#last two paragraphs are things that sadly a lot of people could learn

[medicinemane]

I get very tired of dealing with people who are so busy being "practical" that they're just totally prescriptive

I tend to be, I think, a fairly pragmatic person. Like most years I spend about... maybe $50 on myself for the whole year (this year is going to be a bit higher, but there's also specific utility to what I'm spending it on). I tend to not bother buying myself snacks, cause I know I'm mostly hungry, and if I'm hungry real food is a better deal (I sadly tend to fail to get ahold of the real food either)

My point is that I tend to be very goal oriented (not in a ladder climbing way, in a I set goals and then work towards them kinda way), I tend to be very focused on what will push my situations into being sustainable, I tend to look for high efficiency, low cost, long term solutions

I was... I was talking to that friend I'll say is Dr Jekyll and Mr Dumbass (I was more trying to talk to my dad, but they were both there). It was definitely Mr Dumbass today

For one thing, he was already saying a bunch of really fucking dumb shit where... it's so stupid I'm not even going to repeat it, where it's like the answer for why we don't do that is because it's obviously a moronically stupid idea on top of being immoral, and also totally ineffective you dipshit

So I already wasn't in the mood for him

Then, while talking about visiting my grandma, I mention how in order to start cooking I need sharp knives, none of my knives are sharp (cause my mom's a fool and dulls them all), and how it would really help if I could just take a knife from my grandma since she doesn't cook anymore and just... keep it as my personal knife that I keep sharp

(I can't do this, cause my grandma is... bug fuck crazy, and legit believes that if you gift someone a knife they'll kill people with it which like... where do you even get that idea, like she has literally said before that she'd give money to buy a knife but wouldn't give one as a gift... what?)

Anyway, Mr Dumbass starts going on about how I can just buy a new knife, and it's like no... in your quest for objective practicality you've lost all pragmatism

I don't need to buy a new knife, I need to learn to sharpen knives which... which I just have a bit of a block on cause I've had trouble figuring out how to sharpen stuff so far (I've come to suspect that which of the hard and soft stones you use first and second isn't intuitive and I've been trying to hone with the sharpening stone and sharpen with the honing stone)

Like... to get mean for just a slight moment, shut your fool mouth, you've got more money than I've ever even touched, and while you were poor at one point when you were younger you've clearly forgot, and not everyone can just buy stuff

Also you're saying a bunch of dumb shit tonight with such confidence and it's pissed me off

He's capable of being a very very smart and compassionate person, and then other times he's a damn fool, and far too often he... he talks about practicality without actually understanding how to be practical

Being practical requires working in the confines of reality

...I don't know, I don't think I have all the words I need to explain what I'm saying, but the point is he's annoyed me and people who act like him annoy me where it's like... nothing matters in the end other than if you actually solve something

You can talk all day about what someone "should do", but what matters is what they will do

So it gets frustrating talking with my family with him cause he has all this ideas where it's like... that functionally won't work, and like some of his great ideas are how I can just wait for my grandma to die and get the knife then and it's like... yeah... but I need a knife now dummy, and I have knives, and which is more useful?

Dropping a pretty penny on a new knife, or finishing learning a skill I really fucking need badly and that makes it so I can sharpen things for next to free forever?

...I'm just tired of having to do everything myself and getting no help, that's all. How about you shut your fucking mouth, stop trying to offer advice that's worse than my plans I'm already slowly turning the gears on making happen, and just let me bitch about my idiot relatives?

Laughing at this fool antics when he chooses to do that, legitimately is more helpful than any attempts to help

[finitevoid]

Sorry i was watching something with my mom and i had to check if you answered my ask. On her laptop of course.

sothe is THE orphan character in canon so no parents hes also in the system. Im starting to regret working a jrpg cast into this au the nunber just keeps adding up. sothe is a bad boy who is being kept from the specific group home micaiahs in because their case managers think theyre insane together. micaiah and sothe cannot show up to each others place but thats honestly normal its not like micaiah could bring in a guy that isnt sothe anyway (1984). But Especially that boy sothe. the staff know him well

Characters with parents positivity paragraph ~ Ike and mist still have their dad (for now..). Tormod was adopted by a laguz (Ethnic). Amy was adopted by beorc and stefan was assigned her branded cultural mentor by them. everyone thinks theyre insane for doing rhat. Stefan was the most authentic branded they could pick off the streets though so amy will learn about her people inshallah (she will learn nothing besides feeling gratitude (survivors guilt) for her privilege. also bad words). Two of these characters are canonical adoptees man what rhe fruk is happening in tellius can we not have a normal nuclear american family

ranulf lives in some weird commune type thing. A lot of laguz do. He has a sort of family in that and the govt doesnt meddle in laguz business any more than they have to

Elincias parents died like last week and shes scarily well adjusted. she lives with her uncle. She aftually doesnt go to brashear she goes to a private school off in shadyside but she hangs out in the Working Class Neighborhoods of the west end and southern hilltop because shes flipping awesome? Shes gotta learn and ikes her designated hood tour guide (one of his side hustles for a switch) except ike has no idea about anything that goes on outside of his house. Greil was not letting ike wander the streets like that. Now that greil deems him ready Ike learns along the way with elincia about Pittsburgh

TORMOD ADOPTED BY LAGUZ LO L he doesnt vibe with beorc Youknow. umm thats hilarious all the orderlies think sothe and micaiahs relationship has such a rancid aura that they try to separate them but sadly as is the tradition of melodramatic teenagers that only spurs them on to spend even more time together. micaiahs like Were gonna get married someday :) and all of the adults wince

laguz have communes? Do they still have monarchism

elincia LOL. elincia's parents died and shes like oh well :(. This will make it easier to apply to colleges i suppose. she and ike are going on a journey together <3 a journey through the hood. have you noticed they know like 1 million orphans who all live in group homes presumably in The Hood and instead of asking them they just explore by themselves. urban exploring? are they breaking into abandoned buildings or are they just eating food or somethng

[frank-a-mori-son]

“Extremely detailed character sheet template”

Character Chart

Character’s full name: Frank Daniel Morrison Reason or meaning of name: The name Frank is after his Grandmother, Francesca and Daniel is his Fathers name. Character’s nickname: Killer, Frankie, “Hey asshole!”  Reason for nickname: First for obvious reasons, second also, last one is just heard enough for it to be. Birth date: February 14th 1977

Physical appearance

Age: 19 years old How old does he/she appear: he could be confused for someone down to the age of 16. Weight: 65 kg/ 130 pounds Height: 173 cm/ 5′8′’ Body build: Lithe but athletic Shape of face: Heart Shaped Eye color: Brown Glasses or contacts: None, but he’ll need it once older Skin tone: White with neutral undertone Distinguishing marks:  2 visible facial scars, beautymark under right eye Predominant features: Large neck tattoo Hair color: Brown Type of hair: Straight Hairstyle: Currently an undercut Voice: Tenor voice Overall attractiveness: He’s got rouge-ish charms, so pretty attractive Physical disabilities:  Hypermobility in his joints, unknown condition. Usual fashion of dress: Pretty casual, borderlining grunge and punk rock Favorite outfit: band tshirt, faux leather jacket and jeans Jewelry or accessories: He’d love piercings but has none, always wears some type of gloves.

Personality

Good personality traits: Resillient, loyal, brave and charismatic Bad personality traits: Bad temper, snarky, self critical Mood character is most often in: Agitated Sense of humor: Dick jokes and slap stick Character’s greatest joy in life: Making decisions for himself Character’s greatest fear: Becoming his parents Why? Due to how they ruined not only their lives, but that of an innocent child too. What single event would most throw this character’s life into complete turmoil? At this point that has already happened, making a grave mistake with unthinkable consequences...  Character is most at ease when: With people he trusts/cares about or if completely unnoticed Most ill at ease when: Overwhelmed by attention from strangers, feeling judged by peers. Enraged when: Made fun of, harrassed, hit or when someone he cares about is hurt. Depressed or sad when: Thinking of past mistakes, regrets and worrying about present/future. Priorities: Himself and those closest to him Life philosophy: Enjoy while it lasts, they or you won’t be around forever. If granted one wish, it would be: Freedom for those he cares for. Why? They do not deserve to be trapped in this realm, but he feels he does. Character’s soft spot: Quentin, Susie and dogs. Is this soft spot obvious to others? Quentin is very obvious to most Greatest strength: His will to keep fighting Greatest vulnerability or weakness: His own mental health and trauma Biggest regret: Dragging his Legion down with him Minor regret: Failing at ending himself Biggest accomplishment: Accepting his own sexuality Minor accomplishment: When he made it onto the basket ball team Past failures he/she would be embarrassed to have people know about: The one time he got himself roofied on accident Why? he was trying to impress some older kids and failed badly. Character’s darkest secret: The fact he killed someone. Does anyone else know? His Legion and Quentin knows

Goals

Drives and motivations: Motivated to keep himself and those he cares for safe in the Entity realm. Immediate goals: Spend as much time with his boyfriend as possible, get many smooches Long term goals: Somehow, find a way out of the Entity realm. How the character plans to accomplish these goals: He has no idea, but he knows he can count on Quen to help How other characters will be affected: Hopefully, it’ll be a positive effect

Past

Hometown: Calgary, Canada Type of childhood: Rough and unstable Pets: None First memory: Being locked in his bedroom, the stench of sweetened smoke coming through the door crack and loud angry shouting from below. Most important childhood memory: His Grandma coming by on Christmas morning with a gift for him Why: because it was the first time he got a gift for xmas, it was sadly also the last time he saw his Grandma. Childhood hero: He really looked up to one specific foster dad, a good man. Dream job: Veterinarian  Education: High School Dropout Religion: Christian but not practising Finances: Shaky at best, below poverty line.

Present

Current location: Ormond, Canada Currently living with: Foster dad, Clive Anderson Pets: None unless you count house flies Religion: Agnostic Occupation: Unemployed Finances: None existing. 

Family

Mother: Lorraine Beatrice Morrison Relationship with her: Strained, disconnected Father: Daniel Patrick Montgomery Relationship with him: Tense and disconnected Siblings: Step-sister, Step-brother (both Fathers side) Relationship with them: None, he doesn’t know about them. Spouse: Quentin is his boyfriend Relationship with him/her: Good! very good, they’re very much in love. Children: None Relationship with them: Nothing Other important family members: Grandparents (Mothers side) who are still alive and miss their grandson.

Favorites

Color: Red, black and green Least favorite color: Pink and yellow Music: Death metal, Rock, Punk, retro Food: He’ll eat pretty much anything, has a huge sweet tooth Literature: He’s not a fast reader, so he doesn’t read. Form of entertainment: out with friends, listening to music, exploring and sports. Expressions: “Well, fuck” and “heck!”  Mode of transportation: Other people’s cars, otherwise, his own two feet. Most prized possession: His faux leather jacket, as it’s bought with money he earned honestly. 

Habits

Hobbies: Basket ball, art and climbing Plays a musical instrument? No, but he would’ve loved to learn Plays a sport? Basket ball! How he/she would spend a rainy day: Probably at a friends house or at their usual hangouts. Spending habits: he spends very little money as he rarely has some, but he does shop lift often. Smokes: Yes Drinks: Oh yes Other drugs: Usually just weed, though he has tried a few other things once or twice. What does he/she do too much of? Getting in trouble, drinking and smoking What does he/she do too little of? Eating, sleeping, bathing, just generally taking care of himself. Extremely skilled at: Most physical activities Extremely unskilled at: Reading, writing, maths....  Nervous tics: Foot bouncing, pacing, lip biting Usual body posture: Looks relaxed, but shoulders tensed. Mannerisms: Talks with his hands a lot Peculiarities: He’s a basic bitch in secret, he likes the big ass, sugary, cllorful and extra frappes but he’ll get them in secret like they’re illegal. 

Traits

Optimist or pessimist? Pessimist, or realist as he would say. Introvert or extrovert?  Ambivert! He can go both ways, depends on situation. Daredevil or cautious? Daredevil!  Logical or emotional? A little bit of both, though most often ruled by emotion. Disorderly and messy or methodical and neat? More like Disorderly neat, he doesn’t have enough stuff to make a mess and though he doesn’t enjoy it, he’s often the one to do dishes and laundry at home. Prefers working or relaxing? He really likes relaxing, but if he’d like working if he got a job he enjoyed Confident or unsure of himself/herself? He’s faux confidence most of the time. Animal lover? Yes. Very, very much so. Especially dogs.

Self-perception

How he/she feels about himself/herself: he considers himself damaged, unworthy and incabable of love. One word the character would use to describe self: Survivor One paragraph description of how the character would describe self: Out loud he’d call himself “a badass free spirit”  What does the character consider his/her best personality trait? His ability to get up even when knocked down. What does the character consider his/her worst personality trait? His insecurity What does the character consider his/her best physical characteristic? He thinks he’s got a pretty nice bod, all things considered. What does the character consider his/her worst physical characteristic? His scarred hand, his big ears and his slight buck teeth. How does the character think others perceive him/her: As a bad boy, rebel, problem child and misfit. What would the character most like to change about himself/herself: Many things, though he really like to be taller 

Relationships with others

Opinion of other people in general: They just want something from him and they’ll leave once they’ve gotten what they wanted. Does the character hide his/her true opinions and emotions from others? Often until he trusts them, then he’ll start opening up. Person character most hates: Clive, his parents, Ghostface Best friend(s): Julie, Joey and Susie Love interest(s): Quentin Smith, but Steve is handsome too. Person character goes to for advice: Depending on what it is, Quentin or Susie Person character feels responsible for or takes care of: Susie is like a little sister to him Person character feels shy or awkward around: Jeff, it’s all very complicated Person character openly admires: Jeff, again, complicated Person character secretly admires: David. He’ll never say why. Most important person in character’s life before story starts: Nobody. After story starts: His Legion and, the light of his life, Quentin.

Snatched from here

[aphrodeiities]

♇ tarot reading feedback; number thirty-two

Brief background:

♇ I’ve mentioned before that after my father’s passing last year, my life drastically changed. However, to be more specific, he ran a number of businesses that were incredibly successful and had managed to build up quite the reputation, as did he himself.

♇ I’ve ended up having to run his multiple businesses, and though I’m a Master’s grad, none of these entities fall within my field of expertise, so it’s been quite the learning curve/uphill battle. Furthermore, they all fall within male dominated fields that essentially comprise of old boys clubs whose members, as one can imagine, are extremely misogynistic, and not to mention cliquey.

Reading 1: What Secrets do you Need to Know

♇ When I initially read this, there was one person that came to mind as a possibility. However, since then, incredibly so much of this has come to fruition. And I now think the reading might be referring to 2 different people.

♇ I found out about 2 weeks ago that it turns out that there was someone talking badly about me behind my back, being a loudmouth. It was one of my male colleagues, who is also on a managerial level and is one of the experts I came to rely on. He had been going around saying a whole host of horrible things (- which are unwarranted tbh) and someone finally alerted me to this.

♇ Another one of our managers admitted to feeling guilty about keeping quiet about it, which you literally said in the reading!

♇ Further, I was in fact incredibly heartbroken by his actions and on top of everything I was dealing with at the time, I did find myself in a deeply depressive state sadly.

♇ Admittedly, as you pointed out, I am hyper vigilant/ paranoid about things being both said and done behind my back (due to the nature of this industry and being one of the very few women in this space at this level, to name a few reasons).

♇ There is another individual who I initially pegged the reading to be about as soon as I read “someone with an immature energy”— that is potentially the person who I “might’ve lied to” but the only lie I can think of would have been a white lie and/or not very detrimental or damaging. But he is for sure someone that I can almost sense is trying to plan something vindictive towards me; just a feeling. He’s someone who tends to read betrayal and double-crossing in every action, not sure why but I suspect its ego.

♇ “Someone might be so focused on the task ahead of them, that they fail to see what’s around them” woah. Not sure what this whole paragraph is in reference to but I’m thinking it’s yet to reveal itself?

♇ Also “someone waiting for the right time to do something to you” is so scary, I have no idea what this is about or why.

♇ The Queen of Swords in reverse sounds like it might be me? Whoops. Not so much the vindictive, malicious, and easily influenced part but more so that about gossiping.

♇ Finally also not sure who the last paragraph is about but I do desperately hope that whomever it is about ends up self-destructing instead as stated.

Reading 2: How to Heal Yourself and Grow as a Person

♇ Starting right off with the facts, damn. Lol, I am someone who believes that they understand themselves very well but I could see how my self-awareness is lacking. I laughed when you kept mentioning my need for control, it’s true and almost obsessive to be honest, I hate it!. I’m a self-admitted control freak and it deeply shakes me when I feel out of control or unprepared. The more familiar the environment, the more in control I feel.

♇ Interesting that you say I underestimate myself a lot because this is something that I’ve recently been doing a lot of and those close to me have started to pick up on this, a friend literally said this to me this past Wednesday lmaooo. It’s frustrating because I wasn’t always this way but I have been facing so much adversity of late, thus naturally it starts to chip away at ones confidence.

♇ Though I do believe I’m pretty good with managing my money and will continue to be careful.

♇ I suspect the place I keep going back to might be my home/room? I am naturally a homebody but I’ve recently become quite the hermit due to the amount of stress I’ve been dealing with of late. When I feel this way, I tend to both become a recluse and rely heavily on “distractions” to soothe me. I DO need to “become committed to things that will give you abundance in the future” fully, fully agree.

♇ Don’t know how much more self-reflection or shadow work I can do, but I’ll look into this however I concur that I need focus more on my the tasks and tending to my inner child.

♇ I am desperately in need of need friends. All my closest friends are reside overseas and I barely have any in my home country now. Unfortunately, zooming and skyping isn’t quite the same, and I get lonely a lot.

♇ I wish you’d expounded on how to invest in myself more, I’m curious lol.

♇ You were spot on on how my anxiety holds me back a lot. I’m incredibly anxious and a chronic over-thinker which causes me to get preoccupied a lot in/with doom and gloom. Not healthy! Also, I am very future focused and find it hard to be present, I do feel that this majorly restricts me from enjoying my life.

♇ Definitely need to and will prioritise going out more, and to overall find more excitement in my life, plus take more risks.

♇ “Ignoring my insecurities” hmm… that is kind of is exactly what I do. I don’t know if I’d say I dislike myself but I would admit that I’m incredibly and unfairly hard on myself and kind of do resent how my life is at the moment as well as the state of my home life, but moreover how I have been conceptualising it; life is what you make it.

♇ One of the areas that are lacking is the absence of routine in my life, which I agree I would greatly benefit from.

♇ Lmaoooo, I do have a “secret bank account” that I put my savings into.

♇ Finally, I do need to become more emotionally abundant and embrace my emotions. I definitely do lots of ridiculing of myself over my feelings— I also recently bought a journal for this purpose!

Overall Feedback:

♇ Tremendous, tremendous stuff!! I’m seriously so impressed.

♇ It’s insane because I think the delay in writing this feedback was actually a blessing in disguise; almost all of what you foretold in the “secrets you need to know” reading ended up occurring in the 2-3 weeks thereafter, wtf! Before this, I’d gotten one other reading from you which was future spouse related and though it instinctively felt accurate, until the time comes there’s no way to know for sure, but this is all the more impressive because it took just a couple of days for the reading to come true.

♇ In terms of the 2nd reading, I feel similarly in that there was more than a number of things you mentioned that I had either already been contemplating myself or actively decided to do more of! Which is also why it’s definitely advise I will doing my best to put into practice, I hope it will help me improve the quality of the life I’m living at present. Thank you so very much.

♇ Anyone who is seeking a personal reading should look no further than here, it is worth every damn penny—if anything, I feel Pluto has priced very generously relative to the quality of readings she offers.

♇ You are so great at what you do. Keep up the fabulous work!

reading - secrets you need to know; 10 spreads + how to heal yourself and grow as a person; 15 spreads

paid tarot readings

[g0ldengubler]

i

(*i do not own this gif*)

A/N: (from wattpad): heyyy...how y'all doin? ugh i'm not too happy with the sex scene (even though i'm grateful that a friend of mine helped me with one of the paragraphs) but this is the best i can do right now with the mental state i'm in. pls bare with me with posting, my personal life has gone downhill so fast it's crazy. i wanted to get this up on halloween but it sadly didn't happen. i do apologize. but i hope ur excited for this fic! thank u so much for reading ilyyyyyyy :) (from tumblr): ok last post until tonight! sorry for the spam, i only had this so far so i thought why not throw it all on here now lol. but ok enjoy :)

Category: smut

CW: daddy kink; degradation (from both men to clover); penetration (female receiving); oral (m+f recieving and giving); drunk sex; praise kink; this chapter is not full of smut but you don't have to read the smut if you're uncomfortable

Word Count: 3235

positions | prologue

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

~Clover's POV~

~Two Years Later~

It's been two years since I joined the team, and I've never felt more at home than I did on my first week. Luke, Spencer and I have been named, 'The Golden Trio' thanks to Penelope. We've been stuck like glue ever since I beat them in poker, like the best friends I always wanted but never had. Because of what happen when I was a kid, I always stayed close to my dad and never felt the need to make friends. Sure, I'd have people that I'd see 5 days a week at school, but nothing as close as we were. During our days off, we'd get drunk and have a poker night or a chess night, teaching Luke how to play but he never seemed to understand it, so we'd slowly switch to UNO or Cards Against Humanity.

Today, Halloween of all days, was just another paperwork day. Sure, being out in the field was exciting, saving American citizens like how Emily saved me, but I found relaxation in looking over files and sending my behavioral advice. Everything was calm in the office with everyone doing their work, and some days we'd watch a movie in the conference room or play games when we either got done with our work early or, as Garcia would say, "All serial killers have taken the day off. Maybe even went to therapy."

As I walked back to my desk after turning in the last of my files to Emily, Rossi came out of his office and stood at the railing. "Everyone," he announced, "I think it's safe to say that for the first in several years, we do not have a case on Halloween night!"

Everyone cheered, especially Spencer. Halloween was his favorite holiday, you learned. He was very passionate about its spooky nature by dressing up in a scary mask at work, before having to take it off because of a case. He would pout when he would see Emily, Rossi, or Garcia come out, telling the team that we had a case. This year, however, I noticed a grin on his face that stretched from ear to ear.

"In honor of that, I will be throwing a party at my house and you're all invited. But don't think you could run away from my grandmother's recipe!"

I turned over to Spencer, who's desk was right next to mine, a curious grin growing on my face. "So doc, what are you going to be for Halloween?"

He leaned back in his chair and looked over to me, his left elbow pressed against the armrest. "I was originally going to go as Tom Baker's Doctor Who since I still have the cosplay from when Garcia and I tried going to a convention, but with how my hair looks now, I think I'll go as a mad scientist or, if I want to be more specific, Einstein himself."

"I can see you dressing up as Einstein," I smiled, "Hell, you could even go as Dr.Emmett Brown, himself."

"Who?"

I looked back at him, jaw falling to my desk. "You know, from Back to the Future?"

He still looked confused.

"Don't worry about it, Clover," Luke said as he walked over and sat at the desk in front of me, "What he doesn't know won't hurt him."

"Now I'm curious about this movie." Spencer said, his curious face getting curiouser and curiouser.

"Maybe we can sneak away from the party tonight at some point and watch it." I wink at him and the two began chuckling.

"Those movie's are the closest to nerd I'll ever get." said Luke, which sparked Spencer's interest even more.

"So what are you going to be tonight, Kingsley?"

I looked over at him with a smirk."Oh, Alvez, THAT is a surprise."

~That Night~

"They did the monnnster mash!"

Music was coming from all over the backyard and in the house. Everyone from the BAU was dressed up in their spooky (or sexy...or cutest) best and was dancing the night away with champagne in their hands. I had walked in a little bit late compared to everyone else, which somehow Rossi didn't give me a sassy but funny remark about it. Rossi and Krystall dressed up as Bonnie and Clyde, Tara, along with Jj, Emily, and Garcia, went as nuns, and Matt went as Rickey while his wife, Kristy, was Lucy.

Luke ended up going as Magic Mike, not because he was full of himself, that was way out of line for him, but because the team would joke that he could become a stripper if he had to and played along. Spencer was, indeed, Albert Einstein. Garcia must've helped him with his hair, getting it to stick out like Einstein's and spraying gray hairspray in his hair. Both looked really good in their costumes, I couldn't complain.

I walked in as a sexy devil. I'm not scared to dress sexy when I could. I was comfortable in my body and I wasn't doing it to get someone's attention. I just love to feel myself from time to time, almost like a confidence boost if I needed it. I walked over to my two dudes and saw their eyes bulging out of their heads as they turned around to see. I was in a tight red crop top that showed off the girlies, with red short shorts, black fishnet tights, and red heels. I had horns on the top of my head thanks to a headband, and a tail that was attached to my shorts. The two were completely shocked, but were the respectful men that I always knew they were.

As the night went on, I was kind of getting bored. While I loved being surrounded by my coworkers turned family, I wanted to get wasted. It was Halloween night for crying out loud, but I didn't like being drunk in front of a lot of people. Even when I would go to the club, I would just have one drink and then dance with everyone on the dance floor. I didn't trust my drunk self, not physically but just how my personality changes. It embarrassed me to no end, so I only trusted a few people. Two of them, obviously, being Spencer and Luke.

At one point, I was sitting on the couch in the living room by myself. Luke and Spencer came in and sat down next to me, asking me if I was ok. When I explained to them what I was feeling, they both grinned in unison as they looked at one another, then back at me. I knew exactly what they were thinking, and they were in for it. We said goodbye to everyone, grabbed our coats, and headed out the door where we all met up at Luke's place.

