#photo is bad because the paper is very very big and in the workshop there is no very powerful light 😔 it is what it is

[snakeguy999]

Queen Vader and her little caterpillar

[irrigos]

Some people in the notes of my recent calligraphy piece said they were interested in manuscripts and stuff, so I thought you all might want to see some of my process pics (there are many! I've been working on this project for almost a year!)

Also, I think my own process is interesting, and I wanted to write it out. Very long post with lots of images under the cut:

I first had the idea for the piece as a submission for a zine that didn't come to fruition. I knew I really wanted to do a piece of text from SMEN, made to look like an illuminated manuscript, but I didn't really know how to... do that. And also I didn't know SMEN that well, so I went through all the text and pulled out some quotes I thought seemed kinda church-y, and drew up a few thumbnails for the finished photo. Honestly, the finished product didn't look that far off from that picture in the middle! Although I guess I was originally planning to use a fork as a prop?

Some of the very first drafts. I'm not great at figuring out layouts and line spacing, so I wrote all the text on a separate paper and cut the words out, so I could figure out where they should go. I kept them all in a little envelope, but it looks like I've lost a few, lol. The capital letter and border designs are from The Bible of Illuminated Letters by Margaret Morgan. I think it's funny to look back on these, because the hands they were done in (Foundational and Gothicized Italic, respectively) are ones I really haven't touched since, and am not good at at ALL. At the time, Foundational Hand was the only broad-edge script I kind of knew, and the Gothicized Italic was just me attempting to copy the exemplar from Foundations of Calligraphy by Sheila Waters (which, if you're interested in learning broad-edge calligraphy, is a book I cannot recommend highly enough)

I tried making a full draft using the materials (I assumed) I would be using in the final version. Seeing it altogether, I could tell that... well first of all, I obviously used WAY too big of a nib because I couldn't get all the lines on the page, but also that I didn't really like... any of it. I don't think it's bad (and I didn't then), but it really wasn't what I was picturing for this project.

I took a workshop on a new calligraphic hand specifically for this piece, because.... that's a good use of my time and money. Anyway, I tried writing out the text in Textura (left) and Fraktur (right). The workshop I took was focusing on Fraktur, but we learned some Textura, too, because Fraktur is just if you took Textura and, well.... fractured it. I think I planned on using this ink for the final version, but I didn't, because I... I think I just forgot to buy more? Maybe it would have been too much red.

Strictly speaking, Fraktur wouldn't be the hand one would traditionally use with the border I picked for the final piece. The white vine style of border originated in the 15th century, in the Renaissance (frequently they're called Renaissance white vines), and Fraktur started in the 16th century. Also (and this might be wrong), I think fraktur was designed to be a typeface, and not specifically for calligraphy? I haven't been able to find any handwritten manuscripts that used fraktur, but I might just be missing something. The white vine style border would probably be used with something more like italic calligraphy! But I don't know italics, and I liked the sharpness of Fraktur. I thought it worked well for a manuscript page that's supposed to represent a sort of... self-harm cult.

I briefly considered, instead of doing the full border and big capital like I did in the final version, doing a large versal with filigree, like the work of Benoit Furet. I took a workshop from him on how to do them, but tbh, when I tried to do it, it looked really messy and childish. I don't have any photos of my attempts at filigrees, but just know that I did consider them.

I decided I wanted to do a full border decoration, instead of filigrees, so I took a workshop on some. This was focused on Renaissance Floral Borders, like the one below, which is (as you can see) from the Visconti Hours (an illuminated Book of Hours from the late 14th century)

I designed one to put on the piece, and I also chose a different design for the capital- a big Roman N, with what was supposed to kind of look like a top-down well behind it. When I finally put everything together, I... well to be quite honest, I hated it. The different design elements didn't really seem to coalesce, instead looking more like I just cut and pasted different stuff than it did that time I actually did that, a few pictures earlier. This design is entirely thrown out, and we start over.

So I took another workshop! I love to learn, and I occasionally even enjoy being taught. This one was on Renaissance White Vine borders, like these ones:

I liked these because they seemed a little bigger and busier than the floral borders, and I thought that might be better for what is, really, a very simple piece. Here's some design attempts! The white dots in the background are actually very traditional, but I chose not to use them in my finished piece, because I thought it made the whole thing look too cute. Also I forgot.

Funnily enough, for all my investigation into manuscripts, the boarder design I used wasn't really from any actual historical piece! I liked this one a lot, so the final border was inspired by it. I'm not really sure who made it, or when. When I took this workshop, the instructor gave us a packet of examples, and this was one of them. The caption just says it's a page from "a beautiful album prepared by the Harris Studio, Chicago."

I don't understand how gilding works and at this point, I'm too afraid to ask. I have a bottle of Instacoll and some gold leaf sitting on my supply shelf, and I think they're there just to bully me. I would give them my lunch money if they told me to. Previous drafts were done with Coliro metallic watercolors (from left to right in the previous draft images, it was Rose Gold, Arabic Gold, and Moon Gold), and I decided I would just use that in the final version, too.

I mostly settled on my vine border/capital, so I did another full draft. Why did I do this one landscape, even though I was going to do the final version in portrait? Well, you see, it's very simple: I didn't wanna deal with my hand bumping into the binding on my sketchbook. And while I COULD have just torn a piece OUT of the sketchbook and used that, uh, well... I didn't.

Around this time, I got an iPad, so I decided to try making a digital draft in Procreate. I'm pretty bad at picking colors, and it was a real pain to have to mix up so much paint every time I wanted to try a different color scheme. And I was running out of red gouache! So I thought that, if I made it digitally, I could mess around with the colors a lot easier, and then use that to mix my paints.

After I did the calligraphy and added my border, though, I thought the whole thing looked pretty empty, so I extended the border below and above the text. I used a bottom border design like the one in this piece, which is from the same place as the other one I was referencing.

As for the top border, I kinda just made it up! I drew some swirls and some flowers and then erased it and redrew it until I decided I liked it.

For the colors, I (as I said) am very bad at colors. I don't know how they work, and they scare me! I ended up coloring the border in grayscale, and then use a gradient map to get colors with the right values.

After that, I printed out the digital version and used my light table to trace it onto a piece of Arches 90lb Hot Press watercolor paper.

The lines were done in a sepia Sakura Micron pen. The calligraphy is mostly done in an iron gall ink with a Mitchell Roundhand nib size 3. The first line was done with a 2.4 mm Pilot Parallel pen, in Pilot Red. (The part that says "The Name" was the Pilot Red ink, but with the smaller nib.) I don't have any in-progress pictures of this part, but I did the calligraphy, and then the gold (in Coliro Arabic Gold watercolor), and then I painted the boarder background in Windsor & Newton gouache.

Then I set up everything for my photo! I draped a piece of black linen over my desk (including my very tall desk lamp, so I could get some verticality/block out the rest of my living room from the photo), and grabbed some of the props I'd been accumulating while working on this.

The resin knife and the candle/candle holder I bought off etsy, the red cup I got at Goodwill, and the ribbon is... I think just something I had on hand? You can't really see the cup in the final photo, but it was just out of frame to the right. I also had a few different colors of candles (one was white and one was clear red with gold foil that actually wasn't able to be lit) but the black candle looked best, AND was the right color for St. Arthur's Candle

I think that's everything I have to say!! Hope this was interesting, but if it wasn't: haha I just tricked you into reading that boring thing.

[dragonssparkle]

a critical role s2 pining beau/jester college au concept I will never do anything with but planned extensively ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Beau: Sophomore. Already jaded. Doing her best. Plays field hockey very aggressively. (also does some martial arts club stuff) Everyone thinks she’s here on a sports scholarship but nope! she’s majoring in history and is REALLY smart actually and is here on a full ride scholarship cause her parents refused to help her pay through college after trouble she caused in high school. She wants no one to know this and would rather be perceived as ‘uncaring jock’

>> Classes: World Wars, War in Literature, Theater I, History of Musical Theater

Jester: Freshman. Bubbly. READY TO GO! She’s an art major and LIVING HER BEST LIFE! Her mom is VERY wealthy and putting her through college easily. Is trying to start a cult (but in like a joking college way... they think. they’re pretty sure.)

>> Classes: Drawing Fundamentals, Painting Fundamentals, Freshman Writing Course, Poetry Workshop Fjord: Freshman. Not sure what he wants to major in yet. Was going to do business but the RA keeps nudging him towards switching majors because he is VERY stressed and doesn’t like his major at all. it’s only been a month

>> Classes: Statistics, Freshman Writing Course, Calculus, Into to Psychology

Cad: Senior? They think... No one is sure and he refuses to give a straight answer. A lot of people seem to think he’s been around longer than 4 years. Calm. Religions studies dual major with psychology. Doesn’t do well on exams yet is very knowledgeable and doesn’t seem to actually be failing his classes? Help him. RA. All the freshmen go to him for advice. Sometimes he will come to them before they even realize they need advice. An enigma.

>> Classes: Thesis…. class? (man idk i’m only going in junior year and i’m an art major) Religion and Nature, Religion and Medicine, (some sort of psychology class)

Veth (nickname to certain friends: Nott): Junior. Chemistry major. Has been accused of stealing things from unlocked rooms multiple times. Has yet to be caught. Unsure if she’s actually done these things. Is always seen with Caleb and hanging around his classes. Does she actually go to her own classes? Unknown. Also an enigma but a different kind. Dating the intro to chem TA (first year grad student).

>> Classes: The Organic Chemistry of Polymers, Molecular Neurobiology, Chemical Thermodynamics and Kinetics, Theater I

Caleb: Junior. English major. Has an emotional support cat that is sometimes permitted to wander the hall. He’s not supposed to let it out of his room but Cad never tells on him. Doesn’t really talk to people much. Very diligent with class and studies. There are some whispers about some really bad stuff happening at his high school, but few people know what happened.

>> Classes: War in Literature, The American Renaissance, Poetry Workshop, Multivariable Calculus

Molly: Junior. Film major, theater minor. Transferred from another college and changed his entire vibe after. New place new face. (there are some whispers there’s more to the change. something about a bad accident. he doesn’t talk about it). Always seems to be around. Has defo gotten in trouble a few times.

>> Classes: Poetry Workshop, History of Musical Theater, Social Justice in Film, Musical Production Participation

Yasha: doesn’t actually go to school here. Stays in molly’s room when she comes by. Quiet. Big. Some shit went down a while back. She keeps the flowers in molly’s room alive. he’s bad at it. Oh this thing was WAY longer than I thought. More content under the cut!

Shared Classes: War in Literature: Beau, Caleb

Theater I: Beau, Nott

History of Musical Theater: Beau, Molly

Freshman Writing Course: Jester, Fjord

Poetry Workshop: Jester, Molly, Caleb Rooms:

Beau and Jester’s Room:

Jester’s side is decorated with frills and the walls are practically covered in clothesline ropes and clips for hanging doodles. So many plushies. Everything is more or less tidy and clean. There’s a photo of her mom on her desk. Shrine to the traveler on her desk. She is running a cult someone stop her. Jester put fairy lights all over the room. Beau’s side is pretty plain all things considered. She has sports gear and some other stuff. Blue covers. No photos. A bunch of books on her shelf and notes all over her desk. Beau is… messy.

Caleb and Veth’s Room:

A fucking disaster someone help them. There are books and papers everywhere. Veth’s bed can be better described as a nest. Where is her desk? is it under that pile of random things? Possibly. No one is sure. They have not cleaned the floor ever. At least they take out the trash? Has anyone ever seen them in the laundry room? Do they do laundry? There’s a cat tree in there. It’s the only surface without things on it. The cat runs the room. It has only been a month. Veth isn’t even always there, often goes to Yeza’s apartment

Molly’s Room (also sorta of yasha’s):

A surprising amount of flowers in pots. He has a bunch of tapestries on the walls. Fairy lights. Lots of fancy pillows. He’s taken over the other bed with pillows, blankets, and clothes after Fjord left to stay with Cad a month in. Lot of wild clothes everywhere. Makeup and hair products on the desk along with assorted jewelry. He has his schedule hanging up on his closet door.

Caduceus’s Room:

Started in the room alone before he let Fjord move over. So many plants. Including succulents and funguses. Some of them may be poisonous? Some crystals. A little shrine in the corner. He has a tank of pet beetles. He loves them very much but doesn’t seem to care much if one dies? He just puts them with the funguses if they do and makes little necklaces with the wing shells. Some glow mushrooms. His whole room smells like tea and he usually has a little pot going on a hot tray. The top bunk used to be for plants. Now it is for Fjord.

Plot points in no particular order:

Getting to campus

Meeting hall mates

when beau first gets to room jester is already set up and her first thought is “god damn it i’m suck with a girly girl”

beau listening to jester talk forever and ever about fjord. it is killing her

Meeting jester (and they were Roommates. my god they were roommates)

beau leads a ‘yoga class’ for her friends

beau gets in, like, an actual fight

molly gets really badly beat up. at one point because of something idk. probably was cheeky to the wrong drunk person. DOES NOT DIE FUCK YOU

Tattoos!!!!! 

Beau talking with molly. he gives her advice

Caduceus just watching her closely. He doesn’t bring it up but has his eye on her. gotta love that high wisdom

Molly directs a musical theater show for a club he’s in

Veth comes to War in Literature with caleb every class. beau is confused to find out she is not, in fact,  in this class when she doesn’t show up for an exam

Theater time with Veth and Molly

Confessing to Veth. who offers to do something but doesn’t when beau begs her not to

seeing jester get together with fjord and sad times

confessing and jester kisses her. jester has TWO! HANDS!

classes with caleb (veth is also there)

beau switches to a different room halfway through the year cause she can’t do this

meals with the crew

Jester birthday time!!!

Some sort of nightlife adventure

DRINKING TIME PARTY!

gay thoughts about yasha but knowing it wouldn’t work. not doting on it much. Yasha was her freshman crush, but has someone else

Beau goes to one of jester’s cult meetings. there is a concern

Haha. A lot. I’d as that if someone wants to do something with all (gestures vaguely) this please ask though ask or dm first. When will the hiatus end

[languagelearningjoy]

10 REASONS THAT SLOW YOU DOWN IN LEARNING ENGLISH

The first reason I would like to mention is MOTIVATION. We are used to thinking about our motivation to learn a certain language as about something stable and simple. Nothing could be further from the truth. We may be highly motivated today and be completely unmotivated a month later. Our motivation is tightly bound to our other needs, wishes, hopes, attitudes, to a broader social life and opportunities it offers us. Besides, motivation also depends on actions we undertake and on the outcomes of our actions. When these factors change, our motivation changes as well. When you come home after a hard working day, all you want is to relax, to do something you like, you are just not able to do grammar exercises or write an essay, your brain refuses to think and you watch your favourite TV series or check your Facebook page, in your native language of course. There are many ways to be successful in language learning without compromising your needs. I am going to make a special video to help you understand and support your motivation better at different stages of your language learning. Just one more thing I would like to say about motivation: it has often been undermined by the

DISCREPANCY BETWEEN YOUR GOALS AND YOUR ACTIONS

            What do you usually do when learning a foreign language? You study grammar, memorise vocabulary, write essays, but it is not your goal! Your goal is to be able to use the language to communicate with other people! It must seriously confuse your brain when you put a big effort into something which is not your goal. Does it mean that you can start communicating in a foreign language without learning its grammar and vocabulary? I don’t think so. What can you do to reduce this discrepancy? You can change your way of thinking. Don’t think “I should learn the past tense” if you are not interested in grammar. You can think: “I want to learn how to talk about interesting things I did last week, last year or five years ago”.

Very often the discrepancy between goals and actions is caused by the fact that the course program does not correspond with your goal, or topics and tasks are not interesting for you or the teaching methods are not efficient. Sometimes people try to learn a foreign language by themselves choosing very tiring, boring, time-consuming and inefficient techniques like memorising words one by one from a dictionary or reading English classics when they are on a pre-intermediate level. Some ideas are not as bad, but often they can’t guide them through all the steps that are necessary to be a highly proficient language user, because 

INPUT is NOT ENOUGH  

Frankly speaking, some theorists think it is enough but I strongly believe it is not and many studies have proved that language learning is a complex process, it has many stages of processing, coding, and restructuring information, not to mention that output is a crucial stage of language learning. I am going to do a special video with a more detailed description of the second language processing and acquisition and show how it is slowed down when some stages are omitted and some important factors are neglected. Now I just want to mention the main reason for the fact why learning a lot you may not necessarily bring a great result.

YOUR KNOWLEDGE IS NOT THE SAME AS YOUR SKILLS (describing it in scholar terms, your declarative knowledge does not transform automatically into your procedural knowledge). If you do not have extraordinary language skills you might have noticed that despite doing many grammar exercises you still make the same mistakes again and again; after listening to the pronunciation workshop on youtube, your pronunciation in spontaneous speech is still far from perfection. To transform your knowledge into skills you need to practice it in communication, still better in a real-life situation. So, the next reason why language learning  often fails    

LACK OF COMMUNICATION

Plenty of experiments and papers showed how communication enhances language learning. Social interaction is called a “gate” to language acquisition and it is not an exaggeration. We are social creatures, it is coded in our biology: brain research showed that interaction arouses out attention and activates the brain mechanisms linking perception and action. That is exactly what we need to transform our declarative knowledge into our speaking skills. So, what should you do if you don’t know people with whom you can practice the language you learn? Some youtube videos suggest talking to a mirror, recording yourself, using virtual assistants like Siri, or speech recognition programs. Surely, you can do it and it helps but I strongly believe that real people are much better than the mirror or Siri. Again, I am going to make a special video with some tips as to how to build your own network but you can easily do it now by yourself: there are social networks, there are a lot of virtual communities on the Internet, possibly some of them have real-life meetings in your city, there are tandem group meetings (real and virtual), discussion clubs and many other options. Apart from many other benefits, talking to people gives you feedback and here we are at the 6th reason why language learning might be not satisfactory

LACK OF FEEDBACK AND REWARD

When we put in a great deal of effort into our actions, we want to see the result we have achieved. In the case of language learning this result is ability to communicate with other speakers. But what result do we usually get? The score of our last test. Is it exciting? Not really. You may get a reward a year, two or three years later when you pass your IELTS test or get a good job but it is a very long time to wait, people want results and rewards more quickly. Talking to foreigners gives you this feeling of success and satisfaction. You can also arrange small rewards for yourself, e.g. you can write in your language journal to record your progress, success and your feelings. Do we take our feelings into account when we learn a foreign language? Usually not and it is a serious mistake, and that’s the reason number 7 why your language learning is not efficient:

YOUR FEELINGS ARE NOT ENGAGED 

Your feelings are important, they are related to all the key factors of language learning. If your learning is pleasurable, you are highly motivated to continue it. You memorize much better something that moves you, makes you smile, makes you feel delighted. Many invisible barriers on the way to language proficiency are created by boredom or negative feelings.   

Many learners and even teachers make a big mistake when they think about language learning as  something ordered, something like a formula: do this and this and you get a result. If it does work for you, it is perfect, stick to this way of thinking, but for many people, it doesn’t work. If it doesn’t work for you, stop seeing a language as a set of grammar rules and long vocabulary lists. Language is about words and tenses and endings but first of all language is about you and the world around you, language is about everything. The good news is that you can learn when doing anything, including things you are passionate about: you may learn something very important for you, talk to very interesting people, you can express yourself through a new language. You might think that it will be possible only when you become a proficient language user, but in fact, you can do it right now. The first idea that comes to my mind, you can make a photo album with notes in the language you learn. Share it with your friends. Even if they can’t read your notes, they will be happy to see the photos. Many people don’t perceive language learning in terms of creativity and self-expression and that is the reason number 8 why they struggle:

they CANNOT ENGAGE their PERSONALITY IN LANGUAGE LEARNING

In fact, it is easier to say than do. A foreign language is something unfamiliar to us, it pushes us out of our comfort zone. Our brain doesn’t like unfamiliar things. A commonly held psychological belief says that it happens because for all biological creatures familiar things mean safety, unfamiliar things are associated with some potential danger. Even if you like the language you learn, try to shift settings on your computer into this language or join a group native speakers when you are the only foreigner and it is highly unlikely you will feel comfortable. It is more difficult to express yourself through a foreign language. For a long time after my English became fluent I felt I sounded ridiculous speaking English, especially in public, I was ashamed of my accent and afraid to make mistakes.

So if it is difficult to make a foreign language yours what can we do? We can appropriate a new language gradually switching it to our sphere of interests and to our identity. If you like cooking, start searching for new recipes in this language, if you like sports, start watching sports events in this language, if you like traveling, start sharing your experience in a blog. Don’t overwhelm yourself, do one step at a time and you will realise that gradually you start feeling more and more comfortable and the most important thing: you will use your new language in a real-life situation and that is exactly the 9th reason why people do not succeed in their language learning: they 

DO NOT USE THE LANGUAGE IN REAL LIFE SITUATIONS

Psychology says that the knowledge acquired in a certain situation, in certain circumstances is not always to automatically transferred into other situations and circumstances. That is exactly what many people experience when after years of learning a foreign language in classroom setting, they meet a native speaker and can’t say a word. I would say that language usage limited to a classroom is possibly the main reason why people feel frustrated about their language learning. So, what can you do? Try to expand you language learning out of the classroom. As I said, language is about you and the world around you. Take this responsibility on yourself and you will avoid the 10th reason why language learning is not efficient 

People DO NOT TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR their LANGUAGE LEARNING.

Do not put all responsibility on your teacher. Language learning for a long time has been organised in the way that learners were just passive doers of the tasks they were given by their teachers. I think this approach will be changing in the future but what could you do now? Just plan your learning strategically, engage your emotions and creativity, organise a group of speakers with whom you can practice this language.

So, thank you for your attention, and good luck in your language learning. If you need any help with English, Russian, Polish, you can book a lesson with me via email: olga.nestel@gmail.com ($ USA 20/hour or 15 euro/hour).      

[queenraikichi94]

A song to heal a tired soul 23 (Raikichi x Piers)

Rated: Teen and mature

Warnings: Bad language and some NSFW

Note: Raikichi is around 25-26 years

---------------PART 23------------------

“Babe, here!”

When I heard Piers’ voice as I exited the Flying Taxi, I quickly ran to hug him. I decided to stay some days with my fiancée in Spikemuth not only for helping him to train, but also cause I wanted to spent more time with him in order to speak about some thigns of the wedding and also, because I would be more tranquil to continue my investigation about Galarian story and legends, and also, my investigation about Dynamax and GIgantamax. And now I was there, wrapped in my fiancée’s arms.

“Careful, babe, I don’t want you to fall and get hurt” Piers said chuckling before kissing me “Did you miss me?”

“Of course, babe, and it looks that you missed me too” I said, smirking and then chuckling when he saw that I noticed his hardness when I hugged him tightly.

“Please, babe, don’t tease me like that, at least not here” he said with a soft sigh

“Okay, okay” I chuckled before kissing him again and then, we went inside Spikemuth, heading to his house “So, what’re the plans for today?”

“First we left your things in my house and then, we go to train before having a nice launch”

“Sounds very well for me”

We arrived at his flat and once I left my things on his room, we went to the Gym. There, his trainers were waiting for us, and when they saw us, they stood up as they greeted us. Then, we took positions and when the trainers showed us their Dark type Pokemon, Piers choosed his Obstagoon and I choosed to use Glaceon and also, Rapidash, in order to put them on test againts a type that was strong against Dark type. 

