#old one's main issues were keyboard related for now

[ssaalexblake]

i’ve had my new laptop for almost a year now and i am Just taking the last of my files off my old one. Go me for being on top of all these jobs. 

[yeonkimintakecare]

Washed Up - Chapter 2

Pairing: Kim Taehyung x Reader; Angsty Fic

Summary: You've decided to audition, but will it be that easy?

You run into old acquaintances from the industry and new enemies.

Author's Note: I'm sorry it's taking me so long to write this, but I'm trying to write more lately.

Warnings: mentions of alcoholism, mental health issues, swearing, general angst.

(previous chapter) - (next chapter)

“Sorry! I’m just so proud of you! It doesn’t matter to me if you do the worst acting you’ve ever done. We are going to get through it together! Oh my god, ok. Ok.” Papers shuffle in the background as she mumbles to herself. “ Ok, so I’m sending the script over to you now. Somebody will drop them off in about an hour. Learn them the best you can and I’ll be over tonight to help you. The auditions are next week and we have a lot to work to do. I hear Song Mijoo is also auditioning. She will be tough competition.”

“Song Mijoo? Wasn’t she that rookie idol that wanted to break into acting? I remember just thinking she was okay but she was so stiff whenever she delivered her lines.” You said into the phone, starting to calm down and make yourself a cup of tea.

“Oh, that’s definitely her. But she’s changed a lot over the years, she started working with that one coach, Kim Minji, that worked with your costar on The Star’s Above, Jiwon.” Rina said, keyboard clacking in the background. She’s likely putting everything in motion as fast as she can so that I can’t change my mind. Wise decision on her part.

“Minji is a miracle worker. Anybody who can make Lee Jiwon actually able to cry instead of having to use any artificial tears deserves to win every award.”  You both laugh at that statement. “Ok, tough competition then, so I’ll need to practice as much as a can. I guess it’s a good thing I don’t have a job.” You say with a chuckle, but it’s a bit empty. You can crack jokes all you want but inside you just feel a huge pit in your stomach.

Were you making the right decision? You didn’t want to mess up and embarrass yourself. Again. And this time you would have to be, painfully, sober. God, this was going to really hard.

Over the 4 days, you read the script and practice the lines. Rina was right, this script did speak to you. It’s about a woman, Eunji,  who was trying to get back into her career and life after years of being a wife to a husband who was negligent. While you lost your career due to your own issues with alcoholism and mental health, you can relate to the her feeling of the loss of her youth and the character’s struggles with her own mental health.

The audition scene is a pivotal part of the show where Eunji has realized her husband is having a child with her best friend. She’s extremely hurt, not just because she’s learning the two most important people in her life are betraying her, but also because she’s never been able to have children, which she has always wanted.

It’s a heart wrenching scene and you just hope that you’re able to portray the feelings you have to, you really want this role and so you start to muster up some feelings from your past. You think about the life you had imagined for yourself when you had just begun in this industry.

You were 16, your mom had gotten you into this high school drama, she had gone to school with one of the producers of the show. You were just an extra with one line in one of the episodes. But then they started calling you back to do other small roles in their other shows. By 18, you had landed your first lead. In a high school drama, you were the main character who was in love with your best friend’s brother. It was a very stereotypical romance drama. But there was a scene in it where you got to show of your dramatic work when the male lead left your character to go study in the England.

After that role you started to book more lead roles and by 22 and decided to take a role about a teacher. The show was an easy one to be on. A show about a teacher who was falling in love with a parent of one of her students. That’s where you met Tae, or I guess V now. He was silly and optimistic. He played a recurring character, he was a teacher who would sometimes be comedic relief.

At first you guys weren’t close, but you could definitely tell he was an attractive man. But you couldn’t date, you had to focus on your career. You were on a fast track to be the top actress in Korea at the time. But then one day he bumped into you, and he was so nervous and cute, which normally wouldn’t have affected you, but then you saw his smile. His adorable wide smile. It’s like all dreams for your future flew out the window and all you could think of was how to get this man to smile at you again.

You soon found yourself searching for him in every scene you did together. You even went as far as asking the writers to make his role larger, pretending that it was just because his character was so funny. He was a very good actor too so it wasn’t hard to pull the strings.

Before you knew it he asked you out, and you knew you shouldn’t but you couldn’t help but say yes to him. Especially after how brightly he smiled at you. It wasn’t much longer until you were kissing him and staying over at his apartment most nights a week. You thought you could live forever in his arms, talking about your goals and dreams.

It was peaceful for a couple months, until a paparazzi caught a photo of you guys while you were getting breakfast after a night you had spent together. Your manager at the time was freaking out and your company had decided the best way to deal with it was to have you deny any relationship with him. They said you couldn’t be seen as the type of girl who was unavailable, not at such a young age. They told you if you wanted to make it, then you had to listen to them. They convinced you that if you weren’t viewed as attractive to your fans, they wouldn’t want to watch you. Claiming that your acting was no good unless he public viewed you as fuckable.  And like a stupid, naive young girl, you believed them.

You snap out of it when you hear Rina walk through the door of your home. She’s holding groceries and walks straight to your kitchen counter.

“I got some dinner, which I figure we can eat right now, but I got us some sweets for when we finish running lines. I thought it would be a nice treat –“ She stops suddenly when she looks at you for the first time. For the first time, you realize that you had been crying. Your eyes were puffy and red, cheeks stained with tears. Rina comes towards you quickly.

“Are you okay? Are you having regrets? We can pull out if we have to. You matter more to me than your comeback.” You smile at her as you shake your head.

“No no, I’m fine. I just was trying to muster up some old feelings so I can connect with the character.” You say, wiping the tears from your face. Rina steps closer and holds you in her arms.

“Ok, well if you decide it’s too much, don’t feel like you’ll disappoint me. I don’t think there is anything you could do that would ever disappoint me.” She pats your back as you feel yourself calm down and like that, you feel like yourself again.

You wipe your face and slap your hands down on your knees, making a loud slapping noise. “Ok, let’s eat and then get to work. I still have a long way to go.”

--

Days of working every minute on your craft, Rina had helped you film your audition and send it in. It took a couple takes, but you selected the best one. You didn’t want to look, but you forced yourself to, as Rina sent it off. You felt like a boulder had been lifted off of your chest. You felt relieved, and almost hopeful.

Some days passed and your anxiety began to grow as you waited for a response. You knew this could take some time, but you just wanted it to be done already. Did you make it to the next stage or was all of this a mistake. You had to keep reminding yourself to not get so negative, but after being out all these years, it just doesn’t feel right to be confident.

A week after you had sent in your tape you were cooking lunch for Rina and you were going to bring it to her office. Both of you were single so you did couple things together, like going to paint classes, picking up groceries together, and sometimes you made her lunch. She was an awful cook, so you offered to cook for her most of the time. You guys don’t live that far apart so its easy to pop into each other’s homes. You have keys for her apartment, as does she for your home.

You enter the building through the back entrance they give to celebrities who don’t want to be photographed. I feel the air change as I step into the office. I see the secretary look at me and look away with a grin. Oh no… I didn’t get it and now everybody is laughing at me. My stomach drops. I was so stupid to even try for it. I should’ve known that I lost my touch. I try to avoid contact with the rest of the workers as I make my way to Rina’s office. I take a breath before I open the door, prepping myself to face disappointment.

When I open the door I’m shocked. Rina has a cake and pops the cork on the "champagne" in her hands as she sees me walk in.

“Congratulations you talented bitch! You made it to a chemistry read! You’re this much closer to getting back into the industry!!” Rina shouts while jumping up and down. You feel a smile creep onto your face as you watch the 30 year old toddler. Did you really do it? Is it really happening? What happens now? Will you be able to prove yourself again, or will you fail again in front of everybody? Your smile drops as you start to spiral. Rina immediately senses what’s going through your head and rushes over to you.

“Hey, it’ll be alright.” She pats your back “Just breath in.” You listen to her. “and breath out.” And you do. “It’ll all work out. I have a feeling that you’ll get the role. I wouldn’t have presented it to you if I didn’t think that you’d be able to do it. But ____ so much time has passed, and look how quickly you fell into it again. You’re a natural, and you’ve been doing this for years. It’s like riding a bike.” She says, comforting you.

You wipe your tears and laugh “ That’s not relatable. You know I don’t know how to ride a bike.”

She laughs at your joke. “Ok, that its as easy as breathing. Acting is like breathing for you. I know because I’ve seen it. You are talented, so talented and so strong that I know you can get this role and get back up onto your feet, and even if you don’t get this role, it doesn’t matter because there are so many other projects that you would absolutely kill it in.”

She’s right, this role is everything, but also nothing. Your life wont end if you don’t land this part, this audition is just your first step out the door, your first toe back into the pool and once you make the plunge, there’s no going back.

--

The next week you arrive to the studio where you’ll be doing your chemistry read. Rina asked who you would be doing the read with and they said it would be the second male lead for now. An idol who is making his acting debut names Jungkook. You’re doing one of the scenes where your character has to reject the second male lead, a man who is higher up in the company but younger than your character. Unfortunately for him, at this point in the story the character has started to fall in love with the CEO of the company, who is also her best friend’s older brother that she has known her whole life. But she has gotten very close with the second male lead, as he has helped her transition back into the work place and they have become very close friends. So the scene is very emotional because they both want to be there for each other, but know that they aren’t on the same page.

Makeup artists touch up your makeup and hair before you sit on a stool in front of a camera. Behind the camera is Rina, several producers, writers, assistants, and the director, Min Yoongi. You’ve worked with him before, but he was only an assistant director back then. You’ve remained on good terms with him, the last time you had worked with him was before you became an alcoholic, although it would be hard for anyone in the industry at that time to have not heard what you became.

“____ How have you been?” Yoongi asks while walking up to you, holding his hand out for a hand shake.

“Yoongi, I’ve been doing well.” You say with a slight smile on your face.

“Genuinely?” He says with a concerned look on his face. You know that some people would be offended by this, but you know that he’s a straight forwards guy who just wants to make sure you aren’t going to ruin his project if you land the part.

You draw a deep breath in. “Genuinely. I’ll be candid with you, I’m 6 years sober.” You say, knowing that with him, you have to be honest. It’s probably one of the only things that he truly respects about a person.

With that he offers you one of his signature closed mouth smiles where just the corners go up. “Good, that’s good.” He says giving you a pat on the shoulder. One reason why you guys always got along was that you didn’t have to talk a lot to understand each other. You both were quiet and reserved people who just focused on the work they had to do. “Alright, lets get this started. Taehyung should be here any minute now.”

And like that the breath left your chest. You hear Rina pounce as you feel unable to move.

“I thought she would be doing a read with Jungkook today? That’s what she’s rehearsed for. Why weren’t we notifies of this change?” she says, you see Yoongi withdraw back into himself, clearly intimidated by your best friends protective mama bear side. One of the producers speaks up instead. A younger woman in a classy dress with a neat bob with blunt bangs.

“Jungkook had some idol promotion work that came up and we are running a tight schedule, V was available. Does she want this or not? If she’s truly a good actress like everybody had said she was, then she should be able to read the lines with him.” You can’t help but notice a slight smirk on her face. You can’t help having noticed her ‘was’ when talking about your acting skills. She was challenging you. And you knew you couldn’t disappoint everybody again, you had to prove to everybody that you still have what it takes to be a top star.

Rina starts to respond but you stop her. “You’re absolutely right, Miss…?” you ask.

“LaLisa Manobal, but most people know me as Lisa” she says with an eyebrow raised to you.

“Ah yes, I’ve hear of your work Miss Manobal.” You had heard of her years before. She was an idol from a young age who went solo and had wanted to getting into some of behind the scenes work of making drama. It seems that she’s succeeded now.  “Well, I can assure you that I am still perfectly capable of a simple chemistry read.” You say with fake arrogance. The truth is this wasn’t simple. It was the furthest thing from it. Soon you were going to have to see the only man you have ever loved for the first time since you broke his heart six years ago. ‘

“V’s car just pulled up, they’re bringing him up now.” One of the PAs says to Yoongi. You feel your heart stop, you start to breath faster as you feel your heart beating so loud that you’re scared they can all hear it.

You breathe in. You breathe out. You’ve got this. You practiced this. You worked so hard for this. Breath in. Breathe out.

“You okay?” Rina mouths from behind the camera. You nod. You are okay. Not good, not bad, just okay.

That’s when you hear the door click open, some body guard and managers walk through first and that’s when you see him.

Kim Taehyung. Your Tae. The only man you’ve ever loved.

(next chapter)

[lilxberry]

I Watched You Die} 6 - Natasha Romanoff

Synopsis;

Someone from Natashas’ past makes the most of unsuspected arrivals and begins to cause issues, not only for her, just everyone they come into contact with. HYDRA uses them as a simple puppet and Natasha believes that maybe, just maybe, she could get them back to her in the way she remembers.

Warnings: Language. Fighting. Terrible writing (this chapter was terrible.)

Words: 3,123

Pairings: Natasha Romanoff x Reader (female reader) (super soldier reader) (HYDRA reader)

(A/N: There’s some time jumps that aren’t stated but it’s still relatively easy to follow in that sense. Also, this chapter is more so a filler but nonetheless is related to the story.)

(A/N 2: Strucker and interactions with him are in German and a small interaction with Wanda is in Slovak as a substitute for Sokovian. There is some Russian in this but it’s quite easy to distinguish between the languages’ used.)

< Chapter 5    Chapter 7 >

_______________

Her head throbbed and her neck was stiff and pained from its lolled position it had been in hours on end. Even with her head tilted forward and down towards the hard floor beneath her, the light felt harsh against her eyes, a stinging, burning sensation appearing each time she cracks an eye open.

“Ah, I hope you slept well, Miss Romanoff.”

The familiarity in the voice caused Natasha to tense and she willed her eyes to open and remain as such. Raising her head, her eyes automatically lock on to the figure before her in which everyone believed was dead.

“How are you here?”

The man chuckled and began to take steps towards the tied up red head, his hands folded together behind his back, a smug look etched into his features. “It is quite incredible the technology we have within this day and age, yes?”

Her features twisted up into a sneer, glaring at the one of the few notorious HYDRA leaders they, the Avengers, had come to face. “Why can’t people just stay dead?”

Strucker rounded her body leaving her to look at the room they held her within; bland in colour but crowded with technology. “I believe you’re also not referring to only me now, are you?” He clicks his tongue. “Yes, Y/N. Our best asset yet. The twins were exceptional, yes and the winter soldier was successful until recent years, but Y/N is our best creation.”

His German accent is thick as the words pass into her ears and registers his words, but his next sentence as he leans down to whisper right beside her head makes her blood run cold. “Finding her on the brink of death was undoubtfully wonderful, on our part at least.”

The man chuckled as he straightened himself back out, standing to his full height before rounding her seated position once more to stand before her. “How are our previous assets, anyways? The updates Ghost gives are quite minimal in unnecessary data.”

Silence. Strucker tsked at her lack of response and spun on heel, taking one, two, three steps forward before coming to a standstill. “I suppose you’d like to know why we have you hear,” he called over his shoulder to her. When he was met with silence once more, he continued.

“S.H.I.E.L.D. and the Avengers have certainly been a right ganz schlimmer, a large spanner in our works. We run smoothly when you and your little friends keep out of our business. Perfectly running machinery. So, we’re simply removing the issue with our operation. You.” (Fucking pain.)

Slow and intimidating were his steps as he little by little made his way over towards a board of panels which, much like every other piece of technology was surrounded by people in off-white lab coats. His fingers danced over the multiple of buttons that littered the deck of the panel.

“You may not think so yourself but, we believe you are the strongest of your little band of heroes. No, not physically. Mentally? Yes. We also believe, if we break you, the rest of the team will surely follow in crumbling down.”

His eyes linger on one spot in particular on the panel, his finger hovering over it. “Now you’re also wondering why I’m electing to tell you all this. The answer is simple, really.” He pushes down on a button, resulting in the chair that Natasha is strapped to, to recline backwards, much like a chair in a barbers’, before laying her flat.

“You’re stuck here.”

Natashas’ head looks from left to right in a frantic manner as Strucker steps away from the lengthy panel of buttons and stalks towards her, his boots quietly squeaking against the cold, smooth floor of the room.

Above her is some form of machinery she could best describe as terrifying in appearance, harsh glinting metal and a mass of wires. Movement to both her left and right signify to her that people are beginning to close in on her and surround her. Panic rises in her body further as someone steps closer to her head holding what she believed was a mouth guard; something she’ll be biting down on.

She shakes her head in a desperate attempt to avoid the object but with no such luck. Someone had violently grasped her jaw in a bruising grip and forced the guard into her mouth. Strucker leans over her laying form and the evil grin on his face is purely sickening.

“Have you ever felt 450 volts of electricity surged through your body before? No? Oh, don’t worry. IT should be over before you know it.” He pulls back, making Natasha follow his with her eyes. Her protests are muffled by the guard in her mouth. “But, please, be mindful when it comes to the convulsions that follow. You wouldn’t like to break a bone, surely.”

Strucker walks towards yet another panel, this time with AMP and voltage gages along with other gages she couldn’t quite make out from her position. He places his hand atop a dial and nods his head once to one of the many people scuttling around the room. She feels something be attached to each temple and it reminds her strongly of the old school, brutal electroshock therapy that doctors used to dole out.

“Shall we move this along and see how long it takes until you break?”

Natasha spots your body stood stiff and squared near the door at the foot of the room, features lacking any show of emotion. Her eyes widened, and she desperately hoped that her eyes asked what she couldn’t.

‘Help me.’

Your being, unmoving and unchanged, is the last thing she sees before searing hot pain shots through her body. She bites down on the guard and releases and ear-piercing scream around it as her whole-body tenses and her back arches up, fists clenched tightly, and toes curled.

Her body falls limp for a short moment before the process repeats, over and over. Like an unending, destructive cycle.

_______________

The team had tirelessly put in every effort to find the missing ex-assassin. When Natasha had taken too long to return to the others, Clint did what was asked of him. He waited until the end of the following day when she had left before telling the others.

With no sightings and no communication from the Avenger, they were at a lost.

4 days had passed, coming close to 5, with no such luck in finding Natasha. Every member of the close-knit team had put in hours and hours on end into locating her; everything had been fruitless. The team had chewed out the archer for not mentioning anything sooner than he had but he had argued that he valued his word and believed Natsha would be fine, that she could look after herself.

They couldn’t argue with him on that.

“I’ve got nothing. We haven’t found shit and it’s been what? 4 days since anyone had last seen her?”

Their hopes in finding her were dwindling quickly, its rate in decrease sped up after the three-day mark. Stark groaned and leant back in his chair, pinching the bridge of his nose tightly between his pointer finger and thumb.

“Honestly, I blame Fury for making us use phones that I can’t hack. We’d find her a lot fucking faster if I could just get into it.”

“Language,” Steve muttered before releasing a lengthy sigh. As he went to open his mouth to respond, Tony perked up, this time looking extremely more optimistic than previous.

“HOLY SHIT!” He spun his chair to face the computer on the desk and began to rapid begin typing. The others watched him with scepticism before slowly moving to crowd the billionaire.

“You wanna explain to the class, Stark?”

“You know how I never listen to Fury?” He heard a collective of hums in agreement before continuing. “Well, when I was encrypting the phones we all use, I may have purposefully left out my location cloaking software.”

“So, you’re saying you can ping her location and you failed to mention this?!” Wanda exclaimed.

“One, ouch. Don’t scream in my ear like a damn banshee, Matilda. Two, I forgot. It’s not like we actually use it.”

The team watched in anticipation as Tonys’ fingers continued to rapidly tap at the keyboard. Moments pass by with bated breaths before a small red dot appears on a map that pops up. They stare at the bright red dot in a prolonged silence before Steve straightens out with a hardened face.

“Let’s move.”

_______________

“I don’t understand. Why San Fransico?”

The statement from Sam was what each of them wanted to voice but none did. Each step through the city was following that damn pinged location. The day before it had been in Washington, the day before that was Oklahoma.

They could be tracking a ghost trail for all they knew, certainly with how quickly the location seemed to switch between states so quickly.

“F.R.I.D.A.Y. Update.”

“Location has remained the same. The Railway Museum is just one block away, sir.”

Tony rolls his shoulders before turning to look towards those who walk with him. He and Steve share a look, already knowing that this is more than likely a trap or mislead.

“Only a few of us will enter. Everyone else is going to surround the building, cover each possible exit. Buck, I want you with me, Sam and Wanda. Clint, you think you can take to a nearby building keep an eye on the roof and the main entrance?”

Clint nodded as Steve doled out orders for the group to follow. With the archers’ non-verbal confirmation, the captain continued.

“Thor, I want you to take the West side of the building with Banner. Pietro, you take East. Stark, I want you to take the back with Vision.” Everyone nods followed by them splitting off in the direction of the respective positions.

Dressed as civilians was helpful with entering the museum; they turned no heads when entering the building. The four inside had separated themselves, hoping to search the interior in record time rather than they be grouped up together.

The comms the team had donned before splitting ways crackled before Tony’s voice sounded through into each team members’ ear. “I’ve had F.R.I.D.A.Y. put the location on each of your phones, make it easier for you guys to know if you’re closing in.”

Simultaneously, Steve, Sam, Wanda and Bucky pull out their smartphones and allow the screen to open up correctly, a simple map of the interior showing a blinking red dot in the centre of the building.

The small team inside opposed to those outside slowly close in to the centre of the museum, covering all sides.

Adrenaline begins to heighten as they inch their way closer and closer. Emotions are running high and minds are swirling with possibilities and before they knew it, they surround the exhibit at the very middle of the building.

A large group being led by some guide moves on with their tour and reveals a lone person still stood there; hood up and phone in hand. Steve glances down at the phone in his own hand and sure enough, the dot hasn’t moved.

This is what they’ve been chasing.

With their head down, both Sam and Bucky who face their front can’t identify who holds the phone, Natashas’ phone.

Between the four, a look was shared and with a nod of their head in the figure’s direction, they begin to slowly close in once more. Wanda, Sam and Bucky slow to a stop, only a short distance away as Steve continues to stalk closer and with a few more steps, he’s stood behind the figure.

He reaches an arm out and clamps his hand down on their shoulder which begins to shake slightly as the person laughs quietly. The person slowly raises their head with a shit eating grin on their face and both Sam and Bucky tense, their jaws clenching, teeth grinding.

Wanda freezes up along with them as the figure slowly turns to face Steve; easily catching a glimpse herself.

“At ease, солдат,” your voice rasps. (Soldier.)

You hand moves quickly to clamp on to the blondes’ wrist and before he could react, you bring your head forward in a quick, whip-like motion, slamming it into his nose; a satisfying crunch is heard and blood already beginning to trickle out.

Twisting his arm, you land a hard kick to his ribs and send him back, him falling to the floor with quite the thud, even sliding across the floor a good foot or two. The others had quickly reacted, Sam and Bucky charging over towards you.

You alternate between the two as they dole out a choreographed offensive; punches, kicks, full body hits. The two had been going a solid minute and had done zero damage, even with Steve standing himself back up on to his feet and charging at you himself.

Wanda had dealt with the screaming and panicked public from the first sign of retaliation, giving firm orders to leave the building and to get a safe distance.

The second the first of the civilians exited the building in a rushed and yelling fashion, the team was on high alert.

“Someone talk to us,” Clint crackled through the comms, his sights down the length of the arrow he already has notched and ready to release.

“It’s Y/N.” Just that simple statement made the whole team know exactly what was currently going down. “They had Natashas’ phone. HYDRA put us on a wild goose chase.”

The grunts from Steve, Sam and Bucky brought Wanda’s head back into the fight at hand. The three were being easily overpowered by just yourself and she’s unsure how to proceed. With quick thinking, she uses her powers to push her teammates aside and away from you, the swirl of red like mist dancing around her fingers.

Your attention snaps from the three that had been thrown away from you to the little witch who stood off to the side. You roll your shoulders and smirk before stomping your way over to her aggressively.

You feel your movements slowly become restricted and it’s harder and harder to move forward. Wanda, with a struggle, brings to down to your knees before you could reach her and all you could do it look up at her with a devious smirk.

Tongue peeking out between your lips, you wet them and trail your eyes up and down the length of her body and the action makes her sick to your stomach. “Som ohromená, princezná.” (I’m impressed, princess.)

She takes step towards you, slow, precise, and what she hoped was menacing. “Where’s Natasha?” she spat between her teeth.

You chuckle darkly and shake her head, noticing how she lacked to remember to keep her distance. “You’re in no position to ask questions, little witch.” With perseverance, your left arm shoots forward, grasping her wrist much like you had done with the caps. Shocked, the moment forces Wanda to lose concertation and drops her magical hold on you.

You swipe at the opportunity and raise to your full height, towering over the Sokovian and delivering a hard right hook to the girl, knocking her unconscious the moment your fist made contact with her jaw.

Turning, you look at the trio of men who look at an unconscious Wanda by your feet with wide and worried eyes. You smirk once more as you pull Natasha’s phone from your pocket and wave it slightly before tossing it in their direction. “Keep it. I’m done with it.”

You take small steps backwards away from the four before turning tail and running, closer and closer to the back entrance.

“She’s heading to you guys at the back,” Steve rushes out, struggling to come to a stand and give chase.

“Understood, capsicle.” Tony and Vison both prepare themselves for your arrival, to burst through the doors and go into combat just like the four inside had done. But they waited and waited and waited. Nothing. “Uh, no sign of her. Anyone got eyes on the slippery bastard?” Stark reaches out to the others.

Sam and Bucky left Americas’ sweetheart and Scarlet Witch with the intentions of cheeking the inside of the building, running around the whole of the museum as the team converse.

“Nothing here.”

“Nope.”

“No clue.”

“Nada.”

“Zilch.”

The team’s response came in like clockwork and the entire team felt baffled. Where did you disappear to?

“So, she just evaporated? What the fuck? Are you sure no one has eyes on her?”

“Look,” Steve started. “As much as I want to find them and get some answers, we gotta focus on Wanda. She’s down.” He was kneeling beside her unconscious form and like a lightbulb being lit from a switch, Pietro was right beside his sister on the opposite side of Steve, absolute panic and concern shifting through his eyes.

Steve hears a sigh through the comms followed by Banners’ voice. “Let’s get back. It’s clear they’ve disappeared somehow, and we should focus on Maximoff right now.”

Steve shakes his head and moves to stand, Pietro already holding his twin in his arms. “Let’s go, team.”

_______________

“Wie ich sehe, können wir ihr Telefon nicht länger als Ablenkung für sie benutzen,” Strucker spoke as his back was turned to you, hands folded behind his back, looking at the painting hung on the wall with disinterest. (I see we can no longer use her phone as a distraction for them.)

“Sie werden sie nicht finden können, auch wenn wir sie nicht mehr auf Gänsejagd führen, Sir,” you respond, you own hands folded behind your back. Your eyes are trained on his form as he slowly turns to face you, casually rounded the desk to stand before you. (They won't be able to find her even if we no longer lead them on such wild goose chases', sir.)

