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wardencommanderrodimiss · 5 years

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Witches, Chapter 17: Blackquill wants to fight an orca; Phoenix wants to fight Blackquill; Athena contains within her a multitude of whale facts.

[Seelie of Kurain Chapter Masterlist] [ao3]

[Witches Chapter Masterlist] [ao3]

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Phoenix leaves early, tells Trucy he’ll meet her at the courthouse, and stops by the office first. The computer wakes up slowly and when it finally does, it’s as blank as Phoenix left it last night, not a word of assistance or encouragement. So he’s on his own. All right. Fine.

On his way out through the front, he stops. The lid over the piano keys is opened, something lying directly on the keys. His old badge, weighing down the corner of Lotta’s photograph, a snapshot out of time, poorly planned, Phoenix and Larry both jostled about by Maya, and Edgeworth almost smiling at that, and Gumshoe the only one who’s timed it right, with confetti fluttering through the air fallen from his hand. If he squints with the Sight from the right angle and distance, like it’s one of those illusion puzzles, sometimes he’ll see Mia standing to the side, smiling.

“I can take a hint,” he says, setting it back down on the piano. He can’t see her in the photo today, but it’s okay because it being here, not on his desk, and his badge here and not in his desk, means that she’s here, not frozen in a photo. “All right. I get it. I can do it, and I’m not alone.” He has people to help and to keep him in check. He’s not going to lose a second badge.

At the courthouse he smacks himself in the face with cold water, hoping to knock sleep out of his eyes and with it, clear out the dust from eight years of not playing the lead. Athena bounds into the defendant lobby sounding as cheery as ever and announcing that she ran a few laps around the building to get ready, but tired bags hang beneath her eyes and he tells her such when he asks her if she got any sleep. “Do I really look that bad?” she asks, prodding at the skin below her eyes. “I’d better do something about that. Prosecutor Blackquill gives me shit over everything and I can’t leave another opening. Hey, Trucy!” she calls, as the other two members of the agency enter with Pearl. “You don’t happen to have concealer, do you? Or Apollo, do you? I need to look like I actually slept soundly and I’m desperate.”

“Sorry,” Apollo says. “The only cosmetics I use are hair gel.”

“You mean it doesn’t naturally do that?” Pearl gasps. “I thought for sure…”

“Concealer, coming right up!” Trucy produces a round makeup compact from her Magic Panties - she carries those around in a purse and everything that would normally be found in a purse goes into them - and holds it up to Athena’s face. “No, that’s not the right shade. Hold on.” She plunges her hand back into the waistband and pulls out what appears to Phoenix to be pretty much the same, but comparing it against Athena’s skin, Trucy nods, satisfied.

“Since when do you wear makeup?” Phoenix asks. They’ve had talks about this topic. Why is it all so expensive. Why is this a scam industry that breeds insecurities. No I’m not buying you lipstick. You can buy it yourself when you’re much older. Yes I’ll buy you that lip gloss that’s in a narwhal-shaped container. That’s not really makeup.

“I don’t,” Trucy says. “This is old stage show stuff we still had!”

“We” being the Gramaryes, surely. She pats away the dark circles under Athena’s eyes and with a wave, wishes them both luck, and skips off for the gallery with Apollo and Pearl in tow.

Leaving Phoenix to enter behind the bench, chat with this judge for the first time in a year. If he really thinks about it, this judge - this man, he was going to think, but after all these years he’s not really quite sure how to assess what the judge is or isn’t and whether he’s a being that exists in any capacity outside of the courthouse - has seen him at his lowest, to rise as high as he could, and crash again, sink lower than that, and now here he is again. This judge has presided over all three trials where Phoenix has been accused of murder. He saw Phoenix’s first trial and his last and now he’ll see this second first.

He tells Phoenix that standing here as a lawyer makes him look younger. Phoenix thanks him and decides not to mention that it’s definitely shaving that makes him look younger. Might as well just take the compliment, if it’s a compliment, and not another “baby-faced” jab.

“And you look as young as ever, Your Honor,” he replies, and it’s true, really - his face hasn’t changed a bit since Phoenix first met him. No more wrinkles, and no less. Eternal, unchanging, a fixture of the courtroom who Phoenix knows how to work with.

And then there’s the prosecutor. The latest prosecutorial mystery for Phoenix to unravel. Another one to save.

Prosecutor Simon Blackquill has an even more frightening visage staring at him at level across the courtroom, rather than looking down on him from up safe in the gallery. Not that safe isn’t anything but relative when it comes to a man who throws silvery slices of wind with the slash of a finger and whose hawk flaps about as it pleases, but in the gallery Phoenix is just one of a sea of faces merely observing. Down here at the bench? He’s the man who offered to defend an orca, with nowhere to hide and nowhere to run from the man who brought an orca to trial.

Funny how all this works.

Blackquill berates Phoenix for bringing this case to court, never mind that it’s Blackquill who actually brought this to court - and the poor judge got this case late last night and skimmed it and missed the part that the defendant is an orca. But otherwise Blackquill seems - to be taking this seriously? Enough to speech-ify on the fact that they have an orca to be prosecuted here.

“Though she cannot be present in the courtroom, nor speak for herself, we will treat this defendant as any other,” he says, casting a glance toward the screen being set up behind the witness stand; hopefully in a few minutes Sasha will have Orla on video phone, introducing the defendant to the court and perhaps charming then with her cuteness. Phoenix has had enough witnesses try and play cute to turn the judge and gallery against the defense - it’s about time he gets to have that power on his side. “Man or beast, we stand equal with the same value to our souls.” He pauses, eyes narrowing at his own words. The hawk on his shoulder ruffles its feathers. That’s a loaded word, for someone who knows magic: humans have souls, fae don’t, animals don’t, and fae animals certainly don’t. A soul or lack of one is no indication of moral judgment or standing. It’s just an extra piece of the self that can be cut loose and used in magic, and this seems to be what Blackquill is pondering, and his bird getting at, because he amends himself. “To our lives and hearts. Take Taka, as much a person in spirit as the rest of us who stand here today.”

Phoenix would love to know what Taka is, whether it’s just an ordinary bird, a fae creature, or a familiar - Blackquill doesn’t give a hint, and Phoenix doesn’t know what the difference between a fae animal and specifically a familiar looks like. And even if he did he can’t see through Blackquill’s twisted aura to know.

The Twisted Samurai distorts everything around him, that even if Phoenix wants to test his eyes on Athena next to him, he can’t. The courtroom falls into darkness when he tries, inconsistent silver light throwing the colors off where they aren’t inverted. Athena’s wide eyes appear nearly gray, not blue, and her hair dulls similarly; he sees double of her, sometimes, like he’s dazed or cross-eyed. And across the courtroom Blackquill has eyes almost straight white, and nothing else of him the same. His shape twists and breaks like his reflection in a wavy funhouse mirror has been reflected into a rippling pond, his hair changing lengths, his skin all the depth of white tissue paper, veins and blood and bones below, a dead man walking. At his steadiest, his entire body simply trembles at the edges, like energy barely contained in a vessel too small for it, a person held together in a form that doesn’t naturally belong to them; and all of him either stark white or black, and mostly white, patterned like a photonegative of himself.

Phoenix closes his eyes and gives himself a moment to reset and readjust to the regular world that he’ll see when he opens them.

“The question, then,” Blackquill continues, while Athena squints in confusion at Phoenix because he’s been squinting at her with the Sight, “is what one - what our orca, in this case - has done with that life, and how stained and shriveled their heart.”

Then he decides to prove that the greatest monster in the room is him, immediately after the first witness testimony - from Norma DePlume, who is as much of a terror as Phoenix expected, and she and Blackquill as nasty to each other as he could have imagined - when he demands the judge give his verdict, because they’ve heard everything they need to, and, “deliver your judgement so that I may carry out the sentence.”

“Objection! Hold it!” What the fuck! “You aren’t - you aren’t planning on killing Orla yourself, are you?” Beside him, Athena can’t keep her “what the fuck!” contained, or rather Widget warbles it out, and Phoenix really, really wants to know who programmed the robot to say fuck. “Is that what you’re implying—”

Blackquill says nothing, merely smirks, and Phoenix decides that he absolutely, definitely, does not want to actually know the answer. If Edgeworth wants him to defend this man, which he does, that’s not an “if”, Phoenix would rather not think that this case only went to trial because Blackquill wanted to take a literal stab at fighting a whale. He’d like to think it’s because he and Athena and Pearl found some decent proof, reasonable doubt, and because of what Blackquill said there in his opening statement, that animals have value and deserve a fair chance, too.

(Maybe he just said that to get it on the record hoping for reasonable doubt of his own and a fair trial for Taka when that goddamn bird inevitably hauls off and claws someone’s eyes out.)

(Edgeworth didn’t even warn him that Prosecutor Blackquill had a murder bird! Is the logical conclusion that Edgeworth didn’t know about the bird? Points toward fae creature, a la Gavin’s hound, except who the hell is managing to summon any fae anyone in prison? That place is iron for a reason. Or maybe after everything else, Edgeworth figured this is nothing to Phoenix.)

“We have a right to cross-examine!” Athena’s shrill and rightfully indignant cry rings out over a shriek from Taka that sounds like laughter. “We’re always allowed to, you know!”

“I simply hope to spare us all the waste of time that comes as consequence of your methods,” Blackquill replies, directed more at Phoenix than Athena, who like last trial he seems to mostly be ignoring, “and spare you the heartbreak of burning yourself to ash in a fight for a ‘Not Guilty’ you will not win.”

Like yesterday, Phoenix wonders if they’re talking about an orca, or something else. About Blackquill himself, and the task regarding him that Phoenix has been given. Does Blackquill know what Edgeworth has asked of Phoenix? It sort of sounds like he does.

“Okay, but I’m still going to cross-examine,” Phoenix says. And maybe drag it out a little more than usual, just to let Blackquill know he’s not intimidated.

And DePlume likes the sound of her own voice, so maybe they’ll learn something new from her, some piece of information she hadn’t meant to let slip, if they push on her every statement.

What Phoenix learns instead is that Blackquill likes penguins and thinks them the only part of the aquarium actually worth anyone’s time, and apparently no one told DePlume that the victim died of blunt force trauma, not being bitten by the orca. Not that it helps; there’s more security footage than the short looped bit that they saw behind Fulbright’s back, and that does actually show that Orla had the victim in her jaws, and Blackquill can put a good - bad - spin on it. Sure, it wasn’t when the victim was killed, but it certainly was proof of her malicious intent, toying with a corpse like she’s a cat caught the canary - Blackquill stares Athena dead in the eye as he makes that analogy - but not even hungry to eat it, just taking another life between her teeth as a game.

A game, and singing the while she does it. The theory, working from their preliminary autopsy report that Jack Shipley died instantaneously from a brain contusion, is that Orla headbutted him into the glass of the tank. DePlume didn’t see any moment of actual impact - that was what Phoenix saw on the security footage, Orla with her head tipped out of sight behind some tank decorations - but came to the conclusion that this was definitely the exact time of the victim’s death. A conclusion extrapolated from something that Phoenix really, really wishes Sasha had mentioned: a year ago, another orca trainer at Shipshape Aquarium died under such similar circumstances.

DePlume wrote a whole damn book about it. Sasha entirely neglected this critical fact. Phoenix is going to scream. Maybe faint, instead, get just a little wobbly in the knee area, because Blackquill has this all in the palm of his hand, all under control, and what a horrible mess he would make of a jury trial. Start with them biased against him on basis of that tricky little matter, convicted murderer, and end with them swayed however he wants them to, just as he plays the gallery, but they aren’t the ones making the final call.