When we walked in, Spencer and I sat on his couch getting Back to the Future ready while Luke made us all drinks. As we watched, we ended up leaving our glasses on the table and started taking turns drinking the vodka bottle, numb to the burning sensation. After taking the last shot in the bottle, I set it down and lay back against the back of the couch and blacked out, letting the alcohol take over my mind and body. The last thing I remember was leaning my head against Spencer's shoulder, while my feet were on Luke's lap...

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Clover was giggling on Spencer's shoulder as her foot slowly rubbed over Luke's lap. Luke shifted his position on the couch, trying not to notice what that was doing to him. Not like he had a foot fetish or anything, but the amount of friction caused his pants grow tighter by the minute. Spencer, who had never been this drunk before in his life, started playing with her hair as he moved his arm around her. Spencer could tell that she was just as drunk as he was, but he didn't expect her to lay her hand on his chest, playing with the necklace he had around his neck. He tried to focus his attention to Back to the Future III, but once she started playing with the gold piece of metal with her mouth, he couldn't help but to look down at her, her eyes never leaving his.

He looked over to Luke, who had moved Clover's foot over and started palming himself  through his pants. Spencer quickly looked away, trying not to give in to his own urges. He moved his focus back to Clover, who's eyes were still locked on him. Before he could do anything, she let go of the necklace and began to slowly move her hand down Spencer's chest.

"I know why Luke moved my foot away," she whispered as her hand gently fell on his lap. She moved her fingers ever so lightly over the bulge that was growing in his pants. She had also moved her foot back onto to Luke's bulge, rubbing over it softly.

The two looked at each other, almost in confusion at first. But then, they silently agreed that they were up for it, as Clover clearly was as well. Luke moved her foot off of it and stood up, pausing the movie as Spencer moved her hand out of the way and lifted her head up as he started to get up. He takes her hand and helps her up, grabbing Luke's hand before wobbling their way into his room. She jumped onto the bed as Spencer shut the door, letting the light from the moon and street lamps illuminate the room. The two stood in front of her before she motioned her finger for them to come over.

"You're one hell of a brat, Kingsley." Luke slurred as the two quickly walked over to her, plopping down on either side of her on the bed.

Clover leans in and kisses Luke while Spencer went for her neck, cupping her left breast and massaging it. The touch alone had a moan leave her lips and into Luke's as he moved his tongue on her bottom lip, asking for entrance. As their tongues melded together, Spencer moved the fabric of her top over and took her breast out of the cup of her bra, leaning in and began licking her nipple before taking the whole thing in his mouth sucking it. Clover broke the kiss and let out a whimper, which made both men chuckle as she leaned both of her arms behind her on the bed for support.

Luke looks over to Spencer as he lets go of her breast and looks up to Luke. "Do you think she'll stop being a brat if we do something like this?" Luke asks before moving his fingers down to her core, rubbing over her shorts. Clover bites her lip to hold in a gasp, which Luke wasn't too pleased by.

"Are you going to behave, little one?" Spencer asks as he plays with the waistband of her shorts, his lips ghosting her cheek.

Clover nods, still holding in a moan just from being touched.  Luke grabs ahold of her jaw and quickly turns her face to look at him. "Use your words, princesa."

"Please," she whines.

Spencer has Clover buck her hips as he pulled her shorts and tights off of her. They notice how turned on she was on her panties and both lean in, biting and sucking on either side of her neck. Spencer's fingers linger the inside of her thighs while Luke went back to rubbing her through the cloth. She moves her hips against his fingers, begging for more.

"You were such a tease just a few minutes ago, and now look at you. So helpless and needy in a matter of seconds." says Spencer in between kisses.

Hearing that made Clover take her panties off in a swift, but quick, motion. She couldn't take it anymore, she needed their touch.

"Eager little girl, aren't you?" Luke chuckled.

It took a minute for her to realize that Spencer went straight in, sticking two fingers inside her and pumping slowly while Luke rubbed her pussy. Her brain had turned into mush full of pleasure that when they went in, she couldn't help but let out a loud moan. They sped up their movements, making her let out a silent scream.

"Fuck, daddy!" She gasped out.

The two were shocked, but didn't complain about the name. "Which one of us is daddy, kitten?" Spencer asked.

"You can't think straight, can you?" Luke asked.

Clover pulls Spencer in by his tie while pulling Luke in at the same time by his belt. "Shut up," she says breathy, "just shut up and fuck me."

"Don't go back to being a brat now," says Luke finally after a moment of silence, "You are going to behave or you'll be punished. And I don't think you'll like what we'll do."

Spencer continues to finger her quickly and deeply, curling his fingers as he hit her gspot every time while Luke rubs faster on her clit. Clover falls onto the bed as wave of pleasure hit her like a train.  She closed her walls around Spencers fingers, getting closer and closer to release as he sped up his pace even more.

"Cum for me, little girl, I want you cum so hard on daddy's fingers."

Spencer connects his lips back to her neck as she screamed, letting the waves of pleasure shoot through her body. Luke rubs her slowly to let her ride out her orgasm as Spencer pulls his fingers out and sticks them in his mouth. The way he cleaned her off made her ache all over again, wanting more and more. She didn't want this to end; This was the most pleasure she's ever had.

Luke looks over as Spencer finished devouring her, removing his fingers from his mouth with a small pop. "She tastes so sweet."

Without a single word, Luke gets off the bed and kneels in front of it, pulling Clover by her knees closer to him. As Spencer started making out with her, Luke dives right in between her thighs, licking a single thick stripe up her core, making her moan through the kiss. As their tongues fought like swords in their mouths, Spencer starts to unbuckle his belt and pulled his pants with his boxers in a swift motion, letting his cock spring free. Before it could hit his stomach, however, she grabs onto it with her left hand and starting pumping him slowly. He groans into her mouth before breaking apart, watching her stroke his aching cock.

"Please, daddy. I need your cock so bad fUCK!"

Neither of the two knew who she was talking to, but they did know that it didn't matter. Luke gets up from the floor and takes his costume off while Spencer moved his position so that his knees were on the bed. Clover moves up a bit so that Luke could get back on. The two pump themselves a few times before they pushed themselves in. She took Spencer's cock in her mouth as Spencer grabs a handful of her hair, slowly pushing her down as Luke thrust. As soon as she was comfortable of their size, Luke began thrusting slowly. Clover moaned and grind against him, begging for more, which he happily obliged. Spencer groaned under his breath when she moaned, making him buck his hips forward, shoving his cock down her throat. She gagged on it, tears piercing her eyes.

Clover was at this moment, and maybe even every moment after this, beneath them. Spencer and Luke were exercising their rights to dominate, belittle, and humiliate her. Her holes were filled as her mind quickly unraveled from the rush of pleasure from every minute pulsation. She couldn't even follow their taunts anymore, and the only bit of rationale that she could muster was to be the best sex doll for her two dominators. Her pussy ached for more punishment as they admonished her sloppy performance. She moaned hungrily as she was ravaged, playing the broken slut; no, she was their broken slut. Eagerly enjoying their obvious amusement.

The knot in her stomach was getting tighter and tighter again. She knew Luke was just edging her, making her wait to cum until he was ready. He looked to Spencer, who was holding on for dear life, almost getting into some sort of sub space of his own as the look on his face was begging for release. Clover felt both of their cocks twitch inside her, letting her know they were close.

"Cum for us, princesa," Luke growls, "just one more time for daddy. I know you want to, baby."

Clover turned into a screaming, moaning mess as she came all over Luke's cock, making a huge mess on the bed. That was the last straw for the two men, as they both released inside her, filling her over the edge. The two pulled themselves out, Spencer laying next to Clover (who was showing him that she swallowed every last drop of him) while Luke watched his cum pool out from her, enjoying the view before he lay on the other side of her. Clover wiggled her arms through theirs, focusing on something to cuddle her way into. Spencer quickly grabbed tissues from his side of the bed and cleaned her up.

"You did so good, Clover." says Spencer. He throws the used tissues away in the waste bin beside him and turns back to see tears prickling from her eyes again. "Ssh ssh, it's ok," he coos as he wraps his arms around her. Spencer's soft praises mixed with Luke's gentle hand playing with her hair helped her come back down from the cloudy headspace she was in. She felt cared for and safe with them comforting her.

Clover snuggles into Spencer as Luke's arm wrapped around her waist, spooning behind her. Spencer kissed the top of her head as she nestled her head on his chest, letting the sleepiness that alcohol gave take over them.

As she drifted off to sleep, Clover hoped that she wouldn't forget this perfect night.

[backtothestart02]

Don’t Give Up On Me - 1/? | westallen fanfiction

A/N: Idk what this is. It was gonna be the next Muse chap with just a couple paragraphs of angst, but I managed to change it into nearly 2k of angst and I can’t bring myself to write the happy ending tonight, so it’s turned into a two-shot that I’ll hopefully finish later this week. Enjoy. Bring tissues.

...

Synopsis: Early S7 - Barry and Iris deal with the after effects of the Mirrorverse on Iris.

...

Chapter 1 -

It was a dark, dreary day in Central City.

Iris sat in a light sweater, jeans, and fuzzy socks by the window, her long hair cascading down her back, her forehead pressed to the chilled glass, and didn’t say a word. She’d been silent all morning, sipping her dark roast and forcing small smiles towards Barry whenever he approached her.

It wasn’t that she didn’t appreciate him being near. Hell, she’d been without his presence for months, and it nearly killed her. Just being able to feel him nearby was a relief and soothing to her worn-down senses. But she was so lost in herself, still recovering from all that had happened, that on days like today with crime at a low and both she and Barry off work because of the weekend, she really let herself accept what had happened to her and how far she still had to go.

It had been three weeks since she escaped the mirror verse and together with Barry and team Flash defeated Eva McCulloch once and for all. It had given her a high at the time, and frankly she’d just been glad to be alive and sane and reunited with the people that she loved, especially Barry.

But as time passed she started to face the reality of all that she’d lost, the fact that her doppleganger had been able to convince everyone for so long that she was the real Iris. On the surface she didn’t blame anyone. Mirror Iris was a very good actress, because in a lot of ways she was her. She had the same memories, knowledge, emotions… But she wasn’t alive. She wasn’t human. She wasn’t Iris. And for months Iris had been screaming into the void, the ever-present mirror that occasionally let her see her family and friends, that they see the truth. And how could they not see it?

Especially Barry. Barry knew her so well…

Later she’d come to learn that he had suspected Mirror Iris right from the start. She had cooked better, spoken in a foreign language fluently, and hit some guy over the head with a glass bottle, a boundary Iris herself probably wouldn’t have crossed, even undercover. She’d spoken the truth about how she felt about Barry always putting her in a corner when it was time to fight the bad guys, but Iris would’ve never started an argument just for the sake of it. She wouldn’t have made her husband think they were growing apart or that he wasn’t proud of her. She wouldn’t have stormed off.

In the following weeks, she wouldn’t have shut down around him if he didn’t give her what she wanted. When he reassured her that he trusted her, she wouldn’t have merely smiled and thanked him and walked away. She wouldn’t have spent the night away from him while he merely sat reading in the dark. She wouldn’t have told him that it was for the best that the speed force was dead, and he’d lose his speed indefinitely. She knew how big a part of his identity being the Flash was. If he wanted to walk away from it, that was one thing. But to encourage it when he didn’t? She would have never done that.

The revelation that Mirror Iris had slept with her husband, both literally and sexually, hadn’t hit Iris hard at first, but in time it did. How could Barry not tell? In their most intimate moments, how was he not aware that it wasn’t really her?

But when she learned that at the same moment she had declared her undying love for him with her hand pressed to the mirror of another universe, so had he? She forgot all of that. How could she blame him, especially when he realized it was her after she did the most heinous thing? Mirror Iris had tried to fracture their marriage.

How dare she.

Iris would never. And Barry knew that. He knew it.

Everything started to align after that. In the end, Iris had saved herself, shocking everyone and slapping Barry with a burden of guilt unintentionally. Because she’d nearly gone mad, and he hadn’t connected the dots soon enough, and he should’ve been able to rescue her. He was her husband, the Flash. She might not be a damsel in distress, but she needed his help, and he failed her.

Her ever-constant need to be near him, to touch him, to make love to him helped ease his guilt. She was just so glad to be back and to be with him. She forgave him, she said. She loved him, she said. She never wanted to lose him again.

But that was the first week.

It had been two weeks since then, and Barry could feel them growing apart. Iris didn’t say it, but he wondered if she was starting to blame him for not figuring out she was gone sooner. They hadn’t made love in a week, and the last time they had, it had been the result of a fight. He had started it. He’d wanted to push her into admitting she hadn’t really forgiven him.

She hit him with the blow he hadn’t been expecting, even though his argument implied he should have.

“I have forgiven you,” she’d said, tears fresh in her eyes. “But forgiving and forgetting are two different things.”

And he’d felt so empty, he didn’t know what to do. Tears started to stream down his cheeks at the reality that she would never forget how he’d been with someone that wasn’t her, even if he’d been unaware of it at the time.

She approached him then and laid her hand over his heart.

“I blame her, not you. She manipulated you. She made you think I wasn’t your home.” Her voice cracked.

“Then why did you need to forgive me?” he asked sadly.

She kissed him, unwilling to answer his question, not really knowing how to. She walked backwards till she fell back on the bed and eagerly stripped him of his clothing, as he did hers. They made love that night with the intensity of a lightning storm. And in the morning, they were okay again; except they weren’t really. And Barry didn’t know how to fix it.

But he didn’t bring up the subject again. He didn’t want to fight. So instead he walked around her as if on eggshells. He did whatever he could to make her happy. But they didn’t make love since that night, and they rarely kissed, except for a peck here and there when leaving for work or arriving home. Barry still dropped off love letters at her work during her lunch hour, but she didn’t acknowledge them when she got home anymore like she used to. He wondered if there was any use writing them at all. For all he knew she was throwing them away.

His carefully written, poured from his soul love letters to his beautiful wife might be in the trash. And that worried him most of all.

“Want a refill?” he asked, now, in the present, forcing himself out of his morbid thoughts. Because the day itself looked morbid, and Iris looked sad, and all he could think of was to give her more dark roast, because hell, he knew she at least wouldn’t turn down that.

“Hmm?” she asked, turning away from the window to see him holding the coffee pot before her. “Oh.”

Her brows furrowed, then she looked down into her half-empty cup.

“No, I still have some.”

“Is it cold though?” he asked, before he could get down on himself.

She took a sip.

“Mm…lukewarm.” She wrinkled her nose and held out her mug, and he filled it up to the brim. “Thanks, babe,” she said and took a sip before settling in at the window again.

He nodded once, too afraid he’d say something he’d regret if he opened his mouth again, and returned the pot to its holder in the kitchen. He stood there for a while again, watching his wife. She didn’t seem to notice, and she noticed even less when he went upstairs to change and then sped out of the loft to take a run in the rain.

He needed to get away, to figure things out, to put his relationship, his wife, back together again. As fate would have it though, he was unable to come up with anything any more than the previous times he’d gone out for a run for this exact reason.

Realizing staying out any longer wouldn’t do any good, he sped and stopped abruptly once inside.

Iris wasn’t sitting by the window anymore. In fact, she was coming down the stairs when she stopped suddenly, spotting his sad-looking self standing in front of the door.

“Oh, my God, Barry, you’re dripping! Let me-”

She rushed to get some towels and help him dry off.

“I figured you’d left, but I didn’t realize it was to run in the rain. Of all the stupid-”

He tensed, and she stopped herself. She met his eyes and searched them with concern.

“Barry… Are you okay?”

And he hated himself. Because she’d been about to lash out, but she held back because she knew it would hurt him. He wished she’d just hurt him. This dancing around each other thing they were doing was only making things worse. He wished she’d just acknowledge it. If she couldn’t get over what he and Mirror Iris did, the least she could do was be upfront about it.

He didn’t answer, so she pressed forward as if she had.

“Why don’t you go take a shower?” she suggested softly. “I’ll order some take-out and we can watch a movie after.”

‘You’ll touch me?’ he almost said but held back. That would start a fight. He didn’t want to fight, but he didn’t know how to act anymore.

So, he just nodded and said, “Okay.”

Iris forced another smile and headed into the living room to retrieve her cell phone and make the call. Barry sped up the stairs, lightning crackling behind him, so she wouldn’t see him dragging his feet the way he wanted to.

Then he entered the bathroom, undressed and turned on the shower. The hot water should’ve been soothing, a relief to him after the cold rain that had nearly drowned him as he ran outside. But it only made him want to scream, want to yell, want to shout. He wanted to bang on the walls because how in the hell did he pull them out of this emptiness.

The evening would be fake, put on as a means of not fighting and because both of them were tired.

As it turned out, when Barry finished with his shower and dressed in a t-shirt and sweats, he came downstairs to the sight of Iris sleeping on the couch. He lifted her up and carried her to bed. When the delivery man came, Barry paid him and stuck the food in the fridge. He wasn’t feeling real hungry anyway.

...

*Will post on AO3 and FFnet when beta’d.

[expensiveglasses]

Charming chapter 6

Summary: Prince Jungkook was as infuriating as he was beautiful. In line to one day be king, he requested your guidance in the ways of his people. In turn he will make you laugh, give your family fine gifts, and become an invaluable friend. Unfortunately, he will also make you fall in love with him. But the most unfortunate thing of all was his betrothal…to Snow White

Pairing: Jungkook x Reader

Genre: Fluff, Fantasy, Angst, Snow white/au

Rating: NC-17

Word Count: 4590

Warnings: This is the chapter the warnings have been about. It’s a heavier chapter in the second half dealing with “death” and attempted suicide. Nothing is graphically described, but if you are sensitive to that subject matter, you may want to avoid the last few paragraphs.  

Trigger warnings are TW: Major character “death” TW: Thoughts of suicide TW: Attempted suicide.  

. .

A month had passed since Else’s wedding and the summer was slowly coming to an end. It made it easier to do chores when the air was cooler; more pleasant to sit outside and do the washing. Though you’d mostly neglected that for the last few weeks.

You hadn’t seen your friend as much since her marriage and so you’d spent even more time with the dwarfs and Snow in their cottage. The prince joined most nights, bringing food and humor with him. You’d quickly learned he was a master of terrible jokes and couldn’t help but like him all the more for it.

This morning your mother had sent you in search of berries. She claimed to want to make preserves, but you were wise enough to know she just wanted to go see a friend and gossip. You didn’t mind so much as you chose to dawdle around the edge of the forest, plucking blueberries from bushes and placing them in your basket.

You saw the prince making his way towards you long before he reached you. The sight of him made your insides feel funny, like little wings sweeping delicately against your ribcage and you bent down to survey a raspberry bush, plucking eagerly at the juicy red fruit.

“Good morning.” The prince greeted as he reached your side and you stood straight to gaze up at him.

“Good morning, Jungkook. You’re out very early today; normally I don’t see you until evening.”

“I finished my lessons early today.” He grinned, something mischievous in his twinkling eyes, and you felt that perhaps he’d snuck out before actually finishing his training.

“I hope you won’t get a tongue lashing for this.” You teased, moving further up the path towards a strawberry bush and plucking one to try. “Mmm, they’re amazing right now. Would you like to try one?”

You moved to take another bite of yours, but the prince was faster, grabbing your wrist and pulling the berry towards his mouth, allowing plump lips to encircle the rest of the berry and separate it from its calyx.

For a moment, everything stilled, your heart thumping wildly in your chest as his fingers remained delicately around your wrist. His gaze was wild; heated on yours as he stepped towards you. Heart racing, you let the end of the strawberry fall from your finger tips and onto the ground.

“Sweet.” He murmured, licking the juice from the corner of his mouth and your vision was pulled toward the sight before you quickly looked away.

The prince paused before stepping back, staring down at the strawberry bush and into your own basket. “You’re picking berries this morning? May I help?”

“Yes, of course.” You nodded, turning back to the strawberry bush and plucking fresh fruit to drop into your basket. “There’s more in the forest.” You signaled, beginning to walk and he followed after you.

“What were you studying today?” You asked as you began to pick from new bushes. Jungkook stood nearby, loading his hand with blueberries.

“Foreign politics and language specifically. These are topics that I studied in school as well, but my father wants me polished in the policies of our own kingdom, of course.”

“Are foreign policies of other lands so different from our own?” You asked, walking closer to him so he could drop the berries in his hands into your basket.

“It depends on the country.” He mused, crouching low to pick from more difficult spots. “The ones nearby are very similar, but across waters it begins to diversify greatly. Of course, all people are human at their core, intrinsically the same if we’re all torn down to the beginnings, but traditions and belief systems vary. It’s good to have a working knowledge of any land we may come to have dealings with.”

“Ah, the duties of a king.” You smiled softly as he stood to his full height beside you. The prince drifted closer to you as you weaved your way deeper into the forest. Close enough that you could feel the graze of his sleeve against yours, smell the fresh saffron against his tunic.

“Duty, I find, is a very inconvenient thing.” He looked at you and you pondered his words curiously.

“What do you mean?” You inquired gently, slowing your pace to match his.

“Always to be bound to one’s duty, never to allow the heart to decide.”

You paused a moment. “And what does the heart wish for?” You whispered, looking up at him. He’d come to a stop and you stilled as well, turning to face him.

“I think you know.” He returned just as softly. The weight of his words was heavy to bear; it brought with it a joy you’d felt was impossible. You had hoped he would say something like that; that he’d been feeling what you were feeling. You were flush with warmth at the admission. 

“But your heart cannot have its desires?”

He smiled sadly, eyes softening as he looked at you. “Duty, you see. It seems it bends for no one.”

“I wish it would.” You admit timidly and he sighed, taking your hand carefully in his own.

“As do I.”

“Snow says we mustn’t worry now, after all, the future continues and we do not know what it holds.” You smiled, feigning an optimism you didn’t really feel. If even a prince could not choose for himself, why should you feel things could be any different for you?

At least you knew you weren’t the only one wishing.

“Should we go see her?” Jungkook smiled and you nodded. He released your hand and you strode ahead of him, leading him further into the forest and eventually into the clearing that held the dwarf’s cottage.

Snow was not alone when you arrived; however, and the two of you stood startled in the doorway as you took notice of her with a young man by the hearth of the fire. They looked up at the two of you as the door swung open and Snow smiled, coming to pull you into a hug.

“You’ve come!” She cried happily. “I was so hoping you would. I wanted to introduce you both to my friend, Diterich. He’s the one I told you of, who saved me.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, your majesty.” Diterich said, bowing low. “Ma’am.” He said, inclining his head towards you and you smiled in return.

He was a handsome young man, dark, shaggy blonde hair and bright green eyes. He was well built and had a bow strapped to his back; you wondered if that was his profession. He was certainly not close to Snow in rank, but he held himself as though he were made for something more than his station in life and you liked that quiet confidence. You supposed Snow did too, based on the way she looked at him.

Love sick. It made your heart ache for her and you looked carefully over at Jungkook. Destiny had not been kind to any of you.

“I’ve heard of your kindness to my friend.” Jungkook said, “When everything is well again, you should be rewarded.”

Diterich shook his head, staring down at Snow, the same look of love she’d bestowed on him, and smiled. “With all due respect, your majesty, I didn’t do it for reward.”

“I like you all the better for it.” Jungkook smiled. “How did you come to find her, though?”

“Snow sent me a communication through letter. One of the dwarfs found me in Snow’s kingdom, at her direction, and delivered it personally. I am indebted to him. It has given me much comfort to see her safe and well. I am only sorry I could not bring her some of her clothes.”

Snow waved his comment away. “It is a small inconvenience. Besides, I am far happier to have your company than to have all my dresses back. All three of you. Will you be staying for supper?”

She looked to both Jungkook and yourself and you smiled with a shrug. “It’s still so early in the day so it’s hard to say, but I imagine I’ll be able to spare some time this evening.”

“I should hope so! By the way, did you happen to notice if there are any gooseberry bushes nearby? I want to make a pie tomorrow.”

You nodded, pointing out the window. “Yes, in fact, there are some just before the tree line. Over there.”

“Wonderful!” Snow cried, clapping her hands together. “Then tomorrow you can expect some pie.”

“I’ll be looking forward to it.” You said.

“Snow has said you’ve been friends since childhood.” Jungkook said suddenly, “but I never did ask how the two of you had met.”

He inspected them with the same interest you had and you wondered if he could see what you could. The prince was intelligent, so you imagined the shared looks of longing had not been missed. Diterich looked to Snow before answering.

“We met as children. My father was a huntsman in their court and I was raised to take his place. As children, we would play in the castle together. We got into trouble a lot,” he grinned, “a princess wasn’t meant to be wrestling with a common boy. Kindred spirits, my mother would say. When my father passed, I took his place as a huntsman in the royal court. Youngest in Vildüngan history.”

His chest puffed as he said it and you smiled. “Your family must be very proud.”

He nodded, expression dropping suddenly. “My mother and sister are all I have left. They’re in hiding, though. As am I. The queen found out about the pig’s heart and ordered my head. It’s why I came here; to warn Snow.”

You looked to the princess in alarm, but she smiled at you with all the serenity of one whose life isn’t in perpetual danger. “She doesn’t know I’m here.” Snow assured, squeezing your arm. “All is well.”

“We need to start thinking of ways to get you back to your kingdom. You’re its rightful heir!” Jungkook insisted and she tutted, moving away from the hearth of the fire and towards the kitchen to keep her hands busy.

“It will all work out somehow, I have faith.” She replied flippantly and Jungkook looked angry.

“Why won’t you take this seriously?” He chastised. “She wants you dead and is actively seeking your heart. Let my father help, we can do something; go against her.”

“No.” She insisted, turning sharply to look at him. “I don’t want anyone else to be pulled into this. No one need inconvenience or injure themselves on my behalf. I’m already uneasy with how many people are involved; how many lives are directly affected because of this…I won’t have anymore.”

“But,” Jungkook began once more but was silenced as she frowned at him.

“I said no, Jungkook.”