Two hours later, we decided to stop for that day cause Piers and me had to discuss things of the wedding. After congratuling the trainers for their effort, my fiancée and me went first to the Pokemon Center to get our Pokemon healed and then, we went to his flat to have a warm bath. Once the bath was ready, we got naked and enter in the bathtub, my back againts his chest. I let out a soft sigh as Piers massaged my shoulders. “You’re very tense, love” he murmured “Is something worrying you?”

“Eh? No, nothing” I said 

“Raikichi, you don’t have to lie, ya know. Something is worrying you, isn’t it?”

“Well...I’m worried about the wedding...I mean, I want to marry you but being alone for all these years, rejecting to be in a romantic relationship...It makes me be nervous about the wedding cause I’ve never imagined ending married with a person that I really love and...Sorry, I’m sure you’re nervous as well and I shouldn’t...”

“Hey, it’s okay, babe” Piers said making me turn in order to face him. Lucky for us, the bathtub was wide enough to allow us to turn and face the other when we wanted to do it “I understand why are you nervous, you don’t have to say sorry for that, Raikichi...I’m nervous as well, but I know that we can do this together”

“You’re right, babe” I said with a purr before continue with the bath.

Once we finished the bath, we exited the bathtub and got dried and dressed. We went to the kitchen in order to prepare some food for lunch as we talked about the wedding and some plans of going to Circhester since we decided to celebrate there the wedding. 

“So, tell me about what you discovered” Piers said as we prepared some lunch

“Remember my theory about two heroes that saved Galar from the Darkest Day? Well, my theory was correct! And also, look at this” I said as my Rotom Phone went to show Piers the photos it tooked “See those Pokemon? According to the texts and to the  things that were carved in the stone, those Pokemon were refered as the Cyan and the Magenta, and according to the things I ciuld translate few days ago, both Pokemon went to help the two heroes, the Cyan holding a sword and the Magenta holding a shield. Together, they saved Galar from the Darkest Day and the two heroes became kings”

“And what about this one?” he asked pointing to the one that was mounting another Pokemon. “Did you discover the name of this one? I find it pretty interesting...I’ve never seen a Pokemon mounting another Pokemon”

“I couldn’t translate the name of that Pokemon, like the names of the other two. The carvings of the statues that have their names were damaged a lot, but I could translate de small text that was under the destroyed carving” I said as I served the food “That one is referred in the carvings as the ‘King of Bountiful Harvests’, but I couldn’t find a lot of information about that Pokemon”

“Don’t worry, babe” he said smiling and kissing me when we put all the plates on the table “I’m sure you’ll be able to discover it, and if you allow me to help you, I’ll be very glad of helping you”

“Of course you can help me, babe”  I purred and then, I stole a kiss from his lips “C’mon, the food is going to get cold”

Piers chuckled and we sat down after putting some food for the Pokemon. As we had lunch, we talked about more things, most of them related with our visit to Circhester. After having lunch, we checked our phones and after checking all the notifications, we washed our dishes and after we got ready, we exited the house, followed by Glaceon. Obstagoon, by his hand, decided to stay in his Pokeball.

We took a Flying Taxi and flew to Circhester. When we arrived, we saw that Gordie was waiting for us. We exited the cabin and once we greeted him, he guided us to his jewelry. It was a small shop, as Piers told me the night after he gave me the ring when he asked me to marry him, but due the placement of the furniture, the inside of the shop looked bigger than the outside. 

“Alright, come in, I’ll show you my workshop” Gordie said and guided us to an instance on the shop. There was his workshop, full of tools, sketches on papers, and gems. A lot of gems. “Here, look at this” he said, showing two golden ornaments with two light pink diamonds I quickly recognized.

“Oh, those are Diance’s diamonds” I said and I let Diancie out of her Pokeball “Look, Diancie, do you like the work Gordie is doing with them?” I asked and Diancie nodded and chirped happily before returning to her Pokeball “Gordie, you did a really good work”

“Thanks, but I need to add few more details”

“Alright, man, how much it cost?” Piers asked “C’mon, don’t look at me like that. You are doing a big work with them, you deserve to be paid for the work”

“Don’t worry for that” the Rock type Gym leader said “Is my wedding gift for both of you”

“Oh, Gordie, you didn’t have to do it” I said smiling softly

“We’re friends afterall, right?” he said and then, he patted Piers’ back with a strenght that I thought he would break his back. Then, he put the ornaments in a box and after giving them to me, he guided us outside “C’mon, let me invite you to take some drinks. I’m sure Raikichi has never tried Circhester’s best hot chocolate”

“Is Circhester’s chocolate better than mine that is home made?” I asked, teasing tone on my voice as I arched an eyebrow

“Give it a try!” Gordie said with a soft chuckle as we went to a coffee shop that had the fame of being the one with the best home made hot chocolate. The Rock Gym leader asked us to take a seat and then, we gave a look to the menu and choosed the hot chocolate we would have. Once the waitres brought us the hot chocolates, Gordie looked at me “C’mon, give it a taste”

“Alright” I said and then, I tasted the hot chocolate I aske. It was delicious, I had to recognize, and I had to give a point to that “Alright, you are right. Is delicious. But I have to invite you to taste my home made hot chocolate, Gordie”

“I will give it a try, I promise” he said 

We kept talking until Piers and me had to return to Spikemuth since he wanted to train again and I have to do some work with the information I reunited from all my sources in order to know more about the legends of Galar.

-----

Night arrived and Piers returned after training since we returned from Circhester. I was on the couch, tapping the keyboards key fast as I switched my eyes from the papers to the laptop screen. I was also listening to music that I didn’t hear my fiancée entering the house, and when he kissed my cheek, I jumped a bit startled but then, I kissed him back. “Sorry, I didn’t want to scare you”

“Don’t worry, babe” I said saving the report I was writing on the laptop and once I closed it, I stood up and scretched a bit with a lil yawn before seeing the time that was at that moment “Sorry, I didn’t know it was this late. I’ll make a call to order some dinner while you take a bath”

“Alright” Piers said but then, he turned and kissed me before giving me that smirk of his, noticing that I was wearing one of his shirts over my short pajama pants “You know how to tease me, don’t ya?”

“Perhaps” I purred before stealing a kiss from his lips “Go and take that bath before I decided to do something with that hard bulge between your legs”

That made him blush some madly that I couldn’t help but laugh as he went to his room-well, our shared room as he started to call it since it wasn’t the first time I came here to stay some days-and after taking some clean clothes, he went to the bathroom. I called to a pizza restaurant and after ordering the pizzas we would eat, I prepared some food for the Pokemon. Then, my Rotom Phone started to vibrate. When I looked at the message that I recieved, I sighed. I took my phone once I was done giving the food to the Pokemon and I called the person that sent me the message.

“What do you want now, uncle Nanu?” I asked as I made sure that Piers had closed the bathroom’s door “Did you see what time is it?”

“Yeah, and I knew you would be awake, kiddo” my uncle replied “So, I assume that you saw the message, right?”

“Yeah, I read it”

“And?”

“I’m not going to call him, uncle” I said “My time as an Interpol member is over, and you know it”

“I know, kiddo, but I’m not asking you to return to the International Police” he said “I ask you to call Looker and ask him for advice”

“Uncle, I’m not going to call him cause the most sure thing is that I will have all of them begging me to return to the Interpol if I want their help, and I don’t want to put Piers, uncle Kabu and my friends in danger”

“You know Looker, he won’t tell anyone about this. Listen, Raikichi, I know that the track that Sakura was following is gone. Those furtives know how to hide themselves and withtout help, you won’t be able to track them again, at least alone”

“Wait, you know what Sakura was doing?”

“She told me instead of telling her father about the furtives. You know that Giovanni woudn’t be happy knowing that a more sofisticated and skilled group of furtive Pokemon hunters is operating very active”

I sighed as I took a seat on the couch again before speaking again. “Listen, uncle, I know you trust Looker but give me time, ‘kay? I need time to think...”

“Time to think? Kiddo, those bastards want you death”

“Yeah, thanks for remembering me that” I replied with another sigh “I will call you later, okay?”

“....Fine” uncle Nanu finally said “But tell me first if you decided to tall Looker...or not. I want to know that you’re safe”

“Thanks uncle...Good night” I said and then, I hanged the call before sighing again. Glaceon jumped to the couch and put her head and front paws on my lap, making me smile “Don’t worry, girl, I’m fine” I said and she tilted her head before closing her eyes and purring when I stroked her fur.

“Alright, I’m done” Piers said once he exited the bathroom, her black and white wavy long hair dropping like a waterfall. I couldn’t help but blush when I saw him shirtless cause he was only clean underwear. “Hey, is something wrong?” he asked when he saw me sighing sighlty

“Eh? No, don’t worry, everything’s fine” I replied smiling softly

“Are you sure? Your voice tone is telling me other thing”

“Really, I’m fine”

Piers looked at me as he rose an eyebrow before sitting next to em on the couch in order to hug me and kiss my temple. “You know, I’m here for you, babe” he murmured 

“I know...” I whispered as I leant on his bare chest, closing my eyes and enjoying with his heartbeat before noticing that he was shivering “Go and put some clothes on you. I don’t want you to fall sick”

He chuckled and went to the room in order to put his pajamas on him. Since I noticed that I was shivering also a bit, I followed him and while he put his sleeping clothes on, I changed my short pajama pants for a long one and then, I put my hoodie over me before being wrapped by my fiancée’s arms. “I love you, Raikichi...”

“I love you too, Piers...” I said but before I could kiss him, the doorbell sounded “Dinner’s here” I added with a chuckle as I went to the door to take the food and pay the delivery man

“What did you order?” Piers said as he put the plates on the table while I put the boxes in the center of the table

“Pizza. I ordered three pizzas” I replied while I opened the box and started to cut the pizzas as my fiancée served some fresh water on glasses. “Next time I will be more attentive to the time”

“Hey, don’t worry, babe” he said as we took a seat and starting to have dinner “You were busy with your investigations and I spend all the time I could training since we arrived from Circhester. I’ll take care of the breakfast tomorrow”

“Thanks, babe”

After having dinner, we washed the dishes and then, we watched TV until I heard Piers yawning and when I saw him trying to stay awake, I smiled and turned off the TV. “Go to sleep, babe” I said kissing him

“I won’t go to bed if you don’t go with me”

“Babe, please, I’ll go to bed once I finish the report and...”

“You are tired as well, Raikichi” Piers said “Let’s go to bed. You can continue your report tomorrow”

“Alright, alright, you win” I said with a chuckle and together with him, we went to the bedroom that we shared on his house. I removed the glasses and the ponytail, and after putting my glasses on the night table, both me and Piers slipped under the warm blankets. I curled next to him and he hugged me with a chuckle. “Love you Piers...”

“Love you too, Raikichi...”

----------------------------------

I woke up with a soft groan cause I wanted to sleep a bit more, and cause my sleep was interrupt twice by strong thunderbolts, but my biological clock wasn’t going to allow me that. Then, I smiled when Piers embraced me and kissed me when I rolled in orther to kiss him. “Morning, my Queen...” he said as his lips went down to my neck, making me moan softly.

“P-Piers...” I said moaning again when his hand went down, ready to slip under my pants and underwear as his other hand slowly put my top up so my breasts were free, with my nipples already hard.

“Do you want me to stop?” he asked, worry and fear on his voice cause he was afraid about doing something wrong

“No...Is just...I didn’t expect this...” I murmured before kissing him “Go on, my King...”

“As you wish...” Piers said and then, his mouth started to be busy with my right breast as his right hand was now busy with my wet entrance. “You’re already wet for me...I love it...” he said as he started to stroke my clit so slow that I thought he was going to drive me mad. Then, seeing my reaction, he slipped one finger inside me as he kept sucking and licking on my breasts.

“F-Fuck Piers...This is so good...” I moaned as I felt him slipping two fingers more inside me. He moved those three fingers in a way that made me see stars when he wanted.

Then, Piers smirked and went down, leaving kisses on my sking and when he reached my core, I urged him bucking my hips a bit. My fiancée started to lick my clit as he kept moving his fingers inside me but then, he retired the fingers and before I could complain, he put his tongue inside me, licking and sucking as his fingers played with my clit. That amde me moan so loud as I arched my back, and I couldn’t help but started to play with my breasts and nipples as Piers retired his tongue and replaced it with his fingers again inside me.

“You taste so good, my love” he said licking his lips and going up in order to kiss me, making me taste myself. “Oh, I know that look on your eyes...My naughty Queen...”

I nodded and then, once he retired his fingers inside me and he removed our sleeping clothes and underwear, he allowed me to be over him, by head between his legs and my wet entrance over his mouth. I felt the urge of licking and sucking his hard cock so I didn’t take too long and started to lick the tip, savouring the first hints of precum and then, I started to suck it with a moan as Piers licked my entrance, and using his tongue and fingers inside me. 

“Damn, Piers, you know how to use your tongue, don’t ya?” I teased him before moaning when I felt his fingers reaching that special spot, making me taking my little revenge and sucking him so hard that I could heard him moan even louder. And then, we reached the climax. I popped his cock out of my mouth and after swallow the cum he spilled inside my mouth, I licked his member, savouring his seed before letting him clean himself. Then, once he cleaned himself and covered his cock with a condom, I spread my legs, teasing him as he watched my fingers stroking my entrance. “C’mon, my naughty King. This Queen needs you so desperately “

He didn’t think twice and after lining his cock with my entrance, he pushed a bit hard, but I didn’t care cause this time I wanted it a bit rough, and I made him know it when I bite his neck and scratched his back with my nails. “Do you want this rough, don’t ya?” he moaned as he moved.

“Yeah...Fuck me harder and rough, babe”

Piers smirked and moved faster as he bite my neck. Both of us moaned as he moved even faster, but he knew how to turn things rough, cause when he felt my inner walls starting to get tighter, he retired his cock carefully to avoid loosing the condom and then, I put on my fours, feeling again his cock inside me and then, he started to fuck me harder and rough, being careful of not hurting me, cause on his mind was still the memory of that bite that made me bleed a bit. 

“Do you want keep this rough?” he asked, a bit worried as he kept fucking me

“Yes, fuck me harder, for Arceus’ sake!” I groaned 

Then, with a loud moan, I came, but Piers wasn’t done yet, so he managed to put us in a pose on which I could ride him. His hands were now on my hips, and both of us were panting and moaning louder and louder. 

“You know how to get your revenge, right?” he moaned as I leant down and bite his neck, moving our hips hard.

“Of course...” I replied but I reached again my orgasm, as Piers reached his own. “That...was...” I tried to say but I was so tired that I couldn’t say anything.

“I wanted to surprise you this morning...I didn’t like seeing you worried and sad yesterday...” he said removing the condom and throwing it to the trash can and then, he picked me up on his arms and went to the bathroom “Did I was too rough?”

“Hey, don’t worry” I said as he put me inside the bathtub, enjoying the warm water “Next time try not to bite me so hard...And I will try to avoid not to scratch your back hard”

“We wanted this time to go rough, but is good to speak about it to avoid accidents” he said, sitting behind me and letting me to put my back againts his chest as we got bathed “Raikichi?”

“Yeah?”

But instead of replying, he kissed my check and I smiled. Sometimes, words weren’t needed between us. As we got bathed, we talked about the idea of doing a three-some, but the conversation ended a bit abruptly cause I didn’t know what to think about the idea of me and Piers having sex with another person. The wound of my heart was still there and that made me feel insecure. Piers, of course, wasn’t for the idea neither cause he didn’t like the idea fo sharing me with another person, but at least, it was ncie to talk about new things cause that made our bonds get stronger. 

After taking the bath and getting dried and dressed on clean clothers, we went to the kitchen, of course after putting the other clothes and the blankets on the wash machine, but when I was going to help Piers with the breakfast, he told me to go to the living room cause he wanted to take care of the breakfast. “I’ll make a very tasty breakfast for both of us once I give our Pokemon their food, ‘kay?”

“But I want to help you”

“I told you yesterday that I would make breakfast for both of us, and you’re still tired of our sex morning session, so now rest while I prepare everything, ‘kay?”

I sighed but nodded and after stealing a kiss from his lips, I sat down on the couch, with Glaceon curling next to me. I turned on the TV in order to see some news while my fiancée prepared the breakfast. I stroke Glaceon’s fur and then, Sango, my Galarian Linoone, jumped to the other place of the couch and like Glaceon, she put her head on my lap. I decided to name my Linoone Sango cause she was ready to evolve soon and I wanted to difference her from Piers’ Obstagoon. 

“Breakfast is ready” Piers said bringing the food to the living room. Once he put the plates on the table, we approached the table to the sofá in order to start with the breakfast and Holy Arceus, Piers knew how to do the perfect pancakes; and the chocolate chips added extra points to that! “It looks that you love it” he said with a chuckle.

“These are the most perfect pancakes I’ve ever eat” I said “And the hot chocolate is also perfect. It looks that you like my recipe, right?”

“Yeah, but I wanted to do a different version cause I didn’t have cinnamon”

“Well, the ginger adds a different and tasty savour”

“Point for the chef?”

I laughed and kissed him as we had breakfast. Glaceon and Sango were sleeping on a side of the couch while we ate our food as we watched the news. Then, the breaking news started and both me and Piers shared a confused look before looking to the TV. They said that a strange thunderstorm caused by the bat weather affected all the Galar region, and the damage were still been counted by the experts.

“That’s quite strange” Piers said as we finished our breakfast before getting ready to our daily things “I know about those weather changes but that thunderstorm was quite huge. Marnie sent a message telling me that they were out of light and electricity in all Circhester, and it looks that all the towns and cities of Galar suffered the same”

I nodded in silence cause something like that happened years ago but in Unova. It was after I recovered from my wounds after battling Team Plasma and decided to move to Kalos. Days later fater that, Looker called me and told me that Unova got affected by a thunderstorm similar to the one that affected Galar last night, but with the difference that the thunderstorm he saw was after he saw a black figure flying on the sky, with someone mounting on it.

“Raikichi?”

“Uh?” I said blinking twice when I heard calling me

“Are you alright? You were silent for some minutes” he said, hugging me

“Yeah, I was distract with my own thoughts, don’t worry”

Piers smiled and kissed me before we got out of the house. First, we wanted to evaluate the damage caused by the thunderbolts that had fallen over Spikemuth, like it happened in other parts of Galar, and oh boy, we had a serious problem just in the middle of the town, near of the secondary entrance that the town had on one of its sides. It looked that the thunderbolts hitted several times the ceiling that covered the town and part of it got broken and fell to the ground. I did a quick call and few minutes later, some Police officers arrived and cordoned off the place to avoid people get hurted. Then, one of my Pokeballs shook and Luxray got out of it.

“Why did Luxray get out of her Pokeball?” Piers asked

“I think she noticed the electricity of the place...Listen, Glaceon and me will follow Luxray. I want to make sure that there isn’t any places near the town affected by the thunderstorm”

“Let me go with you then”

“No, you should stay here” I said  firmly “As Gym Leader, your duty is stay here and help the people that lives here”

“But I don’t want to...” he started and then, taking my handsa, he sighed before looking at me “I don’t want to see you getting hurt and I don’t want to be away of you if something happens to you”

“I know, Piers, but I have my duties as World Champion, as you have yours as Gym Leader” I replied, smiling softly “Once I make sure that any Pokemon and people didn’t get hurt by the thunderstorm, I’ll be back. I promise it, love”

He nodded and kissed me before hugging me. “Be careful, my love” he said and then, he went to speak with the Police officers as me and Glaceon followed Luxray, entering the wilds as Luxray followed the electric track that the thunderstorm left last night.

We entered the Wild Area following an unknown path for a lot of people, but a known one for me since I used it when I wanted to go to the Wild Area without being noticed. Some of the trees had gotten hit by the thunderbolts, but for Arceus’ sake, the Pokemon we’ve encountered during the walk were only scared, hut not hurted. Then, Glaceon’s ears twitched and the electricity around Luxray got brighter, meaning that we were near of a very big spot of energy. I returned Luxray to her Pokeball and then, Glaceon and me continued walking until we reached a forest clearing, a small area of the Wild Area but a quiet and tranquil one. I looked at the sky and it was clear, with only few clouds. Then, Glaceon meowed and pointed at someone lurking behind a tree in the base of the small hill where Glaceon and me were in that moment. That green and long hair...That clothes...But before I could say something, he moved on and run to a place that I couldn’t see from my spot, so I moved too and I discovered that he was approaching some cages with wild Pokemon inside them, and of course, those people. Those furtives again. Their clothes told me that they were of a low rank than the ones that attacked me, Piers and uncle Kabu in Mototoske, but they were still furtives that must had to be stopped. Slowly, Glaceon and me went down from the hill, hidding behind the trees and watching the scene, but we stopped when the furtives discovered the guy that we were following.

“Look who was trying to free our goods” one of the furtives said after punching the guy, making him fall on his back. “You will pay for this, bastard”

No doubt. It was him, N, but what he was doing here in Galar? That question and more had to wait cause I wasn’t going to allow anyone to hurt a friend. “Glaceon, use Ice Shard!”

Glaceon’s move made the furtives stand back, and my Pokemon got between N and the furtives’ Pokemon. Then, I jumped and before they could react, I knocked one of the furtives as Glaceon kept the other busy. “You will never change” I groaned as I looked at Glaceon and then, I activated my Icinium Z “From the coldest and hardest blizzards, from the most beautiful winters you rise up and shows your eternal beauty, shining with the first rays of the winter sun” I said “Glaceon, use Subzero Slammer!!!”

The Z move left the furtives’ Pokemon out of combat. Then, I let out Scolipede out of her Pokeball and ordered her to use String Shot on the furtives and their Pokemon to avoid them scaping and then, I let my Lycanroc out of his Pokeball “Use Stealth Rock around the furtives. Glaceon, use Ice beam to reforce the rocks” I said and both Pokemon did what I said. Then, I made a call and once I hanged out the call, I returned both Scolipede and Lycanroc back to their Pokeballs and turned to attend N.

“You always know how to surprise me” I said as I helped him to stand up 

“You...Raikichi?”

“Yeah, the same Raikichi as always” I said while we opened the cages and after making sure that the wild Pokemon were calm, we started to treat them. Glaceon meowed and I nodded. “Go and hide behind those trees”

“Why?” N said “Let me help”

“Trust me, okay? I’m sure you don’t want to be involve in more problems. Go and hide. I’ll call you once this is over”

N nodded and went to a safe place just in time, cause the Police arrived. I told them about the furtives and while the nurses attending the Pokemon that N and me got free from the cages, they asked me about something that got me confused.

“Why I am here, you ask? Simple, I was worried about the Pokemon and people near Spikemuth since in that place and its surrondings, the thunderstorm hitted hard, so as the World Champion I am, I came here followinf Luxray, cause my Luxray could follow the electricity left by the storm, and that’s how we found those bastards” I said, crossing my arms as the Police officer took notes “If you don’t need me, I have things to do. There are still some wild Pokemon that need to be checked”

“Alright, we’ll take care of these criminals”

I nodded and with Glaceon, we left the place. Glaceon sniffed the air and guided me away of the place, following N’s track. And after walking for near thirty minutes, we found him. He was near the Watchtower Ruins, sitting on the grass with his back leant on the ruined stone. He was wounded and he showed his skill to became friendly easily with Pokemon. I remembered when he was surprised with my skill of being able of talking with Pokemon and understanding them very well; also, he was surprised when he found out that I could show my feelings and thoughts to the Pokemon touching them. And he was there, surrounded by different wild Pokemon that let me approach him. I knelt down next to him, and I took his right arm in order to treat his wounds.

