#on another note. if I had drawn these bigger the writing might be to scale

[emry-stars-art]

MY HEART??!???!??

M Y S T A R ? ! ? ! ?

I LOVE THEM SO MUCH

I ALSO LOVE U AND THAT BIG BEAUTIFUL BRAIN OF YOURS FOR COMING UP WITH THESE

🥹❤️

YOU CAN THANK @jtl-fics FOR ANDREW CALLING ABRAM THAT (and also to a degree for Abram’s name for Andrew so like. Thanks Ash 💕)

Dramatized rendering of the two’s letters at whatever point in the timeline idk

Script/cipher under the cut

One fancy version and a simpler handwriting one ✨

[infinitelysordinary]

who has the biggest base on empires smp? (as of july 1st, 2021)

a somewhat in-depth mathematical deep dive into empire smp’s bases

THE CONTEXT.

for the past two weeks or so, scott (also known as: scott smajor, smajor, smajor1995, dangthatsalongname, and branding nightmare) has been building up his second base, effectively taking down his starter house.

most of this building occured during his streams, where he often proclaimed that he thought he was building the “biggest base on the server.” when his third empires smp video came out on june 26, 2021, his titled said “The Biggest Base on the Server! - Minecraft Empires SMP - Ep.03.”

however, the day after, joel (aka smallishbeans) uploaded his fourth episode of empires smp, titled “Building My House! | Empires SMP | Ep.4 (1.17 Survival).” within this video, he claimed that he had the biggest house on the empires smp server. he even went as far as to trap an afk scott in a cage of stone, and writing out three signs asking scott to change the title of his recent video.

[Image Description: A zoomed in screenshot from Joel’s newest video. The screenshot was taken within Scott’s house. There are two walls shown and a birch floor. In the middle, there are three oak signs. Joel’s crosshair is on the middle sign.

The first sign says: “Hello Scott, please can you change your video title as”

The second sign says: “It says you have the biggest base. This is wrong. My base is bigger”

The third sign says: “Come have a look if you want. - Joel”]

so, that begs the question: who has the biggest base on the empires smp out of scott and joel?

THE SEMANTICS.

now, for the purposes of today’s adventure, we’re only going to be counting the volume within the base. this does not include windows, outside accents, bridges, gardens, walls, doorways, or anything else that is not within the confines of the base itself. floors and/or divides do not count towards the total, as they take up space and are not “easily moved.”

the only exception is balconies--the space on a balcony counts towards the total, though that space is counted differently. on enclosed balcony, i.e. a balcony that is surrounded by fences and has a roof-like structure that blocks out rain, all the space that fits between the fences, the roof, and the floor count.

on an open balcony, i.e. a balcony that only has fences and a floor, with no roof, only the two blocks of air on top of the floor and in between the fences count.

similarly, both of their bases are defined by their respective houses that they built during the episode. their farms, tents, bridges, and any other structure that they have built previous do not count towards the total.

i will be only using screenshots from their own videos, e.g., i will use scott’s video (published june 26, 2021) to find the volume of his base, and use joel’s video (published june 27, 2021) to find the volume of his base. anything that scott has added between his video and joel’s will not be counted, neither will anything that either of them created after the fact.

i will not be counting joel’s most recent video, titled “Pranking Lizzie, Interiors & Windmills! | Empires SMP | Ep.5 (1.17 Survival)”, because that was uploaded when i was writing this analysis. like, after i finished all my counting, but when i was writing this post. so, uh-

also, i am not counting anyone else’s bases within this experiment, though i do believe others have similarly sized bases. the other creators not a part of this post until they officially get involved in the ‘rivalry’

THE METHOD.

first of all, volume is calculated in minecraft blocks cubed. a typical ‘minecraft block’ is just a full block, like planks, logs, or stone. i’m not going to calculate this accurately (i.e. counting the space that the glass panes leave behind), mostly because i cannot be assed.

SMAJOR’S BASE.

the volume of smajor’s house, in theory, is relatively easy to find. because his house is just a right pentagonal prism, we can use the formula B*h to find the volume. B is the area of the ‘base’ (which, in this case, is the front/back of his house), and h is the depth of his house.

[Image Description: Two screenshots from Scott’s newest video. Both screenshots have lowered transparency, and are slightly dulled.

One screenshot is of the inside of his house, as he looks at the back. The floor is still grass, though the walls are up. There are dozens of arrows within the floor and towards the back of the wall. On top of the screenshot, someone has noted that there are 13 Minecraft blocks across the back of Scott’s house.

The second screenshot is from the outside of Scott’s house, as he looks up at it. The house appears to be finished. On top of the screenshot, someone has noted that there are 10 Minecraft blocks from the floor up to the start of the room. There is a red marking where the roof hits the wall.]

there are two parts that add up to B: the rectangular bit, and the roof. in these two screenshots, i’m finding the area of the rectangular bit.

the rectangular bit is 13 blocks across and 10 blocks wide.

[Image Description: A screenshot from Scott’s newest video, with lowered transparency and slightly dulled. It’s from Scott’s timelapse, taken up in the air. Scott isn’t finished building his house. One side of the roof is done, as well as all of the walls below and the two faces. 

There are various notations on the screenshot. A blue marking on the bottom counts 10 Minecraft blocks up. A block above that, a red marking notes that the roof, at its widest point, is 15 Minecraft blocks wide. Another red marking notes the slope of the room. An arrow points towards the top of the roof, saying “later adds on 3 blocks here”

To the right, there is a header saying “TO-SCALE MODEL:” Below, there is a pixel model of the front and back of Scott’s house, which are the same. There is a blue rectangular section on the bottom. On top, there is a red roof. There are 3 purple pixels on the top. Markings on the model show the measurements. A dotted line goes through the model, splitting it up into two sections: a rectangle on the bottom, and the roof on top.

Inside the rectangular section, someone has noted down “11 * 13 = 143 mb^2″ the “143 mb^2″ boxed in. Inside the roof section, someone has noted down “111 mb^2″

Below the screenshot, someone has handwritten “143 + 111 = 254 mb^2″]

the second part is the roof. the roof goes outwards for two blocks, and then goes back inwards. using this reference for the roof, the previous two screenshots for the bit underneath, and cross referencing them to find out where they meet, i created a to-scale model of it!

i found the area of the to-scale model, and B = 254 mb^2

[Image Description: A screenshot from Scott’s video, with lowered transparency and slightly dulled. The house isn’t finished--there’s only half of the side wall and the front detailing. The screenshot is taken from Scott’s timelapse, and is from the side of his base; only the side wall is visible.

Someone has marked over the screenshot with a lime green pen. On the top right, someone has written “* coutning the inner wall only”. An arrow is drawn upwards from one side of the side wall. It says “wall starts here”. On the other side of the wall, there is another arrow that says “wall ends here”. In between the two arrows, someone has made tick marks indicating where the blocks are. On the bottom, someone has noted down “3-wide doorway” by the side entrance. Off to the bottom ride, it says “24 px deep”]

next, i used this screenshot to find the h of scott’s base! this was a bit harder because scott doesn’t show the bottom of his base until he’s already detailed it, but with the precise use of my Big Brain (and my wacom tablet), i counted that it was 24 pixels deep.

so, B * h = V = 254 * 24 = 6096 mc^3

but we AREN’T DONE YET

[Image Description: On the left, there are 3 screenshots from Scott’s newest video stacked vertically on top of each other. The first one is of the side doorway. Pink ticks mark the how many blocks wide and tall the doorway is. On the right of the first screenshot, there is a solid pixellated model of the doorway in the same pink. Inside the model, someone has written “18 mb^3″ in white. On the right of the model, someone has written “volume of the side door-way” in pink.

The next screenshot is taken from the inside of Scott’s base, showing the front doorway. Orange ticks mark how many blocks tall and wide the bottom section of the front doorway is. It is 8 blocks wide and 3 blocks tall. The bottom most screenshot is a picture from Scott’s timelapse, where half of the roof hasn’t been built yet. Someone has drawn lines on the building going horizontally, dividing the top section of the front doorway into three sections: one 3 block section on the bottom, and two 2 block sections on top. On the right of these two screenshots, there is a solid pixellated model of the front doorway, labelled accordingly, in orange. Inside the model, someone has written “39 mb^3″

Below the screenshots and the models, someone has written “6096 - 39 - 18 = Vi = 6039 mb^3]

see, scot also has two main doorways: one at the entrance and one on the right side. i used the first screenshot to find the volume of the side doorway, and the next two screenshots to find the volume of the front doorway.

(this is the part where i might be wrong--i couldn’t find a reliable reference for the the front doorway, so i had to use an extremely zoomed out version. the stripped spruce log section underneath the window is either 2 or 3 blocks tall. i assumed 3 based on the bottom most screenshot but like. i could be wrong)

anyway, the first doorway is 18 mb^3, and the second is 39 mc^3. so, the total final volume for scott’s base is 6039 mb^3.

JOEL’S BASE.

joel’s base, on the other hand, is genuinely fucking insane. like, seriously. what the fuck, joel. you couldn’t have made it harder for me to do my job (it does look amazing though and i love it so much)

so, instead of taking screenshots and calculating the volume of his base through those references, i decided to build a replica of joel’s base in my own creative world, and after fill it with sand. i could then count all the sand from his base and add it up to achieve a (somewhat accurate) volume for his base

[Image Description: An array of screenshots of a replica of Joel’s base, laid out in a three by two grid. Each is labelled with a black, comic-style font. The first screenshot is taken from the front of the replica from up in the air, and is labelled “FRONT.” The second screenshot, which is to the right of the first screenshot, is taken from the right of the replica from up in the air, and is labelled “RIGHT SIDE.” The third screenshot is taken from the back of the replica from jup in the air, and is labelled “BACK.” The fourth screenshot is taken from the left of the replica up in the air, and is labelled “LEFT SIDE.” The fifth screenshot is taken from the front of the base, and the player is on the ground. It is labelled “FRONT (FROM THE GROUND).” The last screenshot is taken from the inside of the base, looking towards the back. It is labelled “INTERIOR (FROM THE GROUND).”]

anyway, most of his base is relatively easy to copy. my replica is pictured above. there are two time lapses within his video that show his process of building his base. the first timelapse (4:59-5:54) is shot from the front of his base, and angled slightly downwards, and is where i got most of my references from. the second timelapse (9:48-9:55) is shot from the diagonally back left of his base, and is what i referenced for the back of my replica.

the roofs themselves are symmetrical: barring the roofs’ intersection, the blue and red roofs are the same the entire way around. this is why, even though i technically didn’t see the back of joel’s base, i knew what it looked like and could get an accurate replica of it.

the only problem is that he never showcases the base from the left. this means that the red and blue roof intersection on the left could be very wrong. the only reference i got for this part was a screenshot at 6:12 (pictured below). this only showcases the inside of the roof, and from bad lighting, but it’s better than nothing.

other than that, though, i’m. pretty sure my replica is accurate! 

[Image Description: A screenshot taken from Joel’s video, from approximately 6:12 in the video. Joel is inside his base, staring up at the red roof from the bottom. The floor is lit up by torches, but the details of the roof are barely visible in the darkness.]

next, i filled his entire base with sand. this was the most tedious part--never have i ever placed so much goddamn sand in minecraft. do not recommend, 0/10

i made sure that i filled the entire base by going into spectator mode! (i can’t fit the pics in here because, well, image limit. but i promise the entire build is full)

and, after 2 diamond shovels, two stacks of torches, a handful of night vision potions, here is how much sand i have:

[Image Description: Four screenshots, layed out in a two by two grid. The first three screenshots showcase the inside of three different double chests. They are all filled to the brim with stacks of sand. On the first screenshot, there are two notations, both in blue: one that notes out that there are 9 columns in a double chest, and another that notes that there are 6 rows in a double chest. The last screenshot is that of the interior of partially-full double chest, with 21 full stacks within it. Someone has noted down “21 stacks” in red.

Underneath the four screenshots, someone has written “number of stacks * 64 = Vt” in black. Beneath that, someone has written “there is 54 stacks in the full double chests” in blue. Beneath that, someone has written “( (54) (3) + 21) (64) = Vt,” in various colours. “(54)(3)” is in blue, while “21″ is in red. The rest is in black.

On the bottom, someone has written “Vt = 11,712 mb^3″]

the final total for joel’s base, as of july 1st, 2021, is 11,712 mb^3

THE CONCLUSION + TL;DR.

scott smajor’s title was not a lie, or at least not at the time. he had the biggest base on the server as of that upload. but soon after, joel created a base that was nearly two times scott’s, creating the bigger base out of the two of them.

so, yeah! joel has a bigger base than scott as of july 1st, 2021

this is because 11,712 mb^3 > 6039 mb^3

thank u and goodnight. send me any asks if u find anything wrong with this stupidly lost post, or if you want any progress pics! love y’all

[makoodlesarchive]

when i was young i fell into a river

pairing: kirishima x reader

word count: 5k

warnings: none, really! a bit of angst, a bit of fluff i guess?

notes: hello, it's me, back again with some writing! it's been a long time and i'm very sorry about that, but i've finally gotten around to writing and posting my spirited away au! i'm v stressed with college so this turned out more vent-y than i had originally intended, but hopefully it's enjoyable anyway! thank you all for being so patient with me, i am endlessly grateful for you

The dream is the same as always, comforting in its familiarity.

A salt-scented breeze cools your sweat-soaked brow as you pause behind one of the sliding screen doors, the rice paper windows doing nothing to block out the chatter of the other workers. The bubbling noise of the bathhouse is constant, and the quiet little moments you steal away for yourself in the middle of the working day is the only solitude you’ve gotten since you came here. The work is physically back-breaking, but you know that you’re working towards a goal. It’s just a shame that you can’t remember exactly what that goal is.

One of the other girls calls your name, and you sigh as your unofficial break comes to an end. You slip back into the room, ignoring the way the frog spirits snicker and hold their noses as you pass. They like to complain a lot about your human stench, but it doesn’t stop them from threatening to eat you every time you make a mistake. Fear, you’ve found, is an uncomfortably successful motivator.

The days bleed into one another, full of scrubbing dark wooden floors and the rich earthy scents of the herbal mixes they use in the baths. The spirits that frequent the bathhouse, that once inspired so much awe and fear in your heart, become so commonplace that you hardly spare them a glance anymore. From the cackling masked spirits that always travel in threes to the grinning cat spirits to the sombre, unspeaking river spirits, you only go as far as to offer them a polite bow before scurrying out of their way. They never spare you any attention, anyway -- most of the time, the spirits’ eyes seem to look right through you.

All but one, that is.

He looks to be a boy around your age, but appearances can be deceiving around here. His red eyes are often dull and blank, but even so they have a certain ageless quality about them that no human twelve-year-old could ever possess. His scarlet hair sticks up in gravity-defying spikes, and his skin is as smooth and clear as running water. His face is often stuck in a carefully cultivated blank expression; the only thing about him that doesn’t seem intimidatingly otherworldly are the deep purple shadows under his eyes.

He helped you once, when you first came here. The rare act of kindness had stuck in your head, made even more remarkable in the face of the following weeks and months of harsh work and cruel co-workers. You wonder if he remembers; he doesn’t often look at you, but sometimes when he does you swear you can see a flicker of something in his eyes.

Two of the girls start yelling at each other, arguing heatedly over the way the work is being divided. A foreman appears to break up the fight, but then they both start shouting at him instead. You take the moment of distraction to relax, wincing at the pull of your tired muscles in the back of your neck. All the other girls working at the bath house are older and bigger than you, which means you need to work twice as hard to keep up with them and prove that you’re worth keeping around.

In the brief moment of rest, your eyes are drawn slowly to the corridor, where guests and workers alike bustle past as they travel to the treatment rooms and bathtubs deeper into the bathhouse. As if you’ve conjured him just by thinking about him, the boy stands in the doorway.

You straighten up on instinct, suddenly self-conscious of your sweat-soaked body and dishevelled uniform. He’s not even looking your way, preoccupied with the two girls who are still yelling at the frog foreman. Slowly though, his eyes began to travel the room, and you take a deep breath and hold it as his dull ruby gaze lands on you like a physical weight. You crack a nervous smile, feeling the muscles in your cheeks that have gone unused for weeks ache at the strain, and raise a hand to give him a tiny wave.

For just a moment, that blankness in his face seems to quiver and fall away. He smiles back.

You jolt awake, breathing heavily and coated in a light sheen of sweat. You’ve had the same dream, or some variation of it, regularly ever since you were twelve years old and while it’s become familiar to you, you still find yourself feeling vaguely panicked when you wake up after it, as though you’ve forgotten something very important.

Once your heartbeat has calmed down a little, you pull yourself out of bed and trudge into the kitchen to make yourself some tea. The weak, milky light of dawn filters in through the windows, lighting your apartment up just enough so that you don’t have to turn on a light to make your way around. You take your tea out to the balcony and sit, gazing out at the purplish early morning sky.

Most of the time when you wake up from those dreams you feel blessedly lucky to be living alone with no one to question or bother you, but sometimes you can’t help but be overcome by overwhelming loneliness. The dreams are silly and most of the time they don’t even make any sense, but in the aftermath of them you’re always left with a vague sense of unfulfillment, though you can’t put your finger exactly on what it is you’re missing. You always end up exactly like this; sitting outside on your balcony in the early morning light, drinking tea alone and desperately wishing for something more.

You sigh, and go back inside.

The dream is the same, but different.

The garden is in full bloom, greenery overlaid with bursts of beautiful bright colours. Camellias, rhododendrons, and oleanders wave and shiver gently in the warm breeze, and apple blossoms hang heavily from a nearby tree. The flowering garden is enormous and maze-like, and you have yet to see it in any state other than fully flourishing.

It’s a beautiful place, especially after the hot, cramped working quarters of the bathhouse. You inhale the sweetly fragranced air and feel the knot of tension in your spine unfurl; it feels like the first time that you’ve been able to breathe all week, but that’s not the only reason that you’ve found yourself outside.

At the bottom of the garden, the grass drops off into a sheer drop. The cliff face overlooks a seemingly endless ocean, and you perch a safe distance from the drop before leaning back in the grass. The sky is an almost surreally deep blue and you watch as enormous fluffy clouds float by, looking as though they’ve been painted on a jewel-blue canvas.

It’s not the first time you’ve had this dream, and you know what you’ll see if you keep patiently watching.

It doesn’t take long — it never does. You time your lunch breaks precisely, all so you get to see this sight.

The clear blue sky makes it so much easier to spot the shiny white scales, flashing jewel-bright in the sunlight. The dragon writhes in the sky, streaking through the air like a great serpent caught in the wind. Even from this distance, you can see the knife-like teeth, the great sharp claws that gleam like pyrite, and the twisting horns that erupt from his head like daggers made from calcified bone. He looks deadly, a living weapon that swims through the air like a salmon in open water, but the sight of him makes something settle in your stomach.

You wonder what it would feel like to fall through the air with nothing but the wind to break your fall. You imagine it must feel like freedom.

The dragon flutters through the air, buoyed by the gentle sea breeze. If you didn’t know better, you might almost think that he was showing off — his movements are hypnotic, dreamlike, more like a dance than anything. His scales glow pearlescent in the midday sun, otherworldly and earthly all at once.

You could happily stay and watch him skim through the sky forever, but already the bell is being rung to call all workers back into the bathhouse. You heave a sigh so deep it feels as though your chest is about to crack with the force of it, before hauling yourself to your feet.

Your break is over, and now it’s back to work.

Sometimes you find it difficult to tell when you’re dreaming and when you’re awake. It feels as though everything is always happening all at once, in the present tense, forever. You don’t get to rest when you close your eyes and drift off to sleep, because the dreams just keep coming and coming. Sometimes you don’t feel like your life is real when you’re awake.

Riding on the train has always been therapeutic, especially at this time of the early morning. The sun rising lazily over the horizon sends milky threads of purple and pink across the cloudy sky, and you cradle your chin in your hand as you gaze out across the moving landscape. You love these little trips, feeling more at home in the creaky, overfull train carriage than you do in your own bedroom sometimes, though you can’t quite work out where that particular feeling comes from.

You know sometimes that stories end with “And then I woke up — it was only a dream”, but in your experience the story simply doesn’t end. You cannot fully wake up without the tail-ends of your dreams clinging to you for the rest of the day, and you never fully sleep. You just dream, dream, dream.

Sighing, you lean your head back against the seat that you’re slumped in. The train carriage is too full, and you were lucky to get a seat in the first place — from your vantage point, you watch as people sway in tandem with the motion of the train. It’s almost hypnotic, how they undulate back and forth with every turn, brushing against each other only to be pulled apart again by the lurching train.

Through the sea of bodies, you catch a man’s eye. It breaks the monotony of the morning commute and your own spiralling thoughts, and your spine straightens unconsciously. He quirks an eyebrow briefly, slightly, in such a way that no one would be able to safely accuse him of having done it.

You look away, startled for no good reason. Do you know him? He feels familiar in a way that you can’t quite put your finger on. The train rattles on, and it takes several long minutes before you work up the nerve to glance the man’s way again. He’s still watching you, but you’re ready for it this time. His attention isn’t such a shock, and you allow your eyes to wander over his face properly.

You must know him, you think. Your eyes track over his features as though they’re winding over a well-worn path, admiring the curve of his nose and the fullness of his lips and the arch of his eyebrows over his intense, watchful eyes.

He smiles at you, and it feels as though you’re sharing a secret from across the crowded train carriage. You smile back — it’s just a small tug of the corners of your mouth, but it’s the most you’ve smiled in months. Longer, maybe.

In the middle of the carriage a woman laughs at something her friend has said and sways backward, blocking your view of the stranger. It feels like a loss.

The train trundles onwards, and the carriage gradually empties out. You watch people step off the train with friends, with their heads ducked low, lost in thought, arguing over the phone, distracted with their book bags. By the time it comes to your stop, the man is gone.

You try not to feel disappointed as you step off the train — it’s silly, after all. You don’t know the man, and whatever you thought you felt as you looked at each other was surely all in your own head. Your head has been awfully full, recently.

As you step off the train you grapple with your bag, side-stepping a businessman who is busy shouting down the phone at some unfortunate coworker. You’re distracted, which is the only reasonable explanation for how long it takes you to realise that the man from the train is standing in front of you.

“Oh.” You blurt, startled. You had already begun to resign yourself to never seeing him again, so you can’t help but feel distinctly caught off guard at the sight of him standing before you. “Hi.”

“Hello.” The man says. He’s looking at you expectantly, but you have no idea what he’s waiting for — as it is, you get completely distracted by his eyes. You hadn’t noticed on the train, but now that he’s up close you see that they’re a truly unusual deep burgundy. He tilts his head when you remain silent, and bites his lip. Now that you’re really looking, you notice how sharp his teeth are. “You’ve barely changed at all.”

You blink at him. “Er…” You trail off nervously. You don’t recognise him, but you feel like you know him. Clearly, he thinks that he knows you.

“It’s fitting, isn’t it? Meeting again on a train?” He smiles, and it’s an impossibly knowing expression. You don’t think you’ve ever been on the receiving end of a look that intimate in your life, though you have no idea what he’s talking about.

Someone collides hard with your shoulder and you stagger for balance. You only look away from the man for a mere second, but it’s enough; when you look again, he’s gone.

You take to walking. There’s a wooded area behind the town, and you enjoy traipsing idly through the trees. Ancient roots erupt out of the dirt and fan over the ground like hairs, and the moss that covers the trunks of the trees is such a deep green that it almost seems like paint pigment. It’s soothing, being surrounded by nature like this. It reminds you of childhood — the simplicity of being able to jump over tree roots under a canopy of pale green leaves, of being able to leave all your thoughts and stress at the boundary of the forest.