The prince sighed, rubbing at his forehead in frustration. “Fine, I can’t make you take your safety more seriously. I must return home.” He bowed before turning towards the door and you looked from Snow back to Jungkook before following him out into the clearing, basket full of berries swinging from your arm.

“Jungkook!” You called, rushing to his side. He didn’t slow so you walked with him through the forest in silence. Just as the trees were thinning, Jungkook slowed his pace, sighing loudly.

“I’m afraid I won’t be seeing you again until the day after next.” At your questioning look, he proceeded. “My father and I are expecting foreign dignitaries this evening and we will play host until tomorrow evening as well. I won’t have time to spare while they’re here.”

“Duty, as you say.” You smiled. He returned your soft smile, nodding and reaching for your hand.

“I will be seeing you.” He said, leaving a soft kiss on the back of your hand before making his way back up to the castle. . .

Your mother was in the garden when you returned, cutting cucumbers from their stalks. She looked up as you came through the gate, waving you over.

“Why did it take so long to pick berries?” Your mother asked with a frown, taking the basket from your arms.

“I went to say hello to the dwarfs while I was in the area.”  You said, bending down beside her and helping to dig up carrots at her direction.

“You’re there too often these days; what business does a young woman have visiting 7 old men so often? Aren’t they in the mines at this time of day anyway?”

You sighed, brushing hair from your face as you dropped a couple carrots into the basket beside your mother. “Well, now that Else is married I don’t always have anyone to visit.”

Your mother frowned. “Perhaps you should think of getting married soon.” She said and you looked up at her startled.

“Get married? It’s not that easy, mother. I’m not even being courted.”

She gave you a look, eyes shifting over to the house. “If you gave a little more effort where prudent, perhaps that wouldn’t be a problem.”

You sighed, shaking your head and pulling another carrot from the dirt. “I’m not in love with Peter.” You whispered.

Your mother laughed, wiping her hands on her skirt. “Love? We don’t have that luxury, my dear. You know that.” She stood, hands extended for the basket full of vegetables and you handed it up to her before standing and grabbing your own basket with berries. “I expect you here all day tomorrow. You’ve been neglecting your duties and it’s time you start preparing to run a house of your own. Time waits for no one, you know.”

She walked into the house and you watched after her, chewing on your bottom lip as you willed the tears of frustration back. You wiped your hands on the apron over your dress before walking into the house and out of the sun.

Peter and your father were in the corner, both working with new fabrics. Peter looked up at you, offering you a small smile before returning to his work and you sighed softly to yourself. Why couldn’t you just love him? . .

Your hands were sore. You’d been at the river all morning with your mother washing linen. It had been your job to beat the linen with a poss-stick as your mother insisted that’s what youth was for. You wondered if you’d ever be able to move again. What good was youth if it was wasted away on chores?

Hands feeling like they might just fall off, you wrung out the last of the fabrics before dropping it in your basket and heaving this onto your hip. Your mother chatted aimlessly as you walked from the riverside and around the edge of the forest towards your home.

You cast your eyes up towards the castle as it came into view around the bend of the trees and wondered idly what Jungkook was doing today. You knew he was entertaining foreign dignitaries, of course, but you couldn’t even imagine what that entailed. Perhaps they were holed up in some room discussing trade.

“Can you imagine living there?” Your mother asked, taking note of your gaze. You sighed, looking from her and back to the castle.

“Only in our dreams, mother.”

She hummed, shifting her own laundry basket in her arms. “If we lived in a place like that, I imagine we could have someone else tend to our washing. Our cooking, too. What must their food be like, hmm?”

You chuckled, kicking a pebble across the dirt path. “I suppose we’ll never know. Grand, I imagine, though. Warm potatoes and bread, sweet dessert’s whenever we ask for them. I would eat everything and die happy if I were them.”

“Thanks to the prince, we can have some share in their prosperity.” Your mother commented and you could see her looking at you from the corner of her eye. “He’s been very generous, as of late.”

You nodded; eyes trained on the dirt path beneath your feet. “Yes, he has been very kind.”

“He was never so kind when he was a boy. I wonder at the change.” She remarked and you wondered if she suspected more than she let on. She’d never seen the two of you together; aside from when he and his father had visited your home a few months ago.

“Perhaps he had a very good education.” You said as the roof of your home came into view. “Rumor has it he went to a school for training.”

“Rumor, you say?” She asked and you nodded, pushing through the gate in front of your house.

Conversation stopped then as the two of you went about hanging the laundry from the lines and working in the garden. Peter and your father were working on mending clothing in the home, so you didn’t feel like discussing the king and his son in their presence. It seemed your mother was also of the same mind set.

As the sun waned and the evening became cooler, Peter left your home with goodbyes and well wishes. You were only just finishing supper when the wind outside began to howl. Your father peaked his head outside the door and you watched as you ladled stew into bowls.

“A storm is approaching.” He commented softly. “I must make sure the animals are secured.” He left the home to the small stable behind your house and you listened as the wind whistled loudly from outside the walls.

“We’ve not had rain in a while.” Your mother said, helping you to bring the food to the small table. “It will be good for the crops.”

The storm raged loudly through the night, rain pounding against the timber frame of your home. It was difficult to sleep with all the noise; thunder and lightning bursting loudly across the sky. You could hear your father snoring from the small room next to yours and it soon lulled you into a fitful sleep. . .

Mornings after a storm were your favorite. The calm as opposition to the fierce raging of wind the night before a reminder that brighter days always followed the rain. You’d managed to convince your mother to allow you to check on the dwarfs this morning. You imagined they were mostly protected from the elements in their place among the trees. Even so.

After a quick breakfast of pottage, you dressed and made your way towards the forest. The sun was already sitting comfortably in the sky, illuminating the crystal blue sky and you listened happily to the sounds of birds singing as you walked through the fields.

You found, to your surprise, the prince already waiting by the forests edge. He sat upon a boulder; legs draped out in front of him as he pulled blades of grass apart as distraction. He looked up as your footsteps roused his attention, smile spreading across his lips.

“Y/N.” He beamed, standing and coming to meet you.

“I’m surprised to see you so early!” You exclaimed. “Won’t your father be missing you?”

“Actually, he and our guests drank well into the evening. They will be spending the next few hours recovering in bed.” He said with a roguish grin and you chuckled, making your way into the forest.

The prince followed quickly. “Did you not drink yourself, your majesty?” You teased and he smiled at you.

“I did, but only a little. I knew I wanted to use the opportunity to see you.”

You looked away with a small chuckle, smoothing hair away from your face.

“Well, here I am.” You smiled. Before you could continue, there was a heavy rustling in the trees and both you and Jungkook stopped, watching with unease as something came crashing through the branches.

To your surprise; it was the dwarfs who came rushing into sight and they stopped suddenly, panting before you.

“Y/N, your majesty!” Doc gasped, clutching at his rounded belly as he took deep steadying breaths. The panic in his tone was palpable and your back straightened in alarm.

“What’s wrong?” You asked. Jungkook seemed just as tense from their unusual greeting and you waited with baited breath for your friends to continue.

“It’s Snow.” Doc finally said and your alarm rose.

“What of her?” The prince asked sharply and all eyes turned to him. The dwarfs were still breathing heavily from their run; disrupting the usual quiet of the forest.

“Your majesty!” Sleepy blubbered, hardly able to contain himself. “Snow has died.”

“What?!” You gasped, eyes swiveling desperately to each face, each as stricken as the next.

“How?!” The prince demanded and Doc was quick to try and calm the atmosphere.

“She has not died.” He pacified. Your chest was so tight you thought it might burst. How could someone possibly die and not die all at the same time? “She’s been put under a spell; a sleeping spell.”

“I don’t understand.” Jungkook said tersely. You’d never seen him look so distraught.

“Allow me to explain.” Doc continued, “An old hag came to the cottage when we were away. She had a basket of apples. I’m unsure how, but Snow came to acquire one.”

“It was poisoned and that foolish girl took a bite.” Grumpy cried furiously.

Doc tried once more to continue, but Happy spoke first. “We chased the hag, but it was difficult in the storm. Chased her up the mountain but she slipped and fell off. It was the queen, your majesty. It was her stepmother.”

“Did you capture her?” Jungkook asked angrily, back ramrod straight as he paced back and forth. “Did you tie her up to be tried for her crimes?”

“No need,” Bashful said, shaking his head. “The queen is dead. She died from the fall.”

“What of Snow?” You rasped, “where is she?”

“That’s why we were coming for you, your majesty.” Doc said once again. “It was old magic the queen used; ancient. Unless she can find true loves kiss, she’ll remain asleep forever. We can take you to her.”

“True loves kiss?” Jungkook asked, voice cracking in his grief.

The dwarfs nodded. “It’s the only cure.” Sneezy bemoaned. “That’s why we came to find you, your majesty.”

“Me?” Jungkook asked, looking to you and back to the dwarfs.

They looked to you; gazes filled with pity before Doc spoke once more. “You are her betrothed, your majesty. If not you, then who?”

The pain in your chest was severe. Fracturing from the loss of a friend; ripping apart as the prospect of losing the one man you truly loved loomed like a shadow over you.

“What do I have to do?” He whispered and you looked up at him.

“True loves kiss.” Dopey murmured, eyes shifting over to you sadly and then back to the prince.

It was silent for what felt like eternity, the gravity of the situation sinking in and you felt buried under the weight of it; the forest floor waiting to accept you. The prince looked to you, tears already in his eyes, but your own vision of him quickly blurred.

“I have to try.” Jungkook choked and you could feel your heart break a little more, “she’s one of my closest friends. I can’t sit back and do nothing; I couldn’t live with myself. I have to try.”

“I understand.” You murmured. “What if you’re able to wake her?”

Jungkook paused, his eyelashes fluttering closed, a line drawing between his eyes. “Let’s not think about it right now. I have to go.” He gave you one last glance before darting further into the forest with the dwarfs and out of sight. Was it possible to die from a broken heart? You were sure the question had been asked before…you were also sure the answer was yes. Your heart ached in a way you’d never imagined it could.

The love of your life was running to the side of another woman, and though you knew his reasoning was righteous and sound, you ached for the inevitable outcome. A prince was meant to be with a princess. This was no fairy tale, not for you, at least. You can’t always have what you want.

But as you stood there in the grass, surrounded by your broken dreams, you mourned what you could never have had. Even if Snow had not eaten the apple, even had she not been born at all, you would never have been given your heart’s desire; your class was decided before you were born and you would do well to remember it.

When Snow awoke, as she inevitably would, you would be left to watch them marry. Worse still, your father would likely be commissioned to make Jungkook’s wedding clothes and you would be expected to help. That was a bitter truth you could not swallow. To carry the wedding clothing of the man you were desperately in love with…only for him to wear them with someone else.  

You could not do it.

Your feet began to take you before your mind could catch up. The dwarves’ home, tucked delicately between the trees and the stream. The lighting surrounding the cottage was dim despite the morning hour, the house dark in the absence of the once warm lighting; filled with the dwarfs and Snow’s laughter and song.

Now it felt as empty as your heart. The evening turned chilly, the storm from yesterday taking with it the sun from the late summer and you shivered at the thresh hold, lifting your hand carefully to push against the door.

With a soft creak, the door swung open and you glanced inside. In their haste, everything had been left exactly as it was. An uncooked gooseberry pie sat on the counter top, flour strewn across. The fire in the fire place had long gone out. And there, by the table, an apple with one bite.

You stood in the door way a moment, staring down at the beautiful red skin of the nearly pristine apple. Contemplating. You could not bear to face a future without him in it.

With three quick strides, you picked up the apple and ran from the house, seeking out the privacy the trees afforded you. Not far from the home, in a particularly dense part of the forest, you stood staring down at the beautiful, red fruit.

A choice, so simple yet so difficult. One bite; you knew that’s all it would take…but was it really worth it? The light was fading fast this deep in the forest and you shivered, looking around in the darkness.

You thought of Jungkook again, of his handsome, smiling face. His kind and gentle heart, his loyalty and good nature. Was he with Snow White now? Had she already woken up? He was no longer your Jungkook; forever the kingdoms Jungkook and your heart wept.

You wouldn’t even be missed.

Staring down at the apple you closed your eyes, breathing slowly out of your nose before bringing it to your lips and taking a bite. It was bitter, acidic, and it burned. You coughed, dropping the apple to the ground and fell to your knees, spluttering, eyes watering as your tongue swelled and you felt your blood turn to ice in your veins.

Everything hurt, your limbs felt like they were made of fire, burning, burning, burning and then black.

.

.

Here’s the second to last chapter! The 7th is already finished and in editing. I hope you loved this chapter as much as I loved writing it and I can’t wait to hear from you! <3

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Copyright © 2019 by Taeken-My-Heart. All rights reserved.

[blackjack-15]

Ziplines, Blood Ties, and Colonavirus — Thoughts on: The Silent Spy (SPY)

Previous Metas: SCK/SCK2, STFD, MHM, TRT, FIN, SSH, DOG, CAR, DDI, SHA, CUR, CLK, TRN, DAN, CRE, ICE, CRY, VEN, HAU, RAN, WAC, TOT, SAW, CAP, ASH, TMB, DED, GTH

Hello and welcome to a Nancy Drew meta series! 30 metas, 30 Nancy Drew Games that I’m comfortable with doing meta about. Hot takes, cold takes, and just Takes will abound, but one thing’s for sure: they’ll all be longer than I mean them to be.

Each meta will have different distinct sections: an Introduction, an exploration of the Title, an explanation of the Mystery, a run-through of the Suspects. Then, I’ll tackle some of my favorite and least favorite things about the game, and finish it off with ideas on how to improve it.

If any game requires an extra section or two, they’ll be listed in the paragraph above, along with my list of previous metas.

These metas are not spoiler free, though I’ll list any games/media that they might spoil here: SPY; mentions of the “Nancy Games” (ASH-SPY); SAW; mention of National Treasure (2004).

The Intro:

It’s our penultimate meta, and this time, it’s personal.

In every way, The Silent Spy is the culmination of the Nancy Games. Ever since her trip back home in ASH, Nancy has been increasingly featured in the games, showing us more of her personality, her life, and her backstory — all in an effort to lead up to this story, where we actually delve into Nancy’s place in the world and what it means that she lives in it.

And the answer to that is a lot less wholly idealistic than the franchise would have given 20+ games ago.

I don’t mean to say that SPY is a cynical game — it’s honestly fairly neutral, edging on positive — but that SPY accepts the fundamental truth that all of the Nancy games have been leading up to: that Nancy, though talented, hardworking, and connected, is simply another fish when it comes to the sea of life. She’s not unique in any way that really matters – look at her foils in Alexei, in Jamila, in Deirdre, in Jessalyn — and yet she continues to work hard, to solve puzzles, and to right old wrongs.

At least for me, this is a hopeful message. The point of “Nancy Drew, Girl Detective” is not that no one could do what she does, it’s not that she’s the best, most experienced sleuth in the world, and it’s not that she’s the Last, Best Hope of those who call upon her for aid. The point behind her character is that she’s a relatively normal (if wealthy) girl who does what she can, and chooses to do it again and again.

There’s a wonderful part in the equally wonderful movie National Treasure when our heroes are reading a part of the Declaration — the part talking about the right of the citizens to throw off a despotic government like the British had become — and Ben (Nicholas Cage, actually in a good movie for once!) defines it in modern speech:

“If there’s something wrong, those who have the ability to take action have the responsibility to take action.”

In the beginning of the Nancy Drew games series, Nancy is merely an intuitive puzzle solver. She gets her cases through family connections, turns up at places where mysteries happen to occur, etc. etc. As time goes on and she practices, she eventually comes to the point where she’s being hired for bigger and bigger cases, more and more regularly — in short, she starts to live the truth of that quote. Nancy is, at her core, someone with the ability to take action against things that are Wrong. Throughout this series — and most especially, throughout the “Nancy” games (ASH-SPY), she becomes someone who recognizes her responsibility to take action.

And that’s what’s showcased here in SPY. Upon arriving and learning that she’s been led to Glasgow under false circumstances, Nancy is immediately and wholly over her head — but she’s still someone who has the ability to take action to right a wrong. When she’s working against Revenant, warning the scientist, or reading through secret memo after secret memo, she’s not doing it with the intent to Save the World; she’s finishing Kate Drew’s last task. Her loyalty isn’t to Glasgow, to Cathedral, to MI5, or any other player in this story — her loyalty is to her mother, and to the task Kate Drew died while trying to finish.

Which is, in my view, the best possible motivation in a game that’s all about family.

With that discussion behind us, I want to talk a little bit here about the other theme of this game — power. Revenant, as the terrorist group that they are, want to seize power; their goal is to run Glasgow (branching off from there into a wider sphere, of course) through seizing power during a (self-induced) state of emergency — aka, what’s referred to in-game as the Colony operation.

This is, of course, Politics 101 — whip people up into a frenzy, come in promising to Save Everyone, and entrench yourself in power that you can’t be moved from with any amount of ease. And while Revenant planned it for 2005, it would work even better in 2013, when social media and instant, 24-hour news cycles can keep the fear alive far more effectively than Revenant would have hoped for nearly a decade prior.

Both in 2005 and 2013, Revenant nearly succeeds, only to be foiled by a red-head out of her depth but who tries anyway (the difference between the two, of course, is that Kate was isolated and Nancy had backup). The most startling thing — and one of my favorite things about this game – is that it doesn’t end with Nancy ‘killing’ Revenant once and for all, or even stopping the Colony Operation once and for all. Nancy is, in every way, out of her depth here; she’s not used by either side as an agent, or even as an asset — she is, as Zoe reminds her, a tool, valuable for what she might know, not for her skills, not for who she is, or what she works for.

As the games from TOT on have worked hard to expand Nancy’s world and tie it together, SPY shows the benefit of having a wide-open world: that the world goes on, people live and die, and secretive organizations (ATAC, Revenant, Cathedral, MI5…) plot and scheme to remake the world in their image.

This, in my view, is also a great thing. The thing that Nancy Drew books (and a lot of the early games) get wrong is that Nancy fixes (or is party to fixing) all of the problems introduced. The piano-playing girl that Nancy meets ends up with a Grandmaster as a teacher; the inheritance goes to the Worthy Widow and Her Daughter; Nancy rescues her tied-up father AND solves his case for his client all in one brilliant masterstroke.

That’s not to say that every story should have all of its threads dangling by the end, but Nancy is simply a smart and resourceful girl, working (most of the time) with her own relatively meager resources. She shouldn’t be the answer to the world’s problems, and I think it’s lovely that, especially in the Nancy games, she really isn’t. Nancy is a helper, and that’s far more valuable than being an omniscient, all-powerful being who can magically fix everyone’s problems just by being there.

The last thing I want to talk about in this introduction is how good SPY is for Nancy’s own personal lore. There’s a lot of fuss every time SPY is brought up about how “Nancy’s mom actually died when she was three!!” which, honestly, tells me that the 60s re-writes (which, yes, if you’re pedantic, started in ’59) did more damage than I had previously thought.

The original Nancy Drew books were written in the 30s by various ghostwriters, and were a little different from the yellow-bound 60s rewrites that most people consider the “old Nancy Drew books”. 30s Nancy Drew was a little closer to our games-universe Nancy; brash, outspoken, punishingly independent, and incredibly capable. She’s also a bit violent and unruly, has graduated from school at 16, lost her mother at 10, and does as she pleases with the occasional call home to reassure Carson or (more often) to ask a question about the law.

Sadly, other than taking out a few racial and societal overtones that weren’t really acceptable after 30 years — mostly by taking out any non-white characters and including different forms of bias, note — the yellow rewrites weren’t an improvement to the stories or to Nancy’s character. Nancy becomes less bold, less independent, and far more focused on describing each meal in punishing amounts of detail. The words ��kindly” and “sweetly” were increasingly added after “Nancy said”, she’s far more deferential to authority, and her mother instead passes when Nancy is 3, rather than 10.

In changing the form of the media to video games, rather than books, what would eventually become HER had a choice; they could align themselves with the newest Nancy Drew books — the Nancy Drew Files and Nancy Drew on Campus, both of which were known for being Hotter and Sexier (and, in the case of Campus, ridiculously stupid) — or choose what people called “the classics” — the yellow-spine 60s rewrites, as the once-famous blue books had been all but forgotten in the 90s. In the first (and still one of the last, honestly) brilliant move of the series, HER chose to mix and match the things that made for good game fodder from (nearly, given how much the Campus books suck) every written incarnation of Nancy.

And, to their credit, they chose an important fact from the 30s: Nancy’s mother died when she was 10, not when she was 3.

Losing a parent is a defining moment no matter when it happens, but the exact effect often changes based on (among other things) the age of the child. In order for Nancy to be the kind of person who is influenced by the mystery of her mother’s death, her mother had to have died when Nancy could remember — thus, 3 is right out, as Nancy might remember tiny bits and pieces of the events leading up to and right after, but nothing else.

By taking bits and pieces of contrasting (and often contradictory) lore and making their own out of it, HER (and I’m hat-tipping Cathy and Nik especially here, given Nancy’s characterization spike beginning around WAC/TOT) gives us a version of Nancy that’s similar to the sleuth we know and love from the books and movies (ignoring the 2007 disaster) and, occasionally, TV shows, while still keeping her mostly consistent and showing us a few new flashes that make this character stand out and win her place in the Drewniverse.

Now, with all of that said, let’s move on to this game in specific, shall we?

The Title:

The Silent Spy, as a title, is one that is wonderfully mysterious and really makes you want to know more — right up until the title drop within the game itself, at which point it shifts from quite alluring to desperately sad and foreboding.

After all, “the only silent spy is a dead spy.”

As the game really is about our resident Silent Spy — Kate Drew and her actions and legacy — this is really the only title that the game could have had, and it suits it down to the ground, both with its mystery and with its sadness.

In life, Kate Drew was silenced, and in death, she is obviously necessarily silent — but Nancy reads her words, remembers her speech, listens to her voice, and, of course, hears her song, whenever the world is quiet enough. And I think that’s a wonderful dichotomy for the title to introduce before the game has even properly begun.

The Mystery:

Summoned to Scotland by a mysterious message and guided by a photograph of her mother, Nancy arrives ready to retrace her mother’s steps — only to be thrown into a world of espionage, gadgets, untraceable phone calls, and deadly mishaps. Her luggage (and her best clue about her mother) having been stolen, the presence of an old family friend who refuses to talk, an evasive skiptracer, an excitable local, and a clever intelligence agent all work together to ensure that Nancy is off-balance the minute she arrives.

All, of course, is even less what it seems than Nancy is prepared for, and she spends to game gloriously off-balance trying to keep up with the larger forces pushing and pulling her. She needs to retrace her mother’s steps, escape from certain death, dig deep into the pasts and presents of the people she meets, and do some impressive sleuthing of her own to even make the change from tool to player — and even that might not be enough to keep her safe when the dastardly minds at Revenant come a-knocking…

As a mystery — or as a collection of intertwined mysteries, honestly — SPY succeeds at what a lot of other games tried (and ultimately failed, in one way or another), which is to link all the happenings in the game together under one cohesive plot that grows more and more horrifying the more you think about it. GTH has a fandom reputation for fridge horror, but SPY holds its own easily when you consider Kate’s fatal chase, Moira’s abduction and guilt, the threats that Ewan and Alec operate under, and the life that Zoe leads on the regular.

Every action that Nancy takes benefits someone — whether it be Cathedral, Revenant, herself, or an interested third (fourth?) party — without her really meaning to, and the game is great in including another question in every reveal.

The beauty of SPY’s mystery(s) is that it takes careful reading, paying attention, and honestly replaying in order to grasp the enormity of every action. No matter how many times you play or replay, there’s something new to find — a time-sensitive conversation, an implication in a note, a theory behind the presence of a clue or a piece of (what you previously thought to be) set dressing — it honestly is limitless, and it just helps to contribute to the feeling that this is a world that Nancy isn’t meant to truly be fully immersed in.

And speaking of people who are immersed in that world…

The Suspects:

We’ll begin, for organization’s sake, with our out-and-out (current) agents first, then tackle our other suspects, then our Nancy-related people, and finish off with — for the final time in this series, as this is the last “Nancy” game — Nancy herself.

A new, yet returning character, Bridget Shaw is one of the cover identities of Zoe Wolfe — aka Samantha Quick, who Nancy impersonated in VEN and who helped the Hardy Boys in Treasure on the Tracks.

Prior to SPY, I had money for a very long time that Samantha Quick would eventually come into the game, and I was absolutely delighted with her appearance in SPY — where else would she be so well situated? Zoe is snarky, disillusioned, cynical, and sometimes downright nihilistic, but she’s also someone who took up a job that, percentage-wise, no one wants to or is able to do, because she’s alone:

“I work in the field for two reasons: one, I don’t need any help. And two, because no one would miss me if I fell off the grid.”

I love watching the ND games subvert their own formula, and Zoe is a great example of the “helper”-type suspect who really isn’t like your traditional “helper” at all. She’s there to do a job, and if sticking with Nancy helps her to do it, then that’s what she does. But she’s not there to Right some Great Wrong for the warm fuzzies of it all, or even because it’s Just and Right. She’s there because it’s her job, and her job is to play the game.

“It’ll be brief, painful, and full of garbage…but that’s life, isn’t it? And that’s the metaphor I’m riding into the grave.”

Next is our (kind of) double operative and partial culprit, Ewan McLeod (real name Sean Kent Davis) is a clever operative of Cathedral who decided that he wasn’t valued or important anywhere near as much as he should have been, and reached out to Revenant to supply them with information. Summoning Nancy to Scotland, Ewan is easily able to gain a portion of her trust as the Watcher in the Wires and is her tie to the relative safety of Cathedral.