“Hoffentlich nicht, Soldat. Es liegt an Ihnen, wenn sie sie finden.” His eyes look you up and down subtly, scrutinising you before turning away from you and striding over towards his desk. “Es ist jetzt zu heiß für dich, Ghost. Zu viele Leute werden dich nach deinem kleinen öffentlichen Stunt erkennen. Du sollst in der Einrichtung bleiben. Sie bewachen Romanoff und begleiten sie zum und vom Labor. Verstanden?” (They better not, soldier. It will be on your head if they are to find her.) (There's too much heat on you now, Ghost. Too many people will recognise you after your little public stunt. You are to stay within the facility. You will guard Romanoff and escort her to and from the lab. Understood?)

“Verstanden.” (Understood.)

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THIS WAS SO BAD LMAO

I just needed a filler honestly so, this will do for the time being

If you want to be added to the taglist lemme know

Anywho, I hope you enjoy

As always, constructive criticism and requests are welcomed and greatly appreciated :D

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Marvel taglist:

@thanossexual​ @iwazoomingouttahere​ @xxxtwilightaxelxxx​ 

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‘I Watched You Die’ taglist:

@diaryoflife @username23345 @drpepperobsessed @fayhar @d14n4ol @srtamercurio @gabbygabbie @lostandsearching @afuckingshituniverse @thea13sworld @nelouath8 @navs-bhat @pistachiomilk3 @peggycarter-steverogers @b-5by5 @trikruismybitch @anxiousgoldengirl @when-wolves-howl @whitelotus00 @anxiousgoldengirl @daniescady @unexpected-character @lgtftchan @mitch-cabello1097 @wlwfanfictionss @gottacamz​

(Those whose @ is in bold, I could not tag unfortunately.)

[something-fanfiction-ie]

Rough Drafts

Pairing: Spencer Reid x Reader

Warnings: Explicit descriptions of a murder scene, argument, angst, and cursing.

A/N: Okay, so I know I said I was gonna publish this yesterday but I got Cassandra Clare’s newest book and I couldn’t put it down. I seriously love that lady. Omg. Anyways, it’s here now! And it’s angsty! And there’s gonna be a fourth part soon I promise! For real. Don’t forget to reblog, comment, send me an ask or a message and overall just adore me so that I may continue to feel good about myself. As always thank you for supporting me and I hope you enjoy!!!

[ Part One | Part Two ]

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An incredulous laugh bursts from your lips, your nails cutting crescent moons into the palms of your hands as you try and convince yourself that this isn’t actually happening.

“Do you have alibis for your whereabouts on Monday, June eighth, Saturday, June thirteenth, and Thursday, June eighteenth?” Spencer can see your leg bouncing rapidly under the table, your eyes flying over the pictures and the expression of Emily Prentiss. You seem genuine, but he can’t trust himself to get an accurate read of you anymore.

“I, uhm, I- I wouldn’t know off the top of my head. I keep a planner, I’ll forget things otherwise.” The burst of iron in your mouth is not something you’re unused to, having chewed your cheek so badly that the skin there has broken under your teeth.

“We’ll need to see that.” Emily isn’t sure whether or not she believes that you’re guilty, watching the way you seem to unravel before her. When you look at the crime scene photos, it isn't with any pleasure, but with disgust. Your nose wrinkles a little at the bridge and you keep looking away as the blood from your face starts to drain. 

Either you’re a really good actress or you aren’t the unsub.

Emily says as much as she flips through the small teal planner that you’d willingly given them. Due dates for chapters, publishing events, book signings and days for book tours fill most of the pages in your most neat handwriting. Dates you plan to go visit your mother, grocery shop, doctor’s appointments, even plans to go somewhere and write.

Everything is explicitly stated, that way you’re never unsure of what you meant to tell yourself. That is, until around three weeks ago when a handful of days are notated with an ‘S,’ followed by a random doodle. Sometimes it’s a tiny heart drawn absentmindedly while you discuss the plans over the phone, other times it’s a cartoon bunny or a top hat.

Garcia is the first to take notice of it, her fingers faltering in their constant thrum against the keyboard in front of her. She glances out of the side of her glasses, raising her eyebrows suggestively.

“Looks like lonely girl found herself a boo.” 

“That makes sense,” JJ says from the chair she’s pulled into Penelope’s office from the bullpen. A pen is stretched between her hands, her posture relaxed into the curve of the stiff, government-issued rolly chair.

All the girls have gathered into the tech analyst’s room while the men take turns interrogating you. Well, all except Spencer. He just stands behind that window watching your every move with eyes like a hawk. “What doesn’t make sense is why she keeps it secret even in her personal planner.”

“Maybe she has a stalker? That could be who is doing all this?” 

“Then she wouldn’t keep careful notation of everything else going on in her life. A stalker would follow her every move, not just her romantic interests. Even if he is in love with her.”

“A partner, maybe? Like the days they planned the murders or days they were acted out?”

“None of the days line up with the crimes, save for this one,” Emily leans the book toward the two women with her finger just underneath June fifth, the day Alison Crane was abducted from outside her campus dorm room. It’s the third ‘S’ scribbled into the corner of a day in the entire book.

“And there is nothing else written in relation to this ‘S’ character?” JJ shakes her head, looking for any clues that could be nestled among the loops and curls of your writing. Reid would be better at this, he was the graphology expert among them. So why wasn’t he back here helping?

“Then I guess we better try and get her to talk about it. Meanwhile Garcia, we’ll get Rossi and Reid to head over to her apartment and you can hack into her computer?” Penelope spins the chair, a flash of bright colors and blond hair. She clicks her tongue in response, throwing up a fingers gun and winking.

“Whatever you need me to do, I’m on it like sexy on Derek Morgan stepping out of the shower in a towel.”

After some arguing, and maybe just a little bit of pleading, they manage to convince Reid to join Rossi on a trip to your apartment. He can’t help but feel a little uncomfortable, standing in your living room. Not because he’d been here before, but because he’d never been here before.

The empty mugs that litter every surface, smelling of old coffee and your favorite coffee creamer (he only knows it’s your favorite because you explicitly ask for that creamer at every coffee shop the two of you have ever gone to), is unfamiliar to him. He’s invited you to his apartment at least three times. How come he had never been to yours?

Small pages and notebooks of scribbled ideas and dialogues cover just as many areas as the coffee cups do, your handwriting messy and cramped in every note. It’s almost like you couldn’t get the idea out of your head fast enough.

The bed in your room is meticulously made without a wrinkle in sight, but that could be because of the obvious bed you’ve made yourself along the salmon pink couch that stretches out in front of your TV. A multicolored crochet blanket is thrown haphazardly over the back, a pillow still slightly squished against the arm.

On the coffee table is a half opened laptop, a notebook with red and black ink scribbled in the lines, and a still full cup of coffee. Rossi makes quick work of calling Garcia and helping her get patched into your computer. It’s strange, watching her move the mouse on your screen from miles away.

Reid never stops moving, walking the length of your studio apartment with his eyes peeled for any kind of information he could find. It’s obvious that you spend most of your time in the main room, which houses the kitchen, a small dining area, and the living room. A door leading into your room branches off to a small bathroom which is just as disorganized as everything else in your house.

Hair products, skin washes, and all kinds of makeup are scattered across the sink and back of your toilet. It’s funny because every time he’s ever met up with you, you’re bare faced and your hair is still drying from the shower you took before leaving your house. The tube of lipstick he picks up makes him think he doesn’t really know you at all.

On the nightstand in your room is a bottle of water with the label ripped off and the two Rossi books you’d bought that fateful day in the bookstore. The label from the water bottle is stuck between the middle pages of one of the books. The passages in question don’t lend anything to connecting you as a homicidal maniac, let alone a serial killer.

Back in the living room, Garcia is snooping through every aspect of your computer.

“I don’t know whether or not the be freaked out by her web history. There’s a lot of murder-y questions here. ‘Signs of a post mortem amputation,’ ‘How much blood can you lose and still live?,’ ‘Most brutal ways to be killed.’ It’s creepy.” Rossi is flicking through the notebook from the table, his eyes squinted as he tried to make sense of the abbreviations and scribblings of another writer.

“She writes crime novels so it isn’t entirely strange for her to be looking at those types of things.” Thankfully, the defense of your web search history comes from the older man who looks up as Garcia delves deeper and deeper. Spencer had thought it first, but hadn’t said anything to avoid suspicion. He’s smart enough to know that the truth has to come out eventually, but he wants to be sure of your innocence (or guilt, he reminds himself a bit glumly) before he reveals your link to him.

“I’m not seeing anything she could be using to contact a partner unless her partner is one of the publishing people she’s constantly messaging via email.” At this Spencer stops, leaning against the back of the couch with his weight resting on the heels of his hands. The stance appears relaxed. He is anything but.

“Why do we assume she has a partner?” Reid asks, impatiently pushing a stray curl away from his face. Rossi glances at him curiously, otherwise undistracted from the shake the movement gives the couch.

“Oh, Prentiss, JJ, and I were looking through her little teal book earlier and the only thing not explicitly stated was just the letter ‘S.’ It’s why they came back to interrogate and they sent you guys to her house. I thought they told you.”

Spencer wants to beat his head against the wall.

“That isn’t a lead, Garcia. You have to tell them that ‘S’ isn’t her partner.” The mouse on the computer screen falters, several saved documents for different rough drafts of books or drabbles are pulled up the way you might have papers scattered about in front of you.

“What is it? Do you know who ‘S’ is?” Rossi is turned sideways on the couch, looking over the back and up at the distressed man in front of him. It doesn’t take him long to connect the dots when they make eye contact. Penelope impatiently whines over the phone.

“I’m ‘S,’ I’ve been seeing her for the last three weeks. I’m sure if you tell me the dates then every single one of them will be days that we’ve had plans together.”

“I’m sorry, what?!” Before anyone has the chance to say anything else, the door to Garcia’s office opens and a second voice filters through Rossi’s phone speaker. It’s JJ.

“Let Reid and Rossi know there’s just been another murder.”

This time it’s a fifteen year old girl. Her hair is black and wet, her lips are as blue as the sky, and she’s naked. Water droplets from her skin have soaked into the sheet of paper that was layed over her chest. The bathtub she’s in is completely empty, but it doesn’t take a genius to know that she was drowned there. The bruises on her shoulders from the force the unsub used to pin her down are dark against the contrast of her already pale skin.

...The man leaned over the tub, his eyes squinted in thought and his lips skewed a little to the side. Ryder stayed focused on the crime scene, for the most part. But even detectives of her caliber, and higher, could easily get lost in the eyes that look up at her from beneath long golden-brown lashes.

“Detective?” She blinks the distraction away, looking back at the girl, her black hair wet and spiraling like the snakes on Medusa’s head against the ivory siding of the drained tub. Ryder can’t help but wish the girl had been lucky enough to turn her killer to stone. Maybe it would have saved her.

“Agent.” She crosses her arms, looking anywhere but at the man across from her, pretending to look for any useful clues. Ryder had gotten to the crime scene fourty-five minutes before the pair of FBI Agents had walked in. The man, who had introduced himself as Supervisory Special Agent Matthew Gray, had decided to join her in the second floor bathroom. His partner, a woman named Katherine Swift, had taken to looking for clues through the rest of the house.

Agent Gray is beautiful. It’s the only adjective that seems to stick to him with certainty, every other aspect of his personality just as elusive as the exact color of those eyes. Even as short as his hair is, the golden brown tendrils are unkempt and curl every which way. Ryder has to force her hand to stay at her side and not reach up to smooth an alfalfa that does nothing for the serious expression on his face.

She keeps imagining what it would feel like if he reached out to kiss her, curling his fingers into her hair and bringing her unworthy lips up to meet his. He’s tall so she would probably have to stretch a little, but she wouldn’t mind. Not when his hands are tangled in her hair and he’s giving her the kiss she’s been silently begging for since the moment he flashed that crooked grin at her.

The imagination is so vivid that she jumps when her own partner, Detective Russo, comes around the corner of the hallway and straight into the bathroom...

The paper crinkles in the evidence bag as Morgan places it on the table, trying to ignore the daggers being glared into him on the other side of the mirror.

Nobody on the team had been very happy with Spencer when they heard the news about your relationship, Hotch had nearly snatched him by the scruff of his neck when he made to go into the interrogation room. But after several minutes of thoroughly explaining himself, Hotch had sent Morgan in. To say Spencer was infuriated was an understatement.

“Do you know what this is, (Y/N)?” You look down at it, twisting the evidence bag so that you could read the Times New Roman font you always wrote in when writing in Microsoft Word. The words cover the front and back of the copy paper, but you don’t have to read it through all the way before you know what it is.

“It’s a page from my newest book.” The bag scratches against the tabletop as you push it away from you, crossing your arms over your chest. Your face is stoplight red with embarrassment at the thought of Spencer reading this page, mostly because you had pulled so heavily from your own thoughts when first meeting Spencer to write Ryder and Gray’s first meeting. You created Matthew Gray to write about Spencer Reid in a way that felt less ‘high school diary entry.’

“More specifically, it’s from the book you just started working on about a month ago. The one that only you and your agent have access to.” Finally, Morgan sits. Before, he’d just been pacing around you the way a lioness might stalk around her prey before she launches an attack. It made you uneasy, but that was the whole point, wasn’t it?

“Do you know where we found it, (Y/N)?” His muscles bulge against his shirtsleeves when he leans them up on the table. Derek Morgan is a very attractive man, you’ll give him that, but if making you uneasy and putting you in the room with a attractive man to fluster you was their strategy then they should have sent in Spencer.

“My computer.”

“We found it on the body of a dead girl.” Another picture joins the ones already shuffled around the table. You can barely look at it, nausea and tears building in your throat at the sight of another person dying the same way you’d written in a story. When you don’t respond, Morgan continues.

“‘She was found at the bottom of an empty bathtub, a pale leg hooked over the edge of the porcelain siding, and her arms pinned to her sides in death. Bruises discolored the skin at her shoulders, and Ryder knew at first glance that her cause of death would be asphyxiation by drowning.’” He drops the paper back to the table, having picked it up to read the passage from the end of the page.

“That’s wrong,” You say, leaning back over the table to look at the paper again. Derek looks down, like the words might have changed in the moment he looked away, but the text stays exactly the same as before.

“That’s exactly what is written here.” You shake your head, pulling the bag back to you and wrinkling your forehead in thought.

“I don’t doubt that is what you read, Agent Morgan,” Your eyes fly over the page, reading the end of the excerpt with overwhelming relief. The bag sticks a little to the pad of your index finger as you tap over the paragraph in question. “But I rewrote this scene only two nights ago. It’s on my computer, I’m sure your tech analyst can confirm my claim. This girl, Bella, she doesn’t die from drowning anymore. Her hands are tied above her head to the faucet and she’s strangled. I couldn’t decide if I wanted it to be by her sister or her girlfriend.”

JJ rushes back to Penelope’s office, on a mission to confirm your statement just as you had suggested. Meanwhile, Morgan’s mind is rushing to figure out the mess he is currently sat in. You lean back in your chair now, unsure if the dizziness you feel is from lack of food or the sudden realization that they couldn’t pin this to you anymore.

“I’m not your bad guy. If I was doing this to prove to my mother that my writing is good, that I chose the right career, as your profile says, I wouldn’t change the scene in my book and not change the murder.” In Morgan’s earpiece, Hotch tells him that you were telling the truth about editing the scene two nights ago.

“Unless you planned it to throw us off track. We know about your relationship with Spencer, you’ve probably found out all kinds of things to do to keep us from catching you.”

You clench your teeth, straightening into your chair and pinning Derek down with a look you’d learned from your mother. It makes him think of his mom, your eyes narrowed and your gaze so cold that it could cause frostbite. He watches curiosily as you tilt your chin up a little, trying to hide the pricks behind your eyes and the wobble of your lip. Derek notices them, the entire team notices. They’re trained to notice.

“I want a lawyer.” You say simply, you voice is sharp and quiet but it does the job of slicing through the tension already building in the room.

“Come on, you don’t need a lawyer.”

“That’s where you’re wrong again, Agent Morgan. I do need a lawyer. Because even though I have full-heartedly trusted the justice system since I was in diapers, and even though I came to these offices willing to help your team in any way that I could, you are still trying to use me as a scapegoat instead of actually doing your fucking job and finding the bastard who is killing people in my name.

“A study from criminal law bulletin says that 10,000 people are wrongfully convicted of serious crimes every year. One in every twenty-five people sentenced to death are innocent, Agent Morgan. Just since 1973, more than 160 people were exonerated from the death penalty. That’s not even counting the people who were killed. But you sure as hell aren’t about to make me apart of that statistic because you want to waste your time trying to piece an investigation around me. That’s not how you’re supposed to do your job. So until you can remember how to do it correctly, I do need a lawyer. Thank you.”

By the time you finish you’ve leaned over the table, your index finger jammed into the wood to make your point. It feels like your chest is on fire as you slam back into your seat and cross your arms, determined to keep your silence for the rest of the time you were forced to sit here.

Everyone on the opposite side of the mirror is stunned into silence, their eyes focused on you even as Derek gathers all the things from the desk and walks out looking a little flustered himself. If Spencer was totally honest, your outburst was actually kind of hot. He has to remind himself that you may have killed eight people in cold blood.

Your lawyer makes it to the BAU in record time, his red hair expertly gelled back from his face. His icy blue eyes only cracking when he sees you sitting by yourself in the interrogation room. Spencer can tell by the way that he lowers himself on the balls of his feet to talk to you, reaching out to touch the hand that sits on your thigh, that he knows you personally. He likes you, actually. Spencer tried to tell himself that it doesn’t make him glad when you pull your hand out of his and awkwardly pat his arm.

He’s been lying to himself a lot today.

Hotch is the one to go back in the room, he was the best at dealing with lawyers. Unfortunately his best wasn’t enough to keep you in custody and soon your lawyer, who Spencer learned was named Jeremy, was walking you out of the room for the first time in six hours.

Your back cracks when you stand, your shoulders rolling back to try and ease some of the stress you’d been holding there since this morning. The sound of the door swinging open for you is almost heavenly, the feel of the air outside of the room is damn near enough to make you cry.

When you look to the side, ready to leave out the second door that leads into the hallway and away from this mess, you meet eyes with the only profiler of the BAU that you hadn’t seen that day. Spencer looks back at you with an expression that you find hard to put into words.

He almost looks sorry, the regret evident in the slight widening of his eyes, but at the same time his chin is tilted up like he is facing an enemy he has vowed to take down no matter the cost. His shoulders are squared, but his arms are uncrossed and his palms are open.

And even though you knew you wouldn’t be there without him knowing, the reassurance that Spencer knew and even suspected you is like a blow to the chest and stomach. It robs you of air, causing you to stumble.

Jeremy reaches to steady you. You shake him off, pulling your eyes from the young doctor and focusing all of your attention on the door knob.

“I’m fine, Jeremy.” Your tone of voice is more harsh than you intended but you’re still struggling to collect oxygen, even when you slide into your car by yourself, it feels like you can’t get enough air. The walk from the BAU offices to the parking lot had passed in a blur. Jeremy’s talk about staying at home and keeping your head low had gone by even faster, and now that you have time to truly be by yourself, everything hits like a ton of bricks thrown at you from a speeding train.

In the midst of your panic attack, gasping for air into the palms of your shaking hands, questioning everything about yourself and your career, you don’t register the shuffle of movement in your backseat. You’re so deep in your mind that you almost don’t notice the cool press of a gun barrel against the back of your neck until a familiar voice lifts your head from your hands.

“Drive.”

[marshmallow-phd]

Catching Rain

Part of The Untamed - EXO Wolf Universe

Genre: Wolf!AU

Pairing: Minseok x Reader

Summary: You were more than satisfied with your life. You attended a nice college, had nice friends, a nice boyfriend. That’s what your life was: nice. You weren’t looking for anything more, so what were you to do when this seemingly harmless boy walked into your life and turned your nice little world into one much more dangerous?

Part: 1 I 2 I 3 I 4 I 5 I 6 I 7 I 8 I 9 I 10 I Epilogue

**

The beams of sunlight fell down from the wide open sky, placing warm yet gentle kisses on your cheeks and nose. It was rare for the weather to be so nice this time of year. Usually, the bitterness of winter was still holding on. But today, spring was reminding you that it was just around the corner. The heavy, feather-stuffed coat could be kept in the closet, at least for today. The striped flannel was more than enough protection from the slight breeze though you barely noticed its touch. Above you, the sky was a dazzling pastel blue with only a few puffs of white here and there.

You fingers itched down by your side where they kept you steady on the stone table where you sat. It was truly a beautiful day, too beautiful for late February. The lighting was too perfect to be ignored. With enough coverage so the shot wouldn’t be overwhelmed….

“What are you plotting?”

Your eyes snap open and you look down at your best friend. The thought had only just popped into your head. How she could read you so easily was truly terrifying at times. “Nothing,” you lied coolly. “I’m not plotting anything.”

Willa rolled her eyes. “Please. You had that smirk on your face and your fingers were practically dancing on the table. You’re easier to read than you think.”

“(y/n), please tell me you’re not going to go out into the woods again?” Erik looked up from his tablet with pleading eyes. His wire-rimmed glasses were perched on the tip of his nose, giving him a childlike quality. The wind ruffled his sandy hair. He squinted up at you with concern. You were a bit surprised that he’d caught the conversation, given how concentrated he was on his drawing. “You remember what happened last time.”

Of course you did. You were there, weren’t you? Sure, to say that it wasn’t a slightly scary experience would be a lie. But it was something you’d expected to happen eventually considering your outside activities.

A branch knocked loose by the storm from the night before had fallen from its perch, hitting you in the head. While you remained conscious, you were disoriented and had trouble finding your way back to the city. It was nearly dark by the time you made it to your car, but you had no issues driving yourself to the emergency room. The doctor declare you fine beyond the small gash atop your head, however he still preferred someone else to drive you home. Poor Erik nearly had a heart attack when he found you sitting in a hospital bed with dried blood on your face.

“It was a freak accident,” you reassured him. “Not likely to happen again.”

“But the odds still exist,” he argued. You “hmphed” at him. Why was he suddenly spouting statistics at you?

“Not to mention, there have been more wolf sightings,” Willa added, earning a glare from you. Wasn’t she supposed to be on your side?

But you couldn’t stay mad at them for long. Your brain was too logical, too in tune with being able to understand people to ignore their side of the argument. Hopping down from the table, you gave in. “Alright, I get it! You guys are saying no ventures into the trees where I get the most beautiful photographs I’ve ever taken. Noted.”

“You are such a city girl,” Willa said teasingly. It was true, though.

Throughout your childhood, your exposure to nature was the local park with its scarily overweight squirrels and hordes of annoying ants. It was a shock to your family when you chose to go to college outside of the city you knew and loved, electing to attend a smaller campus surrounded by woods and a good two hours from the nearest airport. They didn’t think you would be happy so far away. But you needed the change. You wanted to challenge yourself. Besides, if you hadn’t come out here, you wouldn’t have met Willa or Erik. And they made you very happy indeed.

Swiping up your bag from the bench, you gave Erik a quick kiss goodbye and waved to Willa. “I’ll see you guys after class.”

Willa grimaced. “Actually, I have to work.”

Erik looked equally as guilty. “And I’m meeting with Don to help out the theatre department.”

Perfect. “Don’t worry about it,” you said with feigned of disappointment. “I’ll survive. Maybe take some pictures of downtown. I’ll see you guys later.” With both of them occupied, there was no one check in on you. And you hadn’t exactly promised either of them….

Your light steps from the free evening grew heavier as you came closer to the building that the math-related classes called home.

Truly, this was your own fault. No one should have allowed you to pick your own schedule. The first two and a half years of college were spent taking all the fun, digital art major-related classes you could. The idea that you would eventually have to take the general studies classes was a problem for future you to handle. And that’s what brought you here: almost to the end of the finish line and now you were stuck taking all the subjects that you weren’t good at in order to actually graduate on time next year with your bachelors and qualify to move on to the masters. You hadn’t pinned down exactly what you would focus on when that time came, but it meant staying here, with Erik. And you loathed the idea of being left behind while your friends moved on with their lives.

The main hall inside was buzzing with voices as dozens of students hung about, arguing over answers and whining about what they would do once the weekend had finally arrived. Words mixed in with the clacking of keyboards and the faint scribbling of hurried pencils that didn’t do the homework the night before. It always amazed you how loud this place could be. Your earlier assumptions had made you think that this hall would be a second library, with stressed out students shushing each other so they could concentrate. But really, it felt more like the cafeteria; a social hangout before life interrupted again.

The classroom was mostly full by the time you arrived. Rows of crooked desks filled up two-thirds of the room with just enough space for the GTA to stand at the whiteboard and not be uncomfortable or crowded. Taking your normal seat near the front – which was unsurprisingly empty for the most part - you took out your notebook and pencil, ready jot down the main points of the day’s lesson. Until then, you scroll through the endless stream of social media on your phone.

While you were normally a friendly person, you’d elected at the beginning of the winter semester to stay serious and not give in to any distractions during this period. Because you knew yourself and you knew that you would give in to any temptation to not pay attention during this hour and a half, including talking to the shy freshman girl behind you who looked desperate for some form of friendship.

Two minutes before the class was scheduled to begin, the GTA walked in, a binder tucked under his arm and a messenger bag hanging from his shoulder. None of the conversations slowed down as he unpacked his laptop on the old desk situated in the front. Even as he opened it up and cleared his throat, the whispered chatting went on. It didn’t help that he wasn’t the most authoritative-looking person. He was on the shorter side with a friendly face that made him feel more like a peer than a teacher. Or maybe it was just because he was closer to your age that made you feel that way. It certainly didn’t help that he asked to be called by his first name rather than the typical formal address that you’d been raised with.

Sungkyu smiled brightly as he stood up. The marker made a pop when he uncapped it. “We’ll start on page ninety-nine, chapter four part two.”

That was how he started each class. No hello or good afternoons with mumbled replies. Straight to the lesson without forcing everyone to pretend like they were excited to be there or demanding a more energetic reply. Perhaps that was the one advantage of having a GTA. They knew what nonsense to skip.

An hour and a half later, you were free. Sure, your brain felt a bit like mush from concentrating so hard on the algebra equations, but now you could relax. Since that was your last class of the day, you were back to that lightness, with that spring in your step. The sun had somehow become brighter, even more inviting in the small amount of time you’d spent indoors. How could you ignore the call now?

Back in your dorm, you unloaded your backpack of the unneeded supplies for your venture. Out came the textbooks and binders that were neatly organized. In their place came a water bottle from the mini fridge you and Willa kept between your beds, a couple of granola bars you stashed away for emergencies, and the leather bound sketchpad Erik had given you for your birthday last year that housed all the photo ideas that randomly popped into your head throughout the day. Checking your watch, you assumed that you had a good three or four hours before your absence was discovered. A slight sense of adventure tingled in your chest as you slung your bag over your shoulder and scooped up your camera case from the foot of your bed.

You didn’t look back as you left the dorm and headed for your car. When – because it was a matter of time, not if – Erik and Willa found out, they’d be sure to lecture you until the end of time. But you had a feeling that it would be worth it. What was that famous saying again? Better to ask forgiveness than permission?

As much as you appreciated their concern and understood where they were coming from, the trees were calling out to you, begging to be captured within the lens of your camera. The photographer that lived inside urged you on. If they were really that upset, you’d make them dinner to make up for it.

