#on the tracking thing it says its like in a warehouse or something 30 minutes away from my house

[glass-trash-bab]

Fingers crossed I get my comic tomorrow 🤞

[stressedoutcanary]

Family Matters - Batfamily x Reader

Summary: A surprise birthday party and Batfamily being chaotic.

“That's it Dick just a little to the right...No the other right...No! Not there you goofus! Just...Just get down from the chandelier before it comes crashing down on the rest of us and For God's Sake let Duke handle the ribbons before you somehow strangle yourself with them”

Warnings ⚠️: Fluff, lots of it, angst because I can’t help myself, Reader has got some parental issues. Hurt/Comfort.

Word count: 2.4k

A/N: I wanted some good dad Bruce content so I did it myself. Also I might have been influenced by a post I made a while back about Bruce and his children. I haven't used reader's pronouns anywhere so it's kinda gender neutral.

I don’t know where I was going with this, my imagines are often like a train derailed from its track but I think it’s fine. So Enjoy ;)  

•°•°•°•°

"Focus (Y/S/N), don't jump in in blind, assessing what action your opponent is about to undertake and countering it out before they can complete that action, this is the key lesson for you today", Batman's commanding voice echoed in the enclosed area of the batcave as he observed you attempting to roundhouse kick the boy in front of you. It was rather rashly executed with the hope of knocking him down which, for obvious reasons, only ended up with your leg connecting with nothing but thin air.

'Damn he is fast when he actually tries.'

"Easy for you to say Old Man! You aren't the one dancing with Mister Duckboy, the teen wonder over here!", you exclaimed, panting as your chest heaved from the exertion.

"Duckboy?!", Tim looked near scandalized as you grinned in return, stealing a glance towards the giggling crowd gathered near the stairs.

Everyone was already in the cave, it was a rare occurrence, it happened only when the issues of upmost importance were being discussed. Today was one of those days; The planning of Alfred Pennyworth's surprise birthday party.

However things usually went a lot less violent, this day every year. The sparring session this year was the result of you messing up, real bad while on patrol last night and since you were around the same age as Tim, he was found to be the most appropriate partner for it. The only drawback was that he had a staff in his hands while your weapons were confiscated, because in Bruce's words 'you rely on them too much'. You were already tired and Tim had a huge advantage over you, if you wanted to win this match you had to be quick and efficient at the same time.

Distracting Tim by your comment allowed you to have an opening, gathering all your strength you went in for a forward strike. Unfortunately he was more than ready to take you on, he crouched down, narrowly missing your punch then proceeded to swipe your legs off of the ground with his bo staff making you fall butt first on the floor.

"Congratulations you've managed to hurt both my ass and my ego, Timbers", You said laying back on the ground, hands and legs spread out and instead of helping you up, Tim joined you on the floor sitting next to you. You gave him a look that was equivalent to 'next time I get the chance, I am going to push you off a roof'.

"Your skills need improvement", Bruce said in his monotonous tone as you grunted knowing that a full ass lecture was gonna follow, but before he could get another word out, Jason chimed in with a statement no one ever expected to hear from him,"You know (Y/N), he's not wrong in fact I think the old man's actually got a point."

Jaws dropped to floor, Tim looked like he just saw a ghost, Dick who was standing near Barbara pinched himself to see whether he was dreaming or not, Damian snapped his neck up from where he was sharpening his katana, even Titus and Ace perked their heads up at the sudden silence that settled over the place. Barbara, Cass, Duke and Steph looked equally shocked.

"Before you all get any ideas, what I'm trying to say is you better pay attention because B over here won't be able to save your ass, 'cause if you slack off the next thing you know you would be in a warehouse with a maniac, getting blown to bits", Jason looked at Bruce with accusing eyes.

'And here I thought he was finally going to say something sensible', you thought to yourself as he continued,

"Take it from someone who has had that experience, you guys remember right? The fact that I--"

"Died, we know!!", everyone groaned at the same time and Bruce looked like he had to physically restrain himself from faceplaming.

"Okay! Guys how about we go ahead and do the thing we all actually came here to do instead of... whatever this conversation was", you suggested, getting up and patting the dust off your clothes.

"Well then someone has got to ask the important question here", Barbara looked around as she worded her sentence,"who is going to be the one to keep Alfred busy while we get everything ready?"

Once again the cave went silent. For a whole bunch of detectives, you all were very, very scared of Alfred, including Bruce even though he will never admit it, lying to The old-butler-cum-grandpa and making random excuses for the whole 3 hours was a thought dreadful enough to make all of you exchange petrified glances at each other hoping someone would step forward to do the job.

"I'll do it", dick raised his hand.

"NO!", everyone snapped and Dick's head tilted with a pout.

"You are good at doing a lot of stuff boy wonder, hiding things from Alfred isn't one of them", Barbara comforted Dick as Damian stepped up next.

"*tt* Since none of you imbeciles have the courage or the ability to do it. I shall be the one to handle Pennyworth. Gordon, Cain and Titus, I will require your assistance", Damian spoke or rather commanded as he went up the stairs, followed by the group he chose.

"Don't mess this up for us, you gremlin!"

"Tim!", you lightly jabbed him in the side with your elbow.

"Ow! What?"

"Be nice", you narrowed your eyes and he understood you were being serious.

"Fine I'll try, but don't blame me if he starts something", Tim shrugged carelessly. You shook your head and let out an audible sigh as you followed everyone else up towards the manor.

•°•°

"That's it Dick just a little to the right...No the other right...No! Not there you goofus! Just...Just get down from the chandelier before it comes crashing down on the rest of us and For God's Sake let Duke handle the ribbons before you somehow strangle yourself with them", you eyed him worriedly.

"Oh come (Y/N) it'll be fine!", the cheerfulness in his voice made you cock an eyebrow at him from below. Duke slid in beside you.

"10 bucks says he will somehow fall within the next hour"

"Oh Duke you should know better, 20 says he'll fall within 30 minutes", you turned towards him with an evil smile.

"What are you both talking about down there?"

"NOTHING!", you both said in unison on which Dick gave you a confused look.

"Oh Hey look Steph needs my help with the cake so, see ya!", you quickly moved to the other side of the room checking in with Stephanie and Tim. She gave you a thumbs up to signal that everything was going according to plan and the place was almost ready. Everyone was laughing, bickering, having fun, it was all very rare and seeing it, a warm feeling spread throughout you.

You smiled to yourself for a moment but it faltered and a frown pulled up at your lips, a sorrowful thought crossed your mind, something you always kept buried deep down. Looking around and seeing as nobody needed your help at the moment you decided to slip out of the chaos, taking slow steps towards the patio to clear your head.

•°•°

Leaning against the railing you thought back to how you left your house this morning telling your mother that you are going to stay at your friend's place for a while and how she just waved her hand at that, not even questioning you anymore. Your mind was completely elsewhere, despite the awe-inspiring dense forest right in front of you, your eyes were lost in space.

You registered, a bit too late, the presence of someone standing beside you.

"It is a nice view, but something tells me that's not what brought to out here, away from everyone else"

"Careful there Brucie or people might think that you are actually capable of some emotions which happen include caring for people", you retorted back at him. It was always a sort of defense mechanism for you, whenever you felt exposed you countered it with snarky remark.

You closed your eyes hoping that Bruce would just walk away. But he didn't. He stayed there.

Bruce leaned on the railing beside you and waited. You took a deep breath, contemplating you next move carefully.

"...Look It's really silly so can we drop it?", you whispered wondering why in the world would Bruce of all people, care about your feelings.

"Talk to me (Y/N). I can tell when something is bothering you, I may not be your father, but you are my family.", unlike usual, his voice was gentle and genuine when he spoke to you.

"I am really not a fan of surprise birthdays", you stated, starting off vaguely.

"And why is that?"

"Because I...It's silly but this one time I spent a whole week working on a birthday gift for my mom, it was like a craft pop up box which had multiple photos of us together, I made that from scratch! everything in it I made that, I worked hard for it, I did it out of love but when I gave her that surprise gift you know what she said Bruce! She said that I wasted my time that she would've been much happier if I had focused on my studies, she never even once said that she liked it and I--", you looked at him with tears brimming in your eyes, threatening to spill.

"I don't know Bruce, it-it just makes me feel sad you know? every little thing reminds me that my mother doesn’t seem to love me anymore. There is this constant thought in my mind that no one cares about me, about what I do for them and I don’t know what to do with a thought like that."

"That's not true, look around you kiddo, you are surrounded by people who would do anything for you, who love you from the bottom of their hearts", Bruce finally looked at you, placing a hand on your shoulder.

"That's the thing! I am not an orphan!", you blurted out and Bruce looked more confused than ever.

"I'm aware"

"No! No you are not. I am not one of those kids you picked up from somewhere, I don't live here, Like I am sure you people aren't even sane, hell! you all make up the most dysfunctional family I have ever seen! I don’t belong here, you people have no reason to care about", Bruce gave you a sideways look, slightly chuckling at your sudden description of the people in the manor.

"But I still love everyone, my mom, you, every dumbass inside the manor right now, no matter much pain they cause me and I don't get why", this time when he looked at you, you didn't look like the vigilante who sucker punched The Riddler in the face last night, you looked like a scared little kid who is lost.

Bruce stood up straight and wrapped you in a hug. Something you never expected to happen in a million years. The shocked settled in after a bit and you wrapped your hands around him, burying your face in his chest.

"The people we love are still people at the end of the day. They act out, and sometimes they let us down, hurt us even, but that doesn't mean we stop loving them. For every bad memory, there will always be a good one that will get you through it. I promise you that (Y/N)", Bruce pulled away and gave you a warm smile. You couldn't help but smile back, your face matching his.

"Okay who are you and what have you done with Bruce Wayne? because I don't recognize this man who is full of emotions and on top of that, is giving free hugs right now", you broke into a grin, making Bruce's face go back to the stoic version.

"If you tell anyone, I will deny it"

"Sure you will"

Suddenly a clattering sound came from the hall, alerting you both. This, however, was followed by a 'I'm okay!' By the one Dick Grayson, which in turn was followed by Duke's 'Oh no!'

"Any idea what that was about?", Bruce inquired raising an eyebrow as you burst out laughing.

"That, you big softie, was the sound of me getting my 20 dollars, now let's get back before they destroy everything."

•°•°

You and Bruce entered back into the hall, everyone was gathered around waiting for Damian and his group to signal the beloved butler's arrival. You stood next to Tim as Jason moved towards the switches to turn off the lights.

"Okay I'll bite why are you covered in frosting before the party even started?"

"Steph", Tim replied, too tired to elaborate, leaving you giggling.

Barbara, Cass and Damian rushed through the door, looking close to terrified, with Titus tagging along.

"He is here, HIDE!", Damian said quickly closing the doors.

After a few moments, the door creaked open and Alfred's voice came through, "Master Damian, you and I will have words for what you did to-- Oh my", he was stuck to his position at the door, too shocked to say anything more after looking at the decorations and bunch gathered around an enormous cake.

"HAPPY BIRTHDAY ALFRED!!", you all exclaimed with extreme excitement.

As the party went on you noticed that there was, in fact, a broken chandelier broomed to the side, later on there were a few not-at-all-safe stunts performed by the boys, some really bad puns made by Dick, all sorts of shenanigans by the others and cake, lots of cake. You looked around, everyone was busy doing something but now you knew Bruce was right:

You have one hell of a family, original, found or otherwise. And you love them all no matter what.

°•°•°•°•

Tags: @thesesickfics-justmakemesick

[olivia-anderson-fanfic]

Satisfied, Part 30

First

Previous

Next

~~~

She hummed softly as she walked through town with the horse miraculous. She watched people’s faces in search of some hint of recognition, but it seemed that she was still pretty obscure. Good. She didn’t want people to know that 'NightMare’ ever existed.

Outside of Harley and her crew, of course.

But, as her eyes landed on a person in the same suit as before and quickly found their way to the needle in their hands, she was beginning to wish that they didn’t know her either. She held her hands up in surrender as they neared her.

“Hey, it’s fine. I’m not going to fight, just put a bag over my head and we can go.”

The henchmen looked at each other awkwardly. Apparently, they hadn’t expected a near-child begging them not to put a needle in her. They didn’t seem all too interested in going against a kid’s wishes.

She smiled as a bag was put over her head and she was picked up.

She tried to track where they were going, she really did. But after turn number 14548 she started to wonder if they were purposely going around in circles to confuse her. Eventually she tipped her head back and closed her eyes.

She was brought firmly to the present as the bag was pulled off, nearly blinding her. Her hands came up to cover her eyes again as she cursed in French.

After half a minute she finally could look up, even though she needed to squint pretty hard to do so.

It wasn’t just Harley and the Penguin. Her eyes wandered over each Rogue in turn. No one seemed to be distinctly hostile. Harley smiled and waved. The Riddler was watching her with interest, not unlike how one would look at a puzzle. The Penguin was sending her wary looks out of the corner of his eyes. Scarecrow, Poison Ivy, and Catwoman seemed uninterested.

She smiled and wrapped Harley in a tight hug. “Hey! Nice to see you again!” She chirped, making sure to keep her face in the woman’s shoulder when she said so. If they were calling for her, something must be going on. She didn’t think it was going to be pleasant.

“Nice to see you, too, darlin’.”

She stood close to Harley’s side. She was the only one reacting positively to her existence.

Marinette bit down on the inside of her cheek as she looked around.

They were in a different warehouse than before, if the box placement was any indication, but it was an abandoned warehouse. Inconvenient if they changed every time they wanted to see her, it meant her and the bats couldn’t just plant a tracker on her and plot an ambush at a random time. They probably could come by right now, but everyone was clearly on guard, probably waiting for that kind of betrayal. They’d have to wait until the Wayne Gala to capture them.

The silence stretched on and Marinette fought to urge to curl in on herself. “So... why am I here?”

To her surprise, Penguin was the one to speak up: “Nothing special, I just wanted to ask a few questions.”

She raised her eyebrows. “I thought I got my interrogation out of the way last time?”

He shook his head. “Different questions.”

“Okay...”

They both sat in the dust and he pulled out a set of cards. She frowned confusedly as he started separating the deck into halves.

He gave a small smile as he handed over half. “Do you know how to play War?”

She raised an eyebrow. “Of course.”

She looked him up and down. He was clearly different from everyone else there. While everyone else seemed to have some sort of manic light in their eyes, his were so cold and calm that she felt a shiver run through her as he stared her down. She’d thought Harley to be the most worrying of the group, she was most likely to catch her out on a lie, but Penguin... she felt like he could figure out she was about to lie before she’d even opened her mouth.

She swallowed thickly as she shuffled her cards a bit.

They started playing, tossing the cards onto the ground. It was a simple rhythm. Toss, toss, winner takes. He waited until they got to a pretty quick pace before speaking again: “What’s your weakness?”

Her hand fumbled her card. That wasn’t at all the subtle manipulation she’d been warned of. She looked up at him, tipping her head to the side. “I don’t know. I guess I’d do anything for my friends...”

“And I’m guessing you wouldn’t tell us any of their names?”

She tossed down her card and sighed when they matched. “I. De. Clare. War.” She considered his question for a second, then snickered. “No, of course not. I’m not giving anyone anything they can use to find my identity.”

He nodded thoughtfully. “I. De. Clare. War.” They examined their losses and then all of the cards were pushed to her side. “Useless ones, anyways,” he muttered, though he still seemed somewhat annoyed.

“Why’d you ask?”

“Just hoping that you would be easier since you’re a kid and new to Gotham,” he explained calmly.

She scowled despite herself. He was hardly trying at all. Was he underestimating her? Or was there some sort of secret game he was playing?

They started to get into a rhythm again. “Alright, so the friends thing is bullsh--.”

“Language!” Hissed Harley.

Penguin shot her a glare. “So the friends thing is a lie. What’re you doing this for?”

“Necessity,” she repeated her answer from last time, tossing down an Ace.

She grinned cheekily at him, up until he set down one of his own.

“Sure, obviously, no one comes to this side for any other reason. But what is it that you need?”

She pursed her lips. “I. De. Clare. War.”

“I. De. Clare. War.”

She pushed everything over to Penguin.

“So, what is it? Money?”

“Nope.”

“Revenge?”

“No!”

“Power?”

She’d been expecting the question. It didn’t save her from tensing, from the slight pause of her hand. Still, she tried: “Of course not.”

His lips quirked into a grin. He’d definitely noticed.

He opened his mouth to speak, but whatever he was going to say was cut off when Harley shoved a tray of cookies in their faces. “Here you go, darlin’s.”

Marinette smiled awkwardly and took one from Penguin’s side. Nothing personal, she just preferred if she didn’t get poisoned.

Then he grabbed one from her side.

She bit the inside of her cheek. Dang, had she guessed wrong? Or was he just trying to even out what he saw as a debt? She couldn’t really change her choice, now, though. She nibbled at the cookie. It was pretty good.

Riddler suddenly dropped down on their left, smiling. “Hey! Can I join?”

She tipped her head to the side, cookie dangling half out of her mouth as she glanced at Penguin. Even if she wanted to have some sort of buffer between the two of them, she wasn’t going to say anything. It was his interrogation, not hers.

Penguin sighed and pushed himself to his feet. He dropped his cards into Riddler’s lap. “I got everything I needed, anyways.”

Riddler beamed and took the cards from her so he could shuffle. “You up for a game of speed?”

She shrugged and nodded as she picked her deck. She picked the top few up and started organizing them. Riddler did the same. Fun.

They reached out and flipped the middle cards, and then they were off.

“Who are you?”

“Secret.”

“Were you from Paris?”

“Not every person in France is a Parisian,” she muttered irritably.

“Didn’t answer me.”

“Yes.”

She cursed in French as he beat her to a card, her hand fumbling back to her deck. She waited for him to either put down a card she could wait until he ran out of things to play. Hopefully the first, she didn’t want to get behind.

“Were you known in Paris?”

“Yes. Under a different name and with a different outfit, though.”

“Is this your first time doing villain stuff?”

He’d paused, his hand hovering over his deck.

They met eyes for a few seconds and then gave each other a nod. They flipped to a new card and the process restarted.

“No,” she said. Not a lie. She’d done ‘villain stuff’ twice before.

“Does anyone know who you are?”

“Unfortunately,” she muttered. She tapped her last two cards against her chin as he whittled his deck down to one card.

“Would you tell me who?”

“Not a chance.”

He grinned and they flipped to a new set of cards. They both glanced at their hands and then at each other. They flipped again. Marinette put down her second to last card and then they eyed each other. They flipped one last time --.

Nothing.

They both sighed and let their cards slip from their fingers. Two sevens. Club and spade. Fun.

She rested her head on her hand and then blinked as he thrust a hand in her face.

“Good game. I’d love to get to know you better.”

She tipped her head to the side as she considered this. He seemed to think of her as something to figure out, as some sort of challenge. She already had two people who knew her identity, that was already far too much, but...

She grinned and shook his hand. “I’d love to get to know you, too, Riddler.”

He smiled and started shuffling cards again.

She felt a weight drop on her and blinked up at Catwoman, who had slung herself over Marinette.

“I don’t have anything to steal,” she said calmly, popping another cookie in her mouth. She figured she’d already be dead if they were poisoned, Harley seemed the type to like instant gratification.

“Saying that because I’m a Rogue?” She purred and all Marinette could do was sigh as she was handed a deck.

“I’m saying that because you’re Catwoman, being a Rogue itself isn’t all that concerning right now.”

She pouted but her hands stopped brushing over Marinette’s clothes for something to grab. To her surprise, though, Catwoman didn’t immediately pull away from her. She just continued to lean on her as she and the Riddler restarted their game.

Five draws later, both of them were cursing.

“HOW IS THIS HAPPENING?!”

“I DONT KNOW BUT ITS STUPID!” She yelled back, tossing the cards down and resting her head in her hands.

Catwoman rubbed her back in an attempt to calm her down. Marinette would be lying if she said it wasn’t at all soothing.

“Maybe this just isn’t our game.”

Riddler chewed at a cookie irritably. She would have thought that impossible a few minutes ago, but now she completely understood.

She smiled as Poison Ivy and Scarecrow came to sit on either side of them. “Thank kwami, now we can play something else,” she muttered half jokingly.

Poison Ivy gave her a small smile as she looked at everyone. “Go fish?”

Marinette snickered. “Aren’t you supposed to be Rogues? What’s with all the schoolkid games?”

Scarecrow laughed quietly. “You’re a kid, aren’t you? Wouldn’t be right to scam you out of your money. Come back when you’re 21 and then we’ll talk.”

She rolled her eyes. “Fine. Fine. Ivy, got any...”

She played miscellaneous card games until pretty much daybreak. They were all pretty evenly matched at most luck-based games, though Catwoman did attempt to ‘help her win’/cheat quite a few times.

Now, though, light streamed through the tattered blinds. She groaned exhaustedly and attempted to push the sleeping Catwoman off of her back, only to have her lean more weight into her.

She sighed and closed her eyes, allowing herself to lean into the Rogue. Just a few minutes...

