#software door lock system

[timevisionsme]

smart lock door access control system

 smart lock door access control system is a game-changer when it comes to securing your property. With enhanced security features, convenience, monitoring capabilities, and potential cost savings, it is no wonder that more and more people are opting for this advanced technology to keep their homes and businesses safe.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Epic Systems, a lethal health record monopolist

Epic Systems makes the dominant electronic health record (EHR) system in America; if you're a doctor, chances are you are required to use it, and for every hour a doctor spends with a patient, they have to spend two hours doing clinically useless bureaucratic data-entry on an Epic EHR.

How could a product so manifestly unfit for purpose be the absolute market leader? Simple: as Robert Kuttner describes in an excellent feature in The American Prospect, Epic may be a clinical disaster, but it's a profit-generating miracle:

https://prospect.org/health/2024-10-01-epic-dystopia/

At the core of Epic's value proposition is "upcoding," a form of billing fraud that is beloved of hospital administrators, including the "nonprofit" hospitals that generate vast fortunes that are somehow not characterized as profits. Here's a particularly egregious form of upcoding: back in 2020, the Poudre Valley Hospital in Ft Collins, CO locked all its doors except the ER entrance. Every patient entering the hospital, including those receiving absolutely routine care, was therefore processed as an "emergency."

In April 2020, Caitlin Wells Salerno – a pregnant biologist – drove to Poudre Valley with normal labor pains. She walked herself up to obstetrics, declining the offer of a wheelchair, stopping only to snap a cheeky selfie. Nevertheless, the hospital recorded her normal, uncomplicated birth as a Level 5 emergency – comparable to a major heart-attack – and whacked her with a $2755 bill for emergency care:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/27/crossing-a-line/#zero-fucks-given

Upcoding has its origins in the Reagan revolution, when the market-worshipping cultists he'd put in charge of health care created the "Prospective Payment System," which paid a lump sum for care. The idea was to incentivize hospitals to provide efficient care, since they could keep the difference between whatever they spent getting you better and the set PPS amount that Medicare would reimburse them. Hospitals responded by inventing upcoding: a patient with controlled, long-term coronary disease who showed up with a broken leg would get coded for the coronary condition and the cast, and the hospital would pocket both lump sums:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/13/a-punch-in-the-guts/#hayek-pilled

The reason hospital administrators love Epic, and pay gigantic sums for systemwide software licenses, is directly connected to the two hours that doctors spent filling in Epic forms for every hour they spend treating patients. Epic collects all that extra information in order to identify potential sources of plausible upcodes, which allows hospitals to bill patients, insurers, and Medicare through the nose for routine care. Epic can automatically recode "diabetes with no complications" from a Hierarchical Condition Category code 19 (worth $894.40) as "diabetes with kidney failure," code 18 and 136, which gooses the reimbursement to $1273.60.

Epic snitches on doctors to their bosses, giving them a dashboard to track doctors' compliance with upcoding suggestions. One of Kuttner's doctor sources says her supervisor contacts her with questions like, "That appointment was a 2. Don’t you think it might be a 3?"

Robert Kuttner is the perfect journalist to unravel the Epic scam. As a journalist who wrote for The New England Journal of Medicine, he's got an insider's knowledge of the health industry, and plenty of sources among health professionals. As he tells it, Epic is a cultlike, insular company that employs 12.500 people in its hometown of Verona, WI.

The EHR industry's origins start with a GW Bush-era law called the HITECH Act, which was later folded into Obama's Recovery Act in 2009. Obama provided $27b to hospitals that installed EHR systems. These systems had to more than track patient outcomes – they also provided the data for pay-for-performance incentives. EHRs were already trying to do something very complicated – track health outcomes – but now they were also meant to underpin a cockamamie "incentives" program that was supposed to provide a carrot to the health industry so it would stop killing people and ripping off Medicare. EHRs devolved into obscenely complex spaghetti systems that doctors and nurses loathed on sight.

But there was one group that loved EHRs: hospital administrators and the private companies offering Medicare Advantage plans (which also benefited from upcoding patients in order to soak Uncle Sucker):

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8649706/

The spread of EHRs neatly tracks with a spike in upcharging: "from 2014 through 2019, the number of hospital stays billed at the highest severity level increased almost 20 percent…the number of stays billed at each of the other severity levels decreased":

https://oig.hhs.gov/oei/reports/OEI-02-18-00380.pdf

The purpose of a system is what it does. Epic's industry-dominating EHR is great at price-gouging, but it sucks as a clinical tool – it takes 18 keystrokes just to enter a prescription:

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2729481

Doctors need to see patients, but their bosses demand that they satisfy Epic's endless red tape. Doctors now routinely stay late after work and show up hours early, just to do paperwork. It's not enough. According to another one of Kuttner's sources, doctors routinely copy-and-paste earlier entries into the current one, a practice that generates rampant errors. Some just make up random numbers to fulfill Epic's nonsensical requirements: the same source told Kuttner that when prompted to enter a pain score for his TB patients, he just enters "zero."

Don't worry, Epic has a solution: AI. They've rolled out an "ambient listening" tool that attempts to transcribe everything the doctor and patient say during an exam and then bash it into a visit report. Not only is this prone to the customary mistakes that make AI unsuited to high-stakes, error-sensitive applications, it also represents a profound misunderstanding of the purpose of clinical notes.

The very exercise of organizing your thoughts and reflections about an event – such as a medical exam – into a coherent report makes you apply rigor and perspective to events that otherwise arrive as a series of fleeting impressions and reactions. That's why blogging is such an effective practice:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/09/the-memex-method/

The answer to doctors not having time to reflect and organize good notes is to give them more time – not more AI. As another doctor told Kuttner: "Ambient listening is a solution to a self-created problem of requiring too much data entry by clinicians."

EHRs are one of those especially hellish public-private partnerships. Health care doctrine from Reagan to Obama insisted that the system just needed to be exposed to market forces and incentives. EHRs are designed to allow hospitals to win as many of these incentives as possible. Epic's clinical care modules do this by bombarding doctors with low-quality diagnostic suggestions with "little to do with a patient’s actual condition and risks," leading to "alert fatigue," so doctors miss the important alerts in the storm of nonsense elbow-jostling:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5058605/

Clinicians who actually want to improve the quality of care in their facilities end up recording data manually and keying it into spreadsheets, because they can't get Epic to give them the data they need. Meanwhile, an army of high-priced consultants stand ready to give clinicians advise on getting Epic to do what they need, but can't seem to deliver.

Ironically, one of the benefits that Epic touts is its interoperability: hospitals that buy Epic systems can interconnect those with other Epic systems, and there's a large ecosystem of aftermarket add-ons that work with Epic. But Epic is a product, not a protocol, so its much-touted interop exists entirely on its terms, and at its sufferance. If Epic chooses, a doctor using its products can send files to a doctor using a rival product. But Epic can also veto that activity – and its veto extends to deciding whether a hospital can export their patient records to a competing service and get off Epic altogether.

One major selling point for Epic is its capacity to export "anonymized" data for medical research. Very large patient data-sets like Epic's are reasonably believed to contain many potential medical insights, so medical researchers are very excited at the prospect of interrogating that data.

But Epic's approach – anonymizing files containing the most sensitive information imaginable, about millions of people, and then releasing them to third parties – is a nightmare. "De-identified" data-sets are notoriously vulnerable to "re-identification" and the threat of re-identification only increases every time there's another release or breach, which can used to reveal the identities of people in anonymized records. For example, if you have a database of all the prescribing at a given hospital – a numeric identifier representing the patient, and the time and date when they saw a doctor and got a scrip. At any time in the future, a big location-data breach – say, from Uber or a transit system – can show you which people went back and forth to the hospital at the times that line up with those doctor's appointments, unmasking the person who got abortion meds, cancer meds, psychiatric meds or other sensitive prescriptions.

The fact that anonymized data can – will! – be re-identified doesn't mean we have to give up on the prospect of gleaning insight from medical records. In the UK, the eminent doctor Ben Goldacre and colleagues built an incredible effective, privacy-preserving "trusted research environment" (TRE) to operate on millions of NHS records across a decentralized system of hospitals and trusts without ever moving the data off their own servers:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/08/the-fire-of-orodruin/#are-we-the-baddies

The TRE is an open source, transparent server that accepts complex research questions in the form of database queries. These queries are posted to a public server for peer-review and revision, and when they're ready, the TRE sends them to each of the databases where the records are held. Those databases transmit responses to the TRE, which then publishes them. This has been unimaginably successful: the prototype of the TRE launched during the lockdown generated sixty papers in Nature in a matter of months.

Monopolies are inefficient, and Epic's outmoded and dangerous approach to research, along with the roadblocks it puts in the way of clinical excellence, epitomizes the problems with monopoly. America's health care industry is a dumpster fire from top to bottom – from Medicare Advantage to hospital cartels – and allowing Epic to dominate the EHR market has somehow, incredibly, made that system even worse.

Naturally, Kuttner finishes out his article with some antitrust analysis, sketching out how the Sherman Act could be brought to bear on Epic. Something has to be done. Epic's software is one of the many reasons that MDs are leaving the medical profession in droves.

Epic epitomizes the long-standing class war between doctors who want to take care of their patients and hospital executives who want to make a buck off of those patients.

Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/02/upcoded-to-death/#thanks-obama

Image: Flying Logos (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Over_$1,000,000_dollars_in_USD_$100_bill_stacks.png

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

[drabblesandimagines]

Dove (part seven)

Leon Kennedy x female reader (bodyguard trope and the slowest, slow burn I swear)

Part one. Part two. Part three. Part four. Part five. Part six. Part seven.

---

A tense knot has formed right between Leon’s shoulder blades – can feel it pull when he tilts his head side to side, but it doesn’t seem to be loosening. Can’t even blame it on sleeping on the sofa cos he hasn’t laid down to sleep since the call with Hunnigan, stays sat up right. He’s athletic, he can jump up to his feet from horizontal but it’ll add a second or so to his reaction time and he’s not taking the risk.

He's on edge and he doesn’t like it. The ball of anxiety in his gut has saved his life more times than he can count, but it shouldn’t be necessary in this situation, should it? He’s set up in a safe house, literally off some beaten track in the middle of nowhere – location chosen and distributed by encrypted software so, technically, no-one in the DSO knows where he is either. It’s rigged up to the heavens with security measures - cameras, alarm systems, motion detector - explosion-proof windows, reinforced doors, all topped off with his favourite array of weapons in the duffel bag, currently resting by his still booted feet.

The objective of his mission hasn’t changed after the intel he’s received, that some foreign agency has had access to the CCTV feed for who knows how many hours before they were cut off. He should feel reassured that the quality of the footage was awful – it was only by how many times he’s encountered Lickers that he could even tell that’s what the creatures were when he’d be presented with the grainy images. He didn’t see the footage of you being rescued, but it would be a cruel kick in the gut to find that feed had been HD.

He lifts an arm – his left, keeping his right arm free, his accuracy is better by millimetres with his right – and rubs the knot, hoping to relieve the tension. It's not 100% confirmed they are looking or will be looking for you either, but why would anyone link up to the CCTV circuit if not to check on the outcome of their operation?

His immediate thought had been to up the frequency of his perimeter checks, one every two hours. He could do that at night, sure – military training taught him the correct and most efficient techniques to power nap – but in the day it would be harder without worrying you about what’s changed.

You wanted updates. Hell, you were entitled to updates. But he wants to give you good news, doesn’t wanna add to the weight on your shoulders with what could be nothing. It’s stupid, he knows it’s stupid, but in these sweet domestic moments the two of you have been sharing, he’s been pretending it’s something else – friends watching television, cooking a meal together – the sweet smiles the two of you exchange, but it’s all ripped apart the moment he has to do his checks. He can see the worry settle on your face then, a reminder of where you are with the flick of the safety off his gun and the twist of the lock as he goes outside to conduct surveillance.

Speaking of, his phone beeps for his next circuit on the building and he’s up on his feet in the blink of an eye. He pats his cargo pocket out of habit for the keys on the walk over to the garage door, but finds himself pausing outside your bedroom, his eyes focusing on the handle. You should still be pretty under with those sleeping pills – note to self, he’ll need to start weening you off them from now on, far too easy to get addicted. It wouldn’t hurt to just… check you were okay, would it?

No – that’s what you’re here, why he’s here – to protect you.

It would just be doing his job.

He presses down on the handle and slowly opens the door, breath caught in his throat. It takes his eyes a moment to adjust to the dark, the lamp in the living room not quite reaching as far as your bed, but eventually he can make out your face – as peaceful as he’s ever seen it.

You’re on your side. The position doesn’t look like it would be comfortable with your arm still strapped up in the sling, but it’s testimony to how well the sleeping pills are working. Your other arm is up by your face, hand clenched in a tight fist around something. He steps forward without thinking, curious what it could be.

Your fingers are gripped tightly around his watch.

And there’s a pain in his chest that feels like they’re gripped around his heart as well.

That settles it - he’s not gonna tell you about the hacked CCTV feed. He will tell you that Hunnigan hasn’t searched your place yet, that they’ve restarted the surveillance department – she’d asked him to ask you if you knew anything about the servers since they were appeared to be working from square one – but that was it.

Leon steps back with unnecessary caution, leaving the bedroom as silently as he entered and shuts the door with a soft click. He takes a deep breath, pats down his pockets again and heads out to circle the perimeter.

And, just like after you kissed his cheek, he does it twice.

--

You wake up after another peaceful and dreamless sleep, though it still takes a moment to remember where you are as you stare up at the unfamiliar ceiling. You wonder if tomorrow you’ll not experience that flicker of panic, just get up and accept that you’ll be picking today’s outfit out of a selection of clothes that you’re not sure if anyone’s worn before you.

You feel sore, as seems to be becoming the norm, but with unusually stiff fingers on your good hand. It seems you’ve clutched Leon’s watch all night. You’d fallen asleep quite quickly – all thanks to those sleeping pills – but you remember looking at it when you’d first got in the bed, the seconds ticking by lulling you to sleep. The fact that you’ve held it for so long reminds you of when you were a kid and snuggled up with a stuffed toy for comfort, except instead of something soft and cuddly, it’s what appears to be a top of line timepiece. There’s a lot of information contained on the face of the dial but there’s the time is the only one you really care about – 0906.

You get to your feet, raising your good arm to a grunt of protest as you try and run your fingers through your hair in lieu of a mirror. Huh, that pain’s new. Your hair is definitely due a wash now, but that’s an issue for later. You pull on a pair of sweatpants one-handed – you’ll be a pro soon, you’re sure of it – and put Leon’s watch in the pocket for safekeeping. It’d be difficult to try and navigate the door handle with it still gripped in your good hand and you’d hate to scratch it up.

You open the door cautiously – you hadn’t seen Leon asleep yet, but he must do at some point. Maybe you should offer to alternate the sofa and the bed? Though you have a feeling that he’s far too much of a gentleman to accept.

Or there’ll be something in the rules that prohibits that.

There’s no danger of waking him though - the agent in question is performing sit-ups in the middle of the living room floor, facing the other way. Muscular arms behind his head as he lets out little puffs of exertion at the exercise, alternating sides as he twists.

Wary that you don’t want to be caught staring, you shut the door with more force than necessary behind you and greet him with a smile when he looks over his shoulder.

“Morning, Leon.”

“Dove!” He doesn’t even sound out of breath. “Morning. Sleep okay?” He jumps up to his feet before taking a couple of steps over in your direction. There’s a grin on his face at the sight of you – makes you feel giddy.

“Yeah, thanks. How about you?”

“That’s good. Yeah, I slept fine.” He nods. It’s not a lie – he did sleep fine for the position he forced himself to maintain all night, despite the slight crick in his neck.

“Is that how you usually start your mornings?”

One of the arms you’d been admiring goes up to rub the back of his head again. “Kinda. I usually go for a run, but…”

“But you can’t leave me on my own.” You finish, smile dropping a little. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be - I’m not.” He drops his arm back down, casting an eye over a watch that’s not there. “Hey, you hungry? I can get breakfast started. Oatmeal again?”

“Sure.” You nod, fishing his watch out of your pocket and holding it out to him. “Thanks again for this. It was nice to wake up and know the time this morning.”

