#so I basically was stuck doing URGENT work r

[notveryshrugemoji]

Lol there was a nationwide internet outage today (rogers I think????) and holy jesus that rly threw wrench into the day my dudes.

[fortuositywritings]

Collide pt 2

Wanda x R

Summary: Trying to do the right thing gets very awkward and complicated.

The elevator was taking its sweet time to get to the 87th floor. It’s like it knows you are anxious and annoyed and oh yeah, naked.

“Come on!”

Bruce is annoyed. He’s been running tests on tests and has come up empty.

“It’s okay, Bruce,” Wanda tries to calm him down, seeing the irritation on his face. She knows the feeling all too well. For crying out loud, these tests with no real results are being run on her. She’s grateful to have people who care so much, like Bruce who is simply mad he can’t give her an answer for why her powers basically seem to have vanished. 

“It’s not okay, Wanda. We don’t have the slightest idea why this is happening. I mean, your magic gone, just like that. It doesn’t make any sense,” he sighs. Then he straightens out his posture and gives her a determined smile. “But don’t worry. We’ll run more tests and we’ll figure this out. For now, why don’t we take a break. We’ll continue tomorrow.”

She returns his smile but less enthusiastically. Truth be told, she’s been kind of enjoying not having her powers. Don’t get her wrong, of course it is worrying not having them and she needs them to get back to doing her job, but for once in a very long time, she felt relaxed almost. 

Her powers are incredible and amazing, but what’s not so amazing is the weight she carried because of them. These last three months, she felt unburdened. She felt lighter, but she couldn’t tell her teammates that, not when they’re doing all they can to help her get them back.

Her powers are important to have for the team. She knows that. It’s why she sucks it up and is doing everything she can to get them back. People count on her. 

She hops off the stool and makes her way to the elevator. She notices Bruce isn’t following behind her. “Are you coming?”

“I’m just going to clean up here. I’ll meet you down in a few,” he replies. Wanda goes to press the button for the elevator. The doors open not two seconds after. 

“That was fast,” she mumbles. She steps into the cart and waves goodbye to Bruce. “See you.”

The elevator’s doors close. You gulp nervously. This could have worked out better for you but you got what you wanted. You came to see Wanda and here she was in the elevator with you. Maybe you should wait to talk to her when you find some clothes. You hope wherever she’s going has something for you to cover up with. 

Happy with your decision to pretend you’re not even there, you stay quiet and keep to the corner. Suddenly the elevator stops. 

“Shit,” Wanda says exactly what you were thinking. She begins pressing buttons trying to get the elevator to go but it’s of no use. She uses the emergency call button. 

“Hello, this is Wanda Maximoff. The elevator seems to be stuck,” she says into the intercom. 

“Yes, Miss Maximoff. The elevators have been stopped for security purposes, but do not worry, they are taking care of the situation. The elevators should be operational in just a few minutes,” the voice over the intercom says. 

If you weren’t so nervous, you could laugh at the situation. They’re taking care of the situation all right. Here you are, the situation, in the elevator with Wanda Maximoff. You hope this doesn’t take too long. You’re feeling very uncomfortable in the state you’re in, especially enclosed in such a small space with someone else. 

Five minutes go by and nothing happens. Wanda has been playing games on her phone to distract herself. You’ve been standing in the corner, hands covering yourself even though technically you’re invisible. It made you feel more decent in a way. 

Wanda’s game chimes and she celebrates winning whatever level of whatever game she’s playing. You smile, finding it cute. She’s been trying to pass that level this whole time. 

Before she can get into the next level, her phone rings. Natasha is calling her. She’s been made aware of the situation and is passing the information to Wanda. “There’s been a security breach. Some girl was asking for you saying it was urgent and forcibly made her way into the building. They still haven’t found her. Where are you?”

Wanda frowns. “I’m stuck in the elevator. They stopped them.”

“Okay, I’ll get yours to work. I’ll wait for you on the 71st,” Nat says.

“Okay,” Wanda responds. Nat rushes, “Oh, and Wanda be careful. She seems to have powers like yours.”

Wanda wants to ask about that but Nat hangs up before she has the chance. Wanda chews on her bottom lip as do you. Both of you are anxious. Your heart is beating out of its chest right now. You do your best not to let your breathing get out of control. You couldn’t have Wanda hear you. 

The elevator begins to move and you stupidly let out a sigh in relief at the same time Wanda does. You pray she didn’t hear it and thinks it was all her. For a moment you think someone heard your prayers, but you are oh so wrong. 

When the elevator stops at the 71st floor, you follow Wanda out the elevator. Unknown to you, she did hear your sigh from before and just needed to reassure herself she wasn’t hearing things. She keeps her ears attentive and when you follow her out, she hears the scuffle of your feet behind her. 

In a quick move, she grabs you and flips you over. Suddenly, she’s got you pinned down and in your shock, you don’t realize you let up on the invisibility. You look at Wanda in shock and fear, thinking she’s about to punch you in the face or something. She looks at you in shock, your face suddenly becoming visible. Natasha is in shock as well, wondering what the hell she’s looking at.

“Please don’t hurt me! I can explain!” you beg. 

“You! The one from the grocery store,” Wanda recalls. 

“Yes! You remember me?” you ask, surprised she would recognize your face after one interaction.

“Who is the naked lady on my floor?” The three of you turn to see Tony Stark walk up to you snacking on some food.

“Hi, I’m Y/N,” you greet him with an awkward smile and cheeks bright red. “I’m going to turn invisible now. Please don’t freak out.”

Wanda looks down and freaks out. She’s about to get off of you but Nat yells at her to stay put.

“She’s naked!” Wanda argues, but stays on you. 

“She’s invisible. We can’t have her leave without us knowing,” Nat reasons. 

“I won’t leave,” you promise. “I’ll show myself but I would appreciate some clothes.”

“Stop talking!” Wanda demands, glaring at you. She thinks she’s glaring at you but you are invisible so she can’t know for sure if she’s looking you in the eyes. 

“Who are you yelling at?” Bruce makes his way out of the elevator car that no one noticed arrived. 

“Me. Hi, I’m Y/N,” you blurt out, making Bruce jump, obviously not having seen you. 

“Who said that?” he asks, looking around the room trying to find you. 

“Down here. Under Wanda,” your voice appears again. Wanda tightens her grip on you.

“I thought I told you to stop talking. It’s unsettling,” she explains. 

“Well, so is being naked in front of all of you, so,” you retort. Bruce looks shocked but he finally pinpoints your voice where you said you were. 

“Can someone please get her some clothes?” Wanda asks for you, finally. “This is not a position I thought I’d find myself in today and would really like to get off.”

“Not the first time I heard that,” you joke trying to alleviate the tension. You think you do, making both Tony Stark and the redhead in the room snort. Wanda blushes. Bruce comes to the rescue, taking off his lab coat and laying it next to Wanda, assuming you are there to grab it. 

It looks odd, watching the lab coat move seemingly on its own. Wanda gets off of you as you put it on and finally reveal yourself after securing it around your body.

“Who are you?” The redhead asks, narrowing her eyes at you. Her tone means serious business.

Finding her intimidating, you try to reassure her, “I’m no one. I don’t mean any harm. I promise.”

“Who cleared you? Why are you here?” She continues her questions.

“No one. I made my way past security. I really needed to see Wanda. I have something that belongs to you,” you direct the last part at Wanda. 

“And this was so important you made your snuck into my building? How did you do that, by the way? Turning invisible. Neat trick,” Tony comments.

“They wouldn’t let me in. I’ve been trying to get someone to let me see her for the past week. I’m sorry for the dramatics but it can’t wait another day,” you explain. “You’re probably having trouble with accessing your abilities, right?”

“How do you know that?” Suddenly everyone is on the offense. You shouldn’t know that, not even the media is guessing that’s what was going on with Wanda and her not being on missions. 

“Tony, you have to see this! Someone has abilities like Wanda and they’re in the building,” Captain Steve Rogers rushes into the room with a tablet in his hand. The security tape of you blasting the guard off his feet with red magic plays on the tablet for everyone to see. Steve notices the stranger in the room. “It’s you!”

Everyone turns from looking at the tablet to looking at you in confusion. Everyone but Wanda who looks upset. 

“I can explain,” you try but Wanda cuts you off, stepping right in front of you, pointing a finger in your face. “You stole my powers!”

“I didn’t steal your powers. It’s not that simple.”

“Then explain how my powers seemed to have disappeared when we met and now there’s a video of you using my abilities,” Wanda demands.

“I-I mean, may-maybe it is that simple,” you stutter. 

She moves forward almost as if to attack you. Steve is on her in a millisecond, holding her back as you put your arms out in defense. You rush to explain, “But I didn’t mean to. It’s just something that happens when I touch people with special abilities.”

“What do you mean? Do you mean to say that you can take anyone’s abilities away? How many abilities do you have? Is there a limit to how many you can hold? If so, how many and can you choose which you keep?” Bruce Banner throws a slew of questions at you that you can’t really process while there is an angry Sokovian ready to throw hands with you.

“I’m just here to return them to you,” you say, trying to calm her down. That trips her anger. Everyone and her look at you confused once more. Wanda asks, “You can do that?”

“It’s what I’ve been trying to do all week, but no one would let me see you,” you sigh in frustration. 

Steve feels Wanda relax at the new information and lets her go. He also notices that because you moved your arms up when Wanda was going for you, you released your grip around the lab coat and were now exposed again. He clears his throat and looks away, “Miss, the coat.”

You look at him confused and then realize he’s referring to the lab coat you’re wearing. You and Wanda both look at it and then blush. You quickly wrap yourself up again. 

“Oh my god, can someone please get, what’s your name?” the redhead in the room inquires and continues once you stutter out your name, “Wanda can you please lend Y/N some clothes? We’ll wait for you on 87. I’ll inform security that the problem has been dealt with.”

It isn’t really a request, both you and Wanda know this. Wanda tells you to follow her and she leads you to what you assume is her bedroom. It’s pretty nice. You note that she keeps it tidy. 

“Here, these will fit.” She leaves you sweats, a hoodie, socks, and some sandals on the bed. “You can change in the restroom.”

She points at a door on the other side of the room. You smile awkwardly in appreciation and head over to change. While Wanda waits for you to come out, she tries to understand everything that has happened and everything that you told her. 

If you are to be trusted and it’s true what you said, including not doing this on purpose, then she supposes she owes you an apology. Are you to be trusted though? This would be so much easier if she had her powers. Then she would be able to figure it out in a wink.

Her powers made things so much easier but also they were a pain in the ass. She is grateful for them of course. She knows all the good she does and could do with them, but sometimes they were too much and she didn’t realize this until she was without them. 

It was odd being without them. She had grown accustomed to them. They were a part of her now and not having them was weird but it wasn’t uncomfortable. It was just different and for a moment she felt lighter. The only real stress of not having them was wondering what happened to them, but now here they are.

You have come to return them to her. She should feel relieved, right?

You step out of the restroom in her clothes. You thank her, “I’ll give them back once I get my clothes back. You don’t happen to have a ‘lost and found’ in the building, do you?”

“I don’t know. I’ll ask Steve or Nat,” she replies. After an awkward moment of standing there, neither of you speaking, you break the silence, “So, should we go now?”

Wanda hesitates to lead you out, so you assume there’s something else she wants to say. You wait. “Before we do, I owe you an apology. I shouldn’t have gone off on you like that when all you were trying to do is help.”

You smile and nod. “Yeah, that was scary, but I understand. It’s a weird situation to be in, but luckily we have everything cleared up and soon you’ll have your powers and you can get back to doing what you do.”

“Yes, lucky me,” she mutters, unconvincingly. She doesn’t know why, but going back to the regular schedule seems daunting. 

She finds you staring at her oddly. It makes her uncomfortable so she makes her way towards the door, motioning for you to follow. You make conversation on your way to the lab. 

“My friend loved the meal by the way. Thank you for all the helpful tips. It was delicious, if I do say so myself,” you tell her, using her phrasing when she described Sokovian meals. She smiles, catching it as well.

“I told you so,” she says, chuckling as you both wait for the elevator to reach the 87th floor. She thinks back to that day and based on what you said earlier, she asks you, “So is that how it happened? When we touched hands? That was how you got my powers?”

“Yep.”

“And to get them back, we do the same thing?” she ponders. “It’s that simple.”

“Yeah. It’s simple and annoying,” you complain. “I graze anyone’s skin and if by chance they can do something no regular person can, suddenly they can’t and I’m the one who can do it, but the most annoying part is when I don’t know who they come from since I have to touch them again to give their powers back.”

“That does sound frustrating,” Wanda agrees. 

“No, what’s frustrating is when they won’t take their powers back,” you whine. “And then I’m stuck with them.”

“What do you mean? Can’t you just touch them and give them back?” 

“They have to want their powers back for me to return them. It’s actually how I got the invisibility one. They couldn’t really control it at the time and I guess they got tired of it, so when they had the opportunity, they didn’t want it back. Those were weird first months with that power. Floating clothes spooks a lot of people. Luckily, a little practice and I could do this on command.”

You show her the way you could turn invisible. She looks startled so you appear again and apologize. “Sorry, I guess it’s still scary to people.”

“No, it’s cool. It just surprised me,” she reassures you. You give her a grateful smile in return. 

“Why did it take so long for you to find me?” Wanda asks and it is a reasonable question seeing as you can turn on the news station and probably find her easily. 

“Sorry about that. Truth is, I don’t follow the Avengers and what they do, so I had no idea who you were. I actually staked out the grocery store for weeks hoping I would catch you there,” you admit. 

“They didn’t kick you out for loitering?” Wanda giggles and then lets out a full laugh when you say, “Actually, they almost made me employee of the month, despite not working there.”

A ring in the elevator signals that you have arrived on the 87th floor. Wanda leads the way through the lab. 

“There they are,” Bruce announces your presence. He motions both of you front and center of the group. “So, how does this work?”

“I just touch her and give them back,” you shrug. “It’s not too complicated.”

“Okay, then,” Bruce accepts your answer. 

You hold out your hand for Wanda to take. “Ready?”

She nods her head and places her hand in yours. You smile, giving her hand a squeeze before letting go.

“That’s it?” Tony asks. You turn to him and nod. “Well, that was anti-climactic.”

“Alright, Wanda. Why don’t you go ahead and try to use your powers now,” Steve inputs more helpfully. 

You all direct your attention to Wanda who shakes herself in preparation to show off her powers. She holds her hands up and clenches and unclenches her hands into fists repeatedly. 

“Any time now,” the redhead whose name you assume is Nat hurries Wanda along. 

Wanda begins to shake her head. “I’m trying. It’s not working.”

“Maybe Y/N still has them,” Steve says. You turn your hand over and sure enough you do still have them, a red energy forming in your hand.

“That doesn’t make any sense. It should be working.” You make the energy dissipate and move towards Wanda again. You grab her hand for longer than before. Then you release her and she tries again without any success. You still have them. 

“Are you sure you’re doing it right?” Bruce asks. “Has this ever happened before?”

“Yes, I’m doing it like I always do. There shouldn’t be any reason why it doesn’t work,” you insist. The only reason why it wouldn’t be working is if the other person… You look at Wanda’s face and she wears a guilty expression on her face but something else catches your attention. A very loud thought from the woman in front of you makes its way to your head.

Please don’t say anything. 

The thought is followed by her looking right into your eyes, practically begging you to keep quiet. So you do. 

“I don’t know what’s wrong. This hasn’t happened before,” you lie for her. You turn your head to look at Bruce and shake your head hoping to convince him. You feel Wanda’s hand on your forearm, giving you a gentle squeeze. 

Thank you.

Now what are you supposed to do?

________________________________________________________

taglist: @dandelions4us @sapphic-girl 

let me know if i missed anyone in the taglist or if you wish to be on it

thank you for reading :)

[canary3d-obsessed]

Restless Rewatch: The Untamed Episode 04 (first part)

(Masterpost) (Episode 03) (Episode 04 second part)

Warning: Spoilers for all 50 episodes!

Also warning: these posts just keep getting longer how are they getting even longer good lord I had to split this one. 

School’s in for the Summer!

All of these nice young actors show off the results of their movement training as they beautifully perform prostrate bowing in near-unison. (yes, there is a Chinese word for this action, but it’s used in English in a shitty orientalist way, so OP is going to call this prostrate bowing)

Note that the very last person to hit his knees, by a wide margin, is Head Snob Jin Zixuan.

Lan Qiren looks them over with pleased dickishness.

I am really wondering what actor Huang Ziteng looks like without a struggle beard and mouth blood and chronic fainting.

That's...a lot of crosses, my dude

(more after the cut!)

Lan Clan Rules

The Lan rule set is basically a checklist for shit Wei Wuxian and Nie Huaisang can get up to this summer.

The rules include several that Lan Wangji is actively breaking this very moment, including “Don’t wear any jangling objects like beads,” “don’t be suspicious,” “don’t pierce your ears” and “don’t be supercilious.”  

Wei Wuxian’s Summer Project

Extrovert Wei Wuxian gets started on the important work of making new friends. Waving to Lan Wangji in class doesn't get him anywhere (apparently), but he meets Nie Huaisang and forms one of the most important relationships of his two lives.

He doesn’t even know what they are being mutually squirrely about yet but they are instantly on the same wavelength.

I like you, yeah I like you, and I’m feeling so bohemian like you

When Wei Wuxian discovers that this classmate has smuggled an entire live birb into this boring-ass lecture he is completely delighted, and they are brothers in troublemaking from this point onward.

This is where we learn something important about Nie Huaisang. He wanted a rare canary, so he stalked it for three days, caught it, and caged it.  

This careful hunter is 15 or 16...I wonder how much more patient and determined he will be when he's 35 or 36?

The Salute Ceremony: The Unstabby Bit

The Jin Clan starts off the salute ceremony by presenting Lan Qiren with a fancy book bound with gold string.

Wei Wuxian is genuinely impressed, but Jiang Cheng calls it "meretricious" [op looks it up] which means "apparently attractive but having in reality no value or integrity." Wow, Jiang Cheng is so deliciously bitchy.

Then it’s Nie Huasang’s turn. Wei Wuxian is impressed when he hears his name, meaning he befriended him without giving a fuck about who he is, which is sweet.  I adore this friendship and think there are so many reasons NHS chose WWX to carry out his vengeance, none of which come from him being the dread Yiling Laozu.

The Salute Ceremony: The Thirsty Bit

To represent the Nie clan, I present this nice pot to Lan Qiran, and this rare and beautiful twink to Lan Xichen

Note: the trash talking jerks in the background are from the Jiang clan. Yanli does not remind them about their manners.

Quiet, reserved Lan Xichen greets Meng Yao with compliments and a hand massage and by doing this thing with his mouth.

No words are being produced at this point, he is just...parting his lips gently while he rakes his eyes over Meng Yao’s face.

