#now I'm a little curious about what it is you've learned from me because I've definitely talked about renesmee before

[aeolianblues]

I'm not an extrovert. At all. In everyday life, I'm a yapper, sure, but I need someone to first assure me I am okay to yap, so I don't start conversations, even when I really want to join in sometimes! It's just the social anxiety acting up. God knows where from and why I lose a lot of my inhibitions when it comes to talking to people about music. I don't know where the confidence has suddenly sprung from. I've made a crazy amount of friends in musical circles, either just talking to people about common music or (since it is after all in music circles) talking to bands about their own music. I let out a sigh of relief any time an interaction goes well, because in truth it's going against my every instinct. I wish I could do that in everyday life

[bookwyrminspiration]

Wait! Bella and Edward have a kid together????? I am so sorry I did not know this whatsoever. My knowledge of Twilight is you talking about it and this one Harry Potter/Twilight crossover fic that I read 4 years ago.

Anyway, why can’t vampire’s bodies change? Is it like how they can’t have tattoos due to their skin being very tough?

Also, if Bella was changed into a vampire midway through her pregnancy, how does she manage to actually have the kid?

.⚙️

Yep! It's a pretty significant part of the story, as in it is like the entirety of book 4. So almost 25% of the series is dedicated to Bella's getting pregnant and the aforementioned problems this new kid raises in the vampire world. And it's generally well known for the Jacob imprinting on Renesmee thing (which is a whole other situation/drama)

Her name is Renesmee Carlie Cullen, and she is the biological human-vampire daughter of Edward and Bella. Renesmee is a mix of the names Renee (Bella's mom) and Esme (Edward's adoptive vampire mom), and Carlie is a mix of Charlie (Bella's dad) and Carlisle (Edward's adoptive vampire dad). She hasn't reached physical maturity by the time the series ends, she's still a kid--but she's like, idk, the equivalent of a five year old perhaps? if said five year old was smarter than the most learned human alive

To get back to your questions: in the twilight universe, the way vampires work is that when you're turned, every cell and fiber of your being is frozen as is, in that state. It heals all blemishes like whatever injury/illness might've killed you if that was the situation (among other things like destroying melanin making all vampires pale...), but vampires do not age or develop past that. This includes physically, mentally, and emotionally. If you were turned at 14, you're physically, mentally, and emotionally 14 forever (that's why the immortal children I mentioned are a problem). Their bodies don't change. They don't age, their hair and fingernails don't grow, they can't grow or lose muscle or weight, there's nothing active or circulating in their system--their hearts don't beat, they don't need to breath, they don't have a life cycle, etc. There bodies stop changing and are stuck indefinitely at the time of turning. Which means vampires can't get pregnant or accommodate a growing, changing baby and body

As for Bella, she was changed at the end of her pregnancy, immediately after the baby was removed/born. The entire pregnancy happened with her still human. I could've been clearer about that. She was pregnant, and then the baby (half-vampire and therefore supernaturally strong and dangerous inside her frail human body) accidentally broke a bunch of bones and her spine a few days before their scheduled c-section, so an emergency one was performed. Baby Renesmee was removed, having gestated entirely in a human body, and Bella--no longer pregnant, but very much so dying--was injected with venom and bitten to transform her and save her life.

I hope that helps clear it up! But I may have also said things that raise more questions, so if so, feel free to ask!

[thatnonameuser]

A Wonderland Of Yanderes

Intro, Part 1,Part 3 here Tagging for the first time @blue-rae18 Minors DNI Trigger Warnings: Mentions of Rape and Non-con but it's a subtle.

You'd bitten your tongue bloody all the way through Crewel's opening lecture. There were so many questions. So many sick and twisted answers.

One class filled you with so much dread

A class about kidnapping, murder and brainwashing some poor innocent soul into Stockholm Syndrome. All shoved underneath the the guise of true love.

A 'darling', the name for someone who was the object of a yandere's unwanted affection. An innocent who spend the rest of their lives living in fear, while someone smothers and controls them with their obsessive love against their will.

And this is all being taught and treated as a normal.

As if it's fine to take someone hostage because you love them.

As if it's fine to kill someone they love if you love them more.

As if it's fine to do unspeakable acts to them and their bodies against their will.

With how much nausea and bile coursing through your stomach and throat it was a miracle you didn't throw in the middle of the lecture.

But that's not what scared you.

What scared you was how bored Ace was as Crewel spoke, how enraptured Deuce looked as he heard about this. How curious some of the other students were about the methods they could use to steal innocent people from their homes, families and lives. How excited some were hearing about some of the ways they would learn about the ways they would use to break the desire for freedom in their future 'partners'.

It was terrifying.

That your friends would kill for someone they love.

Would they kill you?

You don't want to think about that right now. Right now, you needed answers. Fast.

"Crowley! Crowley I need to talk to you!" You shout as you storm in Crowley's office. As soon as the lecture ended you got the hell out of dodge and headed straight to Crowley's office, ready to demand answers.

The door opens to reveal a smiling Crowley, but that doesn't soothe your nerves. "Ah! My dear, what has your feathers ruffled?"

You swallow roughly, "Crowley.......Why didn't you tell me about the fact that I could be........legally murdered here?!"

He tilts his head, "Oh. That must've slipped my mind." You look at him, bewildered.

"I could-" Crowley interrupts you.

"Fear not though. As I am gracious, I already have ensured that will not happen!"

You want to feel relief but you can't, instead suspicion fills you.

"H-How?" According to Crewel's lecture only one crime wasn't pardoned. Darling Murder, and you weren't a darling. You got here on accident and you're not apart of this world so there's no way-

"Crewel was kind enough to inform me of your reaction to his lecture, and I've seen you this past week, how you've tamed your fiery little familiar so quickly." The smile he makes while he speaks fills you with fear, "Only darlings act the way you do~"

"What?"

"As a result, I've had you registered as Darling on and off this island. No one will raise a hand against you." He pauses, "At least not enough to kill you," he laughs at that.

"B-but I'm not from here! What if someone tries to kidnap me, or drug me, or....anything else!? I have a family, friends, and a life back in my home world!" You reason, but Crowley just laughs.

"Ah, the usual darling spiel~ Fear not, I will continue to find a way for you to return home." You feel a sigh of relief bubble into your throat, but before you can release it, what Crowley says next makes your blood freeze.

"But if someone takes you as their own, I cannot and will not try to intervene."

"What!? B-but-"

"I'm afraid after someone stakes their claim, a duel must be done to relinquish that claim to another. You must understand, it would be such a hassle to do every time someone stakes their claim."

"W-wait a second-"

"Of course, I'll leave a way for you to return to your world, but whether you're allowed to leave is another story. You must understand."

"I-I didn't ask to be here, Crowley, you c-can't just-"

"My dear, perhaps the reason the carriage came for you in the first place was for you to belong to another here. Regardless of how you feel about it, my and your hands are tied."

"B-But-"

"Oh, and I should give you fair warning. Many of our students are well aware on the traits a darling like you tend to have. Some may already have their eye on you. Your little friends Ace and Deuce seem to."

You're stunned silent. Ace and Deuce might be, what?

"Y-You're lying...." you whisper.

"I'm afraid not, but as I am gracious I'll inform the ghosts in Ramshackle to keep an eye out for you. They seem to have taken a shine onto you." Why because, you lived with them or because they're obsessed with you too?

What's wrong with this world?

[ms-demeanor]

sorry if you've answered this before, and i hope you don't mind me asking, how do you know so much about computers and what seems to me like everything in the world? how did you become so knowledgeable? it's amazing

i just know a little about a lot of things and I probably have a fair number of things that I've dug into more than most people and less than people who actually focus on that stuff! It's kind of an illusion!

I do know a lot about computers and that's because I've worked at a computer company for 12 years and have been deep into a computery subculture for about 20 years - I do genuinely know a lot about consumer computers. That I'll own and that's experience.

I know a fair amount about literature because I've got a degree in it!

I know a fair amount about journalism because I've got most of a degree in it and I worked with journalists for a long time!

I know a fair amount about nutrition because I've got most of a degree in it and because I've been focused on reading a lot about nutrition for more than a decade because of my own food issues!

But mostly I'm just someone who falls down rabbitholes and has a decent ability to recall what I find when I run down them.

Also I get curious about things and will just go. Experience them.

Like at some point i came across a site for people who own and use RealDolls and I got interested in learning more. The site required an application because they didn't want people just trolling so I applied and I ended up reading through the whole site and reading the magazines they sent out for years after because it was just interesting. The way these guys bought clothes or compared repair techniques and cleaning techniques, the way they constructed identities for their dolls - it was all interesting! So now I know about the proper way to store a RealDoll and how their skeletons are put together and the best way to prevent rips or clean inserts.

Now imagine that with everything.

I got interested in quack medicine so I ended up reading the entire back catalogs of quackwatch and science-based medicine.

I got interested in the history of aspartame as a scare-word and I ended up reading a couple of books, SEVERAL entire blogs with decades-long runs, purchasing a military magazine from the 90s, and submitting a FOIA request.

But, like. I don't own a RealDoll or work in that industry. I am not a medical professional. I am not a chemist who works with aspartame. So I get these weird little collections of information where I know what *seems* like a lot to someone who hasn't looked into it but I know a lot less than someone who has taken the time to actually dedicate themselves to that topic.

And sometimes it's a years-long dive and sometimes it's a months-long dive and sometimes it's a few hours of me digging online until I feel satisfied with what I've learned and I never come back to it, but I've got three more talking points than your average joe at a party would.

(Also though I've attended various colleges at various levels for ten-ish years now and I've taken probably more college-level classes on a lot of subjects than most people have because I've now spent several years just kind of kicking around at community colleges and deciding that a cartooning class sounds fun or that a mesoamerican art class fills certain transfer requirements or that I might as well brush up on spanish, french, and german. Access to low-cost college classes in california is a big part of this, and having the time and money to take classes while i'm working is something that I've been very lucky with)

I've also worked pretty much continuously since I was 18, sometimes holding multiple jobs at once, and I know a lot of interesting people who do a lot of interesting things and I ask them about their interesting experiences and if they offer me a chance to go do cool shit with them, like launch a high altitude balloon or blow up some dynamite that's about to expire or join a band, I do it!

I was also one of those kids who had no friends and spent too much time at the library so I'd do things like read through medical textbooks or pull a book of home chemical formulas out of the trash and read it or take it into my head that I was going to read all of Shakespeare before I got to high school so I was a really annoying twelve-year-old and that kind of thing never really let up.

I don't know! I don't think it's that unusual and I think most people do this kind of thing I just happen to have less focus than a lot of people and talk a lot more.

[l3vi-bby]

OK SO

M! Reader with Beel but reader is a chef/baker. Beel only learns about Readers talent when he eats one of their meals and finally feels full for the first time probably ever. Beel questions reader about the contents of the food and reader is like “idfk, made with love?” Because of this, Beel forces Reader to make him food as much as possible.

Small little thing I was thinking about, thought it might be cute.

𝙇3𝙑𝙄-𝘽𝘽𝙔 ;; ᵒⁿ ᵗᵘᵐᵇˡʳ ░ : ｡.｡

warnings / sum // he's full of your love and still wanting more. || beelzebub (obey me! one master), male reader, fluff

a / n // tysm for giving me my first ever request on here + i love beel sm so i was so excited to start writing this!!! [B. NAME] = bakery name (usually would mean "brother" but in this fic no)

# full of your love // beelzebub x m!reader ≟ ˚◦

: ｡.｡ ░ ᵒⁿ ᵗᵘᵐᵇˡʳ ;; 𝙇𝙀𝙑𝙄-𝘽𝘽𝙔

𝙄𝙏 — was known all across the Devildom that [F. NAME]'s baking was the best and not only that, but the [B. NAME] was also great, even Barbatos and Luke would agree so, their own pastries maybe put to shame. The bakery smelt of fresh sweets, toasted bread, and the clear aroma of caffeine. Everything in the building screamed a homey feeling, it brought a warm welcome to any person, demon, or angel walking in. A heaven in hell.