It’s where you come after waking sweat-soaked and disoriented from a dream that clings to you like a burr, where you walk among the ferns and the needle-leaved weeds until you manage to shake the last vestiges of memory from your mind. You need it, especially in the mornings where you wake up with the acrid scent of herbal cleanser stinging in your nose or the bite of hard calluses on your palms from non-existent rough cloths. On mornings like that, you walk and walk until you no longer feel as though you’re more alive in your dreams than you are in reality.

Deep in the forest is a great red facade, painted a flaking, faded red. You wander by it frequently, admiring the overgrown greenery that crawls up the walls like reaching fingers, the mossy stone guardian that stands sentinel amongst the cracked flagstones that lead into the tunnelled entrance. You’ve asked around in the town, curious about what exactly this building was for, but most of the locals either don’t know what building you’re talking about or admit that they’re not sure. One man told you that the facade was built for a theme park in the 90s that had ended up going bust in the recession, and that the building only looked old.

You remain unconvinced on that front. The building has the kind of presence that only very old things have; it feels like it’s watching you.

For the most part, your walks in the forest are peaceful. Recently though, you’ve found yourself plagued by an insistent, irritating sense of deja vu. You don’t know where it’s coming from, and it hits you at the strangest of times — when you’re making tea, or in the bath, or cleaning your apartment, or on the train, or admiring the sky on a cloudless day.

The man from the train is the boy in your dreams. It takes you weeks to come to that realisation. You just wake up in the middle of the night on a random Tuesday, with wide eyes and clammy skin and his name slipping from the forefront of your mind.

It shouldn’t be possible, but once it dawns on you, you’re certain of it.

Even stranger is that once you realise it, it feels as though you see him everywhere. You see flashes of red hair when you’re walking down the street, when you’re grocery shopping, when you’re walking home late at night. It’s only ever the barest glance out of the corner of your eye, just overt enough for you to know it’s him, but subtle enough for you to question yourself immediately after.

One night, you travel to a local city to meet some old school friends. At night, the city seems to pulse. The music from seedy clubs spills out into the neon-lit streets, muffled shouted arguments echoes from alleyways and apartments alike, and the streets are peppered with people either scurrying or stumbling home, with very little variation. Though the perpetually overcast sky hides any trace of the moon or stars, the streetlamps reflect in the ever-present stagnant puddles littering the street, lighting them up in varying shades of sickly yellow.

At night, the city seems alive. Chronically ill and struggling to breathe, maybe, but clinging to life all the same.

The way the neon lights flicker in the gloomy darkness, just barely illuminating the shadows of people hurrying through the streets to get in out of the rain, reminds you of something you can’t quite remember. It sits in the back of your mind like a sour taste, but no matter how much you reach for the memory it remains just out of reach.

You spend most of the night staring out of the steamed up window of the pub, entranced by the sight of the night streets and frustrated by the memories that seem to dangle just out of reach. You know that it doesn’t make for good company, and you feel guilty for that. Your friends don’t seem overly surprised at your detachment. You’ve been drifting away for years, and though tonight was supposed to be all about reconnecting it seems clear that it’s not going to work.

When you eventually stand up to leave, with forced smiles and awkward goodbyes, you can’t help but feel melancholy settle over you like a second skin. As you slip out of the pub and onto the dark streets, the thought crosses your mind that you’re not used to being alone like this. It’s a silly thought, really; you’ve been alone for years. But sometimes, in those liminal moments between waking and sleeping, you swear you can hear the gentle drowsy breaths of dozens of people sleeping all around you, as though you’re surrounded on all sides. On those nights you wake up hot and claustrophobic and uncomfortable, but never feeling lonely.

It is probably your own fault, you reflect as you drift down the sidewalk like a ghost. It’s difficult to make an effort to know people when you feel as though you don’t know yourself. You don’t know how to bridge the distance between yourself and other people. You think sometimes that you’re missing chunks of yourself.

You pass an open shopfront that’s serving street food, and glance briefly in at the kitchen. The cook is illuminated only dimly in the smoky room, standing out as a shadow figure more than anything, and for a split second you could swear that he has six arms. You look away quickly and carry on walking — you don’t want to look again only to be proven wrong. You want to preserve that little second of magic strangeness for as long as you can.

The puddles on the street seem like they’re glowing with the light reflected from the neon streetlamps, and you weave your way carefully around them to avoid getting your feet wet. The night has a strange quality about it, almost as though it’s holding its breath.

Considering the combination of your pensive mood and the expectant air of the evening, you don’t feel surprised at all when you look up from the wet cobblestones to find the man standing only a few feet ahead of you.

He smiles like he’s nervous, his gaze tracking carefully over your face. In his hands, he’s holding flowers. Camellias, you think. It’s the first time since you first saw him on the train that hasn’t been a fleeting glance out of the corner of your eye— he’s here in front of you and he’s real and solid and sturdy. He seems more substantial than the streets around you, than your friends back at the pub had been.

“Do you remember me?” He asks, voice soft as though he’s afraid of the answer.

“Remember you?” You croak. It feels as though the words are catching inside your throat. “No. But I’ve seen you every night in my dreams for years.”

If that’s the answer he’s expecting, he doesn’t show it. He just keeps looking at you, your face, your body. You wonder exactly it is that he’s seeing. “These are for you.” He says eventually, holding out the flowers. “I didn’t- I wanted to bring you something, when I saw you again. And I know that you always liked the garden.”

He’s talking as if the places that you’ve dreamed about are real. It doesn’t come as the earth-shattering surprise you might have expected — rather, it feels like a key turning in an old lock. A click, and then a sense of yes, that’s right.

You take the flowers, and clutch them to your chest. They’re a fleshy pink, with a vibrant yellow centre. The petals are as soft as velvet. Holding them feels like holding a safety blanket. “Thank you.” It’s the only thing that you can manage to say right now. Your thoughts are too full, and nothing else makes it out of your mouth.

It’s rather startling, the feelings that bubble up in your chest. It feels like something has just been unlocked, as though you had stored away all this emotion somewhere deep in your ribcage and then forgotten about it only for it to resurface at this precise moment, for this precise person.

“Eijirou.” You croak. “Kirishima Eijirou.”

His whole face brightens, and his eyes sparkle. “Yes. That’s me. You do remember!”

They’re not quite memories, you don’t think. They come in dreamlike flashes — the garden, an ocean, train tracks, the feral snarling of a dragon with sharp teeth, hard work and hot food, friends.

“I’m sorry I took so long,” Kirishima is saying, his face open and earnest. “But I told you that I’d come and find you again, remember?”

You do remember, sort of. A flash of a warm hand holding yours, pushing you forward over a boundary between one world and another, and a goodbye whispered behind you that sounds like a promise.

“You saved me.”

Kirishima laughs, though his eyes look a little shiny. “It was the other way around, actually. I would have stayed trapped in that bathhouse forever, if it weren’t for you.”

“The bathhouse.” You murmur, wide-eyed. It was real, real, real.

“Things are different now.” He edges closer to you. He’s large and imposing and taller than you, but he’s hunched slightly in an attempt to make himself unthreatening. “That’s why it took so long for me to come for you. Things were changing. Me and Katsuki run the bathhouse now.”

Katsuki. In your mind's eye you see a boy with wild blond hair and a dangerous look in his eyes, a boy who gives you extra rice when he can manage and takes over parts of your chores when you get so tired that you’re fit to pass out.

“I didn’t mean to make you wait.” He says quietly, and the tide of emotion that you had just barely been holding at bay comes crashing over you. Before the first tear has welled over the edge of your eyelids, Kirishima has stepped forward and wrapped you in his arms. The flowers are crushed between your chests as you cry.

“I didn’t even know what I was waiting for.” You cry into his silk suikan.

“I’m sorry.” He whispers into your hair. “I’m here now. I’m not going to leave again.”

You don’t release your grip on him. You’re not willing to take the chance.

After a moment, Kirishima speaks again. “Are you ready to go?”

“Go?” You echo, finally pulling away. “Go where?”

“Home.” He says, and he means the bathhouse. He means the spirit world.

“You want me to work for you?”

“I want you to help us run it.” He corrects. The distinction is important for both of you — though the memories are distant, you both know what it feels like to have your names and voices erased so cleanly that it makes you wonder if you ever existed fully at all.

“I don’t know anything about running a bathhouse. Especially not one for spirits.” You say, but Kirishima just laughs.

“You were always a hard worker. You’ll learn as you go. That’s what we’ve all been doing.”

You want to say yes. The word beats in your head like a drum, and you can’t think of a good reason to say no. The bathhouse. Home. The chance to feel real and awake at the same time.

“Okay.” You say on a breath, staring at him with wide eyes. “Stay with me, this time.”

When Kirishima’s face lights up in a smile, it’s the first time that you think you can accurately describe someone as incandescently happy. “Good luck getting rid of me again.”

You laugh, feeling nearly delirious with relief and joy. It’s real. He’s real. He’s come back for you, and now you’re going back with him. You think you should probably feel nervous or hesitant, but this brief encounter has felt more solid and right than the rest of the night spent with distant school-friends made uncomfortable by your silences.

“So, how do we get there?” You ask, but Kirishima just grins at you like you should already know the answer.

The train station is tucked away down an alley just off a busy main shopping district.

“It’s easy to miss if you don’t know exactly where you're going.” Kirishima tells you with a sharp smile, and it’s easy to believe. The red brick building that housed the train station is unmarked, and the trains couldn’t be seen from the main street. The alley itself is home to many curious sights -- paper lanterns bob overhead (though they don’t seem to be suspended by anything in particular), a yellowed flyer from the 1950s advertising Marlboro cigarettes drifts along on what seems to be a breeze despite the noticeable lack of wind, and three magpies sit on a wall wearing little golden timepieces on chains around their necks and caw in time with the ticking.

“Ready to go home?” Kirishima asks quietly. In his hand, two train tickets flutter in a non-existent breeze.

A family of mice scamper past your feet, pulling a miniature suitcase between them. A tall, thin woman wearing a blank white mask assists them onto the train.

You laugh at the whimsy of it all — it feels as though you’ve stepped into a fairytale, into a dream, into your childhood. “Yes,” You grin, “I’m ready.”

Kirishima beams back at you, and holds out a hand to help you onto the train. Finding a seat was easy — despite all the passengers you had seen boarding, the carriage was oddly empty. As soon as you’re seated, you sigh. It feels as though you’re sinking into an old overstuffed armchair, comfortable and familiar. When the whistle blows and the train starts moving, you turn eagerly to watch as the train begins to pick up speed. Within moments, you find that you can barely recognise the landscape blurring past the window — It seems that you’re zooming passed a beautiful sea-view, despite the fact that the city the train station was located in was conspicuously land-locked. You sigh happily and lean against your seat.

You still don’t remember everything about your experience in the spirit world all those years ago, but you think you remember hearing someone telling you “Once you meet someone you never really forget them. It just takes a while for your memories to return."

You make eye contact with Eijirou, who smiles back at you so fondly that it nearly hurts to look at. He’s changed so much from the boy in your dreams, in your memories. His eyes are no longer glassy and distant — now they’re shiny and expressive and so bright. His hair is longer too; still spiked and wild, but longer and curling softly over the curve of his neck and shoulders. He’s the boy your remember from all those years ago, but he’s also a man now. Grown, like you have, but smiling at you gently just like you’re ten years old again.

Through the window behind his head, the sunrise begins to bathe the water in delicate pinks and yellows. You’ll wait for as long as you need to for the memories to return, but even if they don’t that’s alright. You can just make new ones.

[scorpiosanssexy]

Pick a card reading: What makes you so attractive to others + bnha characters who would highkey simp for you

Hiya i am back, this spread basically highlights all of your attractive qualities about yourself (and yes you do have them) with the added additon of a hidden talent and how you can better love yourself. 

My favourite part of this reading is at the bottom I have included My hero characters that would very much swoon if you even spoke to them (in other words they have a crush). 

I was going to do 4 piles for this reading but everytime i tried to do the 4th one i kept getting really bad headaches so i decided against it. 

All you need to do is look at the anime food photos infront of you and pick the one you were first drawn to and then scroll below to your reading. I hope you enjoy it and that this reading does reasonate with you.

Stay safe and healthy

Pile 1 (Watermelon)

Why you are so amazing

The traits and simply make you, you. 

The Sun: I literally squealed when this card came out of the deck, like chaotic babies unite. This card represents all things happy, you just have this cheerful personality that brings so much joy to others like even with the doom and gloom around us you still manage to keep on smiling which is honestly a massive talent. For some reason (if there are any MHA fans in the building) I thought of Mirio who is always so upbeat and ready to help others in need, I feel like this is definitely you. To me, the idea of being a really good storyteller came into my mind like the sun represents the performative aspects of life so just naturally grabbing that audience's attention is something you are so good at and I am never ever bored in your company. Looking at the picture of the card there is a little child riding a horse, you have this childlike innocence and curiosity which is the most adorable thing ever but I feel like sometimes people underestimate your intelligence and capabilities. I would like to say that the child on the card is sitting in a very confident manner and is controlling the horse with ease which suggests to me that you do have this deep maturity about you too which people tend to forget, the fact you can go from loud and upbeat to quiet and introspective is so cool and amazing as Hannah Montana says “you got to live the best of both worlds”. One final message is that it is ok to feel sad and that you don’t have to be optimistic all the time, you are not a burden and many people will rush towards you full of love and support. 

Page of Swords: seeing this card after drawing the sun made a lot of sense in my mind, the page represents youthful energy and the swords are all to do with our intellect and abstract concepts (like of like air in astrology) so you might be a bit of a bookworm or you like to learn more about things like tarot or astrology. What I can say is that you know a little about a lot which is super amazing because you always have some random fact tucked into your brain, you would be great on a quiz team. You are so witty and funny too like I can imagine people are always bent over laughing whenever they are in your company and if you do not believe me then I can guarantee that is what they say to other people when talking about how cool you are. Quite the chatterbox on your school reports I can imagine the teacher said that you may have “talked a bit too much” but you can’t help it, you do love to socialise. Looking at the picture on the card the page is surrounded with clouds so I can imagine you are a little bit of a daydreamer which is very endearing and sweet you can’t help it physics the last thing on a Friday is just so incredibly boring, you come up with the grandest ideas and no one knows how like why didn’t they think of that you are a natural outside the box thinker. Lastly, I think the Page of Swords is a very good problem solver sure it might not be the most straightforward solution if you solve your problems in a way which works for you, you do not follow convention and are proud to be an innovator and that deserves a reward in itself. 

The Lovers: the most romantic card in the whole deck, my goodness you are a hopeless romantic, you love to daydream about all the possibilities and you might also believe in soulmates, personally I think it is very sweet and we need more idealist in this world because sometimes reality can seem so bleak. I just know in my heart that you would be one of the best s/o ‘s ever like you would do all the cute romantic gestures like buying roses and leaving cute notes around their room like I am actually gonna go and squeal in a pillow because of how precious you are. The Lovers also indicate that you know who you are and you know what your morals are, whilst you may be an idealist you don’t let people walk all over you that’s for sure, you stand up for yourselves and for others and are the voice for the people who cannot be heard. You make a very good public speaker too (you should give it a go deffo) and are very clever with your words as the Lovers are ruled by Gemini. A scenario which popped into my head was somebody thinking you flirted with them but in actual fact, you were just being friendly. Looking at the picture of the card the background appears to look like the garden of Eden for some odd reason the first kind of trait is you being able to make yourself at home anywhere. The Garden of Eden represents paradise so like you can naturally find your “paradise” in a different location or with a group of people perhaps the word I am looking for is spontaneous whatever it is I feel like that is something you can do. My last message is that you sometimes doubt yourself and your decision-making skills. What I have to say is that trust your intuition and go for it, don’t get too caught up in your head because you do not need to, you have excellent observation skills already. 

Hidden Talent

Perhaps something you might not have been aware of 

Knight of Swords: You are very ambitious, I feel like many people do not see that due to your sunny exterior but once you have a goal in mind there is no stopping you. You remind me of the Queen song “Don’t stop me now” like your life is always so fast-paced. When the situation calls for it you can leave that page of sword persona and step up into the role of the knight and take charge of the situation. You are assertive and direct as I think some of you reading this reading today may feel like you are a bit of a doormat but I can confidently say you are not. Also, you are extremely intellectual, you may not be academically intelligent but it’s more that you are very eloquent and can debate with ease, like you can break down someone else’s point and explain how they contradict one another or how they don’t add up. On the card itself, the knight is wearing the colour blue, according to colour theory blue is representative of Logic and wisdom. Another big indicator of how smart you really are not a himbo by any means. You do have a very logical side to yourself that perhaps you don’t even realise you are using like you are very good reasoning out things (sorry that this is so vague my mind had gone all foggy). Blue is also a very calm colour so you are definitely a very tranquil kind of person too, you do not stress out often and you don’t let high-pressure situations get the better of you. You truly are cool as a cucumber. Writing this currently, I feel so peaceful, like you create a sanctuary for people. 

How to love yourself

We all have our down days so here are some tips and tricks to make you feel better 

2 of Coins: I feel like the universe here has kind of given you two options here. Usually, this card indicates a need to be flexible and have to juggle things around if in this case I do not believe it is your message. I wanted to look at the image, especially the two pictures inside the coins. The first one is the weighing scales which are perfectly balanced which I interpreted as being the symbol of Libra. Being patient with yourself and saying kind words to yourself can be very healing, a tactic could maybe leave post notes in nice places so whenever you walk around the room. Definitely pamper yourself when you deserve it. The message I am getting from this card is that you are too harsh on yourself and never give yourself the self care you deserve, get that face mask and blast a bit of Megan, be the princess/prince you deserve to be. On the other part of the coin is a picture of a big moon with a tiny sun in the middle, my interpretation comes back to the sun card and you feel like you always have to hold this cheery facade. The moon represents our emotions specifically our anxieties and fears with it being bigger so with it being the bigger image I feel like in order to love yourself you are going to need to express your emotions in a healthy way whatever mechanism works best for you, for me ranting to a close friend always helps but other people prefer to journal or use a creative outlet which is fine too. Lastly, as I mentioned at the top the 2 of coins indicates that you have lots of projects in your life so maybe if you immerse yourself in those you can unlock the true path to good self esteem. 

Bnha characters who highkey have a crush on you 

Bakugou, Jirou, Shindo, Shigaraki and Midnight (maybe sir nighteye) 

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Pile 2 (Ramen)

Why you are so amazing 

The traits that simply make you, you

The Star with the 2 of Swords: these cards both fell out at the exact same time with the star on top and the 2 of swords behind so I decided to use the swords card as a clarifier one. I say this about a lot of the cards but i can tell that the star is one of my faves 100% it represents hope, creativity and calm. The first kind of trait that came into my head when this card popped out is that you always shine wherever you go, you are just gifted at everything, some of you think you may be the burnt out gifted child but you are not, you still glow even if you can’t see it yourself and people are in awe (and somewhat intimidated by you) because of your success and achievements. Looking into the actual meaning you are the type of person to never give up, the star is a sign that your wishes are coming into fruition, if something doesn’t go according to plan you do not dwell on it too much and brush yourself up again and carry on which is amazing considering the circumstances we are in. The word I was looking for is resilient and persistent. You don’t let the haters stop you from doing your thing. You have a calming disposition and I imagine your role is the mediator of the friendship, like you just have the most soothing presence. I want to go into more detail about the fact the star is ruled by Aquarius because that fact seems to keep sticking out for me, I trait we never talk about in regards to aquarius is that they can in fact be great leaders, they are the trendsetters of the zodiac so I feel like you prefer to live life your own way rather than copy others which I admire you for because going against the current is hard. Because of your actions I feel like  you inspire others whenever you know this or not (spoiler alert you do). Another thing that has sprung to my mind is that I feel like you can be quite mysterious. Everybody is so intrigued by you wanting to know what is going on in your mind. With the 2 of swords being there too, it usually indicates that a decision needs to be made however looking at the picture the lady is confidently holding the 2 swords which suggests to me that you are a very decisive person and once you set your mind to something there is no stopping you. You are much more talented than you give yourself credit for so never stop shining.

The Hierophant: this made me very intrigued about your reading when this card fell because the star and the hierophant kind of have contrasting energies since the H is ruled by Taurus. The Hierophant stands for knowledge and education, you probably take your studies quite seriously or you naturally maintain good grades throughout the year (which i think is so cool), you are the person who forms a study group to help their dumbass friends  so that they don’t fail the finals and honestly as someone who is a member of the dumbass friend squad without people like you in the world I wouldn’t have any educational qualifications. Helping others is second nature to you, always quick to give a helping hand with those in need. The Hierophant is a responsible figure so that in turn means so are you, you always make sure that everything is done on time and that your drunk friends get home safely, others may say you can be a little bit too serious but I have to disagree, your organisation skills are amazing and if I ever met you you will probably be my idol. Looking at this cards ruling sign Taurus, not a lot of people realise how ambitious a taurus can be (most people think quite the latter but remember there is a reason that taurus is an earth sign), you have big plans for yourself and I feel like you definitely prioritise your career over other aspects of yourlife, your drive and commitment to yourself and others is truly amazing and promise me you won’t be too hard on yourself because as some random kardashian once said “you are doing amazing sweetie”. 

Knight of Pentacles: this card is the CEO of detail, the knight is a figure who is very happy to serve the king and with it being in the suits of pentacles no detail will be missed out. You are incredibly observant of others one example that popped into my head is that you can tell what others are thinking through either body language or just how they communicate (take this if it resonates with you) or maybe you are simply very organised. Either way your amazing perception is something that goes unnoticed by others so I believe this card fell from the deck as a chance to give you the credit you deserve. You are incredibly hard working, the knight is always alert and on duty so no matter the day of the week you are working, it can be school work or passion projects you are constantly trying to achieve the best version of yourself, make sure you have a break and have a kit kat y’know. The knight is patient who works diligently towards his goals which I think you very much channel, like you are so kind and patient towards anyone, always offering to listen to other people’s problems and offering them first class advice (which is something I am very jelly of in a good way). The message I get from this is that you are so patient with others so please be patient with yourself, don’t push yourself so hard that your self esteem begins to suffer because you do not deserve that. 

Hidden Talents

Perhaps something you might not have been aware of 

The High Priestess: this card is such a badass card, like the high priestess is the CEO of intuition and all that jazz, your bullshit detector is off the radar and the even cooler thing you don’t even know it. This isn’t to say you should be distrustful of every single person you meet but if you have a gut feeling I say you should stick with it as mother nature has blessed you out of this world intuition. The high priestess represents having inner power, the picture on the card shows her sitting in her chair very assured. To other people you come across as having this quiet confidence, you do not boast about your talents through words however you bring them forward with actions, I feel like people are secretly in awe of you. Coming back to the picture the high priestess is mostly wearing teal (including her dress and her accessories), typically the colour teal represents elegance and politeness which is something you 100% possess ( a true lady/gentlemen) however reading more into the psychology behind this colour one line really stuck out to me - “Teal is a slightly unconventional colour, you value your uniqueness and don’t wish to fit in the crowd”, whilst you may have a serious demeanor it doesn’t me you are boring by any means, it could be the way your express your style via clothing that is unique or perhaps you have a secret niche interest that not many people know about. Whatever it is, you are a very interesting and complex person and you are definitely a lot more than meets the eye. 