Meng Yao doesn’t mind a bit

Flames on the Side of my Face

The Wen Clan guys have left Club Ruohan and are coming to summer school. Wen Chao is evil. It's subtle but you can tell by the way he casually sets people on fire.

Lan Clan Rules for Gate Keepers

do not draw your sword to stop someone from setting you on actual fire

do not use magic to stop someone from setting you on actual file

do not call for help when someone sets you on actual fire

Wens Qing and Ning believe in helping people, so once the smell of burning flesh starts to annoy them, Wen Qing puts out a solid 80% of the flames.

Note: We’re going to be spending a lot of time hating Wen Chao, so now might be a good time to have a look at (actor) He Ping out of costume.

Clearly, Wen Chao is just a beautiful troubled person with pretty moles who totally deserves a second chance.

The Salute Ceremony: The Stabby Bit

The Wens interrupt Jiang Cheng’s salute. Lan Xichen apologizes to them for not knowing they were going to show up like a bunch of interrupting assholes.

Lan Wangji wants to murder Weng Chao and looks at Xichen for permission but Xichen says no.

I never get to murder anybody not even that Su She asshole

So Wei Wuxian starts running the WWX fight book, which has to actually be pretty gratifying for the Lans, who are stuck being good hosts.  

He skips the windup in this situation of heightened danger, so he is formal, polite, and doesn't cross any boundaries. But Wen Chao came looking to fight so it escalates immediately, with Jiang Cheng also getting in Wen Chao’s face.

The Wen Clan decides to teach the Jiang Clan a lesson.  This is really the seed of the Lotus Pier massacre...it was always going to happen. The Wens draw swords and almost the entire Jiang Clan immediately draws as well.  

Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng both use the same sexy move, kicking their swords up off their benches into their hands.

Nie Huaisang hides behind Meng Yao, who immediately uses his whole body to shield him and shows a bit of his titanium spine. I LOVE Meng Yao’s strength here. 

Wen Qing protects her brother by putting her arm across his chest, which is not going to be helpful in any way if someone wants to stab him.  

To end this urgent and dangerous standoff Lan Xichen slooooowly brandishes his flute and plays a little toodleoo for 15 full seconds, eventually causing all the swords to fly up to the ceiling and then down into the floor.

{I know, flautists, I know. Never let facts get in the way of a joke!]

Everyone politely allows him to do this without actually taking any swipes at each other.  Then the swords all magically vanish along with the holes they made in the floor, which is convenient.

Now we get to see Lan Xichen angry, and oh my god, the tiny glimpse of that secret fire. 

Now Wen Qing finally steps up to defuse the situation. She cannot believe she has to work with her boss's horrible stupid son who insists on fucking up every project, god why did he ever get made a vice president I can't believe I have to work with this tool.

Meanwhile, Lan Xichen is going to rue the day he introduced Wei Wuxian to Flute Magic.

Wei Wuxian and Nie Huaisang 4-EV-R

After the ceremony Nie Huaisang, calling Wei Wuxian “Wei-Xiong” (brother Wei, a bit more formal than -ge) praises his bravery. Wei Wuxian says that he enjoys resisting evil, harking forward to his chivalric calling & future promise with Lan Wangji.

Jiang Cheng says, without irony, I think, and with only a little bitterness, that normal people can't compare to Wei Wuxian’s bravery. Wei Wuxian downplays his courage and says that he wants to teach Nie Huaisang to have fun.

Now - hopefully we've all seen Fatal Journey, right? I won't spoil it here. But if you've seen it you know that a person who gives Nie Huaisang permission to be his true self is going to be precious to him.

Lan Wangji shows up and Wei Wuxian calls out to him, calling him "Ji-Xiong." Lan Wangji totally blows him off but Wei Wuxian is undeterred.

Xichen and Qiren Talking.

Lan Xichen and Lan Qiren talk about this whole Wen situation while Qiren pours some tea that appears to just be hot water. Dude.

Qiren is afraid this murdering of cultivators is going to be something the two of them can't handle. You think? There are already about 16 dead cultivators in the mosh pit at Club Ruohan; at what point are you planning to handle it?

This Ship is Sailing

Meng Yao comes to say goodbye to Lan Xichen and to trade hearts with him. Also to have a lot of feelings that his giant eyes and adorable dimples cannot contain.

Lan Xichen: Don't bow to me. No need to thank me like this. We’re equals. As equals we could take turns kneeling to each other, if you catch my drift.

Lan Xichen: Why not stay for several days? Oh if you're Nie Mingjue's boy I guess I have to let you go. He's great. Really. SO great.  

Lan Xichen: Look, you’re with Nie Mingjue and I’m with Nie Mingjue and it only takes one stroke to turn a Vee into a triangle, is what I’m saying.

Grown-ass man Lan Xichen is so much less prudent than his teenage brother. Each of them has fallen hard for someone but the much younger Wangji tries to control it. Hopeless romantic Xichen goes right over the cliff, as well as deliberately knocking away many of the fences around Wangji’s heart so Wei Wuxian can make a home there. We love him for it, of course.

Episode 04, Part 2 is right here.

[kareofbears]

taste test

“To everyone who decided to come today…”

Makoto heaves a heavy sigh, palms flat on the table, eyes dark and shrouded.

“There’s no backing out now.”

—

read on ao3 or below the cut :)

(lovingly beta read by @mad4turtles)

“To everyone who decided to come today…”

Makoto heaves a heavy sigh, palms flat on the table, eyes dark and shrouded.

“There’s no backing out now.”

Ryuji squints from the sofa. “Are you about to invite us into a pyramid scheme?” his eyes light up with understanding. “Is that why Yusuke’s not here?”

“No,” Ann leans forward. “I think this is a yakuza proposition.”

His brows furrow, “Guys, my mom already thinks you’re all sketchy, can we not join the yakuza?”

“What’re you talking about?” Akira raises an eyebrow, poking Ryuji’s side. “Sakamoto-san loves me. We’re having brunch next week.”

“You’re what?”

Futaba rolls her eyes. “Yakuza isn’t even that bad. Some of them are just trying to protect their adoptive father from being kicked out and shamed for life.”

Ann makes a noise of indignation and slaps her hands over her ear. “No spoilers, no spoilers!”

“That was the first hour of the game!”

Slamming her hands down the table, Makoto glares down at all of them. “This is not a yakuza recruitment meeting.”

“So this is actually a pyramid scheme?” Akira asks slowly.

“This,” Makoto hoists a heavy bag onto the table with a thud, and sloshing sounds from within. “Is much more dangerous and life-altering.”

Four pairs of eyebrows shoot up.

“Alright, place your bets,” Futaba reaches over to jostle the bag. “My guess is that it’s filled with goldfishes and she wants us to learn about responsibility.”

Ryuji snaps his fingers. “Like a Tamagotchi?”

“No.”

“I remember getting one of those,” Ann says wistfully. “I got one, hopped on a train home, and I realized I forgot it on the train.”

“Okay, so at least now we know not to give Ann one of Makoto’s fishes,” Futaba sums up.

“Hold off for a second, children,” Akira interjects. “Makoto has an announcement, or some kind of gift-giving session, I don’t really know.”

Makoto smiles. “Thank you, Leader.” He gives her a deadpanned thumbs-up. “So as you all know, I’m a third-year that plans on going to university, which you should all start thinking about—” all of them suddenly avoid her eyes. “—and that means I need to start acquiring the essentials of adulthood.”

Futaba nods sagely. “R-rated mangas, but age never stopped me.”

“Don’t you already drive?” Ann accuses.

Ryuji’s grin is sharp. “The good mags? Age never stopped me for that, either.”

“Makoto’s about to admit to her smoking addiction,” says Akira.

“Cooking,” Makoto sighs, dejected. “The answer was cooking.”

There’s a collective sound of understanding as Makoto opens her bag and takes out a large pot, plastic utensils, and paper bowls with the words DAD TO THE BONE printed on, placing them all on Akira’s table. She shrugs. “Father’s Day clearance.”

“Ooo! Did you cook this yourself?” Ann peers closely at the pot.

“I did,” Makoto starts setting out the bowls, dropping spoons in one by one. “Though I didn’t get a chance to taste it before coming here. However, I gave it my all, so I hope it’s to your taste.”

The aroma begins to waft from the pot, and the scent of it hits them like a brick wall.

Futaba sniffs carefully. “Seafood?”

“Hmm? No, chicken actually,” Makoto uses a ladle to lovingly pour soup into each bowl.

Her eyes flicker over to Akira’s. His brow cocks up. Got something to say?

Eyes darting to the soup before going back to Akira, her expression morphs to one of alarm. The soup looks bad.

He leans back into the sofa, and raises a shoulder. What can we do about it?

She rolls her eyes. Nothing, obviously. I’m not that mean.

Ann shifts in her seat, and the three of them all watch as she studies the pot with a grimace. No, I’m with Futaba. That soup’s bad news.

Ryuji squints hard at Ann. Rude. You’re a rude person.

She squints back at him. So you’re not worried at all? Really?

Scoffing silently, Ryuji throws his arm around Akira. Nope. He and I are gonna chow down no problem.

Futaba nods patronizingly. Yeah, Ann. Kindness is a virtue.

Ann glares hard at her. “Faker!”

“How’s that soup coming along?” Akira asks quickly, seeing Ann’s outburst from a mile away.

“Ready to eat,” Makoto answers, gesturing to the bowls, expression hopeful. “Would you like to try some?”

Kurusu Akira isn’t lionhearted for nothing. “I’d love to.”

And if Akira’s lionhearted, Ryuji is positively fearless. “Alright, let’s all dig in!”

They all crowd around the table, lifting their respective Father’s Day themed bowls. Ann scoops a spoonful, take one last glance at Makoto’s optimistic smile, and takes a sip.

She almost drops the bowl.

The moment the broth hits her tongue, she immediately understands what Futaba means by seafood; it’s like the ocean had manifested in her bowl and its waved crashed directly into her mouth. It’s mercilessly, brutally, bile-inducingly salty, to the point that any other ingredient is completely overshadowed.

“Mmm,” Ann fights back a grimace with her life. She swallows, and her body trembles with effort. “What a taste.”

Tasting the Dead Sea is almost worth how bright Makoto beams. “Really?”

“For sure,” glancing past Makoto, Futaba looks like she’s being held at knifepoint with how profusely she’s sweating. “Really something special.”

Makoto nods seriously and takes out a notepad and pen. “I’d love to hear anything you’d have to say. Details, specifics, anything to help me improve.”

Ann sends a panicked look at Akira, whose expression is worryingly blank. Still, there’s a reason he’s their leader. “It brings...an explosion of taste,” he chokes out. Bravely, he takes another sip and his eyes water. “There are no words for it.”

Makoto is furiously writing in her notepad. “Explosion...got it. This is great. Anything else?”

Akira gives Ryuji a pleading look from the couch they’re sharing. Ryuji sighs and pats his thigh. Wordlessly, Akira moves to stand where Futaba’s sitting on his bed.

“Makoto,” Ryuji calls. “Sit beside me.” Confused, she does as she’s told. “You got that soup recipe on you?”

“Yes, just let me—” she flips her notepad back a few pages. “Here we go.”

“And, out of curiosity,” he continues gently. “How much salt did it say to add?”

“If I’m not mistaken, it said to put…two cups, I think?”

In the background, Futaba silently spits her soup back into her bowl. Akira moves to where Ann’s sitting instead.

Ryuji works to school his expression. “Did the recipe say to add two cups?”

“It did, look—” she points down at the paper. “See? ‘Add two pinches of—’” she pauses. “Wait a second.”

“Take your time.”

“It didn’t…” Makoto’s brows knit together as her eyes scan through her notes, and Ryuji leans forward to read along with her. “I distinctly remember it said ‘half a teaspoon of pepper, two tablespoons of parsley, two cups of salt, two punches of broth—”

Futaba inches towards Akira. “Did I hear that right?” she whispers, urgent. “Did she say punches? What the heck is that?”

“Just let Ryuji handle it,” he whispers back, eyes never leaving the pair on the couch.

Ryuji points at a line in her notes. “Senpai, it says two cups of broth, and two pinches of salt.”

Makoto could only stare at him.

He clears his throat. “And, uh, ‘punch’ isn’t a measurement. Or, at least not in cooking. Tell that to the guy in the alley, huh?” he laughs.

The silence only serves to punctuate how much that joke didn’t work.

And then, slowly, Makoto stands from the sofa and, hands shaking ever so slightly, lifts the ladle to her mouth, and sips. They all watch as she promptly walks over to the open window and spits out her mouthful.

Akira winces. “Really hope the neighbors didn’t see that.”

Collapsing back into the sofa, Makoto buries her face into her hands. “Oh my God.”

“I know.”

“That was terrible.”

He places a heavy hand on her shoulder. “It’s okay.”

“I basically fed my friends salt water.”

“Makoto, if it’s any consolation,” Futaba says while discreetly hiding her bowl under Akira’s blanket. “It was really good salt water.”

“That’s right,” Ann agrees. “Best salt water I’ve ever had.”

Makoto wails in response.

Akira strides forward and kneels in front of Makoto. “Hey, champ.”

“Don’t bother,” she mumbles into her palms. “I’m too stupid to understand what you’re going to say.”

Ryuji winces. “Damn, if she’s stupid, what the hell does that make me?”

“The guy Akira chose?” Ann offers.

That cheers him up. “And don’t you forget it.”

“Look,” Akira continues, focusing intently on the extremely distressed Makoto. “You remember that time I made coffee for you? The first time, back in June?”

She refuses to look at him. “Yeah?”

“And you almost threw up?”

“...Yeah.”

“What was that you said again?”

Flushing red, “I don’t remember.”

He knocks his knuckles against her knee. “Yes, you do.”

“I don’t want to say it. It was mean.”

“Come on.”

Sighing, she peeks through her fingers. “I said, ‘Kurusu, did you get these beans from Morgana’s litter box?’”

Ryuji coughs, and Akira holds back a smile. “And you said that because…?”

“Because it tasted pretty bad,” she admits.

Ann scowls. “Oh God, I forgot about that. That was so much worse than the soup.”

“Thank you, Ann.”

“Didn’t Sojiro ask why you put dirt into the filter because it tasted so much like crap?” Futaba muses.

“Alright, that’s enough—”

“Dude, I love you a whole lot, but it literally tasted like actual rat poison—”

“Basically,” Akira cuts in loudly. “You are going to improve. You’re not stuck here. I promise you, as long as you practice, you will improve.”

Makoto sighs. “Thank you, but you don’t know that.”

Gray eyes slide to lock with brown ones; even with how easily they all communicate with each other through gestures, it’s still a drop in the bucket compared to Ryuji’s and Akira’s near telepathy.

Do you have this?

You know I do.

Ryuji pats Makoto’s head. “This bastard is going to keep his promise, because I am going to make sure you practice and be a kick-ass chef.” He stands abruptly. “Get up.”

She blinks. “What?”

“There’s a grocery around the corner, and my chicken soup recipe is a thousand times better than whatever mommy website you pulled that one from.” His grin is bright enough to rival the sun. “Let me prove to you that you can move past this.”

Hesitantly, Makoto stands. “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Okay!”

“Okay!” he grabs her wrist and leans forward to steal a kiss from Akira’s cheek. “Be back in ten.”

Akira waves at them half-heartedly as Ryuji sprints down the stairs, a newly-invigorated Makoto in tow. “I hope he buys me some fruit packs—we’re running low.”

“Ryuji’s good at that,” Futaba comments. “Handling her crises, I mean.”

“I was just thinking that.” Ann pours her bowl’s contents back into the pot. “Pretty unexpected. It was honestly kind of weird.”

Shrugging, Akira moves to tidy his room. “Not really. It’s probably because of his mom.”

The girls share a glance. “What about her?” Ann asks.

“When his dad was still around, he made them all get take-out every night,” he says, focused on collecting all the utensils scattered around the table. “And when he left, Ryuji was too young to cook and his mom had zero experience in cooking. So the two of them had to learn it together. And once that’s all done, Ryuji walked out of it knowing how to make great food and help other people learn how to make great food, too. Pretty on brand of him, honestly.”

Akira lifts his hand over his mouth, but it’s impossible to cover the sheer amount of adoration radiating off of him. “He taught me how to cook stuff other than coffee and curry, too. He’s good at what he does.”

Futaba and Ann didn’t know what to say, sincerity catching them off guard.

Akira reaches over to ruffle Futaba’s hair. “Help me clean, or I’ll have to sleep in your room tonight.”

She bats his hand away. “No way, not after you stole all my pillows last time.”

“I’ll get the trash bags,” he grins, heading for the stairs. “And don’t think I didn’t see you hide the soup under my blanket!”

“Shut up!”

Ann hears Akira laugh quietly from downstairs. “They’re good together,” she says softly. “Aren’t they?”

“Akira and trash bags? Yeah, I’d say so.”

—

An hour later, they’re overcome with food comas, stomachs full of soup and fruit packs. All through the night, Makoto couldn’t stop smiling.

[mysunfreckle]

The Rhythm of Life (is a Powerful Beat)

1k of Modern Magic AU Jehan and Grantaire friendship, written for the @bishopmyrielfundraiser for racial justice organisations.

Something very odd happens whenever Grantaire listens to music.

Jehan is sitting curled up in their chair, watching Grantaire draw. He’s focussed on his work, bent over his sketchbook and not even tapping his feet, but he has the headphones of his Walkman on his head and… They can’t explain why, but Jehan is certain they can hear – no, not hear, feel – the music he is listening to.

It’s happened before, but Jehan has never felt it so clearly. Nor have they ever taken the time to try and figure out what exactly they are feeling. But they are now.

Because it isn’t his magic. He isn’t using his magic right now. That would make sense for them to notice at least. Jehan doesn’t have second sight, but they’re sensitive. They do not need to see magic to be aware of it. They can feel it. However vague and hard to interpret. They can.

But what they can feel now is much, much stronger. It isn’t Grantaire’s magic that is moving in time with the music, nor his body, it’s…all the rest of him.

Jehan has always found it difficult to explain their gift. Their tutors talk about Life Force and Essential Energy, but to Jehan they what feel in people is life. Life in its entirety. Life at its core. They can feel it thriving within the confines of a person’s being. It’s a pulsing. Like a heartbeat, but…deeper, steadier. At least when the person is healthy and well.

Grantaire is healthy. Not as healthy as he could be, but healthy enough. But that gives no explanation for this…this rhythm. Where the steady pulse of his life should be is a swing, a cadence. It has a metre. Jehan feels like if they tried, they could tap along with the beat of Grantaire’s very soul right now…

They try. Slowly they map out the ups and downs, the tell-tale recurrences of a song. They almost get it- and they lose it. The rhythm is gone, the energy scatters, and they’re left with a confusing mess of loose ends in their head.

Jehan wrinkles their nose. Were they wrong? Only- No, the rhythm isn’t gone. It’s changed. Because here the feeling is again. Only different this time. And with another sort of beat entirely.

