#she's got a lot of songs about fire in her repertoire

[pvthfinder]

"Sure y' can shoot that thin' straight, lass?" "You worry 'bout doin' yer job. I'll worry 'bout mine."

[posttexasstressdisorder]

So synchronicities abound right now. I don't know exactly WHY or HOW, but they definitely are happening lots more frequently.

Example: I just did the prep and got what will be an excellent beef stew on to simmer for a few hours.

ALL through this I was humming an old Edith Piaf waltz and then vocalizing it louder, and went with it. So I was chopping away, browned the meat, chopped the onions and garlic, and the carrots, basically scatting this Edith Piaf waltz, and visualizing how I was gonna play it, the arrangement, everything, and being just generally happy as shit singin' and choppin'.

So I get everything finished, got the stew on a decent simmer and came back here to my room, where KDFC is playin' on the tubes. It's announcements, and then the FIRST thing that comes on, music-wise, is an orchestral arrangement of the song that MADE Piaf who she was, "La Vie En Rose".

I go from singing one Piaf waltz to hearing an orchestra playing her most famous song.

This kinda thing has been happening a lot. I used to call it "Breadcrumbs From The Universe"...follow the trail of synchronicities to what you're supposed to do.

So i'm about to get the keyboard all cleared off and fire up the tower and play that waltz in my brain first, then go through my 10-CDs worth of Piaf that I have in my collection, and figure out the NAME of the damn waltz!

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

OK...sat down and got the main melody out, and fingers just kinda went for Dminor as the key, so I went with it. Thing is, I can usually transpose a melody to another key with just a little exploration, which is a good thing, because after searching through all of the PIaf I have, I simply couldn't spot it as an obvious title.

So I went through track-by-track, until I finally found it: on Vol. 5 of "The Complete Piaf" (French 10 CD set) The little waltz is actually called "Sous Le Ciel De Paris" or "Under The Sky Of Paris". It was from a 1951 film of the same name, and Piaf recorded it in '54. It is actually in Bminor. It is a catchy little waltz, and I will probably end up figuring the arrangement out. I've at least got a head start on it.

It will sit in the repertoire next to the OTHER Piaf waltz I already play, which i is from 1946, "Un Refrain Courait dans la Rue". I recorded it back in 1998. It's in Aminor, which is probably why I reached for a Dminor melody line first. I don't know how I do this shit...I just do it.

At any rate, here's my 1998 recording of the OTHER Piaf waltz, "Un Refrain Courait dans la Rue", played on a Baldwin baby grand, at a small studio in Houston.

[buckyr00s]

Top Gun Second Gen and Their Go-To Karaoke Songs

author's note: listen, I'm currently working on Fanboy x Reader and Coyote x Reader pieces, but I couldn't help but do this. Feel free to add your own song ideas ;)

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It's very clear that Bradley "Rooster" Bradshaw's go-to song is Jerry Lee Lewis' Great Balls of Fire. But he saves that song for the most special occasions--wouldn't want to overplay the song he cherishes most.

At the end of the day, his karaoke repertoire reflects his retro soul. Rock, jazz, and blues run through his veins and he's more of a lover than he is a fighter, which is why Frankie Valli's Can't Take My Eyes off You, Frank Sinatra's Fly Me To The Moon, Queen's Crazy Little Thing Called Love, and Roy Orbinson's Oh, Pretty Woman are some of his favourite karaoke songs.

All-American classics are Jake "Hangman" Seresin's wheelhouse. He's almost always one of the first to get on stage and take the mic. If he's going to perform, he might as well set the bar for folks. And you better believe he's the type of person to command the stage, taking the mic off its stand the second he can.

Being the man of the people, his absolute go-to song is Sweet Caroline by Neil Diamond. Don McLean's American Pie, the Eagles' Hotel California, Journey's Don't Stop Believin', and Steppenwolf's Born to Be Wild are his back-ups.

Natasha "Phoenix" Trace is the person to go to for up-beat karaoke vibes. Wait until the liquid courage sets in and she'll unleash her inner disco, country, pop diva. She'll always get everyone up, singing, and dancing. And she's definitely got moves of her own.

ABBA's Dancing Queen, Carrie Underwood's Before He Cheats, Spice Girls' Wannabe, Shania Twain's Man! I Feel Like A Woman!, and Cyndi Lauper's Girls Just Wanna Have Fun are amongst her favourites.

Robert "Bob" Floyd sticks to the karaoke classics. It takes a lot of convincing to get him on the mic and it'll usually take him until the chorus to loosen up. But my goodness, when he does, everyone is left with goofy grins on their faces.

Sweet, wholesome Bob only sings sweet, wholesome songs. He has a rotation of songs including Glen Campbell's Rhinestone Cowboy, Elton John's Rocket Man, the Monkees' I'm a Believer, and Electric Light Orchestra's Mr. Blue Sky.

You'll catch him on stage holding the mic with both hands, doing his signature side step move with an occasional head bob--pun not intended but so welcome.

Hero by Mariah Carey is Javy "Coyote" Machado's favourite karaoke song. You cannot convince me otherwise. While he isn't the most skilled singer, he puts on a hell of a production. Because if he's going to sing, then by God, he's going to sing.

And if he's not singing Hero, though, he'll choose a different power ballad. Whitney Houston's I Have Nothing, Jennifer Holliday's And I'm Telling You I'm Not Going, and Céline Dion's It's All Coming Back to Me Now are some of his back-up songs.

Each time he walks up to the mic, he'll half-jokingly, but very seriously preface his performance with, "I'm gunna slow it down for you now." Needless to say, he brings the house down every time.

I mean, come on. The man's call sign is Fanboy for goodness sake. He wears it proudly. Mickey Garcia is a big believer that you can't turn a room like you can with boybands' greatest hits. Backstreet Boys' I Want It That Way, *NSYNC's It's Gonna Be Me, and Boyz II Men's End of the Road (monologues and all) are some of his favourite pleasures that he's absolutely not guilty about.

He's also not shy about honouring his Latino identity with songs like J Balvin's Mi Gente, Enrique Iglesias' Bailamos, Bad Bunny's Yo Perreo Sola, and Shakira's Whenever, Wherever.

Any song he choses, he's singing his heart out and giving it his all. He wouldn't have it any other way. The man low-key has pipes, but he'd rather spend his time on the mic playing it off for laughs than actually showcasing his talent.

You can't tell me that Reuben "Payback" Fitch isn't the life of the party. The man makes it his mission to make any function interesting. Like come on, proposing the 200 push-up punishment during TOPGUN training? If he's going to do anything, it better entertain him.

He's much less strict about his karaoke songs, and probably has the most diverse repertoire out of everyone. House of Pain's Jump Around, TOTO's Africa, Marvin Gaye's Ain't No Mountain High Enough, Lou Bega's Mambo No. 5, Outcast's Hey Ya!, Blackstreet's No Diggity, Gnarls Barkley's Crazy.

Everyone knows his taste is impeccable and it's always exciting when he walks up to the mic. You never know what you get, other than the guarantee that the party will turn up to eleven.

author's note: well how'd I do? did I miss any songs? also, there is a severe lack of variety in the GIFs out there for Coyote, Fanboy, and Payback. someone pls helppppp.

main masterlist || send requests

[lexi-the-twilight-dragon]

So I just went marshmallow toasting for the first time since pre-pandemic, and now I feel like writing KH marshmallow headcanons. Enjoy.

(Also, I'm writing these with the assumption Sora and Strelitzia return to the KH universe at some point)

Sora, Kairi and Riku are the ones hosting the bonfire. They used to go to bonfires with their parents as kids, so it's nice to reconnect with a (mostly) untroubled childhood after All The Bullshit(tm) of the past few years

Kairi's adopted mother makes homemade marshmallows, but there are gonna be a LOT of people, so she takes commercial ones. She does however have a small container of homemade ones that there is a very slim chance she'll share

Riku does most of the bonfire-building. It gives him a few flashbacks which in turn give him a lot to reflect on. This boy overthinks a lot and he needs a hug

Sora tries to start the bonfire with Fira. This is not a good idea

Terra and Aqua are subsequently on the "if this all goes horribly wrong, we can put out the fire" squad

Donald insists he is also part of that squad, but no one pays him any mind, and he performs no duties to the effect

Sora also sits way too close to the fire; his marshmallow isn't the only thing getting lightly toasted

Terra and Aqua end up wearing half their armour just so their clothes don't catch fire

Ventus has to toast with one hand and hold Chirithy in the other. Eventually, he just holds Chirithy in both hands and Chirithy toasts the marshmallows for both of them

Roxas and Xion literally have four years of life experience between them, they have NEVER toasted marshmallows before. Isa hasn't since he was a teenager in RG. Lea used to use his fire magic while in the Organization, but it wasn't nearly the same, so he stopped

Roxas accidentally sets his marshmallow on fire, and tries not to be visibly upset as it melts into the coals

Lea purposefully sets his marshmallow on fire, and barely manages to rescue it from melting into the coals before eating the charred remains

Isa gets his marshmallow perfectly toasted first try, and gives it to Roxas

Xion tries to copy Isa and also sets her marshmallow on fire. Isa gives her one too

Mickey tries to be a good instructor on the best marshmallow toasting, but to little avail

Namine is NOT appropriately dressed for this AT ALL. Like girl, I know the white dress is your thing, but just because there's a FIRE doesn't mean it isn't COLD. She ends up with someone's coat soon enough, and is absolutely swamped in it

The RG guys have been meaning to take Ienzo camping since they adopted him, but never got the chance. They are ABSOLUTELY making up for it now

Ienzo has to remind them the while yes, he's never done this before, he IS in his twenties and a scientist to boot; he can figure out how to toast a marshmallow on his own

Ansem then spends the rest of the night discussing Dad-of-a-Young-Adult Feels with Goofy

(Let Max out of the basement, Disney)

Even's marshmallow stick is like 2m long; this man is going NOWHERE NEAR the fire, but he still wants his marshmallow toasted, dagnabit

Aeleus, the team dad (change my mind), teaches all the kids to make s'mores. He is equally encouraging whether you can make one better than he can or can barely hold yours together

Dilan is put in charge of raking the coals, but gets too enthusiastic about it to the point it's intolerable to be near them for a few minutes

Hayner is the one that starts the spooky stories

Pence has the most spooky stories

Olette acts spooked even though she's heard them all before

Elrena has to be reminded that there's a difference between spooky and gruesome

Lauriam is simultaneously proud, a little sad, and concerned that Strelitzia doesn't have to turn to him for comfort through the spooky stories

Demyx provides sound effects to the spooky stories, which actually make them spookier. When they get too spooky and they have to stop, he has a whole repertoire of campfire songs to bring up the mood. They don't last long either, but longer than anyone expected

[facets-and-rainbows]

Blue Exorcist 10th anniversary book Q&A session

The 10th anniversary book has a section where Katoh answers 100 questions submitted by fans on Twitter, so here they are translated/paraphrased! May contain manga spoilers up to the recent flashback arc, so be warned.

(Note that I’m playing it very fast and loose here because there are A HUNDRED OF THEM, so not exact wordings, but it should capture the gist. Lemme know if there are any you want elaborated on)

1. Katoh likes the feel of traditional drawing more than digital but is impressed with how far digital has come

2. Meph THOROUGHLY ABUSES spacetime to watch all his shows and ensure that he gets all the merch he wants

3. Did the girls take all of Yukio’s school uniform buttons in middle school? Yes, they did (apparently it’s like A Thing for girls to ask for a button from their crush at middle school graduation, based on some sad movie from the 60s where a guy who got drafted as a kamikaze pilot gave a girl one of his uniform buttons to remember him by)

4. Rin's tail is about a meter long

5. There are tons of servants working at Mephisto's mansion. Belial is in charge of them

6. Katoh borrows from all sorts of neat real locations when making settings

7. Katoh identifies with pretty much all the characters the most! Except Lucifer.

8. Demon designs she's proud of include the impure king and hachirou, pretty much anything that was the main one in an arc

9. Katoh lists a bunch of her favorite musical artists/music she’s listening to recently: King Gnu, Official Hige Dandism, Kenshi Yonezu, BAD HOP, Sakanaction, Keyakizaka 46, Hypnosis Mic, Aimer, B’Z, Queen Bee.

10. Awww the rabbit manga that characters are often reading isn't just Robo to Usakichi, it's an even older one that she drew as a little kid

11. She likes industrial style interior designs

12. Rin and Yukio alternated who got the top bunk growing up, because they couldn't agree on it lol

13. Katoh cares a whole lot about panel layouts and speech bubble positions, might even be her favorite part of the process (it shows!)

4. Katoh does NOT have a mashou, lol

15. Rin has probably been practicing in secret so he can learn to carry stuff with his tail

16. Izumo probably got into shojo manga around 1st grade, her mom had some around the house

17. Specialty dishes: Rin - lots of stuff but especially nabe Yuri - stuff you can throw together quickly Shiro - stuff he learned from Yuri and/or cookbooks, alongside teaching Rin Yukio - Does. Not. Cook.

18. Can't pick a favorite place she's been on research, but there's no place like Japan

19. Kinzou's band isn't currently meeting because demons, but he's probably still thinking of new songs

20. Hardest characters to draw: anyone with detailed flowing hair. Hardest to write for: Lightning and Gedouin. She had to go read books about serial killers specifically for material for Gedouin, lol 

21. Suguro actually gets a dorm room to himself, though allegedly Yukio is technically assigned as his roommate, lol. Didn't end up that way what with Yukio being a teacher and also Rin’s whole...situation

22. Shiemi makes some of her own hair accessories! Cute

23. Katoh doesn't mind if you include stuff with fan letters but check with the editor first

24. Time for making each chapter: Planning/storyboarding: 1-5 days. Sketching: 3-5 days. Drawing/inking: the rest. Just...the rest of the time

25. Neither Suguro nor Izumo have dated before and neither is currently dating. But that's probably just because things were hectic for them! It could happen

26. Yukio breaks 5 or 6 pairs of glasses a year, someone get this kid a strap or something

27. How many spare glasses does Yukio have? Check the fanbook lol it's in there (dang it Katoh)

28. The demon she wants us to pay the most attention to is Lucifer. Because plot.

29. What's under the Order's big meeting table? It's a BOTTOMLESS PIT and if you fall in it you DIE that's what makes it COOL (laughs)

30. What are the job requirements for the angelic legion? Literally just Arthur liking you and inviting you to join

31. She WANTS to do more character profiles but just hasn't gotten to it

32. Rin's tail feels like a cat tail, texture wise

33. The "red Assiah fire" is literally just actual fire nothing special

34. Rin's current hair color is light blue fading to white at the ends

35. Thoughts on Rin's growth: she likes that he stays positive in awful situations and she also thinks it's very main character of him to face the past instead of avoiding it

36. Mephisto didn't purposely surround Rin with stuffed animals when he woke up after going crispy. Mephisto's bed is just Like That

37. Kurikara was based on a cool sword she found in a sword book, but that one was technically just a ceremonial sword. The symbol on it us a Sanskrit letter kaan (sp?) associated with Fudou Myouou

38. Kuro can communicate with normal cats and hangs out with them often

39. Sometimes Shiemi's skirt is extra fancy around the hem what's up with that? Apparently it's an optional accessory that comes with the skirts help I haven't noticed this and don't know any fashion terms in any language

40. When coloring, Katoh always tries to have an overall theme in mind ("emphasis on blue" etc) so it comes together in the end

41. Yes the twins are genetically related to Shiro because of Goro (she says they're like his nephews but I say GENETICALLY at least they'd be indistinguishable from his children)

42. Strongest mom of all the strong moms around here? Yuri! Did you SEE her give birth??

43. Are you careful about your own health Katoh-sensei? Not particularly! Her mom has had to bring her food at work sometimes! Don't do this at home kids

44. At the dating events Shura goes to, does she drink cocktails in moderation? Yeah, she probably downplays her normal drinking habits at these things. But normally she's down for just about any kind of drink

45. Lucifer just really likes oysters okay

46. How many pages of manga does Katoh draw in a day? If she's being good about self-care: three. Maximum number ever: TEN

47. Mephisto is one of those folks who can eat like a garbage compactor and never gain weight. Possibly because his body resists that sort of change the same way it resists aging etc

48. First food Rin cooked: fish burger type patty. Yukio's favorite things Rin cooks: fish simmered in soy sauce, yellowtail with daikon radish. It's fish all the way down

49: Did Rin ever get more monthly allowance from Mephisto? It doubled! He gets TWO 2000 yen bills now (rip) [T/N: That's uh, that's USD $37.26 a month or 33.10 euro]

50. Why isn't Rin more popular with the girls? He gets nervous talking to them, plus he's too oblivious to notice even if he DID have some fans

51. Why change Suguro's hair? She gets bored with keeping everything the same, and she wanted a visual representation that he was getting serious and going into kind of a training arc

52. Things Katoh pays extra attention to when drawing: trying to capture the feel of whatever she's drawing (like "that looks warm and soft" or "I bet that guy stinks" cough Lightning cough)

53: Does Rin take after Yuri more? (He's got her eyes!) Katoh tried to draw Yuri so she looks like both twins. Personality, too - Yukio has her smarts and Rin has her optimism

54: Do you ever wanna be like Mephisto? Well she'd like to be able to get away with just ANYTHING EVER, but no, let's not be like Mephisto

55. Konekomaru not only carries around a cat toy in case he meets any cats, he MAKES cat toys to carry around based on what he thinks the cats would like

56. How'd you come up with Shima? Go read the fan book!

57. Do the kids have Twitter/Instagram accounts? Rin - probably not. Konekomaru might be on some social media. Paku and Izumo are totally on instagram

58. Is there something Rin makes that you wish you could try? All of it! That's the whole idea! He's good at cooking!

59. Will we ever have a (G-rated) reveal of what ALL of Mamushi and her family's tattoos look like? Maybe! She'll think about it

60. Does Arthur have a repertoire of different hairstyles? Not really, he just puts some of it up on the top. Heck he might even have people to do that for him

61. If you wrote a shojo manga what would it be about? She'd have to do a lot of research before even coming up with a story, since there are so many style differences between the genres aside from just the subject

62. The other two of Mephisto's top 3 favorite foods: Cup ramen and....f-fried bubblegum?? Is that a THING???

63. Where do you start when drawing a character? Usually the outline of their face but if it's a complex pose/composition she'll start with whatever's in the foreground (like hands)

64. If Katoh could have a familiar, what demon would she choose? Mephisto. As the all-powerful author, she might actually be able to command him as a familiar!

66. If you swapped Yukio and Rin's relationship around what would change? not much, you'd pretty much have Rin going to the Illuminati and Yukio going to the past

67. Top 3 foods/souvenirs to try in Kyushu? Well she doesn't know what’s good CURRENTLY but when she was there she always used to like burdock tempura udon, hakata torimon (a kind of manju with white bean paste inside), and Chikae style cod roe. today I learned Katoh went to high school in Kyushu

68. Katoh listens to music a lot while she's storyboarding, then when she and the assistants are all drawing and inking they put various videos/movies and stuff on in the background

69. For all his hitting on girls, is Shima actually popular with the ladies at all? He's got enough girls in his life that he probably COULD find a girlfriend if he really wanted, but the double agent thing tends to get in the way. He still wouldn't be as popular as Yukio though (side thought/translator’s note: Shima would be proud of being number 69.)