It was unsurprising that Beelzebub, Avatar of Gluttony, quickly found out about the place, and became a frequent patron. Not only that, he was the generally the sweetest and most supportive, having the money to buy all of the bakeries pastries if he wanted to. It was currently a normal day, it had begun to snow in the Devildom and demons all around looked for refuge in any open stores. Beelzebub sat down at a table, scarfing down the food given to him by [F. NAME]. The demon looked up at [F. NAME] as he munched, "your baking is always the best, [F. NAME]... mmm..." The [H. COLOR]-nette could only chuckle, placing more food before the other, "so I've heard, Beel." They continued to bask in each other's warm company, [F. NAME] soon pulling in a chair and propping his elbows up to admire his favorite customer. Beel gulped down the remains of the food with a good jug of coffee and sighed in content. He patted his stomach and realized an odd feeling. "... I feel so full, [F. NAME]." "I'd be surprised if you didn't, you've ate more than you regularly do." Beel shook his head, "no, you don't understand. I never get full." The ginger tightened his brows at the other, seeing as how the baker was not staring back quizzically. "That's interesting...?" [F. NAME] said, confusion in his tone. They stayed staring at each other for a minute or two, an awkward atmosphere still growing. [F. NAME] opted the conversation was done and stood up, grabbing a nearby platter and stacking the empty dishes, Beelzebub could only watch, a curious wilderment still evident. He suddenly snapped out of it, stopping the baker. "What do you put in your food?" Caught off guard, [F. NAME] opened his mouth to close it again. Shouldn't it be obvious...? Flour... sugar... salt — y'know, what else is one supposed to put in a pastry? "What else?" [F. NAME] softly smiled, "it's pastries." Beelzebub shook his head, not satisfied and repeated his question. [F. NAME], a platter still in hand, took his other and placed it on his chin in ponder. "Hmmm... love, I guess?" The silence came back at Beelzebub widened his eyes. [F. NAME] chuckled again, the melody of his voice filling the bakery as he went back to tidy up. Beel felt a feeling deep inside him, butterflies swirling inside his chest. The deepest red took over the avatar's face as he slowly raised his hand, grabbing [F. NAME]'s wrist. Both became surprised at the upcoming words. "Please, make me as much food as you can!" "U — uh? I'm sorry?" Beel stood up, his face now mere inches away from the other, "more! I need more!" [F. NAME] smiled, trying to stifle his laughter but soon blowing up. "Sure! Sure — haha, just — just sit down Beel, and I'll cook you all the food you want!"

𝙇3𝙑𝙄-𝘽𝘽𝙔 ;; ᵒⁿ ᵗᵘᵐᵇˡʳ ░ : ｡.｡ impo . // masterlist || req info / post

[somerandomdudelmao]

I am so sorry for asking this a second time if you've already seen it, but I think Tumblr went and gobbled up the original and I didn't get it back :p Hope this isn't a bother, but...

You mentioned at one point that you work as a storyboard artist, and I got all curious about that since it's basically my dream job! I wanted to ask, what's it like being a storyboard artist? Do you have coworkers, or work within a building with a couple other people, or is it a work-at-home kind of job? Are the deadlines hard to reach or are the manageable? Do you need certain equipment for this job or can you use any drawing/art program as long as its functional?

I have a few more questions but they're a bit more "Personal," (monetary junk that you probably don't wanna answer) so I'll save them for the actual job interview. Decided to re-ask this now since you're shadow-banned (Never knew what that meant until like 6 hours ago) and asks are easier to receive. Hope the ban gets lifted soon btw because I am IN LOVE with your comics! They never fail to make me smile.

Okay thanks for reading and answering if you do and sorry for bothering you with the same question twice I must ascend to the heavens now kk baiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii-

I'm..hahah...so..hahahahhasnfkgn

Let me put on my clown costume real quick

So~ About my storyboarding experience~

I can tell you about it, but if you speak fluent English, your experience is likely to be VERY different from mine.

Because in my country the animation industry is practically dead.

So...haha yeah...my situation is a little unconventional I guess.

Basically, I have nothing.

No office, no co-workers, no requirements for the programs I use.

I kind of...work sitting on my bed with a tablet on my lap because I don't even have a fucking table lmao. Deadlines were really hard to meet when I first started, but after a year on the job I've learned to draw five times faster and it's no longer an issue.

My goal now is to learn English well enough to find a job in any country that isn't mine. And I have absolutely no idea what it looks like to work at a studio that pays you in dollars, not leaves :т

[girls--complex]

I just came upon your blog and it's given me Lots of Thoughts, even though I don't particularly believe in any God (that is to say, I think there might be something more out there, though I don't think it's God as it's portrayed by any religion and I need some sort of tangible evidence before I can confirm or deny that something like that exists. All that to say I'm agnostic lol), but I do think you have some very good points about a lot of things.

I find it kinda hard to understand some of the things you write since you use a lot of long and complicated words that aren't in my vocabulary since English isn't my first language and I've never left my home country, but I'm doing my best! (With the help of an online dictionary)

Either way, I really love your art and I'm taking some inspiration from your style to practice, if that's okay with you! I just really like how flowy, creative and loose it is and I really need to loosen up a bit about making things instead of constantly adding more detail and perfecting it until I lose interest because it becomes stressful instead of enjoyable to create something.

I also wanted to ask, since according to your comics you've done shrooms before, how would you recommend going about shrooms to someone who's not used to doing much of any substance? (I barely drink alcohol and I smoke weed so rarely every time I do it I end up extremely disoriented until I manage to calm down no matter how little I smoke).

I'm asking cause a friend of mine whom I've known for years recently told me they have some, and that he'd be willing to share them with me, and I'm curious about trying them out and seeing if I can learn something from that experience, but I wanna stay safe while making the most of it :3

Hi thank you for a long & thoughtful message

YOU ARE ALWAYS ALLOWED TO COPY OR "STEAL" OR WHAT EVER FROM MY DRAWINGS seriously this is so normal and allowed. I do this with other cartoonists and all the cartoonists I know also do this. We do it to each other. "I like how she draws eyes" or whatever and we absorb it into our own style. Or just copying drawings/ paintings/pages. This is good. Do it.

Thank you for taking the time to decipher my words. I know I use lots of large/obscure words N trying to get better at making me language accessible (& maybe use my beloved obscure words in enough context that a reader can figure out the meaning).

I think using psychedelics is something better to talk about with people who know U in person and can respond to your needs and goals. Maybe your friend can give some guidance or knows someone who has a shamanic streak that can. Or you can always go on erowid or reddit whatever kids are using now to do a lil research.

I don't really feel comfortable giving specific advice or even general advice that might color the experience in a certain way, hope u understand...

Thank u for saying Hi

[knightofthesevenfandoms]

Now that you've watched s2, I'm very curious to hear your opinion about it as an honourable IB shipper

My feelings are very mixed, while their flashbacks were pretty cute, the "confession" scene felt TERRIBLE to me. Why would these two old bureaucrats sing a cheesy song at each other in front of their respective courts 😭 Why were they speaking like 13 year olds. The ending just ruined the relationship becoming canon :(

Really long answer incoming lol.

Okay so. Essentially, yes. It was jarring/cringe because it was so VASTLY different than the vibe of their relationship that I had built in my head the last four years. I've always thought of them quite a bit more mature, sometimes combative, and really fucking kinky. But I wouldn't say it ruined it for me, and I'll explain why.

Initially it seemed SO out of character, the lovey-dovey, almost childlike affection they had for each other. But it's exciting for me to consider what if this WAS in their characters all along, they were just never given the opportunity/felt safe enough to let that side of their personalities be seen. Which is HEARTBREAKING but there's some subtle evidence to back this up.

We all know Bee is an angry, annoyed, high ranking demon with a lot on their plate. Even Crowley said "because they're always such a ray of sunshine" to Shax because it seems common knowledge to all of Hell that Bee is, well... an angry little shit. But they ARE a ray of sunshine when they're with Gabe, away from hell, away from their daily stresses, away from the expectations of running Hell. LOOK AT THEM.

We saw a hint of this in S1, when they showed a moment of vulnerability. When? In front of Gabe, at the airbase. They can't show weakness in Hell because they can't weaken their position as Prince (Grand Duke?), but Gabriel is the only other being in the entire cosmos they feel is an equal, and they can therefore let their guard down like they did at the airbase, and like they do a little bit more at every meeting with Gabe following Armageddon. Until they were actually showing the real Bee- who is a little unsure, kind of quiet, and a worrier. I always headcanoned that Bee absolutely WAS soft, underneath all their posturing, but only ever in private and only ever with Gabe. AND THEN I WAS GIVEN THAT HOLY SHIT.

Okay now on to Gabe. I always headcanoned that after Armageddon, he fucking broke. He snapped. He was SO TIRED of working toward goals, leading the host of Heaven toward said goals, and then the biggest one of all ended up a failure and essentially it fell on his shoulders. And that's basically what did happen in canon! It started, just like it did for Bee, at the airbase, when it was all falling apart, he turned to the only being he could that would understand his frustration.

He was always the hard-ass boss, albeit an idiot and a dick, but the memory wipe proved there was a sweetheart in there somewhere. Before the season aired, I assumed the memory wipe was what would show Gabe the error of his ways, and he would learn to be gentle and generous and loving through that trial. But it turns out HE ALREADY LEARNED IT BY THE TIME OF THE MEMORY WIPE.

Heaven seems so cold and lonely, and my god the scene where he says no one had ever given him anything. My heart ached for him. Heaven didn't even give him a desk. MURIEL, a 37th order, was given a desk but he wasn't. Away from the cold sterility of Heaven and his obligations, he heard Bee say they liked something, and he realized how happy their enjoyment made him. So he decided he liked it too. He never got to enjoy things (other than clothes), or his time around others, and Bee provided him that escape, simply by saying "I like this song." And then he miracled the song to play because he wanted to make someone, other than himself, happy. And he was ready to swan dive into Hell, give up the clothes he loved, because he knew he'd be okay, he and Bee would be okay if they were together.

Yes, their relationship is way different than I pictured it would be. But I'm framing it instead of being ooc, maybe we weren't seeing the real Gabe and Bee in S1. We were just seeing them as the result of their respective situations.

And the confession, to me, was used as a juxtaposition for the husbands confession, which uh. Did not go nearly as well.

So yeah, the singing to each other and their soft, innocent affection was cringe. But Bureaucracy has always been cringe, Bee is a gremlin and Gabe is an idiot. I'm looking forward to exploring their new dynamic in fic, and maybe filling some of the gaps that took them from where they were to where they are now.

[zoeykallus]

Do you take requests? I would love to read something with Hunter where he teaches you how to fight :))) smut is also welcome

Hmm, thanks for the input 🔥🔥🔥

Hunter x Fem!Reader One-Shot - Show Me What You've Got

Warnings: Smut/Strongly Suggestive/Soft-Dom Hunter/Training Turns To Smut/Sexual Content/Dub-Con(?)/Dirty Stuff/18+

_________________

You won't find much of a plot here 🤷🏻‍♀️

Also, I'm so tired I could cry, so this is not proofread, sorry...

_________________

You are much too self-confident, actually you already know that before you visit him, so far you never beat hunter in a sparring session. But you want to try out the few moves you learned yesterday. And who would be better suited for that than Hunter, whom you like to get close to anyway? The man is downright outrageously handsome, with his dark hair, that striking face, those firm muscles under his toned skin. Combined with that deep, slightly smoky voice, the way he moves and looks at you, a cocktail that always makes your heart beat faster and fills your nights with wild dreams. Hunter really likes to be alone. You know that because he always makes sure he has a training room all to himself in the barracks. Basically, Hunter withdraws from others at every opportunity rather than seeking their proximity. You know why he takes time off whenever he can, trains alone, and spends as little time as possible with other soldiers besides his own squad. Hunter's extraordinary senses cause him to be quickly exposed to sensory overload, with things that others wouldn't even notice. Being continuously exposed to everything in this way, you imagine, is very exhausting.

So you can understand his general reserve. Hunter is already waiting for you when you enter the training room. He has already spread out the large mat on the floor, which is supposed to cushion any possible falls. You examine him quickly, inconspicuously. Black muscle shirt, black sports pants, barefoot. Of course, he's wearing his bandana, as usual. He has bandaged his hands, probably he intends to go to the punching bag later, you have observed him secretly, fascinated sometimes. The flex of his muscles, the power behind each punch, his posture. You suppress a longing sigh at the thought. Hunter addresses you, snapping you out of your thoughts. "There you are. I've been waiting." You glance at the clock hanging on the wall of the room above your heads, and say dryly, "I'm five minutes early." Hunter smiles with a mischievous twinkle in his eye, "I know, but you're usually in earlier than that" You blink, feeling caught. Does he know that you sometimes secretly watch him? But he distracts your thoughts again.

"You learned something new you wanted to try with me?" he asks curiously. "Um, yeah, right. Something Wolffe showed me." Hunter frowns briefly and asks, so casually it almost doesn't seem casual anymore, "Since when do you hang out with the wolf pack?" The way you look at him makes him feel like you're looking right into him and seeing through his curious question. So he looks down at his hands and pretends he needs to fix the bandages. Somehow you can't recognize his behavior for what it is at this moment. You shrug your shoulders and say, "For quite some time now, as a matter of fact, sometimes. Did I never tell you about it before?" "No, you didn't," Hunter says, clearing his throat and pulling his bandana a little tighter. "Well, now I've told you," you say lightly, unaware of why he's so interested. Hunter nods and says, "Okay, show me what you've got."

His gaze wanders along your body, your posture. Your black yoga pants hugging your curves, the shirt you wear is a little wider, but knotted in the back. Hunter is distracted and promptly lands on his back as you pull his legs away with a simple trick. He makes a startled noise before landing on the ground. Grinning, you bend over him. "Well, that was easy today," you say, amused.

