#on whey

[revasserium]

entwined shadows

zayne, rafayel, xavier; 1,872 words; fluff, semi-canon compliant, spoilers! for entwined shadows cards, v!suggestive, no "y/n", genderless!reader, lapslock cause lazy, so! many! kisses!

summary: kiss me once, kiss me twice, kiss me thrice or a thousand times

a/n: inspired by the poems of robert frost and also obviously by the entwined shadows cards cause... bruh.

perish, twice - zayne

the hideout is cold — but his lips are warm, hungry.

“z-zayne!”

there’s fire in his veins, pulsing beneath your fingertips, the kind that his ice has never been able to put out — not even once.

“please…” he sounds like a broken man; you know better than to believe him, “i told you… i warned you…” he trails his lips along the column of your neck, his fingers digging into the bend of your hips, his other hand pinning your wrists above your head, “that i might not be able to control myself this time…”

he lets out a breath, the heat of it fogging the air between you in the dark chill of the room. you feel your skin burning, even as you shiver. your mind spins with the incongruencies, the push and pull, the icy bite of the air, the stinging heat of zayne’s body against yours.

“i-if we freeze tonight —” your voice is unsteady, heady with desire, but zayne cuts you off.

“i won’t let you.” he cups your cheek and you feel the skin there tingle with warmth. slowly, you watch as the vines of pale blue begin to fade from his skin.

you shake your head even as you pull him down for another deep, long kiss, the kind that sears —

“no… i won’t let you.”

when you break apart again, there’s a wild, unfocused light to his eyes, a shallowness to his breaths. he looks dazed, but as his gaze flickers down to your kiss-swollen lips, a razor like focus shifts inside him and suddenly, he’s caging you in, his teeth skimming the delicate skin above your fluttering pulse.

“tell me… tell me this is okay…” his voice is barely a whisper. but you hear it loud as the howling of the storm outside. you breathe out.

“zayne. i want this — i want… you.”

a groan rumbles through him, base and heavy as an avalanche.

he murmurs something that sound suspiciously like a prayer before he sinks his teeth into the bare skin of your shoulder and rips open the front of your shirt in one smooth motion.

the storm outside continues to rage, but at the very least, you can be certain — the ice pulsing beneath his skin is slowly beginning to thaw away.

taste of desire - rafayel

“but this one… i think i like this one best.” rafayel grins as he leans down to press two quick kisses to your cheeks, pulling back to trail his gaze over your blush-tinted skin. heat prickles at your neck but you refuse to look away.

instead, you attempt a glare, “y-you said that three seconds ago.”

rafayel makes an aggrieved expression, “it’s not my fault your cheeks can turn so many colors so quickly! do you know how tiring it is to try and pick my favorite color when i can see so many? ah — there, this one’s nice too!” he taps his finger against the tip of your nose even as you feel your entire face flush.

you bite your lips and push back against him, toppling the pair of you over onto the sofa in his wide-open studio. the windows are cracked, and the spring breeze flirts with the gauzy white curtains; the setting sun paints the entire room in a soft, dreamlike glow.

“why can’t you just call it blush pink like everyone else?” you crinkle your nose and try to turn your head away, even as rafayel shifts beneath you, running a warm palm down the length of your spine to shift you closer.

he cocks his head, lips pushing into a familiar pout, “how can an artist like me be so vague?” he shakes a few strands of hair from his eyes, batting long lashes up at you, “in order to achieve perfection, you have to be specific with your words, you know.”

you’re about to say something else but he sits up, pressing in close enough for your noses to brush, “for instance — if you want a kiss…” his eyes flicker down to your lips; you feel your breath hitch, your heartbeat scattering within your chest like a handful of tossed marbles.

he inches forward, agonizingly slowly, till his lips are hovering only a hair’s breath away from yours. your fingers tighten in his shirt but he makes no move to kiss you.