**

Minseok wasn’t hiding per se. He simply needed a quiet place to grade these papers and with eight other rowdy wolves coming in and out of the house, “quiet” was not exactly an easy thing to find. So… yes, he was sort of hiding in his car in the detached garage. It wouldn’t be for much longer; he only had two or three more assignments to look over and, at this point, he had the answers memorized, meaning he didn’t have to stop and look at the key every five seconds.

Blowing out air, Minseok ran a hand through his black hair as he leaned back. Sometimes he wondered why he took up this position. He didn’t need to. It wasn’t required for him like it was in other masters degrees. But the offer was given and he took it. Maybe he liked the excuse that he was busy so he couldn’t go out with the younger wolves all the time. Unlike the extroverts who knew every restaurant and bar in town like the back of their hands, he preferred it out here, in the woods. Homebody felt like an understatement.

Finally through with grading, he neatly packed the papers away into his bag (divided by clear plastic folders labeled by class) and got out of the car. He left the garage with a smile on his face. Before his feet could hit the first porch step, his name rang out in the field. 

“Minseok!”

He half-laughed, half-sighed as he shook his head. He shouldn’t be surprised that he was discovered the moment he left the safety of the garage.

Running towards him as he turned around were the three goofballs of the pack: Baekhyun, Chanyeol, and Jongdae. Their faces and clothes were covered in mud, making Minseok take a step back.

“Where have you been?” Chanyeol asked when they came to a stop in front of him. Thankfully, they kept their distance. Now Minseok just needed to keep them from going in the house.

“Grading papers,” Minseok replied. He wasn’t going to reveal where he was grading them.

“That sounds boring,” Baekhyun said with an expression that made it seem like he’d smelled something bad. Although, given his current state, that was quiet possible.

Jongdae whipped his hair, sending tiny droplets of muddy water everywhere. Minseok jumped back in an effort to dodge them, which sent the former into a laughing fit.

“Come on, Minseok,” Jongdae waved his hand through the air, still trying to catch his breath from laughing so hard. “You know, wolves aren’t supposed to mind getting dirty.”

“Wolves, no. Humans, yes.” The eldest wolf eyed the three of them. “Well, most humans, anyway.”

Smiling broadly and unbothered, Chanyeol made a move towards the porch.

“No,” Minseok said firmly, blocking the giant’s path. Putting his bag down on the porch he pointed to the side. “Go around and use the hose. You’ll get mud everywhere.”

“We’ll clean it up,” Jongdae whined.

“Not to his standards,” Baekhyun chuckled. Completely unbothered, he followed orders and ran to the back of the house. At first, Chanyeol pouted as well, but then he must have found the fun in the idea because only a few seconds later he was ripping his shirt over his head and running after his best friend.

Jongdae gave one last look of pleading. “Can I please go inside and take a shower?”

Minseok nodded. “After you use the hose.”

“But it’s cold.”

But wolves don’t get cold. Minseok went to pat the poor guy on the back, but then stopped, remembering why he wasn’t letting him inside in the first place. “Rinse off and then we’ll go for a real run to dry you off.”

Jongdae mulled over the offer. Grinning, he said, “Deal!” He was back behind the house in the blink of an eye.

Looking over at his bag, Minseok contemplated his options. He could leave it there and risk one of the guys forgetting the “hands-off” rule or he could take it upstairs to his room, leaving those three alone with the water hose for five minutes. It might not sound like a terrible option, but Minseok had known them long enough to understand that they could find trouble without even looking for it.

He decided to go with the second option anyway, knowing his students’ papers would at least be safe.

Just inside the living room, Sehun was glued to the TV screen, controller in hand. He was pressing down on the buttons with more force than necessary. The maknae would never admit it, but he was too competitive when it came to video games. One time, Minseok walked in on Baekhyun whacking Sehun on the head with the plastic controller because he was getting beat so badly. Thankfully, this time Sehun was alone. If he remembered correctly, Jongin and Yixing were in class while Junmyeon was conducting his office hours. At least the four of them took school seriously.

Minseok didn’t bother greeting Sehun as he made his way through the living room and up the stairs.

His bedroom, pristine and magazine-worthy – was at the end of the hall, near Junmyeon’s master. It was a good thing that Junmyeon’s great-to-however-many-degrees-grandfather thought to build a large farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. The alpha didn’t think that it had ever been quite this full since it had mostly been just his family that occupied the walls in the past, but the foresight to think of a larger pack down the line had been there. Each of the wolves were able to have their own rooms, their own space. Given how sloppy some of the others could be, Minseok was thankful. It hadn’t always been that way, but those days were long gone.

Near the beginning when Minseok first officially joined the pack, he’d tried living alone in his parents’ old place in town. The call to be together, with his brothers, was too great. It was an uncomfortable feeling. To this day he wasn’t sure if it was the wolf’s nature that caused it or simply the fact that, as the eldest, he worried about the younger wolves and preferred to be around where he could keep an eye on them. That meant that the peace and quiet was over, but sacrifices could be made and he was much happier here, anyway.

Placing his bag on the desk, Minseok sighed to himself before heading back downstairs where trouble waited.

To absolutely no one’s surprise, Chanyeol, Bakehyun, and Jongdae had turned rinsing off into a full on water war. Pretty much all the mud had been washed away, but that didn’t stop them from stealing the hose from each other and creating new mud in the backyard. They were all without their shirts, showing they were in this for the long hall.

At one point, Jongdae had snuck behind Chanyeol, who currently had possession of the garden hose, and twisted the rubber tube to stop the flow of water. Confused, Chanyeol looked directly in the mouth to discover the reason why. Which meant he fell right into Jongdae’s trap. The troll let go of the hose and the water came rushing back, spraying like a geyser in Chanyeol’s face.

Jongdae fell backwards onto his butt with how hard he was laughing. Chanyeol whipped around to get him back, catching Minseok in the crossfire.

Chanyeol cringed guilty. “Oops. Sorry.”

Minseok chuckled it off. It was just a shirt. “It’s alright. I promised Jongdae a run anyway. It’ll be dry by the time we get back.”

Baekhyun perked up. “A run?”

Minseok nodded. “Yes, you can come, too.” He was already undoing the buttons, folding the shirt and placing it on the ground once it was off. Maybe this run was what he needed. He wasn’t sure what difference it could possibly make. He’d been on hundreds of runs in the past. But something told him to go now. So, once he was ready, he shifted onto all fours and ran after the other wolves who’d already almost reached the tree line.

[tiramisiyu]

【未定事件簿】 Tears of Themis: Xia Yan’s Personal Story 3-8 Translation

Translation Masterlist | Xia Yan Masterlist | Video

Translated Chapter 3: 3-1 / 3-2 / 3-3 / 3-4 / 3-6 / 3-7 / 3-8 / 3-10 / 3-11 / 3-12 / 3-14

See below cut!

--

Home

The next day, Xia Yan and I examined the version of the video with no deletions that Tian Xin left for us yesterday.

Xia Yan: The contents of the video with deletions involve four locations: the Stellis Major Bridge, Jinlan Street, Yunxia Mountain, and the Stellis port. And the same person has appeared at these four locations.

As he spoke, Xia Yan pointed at a person wearing leather in the video. He looked to be around 27-28 years old, his hair had highlights, and his clothes were very punk.

MC: This person is…?

Xia Yan: Meng Qishan, a detective who resigned from the profession half a year ago.

Xia Yan tapped open the document he organized before on resigned detectives, then scrolled to the column with information on Meng Qishan.

Xia Yan: Meng Qishan entered the detective profession four years ago. Ever since he entered the profession, his reputation has always been bad. Based on my investigations, he would often use grey or even illegal methods to help his commissioners achieve their objectives.

MC: Grey or even illegal methods?

Xia Yan: The main focus of Meng Qishan’s work was marital status investigations, whereabouts investigations, and background investigations. Based on principle, a detective’s investigation should seek the truth from facts. But Meng Qishan’s investigations revolved around the commissioner’s requirements.

Xia Yan: For example, if a husband and wife’s relations have broken down and they want to divorce, they would typically need to split up their wealth and properties. 

Xia Yan: But some want to give less or give nothing the other person, and lessen the other person’s pestering, so they’ll hire a detective to find evidence that they have had an affair. If the other person has not had an affair, some commissioners will require the detective to “create” evidence that the other person has had an affair.

MC: So they’ll use special angles to take very ambiguous shots of typical friend meetups, meals, and accidental encounters, right?

MC: I’ve received cases like this. One side used these kinds of photos to threaten the other side, threatening to not agree to the divorce, wanting to have the other person’s reputation utterly ruined.

Xia Yan: That’s right. Meng Qishan is that kind of detective.

MC: Has no one noticed it if he does this kind of thing all the time?

Xia Yan: They have. Not only has he been noticed, he’s even been sued, but because of insufficient evidence, the prosecution was withdrawn.

Xia Yan: Meng Qishan has a good understanding of the law. He’s very skilled at wandering on the boundaries of law, and he does things that are hard to collect evidence for investigation.

I sighed. These are the so-called people that prove that “criminals who understand the law are more frightening”.

MC: Why did he resign from the profession?

Xia Yan: Because a major scandal broke out, and he offended a client. Half a year ago, he received a commission from a corporation’s senior executive to create evidence that the executive’s wife had an affair. Meng Qishan took photos of the executive’s wife entering a hotel with some male.

Xia Yan: But in court, facing the photos that the executive flung out, the wife testified that the male was her own distantly-related male cousin. No one knew of it because they rarely interacted. The wife used this to harshly recriminate the husband, saying that he defamed her wantonly for the purpose of divorce.

Xia Yan: This matter embarrassed that executive terribly, and his future at the company was also affected.

MC: So Meng Qishan offended his client because of this, right?

Xia Yan: That’s right. This case raised a big fuss, so he vanished without a trace from the detective circles.

So there was a hidden story like this behind the matter.

MC: But why would he appear in this video? Is he related to Sphinx?

Xia Yan: At first glance, there is no relation. But I feel like that wife’s male cousin, as well as the timing and location at which he appeared are somewhat too perfect.  It’s like someone deliberately set this up to have Meng Qishan misunderstand and make this kind of mistake.

Xia Yan: “There is inevitability behind all coincidences.”

Xia Yan: I believe that the riddles are just pretenses. There might be another reason behind Sphinx forcing the detectives to resign.

I couldn’t help but remember the opinion Xia Yan had voiced before on Sphinx being like a “vigilante”.

MC: If it’s like what you said before, Sphinx is punishing detectives who behave badly on the regular. Why those detectives who were defeated by him treat this like a matter that has to be kept secret would make a lot of sense.

MC: But you aren’t a bad detective. Why did Sphinx issue a challenge to you? Plus, the riddles he gave you aren’t typical reasoning-based riddles.

MC: This is too weird…

Xia Yan: Mm… I’m guessing that he has other intentions with me. Such as, since I’m the best detective in Stellis City, he’s itching to figure out who’s relatively superior.

MC: … Sure, this reason makes a lot of sense.

Xia Yan: Alright alright, let’s discuss the questions between Sphinx and me later. Let’s continue analyzing this Meng Qishan.

I nodded, turning my gaze back towards Meng Qishan, who was following Tian Xin in the video.

MC: “ɸ” had Tian Xin shoot Meng Qishan in the video, then wanted Tian Xin to delete it – why?

Xia Yan: For this, we’ll have to wait until we find Meng Qishan to find out.

MC: But Stellis City is so large – how should we find him?

MC: Could you be planning to use your privileges to get the police station’s resident data?

Xia Yan: No need. Actually, the video has already given us a hint.

Xia Yan adjusted the video progress back to the place where that person appeared first.

Xia Yan: He’s carrying a shopping bag in his hand, there aren’t many things in it, and they’re all daily necessities. Thus, this place is very close to where he lives. We can use the supermarket on the shopping bag as the centre to draw a circle with a radius of five kilometres.

MC: Five kilometres?

Xia Yan: The scope of a person’s daily activities is three kilometres, but since the location this time isn’t precise enough, I’ve expanded it to five kilometres.

As he spoke, he drew a large circle on the map, using the supermarket as the centre.

Xia Yan: In livestream, the three drawings hinting at Sphinx’s riddle all had the “ɸ” symbol. I’m guessing that this is the information point that the person who set up this matter wants to convey.

MC: Are there any places in Stellis City whose names are related to this character?

Xia Yan did a search on the computer.

Xia Yan: There isn’t – the relation probably won’t be this direct.

Xia Yan: “ɸ” is the 21st letter in the Greek alphabet. It has different meanings in math, physics, and engineering. Magnetic flux, focal strength, Euler’s formula… which meaning is it hinting at…

MC: The “ɸ” was on the drawings. Could it have something to do with the drawings?

Xia Yan: The drawings? Places where “ɸ” can be linked to the drawings…

Xia Yan and I sunk into deep thought for a moment.  I looked again at those three drawings hinting at Sphinx’s riddle, each drawing’s composition very well-balanced.

MC: Ah! Xia Yan, could it be the golden ratio!

MC: Look, the compositions of these drawings all use the golden ratio method.

Xia Yan: So that’s how it was - “ɸ” also means the golden ratio in math. The approximate value, using the first three digits, of the golden ratio is 0.618.

I looked for a place relating to 0.618 in the circle indicated by Xia Yan.

MC: A rest station, Yuelai Hotel, Nautilus Bar – these three places’ addresses all include 618. Should we check out each one?

Xia Yan: No, it probably is this place – Nautilus Bar. The cross-section of the spiral of a nautilus’ shell indicates the Fibonacci Sequence, while the ratios of the sequential numbers in the Fibonacci Sequence approach the golden ratio without limit.

MC: So that’s how it was.

Xia Yan looked at Nautilus Bar on the map and frowned slightly.

Xia Yan: Do you still remember how I said last night that I can track Tian Xin’s whereabouts using his phone signal position?

MC: I remember. What’s the matter?

Xia Yan: I just checked Tian Xin’s movement route for today. Ever since a few hours ago, he’s been hovering near Nautilus Bar.

Xia Yan tapped at the keyboard as he spoke. The map immediately displayed a red route line – Tian Xin’s movement route. Just as Xia Yan said, he’d been moving around near Nautilus Bar the whole time.

MC: Could he also be investigating the clues left by “ɸ”?

--

[Flashback]

Tian Xin: Jeez, this guy. If you’re going to help someone, help them out until the end.

Tian Xin: He clearly had some reasoning methods, but he refused to help me design the riddles. My reasoning is really crappy. Otherwise… Sphinx’s riddles wouldn’t need to be designed that crappily… After that set of videos, people kept spewing hate at me…

[Flashback end]

--

MC: He clearly kept complaining yesterday about how his reasoning ability was very bad. He shouldn’t have been able to figure out the riddle this fast… Right, is there any overlap between the interpersonal relationships of Tian Xin and Meng Qishan?

Xia Yan: Wait a bit – checking now.

Xia Yan tapped quickly on the keyboard, different webpages popping up and shifting back and forth on the screen. A few minutes later, he stopped.

Xia Yan: Found it – there is indeed one point of overlap. I told you earlier that Meng Qishan received a commission from a senior executive client, to create fake evidence and slander his wife for having an affair.

MC: Mhmm, in this case, Meng Qishan just might have lost all face due to something relating to Sphinx.

Xia Yan: The overlap of Meng Qishan’s and Tian Xin’s interpersonal relations is in this case. The wife of that executive has a blood-related little sister named Han Feifei. She and Tian Xin are childhood friends.

MC: Eh?

Xia Yan showed the information he just found to me.  On the social platform, there were a lot of duo pictures of the executive’s wife with her little sister, Han Feifei, as well as duo pictures of Han Feifei and Tian Xin.

MC: Thus, the reason why Tian Xin would investigate Meng Qishan and Sphinx might be this.

Xia Yan: Tian Xin must still be hiding a lot from us.

MC: These hidden things might also be related to Sphinx’s clues.

Xia Yan: …

Xia Yan: Regardless of if it’s for Tian Xin, Meng Qishan or Sphinx, we have to make a trip down to Nautilus Bar.

[thesunnyshow]

Name: hi, i am nyx  Age: 20 years old Writing Blog URL(s): jungcity.tumblr.com | v-asl.tumblr.com 

Nationality: filipino Languages: english, filipino Star Sign: pisces! MBTI: infp-t Favorite color: white accentuated by silver Favorite food: it’s sweet and spicy chicken garlic!! Favorite movie: hmmm, it’s prolly flipped because that movie was so cute :,)  Favorite ice cream flavor: rocky road!! Favorite animal: it’s gonna be cats!! although i love lions so much because of narnia :,( Coffee or tea? What are you ordering? coffee :,) Go-to karaoke song: i don’t sing agskh the world would end if i would 

What has been one of the biggest factors of your success (of any size)? i think it’s me writing about jaehyun??? since he’s the king of fanfiction, especially in ncity nowadays. 

What fandom(s) do you write for?  nct + wayv

When did you post your first piece? three days ago!! that would be august 4 i guess???

Do you write fluff/angst/crack/general/smut, combo, etc? Why? i don’t really much write fluff since i don’t have any idea how to write a good fluff!! :( this has been an issue every time i write some au’s. so im always ending up writing and focusing more on angst. it’s the genre i know best. well, crack… it’s hard to make the readers laugh when you can’t even make their tooth ache from sweetness with your fluffy writings. :( smut… i don’t write smut explicitly any more. i’m more on the suggestive side rn. 

Do you write OCs, X Readers, Ships...etc  i write OC’s especially when im writing a series!! to diversify my writing. but i usually am on the x reader side. ships? not that much. 

Why did you decide to write for Tumblr? uhm, back in 2017, i was searching for some website where i could publish my works. ive always been a tumblr-girl since i am that wanna-be-aesthetic kinda person :D then i had found that i could write and publish on tumblr so yeah that’s pretty much why i am on this app rn

What inspires you to write?  ooh, music has been a great help for sure!! whenever i don’t feel like writing something, i always listen to music and the idea would flow like a river. classic poems helps, too. :)

What genres/AUs do you enjoy writing the most?  supernatural!au’s, fantasy!au, medieval!au. i feel like it’s easier to write something out of pure fantasy. i have a hard time writing modern!au’s since i lack the humor and the knowledge for modern slangs. 

What do you hope your readers take away from your work?  ooh, i always always always am careful with the way that i craft all my works. i try to feel what my characters feel to give them a certain validation. i put my shoes on the scenarios i have in mind even though i haven’t yet experienced everything ive written. and i do love writing strong female characters, whether it’s oc’s or female readers. that’s my main priority whenever i write. and i want them to know that girls could do just as much everything boys could. women are powerful. 

What do you do when you hit a rough spot creatively?  i read a lot to get back on my foot. i also try to re-read my past works so i’d be inspired to better my writing on my current draft.

What is your favorite work and why? Your most successful?  my favorite work is the one i’m still writing rn, which is entitled 505. it’s a hendery fic in which he is a bandit and the female reader is a sacristan. it’s my fave since i relate myself so much to the female reader. :) my most successful one is the childhood best friends!au taeyong x female reader. it’s about to reach 600+ notes i guess? and im so grateful of all the feedbacks i got from it. 

Who is your favorite person to write about?  it’s jaehyun and hendery :) 

Do you think there’s a difference between writing fanfiction vs. completely original prose?  character wise, perhaps. since you already have a face value in fanfiction, but in an original prose, you would have to craft everything from 0. 

What do you think makes a good story?  a good story is something that doesn’t romanticize the bad things going on in the world. a good story is something that is emphatic to the hardships of others. a good story is something that gives comfort to those who are in the dark. a good story is something that boosts the hearts of the readers and makes them feel things!! 

What is your writing process like?  first, i think of a plot! (this happens oftentimes when im washing the dishes) when i have the plot, i think of the ending. when i have the ending, it’s time for me to device a fitting title. and the plot would develop from then on. 

Would you ever repurpose a fic into a completely original story?  i don’t think so… this is scary. since some people think of fanfics as delusional works from delusional authors. it’s kinda sad. 

What tropes do you love, and what tropes can’t you stand?  i love love love enemies-to-lovers trope!! one that i couldn’t stand and do my best to not read is probably… hmm… no, i love all tropes!! i just love e-t-l most!

How much would you say audience feedback/engagement means to you?  it means a ton. since it could really boosts me up. heavy sigh. it’s the best thing when you write something— the feedbacks. even though it’s a simple reblog with the ‘#ATKSHSKSHSKAHAKSGAHGEGSJA’ or ‘#myfave’. i would smile like an idiot whenever i read it.

Dream job (whether you have a job or not)? i want to be a successful writer someday!

If you could have one superpower, what would you choose? teleportation!! 

If you could visit a historical era, which would you choose?  ancient greek + victorian era

If you could restart your life, knowing what you do now, would you?  yes!! im so hell deep in indecision right now so i want to restart to make everything right

Would you rather fight 100 chicken-sized horses or one horse-sized chicken?  100 chicken-sized horses!!

If you were a trope in a teen high school movie, what would you have been?  enemies-to-lovers trope agsksj LOL

Do you believe in aliens/supernatural creatures?  YES!!! perhaps they are lurking somewhere here on earth and we don’t know it yet ;)

Fun fact about yourself that not everyone would know?  oh… i don’t really know what to write. i don’t give much attention to my personal details agsksj

Do you think fanfic writers get unfairly judged?  yes!! ugh, there’s this recent issue wherein stan twt called fanfic writers as freaks. and it broke my heart. i mean, most fanfic writers get inspirations from their idols and that shouldn’t be a bad thing. we aren’t delusionals as one might think. we are simply doing our craft. 

Do you think art can be a medium for change?  yes!! our country’s hero ‘jose rizal’ had somehow stirred the nationality of the people back in the old days because of his writings. i do believe that art changes things!! it has the ability to pierce the heart of the people.  

Do you ever feel there are times when you’re writing for others, rather than yourself?  yes. i feel this whenever im writing smut. i mean, let’s be real, your works would do better once you’ve included some steamy smut scenes in it. when i was writing my first fanfic after three years, i didn’t think that i’d ever include smut. but the fear of not getting feedbacks crept up in me, so i forced myself to write some sexy scenes. i know that’s like… weird. but i’m trying not to dwell on feedbacks any longer. and i also have decided not to write explicit smut anymore. honestly, i feel better now that i don’t force myself to do something that i think would please others rather than me.

Do you ever feel like people have misunderstood you or your writing at times?  uhm, as far as i can remember, nope— still hasn’t felt that way. :)

Do your offline friends/loved ones know you write for Tumblr?  yes!! my best friends irl knows about it. my sister knows. my parents are also aware of my passion in writing, and they do know that i write. but where and what, that remains obscured from them :D 

What is one thing you wish you could tell your followers?  that it’s okay to be vulnerable. it’s okay to make mistakes. it’s okay to fail sometimes. it’s okay to feel things. because like a good book, there is always a character development and you have the pen to write your own version of happy endings. 

Do you have any advice for aspiring writers who might be too scared to put themselves out there?  i’ve been there: the scared and conscious part. but one thing i would say is, you have to dare yourself!! you won’t know how your writing would have impacted so many lives and touch the hearts of people if you won’t grab your pen or your gadget and start your draft. 

Are there any times when you regret joining Tumblr?  nope, there aren’t. the community has been lovely to me ever since i started writing. :,)

Do you have any mutuals who have been particularly formative/supportive in your Tumblr journey? yes!! oh my god. i’d like to take this opportunity to thank my mutuals who’s done me nothing but kindness— @legendnct (hannah), whoo!! you know how much i love you, right? thank you for always being there to listen to me. :) @cloudysuh des, since day one you’ve supported me. i couldn’t ask for more. thank you for the never-ending praises, keyboard smashes, for the tags, and for always boosting me up. @bohoes georgie, you know i love you. since 2017 you’ve been with me— praising my works and supporting me. thank you. @cherr-e cherry!! thank you!! for teaching me how to better my writing. i hope endless happiness for u and please take care. @writermoon hello my babe!! thank you so much for reading my works with such vivid imaginations. i love you. @jaeyongf amy!! the bestest person :,) thank you for always leaving me feedbacks!! thank you for being kind to me. thank you for always supporting me. i love you guys so much and let’s be mutuals for a long time!! 

Pick a quote to end your interview with: 

“If the world hated you, and believed you wicked, while your own conscience approved you, and absolved you from guilt, you would not be without friends.” — Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë

[purplesurveys]

1085

survey by -egocentricity-

On Myspace, what was in the last bulletin you posted? I haven’t been on Myspace for well over a decade; and even when I was there I didn’t have any friends added nor did I remember ever posting anything. Friendster and Multiply were a lot more popular.

When and where was the last time you took a picture of yourself? I took a selfie last Saturday in the dining room. It’s of me holding up the vape pen that Andi lent me for the meantime to show Angela, since she wanted to see what it looked like.

Have you ever been scolded by a mall cop? I remember being lightly chided once when I was like, 7 – I was leaning on a glass wall of a store in the mall, so the guard from that store nicely told me to get back up to be safe. Overall, I don’t think I’ve ever exhibited behavior in public that should’ve gotten me into trouble.

How often do you catch yourself daydreaming? Definitely not so much these days. I need to keep being preoccupied with work or other things to do/accomplish since my daydreaming always seems to end with thinking of scenarios that now upset me, like, idk, happier times with my ex. I’m tired of letting that happen and always being upset in the end, so I try to avoid getting lost in my thoughts anymore.

What's your favorite thing to think about as you're falling asleep? Idk about you but thinking in general keeps my mind up and racing lol, so when I’m trying to sleep I do my best to black out my mind so that I can doze off.

Is there anything that you want to do, but won't because you're too afraid? So I went to college with this girl - I believe she’s several batches older - who, as soon as she graduated, set out on a hitchhiking journey across the world. She’s been doing it for four years, and I believe she has finally made it to Europe after being stuck in Kazakhstan for a year due to Covid. She’s amazing and her spirit is so fucking beautiful. She has a Facebook page that I actively follow detailing her experiences; but as great as her journey has been, I don’t know and I highly doubt that I can set out for such a demanding, commitment-heavy challenge myself.

Who was the last person to yell at you? My mom is the only person who does that, but she hasn’t done so in a while.

Who gets up the earliest in your household? The latest? My dad, since his work starts the earliest. I will sometimes hear the car engine purring by 5:45 AM. The latest would be my sister, since she stays up the latest as well. I think she’s up by 8 AM, but she doesn’t show up outside of her bedroom until 10 or 11.

Have you ever had a pet walk across your keyboard while you were typing? No, and I am glad that’s the case because both of my dogs are too big and I fear that they could actually snap my laptop in half.

What political issues do you think deserve less attention/worry? No political issue deserves any less attention than others. Political issues always mean that someone is on the losing end and I don’t think it’s fair to compare and decide which ones can be put on the backseat. 

Anyway, I do believe it’s not so much the issues that should be compared, but the people in politics who are given the spotlight. Here in the Philippines especially, a lot of celebrities want to have their own political careers (and usually win a seat) despite their zero experience and the media gobbles that shit up all the time, which is disgusting. Related to this, I hope the media makes a consicous effort to wipe Trump out of the headlines once he’s out of office.