70. Katoh has the ending planned out in a big-picture way, but there are still a few details here and there that she's fretting over

71. It's cute when the boys put their ties over their shoulders when they're working on something! Where'd that come from? She just figured a tie might get in the way and that seemed like a realistic way to get it out of the way

72. Looks like Yukio is getting some facial hair! What about Rin? They're both about the age for it, but maybe Rin can't grow a beard yet. Maybe a little peach fuzz here and there

73. Katoh's favorite blue exorcist merch? There were some exorcist licenses a while back, and the exorcist pins. Basically it's really cool that these little accessories she drew ACTUALLY EXIST NOW, LIKE YOU CAN HOLD THEM IN YOUR HANDS

74. Okay realtalk how long do we have left, I don't want the series to end yet? We're solidly in the second half by now but it's not, like, ABOUT to end yet

75. Katoh would be a Knight meister, based on what characters she likes to play in games and such

76. How many people in the whole exorcism cram school? More than you think! She doesn't give a number but apparently licensed exorcists also attend classes for new meisters, etc, so there's a wide age range attending

77. How's Arthur feel about, like, studying Taming on the way to becoming Paladin? He's at least mostly accepted that you have to use demons to fight demons effectively

78. Konekomaru started wearing glasses in his first year of middle school, so like 7th grade (more recent than I thought!) He has one spare pair, in contrast to Yukio lol

79. Katoh's current obsessions? Ghost/scary stories! She's even been going to live readings of them recently

80. Media Katoh consumes for inspiration? A wide range of foreign teen drama, horror/suspense, shojo manga, light novels, anime, etc. Special focus on things where two boys are in conflict or there are brothers involved

81. If they weren't exorcists what jobs would they have? Rin - chef. Yukio - doctor. Shiemi - uh, florist?

82. Inspiration for the design of True Cross Town? Katoh and her assistants gathered up a bunch of references, picked out stuff they felt matched the tone, and mashed them all up together

83. Did you use any references etc for the school/exorcist uniforms? She says she probably should have but she just kind of made them up before publication

84. Favorite part of drawing? For color pages, picking out a color scheme. For black and white, drawing in all the little details (though she doesn't always get time to lately)

85. Once again confirms the demon kings' weird hair is a representation of their horns. ADDS THAT PEOPLE WHO CAN'T SEE DEMONS CAN'T SEE THE WEIRD HAIR

86. Now that Yukio's at the Illuminati, where's he gonna get his Jump SQ and spare glasses? Well he probably never planned to stay for long, but hey it's a big ship and they might have an optometrist and/or newsstand there

87. Do you base the demon characters on any references etc? Not really, she just gets a general idea of popular demon designs and then makes up her own in her own style

88. Merchandise Katoh personally wants to have made: stuff that an adult could just use in their day to day life. Also, it's not gonna happen, but if her favorite figure brand made AoEx figures she could die happy

89. If Beelzebub's host body was a beautiful woman, how would Shima react? Would the womanizing win out over the bug phobia? Katoh replies that Shima would probably just faint from being near a girl that pretty, before the bugs even got involved

90. Will the twins ever get to smile and eat dinner together again?? We'll just have to wait and see!

91. What do you check at a "scenario check"? what's a scenario check man I dunno They check for people being out of character or the setting feeling off. They had a lot of these checks for the anime, but they also do them for the drama CD, games, and all that other stuff where multiple authors are involved

92. Why does Shura use baldy as an insult for people who are clearly not bald? She feels like they have some kind of metaphorical, mental kind of "baldness" and she's calling them out on it. Whatever that means

93. After Blue Exorcist ends, what do you want to draw next? She has SO MANY IDEAS, SO MANY

94. Did Katoh make up the Shinto chants that, for example, Izumo used against Gedouin? They're assembled from bits of actual Shinto prayers according to what feels right in the scene

95. Yukio reads the Jump SQ, right, and, just hear me out here, he likes gag manga, right? Does this mean he reads Salaryman Yukio? It's something he would read, but let's say that in the AoEx universe there's just a very similar manga that he finds oddly relatable

96. What do Yukio and Shima do in their free time on the Dominus Liminus? oh my god you guys this ship has so many amenities.  Yukio probably spends time reading in the library, which they totally have. There's also, like, a gym, and a movie theater, and a THEATER theater, all of which are free. Shima probably hangs out at the pool (!) and goes to the movies, and hits on illuminati girls, lol

97. Easiest character to draw? The ones with boring simple hair, lol. Lightning gets an honorable mention for ALSO not having eyes in most shots, but Rin wins--he was specifically designed to be easy for Katoh to draw because that's what you want in your main character

98. How do demons understand gender? They just possess whatever feels like the best match to how they feel in Gehenna, whether that's a man, or a woman, or a rat, or whatever

99. Where do you start when you're coming up with a story? She starts with character design and how the characters relate to each other. Currently she's just continuing an existing story, so she works on splitting up the overall plot into episodes and fleshing it out with scenes and information about characters

100. When do you feel most happy? She honestly feels like she lives a very happy life overall. Mentions noticing a lot of little things, like how nice her cats' heads smell when she cuddles them or taking a nice cold refreshing drink of water. There's happiness in everything. aww.

[demowogorgon]

Relationship HC’s - Anna the Huntress

Anna loves to hold you. It makes her feel like she’s protecting you from the outside world. Not to mention, she’s really touch starved.

She’ll often pet your head, regardless of how much hair you have.

Please run your hands over her buzzcut. She makes the sweetest sigh.

Often kisses the top of your head. She’s around 7’0 tall, so it’s usually the easiest way to kiss you.

Her bed is so cozy. It’s covered with so many different pelts, and the fur is so soft. If you ask about them, she’ll tell you the story behind each one. You can never tell if she’s embellishing the stories or not.

She’s even more touchy if you’re a survivor. There have been multiple times where she’s threatened to kill another killer for hurting you. You always manage to convince her that it’s their job, and that she would do the same thing to anyone else, but it’s the thought that counts.

She gets so soft when you call her by her name for the first time.

She’s a great cook. You never go hungry when you’re with her.

I really hope you’re not vegetarian, because she always uses meat in her cooking. The only things she can grow are potatoes, and if the season is perfect, buckwheat.

She just doesn’t understand vegetarianism? Survival has been the cornerstone of her life, and calorie management is a huge part of that. Even if you tell her that you eat fine without meat, it just won’t make sense to her. She’ll do her best to accommodate for you though.

(She makes incredible blintzes. If you can convince her to exclude the meat stuffing, they go great with wild cherries and blueberries.)

If you’re not a vegetarian, prepare for the heartiest meals you’ve ever had. Her zharkoye is literally to die for. It’s always nice to come home from a trial and smell the stew cooking over the fire.

She waits at the Survivor’s campfire when you’re in trials. The other survivors are very unnerved and intimidated by her hulking form, eyes glowing in the darkness.

She just wants to make sure you come home safe. And a couple (or a dozen) pairs of prying eyes won’t convince her to leave.

She’s very afraid of losing you. There have been times where the Entity has barred her from the Survivor’s Realm so that it could drain some of her emotional energy and...her home has never looked so empty. She tore so much stuff off the walls, destroyed so many blankets... It was the happiest day of her life when you came home to her. You could feel her heart pounding like a drum beneath her chest as she bent down to hug you. You had to lead her to the bed to lay her down and get her to stop hyperventilating.

She was a lot more brutal in matches for about a week. Not that you knew that, of course. She just couldn’t stop thinking about what she could have did wrong. She had to appease It.

She loves to carry you. You could weigh 90lbs, 250lbs, or anywhere in between. It doesn’t matter: She’s strong as fuck and she’s gonna pick you up.

She really tries to learn your language, especially if you aren’t fluent in Russian.

She’s almost always humming something. Bayushki Bayu isn’t always sung around your house, actually. Her mother taught her a lot of other songs when she was little, but Bayushki Bayu just has the most sentimental memories. She'll sing it occasionally if she’s 100% absorbed in what she’s doing, but it’s out of habit more than anything.

You got awful shivers the first time she started muttering “тили тили бом” under her breath. All of the horror movies you watched came back at full force. Who knew that was actually a real lullaby? Not you.

It’s a little unnerving that all of her lullabies are about death, but her explanation for it is actually really heartwarming.

“Death limps to those who fear and fight her, and she passes around those who call her. I ward away death by singing of her.”

She picks up on any songs you sing very quickly. Your songs are quickly added to her own repertoire.

(One time Meg came up to you and asked why the fuck The Huntress was humming Africa by Toto, and you couldn’t stop laughing about it.)

If you start singing, she’s instantly put at ease.

She loves to make you little trinkets. Her hands are big, but dexterous.

Speaking of hands, she also likes to hold your hand. She loves how little your hands are, compared to hers.

10/10 I love my wife <3

[missmungoe]

So I'm very very soft for parental Makino and Shanks and recently heard the songs Sleepsong and Song of the Sea which made me wonder if you had any particular song in mind that they'd sing their kids to sleep with? I may also be extremely ridiculously soft for their kids (all of them even the honorary ones)

Oh these are both lovely!! ‘Song of the Sea’ is a favourite of mine, perhaps unsurprisingly (and I may have a little fic in mind for the selkie-verse with Makino and Shanks and their seal-babies). I don’t have a specific song in mind for my stories, I just imagine they sing a lot to their kids, but thinking about this ask inspired this soft, silly thing, so...

pirate lullabies

He’d claimed once, wholly serious although with a twinkle in his eyes, that his singing voice had been deemed so dangerous by the World Government, it had been outlawed in several countries. Among the many outrageous tales he’d told her over the years, it was the only one Makino had no trouble believing.

She was working when the song reached her through the floorboards, carried to her first by the rhythm of their boots, before she picked out his voice, the deep timbre with the raw, laughing lilt that needed no instruments to accompany it, and that probably warranted its reputation, given how many times it had stolen away her good sense, her hair tousled and her laughter faint as he spun her, the polished bar-top under her feet a canting deck: a unique kind of magic he had that could transform even the most ordinary things, gentle-natured barmaids included.

She followed it now, up from the cellar where the casks were stacked floor to ceiling, ageing apple wine and whiskey, the spellbinding sound taking shape into a melody she knew as she hoisted herself up the ladder, although had to pause just to check that she’d heard right, but―no, it was the one she thought, down to the rough, stirring pitch of his voice as he performed it.

Her startled blush recalled the last occasion he’d belted out this particular shanty in her presence, but then he’d been naked at the time, a private rendition she still couldn’t think about with a straight face, which begged the slightly shrill but laughing question now―

“What are you singing to our children?”

It saw him turning around, mid-performance, but he took the interruption in stride, at ease at the centre of attention, the common room of their bar full and every pair of eyes trained on him where he stood, their youngest in her sling across his back and their three-year old on his arm. The former refused to go to sleep without her sister, who could never be compelled to sit still long enough to fall asleep; an alliance that had necessitated some creative strategising. A tiny Scylla and Charybdis, and most captains would have steered clear of the challenge altogether. This one had set his course right through the strait.

“You know this one,” Shanks said, his innocent grin as though she’d asked out of ignorance. “You were the one who taught it to me.”

“One hell of a performance, too,” Yasopp supplied, to loud hoots of approval, their tankards raised to her, frothing at the rim with their latest batch from the brewery. Makino accepted the praise with demure dignity, as Yasopp added, “You nearly fell off the bar. Good thing Boss was there to catch you.”

“He’s the reason I was up there in the first place,” Makino parried primly, and with a pointed glance at the culprit, who didn’t look the least bit chagrined. “I’m just relieved you opted out of the acrobatics this time. You’re not as limber as you used to be.”

“Do you know what ‘savage’ means, swallow?” Shanks asked their three-year-old, who repeated the word, if not exactly with the correct pronunciation, but her father’s adoring grin promised many more attempts.

Turning the grin on Makino, a glint of familiar challenge in his eyes where they curved at the corners, “I’d make you eat those words if I wasn’t carrying precious cargo. Or I could always prove you wrong later, if you’ll join me for an encore. Show you just how limber I am.”

“No cartwheels!” called a voice from the back, to laughing agreement. Shanks stuck his tongue out; the girl on his arm responded in turn, to his delight.

Walking up to where he was standing at the centre of the room, Makino tucked an errant lock back into their daughter’s kerchief, sleek and dark as a swallow’s wing; the only one in their brood whose colouring was like her own. A gentle touch to their youngest’s head saw her looking up, snug in her sling, her cheek pressed between his shoulder blades.

“What happened to putting them to bed?” she asked, a teasing tug adjusting his shirt where the sling had pulled the open front even wider than usual, her fingers smoothing through the hair climbing up his chest. Father of three, but some things hadn’t changed. Not that she was complaining.

“What did it look like I was doing?” Shanks asked, with a grin that said her distraction hadn’t missed him, the cheeky flex of a pectoral catching her in the act, but instead of pulling her hand away, Makino only flattened her palm over the hard expanse.

“From where I was standing? Teaching entirely inappropriate bedtime songs to impressionable little ears.” The ones belonging to the girl on his arm missed nothing, to Makino’s continued horror.

“Oh that? Don’t worry,” Shanks said, his wide mouth stretched in a roguish smile she was tempted to remind him was usually cause to do just that. “I censored it.”

Before she could ask if she even wanted to know what he meant by that, a tiny hand gave an impatient tug at his shirt. “Sing about the rusty sailor!”

Brows arching gently with her smile, “Rusty?” Makino asked, as Shanks pressed a sloppy, bearded kiss to a soft little cheek, eliciting an infectious giggle.

The last time she’d seen that grin, he’d had her thighs over his ears. “What?” Shanks asked, his eyes unsheathed steel. “Certain skills need maintenance, to leave all parties satisfied.”

“It’s just hard to imagine he’d ever get that designation, with his infamous appetite,” Makino mused.

“He has a big rock!” their daughter announced.

From the crowded room, a startled cough sounded, from one of the hundred accomplices to this creative rewriting. In the corner of her eye, Ben’s smile curled around his toothpick.

“Oh does he?” Makino asked her, giving a playful tug at her little kerchief, the fawn-like freckles across the tiny bridge of her nose wrinkling with her giggles, before sharing a look with the man who’d given her that laugh, and while she wasn’t sure she wanted to know, “And what exactly does the rusty sailor do with his big rock?”

Shanks grinned, all pride, as their daughter declared, “He sticks it in the hole!”

Her hand flew to cover her startled grin, as several laughs were smothered unsuccessfully, but, “Not the back one,” Shanks assured her, his grin so wide now, she wondered if that wasn’t what warranted censoring. “At least not without asking first.”

“Classy guy,” Makino murmured, and when he wagged his brows, promptly failed to keep a straight face, to the delight of the room.

His eyes danced, the warm look in them compelling the words from her mouth, “So what else does the song say about this rusty sailor?”

A look was exchanged with the girl on his arm, that cheeky little grin his own legacy, and unsuccessfully supporting his claim to innocence, before Shanks said, “That he can usually be found face-up under a tavern bench?”

A round of hollering toasts rose to punctuate the line, the last of a filthy refrain, before he picked it up from the top, his voice raised as he sang to their daughter on her perch:

“Under skirts and petticoats, he’s never hard to ask, a wink and a slap and he’s ready to go, rising to every task. You’ll find him with the portside boars, he knows them all by name, and if he’s got no coin to spend, he’ll charm them all the same. And at the local tavern, well, he’s known to every lass, and every time he visits there, he hopes he’ll get some―”

“GRASS!” shouted a voice from across the room, to hiccuping laughter from the crowd and a bow of approval from the captain, and the loud delight of the girl on his arm, clutching his shirt as he spun her.

“―and if you’re looking for him, know that this is where he’ll be: a sailor with a thirst to quench, you’ll find him on his back beneath a squatting tavern bench!”

This tavern bench was having a hard time maintaining an appropriately chastising expression, hearing the shrieking laughter of the girl on his arm as Shanks spun her, dancing to the song they’d spurred to life like a storm, and with nothing but the rhythm of their boots on the planks. And she might have reminded them that the goal was to get their daughters to sleep, but their children were used to the noise, had all three learned to fall asleep to the sounds of their bar, tucked in their crates, between the shelves of the pantry and the kegs behind the counter, and in the crooks of a hundred arms, coaxed by the wordless lullabies of creaking floorboards and the clink of glasses, ale tapped into tankards and bottles uncorked invoking the sea rushing across the deck and pistols firing, and the muted chatter of a retired crew of pirates that was as effective as any bedtime story, for hungry little ears.

And of course, the songs they’d learned while still in her belly, sung under her breath as she worked, or with his cheek to the swollen curve, his voice reverberating through her, the words pressed with bearded kisses to the movements beneath her skin, as though responding to the sound. They’d known his voice before anything else in this world; had known the songs before they could speak the words, the many in his vast repertoire from a long life at sea, and he’d brought it ashore, to her deck that remained steady underfoot but that didn’t need more than his voice transform to something else; a wild storm brewing and warships on the horizon, and a daring captain at the helm.

He caught her gaze now, a familiar grin flashed like the bare edge of a blade, offering a duel, and it had been a while since he’d proffered his actual sword, his one arm occupied but no regret in the exchange, but Makino answered him as she would with steel, their eyes tethered and her voice raised to join his, her gentler cadence claiming its due amidst the rougher timbres filling their bar:

“And if you’re looking for him, know that this is where he’ll be: a sailor with a thirst to quench, you’ll find him on his back beneath a squatting tavern bench!”

Roaring applause shook the rafters, sending the bottles on their shelves chiming, the kind that would have made her shrink back once, but she’d learned to claim more than just her due, and accepted it now, and the tender look regarding her from over their daughter’s head, and when he bent down to kiss the top of hers, the rough promise kissed into the skin below her ear was uncensored, and had her laughter flinging out, loud and startled.

The noise settled down, their voices taking on a softer pitch, like the sea after a storm, but then this was a familiar routine, performed many times with each of their children, the oldest of whom had claimed the armchair by the hearth, a book in his lap and his father’s cloak around him, and sound asleep, for all his bold claims that he didn’t need a bedtime.

“That’s three out of three,” Shanks said, drawing her eyes back from Ace. His voice was pitched low, to not disturb the girl on his arm, her head tucked against his throat, one small hand still gripping his shirt where she’d nodded off. The one on his back was following suit, her fingers in her mouth and her lashes kissing her soft cheeks. “Questionable methods aside, you’ve got to admit it’s effective.”

Smiling, Makino helped relieve him of the sling, the girl within reaching for her sleepily, a soft breath sighed against her throat as she pressed a kiss to the top of her head, smoothing her fingers over the red down of her hair.

Meeting his eyes, the tender look in them somehow always a little new, “Portside boars?” she asked.

Shanks grinned. “Not to be approached without caution, at least if you value your life.”

“Sound advice.”

“Isn’t it?”

Her soft laugh followed him to the storeroom. The spacious pantry was bigger than Party’s had been, replete with liquors and foodstuffs, crates and barrels and sacks all neatly organised, and all of it written in the leather-bound ledger lying open on the middle shelf. The smells recalled her own childhood, the sound of her mother’s heeled boots across the creaking doorstep, and the bottles chiming in their crates, stacked high above her head. A rough hand smoothing her hair from her brow, before she'd be gone, leaving the door ajar and a sliver of light, the laughter spilling through and into her dreams.

She watched him tuck them in, snug within their makeshift bunks, a different song sung in low, soothing tones, a lullaby for gentler waters that sang of two clever little seals outwitting the fearsome lord of the coast, a longtime favourite that saw two big brown eyes struggling in vain to stay open. Their youngest had already surrendered, even as her sister persevered, but his voice didn’t waver, coaxing until tiny fingers released his shirt, although even asleep, he lingered a moment longer, to finish the verse.

Watching him from the doorway, the sweat of a long evening making his shirt cling to his back, straining over the wide shoulders that didn’t carry the same burdens they had once, she followed the sight to an old memory; a busy galley on a gentler sea, and the rowdy court of pirates with its rakish king that had swept her off her feet. “Do you remember the first time you sang to me?”

Looking over his shoulder at her, his smile held her answer, even before Shanks said, “Don’t know how I could forget, although it’s not my singing I remember. Why do you ask?”

“I was just thinking,” Makino said, smile soft with the memory, her eyes on the little shapes sleeping amidst the liquor crates, “that they’ll remember this when they’re older.” The years had blurred it at the edges, but some things stood out: his hand lifting her atop the table, and of feeling fearless. A long time ago now, but while the course of their lives had shifted, some things hadn’t changed, their marriage always writing new verses, even as the refrains were her favourite―the lines she knew by heart, and while he could still catch her off guard, a few words altered here and there, the melody was always the same.

“Hopefully they won’t find it too mortifying,” Shanks chuckled, lifting back to his feet, before adding, with a look, “That’s not me saying I’d ever stop. As if!”

Smiling, she didn’t say she doubted they’d ever want him to, although wondered how long until it wouldn’t be him holding the room captive with his singing, but two small successors, who knew songs from every deck of the world, questionable rewritings included.

She watched him make a note in the ledger, a once-cheeky habit that had grown tender over the years, no longer noting her missing innocence but two small additions, currently in stock. Makino wondered if it was a way for him to keep them while he could, and might have felt similarly inclined, but the sea had given her more than it had ever taken, and she didn’t fear trusting it with their children.

She lifted her head as he came towards her, bending down to steal a kiss from her lips, his hand raised to tuck her hair back into her scarf, the long length of silk where it brushed her spine, his thumb catching on the gold in her ears, because he might have brought the sea ashore with him, but she had claimed her own parts.

“So, Captain,” Makino said, head tipped back to look up at him, and saw his brows quirking at her gentle challenge, tugging playfully at his scars.

“Join me for an encore?”

[magaprima]

Okay *cracks knuckles* Let’s talk about just how powerful Lilith is. I will be using some of her actual mythology as logic/background info, but primarily I will only be talking about what we canonically see and imply within the CAOS world. I’ll be using logic and actual outright examples. 

First, the logic: 

We gather from the show that the older and more experienced a witch or warlock is, the more powerful they are. A clear example of this is while Sabrina needs tools to banish a demon, Blackwood is able to banish with a simple command. We also see how Sabrina, after decades in stone, is more powerful, because even without practice, time has had its effect. Lilith, is older than every other witch on the show. She is the first witch. The FIRST witch. No one is older than her in witch world, and if we go off her mythology and what typically gets given as the time since Eden, she’s averaging about 6000 years old. I think we’ve had it confirmed that Zelda and Hilda are somwhere between 250 and 300, given they weren’t alive in 1693, but Hilda was apparently old enough to be off partying on the Thames in 1837, and we establish she was in England raising Ambrose, so she is a hell of a lot older than everyone, a hell of a lot more experienced and knows a hell of a lot more spells. So she’s powerful on that basis. 