“you should tell me where…” he makes to lean in, but turns his head at the last moment to skim his lips along your cheeks, his breath tickling your earlobe for a second, “like… here?” he lowers his head, trailing a light kiss against your jaw, “or… perhaps here…” he drops his lips to the bend of your shoulder.

you tremble in his arms, fingers fisting as you attempt to pull him closer.

“r-rafayel… you’re not playing fair.”

he pulls back, an almost gleeful grin spreading across his lips, the light cascading across the room drawing his lashes into long, mesmerizing shadows across the highs of his cheeks.

“why should i? you humans’ve never played fair before. for my own self-preservation… i’ve gotta have a few tricks up my sleeve.”

you squirm in his lap as you feel his fingers tickling at your sides, but as he pins you to his chest, you let out a surprised yelp, palms pressing flat against his chest to steady yourself.

“so, tell me, strange human…” he leans in, nose nudging yours, “what exactly do you want from me, hm?”

you lick your lips, a dull, pulsing ache echoing up from the base of your belly to the top of your spine. you reach up to trace a thumb against the pad of his lips and watch with a stomach-twisting satisfaction as his breath goes shallow, his eyes go wide, go dark.

“kiss me,” you say, leaning down till you’re sure he can almost taste you on his tongue.

you feel him swallow as you trail your thumb down along his neck to the place where his pulse flutters, light and fast as the flurried beats of a butterfly’s wings.

“i thought… i thought i told you… you have to be more specific.”

you allow yourself a grin, fingers tightening ever so slightly around his neck; his cheeks flush the most gorgeous shade of sunset pink and you take a second to marvel to yourself that you’d never quite seen this color on him before. it might just be your favorite yet.

“rafayel… kiss me… right here.”

here come the stars - xavier

looking back, it had felt like a dream — twenty-one days of living together, of grocery shopping and tv-watching, of sleeping next to each other, of waking up to the warm scent of his skin.

“what if we just stayed here forever?”

you twist to face him in the dark; it’s your last night here, and the previous afternoon, you’d sat beneath the thick slices of lemon-yellow sunlight pouring through the windows with a bowl of cherries and the taste of each other resting on your tongues.

“we’d be implicating ourselves in the mission.”

xavier sighs, shifting a bit closer and reaching out to cup your cheek. you lean into the touch, letting your eyes flutter shut as you nuzzle into his heat.

“i know. but…” his finger traces the line of your nose down to the soft of your lips. you let them fall open a second before you feel him pressing in closer, before his lips graze yours and you feel yourself falling into his embrace.

the sheets twist around your ankles. outside, the the scimitar moon watches with slitted silver eyes.

“but…” you say, your voice thick with the honey of recent kisses, “who says that it can’t be like this when we get back to linkon city?”

xavier makes a soft noise at the back of his throat, pulling away to glance down at you.

“what… are you…”

there’s a breathless anticipation pulsing beneath the current of his voice; you sigh and lean up for another quick kiss.

“and you were calling me a dummy earlier…” but even as you steel yourself against the words weighing down the tip of your tongue, you feel your cheeks go hot and silently thank the heavens that it’s too dark in the room for him to see just how red you’d probably gotten.

“i — i’m asking if you want to — i mean, we’re already neighbors so, it wouldn’t even be a very hard move…” you lick your lips, mouth suddenly very dry. beside you, xavier’s gone white-rabbit still. if it weren’t for the shallow sound of his breaths or the wild beating of his heart beneath your hands, you might’ve wondered if he were even there at all.

“i just thought —” you quickly amend, the silence thickening around you like churned butter, “if you really did l-like it like this… it wouldn’t be hard for us to —”

he silences you with another kiss, more forceful this time. and whereas the previous ones were all soft and languid, this one is open-mouthed, a stomach-clenching hunger pouring itself from his mouth to yours as he presses you down beneath him and pins you to the bed.

his knee presses up between your legs and desire lances through you, bright and sharp as lightening. you gasp, biting down on his lips as he groans, burying his face in the crook of your neck.

“i don’t know — if that’s a good — idea —”

you lick your lips, frowning up at him. you’ve never seen him so winded; you’d barely even seen him out of breath, but right now, even in the dim light, you can see him shaking apart at the edges.