As a culprit, Ewan is — ultimately — pitiable. Not that he’s not an egotist with a victim complex a mile wide, but when you actually look at the situation he’s in, it’s hard not to feel bad for him, even though he did it to himself. Having contacted Revenant, he’s now attempting to hold a tiger by the tail, praying it can’t eat him — and his worst fears come true, as his loved ones are threatened (“trying to keep my friends and family alive”, remember) and he’s discarded and made a target by the terrorists that he tried to use to make himself important.

Given the rather chilling threats made by Revenant, I’m inclined to believe that when we find him tied up, he didn’t do it to himself. Nancy would have noticed if the knots were too loose to have been done by a third party, and we know Revenant told him several times that if he wasn’t useful, he’d be punished.

While Ewan makes terrible choices, he’s also a pawn being played by a larger force — like everyone else in the game — and that is at least worth pity, if not forgiveness.

Next up is our former Cathedral agent and all-around tough cookie Moira Chisholm. As one of the people responsible for the events that led to Kate’s death — though no one but Revenant is responsible for killing her, note — Moira lives with guilt, regret, and a powerful sense of loneliness that only the loss of everyone you hold dear can bring.

Moira’s guilty of nothing in the present-day calamity, and helps Nancy the very best she can in her own limited power, but is ultimately a character for whom the past looms larger than the present can match. She has her hobbies, but her house is filled with memories of days when people sat on her couch and broke her teacups, not of hours reading alone.

She’s an intensely tragic character, and an example of what happens when your need to know the “truth” can get in the way of doing right by those you love. Moira lost everything to her previous job for Cathedral (who is implied to have left her, an otherwise dangerous free agent, alive because they knew (correctly!) she would become stagnant and docile under the weight of her own guilt, ouch), and yet she risks life and limb to help Nancy —not because she thinks it’ll exculpate her, but because Moira, at her core, wants to help the world, no matter what it’s taken from her.

Our final suspect is Glasgow’s resident skiptracer and unwilling pawn Alec Fell, who, along with Moira, can be traced back to Kate Drew’s death. Originally, Alec investigated a mysterious car crash — the one that killed Kate Drew — and, when he didn’t stop after a warning, had his office ransacked and burned. In the few months before the game starts, he experiences another break-in and his sister is kidnapped, with a message informing him that if he wants to guarantee her safety, to comply with Revenant’s orders.

Unlike Ewan, when pushed into a corner, Alec does his best to raise a little hell while still trying to keep his sister safe. For everything that he does on Revenant’s orders, he also helps Nancy out, finds her suitcase, locates Moira, tells Nancy where the cards are, and does his best to push back in other, little ways.

Sure Alec is guilty of a few things — most notably the fake shooting scare in Nancy’s room — but he’s a very active character, riding the rails and searching for anyone who can help put an end to this situation. It’s not for nothing that he’s a fan favorite, both for this game for the series at large, and his excellent VA and charming dialogue only make up half of his appeal.

On our Nancy side, we’ve got a few returning characters and one (semi) new one, so let’s go through them before getting (for the last time!) to the girl detective herself.

Carson Drew, father and golf model extraordinaire, is here to ground (as in steady, not punish) Nancy as she goes through this mystery. As the other person besides Nancy who was most affected by Kate’s death, Carson is an invaluable source of Kate-related knowledge, but is concerned foremost with his daughter’s safety.

For my money, the most important thing we learn about Carson here is that, well…he married the wrong woman as much as Kate married the wrong man. It’s sort of simplistic to say that their story shows that, in some cases, love doesn’t conquer all, but it’s true all the same.

Carson was happy to jet off to Scotland on occasion to visit Moira and her husband, but being happy to take vacations is a very different thing from a life constantly shifting and changing. He’s a prosecutor, so he has a strong sense of justice, but also has a strong sense of stability — he chose a career with a set trajectory and clearly defined rules.

Kate Austin, however, was a journalist who occasionally consulted for a Spy Organization when life got a little too boring (it’s important to note that she wasn’t a straight-out spy like Moira — she was far too free-spirited for that). She had all of Nancy’s inquisitiveness but more people skills than Nancy will probably ever have, and made friends easily.

It’s easy to see how she would have been attracted to the All-American, hardworking, solidly intelligent, emotionally balanced man, just as it’s easy to see how the slightly flashy, clever, inquisitive, intuitive redhead would have attracted him.

If this is starting to feel like I’m describing two other characters here…well, longtime readers of this meta series already know what happens when I use a paragraph to describe characters without using their names.

Kate is important in the game in that we’re shown her differences from and —more enlightening — similarities to Nancy. Nancy’s actions in this game are reflections on what Kate did (and what she would have done) as much as they show how the daughter diverges from the mother. And while Nancy doesn’t have her mother’s people skills or ease of making friendships, what she does have is her mother’s – and I’m going to use this word purposely — flightiness.

At the end of the day, Carson couldn’t be with Kate when she flitted off around the world, and Ned can’t be with Nancy when she does the same.

(I also find it interesting that we deal in the games only with Carson’s side of the family, and never even have a mention of Nancy’s maternal grandparents. Yes, I know Kate could have been an only child and her parents could already be dead…but I do like the possibility that they blame Carson for Kate’s death (entirely undeservedly!) and thus cut off contact. But this meta is for, well, meta, not fanfic.)

Ned Nickerson plays an important role in SPY in that he tries to help Nancy the best he can, even to the point of breaking and entering in her house (though really, it’s just entering, since he has permission) to find a document for her.

Ned comes off brilliantly in this game, but it’s important to note that his big, impressive (yet charmingly understated) speech isn’t to Nancy, but to Carson. And it doesn’t sway Nancy, it sways Carson. Because, at the end of the day, Carson can relate to lots of the pieces that make Ned what he is, and the situation that Ned finds himself in.

He’s wonderful, as boyfriends go; he calls her, encourages her, offers oddly prescient hints…but he doesn’t go with her. It’d be easy enough to make that a point in the series that, though we don’t see it happen, Ned often accompanies Nancy on her escapades, but instead we’re told — often through contention — that the exact opposite is true.

Ned is solid, true, intelligent, emotionally balanced and kind, but above all, Ned is stable. He’s enrolled in college — in an honors frat — and plays sports, attends his classes faithfully, remembers important dates…the list goes on and on. These are all wonderful characteristics for a boyfriend, but he, like Carson with Kate, ultimately isn’t what Nancy needs out of a relationship — and she is certainly not, like Kate with Carson, what Ned needs out of a relationship.

At the end of the day, both would need to compromise — Ned would need to set off with her sometimes, and Nancy would need to stay close to home sometimes — in order to make the other happy. And, well…nothing we have in any of the games says that either one would do that in the long term. Sure, Nancy returns home after the fight in CAP for ASH…but is in Egypt the very next game — immediately followed by Colorado, Georgia, and Scotland.

And honestly, this is the basis on which I disagree with Ned/Nancy as a couple. It serves neither one and, as we see in quite a few games where they squabble, they can make each other worse.

And speaking of our resident sleuth, let’s talk about Nancy Drew before wrapping up this character section.

In SPY, Nancy is — as mentioned above — a tool, used by both sides to get what they want without caring how it personally affects her. The big thing we learn about Nancy in this — and one of my favorite characteristics about her — is that Nancy is pretty ruthless. To me, it makes sense that, to get the information she wants, Nancy does what a terrorist organization tells her to because 1) it’s not her home immediately at risk, and 2) most importantly, Nancy has done bad things in the name of a good end in pretty much every game.

Lying, stealing, breaking priceless artifacts, endangering others — none of these are really new to Nancy, and what SPY does is brings that to the forefront. Sure, you as the player have the option not to do what Revenant tells Nancy to do…but then you miss out on big parts of Kate’s characterization — and, more importantly, a big part of Nancy’s.

In an unprecedented move, I’m going to reference National Treasure again, and quote part of Ben’s speech before he steals the Declaration:

“[A toast] to high treason…here’s to men who did what was considered wrong, in order to do what they thought was right — what they knew was right.”

To me, that shows us why Nancy does what she does — in SPY, and in every other game where she lies, cheats, and steals her way to the truth. She does it because, at the end of the day, Nancy is a person who is ruthless in her pursuit of her goal. And that’s a valuable trait.

Especially when one is dealing with spies, terrorists, and shady government operatives.

The Favorite:

I love most of SPY, so I’ll stick here with the things that especially stick out to me.

As covered above, I love: what this game does for the lore of the ND world; ‘Samantha Quick’; the many motivations of our suspects, and the emotional resonance that this game has.

Beyond that, there are a lot of little things. I absolutely love that they got the relative of the guy who plays Carson to play Nancy when she was little — that’s adorable to me. I love the cookie-making minigame, the outfit swap for Bridget/Zoe, the voice work for all of our suspects and helpers, and the beautiful locations (especially the spy cabin, both exterior and interior).

My favorite moment in the game is a sad one, but I’m a mercurial kind of person, so you should have really expected that. It’s actually Moira’s log/diary/letter to Kate (it functions as all three) after Cathedral deactivates her as an agent. I love a lot about it — the sad, almost desperate feeling to the words, the pen color changing as the seasons do — but nothing is better done than Moira’s last entry:

“It’s winter. It doesn’t matter that it’s winter, does it?”

My favorite puzzle is probably the zip-lining one. Sure, it’s easy, and sure, the animation makes me a little motion-sick, but it’s just….zip lines are just cool. That’s all there is to it. It appeals to the spy-loving idiot in me, and I think big-woosh-go-fast is stupid cool.

I also have to give a hat-tip to Kate’s letter — turning a fandom meme into a heartwarming story? Nik, you mad genius — and Nancy’s letter to Kate at the end. Both are beautifully written and are the perfect centerpiece to their respective characters, and both always put a smile on my face (and, at times, a tear in my eye) when reading them.

The last thing I really do have to mention here is Logan’s quasi-reappearance. I mentioned this in my “Top 5 Surprising Moments” meta, but I love, love, love that Logan is a Cathedral operative, and that he reported on Nancy during SAW. Not only does this continue to open up Nancy’s world, but it also shows that there are consequences to Nancy’s actions. She’s in rare form as far as rudeness goes in SAW, and SPY weaponizes that against her, giving Cathedral (and Revenant) a way to weaponize her feelings about her mother’s death and her — to be frank — inability to let things lie as they are.

The Un-Favorite:

There are a few things that aren’t quite my favorite in SPY, so let’s run through those as well.

First, in the common refrain of “small visual distinctions are difficult for me personally”, I didn’t like that there wasn’t enough contrast between a plain (on the bottom half) cookie and the orange/purple jelly. The shadow on the screen makes it kind of difficult to tell them apart, especially if there’s sprinkles and/or frosting on top of it, and I found that mildly frustrating, even though I love the minigame itself.

The second thing I don’t like is the option to skip the dialogue. Yes, this is present in most of the newer games, and I don’t like it in them either, but it’s especially egregious in SPY and LIE. Both of these games really rely on hints given in the dialogue (and of course, in the written materials hidden around the game) in order to get a full, clear view of what’s going on. The option is great on repeat plays, but I really do wish that it was disabled if it was your first save file on the game.

The last annoying thing is the Jabberwocky puzzle — or rather, the percentage of the jabberwocky puzzle that the player actually has to do. The puzzle as it stands feels very confusing, and the “hints” you get are quite unintuitive.

The record tells you basically how to create the encrypted message — it’s the first letter from each green word, the second from each orange word, etc., arranged in the order they appear in the poem — but when you start the poem, Nancy has already basically completed this step, and it’s up to you to do the actual decoding just through process of elimination.

It’s a puzzle of letter deduction, like in TMB and the minigame in ASH — and these are normally my favorite puzzles! — but it’s cloaked in the disguise of an encryption puzzle, and for that, it’s incredibly irritating.

The Fix:

So how would I fix The Silent Spy?

The first thing I’d do, which you can probably guess based on the above section, is to fix how the Jabberwocky poem is presented. Even a bit of dialogue establishing what the player actually has to do versus what Nancy does for the player would be helpful in working through it without bothering making the encrypted message oneself, and would set the player up to actually know what they’re doing, versus the mass of confusion that comes with the puzzle.

The only other change I would make would to put in one more flashback — that of 10-year-old Nancy’s perspective shortly after Kate’s death, perhaps after the funeral. We spend a lot of time in flashback seeing Kate before her death, and I think it would add to just a little bit more of seeing Nancy’s relationship with her mother if we could see the Drew house with her recently gone.

(And perhaps, see or hear Hannah? Please?)

The Silent Spy is a game that I find, on the whole, to be one of the best that Nik penned, and certainly a fitting end to the series of “Nancy Games” that gives us a little more perspective on our teeth sleuth. There are as many moments of joy as of sorrow, but in the end the player is left with the feeling that Nancy’s world is a little better for knowing more about her mother, and that whatever else Kate did and was, she left behind a world (both in game and breaking the fourth wall) that was better — and had ways to become even better than that — than it was when she lived in it.

[snarktheater]

Ready Player Two — Opening Cutscene & Chapter 0

Hello again.

It’s been a while. I haven’t been active on this blog since, fittingly enough, Ready Player One. I was going to do this sooner—even had an alarm set up and everything—but then, it turns out, I’m feeling so much negativity about the world in general that a book just pales in comparison.

Seriously, I had to scrap this post’s entire intro because it’s not even 2020 anymore as I write this. And you know, maybe that’s for the best. I’m not really in the mood for doom and gloom and bitching anymore. I uninstalled Twitter from my phone a while back, I’ve been doing good at my daily writing sprints, my biggest fanfic project concluded on a positive note from people I didn’t even realize had been following it for years.

So I don’t know what this is going to be like. My commentary, I mean; I’ve heard echoes of what the book is like, so I’m not expecting a surprise there.

The book opens right after the end of Ready Player One, in a “Cutscene” where Wade recounts to us what happened after he won Halliday’s contest. It also assumes you remember exactly who the main characters of the book are, which is a bold move for a sequel that came out almost a decade after the original.

Technically, I could just look up the details I’m fuzzy about. But also, I think it’s more authentic if I don’t. I trust my memory enough that if I’m wrong, it’ll be in subtle enough ways that it’ll almost be a private jokes between all of us. An “if you know, you know” sort of error system. And I don’t think there’s anything more true to the spirit of this book than that.

Shoto had flown back home to Japan to take over operations at GSS’s Hokkaido division.

So Wade starts his tenure with nepotism. Wasn’t Shoto really young? Why is he qualified to run anything?

Aech was enjoying an extended vacation in Senegal, a country she’d dreamed of visiting her whole life, because her ancestors had come from there.

You know what, I’m not touching “send the token black character back to Africa.” This isn’t my lane.

And Samantha had flown back to Vancouver to pack up her belongings and say goodbye to her grandmother, Evelyn.

Why is she saying goodbye? Why, she’s moving to Columbus to be with Wade, of course! It’s not like there was anything else in her life. Was there? And why isn’t she referred to as Art3mis? I’m pretty sure Wade found out all of their offline names in the last book, and the inconsistency mildly bothers me.

These three sentences are back to back, by the way. Someone—I forget who—once described Ready Player One as a book that’s fun to write a wiki about, because it’s got fun concepts to summarize about until you realize that all the emotional connective tissue you need to turn a list of things into a story is missing, and that’s roughly how this first page feels.

Hell, the first line of the book is Wade telling us he remained offline for nine whole days after winning the contest, but by the end of the second paragraph we’re already to him logging back into the OASIS to "distract himself from [his and Samantha’s] reunion.

I’ll give Ernest Cline one thing: it feels like he wrote this opening nine days after the first book and did about as much maturing as a teenage boy would do between the two books.

Way more time is spent describing Wade’s OASIS rig, or the in-game planet where the climax of the last book happened, than anything else in this introduction. He is immediately greeted by a crowd of adoring fans who have been waiting over a week for him to come back in the game, because they’re all grateful that our protagonist and his friends restored their avatars after they were annihilated by the Sixers.

You’d think the adoring fans would serve some kind of purpose, or that something would happen, but no. Wade immediately goes “ew, people” and teleports away, since he essentially has ultimate powers within the game. With a caveat: the powers are actually coming from the Robes of Anorak he’s wearing, and I’m mentioning that in the hopes that it will pay off sometime in the book’s future, assuming Cline at least learned to do that. But still, let’s not skip too fast the fact that we introduced that crowd of adoring fans for no other purpose than to tell us they’re out there, because it fits right in with the last book’s attempts at saying as little as humanly possible in as many words as possible.

Anyway, Wade went back into Anorak’s study, where he arbitrarily checks out the Easter Egg he got at the end of the last book, and finds an inscription on it. I was dreading another riddle, but no, it’s just straight-up instructions to a vault in the GSS archives, so Wade logs off and goes to check it out.

Of course Halliday had put [the archives] [on the 13th floor]. In one of his favorite TV shows, Max Headroom, Network 23’s hidden research-and-development lab was located on the thirteenth floor. And The Thirteenth Floor was also the title of an old sci-fi film about virtual reality, released in 1999, right on the heels of both The Matrix and eXistenZ.

I’m equally shocked that it took two whole pages (on my ereader) to get to the first slew of references, and that one of these references is from 1999. I didn’t know we were allowed to think of anything that isn’t the 80s. Speaking of which, I’ll spare you the whole paragraph, but the book does feel the need to explain why it’s vault 42.

Inside the vault, there’s another egg containing a super-fancy and advanced OASIS headset. The egg also has a video monitor that plays a video message from James Halliday shortly before his death.

But despite his condition, he hadn’t used his OASIS avatar to record this message like he had with Anorak’s Invitation. For some reason, he’d chosen to appear in the flesh this time, under the brutal, unforgiving light of reality.

That oh-so-important message? An infodump about the headset’s working. He called it an OASIS Neural Interface, ONI for short. It basically lets you experience the OASIS through all your senses with sensory input just like the real thing, you know, that thing Wade had to get a fancy suit and massive rig to do in the first book. And yes, Wade does spend a paragraph or two comparing it to other works of science fiction. Of course he does.

More importantly, it also records all the sensory input into a separate file, which can then be replayed over to re-experience said sensations, or live someone else’s experiences. Halliday tries to frame it as a tool to generate communication and empathy, seemingly all without acknowledging the potential creepiness of that. But hey. Who knows. Maybe that’s because this is the setup stage, and it’ll pay off eventually.

I also wondered about the name Halliday had chosen for his invention. I’d seen enough anime to know that oni was also a Japanese word for a giant horned demon from the pits of hell.

Add “reducing Japan to anime” to the list of things the book has failed to improve upon. By the way, the narration insisted on spelling out ONI letter by letter earlier, so it’s weird to make that link now. It’s also just kind of inelegant to just tell us “this is the symbolism behind the name”, but that’s just the sort of thing I’ve come to expect from this book.

Anyway, the reason Halliday kept this for his successor to find is he wants Wade to test out the technology and decide if humanity is ready for it. Why Halliday thinks the most glorified pop culture trivia / video game competition qualifies you for such a decision should be a problem, but sadly, a lot of billionaires have said and done a lot of dumb and eerily similar things in the past few years since I read Ready Player One, so actually, I can’t fault the book for that one. Tragically, our fates really are in the hands of people who should rightfully be cartoon villains.

To his credit, Wade does question Halliday’s motives in keeping this under wraps at all rather than releasing it himself. So hey, maybe it really is setting something up.

Wade goes back to his office with the ONI, and we’re treated with this lovely piece of narration:

I was grateful that Samantha wasn’t there. I didn’t want to give her the opportunity to talk me out of testing the ONI. Because I was worried she might try to, and if she did, she would’ve succeeded. (I’d recently discovered that when you’re madly in love with someone they can persuade you to do pretty much anything.)

There’s a lot to unpack about the implications this has for their relationship, but it’s way too early in the book for me to editorialize when one character hasn’t even been on the page yet. So I’ll just leave it here for the record. Hopefully you see the problem without me needing to point it out anyway. If not, feel free to hit my inbox.

So Wade, confident in the fact that Halliday would have warned him if there were any risks to using the ONI, decides to try it out. Even though he immediately follows up that statement with this:

According to the ONI documentation, forcibly removing the headset while it was in operation could severely damage the wearer’s brain and/or leave them in a permanent coma. So the titanium-reinforced safety bands made certain this couldn’t happen. I found this little detail comforting instead of unsettling. Riding in an automobile was risky, too, if you didn’t wear your seatbelt…

Wade. My dude. What the fuck is this simile. And why don’t you see that maybe a machine where you’re forcibly trapping yourself inside a virtual reality might be dangerous? Hell, when I said this was setting something up, I was expecting something vaguely interesting about the potential breach of privacy, or how you don’t need to literally walk in someone’s shoes to feel empathy for them, or anything substantial, but now I’m worried it’ll just end up as “man, sometimes science fiction machines will scramble your brain, isn’t that weird”?

Like, I don’t know, to me “it will put you in a coma” sounds like a good reason for Halliday not to release the ONI. Maybe we can still make it into a commentary on how corporations will sell stuff they know is directly harmful if it can make them a profit. Who knows.

The book waffles on about more risks, and the mechanics of how the ONI activates, and the warning disclaimer when it does turn on. Specifically, there’s a time limit of twelve consecutive hours, after which you’ll be automatically logged out, because yes, using the thing for too long can also cause brain damage.

Gregarious Simulation Systems will not be held responsible for any injuries caused by improper use of the OASIS Neural Interface.

See, now there’s the sort of thing that could be a source for commentary, but no, instead it’s thrown in there like it’s nothing and Wade glosses over the entire warning, and instead keep wondering why Halliday didn’t just release the ONI if even the safety disclaimers were in place.

By the way: this whole system has apparently gone through several independent human trials already, so I’m finding it hard to imagine that it’s actually a secret Halliday took to the grave as Wade says. Unless he also had everyone involved in those trials killed afterwards. Or maybe they all ended up with brain damage which rendered them incapable of talking about it.

And before you think I’m being unfair and maybe we’re supposed to understand that ourselves even if the protagonist doesn’t, I’ll remind you that the book didn’t trust its reader to know what the number 42 is a reference to, or what an oni is, even though I don’t think anyone in the target audience wouldn’t know about these two things.

There’s also the fact that, since this book came out, a video game did release with a scene intentionally designed to cause seizures, and it had countless fans flocking to defend it over that fact. So you’ll have to excuse me if I’m not assuming this book’s stance on whether your video game console causes brain damage and possibly coma is actually a bad thing, or just an acceptable risk.

Wade certainly seems to think so, since he agrees to the terms of service.

As the timestamp faded away, it was replaced by a short message, just three words long—the last thing I would see before I left the real world and entered the virtual one. But they weren’t the three words I was used to seeing. I—like every other ONI user to come—was greeted by a new message Halliday had created, to welcome those visitors who had adopted his new technology: READY PLAYER TWO

Well now that’s just silly.

And that’s our opening cutscene. And while this post is already long enough, I feel like I have to go on to chapter 0, because it feels like barely anything has happened so far. We didn’t even introduce any new character motivation or conflict, or a mystery to set the plot into motion, unless I’m supposed to think “why didn’t Halliday release this?” counts.

So Wade is back into the OASIS, and tells us about how much more real it all feels thanks to the ONI. I especially have to question how he can smell or taste anything—both of which he tells us he can. Like, who coded that? Did Halliday implement every single smell and taste himself, without anyone noticing? I hope you don’t need me to tell you that’s not typically how features are added to a large-scale video game.

If it feels like I’m nitpicking at the logic of the book, even though I always say I’m not very interested in that and would rather talk themes, it’s because I am, because there isn’t much else to discuss so far. Wade is happy about tasting virtual fruit. That’s the scene.

He tests out if he can feel pain, but no, the ONI reduces pain (a gunshot is translated as “a hard pinch”). On one hand, good, it would be a nightmare otherwise. On the other hand, I sort of hope there’s a setting for that in there, because otherwise, you just lost an entire clientele of kinksters.

This was it—the final, inevitable step in the evolution of videogames and virtual reality. The simulation had now become indistinguishable from real life.

Ah, now we have some juicy themes. Because if you think this is the inevitable final step in the evolution of video games, I invite you to look at literally any other art form, and what happened to them once hyperrealism became easy. Hint: they didn’t stop evolving, because it turns out realism isn’t the only goal one can achieve with art.

The realism discussion is not a new one in video games, mind you. In case you’re out of the loop: most of the big-budget blockbuster games (“AAA” as they’re known) are aiming for hyperrealism nowadays, and it results in development teams being forced to work in horrible conditions (known with the equally horrible euphemism of “crunch”). And, because it turns out that 1) humans working themselves to the bones isn’t healthy and 2) racing for realism with little to no vision besides it makes for poor creativity, a lot of these games come out as disappointments. Oh, there are hordes of Gamers™ who will defend them to the bitter end, but inevitably, in the months following release, the defense cools off while the criticism keeps on going, because the defense was a knee-jerk reaction born of a mix of people hyping themselves up for a game they hadn’t seen that much of yet, then attaching a part of their identity to liking that thing.

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that this throwaway line feels like it comes from someone who is so out of touch as to accidentally support a world view that has in fact resulted in the biggest part of the industry stagnating artistically while growing more toxic for the people working in it. All the while, more and more independent games come out every year, proving that that realism is nowhere near the most important thing to making a game good, and that you can achieve much better results with a small team.

What I’m trying to say is: watch Jim Sterling’s channel, they’ve been bleeding out subscribers since they came out as nonbinary and make much better commentary on this topic than I could, and play Hades.

Back to the book, which sadly hasn’t become any more interesting since I decided to go on a tangent. Wade tests the ONI functions some more, all the while musing on how he knows Samantha would disapprove but that he doesn’t care, because what loving relationship doesn’t consist of that?