Lilith is not just any witch, she is not someone who got powers by signing the Book of the Beast, she is a witch of her own making with no conditions. This we know from her mythology (she said the holy name, giving herself powers and the freedom to leave Eden), but it’s also confirmed in that we see in the passion play Lilith already had Stolas, her ‘familiar’, before she met the Dark Lord, and when Lucifer is draining everyone’s powers, he is unable to drain Lilith’s. Lilith stays at full witch capacity. So the fact her powers are not dependent on a fallen angel or God giving her those powers, but powers she’s claimed for herself, also make her very powerful, because her gifts come from herself and cannot be taken away. 

She is also, due to her time in Hell and her role in Hell, the Mother of Demons, and a demoness herself. As  she said to the Spellmans she is a witch, but she’s not only a witch. Being the Mother of Demons and/or a demoness, comes with powers in its own right, powers that aren’t witchy but are infernal. So she’s powerful in that she has extra magic going on, but also she has literally Mothered demons in Hell, which gives her a certain amount of power and agency over the realm, even if the Plague Kings don’t want to admit it and even if Sabrina wants to ignore that. Being the Mother of Demons doesn’t just give her authority, it gives her power. 

She was created by the False God from earth. Divine, celestial energy was breathed into her by a God in order to bring her to life, and she was made from earth, the most powerful, magical thing there is; the earth itself. The very origins of her creation add to her power. 

All of this means that, as much as Sabrina’s role as daughter of Lucifer does make her powerful, she is not as powerful as Lilith, she physically can’t be (even if the writers like to forget that sometimes). And that brings me to the canon examples.

The big one; restraining Satan. Sabrina tries to trap him in the Acheron but it fails and he breaks free. He shouts ‘I am the great Satan which no prison can contain!’ and storms towards Sabrian violently, and is brought to an abrupt stop by Lilith. She ‘contains’ him. She holds him there with just her own telekinetic power. No spells, no aids or potions; just her own unadulterated power. This is one of the few flashes we get in the show of Lilith’s undiluted strength, showing us just what she’s capable of. She also does it with confidence. She doesn’t reach out her hand in panic and hope it works, she knows her power will hold him because she shouts ‘Hold that nasty thought!’ very glibly as she pulls him to an abrupt stop. And then Satan strains against it, he fights her power so much in his desperation to get free, but HE CAN’T. The Dark Lord is fighting to get free,and all that’s holding him there is Lilith, yet he can’t free himself. Lilith admits she can’t restrain him for long, but she holds him there for several minutes and chooses to release him when Nick does the binding spell. We never actually see Lucifer break free, so who knows how long she’d be able to hold him. The fact she can do this canonically shows us she is more powerful than all the other characters, including Sabrina. 

She returns Sabrina’s powers to her. The only other people we’ve seen bestow powers on witches are The Dark Lord (a fallen angel. A celestial) and Hecate (a Goddess). This puts Lilith on a par with both of them. It also shows she has her own source of magic as I said above. We confirm in Part 3 that Lucifer’s powers come from him being an angel  and it’s his celestial energy that allow him to bestow powers on his witches. Lilith therefore has her own power source too which allowed her to return Sabrina’s powers to her. Even though what she returned to her was Satan’s powers (showing Lilith, while Lucifer was bound, also had power over his gifts too), it stands to reason that if she is able to do this she is also able to bestow her own powers. Only...no one thought to ask in Part 3. 

She resurrected Mary without a sacrifice. Resurrecting people without sacrifices, without the life-for-a-life rule has been shown to be the exclusive of beings such as Lucifer and Hecate and things such as the Cain Pit. The fact Lilith is able to do this, and very easily too, shows, yet again, that she is on a par with them. The fact the writers said, in a quote about part 4 ‘Zelda has turned to an even older Goddess than Lilith’, implies even the writers see Lilith as Goddess level in her powers. 

She sent a soul to Heaven with the flick of a hand and she wasn’t even Queen anymore when she did this. She doesn’t do a big spell, she doesn’t do a ritual, she doesn’t even make any effort; she simply flicked her hand and Jesse left hell and flew straight up to Heaven. 

Similarly, she was able to banish Beelzebub with a flick of the hand too (probably one of the reason he didn’t want her as Queen. Holding a grudge). Sabrina, we’ve seen, needed tools to banish demons, Blackwood had magical commands to do it, but Lilith doesn’t say a word. She just flicks her hand dismissively, and Beelzebub is banished back to Hell, not only confirming how powerful she is in general but showing she is more powerful than the Plague Kings.

Which leads onto the point of how they’d challenged her for the throne once before and she beat them back. She says, before Sabrina’s arrival, ‘we will not have our sovereignty challenged again’, meaning they challenged her and she defeated them. This would have been a display of both physical and political power. Yet, when Sabrina comes in, they suddenly start Regalia challenges (the implication being that if they’d made that challenge to Liltih they suspected there was too much risk of her winning. They felt more confident with Sabrina, and reasonably so, as without the help of Ambrose, Lilith and Lucifer she wouldn’t have found any of the items. And there’s no way Lilith would have just let him pick up Herod’s crown). The hordes of Hell know Lilith  is very powerful, they just didn’t like her being Queen. 

She summons the Greendale Thirteen pretty damn easily. That was a big summoning of thirteen long dead ghosts, and conjuring them to be solid enough for them to be able to interact with and touch the living, even starting fires and summonings of their own. Essentially, she did a temporary resurrection with a very simple blood spell. 

She enchanted a ring to hide Adam from the Dark Lord. This is a spell that gets overlook I think in showing Lilith’s power and knowledge. Lilith was able to enchant an object so that the wearer would be unseen by The Dark Lord himself. She was able to hide a freaking person from his sight. That not only requires a lot of power, but shows immense knowledge of magic; an unchallengable knowledge really. I mean the only reason Adam was ever found was that Stolas told on them. If not for him, the ring would have worked permanently which is one freaking impressive charm to make. 

Lucifer seems to believe she is the only one capable of performing the Ritual of Separation. I mean if anyone could do it, he could easily have gone to Nick, or any of the coven, since everyone was wandering about and didn’t seem to be entering a protective circle for a while. And if it’s because he’d taken away even their power to do rituals, there are many people in Hell that would technically be capabe, people who are very loyal to him. And then there’s other witches in the world, ones who still worship Satan, the list goes on. But I think it’s a case of Lilith being the only one who he can trust to do the Ritual correctly and successfully, but also she’s the only one with enough power to match his.

She siren songs the Dark Lord to sleep quite effortlessly, which again is immense power. Much like when she siren songed Sabrina and freaking STOPPED TIME. The woman has power over time too, which the show doesn’t make clear whether it’s also linked to her siren song or not, but either way, time manipulation is also in her repertoire of power. But yes, she siren songs the Dark Lord to sleep, and then wakes up only Blackwood. That requires immense skill and power over the mind and the subconscious, something much more precise and powerful than even the nightmares of her ‘daughter’ Batibat. 

Finally, in notes of immense power, she gives Blackwood the Mark of Cain. In the bible this is only ever given by God, that is the False God. We have Lilith, yet again, doing something we have only confirmed Gods doing, putting her yet again on a par with them.

And all this power is why I just don’t buy how Caliban managed to encase Lilith in stone. And even Lucifer for that matter. Or how they were gone at all. It just seemed a bit of ‘ignoring their power’ in order to allow Sabrina to ‘save’ the world on her own. 

[boogiewrites]

Choking On Sapphires 93

Characters: Alfie Solomons x Genevieve (OFC)

Title & Song: Bigger Boys and Stolen Sweethearts

Summary: Alfie is never far from paranoia. But he and Genevieve both find that it's granted when it seems like the whole of London could be out to get them.

Warnings/Tags: Crime. Canon typical everything. 

Click on my icon then go to my Mobile Masterlist in my bio for my other works and chapters. (Had to do this since Tumblr killed links, sorry.) Please like, comment and reblog if you enjoyed it! It helps out us writers A LOT!

There were only a handful of men in the abandoned warehouse in London this night. A location well suited, as gloomy and shady as their business practices. The cover of smog and fog from the nearby canal both serving as cover for their 'off the book' transactions. Despite their dastardly reputations, if these few men had somehow all been taken out at one time, the city would’ve plunged into bloody chaos that would lead to more trouble than already fell upon their territories.

They were a motley crew to be sure, all with twitching hands and shifty eyes. Not an ounce of trust to be found between any of them. They’d been called to this neutral ground on the guise there was a threat looming over them all. But since when wasn't there one? This desperate claim had been made by Niko, the newest head of the Greek gang who was less than a year into leading after assassinating his father. He was being met with much criticism. The decision to bring together the gangs and criminal leaders of London tonight would be met with the same disdain.

The men stood in their big coats with deep pockets, their seconds in the shadows of the dimly lit and dusty warehouse. Niko stood self-assured in his shirt with the rolled-up sleeves to show his heavy and dark forearms, hair black and slicked away from a strong masculine face. He was feeling accomplished for the ability to get all these infamous people together, and if he’s been smarter he would have actually done something with the occasion. You had the drug runners, the triads, who expected the threat to be from another country. The Sicilians who were known for their brothels thought perhaps new law enforcement might’ve been a threat to their money-making. The English boys and their known violence with the protection rackets they ran, this being their home and all, were worried about the Americans coming in and trying to disrupt the well-established lines in the sand for territories. There were bookmakers and gambling den owners, none who wanted their flows disrupted. Sabini, perhaps the most intelligent of them all had been over the race tracks for some time now, only sharing the space by negotiation or force with the Peaky boys or the Jews. And he couldn’t help but notice neither of which were at this gathering.

Sabini, looking at his pocket watch with a hard face knows Alfie wouldn’t be one to be late, and seeing as he knew the rumors of he and Nikos falling out, his suspicions were growing by the ticks of the watch hands. His faith this would be worth his while was dwindling just as quickly.

“I suppose you are the ones who are going to show...shame not everyone could hear this.” Niko begins, standing from his perched spot on a large wooden crate. “I know you have heard of a joining of powers to be happening soon. And I believe we should all take this as a threat.”

“What are the bloody Americans doin' now?” Billy Hill, one of the English roughens groans.

“No Americans.” Niko corrects and most of the men in the room go through relief and then a feeling of ‘then what?’. “One of London’s own and the French.” He begins.

Sabini groans audibly.

“I’m serious!” Niko insists with eyes that say he’s telling the truth. “I’m sure you’ve all heard that the Jew Alfie Solomons and that French whore Genevieve Durand are getting married.”

“Fucks sake.” Is the grumble of choice that works its way around the crowd.

“We can’t have her alliances and the Jews pairing! It’ll throw off the balance we’ve worked so hard to achieve!”

“And how is Solomons marrying going to affect anyone but him?” The annoyed lead of the Asian gangs calls out.

“This Durand is no ordinary woman.” Niko compulsorily insists.

“Yeah, we know you’re sweet on her.” Sabini mutters.

“This is about her French connections. Parliament, the gypsies, and the Irish! All of them will be with Solomons and not against him now because of her.”

“Look. She’s the godmother of a Shelby baby. That hardly calls for panic. She’s the niece of a French Jew, who has NO footing here. Those are not alliances. You’re acting like a bloody woman, so dramatic.” Sabini purses his lips.

“We all know what Horne did to her.” Billy interjects. “If you think she’s a threat after a wallop like that you’re mad. Alfies the one ya gotta watch for, and you know those Jews, they get all sentimental about their wives. This could work in our favor if he’s gone soft for the bird.”

“I do not think underselling Solomons is a good move. You saw what he did to Horne.” The Asian lead reminds them.

“That shows how unstable he is!” Niko yells.

“Well he didn’t kill his own father now did he?” One of the bookmakers snarks.

“Everyone agreed to that!” Niko shouts, his anger showing at not getting his way.

“Yeah and I think everyone’s agreeing that we don’t give a fuck about the hard prick you’ve got for Solomons woman and how you want us to the dirty work to take him out of the picture.” Billy’s known brash remarks surprise no one.

“That’s not what this is about. She’ll be trouble! I'm telling you. She’s a sly one. Don’t underestimate her. She could be a loose cannon and telling Solomons what to do, and with the men she’s got behind her she could try to take over the city!”

Everyone but Niko laughs. “Her? Telling ALFIE what to do?” Sabini laughs and wipes away an imaginary tear to sell his point. “You daft boy, listen… she’s a woman yeah? She’s gonna get married and shit out a few little kykes and fall into place. Same as the rest. It’s what they DO.”

“She’s not like other women.” Niko growls.

“We know you’re sore about losin' her to a old man like Solomons, yeah?”

“Maybe she prefers the cut cocks.” Someone remarks and a chuckle passes through the group.

“More like the money.” Another adds and a general nod of agreement moves in a wave across the room.

“LISTEN!” Niko shouts in anger. “I think this marriage is a bad idea. She’s been knocked senseless, attacking people in public, and we know Solomons can be unpredictable. Look what he did to Horne!?”

“A man’s love and loyalty to a woman is fueled by an ancient fire. He was within his right to do that.”

“As poetic as that is,” Sabini rolls his eyes “I’ve known Alfie longer than any of you. And if I say there’s no reason to react then there’s not.” He states clearly with the wheels in his head turning his unspoken thoughts.

“He burned down half the city for that woman. He threw a tantrum like a child and bypassed so many of our unspoken rules in the name revenge.” Niko screeches.

“Like you now, yeah?” Sabini snarks. “You have no business with either of them now. Because YOU threw a fit? Remember?” Niko puffs up in shame. “Why do you care? Why are you wasting our time?” Sabini gestures with his hands and gives Niko a disgusted expression for bringing them there “If ya gonna call us all up, Why not talk about the upcoming elections? Or how they're clearing out the slums and breaking up all our established territories?” The reaction from the group is a unanimous groan of agreement. “Those are real fuckin’ things to worry about. If you’re so concerned about women in power why not go after the fucking labour party too?” Sabine’s experience overrides Niko and his barely thought out objections.

The group laughs and makes Niko feel small and childish. A feeling he hated as the youngest son and one he hadn’t felt since his father died. It did him and no one else any favors to light that pain within him again. For it was the one that lead him to kill the last man who caused it. But now that he had the attention of the entire family. ho knows how he would lash out next time he reached his breaking point?

For as crass and disrespectful as Sabini was, he wasn’t the dumbest criminal in London by a long shot. He’d thought about what Niko said after patronizing him in front of everyone. Even though he didn’t agree, he did have a few points of sense that he hadn’t meant to make. Alfie would be having to change up his repertoire. He had Shelby in Parliament and an uncle in law that was the head of a crime family. Albeit was in France, but clout was clout and bodies were bodies when fighting broke out. Sabini didn’t think Gen would be a problem, as he had heard of her seriousness with her newly found Judaism and expected her to be a good little wife and let her husband rule the roost. But Sabini only knew of the slurs and stereotypes for the Jewish people, not so much their beliefs. Because if he had, he’d know what sort of power, Gen, as the wife would hold in their household. Instead, he saw an opportunity to mend things with Alfie. A peace offering for the joyous occasion so it wouldn’t seem suspicious. As he had said, he knew Alfie. He knew what he was capable of and what a pain in the arse he could be. He’d like to make things easier, not harder so he knows it’s time to make a truce, to show him he wasn’t a threat. Sabini knew it was time to reach out to an old school mate. Because he most certainly didn’t want Alfie Solomons on his bad side.

———

Genevieve’s giggle could be heard from the other side of her bedroom door. The raised hand to knock hesitates.

“Do I have to do it?” The young boy winces, fearing interrupting Solomons during his time with his fiancé.

“Oh fucking-c’mon!” Claire gruffs and shoves him out of the way. “Gen? Alfie? Pardon the interruption but we have some little birds with news out here.

The groan of Alfie can be heard, rolling to his back and throwing his arm dramatically. “WOT THEY WANT?” He shouts as Gen pops out of bed to throw his pants at him and slide on a gown before slinking back into bed. “WHO is it?” He asks quickly after.

“One of yours and one of Genevieve’s.”

“Both?” She hears the women in question ask.

“Come in.” Alfie commands, now sitting up with the covers pulled up under his arms.

“Go on.” Claire shoves the two young boys into the room who feel immediately as if they were trespassing. She stands in the doorway so they cannot leave and watches them creep forward.

“Ya gonna speak or what?” Alfie asks with a jut of his chin.

“Yes sir.” The taller of the two mumbles as he steps forward.

“Come to the foot of the bed and speak up.” Genevieve directs with much more kindness in her tone, directing them with a pointed finger.

“Yes ma’am.” The boy keeps his eyes lowered, his hat being wrung in his hands, a clear ring of sweat around his collar. “Who first?”

“You dear, you’ve been employed the longest,” She explains to Alfie's nervous spy. “Seniority.” She nods.

“Yes ma’am. There was news of a meeting last night.”

After a pause, Alfie makes a rolling motion with his hand. “Anything else to go wif that to make it useful?”

“Downtown they saw some men meeting in one of the old warehouses.”

“Some men?” Genevieve tries to get more out of the boy.

“Gangsters, ma’am.”

“Mmmph. And who?”

“Only person I was told the Greeks.”

“Fuckin ell.” Alfie sighs. “That all ya got?”

“Yes sir.”

“I have more.” The smaller of the two adds sheepishly.

“Then out wif it.” Alfie demands loudly.

“The Greek was there first, then some of the English Hill lads and the bookmaker Comer. Triads, Sabini, and the other Italians.”

“Now that’s the kinda report I need yeah?” Alfie says in a fatherly tone to his informer.

“Is that all?” Genevieve pries a final time.

“No one was inside to hear what was said but no shots or shoutin' and it was over very quickly. No one we knew was there.”

Alfie hums with narrowed eyes in thought. “What of the fascists?”

“No political men, only the kind what run the streets like you, sir.”

“Good lad.” He nods in approval.

“Claire pay them their due.” Genevieve points her way. “Leave with her boys, thank you.”

“Give the missus boy more,” Alfie calls out and the young one's eyes blink with surprise. “We reward detail. Leave nothing to interpretation when ya can lads.”

“Yes sir.” In unison comes from the shabby pair.

After the door is shut behind them the minds of the two business owners are piecing together what they had.

“Of course I wasn’t invited to this but I’m assuming you weren’t as well?”

“No,” Alfie says with a slow shake of his head. “No Jews at all actually.”

“But no fascists. Curious.”

“Not about us then.”

“Not as a whole, no. But Niko…”

“Yeah that... fuckers up to somefin.”

“I’ll keep an ear out, poke around at my retailers today.”

“Good, good. I know I can lean heavily on paranoia…”

“It’s kept you alive this long.” Genevieve smirks. “Listen to your gut, always.”

“But no one you run wif was there. None of ours. Leads one to believe this might be personal, yeah?”

“I do agree. We know the man isn’t happy about us. Now we're being left out and those with known loyalty to us are as well. I don’t believe that to be paranoia so much as putting together a bigger picture. Perhaps you could ask-“

“Sabini, yeah.” He finishes her thought.

“Mmm Hmm. He’s been behaving as of late. Due for another check-in I’d say.”

“And I’d say you’re right.”

———————-

Sabini happened to have reached out to Solomons for a meeting before Alfie had the chance to initiate. Alfie knew this meant one of two things, that Sabini needed him, or he needed Sabini. Or perhaps a third option of both? Alfie was prepared for all outcomes as he prided himself in.

For anyone else the smugness on Derby’s face, set to its usual twitch of him acting as if he’d smelled shit, would’ve been an indicator of which option was on the table for discussion. But this observation was useless against someone like Sabini. He didn’t give himself away until you dug in close and arrogance was his base nature.

He waltzed in like some greyscale silent film star with shiny shoes and a coat draped over his shoulders. His appearance next to Alfie gives nothing away that they were both raised in the same streets as the learned posh facade Sabini had long practiced to appear authentic. Alfie even has the passing thought of observing Sabini’s practiced measures of sitting down to be a tad too feminine at this point but that was neither here nor there, he supposes.

Alfie’s nose twitches both from his business mate’s luxury cologne and his impatience for the small talk. He was only interested in faux comradery if he could benefit from it. Sabini was lamenting on the state of the cabinet, the changes, and the way the kids no longer remembered the war and it was leading in directions he didn’t particularly care for. Perhaps it was an attempt to be personable, but Alfie had no time for such things when it came to someone who he’d known since before his balls dropped.