"I wasn't fully on top of my game. That doesn't count." You snort and laugh softly, "Oh come on Hunter, no one on the battlefield cares if you're ready or not either". His eyes narrow, and he says suspiciously smoky, "Hmm, good point". In the next moment he's grabbed you, taken down your defenses, has you on your back and is on top of you.

"Damn," you curse softly and try to break free, but he holds you under him with ease. He grins at you and your heart really jumps out at him, but not only that, a gentle pulse has arisen between your thighs as your nether regions touch, and you feel every contact very clearly through the thin fabric of your pants. "Gotcha, once again," he says with a grin.

You smile back nervously. You are aware of how sharp his senses are, and he will notice the change in your mood and hormone balance very quickly. Finally, you see it in his face. His expression changes, the smile slowly disappears, he blinks and tilts his head slightly to the side. "That's new," he says softly. You don't even ask what he means, because you already know. You swallow and say just as quietly, "Sorry." You expect him to let go of you and seek distance, but he surprises you. Hunter grabs both of your wrists with one hand and pins them above your head on the mattress, his other hand gently moving to the back of your neck. "There is no need to be sorry, if you ask me".

He knows it's a daring move, but he cant help it, he has to take the leap and taste the waters.

Your heart almost jumps out of your chest as his face comes closer and closer. His lips touch yours, slowly at first, tenderly, and your pulse begins to race, your eyes closing. Hunter's tongue slides over your lips which automatically open for him, and as it slides in and touches yours, the pulse between your thighs intensifies. You moan softly into the kiss. Very clearly, you feel him slowly getting hard as his pelvis still rests on yours, between your thighs. The hand that is on your neck slowly moves down, over the fabric of your shirt, feeling your breasts, gently kneading them, probing. His thumb feels your nipples, which are erected, pressing through the thin fabric of your bra and shirt.

A shiver runs down your spine, a tingle spreads through your belly as he plays with your nipples through the fabric, still holding you captive beneath him and his kiss. Ever so slowly, barely noticeably, he moves between your legs, pushing his hard length through the fabric, rubbing over your pubic, sparking gentle, stimulating friction. Hunter's hand finally moves under the fabric, while the other still holds your wrists. You feel his bare fingertips on your skin, the rough fabric of the bandages on his hands as he pushes the cups of your bra up and off your breasts to get at the soft, velvety mounds beneath. Suddenly he straightens up, sitting between your thighs, and let's go of you. He points an admonishing finger at you with a dirty little smile and says, " Stay right there." You obey, not even thinking of contradicting him. He takes off the bandages, removes them from his hands and tosses them carelessly to the side before throwing himself over you again. He stops just inches away from your face, catches himself with his hands on the mat, and grins at you.

Hunter teasingly kisses your chin and the tip of your nose, then straightens up again, pulling your T-shirt over your head. "Be a good girl and come with me," he says in an almost whisper, close to your ear, just before he bites your earlobe very gently.

You swallow, but nod and let him help you up. Clad only in your panties, you follow him to a side chamber where other workout equipment is stored. Hunter leads you to one of the benches where people usually lift weights, puts his towel over it and gently but firmly pushes you onto it so that you are lying on your back in front of him.

With a little smirk, he says, "Good girl."

Hunter wanders down along your body, pulling off your yoga pants and murmuring, "I really need to smell and taste you." You blink, heat flooding your body the second you realize exactly what he means by that. Your pants land on the floor, then his fingers travel down from the base of your breasts to where your body is radiating the most heat. His fingertips ghost over the thin fabric of your panties, lingering on the wet spot, exerting playful pressure. Hunter is kneeling in front of the bench, head between your thighs, close to your pubic area, he takes a deep breath and shakily expels it. "Damn, what a scent!"

His cock is already twitching expectantly in his pants, your hormones, the luring substances your body produces in arousal, tingling under his skin, from crown to toe. His fingers finally wander under the waistband of your panties and pull them off as well.

You can't believe that you are lying practically naked on a bench in one of the training halls, Hunter's head between your thighs. He has reserved this room for himself, but it is not locked, someone could still come in. But this thought suddenly disappears from your mind when you feel his breath on your damp folds, and shortly after his lips and tongue.

He presses his tongue to your pussy, roaming through your folds, dipping into your sensitive, wet hole once or twice, making you twitch, before he focuses on your clit. His tongue, exerting perfect pressure, circles skillfully and nimbly on the bundle of nerves. You haven't noticed it yourself yet, but you're already sighing, moaning and gasping, fueling him in his efforts. Hunter feels exactly each of your reactions, knows exactly when and what causes your arousal to increase, and thus learns very quickly, to perfection, every pressure, every movement that sends you into ecstasy. You tremble with aroused tension, your thighs quiver gently. You are so horny, and yet a part of you is very aware of what is happening and can't quite grasp it. That's Hunter tonguing your clit as if he's been programmed to do just that. It feels so good, everything is tingling and vibrating inside you, your hands are gripping the bench above your head and clutching at it.

He is relentless. You hear the soft slurp, a repetitive soft aroused rumble deep from his chest as he holds your thighs apart with his hands. He's getting faster and faster, his tongue gliding over your swollen pearl more and more rapidly. Hunter is literally chasing you towards your orgasm. The knot that has formed in your belly loosens, a fiery tingle pulses through your clit, your pussy twitches and drips. Your moan is almost like a little scream. Hunter's tongue massages you through a prolonged, intense climax.

You dare only a brief glance and see his intense eyes, the pupils so dilated that his eyes seem almost black. His senses are full of you, your scent and your hormones have practically overpowered him. He lets go of your clit, just at the right moment, and you're just about to catch your breath when he moves further down and his tongue suddenly drills into your dripping opening and starts licking you out. "Hunter!" you exclaim, startled. Hypersensitive after climaxing, you twitch and tremble as he uses his tongue to fill you. He has to grip tighter to keep you from escaping his grasp and slipping off the bench with your twitching. You claw even harder with your hands on the bench. Hunter takes his time, absorbing every drop of your juices like a starving man. It takes a moment, but your arousal builds again. Suddenly his head comes out from between your legs and he takes a deep breath.

"What a feast, my good girl," he says in a voice rough with horniness. He straightens up, kneeling in front of the bench, his pelvis between your thighs, and you catch a glimpse of his hard length. His cock is thick, long, gently curved, the tip slightly red and swollen, leaking pre-cum. You lick your lips, knowing what's coming next, can't wait to feel him inside you. But you're also a little nervous. You know him, you know he won't hurt you, but this has all happened so suddenly and quite unexpectedly. As if sensing it, he looks at you and asks softly, "Are you ready for me, beautiful?" You blink, feeling a little breathless, but you nod and say, "I couldn't be more ready." He smirks, looks down, grips the base of his cock and guides the tip to your pussy. Hunter is hungry, very much so, but he takes it slow, applying only gentle pressure at first, prodding at your entrance, softly. You bend your legs and pull them up, opening your thighs invitingly a little wider for him.

Hunter applies more pressure, parts your wet folds and slowly advances between your slick walls. You watch him as he tenses his muscles. He licks his lips, looks down and watches in fascination as his hard length sinks into you. As he bottoms out in you, he closes his eyes for a moment and takes a deep breath. The feeling is intense, for both of you. For him as your wet heat closes around his cock, his senses full of you, and for you as he stretches and fills you. One of his hands moves to your hip and grips gently but firmly, the other moves to your pubic area. His fingertips gently glide over your clit, which is swollen, gently pulsing. Your legs clamp gently but firmly around his hips, showing him you're ready for more. Hunter smiles in satisfaction. He can definitely feel and smell your willingness. He knows that his fingers dancing on your pearl have got you going again. His hips pull back a bit and thrust into you again. A soft wet sound, accompanied by the impact of naked skin on naked skin, fills the room. He takes you slowly, but he gradually speeds up. You feel each thrust, erotically invading, combined with your pearl pulsing under his fingers, and you lean your head back.

Hunter watches you, your every movement, the way your breasts move with each of his thrusts, and again and again he looks down, watching your bodies merge. "This is so good, Hunter," you moan, pushing against his thrusts, using your hands on the bench to push. He's getting faster and faster. The accelerating, lewd sound of your bodies colliding with each thrust, mixed with your lustful sounds, is like music to his ears. The tension, the intensity increases, you feel it too. You automatically tense your abdomen, causing your pussy to close even tighter around his cock.

He lets out a half-swallowed moan. His fingers on your clit quicken, his whole body tense, hard as granite. You groan out in a near whisper, "So close." "Good girl," Hunter presses out breathlessly.

His thrusts become irregular, he bites his lower lip, his hand on your hip grips tighter. Your climax pulses through the center of your body, makes your pussy twitch, and your thighs shake. A curse comes across your lips. The next moment you hear him let out a deep, drawn-out moan, feel his warm seed coating your walls. Two-three more slow, firm thrusts and Hunter pauses, breathing heavily. You both catch your breath, only now noticing that everything here smells musty like an old gym, mixed with the distinct tangy, salty smell of sex. He leaves your body, gently cleans you with the towel. Then, finally, your eyes meet again. You look at each other for a moment, then both of you grin. "That was an interesting workout," you say, laughing softly. He chuckles and says, "That's something Wolffe sure didn't show you." You look at him cheekily and say, "How would you know?" Hunter frowns, his smile disappears, he doesn't seem to know quite what to say. You can see his shoulders tense. You chuckle and say, "You should see your face. Relax Sergeant, you're the only soldier who's been between my thighs so far."

Hunter's shoulders relax again, he raises a brow in amusement, "If you don't mind, I'd like to remain the only one in the future"

Ko-Fi (If you feel like giving me some coffee)

@rintheemolion

@andyoufollowyourheart @clone-whore-99

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[tia-amorosa]

Sunset Died - Alto/Wolff

The Others... and a secret

Note in advance: this episode contains a bit more text than in the previous parts. But it was important because it answers a few questions that some of you may have already asked yourself.

Nick went outside with Morgana and closed the bedroom door behind him. Then he took a few steps and leaned against the wall. “Thanks, I probably couldn't have done it on my own"/ ”like I said, it would have been better if I'd been informed earlier that she was expecting a child. Worse things could have happened”.

Nick paused for a moment before continuing. “You lack the means to properly examine the pregnant ladies in the city…"/ ”Mh, that's correct, yes. Above all, I don't have an ultrasound machine, there are so many things that could be detected and ruled out with it…"/ ‘It won't be long before… you'll have one of those machines at your disposal’ / ‘What do you mean?’/ ‘I've requested one’. Morgana was shocked and curious. “But where, by whom?"/…

“From people out there somewhere. I asked them for it. “/ “What… What kind of people are they?”/ “Hh… Some who have had me firmly in their grip for months. And it's up to me that… That nothing has happened here so far"/ ‘Mr. Alto…’/ ‘I value you as a very loyal person, Dr. Wolff, not just as a doctor’.

Morgana looked at him skeptically “You want to confide something in me and I'm not allowed to tell anyone, am I right?”/ “Yes, not yet. I'll talk to the people here soon, when I've got the hardest part over with"/ ‘and that would be?’. He looked at her seriously with tired eyes “Is there something you're particularly attached to, Dr.? What's the most important thing in your life?”/ “A few things. My own life, my husband, my child… My friends”.

“That's quite a lot. For me, it's been money for as long as I can remember. I learned early on how to get it, how to invest it wisely and how to spend it wisely. But money… It's also a tool you can use to manipulate people. Now I'm the one being manipulated. I have a lot of assets, it's not small. And that has gotten through to these people”

Morgana tried to follow and understand what Nick was telling her. “So… they want your money?"/ ‘All the valuables I own…’/ ‘And why don't you give them what they want?’. He took a deep breath. “Would you just give away something you've worked so hard for all your life?”. Morgana's voice became a little louder, as she seemed to understand what this was all about. “honestly, what do you have to lose except your money?"/ ‘hh… I know what you're getting at, Dr. Wolff’.

“You probably think now, just like my wife, that I'm stubborn. Yes, I am. But they also said that if I've given them everything, we won't get any more help from them…"/ ”What help have we had so far? We haven't seen any of it…”. Nick found it increasingly difficult to speak as his conscience began to torment him, “We were selfish, I…”. Her voice became more insistent. “Now tell me!"/ ‘They provided us with food and we weren't supposed to give any of it away’/ ”What…why?”

“Because there are other sick minds sitting there who want to know… how long the people here can get by without help and food now. So… Not only do they want all my assets, they also treat the people here like guinea pigs. When that meteor storm came and destroyed everything. That was just the right opportunity for them to test how humans cope in extreme situations…"/ ”Please what? I'm… Completely confused, excuse me”. Morgana had to sit down.

“They just wanted to leave us here to our fate? And you're going along with it, Mr.Alto?”. Nick couldn't look her in the eye. “They said if I lifted a finger, they'd stop supplying us"/ ”What supply? We…"/ ”For me, my family. As I said, the whole thing was an experiment”. Morgana was stunned. „And , how do they know what's going on here? Are there cameras here?”. He shook his head. “No, we should only ever observe and report. Gerhard and Nancy…"/ ”They should be spying on us, am I right? My God, that's really sick!”.