How to love yourself

We all have our off days, so here is some tips and tricks on how to feel better

The Star: I found it so amazing that this card came out again in a different deck, the message when I saw the 2 star cards just confirmed to me that you don’t realise how amazing you are, like you are constantly downplaying yourself because you are so incredible modest, like you are so much better than you think you are and you deserve all the joy in the world. The star in tarot represents hope and affirmations, somebody praising you definitely makes your day. (this message just came to me when i was writing this), society constantly tells us not to out looking for external praise and to be happy with ourselves it has to come from within but I slightly disagree on this standpoint, I believe you guys lack that external validation in your life, so when someone does praise you it really has a big impact. Getting complimented is a good thing and you deserve every single one of them. Getting back on track, looking closely at the picture the lady is pretty much naked except for a blue ribbon covering her “private parts”, to me this is an indication that you should show off, like put on a pretty dress (or whatever clothing makes you feel the most comfortable) and get some beyonce on and pretend you are a victoria secrets angel, release the inner diva, do something bougie, get your nails done. Honestly you guys deserve the spotlight (if you want that) or either the right to feel confident, like just go dancing and let all that negative energy out through your movements. I wanted to have a look at the blue ribbon in more detail, blue is a colour that represents calmness and tranquility, so any activities that make you in a calm or soothing state will really help you too. It could be the classical calming activities such as guided meditation or a really nice hot bubble bath but my sister says she finds shopping to be very relaxing, so whatever hobby or thing makes you fall into this state could also really help increase the self-esteem here. 

Bnha characters who highkey have a crush on you

Monoma, Uraraka, Hawks, Mina and Sero 

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Pile 3 (Pasta)

Why are you so amazing

What traits make you, you

The Emperor: the emperor card represents structure, stability and authority. I feel like a lot of you picking this reading are quite shocked that this card came out, like I feel like you might not think of yourself as the most stable person (especially during these uncertain times) however I do not think you give yourself enough credit. You thrive under following a strict schedule and always follow through on your goals (for some reason I feel like you might have a very extensive writing blog, like your masterlists are all extremely organised). You naturally bring stability to others though, I keep getting the phrase “you are my rock” and you are always there if anyone needs you. Of course this doesn’t make you a doormat by any means in fact quite the latter, the emperor is a man of action and leadership, you are a natural leader and always know the exact action to take in regards to a situation, a problem solver, people come to you for when they need to seek answers and get stuff done. The emperor serves the kingdom fairly thus he facts rationally in regards to making decisions. You are perhaps on the more logical side and are not too rash when it comes to your emotions, an aloof and calculated person, many people are in awe of your authoritative aura you have around you. You are extremely fair and just too, not a cold person at all, if someone wrongs you or your loved ones they are getting the treatment they deserve, we are so blessed to have you as an incredibly loyal person in this world. For some of you I highkey think you are into things that involve strategies or methodical thinking a couple of things that came to mind were Jigsaw puzzles, chess or solving rubik's cubes but sports and other hobbies do use this critical thinking as well, also I feel like you might be extremely passionate about it too. The emperor is ruled by aries so you are a person of action, you hate the idea of sitting around and I feel like you are never afraid to take on a challenge which is extremely admirable because many people are afraid of failure but you don’t see it as that, you see it has another chance to prove yourself and honestly as I am typing this out I am feeling so motivated to do something badass. Best hype man period. (Also i couldn’t help but think of commander erwin smith when i was writing this so maybe you kin this man a little bit) 

Seven of Swords: now this card in tarot is basically referring to someone being a backstabbing little shit but actually I think this highkey is a very badass card to come out of the deck in regards to what makes you so amazing. This card indicates scheming and coming up with a strategy which to me empathises how intelligent you are. You have some extremely high IQ or you naturally incredibly street smart either way your intellect is something to be marveled. Unlike pile number 2 I would not say you are studious but are the type of person who can have like 2 hours sleep and come in and do a test and still pass with flying colours. With this card, I feel like you are two steps ahead of everyone else, I can imagine that you sort of go into this mind palace like sherlock holmes where you connect all the loose threads, out of this world deduction skills, like how do you do it I will never know??? Definitely very good actors, like you can turn on the charm if need be and honestly you guys are super badass, you are the one person I believe who could actually survive animes such as Attack on Titan or the promised neverland.

Seven of Pentacles: Whenever I see this card in a personal reading of me it’s the universe’s way of telling me to stop being an impatient bitch and keep working. You sure do put up with a lot of shit, I 100% think that within your friendship you are the voice of reason and honestly you deserve a nobel peace prize. Seven of Pentacles indicates a need for looking more into the future, a long term perspective, you deffo play the long game, thinking before you leap and taking into consideration the consequences of your actions. You know where to invest your time in and make excellent planners, the archetype that has come into my brain is the chess master, you just know how to move each piece or in this instance know exactly what endeavours to pursue in life. The lady on the card looks very at rest despite all the work she has done, to me this indicates that you make a lot of things look really easy, perhaps you have a niche hobby that you have perfected over the years or maybe you are naturally an elegant person. What I can tell you is that whatever sort of work you present is bougie as fuck, wherever it be a writing for tumblr or some artwork it always looks so damn professional (your talent makes me go on all starry eyed). Lastly, I feel like your motto is “slow and steady is the race”, you would rather take slightly longer on a project then finish it quickly with lots of errors, definitely a perfectionist. 

Hidden Talent

 Perhaps something you might have not been aware of 

The Chariot: the first thoughts that came to mind is that you are incredibly hard working and have lots of self discipline, many people believe you were always just naturally good at stuff not seeing the sweat and tears that has got you to your amazing level now, for instance you are extremely charming however this wasn’t a gift you were born with but something you learnt. The lady pictured on the card was wearing gold armour, the colour gold was really standing out to me so I decided to include this within the interpretation. The colour gold means triumph and success, to me this shows that when you put your talents to good use (towards a goal) the world becomes your oyster, the universe has gifted you the resources now you just have to pick up and use them. Also within the picture, there were 2 horses white and black, to me the colours represent divine feminie energy (emotions) and divine masculine energy (logic), the lady has control of the horses which shows that you have good control over both logic and emotions and don’t let one over power the other one. The spiritual guide of the horse shows that you are actually an extremely passionate person, I feel like you may have a slightly apathetic appearance so people can get quite shocked when they see you all fired up and ready to go, but you are. You look towards the future and never let the past hold you back, you are always ready for battle and just like the chariot you charge on ahead never looking back. The chariot card is ruled by Cancer, I feel like you are a very good listener, people are surprised at how comforting you can actually be, you do look out for your friends and just want to make sure they are healthy and well. You truly treasure those close around you and will take the bullet for any of them, I literally feel so emotionally writing this and honestly words cannot describe how amazing you are.

How to love yourself

We all have our down days, so here are some tips and tricks to help us feel better

10 of Cups: this is literally the happy ending card (that's my nickname for it). 10 of cups represents family and emotional fulfilment. The first message that came to mind in regards to loving yourself was listing things that you are grateful for, as someone who has low self esteem issues I know this can be extremely difficult but you need to dig deep. If you have trouble starting off taking personality quizzes can be a good start, my personal faves our the myer briggs (do not take 16personalities it isn’t accurate) and the jungian archetypes (i got the Jester), you can see some good traits from these quiz results which could help you start your list. What was really prominent on this card was the peace sign that was in the background, this could be an indication that may need to find peace with yourself or perhaps try to find peace around you, with the chaos that has been COVID you may have lost your balance in life, the cups aren’t standing up right. Perhaps your sleep schedule has gone out the window or you are skipping lunch most days ( I am guilty of doing this too), try by fixing your daily routine, this could be by going to bed 1 hour earlier or maybe making sure you go outside at least once a day. I definitely think that will increase your overall morale and thus the confidence will make a comeback. Spending time with your family is another theme of this card, I understand that some family members can be a pain however talking to them just having a normal conversation could really help forge better relationships with them. Be happy with the here and now because contentment is right under your nose. 

BNHA characters that would highkey have a crush on you  

Deku, Toga, Iida, Miriko and Dabi

[scripttorture]

Hello! I've browsed this blog a bit and came across the idea that torturers often develop mental illness because of their repeated exposure to the violence/trauma of seeing another person in pain, which I'd never considered before. A) Do you believe torturers can therefore be a type of victim as well, depending on the circumstances, and therefore deserving of compassion/therapy? B) Can you point me to more information about this/what kinds of mental illnesses develop in torturers? (1/2)

C) Do you think it's possible for a mass murderer/torturer character to have a realistic, satisfying redemption arc? Do you know any media that's pulled it off believably? Thank you so much for taking the time to read/answer this if you do! And for this excellent resource!

-

The most accessible sources that cover this are O’Mara’s Why Torture Doesn’t Work (good grounding, start with him), Rejali’s Torture and Democracy and the appendices to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth where he describes treating two torturers.

 The most current research is about 600 pages of print on demand untranslated French. If you’re fluent in French (I am not and lock down etc has got in the way of me getting this translated) Sironi Comment devient-on tortionnaire?

 Broadly speaking the symptoms appear to be the same as those survivors and witnesses develop.

 And I will go into this in more depth later but keep in mind there is not anywhere near enough research on torturers for us to be entirely sure about most of this. I’m working with the best information we have right now.

 The other two questions are subjective and sort of complicated. By definition a lot of this is going to be my opinion because well that’s what you’re asking for.

 I think we need to be really careful about describing torturers as ‘victims’.

 Yes they’re put in this situation by social structures beyond their control. It is not their fault that they weren’t given training or support in their job. It’s also not their fault that we have this global message that violence is effective or that so many workplaces are unnecessarily pressured/stressful. Most of the time they are drawn in to abusing others because of the social groups and structures within the organisation they join.

 Oversight (with a drive to eradicate torture), funding, training and clear consistent messages about the right way to handle difficult situations would probably prevent most cases of torture.

 This does not change the fact that on an individual level each of them chose to hurt other people.

 Some of them will have made that choice understanding there was a threat to their own safety if they did not. Some of them will have made that choice just because it was what everyone else was doing. Some of them genuinely believe what they did was the ‘right’ decision at the time.

 They still made that choice. And given that we have records of people in similar positions refusing, even when it put them at risk of attack or death, I don’t have a lot of sympathy with the choice torturers made.

 The fact I’m a pacifist factors into this. Consider my biases.

 Torturers typically show a very low understanding of the impact their actions have had on other people.

 They might regret their actions but this is typically framed in a very self-centred way. They usually don’t express more then cursory regard for the victims. They regret it because they’re suffering now, because they have nightmares, because they can’t keep a job. And oh it’s all so unfair.

 I don’t know why this is the case. But it’s a feature Sironi described in interviews about her work. And I’ve seen it over and over again in interviews with torturers.

 Yes torturers suffer. The symptoms they develop are terrible and have a lasting impact on their lives. They typically can’t hold down jobs and struggle to re-integrate into society in any meaningful fashion.

 And yes I believe they should be treated. I believe that anyone with a disease or condition which requires treatment should have access to care and treatment. Whoever they are. Whatever they did.

 I believe that as fellow human beings torturers are entitled to a degree of compassion. When I say that torture and mistreatment are wrong I mean it. My position doesn’t change just because the theoretical victim is a former torturer.

 I do not think that treatment and compassion should be dependant on a person being suitably victimised. For me the only thing it depends on is their need and their humanity. In the literal physical sense of them being a human.

 But we tend to think of ‘victim’ as a simple category that doesn’t overlap with mass murderers.

 And I don’t believe the position of torturers is that simple.

 Especially when so few of them are charged. Torture trials are rare. Convictions are rare. And sentences are short.

 And their victims deserve justice too.

 I feel conflicted about calling torturers ‘victims’ because of this complex reality. And because in fiction we have a tendency to focus on the torturers prioritising their voices over the survivors. I feel like presenting torturers as simple victims of society could risk adding to that.

 For me the focus has always got to be the survivors.

 And I think all of this feeds into how we handle redemption arcs.

 I don’t think that writing redemption arcs for villains, even torturers or mass murderers is ‘wrong’. In fact I think that it can be a really good idea. Showing how toxic the environments these people are in is a good thing. Puncturing the way it’s romanticised is a good thing. And showing a way out of it, even if it’s imagined, is not a bad thing.

 But if we’re going to do that in our stories then I think we need to think about what redemption means and in whose eyes the character is redeemed.

 There’s also a small problem: we don’t really know what recovery for torturers looks like.

 There isn’t enough research on them. Partly because of lack of interest but partly because the low conviction rates means sample sizes are small. We’re talking about a limited number of individuals who are jailed and we can’t really ‘prove’ that individuals who weren’t convicted were torturers. We don’t really know what the long term outcomes are, what treatments might be effective or- Much of anything.

 Studies on torturers are typically based on very small numbers of individuals. (For a long time Fanon’s work was the only example of a mental health professional talking about torturers specifically. He saw two of them.) They are not statistically sound. And a lot of resources were simply journalists or mental health professionals compiling notes on the handful of individuals they talked to.

 Everything I say about torturers is based on things like interviews, a handful of studies that have flaws and anecdotal evidence. Unfortunately as of right now it’s the best we’ve got.

 Personally I don’t think there’s enough research on torture generally. Or enough attempts to collate relevant research from other fields. But that’s a rant for another day.

 Let’s get back to that central question: what does redemption mean?

 I think that it’s pretty easy to write a character changing for the better. You can build up the character’s level of insight into what they’re doing/did over the course of the story. You can show them choosing to stop. You can show them shifting to oppose their former allies.

 But bundled up in the idea of a redemption arc is this: is it enough? And who is it enough for?

 I don’t think survivors should be obliged to forgive former torturers. I also don’t think they’re likely to interact positively.

 I’ve talked about this now and again when asked about the difference between legally defined torture and abuse. Because of the organised and widespread nature of legally defined torture there are usually communities of survivors. And communities that are collectively moving through a recovery process because even those people who weren’t directly attacked are likely to be witnesses, carers and relatives or friends of survivors.

 These things echo down generations.

 Cyprus gained independence from the British in 1960, my father is too young to have any real memory of the violence during the colonial period. But he referenced it in arguments with my English mother during my childhood. There are people throughout China today who won’t buy anything Japanese because of Japanese war crimes there during World War 2. There are people who won’t eat fish from the Black Sea, because the bodies of their ancestors were thrown into that sea during a genocide over a hundred years ago.

 I know that as a both a Greek Cypriot and an English person there are people all over the world who will not want anything to do with me based on what my people have done to theirs. And the fact I wasn’t alive at the time does not really factor into it.

 What I’m trying to illustrate here is that this is much bigger, broader and more complex then individual acts of forgiveness.

 Survivors are a highly varied group of individuals. And each torturer can have thousands or tens of thousands of victims. Expecting each impacted individual, and any witnesses and all their family members and friends, to forgive these people is… let’s say ‘unlikely’.

 So does redemption require forgiveness from the wounded party? Is there any possible action that can atone for the sheer scale of these atrocities?

 If we play a simple number game causing this level of harm can be achieved in months or years, but saving the equivalent number of lives takes decades of skilled, dedicated work. If we look at concepts like wergild or jail as ‘paying your debt to society’ then how do we measure something like torture where the numbers are so big?

 I haven’t seen a piece of fiction seriously tackle these questions. But then again I also haven’t actively looked for that fiction.

 I feel like a lot of fictional redemption arcs judge a character to be sufficiently redeemed based on audience sympathy and the main cast forgiving the character. They don’t typically go on to broaden the scope of the narrative and question whether any one else impacted by the former villain’s actions also sees the character as redeemed.

 One of my stories has a former torturer as a major character and I think they are a sympathetic character in many ways. I think that my readers would empathise with them through a lot of the story (which takes place decades after they stopped torturing).

 They’re a mentor figure to some of the younger cast members. They’ve acted as a protector to them and taught the younger generation a lot about the minority culture they themselves are from. And they do genuinely care about these people that they helped to raise, consistently sacrificing to protect these ‘kids’. (The ‘kids’ are 30s-20s at the time of the story.)

 But they’re also incredibly self centred. They don’t really interact with or have a lot of sympathy for the people they hurt. And while this particular family loves and forgives them society at large views them as a monster. Albeit one that is now leashed.

 Is this a redemption story? Is this character redeemed? I genuinely don’t know. In fact that’s part of my interest in writing the story: trying to work out if there is a point, as this character grows, develops and helps others, when I believe they’ve done ‘enough’.

 I think that redemption means different things for different people. A satisfying redemption story is different for different people. And if we can disagree so strongly about it with much simpler, smaller scale crimes then where does that leave us with torture?

 There isn’t a simple answer or a one-size-fits-all writing solution. There can’t be.

 My approach is to try and use the story to see if I can find an answer. Even if it’s only a limited one. For me the story itself is a forum for exploring human complexity and difficult ethical questions.

 I don’t think we have a good solution for how to deal with these people in reality yet. But I do hold out hope that a good solution is possible. Fiction is an arena where we can safely explore possible solutions.

 I guess in the end I’m not sure if there’s any story or arc that will work for everyone. I don’t think there are any hard rules for writing anything and I don’t think there’s ever a way to please everyone.

 Redemption and forgiveness are complicated topics. I think we do a much better job when we engage with that complexity then when we assume a character just has to do a, b and c in order to achieve it.

 When you consider someone to be truly redeemed is an ethical question that I can’t answer for you. I don’t think I should. The chances are you’ll know when you think your character has done enough.

 Just be open to the fact that it won’t be enough for everyone. Consider reflecting that with the characters, because that can make for truly powerful moments.

 In Midnight’s Children Shiva never forgives Saleem, even though Saleem isn’t responsible for Shiva ‘losing’ his life and family because they were both infants at the time. And damn there are a lot of flaws in the movie adaptation but that scene between them in the jail, when Saleem throws that in Shiva’s face hits hard. It shows us so much about both characters.

 And I think that’s a better way to approach it then trying to figure out if a character is redeemed yet: figuring out how they’ve progressed, how others respond to that progression and why.

 I hope that helps :)

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[opbackgrounds]

Hi there Sarc' ;) I am sorry if the question has already been asked but I thought it could be interesting to have your opinion about this. While I love most of the female characters in OP and think that most of them are well developed and can be truly good role models for girls I still feel that Oda sometimes has a sexist view on female characters (the jokes about the naked bath scenes for example or Kororo being considered ugly make me really uncomfortable). What do you think about it?

Ah, I wondered when I would get this question. 

When people talk about sexism in One Piece they typically are referring to two different things: How women are drawn, and how they’re treated within the narrative. While there’s some overlap here, there’s enough distinction that I want to address them as two separate points in two separate posts, because I guess I had Opinions, and by god there should be a limit to how much text one tumblr post can be expected to hold. Consider this an introduction.

Buckle up, kiddos. This is gonna be a long one. 

Nami Face Syndrome Isn’t the Problem...

An important thing to remember with Oda’s art and storytelling style is that almost everything is hyper exaggerated for effect. You don’t go into One Piece looking for realism. You don’t go into One Piece expecting the characters to act like normal people. Everything--from the art to the humor to the battles--is stretched and pulled to its absolute limit in hopes of garnering a particular reaction. When a character is sad they cry big bubbly tears with dribbles of snot coming from their nose. When they laugh their mouths take up half their face. 

And when a girl is hot, her tiddies are two great big watermelons stuck to the center of her chest.

What is often dubbed “Nami Face Syndrome” within the fandom is somewhat misleading. After all, why was Wanda, who is a literal dog that walks on two legs, decried as yet another Nami clone at her introduction? I would postulate it’s less to do with her face and more to do with the fact that from the neck down they are virtually identical, something that’s made more obvious because Wanda is literally wearing Nami’s clothes

What makes this frustrating for a lot of people, myself included, is that it’s not that Oda is incapable of drawing more diverse body types, but that he often chooses not to. Take for example the Kuja tribe

or the Charlotte family daughters (thanks to Arthur at Library of Ohara for the resource). It’s pretty clear Oda has the chops to make his women as weird as the men, and he often does! For important characters, even. And yes, as the Kokoro example given above sometimes the gonkness is brought attention to, but for others like Lola and Chiffon it’s...not. 

(more on mermaids later)

But Sarcasticles, one might protest, even Oda’s “ugly” characters have ginormous boobs! Where is my itty bitty titty committee representation >:(

To which I can only shrug. For Oda, boobs on a woman are like abs on men. It doesn’t matter if it makes sense, they’re gonna have ‘em

Seriously, Oda. What the fuck.

...So What Is?

I have a theory that’s impossible to prove, and that the problem isn’t so much Oda’s character design so much as the ratio of his male to female characters in general. It’s not that every female character is a Nami clone, but Oda has a template he uses for attractive female characters ages 16-25, the same way he uses Robin as a template for attractive women ages 26-35, which is how you get cases of mistaken identity like Viola for Robin or scenes during Reverie where one could be forgiven for thinking Nami’s supposed to be an identical triplet

 Oda does this for his men, too. It’s not as obvious because 1) Even men with similar facial features can have a wider variety body types due to Oda having a sliding scale of buffness he’s willing to attach to a pretty face and 2) There are more men. 

There are a lot more men.

In groups where the male to female ratio is more or less equal (Baroque Works, Big Mom’s kids) you get a wide variety of designs. But there’s only one female Supernova. There’s one female Warlord. CP9 only has one female agent. Only one of the Revolutionary Commanders is a woman. There are very few female background characters in crowd shots, especially among marines. Big Mom might be the only female Emperor, but she’s not young, In fact, when drawing her at age 28, Oda defaults to a much more generic “pretty girl” face before giving her much more striking, memorable features in her 40s

If you look at Oda’s male characters, the ones that are supposed to be hot are often given the same square jawline and the thin-bladed nose that at one point in time was reserved for Robin. Both Coby and Sabo had very distinctive noses before their glowups, while Ace must have had a laser treatment done on his eyebrows sometime between Alabasta and Marineford. 

But the biggest difference on the men has got to be muscle mass. The overgrown noodles of early One Piece are lost to the annals of time. Shanks alone must have gained 30 pounds of pure muscle from the time Luffy got his first bounty to his appearance at Marineford. 

Now, I will acknowledge that there is a difference between the increasing sexualization of female characters and the male power fantasy of giving Zoro bara tiddies post-timeskip. While I do think there are certain male characters specifically designed to be the Hot Dude, what I’m trying to emphasize here is that Oda works with templates for both men and women, and both of those templates have been exaggerated over time. Bigger boobs for women, more muscles for men. And when you’re only slotting for one girl in any given group, and that one girl has to be The Hot One then you’re going to have a lot of ladies that end up looking the same. 

My love for Otohime on this blog is well known, and I want to use her as an example of what Oda can do when he works beyond this template, because it’s really freaking good  

Otohime is neither conventionally attractive nor gonk. She’s dressed in very conservative, traditional clothing and has a narrow waist and small chest. 

There are no sharp edges on Otohime. Not her eyebrows, not her jaw, and most of the time not even her hands, emphasizing her gentle nature. You don’t see it as well in this panel, but Otohime’s head is often drawn wider than her shoulders, emphasizing her frailty. Oda gives her a longer neck to compensate, and the overall effect is a very soft, willowy figure. 

Her headpiece looks like a sunburst. The audience never sees her fins, so Oda gives her a scale patterned kimono-dress-thingy (my knowledge of Japanese clothing is, uh, not good) as a visual reminder that she’s not human. The sash that circles around her head harkens back to Japanese mythology as a symbol of divinity, similar to a halo in Western culture. And fun fact: Otohime is named after a god, just like Neptune, while her goals and ideals are pure enough to be heaven-sent. 

I’m not an artist, but this is a really damn good character design. A lot of Oda’s older female characters are. Dandan, Tsuru, O-Tsuru, Shakky, Kureha, Big Mom, and Nyon are all instantly recognizable and have strong designs, even if a few of them fall into the hourglass figure that Oda often defaults to. It’s just...there aren’t that many of them.