“N, how many times I’ve told you not to do things like this alone?” I asked softly as I treated his wounds using my little first aid kit

“And how many times I will tell you that I will keep doing the same?” he replied raising an eyebrow and making me chuckle

“You’ll never change” I said as I finished putting bandages covering his wounds “Here you are”

“Thanks, Raikichi...” N said and then, his hand reached my face in order to retire the hair that covered part of my face. I got frozen on my stop cause I didn’t expect that, and when he noticed that, he quickly retired his hand after seeing the scars on my face “You’ve changed a lot...Last time we’ve seen was on that Pokemon Center, when you were recovering from the wounds that Team Plasma caused to you when you saved me...” he said, looking to the scars of my belly before looking to the ground. 

“Yeah, that was a long time ago” I said sitting next to him and stroking Glaceon’s fur 

“You’ve got more scars, right? Apart of the ones you’ve got on Sinnoh and Unova”

I nodded and N sighed. “The ones on my arms, right leg and both ankles are from Kalos; I’ve got them fighting againts Team Flare”

“And the burn of your right arm?” he asked “Did you get it fighting againts Team Flare?”

“Oh, no, I didn’t” I replied “That is one of the most recent I got...So, after being near of dying for a second time, this time in Kalos, I decided to stop working with the International Police, so when Nurse Joy allowed me to went out of the Pokemon Center, I took a flight and went to Alola, to spend some time with my uncle, Nanu, who is Ula Ula’s Kahuna” I said and then, I sighed “In Alola I was able for a long time to open my heart...Since I didn’t have more responsabilities with the Interpol, only my duties as World Champion, I felt...free. Completly free...So I met someone that put me on test everytime I saw him...He was and still is the leader of a group of young vandals...Yeah,l they did things wrong but...That group was their family. Society ignored them for stupid reasons...And Team Skull was the only thing they knew that for them was family...”

“Team Skull...I heard about them...They worked for Lusamine, right? News and rumors spread quickly, specially when the news are about a crazy woman that has brought a very dangerous and strange Pokemon to this world from another dimension...” N said

I chuckled sadly and nodded “You always know how to be updated with things...The case is that Lusamine manipulated Team Skull...I did everything to help those grunts to have a better life...Even I tried to help Guzma, their leader...And then, my heart started to have feelings for him...I felt at first stupid but at the same time, I couldn’t help but empathize with him...His own father treated him badly, hitting him since he was a child...and well, when you open your heart to someone, is difficult to step back once those feelings of love stay on your heart...”

“I can feel a wound in your heart, right?”

I looked at the sky, and N understood my silence as a yes. He knew when someone, Pokemon or person, was feeling hurt inside. He was one of those people who could tell you how you really felt jugding your emotions.  “One day, a Team Skull grunt tried to do the Fire trial that takes place in the Wela. He was doing right, but then, the Totem Salazzle appeared and attacked him. I was watching the trial and when I saw the Pokemon attacking him, I quickly ran and pulled him away” my hand went to touch the scars of my face before returning to Glaceon’s fur “That Salazzle wounded me on the face and threw me inside the volcano, but thanks to Charizard, who was quickly when she went out of her Pokeball, I didn’t end in the lava...After days being unconscious, I woke up and I saw Guzma...I wanted to tell him about my feelings, but instead of that, he yelled at me, saying so many bad things to me that my heart and feelings got broken...During the following days and after moving from the Pokemon Center to my uncle’s home, I got worst, and my Pokemon noticed it quickly” I said looking at Glaceon who meowed and licked my arm before putting her head on my lap. “If I didn’t eat, they didn’t eat or they tried to make me eat. When I spent most nights crying and awake, they were there for me, staying awake for me...Even my uncle’s ace Pokemon, Persian, left his side those nights in order to stay with me, and he understood it. My uncle knew when I needed to be alone and when I needed to be with someone in order to let out all that pain that was hurting me...”

“You have a very strong bond with all of your Pokemon, specially with your Glaceon” N said as he stroked the feathers of a wild Rockidee that was at his side “I remember when you showed me how you could understand them, and how you could show your feelings to them and how you could see their feelings too...I used to live inside a bubble of lies, until you showed me that the perfect world that I wanted couldn’t exist...There will still being bad people that hurts Pokemon and use them againts people and Pokemon...”

“But there are good people that has strong bonds with their Pokemon and makes all they can to protect both Pokemon and people” I added and N chuckled, making me look at him “What?”

“Despite of all those scars, of all your adventures...You’re still the Raikichi I met back there in Unova...Only with the difference that now that you opened your heart, is easier for me to understand you...I can feel the wound that hurts your heart...But something tells me that is healing, right?”

“Yeah...Slowly...The wound is still there but is healing...” I said touching the engagement ring that I have on my necklace.

“I’m glad that you managed to find someone that really loves you” N said “I still remember when you told me that you would try to be alone without allowing anyone to see your true feelings”

“People changes, remember?” I said and then, I stood up and streched a bit “Is Zekrom away, right?”

“Yes, why?” N said standing up as well “Wait, how did you know that...”

“There was a huge thunderstorm that affected Galar last night and I want to be sure that it was caused by the bad weather of this time of the year”

"And it was” N said, defending tone on his voice “Zekrom came with me, of course, but I didn’t arrive here flying with it. Zekrom followed me. I took a flight from Unova and arrived here at Galar and Zekrom just followed me from the distance”

“So Zekrom doesn’t have anything with the thunderstorm?”

“No...Well, maybe the thunderstorm got a bit rough when Zekrom flew through the clouds but I swear that Zekrom didn’t cause it”

“It’s okay. Just make sure that Zekrom is away from Galar. As long as you stay with me and my friends, you will be safe, so Zekrom doesn’t need to stay near...You met those furtives. There are from a big group of furtives and you are lucky cause those ones were from a low rank. I dealt with the elite ranks of those furtives, so it will be good if you tell Zekrom not to be near of Galar in order to avoid him being detected by anyone until you really need its help”

“True...If there are more furtives that are even more dangerous than those ones...” N murmured to himself and then, he said goodbye to the wild Pokemon that were with us before looking at me and at the Luxury Ball I had on my hand “What are you planning?”

I smiled and let out Corviknight from her Pokeball and knowing how was N, she allowed him to stroke her feathers. “I rescued this Corviknight from a terrible fire caused by some furtives from the same group like the ones we confronted before” I said stroking her feathers as well “They set up fires in a lot of places here in the Wild Area, and this Corviknight was trapped by a ring on fire trying to protect her clutch, but saldy, her offspring died due the smoke” that made N flinch when he heard that “Piers and me took her to Spikemuth’s Pokemon Center and her physical wounds healed...But she was so devastated by her lost that she was letting herself to die...Only giving her a Pokemon egg was the only way to avoid that”

“And that was successful, wasn’t it?”

“Yes...She took care of the baby Murkrow that hatched from the egg as her own offspring and now, that Murkrow is a strong Honchkrow and Piers is his trainer now”

“I see...” N said, closing his eyes as he stroked Corviknight’s feathers “I can feel that you really feel proud of your succes with Murkrow...”

Corviknight nodded and then, the sky darkened again with dark clouds, and the first rain drops started to fall, so I quickly jumped onto Corviknight’s back, followed by Glaceon and offered my hand to N. “C’mon, I’m not going to leave you under the rain on the Wild Area, and the nearest building is very far from here”

N nodded and took my hand and jumped on Corviknight’s back, behind me. “Are you sure that this is something secure?” he asked

“C’mon, you mounted on Zekrom and that was even more dangerous. Now hold tight! Corviknight, let’s go back to Spikemuth!”

Corviknight move her powerful wings and in few seconds we were now in the air. I told her to fly fast cause the rain started to fall more and more and I could see the first bolts in the clouds. “Are you sure Zekrom isn’t near?” I asked N, nearing shouting

“Yeah, Zekrom is away right now!” he said “We should be fast and reach Spikemuth before the storm gets even worst!”

“Then, hold on tight!”

We flew as fast as Corviknight could, avoiding some thunders that fell from the clouds and in less than an hour we arrived at Spikemuth’s surroundings. We quickly got down from Corviknight and once I let her return to her Pokeball, we quickly entered the town. In the center of the town, the crowd of people blocked our way, but when they saw me, they let us pass. “Piers!” I said, calling my fiancée atention who was talking with the person I didn’t want to see in that moment. “What is he doing here?” I asked my lover as my eyes went to Chairman Rose.

“Macro Cosmos Construction is one of his companies and I was trying to convince them to repair the damage but...” Piers started

“But their boss is too busy to attend this petition, right, Rose?” I said growling at the Chairman “I’m tired of this bullshit. You will do what I’m going to say right now”

“You can’t order me nothing” Rose said with disdain “I’m Chairman Rose, the Chairman of Galar Pokemon League and...”

“And I’m the World Champion, I’m in a higher position than you and if you want to see my second match defending my world title, I hope you put your workers working right now” I said, growling “How would people will react if they know that I cancel that match cause the Chairman of the Galar Pokemon League is in fact a selfish and vain man? Not good for you, I think, right?”

Everyone there stayed silent; even Rose was without words. Glaceon was growing at him, her fur was bristly and even her claws were out, and that only happpened when she was really REALLY angry. Then, I took a deep breath and sighed. Oleana was near of saying something to insult me but Glaceon’s growls were enough to make that bitch back off. I smirked and then, I looked at Rose, returning to my serious expression again. “So? Are you going to make your workers being here as soon as posible? I want them to start working today”

“Alright, you win” Rose said after being silente for two minutes “Macro Cosmos Construction accepts your payment and will start to work on it and...”

“And I will make sure that the work will be good supervised” I said smirking as I send some messages quickly through my Rotom Phone “Now, if you don’t need anything more, go away. I want to take a bath and see if the people and Pokemon here in Spikemuth and in its surroundings need my help”

“How you dare to speak to...” Oleana started to said but Glaceon hissed at her

“Shut your fucking and filithy mouth and go away, bitch” I said, angry “I don’t need people like you here right now ruining more my day”

“You...”

“Oleana, enough” Rose said “We don’t want to turn this into something worst. Raikichi, I’ll make sure that my workers from Macro Cosmos Construction are here at evening”

“Good, cause you know what is at stake”

An ultimate glare from me and Glaceon made Rose nod and with the representatives from Macro Cosmos Construction and Oleana, they left Spikemuth. The crowd sighed in relief and I got a bit relaxed, getting even more relaxed when Piers hugged me. “Sorry for scaring you, babe” I said smiling and kissing his cheek.

“Scared? I was impressed! You got Rose on your feet when you put him on his place” my fiancée said

“I know...”

“But?”

“But she’s worried” N added approaching us “I could feel the anger on that woman and the feeling of humilliation on that man...And Raikichi is worried cause maybe they would seek vengeance againts her”

“And they will, I’m sure of that” I said “Since I arrived to Galar, I have the feeling that something is weird with them, like if they are hidding something. And of course, it’s clear that Rose only worries about himself and his reputation. Did you see his face when I threated him with cancelling my second official match to defend my world title? His vanity and his ego are very very high, and the idea of seeing his ego being hurted scares him a lot”

“But if they try to get their revenge, I’ll stand by your side, my love” Piers said and then, he looked at N “By the way, who is this guy?”

“Piers, this is N. He’s a friend of mine. N, this is Piers, Gym Leader of Spikemuth and my fiancée”

Both Piers and N shook their hands and then, I looked up, seeing how some Psychic type Pokemon used Psychic to elevate a big piece of plastic lone in order to cover the hole on the ceiling in order to avoid the water fall inside the town, but it wasn’t going to resist a lot. I was worried about the Pokemon getting tired, but then, some workers from Macro Cosmos Construction that decided to stay there at night helped the Pokemon to put something stronger with the plastic lone in order to have something covering the hole until tomorrow. 

Then, I moved a bit my arms and I groaned a bit when I felt a bit of pain. I didn’t notice it due the adrenaline but I had some purple spots where that furtive hurted me before I knocked him out. I tried to hide it but Piers was faster and when he saw me looking to those purple spots, he ran towards me in order to examinate them. “Babe, you are wounded” he said, worried as he asked one of Team Yell grunts to bring a first aid kit.

“Piers, I only got some purple spots, I’m fine” I said “That furtive gave some trouble before I could knock him out”

“Furtives? In the Wild Area? Again?” he asked and when I nodded, he sighed “You know you still need to rest, babe...”

“Please, Piers. I’m fine. The attack that we suffered was like near two weeks ago and you’ve seen that I recovered in a week”

“But you still need to rest and...”

“And what? Leaving my duties as World Champion? I can’t stay with my arms crossed!”

“You were near of dying!”

“I have been near of dying multiple times and I’m still here!” I said, a bit angry, but then, after seeing Piers’ face, I knew that I didn’t choose the correct words and of course, I was still nervous with Rose’s visit “I...” Fuck it, fuck it. I closed my hands into fists so hard that my knuckles turned white as I though on the worst things and fears. Piers didn’t have the fault of worrying a lot for me, but for some reasons, sometimes I felt overwhelmed with his extreme worries that made me not able to see that now I wasn’t alone, but I was still having those thoughts due the long time I spent working for the Interpol and having to be and deal alone with everything. “I...I have to...”

“No, wait” Piers said, grabbing my arm and hugging me tightly “Don’t go, please...You know that since that day, I can’t avoid being worried a lot about you and...”

“But I shouldn’t have yelled at you like that” I said interrupting him

“And I should have known that you’re still feel a bit overwhelmed with all my worries” he replied smiling softly

“Piers...I’m...I’m sorry...” I said, hidding my face on his chest as he kept hugging me “I’m still acommodating to the fact that I don’t have to deal with things alone...”

“I know, that’s why I’m also sorry for making you feel overwhelmed” he said and then, he kissed my temple before he let me go from his arms when we heard N chuckling.

“I knew that both of you will overcome this argument” N said “Even the lovers with the strongest and deepest bond between them have arguments”

“You’re right...” I said and then, my Rotom Phone showed me a message from Rose asking me not to cancel the match, something that made me laugh “It’s clear that he is more worried about his reputation” I added as me, Piers and N went to Piers’ house while the Police officers that we had called kept the place in order to avoid any people or Pokemon to get hurt by the rubbles that could fall from the ceiling.

Once inside Piers’ house, I went to our shared room and after taking some clean clothes, I went to the bathroom to take a quick shower as Piers and N talked in the living room. After the quick shower, I got dried and dressed and I exited the bathroom and after putting the clothes into the washing machine, I went to the living room.

“I need you to remove your shirt if I want to treat your wounds” Piers said and I blushed a bit, cause , well, we were not alone

“Don’t worry for me, I was the one who had to remove your turtleneck sweater when you got terrible wounded by Team Plasma in order to allow Nurse Joy to attend your wounds and to help you to deal with the poisoning” N said, blushing a bit when he said that

“Wait, you did what?” I asked blinking twice “I don’t remember that”

“You fainted before that on my arms when I was trying to convince you to stop fighting” N replied “And as I helped Nurse Joy, I could hear Looker talking with someone and jugding by Looker’s tone, his interlocutor was very angry”

“Oh, then he was talking with my uncle Nanu” I said with a chuckle before removing my shirt but leaving my bra on. Then, Piers started to apply a special ointment for those purple spots and another one to treat the little cuts and scratches “I’m really sorry of what happened some minutes ago...During the time I was with the International Police, I had to learn how to treat my wounds and things like those by my own, and it’s true that it has passed years since I decided to stop working with them but...Some manners I’ve got are still there...That’s why sometimes I don’t think that I bruish or a scratch isn’t something serious...”

“But now you’re not alone, my love” Piers said and after treating my wounds, I put my shirt on me again and then, I looked at N. “The bathroom is free if you want to have a warm bath”

“Don’t worry, I don’t need it, really” N said

“At least take let me to lend you some clothes while yours get dried” my fiancée said giving N some of the biggest clothes he had cause N was taller than him “Sorry if these clothes are a bit small for you”

“They’re perfect, since I’ll wear them as mine get dried” N replied with a smile “Where is the bathroom?”

I pointed at the bathroom and after nodding, N went there and closed the door once he entered in the bathroom. Then, I helped Piers to prepare some food for lunch while we talk about somethings from my past, including how I met N.

“So, you first stopped him and then, you helped him? That’s a curious plot twist” Piers commented as we finished preparing the lunch

“N has suffered a lot when Ghetsis manipulated him...Believe me when I say that is was hard to see N seeing that all his life had been a lie...”

“I can’t imagine living like that...With someone telling those lies to you from a young age...”

“That’s why I had to take my time to trust again in people”

Both me and Piers turned and saw that N was there. He had finished in the bathroom and now he was on the kitchen, wearing the clothes Piers gave to him. “Sorry, I didn’t...” Piers started to say

“You didn’t say anything wrong; in fact, your words were full of honesty and empathy” N said as I put his clothes near the radiator in order to get them dry “Also, thanks to people like Raikichi, I knew that there are also good people in the world”

“That’s why Zekrom feels interested on you, N” I said as we served the lunch in the plates “You want to follow your ideals, and Zekrom is the representation of the ideals, being Reshiram the representation of truth”

“You always said that sometimes, neither the turth or the ideals are correct, that we must seek balance” N added

I nodded as I remembered that, one of my multiple talks with N during the time I passed with him when I had to scort him to the safety of the International Police. I couldn’t help but smile when I remember how part of Team Plasma decided to follow N in a helping way to both Pokemon and people, unlike the ones that decided to follow Ghetsis’ destructive plans. I remembered Anthea and Concordia’s faces when they saw us arriving to the meeting place, and also, I remembered how excited was the sage Rood when he saw N safe and alive. “N, did Anthea and Concordia came with you here to Galar?” I asked

“I tried to convince them to come but they decided to stay in a safehouse from the Interpol there in Unova. Also, they wanted to watch over Rood since his health has turn a bit bad.” N said “Speaking of which, you’ve told me about your grandmother, and since she shares the same gift as you I...”

When he mentioned my grandmother, my stomach closed and I couldn’t eat anything more. When I looked away, N understood what happened and looked away too. “Sorry, I didn’t know it...”

“No, it’s okay...Is just...Don’t worry, okay? If you excuse me, I’ll go outside to see if Rose has send his workers”

“I’ll go with you if...” Piers started to say by I shook my head “Raikichi...”

“Don’t worry, ‘kay?” I said and after putting a jacket on me, I called Glaceon and we exited the house.

--------------------PIERS’ POV--------------------

I sighed and I looked at N, who looked even guilty after seeing Raikichi exiting the house. Part of me was a bit angry with him for not being more careful but, in fact, he didn’t know about Raikichi’s grandmother, and I understood her reasons to not tell anyone more than her relatives about her grandmother, despite of N being a friend, but I understood why. N, like me, worried a lot about her, and knowing that the last time they had seen each other had been years ago could make things a bit complicated. Raikichi told me once that he didn’t want to keep a lot in touch with N once she left Unova cause she wanted to protect him, knowing that some people in the International Police would still see N as a criminal despite of the proofs that showed that he had been manipulated, so I couldn’t blame her afterall. That’s the Raikichi I knew, the woman I was going to marry with, someone that worries about Pokemon and people. 

“Sorry, it’s all my fault” N finally said “I didn’t know that her grandmother died and I said those words with that emotion thinking that I could meet her that I didn’t think...”

“Don’t blame yoruself, N” I said retiring the plates “Raikichi was and still is very reserved with her grandmother’s death. And not all of our friends know about it, despite of that happening some time ago. The ones that know about her grandmother’s death are me, my sister, Raikichi’s family-her parents and uncles-, Lance, and three Gym Leaders from Galar that are our closest friends”

“But I’m also a friend of hers, why...Oh”

“She told me once that the reasons she had to cut all communication with you was to protect you, not only from the Team Plasma members that could have escaped from justice but also from some members of the Interpol that still think that you are...”

“A criminal”

“But you weren’t. The only criminal was Ghetsis, not you”

“It’s easy to say, but I still hide from curious people...”

“In that we are similar” I said as I offered him a jacket once we washed the dishes cause we were going outside “I grew up here, with very few resources, and when I was a kid and my sister was a baby, my parents were gone. I raised Marnie alone and then, after participating in the Gym Challenge, I made my way to became the Gym Leader of Spikemuth and also, I became a singer, so I could bring money to the town and to my family. My past made me being away from others, trying to avoid being with others”

“But then, Raikichi arrived and changed your point of viewing things, right?” he asked

“She did” I replied with a chuckle “And that also helped her to see that now, she can have a quiet life without worrying about the Interpol and...”

But then, we heard some yells that interrupted our talk, and with confusion, we went to see what was going on. In the middle of the crowd there was a pair of little kids-probably they were four years old- and over them, stopped at time with Pyschic, were some fragments from the damage ceiling.

“Umbreon, Raichu, Delphox, Meowstic, Rapidash, keep using Psychic!” I heard Raikichi said as she helped the kids getting out of the danger. N and me quickly ran to help her but Zoroark and Luxray stopped us. Then, my gaze and Raikichi’s met and when she nodded, her Pokemon allowed us to help her. We took the kids out of the dangerous place as Raikichi guided her Pokemon to put the ceiling fragments in one of the work containers that Macro Cosmos Construction brought just after Rose left the town.

After that, Raikichi called all her Pokemon to their Pokeballs except Glaceon and went to check on the kids. “You’re not hurt, right?” she asked and the kids shook their heads “Good. I’m sure your mother is very worried right now. Next time ask for help before running away, okay?” she said as Glaceon gave them the Impidimp she was picking on her mouth. “You have to be more careful whith your little friend. Now, go with your parents”

Both kids nodded and ran to reunite with their parents together with their Impidimp. I approached my fiancée and I made sure she wasn’t hurted. “Don’t worry, I’m fine” she said

“What happened?” N asked

“Their Impidimp ran away after doing getting scared by the thunders and the kids ran after him, with the bad luck that a thunderbolt hitted the ceiling again, making those fragments to fall. Luckily, I was able to act at time and nobody got hurted”

“That’s good” I said with a sigh of relief “Dammit, I hope Rose acts quickly and send those workers as soon as possible”

Raikichi nodded, but then, she looked to N, who exited the town using the second entrance that the town had. “I’ll follow him. Can you deal with things here well?” she asked

“Don’t worry, babe. Go, and be careful, ‘kay?”

She nodded and left the place, followed by Glaceon.

------------------RAIKICHI’S POV-----------------------------

“N!! Wait!!” I said calling him as Glaceon and me ran after him 

We kept running until we were able to reach him when he stopped when he arrived at the Wild Area. Both me and Glaceon panted a bit due the long running but once we recovered our breath, we approached him. “N, you shouldn’t tun away like that

“But I know how to make this storm to stop”

“C’mon, is a weather thing” I said “This type of storms are normal...Wait, are you planning...?”

“I will ask Zekrom to take all the electricity from those dark clouds in ordert to get those clouds ride off that amount of electricity, that would make things easier and maybe, the thunderstorm will be less hard and...”

“N, listen, that won’t do anything. What if Zekrom can’t hold all that electricity? That would be worst”

“But...”

“Is not your fault that the thunderstorm got worst. It was an accident since Zekrom didn’t do it without intention” I said before sighing “The weather will get better during these days, so don’t worry. If you want to blame someone, blame Rose for not helping the people of Spikemuth. Maybe you don’t know, but all the towns and cities in Galar have Power Spots, even in the Wild Area, but not Spikemuth. Spikemuth can have its own Power Spot with the proper work, but Rose only wants to destroy the town and rebuilt it near a Power Spot cause according to him, is the only way, but it isn’t. That’s why Piers is always arguing with Rose, cause as Gym Leader he is, he isn’t going to allow Rose to destroy the houses of the people that are under his care”

“I know but...” N started to say but he stopped when I put my hand on his arm

“N, please...During all these years since the last time we’ve seen, you’ve carrying with the guilt of your acts...And now I see that you’re still carrying it despite all you did to help us againts Ghetsis”

“Cause my fault, you got wounded multiple times” N said “When you helped me to arrive safe to the safehouse provided by the Interpol...During all that journey you get wounded a lot of times...And then, when we battled againts Team Plasma...”