Alfie perks up his demeanor, hands flat and wide on his old wooden desk, dust unsettling as he hit heavily against the top. “Now DERBY… “He clears his throat, lips pooching out ever so slightly to appear in thought, but it was clearly making a mockery of the behavior of Sabini. “We could, y’know, sit and listen to you talk out ya arse ‘bout shit no one gives a FUCK about.” he blinks rapidly and nods his head with his low brow directed at his associate. “Or we could just skip it, the gossipin’ like the birds ‘n that, and get down to business. Like men.” his tongue punctuates against his teeth to show through his deepened voice that he meant what he said. In case Derby had forgotten.

“Now for what it’s worth, your precision is something I always did like about you Alfie.”

“Compliments ain’t like you now, Derby, old friend. Should I pull me cock out for those sweet words or do you want to get to your fucking point?”

With a slight wince of his lips, Sabini takes a deep breath to crispen his delivery. “I am here as a show of good faith, right? I have some information that you need and I want to discuss how this might affect us in the future.”

“Us?” Alfie laughs and sits back in his chair with a smug grin. “Presumptuous, innit?”

“Yes. Us, Alfie.” Sabini states with the annoyance already showing through in his voice.

“Go on then.” a demanding hand motions forth from the leather chair.

“The Greeks are trying to upset the truces.”

“Ahhh.” Alfie groans. “Always the fuckin’ Greeks, yeah? If not then it’s the Italians.” he jokes.

Sabini chose to ignore the jab. “I have the information you want. But I need something from you in return.”

“How do you know I need it? How do you know, yeah? That I don’t already know?” Alfie's lip curled up almost in an almost childish taunt.

“Because you aren’t reaching out to anyone. You’d be doing damage control if you knew. Gettin’ all the little ducks in a row to keep everyone in line.”

“You are being rather bold, y’know, there mate... Don’t much care for it to be honest. Arrogance, innit? Which means, you tellin' me how you think I fuckin’ run things, which you can fuck RIGHT OFF with, mate, respectively, I mean that Derby old mate… THAT indiscretion leads me to believe, yeah? That you do genuinely think that the information you have is valuable.” he taps the desk in front of him to demand the information with not only his words. “So what is it that you think is so important that you’d come down here to mingle among us… dirty dust bin lids, I believe is what you call us.

“I need something from you in return.”

Alfie throws his hands up half way, “Let me ask you this Derby, in all seriousness now lad, Are you thick? Are you lame? NO! No, listen ‘cause that statement was something an imbecile would say to a man like me.”

Sabini sighs and rolls his eyes, “Me ‘n you go way back Alfie. We’ve been enemies, and we’ve been friends. And isn’t it much better when we’re friends?”

“Oh yeah, mate.”

“I need us to be on the same side here. We grew up together. Immigrant lads and the like. We know war, we know the streets, we have an advantage here as a pair and I want to propose we work together instead of apart for the foreseeable future.”

“Mmm.” is Alfie’s only response. Best you stay silent and let the other man do the talking.

“Can you agree to that? We can do it formally, with your contracts and that. I know how your lot loves to have documentation of everything.”

“Can ya fuckin’ blame us? What with whats’ goin’ on out there?”

“That’s why we need to work together.”

“How’s about you tell me what this information is and I will tell you if it’s worth me workin’ with a man like you? You Italians aren’t known for your inclusivity ya daft fascists.”

“Alfie.” Sabini groans. “You know I'm not that stupid and I know you aren’t either. Let’s move past this yeah? I’m English, I don’t live in bloody Italy, my parents don’t live there, I work with what’s in front of me don’t I? Not with my head in some other fuckin’ country. Give me a bit of credit here, I'm not some amateur.”

“A truce?” Alfie quickly switches the conversation direction in a show of understanding.

“Yes.” An exasperated Sabini spits out.

“What terms?” Alfie asks with a rather dainty placement of his gold spectacles and a lick of his pen.

“We share the tracks. I can give you more races to share if you agree to not come for me or my men. We won’t cross on each other territories of businesses. No fighting over pubs and theatres. We’d have each other's backs, like the good old days.”

“Good old days.” Alfie snorts as keeps writing. “I get one race a month of my own. Share the rest.”

“Fine.”

“NO crossing territories, no murderin’, no fightin’.” Alfie repeats, with a mumble as it’s the least of his worries.

“Agreed.”

“And the giving of men for circumstances of attack and revenge on other groups if the situation arises.”

“Acceptable.”

“Then sign here,” Alfie says with a satisfied expression. “You must be in a right spot, mate. Givin’ up this.”

“It’s an investment.”

“Mmm.” Alfie hums and shakes the paper to dry the ink. “Now. This information…”

“There was a meeting-”

“Remember when I said I knew things…?”

“Let me bloody talk now. We get it you KNOW things, Alfie.” he interjects with an annoyed wave of his hand. “What you might not know is that Niko tried to gather the lot of us from all of London and turn us on you.”

“Mmm.” another sound of acknowledgment that meant nothing.

“He doesn’t trust you or your bride to be. Congratulations by the way.”

“Thank you.” he nods gracefully.

“We all know he’s after her, yeah? But he wants us to believe she’ll turn you against everyone and try to take us all down one by one. Which after your reaction to Horne, almost all of us aren’t sure what the fuck to think about you.”

“Couldn’t possibly have been intentional.”

“I wanted a truce because I don’t want you coming at me how you did Horne. A new war between us will do nothing but lead to problems I don't fucking have time for anymore. Not with how the worlds changing and us getting older.”

“Yeah, I feel it in my legs mostly...” Alfie groans.

“Niko is going to come for you. I believe you need to set up a meeting of your own and address him and, well bloody almost everyone else. It might help, might not. But at least then when faced with you and not behind your back you might see what sort of man Niko has turned into after taking over.”

“Never was much of one to begin with.” Alfie rolls his eyes.

“No, which makes him behave like a child and thus not act according to the truces that are set in place.”

“Yeah yeah.” Alfie nods. “There needs to be somethin’ said. Can’t have the little wanker goin’ round runnin’ his fuckin’ mouth bout me. OR my wife. “

“All this over a fucking woman.” Sabini groans.

Alfie points a ringed and aggressive finger his way. “You can’t be talking about her either, yeah? That’ll break this little agreement faster than I could put a bullet in your fuckin’ skull, right?”

“I'm not. Nothing personal just… he’s acting like a little boy. I know marriage is important to you Jews.”

“Always the tasteful one, Derby.”

“You know what I fuckin’ mean.”

“Unfortunately I do speak prick.”

“Alfie, I’m not after you or your wife. In any capacity. How I talk is just how I talk, yeah? I don't mean nothin’ by it, it’s just how I am. How we grew up. And I know you. We know each other right? And I would rather work with the devil I know than the devil I don’t. And that’d be you. Especially after what you did to Horne.”

“Mmph.” Alfie nods. “Spose that checks out.”

“I was impressed, I’ll admit. We haven’t seen a retaliation wipe out a whole enterprise like that in decades.”

“And I’d dig him up, skull fuck him and set him on fire if I could. Salt the fuckin’ earth wherever his feet touched.” Alfie's eyes are familiar darkness to Sabini. He’d expected as much from him after seeing the ash fall from the city skyline line it was snow from the destruction Alfie orchestrated. “I don’t blame you for not wantin’ me on your bad side. I know they say we’re both crazy now.”

“But see...I know neither of you are.”

“And that’s why we’ve not killed you yet, mate. Every now and then, you use your brain. ”

@jaegeeeeer @cosettewinchester @lookuptheskyisfalling-blog @brianaisasongbirdd @cry5t4l-w4rri0r @jess2464 @hardygal69 @thegarrisonpublichouse @a-flock-of-angry-pigeons @pootle @s-h-e-w-r-i-t-e-s​

 @musingsby-night​ @shine-dont-shadow​ @inkinterrupted​ @vale0413​ @emerald-bijou​ @elaenom @give-jack-a-lightsaber​ @ultrablackwidower​ @tinastarkandco​ @arrowswithwifi​ @marvelgirl7​ @they-are-not-just-stories​   @ugly-crying-over-bucky-barnes​ @alitheamateur​ @gold-trashbag @divadinag​ @imhelenagardner

[s3rendip1tous]

Star Wars OC:

G E N E R A L I N F O R M A T I O N

Name: Josren Ifol

Age: 17

Species: Miraluka

Gender: Female (she/her)

Birth: 37 BBY

Affiliations: Luka Sene, Jedi Order

Era: Clone Wars

P H Y S I C A L I N F O R M A T I O N

Height: 5’ 6”

Skin tone: Light

Eyes: None

Hair color: Brown

Hairstyle: Ponytail with messy bangs

A B O U T T H E M

Homeworld: Alpheridies

Language(s): Miralukese, Galactic Basic Standard, Binary

Personality: Josren is a very emotional and expressive person. She has to since she has no eyes and half her face is covered by a mask. She also makes up for this by using the force to convey her emotions if they're strong enough, causing other force-sensitives to feel similar emotions.

Backstory: Josren Ifol is the daughter of Zadek and Aileeh Ifol on the planet Alpheridies. She lived a relatively comfortable life and, when she displayed more advanced abilities with the Force, she was brought to be trained and educated at the Luka Sene. For many years, she lived and learned with her brothers and sisters until Jedi came to Alpheridies looking for force-sensitive beings to help fight in the war against the Separatists. Being the naive and eager girl she was, Josren was quick to volunteer and fight at the age of 14. Many of her people, including her teacher warned her and tried to convince her otherwise, but Josren wanted to try and help people all over the galaxy. So, she left with a few others to Coruscant and to the Jedi Temple. She was initially taught the beliefs of the Jedi and taught how to fight with a lightsaber. Training went by pretty fast since the girl was already taught the basics of combat during her time at the Luka Sene. She also had to construct and learn how to wield a lightsaber. Although this time, instead of combat being a means of self-defense, it was to be used in the means of attack. The training is what started opening her eyes to how contradictory the Jedi were—supposed peacekeepers fighting in a war.

She was assigned to Jedi Master Kit Fisto as an apprentice. Her first mission was helping her master track down Viceroy Gunray where she met Fisto's former padawan. They soon found out it was a trap. Most of their clone squad had been killed by Grievous and Josren became angry over their deaths and wanted revenge, the anger translating through the force, causing Nahdar to become angry as well. Josren herself starts to calm down each time Fisto reminds the two but Nahdar doesn't calm down until eventually, Nahdar is separated from the two and ultimately killed by Grievous in a duel. The two then go to escape, fighting off Grievous and his droids before flying away. After this mission, they mourn over the deaths of the clones and Nahdar and Kit teaches Josren how to control her emotions more since he could feel through the force that she was projecting her emotions through it. This makes Josren feel guilty and responsible for the death of Nahdar, making her hesitant to use the force as often as she used to. Yoda then offered to teach Josren a few lessons after Kit Fisto reported to the Council what happened and help her regain her confidence and have better control.

Soon, Josren and Master Fisto were assigned to go to the Ord Cestus medical station in order to gather supplies and aid for Master Windu and get them ready to be shipped off on Ahsoka Tano and Barriss Offee's ship. When word got out that Geonosian brain worms had taken control of the ship, Josren became increasingly worried for the people on board, especially for Ahsoka whom the young padawan had befriended. When they eventually boarded, Josren was quick to care for the Togruta and make sure her friend was in stable condition. It was also there that she met Barriss.

Once regaining her confidence, Josren rejoined her master and helped fight in the war. In her free time, she’d often meditate or look through the archives to expand her knowledge in both the Force and combat, befriending Jocasta Nu.

When Order 66 took place, Josren was at the Jedi Temple. She was doing her usual studying when she heard blaster shots. Investigating, she found the 501st marching into the Temple and shooting at other Jedi. Josren was about to fight when a hand grabs her shoulder. Jocasta stops her and shoves a sack into her arms, a youngling sleeping in it. Jocasta ordered Josren to leave the temple and run far, far away. Josren did as she was told, escaping to the Underworld of Coruscant with the child in hand. She soon left the planet altogether. Only then did Josren take a breath and try to use the force to sense if any other Jedi were alive. She found only death, fear, and pain.

Likes:

-Flying ships

-Competition

-Destroying droids

-Meditating

-Danger

-Jedi Archives

-Learning

Dislikes:

-The cold

-Injustice

-Hypocrisy

-Caff

P O W E R S / A B I L I T I E S

Skills:

-Force: She is very connected to the force. Able to see extremely well using force sight, she's a bit more advanced than most her age with the force, especially thanks to her teachers at the Luka Sene training her pretty early. She's able to do basic things such as telekinesis, but also force jumps, jedi mind tricks, occasionally getting visions, and other force sub-powers. As she trains, her perception of the force becomes even stronger and her trust in it helps her learn abilities pretty fast compared to other jedi her age. She also uses the force to compensate for the lack of experience she has in combat since many combatants have been training for the better part of their lives while she has only trained for around 2 years. Some special force techniques she learns to use are animal bond and psychometry.

-Jar'Kai: She often used this technique and wielded two lightsabers, both usually in the unorthodox reverse grip. Although she still trained with one lightsaber in order to not be so dependent on both sabers.

-Form IV, Ataru: She utilized this form often thanks to her acrobatic skills and her master himself a user of this form. Often, Josren will maneuver her way around her opponent using flips and handsprings. It's also handy when trying to dodge blasters. She used this in pair with Djem So, using acrobatics to dodge and disorient her opponent before unleashing a number of powerful blows.

-Form V, Shien/Djem So: One of the first forms she learned, Josren utilized this technique often. Although pretty incompatible with Form IV, Josren used it because she preferred the reverse grip the form made so easily capable. She mixed it with the acrobatics of Ataru, dodging then striking with many powerful blows. She also used it to deflect blaster shots, often using her lightsaber to deflect them toward a chosen target.

-Marksman: She has great aim. Josren is able to deflect blaster shots with her lightsaber and hit her intended target spot on. She also has skill with shooting a blaster itself, hardly missing.

-Pilot: She's able to fly a ship extremely well and maneuver her way out of tight places. She's also able to fire the ship's guns accurately to knock down another ship.

Inventory:

-Blue Shoto Lightsaber

-Purple Shoto Lightsaber

-Credits

Limitations and Weaknesses:

-Reckless: She tends to jump into battle thanks to her enthusiasm, often not seeing the big picture and putting herself and a lot of others in danger. She becomes less and less reckless as she gets older, but sometimes she can't help it

-Weak in combat: She's only studied the different forms of lightsaber combat for about two~ years. On top of that, she added a second lightsaber to her repertoire. To compensate for this lack of skill, especially in lightsaber battles, Josren relies on the force since she's been practicing and perfecting her connection all her life.

-Overly emotional: She often projects her emotions into the Force, causing not only others, but also herself to be emotional and distracted.

R E L A T I O N S H I P S

Family:

-Zadek Ifol

-Aileeh Ifol

-Veros Ifol

-Demral Ifol

Master: Kit Fisto

Friends:

-Ahsoka Tano

-Barriss Offee

-Riyo Chuchi

-Jocasta Nu

Droid(s):

-R6-D3

E X T R A S

Quotes:

“Die you stupid droids!"

"The Jedi are arrogant hypocrites"

Theme Song: "Hang on a Little Longer” by UNSECRET, Ruelle

Trivia:

-She is herbivorous

-Josren is flexible enough to be a contortionist

-She holds her lightsabers in a reverse grip

-Worships the deities Ashla (light side of the force) and Bogan (dark side of the force)

-Studies the way of the jedi in the Old Republic Era

-Often studies/guards the library in the Jedi Temple

[stabletwooriginals]

CHAPTER TWO: Equestrian Wasteland

Panic attack! A surprising, yet well described reaction LittlePip has to the vastness of the great outdoors. The little ghost story about the outside just being a black void also comes back one final time.

The prospect of finding Velvet shrinking dramatically phases LittlePip surprisingly little. Instead she just kinda starts looking for her by seeking a high vantage point. This pro-active attitude and little time spent on feeling sorry for herself is endearing, as well. I think this is gonna change at certain points, considering all the stuff that is going to happen to her. But maybe I'm confusing my memories with Project Horizons, in which the main character spends quite some time feeling sorry for herself. (And considering what happens to her, I don't really blame her.)

I love the light emitted by a terminal described as "the soft green glow of a poisoned apple". Horse gonna think of apples.

LittlePip remarks on the sturdiness of the StableTec terminals, looking new while everything around it decayed in some form. I think this actually has a (horrifying) explanation in lore. But we won't get to it for a while.

On it, we get a message from Velvet asking, or rather pleading the reader not  to look for her. LittlePip's enthusiasm is curbed by it, but not her plan. While she is considering her options she gets distracted by a light in the distance. So, uh, the issue that Velvet doesn’t want to return just gets shoved to the back row until it has to be confronted again at a later date. Seeing as finding Velvet is the bigger issue anyway, that's not very hard to accept for now, at least.

Oh and there is a encrypted message on there too. We don't learn anything useful about it and LittlePip downloads it for the heck of it. In my opinion, a weird place to stick this beat, as it draws attention only to get pushed aside immediately again and the payoff it has at the end of the chapter brings a minor revelation at best. This information could have been given later as well.

Now I was forced to admit how foalish that vision was.

 Reading FoE made me realize they say "foalish" in the original show too. At least in season 1, which is all that existed during the time FoE was being written. Isn't that wild? Discord gets a mention very late into the story, otherwise all the world building is propped up on lore that existed *before* the fandom really reached it's peak!

And LittlePip runs straight into a slaver trap. I appreciate the effort to have her not recognize the shotgun and how the details of the situation slowly unravel until the dreaded clarification "They're slavers, you idiot". Makes it relatable that she fell for their trap.

Thinking about the slavers LittlePip mentions her "repertoire of colorful metaphors". Interesting to tell us about it instead of letting us see for ourselves later. Because, well, she undoubtedly does have quite the repertoire of colorful metaphors.

I absolutely love that the description of the music the Spritebots makes captures the song Pinkie Pie uses in the episode "Swarm of the Century" to remove the Parasprites perfectly. Even the first time reading I had that song in my head at this point.

LittlePip being a swift learner is yet another endearing trait on display when she sees one of the slavers fire his shotgun at the Spritebot and notices how the weapon works. Let's hope there is some kind of fight soon where she gets to implement this newfound knowledge!

I wonder why the raiders decided to attack the slavers. The slavers clearly didn't anticipate this and I doubt LittlePip or Montgomery Jack (the other slave) are such evidently high-tier cargo worth stealing. But hey, I got my wish for a fight and establishing LittlePip's talent with a bobby pin and screwdriver to unlock her shackles is already paying off too.

This kinda leads into a larger question of what raiders are and what they want, but I'll save that for later. Once we met a lot more of them.

Well, seeing how the raiders are beating them up, that probably wasn't why they started the fight either. Also, like with the slavers before, they throw in a threat of sexual violence against LittlePip that feels kinda cheap to me. Like, yo, enslaving her and/or threatening to kill her apparently isn't enough to paint them as bad guys? I understand that this is mainly a taste thing, as some people don't mind a story that is painted this dark this casually. I just feel like the story would not lose it's tone without them, while being more upsetting than it needs to be with them. At least here, in Chapter Two.

LittlePip’s first fight is awesome. It's scary, it's fast and has a few surprises. The biggest one probably being that the question of killing others hasn't come up yet. If we are familiar with Fallout (at least 3 and onward) this shouldn't be a hard question to answer, but LittlePip tries to avoid it here.

Montgomery, like a more experienced Fallout player however, finishes the raider off and starts to loot them. Showing LittlePip the ropes of the game. How nice of him. Then he robs her. That's not how I play Fallout, but the games pride themselves with their choice of options, I guess.

That he instructs LittlePip to check the bodies, she therefore has to puke into the river because of it and sees Montgomery's shotgun reflected in the water behind her head is just great dramatic storytelling. I can just see the movie version of this in my minds eye.

However, LittlePip actually manages to get out of this with a little luck in finding the raiders shotgun next to her (which is a combat shotgun, unlike the regular one the slaver had and Montgomery is holding now) and by packing everything she learned about the two weapons into a convincing argument. Making her win the fight before it started, which is just genuinely bad-ass.

Finally LittlePip makes it into Ponyville -- pursued by a sniper. Can't catch a break!

No, she or he could just wait until I came out.

Something that might not be very noticeable yet is how FoE has kind of a inverted societal structure when it comes to gender. MLP had this too, to a degree, as it was targeting young girls. Here, we can see it transform the order pronouns are used in a common phrase. It might read as a typo or error but we will see that female characters tend to enjoy higher privileges and hold the highest positions of power. Of course that would affect their language as much as other phrases are transformed due to them being horses. See: "What the hay?"

 A pile of torn-up cloth rotted in a corner, smelling foul, like ponies had urinated on it repeatedly.

Nooo, Rarity's work and art :(

 Finally, we get to read the encrypted message from earlier. It's Applebloom’s final words to Sweetie Belle, letting us realize that at least some of the Apple Family has been in Stable Two when it closed and it's first Overmare was Sweetie Belle, Rarity's younger sister. That’s cool to know, but doesn’t affect much of our understanding of anything yet.

