#the entire deep dark is designed around audio

[dismembered-narrator]

if i designed the deep dark i would have the warden operate purely on sound (and have the three strikes reset after you escape or die)

[the-tmnt-ficfinder]

Ficfinder finds: Ocean Tides and Butterflies

Rottmnt Oneshot Summary: The wind raced past him, enveloping his body in a cold unwelcome hug. He stood on the edge of a building, the ravine of a city buzzing like a wasp’s nest below him. The wind shoved against his face, causing his eyes to water. Teasing him with the presence of unwanted tears, tears that he had trained himself to hold in.

Ocean Tides and Butterflies: Appraisal and Ratings

(Don't know what fanfic "Appraisal and Ratings" means? Check out my explanation on my Main Masterpost! Looking for a different fanfic to read? Head on over to my Fanfic List Masterpost!)

Disclaimer: This fanfic is a oneshot, and is completed! This fanfic is written by @inkypawprint so go show them some love and support!! This fanfic has a version on both Tumblr, and Ao3. Here's the link to the Ao3 version.

The fanfic ratings are not based on quality, favoritism, or how good I think it is, but rather, how intense a subject may be. Like a movie review, or the tags on Ao3, letting the readers know what to expect.

Plot: 💛🖤🖤🖤🖤

"Plot is one out of five!! This oneshot has less plot, and more poetic story telling of a deep and painful emotional experience. This story is rich in deep thoughts, and has many unique metaphors."

Suspense/Mystery: 💛💛💛💛🖤

"Suspense/Mystery four out of five!! This fic does hold quite the amount of mystery within it, as many of the meanings are written out in deep thought-provoking metaphors, designed to make you think. Along with that, the ending of this fic is open to reader interpretation."

Angst/Hurt: 💛💛💛💛💛

"Angst/Hurt is five out of five!! The entire plotline for this fic, revolves around deep emotional pain, and how it effects one's life."

Fluff/Comfort: 🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤

"Fluff/Comfort is zero out of five!! This fic has no comfort in it at all, as it goes over some very dark and upsetting emotions."

Emotions Conveyed: 💛💛💛💛🖤

"Emotions Conveyed is four out of five!! This oneshot tells a deep and poetic story through the use of metaphors, and correlation to nature. This fic will absolutely make you think on a deeper level, as it talks a lot on the subjects of life and death."

Drama/Tension Level: 💛💛💛💛🖤

"Drama/Tension Level is four out of five!! There isn't really any drama in this oneshot, however, it does have a lot of emotional tension!"

Triggers: 💛💛💛🖤🖤

"Triggers for this chapter are three out of five!! I'd say, the triggers are hidden between the lines. Nothing is really said out loud, though many things are implied. This fanfic has the triggers of thoughts of suicide, feelings of inadequacy, existential crisis over life and death, and potential suicide attempt (open to reader interpretation).

Legibility (Reading): 💛💛💛🖤🖤

"Legibility (Reading) is three out of five!! As this fic has a very roundabout way for text, it could be a little hard for some to understand it, as most of the meaning is hidden in the metaphors. A beautiful beautiful writing style, just one that may be hard for some to read ^^"

Legibility (Audio): 💛💛💛💛🖤

"Legibility (Audio) gets a two out of five!! As this fanfic has a high amount of runabout metaphors, I find that it's easier to listen to. Helps separate the words, and put them better into perspective, though that's just my opinion ^^"

Length: 💛🖤🖤🖤🖤

"Length is one out of five!! This fanfic is a oneshot with a word count of 1.5k words, and takes around 9-10 minutes to read!"

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Personal thoughts on chapter below cut (Contains Spoilers)

This fanfic, as said in the authors note, seems to be inspired by the song, Killing Butterflies, which the author provided a link for in the authors notes.

The wind raced past him, enveloping his body in a cold unwelcome hug. He stood on the edge of a building, the ravine of a city buzzing like a wasp’s nest below him. The steady stream of car lights growing ever brighter as the sun retired behind the relentless pull of gravity. Each car held people and pets, hundreds of them rushing down the road each minute. Each person oblivious, stuck in their own worlds, cocoons of social circles that they had trapped themselves in.