Morgana had to process the whole thing first. She was angry, surprised, many feelings overwhelmed her . “How… How did this contact even come about, Mr. Alto? How…”. Morgana hadn't really paid attention to it at first, because she had been looking after Vita the whole time. But she remembered this device in the bedroom. “Is that a Transmitter? Where did…”. Nick collected his thoughts again and tried to explain everything to her in detail. “The day before it all happened… I took it from the town hall because I wanted to do some restoration work on it. Actually, it was just an exhibit.”

“Now I remember, it was there in a bigger glass case in the foyer". He nodded. ”actually, it belonged in a museum long ago. Be that as it may. After the initial shock of the impacts was somewhat digested and we realized that the internet was down, I came up with the idea of getting the thing operational. Unfortunately, I just didn't know how to find a frequency. And then… they found me”.

Morgana had many questions running through her mind. “How did they contact you through this device? How did they know which frequency to select? How…"/ ”Believe me, I've often asked myself these questions too. Someone seems to have known that I have one of these devices. I just wonder who the hell it is. Maybe someone from here?"/ ‘That's nonsense!’.

Nick stood up and took a few steps across the room. “Why nonsense, Dr.?"/ ”Well, first of all, I don't think anyone else here has such a device except you. And I'd put my hand in the fire for every single person here. Who would come up with something like that? I would never voluntarily put my friends, my family or anyone else in the city I live in at risk. Do you understand?”.

Nick took a deep breath and exhaled. “I'm sure you're right, who would put up with such macabre nonsense here?"/ ‘You said… you get deliveries, right?’/ ‘Yes, food and other things for everyday use.’/ ‘Where do these deliveries come from?’/ „Where? I don't know, but definitely across the sea. There's a landing stage somewhere far away. The things were unloaded there and we pick them up by arrangement.”

“By arrangement… Does that mean they were never there when a delivery came?"/ ”No. We never knew when they were going to deliver to us. We were only informed by radio when the delivery arrived and we could pick it up. But apart from the goods, there was no one to be seen there, the ship was usually gone by then”. Morgana put her hands to her head. There was just so much information she had to deal with. “hh, my goodness… My head is spinning and I… I have to get back to my child”.

“Dr. Wolff…"/ ”If I've understood all this correctly, it's up to you whether we survive or perish here. I don't know how long I can carry this secret around with me now. You should talk to the people here urgently. Otherwise… I will do it” / ‘I'll do it, I promise you, as soon as…’ / ”You'd better not promise anything. Good night, Mr. Alto!”. Morgana picked up her things and made her way home.

After Morgana had left the house, Nick stood in front of the closed front door for a moment. And as he said, he had already made his decision. But he still didn't know how to deal with the consequences. He shook off his thoughts for the rest of the evening and went into the bedroom. “ssh, don't cry, o.k., I just wanted to take a closer look at you. Come here… My son”..

Nick could hear his wife snoring softly. She was still very exhausted from the birth, which had dragged on for almost a whole day. “So we haven't thought of a name yet, have we? I have a cousin, Alfonso, but we're no longer in contact. I would like that, Alfonso…Alfi, hnhn”. As he looked at his son, a few tears welled up in his eyes. Yes, as Cy once said, a little one like that changes something in you. “We'll find a solution, Alfi… Somehow”.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

End of this part

@greenplumbboblover😊

poses by @poses-by-bee & @inkwisteria

[chaos-the-stinky]

Waiting to get a copy of tbob. Uhh The Great Gatsby

Chapter 1

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.

"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."

He didn't say any more but we've always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence I'm inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon—for the intimate revelations of young men or at least the terms in which they express them are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes but after a certain point I don't care what it's founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction—Gatsby who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the "creative temperament"—it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.

My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this middle-western city for three generations. The Carraways are something of a clan and we have a tradition that we're descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfather's brother who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War and started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries on today.

I never saw this great-uncle but I'm supposed to look like him—with special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in Father's office. I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War. I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless. Instead of being the warm center of the world the middle-west now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe—so I decided to go east and learn the bond business. Everybody I knew was in the bond business so I supposed it could support one more single man. All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a prep-school for me and finally said, "Why—ye-es" with very grave, hesitant faces. Father agreed to finance me for a year and after various delays I came east, permanently, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two.

The practical thing was to find rooms in the city but it was a warm season and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office suggested that we take a house together in a commuting town it sounded like a great idea. He found the house, a weather beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington and I went out to the country alone. I had a dog, at least I had him for a few days until he ran away, and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman who made my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove.

It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road.

"How do you get to West Egg village?" he asked helplessly.

I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He had casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood.

And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees—just as things grow in fast movies—I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.

There was so much to read for one thing and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air. I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Maecenas knew. And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides. I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the "Yale News"—and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the "well-rounded man." This isn't just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.

It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North America. It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York and where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land. Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western Hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound. They are not perfect ovals—like the egg in the Columbus story they are both crushed flat at the contact end—but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual confusion to the gulls that fly overhead. To the wingless a more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size.

I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them. My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season. The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard—it was a factual imitation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool and more than forty acres of lawn and garden. It was Gatsby's mansion. Or rather, as I didn't know Mr. Gatsby it was a mansion inhabited by a gentleman of that name. My own house was an eye-sore, but it was a small eye-sore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor's lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires—all for eighty dollars a month.

Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans. Daisy was my second cousin once removed and I'd known Tom in college. And just after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago.

Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven—a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-climax. His family were enormously wealthy—even in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach—but now he'd left Chicago and come east in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for instance he'd brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest. It was hard to realize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to do that.

Why they came east I don't know. They had spent a year in France, for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together. This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn't believe it—I had no sight into Daisy's heart but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking a little wistfully for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game.

And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarcely knew at all. Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful red and white Georgian Colonial mansion overlooking the bay. The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens—finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run. The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold, and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch.

He had changed since his New Haven years. Now he was a sturdy, straw haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner. Two shining, arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body—he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage—a cruel body.

His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the impression of fractiousness he conveyed. There was a touch of paternal contempt in it, even toward people he liked—and there were men at New Haven who had hated his guts.

"Now, don't think my opinion on these matters is final," he seemed to say, "just because I'm stronger and more of a man than you are." We were in the same Senior Society, and while we were never intimate I always had the impression that he approved of me and wanted me to like him with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own.

We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch.

"I've got a nice place here," he said, his eyes flashing about restlessly.

Turning me around by one arm he moved a broad flat hand along the front vista, including in its sweep a sunken Italian garden, a half acre of deep pungent roses and a snub-nosed motor boat that bumped the tide off shore.

"It belonged to Demaine the oil man." He turned me around again, politely and abruptly. "We'll go inside."

We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding cake of the ceiling—and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.

The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.

The younger of the two was a stranger to me. She was extended full length at her end of the divan, completely motionless and with her chin raised a little as if she were balancing something on it which was quite likely to fall. If she saw me out of the corner of her eyes she gave no hint of it—indeed, I was almost surprised into murmuring an apology for having disturbed her by coming in.

The other girl, Daisy, made an attempt to rise—she leaned slightly forward with a conscientious expression—then she laughed, an absurd, charming little laugh, and I laughed too and came forward into the room.

"I'm p-paralyzed with happiness."

She laughed again, as if she said something very witty, and held my hand for a moment, looking up into my face, promising that there was no one in the world she so much wanted to see. That was a way she had. She hinted in a murmur that the surname of the balancing girl was Baker. (I've heard it said that Daisy's murmur was only to make people lean toward her; an irrelevant criticism that made it no less charming.)

At any rate Miss Baker's lips fluttered, she nodded at me almost imperceptibly and then quickly tipped her head back again—the object she was balancing had obviously tottered a little and given her something of a fright. Again a sort of apology arose to my lips. Almost any exhibition of complete self sufficiency draws a stunned tribute from me.

I looked back at my cousin who began to ask me questions in her low, thrilling voice. It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again. Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth—but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered "Listen," a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.

I told her how I had stopped off in Chicago for a day on my way east and how a dozen people had sent their love through me.

"Do they miss me?" she cried ecstatically.

"The whole town is desolate. All the cars have the left rear wheel painted black as a mourning wreath and there's a persistent wail all night along the North Shore."

"How gorgeous! Let's go back, Tom. Tomorrow!" Then she added irrelevantly, "You ought to see the baby."

"I'd like to."

"She's asleep. She's two years old. Haven't you ever seen her?"

"Never."

"Well, you ought to see her. She's—"

Tom Buchanan who had been hovering restlessly about the room stopped and rested his hand on my shoulder.

"What you doing, Nick?"

"I'm a bond man."

"Who with?"

I told him.

"Never heard of them," he remarked decisively.

This annoyed me.

"You will," I answered shortly. "You will if you stay in the East."

"Oh, I'll stay in the East, don't you worry," he said, glancing at Daisy and then back at me, as if he were alert for something more. "I'd be a God Damned fool to live anywhere else."

At this point Miss Baker said "Absolutely!" with such suddenness that I started—it was the first word she uttered since I came into the room. Evidently it surprised her as much as it did me, for she yawned and with a series of rapid, deft movements stood up into the room.

"I'm stiff," she complained, "I've been lying on that sofa for as long as I can remember."

"Don't look at me," Daisy retorted. "I've been trying to get you to New York all afternoon."

"No, thanks," said Miss Baker to the four cocktails just in from the pantry, "I'm absolutely in training."

Her host looked at her incredulously.

"You are!" He took down his drink as if it were a drop in the bottom of a glass. "How you ever get anything done is beyond me."

I looked at Miss Baker wondering what it was she "got done." I enjoyed looking at her. She was a slender, small-breasted girl, with an erect carriage which she accentuated by throwing her body backward at the shoulders like a young cadet. Her grey sun-strained eyes looked back at me with polite reciprocal curiosity out of a wan, charming discontented face. It occurred to me now that I had seen her, or a picture of her, somewhere before.

"You live in West Egg," she remarked contemptuously. "I know somebody there."

"I don't know a single—"

"You must know Gatsby."

"Gatsby?" demanded Daisy. "What Gatsby?"

Before I could reply that he was my neighbor dinner was announced; wedging his tense arm imperatively under mine Tom Buchanan compelled me from the room as though he were moving a checker to another square.

Slenderly, languidly, their hands set lightly on their hips the two young women preceded us out onto a rosy-colored porch open toward the sunset where four candles flickered on the table in the diminished wind.

"Why candles?" objected Daisy, frowning. She snapped them out with her fingers. "In two weeks it'll be the longest day in the year." She looked at us all radiantly. "Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it."

"We ought to plan something," yawned Miss Baker, sitting down at the table as if she were getting into bed.

"All right," said Daisy. "What'll we plan?" She turned to me helplessly. "What do people plan?"

Before I could answer her eyes fastened with an awed expression on her little finger.

"Look!" she complained. "I hurt it."

We all looked—the knuckle was black and blue.

"You did it, Tom," she said accusingly. "I know you didn't mean to but you did do it. That's what I get for marrying a brute of a man, a great big hulking physical specimen of a—"

"I hate that word hulking," objected Tom crossly, "even in kidding."

"Hulking," insisted Daisy.

Sometimes she and Miss Baker talked at once, unobtrusively and with a bantering inconsequence that was never quite chatter, that was as cool as their white dresses and their impersonal eyes in the absence of all desire. They were here—and they accepted Tom and me, making only a polite pleasant effort to entertain or to be entertained. They knew that presently dinner would be over and a little later the evening too would be over and casually put away. It was sharply different from the West where an evening was hurried from phase to phase toward its close in a continually disappointed anticipation or else in sheer nervous dread of the moment itself.

"You make me feel uncivilized, Daisy," I confessed on my second glass of corky but rather impressive claret. "Can't you talk about crops or something?"

I meant nothing in particular by this remark but it was taken up in an unexpected way.

"Civilization's going to pieces," broke out Tom violently. "I've gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read 'The Rise of the Coloured Empires' by this man Goddard?"

"Why, no," I answered, rather surprised by his tone.

"Well, it's a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don't look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It's all scientific stuff; it's been proved."

"Tom's getting very profound," said Daisy with an expression of unthoughtful sadness. "He reads deep books with long words in them. What was that word we—"

"Well, these books are all scientific," insisted Tom, glancing at her impatiently. "This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It's up to us who are the dominant race to watch out or these other races will have control of things."

"We've got to beat them down," whispered Daisy, winking ferociously toward the fervent sun.

"You ought to live in California—" began Miss Baker but Tom interrupted her by shifting heavily in his chair.

"This idea is that we're Nordics. I am, and you are and you are and—" After an infinitesimal hesitation he included Daisy with a slight nod and she winked at me again. "—and we've produced all the things that go to make civilization—oh, science and art and all that. Do you see?"

There was something pathetic in his concentration as if his complacency, more acute than of old, was not enough to him any more. When, almost immediately, the telephone rang inside and the butler left the porch Daisy seized upon the momentary interruption and leaned toward me.

"I'll tell you a family secret," she whispered enthusiastically. "It's about the butler's nose. Do you want to hear about the butler's nose?"