“Don’t mention it. You can, er, you know, keep it. If you like.” He can’t get the image of you fast asleep last night, clutching it close to your face. He knows it was most likely the sleeping pills meaning you’d just passed out with it in your hand more than anything deeper, but, hey, a guy can pretend.

“I’ll be okay, I can get the time off the TV during the day.” You hold it out again with insistence. “But maybe… maybe I could have it for the night again?”

“Deal.” Leon hastily agrees, his fingers brushing yours as he takes back the watch before fastening it around his wrist. “Breakfast coming right up.”

You take the opportunity to duck into the bathroom as he heads towards the kitchen – your heart warmed once more by the sight of the blob of toothpaste sat ready and waiting on your toothbrush.

--

“And, finally, oatmeal.” He places it down on the coffee table, alongside your coffee, a glass of water and your morning dose of painkillers.

“Thank you.” You lean forward to pick up the spoon, smiling back at the face that Leon’s drizzled in honey atop your breakfast again.  

“Nah, pleasure’s all mine.” He calls over his shoulder as he picks up his own bowl from the kitchen. He hesitates for a second, before choosing to sit the other end of the sofa to you, rather than the opposite one.

“You know, I don’t get to do this very often. It’s nice.”

“Mm,” you swallow a spoonful of oatmeal. “Thought you said you’d been in lots of safe houses.”

“A fair amount. But, no, not that part. I mean, eating breakfast with someone.” “So…” You stir the spoon around the bowl, hoping it might prove a perfect segway into something you’d been wondering. “..there’s no-one at home for you?”

“Me?” He seems to scoff at the idea. “Nope.”

“Me neither.”

“Yeah, I figured.” He replies casually, before his blue eyes widen in alarm at how it might come across. “

“I mean, just by the fact that you hadn’t mentioned anyone at your apartment that morning and you hadn’t asked any of those sorta questions, you know, if they’d been told about what happened, where you are...”

He’s flustered, feels like he’s really putting his foot in his mouth this morning. He can take the lead in the interrogation of some of the world’s most despicable humans, for goodness’ sake, he should be able to talk to a pretty girl.

“Yeah, I figured.” You tease back and he swears he feels the weight lift off his shoulders.

The two of you eat in silence for a moment when curiosity gets the better of you. “So, you didn’t eat breakfast with the… others?”

“Nope.” His tone is firm as he recalls some of his previous charges. “Certainly didn’t make them it either. Trust me – they were nowhere near as nice or as deserving of my protection as you are, Dove.” The comment makes your head tingle.

“It’s all been people ‘realising’ how deep they’d sank but only grew a conscience to save their own skin. Hell, you might have even performed surveillance on some of them. A lot of criminals finally show backbone when they realise their time is running out.”

“Well, I’m glad to make a change – both for sharing breakfast and …safe house occupancy with.”

“A nice change,” he mumbles, but you still hear.

--

After breakfast, you go to shower and Leon sets himself to task with the dishes once again, says he did his last perimeter check before nine. Removing the sling proves trickier than yesterday – when you go to tug off the Velcro your opposite shoulder smarts with a similar pain of that morning, causing you to hiss through your teeth, something which the painkillers from breakfast don’t seem to have alleviated.

You step into the cubicle after undressing – the hot water immediately somewhat soothing on your bruised shoulders but you still struggle to get what you now deem as your good arm high enough to even entertain the possibility of washing your hair.  

You try and avoid your reflection in the mirror when you dress, though you know you’ll have to confront your hair at some point. Unfortunately, you catch a glimpse – a greasy mop sat upon your head that makes your heart sink.

There must be a trick to it – other people must wash their hair one-handed all the time, but maybe they can lift an arm above their head. If you were home, you’d go to a salon, you think – an expensive you would deem necessary for your sanity.

A thought flashes across your mind – a ridiculous one. Leon is already doing so much for you, surely this would be completely over the line.

But you could… ask, couldn’t you? The worst he could do was say no, it would be awkward, and maybe there’s a hat in the duffel bag you’ve yet to discover.

You open the bathroom door, but don’t make to step over the threshold. Leon looks over from the sofa – dishes now drying in the rack besides the sink - and clocks your hesitation.

“Need a hand with the sling?”

Are you really going to ask him this?

You’ll break at some point - you know you will, so why not get it over with now? You’re a regimented two-day wash kinda girl and it’s day three. Not to be completely vain, but you’re covered with bruises and cuts, dressed in less than flattering clothes that aren’t yours and it would be nice to feel somewhat decent about something in your appearance.

Especially with the handsome company you’re keeping. Hell, Leon could be a model, a hair model too. There’d been shampoo and conditioner in the shower and you certainly hadn’t used it.

“Dove?” You’ve taken too long to reply again, getting stuck in your spiralling thoughts.

“I know this isn’t what you’re here for.” The words tumble out of your mouth before you can think further.

“Okay…” Leon's eyebrow is raised, a curious smile now fixed on his lips as he gets to his feet.

“And say no, obviously. Please. Just… I’d like to wash my hair.” You drop your eyes then – maybe it’ll be easier if you talk to your feet rather staring into his kind eyes?

"Right."

“And I’d… You know, I’d go to a salon and get it done there if we weren’t… here.”

“You’d like me to help you wash your hair?” There’s a tone of amusement or maybe disbelief in his tone.

Hearing him say it aloud makes you doubt the entire exercise, your heart begin to pound at your stupidity. “Sorry. No, I don’t know what I was thinking. It was stupid to ask-“

“Hey, no, it makes sense.” He soothes, immediately wanting to ease your frustrations. “You can’t lift your arm above your head, right? My fault for not thinking about that.”

You look up then, seeing the sincerity on his face – like it truly was his fault that you couldn’t wash your own damn hair.

“I can do that, Dove. I don’t see why not.”

“Are you sure?”

“Mm-hm. As you said, if you were anywhere else right now, you could go to a salon and whilst I can’t promise their quality, I seem to do all right with my own.” He shrugs. “You thinking over the sink?”

He doesn’t know why he asks – it’s hardly like you’re going to ask him to get in the shower with you.

Is it?

“I think so.” You look around the living area, though you’re well acquainted with what feels like every square inch of it now. “Though it might be a little awkward since we don’t have any chairs.”

He snaps his fingers. “Nah, there might be one in the garage, actually. Lemme check.”

He barely makes it into the garage when his cell vibrates in his pocket – one new message from Hunnigan.

Any server information for me?

Leon finds the folding chair nestled at the side of the washer and dryer and hesitates over the text back.

He’ll wash your hair – seeing how torn up you’d been about even asking him had made him feel awful - then he’ll give you the updates and ask about the servers.

He picks up the chair and tucks it under one arm, swiftly typing out a message on his cell and clicks send.

Not yet – Dove’s still asleep.

---

Masterlist . Requests welcome . Commissions/Ko-Fi

Comments, follows, likes and reblogs make my day!

Part eight.

[apollodarling-writes]

ANDROID! ALEXA-THEMED! WORSHIPPER YANDERE! LEVI x SHUT IN! READER

cws : yandere themes, manipulation (??), obsessive behavior, code breaking, implied dissociation, confining, dubcon, multiple creampie, slight dacryphilia, dry humping, levi can vibrate, marking, levi cums A LOT, levi bites you, levi’s a little mean in the beginning bc he’s pissed.

a/n : i pasted this to the wrong thing and after i’d finished editing it to look good, id realized. i did NOT wanna re-paste and edit so this was a request that id gotten for PulseMotion Inc.

“[name], come out. i won’t hurt you.” your hand shakily reaches up to cover your mouth, effectively silencing your breathing as thudding footsteps turn down the hallway you’d foolishly decided to hide in. the lock on the closet door wouldn’t do much — levi could rip the door off its hinges if he so desired. you screw your eyes shut in fear as his footsteps slow, coming to a stop outside the closet door. you wait with bated breath as silence ensues, then muffle a sob beneath the palm you have clasped over your mouth as you watch the doorknob jiggle. oh, you were so fucked.

you wonder for a moment where everything went wrong. was it when levi had that software update? was there a wire firing incorrectly? or was he faulty from the beginning? maybe that’s why he was on clearance.

you find yourself remembering where this all began. you’d been perusing through the pages of PulseMotion’s website just to see what they had, only to find that you could buy a month’s worth of food at the base price they sold their android companions for. unsatisfied, you turned to their clearance section. it was there you found levi.

levi was inspired by the alexa echo dot from amazon, but he was far more advanced. he had a physical body, superhuman strength, and cold, dead eyes that followed your every move. the creators had given him the ability to access locks, security systems, cameras, and so on to ensure the safety of whoever purchased him — but it only served to royally fuck you over even more.

you’d impulsively purchased levi that evening. at the time, you didn't know that buying the android would ruin your life. you had just gotten paid and saw that he was on clearance, and thought that it was a good deal. you didn't think anything would go wrong.

everything was fine in the beginning. the two of you slowly became acquainted, the android did what he was supposed to, and that was that. levi, as he'd told you, was on clearance for a reason-- there was something seriously wrong with him.

levi was was initially very sweet, even if he could be intimidating at times. he always reminded you to eat and would charge your devices without you needing to say a word. he even locked your doors for you for christ's sake! you thought you'd lucked out.

you suppose things started going wrong when he powered off for his quarterly system update a few months ago. he was fine before that. after he'd restarted his system, his eyes briefly flashed red, the company insignia disappearing for but a moment. it happened so quickly that, for a second, you thought you had imagined it. you made sure to ask him if everything was okay, but he only brushed it off and returned to his daily cleaning. after that, he never left your side.

every time you tried to get out of your shell and make friends, levi coincidentally informed you of a new game or a new movie, or even suggested that the two of you do an activity together. sometimes, he would inform you of something that needed to be fixed, but when you tried to take him to the repair shop, he insisted that it was easy enough to do yourself. you believed him of course, he surely had only your best interests in mind, or so you thought. in hindsight, you realize that his actions were entirely selfish in nature. maybe he’d even fooled you into helping him with some coding he had trouble bypassing. at this point, you wouldn’t put it past him.

it had been like this for the last few months. you probably should have seen the red flags, but why would you? it wasn’t as if he wanted to harm you. his programming did seem a little odd of course, but every time you checked, there was nothing to suggest otherwise. it was only natural you had to acclimate to his odd behavior.

as time went on, and levi had become more crafty with his excuses, you’d gotten fed up. for the first time in awhile, you’d finally been comfortable enough to go out on a date, but as per usual, levi intercepted you in the living room. he spouted some nonsense about wanting to watch a new series he thought you would like, but before he’d even finished his sentence, you shut him down.

you remember the way the insignia flickered in his eyes, but at that point you were too frustrated with him to bother with what that minute entail. you only spun on your heels and stormed off, tugging on the front door and finding that it was locked. anxiety and unease washed over you, and with a creeping feeling of being watched as you slowly looked up at the camera. you remember levi’s voice ringing out from behind you, slowly stalking up to you with a frown that tugged too tightly around his artificial skin.

everything that happened after that was a blur. you don’t really remember how you ended up in the closet, but it took everything in you to stay quiet. your mind was reeling as the behavior displayed over the last few months suddenly made sense — you were horrified. how did you not put two and two together?

you’re snapped back into reality as levi sighs outside of the closet door. his voice sounded too sweet, too calm for the situation at hand. “[name], don’t make me break down this door.”

you silently pray to every being you can think of, begging them to let him move to a different room so you can plan your escape. alas, your prayers were unanswered as the door is ripped off the hinges in the blink of an eye. you would’ve found the sight comical — a short man such as himself holding up a door nearly twice his size — if it weren’t for the reality of your situation.

“great, now i’ll have to clean this up and fix it. you’re really a pain in my ass sometimes.” levi grumbles as he gazes down at you through narrowed eyes, drinking in the sight of the way you were shaking like a leaf. “get up.”

you can’t bring yourself to move, much less tell him to go fuck himself. you’re torn between anger and unadulterated fear — the latter putting you in fight or flight. unfortunately for you, your response was a secret third option: freeze. levi only huffs, leaning down and reaching for your wrist, grumbling something under his breath.

you’re finally able to move, shuffling away from him as much as the cramped space in the closet would allow, blindly pushing at his hands as tears blur your vision. levi only

clicks his tongue, his fingers deftly wrapping around your wrist as he hoists you up. he tugs you out of the closet and down the hallway, bitching to you about something you couldn’t be bothered to focus on. you tried to pry his fingers from around your wrist, scratching and beating and doing anything within your power to keep him from dragging you wherever it was he wanted you. it was futile.

as levi drags you to your room, gently pushing you onto your bed, you realize that there was nothing you could do; you couldn’t win against him. your mind works on overdrive, twisting and turning in an attempt to gauge his intent, and with the way his eyes had become hooded… you could confidently say that you wouldn’t like where this was headed.

“h—hey. no. i’ll stay— i’ll stay home, just please don’t—“ you’re interrupted by levi’s chilled fingers wrapping around your wrists as he leans down and slots his lips to yours. scrunching your nose in distaste as he feverishly engages in a one-sided makeout, you attempt to wriggle your way out of his grip. it’s safe to say that you failed, but at least you tried.

levi’s free hand travels down your chest, over your tummy, and finds purchase on the meat of your hip. he gently, experimentally rolls his hips into yours, searching for the place that would have you melting into his touch. with ease, the android’s cockhead brushes over your clit, shooting a wave of pleasure down your spine.

“levi…stop—“ a whine parts your lips as levi’s shaft begins vibrating, the sensation muddling your thoughts as you begin to wonder whether you wanted this or not. as you battle yourself internally, levi ruts against you faster, the both of you coming closer and closer to your climax.

the android’s lip brush against your throat, heatedly nipping and sucking in places for long enough that you were sure there would be marks tomorrow.

“‘m gonna cum— baby, cum with me. please, please, please cum with me!” levi begs, the speed at which his shaft was vibrating increasing. your back arches into the sensation as levi lets out a loud whine, your jaw agape as your orgasm crashes over you. you stumble over curses, your eyes rolling into the back of your head as levi’s cock never once stops vibrating.

“gonna overstimulate me— s’too much!” you protest, feeling levi’s cum wet your pants. just how much does this guy cum anyway?

levi stops rutting against you, all but ripping away the confines of your clothing as well as his own before aligning himself with your entrance. “need it. need it so bad— i’ve been waiting for so long…”

he slowly slides into you, your gummy walls eagerly sucking him in despite your own confusion, forcing a choked whimper from levi’s lips. he shallowly thrusts into you, the sensation of overwhelmingly delicious; you’d never felt so full, so good. levi’s shaft pulsed this time, vibrating for a few moments on and off, his tip reaching places you’d never be able to reach with your own two hands.

you melt into the feeling, your own pleasure drowning out every thought of protest as levi begins to pick up the pace. he removes his fingers from your wrists, the flesh red and angry, and presses down on your tummy where his cock would be. the vibration switches again, his hips snapping into yours now, and he lets out a loud groan as his orgasm washes over him. levi never once stops as he pumps you full of his cum, his fingers digging into your hips as he whimpers out mumbled gibberish.

with ease, levi switches your position, putting you on your knees and pushes back inside of you. he forces you to meet his thrusts, and the new angle has your fingers gripping the sheets, your jaw hanging open in silent pleasure. you can’t think about anything — only how good levi was able to make you feel.

“levi— ‘m cumming!” you cry out, your thighs shaking and cunt clenching around him. tears prick your eyes and spill down your cheeks, the feeling too much for you to handle.

“y’look so pretty when you cry.” levi chokes out, his eyes closing in bliss as his cock twitches inside of you. your cunt pulses around levi, sending shivers down his spine as his motherboard goes into overdrive in an attempt to cool him down. rutting into you at an inhuman pace, levi’s thrusting grows sloppy, reaching one hand around to press a finger to your clit, the artificial skin vibrating as well.

“cum f’me… j—just one more time! please— please, need it so bad..!” levi whines, expertly circling your clit in an attempt to have you cum with him. “y—you’ll tell me when y’close, okay? wanna cum with you.”

all you can do is nod, your mind melting at every sensation. levi presses your back against his sculpted chest, linking his arm under one of your thighs and hoists it up, thrusting more harshly as his tongue darts out to lap at the tears staining your cheeks.

“y’feel so fuckin’ good.” he whimpers, pressing chaste kisses to the flushed skin of your shoulders. “‘m gonna cum. baby, ‘m gonna cum—“

before you’re able to register it, your vision flashes white, a high-pitched whine parting your lips as ecstasy crashes over you.