N put his knees on the ground, tears of anger and sadness on his eyes as he clentched his fists so tight that his knuckles turned white. “And then, I hurted you again when I said that about meeting your grandmother without...”

“Hey, hey, stop there” I said, kneeling in front of him and putting my hands on his shoulders “You didn’t know that my grandmother was death, so it wasn’t your fault”

“But I should have been more careful!”

“By the love and the sake of Arceus, N, look at me” I said, and he looked at me “It wasn’t your fault. Not everyone knows about my grandmother’s death...And please, stop blaming yourself about the wounds I’ve got during the time I was scorting you or when we fought againts Team Plasma. Those weren’t the first wounds I’ve got...”

“But the first that put you on the edge of death...And it was...”

“Stop it. Don’t say it again. You’re not guilty for Ghetsis’ acts...You’re not his puppet anymore, you’re yourself, so please, stop blaming at yourself...You’ve been carrying with that guilt for years and it’s time to get ride off it”

“I will try...But you should try too as well”

“Uh?”

“You’re trying to hide it, but in the deepest of you, there is a feeling of guilty, right?”

And damn again, he was right. When I battled againts those evil teams, something inside me made me always feel guilty of not being the enough fast to stop them or the enough quick to convince them to change their minds; the last time I’d tried it it was near of taking my life in Kalos. “You’re right...We have our own inner demons that we have to fight...”

“Then we won’t give up until we defeat them” N said as we stood up. 

I nodded and then, we went back to Spikemuth, just in time cause workers from Macro Cosmos Construction arrived and they started to work as soon as they arrived. “Finally you’ve arrived” I said “We have another problem apart of the hole in the ceiling. We need to make that part more estable and I hope that you will do a very good work”

“Yes, ma’am!” they said and then, they started to work

With a sigh, we decided to join Piers who was speaking with Nurse Joy. When he saw me, my fiancée ran to hug me and peppered my face with kisses, making me chuckle and blush before telling us that the Pokemon affected by the storm that lived near Spikemuth were recovering pretty well, but something was making Piers feel worried. “Babe?” 

“Uh? Oh, don’t worry, I’m okay”

“Maybe some training will help you to distract a bit” I said and then, I looked at N “I know that since you stopped being Ghetsis’ puppet you also stopped being a Pokemon trainer, but what do you think about watching us training?”

“That would be nice” N said and together, we went to the Dark Type Gym.

There, Piers and me trained with the Gym trainers, working on the most important points thay needed to work if they want to have a chance against Fairy and Fight type Pokemon and moves. I didn’t need to look at N to know that he was amazed at the bond that Piers, me and the Gym trainers shared with all of our Pokemon, and jugding for how he started to cheer us, I knew he was enjoying watching that bond.

Night arrived and we decided to stop training. We went to see how the workers were doing and I got amazed of how quick they were going, and also, I got surprised that they were doing their work with the best quality. After that, we went to Piers’ house and we convinced N to stay at least that night with us. We prepared some dinner for us and for our Pokemon and after that, Piers gave some blankets to N and he helped him to prepare the couch since N was going to sleep there. Piers was the first on going to sleep; he was really tired. N tried to stay awake a bit more cause he found himself curious about my research aboyt Galarian history, but he ended falling asleep and then, after saving my progress with the report, I closed my laptop and I went to Piers’ room to sleep.

-----------------------

I woke up after feeling a cold breeze entering from the window, and when I realized what was it-it was midnight- I yawned and tried to go back to sleep, until I saw that the window was opened and I didn’t remember opening the window before going to sleep. Confused but curious at the same time, I put my glasses on and using the light from my Rotom Phone I discovered some scratches on the window that told me that a Pokemon opened it from the inside, and then, I found some black and white fur and I gasped.

“Babe?” Piers asked half asleep as he yawned “Do you know what time is it?”

“Sango is gone”

“Wait, what?”

“Sango is gone” I repeated as I put my hoodie over my sleeping clothes before putting my shoes on “It looks that she opened the window and made her way outside”

“Dammit” Piers said putting a jacked over his sleeping clothes and putting his shoes on “Tell me, was she behaving strange these last days?”

“Yeah, these days was...Don’t tell me that Galarian Linoone also goes to places far away when they feel that they are ready to evolve”

“Yes, specially at night. Galarian Linoone only evolves into Obstagoon during night”

“Then, we should be quick” I said exiting the room “I’m afraid to encounter again more furtives if Sango has gone to the Wild Area

“What’s going on?” N asked, aywning again

“Raikichi’s Galarian Linoone is gone and we think she has done that cause she is ready to go” Piers said as we exited the house, followed by N 

“Then let me help you to find her”

“N, listen, I really appreciate your help but I don’t know if Sango is in the Wild Area,l and if she is there, I’m sure there are going to be furtives cause I always find them there and since you don’t have any Pokemon...”

“Maybe I’m not a Trainer anymore, but I can fight” N said “You’ve taught me some moves, remember?”

“And what if we encounter with one of their elite groups? How are you going to fight with people that can calculate all your moves? N, I know what is fighting againts an elite group of furtives and believe me that it isn’t easy, believe me”

“But I can help you!”

“How do you want to help us againts an elite group of furtives when I was near of dying fighting them two weeks ago?” I said, a bit angry but also worried, and when I saw that my words shocked N, I sighed “Please, N, I don’t want you to get hurt”

“Then let me help you” he insisted “If we encounter furtives, I can...”

“Distract them alone? What part of ‘I don’t want to put your life in danger’ you don’t understand?”

“And why you don’t want to understand that I really want to help you to find your lost Pokemon?”

“N, for Arceus’ sake...”

“Is my way of paying the debt I owe you for saving my life back in Unova”

I looked at Piers and my fiancée looked at me before nodding. I sighed and then, I shook my head. “Alright, alright, you win, but if we see that the danger is very big, you will promise us to go to a safe place”

“I promise” N said

I nodded and then, we followed the track left by Sango. Glaceon and Lycanroc were really good following tracks, specially Glaceon, since it was a part of the training we recieved during the training with the International Police. As I feared, the track guided us to the Wild Area. We arrived at Hammerlock Hills, and there, Glaceon and Lycanroc tried to keep following the track. Luckily for us, the night sky was cleared and the moon was showing its bright side. “Honchkrow, it’s your turn to help us!” Piers said calling his Pokemon out of his Pokeball “Help su to find Sango from the air”

Honchkrow chirped and took flight to help us find Sango from the air while me, Piers and N followed Glaceon and Lycanroc, who catched Sango’s track again. And there she was, fighting againts a Pangoro, and judging for the moves her opponent was performing, it was clear that it was from a trainer. “Sango!!” I said, running to approach her with Glaceon and Lycanroc before noticing that Sango was protecting a group of Galarian Zigdagoon from that trainer. “Leave these Pokemon alone!”

“Oh, c’mon, from all the people in the world, and it has to be the World Champion who ruins my day”

“So you’re a furtive” I growled and then, I told Lycanroc to go at N’s side to protect him while Piers called his Obstagoon out when they saw that there were more furtives. “Glaceon, let’s make...” I started to say but Sango growled, her fur so bristly that she was telling me that she wanted to keep fighting. “Alright then. Sango, use Rain Dance!”

As Sango performed the moved, the furtives tried to seek refuge but were stopped by Piers and N. “Now, Sango, use Thunderbolt!!”

The move hitted the Pangoro and then, Sango started to bright. She was evolving and when the evolution finished, she roared now as an Obstagoon. “This isn’t over!” the furtive said “Pangoro, use Fire Punch!”

But Sango then used a move that I knew very well cause I’d seen Piers’ Obstagoon using it. She used Obstruct to stop the move and then, she grabbed Pangoro and when she looked at me, I nodded. “Sango, use Thunderbolt!!” and Sango’s move, powered by the Rain Dance, knocked out Pangoro. “You did it!!” I said hugging my recently evolved Obstagoon. Glaceon joined us to celebrate it, but then, something made us be in alert. I approached Piers and N to help them, but they managed to deal with the other furtives and when the furtives ran away, I called Lycanroc back to his Pokeball while Piers’ Obstagoon greeted Sango, licking her face.

“Sango finally evolved” Piers said hugging me after making sure that I wasn’t wounded “And you aren’t wounded...That’s good...Also, N worked very well with your Lycanroc”

“Lycanroc knew what he has to do, so it was easy to work with him” N said “We should follow them”

“No, let the Police from Hammerlock take care of them” I replied “I send a mesagge to Raihan, so now we can go back to Spikemuth” 

I yawned and called back Sango back to her Pokeball and then, we took a Flying Taxi and returned to Spikemuth. We quickly entered on Piers’ house and after making sure that our Pokemon were alright, we went back to sleep.

-----------------------------------

Days passed and the thunderstorm and the bad weather started to calm down until it stopped raining. The workers that Rose sent to repair the broken ceiling in Spikemuth were near of finishing their work, and it was time to see if they were doing a good work.

“M-Ma’am” one of them said when he saw me “W-We didn’t expect you at this hour”

“I wanted to see by my own your work” I replied and then, I smiled “Don’t be nervous, I don’t bite”

“W-We know but since...”

“Oh, I see” I said and then, I sighed “Listen, I’m not Rose, okay? I’m really impressed that you have made a big progress with the repairing in these few days but I don’t want that the pressure that Rose is putting on you makes your work being of bad quality, so since today, I want you to work relaxed, ‘kay? Now, let’s see the progress”

The workers sighed in relief and showed me how they did their work until today that I decided to see how they were going. Despite of being under pressure, they were doing a really great work, and the quality of the materials was also good. “If everything goes this good, we’ll be finishing the repairing in few days”

“Perfect, just in time to recieve the Gym Challengers that will arrive to battle Piers” I said and then, I greeted Nurse Joy who came with warm food and drinks for the workers “Here, you deserve it. Now, if you excuse me, I have things to do”

After saying goodbye to the workers and to Nurse Joy, I went to check on Piers. He was at the Gym, talking with N as my fiancée groomed his Pokemon. “The repairing is progressing very well. In few days and if there aren’t any complications, the ceiling will be completly repaired” I said after greeting my fiancée with a kiss

“That’s good” Piers said letting out a big sigh “I was talking with N about how is the Pokemon League here in Galar”

“I find it quite interesting, if I’m honest” N said and then, my Rotom Phone sounded “What’s it?”

“Oh, the confirmation of my opponent for my second official match” I said smirking as I replied the message

“What Champion did accept your challenge this time, babe?” Piers asked

“Hoenn Champion, Steven Stone” I replied as we went for a walk “He specializes in Steel type Pokemon and his ace Pokemon is a Metragoss that can Mega evolve”

“Metagross is Stell type, but also, is Psychic type” N said “What Pokemon are you going to use?”

“Ahhh, it’s a surprise~~” I said and Piers chuckled “The match will be after you battle the challengers for your Gym Badge, so I have plenty of time. Now, let’s keep training!”

----------------------------

More days passed and the repairing of the ceiling that covered Spikemuth was completed. The workers did a very good work, and that made Piers feel more relaxed. Also, today was the day when he was starting recieving challengers, so that put him on his nerves, specially when he knew that I had to deal with some Teal Yell grunts that shuted the entrance to the town down cause they only wanted Marnie to win and I had to tell them not to do that.

“You have a good hand with them” N commented as we went to the VIP place of the Gym “Where’s Piers?”

“I know where he is, wait here” I said and N nodded

As I thought, Piers was still in his locker room, trying to relax, and when he heard me entering, he jumped a bit startled. “Sorry, I didn’t want to scare you” I said locking the door once I entered and going to hug him “Are you okay?”

“I...I don’t know” he said “I’m nervous, but I’ve never felt this nervous before...”

“It’s normal since Marnie will be here to challenge you...” I said and then, I smirked and put him againts the wall “We have a bit more time before you go there and start to battle the challengers, so let me help you to get relaxed”

“Raikichi, in what are you...” he tried to ask but a moan interrupted him when I started to stroke his bulge, noticing how quickly it got hard. As I kissed his neck, my hand kept stroking his hard bulge “B-babe, what if someone...”

“Don’t worry, I locked the door when I entered” I said and then, I kissed his lips “Now let me help ya~~”

I knelt down and after managing to pulling his pants and underwear down, I grabbed his hard cock and started to suck it, first the the tipi and then, the rest. Piers moaned as his hands pulled my hair softly as I kept sucking his lenght. “Oh, Raikichi, please, don’t stop...” he said between moans and of course, I kept sucking him until he came with a low groan “That...was...” he tried to say as he held to the wall for some balance while I stood up and after swallowing his cum and getting myself clean, I helped him to get clean and once he recovered his breath, he put his underwear and pants on while I picked a pair of fresh water bottles, one for me and the other for him. “Thank you, babe” Piers said hugging me.

“Do you feel better?” I asked 

“Yeah...I feel relaxed and with all my batteries charged” he said before kissing me “Thank you, my love...”

“You don’t have to thank me, ya know” I replied and then, we looked at the time in our phones “It’s time. I’ll be in the VIP part of the Gym with N cheering you up”

“I will give everything in the battles. For you, my Queen”

“It’s time to rock’em all, my King”

-------------------------

Of all the battles Piers had that day, he only lost five, and of course, after battle in a single day againts eleven trainers, he got exhausted, but he had to keep up, cause the next days he had to battle with more trainers. From our place at the WIP terrace, N and me watched all his matches, and I couldn’t help but worry aboyt Piers’ health during the battles. Maybe on his Gym, Dynamax wasn’t used, but anyone was exempt of recieving damage. In one of those battles, one of the moves from the Pokemon of one of the trainers got out of control and Piers got a bit of damage, but sometimes, the danger could come for other places, like when I had to interjece between Piers and an angry trainer that didn’t want to accept his defeat and when he was going to order his Pokemon to attack Piers, I jumped and put myself between Piers and the challenger, telling the boy that he would be out of the Tournament due his acts. After that, I didn’t have another option that ask Team Yell grunts to keep an eye as well. N also offered to help, but I convinced him not to do it once I made sure that everything was under control.

That day, at night, Piers was acting quiet strange. I noticed it quickly when he went to his room as soon as we arrived to his house. He was still affected by the incident he had with that challenger, and it was very painful to see him like that. 

“I’ll be in the Pokemon Center” N said “If you need help...”

True. N decided to stay at night at the Pokemon Center after spending that night in Piers’ house cause he didn’t want to disturbe us. “Thanks, N...Sorry that you’ve seen that...”

N shook his head and put a hand on my shoulder. “Don’t worry. Now Piers needs you”

I nodded and when N left the house, I entered at Piers’ room, only to find him sitting on a corner, crying, with his head leant on his knees and his hands grabbing his hair very tight. I quickly rushed at his side and knelt down in front of him. “Piers, it’s me...” I said grabbing his wristles softly. At first, he resisted a bit, but when he recognized my voice, he allowed me to pull down his arms and then, I made him look at me. His makeup was ruined by his tears and after doubting a bit, he quickly hugged me, sobbing. “Hey...I’m here, my love...”

“That boy was right...” he started to say when he calmed down and he allowed me to help him to be on his feet in order to take him to the bed, sitting down on the soft bed “I’m...”

“Don’t say that your weak cause you’re not that. You’re the seventh Gym Leader in Galar Pokemon League and your strenght is a proof of that. The decision of putting myself between me and that challenger was only mine cause I wasn’t going to allow that behaviour in an official tournament. I wasn’t only doing my job as World Champion, but also I was avoiding you of getting hurt”

“But what if you...”

“You saw that when I said to him who I was and the consequences he would suffered due this acts were enough to made him back off”

“But Rose doesn’t give a fuck about me or about Spikemuth. He will allow that boy to be in the League despite of...”

“No when the World Champion has given order to kick that boy out of the League” I replied “Doing what he did is againts the Pokemon league principles, in this region and in the rest of regions, so if Rose wants to be free of problems, he will have to accept my words and putting that boy out of competition”

“Raikichi...”

“Listen, all these days you have been put under a big preassure, and I can’t help but worry about your health. Since tomorrow is the last day of battles, I ask you to take the night free of training. You need rest”

Piers stood in silence before nodding and hugging me. “Thanks, babe...” he said “I’m really lucky having you at my side”

“Now lay down on bed while I prepare you a warm bath” I said and he nodded, laying down on the bed as I went to prepare the bath. Then, I checked Piers’ Pokemon. They were exhausted for all those battles, like PIers. With a sigh, I told Glaceon to go to the Pokemon Center, and some minutes later, she returned with N following her. “Help me with these buddies” I said closing the main door.

“How’s Piers?” N said as we treated the injuries that the Pokemon got from the battles

“Exhausted...And tired of everything”

“I think I don’t understand...”

“Since he became Gym Leader of Spikemuth, he has been trying EVERYTHING to help his town, but he always got rejected by Rose when he asked him for help...So slowly, Spikemuth started to see its population decreasing, and Piers started to feel guilty about that...Of course, that affected him a lot. The other Gyms have security provided by Macro Cosmos, but as you could see today, Spikemuth doesn’t have it cause Rose doesn’t care about Spikemuth”

“That’s why you decided to interjece” N said and when I nodded, he sighed 

“Rose hids something, and it’s curious that always I get on a fight with the furtives, he and his filthy secretary appear...But let’s not talk about that right now. These buddies need us” I said, chuckling when Obstagoon licked my face.

Then, I heard Piers’ room door opening, so I stood up and went with him to the bathroom as N stayed with the Pokemon. I closed the bathroom’s door and while Piers got naked, I called my Leafeon out of his Pokeball. Once, my fiancée got naked, he looked at me and I nodded, getting naked as well, but this time, I sat behind him once we entered in the bathub, enjoying the warm water.

“Glaceon, use Heal Bell. Leafeon, use Aromatherapy, but low and long” I said and both Pokemon used both moves, helping Piers to relax “That’s it...” I added and then I started to wash his hair and body, giving him a massage and noticing how tense he was “Easy there, love”

“Mmmhhh...I like this...” he murmured, his eyes closed as I gave him the massage, but then, he opened them when he heard me singing. It was a song from his, and it tooked him by surprise cause he smiled and then, he joined me in the song “You really know my songs, don’t ya?”

“Cause I love them, like I love you” I replied and he giggled

We stayed in the bathtub the enough until I felt that Piers was feeling better. I told Glaceon and Leafeon to stop their moves as Piers and me went out of the water, and after we got dried and dressed with our sleeping clothes, we went to the kitchen, only to find N preparing some dinner. “I thought you wanted to eat something and cause you were with him, I decided to prepare some dinner”

“Thank you, N” Piers said, checking on his Pokemon “I see that you also took care of my buddies”

“Raikichi called me for some help, so I came here to help”

“Now I know why Raikichi considers you a good friend” my fiancée said and I chuckled as we had dinner 

After dinner, N decided to return to the Pokemon Center. He didn’t want to disturb us, and after thanking him for his help, he exited the house. Then, Piers and me went to our shared room, and it didn’t take us very long to sleep under the covers.

“Tomorrow is the day...” he said with a yawn “Tomorrow I’ll battle againts Marnie...”

“And againts more trainers, but remember, I’ll be there cheering you up”

“I know...Thanks for not letting me going even more down...”

“Piers, listen to me” I said, cupping his cheeks on my hands “I promised to be there for you, right? We both promised each other to be at the other’s side for everything...So don’t worry, ‘kay?”

He nodded and I kissed him, letting him to put his head on my chest, and slowly, he got even more relaxed before falling asleep, followed by me minutes after he fell asleep.

------------------------

The next day, Piers was with his batteries full charged and was ready to face the last challengers. From this last bunch of trainers, he only lost three times, so Marnie, Gloria and Hop won their Dark Badge, but not after having hard battles againts Piers; even Marnie’s Grimmsnarl, that apart of being Dark type was also Dairy type, had difficults to beat Piers’ Pokemon. And then, the battles were over. I greeted the three trainers and after having a talk with Piers, the three of them left to the Pokemon Center while Piers and me went for a walk on the outskirts of the city.

“It looks like taking all the night free helped you a lot” I said as we walked side by side, holding hands, under the starry sky 

“Yeah...And you helped me a lot too, Raikichi...This starry night reminds me the night when I asked you to marry me...” he replied as he made me turn in order to hug me “I can’t express how happy makes me the idea of marrying you...”

“I can say the same...Even if we have arguments...Our bond grows stronger...Like our love...And...”

“And?”

“And of course, when the day comes, we’ll be ready to bring a child to this world”

That made him smile as we returned to Spikemuth, walking under the starry sky while we talked about our plans for the future. Now, for a long time, I could say this. I felt loved, safe...I felt like home.

[suicidalcatz]

DOG DAYS ARE OVER : CHAP 4

AN: Hello ! In this chapter we go on an investigation! But also we get closer to God Jake. I’m writing the 7th part at the moment, and I think the 8th one will be the end of my dream, but not of this fanfic. Let the fluff begin !

Pairing: Jake Kiszka x reader

Genre: College AU

Previous parts: Prologue ; Chap 1 ; Chap 2 ; Chap 3

Masterlist : here

Chapter four : Need a hand ?

It became obvious to both Mandy and I that I was starting to have a crush on Jake. How could I not ? For a far as we knew him, he was perfect in every way.

At first it was discreet. My new hobby of staring at him during lectures was unnoticed by both of the Kiszkas, or if Josh noticed something, he at least thought it was me waiting for his next paper ball notes and getting impatient. Regarding my class daydreamings, they weren't new so classmates and teachers didn't think much of it. Although it became very apparent something was up when I started unintentionally drawing his face several times in the workshop during portraits studies. Even though my photo reference was Kurt Cobain. It could've been easily mistaken for a very bad observation job (and it did), if it weren't for Mandy who saw me coming home after a long day with a painted 50x70cm Jake canvas under my armpit. Judging by my defeated look, she didn't address it, but she knew.

It's a few days later that we had that talk. It was getting so bad that I began mistaking people in hallways for him, smiling or even giggling to myself as I was remembering stuff he did or said, and again, drawing him.

- I can't focus on anything, I sighed defeated. I have this assignment due to next week and I can't draw any character right. I even dreamed of us doing grocery shopping.

I let my head bump loudly against the dining table as she made me a cup of tea/coffee and placed it in front of me. She knew perfectly how I felt because we all went through the same, that's why she softly pulled the chair opposite mine to sit and have a chat.

- You should talk to him more, get to know him, she encouraged. He's nice and now we sometimes hang out so it's not that weird wanting to know him better.

She was right. Sooner or later I'll had to talk to him and even tell him how I feel anyway. Not now though, it was too soon. I kind of got struck by lightning when I first laid my eyes on him and it got worse when we spoke, but it still rarely happened for people to fall instantly like that. There was no way he'd understand if I just confessed my feelings out of the blue. I should wait and see if there's any chance that my feelings are shared, because there was no way in hell I'd tell him if I wasn't sure I had a chance to date him. Speaking of which...

- Should I ask him out on a date?

As an answer, Mandy smacked my head accross the table with an empty box of biscuits.

- Are you out of your mind ? I just told you to wait ! I know you're impatient to get into his pants but think about all the times you rushed things and how many times it worked.