(Edgeworth fretted often about what a particularly charismatic and manipulative lawyer could do to the jurist system, and Phoenix thought he was worrying over Klavier, his charm, his glamours, his celebrity status. How likely instead that he was concerned with Blackquill, already planning ahead to when he would place him back in court?)

Though if Phoenix is going to faint for any actual reason, it’s the picture that Blackquill has projected up for the court. A page from DePlume’s book, half the sheet taken up by a glossy color photograph of the dead orca trainer - so that’s the kind of writer DePlume is, a sensationalist one, like some others he could name. The unfortunate girl was probably around Sasha’s age; her body lay on the edge of the show pool, water puddling beneath her and dripping from her long dark hair. Her shirt has flowing puffy pirate sleeves in a soft powder blue fabric. Almost the color of Trucy’s show cape, and it’s hard not to think of his daughter, but it’s even harder not to think of someone else wearing that color and killed while performing at her profession. It was a rehearsal, not a live show, when Thalassa died, but—

Reflections, reflections. He keeps running up against familiar faces on the corpses in this case.

“Athena! Phoenix! Please!” Sasha pleads from somewhere out-of-sight, while Orla, centered in the screen, chirrups in confusion, but when she makes sound, she shows off her powerful jaws full of teeth. “Orla didn’t kill anyone! Please, we’re begging for your help!”

Orla waves a flipper, the gravity of the situation not really clear to her.

The trainer who died last year - if Orla really did everything DePlume says, biting and headbutting, they should see marks of that, blood and bruises, and there’s nothing. Logic himself out of fear, that’s right, he can do that - Orla can’t speak, but she understands them, and Sasha in part understands her. Sasha has faith in her. Phoenix has to have faith in Sasha.

“You’d be better off saving your breath, you sad slippery pup.” Blackquill leans forward, elbows on the bench, laughing, and Phoenix really, really does not like that. “Perhaps you did not see his face, but allow me to tell you - when he saw that photograph, he turned even paler than me. You were yourself rather afraid of the orca then, weren’t you, Wright-dono?”

Not enough for him to play the judge and gallery against the defendant, now he’s trying to turn lawyer and client against each other, make them lose faith in the other. How discouraged must Sasha feel, to be told Phoenix is doubting too?

“For shame, to take up the matter of a client who you have neither the courage nor drive to defend, and further crush them under the false hope you’ve given.”

“Nothing about my defense is ‘false’, Prosecutor Blackquill.” Keep his face and voice calm and level, don’t give Blackquill an inch or a twitch to work from. “If you’re hoping for an easy win by talking me into giving up, I assure you, it’s not going to happen. Orla is my client, and I don’t give up on my clients.” Whether or not she can speak to him doesn’t matter. That she’s an orca doesn’t matter. You can never truly know if your client is innocent or not, Mia said once, a very long time ago. And she’s right, and was always right, because even Truth can get subjective and messy, be talked around, and relying wholly on it made him an arrogant idiot. All you can do is fight with everything you have.

And he’s going to. He’s going to do Mia proud, orca or no.

“I see the trust that Sasha has put in Orla, and I respect that.” He sympathizes, after all the nightmarish cases when he’s had to trust someone that no one else would, or trust someone who didn’t even trust himself. “So I’m willing to have faith in Orla, too.”

“Yet you do not know the first thing about orcas, do you?”

“Is that relevant?” Phoenix asks.

He relishes the surprise that grips Blackquill’s features. Time to find out whether the Twisted Samurai, master manipulator, is smart enough to not be taken in by a tactic Phoenix has had seven years to perfect, playing the idiot and being underestimated. If it can’t get him anything about this particular case maybe he’ll learn something more about Blackquill himself that can help Edgeworth.

“Do you know why they are also known as ‘killer whales’?”

What kind of trick question, and how actually relevant—? “Uh, because people have a tendency to fear what they don’t understand, and because they didn’t understand orcas and just saw their teeth, they presumed that these creatures were out to get them too?”

That’s basically a psychology explanation, right? He’s basically working on Athena and Blackquill’s level, in their wheelhouse, now, right?

Blackquill stares at him. One of his eyes twitches. Taka scratches its head. The question is written plainly across his features, the icy stare and the cold scowl: how did you pass the Bar, twice?

Joke’s on him; Phoenix doesn’t know either.

“No,” Blackquill says. “That is not it.”

“It was a good attempt,” Phoenix says, glancing to Athena for confirmation. She shrugs, her teeth pressed together in a failure at forcing a smile, and she sharply sucks in her breath. Okay. Ouch. That noncommittal of an answer is a hell of an answer of itself.

“The reason,” Blackquill says, stressing the word, now acting along the belief that yes, Phoenix is a fucking idiot who needs to be addressed accordingly, “is that they are cunning and merciless predators known to hunt and kill even true whales. They are also known as ‘wolves of the sea’ for that same reason, that they are clever, powerful, and dangerous creatures who hunt in packs.” How, in the midst of going over the case, preparing witnesses, and filling in the gaps of the evidence Fulbright had, did he, from prison, have the time and resources to do this much research on orcas, down to etymology of the name? “Tell me, does that sound innocent to you? Does that not sound like the creature we have here on stand today, and her capacity to so efficiently kill a man before entertaining herself with that corpse?”

So he thinks orcas are smart enough to ascribe malicious intent to, and he’s doing his damndest to convince everyone else of the same. “My goodness,” the judge says. “So they truly are ‘killers’? Though may I ask, what do you mean by ‘true’ whales?”

Phoenix wondered the same, but if there’s time for a tangent then he’d rather use it to reconvene with Athena, steady themselves, and figure out how to work past this huge gap in their knowledge. It looks really bad, all the pieces they weren’t aware of. They need a new angle of approach as everything they’ve done so far has been smacked down—

“Oh, I can help you with that!” Athena says brightly, and her ponytail sways from side to side as she bobs up and down with uncontained glee. “Technically, if we want to get pedantic, which we do” - spoken like a true lawyer; Phoenix could shed a tear with pride - “what’s known as a ‘whale’” - she makes quotation marks with her fingers in the air - “is different in our informal everyday usage than in taxonomy. You traditionally wouldn’t call a dolphin a whale, right?”

Maybe Phoenix won’t have an opportunity to confer with Athena and will just ponder how dire this case has gotten on his own, while Athena spouts Whale Facts. If Blackquill meant to distract her, it’s working, but Phoenix is not honestly sure he could’ve expected this to happen, or the judge to ask. Either way, Blackquill hasn’t turned his back bored on the tangent yet; he has stepped back from the bench, arms crossed, the chain between his cuffs tangled up around them, eyes half closed, maybe glad for the break.

“But,” Athena continues, “you could! Technically! So from, like, primary school biology we know that classification in taxonomy goes, kingdom phylum class order genus species, but there are orders within orders and suborders—”

“Athena,” Phoenix says, not sure she can even hear anyone else but herself right now, “I don’t think His Honor needs this much detail.”

“Yes, do stop her,” DePlume says with a roll of her eyes.

Which makes Phoenix immediately want to change his stance and tell Athena to continue talking, but someone else gets to it first. “Let the lass go on,” Blackquill says dryly. “Don’t crush her spirit. I’ll do enough of that myself when we get to the next testimony and the sentencing.”

“—and so there’s a smaller order known as Cetaceans, that’s literally just, derived from Ancient Greek for ‘whale’. But this whales order contains two more even smaller orders, and those are toothed whales and baleen whales. Baleen whales are what you’d consider ‘true whales’, basically, like blue whales and humpback whales, and they’re probably what you think of if you were asked to picture a whale. But toothed whales include dolphins and orcas and narwhals—”

“Wait,” Phoenix says. “Narwhals aren’t giant fucked-up seals?”

Blackquill closes his eyes entirely.

“Nope! They don’t have a fin on their back, so maybe that’s why you got confused, but belugas don’t either, and they’re whales as much as narwhals are! But the short of the orca matter” - wasn’t the judge’s question about what a true whale is, not how orcas are taxonomically classified? - “is that they are actually classified within the dolphin family. Orcas are dolphins! So if you’d call a bottlenose dolphin a whale, you can call an orca a whale. They’re both the same amount of whale! Or informally you can just keep using the words ‘dolphin’ and ‘whale’ however, with no regards to which animals are genetically most similar, and people will get what you mean, because words mean what we’ve made them mean and that’s how we use them. But since you wanted to know, now you know!”

“I - yes.” The judge is slightly taken aback by her enthusiasm. “Thank you, Ms Cykes. You really have done your research for this case.”

Phoenix somehow has the feeling that she knew that long before this case.

“And yet.” Blackquill leans forward, his eyes alight and alive, a point ready to be made even off the back of something not case-relevant. “You dispute and explain the ‘whale’ part, but never once say a thing to refute the ‘killer’.”

“I - but, I—” Athena turns helplessly to Phoenix, her mouth opening and closing without any more words coming through.

“I simply cannot bear to hear more such drivel from the defense about trusting a killer,” he continues. “Can you, either, Your Baldness?”

Phoenix would’ve been thrown out of the court after bringing a bird in (or a whip, or for throwing an enchanted coffee mug across the room), or for even half of this amount of contempt for the judge - the rules have always been more lenient for prosecutors, he’s always known that, but there’s never been such a stark demonstration of it. Once this trial is over, he’ll take that up with Edgeworth. Far from the most important action to take to level the field, not by a long shot, but might as well make a note of it.

“Funny that he’s talking shit on ‘trusting a killer’,” Phoenix mutters, “when he’s the convicted killer here, asking the judge to trust his case.” He snorts, but Athena doesn’t laugh or make a sound. She stares across at Blackquill, drumming her fingers on her collarbone right next to Widget. The one to laugh is Blackquill himself, even though Phoenix was taking care that he wouldn’t be heard by anyone but Athena, to keep that from being an on-the-record statement when he’s said enough bullshit that already will be going into a transcript. (Goddamn narwhals.)

As if Blackquill wasn’t enough of an uncomfortable, inscrutable mystery. Where’s his damned bird? Taka isn’t close to Phoenix, but it isn’t right with Blackquill, either; it splits the distance, and Phoenix doesn’t know how good a hawk’s hearing is. Pretty good, he thinks. He’ll ask Kay if she knows. And Taka heard, what was his name, the tanuki from Mayor Tenma’s trial, talking to them in the lobby after, and what Taka heard got to Blackquill, got to Edgeworth. Is that how this works?

“I’ve been told I can’t take a hint,” Phoenix says, louder, and Taka circles over the room and decides to settle now on the judge’s head. “And I certainly am not going to take this hint of yours to give up, Prosecutor Blackquill, because I’ve also been told I don’t know when to quit.”

“Your self-awareness does no credit to you,” Blackquill says. “Very well. Witness, tell them what you saw, and what you heard. Deliver the fatal blow to their deluded determination.”

Back to work.

It’s touch and go, like every case, every time, just like Phoenix remembers, but they work through DePlume’s testimony, keep pressing the possibility of a human killer. Suggest that Orla was manipulated, given the command to start singing by a human culprit who wanted to draw attention to her, frame her, and create a witness. He’s pushing the bloody coin at the court as much as he shows his badge to witnesses during an investigation - and he’s not gonna stop doing the latter any time soon, not now that he’s got a new badge to be proud of because it means he survived and that’s worth announcing to everyone, right? - but the judge is coming around, surely—

And Blackquill is not; Blackquill’s a damn tricky bastard who has a blood-covered burlap bag, the exact piece of evidence Phoenix desperately wanted to find. He has the bag, he knows Phoenix wanted it for proof, but since he’s known of it since yesterday he’s had time to spin a tale that keeps Orla as the perpetrator. He’s prepared it to the point that it’s not even a bluff: he has Marlon Rimes as a witness to confirm that something happened, a loud clattering noise from the orca pool room that Blackquill argues is the moment that Orla, by pulling on a flag lying underneath them, upended four-hundred pounds of show props all precariously stacked, right down onto the victim’s head.