Right off the bat, this is just so poetically beautiful!! Each little description invokes such beautiful visuals in my mind! I can practically feel the cold wind, swooping around, hugging with icy fingers! I also love how a wasps nest was used as a metaphor for the city, as it really does feel fitting. Just, this entire thing, is filled with so much symbolism, its beautiful!

The weight from his sword pulled on his arm, gravity bullying him the same way it bullied the earth.

Gravity, pulling on the sun, pulling on his arm, pulling on the earth. I feel like this is a metaphor for how depression feels. Ever present, ever weighing, ever a part of life.

It wasn’t long before Leo reached the end of the rooftop, swinging his sword in front of him and ripping a portal into the air, tearing into the matter of the world. He stepped through it, the light blinding him momentarily before he emerged on the next rooftop, walking forwards once more. The bright light of his nimpo flickered out behind him as he walked away from it. He could still see the circle of blue light throbbing in his retina’s, pulsing each time he blinked.

I wonder, would this be silent? Or would it make a ripping sound? Would you be able to hear the sound of the portals tearing open? I wonder if he could even hear it over the sounds of the city.

His brothers had no clue where he was. He had left without a word, simply walked through a portal when no one was paying attention. It was a frequent occurrence. Quite often his brothers would ignore him, stuck in their cocoons, just like everyone else. Leo sighed, scuffing his foot against the rough rooftop in aggravation. Maybe he was the one stuck in his cocoon. Maybe his brothers had broken out of theirs a long time ago. They had spread their wings, they were free, and he was still inside his unwanted cocoon.

This is such a beautiful little metaphor right here!! I feel like it symbolizes how wrapped up folks get in their own lives. Feeling trapped, thinking only of how they're trapped. Then, as they break free, they're able to fly, and they divert their attention to all of everyone else. Its rather fascinating, that people who feel trapped and stuck, are the ones who think of themselves the most, while folks who are free, think of others. You'd think that free folks would think of themselves, because of their fortune to be free, and yet, they divert their attention to those who are still trapped. I might be going to deep with this all, but I just love how deeply this fic is making me think!!

This was because he wasn’t worth listening to. Because his ideas were unrealistic, they contained loopholes. He wondered why he kept trying.

Nooooooo you poor boi T^T

Leo sighed. He was the face man.

Y'know, something I find interesting, is how little Leo appreciates how big of a role his role is. To define what being the face of a team means, "In a team character dynamic, the Face is the one you want doing the talking. They are charming, socially savvy, and otherwise know how to get things done with words. At worst they will be the least dysfunctional team member." As these qualities come naturally to Leo, he often believes that his job is to easy. That he's got the losers job. Now, if any of his other brothers had to do the job of face man, they'd fail spectacularly, as its just not in their nature. I also feel like Leo's brothers don't appreciate how hard he actually works in this job. Being the face of the team, is also somewhat like being the therapist friend. Its something that others won't see, and is very hard work. Easy to get overlooked, and/or burnt out. Leo's been the face man for so long, that its all he knows.

He had tried, he had tried to be better, to contribute to the group more. He couldn’t though, no matter how hard he tried. He couldn’t make tech, he wasn’t stronger than Raph, and he could never reach Mikey’s level of emotional intelligence. He had lived his entire life like a parasitic leech. Taking space and energy from a family that he could never contribute to.

Once again, Leo is clearly underestimating how much his position in the family is worth. Something, I think that Leo isn't understanding, is that while he may be leeching away energy, as the face man, its part of his role. He leeches away the bad, to keep team morale high, and leeches some good, to keep his own energy levels stable. Its just how it works.

He sauntered through the portal, feeling the cold burn of the mystic energy against his skin. Stark and biting like the deep currents of the ocean. A place he never should have been, a power he never should have had.

Oh, I love this description!! The way raw power just seems to emanate from his mystics, its just stunning!

The thought burned him, the boiling ocean of regret and turmoil lapping at the sand of his soul.

I'm enjoying how the ocean and the beach have been used numerous times as a metaphor for the soul, and emotions. It's a very good metaphor!