"That's why I came over tonight."

"Well, he wasn't always a butler; he used to be the silver polisher for some people in New York that had a silver service for two hundred people. He had to polish it from morning till night until finally it began to affect his nose—"

"Things went from bad to worse," suggested Miss Baker.

"Yes. Things went from bad to worse until finally he had to give up his position."

For a moment the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon her glowing face; her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as I listened—then the glow faded, each light deserting her with lingering regret like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk.

The butler came back and murmured something close to Tom's ear whereupon Tom frowned, pushed back his chair and without a word went inside. As if his absence quickened something within her Daisy leaned forward again, her voice glowing and singing.

"I love to see you at my table, Nick. You remind me of a—of a rose, an absolute rose. Doesn't he?" She turned to Miss Baker for confirmation. "An absolute rose?"

This was untrue. I am not even faintly like a rose. She was only extemporizing but a stirring warmth flowed from her as if her heart was trying to come out to you concealed in one of those breathless, thrilling words. Then suddenly she threw her napkin on the table and excused herself and went into the house.

Miss Baker and I exchanged a short glance consciously devoid of meaning. I was about to speak when she sat up alertly and said "Sh!" in a warning voice. A subdued impassioned murmur was audible in the room beyond and Miss Baker leaned forward, unashamed, trying to hear. The murmur trembled on the verge of coherence, sank down, mounted excitedly, and then ceased altogether.

"This Mr. Gatsby you spoke of is my neighbor—" I said.

"Don't talk. I want to hear what happens."

"Is something happening?" I inquired innocently.

"You mean to say you don't know?" said Miss Baker, honestly surprised. "I thought everybody knew."

"I don't."

"Why—" she said hesitantly, "Tom's got some woman in New York."

"Got some woman?" I repeated blankly.

Miss Baker nodded.

"She might have the decency not to telephone him at dinner-time. Don't you think?"

Almost before I had grasped her meaning there was the flutter of a dress and the crunch of leather boots and Tom and Daisy were back at the table.

"It couldn't be helped!" cried Daisy with tense gayety.

She sat down, glanced searchingly at Miss Baker and then at me and continued: "I looked outdoors for a minute and it's very romantic outdoors. There's a bird on the lawn that I think must be a nightingale come over on the Cunard or White Star Line. He's singing away—" her voice sang "—It's romantic, isn't it, Tom?"

"Very romantic," he said, and then miserably to me: "If it's light enough after dinner I want to take you down to the stables."

The telephone rang inside, startlingly, and as Daisy shook her head decisively at Tom the subject of the stables, in fact all subjects, vanished into air. Among the broken fragments of the last five minutes at table I remember the candles being lit again, pointlessly, and I was conscious of wanting to look squarely at every one and yet to avoid all eyes. I couldn't guess what Daisy and Tom were thinking but I doubt if even Miss Baker who seemed to have mastered a certain hardy skepticism was able utterly to put this fifth guest's shrill metallic urgency out of mind. To a certain temperament the situation might have seemed intriguing—my own instinct was to telephone immediately for the police.

The horses, needless to say, were not mentioned again. Tom and Miss Baker, with several feet of twilight between them strolled back into the library, as if to a vigil beside a perfectly tangible body, while trying to look pleasantly interested and a little deaf I followed Daisy around a chain of connecting verandas to the porch in front. In its deep gloom we sat down side by side on a wicker settee.

Daisy took her face in her hands, as if feeling its lovely shape, and her eyes moved gradually out into the velvet dusk. I saw that turbulent emotions possessed her, so I asked what I thought would be some sedative questions about her little girl.

"We don't know each other very well, Nick," she said suddenly. "Even if we are cousins. You didn't come to my wedding."

"I wasn't back from the war."

"That's true." She hesitated. "Well, I've had a very bad time, Nick, and I'm pretty cynical about everything."

Evidently she had reason to be. I waited but she didn't say any more, and after a moment I returned rather feebly to the subject of her daughter.

"I suppose she talks, and—eats, and everything."

"Oh, yes." She looked at me absently. "Listen, Nick; let me tell you what I said when she was born. Would you like to hear?"

"Very much."

"It'll show you how I've gotten to feel about—things. Well, she was less than an hour old and Tom was God knows where. I woke up out of the ether with an utterly abandoned feeling and asked the nurse right away if it was a boy or a girl. She told me it was a girl, and so I turned my head away and wept. 'All right,' I said, 'I'm glad it's a girl. And I hope she'll be a fool—that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool."

"You see I think everything's terrible anyhow," she went on in a convinced way. "Everybody thinks so—the most advanced people. And I know. I've been everywhere and seen everything and done everything." Her eyes flashed around her in a defiant way, rather like Tom's, and she laughed with thrilling scorn. "Sophisticated—God, I'm sophisticated!"

The instant her voice broke off, ceasing to compel my attention, my belief, I felt the basic insincerity of what she had said. It made me uneasy, as though the whole evening had been a trick of some sort to exact a contributory emotion from me. I waited, and sure enough, in a moment she looked at me with an absolute smirk on her lovely face as if she had asserted her membership in a rather distinguished secret society to which she and Tom belonged.

Inside, the crimson room bloomed with light. Tom and Miss Baker sat at either end of the long couch and she read aloud to him from the "Saturday Evening Post"—the words, murmurous and uninflected, running together in a soothing tune. The lamp-light, bright on his boots and dull on the autumn-leaf yellow of her hair, glinted along the paper as she turned a page with a flutter of slender muscles in her arms.

When we came in she held us silent for a moment with a lifted hand.

"To be continued," she said, tossing the magazine on the table, "in our very next issue."

Her body asserted itself with a restless movement of her knee, and she stood up.

"Ten o'clock," she remarked, apparently finding the time on the ceiling. "Time for this good girl to go to bed."

"Jordan's going to play in the tournament tomorrow," explained Daisy, "over at Westchester."

"Oh,—you're Jordan Baker."

I knew now why her face was familiar—its pleasing contemptuous expression had looked out at me from many rotogravure pictures of the sporting life at Asheville and Hot Springs and Palm Beach. I had heard some story of her too, a critical, unpleasant story, but what it was I had forgotten long ago.

"Good night," she said softly. "Wake me at eight, won't you."

"If you'll get up."

"I will. Good night, Mr. Carraway. See you anon."

"Of course you will," confirmed Daisy. "In fact I think I'll arrange a marriage. Come over often, Nick, and I'll sort of—oh—fling you together. You know—lock you up accidentally in linen closets and push you out to sea in a boat, and all that sort of thing—"

"Good night," called Miss Baker from the stairs. "I haven't heard a word."

"She's a nice girl," said Tom after a moment. "They oughtn't to let her run around the country this way."

"Who oughtn't to?" inquired Daisy coldly.

"Her family."

"Her family is one aunt about a thousand years old. Besides, Nick's going to look after her, aren't you, Nick? She's going to spend lots of week-ends out here this summer. I think the home influence will be very good for her."

Daisy and Tom looked at each other for a moment in silence.

"Is she from New York?" I asked quickly.

"From Louisville. Our white girlhood was passed together there. Our beautiful white—"

"Did you give Nick a little heart to heart talk on the veranda?" demanded Tom suddenly.

"Did I?" She looked at me. "I can't seem to remember, but I think we talked about the Nordic race. Yes, I'm sure we did. It sort of crept up on us and first thing you know—"

"Don't believe everything you hear, Nick," he advised me.

I said lightly that I had heard nothing at all, and a few minutes later I got up to go home. They came to the door with me and stood side by side in a cheerful square of light. As I started my motor Daisy peremptorily called "Wait!

"I forgot to ask you something, and it's important. We heard you were engaged to a girl out West."

"That's right," corroborated Tom kindly. "We heard that you were engaged."

"It's libel. I'm too poor."

"But we heard it," insisted Daisy, surprising me by opening up again in a flower-like way. "We heard it from three people so it must be true."

Of course I knew what they were referring to, but I wasn't even vaguely engaged. The fact that gossip had published the banns was one of the reasons I had come east. You can't stop going with an old friend on account of rumors and on the other hand I had no intention of being rumored into marriage.

Their interest rather touched me and made them less remotely rich—nevertheless, I was confused and a little disgusted as I drove away. It seemed to me that the thing for Daisy to do was to rush out of the house, child in arms—but apparently there were no such intentions in her head. As for Tom, the fact that he "had some woman in New York" was really less surprising than that he had been depressed by a book. Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart.

Already it was deep summer on roadhouse roofs and in front of wayside garages, where new red gas-pumps sat out in pools of light, and when I reached my estate at West Egg I ran the car under its shed and sat for a while on an abandoned grass roller in the yard. The wind had blown off, leaving a loud bright night with wings beating in the trees and a persistent organ sound as the full bellows of the earth blew the frogs full of life. The silhouette of a moving cat wavered across the moonlight and turning my head to watch it I saw that I was not alone—fifty feet away a figure had emerged from the shadow of my neighbor's mansion and was standing with his hands in his pockets regarding the silver pepper of the stars. Something in his leisurely movements and the secure position of his feet upon the lawn suggested that it was Mr. Gatsby himself, come out to determine what share was his of our local heavens.

I decided to call to him. Miss Baker had mentioned him at dinner, and that would do for an introduction. But I didn't call to him for he gave a sudden intimation that he was content to be alone—he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and far as I was from him I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward—and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock. When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.

Chapter 2

About half way between West Egg and New York the motor-road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud which screens their obscure operations from your sight.

But above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground.

The valley of ashes is bounded on one side by a small foul river, and when the drawbridge is up to let barges through, the passengers on waiting trains can stare at the dismal scene for as long as half an hour. There is always a halt there of at least a minute and it was because of this that I first met Tom Buchanan's mistress.

The fact that he had one was insisted upon wherever he was known. His acquaintances resented the fact that he turned up in popular restaurants with her and, leaving her at a table, sauntered about, chatting with whomsoever he knew. Though I was curious to see her I had no desire to meet her—but I did. I went up to New York with Tom on the train one afternoon and when we stopped by the ashheaps he jumped to his feet and taking hold of my elbow literally forced me from the car.

"We're getting off!" he insisted. "I want you to meet my girl."

I think he'd tanked up a good deal at luncheon and his determination to have my company bordered on violence. The supercilious assumption was that on Sunday afternoon I had nothing better to do.

I followed him over a low white-washed railroad fence and we walked back a hundred yards along the road under Doctor Eckleburg's persistent stare. The only building in sight was a small block of yellow brick sitting on the edge of the waste land, a sort of compact Main Street ministering to it and contiguous to absolutely nothing. One of the three shops it contained was for rent and another was an all-night restaurant approached by a trail of ashes; the third was a garage—Repairs. GEORGE B. WILSON. Cars Bought and Sold—and I followed Tom inside.

The interior was unprosperous and bare; the only car visible was the dust-covered wreck of a Ford which crouched in a dim corner. It had occurred to me that this shadow of a garage must be a blind and that sumptuous and romantic apartments were concealed overhead when the proprietor himself appeared in the door of an office, wiping his hands on a piece of waste. He was a blonde, spiritless man, anaemic, and faintly handsome. When he saw us a damp gleam of hope sprang into his light blue eyes.

"Hello, Wilson, old man," said Tom, slapping him jovially on the shoulder. "How's business?"

"I can't complain," answered Wilson unconvincingly. "When are you going to sell me that car?"

"Next week; I've got my man working on it now."

"Works pretty slow, don't he?"

"No, he doesn't," said Tom coldly. "And if you feel that way about it, maybe I'd better sell it somewhere else after all."

"I don't mean that," explained Wilson quickly. "I just meant—"

His voice faded off and Tom glanced impatiently around the garage. Then I heard footsteps on a stairs and in a moment the thickish figure of a woman blocked out the light from the office door. She was in the middle thirties, and faintly stout, but she carried her surplus flesh sensuously as some women can. Her face, above a spotted dress of dark blue crepe-de-chine, contained no facet or gleam of beauty but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering. She smiled slowly and walking through her husband as if he were a ghost shook hands with Tom, looking him flush in the eye. Then she wet her lips and without turning around spoke to her husband in a soft, coarse voice:

"Get some chairs, why don't you, so somebody can sit down."

"Oh, sure," agreed Wilson hurriedly and went toward the little office, mingling immediately with the cement color of the walls. A white ashen dust veiled his dark suit and his pale hair as it veiled everything in the vicinity—except his wife, who moved close to Tom.

"I want to see you," said Tom intently. "Get on the next train."

"All right."

"I'll meet you by the news-stand on the lower level."

She nodded and moved away from him just as George Wilson emerged with two chairs from his office door.

We waited for her down the road and out of sight. It was a few days before the Fourth of July, and a grey, scrawny Italian child was setting torpedoes in a row along the railroad track.

"Terrible place, isn't it," said Tom, exchanging a frown with Doctor Eckleburg.

"Awful."

"It does her good to get away."

"Doesn't her husband object?"

"Wilson? He thinks she goes to see her sister in New York. He's so dumb he doesn't know he's alive."