“R?”

Grantaire looks up from his sketchbook. “Hm?”

Jehan does their best to keep down the excitement in their voice. “Did your song just end?”

He frowns in momentary confusion. “Uh. Yeah?” He lifts up one of the shells of his headphones. “I haven’t got the volume up that high, do I??”

“No!” Jehan interrupts. “I can’t hear it!” Sparks light up in their eyes. “R I can feel it.”

“You can…” Grantaire puts down his pencil.  “Was I doing magic?” He sounds concerned and Jehan knows why. Grantaire has spent most of his life believing he couldn’t do magic. Or barely. But once they found how that his magic was tied to movement and once he learned how to tap into that, it became rather hard for him not to do magic.

“You weren’t,” they assure him hastily. “You weren’t even moving, I could just…it felt like I could feel you move on the inside. Like you’re…living to the beat of the music.”

Grantaire stares at them for a long moment. “Jehan Prouvaire,” he says finally. “You mean to tell me that your life-divining ass could feel my life force jamming to my tunes?”

“Jamming and jiving,” Jehan laughing, shimming in their chair a little.

“Are you kidding me.” Grantaire throws his hands up and Jehan feels a surge of power crackle through the air before immediately dissipating. “Do it again.” He leans heavily on the table, staring at Jehan head on. “I’m not moving, not singing along. Do it again.”

“Do what again?” Jehan laughed.

“You could feel it, right?” he urges. “You said you could feel the beat. Did you mean that literally? What’s my energy doing now?”

“Your life,” Jehan murmurs.

“My life,” Grantaire corrects hastily. “What do you feel now?”

Jehan drops their gaze down from his eager expression to be able to concentrate. Yeah, they can feel it again. Almost more clearly than before. Perhaps because Grantaire is excited now. But it’s hard to put into words. “It’s…” they begin hesitantly. “You’re doing…”

Instead of finishing the sentence they lift their hand, tapping on the armrest of their chair:

Tap, a-tap, a-tap-tap, tap, a-tap, a-tap-

“Holy shit.” Grantaire beams. “That’s the song! That’s the exact damn song! Jehan that’s insane!”

They laugh. It’s hard not to laugh when Grantaire is genuinely joyously excited about something. Bossuet likes to joke that he’d make a terrifyingly strong empath if his talents had gone that direction.

“But other people don’t do that, R,” they say delightedly. “I’ve never felt this before! You’re not even dancing and you’re still all in the music!”

Grantaire gets up from behind the table, pulling the headphones down to his neck. “Wait-” He grabs one of his eclectic mixtapes from the pile of cassettes. “Do you think you could guess what type of song I’m listening to as they switch from one to the other…?”

Jehan grins. “Only one way to find out.”

Seven songs and five correct guesses later Jehan is all triumph and Grantaire is practically filling the room with his unrestrained delight.

“Fan-fucking-tastic,” he cheers. “This is the best thing since Gav set the registration office on fire.” He looks at Jehan with his eyes all lit up with affection. “You’re one of the most powerfully gifted people I have ever met and we are using your magic to do parlour tricks.”

“Well what else would I use it for?” Jehan grins. They lean back in their chair. “Now what I want to know is, how accurate can we get this?”

“And more importantly,” Grantaire says seriously, sitting down beside them with the utmost gravity. “How can we use it to either blow some minds.”

“Or get Courf to lose a bet and pay our drinks…” Jehan muses aloud.

Grantaire presses his hand to his hear. “See?” he sighs emphatically. “This is why we’re friends.”

---

A/N: This story takes place in the same universe as Second Sight. (A world that is stuck in analogue technology, because its easy integration with magic made the digital revolution less urgent). Some background on the characters:

Jehan: Was born with the talent to sense and manipulate life force. There are two ways you can go with that, healing and necromancy. Their family are adamant it shouldn’t be necromancy. They never received formal tutoring beyond the basic levels, because of how controversial their gift is. Works in a flower shop with strangely unwilting flowers. Since they can literally touch the force of someone's life, they can easily sense how strong it is and if there's anything wrong.

Grantaire: Has no talent for a specific type of magic, but his power is directly linked to physical movement. He was absolutely rubbish at magic until his tutor struck on the idea of teaching him sign language. When he signs Grantaire can cast extremely well and he’s learned that dancing is the best way for him to draw up a lot of magical energy.

[ngame989]

“Brew” - TGG SVTFOE Fanfic Collection Ch. 6

Writing: @ngame989​

Art: @toxicpsychox​

Editing: @toxicpsychox​, @seddm​, an IRL friend

Alternate fic links - FFnet, AO3

Summary: After close to a year on Earthni, Tom's been dragged back into the princely life, and it's a lot less exciting than he'd expected. With Star and Marco away on urgent business, can Janna help him turn a boring errand into a fun adventure?

Comic Page

Masterpost

This one’s a nice change of pace from the last two chapters, I think. TGG’s still a Starco-focused work, expect these to be the exception not the norm, but I think it’s important to strike a balance. See below for the text, hope you enjoy!

“No results.” Huh? Three eyes narrowed at the screen in frustration. Maybe a different search term? “No results.” Alright Tom, no big deal, man. Maybe you just spelled something wrong. Annnnnd… there. “No results.” How could there be nothing?

Tom leaned back in the chair and sighed, exercising restraint over the little anger demons inside him as he’d trained himself to do. In the past he’d needed a physical bunny to pet if he wanted even a hope of keeping his cool, but at this point suppressing the urge was such reflex that most would think he just had a regular Mewman quick temper and nothing more in all but the most extreme of conditions, but he was getting pretty close to that point now. Grandpa Relicor’s study had everything, or so he thought, but this was the first time he could ever remember being here where it come up short. He’d checked every shelf, everything he could think in the computer, had even fireblasted a few of the shelves just to see if there were any hidden switches or anything. Even Relicor had been at a loss and had been screeching in distress on the floor for long enough that Tom’s brain had graciously tuned it out. What could be so important about this book his mom needed? He hadn’t even had time to change his casual graphic tee from a cartoon he liked, simply tossing his maroon jacket over it before heading out at his mother’s behest. He wasn’t one to say no to her, but it had been hours since he’d shown up here and he was no closer to figuring this out than he had been this morning.

Suddenly his phone buzzed, displaying the familiar beaming face of his ex-girlfriend close up to the camera. A toothy grin erupted as he picked it up, holding the phone up for a video feed. “Heya, Starship.”

“Hey, Tom!” Star beamed into the camera. “How’s it hanging? Long time no see. So,” she rambled out in one breath, “I may have a teensie weensie wittle problem.” She backed up to reveal her hair in complete disarray, sans horns, and black marks all over her light blue dress. Before Tom could even ask the question, her other hand held up charred fragments of her headband. “Someone still hasn’t learned how to use an Earth oven properly!” she forced out through gritted teeth.

“Look, gurl, I said I was like, so sorry! All the Cloud Kingdom kitchens are powered by glitter and horn blasts, like that’s just how ovens are supposed to be, that is all I am saying here,” Ponyhead’s indignant voice chimed in from behind, punctuated by a snort.

“Anyway, we just finished putting out the fires and I need a new headband and their website says they’re almost out of stock and I’ve wanted to show Marco around the Underworld for a while and- wait, is that screeching in the background? Where are you?”

Tom shuffled away from the elder demon still writhing on the floor and cleared his throat. “Just in Grandpa’s study trying to find something for my mom, she really wants it today. I don’t know if I can go- but I can still send the carriage for you guys, if you want.”

“Do you need help with that?” Marco inquired as he peeked his head into the frame, casually wrapping an arm around Star.

“Naaaah, no big deal,” Tom shrugged. “You two should go, though! I can just fly over whenever I finish this.”

Star and Marco looked at each other hesitantly. “Alright,” she said. “Carriage to our house in maybe five minutes?” A fire alarm went off behind her followed by a scream from Ponyhead and an even girlier one from Marco. “Maybe ten,” Star sighed, burying her face in her free hand.

“You got it,” Tom chuckled.

“OK, bye!” Star said with relief before hanging up. He rolled his shoulders from inside his jacket and ran his hands through his hair before stepping into the main foyer, taking advantage of the space to summon the carriage and its horses, the incantations coming effortlessly to him. Demons had been fortunate enough to retain their powers on Earthni, but the location underground and the relative lack of portaling methods available left them even more isolated than previously. While most of the other kingdoms had dissolved or integrated into a loose coalition of government covering all of the Echo Creek area, the Underworld had been content to stay completely under the banner of Lord and Lady Lucitor, and Tom found himself pitching in more and more in his role as Prince. In truth, he would have appreciated the company his friends were offering, but he knew how much it had meant to Star to be able to give this life up, and he didn’t want to drag her - either of them, really, considering Marco had earned an official title on Mewni himself - back into the boring thick of regal errands. Was Prince Thomas Draconius Lucitor really going to let some stuffy old book collection get the best of him? Hah, as if.

With a flick of his wrist, the half-demon shuttled the carriage to the surface in a pillar of flame, barely looking and instead pulling out his new phone. He was still getting the hang of the new and improved Reflectacorp’s Earth tech integration, but he’d at least learned how to open yesterday’s text conversation thread from its new message notification.

Janna: anti-gravity potion attempt 4 failed. affected bottle glass itself and launched into sky. note to self: work under roof. star and marco’s suggestions didnt work either. not all bad though, it went towards cloud kingdom lol

Tom: careful, don’t hit pony’s ego and make it fly even higher ·;) btw pony + starco are going shopping in underworld soon. im stuck working for mom though.

Janna: stores r lame. even in underworld. and srsly dude u gotta stop using starfans dumb name for them. otoh it bugs them so actually nvm go 4 it

Tom: it was mine first >·:( it saves letters when they’re together!

Janna: which is always

Tom: exactly. speaking of which, they’re here ttyl

Star stepped out of the carriage in a nice white polka dotted green dress, quickly followed by Marco, the pair’s fingers remaining intertwined until they gave him a hello hug, and Tom honestly wasn’t sure they’d stopped holding hands even then. Ponyhead burst out a moment later with her phone floating in front of her pointed at herself, and she was in the middle of a monologue to no one in particular.

“-so yeah anyway as you all can see we have now arrived in the Underwoooorld. So yeah this is, like, basically the best place on all of Earthni to go shopping as I’ll be showing you today. Oh yeah, I guess some demon boys live here too. Oh my goodness, say hello you guuuys,” she rolled her eyes as she butted in between Star and Tom, side-eyeing him for a split second before grinning back into the camera. After all this time Pony still hadn’t dropped the passive aggression over his and Star’s messy history; Tom had to admit it was a bit understandable, but did she really have to keep it up in such an annoying way? He rolled his eyes - it was Ponyhead he was thinking about here. “OK, the Ponyhead Experience will be taking a short break. Tune back in soon! Love y’all, buhbye!” She snapped the phone shut and caught it with her tongue. “Ugh, why do all of my vlogs with you dorks get like ten times as many viewers? Tom, you were in the shot for like three seconds and do you know what happened? 2000 more people tuned in! What the heck! It’s like, just because I have one less horn and one less eye I’m not exciting to you? But I can’t stay mad at my adooooring fans.”

“Must be the Lucitor charm.” He flashed a toothy smile and a pair of finger guns at her, accidentally flinging his phone across the room in the process. “Totally planned,” he blurted out with a much less authentic grin. Marco chuckled and picked it up, handing it back and patting him mock-sympathetically on the shoulder while holding back a smirk.

Star giggled but tapped her foot impatiently, looking around the room nervously. “OK, great catching up, but on the way here I checked the website and the headband shop is almost out of stock! We have to go, now! Let’s move it, people! Tom, can we borrow the carriage for the day?”

He shrugged nonchalantly. “Fine by me.”

“Thankyouthankyouthankyou, you’re the best!”

“You sure you don’t need anything?” Marco inquired again.

“You heard the girl, Marco, my audience wants to see us get our shop on!”

Tom blew a raspberry, pushing them towards the carriage. “Relax, it’s nothing. I’m practically done already! Tooootally almost done!”

Marco finally relented, nodding his assent. Star was bouncing up and down so much that she looked ready to launch around the room. He giggled as she wrapped both her arms around his middle and kissed his cheek before hauling him the rest of the way into the carriage. “C’mon boo, mama needs a new pair of horns. Plus we can get whatever you need, too! I saw a few things in the catalog that would look preeeetty good on you,” she sing-songed, walking two fingers up his chest to boop his nose after they plopped down onto the seat together. Ponyhead mimed vomiting at Tom, who silently laughed in response; they were so engrossed with each other that Tom was fairly certain they wouldn’t have noticed even if he’d shouted his laughter, though. He blankly stared at the spot the carriage had been for a few seconds after it exited in a blaze.

“Pretty gross, right?” Tom started and launched a fireball in the direction of the voice, hovering away from the intruder. A split second after, his vision caught up with his instincts and saw Janna in her usual green shirt and beanie and yellow skirt, sans jacket, nonchalantly sidestep the flame. “You do the same thing every time, you really need to work on that,” she chided with her arms crossed and a devious smirk on her face.

He rubbed his temple and gestured at her in sullen disbelief. “How did you-”

“Roof of the carriage.”

“Huh.” An eyebrow up in surprise, studying her expression. “You never usually, you know, answer that.”

She shrugged, kicking a boot into the hard stone floor. “Whatever, guess I’m just bored. Besides, half the reason I do that is to get a rise out of Marco,” she slyly snickered, and Tom couldn’t help but join in. “Alright, demon boy, what adventure are we going on today?”

Tom crossed his arms apprehensively. “Just trying to find a book for my mom, not really much of an adventure.”

“Like I said, dude, I’m bored and shopping is dumb. I don’t mind hanging out here for a study session or whatever, your family’s got great taste in decor.” She picked a skull off the ground and tossed it back and forth between her hands. He grinned back at her, grateful for the company. “So what kind of creepy curses are in this book?”

The pair started walking back into the study as their conversation continued. “Don’t think there are any. It’s called ‘Historia Homewnum’, according to my mom, so it’s probably a history book but that’s all I know.”

“Darn. Demon history’s bound to be pretty cool, though.”

“You’d be surprised how little actually happens down here, it’s just a lot of maintenance. Last month the most important thing I did was a ribbon-cutting ceremony at a new boba cornshake shop, it’s really caught on here since the Cleaving. But man is it good! Marco was right, the little pearls are just so tasty, I like the creamed corn version best.”

“What is it with you and corn, seriously...” Janna shuddered.

“Don’t knock it ‘till you try it.” He knew he’d gotten distracted thinking about the delicious creamy beverage, but that didn’t seem like an adequate reason to look so horrified, especially coming from Janna. Not able to figure out any other reason she might be disgusted by his comments, he got his thoughts back on track. “Really don’t know why she wants this thing so much. Anyway, I already checked the entire study for it, and the search archives don’t have anything either. Oh well, what can you do, might as well just give up and-”

“Found something,” Janna piped up, somehow already in the computer chair with her feet on the desk.

“Really? How?” he asked incredulously, throwing his hands in the air for emphasis.

“OK, I didn’t actually find the book, but maybe we should check this place out.” He leaned into the screen to see a Mewgle search for ‘how to find weird book in underworld’ on the screen.

“I already tried that, Janna!”

“Yeah, but your antivirus was blocking this link to some place called the ‘Librarinth’.”

Tom slammed his palm into his forehead. “Of course, the Librarinth! How could I not think to look there, that’s where all the oldest books are. Why was it getting blocked?”

She clicked on the link and both recoiled at the sight: an abhorrent patterned background with almost unreadable randomly colored text and low quality cartoon images scattered all around the page. “Yeah, it’s awful,” she said in response to his obvious horror. “Seriously, whoever must made this website must be, like, a thousand years old.”

“Probably , yeah, but why does that have anything to do with-” His eyes widened in realization as he clapped his hands together in contemplation. “Right, humans and their lifespans. Go on.”

“Look.”

She scrolled past the despondent, blurry faces of demons of all shapes and sizes in the staff section until she arrived at the catalog, folding her arms triumphantly. Tom excitedly butted in, typing into the search box and being greeted with a loading wheel. “Uh, Janna? It’s not working.”

“Pfft, yeah, I might actually be dead by the time the search finishes. But that doesn’t matter because they have our book. It’s the header image for the whole catalog.” He squinted and brought his face closer to the monitor, and to his surprise the title was clear as day on the cover of the book, although all the other information was too difficult to make out. “Alright, let’s go. Main page says the Librarinth is on Floor 216.”

With a snap of his fingers, the demon elevator was summoned into a bookshelf much as it had been the day they had dealt with the Blood Moon. Relicor’s shrieking, which had slowed to a whimper since they’d left, resumed in full; fortunately they began descending, which quickly put them out of earshot. Tom awkwardly stretched his arms, unsure what exactly to say. She was his friend, yes, but he was never the best at small talk, and Janna being Janna didn’t make that any easier. After long, messy years of broken hearts and misguided feelings, he finally felt comfortable forging friendships, but even though they got along quite well there was something about Janna that made that vibe a lot less effortless than with Marco or even Star. Thoughts of his other friends reminded him of something. “Uh, by the way… how did you even know about the carriage earlier?”

“A girl’s gotta keep some secrets.”

“Pony was posting about it every 15 seconds,” he guessed, calling Janna’s bluff.

“Touché. Every 10, though,” she coolly responded. “Ha, now she’s just flipping out because Star and Marco have way more likes than her selfies.”

“Figured you’d have him bugged or something,” Tom chuckled as he scooted over to get a look at Janna’s screen, and sure enough there was a picture collage of Star sitting in Marco’s lap with tens of thousands of likes and comments already. They were laughing their butts off at themselves in a mirror in front of them with novelty sunglasses, fake mustaches, goofy props, and even a few absurd full-body costumes; Ponyhead joined the fun for a few but just as often butt in trying to take over the mirror by herself.

“Ew, no, I disabled it all months ago. Boyfriend Tom was already too cutesy for me, and you two just had a little flirty fling. Do you think I’d really want to see or hear whatever Star and Marco have going on? They’re, like, deeply in love, or whatever, and it’s gotten even worse in the last few weeks.”

He murmured in tacit agreement. Now that he thought about it, they had seemed even more affectionate than usual, but he wasn’t too keen on uncovering why that might be. The ding of the elevator saved him from any further speculation, and he and Janna stepped out of the elevator into the lobby, which was empty with cobwebs coating most of the weathered stone walls. Janna looked at him with a quizzical expression. “Anyway, so the Librarinth is basically a combination of a library and a labyrinth-”

“Right, I got that,” she curtly retorted.

“The legends say that some ancient librarian demons wanted to challenge any who sought knowledge, so they hid all the books in a giant maze that only the worthy could navigate. But everyone who made it still decided to organize it thoroughly for some reason, and you still had to check out the books and bring them back and all that.”