~~~

I actually learned this interrogation method through my mom

She’s a therapist and she’ll play quick-pace games while asking questions people would be inclined to lie about

Apparently it’s pretty good at figuring things out

~

Me, staring at my finally finished plotting: oh. huh. this is a LITTLE longer than i thought it was gonna be

~

Taglist

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<3

[ghostpeblewrite]

Paradoxical - Chapter 5

~~~~~~

Ghost knew deep down that walking out on Toast right then was a bad idea. However, he didn’t know how bad of an idea it actually was.

Only now he realizes that, his head pounding and his wrists tied behind his back. As he comes to his senses more, he realizes he has a blindfold over his eyes. He’s also tied to a chair.

And he can also hear sound in the room he’s in. Quiet whispering to his left. The voices almost sound familiar to him. Hey, maybe if he knows them, they won’t kill him!

“Hello?” he groans. Maybe he can talk his way out of this.

He can hear a gasp followed by a quick, shrill, “He’s awake!!” Two sets of footsteps approach him. One stops to his left, the other directly in front of him.

“Oh, please let me take his blindfold off!!” the shrill voice says, sounding almost like a begging kid.

“I’m not letting you do it,” a deep voice says. It has a weird accent, almost like a mix of southern and British- Wait a fucking minute.

“Oh, you mother FUCKER!” Ghost exclaims. He’d know that fucking voice anywhere. “Gavin you piece of shit!”

The man, correctly identified as Gavin, chuckles. The shrill voice laughs as well, a disturbing cackle that chills Ghost to his bones. “Long time no see, Ghostie.”

Ghost’s blindfold is taken off his head, and he’s face to face with the twin brother of his best friend.

Despite being identical twins, many things help differentiate the two brothers. First of all, Gavin doesn’t have the same baby blue eyes as Toast. His eyes are instead an abnormally vibrant green colour.

Another thing is the scar on the left side of Gavin’s face, stretching from his jaw up to the corner of his eyebrow. Gavin also has a few face piercings, one of them being on his eyebrow, another on his lip. He also does his hair differently than his brother’s.

The easiest way to tell though, is Gavin is a total dickhead, and Toast isn’t.

“What was even the point of the blindfold??” Ghost huffs, glaring at him.

“So you didn’t see him,” Gavin says, backing away from Ghost as he motions to the other guy in the room, presumably the owner of the shrill voice. Ghost freezes when he sees him.

The man looks a lot like Ghost, like he could be his brother or something. However, the man has shaggy nearly black hair that hangs into his face, red eyes, and more scars than a tortured war hostage. The guy’s face splits into an eerie smile, his cracked and scarred lips twisting, forming into something almost inhuman. He has sharp canines.

Everything about the man unsettles Ghost, and he hates to say he knows exactly why.

“We meet again, Ghost!!” The guy says, then lets out a chilling cackle, the effort from it shaking his entire body.

Ghost squeezes his eyes shut. He thought he was finally rid of this parasite, but his cackle drives its way deep into his brain again. He hasn’t seen him since the incident. He never wanted to see him again.

Yet there he stood, in front of him. His parasite. The thing he got ripped from his skull.

Jimmy Casket.

---

“Good morning,” Toast greets. His voice is tense, and he looks like a complete mess.

Spooker, who had just woken up after staying the night at the HQ by accident, blinks in surprise at Toast’s appearance. Toast never looks like this.

“Hi…” Spooker says slowly, “did you sleep?”

“Er, no,” Toast admits, seeming to shake a bit as he goes to grab his mug off the table. “But it’s fine. Have you seen Ghost?”

“Not since yesterday morning. Why?” Spooker raises an eyebrow. “Is he not here?”

“No. He’s not. And he didn’t bring his phone with him. And this isn’t like him,” Toast says quickly, shaking a bit as he takes a sip of whatever’s in his mug.

“Well, I’m sure he’s alright!” Spooker says, putting a hand on Toast’s shoulder. Toast just sighs.

“I don’t know. What with all this … Paranormal stuff going on, I’m worried. This isn’t like him! He always comes back- It’s been 24 hours maybe I should report him as missing?”

“Cmon, Toast! He’s a 30-year-old man, he can spend 24 hours on his own, right?” Spooker says, smiling at him. Toast thinks about that.

“I… I suppose you’re right,” Toast sighs, looking down.

“Yeah!” Spooker nods. “Anyway, Colon and I are gonna go somewhere today. You’ll be okay alone, right?”

Toast looks at him, in such a state that he is most definitely not good to be alone. He nods. “Yeah, I’ll be fine. You two have fun.”

“We will!!” Spooker says as the two head out the door.

Toast watches them go quietly. As soon as the door closes, he feels the weight of being alone settle on him. He can’t stand being alone. It reminds him too much of that dark time of his life.

He can barely remember any of it, really. Just the feelings he had. He remembered the apartment he and … she used to share, once a bright place full of laughter and love, turned to a dark blur in Toast’s memory. He still hasn’t quite forgiven himself for it, but he’s moved past it with Ghost’s help.

Ghost.

His childhood best friend. The memory of Ghost is the only thing that pulled him out of that place. Lead him all the way back to America. All the way to Ghost’s front door. He barely even remembers the first few weeks with Ghost. Ghost doesn’t bring them up either. All Toast can remember is a few blurs of the bottom of the bottle, an overall feeling of shit, and Ghost’s face when he found Toast unconscious on the floor of the kitchen. He had slapped Toast awake, and the face Toast saw when coming to consciousness was one of fear. Sure, he’d seen Ghost afraid before, but nothing like that. It was pure panic, fear from worry. It hurts Toast’s heart to think about.

He remembers Ghost yelling, but none of what he said. He was too captivated by him. Ghost was his own guardian angel back then, always there for Toast whenever he needed him. Toast was there for Ghost too. They sort of relied on each other, both coming out of dark times in their lives.

But now, remembering Ghost’s face the last time he saw him, the anger there. Toast sighs, looking down at his mug of coffee. He hates coffee, he could never understand how Ghost drinks it. He thinks he can understand now.

Part of him thinks he is overreacting. Ghost is a grown man. He can do what he wants, he doesn’t have to stay with Toast. It’s just odd. They’ve always been there for each other, always right nearby. It’s not like Ghost to be gone for so long.

Toast thinks about Ghost’s incident next. It’s barely been a month since it happened, and it’s been a relatively smooth road. Sure there are moments like these where Ghost would get irritable for no reason, but Toast just brushed it off as him adjusting. Maybe he shouldn’t have.

He can still remember the day he found Ghost. He’d been missing for a whole day before Toast finally tracked him down. He had found him in an old warehouse where Gavin resided, a place off the grid and abandoned, but big enough for all of Gavin’s needs. Gavin had stopped him near the entrance, trying to hold him back, saying how Ghost needed time to adjust. Toast had no idea what had happened, or how Gavin was involved. He just knew he needed to get Ghost out of there.

Toast had pushed past Gavin, into a room where there were two cots laid out, a body on each. Both looked similar to the other, with similar body types and faces. However, Ghost had redder hair. That’s how Toast recognized him.

Not to mention, the other guy had way too many scars to be Ghost.

Ghost later explained to Toast what had happened. How Gavin had contacted him, told him he had a way to solve his problem. Toast knew his brother could use magic, but he still does not know to what extent. Apparently, it was enough to extract Jimmy from Ghost’s head though.

Toast shudders at the memory. Knowing that the body on the other cot was Jimmy. He’s done his best to memorize that face, in case he ever sees him again. But he hasn’t seen him since. What’s shocking though is the fact that despite keeping an eye on murders in the area, Toast’s seen no change. Knowing Gavin, he’s probably got Jimmy locked up somewhere so he can’t draw attention to himself.

Toast goes to take a sip of his coffee, gagging a bit when he realizes it’s cold. How long has he been sitting there?

He sighs, standing up to go pour the coffee out. He’s probably had too much anyway.

~~~

haha evil men

[dwead-piwate-meggers]

Kiss Me, Kill Me

A kiss. A bad reaction. The aftermath, and how Unit Bravo deals with the potential loss of Detective Charlotte Langford from their little group. Inspired by this ask to @twc-thoughts-you-didnt-ask-for.

Chapter 7

Adam du Mortain x f!detective approx. wc: 2030 rating: t warnings: none Read it on Ao3

The Warehouse Common Room, Several Days Later

A broken ankle. This is why she never takes vacation. Three days off for some R&R and she comes back with a broken ankle and a round the clock protection detail because there’s a price on her head and she can’t exactly hobble away at any great speed. Maybe she could just brain an attacker with a crutch instead, but that’s a bit beyond her basic combat training.

This is the last time she takes Tina’s advice. She’s fairly certain she’s said before. She means it this time.

At least she’s still being kept in the loop. Rebecca made sure to include her specifically, even if she isn’t entirely sure why she’s here. She avoids looking at Adam, standing in his usual place by the fireplace, as she sits in one of the armchairs. It would be hard to get a peek in, anyway, what with Nate’s fussing over her while trying very hard to look like he isn’t fussing, and Farah watching her like a cat tracking a nice, fat pigeon. Morgan is acting blessedly unconcerned, perched in a dark corner.

Thank God it’s her turn to babysit tomorrow. I might actually have space to breathe.

“The situation has changed with the coven,” Rebecca explains, and Charlotte isn’t entirely sure why she’s here. The witches in question are a long way from Wayhaven, and they have requested some assistance with something apparently outside of her clearance level. “They’ve requested assistance from the team that worked with Detective Langford.”

She frowns, processing the fact that a coven of witches halfway across the continent know her by name. “Just the team, though,” she looks to Rebecca to confirm. “Not the detective?”

Her mother nods. “Correct.”

“Then, while I appreciate being kept in the loop,” she offers a slight nod of acknowledgement to Rebecca for her efforts, “I don’t see how I can help with this.”

Rebecca accepts the nod. “Your protection, and that of Wayhaven, is still Unit Bravo’s primary assignment.” She continues, “It has been decided that Agent Sewell will take the team to meet with the coven. Commanding Agent du Mortain will assume all duties with regards to your protection until their return.”

She gapes at Rebecca. I can’t have heard that right, she thinks, even as she hears Adam’s tense, “Understood.”

No, apparently I heard that right . Christ.

Her feelings must show on her face, because Rebecca is looking over at her with some concern, “Is that a problem?”

No, no problem. Who wouldn’t want to spend nearly every waking minute crammed into a small apartment with the person who kissed them and then rejected them within the span of, oh, 30-60 seconds? Why would that be a problem?

But she is not losing face like this, not in front of Rebecca, and definitely not in front of him. Not a goddamn chance.

“No,” she shakes her head, impressed with her own ability to keep her tone neutral.

“Good.” Rebecca nods, her mind clearly already with the rest of her briefing notes for the team, “I’ll see you tomorrow for lunch.”

She recognizes a dismissal when she sees one. Charlotte gets to her feet, and begins making her way to the agency vehicle she and Nate had ridden to the Warehouse in. She feels, rather than hears, Adam following her, completely silent in spite of his bulk, like the world’s most corporeal ghost. He opens the door of the SUV for her and hovers awkwardly as she hauls herself into the passenger seat - like he’s not sure if he should be offering help. It takes a bit of work, these SUVs aren’t exactly close to the ground, and she’s only got one good leg, but eventually she manages, pulling her crutches up beside her. He closes the door, and she pinches the bridge of her nose as he walks around to the driver’s side.

It’s going to be a long day.

The Detective’s Apartment, Evening, Three Days Later

She has about two-and-a-half nerves left, each of them frayed, and his continued existence in her space is getting on all of them.

He has her coffee ready at the table in the morning, before she’s finished getting dressed. Exactly the way she likes it. He has Timbit’s feeding schedule memorized, has the cat food in the bowl exactly on time, before she can even stand up to get it. He has the bottle of painkillers in front of her before her reminder alarms go off. Yesterday, her lunch had been delivered to her desk before she even placed the order at Hayley’s. He knew her order. And that she ordered from Hayley’s on Tuesdays. All without her having to say a goddamn word.

She’s barely had to lift a finger for herself in three days. In any other context - well, mostly in the context she’d thought they’d been in a few months ago - it would have been kind of sweet. Maybe.

Now it’s just fucking infuriating.

He’d swept her dinner dishes off the table and had them washed and in the drying rack almost before she could finish blinking, leaving her staring through the partition between the living space and the kitchen at him where he stands with a tea towel in his hand, drying a glass. And there’s an image that sends a lonely twisting feeling through her heart.

Like she still wants him. Like she still wants him like this. In her home. Taking care of her. Being domestic. Like maybe she’s not as over him as she wants to believe.

He catches her looking, and she turns to scowl at the wall. Fuck.

“What the hell is going on?” The words just slip out.

He turns from where he’d just finished returning her plate to its place. She hadn’t needed to tell him which cupboard. Down to two nerves, then.

“Is something wrong, Detective?” He seems perplexed. She wonders if he’s actually that oblivious.

She looks at him, gestures to the towel in his hands, “This. What the hell is going on with this?”

“You’re injured,” he says. Like that explains everything.

“I have a broken ankle. You’re acting like I’m completely incapable of doing anything for myself!”

“I was simply trying to make things easier for you.”