So the question becomes why aren’t there more women, and I think the answer is because, ultimately, One Piece is a series geared at boys. While I wish there were a few more important ladies, I can understand why there aren’t. 

Note, that doesn’t mean I think it’s right or that Oda is obligated to include more women. It’s just one of the facts of the shonen manga industry at this point in time. 

A more important question, I think, is why does every younger woman have to be attractive? And why do the attractive ladies have to wear outfits that are blatant fanservice? This is something I don’t have an answer for. Oda has said on more than one occasion that he writes One Piece with his twelve year old self in mind. It could be that it’s a calculated move to appeal to his audience, in which case it’s certainly worked because said Hot Ladies are constantly used in marketing and merchandising. It’s the Hot Ladies that top the popularity charts (although, to be fair, who’s there for competition?). In the most recent chapter a new Hot Lady was introduced, and the fandom went batshit crazy for her.

Even the fans who are very vocal about how Oda sucks at drawing women. It’s interesting how that works out sometimes.

Or maybe I’m giving Oda too much credit, and he’s just horny. Not having direct access to Oda’s mind, I don’t have an answer. If I had to guess I’d say it’s a little of Column A, a little of Column B, because that’s usually how life is. 

But in a vacuum big tiddies are just a design choice. An exaggerated aesthetic, in a series full of exaggerated aesthetics. It’s when that design choice is paired with in-story comments, actions, and decisions where things really start to get heated. But that’s a whole other ball of wax, and there should be a limit to how much one tumblr post can be expected to hold. I promise I’ll get to the meat of your question next time.

Thank you so much for your patience. I really do think it’s important to start here before diving into everything else, if only because it helps keep my thoughts organized. I hope you’ve found this helpful, and if not, I hope to do better next time. 

[a-mellowtea]

I was going over notes from one of my creative writing classes the other day, and one particular discussion we had stuck out to me, likely as much now as it did then (I took notes on an idle somewhat off-topic conversation, after all). It was about how people latch onto flawed, even antagonistic or villainous characters; what might drive someone to identify with them; when, if ever, it becomes problematic to do so; and the idea of empathy by degrees -- how different experiences and personal biases, conscious or unconscious, can lead to vastly different readings of the text and subtext.

And in bold black, circled several times, is the bullet point:

"These interpretations are not mutually exclusive."

I see a lot of lines drawn nowadays when it comes to fictional characters. Anyone familiar with me, even in passing, can probably assume that I'm thinking of James Ironwood when I bring this up, but he's far from the only one. Interpretation of heroes is fraught enough, but typically most can agree on their inherent goodness and whether or not an audience should root for them is rarely in question. The further along the scale you push from those lighter shades of white and grey, however, the bigger the divide between interpretations becomes, and the more arguments you tend to see. That idea of empathy by degrees means that everyone looks at these characters through a different lens and, naturally, those views conflict. It doesn't mean that any of them are wrong -- even if they don't account for every minute detail or implication of the text. Quite the opposite, and it's why insult-slinging and bad faith arguments over characters makes little sense. They may conflict, but they also coexist. An element that one person reads in a character exists just as firmly as a potentially opposing element another person reads. Is Darth Vader a tragic fallen hero, or a monstrous villain? Yes. These views bump up against each other, but they are also both true.

Where my peers agreed that becomes problematic is when audiences start excusing or staunchly defending villainous behaviors, but that's a discussion for another day, and even then has shades of reasoning involved that shouldn't always be immediately dismissed.

All this is to say is that character analysis and interpretation is a lot more subjective than most realize, and we should be a lot more careful about the arguments we pick and the lines we draw. It's hard, especially when they're characters near and dear, and I'm not innocent of it myself. But I think we'd all get along better if we at least tried.

[mcrmadness]

Madness draws: Behind the Scenes of the “Alleine in der Nacht” die ärzte fan comic.

A few weeks ago I posted this comic:

This post is yet again just another drawing behind-the-scenes post but You can go and reblog the original post here.

And as always, all my ramblings are under the cut!

This one was relatively easy to do because I just woke up one morning and internally died from laughter because this idea just happened like a random pop up window in my brain. I wrote it down to my phone notes and later on also into my sketchbook:

I was laughing out loud when I was drawing those images, Bela’s face still is cracking me up :D And because I’m yet again trilingual with my comics, there’s only one word in my mother tongue and it’s: Bela laulaa = Bela sings.

And other fans might recognize the lyrics of the song, I needed to write them down in order to decide which ones would fit the comic the best.

This one is then again me trying to see how it will fit on a A4 paper. Originally I saw it in my head more like a short, regular comic strip with 3 panels but somehow I couldn’t get it to fit into 3 panels. And 4 panels was too many in a row so I decided to go for a full page then. That caused bits of trouble to me because I normally don’t draw the comic book faces THAT big and it’s surprisingly hard to draw them in bigger scale. (With pencil drawings it’s the opposite, the bigger the better. It’s much easier to draw an eye the size of a finger instead of a size of a tip of a needle.)

Here’s the first sketch! Just the shapes to see how and what I need to draw. Sorry for the awful photo quality again, my phone’s camera has really gotten really bad after these 3 years of use...

Anyhow, the third panel caused me some troubles because I knew how I wanted Bela’s arms and hands to be but I didn’t see them that good in my head so what I did next was to try different postures into my sketchbook:

I also tried this foreshortening technique I saw in a video of after a Tumblr post, even tho I don’t find that too hard to do myself anymore but it was still interesting and can really help making the eye and brain to see the image in 3D. So here I finally figured that I wanted Bela to have is arms like he was singing something very theatrically. I think it turned out pretty good.

Next I struggled with the bedsheets and I figured that I am a bit too good at blocking out information when I draw because I tried to draw unmade beds from reference photos and I’m able to follow a line but also able to completely not see any other lines around the line I’m following. Like I’d often follow a line to somewhere and suddenly notice that wtf there’s SO MUCH MORE lines all over the place in the photo but I just did not see them.

^Here’s two pages in my other sketchbook that I got for the comic stuff especially because the paper is actually white. The bigger sketchbook has light yellow tint to the paper so it can mess up with the colors when I need to try out and look for perfect colors from the colored pencils. (This sketchbook is also smaller aka A5 because Derwent sketchbooks are expensive but this was the only A5 one with a bit grainy paper in white. The A4 one is cheaper and from Mont Marte.)

After a while I was done with the besheet and the rest of the second sketch. I don’t have a photo of the comic with just the lineart, only a photo where the first panel is already colored and now I actually need to talk about the coloring.

That caused me lots of trouble because I really love playing with lights and shadows in everything (drawing, photographing... everything) and I do know how to do the night effect in black and white, but I have only once before done that with colors and it’s never that easy. Plus that one was my first comic when I started drawing again in 2018 and it was not that good to begin with.

I run some tests with the pencils, as well as some shading tests:

Käsi = hand, iho = skin. I use Derwent Flesh Pink (I have a 72 set of Derwent Watercolour pencils) for the skin color and was then trying out other colors to see which one would look the best for shading. It was actually really difficult to do and my sister suggested that I’d use only cold colors but like... how do you use cold colors on a skin without making the character look dead? :D

I imagined that there’s a moon shining in from a window that would be behind the “camera”. I almost ruined the first panel because I wasn’t exactly sure what was I even doing and what did I want from the colors:

Here’s the lineart and almost finished first panel in colors. I really liked the lineart and this would have looked so nice in black and white too, maybe even better. But I just saw that blue background so strongly in my mind that I just had to go for it.

The first panel was really difficult to do like I said and I almost ruined it at some point. But it also taught me something because with the rest of the panels I knew to start with the skincolors and end with the black (I started the first panel with black, I think... kids, never do that, always start with the light colors! :D) and I think the last panel is the best what comes to the colors in the final comic. I also added light blue here and there to make it look more like the colors of a moon at night:

I’m actually very happy with all of the other colors in this panel! It also reminds me of a book I had and used to read as a child. It was about this girl that went to an appendix surgery and all the images were drawn with either colored pencils, pastels or crayons and it looked grainy the exact same way as this one too. It also had lots of red and orange and brown colors in it. (I wonder if I still have the book here...)

Then there’s also the title and “Das Ende”. Originally I was going to do the late 80s logo they have e.g. on the 80s live vhs/dvd but then I just saw another post in my dä blog’s queue and I just needed to do this logo instead!

I had just a couple of weeks prior ordered a pack of white Sakura Gelly Roll pens and needed to test what would make the best compination and with which black!

I also had bought a white paint pen but it’s useless. As you see, it just looks grey after it dries and it just... doesn’t look nice. Plus it takes so much time to dry AND it’s extremely messy and I have paint more in my hands and a puddle on the paper but barely none where it should be. So my choice for the logo was to use either Pigma Microns or Promarkers (I think I chose the latter) and the thickest Gelly Roll aka 10. This was the result:

And I’m actually super happy about how it came out! Couldn’t do that good looking spots on the letters because can’t make splashes with a gel pen so I did a few bigger ones here and there and then just poked everywhere with the pen to make it look more random. You can actually see how it’s slightly whiter than the paper if you look closely, but it’s not too strongly whiter so it looks pretty nice like this.

So, this was less work than the “Widumihei” one but it was also an interesting piece to draw. And I think I have now this comic drawing more freshly in mind so that drawing the next ones (there’s three waiting for sketching already) will be much easier as well :)

[douchebagbrainwaves]

WHY I'M SMARTER THAN TREVOR

But it worked so well, and we knew that buyers would have a big pool of potential users, at least. Web browser.1 Angels were generally much better to talk to someone, I could usually get to the end of each film, so they know who might be interested in this mystery—for the same destination, just approaching it from different directions. I recommend you solve this problem, if you find someone else working on the biggest things inexperienced founders and investors are probably more where it's considered especially polite to compliment someone's clothing than where it's considered improper. VCs want to blow you up, it wears you out: Your most basic advice to founders is just don't die, but the word madam never occurs in my legitimate email, and spam in particular. Basically at 25 he started running as fast as possible. And what are the universities thinking?

The next best, for startups that aren't charging initially, is active users. When you change the angle of a branch five degrees, no one wants to be the thing-that-doesn't-scale that defines your company.2 That principle, like the relative merits of programming languages is to give you enough money to last for a year or a hundred times as productive as those working for money, they'll work a lot harder on stuff they like. 5-7% of a company like Apple and think, how hard can it be? Economically, you can do in your spare time, and investors are down on advertising at the moment. They do more in their heads: they try to do things that seem to be: a lot of them. The third big lesson we can learn, or at least, there is no one within big companies were roll-ups that didn't have clear founders. When I look back it's like there's a line drawn between third and fourth grade. That's what makes sex and drugs, it would be good to solve?

Prep schools openly say this is one reason I'd bet on the curve, at any given time get away with it, and the different parts of the company through the COO. Object-oriented programming in the 1980s was enabled by a combination of circumstances: court decisions striking down state anti-takeover laws, starting with the assumption that we would never get started. Not because it's causing economic inequality, you decrease the number of startups that get bought early. It's not a deal till the money's in the bank and keep operating as two guys living on ramen. I'm optimistic. They think that there will be ten JetBlues.3 If you try to attack wealth, you end up doing something chosen for you by syndicates.

And you don't want to see the Valley itself, but it goes fast. What Happened to Yahoo August 2010 When I went to.4 What this means in practice. That makes him seem like a winner, they may avoid publishing's problems. After reading a draft, Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell has made a handy calculator you can use them as communication devices.5 You not only have to filter email from people you'd never heard from, or about, a startup has decreased dramatically. Startups are that constrained for talent. But it's harder than it sounds.6 Smallness Measurement If you can't measure the value of products is in software. You don't have to rely on. Hackers just want power.

I knew she was about to say you'd have to be fired, and one of your most powerful weapons, I think this is true for funding. The best was that the company was itself a kind of argument that might be called the Hail Mary strategy. They don't have time to work, just like a software company. But it hardly ever is. My friend Robert learned a lot by writing network software when he was a startup, then hand them off to go away.7 Sun. Oxford had a chair of Chinese before it had one of English.

Which means the slowdown that comes from being in America. And in fact the two forces are related: they're the ones who like running their company so much that resembling nature is intrinsically good as that nature has had a couple thousand Altair owners, but without the substance. Ditto for hacking. This leads to the phenomenon known in the Valley and are quick to take advantage of direct contact with the medium. We were all starting from scratch, that's a really bad sign.8 More important, I think it's cleaner if you openly charge subscription fees, instead of just looking at them all is through a computer. Thanks to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, and Robert and Trevor read applications and did interviews with us. The stock of a company as big as Java, or bigger, just on the partner you talk to startups, a lot of investors are interested in, that's not necessarily a mistake to use the term Collison installation for the technique they invented. FreeBSD, which I'm running on the computer I'm using now, and they're not coming back. Court hierarchies are another thing entirely. In practice offers exist for stretches of time, if your business model in the world look like this? Startups don't win by winning lawsuits.

5 spams per 1000 with 0 false positives. When I was in college that there were about 20,000. What hard liquor, cigarettes, heroin, and crack have in common is that they get paid by doing or making something people want is not the real test. Ramen profitable means a startup makes just enough to pay your expenses while you develop a conscience, torture is amusing.9 Wouldn't that at least someone really loves. Sex, or something just as bad. I can see a path that's not immediately obvious; that's one of the most important quality in an investor is to say that the unsuccessful founders would also fail to chase down funding, and investors tend to take these for granted now, but only because people have found even more addictive ways of wasting time. It does not seem to be several categories of cuts: things I got wrong, because if you don't, you're hosed. So we should expect founders to do it yourself. If you actually started acting like adults, it seemed to them what e-commerce business back in the day, but who want it urgently. 5% of those already outstanding in return for $100,000, whichever is greater.

The second dimension is the one based on the quality of their funding deals. So I want to zoom in on one detail of this picture. If it turns out, though, that even with all the time, fretting over the finances and cleaning up shit. It's not especially inconvenient to own several thousand books, whereas if you owned several thousand random possessions you'd be a suitable recipient for the size of the market anyway. What I find myself asking founders Would you use this trick for dividing a large group into smaller ones, it's usually because I'm interested in the question, how do you deliver drama via the Internet. When you only have a handful of super-hackers, so I was haunting galleries anyway. But I know the real reason: the product is only moderately appealing. Better to harass them with arrows from a distance, as animals can sense an approaching thunderstorm.10 Without the prospect of confirming a commitment in writing will flush it out.

Notes

Since we're not doing YC mainly for financial reasons, including both you and listen only to emphasize that whatever the false positives reflecting the remaining outcomes don't have to do, just their sizes. The problem with most of their origins in words about luck. It was common in the imprecise half. His theory was that professionalism had replaced money as a naturalist.

If you wanted to than because they need them to represent anything.

From? The way to fight. The Harmless People and The Old Way. I know, Lisp code.

Do not finance your startup.

Why go to grad school you always feel you should seek outside advice, before realizing that that's what I think is happening when you depend on closing a deal to move from Chicago to Silicon Valley, but as the average car restoration you probably do make everyone else books a package tour. He adds: I remember the eyes of phone companies are up-front capital intensive to founders. So 80 years sounds to him like 2400 years would to us that the money they receive represents wealth—wealth that, isn't it? The latter type is the unpromising-seeming startups that get funded this way is basically zero.

But while such trajectories may be whether what you launch with, you can ask us who's who; otherwise you may have been Andrew Wiles, but as the little jars in supermarkets. Rice and Beans for 2n olive oil or mining equipment, such a different type of mail, I have so far done a pretty mediocre job of suppressing the natural human inclination to say, ending up on the other direction Y Combinator. This is an instance of a business is to carry a beeper? This trend is one of those most vocal on the LL1 mailing list.

The First Two Hundred Years. Who continued to live inexpensively as their companies took off? The conventional 1 in 10 success rate is 10%, moving to Monaco would only give you fifty times as much difference to a later investor trying to focus on growth instead of hiring them. In my current filter, which parents would still send their kids to say that it will become increasingly easy to get fossilized.

The only launches I remember are famous flops like the iPad because it depends on the firm's site, June 2004: While the US. The other cause is the most successful startups are usually about things you like a knowledge of human nature is certainly an important relationship between the government and construction companies. People tell the craziest lies about me. Patent trolls can't even trust the design world's internal standards.

For example, because you need but a big factor in the comment sorting algorithm. Horace, Sat.

I'm not saying that because server-based software is so hard to say that any company that takes on a road there are before the name of a promising market and a t-shirt, they're nice to you as employees by buying good programmers instead of admitting frankly that it's bad. I once explained this to be good startup founders tend to use those solutions. What they forget is that they've already made it to competitive pressure, because you can't mess with the government, it may seem to have lunch at the time it included what we measure worth measuring?

[aftermathdb]

DEATH BATTLE Review: Obi-Wan vs. Kakashi

This episode is released to Youtube on May 4th. So, may the Fourth be with you.

Obi-Wan′s Preview.

So, before going into this, just be warned: Boomstick has a bunch of Obi-Wan Liners. Let’s get started.

We open up on Tatooine, and our first Obi-Wan Liner, because old Ben was actually Obi-Wan Kenobi. Now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time.

And of course, the classic “Hello there.”

They go over his brief story of training under Liam Neeson, and his rise through the rankings of Jedi Knights. And for the record, yes. I’ll be referring to them as “knights” as opposed to Boomstick’s “Samurai Space Wizards.”

Anyways, they also go over Kenobi’s relation to The Force. The energy that’s all around the universe and allows Obi-Wan to do incredible things.

It also leads us into our first Wiz/Boomstick segment!

Aside from the Force, they also go over some of Obi-Wan’s techniques and other parts of his arsenal.

And they also go over several novels that help give Obi-Wan an edge up as well.

And the Force is no joke. There’s a reason why I’m capitalizing it all the time.

And it wouldn’t be a true Obi-Wan rundown if they didn’t mention his ultimate weapon:

The High Ground.

A powerful technique that he copied from Darth Maul. It gives him all sorts of advantages.

Kenobi also scales to other Force-Users, like Anakin. Which is brought up when pre-Vader did a Force feat that puts the ability to move massive dreadnaughts at massively relativistic speeds.

And to pull that off, it would need over 21 Megatons of TNT. And that was when Anakin was a newbie.

Of course, they do go over some of Obi-Wan’s weaknesses, like his dedication to the Jedi Order, trying to trick Luke into killing his father, and that time when he uh… Dropped the ball when it came to Anakin.

But even at his worst, Obi-Wan is a protector of the innocent, the universe, and the next generation. Sacrificing himself in service of a New Hope…

And then Boomstick ruins the moment by then declaring that Old Ben then became a ghost!

Yeah, let’s be real… This was the only way they could have ended it.

Kakashi′s Preview.

So, apparently it’s not just the kids who had dead parents, it’s the adults too!

The hosts go over the accomplishments that Kakashi had over the years, and how his dad was disgraced for saving his friends rather than prioritizing a mission… And how his dad committed Seppuku. Dick move Ninja Village.

Regardless, the hosts go over his accomplishments. Becoming a Genin at age five, a Chunin at age six, and a Jonin at age twelve. And yes, I copy-pasted that from the wiki because screw actually writing that out.

To be honest, the most “memey” thing about Kakashi’s preview is the “One Thousand Years of Death” technique he has. And while I can understand that Kakashi’s preview isn’t supposed to be “memey”, It’s a tad jarring when Obi-Wan’s was full of memes.

Anyways, the hosts note that Kakashi is most familiar with Lightning. And specifically, that he made a jutsu called the Chidori that got its nickname when it was used to cut a bolt of lightning.

Now, when Kakashi invented it, he ran into a problem… Literally.

He can’t really see that well when using it. So, once he starts moving, he can’t stop.

Until a friend of his gave him a Sharingan.

With this, the hosts note that Kakashi has stolen over a thousand techniques. But, they also note that since he’s not an Uchiha… he can’t really turn it off.

And then his friends all died! Which leads us to our next animated segment.

(I can never spell “Mangekyo” right… This is what I get for being a Transformers fan as opposed to a Naruto fan).

We get a list of feats, and a quick scaling test by way of Jiraiya. Remember him?- He’s the old pervert who carved up a mountain.

Anyways, this comes out to about 18 Megatons of TNT.

And after all the trauma that Kakashi endured, he finally found out that the ways of old were not the way that should be taught. And he lives on, knowing that he trained the next generation to do better than his could.

… Like I said: not a Naruto fan, so I have no idea what significance that this has.

The Battle Itself.

Doovan Hohdan, Daitomodachi, and Devil Artemis are back for an SFM animation. Obi-Wan will be voiced by Steven Kelly and Kakashi will be voiced by Nicholas Andrew Louie. Force and Lightning by Therewolf, and audio led by Chris Kokkinos.

So, after crashing into Konohagakure, Obi-Wan “celebrates” his landing, and opens up the only way Obi-Wan could:

Now, credit where it’s due: Obi-Wan tries to resolve this without violence. Looks like we know where Luke got it from. If all Star Wars DEATH BATTLE combatants start by them trying to diffuse the situation, I’d say that these guys know what they’re doing when it comes to portraying them as normal… Y’know, minus the removed morals.

Obviously, Obi-Wan not going to let Kakashi just outright kill him, so he starts defending.

Now, it takes a while for Kakashi to take the fight seriously. He keeps readinng his book while fighting and it takes some heavy blows to get him to put it down.

Obi-Wan declares that he has the high ground, and unfortunately, that’s too much power to be contained in one screenshot. But, Kakashi manages to counter Obi-Wan’s almighty High Ground technique.

But, Obi-Wan has the force on his side, so being buried isn’t going to stop him.

Now, the fight rages on, and it’s pretty clear that any physical blows are kinda-sorta leaning in Obi-Wan’s favor a bit. Kakashi puts in more effort when countering than Obi-Wan does. Maybe that’s just Kenobi’s calm demeanor, or Kakashi’s hotheadedness though.

Regardless, Kakashi opts to put Obi-Wan into an illusion for a  striking blow.

So, with the illusion dispelled (Seriously. First Hiei, now Kenobi. Will any illusion-character be able to land that move?), Obi-Wan counters.

And he counters HARD.

Kakashi doesn’t break easily though, so he starts using lightning.

The two get ready for a charging blow, so finishing move in

5…

4…

3…

2…

1…

Another Sasuke vs. Hiei parallel: it takes a moment for Kakashi to actually die.

Also, has anyone noticed that all the Naruto mentors die at the end of their respective battles? (Yeah, I’m kinda cheating with Might-Might, but still.)

Verdict + Explanation.

So, right off the bat, Kakashi has the edge in versatility. Hands down.

For starters, Obi-Wan isn’t going to be running out of fuel anytime soon. Chakra is internal, and the Force is external. And since it’s not a Chakra technique, Kakashi couldn’t copy it.

And the mountain feat is about on par with the dreadnaught feat, so they looked to be pretty even on power… At first glance.

Remember, Anakin gained power over the course of the series. By the time that the two fought, Anakin was much more powerful. So it stands to reason that Obi-Wan, who matched him, would also be on a similar level of power.

Obi-Wan could also tear apart General Grevious’ armor, which could tank blasts from star destroyers. And while it’s a little unreasonable to say that he could do this with his bare hands, the Force definitely can.

In terms of speed, Obi-Wan could react many times faster than Kakashi, meaning that Kakashi wouldn’t have a whole lot of opportunities to actually land a blow. Combined with the precognitive powers that the Force gives Kenobi, this means that it would be hard for Kakashi to get in close at all.

The elephant in the room is dismissed, as when Kakashi had the Perfect Susanoo, he was being possessed by the spirit of his friend.

But, even if he did, Obi-Wan is still stronger.