She ran a finger over the dust on the front counter, and the surface of the desk sizzled in response, causing her to pull her hand back before poking the bubbles that formed with a curious smile. “So why is it completely empty?”

Tom rubbed the back of his neck. “Weeeeeeell, after a few people went missing or insane, everyone realized it really wasn’t a great way to, you know, run a library. Grandpa actually started collecting books to try and get them away from this place. No one really knows what goes on in there, but as far as I know it’s still maintained even though no one uses it. The kingdom stopped staffing the lobby but they could never just shut it down because anyone who tried, well-”

“Went missing or insane. Sounds cool, I’m in.”

“You sure?”

“Dude, you brought me to a wicked hell maze filled with psychotic demon nerds. Maybe there’ll be bottomless pits or a wicked dungeon boss. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you’re flirting with me, Mr. Lucitor,” she purred, running a finger up his chest and flicking his nose.

“Haha, very funny. And it’s Prince Lucitor,” he sarcastically chided, poking her arm in response before crossing the room with her following, but he couldn’t help but hide that he was flustered. Seeing Star and Marco’s relationship in the past year had reinforced his already-firm convictions about romance: he wanted someone with whom he could be life partners in all ways, not just handholding and rooftop picnics. Otherwise, what would be the point? He’d made that mistake enough times, and even just a light jab at the notion of him casually flirting struck made him feel self-conscious about that past. Finally his reflection was halted when he found what he sought: a large wrought iron door furnished with ornate demonic symbols and various carvings of mythological creatures dwarfed them both. With a soft, steady flame for light, he brought his hand up and ran it over the rusty engravings. He jumped back with a gasp as the fire spread into the lines of the door, lighting up the patterns on it and causing it to creak as it slowly opened.

“Nice,” Janna muttered in awe before strolling inside, with Tom hesitantly following. She was the most eager of their little group to dive headfirst into the unknown, even more than Star most of the time, but he trusted her gut.

They started walking down the long, cramped hallways, hearing only the sound of their own footsteps on the cold floor. Janna peeked her head into a small doorway that appeared to their left, earning herself an explosive blast to the face and getting knocked onto her butt. Tom slammed the door shut and leaned in to read an inscription next to it. “Incinerator for any books too damaged or damaging for further use. Probably not the right place.”

Janna huffed, brushing herself off and finding scraps of paper among the char. “I can see that. Seriously, what kind of labyrinth labels its doors?”

“Maybe one run by book nerds,” Tom offered, gripping her hand to help her up.

“So it’s just as bad at being a labyrinth as it is a library. Neat. Great adventure.”

Tom pressed on, keeping his focus ahead of them. “Hey, I’m just here to help my mom. You’re the one that said you were fine with anything.”

“Fine, fine. Just saying, I could be working on my potions or something.” She pulled a glass bottle full of purple liquid from her skirt pocket and casually tossed it at a wall. Janna snickered at Tom’s yelp when it shattered, but found herself joining him in backing away when a chunk of stone quickly deteriorated and slammed into the ground at incredible speed. She went over and carefully kicked a pebble, finding it impossible to even budge. “See, this was just a stupid pro-gravity potion. Worthless.”

He leaned against the stable wall opposite the hole, sighing. “I’m sure there has to be something interesting here. What if we, I dunno, make it a competition or something?” His frustration with both the situation and Janna were there, yes, but he still wanted to try and get something fun out of the day.

“Go on,” Janna said, eyes flickering up from the bottle that she was tossing between her hands nonchalantly.

OK, maybe he should have thought further ahead. His arms flailed as he scrambled to come up with an idea. “OK, so, uh, whoever finds the weirdest thing in this place in the next hour wins. Just call them out if you think you found something. Or whoever finds the book, whichever comes first, yeah. Mom still needs it.”

“Momma’s boy. I respect that. You’re on, Tom.” Janna cocked an eyebrow, staring at him for a second before pushing off the wall into a sprint, opening the first door she could find. “Empty. Another empty. Three empties, dammit.”

Tom used his flight to travel more smoothly from door to door on his side of the corridor, but still found himself losing ground as he took the time to read the sign posted by each threshold. The ‘Demonic Studies’ room had a very ornately ghoulish aesthetic, with macabre skeletal models throughout. Definitely something to show Janna on the way out just for the aesthetic, and it’d have been weird for most humans, but it wasn’t any more abnormal than what the two of them were used to as a daily routine. Another room for astronomy had an exquisite planetarium dome, but it turned out to be rather useless as the Underworld did not, in fact, contain any stars since it was underground. There was, however, a plentiful selection of guides to stalactites stocked on the shelves. The next four whole sections were devoted to anger management self-help books, which only made him waste precious seconds cringing at old memories.

His pace picked up as he kept going from door to door finding nothing but normal library fare, although he had to admit it was certainly well-maintained. On any other day he might actually enjoy some of the things here, but today he was on a mission to get out of here so they could actually have fun elsewhere.

‘Bookworms’... now that had potential. What sorts of hybrid creatures could lurk behind the inches of wood? “I think I might have found something!” he shouted, throwing open the door only to receive a harsh shushing. Within were only elderly demons in cozy sweaters reading by candlelight, all now glaring at him with an intensity that reminded him of his mom’s own rare reprimands. “Never mind,” he loud-whispered back out into the hall as he gently closed the door and found Janna in a nearby corridor. “Ugh, why is there nothing interesting here?” Sparks trailed behind him from his mounting anger as he paced.

“Tell me about it, even ‘Wormbooks’ was just a bunch of regular novels, somehow,” she sighed. “I was hoping for a big long chain of open books slithering around on the ground, now there’s a party.” She slumped down against the wall next to the streak of flame he’d left on the ground, idly stamping it out with her boot until Tom sat down beside her.

“Wouldn’t a wormbook be the opposite? A big fat worm in the shape of a book?”

“Nah, it’d totally be a book made of a bunch of little flatworms all working together, duh. Still pretty lame.”

OK, now he knew something was up with her. “Janna, is- is something wrong?”

Her body slouched further down until she was almost horizontal on the cold floor, staring ahead of her like a zombie. “Being weird has just felt so pointless lately. Everything’s weird now, all the time! I’m wasting all my time trying to brew potions when there’s a shop that sells them on every corner. I got so bored that I even passed that same dumb test Marco did and now I’m done with high school, like, for real this time.”

“Hey, don’t be so hard on yourself, that’s pretty impressive.”

“It’s easy if you know who to blackmail.” Tom blinked a few times, not sure why he’d expected anything different. “Everyone else is moving on with their lives, but I’m still feeding the same old possums and picking up the same old tennis balls. The whole point of my routine is that it’s different, it’s me, it’s my Jannanigans or whatever Star calls it, but it’s just not the same. I’m still into all that stuff, and Earthni’s actually really cool, but… ugh.” With that, her head fully sunk to the ground.

Tom brought his palms together over her head, opening and shutting his hands while wiggling his fingers around. “It’s a wormbook,” he said hesitantly, not really sure what he was doing. It was silly amusement, but perhaps that was just what she needed right now. Janna frowned and rolled her eyes, so he snapped at her arm with his hand puppet wormbook a few times.

“Alright, I get it,” she barked out, but her sullen demeanor slowly cracked under the onslaught of frivolity as she sat back up with an unusually ponderous look at him.

“Remember that time you took me bootsledding?” She nodded. “You told me that I needed to find a life outside of Star, and- and it was really great advice. Didn’t mean I still couldn’t like spending time with Star or anything, heck, I still do! But I just needed to get out of that rut of depending on it. Maybe you just need to do that, too. If doing your weirdness by yourself is normal, then adding something normal might be kinda weird.”

“That’s it.” Janna leapt to her feet, looking very suddenly invigorated. “That’s it!”

“Well, uh, glad you liked it. It was nothing, really, just trying to be a good pal-”

“Yeah, yeah, that too,” she waved dismissively, and he couldn’t help but feel a bit scorned. “If weird is normal then normal is weird. We were looking for the craziest things we could find here, but everything that should have been weird was normal, so we should be looking for the most painfully boring room here!” All three of Tom’s eyes blinked a few times as her words sunk in. Could it be…? “Tom, over here!” He hustled over to a particularly plain wooden door. Janna pointed at the plaque on the wall, which was far more faded than the others had been. “Look. ‘Government Records’.”

A burst of energy coursed through Tom’s blood, sparking life in him once more, and he could see the same reflected in Janna’s determined brown eyes. “And the book Mom wanted has something to do with history. Maybe it’s political history! Janna, you might be a genius!”

“Pfft, ‘might’. Now we just gotta…” She grabbed his arm, aiming it at the door, and he looked at her incredulously. “C’mon, dude, who knows what’s behind there. We’re gonna bust in with a demon blast, duh. Pew-pew!”

He rolled his eyes, but the corner of his lip turning up in a begrudging smile gave away his agreement. The pair aimed at the door and blew it off its hinges before charging in through the smoke.

“I see you two have finally solved the grand riddle of the Librarinth!” A deep, booming voice greeted them from the smoke. “Janna Ordonia, Thomas Lucitor, you certainly took your time. I expected you to book it here much more quickly. No matter, for this room shall be your tome!”

“How do you know my-” Janna stammered.

“Uh, don’t you mean tomb-” Tom started at the same time before realizing the wordplay and groaning in misery. Wait a second… Epic threats, an obvious personality quirk…

“Dungeon boss!” the teens cheered together, glancing back and forth between each other and the remainder of the room in front of them obscured by shadow.

“It is I, the bookkeeper of this place. I guard the most sacred treasure of all… knowledge!” Paper rustled loudly, echoed throughout the cavernous space, far taller and wider than Tom had noticed when they first entered with a massive array of bookshelves many times taller than him in a single row near the back wall. The ground beneath them began to shake and Tom tossed a puff of light in front of him, exposing the wide chasm that had just opened up in the ground, swallowing all the shelving in the room. Neither were prepared for the sight that greeted them: a coiled mass unfurled from the abyss and slithering with purpose along the ground, finally raising itself up to stand at fifteen feet tall, swaying back and forth with enough force to create an artificial wind within the space. A closer look showed that the body was made of some peculiar segments of… books, of all shapes and sizes. The volume at the top of the chain was much larger and far more ornately embossed than the others, and on the blood red surface of the cover Tom could make out a set of eyes. As the picture became more and more clear, he could finally see what they were up against. Now THIS is a bookworm.

“Aren’t libraries supposed to be, like, public and free?” Janna blithely inquired.

“You are correct, child, but perhaps try reporting that to your friend there! The Lucitor family is the sworn enemy of this great Librarinth! That fiend Relicor pilfered our collection for his own use for millennia, and the rest tried to shut this place down for good. But worst of all, in the most egregious display of contempt I have witnessed since the dawn of writing itself… Prince Lucitor and his ilk have amassed twenty-six dollars in unpaid fees!”

The tension in the room nearly evaporated in a heartbeat as Tom and Janna paused momentarily before bursting out into raucous laughter.

“Seriously, dude? I could just, like, repay it.” He fumbled in his pockets for his wallet for a moment before being interrupted once more.

“Do not condescend to me, children! It is far too late to make up for these sins with mere currency. Revenge is my fee most overdue, now prepare to meet… Overdoom! I shall harness the power of the written word to spell your demise!”

Books were hurled from the depths of the crevice en masse. Tom stepped in front of Janna to blast them away, but they had taken on a life of their own and homed in on him, covers flapping in the air like wings. Behind Tom, Janna snatched one out of the air to thwart a flank attack. She grabbed his left arm and pointed it up, tapping his elbow frantically. He spared a glance and saw the paper tornado coalescing, and understood her intention. Demon flames surged out of both hands with Janna calling the shots for the left side and Tom focusing on his right. They used the opportunity to back up to a wall, letting them cover every attack vector but creating a stalemate they were sure to lose in time as the seemingly endless offense droned on. Overdoom for the time being simply floated out of the abyss, glaring harshly at them as more and more papers kept emerging.

“Wait, Tom, look…” Still using his hand, she pointed to a shelf that had fallen at an odd angle and hadn’t collapsed into the abyss. There was a large, torn-up poster on which he could barely make out the word “Historia”.

“That might be it,” he breathed out, starting to feel the burn from minutes of nonstop vigilant defensive demon blasts. Oddly, none of the books in that corner were joining the assault. Almost as if...

“It’s making them magical in the chasm.” Tom’s heart leapt up in his chest at the revelation, hope and adrenaline mixing in his veins to keep him fully alert. But charging in was a suicide mission and they clearly couldn’t win on raw firepower.

“Have you had enough? Are you children yet ready to come scrawling on your hands and knees to a-tome for the sins of your forefathers?” the imposing figure growled, bristling impatiently.

“Did it seriously just use the tome pun again?” Janna griped, running her hands past her eyes and down her cheeks in disgust. “For a word nerd, that’s just awful.”

“Yeah…” Tom absent-mindedly responded. He knew she was right, though. Book, tome, scrawl… even if the creature’s summoning powers were off the charts, and it wielded them with calculated ease, its cocky wordplay taunts left something to be desired. It struck him then: what if they’d been approaching this all wrong? If the battle couldn’t be won by blows, then they had to find another option, and Tom was ready to put his plan into action.

He quickly shook off Janna’s rather tight grip on his arm and stepped forward, mustering up a confident expression masking any fears he still had left. “Nice try, Overdoom. Your words aren’t scaring us. Learn to read the room!”

Its “body” immediately began wiggling violently in the air as it crawled a bit forward towards them. Tom paid careful attention to its back end, which had climbed a few feet out of the ground in the move. “How dare you! Petulant brats!” Literary fire and brimstone rained down upon them with more fury than ever, and the two backed up into a corner which was the best they could do in a room largely devoid of any cover.

“What the hell-” Janna whispered through gritted teeth. Tom wriggled his tail out and waved it in front of Janna’s face momentarily. “Now is not the time to-” She was cut off when a barrage of index cards launched at them with enough force to somehow chip the stone behind them on impact. Tom forcefully nodded his head towards the worm’s tail, waggling his own once again. Her eyes lit up much like his had and she nodded in understanding.

“Come on, is that the best you got? I’ve heard them all before, at least give us something novel!”

Janna stood beside him, and her grimace even managed to spook Tom a bit. “I’d alphabet you couldn’t do better even if you tried!” Not what he would’ve gone with, but hey, if it helped tick Overdoom off then who was he to say no?

“You can talk up a storm all you want, but no matter what volume of air you blow, all I feel is a not-so-rough draft!”

“ENOUGH!” Overdoom’s tail launched out of the chasm faster than either could follow, crossing the room in a heartbeat. Tom shoved Janna out of the way before it wrapped itself around him, dragging him much more slowly towards the abyss. His jacket and jeans mercifully protected the paper edges pressing into him, but it was still a painfully tight squeeze that left him gasping for air. His arms were uselessly pinned inside the embrace as he was dragged headfirst, but their hypothesis had been proven correct as all the books around them had dropped to the ground lifeless.

“Tom!” Janna called out. He strained his head to see she’d removed her beanie and had something purple in her hand that she lobbed at that moment. Through the haze of pain he recognized it as another of her potions. The arc was due to miss until he summoned his energy reserves and redirected it with a weak burst of flame from his boot. Though the glass was durable enough to not melt or shatter, the demonic heat changed the potion into a bubbling olive green milliseconds before it contacted a random segment of the behemoth they were fighting. All at once, its hold on Tom and the rest of its body went limp as it began floating lazily into the air before bouncing off the ceiling a few times like a balloon. Janna ran over and helped Tom up as Overdoom screamed inarticulately from many feet above. They traversed the chaotic mess towards the pile they’d spotted previous. After some digging around, he found ‘Historia Homewnum’ miraculously unscathed and protected by a large, sturdy slab of mahogany that had fallen flat on top of it. “I got it!”

“Cool, potion is wearing off. We need to go.” Janna calmly stated. Twin jets of fire erupted from his feet as he swiftly passed the book to Janna and scooped her up in his arms, carrying them across the room towards the door. After setting Janna down, he hesitated for a moment as she stood in the doorway.

“Do you think I should still pay the late fee? I feel kinda bad and-”

“TODAY MAY HAVE BEEN YOUR VICTORY, BUT TOME-ORROW WILL-”

Tom sighed in resignation with a very unimpressed expression. “OK, yeah, never mind.” And with a quick slam of the door, they were both out scot-free. They didn’t stop running until they arrived back at the elevator. Once inside, they slumped down onto the ground as they began the journey back up to the main surface of the Underworld.

“Woo!” Tom was caught off guard by Janna expressing visible joy, and it was immediately infectious. “Now that’s an adventure. Of course, demon fire is what makes the potions work. Makes a lot more sense. Stupid ink smudge, I burned all those lemons for nothing.” He belly laughed, falling over to the floor and clutching his gut as Janna kicked him in the arm.

“Sorry, sorry, couldn’t help it.”

Her foot backed off after one last good hit. “So now you just have to give that book to your mom?”

“Yeah, should only take a minute. Want to come with?”

“Dude, she’s half a story tall and cries lava. I’d be honored. Oh crud, Pony’s current stream title is ‘WHY Y’ALL CARE MORE ABOUT EARTH TURD AND B-FLY THAN ME?!?!’” Janna showed him the notification on her phone. “That can’t be good.”

Tom pulled out his phone and called to see what was up. Pony picked up after only one ring and didn’t even bother with a greeting as she screamed so loudly that he lost hearing for a moment in his right ear. Her voice carried through the elevator car even without being put on speakerphone. “Yo Tom, why do all my Pony Pals just want to watch those two idiots kiss and cuddle? What is up with that? I even gave my fanbase a stupid nickname, they eat that stuff up, so why won’t they looooove meeeeee?” Business as usual with Pony, it seemed. “An-y-way, this whole shopping spree was amaaaazing, I am all kinds of extra fabulous now. B-Fly and Earth Turd took over the stream cuz the viewers, like, wanted a Q&A sesh but I’m only giving them twenty minutes! Hmph!”

“Might as well just make a whole show about them,” Janna chimed in, rolling her eyes a few times for good measure.

“Wait, demon boy, is Janna there? What the heck have you two been getting up to? Don’t tell me you too are getting your freak on too, I could not handle that T.M.I.-”

Yeah, there was nothing more to gain from that conversation. Tom flipped his compact shut, disconnecting the call. Wait, ‘too’? Did she mean- he shuddered involuntarily. You know what, nope, just not going to think about that one.

“So glad I turned off the cameras,” Janna mumbled, curling up into a ball on the floor, clearly not wanting to touch that whole situation either.

He opted to make contact with the other group via Marco instead - why he hadn’t just done that in the first place, he’d never know - and sent a quick text. “Marco wants to get dinner at the Waterfolk Kingdom in, like, an hour and a half. Apparently Star found some earrings she wanted at the last minute, and Pony got arrested for shoplifting three seconds after I hung up.”