There really isn’t a good response to that. Because it’s a perfectly reasonable thing to say. But she’s not in a space where she needs a good response to justify being angry. She’s in a space where even a perfectly reasonable thing is more than enough to set her off, when it’s coming from him.

“For fuck’s sake,” she mutters, bracing her hands on the table and heaving herself to stand on her good leg. She grabs her crutches from where they lean on the wall, and twists towards the couch, turning her back on him and the kitchen. But one of the crutches catches on the table leg, and she can feel her balance slipping…

And then he’s there, hands on her elbows, gently setting her straight. She swears they linger for a second, and she squeezes her eyes shut tight, because no, no they can’t be there, he can’t be touching me and I CAN’T WANT HIM TO, and then his hands are gone, and it’s safe to open her eyes. Safe to see him standing right in front of her with his hands extended towards her and that way he has of looking at her like he’d hand her the world on a plate if she asked for it and she can feel her arms tingling where his hands had been and her heart pounding in her chest and…

“I’m sorry.” His voice is soft.  

She presses her lips together, swallows hard, trying to get herself under control. She shrugs, not quite meeting his eye, “It’s probably better that I didn’t fall over.” She hates how choked her voice sounds.

“That’s not what I meant.”

She closes her eyes for a brief moment. Oh good. We’re doing this now . Because this is when I want to have this conversation . “Then what are you sorry for?”

“For how I behaved.” He’s standing a little closer now. Is he? Maybe. Or maybe that’s just how she’s seeing him. It’s not his size. Just his...presence. He seems to drown everything else out. “That night.”

She feels the prickle in her nose, the burn in her eyes. But she will not cry in front of him. She absolutely will not cry in front of him. So she casts her eyes to the ceiling instead, shaking her head.

“Charlotte.” He says her name like he always does. Reverent, like it’s sacred.

And that does it, she feels the first drop slip down her cheek. Fuck it. He’s seen her almost bleed out. What difference does it make if he sees her cry.

“Why?” she whispers. It’s all she can think to ask, hopes he understands what she means. Why did you do it? Which part are you sorry for?

“I…” He’s looking down, brows knit, hands clenching and unclenching. He looks back up at her, eyes flicking back and forth as he looks between hers. “I was afraid.”

And you think I haven’t been?

She shakes her head, just a little, “Did it help?”

“No.”

Oh God.

She collapses back into the chair that she’d just left, too overwhelmed to react when he drops to his knees in front of her.

“I know that I don’t deserve your forgiveness,” he says.

A sound that’s something like a laugh, something like a sigh, breaks through her tears. She has a brief flicker of a memory: Tina asking her a question, something about him being on his knees begging for her forgiveness, something about how she’d never believed there would be a chance that that would happen. It merges with the current situation and leaves her feeling like the world is tilting slightly. It’s all too goddamn absurd.

She rests her elbow on the table, her head on her hand as she looks down at him. He’s close enough that her toes are almost brushing his knees. “What would you even do if you had it?”

“Whatever you wished of me.”

A simple statement. That’s his way, isn’t it? The simplest statement that could mean anything or everything. But she’s tired. Tired from her pain and tired from work and and tired from heart-ache and tired from trying to parse the meaning of his simple statements.

“What does that even mean?” she asks.

“I...If you tell me that you wish to remain colleagues, it means that. If…” she watches him close his eyes and swallow, hard, before looking back up at her, and his gaze is soft, warm, “If there was a time when we could have been something more...if that is something that you still want…”

It’s a pretty promise, but… she sighs, “It’s not just me that has to want that, Adam.”

“It isn’t just you.” He looks …young, somehow, kneeling on the floor in front of her. Young and sweet and heart-breakingly earnest and her heart lurches in her chest towards him, even as her mind screams at her to get a grip. Because how long has she been waiting to hear this. Even when she thought she was done with waiting. And she can’t stop the smile that spreads across her face, even as the tears are flowing unchecked down her cheeks.

“Goddamn it,” she huffs a little laugh, “yes. Yes. It’s something that I still want.”

He offers her a wry half-smile, “I confess, I was hoping for a little more enthusiasm.”

She laughs at that, feels it bubble up her throat and she rolls her eyes with relief as it escapes her lips, “And I was hoping for a quiet night, so I guess we’re both disappointed.”

His smile broadens, and she sees the hint of dimples in his cheeks as he reaches up, brushes the tears from her face with the backs of his knuckles. She feels her eyes drift shut at his touch as he whispers, “I have never been disappointed by you.”

[huahsu]

YEAR OF THE BUTTERFLY

previous years: A SONG THAT DEGRADES EACH TIME YOU PLAY IT :: 2018 A CHURCH AND JOHN LENNON’S “IMAGINE” :: 2017 SIKH DEVOTIONAL MUSIC :: 2016 SPOOKY BLACK :: 2015 this year: I’ve spent the past few months working on a book that I’ve always wanted to write but never figured I’d make the time for. At a really basic level, it’s about listening to music with friends. A couple weeks ago, I devoted a few days to reading a stack of books and articles about the emotional experience of music. They were written by philosophers, critics, cognitive scientists, historians. I took from them two overarching questions. First, what does it mean to assign a piece of music a feeling, like “happy” or “sad?” Is the song itself “sad,” or does it just model a kind of sadness proximate to how we feel? What elements of a song do this? The fraying of a voice? Minor keys? Tempo? Is it all a trick of memory? None of the answers really satisfied me, since music is such an intimate thing. A song makes us feel a way for reasons that are often either blindingly obvious or remote and mysterious. An expert can tell you that humans are wired to feel joy when a certain configuration of notes are struck in tandem, but maybe it just reminds you of looking at the front door.

The other question was whether music itself facilitates any unique emotional possibilities--a mode of feeling that we can’t get anywhere else. Music doesn’t mimic the real world, it doesn’t make arguments. One writer suggested that the thrill of music was its capacity to remind you, foremost, that music can thrill you. In essence, each time we hear something new and feel something, we are being reminded of all the times we’ve felt this way before. We’re living in the echo of a former enchantment. Maybe you’ll hear it again, process it, assign it a genre or context, and the mystique evaporates. But music is one of those things that doesn’t happen on our time. We don’t stand in front of it and train our gaze on this quadrant or that. We don’t flip back to make sure we didn’t miss something. You can’t slow it down as it is happening, you merely let it happen. 

In the spring, the Museum of Chinese in America in Manhattan showed “The Moon Represents My Heart,” an exhibition I worked on with MOCA’s curators, Herb and Andrew. The basic idea was to look at all the ways music had enriched immigrant life, from early opera troupes touring America’s Chinatowns to karaoke bars, church choirs, and after-school violin lessons, fifties doo-wop trios to garage punks and self-taught dance music producers. There’s no legible tradition of Chinese American music so we just wanted to present it as a textured and everyday thing--the experience of the fan could be as legitimate as that of a Mando-pop superstar. While working on the show, people would often ask me for a playlist, but I didn’t really have any to share. It wasn’t really about the music itself, which could sound derivative or amateur to some. It was about the fact that they sought to express themselves through music, in contexts that made them outliers and oddballs. I came to love all the music in our show because of that second-hand thrill--that sense that these moments had been deeply meaningful to everyone in the room. 

You can hear it in the voice of Stephen Cheng, who ended up being the show’s most memorable star. He put out a rocksteady gem in the sixties and then spent the next decade in New York trying to get the Dragon Seeds, his Chinese “folk-rock” band, off the ground. Cheng died years ago, but Andrew found his children, who brought some reels of unreleased music to the museum. I remember staring at them, wondering what was on them. It was a kind of anticipation and wonder that I often miss, when the operative feeling I associate with music-listening on the internet is the frenzy of opening and closing windows, clicking links, proving my humanity to a captcha.

Stephen’s singing wasn’t great, but it was perfect. His version of “Yesterday,” all warbly and over-the-top, has now supplanted the original for me. Somehow, we played some of Stephen’s songs on the radio, including one about butterflies and love. Somehow, one of the people listening was a butterfly expert, and he was about to marry another butterfly expert. Who knew such a song was possible, the groom-to-be told me. Stephen was too obscure to be properly forgotten. Or maybe his song was just dormant all these years. It awaited just the right listener, and now, over forty years later, he would get his propers, sandwiched somewhere between the vows and Kool and the Gang, a couple minutes of people scratching their heads, searching for the right smile, saying Can you believe this? to one another.

### TEENAGE DREAM

Warren Defever/His Name is Alive, All the Mirrors in the House

EXCELLENT USE OF “P.S.K.” Kindness feat. Robyn, “Warning” EXCELLENT USE OF A TELEPHONE Mavi, “Guernica” TECHNICALLY 2018, BUT TAIWAN’S ANSWER TO COIL, JOY DIVISION, ETC SEN, “The Cicada” SAME (2018) BUT TAIWANESE DREAMBOAT VIBES Linion, “Can’t Find” ANOTHER, KINDA BILLY BRAGG-Y Wayne’s So Sad, “Wanderer’s Guide to Taipei” SUMMER IN TAIWAN, AND SO I BOUGHT A LOT OF CDs, INCLUDING THE LIMITED EDITION SIGNED 9M88 DEBUT 9m88, “Love Rain” THEY ARE VERY INTO THE “FUTURE SOUL” THING Andrea, “You Better Kiss Me” THIS GUY HAS THE SAME NAME AS MY COUSIN Yo Lee demos LOTS OF BACKPACKS Hsien, Lately AMAZED TO SEE LIM GIONG REISSUES THERE, THIS IS THE DANCE ALBUM HE RECORDED IN 1994 IN THE UK BEFORE BRINGING RAVE CULTURE BACK TO TAIWAN Lim Giong, Entertainment World (IF YOU ARE UNFAMILIAR WITH LIM GIONG, THIS IS THE GREATEST SONG EVER Lim Giong, “A Pure Person) AND HERE’S 9m88 COVERING “PLASTIC LOVE” 9m88, “Plastic Love” AIR SUPPLYERS Oso Leone, Gallery Love Sunset Rollercoaster, Vanilla Villa I ENJOYED THIS WHEN IT CAME OUT BUT HONESTLY FORGOT IT CAME OUT THIS YEAR, OR THAT I ENJOYED, BUT FOR THE LONGEST TIME MY “2019″ EMAIL DRAFT JUST READ “CHIEF KEEF HNIA KAIL MALONE (sic)” Chief Keef and Zaytoven, GloToven

ANOTHER DEVASTATING DUO Pink Siifu and Akai Solo, Black Sand

MYSTIC CHORDS OF MEMORY Kali Malone, The Sacrificial Code Clarice Jensen, Drone Studies I AM A SLOW WALKER, BUT I NEVER WALK BACKWARDS Michael Vincent Waller, Moments ana roxane - ~~~ A THOUSAND POINTS OF LIGHT Caleb Giles, Under the Shade Medhane, Own Pace WE ARE THE ONES WE HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR Angel Bat Dawid, The Oracle Art Ensemble of Chicago, We are on the Edge READ JOSEPH JARMAN Joseph Jarman, Black Case I and II RESPECT YOURSELF Helado Negro, This is How You Smile Deb Never, “Swimming” LET’S DO IT AGAIN Tommy Holohan & Casper Hastings- RVE001 Eris Drew, Raving Disco Breaks LET’S DO IT AGAIN AGAIN, BUT SMEARED Burial, Tunes 2011-2019 OR PERHAPS YOU WERE THERE Callisto, Guidance is Eternal, Part I PERHAPS YOU WERE THERE FOR MICROHOUSE AND PEAK MEGO AND BLOGS Barker, Debiasing AT A WAREHOUSE PARTY, ABLE TO HEAR TOO MANY FLOORS, ROOMS, SOUNDS AT ONCE, IN A GOOD WAY Dies Smely, “Neptune Rises” AT A WAREHOUSE PARTY, BUT THINKING ABOUT PLUNDER, THE TRAIL OF TEARS, THE SANCTITY OF EARTH Kelman Duran, 13 Month A KIND OF BLUE Steve Hiett, Down on the Road by the Beach POSSIBLY MY MOST PLAYED ALBUM, 2019 Galcher Lustwerk, Information R.I.P. PRINCE, FOREVER AND ALWAYS Serpente, Parada Moodymann, Sinner Nelson Bandela, Purprain THE OPPOSITE OF “I AM A GOD” Nelson Bandela - “i'm mortal” YOU GOT ME Shane Eagle feat. Santi and Bas, “Vanya” HARD TO BELIEVE JAZMINE SULLIVAN REMAINS SO OVERLOOKED Kindness feat Jazmine Sullivan, “Hard to Believe” WATCH FOR THE HOOK Quando Rondo, “Gun Powder”

ANTE UP Polo G feat Lil Tjay, “Pop Out” “PANTS GON BE SAGGIN TIL I’M FORTY” Freddie Gibbs and Madlib, “Thuggin”

“WHY THEY LET THE TERMINATOR WIN THE ELECTION?” Sault, “Why Why Why Why Why”

HOLLOW BONES Showbiz and Milano, “Guillotine” LADI LUV, “GOOD TO THE LAST DUB” City Girls, “Act Up” MONEY BOSS PLAYERS Benny the Butcher feat 38 Spesh and Jadakiss, “Sunday School” Roc Marciano, “Richard Gear” WARP 30 (1989-2019) Droop-E, “The Droop-E Way” INTERSTELLAR SPACE, PROBABLY KILLER LIVE Blacks’ Myths, Blacks Myths II ALICE NEVER WENT ANYWHERE Sam Wilkes, “Sivaya” Alice Coltrane, Live at the Berkeley Community Theater 1972 RIYL: LYRICHORD, EFFECTS PEDALS Seungmin Cha, Nuunmuun RIYL: EFFICIENCY, INTERLUDES Solange, “Binz” “WHO HERE IS STILL LISTENING TO JOHNNY MAY CASH’S “DRUGS” IN 2019?” Playboi Carti, “Molly” “MOLLY” CZ Wang and Neo Image, “Just Off Wave”

YOU’VE SUBSCRIBED TO “UK STREETSOUL YOUTUBE PLAYLIST” Apiento feat Harriet Brown, “Down That Road” WHERE WERE U IN 2092? Jai Paul, “He”

LIL B, INNIT Voldy Moyo, Paper World SCREAMADELICA Vampire Weekend, “Harmony Hall” Humeysha, Nusrat on the Beach FOLKTRONICA Aldous Harding, “The Barrel” TOO PURE Springfields, Singles 1986-1991 MY AQUARIUM Rod Modell, Captagon ANOTHER WORLD IS POSSIBLE Vagabon, Vagabon 4-TRACK TWEE BEDROOM COVERS OF BLINK-182′S DUDE RANCH Colleen Green, Blink-182′s “Dude Ranch” as Played by Colleen Green

KINDA AS THOUGH A PART OF MY 2016-19 LP PURCHASES FORMED THEIR OWN BANDS Anunaku, Whities 024 75 Dollar Bill, I Was Real Joshua Abrams and Natural Information Society, Mandatory Reality

JUST 30 OR SO GECS Cool Fang, Sparring I’M A DEADHEAD BUT FOR STANDING ON THE CORNER SOTC Art Ensemble, SOTC Double Bass Ensemble * Merciful Allah Black Hole Theater * 4/24/19 SOTC Art Ensemble, Variation 9 * Merciful Allah Black Hole Theater * 4/27/19

SONG OF THE SPRING, SUMMER, WINTER, YEAR, STILL UNDEFEATED

[refreshmint1]

The right way to do Financial Planning in 2 minutes

How does financial planning happen today?

The typical process of financial planning involves the following steps.

Identifying your risk type and thus the ability to take Risk

What are your long term goals usually more than five years into future

Basis the above you get a plan asking you to invest in various products at various times

But it doesn’t work!!

While there are tons and tons of tools and financial advisors, none of it usually works cause of the fact that our risks keep changing. Our goals are not steady or fixed, and finally, new products keep coming up.

Let’s look at Risk first:  

Suppose two people have seen the 2008 crisis. One of them lost his job and took a massive hit on his investments. The other girl was able to retain her job and then invest also at those rock bottom prices.

Fast Forward now: Both of them are working and doing well, have similar salaries and similar lifestyles. All tools will tell you that their risk-taking ability is of the same type. However, that 2008 event changed everything which no advisor or a tool can detect.

Next lets at goals:

Long-term goals are hard to implement because they are a collection of short term goals. These have to be managed, marketed, and used as information to gauge whether a long-goal reward still exists.

What this implies that long term goals look great on spreadsheets, but what matters is managing the short term goals consistently to make the long term goals happen.

Long term thinking will say keep investing for ten years without telling that in between you would be asked to invest even when your portfolio is down 50%.

As you can see its almost impossible to have a stable financial plan when all the components underlying the idea keep moving

Financial Plans are inherently unstable

The emergence of Financial Pornography!!

Coined by Nick Maggiulli, it tells that how financial apps and advisors use beautiful looking charts, engaging tools, quizzes to portray a future that seems highly achievable. Unfortunately, they usually have no resemblance to reality. Like in our post on goals we looked that the same

Looking at these tools and charts will make you think you are doing well only to release that goal don’t move that linearly and bad things happen

The Financial Turing test

We borrow this concept from the Blog https://ofdollarsanddata.com/the-financial-turing-test/

Imagine you meet someone new or use an app that claims to be a “financial expert.”