Leo stepped up to the edge overlooking the city, spinning his sword once at his side before holding it out to the side and dropping it onto the hard surface of the roof. It clattered, a cry of remorse and warning. Screaming at him to rethink his actions.

Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!

Leo stayed frozen on the edge, torn between the barriers between life and death. Curious.. Ever so curious what it would feel like to fly. To break out of his cocoon. To finally soar for once in his life before the swells swallowed him completely

What??... Just, what??? Did he jump, did he die?? What happened??? No, Leo, you precious baby, whyyyy??

[the--silent-hero]

Could we get more info about operator Link?

Sure! His Lore is pretty big so, imma write down some info which describe his personality and overal looks

His Father is Hayden from Dark Sector (as he looks similar to Link and thought it would be funny having him as Link's Dad lmao) which protected Link as he was a baby and his wife from a brutal Dax Attack (which he successfully defended). He teached Link a few years after with how to fight with his Glaive, which caused that Link accidentally cut his lower lip, in which he has now a deep scar on it

Link had a best friend on the Zariman which he crushed on but lost him during the Void Jump as they died. Link survived but barely as he was close to death as his almost entire body is filled with Void Scars. But before the Void Jump, he was pretty popular at the Zariman for his Music and Athletic Skills and he was even the Captian of Team Moon at the Lunaro Games and won Tournaments as well

He's a HUGE mommy boy, as he sees Lotus as his own mother by how much Lotus takes care of him with his issues.

Link found his Octavia Cadence at a broken and abandoned Corpus Danceclub, in which he took her to his Orbiter and worked for weeks to repair her. Ordis kept annoying Link, in which Link almost blew Cadence up, which made Link almost delete Ordis from his Ship System (almost. He did that later at another accident lmao)

Link also had a boyfriend before Lotus vanished, but they betrayed him in which Link broke down and made Vent Songs about his Feelings towards his Ex. Love, Anger, Sadness and Forgiveness. In which he made a Album out of it and released it, which got a massive hit from the Tenno all around the System.

One unreleased Song that didn't made it to the Album, was about Forgiveness and that he deserved it. Ordis (this stupid piece of shi-) accidentally released the unfinished and scrapped audio file on the internet, in which Link got furious and Ordis quickly deleted the file from the internet (but it was late anyway as the Fans found it quicker and now there are a bunch of remixes of it lol)

Link later on deleted Ordis from his Ship System and installed a new Cephalon, which's name is Amadeus (i even designed it. Might post it someday when i don't forget it)

As Link's Void Powers are way to weak and can barely hold a Transference with his Warframes, he decided to focus on his Music Career as he released more Singles and Albums and arranges Concerts. Baro (his manager lmao) takes care of the Merch and Album Sales and both discuss about basic things like "Ok what do you need for your music video?" and such. Basic buisness

Link has also a Void Demon Form in which he loses control and attacks everything he sees, which he doesn't have a deep connection on. Once he passed out and some Grineer took care of him and has now a Contract with them of giving them Ressources by the rescue and the Grineer wont attack Link

Another Fact is, Umbra hates Link. Like.. DEEEPLY. Umbra hunts down to kill Link. I can't say much yet because i need to replay the Quests and get a better idea of why and how.

Because Link and Lotus are close, Lotus grands Link a "Lotus Protector" Form, in which he protects Lotus from any harm, as Lotus has "control" over him to give him energy he needs to protect her

ALSO!!! He's bisexual! I don't mind if you guys ship him with your Operator, as long it is SFW and wholesome! I don't plan any canon relationships with Link so, go wild if you guys want!

And, Link is a lil cinnamon roll so, he can be pretty shy most times when he's around someone he likes

[dofengineeringemotions]

What is a Dark Ride?

A dark ride is an indoor amusement park attraction that combines physical ride elements with advanced technology, such as VR, augmented reality (AR), or projection mapping, to create an immersive storytelling experience. These attractions usually take place in a darkened environment, hence the name, and often involve a mix of live-action and animated characters, special effects, and interactive elements.