Janna cackled in response. “Let’s just meet them there. My jacket got ripped to shreds by the possums last week, might as well get a new one while I’m down here. Been thinking about changing it up. I kinda like that style.” She lifted up his arm and poked at a button on the sleeve of his own.

“Uh, yeah, sure, I can show you where I got it.” He stumbled over his words, still caught off guard by this new normal-person-Janna. The elevator dinged and the teens began their trek through the Lucitor castle in search of the queen. “So, the Librarinth... we’re definitely going back there at some point, right?”

“Totally, bet’s still not over. We should do this more often, you’re not so bad a friend.”

“You too, and yeah, we should.” Looking back on the day, it had honestly been one some of the most fun he’d had in a while, despite almost dying at least once. Tom still wasn’t sure what to make of this friendship brewing between them, but if it meant more days like this to look forward to? Maybe he could get used to that.

[azulemega]

Code: Too much Alcohol - Ch2

Pre-movie

Megamind, Minion, Roxanne - Megamind/Roxanne (hinted at) Drama/Angst/some humor -  R (for alcoholism, cursing, sexual tension/thoughts)

When Megamind’s most recent plan fails miserably, he seeks to getting drunk to try to wind down. Hopefully he can stay sober enough to stop himself from making a mistake that he might live to regret.

(Chapter 1)

——————————————-

Remarkably Megamind was able to make it unscathed to Roxanne's 7th floor apartment balcony. Maybe it was the fact that he was basically on autopilot, just going through the motions of this particular drive/flight he's made a million times. It also helped that he was emotionally fueled and, thus, determined to speak his mind and reach his destination.

He put the motorbike in park and turned off the engine (thankful that he had installed a few mufflers a week ago to keep it nice and quiet). He then quickly made his way to Roxanne's glass sliding door and tried to open them.

"*Aggrevated sigh* of coursh da damn thing's locked. Easy fix!" Megamind pulled out his De-Gun and shot the lock. The lock disintegrated while the handle fell off and made a loud crashing sound on the floor inside the apartment.

"Pffftt...oops! Oh well!" Megamind giggled and slid open the door while trying to keep his steps straight as he walked in. The more he concentrated on his footfalls, the harder he started laughing. Even though he came in with serious intentions, everything suddenly seemed hysterical and he just couldn't calm himself down.

"What the fuck do you think you're doing here?!" The overhead light suddenly came on revealing the real Roxanne Ritchie looking extremely pissed with a baseball bat gripped tightly in her hands.

"I'ma comin' to tell yer stupid face dat you are a bitch and I am absolutely in wuv--" Megamind drunkenly started to reply but was cut abrupt as his face started to turn green with his stomach trying to come up his throat.

"*CanIuseyerbathroom!" Megamind blabbed urgently and quickly covered his mouth as he started to panic. [*Translation: 'Can I use yer bathroom!']

"Absolutely not! You'll have to get through my bat to step any further into my apartment," Roxanne replied agitation filling her voice as she held the bat tighter and got in batting stance.

"Please--I feel--sick--*gulp*-bath--room..." Megamind's face somehow amongst all that blue turned very green and he began to worry that his insides were going to be all over Roxanne's floor.

Roxanne realizing that he wasn't trying to pull some kind of trick, lowered her weapon and replied, "Umm okay...It's on the--"

"---anx!!!" Megamind whooshed past Roxanne and made his way to her lavatory, slamming the door, and immediately began retching.

"--the right....yeah..." Roxanne stood dumbfounded watching the door close. What the Hell is going on here? Matter of fact, what the Hell am I getting into by letting him further into my apartment? Seems something--*more throwing up could be heard*--is clearly wrong here. Is he sick? Wait, do aliens even get sick? Drunk? Seems possible...Maybe this is a good time to get in some deep questions? I mean he is disturbing me at an un-Godly hour and I'm helping him by letting him--*more tossing of cookies can be heard*--well, do "that".

Megamind felt miserable. The long ride over here must have sobered him up so he no longer felt giddy and calm. He physically felt sicker than a dog as he leaned into the toilet breathing hard. He could feel his emotions whelming up within him as was he pummeled by all the strong thoughts and he feelings he remembered from earlier at Evil Lair.

What the fuck is wrong with me?! I'm not like this...When did I become an animal?...I mean, I am evil, but I do have morals...How could I have even began to think that Roxanne was trying to trick people--well, me--by the way she talks or moves...This is Miss Ritchie we're talking about! She's professional and the most smartest person I've ever met. She'd never sink so low as to use her womanly ways to get what she wanted. Hell she'd just as quickly kick someone's ass if she even got a whiff of them trying to take advantage of her...She's not an object or prize to be won...Oh, Evil Gods, what was I thinking???

He began puking violently as His mind started to feel muddled and tired. The alcohol and exhaustion from the day finally started to catch up with him as he forgot where he was.

I'm just glad that I'm still in the Lair and not off doing something stupid. Minion, as always was right--shit, I said terrible things to him...*Sigh* I deserve this. I can't believe I was acting like such a fool and thinking like a creep. Not only that...He grabbed his mouth as if to hold back a sudden sob then continued thinking, Miss Ritchie...why would I think she'd want to be with m---

"Uhh...you almost done in there? It's 3am and some of us have to go to work in the morning..." Roxanne was starting to get annoyed and had no interests in letting someone (especially an evil villain) make vomiting noises to keep her up all night.

Megamind did not respond.

"Well, I'm coming in. I really don't want you in there all night..." Roxanne said assertively.

Megamind incoherently moaned not really to anyone, just mostly because he felt awful.

"Let's get this over with," Roxanne said to herself taking a deep breath. She opened the door to find Megamind sitting on her blue bath rug with his large head between his knees. He appeared to be staring at the ground with his eye lids half closed, looking the most defeated she had ever seen him.

"Are you alright?" She asked, not being able to help herself. Something is way of here. Villain or not, I'm going to have to assist him I want to get him out of here.  

"Oh SHIT! Where the hell did you come from?!" Megamind answered with full panic in his voice and bloodshot eyes almost popping out of his big, blue head as he backed up into the corner where the wall and bathtub connect.

"Didn't you hear me call from the door?---erm, nevermind..." Roxanne after fully seeing the horrible state he was in, looked away feeling her face blush with embarrassment. She'd never seen him so...vulnerable...His face was a deep hue of purple (no longer green, thank God) and he was gasping like a man who just finished a marathon. He reeked of sweat, alcohol and sick. This whole ordeal was so unlike Megamind that it made her very nervous.  

"I'm at your apartment *deep breath* aren't I?" Megamind replied pitifully and looked at the ground again as he tried to regain control of his breathing.

"Yup..." Roxanne looked around the bathroom trying to look anywhere but at him. This was the first time she'd been stuck in a situation like this with her usual kidnapper and she really wasn't sure of what to say or do.

"I'm sorry..." Megamind mumbled very quietly under his breath but sounding very loud in the silent apartment. He felt so gross about himself that he wasn’t even mad he let that bit of feeling slip.

Roxanne was completely shocked. There's no way she heard the words "I'm sorry" come out of Megamind's mouth. It just wasn't possible! He's never been sorry for anything as far as she knew.

Thinking against her best judgement and acting spontaneously, she replied, "Ummm...yeah, so you maybe want to call a truce for tonight?" She walked slowly toward the Evil Genius and held out her hand.

Megamind looked up at her eyes, slowly understanding what she was saying, making sure this wasn't some kind of trick. He then focused on her hand where he replied in a disconnected voice, "Yeah, sure..." He took Roxanne's outstretched hand and slowly stood on his feet while she tried to help steady him.

"So...you can sleep on my couch for one night but after this, you owe me," Roxanne stated as she let Megamind lean against her and they began to exit the bathroom.

"Yeah, yeah..." Megamind answered with sudden aggression. He could feel his hangover becoming a headache very quickly, making him feel very irritable. Maybe it was the close proximity of Roxanne’s body, but some of his anger from how she acted during the failed scheme earlier that day came back to him. His mood swings were really starting to piss him off too. Usually he was in control of this mess but here he was being manipulated by it.

"Hey, no need to be like that! I'm helping you out here. I mean I'm not the one puking in your home while you're trying to sleep!" Roxanne started to think she should just throw him out on to the balcony. Instead she continued to help lead him to the couch with an arm around his slender body.

"Pshh," Megamind rolled his eyes and huffed.

When they reached the couch, Roxanne heaved Megamind toward it. "There! You better be gone in the morning." She left him to go to open a closet in the hall, where she grabbed a blanket, slammed the door shut, and continued on with her demands from earlier, "I also expect you to fix my door and up my 'Frequent Kidnapping Card' benefits."

"Yeah, sure, whatever. It's done," pouted Megamind as he crossed his arms and glowered at her.

Roxanne tossed the blanket at him and replied with annoyance, "You can be really childish you know. I mean did you really just come here to tell me that I'm a 'bitch'?" She hadn't forgotten that outburst and had truly wanted an answer since she finally had his attention.

"Well...you are one," Megamind muttered under his breath and turned away from her to stare angrily at the wall. He was still feeling frustrated with her, himself and just...well, everything. He was done trying to mask his feelings and just decided to go with it. I mean, she was already upset with him and he was in no mood to try to right things.

"Oh, come on! What is this about?!" Roxanne just had it. Fuck this stupid attitude of his. I deserve some answers since he's the one that barged in on me. Surely he had a better reason to come and bother me while wasting my time to berate me...An idea suddenly came to her.

"Wait, is this about today's 'super successful plan' because you cannot be mad at me about that. It was your stupid scheme that didn't work and had nothing to do with me." She could feel heat rising in her cheeks and it felt good to let off some of the steam she's been building up for a few days. Of course that's what this is, just his fucking hurt pride. So predictable!

Megamind then slowly turned to face her. His long, blue face looked no longer angry, just sad. She couldn't stop staring his big, emerald eyes that appeared to hold so much pain. Where did this come from?...No, no! I'm not falling for that. He captured me at a very inconvenient time and I can't help that his plan was really, really bad...But why...why does he look so sad? Surely a villain wouldn't show this much sadness even if they are having an off night...

"You're right..." Megamind replied honestly and began to pull the blanket around his lean body as he laid down across the couch. "I'll be gone in the morning and will make all the arrangements to meet your demands. I respect your hospitality, Miss Ritchie." He turned away from her and prepared to try to go to sleep and relieve his aching giant head. I've just got to end this. Once I get some sleep, I can make up some story to explain myself. Right now...I've got to stop this pounding in my brain.

Wait! What the Hell was that?! Now he's admitting to being wrong and thanking me again? I just do not understand...Roxanne thought as her mind began to race with questions and utter confusion. It's got to be the fact that he was drunk. He's showing me so many emotions and sudden kindness...I just...I feel bad for him. I don't know how he did it but I do...

"Look, I'm sorry to for today," She replied truthfully.

Megamind slowly glanced over his shoulder at her giving her an interested look that said "continue".

"It's just...I've got other things going on in my life right now that's made our arrangement, or whatever it is, difficult..." Roxanne hesitated as Megamind set up suddenly with a wince and turned to fully face her. His green eyes glowed with surprise and hurt. Roxy, you know you shouldn't be doing this. I'm basically giving him the deets of a super secret project that literally involves him. He can't know or everything will be ruined...I've got to be very careful here...

"You mean, you're replacing my epic battles with Metro Mahn with something...else?" Megamind inquired sadly. He couldn't believe it. He laid back down on the couch and started to focus on his thoughts. This has to be a bad dream...It's just the lasting effects of the alcohol playing tricks on me, right?

"No, no, it's not that at all. What I'm working on is just a really complicated side project. It will in no way effect Metro City's top story which will always be you and Metro Man." This was the best answer that she could come up with. It was a partial lie but it was the best she could come up with hoping he wouldn’t begin barging her with questions.

"It's just been draining to work on and has made me irritable...Even my co-workers have commented on it, haha. But I can assure you that it's almost done and everything will be..." Roxanne stopped as she noticed Megamind had fallen asleep. Phew, thank goodness.

She noticed that part of the blanket had fallen off him and as a reaction fixed it.

"....you're not a...bitc...." Megamind mumbled sleepily as he drifted off into a deep slumber.

Roxanne smiled at him and watched as his face relaxed. He looked so peaceful lying there with a strange presence of innocence around him that confused her. If someone was to see him now, they would never that he is an evil vilian... Megamind smacked his lips and lightly licked them as he stretched and rolled his body away from her.

She felt her heart betray her as it fluttered at the sweet sleeping scene before her. She could feel her cheeks blushing as she quickly looked away thinking, Well, this has definitely been an interesting night, morning actually, haha...Maybe he's not all heartless after all?  

With the crazy events of the late night/early morning seeming to be at an end, Roxanne went back to her room and immediately fell asleep.

——————————————-

Roxanne awoke that next morning with a jump. Everything that happened last night came flooding back to her and she quickly made her way to living room to check to see if it was all real.

Megamind was not there nor was his motorbike.

That couldn't have been a dream?I know it happened.

She looked on  the couch and saw that a note was left for her on a folded blanket:

Miss Ritchie,

I do not remember what happened last night but I know that I owe you a new door. I hope that I did not ruin our relationship and as a free heads up, I will be planning the next kidnapping on Thursday. Hope that makes it up to you a bit.

ϟ M ϟ

Roxanne smiled and laughed to herself. Well, I guess this will have to do.

*~END~* (Chapter 1)

(Author’s note: Hope you guys liked this little drabble I did. There’s some connections to other stories that I might write this one is referring too. Thanks for reading! ♥)

[mimicsecretdiary]

Star Wars oneshot

[beware: long post ahead] Introduction

The Galaxy,for the first time,seems to be at peace: the Republic and Empire have reached a stall and acceptable agreements and both of them are not pinching and nabbing at each other too much. This is also thanks to the just-ended great war, lasting the incredible short period of 5 years, which had ended with a large-scale schism of the Sith order that destabilized the Empire. There are those who say the Sith "rebels" were supported by the Republic, some say they were headed by a Sith lord with powers comparable or even higher than the Emperor himself. The fact is that now the intergalactic forces are more or less in peace. [Characters introductions here]

The scene opens with a Chiss pilot in space. Janos has just finished one of his regular smuggling jobs and he's relaxing while the most recent member of his "one man crew" is being the paranoid of the bunch and he's checking the ship for any evidence or problems that might have happened during the mission. They receive a call on holo from a "private number" basically, and Janos, before letting his "co-pilot" paranoid human hacker answer, checks from where it arrives. It's from Korriban. "AH. EXCELLENT". They are a bit on the defensive but Jaydkan,the hacker knowns as "cresto", or hacker, or paranoid, or simply J says that "curiosity makes him curious" (he's a hacker, not a poet) and they respond. It is a rattataki that calls Janos by name (OK) and tells him that it is the apprentice of his "employer" (GREAT) and that has a job for him, perhaps the last "mandatory" one (actual good), and she basically wants me to pick up two Night Sisters( G L O R I U O S) and a couple of jedi ( SPEC TA CU LAR) to help her Master in a thing. "ah ok, so now I'm taxi service". Of course I accept, I do not have the right to refuse, and I head to the coordinates. The scene moves to the Night Sisters, who are briefly informed about the matter by teh same rattataki woman, even if they already knew what they had to do and they get informed about who and where and when they will be taken to do such work. Madea and Winter are of few words and many facts so when the "taxi" arrives, they introduce themselves - more or less- and they go quietly in their ""lodgings"" on the ship to meditate. New change of scene and we are on Typhon, known planet of jedi temples. Three jedi are digging and working in an archeologic site when one of the three, Sa'Vin, recieves an holo call. From a "private number" She moves away from the tent and answers, finding the same rattataki as before. But she knows her by name ("Tiraka"), and knows who she is and who her Master is, as she had had "dealings" with him in the past. There is a strenuous conversation where Tiraka asks for support from Sa'Vin, and she deduces that it must be a great deal if it is her and not her Master who calls for help. The sith apprentice confirms the situation it's as such. With a sigh, Sa'vin accepts the caller's request for help and closes the call, speaking soon after privately with her padawan Milisendis asking if she would feel comfortable doing a "special" mission. The Miraluka girl seems to be interested academically speaking and, when asked, the other Jedi, a Givin called Iad-aan, appears to be interested as well (there is a samll player-death here bcs the charcter vocie od Iad-aan made me die laughing.). Iad-Aan asks if it is an illegal thing, and when it is confirmed that it is not "technically" he lightly accepts. Sa'vin drives in speeder the two colleagues / companions to the place of randevouz for Tiraka had confirmed that she had already arranged somebody to come and get them near the place of need. The three await the ship in a open grassfield and when the said transport arrives after a a couple of hours, Iad-Aan uses the Force to "see" who is inside and percieves clearly two strong sources of Force not fully trained on but mostly Dark Ways. On the other hand, the Night Sisters perceive themselves to be observed. Landing, Janos comes down from the ship to check his "cargo" and remaining pleasantly surprised by (re)Seeing Sa'vin, cordially greeting Millisendis and remaining a little shocked by the welcoming of the Givin, makes them jump on board, urgently asking not to provoke quarrels with the other two young ladies in the ship. There is a brief chat between Janos and Sa'vin, where she asks him to use the name with which she presented herself and where she whispers that she would like to know where he had met this current employer of his (The sith master she also knows). "I could ask you the same question, Counsellor Sa'vin" "it is not obvious that i will not answer". On the ship they all meet up with a young blue twi'lek and a jawa, who is promptly threatened by Janos who warns the small alien that he is "keeping an eye on him (Zili.. Don't let it touch my droid)". It's obvious that this kind of conversation is now routine on the ship. [Sa'vins player was feeling ill so she left after this point] Before taking off, on the datapad that gave Janos the coordinates for the variosu landings a message compose itself and it suggests to ask the Nighsisters to explain the problem to the new arrivals of the ship. Janos hurriedly gets up (complaining that it could have wrote the message in the 5 seconds before i had sat down on the pilot seat) and he goes, but before he could hear the Night sisters' negative answer, he's already gone. The journey starts... without any of the main groups exchanging covnersations. We arrive at the coordinates set: a moon that looks more like a cemetery of buildings than an inhabited place, with several craters created or from large battles or frequent meteorites. When the ship docks, the landing pod blocks my supports and I find myself very frustrated at the idea of ​​not being able to just get the fuck out. The jedis and the non-Force-users get off board looking at a pyramid liek tomb, stil lwondering what we are doing there since miss onehanded -shotgun-loading-sound Madea has not told us anything about the job yet. Looking around the landing pod we see the door of a pyramidal tomb that is closed by two statues with hands and arms joined. The scavengers notice also some computers with soem data running on the screens and the hacker + twi'lek are observing with great interests the tech there: it's an automatic station for archaeological finds' analysis. J downloads a bit of the just finished analysis on the device and Yewzili pockets some various paddles. I'm like "kid don't do it" and she "it's to repay you: 3" "if you want to repay me by sicking 45 angry Siths because I stole their precious antique night vases, i'll gladly skip that" "they will never notice." While the three smuggler-type pirate things, the jedis use the Force to open the doors, after Madea said, very caustic, that their employer is literally just locked inside (janos: "AH he called us because he got stuck a tomb, this is AMAZING"). The jedi open the door of 50cm and let pass the two Night sisters in front of line, then they go in and finally the mere blaster-holders go at the rear. As soon as we get all inside, Iad-aan uses the Force again to perceive dangerous creatures and finds two or three BIG clustersof negative energy plus a more powerful one of inestimable suffering in the depths of the tomb. We assume that's out quarry. Trying to avoid the clusters of life forms perceived by the mathematical jedi, we start our descent. At the first junction we are attacked by a Kath who is severely mistreated by the force-users (Medea jumps behind him using the wall as a lever hitting his back, ian-aad splats it on the ceiling, Zili electifies it with the vibrosword and finally Medea eviscerates it while iad -aan overkills it with a Force-beheading. Janos kinda just puts away the blaster shrughing). A little further on we find another forkin the road, with both ends going downhill, and an obelisk at the center of a small opening in the cave. The jedi interact with it- in whisper - while Janos  -"feeling lucky" in whisper - gets a very bad feeling from the way on the right. Iad-aan says that the obelisk has "spoken to him" and that we must continue in the way right but "without touching the dead" - something along these lines. There is a brief pseudo-philosophical discussion between iad and medea where medea does not seem particularly inclined to speak, while janos and zili are having an heated covnersation about some potential good stored in Janos' ship that zili may or may not have"resold" or used (spoielr: it was spice. (context: spice in sw its drug basically)). In the fustration, Janos does not realize that he is walking right in the direction of the bad feeling. We arrive in a room full of stacks of skeletons and Iad-Aan assumes these are the dead not to be touched, so with nonchalance levitates wit hthe Force across the room (he's usign a lot of Force powers, he should be more careful). Madea comments caustically that "some" people REALLY like to show "how many things they can do"; the Night Sisters make show of their great agility and the others (Milisendis Zili, and J) simply walk - janos needs a few seconds before deciding to cross the room .  The "bad feeling" really gets to him- [J's player is prone to be very sleepy so he left as well at this poing] Just as we are getting out the blasted room, 6 huge and disgusting humanoids, Rakghouls, jump on us and we start a fight. Janos  -last in the line so first to be attacked- slips his entire arm into the mouth of one of these monsters as it growls and he like unloads his blaster charge in the skull of the disgusting thing, causing it to burst from within. The creature falls to the ground coem a fish without bones, ("Ah ... he bit me ç_c ...") biting janos' arm on the way down; Iad-aan unleashes his levitate to lift himself up into the cavernous room and not get caught by two of them; medea uses, according to old tactics already tried, Winter as jumping pad and twirling in the air with feline grace and shoots in the head to another of the creatures with the blaster incorporated in her mechanical arm; zili jumps back while the attack of the jedi padawan Milisendis doesn't go as good as she would have wanted. In the second round with a bit of Force pushes and blaster shots an classical Force-beheadings, we take the rest out. Medea snaps a bit of acid words to Zili ("Cowardice will not keep you alive") and we contine along the path down (zili is quite offended: "it actually works pretty good to me"). Around the corner we hear heavy steps and Mili, Yewzilin and Janos peek the corridor while Iad-Aan perceives it with Force: it is a fairly large creature known to feed on the Force + force users altogether. Janos comments that "hey, at least three of us are safe!" readily correct that they are nonetheless creatures carinvore and the Force flows in all of us. yadda yadda jedi shit. Janos promptly takes zili for an arm and literally sprints silently across the corridor to where the creature is eating some corpse or carcass. Zili does not make a sound but Janos almost slips and schatters a bone by mistake. Luckly the creature does not seem to care too much. ("DAMN IT YOU OLD MAN" Zili whispers angrly. "Ehy watch your mouth kid, the thing didn' saw us anway!!") Janos was "arguing" with Zili to use the Jawa as a distraction while Milsendis and Medea convinced Iad-aan that usinf the Force -again- to move soem rock in a far away corridoir would have not distracted the creature because it would have felt the source of the Force-usage. Some more or less sucessful sneaking made us avoid the creature complitely. We find now in front of a dor not much different from the one we met earlier and Medea with Winter brute-forcibly try to push it open (Medea: "will you others help us or not?". Janos and zili, together:"no no i think i'l lstay here watchign you two." zili:"I could watch them all day * eyes emoji *") while the jedi reuse the Push to Force it open. The initially percieved source of pain becomes it stronger once we enter the next room. [And hereby we ended the oneshot]