When Rimes said he had come here on Sasha’s behalf, because she had to stay behind with Orla - that wasn’t the full truth, clearly.

Not that Rimes is exactly happy to testify for Blackquill, either. The story is dragged out of him: he was up in the staff room around 10:10 am, roughly the time that DePlume saw Orla with the captain’s body, when he heard a crashing and peered into the room to see the props had all fallen, after they had been cleaned up neatly the prior night. “Just to clarify,” Phoenix says, already certain that Rimes is lying about the timing of this, but he wants to get the most information he can from this fake story if it might help him figure out why Rimes is lying. “You heard the sound, couldn’t go in the room because you need a security key for that” - Rimes nods - “but peeked in and couldn’t see the victim” - Rimes nods a second time - “but could see the props?”

Rimes nods a third time. “Yeah. The rest of the stuff mighta been blocking my view of the captain, but I could see a bunch of those gold coins lying all about everywhere.”

And the current running theory is that the gold coins, via bag, are the murder weapon. Phoenix has staked the case for a human culprit on those coins. “I suppose it fits as a certain tragic thematic,” Blackquill says. Phoenix braces himself for tasteless remarks. “With the pirate theme that the victim pursued for his aquarium, and consider how many pirates lost their lives in pursuit of gold. Perhaps it’s faery gold; I’ve heard that unfailingly claims lives. Or perhaps the orca wished to be compensated for her labor, and saw fit to take the matter between her own teeth.”

There it goes. There’s the cruel biting words, the nasty chuckle, Blackquill laughing with himself when no one else is. “We all deserve to be properly paid for our work, do we not? And I myself shall have a fine meal tonight.”

Several questions arise, none relevant to the case: how exactly is Blackquill paid? He’s a prisoner on death row; money isn’t exactly an issue, or worth anything, to him. Maybe he’s compensated with better food than standard prison fare. Maybe that’s what he means. Maybe it’s that and not the alarming, outlandish, prospect Phoenix can’t shake, not when Blackquill wears that cloying smirk across his face, the one that suggests he knows something more than he’s letting on, and he took the time at the beginning of the trial saying that he wanted to “carry out the sentence” - read: kill, because if Orla was guilty she’s going to be put down.

So, well, knowing Maya for as long as he has, there’s no way for him to discount the possibility that Blackquill, talking about dinner, means that he wants to kill and eat an orca.

(He’s tried for a while to figure out what it is that drives Maya’s appetite. Does she just think human food tastes better? Isn’t it supposed to be the other way around, that faery food tastes so exquisite that after having it, anything else is ashes in a human’s mouth? Is that even true? Something else to ask Thalassa. But for Maya, he’s not ever figured out whether it was just a trait she was born with, an insatiable void within that she’s driven to fill, or a way that she revels in the human world, that to get food here it’s a simple price of money, with no debt incurred, no complex magically binding rules of hospitality. Eating plastic packaging, though - the Gavins’ hellhound does the same, swallowed a whole takeout container that Phoenix offered it as a gesture of “please don’t kill me” - he’s got even less an idea.)

If this, though - this with Blackquill right here, the insinuation that might say more about Phoenix than Blackquill, about what he’s dealt with on a regular basis and how every place he turns these past two days he sees it - if this could be how he gets the answer to the “is he human or fae” question, so help him—

(If it’s anything for Blackquill, if he’s anything like Maya, then this is a thing about dominance, about being the one at the top of the food chain. About having any ounce of control over someone’s life, even if his own is out of his hands, and he on death row. Hey, is that analytical psychology? Everything that Athena refers to as “analytical psychology” means Phoenix doesn’t have a clue what it’s actually supposed to be.)

“Good to clear that up, Mr Rimes, thank you,” Phoenix says. Blackquill’s grin widens. He knows Phoenix is deliberately, consciously ignoring him. He knows that he’s gotten under his skin.

(Hell, he’s been there for months already, but more in the way of a faint itch, and now he’s plainly a knife jammed through Phoenix’s chest. Isn’t stabbing someone a way of getting under their skin, both literally and metaphorically? And he wouldn’t put it past Blackquill to stab him, literally. With magic, sure, but still.)

“Now,” Phoenix continues. “The trouble is, Mr Rimes, that there’s no way you could’ve been in the staff room at that time. Is there not a certain young woman whose acquaintance you made yesterday, in the food prep room, at this same time that you claim to have been in the staff room?”

Another thing to bring up with Edgeworth, in terms of legal reform: maybe some sort of public service announcements about the consequences of perjury? Make some informative posters to put up at bus stops and subway stations. That couldn’t hurt.

“Sasha’s under enough stress now, y’know? I didn’t want her to have to come in and testify. Figured if anyone should have to go up on the stand, it shoulda been me.”

“That’s a very…” Phoenix pinches the bridge of his nose. Very noble? Very stupid? Why not both? “Very kindly meant, thing to do, Mr Rimes, but that’s still perjury.”

“Yeah,” Athena says. “It seems like a lot of trouble to go to just so that Sasha didn’t have to come in and say yeah, she heard a noise. And now she’s got to come in anyway, and you’re in trouble too now. Why would you go to that extent?”

Why indeed.

He tells them. The calendar they thought was his, the one Pearl accidentally picked up, the one that tells them that the victim met with someone at the pool - that wasn’t his. He thinks it’s Sasha’s. He worried suspicion would fall on Sasha.

And now Phoenix is worried by that prospect, too.

He didn’t miss this part of being a lawyer, not at all. Damn all of it.

Rimes leaves to return to the aquarium, take over orca-sitting while Sasha has to testify, and that leaves Phoenix and Athena to pace around the lobby like fish swimming circles in a tank for the rest of the recess. Just waiting, helplessly, to know what horrible new revelation will come next.

Sasha’s testimony is about the same as Rimes’, except for the part where it’s actually true. Orla kicked up a fuss, DePlume started screaming, which of these happened first she doesn’t remember, because finding your boss dead in an orca tank doesn’t help one maintain a firm, linear thought process to exactly recall it later. No surprises there. Lacking any other strategy, Phoenix nitpicks and nitpicks at her testimony until even she is annoyed with it, even though he’s the lawyer she came to for help and she knew from the start that he cross-examined a parrot so she should expect that this is the strategy and the strategy is bluffing and bullshitting.

But it gets them places. It gets them information about the way the props fell over the victim, that Orla couldn’t have dragged him into the pool after they fell because that would’ve disturbed the scarf that landed on top of his body, the way that once again Phoenix’s entire theory is wrong and he’s got to dispute his own suggestion that he built this case on, the bloody coin as the murder weapon. It’s not. He disproves his own bluff that got the case to trial in the first place.

His real argument, his unwavering stance, is simply that Orla was not the killer, and against everything new they pull from Sasha, that holds true. The victim most likely fell to his death in the drained orca pool. Orla was manipulated, using one of the new tricks she’s learning, to grab the victim’s body and bring him back up to the surface. Sasha and Rimes get her to demonstrate, on the video phone, with a practice dummy. Blackquill’s case about a killer whale is losing ground, fast; Orla’s too endearing. “The whole gallery loves her!” Athena says brightly, and her voice and stance both turn smug as she adds, “And Prosecutor Blackquill’s shut right up!”

Planning a counterattack is well within the realm of possibility for why he’s silent. He might also be convincing himself that whale meat would taste nasty anyway. Or Phoenix might be terribly uncharitable, and Blackquill never intended to eat the orca. He never said it outright. He just had a look about him that didn’t seem innocent, if he’s ever seemed innocent, which Phoenix does not believe he has. Probably shouldn’t say that about a sort-of client, but here they are.

Also here they are, with the judge agreeing, ordering an investigation be done of the bottom of the orca pool, and Blackquill still sullenly silent, the trial inexorably rolling to its final conclusion, a verdict, Orla saved—

“Prosecutor Blackquill!” Fulbright makes a loud reappearance, waving a manilla envelope with one hand and with the other trying to extract a paper from the envelope, and he isn’t really doing either with any dignity. “The thing you ordered has come in.”

“Hmph.” Blackquill doesn’t raise his arm to accept the paper - finally extracted from the envelope - Fulbright offers him. He doesn’t move in any way, doesn’t make a sound or an indication of a command, and Taka alights from his shoulder, snatching the page from Fulbright, talons piercing through it, and circling up to the judge. “If you would read that out to the court, Your Baldness.”

“Ah - and what is this, exactly?” The judge slowly pulls the sheet lose, care made to avoid his hands getting close to Taka’s talons, but also to not rip the paper even further.

“An updated autopsy report,” Blackquill replies.

“God damn it!” Phoenix should not say that so loudly, and saying it out loud at any volume is too loud with Athena around, especially when he’s been over Courtroom Manners 101 with her and had the lesson basically boil down to don’t challenge the prosecution to a fistfight by the dumpsters in the back lot and don’t curse on the record. But the words escape from him anyway, like air knocked from his lungs when the prosecution roundhouse-kicked him straight in the gut. “Why now? Just when it’s going good for us—”

“During the recess, a particular thought occurred to me,” Blackquill says. He’s the one ignoring Phoenix, now, though there’s nothing smug about it, only chilly disdainful professionalism. “I asked the body to be reexamined, bearing in mind what had been nagging at me. Now.” He jerks his head to the side, directed at the judge.

“Very well.” The judge casts one last cautious glance at Taka before he allows his attention to turn to the paper. “Let’s see here… The cause of death, blunt force trauma, shown to be consistent with - with a fall? A fall of around sixty feet? But the orca pool is sixty-five feet deep! This report backs up the defense’s claims!”

Blackquill nods once.

“What?” Phoenix’s yelp is even louder this time, never mind that this is good news. It’s good news. It’s solid evidence in favor of his claim and his client. Why does it feel like someone still has a foot on his chest?

“The orca could not possibly be involved with what happened with an empty pool,” the judge says. “This autopsy report proves her complete innocence!”

“Yes,” Blackquill says, at length. Even it being his autopsy report, it takes him several seconds to finally acquise. “I suppose it does.”

Taka spreads its wings and flaps back to Blackquill’s shoulder.

“Then we did it!” Athena bounces again, her excitement bubbling over into obvious physical expression, just as her every other emotion refuses to be contained. “Prosecutor Blackquill can’t even object! He isn’t even trying! You’ve done it, Boss! You saved Orla!”

His agreement with her, they’ve done it, Orla’s safe, emerges as a sticky click from the back of his throat. Words don’t come, and another choked attempt at response is lost against the clack of the judge’s gavel. “This court finds the defendant, Ora Shipley” - right, Phoenix had entirely forgotten that Orla’s “legal” name is something different than what she’s called - “not guilty!”

An expected Objection! doesn’t follow, not from Blackquill, not from a different witness, not anyone. Beside him, Athena woops and throws her hands in the air, extended a bit toward Sasha, who pumps her fist in the air in return. “Phoenix! Athena! Thank you both so much!” She springs out from behind the witness stand and calls over to the video phone, “Hey, Marlon! Give Orla some celebratory snacks!”

“Sure thing! Congrats, Sasha!” Orla on screen is pelted by a hail of fish, catching only about half of them, like someone flung a whole bucket at her. He probably did, in fact.