Which political issues are you most passionate about? I dunno if I can measure that since I’m pretty vocal about a lot of things. What I can tell you is that in the political issues I have a say in, I always side with the marginalized and the oppressed. IPs, POC, LGBTQ+, immigrants, factory workers, jeepney drivers, contractualized employees, activists, student-activists...my heart has always been with them and their cause.

You're going to your favorite foreign country; what landmarks do you go see? I’m not sure if I have a favorite country, but I’m very picky about landmarks in general anyway. I’d rather experience the local life and eat at smaller local places and go to lesser-known beaches and stuff.

What is the longest amount of time that you have spent away from your home? A little longer than a week, and this was usually when I traveled abroad.

Did the last movie you watched have any emotional effect on you? Yeah, so much so that I was unable to finish it and I had to show up at dinner while still fresh from crying.

What motivates you to go to school? Not applicable to me anymore, but I suppose this can be easily rephrased to mean work. Honestly, my main motivation is the desire to have a perfect record at work lol. I’m super neurotic about this and I hate the idea of being absent or late. Money comes second; I rarely buy stuff for myself so I mostly don’t even realize the money coming in to my account every two weeks. Then third is the desire to be good at my job because I do want to get promoted and rack up more positions as I go along.

How much caffeine have you consumed in one day? The most cups of coffee I’ve had in one day is 3, and that was not an enjoyable experience ha. Right now, I’m on my first cup of coffee.

Are you more hyper and up-tight, or laid back and relaxed? I guess it depends on the situation. I can definitely exhibit either, but my behavior will vary based on the people I’m with and/or how comfortable I am in a certain situation.

When was the last time you heard someone talking about you? Around a week ago. My parents were having dinner separately and I heard my name being mentioned in a few sentences.

How did you pick out your last outfit? I wanted an outfit that was chill and easy to carry around, but would still make me look like I put some effort into picking it out.

When buying shoes, what do you look for in the product? I admittedly like brand names, so that’s the first thing I look at. I also like to keep up with what’s trending, so I look at items in a brand’s catalog that I see more and more people wearing. If it matches with my own personal style, then I keep an eye on it/purchase it altogether.

What happened to cause the last mess you made? The last and current mess I have on me is my work desk, which I’ve since abandoned in favor of my bed + portable desk as my new workspace. Idk, over the Christmas break I just ended up stacking up so much shit on the desk until it became a little too cluttered. I’ve cleaned it up here and there to make the space look neater, but there’s still a lot of stuff.

Are you embarrassed to bring people into your bedroom? Not embarrassed; I just find it unnecessary. My bedroom is too small to host guests and the only times I’ve let someone in there is when I had a significant other. I prefer people to stay in the living room.

When was the last children's birthday party you attended? It was my third cousin Isabella’s 7th birthday party at a Jollibee. Her family has been living in Australia for a while, but I guess they wanted to host a party with their Filipino family so they flew back here to stay for a few days. Because she is my third cousin and because she’s been living in Australia all her life, I don’t actually have any sort of relationship with her lmao but I still made an effort to greet her and stuff.

Are you good at reading other people's body language? Yes, to the point that it contributes to my overall anxiety.

If you're sick, do you go to school or do you stay home [usually]? I rarely get a fever so when I do it feels like actual death. For that reason, I usually have to skip the day and focus on feeling better.

Does chicken noodle soup really make you feel any better? I never had it whenever I’ve felt like crap in the past. I don’t really like soup though, so on a personal level I doubt it would have any effect on me.

What is one meal that you like to eat whilst sick? I don’t have a go-to meal because again, I rarely get sick.

Think of the last survey you filled out; did you enjoy it? Sure, it was easy to digest and it’s the kind that you can take over and over again.

Have you ever fed bread to ducks or geese? I’ve fed bread, but to fish in the sea; not ducks or geese since idk if we have either here other than in zoos. In our trip to Mactan in 2010, I remember how we were allowed to pay a certain small amount to get bread from the resort and proceed to feed the fish swimming around in the beach.

Is it hard to imagine you were ever as small as a 1-2 year old? Yeah, I definitely feel that way sometimes.

What set the tone for your mood today? Eh, I wouldn’t say I had an overall mood today, honestly. It was a normal day at work, maybe a little more uneventful than other days; and I was on top of my tasks so there wasn’t anything to dread or worry about. I was just concentrated on getting the day over with and wasn’t strongly attached to any emotion.

Have you ever set out to ruin someone else's day? I don’t think so.

Have you ever felt like the whole world was against you? It happens sometimes.

The name of the last video game you played? Mario Kart 8 probably? It’s been a while but it’s all I play if I do play a video game, so it’s a safe guess.

The name of the last board game that you played? We whipped out my old box of Trivial Pursuit last November when we didn’t have electricity and internet because of the typhoon.

What was the last thing that you told yourself? I don’t remember the last time I talked to myself, but like two minutes ago I was starting to feel sad so I silently reminded myself to think of positive things.

How many times a day do you wash your face? At least once, in the morning before I start work. I’ve learned that cleaning myself up, even if it’s just splashing water on my face, super helps if I want to start working in a good mood.

Do you remember your D.A.R.E. officer's name? I didn’t have one of those, anddd I’m sure we didn’t have that program here.

Someone throws hot coffee on you; how do you react? It’s taken me a whole goddamn week to finish this survey, lels. Anywho... I think out of instinct I would scream out in extreme agony first? And I’d probably spend the first immediate seconds to try and process what just happened. I don’t know if I would fight back because I’m pretty sure the burns would be hurting too badly for me to focus on revenge.

Is there a high school or college that you would rather be attending? I attended one school from kindergarten to college, and I can’t imagine having attended anywhere else. I had one dream university and I ended up attending it.

Have you ever lived in an apartment or duplex home? Yes, both. My parents lived in an apartment for a few months when I was a newborn. From ages 2-10 I lived in my childhood home, which is actually a duplex. The other house belongs to my grandpa’s late sister and her family.

Has anyone ever commented on your weight? Sure, but I care so little about my weight that they don’t really have an effect on me. The most common one I get is to “eat more.”

Where do you stand when it comes to sexual intercourse? Erm not really lmao. Just do it?? Idk. And just make sure consent is mutual and that you aren’t doing it out of pressure.

Name a show from the 90's that you miss? I guess ‘miss’ is the wrong word since I never watched it while it was ongoing, but I do love Friends. I’m excited to see what they have planned for the reunion episode.

Who provokes your sarcastic side the most? Bad co-workers, but luckily I haven’t had to pull that side of me in a while.

Have you ever thought about joining the military? Never.

When you were little, did you ever stare at disabled or "different" people? Being a kid, I probably did but never thought anything of it during those times. My mom certainly would’ve whooped my ass if I tried to comment anything mean or be a smartass.

Could the contents of your bedroom get you in any trouble? The one thing that would piss my mom off are my vape pens. I still have Gab-related stuff in my room that I’m too lazy to throw out, but I doubt I will get into trouble from those anymore because there has been no relationship to speak of in the last four months.

Do weather patterns sometimes have an effect on your health? Not on my health, but on my mood.

If it snows a lot where you live, do you experience cabin fever? It doesn’t, so idk what this would feel like.

When was the last time someone disapproved of something you were doing? Not entirely sure; this hasn’t happened in a while. Admittedly, as a people pleaser, I thrive on doing what people would want me to do lol.

How good are you at getting along with other people? On a scale of 1 to 10, probably a 9? I’m super nice to everyone and in the end it only really boils down to whether I have chemistry with them or not. If I fail to feel comfortable around someone I’m more likely to stay formal, but I do try to be lively and crack jokes with everyone as much as I can.

Do you consider yourself to be approachable? I want to be and I always try to come off as such, but my resting bitchface hurts that chance sometimes haha.

Do you know anyone that's a little emotionally unstable? Uhm, no one comes to mind.

Have you ever felt like you were going out of your mind? Yes.

Has anyone ever suggested that you might need "help"? I don’t recall being told this by anyone before. But with the way I broadcast my anxiety and sadness from time to time, I’m sure people have thought of it.

Do you take offense to things easily? Yeah you can say that. I’ve always been more sensitive than most.

How do you respond to cheesy pick-up lines? As with any pick-up line, I inwardly roll my eyes and move on.

Do you like to give people a taste of their own medicine? It’s such a waste of time and energy for the most part, so no. But if I feel petty, I have no problem doing it.

How was the service at the last restaurant you visited? It was...fine. Nothing to write home about. It was unlimited Korean barbecue and they actually had a system in place where they gave us a link to some internal website they kept, and we could simply order from there to minimize contact with the servers. I will say that I never got the kimchi jjigae I had ordered, but it was fine because I was full by then lmao.

Are you ever jealous of happy couples? No. I mean, I guess I’m reminded of my loneliness when I see couples in public, but I don’t get jealous or angry. I just shake it off and try to focus on myself.

Describe a thought that is sticking with you today? That I can’t wait for Friday.

Lately, who has spent the most time on your mind? I’ve been thinking more of my anxieties than certain people, tbh.

In a car: air conditioning, or roll the windows down? Air conditioning. Though sometimes it’s nice to have the windows down, especially when I’m driving within my village or up a mountain.

When was the last time you did anything to your playlist? I made an angst-themed playlist over the weekend.

Is there a new song or band you've discovered? Massive Attack. Hayley Williams did a super great cover of their song Teardrop, so I checked out the original version which I also ended up enjoying. Olivia Rodrigo too, who I found out is part Filipino yay!

Which teacher gives you the most homework? My Journalism Ethics professor will probably rank the highest on this list.

What type of personality do you find most annoying? Idk, condescending ones maybe? There are a million kinds of personalities lol, but yeah I hate those who make you feel dumb, and feel good about doing so.

How did you hear about Bzoink? If my memory serves me correctly, my 10 year old self just wanted empty about me surveys to answer. Bzoink was always one of the first websites to come out if I searched for surveys on Google.

How long did it take you to sign up for an account - if you have one? I don’t think I ever made an account on there since I was too shy to share my answers.

Are you punctual? Yes, very.

Have you ever howled at the full moon? No.

Have you ever seen yourself on camera? Like if I’ve seen photos of myself??? I would be very surprised if anyone can say they haven’t.

Do you give any consideration to what's said in your horoscope? No.

When was the last time you felt like you were being followed? This has never happened before, thankfully.

[hydrus]

Version 428

windows

zip

exe

macOS

app

linux

tar.gz

I had a good couple weeks working on the taglist code and some other jobs.

If you are on Windows and use the 'extract' release, you may want to do a 'clean' install this week. Extra notes below.

taglists

So, I took some time to make taglists work a lot cleaner behind the scenes and support more types of data. A heap of code is cleaner, and various small logical problems related to menus are fixed. The tag right-click menu is also more compact, quicker to see and do what you want.

The main benefits though are in the manage tags dialog. Now, the '(will display as xxx)' sibling suffix colours in the correct namespace for the sibling, and parents 'hang' underneath all tags in all the lists. It is now much easier to see why a parent or sibling is appearing for a file.

This is a first attempt. I really like how these basically work, but it can get a bit busy with many tags. With the cleaner code, it will be much easier to expand in future. I expect to add 'expand/collapse parents' settings and more sorts, and maybe shade parents a bit transparent, in the coming weeks. Please let me know how it works for you IRL and I'll keep working.

the rest

The main nitter site seems to be overloaded. They have a bunch of mirrors listed here: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/wiki/Instances

I picked two roughly at random and added new downloaders for them. If you have Nitter subs, please move their 'sources' over, and they should start working again (they might need to do a bit of 'resync' and will complain about file limits being hit since the URLs are different, but give them time). If you would rather use another mirror, feel free to duplicate your own downloaders as well. Thanks to a user who helped here with some fixed-up parsers.

I gave the recently borked grouped 'status' sort in thread watchers and downloader pages another go, and I improved the reporting there overall. The 'working' status shouldn't flicker on and off as much, there is a new 'pending' status for downloaders waiting for a work slot, and the 'file status' icon column now shows the 'stop' symbol when files are all done.

The menu entry to 'open similar-looking files' is now further up on thumbnails' 'open' submenus.

The duplicate filter has its navigation buttons on the right-hand hover window rearranged a bit. It is silly to have both 'previous' and 'next' when there are only two files, so I merged them. You can also set 'view next' as a separate shortcut for the duplicate filter, if you want to map 'flip file' to something else just for the filter.

windows clean install

If you use the Windows installer, do not worry, these issues are fixed automatically for you from now on.

I updated to a new dev machine this week. Some libraries were updated, and there is now a dll conflict, where a dll from an older version is interfering with a new one. As it happens, the library that fails to load is one I made optional this week, so it doesn't ''seem'' to actually stop you from booting the client, but it will stop you from running the Client API in https if you never did it before (the library does ssl certificate generation).

It is good to be clean, so if you extract the Windows release, you may want to follow this guide this week: https://hydrusnetwork.github.io/hydrus/help/getting_started_installing.html#clean_installs

full list

interesting taglist changes:

taglists work way better behind the scenes

when siblings display with the '(will display as xxx)' suffix, this text is now coloured by the correct namespace!

parents now show in 'manage tags dialog' taglists! they show up just like in a write/edit tag autocomplete results list

the tag right-click menu has had a pass. 'copy' is now at the top, the 'siblings and parents' menu is split into 'siblings' and 'parents' with counts on the top menu label and the submenus for each merged, and the 'open in new page' commands are tucked into an 'open' submenu. the menu is typically much tighter than before

when you hit 'select files with these tags' from a taglist, the thumbgrid now takes keyboard focus if you want to hit F7 or whatever

custom tag presentation (_options->tag presentation_, when you set to always hide namespaces or use custom namespace separator in read/search views) is more reliable across the program. it isn't perfect yet, but I'll keep working

a heap of taglist code has been cleaned up. some weird logical issues should be better

now the code is nicer to work with, I am interested in feedback on how to further improve display and workflows here

.

the rest:

added two mirrors for nitter, whose main site is failing due to load. I added them randomly from the page here: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/wiki/Instances . if you have nitter subs, please move their download source to one of the mirrors or set up your own url classes to other mirror addresses. thanks to a user for providing other parser fixes here

gallery download pages now show the 'stop' character in the small file column when the files are done

gallery download pages now report their 'working' status without flicker, and they report 'pending' when waiting for a download slot (this situation is a legacy hardcoded bottleneck that has been confusing)

thread watchers also now have the concept of 'pending', and also report when they are next checking

improved the new grouped status sort on gallery downloader and watcher pages. the ascending order is now DONE, working, pending, checking later (for watchers), paused

the network request delay after a system resume is now editable under the new options->system panel. default is 15 seconds

the 'wait on files too' option is moved from 'files and trash' to this panel

when the 'just woke' status is active, you now get a little popup with a cancel button to override it

'open similar-looking files' thumbnail menu entry is moved up from file relationships to the 'open' menu

the duplicate filter right-hand hover window no longer has both 'previous' and 'next' buttons, since they both act as 'flip', and the merged button is moved down, made bigger, and has a new icon

added 'view next' to the duplicate filter shortcut set, so you can set a custom 'flip between pair' mapping just for that filter

thanks to a user helping me out, I was able to figure out a set of lookups in the sibling/parent system that were performing unacceptably slow for some users. this was due to common older versions of sqlite that could not optimise a join with a multi-index OR expression. these queries are now simpler and should perform well for all clients. if your autocomplete results from a search page with thumbs were achingly slow, let me know how they work now!

the hydrus url normalisation code now treats '+' more carefully. search queries like 6+girls should now work correctly on their own on sites where '+' is used as a tag separator. they no longer have to be mixed with other tags to work

.

small/specific stuff:

the similar files maintenance search on shutdown now reports file progress every 10 files and initialises on 0. it also has faster startup time in all cases

when a service is deleted, all currently open file pages will check their current file and tag domains and update to nicer defaults if they were pointed at the now-missing services

improved missing service error handling for file searches in general--this can still hit an export folder pointed at a missing service

improved missing service error handling for tag autocomplete searches, just in case there are still some holes here

fixed a couple small things in the running from source help and added a bit about Visual Studio Build Tools on Windows

PyOpenSSL is now optional. it is only needed to generate the crt/key files for https hosting. if you try to boot the server or run the client api in https without the files and without the module available to generate new ones, you now get a nice error. the availability of this library is now in the client's about window

the mpv player will no longer throw ugly errors when you try to seek on a file that its API interface cannot support

loading a file in the media viewer no longer waits on the file system lock on the main thread (it was, very briefly), so the UI won't hang if you click a thumb just after waking up or while a big file job is going on

the 'just woke' code is a little cleaner all around

the user-made downloader repository link is now more obvious on Lain's import dialog

an old hardcoded url class sorting preference that meant gallery urls would be matched against urls before post, and post before file, is now eliminated. url classes are now just preferenced by number of path components, then how many parameters, then by example url length, with higher numbers matching first (the aim is that the more 'specific' and complicated a url class, the earlier it should attempt to match)

updated some of the labelling in manage tag siblings and parents

when you search autocomplete tags with short inputs, they do not currently give all 'collapsed' matching results, so an input of 'a' or '/a/' does not give the '/a/' tag. this is an artifact of the new search cache. after looking at the new code, there is no way I can currently provide these results efficiently. I tested the best I could figure out, but it would have added 20-200ms lag on all PTR searches, so instead I have made a plan to resurrect an old cache in a more efficient way. please bear with me on this problem

tag searches that only include unusual characters like ? or & are now supported without having to lead the query with an asterisk. they will be slower than normal text search

fixed a bug in the 'add tags before import' dialog for local imports where deleting a 'quick namespace' was not updating the tag list above

.

windows clean install:

I moved to a new windows dev machine this week and a bunch of libraries were updated. I do not believe the update on Windows _needs_ a clean install this week, as a new dll conflict actually hits the coincidentally now-optional PyOpenSSL, but it is worth doing if you want to start using the Client API soon, and it has been a while, so let's be nice and clean. if you extract the release on Windows, please check out this guide: https://hydrusnetwork.github.io/hydrus/help/getting_started_installing.html#clean_installs

the Windows installer has been updated to remove many old files. it should now do clever clean installs every week, you have nothing to worry about!™

.

boring db breakup:

the local tags cache, which caches tags for your commonly-accessed hard drive files, is now spun off to its own module

on invalid tag repair, the new master tags module and local tags cache are now better about forgetting broken tags

the main service store is spun off to its own module. several instances of service creation, deletion, update and basic fetching are merged and cleaned here. should improve a couple of logical edge cases with update and reset

.

boring taglist changes:

taglists no longer manage text and predicates, but a generalised item class that now handles all text/tag/predicate generation

taglist items can occupy more than one row. all position index calculations are now separate from logical index calculations in selection, sizing, sorting, display, and navigation

all taglist items can present multiple colours per row, like OR predicates

items are responsible for sibling and parent presentation, decoupling a heap of list responsibility mess

tag filter and tag colour lists are now a separate type handled by their own item types

subordinate parent predicates (as previously shown just in write/edit autocomplete result lists) are now part of multi-row items. previously they were 'quiet' rows with special rules that hung beneath the real result. some related selection/publish logic is a bit cleaner now

string tag items are now aware of their parents and so can present them just like autocomplete results in write/edit contexts

the main taglist content update routines have significantly reduced overhead. the various expansions this week add some, so we'll see how this all shakes out

the asynchronous sibling/parent update routine that populates sibling and parent data for certain lists is smarter and saves more work when data is cached

old borked out selection/hitting-skipping code that jumped over labels and parents is now removed

'show siblings and parents' behaviour is more unified now. basically they don't show in read/search, but do in write/edit

a heap of bad old taglist code has been deleted or cleaned up

next week

This was a big couple of weeks. Setting up the new dev machine--I replaced my six year old HP office computer with a nice mini-pc with an SSD--worked out great, but there were some headaches as always. The taglist work was a lot too. I'll take next week a little easier, just working misc small jobs.

[wardencommanderrodimiss]

Witches, Chapter 23: a long overdue reunion, and reckoning. 

[Seelie of Kurain Chapter Masterlist] [ao3]

[Witches Chapter Masterlist] [ao3]

----

Phoenix wakes with his phone buzzing beneath his pillow like someone is calling and letting it ring to eternity, but when he brings it, still vibrating, into sight, there is only a location printed on the small screen. He punches the keyboard to text back K and rolls out of bed. How does texting the fae work anyway, he wonders. He’s wondered it for years and never asked. Does the text float up in her mind visually, or does she hear his voice in her head? And what voice would she hear if it was someone else texting from his phone? His or theirs? 

As he blinks to ease the heaviness of sleep from his eyes, the red lights of his bedside clock tell him it’s not even 5:30. 

Damn it all, Maya.

She’s left him with no indication of what this is about, how long it will be - if he’ll have time to make it back here before work to change into his suit. After a few seconds more thought he puts on jeans and a t-shirt, in case she shoves him in a lake, and if he’s late to the office then he’s late. He leaves a note for Trucy on the table so she’s not surprised when she gets up for school, and he slips out of the apartment into the dark Los Angeles morning, with no idea what awaits him. 

It could be a conversation about Thalassa. After he saw her he called Pearl and told her everything that had happened that he thought could help, and she promised that she would tell Maya everything. And then he told Pearl plenty more that he knew wasn’t related to magic much at all. He has no one else to talk to about Thalassa, no human he can ask for advice. Maybe the reverse is creating a serious problem, too - that Thalassa has no one at all, besides Phoenix, and she doesn’t want to divulge too much in case it leads him to do something reckless. Is “therapist specialized in magic people” too niche of an occupation to make a living out of? Even if it’s not, the only person he has to float that idea by is Athena, and - like hell he would. That’s a can of worms he isn’t unpacking. 

It’s been a week since then. Maya could’ve called him if she had thoughts on Thalassa - or more than likely, relayed a message to Pearl to get back to Phoenix. He’s spoken more with them in these past eleven months than they had for the last five years, but it’s always Phoenix reaching out with a new quandary that goes through one of the others. For Maya to reach back, stretch her hand out across the gulf - he’d expect it to take more than this. 

Unless she’s figured something out. And even then she could have called.

Or she’s figured something out and wants to push him in a lake. No one ever said she’s not capable of holding two thoughts in her head at the same time.

The years have not been kind to Gourd Lake. It was a nice park in the springs and summers, when the trees flowered and the grass covered the ground in full, and even when the winters turned the lakeside sparse and gray, there were enough people who passed through to give it some sort of life. But it collected its share of incidents, all after Larry broke the seal and released an actual lake monster in the course of trying to set up a hot dog stand, and some time after the (phony!) president of Zheng Fa was nearly assassinated there, the cold, unlucky heart of the lake pooled outward, and whether people consciously decided it had too much of a reputation or made the decision without really knowing why, they started to find other places for summer picnics.

It was always a gross lake that no one would go swimming in, anyway. Far too much mud and weeds.

Around the lake it gets chilly sooner in the year than other parts of the city, and the still morning air turns crisp as Phoenix walks up the main path, through the trees whose leaves yellow and flutter down onto the patchy grass below. Nature overtook the old boathouse years ago, and no one ever tried to repossess the boats for other things; Gourd Lake is now a BYOB (bring your own boat) lake, and algae and rot and nesting wild geese laid claim to Yanni Yogi’s fleet. Trucy says the rumor at school is that said boathouse is a certifiably haunted structure and that her classmates dare each other all the time to break in and never do, as afraid of the geese as they are of ghosts.

If those investigation days with Maya, both of them stressed to hell and Edgeworth’s life on the line, hadn’t carved the full map of Gourd Lake in his mind, he wouldn’t know where to push through the bushes to find the old boathouse. The woods had almost a life of their own the way they swallowed it up so thoroughly, almost like the park itself wanted to erase it. He bats aside branches and knocks leaves from them, and after wading into the thicket finds a bit of a thin path where the foliage hasn’t been trampled down but has moved aside, as though of its own accord. Like the branches are all tied back with invisible strings. 

With the boathouse in view, he starts to notice frost on the ground, as patchy as the withering grass. All of the colors of the woods seem desaturated and muted, overlaid by a brown filter - everything except a few scattered flowers caught up in the bushes like someone carelessly plucked them from a bouquet and tossed them to land wherever. He recognizes these flowers; couldn’t for the life of him name them, but their thin red petals and spindly spidery red thin - whatever they are that pop up from the center of the flower, are pretty distinct. His grandparents told him that they were flowers that back in Japan meant death. They had them at their funerals, and even if they weren’t all that, they’re, well - Maya’s flower. The ones that show up in a ring when she shows up, unbidden by everyone but herself.

(He’s not sure what to think about the “death” connotation, especially when the fae of the Winter Court came to LA by way of Japan, too.)

And there she is, sitting cross-legged on the dock that is collapsed half into the lake. Paying no mind to the edge of her long ivory-colored skirt trailing into the lake, or the ends of her sash slipping through the gaps in the dock, she holds her hands stretched out in front of her, palms flat over the water about a foot above the surface. Her hair is a billowing, insubstantial cloud of smoke around her head; six orbs like pearls float around her face, the arc of the two sets of three meeting in the center at her magatama that pulses with a soft rainbow of light. The water freezes in a thin sheet of ice that cracks apart and melts and refreezes beneath her hands and the sharp white claws at her fingertips. Her mouth, moving silently, has the shape of any human’s mouth, a normal one, until she lets out an audible scream of frustration. All of her red eyes snapp open bright against her pastel purple skin, and her mouth splits across her face in a wide slash of teeth. The ice breaks apart for the last time and the water goes still; Maya’s hair coalesces into a sheet of inky black, tumbling back down around her shoulders, solid and subject again to gravity.

“What were you trying to do?” Phoenix asks, standing at the water’s edge where the dock meets the shore, unsure if the old wood will also take his weight. 

“Maybe it’s the water,” Maya mumbles, reaching into one of her sleeves and producing a small scroll which she unravels and passes her hand over the scribblings on it. The mixture of English and Japanese and some other symbols that Phoenix can’t ascribe to any known language changes beneath her fingers into new sloppy marks. Even her magical writing can’t fix her atrocious handwriting. “Because the way it translates could either be a specific kind of water that isn’t named because it was assumed everyone would know it, or water, general, any…” She drums her claws on the scroll and more words and characters appear in the margins around what was already written. 

“Maya?” he asks, again, now considering that she’s ignoring him on purpose.

“There’s this new spell I’m trying - new old spell, it’s absolutely ancient and that’s why I’m having issues with what the components are.” She shuffles the scroll back into a roll and slides it back up her sleeve. “The language it’s written in is imprecise so at this point I have to experiment and hope that it doesn’t go catastrophically wrong.”

“Is this spell what you called me out here to talk about?” Phoenix asks. “Or just something you’re working on while you waited for me, which is why we’re—” He gestures around at the lake, at the boathouse, at the boats half sunken into the murky brown water. He’s not sure this location is haunted-haunted the way people generally refer to such - there’s no ghost, a floating white translucent figure, in the boathouse, but there are ghosts, memories with cold teeth, all around them. 

He doesn’t really want to be out here. He can hear it in the breeze: don’t forget DL-6. 