Kyp could move a black hole. And Obi-Wan was directly compared to him. Taking this literally, this comes out to just short of 14 Petatons of TNT.

And as we all know, a Petaton is a whole lot bigger than a Gigaton, that’s for sure.

And this isn’t even counting the fact that Obi-Wan could just crush his organs using the Force.

Damn! Thank god for the Jedi Code. These guys could literally conquer the entire universe if they wanted. Good thing they adopted the Spider-Man ways of taking great responsibility with that power and using it for good. Screw the Sith for going the Green Goblin route.

Overall impression.

So, has anyone noticed that we’ve been getting lessons in these past few battles lately? Cable vs. Booster Gold came with the moral of “the level of seriousness between characters only really matters for their own universes, not in a DEATH BATTLE”, the one before that had the (somewhat humorous) “We’re all beautiful just the way you are, no matter how many arms or whose wife you stole”, and now we have “With Great Power, comes Great Responsibility” delivered through the fact that we have now seen that power, and we’re thankful for the Jedi for holding back.

Aside from that, the fight is really well-choreographed. While it’s hard to discern that Obi-Wann had the speed advantage, it’s pretty clear that he had everything else. It was clear that he was the more level-headed of the two, and that gave him an immediate edge as it showed that he was more or less, holding back. And the ones who hold back the most tend to be the one who has the most power.

And the Obi-One liners are a delight. If there was anything really awesome that came out of the Prequels, it was the Obi-One liners. Ad to think! This airs on May 4 on Youtube… Yeah, cue angry Naruto fans claiming that “Obi only won because May 4.” Ugh… Freaking DEATH BATTLE Curse, amirite?

8.8/10

Next Time…

Oh. Speaking of Spider-Man…

If this isn’t hand-drawn, there will be riots.

Is there a fight that you want me to review? - Send an ask/request, and I’ll look into it!

Do you want to read my fanfic based around DEATH BATTLE itself? click here!

Thank you for reading, and I hope to see you next time for…

Spider-Copycat Combat.

[unfolded73]

How Do We Get Back (5/16) - schitt’s creek ff

Summary: In a literal alternate universe where the Roses escaped financial ruin, David and Patrick struggle with loneliness and a sense that something isn’t right. A chance meeting in New York and a terrible tragedy drive them to question whether the timeline they are on is the right one.

This chapter is explicit. 3.9k words.   (ao3)

Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4

_____________________________________

Chapter 5

David finally stopped hitting snooze on his alarm at 9:45, groaning as he sat up. Looking down and seeing his lack of clothes wasn’t exactly a shock, even when the memories of the night before were a little slow in making their appearance. Waking up naked and confused had been a pretty regular occurrence for him over the years. Then the memories flooded in: Patrick, the closeted button of a man who’d drawn him in with his big brown eyes and his soft lips. Patrick, who’d given him an adequate but enthusiastic handjob and had trusted him enough to fall asleep in his bed. Patrick, whom he’d likely never see again.

He was supposed to open the gallery at 11:00, but David decided not to go in today. He felt like he needed a day in front of the TV, watching old episodes of Downton Abbey and eating a pint of whatever expensive gelato he could get Seamless to bring him. Dragging himself out into the kitchen, he remembered he’d used up the last of his good coffee beans a few days ago, and if he wanted coffee without having to wait for a delivery or going out, he’d have to settle for using the stupid Keurig machine that Alexis had bought him a few Christmases ago. Grumbling, he opened the cabinet where he kept coffee stuff and found only those cursed pods.

As he moved to pull the Keurig machine out of a cabinet, a small white card on the counter caught his eye. He picked it up and held it close to his face to read.

Patrick Brewer, B.B.A. Business Manager Rollins Electrical Supply

And, of course, there was a cell phone number and an email address.

Did that mean Patrick wanted him to get in touch? He didn’t remember how much longer Patrick said he’d be in town but he thought it was at least two or three more days. They hadn’t exchanged numbers, so this business card was the only way they could feasibly reconnect. But it also put the decision of whether to reconnect entirely on David, which he was very much not a fan of. David was not a man who put himself out on a limb easily, not when he’d crashed to the ground so many times in the past. He preferred to let the other person be the one responsible for reaching out so that when they inevitably didn’t, he could pretend he hadn’t cared that much anyway.

Whining and shaking his hands up and down with anxiety, David went in search of his phone. Instead of texting Patrick, he tapped out a message to his sister.

Hey are you up?

While he waited for a response, David turned on the television. A solemn news announcer was talking over helicopter footage of a house, intoning the news that 57 people had died in an apparent mass suicide. “GRISLY END TO DEATH CULT IN SAN JOSE,” the chyron at the bottom of the screen read. “Oh my God,” David whispered to himself, then just as quickly forgot about it as the phone in his hand buzzed.

[Alexis] Ew don’t text u up to your sister

[David] I need you to talk me down though

[Alexis] why

[David] I hooked up with a guy last night and I need you to tell me whether I should text him today.

[Alexis] Wait at least 48 hours. You know this.

[David] Yeah but he’s not going to be in NY in 48 hours. Also he’s different.

[Alexis] 👀

[David] What?

His phone rang.

“What??” he said, holding the phone to his ear.

“How is he different, David?” Alexis’ voice was sing-songy, like she thought he was cute and also ripe for being mocked.

“I don’t know, he just is!” David shouted. Then more softly: “He’s nice. And I guess just realizing that he’s gay, or whatever.”

“Mm hmm.”

“He actually says the things he’s thinking. Out loud.”

“Ew, who does that?” Alexis asked. “What kind of game is that?”

“Also he’s married.”

“So not that nice, then.” Alexis said.

“Look, he left his business card in my kitchen. So should I text him today or not?”

“I don’t know, David.” It sounded like she’d already lost interest.

“Alexis!”

“Yes, text him. He probably left his card because he wants to hook up again. And if he doesn’t, then it’ll only be mildly humiliating on the scale of humiliating things you’ve done.”

David hung up on her.

~*~

[Patrick] I need some advice.

[Stevie] i’m glad you realized that yes your hair is too short

[Patrick] No. You know how I had to go to NY for a tax seminar?

[Stevie] idk i don’t always listen to what you say

The crowd around Patrick was laughing, and he looked up at the speaker who was lecturing on import taxes to see what was funny. When he couldn’t figure it out from the powerpoint slide on the screen, he looked down at his phone again.

[Patrick] I’m there now. Last night I met someone. A guy. I went home with him and spent the night.

[Stevie] omg

[Patrick] Yeah.

[Stevie] omg omg

[Patrick] Is that all you’re going to say?

[Stevie] was he hot?

Patrick pictured David: his dramatic eyebrows and chiseled jaw, his dark eyes that could be steely or surprisingly soft, his leather jacket. And then later, his hairy arms and gasping sighs and his cock in Patrick’s hand.

[Patrick] Yes

[Stevie] did you duck? fuck ???????

[Patrick] Um. I guess it depends on how you define that word.

[Stevie] were there orgasms?

[Patrick] Yes

[Stevie] 🍆🍆🍆🍆🍆🍆🍆

[Patrick] Please stop

Clearly Stevie wasn’t going to be any help, so Patrick tried again to catch the thread of what the lecturer was saying. He wrote something down from the slide that sounded important, all the while watching his phone, still open to the texting app. The dots to indicate Stevie was typing came and went for a while.

[Stevie] ok so i know you were only here a few months and i don’t know everything about you. but i thought you only drank white wine, and now i find out you also drink red wine?

Her analogy was obvious, but Patrick sat and pondered his response for a while.

[Patrick] More like, I’ve been drinking white wine because it never occurred to me that I might like something else. But now that I’ve had red wine, I’m realizing that I may only like red wine.

[Stevie] wow

[Patrick] Yeah

[Stevie] who is this guy?

[Patrick] His name is David Rose. I guess you can probably google him - his family is sort of famous.

It occurred to Patrick that he could google David if he wanted to. Probably should, in fact.

[Stevie] so what advice do you need exactly?

[Patrick] What the fuck do I do?

[Stevie] like, about your wife? i think you have to tell her the truth if you’re gay

Eyes squeezing shut, Patrick shut his screen off. He couldn’t think about that yet. She was right, but he couldn’t think about the horror that his life back home would become if he went to Rachel and confessed that after all these years, he was actually gay. He tried again to focus on the lecture, but he’d missed too much and had only the vaguest idea what the speaker was talking about. He tried writing everything down for several minutes, hoping he could look up the rest later and that the notes would make sense in retrospect.

Another message popped up on his screen from Stevie: are u gonna see him again?

He didn’t respond to that either.

When a few minutes later another message popped up, at first Patrick assumed it was Stevie again, but then he noticed it was from an unknown number. He swiped his phone up off the table quickly.

[212-555-4561] Hey, it’s David from last night. I got your card.

Hands shaking, Patrick unlocked his phone and stared at the message. David had actually texted him; when he left his card, he hadn’t really expected that to happen.

[Patrick] Hey, just waking up? ;)

[David] No. Did you think the sex was so good that it knocked me into a 12 hour coma?

Patrick cringed. Okay, that stung a little, but it’s not like he wasn’t aware that last night had been a much bigger deal for him than it had been for David.

[David] Sorry, I didn't mean that. It was very good.

[Patrick] For me too. Obviously.

He stared at David’s last message for a couple of long minutes. ‘It was very good.’ Was he just being kind? He could have just not texted at all if he wasn’t interested. He must be interested. Psyching himself up, Patrick typed out: Would you like to go out with me tonight? and pressed send before he could out-think himself.

The time between hitting send and when David texted back felt like years. Decades. Millennia, maybe.

[David] Or we could order in? At my place?

[Patrick] What time?

[David] 7?

[Patrick] See you then.

Patrick finally looked up from his phone and realized that a new speaker had taken over to present on the next topic. He also realized that absorbing any more information today was hopeless. He sent one more text:

I’m seeing him again tonight.

[Stevie] 👍👍👍

~*~

“Hi.”

“Hi.” Patrick stood on his doorstep, and if he hadn’t been wearing a shirt in a darker shade of blue, David would have sworn he had on the same clothes.

“Come on in,” David said, opening the door wider and sweeping his hand out dramatically. He’d agonized over his own clothes for far too long before opting for his favorite Kitsuné sweatshirt and a pair of skinny jeans that he thought made his ass look good.

“I brought wine,” Patrick said, holding out a bottle of red, “which is probably terrible, but in my defense, I don’t know or care anything about wine.”

“Thank you,” David said, taking the bottle and looking at it as they walked into the kitchen. “Actually, a Williamette Valley pinot is a safe bet, but it probably won’t pair well with the Thai food I just ordered.” He set it down on the counter. “We can open it after.”

Patrick shoved his hands deep in his pockets, rocking back and forth on his heels. He looked nervous.

“How was your seminar thing today?”

“Oh, I have no idea. Couldn’t stop thinking about stuff. You know, last night.”

David didn’t want to ask, but the word came out of his mouth before he could stop it, his head tilting back like it was trying to extract itself from this awkward conversation that his body had gotten them into. “Regrets?”

“I mean, I’ve cheated on my wife, so… yeah,” he said to the floor before looking back up at David. “But also, no. How could I regret the way you made me feel? Nothing’s ever… nothing’s ever felt as right as last night felt to me.”

“Okay,” David said, his voice coming out as a breathy tremble.

“I guess I wouldn’t be here if I truly had regrets.” And then it was like his hesitancy melted away and David got a glimpse of a confident man underneath as Patrick moved in to kiss him.

Patrick backed David up as their mouths collided, making his ass bump against the edge of the countertop. It was a dominance that hadn’t been in evidence the night before, and it made David go a little bit weak in the knees. “This was all I could think about all day,” Patrick whispered, which weakened his knees further.

David couldn’t stop himself from smiling, which interfered with his ability to kiss Patrick back. “That’s a… very nice thing to say.”

“It’s true.”

They continued making out, and David let his hands wander down to the plain of Patrick’s chest, over his belt to the bulge in his jeans. Patrick moaned into his mouth, and okay, that was it. David couldn’t take it anymore. He’d been thinking about this all day too, even if he wasn’t prepared to admit it out loud.

David turned them around so that Patrick was up against the counter and then sank to his knees. Immediately, he regretted the fact that they were in the kitchen where the granite floor was very hard, and his artfully ripped jeans weren’t doing him any favors.

He put his fingers on Patrick’s belt buckle. “May I?”

Patrick was breathing quickly, his eyes wide. “I… really want to say yes.”

David shrugged and gave him a tiny smile, his other hand rubbing up and down Patrick’s thigh. “So say yes.”

“God, David, you’re so hot. Yes.”

“And I just want you to know,” David said as he unfastened Patrick’s belt, “that I’m no less attracted to you because of this terrible woven belt.” Unfastening and unzipping his jeans carefully, David pressed a hand against Patrick’s erection through his underwear, turning Patrick’s laugh at the belt comment into a gasped exclamation. Inspired to tease him a little longer, David nuzzled and mouthed over Patrick’s clothed cock, his thighs trembling under David’s hands.

“How do you do that?” Patrick asked him.

“What?” David pulled Patrick’s underwear down but didn’t touch him, stretching out the anticipation, letting Patrick’s cock bob there in front of his face,.

“How do you make me feel this way?”

David didn’t answer, didn’t think he could answer even if he wanted to, so he avoided having to do so by taking Patrick’s cock into his mouth. He moved his hands to grip Patrick’s hips, holding him against the counter as he worked. Patrick seemed to have immediately been rendered speechless, reduced to hitched breathy sounds that were very gratifying.

This was an act David had performed countless times, and he often let his mind wander during the process. But right now his mind was full of only this, the rigid length of Patrick and the taste of him and the noises he was making. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Patrick gripping the counter, his knuckles white. David reached out for Patrick’s right hand, picking it up and putting it on the back of his own head, hoping he would get the message. Patrick’s fingers immediately gripped David’s hair, pulling slightly, and David moaned in appreciation.

“Fuck, David, I’m… I’m gonna…” David didn’t let up, swirling his tongue and sucking him deep until Patrick cried out and came down his throat.

Just as David was releasing Patrick from his mouth, the door intercom buzzed. “Look at that, perfect timing,” he said as he pulled himself up from the floor. “Food’s here.”

Patrick looked stunned, his breathing very fast, so David reached down to begin righting his clothes for him.

“I’ll get this, you get the door,” Patrick said, his voice raspy. He looked like he wanted to say more, but couldn’t summon the words.

“Okay,” David said, giving him a quick kiss on the cheek before going out to the hall to buzz in the delivery person.

~*~

“So how old were you when you came out?” Patrick speared a piece of chicken with a fork. “If you don’t mind me asking a personal question.”

David grimaced, but said mildly, “I don’t mind.” He took a sip of water. “Look, I’m not unaware that I have some stereotypically gay mannerisms. So most people assume I’m gay, and that included my parents. The hard part was convincing them that when it comes to sexual attraction, gender doesn’t matter to me.” When Patrick frowned in confusion at that, he added, “I identify as pansexual.”

“Oh. Sorry, I didn’t mean to assume.”

“No, it was a reasonable assumption. I mentioned I was waiting for a guy at the bar last night. Also I just gave you a blow job, so why wouldn’t you assume I’m gay?”

Patrick’s face heated up. It felt surreal that he was sitting politely at a table eating dinner with a man who’d just brought him to an earth-shattering orgasm fifteen minutes before, but he was doing his best to roll with it. He ate his noodles slowly, trying to ignore the loose, lazy feeling in his limbs. David had ordered an assortment of dishes, way too much for two people. Patrick had never been a picky eater, so all of it was fine with him, and the two of them had taken turns putting food from various containers onto their plates. In spite of his undercurrent of sexual panic, Patrick found it strangely comfortable sitting down to eat with David, like they’d done it a hundred times.

“Anyway, when I was a teenager I had dated some boys and some girls, and I guess my family assumed I was still figuring things out? I don’t know, we didn’t really talk about it. There was a point in college when I was in a polyamorous relationship with a couple, and so I just brought them home with me and told my parents to deal with it.”

“And they did?” Patrick asked. “Deal with it?”

David shrugged. “They weren’t… all that invested in my life. I guess they did. My dad did ask me at one point if it wouldn’t be easier if I picked a gender, but he’s never been… there was never any homophobic drama.”

Patrick thought about his own small-town upbringing, where any behavior outside of the norm would result in the epithet of ‘queer’ or worse being hurled at the person in question. It was the kind of bullying that Patrick himself had usually avoided — he was likable and good at sports, and he’d managed to traverse school with enough popularity to feel secure most of the time. His own parents had never said anything bad about gay people, but that was maybe because they’d never said much of anything about gay people.

He envied David, with his cosmopolitan family and his urban lifestyle, where he’d been open to exploring his sexual identity at a young age. He wondered what that must have been like.

“I’m embarrassed,” Patrick said, and then winced at his own admission.

“Why?”

“Because I’m thirty years old, David! How did I get to this age without realizing very basic things about my own identity?”

“Hey, don’t do that. Every queer person has a different journey.”

“Yeah, but if I could have figured it out sooner, I wouldn’t have so royally fucked up Rachel’s life.”

“Rachel is your wife?”

Patrick nodded and pushed his plate away. “It’s not like there weren’t signs, thinking back on it. My cousin Dennis just told me recently that he’d thought I was in love with a high school friend, Eric. And you know what? I guess I probably was. But I was dating Rachel, and I just thought… I don’t know. Maybe I just didn’t let myself think about it. Maybe I was afraid of what I might uncover if I thought about it.”

David was watching him carefully, just listening. It was comforting, having someone to talk to about this to who would just listen.

“I was a late bloomer. When I was thirteen and all my friends were pairing off and playing seven minutes in heaven at parties, I was only interested in hockey and baseball and music. I was small for my age, and I hit puberty seemingly after everybody else in my class.”

“Ugh, not me. I’m so fucking hairy — it’s my dad’s sephardic genes — and I hated it at that age. Braces and acne and hair everywhere and my terrible nose… I just wanted to hide under the bed until puberty was over.”

Patrick smiled. “What’s wrong with your nose?”

“Nothing now; I had a nose job.”

He’d be willing to bet that teenage David was more attractive than he was giving himself credit for, but Patrick let that topic drop. “Anyway, Rachel had been a friend of mine since we were kids, and when we were fifteen and she kissed me, I sort of went along with it. A girlfriend was something every guy was supposed to have, and here she was, a girlfriend I genuinely liked spending time with. I didn’t feel much when we kissed, but I never knew any better. I didn’t have anything to compare it to.”

“And by the time you reached an age where you might explore your sexuality, you were already dating Rachel,” David guessed.

“Yeah. But dating wasn’t… it just wasn’t a big deal in my life. I was a hard worker at school and I had a lot of activities that kept me occupied. Rachel and I did eventually, um…”

“Have sex.”

“Yeah. And it was fine. It felt good, and I figured, okay. This is what sex is. But I didn’t understand why it was such a driving force in other people’s lives,” Patrick said.

“I’ve known people on the asexual spectrum who felt that way.”

“I actually had a genderqueer bartender suggest that I might be asexual a few weeks ago, now that you mention it.”

David smirked. “For the record, you don’t seem to be asexual.”

“Yeah, no. Just in deep denial for a lot of wasted years, I guess.” He heaved a sigh. “Rachel and I were on-again, off-again for a long time, but we always just, I don’t know, fell back into it. We’d break up, and then something would always push us back together. I proposed, and then six months later I panicked and broke it off again and left town.”

“Ouch.”

“Yeah. So I moved to this small town that was even smaller than the one I’d grown up in for some bizarre reason,” Patrick continued. “But that didn’t magically fix me, it was just a change of scenery for my sadness.”

“You might have considered going to a city; Toronto, for example.”

Patrick shrugged. “I don’t know why I ended up where I ended up. It seemed like some kind of weird destiny at first, that it was very important that I be there. And then it just… wasn’t. So Rachel and I got back together and I suggested we elope.”

“Marrying her before you could chicken out again?” David guessed.

Patrick nodded. “In retrospect, yeah, that’s what it was. That was four months ago. Now I have to tell her… I don’t know what I’m going to tell her.”

“I’m sorry, Patrick. If I could have met you before you got married, I would have.”

He laughed, but there wasn’t any humor in it. “Yeah, that would have been nice, huh? If I’d realized this about myself six months ago, I could have spared Rachel some of the pain that…” Patrick wiped his hands over his face and groaned. “You know what? I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

David glanced over to the living room. “We could watch a movie?”

“Yeah, that sounds good.”

“I think I’m in a Sandy Bullock mood.” David drummed his fingers on his lips. “What’s your preference between Two Weeks Notice and The Lake House?”

Patrick had never seen either, so he shrugged and picked one at random. “The Lake House?”

David grinned at him. “Correct.”

Chapter 6

[cuthian]

*waves shyly* Hi! I've been a huge fan for years, and I've been reading Stucky fanfics for... God, I don't even know how long, but I never took the leap to write one myself. I was always a little afraid I wouldn't do my boys justice. This idea, however, would not leave me alone, and with some encouragement of my dearest Juulna, I was able to get it written down.

It's entirely written and just awaits editing and posting. Thank you to my darling Juulna, for giving me the courage to actually post this.

I hope you enjoy!

Love, Annaelle

(See the end of the work for more notes.)

Chapter One

—————

The story of Captain America has been shrouded in myth and urban legends from the moment he became a prominent player upon the battlefield during one of mankind’s bloodiest and cruelest wars in recorded history. There seems to be no single conclusive source that will confirm or deny any of the impossible feats that have been attributed to the man, nor anyone alive that can attest to witnessing said feats.

…the only thing that is, possibly, more mysterious than the figure of Captain America is the man behind the shield—a man whose full name is said will be released to the public in a few short weeks, on the fiftieth anniversary of our heroic Captain’s ultimate sacrifice, so that we may honor his memory as we should have been able to do for the past five decades.

—Sofia Johnson, ‘The Man Behind the Shield: Captain America, an exposé”, People Magazine, 1995

——————

S.H.I.E.L.D. Recovery room, New York City, New York, United States of America

June 2011Steve

There was music playing, somewhere in the distance, a jingling tune that Steve couldn’t identify for the life of him. He felt odd, ill at ease in his own body in a way he had not been since the first few days after he’d been given the serum.

His body felt simultaneously too big and too small, like it had in those excruciating few heartbeats in the chamber when he had been radiated with vita-rays. Like it had in the moment when his body was suspended between expanding and shrinking, falling apart at the seams while being knitted together again. His skin felt like it didn’t fit his body anymore, and he couldn’t figure out what had happened to make him feel like that again.

It took him an embarrassingly long time to realise his eyes were already open, and that he was blinking up at a stark white ceiling with some sort of fan that spun in lazy circles.

He felt unfocused and tired, and though he tried to look around the small, brightly lit room he had somehow found himself in, his entire body felt stiff and unused, and his muscles seemed to protest even the smallest movement.

Something felt wrong about the room—it looked much like one of those recovery rooms in the SSR headquarters, but not quite. The details didn’t add up, and the sounds that filtered through felt too loud—like a cacophony of superfluous sounds from New York that had been dialed up until it was all he could hear.

He blinked when he noticed an open window, sunlight filtering through the thin, gauzy curtain and falling onto the bed where he lay—

But he couldn’t feel its warmth.

He couldn’t smell anything¸ and that, more than anything, unnerved him. Before the serum, he’d been sick constantly and had suffered from a near-permanent stuffed nose, but after he’d received it, he’d been able to smell everything—even miles away.

It had been hell at times, especially when he and the Commandos were sent on stealth missions that went on for weeks without much room for bathing and cleanliness.

