21 questions and tag 21 people you want to know better

Nicknames: Catie Ann, Katia, Katica, Cat, Māo 猫 (it’s cat in Mandarin; a friend of mine is from China is responsible for this), Willis, Turtle, Bug, Tündér (it’s fairy in Hungarian; a family nickname) Girly, and Wings

Zodiac sign: Aquarius

Height: 5’8 (Midsize bean)

Hogwarts House: According to the quiz I’m a Gryffindor/Hufflepuff. Honestly, I’m probably more a hufflepuff.

Last thing googled: “accessory ossicles” locations

Favorite musicians: Vampire Weekend, Rich Mullins, Johnny Cash, John Williams, Caro Emerald, Ella Fritzgerald, The Hives, George Gershwin, and plenty more

Song stuck in my head: Hard Times by Paramore and Let Me Down Slowly by Alec Benjamin I’ve was playing around with different aspects of each and mashing them together while at work today so they’re all kind of stuck in there.

Favorite time of day: The twilight before sunrise, when all the birds start to sing and the sky begins to turn. It’s just the best when you can catch it; especially if you have a cup of tea or coffee.

Favorite color: Amber, currently

Following: 4,987

Followers: 495 (Which way more people than I thought would ever follow me; thanks guys!)

Do I get asks: Nope, and that’s alright :)

Amount of sleep: I usually end up with 5 or 6 hours

Favorite numbers: 121

Wearing: A knee-length black skirt, a geeky t-shirt, and some sandals (it’s very comfy)

Dream job: Chemical Engineer

Instruments: I can play piano and the hardest instrument of all- the triangle

Languages: English and tiny bits of Spanish, Hungarian, and Latin

Favorite Songs: Fernando Ortega’s Give Me Jesus; You Did Not Have a Home by Rick Elias, Mark Robertson and Jimmy Abegg; Grace Kelly by MIKA; Goody Two Shoes by Adam Ant; Rhapsody in Blue by George Gershwin; My Chemical Romance’s Planetary (GO!); That Where I Am, There You by Rich Mullians; High Hopes by Panic! At the Disco; William Murphy’s Everlasting God; That Man by Caro Emerald; Thy Will by Hillary Scott; and way too many more.

Random fact: Three of my younger brothers are identical triplets

Aesthetic: uh… kind of basic? I tend to lean towards comfy artsy hipster with (sometimes) a loose but cute scientific twist. So I have dinosaur plant markers in my garden and I am currently knitting a picnic blanket that’s meant to look retro. Does that explain it?

Tagging: @real-truth, @constellation-savvy, @arithmetic-mean, @girlysword, @cliff-snowpeak, and anyone else who’d like to do this. Have fun!

[illgetmerope]

I got tagged :)

I was tagged by the lovey @irisnsc - I haven’t done a tag ever, so...

Rules: answer these questions then tag 20 blogs you’d like to know better

Nickname(s): Bug or Annabug, and A-Mo.

Zodiac: Leo

Height: 5'9″

Time: 11:05 AM

Favorite Band/Artist: The Beatles. No contest.

Song stuck in my head: If Only You Would Listen from School of Rock the Musical (just got done with tech week on that show)

Last movie I saw: Three Identical Strangers- a documentary about a set of triplets separated at birth. It’s good, I recommend!

Last thing I googled: Lyrics for If Only You Would Listen because it is SO STUCK IN MY HEAD.

Other blogs: None. This one is more than enough of a time suck hahaha!

Do I get asks: Yes? I don’t actually know what this question is asking. My asks are open. Go for it, y’all.

Why I chose this username: When I got on LiveJournal in high school I was very into The Boondock Saints, and I chose a name based on a quote from that film, and I just kept it. I like it!

Average amount of sleep: 6-7 hours. I am a good sleeper!

Lucky number: I like 11. And pi.

What I’m wearing: Star Trek T-Shirt and gym shorts.

Dream job: I've already got mine- high school math and science teacher. The dream part is to one day teach in the UK.

Dream trip: Japan.

Favorite food: Probably sushi, but I also adore gnocchi.

Play any instruments: Technically I play piano in so much as I took lessons for 7 years. It has been quite a while, so I would not say I have any ability. I can sing?

Eye color: Brown

Hair color: Brown

Languages you speak: English, Spanish, some Italian.

Most iconic song: Iconic... hmm... I mean the one that makes me immediately sing along is It’s Gonna Be Me by Nsync?

Random fact: My favorite tool is the chop saw.

Hmm... I don’t know who to tag! I suppose I’ll go with @thesnowyswan @theprincessed @letthebluerain @escapingreality51 and @omarandjohnny and end there because 20 blogs is an insane number. I don’t follow that many people hahaha!

[adelmortescryche]

yoimafiaweek - day 7

AN: Ack, I hope I’m not too late with my submission, @yoimafiaweek! This is what happens when you get caught between two really different ideas. Well, anyway, here’s my fill for day 7! I’m going with ‘Identity Reveal’, since it’s a free day. What a week this has been. *grins*

Premise: Have some podium family fluff/humor, and Yuri P.’s POV! This follows his journey to figure out why something about Yuuri, the Katsuki family and Hasetsu as a whole seems... Very... Strange. There’s no way in hell Katsudon’s in the yakuza. Right?

Warnings in advance for language and attitude in this one: Yurio’s got one hell of a potty mouth. Nothing too explicit, but there’s a whole load of f bombs all through his narrative.

Whatever the hell Yuri had been expected when he finally got around to joining the pig and Victor in the hot springs, it sure as fuck hadn’t been the humongous red dragon tattooed on the pig’s back.

“Eh? Are you okay, Yurio?”

The pig actually had the fucking gall to look confused.

Victor barely looked phased, damn him. And it only got worse when they actually headed out to the bathing area. He still remembered Yuuko and the triplets’ dumb lectures about why you weren’t supposed to stare at people in the hot springs, but it was a little hard to actually not look at anyone when at least fifty percent of the people around him were inked up in places where their clothes could cover it, just like the pig.

“I though the Japanese were supposed to be prudes about shit like tattoos,” he hissed at the old man under his breath, but Victor just gave a gay little laugh.

“Oh, but Yuuri and his family are really open-minded! I’ve been to hot springs before when I’ve come to Japan for competitions, Chris dragged me out on a free day between events, but I barely saw anyone with this much ink then.”

Yuri just had to stare up at him in silent incredulity for a moment. Because, really, wasn’t that a fucking sign that there was something fucking wrong with the picture here?

And by that point the pig was headed back their way, towel over his shoulder. Which, god, he didn’t get the Japanese at all. Katsuki was such a wimp and jumping at shadows all of the time, having a sick look flashing across his face when he noticed the barest pudge around his middle in reflective surfaces, freaking out when Victor touched his cloth covered shoulder, and he didn’t even hesitate to roam about with his dick out when they were in the baths? He couldn’t figure out if the older skater was body conscious or not, at this point.

He’d probably lose the pudge. Yuri hadn’t been around for more than a week in the Podunk little town Victor had chosen to set up in, and he could already tell Katsuki was a stamina monster of the worst kind. He had the flab to burn, but one look at his mom had told Yuri that Katsuki’s pudge was genetic, and not necessarily letting himself go since he’d fucking given up on skating.

The news about his retirement had shaken Yuri hard, because he sure as hell hadn’t been expecting it to come out. So he’d had a bad skate day. It sucked balls. Didn’t mean he couldn’t lift himself off the floor and get back to it, right?

He’d suspected Yuuri was a yellow bellied coward until he’d taken the flight to Hasetsu to see whether or not Victor had just followed his libido to fucking Japan. And while he still thought Victor might very well have followed his libido like originally assumed, he… could already tell there was something more going on, there. Well, whatever. Sure, he’d be disappointed irritated if the pig actually decided to go cold turkey and drop everything, but to be really honest, he was more interested in getting that program Victor promised him. He’d cut it out of the old man’s balding hide with his skates if he had to damnit.

Yuuri sank into the water beside them with a long sigh, the line of his frame wet and lithe as he slicked his hair back with both hands and leaned into the edge of the pool, staring up at the sky with a sharp look in his eyes. Victor made a choking sound, not able to tear his gaze away, and Yuri rolled his eyes, aiming a kick at his hip.

The wounded sound he got in response was fully worth the put upon look the pig shot them both.

*

It wasn’t just in the springs, though. Yuri was willing to bet anything that there was something up in Hasetsu. Or, if not the town as a whole, then definitely in Yu-topia Katsuki. Which, really, that was such a shitty play on the pig’s name. He hadn’t found it cool or anything, seriously. So lame.