Dark ridemanufacturers have been around for decades, producing classic attractions such as Disneyland's Haunted Mansion and Pirates of the Caribbean. However, recent advancements in technology have allowed for increasingly sophisticated and immersive experiences that are revolutionizing the industry.

Behind the Scenes: Dark Ride Technology

At the heart of any dark ride is the seamless integration of technology and storytelling. This requires meticulous attention to detail and a deep understanding of the latest advances in VR, AR, and other immersive technologies.

One of the key components of a dark ride is the ride system itself, which can take various forms, such as trackless vehicles or motion simulators. These systems are designed to transport riders through the attraction while synchronizing their movement with the surrounding visuals and audio to create a fully immersive experience.

Another critical aspect is the use of projection mapping or other display technologies to create the virtual environments in which the ride takes place. This can involve anything from projecting images onto screens or physical sets to using AR headsets that overlay digital content onto the real world. The key is to create a seamless blend of physical and digital elements that fully envelop riders in the story.

Additionally, many dark rides incorporate interactive elements, allowing riders to engage with the experience in a more personal and meaningful way. This can involve using handheld devices to interact with the environment or even incorporating biometric data, such as heart rate or facial expressions, to tailor the experience to each rider.

The Future of Dark Rides and Virtual Reality

As technology continues to advance, we can expect to see even more impressive and immersive dark rides in the coming years. One of the most exciting trends is the growing use of AR and mixed reality technology, which has the potential to create truly seamless and convincing virtual worlds that blend seamlessly with the physical environment.

Another area of growth is the increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to create more personalized and adaptive experiences. For example, AI could be used to analyze rider reactions and tailor the experience accordingly, ensuring that each individual has a unique and engaging journey through the attraction.

Finally, as the popularity of dark rides continues to grow, we can expect to see new and innovative partnerships between dark ride manufacturers, entertainment companies, and intellectual property holders. These collaborations will bring exciting new stories and characters to life, offering riders the chance to explore their favorite worlds and interact with their beloved characters in entirely new ways.

Ultimately, the future of dark rides and virtual reality lies in the continued pursuit of innovation and excellence by dark and simulator ride manufacturers, designers, and storytellers. As technology continues to evolve, we can expect the boundaries between reality and fantasy to blur even further, offering riders unparalleled experiences that ignite their imaginations and transport them to realms never before imagined.

[swimmingleo]

The Wizard of Oz: yet another conspiracy

It's about the infamous spinning around parallel, this one:

Why... would they do this.

Point is I've gone too far, Harryween happened, I fell into a Wizard of Oz rabbithole and found this that for some reason I've missed all this time, which happens to be mf Pink Floyd related because why wouldn't it be.

I promise it kind of adds up in the end, but it's mostly me... clowning.

The Dark Side of the Rainbow:

It's an old Pink Floyd theory and one of the most well-known in the band's lore: it started around the 80's with the popularization of videotapes. One day, someone just had the idea to mute the Wizard of Oz (1939) and play The Dark Side of the Moon (1973) over it right at the beginning of the movie (the third roar from the MGM lion). A scarily accurate synchronization resulted, to the point where one could ask themselves if the album was indeed produced as an alternate soundtrack to the film.

cut, im pouring mercy on the dash

Just your average fan theory, which really took off in the 90s and surprisingly received a lot of response. The album's audio engineer called it "eyewash" and an impossible thing to do with the technology they had back then. (which is. really not true. You could do it, it was just terribly impractical. then again if you're crazy enough..)

David Gilmour and Nick Mason, guitarist and drummer of the band, also vehemently denied the theory: total non sense and a waste of time.

basically everyone got real pressed for no reason lol it's a cute fan theory guys not gAy rUmOuRs cmon

HOWEVER, there is one person who never denied it and it's the guy who literally conceptualized the entire album. Indeed, Roger Waters found the theory "amusing" and had even referenced Over The Rainbow in later album The Wall (and seeing how frustrated he gets when the audience doesn't engage with their music the way he'd like, it almost feels like he was encouraging the theory but then again. pure assumption idk shit)

So yeah, make what you want of this dysfunctional band's response to the theory.

Okay but does it really work ?