She pops up onto her feet in one quick motion, swinging her skirt out of the water; the cloth has no muddy stain like it should. The purple drains from her skin, her mouth shrinking, and her extra eyes close up and the two that remain gain whites and dark centers. “Hi, Nick, long time no see!” she says, and the cheery chirp of her voice doesn’t sound right. Sarcasm sours every word. “I’m doing all right! How are you? See, isn’t it nice to take the time to catch up with someone you haven’t talked to ages, rather than just trying to get right down to the point as though we’re merely business associates and not friends? That’s pretty rude, don’t you think?”

“Hi, Maya,” he says, and if he does ask her how she is now, she’s just going to go in for another round of mocking. The only good choice would have been, as she says, starting with the friendly greeting. But she also woke him up hours early and dragged him all the way out here, and being terse is somewhat justified. Isn’t it?

“I realized something, the other day, when Pearly caught me up on what’s going on with your siren.” Maya clasps her hands behind her back, turning away from Phoenix to look out over the water. “Memories are, in no small part, connected to the mitamah, which is why our changed child in question has the trouble that she does. Time, distance, whatever, that part isn’t super important right now. I mean, this isn’t actually about her, what I’m working on right now. I’ll get back to her. But this is important - Nick this is a revelation!” She spins around, robes and hair all swirling wide, red excitement beaming through her dark eyes. “I finally understand! I was looking in the wrong places - I kept trying to understand ghosts, like Sis, or if there was - necromancy, such a thing, or a way to channel and commune with the dead - but it wasn’t ever really about that! It’s not - it’s not an active conversation like I thought it must have been. It’s about memory!”

“What is?” Phoenix asks. He has honestly never quite understood how it works, when they talk about studying and learning new magic. He pictures like a vast library full of very ancient archival texts, but that has always seemed too accessible, for a society as hierarchal and stratified as the fae. Knowledge is power, and anyone else gaining power is greater odds of a knife in the back. And for all Maya is willing to go on and on like this about what she’s learned, she never ends up saying how. 

“What my mother did! During the DL-6 investigation!”

The breeze skims across the surface of the water, sending ripples to the shore where they break against the old wooden boats. 

Phoenix steps out onto the dock. Ice clings to the edges of it, over the algae. The question has puzzled them for years: the official police reports, the ones Redd White leaked, said that the fae that helped them “spoke” with the victim to gain insight that Yanni Yogi was the killer. But Phoenix and Maya can’t even speak with Mia - well, she can’t speak with them - and contacting the human dead is far beyond any magic any of them have ever known. It had seemed one last part of the case would never be solved.

“I haven’t been able to duplicate it.” Maya covers her mouth with her hand. Her fingers still have claws. “But there’s a spell, a very old bit of magic, that can call up the last memories of a dead person, human or fae. That must be what my mother did! She must have known this, and known what the key was - water is the important physical component, but—”

“You don’t know what kind,” Phoenix says, recalling her earlier mutterings. 

“Right. I’ve tried ocean water, water from the falls in the mountains, water from the cave under Mount Mitama which is technically ocean water - none of it worked. I came out here to see if water with some sort of connection to the victim was the answer - it was Gourd Lake, or fill a bowl up with tap water and go sit in the courthouse elevator.”

“I’m sure the courthouse has seen weirder,” Phoenix says, “but it’s probably better that you didn’t.”

Maya joins him on the part of the dock that still stands above the lake and she sits leaning up against the boathouse, patting the spot next to her. He still doubts its stability, but if he keeps standing, he’s that much more liable to be pushed into the lake, and after weighing those odds, he sits down next to her. For a moment they’re both sitting cross-legged on the office floor, leaning up against the couch that’s piled high with case notes and takeout containers, formulating a trial plan as the television spouts some news neither of them pay attention to.

“This is magic ancient enough that it would have come with us from the Summer Court when we left,” Maya explains. “Which could be another reason I’m having trouble with it. The water might be from their waterfalls, or something special - it raises the question of how my mother knew, it’ll be something else to look into once we find the Summer Court.”

“There’s no records about where they’re located?” Phoenix asks.

“It’s active erasure - they didn’t allow us to know. There’s - from the seat of the Winter Court, I can sense the Vernal and Autumn Courts, if we” - she gestures between Phoenix and herself - “didn’t already know by family history where they’re at, but there’s just a bit fat block shutting us away from the Summer Court. And if I were to start pushing up against that wall, they’ll respond in kind - I’ll do it, of course, but I’m waiting for the solstice when we’re strongest and they’re weakest to try.”

“I guess, with the Winter Court being the Winter Court’s own worst enemies, I should have expected that you’d be on bad terms with the others.”

“Fae are fae’s worst enemies.” Maya brushes her hair back behind her shoulder. “And I kind of - um, intentionally obfuscate the history, when I say we left the Summer Court. It was a lot more like an exile. My branch of the family went to war for the throne and lost and there’s a legend that when we were thrown out we lost the ability to use certain kinds of magic but I’ve got no idea what those might be or if that part of the tale got twisted after all this time. I’m sure we could figure out all the nuances of what to do with mitamahs if we had more than me and my two cousins who are trying anything more than just grabbing it with brute force to be stronger.” She picks at a loose splinter on the dock. “Speaking of powers and exile, by the way, we must have seriously underestimated how powerful Magnifi was, all this time.”

“What do you mean?” Phoenix asks. “When did you find this out?”

Maya waves a hand dismissively. “A while ago, but you haven’t been in touch. It occurred to me, with the way the siren is still alive and walking around - having your soul taken doesn’t just make you immortal. Your heart stops working, you’re still stuck. When she was shot, someone had to heal her - Magnifi would have had to heal her, patch her up just enough. But healing magic is - Pearly barely knows a little, and she’s the best of us at it. It’s hard. And Magnifi should’ve lost most of his power on exile, but no, he could just…” She makes another dismissive hand gesture. 

“He healed her and then just - sent her away?” Phoenix asks. Maya shrugs. Maybe once he realized her memory was unstable, he decided that her death as blackmail was more valuable than her life. “Could having hold of her soul have given him enough strength to do that sort of thing? The healing, the—”

“Could be. Then there’s the little pocket dimension he had set up for the Gramarye hideaway - that’s another real tricky thing. And then, your daughter, he bound a wisp to her for her to be able to control, gave her a blessing - a blessing to the siren, too, because I can’t imagine he would’ve thought Truth was useful before they entered the human world, sure it sometimes helps when someone’s hiding something but only sometimes - anyway. Good thing he’s been dead as long as we’ve known of him, else us underestimating him could’ve gone badly.”

And now he’s just another man causing problems for them long after his death.

“It was real brave of your daughter to reject her family’s legacy of so much hurt,” Maya adds, “but it’s unfortunate that it’s made this all so much more difficult.”

“What do you mean?” She’s never not jumped between different thoughts like this, but with so much to catch up on, it’s harder to follow than ever.

“Ownership of that mitamah should’ve gone to her. I mean, that was how it was supposed to work - Magnifi’s power gets passed down to chosen successors, that’s the plan. And if your little magician had accepted it - not to say she should have, just had she - then that soul would belong to her and she could do what she wanted with it, like give it back. Instead she rejected it, and Magnifi has no other heir by the legal standard he chose to set an heir by, so we’re left with - a mitamah is always supposed to have an owner.”

“But it’s just floating loose?”

“Exactly. And that’s why none of us know how to put it back. If someone owned it, they could set that term to give it back, but no one owns it and it isn’t naturally returning, either.”

He’s going to do his damndest to keep Trucy from learning this particular fact. She doesn’t need to feel worse about her family, doesn’t need to know that turning away from its legacy of pain still ends up continuing another kind of pain. “You’ve been busy, huh. Getting all this figured out.”

It’s treacherous ground he approaches, that yawning chasm of eight years between them. How much did she learn in that time, only to wait until now to catch him up on it? Even just what she must have discovered in the past year—

“I’ve wondered all this time why my mother helped the police with their investigation of DL-6,” Maya says, her eyes vacant and her claws tearing up new splinters from the dock. “Simply assuming that she was nearest to their summons never felt like an answer. I knew whatever she did was magic beyond my wildest imaginings, and she used it in the course of a human’s murder investigation. What could the police have offered her?” A small slice of wood snaps. She tosses it into the water where it floats in the midst of a tangle of reeds and matted fallen leaves. “She knew him, beforehand, Gregory Edgeworth. I found that out, asking around - the office that still uses his name, you know.”

“Mr Shields?” Phoenix asks, too confused about why Maya is going down this path to protest it. Ray’s never said, exactly, that he’s had close brushes with the fae before, but even if Phoenix didn’t have the Sight it would be obvious by the way he acts when the topic comes up.

“He mentioned - and I realized that was my mother. I know her only well enough to recognize her ghost.” Maya spits the last sentence like it’s a bitter taste, and when she pulls her hand away from the dock to rest it in her lap, the deep scratches of her claws in the old wood show her agitation. “And now when I’ve realized about what kind of magic she used, when I started trying it myself” - she gestures out at the water, and a faint trail of frost follows along the surface after the movement of her hand - “that left me another big question about that entire affair. What did she see, that the answer she gave to the police was, Yanni Yogi is the killer.”

Phoenix wishes he had even a clue where she’s taking this conversation.

Maya holds her hand up and starts ticking off the facts of the case on her fingers as she speaks. “Lawyer and bailiff were arguing and because of that, the son throws a gun. It makes impact with the ground and misfires. Gunshot, scream, he passes out. The other two must have moments later, else Yogi could have testified to who really committed the murder, or my mother viewing Gregory’s last moments would have seen von Karma. Is there really no difference between watching a man fall unconscious through his eyes, and watching him die, that she could have thought that first gunshot killed him? Wouldn’t she have known the scream was not his?”

Maya’s hands sink back into her lap. “She did not know any objective truth of the crime. She should not have been able to lay blame.”

“But she did,” Phoenix says.

“What were her words? Did she tell them it ‘most likely’ would have been Yogi? The police could have figured that for themselves - would they have accepted a vague answer from her? Or did she speak with certainty because she refused to entertain the idea that the son had killed his father?”

Maya’s mother left the Court long before DL-6 happened; her abandonment of her daughters was a refusal to play the Court’s game that time and again saw parent pit against child for a sliver more of power and status. She refused to consider the prospect of having to kill her daughters. (And Mia, down the line, forfeit the throne to her sister rather than worry that she might try to take it by force, rather than consider killing her now to prevent it and keep it for herself.) 

There in the human realm, with a crime scene photograph and a dead man, did Maya’s mother again reject that concept, that possibility of patricide? Was it to save someone else’s son from that fate the way she tried to spare her daughters?

(Maya hadn’t thought much of her mother until she realized that, unlike most fae parents, her mother truly loved her, and then she like Mia wanted to find her, and then it was too late.)

“As she knew Gregory Edgeworth prior, she must have known how he loved his son,” Maya says. Phoenix’s throat tightens. He remembers - well, he remembers very little, is the tragedy. He better remembers von Karma’s steamroller objections, the furious wounded scream of a man finally beaten, the photograph of the  inside of the elevator. “And I keep thinking, when I wonder what the police offered her, I am not sure that they did. Offer anything, I mean. I think she did this for - I think she must have respected him enough, or—”

She shakes her head, clears her throat, and it sounds rather like a growl. “She used magic that no one else in the Winter Court could have dreamed of. However she learned it, whenever she did, magic that powerful you don’t do on a whim. What’s equal payment for that? What could the cops have bargained with? Dignity doesn’t fetch a high price these days - they lost that on their own, my mother was involved in why, certainly, but not to blame - and the LAPD has never quite had a good name that they could sell.” She frowns, her eyes flashing. “And all they had was professional pride at stake, and people do nasty shit for that, but none of them are gonna be personally selling their souls or names for it, right?”

Manfred von Karma, Matt Engarde, Blaise Debeste, Kristoph Gavin - all monsters for their pride, to uphold their names and reputations, but none of them sold their souls for it. Maya’s right. Someone seeking out the fae for a matter they have little emotional investment in will draw a much firmer line than the frantic and desperate with personal problems they hope magic can solve, the kind of person who gets tangled in lopsided bargains and dangerous debts.

“So why would she do it?” Maya presses a contemplative finger to her mouth. 

It seems only like supposition, that Maya is building a case on, a theory that there wasn’t an offer, or a good offer, made. That her mother wasn’t the kind to help for the sake of helping. (Mia saved Phoenix’s life but he could help her convict Dahlia in return. Mia was already a lawyer then. Before Elise became Elise, the artist, what was she? How did she care for humans?) But the fae know things and Maya, sometimes, knows things she doesn’t know how. This is her mother, the last queen, and maybe it’s more than supposition. Maybe she knows and doesn’t know she knows. 

“But if it was me,” she continues, “when would I do that, for chump change? If it was you - you asking me, or you were the one that died - if I knew that magic, and it was you, then I would. So I think, why my mother ever got involved in DL-6, like I said, it was about Gregory Edgeworth. That she must have respected him enough, or loved him enough, that she would—” Maya sighs. She leans her chin on her hand. “I think damned doomed defense attorneys just have a draw for my family, whether to befriend them or become them.”

Or be the one who damns them, but besides Dahlia, Maya’s formula fits. And even if he presumes that she has given thought to this again because of the relevance of the memory matter, there’s still a reason she’s telling him this, and now. Of course he’d like to know, and she’d know that: they can never fully lay DL-6 truly to rest. It will always matter to them. But that can’t be all she’s thinking, because even with Maya it’s never just the surface level. There’s a moral to the story buried in its timing, or simply in that last sentence. 

“Hey, Nick,” she says, her voice softer and less confident than before. “You remember when you were arrested for my sis’ murder, and that got me out of jail - and you told me you knew who did it, and you told me who. And I could’ve done anything that night you spend in jail. I knew what monster had killed my sister and tried to blame me and then blame you when you were the only person in the world on my side. I could have killed him. I really thought about it.” Maya pulls her knees in close to herself. “I really wanted to. But it wasn’t what Sis would’ve done. She could’ve killed him for everything she knew he did, but instead she spent years trying to bring him to justice through human courts. And if I killed him, then your name would never be cleared.”

Has that honestly ever occurred to him? He didn’t know Maya well enough to worry what she would do; and then once he did know her, he didn’t look back. Not to that. Not to ever notice it was weird that all she did, knowing the identity of the man putting them through hell, was go home to Mia’s office and put together the last pieces of the case, that list of names, on Phoenix’s behalf, because Mia wrote a note that asked her to. 

“You told me you didn’t want me to,” Maya says, staring at her hands, fingers hooked together in front of her knees hugged up to her chest. “You said you wanted to know why he did it. I wouldn’t have killed Kristoph Gavin, not as long as you live and have a name that needed clearing. I’m fae, not a monster! All you had to do was trust me! That would’ve been easier than binding and banishing me to stay away!” She doesn’t stand up but she unfolds herself so that she is kneeling on the dock, her hands balled up in the fabric of her robes in her lap. 

“I kept everyone out of it,” Phoenix says. It isn’t difficult to meet her eyes, even as smouldering red simmers up from their depths. This is a conversation he’s had before, justification he’s made to others and himself time and again. “It wasn’t just you. I didn’t want Kristoph to feel like he was being investigated like he would if all my friends started coming to him if I told them something was up. I didn’t want to tip my hand too soon.

More threatening than her glittering glare is her silence, because this is Maya, and Maya isn’t silent. He keeps talking even through his awareness that the longer he goes on justifying himself to her uncharacteristically stern face, the higher his chances of saying something regrettable. “And you especially - Kristoph hates the Court. You getting involved at all would just have been ugly.”

(When an orca tried to help her people, with those big teeth of hers, it looked like she was doing more harm. It saved no one, and made a more complicated mess of the truth in the end. But she wanted to help. She was an orca. What else could an orca do to help?)

“And you could think of nowhere else in your life that your friends are welcome - it’s help you investigate or nothing? No room for us otherwise? Not unless we’re usable by you?”

“That’s not at all what this was! And you know it, and you know you’re deliberately misinterpreting it.” This is what he’s been waiting for - the confrontation, the fight, about the years of distance between them. When she left him a message he expected that she was finally tired of him calling her and her family up for favors from a distance, that she was finally ready to indict him for it, and her restraint so far has been surprising. “I was afraid something would happen to you! Like I was afraid for Edgeworth! And I had to figure out how to raise a daughter! And you had a kingdom to rule! To reform its treatment of humans from the ground up, didn’t you tell me you were going to do that? When the hell were you planning time to watch kids’ shows at my office in the midst of all that!” 

She bares her teeth at him but doesn’t make a verbal response more than a hiss. 

“Besides,” he adds, furious but not at her, and rather furious that she’s tricked him into anger, “you can’t blame me for not trusting that you would leave Kristoph alone! You tried to talk me out of looking for the reason why he did what he did! You can’t blame me for thinking that the reason you wanted me to give up was so I would be fine with you killing him!”

“So what was his reason?” she demands. Her teeth have lengthened to points, her second small set of red eyes opening up at the outer corner of her main ones. “How about those locks, Nick, did you break them, did you find out why!” 

He doesn’t even know why the locks were black. “I cleared my name,” he says. “I’m a lawyer again.”

“Yeah, would’ve loved to hear that from you.” Maya jabs a finger that lacks a claw into his chest, the spot where his lapel would be, where his badge would go. 

“I…” He has no good answer to this one. It didn’t sink in, it didn’t sink in, and then he was busy on a case with no other thoughts to spare. He didn’t tell Larry. Edgeworth did. He didn’t tell Maya. Pearl did. And then they knew and there was no point to calling. Right?

She prods him several times more in the same spot, for emphasis, and then she yanks her hand away and furiously rubs at her eyes. Shit, is she crying? Before he can really tell, she is on her feet, staggering clumsily, her claws tearing rifts in the boathouse wall when she steadies her wobbling. Standing with her back to him, the movements of her arms tell him she is still wiping her eyes. Shit, she is crying. “You left me alone!” Her voice rings shrill out through the predawn silence. “You sent me away and left me alone! Like my mother left me! Like Sis did! You were supposed to be different! You could be different! Because you’re human!”

He’s a lawyer. He always tries to have a counterargument. He always tries to have anything to say, anything except the admission of wrongdoing, because that’s an admission that there is something that should be repaid. The fae don’t apologize. Humans don’t apologize to fae. Those become debts.

“Maya…”

“You were the one who wasn’t supposed to go away! You were the one - you’re my friend!” Maya’s hands drop to her sides. When she turns around, her skin is purple again, much harder to tell if her face was starting to redden and go blotchy. “I love Pearly with my whole heart but she’ll never be my friend, not really. She cares too much about our tradition and our hierarchy and thrones to ever look at me as an equal.”

“I know,” Phoenix says, not really to that, but to everything, to the fact that she’s more right than she is wrong and he’s the one who’s made a mess with almost everyone he’s loved in the past eight years. “But times change. We change.” The fae might hate change, strive to stop it from happening, but they still do. “We’ve both got all sorts of other responsibilities. Even if - it was never going to be the same way it was, when it was just the two of us and the office.”

“No,” she agrees, “but the problem wasn’t that we were different. It was that we” - she gestures back and forth between them - “were nothing at all.”

“Yeah. I…” He sighs. “I know I’ve not been a good friend.” He can’t even stick the lately qualifier on it. Eight years is not lately. “Not to you.” Or to Larry either, if he’s already thinking about this. He and Larry both know that they’re each closer to Edgeworth than they are each other. They knew that years ago. Maybe ever since Larry admitted that he was the one who had stolen Edgeworth’s lunch money, and all those years never told Phoenix that.

“You definitely have not.” Even if he said it, her echo of it hurts more than he expected. Maya sighs, equally heavy to his, and she sinks back to the dock next to him, leaning one shoulder against the side of the boathouse. “At least you figured out how to be a good father, Pearly says.”

Maya can’t say, really, because Maya hasn’t seen him, and him and Trucy, enough to know. Whether it’s that she’s thinking about, or something else, she goes quiet for a while, and they watch the sky slowly lighten from the faint but unerring approach of the sun up from beneath the horizon. Yellow autumn leaves fall with the breeze, landing in the water and casting ripples out from the impact. Maya reaches out and snags a leaf from the air, her claws puncturing its fragile surface. 

“I’m sorry,” Phoenix says. It feels like a deeper debt he’s leaving open if he doesn’t say it; she couldn’t collect on silence, but his guilt would still be there and that’s a hell of a thing, guilt. For some things he’s said today, and some things he’s said eight years ago, and for some silence over eight years. 

“I am too,” she says. “That you’re a jerk and that you didn’t trust me and that any of this happened and that we're both too petty to ever try and talk it out since. I kept wanting to hate you and I never could and I just got too tired to be angry.”

He had expected that anger, had wanted to wait for her to reach out, afraid that if he tried, she would be furious with him anew and tear him apart - this lack of yelling this morning was not the expectation. Maybe she’s matured - somehow, as queen in the pettiest, cruelest environment of them all, she’s grown up. Enough that she acknowledged her own failings there too, a little, even if she put the onus more on him. Deserve it as he might.

She catches another leaf and rips it apart and drops the pieces one by one in the lake. “I tried to do a lot of hating of you guys over the years. Sure I was mad at you, but it - it was more than that, considering when it was, you know? Just after - just not that long after…” She clears her throat. “I tried to hate them too, my mother and Sis, for leaving me to the throne, for making me be queen because if not me then it’s Pearly and I can’t make her do that. But I just kept thinking instead that I never knew either of them really. That you got more time with Sis than I did.”

And that time - and still, what would Phoenix do for more time with Mia? Real, actual time to learn from her, to speak to her and hear her voice in return, to share the office with someone more than a ghost. He had more time with her than Maya and now it still feels like nothing at all. 

“There’s something I wanted to ask you, because I’ve said everything else, because I kept thinking about her,” Maya says, and the pace of her voice picks up, faster and faster, the frantic way of someone who expects to be rejected in what they are saying. “And you don’t need to answer me now, you can think about it and get back to me, and whatever questions you have we can figure out, but—” She inhales sharply. “But um, whenever you die - whenever that’s gonna be, in another hundred years or whatever—”

What’s a human lifespan, anyway, and why would she have bothered to figure it out in the decade she’s been friends with humans. Maya’s relationship with the passage of time is like Edgeworth’s with money: barely an inkling that they, and not the rest of the world, are the odd ones out. I said a month, and it’s been two days; what do you mean you thought it’s been more than a month already? - What do you mean, a private jet?

“—Whenever that happens, can I have your heart?”

Phoenix knew that whatever she was asking was going to be bad, messy, ugly, and a bit terrifying, when the question started with “whenever you die”, but somehow this exceeds his worst expectations. He pictures her holding it bloody in her claws, or maybe, less messy but no less morbid, the Mary Shelley route, with a calcified heart instead. (Iris read Frankenstein in one of her literature courses, and thought the story of Shelley keeping the supposed remains of her dead husband’s heart was as romantic as anything could be. Phoenix had not agreed, exactly, though he also hadn’t argued, exactly, either; his aversion to the gothic horror of carrying around a loved one’s heart had wilted in the face of his infatuation and the giddy glee that she might like him enough to want a memento of him if something happened. Ironically back when his heart was still soft enough that it would burn up on a pyre, not like he is now, a hard rock that could survive the flames.)

“What?” he asks. “My heart?” 

“I mean,” she says, quickly, hurrying to get the words out but weirdly casual all the whole, “I’m not gonna ask you for your soul. Even if that’s where your memories are and memories are be the best way to know Sis - that’s your soul. I can’t just take that.”

Now there’s a statement that he would never expect one of the fae to make. Maya, always surprising him. 

“You’d just be worried that I’d make a mess with it after your death and end up bringing you back because your soul’s still kicking around,” she adds. “But your heart - all the feelings in there, even separated from memories, those still - you don’t ever truly forget some things. Some people.” Thalassa might disagree. Then again - Thalassa, devoid of memory, separated from her children, taking Machi under her wing and making him an inseparable part of herself, mothering an orphan even if she didn’t remember she was a mother herself. Kay, no idea at all who she was, but concerned enough about Edgeworth’s well-being that she would gladly be arrested if it caused less trouble for him. Phoenix himself, defending Maggey, not knowing he was a lawyer but still knowing that if he didn’t help her than no one else would do it right.

So then maybe Maya’s correct enough. “And I could figure enough out from your heart,” she continues. “And it wouldn’t - if you’re gone, you not having it wouldn’t be an issue, and I can’t cause trouble with it. There’s a reason that we never make deals with people asking them to sell their hearts.”

“There’s no power in that?” 

“Nah. I’ve never figured out what you would do with someone else’s heart, besides sentimentality. Y’know, like this thing I’m doing. Or will be, if you…” She looks down at her hands. “You don’t have to answer me now. Just think about it. And maybe help me workshop how to pitch this same idea, but about my mother, to Laurice without it sounding so weird.”

“I think it’s going to be very hard to make this sound less weird.” He forgets, sometimes, that he knew Mia just about as well as Maya did, but he’s never forgotten that Maya never knew her mother at all - she met her as a stranger, saw her die as a stranger, and learned the truth days later. He thinks about it when he thinks about Thalassa, and how Trucy has no memory of her, and god damn if he’s going to let her die a stranger to her daughter.

“Then we’ll just have to take some time to work at it,” Maya says. She glances sideways at him, from the corner of her eyes, a mischievous glint alight in them and a grin on her face. “Like, over breakfast?” She had begun to push herself up onto her feet, but she stops while waiting for an answer and stays squatting there, her hands on the ground in front of her to keep her balance, staring at him. She looks like she’s ready to pounce.

She’ll eat until his wallet is flat, she’ll eat until she drives him into credit card debt, and she’ll eat until it’s noon and he has an office to run. He’s got to get back to Apollo and Athena. He—

Maya waits, her smile starting to fall off at the edges. Phoenix can say anything but he knows the truth really is that he didn’t trust her, and could have; he did stop her from getting involved with the Kristoph situation and no matter how she pulled back out of frustration with what he did, he pushed her away too. She could have acted better, but so could he. 

“We are going to have to negotiate a limit to the amount you are allowed to order,” Phoenix says. “I can’t afford for you to order the whole menu.” Her smile blossoms back into full, her glamour holding but not quite, her mouth just a little too wide and teeth too sharp, too excited to contain herself. “The office isn’t exactly brimming with clients lately, and I’ve got a daughter too—”

Maya springs up. “Nick, Nick, come on, you’ve never had that many clients, and you can’t keep using the daughter excuse forever!” She hops over his legs, putting herself between him and the place where the dock meets the shore. “She’s got to be old enough to be getting money herself too, right?”

“She’s sixteen,” Phoenix says, knowing as he does that it’s a meaningless number to her. “So, no, not really, not yet. She’s working on it, been trying to get herself up on stage as a bona fide stage magician, but she’s still trying to find an in.” 

The Gramarye name carries some local power and status - they did stage tricks of their own, in between the real magic and shady deals, or it was more like the shady deals and real magic happened backstage after the stage performances were over. But it’s hard to chance on a sixteen-year-old, so Trucy’s been searching for someone to share the spotlight with her, make her less of a gamble. Someone who isn’t Valant. That ship sailed. 