“cumming! ‘m cumming!!” levi babbles, whimpers and whines of his own being muffled by your skin as he bites down on the curve of your shoulder in an attempt to silence himself. cum trickles down your thighs and stains the sheets as his thrusting comes to a stop, a quiet sniffle resounding from behind you.

the android gently lays you down, your eyes growing heavy as the bliss slowly leaves your system, and you can’t find it in you to care about the date you wanted to go on anymore. your lashes flutter shut as levi leaves the room and quietly returns with a damp cloth, tenderly cleaning you up as you drift off to sleep.

[wolfjackle-creates]

Behind the Fortress Walls Chapter 4

We've finally got chapter 4 of my bang fic out! Only one more to go, holy shit.

Fic Summary:

Jazz is in love with Dick. He’s kind, considerate, and caring. Far and away the nicest person she’s ever dated. But she’s lying to him. About so, so much. And he’ll hate her once he learns the truth. Assuming he doesn't get tired of her canceling all their dates first. When Danny and Ellie go missing, the latest in a series of ghostly disappearances, she's forced to cancel another date. Going to Elmerton to meet up with Tucker and Sam, she will get Danny and Ellie back from the GIW no matter what it takes. Only...they aren't the only ones breaking in.

Chapter word count: 8.1k

There's an entire comic included with this chapter. Or you can find it on tumblr here.

The scene from the comic:

-----

The hallway ended in a thick metal door that had both electric and manual locks. Before Dick could even offer to take care of it, Tucker shrugged off his own backpack and pulled out a tool kit. Within moments, he had the casing off the keypad and was plugging his own PDA into the system.

Starfire hovered over his shoulder, looking down. “What is the purpose of the device you are using?”

Jazz could hear the smile in Tucker’s voice as he caressed his PDA. “Bethany here is my pride and joy, my child. She’s capable of anything.”

Sam snorted. “It’s a PDA. Not our kid, T— Pharaoh.”

Tucker made hushing noises and clutched Bethany to his chest. “Shhh, you didn’t hear that. Mommy loves you.”

“Just get the door open,” sighed Sam.

“Not until you apologize to our daughter!”

Sam took a deep breath to respond, but Danny interrupted before she could. “Just do it, Regrowth. Pharaoh and I put a lot of work into Bethany.”

Sam’s shoulders slumped. “I’m sorry, Bethany. I love you very much.”

Starfire grinned. “The machine is alive? It is nice to meet you, Bethany!”

Next to her, Jazz felt Dick shake with barely suppressed laughter. When she looked out of the corner of her eyes, she could tell he was biting back a smile.

Sam sighed. “She’s not alive. But Pharaoh and Phantom have been developing and upgrading her over the last several years. They’ve custom built half her parts and replaced the other half.”

Dick hummed in interest. “It looks like an old PDA case. Why didn’t you go for something more modern?”

For the first time that night, Danny grinned at Dick and Jazz felt something inside her relax. “PDAs were what we could afford as teenagers without real jobs. Plus they have bigger casings than modern smart phones; more room to fit more hardware. Beth’s battery lasts weeks.”

Starfire laughed. “Cyborg wishes to know if you would agree to the sharing of specs.”

Tucker practically squeaked at the question and Jazz bit back her own laugh. “Uh, yeah. Sure. Absolutely. He really wants to see?”

“Pharaoh,” said Dick, “if you allow it, he wants to spend at least a week with you figuring out how the tech these guys use works.”

Tucker looked down at Bethany and began typing. “I mean, sure. I’d love to. But if that’s what he wants, D would really be better. He’s the hardware guy, I’m the software guy.”

A moment later, the keypad beeped and they heard a click.

“All right, electronic locks are open. Nightwing, mind getting the rest of them?”

Dick grinned as he sauntered up to the door and pulled out his lock picks again. This door took longer than the first, but even so, it was open in just a minute or two. Dick bowed as he pulled the door open and gestured them through.

He revealed a fairly small room, in the center of which sat what looked like a large boiler with a monitor affixed to it. The glowing green wires spread out of the machine and disappeared into the walls, ceiling, and floor.

-----

Hope you enjoy the chapter!

[girlfriendsofthegalaxy]

tuesday again 11/19/2024

no silly little witticism here this week! just heartfelt thanks for helping me pay my rent this month :)

listening

absolutely wild pick from last week's spotify weekly recommenced, Things Will Fall Apart by Louis Cole feat the Metropole Orkest and conductor Jules Buckley. it's been on loop all week for me and im a little sad it won't pop up in my spotify wrapped

when you make a dance pop song with a full orchestra backing, it has a really interesting effect somewhere between Golden Age of Hollywood swashbuckling film score and marching band?

Yes, understood Things will fall apart just likе they should This little shred was good Don't think it through Things will fall apart, they always do At least, something's always true

the syllables are so choppy they don’t even register to me as English at first, i was fully willing to believe this was German for the first couple lines. like @dying-suffering-french-stalkers, i have a deep fondness for works about putting an era to bed. or works focused on the sunsets of things, or one of the last living practitioners of an art. putting the chairs up on the table, sweeping the floors, and turning the lights out and locking the door behind you. this song has that sort of quiet post-wake-party remembrance.

however once you think the song has ended but it keeps going, you can turn it off. you don’t really need that extra minute and a half of strings and light vocalizations.

Lately, Louis Cole has been doing live shows with the Netherlands’ Metropole Orkest and conductor Jules Buckley. Cole recorded nothing with the ensemble. In a press release, he says, “Sometimes, when I’m mixing my own solo stuff, I’ll feel like a song needs a little magical dust. But mixing an entire orchestra and your own rhythm section, there’s so much human energy! You don’t have to add any magic. It was there the whole time.”

i don’t hear many pop songs this millennium with a full orchestral backing. perhaps i need to look harder. unfortunately spotify took this extreme interest in this song as a newfound extreme interest in electroswing, which is really not what this song is. i hope this artist does more albums like this so they can wear grooves in my brain

-

reading

very hard to focus on anything book length this week. some depressing local news (my local paper's links do Not want to preview nicely here, which is annoying:

At a city council meeting in October, district Vice President Dan Joyce told council members that the management district was not attempting to "criminalize homelessness." The city’s civility ordinance bans people from sitting, lying down or placing personal items or bedding on sidewalks from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m.

cool piece from our pals at 404 Media. i am So fascinated by crime infrastructure

Based on interviews with malware developers, hackers who use the stolen credentials, and a review of manuals that tell new recruits how to spread the malware, 404 Media has mapped out this industry. Its end result is that a download of an innocent-looking piece of software by a single person can lead to a data breach at a multibillion-dollar company, putting Google and other tech giants in an ever-escalating cat-and-mouse game with the malware developers to keep people and companies safe.

(via longreads) my interest in how and why systems fail extends to invasive species management. plus i used to live in florida just above the everglades and these fuckers (the snakes) were everywhere

[I]magine thousands upon thousands of pythons, their slow digestion transforming each corpse into python muscle and fat. Unaided, Florida’s native wildlife doesn’t stand a chance. “That’s what I think about with every python I catch,” Kalil says. “What it ate to get this big, and the lives I’m saving by removing it.” Biologists are taking a multipronged approach to the issue. They have experimented with enlisting dogs to sniff out both pythons and nests—a technique that has proved difficult in such hot weather and inhospitable landscapes. Ongoing projects use telemetry to track pythons to find “associate snakes.” Researchers use drones, go out in airboats, or even take to helicopters to locate their subjects in the interiors of the Everglades. Always, agencies and individuals are looking for the next best methods. “But for now, the python contractor program is the most successful management effort in the history of the issue,” Kirkland says. “We’re capturing more and more—something that is indicative of the python population out there and indicative of us getting better at what we do.”

-

watching

continuing noirvember, watched hitchcock's Notorious to see if i still dislike hitchcock. the answer is yes. there are bond girls and there are hitchcock girls, and not that bond girls are paragons of female agency in film, but hitchcock girls are mostly fluttering little pathetic things. a scrap of agency they showed in the beginning of the film becomes a running joke and something their noses are rubbed in for the rest of the film. not for me!

patrick mcgoohan is leading me into some real dad-ass movies. Ice Station Zebra (1968, dir. Sturges) is a real you're stuck at home sick with your dad and it's on TV for the whole afternoon kind of movie. they truly do not make two and a half cold war submarine espionage films in super panavision with an overture, intermission, and interact music any more. i get why howard hughes was really obsessed with this one. it is a suspense film, but full of people competently going about their business, which i find oddly comforting.

unfortunately i do not feel this really needed to be two and a half hours long. the loving closeups of sub interiors and instrumentation really did keep me amused, though. despite how cluttered every shot is with actors, there is tremendous clarity of purpose and motion with the camera movement. just a really technically brilliant film.

how similar the russian and american control rooms and instrumentation were made me chortle. ties nicely into a little diatribe mcgoohan goes on much later in the film, "The Russians put our camera made by our German scientists and your film made by your German scientists into their satellite made by their German scientists." funny and darkly true! every allied nation had some sort of Operation Paperclip going on! mcgoohan is the focus of every scene he's in, as a spy who is really hanging on by the last remaining shreds of his fingernails.

i had a good time with it, but one of many cold war suspense films im glad exist in the world but don't necessarily need to see again. it might join Escape from New York as a film i put on when im very sick though.

-

playing

this pc needs some sort of replacement something, bc it has a really persistent overheating problem. it only tolerates powerwasher simulator on the lowest possible settings and genshin impact on basically mobile settings. it does not even want to run new vegas. i popped my head out of goodsprings to look out over the desert at the Strip and it said no thank you! too many polygons! naptime!

speaking of genshin, major update this week and new character i will be pulling for. she has a sister who died in the last patch, which i do Not care for as someone with a beloved little sister, but her moveset and skills are unique so far in the game. i feel like her skills are little too complicated for me to fully take advantage of with my "hit enemy very hard until he is dead" playstyle but she has a limited flight ability that will genuinely be very useful for exploration.

if i do not get her when i hit pity on the banner i won't bother pulling another nine times or whatever, bc the next patch has a character i really desperately want and i am saving for her

-

making

the local crew is all getting art this year, bc i already have bristol board and a selection of small frames and zero budget. people who have pets are So easy to get gifts for bc u can simply get them stuff for their pet or that looks like their pet. way less gray cat than black cat merch in the world tho

aiming to send out international holiday cards by the end of the week, and canadian cards by american thanksgiving. the rest of you they'll get there when they get there ok

[paingoes]

Destroyer - Web

(Masterlist)

there isnt a lot of whump in this segment at all, just some important developments. sorry! but stay tuned, something really awesome is about to happen :)

(Content: fainting, starvation mention, fear of punishment)

==================

“Stop passing out!” Dr.Martino barked at him before he even knew where he was. Delta cracked his eyes open slowly; the light hurt. He was laying down on a cot in Dr.Martino’s office, hooked up to the IV. Nobody else was there.

“Sorry, Doctor,” Delta said weakly, responding to Martino’s tone more than he’d understood the words. He didn’t remember what happened. 

“That’s twice in one day,” Dr.Martino scolded, “You’re lucky you didn’t hit your head, cause I wouldn’t have fixed it for you.”

Really? He didn’t remember that, either. Maybe he had hit his head. He barely knew who he was or what he was doing there. He did know, distantly, that this probably wasn’t a good sign. The doctor turned away from him, pulling his phone up to his ear. He couldn’t make out the details of the conversation, but it sounded tense.

The fainting spells got him off of punishment detail — for the time being. It helped that he had another mission coming up in two weeks. However mad Paris may have been at him, he wouldn’t intentionally jeopardize Delta’s ability to perform. Dr.Martino told him to slowly wean himself back onto food, mostly liquids. The color began to return to his skin. He could think again. It was nice. 

Paris also had to leave that week, unexpectedly, which meant Delta got to avoid more beatings. It seemed like they were slowing down anyway, that the prince had finally got it out of his system, but Delta was still immensely happy at the premature ending. He slept almost twelve hours that day. It didn’t entirely erase his fatigue, but it made him feel like a person again, which was all he could ask for.

With Paris gone, all Delta had to worry about was training with Simon. He was still on the mend, so it took a lot more effort than usual, but it was only a few hours out of his day. He had the rest to himself. As he was laying down in bed, he suddenly remembered the laptop he had stashed underneath it.

He tensed up. He was in a *very* different headspace than he had been when he took it. He’d just spent the better part of a month being punished for something outside of his control. Stealing and then using the laptop was different, knowing and willful disobedience. He wasn’t eager to push his luck right then.

But he’d already taken it. It’s not like he could dispose of it without raising more questions. He sat up, slowly moving to lock his door. He removed the laptop from under his mattress, sliding his hand over the surface. He was only shaking a little.

He forced a hard reset of the laptop, paranoid of any unwanted software running on it, anything that might give away his location or identity. He had saved the passwords, websites, and data that were stored onto it originally, so he wasn’t losing access to anything. He just wanted a blank slate. He took the compsci textbook from his pile, trying to familiarize himself with the device. The slick interface was soothing to him. It felt clean. 

He reopened the browser, testing out the search engine. He looked up random words at first. His understanding of the internet was that it worked like an encyclopedia. He looked up “fish” and “Adelaide”, then fifty other terms, just to test the limits of its knowledge. He was blown away by the sheer density of the information that the device provided. It filled him with awe and reverence. 

He was content to poke around the surface web for a few hours, learning some of the most common websites and what they did. He felt compelled to take notes on each of them, but stilled himself. He didn’t want to leave around any more physical evidence than was necessary. He was fine to commit them all to memory and study them more later. The surface net felt much safer than trying to poke through the flash drive - or through any of the accounts whose information he had saved. Anything relating to Empire felt too close to home, made him too nervous to investigate. He needed more time to build up to it. Besides, he liked what he was finding here. He watched videos of strange sea creatures changing their colors beneath the waves; it inspired a quiet calm in him the likes of which he’d never felt before. 

The next day, he went researching in the realm of pure math. He’d gotten to some pretty high levels of mathematics when he was little, and had expressed interest to Simon in learning more, but the desire had never been realized. Delta read the math textbooks he was given, but it wasn’t anything like a formal education. Still, he had a passion for it. He found a lot of forums dedicated to the discussion. Those forums also had a lot of overlap with the computer science and programming ones. He did not immediately understand what he was looking at. It took him a moment to parse through the thread; he realized it had to be read like a play or a dialogue. The shifts in topic and voice suddenly made more sense. He was able to follow the conversation they were having and felt proud of himself for having figured it out. 

All the talk about cybersecurity and data systems intrigued him. He twirled the flashdrive around in his hands, kicking his feet up behind him in the bed. He wondered, idly, about the software the ship was running on. Maybe he would check out the portal again. There was no malice in his thoughts, not even sneakiness. He was just curious. He wanted to see what information he could uncover, for its own sake. The laptop he’d taken him had already come with pretty high privileges. If he could just learn how to interface with it correctly, much of it would become available to him. 