The judge clears his throat, taps his gavel once. “That concludes today’s—” He taps the gavel again, raises his voice a little more. “Today’s proceedings!” Court’s never going to be officially dismissed at this rate, with the hubbub; Athena’s leaning over the bench now, grinning, saying something to Sasha, and Orla chattering loudly. She’s so caught up in the fervor, but Phoenix still waits for the other shoe to drop, always is waiting for that, and he still concentrates enough that he hears, over the sound of her and Sasha’s laughter, a low, throaty chuckle drift across the courtroom.

Then Blackquill slams his palm on the bench, and the courtroom goes quiet enough to listen to the rattle of the chain echo into silence. Athena, basically lying sprawled across the bench , pushes herself up. Sasha has frozen.

For a moment, Blackquill doesn’t move, his eyes fixed down on his hand on the bench. Then he raises his eyes up, his face alight with smug triumph. “My sincerest thanks, Wright-dono.”

“Huh?” There’s no way this goes that’s good, is there? Maybe Blackquill could surprise him, like the updated autopsy report surprised him, or maybe he’s going to have to ask Athena how many languages she knows and how to say oh fuck in all of them. (She knows German, right? He could pull double time with that, between swearing in court, and driving a few people he knows up the wall.)

“For your work in drawing out the truth.”

If Blackquill had a personal stake in wanting to know the truth behind this case, that would be one thing, but—

“Now, Fool Bright. Arrest this woman.”

“Certainly!” Fulbright throws up a jaunty salute with two fingers. He and Blackquill are the only ones moving, like they’re the only ones alive, everyone else turned to stone, unable to do anything but wait. “Sasha Buckler, you are under arrest for the murder of Jack Shipley!”

“What?” Sasha springs backwards, knocking into the bench and grabbing onto the edge of it to hold herself up.

“No! I don’t believe it!” Athena smacks both of her palms down on the bench, pushing herself up entirely off of her feet, suspending herself in an attempt to be taller.

The shoe dropped. “For what reason—”

Blackquill cuts him off before he finishes asking the question. “Come now. You must have had some idea in your sorry sad head that this would be the outcome. The drained pool in the orca room accessible only by key card - the orca being framed with its show commands. Who else had access and ability to be on the scene and properly manipulate the orca? She and the victim are the only two who participate in the training and commanding of the orca, and her security card, last night, had the last recorded usage until the body was discovered yesterday morning.”

“Yesterday, we requested security card logs from the company that handles them,” Fulbright says. “Apparently, the aquarium employees don’t know the card usage is tracked. Come along now, Ms Buckler. It’s time we have a nice long chat down at the station.”

Card usage records, think Phoenix think; he’s run up against this kind of thing at least once before. What are all his theories and bluffs to get around that? If employees didn’t know that their ins and outs were recorded, someone who had their own card would probably use it, but a culprit who didn’t have a card would still have to steal it, even if they didn’t know they could frame someone that way.

Objecting at this point won’t stop what’s in motion. Fulbright takes Sasha by the upper arm, escorting her away, and she follows in a dazed trace. But Phoenix is not going to not object, if he sees any way to, and Sasha is his client about as much as Orla is, and Athena is indignant and seething beside him. “Why would Ms Buckler have come to us for help with Orla’s case if she intended to frame Orla?” he demands. “Why wouldn’t she just let Orla be blamed and escape the scrutiny?”

Blackquill snorts. “She’s quite the performer, acting the part of such a worried girl concerned for the life of her friend. Perhaps she thought to even better sell her concern this way, knowing all the while with a witness, the margins of victory were quite slim for you. I of course suspected her from the start. That the orca may have been a malicious killer, or may have been a pawn and victim herself of someone so heartless as to place the blame upon the unwitting - I considered both possibilities.”

Phoenix should have figured something was up, that he had another culprit ready to blame, when the update to the autopsy report arrived. If Blackquill ordered the body reexamined for - what, exactly? The differing patterns of blunt force trauma for being slammed by an orca against glass versus falling a long distance? Squish versus splat? - then did he expect that the defense was going to find that angle? If he wanted the examiners to specifically consider falling, then that meant he realized Orla was innocent. And if she was innocent, then he could just switch targets. He was waiting for this since they put Sasha on the stand.

He had unwitting pawns of his own.

“I really must thank you again.” Blackquill is undeniably enjoying rubbing salt into the wound. “I surely could not have done this without your assistance. After all, you were the one who put the witness so at ease as to bring forth the information about the orca’s lifesaver trick.”

This is not the kind of defense-prosecution collaboration that Phoenix signed up for.

“Wait - wait!” Sasha wakes to the reality of her situation, snaps out of the confused daze the accusation put her in, and starts dragging her feet, not slowing hers and Fulbright’s trajectory out of the courtroom in any way, but succeeding at making a horrible squealing noise of her shoes on the polished courtroom floor. “I didn’t kill the captain! I would never do anything that would hurt Orla! I - oof!” Fulbright seems about two seconds from lifting her off the ground and simply hauling her from the courtroom that way. “Please! Phoenix! Athena! I—”

Her voice fades and a door slams.

“Sasha—” Athena has her feet back solidly on the ground, her hands still pressed against the bench, fingers curled under her palms to form trembling fists. She doesn’t speak again, doesn’t move again. Even once the judge has adjourned the court - this is Orla’s trial, after all, and she is resoundingly innocent - she remains still, her eyes fixed blankly out into space. Phoenix has to tap her on the shoulder to get her moving, and even then, when she does, she walks with the same slow cadence that Sasha did as she tried to figure out what was happening. Widget is still lit up, displaying its sad purple-bluish face, but Athena might as well have shut herself off.

“What a horrible end to a trial,” Trucy says, shaking her head. They’re already in the lobby waiting, she and Apollo and Pearl, all serious and solemn and surprisingly quiet. “It was going so good! I was so excited for you both! And then—!”

“She didn’t do it!” Athena blurts. Widget snaps to red. “I believe that with my whole heart, I know it, Sasha didn’t do it! Her voice and her heart were both saying the exact same thing, that she didn’t! And no one listened!” Her anger teeters on the edge of tears. “The whole court should’ve listened and no one - no one—”

“Well, obviously you listened,” Apollo says. He looks pretty uncomfortable with her distress, drawing himself back, his arms tightly folded together, but as he speaks, Athena’s body snaps up straight, her head level again, eyes wide, like she was just doused in cold water to finally wake her.

“I - Boss!” She spins around to face Phoenix. “Boss, we have to defend Sasha! We have to get to the detention center to see her, right now! Right now!”

“The police aren’t even going to be back at the detention center yet,” Phoenix says. “They do have to drive there, you know. It’s not like it’s - wormholes or anything.” He deliberately goes for a word far from fae connotations, far from something that will give Pearl, Athena, or Trucy any ideas. “We’ll go back to the office and regroup, figure out how we approach today’s investigation at the aquarium, and we’ll go there—”

“But you’re going to be defending Sasha too, right, Boss?” Athena demands. “If you’re not, then - then I - and—” She looks to Apollo and Trucy, her words all tangled up, but the intent clear: she’ll do it with or without him.

“Of course I will be,” Phoenix says. “But the police will be interrogating her for a while, probably, so we should do some investigating first, so we’re not just waiting around at the detention center, and so we can have something actually helpful to tell her, because…” He drags a hand through his hair. It’s the way this always goes, the up-and-down trajectory where after every crescendo there’s a further place to fall, and if he ever proves innocence in one matter for certain, something else waits in the wings to tell him he lost a different round he didn’t know he was playing.

“Because what, Daddy?” Trucy asks. “You think she’s going to want a different lawyer? You proved Orla didn’t do it! She sounded really grateful to you and Athena! Of course she’d want you as her lawyer!”

“I should’ve seen this coming,” Phoenix says. That’s the trouble: Blackquill said he must surely have had some idea of how this would end, and he did, and he pushed it away, and it caught up to him. “And figured out - some way around it, asked Sasha what her alibi was and what she was doing because if we were proving a human culprit then of course the prosecution could turn it around to—”

“But how could you have seen that coming?” Athena glares at him like he’s a lying witness on the stand, and she, ready to tear him apart verbally and physically. “That Prosecutor Blackquill would - ugh! Prosecutor Blackquill.” She says his name like a curse, the tone that Maya always used on Edgeworth’s name at the beginning. (Then he stopped being such a pain in the ass and became their friend and she stopped using his name at all.)

“How could you have even thought to ask Ms Buckler those questions?” Trucy says. “Like ‘hey you were the only one to use the security key in the past 12 hours right’? Or ‘did you leak any of your top-secret orca whistle patterns to anyone else’ or ‘how do we break into police files to get the full security camera footage’ or—”

“I get it, Truce,” Phoenix says. She squints doubtfully at him. “No, I do, really. But the thing is—”

She rolls her eyes and turns silently to Apollo, the obvious sentiment conveyed that this further objection is him further not actually getting it, and Apollo snorts, and Phoenix’s heart clenches up with a vice around it that they’ve only had a year and not a lifetime to perfect their silent, condescending, sibling communication and they don’t even know that’s what this is. It’s the same way Edgeworth and Franziska can cast the briefest glance at each other but convey three levels of disdain and mockery and coordinate a savage teardown of whatever sorry fool has earned their ire—

Where was his original thought going?

“The thing is - this happens all the time, to me, with my cases. Where everything I do to prove my client innocent just further pushes them, or someone else they love, closer to drowning. Just makes it worse.” Edgeworth’s new confession, an accusation against Ema. A last accusation against Maya, her own mother. Phoenix’s own badge because he tried too hard to save someone with it. Just the highlight reel. “And it’s kind of horribly crushing every time. I didn’t want you to have to go through that, Athena.” Look how badly it affected her. She asked him something like that back when they first met, didn’t she: what happens if no one listens to you? And here it went, and hurt her badly.

All four of the kids stare at him, unblinking, confused. “But then you would’ve had to defend and investigate all on your own!” Athena protests. “And - and then you’d have no one to share the crushing despair with!”

“I don’t want to share that,” Phoenix interrupts. “I’m pretty sure I’m cursed.” And like the other ways he’s cursed, he’s afraid that sooner or later it will take one of his kids as victim. Less horrible than Death catching up to them, of course, but still. He’s put them all through enough.

Pearl studies him intently, chewing at her thumbnail again. She concentrates hard enough that her glamour starts slipping from her eyes, turning them red. “I don’t see anything,” she says. “I mean, Misfortune could do it, but you only got that when you stopped being a lawyer.”

Apollo recoils. He knows exactly where that one came from.

“But your win record is still kickass!” Athena punches her fist into her opposite palm. “So even if it happens you still pull it off! And I want to learn how to do that! From Apollo and from you, too!” In his logical, detached brain, he can keep a good distance from her, and then when she’s staring him in the face reminding him of why he became a lawyer and the good things he’s done - it’s that much harder. “C’mon, if we’re going to the office we’d better go now! We’ve got investigation to do!”

“You know,” Pearl says as they head for Athena’s car, “you sure do know a lot about orcas. And I didn’t get to learn much about Orla at the aquarium, unfortunately, and I know she’s not the point of contention in court anymore—”

“Do you want me to tell you more orca facts?” Athena interrupts. As though she honestly needs the excuse that Pearl was going to offer her, of teaching them things they can use in court to defend Orla. Pearl nods.

On the drive back to the office, Phoenix gets the other front seat, and Apollo, Trucy, and Pearl squish themselves into the back. Athena chatters animatedly to the rearview mirror the whole time.

“Was there something you wanted to say to me, Athena? Or show me? That’s a very large book you have, there.”

“...Junie brought it to me from the school library. Since I haven’t been able to go in lately.”

“She did? That’s very kind of her. And what is it - An Encyclopedia of Marine Mammals. Very nice.”

“Mhm. I’m nearly done reading it.”