“She’s reached out to some stage magician who ran with the Gramaryes a long time ago, though he didn’t take the name” - she doesn’t actually remember him herself, but there’s a lot of information still lying around in the Gramarye basement - “so depending on how that goes I might be checking with Pearls or you to vet him additionally and make sure he’s not—”

“Not a monster?” Maya finishes. “Not sold his soul or gone off to be a bastard like the rest of that coven? Yeah, you meet the guy and don’t like what you see, then we’ll talk on that one.” 

Apparently he’s been taking too long to stand up, because Maya grabs him by the forearms and yanks him back up onto his feet. He staggers, but she has a steely grip on him and keeps him upright. She doesn’t release him immediately, but stares at him, and he expects that she’s going to say something else about the Gramaryes and this guy whose stage name Phoenix can’t quite remember but he’d swear it’s literally just Mysterious because that’s just what performers do sometimes, shitty names - but she just stays silent another moment, and then another.

And she lets go of his arms to step forward and throw hers again around his shoulders, pulling him in against her and giving him a forceful snake’s squeeze. In his shock, it takes him a few stunned seconds to bring his arms up. “Missed you, Nick.”

“Yeah,” he says. “I missed you, too.”

[gumnut-logic]

We’ll Be Home For Christmas 2.2

Title: We’ll be home for Christmas

Day Two – Aboard This Tiny Ship – Part 2 Prologue | 1.1 | 1.2 | 2.1

Author: Gumnut

14 - 18 Dec 2019

Fandom: Thunderbirds Are Go 2015/ Thunderbirds TOS

Rating: Teen

Summary: The boys can’t fly home for Christmas, so they have to find another way.

Word count: 2576

Spoilers & warnings: language and so, so much fluff. Science!Gordon. Minor various ships, mostly background.

Timeline: Christmas Season 3, I have also kinda ignored the main storyline of Season 3. The boys needed a break, so I gave them one. Post season 3B, before Season 3C cos we haven’t seen it yet.

Author’s note: For @scattergraph. This is my 2019 TAG Secret Santa fic :D I hope you enjoy it.

This section is a touch shorter than the last one, but the next section will be much bigger.

Many thanks to @vegetacide and @scribbles97 for cheering me on and their wonderful support through this craziness. And to @onereyofstarlight for geeking out with me over the setting.

Disclaimer: Mine? You’ve got to be kidding. Money? Don’t have any, don’t bother.

-o-o-o-

 Scott was ready to chew an arm off just to entertain himself by the time Gordon announced they were approaching L’Esperance Rock just after lunch. He’d seen it enough from the air to know it meant they were around halfway home. The thought did give him some relief and he stood at the bow of the boat watching the islet come into view.

A grunt behind him had him turning to find Virgil making his way forward, coffee in one hand, abdomen in the other. He darted in to help his brother up the steps.

“I’m okay.”

“I know you are. Just being useful.”

That earned him a stare and an arched eyebrow. “You’re bored shitless, aren’t you.” It wasn’t a question.

“I’m okay.”

Virgil snorted. “I had a bet with John you’d last until tonight at least. You’ve shafted me fifty bucks, big brother.”

Scott grunted. “Well, that explains why he was so happy to steal my phone.”

“He stole your phone?” Brown eyes frowned up at him.

“Oh, yes. On Grandma’s orders apparently.”

“That’s cheating.”

“Heh, that’s between the two of you. I’m only the subject of the bet, not the umpire.”

“Null and void. He’s not getting a cent.”

Scott grinned as he held his brother’s elbow, surprised he hadn’t been shook off.

“It is beautiful, isn’t it?” Virgil’s voice was wistful as they approached the railing. “Sometimes I think we get too busy or just take it all for granted. We do live in a stunning corner of the planet.”

“Dad always thought so. I wouldn’t have called him much of an environmentalist, but he knew what was important.”

“Hmm, I think you underestimate him. You were off the Island when Alan brought two rats home as pets.”

“He did what?!”

Another arched eyebrow. “Yes, he did, early on. Snuck them in. Dad went ballistic when he found out. The words he used had Grandma blushing. Let’s just say that Beau and Belle were deported rather abruptly and Alan now has an unofficial degree in environmental management.”

“Hmph, serves him right.”

Virgil smiled at him. “Sounds like you might be a bit of an environmentalist yourself.”

A tolerant glare at his brother. “I do what is necessary.”

Scott was surprised when Virgil’s response to that statement was a sigh. His brother’s expression was almost sad.

“What?”

“You need to relax.”

“I am relaxing.”

“No, you’re not. You’re wired tighter than Two’s primary generator. You need to find a way to wind down. We’re on vacation.”

“We’re on mandatory lockdown.”

“Grandma is right. We need a break. Preferably before we break something we can’t repair.”

“It’s not just about us!”

“Yes, it is! You need to let go! Focus on you for a change.”

“Dad-“

“Is not here! You have the right to a life, Scott. You have the right to look after yourself, to have a little fun, for god’s sake. When was the last time you read a fiction book? Flew a kite? Sat in front of the projector and binge watched an old television show?”

“There are more important things-“

“Importance is relative. It was you who blew my head off a matter of days ago about priorities, was it not? Our business forces us to prioritise according to lives at risk, I get it. I know it. I live it beside you. But you are my big brother, you are the leader of this team, your health affects our effectiveness. To put it harshly, some may die today, so many more can be saved in the future.” Virgil visibly swallowed. “I know International Rescue is important, but please, take the time, Scott. If you have to, do it for IR, do it for us or me or whatever gets you going, but most of all please do it for yourself.” Quietly. “I can’t lose you.”

What the hell? “You’re not going to lose me.”

“If you don’t look after yourself, we will!” He didn’t think it was physically possible for his brother to frown harder.

“If you don’t look after yourself, you’re going to blow your stitches.”

“This isn’t about me, it’s about you!”

“So, what are you thinking? Yell at me until I crack? I’m not finding this relaxing at all, Virg.”

“Well, it seems I need volume for you to actually hear me, because you certainly don’t listen otherwise.”

He couldn’t think of an immediate retort to that and to be honest he was worried Virgil was going hurt himself if he wasn’t careful, he appeared so uncharacteristically angry. “You’re that worried?”

“Of course, I’m fucking worried!”

Whoops, wrong thing to say.

“Virgil! Calm down. You’re the one who needs to relax.” He reached out and placed his hands on his brother’s shoulders. “Take a breath.”

To his surprise, Virgil was actually trembling a little. He was that passionate about this? He hadn’t been doing that badly, had he?

His brother did as requested and took a deep breath. “You are so hard to look after sometimes.” It was breathy and full of exhaled tension.

“You don’t have to look after me, Virg.”

“Somebody has to.” He looked up and brown eyes caught his. “Because you don’t.”

Ah, shit. A sigh and Scott gently drew his brother into a hug. “Okay, I’m sorry, I’ll try to do better.”

His brother didn’t answer, but he did lean in a little, one big hand reaching around Scott’s back and returning the embrace. “Please try.”

“Okay.”

Virgil pulled away slowly, not looking up at his brother, but focussing on the coffee he held in his other hand. He brought it to his lips and turned away slightly.

Scott stared at the back of his brother’s head and frowned.

The boat slowed as they approached the Rock. As jagged as its distant cousin, the Rock was like a miniature version of their home, the very top of a huge undersea volcano.

“Are we stopping here?”

Virgil’s question echoed his own thoughts. He thumbed his comms. “Gordon, are we stopping here?”

“Only for a moment. Just grabbing a sensor snapshot for Mel.”

Melissa Fisher, their closest neighbour. Blonde and sharp, she would remind him of Penny if it wasn’t for her obsession with all things Kermadec. That and the twigs in her hair. Even Dad had been a little wary of stepping on anything living when visiting Raoul Island. And visit they had. They needed to keep up relations and the woman was a mine of information when it came to ecological stabilisation and rehabilitation. Tracy Island had its issues when his father bought it and ever aware of the ecological importance of the area, once Brains had built the necessary infrastructure, his father had attempted to re-stabilise the ecosystem.

Melissa had been very helpful.

Gordon had taken to her immediately, jabbering in biology terms. For a bit there, Scott had wondered if the two of them might get involved with a different kind of biology, she was a little older than Gordon, only a year younger than Scott, but that might just float his brother’s boat. But apparently, they were too distracted by what they were discussing to notice each other.

Scott hadn’t seen her in years.

The boat came to a complete stop not far from the Rock and a moment later, Gordon appeared on the starboard side and threw out his sensor buoy.

Virgil was staring at him.

Scott blinked. “What is it?”

His brother didn’t answer immediately, those dark eyes assessing him a moment longer before sipping his coffee. But then a decision flickered across his expression and his hand reached out and gently took Scott’s arm. “Come with me.”

His brother turned slowly and led him off the bow. He negotiated the stairs and walked Scott back into the living area where Gordon was once again staring at holographic fish.

“Sit down and wait a moment.” His brother disappeared off into the depths of the living quarters.”

“Yes!”

Gordon’s jubilant yell made Scott jump. What?

His little brother was staring at a huge fish. A huge and weird looking fish. “What is that?”

“That, my wonderful big brother, is a sunfish or Mola mola, to be more specific.”

“And that is?”

Gordon glanced at him and frowned. “Heaviest bony fish on the planet. Came close to extinction twenty years ago. Saved by the World Council and its endangered species bill in 2039.” He turned back to the holographic display. “Though this one appears to have had some challenges.” Gordon’s fingers traced some gouges on the fish’s flank. “Old, but nasty.”

“Shark?”

His brother snorted. “No. That’s net scar. It’s been caught in a fishing net at some point. I can’t see any trace of the net, so this has to be one of the lucky ones.” The giant fish drifted lazily across the table as Gordon grabbed his tablet and stabbed his finger into it several times. “It must be well travelled. We are quite a distance from the fishing zones here.”

“I thought I told you to sit down.” Virgil edged carefully back into the room carrying his keyboard.

“And I thought you weren’t supposed to be lifting anything.” Scott hurried over and took the instrument from his brother’s hands.

“It’s not heavy.”

“So I have to look after myself, yet you don’t?”

Virgil’s shoulders dropped. “Okay, okay. Give me a second.” His brother grabbed a couple of cushions and shoved them together on a lounge chair to support his back and lowered himself into it. “Put it here.” He gestured across the arms of the chair and his lap.

Wary, Scott put the keyboard, that, yes, actually was quite heavy, down where his brother told him too. “Be careful.”

Virgil frowned up him with an expression that plainly said, ‘What am I? Stupid?’

“Well, you did carry the keyboard out here, did you not?”

His brother muttered something Scott couldn’t quite hear and wasn’t sure he wanted to.

“Now, you sit down and close your eyes.” A pause. “No, actually, lie down on the couch and close your eyes.”

“Why?”

“Just do as I ask.”

Scott rolled his eyes, but lay down. “You didn’t used to be this bossy.”

“You didn’t used to be this stubborn. Call it evolution in trying times.”

“Smart ass.”

“Shut up and close your eyes.”

Scott muttered under his breath, wriggled where he lay and did as his brother told him. Anything to stop the man from freaking out.

His brother began to play, the keys soft and blending with the water lapping against the hull. With his eyes closed, his mind focussed on the sounds around him. Gordon’s fingers on his tablet, heard just under the music. The distant calls of seabirds. Actually, it wasn’t much of a step from the sounds of home. Virgil playing his piano. Gordon sitting on the lounge playing with his tablet. The balcony doors open to the breeze, the distant sound of the waves on Tracy Island rock, the distant call of the bird colony on Mateo. John would be in his room reading. Alan would be playing a video game in the kitchen while Grandma attempted to make dinner. Brains, as always, would be in his lab.

Virgil playing the piano.

Waves against the rocks.

Birds calling...

Home.

-o-o-o-

Virgil kept playing ever so softly. Gordon had stopped working and was staring at the two of them, frowning.

Scott started snoring.

Gordon’s eyes widened and he mouthed words at Virgil. ‘How do you do that?’

Virgil just smiled and kept on playing, drifting into a long, gentle piece his mother had taught him long ago.

At some point he closed his eyes, too, and let himself go with the music, let his fingers do what the music asked.

He woke to find both Scott and John sitting opposite him.

“That was dirty pool, Virg.”

He blinked. Someone had taken the keyboard away and shoved a few extra pillows into the chair to support him. “You knew what I was doing. I’m just your excuse. How long did you last?”

It was John who spoke up. “About twenty minutes. It was enough. Gordon had to get the boat moving. He woke up the moment the engine started.”

“You, on the other hand, have been out for over two hours.” Scott was smug. “You missed the active volcano.”

Virgil turned to John. “Anything worth looking at?”

His younger brother shrugged. “Looked like an island to me. Bigger than the Rock. No activity at the moment.”

Virgil turned back to Scott. “Sounds like I didn’t miss anything. Where are we now?”

“Anchored at Macauley Island.” Gordon strode across the room. “Hey, Virg. Good to see you awake. You might like to see this.” His fish brother’s grin was highly suspicious.

It took both Scott and John to get him out of the chair. He should not sleep sitting up with abdominal incisions. Ow.

For a moment there he thought Scott was going to send him to bed or demand he take painkillers, but he didn’t. His brother didn’t say anything, and even if he did, a familiar roar distracted Virgil enough that he wouldn’t have noticed if his brother said anything anyway.

He pushed himself forward, leaving his helping hands behind and stepped out onto the deck.

His beautiful ‘bird was roaring in from the north. She moved so fast, he blinked and she was coming to a halt some distance away, VTOL firing her into a hover.

He just stared as she dropped her module.

He blinked as Gordon and Alan suddenly started the engine of an inflatable dingy and tore off towards the module sporting its proud number four.

“Thunderbird Two to Virgil.” Kayo’s voice startled him out of his stare. “So how did I do? Score out of ten.”

The door to the module lowered and Gordon leapt out of the little boat and jumped on board.

“Oh, ten, I guess.”

“Ten?!” Gordon’s outrage yelped across comms as the aquanaut turned in the distance and put both hands on his hips. “I knew he liked you more than me. I haven’t managed anything higher than an eight and I’ve been trying for years!”

Kayo didn’t answer as his ‘bird turned and took off for home, but Virgil grinned. “Keeps you on your toes, bro.”

“You suck.”

Their sister snorted across comms as Alan turned the dingy around and headed back. Gordon glared a glare that made it across the ocean despite the distance and stormed off into the module.

Virgil’s grin just got wider. “Why did he call for Four?”

“Something about helping Melissa. A sensor malfunction in the Macauley caldera.” A glance at Scott found him grinning, too. “You know he’s not going to let that go, don’t you?”

“Yep.”

“We’re stuck on a boat, captained by him, in the middle of the ocean and you want to set Gordon off?”

Virgil shrugged. “He’ll enjoy it.”

“We won’t.”

“We’ll live.”

“If I wake up with pink hair, you’re dead.”

“I love you, too.” Virgil was still grinning.

“You do know that you still have your comms on, don’t you?” His aquanaut brother’s voice was admittedly amused.

“Yes, Gordon, I do. Got some good ideas?”

“I guess you’ll have to wait and see.” And with that, Four’s rear thrusters fired and she shot out of the module and into the ocean.

“You got your uniform on?”

“Yes, Mom.”

“Fly safe.”

“FAB.”

-o-o-o-

End Day Two, Part Two

Day Two, Part Three

[gigsoupmusic]

INTERVIEW - MICKO WESTMORELAND ON 'VELVET GOLDMINE' AND LIFE WITH THE MELLOTRONICS

Micko Westmoreland first came to the public's attention as the enigmatic Jack Fairey in the star-studded glam rock fake biopic 'Velvet Goldmine', and since then has done everything from making electronica as The Bowling Green to the sharp edged new wave of his current project Micko & The Mellotronics. With that band on the verge of releasing their second single, a double A-side with the timely 'Noisy Neighbours 'and 'You Killed My Father' (featuring the late Neil Innes), he spoke to Gigsoup to tell all... Starting at the beginning, you got your first break appearing in the film ‘Velvet Goldmine’…  Quite a baptism of fire! Yep, I was fresh out of film school with little acting experience. So I did a ton of research, suspended all activities other than glam rock ones; late mornings, blurry eyeliner, became a kind of ‘Our Lady of the Flowers’, to quote Jean Genet. I did appear on set however with well prepared sleeve notes. Ziggy/Hunky and early Roxy had been teenage territory. Toni Colette really helped me during filming, showing me where and how to move and stand in frame etc. which I really wasn’t aware of and she was such a wonderful person to hang out with. Ewan McGregor was enormous in the 90s but treated you like a complete equal. I’ve acted the fiction of being a sensational rock star, my embalmed alter ego is now moth balled and hermetically sealed for posterity. What do you make of the film’s recent re-appraisal – it was panned at the time but now it’s considered a cult classic A lot of the film heavyweights liked it at the time and have consistently sung its praises over the last 20 years, which has contributed to its legacy, plus Todd Haynes is now seen as a 24-carat auteur. 1998 wasn’t ready for a kaleidoscopic pansexual odyssey. Velvet Goldmine truly tapped into a teenage hormonal feeling, so the audience is responsible for its longevity I think, people have grown old with it and new fans have discovered it. You had quite a lot of success making electronic music as The Bowling Green but then switched tack to making more song-based stuff.  What’s the story there? The music I was making was becoming increasingly filmic, so I moved into movie sound tracks for a while and did two film scores and a few documentaries with my brother; acclaimed director Wash Westmoreland (Still Alice, Colette). One of them, Echo Park L.A., won best drama at Sundance in 2006! I was becoming more attuned to a literary narrative and was listening to Dylan’s Time out of Mind and Beck’s Sea Change at the time – couple that with improvements in technology that weren’t so reliant on sampler and keyboard. I started playing much more guitar again, my first love and now my primary instrument for writing. You made a couple of albums under your own name but then formed Micko & The Mellotronics – your first ‘band’ project.  What was the thinking behind that move? I was very much used to working on my own. I made a couple of solo albums, one which Terry Edwards (P.J. Harvey/Holy Holy) released on his Sartorial label called ‘Wax & Wayne’, and ‘Yours Etc Abc’, on my own Landline records imprint, which I believe was the main unconscious projection into putting a live act together. The person doing PR for it asked, ‘Who’s in the band?’ When I realized I didn’t have one, it made sense to look for folk to start pushing sounds around. How would you sum up the band to someone you hadn’t heard you before?  Can you name us a few bands that have influenced its sound? We get compared to the Buzzcocks quite a lot, I’ll take that. I’ve loved Magazine since teenage, Television too. I also dig Serge Gainsbourg majorly and bands like The Silver Apples. I’m really into Iso Tomita, the 70’s electronic musician and of course Mr. Eno too. People have commented that the double A side, soon to be released, is like early Genesis but I think it’s much closer to The Rutles. Patrick from R.O.C. said there was violence to the sound. I do pride the writing on an intricacy and eccentricity but without getting prog about it. Talk us through the Mellotronics members and their individual flavours... Nick Mackay a friend referred me to. He was playing in a two-piece called ‘Barricades’, and was clearly a very good drummer, real flare as a player/performer and had the magic ingredient for any band – he was a thoroughly decent chap you could spend a ton of time with. Jon Klein is our very own rock star hiding in plain sight. He has a CV better than the rest of us put together: Banshees, Sinead O’Connor to name a few and of course his own band Specimen. I lent Jon my amp when we were on the same bill. I gave him a copy of my previous album and he contacted me the next day, which I considered a big thumbs up. He’s very quick, obscenely talented and has revolutionized day-to-day working practice. In short a turbo charged V12 engine has been carefully placed inside a Hillman imp, with fresh brake pads added. Vicky Carroll the bassist also came through personal referral, Haydn Hades who does stand up. At the time she was playing in a band the ‘Owls of Now’, a very bright lady indeed. She really got what the band was about and had great style. The dynamic of now the band get on and its chemistry is essential to longevity. Having a woman on board was important to us, so we really lucked out by finding such a smart cookie in Vicky. So far, you’ve shared ‘The Finger’, your first single, and now two new tracks, which will (eventually) be released as a 7” single.  Talk us through ‘Noisy Neighbors’ and ’You Killed My Father’. Noisy Neighbours came about from my experience with dealing with serial complainers whilst living in a housing co-op. We shot the video with filmmaker Ashley Jones (www.thechaoesengineers.com) in the next door location the inhabitants of the song were occupying, so we had to be quiet. Of course some complaints are genuine but most were more telling of the complainant than complainee. There are control issues, which come about as a result of trying to micromanage your environment beyond your own four walls. I wanted to make a witty statement about that without being over critical or condemning. Raising a single eyebrow over that type of behavior. ‘You Killed My Father’, the double A side was inspired by Neil Innes R.I.P. (Monty Python, Bonzo Dog, The Rutles). So of course I was thrilled when he agreed to play on it. I was introduced to him through an artist friend Harry Pye. We inadvertly created a supergroup together called the Spammed and meet up once a year to record for the Teenage Cancer Trust. Last session Tony Visconti produced a cover of Bolan’s ‘Get it on’, for us. It comprises, Rat Scabies (The Damned), Horace Panter (The Specials), Neil when he was with us and actor/comedian Kevin Eldon on vocs, I play guitar. The song relates to my childhood, growing up in Leeds and has a Shakespearean quality. I checked the prose with an expert to make sure I hadn’t over egged the pudding. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5iswf8GG6o You seem to be able to attract some interesting names to collaborate with - Horace Panter of The Specials and the late Neil Innes recently, but also members of The Blockheads, Madness, Stranglers and Goldfrapp in the past.  Who would be top of your collaborative wish list? I’d love to do something with Eno again. We became friendly during the mid nineties. I was tutored by him, whilst working on an art show called ‘Self Storage’ with Laurie Anderson but never made it into the studio. A wild card like Wendy Carlos, famed for the soundtrack of ‘A Clockwork Orange’ would be great too. Likewise, your videos have featured some interesting names from British comedy…  What do they bring to the party?  Anyone else you’d like to get on board if you had free reign? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDr7nkOQN9Q All the comedy connections came from Kevin Eldon initially, a super bright and truly wonderful guy. He introduced me to Paul Putner at a Specials gig. Paul’s a brilliant bloke and really likes the band. He found the remarkable Suzy Kane for us. All three have taken excellent roles. Suzy had a lot of input in Noisy Neighbours, suggesting wardrobe and even shots to Ashley as we were making it; we really have had tremendous fun with our contributors. Obviously, Chris Morris would be fantastic but I’m a little afraid to knock. We hear the debut M&TM album is close to completion – what have you got in store for us? A psychedelic mish mash of fable, sound collage and idea. With the new single, 3 of the songs are now out there. On a musical front Horace Panter out of The Specials has guested on a couple of tracks for us and of course we have one of Neil Innes’ last performances too. I’ve written a song about Imelda Marcos, she seemed like a person who was way ahead of her time, a modern template for a highly manipulative battle-axe. I have an author friend in his 60s who’s an eminent  psychologist, (Georg Eifert - Anxiety Happens) so I wrote a song called ‘The Fear’, with a lot of his theories in mind. There’s also one too called ‘Sick and Tired’, it’s not about what I’m eed up about, but like Noisy Neighbours it’s a comment about complaint. When writing I try to look at what gets talked about by everyday people and base some of the songs around those themes. Earwig on phone conversations on buses, pick up discarded bits of paper, when you get into the habit you’ll be amazed what you find. So I get on the 38 and set my brain to record. There’s also a fair amount about growing up on the record too, which I hope all can relate to. I think you have to start with a good idea, that’s on any level otherwise you’re unlikely to get far. From my art college days I got into the habit of noting things down, if you don’t it often escapes you. It’s difficult to marry a multitude of ingredients and let’s face it the world is full of plenty, pair it down and make it resonate. Anyone who tells you otherwise is telling porkies. To make something that stands the test of time is more difficult still. But I’m not afraid of the work and I enjoy ‘the doing’, for me that’s what it’s all about. I believe that as individuals we have a natural tendency to evolve, if we choose to see it that way and trust, it’ll ‘self fulfill’. If you’ll allow yourself to tap into that expansion creatively, you’ll always find inspiration. Micko & The Mellotronics release 'Noisy Neighbours / You Killed My Father' on Landline Records on April 17 with the 7" single schedule to hit the shops on June 27. Read the full article

[audiogrizzly]

Top 5 Games of 2019

It was a little tricky to construct a top 5 for this year, though there have been a couple of surprises.  I wasn’t expecting the year to be a bit crap as we are no w on the cusp once more of a new generation.  But 2012 wasn’t all that bad of a year (PS4 and Xbox One would release in 2013) and at the moment, everyone is doing alright.  PS4 has sold through over 100 million systems, Nintendo are definitely on an “on” generation with Switch, Xbox has been able to get back into peoples good books with things like Game Pass (on both Console and PC, their PC side they seem to really be turning around), there’s even interesting things happening in the mobile space with Apple Arcade.

This won’t be the last year where my top 5 games are full of current gen titles, I am expecting the new systems to drop in around November, last time it was hard to find a top 5 specific to PS4 (as I listed each platform separately back then).  It IS however, another list of mostly AAA tier games.  If you want to know what smaller more “interesting” games I have been playing, check out my honourable mentions at the end.

Also, follow me on Melee.  It’s this new image blogging service from Imgur which you can download now on the IOS App Store (its just on iPhone at the moment) and it has seemingly been built to help people share gaming related clips and images off of places like Twitter and Instagram (and err, here on Tumblr).  I posted a couple of daft clips of me failing in Modern Warfare and Destiny 2 and it didn’t take long for them to amass a few likes and comments.

That sounded like a sponsored advert but ain’t nobody paying me for this.  Let’s get into my top 5

5. Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order

I was about to select Gears 5 to be my number 5 until I saw sense and cast my memory back to when I started playing Jedi (all the way back in November.  I was impressed by its intense action, impressive visuals and great characters.  I especially enjoyed the 4 armed pilot who always complains.  I did feel that towards the end I got sick of managing large groups of enemies so I dropped the difficulty to get through it, but I still haven’t achieved 100% of activities on all planets so I can still go back to it one day.

4. Borderlands 3

We all knew this was coming but not even I had any idea that we would have been actually playing it in 2019 way back at the start of the year.  For me, I look at the game.  I don’t care about weird magicians or their insane sounding legal woes, all I’m interested in is the work of a team who deserved better for their last title, but am still glad returned to what they do best, looting and shooting.  I enjoyed rejoining these characters I have followed over the last 10 years, all the referenced to older games, cameos from characters from Tales From the Borderlands and The Pre Sequel and was sad to see some people go.  I still have about a year of extra content to go through and I really appreciate the efforts they have made to make the game last longer than just one playthrough through in the Proving Grounds, Circle of Slaughter and Mayhem modes.  Though I have always tended to stick to Borderlands games and create builds for each and every vault hunter, so I will be doing that.

3. Mortal Kombat 11

It’s been a while since I last put a fighting game into my end of year round up.  And I HAVE fallen off MK11 a little bit, but this entry reminded me of how impressive it is for Nether Realms to pack their fighting games with some many things to do and keep people playing outside of just going into matchmaking and fighting others.  The Vault this year is basically another little adventure full of exploration and puzzle solving and the Towers of Time give you plenty of challenge and direction of many months to come.  You also have to give the developer credit for never backing down on the brutality of the game, they must have all got their heads together after DC Universe vs. and vowed never again to make watered down versions of Fatalities.  It is a game that keeps getting better and better.