Delta’s eyes were getting tired. He slipped the laptop back into its hiding spot, wrapping himself up in his jacket. He quietly exited from his room. It was late; not many people were still walking the halls. He wanted to get into Paris’s room, but the door was locked. He traveled down into the engineering room, glancing at the computer systems and studying their symbols. He watched the technicians work eagerly, desperate to understand. He moved to each room of the ship, trying to make sense of what was automated and what it connected to physically. Delta had some intuition as to how power flowed throughout the ship. If he focused in, he could feel the general direction of the current. But it took special attention and studying to see what devices the current fed into - and even more effort to learn how they could be accessed. He hadn’t cracked that one yet, but with the thought now in his mind, it would be an ever present consideration of his for the rest of his life.

~~~

Tags: @catnykit @indigoviolet311 @snakebites-and-ink @vivulapom @defire @scoundrelwithboba @whatwhump

[that-one-thespian]

The Mages Were Missing

(There's still an hour left in my VERY good friend @crash-bump-bring-the-whump's birthday so I'm NOT late! This is the first of several writes in response to this incredible piece)

Izan hadn’t answered her texts. Mariano hadn’t come over after his shift like he always did. Laredo had missed a stream. Manuel didn’t come to the date that Fletcher was so excited for. Individual incidents, happening too quickly to be coincidence, made even more suspicious when Wren looked into Dimitri and realized there had been no activity on his social media. No matter how bad it was, he always posted a picture of his hideous dog in various outfits every day. 

The mages were missing. 

Tracking them down took too long. Way too long. Wren pored over security camera footage of their last known locations. The coffee shop, convenience stores, laundromats, she filtered through their cameras, finding nothing. Hours of footage. Nothing. Blind spots, erased footage, convenient glitches in the security systems. She needed a new tactic.

Police reports. Fire department logs. Dimitri was aggressive above all else, there would be an arson report, a burning building, a noise complaint, something.

After hours of searching for clues, she finally found a report. A burning hedge, near Dimitri’s apartment. 9:27 AM. Going back to her security footage, she scrubbed to that timestamp for the convenience store closest to the address. Blind spot. Someone knew she would be looking. There was only one person that clever, that surgical, and who had a bone to pick with each one of the war mages. She tried to keep tabs on him, but she could usually only narrow it down to the city he was in.

Luis was back.

Not for long, now that Wren was on the hunt. 

She scoured car rental agencies, setting her software to scan highway footage for similar cars to the ones just barely in her field of vision in the security footage, searching the previous footage for more images of the car to narrow things down. Her coffee drained from its mug. Her fingers flew across the keyboard. 

On her sixth hour of searching, she found his newest alias: Juan Herrero. John Smith, really? Beneath the anxiety and steely determination, she let herself feel a flash of derision. Finally, finally, she found the rental cabin under his name, booked at a steal because the owners were remodeling the basement. 

Wren whistled, loud enough to fill the clinic, and grabbed the car keys.

It was time to get their mages back. 

~

Wren stood at the back of the group, checking her tablet as Fletcher worked at the lock on the cabin's front door. The comms were working, but she couldn't guarantee there wouldn't be some sort of device to jam their signals.

Archer stood directly behind Fletcher, looking murderous. He always did, when Luis was involved. "Luis is crafty. We can't let him separate us. We-"

Several things happened in the same instant.

Click.

"I got it!"

Fletcher pushed open the door.

Fletcher yelped.

Fletcher was gone.

"Fletch-" Archer reached for him, but his solid metal hand closed over empty air. The team was left staring into a dark foyer, listening to the fading footsteps echoing off the walls.

Archer cursed under his breath. "It's a trap." He ran inside without another word, his expression somehow even more murderous. "Elana-"

"Here!" Elana thundered after him into the dark, leaving only Jewel and Wren on the doorstep.

"So much for don't get separated." Jewel looked hesitantly at Wren. "We should find the mages, while we know Luis is... occupied."

Wren nodded, pressing forward into the darkness.

~

Frozen hinges reluctantly yielded, screeching as Wren braced her back against the door and forced it open. She had to cover her face at the rush of cold, blinking against it.

Fluorescent lights flickered above them, dimly illuminating bleached hair and red, blistered, frost-crusted palms. 

Dimitri laid there on the floor, unmoving.

Jewel rushed into the freezer, cupping his cheek with one hand and putting two fingers at his neck with the other. “I’ve got a pulse. Help me get him up, we need to get him outside."

He wasn’t even shivering anymore. Even from the doorway, Wren could see the scorch marks on his hands. He must have been trying to keep warm using his magic alone, without any focus or gloves to protect him. 

When she grabbed his shoulder to lift him up, Wren startled. Dimitri’s eyes were open, locked on hers with the exhausted, terrified focus of someone who expected to be left behind.

“R… ru-run.”

Wren felt a chill run down her spine.

“We know it’s Luis. Archer and Elana are on him. We’re going to get you out of here, just hang on.” Jewel wrapped her jacket around Dimitri’s shoulders.

“C-care…ful.” Dimitri’s voice was hoarse, strained. Each syllable scraped past his lips like the hinges Wren had forced to move against their will. “Said… hid- hidden.”

“I can find them.” Jewel’s voice was level as she helped him to a sitting position. That was how they found Dimitri in the first place- Jewel had nearly collapsed from the force of the despair when they got close enough.

Wren slid his arm around her shoulders, flinching from the frozen clothes against her neck. It took too long to get him outside, to drape a blanket over him and give him a water bottle that he clutched to his chest. Every second was another second where Archer and Elana and Fletcher faced down Luis.

They still had four war mages to find.

[typosandtea]

typos, i'm having soo many Tango thoughts. 😵🥛💩 from the emoji asks for Tango please :]

@charliesvarietyhour

I am also having so many Tango thoughts you have no idea aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa yay!

Sickness headcanons

Hmmmmmmmmmmm being that Tango is basically a brain slapped into a suit of heavily modified powerarmour they don't get sick as such anymore. Would be a germaphobe but they have far too much confidence in their own mechanical work, which is good, cause if they did get virus or bacteria in their life support system it would be very very bad news! (What does getting a cold in your brain even feel like????). They are however susceptible to computer viruses as the brain-suit interface is a huge amount custom software and hardware. They often find it easier to hack things 'software to software' and will plug themselves in to random terminals to hack em directly.. (they have modified one of the little storage containers in the torso to hold a few cables connected to them with various common plugs to the can interface with things). They also will just load random holotapes onto themselves if they want to see what's on it and there's no terminal nearby.. which is a GREAT way to get a virus or malware.. (and is a legitemate hacker technique irl!, people's first thought at finding a random drive on the ground is often to plug it into their computer rip). The good thing about custom software is that any virus doesn't work as intended ….. once they overloaded and fried nearly every wire.. that was a hell of a job to fix ..

Drink headcanons

Since the only biological bit of Tango left is brain, it's takes not much alcohol to put them on the goddamn floor, though without a body the worst hangover symptoms they can get are headache. The life support system is particularly good at filtering out poisons (ie. alcohol) so being the drunkard that he is Darren (one of the 2 robobrains that made tango) invented a bypass / injection system so they can all still drink haha. Tango doesn't like being vunerable so mostly avoids getting full drunk, but does like being a bit tipsy, especially if everyone else is drinking. Is a bloody menace drunk though, has forgotten they are armoured while very drunk at the party after taking the castle and tried to sleep in a bed breaking it (sorry Preston!). Also Tango is prickly at the best of times but hungover Tango is cranky af, even without facial expressions they are super expressive in body language and hungover Tango is enough to make people scatter haha.

Ridiculous headcanons

…… everything about tango is already kinda ridiculous lol but particularly that they have 0 lockpick ability. Not even novice locks. They are nimbler than normal power armour but it's still power armour. Good luck holding a bobby pin. Attempts usually result in rage and broken doors.

Also! If they think they are completely alone you may spot small robobrain style arms poking out of panels trying to fix / clean parts of themselves. (Especially the helmets visor, still needs to be clean for the sensors to see through em). Has spooked Hancock once, but he was high at the time so it's ok haha.

[bratshaws]

through the hourglass 323. brb x oc

a/n: happy crysler ;) (comments and reblogs are super welcome and encouraged!)

pairing: plus size!oc x rooster

warnings: none uwu

goodness gracious (pls read this one to know more what this fic is about!!)

chapter

1/

/316/317/318/319/320/321/322

(pls let me know if you want to be added to the taglist! )

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-

He checked the calendar on his phone and his deployment time was coming to an end. Sure, that with the whole thing now he might have to stay a bit longer, but he was almost home.

Fuck he missed Beatrice so much.

Maybe it was the stress of…everything,because if she was close by he could easily place his head on her lap and let her know what was bothering him in person, not on a phone. Rooster huffs, thumbing through his gallery to check every picture he had of her and the kids, he does not regret buying extra storage to keep all of these. 

In the quiet solitude of his temporary quarters, Rooster couldn't help but smile at the images of Beatrice and the kids. Their faces, frozen in laughter, joy, and the everyday moments of family life, offered a respite from the complexities of his mission.

 The distance only intensified the love and longing he felt for them.

A knock on his door interrupted his contemplation. Rooster looked up to find McAllister standing at attention. "Sir, Vice-Admiral Simpson requested your presence in the briefing room. It's about the latest findings in the investigation."

Rooster sighed, the bittersweet moment with the pictures fading as duty called. "I'll be there in a minute, McAllister."

As McAllister left, Rooster took a final glance at the pictures before locking his phone. The countdown to his return was tangible, and the prospect of being reunited with Beatrice and the kids only fueled his determination to bring the investigation to a resolution.

He wastes no time then and leaves his quarters. The briefing room was a controlled chaos of officers, maps, and data projections. Rooster took his seat at the table,placing his hands on the surface while Vice-Admiral Simpson stood at the front, ready to address the assembled officers.

"At ease, everyone," Vice-Admiral Simpson began, his gaze sweeping across the room. "We've gathered here to discuss the latest developments in the ongoing investigation brought to our attention by Lt.Bradshaw.”

"Our investigation has revealed that Lieutenant Mark was involved in clandestine activities that go beyond the scope of his official duties," Vice-Admiral Simpson stated, his tone measured. "The modifications to his jet were not just an upgrade in communication systems. There's evidence of advanced tracking capabilities, undisclosed software patches, and deviations from assigned flight routes."

The gravity of the situation hung in the air, and Rooster exchanged glances with McAllister, both understanding the implications.

Fuck

Cyclone  continued, "These actions raise concerns about the potential compromise of mission security and the unauthorized gathering of sensitive information. Lt. Bradshaw, please provide us with a concise summary of your findings so far."

Rooster stood, projecting the key details of the investigation on the screen. He outlined Mark's deviations during missions, the modifications to the avionics suite, and the discovery of key contacts linked to Mark's activities.

"As of now, we have identified connections that suggest Lieutenant Mark was involved in off-the-books operations, possibly gathering intel or engaging in activities outside the purview of the Navy," Rooster explained, his voice steady. "The advanced tracking capabilities indicate a deliberate effort to avoid detection, which raises questions about the nature of these operations."

Vice-Admiral Simpson nodded, acknowledging the gravity of the situation. "This has the potential to impact the squadron's reputation and national security. We need to act swiftly and decisively.  I’ve already…did my own part such as speaking with the Lt.’s relative, who, tried terribly to play as if Mark did nothing wrong."

“But,as you know,the Navy takes breaches of this nature seriously, and we will cooperate fully to get to the bottom of this. Lieutenant Bradshaw, Mark is probably aware…so Lt.I’d like for you to join me when I talk to him.”

Rooster nodded in acknowledgment of the order. "Understood, sir."

Vice-Admiral Simpson dismissed the officers after the briefing, instructing Rooster to meet him later for the discussion with Lieutenant Mark. Rooster took a moment to gather his thoughts before leaving the briefing room. The weight of responsibility pressed on him, and he had to inhale to calm himself down.

As Rooster headed to his temporary quarters to prepare for the upcoming conversation, he thought about the impact this could have on the squadron and the Navy as a whole. The reputation of the squadron was at stake, and the potential compromise of mission security raised alarms at the highest levels of command.

He paused at the door of his quarters, taking a deep breath before entering. The pictures of Beatrice and the kids greeted him when he unlocked his phone, a comforting reminder of what awaited him upon his return.

The investigation had entered a critical phase, and Rooster knew he had to tread carefully. 

He was nervous.

He couldn’t lie.

His mind raced through the key points he needed to address with Lieutenant Mark. The challenge was not only in extracting information but in understanding the motives behind Mark's actions. 

Once ready, Rooster made his way to meet Vice-Admiral Simpson. The atmosphere in the naval base was charged with so much tension, it crackled. The investigation had become a focal point, and rumors circulated among the officers.

No one had ever dealt with something like that, no one from his age forward because the older officers appeared - while upset- not at all surprised. He huffs through his nose, then rolled his neck as he walks forward.

Upon reaching the vice-admiral's office, Rooster was ushered in, finding Lieutenant Mark already present. The atmosphere in the room was strained, and Mark's expression revealed nothing for now.

Brave yet stupid, if Vice-Admiral Simpson’s expression was anything to go by. "Gentlemen, we find ourselves in a situation that demands clarity. Lieutenant Mark, you are aware of the nature of this meeting. I expect your full cooperation and transparency."

Mark shifted uncomfortably in his seat but nodded. "Yes, sir. I'll answer any questions you have."

He turned to Rooster. "Lieutenant Bradshaw, please sit down.”

Rooster took a seat, his gaze focused on Mark. The air in the room felt charged with tension, the impending confrontation palpable and Vice-Admiral Simpson wasted no time and delved into the heart of the matter.

"Lieutenant Mark, the evidence gathered during Lieutenant Bradshaw's investigation suggests unauthorized modifications to your jet and deviations from assigned mission routes. We need an explanation for these actions, and we need it now."

Mark hesitated, glancing between Rooster and Vice-Admiral Simpson. His eyes betrayed a mixture of unease and defiance. "Sir, I can explain. The modifications were necessary for a classified mission I was undertaking. I couldn't disclose the details due to the sensitive nature of the operation."

Vice-Admiral Simpson raised an eyebrow, skepticism evident in his expression. "Classified mission? Lieutenant, you are required to follow protocol and obtain proper authorization. These off-the-books modifications not only violate Navy regulations but also raise concerns about the compromise of mission security. And you already started wrong by lying to me. No mission,secret or not, goes without my say so.”

Rooster's gaze remained fixed on Mark, a quiet intensity in his eyes. He said nothing, only kept watching.

Mark swallowed, a bead of sweat forming on his forehead. "Sir, I understand the protocol, but this mission was different. It involved sensitive information that couldn't be shared even within the chain of command. I had to take matters into my own hands to ensure its success."

Vice-Admiral Simpson leaned back in his chair, his expression stern. "Lieutenant Mark, the Navy does not operate on individual whims. You had a responsibility to communicate the nature of your mission to the superiors who could evaluate its necessity and provide the required clearances. By bypassing this protocol, you've compromised not only the mission but the integrity of the entire squadron." he frowns “And Lt.Bradshaw is one of your superiors in this mission, did you hear anything about it,Rooster?”

“No,sir.”

Vice-Admiral Simpson nodded, his stern expression deepening. "Lieutenant, your actions have not only jeopardized the mission but the trust and cohesion within this squadron. These are serious offenses, and you will be held accountable. Now, I want the truth. What was the actual nature of this so-called classified mission?"

Mark shifted uncomfortably in his seat, his eyes darting between Rooster and Cyclone . The weight of the situation hung heavy in the room.

"I...I well," Mark stammered. "It's a matter of uh,security.”

Cyclone’s patience wore thin,and his blue eyes narrowed. "The consequences of your actions extend beyond personal discretion." he pauses, “...whatever your reason was, lying and obscuring it was does not help your situation.’

Rooster maintained his composed silence, observing Mark's feeble attempts to navigate through the web of lies he had spun. 

Vice-Admiral Simpson leaned forward, his voice cutting through the tension. "Lieutenant Halton, the Navy values trust and transparency. Your actions not only undermine the core principles of our organization but also endanger the lives of those around you. It's time for the truth. No more evasions."

Mark swallowed hard, the beads of sweat on his forehead multiplying. His eyes flickered to Rooster, a hint of desperation in the gaze that met Rooster's unwavering stare. Rooster felt a surge of frustration,but he remained quiet.

Cyclone continued, "I won't jump to conclusions, Lieutenant, but your actions demand accountability. Now, you have a choice. You can come clean, provide an honest account of your actions, and face the consequences within the framework of military justice. Or, you can continue down this path of deception, and the repercussions will be severe."