Raising my head to rest my chin against the plastic flowery tablecloth, I considered it, looking at her munching on chocolate biscuits, browsing a fashion magazine for inspiration. Defeated once again, I let out a sigh and shifted so my cheek was against the table.

- First of all, I don't want to get into his pants- Not yet. Second of all, you're right. I don't want to screw up this time because it'll be so awkward afterwards.

She closed her eyes and quickly nodded because she knew she was of good advice, as usual.

- You forgot something essential boo. You don't know if mister doe-eyed guitarist is single.

Fuck, that's right. Neither of them mentionned it but it's not something you just blurt out. We exchanged a look, and she grinned at me in a knowing way.

- Let's investigate.

The first thing to do was to go on his Facebook. It did seem a bit wrong searching him like that instead of asking straightforwardly, and as if karma thought the same, we found that his infos were set on private. We didn't even bother searching for instagram or twitter as nobody puts their real full names on these, so the second thing to do was to go on the field.

Despite all the departments, the school was small so buildings were close to each other and all communicated (except for the fashion workshop). I kind of knew where everything was, since you could tell just by looking at the people hanging around. And as cliché as it sounded, it was true. Illustration students were always carrying ridiculous amounts of art supplies. Entire bags of paint, books and pencil case in their backpacks, giant portfolio under an arm, A3 sketchbooks in the other, and somehow they still found a way to carry their coffee cups. Architecture, Carpenters and Furniture Design students were often seen with big mock ups and models in their arms, tools or wood. Photo and Fashion peeps were carrying the less stuff since they worked mainly on computers in the Photography dep and let all their mannequins and fabric either at home or in the Fashion workshop. It was as easy to spot dudes from the Music dep, with their guitar on their back, hanging around the Architecture building, smoking, chatting, and drinking soda or coffee.

Their building was near the park, so they were mostly seen in that area. And thank God because I would've look so stupid passing by purely « by chance » in an area where no one ever went except for the people who actually studied there. The park was great. A lot of us used to play ball, sit on the grass to drink, chat or have lunch. It was big enough that the Architecture jocks built some cabins in a corner of it to host parties. I still don't understand how the school allowed that, but anyway, the plan was simple, make a little detour to see if I could spot Jake.

It was so cold outside that students were just hurriedly passing by, quickly making their way inside where it was somewhat warm. As a result, there wasn't many people in the park at this hour of the day and I wondered if Jake was in the dorms or in class before catching a glimpse of his hair in the corner of my eye. Okay time to be discreet. I put my bag down near the trash to fake looking for something while watching him. Fuck he looked good with a scarf and head covered with a beanie. Aside from his looks, he seemed rather bummed. Passers by kept shaking him off as he tried to hand them yellow papers. Probably flyers.

- Jake, I'm taking 5 !

Some guy just beside me doing the same task called him loud and clear, and I think I just saw my life flash before my eyes when Jake turned around to reply and locked eyes with me. I instantly felt very dumb, crouched next to the trash with my hands on my bag. The mental image I had of myself at that very moment was that of a raccoon. Running away was out of the question since he was approaching my way already, one hand holding the flyers and the other in his jacket pocket.

- Hey.

- Hi, I replied without moving an inch.

- Need a hand ?

Shaking out of it, I got on my feet by myself and lied about just passing by. Karma really was a bitch, wasn't it ? Henceforth no more weird MI6 strategies for me. Avoiding staring at the blushed tip of his nose, I gazed at my hands and saw his in the process.

- Are you giving out flyers ?

- Oh yeah, for the Christmas school festival, but no one is either interested or invested in it unfortunately. It's a shame, I think it's gonna be great. I don't know what's holding them, he added while scratching his beanie, it's free and there's gonna be music and food and booze, what more could we need ?

To be fair I understood both parties. Jake was right but some students probably had exams or homework, and it was freezing and they were doing it outside. Well if we were honest it never stopped anybody from partying so maybe the event wasn't the issue.

- I saw people displaying posters, I remembered, can I see the flyers ?

Without missing a beat he handed them all to me and dear lord I almost got blind just by looking at them. That yellow and black and these awful drawings weren't doing anything good for the event. He must've saw it on my grimacing face because he sighed.

- That bad ?

- Honestly ? It looks like a Bee Movie add.

It actually made him let out a chuckle before puting a hand to his heart.

- That hurts.

That flawless smile made my cheeks burn, thank god they were already red because of the cold. His thumb brushed mine when I handed the flyers back to him, and at this moment I knew I was gonna act without thinking again, because my brain went on vacation the second his skin got in contact with mine.

- I can make you new ones, if you want.

His eyes searched for any traces of a joke on my face before realization hit him and his brows frowned lightly.

- Are you sure ? 'm not an expert but this looks like a lot of work.

As backup to his words, he shook the big bundle of paper between his fingers. Jake genuinely looked worried about me, and all the work it'd put me through. Deep down I knew there was a little voice in my head screaming that helping him only meant more sleepless nights but all the other parts of my brains ignored it when two gentle brown eyes stared at me with concern.

- It'll be fine, I assured with a smile. I'm working fast. I just have to do one design and the rest will be printed, right ? No big deal.

Hand on his hip, Jake let out what sounded like a relieved breath and cracked a smile.

- Thanks, I really appreciate it. Do you have a pen ?

Of course I did, I even got one on my coat pocket for some reason. Things I just forget to remove. He gave me the flyers for me to hold while he uncapped the black marker and took my free arm.

- I'm giving you my number, so you can text me if you're having troubles for the design, and show me some pics if you need advice.

With cold fingers, he gently grabbed my wrist and pushed back the fabric to expose my already shivering skin, and started writing numbers on my veins. It tickled, and I got goosebumps, mostly because of the cold wind but also because of his hand around my arm. The soft touch of his calloused fingers felt right on my skin, replacing the freezing feeling of his digits by a sweet wave of heat and I unconsciously held my breath to focus on the new sensation. He let the ink dry a bit before covering my arm again, raising his chin to meet my face.

- I could've write it on one of the flyers but I got a feeling you would've lost it, wouldn't ya ?

A playful smile danced on his face and once again I found myself mesmerized by him, nodding and chewing on my lip in a childlike manner. Jake tapped me on the shoulder to thank me again, saying he'll make it up to me, but I was too absorbed by the burning feeling of his skin on mine.

- I have to go, he said after sliding the marker back inside my breast pocket. My band's playing at the christmas party by the way, I hope you'll come!

[altegos]

Aawweee that was sweet. Well reading that i just laughed and smiled, too sweet. I guess bing had a good birthday. (How'd google get that picture though? Was it on the internet)

“Nice of you to finally join us Ashley.”

As Bing trudges in to the meeting about a half hour late and plonks into his seat, he slumps across the table and buries his head, completely ignoring Dark’s sarcasm. All the others are staring at him but he doesn’t care. The rest of the meeting is spent in this position, not sitting up, not contributing and only groaning when King leans over and asks if something’s wrong.

It’s not a grey day or else Bing wouldn’t have turned up at all, but even when the meeting ends and Dark dismisses them, Bing doesn’t move. He stays, exactly where he is, and listens to everyone leaving around him.

“So are you going to tell me what’s wrong or are you going to be a whiny baby and just lay there?” King is still in his seat beside the cyborg, leaning forward and talking to the little pile of grump that is his best friend.

There’s a vague grumble in response and King frowns in confusion.

“What?”

Bing shifts slightly so his mouth isn’t covered. “I broke my photo.”

“Photo?”

Giving a sigh, Bing gets up, reaching for King’s hand, before pulling him, remarkably silent for Bing, through the corridors to his room and points to his bed. On top of the messy covers sits the photo frame that’s usually on the table beside Bing’s bed. The glass is broken.

“I didn’t see it fall on the floor and I stood on it.” Bing mutters quietly.

Sure enough, all the spiderly break lines lead to what looks like the pressure point where it was probably stood on and the photo underneath is barely visible through the glass any more.

Now that is the big issue, because, being the cyborg’s best friend, even not being able to see the picture, King knows what this picture is. It’s of Bing and his mom at this place that the cyborg swears does the best wings he’s ever had in his life. They’re both happy and smiling, her arms are wrapped his shoulders and he’s got his trademark goofy grin on his face. The server took it for them, and it’s the only connection Bing has to her any more.

After he first moved in to the building, shortly after the two of them became friends and just as he was starting to cement himself as a playful nuisance to the Googles, Bing had a really really bad day. Not so much grey as nearly black. All he’d known for years was this old workshop and now he was somewhere new and the homesickness was way higher than it had even been before, or ever has been since.

And when he finally emerged from his room, wrapped in a giant blanket, eyes sunken and hair looking like he’d been dragged through a hedge backwards, then forwards, then backwards again, Oliver had gifted this photo to Bing.

To this day, the droid refuses to explain how he obtained it just that it seemed that Bing looked like he needed it and ever since then, it’s sat in its simple frame, in pride of place, next to Bing’s bed.

And now it’s broken.

Thankfully there’s no glass on the floor, and the glass is still in place, just shattered. So King just leads Bing, picture in hand, to the kitchen where they wrap it very, very carefully in cling film. That at least will stop the glass falling all over his floor if it gets knocked, and keep any shards from getting loose and damaging the photo.

It’s just a temporary solution, until Bing can get a new frame. Except Bing can’t exactly work, technically being dead and all, and also illegal. And it’s not like they have allowances or anything. And it’s obvious from the gloomy look on Bing’s face and the way he carries the frame, so very delicately and like it might just shatter in his hands, that the cyborg is distraught that he’s ruined his picture forever.

Luckily King already has an idea, and once he’s able to get the Jims to distract Bing, he disappears to the Google’s computer lab.

Google is in there, as he usually is, doing some hardware maintenance, caught a little unawares by the sudden appearance of King.

“Are you still looking for a present for Bing’s birthday?” King asks.

“We have the shirt-”

King waves to dismiss this as he interrupts. “Yeah but are you still looking for a present for Bing’s birthday?”

Fast forward a few months, it’s Bing’s birthday and after he finally gets up and heads to the kitchen for his usual three or four bowls of cereal, King sneaks in and carefully picks up the picture frame and sneaks it out, rushing it to the Google’s lab.

It takes a while to carefully extract the photo from the broken frame, especially with the cling film that still holds it together but soon enough it’s in it’s new frame, and Google is wrapping it up, at King’s insistence.

Luckily, everyone has planned a busy day and Bing doesn’t even know that his picture’s been moved, and as he is about to head back to his room, grinning like a happy idiot and exhausted beyond belief, Google approaches him, haphazardly wrapped present in hand.

Given that the Googles gifted him a black shirt with an orange ‘G’ on it, Bing is a little confused but still thanks Google and pulls the paper off.

There’s a moment of silence as Bing stares and Google looks down at the frame in Bing’s hands. It’s nothing overly ornate or elaborate since the photo is more important than the frame so it wouldn’t do to have it overshadow the photo.

“King says your old frame became broken so I-”

Bing surges forward, wrapping his arms around Google, cutting him off. It’s not particularly comfortable but Bing just needs to hug his brother right now because despite being easily the simplest gift he’s been given, it’s also the greatest and if he wasn’t trying really hard not to burst into tears right now, he’d just be saying ‘thank you’ over and over again.

The picture takes up its usual spot on Bing’s bedside table and now it’s even more his most prized possession. And he sets his alarm about an hour earlier so he doesn’t wind up running late and knocking it over again.

[mysticsparklewings]

Arteza Expert Colored Pencils Review

Hu-boy, have I got a story for you guys! So I've been seeing Arteza's Expert colored pencils floating around in both ads and as freebies to Art Youtubers for a while now, and finally, it was too much and I threw up my hands and said to myself OKAY LET'S TRY THEM. (even though I very sincerely don't need any more colored pencils...) Previously, I've tried their Woodless Watercolor Pencils and liked them, and I've specifically heard good things about these pencils. So I went in with measured, but positive expectations. The full 72 set goes for about $30 either on Amazon or Arteza's own website, which is the same price point as the Schpirerr Farben colored pencils currently on Amazon. So they aren't the super-duper cheapest, but the price is pretty fair compared to companies like Derwent, Faber Castell, or Caran D'ache. So, some tea first, and then I'll talk about how the pencils handle (tea in small text in case you don't care): My set came in the mail and I immediately opened them and went to swatching, as I do. It was when I was writing out the color names (I write the names out first, then go back and put the color down) that I noticed I had two "Charcoal A120" pencils, and likewise discovered I was missing "Peacock Blue A008." And suddenly I was filled with dread; oh no something's wrong I'm going to have to contact customer service ohnononoohno.   So I contacted their customer service through the Guarantee address (returns@arteza.com) on the back of the tin, hoping to get the issue resolved as quickly as possible and wanting/expecting nothing more than the one pencil I didn't have. About two hours later, they got back to me and through a bit of back-and-forth, I provided pictures (which I expected them to ask for), then a screenshot of the Amazon Order Details and my shipping address (also expected). It was just after 4:00, last I heard from them on a Friday, so I figured either that was that and I should be on the lookout in the mail, or they had closed up shop for the weekend and I'd heard from them again on Monday. I woke up Saturday morning with an order confirmation email that confused me, and another reply informing me they couldn't just send the one pencil, so they'd be sending me a whole new set, and I didn't have to return the original set; I was welcome to keep or donate it. This made the confirmation email make sense, as it was for the shipment of the new set. This naturally was a nice surprise. (And I must also add the reply email had a timestamp of 4 in the morning so I have to applaud the magical soul that was coherently responding to customer service emails at such an hour as I would be loathed to do the same.) With that issue at least temporarily dealt with (as I wanted to wait and see the new set before "officially" closing my mental books on it), I moved on to producing the test image you see above and otherwise evaluating the pencil. However, I decided to wait and not fill out a Colored Pencil Testing Workshop for these until after the new set arrived, just in case. And I'm glad I did. The replacement set came in on Wednesday, and I was practically bursting at the seams to get it open and see what was what. All 72 different colors were present and accounted for. However, the "Emerald A094" pencil's tip was broken/missing. I did sharpen it back up, and it appears completely fine. Probably what happened is it was broken during sharpening or something at the factory. Not a big deal, but noteworthy when combined with my previous experience and considering that there are other signs of minor quality control issues. For example, the company/color names and information printed on the pencils are not aligned consistently, and if you go on Amazon and start looking at the negative reviews you'll find a lot more than just these relatively small things. My point in including all this: As I'll talk about in a second, the pencils themselves work just fine and I don't think Artexa is maliciously producing defective sets of colored pencils and just trying to make a quick buck. Quite the contrary. I think they are dedicated to making the best products they can while still keeping them affordable compared to their competition. It's just that they have some issues here and there like every company in existence does, and part of that, in my theory, is likely because they have less in the budget for certain quality control measures when compared to the more expensive brands. This isn't a dealbreaker by any means, but I do think it's important to keep in mind. So all of that out of the way, how do these pencils actually work in the field? They're not as soft as Prismacolor, but I went in expecting that from what I'd already heard. They're not as hard/rigid as the Faber Castell Polychromos, so they land somewhere in the middle. They layer pretty well; they don't seem to build up wax quite as quickly as Prismacolor, but they aren't nearly limitless with layers like the Polychromos. Blending was better than I expected and overall pretty good. The white surprised me a little. The Prismacolor white is still the best I've used, but this one did better than I expected. It also worked well with blending other colors. Speaking of; Color selection is interesting. In the plastic trays, they seem to be arranged from in color order...but in three separate "sets," rather than in typical "all the yellows are together, and the pinks are together," etc. color order. This bothers me a little since I'm used to the other way, but that's just me. The colors themselves though seem to sit somewhere between typical color choices and also trying to be different, which is. (Also a lot of them have really fun color names, which I really appreciate personally.) (And while we're here, I will say the tin and trays are nice/pretty standard, but the trays are pretty snug in there so I have a little trouble moving things around, but it's not so much of a deal-breaker that I feel I need a separate case for them.) They seem to generate a lot of dust/crumbs, but the weird thing was that when I went to wipe it away, it didn't smear specks of color on the paper. Good, but odd. Honestly, they measure up about the same as the Schpirerr Farben pencils in terms of falling somewhere between Prismacolor and Polychromos in terms of performance, and that makes a lot of sense considering both sets are at the same price point. (Though the Schpirerr Farben pencils do still behave and feel different, most likely because they're oil-based to the Arteza's wax-base.) They aren't my new favorite, but they are pretty decent and if Prismacolor is just too expensive for you, I'd say they're not a bad second choice. I did notice something exceedingly peculiar during my testing though: These pencils have basically no water resistance. They melt down almost like watercolor pencils, or at least like the Derwent Inktense (which dissolve pretty well but compared to typical watercolor pencils they do take a little more water and working to melt down entirely). Typically, regular colored pencils do move when hit with a lot of water, but not to this extent, and it usually takes a lot to really pull a noticeable amount of pigment out. The thing about this is that Arteza sells a set of regular watercolor pencils, and as best I can tell from the pictures (as I have yet to procure a set for myself) the only differences between that set and this one are the colors on the front of the tins, and the Expert pencils are round/circular, while the watercolor pencils are hexagon shaped. Other than that, there aren't any visible differences between the two. Granted, this isn't really fair, as the main differences would normally be in how they perform on paper and you can't really tell that from stock photos. And yet, and I can't help but wonder if there's something fishy going on there.  Could they be the exact same cores, just packaged differently...?   I am very tempted to order a set of their watercolor pencils just to compare...But until then, I am planning on trying a watercolor piece with these just to see what happens. Maybe I'll try and they won't turn out that well and my theory will be busted, or maybe I'll have to order the other set and find out for sure that way...   ____ Artwork © me, MysticSparkleWings ____ Where to find me & my artwork: My Website | Commission Info + Prices | Ko-Fi | dA Print Shop | RedBubble |   Twitter | Tumblr | Instagram

[reekierevelator]

The Face of Tomorrow

Sitting, eyes red and head drooping, foot almost glued to the pedal, feeding the coarse material through the needle.  At last, she moved her foot away and let her head fall. Another piece finished.  Twenty shirts, all exactly the same, already today.

But before Ode could take a few moments to rest her arms and have a sip of water the foreman arrived to snatch away the finished shirt, saying ‘Atta girl, plenty more where that came from’, and pushed a sewing pattern down in front of her tired eyes. This was quickly followed by ‘Here you go then, next piece’ as he thrust a pile of cut-outs on to the heavily scratched beech wood of her small work desk.  The new pieces were in a dazzling shade of almost iridescent blue with a subtle pattern of thin black lines running through them. Ode sat up and stared, mesmerised. The foreman couldn’t understand it. ‘It’s the same shirt dear, just different material’ he explained slowly, as if Ode was some kind of simpleton.

Since leaving school Ode had spent long hours working in the dilapidated red brick building only the boss calls the Golden Garment Company factory.  Her fellow workers called it the workshop. Her old school friends called it the sweatshop. Long hours and poor pay, but ‘it’s a job’. And without qualifications Ode felt lucky to be employed at all.  She knew it was only because her mother had taught her the basic skills required – through making her sew and mend from a very young age, - that she’d got the job in the first place.  In her own family, new clothes were a rare and almost unheard of luxury. It had been that way since they had fled to escape the fighting, arriving in Britain from Nigeria when Ode was a small child.  

She had never owned the kind of on-trend fashionable clothes that she’d seen on some of the city’s girls. And she knew anyway that she was plain and unattractive. Fancy clothes wouldn’t hide that. People had never been backward in coming forward to tell her so.  

Once, she’d gone with her friend to try on expensive clothes in a posh shop – it was what they did, try them on, admire themselves in the mirrors, and then return the clothes to the rails.  Sometimes Ode took even longer as she examined the textiles, the way a particular fabric had been cut, sewn, pleated. It was much more valuable to examine the actual clothes, see exactly how they had been treated, cut on the bias or whatever, than to read about them in the odd fashion magazine that came her way. She could understand why her behaviour could irritate the woman in charge of the changing rooms and how she might get annoyed.  When Ode emerged wearing a floor length sequined gown the woman had carped ‘You don’t really fit the modelling mould, do you love? Not got the required features: not thin enough, not tall enough, and your legs are too short.’ It cut Ode to the bone, but still she couldn’t shake the obsession.

In fact she became quite acclimatised to cruel humiliation. ‘Your cheekbones are too low, nose is too big, your mouth is too wide, the shape and colour of your eyes is all wrong.’ In a way it made her more resilient. ‘You can’t squeeze into that dress my girl, even the bust’s not right.  In fact, your whole build is all wrong for those kinds of dresses. To be honest I can’t see even spending a fortune on make-up and cosmetics making much difference.’ Even when it left her almost in tears Ode found she could cope. That was just how her life was and since it was likely to stay that way she better get used to it.  

Somehow she just couldn’t help herself.  She inevitably found herself starting conversations with workmates, family, and sometimes even strangers at the bus stop by commenting on their clothes. She offered them her ideas on what might suit them better.  But what she considered sensible suggestions were often received as rudeness; unwarranted intrusions, impolite, offensive, insulting. On the odd occasions when she had ventured to make such suggestions to her friends they had either laughed out loud, asked what on earth she was thinking, or stared at her as if they thought he was going mad.  

But at least the meagre wages she was earning allowed her the very occasional luxury purchase. The unusual blue cloth triggered her desire.  At the end of the day she noticed the scrag end of a roll abandoned on the cutting room floor. She picked it up and approached the foreman.

‘Could I take this home with me?’ she asked

The foreman knew there was not enough material for another garment and that it would only be swept up and put in the refuse with the rest of the rubbish. He barked back ‘Of course not, it belongs to the company,’

‘I could pay for it,’ Ode answered timidly.

‘How much?’

‘I have six pounds saved,’ said Ode, rummaging in her pocket then stretching out her hand showing him the money.

The foreman cast his eyes furtively around the now empty room. ‘Sold’, he muttered, quickly grabbing the cash from Ode’s hand.

With the dress-making skills her mother had somewhat forcefully bequeathed to her Ode intended to cut the material into embellishments for her existing clothes.  But then she struck on the idea of unpicking the stitching of her own dress and using her own quirky ideas to remake it in a wholly new style, one she imagined would show off the blue material properly. The dress she created was highly unusual, a peculiar variation on the traditional dress of her ancestors, a new take on the sort of clothes her mother wore as if she still walked the Nigerian countryside every day. A matching gele, or headdress, completed the effect.

At first her best friend, Uma, impulsive and beautiful, with big eyes and an impish smile, was the only one she would allow to see her new ‘African’ dress. Then one day Uma said ‘Is real neat, yah. But what you gonna do wit it though – just sit at home wearin it, starin at youself in the mirror like you famous?  Shu, no girl like you ever gonna wear that kinda thing on the street.’

But maybe that was just the challenge Ode had been waiting for.  The very next Saturday she wore her highly original new dress while accompanying Uma to Harlesden market, shopping for yams, plantain, and cooking bananas.  She drew admiring glances from other girls, saying ‘Stunna, innit’ and ‘You got an ankara buba now Ode?’.  Even some of the boys approached her, passing comments like ‘That’s a wicked colour’, and ‘Cool dress’.  A white boy mentioned her ‘Impressive kaftan.’

Ode’s girlfriends were quick to convert to a full appreciation of the new style. They found themselves re-thinking the fashion advice Ode had tried to give them, which they’d previously rejected as ridiculously outlandish. It didn’t take long before they were asking her advice on materials, and arranging for Ode to run up clothes for them at home after they brought her the lengths of cloth they’d bought.