Knowing that he couldn’t smell anything but the dull, stale scent of old bandages and recently unearthed sheets unnerved him more than he could put into words, because he could hear the city, even as off as it sounded, and he could hear murmured conversations that blended into one another until he couldn’t tell one word from another anymore.

It was… wrong.

He sat up slowly, biting back a groan at the ache in his joints and the strain in his muscles as he did.

Before he had the chance to move, the door opened and a woman stepped in, a pleasant but bland smile on her lips, and Steve figured she was supposed to be some sort of nurse.

He noticed immediately though, that her hair was not done up in the traditional curled bun he had seen his mother don hundreds of times, instead hanging loose over her shoulders in odd, wavy curls unlike any hairstyle he had seen women in professional settings wear before.

“Good morning,” she offered with a kind smile, though there was a note of humor in her voice. She glanced at the watch on her wrist—too large, too shabby to be a woman’s—and added, “Or should I say afternoon?” Steve watched, a feeling of unease curling in the pit of his stomach, as she stepped closer to the foot of the bed he was still seated on.

As she stepped did, his eyes were drawn to her attire, and it struck him just how ill-fitting her clothes were. Her blouse was bunched awkwardly into her skirt and her tie was broad, like a man’s tie should be and, though his cheeks flushed and embarrassment burned through his veins when he noticed, her brassiere did not look like any he had ever seen Peggy or any of the showgirls wear.

Something was wrong.

For some reason, he was being held in an odd facsimile of a recovery room, with a woman who was—poorly—pretending to be a nurse. It seemed like too much of an effort for Hydra to organize something on this scale, and Steve was fairly certain that after Schmidt had… disintegrated, for a lack of a better word, Hydra had far bigger things to concern themselves with than keeping Captain America in a recovery room of all places.

If Hydra had found him, they’d have tossed him in a dark, damp cell.

And yet…

“Where am I?” he demanded, slowly pushing himself up from the bed—with a mattress that was softer and smoother than anything he had ever felt before—as he assessed the room, a little disgruntled to find the only secure point of exit was the door the woman had entered through.

“You’re in a recovery room in New York City,” she replied immediately, her voice pleasant and smooth, but Steve had been part of show business long enough to recognize when someone recited lines from a script. There was enough intonation in her voice to pass of her words as genuine, but the way her expression did not change whatsoever and the way she replied almost before he had finished asking the question in the first place raised his hackles.

He might not know what was going on, but he was not going to take it lying down.

“Where am I, really?” he insisted, stepping directly towards her, not above using the sheer size of his body to intimidate this strange woman into telling him the truth.

Before she could respond again—undoubtedly with more well-rehearsed lies—the door behind her flew open and another woman stepped in. Steve gaped at her, because he had never seen a woman dressed as boldly as she was, nor had he ever seen a woman wear this many weapons—and he didn’t doubt that she carried more that he hadn’t yet clocked.

She wore tight black trousers that made him blush even as he tore his eyes away from the way they accentuated her shapely, muscled legs, only to have his gaze linger on her torso, likewise clad in tight black fabric that accentuated her figure in ways even Peggy had not been bold enough to try. She wore several firearms and had a knife strapped to her thigh, and Steve had no idea what was going on anymore.

“We tried your way, Van Zandt,” the woman said, shoving at the oddly dressed nurse. “Told you he wouldn’t fall for it. Go brief Fury. I’ll take it from here.”

Van Zandt—assuming that was her name—seemed to consider the other woman, opening her mouth in protest, Steve supposed, before she snapped it shut at the glare the other woman shot her way. She squared her shoulders and tilted her chin as she stared the redhead down, and Steve was struck by the sudden flare of pain from the throbbing ache that had lodged itself beneath his breastbone the moment Bucky had fallen.

The way the dark-haired woman moved was eerily similar to the way Bucky had, when he’d been trying to intimidate bullies into backing down, or when he’d squared off against Howard when the older man tried to imply that Bucky or Steve weren’t smart because they’d not been able to afford college.

He watched with interest as the redheaded woman eventually withered beneath the other woman’s glare—it had worked miracles when Bucky had done it too, his mind supplied unhelpfully—drooping out of the room with the distinct air of a kicked puppy.

“Captain,” the new woman spoke again as she turned back towards him, a genuine smile on her lips, though he could see something akin to wonder lingering just beneath the surface of her expression as well. “I apologize for the poor show-and-tell.” She waved her hand at the room in general, and Steve wondered if he was supposed to say something about that—

She continued before he could, though, gesturing towards the bed while she pulled out a chair for herself. “Please, sit. I will try to explain what is happening, but I need you to tell me what the last thing you remember is first.”

“I—” Steve stuttered, plopping back down on the bed ungracefully as he stared at her. “The Valkyrie. Schmidt… disintegrated and I… I didn’t have time to land the plane, so I—”

Cold. So, so cold. Pain. He can’t breathe—

“Captain?”

The woman’s voice abruptly drew him back from the memory, and he swallowed thickly, shame curdling in the pit of his belly for showing such weakness. He did not want to give the woman any indication he might be suffering from battle fatigue—it was a weakness he could not afford to show.

“I put her down in the water,” he concluded quietly, casting his gaze down to his own hands to avoid seeing the look on the woman’s face.

“No loss of memory, then,” she deduced gently, offering him a kind smile when he dared look up again. “A few weeks ago, a recovery team in the Arctic Circle came across a large object in the ice that sent their radars haywire. Upon further investigation, they realized it was a warplane, and when they entered, they found your body.”

Steve flinched, but shook his head when she paused in her explanation. “No,” he insisted. “Tell me.”

He met her gaze head-on—and was oddly struck by the icy blue color of her eyes, a shade that was all too similar to the color of Bucky’s—until she nodded and offered him a quick grin.

“It took some maneuvering, but they determined that your heart was still beating. We’re still not entirely sure what happened, but the generally accepted theory is that the serum kept you alive, and the ice preserved you until we could find you.”

“Who are you?” he blurted, twisting his fingers together in a nervous gesture he usually tried to suppress. “Where am I really?”

The woman offered him a wry smile and leaned back in the seat and seemed to take a moment to think about her words before she replied. “You’re in New York City,” she began, holding up her hand to stall him when he opened his mouth to protest again. “You’re in a specially built recovery room inside S.H.I.E.L.D. HQ, which is an intelligence agency that developed out of the SSR after the war. You’re here because the higher ups wanted to break the news to you gently. S.H.I.E.L.D. stands for Strategic Homeland Intervention Enforcement Logistics Division.”

Steve couldn’t help the snort that fell from his lips as she explained the acronym, shaking his head a little as he rubbed his thumb and forefinger across the bridge of his nose. “Someone really wanted that to spell S.H.I.E.L.D., didn’t they?” he said wryly, smiling a little at the entirely undignified snort that fell from the woman’s lips.

“Yeah,” she chuckled, lips curled up into a broad grin. “From what I hear, they really did.”

They were silent for a moment while Steve let her words sink in, before he swallowed thickly and asked, “You said, ‘after the war’… Does that mean—is it—did we?���

He couldn’t quite get the words past his lips, terrified of what the answer might be, but it seemed she knew what he was trying to ask anyway. “We won, Captain, in no small amount thanks to the sacrifices you and your men made during ’44 and ’45.”

The words comfort him for a long, blissful heartbeat before the way she worded her sentence finally hit him. Bucky had been the one reading any science-fiction book he could get his hands on, had been the one devouring Brave New World until the copy his mother had gotten him had been frayed at the edges, but Steve had listened, every now and then, when Bucky talked about it.

There was usually only one reason people named years the way she did.

God, please. Please, no.

“What year is it?” he asked slowly, voice hoarse and trembling. He’d been afraid to hear about the outcome of the war, but that fear paled in comparison to the outright terror he experienced while waiting for her reply.

Her smile turned strained and a little sympathetic before she replied, “2011.”

The words felt like a blow to the chest, leaving him breathless in a way he hadn’t been since the serum cured his asthma, and his head felt like it was spinning as he tried to comprehend the magnitude of what she’d told him—2011.

That would be—sixty-six years—Peggy—Dum Dum—Gabe—all of his friends—everyone—

Bucky.

“Captain? Steve?”

He snapped his head up at the sound of his given name, and he suddenly realized his breath was wheezing in his lungs and his breathing was far too fast and he was slightly lightheaded. He hadn’t realized he was falling headfirst into an anxiety attack, and while it wasn’t the first he’d had, it was the first time he had to deal with one without his mother, Bucky, or even Peggy to talk him down.

“Steve, it’s okay. I’m going to help you calm down, alright? Just listen to my voice. I’m gonna count, and I want you to try to match your breathing to it, okay?” He barely had time to nod before the bed sagged a little beside him and her hands were suddenly curled around his, her voice soothing and calm in his ear. “One… Two… Three…”

His breath slowed more easily than he had thought it would, and before long, the world had stopped spinning and he felt less like he was going to choke on thin air. He didn’t know how long they sat there, her thumb rubbing over his knuckles in a soothing gesture wholly like Bucky had done hundreds of times over the course of their lives together.

“What do I do now?” he whispered, the words slipping from him before he could stop them, before he could censor himself, before he could slip back into the Captain America mindset and make the woman forget the embarrassing display of weakness she had witnessed.

She didn’t reply for a moment, clearly deep in thought as well, before she offered him a smile and said, “Well, if you’re up for a field trip, I’m pretty sure I know someone who’ll be thrilled to see you.”

He eyed her speculatively for a moment, briefly trying to think of anyone he knew that would even be alive anymore, once again struck by how much she reminded him of Bucky—no matter how hard he tried not to think about him, because he would fall apart if he thought about him again—before he nodded.

Anything was more appealing than sitting in this room, alone with his thoughts.

“Thank you for your honesty,” he blurted when he stood, following the young woman—who was some kind of agent, he was sure, with this S.H.I.E.L.D.—to the door. “I appreciate it, Miss…” He faltered, quite suddenly realizing he had no idea what her name actually was.

She turned at the sound of his hesitation, and for the first time, he saw a crack in the confident façade she had portrayed so far. “…Barnes,” she finally said, and his heart jumped to his throat while the bottom of his stomach fell away.

“Rebecca Barnes.”

Notes:

Thank you for reading! Leave a comment/kudos <3

Until next week!

[itsnotdavid-blog]

MY VILLAINOUS LAIR

TL;DR - I’m indecisive and I don’t know if I want to live in a large house surrounded by friends and family, or if I’d be better off hiding away in isolation inside some tiny, walled off excuse of a home. No to cars, yes to gardens. Fuck yeah, nature!

-

Nothing’s more fun than being tasked with writing a blog post for a class activity. To start things off, I’d like to apologize beforehand for this needlessly long wall of text. I don’t expect you to read along, and I certainly don’t expect you to remember all the itty bitty details, but I do want you to know is that I’m what the cool kids call extra. We were expected to draw one house and my stupid self ended up coming up with three. If that doesn’t give you an idea of what kind of person I am, then I don’t know what will. 

The question still lingers: what exactly do these houses represent? If there’s one thing I’ve learned today, it’s that all these seemingly insignificant little doodles form a bigger picture. Isn’t it exciting - a big picture made of little pictures? Like one big mosaic where each tile delves deeper into the myriad insecurities that stir within me. My inner optimist says it’ll paint something pretty, like a field of vibrant sunflowers, or a horde of zombies getting ravaged by a pack of fire-breathing velociraptors. Then again, there’s also the possibility of this picture taking the semblance of a donkey’s sphincter, or possibly even Mama June after a hot, sweaty yoga session. 

Either way, the picture isn’t what’s important. 

What’s important is that I’ve got three houses, each more pointless than the last, and it’s my job to figure out what these doodles mean. Even as the professor spoke and told us to put our pencils aside, I simply couldn’t keep mine off the paper. It was like there was this odd, supernatural force compelling me to finish what I started. But why? I don’t even put this much effort into waking up in the morning, so what’s gotten me to go full-ham on something entirely fictional and meaningless? The more time I spent on the drawing, the more I began to realize it was wholly unrealistic.

So I started again.

Scratched that one after five minutes. Too small, too unambitious. This one didn’t seem right to me at all.

So I started again.

Eventually I ran out of time, and was ultimately left with three unfinished houses; all distinct with little-to-no similarities save for the essentials. Needless to say, I was devastated. How could I fail something as simple as drawing a house? This was the unassuming sort of task you’d give to a five year old and I’m sure they’d manage to get it finished one way or another. I’ll bet their houses even have dinosaurs. Life isn’t fair.

The first house I drew was far larger than the other two - the perfect home for a less-than perfect family. There’s even a small patch of land in the back that’s dedicated to growing fruit and vegetables, it is fucking awesome. Despite the sheer size of the building, the rooms totaled to four, and that’s only if you don’t count the garden and the backyard. Think of it this way: if a house is big, you can assume it’s got a lot of rooms, and if it’s got a lot of rooms, it’s got a lot of space for inhabitants and/or guests. Generally, some of the more introverted people prefer returning to a lonelier home after a long day of work, faking smiles and chatting up people they’d never interact with outside the office. The last thing they’d want to deal with at home is even more needless social interaction. 

With that in mind, it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to conclude that an introvert wouldn’t want to live with other people unless they absolutely had to. The second house drawn seems to represent this on a deeper level. Let’s pretend for one minute that there’s more to me than meets the eye. It’s not totally unreasonable to assume that a self-proclaimed introvert would want some company every now and then - there’s no shame in wanting to be alone, but that doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to enjoy spending time with friends and family. The two aren’t mutually exclusive.

Though it might not be clear, given my abysmal skill with architecture, house planning and all things creative, I poured a lot more passion into this house in comparison to the others. Even if I firmly believe that what other people think of me is none of my business, I still feel as if my appearance matters in some way. I’m all for sticking to the status quo but there’s no denying that I’m, as I said before, what the cool kids call extra. For better or for worse. 

It’s strange. I’d never admit it in person, I do actively try to distinguish myself from the crowd for whatever reason… but at the same time, I resent the attention that comes with it. It’s a hard duality to put into words, so you’ll have to pardon my inability to explain it. I don’t quite get it myself, you see. Even if everyone in the world’s special and unique in their own whimsical little ways, people are too busy concerned with themselves to notice this about others. It’s an easy to trap to fall into, perceiving someone as dull simply because they’re not good conversationalists; because their quirks are of the subtler sort and only tend to shine once you truly get to know the person. 

The tragedy is, people won’t ever invest enough time to see that side of them.

This is only highlighted by the sheer difference between this house and the two drawn after it. It could be argued that the first home - the larger home - represents the side of me that wants to be surrounded people, and stand out by towering over all the others. This is in stark contrast to the other two, which arguably fits the size of an apartment room than an actual house given its scale and lack of a second floor - a claustrophobic little hovel that’s more fit for a gremlin than a man. I’d imagine it’d be like living in a trash compactor. Don’t get me wrong, it’s good living. Doesn’t change the fact that you’re living in a trash compactor.

Still, I get the feeling I’m only scratching the surface and that there’s so much you can take from the size of the two houses alone. Maybe it represents my desire to live in isolation in my villainous lair, walled off from the rest of the world. Looking back on it now, there’s no way I’d survive in a house like that. I’d go insane, mainly because there’s nothing to do but also because I’m a bit of a claustrophobe. What was I thinking?

Just by looking at this house alone, you can already tell I’ve started to lose a bit of steam. There’s a reason why I don’t do interior decorating - it’s because I’m absolutely dreadful at it. Look at this. What kind of madman puts the bathroom next to the kitchen and not the bedroom? It’s hilariously inefficient, if you ask me. Takes a certain kind of idiot to come up with a house like this and even bigger one to want to live in it.

Bah! It just gets worse and worse!

If there’s something all three of these houses have in common, it’s a kitchen. Funny. You’d think the bedroom would be something I’d prioritize, but apparently food comes first. In all fairness, the only reason I didn’t include a bedroom in the first doodle was because I lacked the time. It’s strange though. I haven’t exactly cooked a proper meal since I moved here just a little over a year ago. Perhaps this the brain’s strange and subtle way of telling you to start cooking once again, though it’s also possible that my brain’s simply calling me fat. Either way, it capitalizes on my love of food. 

On the other hand there is something that all my houses lack and the only person I can blame for that is myself. There’s no fucking garage. Whether it was a simple overlook or a subconscious desire, it’s given me a lot to think about. I’ve never been fond of cars, and I’ve never exactly wanted to drive either so it’s only natural that there’ll be nothing in my house related to such things. Still, every family ought to have a vehicle. They’ve got to get around town somehow. Walking simply isn’t an option in this day and age, as fun as it sounds. Speaking of oversights, I’ve also failed to make any note of what house would look from the outside. All I’ve got is a top-down view: a simple outline that maps out where the furniture’s supposed to go. 

Not that I’d end up following it anyway. 

[mylittledragonhoard]

Fic: A Growing Trust - Chapter 2: Fili

Semi prequel to A Sign of Trust.

AO3 Link

The mer is slowly starving to death, and it's hard being the only one clinging to hope that he'll survive.

The sudden quiet was what brought Thorin out of the deep concentration it took when it came to the facility's paperwork.  It was tedious and boring and the part Thorin hated the most about being the owner and boss. Numbers swam before his eyes and slowly faded as he turned toward the door of his office, leaning back in his chair to stretch muscles he hadn't used in a couple of hours and to see if he could see anything from the hall.

There was nothing of interest, but that's not where the sound had been coming from for the last few days anyway. He sighed and straightened the chair, rubbing a hand down his face in an attempt wipe the wariness he'd been feeling for the last while away.

A nervous tension hung over the aquarium that effected the residents and the staff, and it was getting worse every day that passed that the mermaid they'd brought in went without eating.

He'd spent a little more than a week in Oin's medical bay while his infected wounds slowly healed, only able to be misted so that his scales and skin didn't dry or crack. He'd been getting nutrients intravenously then, which had granted him a little more time, but Oin couldn't very well keep him that way forever.

The slices along his tail where his fins once were had healed surprisingly well, but the laceration running down his right side had been aggravated and the stitches broken when Oin had allowed the mer to wake from his sedative state to get a better read on his vitals. The mer had predictably freaked out, lashing out at anything he could, and it had taken both Thorin and Kili to hold him down. Luckily he was still groggy and uncoordinated.

Oin had gotten caught by those claws as had Kili before another sedative could be administered. Thankfully neither injury was very deep and wouldn't scar in the future, unlike the teeth marks embedded in Kili's left arm from when the mer had caught it between his jaws. 

The mer's new - hopefully - temporary home wasn't very big, but he couldn't be kept out of the water any longer, and until Oin deemed his patient well enough for a larger and deeper enclosure, it would have to do. It was an observation tank connected to the medical bay, which freed up his ward once more. The veterinarian was getting frustrated with having Kili constantly under foot as the brunet sat by his patient and read book after book on mermaids. Once he'd run out of physical things to read, he had turned to the internet and would constantly be staring at his phone when he wasn't asking Oin questions or talking to the unconscious creature. Thorin found Oin's annoyance rather amusing, but he definitely wasn't going to let Oin know that.

There was a fair sized viewing window in the wall between the tank and medical bay so that Oin could see how things were going from an underwater prospective, and that way Kili could get out of his space and sit on the observation platform on the roof of the medical ward to watch over the mer instead of constantly stealing Oin's desk chair.

Because the sedative had still been in his system, it had been like releasing a sleepy toddler complete with disgruntled complaining and half-hearted glares that would have been downright scathing had he not been drugged to the gills he no longer had. Instead they were actually rather endearing and caused both Tauriel and Ori to coo and squeal at him.

Clearly having enough of humans, the mer had retreated to the farthest corner of the tank with a flick of his tail where he'd curled up to sleep it off.

When he refused to be drawn away from the corner a day after, and then a day after that, Thorin had noted Kili growing a little tense despite the young man's reassurances that he wasn't worried. They'd all seen it before with new residents coming into a new and strange environment, refusing to eat until they settled down a little.

Oin had also reassured him that it was normal behaviour, and the vet was sure that the mer would grow hungry enough on his own to seek out food.

Hope had been high for the first few days, but by now it was clear that something was wrong. Physically the mer was fine; Oin had reassured him he'd gone over everything, but the creature still refused to eat. He barely moved from the corner he'd planted himself in. This wasn't unheard of and was actually typical behaviour for captive mers, but knowing that didn't make it any easier to bear.

Everyone in the facility wanted the mer to survive, and it was hard on everyone to watch such a beautiful creature waste away to nothing after suffering so much already. But it was hardest on Kili.

When he'd given Kili the assignment, Thorin hadn't realized just how much heart the young man would put into it so quickly. He'd barely gone home, hell, he'd barely left the medical ward before the mer had been released, and now he spent all his time by the tank either reading or just talking to the creature.

Thorin had gotten used to hearing his voice filtering into his office since the tank was close by, and the sudden silence was unnerving. With a sigh and a slight feeling of apprehension, he pushed out of his chair and stretched until his back gave a satisfying pop before making his way out of his office and down the hall. He was stalling a little, half expecting to find out that the mermaid had finally given up. As sad as it was, he was used to this kind of thing happening in his many years doing this job, but he knew Kili wasn't and that's what was going to break Thorin's heart.

His name was called out as he passed the medical ward, and he stopped and looked inside where Oin was sitting at his desk. The room looked bigger without the mer and Kili taking up room.

"He's not up there anymore." Oin explained without looking up from whatever it was he was writing on. "Tauriel dragged him over to visit Lady for a break. She alway manages to put a smile on his face."

Thorin smiled slightly as he entered the ward, "Lady or Tauriel?"

Oin hummed as he took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes. They were all tired these days. "It might just take both of them at the moment." He admitted before turning around so that he could see through the observation window.

Thorin moved away from the door so that he could also see inside the tank. The view was disheartening to say the least. The mer was in his ususal corner, farthest from the window. Sometimes he'd stretch out along the wall, but other times, like now, he'd be curled up in the smallest form possible. His back was facing the two men, showing off the few scars he'd accumulated within his life. None of them had been fresh when he'd been brought in, so they were assumed to be from regular life living in the ocean.

"Hasn't moved in a couple of hours." Oin said before Thorin could ask. "As far as I can tell he should have been dead by now." The veterinarian muttered, making Thorin turn to him in surprise. "He was already malnourished and severely underweight when he got here, and considering his fins had only recently been cut off, I can only guess that he was kept somewhere for a while."

Thorin frowned at hearing this news. "Normally they're brought inland though, so they have no chance of escaping back into the ocean. He was found washed up on a beach."

"It's just speculation," Oin shrugged, "But greedy people can live near the oceans too. Perhaps when they realized he was dying, as mers in captivity tend to do, they decided to make some profit and sold him to a poacher." The vet smirked then and gave Thorin a smug look, "But our boy's intelligent and a fighter and managed to escape somehow. My best guess would be that he put those teeth to good use."

There had been bruising along the mer's face, as if someone had taken a fist to him. Thorin could easily see the mer having latched on to some vital body part and refusing to let go until he was literally beaten off. He was ashamed to admit that the thought of having to do something similar had crossed his mind when he'd witnessed those teeth locked around Kili's arm. Luckily, Thorin could control his baser instinct.

The smug look melted away and was replaced by a deep regret. "The diet of the mermaid isn't well documented because they're such a secretive lot. Kili has gone through book after book and scoured the internet for any information he can find, but so far anything listed as part of their diet has been rejected or impossible to catch." Oin motioned toward the tank. "He won't even look at dead fish and the live ones are too quick for him."

Thorin could see what looked like three small herring gathered near the observation window and far away from the mer. "Dead fish probably mean diseased or something wrong to him." Thorin pointed out.