If you could only ask them one question to determine if they are legit, what would you ask? We call this the Financial Turing Test.

The original  Turing Test was a thought experiment designed to determine whether artificial intelligence (AI) had been invented. The idea was simple. You sit down at a computer terminal where you message back and forth with some “entity” (either a human or a computer program, but you don’t know which).

Assuming you can ask any questions you want, could you determine whether the entity you were chatting with was a human or a computer more than 50% of the time? If you can tell the difference, then AI doesn’t exist. Otherwise, the Turing Test has been passed, and AI exists.

Instead of identifying whether an entity is a computer or a human, the Financial Turing Test differentiates financial sages from financial charlatans.

So what is the Turning test question for alls such tools and advisors?

Ask if the tool/advisor helps you answer this question.

How do you get rich without getting lucky?

If they tell you to invest in goals or ask you to save here you know well they are failing the test. Cause they are implicitly telling you that the three components of financial planning Risk, Goals, and Product all have no luck involved. That is so far away from the truth

The 2-minute Financial Planning checklist

So yes we have criticized everything till this point. How do we then address this?

We do it in a straight forward manner.  

All your financial decisions have to do two things

1) Ensure that you remain anti-fragile

We leverage the concept of Anti- Fragile by Nasim Taleb

Key Point of Prof. Taleb’s concept.

What that means that If bad things happen, you are ready to benefit rather than getting destroyed. While the probability of this low if it happens, it will ruin all wealth creation. A lot to times when things are doing good, you would think there is no risk, but Risk is always there. Pablo Escobar expected 10% of the cash he stored in warehouses to be eaten by rats or spoiled by mold. That was if everything went well.

Some downsides are unavoidable. You can push back, but they’ll never die. They’re part of life, and you might as well learn to accept them than pretend perfection exists.

What matters is how you plan for them!!

2) Allow compounding to work

To do this decouple all your investment from goals. The only goal which you have is creating wealth. And the simplest way to build wealth is that let money create money whenever you take out cash or break this pattern you're set your self back.

With these two as foundations below is the 2-minute financial planning tool. Answer these questions every quarter to be on track

If I or someone in my family gets hospitalized for 15 days, do I have to break my investments or savings? Do I have enough savings if my parents to get hospitalized to take care of them? If I am not able to work or lose my job, can I manage my expense for next three months OR will I have to break my investments/ savings? In case of n urgent requirement of funds ( Wedding, Brothers College Fees etc) can I borrow money at low costs If I die, can my family survive for the next ten years? Is there a goal/ desire in the next three months, which will lead to me breaking my investments? Am I able to save 30% of my salary each month Do I think that my finances will beat real inflation comfortably?

That s it!! Any time you hit a NO against any of these questions, you know you need to do something. Whatever financial instruments you are using need to be adjusted or calibrated.

For more information check out: refreshmint.in

[marsobars]

Ribbons and Cobras

First fanfic/short story!! This was an assignment for a Creative Writing class. It was this or a poetry book, and I went with the option that had more freedom to do what I want.

...I think it's kind of cringey, not gonna lie.

Enjoy it regardless!

Beau was the newest member of the ARMS League, and everything was immensely different from her previous life. No longer would she stay with friends and family she knew. The League was not her first choice, but now she was here to stay. There were only about 10 people who were in the league, but all of them were incredibly unique. One man was attending college, but that came to a halt when he woke up with chainlinks for arms and had to join this league. Another woman had somehow gotten the mutation to her hair, leaving her with four arms instead of your typical two. Members even ranged from robotic beings to the undead. Nonetheless, everyone in this small group was family.

One person in the league, however, stood out from the rest of them.

    “You must be the new one.”

Beau looked up to see a figure above her head. She hadn’t noticed she was being watched.

    “As far as I know,” she replied. “It’s rude to watch someone without them knowing.”

    “I don’t follow the rules all the time,” he said, hopping down from where he stood. 

    This character was a unique breed of human she could not possibly describe. He had a humanoid build, but had snake-like features. His face was partially covered with a bandana, but she could tell that his forehead and part of his cheeks were covered in what appeared to be scales. His torso was longer than normal, and lacked normal length in his legs. Long, black, and silky hair just about matched the length of hers. It might have been a little longer.

    He held out his hand for her to shake. “I go by Kid Cobra.”

    “My name is Beau,” she said, returning his hand shake.

    “Beau?... is that, like, your real name?” Kid Cobra began to blush slightly, then looked towards the ground. “No one has ever told me their real name right off the bat like that.”

    She gave him a patient smile with a small blush as well. “You don’t seem so bad. At least you took the time to introduce yourself.”

    He placed a hand behind his head. “Well, uh, call me Akshay, then.”

    “That’s a nice name, I like it.” Beau replied.

    From that point on, their bond began to flourish. They had the biggest connection out of everyone in the league. They would visit each other for hours just to talk and spend time together. Days turned into weeks, weeks turned into months, and their connection only grew more. There was never such a unique bond between two drastically different beings. 

They were always there for eachother, in their darkest times. Beau specifically had a harder time compared to him. Her career outside of the ARMS League allowed her to perform for thousands of people, but, there was always something missing. Something she couldn’t describe.

“I don’t know, Cobra…” she paused for a moment, considering what to say. “ No one really cares about what I do.”

“What do you mean?”

“Everyone is only there because it’s a part of their job. They don’t want to connect with me. I just come off as the spoiled rich person. I don’t want to be that way.”

“I know. What about all of your fans?”

“I mean, yeah, they are there, but… I can’t connect with them. I’m not talking to them and bonding with them like I want to. I don’t want that for them. I don’t want any of this.”

Akshay couldn’t see her, but her sniffles were enough to tell him she was crying.

“I don’t know if I can do this anymore. I just... feel so unloved…”

The conversation was cut off. Beau looked at the screen of the phone to discover that Akshay hung up. Upon the sight, she immediately broke down into tears. Everyone she knew had turned her down and ignored her. Now Akshay was one of them. All she could do was curl into the corner of her room and cry. 

Until, 30 minutes later, she heard a knock on the door.

She cracked the door open and peeked through. Standing in the doorway was Akshay, soaked from the rain with a skateboard in hand.

“Beau,” he began.

She stepped outside of the door with tears in her eyes. Akshay removed the handkerchief that was always around his face to reveal that he was crying just as much as her. 

“I love you. I love you so much.”

Cupping her face into his hands, he pulled her in and kissed her lips. She wrapped her arms around the back of his neck. How long they stayed in each other’s embrace is unknown, but it was enough to melt their dread away.They remember spending time with each other in silence that night. They remember falling asleep with one another. They remember falling in love. Their relationship flourished, but other people who saw their connection thought otherwise. 

'A normal girl wasn't supposed to be with a beast like Akshay,' they thought. He couldn't take the neglect. All of the discrimination not only directed towards himself, but Beau as well would send him into a silent fury, sending him straight to her to let it out.

"The things they said about you behind your back," he would say, "they think I'm stupid and that I can't hear it."

Beau cupped her hands around his face. "Listen, sweetheart. They can call me whatever they want, but it won't stop me from loving you. They call you a beast, but just remember you are my beast. I know you are upset, but just keep me in mind when you are upset, okay?"

He nodded. 

Despite all of the hate and discrimination they received, the love they felt towards each other never died off. That didn’t stop people from trying to bring them apart, however, and there were times when that went too far.

Upon unlocking the door to their home, Akshay walked inside. He stood and stared around a completely ransacked room. Furniture was flipped, and all of the curtains and rugs were folded over. Glass was shattered, and spread across the floors. What stood out the most was the absence of the most important thing in his life. Beau was gone.

He frantically searched around the house for any sign of her, but to no avail. Grabbing his phone, he began to dial for the authorities before realizing that that would be a mistake. Akshay was a phenomenon on his own. Having the police walk in on a mysterious man of both human and snake surrounded by a completely trashed home is asking for his arrest. There was no getting arrested when the love of his life was in danger. He had someone he needed to save.

    Clues were what he needed to find, but everything that he could use to his advantage was either taken or broken onto the floor. Out of desperation, he picked up his phone and, instead of calling for help, he called for Beau. Perhaps there was a chance she could answer her phone. He called once, waited about 30 seconds, before it went to voicemail. He called again, with the same outcome. He got even more desperate, and called a third time. He waited for what seemed like another eternity, before he got an answer.

    “Akshay?”

    A weight lifted off of his shoulders to hear her voice again. “Beau, where are you? Are you okay?”

    He was cut off from her frantic breathing and fast-paced words on the other end of the phone. “Akshay, I don’t have a lot of time! Please, come get me! He’s gonna keep me here!”

    “I’m not letting anything happen to you. Where are you now? I’ll come get you.”

    There was a pause between their exchange where no one said a word.

    “Beau? Answer me!”

    “The warehouse! Hurry, he knows!”

    “Who knows?”

    Akshay looked at the screen to see the call had ended. There was no more time to wait; Beau’s life was in danger. Whoever this person was wanted her dead, but he wasn’t going to let that happen.

    The warehouse Beau had mentioned was on the very edge of town. It towered above all of the buildings in the neighborhood. It was ancient, old and rackety; a single breeze that was slightly stronger than the others could knock it down onto its side. The condition of the building was not enough to stop Akshay, however. Without a second thought, he stepped inside. 

    He glanced around the area that he could see. The inside was nearly pitch black. 

    “Beau? Beau, I’m here! Answer me!”

    Silence was the only thing to answer. The only thing he could do was fear the worst. That was before he saw a familiar face precariously step out from behind the abandoned wares in the shadows.

    “Akshay?”

    He gave her a smile of relief, and began to run towards her. “ Beau, I’m getting you out of here!”

    Before he could progress any further, a blast came from in front of him, and a wave of heat entered his chest, stopping him in his tracks. He looked down to find a bullet in his side, before collapsing onto the ground beneath him.

    “NO!” 

    Beau tried desperately to run to his side before a figure pulled her back. Akshay was in a pain so intense that his vision blurred, but it he could see and hear enough to tell him it was someone he knew. Someone who was familiar. Upon raising his head to get the best glance he could, he could identify another snake-human hybrid, only this hybrid was out to stop what Beau and Akshay had started between one another. 

    “We warned you, Akshay,” the figure replied. “Our kind is not to intertwine with a normal human. You broke the one rule of our clan. We can’t have this.”

    Akshay tried to reach his hand out, but flinched at the shot of pain rushing through his side. The heat was getting worse in his chest, yet the rest of his body was getting cold. Tears began to run down his face.

    He refused to give up. If he were to go down, especially without a fight, it meant that Beau would go down as well. With all of the strength he had left, he got onto one foot. A sharp pain shot through all of his body no matter what he did, but it would go ignored.

    “Beau,” Akshay grunted, “get over here, now!”

    The figure placed had wrapped his arms around her torso and throat. It wouldn’t be an easy escape, but she would fight with her life. Beau dug her elbow in the figure’s side, getting it to kneel over. She then stepped onto its feet before reeling back and knocking the figure in the jaw,making a break for her injured partner.

    “Akshay, Get up!”

He threw an arm in front of her, signaling her to get back before suddenly shooting up on two feet. Every step, another agonizing pain. Every pain he felt only increased his determination to take care of this threat. 

The figure had begun to recover when it began to panic. Akshay was strong, stronger than anyone it had ever known. It was going to take more than a single bullet. It reached for the gun lying on the ground and fired.

The first bullet hit Akshay in the shoulder, but he did not flinch. Bullet three hit his hip, but he kept making his way closer. With every bullet he fired, the panic augmented. The final attempt at firing the gun failed. It was out of bullets. 

“You’re insane! Akshay, don’t do this! The Naja Crew will hear of this! They will hunt you down and kill you if you kill me!”

Akshay grabbed the figure by the throat and lifted him into the air. His hands began to shake, and his body could not take it anymore. With a shaky breath and eyes glaring daggers, Akshay continued. 

“I’ll take my chances.”

With a single fell swoop of his arm, Akshay threw the figure into the ground, knocking them unconscious. Akshay knew that the job was done. With the strength he had left, he turned to face Beau. She was okay. Scratched and shaken up, but okay. 

    “Beau,” he muttered, “It’s going to be okay.” 

Akshay gave her his best smile, before blacking out and collapsing onto the ground.

    He remembered hearing the sirens. He remembered hearing the heart monitors constant beeping. He remembered his vision fading in and out. He saw the red and blue flashes, and the paramedics trying desperately to save his life. He saw Beau. He saw her crying harder than he had ever seen her cry. It broke his heart to see her worry. But despite it all, he knew that she wasn’t hurt. He would feel all of the pain in the world if it means that Beau didn’t have to feel it herself. That was all that mattered.

    Hours turned into days as they passed, yet Beau refused to leave the hospital. Akshay was in pain. He might not be able to see or hear her, but she was going to comfort him all that she could. 

    She lay in silence next to him in his hospital bed, stroking his chest. Tears seemed to be permanently stuck to her eyes through the days he stayed there.

    She felt a hand touching the top of her head. A large hand, that held the top of her head perfectly. Looking up, she saw Akshay, staring back at her and smiling. There were bags under his eyes; he looked as if he hadn’t slept in ages.

    Beau shot up in disbelief. “Akshay?”

    He let out his best attempt at a laugh. “I missed you.”

    She began to cry at the sight of him. The fact that he was smiling and talking to her again melted all of her worries away. Beau smiled, throwing herself into his chest for a hug.

“I missed you too, dumbass.”

    He wiped the tears off her cheeks. “You haven’t changed a bit.”

With the strength he had regained, Akshay held up her chin to get a good look at her before pulling her in for a kiss. 

“I told you everything was going to be okay.”

[not-a-gotham-villain]

Part 2

TW: Death, Extreme violence, slight swearing, Guns, Kinves

(i cant do under the cut on mobile so be ready to scroll sorry..)

Her broken Jaguar mask works surprisingly well considering what it's been through. Perhaps it's because whoever sees her face now doesn't live to tell the tale. She can only think of one time anyone got away alive seeing her face over the past Three days.

She had walked her way into the iceberg lounge an hour before penguin hightailed it out because her tip line had gone cold and she could feel how close she was to finding Falcone. Needless to say, Penguin was not happy to see her.

"Ah, Jaguar! Long time no see my dear!" His voice was condescending and his men were armed. "I've heard you've caused quite ruckus all around town recently. Any reason you've stopped by?"

"Buzz off Penguin. I'm not here to kill your goons."

"Character development." Nygma quipped. He was seriously unnecessary and proved to test Jade's already thin patience.

"I just need information. My wells gone... dry." she ground out.

Penguin huffed a laugh before he relaxed his guards and gestured Jade to sit next to him. She refused.

"Falcones at 213 30 Primrose street. Red warehouse."

".....how did you know who i was after?" Jade asked.

"Because i've worked with you since you were definitely not 17, and the only person you ever talked about was him. I did the math."

Jade's eyes narrowed as she collected her things. "You aren't gonna try and stop me, are you?"

Penguin laughed, a little bitterly, a little mockingly. "I'm not sentimental dearie. I will say though," his face got deadly serious then "that his son's died. You two are the only ones left."

Jade stared at penguin for a bit before heading for the door.

"Just for the record, Im sorry Jade. I truly am. Most of us had no idea." Penguin said it a way so plaintively he could have almost mean it.

Jade slammed the door shut on her way out.

☠︎

Falcone's private room security is painfully understaffed. A single man, a whisp really, stands outside his office door.

"What's your name kid?"

Jade resents that.

"Jade Dawes."

"Really? Ya know that used to be a DA's name. Till we bumped him and his family off. You knew him?"

Jade really resents that.

"A little."

He gives her a look before searching through a clipboard, as if Falcone was a legitimate buissness man and not a Class-S Mob Boss. Jesus, she was already planning on killing the guy but he's just making it too easy.

"You got an appointment?"

"Yeah. Five years in the making."

"Wha-"

The silenced bullet goes cleanly through airheads brain. She wasn't really planning on killing him, but everyone else in the buildings dead, so she guesses due diligence won't hurt.

The door opens as millions of others close.

"Janessa. Pleasant surprise. Please do sit down." The man who says the name she hasn't heard in five years looks the same now as he did then. Falcone is still tall, and lean, and his voice still reminds her of beach houses in the summer, before her father had found out about his job and their lives had gone to hell.

"I'm not here to talk Uncle Carmine." She hopes the title comes off as mocking. From the way he reacts, it does. "You know what I'm here for."

Falcone stares at her for a few more seconds before he sighs deep and turns away from his windowed perch towards her.

"Will this" he gestures to her aimed gun with his bourbon "really accomplish what you want Janessa?"

"It doesn't matter what I want." She lies "Its what you deserve." He's far enough away so that she doesn't need to strain her head too much to see his face.

"We are the only ones left little one. Your family is long gone. So is my wife. Mario died Saturday night. If you were to do this, you would be all alone." He's taking languid steps her way, and with each one she feels smaller and younger.

"You killed my family Carmine." She sets her jaw in determination.