Among the functions, he tries the ONI files, the aforementioned recordings of someone else’s experiences. Specifically, a woman, which Wade tells us by telling us he suddenly has breasts, I suppose because Ernest Cline saw that subreddit about men writing women and went “I want a piece of that”. Oh, and also, those sample files were recorded from real people, in the real world. And yes, this goes exactly where you think it does.

SEX-M-F.oni, SEX-F-F.oni, and SEX-Nonbinary.oni

Look, I actually started writing a complaint about the boobs thing, and I deleted it, but now Cline is doing it on purpose. So, here goes: I saw a quote from this book on Twitter that looked like Cline attempting to make up for Wade’s casual transphobia in the first book. It wasn’t good, but it at least sounded like he was trying. So to immediately get this is…a lot? Let’s go for a lot.

I can almost excuse the use of “M” and “F”. You gotta name your files and you could excuse a non-exhaustive list. But…nonbinary? On one hand, I want to know what Cline means. On the other hand, I don’t think he can come up with an answer I’ll find satisfactory.

We are thankfully spared from finding out because Wade has just lost his virginity to Samantha a few days ago and he’s 1) not ready for this and 2) pretty sure this counts as cheating. You could make a case that this is more like porn, but I can see that this is more of a personal distinction anyway, and I can respect that one. Plus, you know. I don’t want to find out.

Wade logs off, and he can’t tell the difference between the OASIS with the ONI, and decides this will change the world. And then it’s back to the “how did he do it and keep it a secret”, even though Wade now finds out in the documentation that this had been in development for twenty-five years, basically since the OASIS launched. So it’s not really that it’s a secret, so much as there are a lot of people under very strict NDAs out there. Or, again, they’re all dead and/or otherwise incapacitated.

The ONI is the product of the Accessibility Research Lab, and Wade tells us about other stuff that the lab has produced using similar technology, mostly for medical purposes.

GSS patented each of the Accessibility Research Lab’s inventions, but Halliday never made any effort to profit from them. Instead, he set up a program to give these neuroprosthetic implants away, to any OASIS users who could benefit from them. GSS even subsidized the cost of their implant surgery.

Look, it’s nice that you want Halliday to be the good guy through and through, but it’s kind of hard to take any social commentary seriously when you think this is how a billionaire is made. Hell, even when he shut down the lab and fired its entire staff, he gave them a big enough severance package to set them for life. You know. Capitalism!

Hey, remember when Samantha said she was going to end world hunger if she won the contest, a thing billionaires right now could be doing, but aren’t, and she is now the co-owner of GSS? Yeah, I kind of hope the book remembers that too.

Speaking of the co-owners, the book just completely skips over the debate that our four main characters have over whether or not to release the ONI to the world. All we know is that they voted, and the vote goes in favor of releasing it. I mean, why have characters who could have opinions and feelings that could create a discussion? That might make us care about them! And who wants to care about characters in a story?

We put them on sale at the lowest possible price, to make sure as many people as possible could experience the OASIS Neural Interface for themselves.

What exactly is “the lowest possible price” here? Your company literally owns money. Like, OASIS money is real money. There is literally nothing stopping you from giving them away, especially because what you’re giving away is access to the platform you’re already running for a profit.

It’s almost like, even trying to make “good billionaires” out of its protagonists, the book can’t stop and actually make them significantly good.

Oh, I should mention. If you thought my Ready Player One review was angry at capitalism, wait until you see what the past couple years have done to me.

Anyway, once they his 7,777,777 simultaneous ONI users, a new riddle shows up on Halliday’s website. Because yep: our plot is apparently not about the implications of releasing the ONI, or any of the potential ideological discussions associated with that, it’s another riddle. Oh boy, do I wish I’d known that.

Seek the Seven Shards of the Siren’s Soul On the seven worlds where the Siren once played a role For each fragment my heir must pay a toll To once again make the Siren whole

I cannot wait to have the book give me just not enough information to solve the riddle until it’s solved by the book itself. That was so much fun the other…what was it, five times? Six times? Something like that. Wade already tells us the Siren might be Kira Morrow, because her alias was named after one of the sirens of Greek myth, so I can’t wait for that plot point to stick around. It was so fun to hear all about this man pining for another man’s wife the first time!

So this is the “Shard Riddle”. People are apparently convinced it was made by Wade and his crew as a publicity stunt, but of course, they know that that isn’t the case, and they also don’t know what that riddle is supposed to lead to. So, that’s great. We have a puzzle, and we also don’t know what the stakes are. All we know is that Wade wants to solve the puzzle essentially because it’s a challenge.

We skip over a year, and Wade tells us about how IOI collapses and gets absorbed by GSS because of the ONI’s launch. Remember IOI? They were the bad guys, so I guess we have to cheer?

GSS absorbed IOI and all of its assets, transforming us into an unstoppable megacorporation with a global monopoly on the world’s most popular entertainment, education, and communications platform.To celebrate, we released all of IOI’s indentured servants and forgave their outstanding debts.

On one hand: good for the slave. On the other hand: not gonna cheer for a monopoly, you guys.

Another year’s skip, and now 99% of the OASIS users are using the ONI, and yes, that includes trading their experiences with one another too. And I guess we’re still hand-waving any possible problems associated with that technology, because the technology is made so that all recordings must be shared and played through the OASIS.

This allowed us to weed out unsavory or illegal recordings before they could be shared with other users.

How? Do you know any of the problems associated with content moderations on the current platforms? I don’t know if I want to point to Youtube’s extremely faulty algorithm, Twitter’s complete apathy towards its Nazis, or Facebook doing moderation by making underpaid staff watch all potentially problematic content, which resulted in serious psychological damage to said staff.

You can’t just say that as if it solved everything. The chapter later says this is handled by an AI called “CenSoft”, and as an AI engineer myself, let me tell you: this is not going to work. Again: Youtube is the way it is for a reason.

It also let us maintain our monopoly on what was rapidly becoming the most popular form of entertainment in the history of the world.

And again, monopolies are totally a good thing as long as it’s in the right hands!

When I’m implying that the book does not care for any of these potential problems, I mean it. These enormous ethical issues are sidestepped in cold narratin, and we just keep going on introducing new slang that I hate, but have to quote so help you keep up.

“Sims” were recordings made inside the OASIS, and “Recs” were ONI recordings made in reality. Except that most kids no longer referred to it as “reality.” They called it “the Earl.” (A term derived from the initialism IRL.) And “Ito” was slang for “in the OASIS.” So Recs were recorded in the Earl, and Sims were created Ito.

There. You have been infodumped.

In the midst of all this (still extremely dry) exposition about how this changed media, we also get this tidbit:

You could take any drug, eat any kind of food, and have any kind of sex, without worrying about addiction, calories, or consequences.

Now, I was going to rant about this, but then, a page later, this happens and spares me the trouble:

I’d struggled with OASIS addiction before the ONI was released. Now logging on to the simulation was like mainlining some sort of chemically engineered superheroin.

So, you are aware that addiction isn’t just possible, but extremely facilitated by this. But sure, no worries! It’s perfectly safe! Because our protagonists are good.

Also, remember how the last book ended on a weak attempt at having a moral that maybe the real world is good, actually? Yeah, Wade tells us the ONI helps poor people live enjoyable lives in the OASIS. So. Fuck that message, I guess. It only applies if you’re the literal wealthiest man on Earth.

And me? All my dreams had come true. I’d gotten stupidly rich and absurdly famous. I’d fallen in love with my dream girl and she had fallen in love with me. Surely I was happy, right? Not so much, as this account will show.

Aside from the aforementioned returning OASIS affiction, there’s the Shard riddle that Wade is now obsessed with, to the point of offering a billion-dollar reward to anyone with information about the riddle’s answer.

I announced this reward with a stylized short film that I modeled after Anorak’s Invitation. I hoped it would seem like a lighthearted play on Halliday’s contest instead of a desperate cry for help. It seemed to work.

On one hand: good, Wade finally has a character flaw that the book actually acknowledges as a character flaw. I can work with that. On the other hand: this is all told to me in such a dispassionate that I am dreading how the book will handle this character flaw. Which is to say, I’m not expecting it to be very good.

(For a brief time, some of the younger, more idealistic shard hunters referred to themselves as “shunters” to differentiate themselves from their elder counterparts. But when everyone began to call them “sharters” instead, they changed their minds and started to call themselves gunters too. The moniker still fit. The Seven Shards were Easter eggs hidden by Halliday, and we were all hunting for them.)

Especially when this is something the narration feels is more important to tell me about.

Anyway, skip another year, and a gunter finally leads Wade to the First Shard. Solved that riddle, I guess. And wait, wasn’t part of why IOI was ~evil~ in the first book that they were paying people to find the Easter Egg for them? How is this any different, Wade?

And when I picked it up, I set in motion a series of events that would drastically alter the fate of the human race. As one of the only eyewitnesses to these historic events, I feel obligated to give my own written account of what occurred. So that future generations—if there are any—will have all the facts at their disposal when they decide how to judge my actions.

And that is the end of our chapter 0. And can I just say: what a mess already. I don’t think my snark can properly convey how utterly devoid of emotion this book’s writing is, and that alone is honestly more of a turn-off than anything else in the book so far. Even, knowing that I railed about it in the first book, I still feel newly unprepared for it. And it’s not like this double-prologue is making me hopeful that the book will show an ounce more critical thinking—or decent fucking humanity towards marginalized groups—as its predecessor.

So, that’s a lot to look forward to! For the sake of my sanity and schedule, don’t expect me to do such big posts every time. I’ll probably do one chapter a week from now on, if that. We’re in for a long ride, but I hope it’s worth it, at least.

[chocoholicannanymous]

...As Stupid Does (Teen Wolf) 19/19

Disclaimer: I don’t own anything – except for a red hoodie...

This is the final part of this story, and this ‘verse. A bit bittersweet, but honestly? So much relief too. Because as much as I never wanted to abandon this story I was worried that I’d never pull together the focus and energy to connect scattered paragraphs and thoughts into a complete ending.

Here it is though. I hope those of you reading this enjoy it.

Part 18, Part 17, Part 16, Part 15, Part 14, Part 13,  Part 12,  Part 11,  Part 10,  Interlude,  Part 9, Part 8d, Part 8c, Part 8b, Part 8a, Part 7, Part 6, Part 5,Part 4,Part 3, Part 2, Part 1,Not Stupid, Stupid Is… and pre-verse ficlet I’m Stupid (Don’t Worry ‘Bout Me)…

Epilogue

Here's the thing: Stiles is a lucky guy. He's smart enough to realize exactly how lucky.

He's three years through a four year college degree, with a job waiting for him after graduation. His relationship with his dad is stronger than ever. He's got a home also waiting for him, one that's surrounded by two packs full of 'wolves.

He's also got Derek.

And the thing is, he and Derek? They're good together. Like really, really, almost disgustingly good. They weren't back in Beacon Hills. They kind of weren't when they decided to try again, for real this time.

They had spent their first year together fucking up, and god, the amount of times Stiles had questioned not just his sanity in doing this but also his intelligence. But during that year they also started working together, begun healing old hurts and smoothing down their rough edges, and found a way to fit together.

Once that year was over they'd sat down and talked things through.

Okay, they'd screamed some too, and once Stiles had even walked out. But the important thing is that he'd done so in a mature way. He'd told Derek that he was walking out, why he was doing so and that he was coming back once he'd cooled off. And then he'd kept his word.

And they'd done it on their own. No prompting, no mediating, no one coming in to send them to separate corners or patch them up. Stiles is still hella proud of that.

It's been three years now, and as far as Stiles is concerned he's got an amazing boyfriend that he fully expects to spend the rest of his life with.

If anyone had told him this years ago, when Scott had just been bitten and they were scrambling to keep their heads above water – at one point literally – Stiles would not have believed it. At one point he'd have taken violently offense, even without being told said boyfriend would be Derek.

Things have changed. He has changed. Derek has changed. But most importantly? They've changed together.

These days Derek has enough of a handle on himself to not need magic or therapy to make it through a visit. He's still seeing Dr Bianchi occasionally, as is Stiles, but they're both down to a handful of times per year.

And it's not just when it comes to the two of them that Derek has improved. Stiles gets regular reports from Scott, and it's obvious that Derek's a good Alpha these days. Sure, he will only stay an Alpha for a little while longer before handing it over to Cora, but that doesn't diminish his accomplishment. Everyone in a pack benefits from a good, steady Alpha.

Just like Cora benefits from a brother who is all these things.

Yeah, life is good.

The only dark cloud on Stiles's horizon is that he's going to have to go back to Beacon Hills.

Returning to Beacon Hills is, yeah okay, it's not the last thing Stiles wants to do. Reliving the Alpha pack, the kanima, Kate, Allison, Gerard, Peter (though that one's a firm “against” on returning too), reliving his mother's death, living through his dad's death, killing someone, almost killing someone, losing his pack, losing Embry... There are a lot of thing that Stiles wants even less.

But returning to Beacon Hills, even for a weekend, does come very low on the list. Distance has not made Stiles' heart fonder. Returning sadly isn't exactly optional.

Sure, no one's forcing him, but that doesn't mean staying away is an alternative. Not this time. Because Scott is getting married. Scott, who's still only 21 for another couple of weeks, and who used to think that werewolves were the worst (or second worst depending on how angry he was with Derek that day), who believed that he didn't need an Alpha and that Allison had hung the moon, is getting married to a werewolf, one that's not only Derek's sister, but also his soon-to-be Alpha.

And of course said wedding has to take place in Beacon Hills.

Now, Stiles has done his best to talk Scott into eloping, has tried since Scott called him with the news that Cora had said yes, but. Apparently Scott can't see the brilliance in eloping, not even with Stiles's excellent arguments.

“You, me, your mom, abuela Delgado, Derek and Cora. Just the family. No douche pack.”

“What about Peter?”

Seriously? The last thing Stiles had expected to need to justify is why leaving Peter out of, well, everything is a good idea.

“No uncle psycho either. He doesn't qualify as family.”

There's a sound that Stiles knows from years of being Scott's friend means he's nodding in agreement.

“Okay, true. What about dad though?”

“Oh, you know, I figured he'd be my plus one.” That came out flippantly, because he knows there's no way Scott wouldn't invite his dad regardless.

“No, Stiles, what about my dad?”

“He doesn't qualify as family either.”

The words come out before Stiles can filter himself, and he kind of wishes he could take them back, except...

“Look, can I be brutal here? I mean, we both know I'm going to be honest so... When's the last time you saw agent McCall?”

“There was a thing junior year, he came here to investigate.”

Not what he was asking, but a very telling answer.

“Okay, and when's the last time you saw him in his capacity as your dad? Hell, when's the last time you spoke to him? Does he even know about Cora?”

Scott evades the questions, which again: telling.

“He's my dad though, doesn't that kind of mean I have to invite him?”

Stiles snorts. As if.

“I don't see why. Sure, he's 50 % of your genepool, but is he really your dad? I mean, I can't remember the last time he and you shared anything other than your last name, and we both know that's not going to be true for much longer.”

“Yeah, okay, you have a point. He's not getting an invite. That doesn't mean we're eloping though, Stiles. Cora deserves a proper wedding, and I'm going to give her that. Now, you convince her that eloping's a good idea and we can talk about it again, but I'm not risking making her mad at me just because you don't want to subject yourself to Isaac. At least Jackson won't be invited?”

“Small favors, man. Small favors.”

There's another one of Scott's agreement noises before the conversation had moved on.

Of course, Cora had been an even tougher nut to crack than Scott, and Stiles had retreated ungracefully once she'd started threatening his balls.

Really, there was no need to go there. If for no other reason, well, shouldn't she leave the goods intact for Derek's sake?

Of course, Stiles can understand why she's unwilling to let go of the only Hale tradition she still can have, namely getting married in the preserve and in the presence of pack. Every Hale has done so for over 200 years, before they were even called Hale.

(Stiles listens to Derek explain, haltingly, and decides to admit defeat. At least Derek's willing to bypass that tradition, should they one day decide to marry. He'll take that win and stop pestering Cora.)

So, anyway. There's no talking the lovely couple into eloping. Which means like it or not – and trust him, it's not – Stiles is going back. Because it's Scott.

There's also the fact that in a strange way Stiles has waited for this wedding as long as Scott has. When he and Derek had gotten back together the plan had been for Cora to graduate, then take over the Alpha spark and the pack. Two years had felt long, but doable.

And then Cora had asked for more time.

She'd gone straight from school to working at the Beacon Hills sheriff's department and had felt she needed to adjust a little better to that before taking on something new. It'd been reasonable, and more importantly: Derek had been almost unable to deny his sister anything after getting her back from the dead (except you know, figuratively speaking, unlike a certain other family member).

So they'd talked it over and agreed to give Cora another year, moving the transfer to after the wedding. It makes, Stiles thinks, for one hell of a wedding present. If that's good or bad, eh. Who knows.

He'd taken on more classes in order to have a distraction, had worked himself to the point of exhaustion more than once, and nearly driven the people around him crazy. It'd been more than a little overkill, he admits now, but it had kept him from missing Derek too much. It also means he'll be able to slow down a little his final year.

Or take on whatever shiny but totally unnecessary new class catches his eye, probably, but. He pretends he'll take it easy. Derek pretends to believe him. Derek's also made it clear he's going to move to Seattle once he can leave Beacon Hills, and stay there as long as Stiles does. They both pretend it's not partially to keep Stiles from studying himself into the hospital.

Anyway. He's just, you know, going to have to count small favors. The first one being that Jackson really isn't invited. The second is that Lydia, who was, isn't coming either. Once Stiles had gotten over his crush on her he'd kept a measure of fond respect for the person he'd learned existed behind Lydia's facades, even though they'd never really become friends. That didn't change the fact that her not coming was a relief – she's too smart, sees too much, and he would hate for her to figure things out.

Another person not coming is Danny who's transferred his allegiance to the pack near his college where he's, completely coincidentally Stiles is sure, dating the Alpha's grandson. He'd been invited as a courtesy, but told he couldn't bring his boyfriend, and had wisely chosen not to accept. Cora hates him, and he apparently knows it, and Scott isn't to fond of him either.

Those really are small favors though.

A slightly bigger one is the fact that Deaton isn't coming. Not only does he no longer live in Beacon Hills, but he hasn't been invited. While no one had been able to prove that there had been magic on Scott, his opinions on both Derek and Deaton had changed a little too much for comfort after first moving away and then beginning to meditate. Even Scott had noticed, and gotten suspicious.

In the end there had been no protests from Scott as Derek and Cora had ended Deaton's lease of the land for his practice – land he had been granted use of as the Hale pack's emissary and then had kept using free of charge since the fire, knowing he wasn't keeping to the agreement. Once he'd been called on it, Deaton had packed up, sold his home, and moved away.

No one misses him – not even Scott.

However none of that changes the fact that Beacon Hills still has Peter Hale, who is most certainly both invited to the wedding and attending, and who Stiles still sees as a threat. Because, well, he's not stupid.

Peter Hale will stop being a threat the day he dies, and maybe not even then. (Next time, Stiles has promised himself, he's going to make sure Peter gets the Aiden treatment.)

And Stiles is going to willingly place himself within striking distance from said threat, without a protector on hand.

He hadn't even thought about it at first, just assuming he'd have Embry to keep him safe, but it hadn't taken long to realize that bringing Embry to Scott's wedding wasn't an option.

First of all there's the fact that while neither Derek or Cora can feel the supernatural in the LaPush 'wolves unless they're shifting Peter might. Peter, who's not only older and has had the kind of training Derek never got but who also has access to a lot of the Hale pack's lore which Derek had thought lost in the fire. Stiles isn't willing to take a chance on that knowledge not containing something to help Peter identify the LaPush shifters. (This is, incidentally, one of the reasons Stiles is happy Deaton is gone. He too knows too much for Stiles to trust he wouldn't be able identify another kind of shifter.)

Second there's the fact that every single pack member is visibly Native American, and there are only so many tribes. Peter – or Danny for that matter, even though he's not going to be present, but he's more of an annoyance – could locate Stiles far too easily easily with that kind of information.

There's also the fact that Embry would be on a hair trigger simply because Stiles will be, and might shift and expose them.

Most importantly though is that bringing what would look like a plus one to Cora's wedding would be an insult. Not just to her, who's only just gotten to the point where she accepts that Stiles is in her brother's life for good, but also to Derek. Yes, everyone who matters knows that Embry's relationship with Stiles is as platonic as can be, but that doesn't change anything. They smell enough like each other for wolfy noses to know they're not casual acquaintances, and chances are there would be quite a bit of ribbing and speculation. Derek shouldn't have to listen to that, or for that matter look at Stiles walking around with another man when he himself has to hide what they are to each other. Desire for protection or not, Stiles just isn't willing to do that to Derek.

It's possible that Embry could have skated by as the son of John Stilinski's fiancée – and wow, Stiles still hasn't gotten used to referring to Tiffany Call that way (and damn, does that make him glad that he and Embry are platonic, because that's a little to incestuous even as is). Scott would have been okay with both of them coming, had even brought it up, but everyone involved is aware that it'd make Melissa feel uncomfortable. Regardless, Tiffany's not coming either. Like with Embry there's no way of hiding that she's native, making her too easily identifiable. There's also the fact that it just isn't safe.

Tiffany is many things, and a stronger woman than most, but she's not a fighter. If things go wrong she would be vulnerable, and a liability.

Bringing someone other than Embry means the same risk of discovery.

So instead of a werewolf bodyguard or ten Stiles has his dad.

Yeah.

There's also the fact that in the interest of keeping secrets Stiles can't even use the silver lining of more time with Derek. Letting anyone from that pack know of their connection is bad, but the thought of letting Peter know makes Stiles's blood run cold. That means he's going to be within minutes of his boyfriend for days, and yet he's not going to get hugs, or kisses, or a bedpartner. He's going to be at a wedding along with his romantic partner, while pretending he's single.

Yeah.

It's going to suck.

O--o---o--O

The wedding is missing a lot of traditional parts. It's understandable, really, and not just because both bride and groom along with several guests are werewolves. It's just... Cora doesn't have a father to give her away, or dance with her. She doesn't have a mother to support her, an inherited dress or heirloom jewelry. She doesn't have a best friend to be her maid of honor. What she's got is a brother whose Alpha she'll be within days and an uncle that she doesn't trust as far as she can throw him. Or well, as far as Stiles could throw him.

So they adjust.

No one gives Cora away. Instead she and Scott walk up the isle – isle, forest path, same thing – together. Neither of them have attendants, and Melissa McCall's wedding dress stays in its garment bag.

The wedding is small and intimate, with only a handful of guests outside of the pack – Stiles, John, Melissa, abuela Delgado and two 'wolves from Cora's South American pack. It takes place in a glade just on the edge of the preserve and the only decorations are wild flowers and boughs of leaves.

It's scaled-down, but also beautiful in its simplicity, because no one can doubt that these are two people who love each other deeply.

Stiles has to blink away tears at more than one time. His friend, his brother, is promising to love, cherish and honor his girl, and is being promised the same in return. There's not a doubt in Stiles's mind that when they swear to do so until death do them part they mean it. This, he knows, is Scott's life now. It's the life and future he deserves. It's enough to make Stiles's heart swell with love.

And then it hits him. With a little luck that'll be him in a not too distant future. He has to look away not to betray himself by staring lovingly at Derek.

Stiles walks through the door to the cabin he's sharing with his dad. He's tired, both because of emotion and vigilance. His dad's still back at the wedding, catching up with Melissa, but Stiles doesn't have the energy. He's spent the day keeping one eye on the pack, and Peter in particular, and generally hating that he's back in Beacon Hills while loving that he's able to be here for Scott.

It's been exhausting.

Just about everyone else is still celebrating, but once Scott and Cora had left to change clothes and go on their honeymoon Stiles had left too. Pretending that he doesn't want to kill Peter, or kiss Derek, has taken it out of him and he can't do it any longer. He's going back home tomorrow and he can't spend another minute being that close to Derek without being able to be with him. That it'll be at least a month, probably two or more, before he can see Derek again is making it even harder.

As far as everyone but him and Derek knows Scott and Cora are going on an actual honeymoon, for a whole month. The truth is that they'll be gone for a week before sneaking back. The rest of the time will be spent in recovery and training after Derek transfers the Alpha spark. Cora will come back as the new Hale Alpha, but that doesn't mean Derek will be free to leave.

There will be unrest in a pack with a new Alpha, even under the best of circumstances, and these – as so often for them – are not. Cora will need Derek by her side, to support her and calm the pack. Maybe she'll also need him to help take down threats thinking to take advantage of a novice Alpha. Maybe they'll have to deal with Peter...

It'll be a little while yet before Derek will be free of Beacon Hills.

So Stiles is sad, and he's got a headache and he just wants to take some pills, text Embry some and then sleep.

After he's re-ringed the cabin with mountain ash of course.

Stiles pulls his phone out of its pocket, takes off his jacket and goes to throw it at the chair before thinking twice. It's a decent suit jacket and if he treats it right he won't need to go suit shopping again in years. Coat hanger it is.

He turn towards the clothes rack, his brain three steps ahead, and hits a wall, his phone clattering to the floor.

Only there's no wall there.

He scrambles backwards, trying to put as much space as he can between himself and the threat and swears. The door is out of reach and he's trapped.

“Hello Stiles.”

Fuck.

“Peter.”

He flicks through scenarios in his head, trying to figure out how to get out of this, but he keeps running into mental walls.

Stiles is a lot better trained than when he left Beacon Hills, in ways Peter knows nothing about. Under the right circumstances he might have a chance.

These are not.

He's in close quarters with Peter, unable to reach the door before the 'wolf can get to him. He's mostly unarmed due to being dressed for a wedding, and what he does have isn't as easily accessible as he'd like.

Plus it's Peter.

Stiles is going to assume that everything he thinks he knows about Peter's skills and strength is wrong. To do anything else would be to sign his own death warrant. Derek might be clouded by memories of “uncle Peter”, but Stiles has never forgotten the psychopathic killer he'd first encountered.