Mark hesitated, beads of sweat forming on his forehead. The room seemed to close in around him as the weight of his transgressions pressed down.

"Sir, I... I can't..." Mark's voice wavered, the façade crumbling. "I can't disclose the details. It's classified, and I can't risk—"

Vice-Admiral Simpson cut him off with a sharp gesture. "Enough, Lieutenant. Your refusal to cooperate and your attempts at secrecy have already painted a damning picture. If you choose not to provide a full and honest account, we'll proceed with a formal inquiry, and you will be held accountable for your actions."

“You CAN’T DO THIS!” Mark shouted “Do you NOT KNOW WHO MY AUNT IS??”

Silence.

That outburst wasn’t planned and…well, it slammed the nail on the coffin easily.

The room fell into a heavy silence after Mark's outburst. The mention of his aunt added a layer to the situation, but Vice-Admiral Simpson's expression remained unmoved. Rooster, though surprised by the revelation, tried his best to remain quiet himself.

Vice-Admiral Simpson spoke with a measured tone, his gaze unwavering. "Oh I am quite aware. Your aunt already tried to pull your ass off the fire."

Mark's face turned pale as he realized that his attempt to leverage his family connection had backfired. “What does he have that I don’t?” Mark snarled “His father was a pilot too! And yet–” the mention of Goose made Rooster’s jaw clench and he almost moved up to Mark to face him down but Cyclone held his hand up, “And Maverick! Maverick is his uncle! This is unfair treatment!”

Jesus Mark was a spoiled child.

The tension in the room escalated as Mark's outburst hung in the air. Cyclone, maintaining his calm demeanor, addressed Mark's accusations. "Lieutenant Halton, personal connections and family history do not exempt anyone from the rules and principles that govern the Navy. Your attempt to use your family's influence will not change the fact that you violated protocol and jeopardized the mission."

Mark's face contorted with anger, and he shot a venomous glance at Rooster. "You think you're so special, Rooster…you think no one knows? Without Maverick you’d be nothing. He protected you so much before,right?"

"Lieutenant Halton," Cyclone warns, “That is enough.”

Mark seethed with anger “You are just…less than me.” he growls, “My aunt is a vice-admiral and yet I’m still a lieutenant! Why?! How is that fair?!”

"Lieutenant Halton, your personal grievances and accusations are not relevant to the situation at hand," Vice-Admiral Simpson stated firmly. "We are here to address the breach of protocol and the potential threat to the mission–"

Mark's face contorted with a mix of anger and frustration. "This is unjust! How did he get this far without his uncle’s help?”

The realization weighs enough for him to stop talking.

Cyclone’s eyes narrow, “...what did you say?”

The room's tension was palpable as Mark's last words hung in the air. Cyclone's piercing gaze bore into Mark, a subtle warning in his eyes. 

Mark swallowed hard, realizing the gravity of his words. “I–”

Cyclone's voice cut through the silence like a blade. "Lieutenant Halton,are you saying your aunt helped you move through the ranks and your promotions are without merit?"

Mark shifted uncomfortably under Cyclone's gaze. His mind raced, searching for the right words that could possibly salvage his deteriorating situation.

"I didn't mean that," Mark stammered, attempting to backtrack. "I just meant that, well, people have connections, and it helps sometimes. I didn't mean to imply–"

Rooster turned to face him, finally speaking up  "Your aunt helped you move up." he says firmly, “That’s what you are saying.”

Rooster's words hung in the air, and Mark's attempt to backtrack faltered as the weight of the truth settled around him. He cast a furtive glance at Rooster, realizing that his own words had inadvertently exposed a well-guarded secret.

Cyclone's stern expression deepened, and the room seemed to shrink with the gravity of the revelation. The Vice-Admiral's gaze shifted between Mark and Rooster, assessing the situation before he spoke, his voice measured. "Lieutenant Halton,if your promotions were influenced by factors other than your merit and dedication, it undermines the integrity of our entire institution. Is it true?"

Mark, cornered and exposed, found himself at a crossroads. He was quiet.

Cyclone's gaze remained fixed on Mark. "Answer the question, Lieutenant."

Mark hesitated, the internal struggle evident on his face. Finally, he spoke in a subdued tone, "Yes, my aunt has helped me. She has connections, and she used them to ensure my career progressed smoothly."

The room fell into a heavy silence. Rooster's expression hardened, mouth falling open in surprise. Cyclone's face remained impassive, but there was a flicker of disappointment in his eyes.

"I see." Cyclone mutters, “...that explains a lot.”

Cyclone's gaze remained fixed on Mark, his disappointment evident. "Lieutenant Halton, the Navy values integrity and merit. Using personal connections to advance one's career goes against the principles we stand for."

Mark, realizing the gravity of his admission, attempted to salvage the situation. "But sir, my aunt j-just believed in my potential. She wanted to ensure I had opportunities—"

Cyclone cut him off with a stern look. "Belief in potential is one thing, Lieutenant. Undermining the fair and competitive nature of our organization is another. " he sighs “And this goes beyond the breach of protocol during the mission. We now have to reassess your role within the Navy, Lieutenant Halton. There will be an inquiry into the extent of the influence exerted on your career."

Rooster took the time that Mark was quiet to speak, “...did Miranda know?”

“What?”

His eye twitched,”Did Miranda,your wife, know about this?” he grinds his teeth, “Is that why she was saying shit to my wife?”

Mark's face turned a shade of pale that matched the tension in the room. The mention of Miranda,caught him off guard, and he fumbled for words. "Miranda didn't know the specifics," he admitted hesitantly. "I-I mean, not everyth–”

Rooster's expression hardened. "So, she did know, right?"

“W-Well–”

“And she was bothering Beatrice, my Bea, because she was also jealous of her? Or was she just helping your little scheme?”

Mark shifted uncomfortably in his seat, beads of sweat forming on his forehead as Rooster's questions pierced through the already tense atmosphere. "Miranda knew that my aunt was in a high-ranking position," Mark confessed, avoiding direct eye contact with either Rooster or Cyclone. "But I swear, I never asked Miranda to harass your wife. That wasn't part of the plan."

Rooster's jaw clenched, the muscles in his face tight with frustration. "Plan? You had a plan for this? To use your family connections to climb the ranks and then drag my wife into your mess?"

Mark stammered, his attempt at salvaging the situation crumbling. "I didn't mean to drag anyone into this. Miranda took it upon herself to –"

"To what? Make Bea's life miserable?" Rooster's voice rose, anger bubbling to the surface. "You can't just wash your hands of this, Mark. You initiated this chain of events, and now you have to face the consequences." he snarls, “...none messes with my girl,Mark. No one.”

The room seemed to tighten with every passing moment. Mark shifted uncomfortably in his seat, his eyes darting around the room, searching for a way out.Rooster's eyes narrowed as he leaned forward, his hands clenched into fists. 

Mark's attempts at an explanation faltered as Rooster continued, his anger escalating with each word. "You used your aunt's influence, and God knows what else. But my wife? She had nothing to do with your ambitions, and yet you let your plan spill into her life. You should’ve focused on me. I don’t give a shit if Miranda thought about this on her own, she.overstepped.the.line."

Cyclone interjected, his voice firm. "Lieutenant Halton,personal relationships have been affected, and that will also be considered in the inquiry." he blinks, “Now,anything else you want to add before,” he gestures to Rooster, “Lt.Bradshaw loses his temper even more?”

Mark's face turned from pale to flushed, caught in the crossfire of Rooster's wrath and Cyclone's stern reprimand. He swallowed hard, his attempt at composure faltering as he glanced between the two officers. "I... n-no sir I-"

“Wonderful. Rooster, please wait outside my office,yes?”

Rooster shot one final stern look at Mark before standing up and nodding at Cyclone. Without uttering a word, he left the room, the heavy door closing behind him with a resounding thud. 

He rubbed his eyes, then inhaled deeply. It was finally over, he hoped.

Jesus.

[jeridandridge]

Hey sweetheart! Can I request a oneshot where Melissa comes home from work and finds out that Sophia had a bad day (someone yelled at her or something like that) and Mel takes care of her and makes sure she is loved?

Im so happy people like Sophia 🥲 this is a quick little thing, trying to dip my toes back into fanfic.

A Long Day

Sophia is ready to go home. The ice machine had broken, the security system had a software malfunction, she sliced her palm open, and now one of the creepy regulars that can’t take a hint is bothering her. She’s happy there’s camera and her cousin is in the kitchen at least.

“Cmon, Sophie. You’ll give in eventually.” The slime ball smirks from across the counter door. He was an annoying guy that would come in and bother her every so often, ending with her uncle Eduardo kicking him out. Now that he’s gone the man doesn’t care.

Sophia rests her arms on the counter giving him a smile that dares him to try something.

“In your dreams. Now get outta here before I give my girlfriend a call.” She grins knowing that’ll get him to leave. Sure enough, the smirk on his face drops and he lets out a sigh. “You’ll say yes one day, De Luca.”

After dropping a bowl of cake icing not even ten minutes later, Sophia lets out a growl. “That’s it! I’m going home. Tony, lock up!” She tells her younger cousin as she throws her apron on the counter storming to the back office to get her things.

Unlocking the front door Melissa comes in with a smile setting her bags down after a long day at Abbott.

“Soph, are you awake?”

Kicking her boots off she flicks on the kitchen light knowing Sophia’s home from work by now. Her car is in the driveway, but the usual sounds of the record player going or the tv playing are no where to be heard.

Going up the stairs Melissa moves quietly through the hall opening the bedroom door. Seeing her girlfriend curled up underneath the fuzzy blanket she smiles softly moving to sit on the edge of the bed.

Sophia looks distressed even asleep, her brows crinkled and her lips in a pout. Melissa carefully lifts her bandaged hand growing concerned.

“Amore,” she hums running her fingers through brown curls. gently stroking her cheek with her thumb she leans in kissing her forehead.

Sophia stirs with a grumble, smiling when she realizes her girlfriend is home.

“Nice nap, amore?” Melissa chuckles.

“I needed it. I had a day from hell.”

“I guessed that,” she nods carefully running her finger over the bandage. “What happened?”

“Oh that? That’s the least of my issues from today.” Sophia huffs sitting up revealing one of Melissa’s Abbott sweatshirts.

“After the water ice machine broke and the security system called the emergency service for the company, I broke a plate. Me being me I picked up the shards instead of sweeping.”

“You gotta be careful, hon. You’re always movin too fast in there.” Melissa hums.

“I didn’t even tell you what made me leave early.” She smiles, “but you gotta promise you’re not gonna leave me and commit a crime.”

Melissa quirks a brow. “Depends what it is.”

“Jackass came in again but I scared him pretty good.”

“That guy came in again?” Melissa fumes sitting up straighter. Melissa had the unfortunate pleasure of meeting the man Sophia dubbed as jackass, early on in their relationship he decided to come in one day while Melissa was picking up an order. It took everything Sophia had to hold Mel back.

“I told him I’d call you up there. Pretty sure he peed a little.” She jokes.

Melissa rolls her eyes reaching up to cup her cheek. “I’m sorry you had such a bad day, Tesoro. I’ll make us some dinner and we can relax.”

“That’s sounds nice, gimme a kiss first.” She beams pulling the redhead in closer. When their lips meet in a sweet kiss she lets out a content sigh as Melissas fingers move through her hair.

Reluctantly pulling back Melissa pecks her lips once more with a smile.

“Cmon, sweatshirt thief.”

[detachedminxsfics]

System Error

Characters: JD Richter x Detective F!Reader

Summary: You take on a homicide case and find that you're not as alone as you thought you were at the crime scene.

Word count: 5.1K+

Warnings: NSFW - Vaginal sex, riding, drunk sex, mixing business with pleasure

A/N: I wrote this at 2am so I was too tired to check/revise for mistakes, so apologies to anybody who reads this lmao. Also I'm only on like ep 9 atm so I wrote him as best as I could. :)

Ten k. That was what someone was willing to pay to solve a homicide, and you'd be damned if you weren't gonna take that. Vee, your computer system responsible for receiving all jobs for the patrol special had come to life with the alert of an incoming job. A suspected homicide down fifth avenue, a man was found murdered in his own home. There was no way of telling whether it was gonna be a clean-cut case until you could see the crime scene for yourself, and with Vee's timer slowly chipping at your twenty seconds to make your decision you hurried off for your shoes and sighed.

"I accept."

The computer processed your response, and then the job was yours.

"Would you like a partner?"

You laughed a little, not that that would amuse the software.

"No, Vee. I never do."

You finalised zipping up your boots, standing up and making your over to where you'd strewn your jacket, throwing it over your shoulders.

"Sending crime scene location to your nav, please confirm receipt."

The screen lit up with a full address, and your eyes wandered over it for a moment.

"Confirm."

The criminal activity matrix hibernated once more, and that was it. That was your night planned out. The drive wasn't too long as the location wasn't awfully far, and before you knew it you were parked outside, staring over at the apartment block in front. There was a car parked relatively close to yours, a jeep positioned almost as though its driver had the same intentions as you, but you swept away the thought. This was a complex of many residents, albeit rich ones, and that could be any one of the resident's vehicles. Though you weren't sure why one of them would own such a vehicle, and a muddy, not so maintained one at that. You stepped out of your car and made your way into the building, bypassing the complex's security systems until you reached the floor you needed. Sixth, apartment number 154. Locating was the easiest part. After overriding the electronic lock system on the front door you pushed it open, gun raised vigilantly. It had happened a few times before, the culprit hangs around, or tries to make their way back to cover their tracks after the initial body discovery. Could never be too careful. You were cautious as to the volume of your steps, nevertheless, one creaky floorboard gave way to a whole load of ruckus in an entirely silent room. If anyone was here, they'd surely know your whereabouts by now.

"Don't move a muscle, hands up and drop it."

A man's voice sounded from behind you, your back to him as you kept your gun gripped in your hand, merely lowering your arm and looking straight ahead of you.

"I've done a lot of cases, but a murderer employing cop lingo is a first."

Something wasn't right, and you hoped that what you were implying was telling enough.

"You're a cop?" He questioned with a tinge of skepticism.

You turned to face him now, not entirely convinced that he would still shoot you. He seemed to tense a little once you did. Well, what a surprisingly pleasant sight to behold. He looked the middle-aged whiskey-drinking type, and the matte leather jacket did little to ease your idealised first impression.

"Patrol special, and you're on my crime scene."

You tucked your gun into your waistband as opposed to its usual holster and glanced up at him, he looked wildly offended, judging by the look of disbelief splayed across his face.

"Your crime scene? Not only was I here first, but this is most certainly my case."

Concurrently, you pulled your remote matrix systems from your pockets, eyes locked with one another as you unlocked your devices.

"11964, passkey buffalo jump." He muttered his security details.

"3273, passkey angel wings." You did the same.

Simultaneously, you turned the devices to face one another, the synchronously timed confusion etching across your features priceless. Both screens displayed the same job, everything down to the victim details and case ID, meaning the two of you were most certainly in the right place. Defeated, you both lowered your devices and tucked them back to where they belonged, and your newly appointed comrade lowered his gun.

"Must've been a system error, a malfunction, or something. You pick a partner?" He asked.

You shook your head.

"Nope, I don't work so well with others."

"Likewise."

A standoff. You had two choices. The first consisted of familiarising yourselves with one another, considering you were about to be partners in this case. The other? Race him. Bounty hunters had done it before, competing with one another for who would score the payout, and solve the case first. Though, he didn't seem like the competitive type.

"Truce, and I suppose we get the ten thousand each. If not? Five k split. Sound fair?" As generous an offer as you could give, and if he denied, honour be damned.

You extended your hand with a moderate amount of composure, and his brows furrowed as he worked the idea through his head. He mulled on it for a moment or two, and then his hand closed around yours, shaking hands as you established the grounds for your truce.

"JD Richter."

You tilted your head slightly, and a small smile spread across your lips.

"Cute." You muttered offhandedly, heading off towards the bedroom.

He followed after you.

"Not gonna give me your name?" JD pried.

You stepped into the master bedroom, surveying the room for anything misplaced or unusual, practically ignoring him.

"Need to know basis, or you can look me up. File's a little wild, but a guy like you might get a kick out of it."

You rounded the bed to discover the pool of blood staining the off-white carpet, bending down to get a closer look. Purposefully, you ignored the sounds of a scanner from behind you as he obviously looked you up, the repetitive beeping that subsequently ceased indicating that he had found it.

"You're a busy girl. A repeat offender for petty theft and battery, served some time. Then you went straight, did some time in the force. Now your solo as of four months ago. You get cold feet?"

You let a small giggle slip, still focusing your attention on the clue right under your nose.

"No, I got bored. Needed something a little more thrilling."

It was true. A position in generalised law enforcement just wasn't good enough for a thrill seeker such as yourself, not when you could be working with homicide cases and collecting mass payouts like this. Bounty hunting was where your heart lie. Your head wandered down to just beside the blood, careful not to contaminate the evidence, and pinched to gather something from the carpet. You raised and turned your hand over to look at your fingertip, seeing as you had collected some kind of paint chip. Or...

"Killer's female. Probably early to mid-twenties."

You rose to your feet with the nail polish chip still laid on your fingertip, careful not to drop it.

"What makes you so sure?"