"And your family locked away mine, an eye for an eye my dear."

"You shot them right in front of me! You burnt their bodies in a pile! I can't even go near restaurants without -"

She cuts herself off, her voice beginning to shake.

"Piccola, that is why we must start over. Live a new life. Be like my daughter again. Don't you remember how it could be?"

Unbidden, memories of a lifetime ago crop up. She remembers sitting silently at the beach, just seven years old, watching as uncle Carmine taught her how to make a drip sand castle. She remembers thinking he was the greatest man she'd ever seen, right after her dad. Her heart sinks.

"That-that can't happen now. We're-it's-it's all too far gone." Falcone is right up in front of her now. She feels seven years old again next to his six foot three.

He sighs again, and places a hand on her shoulder. She thinks she might cry.

"Well then my dear, do you think we should get it all done with together? After all, what did you have planned for after you killed me?" He points his gun to her temple and her gun to his own.

Jade is silent. Her head is racing. She needs to decide.

Needless to say, she doesn't get to.

Glass shatters everyone, and Falcone is pushed out of her line of sight by something large and black. Upon further inspection she realizes it's Batman. If Jade was in any physical or emotional capacity to she would scream.

"Get away from her you slimy bastard!"

They tussle for a while, a second, a minute, an hour, forty days and forty nights? She can't tell. However eventually Falcone's gun is confiscated by the more powerful Batman and the former is left slumped on the floor, defeated.

"You should let her decide who to go with, Dark Knight." They must have had some important conversation about Jade's autonomy while she was out.

The Bat tenses again, starting at the hands and working up to his temple and then down again. It's strange, being able to see the Batman in full detail. She never got to catalog his responses to jabs or taunts. Yes, she's worked with Batman before, but at the time he was more concerned with Tori's stubborn demands to join then properly introducing himself to Jade. (The green beast whose name she refuses to say spins in her stomach at a very inconvenient time)

"Fine." The Batman spits out. "Jade, what do you want to do?" His voice is paradoxically soft and terse.

"How—how did you find me?" It's not what she meant to say, but it works. "Were-were you tracking me?!"

The responding silence should make her feel indignant, however she is also feeling very overwhelmed.

"He does that often piccola, no respect for personal privacy." Falcone makes no effort to move, slumped up against the wall. His arm is covering his stomach, he's bleeding.

"You stabbed him!" Jade's voice comes out more panicked then she wanted.

"Come here la mia piccola farfalla."

"Jade.." Batman says.

Jade ignores him.

"Zio.." her italian's a little rusty, but she seems to get the message across.

"Listen my little butterfly. We must move on from this." He places a calloused hand on her cheek. "My empire is all but collapsed now, thanks in part to you. Come with me, we can rebuild in Italy, or perhaps just live. You can find a good husband and settle down. I could finally have grandchildren. Please, let me be your Uncle again."

Jade is shaking like a leaf now and she prays she isn't going to cry. "I can't Zio, not after what you did."

Falcone sighs "Well, thats alright, I was going to die anyways."

Jade feels more than see's the knife slip out of his pocket. She acts on instinct, and before Batman can say anything there are three shots ringing out into the night.

Falcones hand goes limp, and falls to the floor.

Jade does the only thing she can do in this situation. She screams.

☠︎

Jade can't tell how long she screamed before she started to sob, but it must have been a long time, because she doesn't get her senses back until she's speeding down an avenue in the Batcar.

She thinks she remember him carrying her. Is she really that light now? She must be, she cant remember the last time she ate.

"Ah. You're awake. I'm getting you to your apartment, but I'm going to be stripping it out. All your identifying objects need to go, otherwise the gangs will track you."

Batman wont look at her, but she thinks he looks the tiredest she's ever seen him.

"Why?" she can't form anymore words than that. He seems to understand.

"With the stunt you've pulled over the last few days, the crime families will be worse than ever trying to fix themselves up, and they'll be aching for blood. So no more Vigilante work of any sort, no more crime, hell, don't go out without asking me first. I'll set up an allowance so you can quit your job, and I'll drop off some old clothes of the robins for you to wear. Jaguar and NightFawn are dead, you hear me?"

She sits silently, taking in the new information. She can't feel anything.

"Am I adopted?"

Batman laughs. "Not exactly." They pull up to her apartment complex's fire escapes. "You're almost home." He walks out of the drivers side and circles over to pick Jade up out of the passengers seat. She'd be embarrassed if she wasn't so empty.

"I don't have a home." She says. She's still crying, she doesn't know why.

"You will one day kid, you will."

[the-voltage-diaries]

When Demons Prevail - Soryu Oh

Warning: Implied character death(s), Angst (but with a happy ending)

Tick, tock. Tick, tock. Your time is running out, Soryu Oh.You just have one day left.

Soryu scrunched up the note angrily, his frustration getting the best of him. It had been three weeks since Samejima had disappeared, and three weeks since Soryu had gotten proper sleep. These notes came in everyday, crippling his sanity little by little, everyday, that is, if he had already not broken down completely by now.

It had been three years since Soryu had been made the leader of Ice Dragons, and needless to say, he had fulfilled his role dutifully. It was moments like these, moments where someone else got hurt because of him, where someone else’s  life was being played with because of his position, that he truly wished to escape this life, even if for a day.

Even today, if he closed his eyes for a moment, he saw flashbacks of that one incident that made him shudder every single time. It had been two weeks since the incident had taken place, but it still made his eyes burn with un-shed tears, whenever he thought of it. 

He remembered that one day two weeks ago, when Ota and Baba were supposed to come back from their trip to Las Vegas. He had just gotten up from the breakfast table, munching on a toast, when he got the call from Eisuke, asking him to hurry up towards the harbor. Eisuke’s voice had cracked, indicating the seriousness of the situation. 

Just as he was about to open the door of his car, a note on the windshield had caught his attention.

Surprise, surprise, Mr. Oh.

Thinking of the note as an empty threat to scare him, just like what he thought of the previous ones, he crumpled it up, motoring his vehicle to life, starting towards the harbor. 

Little did he know, the notes weren’t an empty threat.

That day, he had felt so broken for the first time.

He still remembered it, the way Ota and Baba’s bodies were floating on the ocean, lifeless. One shake of head from Eisuke was all it took for him to know that this wasn’t a prank, that it was indeed Ota and Baba, his friends, the ones he had spent the last decade bantering with, laying there without an ounce of life in them. He had shaken their bodies, wanting for them to wake up, tell him it was a prank, laugh at him for being so gullible. He wanted to hear Baba give one of his overly-sexual suggestions, or Ota be the brat he was.

But alas, they didn’t open their eyes. That was when Soryu realised that they had closed their eyes once to never open them again.

Eisuke had asked his staff to leave him and Soryu alone with the bodies, and the moment the staff had left, he had seen Soryu shed a tear for the first time in all the years he had known him.

Eisuke had walked over, and rubbed his shoulders in sympathy as Soryu remained crouching, not believing the fact that this was the last time he might see the two so-called “banes” of his life, that after this, there’d be no sexual references to anything and everything he and Eisuke uttered, there’d be no fun and games, no talks of wanting to inspire people through one’s art, no debates on whether he was really straight or was he asexual. There’d be no life in the penthouse, for the two lifelines responsible for carrying out that work were lying right there, in front of his eyes, with their bodies as cold as ice.

That was when he knew the notes weren’t just empty threats.

That day, he had told Eisuke everything about the notes he had been receiving, while Eisuke already knew about Samejima’s kidnapping. They had decided not to call Mamoru yet, for he was in his hometown, spending some quality time with his family. Mamoru had seen his fair share of bad times, and they didn’t want to taint one of his happy memories with dark ones.

Eisuke had promised to do everything in his power to find out who was behind this, his eyes red, indicating how affected he was by the death of two of the five people that mattered to him the most, as of that day. He was barely holding himself together, but he had promised Soryu to see this through with him.

A knock on the door to his office cabin shook him out of his reverie, as Inui entered, his face crestfallen.”No clue, sir. We have no idea where the notes have been coming from, or who was responsible for Mr. Kisaki and Mr. Baba’s deaths,” He said, his eyes nearly watering from uttering Ota and Baba’s names. 

Soryu nodded his head, acknowledging the piece of negative news Inui had given him, and turning his gaze back to his laptop, he lifelessly started typing away at his keyboard, not noticing the way Inui’s brows furrowed in concern, yet again.

Ever since that incident at the harbor, Inui had noticed a change in his boss. Soryu had stopped talking to his mob members, he had stopped asking them how were they doing, he had stopped eating, sleeping, he had stopped living life. He didn’t talk unless absolutely necessary, and stayed cooped up in his cabin, looking at the pieces of evidence he had on his hands, trying to figure out how to find the mastermind behind all of this, and it concerned Inui. He knew the death of two of his close companions had had its effect on Soryu, but he was still worried. Shaking his head at the inability to do anything to change the situation, Inui had just walked out of Soryu’s cabin when Taichi, another mob member had stopped him in his tracks.

“Inui, can you give this to Soryu? It was at the door, with ‘To be opened by Soryu Oh only’ written on it.”

Inui hurriedly grabbed the small envelope, once again knocking on his boss’ cabin. Once he got the green light to enter, he opened the door, immediately handing Soryu the envelope.

Opening the envelope, Soryu’s eyes widened as he saw something he was not prepared for.

If you want Samejima, come to the XXX Warehouse at 6 in the evening. Be late, and you might want to bring a bouquet to give to your subordinate’s dead body. Tick, tock. Tick, tock. Your time is ticking, Mr. Oh.

Soryu got up faster than the speed of light, calling Eisuke as he left the Ice Dragons HQ, already entering his car. Looking at the time, he saw it to be 4:57 P.M. He cursed under his breath, for it would approximately take him 45 minutes to drive to the location, considering there was no traffic on the road. Connecting his phone to the Bluetooth speaker of his car, he waited for Eisuke to pick up as he stepped on the gas, already on his way towards the destination on the note.

“What is it?” Came Eisuke’s voice through the speakers, and Soryu quickly gave him a rundown of events, not wasting any time on pleasantries.”I am coming with you too, Soryu,” Eisuke spoke, after hearing about the progress of things from Soryu. At the latter’s opposition, he clicked his tongue, “Soryu, you don’t get to order me around. If I say I am coming with you, I am coming with you. That’s it.”

“No, Eisuke. What if something happens at the hotel? I need someone with a calm head to be there, making sure everything is okay. Anyways, I have already informed Inui, he is coming with the other Ice Dragons. Okay, take care, I’m hanging up.”

Eisuke scowled when he heard the line going dead, and as much as his instinct was telling him to go after Soryu, he chose to stay behind, knowing that Soryu was indeed correct. He needed to be at the hotel to make sure nothing went awry.

On the other hand, Soryu kept looking at the time, internally cursing the traffic he was met with. As soon as the traffic cleared, he sped up the vehicle, cursing his luck for having wasted 15 minutes. It was 5:30 P.M. now, and he had to make it in the next 30 minutes or else... he didn’t wish to even think of the consequences.

As soon as he reached the location, he went inside the warehouse, only to find it empty, except the single piece of paper that was lying there.

You’re late, Soryu. Whatever happens now is your fault, for it was you who didn’t reach in time.

He immediately looked at his wrist watch, only to see that the time was indeed 6:02 P.M. He was two minutes late. Looking around, he found nothing; no trace of life whatsoever. Turning around, he picked up his phone, trying to dial Eisuke to make sure everything stayed okay back at the hotel.

His heart beat sped up when Eisuke didn’t pick up for the fourth time. Maybe he is looking after the security of the hotel, Soryu thought, trying to ignore the sinking feeling in his gut, telling him something was wrong. He turned the vehicle onto the road leading to the Ice Dragon HQ, not being prepared for the sight that was about to hit him.

As soon as he entered, he was met by an eerie calm. Looking around, he didn’t see a soul. The sinking feeling in his gut only got stronger as he neared his cabin, remembering Eisuke’s text. While he was on his way back, Eisuke had texted him that he’d meet Soryu at the Ice Dragons HQ, for he had some news to share.

What Soryu saw in front of the door to his cabin made him feel as if the ground beneath his feet had given out, his eyes widening at the two lifeless bodies slumped together in front of him; Inui and Samejima. 

Although he couldn’t believe what was happening, and he didn’t know what to do now, something in him told him to keep it together. Choosing to listen to that internal voice, Soryu’s trembling hands moved the two cold bodies away from the door to his cabin, and he fearfully opened the door, holding on to that silent thread of hope that he’d find Eisuke in there, waiting for him, helping ground him and telling him to keep it together.

Alas, he did find Eisuke. But just not how he expected to.

The shock of what Soryu saw made his legs give out, and he fell on the floor in a heap of bewildered mess. Gathering whatever energy he had left in his body, he slowly crawled towards the human lying there on the floor, right in front of his table.

Reaching the said body, he touched it’s face, not wanting to believe that it was him, even though his clothes gave him away. He touched the ice cold face, turning it over to see the one man who had been by him when he didn’t know what to do, the one man who had promised to see things through with him.

Soryu barely chocked on a sob at the face of his best friend, Eisuke, lying there in a pool of his own blood. He did nothing to stop the tears that now streamed down his face, he was too tired to keep it together now. He was too broken to care.

His fingers moved over Eisuke’s face, refusing to believe it was him. He remembered Eisuke’s words of wanting to come with him. He laughed self-deprecatingly, blaming himself for not taking his best friend with him. At least he had the chance of securing Eisuke’s life, and he had lost it too.

Soryu sat there, with tears streaming down his face, for over an hour, with Eisuke’s stiff face in his lap, his eyes sorting through the memories they had made together in the short time they had, his eyes shedding new tears at every new expression of Eisuke that surfaced in his mind, his fingers clenching on Eisuke’s clothes every time he remembered his cockiness, his smirk, his micromanaging everyone.

Needles to say, that was the day Soryu not only felt, but also heard himself shatter. 

He couldn’t help but think about how there would be no Eisuke who would irritate him, promise to be by his side, be the protective older brother, the cocky younger one. His shoulders shook when he thought about how he wouldn’t be able to tease Eisuke about his sweet tooth anymore. 

Soryu looked up at the ceiling as his tears refused to stop, silently saluting Eisuke for being the diamond among the countless stones in his life.

He was just about to get up to wash his face and call Kenzaki to set dates for the last rites when he noticed a letter clenched in his best friend’s hand. With shaking fingers, he took it out, opening it and silently reading what was written.

Soryu,

I don’t know who this person is, but I do know that I don’t have enough time. I might not be able to say this to you face-to-face, but this time even I won’t be able to stop the worse from happening. I have already signed the papers giving away all my resources to you, so use them wisely.

Since we might not even get to see each other in time, treat this letter as my last message to you.

In whatever the years we had with each other, thank you for being the rock of my life. I know, this sappy stuff sounds unusual coming from me, but you need to hear, or read, this. 

You can’t give up now, Soryu. Stay strong, for you know, I don’t keep losers as my friends. Keep it together, Soryu. Remember, I believe in you. Don’t let me down.

Until we meet again, 

Farewell.

()

Soryu woke up with a start, tangled in bed sheets with cold sweat dripping down his forehead and back. Looking around, all he saw was the darkness of his room. Turning to see the time, he noticed it to be 2:37 A.M.

He ran his fingers through his hair, not knowing what to believe anymore. Had Eisuke, Ota, Baba, Inui and Samejima really died, or was it all just a nightmare?

He didn’t know what to do, so he did the first thing his instinct told him. Getting up, without a care about how bad he looked, he rushed out of his suite and stepped onto the elevator, pressing the button that would take him to Eisuke’s personal suite.

The ride in the elevator seemed like that of an eternity, but as soon as the doors opened, he scrambled out, knocking on the door of Eisuke’s suite repeatedly.

“What the fuck is it at two in the morning, Soryu?” Eisuke asked, not prepared for the tall mobster to gather him in a tight embrace. Before he could ask what in the world was happening, he felt the man’s shoulder’s tremble, and that was when he noticed Soryu’s sweat stained shirt, his tired but red eyes, his one silent tear of relief that had shed out.

Calling Soryu inside and having him sit down, he waited for Soryu to calm his trembling down before he asked Soryu what had gone wrong.

 As soon as Soryu finished telling him about his nightmare, Eisuke burst out laughing, his signature smirk soon taking over his features, “Heh, that’s interesting. You think you can get rid of me that easily, do you? Nice daydream you have going on there.”

Soryu looked at him, exasperated at his sense of humor, when he noticed the sound of someone knocking at the door. Eisuke sat back on the couch with a scoff, motioning with his chin for Soryu to go and open the door. Soryu, although confused, did get up from his place on the couch, walking towards the door.

Soryu didn’t have the time to register what was happening when bodies crashed into him in a hug from both sides. Looking up to see Ota and Baba being the jerks practically crushing his bones, he pushed them off of him hurriedly, looking for him gun, only to remember he had forgotten it at home in his hurry while coming to the Penthouse.

“Aww Soryu, we knew you loved us!” Baba stated, laughing as he got up from the floor after Soryu had pushed him. “Unfortunately for you, even though I am 35 and single, I am ready to mingle with only ladies, so I can’t kiss your sadness away.”