“You’re reading the whole thing? Cover to cover?”

“Don’t you do that with books? Um… being a lawyer is a lot of reading, isn’t it? You should read it all. To make sure that you don’t catch an innocent person by mistake.”

“I do, don’t worry. I wouldn’t want any person sent to the gallows for something they didn’t do.”

“Then why don’t you read whole books?”

“I don’t read entire encyclopedias. You know, a lot of libraries don’t let you take them home with you at all. You just look up what you want to know while you’re there.”

“But I want to know everything that’s in this encyclopedia.”

“Well, then I suppose you know better than I and I shouldn’t be telling you what to do, I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. Do you want to hear something I’ve learned so far? Um, since you’re always taking time to, to teach me what you’re learning.”

“I’ve heard it said, and found it myself to be true, that by teaching something you learn it better yourself, too. It helps us both that way. It’s very efficient. Go ahead, tell me something about marine mammals.”

“I’ll try and find something you wouldn’t already know.”

“I’m a law and psychology student, not a marine biologist. I don’t know anything. How about you tell me about - penguins?”

“Birds aren’t mammals, silly! But I can tell you about orcas. They’re black and white like you and penguins are, too! They’re the largest member of the dolphin family - they’re not whales at all!”

“Killer whales aren’t whales?”

“Nope! And the ‘killer’ part, is because sailors would observe them hunting and killing baleen whales, and they were first known as ‘whale killers’ and then that got flipped, somehow. And now people tend to think of them as vicious killers, but they aren’t! Wild orcas have never killed a human! They’re just strong and hungry.”

“That they gained that reputation is unfortunate but not surprising. Humans have that tendency to fear what they don’t understand, and to not bother understanding so much of the world around them. To presume that their impressions of the world constitute its one objective truth.”

“...”

“I’m sorry. The cases I’ve been studying lately have me pondering this sort of matter quite a bit, lately. This and worse.”

“Do you want to talk about those? That might make you feel better?”

“...how about you explain to me what a ‘baleen whale’ is.”

“They don’t have teeth - they’re the ones like humpback and blue whales that have, like, bristles in their mouth that they filter in plankton through. That’s what baleen is! It looks sort of like my hairbrush over there.”

“Speaking of, you certainly don’t look like you brushed your hair at all today.”

“No? I… Mom’s been busy all day working, and I was busy reading so I didn’t think I…”

“How about I go get it and fix your hair so that you look presentable, and you tell me more about orcas.”

“I look fine!”

“You look like it was arranged by nesting birds looking to make a comfortable place to raise their young.”

“Pbbbbft! Oh, but did you know that orcas are one of the only species of mammal besides humans and other primates that undergo menopause? Female orcas who can no longer have babies stick around to help raise other babies and take charge of the group. Different populations of orca tend to live in different-sized pods but for most of them, the babies even once grown up don’t leave on their own and instead they’ll stay with their moms for their whole lives—”

#roddy fanfics #fic: the witches of los angeles

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sophygurl · 5 years

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okay so I saw your fox way post (which i realise is from like 5 months ago so i'm sorry if it's not in your main interests anymore) and I wanted to know what you think would be some good descriptors for the organised comfy chaos that is their house. bc i love the idea of a house of miss-matched over stuffed sofas and everything everywhere that doesn't understand the concept of minimalism but I can't find anything online that looks like what I imagine. Thoughts?

omg so The Raven Cycle in general, and Fox Way in particular, is never out of my main interests so thank you for this!! I actually have a Bunch of other metas that I’ve kinda collected notes for and one of them is actual physical descriptions of 300 Fox Way?

I feel bad because I’ve already promised @sparkly-things metas about Maura and Gray next up ages ago, but hopefully they won’t mind? And I happen to have a lil energy and time today, so here goes with every physical description of the house that I’ve collected during re-reads (may have missed stuff).

This got long, and is perhaps not even what you were looking for, but I hope it helps you and/or others looking for descriptions of the house!

Blue describes the architecture of the house, simply, as weird in TRB. In TDT she expands on that, saying it “was two houses knitted together, and neither structure had been a palace to begin with. Narrow hallways leaned eagerly toward one another.” I’m not sure if she means this literally, as in two small houses on nearby lots got made into one building somehow, or just that the way the house is built just makes it feel that way?

She goes on to talk about a “stray toilet gurgling somewhere” - since we know there is only the one bathroom is she talking about that or does this language mean there is maybe another toilet connected somewhere, like in a basement? Then “the wood floors were as buckled as the sidewalk out front.” Some of the walls were painted in vivid purples and blues, and some had decades old wallpaper (in the same rooms or in different rooms?). “Faded black and white photographs hung beside Klimt prints and old metal scissors. The entire decor was a victim of too much thrift-shopping and too many strong personalities.”

Gansey describes the house as being “cramped with extraneous people and whimsical objects. It hummed with conversation, music, telephones, old appliances.” Malory calls the house “lovely” and seems to appreciate just how many walls there are.

At one point, it’s said that 300 Fox Way is one mile away from Monmouth Manufacturing.

The exterior is a “little bright blue house”. There is a hand painted sign that reads “PSYCHIC” and then “By appointment only”. When turned around, the sign reads “CLOSED COME BACK SOON!” I’m not sure if there is a porch, but there is a porch light referred to when opening the front door, so that’s a good guess. There is a front step, so it’s not a ground level entrance to the front of the house the way it seems to be in the back.

Outside in the backyard - there’s Blue’s large Beech tree, which shades the entire backyard with it’s “beautiful, perfectly symmetrical canopy” that kept out all but the heaviest of rains. There is a high wooden fence covered with honeysuckle that blocked out neighboring lights and the canopy of the tree blocked out the moonlight.

Right off the sliding glass door in the kitchen, there’s a cracked brick patio leading into the yard itself. There are chairs arranged on the patio.

In the kitchen, above the table, is the chandelier described as a “badly designed stained-glass creation” (also described as “the fake Tiffany lamp”) - the one they have difficulty changing the bulbs in. The process of changing the bulbs took at least three hands and was generally left until all the bulbs had burned out - so consider that the kitchen would have different levels of light depending on how far along in this process they might be. The kitchen counters seem always to be cluttered with mugs, teas being made and packaged, essential oils, flowers, pots boiling, etc. There is also a cabinet filled with glasses, either in the kitchen, or close enough to the kitchen for them to rattle when one gets down off of the kitchen table.

Also in the kitchen - the door to the pantry that Artemus takes up residence in.

You can see to the front hall and the base of the stairs from the kitchen, and there’s a main hallway that connects from the kitchen, which is at the back of the house, to the front of the house where the front door is, and so I imagine that the stairs are right there in that front hall area. I also believe there is only the one set of stairs connecting the two floors. The staircase has a railing with a knob on it. In the hallway, there is a table with a clock on it.

The reading room can easily be gotten to from both the kitchen and the front hall, so I imagine it’s off to the other side of the stairs perhaps and maybe there’s a door from the hall and another to the back from the kitchen? There do seem to be multiple doors into the room, and since Adam describes it as a room meant to be a dining room, that makes sense to me. The doors are sometimes closed, so it’s not one of those rooms that is just separated off by archways or whatever.

Anyway, it is described as containing “the candles, the potted plants, the incense burners, the elaborate dining room chandelier, the rustic table that dominated the room, the lace curtains, and finally ... a framed photograph of Steve Martin.” Maura seems proud of that photograph, and makes sure to tell Whelk that it’s signed. It’s also described as having mismatched furniture, with an armchair at the head of the table.There’s a framed photograph of a standing stone on the wall. Also, apparently, there’s a phone in the reading room. There are blinds over the windows.

There’s also a living room, which I’m thinking is further into the house, because you can’t see the front hall/door from there. There is a fuzzy mint green love seat, and a blue striped chair, and a wicker bench in front of the window. There’s also a couch. I’m also guessing this is where the TV is, unless there is a separate TV room as well, somewhere on the downstairs level?

There is only one bathroom, and it’s upstairs. There’s a full bathtub.

The upstairs phone, the one dedicated to the psychic phone line Orla had put in, is in the Phone/Sewing/Cat room, which has green gingham wallpaper and is “full of a multitude of odds and ends”. I’m not sure if the long purple silk Calla does her aerial yoga in is always there, or of Calla sets it up before she does it each time? There are bins of sewing materials, a chair with a pillow on it, and I’m guessing this is the room with the sewing table in it?

Blue had repurposed canvas trees glued to her bedroom walls, decorated with collaged and found-paper leaves. There was a card table shoved against her twin mattress with reading materials on it, and a nightstand with a dim green lamp. Her closet door was covered with glued dried flowers. She had a ceiling fan that was hung with colored feathers and lace, also leaves. And she had copied a poem on her ceiling. There was a bird painted on one wall with a talk bubble that read “WORMS FOR ALL”. A shelf cluttered with buttons and scissors. A rotating fan in the corner. Blue’s room is adjacent to the Phone/Sewing/Cat room.

Maura has her own room, which is next door to the Phone/Sewing/Cat room. Calla describes it as being chaotic and messy and filled with too much shit.

Calla and Jimi share a bedroom. It is my considered opinion that they also share a bed, but this is never mentioned or alluded to. We do know that on Calla’s dresser is kept the three statues of Oya, Oshun, and Yemaya, the Yoruban goddesses.

Persephone’s bedroom was at the end of the hall upstairs, past the Phone/Sewing/Cat room and bathroom, and the door to her room was painted red. She had a desk with a Victorian desk chair, and a “high, elderly twin bed”. There was a shaggy rug.

Presumably Orla has a bedroom somewhere up there and if there are other residents of the house (see the post referred to in this ask for why I wonder about that possibility), then perhaps there are also other bedrooms??

The attic is accessible from the second floor with a door that leads to the stairs that lead up to it. This door is at the very end of the hall, probably past Persephone’s room. A single light bulb lit the attic and it didn’t reach the stairs, so that was a dark stairway. Once up there, there are numerous slanting roof lines which means this is one of those houses with lots of angles and not just one flat or arched roof. There’s also unfinished wood floorboards and areas patched with plywood. There’s a porthole window (along with other windows apparently?), the leads out to the mismatched roof angles outside. Before Neeve moved in, there was nothing up there because Maura was against collecting things.

When Calla and Blue go up to investigate once Neeve’s been living there, they find a mattress covered with throw rugs on the floor; lots of candles, bowls, and glasses cluttered together, bright painter’s tape making patterns between those objects, a half-burned plant stalk on a plate dusted with ashes, and in one of the narrow dormers - two full-length footed mirrors facing one another. Also a statue of a woman with eyes in her belly, a black leather mask with a large pointed beak, a red mask that matched it, a switch made of three sticks tied together with a red ribbon, and a little cloth bag with asafetida tied into it.

After they clear out Neeve’s things and it becomes Gwenllian’s room, the mirrors are still there, and the mattress, but it becomes cluttered with her own mess of things, also including candles and half-burnt plants.

So that’s what I got! LMK if you have more questions. I love this house and the people who live in so very much. Thanks for asking about it!

#300 fox way #the raven cycle #trc #fox way #blue sargent #maura sargent #calla johnson #peresephone poldma #ask me stuff #i swear i'm getting to those other topics soon #charactersoverkisses

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lecturasdiarias · 3 years

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Lecturas del Domingo 5º del Tiempo Ordinario - Ciclo C

Lecturas del día Domingo 6 de Febrero de 2022

Primera lectura

Lectura del libro de Isaías 6,1-2a.3-8

El año de la muerte del rey Ozías, vi al Señor, sentado sobre un trono muy alto y magnífico. La orla de su manto llenaba el templo. Había dos serafines junto a él, con seis alas cada uno, que se gritaban el uno al otro:

“Santo, santo, santo es el Señor, Dios de los ejércitos; su gloria llena toda la tierra”.