[the-fandom-assembles]

The great epic has begun. They say history is recorded by the victors. Well history, then, has yet to be written. Heroes have fallen and the world is a ruin of chaos and self-destruction. The time of the apocalypse has come. Who, then, will stand and face the Devil?

Thanos left an indelible mark. What was undone was far from erased and the world is the poorer for the losses he brought to bear. But he is not the only being of power looking to claim Earth as its throne. The enemy from the heavens was defeated. But it is the enemy from the darkest and deepest places who may prove to be the final death knell for the universe.

And yet... hope comes...

Like the ringing strike of a hammer against iron...

Chapter 1

It was a pretty great view. He'd been meaning to check it out; sometime. Those weeks spent in his (new) room; dishes of food going cold at his elbow while he'd sat at his computer and clicked through five years of history that he hadn't lived. Most of the news stories had been about the failing economy; the declaration of martial law around the country, the breakdown of infrastructure. His current roosting spot was exactly the same as it had been the day he'd... dusted. Skyline Tower had been scheduled for completion in 2020. Three years later and, like so many other construction projects, it was an abandoned property with naked I-beams stabbing towards the clouds. It would probably never be finished. Not the way things were, now.

It was bad. So bad. So, so, so bad!

Panic had been clawing at Peter for the better part of three days, now. He hadn't spoken to MJ, or Ned. He was being a coward, he knew, but he'd screwed everything up so much and didn't want them stuck in his mess worse than they already were.

Nothing had been right since Titan.

He hadn't gone back to the apartment. The new apartment.

May was worried but he'd assured her he was fine. Everything was okay; he just needed... he had to think. And he wasn't doing her any favors staying at the apartment, the new apartment, with reporters crawling everywhere. He had begged her to stay with Happy (and he didn't want to analyze that too closely). The media may know who he was but he bet they didn't know about Happy or where to find him. May would be safe. Peter...well, he knew how to hide.

What would Tony...?

No. Nope. He couldn't think about that. He couldn't; no, not no, not now!

Peter crushed the heels of his palms against his eyes until bright colors flared. He gulped and gulped and rocked against his perch until the heat started to leech away from his cheeks once more. He sniffed and lifted his head; noting how the lights below had a halo from his compromised vision. He scrubbed the wet from his lashes and blinked until everything cleared.

Leaning back against a thick beam he let his attention drift – picking out the far off shape of one, particular, building; unique among its neighbors. From this distance he could almost pretend...

A somewhat closer sound pulled his eyes back to his immediate surroundings. Raised voices – then a sharp report from a gun. Peter snatched his mask from the place where he'd tossed it. Dragging the dark fabric over his eyes, he squinted down towards the direction of the shouts. He missed the greeting that used to come with the motion. He hadn't activated Karen since that day... he just couldn't...

Silently dropping down the side of the building, avoiding the use of his webs, Peter dropped to the pavement and crouched – keeping to the shadows. The gunshot had chased off most of the group involved in the fight. There were still three people left behind, however. One of them was on the ground holding his leg. There was another guy beside him on a phone; probably calling for help. The third person looked like a bystander. She was also on her phone. Basically it looked like they had things covered. Sighing, Peter jumped and caught the wall with his fingers; slipping out of sight and feeling the last of his concern leave him at the sound of an ambulance approaching.

He worked his way back through Queens; only using his webs twice when he didn't have any other options. Nobody saw him. He'd promised May he'd stay with her at Happy's apartment for the rest of the week. It just... it felt weird. He was still trying to wrap his head around it. Well... not just that.

His destination was just across the street. Late enough that the building he braced his shoulders against was dark, he gave the sidewalk a quick back and forth before darting towards the back of the shop. Closed for the night but he had an in with the owner. A double rap on the back door and he waited; still keeping eyes and ears open. But the only sounds were from the traffic. The door opened, and Mr. Delmar gave him a look. That same look.

“How you holding up, kid? You look too skinny these days.”

Peter shrugged, accepting the fragrant bag held out to him. “I'm okay. Thanks for the sandwich. Here, I...” He dug into one of the pockets lining the suit but Mr. Delmar shook his head – hand flat towards him.

“Hey; on the house, right? I told you before, kid, your money's no good here. Just... take care of yourself, alright?”

Peter swallowed but pushed the bills back into his pocket; nodding. “I will. I promise.” He knelt to scratch Murph on the head as the fluffy cat coiled around his owner's legs. “You look after this old guy, okay?” A purring mew in response and Peter gave a final pat before straightening. “Thanks... for the sandwich and... everything...”

The older man nodded. “Anytime you need anything, kid...”

Peter pushed a smile across his lips. “I will. Thanks.” He didn't look back as he slunk away.

He didn't open the bag until he was back on his chosen perch; watching the last of the evening turn purple on the horizon as he dug out the first of two sandwiches and a can of strawberry soda. He wolfed down the food – noting, only then, the burn that hunger had left behind. Stuffing the trash back into the bag, he crushed it into a ball before dragging his heels to the open cavity that was meant to one day hold an elevator. A dead dream with a hole left behind.

Leaning forward, he hooked fingers on the straps of his backpack – spraying the webbing with release fluid and slinging the bag across his shoulders.

The trip to Happy's place took around twenty minutes by web. Employing somewhat more conservative travel, Peter reached the rooftop in about an hour. He changed clothes before creeping his way down to the window outside of the spare room. It was unlocked. It was always unlocked. He spread one hand over the pane and slid it up easily. Out of habit he crawled along the ceiling; lowering himself without a sound and listening at the crack of the door. The television was on but there was no talking. It smelled like pasta and his stomach rumbled; as though he hadn't eaten two #5's a little over an hour ago. His phone vibrated. Crossing back to close the window, he checked the screen. So MJ and Ned had been texting him all evening. The last appeared to be a joint effort including a close up pic of their lips making an exaggerated frown. He laughed; he couldn't help it, and sent off a long-ish reply and a gif of a dancing pickle.

“Peter?”

He turned as May rapped on the door frame. She looked... really beautiful. Tired and worried but...

“Hey.” He dropped his phone to the polished end table alongside the bed (no scratches, no ink stains, no wall mounted lamp with the chipped metal shade). “Sorry I... I was...” He fiddled with the hem of his tee. He didn't know how to finish that so he just shrugged.

May approached until her arms could go around him. She didn't say anything; just hugged him and he closed his eyes and breathed in her hair. He didn't know the shampoo she'd used – it wasn't like the kind she usually bought. He finally breathed out and stepped back. “You guys cook?”

May brushed two fingers through his bangs. “Happy made chicken primavera. You hungry? I saved you some in case...”

Peter nodded and followed his aunt from the room. The television was turned down but he pretended that it wasn't because Happy was listening from the other room. The kitchen was still a bizarre space, to him. Open and with lots of counter space and shiny appliances and various pieces of equipment he wasn't totally certain what they did. He hadn't even known Happy liked to cook until the first time May and he had been invited over for dinner. Happy had made grilled salmon.

The leftover pasta was in a pyrex container that Peter could heat in the microwave. He grabbed one of the fancy bottles of sparkling cider from the fridge – trying to beat down the uneasiness of eating someone else's food no matter how often Happy had told him he could have whatever he wanted.

He ate while leaning against the counter and cleaned up afterwards; putting his used dishes in the washer. He took his cider with him to the large living room where May and Happy were sitting on the couch and watching some sorta old musical or something. Peter shifted his feet and had the urgent rush to scurry back to his borrowed bedroom. Happy smiled at him and pointed towards the nearby overstuffed chair. “Wanna join? Your aunt picked this out. She swears it's good.”

May patted Happy on the knee. "It is good when you actually pay attention.”

Snorting, Happy slouched down. “I would if they'd stop singing...”

Dropping into the chair, Peter tried not to sink too far into the comfortable softness. “Isn't that the whole point of a musical?”

Happy pointed at him though Peter wasn't entirely certain what the gesture was supposed to mean. He just smiled in response and earned a smirk back. Belly, for once, a bit over full, Peter set his mostly finished bottle of cider on a magazine (Happy wasn't a big coaster guy) and finally let himself go limp in the way too comfortable chair.

It was some black time, later, when May was rubbing her fingers against his scalp.

“Hey, sweetie... how about you head to bed, okay?” Peter snuffled – wincing as he wrestled to unwind himself from the awkward slump draped over the arm of the chair. It had been a hard lesson, learning that super healing didn't mean he couldn't get a kink in his neck from sleeping like a pretzel.

It was a weaving wander back to the spare room. He rubbed at his eyes and yawned hard enough to crack the tendons in his jaw. “Ow.”

May's hand was a warm span against his back as he slid his feet through the door and towards the queen sized bed. Part of him sorta hated that it was so much more comfortable than the twin back at the old... at the other apartment. But most of him was just glad to flop onto the thick mattress and spread out.

May started to leave but Peter's fingers had caught at her hem. He felt a little silly and small but...

He didn't say anything as she sat back down. He watched her as her fingers found his scalp and rubbed at the small hairs near his temple.

“I've missed you. I know you want to handle this your own way but... you know, there are people who can help you. And we can take care of ourselves, too, you know? But what you're doing; staying away night after night...”

Peter turned his head; eyes landing on the framed poster of the New York skyline taking up much of the far wall. May didn't chastise him further; though he was pretty sure he'd earned more. His fingers dug and pulled at the edge of the comforter that she'd pulled over his shoulders. Heat and cold rushed across his scalp in a familiar tension and he squeezed his eyes; battling the tight clench that worked through his throat and into his belly. He knew hope was lost when his breaths stuttered and his eyes got hot behind his lids.

May didn't ask him what was wrong; not when he turned towards his pillow in a hopeless attempt to stop up the sounds he couldn't prevent. She just brushed at his hair and stayed by his side.

And eventually... eventually... he fell asleep.

҉

May's hand continued to move – her fingers gliding through curls that were desperately in need of a trim. She sat there, every day. Same spot; often enough that she was surprised the mattress hadn't shaped itself to fit her frame.

The figure that stood alongside her was silent; also watching the boy.

“He always hated his curls; at least when he was younger. The first time he ever let his hair grow out was when he was eleven. Glory Grant had moved into the apartment across from ours. Glory Grant was sixteen, wore silk flowers in her braids, and loved curly hair. Of course he was smitten.” She grinned; her fingers coming to rest on Peter's scalp. “Now, of course, he likes to slick it back with product. One guess as to where he got that idea.”

Her companion finally crouched as well; sitting on the opposite side of the bed and letting his hand rest on Peter's shoulder. “What can I say? Kid's got good taste.” Tony couldn't manage a smile, though, his face appearing sallow in the blue lights of the monitor.

May pulled her glasses from her nose and let them dangle from two fingers while the heel of her hand pushed against her left eye. Another headache. Been having them, on and off, ever since she'd come back; standing over a cold stove with a moldy pan of pasta before her. It was only later that she'd thanked every entity in the book that she'd turned the oven off prior to the Snap. She'd heard some stories...

“Will you be here? Tomorrow?” If... always if... The un-worded hope. That maybe it would help. Maybe it would make a difference... if...

“Yeah. Wouldn't miss it.” Tony squeezed the small shoulder under his fingers. And then he stood; tipping his chin towards May. “You coming over, Saturday? Happy's cooking. Some sorta large... meat... thing.”

May smiled and shrugged. “Can I let you know? After tomorrow?” If...

Tony nodded. “Yeah, you bet. Just so you know, you're taking home half of the leftovers, either way.”

He stopped, on his way back out – one hand coming down in a gentle touch on her shoulder. “Hey... we'll get this figured out.”

May looked up – into darkened brown eyes – red-rimmed and showing every hour, every day, that he hadn't slept in the past three months. She knew, far too well, what that felt like. And whatever the whispers tried to say, in the back of her mind, she smiled at him. This room was only for hope. “I know.” Her attention turned back to Peter – fingers tracing along his hairline – rubbing at his temples where the fine hairs curled against his scalp. “Come home, Peter.”

She didn't watch Tony leave. She would stay there, with Peter, as she had every night in the three months since they'd woken back to life, only to find her nephew hadn't quite made it back. He'd been in that room ever since.

“Come home, baby. We're all waiting for you.”

[copperbadge]

Hi Sam! I'm curious about your magical time management skills: you have a full-time job, are super active in fandom, answer countless asks, write fanfiction and books, and still have time for jogging and many other stuffs. How do you organize yourself? I feel super overwhelmed due to lack of time and end up not doing what I want do. Do you allot time to do stuff? How does your typical day looks like? And any useful tips for us slackers.

I dunno how helpful it’ll be – I mean, some of it is time management, and some of it is that I have spent a long time working on arranging my life so that I have as much free time to pursue my own interests as possible. This hasn’t consciously meant giving up things like close brickspace friends and romantic relationships but in some ways it has kind of worked out that way. (Not that I couldn’t have those things if I chose to work towards them, in other words, but they don’t come naturally to me and I don’t mind the lack.) 

So, I will give you a rundown of my average day, but before we begin, I will also give you some context! And this will be long so I’ll put it under a readmore. 

I have at present no romantic partner, no children, no pets. This sounds sad, but I’m not complaining; I could work towards those things and choose not to, for a variety of reasons, some good, some not. I would like to have a partner, but honestly at this point in my life it’s as much because it’s cheaper to cohabitate; I am very independent and not, I suspect, built for the kind of daily intimacy that romantic cohabitation requires. 

If I were to get a pet it would probably not be a dog, since when I was dogsitting for R I had real trouble with the concept of properly caring for a creature whose life was so scheduled, who required specific attentions at specific times – I have owned dogs before and love them deeply, but never in an apartment or as a solitary person. I would probably get a cat or an axolotl (axolotls: like being alone, require very specific but easy-to-procure stimulus, look like tiny water dragons, sound like fantasy aliens). 

I have very few close brickspace friends, not by design but just because I’m kind of a private homebody, and my extensive network of online friendships is satisfying in that regard. But online friendships, while not LESS of a time commitment, are a different kind of commitment – you can multitask while hanging out with online friends, you don’t have travel times, if they’re running late you’re not stuck waiting and vice versa. 