So Tom Buchanan and his girl and I went up together to New York—or not quite together, for Mrs. Wilson sat discreetly in another car. Tom deferred that much to the sensibilities of those East Eggers who might be on the train.

She had changed her dress to a brown figured muslin which stretched tight over her rather wide hips as Tom helped her to the platform in New York. At the news-stand she bought a copy of "Town Tattle" and a moving-picture magazine and, in the station drug store, some cold cream and a small flask of perfume. Upstairs, in the solemn echoing drive she let four taxi cabs drive away before she selected a new one, lavender-colored with grey upholstery, and in this we slid out from the mass of the station into the glowing sunshine. But immediately she turned sharply from the window and leaning forward tapped on the front glass.

"I want to get one of those dogs," she said earnestly. "I want to get one for the apartment. They're nice to have—a dog."

We backed up to a grey old man who bore an absurd resemblance to John D. Rockefeller. In a basket, swung from his neck, cowered a dozen very recent puppies of an indeterminate breed.

"What kind are they?" asked Mrs. Wilson eagerly as he came to the taxi-window.

"All kinds. What kind do you want, lady?"

"I'd like to get one of those police dogs; I don't suppose you got that kind?"

The man peered doubtfully into the basket, plunged in his hand and drew one up, wriggling, by the back of the neck.

"That's no police dog," said Tom.

"No, it's not exactly a police dog," said the man with disappointment in his voice. "It's more of an airedale." He passed his hand over the brown wash-rag of a back. "Look at that coat. Some coat. That's a dog that'll never bother you with catching cold."

"I think it's cute," said Mrs. Wilson enthusiastically. "How much is it?"

"That dog?" He looked at it admiringly. "That dog will cost you ten dollars."

The airedale—undoubtedly there was an airedale concerned in it somewhere though its feet were startlingly white—changed hands and settled down into Mrs. Wilson's lap, where she fondled the weather-proof coat with rapture.

"Is it a boy or a girl?" she asked delicately.

"That dog? That dog's a boy."

"It's a bitch," said Tom decisively. "Here's your money. Go and buy ten more dogs with it."

We drove over to Fifth Avenue, so warm and soft, almost pastoral, on the summer Sunday afternoon that I wouldn't have been surprised to see a great flock of white sheep turn the corner.

"Hold on," I said, "I have to leave you here."

"No, you don't," interposed Tom quickly. "Myrtle'll be hurt if you don't come up to the apartment. Won't you, Myrtle?"

"Come on," she urged. "I'll telephone my sister Catherine. She's said to be very beautiful by people who ought to know."

"Well, I'd like to, but—"

We went on, cutting back again over the Park toward the West Hundreds. At 158th Street the cab stopped at one slice in a long white cake of apartment houses. Throwing a regal homecoming glance around the neighborhood, Mrs. Wilson gathered up her dog and her other purchases and went haughtily in.

"I'm going to have the McKees come up," she announced as we rose in the elevator. "And of course I got to call up my sister, too."

The apartment was on the top floor—a small living room, a small dining room, a small bedroom and a bath. The living room was crowded to the doors with a set of tapestried furniture entirely too large for it so that to move about was to stumble continually over scenes of ladies swinging in the gardens of Versailles. The only picture was an over-enlarged photograph, apparently a hen sitting on a blurred rock. Looked at from a distance however the hen resolved itself into a bonnet and the countenance of a stout old lady beamed down into the room. Several old copies of "Town Tattle" lay on the table together with a copy of "Simon Called Peter" and some of the small scandal magazines of Broadway. Mrs. Wilson was first concerned with the dog. A reluctant elevator boy went for a box full of straw and some milk to which he added on his own initiative a tin of large hard dog biscuits—one of which decomposed apathetically in the saucer of milk all afternoon. Meanwhile Tom brought out a bottle of whiskey from a locked bureau door.

I have been drunk just twice in my life and the second time was that afternoon so everything that happened has a dim hazy cast over it although until after eight o'clock the apartment was full of cheerful sun. Sitting on Tom's lap Mrs. Wilson called up several people on the telephone; then there were no cigarettes and I went out to buy some at the drug store on the corner. When I came back they had disappeared so I sat down discreetly in the living room and read a chapter of "Simon Called Peter"—either it was terrible stuff or the whiskey distorted things because it didn't make any sense to me.

Just as Tom and Myrtle—after the first drink Mrs. Wilson and I called each other by our first names—reappeared, company commenced to arrive at the apartment door.

The sister, Catherine, was a slender, worldly girl of about thirty with a solid sticky bob of red hair and a complexion powdered milky white. Her eyebrows had been plucked and then drawn on again at a more rakish angle but the efforts of nature toward the restoration of the old alignment gave a blurred air to her face. When she moved about there was an incessant clicking as innumerable pottery bracelets jingled up and down upon her arms. She came in with such a proprietary haste and looked around so possessively at the furniture that I wondered if she lived here. But when I asked her she laughed immoderately, repeated my question aloud and told me she lived with a girl friend at a hotel.

Mr. McKee was a pale feminine man from the flat below. He had just shaved for there was a white spot of lather on his cheekbone and he was most respectful in his greeting to everyone in the room. He informed me that he was in the "artistic game" and I gathered later that he was a photographer and had made the dim enlargement of Mrs. Wilson's mother which hovered like an ectoplasm on the wall. His wife was shrill, languid, handsome and horrible. She told me with pride that her husband had photographed her a hundred and twenty-seven times since they had been married.

Mrs. Wilson had changed her costume some time before and was now attired in an elaborate afternoon dress of cream colored chiffon, which gave out a continual rustle as she swept about the room. With the influence of the dress her personality had also undergone a change. The intense vitality that had been so remarkable in the garage was converted into impressive hauteur. Her laughter, her gestures, her assertions became more violently affected moment by moment and as she expanded the room grew smaller around her until she seemed to be revolving on a noisy, creaking pivot through the smoky air.

"My dear," she told her sister in a high mincing shout, "most of these fellas will cheat you every time. All they think of is money. I had a woman up here last week to look at my feet and when she gave me the bill you'd of thought she had my appendicitus out."

"What was the name of the woman?" asked Mrs. McKee.

"Mrs. Eberhardt. She goes around looking at people's feet in their own homes."

"I like your dress," remarked Mrs. McKee, "I think it's adorable."

Mrs. Wilson rejected the compliment by raising her eyebrow in disdain.

"It's just a crazy old thing," she said. "I just slip it on sometimes when I don't care what I look like."

"But it looks wonderful on you, if you know what I mean," pursued Mrs. McKee. "If Chester could only get you in that pose I think he could make something of it."

We all looked in silence at Mrs. Wilson who removed a strand of hair from over her eyes and looked back at us with a brilliant smile. Mr. McKee regarded her intently with his head on one side and then moved his hand back and forth slowly in front of his face.

"I should change the light," he said after a moment. "I'd like to bring out the modelling of the features. And I'd try to get hold of all the back hair."

"I wouldn't think of changing the light," cried Mrs. McKee. "I think it's—"

Her husband said "Sh! " and we all looked at the subject again whereupon Tom Buchanan yawned audibly and got to his feet.

"You McKees have something to drink," he said. "Get some more ice and mineral water, Myrtle, before everybody goes to sleep."

"I told that boy about the ice." Myrtle raised her eyebrows in despair at the shiftlessness of the lower orders. "These people! You have to keep after them all the time."

She looked at me and laughed pointlessly. Then she flounced over to the dog, kissed it with ecstasy and swept into the kitchen, implying that a dozen chefs awaited her orders there.

"I've done some nice things out on Long Island," asserted Mr. McKee.

Tom looked at him blankly.

"Two of them we have framed downstairs."

"Two what? demanded Tom.

"Two studies. One of them I call 'Montauk Point—the Gulls,' and the other I call 'Montauk Point—the Sea.' "

The sister Catherine sat down beside me on the couch.

"Do you live down on Long Island, too?" she inquired.

"I live at West Egg."

"Really? I was down there at a party about a month ago. At a man named Gatsby's. Do you know him?"

"I live next door to him."

"Well, they say he's a nephew or a cousin of Kaiser Wilhelm's. That's where all his money comes from."

"Really?"

She nodded.

"I'm scared of him. I'd hate to have him get anything on me."

This absorbing information about my neighbor was interrupted by Mrs. McKee's pointing suddenly at Catherine:

"Chester, I think you could do something with her," she broke out, but Mr. McKee only nodded in a bored way and turned his attention to Tom.

"I'd like to do more work on Long Island if I could get the entry. All I ask is that they should give me a start."

"Ask Myrtle," said Tom, breaking into a short shout of laughter as Mrs. Wilson entered with a tray. "She'll give you a letter of introduction, won't you, Myrtle?"

"Do what?" she asked, startled.

"You'll give McKee a letter of introduction to your husband, so he can do some studies of him." His lips moved silently for a moment as he invented. " 'George B. Wilson at the Gasoline Pump,' or something like that."

Catherine leaned close to me and whispered in my ear: "Neither of them can stand the person they're married to."

"Can't they?"

"Can't stand them." She looked at Myrtle and then at Tom. "What I say is, why go on living with them if they can't stand them? If I was them I'd get a divorce and get married to each other right away."

[justmystyles]

Hey, you are literally one of my favorite writers out here. I honestly love every piece you've written, it's just all really really really good. (guess I am not as good with words as you, oops)

Anyway, I am so glad your requests are open. I was wondering if you could write something where the reader comes from a difficult family. emotionally abusive mother, distant father, eldest daughter syndrome, all that jazz.

So she's sort of moved away but still keeps in touch with her family cuz she does sorta love them but it's hard. So it's like she's got some body image issues and she's closed off, pretty funny but likes to use humor to hide her feelings, has a lot of acquaintances but doesn't like sharing herself with people much (why do I feel like I am describing someone specific lol)

And one day it all just becomes too much ig. I don't know exactly how the story goes, guess I am just looking for some comfort. had a weird few days.

Honestly, love you work. You're great. Thank you for reading that bs. Doesn't matter much if you decide to write it or not. You're already perfect. <3

Let's talk about this ask I got a few weeks ago, shall we?

First of all, I am honored to be considered one of your favorite writers on here, your words are so sweet and I love you.

Now, getting down to business, this ask genuinely made me cry because I know this reader. I am this reader and it was truly terrifying that a stranger on the internet described me so well to me. As soon as I read this, I knew it was going to be my next series, and after weeks of taking down notes and ideas, I finally started actually writing it today.

It'll still be a bit before I start putting it out there, this premise means so much to me that I want to really take my time and do it the justice it deserves, but I have included a little teaser for you below the read more so that you can get a taste of what I'm working on. I've also tagged my tag list peeps so that you all can see what I've been up to.

I'll still be working on NYIML and the other asks I have (if you sent me one, I love you and I'm working on it, please be patient, life has kind of blown up over the last week or so).

You would watch on in awe, watching the music come to life, watching Harry work. From time to time, you would meet his gaze, noticing a softness in his eyes that warmed your insides. You brushed your feelings off, reminding yourself that Harry was just a kind person. He probably looked at everyone like that. He would often invite you to join the group for lunch, or drinks after a successful session. You always declined politely, certain he was just asking to be polite. 

But Harry wasn’t just asking to be polite, and those looks that he threw in your direction were different than the way he would look at anyone else. He was fascinated by you, he felt like he needed to know more. When he met you, he thought you were beautiful, and the refreshments that you had laid out showed how kind and thoughtful you were. But he knew there was more to you, and he couldn’t wait to find out all of it.

You truly were the studio mom, always making sure everyone had what they needed. You would bring coffee and breakfast in the morning, make everyone’s lunch orders, or reservations if they decided to go out. But you would never join them. He found that curious, but also disappointing. He understood if you wanted to focus on work while you were all locked away in the studio, hoping to take those lunches and extra curricular times to get to know you, but those moments never came. 

He had asked your coworkers about you, hoping to gain some kind of intel that could help him break the ice. Everyone told him how sweet you were, always asking about them and their goings on, but often changing the subject when the conversation would turn to you. He also learned about how funny you were. He would have never guessed, based on how quiet you’d been around him. He figured some of that was because of his celebrity status, he was used to people being shy around him, but they would typically warm up over time. You hadn’t. 

There was a bit of worry in his mind that maybe you had an issue with him. You weren’t cold with him, you had always been incredibly kind in your interactions with him and that threw him for a loop. He racked his brain, trying to think of anything he might have said or done to upset you, but nothing came to mind. Perhaps you just weren’t a fan of his? Whatever it was, he was determined to figure it out. 

One afternoon, he was coming back from lunch and he overheard you talking to someone in one of the studios. He lingered by the doorway, he knew eavesdropping was wrong, but he was desperate. 

The conversation wasn’t much, you were just talking about a television show, but he heard the excitement in your voice and couldn’t help but smile. You sounded so cute. And then you laughed, and he could have died right there on the spot. You had an incredible laugh. He wanted to do anything to be the reason that beautiful sound came out of your mouth. 