Level Up! New Perk: Horse Sense. As we saw, LittlePip is a swift learner. I usually feel like whatever LittlePip learned in the chapter influences the perk she receives at the end. But shouldn't a perk only affect her after she got it? The allusions to RPG mechanics kinda fall apart a little bit when you think too hard about them.

Since they are a "Footnote" I'll just imagine that LittlePip leveled up and received the perk sometime *during* the chapter. Ah, now the world is right again.

[friendshipcampaign]

Fireside Chat

Ditto takes a quiet moment shortly before leaving Veritas

Ditto knelt in front of the fireplace, blowing on the tiny, glowing spark until it began to spread, eating the dry grass and finally catching the tinder. It took longer than it should have. She was out of practice with this, honestly. Usually when she wanted to get a campfire going she would just set up the dry materials and cast a fire bolt into the center of it, but it felt important to do this by hand.

Once it was burning steadily, she locked the door to give herself some privacy, then sat back down.

She started with prayers she knew. A simple one directed at all the gnomish gods, thanking them in a general way for being gods and vaguely implying that if they wanted to look fondly on the speaker and perhaps slightly nudge things in their favor, that would be pretty nice of them. A song or two to Baravan Wildwander, about her kindness and wisdom and wildness, and a poem she knew from childhood to Chiktikka Fastpaws. Having more or less used up her repertoire she went silent, looking into the crackling flames.

Ditto didn’t pray all that often, and definitely not since the Kraken’s Beak -- not since the sea hag had given her a hint of just how far-reaching the consequences of her apprenticeship had been. She wondered sometimes if the gods really heard all the prayers that directed at them. Probably not, right? Listening to so many people chattering at you at once, surely that’d get overwhelming. She imagined that most of it faded into the background. Or maybe certain prayers stuck out more than others.

She remembered how the oracles at the Goblin Market had stared at her and her friends, and momentarily wondered if she’d already caught the gods’ attention, before shoving that thought down as deep as it would go. She looked into the fire and smiled apologetically.

“This is probably pretty rude, huh?” she said. “I mean, not keeping up with prayers and stuff until it’s time to ask for something? That’s gotta be a rude thing to do. But maybe gods are used to that kind of rudeness, since we usually turn to you when we’re scared.”

“I guess I’ve felt kind of ashamed, lately. And maybe it would make more sense to be praying to Garl Glittergold or Nebelun instead . . . I mean, I don’t know ‘em personally like you do, but if the stories are at all true they gotta know what it’s like to mess up in a way that has big consequences, right? I figure they wouldn’t judge. But when I’ve been scared or sad over the years, it’s mostly been your stories I’ve thought of. So it feels right to turn to you now.”

“I’m trying to fix it. You probably know that. This isn’t about that, though, cause I imagine you guys want that fixed as much as we do. If you can help you’re probably already helping, and if you can’t . . .” she shrugged. “We’ll just do our best, I guess? I mean either way we’ll do our best, but – well, anyway. It’s something else.”

“See, there’s this forest we’re headed to with a sacred tree in it and – well, maybe you know the story already, but it seems like your territory. Recently, something really, really bad happened to a friend of mine, and apparently he’s desecrated now, which, not completely sure what that means in the context of a person but it’s obviously really bad? And we’re hoping the this tree has the key to helping him, but in the meantime he has to get there.”

“He’s holding it together for now, but it’s still hard. I know he’s struggling. So you could see your way to lending him some strength, helping him get through it somehow, I’d, um, appreciate it? That’s what I’m praying for, I guess. For him.”

“I, um . . . I’m glad I got to hear your stories growing up. There’s a lot that I’ve learned from them, and one thing they taught me is that it’s better not to travel alone. And I’m pretty sure Erwyn’s been traveling alone for a while, y’know? So, uh, he could probably use your help. I guess that’s it.”

She took a deep breath.

“And uh, I have a gift. I thought for a while about what it should be. Most valued possession, you know--” she tapped the cuna around her neck “—if I’m bein’ totally honest I should be burning this. But hopefully you won’t begrudge me holding onto it. And then there’s my spellbook, but I’m pretty sure I’m gonna need that. So I decided on this, instead.”

She slipped a hand into her pocket and unrolled a small coil of parchment, slightly warped and spotted with discoloration. She ran her thumb across the base of it.

“I don’t – I mean, I guess I don’t really need it since we’re leaving. But I haven’t needed it in the years and years since I left, either. Still kept it this long. And there’s a few parts of it she wrote on. And . . . I dunno, for a few years, this was what my world looked like. There’s not a lot of stuff I’ve held onto as long as I’ve held onto this. But it feels right as a gift, too. It’s a piece of my travels,” she rolled it up again, taking a deep breath. “And after all that’s happened in Vertias, these last few days . . . maybe now I can give that piece of it away.”

Before she had a chance to think about it any more, Ditto threw the map of Vertias she had carried across Ashona onto the fire. It curled and twisted, slowly but surely turning to char. She sat, stoking the fire, until there was nothing left that was recognizable. Quietly, she whispered a closing fragment of what she was fairly sure was either prayer or poetry, something she remembered from the bonfires at festival days. Then she snuffed the fire, unlocked the door, and walked downstairs to join the others.

[bluewatsons]

Claudia Roth Pierpont, A Raised Voice: How Nina Simone turned the movement into music, The New Yorker (August 4, 2014)

Simone with James Baldwin in the early sixties. Her intelligence and restless force attracted African-American culture’s finest minds. Photograph courtesy New York Public Library

“My skin is black,” the first woman’s story begins, “my arms are long.” And, to a slow and steady beat, “my hair is woolly, my back is strong.” Singing in a club in Holland, in 1965, Nina Simone introduced a song she had written about what she called “four Negro women” to a young, homogeneously white, and transfixed crowd. “And one of the women’s hair,” she instructed, brushing her hand lightly across her own woolly Afro, “is like mine.” Every performance of “Four Women” caught on film (as here) or disk is different. Sometimes Simone coolly chants the first three women’s parts—the effect is of resigned weariness—and at other times, as on this particular night, she gives each woman an individual, sharply dramatized voice. All four have names. Aunt Sarah is old, and her strong back has allowed her only “to take the pain inflicted again and again.” Sephronia’s yellow skin and long hair are the result of her rich white father having raped her mother—“Between two worlds I do belong”—and Sweet Thing, a prostitute, has tan skin and a smiling bravado that seduced at least some of the eager Dutch listeners into the mistake of smiling, too. And then Simone hit them with the last and most resolutely up to date of the women, improbably named Peaches. “My skin is brown,” she growled ferociously, “my manner is tough. I’ll kill the first mother I see. ’Cause my life has been rough.” (One has to wonder what the Dutch made of killing that “mother.”) If Simone’s song suggests a history of black women in America, it is also a history of long-suppressed and finally uncontainable anger.

A lot of black women have been openly angry these days over a new movie about Simone’s life, and it hasn’t even been released. The issue is color, and what it meant to Simone to be not only categorically African-American but specifically African in her features and her very dark skin. Is it possible to separate Simone’s physical characteristics, and what they cost her in this country, from the woman she became? Can she be played by an actress with less distinctively African features, or a lighter skin tone? Should she be played by such an actress? The casting of Zoe Saldana, a movie star of Dominican descent and a light-skinned beauty along European lines, has caused these questions—rarely phrased as questions—to dog the production of “Nina,” from the moment Saldana’s casting was announced to the completed film’s début, at Cannes, in May, at a screening confined to possible distributors. No reviewers have seen it. The film’s director, Cynthia Mort, has been stalwart in her defense of Saldana’s rightness for the role, citing not only the obvious relevance of acting skills but Simone’s inclusion of a range of colors among her own “Four Women”—which is a fair point. None of the women in Simone’s most personal and searing song escape the damage and degradation accorded to their race.

Ironically, “Four Women” was charged with being insulting to black women and was banned on a couple of radio stations in New York and Philadelphia soon after the recording was released, in 1966. The ban was lifted, however, when it produced more outrage than the song. Simone’s husband, Andrew Stroud, who was also her manager, worried about the dangers that the controversy might have for her career, although this was hardly a new problem. Simone had been singing out loud and clear about civil rights since 1963—well after the heroic stand of figures like Harry Belafonte and Sammy Davis, Jr., but still at a time when many black performers felt trapped between the rules of commercial success and the increasing pressure for racial confrontation. At Motown, in the early sixties, the wildly popular performers of a stream of crossover hits became models of black achievement but had virtually no contact with the movement at all.

Simone herself had been hesitant at first. Known for her sophisticated pianism, her imperious attitude, and her velvety rendition of “I Loves You, Porgy” (which, like Billie Holiday before her, she sang without the demeaningly ungrammatical “s” on “loves”), she had arrived in New York in late 1958, establishing her reputation not in Harlem but in the clubs of hip and relatively interracial Greenwich Village. Her repertoire of jazz and folk and show tunes, often played with a classical touch, made her impossible to classify. In these early years, she performed African songs but also Hebrew songs, and wove a Bach fugue through a rapid-fire version of “Love Me or Leave Me.” She tossed off the thirties bauble “My Baby Just Cares for Me” with airy insouciance, and wrung the heart out of the lullaby “Brown Baby”—newly written by Oscar Brown, Jr., about a family’s hopes for a child born into a better racial order—erupting in a hair-raising wail on the word “freedom,” as though registering all the pain over all the years during which it was denied. For a while, “Brown Baby” was as close to a protest song as Simone got. She believed it was enough.

And then her friend Lorraine Hansberry set her straight. It speaks to Simone’s intelligence and restless force that, in her twenties, she attracted some of African-American culture’s finest minds. Both Langston Hughes and James Baldwin elected themselves mentors: Simone, appearing on the scene just as Holiday died, seemed to evoke their most exuberant hopes and most protective instincts. But Hansberry offered her a special bond. A young woman also dealing with a startling early success—Hansberry was twenty-eight when “A Raisin in the Sun” won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, in 1959—she had a strongly cultivated black pride and a pedagogical bent. “We never talked about men or clothes,” Simone wrote in her memoir, decades later. “It was always Marx, Lenin and revolution—real girls’ talk.” A milestone in Simone’s career was a solo concert at Carnegie Hall—a happy chance to show off her pianism—on April 12, 1963, which happened also to be the day that Martin Luther King, Jr., was arrested with other protesters in Birmingham, Alabama, and locked up in the local jail. The discrepancy between the events was pointed out by Hansberry, who telephoned Simone after the concert, although not to offer praise.

Two months later, Simone played a benefit for the N.A.A.C.P. In early August, she sang “Brown Baby” before a crowd gathered in the football stadium of a black college outside Birmingham—the first integrated concert ever given in the area—while guards with guns and dogs prowled the field. But Hansberry only started a process that events in America quickly accelerated. Simone watched the March on Washington, later that August, on television, while she was preparing for a club date. She was still rehearsing when, on September 15th, news came of the bombing of Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, killing four young African-American girls who had just got out of Bible class. Simone’s first impulsive act, she recalled, was to try to make a zip gun with tools from her garage. “I had it in my mind to go out and kill someone,” she wrote. “I didn’t yet know who, but someone I could identify as being in the way of my people.”

This urge to violence was not a wholly aberrant impulse but something that had been brewing on a national scale, however tamped down by cooler heads and political pragmatists. At the Washington march, John Lewis, then a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, was forced to cut the word “revolution” from his speech and to omit the threat that, absent immediate progress, the marchers would go through the South “the way Sherman did” and “burn Jim Crow to the ground.” James Baldwin, in a televised discussion after the bombing, noted that, throughout American history, “the only time that nonviolence has been admired is when the Negroes practice it.” But the center held. Simone’s husband, a smart businessman, told her to forget the gun and put her rage into her music.

It took her an hour to write “Mississippi Goddam.” A freewheeling cri de coeur based on the place names of oppression, the song has a jaunty tune that makes an ironic contrast with words—“Alabama’s got me so upset, Tennessee made me lose my rest”—that arose from injustices so familiar they hardly needed to be stated: “And everybody knows about Mississippi, goddam!” Still, Simone spelled them out. She mocked stereotypical insults (“Too damn lazy!”), government promises (“Desegregation / Mass participation”), and, above all, the continuing admonition of public leaders to “Go slow,” a line that prompted her backup musicians to call out repeatedly, as punctuation, “Too slow!” It wasn’t “We Shall Overcome” or “Blowin’ in the Wind”: Simone had little feeling for the Biblically inflected uplift that defined the anthems of the era. It’s a song about a movement nearly out of patience by a woman who never had very much to begin with, and who had little hope for the American future: “Oh but this whole country is full of lies,” she sang. “You’re all gonna die and die like flies.”

She introduced the song in a set at the Village Gate a few days later. And she sang it at a very different concert at Carnegie Hall, in March, 1964—brazenly flinging “You’re all gonna die” at a mostly white audience—along with other protest songs she had taken a hand in writing, including the defiantly jazzy ditty “Old Jim Crow.” She also performed a quietly haunting song titled “Images,” about a black woman’s inability to see her own beauty (“She thinks her brown body has no glory”)—a wistful predecessor to “Four Women” that she had composed to words by the Harlem Renaissance poet Waring Cuney. At the time, Simone herself was still wearing her hair in a harshly straightened fifties-style bob—sometimes the small personal freedoms are harder to speak up for than the larger political ones—and, clearly, it wasn’t time yet for such specifically female injuries to take their place in the racial picture. “Mississippi Goddam” was the song of the moment: bold and urgent and easy to sing, it was adopted by embattled protesters in the cursed state itself just months after Simone’s concert, during what they called the Mississippi Summer Project, or Freedom Summer, and what President Johnson called “the summer of our discontent.”

There was no looking back by the time she performed the song outside Montgomery, Alabama, in March, 1965, when some three thousand marchers were making their way along the fifty-four-mile route from Selma; two weeks earlier, protesters making the same attempt had been driven back by state troopers with clubs, whips, and tear gas. The triumphant concert, on the fourth night of the march, was organized by the indefatigable Belafonte, at the request of King, and took place on a makeshift stage built atop stacks of empty coffins lent by local funeral homes, and in front of an audience that had swelled with twenty-five thousand additional people, drawn either by the cause or by a lineup of stars that ranged from Tony Bennett and Johnny Mathis to Joan Baez. Simone, accompanied only by her longtime guitarist, Al Schackman, drew cheers on the interpolated line “Selma made me lose my rest.” In the course of events that night, she was introduced to King, and Schackman remembered that she stuck her hand out and warned him, “I’m not nonviolent!” It was only when King replied, gently, “Not to worry, sister,” that she calmed down.

Simone’s explosiveness was well known. In concert, she was quick to call out anyone she noticed talking, to stop and glare or hurl a few insults or even leave the stage. Yet her performances, richly improvised, were also confidingly intimate—she needed the connection with her audience—and often riveting. Even in her best years, Simone never put many records on the charts, but people flocked to her shows. In 1966, the critic for the Philadelphia Tribune, an African-American newspaper, explained that to hear Simone sing “is to be brought into abrasive contact with the black heart and to feel the power and beauty which for centuries have beat there.” She was proclaimed the voice of the movement not by Martin Luther King but by Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, whose Black Power philosophy answered to her own experience and inclinations. As the sixties progressed, the feelings she displayed—pain, lacerating anger, the desire to burn down whole cities in revenge—made her seem at times emotionally disturbed and at other times simply the most honest black woman in America.

She recalled that racial anger first arose in her when she was eleven. Born Eunice Waymon, in 1933, she was the sixth of eight children of John and Kate Waymon, who were descendants of slaves and pillars of the small black community of Tryon, North Carolina. Her mother was a Methodist preacher, a severely religious woman who made extra money by cleaning house for a white Tryon family; her father, who had started off as an entertainer, worked at whatever the circumstances required. Even during the Depression, the Waymons made a good home. Simone’s earliest memories were of her mother singing hymns, and both the house and the church were so filled with music that no one noticed little Eunice climbing up to the organ bench until, at the age of two and a half, she played “God Be with You Till We Meet Again,” straight through.

Yet as rare as the little girl’s musical gifts is the way that, in that time and place, those gifts were encouraged. She began playing for her mother’s sermons before her feet could reach the pedals, and was soon accompanying the church choir and Sunday services. She especially enjoyed playing for visiting revivalists, because of the raptures she discovered that she could loose in an audience with music. At the other end of the spectrum, she was five years old when the woman for whom her mother cleaned house offered to pay for lessons with a local piano teacher, Muriel Mazzanovich. The British-born Miz Mazzy, as Eunice called her—and also, later on, “my white momma”—inspired her love of Bach and her plans to become a great and famous classical pianist. Giving a recital in the local library, at eleven, Eunice saw her parents being removed from their front-row seats to make room for a white couple. She had been schooled by Miz Mazzy in proper deportment, but she nevertheless stood up and announced that if people wanted to hear her play they’d better let her parents sit back down in the front row. There were some laughs, but her parents were returned to their seats. The next day, she remembered, she felt “as if I had been flayed, and every slight, real or imagined, cut me raw. But, the skin grew back a little tougher, a little less innocent, and a little more black.”

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Her skin was very black, and she was made fully aware of that, along with the fact that her nose was too large. The aesthetics of race—and the loathing and self-loathing inflicted on those who vary from accepted standards of beauty—is one of the most pervasive aspects of racism, yet it is not often discussed. The standards have been enforced by blacks as well as by whites. Even Harry Belafonte wrote, in his memoir, about his mother’s well-intentioned counsel to “marry a woman with good hair,” and he added, in unnecessary clarification, “Good hair meant straight hair.” (Reader, he married her.) But Nina Simone, strong and fierce and proud Nina Simone? “I can’t be white and I’m the kind of colored girl who looks like everything white people despise or have been taught to despise,” she wrote in a note to herself, not during her adolescence but in the years when she was already a successful performer. “If I were a boy, it wouldn’t matter so much, but I’m a girl and in front of the public all the time wide open for them to jeer and approve of or disapprove of.”

Countering the charge of physical inferiority, in her youth, was the talent that her mother assured her was God-given. Music was her salvation, her identity. Thanks to a fund established by a pair of generous white patrons in Tryon, she was sent to board at a private high school—she practiced piano five hours a day, and graduated valedictorian—and then to a summer program at Juilliard, all with the unwavering aim of getting into the Curtis Institute of Music, in Philadelphia, where admission was terrifically competitive but tuition was free. Her destiny seemed so assured that her parents moved to Philadelphia before she took the Curtis exam. The fact that she was rejected, and believed that this was because of her race, was a source of unending bitterness. It was also a turning point. In the summer of 1954, in need of money, Eunice Waymon took a job playing cocktail piano in an Atlantic City dive—the owner demanded that she also sing—and, hoping to keep the news of this unholy employment from her mother, turned herself into Nina Simone, feeling every right to the anger that Nina Simone displayed forever after.

At times, it seemed that she could outdistance her feelings. In 1961, after a brief marriage to a white hanger-on at the Atlantic City club, she married Stroud, a tough police detective on the Harlem beat whom she initially sized up as “a light-skinned man,” “well built,” and “very sure of himself.” The following year, she gave birth to a daughter, Lisa Celeste, and Stroud left his job to manage Simone’s career; they lived in a large house in the leafy Westchester suburb of Mount Vernon, complete with a gardener and a maid. Although she complained of working too hard and touring too much—of being desperately exhausted—her life was not the stuff of the blues. And then, before a concert in early 1967, Stroud found her in her dressing room putting makeup in her hair. She didn’t know who he was; she didn’t quite know who she was. She later remembered that she had been trying to get her hair to match her skin: “I had visions of laser beams and heaven, with skin—always skin—involved in there somewhere.”

The full medical facts of Simone’s mental illness became public only after her death, in 2003, thanks to two British fan-club founders and friends of Simone’s, Sylvia Hampton and David Nathan, whose account of the singer’s career was aptly titled, after one of Simone’s songs, “Nina Simone: Break Down & Let It All Out” (2004). Subsequent biographies—the warmly overdramatizing “Nina Simone,” by David Brun-Lambert (2009), and the coolly meticulous “Princess Noire,” by Nadine Cohodas (2010)—have filled in terrible details of depression and violence and long-sought but uncertain diagnoses: “bipolar disorder” appears to be the best contemporary explanation. Excerpts from Simone’s diaries and letters of the nineteen-sixties, published by Joe Hagan (who got them from Andrew Stroud) in The Believer, in 2010, added the news that Simone’s personal hell was compounded by regular beatings from Stroud. The marriage dissolved in 1970, but it was many more years before she received any helpful medication.