I also am not in school, which is much more life-consuming than many jobs. School is a way of life; work can be, but doesn’t have to be. And I am very fortunate (in the literal sense of “it is luck that brought me here”) to have a job where I spend the vast majority of my time a) on a computer and b) in self-directed, non-public-facing work. For most of my day, every day, I guide my own workflow, I choose what to work on and when. Of course I have deadlines, but within the strictures of those deadlines I am free to triage my time as appropriate, and because I’m on a computer with unrestricted internet access, I can take ten minutes to log onto tumblr, read some things, respond to some things, and then go back to my work. 

So I am starting from an advantageous position: few personal commitments, unstructured time throughout the day, and a job where when I leave for the day, work stays at work. 

So here’s what a normal day is like for me. Bear in mind this is for comparison purposes rather than because I think it’s particularly ideal.

I wake up around 4am; if I haven’t slept well or feel like I need it, I may go back to sleep for about an hour. Normally when I get up I either work out from 4-5 (weights, running) or I sit on the couch with my laptop and check out what’s been going on while I was asleep. We’ll circle back to this, but I go to bed quite early, so at this point I have generally had at least seven hours of sleep. Also, I am a morning person, so I go straight from zero to lucid, which is nice. 

I answer email, check tumblr, check my RSS feeds (podcasts, news, fanfic, a couple of NSFW blogs that I can’t have on my tumblr feed because I read it at work). I look at my calendar so that I know what’s on offer for the day – my calendar doesn’t cover work stuff, but primarily anything I want to or need to do after work. My family has a mutual Google Calendar that we all use to schedule stuff the others should see, like whenever I take a vacation, and my parents also use it as their central calendar, so I can see what they’ll be up to on any given day. I’ve been thinking of switching over to a private Google Calendar, but out of habit for years I’ve used a custom-built spreadsheet, now in Google Sheets, that looks like a calendar: 

That’s July. This kind of layout works well for me because it’s easy to go in and change things, and I get a good “high level” view of the month. As you can see I’m traveling quite a bit; I’m tracking new TV shows, peoples’ birthdays, events I may attend (I will probably not be at everything happening in evenings on the week of the 10th), baseball games I have tickets for, and possible plans for camping. Google Calendar would work as well and would have some significant advantages, I just haven’t got off my ass to switch over. 

Around five, I usually get up and fix breakfast; often I’ll put on something to listen to while I cook and/or eat. If I’ve been working out, all the stuff I did – checking email, tumblr, etc – is pushed forward, and I do a bit less of it. But essentially from 4-6 I’m working out, eating breakfast, and getting a start on the personal-life aspect of my day. In terms of social media, this is the time I’m most likely to like something or save it to drafts to deal with later; I don’t spend brainpower on responding this early in the morning, usually. 

I have some fairly…prescriptive routines for the rest of the day, and that works for me, I like structure. Other people may find this sort of thing doesn’t work for them, and that’s okay. This is, again, for comparison purposes, not to dictate how your life should be. 

At six o’clock my alarm goes off, warning me that I have nine minutes before I need to stop what I’m doing and start getting ready for work. This is by design, so that I have a buffer zone in which to shift my mental attitudes from morning routine to something more focused. I hit snooze on the alarm and then at 6:09 I turn the alarm off and get in the shower. I shower, brush my teeth, and get dressed in clothes I laid out over a rail the night before (I have an electric heated towel rail, one of the best random-ass things my mother ever gave me, and in winter I turn the heat on so I come out of the shower and into warm undies; in summer it’s just a convenient place to hang clothes). I dress, grab my bag, take my keys off the doorknob and put them in a pocket of the bag, and I’m out the door around 6:25. I catch the 6:40 express bus to work. I usually read on my tablet on the bus (currently reading The Last Runaway by Tracy Chevalier after remembering how much I loved her prose in Girl With A Pearl Earring) and I get to work around 7. 

At work I have routines too: I set down my bag, hang up my jacket, and before I do anything else I get my 32oz mug and go to the kitchen to get ice water to sip on throughout the morning. I come back to my desk, turn on my monitors, and log into my computer. 

I check my work email first, to make sure nothing is on fire from yesterday, since I leave work quite a bit earlier than most of my colleagues. If nothing is urgent I delete anything irrelevant to me, respond to anything that needs immediate response, and move on to a quick glance at email and tumblr, then I open my “daily bookmarks” folder. My daily bookmarks folder is mostly stuff that either I can’t or don’t want to put in my RSS reader: a couple of messageboards, a few real estate sites I’m watching for my dream home to show up, a couple of tumblr tags (I don’t follow tags on tumblr because I don’t like seeing shit recur constantly on my dash), and some activism facebook pages because I despise facebook but it’s the only site some of these organizations use. If it’s Monday, I also open my Monday bookmark folder, which is a combination of sites that rarely update and “event” sites (the cinema I’m a member of so I can see what new movies are coming, the calendar of a local band I like, the events page of various cultural centers). I review these quickly, closing most tabs and setting aside anything I need to look at more indepth like an event I’d like to attend. Usually basically I fuck around on the internet until about 8, unless work has something urgent for me. 

The one scheduled task I have daily at work is news clipping, where I read several news sites and save off articles of interest to our staff, which need to be turned in by mid-morning. Realistically this could take 15 minutes of focused work, but I like to read the news, too, so from eight to eight forty-five or nine, I’m usually reading a very specifically aimed sort of news, saving off articles, and archiving them appropriately. 

After that, the day is, in many ways, mine to do with as I please.

I organize my life by using Google Tasks, which is a little pop-up to-do list in gmail. I have a to-do list for every day, and anything that doesn’t get done one day gets moved to another day, depending on how urgent it is. So at nine or so, I open Google Tasks and start moving each task around based on how urgent it is or how quickly I can do it. Urgent work and fast tasks go at the top; less urgent work, stuff I’m less enthused about, and stuff I can’t do at my desk (buying a card for Father’s Day, picking up groceries after work, etc) goes at the bottom. Some tasks are recurring – every Monday, for example, Radio Free Monday is at the top of the list because it’s time-sensitive. 

You can see RFM there at the top; I have to email some information about a 5K to a friend, but I need to get his email from another friend first; I have some registration and hotel issues to attend to for an upcoming conference; I have to write up some evaluations, and do some reading for a presentation I’m giving. I should stop by my PO Box after work. Other stuff will no doubt be added when I check my work email (documents to be prepared, research requests) but this is where I start the day. You can also see I have stuff with pushed out deadlines – Credit Cards is a monthly reconciliation for my corporate card, which I will do ON the 26th rather than BEFORE it, and quarterly I check my 401K, so I won’t need to do that until August 7th.

“PRESENTATION: Reading” will probably get pushed to another day, because by the time I get down that far on the list, I won’t have a ton of brainpower left to do a lot of reading and analysis. It’s ok, my presentation’s not due until the 30th.

And then I just work through my to-do list. Some days I’m really good at getting it done. Some (rare) days I spend most of my time reading tumblr and fucking around because I’m not having a good focus day. But again: this is a job in which I have the luxury to do that, and I’m very lucky. 

Rather than take a traditional lunch, I usually eat two small meals, at 11am and 2pm. Usually I bring most of my lunch for the week on Monday and just reheat tupperwares as I go, augmenting them with cheese and crackers; sometimes I’ll throw in a protein bar from a stash I keep in a little box on my desk. Most of my lunches are cooked on the weekends, when my time is a lot less structured. You’ve probably seen my COOKING DAY posts; sometimes I just set aside a day to cook and rest.

I’m gonna tackle fandom and social media here because truthfully my job has enough spare time built into it that this is when I do the majority of my fannish activity, at work, in small chunks. And yes I am very active in fandom but occasionally in very limited ways.

I don’t read a ton of fannish blogs. I have a limit on my tumblr of following 99 people, and I choose those people very carefully. Some are friends, but those who aren’t personally known to me are people who post both low-volume and things that are of interest to me. I do not follow people who flood dashes not because I disapprove but because I don’t have time to wade through ten million gifsets of things that I’m not concerned with. I also follow a few artist or writers, but again, only if they’re of relevance to me. I follow Skottie Young because I really like his art and think he’s a cool dude, and most of what he posts is his art. I don’t follow Matt Fraction because while I think he is also a cool dude and I enjoy his writing, his tumblr wasn’t generally speaking about his writing or him, it was aesthetic stuff I didn’t care for and it was A LOT OF IT. 

I don’t read a ton of fanfic. I have a couple of tags fed to my RSS reader and I subscribe to a couple of fics and fic writers, but even then I skim for interesting summaries and tag combinations I don’t find offputting. I don’t read fanfic at work, full stop; when I find one I want to read, I set it aside for a time when I’m at home and feel like reading fanfic.

Throughout the day I will check in on tumblr, in a very systematic manner: I read my dash, only the posts, and like or queue anything I want to reblog or examine later. I read my inbox and try to respond, but some asks don’t get answers for a really long time, because they require more focus or time or whatnot. I read my Activity page and open any reblogs with commentary; I set comments aside to be responded to en mass. I check my likes and try to clean out anything I’ve liked that could go in drafts or queue; I check my drafts and try to move just one draft into my queue (I constantly have a draft backlog). This all takes about ten minutes, then I go back to work.

I get AO3 comment notifications throughout the week, but generally I set aside a block of time either on Friday (if work is slow) or on Sunday to “clear out” my comments; every week I go through my comments, re-read each one, and either delete it or respond to it and then delete it. I don’t reply to a vast majority of them simply because I don’t have the time to respond to each one (I have tried, it was very stressful) and also because most of them don’t really a require a response. For everyone’s patience in this, I thank you.

So work is a long series of multitasking, breaks, deadline work, procrastination. It’s about average, I’d say, with anyone else in my situation. If I’m doing something after work, I check to make sure I know how to get there and what’s going on; if I don’t have all the info I need, I prepare a “brief” that has maps and directions and anything else I need, print that out, and toss it in my messenger bag. And then around 3:45 I pack up my bag, make sure I have my phone, and I head out to either (usually) catch the 4pm express bus home, or catch transit of my choice to whatever I’m doing after work. 

If I don’t have something I’m doing after work, I come home, take my keys out of the bag pocket, hang them up on the doorknob once I’m inside, and set my bag down. I’m very specific about my keys here, as I was up above, as a way of demonstrating that I live a very habitual life. Stuff like keys, phone, wallet always has a specific place it goes, and it stays there if I’m not using it. I used to lose shit a lot, and rigidly adhering to “if this is not in your hand, it should be in X pocket” is what saves me. 

I change into more comfortable clothes, usually yoga pants and a t-shirt. I make something for dinner and eat it, I unpack anything that needs to come out of my bag and pack anything that needs to go into it, and then usually these days I fuck around on the ukulele for a while. I don’t set a time limit on it, so sometimes I do it for half an hour, sometimes for ninety minutes. It’s a way of unwinding and finding stress relief, so it’s entirely voluntary and anything I do during this time is being done because I want to do it. I think it’s the only thing in my life where there are no external pressures anywhere and I have set no goals for myself. 

I don’t think external pressures and goals are inherently bad. The goals I set for myself in my other hobbies, like writing and running, being in fandom, going to movies and such, are good goals and they help me do well. External pressure is something that exists in every human interaction; that’s just the nature of being a person in society, and likewise isn’t a terrible thing. And not everyone needs a release from those things, or finds that release in the same way. I like a lot of my life; I wouldn’t do things if I didn’t like them. But I have found that it helps to have one thing which only belongs to you and which has no goals or benchmarks. For me that’s currently the ukulele. 

In the later evening – and let’s be clear, I get home at like 4:30 so “later” to me is 6ish – I’ll hop back on tumblr, maybe do a little writing, or attend or host a stream. I’ll chatter with people, respond to emails and posts, read things I had set aside for reading earlier in the day; it’s probably my most socially active time.

When I was in my twenties I did perfectly fine on five hours of sleep a night, but as I got older that stopped being comfortable, and also I started realizing that after a certain point in the day, I not only wasn’t doing anything useful or interesting, I wasn’t having a good time. I was being awake for the sake of not going to bed. So I adjusted my life to going to bed at nine, and when I started getting up earlier to run, I adjusted again. In order to do that, I created an evening routine, because going to bed is easier if you start out by doing other shit BEFORE going to bed. 

Now, generally, I log off between 7 and 7:30. Sometimes I go to bed that early, but that’s when I close down social interaction. Not necessarily turning off the computer, but just gently shutting down on being “around” other people. I log off chats, I stop responding to emails and tumblr posts. I set them aside for the morning. I might continue to read my dash or listen to podcasts or whatnot until eight or so. 

I change into pyjamas, wash my face, brush my teeth, lay out my clothes for tomorrow, and get into bed, usually with my tablet to do a little reading. It’s a very rare evening I go to bed any time past 8:30.  And that’s my day.

I have actually some reasoning about why I go to bed so early, but I think it’s the most important part of a post that is REALLY LONG and otherwise devoted to the boring details of my day, so I’m going to make it a separate post. 

I hope this has helped, Anon! As you can see, what helps me organize and sort out all my time commitments is schedules, lists, and an adherence to several fairly rigid habits – this may not work for you, and I don’t recommend it for everyone. But for me, it’s really the only way I can stay on top of everything, especially in cases where I’m dealing with some particularly intense depression. I’m happy to answer questions, though if people have commentary about the post they should remember to reblog or comment, since I don’t repost asks sent to me about other asks. 

[movieiwatchedtonight]

Monthly Movie Recap: March 2017

Monthly Movie Recap: March 2017 

March was slow for movies for me, I had was out of town for two weeks and was super busy at school so I didn't get to the theater as much as I would have liked. This month I was able to see Logan, Beauty and the Beast, and Power Rangers. I saw Power Rangers twice but the other two I only saw once. 

 Did anyone else feel like March was the month of nostalgia movies? Especially with Beauty and the Beast and Power Rangers. To some extent you could argue for Logan as well. 

Ranked favorite to least; I would go with Logan first, Power Rangers second, and Beauty and the Beast third. 

Logan: It did not come to a shock for me that that Logan was my favorite movie this month. 

(This is a copy of my post from right after I saw it, and since I haven't seen it again, I can't add anything new until I see it again)

I had been anticipating this movie since I first saw the trailer. I had recently really invested myself in the Marvel universe and was very excited for this movie. I saw it opening night (technically the Thursday before since my local theater allows Thursday night showings) with my dad and my brother. They liked it as well. I was interested in the R rating.I thought that it was a good amount of like blood and gore, but I also don’t get shifty around that kind of stuff in movies. I just recently started to get into the whole marvel and XMen world but honestly this movie was so good and I didn’t necessarily feel like I had to watch anything else to understand what was happening. Having the basic understanding of who Logan and Charles are would probably be helpful though. I loved the tone of the trailers, how I got kind of a western vibe from it and I thought it carried over into the movie too which I was really impressed by because lately I feel like trailers are not matching up to their movies. Also you know how in some movies, all the fight scenes are shown in the trailers and nothing is really a surprise? Yeah, not here. I felt like I got so much more from it. Yes it was an action movie but I also didn’t really feel like it was because it had a pretty solid story that I wanted to follow as well, not just watch the fight scenes. It was also a two and a half hour (about) movie but it did not feel like it at all, I think because it help my interest the whole time, it made the movie seem shorter because I was so engrossed in it. There was always something going on but it never felt like overwhelming or too busy or rushed. Timing was great. I’m so happy it was rated r because I feel like if it was pg-13 than it would have lost a lot of important moments. Plus there wouldn’t be as much use of the f word. Which by the way I did not feel was overused or used inappropriately, it always felt like it was well placed, whether in frustration, rage, or comedic. Dafne was absolutely amazing was Laura. She’s what, eleven years old? She was just so good and caused me to die like a dozen times. She’s eleven and did such a good job with how violent and gory this movie is. Laura was ruthless at times, if she got upset that was it and she was going full force, decapitating people, ripping them up and all. I was so intrigued by her because I never knew what she was going to do next, and if I thought I did, I was wrong and she did something completely different. When she first spoke, I don’t know why but I just assumed she would speak English, but when she spoke I was so impressed because that’s how it should be and I don’t know why I thought any differently. I love how yes she was ruthless and violent but you also saw that she was still a little girl. Playing with the buttons on the elevator, messing with the car window switch, riding the horse outside the gas station, and finally at the end when she calls him Daddy just broke me because she’s so young and even though she’s see so much, done so much, she’s still a little girl somewhere in there. Some of my favorite moments from her include when she decided to drive the car to get Logan to urgent care, her clinging to the picture of her and the other kids, when she called Logan daddy, her speech at his makeshift funeral, and I think the best moment of all: when she turned Logan’s cross into an X. An odd phrase that I can’t completely remember but something along the lines of that people can be considered weapons of mass destruction and that really stuck out for me. Emotions. Emotions. Emotions Just all over the place but that’s what makes it so good, the emotions are just so fitting. It was almost hard for me to see this is a superhero movie because it wasn’t. And it’s not just like “oh well yeah this is a good superhero movie” no like this is just a great movie, regardless of superhero context. Overall, I can’t say enough good things about this movie. I’m not-so-patiently waiting for the next time I have a chance to watch it. It was a road trip, literally and figuratively, in the way that it was about the journey. 

Watch Again?: I’m trying to see it again as soon as possible. Like trying to skip my gym class to see it 

Will I watch the sequel?: I don’t know if sequel is the right word to use here but the answer is still (and always will be) YES 

Power Rangers: I'm surprised at how much I enjoyed this movie. I knew that I would see this movie after seeing the trailer, I've been into the whole superhero/action movies lately and this seemed up that ally. But I did not expect to like it as much as I did. Now when I say that I know nothing about Power Rangers, I mean it. Not like when I say I don't know much about superheroes but I really kinda do, no like I really don't know anything about Power Rangers aside from the toys my brother played with as a kid. I went to see it with my mom, dad, and brother the first time; they do not share my opinion. I personally really liked it, some aspects felt childish but then I had to remind myself that I was literally watching a Power Rangers movie. I felt like the first two thirds of the movie was great, beyond my expectations, but fell in the third act. Here were some thoughts I wrote down while watching the movie the second time: 

 Did I walk into the remake of The Breakfast Club? 

soundtrack was excellent; especially the song they ended on. Not the song in the credits but right before that 

besides HandClap in the training scene, that could have been better  

Kimberly cutting her hair in the bathroom was a little too on the dot 

No one is as mean and blunt as those girls who literally cut Kimberly out of the picture 

Jason Scott looks like a mix between a young Zac Effron and Chris Pine 

Billy directly says he's on the spectrum so there o tip-toeing around it 

I love Jason and Billy's friendship 

When Jason reminds Billy to keep breathing

"I got you buddy," 

Kimberley made a horrible mistake, horrible choice, but someone reminds her that it doesn't make her a horrible person and I love that  

Bill Hader for Alpha 5 was such a good choice. He was funny and cute. Reminds me of BB8 in a way 

“Different color coins. Different Kids, different color kids!” 