Harry was so distracted that he didn’t notice that you were coming out of the studio. You weren’t expecting anyone to be standing there, so you bumped right into him. 

“Oh my gosh, I am so sorry Harry.” Your eyes were wide with panic.

He put his hands on your shoulders to steady you. “Don’t be. That was on me. It’s what I get for zoning off in front of doors.” He chuckled. 

You smiled politely and nodded at him. “Are you okay? Do you need anything?” 

“I was actually hoping to talk–”

He was interrupted by the ring of your phone. You pulled it out of your pocket and saw your mother’s name flash across the screen. “Crap, I’m so sorry it’s my mom. Do you mind if I take this?”

“No, not at all. You should always take calls from your mum.” 

“Right,” you scoff. “You’ve never talked to my mother.” You answer the phone, walking away quickly. 

He noticed your posture stiffen when you answered, and he hoped everything was okay. Once you were out of sight, he left, returning to the studio. “Y/N is taking a phone call, she’ll be right back.” 

When you finally returned, you apologized with a smile on your face, but Harry could see the sadness in your eyes. You took a seat at the computer, and he came up behind you, placing his hand softly on your back. You subconsciously relaxed into his touch. 

“Is everything alright?” He asked. 

You put on your best fake smile, which he immediately saw though. “Yeah, thanks.” 

He wanted to press, but he knew it wasn’t the right time or place. He also wasn’t totally sure you even liked him.

@allthelovehes @ameerakane20 @ash-craze @bethanysnow @blue-ballad @blueraspberryreader @brightlightsinlife @creativelyeva @cute-as-ducks420 @deannaard @fanficismydrug @gem1712 @golden-hoax @gothmingguk @groovychaosavenue @hillzrry @iceebabies @indierockgirrl @jerseygirlinca @jng4kook @jooniesbabie @kaverichauhan @laurxn-robinson @lexiecamposv @likeapplejuicenpeach @lilfreakjez @mrs-anna-styles211994 @n0vaj3an @potterheadandsherlocked @rach2699 @ravenclawdirectioner @stylesfeverr @superchrystaldrug @tenaciousperfectionunknown @tiaamberxx @thechaoticjoy @theekyliepage @walkingintheheartbreaksatellite @youknowwhaaat

[yanderepuck]

The amount of thought that went into his prompt was a little too much. Mainly bc I had an idea...but then I accidentally gave it to Arthur because I was on a roll with his and didn't realize. Oops.

I might be a Vlad hater now but I don't mind writing him. He's a whore.

But here's 3??? of 12???? If the wheel of smut.

Prompt: you being a brat and he decides to fix that

You lay in his bed sending him photos. You are in his shirt and some underwear, but the shirt is doing nothing for you.

You take photo after photo after photo in different poses and blow up his phone. He won't be coming after you soon however, he's busy working, so there's a chance he won't even see the photos for some time.

The two of you spent the day together yesterday and you even slept in his bed last night and you were sweet as can be. Maybe that's why you're being a brat now.

Texting him half naked pictures with text that reads "the blanket isn't keeping me warm, I need you instead" and "your cock belongs right here~"

By the time he gets back to you, you are dressed and doing some chores around the castle, almost forgetting you even sent those.

You feel your phone vibrating like crazy in your pocket while you are cleaning up from eating lunch. You opt not to even look at it, already knowing you're in trouble. It will be much more fun to play dumb when he gets back.

You think back to something you noticed the other day. You noticed a notebook next to his bed with nothing but a few tally marks on the page. You asked Vlad what it was for and he told you that he was keeping track of how much you've been a brat in the last week.

It explains why he hasn't decided to punish you in the moment. He is keeping track and has something bigger planned at the end of the week. But with how many times you felt your phone go off, you don't think he can wait two more days.

After some cleaning you go outside into the garden to relax, very curious about what the texts say, but you don't want to look at them. You want to be "surprised" when he comes back upset.

You kneel in front of a bed of flowers, admiring them, when suddenly you're picked up.

"Hey! What do you-"

You realize it's Vlad that swung you I've this shoulder like a ragdoll.

"You didn't need to be so rough, I would have followed if you asked," you tease and try looking at his facial expression.

"I can be as rough as I want after that."

He holds you tighter, immediately taking you to his bedroom. You should be intimidated, and worried about what he's going to do, but he smells so much like flowers when he comes home that it's soothing.

You're lost in a trance until he drops you on the bed.

"I didn't do anything wrong, you don't need to throw me around."

You sit up on the bed, but he immediately pushes you back down, a hand around your neck. You gasp while his knee squeezes between your legs.

"You've done a lot wrong, draga mea," he softly growls. "You aren't very obedient."

You squirmed under him like you're trying to get away. "What happened until waiting until the end of the week~ Did I push your buttons too much," you smirk at him, still believing you have the upper hand.

"You're not as well trained as I thought. I think you need to learn your lesson."

He lets you go, sitting up, taking his belt off. You start grinding against his leg but he quickly puts a stop to it. Putting his hand on your lower abdomen and pushing you down into the mattress.

"Stay."

Of course you aren't going to listen. Just as you're about to do it again, he holds you down again.

"If you don't stay I'll just use your other hole."

You whine and decide to not do it again. Vlad takes your shirt off before tying your hands together with his belt.

"Maybe I should turn each of those pictures into a tally, what do you think? That would bring you up to seven."

"What do you plan on doing, Tati~"

You start moving your hands against the belt until he pushes them above your head into the pillows.

"Each mark is a whole hour that I'm going to tease and edge you," he smirks, getting closer to your face.

You start to get nervous. That would mean seven hours. Seven hours of him having you on edge. You hoped the nervousness didn't show on your face.

"I can handle it for seven hours," you get cocky. What's the worst he can do anyway? "You're going to be the one who feels bad and stops early."

"Oh we'll see," he smirks and pulls your pants off, throwing them to the side along with your underwear.

You bite your tongue to stop moans as he touches your body. His fingers go down and glide against the entrance of your hole. You can't help but buck your hips up and he immediately slaps the inside of your thigh.

"Ahh!"

"I told you to stay," he hisses. "If you can't then you'll get tied to the bed."

You got your thigh slapped a few more times before Vlad got up to get the rope. He tied your feet down and decided to tie your hands to an upper post to the bed.

Now your legs were forced apart with no hope of you being able to close them.

Hour one was barely up and he's yet to finger you, but damn to your nipples hurt. He's been pinching and nibbling at them, enjoying watching you squirm like crazy.

"Those pictures of yours would have been much better if your body was covered in my cum."

He sits between your legs, his hands on your very red thighs. You look down at him, your chest heaving. It looks like he's going to finally fuck you and you start to whine.

He's undoing his pants to get his cock out, but then starts to rub himself.

He raises an eyebrow at you. "Hm? You think I'm going to fuck you after how you acted?" He chuckles. "No. I'm just going to make you look pretty."

He keeps rubbing himself, with his second hand he teases you with a finger, never quite entering you. You try moving your hips the best you could for something.

"Maybe by hour four you will have earned something."

You try to tug your hands free. Hearing his moans is driving you crazy. The fact that you aren't why he's moaning is driving you insane.

It's not long before your body is covered in his cum.

He pulls out his phone from his back pocket and looks at the photos you sent him earlier.

"Perfect. So much more beautiful now," he purrs at his handiwork work and you are pretty sure he takes a picture or two.

"Vlad.. please.."

He holds your jaw with his hand and smirks. "Aww... Are you already breaking? It's barely been two hours. We have five more to go. Or are you going to be a good girl and apologize? You're going to have to be on your knees to apologize correctly."

You try pouting the best you can. "No! I have nothing to apologize for."

"Look at you for sticking up for what you believe in. Pity," he looks at his phone again. "Time to make a brat squirm."

Your body jerks. He looks down at you, being able to tell that you are doing your best not to moan.

"Come on, draga mea. I'm sure Faust and Charles would love to hear the beautiful sounds you make."

You try kicking your feet to be able to close your legs, or to even roll over. You and Vlad have been messing with one of those app controlled vibrators for the last few months. He's been relatively fair when using it. But this is evil. You knew you should have taken it out. But then how much more trouble would you be in?

He smiles, enjoying his little show. Eventually he gets off the bed and turns it up.

"Ahh! Vlad!"

"That's what I like to hear," he sets his phone on the table next to his bed. Since the castle is stone, he can't take his phone too far or it stops.

"I'm going to see how the other two are doing and I'll be back to check on you, maybe," he boops your nose and fixes his pants as he walks out of his room.

Your body squirms and wiggles and you try to hold in moans.

~~

You have no clue how long it has been since Vlad left. Your chest is heaving and you can't stop whining. You hear the door open.

"Vlad!" you're so frustrated, but also exhausted. You can't say much more than his name.

"Aww look at you," he stands next to the bed and grabs his phone. "Do you have anything to say to me?"

"I-I-I'm sorry. I- I'll be good!"

"Just what I wanted to hear," he smirks and turns it off.

You pant as your body finally relaxes.

"Don't get too comfortable now," he pulls the small vibrator out of you, setting it on the side table. "It's my turn now."

He takes his shirt off and starts getting his pants off. "And since you were a good girl," he unties your feet but immediately gets between your legs. You pull at your arms and whine. "You haven't been that good."

He moves both of your legs over his shoulders, easily sliding into your hole.

You take in a sharp gasp of air and whimper.

"You're so slick. How much did you cum while I was gone," he chuckles and slides all the way into you. Getting as deep as he can so his entire cock is in you.

"Ahh, V-Vlad!"

"I've barely started and you're screaming my name. Someone learned their lesson."

He leans down slightly, your knees basically at your chest and he starts trusting.

You pull at your restraints, squirming under him. You cummed too much that was your answer. But now with the added movement of being fucked, your mind starts to go numb.

Your mouth hangs open as you moan and whine. You go cross eyed and see stars.

"What a good girl," he purrs between his grunts. "You look so pretty~"

He brings your knees closer to your chest, lifting your bottom half off the bed. His tip starts hitting you at a new angle causing you to whine louder.

He picks up the pace and holds you tighter.

"Ahh!" You squeeze your eyes shut and bite you lip.

With a low growl he grabs your jaw to make you look in his direction. "Look at me."

You slowly open one eye, and then the next, being met with his deep red eyes.

"You look at me when I fuck you, got it?"

You try to make a moan of approval.

"Good girl," he lets your jaw go and doesn't take his eyes off of you.

After some time you feel your body going numb. You have climaxed so much that you aren't sure if you can anymore. You're too tired to pull your restraints. Your eyes start to flicker.

"Tired already? What happened to being able to handle it for all seven hours," he chuckles. His hot breath hits against you. You can only hope that he's getting close.

Unable to talk, you just whine as a smart remark.

"Good girl," he groans. His hips snap harder into you. You tend to forget that along with being a pureblood comes enhanced strength. Rarely does he show it, but in time like this you get a taste of it, and it's hard to believe that he's still holding back.

Looking up at him, forcing your eyes to stay open, you see his fangs poking out past his lips.

He slightly adjusts your body, causing his cock to shift inside you.

"Ahh-hh!"

"Fuuck..just like that," he gasps and gets faster. You get louder, screaming almost. He gets faster and faster, holding you tighter and tighter, keeping you motionless. Using you to just be a hole where his cum goes.

You weakly pull in your restraints as he buries himself inside you, cock twitching as it spills out every bit of his cum.

You both pant hard. He carefully lets your legs fall to the bed to let you relax.

As he slowly lets you go, you now start realizing how sore and tired your body really is.

Vlad sits up, looking down at you, chest heaving. "God you're a mess," he pulls out of you and takes his belt off from around your wrists, kissing each one.

You rest your hands on your body, moaning softly since they could finally change position.

Vlad lays beside you and pulls you in to cuddle. "I hope you've learned your lesson," he purrs in your ear, kissing you softly.

~~

Tag list~

@kissmetwicekissmedeadly @fang-and-feather @xalxtusxiao @namine-somebodies-nobody @ana-thedaydreamer @evil-quartett @ameyoruakiikemenseries @yrenesposts @p1nkpandomium @tele86 @damekathearasi @lokis-laugh @candied-boys @breadmercury @aquagirl1978 @xenokiryu @nightghoul381 @vampiricpancake @lulu-the-smol-floof @faust-bite @floydsteeth

[malsfefanfics]

Edelgard and Marianne?

Hey, so that line Marianne says about Edelgard in CF before the timeskip haunts my brain on the daily.

"Thank you for taking the time to join me, your Majesty."

"I couldn't possibly turn down such an invitation. Though I'm surprised that you invited me to tea to begin with, I am grateful all the same."

Marianne nodded, and started pouring them both a cup. "I'm glad to hear that." She glanced over her shoulder, staring at one of the hedges that surrounded the gazebo. "And Hubert is still not going to join us?"

Edelgard held back a snicker. "So you noticed him as well."

"He's not as hard to notice as he thinks he is."

"Oh, now he'll be working harder to make sure he's absolutely undetectable until the last moment."