“w-why?” you have to fight to keep the hurt from your voice, but the next second, xavier is pressing his tongue back into your mouth and running it along the backs of your teeth. he kisses you so hard and so thoroughly you nearly pass out from the lack of air.

“because — i — we’d never get any sleep. and —” his hair tickles the skin of your cheeks as you let out a surprised laugh, his lips trailing down the length of your throat, “and i rather like my sleep…”

you let your eyes fall shut again, tangling your fingers in his starlight hair as he hisses against your chest.

“well — at least tomorrow we have the day off… so, i suppose if there’s any night we won’t need much sleep…”

xavier lets out a soft groan, shaking his head even as he peppers your skin with even more kisses, “don’t… don’t say stuff like that. people might get the wrong idea.”

you give his hair a playful tug, reveling in the way his whole body seems to go taut above you as he lifts his head.

“or,” you smile, slowly releasing his hair from your fingers, “they might be getting exactly the right idea.”

[reasonsforhope]

"Scientists have developed a way to dramatically reduce the cost of recycling certain electronic waste by using whey protein.

Their method allows for the easy recovery of gold from circuit boards at a cost of energy and materials amounting to 50 times less than the price of the gold they recover—these are the numbers that big business likes to see.

Indeed, the potential for scalability depends on this sort of cost savings, something traditional e-waste recycling methods just can’t achieve.

Professor Raffaele Mezzenga from ETH Zurich has found that whey protein, a byproduct of dairy manufacturing, can be used to make sponges that attract trace amounts of ionized gold.

Electronic waste contains a variety of valuable metals, including copper, cobalt, and gold. Despite gold’s public persona as being either money or jewelry, thousands of ounces of gold are used in electronics every year for its exceptional conductive properties.

Mezzenga’s colleague Mohammad Peydayesh first “denatured whey proteins under acidic conditions and high temperatures, so that they aggregated into protein nanofibrils in a gel,” writes the ETH Zurich press. “The scientists then dried the gel, creating a sponge out of these protein fibrils.”

The next step was extracting the gold: done by tossing 20 salvaged motherboards into an acid bath until the metals had dissolved into ionized compounds that the sponge began attracting.

Removing the sponge, a heat treatment caused the gold ions to aggregate into 22-carat gold flakes which could be easily removed.

“The fact I love the most is that we’re using a food industry byproduct to obtain gold from electronic waste,” Mezzenga says. In a very real sense, he observes, the method transforms two waste products into gold. “You can’t get much more sustainable than that!” ...

However the real dollar value comes from the bottom line—which was 50 times more than the cost of energy and source materials. Because of this, the scientists have every intention of bringing the technology to the market as quickly as possible while also desiring to see if the protein fibril sponge can be made of other food waste byproducts.

E-waste is a quickly growing burden in global landfills, and recycling it requires extremely energy-intensive machinery that many recycling facilities do not possess.

The environmental value of the minerals contained within most e-waste comes not only from preventing the hundreds of years it takes for them to break down in the soil, but also from the reduction in demand from new mining operations which can, though not always, significantly degrade the environments they are located in.

[Note: Absolutely massive understatement, mining is incredibly destructive to ecosystems. Mining is also incredibly toxic to human health and a major cause of conflict, displacement, and slavery globally.]

Other countries are trying to incentivize the recycling of e-waste, and are using gold to do so. In 2022, GNN reported that the British Royal Mint launched an electronically traded fund (ETF) with each share representing the value of gold recovered from e-waste as a way for investors to diversify into gold in a way that doesn’t support environmentally damaging mining.

The breakthrough is reminiscent of that old fairy tale of Rumpelstiltskin who can spin straw into gold. All that these modern-day, real-life alchemists are doing differently is using dairy and circuit boards rather than straw."