But, anyway.

Something was up. He could have sworn that at least a few men the pig’s dad drank and cracked jokes with in the night were inked from head to toe. Well, every covered bit of them, anyway, when they weren’t pulling their long sleeves back because of the damp air sitting heavy in the dining area. They all looked the rough sort, but it hadn’t actually registered right after he got to Hasetsu – a combination of the facts that, not only were they really friendly with anyone staying at the inn under Yuuri Katsuki’s name, but also that they… didn’t really look rough to him. He was probably being naive about it, but how the hell was he supposed to know how gangsters looked anywhere else in the world? He barely knew what they looked like in St. Petersburg or Moscow – he just knew what sections of the cities to avoid while out on his own to avoid trouble. That had always been how it went no matter where he went – you couldn’t trust movies or books to tell you what trouble looked like, but you sure as hell could avoid trouble by not heading out to places the actual residents in a city avoided on a good day.

And, anyway, it was probably better he didn’t go to those places. Yuri knew himself, he knew how likely he was to pick a fight with someone just because they looked at him too long or funny. And he couldn’t afford to get shanked in an alley for being dumb, he had his dedushka (дедушка) to think about, damnit. And he was getting old.

So, yeah. He never really registered that the pig’s father’s friends looked ‘rough’. Not until this one time he saw one of the really old guys gesturing at something in the newspaper with a fucking knife, relatively longer blade and everything which, holy shit, and not one person in the room actually reacted. Well, no, that wasn’t true. A couple of the guests who’d come down from a bigger city for a weekend off or some shit went white and looked away immediately, murmuring to each other. That was actually what had made Yuri curious, really. He’d been taking his cues from Victor, but the old man had more air in his head than anything else. Unless you spoke about skating or Victorian Literature, or Romanticism or – yeah. The old man was an air head if it wasn’t literature or skating. Or Yuuri, but he just got more airheaded then, didn’t he?

Bottom line, he probably shouldn’t have been taking his cues from Victor. But even if he had been doing that, he had to admit, the people who showed up at the inn each night… weren’t bad people. Even if they were rougher than Yuri had actually registered until that point.

No, what actually had him confused was what role the pig had to play in all of it. Because asking him outright had just netted Yuri a faint smile. Asking Yuuko had earned him a giggle, and her husband had just rolled his eyes, saying Yuri was better off not thinking about it.

The triplets had just laughed at him. He actually missed when the little hellions were too busy gasping and taking pictures of him and Victor all the time – now that they’d gotten over the momentary hero worship they were downright scary irritating.

At least he got why the pig got that look on his face whenever he caught sight of them filming things on the side of the rink and giggling at each other, now.

*

Actually looking it up on Google had just confused him further. Because Japan and tattoos and springs just got him a whole bunch of yakuza discourse and why people in Japan were so uneasy about tattoos.

Irezumi was gorgeous, he had to admit. That said- no. Just, no way. The fucking pork cutlet bowl couldn’t be a gangster goddamnit, it made no sense.

There had to be something else going on and he was going to get to the bottom of it if it was the last thing he did.

Fuck.

*

“Make sure Victor doesn’t get in over his head, okay?” he growled at Yuuko, when she caught him just before he headed to the airport.

She tilted her head to the side, that same blandly amused smile he’d seen on Katsudon’s face flitting across her lips. It made him hunch his shoulders up instinctively, because thinking about Katsudon right then wasn’t very nice. The look on Victor’s face when he stared out at the rink had sent a sick wave through Yuri’s gut, but even he had to admit that the kind of meteoric rise Yuuri had made overnight meant Victor sticking around could only benefit him.

He’d get one hell of an opponent to beat out of the bargain, but that didn’t mean he had to like it. Victor was unchanging, he’d always been there. For all that he respected thought that Katsudon’s skate skills were worth something, losing Victor to the cause just pissed him off.

At least he’d be back at some point. Right? Right. And Katsudon would just follow him wherever he went, so there was that. He’d get them both. To skate against, obviously, that’s all they were worth, but he’d get them both.

“I don’t know what the fu- I don’t know what’s going on here, but Victor’s an idiot. You control the pig to some extent, right. Make sure Victor doesn’t get hurt.” Yuri demanded, point blank, and Yuuko’s face softened to something that almost looked fond.

Ugh.

“That doesn’t mean that I’m not going to win! I don’t care what weird shit Katsudon’s involved in, but it doesn’t make him a better skater than me! Tell them I’ll see them on the ice. Dasvidaniya (До свида́ния).”

His piece said, he turned around and walked away.

*

That sure as hell didn’t mean he stopped thinking about it, though. Lilia and Yakov put him through hell, as did learning and training his free skate. And streamlining his Agape, which Yakov had looked pleased with, when he’d gotten back to St. Petersburg and showed him what he’d learnt.

“You’ve gotten soft, Yura,” Mila teased, and he tuned her out. And tuned Georgi’s dramatics behind her.

He hadn’t gotten soft. He’d just hardened up where it counted. So there.

But, like he said, it was kind of hard to not keep thinking about the old man and the pig. Especially when he was training Agape, for some reason. Yakov had gotten a strange look on his face when he’d complained about that, but at least he’d settled in to listen when Yuri complained. After training, mind you, he’d have gotten yelled right back onto the ice if he’d tried to say anything during training.

His complaints had just gotten him a weird look, though.

“Yura, you’re being paranoid,” he sighed, once Yuri was done. It made Yuri flare up dramatically in response, but Yakov just got a hand on the top of his head, and his voice cut off immediately when he noticed the look in his coach’s eyes.

It wasn’t pure disbelief, just… bemusement. And irritation, yes, but that as Yakov all the time every time. He had to keep an eye on too many skaters, and with people like Mila and Georgi around, obviously he was going to be irritated. Those two were such a fucking pain. And Victor, but thinking about Victor just made Yakov blow up most of the time.

Yuri complaining about the sheer weirdness of the Katsuki family and the guests at their inn was about the only time he didn’t blow up, actually.

Maybe he just didn’t know how to react? Who the fuck knew.

“Get back to Lilia’s home quickly, and rest. You have a long day ahead of you tomorrow,” he said, and Yuri nodded, scowl firmly in place.

*

He didn’t need to be believed by his rink mates or coach. Hell, Katsudon and Yuuko had all but confirmed that something was up in the way they quietly ignored all his questions. So, whatever.

He’d just ask Chulanont and that American skater about it- he’d followed observed enough of the pig’s career to know whom he spoke to off of the ice. Even if the American didn’t know about it, Chulanont definitely would, and at least one of them had to make it to the final, right? Right. If they were both pathetic enough that they didn’t get till the end he’d just message Chulanont over Instagram.

And after the pig’s disgustingly good performance during his short program, he’d definitely make it till Rostelecom, at the least. Yuri was going to find some way to murder people with the power of his mind if he didn’t.

*

“Yakuza?” Chulanont repeated with a grin, the night before the short program. “I don’t know whom you’ve been speaking to, little Yuri, but have you seen my boy? He wouldn’t hurt a fly!”

“That’s not what I asked and you know it,” Yuri grunted, scowl in place.

Chulanont just laughed and waved him off, turning around and walking away. Probably to go spend some time catching up with ‘his boy’. Fucking disgusting, is what it was.

Why the fuck wasn’t anyone willing to take him at his word, damnit. He already knew Yuuri wouldn’t hurt a fly. Unless he was going through a bout of self-doubt, or some shit, in which case all bets were off. But Yuri knew he wouldn’t go out of his way to hurt anyone. Not unless they deserved it, anyway.

Or, at least, that’s what he thought till he ran into Victor in the corridor the night after the short skate, red eyed and wet cheeked. He’d been hanging out with Beka, and just going back to his room after Yakov had yelled at him on the phone about curfews for a while. The sight made his brows rise, bemused. Because he had to be seeing things, right.

Well, he thought he was seeing things until Victor hurriedly wiped his eyes and gave him a wide, cheesy and disgustingly fake grin, anyway.

“Ok, what the fuck.” He snapped, making the older man laugh.

“It’s nothing, Yurio. What are you doing outside your room, though? Little kittens should be asleep by now!”

The words made him snarl and aim a punch at Victor’s stomach, but for once, the old man actually caught Yuri’s fist in his hand, the smile fracturing just a bit before he pasted it back in place.

“I’ve had a really long night,” he said, “and I think I need a drink. And you need to sleep. You should get back to your room before you worry Yakov.”

Don’t say that when you look like you’re going to start crying if I leave you and go, Yuri threw at him mentally, but no way in fuck was he going to say it out loud.