2. Call of Duty Modern Warfare

I was debating whether or not to include this years CoD.  I always get the same type of enjoyment out of it each year, people complain that it never changes but I’m glad it sticks to a formula.  Of course they are not identikit games, there are new maps, new modes, new ways of building your loadout and new touches, like how in this year you can snap to edges to stay in cover while you shoot, there’s the new special equipment system where you can drop ammo or reduce your footstep noise.  Having doors you can either peek through or smash open adds another level of strategy, there have been times where I have been able to escape being under fire by closing a door, re-positioning and then wasting whoever just wanders in.

The campaign this year, good to see it back, but whatever, the co-op mode is Spec Ops again, like it was back in MW2 and 3 but on a much larger scale, I have yet to complete one of these btw.  But as always, it’s the multiplayer that does it for me and Modern Warfare deserves credit for being what must be the first AAA game to feature cross platform play, not just launch with it.  I know that games like Fortnite are popular, but I don’t see that as a AAA title, it doesn’t have the full package, it’s just a mode and it started off small.  Call of Duty is expected to be big each year, has a lot riding on it and allowing for cross play is a big step.  I especially appreciate being able to play with a keyboard and mouse on PS4 and being able to matchmake only with people playing with controllers on PC, in fact, I have never really given the game much of a shot on PC before as I know people just fall of it, there has often been low player numbers reported on the PC versions of CoD and it looks like it won’t have that problem this time round due to cross play.

Modern Warfare still has to contend with Destiny 2 and Overwatch for my time as my main multiplayer game but it’s still as fun as ever.

1. Control

Put this down as my main “surprise” game of 2019.  A game which was not on my watch list, though I was aware of it as you can’t ignore a game from the makers of Max Payne (I did skip Alan Wake and didn’t care much for Quantum break though).  Bought it at the last minute before its release, downloaded it and was wowed by the sinister nature of the environment you run around in.  This weird fictitious US government agency which looks into paranormal activity which you seem to have become in charge of because you picked up a mysterious weapon from the deceased Director while searching for your brother.  What then follows is about 12 hours of wacky powers and odd video clips as you unearth what has been going on in this strange ever morphing building.

I especially loved how the game never holds your hand too much, the map of each floor is vague enough that you also have to rely on in-game signposting to move around, as well as a bit of memory work.  There is also great humour involved too in some of the PSA posters on a lot of the walls, the antics of the caretaker and the videos you find of Dr. Darling throughout the game.

I did have a few weird technical issues with the game throughout playing, but still found it to be visually pleasing, there was this weird hitch that used to appear after coming out of the pause screen that always threw me, it would be followed by a few moments of low performance before getting back into the smooth action.  But this didn’t stop me from having a great time with Control.  Perhaps the game that will be the most prominent in my head when I think of 2019.

So there you have it, control is my best game of 2019.  But let’s look at the other new games I played throughout the year in my honourable mentions:

Gears 5

The Outer Worlds

Days Gone

Apex Legends

Far Cry New Dawn

Trover Saves the Universe

Concrete Genie

Devil May Cry 5

Tom Clancy's The Division 2

And also a special mention to these old games that were rereleased/remastered/repackaged etc in 2019:

Borderlands Game of the Year Edition Remastered

Halo Reach

And now, a look at the games I have on my watchlist for 2020:

Cyberpunk 2077

Last of Us Part 2

Ghost of Tsushima

Halo: Infinite

Watch Dogs Legion

Phantasy Star Online 2

Gods & Monsters

Doom Eternal

Overwatch 2

Diablo IV

Minecraft dungeons

Marvel's Avengers

Carrion

Streets of Rage 4

Will they all even come out?  Let’s find out, happy new year!

[loyalflutist]

Manmade Killer (Pt. 1)

It was Christmas. Snow fell down within the city of Shinjuku and friends, families, and couples come together to celebrate the occasion. The night sparkled from decorations. Blue, red, green, white... all kinds of colors brighten the city. Tranquility makes it difficult for much negativity to taint anyone during this holiday. However, Oshima Yuko couldn't celebrate it. In one of the many buildings, on the third floor, the squirrel sat in one of the many desks. An ex-detective that originally came from the Metropolitan Police Department years ago, she came to an early retirement due to a past issue. But nevermind that, the young woman in her mid-20s clicked away on her laptop. Each keystroke was notable in the barely lit premise, a desk lamp the only source of light. Exhaustion. Fatigue. And alone. She desires to sleep, yet won't allow her body to feel the relief. Yuko has to keep on working. Work... work... work... work. The saying "sleep is for the weak" is horribly applicable to the ex-inspector. She furrowed her brows and resisted the temptation to rub her weary eyes. A loud exhale as she continued to tap away on the keyboard. "Yuko? You're still awake?" Thanks to Yuko's mental and physical state, hypersensitivity is prominent. She nearly leaped off from her black rolling chair. Thankfully, the person that called out for her is none other than Special Police Officer Yokoyama Yui. The tall raven-haired woman rested an arm against the doorway between the main workroom and the nap room, her sharp gaze aimed at the squirrel. In comparison to the ex-detective, not a hint of fatigue was shown on her face and body language. Donned with a white collared shirt, black pants, and uniformed blue jacket, the medal "SP" clung to her shirt as a sign of her prestigious position. Although her duty is to protect VIP figures such as politicians and CEOs, the Kyoto-originated female personally requested to be Yuko's bodyguard. Yui's reason for doing so? Well, it wasn't a difficult question to answer. A faint exhale escaped from her partially parted lips. "You should be sleeping." Yuko shook her head. "I can't. Shouldn't you be sleeping in the nap room here?" Another sigh came from Yui's lips when she saw the other female reach towards her cup of coffee. It wasn't necessarily the caffeinated product that concerned her so much. Instead, it was more so with how OLD the coffee is. When the SP Officer checked in for the morning, Yuko was sipping from the same container and drinking the God-knows-how-long-it's-been-made black coffee. It wasn't like the squirrel to forget how to operate normally on daily necessities. Then again, it's not surprising considering the month-long predicament that ate at them. Endlessly taunting them... especially Oshima Yuko. No grave sins were committed to sending her to Hell, but she's experiencing one right now. Rest did not bring any alleviation, agitation gnawing at her nerve. "Yuko..." she said. Yuko readjusted her seat as Yui waltzed over to the clear-glassed window from behind the inspector. Hands in her jacket's pockets, the Kyoto woman stared out to the city view. If it weren't for the heavy atmosphere that weighed on their shoulders, they would've not only celebrated the holiday but share wine with each other just like old times. Maybe even played out in the snow with their teammates. "I know you're trying your best to search for your sister, but I can't protect you from diseases." A scoff. Then, Yuko clicked on the laptop a few times to close all of the web browsers. Whether she was closing them to actually take a break or closing them out of obligation to shut Yui up is up for speculations. Thanks to the brightness of the screen, it somewhat reflected on the window's surface. The SP Officer didn't have to look over her shoulders to see what was on the device. Nevertheless, her eyebrows slightly raised at the sight of a group photo. Oshima Yuko. Yokoyama Yui. Yamamoto Sayaka. Kashiwagi Yuki. Watanabe Mayu. Maeda Atsuko. Matsui Rena. Seven members. A mixture of active and retired officers. A melting pot for the roles they each played. A group primarily focused on stopping a terrorist organization outside of police jurisdiction and limitations. They were after Adrestia. A faceless Japanese terrorist organization bent on taking revenge and delivering retribution to those seemingly "evil" to justice. They were meant to be upheld as a holy figure that would topple the police force. Those victims who died were murmured and whispered amongst the civilians to be truly terrible in society. For the government to lack efficiency in handling these small, but severe problems became a devastating blow to their reputation. Fewer people trusted the police and more on Adrestria. It's almost as if a superhero arose from the crowd and stood up for what is right and what is wrong. However, what made them God? What made them decide what's just and unjust for everyone? Not many were able to perceive this fatal flaw as their criminal acts... might not be so criminal at first glance.   It has been six months since their existence came to light. Their first appearance was no minor introduction. The death of a man who is labeled as a stalker to an idol from AKB48 was their first case. Gunned down by a security guard protecting Team K when they were out on tour around Japan, the man immediately killed himself before he explained why he chose to murder the fan. Either way, Team K have been protected thanks to him. Adrestia made a big note of who they are when they uploaded a video on the Internet about the fan's crimes. He had stalked them, taken photos of them, and sent them Anonymous videos of the dirty actions he did with those pictures. Idols filed a report many times in the past. The police came to protect them but did a lackluster job. He still came to bother them. Over... and over... and over again. One idol even committed suicide because of it. Adrestia took action and protected the group in the police's stead. We are Adrestia and we strive to take revenge on the evils that outlived their days compared to their victims. The Cleansing Day will come when New Year Eve arrives. All in a distorted voice. Eventually, exactly a month after that, another death came to light. Instead of just one victim, there was a total of a whopping twenty. To make matters worse, they were all young adolescents. Their crimes? Bullying hurts but cyberbullying hurts even more. You have no way to distinguish who they are and if they really meant what they said. These twenty students, all between the age of 12 and 22, committed a grave sin. They bullied others on Facebook. Many victims called for help, but no one came to their aid. Police officers and therapists mocked them for their sensitivity. Adrestia did not take this lightly. We took action and protected the bullied users in the police's stead. We are Adrestia and we strive to take revenge on the evils that outlived their days compared to their victims. The Cleansing Day will come when New Year Eve arrives. A more feminine distorted voice, distinguishing itself from the previous video. And so it went on. Month by month, their crimes became horrific. Murders of rapists, child molesters, corrupted government officials, bribers, murderers, stalkers, corrupted officers... It went on. The crimes committed by them were atrocious. Police forces throughout Japan, especially Shinjuku, went haywire. Everyone in the organization used as much force as possible to search for the culprits. Some overexerted and abused their authoritative powers, making innocent civilians go to jail as a way to pat down one of the monthly cases. Lives were at stakes, reputations were at stakes, and most importantly, answers were desperately needed. The group that Yuko had formed alongside with her stepsister, Mayu, had kicked into gear. Beginning the day after the first month's murder, Yuko and everyone spread out to do their research. They were possibly the only ones able to stop Adrestia given their resources and experiences. But every single time they came close to an answer, it slipped through their fingers. In its place, another murder pops up in the name of the terrorist. It was a frustrating cycle. Loads of responsibilities and trouble began to accumulate as the months ticked by. Clues were gathered, but not enough to catch up on the latest events. By the time the ex-detective found an answer, the worst-case scenario unfolded before her eyes. That day, on November 25th... Yuko's thumb ran across Mayu's face on the screened photo. "I have to find my sister." Missing. Mayu is missing-- Er, well, it wasn't to say that she's missing like those found in the missing person poster. Actually, the Special Regions Crime Prevention Office (SRCPO) member is plastered on the bulletin board of this investigative's room as a wanted individual. Alongside, Kashiwagi Yuki went missing. Whether she was found with Mayu or not currently is not clear. Same goes for Matsui Rena. She disappeared the same day as Yuki. Then there's also the other two members-- "I can't forgive her. She murdered Sayanee." Yuko snapped out of her trance-like state at the sharp proclamation from Yui. She turned to look at the officer, her baggy eyes staring straight at the fierce woman. As if to showcase how serious she is with her statement, Yokoyama took the gun out from her holster and toyed with it. She unloaded all of the bullets into her other hand and immediately stuck them back into the cylinder. One-by-one, the gold metallic ammunition went into its original spot. Silence hung in between the two figures. Figuring that Yuko would object to her perspectives, the Special Police Officer raised her chin slightly. "Did you also forget that she murdered your parents?" They may not have been related to each other, but they were adopted together under the two kind parents. They were raised to be an outstanding citizen of society. Yuko and Mayu wished to serve in the police department as a way to give back to the community. Of course, thanks to a mishap, Yuko took early retirement (more like quit) from her position and became independent. Mayu, on the other hand, remains as a counselor and listens in to people's worries during times of emergencies. Regardless of their roles and what they did with their life, they loved their adopted parents dearly. So the cold-blooded slaughtering of their parents was the last straw for Oshima. She vividly remembers their death. It was exactly one week after the disappearance of Watanabe Mayu, Kashiwagi Yuki, and Matsui Rena. Yuko returned home with her parents to have dinner with them. There wasn't much to discuss, but the least she could do is bring them comfort during this turbulent time. It was likely that the three were kidnapped by Adrestia, but it's also possible that the trio's disappearances didn't correlate with each other. The independent detective does admit that it was too much of a coincidence to have such scenario occur though... Regardless, the doorbell rang during their quiet mealtime. Yuko went to open the door. A loud gasp came from her direction from the sight of who it was. There stood Watanabe Mayu in the doorway. Her eyes dead. A black collar snapped around her neck as if she were an animal. A handgun held within her two hands. The white police uniform she donned disheveled and dirtied. Yuko didn't even have a chance to register a dialogue before Mayu shoved her way into the house. Two fires came from the weapon. Two screams. Then, silence. Complete and eerie silence. It wasn't long till Mayu walked right out the same doorway as she had entered, ignoring the older female. Darkness from the dimly lit streets engulfed the gunner once she was far enough. Yuko was still standing in awe. Oshima Yuko always wondered why she wasn't able to stop her sister at that time. Was it because of her lingering attachment to Mayu? Was it because she hesitated to pull out her own revolver and shoot Mayu? Was it because she was shocked to think that her sister would return after a week of disappearing? Whatever it was, their parents are dead. A single bullet straight to their forehead. It was a direct hit to their brain. Death is certain for their fates. Still... it was all too strange. How could someone like Mayu not only go off to hurt their teammates, but their very own parents? Sure, they weren't related by blood, but it doesn't excuse the abrupt and violent end they were met with. Something must've caused her younger sibling to react this way. Yuko parted her thumb from the screen and bit the bottom of her lip. Besides, Watanabe harmed someone that she too cared for greatly... Someone that Yuko couldn't understand why either. "There's also Acchan too..." she cracked. Yui nodded in the background. That was right. Not only was Sayaka the victim in this betrayal, but Maeda Atsuko was at the brunt end of it. This didn't happen all in one day. The first victim was Yamamoto Sayaka. Yuko remembered the video that Mayu had personally sent to them, stating that another teammate would be next on her hit list. Her lifeless voice... Her bone-chilling message... Was this really the sister she knew since they were children? Atsuko... oh, Atsuko is someone Oshima loved so much. The ex-detective and a profiler from the Crime Lab at the Metropolitan Police Department. The unlikely duo that became tragically separated by a murderer no one expected. Yuko's hands curled into fists as she shakily exhaled. "Yuihan, I want to talk to her before I bring down her judgment. Even if you want to take revenge on behalf of your lover, I... I can't allow that. She's my sister." The Special Police Officer shifted her attention back to the scenery. She narrowed her eyes. "Well, you better be ready for it. I have a feeling we're going to find her before January 1st." "...right." The sooner, the better. Yuko wanted nothing more than to get this nightmare over with. ---------- In another location, Kashiwagi Yuki, a hacker at the Cyber Crimes Division, felt so useless. It wasn't the useless kind of sensation where one stands on the sideline. At least she could be cheering for someone or something. She could become an influence thanks to those encouraging words. This was a literal uselessness. Physically and mentally. She was stuck in a bright metallic room with nothing but herself. Steel wall surrounds her figure as she huddled in the corner of the mostly dried blood-splattered room. She hugged herself. Comfort was nowhere to be seen... She wasn't safe in isolation from her mind. The terrorist organization has her confined to this premise. No matter how much she screams or pounds at the only exit, no one would respond. Well, she tried to scream, that is. Not a single sound came out of her voice box. The tattered and bruised Yuki that was once kind, gentle, and a good listener to everyone around her is reduced to a silent wreck thanks to Adrestia. Whatever poison or surgical techniques they performed on the unconscious woman... She won't be able to vocalize her thoughts, her concerns, her love, her sorrow... anything anymore. Yuki gave up. The woman's ears perked up when the door creaked open. Her brown eyes peeked over her crossed arms. Watanabe Mayu came back. The door immediately clicked close by another individual once Mayu had taken a step into the confinement. Partially bathed in another person's blood on her clothes, Mayu truly painted an image of a psychopath. A black collar around her neck, the woman barely blinked when she saw Yuki extend her arms out. She acted almost like a baby in need of a mother. Ironic considering the fact that Mayu had a hand solidly gripping a loaded revolver. However, everyone knew that the two would never wish harm upon one another. They've loved each other and still do. Watanabe just doesn't know if she's alive or dead in this state. 'Mayuyu... Oh, Mayuyu...' Mayu was the only person who could bring some sense of peace to the hacker. However, the guilt that weighed on Yuki's shoulders were heavy as she littered long kisses on her lover's cheeks. The raven-haired desperately tried to give as much warmth as possible to the present day Mayu. Usually, the officer would be annoyed by the close treatment as it's reserved for privacy, but it hurts that Mayu isn't flinching or reacting to this at all. Tears streamed down Yuki's face as she wrapped her arms around the armed woman. Both of their brown eyes had no life... A lifeless duo that barely clung onto reality. 'Why did it become like this?' Of course, Mayu has no way of knowing. She's not human anymore... A police officer who once specialized in the Special Regions Crime Prevention Office is now a murderer. She not only raised her revolver at innocent civilians, but she assassinated their comrades. Yamamoto Sayaka and Maeda Atsuko... Someone they once called their allies, their friends... it all went away weeks ago with a bullet to their chest. Mayu may have given them a quick death, but the fact that they're not in this world anymore destroyed Yuki. It wasn't Mayu's fault though. "Neh... Yukirin..." That tone. That voice. Unlike Kashiwagi, Mayu didn't lose the ability to speak. This was a chance for her to tell the official what's on her mind. She was given free rein on what to say. Freedom of speech isn't exactly one hundred percent true in the hands of this terrorist organization though. "I killed our captain." Yuki knew Mayu had pride and conviction to remain true to her ways. Yet the collar that Adrestia's leader snapped around her neck served as a torturing device. Poison contaminated the metallic band. Every single time the girl would raise objections to their beliefs, to the orders they shoved down her throat, to their harsh treatment and abuse with Yuki, the leader allowed the collar to release its chemicals into the officer. The excruciating agony that paralyzed the victim ran on till Mayu sobbed for death to relieve her. Of course, they weren't so kind. A quick antidote brought her to good health within an hour. Then, they shoved their idealisms... their moralistic values... and assassination orders upon the woman once again. If she were to object once again, she would be subjected to the same treatment. "I'm okay... I'm fine." The hacker saw it all since day one of their kidnappings. A date out in broad daylight at a park to take a break from their work turned into a living nightmare. Since Yuki holds no value to the terrorist organization, they simply used her as their pawn to keep Mayu in check. With the police officer's strict outlook on what justice means and why revenge can be justified, their eyes have rested on Mayu. Her ability to use the gun is a bonus to them as she can play the role of an "Executioner". Of course, knowing the ponytailed female, she outright rejected their offer only to undergo horrific treatments. Yuki was there to witness it all in her mute cries and sobs. It's as if Adrestia is training a pet... Like a broken pet to order and reward. Yuki tightened her hold around the crimson-stained girlfriend. When the wet cheeks pressed against her lover, Mayu expressed her opinion in a monotone voice. "You're crying? Are you hurt anywhere?" Hurt... Pain. Oh, Yuki felt pain much worse than the abuse she's been submitted to by the hooded terrorist leader. It's the crushing anguish of her heart being squished to oblivion by an invisible force. The sight of her lover succumbing to cruel punishments for staying true to her ideals and not aligning with the enemies'. The horror of losing her ability to speak. The urge to scream in terror as she frantically and desperately provided as much useless care to Mayu as possible. She buried her face into the gunner's shoulder. 'If only I was strong...' Yuki wasn't trained in the art of firearms like Mayu. Thoughts ran through her head about taking up lessons from her girlfriend. However, Mayu urged that it wasn't necessary. If only the hacker held her stance much stronger back then... Then she might've protected Mayu rather than become dependent on her. More tears ran down her face as she leaned forward, lips close to Watanabe's ear. Just like every single day, Yuki tried her best to formalize words that can be audible rather than incoherent airy whispers. "I'm... sorry..." Did Mayu hear that? Or was that just a figment of Yuki's hallucinations she's constantly had in this confined room that she was able to utter words to her lover? Either way, the curtain will soon descend upon the stage as Adrestia makes their final move. After all, it won't be long till New Year Eve comes around the corner.

[dailytechnologynews]

MacBook Pro Keyboard Failures: Why Apples dust excuse is bullshit! [Teardown + Explanations]

Original source: https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/bjtyaw/macbook_pro_keyboard_failures_why_apples_dust/

Today we will be tearing down a MacBook Pro keyboard to try and figure out some possible causes for all the failures that these keyboards get. Settle down, because this will be a bit of a long post. Hopefully you'll at least learn something from this.

My Background:

I've worked as an Apple Authorized Service Provider (AASP) Technician for the last 3 years.

Before that, I use to work as a 3rd party Technician at an Apple-focused repair shop.

Because of this experience, I stand in an interesting position where I use to see all the shit Apple pulls in order to make 3rd party and DIY repair difficult, and now I sit in a position where I can see exactly how Apple deals with these issues and get a more-representative ideas of how the machine fails, how many fail, and exactly what the most common failures are. 

History: 

Apple originally released the Butterfly-style keyboard back in 2015 with the release of the 12" Macbook. Afterwards in 2016, this keyboard design was expanded to all Macbook Pros. The butterfly keyboard is different from a conventional rubber-dome keyboard that was used for 20+ years before that. It uses a metal dome that buckles under enough stress and makes contact between 2 metal terminals, and the keycap itself is held up with a butterfly-style henge rather than a traditional scissor hinge. Both are pictured further down.

This entire experiment began with a thought: How could something as simple as dust kill the keyboard switch?

My old 3rd party tech instincts say that this should not be possible, since there are billions of smartphones that use metal-dome style buttons that do not experience failures like this.

Apples official stance is that dust manages to somehow enter the keyboard and cause the issues. This can cause things like: 

Keyboard keys feel sticky, crunchy, or are physically jammed.

Keyboard does not input even though you pressed the key.

Keyboard inputs the same character 2+ times even though you only pressed the button once. https://www.apple.com/support/keyboard-service-program-for-macbook-and-macbook-pro/

Their official documentation also states that you can "fix" the issue by using compressed air to blow out the keys. https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT205662

When it comes to failures, there's 3 schools of thought about how the switches fail:

"Dust" Theory. This generally takes apples words at face value and don't go deep into it.

"Heat" Theory. This assumes that Dust Theory is bullshit and assumes that overheating causes the material to expand and warp enough to render the buttons inoperable (2018 TouchBar models in particular).

"Shit Design" Theory. This assumes and accepts that it's just awful design.   

You may have also seen articles like https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/macbook-pro-keyboard-failure-rate-double-older-models/ that say that keyboard failure is in the low 10% range, but these should not be accepted at all since they do not take into account a number of things that critically invalidate these statistics as a whole:

They come directly from apple, which is a huge conflict of interest considering they have to sell these machines to make money.

They do not take into account the number of repairs that were turned down due to the cost of the repair itself, which is around 500USD before the keyboard replacement program came into effect.

They do not take into account the number of people that don't want to go to apple or cannot go to apple due to time constraints, especially since most countries do not offer over-the-phone mail-in repairs on Macs.

They do not take into account the number of people who just avoid apple stores and AASP in general and instead go to local 3rd party repair stores.

The keyboard program was introduced June 22, 2018, meaning that anyone before that date who does not have warranty was forced to pay 500USD for the replacement part, and most likely falls into the above. Notice how conveniently these statistics don't include numbers for 2018?

From my experience as an Apple Technician, here are the most commonly reported problems at my store, in order of most to least common:

No-input, particularly from all vowel keys, most commonly used consonants, spacebar, enter, and shift.

Multi-input, particularly from all vowel keys, most commonly used consonants, spacebar, enter, and shift.

Sticky/Crunchy/Stuck keys.

As for demographic, the most common folks we see with these issues are:

Writers or any kind (blog, scripts, office workers, etc).

Students of all kinds.

Programmers. 

With that said, here are a few things that were floating around in my head:

The first red flag about the dust hypothesis should be the failure types. Only 1/3 are related to physical objects actually preventing the keys from working. The other 2/3 are related to electricity, specifically whether the circuit in the switch itself is "closed" or "open". Open circuit means that the positive and negative terminals are not connected, which is the equivalent of a keyboard button that is not pressed. Closed circuit is the opposite. 

Second red flag is that human dust and household dust is classified as non-conductive. By itself, it does not have enough conductivity to meaningfully carry electricity, so the multi-input style failure should not be possible at all. The No-input failure can somewhat be explained with dust, since it can at as an insulator between 2 metal terminals, but keep reading and you'll see why this isn't the case. 

Third red flag should be specifically which keys fail. Spacebar, enter, shift, vowels, and the most common consonants are the most commonly pressed buttons whenever anyone types on their keyboard. Coincidentally, these buttons are the ones that are reported to fail the most.

Finally, the last red flag is the demographic. All of these are people who type a lot on the machines. While this one is highly anecdotal, most of my customers fall within this demographic.  

​

Enough rambling, on with the teardown!  

​

https://i.imgur.com/5MRswJ6.jpg

In front of me, I have what's referred to as a Top Case assembly. Its essentially the metal frame, battery, keyboard and trackpad, all shipped and prepared as one piece for Apple techs to swap out. This particular one came from a 2017 model MacBook Pro 13", which rocks the 2nd generation of the Butterfly keyboard. This specific top case came from a machine that was "liquid damaged by my drunk roommate" so I have no issues tearing it apart for the greater good.

https://i.imgur.com/dnwTzDO.jpg

After removing the keycaps, here's what the keys actually look like underneath. Theres a few main parts here:

The silver metal dome. Thats what actually teams the machine that a key is pressed. It makes contact between metal pads when it is pressed.

Clear Plastic Housing around metal done. Its there to make sure the dome doesn't go anywhere and keeps it safe.

Butterfly Mechanism. This is the white part all around the perimeter of the clear plastic body.

I included both larger and smaller sized keys just for demonstration purposes.

https://i.imgur.com/VoRDuhG.mp4

Butterfly Mechanism in action. This is actually a genius idea, since it eliminates individual moving parts in favour of a single Large one. Youtube creator Veritasium made a video talking about how flexible moving pieces have a lot more advantages over multi-piece hinges (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97t7Xj_iBv0).

https://i.imgur.com/8zsuDFg.mp4

Metal dome in action. This is what happens to the dome and butterfly mechanism when the key is pressed.

https://i.imgur.com/SROBJRq.jpg

Here's an example of something that can cause the "Sticky, Crunchy, or Stuck Keys" problem. Having crumbs, or sticky liquids, or other gunk will cause your keys to feel weird, or to stop working. These are genuinely caused by crap getting stuck between the mechanism. Enough of these can definitely jam a key. The 3rd generation keyboards help negate this problem by adding a rubber piece around the perimeter of the butterfly mechanism in order to reduce ingress of larger bits into the mechanism.

https://i.imgur.com/fauw47h.mp4

Example of how a key can get jammed. That single large piece prevents the mechanism and switch from pressing down al the way.

https://i.imgur.com/SogaaLg.mp4

Upon further inspection, we run into another blockade in the Dust theory, a see-through plastic barrier that encloses the entire switch.