All the more remarkable, then, the strength that Simone projected through the sixties. As the decade wore on, she began to favor bright African gowns and toweringly braided African hair styles; she became the High Priestess of Soul, and though the title was no more than a record company’s P.R. gambit—Aretha Franklin was soon crowned the Queen of Soul—she bore it with conviction. It would be wrong, however, to give the impression that her songs were mostly about civil rights. Stroud, with his eye on the bottom line, was always there to keep her from going too far in that direction. In concert, she even pulled back on “Mississippi Goddam,” singing “We’re all gonna die, and die like flies” in place of the gleefully threatening “You’re all gonna die . . .” Although she did record the classic anti-lynching ballad “Strange Fruit,” in 1965, and she could give the most unexpected songs an edge of racial protest (listen to her harrowing version of the Brecht-Weill “Pirate Jenny”), she had a vast and often surprising musical appetite. By the late sixties, she was so afraid of falling behind the times that she expanded her repertory to include Bob Dylan, Leonard Bernstein, and, covering all bases, the Bee Gees. One of her biggest hits of the era was the joyously innocuous “Ain’t Got No—I Got Life,” from the musical “Hair”—which, in her hands, became a classic freedom song.

But womanly strength was in everything she sang: in the cavernous depths of her voice—some people think Simone sounds like a man—in her intensity, her drama, her determination. It’s there in the crazy love song “I Put a Spell on You,” in which she recasts the crippling needs of love (“Because you’re mine!”) into an undeniable command. It’s there in the ten-minute gospel tour de force “Sinnerman,” when she cries out “Power!” like a Southern preacher and her musicians shout back “Power to the Lord!,” and especially when she takes the disapproving voice of the Lord upon herself: “Where were you, when you oughta been praying?” If you’d never before thought of the Lord as a black woman, you did now.

The civil-rights songs were nevertheless what she called “the important ones.” And the movement is where she gained her strength. It’s also where her private anger took on public dimensions, in the years when patience gave way entirely and the anger in many black communities could no longer be tamped down. Onstage in Detroit, on August 13, 1967—two weeks after a five-day riot had left forty-three people dead, hundreds injured, and the city in ruins—Simone, singing “Just in Time,” added a message to the crowd: “Detroit, you did it. . . . I love you, Detroit—you did it!” She was met with roars of approval, which one Detroit critic said he presumed had come from “the arsonists, looters and snipers in the audience.” Another critic, however, wrote that her show let white people know what they had to learn, and learn fast. Was she the voice of national tragedy or of the next American revolution?

And then King was shot, on April 4, 1968. Sections of Washington, Chicago, Baltimore, and more than a hundred smaller cities went berserk. Despite her rhetoric, Simone was profoundly shaken, and her views of what might be accomplished in this country only grew more bleak. At an outdoor concert in Harlem, the following summer—it’s available on YouTube—she went for broke.

Majestically bedecked à l’africaine, she opened with “Four Women,” singing now before a crowd where an Afro was the norm. After several other stirring, politically focussed songs—“Revolution,” “Backlash Blues”—she closed with something so new that she had not had time to learn it, a poem by David Nelson, who was then part of a group called the Last Poets and is now among the revered begetters of rap. She read the words from a sheet of paper, moving across the stage and repeatedly exhorting the crowd to answer the question “Are you ready, black people? . . . Are you ready to do what is necessary?” The crowd responded to this rather vague injunction with a mild cheer, prompted by the bongos behind her and the demand in her voice. And then: “Are you ready to kill, if necessary?” Now a bigger, if somewhat incongruous, cheer rose from the smiling crowd filled with little kids dancing to the rhythm on a sunny afternoon. It had been five years since the Harlem riot of 1964, the granddaddy of sixties riots; New York had largely escaped the ruinations of both 1967 and 1968. “Are you ready to smash white things, to burn buildings, are you ready?” she cried. “Are you ready to build black things?”

Despite her best efforts, Simone failed to incite a riot in Harlem that day in 1969. The crowd received the poem as it had received her songs: with noisy affirmation, but merely as part of a performance. People applauded and went on their way. There are many possible reasons: no brutal incident of the kind that frequently set off riots, massive weariness, the knowledge of people elsewhere trapped in riot-devastated cities, maybe even hope. Simone had her unlikeliest hit that year with a simple hymn of promise, “To Be Young, Gifted and Black,” based on the title of a play that had been put together from Lorraine Hansberry’s uncollected writings. Hansberry, who died in 1965, had used the phrase in a speech to a group of prize-winning black students, and Simone asked a fellow-musician, Weldon Irvine, to come up with lyrics that “will make black children all over the world feel good about themselves forever.” Indeed, it is a children’s song (or it was, until Aretha took it over). Simone’s most moving performance may have been on “Sesame Street,” where she sat on the set’s tenement steps wearing an African gown and lip-synched her recording to four enchanting if slightly mystified black children, who raised their arms in victory toward the end.

It was not a victory she could believe in or a mood she could sustain. By the end of the sixties, both Simone’s career and her marriage were in serious trouble. Pop-rock did not really suit her, and the jazz and folk markets had radically shrunk; the concert stage still assured her income and her stature. And if the collapse of her marriage was in some ways a liberation she was also now without the person who had managed her finances and her schedule, and who had kept her calm before she went onstage (by forbidding her alcohol, among other means), and got her offstage quickly when the calm failed. She was left to govern herself in a world that suddenly had no rules and, just as frightening, was emptied of its larger, steadying purpose. “Andy was gone and the movement had walked out on me too,” she wrote, “leaving me like a seduced schoolgirl, lost.”

Looking back on the historic protests and legislative victories of the sixties, one may find it easy to assume a course of inevitable if often halting racial progress, yet this was anything but apparent as the decade closed. When, in 1970, James Baldwin set out to write about “the life and death of what we call the Civil Rights movement,” its failure seemed to him beyond contention. As for the black leaders who had “walked out” on Simone, they were in cemeteries (Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, King, Fred Hampton), in jail (Huey Newton, Bobby Seale), or in Africa (Stokely Carmichael), or else had “run for cover,” as she put it, “in community or academic programmes.” White liberals had diverted their efforts to Vietnam; this was now the war being fought on televisions in living rooms every night. According to Simone, “The days when revolution really had seemed possible were gone forever.”

She left the country in 1974. Travelling to Liberia with her twelve-year-old daughter, she stayed for two years, during which she performed hardly at all. She left Liberia for Switzerland in order to put her daughter in school there. Eventually, she moved to France, alone. It seems to have been only the recurrent need for money that spurred her to perform again in the United States, although she took great pride in an honorary doctorate that she received from Amherst, in 1977, and insisted ever after on being called “Doctor Nina Simone.” Meanwhile, her concerts tended increasingly toward disaster. As she now sang in “Mississippi Goddam,” “the whole damn world’s made me lose my rest.”

The remainder of her life, some twenty-five years, is a tale of escalating misery. At the worst, she was found wandering naked in a hotel corridor brandishing a knife; she set her house in France on fire, and once, also in France, she shot a teen-age boy (in the leg, but that may have been poor aim) in a neighbor’s back yard for making too much noise—and for answering her complaints with what she understood as racial insults. Yet the ups of her life could be almost as vertiginous as the downs. In 1987, just a year after she was sent to a hospital in a straitjacket, her charmingly upbeat 1959 recording of “My Baby Just Cares for Me” was chosen by Chanel for its international television ad campaign. Rereleased, the record went gold in France and platinum in England. In 1991, she sold out the Olympia, in Paris, for almost a week.

She toured widely during her final years. In Seattle, in the summer of 2001, she worked a tirade against George W. Bush into “Mississippi Goddam,” and encouraged the audience to “go and do something about that man.” She was already suffering from breast cancer, but it wasn’t the worst illness she had known. She was seen as a relic of the civil-rights era, and on occasion she even led the audience in a wistful sing-along of “We Shall Overcome,” although she did not believe her country had overcome nearly enough. Once she became too sick to perform, she did not return to what she called “the United Snakes of America.” She died in France, in April, 2003; her ashes were scattered in several African countries. The most indelible image of her near the end is as a stooped old lady reacting to the enthusiastic cheers that greeted her with a raised, closed-fisted Black Power salute.

Thirty-four years after Simone released “Young, Gifted and Black,” Jay Z reused the title for a song that describes the fate of many of those gifted children—“Hear all the screams from the ghetto all the teens ducking metal”—in twenty-first-century America. The rap connection with Simone is hardly surprising, since rap is where black anger now openly resides. Simone disliked the rap she knew, however, in part for displacing so much anger onto women—or, as she put it, for “letting people believe that women are second class, and calling them bitches and stuff like that.” Back in 1996, Lauryn Hill rapped an anything-you-can-do retort to a male counterpart, “So while you imitatin’ Al Capone / I be Nina Simone / And defecatin’ on your microphone,” but no one has really taken up the challenge of Simone’s example. There was a minor uproar last year over Kanye West’s sampling of phrases from Simone’s recording of “Strange Fruit” (with her voice speeded up to an unrecognizable tinniness) in “Blood on the Leaves,” in which Simone’s evocation of lynched black bodies is juxtaposed with West’s personal concerns about “second string bitches,” cocaine, and the cost of paying off a baby mama versus a new Mercedes. Some people have seen a social statement here, but one can’t help recalling Simone’s broader reaction to rap: “Hell, Martin and Malcolm would turn in their graves if they heard some of this crazy shit.”

As for jazz, Simone was largely excluded from the history books for decades. Will Friedwald’s seminal “Jazz Singing,” of 1990, mentioned her only in passing, as “off-putting and uncommunicative” and as the center of a cult “that only her faithful understand.” But Simone’s eclecticism has slowly widened the very definition of jazz singing. And, ever since Presidential candidate Obama listed her version of “Sinnerman” as one of his ten favorite songs of all time, in 2008, the cult has gone mainstream. There’s now a burgeoning field of what may be called Simone studies—Ruth Feldstein’s “How It Feels to Be Free” and Richard Elliott’s “Nina Simone” offer two highly intelligent examples—and Friedwald’s even more authoritative volume of 2010, “A Biographical Guide to the Great Jazz and Pop Singers,” includes a lengthy entry on Simone that pronounces her “more important than anyone” in her influence on twenty-first-century jazz singing.

Last year, two Broadway shows depicted Simone as an inspiration for a couple of unexpected figures: in “A Night with Janis Joplin,” she helped to provide her white soul sister with the gift of fire, and, even stranger, in the crude but enthusiastic “Soul Doctor”—which reopens Off Broadway this winter—she was the force behind the “rock-and-roll rabbi” Shlomo Carlebach. Nutty as it seemed onstage, Simone’s acquaintance with the rabbi appears to have some basis in fact, and helps to explain the Hebrew songs she performed at the Village Gate (where he also performed) in the early sixties. While it may be a show-biz exaggeration to suggest that the rabbi and the jazz singer had an affair—the show featured an Act I curtain clinch that, on the night I saw it, had its largely Orthodox audience literally gasping—the point was the universality of Simone’s message about persecution, the search for justice, and the power of music.

Back in 1979, at a concert in Philadelphia, Simone followed a performance of “Four Women” by scolding the black women in the audience about their changes in style: “You used to be talking about being natural and wearing natural hair styles. Now you’re straightening your hair, rouging your cheeks and dressing out of Vogue.” In 2009, the comedian Chris Rock made a documentary titled “Good Hair” because, he explained, his young daughter had come to him with the question “Daddy, how come I don’t have good hair?” For an African-American child, nothing had changed since Harry Belafonte’s mother’s advice, more than half a century earlier. (According to one contented businessman in Rock’s film, African-Americans—twelve per cent of the population—buy eighty per cent of the hair products in this country.) As for skin tone, the cosmetic companies have been expanding their range ever since Iman established a line of darker foundations, in 1994, although in March, 2014, a former beauty director of Essence, Aretha Busby, complained to the Times,“The companies tend to stop at Kerry Washington. I’d love to see brands go two or three shades darker.”

The question of skin tone and hair and their meaning for African-American women exploded on the Internet with the announcement of the casting of Saldana in the Hollywood bio-pic about Simone. When the idea for such a film was initially floated, in the early nineties, Simone herself gave the nod to being played by Whoopi Goldberg. When, in 2010, the present film was announced in the Hollywood Reporter, Mary J. Blige—the reigning Queen of Hip-Hop Soul—was announced for the lead. Once Blige was replaced with Saldana, however, a woman whose skin tone is more than two or three shades lighter than Simone’s, the cries for boycotting the film on the basis of misrepresentation—on the basis of insult—were instantaneous. Why not cast Viola Davis? Or Jennifer Hudson? Production photographs showing Saldana on the set with an artificially broadened nose, an Afro wig, and—inevitably, but most unfortunately—dark makeup that is all too easily confoundable with blackface rendered any hope of calm discussion futile. It’s been suggested that the filmmakers might as well have cast Tyler Perry in full “Madea” drag.

Simone’s daughter has come out against the film because its story focusses on an invented love affair as much as for the casting of Saldana, although she is quick to point out how much her mother’s appearance shaped her life. (Lisa once told an interviewer that her mother would sometimes “traumatize” her because she is light-skinned—“and I’d remind her that she had chosen my father, I didn’t.”) The fight over the film ultimately extended to a lawsuit filed by the director, Cynthia Mort, against the British production company, Ealing Studios Enterprises, on the very eve of the screening at Cannes. Since then, though, the suit has been dismissed, so “Nina” may yet show up in a theatre near you. And Saldana may give a compelling performance—may well prove that she can play not only women who are sci-fi blue (as in “Avatar”) or green (as in “Guardians of the Galaxy”) but real-life black. Still, there is no escaping the fact that her casting represents exactly the sort of prejudice that Simone was always up against. “I was never on the cover of Ebony or Jet,” Simone told an interviewer, in 1980. “They want white-looking women like Diana Ross—light and bright.” Or, as Marc Lamont Hill writes in Ebony today, “There is no greater evidence of how tragic things are for dark-skinned women in Hollywood than the fact that they can’t even get hired to play dark-skinned women.” Well beyond Hollywood, these outworn habits of taste reverberate down the generations, infecting all of us.

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Simone’s favorite performer in her later years was Michael Jackson. She brought cassettes of his albums with her everywhere, and recalled having met him on a plane when he was a little boy, and telling him, “Don’t let them change you. You’re black and you’re beautiful.” She anguished over his evident failure to believe what she’d said: the facial surgeries, the mysterious lightening of his skin, the fatality of believing, instead, what the culture had told him, and wanting to be white. Simone appeared onstage with him just once, amid a huge cast of performers gathered for Nelson Mandela’s eightieth birthday, in Johannesburg, in the summer of 1998. She was sixty-five years old, and photographs of the event show her standing between Mandela and Jackson, overweight yet glamorously done up, her hair piled in braids and her strapless white blouse a contrast to the African costumes of the chorus all around. But she was also very frail. In one photograph, Jackson—in his glittering trademark military-style jacket, hat, and shades—holds her left hand in both his hands, in a gesture of affection. But in another shot he has put one steadying arm around her, and she is grasping his hand for support. Few people seem aware of what is happening. The stage remains a swirl of laughter and song, a joyous African celebration. And at its center the two Americans stand with hands clasped tight—one hand notably dark, the other notably fair—as though trying to help each other along a hard and endless road.

[samwrights]

Bricks - Punk!AU [Terushima]

Here is the first chapter of Terushima’s route in Elixir! If you haven’t read the prologue, I’ll leave a link here as well as at the bottom of the chapter’s navigation. Artwork is not mine so if we find the artist, can someone please let me know so I can properly credit them?

Ya know, this is probably least popular post/series on here but I’m in it and I write what I want 🤙🏻

Lyrics are italicized and sang entirely in your voice.

WARNINGS: this kinda fluffy chapter involves cheating, vulgar language, indirect use of marijuana, and cocaine use. There is a brief mention of you getting drugged a party and mild sexual themes as well, but nothing super heavy. Just making out. Please please please do not read if any of these themes make you uncomfortable.

Word count: ~4K

Song used: Brick by Boring Brick - Paramore

A complementary playlist can be found  »  here

“Can we run Brick By Boring Brick one more time? My vocals were kinda meh.” Was your response to Kuroo’s question. The rest of your bandmates look to you in surprise, which you feared that they might since there was nearly no flaws in the song at all. After all, it was a pretty straightforward song with simple beat and melody. “I-I think my notes were just a little flat and my timing’s off, that cool with you guys?” Both of the guitarists looked to each other before turning to face the drummer, who gave a reassuring grin to you.

“If that’s what you wanna work on, baby, then we’ll do it.” You had half a mind to reprimand Terushima about using pet names with you while his girlfriend was present. Not that it necessarily should have raised anybody’s suspicions—more often than not, Teru called everybody by some form of a nickname, whether it be out of affection or because he didn’t know a person’s name was entirely dependent on the situation. In truth, you loved the lyrics to this song more than anything, even more so that the same man you wanted to reprimand was the one who helped inspire you to write it.

It started off with easy power chords and a steady drum beat, until Makki took his place as the steadfast rhythm. The intro takes a few bars of space before you begin your first verse nearly twenty-five seconds in.

She lives in a fairytale

There were many reasons that this song was special to you. For starters, it was one of the few pieces that Elixir had in their repertoire that emphasized and valued the distinct differences between yours and Makki’s vocals. Naturally, you tended to have a higher yet shorter range, whereas Makki was capable of complimenting you in more ways than one.

Another was that, since this was a second song in the set after a taxing song like Besitos, Brick By Boring Brick was much more tame, yet still held an easy feel to it that the audience could weave and bob along at a leisurely pace. It was a crowd pleaser while simultaneously having bits and pieces in which the crowd could engage by clapping along with the beat, which always gave you an additional burst of energy.

Finally, this song truly highlighted the things that Terushima did for the band. This blondie was in charge of setting that pace to fire up the crowd; he was in charge in holding the steady rhythm to keep the four of you in time.

He was the reason you wrote the song.

Not that anyone else in the band knew that the words comprised in the verses were strings of feelings you’d had towards the man in a non-obvious way.

She’s ripping off wings of butterflies.

You smiled as you drawled the line out, staring at the three girlfriends sitting on a couch together not ten feet from you. They were staring back at you as well, not that you could be bothered in the moment. Right now, your focus was on making sure you were hitting the high notes in the right key when you entered the chorus. Considering you wrote the song, it shouldn’t have been hard for you to hit. Then again, you’d been smoking nearly a pack a day for seven years—there were bound to be raspy inconsistencies. After the first chorus, you were granted a moment’s reprieve as Makki scatted a simple line, his soprano contrasting your tenor in all the right ways. And while you loved hearing your bassist sing, you were entranced in the way Teru focused on emphasizing the drum beat, considering you and Kuroo were essentially mute for the brief moment.

Terushima hated the second verse of the song with every fiber of his being, but he loved seeing how joyous you looked when you sang it. He hates it because he knows why you wrote it and he hates because he knows you feel the same way he does.

The first time he cheated on his girlfriend was with you. Or rather, you were the only person he cheated on her with, and the first time it had happened, you were so overrun with guilt that you laid naked in his bed, curled into a ball and sobbed. Yet the two of you couldn’t stop, refused to stop, no matter how much guilt flooded your bodies.

More importantly, he hated the song implied that he was some sort of prince when he lacked the grace of one and the implication that he saved you. He did no such thing—if anything, he destroyed you.

But it was a trick and the clock struck twelve

How Terushima was able to focus on drumming when every time he heard his song, all he could think of were the secret trysts between the two of you, was beyond him. But hearing that line constantly reminded him that your relationship was illusion made of paper thin glass that could be shattered in an instant. Hence the line,

Build your home brick by boring brick or the wolf’s gonna blow it down.

Yūji was thankful that Elixir was home for you because it was home for him too. The bricks that built your guys’ foundation was the many years of friendship and memories together. A lot of them were firsts—the first time you all met; the first time you all hung out outside of work; the first time you all drank together despite being underage; the first time Yūji offered to smoke everyone up and the way you hesitated, never having smoked weed before. He distinctly remembers having to work a bong for you because you couldn’t grasp the concept of the mechanics.

Terushima remembers the first and only time you got drugged at a party in college and he how he had never felt the fear swelling in his body so bad. The same night the four of you vowed that you were done with the party life and how the only people you trusted was the four people holding instruments right now. Sometimes he would use these type of thoughts to ease yours and his guilt for his infidelity when, in reality, Terushima really just didn’t know how to tell her he didn’t want to be with her. Minami meant well, that much he knew. She wanted to see him succeed in life, as opposed to the way he was wasting away in his mom’s basement while playing in a band with his high school best friends. According to her, Terushima was destined for something greater than the way his life was going, but he also was too pathetic to do anything about it. She’d told him once he would never go anywhere if he didn’t try to push himself.

You built up a world of magic, because your real life is tragic.

The only way that Terushima felt that he was destined for something greater was when he was with you buried and twisted up in the sheets of your apartment. Naked or not, there was no better feeling for him than when he got to lay beside you, reassuring you that he was going to leave Minami one day. But you weren’t stupid, and you swore that it was better for the group if you two remained incognito. Your delusions convinced you that Kuroo and Makki would be more upset to know that the two of you were fucking behind each other’s back, as opposed to respecting the “homeostasis of the group”, as Kuroo called it. Deep down, you knew and Teru knew that the others would be so happy to finally see you both stop embarrassingly trying to bottle your feelings because man you guys flooded rooms with sexual tension.