“Did the pig finally fess up about being a gangster or some shit?” he snapped instead, just putting it out there, and stopped short when Victor’s hand actually tightened around his wrist, his eyes going wide for a split second before he got them back under control.

Whoa, okay. Not what he’d fucking expected.

“You should get to bed, Yura,” Victor said, and after staring up at him for a few more moments, Yuri gave a slow nod. And backed off.

*

“My dad’s family’s old school yakuza, yeah,” Yuuri said with a bemused smile, the morning after the banquet. Over fucking breakfast, of all things.

Chulanont, who’d dropped in to join them for breakfast along with Giacometti and Beka, made a choking sound.

“Yuuri,” he wailed, sounding heartbroken, and Yuuri started laughing, damn him.

“I knew it!” Yuri declared, vindicated, pumping a fist in the air. And made to jump straight over the table between them when Katsudon turn that razor-like grin his way.

Beka caught him by the hem of his jacket and pulled him back down into his seat. He turned a wounded look on the older teen, and got a single shoulder shrug in response. Which, okay. Okay. He wouldn’t make a scene, damnit.

But it was so damn tempting. He wanted to bash the pig’s face in.

“Yuuri said that the Katsuki clan takes care of Hasetsu,” Victor explained, curled up right against Yuuri’s other side. They traded a pair of disgustingly sappy looks before looking back at him and Yuri just had to bare his teeth in response.

“That doesn’t tell me anything. Don’t scrimp out on the fucking details, Katsudon – I’ve been going crazy for almost a whole damned year!” he snarled, making Yuuri grin.

“Well. It’s not like we really talk about it. What was I supposed to say?”

“Hi, I’m Katsuki Yuuri, Japan’s Ace, and oh, I’m also in the yakuza,” Chulanont suggested sulkily, making Katsudon elbow him. Victor coughed on his other side, hiding a grin of his own, and Yuri groaned, covering his face.

“I was starting to think I wouldn’t find out until I ran into Katsudon fighting delinquents in an alley or some shit. What the fuck. What the fuck,” he mumbled, making nearly everyone at the table muffle their laughter into their fists or shirt sleeves. Except for Victor, who fucking sighed, sounding like a lovestruck American movie actress or something. Why were they so-

“Disgusting,” he groaned into his hands again, and Beka patted him comfortingly on the back.

See? This is why he liked Beka. He wasn’t disgusting. Not like the pig and the old man, or even like fucking Giacometti, who was smirking on Beka’s other side.

“Is that actually what happened? Is that how you found out?”

Yuri stiffened immediately, hands still covering his face, but Victor didn’t even hesitate when he laughed and cracked a joke about always being ready to be rescued by ‘his Yuuri’. When Yuri peered over the tips of his fingers, Katsudon was staring straight back at him, eyes sharp as a naked blade.

Yuri stared back. Because he wasn’t fucking afraid. Not of Katsudon. And es-fucking-specially not when he’d been the one to make Victor cry.

Yuuri eyed him for a moment longer before cracking a wry smile, turning his attention back to what Chulanont was saying beside him. And Yuri didn’t think anyone else had noticed their silent exchange, not until Beka’s fingers tightened on Yuri’s back.

When he looked around, surprised, it was to find that Otabek had gone still, gaze fastened right on Yuuri’s face where he was laughing and flushing at whatever it was Victor was whispering into his ear. And when he looked down at Yuri, his eyes had gone just that slightest bit wide.

Yeah. Yeah. This? This was why he liked Otabek. He wasn’t blind, unlike nearly every other damned person that Yuri could name.

*

“Yuuri didn’t lie when he said that the Katsuki clan protects Hasetsu,” Yuuko said with a smile, when he video-called her to complain about her friend.

“That doesn’t tell me anything. Also, what the hell, do they teach people in Hasetsu to be unassuming or something?”

“Toshiya-san’s family probably owns most of the land in town, now,” she went on, not responding to what Yuri said.

Yuri didn’t even feel miffed about that. What she’d offered up was so much more interesting.

“Wait, what?” he breathed, and she burst into giggles.

“Yes,” she said, “oh, that’s how Takeshi reacted when we were children, when he first moved to Hasetsu with his dad. Yuuri’s family’s loaded. That’s why they were so willing to send him off to study skating abroad without any hesitation. Toshiya-san supported Yuuri all the way through the juniors until Sponsors started approaching him – and that didn’t happen until right before he got into the Senior League.”

Yuri stared at her.

“That- but- The inn! It’s a dump!”

“It’s homey,” she corrected with a grin. “And, anyway, the Katsuki clan was never big on impressing anyone. There’s absolutely no crime in Hasetsu or any of the surrounding towns- they police their territory better than the actual officers do, and even after the smaller onsens lost business, they never took it out on the people who rented their property.”

Yuri choked, because didn’t that mean the Katsuki clan owned-

“They’re good people, Yurio. If a little scary when you piss them off. Yuuri’s like that too, you know,” she concluded, smiling softly at him.

The expression on her face made him want to throw his phone straight at the fucking wall.

But, okay. Okay.

“Tell me more,” he said, and that was that.

*

If you make him cry again-

I won’t.

You better not, Katsudon. Or fuck your badass yakuza rep-

I don’t know what you’re talking about, Yurio.

Yuraaaaaa~ You had best not be talking about me when I’m not there to hear you!

*

What the hell was he supposed to do with these two. Really.

[condensed-theorem-shop]

a love letter to the Constellation

 This one's for @marrinikari and @throne3d.

Constellation, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I don’t think I mention enough how much I love the Constellation.

I started glowficcing at the very end of its being on Dreamwidth, a little while before the Constellation sprang into being from Marri’s head, like Athena from the head of Zeus. So I only had a little taste of glowficcing not on the Constellation, and that was quite enough.

I am genuinely unsure whether I’d have ended up getting into glowfic if it weren’t for the Constellation -- doing it on Dreamwidth was that unwieldy. I know I’m not the only one to have expressed this sentiment. If we’re counting up our Very Large Numbers of glowfic, T’Mir style, I think Marri should get a significant cut of every new thread made.

On Dreamwidth, switching between characters involved logging out of one account and logging into another, every time, keeping track manually of all your accounts. When you had two or three characters in a thread and were rotating between them, this got unimaginably annoying -- the login process wasn’t that bad, but going through it for every single two-word reply frequently made me want to punch through the screen.

On the Constellation, switching between characters takes two clicks. Click to bring up the list, click to pick one. You don’t even have to scroll up to the top of the page, the way you did on Dreamwidth; it’s right there next to the reply box. You don’t even have to type in the name of the character to search the list, or scroll through it; characters who have previously appeared in the thread get their own section at the top of the list.

This is incredible. I love it. I can have a separate account for each NPC, instead of running them all out of a main account and only making separate accounts for important characters, because it’s that easy to swap between them. I can write long conversations between two of my characters, without getting frustrated and resorting to putting all their dialogue in the same post and relying on my readers to keep track of which is whose. I can be replying to half a dozen threads at the same time without having to swap between characters for each of those.

Switching characters is one of the Constellation’s most basic features -- I don’t think I’ve ever commented on it, except to request that it be made even more convenient in one way or another -- but I can’t overstate just how huge a quality-of-life improvement it is.

Another huge improvement the Constellation makes as part of its basic structure: everything is linked to everything else.

Click on a character, and you can see its template. Click on a template, and you can see all its instances. Click on an author, and you can see all their threads. And so on and so forth.

Again, this gets so easy to take for granted, because it’s how things obviously should work, but it’s this huge boon which I rely on constantly. I can’t remember what I established as canon about a certain character? Click on their name, go to the list of threads they appear in, check those. Can’t remember who one of Lintamande’s endless Elves is? Click on the character, go to their template, switch to icon view, recognize the face of one of the instances even though I can’t keep track of their names.

And I remember what a pain it was not to have these features that Marri built us. The first time I read through Effulgence, it took me forever to figure out which characters were whose -- multiple re-reads, usually -- I still occasionally realize that I assumed wrong about the moiety of some minor character. Now, I can just ... look at the author name.

I remember struggling to figure out what template a given character was -- which can be fun, sometimes, but as a new reader who’s trying to get all these characters straight it’s more overwhelming than fun -- and sometimes not being able to figure it out at all, especially if the thread was a short one. (I hadn’t yet gotten over my shy lurkiness enough to ask the authors.) Now, I can just click through to the character page and go “ohhh, it’s another Serg.”