One Saturday afternoon Ode and Uma passed the unimposing little shopfront of a professional photographer.  They paused outside for a moment before Uma, on the spur of the moment, marched in, her friend trailing behind, and asked him to take photos of her. ‘For a fashion model portfolio?’ the photographer had joked, and Uma surprised herself when, the idea having been put in her head, she replied ‘Well yes.’ When she asked him for the names and addresses of modelling agencies her Ode’s laughter became uncontrollable. But still, he’d gamely suggested a few names while keeping his grin in check.

Uma collected the big glossy photos the next weekend and posted them off to New Vision Models, one of the names she’d remembered.  Surprisingly, the agency, under pressure to demonstrate greater ‘diversity’, invited her for an interview. But when Uma arrived to speak to Zelda it was quickly clear that she wasn’t really interested. Uma was glad she’d gone alone and that her friend wasn’t there to hear Zelda’s casual, acerbic comments on her height, weight, and the size of her feet.

Zelda’s phone rang.  It was an urgent request.  One of their clients had put together a mail order catalogue that had to go to print next day and they’d only just realized all the models they’d used were white. They couldn’t afford to be depicted as racially biased and they couldn’t afford to re-schedule the printing job.  In fact, business was so bad because of all the new online retailers that unless the catalogue brought in a lot of sales they knew the company was going to collapse anyway.  As a matter of fact they couldn’t even afford to pay the usual going rate for models but they desperately needed someone within the hour.

So for a minimal fee, from which Uma would earn only ‘experience’, the agency sent her to wear cheap clothes for some quickfire photographs which would be included in a mail order women’s clothes catalogue that would be printed in great haste on cheap paper. In their hurry a shot was taken of Uma wearing the dress in which she’d arrived, a dress designed and stitched together by Ode. The photo was included along with an arbitrary price the catalogue editor had made up on the spot.

Inevitably, the catalogue’s readers hated the clothes and bought very little.  But even while the company was folding, comments proliferated across the social media about one of the models, how she was so different to the usual mannequin-like catalogue clothes-horses and actually looked like a ‘normal lively girl’ for a change. As attention was directed towards Uma, more readers also commented that the only item of clothing in the catalogue that was worth buying was one that she modelled – a sort of esoteric take on traditional West African dress. Unusually, the dress was in bright pink rather than the usual primary colours and its pattern was picked out in subtle, swirling crimson and gold.  Surprisingly, the cut was for a casual dress style, a chiseled cut and only knee-length, with a rectangular neckline. Equally surprisingly, the dress was still somehow unmistakeably African.

While casually flicking through Instagram discussions a young man linked it to a message he sent to the husband of Phoebe, a young aspiring clothes designer. ‘People are saying there’s someone, something out there, that is “different” ‘.

When the husband brought it to her attention Phoebe investigated.  She checked Instagram. The nape of her neck prickled. She tracked down a copy of the printed catalogue.  She phoned the catalogue company, then the modelling agency, and then Uma herself. When she discovered who had made the catalogue’s one outstanding clothes item her sense of excitement went into overdrive. She ran out of her office in Jermyn Street and was soon on the Bakerloo Line heading north to Harlesden.  When she found the flat in the high-rise she confused Ode’s mother by asking to talk to the girl with the perfect eye.

The social media hubbub also reached Zelda.  She was quickly back in contact with Uma, offering her more work, and insisting the company could live up to its name of New Vision.

Ode handed in her notice at the sweatshop. The foreman told her to stay, warned her she’d regret leaving, since his own pay was linked to production and he knew how hard Ode worked. But Ode began working with Phoebe.  With Ode’s ideas and Phoebe’s business contacts it wasn’t long before they were selling vast numbers of new garments, not only throughout the UK but to the near two hundred million Nigerians and to other parts of West Africa.

Within a year Uma’s cheerful face was on billboards and the cover of Cosmopolitan. She was following in the footsteps of Iman and Naomi Campbell.

But Ode’s face, despite the cheekbones being too low, nose too big, mouth too wide, and shape and colour of the eyes all wrong, was the real face of tomorrow. It was already to be found on the inside pages of Business Today as well as StyleWatch, Glamour, and West Africa Now.  The world had moved on. The face of Britain was multicultural and not only was the West African market online, but the whole face of Africa was changing fast. Given the respect accorded a top class designer, business couldn’t be better.

[imogenwilliamsproject4]

Evaluation

Evaluation

•Briefly explain what your final piece is and how you came up with the idea.

My final piece is a documentary is local and focused on homelessness, it includes images of people sleeping rough, possessions left behind and common areas where people sleep rough I’ve named the book ‘modern issue’ I named it this because I think homelessness is a very now and current issue in all of Nottingham and around England it was a kind of play on words of the magazine company ‘the big issue’.  My images are in colour and some are in black and white I decided to have some in colour as black and white doesn’t suit every image and some look better with that pop of colour. I then chose to have some in black and white because it brought out the harsh lines and depth in the image. Sometimes a photograph can rely on the colour to make it interesting so using black and white can decide if in image is good or not and I think my photos were strong enough to be in black and white.

•Refer to research or workshops that inspired you.

I liked the typology’s workshop but as getting my images were hard enough I didn’t have enough images to make an effective typology with what I had and I didn’t have time to go out and photograph more I liked what I had as well and a typology can take away from photos as individuals.

•Why did you decide to use the method of documentary book?

I decided to use print my images onto A4 card. I chose to do this because card is better quality than paper and it looked better for printing. I originally wanted to have a black background but I couldn’t print on black card so I wasn’t able to I did have the idea of printing n white card then cutting the images out and sticking them onto the black card but I thought this wouldn’t look as well done and clear as it just printing the booklet out and leaving it. I chose to print on A4 as I didn’t like how printing on A3 looked and on A4 it looked better quality as the images weren’t stretched too far.

Using the techniques we tried in class for making a photobook I chose to staple my pages together. I did like how the stictching looked but just stapling the pages together looked more professional I didn’t want my documentary to look to hand made. I chose silver staples instead of the coloured ones as I thought using bright coloured staples didn’t fit with the seriousness of my documentary.

I looked at an artist called John Conn he focused on homelessness and issues surrounding it. He inspired me with the using the black and white images his work was really eye opening and gave me the influence to do this project. When going out and taking my images I was nervous about doing so, I felt that I was invading their privacy and I was worried about what people thought and if I was coming across like I was photographing them for a bad reason. I got ever this by just thinking about how it could affect my images. I wouldn’t have been photographing to my best ability and I would have held back. I really wanted to get some dramatic images into my documentary and so I went out my way and just photographed to make sure of this not worrying to much about how it came across to others. Towards the end of the project I wanted to change my idea as I didn’t think the images I had were good enough I tried editing them to look more interesting but didn’t like the outcome. I went out to really try and get some good images I get a handful of good ones I’ve used in my final documentary. I came back after the shoot and reviewed all my images, I had 16-18 images I was happy wit to use but I still kept my camera with me in case I saw an opportunity to photograph something good. I then edited my images to look more intense I kept a theme on a few images of having the clarity at a high number and then the saturation down lower I liked how this made the images look especially in black and white because it just really brought out the intensity and shadows.

Overall I’m really happy with what I’ve created and how it looks I’m happy with all of my final images and my overall idea. This was my favourite project to do as it was open for us to decide what we wanted to do it on. I often walk to the bus stop after college and think about how lucky and fortunate I am to even have a place to go back to and these people have no choice but to stay out all night no matter what conditions all day every day.

[voidsettle]

Birthday in Venice

                                                                                                          October 2018

Everyone suggests you should get lost in Venice. Funny thing is, you don't actually have a choice. First thing you do when setting foot on land is completely lose your sense of orientation, map or no map. Venice is as welcoming as a labyrinth of water and stone can be. Oh my, did I have fun with its feats!

Venetian masks; a lucky shot I got from the storefront at night after spying a random guy taking similar picture on his phone

This year, I've made the decision of spending the Big Day in a different country, away from people I know and love. My mom said there are three things you should never hesitate to spend your money on: food, books and travel. I heeded her advice, like the obedient daughter I was.

As (yet another) birthday present, I finally bought myself a DSLR camera. Photos aplenty!

Prepared by my solo trip to Rome, I was relaxed and at ease. Venice met me with sun through clouds and sparkles of water.

Confused Rant (Skip at Will)

Accademia Bridge between San Marco and Dorsoduro

Before I start praising the beauty of the place, I need to vent out my disappointments and be done with them.

The biggest shock I got during this trip was upon realization that Venice is not Italy. It's completely separate; Venetians hang out the winged-golden-lion-on-red flags of their city not the country they live in. They boast their history, they live engulfed in the past magnitude of the Venetian republic, the dominion dictating its will to the region if not the whole ‘enlightened’ world.

‘Venetians’ are only those living on the cluster of islands; mainland (deprecatingly referred to by true Venetians as Mestre) is a completely different thing.

They are pridefully blindfolded by the achievements of the past - which are impressive, no doubt. But.

Venice doesn't seem welcoming. It's a fascinating place, for sure, but it's not one I'd chose to live in. It's slowly dying, despite the flocks of tourists crowding the tiny streets. Not just drowning, although this is a real problem - but losing its touch with reality, completely dependent on the inflow of money brought by tourists yet also soaked with condescending disdain. As if asking you to leave your money and get the hell out of their islands, thank you very much (Venice is surprisingly expensive; in a day, you get the habit of taking out a wallet when entering a church).

Venetian gondolas, wharf at Grand Canal

Unlike Rome, oblivious to your presence, living its life, Venice wears its colorful, gaily painted hospitality mask and a painful scorn underneath, struggling between the need to please you and get rid of your presence. This is exactly my problem with tourist towns - they need tourists, but the feeling of silent, woeful aversion toward non-locals is ever-present and oppressively strong. Thanks, I hate it.

However, this is also a puzzle piece that makes Venice unique. I'm not exactly an inexperienced traveler, yet I rarely feel this strongly about places. The contrast here is stark (especially when emphasized by a short trip to Verona - this, a definitely Italian town), and it makes the place even more vivid in my memory.

Lost in Venice: The Labyrinth, the Moments, the Rhythm

Venice is one of those cities known around the world. Its history, its geography, its multitude of symbols and names (La Dominante, Queen of the Adriatic, City of Canals, City of Bridges, City of Masks). It became the appellative to other cities around the world. It astonishes at first glance; it's unique

The infrastructure of Venice is impressive. The city literally is built on swamps, the marshy land that sinks underfoot, not to mention the weight of stone and brick buildings. To strengthen the soil, long wooden piles were installed to reach the firm clay underneath sand and mud. The wood used is still argued to be either alder trees from southern Baltics or Russian pines (probably the former). Either way, the wood is water resistant, given its century-old age and excellent preservation state.

To boot, Venice, surrounded by the sea, had no source of fresh water. Today, it is delivered from mainland. In the days of Venetian republic, a system of water cisterns that collected rain was constructed - hence the huge stone socles of wells on nearly every campo.

There is an anecdote roaming among the tour guides that some of these stone wells were stolen by insane tourists as souvenirs from Venice.

Venetian water cistern. The most unbelievable part is that, in the wells, the preserved water is probably still drinkable

The unusual geography gives way to even less usual architecture. Usually I'm pretty decent with maps and finding my way in a new city. Venice shattered my confidence to shards when I spent nearly two hours for a walk that should've taken no more than 15 minutes, and after finding myself going in circles. That was a start! The first day I arrived, I didn't have plans but wanted to have a bite and then get to San Marco - well, good luck with that. An hour later, despite living in 10 minutes walk from the piazza, I found myself in the middle of Castello, a completely different neighborhood of Venice - actually further from the destination.

Venice has 6 neighborhoods (sestieri): San Marco, San Polo, Cannaregio, Castello, Dorsoduro and Santa Croce.

San Marco is the only piazza in Venice. Although the place doesn't lack squares, they're all called campos, literally fields, since were used as such when Venice was built. The houses faced water, and it was the only way to get from one island to another (hence boat transportation system). Naturally, every island needed somewhere to grow food, and a church for the people living on each separate island. That's the trademark of Venetian urban planning: a campo with a church and a well for rainwater.

The house located on the peak of the island but looks like it is the island

I cannot remember the last time I was this fascinated by the way a place is built. It's literally a labyrinth, with dead ends of tiny private squares (never closed; you can get anywhere and knock on any door if you wish) and steps leading into water. Even with a clear idea of a direction in mind (and a first couple of turns you need to make remembered), you are bound to get lost. There are little to no identifiers (if you don't count the names of streets and campos, which tell you precisely nothing), with pointed signs reserved for major attractions like San Marco and Rialto.

Campos are often named after the churches that are or were standing here (signified by letter 'S', e.g. Campo S Maria Formosa).

Besides, some of the street names repeat (like Via del Forno, or literally Baker Street - specifically because bakers were important for every island, so most of the islands have one of those). It's best to avoid making appointments without specifying the sestiere.

Despite how scary this may sound, I relished in this feeling of being lost and aimless (control freak, present). It's a rare sensation of freedom, unobtrusive and calming, when you forget everything and just wander around with only a vague understanding of your final goal: food, coffee, sites, excitement!

I was cautioned GPS goes nuts in this water-stone labyrinth; it's not always the case, but having a paper map on you is still not a bad idea. And throw in an umbrella to the kit: Venice enjoys being rainy.

San Marco is (obviously) the busiest, most chaotic among the Venetian sestieri. Always full of tourists - even near midnight, even in its narrowest, smallest of streets. In comparison, Cannaregio and most of Dorsoduro look empty, almost deserted. The rest of the sestieri are relaxed, drowning in quiet slumber.

Every city is different and beautiful in its own right - there are people that make them unique. There are moments to witness in the quietest sestieri - and in the busiest of crowds.

A nun dressed in white descending the stairs of a half-blocked bridge, with a dove scared away from her feet. A group of middle-aged tourists abstrusely discussing the architecture of a baroque church in some incomprehensible language. A couple of elderly friends having a cozy chat at the bench on a tiny campo, with cigarettes smoking in their lazy fingers. A woman walking her minuscule dog along one of the wider canals near Rio dei Mendicanti. A colorful boat that looks like a toy bobbing on the busy waves of Cannaregio. Doors with quirky handles at the center of the frame, scattered all over the city. White-necked, grey-winged seagulls crowning the chimneys of old houses in desperate need of repainting.Colorful enjoyably shaped masks crowded in the shops. A couple sitting on the pavement at the water's edge, the woman going through the contents of her bag while the man smiles at passersby. An intricately cut wooden paddle in the showcase. An artist's workshop on full display with floor-level windows - or a woodworker's, hidden at the back corner of a narrow street. The most peculiar style of windows made of bottle bottoms (this can be seen all over Venetian region, in churches, palaces and old houses). Small crooked bridges with fragile rails. Gondolas hidden among the forest of striped palines, and gondoliers in striped shirts and straw boaters with red ribbons - smoking, chatting, singing. A kitten playing on the windowsill among the plants in pots. People sitting on marble stairs of the churches. Traditional hexagonal Venetian lamp posts of pink glass. Students sketching hastily in their notepads. A guy with the sun stuck in his ruffled dark hair photographing the lagoon. A group of men in acid-orange lifesavers' jackets smoking during break near their ambulance boats. A policeman bowing his head to a Madonna in a dilapidated wooden shrine. A messy old bookshop with human-high stacks of multi-colored books felled outside the door.

At times I think I've seen less than I could - because I kept getting lost in streets and thoughts.

The rhythm is everywhere. The lulling tempo of residential houses with their rounded windows. The dignified cadence of lofty Renaissance palaces (especially evident on Piazza San Marco, with its Doge's Palace and the Procuratie). The clear pulse of campos, churches, water wells and - most distinctively - bridges, small, grand, wide, connecting two or even three islands, crossing Grand Canal, leading into stores and homes.

What to see in Venice:

San Marco sestiere:

piazza San Marco

basilico di San Marco

St Mark's Campanile

St Mark's clocktower

palazzo Ducale

Bridge of Sighs

Procuratie Vecchie and Procuratie Nuove (Museo Correr, Venice National Archeological Museum, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana)

chiesa di San Zulian

chiesa di San Moise

campo San Luca

chiesa San Luca

Rio Tera dei Assassini

Scala Contarini del Bovolo

chiesa di San Salvador

Rialto bridge and terrazza panoramica

chiesa di Santo Stefano

Museo della Musica

campo Santo Stefano

Instituto Veneto di Scienze Lettere ed Arti

basilica di San Giorgio Maggiore (Isola San Giorgio)

Dorsoduro sestiere:

Accademia bridge

Santa Maria della Salute

fondamente Zattere ai Saloni (fondamente dei Incurabili)

chiesa del Redentore (Giudecca)

campo Santa Margherita

Santa Croce sestiere:

Constitution bridge

Venetian subway (3 stops in total)

San Polo sestiere:

chiesa di San Giacomo Apostolo (hosting musical museum)

San Simeon Piccolo

Cannaregio sestiere:

Santa Maria di Nazareth (Gli Scalzi)

Ponte degli Scalzi

La Maddalena

Madonna dell'Orto

La Scuola nuova di Santa Maria della Misericordia

chiesa dell'Abbazia della Misericordia

Ca' d'Oro

chiesa di Santa Maria dei Miracoli

Castello sestiere:

Scuola Grande di San Marco

basilica of Saints John and Paul

chiesa di Santa Maria Formosa

chiesa di Sant'Antonin

Venetian Arsenal

Sotoportego e Corte Delfina

basilica di San Pietro di Castello

Cimitero di San Michele (the island of St Michael)

The Brighter Side of Islands

Burano

Before getting here, I planned spending my birthday roaming aimlessly around Venice, getting lost in its streets. But that is every day in Venice, so instead I bought a 24-hour public transport pass and went to see the islands.

The public transport in Venice is water-based. Aside from the trademark gondolas, there is a variety of yachts, motorboats, and, local signature vehicle, vaporettos. These come in different configurations depending on the routes - the best, in my opinion, have seats on the front, in the open air, serving partly as a tourist transport.

Throughout the trip, the weather in Venice was a bit moody, although thankfully not rainy. Saturday, the 13th, however, happened to be the sunniest day of the trip. Standing outside, wind tangled in my hair, barely able to see anything as sun threw handfuls of golden sparks into my eyes, I intensely enjoyed the feeling of speed, scent of salty water and marshy earth, the old stone and red roofs covering the patches of land scattered here and there.

Sunglasses come handy during such water-trips, unless temporary blindness is a viable option.

First stop was Murano, historical area dedicated to glass factories and, today, featuring numerous showcases of artists that are not unlike museums full of oddest, most peculiar and wondrous glass sculptures. Walking along the quay, it is possible to find an artshop that has free tours on glass sculpture production.

For me, Murano was the area's first glimpse of a true Mediterranean palette: bright whites, pure blues and fresh, light greens. Waiting in line for the tour, I delighted in the view of the lagoon. Festive, clean yachts, all white gleaming surfaces and polished wooden panels the color of dark honey with even darker veins. Neat paths and lanes covered with white smoothly round gravel. Soigne yards with delicately trimmed bushes. Blue-and-white striped mooring posts (aka palines, another one of Venetian symbols on par with gondolas and bridges).

Pomegranate tree full of red fruits - looks just like Charles Demuth's 'Plums' (1925)

The inner Murano has a different feel than the seaside: it's much wider. Besides, Murano has much less canals - I saw literally one, the rest is all streets and inner patios, quiet, serene, bathed in sun and empty; the closest place in Venice must be the northern side of Cannaregio, closer to the old Jewish quarters.

Waiting lines to get out of Murano are enormous. Be prepared to spend at least half an hour, whether you leave for Venice or for Burano, the next-favorite stop.

You can skip Murano if not very interested in glass and in order to save some time. Skipping Burano, on the other hand, is a sin for any traveler.

The houses of this small island are unique: each has its own designated color, which is ruled by the local government to preserve the look of the town - truly a museum under the open roof. Burano is a study of cheerful, bright colors. It's fun catching people in front of houses the color of their clothes.

Burano is widely known for its textiles - the main street running inland from the wharf is covered in the assortment of shops selling lace umbrellas (souvenirs and human-sized), fans, corsets, scarves et cetera. As the shops give way to homey cafes and quaint restaurants, the crowd thins out, flowing along the splitting canals.

Real-life drama broke out on the quay. A Japanese girl dropped her phone into one of the canals - and she actually managed to fish it out using a scoop-net provided by some compassionate local. I was observing while pity and mirth dueled to be plastered all over my face.

Behind the Burano main streets, a much quieter area runs along the quay at the murmurous accompaniment of a street singer playing something sweetly romantic. This is an enchanted area for picnics - spacious green lawns under the rich crowns and low branches of firs, warm pale-yellow sun, cool stone parapet, sprinkles of light glistening off the waves and drops of water from the tumultuous waves, seagulls touching wings over the waters and fast motorboats passing by.

Take off your shoes to enjoy the fresh breeze and let your feet some rest. Have a glass of Prosecco and a seafood salad on the central square of the island, near chiesa di San Martino. Awe at the leaning tower protruding from the colorful rooftops (actually, Italy is full of those; Pisa is just the most famous).

Torcello offers little in comparison - just an old church of Santa Fosca (XI-XII centuries), an even older cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta (639 AD) surrounded by the garden of ancient sculptures (including Trono di Attila) and its belltower with the view of the marshes of the Venetian lagoon (truly makes one imagine what this place was before an empire was built upon the morass). Leisurely crowds stroll to visit the ancient sites, passing by Ponte del Diavolo, an unfinished bridge remarkable for its lack of handrail.

Panorama from the top of Santa Maria Assunta belltower, Torcello

Way back to Venice (and Lido, my final stop on this island run) was marked with sun hovering over the horizon, throwing a haze of pink-blue blanket over the lagoon. In this tremulant light, the dark shadows of palines protrude from the soft waters, ragged and cankered.

Palines mark the waterpaths like the posts of highways; grouped in three, weathered, dark from time and water, partly rotten to the point of only the upper half remaining. They are bizarre, surreal as they bask in the translucent dusk, a mirage reflected in the water amalgamating with the sky.

Lido gained fame for its long beach. Facing the open Adriatic sea, it makes a wonderful case for both sunrises and sunsets. Pity, I was 10 minutes too late for the sunset (I blame the unhurried vaporettos), and instead only caught the last glimpses of it

Staying in Venice, you forget about such integral part of modern life as cars. Not even bicycles make sense on the islands connected with innumerable bridges, most of which have stairs, the tiny streets that at times allow only one person, and the crowds that flock them. For this reason, on Lido, I caught myself staring for consecutive five minutes at a bus, feeling something was wrong but unable to pinpoint what exactly. Until it hit me: people were standing at a crosswalk waiting for the car flow to subside. For a person living in a metropolis, this is a weird feeling to experience.

Lido sports the ambiance of a typical tourist resort near the sea - very unlike the deeply historical, proud and arrogant Venice.

The final touch of the day was dinner at La Colombina, a Michelin restaurant found on the side street of Strada Nova. I relished in the sensation of being cared for: an assortment of traditional Venetian dishes by the recommendation of maitre d'hotel and a glass of white wine offered by a sommelier followed by black coffee served as good as in Sarajevo.

Bridge near San Zaccaria station, Venice

Venice is the water-borne city, and experiencing it from water is an integral and wholesome experience, whether a gondola ride or a trip down Grand Canal (better not to mix those, traffic on the central Venetian waterway is competitive). A night vaporetto shows off the lighting wonders, from the rigorous black-and-white facades to the flirtatious pinks and warm yellows of palaces turned posh hotels.