“Stop it, Baba. You sound creepy as fuck,” Ota retorted, smirking at the fake hurt expression Baba made, trying to gain his sympathy.

Mamoru, on the other hand, was already dozing away in one corner of the room, not the slightest bit bothered by the ruckus the others were creating.

This time, instead of hitting them on their heads to knock some sense into them, Soryu chose to let it slip just once. While Ota and Baba were busy bantering away and Eisuke was too focused to try to get them to shut up, they all failed to notice the small smile that crept its way onto the mobsters face, glad to see his family alive and well, being the weirdos they always had been.

[shellsan]

30 Day Writing Challenge

Day One: Explosion

Fandom: Marvel Cinematic Universe

Pairing: Pre-Tony Stark/Bucky Barnes, Pre-Tony Stark/The Winter Soldier

Disclaimer: I do not own Marvel or the MCU

Explosion

-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-

Walking out of the tower, Tony mentally sighed in relief when he wasn't accosted by a group of waiting paparazzi or nearly bowled over by some journalist who wanted to hear about any of the up and coming news. Of course, just because he couldn't see them didn't mean that Tony was oblivious to the fact they were probably still there, laying in wait and taking photos so that they could spin some elaborate tale for the gossip magazines. But that was fine – he'd been dealing with that for years.

Lost in thought, Tony hummed the notes to ACDC's Highway to Hell lightly as he turned down the street, heading towards his favourite cafe to pick up a caffeine hit, deciding that he deserved it after a long day of meetings.

Of course he could have just made something fancy back at the tower – he was more than capable and had enough ingredients for it – but it was nice to get out for a change. He'd been feeling a little cooped up.

Turning another corner, Tony stopped all of sudden, eyebrows furrowing. Even though nothing really seemed overly out of place, there was something about this street that was screaming to his senses that he shouldn't walk down it.

Never one to listen to sense however – or turn away from danger – he casually messed with the iron man bracelets, calling for the suit just in case as he cautiously walked down the side walk.

Seconds after he'd reached half way down the street (the point where a normal person would have let down their guard, a mistake he was not prone to) there was a loud explosion and he found himself being blown from one side of the road to nearly the other footpath, ears ringing from the sound and eyes going fuzzy.

On instinct he reached up and winced at the feeling of blood from his head, crimson wetness spilling over his fingers as he reluctantly pulled  them away from the wound. Great. Just what he needed.

Urging the suit to appear faster, Tony frowned as he pushed himself from the ground, refusing to wince even as one of his ribs moved in a way that it was not supposed to and his shoulder cried in protest from how he'd landed on it.

On guard, the engineer looked around, keen eyes searching for the cause of the explosion.

His eyes landed on a single man who was walking towards him, a mask covering his face and gear practically screaming 'assassin'.

Naturally.

Where the hell was his suit anyway?

“It's not safe here.” The man said.

Tony's eyebrows furrowed in confusion as he gave the man an incredulous look. Did he really think that it wasn't clear that he was the one who caused the initial accident?

“I'm pretty sure that's been made clear.” He settled on finally, and raised eyebrow (which ow, shouldn't do that apparently) as he gestured towards himself. “But that doesn't mean I’m going anywhere with you. My mother taught me not to go random places with strangers.”

He didn't feel the need to add that it was a rule he'd found strangely impossible to follow.

The man growled. “You will come with me regardless.” He informed, not a bit of doubt in his voice, as though it was just another fact.

Think again.

As the man moved to grab Tony, he ducked under his arm (ow, his rib really hurt now) and spun, aiming a kick for the back of the guys knee to hopefully slow him down but instead finding himself caught and then hauled over guys shoulder.

“It's not safe here.” The unknown assassin stated once more, like Tony needed to be told that a second time, before he turned and started down the street, turning into an alley and moving quickly through the back streets of New York, ignoring the endless complaints that Tony was throwing at him.

It was another forty minutes of travel (damn it how was this guy not even having trouble breathing at this pace while carrying Tony as well?) before they reached the warehouse district and found themselves set up in some abandoned building.

How cliché.

When he said so aloud, he only got a grunt and glare in response.

Not much of a talker, it seemed.

Unfortunately for him then, he'd kidnapped the wrong person if he wanted any peace and quiet.

“So, you gonna tell me why you've stolen me away? Usually this is the point where people start making demands, so I'm listening. What is it you're after? You let me live this long so you have to want something.”

The unknown man's eyebrows furrowed, although whether he was confused or annoyed it was hard to tell, so  Tony was going for the safest option which was to assume he was both.

“Not kidnapped. Protection.” The man explained – or at least he looked like he was explaining something, Tony had to disagree. That didn't explain a thing.

Scoffing, he crossed his arms, wincing at how it jostled every injury he'd managed to get. “I don't know if you noticed, buddy, but these injuries didn't come from a couple rounds in the ring.”

Was that guilt on his face.

“Hydra wanted to you. Couldn't let them take you. Must protect the mechanic.” The man assured.

Tony sighed, somehow not at all shocked to hear that it was hydra who had mounted the attack. Although if what this guy was saying was true then he had him to thank for saving him from spending some time enduring hyrda's hospitality.

But some things were still not adding up for him.

“And I assume I am the mechanic then. What for? What's your name? Can you take off the mask so I can see your face?” Tony asked, curious to see.

The man looked a little confused. “I am the asset. The asset can not remove the mask without express permission for its handler.” It recited, voice more robotic than it had been previously and Tony wished he could take back the words.

Somehow he didn't think he was going to like this one bit.

“And who is your handler?” He tried, leaving the whole 'asset' shtick alone for a moment.

The man's eyes seemed calculating as he replied. “The asset's handler is currently the mechanic; Anthony Edward Stark. Primary goal: protect the mechanic.” He recited. But there was something different about the way he'd said it to how he'd recited the first lot.

“And who assigned your handler?”

“The asset did.”

The response was not at all what he'd been expecting and it took Tony a moment to form words before he gave in and gave the 'asset' and incredulous look. “Why?”

“The asset requires regular maintenance to its arm. The mechanic will provide.”

Automatically, Tony found himself glancing down at the man's arms to figure out what the hell that meant and that was when he noticed that one of his hands was metal.

“Holy shit, how did I not notice that?” The engineer breathed, fingers twitching as he fought the urge to just reach out and touch, cursing himself for getting so distracted that he hadn't noticed something that obvious.

Something that seemed akin to amusement flashed in the other man's eyes but it was gone before Tony really had a chance to examine it closer.

Forcing his mind back on track, Tony tried to figure out how exactly he was supposed to get around this situation. He wasn't about to stay in some dingy warehouse while he waited for someone to realise that he'd been kidnapped and he definitely didn't trust someone who called themselves the 'asset'. Like they weren't even human.

Apparently he'd asked the question out loud because the man seemed to go cold as he addressed Tony. “The Asset was a creation born of Hyrda, code named The Winter Soldier on mission. It is not human.”

The statement was said so simply that Tony choked a little on what he was going to say.

“Well uh, I don't know about you buddy, but from where I'm sitting, you look just as human as I do. But if you're one of Hyrda's goons, what are you doing helping me?”

The Soldier looked confused for a moment. “The Voice says that I'm malfunctioning in a good way. It suggested that the asset choose a new handler, a better handler. It approved of you as the choice.” He stated finally.

Sighing, Tony rubbed gently at his temples, ignoring the flare of pain in his shoulders. “So, this voice. Do you know what it is?”

“The voice has always been with the asset. Sometimes he would go quiet for a while after the asset was wiped, but he would always come back. Hydra has no knowledge of the voice. The voice says that if they knew, they would get rid of him.” He states, before his voice goes a little soft and Tony almost melts at the slightly lost and guilty look on the Soldier's face. “The Asset likes the voice. Didn't want it to leave, so it kept quiet. Are you unhappy with the asset?”

Tony's blood froze at the implications he could draw from that sentence, and he cursed himself for his lack of tact. “No. You did fine. But listen, I can't call you the asset. It sounds wrong and it's just not my speed so we need to think of something better.” He suggested, trying to switch gears.

The Asset looked even more confused. “You wish to call the Asset by another name? It is your right as handler.”

Sighing, Tony did his best not to look exasperated. It wouldn't do him any good anyway. From what he'd managed to gather so far, the man in front of him was an unwilling assassin who worked for hydra but managed to break their programming somehow – it probably had something to do with this voice in his head – and was now on the run and had chosen Tony to be their 'handler' or in this case, director of sorts?

He was too tired for this shit.

“I want something to call you by that seems less demeaning. Is there something you prefer to be called?”

“Soldat.”

Tony shook his head. “Absolutely not.”

The soldier seemed to deflate at that and Tony groaned, not bothering to pretend he wasn't frustrated. “Alright how about this. You said that your code name was The Winter Soldier, right? How does Winter sound?” He tried.

'Winter' was quiet for a moment, seeming to consider it before a small smile formed on his face. “Winter. It is acceptable. The Voice also seems happy.”

Nodding in satisfaction, Tony relaxed slightly. “Alright, now that we have that covered, how about we consider getting a move on? We can't stay here indefinitely, and I do have to get back to my company.” He pointed out.

Winter looked unsure. “You are safe here. I must keep you safe.”

Tony shook his head. “You can't keep me here in an attempt to keep me safe. I have a life and the world doesn't stop turning because you want to keep me safe.” He informed, trying to be gentle.

Biting his lip, Tony considered his options. “You can come with me? To keep me safe?” He offered.

It was a ridiculous thing to offer. He didn't really know this man and for all he knew this was just another ploy from Hyrdra in order to gain his trust and access his tower. But a larger part of him ached to help the man. Winter was alone with just the voice in his head to help keep him sane and safe from Hyrda's clutches, and Tony would be damned if he would let them get their hands on him again.

He knew a little something about being an unwilling prisoner after all, and he'd wish that upon no-one.

“Your terms are acceptable.” Winter stated finally, moving to pick Tony up from the crate that he'd spent the better part of two hours sitting on at this point only to tilt his head when Tony glared at him.

“You aren't carrying me again.”

“You can't walk yourself. You are injured.”

It was a logical argument that would work on anyone else, but Tony Stark was nothing if not stubborn.

“I'll manage.”

Winter frowned. “You will hurt yourself further.”

“Worth it.”

“I cannot allow you to do that. You're health and safety is my directive.”

“Still a nope.”

Winter seemed to accept it after a moment of silence and Tony relaxed, giving himself a moment before pushing himself onto his feet. “Alright, lets go- what the hell do you think you're doing?”

Something about Winter's facial expression in that moment was borderline smug as he held Tony carefully princess style in his arms, a spark of mischief in his eyes.

“The Voice explained that if you were going to be difficult it would be easier to just pick you up. You are not strong enough to break free.” It was said as a statement of fact, although the level of satisfaction he seemed to be feeling was not nearly warranted in Tony's opinion.

He struggled for a moment before hissing when it moved things in the wrong direction, finally letting himself settle down with a pout on his face as he pointedly refused to look at Winter now out of spite.

This didn't seem to concern him in the least.

“At least let me take off the mask. You stick out like a sore thumb with it on even in the back alleys.” Tony grumbled after a few moments of silence.

Winter tilted his head. “I told you. The handler may remove the mask if they wish.” He reminded.

Huffing out a laugh, Tony sighed. “Gotta do all the hard work around here.” He teased before shifting a little to undo the clasps of the mask and gently pull it off.

There was a moment of silence after Tony saw the face of the man who was carrying him before he came back to his senses, fingers clutching the mask tightly as he breathed out in disbelief something he never thought he would say.

“Holy shit, you're Bucky Barnes.”

[thelastloop]

The Last Loop- Chapter 2: Rerun

Prologue

“Alright, Joey. I’m here. Let’s see if we can find what you wanted me to see.”

Henry felt like he’d taken those first couple steps into the studio thousands of times—and surely, he had. But it was so long ago, it amazed him he still recognized the place. A thin veneer of nostalgia did all it could to rub away the derelict exterior. He hardly noticed the disarray.

Or if he did, he tried to ignore it.  His first instinct was to make a beeline for where his old desk used to be. Whether he’d actually expected to find it there, even he didn’t know. There it sat though, untouched by time. An original sketch of his, one he hadn’t grabbed up in his hasty exit 30 years ago, still lay on its surface, waiting for linework. The wood was a bit rougher around the edges from age, but still the same… except for the fact that his chair now backed an entire animation department, rather than a wall.

|There is something rather satisfying about being proven irreplaceable. |

He didn’t step inside. A once-over told him enough. He returned to the main room to explore more, running a finger down one of the posters as he passed.

The first thing to greet Henry down the next hallway were the words DREAMS COME TRUE slathered in what he assumed to be ink on the wall. He blinked at it a moment or two. He recognized it one part of Joey’s favorite mantras, but simply disregarded it and moved on. All he planned was a quick in and out. He didn’t need to think about anything else. Joey’s office should be just around the corner.

Except… it wasn’t. His sureness faltered at the next line of signs, directing to something called an ‘ink machine’. He was about to follow the pointed direction when he spotted a familiar object off to one side—an audio log. He remembered when Joey introduced the damn things, insisted on every employee having and using one for ‘productivity reasons’. He still believed that Joey only wanted them so he could eavesdrop on the employees. ‘Work Hard, Work Happy’, after all.  Unlikely that Joey kept any of his; he disparaged the man in most of them. Curiosity got the better of him though, and he pressed play on the one in front of him.

“At this point, I don’t get what Joey’s plan is for the company. The animations sure aren’t being finished on time anymore—"

Wally. Of course. It almost felt good to hear him again, though a shiver ran down his spine when the mischievous New Yorker’s voice crackled to life.

He’d have to keep an eye out for more tapes.

For the moment though, the ‘ink machine’ awaited. He paused a moment in front of Thomas’ ink output chart, briefly wondering what in the world Joey would need so many gallons of ink for, before continuing to the room the machine itself sat in.

…Perhaps ‘room’ was the wrong word. Just the… the warehouse this monstrosity of ink and metal hung in (he realized when he noticed the floor was just a sheer drop into nothing) was bigger than the whole building that Joey Drew Studios first encompassed. He could have sworn the studio wasn’t this big from the outside.

No Joey waited there to greet him. He supposed he’d have to track down where the man’s office had disappeared to. That required starting the machine, from the looks of it. Batteries conveniently lay strewn about before the railing. While he did wonder about just how easy this task seemed to be, he simply reminded himself,

|Don’t overthink it. |

Retracing his steps brought him to another new room: pictures behind pedestals, all with thickly corded tubes leading back to what seemed to be the ink machine’s power switch. The former break room.

“—Joey had each one of us donate something from our work stations,” he recalled Wally saying. “To help ‘appease the gods’.”

|Fix the machine. Locate and place the items. |

Times like this reminded Henry of where his talents lay. A mind like a steel trap and an innate sense of direction helped immensely in this little fetch quest. A couple lucky guesses didn’t hurt either.

|Turn Left, there’s the break room. Grab Joey’s old book, ‘The Illusion of Living’. |

|Grab the ink bottle from the animation department. No, not that one, the one with the skull on the label. |

|The Bendy doll is in the recording room. |

|Record’s in Sammy’s office. |

|Gear’s back by the ink machine. |

The last thing he needed was something from Thomas (or perhaps Wally, he tried to guess): A wrench. He let his feet guide him, since he didn’t recall seeing a wrench in any of the rooms he’d entered.

He ended up partway to the ink machine in a room that he’d somehow walked right past. The sight now before him terrified him. That… whatever it was, sure looked a lot like Boris. Strapped to the table.

Split open.

“Oh my god. Joey… What were you doing?”

Then he spotted the wrench. Of course it was shoved inside him.

He moved toward it, even as his mind screamed to turn and leave. The wrench popped out with little difficulty.

|Grace under pressure. |

The ink machine turned on quickly once he’d gotten the ink flow running. Now to see how that helped him.

He slowly approached the now boarded-up doorway to the ink machine, brow furrowing slightly in confusion. When did this happen? He’d just been in that room a few minutes ago! As he raised a hesitant hand to touch the boards, a skeletal figure popped up on the other side, startling him back. An ominous tolling in his head forced him back to his feet, ink and darkness creeping towards him, threatening to swallow him and this world whole. He turned on his heel and ran. Whatever Joey wanted to show him could rot here for all he cared! He just needed to escape! Little trickles of light seeping under the door he came from encouraged him forward, as the world started to sink into an inky black abyss. He just needed to reach the door—

Then the floor gave way.

One last desperate lunge to grab the handle, the floorboards, anything to keep him there only succeeded in slamming his hand into a jagged clump of wood shards and rusted nail before he plummeted further into the darkness.

The impact hurt as much as his hand did. He laid there, face to the floor as he tried to keep consciousness. At first the blackness seeping in seemed like he was losing that fight.

Oozing black feet stepped into his line of vision. Ink. Incapacitated, all he could do was wait for death.

The creature didn’t attack, though. Instead, it silently padded over to some wooden structure, set something he couldn’t discern down, and retreated, taking the shifting darkness with him.