No, training or no training, Stiles's one real advantage is having a pack, and what being part of it means. Unfortunately he has no idea if it'll be enough.

“Shouldn't you be with the pack, or, I don't know, in your own home? Not breaking and entering somewhere you're definitely not welcome.”

“Oh, but it's not breaking and entering if you have a key.” Which, fuck, did Peter kill someone to get his hands on a backup key? “Besides, I didn't get a chance to talk to you earlier. It's been so long, Stiles, won't you humor me? We're practically old friends, are we not? It'll be like old times.”

“You're crazy.”

“Now now Stiles. That's not very nice of you.”

Stiles snorts, because nice? Not really in his wheelhouse.

“You think I care? When it comes to you? Come now, I said crazy, not stupid.”

Because unfortunately Peter is anything but, making him even more dangerous. Still, the wolf just smirks a little at Stiles's defiance.

“I'm afraid that answer just isn't acceptable. See, I really do need to talk to you. Or well, I need you. I'd like it if you talked to me, but I'll manage either way. You however... You really would do well to humor me.”

Then Peter looks at him, and oh shit. His eyes are flashing back and forth between the electric blue that had looked so good on Derek and a sickly red.

It takes nothing to figure it out.

Peter had called him the clever one, and meant it in a mocking way. But the reality is that Stiles is clever, and knows how to put puzzle pieces together.

And these particular puzzle pieces... Peter came back to life using not only Lydia but also Derek – had drained Derek of life and strength and power, and had tried to steal the Alpha power too.

And afterwards Derek had changed. Had grown more volatile, more likely to hurt someone – more unstable.

Stiles is willing to bet Peter had had a bit more success than they'd realized, that he'd managed to siphon off some of the Alpha power and keep it.

That would explain why Derek had acted the way he had. Why he'd been so easily influenced by the pack's negativity. Why Derek had sometimes acted more like Peter than like himself.

It would definitely explain how the Alpha power had become this unstable, negative force in Derek that he felt was fighting him. He is sharing it with Peter. And apparently Peter is done sharing. Stiles is uncomfortably aware of exactly how little defense he has to put up in regards to a Peter who is no longer hiding his power, who is no longer playing weak and damaged.

The only reason he's still alive is so Peter can use him against Derek.

Because even holding a part of the Hale Alpha spark Peter isn't going to just challenge Derek for the rest of it, or meet him in a fair fight. It's not how he works. Peter doesn't believe in fair, and wants the odds as weighted in his favor as possible. Using Stiles as bait, or whatever, is a way of doing that. There's also the fact that Derek has been getting stronger and better as an Alpha, leaving Peter needing every advantage he could. Even an ambush might not give him the upper hand.

Well, Stiles is going to do what he can to even out the odds a bit.

It helps that he has no reason to believe Peter will let him go after killing Derek. He'll either be dead too, or bitten without concern for his wishes, and forced to obey Peter. His dad will probably be used against him – or, again, killed outright.

Not fighting won't save him – it'll only make it easier for Peter.

“You kept some of the Alpha spark after using Derek to come back to life.”

“Ah. You really are clever. Too bad you've always wasted that cleverness on my failure of a beta and my useless nephew. Yes, I kept some. It should have been mine altogether, but something went wrong.

“Doesn't matter though, because I'm getting it back. I'm getting it all back tonight.”

Stiles stiffens. That sounds really not good.

“I was willing to be patient. To wait for it. Derek isn't made to be Alpha, and I've always known that sooner or later he'd get himself killed, especially the way kept attracting hunters. I could wait. After all, I had enough power to get through most. Especially after getting a little boost.”

That's what happened to miss Blake, Stiles thinks. He doesn't say anything though. It's not time to upset the balance. Not yet.

“It was possible one of the others would have had enough and killed him, but chances were the Alpha spark would have gone to me either way. If not,” Peter shrugs, “a new Alpha, who doesn't know how to deal with the change in their senses? Easy to kill.”

Stiles can see it happen just like that too, unfortunately.

“Everything was going according to plan too, with Derek growing more and more unstable. Given a little more time I might even have been able to talk him into giving up the spark voluntarily.” Like hell he would have. “And then my dear, dear niece came back to life.”

There's something in Peter's voice with couple with the moue he makes that gives Stiles another flash of insight.

“You resent Cora for being alive. You resent her for surviving the fire.”

Peter almost slips into a roar.

“She abandoned me!”

“She was a child! I know you were trained to hide from hunters, to go to ground and stay there until the threat was over. Are you blaming her for doing what she's been told?”

“You go to ground, yes. And then you come back. You don't abandon your pack.”

And wow, hearing that shit from the wolf who killed one niece, tried to kill a nephew, and had just explained how he had been waiting to try again... Yeah, Peter Hale is a hypocrite on top of being fucking insane.

“She abandoned us, and then when she comes crawling back,” which, totally not how it had actually happened, “that useless weakling wants to reward her for it by passing the Alpha spark to her. And they expect me to just take it?”

Fuck. The biggest flaw in the plan had always been the risk of Peter finding out and getting mad. There are contingency plans, sure, but none of them counted for quite this.

“I should have been Alpha after Talia. Laura was just as weak, just as unsuitable, as Derek. She didn't have it in her to take vengeance for our family – she just ran. It should have been me. It would have been me, had I not been burnt so badly.”

Peter's eyes are flickering between red and blue again, but the light in them has nothing to do with the 'wolf. It's insanity, and Stiles makes a quick judgment call.

He's never going to be able to outfight Peter. What he needs is to keep him of guard, while hoping for help to reach him. And as dangerous as it might be, the best way is to go after Peter's ego.

He's calm and collected in a way he rarely is as his brain starts listing sore points to hit.

He starts off by laughing, startling Peter out of his self-righteous rant.

“I might have to take back what I said about you not being stupid. You really think you should have been Alpha over Laura? Dude, you are delusional. You not becoming Alpha after the fire had nothing to do with you burning, and everything to do with the fact that you're a monster. Hell, the only way you had a shot at Alpha-hood was to steal it.

“Derek's fucked up plenty, yes, but even on his worst days he's better than you. He at least is sane.”

His words are working, Stiles can see it, and he continues to taunt the 'wolf.

“In fact, should Derek die today? You're not even in the running to become the next Alpha. It'll be Cora, or Scott if she's not an option either. Hell, even Isaac is a better candidate for Alpha than you and I really don't like that guy. No, you're going to have to kill the rest of your family and the new Hale pack along with them to even have a shot.

“Fuck, if I was that Alpha spark? I'd leave the Hale line – hell, existence even – completely over settling in you. You're simply too corrupt.

“You speak of Derek and Laura not being worthy of the Alpha spark. The truth is that you're the one that's unworthy. The world truly will be a better place once you're dead.”

Peter's eyes flicker back and forth and Stiles is actually kind of surprised he's not already dead. Maybe Peter still thinks he can get something out of keeping him alive.

“Brave words, Stiles, but that's all they are. Words. You don't understand what it's like to be a werewolf, what it means to be in a pack. But I'll make sure you do. Before the sun rises I'll be the Alpha, and like it or not you're going to help me. And as a reward I'll give you what you wanted but were afraid to say yes to all those years ago.

“Once my useless nephew is out of the picture you'll be my beta. Part of my pack. And you'll be good to me, won't you Stiles? After all, you have...experience in being good to your Alpha, don't you?” Peter's voice is silky-sweet around the words, and Stiles shudders with disgust.

What Peter is hinting at is never going to happen, not even if Stiles has to kill himself to make sure it doesn't. Yes, he's made some pretty harsh statements about what was between him and Derek, but not even at the lowest point did that make him feel as dirty as Peter's mere words are doing now.

At the same time Stiles is willing to put money on the fact that Peter doesn't really mean what he's saying. Oh, he might follow through, especially if he leaves Derek alive, but this isn't about any kind of want or desire. This is about scaring Stiles, about rattling him, about making him beg.

He's not going to do that.

“Fuck no.”

“Tsk, tsk. You'll sing a different tune once you're in my pack.”

Stiles laughs again, short and sharp, putting as much mockery as he can muster in it.

“Your pack? You don't have a pack. You'll never have a pack. All you've got, Peter, is two people who shares blood with you and who pity you too much to put you down like the animal you are.

“Really, where's an Argent when you need them?”

That does it. Peter's claws pop, his teeth lengthen and his eyes shine like lasers. Only one of them will walk away from this, and Stiles has finally managed to tip the scales enough that it just might be him. Of course, even almost out of his mind with rage Peter does have some control – he hasn't howled, for instance, keeping it in as to not warn anyone. Stiles's chance is tiny, and it mostly depends on outside factors, but unlike five minutes ago it exists.

Now he just has to be right about a number of factors.

Luckily he is.

The window breaks, glass splintering and flying across the cabin. Peter jerks back as a big furry shape follows and Stiles hurries to to put his back against a corner. Chances are that Peter will win this fight so he's not safe yet, but he's certainly safer than he was a minute ago.

No one had been happy with Stiles going back without Embry. Hell, Stiles hadn't been happy about it. Had it been an option he would have brought the entire pack with him – preferably both even. Jake'd been on the verge of laying down an Alpha order about Stiles and John not going on their own for weeks, the only thing stopping him being the safety of LaPush. Instead he had had to stop basically the entire pack from sneaking off to follow them, same for Sam.

The compromise had been one 'wolf. There had been a fight over who got to go, and even Leah – who still think Stiles is being an idiot – had wanted to go. Of course, Leah is also finally pregnant and no one wants to put her and the baby at risk. (Plus, she's not feeling that great. The phrase “sick as a dog” takes on a new light when you've seen a horse sized shape shifter with violent morning sickness, Stiles decided after seeing Leah sick up to the point where she phased out of her wolf form and fainted. Yuck.)

Embry still hadn't been allowed to go, and Stiles knows why, knows that Jake has a point in claiming Embry's bond to Stiles would cause him to be on edge and risk exposing them in more ways than one. That doesn't make it easier to deal with though.

Stiles wishes with all his being that it could have been Embry.

Instead it had been decided that Collin, as the most harmless looking one, should go and play hapless tourist. He had arrived in Beacon Hills a couple of days ago, and as far as Stiles knows no one's picked up on anything strange about him or his story.

Of course, with Collin being one of the youngest and least experienced 'wolves he's not the one Stiles would have wanted in a fight against Peter Hale.

All he really is is a distraction, but it does gives Stiles a chance. While Peter's attention is on the giant 'wolf Stiles slowly eases the hidden blade from his sleeve and then carefully rips open his cuff.

The mountain ash concealed in the cuff does as it's meant to and falls into his hand. Now he's got a chance.

Provided nothing has gone to hell in the last couple of hours there is at least one other 'wolf near, able to warn others. If it has and they're on their own, then there's always howling.

All Stiles needs to do is get up a barrier and they'll have some breathing room. He just needs some distance between Collin and Peter.

At first the giant 'wolf is causing Peter to be cautious, but it doesn't take long for the man to realize he's the strongest of them. The wolf shape is excellent for fighting and killing vampires, but less so when it comes to another type of werewolf.

Collin yips in pain and Peter strikes again. This time he lands a powerful blow that throws Collin across the cabin. He lands heavily, with a whine, and doesn't get up. Stiles swallows as he sees blood pooling out from the still body.

A 'wolf can heal just about anything, given time. Peter won't give them that though. He's already stalking across the floor with blood dripping from his claws and a sadistic smile on his face. He's fast enough that he could have crossed before Stiles knew what was happening. This slow walk is just a show, meant to intimidate Stiles.

Too bad it just gives him the time he needs.

“You've been keeping secrets. I'll enjoy dragging them out of you.”

It's a promise, meant to invoke, and it works. But Stiles has gotten used to pushing down his fear and working through it, and so he looks Peter straight in the eyes and quips.

“Didn't your Alpha teach you not to play with your prey?”

And then he throws the mountain ash.

He's practiced this very moment over and over until he doesn't need to walk the perimeter, or to have “enough” ash. All he needs is a little bit and his belief.

He's never believed anything this hard before.

“Mountain ash? Always the clever one, aren't you? But your little trick won't save you, or your friend there. You can only hold the barrier for so long, and I can be a very patient man.

“It would be wise of you not to test that patience though. Sooner or later your father will walk through that door, and I would hate to kill him just to prove a point.”

Like he'd let any of them live either way.

“Here's the thing, Peter. You would be wise to leave now. Who knows, run fast enough, far enough, and you might even live to regret your actions here tonight. Because Game of Thrones might be shit about a lot of things, but they're dead right about: 'the lone wolf dies, but the pack survives'. And you, Peter. You're all alone.”

“You think you're pack? You, my useless nephew's even more useless fucktoy? Don't make me laugh.

“Since you're apparently too stupid to realize, I've got you trapped in here. You've got no way to call for help,” and he steps on Stiles's phone, grinding it to components to make a point, “your supposed savior is out like a light, dying as we speak, and your mountain ash barrier is weakening by the minute.”

It's not. Stiles can feel that it's still just as strong, but it's a good tactic, trying to shake the belief holding it together.

“That poor fool is even more of an idiot than that useless beta of mine. He didn't even howl for help. Not that he would have gotten any, but he didn't even try. Pathetic.”

Stiles smirks. No, Collin hadn't howled. But with the LaPush pack mind he didn't need to, not being shifted.

“Peter? This is the 21st century. Proper 'wolves use cellphones just like the rest of us.

And then in a show of timing almost too good to be true Seth and Brady jumps through the broken window as Derek – followed by Cora – break through the door.

Stiles almost sobs with relief. Having Collin arrive had been such a help, but it hadn't really made him feel safe. Not when up against Peter Hale. The same goes for Brady. They're his friends, yes, but they're the most inexperienced of the 'wolves and they're Sam's. Seth is, well, he's not that much more experienced but he's pack. That matters.

It's not the fact that they're four against one that calms Stiles, or even that Derek is there – it's the presence of pack.

He still wishes Embry was with him, but now he dares to believe he'll see his 'wolf again.

Peter is actually looking stunned, faced with another two giant wolves. And is that a hint of fear Stiles sees? It could be. After all Peter has to realize that while Derek and Cora might be swayed to spare him out of sentimentality, these new and unknown wolves have no such compunctions. Stiles wonders if the crazed 'wolf sees his death in their arrival.

He hopes so.

The four circle Peter, cutting of all routes of escape. If he wants to leave he'll have to go through them, and that's not as easy as fighting Collin might lead Peter to believe. They don't attack though and Stiles can't help but think his 'wolves are holding back out of consideration for Derek, and to a lesser degree Cora.

Seth and Brady both know that Peter needs to die, but Derek has had a hard time reconciling with the fact that killing Peter had been necessary the first time. He hasn't even wanted to entertain the idea that it might be needed a second time, and might want to give Peter a chance to surrender.

Or it's just about waiting for the right moment. Regardless Stiles finds himself unable to watch what is about to come. Strange. He'd had no problem watching Peter die the first time, had thrown Molotov cocktails at him and watched Derek rip his throat out without regret. He has been certain Peter needs to die again since about 5 seconds after finding out he was back.

And yet he finds he can't watch.

As Peter lounges, desperately, towards Brady – either having identified him as the easiest target or unwilling to attack his remaining blood family – Stiles burrows his face into Collins fur and tries to shut it all out. They're safe behind the mountain ash barrier, and their friends will take care of Peter without them. They're safe, the barrier will hold, their friends will live, and Peter will die.

Stiles's world shrinks down to those four things, trying to will it into existence.

They're safe. The sound of a large body hitting the wall.

The barrier will hold. A grunt as claws strike flesh.

Their friends will survive. A high-pitched whine and the smell of blood.

Peter will die. A howl rises, then cuts out and is replaced by silence.

Derek and Cora are curled up together, shaking and crying and laughing all at once, both their eyes flashing between red and beta blue or gold. Stiles looks at them and feels a sting. Not jealousy, precisely, because he's got Seth, and Brady, and he's pretty sure Embry is a lot closer to Beacon Hills than Jake really likes, just...

Derek won't be coming back with him.

Stiles knew that already, knew that Cora would be vulnerable after the transfer of power, and that having Derek essentially break away straight after wasn't going to happen. They'd talked about it repeatedly and made their plans accordingly.

It's even more true now, with the added trauma of Peter's betrayal and death, causing her to lose a pack member already that day along with half of her remaining blood family.

For her to lose Derek on top of that... No. Stiles doesn't wish that on anyone. Cora needs to stabilize herself, find her balance again, and both siblings need to be allowed to grieve.

Again, it's no surprise that Derek will be staying in Beacon Hills for a while. It's just... It was abstract before. Now it's right there in his face, and Stiles realizes he wasn't prepared.

Looking at Derek and Cora he also realizes that regardless of what they've said, what they've promised, there's a possibility that Derek will change his mind now that the moment is here. It's possible that Beacon Hills without Peter will be tempting enough that Derek will start seeing it as  his home again. It's possible that he will decide that staying with Cora, and the pack he started, is more important than being with Stiles.

If he does... It'll hurt. It'll even hurt like hell. But if it's one thing Stiles has learned it's this: he can live through that, can heal from it, because he won't be alone. Even if he doesn't have Derek he'll have Embry, and his pack.

But that's not how Stiles sees it happening. Not after everything they've been through to get to where they are.

Derek is going to grieve with his sister, and help her settle, and when he's ready he'll leave Beacon Hills, leave their own personal Hellmouth, and come back to Stiles.

Because that's where they're headed, full circle. When they're both ready things will be different. This time around it'll be Derek joining Stiles's pack. There will be no begging, no miscommunication, no posturing, no self-hatred and no Alpha crap. It'll just be Stiles and Derek, healed and happy and together, trying their very best to love each other and not do anything stupid.

It'll be great.

Stiles believes it with all that he has and is. And his belief? Is magic.

~ The End ~

[popculturebuffet]

Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck Restrospective: The Raider of the Copper Hill! “You Got Rich Son”

Hello all you happy people! And welcome back to my retrospective of the Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck! It’s been far too long, almost three months since we last checked in with Scrooge and frankly I feel i’ve been spacing these entries out too much for this one and for the retrospectives that aren’t paid for in general. So expect at least one McDuck adventure a month till I finish, possibly two when I can swing it like this month. 

Now i’m done beating myself up, when we last left off a younger more naive, more optimistic and less experienced Scooge took up a career as a cowboy for  Cattle Baron, gained his first sidekick in the form of his Horse Hortense, and took out some cattle thieves with the help of Teddy Fucking Roosevelt. 

This chapter marks the end of the story’s first act. The first act is about a younger and far nicer Scrooge: still onrey and still a cheapskate, but still a good kid and far more outwardly friendly and welcoming, a far cry from the bitter untrusting man we come to know. This chapter is one of the reasons why, as Scrooge learns a hard lesson about wealth and success, the sacrifices one needs to make for family and about sticking your hand in a lightbulb while it’s plugged in. So join me under the cut as Scrooge meets another valuable mentor, one of his greatest enemies, and about 50 feet of barbed wire. 

We begin with the end of Scrooge’s time as a ranch hand and cowpunch. With homesteaders moving in and dividing up the land, Murdo simply dosen’t have the space for cattle baroning anymore and has to let Scrooge go and head back to texas. We do get a great bit of Scrooge wrapped in barbed wire, having gone to cut some down so Murdo could move the herd out. 

So with his Job done and parting on good terms with his old boss, Scrooge sets up his own homestead on some land near the Anaconda Silver Mine, trying to make it as a prospector, starting on the path that would eventually lead him to riches.. in about a decade and a half.

 So Scrooge bemoans his rotten luck over Dinner with a stranger, Marcus Daly owner of said mine... who just.. randomly sat down to have dinner with a 17 year old. 

Marcus belays his own woes: While Scrooge has failed at what he tried to do, having gotten into both steamboating and cattle punching too late to go anywhere with either, Daly has a silver mine that’s full of copper: decent amoutns of it but still not what his investors wanted. 

Both however find their fortunes reverse in an instant in the weirdest way possible. The light goes out at their table and Scrooge tries to adjust it only to electcute himself. To his shock...

He finds out it’s running on electricty, which is starting to become widespread.. and requires vast amounts of copper wiring. Scrooge is back in the game but finds trouble getting equipment as the local seller naturally is a jackass who jacks up the price. Scrooge instead sells the gold teeth his dad gave him to the nearest gentleman after talking him into it. . And i’ts not even the weirdest transaction i’ve seen this week. 

For the record those weird things are the guy on the left’s skinflakes, his power is to make naked golems of himself out of his dandruff and skin flakes and what have you, while the guy on the right is paying for a mutant with a star for a head. So yeah a scottish cowboy selling his ancestor’s dentures to pay for mining gear is refelshingly tame after all of this. 

So we get the comic equivleant of a montage as Scrooge starts his work at prospecting, making a portable homesteader shack as a miner owns any land he lives on, and moving around to try and find it, but he runs into a problem: with his last two careers he had mentors to help him learn what to do: Pothole taught him riverboating and Murdo helped him learn to ride the trails. Here he has no one and while you can self teach a lot of things prospecting isn’t one of them. 

He end sup finding one though as a rich gentleman asking about the mine happens to wander by: Howard D. Rockerduck. If that names sounds familiar it should as he’s indeed the father of exactly who your thinking of and we meet a young 10 or so year old john who asks him to stop dealing with a grubby workman. We also find out whose responsible for him turning out ot be such a piece of work as his mother’s response to his father telling him “I used to be a grubby workman is well... word’s cant’ do this amount of classist bulslhit justice. 

Seriously his unnamed wife is so odious it hurts. And how the fuck did an honest, kind man like Howard end up with this bitch? It’ sbaffled me every time i’ve read this: did he marry for money? is he a gold digger? go down gold dig get down? Is she just THAT good in bed? Did he just make a horrible mistake one night? Did she lie to him about who she was? Was she replaced by a skrull? I have questions no duck comic has properly explained.. and if they have please tell me.  Also it does tickle me we’re getting a bit with a duck named howard though sadly he wears a top hat instead of a nice little bowler. And if you don’t know who howard the duck is.. shame on you. And if you’ve seen the movie.. my deepest sympathies. 

While Howard laments wanting to horsewhip his son, this was a century ago with change mind you standards were different and also John sucks. Howard crticizes Scrooge’s techqniue after introducing himself, and Scrooge and him get into a bit of a tizzy, with Howard offering to teach him for two cents.. but the hostility quickly desolves hours later as Scrooge realizes Howard was right and he’d been doing things completely wrong and the thrill of hard honest work again has washed away any ego driven competiviness. 

I”ll get more into Howard in a second but he does eventually strike copper, and while the vein is full it’s also thin. But Howard has one final trick and takes Scroogey for an ore test. I tried to find more on this but just found a lot of ways to do it yourself and what not. I”m now really intrigued how they did this and found the content of minerals. I know it’s a dull subject but i’m curious how they did it with the technology of the time. Did they just use acids like I found? If so how’d they get them? I do say this is one of the great qualities of Rosa’s works: he makes you want to learn more about history. I looked up more about TR after the last chapter and now I want to know how the hell metallurgy worked in the late 1800′s. 

We then get an intresting interacton as Scrooge.. warmly greets the townsfolk and vice versa.. yes the same Scrooge who as an adult would be introduced proclaming...

Is warm, optimistic and wholeheartedly belieives...

As you can probably tell by Howard’s reaction and what Scrooge becomes.. this story’s all about shattering that notion and is the first of two to shatter the poor kid’s trust in people and make him into the bitter old sod we know. 

The sample comes back 55% positive... which leaves Howard rushing to get Scrooge to a court house. As it turns out there’s an old, very real for the time, mining law called the Law of Apex: whoever owns the land closest to where an ore vein is on the surface owns the whole thing... so legally Scrogoe owns the ENTIRE ANACONDA COPPER MINE, which at this point as detailed in the time skip has gone from struggling to utterly thriving and sucessful. Whoever owns the land at the time the Judge rules it gets the mine.. and Scrooge’s friends, who seconds ago were concerned about him being dragged into court.. are now all scrambling to take his fortune, something Howard dosen’t seem at all suprised about. 

But while this may be a kinder, more naive Scrooge McDuck, it’s still SCROOGE MCDUCK. His response is to cut a nearbye power wire and swing it tarzan style over to hortense and ride her back ahead of the mob... with the electric wire slapping her rear and causing her to go extra fast.. and also quit. So Scrooge stands alone but manages to take out some of the ruffians with his shack while John and the Judge rush to the site. As for Scrooge well... you want to see what a McDuck family beserker rage against an ENTIRE angry mob of opportunistic assholes look like? 

And this isn’t even the most badass thing Scrooge will do this series. Or even in the next few issues. That’s how awesome this series is: fighting an angry mob SOLO with simply his pure rage and whatever he can grab and throw. And he WINS. He’s exausted and passes out, falling out of the sky on his final opponent.. but he took out what was at the LEAST 50 men, and ONLY passed out because one of them threw dynamite in his out house.. and even THAT didn’t kill him or put him out, simply casuing him to land on said dynamite throwing idiot and wins. 

We find out Rockerduck actually was one of the mine’s owners but helped Scrooge anyway: he has more than enough money and all it’s going to do in the end is go to a greedy brat. Marcus Daly shows up and while he’ll get the law overturned eventually, he still has to shut down while that happens and finds the right officials to bribe. And this is the 1800s... you gotta go by train to do your bribes. You can’t just do that shit over email and hidden bank accounts. Daly offers him 10,000.. but given what Scrooge could earn even before he got his mine back, Scrooge turns it down. 

However this victory is bittersweet as Scrooge warmly greets his friends.. only for one to cuss him out and the other to tell him to get loss. We then get one of my faviorite exchanges in this story.