If it’s not real, you can’t hold it in your hand.

Yūji Terushima loved many things about you. He loved your passion for life, the vivacious nature you brought to everything you did, how you made dirty words sound like praise and compliments and not just when you sang. However, he could live without you singing songs that had constant digs at him and you and your guys’ shitty situation, but even then, he could listen to you forever. Even if there were times he could see the veins in your neck begin to protrude in efforts to try to raise your pitch, Teru swore you were an angel. Even if you would lean your head on Makki while the two of you closed out the song in harmony, he knew the feelings you had for Makki were different than what you felt for him. You were special to him and he was special to you.

“Satisfied, princess?” The drummer asks you, not even remotely out of breath after the track. You gave a roll of your eyes before grabbing another beer from the mini-fridge just to the side of the stairs, making sure to hand one to each of your mates. By the second turn around, you noticed that the couch was now vacant and Terushima was excusing himself, plucking the tall can from your hands. “Just gonna walk ‘em out real quick, be right back.” It takes everything in him in that moment not to reach over and peck your lips, like he’s not saying his goodbye to his actual girlfriend for the evening.

“So, did that sound better or—“ while your question was technically finished, the remaining bandmates stared at you knowingly. You were thankful all the girlfriends left. “What?”

“Don’t think we didn’t see that.” Kuroo muses. Everyone in the band knew, to some degree, that you liked Terushima. It was so painstakingly obvious, yet you chose to live in denial that you would ever have him. Even though the mutual pining between the two of you had gone on for years, you were adamant on remaining neutral and keeping the friend group together until Terushima had finally given up on you.

Well, he did give up on you, until the first time he had laid victim to the verbal assault, for lack of better term, to Minami’s insults. She knew how to play him better than he did his drums, knew that to keep him hooked she just had to sit there and stroke his fragile ego and tell him he was the most amazing person in the world. That Terushima was worthy of all the love and praise she showered him in, before she would follow it with knocking him back down to size. The first time he heard it three months ago, he had spiraled so hard that nobody was even in contact with him for a week. Every day for seven days, Terushima was so far gone, blowing through his monthly supply of weed and tapping into his emergency stash of edibles. So far gone with nothing to numb him except for dabbling with blow, hoping the high of cocaine would soothe his need for constant reaffirmation.

Spoiler alert—it didn’t.

“You saw nothing.” You bit back, glaring at the two men before you before taking a gracious glug of your ale to quell your embarrassment.

“We aren’t stupid, babe.” Makki chimes, setting down his guitar and leaning on his amp to stare at you. “Why are you guys even putting yourselves through this? It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Let me humor you, Makki,” your voice is dry, and contrarily humorless as you sit on top of a spare stool that Kuroo kept nearby for when he had to switch to acoustic guitar. “Say we date and everything’s all happy and shit, hooray! But then it’s like we leave you guys behind. I would never forgive myself for that.”

“[name], we would never let you leave us behind.” Kuroo blanches in rebuttal.

“Okay, but what if we have to end things and it gets messy? You’ve seen how I can get.” The latter leaves your lips bitterly, knowing full well that when you were mad, there was no object off limits to you and they would inevitably be broken and thrown. “It’s just not worth throwing away our ten plus years of friendship.”

“I’m not worth it, huh?” Teru announces as he walks back down the basement stairs, face sullen as he heard every word of the conversation. Seeing his own grave expression cracks your heart like concrete in an earthquake.

“T-Teru, no...”

“Everyone get the fuck out.” Sensing the volatility of the situation, Hanamaki and Kuroo remove their instruments cautiously, fearing that the slightest upset would unleash the kraken of Terushima’s bitter rage. Gathering their belongings, the two men began to trickle out, stopping when they realized you’d yet to move. They glanced at each other in worry, unsure of whether or not they needed to drag you out of the basement or stay to back you up for an inevitable argument. Their decision was made for them when Terushima repeated, “get the fuck out!”

“No.” Sometimes, everyone hated how stubborn you were, especially Kuroo and Makki. Everyone hated how stubborn you both were.

“[name], please try to get this shit together. We have a show tomorrow for fuck’s sake.” The raven haired guitarist mumbled in defeat before thudding up the steps with Makki in tow, leaving you in the basement and Terushima halfway down the steps.

“I meant you too.” The blonde bites out, contradicting his movements as he descended down the stairs further. You don’t move, watching him cautiously as he pulls off a small panel of the wooden walls of the basement. “I mean it, [name],” all humor and sunshine has dried from his vocal chords as he says your name, something he does not do enough of. “Go. I-I can’t look at you right now.” Still, you remain, watching in wonder as begins cutting up a small rock on a silver tray near his drum kit, pulling out a bill and rolling it tightly.

“I thought you quit.” You say quietly, unsure of whether or not you should approach him.

“How can I?” Terushima’s voice is bitter and sharp, his statement accentuated with the sound of him snorting the line he had out on the tray. You could tell from his movements alone that he needed to adjust his nose ring after doing so. “Takes me to the only place where everything’s okay.”

“How is any of this okay, Yūji?”

“Don’t fucking call me that!” The blonde snaps, whipping his body around with a feral look in his eye. Out of context, it would have been stupid to say that considering all you said was his name. But you knew what it did to him to hear you say it, to not call him by his last name as you have for ten plus years; for you to not call him by the nickname that only you used. “You lost the right when you said I wasn’t worth it.”

“Yūji, I didn’t say that.” By now, your voice is pleading, begging for him to hear you out. As he stomps towards you, you expect him to grab you, either out of anger or love didn’t matter, you welcomed both. But instead he breezes right by you to sit on the couch where Minami once sat and buried his face in his hands. Hesitantly, you sat beside him, his silent cries coaxing you to approach. Terushima was shaking, the clothes on his back trembling as he mutely wracked sobs. “All I said is that I’m fucking terrified of throwing away everything we built for the last ten years.”

“Why can’t we just keep building?”

“Teru, you made that choice and I don’t blame you for it.” You shifted slightly beside him to face him despite his face still being covered. He meant it when he said he couldn’t look at you right now—he couldn’t stand to stare at you knowing he wouldn’t find judgment or anger like when he faced Minami. Every time he looked at you, he saw nothing but love and trust and he couldn’t help but be overrun with guilt over making the stupid decision to date Minami in the first place. “I made that choice, too.”

“I thought having her around would help me get over you.” A small, sympathetic hum vibrated between your tightly pursed lips. “I’m still hoping she does.” You know there’s truth to his words—there is. But even with that portion of honesty didn’t change the fact that he routinely cheated on his girlfriend with you and you can’t help but wonder how all of this happened in the first place and why you kept going along with it. There was no use in wondering, not when you had all the answers. Not when you knew the first time it had happened, he was so overrun with insecurities than Minami created and that you loved him so much that you couldn’t stand to see him talk about how much he hated himself. If infidelity was what was needed for him to see himself the way you see him, then so be it.

You needed him to see himself as the light that brought and kept the four of you together—kept you together. As the person that protected you at university after someone drugged your drink when nobody was looking. As the person who valued your safety more than he loved his freedom and proved it by getting everyone to put their party phase to rest. As the beautiful man that he was, even with scars that littered his face from old, retired piercings he had taken out because he thought they made him look stupid. You missed his lip rings.

You loved him so much that you couldn’t risk a sour relationship ruining your friendship with him forever. “Yūji, you know that I return your feelings...” With extreme carefulness, you pry Terushima’s hands away from his face and cradle them in your own. “You also know what I’m afraid of.”

“You can’t keep hiding behind that fucking excuse.” He snarls, his blown out pupils finally turning to face you. The harrowing of his eyes was daunting, taunting you with guilt that you were some how responsible for his dependency on cocaine. “Our friendship was ruined a long time ago.”

“You can’t keep a back up plan,” you countered, “either we face this together or we call it off.” As the words left your mouth, tears began to quietly roll down your cheeks, speaking your ultimatum into existence. You’d had enough. No more seeing your sunshine bury who he used to be under bumps; no more covering up his stupid amateur basement tattoos with hoodies and jeans because Minami didn’t like them; no more pretending that he was over you just to crawl into your lap after a bad high and kiss you. You couldn’t take it anymore, but neither could he.

With urgency and fire, Terushima’s trembling hands cup your cheeks, holding you in place like you would disappear if he hadn’t. Surely, had your lips not softened the blow, your teeth would have clacked with his from sheer force. Needing no further assurances, your eyes squeezed shut, basking in the warmth that radiated off of him. The stud in his tongue ran along your lower lip, asking for permission he knew he didn’t need before the muscle and metal traced along every surface in your mouth. Your fingers twisted and tangled at the base of his grown out undercut, trying to pull him impossibly close to you, trying to fuse his body with yours. “We face this together.” The blonde pants out, only taking a moment to recollect his oxygen before he’s on you once again. Clumsy, tattooed hands are tugging at the hem of your shirt while yours are unceremoniously clawing at his zip up hoodie to get it off of him. When both of you are faced with the need to pull cloth off of your torso, your hands press delicately to his inked chest, stopping him from professing.

“I love you.” You remind him softly, wondering how many times someone else had been underneath him, saying the same thing. Terushima doesn’t say anything in reply, instead latching his lips on the thin, sensitive skin on your neck. “Yūji, listen to me for a second.”

“No.” There was a fearful twinge to his voice that he could no longer mask. Fear that if the two of you stopped what you were doing, it would never happen again; fear that this wasn’t happening and he was too high and that he was imagining it all. It happened to him enough times. Knowing that he liked to be treated rough, your fingers thread through his matted locks once again, though this stop not out of pleasure.

“Listen to me,” you repeated, now scooting up a bit to rest on your elbows to keep you suspended. “I love you. And no matter what happens, I will always love you.”

His voice trembles, along with every bone in his body, as Terushima responds. “Please, you’re making this sound like this is the last time...” It broke your heart in more ways than one. Because, in a sense, it would be the last time. Only if the two of you couldn’t dive in together, only if he couldn’t end the relationship that was slowly tearing him apart from the inside out. “I promise, it’s you and me.” He’s far from calm, but he stills has your fingers trace down his sweaty brow, following down to the single dermal stud below his eye before dancing along his nose hoop. Knowing your path, Teru sticks his tongue out, allowing the tips of your fingers to trace the barbell that typically rested in his mouth. It’s an oddly intimate act, one that was only ever done by you, but it’s an act he loves nonetheless because it’s done by you. But while you love touching him, you know what he needs more than anything.

He needs to hear it.

“I’ve always loved the way you looked.” Your words of praise start off slow and your fingers gingerly graze over where the studs in his lips once resided. “I waited those two extra years for because I didn’t wanna move on to a new chapter in my life without you.” Terushima groans at the admission, unsure if he wanted to cry or kiss you in response. “It breaks my heart to see Minami treat you like you’re less than you are, because you are my sunshine. You bring light into everything you do and I can’t help but wonder if it’s my fault that she’s in the picture at all.”

Cry, he decides finally, because your words hurt him in the most sensual way.

“It’s my fault. I ran away, thinking if I just fucked someone else I would get over you.” Shit, now he’s blaming himself and the two of you are back at square one.

“No, Teru. It’s my fault for being chickenshit.” He doesn’t wanna hear it anymore, he decides, bringing his bruised and swollen lips back to yours. It doesn’t matter who’s fault it was or is, all that matters is that you stick true to your word. That after Minami’s out of the picture, the two of you hang on to each other tightly and dive headfirst into this new territory. “I love you so much and I’m so fucking sorry for ever holding back.”

“So don’t hold back anymore.”

[ Elixir « Bricks » Love Bites ]

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[disinvited-guest]

3/9/2020 Detroit

The venue staff were much better for this show, primarily because they were able to chill out just a little.  I’m not sure if they had gotten a sense of how harmless tmbg fans were from the night before, or if Flans, who had seemed a bit peeved at how uptight they were, gave someone an earful.  Either way, they still were a bit strict about some things, but much more relaxed than they had been.

As with the previous night, I was able to hear all of the soundcheck while waiting in line in the bar.  They were practicing a bunch of songs I hadn’t yet heard on the tour, all of which they did play during the show.  I heard Authenticity Trip, Memo to Human Resources, Number 3, and Man It’s So Loud In Here, and I just got more excited for each and every one.  The soundcheck changed to just individuals trying different things out for a while, and then that stopped and they started soundchecking With the Dark.  

The rest of the wait was relatively uneventful, and soon we were let inside.  To change things up, I found a spot squarely in front of the drum riser.  I think the security fence was set slightly closer to the stage than it had been the day before, but the added distance actually worked to my advantage today, as I could see more of the other side of the stage.  I always forget how much I enjoy shows from this side of the stage until I actually get there.  It’s different from over on the larger side of the stage, but that just makes it another type of wonderful.

Once again, the first set was the same Flood set from the last several nights, so the recap of the first set will be slightly shortened.  I have a few general notes before I begin. Fresh was wearing neon doce socks, and once again had his hair in pigtails.  This show was the first since Milwaukee where Dan was able to get through the first set without switching to his backup guitar.  Marty was absolutely on fire the whole set.  There were also a series of cold breezes coming from multiple directions towards the end of the set.

Coming onstage, Linnell was doing his wavy-armed walk to get up to his keyboard. During The Might Be Giants, Flans was apparently having a problem with his guitar, and desperately trying to get the crew’s attention while singing.  Eventually, towards the end of the song, he started singing “John Carter look at me” in place of the actual lyrics (the repeated “they might be giants” at the song’s conclusion).  It must have worked, because Flans stopped wildly gesturing offstage after that.  

After We Want a Rock, Linnell took the task of welcoming us to the show, before Flans made it up to the mic to tell everyone that it was an exciting day for him, “If you came to the show last night, you’ll notice that I just got a haircut.”  He called it one of the few perks of staying in the same city for two nights before launching into a detailed account of the event.

Apparently, his barber asked him what he was doing in town, “and, reluctantly, I told her the truth.”  He then told us that usually he lies, and that when a cab driver sees his guitar case and asks if he’s in a band he tells them “Yes, I’m in Fountains of Wayne.”  

He continued, saying that he has a “whole fanfiction thing going on” to explain why he doesn’t show up in photographs.

“When it turns out the cabbie is a Fountains of Wayne fan who’s like ‘I didn't see you on the album cover’” Linnell interjected.

“Yeah,” Flans agreed. “I’m just covering my tracks for the inevitable Google Search after.”

Getting back to his haircut story, Flans said “I told this woman I was in a band.  She did not ask me the name of the band but she did tell me the entire plot of the movie Queen.”

This got a huge laugh from the crowd, but Flans wasn’t done yet telling us his story.  The plot of the movie “lasted just about the entire haircut length.  Which was great.  I’ve gotta see that movie.”

He then moved to to explain the setup of the show, telling us they had put two songs from Flood in the second set “so that the friends that you dragged here will stick around.”

When Flans asked Linnell about his day, Linnell replied promptly “I’ve just been goofing off.”  He then told us that every other time they come to Detroit, he checks up on the city, and this time he found a lot more “boutique-y” stores downtown “and we’ve been informed that that is both good and horrible.” He concluded that he was “excited and disgusted” to see how Detroit comes along.

Flans told us that they were “standing in judgement” from 450 miles away.  Linnell agreed, but said the crowd was welcome to judge New York as well.“

But only from 450 miles,” Flans told him. “Those are the rules.”

Introducing the next song, Linnell told us it was off the Flood album, and that it was probably the second shortest song on the album.

“No spoilers, John!” Flans interrupted.

“No?”  Linnell continued “And here’s another spoiler: it contains unlicensed samples.  OOOH!”

“Now I beg you to shut up!”

“You guys ready for this?” Linnell asked, and they launched into Minimum Wage.

I think it was during Particle Man that Danny, backing up towards the drum riser while playing, bumped into it and sat down with a bit of a thump.  He stayed sitting there for a few measures before he got up again.  

After Hearing Aid, Flans came up to the mic and, without preamble, told us “So, then Queen fired their manager, and they had the opportunity to do Live Aid.  Which changed everything for them.  Because they rehearsed.”

Moving on to introducing the next song, Flans repeated his preamble from the day before about playing songs backwards, then told us they were embarking into uncharted territory “where the entertainment value is very low,” and that he hoped that our “thresholds of pleasure are set very finely tonight.”

He explained that they weren’t just flipping the chart, but playing what the sound recording backwards would sound like. “So if one was to reverse the live performance in front of you right now-if you could do that-it would reproduce the actual song, incredibly effectively.  If you could do that.  But you can’t, so we’re just gonna tell you that.”

He concluded “We’re not sure why we’re doing this, but we practiced it, and we’re committed to it, so we’re going to play it.”

He then introduced the members of the band individually.  We were asked to scream for Marty, and then for Danny, who Flans pointed out especially to the ladies. He introduced Dan as “on the electric guitar, with his eyes glued to the chart he made himself.”  While we cheered for Dan, Danny lifted his bass and pointed the neck of it at Dan as Flans continued “perhaps the finest electric guitarist in They Might Be Giants.”

“This song is called… Well it doesn’t really have a title,” Flans told us, and they started  Stilloob.  Maybe it was that they were getting more confident with it, but I do believe that this was their best performance yet!

Afterwards, Linnell responded to the crowd’s applause by saying thoughtfully “We should get you guys applaud before we play it, if we’re doing this correctly.”

“That was really the best applause that song has gotten thus far,” Flans decided. “You are really on the vanguard.”  He then predicted that in the future, when all songs are backwards, Stilloob will be seen as the ‘Rock Around The Clock’ of the movement.  He then imitated a person form the future explaining their musical tastes “I’m not into songs, man.  I’m into songs that are played in reverse.  I like digital, I like CD’s.  I like the sound of CD’s in reverse.  It’s got digital harshness, that’s what I like.”

Someone in the crowd shouted something, and Flans answered back that “I want to hear every word you’re saying, but part of me is saying we should resist that.”

Linnell introduced the next song as being the fastest sung in their entire repertoire (Letterbox), and Flans agreed, saying that they had officially entered the “stunt part of the program: stunt songs.”

After Lucky Ball and Chain, Flans admitted he was curious how many people had been to the show the night before.  Finding one person who had been he said directly to them “I just want to tell you that the second set is almost completely different.  But this part is music under glass.  We’re gonna tell the Queen jokes…” 

“As you know,” Linnell continued when Flans trailed off, “we’re doing the exact same raps, including what I’m saying right now. As we said last night.”

“I’m getting my hair cut every day,” Flans agreed.

Apparently this reminded Flans of their conversation from the start of the set, because he asked Linnell if he really hadn’t gone to a museum or something that day.

Linnell responded that he really had just goofed off but “A mystical thing happened to me.”  He then explained that he had a can of Faygo “my very first can of Faygo.”  This got laughs and cheers from the crowd, and Linnell responded “I know. I can feel the clown makeup just starting to grow on my face.”  

He tried to continue with his story, but Flans had gone upstage and grabbed a can of Faygo that had been sitting there, which he was now holding up, causing the crowd to start cheering once again.  He started to say something about it, but Linnell interrupted him “Let me finish the story, before you start in with your jokes.”  

“It’s taking too long, John,” Flans argued, “It’s taking too long.”

Linnell replied “Alright. Let’s just play the next song, forget it.  Nevermind.  It wasn’t that interesting anyway.”  The crowd reacted instantly, demanding the rest of the story, so Linnell finally got his chance to continue.  He had set the can of Faygo on a table and fallen asleep, then “I was awoken by the sound of it falling to the floor, but it was still upright.  And I thought, ‘I don't’ know what just happened, but there’s something special about this beverage.’”

“Do you think it was the ghost of Insane Clown Posse?” Flans asked, finally free to ‘start in with his jokes’, “Reaching out from before the grave?”

Linnell responded that, from what he knew, ICP wasn’t reluctant to spill Faygo so that didn’t seem likely.  Someone in the audience asked him what flavor it was, and he responded that it was Root Beer.  

This got some cheers and a lot of shouted responses from the crowd.  Flans, trying to get things back on track, seemed slightly annoyed by the shouts, and responded sarcastically “please, talk amongst yourselves for a little while.”

They played Hot Cha, then brought the topic right back to Faygo, with Linnell announcing “Hot Cha, ladies and gentlemen, sponsored by Faygo Root Beer.”

“I always thought that Fayo was like a cocktail put together by the Insane Clown Posse,” Flans admitted, once again holding his can of the stuff. “Then when I saw this I was like ‘Man, they are ripping them off!’  Lawsuit!”

He put the can down and then continued “But I guess it’s just… they really like soda.”

That, apparently, was the wrong thing to say in Detroit.  A few people in the crowd cried out “Pop!” “It’s pop!”  Other members of the crowd took up the cry, until the room buzzed with it.