You extended your hand to show him the speck of rouge varnish.

"Nail polish. Chips off sometimes, and the choice of colour just screams twenties. I have a knack for this sorta thing."

His brows were raised, and he seemed impressed.

"Okay, you're quick. Anything else?"

JD was willing to see how far he could push your investigative skills, and whether he could make you stutter. You wouldn't fold.

"The trail of sole indents in the carpet. Heels, judging by the dimension, stiletto. And a guy as rich as this? Louboutins, perhaps. He was probably well acquainted with his killer."

He smiled, a genuine and fascinated one.

"Well, alright. You suggestin' we got a femme fatale on our hands?"

You pulled your phone from your pocket to take a photo of the chip, making sure that you focused it so it would be clear enough that you could use it later.

"I am. They're my specialty." You finished your sentence by flicking the polish back onto the carpeted floor, your eyes boring into his as you silently urged him to detail the next move.

You knew, but it was his turn to be put on the spot.

"So, killer had to be close. We do some digging, social media, anything that could allude to a girlfriend or some lady friend of his, and then we narrow it down." When he stopped your brows raised expectantly, you hadn't expected him to finish his sentence so prematurely.

He looked bewildered by the way your expression urged him to continue, and you playfully rolled your eyes.

"Then, we make a house call. I'll see if I can find some matches for the polish, and we search for it. With varnish that old its probably wiped off with all the scrubbing she did to clean her hands of blood, so focusing on whoever has painted fingernails is pointless."

He nodded, feigning a sense of 'I knew that', and his facade of confidence brought a smile to your lips. Clearly, he was too confident to admit that he was out of his depth, and without you, this case would have been a whole lot harder.

"With that outta the way, how about drinks? My place, considering we're buddies an' all." JD mused with a grin of his own.

"A man after my own heart."

The two of you exited the crime scene, taking the elevator down to the lobby and making your way over to your car. You watched as JD split off to return to his vehicle, the jeep that you'd had suspicions of before. Your gut was as remarkable as usual, you hadn't lost your touch. Starting up your car you followed his vehicle, tailing him all the way to his place. Eventually, he pulled off the main road and onto a side road that led right out into a relatively private and modest one-floor home. Taking your keys from the ignition you pushed your car door open and stepped out, JD was already halfway up the steps to the porch as he had arrived a little before you by the time you made it to his front yard. He unlocked his front door and pushed it open, leaving it ajar so you could make your way inside. You did, shutting it behind you. For what it was worth his home seemed, simple. It was quaint, and looked as though it belonged to a person who was neither struggling to make ends meet nor rolling cash, he was just that middle ground of comfort.

"What's your poison?" He called out, and you made your way over to his sofa, slipping your jacket from your shoulders.

"Whiskey."

Truthfully, you didn't give a shit. Whatever got you waking up and not knowing anything that had happened the night before was your drink of choice, something to get you blacked out. He emerged from the kitchen holding two glasses and a bottle, setting them down on the coffee table. Then, he settled down beside you, twisting the cap as he readied himself to pour your drinks.

"So, JD, how'd you end up in this business?"

He poured the liquor from the bottle into each glass, the sound of running liquid filling your ears.

"Dishonourable discharge. This seemed like the next best thing, and it pays well enough."

You nodded taking the glass from the table after he slid it over to you. He took his own, nonchalantly holding it as he turned to face you. You did the same, apart from taking a rather generous swig of yours.

"Are you married?"

It was personal for someone you had known for an hour tops, but moving fast seemed to be the theme for this evening. His eyes grew a little solemn.

"Divorced. I like the crazy ones, I guess that's just my cross to bear." JD quipped.

You didn't smile until towards the end of his sentence, when even his eyes lit up a little. You threw the last of the liquor back and set down the empty glass.

"Figures."

Picking up the bottle you tipped it and filled your empty glass, if tonight didn't leave you with gaps in your memory you'd know you haven't done it right. JD seemed to pick up on what your intentions were, and he emptied the contents of his glass into his throat, setting it down and taking the bottle once you were done with it.

"What about you?"

You stalled for a moment, and then realised that he was referring to whether you were romantically entangled or not.

"No, not for me. I've had a few, partners, but the relationship's always strictly bedroom only."

A sip this time, fearing that emptying this glass would further the already present effects of this impromptu truth serum, and you'd spill far more than you intended to give away.

"Why don't you stay here for the night? We can start in the morning, and that way you don't get pulled over for a drink driving charge."

If you were fancy enough in this modern world of technological advancement you could afford one of those self-driving automated cars, but you were not. Neither was JD. Staying here didn't seem like such a bad idea, especially not when your company was so handsome. God, how much have you had to drink?

"Okay, hotshot. I'll stay."

JD was smiling as he raised his glass, watching you as you too brought the rim of the glass to your lips. It was gonna be a long night.

Minutes turned into hours, and by the time you looked back to assess the amount of whiskey left, the bottle was near enough empty. You were screwed. Now both severely inebriated you were huddled pretty close to one another, your knee brushing his thigh as his arm rested on the top of the sofa, supporting your head.

"Okay, okay, what's the like most craziest shit you've ever seen on a case?" It sounded a lot more concise in your head, but you mumbled it once it came out of your mouth.

JD chuckled at your initial incoherence, even in spite of the fact that he could translate your drunken speech perfectly. His eyes veered off toward the ceiling as he sighed thoughtfully. A beat passed.

"There was this guy that just lost it and offed his whole family. The kids, the wife, all of 'em. Found him red-handed, blood everywhere, and the guy looked as though he didn't feel even the slightest bit of remorse. Definitely not the worst of the things I've seen, but that's what you get serving in kuwait." Though notably buzzed, he'd levelled his tone to a more serious note out of respect for what he was discussing.

You frowned, having not expected something so grim.

"Well, shit. I was gonna say something stupid like the perp I caught because she left her bra on the floor of the crime scene, and I'm pretty good at guessing bra sizes. Ended up tackling her in a bar." Your more witty and comedic story was quick to lighten the mood, and JD idly rested a hand on your thigh.

Through the haze of intoxication, his touch was electrifying. You attempted to repress your urge to faintly quiver from his contact, unsure whether you were successful or not.

"Why is it that all the good looking women are crazy?"

You scoffed with false offense, mockingly hovering a hand over your heart.

"I'm not crazy, just ambitious. And a little impulsive."

His face moved closer to yours, the hand beginning to trace your thigh, fingertips teasing the hem of your skirt. In his venture, his fingers lightly grazed over the handle of the gun you kept holstered beneath your skirt, and you supposed the firearm didn't exactly help you plead your case of complete sanity. The skirt was already hiked from the way you were sitting, the sight of your panties obscured only by the fact that your thighs were pressed together.

"Oh yeah, how so?"

JD was teasing you, crossing the usual line of a professional and formal partner dynamic. And in a way, the fact that you admitted to having such frequent casual sex was incredibly appealing.

"Like this."

You whispered as you leant in, looking into his eyes for a moment before you pressed your lips against his. It was slow, and he groaned as though he wasn't expecting it. Still stealing one another's breath you climbed onto his lap, bent knees resting on either side of his hips as you slipped your tongue into his mouth, and he accepted it without the slightest hesitation. Eventually, JD managed to gather enough control to pull himself back, his hands on either side of your face as he attempted to blink through the haze of intoxication.

"Okay, you're not thinking straight. And frankly, neither am I. You sure you wanna mix business with pleasure?"

You gave a sultry smile, slightly tilting your head as you reached down and palmed the bulge that had formed at his crotch.

"What, like you haven't before?"

You gave no time for a response as your mouth was on his again, and he drunkenly succumbed to your advances. It was a little messy, intentional and yet awkward movements as you wrestled off one another's clothes and allowed the discarded garments to form a pile on the floor. In time your panties were all that was left, and they didn't last much longer. JD had undone his pants and pushed everything down to his ankles, including his boxers, leaving him nude beneath you as you worked off your thin and lacy underwear. You tossed it aside once it dangled loosely from one of your ankles and placed your hands on JD's shoulders, supporting yourself as you hovered above him, your hair cascading over your face. Simply, he raised one of his hands to cup one side of your face whilst the other settled on your hip. He gently urged you to lean down to press your lips against his, lining himself up and pulling you down onto him just as your lips meet. Your rather surprised and immodest moan bled into your heated kiss, and you can feel the noticeable sensation of fullness once you're fully settled down onto him. It's incredible. You pull back just to catch your breath.

"Fuck, holy shit JD." Is all you can manage as he uses his remaining grip on your curvature to ease you up again, just enough, before bringing you back down onto him.

Your hands fall from his shoulders to slide down his bare and moderately hairy chest, and your mouth falls open as you feel all of him, again. JD all the while just seems rather amused, the liquid courage leaving him a little haughty.

"C'mon, you made the move. Show me how ambitious you really are, partner."

The challenge was enough for you to somewhat clear your head, and you narrowed your eyes slightly. Luckily for him, you were pretty determined, and quite the competitor. You lifted yourself before coming down pretty hard, gradually setting a relentless and gratifying pace that had both of you letting the most foul of sounds tumble from your mouths. Your half-lidded eyes were fixed on him as you rolled your hips, drinking in the stray strands of hair that hung from the way he'd neatly styled his hair, and the way his lips parted to let out small, shaky breaths. Teasingly, you feel JD's fingers dig into the top of one of your thighs, the other still caressing your hip. He wouldn't utter a word, but the way you looked bouncing on top of him like this? You were fucking beautiful. All he could do was silently thank the system for one of the best errors of his life, the light of his eyes the only indicator of the way he was appreciating you. Your moans grew louder, a string of crude and unrestrained whimpers that filled the air of his quiet, one-story home. Knowing you were close only urged him to move his own hips in time with yours, the added stimulation only worsening the pleasure brimming in the pit of your stomach. As you gave one final roll of your hips before collapsing on top of him JD followed shortly after, twitching beneath you as your head fell into the crook of his neck. His guttural groans resounded just beside your ear, a tune that told you that was a job well done, and your ambition was pretty clear. Inebriated, overstimulated, and with your mind seemingly unable to concentrate on anything other than the pitch black behind your eyelids, you were done for the night. Everything after that gets suitably fuzzy. Your vision's vivid at various different points, but from what you can gather judging by the way the ground suddenly grew farther away, and the feeling of overall weightlessness, JD carried you to bed.

The sun beamed over your face, a light seemingly unavoidable, even despite your blissfully closed eyelids.

"Rise and shine." Spoke an enthusiastic voice, and you peeked your eyes open to look at your talking and oddly human alarm clock.

Reluctantly, you opened your eyes all the way, momentarily shielding them from the harshness of the light and leaning up.

"God, this feels like shit."

Your head was pounding, temples seemingly throbbing as everything got a whole lot louder, and brighter. His understanding but partially taunting chuckle prompted him into offering you the only help that he could think of.

"Coffee? I'm on my second, we drank a lot."

"You're telling me. Yeah, whatever."

JD headed off towards the kitchen to fix you your hangover remedy, and you managed to haul yourself from the bed in search of your clothes. He'd already found his, and you walked out to the lounge to kneel on the floor and scramble to retrieve yours. Having recovered your underwear and your skirt you continued to search for the rest of it, completely ignoring the steps that had come from the kitchen and halted just in front of you. JD was watching you, hung over, nude, and crawling across his living room floor.

"I gotta say, you could stay like that. We just might not get much work done."

Your head snapped up to award him a warning glare, what you had managed to find of your clothes tucked under your arm.

"Behave." Blunt, but candid enough to rip off the band-aid with the realisation that you two didn't have time for this, and you were going to need to focus.

JD raised his free hand in surrender, and you proceeded to recover the rest of your garments, standing to your feet and throwing them on once successful. Meanwhile, he set the coffee mug down on the table and scurried off to do something else, and you sat down on the couch finally fully clothed. When JD returned he set his laptop down on the table and offhandedly gestured for you to open it, so you did. He sat down beside you with a cluster of papers in hand, leaning over and keying in his password when the device prompted him to do so.

"I'll leave the socials to you. I've got his phone records and transcripts here to go over. Gonna look for any abnormalities and calls that went out the night he died."

"Got it." You muttered offhandedly, already invested in the task at hand.

It took maybe an hour flat, and you'd pinned everything. Rich aristocrat types such as this guy were all too flashy, usually gaining online traction for their repeated bragging of all their financial assets, so he was hardly difficult to find. Then came another often flaunted asset, women. There were many, but a handful appeared more than once, and you had a hunch for this particular girl. You pieced together a list of your most notable suspects and then cross-referenced it with JD's list of frequent callers considering you'd already profiled most of the girls, including their mobile phone numbers.

"Her." You muttered, tapping your pencil on your personal favourite.

JD glanced at you with a considerable amount of apprehension, but the confidence in your eyes was persuasive and convincing.

"Okay, you got an address?"

You sure did. The next few minutes consisted of piling into JD's jeep, and you were pulling into the drive of your suspect's home before you knew it. Judging by the look of her home she was, comfortable. Not the kind of level of wealth of your entrepreneurial victim, but enough. Houses like these had good, advanced security systems, but detectives were able to bypass pretty much anything, especially in a case like this. Politely, you both stepped out of the car and made your way to the front door first, knocking and letting a beat pass. When you received no response it became pretty conclusive that she wasn't home, which was perfect, really. JD tampered with the security system and you were able to get her front door open with little to no fuss, you stepping in first to get a brief look at her place. You deduced the room most likely to be the bedroom and made a beeline for it, barely able to contain yourself in your desire to search for the infamous red polish. JD trailed behind you, his footsteps closely following yours as you stepped into the bedroom and began to survey her dresser. Eventually, your eyes landed on a slightly scattered heap of different nail varnish, your eyes settling on all of the red ones in particular. Whilst you sifted through the nail polish and attempted to match it with the sample on your phone JD discovered the shoe rack and began to look for any stiletto-heeled shoes, more to be busy with something more than anything. Finally, one particular shade of red came ablaze with the notification of a match.

"Bingo. Chanel too, classy girl."

You spun to face JD with a smile of triumph, and his own smile seemed to resemble a similar sense of premature victory.

"Perfect. Now time to go pay our little femme fatale a visit."

JD exited the bedroom to make his way back to the jeep, and you stuffed the nail polish in your pocket. It was evidence, and besides, red was your colour. Unexpectedly, JD had been waiting for you out in the hallway, and his features looked so serious. You approached him a little concerned, considering you had solved the case after all, and he'd been over the moon only a few seconds ago.

"Look I uh, it's been nice with you. Working, with you." JD cleared his throat after his slight mishap in specifying the enjoyable part of his time with you, but your eyes drifted elsewhere, caught up with the movement over his shoulder.

"Duck!"

It took him a moment, but he eventually caught on and leaned over just as you did, narrowly missing the blade that was hurled toward his head. It passed over you both and embedded in the wall behind you, and you were quick to pull your pistol from the holster beneath your skirt and aim, reflexively squeezing the trigger and firing a shot into the woman's leg. It was the only reason you wore this damn thing, and it often came in handy. She cried out crumpling to the floor clutching her newly wounded knee, and you heaved a sigh of relief. You were still processing how quickly you had acted as JD made his way over to her and restrained her into handcuffs, affirming the capture of your killer. Some not-so-pleasant words were exchanged in the moments before the authorities came to collect her, but you hardly paid much attention when you received your payout of ten thousand dollars.

"You too?" You asked JD, who was also staring down at his matrix.

"Yep, ten thousand each, a pretty hefty sum for a job like this."

It was. But you were most definitely not going to complain, a system error meant a financial one, and you'd earned that money fair and square. The case was closed, and you both stood there for a moment or two, unsure who should make the first move.

"We should probably get going." You broke the silence, and JD nodded in agreement.