This whole Panel is a masterwork. The sheer INNOCENCE on Scrooge’s face, almost looking like Donald, desperately wondering what he did, when as Howard points out.. he did nothing wrong. He simply got successful and they resent him for it. 

This has been a hard paragraph for me to write as I want to tread carefully. People do have good reasons to scorn the rich or celebrtiies sometimes. Some rich people or those in the media are genuinely terrible. Jeff Bezos, Tucker Carlson, Mel Gibson, Louie CK, Joss Whedon and even someone as low on the totem pole as Doug Walker is odious. And of course we all can think of one odious example of rich bastard i’d rather not think of, especially when thinking of John D Rockerduck and what he’l lbecome as an adult that i’m not giving a pleasure of the name drop but came to mind. 

But even for good people becoming succesful puts up a barrier between you and other people: Fans of yours will admire you or write fanfic or what have about you without even knowing you, i’ve been on that side, and some people will hate you just because without valid reason, especially in this day and age. Success breeds resentment and even people you trusted and loved can sometimes turn on you. It’s the double eged sword of achieving your dreams: You get what you wanted but you often loose what you had. 

And it was no diffrent two centuries ago, with Scrooge’s friends only being friendly as long as it suited them, turning on him first to steal his chance at glory and then to scorn him for daring to achieve it. Some people.. are only there for you as long as your not above them. And sometimes you can be happy. Look at Tom Hanks, who has a lovely family and a long and storied career. Or Linkara, a youtuber who has been at this for over a decade, has tons of fans, a loving wife with her own succesful channel, and just recently got contacted by his childhood heroes. You CAN be happy and successful.. it’s just very hard to make it that far. 

One of the central points of life and times is that’s often not the case: You can get what you want but it comes at a cost. And it’s how you pay that price that will determine how happy you are. Another central point intertwined with it is it’s not the journey but the destination, and i’ts how Scrooge takes that journey that ultimately leads him where he ends up good and bad. And we get an all to telling all too foreboding hint in how he takes everyone he knew for at least a year turning on him overnight. 

When faced with his first real loss on this Journey that wasn’t material.. he dosen’t care. He has his money and riches and that’s enough. And as we’ll see that attitude will cost him greatly. Howard is irate for a moment, hoping he wasn’t wrong in trusting Scrooge.. and indeed, for now, turns out to have placed his faith in the right person as Scrooge gets a telegram: his family needs him. And while he could stay, turn his back on them, and earn MILLIONS.. he tells Howard  to tell the owner he’s taking the deal. For now when given the choice between his family and his fortune, SCrooge will choose them. Sadly.. that won’t hold true forever. 

With this being the end of his time in the story, as he has a still insufferable John buy him a horsewhip for horrific but darkly funny reasons, as John brags about how rich his father is not realizing he’s buying his own whupping tool, i’d like to touch on Howard D Rockerduck and how amazing he is. Rosa managed to pack a throughly interesting, throughly engaging character into only 8 pages. While Rockerduck DID show up earlier in of ducks dimes and destinys, he wasn’t really fleshed out or named and only showed up for one page so still 9 pages total. 

But in those we see a kind and noble man whose easily what Scrooge COULD have been, kind, noble, generous, hardworking and willing to give up money to help people. He’s a good man.. but even he’s seen the sacrifice Money brings. He’s clearly lost friends, lost a sense of peace, and married the wrong Woman, whose poisoned his children into a spoiled brat who will only grown into an even more spoield adult in both continuities.. if raised quite a bit earlier in the 2017 cartoon as he was made scrooge’s contemporary there rather than a child, but semeantics. Point is Howard hismelf isn’t wholly satisfied with his success.. and that’s what he and Scrooge will forever have in common, with Scrooge, likely as a result of meeting the Rockerducks, fearing an indadiquate inheritor and someone squandering what he worked hard for. Though his reasons for not taking up a wife as we’ll see eventually, if outside the main 12 part story but I intend to cover the subchapters in their own time, aren’t entirely motivated by avoiding goldigging but a broken hard and his own stubborness. 

For now though we bid Howard and america adue. Scrooge however for once ends an occupation with less bitterness. Unlike his last two ventures where he made it out with only enough to get to the next one here he made it out ahead: he now has a decent suit, likely bought for him by Howard given he hasn’t cashed the check yet, I know this as it’s a major plot point for next time, 10,000 dollars.. and experince. He may of not gotten all the money he was due on this venture, but he learned more valuable skills and he feels with a land like america, the next opportunity to earn some dough is just waiting for him to get back. And as the chapter ends he muses that maybe the country could use a symbol of this countries boundless opportunity...

Final Thoughts for the Raider of the Copper Hill:

This chapter is one of my favorites. It’s nicely paced, something Rosa himself admits was often a struggle as he had to cover years at a time, has a wonderful new mentor for Scrooge, and sets up a lot of the tragedy to come in the last act beautifully. It’s a nice closer for our first act, showing Scrooge has come out of his first trip to america wiser, more experinced and more hopeful, but at heart still the same kind and noble kid he left Glasgow as. The next act is about the change of that boy into a man, how he will finally find his fortune after some more adventures.. and how the last viestges of his kindess and optimisim towards others die at the hands of a certain fake scotish gentleman. 

Next Life And Times: As is tradition for this series act openers, Scrooge returns home.. and just in time to get his castle back, fight a duel and go to heaven and back. So an average McDuck tuesday then. 

If you liked this review follow for more. And if you liked it a lot join my patreon so I can keep making these and hit my stretch goals. Even at just the 2 dollar level you get access to my discord and your pick of shorts whenever I do a series of them and with Goofy and Donald’s birthdays being the next ones to be celebrated you can’t pick a better time. patreon.com/popculturebuffet See you at the next rainbow. 

[meldy-writes]

Luckiest Girl in the World (Daryl Dixon X Wife! Reader)

Context:So I have an alt AO3 because for some reason I didn’t think a walking dead fic fit with the fanfictions I had under my Pen Name’s account, but at this point, I don’t think it really matters. Anyway, there’s this Daryl X Reader fic I’m writing on this alt account and I’m at the point where I’m writing two ways the story could branch, and there’s this little scene from the path I didn’t take that could work as a drabble. If you like this, or if you want to read the fic for context, it’s here. Be warned, it’s pretty long.

Summary: The Reader has been with the group since the CDC, and along the way, she fell in love and married Daryl Dixon. Now they’re in Alexandria and Aiden, one of Deanna’s sons has begun to harbor a crush. He doesn’t seem to realize that she’s taken. (Daryl’s not really mentioned until the last couple of paragraphs, but I thought those paragraphs were cute enough to warrant this being tagged as an x reader fic.)

Aiden sat at the top of the fence with her, casually leaning back in his seat. The front legs of the plastic chair were off the ground, his feet planted as he rocked back and forth.

“You’re gonna to fall backwards, you know.” (y/n) stated.

“You worried I’m going to get hurt?” he teased, leaning even farther back.

“No. In fact, I think it’d be funny. I just don’t want your mommy to yell at me.”

He let out a snort and put his arms behind his head as he began to rock back and forth. She rolled her eyes, amusement dancing on her features as she eyed the back legs of the chair in anticipation. As she predicted, they eventually snapped, and Aiden promptly fell backwards just as she’d cautioned.

She let out a barking laugh, and a few people passing by stopped to look up at her as the flushing boy tried to shake off the embarrassment.

“All right, all right, it’s not that funny.”

“Oh, I beg to differ, that was the most entertainin’ thing I’ve seen all week,” she argued, wiping a tear from her eye.

“Then your life must be very boring.” He countered bitterly, his pride hurt just a tad from how demeaning her tone was and how promptly she’d always shut him down.

“Oh, no. it’s not borin’, it’s just not fun, either.”

He finally recovered from his little mishap, tossing the broken chair down into the grass below to be fixed later, and choosing instead to sit against the wall. (y/n) kept to her perch, eyeing the expanse of pavement in front of the fence gate.

“You know, if you can’t find fun, you can always make it. There’s a game a lot of us play when we’re on watch to pass the time, want to play?”

She rolled her eyes. “I gotta keep my eyes on the gate”

“It’s a talking game. You can still keep watch. It’s called The Worst. We each share the worst experience we’ve ever had with something, and the one that’s the most terrible wins the round.” He continued, eyeing her with a charming smirk that, despite his best efforts, she hadn’t registered as flirty, yet.

He was an attractive guy, and after she’d saved his life on that run, and yelled at him, they’d bonded. He’d even swallowed his pride and let her train him. They’d gotten close, and they were both attractive, sarcastic, and confident people, so he couldn’t understand how they weren’t together yet. No matter what he did, she always shut down any plans he tried to make to hang out alone outside of the occasional look-out duty, and she always spoke to him like she was talking to a child. A very stupid child.

He didn’t let it deter him, though. No matter how much it hurt his pride. She’d eventually come around.

She turned her nose up at his suggestion, looking at him like he just told her the sky was green, and she was about to gently tell him he was a dumbass.

“That sounds like a game you don’t wanna play with me.”

He asked her why she felt like that.

“Because you’d always lose.” She stated simply, turning back to the scene past the gate.

“Okay, you don’t always have to play the jaded soldier. This world is shit, it’s fucked us all over one time or another, quit acting like you’re the saddest sack in the world.” He scoffed, smacking her shin with the back of his hand playfully.

She sighed, shrugging her shoulders.

“Alright, then. But if this ends up bummin’ you out, you can’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Internally, he celebrated. This was the first time he’d ever gotten her to agree to something she initially said ‘no’ to. Slowly but surely, he was winning her over, he was sure.

“Alright, easy. Worst night of your life. Mine was that time I left that supply run group behind. Usually, we’d go into detail, explaining what happened, but, you already know about that night ‘cuz I told you about it.” He stated sadly. She’d talked a big game, so he was pulling out the big guns. “What about you?”

Let’s see you top that, Debbie Downer.

She smirked, sensing the challenge in his voice.

“A long time before we all came here, we were stayin’ on Maggie’s dad’s farm. One night, it got overrun by a horde, an’ everyone got separated. I was with Carol, an’ a walker fell on top of me, tryin’ to bite into my shoulder. She thought I was bit, so she left me behind, but I was wearin’ a real thick jacket. I was fine, but I had to cut it open and drench myself in its blood so the herd wouldn’t sniff me out and tear me to shreds. I had to slice my way through a sea of those suckers, an’ then stumble through the woods covered in gunk for a whole day and a half ‘fore I found my people again. That was the first walker I ever killed on my own. Damn terrifyin’.”

He was quiet after that, face white as a sheet as he shuttered and coughed awkwardly.

“Y-your turn to come up with a topic.” He finally uttered.

“Worst walker encounter you ever had. Mine was this time at a mechanic shop out in… It had to be North Carolina. A guy tried to--well, it’s not important what his intentions were, the point was that he had me handcuffed to one of those automatic levers they use in autobody shops to lift cars, an’ I was hoisted off the ground. He had the keys in his front pocket, an’ I’d managed to get his head ‘tween my thighs to snap his neck. I was tryin’ to reach for the keys with my feet when he re-animated. I was strugglin’, I couldn’t go anywhere, I couldn’t use my arms, the only reason I got out of it was ‘cuz he accidentally bumped up against the control for the lift, and his head ended up crushed under the mechanism. I’ve had a lot of close calls, but I think that was the only time I ever truly felt like I was gonna die.”

Aiden let out a low whistle, letting her words settle. Maybe she’d been right after all. Still, depending on how she saw things, his might still be worse.

“Mine was right at the beginning. My girlfriend was with us while we were traveling for Mom’s campaign. I left for twenty minutes to grab some lunch, and when I got back to our hotel room, she was a walker. I don’t know if she was bitten, or if she had an accident, or if someone… I don’t know. All I know is that I had to kill her with my bare hands just to stay alive. I... dropped the hotel room tv on her head.”

He shuttered at the memory, and to his surprise, he felt (y/n) place her hand on his shoulder and squeeze comfortingly. He grabbed for it, but she pulled away before he could.

“Let’s uh, choose a more up-beat topic,” he continued weakly, “Worst date you ever went on. Mine was this girl Cierra Mauldry in sixth grade. I kissed her goodnight on her porch, and our braces stuck together.”

She laughed at first, but a long-suppressed memory resurfaced at the mention of dates, and instantly she was somber again.

“A guy I worked with at the CDC,” she started softly.

“He’d had a crush on me for a while, an’ I’d just learned that my dad died, so I was in kind of a vulnerable spot. I said yes to grabbin’ dinner together, an’ takin a walk ‘round the facility. When we got back to his room, he wanted to sleep with me, but I didn’t. I didn’t really like him that way, an’ I didn’t think it was fair to him to string him along, so I told him ‘no’, an’ that we should just remain professional from now on. Next day, he didn’t show up in the lab, an’ my boss sent me to go get ‘im. I found him as a walker hangin’ from his closet.” She took a hiccupping breath, reliving the memory in her mind, and scrunching her eyes shut. “Worst part is I cannot, for the life of me, remember his name.”

They were both quiet after that, and soon, they heard Spencer calling up to relieve (y/n) from her shift. She grinned sympathetically down and Aiden, and gave him the goodbye of:

“Told you it was a bad game to play with me.”

Still, when she got up, he scrambled to his feet as well grabbing her arm to stop her before she made her way down the ladder.

“Well, hey, I still had fun. I got to know you a bit better. I’d like to continue doing that, maybe you could come over for dinner and eat with my family tonight.”

She smiled the smile she usually did; like she was talking to a slow, and simple child.

“I’m sorry, Aiden, but tonight’s not great. Daryl’s gotten kind of close with his recruitn’ buddy, and his husband wants us to come to dinner tonight so he can finally properly meet me.”

Aiden scrunched up his eyes in confusion.

“What? What does Daryl getting close with them have to do with you? If they wanted to get to know you, couldn’t they just approach you without having to go through him?”

She smiled wider like he’d said something adorably stupid, as she clarified:

“I didn’t explain it very well, It’s more like a couple’s dinner party sort-of thing.”

Aiden blinked. What? What the fuck? Was she insinuating that she and Daryl were… she couldn’t be, right?

“You and Daryl are together?”

She nodded as if his statement was beyond obvious, “we’re married,” she corrected.

He squeezed his eyes closed, trying to picture the violent, mean, constantly dirty guy with the long, long hair together with the clever, beautiful, and secretly caring woman he’d been trying to flirt with for the past week and a half, but he just couldn’t picture it.

“How?” he blurted out.

“How do people get married?” she teased flatly.

“No, how did you two end up together? You’re so different!”

She smiled softly, looking down at her fingers as she began to twiddle them. This smile was different than any of the ones he’d reluctantly wrangled out of her. This one was genuine, and bashful, and affectionate, and dazzling. Aiden knew it wasn’t for him, and it almost felt like he was intruding on something he shouldn’t be just by looking at her.

“He an’ I are a lot more alike than people realize. We’re more alike than even he realizes, I think. That doesn’t matter though. These days, it’s not about whether you’re similar, or if you’ve known each other for a long time, it’s all about who you can trust and depend on. It’s about who you’d die for, and who’d die for you. We might not have ended up together in the old world, but in this one, we’ve got somethin’ strong. Somethin’ special.”

She grinned brightly, practically knocking the breath out of her companion as she looked him in the eyes and said, “I’m the luckiest girl in the world.”

With that, his grip on her arm retracted, and she finally made her way down the ladder. He watched her walk down the street and run into the man they’d just been discussing. He watched as she strode over to him, and gripped his leather vest, trying to pull him down for a kiss.

He noticed how Daryl grinned fondly and put his hands on her waist, placing a quick peck on the tip of her nose. He noticed how she leaned into him with her whole body. He noticed how the sun reflected off the ring on her finger, the ring he had not gathered was supposed to be a wedding ring until that moment. He noticed how soft Daryl was for her when no one else was around.

Or maybe, he was always like this around her, and Aiden had just been too absorbed in himself to realize.

[sharks833]

Sad Face

Well, my relationship of over a year has come to a very sudden end. I am very saddened by this but to be honest it makes as much sense as the rest of the relationship. We meet here on Tumblr, we became partners for a writing/art event. I had been a reader for this event before and this year I wanted to be a writer. Iv passively been a part of the community around the event for a while now and wanted to try and become active in the community. I enjoy reading and have always wanted to try my hand at writing on the count that I have a very vivid imagination and would like to try and get some of my thoughts down. I thought doing so on Tumblr would be a good idea both because I could give back to a wonderful community and people would be more understanding of my dyslexia which I use editing software to try and correct but sometimes even they don’t understand what I’m trying to spell (which spell check never does). To be honest, I was also looking for a more intimate relationship, but never really expected anything to come from it. I was very fortunate to get a wonderful partner but was too shy to ask them if they were a girl until I accidentally called them him for my big post and quickly edited it (a point that I got a lot of much deserved teasing for once we started dating). We kept talking after the event though and slowly after talking to each other every day we became closer and closer until I asked them if they wanted to start dating. Originally they said no, to which I was surprised and disappointed but understood that they were wary of dating after past experiences which I was made aware of. I thought they deserved a wonderful boyfriend and always hated when people said that and yet were themselves unwilling to be that person, so I offered myself. It wasn't long after that however when they confessed their own love for me and would love to date with an understanding of the things they would be uncomfortable with given their past. I was happy to be able to just talk to them and was more than happy to make any concession that would make them happy. A year passes and it’s both one of the best and worst years of my life.

(This is the complaining paragraph and if anyone reads this feel free to skip)

I quit my awful part-time job and moved out of my apartment I share with a roommate to try and live with my aunt and cousin in DC to try and go to CU in DC or find a job that I don't hate. Unfortunately the week I get there covid hits DC and we have quarantine. After about two months it's very clear things aren't going to work out and I go back home. Sadly my mother passed suddenly a few years ago and my father didn’t waste time finding remarrying, selling our family home, and moving in with her across the state line. At this time my twin brother gets recalled from the peace corps and now we are both in this strange house with this woman that we barely know who retired the moment she married my father much to his dismay. Were both forced to very quickly get any job and I find myself in hell on a tugboat for two months. Living in that hell for two weeks at a time working six hours, sleeping six hours. Once off the boat I get two weeks off and get to try and hide in a room that’s not mine from the monster that is my fathers’ wife. All while studying for the GRE and joining my brother in an online class to learn all the math. After two months I quit that hell much to the horror of my father. I’m quickly forced, and I mean forced as much as one can without putting a weapon against my skin, to work five hours of labor at FedEx throwing boxes in the back of semi-trucks. After another month the monster has had enough and me and my twin are moved into an apartment we didn’t get to choose but still pay everything for. The apartment isn't so bad as I'm away from my father and his wife and me and my twin took the GRE and will now be attending grad school in August through housing and such still need to be acquired.

Through this time though I've had the wonderful experience of being in a loving relationship. Every day I talked to my love and she talked to me. We went on dates and skyped with each other and I honestly loved Them more than I have loved anyone before. I want to fill a page full of all the wonderful things that we did and how happy I truly was at the time but those moments were between us and I like to keep the details of my love life private. My very first relationship was a long-distance one and it was a wonderful six months before it quickly became one-sided. For the next two years that we were dating, I was miserable because I didn't understand that people with more experience in dating get bored of relationships. After that, I never wanted to be in a one-sided relationship again. Sadly that's exactly where I found myself the moment they came home from the end of the semester. I always knew they were close to their family, and didn't and don’t mind being second or third to family, but I wasn't even last on the list. We went from talking every moment of the day to, from waking up to falling asleep, to never at all. I for my part tried to text her and keep a lively conversation, but she was never interested. After a week I figured she needed some time for herself but it became clear after another week if I wasn't talking to her then I'd never hear from her again. I tried to talk to her about this, and every time she apologized and said she felt awful about not talking and she would in the next few days but she never did. I talked about my past relationship with her and how I didn't want to be in another one-sided relationship again, and just as I had made concessions for the sake of our relationship she would too. I didn't think a single hello sent to me in the span of a month would be a deal-breaker to our relationship but here we are.

We first met in September of 2019 and for almost two years I felt like, for the first time in my life, there was somebody that actually cared if I was around. Iv always had a problem with saying no to people and giving more the is proportionate and as a result, always felt used or taken advantage of. I struggle with knowing how much to contribute to any kind of relationship and it has hindered my ability to be in healthy relationships whatever form they take. For the first time in my life though I found someone who gave to me just as much as I gave to them. Unsurprisingly however they admitted to me that they suffer from that same problem and that they never focus on themselves. I don't have too many friends so I'm normally focusing on myself and it was nice to be there for someone else. However, they have a family and others to focus on and as a result, almost never get to focus on themselves. Now that they are home however they would like to focus on themselves and no longer want anything to do with me. I get that though I don’t know why you can’t focus on yourself and still send me a hello, I don't want them to talk to me because they feel pressured to. If they have decided they no longer want me in their life suddenly then all I can do is hope they are able to achieve their goal and move on. I will always love and respect them for the kindness they have shown me.

As a moral philosopher who has studied the nature of virtue, I truly believe this person to be so virtuous as to be one of the greatest people, I have ever met. An observation I came to make shortly after meeting them, and I am very grateful I had their compassion for even a short time. I thought if I could lead them down the path of some philosophical school they would be able to find the answer to the problems they had but I never knew how to do it and now it's too late. My only regret is that I couldn’t help them with the problems more. In the entirety of our relationship from the first meeting to the end we never even got into one argument. Technically we did have somewhat of a fight when she decided to tell me she could no longer be in a relationship with me and work on herself but she ended the relationship the moment she left her dorm, she just forgot to let me know. I am again deeply saddened by this but I always knew in the back of my mind she too would get bored of me and move on. It's been the thread through all my relationships dating back to that first one and I knew it would appear again, I just wish my head had told my heart. I know in every relationship you tell each other you want to spend the rest of your life with the other one but for some reason I really believed it this time, making this loss all the more crushing. I know they won’t read this as I suspect only two people ever will and that for the best, I doubt she is saddened by this whole affair but on the off chance she is I don't want them to feel bad. I have always wanted them to be happy from the start and even know that it's over. That's all I want, it's all I ever wanted truly. Plato says happiness is what happens when all three parts of the soul are doing their work well, each part representing a virtue. I’ve always been good at knowing what to do (desire) and I'm alright at knowing how to do it (reason), but I've always been horrible at doing it (courage). She led me to courage though, both for her and myself. And for those moments when the three came together through her and for her, I can truly say to have been happy. I don’t know if I ever inspired anything in her that led her to happiness but I hope she can find someone that does, and that I can come to know the courage she showed me I had myself.

[vaguely-concerned]

Twisted Fate/Graves thoughts 2 Electric Boogaloo because none of you can stop me

and I just have a lot of feelings okay

- t.f. taking an entire paragraph mid-fall during a harrowing life or death chase to give you the context for how much the imminent destruction of his boots is a  tragedy is the funniest and most endearing character detail and also irrefutable proof that despite appearances he, too, really does only have that half a brain cell, it simply pingpongs around in there much more than graves’ half (which instead finds one idea and GOES HARD for it no matter what lol bless him)   

also his pov is basically just a flippant ‘well this is a goddamn bitch of an unsatisfactory situation’ until graves literally forces him to have an honest emotion at gunpoint, and y’know... that be what love feels like sometimes when you’re like that as a person, extremely relatable, I feel for him so much

- I’m still just quietly astounded by the hmmm... implied intimacy? I guess? in the argument they’re having once they’re actually talking in burning tides. let’s look at what they’re actually saying to each other:     

T.F.: “Are you ever gonna learn? . . . Every time I try to help you, I-” and “ I tried to get us out. The rest of us saw the job was going south . . . But you wouldn’t back down. You never do.”

vs.

Graves: “You’ll run again. That’s all you’ve ever done.” and “You made out alright, though . . . You know why? It’s because you’re a coward. And nothing you’ll ever say can change that.” 

like them’s the sort of fraught fighting words you have with a spouse right towards the end of an ugly divorce, the full fruitless ‘why do you always have to --’ and ‘but you never listen to me!!!’ deal, especially from graves’ side lol. it’s the sort of hurtful you can really only be with someone you’ve been very, very close to, someone you know incredibly well. considering the whole backstory what graves is essentially saying here is ‘It’s your own fault people have left you; you deserve to be alone’.

(interestingly, in twisted fate’s pov it seems that what’s really messing with him is the part of not being listened to. he tried to plead with his family and they refused to listen, he tried to convince graves to run away with the rest of them and he didn’t listen, and here they are again and graves isn’t listening  a g a i n  and at that point t.f. clearly just sort of. gives up on actually being heard, in a slightly heartbreaking way. and from how graves reacts to seeing that I really think he’s not naturally cruel like that at all, he’s just in too much pain to think until this startles him out of it and then he does actually listen)

- through both stories graves is so desperately, enduringly horny for t.f. to be emotionally present and engaged with him without slipping away into his ~*cool magic gambler*~ persona and I find it weirdly sweet 

- graves immediately getting fond of this leaky battered old rowboat... hfsadkjfhasd he’s sort of adorable in a way? it’s also really cute how he’s got this really tight focus on tf and his mannerisms and how genuine he’s being at any given moment. it’s such a neat way to show what he’s feeling and thinking about, which must be hard with a character who’s so massively oblivious to the finer points of his own inner life lol  

ALSO can we talk about how tf literally winks at him at one point, right after they’ve sort of had a little moment of regained trust... like my good sir that is so deeply unnecessarily saucy of you, please control yourself (though in his defense graves somehow still isn’t picking up what he’s putting down so y’know maybe subtle isn’t the way to go here anyway haha)

- I wonder if t.f. used to go by his initials even before he changed his name -- graves calls him by it straight off the bat in burning tides and t.f. seems to consider his real name mildly embarrassing lol. (also intriguing that he does appear to think of it as his ‘real name’, and not ‘old name’ or something like that. it’s why I feel like we’ve got more of a dual identity going on here than a deadname situation, it feels more like two distinct levels of emotional vulnerability/availability to me. and so ‘tobias’ stops being relevant when there’s no one left to know him as that. ow.)    