Getting home from the vaporetto station, I decided I should be able to find the way on my own, without being glued to the screen of my phone. I was wrong, obviously; after an hour I caught myself staring at a vaguely familiar balcony that I passed under ten minutes ago. That was when I realized I've uncovered the true character of Venice and finally let go of all hope finding the way on my own in this city. A profoundly enjoyable awareness.

What to see on the islands:

glass factories and artshops (Murano)

Cometa di vetro (Murano)

chiesa di San Martino and leaning belltower (Burano)

Ponte del Diavolo (Torcello)

chiesa di Santa Fosca

cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta and belltower (Torcello)

Museo di Torcello (garden of sculptures)

Trono di Attila (Torcello)

beach Lido de Venezia

Verona: Consistency Through the Ages

Ponte Pietra, river Adige, Verona

At first I planned on visiting Padua, but a girl at my hotel's reception was surprised enough to convince me to change the destination to Verona, a small, well-preserved medieval town an hour inland away from Venice.

It is my guess that most people come to Verona because of one minor play by some insignificant English playwright. Naturally, I was prepared to pay my respects to Juliet's abode, yet it wasn't the best place I've seen in Verona (it didn't even cut to top ten).

I am weak toward cities that have a clear route encircling all the major attractions, as if it was built for exploration. Verona uncovers historical layers through its architectural milestones. Pre-Christian era is embodied in Roman edifices including the local colosseum, Arena di Verona (third biggest after Rome and Capua), Porta Borsari (ancient gate in the city wall surrounded by medieval houses and oleander bushes) and Teatro Romano, a grim, gray structure across Adige river and up the hill. The Romanesque Cattedrale di Santa Maria Matricolare featuring two reconstructed Paleo-Christian churches and one of the oldest functioning libraries in the world is a study of several ages of early Christianity. The Gothic Arche Scaligere is so intricate one can spend days studying its decorations, and the red-brick Castelvecchio, the powerful square construction of war explains the military aspirations of the Medieval Verona.

Piazza delle Erbe (literally Herb Square) features statues and fountains of different eras dating back to Roman rule through the Middle Ages. The market in the middle of piazza is still selling fresh vegetables and herbs, the epitome of integrity (a pleasant change from modern inconsistency)

In the train, I by chance overheard a conversation by fellow tourists who were also going to Verona and discussing the places to eat. That's how I got my lunch destination. It appears, in Verona, horse meat is a thing.

There's much less people compared to Venice; a breath a fresh air (both figuratively and literally). Quiet old streets, paved in uneven stones, lead to the tumultuous Adige and the white Ponte Pietra.

Compared to Venice, this is real Italy: a river across the town, enchained in high stone walls, manacled by elderly bridges; motley planes along the quay, dappled in summer sunlight; old red brick castle with Gothic merlons along the walls

The walk around the city is calm, warm and fits in the span of several hours. Quite an enjoyable detour.

What to see in Verona:

Porta Nuova

piazza Bra

Arena di Verona

palazzo Barbieri

palazzo della Gran Guardia

Casa di Giulietta

piazza delle Erbe

Madona di Verona

Torre dei Lamberti

piazza dei Signori

Arche Scaligere

chiesa di Sant'Anastasia

Ponte Pietra

Teatro Romano

chiesa dei Santi Siro e Libera

castel San Pietro

cattedrale di Santa Maria Matricolare

chiesa di Sant'Eufemia

Porta Borsari

Castelvecchio and its bridge

Arco dei Gavi

Coming back to Venice, I managed to catch sunset at San Marco. The seagulls here are fierce and beautiful creatures; it's not always a good idea to carry food around

What to eat:

cicchetti (bite-sized snacks common for bacari, traditional Venetian bars)

sarde in saor (pickled fried sardines with onions)

baccala mantecato (cod cream)

risotto al nero di seppia (black rice and seafood)

risi e bisi (rice and peas soup)

bigoli in salsa (pasta with onions and salt-cured fish)

fegato alla veneziana (liver and onions)

moleche (fried small crabs)

scampi alla veneziana (shrimps)

caparossi a scota deo (clams)

scampetti con polenta (baby shrimps served on polenta)

baicoli (biscuits)

fritole venessiane (sweet pastry served during Venetian Carnival)

pincia (sweet pastry)

buranelle (sweet biscuits)

zabaglioni (egg dessert)

What to drink (alcohol is important in Venice - drink your days away):

Aperol Spritz (Venetian signature cocktail, refreshing and fun)

Bellini

Prosecco (white wine, commonly sparkling)

Soave (white wine, good with fish dishes)

Orto di Venezia, Venissa (white wines)

Valpolinella and Amarone (red wines)

vino della casa (homemade wine, usually less expensive and rarely served in traditional wine glasses)

Final Word

Sunset at piazza San Marco

Venice is a city of its own character, sometimes oblivious, sometimes arrogant and condescending - but it surely has the right to be so. Hit some sweet Vivaldi, order a glass of Aperol Spritz at bacaro - and let yourself get lost in this bizarre, lovable chaos.

[thesundayread]

An open letter to the Chron team seniors

By Justin Smith

This Sunday Read marks my final responsibility as a member of The Marlin Chronicle. I am extremely grateful for my time with the paper. From workshop writer to section editor to editor-in-chief, the past two and half years have taught me many important things. Instead of writing 500 or so words on how The Marlin Chronicle has shaped me into the person I am today, I want to draw attention to a group of people who were just as influential.

One of the effects of a newsroom is its power to draw together people of different backgrounds and personalities. While I hold memories and bonds with everyone I’ve work alongside with, the commonality shared between all the graduating seniors this year has been significant. The infamous “senioritis”, the mental breakdowns, the questioning of our futures...all things that we experienced together in and out of the newsroom. Now that I’ve finally gotten to the point of what I’m writing about, here is an open letter to the Chron team seniors:

Ashlei: Although you graduated in December, I’m including you in this letter. You and I have pretty much been through everything from the get-go. We worked in the Batten Center together, went through the entire communication major together, and became members of the Chronicle at the same time. I know you’re already doing great things and making “adulting” look easy, but I can remember those nights when you were freaking out about post-grad life and I tried my best to keep your head level. I’m thankful for you because just a few months ago, the tables were turned. I was freaking out about graduating and you were there to calm me down. As you’ve already began your next chapter, I know that you will continue to thrive and succeed. You’ve got big aspirations and I have no doubt you will accomplish them.

Brianna: I feel bad for the newsroom after May 19 because you were the light of the newspaper. You never failed to make people laugh (either with you or at you) and with the stresses of senior year, laughter is important. Our weekly meetings were always a treat, from you freaking out about being late but arriving 10 minutes early anyways to you and Corey picking at each other like siblings. The quality of yours that I love the most is your “no filter” attitude. You say what’s on your mind and how you feel regardless of who’s in the room or how it comes out. Any person outside of the Chronicle might have been offended if they stepped foot into the newsroom during one of your rants, but I find your...colorful language endearing. I may never understand why you call me Linda, but I’m going to miss hearing it.

Amanda: First off, I want to thank you for being a supportive wife. I know neither one of us were planning on eloping when we went to Dallas, but you can’t help fate. While other readers try to determine if my previous two statements are truthful, I want to say just how thankful I am to go through senior year with you. Our conversations always became a release of stress for the two of us. People probably thought we were depressive, but little did they know...they were right, as senior year dimmed our sparks of hope and ambition. I always found myself drawn to you during deadline nights, one, so we could complain about our daily struggles, but two, you just have this comfortable and easy-going vibe. Although you are off to do great things in life, don’t let what that homeless woman in Dallas said to you sike you out.

Corey: You are the living definition of the saying “don’t judge a book by its cover.” I’m going to be honest, I did see us becoming friends when I first met you. Now that speaks more to my character flaw of judging others, but I’m very grateful for the Chronicle as I probably would have never gotten to know you. You and I began the paper at the same time and I can honestly say that you’ve made it the fun environment that we’ve all come to love. This may be selfish of me, but my favorite past time (especially during senior year) is witnessing you freak out. I never thought you could physically see panic flow through a person’s body, that was until I met you. I want to thank you for making the trip to Dallas one to remember. The debauchery that took place just about every day was something that only Corey King could produce. As I said, I didn’t expect us to get along because we were so different, but I’ve slowly learned we aren’t that different. We both have big dreams and high ambition to make those dreams reality. I look forward to seeing you succeed in life.

Julie:  Our friendship began far before you joined the Chron team, but has just been reinforced since then. I’m thankful for the elevator screaming, the podcast that we inconsistently record, and of course, the self-deprecation. You nailed our friendship on the head by saying “we tear each other down just to build each other back up...still waiting on the building up part.” I love that whenever we insult each other, instead of rebutting we just agree with the comment. People may think we have an unhealthy friendship, but we have moments of sentiment and kindness. You have been an inspiration and I am thankful for the lessons you’ve taught me since I met you. I can’t wait to see where you head in life because I know it’ll be something great. You have so much knowledge and so many ideas that will benefit so many people.

    As my days are numbered here at Wesleyan, I’ve come to learn that if someone has had an impact on you or you value someone, let them know. I don’t mean to sound pessimistic, but it’s the reality of the situation: we’re all not going to see each other for a while after we graduate. I know you all will do tremendous things and take on amazing opportunities in the future. I am thankful for all five of you for making senior year something special. (P.S. I like one of you slightly more than the others, so have fun figuring it out!)

Sincerely,

Justin

(Photo | Justin Smith)

[flowing-paint]

Painting on a budget

So you decided to get into the wargaming hobby? Good! Let me welcome to what many people seem to perceive like one of the most expensive hobbies around. But is it really true? Is there any way you can cut the expenses? As a matter of fact, there are many ways you can reduce your costs so I will try to show them to you. Less money for the tools means more models and more games to pump up your fun!

I had this idea after discussing with my friend that is trying to jump into tabletop wargaming. We were discussing how, with board games, you go to the shop (or internet) and buy your big box where you have all you need to play the game. If you are new to tabletop wargaming you already probably know that, whatever the game you chose to start, the models need assembly at the very least and in most cases, you need to remove them from sprues. Then you have mold lines, flashing, warping… you need a lot of tools. While all modeling related tools can be easily substituted with stuff from the hardware store for half the price, this is always not the case for paints, brushes and the likes. With this post, I want to help newcomers to try and get into the hobby with the smallest possible investment.

First of all, let’s make a list of stuff you need to buy to paint and then let’s see what we can do to reduce the cost.

Paints

Primers

Texturing materials

Paintbrushes

Palette

Miniature holder

As you can see you need a lot of stuff and we know that when it comes to “hobby” use, the prices increase easily. Let’s tackle each item one-by-one and see if we can come out with some good alternative.

Paints

They are the core of the painting phase: you cannot paint without paints, right? But, have you tried to go on eBay, Amazon or even in a Games Workshop store to look for some paints? They are extremely expensive, probably due to the amount of research needed to get them to best suit miniature painting but also because of the hobby effect. The de facto standard in miniature painting are Citadel paints (the most widespread) and yield really good results: but take a look at their price on the official website. It is a huge set but it’s roughly one-month salary worth of paints. I don’t know you but for me, that’s a big no-no. Even small sets cost around 400$ so that’s not feasible for those who want to paint on a budget. Let’s see how we can reduce the costs:

try different paint manufacturers

I mostly use Vallejo paints (as you can guess from my tutorial posts) they come in 17 ml dropper bottles for 2.7 USD while Citadel paints come in 12 ml pots for 4.8 USD. That means Vallejo paints are more than 2 times cheaper than GW paints. The same is true for Reaper Master Series paints that come in dropper bottles similar to Vallejo and only cost 4.5 USD.

*: all prices in this post are based on a conversion from JPY.

try fine arts paints

This is the cheapest option: go to your local art store and look for acrylic paints. Take a sampler for each manufacturer and throw them on some test miniatures (don’t forget to prime them). You will probably realize that you need to thin them quite a bit but if you are lucky you can find paints with fairly small pigments that will give you good results. I oftentimes use the acrylic paints from Amsterdam Acrylic standard series: they have super-fine pigments and some gorgeous colors you can check out here.

They are perfect for miniature painting and the 20 ml tubes are a nice bargain for 2 USD! They may last you forever. You can have a taste of how they look like by taking a look at my “Leoric of the book”. The orange and the light blue come from these paints. Not bad!

Primers

Primers are really important (check out this post) and you need at least two in different colors if you plan to leverage underpainting. You can buy more colors but that costs you more money, of course. A medium bottle of brush-on primer from Vallejo costs 6.5 USD and even if it goes a long way, buying five of them is a lot of money. If you want to get the highest bang for your bucks you must try to prime with Gesso for an ultra-thin matte finish. This is also sold in art stores and a big 50 ml pot was 4.8 USD. And if that sounds too expensive, you can also try to prime with liquid acrylic “gouache” which gives you the same result but with roughly half the price! I have a 30 ml bottle of Turner gouache that cost me just 1 USD! For these prices, the results you get are really super-cool.

Texturing materials

This is one of those never-ending fields: just have a look in one of those railroad model shops and you will understand what I’m talking about. You have thousands of different stones/sands/grasses/etc. that give a realistic representation of the environment. But if you just base some miniatures for gaming purposes what you really need are just three ingredients you can get for free:

baking soda: used with CA glue gives the illusion of sand on the base

kitty litter: gives some more variegated texture, from dust-like to small rocks.

some dirt: go and get this on the side of the road where the rain washes out some random grit and dust. You can use it as is or put it on top of the CA glue/baking soda achieving the same result as the kitty litter.

There you have them: three texturing materials that cost you nothing.

Another texture that is commonly looked after is “water”. you can get some amazingly good water bases just by using PVA glue slightly pigmented with a brush tip of green or brown wash. Nobody will ever know you did not use one of those super-expensive resins! Check it out! (sorry for the crappy iPhone pictures).

Paintbrushes

Many painters can confirm you that, together with paints, these are the most important tools. It almost goes without saying that a good brush helps you a lot. What is not always completely understood by the beginners is that a good brush helps but you do not need to go super-fancy. For example, the golden standard of brushes for miniature painting is the Winsor & Newton Series 7 with Kolinsky bristles. The uniform consensus is that these paintbrushes are the best because of their bristle size vs. tip size. I could not agree more. But I don’t have one them and I am not planning on buy one anytime soon. Why? Cause I can have similar results with 1/10th of the price with my Holbein Series N (no. 0) paintbrush. You can see the whole series here (Japanese only). The bristles of this paintbrush are made of Itachi which is the Japanese for weasel. This means that this paintbrush has almost the same properties of the Kolinsky sable but for 2.5 bucks. No surprise it’s a Japanese market only product…. for this price I could almost start thinking to export them via eBay. Of course the tip is not super sharp like the WN7 but still, 1/10 of the cost so, I’m fine with that. If I want a Kolinsky brush I usually use one of my Bunseido “woody” that cost around 8/10 bucks each and give awesome results. 

Yet, with the full set of brushes in the above picture, it is still cheaper than a single WN7. What’s the lesson here? Go to your art supplies store and try all the brushes… even the cheap ones. You may find some amazing quality for bargain prices and don’t feel any pressure if you’re not using the same stuff the pro painter use: they are so freaking good they could easily make a masterpiece painting with toothpicks.

Palette

If you use to watch Warhammer TV, good! Those painting tutorials are great for beginners! There is just one thing that I do not understand: why don’t they use a wet palette? What’s a wet palette you ask? Is the way to save tons of paint and to have your color mixes going on and on for days without drying. They sell fancy wet palettes in art stores but they are expensive… so why don’t you make your own? It’s super easy if you have the following:

parchment paper

a Tupperware

some heavy duty kitchen paper

Fold the paper to make it fit in the Tupperware and moisten it abundantly. Do not let the water flood the whole thing. Place a piece of parchment paper on top of the moist paper and voila: you have your wet palette. You can leave colors on top of it for days and forget about them. I will do a detailed tutorial on how to build and use the wet palette. Someday….

Miniature holder

Holding your miniatures from the base is terrible: you can drop them, move them while you paint some detail, etc. It’s a really bad habit. For this reason, on the internet, you can find a whole bunch of fancy handles called miniature holders that supposedly help with the above problems. They come at a cost of course, which is usually not so small (you can use them forever). GW, for example, opened pre-sales of its own miniature grip. Getting a miniature holder in your hobby box is important but 16 bucks is really a lot for a piece of plastic. What to do then? All you need is some poster putty (also known as bluetack) and a comfortable handle of your choice. You can use old pill bottles, photo-film holders, everything that you can hold firmly on and just stick your miniature on top of it with you poster putty. It’s so very easy and so cheap that is probably the most important thing to do when you start to paint. This is so straightforward that I will skip the picture.

This concludes today’s post. I hope you found some interesting idea if you are planning on painting on a budget or if you just don’t have the money. You may also be one of those people that prefer to invest money in models or games instead of the tools. whatever your background is, if you put into practice all these tricks, you can lower your painting expenses up to 50/60%.

Game on!

[chandlermovestomichigan]

Thanksgiving break seems like a good time to reflect on my semester.

With only a month remaining, I’m past the point where things started to get crazy. This week was certainly one of the more difficult weeks, with a project due Thursday, a test Friday, and two papers the following Tuesday. It’s not going to get easier anytime soon, but that’s okay.

This semester, I’m completing two of my three remaining requirements for my history major and my last class that’s part of the core curriculum

Constitutional Convention - Dr. Rahe I was really excited about this course when it was first announced. Unfortunately, I was not prepared for the very extensive reading requirements for each class. I regretted taking it for a little while, but I’m glad I stuck with it. I’ve enjoyed discussing the notes from the Constitutional Convention, and having a better understanding of why the Constitution is the way it is.

Ancient Rome - Dr. Calvert This has been a great class. My favorite part is that instead of tests, we write papers. I definitely think all history classes should be this way. It’s so much more valuable to spend time with a text and analyze it than to just memorize facts, which often happens on tests. I was surprised to learn that we have two papers due during finals week, though. Until about two weeks ago, I thought there would just be one.

Human Biology - Dr. Johnson I’ve complained before on this blog (when I took Physics/Chemistry) about how awful my experiences have been with science classes. I hoped this class would be different, but it is not. There’s a tendency in the core science classes to assume that— even though they’re taught to non-science majors— everyone in the class has a pretty decent understanding of the subject from high school, and that this class is just a review and extension of everything we learned before. My last biology class was seven years ago, and it was bad. I have no knowledge to build on, and I have learned nothing in this class. I hear the tests are difficult even for people who understand the material, so you can imagine how that’s going for me.

Philosophy of Education - Dr. Beier I’ve been interested in taking this class for a while, and I’m glad I finally could. It’s been really interesting. It’s definitely a philosophy class, not so much a “how to teach” class, which I like. We’ve read Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, and, most recently, John Dewey. It’s all discussion-based, which is fun. I gave a presentation recently on “The Well-Trained Mind” by Susan Wise Bauer and Jessie Wise. I think it went well.

Lastly, I’m still taking voice lessons with Kristi Matson, and that has been good, although more challenging than previous semesters.

I’m also now the web editor for the Collegian, so I edit the online-only section Study Break. It’s a good time. It’s pretty flexible, so I can pretty much run whatever I want to. It’s certainly a challenge to get writers to turn pieces in on time. There were a couple of times at the beginning of the semester when I scrambled to write something since the pieces I was counting on didn’t come in. I started assigning more pieces than I needed, and that worked for a while, but there have still been a surprising number of instances where I get pieces back very late, incomplete, or not at all.

I tend to try a new planner technique every year, and I’ve finally settled on my favorite yet. It’s called bullet journaling, and I wrote an explanation of it on Study Break. It’s been fun to adapt my layouts as the semester goes on to find out what works best for me. I like doodling, and I like the super customizable aspect.

As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t blog as much as I used to because I journal much more consistently. I started my “One Line a Day” journal over a year ago, so now I can read what I was doing on a year before when I write my entries, which I love. And, I can refer to my journal when I blog.

September highlights 9/2- Some guys who live off-campus in a house called “The Womb” threw a music festival called Wombstock. I had a blast listening to loud music, and later, hanging with friends at Rough Draft, my favorite coffee/cocktail place in town. 9/17- I went to the Toledo Museum of Art, thanks to the Art department! I posted a few photosets from this day earlier on the blog. We went mainly for the Berlin painter exhibit and saw a lot of really neat Greek vases, and I also enjoyed seeing two paintings by Monet and two by Van Gogh. 9/21- At every SAI meeting, someone performs a “musicale.” I performed my first this semester. I did “Sawdust & Diamonds” by Joanna Newsom. I love her and I have long wanted to perform one of her songs, but they are generally very long and require a harp. So, this was a good chance to play only the last third of this song and with a piano, since it was pretty low-key. 9/23- Every semester, SAI hosts a Rose Tea. It’s a chance to get to know our potential new members and reminisce, as seniors share a memory. It was more emotional than I intended, but in a good way. 9/29- I went to the Most Popular Fair on Earth! It was super fun seeing animals, eating donuts, and more with dear friends. My favorite part was seeing a baby cow who had been born just a few hours earlier!

October highlights 10/5- SAI pledging ceremony! My friend Elena Creed and I are now co-bigs to Jessica MacFarlane, which is very exciting! Initiation is happening soon. 10/7- The Phi Mu Alpha electric serenades are always a delight, and this year was no exception. I watched them at both the SAI house and at Mauck because I was so excited. 10/16- I took a journalism seminar with Matthew Continetti about the history of conservative journalism. There was a lot of really good reading, and I enjoyed the discussions as well. 10/20-22- Mom and dad flew in for Parent’s Weekend. We took family photos, got dinner at Handmade (a sandwich shop that I had never been to that was delicious), and hung out reading and listening to live music at Rough Draft. 10/25- Fall Break began, and I house sat for a professor. 10/16- I drove with friends to Frankenmuth, Michigan, a cute little Bavarian tourist-y town. And, my boyfriend Jonathan flew in and met us there! That was wonderful! We ate delicious German food and fudge and went to the world’s largest Christmas store. 10/27-28- I showed Jonathan around all the important spots, like the Arb, Baw Beese, Checker Records, and Rough Draft. 10/31- I went with friends to a Halloween party at Rough Draft (which I realize now I have mentioned a lot) and that was very fun!

November highlights 11/4- SAI concert! I sang Regina Spektor’s “Us” with Maddie Greb on violin and Sarah Schutte on piano. It was delightful. Here is a video. I also sang in our two group pieces (“Give My Regards to Broadway” and “New York, New York”) and in an ensemble for a Hamilton song. 11/7- Fall Convocation, and I suddenly felt like an actual senior. 11/10- I went to Phi Mu Alpha’s annual Battle of the Bands, and it was a blast, as always. 11/11- I saw the Opera Workshop performance of Pirates of Penzance, and it was incredible. 11/17- I saw the theatre department’s performance of Proof, which I really loved.

It’s been a good semester, and it’s hard to believe I only have one left.

[artmutt]

Antwerp in a Day

Have you ever been in a restaurant that has an item you’ve never tried before as both an appetizer and an entrée, so you order the appetizer version, only to discover when it comes that it’s delicious, and you now want to change your order so that you can have more of it?

That was basically my experience with Antwerp. We allotted one day to visit, midway between Amsterdam and Brussels. Considering they do “day trips” from Brussels, where you spend something like 3 hours in Antwerp and drive back to Brussels, I thought it would be feasible to hit the highlights of Antwerp in a day. Once we got here, I wish that I had plotted two days at least, maybe three. OK, maybe a week. How about we find an apartment and just move there?