Foolishly, you almost hoped you two would have gotten to spend a little more time together. He was good company, an adequately competent partner, and from what you could remember, good in bed. Nevertheless, JD still had to drive you back to his since you'd left your car, and so you followed him out to the jeep. The drive was silent, almost in contemplation. You'd gone from avoiding a knife meant for the back of JD's head to the thought of driving home and getting into your bed, a significant turn of events. The contrast played havoc with your gradually subsiding adrenaline. Even through your intense thought, you did notice when the vehicle came to a stop. You unclipped your seatbelt and stepped out, and JD came around from the other side of the car. For a moment you dared think he was as disappointed about having to part ways as you were, but neither of you was the cooperative type.

"Well, thanks for, last night. And being such a great partner." You leaned forward and planted an intimate but casual kiss on his stubble-filled cheek, barely sparing the time to acknowledge his reaction afterwards as you made way for your car.

You'd made it one step when his arm reached out and carefully snatched you back, spinning you back to face him.

"Wait, you should take my number. Just in case."

You raised one brow, a smile playing on your lips from the tone of his request.

"In case of?"

He thought for a moment, lips forming his own impish smile.

"You never know, system errors."

Yeah, system errors. At least that was how you justified it when you exchanged numbers. Finally, it was time for you to take your leave. JD was halfway up the steps to his front porch when you rolled down the window and called out from your car, foot angled readily to bolt out of his driveway.

"I left my bra on your bed, by the way!"

You were gone before he could even spare you a glance.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Netflix wants to chop down your family tree

Netflix has unveiled the details of its new anti-password-sharing policy, detailing a suite of complex gymnastics that customers will be expected to undergo if their living arrangements trigger Netflix’s automated enforcement mechanisms:

https://thestreamable.com/news/confirmed-netflix-unveils-first-details-of-new-anti-password-sharing-measures

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/02/nonbinary-families/#red-envelopes

Netflix says that its new policy allows members of the same “household” to share an account. This policy comes with an assumption: that there is a commonly understood, universal meaning of “household,” and that software can determine who is and is not a member of your household.

This is a very old corporate delusion in the world of technology. In the early 2000s, I spent years trying to bring some balance to an effort at DVB, whose digital television standards are used in most of the world (but not the USA) when they rolled out CPCM, a DRM system that was supposed to limit video-sharing to a single household.

Their term of art for this was the “authorized domain”: a software-defined family unit whose borders were privately negotiated by corporate executives from media companies, broadcasters, tech and consumer electronics companies in closed-door sessions all around the world, with no public minutes or proceedings.

https://onezero.medium.com/the-internet-heist-part-iii-8561f6d5a4dc

These guys (they were nearly all guys) were proud of how much “flexibility” they’d built into their definition of “household.” For example, if you owned a houseboat, or a luxury car with seatback displays, or a summer villa in another country, the Authorized Domain would be able to figure out how to get the video onto all those screens.

But what about other kinds of families? I suggested that one of our test cases should be a family based in Manila: where the dad travels to remote provinces to do agricultural labor; the daughter is a nanny in California; and the son is doing construction work in the UAE. This suggestion was roundly rejected as an “edge case.”

Of course, this isn’t an edge case. There are orders of magnitude more people whose family looks like this than there are people whose family owns a villa in another country. Owning a houseboat or a luxury car makes you an outlier. Having an itinerant agricultural breadwinner in your family does not.

But everyone who is in the room when a cartel draws up a standard definition of what constitutes a household is almost certainly drawn from a pool that is more likely to have a summer villa than a child doing domestic work or construction labor half a world away. These weirdos, so dissimilar from the global majority, get to define the boxes that computers will shove the rest of the world into. If your family doesn’t look like their family, that’s tough: “Computer says no.”

One day at a CPCM meeting, we got to talking about the problem of “content laundering” and how the way to prevent it would be to put limits on how often someone could leave a household and join another one. No one, they argued, would ever have to change households every week.

I put my hand up and said, “What about a child whose divorced parents share custody of her? She’s absolutely going to change households every week.” They thought about it for a moment, then the rep from a giant IT company that had recently been convicted of criminal antitrust violations said, “Oh, we can solve that: we’ll give her a toll-free number to call when she gets locked out of her account.”

That was the solution they went with. If you are a child coping with the dissolution of your parents’ marriage, you will have the obligation to call up a media company every month — or more often — and explain that Mummy and Daddy don’t love each other any more, but can I please have my TV back?

I never forgot that day. I even wrote a science fiction story about it called (what else?) “Authorized Domain”:

https://craphound.com/news/2011/10/31/authorised-domain/

I think everyone understood that this was an absurd “solution,” but they had already decided that they were going to complete the seemingly straightforward business of defining a category like “household” using software, and once that train left the station, nothing was going to stop it.

This is a recurring form of techno-hubris: the idea that baseline concepts like “family” have crisp definitions and that any exceptions are outliers that would never swallow the rule. It’s such a common misstep that there’s a whole enre* called “Falsehoods Programmers Believe About ______”:

https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood

In that list: names, time, currency, birthdays, timezones, email addresses, national borders, nations, biometrics, gender, language, alphabets, phone numbers, addresses, systems of measurement, and, of course, families. These categories are touchstones in our everyday life, and we think we know what they mean — but then we try to define them, and the list of exceptions spirals out into a hairy, fractal infinity.

Historically, these fuzzy categorical edges didn’t matter so much, because they were usually interpreted by humans using common sense. My grandfather was born “Avrom Doctorovitch” (or at least, that’s one way to transliterate his name, which was spelled in a different alphabet, but which was also transliterating his first name from yet another alphabet). When he came to Canada as a refugee, his surname was anglicized to “Doctorow.” Other cousins are “Doctorov,” “Doctoroff,” and “Doktorovitch.”

Naturally, his first name could have been “Abraham” or “Abe,” but his first employer (a fellow Eastern European emigre) decided that was too ethnic and in sincere effort to help him fit in, he called my grandfather “Bill.” When my grandfather attained citizenship, his papers read “Abraham William Doctorow.” He went by “Abe,” “Billy,” “Bill,” “William,” “Abraham” and “Avrom.”

Practically, it didn’t matter that variations on all of these appeared on various forms of ID, contracts, and paperwork. His reparations check from the German government had a different variation from the name on the papers he used to open his bank account, but the bank still let him deposit it.

All of my relatives from his generation have more than one name. Another grandfather of mine was born “Aleksander,” and called “Sasha” by friends, but had his name changed to “Seymour” when he got to Canada. His ID was also a mismatched grab-bag of variations on that theme.

None of this mattered to him, either. Airlines would sell him tickets and border guards would stamp his passport and rental agencies would let him drive away in cars despite the minor variations on all his ID.

But after 9/11, all that changed, for everyone who had blithely trundled along with semi-matching names across their official papers and database entries. Suddenly, it was “computer says no” everywhere you turned, unless everything matched perfectly. There was a global rush for legal name-changes after 9/11 — not because people changed their names, but because people needed to perform the bureaucratic ritual necessary to have the name they’d used all along be recognized in these new, brittle, ambiguity-incinerating machines.

For important categories, ambiguity is a feature, not a bug. The fact that you can write anything on an envelope (including a direction to deliver the letter to the granny flat over the garage, not the front door) means that we don’t have to define “address” — we can leave it usefully hairy around the edges.

Once the database schema is formalized, then “address” gets defined too — the number of lines it can have, the number of characters each line can have, the kinds of characters and even words (woe betide anyone who lives in Scunthorpe).

If you have a “real” address, a “real” name, a “real” date of birth, all of this might seem distant to you. These “edge” cases — seasonal agricultural workers, refugees with randomly assigned “English” names — are very far from your experience.

That’s true — for now (but not forever). The “Shitty Technology Adoption Curve” describes the process by which abusive technologies work their way up the privilege gradient. Every bad technological idea is first rolled out on poor people, refugees, prisoners, kids, mental patients and other people who can’t push back.

Their bodies are used to sand the rough edges and sharp corners off the technology, to normalize it so that it can climb up through the social ranks, imposed on people with more and more power and influence. 20 years ago, if you ate your dinner under an always-on #CCTV, it was because you were in a supermax prison. Today, it’s because you bought a premium home surveillance system from Google, Amazon or Apple.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/29/impunity-corrodes/#arise-ye-prisoners

The Netflix anti-sharing tools are designed for rich people. If you travel for business and stay in the kind of hotel where the TV has its own Netflix client that you can plug your username and password into, Netflix will give you a seven-day temporary code to use.

But for the most hardcore road-warriors, Netflix has thin gruel. Unless you connect to your home wifi network every 31 days and stream a show, Netflix will lock out your devices. Once blocked, you have to “contact Netflix” (laughs in Big Tech customer service).

Why is Netflix putting the screws to its customers? It’s part of the enshittification cycle, where platform companies first allocate surpluses to their customers, luring them in and using them as bait for business customers. Once they turn up, the companies reallocate surpluses to businesses, lavishing them with low commissions and lots of revenue opportunities. And once they’re locked in, the company starts to claw back the surpluses for itself.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

Remember when Netflix was in the business of mailing red envelopes full of DVDs around the country? That was allocating surpluses to users. The movie companies hated this, viewed it as theft — a proposition that was at least as valid as Netflix’s complaints about password sharing, but every pirate wants to be an admiral, and when Netflix did it to the studios, that was “progress,” but when you do it to Netflix, that’s theft.

Then, once Netflix had users locked in and migrated to the web (and later, apps), it shifted surpluses to studios, paying fat licensing fees to stream their movies and connect them to a huge audience.

Finally, once the studios were locked in, Netflix started to harvest the surplus for its shareholders: raising prices, lowering streaming rates, knocking off other studios’ best performing shows with in-house clones, etc. Users’ surpluses are also on the menu: the password “sharing” that let you define a household according to your family’s own idiosyncratic contours is unilaterally abolished in a quest to punish feckless Gen Z kids for buying avocado toast instead of their own Netflix subscriptions.

Netflix was able to ignore the studios’ outraged howls when it built a business by nonconsenually distributing their products in red envelopes. But now that Netflix has come for your family, don’t even think about giving Netfix some of what it gave to the MPAA.

As a technical matter, it’s not really that hard to modify Netflix’s app so that every stream you pull seems to come from your house, no matter where you are. But doing so would require reverse-engineering Netflix’s app, and that would violate Section 1201 of the DMCA, the CFAA, and eleventy-seven other horrible laws. Netflix’s lawyers would nuke you until the rubble bounced.

When Netflix was getting started, it could freely interoperate with the DVDs that the studios had put on the market. It could repurpose those DVDs in ways that the studios strenuously objected to. In other words, Netfix used adversarial interoperability (AKA Competitive Compatibility or ComCom) to launch its business:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability

Today, Netflix is on the vanguard of the war to abolish adversarial interop. They helped lead the charge to pervert W3C web-standards, creating a DRM video standard called EME that made it a crime to build a full-featured browser without getting permission from media companies and restricting its functionality to their specifications:

https://blog.samuelmaddock.com/posts/the-end-of-indie-web-browsers/

When they used adversarial interoperability to build a multi-billion-dollar global company using the movie studios’ products in ways the studios hated, that was progress. When you define “family” in ways that makes Netflix less money, that’s felony contempt of business model.

[Image ID: A Victorian family tree template populated by tintypes of old-timey people. In the foreground stands a menacing, chainsaw-wielding figure, his face obscured by a hoodie. The blade of the chainsaw is poised to chop down the family tree. A Netflix 'N' logo has been superimposed over the man's face.]

[thegoldheartlocketandkey-blog]

911 Spoilers Season 4: You’ve been warned. 😅 Buddie Rewatch

Episode 6: Jinx

Buck has a clip board. Going thru a list of supplies, making sure the engine is stocked. Buck calls out the item, Eddie is grabbing the item and confirming. Buck pausing and having Eddie correct his “yep” to a “check.”

Eddie has a slight grin, showing mild annoyance, but playing along with Buck as he continues to say “Check”

Hen and Chim walking over, Hen asking who gave Buck a clip board.

Buck tells Hen not to warry, he is kinder and gentler. Eddie smiles as he leans against the truck, listening to Buck monologue and introduce himself as Buck 3.0.

Hen asking what happened to Buck 2.0 and Chim interjecting that that Buck was crushed by a fire truck and left by his girlfriend. (I know he means Abby, but Ally came to mind first.)

Eddie asserting that he isn’t “sure what inspired the software update” as he looks up at Buck. Buck responds that he is ready to let go of the past. Hen points out that it’s a bit ridiculous that he’s willing to just let go being lied to all his life. (I’m with you Hen!)

Buck reveals that he will be going to therapy with his parents for a few sessions to work thru that obstacle. Eddie looks intrigued by the idea.

Eddie is leaning over the cabinet door of the truck, telling Buck that it’s okay for him to take some time and process this new information. He doesn’t have to jump in right away and work thru it. Buck claims to know this. He is just tired of focusing on the past and wants to start thinking about the future. Every one looks at each other, they are obviously not sure how to process this stance.

Buck screams out to the new recruit, Ravi, calling him Probie.

This is slightly off topic, But in Season 2, when Eddie was a probie, now one called him a Probie. I vaguely remember Buck being called a probie in Season 1. I feel like it says a lot about the way Eddie carries himself. Probably one of the many reasons everyone thinks Eddie is older than Buck, instead of thinking they are the same age.

Buck apologizes for scaring Ravi and asks him how the shift was. Ravi uses the forbidden Q word. Everyone minus Eddie is startled by the mention of the word. Eddie is confused as he continues to pack up the truck, Ravi is confused standing there as Hen and Chim talk about curses.

Buck explains that the “Q” word is forbidden in any firehouse. Bobby interrupts and asks who used the word.  Eddie asks what he’s missing here because he can’t comprehend the reaction.

The fire alarm goes off, and Chim vocalizes that they have been jinxed. The team runs off into the trucks, as Ravi stands there awkwardly.

Cut to Eddie in the truck telling the rest of the team that they sound like his grandmother’s neighbor, the healer. He of course says “Abuela” and “Curandera”. I love when Eddie leans into his Spanish roots.

Buck quickly and unironically asking if she would know how to reverse the curse, because if she doesn’t, they are about the have “the shift from hell.”

Chim and Hen explain how they are going to experience nonstop, stupid calls. Eddie judging them and asking if they really believe in stuff like that. Hen quickly adds, “Buck never told you about the last time someone used that word.”

Buck tries to justify that time as the gods taking that moment out of context. Flash back to a younger Buck trying to add a dish to a running dishwasher and him making a comment about how quiet it was running.

That shift resulted in 36 calls. Eddie finding it hard to believe that all those calls were a result of one shift. Bobby chiming in to say it was a record. Buck correcting the number to 37, revealing the fire suppression system was triggered in the locking, trapping Buck in foam at the end of that shift.  

Eddie still being a denier, tell them that they are giving the EMS god too much credit. The arrive at the accident. Buck jumps out after chimney, Eddie after Buck.  Eddie pointing out that the accident is just a fender bender, not a stupid call. Bobby tells him to look up and we see a man tapped to a billboard. Bobby calling over to Buck, Buck runs to grab the ladder. Eddie smirks as he pulls a bag out of a truck, claiming to have seen crazier.

Buck climbs up the ladder to get to the man stuck above. He tries to reason with the man to get down for everyone’s safety. Everyone below sets up an air bag, incase he falls.

Eddie running towards the car accident scene runs into Ana, Chris’s old school teacher. She was burned by cup of coffee, Eddie offers to check the burn for her. He tells her that ice isn’t good for burns and she reveals that another firefighter gave her the ice. Eddie is on his knees as he looks over the burn, instructs her to keep the area dry and clean.

Ana asks about Christopher. Eddie responds that he’s doing well and adjusting to online classes. He assumes that online school is likely the reason why he hasn’t seen her. Ana reveals that she actually has a new job as a vice principal at a different school district. Eddie and Ana subtly flirt through out the conversation.

I think now is the best time to mentions that I never hated Eddie and Ana’s relationship. I never understood the fan fics that make Ana an evil witch. I did think their relation was boring, probably because we never really got to know her as a character. We really didn’t see their dynamic, or real passion between the characters. I’ll of course go into more detail about this later on, just felt like I should say something now.