"So long as he doesn't scare the horses, that's fine."

The two shared a laugh and continued their conversation. Updates on animal care. Training reports. Books they'd been reading in what little spare time they managed to get. Edelgard, much to Marianne's surprise, had been catching up on a romantic novel about a devoted cleric and a third prince of an ancient kingdom. Quite fantastical, but truly enchanting. Marianne hadn't read much herself, but she was learning to paint from Bernadetta and Ignatz. The three of them were having a great time.

Just as Marianne was enjoying the time now.

It was rather nice, getting to see the Emperor relaxed and enjoying herself. From what she knew at the start of the school year, Edelgard rarely allowed herself a moment of repose. And the few times she did, she was often surrounded by others. It felt more forced. As though she were wearing a mask.

Well. She had been. But not what Marianne meant.

Edelgard finished her cup and reached to pour more. "Marianne? Might I ask you something?"

"Of course," Marianne answered. "Anything."

"Why did you invite me for tea. You never had before."

"Oh. Um...." Marianne traced her finger along the rim of her cup. She knew it was coming. "I...noticed the other day, while heading to the stables. You seemed panicked about something. And frozen in place."

"....I see." The Emperor set the pot down carefully. Her jaw stiffened slightly. "I....I saw a rat. On my way back from putting my horse away for the evening."

Marianne blinked. "A...rat?"

"Yes."

"I see."

Silence passed over them, barely broken by the sound of birds flying in the air above.

Edelgard sighed. "I'm sorry. I had a bad experience with rats before. So they make me...uncomfortable."

"Oh!" Marianne shook her head. "Please, don't apologize! I completely understand. If anything, I should apologize for bringing it up."

"You don't need to, Marianne," Edelgard assured. "Still, now I am curious. Was your invitation for tea a ruse to check on me?"

"Um...y-yes." Her face flushed. "I just...I've never seen you look so unsettled. I was worried. You and the others have done so much for me, so... I wanted to repay that kindness somehow."

"You needn't try to repay anything, Marianne. We do what we do because we care about you."

"And I care about you too," Marianne said. "That's why I wanted to check on you. You are the Emperor of Adrestia. But you're also our friend. You deserve to feel safe. And happy. And if I can do something...”

Edelgard's face slowly became as pink as the roses on the table. "You've done more than enough, Marianne." She reached out, gently taking her hand. "But...if you wouldn't mind indulging me. I would love to do this again."

Marianne wasn't sure, but she could have sworn her heart skipped a beat.

"I would love to."

[desertdollranch]

Dolls brands I never thought I'd own, part 4: Global PenPals

Meet Amity Anderson!

This doll was a tough cookie to track down. I first stumbled across her last year while searching for a completely different doll on eBay. I thought she was adorable, but priced way too high, so I let someone else have her. When I saw her come up again recently for a lot cheaper, I lost the bidding war. When she popped up unexpectedly a third time, I managed to snap her up right away.

The first time I saw her, I was curious about her origin, since the listing said nothing about the brand, Global PenPals. I figured it was someone's small business, because it's an unfortunate truth that many, many 18 inch doll companies produce beautiful and quality dolls for a few short years and then go out of business. Because she certainly didn't look poorly made or low quality; she obviously had a lot of love put into her production. I could tell she had a really nice wig and a carefully sculpted, realistic face mold. She was meant to be more than just a toy, but a little friend as well. That's what I liked about her. She was special, rare, obscure, and unique. And as much as I love my American Girl dolls, I also love the rare and obscure 18 inch dolls that have fallen into my lap over the years through pure luck. That has turned me into a connoisseur of obscure dolls. The rarer, the better.

So for that reason I couldn't get her off my mind. I became very fixated on finding one. I did a Google search that brought up nothing but the listing for her, plus a few dolls with similar brand names, or sites for finding an actual human pen pal. But I noticed the listing photo included a picture of her box, which had the URL of the brand's website. It was defunct, so I plugged into the Wayback Machine at archive.org to see what I could find.

Keep reading for a deep dive into The Global PenPals.

(Hello to anyone in the future who might be doing a web search about this doll! I'm sure you've found little to no information. I've put everything right here for your convenience!)

...

The site's first snapshot was taken in February 2011. It has a very short intro:

"This site is dedicated to children everywhere. Autumn Woods and Amity Anderson will begin pen pal corresponding with children in other parts of the world. They will learn about different living conditions and diverse cultural traditions. Will they discover that children are the same worldwide? Come along with us and see!"

None of the links on the sidebar were archived by the Wayback machine, so I looked at the next three snapshots, taken in July 2013, January 2014, and December 2014 (the final snapshot).

Now this snapshot displays a lot more content, although once again most of the site didn't get archived. The intro is more or less the same. But now we can see illustrations of the two main characters, Autumn Woods and Amity Anderson.

Clicking through the "Meet and learn more about Autumn" graphic linked to a page that had biographies for both characters.

Autumn Woods introduces herself first. She was born in October, hence her name, but she loves Christmas more. She lives in Kennewick, Washington with her parents and younger sister, and likes her school. She's athletic and loves to do cartwheels. Her best friend Amity lives in Basin City, near the farm where her grandparents live. She doesn't know a whole lot about the world outside of Kennewick, so she's looking forward to making pen pals all around the world.

Amity Anderson introduces herself next. She loves living on a farm in Basin City, and most of the other kids at her school are also from farming families, or live in the area seasonally, which has made her curious about the lives of other children of different background. Her family grows cherries, and sometimes the crops fail due to weather conditions. They also have lots of animals including dogs, cats, and cows. She has a secret hideout in the hay loft.

The next page linked at the top contains all of the pen pal letters to and from Autumn and Amity.

There are 10 pages of these letters. The first letter is dated June 11th of 2011, and the final one is dated August 14th of 2013.

Next link is Marcia's Dolls.

To sum it up, Global PenPals was started by Marcia Elovich in 2010. She had always sewn doll clothes for her granddaughter, and her husband built doll furniture. She used dolls to help schoolchildren learn more about the lives and perspectives of children all over the world. She modeled the dolls' faces on her granddaughter and niece, and hopes to introduce more dolls to the brand.

The next link is to the shop.

Only the Amity doll is being sold here. All the images are broken, but I can see that Amity cost $59.00.

The next tab, Media, is pretty much empty.

That's all that I can access with the Wayback Machine, but I didn't stop there.

I Googled Marcia Elovich and found the three Global PenPals books she has published.

These are current, no need to use the Wayback Machine. Here's the link to the list if you're curious about the books. You can click through and read summaries of each.

"About the Author" on the second and third books:

Marcia Harvey Elovich has enjoyed interacting with children in family, at school and other community settings. When she began looking forward to retirement from the local school district, she set up a website around two fictional characters, Amity Anderson and Autumn Woods, using her granddaughter and her niece as visual models for the character images she draws. Through the website, Marcia continues to story-tell to youngsters and adults alike. Amity lives on the farm in Basin City where, in fact, Marcia was raised, and she pursues many of the same interests and activities Marcia did while growing up with her best friend Linda. Autumn lives in town and attends Amistad Elementary School, where Marcia formerly worked as a para-eductor, and earlier as a nurse in the Kennewick School District. This was the birthplace of her peaked interest in interacting with children and later-in-life interest in education. Marcia has recently begun manufacturing of the character dolls and is now converting the website stories into children's books. Also within the framework of her stories, Marcia has interactions from her personal pen pals with whom she is communicating around the globe. Through contrast and compare, she can better present awareness of how alike we are from country to country, culture to culture, religion to religion. "Perhaps the next generation will be more compassionate, not merely tolerating diversity but embracing it!" she adds. In their retirement, Marcia works with her husband and sidekick Bob, marketing her dolls and his woodworked doll furniture. She has one young adult son living at home and an older son living within the community. Her daughter and grandchildren live out of state, so she has to love them long-distance. Through Bob, she has acquired a second daughter who lives in the area and a step-son living out of state. Marcia specifically wants to thank her mother and father, Bob and Kay Harvey, for providing a childhood almost as colorful as the fictional one of which she writes. They gave to her, her three brothers and many childhood friends their mentoring in an era when the village actually did help raise the children.

I also found Marcia's Pinterest profile. She has pinned exactly four images.

The first two are the illustrations seen on the website. The other two are pictures of the dolls.

This picture's caption:

"Amity Anderson if one of the first two characters at www.theglobalpenpals.com and the first to be manufactured as a doll. She is vinyl with soft body and has beautiful peach complexion, with perfect detail down to tiny doll- scale freckles across her nose. She comes in clothes as seen, turquoise tennis shoes, and the matching elastic headband on her long, tangle-free auburn hair. I designed the doll after my own granddaughter. Lovely presentation box designed solely for The Global PenPals."

This confirms that the doll I have is indeed Amity, not Autumn as I had sort of guessed. Amity is illustrated with bangs, but it seems that changed at some point in the doll's design.

I guess that's Autumn on the left? I see no indication on the site or elsewhere that she was ever sold, so it's possible she never made it past the prototype stage.

There's very little else out there about the dolls. A few pictures on Worthpoint with captions stating what I've already put here.

Amity seems to be one of those ultra-rare dolls that only a few collectors know about. After losing out on two other listings, I know that at least two other people do have one and know what Amity is worth. But I have no idea exactly how many dolls were ever produced and sold before the brand disappeared, which probably happened within three years of their debut.

I wonder if their failure may have been due to the price point, $59, which seems very low for a doll with such a nice wig, sleep eyes, a cloth body, a beautifully designed box, and proprietary clothing.

[oshinohoshi]

Oshi no Ko Chapter 163 Thoughts

In this chapter we finally learn Aqua's fate and - wait. Hold up. Three chapters to go and it's still being dragged out. Great

I think there's a 90% chance Aqua is toast

The other 10% is that Gorou has "died." Aqua can now fully move on from his past and embrace being Aqua. It's a second rebirth

But if that's true, why is Crow Girl, who affirms his identity as Aqua, crying?? Why does she say "you were a child?"

And this interview is really killing my copium. Akasaka texted Mengo the ending and this was the convo:

Mengo: Eh? You've decided to go with this [ending]?! Aka: Yeah, I've decided to go with that! Interviewer: I'm really curious about that, but it's hard to ask. Mengo: We talked about the unlikely what-if scenario earlier, but if I were to continue writing and complete Oshi no Ko in place of Aka-sensei, I want to say out loud to my readers: this was Aka-sensei's idea!

I like what Tsukuyomi... no, sorry, she'll always be Crow Girl to me, says about who Aqua is. While Gorou's memories and desires are part of him, he is still his own person: Aqua Hoshino

And Aqua has his own hopes and dreams and... now I'm crying

A bad end is not necessarily a bad ending for the story so I really want to be satisfied with Aqua's potential death but I just can't be

Thematically, there's a clear parallel between Aqua and Ai but I'm struggling to neatly tie it together

Ai died due to the twisted expectations of a parasocial fan. Aqua might die because Hikaru is apparently a madman. We could try to put Hikaru in the same category as Ryosuke but it doesn't work well when Hikaru's attempt to kill Ruby was basically a crime of passion due to devastation over his breakup

Hikaru doesn't want anyone to surpass Ai but I'm inclined to believe that's because he wants to preserve Ai's memory rather than because he gives a fig about Ai the idol like Ryosuke did

So Aqua's potential death doesn't hit the mark in terms of what it has to say about the idol industry and society like Ai's does

Putting that aside, the tragedy of Aqua Hoshino is too damn bleak for a story in which Ai died having realized her capacity to love

Is it supposed to be satisfying that Aqua threw himself into the sea for Ruby? Am I meant to feel the same thing I did when Ai died? Devastated but relieved that she died with a smile on her face. Or are we meant to see this for what it is: a needless sacrifice?

Anyway, Aqua's dream of Sarina standing on stage with Ai broke my heart. They sure are adorable

But even in his fantasy, Gorou/Aqua is still on the sidelines! His happy tears are really sweet, though

Everyone is talking about how this will break Ruby but I can't stop thinking about Miyako. She worried so much that she wasn't a good mom and now this

Don't even get me started on Crow Girl. First she reincarnated the twins as a favor. Then she pestered them non-stop, incited Ruby into despair, and dropped vague hints about Aqua's purpose. Now she's hugging him like she loved him all along

Fuck you, Crow Girl. Stop this nonsense and summon a flock of crows to carry Aqua out of the sea

Well, at least in his dying moments someone is comforting him

I'm withholding judgement until the end but unless Aqua wakes up at the hospital and mutters, "This is an unfamiliar ceiling" I'm not gonna be happy

The faces Aqua makes are just so uncalled for. It's too sad

I still wanted a more satisfying characterization and ending for Hikaru. Alas, we can't always have nice things

Next chapter: This is supposed to be the section where I make some dumb joke that only I find funny about what will happen next chapter but I can't. Nothing is funny. Jokes are banned. All holidays except Day of the Dead are cancelled.

No, I can handle this. I can just stress purchase some more Ai merchandise to feel better. Look what I have coming:

I'll never allow this little guy near knives or bodies of water.