Nobody on the stage had any clue what was going on, but realized the crowd was upset.  Flans tried to smooth things over, obviously confused “Understand...understand…”

“We are on the outside of this discussion,”  Linnell chimed in, coming to his aid.  “You guys know what it is…”

Flans, inspired, thought that the anger might be some sort of defense of ICP. “I just want to make it clear,”  he said, in a misdirected attempt to smooth things over, “that we are down with the clown.”

This got a laugh from the crowd, and a visibly relieved Flans continued “After that whole FBI thing, I was nervous they didn’t have enough representation.”

That might have been the end of the Beverage Wars, but a few determined people in the crowd started up the “Pop!” cry again, with a few people even beginning to chant it.

Flans, interrupted once again, looked out over the crowd and determined “It seems like fights are breaking out in the audience now, John.”

This stirred up the crowd even more.  Flans tried again to calm the crowd while still not sure what they were angry about ���Guys, guys, guys…”

He was interrupted by Linnell, who had finally grasped what was going on, “Okay, okay, I get it!”  He explained to Flans “They say pop, we say soda.  It’s a different language.”  As soon as Linnell said the word  ‘pop’  emphasizing the final ‘p’ as if it was completely foreign to him, a huge cheer rose from the crowd.

Flans immediately turned this new information into a joking lecture on the cultural differences “We’re from New York City, that means we’re gonna get on stage late.  That’s the way it works!  People are different, everybody’s got their own thing.” This was all said in an overly-patient voice. “We would change, if we knew how to.”

Linnell, who seemed genuinely amused, chimed in with his thickest Boston accent “But you’ll be cryin’ when we’re havin’ our victory party later on.”

This got laughs from the crowd and Flans cracked a smile, replying in the same voice “At Boston Garden!”

“That’s right!”

“When I put my thumb in my eye.”

Linnell responded with a stadium-organ style scale from his keyboard.  There was a beat and both looked a shade embarrassed.  Eventually Linnell, recovering, said “Alright, here we go.  Another song,” and started them into Women and Men.  Linnell switched the words shipwreck and beachhead, singing them in the other’s place.

After Someone Keeps Moving My Chair, Flans stepped up with the picture disk in hand and asked Saul for a “big white spotlight you can throw on me.”  He told us he had forgotten to do this yesterday, but was reminded by their new t-shirt person and he promised us that if we bought the picture disk “you could make your money back on ebay right away.”

“We have been asked on social media if it’s  true that picture disks don’t sound as good as regular vinyl records,” Flans continued.  “And my first thought to write back is like ‘well what do you want it to sound like?’”  He admitted that picture disks didn’t sound quite as good but “they have PICTURES on them, which is I think the larger point.”  He then introduced the zoetrope on the back, saying they had sweetened the pot with it and promised us “a beautiful visual effect that will remind you of psychedelic drugs.”  He concluded by promising that this was “the best sounding zoetrope you will ever see.”  

After Whistling In the Dark, Linnell stopped them from moving on because “I just have something to say about that last song.”  He told us all that they do a lot of Flood songs slightly different from how they are on the record, and “I was reminded on this song that we completely changed where the big smash sound happens, ‘cause I saw someone in the audience doing it where it happens on the RECORD, and I was like ‘Oh NO!  Eugh, no!’”  

He then assured us that the live version was the correct one “We did it wrong on the record, and now we’re doing it the right way.”  

Flans chimed in with his own observations on the live version of the song, saying that playing familiar songs “at less 4-cup-of-coffee-in-the-studio tempos” gives him “the distinct impression that people just think we’re tired.  But there’s no explaining it.”  He then did his best impression of the part of the song in question “But it goes ‘Whistling in the dark BOMP, whistling in the dark-”

“It should do that, yeah,” Linnell interrupted.

“It’s a more musical way of doing it, that’s our best explanation” Flans continued.

This reminded Flans of the difference between the album and live versions of another Flood song.  Without telling us the title of the song, he explained that they had left out a verse when recording and “didn’t have enough juice, or whatever the term is, to tell the producer people, like ‘we have to redo it.’”  Explaining that he sang the missing verse in the live version of the song, he told us that during shows “People will be singing along and then when it gets to that verse, they just stop. ‘Cause nobody knows those words.  But we will, uhh-”

Flans had been distracted by a guy in the crowd shouting out the song’s title (Road Movie To Berlin), and responded “No spoilers, man! No spoilers!”  The end of this scolding was muffled as Flans lost the battle to keep from cracking up, then moved away from his mic stand for a moment. 

Linnell gave him time to recover by promising us “Just bear in mind , we’re older and smarter now than we were then, so this is the right version.”

“You came to the right show, people,” Flans agreed. “We know it’s disorienting when the bass drum is on the opposite beat.”

After Birdhouse, Flans turned Linnell’s accordion mic around to face the crowd.  “I just realized the song I was talking about is coming up next,”  he told us all.  “So I’ve turned the microphone around to you so we can slightly amplify the parts you can sing along to, to which we encourage!  And then don’t be afraid of the parts you don’t know.  It’s just a little bit different.”

People really took the invitation to sing along to heart, which made it all the more hilarious when, of course, they petered out during the King of Liars verse.

Nothing too noteworthy happened between sets, although I finally was able to successfully pinpoint the end of the new cue song.  They used the Godzilla Intro once again, with Linnell speaking over the end of it in his best creepy-TV-narrator voice “Hello...And welcome back.”

Flans introduced Marty on the electronic drums “nothing says unplugged better,” and then made the claim that “In the world of drummers, Marty is Faygo.”

 Flans was about to start the first song of the set, when he stopped and decided it needed a better introduction.  At this point, I was expecting the Quiet Storm to be identical to the others so far on the tour, so I was completely shocked with Flans explained “This song is the full-length version of a song that a fragment of it was on the album The Else, and we’re gonna perform the entire song called With the Dark.”

And then they performed it.  Even though I’d heard strains of them soundchecking it earlier, I hadn’t known it would be this version, or that it would be so beautiful to witness firsthand.

Moving back to more familiar ground, they played 2082 and then Flans introduced Wicked Little Critta, “Ladies  and Gentlemen we are now gonna move to the place where John and I first met.  It’s a song about New England and it features the Keyboard Stylings of Mr. John Linnell.”

Finishing out the Quiet Storm, they left the stage to a projection of the Gudetama’s Busy Days video, which was a welcome change from Underwater Woman, which they’d used at the last three shows I’d attended. The guys were all onstage before the video ended and Dan, who was apparently raring to go, started Damn Good Times the moment after the last note of the video had finished.  Flans didn’t make us sway along to Dan’s solo this time, but he did introduce him as the “King of Pop” beforehand, and demand a “sea of hands” midway through.

This began a truly amazing set.  The guys were all at the top of their game, and clearly enjoying themselves as well. They also played a lot of songs I hadn’t gotten to hear yet on this tour, starting right after Damn Good TImes as they went straight into Man It’s So Loud In Here.

Afterwards, Flans started to introduce the next song, claiming that it was on a compilation album of things they’d done during their 2015 Dial-A-Song year.  Pausing, he decided “No, it was before that.... It was on an album…that we made...What?”  This last bit was directed at Danny, who had come up next to him.  Danny said something urgently into his ear, likely the song listed next on the setlist, and Flans responded with a quiet “Oh..”  As Danny returned to his spot, Flans grabbed the mic with both hands and whispered into it “Fuuuucck.”  Raising his voice out of the whisper, he continued “I don’t even know what song we’re doing.”

Recovering his stage presence and pivoting topics, Flans said, as if he was picking up a story he’d just stopped telling a moment ago, “So, at a certain point Queen realized that if they wrote songs they could do WITH the audience, that it would be like a whole new way of getting everybody involved.  And that’s why this song was written.”

This was clearly meant as a graceful exit into the next song, but Linnell had more to say on the topic. “Except… I think he wasn’t wearing the fake teeth in the real story, right?  I’m pretty sure.”

“That mustache didn’t look real,” Flans told him.

“I saw the movie, actually,” Linnell admitted.

“Ohh,” Flans was a bit disappointed.  “How was the mustache?”

“I-You know- That guy’s a good actor,” Linnell replied, evading the question.

“And he’s a REALLY good singer,” Flans added.

Missing the sarcasm in Flans’ voice, Linnell said “He’s a good singer.  You’re not joking around.”

“I actually was joking around,” Flans told him.

“No-no, he’s good.”

“It’s Freddie Mercury,” Flans said flatly.

“But I think the guy can sing,” Linnell insisted. “The robot… The robot guy.”  This drew laughs from the crowd, which Linnell stoked by declaring “The robot guy!”  once again.

“My acting friends thought that the Oscar should go to Freddie Mercury,”  Flans said, as the crowd quieted.

“Oh really?” Linnell asked, “ To the….the robot guy, or to the real Freddie Mercury…”

“No, no, ‘cause he’s lip-synching along to the thing,” Flans clarified.

Linnell answered with a non-committal ‘oh’ and then, after an awkward moment of quiet, brought up that “I hate movies where you’re instructed to like something because members of the audience in the movie are going ‘This is good.’”  He completed his impression with a thumbs up and a nodding head.  “It drives  me crazy.  I don’t need a proxy on the screen,  I can decide for myself if something is good or not.”

This got a cheer and applause from one solitary member of the crowd.  Linnell pointed him out and thanked him for applauding, then Flans declared “This show is dedicated to that guy applauding,” they then finally got around to introducing the next song: Wearing a Raincoat.

From there they played Authenticity Trip, which is always an amazing song to watch live,  with Flans roaming around the stage to sing.  Introducing Curt as he came on the stage for the next song, Flans told us all “During the break, Curt informed us that in Oklahoma, where he grew up, they refer to all soda-pop...all cola... they refer to everything as Coke. So you just say, like ‘You want a coke? What kind? Orange?’ That’s how it works there.”

This got a reaction from the crowd, who grumbled at the term coke, and even started yelling out a few states where they used the word that way.  Flans concluded “There are regional differences everywhere ladies and gentlemen.  We’re just ambassadors of disinformation.”

“Which is a way of saying, you were hurting our feelings when you were yelling at us before,” Linnell explained, amused.

“When we saw there was a clamor, we just assumed it was Insane Clown Posse fans,” Flans confessed, “Your mind jumps to that in rock music.  We didn’t realise it was the whole pop versus soda thing.”  He then started growling deep in his throat in what I can only assume was an imitation of what the upset crowd had sounded like to them.

After watching Flans do that a few times, Linnell moved on with another story about crowds and pronunciations.  “I can’t remember if I’ve told you this,” he said, looking over at Flans briefly before addressing the crowd “but I had a solo act about twenty years ago and I had a song.  The name of the song was ‘Oregon is Bad’ and I played it in Oregon and people were not offended by the title of the song. They were really offended that I mispronounced the name of their state.  That was the- that’s why I had to leave in a hurry.  So, you know, I get it!”

“Somebody threw a bottle of Faygo through your windshield,” Flans added.

“Yeah, yeah,”  Linnell agreed with a laugh.  “So here’s another song not off of Flood.”

This led into Turn Around, and from there straight into Spy.  I absolutely love the intro to this song, especially during shows like this, where Curt feels like showing off a bit.  The ending was pretty standard for this tour.  Linnell used his ‘Take It to the Limit’ sample opposite of and over the band, at normal and slowed down speeds.  Flans did a bit of stuff with playing his guitar pressed up against his mic stand opposite the band, and worked in the crowd relatively successfully.  At one point, Flans started to indicate the band, but changed his mind part way through and stopped his hand.  Marty played anyway, which made some other members of the band play with him.  Everyone soon realized what had happened and all looked over at Marty, who must’ve been a bit distressed, because Flans indicated it was his bad at the time and actually went over behind the drum riser after the song to apologize to Marty. 

While Flans was dealing with that, the crowd became a bit restless and a few people started to shout out songs.  Flans, coming back up to the front, let them go on for a bit. Once the crowd had gone quiet, he commented sarcastically “I was just gonna wait here until someone requested the next song.”  This led to another flurry of requests, which Flans quashed with “Guys, guys, guys.  We really are from New York City.  People don’t- that whole request thing…”  

People were still shouting out requests, but Flans ignored them.  “It’s like, you know, feel good to a certain extent and then you draw the line.  Here’s a song about that.  It’s called Memo to Human Resources.”  Confession time:  I actually cried a little during this song.The song holds a very special place in my heart, and the live experience of it is overwhelmingly emotional for me.  

They followed up with Don’t Let’s Start, which is always super fun to watch Flans and Danny spin around during.  Dan and Curt returned to the stage and Flans, introducing them, tried on his announcer voice “CAESAR’S PALACE IS PROUD TO PRESENT…”

“That was the thing we did in Chicago, where the guy was like ‘I’M COMPLETELY SINCERE!’”  Linnell explained, “I’VE NEVER HEARD OF ANY OF THESE ACTS!”

“I’M YOUR DAD’S ALCOHOLIC FRIEND!”  Flans shot back “PUT YOUR HANDS TOGETHER FOR HEY MUST BE GIANTS!”

This got a mix of laughter and applause from the crowd, which Flans responded to, still in the voice “KEEP IT GOING!  FOR AIN’T THEY GUNS.”

Seizing on the moment of quiet after that pronouncement, Danny began the intro to Museum of Idiots.  Four songs from Spine in one night!  Afterwards Flans briefly introduced Dan, and everyone else stepped back to let Dan begin his intro to Istanbul.  After a few fake endings, with some of Dan’s electric and a lot of Curt’s amazing everyone, Dan and Marty left the stage.  Flans thanked everybody for coming out and introduced the final song of the night as “the song I thought ended the first set for the last four nights,” Theme From Flood.

(Note:  I had no idea of this at the time of course, but Flans’ goodbye had a bit more emotion in it than is typical, and I’m guessing that at this point they were already rescheduling the rest of the April shows.)

Coming on for the first encore, the crowd was a bit rowdy, and Flans made the comment that “I once saw a guy defeated by a mic stand,” before they started the first song of the encore: Number Three!  During this song, Marty just plays his kick drum.  Danny, coming to the side of the drum riser, looked over at what Marty was doing and began copying his leg movement. It looked more than a bit silly, especially since Danny was grinning hugely up at Marty so he would notice.

“Mr. Dan Miller will be playing the keyboard on the next number,”  Flans announced

“Mr. Dan Mil-Ler,” Linnell repeated, with a bit of a call back to the announcers voices they had tried out earlier.

“YOUR DAD’S  ALCOHOLIC FRIEND IS ANNOUNCING MR. DAN MILLER ON THE KEYBOARDS,” Flans added, liking the idea.

“MISTER DANNY MY-LER,”  Linnell claimed.  Dropping the voice with a bit of a laugh, he started to ask “What was that thing where-”

Flans cut him off with a “DANNY MY-LER PLEASE MOVE YOUR CAR!”

Undeterred,  Linnell continued telling us about their sometimes trombone player Dan Levine.  Apparently, when he was playing in Frank Sinatra’s orchestra “he played that famous trombone solo in You Make me Feel So Young at which point Frank Sinatra said- this is the only time he’d ever called out our trombone player- ‘JOHNNY LEVINE!’”  Watching the crowd react, he concluded quietly, “you know, it’s the thought that counts.”

They finished out the first encore with “a song that we do”  Doctor Worm.  I think Dan finally had the keyboard settings figured out!  Just before the trumpet's final bit that ends the song, Linnell called out “Johnny Ramm!”

Coming back onstage for the second encore, they went right into She’s An Angel.  I hadn’t realized before, but Marty puts a tambourine on top of his hi hat for this song.  They went from Angel to The Guitar without any more of a pause than it took for Linnell to switch from accordion to keys.  Flans sang “is it Johnny Levine/ I don’t think so” during the first verse, and introduced Johnny Linnell and Johnny Ramm for an especially interesting and extended Future of Sound.  Everybody onstage was really going all out the whole song, including Dan doing what I can only describe as prancing while he played, and as they finished Flans thanked us all for coming one more time before leaving the stage.  

The rest of the band quickly followed him as the house mix began playing.  Except Danny that is, instead of leaving right away, he grabbed his setlist and walked over to me.  He had to step out onto the amp and lean across the aisle for me to reach it. I took it with a big smile, which he returned before heading offstage.

[yourkeeperoftherunners]

maybe i sent too much? lol just do as many as you'd like to!💗💕💞

You didn’t send too much! I appreciate you sending them!

Here are my answers below:

What are your favourite albums from each of the groups you mentioned?

BLACKPINK – SQUARE TWO (Ironically it also contains my favorite song “Playing with Fire” from the group.)

BTS – The Most Beautiful Moment in Life: Young Forever (My first song with them was “Fire” and it’s still my favorite song for the lyrics and melody.)

EXO – The Power of Music (The group had a lot of fun with the video and I really liked their b-side “Boomerang” too.)

ITZY – IT’Z ICY (Another one where my first and favorite track from them is on this EP.)

Stray Kids – I am WHO (This was a hard pick between this one and I am YOU which has the same name for the title track. The latter was my first song I heard from them but “My Pace” holds a special place in my heart for the meaning and the memory of Changbin asking the KCON audience to help him with the beginning part.)

What are your favourite songs?

BLACKPINK – “Playing with Fire” and “Hope Not”

BTS – “Fire”, “Trivia: Seesaw”, “MIC DROP (Steve Aoki Remix)”, and two songs off RM’s second mixtape “Seoul” and “Tokyo”

EXO – “Lightsaber”, “Boomerang”, and “Power”

ITZY – “ICY”, “Wannabe”, and “I Don’t Wanna Dance”

Stray Kids – I like a good chunk of their repertoire so it’s difficult to narrow it down. “My Pace” and “I am You” are ones I hold close. “Mirroh”, “Road Not Taken”, “STOP”, “Blueprint”, “God’s Menu”, and “Slump” have been on replay for me as of lately.

Do you have a favourite moment of theirs?

BLACKPINK – They did a short reality show called BLACKPINK HOUSE and one of the early episodes showed Lisa and Rosé waking early to make breakfast for the older girls. Rosé found bread and made toast, only she burned the first two slices and tried to save it by scraping off the burned areas. She proceeded to try her handiwork and did this cute arm flapping thing to show how proud she was of her work.

BTS – They do a series called Run! BTS and two episodes were split over them doing games themed to old Korean variety shows that were on when they were very young kids. They had these really dated looking outfits on and at one point they had to play a game where they listen to a children’s song, take a nap for 20-30 minutes, then wake up and try to remember the full song lyrics without any guidance. Some of them got hung up on words and poor Suga, who was the referee, was trying to find ways to give them hints without spoiling the answers.

EXO – Their appearances on Ask Us Anything/Knowing Bros. There was one where they played a game themed to their concept superpowers and a few of them actually were terrible at their jobs. (Ex. Xiumin’s assigned power is ice so he had to fish beans out of a bucket of ice in the game – he struggled because it was very cold, so another member did his job. Sehun’s assigned power is wind and he struggled to keep a piece of paper floating in the air with his breath only, etc.)

ITZY – At KCON LA, they introduced themselves after performing their latest single “ICY” and did a cute showcase of their talents.

Stray Kids – When they were on Weekly Idol, they played a game where they had to appeal to I.N., their maknae, to rank them from 1-8 in terms of his favorite hyung. The other members did things like bribe him with new sneakers, making up raps on the spot, and the dancers tried dancing to impress I.N. plus threw in some extras. (Hyunjin gave I.N. a ring, Lee Know tried dancing sexy until Hyunjin shoved him off I.N. for being inappropriate, and Felix offered I.N. a piggyback ride.)

Favourite outfit?

I really like Rosé’s grey sweater/checkerboard skirt/black thigh high boots look from “As if it’s Your Last”. That skirt inspired me to make my own skirt.

I like some of RM’s pieces from VISVIM because the head designer does pay a lot of attention to the process and details in his clothing pieces and it shows.

Most of the stuff I like for EXO is Chanyeol’s personal style – he wears a lot of VETEMENTS but maybe his “Freal Luv” look from the Far East Movement MV?

There’s a stage outfit Lia has worn where it’s this black sleeveless dress with buttons down the front and it’s cute and classy. The buttons kind of remind me of marching band jackets a little.

I did love the styling for KCON LA – albeit I still laugh about my friends asking me who the hot guy in all black with the abs (Bang Chan) and the cute guy in the red/black striped jacket (Han) after the concert.

If you could only stan one group for the rest of your life, which group would it be?

Stray Kids and I think it has to do with the fact that I’ve seen them twice in concert and always have a lot of fun when they perform.

Which 3 idols from those groups would you rather be stranded on a deserted island with?

Rosé (BLACKPINK)

Bang Chan (Stray Kids)

? I’m not sure who I want as my third pick. Felix is the other half of the Aussie line from Stray Kids, but it’s tempting to consider someone like Jungkook from BTS since he’s one of those “happens to be good at almost everything” people and that would come in handy for survival. While RM is my favorite in BTS, please protect Mr. Danger Prone – he’s clumsy and I’d be more concerned about the injuries he’d end up with.