Temblaban las puertas al clamor de su voz y el templo se llenaba de humo. Entonces exclamé:

“¡Ay de mí!, estoy perdido, porque soy un hombre de labios impuros, que habito en medio de un pueblo de labios impuros, porque he visto con mis ojos al Rey y Señor de los ejércitos”.

Después voló hacia mí uno de los serafines. Llevaba en la mano una brasa, que había tomado del altar con unas tenazas. Con la brasa me tocó la boca, diciéndome:

“Mira: Esto ha tocado tus labios. Tu iniquidad ha sido quitada y tus pecados están perdonados”.

Escuché entonces la voz del Señor que decía: “¿A quién enviaré? ¿Quién irá de parte mía?” Yo le respondí: “Aquí estoy, Señor, envíame”.

Palabra de Dios

Salmo Responsorial

Sal 138 (137), 1-2a. 2bc-3. 4-5. 7c-8.

R./ Cuando te invocamos, Señor, nos escuchaste.

De todo corazón te damos gracias, Señor, porque escuchaste nuestros ruegos. Te cantaremos delante de tus ángeles, te adoraremos en tu templo. R./ Cuando te invocamos, Señor, nos escuchaste.

Señor, te damos gracias por tu lealtad y por tu amor: siempre que te invocamos nos oíste y nos llenaste de valor. R./ Cuando te invocamos, Señor, nos escuchaste.

Que todos los reyes de la tierra te reconozcan, al escuchar tus prodigios. Que alaben tus caminos, porque tu gloria es inmensa. R./ Cuando te invocamos, Señor, nos escuchaste.

Tu mano, Señor, nos podrá a salvo, y así concluirás en nosotros tu obra. Señor, tu amor perdura eternamente; obra tuya soy, no me abandones. R./ Cuando te invocamos, Señor, nos escuchaste.

Segunda lectura

Lectura de la primera carta de San Pablo a los Corintios 15,1-11

Hermanos: Les recuerdo el Evangelio que yo les prediqué y que ustedes aceptaron y en el cual están firmes. Este Evangelio los salvará, si lo cumplen tal y como yo lo prediqué. De otro modo, habrán creído en vano.

Les transmití, ante todo, lo que yo mismo recibí: que Cristo murió por nuestros pecados, como dicen las Escrituras; que fue sepultado y que resucitó al tercer día, según estaba escrito; que se le apareció a Pedro y luego a los Doce; después se apareció a más de quinientos hermanos reunidos, la mayoría de los cuales vive aún y otros ya murieron. Más tarde se le apareció a Santiago y luego a todos los apóstoles.

Finalmente, se me apareció también a mí, que soy como un aborto. Porque yo perseguí a la Iglesia de Dios y por eso soy el último de los apóstoles e indigno de llamarme apóstol. Sin embargo, por la gracia de Dios, soy lo que soy, y su gracia no ha sido estéril en mí; al contrario, he trabajado más que todos ellos, aunque no he sido yo, sino la gracia de Dios, que está conmigo. De cualquier manera, sea yo, sean ellos, esto es lo que nosotros predicamos y esto mismo lo que ustedes han creído.

Palabra de Dios

Evangelio

Lectura del santo evangelio según San Lucas 5,1-11

En aquel tiempo, Jesús estaba a orillas del lago de Genesaret y la gente se agolpaba en torno suyo para oír la palabra de Dios. Jesús vio dos barcas que estaban junto a la orilla. Los pescadores habían desembarcado y estaban lavando las redes. Subió Jesús a una de las barcas, la de Simón, le pidió que la alejara un poco de tierra, y sentado en la barca, enseñaba a la multitud.

Cuando acabó de hablar, dijo a Simón: “Lleva la barca mar adentro y echen sus redes para pescar”. Simón replicó: “Maestro, hemos trabajado toda la noche y no hemos pescado nada; pero, confiado en tu palabra, echaré las redes”. Así lo hizo y cogieron tal cantidad de pescados, que las redes se rompían. Entonces hicieron señas a sus compañeros, que estaban en la otra barca, para que vinieran a ayudarlos. Vinieron ellos y llenaron tanto las dos barcas, que casi se hundían.

Al ver esto, Simón Pedro se arrojó a los pies de Jesús y le dijo: “¡Apártate de mí, Señor, porque soy un pecador!” Porque tanto él como sus compañeros estaban llenos de asombro al ver la pesca que habían conseguido. Lo mismo les pasaba a Santiago y a Juan, hijos de Zebedeo, que eran compañeros de Simón.

Entonces Jesús le dijo a Simón: “No temas; desde ahora serás pescador de hombres”. Luego llevaron las barcas a tierra y, dejándolo todo, lo siguieron.

Palabra del Señor

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fromchaos · 8 years

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50 ~little sarchengsey things~

1. who is the early bird/ who is the night owl?

well,,, they are all modern day teens, so not a single one is actually an early bird. normal bedtime for blue and henry is 1-2am, and gansey joins them when he thinks he can sleep. henry is best at mornings tho.

2. who is the big spoon/ who is the little spoon?

i’ve said it before and i will say it again: blue is the supreme big spoon. she hates being in the middle. if gansey’s insomnia is flaring up, henry goes in the middle. if henry’s claustrophobia is worse that night, gansey goes in the middle.

3. who hogs the cover/ who loves to cuddle?

they all love to cuddle when they’re awake/falling asleep, but they are all rude and grabby when they’re unconscious. the first few weeks they share a bed, blue regularly wakes up on the floor having pulled the covers so hard she launched herself off the side.

4. who wakes the other one up with kisses?

blue or henry depending on who wakes up first. blue cares more about morning breath, so she does it less often than henry. gansey has either been up all night and is too exhausted to be super affectionate or he’s too in his head when he wakes up naturally and sort of forgets the others are there. however, he very much likes morning kisses from his bf and gf U u U

5. who usually has nightmares?

HOO BOY. MORE LIKE WHO DOESN”T, AM I RIGHT LADIES?

6. who would have really deep emotional thoughts at the middle of the night/ who would have them in the middle of the day?

even tho gansey has terrible insomnia, i feel like he usually distracts himself and tries to stuff down the deep thoughts in the middle of the night, though he will engage in deep discussions with blue at 3am bc she likes it. henry’s late night thoughts are just faux-deep shitposts. then the next day they’re looking at the world’s biggest rubber band ball and gansey and henry are having existential crises.

7. who sweats the small stuff?

ganseyyyboyyy does (but i think he’s also weirdly more zen after his 2nd death). he’s haywire in everyday life and deathly calm in a calamity. blue will get stressed if there’s A LOT of small stuff all building up at the same time, but is normally chill. henry can seem like a bit of a mess under pressure but actually things work out weirdly well for him most of the time. (think dirk gently lmfao)

8. who sleeps in their underwear (or naked)/ who sleeps in their pajamas?

i don’t think any of them have proper pajamas? comfy t-shirts and underwear all around. especially henry and blue stealing gansey’s t-shirts and underwear to sleep in.

9. who makes the coffee (or tea)?

gansey and henry each brought their own french press on the roadtrip lmfao. gansey usually winds up making it tho because one time henry was dared to mix a monster energy drink and black coffee and chug it by lee^2 and it killed his taste buds and his caffeine tolerance so he makes his way too strong now. blue starts the roadtrip hating coffee but by the end she’s a caffeine demon living off of gas station sludge.

10. who likes sweet/ who likes sour?

blue likes the two together (idk i find yogurt a bit of both so). gansey doesn’t really have a taste for either; he likes blander savory foods. henry likes sweet things, but more rich-sweet than sugar-sweet.

11. who likes horror movies/ who likes romance movies?

i can’t imagine any of them being super into horror??? if they watch a horror movie it’s just to rip apart the lore for inaccuracy. gansey and henry like romcoms and have to bribe blue to watch them with them. gansey’s faves are love actually and notting hill, and henry’s are you’ve got mail and he’s just not that into you.

12. who is smol/ who is tol?

blue < gansey < henry

that’s pretty much canon, but body type-wise i think blue is chubby all-over, gansey is pretty solidly built w/ broad shoulders, and henry is skinny but with a small beer belly lmao.

13. who is considered the scaredy cat?

tbh i don’t think any of them really fit that role? and when they do it’s because they’re traumatized??? i just can’t see them teasing each other for being afraid because they all know TRUE BONE-DEEP HORROR.

14. who kills the spiders?

blue carries the spiders outside. henry screams and gets up on the couch. gansey either doesn’t notice or just freezes in fear.

15. who is scared of the dark?

none of them usually? but certain scenarios can give any of them flashbacks, so i’d say more wary than scared?

16. who is scared of thunderstorms?

i could see henry being a little afraid of thunderstorms? and gansey is autistic, so he HATES thunder but isn’t exactly scared of it.

17. who works/ who stays at home?

they all work, but i’m not sure any of them have traditional 9 to 5 jobs? when they have kids, they probably spend equal amounts of time at home taking care of them. blue travels less at that point, but is sometimes gone for longer periods of time that she makes up for with long periods of time spent at home.

18. who is a cat person/ who is a dog person?

they are all cat people. blue loves all animals, but if she were to get her own pets, they would be cats. i’ve written about it before, but they have so many cats. they adopt like 5 and feed all the neighborhood strays and let them roam in and out of their home.

19. who loves to call the other one cute names?

oh wow NO IDEA who could that possibly be???

20. who is dominant/ who is submissive?

literally the only person gansey could dom is ronan r u kidding me?? that boy is subbier than a 5 dollar foot long. (then blue and henry are about equally weighted toward dom, like 6 or 7 on a scale of 1 to 10)

21. who has an obsession (over anything)?

obsession is literally what brings them together. they recognize that intense passion that drives all of them in each other. none of them could be with someone who wasn’t completely obsessed with something because it shows a lack of that passion. also, they’re totally obsessed with each other.

22. who goes all out for valentine’s day?

is it weird that i think it’s blue? she goes on some tirade about the commercialization of valentine’s day, how it’s a bullshit hallmark holiday, how it makes single people feel less than, blah blah blah, so henry and gansey figure they should keep it lowkey and just have a normal date or something. BUT the day-of blue has made them both extravagant cards and thoughtful homemade gits. because authentic love is best honored with DIY. (blue contains multitudes, y’all.)

23. who asks who out on the first date?

this is hard?? what’s a year-long roadtrip other than one humongous first date to woo your third partner? but real talk, post-trk, gansey realizes he and blue have never had an official date but also the only place in henrietta is nino’s and u can’t go on a date to a place u work, so they just go out for drives like they did before. and drives turn into daytrips. and datetrips turn into “oh henry you have to come with, you’d just love this place!” and suddenly polyamory happens.

24. who is the talker/ who is the listener?

this like,,, isn’t really how relationships work lmfao. gansey is the most genuinely extroverted (henry can be super extroverted obviously, but that’s 50% for show), but unless the topic of discussion is one of his special interests, he’s more of an active listener than a talker. but a conversation with these 3 is basically all of them taking turns ranting because they are all very opinionated and have a lot to say.

25. who wears the other ones clothes?

blue will steal ur clothes and transform them so completely u hardly notice. both her and henry like wearing gansey’s shirts as pajamas, but they are all such different sizes and have such different styles that actual borrowing isn’t all that common. (tho blue does make clothes for henry pretty often)

26. who likes to eat healthy/ who loves junk food?

i don’t think any of them are super obsessed or even like,,, concerned with eating healthy, and they all have a good appetite for junk. henry probably has the most balanced diet tho because mrs. woo made all the litchfield boys eat dinner together on weeknights. (think traditional korean cuisine meets deep south comfort food, both of which love their side dishes) meanwhile, blue’s idea of a balanced meal is the signature dish of each 300 fox way lady and a yogurt. and gansey is an autistic boy who has been feeding himself for a few years, so he eats the same 3 things in various combinations.