I remember when I finally fell in love with Mileses. It took me a while; I wasn’t familiar with the canon, and combining that with the twins and triplets and the fact that there wasn’t a way to check templates so sometimes I couldn’t even figure out which triplet was which, and with the fact that they have an identical twin who has a half-alt who also comes with an identical twin but a different one -- okay, so I found Mileses too confusing to enjoy properly for a while. But eventually it clicked, and I promptly wanted to read all the Miles threads, and there ... wasn’t a good way to do that! I couldn’t go from an instance to the threads they were in; I couldn’t even find all the accounts of Miles instances; there wasn’t any master-list of Kappa’s glowfic; even within Effulgence, there wasn’t an easy way to see which threads would have Mileses in them. Alicorn’s list of her glowfic helped some, the glowfic Dreamwidth comm helped some, and for the rest I resorted to increasingly desperate googling. (And I still missed some.) Now, of course, if I want to read all of the Miles threads on the Constellation I can just go to the template page. And since that’s the sort of thing I want to do pretty frequently, the Constellation is an incredible gift.

Let’s talk about icons.

Starting with the obvious: remember Dreamwidth, with the fifteen-icon limit? Yeah, I don’t know how people even worked with that. I’m pretty sure my average Jean-instance has more than fifteen variations on “empty, broken gaze into the middle distance, too shellshocked to bother crying” alone. And that’s before you start in on “struggling not to cry” and “openly sobbing” and “frightened, but in a tired way because of constant hyperalertness from trauma” and “bitter laugh” and “hysterical laugh on the edge of tears” and... So the Constellation is a vast improvement just by virtue of letting me have as many icons as I want. Now I can have all the shades of Jeantrauma with appropriate pictorial representations!

And what’s more, I can use the same gallery on more than one character, and more than one gallery on the same character! So I can have a standard gallery of my most ubiquitously useful Jean icons -- and a specific gallery for each instance with icons that only that instance uses, to establish some visual distinctions -- and a whole gallery of extra sad icons for extra traumatized Jeans -- and a gallery for instances who are particularly involved with running their underground organizations -- and a gallery for instances with long hair.

(And I am aware that all this is ridiculous and over-the-top but I like doing it and now I can! And it makes creating new instances so easy, too, when I can just start them out with one or two of the general-use galleries and go ahead and thread like that, and it’s super easy to later go add a gallery of icons specific to them. Because the Constellation is so good.)

It’s easy to build those general-use galleries, too, because the Constellation has a feature that lets you scroll through all your icons, divided by gallery, and select the ones you want to add to another gallery. (Icons can be in more than one gallery!) So if I’ve been just doing individual galleries for each instance of a template, and then they end up becoming more prominent than I expected and it’s starting to get out of hand, I can just browse through all of those and make up a default gallery for the character with the best icons from all of the galleries.

Oh, and it’s easy to figure out which icons are the most useful to have in a default gallery, because you can click on the icon and go to a stats page that will tell you how many times you’ve used it! And what’s more, it provides you with handy links to all of the replies where you’ve used it, which I use in a ridiculously self-indulgent and clearly-not-intended way, finding a favorite phrase from one of those and setting it as the icon’s keyword once I’ve been using it for a while. And this makes me super happy every time I use the icon, and it seems to entertain other people, and the reason I can do it is the Constellation is so wonderful.

And then there are all the tools the Constellation has for fixing one’s own stupidity with icons. If you’ve been using an icon for months and suddenly you realize there’s a glaring blemish that you can’t unsee, you have so many options for fixing this. You can replace the link to hosting with a link to a fixed version! You can go to the list of replies-with-that-icon and change each one to a different icon! You can delete the icon, if you decide you’d rather just have no icon on those posts! All this as opposed to Dreamwidth, where your options were ... let me count ... right, literally nothing.

Or if, like me, you’re prone to putting an icon in a gallery and failing to move it out of your “unassigned icons for X character” gallery (which I can have! because Constellation!) and then completely forgetting about this and adding it obliviously to another gallery, and being annoyed that you’ve got the same icon in more than one gallery: no problem! You can go to an icon’s page and see a list of all the galleries it’s in! And you can remove it from those galleries safely, too, you’re not going to break all of the icons in replies where you’ve already used it, not unless you delete the icon altogether.

And then there’s how delightfully permissive the Constellation is with icon keywords! I can have my ridiculously long quote-keywords, because there’s no length maximum! I can have punctuation! I can have upper and lower case without them all getting made the same! I can have arbitrary unicode characters! I can have more than one icon in the same gallery with the same keyword! Yes of course I have used all of these I am the literal worst edge-case user!

Or here’s one: the facecasts page.

Marri did not, like, need to make a facecasts page. She didn’t need to do any of this, but she extra didn’t need to make a facecasts page. No one was going to look at the glowfic website and go “you know, this is pretty good, but why is there not a page listing all of the facecasts which have been used, and the corresponding characters and templates and authors?” This is not a core feature. If I had written up specs for a glowfic website (which I didn’t, because I am not as awesome as Marri), it would not have occurred to me to put in a facecasts page.

And yet there it is, quiet and functional and present since the very beginning of the website. And you guys, it is so useful? Especially for new glowficcers, it is wonderful if you are a new glowficcer and terrified of stepping on toes and haven’t learned all of everyone’s million characters yet and what if you pick a facecast that already belongs to the character of someone super important and everyone judges you? (This is not, to be clear, a reasonable worry, but in my experience brains are rarely reasonable.)

You don’t have to worry about accidentally taking someone else’s facecast anymore. Not even if you are terrible with faces (as I am) and find yourself squinting at Pretty White Male Actor With Dashingly Ruffled Short Brown Hair #47865 and going “.....have I seen them before somewhere? might it have been glowfic? is that literally boy-Bell? I have no idea!”

No; now you can just go to the Facecasts page on the Constellation, and ctrl+F for their name, and there you are.  I do this every time I pick a new facecast: hollow art open in one tab, the Facecasts page in another, and I can rule actors out before I fall in love with them and start picturing the character with their face.

And, like -- on the one hand it’s super simple? But on the other hand it’s not only super useful, it’s something that can only exist because of the huge amount of work that’s gone into the Constellation. It works because the create-a-character page is conveniently enough designed that people actually, reliably fill in the “facecast” field. It works because there is a “facecast” field, because this is a website designed for glowfic, we aren’t sticking that in character descriptions or icon credits or somewhere else equally makeshift. It works because there’s an easy way to view a list of all your characters, with their various information in a neat table, so that you can spot ones where you forgot to put a facecast. It works because it’s easy to edit characters, to go back and put in that facecast you forgot. And, on a fundamental level, it works because the Constellation is good -- because it’s so good that glowfic completely migrated to it, so now we have it all together in one place, which means that the Facecasts page can actually pick up all of the facecasts.

Or there’s the Tags Owed page. I suspect I rely on that even more than most people (and most people, I think, rely on it a lot), because of the ways that my brain is terrible.

(And that’s another wonderful thing about the Constellation; it’s designed while explicitly taking people with terrible brains into consideration. And there are probably all sorts of social-justice-y things to say about that -- and that’s not meant to be dismissive, I’m sure many of those are worth saying, I’m just not the one to say them -- but on a basic level, it seems like empirical proof that when people with terrible brains build their own community, magic things happen. Things which mean that they can function in the community. Social model of disability!)

But back to Tags Owed -- first of all, it means that I can glowfic even on days when I cannot people. I don’t have to have gchat or IRC or anything else available for pinging with replies; I can just refresh Tags Owed once in a while. No human interaction required. Without that, I suspect I would glowfic something like 10-25% as much as I currently do.

Then there’s the fact that it keeps track of all your threads for you. On Dreamwidth, you didn’t have a nice way to do that, let alone an automatic way. I mostly wound up leaving tabs open with all of my active threads. I’m sure other people had other methods. But with Tags Owed, Pedro can have his two dozen active threads, and the rest of us can have our large-but-not-quite-that-large numbers, and we don’t have to work to keep track of all that, the Constellation does it for us. We can just go to Tags Owed and work down the list until (if we have Hard Work And Determination) there aren’t any left waiting for us. (And right there, Tags Owed is already so much nicer than just a list of Active Threads You Are In; it’s obvious at a moment’s glance whether you owe tags and what in, and you get that wonderful sense of satisfaction when you clear it out and don’t owe any.)