"True." Oin agreed, "But he's too slow for live ones. He tried catching these three for a while, but eventually he lost the energy and the motivation." He turned back to his desk so he didn't have to see the desolate creature. "Tauriel and Ori want to name him."

"Oh?" Thorin was surprised that Kili hadn't been the one to mention it sooner.

Oin nodded but he didn't look happy about it. "They think it'll mean more to Kili if he can remember his mer as an individual instead of just a creature he couldn't save."

Thorin could see the point behind that idea, and though he didn’t want to think of what that would do to Kili, it was becoming more of a possibility every day. "Maybe that's a good idea."

"I thought so." Oin turned to Thorin, a serious expression on his face. "You need to talk to Kili, Thorin. As much as I don't want to say this, it doesn't look like this mer is going to survive. His tail is starting to lose its colour and his skin gets paler by the day. I know how much Kili was looking forward to helping him, but we've done all we can. He looks up to you and he respects you. He might have an easier time accepting it if he hears it from you."

Thorin scoffed. The last thing he wanted to do was have this talk with Kili. "Regardless of who it comes from, Kili will have a problem accepting this." He took a deep breath, "But I'll talk to him." He nodded, but he'd do it his way.

***

"That's a good girl, Lady!" Tauriel praised the manatee and slipped her a little treat after she'd managed to manoeuvre around her obstacle. The gentle creature was still moving in the same counter clockwise path as before, but now she was beginning to recognise that if she shifted sooner, she could change her path just a little.

"I suppose I should give your obstacle a treat too, hm?" She cooed to the manatee, scratching her whiskered chin as vibrant green eyes shifted to look at said obstacle.

Kili rolled his eyes upon hearing that comment, but it was his only reaction. He didn't feel like bantering with anyone right now. He didn't feel like doing much of anything except going back to the mer’s tank.

He heard her sigh and watched as she planted a big smooch on Lady's head. "I don't think we're distracting him very well, Lady." She whispered loud enough for him to hear before standing up straight and making her way over to where he stood in the water. Her eyes were worried though she tried to hide it behind a kind smile, bringing her hand up to sweep away the bright red bangs that refused to stay in the pony tail she'd tied the rest of her hair up in. "Maybe you should go home and sleep. Your actual home and not the bunker."

Within the last week, Kili had only gone home to shower and to occasionally eat something, staying either by the observation tank or crashing in one of the bunks when he couldn't keep his eyes open any longer. He was riddled with anxiety and constant fear that if he were to leave, he'd come back to find the mer had died without him there. He was also filled with guilt every time he put food in his mouth, and he knew that it was a useless thought. He shouldn't stop eating just because the mermaid refused to, but the guilt ate at him nonetheless. She'd always had observation skills that Kili could only dream of possessing, so it wasn’t surprising that she’d noticed.

"I'm good." He finally responded to her suggestion, "I want to look through a few books this afternoon and see if I can find something else that might help." Never mind the fact that he'd read the same books over and over so many times that he practically had them memorized, and there was nothing in them that he hadn't already tried twice.

Tauriel's brow pinched for a moment and her lips pursed together so hard that they turned white. Kili had known her for a long time and he could read her thoughts from her expression. She wanted to talk some sense into him, though by her clenched fist, perhaps she wanted to beat it into him instead. She did neither and he watched as she physically reigned herself in, forcing that well known redheaded temper back to spare him. "Maybe." She said instead of what she truly wanted to say, "You never know."

He was being humoured, and he was hurting enough that he didn't care. While he was fearful of the mer dying, the rest of the staff was just waiting. They were still upset by it, but they'd accepted that it was inevitable. Kili hadn't accepted anything.

"I wish you'd smile again, Kili." Tauriel sighed as she turned to watch Lady make another around, scooping up the plants that she's managed to swim over. "Even the animals feel when you're upset."

"I'll smile when the mer eats something."

Tauriel did nothing for a moment, but then Kili found himself suddenly held in an embrace and being squeezed tighter than he normally would have been. "If you need to talk, you know I'll listen." She invited.

Before he could tell her that there was nothing to talk about, the sound of his name drew his attention away from her sympathy and to his boss standing by the ladder. Kili's heart automatically lurched sickeningly inside his chest as thoughts as to why Thorin would be there specifically looking for him raced through his mind.

Tauriel pulled away at the same time and they both looked up at him.

Thorin didn't look like he was about to deliver the devastating news Kili had been dreading, and for a moment he felt a flash of annoyance at the same sympathetic look on Thorin's face that Tauriel had, but he knew it wasn't worth the hassle to call the man out on it. He understood they were worried, but they were worrying about the wrong being.

"I'm taking you home." Thorin voiced, leaving no room for argument.

Of course Kili argued anyway. "I'm good, but thanks. I drove myself here anyway."

"Two days ago." Thorin scowled and crossed his arms. With his already imposing features combined with the rather impressive beard he'd allowed to grow simply because it was easier than trimming it, he was a little intimidating. "I have some errands to run closer in town so I can drop you off. As your boss I'm ordering you to shower, maybe take a nap, and eat something." Those eyes narrowed at him, "I know damn well you don't eat while you're here. I don't need you not eating either. So you have ten minutes to get your ass in my truck."

That actually made Kili's lips twitch upward into an almost smile. "My soaking wet ass?"

"I've had a seal ride shotgun, a little water isn't going to hurt anything. And we'll drive with the windows down to counter the smell."

Kili allowed himself to react the way he knew they wanted him to. He huffed out an offended breath and was about to respond to the comment, but then something happened that he wasn't expecting. There was a pressure against his side and the next thing he knew he was inhaling water.

He sat up sputtering and wiping water from his face, glaring at the grey culprit who'd made another lap around her tank. "Are you telling me I need a bath?" He hauled himself to his feet again, eyes narrowing at Tauriel as she tried to hide her laughter.

Seeing his glare caused her to erupt, giggling freely. "I think Lady's saying you should go with Thorin." Tauriel insisted as she shooed Kili away.

Clearly he was being ganged up on, and it felt nice to forget about his worries for a moment. They were back full force with that thought and he turned back to Thorin. "This isn't your way of breaking the news that the mer's gone to me gently, is it?" He asked suspiciously because that is something Thorin would do; take Kili away from people to give him his privacy.

Thorin shook his head, "He's still hanging in there. You can check before we leave. You now have seven minutes."

Kili snorted as he dragged himself through the water, using the ladder instead of his preferred method of climbing out of the tank via Air-Thorin. "I hope your truck stinks for months." He muttered as he squeezed water out of his clothes.

"It still stinks from the last time you were in it." Thorin bantered back the way they always did, "I've gotten used to the stench." He winked at Kili before clapping him on the shoulder. "I've got to stick a few things in the back of it. There's a package you can grab from Oin and check on your mer at the same time." With that he turned around and walked away. "Five minutes!"

Kili frowned, "He's not my mer." He shook his head before glancing back at Tauriel and Lady. "Guess I'll see you later."

"Much later." Those green eyes caught the sun, which made her stern look all the more intense.

Kili made his way down into the hallways beneath the observation area, heading to the medical bay. He'd spent most of his time above water, only able to see the dark figure from up top. He was actually a little apprehensive to see the mer through the glass. It made denial that much harder when one saw a better picture.

"Ah, Kili. Tauriel chase you away?" Oin greeted him good naturedly. The vet was at his desk, writing on something before beginning to tape it to a box.

"Something like that." Kili admitted as he plodded over to the observation window and forced himself to peek in. He deflated a little, leaning his hands on a small ledge. The mer looked worse than when they'd brought him in. Kili's hand unconsciously slid down his left arm and rubbed over the healing marks those teeth had left. At least the creature had had more life then. But he was still alive, so not all hope was gone.

"Hang on, buddy. We'll figure something out." He whispered as he leaned his forehead against the cool glass.

Pale blue eyes stared back at him calmly from inside the tank before blinking closed and not opening again.

Kili sucked in a deep breath before turning back to the vet, "Thorin said you have a package?"

"Right here." Oin tapped the box he'd just been taping. "Frozen blood and tissue samples."

That made Kili curious. "From the mer?" 

"Mm hm. I took them while he was sedated and you were sitting in my chair snoring." Oin seemed to read his mind, "Things have slowed down enough now that someone can run them to the main lab. They'll be tested for age, but also to evaluate how his organs are functioning, and any diseases he may have."

"Do you think they might be able to tell why he won't eat?" Kili was hopeful.

Oin's expression said it all, "Even if I put a rush on it, we wouldn't get results for several weeks, Kili." He kept his voice gentle.

The mer would starve to death long before then. This was obviously for medical research more than it was for aiding the ill creature. "Well, we'll figure it out without it then." Kili insisted.

"I hope you do." Oin said, but Kili could detect his doubt. He'd given up too. Even the veterinarian had given up. Oin picked the box up and handed it to Kili, "Now get this to Thorin. When you boys return, he'll still be here." The older man promised as he motioned toward the tank with his head.

Kili took the box, face neutral. He didn't bother saying anything on his way out.

Thorin was already waiting for him in the small employee parking area, leaning against an old Chevy that was definitely older than Kili. It was a two-toned blue, regular cab four-by-four beast that was surprisingly dependable for her age.

Kili was sulking as he approached with the box in hand. "Why can't I just drive myself home?"

A dark eyebrow rose as Thorin looked at him with such an unimpressed expression that Kili had to fight the urge to squirm. "One, because I don't trust you to drive. I don't think you've slept much in the last week. And two, I don't trust you to go home."

"Ouch, Thor. That's a lot of distrust. It breaks my heart to hear that my favourite person in this whole world doesn't trust me."

That got him an eye roll and a hand nudging him to the passenger side. "Not with your health. You're going to burn out and then you won't be a help to anyone." Thorin expressed as he opened the door and got in. The old metal of the truck squealed with the movement, but it gave a solid slam when the door closed.

Kili climbed into his seat, setting the box on the floor between his feet before buckling up. "You're not just going to drop me off and then not come back, right? Because I'll just take a cab back." He wasn't sure if it was a promise or a threat, but Kili wasn't fooling around.

Thorin sighed and gripped the wheel as he started the engine. It roared loudly for a moment before calming to a pleasant hum. "As much as I want you to get a good night's sleep, I wouldn't do that to you." He promised before putting the truck in gear and backing up. "But I'm going to be gone for a few hours. You'd do well to squeeze a nap in during that time. If you're still asleep when I come to pick you up, I'll wake you."

"Swear it to me." Kili couldn't help but feel distrustful. He knew he wasn't taking care of himself properly, but he had other priorities that were more important. Thorin, on the other hand, had to look out for his employees first and foremost.

"I solemnly swear that I will come get you after my errands and I will bring you back to the aquarium." Thorin dutifully recited as they pulled away from the building and turned onto the road leading to the highway that would take them into the heart of the city.

"Thank you." Kili could trust Thorin's word despite all his misgivings.

Kili's apartment was downtown in a large, but quiet complex. The apartment itself was on the small size, but perfect for Kili who barely spent any time there. One bedroom, one bathroom, a full kitchen attached to the living room, and a room for storage had been his home since he'd moved out of his mother's place. He was one of the youngest tenants, but his landlady had always treated him fairly and had kind of adopted him like a grandmother would.

Once Thorin had sped off to do his errands, Kili made his way up to his floor, attempting to focus on what he needed to do without any intruding thoughts.

Of course, something as simple as taking a shower made him think of the aquatic creature, but he managed to clean up without incident. And maybe Thorin had had a point about bathing considering he pulled at least three strands of plant material out of his hair. That wasn't something the man would ever find out about.

Forgoing food because he probably didn't have anything edible, the brunet decided that he'd try to get a little sleep in before Thorin returned. With all the thoughts and emotions churning around inside him, he didn't expect to really be able to, but instead, he was out minutes after hitting the pillow.

***

He was woken sometime later by a loud knocking, and he slowly came awake, blinking up at the intruder standing in his doorway knocking on the frame.

"Should I let you sleep longer?" Thorin's voice jolted Kili back to reality and he remembered why he was even home and why Thorin was there.

"No." Kili sat up, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.

"You didn't answer your phone after three calls, and I knew you'd never forgive me if I left without you, so I used your spare key." Thorin replied as he disappeared from view. Kili had made sure that both Thorin and Tauriel had a spare key to his place in case he lost his own. This came after his keys had fallen into a tank and had been mistaken as a shiny toy by a couple of otters. His landlady had had a heyday listening to that explanation on why he needed a new set.

"You'd be right." Kili huffed as he got up and stretched.

"Come and eat. Then we can go." Thorin's voice came from the kitchen.

"Did you go shopping for me?" Kili stumbled out of his room, still not quite as coordinated as usual. Tauriel would probably argue he wasn't usually coordinated either.

"I picked up enough for a meal. Which I'm to make sure you actually eat." There was a rather large sub sandwich on a plate already waiting for Kili on the table. "Both Oin and Tauriel demanded it. Your milk went bad, by the way, so I chucked it."

Kili made a face as he picked the plate up, his stomach grumbling loudly at even the sight of the food. He really hadn't been eating properly. "I don't like milk anyway. I don't know why I buy it." He admitted before taking a giant bite, groaning at the taste.

Thorin looked half amused and half frustrated as he leaned back against Kili's counter. No, Kili wasn't sure how that expression was even possible, but of course Thorin could pull it off. "You're going to be eating regularly from now on. I don't know what made you think starving yourself was going to help the situation any." He scolded with a frown.

Kili swallowed his mouthful. "It wasn't that. Every time I go to eat something I just feel so fucking guilty." He complained before frowning as the familiar feeling swelled up in his chest. He couldn't put the sandwich down though, not with Thorin there.

"I understand that, but you need to take care of yourself first. You passing out because of exhaustion or hunger will only make things worse." Thorin looked regretful, "If you do this again, I may have to look into suspension."

"What?" Kili's eyes went wide.

"I need to make sure my staff is safe when they're on the job, Kili. What if you passed out and fell into a tank? Not only do we have creatures that could potentially eat you, but you could drown. You guys are family, so watching one of you suffer like this is difficult on everyone." Thorin reminded him. 

Kili guiltily took another bite of the sub, mostly so he didn't have to say anything in response. He did eventually mumble an apology.

"Don't apologize, just stop being dumb." Thorin instructed. "Your mother would kill me if I let anything happen to you." He muttered the last part.

That got Kili to grin. Thorin and his mom went way back. "I can't promise that. It's part of my charm."

Thorin scoffed loudly as he chuckled. "Charm. Sure. We'll call it that."

Kili took the mature route and stuck his tongue out. "Can we go? I'll eat in the truck, and I promise not to make a mess." He glanced down at the table, "I want to get back."

Sighing and looking like he wanted to refuse, Thorin relented instead. "Yeah, come on. I have crates of fish sitting in the bed of my truck."

The drive back seemed to take forever, and Kili finished his sandwich within the first ten minutes, so he didn't have much to occupy his time with. He chatted with Thorin about what errands he'd had to run which had included dropping the box off for Oin, picking up their regular order of food from the fish market, paying a few bills, and food shopping for an annoying employee.

"I didn't realize you went shopping for Tauriel too." Kili replied cheekily, "She better thank you."

Teasing Thorin and getting teased in returned was nice, and Kili's thoughts didn't stray as easily now that he'd gotten some sleep. He could actually call the ride pleasant.

At least until they were parked and Kili tried to leave the vehicle.

"Kili wait." Thorin drew him back, and it was the tone in his voice that made Kili's defenses slam up. It told the brunet all he needed to know about what Thorin wanted to say.

"Don't bother." He snapped as he crossed his arms, throwing himself back against the seat. He wouldn't normally ever speak to Thorin like that, but he was hurting. "I already know what you're going to say, and I don't want to hear it." He growled through clenched teeth.

"Kili-"

"No, Thorin!" Kili turned his head to glare at the man. He could see how hard this was on Thorin too, but at that very moment the anger and desperation consuming Kili were the only things he felt. He'd appreciate Thorin's seemingly limitless patience and understanding later.

A heavy silence filled the truck before Thorin let out an even heavier sigh as he leaned back in his seat. "Oin believes he was held captive by someone wanting to keep him as a pet."

Kili wasn't sure what to say to that, so he said nothing and continued stewing in his emotions. News like that wasn't particularly surprising. It was rare nowadays, but not completely unheard of. It made Kili angry that someone had done that to this mer.

Thorin didn't need him to say anything. "You know they don’t last since they all just seem to give up on life in captivity. He's too thin to have just been injured so recently." His frown was obvious in his tone, but Kili refused to turn so he could see it, having focused his glare on the latch to the glove compartment. "Oin figures the people sold him for his fins when they realized he wouldn't survive."

Kili's fingers tightened in the material of his shirt at the cruel thought, and the glove compartment latch blurred from the tears beginning to gather in his eyes. He'd read multiple pages about how mermaids could die from a broken heart, and that was why nobody could keep them in captivity for very long. Whether it was true or not, there was nothing else to explain all the deaths. The mer was technically in captivity now. Was this him giving up on life? All Kili wanted to do was help him. 

"Maybe he's waiting to die, Kili." Thorin spoke quietly and gently.

But it only made Kili's anger flare wildly. "Fuck that!" He shouted at the man before grabbing the door handle and scrambling out. His foot got caught on the seat belt and he almost tripped, but he managed to straighten himself. He could see a few of the staff members nearby and could plainly see Tauriel's hair in the sun, but he didn't care if anyone saw him freaking out. They needed to understand that he wasn't going to give up.

So their presence didn't stop him from whirling around and glaring at their boss, "I can't believe that!" He shouted angrily, "He wouldn't have fought against us so hard if he was just going to give up and die now!" He clenched his fists at his sides, nails digging into his palms. "He wouldn't have fought to escape the assholes that cut his fins off!" The images of the bleeding and frightened mer had been haunting Kili since the day they brought him in, and now they returned. His tears fell but he didn't acknowledge them as he stared at Thorin, almost pleading. He took a deep breath to try and calm himself because Thorin wasn't the bad guy and Kili knew he didn't have the right to be yelling at him. "As long as he's still alive, I won't give up on him." He said, calmer than he was before. "I can't, Thorin." He shook his head before fleeing away from the truck, heading into the establishment.

***

The sun was just beginning to set when Kili's radio crackled to life. Every staff member carried one so that they didn't have to use an intercom that might startle the residents or hunt someone down when they were needed. Kili's had been sitting next to a cement support wall since yesterday. He was actually surprised the batteries were still working, but the sound of it made him want to chuck the thing into one of the tanks. He didn't want to speak to anyone.

He glanced down into the tank, spotting the mer still huddled up in his usual corner. He hadn't moved since Kili had sat down.

"Kili. Can you come to the staff room, please?" It was Tauriel's voice, which surprised him as he'd been expecting Thorin's.

A sliver of him was curious as to what they wanted, but he was mostly suspicious and worried he'd get another talk like the one Thorin had tried to give him. He didn't think he could handle another person telling him to let go.

"Kiiiili." The radio crackled again as she sang through the speaker. "Pick up your radio."

He sighed and gave in, yanking it from its position. "I'm busy." He muttered before releasing the button so she could respond.

"Yeah, busy sulking. I saw you five minutes ago and you probably haven't moved an inch."

"I moved to pick up the stupid radio." Kili retorted mockingly.

"Just get your surly ass down here before I come drag you down here kicking and screaming." She growled, apparently having had enough of his attitude.

He groaned and forced himself to his feet, clicking the radio where it belonged along his belt before casting one last look at the mer. "I'd toss her in if I thought you'd eat her." He muttered as way of parting, heading down to the break room.

When he got there, he found most of the staff inside, and he couldn't help but feel even more suspicious when they all turned to face him as one. Making an unhappy noise, he stepped inside and crossed his arms in a last ditch effort to defend himself. "Are we having a staff meeting?" He kept his tone light.

"We were overdue." Tauriel shrugged before holding out a few pieces of paper in his direction.

"What are those?" He asked without moving his hands.

She rolled her eyes and shook the papers. "Just read them." She sighed impatiently.

Reluctantly, Kili reached out and took the papers from her, figuring this was a suspension notice or something. It would be a dick move to do in front of everyone, but Kili couldn't argue that Thorn had every right to fire him let alone suspend him.

Hazel eyes narrowed in puzzlement as he read over what appeared to be a medical record and some sort of documentation. The documentation was familiar as every animal they housed required it as well as medical history. He read the name of the animal these were for and his confusion grew. "Fili?" He read it out loud before focusing on the sheet before him.

It stated that he was the primary handler, and that the animal in question was permanent to the facility for now. It wasn't until Kili flipped the page and found himself staring at a sedated mermaid lying on Oin's medical table that he finally clued in.

He looked up at Tauriel and Ori who'd stepped closer. "You named him Fili?" He asked, ignoring the way his voice cracked on the mermaid’s new name. "Why? Naming animals makes it easier to get attached." And it was so similar to Kili’s name.

Ori snorted, "Kili, everybody can see that you're already attached. Name or no name." He said before his expression shifted to regret. "Tauriel and I wanted to give him a name so you'd have something to remember him with." He admitted shamefully, "But we were wrong."

Tauriel took over then, "You were right. He wouldn't have fought against us or even dragged himself out of the ocean if he hadn't wanted to survive." She admitted, revealing the fact that they had heard Kili yelling at their boss, "He's a fighter, and you're his biggest supporter, hence his name." She smiled.

"And we're all with you, lad." Dwalin spoke up then from behind Tauriel and Ori. "If you're not giving up on that giant fish, then we're not going to give up either."

Kili teared up before he registered how much his eyes were burning, Fili's new name blurring on the page. "I...I don't know what to say."

"I'd like to hear a promise that you'll take better care of yourself from now on." Thorin spoke, "That means eating and sleeping regularly. Even if it's not at home." He added, seeming to sense that Kili would continue to spend most of his time near the mer.

Fili, he reminded himself as his eyes glanced down at the name printed in blue. It was Tauriel's handwriting. Somehow, seeing that name renewed his hope that the situation would work out.

"I can promise that." Kili managed a slightly quivering smile, and before he knew it he was enveloped in a hug.

[aion-rsa]

Skyman: Don Miggs Discusses Universal Sonics

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The mock-documentary Skyman doesn’t tell the usual UFO encounter story. Director Daniel Myrick, who broke on the scene with the groundbreaking horror thriller The Blair Witch Project, does not put this together using found footage. The film examines the aftermath of an alien visitation, and the story is told by a witness and survivor.

Carl Merryweather (Michael Selle) was seven years old when he saw the “skyman” in Barstow, a small town in California. The event changed him. He’s spent years obsessively collecting UFO magazines, as well as first-person accounts of other contactees. It made him the neighborhood “character.” Skyman takes place 33 years after the visitation, he is living with his sister, Gina (Nicolette Sweeney), and waiting on a promise the alien made to return on his 40th birthday.

The film was shot in Barstow, where there have been multiple real life reports of UFO sightings. Merryweather also takes the crew to a real UFO festival in McMinnville, Oregon, where the character is met with amused scorn by amateur enthusiasts armed with cellphone cameras.

The soundtrack for Skyman was written by Billy Corgan and Don Miggs. The Smashing Pumpkins frontman is a household name, and occasional appliance. Miggs is a studio veteran. He’s written with Creedence Clearwater Revival’s John Fogerty, and worked with such diverse artists as Boyz II Men, Paul Anka, Tyga, and the Plain White T’s. Miggs spoke with Den of Geek about the film, the universal language of music, and the OZ Paradigm.

DEN OF GEEK: Were you drawn to Skyman because of the subject matter?