27. who takes a long shower/ who sings in the shower?

blue is used to taking super fast showers with orla banging on the bathroom door, and gansey is perfectly perfunctory when it comes to hygiene, so henry. he makes 45 minute pop-filled playlists for his showers.

28. who is the book worm?

gansey. the others love reading and learning for sure, but gansey is the one with the overflowing bookshelves, half full of books he hasn’t read yet. and blue and henry like listening to him rambling about his recent reads like a human audio book because he’s a pretty good storyteller.

29. who is the better cook?

henry is the best cook, and he makes most of their meals once they’re settled down and living together. litchfield definitely had a chore wheel and all the boys took turns helping mrs. woo cook. gansey is used to eating takeout all the time, and blue only eats yogurt.

30. who likes long walks on the beach?

blue!!! she sees the ocean for the first time on the road trip and loooooves it. she’ll let the boys bury her in the sand without fuss because it’s like a lil warm cocoon. she doesn’t go too deep in the water, but she likes standing where the waves break and looking for signs of life underneath the sand. henry and gansey grew up taking vacations to tropical beaches on the reg, so it’s nothing novel or special for them, but they love seeing it through blue’s eyes!!!

31. who is more affectionate?

well i think it depends on the type of affection?? (warning: this is really fucking gay) henry is the most verbally affectionate with all the nicknames and the affirmations and the enthusiasm. sometimes he’s more reserved with deeper emotional statements, but he’s never cold or distant. blue is the most physically affectionate, wanting to be constantly touching and feeling her boys beside her. she always has an arm around someone’s waist or a hand on someone’s knee to ground them and herself. and with gansey it’s all in the eyes and the gestures. he’ll look at them like they’re magic and then suggest the perfect thing they need right at that moment.

32. who likes to have really long (deep) conversation?

blue and gansey have really long deep conversations together where they dance around and circumnavigate the issues. henry cuts straight to the point in deep conversations because he’s been thinking about the thing for ages and just wants to get to the point and know their answers already.

33. who would wear “not guilty” t-shirt/ who would wear “sin” t-shirt?

oh jeez. either blue and gansey wear “not guilty” and henry wears “sin” or gansey and henry just dress normally while blue wears the “sin” t-shirt while trying to look her most badass?

34. who would wear “if lost return to…” t-shirt/ who would wear “i am…” t-shirt?

the boys definitely wear “if lost return to blue sargent.” someone has to be the sensible one.

35. who goes overboard on the holidays?

they probably all do in their own special ways. blue spends all of december making gifts for her loved ones that are filled with love and couldn’t come from anyone else. gansey gets people the one big perfect present he definitely spent way too much money on. henry overwhelms them with multiple small presents, each inspired by an inside joke they share or an offhand comment the person made and winds up spending as much as gansey.

36. who is the social media addict?

idk if he’s a social media ADDICT, but henry uses social media the most. blue grew up without a home computer or a smart phone, and gansey uses both for only 3 things: schoolwork, research, and GPS. so henry is really the only one that uses social media a Normal Teenager Amount. and he loves memes.

37. height difference or age difference?

height difference. i’d say gansey has 6 inches on blue and henry has 6 inches on him, so sometimes when they stand or walk together they look like cellular bars.

38. who likes to star gaze?

all of them. stargazing is one of their go-to date activities, especially for blue and gansey since it reminds them of their early days. they both have special individual things they do with henry too, of course.

39. who buys cereal for the prize inside?

either blue or henry depending on the prize. blue never got prizes as a kid bc they only bought generic cereal in the big plastic bags, and now she is living The High Life (more like the small luxury millennial life). henry is probably the one that first points out the cereals with the best prizes. gansey eats the cereal because he lovs the cronch.

40. who is the fun parent/ who is the responsible parent?

i feel like they have pretty good balance here?? gansey is a professor/writer so he stays at home with the kids most often and is about the same proportion of stern/pushover with them as he is with ronan in canon lmfao. the more deeply involved in a project he is, the more he can be convinced to let the rules slide.

henry is an environmental activist with a nonprofit and an occasional lobbyist, so he has much more typical 9-5 hours. he is probably much more fun than gansey, but their kids think he is insufferably, adorably uncool with his retro pop music and graphic tees under blazers and nicknames.

blue does ecological field research for weeks at a time and then comes home and writes papers for the next few months. she has 2 competing desires as a parent: 1. make up for lost time with lots of spoiling and 2. make up for lost discipline and moral instruction with lots of discourse.

41. who cries during sad movies?

gansey and henry cry really easily at sad movies but like,,, rarely cry over real life stuff. meanwhile, blue is the opposite because she’s pretty bad at suspending her disbelief when interacting with fiction.

42. who is the neat freak?

i think blue and henry butt heads a little bit here because blue likes for everything to have its place and hates actual mess and unclean things BUT her idea of neat is a lot more cluttered and homey, very much inspired by 300 fox way. henry doesn’t clean often, but when he does he wants things to ACTUALLY be neat and tidy and put away.

meanwhile, gansey has his office where chaos rules and only he knows where anything is.

43. who wins the stuffed animals at the carnival for the other one?

they probably go to a carnival or town fair on their road trip and gansey and henry compete to get blue stuffed animals (only 50% ironically) and blue gets mad and gets her own damn stuffed animal and then for good measure one for each of her boys.

44. who is active/ who is lazy?

idk about “”active”” as in fit and sporty but blue likes to keep herself busy. she always has 5 projects going and likes to get out of the house at least once a day even if it’s just for a walk around the block. gansey has homebody phases and active phases. henry feels like he works pretty hard and has enough adventures to justify a little bit of lazing about the house.

45. who is more likely to get drunk?

i mean, on the road trip if they’re drinking, they pretty much always all get drunk together unless a designated driver is needed in which case they take turns. gansey has the lowest tolerance tho, so he’s always first to get drunk.

and while henry and gansey are at school together, blue gets a lot of midnight facetime calls from her boys, sloppy drunk and over-affectionate and cute.

46. who has the longer food order?

it’s definitely gansey, and it’s definitely 50% a picky eater thing and 50% an entitled rich white man thing. like, okay, gansey ii seems like a good dad but he’s definitely that guy whose like “i’m a paying customer i deserve to get exactly what i want and am paying for,” and gansey sort of grew up seeing that as pretty normal, so he gives all sorts of unnecessary extra instructions to the waiter.

blue’s like “u know u can just tell them u don’t want pickles or onions on the burger, right? u don’t have to teach them step-by-step how to grill it. the waiter isn’t even cooking ur burger, tho know she is definitely spitting on it.”

henry chimes in a very helpful “yeah, stop mansplaining the burger.”

47. who has the more complex coffee order?

henry. gansey likes black coffee or ridiculous fraps, no in between. blue gets really simple coffees and totally makes them over at the counter w/ the cinnamon and vanilla and cocoa shakers. meanwhile, henry has to inquire as to whether the beans are ethically sourced and ask about all the specials and what is most popular and what does the barista like best and after all that just gets the thing he saw recommended on instagram the other day.

48. who loses stuff?

losing stuff? excuse you, this crew’s game is FINDING (bunch of hufflepuff wannabes). the only exception is gansey pulling a velma with his glasses.

49. who is the driver/ who is the passenger?

they rotate on the road trip because like,,, u gotta. but i think gansey likes driving the most, and henry likes it the least. when they’re in college and blue comes to visit, she does all the driving in her ecopig. henry always calls shottie no blitz because the passenger seat comes with all the best jobs: music duty, navigation, hand-holding, feeding french fries to ur s.o. in the driver seat, etc. if blue’s not driving, she actually likes the backseat best most of the time bc she can fully stretch out across it lmao.

50. who is the hopeless romantic?

ALL of these fools. have you HEARD their narration?!

#sarchengsey #the raven cycle #trc #50 otp things #blue sargent #gansey #henry cheng #mine #this is so long omfg

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isabella880 · 5 years

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Vranded, la startup coruñesa que viste a los restaurantes de moda

Manuel León y Luis Zurita, anejo a los hermanos coruñeses Martín y Sergio Mosquera, constituyeron la sociedad en Madrid hace dos primaveras y desde entonces non han parado de crecer. Así nació Vranded, una empresa que ha saltado a la auge por diseñar los uniformes más fashion del mercado.

Con un afectado carácter gallego, la startup se ha hecho excelso en poco tiempo y en su cartera de clientes cuentan con conocidas marcas como el liga Zena, Pastelerías Mallorca, Beefeater, Grupo Dani García, el Real Madrid, la famosa sujeción de croissants, Manolo Bakes; y la cadena de hamburgueserías Goiko Grill. Precisamente, los uniformes que la consultora creativa ha realizado para muchos de ellos los ha catapultado al éxito, pero su trabajo va mucho más allá del textil.

El equipo de la consultora creativa al completo.

Desde Vranded trabajan principalmente cuatro áreas: Workwear, Fashion, Merch y Vranding. La primera es la división dedicada a elaborar ropa para profesionales, la segunda centra sus esfuerzos en ayudar a todo aquel que quiera crear su propia colección, la tercera está especializada en la creación de merchandising, y desde la última se dedican a crear marca.

Emprendedores por inclinación

El coruñés Martín Mosquera, CEO y confundador de la start up, que se está consolidando en el mundo empresarial y que ha ganadería el Certamen Nacional de Jóvenes Emprendedores 2019, nos da las claves para entender el trabajo de Vranded y nos adelanta sus planes de futuro.

¿Como surgió el negocio?

El origen fue muy orgánico, muy natural. Mi hermano Sergio y yo teníamos una pequeña marca de ropa Online. Después vendimos ese esquema, pero en los siguientes meses continuamos trabajando como consultores para ayudar a amigos o a empresas en la creación de marca, todavía diseñando ropa para universidades, por lo que de alguna forma ya nos dedicábamos a esto. Después, en un evento coincidimos con Andoni Goicoechea, fundador de Goiko Grill, y empezamos a trabajar con él. Y a partir de ahí seguimos.

¿No tendréis poco que ver en la implantación de Goiko Grill en A Coruña?

No, ja, ja, ja. Aunque la verdad es que estamos muy contentos de que ya tengan dos locales en A Coruña porque es poco que echábamos en desatiendo cuando volvemos a casa. Cuando nos encontramos con Andoni ellos tenían 12 locales, ahora cuentan con muchos más, y nos pidieron una propuesta de uniforme. Tampoco tenemos mínimo que ver con los Manolitos, que todavía están ya en la ciudad.

¿Hasta ese momento acudían a otras marcas para sus uniformes?

Ellos lo que hacían por entonces era ir a Zara, H&M o Primark en escudriñamiento de camisas de rayas que se ajustaran a su estilo, pero luego cada restringido era diferente por lo que era complicado que lo que había en las tiendas de ajustase a cada establecimiento. Como nosotros ya teníamos poco de experiencia, no solo con el diseño de las prendas, sino personalizando las etiquetas, los patrones, el hilo… todo, les hicimos nuestra propuesta y les gustó. Así comenzó a sonar el teléfono.

¿Fue entonces cuando visteis un hornacina en el mercado?

Sí, vimos la enorme demanda que había a la hora de realizar prendas personalizadas. Sobre todo por el diseño y entonces decidimos comenzar ya como Vranded. Nuestra idea no era solo estar vinculados al textil, que fue el origen, sino a todo tipo de negocios.