And then there’s the ability to hiatus threads, which I cannot praise highly enough. I’m sure I drive plenty of coauthors up the wall with my thread-dropping ways; but the ability to hiatus threads is fairly key to my ability to function as a glowficcer. If all the threads in the intersection of {haven’t tagged in some time and don’t expect to in the immediate future} and {not ready to declare totally dropped} were constantly on my Tags Owed page, I can tell you right now what would happen, having lived with myself for a couple of decades: I’d feel anxious and guilty about it, so I’d avoid looking at them, so I’d avoid opening my Tags Owed page, so I’d tag less in all my threads, so I’d feel more anxious, and it would spiral downwards until I was glowficcing zero. Having the ability to hiatus threads means that I have the room to say “okay, this is not something I can do right now, but I don’t want to give up on it either.” (Which is, like, a really good thing to be able to say, mental-health-wise.)

And it also means that, even if I can’t tag a thread for a while, it’s not lost to the ravages of time. Back on Dreamwidth, if I stalled on a thread for a week and then picked it back up, my cowriter would usually need me to message them the link so that they could find it again; and that was when I usually only had one or two threads and so could keep track of them, so I had the link on hand and remembered to keep checking if my brain was up to tagging in it. With just a few more threads, I’d have inevitably ended up putting a thread aside for a while and then completely forgetting it existed (and my cowriter probably would, too). Now, though, if I can’t tag in a thread for a week, I keep remembering to try, because I see it every time I open my Tags Owed. And when I have a particularly good brain day, I can go to the list of all my threads and browse the hiatused ones and see if there are any I’m up to picking up again.

I love my Tags Owed page. I love, love, love, love, love it. It’s so useful, and it’s a thing that feels so right to have. It feels bizarre to think about glowficcing without it.

The Favorites page. The Favorites page! I have eight links on my bookmarks bar (for recreation; I use a separate browser for work), and two of them are Tags Owed and Favorites. It means I can conveniently keep up with all the threads I’m following; and, on the other side of the coin, it means that at least there’s only one page I’m addictively refreshing, instead of all the threads I’m reading. It means that when people ask me for glowfic recs (as happens fairly regularly), I can easily browse through some of my favorite threads, ongoing and completed, and pick out a couple appropriate to the situation.

I think the Favorites page is emblematic of one of the greatest achievements of the Constellation. As far as I can tell (I was around-but-new during the crucial times) there was a huge boom in glowfic at about the same time as the exodus to the Constellation. (I’m not sure of the causation, there -- Dreamwidth getting unwieldy with that much glowfic? The convenience of the Constellation meaning people glowficced more, and more new people got into it? Coincidence? A bit of all those?)

In any case, the Constellation handled that boom with incredible aplomb. There was a sudden need for all these new tools -- and most of the time it wasn’t clear what tools, exactly, just that what we had wasn’t working -- and Marri, and later Throne, stepped up to the plate and hit a home run.

With only a couple of authors, it worked fine to follow their personal indexes or blogs to keep up with new glowfic; with only a relatively small amount of glowfic happening, it was feasible for them to maintain those indexes. Daily reports could happen manually; people could announce new threads; it wasn’t really a system, but it worked fine. Things weren’t very transparent to new people, but there weren’t a lot of new people.

And then: ridiculous amounts of glowfic. And somehow, the Constellation -- despite being tiny and under development and run by Marri-and-Throne-in-their-spare-time -- despite the boom happening while it was still on shaky metaphorical toddler legs -- the Constellation kept up. The Constellation made dealing with that possible, so instead of drowning we got to stretch out on the lovely sunny beach by our new ocean and sip iced drinks.

The Constellation gave us Favorites; and Unread, not just “threads with unread posts” which was already wonderful but also “unopened threads” as its own page, and as a visual distinction on other pages; and continuities as an actual functionality; and a search feature; and the ability to do things like favoriting an author or a continuity, or hiding a thread or a continuity from unread, or finding all threads with a given character or author, or just plain seeing all of the glowfic right there in one place.

And, like -- I know I have muttered about filters, and whether hiding things should mark them read, and subcontinuities, and so on, as much as anyone. But, at least this once, I would like to register not only how incredibly grateful I am for the tools the Constellation gives us for managing the flood of glowfic, but how amazed I am at Marri’s and Throne’s ability to build headache-inducingly complex tools (which don’t induce headaches on the user end), and have them work, and to do this under conditions roughly equivalent to building a spaceship while it hurtles through the atmosphere, spurting jets of flame, escaping from an imploding planet with a black hole at the center.

Another thing that feels too trivial to mention until I actually stop and reflect on it: editing.

Dreamwidth doesn’t let you edit comments which have been replied to. This is probably reasonable in a blogging site! It means that you can’t go back and change something you said, in response to an objection, and then have people reading the thread later on assume the other person is just a jerk objecting to something completely reasonable. It means you can’t edit something and then deny ever having said it at all. In general, it means that you can’t change the meaning of someone else’s comment by altering your comment which it was a reply to.

However, when the site is being used for glowfic, this is a lot less reasonable. You couldn’t do something as simple (and easily taken for granted) as fixing a typo. (Which could be just annoying, if it was something silly that distracted from a dramatic moment, or actively confusing, if you accidentally mis-indicated who was talking.) If someone clueless, or a spambot, replied to a thread, and someone else trying to be helpful replied to suggest they not do that, you were then stuck with that in the middle of your thread. Certainly you couldn’t go back and fix that throw-away remark in reply #6 that ended up contradicting a key detail of the events of reply #733.

The Constellation lets you edit your replies, which is already wonderful enough. I don’t have to be bugged/shamed forever by my own spelling errors or typos or brain malfunctions. (You don’t even know how many times in one for sorrow, two for joy I had to go back and edit a post where I called Iliar “Jean.”) If my cowriter notices my error, they don’t have to wait to reply until I’ve fixed it, they can go ahead and tag me back and mention the typo at the same time. When I’ve got one of my characters into a delightfully terrible situation and someone in chat says “wait, didn’t you mention three pages ago they had a gun,” I can go back and edit in a hasty “which they left outside the door” and be all no I don’t know what you’re talking about I never make continuity errors pay no attention to the little man behind the curtain.

But it’s not just the little stuff that the Constellation makes possible! I know of multiple instances -- some mine, some other people’s -- where a thread went off course and ended up somewhere completely unfeasible and the authors looked at it and went “....yeah, okay, that is not the thing we want;” and in each case, they could just delete the last dozen or so replies, alter the point of divergence, and proceed forward in a saner fashion. And not only is this possible on the Constellation, the unread and favorites pages of people following the thread handle it gracefully! There is absolutely no spontaneous combustion!

Or there’s the “replace character” and “split character” tools, which -- guys, I cannot get over the fact that the Constellation devs made these for us. Any sane person would have looked at those requests and gone “uh, that sounds like a ridiculously complex thing you want, and the occasions where you’ll need it are totally on you, and this is not the sort of thing you can reasonably expect a website to offer, I think this is a you problem.” I cannot believe that our devs actually made them for us. They are insane and I do not know what they were thinking and I love them so much.

There’s the fact that even though there’s no easy user-side way to split threads, Marri will do it by hand on request. Would do character replacement by hand, before that was an actual user-accessible tool. Again, this is the behavior of a madman or a Miles (okay, redundant); any normal person would say “sorry, we don’t have that functionality in place.” Any normal person would say “have you seen the list of requests lately?” But no. Not our devs. If it doesn’t work, they will make it work.

A search function. Have I mentioned the Constellation has a search function? That actually, you know, functions? This one I manage not to take for granted, if only because so many huge professional websites don’t. And not just Tumblr, The Flaming Death Pit, either. Dreamwidth doesn’t. Facebook doesn’t.

The Constellation does.

I can search that neat little phrase in my head to see if I actually just came up with it, or if I read it in another glowfic and it lodged in my brain, or if I came up with the exact same clever phrase three pages back. I can find that thread where I don’t remember the title or the authors or the characters but do remember that particularly clever retort that someone-or-other made to I-can’t-quite-remember-whom. I can find that one reply where someone summed up a bunch of important stuff I need to refer back to, and I’m pretty sure it was either in Room of Requirement or one of the later threads in Silmaril.

The search function is great for avoiding continuity errors. I can check if I already explained vampires in this thread, or if that was a different one. I can check if my characters should already know something or if it hasn’t come up yet. I can check which amusing pseudonym Jean introduced himself as. I can remind myself for the twentieth time if that minor character of my coauthor’s is named Janet or Janice. I can remind myself of what number I calculated for the approximate population of a planetary settlement.

When I’m feeling particularly writer-anxious, I can check how often I’m using “mutters” versus “murmurs” versus “mumbles.” When I realize I’ve been inconsistent about an NPC’s last name, I can find all the occasions where I used my less preferred option and fix them. When Lintamande pulls yet another character out of her watch-carefully-nothing-up-my-sleeve, I can check if they’re supposed to be mysterious or if we met them earlier in the thread.