- from reading his bio it seems like twisted fate has had to figure out a lot of the magic stuff on his own (except for the mention of his grandpa teaching him the fortune telling part of it -- seems like they had a bit of a special connection, really, if him leaving his old cards with the kid before they left is anything to go by). what I’m saying is that I would read thousands upon thousands of words of him experimenting with it when they were younger and graves hurriedly having to topple a table over and pull them both behind it for cover before they both explode lol 

(and then t.f. popping his head up afterwards like ‘hAH see I TOLD you I could do it!’ and graves disconsolately lighting a cigar from the burning rubble b/c the things one does for love partnerships huh)

- I’ve been looking over burning tides with a writing eye a few times to figure out what makes it work so well for me, and one of the things I really like is that there are a lot of small comments/details that are there or are framed in a certain way specifically to emphasize the familiarity and history between the characters. Just small details like He moves fast for a big man. I’d forgotten that and graves mentioning he’s never liked standing too close when t.f. does the teleporting thing -- not to mention t.f.’s name reveal, which if I understand this correctly was actually new information to the readers when burning tides was going on. (and yes it is still very funny to me that his actual name is tobias. the duality of man)   

(I also feel like there are HUGE differences in writing quality between the different POV sections -- I guess different people wrote for the different characters? Well, both of the first person sections are gold and that’s what matters to me in this story so I don’t really mind. Sadly the Miss Fortune parts read the weirdest and stiffest to me, which is unfortunate b/c I love her lore concept a lot and she’s so cool in double double-cross. WHO the fuck let an unironic ‘the crimson-haired siren’ slip through the edit, is what I really want to know. please, narrator, tell me about her cerulean orbs while you’re at it) 

- The man I used to know seems lost under years of hatred.

I don’t try to say anything else. I can see it in his eyes, now. Something’s broken inside of him.

still makes me SO SAD and I’m incredibly happy it turns out not to be true in the end thank GOD

- this might just be me reading into stuff too much, but I really like this sense that in moments of high emotion/genuine vulnerability, graves tends to sound older and more tired while t.f. sounds younger than he actually is, more frightened and hurt

- if his mind hadn’t been completely focused on partner-rescuing and open murder were in any way his style, t.f. totally could have killed gangplank right there and then before miss fortune even got to blow the fucker up haha. then again if that were the sort of guy he were he’d be dead along with all the rest of them

- it’s so good that graves tries to save miss fortune’s guy before they leave the cave but also isn’t broken up about it when it turns out he can’t, that feels like such a correct encapsulation of his moral character haha

- I really do enjoy graves’ POV so much not just because there’s something immensely comforting about how he refuses to be scared even in the face of death because he’s too damn grouchy and won’t give the world the satisfaction, but also because the language/cadence is so satisfying. he does have a way with words, in a gruff non-flashy sort of way.

It smells like the end of everything – sulfur and ash and death; cooked hair and melting skin -- the rhythm of that is so gooood and that whole section conveys the horror and destruction but also the awe of the scene so well. (I’m telling you graves isn’t actually dumb at all, just astoundingly unbendingly single minded once he’s got an idea in his head lol) 

- I keep thinking about the fact that the last two things twisted fate thinks about before he passes out from drowning is if graves is scared and ‘What would Malcolm do?’ and I’m feeling real 😭😭😭 about it

- I’m still so disproportionately intrigued by graves mentioning his mom in burning tides. considering how early and seemingly easily he left home (...not to mention that he brings her up in connection with someone punching him in the face) it might be a safe bet that they weren’t that close but like. she also seems to be one of the very very few non-revengy things he’s checked up on after getting out of prison. did he send money home sometimes? would he visit whenever they came back to bilgewater? did she ever meet t.f. and if so did she approve or was this a bit of a uncharmable mother in law from hell situation? I um. I want to know these things pls riot it’s for science

.

(First post is over here btw, if anyone’s interested!)

[eloarei]

1, 2, 3, 7, 9, 13, 17, 23 (some of these are random and some aren't)

Thanks for the many questions, Socks! Sorry I didn’t answer them earlier; I decided answering asks on mobile sucks.  ALSO, this is going to be super long haha sorry.  1.  Tell us about your current project(s)  – what’s it about, how’s progress, what do you love most about it?       Well, my most current project is one I just started brainstorming. It’s (hopefully gonna be) a Fallout 3 series, with my latest fic being the starting point. LW/Fawkes is a ship I liked immediately when I played the series some years ago, but I never got around to writing for it, probably in part because there’s already a super good longfic about them, and I just didn’t think there was much else I could say. But my LW is different from Choco’s LW, and lately I wanted to start something self-indulgent. Although I have enough ideas for this to maybe be a single 30k fic, I’m choosing to do a series of shortfics instead, so that I’m not burdening myself with another long project. Fic series are great in that way, because it’s basically complete with every new fic.       On top of that, I have... probably 3 other things I want to make significant progress on this year. First is another Fallout fic: Same Heart. I’ve posted 8 chapters already and have almost 2 more done, but due to the slow-build nature of it (and my tagging) I don’t expect to have almost any readers until at least chapter 10 (when the ship characters finally meet). I’d like to at least get that far this year.       A project I’d love to finish by fall is the unreleased “The Wilderness”, a Venom zombie AU that I started for NaNoWriMo 2 years ago. It’s about 55% written, and my goal is to have as much of it done as possible before the sequel movie comes out. If it’s not done by then, I still plan to post whatever I have.       And lastly-ish, my novel... thing. Rogue. I’m in the process of editing it, although I’ve taken kind of a break lately. And as soon as I’m done with the edits and can get a couple of people to read it (just so they can tell me if certain parts are stupid and need changed) I plan to start the next book in the series... which will probably end up being book #1, actually, if I do them modern-era chronologically. It’s... gonna be a process. ^^;  2.  Tell us about what you’re most looking forward to writing – in your current project, or a future project.       In my upcoming FO3 fic series, I’m honestly just kind of weirdly looking forward to... how do I put this? Exploring my own vaguely-traumatic experiences through fic. I’ll always do a happy ending, if possible, but before we get there I really want to run these two through the ringer of... being given something they were led to believe was impossible, being judged for it, having it taken away, and then being told “well maybe it’s for the best”.       When it comes to future projects, I guess I’m really excited about writing the new Rogue book. “Reaper”, I guess, is its unimaginative working title. I’m anxious about it, because I thought Rogue had some really deeply emotional scenes, and I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to accomplish that as well with this new one, simply because the characters don’t have the same level of desperation about each other. I need to figure out what’s unique about their dynamic and push that. I guess I’m looking forward to the challenge.  3.  What is that one scene that you’ve always wanted to write but can’t be arsed to write all of the set-up and context it would need? (consider this permission to write it and/or share it anyway)       Hmm gosh. Technically there’s a scene in the later chapters of Mobius that I already wrote, but it wouldn’t take place until probably chapter 3 or later, and I just lost all steam on that fic, sadly. But every time I poke through my notes I make myself cry reading it. It’s a scene where one character knows it’s going to be the last time he sees the person he loves most, and he can’t explain his pain to anyone. I really just want to get there so I can see if it makes other people cry like babies haha.       But on a completely unrelated note, there’s also this ZADR fic I started writing in like 2009, and I absolutely didn’t want to do the work to get to the fun middle scenes, but basically it was an AU where young adult Dib went to live/work in the thriving multi-species space community, where he’s... I dunno, studying alien biology I think?, and he ends up with Zim as a roommate. The scenes I really wanted to write were about the two of them getting into like a bar fight with some tough types, and Zim gets his pak ripped off/damaged in the process, and Dib has to sort of take care of him through a horrible fever. But then it turns out that the pak was not a life-support system like they thought, but actually a growth inhibitor so they (the people in charge of the Irkens) could choose who became the Tallest (the leaders). (And also it hindered reproduction, etc.) So basically the two of them accidentally start to unravel a galactic conspiracy which also involves corruption in the Earth government, etc, and Zim gets taller but spoiler alert, he still doesn’t get tall enough to challenge the Tallest lol. Sadly, I doubt I’ll ever actually write that fic. Sounds like too much effort lol.  7.  What do you think are the characteristics of your personal writing style? Would others agree?       That’s such a hard question. Ummm. How do I put any of that into words? ...I think one of the things about my writing is that a lot of the time nothing really happens in a scene, and the story mostly focuses on a character thinking. Like, enough happens so there’s something for them to think about, but I think I tend to put a lot of emphasis on POV character’s thoughts, to the point of sometimes seeming stream-of-consciousness. I’ve been told that this makes my stories feel alive though? So I think it appeals to some people, though I’m sure others would find such stories boring.       Oh also, somewhat along these lines, I like to add commentary that is only somewhat relevant, usually in parenthesis at the end of a sentence or paragraph. (Honestly, it’s not unusual to see one in every paragraph if I’m writing something slightly humorous.)  9.  Are you more of a drabble or a longfic kind of writer? Pantser or plotter? Do you wish you were the other?      I would LOVE to write primarily longfics! However, I just don’t have the time or energy for it, and I don’t write fast enough. So I end up with a lot of oneshots under 10k. I had to challenge myself to learn to write short things though, and then it’s really about writing something short, not about writing a specific story.       Generally, I’m both pantster and plotter. I tend to write the first chapter/few scenes/maybe as much as 10k, just by the seat of my pants. After that, I look at what I’ve got and write out a plot to continue from there. Plotting everything out before I start just doesn’t work for me, but if I try “pantsing” anything longer than 15k I know I’m gonna have an absolute torturous hell of a time.  13.  Do you share your writing online? (Drop a link!) Do you have projects you’ve kept just for yourself?      Lol I think anyone who’s reading this knows I share my stuff online. Primarily on my AO3, though there’s some other stuff floating around here on tumblr too.  Most of the time if I keep something to myself it’s only because it’s not finish enough to share. So, sure, there’s plenty of that, but the goal is always to share it eventually. If I ever get around to finishing a novel, those will probably be the only things I don’t just post online. (Though I do post most of my OC stuff currently.)  17.  Do you think readers perceive your work - or you - differently to you? What do you think would surprise your readers about your writing or your motivations?       I think that inevitably my readers will always perceive me and my writing a bit differently than I do. That’s just... interacting with people. Nobody knows you entirely. However, I am as open and honest in my writing as possible, and I actually think that reading my fic is the best way to get to know me. I like to hope that I am an open book to anyone who has read many of my words. =] While you may not know the details of my life, I think you would have a good insight into my personality.    23.  What’s the story idea you’ve had in your head for the longest?       Like... my oldest fic/story that I’ve never written or posted? Not counting stuff I’ve consciously abandoned (things from middle school, mostly), my original fic series, “Damsel and Company in Distress” aka DamselCo. is definitely my oldest story. I think I started fiddling with it in 2006-- which makes it pretty disappointing that it’s gotten next to nowhere. XD; But the story is my baby, and it’s been my baby for so long that anyone who’s followed me ever is probably at least vaguely familiar with a few of the characters.  Now maybe one day I’ll actually give it the attention it deserves, though I’m sure it’ll need significant revamping. After all, a lot has changed in 14+ years. Ideas that were new and subversive then are probably already stale. 

[vasiliassuns]

thistle gimme the tea on ruby

♥ oh gods, you really just love getting me on the analysis trains, hm ?

♥ ( note ; do not read this post if you absolutely love ruby with all of your heart and believe she is 100% innocent , to each their own , these are just my own personal opinions and im not trying to offend anybody ) 

♥ warning ! this post is very long, and essentially turned into a character analysis of specific moments and nearly an entire volume largely based off of how i see the show. it is multiple paragraphs long, standing at exactly 3444 words exactly. there will be a tl;dr at the end for anybody who doesnt want to read the full post, or has trouble focusing ! thank you for understanding. 

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♥ where do i start ? personally, ruby’s character really got it’s worst in volume 7. i really enjoyed her character pre - fall of beacon, and a decent amount in volumes 4 - 6 as well. there is a moment in volume 4 that make me let out a long sigh, as well as a singular moment in volume 5 that greatly confuses me on her character, so i will touch up on that as well.

♥ volume 7 is what kills my love for her character, in all honest, as well as some moments in volume 6 that i feel could have been written better. i’ll go in chronological order for this, starting with my “:///” towards a part in volume 4, then confusion of a scene in volume 5, then the slight issues that developed with her in volume 6, then moving on to volume 7 and how im no longer really enjoying her character

♥ so, in volume 4, its very common knowledge that tyrian was sent to attack and retrieve ruby to bring back to salem, due to her having silver eyes and the damage she cause salems fall maiden. when qrow shows up to save ruby at the perfect last second, he adamantly tells her and the rest of team rnjr to stay out of the fight. at first, ren and nora dont listen, but then do, which is fair. but ruby continued to push her helping qrow. as we all know now, qrow was telling her to stay back due to his semblance. while, yes, ruby did help qrow against tyrian with a couple of the blows, the fight would have gone much different should she have not interfered (personally, i feel like qrow would have had a shot at beating tyrian, especially because their auras were both flickering and they seemed very evenly matched). but due to her constant interference, she nearly got knocked out by a large wooden beam, had qrow not sliced it in half. she wound up (even if it was accidentally) distracting qrow, giving tyrian the opportunity to nearly poison him. i dont hate her for wanting to help in this scene, because its her uncle who she cares about, but i feel like she also should have trusted qrow and stayed out of the fight. the line “this is my fight too” also gets me. maam, this isnt your fight, the fight is about you, but doesnt need to physically involve you.

♥ with volume 5. its a very well known scene, at least in my opinion. when weiss got impaled by none other than cinder fucking fall. within the few episode long battle for haven, we did see ruby’s eyes activate once when jaune and cinder were running / flying at each other to fight. i do understand why her eyes activated there, because jaune is her first friend from beacon that wasn’t her sister, arguably one of her closest. what i dont understand is why ruby’s eyes didnt activate when she saw that cinder had impaled weiss with the spear, weiss sitting in the same position ruby last saw pyrrha in, weiss an inch from death. it just doesnt add up to me how her teammate and partner, somebody who��s saved her multiple times and shes saved multiple times. it may be that she was too stressed in the moment for them to properly activate, which we’ve seen ( in volume 7 ), but i still feel like something should have happened with her eyes. 

♥ continuing on with volume 6, i really didnt have many issues with her character here either, but a few of her lines / moments kinda made me go “:/ bruh why tho” closer to the end of this volume. it’s really only two quotes of her’s that get me, which is “Just because you don't have an idea, doesn't mean we're out of options! Oz hasn't been here to tell us what to do, but we still managed to get this far anyway. We've been in bad situations before, and we don't need an adult to come save us or tell us what to do. We just did it our way! And I say we do it our way. And if you think you can keep up with us "kids"... we'd be happy to have you.” from the episode ‘lost’. i partially understand what she’s saying here, but at the same time, she says this to qrow, who saved her life on multiple occasions, and who wanted to get to atlas without breaking any laws. the way she said it (nothing against lindsay, she is an amazing and very talented voice actress, and she delivers nearly all of rubys lines perfectly, but imagine as if this was a real person we knew), kind of seemed decently rude to me. i understand that she knows they need to get to atlas, because james can help them (ill bring this back up later, trust me), and shes clearly not afraid to break the law that involves james’ military to get to him. 

♥ the second thing in volume 6 about ruby that semi-upsets me / makes me go “:/” is in the episode seeing red, when she was talking to cordovin, she said “ We're going to Atlas. Bigger people than you have tried to stop us and failed, but we're supposed to be on the same side! We're supposed to use our power to protect people, but you just use yours to look down on everyone! We didn't want to steal from you. We did it because you gave us no other choice! Now I'm giving you one last chance to stand down and hear us out.” this semi-upsets me mostly because of the line “bigger people than you have tried to stop us and failed”, as well as “we did it because you gave us no other choice.”. the “bigger people than you” gets me because while, yes, in the grand scheme of things within the war against salem, cordovin is a small footnote within it, the only other people who physically tried to stop team rwby was roman (who sadly was eaten by grimm due to his negative emotions with flocks of grimm around, not because of ruby), cinder’s miniature faction (who only partially failed. as much as i hate cinders character, she didnt fully fail in stopping rwby, she just was forced to step back for a while...multiple times.), and tyrian with rnjr. roman didnt inherently fail, he just chose to walk away from the fights hed been having with team rwby in order to devise a new plan to beat them the next time. cinder’s faction only partially failed because ruby managed to get on top of beacon tower in volume 3 with weiss’ help, watching pyrrha pass away thus activating her silver eyes for the first time. the only reason tyrian failed to stop rnjr was because qrow was there to help, and ruby managed to get an opening to slice his tail in half (which. ew that shot looked disgusting). yes, bigger people have tried to stop her and her friends, but they didnt inherently fail, at least not yet. with the line “we did it because you gave no other choice!” mostly just confuses me. while yes, technically cordovin didnt really give any options for the group, it didnt automatically mean that they had to instantly resort to stealing from the military. 

♥ now ! onto volume 7, where my salt really starts. because i have a growing icky feeling about her character in volume 7, im going to split this next bit up into three parts. the first part being the first 4 episodes, the second being episodes 5-9 and the third and final being episodes 10-13. buckle up!

♥ episode 1, i really have nothing against ruby. she has the same attitude she did in volume 6 and before, which is a mixture of pure but also wanting to stop salem.

♥ its episode 2 that starts to get me. as i mentioned earlier, ruby knows they have to get to atlas because they know james can help them, and that the lamp is safer if its locked away in the vault, but then she suddenly doesnt trust james. i dont know if this is because the ace-operatives arresting them, but in that situation, james also couldnt have known who the unlicensed huntsmen were. as seen by his and winter’s reactions to the soliders bringing rwby+jnr+oscar & qrow in, they instantly tell them to let the 9 go, because james and winter personally know them and know they would never attack people. so, i dont really know why ruby would stop trusting the idea that james could help them because of that. it may also be the fact that ruby doesnt like the idea that james was planning on telling the people of atlas and mantle about salem (which, honestly? to me? this decision seems fully rash and makes a lot of sense.), but even then, if the students at the vytal festival knew about salem, or the world did, it may have proven to be more beneficial to them, because the more people that knew she existed, the more people who can fight her or the more people that can support those who are fighting her on the front lines, so ruby no longer trusting him over that doesnt make sense to me either. ruby’s sudden distrust of james upsets me quite a bit, because she and the team shed been traveling with had learned ozpin was hiding things from them (my feelings on this is a whole different post, but not necessarily a negative one), and was very upset about that. really, her openly lying to james about not knowing why ozpin had disappeared / locked himself away in oscars mind, as well as the amount of questions jinn has left, really ticks me off. they spent the entirety of volume 6 trying to get to atlas and to james because they needed his help, and once they finally got there, in front of the man himself, she lied. she became the exact same thing that she and her group had openly not liked what so ever, which was a blatant liar. id understand if ruby said that jinn had one more question left, to see how james would react, and tell him of salem’s immortality at a slightly later date, when they got into the rhythm of being around each other and working as a team against salem, but just blatantly lying, without consulting her team prior, to the man who could in all honesty make or break how they fought this war, was plain wrong.

♥ in episode 3, ruby was mostly back to who she had been prior to this entire mess. she explains why theyre hiding stuff from james, albeit in the vaguest way possible (weiss and blake explain the thinking behind it more than she does, honestly). we also see the beginning of a conversation between ruby and oscar about them lying to james. though, with the lying situation and who she was turning into, this is really all for this episode.

♥ in episode 4, the largest scene we see with ruby openly talking about her distrust for james is her conversation with qrow. she says “I'm trying to do what I think is best, but I really can't tell if what's best is what's right. Or if I'm no different from Oz.“, which at this point, shes nothing like ozpin. shes worse. ozpin was hiding the truth about salem due to the trauma connected to her and the fact of her immortality that the ozma line of reincarnations had, which isnt entirely a bad thing. should he have tried to find a way to tell them she was immortal without disclosing his own personal traumas? absolutely, i dont disagree that he hadnt made brash decisions, that should have been made differently, but the sad truth is, is that ozpin chose to hide what he hid, but that one mistake (albeit, a large one) doesnt entirely make him a terrible person. ruby, however? her choice on telling james wasnt brash, it was blatantly impetuous. she barely thought and decided to lie on the spot, unless shed purposefully been internally planning for a long while to lie to him, and had a lie stored up to use should he have asked. that isnt okay, what so ever. the conversation ruby had with qrow eventually delvs into talking about summer, which isnt really important.

♥ when thinking about episodes 5 through 8, nothing particularly stands out to me as ruby blatantly lying. those episodes are mostly team rwby and jnr doing huntsman work, yang making a terrible decision and making blake talk for her, and r/enora turning into something i honestly really hate. episode 9 however, gets me thinking.

♥ in episode 9, the finally tell james that salem cant be killed, but ruby doesnt tell james, oscar does. a quick side note, i really like the fact that crwby had oscar tell james and not ruby, because oscar is the current (and hopefully final) reincarnation of ozma, and its a secret his past lives kept for a millennia. but! back to ruby. within this episode, before she decides they can finally tell james about salem (which, as you can tell, i believe they should have done instantly), ruby is preaching to james about how they can figure it out and that how they should all work together. this pisses me off because shes standing there, hiding one of the largest, if not the largest secret in the show, to a man who has done everything for her and her team. james trusted rwby, especially ruby, with everything he knew, gave them new weapons, clothes, a place to stay, food, etc. all for free because he trusted they wouldnt hide anything from them. another thing that gets me about ruby saying it was finally time to tell james, was that it seemed solely up to her to tell him or to chose when to tell him. it was up to the technically youngest in the group to chose when to tell james about salems immortality (i say technically, because oscar is the current reincarnation of a millennia old line, and i personally have seen him be wiser than ruby in this, weather hes more mature than her or not. physically, yes, oscar is the youngest. mentally? i really dont think hes the youngest in that regard). it doesnt make sense to me as to why everybody was trusting ruby with when to tell james. why wouldnt qrow tell him? qrows known james for years, weather they were close friends (that hug and sincerity tells me that they arent the bickering work partners v3 shaped them up to be) or not. qrow knows he can trust james because simply of how long theyve known each other. weiss knows she can trust james, hes been seen multiple times in the show defending her against jacques, even offering her a place at atlas academy (that bit to me seemed like james offering weiss a way to get away from jacques, because she would need to live at atlas to properly be a student, not the manor), he even said “shes the only one making any sense around here” after weiss got rightfully upset at the woman talking beacon down in volume 4. oscar knows he can trust james, simply because of his connection to ozpin. seeing as ozpin can access oscars memories, and its cannon that their memories merge, its safe to say that oscar was able to see who james used to be pre-fall of beacon, and to see the kind of man he was, as well as making his own judgement based on their first introduction together. so, why would these three, and the rest of the team traveling with ruby not tell james the truth? hell, qrow is a mother fucking spy. im pretty sure he would be able to tear james apart and figure out his intentions pretty easily. why couldnt qrow have just had a one on one conversation with james to make his own final call, as the fully fledged adult of the group? it doesnt make sense to me why they would trust ruby with this extremely important decision what so ever. 

♥ episode 10, there really isnt anything i have against ruby. shes fighting to protect mantle and is doing her current job, which is one of the few details i can appreciate, but thats about it. 

♥ episode 11 and 12 specifically piss me off, and not just about ruby, about nearly everybody involved. i understand rubys standing in this, saying that they need to stand their ground and fight salem head on, unlike they had in the past, i honestly probably would have said the same thing if i were her too. james had emotionally shut down at this point, i think that this is very clearly evident, especially seeing as the white sparkles in his eyes have dissipated, something we commonly see in the eyes of rwby characters to represent their humanity or emotional status. james is emotionally shut down, the ace-operatives have their own opinions on this situation which is entirely okay and valid, and they happen to be siding with james. blake is trying to take the calmer approach, most likely having noticed that if they lashed out like yang began to, it would go very bad very quick. weiss was in a state of semi-shock, her mind most likely naturally connecting their current situation with trauma and abuse she endured as a child (most prominently ; isolation). but how ruby handled going against james and the fight against the ace-operatives / specifically harriet, was down right wrong. she should not have jumped past james with her semblance to reveal james’ plan, which automatically escalated the situation from bad to even fucking worse. she yet again made a decision for herself and a group of people that can cost them their lives if things dont go their way (which, knowing how this show can be written sometimes? it will always go their way in the end), without thinking. i really dont feel i have to explain how spontaneous her choice on this is, especially because i know multiple people have covered it in better written posts. it essentially boils down to rubys blatantly reckless actions and absolutely moronic choices to do what they did. do not get me started on her line of “then you trained us” or the fact that all the ace-operatives walked into that fight with less aura than team rwby, which already gave them an unfair advantage. i really do not have the patience to fully type out and explain why i hate these two episodes with my entire being, but it mostly boils down to: nobody in this situation is right. not ream rwby, not james, not the ace-ops, very clearly not salem and her lackeys, not qrow choosing to fight 1v1v1, or cinder for a multitude of reasons. the only characters in these episodes i dont have a burning hatred for, be it temporarily or a fire i have a feeling will be burning for a while, is team jnr and oscar. they were trying their best in regards of what was best for everybody, oscar wanting to help james to the best of his ability. 

♥  tl;dr : basically? ruby rose in volumes 1 - 6 was actually a really enjoyable character and only had a few moments of “okay but why?” but everybody also has those moments. ruby rose in volume 7 turned into a hypocritical, blatantly rude and whiny little girl who i honestly cant really see as a good character at the moment at all, because of how she acted the entire volume.