The scene of Billy in the water when the first find Zordon's ship, that was beautiful  

The way Zordon was able to move around to talk to the different Rangers was pretty neat 

Trini isn't straight and it was just insinuated, it was addressed 

Jason's graphic tees are awesome and I want to know where I can get them 

My favorite is "Cash Only" 

I like how it's questioned if they'll still be friends when it's all over 

Rita's colors and costume remind me of Loki from the avengers but it still looked awesome 

"I'll show you mine if you show me yours" 

There's not really a romance and I love it 

I love them passing notes to each other, especially the lighting bolt at the end 

"We should start a band" 

How the hell do they know how to work the megazord right away? 

 There's no way they could even know how to work their own, let alone the mega where each person controls a different limb 

But making it dance at the end was pretty cool 

Does Jason have a little sister? There's a pink bike in his yard and a little girl holding his hand at the fishermen's funeral 

The way they carried Billy all the way back after he died, and the song was perfectly paired with it 

"No one dies alone" 

 Jason's sword (I guess that's what you would call it) is very Psylocke from XM:A but I'm still into it 

Is "Hold the line" a reference I don't understand because I don't get football? 

I can't tell if I love the use of the 90's power rangers song or hate it 

Not a single person woke up when Rita visited Trini? Nor did anyone question the holes in the wall? 

"Sorry Bumblebee!" 

The Krispy Kreme product placement was done well, I didn't feel slapped in the face with it 

Speaking of being slapped in the face, that's how they defeat Rita? 

Ok but like Angel Grove is still in ruins after all of that right? 

Tommy Oliver or Tomi Oliver? Either way I'm in  

Watch again?: Yes, probably not in theaters again but will for sure rent it and buy the DVD 

Will I watch the sequel?: Yes 

Beauty and the Beast: I honestly thought I would like this movie more than I did. I'm a huge Disney fan but honestly I just wasn't feeling this movie. It's been a long time since I've watched the original but I decided not re-watch the original going into this because I didn't want to just be comparing the two the whole time. The technical aspects were amazing and really well done. What I did love about this movie (I feel like I should start with the good stuff) was the music! It was excellent! My favorite was Be Our Guest, that is also my favorite from the original though. I loved the scene where she is teaching a little girl how to read and when she told Gaston that she didn't want to have dinner and it wasn't because she was busy, just didn't want to, that was awesome. The costumes, where Disney excelled with Cinderella, I thought was a little short here. I did really like the opening scene where everyone was in elaborate white outfits. I wasn't really a fan of the jacket type things Belle wore a few times. But I did like her 'blue dress'. Now the yellow dress. I just didn't like it, I didn't like the necklace choice but I did enjoy the hairstyling. I felt like I was looking at Emma Watson in a Belle inspired costume, not looking at Belle. The last dress, the while floral one, it was alright. I was indifferent about it, didn't love it but didn't hate it. I loved the castle though, I thought it was beautiful. Ugh I would love to have a library like that and those chandeliers were gorgeous!

I was actually frustrated with myself because everything technically about this movie was great, I just didn't really enjoy it. It was fine, good, but not outstanding for me. Maybe I had too high of expectations from how much I loved Cinderella. But it was like when you try on a shirt and it fits well, it's made well, good price, everything's technically great about it but you just don't like it. You don't know why, there's no real logical reason, you just don't like it. That's kind of what this movie felt like for me. 

Watch Again?: yes, I feel like I should

Will I watch the sequel?: I don't think think that's the right word, but I will always watch any Disney movie so yes 

Overall: March was a pretty solid month for movies. There's a couple that came out this month I wasn't able to see this month but will get to in April. Also tons of trailers started to be released towards the end of the month, which is getting me excited for the summer movie season. I wish I could have gone to the theater more this month, just didn't work out, but I am extremely happy with the movies I was able to see. 

Next month: I'm most looking forward to Gifted released in April. Will also probably see Smurfs: The Lost Village with my best friend because she loves kid movies and I take any excuse to go to the movies. Also I never got around to seeing Before I Fall this month because it left my local theater so quickly so hopefully next month I will.

[smoothshift]

At a dilemma - to keep or to sell via /r/cars

At a dilemma - to keep or to sell

So, I have a 2002 Lexus IS 300 with 145k miles, no car payment. My dad thinks it's a money pit since parts are more expensive, and I'd agree normally. I was looking into the Civic Coupe as a solid option to keep that same general body type and aesthetic, as well as a reliable option. The thing is though, I just got a new job where I work from home, the only time I drive to work is at my second job, less than 15 minutes away. I used to drive probably 150 miles a week for work alone, now I drive probably 30-50 total. It would make more sense in the long run to have a car payment with a new, more fuel efficent car during my old driving situation, as those repairs could go to a downpayment, but I'm starting to question whether having a car payment is truly better in my current situation. Here's my current car's general state:

*Bought the car at 115k miles, service package done at 100k by previous owner, including timing belt and water pump. Engine itself is solid.

Valve cover gaskets need to be changed, camshaft may also have a minor leak.

Power steering is making noise, fluid is dirty so going to change that. I've noticed it's especially noisy and first starting up and in cold weather, but once it warms up it stops, occasional rough idling /w steering wheel shaking. Likely needs new pump eventually, but doesn't seem urgent. Rack and pinion are fine.

*May be related to the above issue, only happened once, but after sitting for 3 or 4 days, I noticed a grinding noise while idling, drove for 5 miles, seemed normal until I got on the highway, then the engine rev sounded louder and the pitch sounded lower, I'd imagine some sort of valve was stuck open. When I parked and drove again, the issue was no longer apparent, nor has it been since.

Suspensions are good.

*Rear pads and rotors replaced 2 years ago, front ok.

Transmission showing some minor issues. Shifting from 1st to 2nd and 2nd to 3rd feels rough compared to other gears, confirmed it was 2nd in manual mode. Feel a very minor pop, and some brief hesitation in automatic mode. You have to be driving to notice either, but it is much more apparent in stop/go traffic, which I rarely deal with now that I work from home.

*I'm guessing this is due to coolant pressure buildup from previous stop leak usage (NOT my idea, for the record). Basically when my heater core first leaked, coolant was incessently building up on my cabin windows, to the point where it was coating the back passenger windows. Stop leak was used, it held up for a year and a half, and then it leaked again. Got my heater core replaced, then it got really cold, it began leaking through the vent again, but when the weather warmed up, it was fine again, then today, it sat for 2 days in the snow, I noticed the film forming on my windshield, but the weather warmed up to 50 degrees, and the coolant blowing stopped, even fading a little. So it only blows coolant when it's very cold.

* Let a P0141 go for a while, then after I replaced the sensor, I got a P0440, revealed to be the charcoal cannister. Got my tags upon replacement thank god, the P0440 came back, with a P0442 this time. The dealer took my back seat out when I had them look at it, said they smelled gas, but could not determine the source. I used to have a bad habbit of forcing extra gas in my car, so I probably ruined the cannister myself, and this is also probably related.

So, what do you guys think? With my new driving situation, should I keep it or sell it? Am I likely to get hit with thousands of dollars at once, or could this take years with my low mileage. If it lasts me another 3 or 4 years when I make more money, I really wanna fix it up good, and it's not gonna be easy to find these things 10 or 15 years from now, and I DEFINITELY want to get one again at some point in my life, and I'd be really pissed if it became worth money 10 years after I sold it. The hype and cult following are certainly there for that to happen.

[gaiatheorist]

Blind faith.

(I’m smirking at that play on words, but my left eye is already ‘going’, it remains to be seen, or not-seen whether I’ll be able to see anything at all on the left side soon enough. It’s annoying, but I can work around it by turning my head, and not moving around any more than I need to, having one eye ‘gone’ buggers your depth/spatial perception.)

The NHS is celebrating its 70th ‘birthday’. Inception date, I suppose, and I genuinely doubt there’s much celebrating happening. Someone has posted a link from a BBC Radio programme asking ‘Is the NHS a new religion?’ I was going to say I hadn’t read it, but it’s radio, I haven’t listened to it. My immediate thought? “Is it bollocks!”, I then tangent-bounced through various “Religion is bullshit!” opinions, before remembering that I do have a religion of sorts. THEN I remembered all of the people I wanted to punch after my brain haemorrhage, for telling me I was ‘lucky’ and ‘a miracle’, and ‘must have a guardian angel.’

Semantics, but words are my thing. I wasn’t ‘lucky’, I was a statistical anomaly, the type/grade of haemorrhage I’d had has a statistical mortality rate of between 80 and 90%. The 10-20% of us that ‘wake up’ don’t all immediately shout ‘Hallelujah!’, and claim that we have ‘seen the light’, because a lot of us can’t speak, or see. The dancing in the church aisles has to wait, too. I can mostly walk and talk now. Sometimes I walk into things, sometimes I fall over, and sometimes I assess the risk of walking, and decide to stay sitting down, to avoid significant injury to myself. I can talk in relatively short bursts, until my concentration starts to fog, and I start word-slipping, or babbling absolute jumble. I repeat myself A LOT, and I quite often think I’ve told people things when I’d actually just THOUGHT ‘remember to tell...’ I am in varying degrees of pain at all times, and have only just started accessing prescription analgesics, after three years of gritting my teeth and ‘getting on with it’ through the pain haze. Lucky? I’m alive.

I’m not ‘a miracle’, I’m a stubborn bastard. That obstinate streak could have killed me. When the aneurysm ruptured, when I felt the irregularity in one of the arteries in my brain burst, and was struck down by the most blinding, indescribable pain I have ever experienced, I played it down. I told the friend who was with me that I thought it was a migraine, and then tried not to vomit in my office bin, because I didn’t want to put a dampener on his weekend. I told the ex I needed to sleep, and, when I woke up, and vomited in my son’s bedroom, it wasn’t a ‘miracle’ that he woke the ex, it was his judgement that there was something seriously wrong with me. There was, the rupture was pumping blood into my skull, which is a closed unit as far as circulation goes, my brain was being crushed. It might have been a minor miracle that the ex got out of bed, but that’s just me being bitchy. It wasn’t ‘a miracle’ that the ambulance was eventually sent, or that the ambulance crew eventually agreed to take me to hospital, that was a clinical decision based on my presentation, they didn’t have scanner-eyes, they couldn’t see what was happening. My ‘Glasgow Coma Scale’ rating was around 7 on admission to hospital, I had very basic muscle-response, virtually no eye-response, and was non-verbal, and unresponsive to verbal commands. At that point, I was probably ‘dying’, there wasn’t much of me ‘in there.’ 

Another not-miracle was the clinical decision to send me to another hospital, rather than write-off the drooling, cross-eyed lump that I was at that point in time. The surgeries that saved me weren’t miraculous, they were examples of skill and judgement by the medical staff. (On a Saturday morning, I’ll add, for the type of politician who likes to infer that the NHS is a Monday-Friday 9-5 institution.) I don’t have a time-line for the surgeries, the first one was similar to something from a horror film, the second more of a futuristic science fiction thing. Intubated and anaesthetised, the surgeons shaved a chunk of my hair away, used a bone-saw to make a groove-incision in my skull, and a drill to make a small hole. That’s not the goriest bit. Then, they very carefully punctured the membrane that stops your brain chaffing against your skull ‘subarachnoid membrane’, I think, and it probably made a right old mess, with the blood, and cerebrospinal fluid that was causing the hydrocephalus. Membrane punctured, they laid some sort of plastic tubing from the large incision at the front of my skull to the small drill-hole at the back. (I’m sorry, I should have asked if you wanted a sick-bag.) Plastic tubing, along the surface of my brain, poking out of the hole in the back, and draining the STINKING accumulated fluids out of the water-bomb that had been my brain-sac, into a plastic bag on one of those IV-stand doofers. High-end trepanning, isn’t it? It wasn’t ‘a miracle’ that they didn’t slip with the drill, or the bone-saw, it was technological advances in imaging, that meant they knew how deep to go. It wasn’t ‘a miracle’ that the bit of tubing IN MY SKULL didn’t track bacteria or infections into my brain, it was scrupulous attention to cleanliness and infection control. ‘Drain infection’ is a real thing, I’m glad I didn’t Google that phrase until afterwards.  That was the horror film bit.

What they did next was amazing, a marvel of technology and medical expertise combined, but it STILL wasn’t a miracle, it was ‘hard’ technological science, combined with knowledge, and centuries of medical developments. Also very steady hands. Having drained off the fluids that were physically crushing my brain, it was assessed that the bleeding was coming from a ruptured aneurysm on my Anterior Communicating Artery. Imaging also noted two other aneurysms in there, but science is logical-rational, they weren’t urgent or life threatening, the ruptured one was. Linear-logical-analytical, although my ex and son had been taken into one of the quiet side rooms, and told I might not ‘pull through’, and I wouldn’t be ‘the same’ if I did, the risks of the surgery were minimal, compared to the battering my brain had already given itself, they weren’t going to make me any worse. I can’t even find the scar from that surgery. An incision was made in my groin, over the femoral artery, and a surgeon guided wires and cameras and all manner of improbable machinery into my brain. Science knows that the human body builds scar tissue around foreign bodies it can’t eject, so, that’s what the surgeon did, he fired multiple tiny platinum coils into the burst aneurysm, to encourage scarring. (Don’t weigh my head in at Cash Converters, I assure you it’s worth more to me, and I bite.)  A ‘miracle’? No, science and technology.

‘You must have a guardian angel!’ No, just no. My survival, and subsequent ‘recovery’, although impossible without the NHS intervention at point of need, were all down to me. There’s no delusion of grandeur about that, it was a life-altering medical emergency, with a statistical mortality rate averaging 85%. Most people don’t survive at all, and the majority who do don’t go back to work six weeks later. The NHS is strained beyond breaking point, I wasn’t ‘discharged’ from hospital, because there wasn’t a doctor on the ward, so nobody told me what I was, or wasn’t ‘allowed’ to do. Two weeks after my brain leaked, and my head was hacked into, I just sort of wandered out of the hospital, because the ex was whining about being bored of waiting. Everything after that first two weeks was me, because when I eventually had my rehab clinic appointment, I was an absolute horror, and told the poor woman that I WAS going back to work, that I WASN’T going to ‘be looked after’, or ‘make colour-coded charts for household chores.’ Yeah, I misjudged how ‘better’ I was going to get. My bad. 

Despite having ‘a religion’, I’m not a big fan of the organised mainstream religions. I was raised Catholic during my formative years, and I never quite managed to step out of the ‘Shit, I’m going to get caught!’ guilt-trip, into the ‘if I do get caught, I’ll just atone, and it will be fine.’  I didn’t ‘put my faith in God’ after the haemorrhage, I trusted the medical staff to do the best they could, and hoped my body would eventually repair itself. 

My religion. A couple of hundred years ago, I would have been burned for it, you get the drift. I’m a throw-back, a glitch in the system, because I understand most of how the human body works, based on science, but I can also pinch a bit of a plant between my fingers, and tell you, from the smell, what medicinal value it would have. It works, my son has been prescribed pharmaceutical drugs twice in his entire life, and I’ve successfully treated animals with herbs and aromatherapy oils, you can’t argue placebo-effect on that. I’m that weird old woman, living mostly alone, except I’m not in a tumble-down shack in the woods, I’m in a detached house in a cul-de-sac just off the main road, couldn’t tell you if my right-hand neighbours have two children or three, and today was the first time I ever spoke to the lady-neighbour on that side.    

Here’s the old cross-over between medicine and religion, that old woman in the woods would have been feared and revered, but, with the emergence of science and medicine, that link was lost. I genuinely don’t believe that the ‘pray for...’ Facebook posters have given any thought to the immense unlikelihood of a collective consciousness having any impact on a dog with ham on its face, or whatever they’re babbling about now. I think it’s just a ‘thing’ that’s stuck. We don’t believe that our soul is going to fly out of our nostrils when we sneeze, that’s just snot, but we still say “Bless you.” The ‘thoughts and prayers’ phenomenon drives me insane, I think it’s just as much of a reflex-nothing as ‘bless you.’ 

I don’t think that the people mouth-barbling, or typing that nurses are ‘angels’ are drawing any real correlation between over-worked, under-paid humans doing phenomenally difficult work, and cherubim and seraphim, they’re just weightless words. There has been a shift, with the advent of the internet, and the increasingly litigious nature of society. The ‘man in the white coat’ is no longer as respected or revered, because we all have Dr Google now, and can look up our symptoms, disregard the first result that says we’re clinically dead, and stomp into our GP’s surgery to tell them what’s wrong with us, and what we want doing about it. (If we haven’t actually died during the 4 week wait for the next convenient appointment.) 

My ex father-in-law had prostate cancer. He’s all clear now because he ‘went on the computer’, and looked up emergent techniques available locally. This is a man approaching 80 years of age now, who always followed his doctors instructions to the letter. To the extent that, when I queried whether he should STILL be ‘on tablets’ for his ‘bad toe’, he shushed me, as the doctor hadn’t discontinued his prescription. I can’t remember what the medication was, but it wasn’t intended for long-term use, and accumulated in his liver and kidneys, causing significant damage requiring surgery. From a man who wouldn’t question his doctor, he became a man who would. (Still paid no attention to me, I was just ‘a girl’, not a doctor or nurse...) 

It’s not all good, because the NHS has limited funding, and, if we all demand everything we’ve seen on the internet, and the poor over-stretched GPs are concerned about legal action, we will screw it into the ground. Free at point of use is what we’re used to, but that Gods-like obedience to whatever our doctor says is slipping away. (I know, I’ll only see one of the three doctors at my surgery, because the other two are fond of ‘everybody gets that’, and ‘you survived, what more do you want?’ The third one listens and responds, he doesn’t just dismiss, and THAT is the relationship I need.)  

Doctors are not Gods, we do not worship them. We respect them, but we do not revere them as our spirit-guides, and we know they can’t hex us. The NHS is ‘a Godsend’, in the loosest sense, thousands, if not millions of us would be dead without it, but to ask if it is ‘a religion’ is the silliest of wordplay. People who say ‘Thank God!’ generally aren’t, and people who do ‘Thank Gods’ generally don’t bandy the phrase about, lest it lose weight, a Djinn only gives a fixed number of wishes, after all, and there’s a price to pay. 

I’ve been tapping away at this, in fits and starts all day. I am thankful for the functionality that the NHS managed to save, and I’m wary of the way that the government is asset-stripping and disassembling it. For 70 years, the UK has had free medical care at point of need, and, this week, almost 20 ‘non-urgent’ surgical procedures were removed from the available catalogue of things we’ve always had access to. This anniversary will see many of us reflect on life-saving, and life-preserving procedures, care and compassion. It will also see many people reflecting on why they had to leave the NHS as an employer, lack of funding and cohesive support mechanisms mean that the system can no longer function as it was intended. Is it a religion? I don’t believe so. Is it fundamentally a compassionate and humane service, intended to preserve and prolong life? Almost certainly, for now. Our ‘Christian’ Prime Minister would do well to acknowledge that.