A search feature is so useful to have, especially for something like glowfic which is prone to information overload. But they’re nontrivial to implement, and lots of websites don’t have them, or they have searches which work in annoying unintuitive useless ways. The Constellation has a functioning search.

Or -- aliasing. Aliasing is amazing precisely because it’s such a tiny thing -- the option to display a different name for your character on a particular post. That’s, what -- one, two words, plain text? Hardly anything. Not something you need constantly, either. Not something you really really need, when you do need it. Not having aliasing wasn’t preventing anyone from making a thread they wanted to make, or reading something they wanted to read, or understanding what was going on.

So we could have made do just fine without it. We would have, on Dreamwidth -- or under basically any other circumstances, really. We could have put the alternate name in the character’s screenname field. We could have put it in quote marks in their name field, nickname-style. We could have used a specific icon to indicate it. We could have made a second character instance with a different name. We could have posted from a general “[Name’s] characters” account. We could have just mentioned it in the text somewhere. It would have been fine.

But we don’t have to, because the Constellation has aliasing. Because we have the best devs. Because they went ahead and made it for us anyway, even though they totally could have just not. (Even more so than they could have just not done any of this.) And so now characters can be mysterious even while posting from their proper account; the Elves can switch among all their various names; characters who peal can display their nickname instead of their name, for convenient reading; people can even run a character and their daemon out of the same account just because they find it more conceptually fitting.

Or the Many Worlds Forum. This is on the Constellation now, and that has to be a huge pain in the neck for the devs, because all of a sudden everyone is using their beautifully-designed, custom-tailored glowfic website for something totally different, and then demanding it support that. (And “everyone” there totally includes me.) And, like, it is totally fair for them to find this annoying, and if they end up deciding to throw up their hands and say “if you are determined to use the Constellation for this, on your own heads be it,” I will consider them entirely justified.

But even aside from the fact that I’m pretty sure the devs should be beatified on the spot for not snapping and using their mysterious time travel powers to prevent all our parents from meeting -- I think it also illustrates just how great the Constellation is. The Many Worlds Forum is a forum; it’s right there in the name, it’s the whole concept, half the point is that it’s something you can actually have, so even if it isn’t really populated by denizens of various dimensions it looks just like it is. It’s LARP for the internet. And yet, when the reboot was being planned, and people discussed where to host it, and whether it should be on the Constellation or on a forum -- the Constellation won. Because it is just that much better than anything else. More convenient, more user-friendly, more flexible, more streamlined, prettier.

(Like Daedalus, they invented a marvelous device, the Constellation; but like Icarus, the devs soared too high, and brought about their own downfall...)

(*cough* Sorry. Continuing.)

While I’m praising the devs’ patience -- I have to be the absolute worst, most demanding, nightmare edge-case stress-test of an end user. Ways I have abused both the Constellation and the devs’ patience include but are not limited to:

writing half a reply in English and half in Hebrew; complaining when the right-to-left text format failed to properly reflect punctuation

relying heavily on the Constellation’s private messaging feature, even though, like, literally why would anyone do that

filling every input box I could find with random unicode characters

accumulating [counts] 2,853 icons; proceeding to complain that the “add existing icons” page was slow to load

setting a single icon to randomly display one of half a dozen images every time the page was reloaded

complaining that I couldn’t message “<3” to people because it broke the HTML; rejecting “don’t message ‘<3’ to people” as a solution

setting my own thread to “hide from unread;” subsequently complaining that it no longer showed me the latest unread post

repeatedly making the same error in filling out forms; proposing that this be solved by making the Constellation smarter than me

re-organizing the aforesaid 2,853 icons at least half a dozen times; requesting support not only for each new configuration, but also for the process of transitioning between them

wanting a thread un-hiatused despite not having replied to it in months; being unwilling to achieve this by replying to it; eventually settling for making and deleting a blank reply, messing up daily reports & unread lists & probably all sorts of other things in the process

putting deeply excessive numbers of warnings on threads, including “#torture #so much torture #i’m serious about the torture guys” and “#i can’t believe there are now six jean-related warnings”; complaining when this overfilled the text box for warnings and made them less than optimally easy to read while entering them

The short and the long of all this being: I’m pretty sure Marri and Throne deserve a special accolade just for continuing to put up with me.

Speaking of which: have I mentioned just how awesome the Constellation support is? Because the answer is -- so very. It is so very awesome. (And not just for the part where they haven’t yet gone back in time to prevent my existence, though that too.)

I mean, there’s the time travel. I don’t need to explain why that’s awesome. And there’s the fact that, as far as I can tell, they will make literally anything happen if a large enough proportion of glowficcers ask for it. (Have we tried asking them to cure malaria yet? We should do that.) There’s the fact that they didn’t take one look at that To Do list of theirs and run away screaming and gibbering.

There’s the fact that the Constellation -- doesn’t go down? It did, once in a while, for a couple of minutes, when it was very new. Once that I can remember for more than an hour. And then it, uh -- stopped? Which (in addition to being a great relief to those of us who are Utter Glowfic Addicts) seems super impressive. Big serious professional websites have scheduled maintenance! And they still go down sometimes! And Marri and Throne don’t (I’m pretty sure) even have a testing environment, they are just being super careful, and it is working. Despite the fact that they are also constantly adding all these changes we demand.

And beyond that, like -- they have just completely spoiled me for any other tech support ever. When I’m on other websites, I constantly find myself responding to some minor inconvenience by starting to formulate a post in my head asking Throne and Marri to fix it. And this is for things where -- if it were the Constellation, they would. But these enormous professionally-built websites with significantly more than two support staff haven’t.

I’m not just talking about, like, tumblr, either. We all know tumblr is terrible. But I’ll be posting on facebook and thinking hey, Marri, the new feature where short posts get put in enormous font is annoying, can we at least have a box by the text entry we can manually uncheck if we don’t want that? Or on my university’s website thinking so Throne, the professor’s name shows by the course in the search results, but if you click through to the course it has a bunch of information but not the professor’s name anymore -- could you fix that?

(And then, of course, I remember that neither Mark Zuckerberg nor the state of Texas is likely to respond to me with actually, we’ve had that feature in place for a couple of weeks! Look in the upper right hand corner, and I sulk and go write some glowfic instead.)

Of course, it’s not like they’re getting paid for any of these I-don’t-even-want-to-think-about-how-many hours of work. There’s a donate button on the Constellation, but that doesn’t even go to tips for Marri or Throne, let alone compensating them for the work they put in; it goes towards the expenses of running the Constellation. Which Marri otherwise covers out of pocket. Which means she is getting paid negative money for all this, which is completely nuts.

I don’t have the faintest idea how Marri and Throne do what they do. Marri has, you know, a job; Throne is a college student (sorry, he’s British -- a university student); they both have, to my certain knowledge, lives. And significant others. And, I assume, sleep from time to time. (I consider all this further evidence in favor of the time travel hypothesis.)

Basically what I’m trying to say here is: to whoever is writing Marri and Throne: I know glowfic is big on overpowered characters, but have you tried at least giving them challenges more appropriate to their power level? I don’t think running a website is cutting it. Maybe they can go fight a Sauron or something.

Even beyond all this, though, there’s something special about the Constellation that’s hard to sum up. (As evidence for the difficulty in summarizing, witness the length of this post.)

It’s made by glowficcers, for glowficcers -- and this I think must be what some older fanfic writers feel about AO3. It’s ours; it’s made for us. We’re this weird little community out on the fringes of the internet, full of weird people with weird brains and weird opinions and weird interests, we have the most ridiculously high-context hard-to-explain hobby; but we’re not stuck squeezing in at the edges of sites that weren’t meant for us, working in frameworks that were never meant to fit us. We have a home now, and it fits us, and we belong here, and it’s ours.

And it’s made with love. That’s the thing that always gets me, about the Constellation: the amount of love in the tiny details. I mean, I’m familiar enough with programming to guess that most of the tiny details were probably kicked into functioning at three am with Marri or Throne growling at their screen and cursing the code and its descendants yea unto the seventh generation -- but that’s not incompatible with love (as anyone who has crooned ~go the fuck to sleep already~ to a fussy baby in the wee hours of the night knows).