If you don’t follow European politics, Belgium is a country divided by language. There’s the Dutch-speaking north, that is next to the Netherlands, and calls itself Flemish, and there’s the French-speaking south, who are called Walloons. Brussels is in the bi-lingual center of the country. Namur tends to be the center of the French-speaking area, and Antwerp is the “capital” of the Flemish side of things. Having come from Amsterdam, it felt like we were still in the Netherlands.

You want to arrive in Antwerp by train. The Central Station is a masterpiece of Art Nouveau architecture, and a major photo op. I’ve never seen so many people get off a train and stop to whip out their cameras. Signs will point you to the many shops, or winkels, in the station, so if you’re jouncing for a waffle, you won’t have to wait. The Antwerp Zoo is also right next to the station, if you’re into such things. We were more interested in finding a taxi, which proved easy, and it got us to our hotel pretty quickly.

Our hotel, the Pilar, was a hybrid operation. Downstairs was a restaurant and shop (selling a bunch of different kinds of stuff), and then the upper floors were hotel rooms. It sat on a roundabout, where multiple streets came together, right across the street from the KMSKA - Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen, or the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp. Alas, as you can see from the photo, the museum is in the midst of a long and very extensive renovation, and has been closed for some time. Basically, from what locals told me, this rehab is mover slower than most of the glaciers in Switzerland. So alas, their extensive collection of works by James Ensor and home-boy Peter Paul Rubens was not available.

On the bright side, a handful of works from the museum are currently residing in the Cathedral, which was a long, pleasant walk from the hotel. A day trip to Antwerp would give you fifteen minutes at the cathedral: you need much longer. The architecture is interesting (Gothic) and so is the art inside (mostly Baroque, though some interesting modern stuff, too!).  Of course, part of the cathedral is undergoing renovation at present, so outside it’s covered with scaffolding. 

I don’t know what it is about the Flemish personality that it takes such interest in Michael driving the bad angels out of heaven, thereby causing them to transform into monsters. Maybe it’s because it gives artists a chance to loose their imaginations upon human figures. Somehow, Michael often comes off looking self-righteous, and hell looks like it would be a lot more fun.

The cathedral also had an elegantly painted cycle of paintings of the Stations of the Cross along one wall. This one really struck me. The look on Jesus’s face seems to say, “Oy! The day I’m having and now you’re yanking on my shirt??” If you want to understand where the mindset of the white male victim comes from, you just need to stroll around a Flemish church for a few minutes: poor white guy! So abused, when all he wanted was to be nice!

Then we found (after some wandering around lost) the Museum Plantin-Moretus, the former home and workshop of a printer of books. It’s a beautiful building, and you get to enjoy being inside this lavish home, as well as check out the displays of printing presses, type, old books, etc. You can even pick up a printed sheet that, properly folded, sewn and cut, shows you how a single piece of paper could become a small 16-page booklet.

But my favorite thing at the museum was the room with embossed leather wallpaper. OK, sure, it made the room kind of dark, but this stuff was fabulous!

Feeling footsore after all our walking, we jumped the tram running down the street to our hotel, and rode it red for three stops back to the hotel. (I don’t recommend doing something like this: much better to have a proper ticket! But it sure beat walking!) By late afternoon, the light in the Zuid (pronounced Sout, as in the Sout’ side of town) was reminiscent of the light in many Flemish paintings. Indeed, that light, the lovely architecture, and the pale blue sky punctuated with clouds, was part of why I wanted to linger...

We went out for dinner, and found, oddly, that a number of restaurants were closed on Tuesday evening. Go figure! We had dinner at a sushi place that seemed to be completely run and managed by women. Women also seemed to make up the bulk of the clientele. Indeed, you could almost taste the estrogen in the air, mingled with the wasabi. 

Our hotel room came complete with a bathtub the size of a lap pool! Mind you, you had to scale a meter-high wall to get in (so climbing out, dripping wet, was a challenge!) and it took forever to get enough hot water in it to enjoy, but it did feel amusingly extravagant. While the room had some issues, we loved the high windows, and the sense of design of the place!

The next morning, before catching our train for Belgium, we had time for a visit to the Photo museum. Of course, I went down the wrong street for starters, and we ended up wanting all over the Zuid-side of town, trying to get our bearings and find the freaking museum, which was supposed to only be about a block away from the hotel. Oh well, we got to see a lot more of the area that way, and we came across this handsome guy in the middle of a square. Naked boy holding a big ball: OK, whatever.

We did finally make it to the photo museum (which goes by FOMU for short). As you can see, the building is undergoing renovation (you can’t make this stuff up). The main exhibition, which we enjoyed very much, was devoted to the Moon, in honor of the 50th anniversary of the Moon Landing (on 21 July 1969). There was an array of moon-related photos, dating back into the 19th century, and providing a kind of historical overview of how the moon has been thought of and imagined by earth-dwellers over the centuries. My favorite piece was a work by Katie Patterson, a sound artist, who converted Beethoven’s Moonlight sonata into morse code, and bounced it off the moon. When the signal returned, it had been altered, and some of the information lost. She then recorded this version of the work, resulting in a partially erased Moonlight sonata, with pauses and missing notes. It was lovely, in its partially erased state. Realized on a player piano in a gallery full of satellite pictures of the moon, it made for a lovely presence.

After the museum, we had just enough time to get back to the hotel and check-out, before catching a train to Brussels.

[renrutnnej]

I’ve become the adult I needed as a child.

My adventures in mental health.

Back in college, I was a huge fan of this new show called Grey’s Anatomy. Its lead character Meredith Grey spoke often of being dark and twisty, qualities I identified with but had trouble spotting in the glorified soft-lit medical soap opera. Oh, her parents divorced and she had abandonment issues? How quaint. I rolled my eyes as she pouted and attracted scores of dudes with nicknames like McDreamy and McSteamy.

Darkness

This piece isn’t meant to detail all of the horrible things that happened to me, but suffice it to say I experienced my first trauma as a child younger than my daughter, and it was sexually abusive. I did not have a childhood beyond that point.

I have the memories and my family has the photos, but I don’t think anyone who ever knew me described me as a happy child.

I’ve said it before, and even my mother described me as a “little adult” from birth. So let’s talk about mental health. To survive what happened to me, my childhood mind wrapped those memories up tight and tucked them away, so I could move forward. This was also made easier by the fact that my family moved around the same time, so I left the physicality of those memories behind.

I grew up in a new place, and filled up those spaces in my mind with new thoughts and memories, but there was always a lingering darkness. I was afraid of adult men almost my entire childhood but I couldn’t articulate that fear or name the reason for it. I also struggled with a simultaneous desire to be in the constant presence of adults, for safety.

My family teased me at gatherings for sitting in the corner of a room, reading a book and keeping to myself, rather than playing outside with the kids. I grew overwhelming anxieties for reasons I didn’t understand. Going to school every day gave me a stomachache. Watching the news and reading the paper gave me an ulcer. The world was a very bad, very scary place to me since the age of five and I didn’t know why. I couldn’t remember and I didn’t have the words.

Without the memories, or the words, I discerned that the world was a bad and scary place for me, because I was bad. I knew I was different from everyone else and I knew that it was bad. My siblings played happily, without care and seemed adept at socializing. I think I only turned out somewhat normal because I grew up in a very small community so the people around me from kindergarten to graduation remained stable and mostly the same, so I was able to form relationships around routine.

Suicide

The first time I grappled with suicide (there would be several) I was thirteen years old. The combination of my internal darkness and the awkwardness of puberty turned lethal. By this time I had begun actively repressing things that were hard or scary. I learned that through a combination of repeating phrases in my head with exhausting physical strain I could banish thoughts. I’d fall asleep, after sobbing silently (a skill I taught myself young and has been quite handy as a young mother), repeating the phrase “You don’t feel. You don’t feel. You don’t feel. You don’t feel. You don’t feel…” until I truly couldn’t.

I filled journals with similar repetitious phrases.

Everything inside me was weird and broken and wrong.

The events leading up to my first suicide attempt came about due to another lethal combination: my internal darkness plus my devout religious beliefs plus peer pressure.

I learned that my parents’ union wasn’t a blessed partnership that had come together fatefully, but a hasty legally binding ceremony that only slightly validated my birth. I was the result of a shotgun wedding. This is absolutely not a big deal now. But back then most of my close friends had parents 20 years older than my own, which in retrospect did seem odd. And most of my friends were second, middle, or younger children in their families. My family life at the time was strained. My young mind and heart gathered up all of these factors and came to a singular conclusion.

I was the sole reason for everyone who I loved’s misery. Without me, my parents would have fulfilled their dreams individually and my siblings, well they’d have never been born. But maybe they’d have been born to a happy family, one better off than ours.

I had to go.

My attempt was unsuccessful, with further dampened the dark places in my mind. I was so bad, so wrong, I couldn’t even kill myself right.

Bullying Myself

I was able to hide my shaky mental state throughout high school through some sort of magic concoction of intelligence, cynical wit, and sheer busy-bodied ness. You would never have guessed how much I hated myself. I was involved in clubs, sports, volunteering, student legislation, leadership and I kept regular jobs. I told everyone my goal was to get out of that small town.

I just wanted to get away from myself.

University frightened the ever loving shit out of me to my core. But I’d created a hard persona, who wanted to be independent and was vaguely ambitious? The darkness pervading in my mind kept me from wanting anything truly for myself; I knew deep within myself that I was different and bad and that I didn’t deserve the life reserved for those special sort of people who seemed to have it all.

I knew it the way I believed I wasn’t really worthy of salvation, or to be someone’s wife or my worst nightmare — having to be someone’s mother. I could not stand to think about someone having to look up to someone as truly awful and lonely as me.

Through much of my young adulthood I was my own worst bully. This is a pattern of thinking that I’ve struggled to work through still.

This pattern of thinking looked something like this:

I would decide what (or who) I wanted to be like

I would participate in some action

Mentally I would be terrified and paralyzed with anxiety and fear the entire time

Even though I was terrified I would bully myself mentally throughout the action “A smarter/stronger/prettier/better Jenn would….”

Afterward I would feel relieved that I had survived, or that was it over. Or overwhelming and debilitating shame.

And then I’d criticize myself endless at every perceived failing during the action.

Very rarely in my young adulthood did I bully myself through any sort of “growing experience.”

I kept putting myself through experiences hoping for some sort of release but I ended up more often than not with more memories that needed active (and exhaustive) repression.

A Series of Traumas

I’ve written before about how I had stalkers in college and how was I was raped my freshman year. I’ve also mentioned a physically abusive relationship. What I haven’t addressed was my complete inability to handle male sexual attention. Being traumatized as a child about your sexuality, but not remembering why you are like that makes every sexual experience a dark and twisty one, right up in your face.

I’ve tried to be a proud, sex-positive, modern woman about my sexcapades but truthfully my history is more like magically hoping the next guy cured me of whatever was dark and wrong in my mind. In me.

But it never worked, so afterward I had to deal with overwhelming embarrassment over this naivety about true love conquering all or some bullshit, and then just straight shame that I kept going through guy after guy.

I sexually traumatized myself in college trying to find something outside of me to fix what was broken inside of me.

That’s not to say that people weren’t available to help take advantage of me. There was a boyfriend I can confidently say raped me on several occasions. At the time I felt like the worst girlfriend on earth for not being attracted to him in those moments or for lacking some sort of sexual je ne sais quoi.

I dove head first into drugs and alcohol for the next few years. I participated in a lot of dumb, risky behaviors because why not? Everything was bad, including me and I was probably going to die young I was convinced.

On one spring break in Las Vegas, completely wasted, I stood on the balcony of an Imperial Palace hotel room I shared with friends and stared down at all the drunk people dancing to obnoxious pop music from the Harrah’s circus club thing. I wondered if any of them would even hear the thud of me falling. My friend came into the room and embarrassed, I quickly stepped down from the ledge.

Until I met my last boyfriend in college, there are entire chunks that are a blur of blackouts between class and work. Until I started missing class entirely. The ones that couldn’t keep me occupied at least. Any sort of working or workshop class I’d attend. But those auditorium sized lecture classes became a sort of torture forum for me.

As it turns out, the place I’d been banishing my thoughts to was starting to crack. If I wasn’t fucked up or distracted (like during a lecture) horrible thoughts would start to trickle in with no way for me to avoid them–and absolutely no way for me to process them. I regressed to a five year old and broke out sobbing like a lunatic in lectures a couple of times and that embarrassed me enough to never return.

I failed out of university after my first senior year.

The unraveling

What I didn’t understand about being traumatized a child, is that until the child has had a chance to process their trauma (usually with the help of an adult), they don’t grow. They definitely don’t move one forward in a healthy sense.

Every additional trauma I encountered thrust me into a mental place of the five year old girl. With no vocabulary or tools or knowledge to help herself.

That explains why, when faced with the volume and enormity of my emotional and sexual trauma load, I regressed to five year old Jenn and was paralyzed.

It’s important to understand that at this point in my adulthood I’d told very few people about my inner self and the traumas that had happened.

Well that’s not entirely true. I’d written an op-ed piece about being raped for the college newspaper when I was on staff, in a rage about the then editor-in-chief’s remarks during a meeting about girls lying about being raped to get away with being whores (paraphrased). I completely traumatized myself by doing that.

For long after that I was approached by either women, confessing their own traumatizing assault stories, or by men, apologizing to me about what had happened. One night, a group of dudes recognized me from my story (we printed photos with op-ed’s so my smiling face appeared next to my story…kind of bizarre in retrospect), and exclaimed, “YOU’RE THE RAPE GIRL! Let us buy you a drink!” Which I definitely took them up on that because I think it’s the only somewhat monetary reward I received from the experience.

Other than that I told friends some things but not everything. At the ordering of the university, I had to take summer school courses to get to good standing where I could (possibly) graduate the next year–AND I had to go to both academic and mental health counseling.

I was deeply ashamed of my failures, after all I was an intelligent and vaguely ambitious person who had authored many important pieces in the school newspaper and had very angsty LiveJournal with a decent following.

I used my shame as motivation and was able to buck up in school (graduating a year late) and participate the school’s other mandates. I became obsessed with my academic counselor and I told her everything. She is a goddess and I love her to this day. My mental health counselor was a meek piece of work. I mostly felt like she was getting some sort of sensitivity-porn-type high from me retelling (and reliving) my emotional and sexually traumatic experiences.

She was the “How does that make you feel?” type of counselor I felt like was about as useful as talking to a wall. Hmm, how do feelings make me feel, given that I’ve been using all of my internal strength to hide them from myself for oh, the past 16 or 17 years?

At least I said somethings out loud for the first time. But she made me very bitter on mental professionals as a whole for a very long time.

Oh, also, she encouraged me to join my university’s volunteer sexual assault response team. And me, being newly sort of motivated, and also an idiot, did it. And continued to re-traumatize myself for my last year of school by helping newly traumatized victims and exposing myself to their pain.

Pregnancy

Through a new start and earning my degree I managed to scrape together about a thimble full of self esteem and moved to Las Vegas with my sister to begin our adult lives.

That plan unraveled quickly and in no time at all I found myself alone (my parents and sister moved back to Washington state within a year), working a job I hated (retail) and pregnant by a much younger guy who was supposed to be a fling on my way to success.

Sorry if you thought I was always a badass mom to Mila, but our relationship started off with the darkest period of my life.

I resigned myself to the only fate I could imagine: surely I would die in labor. I couldn’t possibly raise a healthy human. I prayed my child would be a boy, and that he would be like his father and not tortured by darkness.

I prayed for a quick and painless death.

It’s not very popular to mourn your pending death while everyone around you is elated about the tiny life you’re bringing into the world so I tried, really unsuccessfully, to hide my misery. I took long walks, and filled pages of my journals up with doom and gloom and a lot of tear stains. I slept as much as I could. I tried to avoid talking about my baby at all costs, refusing to have any baby showers, for fear that any attention would reveal my nihilistic views.

I didn’t understand how this could happen to me.

Okay, confession time. I did relish the sort of perverse sense of fear I spread through the young mothers in my birthing class. The instructor asked me to stop asking so many questions about death because it was “too distracting” and “scaring the other mothers.”

Mysteriously, I survived. Just like women have been doing since the beginning of time. Although you’d think I’d be a prime candidate for postpartum depression, thankfully I was passed over for that condition.

As I’ve mentioned in the past, I’m the most god awful person without sleep, and my daughter waited nine long months to sleep through the night. But other than that, I was blessed with a healthy, happy, adorable baby girl.

She was impossible not to love. I never figured myself a nurturing or motherly type, but I couldn’t not care for her. Maybe it was genetic, at least at first it probably was. As sleep returned, and sanity, my child awakened something in me that I had never experienced in my life: my own capacity for which I could love another person.

Typical parenting stuff, but it completely changed my world. I vowed that this brown eyed blob deserved the best fighting chance at life, and despite her parentage, I would do whatever it took to propel her forward.

The busy-ness of being a young mother (sheer exhaustion) kept the darkness away for a time.

Single parenting

A few years later when my relationship inevitably fell apart, I took it really hard.

On one hand, I felt a freedom I hadn’t felt in a long time. I could take my child back home to Washington where my friends and family lived, and pursue something different.

On the other hand, I felt I had already failed my child in the worst way possible — one half of her family structure and sense of stability was now missing. This failure to protect her sense of self and emotions tore a gaping hole through the core of me.

A perfect place for the darkness to regrow.

Against my better judgment, and trying to regain some semblance of a life, I began dating again. The first guy I dated post-domestic partnership was a Navy guy, who often sided with the overt sexist reasoning of my boss and the men in the culture I inhabited as a technical writer for a government contractor on a Department of Energy site. Complaining to him about work sucked. He made me feel like a silly blonde, a thing I knew I wasn’t. But he, he was a nuclear submarine pilot, and very impressed with himself. And bald.

When that was over, one of my close friends talked me into dating her ex-brother in law. Big mistake. HUGE. In that relationship my low self esteem tortured me for the first two years. I allowed someone to not be faithful, to treat me way less than I was worth, and to be wholly unavailable. Because I thought replacing the missing “good man” in my child’s life was more important than me wasting my life wishing for the mythic perfect partner.

Until I didn’t anymore.

A turning point

Working at &yet didn’t magically make me a better person. In fact, being hired at &yet turned me into the most insecure, anxious person I’ve ever been. Surrounded by talented and well-known people in an industry I respected but didn’t understand made for a mostly paralyzed Jenn.

My insecurities bled into everything I was doing at that point. The inside of my head was a cacophony of second guessing my every thought, every move. The nastiest voices criticized me mercilessly and wildly speculated as to what people thought of me, every aspect of me.

This team was one I respected and admired so intensely that the stakes felt high and the pressure I put on myself was keeping me from being effective at anything. I still kept a confessional and highly emotional blog, and after one particularly dejected post, my teammate and mentor Adam reached out to me. He offered to introduce to me to a counselor friend of his.

I remember a strange mix of feelings reading his message: embarrassment, relief, my past bitterness toward mental health counselors. I archived his message with eyes full of tears.

Some time passed and the thought that my child is basing what she understands about adults, and thus the world, on her experiences watching and learning from me, gnawed away at me.

I did not have basic tools to teach her.

What are you supposed to do in a fight? (I didn’t know because my parents didn’t fight in front of us.) What do good professional relationships look like? What do people mean by boundaries? What am I teaching her about the relationships I have in my life?

I’d become a responsible, clean, sober adult who cared for her physical needs, but I was clueless as to how I could help her become a good person, a solid adult.

I messaged Adam back.

Counseling and progress

I was skeptical about counselors but I trusted Adam. I say this with one hundred percent certainty — going to a Cognitive Behavioral Therapy trained professional saved my life.

My counselor started with the tough stuff: addressing the darkness, the trauma that had happened to me, the subsequent build up of feelings—without requesting the gritty details. She helped me realize that all along I have been a person with worth, deserving of love and respect.

Being a parent helped me to heal in that I was able to look back at my childhood self with the deep intensity of a mother’s love for a child, and tell myself from an adult place the things I needed to hear as a child.

Imagining my child, my greatest love, having to endure the things I did as a child, and as a young woman, broke me entirely on several occasions. But the heartbreak and the grieving were completely essential for my regrowth.

Addressing my trauma, validating my experiences, and giving me vocabulary and tools to deal with being triggered gave me a firm foundation on which to stand when dealing with feelings for the first time in my life.

I also found the empathy I needed to be able to forgive myself for a lot of things I felt warranted me a miserable existence. Forgiveness is the only way forward.

I had found my footing.

It took a lot of work, but I came to understand that I was not bad, wrong, or weird. Well, bad weird. I own being good weird.

That was half of the work. Situational depression (from which I regularly suffer) reared its ugly head during a dark period in the end of 2014 when I was being stalked. It was at that point I began taking anti-depressants.

It felt like I woke up one morning and someone had turned the volume all the way down on all of the negative, nagging voices. I was finally left to live in my mind and think my own thoughts, which could still contain anger, worry, or sadness — but not at an overwhelming clip.

Medication (which I was a huge asshole to my close friend Eric about for a long time) balanced me out in a way I never imagined possible. I went from pharma-skeptic to life-long believer.

What now?

I went through my first healthy relationship, and consequent breakup. And though I was sad, and felt sadder than I had in a long time, I never felt myself slipping into darkness. It was a legit, clean sad. The newness of such an intense feeling grasped me for quite a while.

I moved across the country, determined to take steps toward having more of an influence on my own fate. But my intention was to take baby steps. I moved the New York, with a steady job, and my team as a second family support network. When I was laid off in October, I lost one and a half of those things. With my team in shock and mourning, I realized I needed to work on a new support network. (Not that the network of friends I’ve made at &yet is gone, it’s very much the opposite).

This is all to say that I was not prepared for that one-two punch of moving and then loss. But I didn’t collapse, I didn’t even cry. My worse nightmare ended up not even being really a nightmare but a nudge forward. And still, the darkness didn’t come.

The closest thing to shame I’ve felt is guilt over not knowing what I should pursue next, aware that opportunities are ripe within my grasp. Ooh, and that one time I had to borrow money between unemployment checks from my dad. Meh, but that’s not even shame really, more of could you book a car to take Mila to the airport so we don’t have to ride the subway at 3am type thing.

I even went a little overboard while my daughter was out of town and ended up lying on the couch all New Year’s Day through a combination of blackout drunkenness and PMS, feeling like I was the worst mother of all time. (When my child was in another state, completely adored and cared for, and I was home safe in my warm apartment streaming HBO Now and eating delivered breakfast foods like a spoiled tear-stained brat). I felt the darkness, the child in me, creep up in some of my thoughts.

Thankfully by the end of the evening, I had regained my senses and realized that I’d just made a mistake in maybe the most responsible way possible? And forgave myself and moved on.

My adventures in mental health have led me to become the adult I needed as a child, and the person my daughter needs now.

I’ve achieved a few items on the list of tools and questions that plagued me in terms of teaching Mila to be an adult, and a good person.

I understand that I’m not the best mother alive, but I’m a fucking boss when it comes to being Mila’s mom.

We do this thing, and we’ve done it ever since I read THIS BOOK and I know she is sick of this game but I really want it to stick.

Jenn: Why do I love you Mila? Is it because you are pretty? Mila: Nope. Jenn: Is it because you are smart? Mila: Nope. Jenn: Is it because you are kind? Mila: Nope. Jenn: Is it because you are a good listener? Mila: Nope! Jenn: Well why do I love you then? Mila: Because I’m me.

That’s all that any of us wants, right? To know that we are loved, not for our work, our occupation, our appearance, our personality, our network, or anything we could possibly do or achieve in this lifetime — but simply because we are human beings, worthy of being loved.

And nothing will ever change that.

Originally published on Medium, March 7, 2016.