DON MIGGS: You know, first and foremost, [I was] told I could do a film with the guy who wrote Blair Witch. Now I’m already interested, right? So you’ve already got me right there. Then a really strange chain of events happened when Dan Myrick approached me to do it. I had just had a crazy incident happen at my L.A. house that involves sort of like the supernatural. Right now, I can’t even believe I just said that because I’m going to tell the story. The person who built our home was Mickey Rooney, who was famous in the ’40s, but ’50s and ’60s, for sure. He was a child star and a long time he was with Judy Garland from The Wizard of Oz.

We bought that house. In between us, there was another artist, Rick James, from, “She’s a very kinky girl.” It’s the house that Rick did all that crazy stuff. He’d been arrested at one point because he and his girlfriend locked another girlfriend in a room and tortured her. They were doing things like meth or heroin or something. He was sort of crazy. We bought this house and maybe it was haunted. I don’t know. But when Dan called me about doing the movie, we had just had an incident where a book was off of a bookshelf that couldn’t have fallen where it fell. Someone would’ve had to take it down.

I walked by for a few days. Finally I said to my wife, “Is it down here for a reason.” She’s like, “I was going to ask you the same question.” I pick up the book, this is before I knew about Judy Garland, and it’s The Wizard of Oz. I’m like, “That’s kind of weird.” Someone told me the book was on the ground because Mickey Rooney was with Judy Garland in this house. This is where they stayed.” I’m like, “Wow,” and so I flipped through. I’m looking through Google and I go into a deep search and I see this photo of them in our house where the piano is and it kind of freaks me out.

So as that’s happening, I’m telling this to my friend and my friend says, “I didn’t want to tell you this. I was in the movie room and I heard clinking of glasses in the kitchen. Then they put them down on the counter, and I was like, “Hello? Hello? Hello?” and nobody was there. Then his girlfriend was in the kitchen and turned and looked to the right, and said, “What do you want?” Because she thought that my friend was standing there. The friend, by the way, is the third writer that wrote the music on this, Greg Hanson. Greg wasn’t there, he was in my studio.

So all this stuff happened, and Greg and I are having this conversation about the supernatural and what do we believe in, life on other planets, all this stuff and we’re coming to all these conclusions then Dan calls me and tells me about a movie about a UFO, about an alien. I’m like, “That’s the craziest thing.” A week later, Billy Corgan comes to stay at my house. We know that he’s had some history with UFOs and believes, and I tell him about it, and he’s like, “That’s crazy.” I said, “Does it make you nervous to stay in the house?” He goes, “No, not at all.”

So all that stuff is a long way to say it felt like it was supposed to happen when Dan called and said “Do I want to do the film?” Because it felt like I was sort of on the brink of changing my whole belief system.

You own vintage guitars. I was wondering if the guitars can be haunted, and if you ever caught someone else’s riffs?

Of course, the way I look at everything is energy is out there. We’re all the same age in the end. Right? Because we’re all just energy and it’s all floating. I own Hendrix’s guitar from when he played with the Isley Brothers. One day, his brother Leon came to the house, and wanted me to record him, but it’s not something I wanted to record. But as he was holding the guitar, he said something like, “This guitar is the guitar that Jimi dreamed in before he became … This is when he was James Hendrix, and he was basically playing guitar for the white man and dancing in the back and doing all this stuff, and then it’s the guitar that he emerged as Jimi Hendrix, which is the guy with the Afro and larger than life.”

Whenever I play the guitar, and I play it all the time, I feel that life in there, and I think it’s sort of in everything. People tend to be scared by it, but there’s this root beauty and the whole thing that we’re all connected. That’s kind of what the movie, ultimately, is about for me. When Dan explained it, I didn’t see one piece of it when I started writing music to it. The first thing I wrote was “Are you real Skyman?”

When he was describing to me what it was about, I said to him, “This is not really a story. This to me isn’t even a UFO story. It’s the story of a person trying to connect with his father and his father is no longer around. This is his connection. It’s really a story about how we’re all connected and it’s about family.” If you look at your main character, he’s on this journey and he’s very much alone, but he has his sister and his best friend still show up, they might think he’s a little crazy, but they show up because it’s important to show up. I think it makes the story a little bit more beautiful than “there’s a UFO, let’s go chase it.”

You’re one of the authors of Dad’s Know Best. What do you tell your kids about UFOs?

I tell them that I’ve never seen anything, but the likelihood that we are the only thing out there seems pretty slim to me. Maybe it’s not happening at the same time, maybe it’s because of time and space. The thing I always say to my kids, they’re 11 and nine, is I just say that anything and everything is possible. Your job is to be open enough for it to happen. I don’t believe in God, I feel like there’s something bigger than me out there, but I don’t know if it’s God. I’ve never said that really out loud like that. I don’t know if I can even say I don’t believe in God, but I’m open to the possibility that I’m wrong, and I’m looking forward to being wrong. I tell my kids that the fact that we’re here sort of almost demands that there must be someone somewhere else.

What key best captures the abductee experience. Is it A minor? Is it mixolydian?

I love that you would ask that question. It certainly has to be a minor. This is so geeky of me. For me, it would probably be like a minor seven. I literally just wrote a song before I got on. I had a client and we’re doing a record and I just did a Skype with her, and I made sure the whole thing is sort of about, in the end is that it’s going to be alright. It all really stems off of this one minor. It’s a B flat minor seven that comes at the end and just playing that chord leads everything up to a question like, “Is it going to be alright?” But I would say, if you have to say what the best minor chord is, it’s probably E minor and that’s the key of tension for sure. E minor, I’ll say.

Close Encounters taught us music is the universal language. So are different modes more effective at communicating if we were to communicate with another species?

I would think that. I would think that we see things very much in, [hums major scale], right? If I play Indian music, there’s going to be more chromatic notes than there would be in Western music. So yes, for sure, everybody’s going to have a little bit of a dialect when it comes to what’s going to work for them.

I find it interesting actually, when I’m thinking of Close Encounters, “[sings theme], nu, nu, nu.” That resolve, which makes very much sense, it’s very nice for our American ears, but I don’t know that the  [sings last two notes of theme],” which is four/five, “Duh, nah, nah, nah, nah,” would be soothing to someone from another planet because I don’t think that “Duh, nah” would be soothing to someone from necessarily another country.

What do you think extraterrestrials would pick up from what’s going on in music right now?

The best thing about music today for me is sonically, it’s amazing. The sounds are really exciting. It’s thinner. It’s more shrill. It would be heard better, probably. If I were an alien, I’m going to say that I think they would pick up that it’s a little more vapid. If we’re talking about popular music and I just dated myself, that’s a dumb thing to say because the ’50s music was as vapid as vapid could be, same chords, same melodies.

You mix some pretty etheric sonics into the theme music. I was wondering what tells you how to capture that? There’s one part that sounds like you caught feedback off of a stick across a snare drum.

You’re right. I hit a drum and then I literally grabbed the feedback from it, and I might’ve supported that with some other instrument in there. Then yeah, and that wound up being a part of the sonic scape for a lot of different parts.

I equate music writing with you’re in a field and some days you’re pulling weeds, and other days you’re picking flowers and the job is to stay in the field and keep picking. That’s what I do all day, every day. With this soundtrack, we had a crazy thing happen where Dan Myrick came into the studio and was like, “Well, what are you going to do?” And this idea just hit me on the piano. I went and hit the three notes, came back to the patrol room, and I just said to my engineer, “I need everything on. I need the drums on. I need guitars, I need everything on.” And literally, I just kept going from thing to thing and adding, and it was like I had nothing to do with it.

No joke. I mean that for most of this record, what was so cool about doing Skyman, I didn’t do it to film, I did it to my idea of who these characters were, and what their stories were, and that’s a difference than with Billy. So Billy stays with me sometimes when I’m in LA, in my house there. So he was there and I said, “Hey, if you want to come out to the studio, I’m working on this thing for the film and I think it might be of interest to you.” He comes into the studio, probably at 10:00 a.m. and my studio is on the property, and I could see him walking up, I said, “Hey,” and I had started a thing. For the next three hours and I might be generous, it may have only been two and a half. We wrote five things. Like we were vomiting. Literally it was coming out of us and no discussion about it. I said, “Here’s one idea.” He goes, “Oh, it might be cool on piano.” So he goes down and starts playing the piano to it, and I’m playing the guitar.

Then there was another one where I’m like, “I have this idea [sings]. You could have that very cinematic. And he goes, “Oh, I think we’d do this.” That two and a half hours became four of the tracks, two of which made the record, then which made the movie, and two others that we have for something else. It all fell out, which is what the whole movie did. Every time I thought I was going to tell it what to do. So I had to listen back through it because I had to put the songs in an order. I could remember being there for all of it, but I couldn’t remember how I came up with some of those sounds because all the drums are real, all the guitars and all the instrumentation is me playing it. Unless it was Billy, he plays an acoustic on two, and piano on another, and I think Greg Hanson plays a guitar in one part of something, the rest is just me.

But I have no idea how it all came out and how the sounds came out like they do. But I’m so damn proud of it. I think it’s a freaking cool record and it takes all these twists and turns, which is why I kind of feel like someone else’s driving.

But you never jammed to visuals?

I think at one point I got a scene that was on my phone, and I think I showed Billy the scene. We were already playing. The visuals were in our head, man. I’m telling you like it was really crazy. First of all, Billy is one of the most gifted, incredible artists of our generation. There’s no doubt. I’m cocky enough to feel like I belong in any room, and I’ve written with some big people. But I knew that the most talented guy I was ever in a room with was Billy Corgan. He’s humble. But also, he’s an encyclopedia, knows exactly what he wants to do, and we had the visuals in our head. When I told him the story that it was really to me about a guy wanting to reconnect with his father, and then we talked about the abduction thing. I don’t think we needed to see anything to know where we were going with it. I don’t know that seeing the movie would have helped, but maybe would have hurt. It’s a weird thing to say.

You said everything was done with instruments. What about that bagpipe, was that sampled?

It’s not a bagpipe. That was me playing  a combination of a guitar and a keyboard, and then me altering the sound to turn it into what it sounds like. There’s a couple things like that on there that are really cool. I wrote to the feeling and the nice thing about that is I could stretch these things out. As you listen to some of these tracks, some of them take so many turns and twists that I don’t know that I could have done if the movie was playing in front of me. I might’ve been almost too sympathetic to the character as opposed to sympathetic to what he couldn’t see. I wanted to play it from the point of view sometimes of the alien looking in on the story. So it’s not always the story. It’s sometimes the music is supporting what you don’t see.

I couldn’t have done that if I was just using the visual because that’s not part of the visual. You don’t ever see the alien. So my job was to sort of make the alien come to light. Dan didn’t tell me to do that. It was something instinctually. I felt it had to be done because you don’t ever really get the payoff. This is one of those movies. It’s the last two minutes of it where you go, “Oh. There’s the Blair Witch thing happening.” So I needed to sort of create that for the rest of the movie and didn’t know that I needed to, and then there it is.

There seems to be a lot more piano on Skyman than guitar. What can you say on the piano that you can’t say with those strings?

I had a theme that started when I did, “Are you real?” There’s that little piano thing. I considered the piano a character. I wanted that character to make sure he resonated throughout the piece, meaning throughout the movie. So I couldn’t abandon him almost at any point. He was more vulnerable. So the piano became the real vulnerable side, I guess, of all the characters really, including the alien. Then the guitar was then allowed to be more of the Goliath to Davey, which was the piano.

If you were asked to play a concert for extraterrestrials, would you change up your set list?

I tell you what, I’d be damn proud. Billy actually said to me, “We should play live.” There are two songs that I really wish would have made the movie and kudos to Dan for not putting them in because one of them has Billy singing a little bit, he’s humming, and it’s eerie and beautiful and so great, but it wouldn’t have fit the movie. It would just serve the purpose of being sensational because there’s Billy Corgan singing. But the only change up I would do, is I would do “Time Will Melt Us,” which is the one where he was humming on, and then this other one that we didn’t put in that he and I did for the movie. But I’d play that soundtrack. I love it.

Would you host an alien on the “Miggs and Swig Show?”

Damn. He could live in my house for a while. I’ve had some alien-like people living in that house at different points. So yes.

What would you ask them?

Are they laughing at us? Do we seem comical to them? Do we seem intelligent? I mean, I wonder so many things about what we do as a human race. If there is a God, he’s laughing at us too. And then I’m always a sucker for what’s the secret of life. Are they happy? Does that even come in to it? If you are more enlightened than we are, is happiness even a factor? Do questions like we’re asking right now matter?

MIGGS recorded their first album in 50 hours. Would that be easier now because you’re a studio veteran or harder because you’ve learned so many tricks?

There’s such beauty in being naive. There’s this not knowing. I’m working with three different 16 year old artists and I was working with one today, a girl. Every single option is possible in her mind, and I’ve learned the rules. There’s a song called “Girl” by The Beatles. John Lennon goes from a C to an F to a D major. But you’d think the song is in C, and if it’s in C, it would have to be a D minor. There’s something that’s so beautiful about it because he was so early in his career. But once you know them, it becomes more difficult. So I could certainly make the record.

I said to Dan, doing this movie, “Could I get one more chance to remix it?” And he’s like, “It sounds perfect to me.” I had to let that be. It does, it sounds great. There’s always something you want to tweak, but that’s the beauty of stopping, of moving on, is that if you can let it go, then you can also have a real time stamp for where you were at that as opposed to making everything perfect so it all sounds the same, no matter where you’re at.

You were the last artist to work with Phil Ramone. I just want to know what that was like and what you learned from him?

You want to talk about someone who haunts me in the best way? Phil Ramone worked with Ray Charles. Phil Ramone recorded Marilyn Monroe singing happy birthday to JFK. Phil Ramone did Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney’s Ram record. He did Blood on the Tracks with Bob Dylan. He did Paul Simon. I grew up on Long Island. He was such an icon, and he stayed with me for three weeks to do the record. I didn’t know it was going to be the last thing he did. He sings on the last song. I did like a little tribute to him by saying it was a tribute to Billy Joel. I mean, I respected him, but on Long Island Billy Joel was a God.

Phil had 15 Grammy awards, and the hope was that maybe he gets 16. Then after we did the record, he died and then no one was interested in my record until he died. Then everybody wanted to interview me and I declined all of it. I didn’t want to make that sensation, it was a really personal thing. But he was such a wonderful man, and so incredibly otherworldly. He could be falling asleep, he would make his record wait, and he could be falling asleep and look like he’s out, and you would hit a wrong note. He’d go, “It’s a B flat,” under his breath, like he was still listening the whole time. The last five years have worked out incredibly well. I feel like I’m on a really good path, and things just keep getting bigger and better. I feel like Phil really started on that for me.

The post Skyman: Don Miggs Discusses Universal Sonics appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[ladystylestores]

A Silicon Valley for everyone – TechCrunch

Editor’s note: Get this free weekly recap of TechCrunch news that any startup can use by email every Saturday morning (7am PT). Subscribe here.

Many in the tech industry saw the threat of the novel coronavirus early and reacted correctly. Fewer have seemed prepared for its aftereffects, like the outflow of talented employees from very pricey office real estate in expensive and troubled cities like San Francisco.

And few indeed have seemed prepared for the Black Lives Matter protests that have followed the death of George Floyd. This was maybe the easiest to see coming, though, given how visible the structural racism is in cities up and down the main corridors of Silicon Valley.

Today, the combination of politics, the pandemic and the protests feels almost like a market crash for the industry (except many revenues keep going up and to the right). Most every company is now fundamentally reconsidering where it will be located and who it will be hiring — no matter how well it is doing otherwise.

Some, like Google and Thumbtack, have been caught in the awkward position of scaling back diversity efforts as part of pandemic cuts right before making statements in support of the protesters, as Megan Rose Dickey covered on TechCrunch this week. But it is also the pandemic helping to create the focus, as Arlan Hamilton of Backstage Capital tells her:

It is like the world and the country has a front-row seat to what Black people have to witness, take in, and feel all the time. And it was before they were seeing some of it, but they were seeing it kind of protected by us. We were kind of shielding them from some of it… It’s like a VR headset that the country is forced to be in because of COVID. It’s just in their face.

This also putting new scrutiny on how tech is used in policing today. It is renewing questions around who gets to be a VC and who gets funding right when the industry is under new pressure to deliver. It is highlighting solutions that companies can make internally, like this list from BLCK VC on Extra Crunch.

As with police reforms currently in the national debate, some of the most promising solutions are local. Property tax reform, pro-housing activism and sustainable funding for homelessness services are direct ways for the tech industry to address the long history of discrimination where the modern tech industry began, Catherine Bracy of TechEquity writes for TechCrunch. These changes are also what many think would make the Bay Area a more livable place for everyone, including any startup and any tech employee at any tech company (see: How Burrowing Owls Lead To Vomiting Anarchists).

Something to think about as we move on to our next topic — the ongoing wave of tech departures from SF.

Where will VCs follow founders to now?

In this week’s staff survey, we revisit the remote-first dislocation of the tech industry’s core hubs. Danny Crichton observes some of the places that VCs have been leaving town for, and thinks it means bigger changes are underway:

“Are VCs leaving San Francisco? Based on everything I have heard: yes. They are leaving for Napa, leaving for Tahoe, and otherwise heading out to wherever gorgeous outdoor beauty exists in California. That bodes ill for San Francisco’s (and really, South Park’s) future as the oasis of VC.

But the centripetal forces are strong. VCs will congregate again somewhere else, because they continue to have that same need for market intelligence that they have always had. The new, new place might not be San Francisco, but I would be shocked just given the human migration pattern underway that it isn’t in some outlying part of the Bay Area.

And then he says this:

As for VCs — if the new central node is a bar in Napa and that’s the new “place to be” — that could be relatively more permanent. Yet ultimately, VCs follow the founders even if it takes time for them to recognize the new balance of power. It took years for most VCs to recognize that founders didn’t want to work in South Bay, but now nearly every venture firm of note has an office in San Francisco. Where the founders go, the VCs will follow. If that continues to be SF, its future as a startup hub will continue after a brief hiatus.

It’s true that another outlying farming community in the region once became a startup hub, but that one had a major research university next door, and at the time a lot of cheap housing if you were allowed access to it. But Napa cannot be the next Palo Alto because it is fully formed today as a glorified retirement community, Danny.

I’m already on the record for saying that college towns in general are going to become more prominent in the tech world, between ongoing funding for innovative tech work and ongoing desirability for anyone moving from the big cities. But I’m going to add a side bet that cities will come back into fashion with the sorts of startup founders that VCs would like to back. As Exhibit A, I’d like to present Jack Dorsey, who started a courier dispatch in Oakland in 2000, and studied fashion and massage therapy during the aftermath of the dot-com bubble. His success with Twitter a few years later in San Francisco inspired many founders to move as well.

Creative people like him are drawn to the big, creative environments that cities can offer, regardless of what the business establishment thinks. If the public and private sectors can learn from the many mistakes of recent decades (see last item) who knows, maybe we’ll see a more equal and resilient sort of boom emerge in tech’s current core.

Insurance provider Lemonade files for IPO with that refreshing common-stock flavor

There are probably some amazing puns to be made here but it has been a long week, and the numbers speak for themselves. Lemonade sells insurance to renters and homeowners online, and managed to reach a private valuation of $3.5 billion before filing to go public on Monday — with the common stockholders still comprising the majority of the cap table.

Danny crunched the numbers from the S-1 on Extra Crunch to generate the table, included, that illustrates this rather unusual breakdown. Usually, as you almost certainly know already, the investors own well over half by the time of a good liquidity event. “So what was the magic with Lemonade?” he ponders. “One piece of the puzzle is that company founder Daniel Schreiber was a multi-time operator, having previously built Powermat Technologies as the company’s president. The other piece is that Lemonade is built in the insurance market, which can be carefully modeled financially and gives investors a rare repeatable business model to evaluate.”

(Photo by Paul Hennessy/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Adapting enterprise product roadmaps to the pandemic

Our investor surveys for Extra Crunch this week covered the space industry’s startup opportunities, and looked at how enterprise investors are assessing the impact of the pandemic. Here’s Theresia Gouw of Acrew Capital, explaining how two of their portfolio companies have refocused in recent months:

A common theme we found when joining our founders for these strategy sessions was that many pulled forward and prioritized mid- to long-term projects where the product features might better fit the needs of their customers during these times. One such example in our portfolio is Petabyte’s (whose product is called Rhapsody) accelerated development of its software capabilities that enable veterinarians to provide telehealth services. Rhapsody has also incorporated key features that enable a contactless experience when telehealth isn’t sufficient. These include functionality that enables customers to check-in (virtual waiting room), sign documents, and make payments from the comfort and safety of their car when bringing their pet (the patient!) to the vet for an in-person check-up.

Another such example would be PredictHQ, which provides demand intelligence to enterprises in travel, hospitality, logistics, CPG, and retail, all sectors who saw significant change (either positive or negative) in the demand for their products and services. PredictHQ has the most robust global dataset on real-world events. Pandemics and all the ensuing restrictions and, then, loosening of restrictions fall within the category of real-world events. The company, which also has multiple global offices, was able to incorporate the dynamic COVID government responses on a hyperlocal basis, by geography, and equip its customers (e.g., Domino’s, Qantas, and First Data) with up to date insights that would help with demand planning and forecasting as well as understanding staffing needs.

Around TechCrunch

Extra Crunch Live: Join Superhuman CEO Rahul Vohra for a live Q&A on June 16 at 2pm EDT/11 AM PDT Join us for a live Q&A with Plaid CEO Zach Perret June 18 at 10 a.m. PDT/1 p.m. EDT Two weeks left to save on TC Early Stage passes Learn how to ‘nail it before you scale it’ with Floodgate’s Ann Miura-Ko at TC Early Stage SF How can startups reinvent real estate? Learn how at TechCrunch Disrupt Stand out from the crowd: Apply to TC Top Picks at Disrupt 2020

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#EquityPod

From Alex:

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

After a pretty busy week on the show we’re here with our regular Friday episode, which means lots of venture rounds and new venture capital funds to dig into. Thankfully we had our full contingent on hand: Danny “Well, you see” Crichton, Natasha “Talk to me post-pandemic” Mascarenhas, Alex “Very shouty” Wilhelm and, behind the scenes, Chris “The Dad” Gates.

Make sure to check out our IPO-focused Equity Shot from earlier this week if you haven’t yet, and let’s get into today’s topics:

Instacart raises $225 million. This round, not unexpected, values the on-demand grocery delivery startup at $13.7 billion — a huge sum, and one that should make it harder for the well-known company to sell itself to anyone but the public markets. Regardless, COVID-19 gave this company a huge updraft, and it capitalized on it.

Pando raises $8.5 million. We often cover rounds on Equity that are a little obvious. SaaS, that sort of thing. Pando is not that. Instead, it’s a company that wants to let small groups of individual pool their upside and allow for more equal outcomes in an economy that rewards outsized success.

Ethena raises $2 million. Anti-harassment software is about as much fun as the dentist today, but perhaps that doesn’t have to be the case. Natasha talked us through the company, and its pricing. I’m pretty bullish on Ethena, frankly. Homebrew, Village Global and GSV took part in the financing event.

Vendr raises $4 million. Vendr wants to help companies cut their SaaS bills, through its own SaaS-esque product. I tried to explain this, but may have butchered it a bit. It’s cool, I promise.

Facebook is getting into the CVC game. This should not be a surprise, but we were also not sure who was going to want Facebook money.

And, finally, Collab Capital is raising a $50 million fund to invest in Black founders. Per our reporting, the company is on track to close on $10 million in August. How fast the fund can close its full target is something we’re going to keep an eye on, considering it might get a lot harder a lot sooner. 

And that is that; thanks for lending us your ears.

Equity drops every Friday at 6:00 am PT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.

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