“Los uniformes son nuestra puerta de entrada, pero nuestro trabajo va más allá del textil”

Martín Mosquera, CEO y Cofundador de Vranded

Sois sobre todo conocidos por los uniformes, pero vuestro trabajo va más allá. ¿En qué estáis especializados?

Si, nosotros queremos aportar toda la visión de universo de marca a clientes de todo tipo. Desde diseño dibujo, diseño web, comunicación… no solo la creación de prendas de uniforme, sino todo el posicionamiento. Solemos sostener que los uniformes son nuestra puerta de entrada, pero nos encanta el diseño y lo llevamos a todo. Puedes utilizar, por ejemplo, el estampado de una camisa para hacer la papelería del restaurante.

¿Cómo os definís entonces?

Como una consultora creativa especializada en textil. Es poco que faltaba en el mercado, lo natural es que haya muchas agencias, pero no era hacedero conseguir hacer productos personalizados. Es poco que como que se queda en el orla. Por un flanco están los diseñadores gráficos, y por otro los proveedores que trabajan por catálogo, entonces lo que hemos hecho es unir ambas cosas para conquistar diseños que molen y que queden aceptablemente en la propia prenda. En ocasiones, los diseñadores no conocen las capacidades de especialización que se pueden asistir a hacer. Nosotros personalizamos todo: el retoño, el gramaje… Fabricamos cada prenda de cero.

Comentas que ayer ya habías tenido una tienda Online con tu hermano. ¿De dónde viene vuestro interés por la moda?

Pues de una forma autodidacta, la verdad. Desde pequeños hemos estado interesados en la moda y en el diseño dibujo y de web. Además tuvimos siempre una conducta emprendedora y siempre quisimos exhalar un esquema propio. Vimos que lo que mejor podíamos hacer era poco relacionado con la ropa, pero surgió eso como podía ser otra cosa. Luego al final nos hemos destruido especializando, vas conociendo a los proveedores, y como es poco que obviamente nos encanta seguimos por ahí. Pero nadie en nuestra tribu tiene que ver con la moda ni mínimo.

¿Cuáles son vuestros próximos objetivos?

Seguir creciendo en otros sectores en los que todavía no hemos entrado, como puede ser hacer equipaciones deportivas o trabajar con empresas desvinculadas de la hostelería. Por ejemplo, hemos trabajado con Beefeater, y más allá de restaurantes donde más crecemos es ofreciendo diseño web dibujo a entidades corporativas para todo tipo de negocios: abogados, creando la web de nuestros proveedores o con agencias de comunicación.

A la hora de crear las prendas, ¿qué buscáis?

Cada esquema es un mundo. Adaptamos todo, el presupuesto, la calidad… porque cada cliente es desigual. Por ejemplo, para hacer el uniforme de un Estrella Michelín se hacen casi prendas de sastrería, e igual otra sujeción que necesita más bombeo de ropa se ajusta para darle un buen precio con menos diseño. Precisamente lo que nos hace diferentes es que no decimos a mínimo que no y cada esquema es único.

“Cada proyecto es un mundo. Adaptamos todo a cada cliente. Lo que nos hace diferente es que no decimos a nada que no”

Martín Mosquera, CEO y Cofundador de Vranded

¿Alguna marca en la que os inspiréis?

No, hacemos cada trabajo a medida. Dependiendo del esquema tenemos unas referencias u otras, en función del estilo del sitio.

Vosotros no tenéis uniforme, pero ¿cómo seria el ideal para ti?

No, ja, ja, ja. Pero lo que sí hacemos es elaborar merchan de cosas que nos gustan para probar como quedan algunas cosas. Entonces dejamos fugarse nuestra imaginación y somos como nuestros propios conejillos de indias. Nos hemos hecho sudaderas increíbles probando alguna técnica de bordado para ver como quedaría y varias cosas. Pero no sé decirte un uniforme ideal, porque depende del sector y de la zona. No es lo mismo vestir en Galicia que en Canarias. Pero si fuera para nosotros, como somos multitud muy zagal, haríamos poco harto urbano e informal. Nadie viene de traje a trabajar, a no ser que tengamos alguna reunión o un evento.

Habéis ganadería el Premio Nacional de Emprendedores, ¿fue una sorpresa?

Para serte sincero, nos presentamos al divisoria. Nos enteramos del concurso una semana ayer de que cerrase el plazo de presentación de candidaturas y nos pusimos las pilas para preparar todo lo que se nos pedía. Enviamos la solicitud un minuto ayer del pestillo de la plataforma y, claro que sabíamos que teníamos posibilidades, ya que por eso nos presentamos, pero fue una sorpresa ganarlo.

¿De qué os ha servido el galardón?

Pues sobre todo para darnos cuenta de que sí nos han obligado como la mejor startup del año es porque hemos hecho una buena diligencia. Hoy en día se crean muchas, pero ves que aunque sean conocidas no son rentables porque no tienen clara su forma de monetización. Nosotros hemos tenido ingresos desde el primer día.

El premio os ha entregado más repercusión, pero en los inicios. ¿Cómo fue la acogida?

Siempre hemos tenido buena acogida porque hemos funcionado mucho por el boca a boca. Además, hemos hecho una muy buena bordadura comercial y siempre hemos obtenido un buen feedback en el contacto a puerta fría. La mayoría nos han solicitado presupuesto y claro, ahora con el premio la puerta suena más y estamos hasta hacia lo alto. Es un happy problem, como digo yo. Ja, ja, ja.

¿Habéis crecido en bombeo de empleados?

Sí, todo lo que ganamos lo hemos invertido en el equipo. En formar talento y en crecer. Ahora mismo somos unos doce, un equipo muy zagal y la media de existencia en la oficina es de 26 primaveras.

“Somos un equipo muy joven. La media de edad en la oficina es de 26 años”

Martín Mosquera, CEO y Cofundador de Vranded

¿Un cliente que te haya gustado especialmente y que sea menos conocido?

Pues nos encantó el trabajo que hicimos para Paddy Power, que es una casa de apuestas de Irlanda. Nos contactaron para crear unas camisetas de estilo de las de fútbol para repartir en el orgullo gay de Brighton, en Reino Unido. Pudimos dar rienda suelta a la creatividad de forma pura, sin límites, y por eso nos gustó tanto.

¿Os habéis expandido ya fuera de España entonces?

Sí, de momento no es que signifique mucha facturación lo que hacemos fuera, pero nos abrimos camino. Muchas veces son las propias agencias o estudios de los clientes los que contactan contigo, estando las empresas fuera. Hemos trabajando mucho con agencias de estudios en el extranjero y todavía con campamentos.

¿De dónde viene el nombre de Vranded?

Pues cogimos la palabra brand, porque es marca en inglés, y nos parecía que con el bisagra con la v quedaba aceptablemente, y adicionalmente nos daba un buen posicionamiento.

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lacronicacoruna1 · 5 years

Text

Vranded, la startup coruñesa que viste a los restaurantes de moda

El equipo de la consultora creativa al completo.

Emprendedores por inclinación

¿Como surgió el negocio?

¿No tendréis poco que ver en la implantación de Goiko Grill en A Coruña?

¿Hasta ese momento acudían a otras marcas para sus uniformes?

¿Fue entonces cuando visteis un hornacina en el mercado?

“Los uniformes son nuestra puerta de entrada, pero nuestro trabajo va más allá del textil”

Martín Mosquera, CEO y Cofundador de Vranded

Sois sobre todo conocidos por los uniformes, pero vuestro trabajo va más allá. ¿En qué estáis especializados?

¿Cómo os definís entonces?

Comentas que ayer ya habías tenido una tienda Online con tu hermano. ¿De dónde viene vuestro interés por la moda?

¿Cuáles son vuestros próximos objetivos?

A la hora de crear las prendas, ¿qué buscáis?

“Cada proyecto es un mundo. Adaptamos todo a cada cliente. Lo que nos hace diferente es que no decimos a nada que no”

Martín Mosquera, CEO y Cofundador de Vranded

¿Alguna marca en la que os inspiréis?

No, hacemos cada trabajo a medida. Dependiendo del esquema tenemos unas referencias u otras, en función del estilo del sitio.

Vosotros no tenéis uniforme, pero ¿cómo seria el ideal para ti?

Habéis ganadería el Premio Nacional de Emprendedores, ¿fue una sorpresa?

¿De qué os ha servido el galardón?

El premio os ha entregado más repercusión, pero en los inicios. ¿Cómo fue la acogida?

¿Habéis crecido en bombeo de empleados?

Sí, todo lo que ganamos lo hemos invertido en el equipo. En formar talento y en crecer. Ahora mismo somos unos doce, un equipo muy zagal y la media de existencia en la oficina es de 26 primaveras.

“Somos un equipo muy joven. La media de edad en la oficina es de 26 años”

Martín Mosquera, CEO y Cofundador de Vranded

¿Un cliente que te haya gustado especialmente y que sea menos conocido?

¿Os habéis expandido ya fuera de España entonces?

¿De dónde viene el nombre de Vranded?

Pues cogimos la palabra brand, porque es marca en inglés, y nos parecía que con el bisagra con la v quedaba aceptablemente, y adicionalmente nos daba un buen posicionamiento.

0 notes

lacronicacoruna · 5 years

Text

Vranded, la startup coruñesa que viste a los restaurantes de moda

El equipo de la consultora creativa al completo.

Emprendedores por inclinación

¿Como surgió el negocio?

¿No tendréis poco que ver en la implantación de Goiko Grill en A Coruña?

¿Hasta ese momento acudían a otras marcas para sus uniformes?

¿Fue entonces cuando visteis un hornacina en el mercado?

“Los uniformes son nuestra puerta de entrada, pero nuestro trabajo va más allá del textil”

Martín Mosquera, CEO y Cofundador de Vranded

Sois sobre todo conocidos por los uniformes, pero vuestro trabajo va más allá. ¿En qué estáis especializados?

¿Cómo os definís entonces?

Comentas que ayer ya habías tenido una tienda Online con tu hermano. ¿De dónde viene vuestro interés por la moda?

¿Cuáles son vuestros próximos objetivos?

A la hora de crear las prendas, ¿qué buscáis?

“Cada proyecto es un mundo. Adaptamos todo a cada cliente. Lo que nos hace diferente es que no decimos a nada que no”

Martín Mosquera, CEO y Cofundador de Vranded

¿Alguna marca en la que os inspiréis?

No, hacemos cada trabajo a medida. Dependiendo del esquema tenemos unas referencias u otras, en función del estilo del sitio.

Vosotros no tenéis uniforme, pero ¿cómo seria el ideal para ti?

Habéis ganadería el Premio Nacional de Emprendedores, ¿fue una sorpresa?

¿De qué os ha servido el galardón?

El premio os ha entregado más repercusión, pero en los inicios. ¿Cómo fue la acogida?

¿Habéis crecido en bombeo de empleados?

Sí, todo lo que ganamos lo hemos invertido en el equipo. En formar talento y en crecer. Ahora mismo somos unos doce, un equipo muy zagal y la media de existencia en la oficina es de 26 primaveras.

“Somos un equipo muy joven. La media de edad en la oficina es de 26 años”

Martín Mosquera, CEO y Cofundador de Vranded

¿Un cliente que te haya gustado especialmente y que sea menos conocido?

¿Os habéis expandido ya fuera de España entonces?

¿De dónde viene el nombre de Vranded?

Pues cogimos la palabra brand, porque es marca en inglés, y nos parecía que con el bisagra con la v quedaba aceptablemente, y adicionalmente nos daba un buen posicionamiento.

0 notes