--

Next chapter

[justinstares]

The air cargo industry is staring at a tidal wave

Here follows a short conversation between retail giant Amazon and IATA, as imagined by Alex Labonne, chief technology officer at Hermes Cargo Management Systems.

Amazon: “Given that we do pretty well at warehousing, it’s only logical for us to think about moving into ground handling”.

IATA: “You’ve got to use our SITA system, and there are other things…”

Amazon: “Nah, we don’t want to do that.”

IATA: “You must, otherwise you won’t be able to…”

Amazon [interrupting]: “You know what, I’ll use my own airline as well. I’ll use my own protocol, all the way. You guys do whatever it is you do, and we’ll do what we want to do.”

At which point the conversation ends, Amazon walks out, and, in Mr Labonne’s words, “they smash it”, meaning they put anyone who competes with them out of business.

Welcome to the near future.

If industries now rise and fall according to how successfully they collect and manipulate data, air cargo is in trouble.

Despite predictions of volume growth and reassurances that 3D printing will not bring an end to world trade, there was a sense of foreboding among attendees at the Air Cargo Handling conference in Zaventem, on the outskirts of Brussels.

A wave of technological disruption is racing in from the horizon, and companies still operating as if this were the 1990s are set to be swept away.

Data - or rather, good data - is already what separates the profitable from the also-rans. If you can capture enough of it, and if you know how to analyse it, you can squeeze out that extra few percentage points of efficiency from your logistics chain: the 10% that makes the difference between profit and loss.

Alastair Band, who came to Belgium in a search of applications for blockchain technology, talked about Amazon and its plan to ship the goods you haven’t even thought about ordering yet to your nearest distribution centre. If the data predicts that you will buy face-cream this month, because you buy it every other month, then why not have a pot ready and waiting, just a few minutes from your front door?

While the likes of Amazon and China’s Alibaba ramp up their robotics-controlled warehouses, some legacy air cargo handlers still rely on old-fashioned brawn to prepare pallets for loading. Worse still: many are drowning in paper documents.

The amount of paper produced in 2018 by the air cargo industry is an embarrassment, conference panellists agreed. Agents routinely throw away reams at the end of every working day because their customers, believing that everything has been digitalised, don’t bother to pick it up.

‘Digitalisation’ for some in the industry means scanning a paper document and sending it as an email attachment, which would be laughable if it were not for the fact that some haven’t even got this far.

The fact that industry bodies are talking today of developing a worldwide barcode standard says it all. “Come on guys,” commented one attendee. “Bar codes are technology from 20 or 30 years ago, and we’re still scratching our heads asking how we can implement it.”

“Amazon and Alibaba are not waiting,” warned Céline Hourcade, head of cargo transformation at IATA. “The market is susceptible to being shaken up by new entrants.”

Everyone in Zaventem recognised that modernisation was well overdue. There was talk of “making cargo talk” with microchips that could theoretically also measure temperature and any damage-causing shocks. The buzzwords were all there: new facilities must be “future-proof”; drones and artificial intelligence will carve out a niche. All agreed on the need to move on from tracking consignments to individual parcels so as to latch onto the e-commerce wave and compete with the integrators.

But there was the inescapable impression that the old-fashioned ways of doing business, the ways that still predominate, mean the industry of today may not be up to the task. “We come to conferences like this, discuss initiatives and then go home and do nothing,” lamented Hendrik Leyssens, head of operations at Cargo Swissport International.

‘Doing nothing’ has not been ruinous for the past 30 years, but in it could now be fatal.

To start with, those who do nothing are unlikely to profit from the growth in e-commerce. This new business is benefitting integrators rather than traditional handlers, conferences attendees heard.

Legacy companies must “wake up” to the fact that integrators are eating into their heavy cargo business, said Hans Van Shaik, sales manager at Saco Airport Equipment. “E-commerce growth is tremendous,” he said. “Consignments are increasing in weight and integrators are handling 100 kg, 150 kg packages.”

Handlers cannot compete with the integrators’ ability to both keep track of individual items and move them fast.

“It’s going to go worldwide,” Van Shaik (who, let us remember, has equipment to sell) warned. At integrator hubs in Brussels and Liege there are now 300 to 400 workstations, while at Leipzig there are 700, he said. There’s not much difference between shipping a package and shipping a pallet. “If you can do it for parcels, then why not for pallets?” he asked. The slide on the wall behind him showed a piano, which typically weighs 200 kg, being shipped by an express carrier.

Given that e-commerce is supposed to make up for the small drop in volumes that will be lost to 3D printing – estimated to amount to between 2% and 5% of total volumes, mostly furniture - traditional handlers are on the losing side of this equation.

And that’s before the second wave of disruption hits.

Amazon’s fleet of 40 freighters was brought up in almost every conversation during the coffee breaks. When Amazon and Alibaba realise that they can improve their margins by using their own ground handlers, an era will come to an end.

Part of the problem is scale. Handlers without sizeable cashflow don’t have the financial clout to invest in robotics, it was reported. Ludwig Hausmann, a partner at McKinsey & Company, pointed out that Google makes more profit on its own than the entire air cargo industry.

That said, the chief executives of profitable companies have been guilty of complacency.

“Cargo protagonists could have done a whole lot of things, but no-one wants to pay for it,” said Labonne.  “The standards are low and not good enough, especially the heavy standards. If people want to survive the Amazon or the Alibaba, they have to invest. The fragmentation is a lot of the time in people’s minds.”

Attempts by IATA and others to encourage the spread of technology with top-down standards are doomed to failure because that’s not how technology propagates, says Labonne. Trying to pick a winning standard, much like attempts to predict which hardware or software will be used in the next five to ten years, is futile. “Have we heard this before?” asks Labonne. “We have heard it forever. Everyone’s going to have the same laptop, the same desktop”.  Every two years comes the latest trend, and the predictions are soon forgotten and recast.

“Things don’t evolve that way,” Labonne continues. “For me, interfaces are always between two protagonists. That’s fragmented, but that’s the way the world is. Believe you me, Amazon systems are not that standardised, not that uniform. That’s how Amazon managed to grow so quickly.

“They weren’t too fussed about a uniform support. What they were fussed about is that when they had interfaces, they were tested. If somebody broke something, it was known.” Tolerant systems, rather than rigid standards, allow for patching and growth. “You have to be stringent with what you send and tolerant with what you receive, it’s called Postel’s Law,” says Labonne, quoting one of the guiding principles of data interchange over the internet.

“In terms of interfaces, we all speak different languages, we all operate differently. When you try to string [a new standard] across the world, you’re chasing windmills. You’ll be the Don Coyote swinging at windmills. Half the people will use it and the other half won’t” because the other half simply don’t want to.

Cargo intermediaries should instead make their interfaces public and allow others to link up without any top-down imposition. “It’s an organic system, and that’s how things grow,” says Labonne. “This is how Alibaba and Amazon have grown.” Attempts to force transport onto one single standard are “irrelevant”. It’s the equivalent of carving principles on stone tablets, he says.

Given that few in the industry are prepared to take the coming threat seriously, and given that it will soon be too late, the best hope for legacy players might be to become food for predators. “If the Amazon wave happens, the race will be about who is going to be bought,” says Labonne. “I think everyone has to invest a bit more. That to me is the biggest issue.”

While the fatalistic mind set seemed to have taken hold among many conference attendees, it was not universal. “It isn’t going to happen,” said Sebastiaan Scholte, chairman of The International Air Cargo Association (TIACA) and ceo of Jan De Rijk Logistics. “Alibaba can’t compete with the belly network,” Scholte said. He then pondered, and added: “Anyway, this industry needs disrupting.”

The worldwide network of belly capacity would indeed be difficult for the giant retailers to recreate quickly, unless drones become commonplace. This argument would suggest however that handlers could well be pushed onto minor, secondary routes as the Alibaba et al set up shop.

The problem, in essence, is that the fragmented air cargo industry suffers from low levels of trust. “We have to stop keeping data to ourselves,” was the recurring conference refrain.

The advantages of sharing data were laid out. The automobile industry has managed to reduce the cycle for producing new models from seven years to two through collaboration.

While some attendees were wringing their hands ahead of what could be an apocalypse, others have been spurred to action.

Citing Amazon’s fleet investment as one of the triggers, the Brussels airport air cargo community has with the financial support of the Flemish Government over the last two years worked hard to “demolish the silos” between the various players in the logistics chain. Via a not-for-profit umbrella organisation, 142 cargo community members have pooled their training and lobbying efforts. Their jointly-created applications for slot booking and customs clearance have brought about efficiencies, bringing down clearance times in particular. Members lend their experts to the many community steering committees, while youngsters are encouraged to bond, literally, at speed-dating evenings.

Zaventem did witness some inspired thinking. Why not combine baggage handling with express parcels under the arrivals lounge, one member of the audience asked? But the airports themselves were seen as a brake on innovation. Airport owners are often unsympathetic to the needs of the air cargo industry. Given that passengers and duty free bring in more profit, will handlers inevitably be pushed further and further from the runway?

Will full freighters be forced to operate exclusively from secondary airports? Should airports be publicly owned so as to reflect the interests of all users, not just the most profitable sectors? Can airport designers be lobbied before they lay down their plans?

To get to the root cause of what now afflicts air cargo, it may be necessary to go back to the drawing board. But if that’s just not feasible, handlers will have to make do with the latest iteration of track-and-trace systems (such as the one being put together by pharmaceutical handlers).

The parting image was one of a circular firing squad made up of handlers shouting “share your data” at each other. Or else.

[stepphase]

How Does Amazon Drone Delivery Work

It's well over a decade since Amazon launched its Amazon Drone Delivery called Prime Air Service. In fact, it was 2007 when the company first introduced unlimited next-day shipping. On what was at the time almost a million products.

Read More Regarding Amazon: Amazon One Lets You Pay By The Palm Of Your Hand

But in 13 years we've seen little change that is until recently many areas now offer same-day delivery. But behind closed doors, Amazon had been working on an ambitious plan to realize almost instant delivery.

The goal just 30 minutes from the click of the order now button to the tangible products in our hands.

Every delivery company can agree that the final mile or so of a product's journey is the most expensive. As it leaves a shipping container and steps away from the lorries vessel it enters the smallest vehicle yet vans and sometimes cars.

Rather than carrying millions of products, a driver can now only carry a few dozen. Employing thousands of drivers comes at an incredible cost to shipping companies.

Amazon has been playing with the idea of cutting out these final employees with autonomous machines such as the six-wheeled scout robot.

Testing Phase and Government Approval

Its latest venture however has taken to the air. Testing has been taking place for Amazon's fleet of drones since 2013. But it wasn't until 2020 that the company received approval from the Federal Aviation Administration to operate a fleet of Delivery Drones.

The online shopping giant joined the list of companies experimenting with the idea including Wing Aviation owned by Google's parent company Alphabet and UPS flight forward.

How Amazon Drone Delivery Exactly Work?

When an order is received at a local fulfillment center it makes its way through the usual packaging process. Before finding itself in a special box designed to be carried by one of the company's drones.

After being picked up by one of these the drone is carried to an outdoors take-off spot on a mini rail network. It's not until it's outdoors that the fully electric motors spin into action ready for takeoff, ascending vertically the drone will reach an altitude of fewer than 400 feet before beginning its journey to the customer's house.

Just like a self-driving car, the drone contains a number of special sensors. To help it understand its surroundings including GPS, Visual Thermal, and Sonar Detectors.

This allows it to paint 3D pictures of the world around it including obstacles on the ground like people, wires, and buildings as well as airborne intrusions such as hot air balloons and other drones. This forms the basis of what Amazon calls Sense and Avoid Technology.

When the drone has arrived at the customer's house it begins to scan for a safe landing spot. We're unsure how this process works but from videos it could work as one of two ways

This could involve the drone assessing a fixed landing area either set up by the customer or a mapping system or a special map could be placed down by the customer which provides the drone with a reference point.

Amazon Drone Delivery Technology

The tech on this map could be as simple as a color-coded symbol for the drone to read or it could involve a QR code that confirms the correct location.

For a more private experience, the map may even use a combination of Bluetooth and ultra-wideband for pinpoint accuracy although this would have to involve charging the map between uses

It's safe to say we don't know at this point and Amazon could be trying a combination of all these ideas out right now.

Parcel Weight Limit

Currently, the weight limit for parcels set at just 5 pounds / 2.3 kilograms. This doesn't sound like a lot but Amazon claims more than three-quarters of its parcels weigh less than this.

Drone Models

Just like cars various models will be designed for different environments. Some suited to the agile nature of city centers and some suited to the highspeed crossing of rural areas.

After Successful Amazon Drone Delivery

Once the delivery has been successfully made, the drone returns to the fulfillment center before embarking on another mission.

At the time of Collision

In the event of a collision, some believe the drones will be instructed to dismantle themselves mid-flight because smaller and lighter pieces of debris are less dangerous than a 25kilogram man-made asteroid heading for an innocent human.

Others believe intentional collisions can force. As crashing into something like a tree will be less catastrophic than somebody's car.

The current problem is that fulfillment centers inhabit a large area which means they are found in semi-rural areas just outside the city boundaries

This is great for the handful of people who live locally to these warehouses but city dwellers are larger in numbers and generally order more packages online.

Fulfillment Centers

Amazon's solution patents have already filed for the fulfillment center's city-dwelling cousins. These buildings expected to resemble beehives tall in design and with multiple takeoff and landing zones across the surface.

A design similar to the unfavorably named Gherkin in London's financial district could be beneficial. Allowing it not only to serve as a landmark for drones to use but with floor space in cities so expensive height is a sensible option.

Drone Traffic Monitoring Facility

Not only this it could allow the company to have its own air space monitoring facility high in the sky just like an airport's air traffic control center.

The potential is huge here we're talking about an amazon inspired city of course entirely theoretical for now.

Everything could double its purposes, lamp posts could become charging points for the drone, rooftops could become waiting areas, which could help regulate high demand areas, public spaces could become drop-off points for people lacking in private outdoor spaces as is the case for many apartments in the city.

The chances of seeing a fully qualified amazon drone delivery service any time soon are very slim, however.

Whereas vans navigate a series of roundabouts traffic lights and junctions on a 2D scale. There's no such traffic management in our urban airspaces which operate on a 3D scale.

Amazon Prime Air Development Centers

Amazon Prime Air development centers are in the United States, the United Kingdom, Austria, France, and Israel.

First Amazon Drone Delivery

Don't be disappointed, though Amazon is working to realize this dream. A very important day for the company was 7th December 2016. This was the date that its first customer received his first drone-delivered amazon parcel via Prime Air.

From purchase to delivery the smooth process took just 13 minutes. In less than half the goal time frame he was able to choose from thousands of products from his local fulfillment center in Cambridge England.

As one of two customers part of the initial trial before it extended to include hundreds of more participants

To speed up the process amazon plans to act within the regulations which means less time spent bending the rules.

Rules and Regulations on Drones

Current US Regulations require drones to fly under 400 feet at speeds of less than 100 miles per hour. Prime Air will operate between 200 and 500 feet at speeds of up to 50 miles per hour within a 10-mile radius of their base station.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos famously described the success of his company was thanks to its passion for the end-to-end experience.

From the customer's initial engagement with the website to the arrival of a product. Online tracking and often faster-than anticipated delivery times have stunned millions of customers. But things are about to get a whole lot better

With years of planning under its belt and its huge expertise in online shopping and delivery. We're excited to see amazon's final solution to deliver thousands of packages in less than 30 minutes. But have you ever received a parcel by a robot if so what was your experience?

#Stepphase #technologies #technology #tech #technews #techworld #techtrends #smartphone #apple #techupdates #futuretechnology #newtech #techgeek #technologynews #technologythesedays #smarttechnology #technologylover #technologytrends #technologyblog #gadgets #smartphone #gadget #marketing #digital #india #technologyisawesome #amazing #repost

[bloodiedcuriosity]

Chronicle 1

Note: This chronicle is over a year long, so I will summarize story beats the best I can from Fangs perspective, labelled for skimming ease.

Headers: main story arcs Bold/italics: subplots

Strike through stuff are comments from me the player, not Fang.

Coterie: Fang (Gangrel), Jacks (Ventrue), Udjat (Ministry), Ariyah (Tremere), Alex (Banu)

The Gangs First Mission:

��   Jacks and I were summoned to the Prince, where we met 3 others to take care of a masquerade breach. Someone frenzied in the middle of a club and we were to take care of the police that responded and the witness at the hospital, the kindred was not our main priority. Me, Jacks, and Alex handled the Police. Loki caused a distraction for Alex to sneak in and Jacks commanded the head detective to head to Brazil, and to shoot anyone asking why. Which is a great idea. We found the evidence and took care of it as well as the 2 other witnesses.

     Following some leads that Udjat and Jacks had found as the previous night ended, we found the Kindred responsible, but it looks like someone had gotten to her first. We head back to Elysium as everything is handled and overall we did well and were recognized as an official coterie with domain. Ariyah says there’s ghosts in the apartment we were given though.