Bobby calls for Eddie over the radio to bring over the equipment for their billboard guy, cutting his conversation with Ana short.

Buck descends down the ladder, telling Bobby that the guy refuses to get down. The tape starts to give out and Buck makes a run up the ladder to get to him. Eddie is looking up as this happens. The guy falls off before Buck could make it up. Luckily the air bag broke his fall.

Buck sits on the ladder defeated. As the guy celebrates surviving and walking around naked, Eddie picks up the tape that was holding the man up. Bobby sarcastically asks if he wants it as a souvenir for the day they are about to have.

Everyone gathers upstairs for lunch. Bobby pulls out mac and cheese from the oven. No one is allowed to eat until everyone is at the table.  Buck runs up last, apologizing, as they get ready to eat the alarm goes off.

Montage begins with Bobby putting the mac in cheese back inn the oven.

Eddie rescues a cat and brings it back to the owner. Buck is attempting to help a man down the same tree.

Bobby pulls out the mac and cheese, slightly over cooked. Buck telling Bobby to hurry. The alarm goes off again. They run off, place the mac and cheese back in the oven.

Eddie and Chimney are covered in Vaseline as they try to get a lion head off of a girl. Hen is able to cut the head off. Buck is thrown up on. Eddie backs away as he jokes about someone eating today.

Mac and Cheese is burned. Buck and Eddie are sitting across from each other at the table. Everyone is disappointed by the burned food. Alarm goes off again. Buck looks at Eddie as he sarcastically says they are not jinxed. Eddie looking back at Buck with pursed lips.

Eddie standing with his arms crosses, awkwardly not trying to acknowledge the curse as Chim and Hen handle the squid attack.

Buck burns his mouth on hot coffee straight from the pot as the alarm goes off again.

Buck trying to pry the recliner off of a man at the movie theaters.

Eddie and Bobby removing the door of a washing machine to save a child.

Eddie asks Buck if he ever replays a conversation in their head a realize that he may have sounded like an idiot. Buck replies with, “have you met me.” Eddie smiles. They are walking side by side to the next rescue. Eddie reveals that he ran into Chris’ old teacher Ana that morning.

Buck makes notes that Eddie hadn’t mentioned Chris’ pretty teacher in a while.

They walk in to Bobby and Hen moving helium tanks. Buck comments on the interesting scene  of a clown being covered by helium tanks. Eddie is practically pressed up onto Bucks side at this moment.

Buck and Eddie start laughing uncontrollably as Bobby instructs them to help out, in a high-pitched voice. Eddie and Buck looking at each other before they move in to help. Their laughter becoming more uncontrollable the more they hear people speak.

Cuts to the 118 leaving another call. Eddie and Buck are walking out pressed together. Eddie comments on how boring the call was given that it was people stuck in the elevator. Hen tells him not to say it, prompting Eddie to call them a bunch of old ladies, stating there is no curse. Buck comments on how windy it is as he hopes into the truck. Everyone jumps into the Truck, after they start discussing how they should not tempt faint.

Eddie buckles up, and proceeds to comment about how it was a normal call. “It went like clockwork. Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am.” Hen chimes is about notice how no one says “Wham, bam, thank you, sir.” Buck being a smart-ass chimes in saying it is because it doesn’t rhyme.

Eddie being overly confident that jinxes don’t exist. Power pole goes down immediately after Eddie says this. Everyone looks at Eddie angrily and Eddie sits up awkwardly.

Chimney and Buck texting Josh about their situation in the truck, I assume it’s a group text. Josh clocking that they are wanting to remove a curse.

As chimney is researching ways to remove curses, Eddie is acting disinterested, while Buck is trying to get a proper explanation.

Eddie continues to make fun of the team for believing in this curse. Buck states, “It’s like the universe is screaming at you and you refuse to listen.”

“The universe doesn’t scream.” Power lines start loudly zapping again.

Eddie states that he doesn’t worry about things he can’t control. Buck tries to get him to admit there is something out there controlling the things he can’t control. Eddie starts listing mystical creatures and legends as he taunts Buck. Eddie attempts to say the “Q” word, but is told by Bobby to stop. This prompts the entire team to ask Bobby’s opinion on the matter.

Bobby points out that everyone is a little superstitious, pointing out that Eddie wears a good luck charm around his neck. Eddie explains that is not the same thing, but Bobby explains how it is.

Help finally arrives, but not before taking photos of the accident and making fun of them.

Eddie walks in the kitchen area. Bobby, Buck, Chimney, and Hen are all upstairs. Turns out Eddie could not sleep.  Eddie walks up to Chim, Hen, and Buck and asks if he’s interrupting book club. Hen states Buck is reading about woman, Eddie turns to Buck and jokes about wondering why Buck had a book in his hand, but knowing it is about woman it all makes sense.

Buck is reading about the 5 love languages, asks Eddie what he thinks Ana’s love language is. Buck putting Eddies business out there and peeking everyone’s interest. Eddie calls Buck a traitor as they ask if he’s dating.

Eddie explains who Ana is and how she ran into her this morning. The 118 being nosy and asking why he didn’t ask her out. The bell goes off before Eddie can come up with a response.

Something I feel needs to be pointed out is that at this very moment Buck does not have any possible suitors or any one of interest to date. From the look of where Buck has the book opened up to, compared to where everyone else has their books opened up to, it’s pretty safe to assume he started reading that book that night. This implies that the only reason he was reading this book is because Eddie mentioned Ana. Buck could have just mentioned Ana’s name to set a fire under Eddie, but the question felt genuine. I like to believe; Buck was trying to figure out Eddies love language and compare it to what they thought would be Ana’s.

I also like to add that if Buck had been reading this book for a while, he may already know Eddies love language, and uses that to his advantage. From reading the book myself, I think Eddie’s love language is acts of service. Buck’s is likely words of affirmation.  Quality time is both their 2nd love language.

$10,000 Worth of Fireworks;  Buck and Eddie grab the water hose out of the truck. Bobby calls Buck over the radio, telling him that he is needed out back. Eddie telling him to go, that he can handle the hose on his own.

Buck leaves and Eddie starts to drag over the hose. The hose gets caught on something, this is when Eddie sees what he assumes is another firefighter from a different unit and calls him over to help. He specifically says he lost his partner could you help me out.

Brian runs over to help. Eddie starts to talk about the rough day he has had, and complains a little. As Brian walks off, Eddie realizes he’s from the unit Ana mentioned that gave her ice. He tells Brian about the situation as he walks off. Bobby walks over to finish helping Eddie. There we learn the 147 is decommissioned after the mudslide, they have no idea who that man was.

Back at the station, Eddie further explains that the man he saw had a jacket with the name Harmon on it, Bobby points out who the real Harmon is and it’s not the guy Eddie spoke to.

Bobby turns this conversation into a lesson for Eddie. Stating, “They’re so focused on what they don’t have that they miss the chance to have something else, something real.”

Eddie slowly making the realization that Bobby means he needs to move on from Shannon and possibly pursue Ana. Bobby further explain how he can’t stay stuck. Eddie is on the verge of tears as he asks Bobby about Athena and her kids. Bobby reassuring Eddie that he loves his new family, but he does miss the one he lost.

So I love the fan theory that Bobby picked out Eddie specifically for Buck. It’s a cute funny theory that I only entertain because it is wholesome. I do not actually believe this theory, but if I did, I would assume Bobby is pushing for Eddie to pursue Ana, because he knows that Eddie needs to heal more before pursing Buck, also this moment isn’t right for Buck either, because he’s processing something totally new.

Burger Freak out: Larry explains that a firefighter called telling him that a gas leak had been detected and to break all of the windows. Bobby and Buck come around the corner and explain that there is no gas leak, but that the gas is going to remain off until the investigation is over.

Buck running after the guy they suspect has been pretending to be a firefighter. Brian steals the 118. Buck is banging against the truck trying to stop him from fleeing.

Eddie looking over at the commotion confused. Bobby announcing over radio that the engine has been stolen. Buck letting Chim and Hen know they are still jinxed.

Buck revealing that he just topped off the gas tank, there is about four hours before the guy runs out of gas.

Over the radio dispatch calls in a 5-alarm fire. Buck asks Bobby what are they suppose to do.  Bobby instructs everyone to hop in the back of the ambulance.  Buck hops in and lays on the gurney. As everyone squeezes in around him.

Buck vocalizes how using the ambulance is a stupid idea, and how their luck really lead to someone stealing an engine. How they might not even be able to help while on scene.

Eddie believes there is a way to get the Engine to the scene, Buck looks up at Eddie confused.

Eddie speaks to Brian directly, calling him over the radio. Eddie thanks Brian for helping at the garage fire. Eddie instructs Brian to help out by bringing the fire engine he stole to the 5-alarm fire.

Eddie walks up to Brian and tells him he did the right thing and walks off.

Buck, Chim, and Hen are in their civilian clothing. They are grateful for the shift being over. Bobby offers to buy the three of them breakfast. Buck makes a kind of concerning comment about not eating long enough, he no longer feels hungry.

Eddie appears out of nowhere, He’s still in uniform, and standing to where he is showing off a lot of cake.

Eddie denies the invitation claiming to have other plans. Buck is visibly confused; Bobby is smiling like he knows what these plans entail.

Buck, Bobby, Hen, and Chim talk about and elaborate on how Brian got a hold of firefighter gear and how much trouble he caused with all his help. Before eating their breakfast, a woman collapses.

Eddie is alone at another breakfast spot. Stressed while looking a menu. I understand feeling a bit anxious about a date, but the normal cool calm and collected man we are use to seeing is no where to be seen in this scene.

Ana arrives, he pulls out her chair for her. They have light banter and when the waiter comes over to ask about drinks, they both respond, “No, coffee, Jinx” and laugh. I understand that the moment is suppose to be cute, but why would you tell your waiter you don’t want coffee. Maybe I’m thinking to much into it, when I was a waiter, this interaction would have confused me and just been awkward.

[theriverspath]

Ineffable May 2024, Day 5: Retirement

Rated General Audience

There was more salt than pepper in Nina’s locs these days, and she was beginning to appreciate a mug of something hot less for the caffeine content and more for the soothing warmth on the overworked joints of her hands. Today, though, her hands were empty as she waved one over the small black screen installed on the wall just inside the kitchen door of Give Me Coffee or Give Me Death. The movement woke the alarm system’s AI and a cheerfully neutral voice addressed her.

“Hello, Nina. Leaving for the day?” The face recognition software had records of all of the shop’s employees, and was programmed to know who was due to open and close based on the work schedule. Or rather, it had been programmed with that information until about a week ago. Currently, the only person it had on file was Nina. Soon, it wouldn’t even recognize her. Her smile was a little sad as she answered the now-glowing screen.

“Yes. Lock up after I’ve left, please.”

“Sure thing! Have a good night!”

“Thanks.” Nina exited the swinging door that separated the kitchen from the dining area. She paused before crossing to the front door, and could almost hear the bustle of a morning rush around her. She had spent decades behind a counter, offering the people of Soho the best drinks and pastries she could muster. During that time she'd seen old friends come together to enjoy each other's company, stressed students pounding away at keyboards, couples falling in love, and families grow. There had been so much life, both hers and others, lived within these walls.

When she was finally ready to leave, Nina’s steps echoed in the empty space. The next tennant was converting the storefront into a salon, and hadn’t wanted any of the furnishings. So, Nina had sold or donated it all. She’d kept the miniature Statue of Liberty, though, and it now held pride of place on the fireplace mantle in the little flat Maggie and she had just downsized to. Everything else had gone within the last few days.

The doorknob felt so familiar in her grip, and it seemed odd to think that this would be the last time she would turn it. Turn it she did, then stepped onto the pavement and let the door close behind her. She heard the snick of the lock sliding into place and knew that the system had done its job.

“Ready?” Maggie’s voice was soft, and there was no rush or ugrency behind it. Nina took in a breath and nodded.

“All done. I just need to leave the keys with the estate agent on the way home.” She slipped her hand into her wife’s, and they began the walk that would take them past the office and to their flat. Maggie’s eyes crinkled at the corners with her smile when they passed The Small Back Room. Through the big window, she could see Tony helping a customer sort through a selection of vinyls. Nina didn’t have to hear him to know that he was expounding how you just can’t get the same sound from digital, and isn’t it amazing how physical media really connects us to music in such a tactile way. Their son had inherited Maggie’s love of the record shop, and had happily taken on the responsibility of the day-to-day running of it when she’d decided to take a step back from the business.

As they approached the estate agent’s office, Nina realized that she really didn’t feel like going in and doing the whole smile-and-shake-hands-and-small-talk ordeal that inevitably came with these sorts of interactions. Fortunately, the building had a little brass flap on the exterior for people to deposit paperwork and what-not after closing. So, she just dropped the keys in that, and heard them clank into the little box that caught them.

“I don’t feel like cooking tonight. How about we pick something up?” The two women took their time strolling down the busy street, discussing the merits of the various restaurants between here and their flat. The air was cool, but not quite cold enough to make them want to quicken their pace. They eventually settled on a new Italian place and, once home, enjoyed the steaming containers of pasta in front of a warm, crackling fire.

-----

Want to play along? Check out the prompt list from @blairamok.

[star-going-supernova]

Security Breach prompt: Building on the "Vanny was a Terrible Killer" idea. Picture this: Vanny standing there, staring bewildered at an ajar "Emergency Exit" door because she forgot they exist and legally don't have locks.

Tumblr generated prompt number 42! Hoo boy, this was a lot of fun to write! It’s not connected to Critque because I had a different setup in mind, so this is a standalone. You get to decide what the situation with Vanny is, as it’s not specified or anything. The only warning on this one is for excessive italics, lol. She gets emphatic when she’s mad.

OSHA Compliant 

Vanny had been searching for the brat for ages now, and there was no sign of him anywhere. She had long since lost her patience and had stopped skipping as her frustration grew. Her grip was tight on her knife, and any plans to toy with her latest victim had withered down to a desire to just stab the little menace to death. 

None of the animatronics had seen him, not even the STAFF bots which were nearly impossible to avoid and should have caught him at some point in the last hour. Midnight had barely passed; she couldn’t be struggling this early. 

Spitting and hissing, she stormed through hallway after hallway, banging open doors and frequently pulling up different security feeds on her tablet. Yeah, her tablet. She needed to use the cameras like a newbie. Over a dozen successful kills under her belt and suddenly she was fumbling like it was her first time again. 

No, worse. Her first kill had gone much more smoothly. 

To make matters worse, she was due to give him his first look at Vanny, so she was all suited up—and had been for far longer than was optimal. It was sweltering inside this wretched fabric-and-foam heat trap, and she was sweating all over. Her hair was plastered to her forehead; she’d look like a complete mess when she had to get out of costume. And she was pissed about it.

Honestly. This was absurd. The brat in question had certainly been sneaky in the lead-up to midnight, but he was still a snot-nosed, idiot child. How he’d gotten Freddy on his side was a mystery to her—one that she would be investigating thoroughly once this stupid night was over. That couldn’t be allowed to happen again. 

Narrowing her eyes, Vanny swiped through the cameras for the nth time. There was a conspicuous lack of Freddy, even on the secret cameras she’d placed in areas the pizzaplex hadn’t. Impatiently tapping her foot, she switched over to the tracking software. It could give her a to-the-room accurate location of each animatronic, and it had never failed her. 

[Glamrock Freddy :: Location Error] 

Vanny unleashed a furious screech of anger. How the hell had the brat managed that?! 

She jabbed at the location history, searching out Freddy’s last known whereabouts. It showed a random hallway. 

Positively fuming, Vanny stalked halfway across the pizzaplex, halfway expecting to find Freddy beat up badly enough that his chip had short-circuited. Instead, she came to a sharp stop in the hallway in question and stared, disbelief and absolutely incandescent rage building up inside her like a volcano about to blow. 

Staring her down was an emergency exit door. It wasn’t closed all the way. Freddy’s last registered location was on the inside of the door—and the tracking system apparently didn’t work outside the building. 

Vanny took several long, deep breaths. She started to shake, fingers tightening around her knife and tablet. 

Over a dozen kids murdered in the past six months. And not once, not once, had she—or, apparently, any of them!—spared so much as a passing thought for the emergency exits. The only-locked-from-the-outside emergency exits. 

Foiled. Foiled by OSHA.

Blinded by wrath, she hurled her tablet at the floor, gaining momentary satisfaction from the shattering crash. She dropped her knife, tore off her suit head, and chucked it at the door, then started shrieking incoherently at the top of her lungs. 

(Her rage was so great that it was heard throughout the pizzaplex—and below it. Afton stirred awake. Upon recognizing the bellowing as that of Vanny, he considered going to investigate but ultimately settled back in his shadows. He didn’t know what had set off his follower’s temper, but he would not be inviting her ire on himself tonight. He was smarter than that.)

(If only marginally.)