The purpose of this barrier is both ingress-protection and to make sure the metal dome stays in its proper place, as you'll see later.

https://i.imgur.com/N2YxJhs.mp4

There is also this black tape-like material covering the top portion. After peeling it off, I discovered that this is where there is a little lip that overhangs the plastic housing. Most likely this is so that the domes can be replaced by the companies that refurbish all the old parts/devices apple sends to them.

https://i.imgur.com/1KDJK2n.mp4

It wasn't very hard to peel it off, but the plastic film was adhered to the plastic frame. Again, a huge dead-end forest theory since it physically cannot get in through this area.

https://i.imgur.com/GqsUHrz.jpg

A close-up of the film and the metal dome itself.

https://i.imgur.com/6zVVFuY.mp4

After examining the dome, I discovered that it is not at all soldered down into place, but rather it is free-floating within the plastic housing. Whether it makes a connection or not depends on how well its legs are contacting those gold pads in the corners.

https://i.imgur.com/LAM75Lz.jpg

Top side of the dome itself. The 4 outer legs are what make contact with the gold pads that are used to carry electrical signals. The dome itself appears to be Steel. It is also incredibly light, it's no wonder the film has to keep it down.

https://i.imgur.com/ZBi4jau.jpg

Bottom side. That brown part is not corrosion, that's just laser-cutting left-overs from when the dome is manufactured. I checked, all the metal dome have these marks.

https://i.imgur.com/JmWD4DD.jpg

Close-up of the plastic body around the metal dome. Here we see 6 gold pads. All 6 of those are for carrying electrical signals. There is also a large hole close to the oval-shaped gold pad. This is a ventilation hole.

Now, I know what you're thinking. Ventilation hole? Aha! That's where the dust gets in!

Hold your horses, we are far from done.

https://i.imgur.com/o70lCgg.jpg

The plastic body takes a bit of effort to remove, thanks to the fact that it uses 4 plastic legs that are riveted to the underside of the board.

https://i.imgur.com/tqLXY1c.jpg

Once removed, we see that the entire plastic body is surrounded by an adhesive film with no obvious gaps in its seal. This is another dead-end for the dust-ingress theory, since the entire plastic body is sealed around the perimeter. For the sake of thoroughness, I tested the conductivity of all the gold pads; the 4 outer pads along with the oval-shaped one in the middle are all connected and act as a single end of the terminal, while the round central pad is a second terminal. Once these 2 are bridged by a conductive object, like a metal dome, they will register as a keypress.

https://i.imgur.com/EHIkSsn.mp4

Just to give you an idea, You can see my trying to fit my sharpest set of tweezers under the plastic body. At most it budged a bit to the side, but that's because adhesive is fairly flexible. It takes a fair bit of pressure to puncture that plastic film on top.

https://i.imgur.com/WDD2C8b.jpg

Out of curiosity, I also tore apart the thinner small keys to see what the mechanism looked like. It's the same thing, just a smaller version.

https://i.imgur.com/tkg6RMH.jpg

I attempted to test the "Heat Failure" theory with my heat-gun set to 300C and pointed directly at the metal dome. This was a beyond-extreme-case test to see if the key would warp and possibly make contact. 

Since MacBooks have god-awful cooling and will heat up to very hot temperatures in order to ensure that the machine stays as quiet as possible (which is a questionable method overall, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=947op8yKJRY talks about it more), some people suspected that the expansion and contraction of material can cause these keys to stop working.

After leaving it under heat for 2 minutes, it did not move a millimetre. This theory is very unlikely since there are keys that fail that do not sit in the same area as the Processor cooler (which can reach 70-100C pretty easily on these models).

At this point, I finished tearing up the entire top-side of the keyboard, so I turned my attention to the underside.

https://i.imgur.com/IZsaOvE.jpg

The keyboard is covered by a large, layered film material. Based on its thickness, it is likely meant to serve several purposes:

As a heat insulator for the keyboard area.

As an insulator for electrical signals between the Motherboard and the metal frame/keyboard itself.

As a barrier to prevent dust and crumbs from interfering with operation.

​

https://i.imgur.com/iEdRuZs.jpg

After removing it, I found a small surprise. The keyboard itself sits on one giant PCB (Printed Circuit Board) and even has a fair bit of componentry on it! Quick google search showed that the 4 large chips on the right are for controlling the LED backlight, the pair of smaller chips in the middle are some sort of micro controllers (probably for the keyboard itself), and the components on the left are a mystery; I suspect they're the fan control/PWM (pulse width modulation) circuit for the fan, since the fan connects directly into the keyboard on all new models

https://i.imgur.com/6Pm0Uqd.jpg

Whats this? A dust filter? In my friendly christian teardown? Dust filter indeed. This is one of the finest filters I've seen in years! (pun intended).

After looking at it, it turns out that this dust filter is used for the breathing hole that was pictured in the Switch teardown further up the post.

Another dead-end for the Dust Theory, since the breather hole itself is covered by a very fine mesh.

https://i.imgur.com/hycxJcR.jpg

Here's the tip of a 0.5mm ballot pen for size reference. Most dust and all hairs will not be able to fit between this mesh, which only further solidifies the dismissal of the Dust Theory.

https://i.imgur.com/rVfLEkF.jpg

This is the closest shot of the mesh that I can get. This is with 10x Macro lens + iPhone camera at full zoom. Pen marks for size reference.

https://i.imgur.com/hjIboNB.mp4

Here's a short clip of the alignment of the dust filter with the breather hole along with visible movement from the underside of the metal dome and butterfly mechanism.

https://i.imgur.com/4rtoCUP.jpg

After looking closer at the protective keyboard insulator bit, I noticed that the entire mesh portion is surrounded by an adhesive-material, with absolutely 0 gaps around the hole. This basically puts a dead-end to the last possible entry point for dust, since this entire breather hole is not only sealed by adhesives on both top and bottom, but also a clear film on top side and an extremely fine mesh on the bottom of the switch.

At this point, there should be little reason to believe that dust can get in there, since every possible vector of attack is throughly sealed and/or protected.

Contrary to popular belief, Apple actually took a lot of effort sealing these switches from the elements.

https://i.imgur.com/9pmrI0A.jpg

I found some household dust and threw it on the mesh. As you can see, the mesh is not having trouble stopping these tiny bits.

https://i.imgur.com/j32hfyl.mp4

And finally, here is a demonstration of what happens when the key is assembled and pressed under the most extreme of dusty conditions. I threw literally an entire pile of dust on that breather hole.

Since these switches are pretty much sealed from all angles other than this breather hole, this is where all the air can freely move in the switch. Once assembled, the design of the switch actually very closely resembles that of a conventional speaker, which deals with air pressure inside its sealed chamber by allowing the air to freely enter and exit its port hole. Once the key is pressed, there is a higher air pressure created between the PCB and metal dome. Since this pressure needs to go somewhere to prevent rupturing the plastic film, all of it immediately gets pushed out of this single vent. Any dust that has accumulated on this opening will immediately be ejected from the mesh filter. Bear in mind that the laptop would technically be upside-down if you viewed it from this angle. In reality, the dust would actually fall to the underside of the Logic board, which sits in very close proximity to this breather hole.

Excuse the shit quality, I had to heavily compress and alter the vids quality to make it fit into an upload able GIF.

https://i.imgur.com/i6a1KWK.jpg

See that rivet? There are close to 70 of these holding the keyboard into place, along with a battery that's glued in on-top of the bottom portion. You want DIY repairs? Good luck with that. This is why Apple ships these as a "Top Case Assembly" rather than "Keyboard".At this point, there is no evidence left at all that dust is the cause of failures for this switch, especially not for the Double-Input issue since that entirely relies on how long and how many electrical signals are detected by the keyboard controller. There is absolutely no reason why dust or humidity can cause this, especially with no easy entry points and the general lack of electrical conductivity of both dust and water.

The No-Input issue can still somewhat be explained by a few other theories (Humidity, or oxidation of the underside of the dome), but both these theories still have a lot of holes (breather hole pushes humidity out when key is pressed, gold contacts do not oxidize on their own, corroded material will get slightly worn off when one and pads make repeated contact with dome, the amount of dust and water needed to cause these situations is fairly high, etc).

  Why is this teardown so important***?***

​

It proves that Apple themselves have no idea how to deal with the issue and that dust was either just an excuse to satisfy their customer bases demand for an answer, or their engineers are genuinely nowhere near as smart as everyone thinks they are. I'm not sure which of these two is worse. Considering they've had 4 years to deal with it, i'm leaning more towards the latter.

The way Apple is handling this problem is actually far from good. People think that its nice of them to have a repair program for the issue, but this is actually just a shitty half-assed bandaid fix for the problem. As it stands, the current situation is as follows:

All 12" MacBooks + 2018 Air + all 2016-2018 Pro models will eventually develop keyboard issues, its a matter of time.

All 2016/2017 pros (and 12" 2015-2017) have the extended keyboard warranty program. This program covers these units for 4 years from original purchase date, meaning that 2016 models coverage ends around 2020/2021, depending on exact purchase date, and 2017 models coverage ends around 2021/2022. 2015 12" Macbook coverage is ending between this year and next year, so 2015 12" owners be prepared!

2018 models are not covered by this program! Currently, they rely entirely on their warranty or consumer protection laws, meaning that if you didn't purchase AppleCare or live on a country where Consumer Protection laws suck, you'll only get support for 1 year out of the box.      

For any of the above, once your warranty or keyboard program coverage ends, it's $500 USD per failure to replace the entire top case. There is no "cheaper" aftermarket solution, the keyboards themselves are a nightmare to replace and the aftermarket parts are even more likely to fail. Replacing the part will not permanently fix the issue either since Apple only replaces it with identical parts, meaning they're bound to fail again. On top of that, all machines will be classified as vintage 5 years after their original release date. Once that happens, spare parts from apple go bye bye for good and you'll be left only with the cheaper aftermarket parts that are usually more prone to failure, or be stuck buying used parts which are also failure-prone.

Ownership beyond 3-4 years fo these models is pretty much a gamble at best, and ownership for 2018 models without AppleCare is even more of a gamble since there's no repair program support for them and there is 0 guarantee that these models will be added to that keyboard replacement program at all.

As for what the actual cause is, honestly I don't know. My suspicion is that the metal dome experiences metal fatigue and slowly begin to lose connection, or that that little U-shaped cutout in the centre of the dome weakens and starts to easily bounce when pressed, making contact 2+ times. I honestly cannot test this at home, my equipment is woefully inadequate to go that deep.

Macbook owners, please beware. Always have AppleCare, even if paying extra to cover a flaw that should be properly dealt with is morally questionable and a shitty thing to do. Right now is not a good time to be a Macbook owner or buyer, and please consider whether or not you wish to financially support a company that pulls stunts like these.

​

This law firm is setting up a class action if anybody wants to join: https://www.research.net/r/MacKeyboard

[beesandwasps]

Everything You Will Ever Need To Know About Unicode (And Many Things You Will Not Need To Know As Well)

(This post is specifically being written so I have a single URL which covers all the points involved, and therefore does not necessarily cover all technical/historical points thoroughly even though it is extremely long. For your convenience in skipping it, the whole thing is below the fold.)

A Little History

Once upon a time, computers with keyboards instead of punch cards and switches were new and magical things. Since computers deal with complex data by converting it into numbers, a system was needed to map text to numbers. This kind of system — where numbers in some range, usually beginning with 0 and ending with some binary-significant value — are mapped to printing characters is called a character mapping.

After a certain number of false starts, American computer companies and their English-speaking foreign counterparts settled on ASCII (the American Standard Code for Information Interchange). Most people, even now, know a little bit about ASCII — the main points are:

Uses values from 0 to 127 (that is, values which can be represented in seven-eighths of one byte)

Values from 0 to 31 and the lone value 127 are non-printing characters (including a “backspace” character) intended to transmit control instructions

Contains the digits from 0 to 9, the latin alphabet without accents in both upper- and lower-case, and 32 symbols; the digits are in sequence, as are the alphabet.

Does not contain “curly quotes”, accented characters like “é”, or currency symbols other than the dollar sign “$”

Does not specify which non-printing character signifies a line break/paragraph ending

The line break issue is of some importance, so it’s worth explaining: ASCII as originally formulated treats text more or less as a stream of characters passing through the print head (the “carriage”) of an electric typewriter or old-fashioned line printer. As such, it has two characters which deal with moving the carriage to a new paragraph: “line feed” (LF), which moves the head down one line, and “carriage return” (CR), which moves the head to the extreme left edge of the line. ASCII says that LF is 10 (hexadecimal 0x0A), and CR is 13 (hexadecimal 0x0D). On an electric typewriter or line printer, where there is a physical moving part, a new paragraph is a carriage return and a line feed, in either order, but a computer generally doesn’t need two characters. With typical contrariness, the major families of operating systems adopted three standards:

POSIX-y systems (Unix, and eventually Linux) decided that LF meant a new paragraph, and CR meant nothing.

DOS (and eventually Windows) decided to follow the electric typewriter model, and used a carriage return followed by a line feed, CRLF. Either character by itself meant nothing, and LFCR meant nothing.

“Classic” Mac OS decided that CR meant a new paragraph, and LF meant nothing. (Mac OS X — which is actually a reworking of an older OS originally known as NextStep — is actually a Unix variant; any GUI program using the built-in text APIs will auto-translate all three options when reading a text file, and write LF.)

Obviously, although ASCII is good enough for programming in most computer languages, which tend to be English-y and designed for a certain amount of backwards-compatibility, ASCII was not good enough for other forms of text, which demand better punctuation and support for languages other than English.

There was a longish period during which a number of other character mappings were used in different contexts. Many of them were “extended ASCII” character sets, which used one byte per character, and filled the extra 128 values left by ASCII with extended punctuation and accented characters as support for other languages. By and large, these were encoded into a family of standards by the International Standards Organization (ISO), known collectively as ISO 8859. The most common of these is ISO 8859-1, “ISO Latin-1”, but there are others as well. (Most versions of Windows use a modified version of ISO Latin-1 known as Windows-1252, and the “Classic” Mac OS had an equivalent mostly-overlapping character mapping for European languages, Mac Roman.)

(As a purely historical note: IBM had its own family of character mappings entirely distinct from ASCII, known collectively as EBCDIC: Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code. For many reasons, EBCDIC did not catch on — among other things, the latin alphabet was never encoded as a single set of consecutive values — and it is included here primarily so that you can win trivia contests.)

Other languages, however, could not base their character mappings on ASCII. Real support for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean requires at least some large subset of the multi-thousand-character system called “漢字” (Pronounced “Hanzi” in Chinese, “Kanji” in Japanese, and “Hanja” in Korean), among other non-ASCII things. For this reason, there were also many pre-Unicode character mappings which used more than one byte per character, and even a few which used a variable number of bytes per character. All of these systems tended to include all the characters of ASCII, but were obviously not directly mappable to any ASCII-based single-byte character mapping.

This was the situation in the late 1980s, when Xerox and Apple began working on what would eventually become Unicode. The first published version of Unicode — which was a fixed-size two-byte encoding intended purely for modern languages in active use — was published in 1991, and an expanded version (essentially the current system from a technical standpoint) was published in 1996.

What Unicode Is, And What It Isn’t

Unicode is a character mapping (and a few other things as well which we won’t go into). It attempts to fulfill (sometimes with more success than others) certain specific goals:

Every character set used in “real” human communication should be representable. (There is a certain amount of fussiness over what “real” means — Klingon is not included, for instance, because it was deliberately invented to be “alien”, but Shavian phonetic script is included.)

For every character set included in Unicode, the order of the characters should ideally follow some popular pre-existing character mapping, if there is one, or at least have some technical justification even if it is only “this is the order of the alphabet in this language”.

Every included character has a numeric value — its “code point” — and a unique name in English, usually represented in all capitals. A code point is properly given as “U+” followed by the value in hexadecimal, padded to at least 4 digits. (That is, “U+0043”, not “U+43”.)

Characters which modify other characters, such as accent marks, should be included. If a modified character is common enough, it should appear as its own character. (For example, a capital “A” with a grave accent, “À” can be represented by U+0041, “LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A”, followed by U+0300, “COMBINING GRAVE ACCENT” — but it can also be represented as U+00C0, “LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH GRAVE”.) Algorithms are provided to “compose” these combinations into single characters where appropriate, and to compare strings properly with consideration for composition.

The Unicode standard, which is at version 12 as of this writing, is maintained by the Unicode Consortium, which is an international organization not under the control of any company, but including representatives from some companies as well as academics specializing in language. Note that Unicode is not a piece of software, nor is it a font. It is a character mapping, which must be implemented by software companies and font designers who want to display text. Although the application to include new characters in Unicode (or to modify existing ones) is not particularly complex, the process involves deliberation and tends to move very slowly.

It is important to remember that a Unicode code point is distinct from the bytes which will be recorded in a file. Unicode by itself does not specify how a code point should be recorded in bytes, merely which number values correspond to which characters (and how they interact). Unicode code points range between 0 and 0x10FFFF, which means that it would be theoretically possible to encode Unicode directly to disk as a fixed-size 3-byte encoding. In practice, this does not happen; more about this topic below. Certain specific code points are deliberately unused, most notably the 2048-code-point range from U+D800 to U+DFFF and the specific value U+FFFE.

The code points are usually (with a few exceptions) arranged into groups of related characters by language or purpose. These sections are known as “code tables”, and always contain a multiple of 16 characters, some of which may be unused, so that any two code points whose hexadecimal value differ only in the last digit are always in the same code table. (For instance, Mongolian is U+1800 through U+18AF.)

Some general notes on the basic structure of Unicode:

The values from 0 to 255 are identical to those in ISO 8859-1, so that ASCII and the most common “European” encoding have a direct conversion of values.

Most (though not all) character sets which would have a single-byte encoding by themselves, but are not based on the latin alphabet, appear fairly early in the list. (Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Cherokee, and so on.)

The majority (though again not all) of characters used commonly in modern languages appear in the Basic Multilingual Plane, or BMP, which is the range of values from U+0000 to U+FFFF. (In fact, Unicode 1.0 was the BMP.) There are other “planes” as well, and certain ranges of values are designated as “Private Use Areas”, so that programmers can use characters which are explicitly not part of ordinary text without having to switch between Unicode and other systems. (Apple, for example, stores their logo in the system fonts which come with Mac OS X as U+F8FF, so that it can be used in the menu bar and in text.)

In many cases, the Unicode Consortium later added additional characters for a specific language or character set, and so there are many small code tables containing “supplementary” or “extended” characters to previously-defined code tables. (The latin alphabet has 8 code tables so far, starting with “Basic Latin” for ASCII and “Latin-1 Supplement” for the rest of ISO Latin-1, but extending into extraordinarily rare characters up through “Latin Extended-E”, with a brief side trip to “Latin Extended Additional”.) Although the latin alphabet and the CJK character sets have more code tables than usual, there are “supplementary” and “extended” code tables for many others as well.

The 漢字 characters for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean appear only once, mostly in the massive code table “CJK Unified Ideographs”, which stretches from U+4E00 to U+9FFF. (The characters often have different appearances in the different languages, which means that there is a useful distinction between, say, the Korean version of a character and the Chinese version, which Unicode by itself does not preserve, making the single inclusion a contentious decision.) The characters generally appear in order of complexity, with the most common/simplest ones appearing at lower code points — but, as anybody who has perused a reference work involving 漢字 will tell you, “simpler” is not only a relative term but one on which different authorities disagree.

In addition to characters used in spoken languages, Unicode also contains a very wide range of shapes and symbols. Usually, these characters are added in response to their inclusion in some communications system outside of the Unicode Consortium’s control. (For example, emoji were originally taken from Japanese cell phone texting systems, which is why so many of the early emoji in Unicode are Japanese cultural items, like U+1F359 “🍡”, dango. That’s also why all the “face” emoji started off without alternate forms for skin color.) These non-language characters tend to appear in two places in the Unicode table: just before the 漢字 characters, and towards the end of the currently-defined characters.

Recording Unicode On Disk: Byte Sequences and UTF

In theory, you could record all Unicode characters using a 3-byte encoding; more commonly, people think of Unicode as having 4-byte values. While this is not technically incorrect, it is worth remembering that Unicode itself never uses values above 0x10FFFF. (On the other hand, there is a “larger” standard known as the Universal Character Set, UCS, which is currently defined as being identical to Unicode for all defined values, but explicitly says that characters can potentially have any four-byte value, and most software is written with an eye on UCS.)

A method of converting Unicode code points into values on disk is a Unicode Transformation Format (or, if you like, a UCS Transformation Format), abbreviated UTF. The obvious, simple, and almost unused method is to record text as a stream of 4-byte values. This is known as UTF-32, or UCS-4, and is extremely rare in practice.

There are 2 common encodings (one of which comes in two variants) which reduce the amount of wasted space (bytes of value 0) recorded to disk:

UTF-8

UTF-8 is by far the most common encoding found on the web, and also in text files used by programmers. The premise is simple: characters which appear in strict ASCII take up one byte with the high-order bit set to 0 (that is, with a value from 0 to 127), other characters use 2, 3, or 4 bytes with the high-order bit set to 1 (a value from 128 to 255). A valid strict ASCII text file is automatically a valid UTF-8 text file.

The Wikipedia article explains the algorithm in detail, but in short: multi-byte characters in UTF-8 are formatted so that the first byte indicates how many bytes will be used, and the remaining bytes cannot be mistaken for the first byte of a multi-byte character. That means UTF-8 is useful across unreliable transmission methods — if a single byte is lost, the character corresponding to that byte will be lost, but the rest of the text is not jumbled.

In addition, any system which was written with the assumption that all text was ASCII (which includes most command-line tools) will probably handle UTF-8 text without any problems, provided that they do not strip high-order bits or split up any adjacent multi-byte characters. (That is, they will be able to do things like search through the text or wrap it to a maximum line width for display without making it unreadable.) This makes it particularly convenient for programmers and system administrators, who frequently use tools which were written long ago and “think” in terms of pure ASCII text (or, at least, ASCII-based single-byte character mappings).

It is possibly important to remember that, contrary to popular belief, not every sequence of byte values is valid UTF-8 text. There are byte sequences which encode values which have no character mapping, byte sequences which encode values too large for the Unicode range, and byte sequences which encode ASCII characters — which would be readable but still invalid.

The algorithm for UTF-8 can actually handle the entire UCS character set, using up to 6 bytes per character for values outside the official Unicode mapping, and when the UTF-8 encoding was introduced, those additional values were part of the algorithm. By the official standard eventually set by the IETF RFC in 2003, UTF-8 is restricted to valid Unicode values, and therefore no more than 4 bytes per character.

UTF-16 (and UTF-16BE and UTF-16LE)

Much though “tl;dr” synopses are horrible, this section can be summarized as: “unless you are defining your own file type (so that only your program will ever need to read it) and will be storing a lot of text which does not use the latin character set, do not use UTF-16 because it is a mess and invites trouble”.

UTF-16 was — in Unicode 1.0 — the equivalent of UTF-32 in later versions, because all Unicode values used 2 bytes, meaning that recording two bytes per character was the simple, obvious thing to do. It was somewhat wasteful of space for most European languages, since it “wastes” a byte for any character in the ISO Latin-1 character mapping, but even in 1991 when Unicode 1.0 came out this was not an unreasonable strain on existing storage technology. The problems which eventually made UTF-16 unpopular were more subtle and varied.

First was the fact that there are two varieties of UTF-16. Some computers are “big-endian” (that is, the first byte in a multi-byte value is the byte which stores the larger portion of the value, the “big end”) and some are “little-endian”. (The terms are references to Gulliver’s Travels, and are traditional for describing this problem.) So by default, some computers “want” to write U+1234 as 0x1234, with the “big end” first (UTF-16BE) while others “want” to write it as 0x3412 with the “little end” first (UTF-16LE), and since U+3412 is just as valid a code point as U+1234, there is no automatic way to be sure whether a UTF-16 file from an unknown source was UTF-16BE or UTF-16LE.

In order to solve this problem, Unicode defined U+FEFF as a “Byte Order Mark” (BOM) which could be placed at the beginning of a UTF-16 text stream to show which one was in use. (Its character is defined as a “zero-width non-breaking space” — in other words, a character which is technically a space for the purposes of word-count or spell-checking, but takes up no space on the screen, and at which programs are not supposed to break up text for line-wrapping or layout purposes. Since this has no visible or analytical effect on the text at all, a correctly-interpreted BOM in a Unicode-supporting program does not alter the text and can even be safely included in UTF-8 text files where it is unnecessary.) Which solved the problem… except that the overwhelming majority of programs which used UTF-16 did not record a BOM in their files, regarding it as an unnecessary waste of space. As a result, most pure text editors which support UTF-16 have an option to force a file to open as either BE or LE.

When Unicode 2.0 increased the range of valid code points all the way to U+10FFFF, two bytes were no longer sufficient to cover all possible characters. UTF-16 was amended to use approximately the same trick as UTF-8 to extend its range. As it happened, no characters had yet been assigned to the range U+D800 to U+DFFF, and so this range was declared to be permanently unused; characters with code points above U+FFFF are recorded in UTF-16 as a pair of 2-byte values in this range. (More specifically, the first value will be in the range 0xD800 to 0xDBFF, and the second value will be in the range 0xDC00 to 0xDFFF; this gives 1024×1024 combinations, coincidentally the number of values from 0x010000 to 0x10FFFF.) As a result, “modern” UTF-16 is a variable-length encoding — most of the time, it uses two bytes per character, but sometimes uses four.

If a single byte is missed or deleted in transmission (or any odd number of bytes), the rest of the text is garbled, and unless an invalid combination like an unmatched U+D800 occurs, there is no way to detect this algorithmically. If multiple bytes are lost at random, the text will switch back and forth to and from gibberish.

Finally, and fatally in many cases, UTF-16 often chokes old programs which “think” in ASCII, which are often used by programmers. Unfortunately, a very large number of two-byte combinations which are valid UTF-16 are also valid ASCII, so programs which expect to be able to alter ASCII text for convenience can mangle UTF-16 text irreparably.

In particular, line break characters can be a problem with UTF-16 text. Tools such as Git often default to some sort of “auto-translation” mode when retrieving code files, but are not smart enough to catch on to multi-byte character encoding. A file which is converted to the Windows paragraph ending, CRLF, from (usually) the POSIX paragraph ending, LF, will cause the insertion of an extra byte, garbling all the characters in even-numbered paragraphs. Although it is possible to shut off a given tool’s auto-translation mode, it is much easier simply to avoid UTF-16 encoding in favor of UTF-8 from the start.

UTF-7

UTF-7 is primarily used in e-mail. You are unlikely to use it and it is listed here purely to head off questions. It records unaccented latin letters, numbers, and a few symbols directly as their ASCII equivalents, “+” as the sequence “+-”, and all other characters with a “+” followed by the base64-encoded UTF-16BE value of the character. This means that the entire text will consist of ASCII characters, thus conforming to MIME requirements. Since this is extremely wasteful of space without any particular benefit in terms of readability or formatting, it is generally unused as a file format.