It’s called the Constellation, for goodness’ sake. It has “starry dark” and “starry light” themes. Because it was made by glowficcers for glowficcers, and so it has these lovely aesthetically delightful little tributes to glowfic traditions. Characters have screenname fields, even though those serve absolutely no practical function, because people remembered them fondly from Dreamwidth and wanted to be able to keep adding that little extra quote or pun or reference. It even supports moieties, even though those are completely ridiculous at this point, because we love them anyway.

Every time I look at the little icon in my Constellation tabs, with the three stars for Alicorn and Kappa and Aestrix -- in the appropriate colors, no less -- it makes me smile.

I love the Constellation. I don’t say it enough. I expect I will continue not saying it enough, and instead pointing out ridiculously tiny things which I feel could be improved upon, and ridiculously elaborate features which I would like to have.

But, at least once, I wanted to say it properly:

I love the Constellation.

[thesassybooskter]

SOMEBODY LIKE YOU & NEAREST THING TO HEAVEN by Lynnette Austin: Book Spotlight

WHEN A COWBOY MEETS AN HEIRESS…

Cash Hardeman thinks he’ll have all the time in the world to find the right woman…until he discovers he might lose the family ranch if he’s not married by his 30th birthday. So when Boston beauty Annelise blows into town on her Harley, Cash can’t help wondering if she’s the sexy, leather-clad answer to all his problems.

Giving her bodyguards and the paparazzi the slip, heiress Annelise Montjoy comes to Maverick Junction on a mission to help her ailing grandfather. But keeping her identity hidden in the small Texas town is harder than she expected—especially around a tempting cowboy like Cash. He’s the kind of man who makes her want to spill all her secrets. Soon Annelise starts to wonder if she’s finally found the man who can love her for herself rather than her money. But will the secrets they both keep ruin their plans to ride off into the sunset together?

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Add to Goodreads

  The cowboy and the city girl

Sophie London hates Texas. The longhorns freak her out and the wide-open spaces are more unnerving than a Chicago alleyway at night. But Sophie wouldn’t miss her cousin’s wedding for the world—even if it means returning to Maverick Junction . . . and to the dangerously irresistible Ty Rawlins.

A single father of rambunctious triplet boys, Ty knows trouble when he sees it—and Sophie’s got it written all over her. Yet he’s never been able to stop thinking about her, after their one brief meeting. Maybe fate is giving him a second chance. But if Ty wants Sophie to swap her stilettos for cowgirl boots, they’ll each have to face the past—together.

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Add to Goodreads

  Excerpt

from Nearest Thing to Heaven: Maverick Junction #2

“Ty Rawlins has posted a no trespassing sign. My guess is he’s still in love with his dead wife.”

“There is that possibility.”

“Yes, there is.” Sophie swung open the door and marched out, straight into Ty.

He put his hands on her arms to steady her.

“Sorry,” she mumbled.

“Don’t be. My fault. I wasn’t watching where I was going.”

“Ask the girl to dance, Ty.” Annelise stood behind them in the narrow hallway.

“I—” He raised his hands.

“That’s okay.” Sophie moved to skirt around him.

“No.” He reached out, caught her hand. The jolt was instantaneous, and she knew he felt it, too, when he momentarily broke contact.

“It’s all right. I don’t need to be entertained.” She heard the snap of temper in her voice but couldn’t control it.

“Understood.” Ty nodded toward the jukebox. “But here’s the thing. Cash fed the machine enough coins to fill a good-size swimming pool. All those quarters. All that music. Why waste it?”

He held out a hand; heat flooded her face.

No way to avoid it. If she refused, she’d come off as a prickly snob. He had to think the worst of her anyway. Whatever social graces her mother’d drummed into her seemed to have flown out the window.

She had no idea why he’d want to dance with an idiot, but who was she to deny him that dubious honor?

“In that case, I’d love to.” She smiled, took his hand, and they walked together to the small center square reserved for dancing. She refused to so much as look at her cousin. Refused, for that matter, to meet any of the eyes in the restaurant watching them speculatively.

A slow number came on and Ty turned her to him, put his other arm around her waist, and drew her in.

“‘The Keeper of the Stars,’” he said quietly. “Quite a song.”

Her heart hammered as Ty very skillfully swept her along to the music. It was different from any dance she’d ever experienced. Night and day from the one she’d shared with Brawley. He’d been fun. Ty? Intense was the only word she could come up with to define the aura surrounding him.

Totally unfamiliar with country songs, she listened to the words over the beating of her heart. “It was no accident me finding you…” Her temperature spiked ten degrees. He was right. The words were captivating. Intense, just like him. And, oh, so romantic.

His hand holding hers was callused and strong, the one at her waist firm. Hot.

Ty did not, in any way, make her think brotherly thoughts. Instead, heat pooled low. Yearnings stirred. Thoughts and desires she’d doubted she’d ever feel.

The man was dangerous. She’d do well to remember that. But for now, she’d simply enjoy the moment. The dance drifted into a second, then a third. Sophie vaguely registered others on the dance floor with them, smiled when Annelise and Cash brushed past.

Ty stood over a foot taller than her five-three, and her head rested on the strapping cowboy’s chest. She heard the steady beating of his heart and surprised herself by wishing the song could go on forever.

She was deathly afraid she wouldn’t say no if this man wanted to park his cowboy boots beneath her bed. For one night, of course.

“Sophie?” Ty’s voice whispered against her ear.

“Hmmm?”

“The music’s stopped.”

  a Rafflecopter giveaway  

  About Lynnette Austin

Lynnette Austin, a recovering middle school teacher, loves long rides with the top down and the music cranked up, the Gulf of Mexico when a storm is brewing, chocolate frozen custard, anything by Blake Shelton, Chris Young, and Thomas Rhett, and sitting in her local coffee shop reading and enjoying an iced coffee. She and her husband divide their time between Southwest Florida's beaches and Georgia's Blue Ridge Mountains. Having grown up in a small town, that's where her heart takes her—to those quirky small towns where everybody knows everybody...and all their business, for better or worse. Writing for Grand Central and Sourcebooks, she’s published twelve novels and is at work on a new series.

Website | Twitter | Facebook | Goodreads | Pinterest

SOMEBODY LIKE YOU & NEAREST THING TO HEAVEN by Lynnette Austin: Book Spotlight was originally published on The Sassy Bookster

[weeklyhumorist]

Signs That the Person You’re Dating Is Secretly an Identical Twin

Sometimes it’s too hard to tell!

One of the most disturbing new social trends is twin-fidelity, in which a pair of identical twins share a single identity in order to engage in a fraudulent romantic partnership with another unaware person.

Before you Google whether or not that last sentence is true, please skim the below exhaustive list of red flags that the person you’ve been coupled with is actually a couple in and of themselves —i.e. a duo of secret twins masquerading as one. You never know until it’s too late!

– Your partner forgets most everything that you say.

Deceitful twins must choreograph a complex yet delicate dance of tagging each other in and out of the room whenever your back is turned, so they can’t possibly debrief each other on every conversation, argument, or important task they agree to do. They mess up – big time and all the time – and they cover up for this by saying things like, “oh I forgot all about that” or “thanks for the reminder.”

Yeah, uh huh, you’re welcome…to BOTH of you…

– Your partner is tired and/or out of breath sometimes.

Does this scenario sound familiar?

You and your husband step into the elevator for your favorite fancy rooftop restaurant. Once you arrive at the top floor, your husband politely ducks around a corner to “let out a sneeze,” but when he returns, he’s extremely sweaty and out of breath. When you inquire about why this is, he mutters something about the building’s thermostat setting, and he refuses to discuss the matter further.

Your husband’s secret twin just had to hoof it up sixteen flights of stairs while wearing a suit, you idiot. You do the math.

– Your partner answers to their own name and sometimes exactly one other name.

Every once in a while, a passerby on the street might call out to your partner, but with a name that’s not at all the name you’ve been calling them. Your partner might then briefly turn toward that person, but quickly look away and pick up their walking pace in the opposite direction.

The first time this happens is easy to disregard, but when the fifth person in a two-block radius uses that specifically incorrect name to greet your partner, something shady is afoot — your partner’s two feet are really four feet because they’re a person times two, goddammit!

– Your partner is competitive at certain activities.

Because your partner’s wrestled for food scraps since sharing their twin’s umbilical cord in the womb, they will forever exhibit a competitive edge at any and all sports or games. You really want to know the sad but true reason that your partner is such a solid teammate on any given trivia night? No, they don’t possess a “certified genius-level IQ,” nor are they “just a curious trivia buff” — they’re a secret twin, they always have been, and always will be.

This also explains why your partner nips at your hand every time you reach for food on their plate — typical twin behavior, let me tell you from way too much personal experience!