-via Good News Network, July 19, 2024

[shaadowmilkcookie]

skill issue? skull issue!

if tumblr compresses it... pls open it for better quality o|-< sobsob

[liltaireissocute]

[PERC'ILDAN]

midnight conversations during the night watch can make you closer than anything in the world

[fullcravings]

Chocolate Protein Powder Brownies

[oifaaa]

Seeing people finally realising Alfred is a bitch and horrible

The world is healing

Honestly I dont think everyone needs to be a alfred hater like mysef just acknowledge that he's not a perfect wee saint obviously personally I'm always gonna dislike him bc he's so tory coded

[gaypirate420]

I'm not going on twt a lot today it seems. I'm liking Viktor's arc, did I want Transhumanist Viktor? Of course but I'm also a BIG sucker for the "died and came back wrong" type of shit. And whatever the fuck the Hexcore is going to his mind is making me so invested. I want to see what he is going to do and I want to see if he stays like that forever (which I kinda don't want honestly) or he comes to his senses and goes mental.

[twink-between-worlds]

im eepy so headcanon time

fable usually messes with legends hair to help him fall asleep. ravio probably does it too once they get together.

because of this, he has trouble sleeping around the chain because he doesn't want to ask them to do that, it would be embarrassing.

sky picks up on it super quickly though

[scribefindegil]

We have a kitchen again so I got to make my favorite summer treat: Smitten Kitchen's whole milk ricotta with honey and seasonal fruits (farmer's market strawberries). Absolutely ambrosial.

[lunian]

pffft, I didnt know Blackwall and Dorian had a romance related banter

oh?

asdfdsfgsdg DORIAN-

why its so awkward but yet so hilarious

[izvmimi]

enemy of progress for actual real!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[falazaria]

I really hate how much I wanna talk to women/get to know any actual women but as soon as I am approached even just in DM's my brain imidiently goes "but what if" or just plain dysphoria mode

[penroseparticle]

Nothing annoys me more lately than "Going to the gym isn't a personality" like yes??? it is???

People talk about the things they care about, that they spend time on, that they put effort into. That includes their bodies?

I work with a lot of athletes. Like more than your typical amount. And they will happily debate protein powders, tell you they're doing a new training regimen, talk about Lat Pulls like having opinions on them is something obviously I have as well. Going to the gym is exciting for them- they tell me they hit a new personal best bench press, or are trying to hit a specific weight class, or are working on knee strength after their surgery. They compare times they threw up or got too dizzy.

The same way when I talk to MTG players they tell me about their new EDH deck, or talk about that one wombo combo they pulled in Draft, or this asshole at FNM. It's all just nuts and bolts for a thing they care about. I don't know much of anything about Knitting but a lot of my friends do, and I would NEVER tell them that "Knitting isn't a personality" just because I personally find it boring or whatever. Because I would be an asshole.

Going to the gym is a ~personality~, it's just not one you want to talk about. You don't care about machine vs. free weights. You don't want to know how long they spent working out this morning. Frankly, you want them to do the work at the gym and not give you a peek behind the curtain. You want people to look good, look fit, look how you want to, but not talk about how much work and effort it takes to do so. Working out to you is a chore, and an unpleasant one at that, so you'd rather they not remind you of it.

But exercising your body shouldn't be a chore, it should be something you enjoy- your favorite rock climbing place, the dance class you and your friends take, etc. These people LIKE going to the gym. They would gladly tell you about it. And if for some reason you are talking to someone who works out religiously but hates every second of it- first of all, yikes, buddy you don't have to live that way- but second of all, that person will not talk to you about the gym. They will talk to you about what they are actually passionate about.

You don't have to enjoy their hobby! You can think the gym is boring, or exercise isn't interesting. But like. say that. The gym can be a personality. Anything can be a personality.

[cqallenwalker]

You've heard of the Miku binder, but now get ready for

The Miku sports bra.

[pishifuzul]

hi it's me lea, with a workout question. for health reasons İ can't have too many animal proteins, do you by any chance have a recommendation for a vegan protein powder?

i wish i had an answer for you! protein supplements (whether animal or vegan) are something i know virtually nothing about, and im not familiar with the terrain. all i can suggest is looking for what others have recommended.