The Curious Case of the Thinbloods:

     Nothing happens for 2 weeks, I network and gossip at parties. I overhear that there’s a group of humans spreading odd rumors as well as accurate information on Torries and Nos at a bar in Etobicoke. at the end of the 2 weeks, someone is at our haven, an Anarch named Jeremy. He offers 5 more blocks into their territory for feeding as well as phones that have been Kindred proofed (Alex the resident techie makes sure). The humans are operating in the Banu domain, of which we were granted permission to stay in for a week to handle them. Watching the bar Loki and I spot 3 odd acting humans and alerted the others. I had Loki follow the humans home, and to follow Udjat if they split up. We found the homes of the humans and broke in to figure out what they knew and what they had. RED swooped down to collect me while they were finishing up searching the houses, an urgent delivery to a warehouse in Hamilton. I didn’t open the package. Though I really wanted her to. This is relevant info I promise

    I met back up with the others in the Banu domain, following a lead for the ones giving the humans kindred info at a homeless camp. A nos named Slash gives us the name and location of three thinbloods at Humber College. They’re having a party tonight so we decide to crash it. I find one of them named Gil and in trying to get him alone/looking at what he has in his room I end up in a threesome because that totally happens, what can I say, Fang the knockoff torrie has her ways. In the process Alex obtains all of their phones and determines that there’s no breaches there, though Gil was interested in Ethan’s disappearance.

A Pillar Collapses:

     We learn that Ethan was aware of him being a thinblood and of the masquerade, and sought to connect with the other two, teaching them the masquerade as well before he disappeared. Ethans parents were never aware that he was missing. We capture Ethan and Jacks wants to bring him to Liams (Jacks’s sire), but Ethan would rather go to Elysium or the sun than go to Liams. He tells us all the terrible experiments that Liam has done on him and other Thinbloods. Jacks makes the executive decision to still take him to Liam, and he and the other coterie members fight, and chase. In the end, Ethan makes it to Elysium where in a month he will have an audience with the Prince, as well as the other Thinbloods with Alex as their lawyer. Jacks tells me to go back to the Haven, and he will explain everything.

    30 minutes to sunrise, I get hundreds of messages from Jessica (his ghoul) to go find Jacks, but its too late for me to go out to look for him. I pass out in the living room fighting the sun to wait for messages from Jessica. When I wake up the next night, Jessica leaves one more message, saying that he walked into the sun. I frenzy at the loss of a close friend in a puff of feathers. Patches of feathers remain even when the frenzy fades for the night. When I calm down, Alex invites me to go to a meeting with Udjat and Jeremy to talk about the Thinbloods and Liam. A meeting at Elysium is called, they confirm that Jacks is dead, and to confirm the time line given for the trial of the Thinblood that is now in 3 months. Someone under the Sherrif is dispatched to the Coterie named Vinny. After the meeting we go to Jacks’s haven, and find Jessica heavily drinking. I console her, give her me phone number, and convince her to let them look through the haven. I find a briefcase full of pictures of my graffiti on his buildings which makes me cry, I also riffle through his jewelry for a ring and put it on a chain. Ariyah and I have a heart to heart, she knows loss like this. I later gain custody of Jessica, and question the three thinbloods with everyone, as I am the better lie detector. Alex says he has business to attend to and leaves. We go to Ethans parents to try and glean more information, and find that they are missing and have been for a while. Found foot prints and tire tracks but that is more Alex’s forte. 

The Beach Episode:

     Vinny and I decide to have some bonding time, and spar. He kicked my shit in but I proved my point to him that I could take a punch. Fortitude yeehaw. Udjat and I share blood since he was hungry and wanted some disciplines, we also learn that Vinny is Caitiff, and I wanted presence so you know. RED came and visited, saying someone came to the pack looking for me that fit the description of someone who ambushed me years ago. She doesn’t like it and offers to come with us to look for her. Udjat, Vinny, RED and I go looking for her at a close by conservatory. We find her, we fight and she falls into damage torpor. We take her to the haven with us and talk more but she falls into hunger torpor not giving us anything so we take her to the Camarilla. Ariyah mothers us and RED hits on Vinny and I hate it. Imagine if your mother started hitting on your friend, its WEIRD MAN

The Trial:

    Liam gets fucked up for being a lying bitch, Slash is a lying bitch who kept lying and even tried to run away. Liams ghouls were killed, 2/3 thinbloods found innocent, we are given a major boon from the court. An explosion rocks Elysium, 3 bombs have gone off in the city. We were told to go home and wait for instructions. Vinny and I spar again while waiting, he wins again but not as bad. The following days they’re told to be even more careful and to not go near the bomb locations. Jobs for the pack have been cancelled for the next month, RED tells me to tell Vinny something and I am not having it but RED sees right through me and came over. Jeremy comes over and we learn that the man Ariyah saw in her sires library while preparing for the trial is Vigil, the Malk Primogen, and that Jonathan is his brother as well as the leader of the Anarchs. They also learn that the doors to the clubs prior to the bombings were boarded up. He also tells us that the phones will be updated soon. Alex after Jeremy leaves tells us to give him the Anarch phones and to not trust Vigil or Jonathan.

3 Years Later:

    There is a remembrance every year for the bombings, RED tells me she mates for life and I realized that I can’t sabotage her and Vinny anymore. There’s CCTVs everywhere, everyone does their own thing. I try to start using my networking to gain some favor to plant the seeds of becoming a Harpy. Jeremy comes over near the end of the time skip, offering us a job to go get a shipment of thermal cameras for them to gain a Major boon from him. The mission goes well, though we had to fight SI, but I had Loki keeping watch and gave us a decent heads up. I take a couple bullets, but otherwise everyone was unscathed.

    I keep my ear to the ground about the mission, to see if anyone knows more than they should and all I find is that people know it happened but no one knows who did it or why. The coterie is called to Elysium for a job, Julius Moon (Anarch) needs to be interrogated in connection to the bombings. Another Anarch we’ve kept in contact with sets up the meeting with him. The meeting was a mess, something tipped Ariyah off about his answers, he tried running, even got into Vinnys head to use him against us. In the end, he was chopped into pieces and stuffed into a suitcase to be easily transported as he was missing his arms for trying to fight us. He was brought to Elysium to be held and questioned by us, after I put him back together. He knew way too much. The Anarchs were trying to start a war with the Camarilla, and our Anarch contacts were all involved in one way or another, except notably, Vigil. 

War:

    Natio entrusts the coterie to deliver the first strike back in this war, granting us the right of destruction to any Anarch. Our job is to take down their main method of communication, the Anarch cellphones, by destroying their servers and bricking their phones. Udjat left, last talking with Ariyah. We scout out the building the Anarchs are using, a building at York University, to find its guarded well by mortals and kindred alike. Alex comes up with a plan and creates something to destroy and erase all the information on the servers as well as brick the phones that are attached to the servers.  

The First Strike:

     Vinny, Ariyah and I go directly into the building as students, as the servers are in the basement, and scout out/keep an eye out for not students while Alex sneaks his way in. We encounter another Kindred named Bennie, who also seeks to pick a bone with Jeremy. The chaos begins with EDM blasting over the speakers and a pulled fire alarm. The kindred near by burst in, fighting ensues, I get my shit wrecked by feral weapons and bot me and Vinny get wrecked by Sarah with Fist of Caine. Vinny is in damage torpor while Ariyah and I whittle her down to hunger and damage torpor, capturing her, though we later learn Benny took her while Ariyah tried to take her to Elysium. Benny disappears in the scuffle. Everything was so action packed I didnt take good notes, and Fang wasn’t part of the more ‘important’ scenes for the overall story. When the dust settles, the servers are damaged and phones bricked, though not to Alex’s satisfaction. 

Cleanup Crew:

     The next mission we were given, take care of some of the fighting forces for the Anarchs. The Anarchs were more Gangrel and Brujah, while the Camarilla distinctly lacked them and any fighters, besides the Camarilla Nos. We prepared to go to the Anarch Gangrel domain and smoke them out, napalm and flame throwers included. However upon arrival it looks like the SI beat us to it. It was a setup for us most likely, but Loki and I caught it before they spotted us. On the way back, I hunted. On that hunt I encountered the same bouncer I gave empty promises the night after my embrace. I was shook, he attempted to kill me, but I scared him off, I hope for good. Daunt is one hell of a drug

     While we were distracted though, the SI stormed Elysium. We were told by a Nos that Vinny knows, Roach, and he asks us to come with him to kill the prisoners that are being held underground before the SI get to them. We accomplish that, killing some more SI on the way, and killing Sarah and Julius as well. No one has seen Alex in a while. 

     A new Elysium location is picked and called, the remaining kindred are all over the place in terms of happiness and or nervousness. 4 Anarchs want to switch sides as well. Natio announces that there is going to be a parley between him and the Anarchs, and that the coterie (and Benny) is to come with. It is not intended to be peaceful, no one goes in or out.

Parley:

There are three main figures, Jonathan is in the center, 2 guards inside and 2 more on the outside of the room. He denies having any part of the bombings, and gets aggressive when Natio accuses him of telling the SI where Elysium was. Another fight ensues, everyone killed besides Jonathan and one of the inside guards, he was an undercover Camarilla. 

You Reap What You Sow:

The war is over, and things change.

Ariyah is appointed Tremere whip, her sire the new Primogen

I am the representative for the Camarilla Gangrel, not Primogen but still of some importance

Vinny was given the opportunity to Diablerize Alex, for he had tried to leave while we were killing prisoners, and he does, becoming Banu Haqim. He also becomes an official Hound

We all have our own domains as well as the coterie domain.  And with that, comes the end of Chronicle 1. 

[musicplayperformance]

Let Yourself Go: Ludo-musicality in the Roland TB-303

By Illés Plompen

When I think of a ‘ludo-musical object’ (an object that contains elements of both music and play), one of the first things that comes to mind is the musical instrument, since the act of making music – whether alone or together with other people – always has a certain degree of playfulness to it. How this playfulness manifests itself really differs from genre to genre: in blues and jazz it is mostly in the act of improvisation; in classical it is in the way musicians react to the movements of the conductor; in pop and rock it is in the musician’s lively performance style and the way they interact with the crowd; and so on. This is obviously a very generalized, surface-level analysis of ludo-musicality in the performance of these different genres, but it shows that the concept of ‘play’ can be applied to music-making in a lot of different ways. Despite that, many would argue that it falls a little flat when talking about music that relies on ‘electronic instruments’, meaning things like synthesizers and drum computers, because these instruments allow you to play a set musical pattern at the push of a button. The concept of play would therefore not really apply, since you are mostly composing and arranging the music as opposed to actually physically playing it like you would on a traditional instrument.

I do not subscribe to this point of view. I think electronic instruments are just as ludo-musical as, if not more ludo-musical than, traditional instruments. It is just that the way you interact with these instruments is fundamentally different – something Mark Butler thoroughly discusses in his book Playing with Something That Runs (2014). <1> Because these instruments allow you to play the exact same pattern over and over again at the push of a button, they give you the freedom to manipulate the timbre via filters and effects, or even add new musical layers on top of it. Plus, these instruments allow you to create patterns that would be humanly impossible to play, opening up new possibilities in terms of tempo, dynamics, rhythmic complexity, you name it. Because of all this, new forms of play start to emerge. And if there’s one electronic instrument that exemplifies this best – both in terms of its practical use and fascinating, myth-like history – it is the legendary Roland TB-303 Bass Line.

The Roland TB-303 Bass Line (also known as the ‘Roland 303’ or simply ‘303’) is a bass synthesizer-sequencer, first released by Roland Corporation in 1983. Its rectangular shape resembles a modern-day computer keyboard (albeit much thicker and heavier) and its light grey colour, shiny knobs and playful red LEDs make it almost look like a toy. According to the owner’s manual, the TB-303 basically works as follows:

“In order to memorize a Bass line, divide it into each measure (pattern) and memorize one pattern at a time. Each “pattern” can remember various musical factors, such as ‘pitch’, ‘length of note’ and ‘accent’, individually. After memorizing several patterns, these patterns may be joined in order to produce the Bass line of a musical piece.” <2>

While this sort of digital sequencing technology seems simplistic, almost primitive, by today’s standards, creating and looping a rhythm or melody without first having to manually record or even play it was an incredibly novel idea in the early 1980s – an idea that has changed the way we make and think about music forever. And although Roland did not invent the synthesizer or even digital sequencing, they were one of the first companies to bring this technology to the masses, by making it affordable to people outside of the major label music business.

That said, the Roland TB-303 was a complete commercial failure when it came out and Roland decided to cease production of the instrument as early as 1985 (only two years after its initial release). And honestly, it is not hard to see why people initially weren’t taking to the 303: the synthesizer was meant to emulate the sound of a bass guitar and was mostly marketed toward solo-guitarists as a sort of imaginary bassist to play along to. <3> This seems almost too absurd to be true (especially in retrospect) because if you have ever heard a 303, you know that it sounds nothing like a bass guitar. The instrument’s strange, rubbery tone and synthetic timbre sounds more like a futuristic digeridoo than anything else! But, as author William Gibson first declared in his science fiction classic Burning Chrome, the street finds its own uses for things. And in 1985 – shortly after Roland ceased production of the TB-303 – a group of up-and-coming producers from Chicago by the name of Phuture would use the instrument to create one of the most important pieces of electronic dance music of all time, “Acid Tracks”. <4> <5>

To create the iconic bassline of “Acid Tracks”, Phuture used the TB-303 to make a simple, one-measure pattern of relatively high-pitched 16th notes, which is played in a loop throughout most of the track’s 12-minute runtime. While this is already a very strange way to use the TB-303 – since the octave-spanning, 120-bpm stream of 16th notes would be impossible to play on a real bass guitar – Phuture takes it even further, by constantly adjusting the knobs ‘cut off freq’, ‘resonance’, ‘env mod’ and ‘decay’ while the bassline is playing (see the image bellow this paragraph). As a result, the bassline has an everchanging timbre that, combined with the extremely repetitive rhythmic- and melodic pattern, makes it very hypnotic to listen to. This inventive use of the Roland TB-303 as a kind of squelchy arpeggiator instead of a real bassline synthesizer makes “Acid Tracks” a shining example of the experimental nature of the early Chicago house scene; one that planted the seeds for the acid-house revolution. <6> <7>

Because soon after “Acid Tracks” caught on in Chicago clubs like The Music Box, the sound of the TB-303 popped up everywhere: first fellow Chicago producers like Adonis and Mr. Fingers started using it; then came a whole wave of British house acts, making the 303 the defining instrument of a new style they called ‘acid-house’ (808 State’s “Let Yourself Go (303 Mix)”; New Order’s “Fine Time”; LFO’s “LFO (Leeds Warehouse Mix)”; A Guy Called Gerald’s “Voodoo Ray”; Orbital’s “Chime”); and by the late 90s, the 303 had become such a staple of dance and rave culture that it was used all across the electronic music spectrum (Daft Punk’s “Da Funk”; The Prodigy’s “Smack My Bitch Up”; Aphex Twin’s “Cornish Acid”; the list goes on). In his book Energy Flash (2013), Simon Reynolds described the ubiquitous presence of the 303 as follows: “[…] it’s like the wah-wah guitar: instantly recognizable, yet capable of infinite variations and adaptations, and forever drifting in- and out of fashion.” <8> What makes the typical 303-bassline Reynolds describes (also known as the ‘acid-bassline’) so addictive is hard to pin-point, but I would argue it has a lot to do with how well it complements the use of MDMA; electronic dance music’s drug of choice. Whether it is the continually evolving tone colour, or the repetitive, disorienting nature of the fast arpeggio’s: the sound of a 303-bassline has a very trippy, psychedelic aesthetic.

And I would argue this aesthetic also has a strong sense of ‘play’ to it, with the notes gradually moving up and down the scale and the person operating the instrument knob twiddling their way through a never-ending climax – it is like a child playing with their toys. And I think this playfulness also comes through in the strange history of the 303. The fact that a group of house producers discovered the untapped potential of some flopped piece of equipment by using it in a completely different context, says something about the playful nature of making music and creating things in general. It might not be as obvious as literally playing a guitar, piano, violin or any other traditional musical instrument, but it is playing nonetheless. And it’s a hell of a lot of fun!

<1> Mark J. Butler, Playing with Something That Runs, (New York : Oxford University Press, 2014).

<2> Roland TB-303 manual, 4. http://www.synthdiy.com/files/2013/tb303.pdf (consulted on May 11, 2020).

<3> Simon Reynolds, Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave and Dance Culture, (London [New York]: Faber and Faber, 2013), 30.

<4> Geeta Dayal, Roland TB-303 in Grove Music Online, published January 31, 2014. https://www-oxfordmusiconline-com.proxy.library.uu.nl/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-1002257226?rskey=0F2Q2H&result=1 (consulted on May 10, 2020).

<5> Although it would not be officially released until 1987, “Acid Tracks” was created and played in local nightclubs in 1985 according to the members of Phuture, producer Jeff Mills and DJ Ron Hardy, which would make it the first house track to use the Roland TB-303.

<6> Reynolds, Energy Flash, 31.

<7> Sarah Thornton, Club Cultures: Music, Media, and Subcultural Capital, (Wesleyan: Wesleyan University Press, 1995), 236.

<8> Reynolds, Energy Flash, 33.