– Your partner always has plenty of time for you.

This is actually one of the few benefits of dating a secret twin, and you can actually force them into being two places at once if you’re manipulative enough. Use their deceptive lifestyle to your advantage and start demanding that your husband/wife run errands on opposite sides of town at the same time…and then watch them (and their filthy look-alike sibling) seemingly bend space and time to keep up with your impossible tasks!

– Your partner just walked in the room with a totally different hairstyle than the one they had a few seconds ago.

Ok, this one’s kinda on you. Remember the first time you slept at your partner’s apartment, and in their closet they had exact doubles of every outfit they owned, down to matching stains and holes? Those were the good ol’ days — when your back-stabbing doppelganger partners truly cared about tricking you — so they paid attention to the tiniest of details. But as the years went by, they got lazier — one twin packed on a few pounds or went through an annoying blonde phase, and they’re just hoping that you’re tired and overwhelmed by modern life to notice. Jesus, have some self-respect and romantically attach yourself to a pair of con artists with a better work ethic.

I can put you in touch with such people. Email me!

– You watched an interesting Netflix docu-series about twins and clearly saw your partner and their twin in numerous interviews talking about how they are definitely twins.

At first you thought, Well, I’m no Steven Spielberg, so I don’t know much about filmmaking. But I’ve seen plenty of actors plays twins of themselves in movies and TV shows for the past 50 years. Maybe what I just saw was some sort of fancy Hollywood editing trick! But now you’re reading this article and you’re learning (because I’m telling you) that that’s not how documentaries work. It wasn’t “some special FX or whatever,” like your partner screamed at you, right before they smashed your modem to prevent you from binging the remaining episodes of that docu-series.

Face the music, toots — you’re dating doubles…and now it’s time to get single!

If the above list helped you realize that you’ve fallen madly in love with two people instead of one person — stay calm and remember: this is all totally ok and normal. Twin-fidelity will continue to become more common in American life, primarily due to articles like this one, which provide valuable ideas and inspirations for morally-depraved twins who are curious about running their own fake relationship scams.

Hey, as I’ve told both of my secret triplet siblings, it’s a crazy world out there, so be careful who you trust and whose advice you listen to!

Signs That the Person You’re Dating Is Secretly an Identical Twin was originally published on Weekly Humorist

[lunasoulstice-blog1]

Copy

This week’s tutorial delved into some significant artists and their media art practice which connected with their own individual aesthetic. Particularly what stood out to me was the ‘Copy Shop’ by Virgil Widrich. The ‘Copy Shop’ delves into experimentation with multiple of the same people in one shot. The plot follows a man who works in a printer copy shop when a scan of his own hand accidentally triggers the machine to make copies of his own life which forces the man to see the mundane and repetitive nature of his life which incites a possible change. To undertake this idea would need to include a single angle shot of a space with the character which then in after affects could be layered ontop of each other to create the effect of having multiples of the same person in one shot. Considering that most people don’t have identical twin or triplet actors to work with like in Charles Shyer’s ‘The Parent Trap’ (1998), I researched how other producers created multiples of the same person in one shot and found three viable options.

Option 1:

The most realistic method became shooting a scene in the same shot multiple times with the same actor repeating the different characters movements. The only difficulty in this method is that if I wanted movement in the camera such as a pan the device I would need to use to allow me to ‘record’ the camera movement and recreate this movement identically in each shot would be extremely expensive. In post-production I would then figure out how to layer the shots so that the multiple characters could come through and appear as if all are in the same shot. Another challenge I could see happening through this process is the need to have every single shot identical for the multiple times I record the same character. For a big scene for example, if there is any change or movement in the background such as a bird flying through, the shot will have to be re-recorded (changes in lighting through the say- as the sun sets will also be quick a hassle). I googled a tutorial in premiere to see how I could change the transparency to layer the video. I think the best way may be in after effects however as the transparency will just create a more see through version in the separate characters.

Option 2:

The other options utilizes trickery of space and how you never show any key features of both characters such as the face at the same time. For example while your seeing the face of one character, the other one could be a body double an shot through an over-the-shoulder shot.

Option 3:

The third option is to optimize use of the green-screen. Shooting the actor playing different parts for the same scene then can have the green removed and substituted with the background, unlike the first option which will require shooting in the exact same camera angle. The only technical disadvantage would require having to shoot wider shots with a stand in. For scenes with both faces visible, one character will have to be shot in front of a green screen to overlay ontop of the stand in.

[kendrickmceachar-blog]

Cheats And Tricks For Madden NFL Mobile

In madden though, no matter the participant they really run the routes fairly equally. Be at liberty to run aim line's with LT and just trigger main havoc. Free of charge security, scout till you'll find out the Pursuit score. You are able to obtain the set up package of Information Madden cell 17 Nfl 1.0 without spending a dime and have a take a look at users' opinions on Droid Informer. Clearly, players may have to wait till the sport drops to get a glimpse at full rankings for every player featured in the game. Millions have downloaded and played the sport already, and there's a thriving community dedicated to the phone and pill exclusive game. No one can argue that they do not have an unimaginable triplet with Ben Roethlisberger, Le'Veon Bell, and Antonio Brown. Raider players have been traditionally recognized for profitable at all prices. Building a workforce entails gathering nfl 18 coins ps4 (nellydeborah.use.com) gamers from packs or profitable them in the Public sale Home, which adds a much-wanted selection to the administration facet of the sport.

Real LEAGUES. Welcome to probably the most authentic football recreation for Android smartphones and tablets. Madden NFL 25 is the series first freemium merchandise on the iOS and Android platforms. The story begins as the two head to the regional NFL combine in hopes of leaving a lasting impression on the scouts. With Madden 12 for cell platforms, EA’s intent is to capture each hardcore and informal Madden fan, thus there are two completely different gameplay modes. Should you suppose that could be a superb concept and would need to find out The twelfth Person celebrated to the handle of madden nfl mobile sport information NFL 12, head over in the direction of the dwell voting site and produce your voice heard. However this game was previously performed on Android gadgets from Google play store however at present we are going to let you know learn how to download and install the Madden NFL Mobile for Laptop Home windows 10/ eight/ 7 and Mac.

This Madden NFL Mobile 16 generator is reply information you would possibly obtain beneath. Afterwards connect your gaming device to the computer except you are on cellular. First off, let's get something perfectly clear about Madden 25 for iOS: this bears little resemblance to the console variations of EA's anniversary soccer title. Here’s the thing, although: people get actually into Madden, simply as a lot as any compulsive MMO or MOBA participant. In a single back alignment you will generally get a run-by defender due to offensive lineman synthetic intelligence being as much as par. Discovering your manner back could be a journey. Sadly, the title is extra well-liked in the United States and folks from other continents should not that accustomed to American football. EA had a duplicate of the 1980 Raiders playbook, and hired San Francisco Chronicle writer Frank Cooney, who had designed his personal figurine soccer game with numerical talent scores. Recreation lovers from a very competitive game such as Madden 12 are normally wanting to boost their experience. What are you guys making an attempt and having success with shifting the ball?

Once you have been cleared by your physician you might be prepared to begin an exercise program. Down beneath, we are showing you the strategy of installing this app viaBlueStacks however don’t fear that actual identical methodology applies to Andy Android Emulator. Check out the official Fb web page for the sport, or put up an "add me" request within the comment box under, or go to the app store and look on the reviews. The artwork look youngster-friendly, however itis actually At-rated game. The game is ideal in the graphics. With this program including issues to associate diploma individual’s sport account is simple. Take pleasure in all the action throughout the league via a new, network inspired highlight show. Brady just isn't fearful about the Madden curse, and within the video, above he proceeds to break a mirror and stroll under a ladder to indicate he isn’t worried about luck. Playing only for incomes cash would possibly sound a bit boring at later levels when upgrades and players price an excessive amount of while you level-up within the leaderboards.

EA makes use of components like a player’s profession statistics, damage history, tenure within the league and predictions on how the coming NFL season will go for each player in determining an preliminary rating. I felt Madden 16 somehow knew I was taking a look at solely Fleener, just like Malcolm Butler did within the Tremendous Bowl. However that is deceptive because it implies that the Constitution is optional - considered one of many selections - like selecting a religion. There may actually be more than enough or a limiteless supply for all. Tap and drag a benched player to the Drag & Drop slot to swap out your energetic player. GettyAntonio Brown trails only Julio Jones in the Madden 18 receiver rankings. I truly still play Madden thirteen due to its superior franchise features. FB Korey Corridor - seventy five to 83 - The previous college linebacker is the making the transition to NFL fullback.