There have been psychological explanations of the phenomenon: the theory has been dismissed as the brain always finding connections and parallels between different elements: if you're looking for something, you find it. Yes, this explains various fan theories like the Beatles' ''Paul is dead'', or crispy audios we have around here (pReTtY uNfoRtUnaTe) where the perception is influenced by what we're told to hear or what we want to see. If you play any random music over any random movie, you will always find synchronized moments. But I think the Dark Side of The Rainbow goes beyond that: you can actually make out obvious interpretations and patterns that make sense with the rest of their discography or what they said about certain things/songs. The album actually matches the movie’s narration or the transitions between scenes. But once again, the theory has been associated with crazy delusional fans on acid who live on conspiracies so... (so larrie of em)

Here you have the full movie, with the album playing on loop over it (cuz it's an album designed to be played on loop). Most little moments feel like those funny coincidences I mentioned before, like a character moving, dancing or speaking on beat, but some others are like... too much for me to dismiss as coincidences, because they carry some deep PF-esque meaning. I won't get much into it here cuz we don't have time for that~ but if you're a PF fan interested by the topic feel free to send me an ask and we'll rant about it it's honestly so cool ffgeifzji

Still, I really recommend to watch this specific part:

There isn't any kind of edit to make it fit. It just naturally goes smooth like that.

CMON IT'S. IT'S WEIRD.

Also the front and back cover of the album:

...No colour > Colour > Back to no colour // Sepia > Technicolor > Back to sepia.

If you're wondering why Roger Pink Floyd would go this far to hint at a movie which had a massive impact on queer culture ever since WW2, and how it could be even more relevant to Larry, here <3

AND LARRY BITCH??

Do we know other weirdos with too much time on their hands who do weird shit with synchronization in their art yes we doooo.

So, the shot of them filmed by a camera spinning like a tornado, in an already spinning setting (twirling dancers) in MVs loaded with queer symbolism.

last one just because... SOTT sounds a lot like The Great Gig in the Sky to me. Also he's flying passing by a rainbow at some point so.

The tornado scene is the core of the Dark Side of the Rainbow theory. The music and image go incredibly well together: the piano starting on the first gust of wind, the music gradually getting louder with the chaos on screen until it suddenly calms down when Dorothy’s unconscious in the eye of the tornado. Music ends when the tornado stops for good. But also the symbolism of that song and that scene combined: The Great Gig in The Sky is part of the transition between the first and the second part of the album and it evokes death. The tornado in Oz is the transition between sepia and technicolor, two different worlds and technically.. it's Dorothy's departure from earth to somewhere over the rainbow.

Meanwhile, TPWK is in black and white, Walls is colorized. Both songs represent a significant milestone in their respectives careers. That theme of "I used to feel bad, but I've made peace with myself and now I feel better".

The TPWK/Walls parallel starts at 1:41. Solely based on that film video I linked earlier, The Wizard of Oz is 1:41:47 long. So like. If they wanted to be little shits and choose a precise timestamp that would hint at the Oz synchronicity theory...

... I just like the idea of Harry and Louis scanning the internet for some rbb/sbb ideas, stumbling upon (or already knowing) the Dark Side of the Rainbow and being like.. aha, we could do that at some point. Because in the end, whether it's intentional or not, it's a pretty big pop culture fan theory, and they've both already hinted at PF and Oz.

All in all, the first person who had the idea to play Pink Floyd's album over the Wizard of Oz would have made an excellent delusional larrie and I wish they were here.

[treybriggsthewriter]

This makes me nervous, but I’m going to post it. I’m going to try my best to achieve my goals. I’ve put in a ton of work already, so I’m looking for additional help. 

From the campaign:

My name is Trey Briggs, and I'm a black woman who writes paranormal horror, speculative fiction, and other types of fiction. You can find my stories at MaybeTrey , Astrid the Devil , and on Instagram , Medium , and Wattpad .

My stories are aimed at black people who want to read dark stories that focus on original black characters that are complex and interesting. I genuinely believe Black audiences deserve a variety of genres to delve into, and I want to introduce them to paranormal horror, dark romance, and fantasy that they haven't gotten enough of in the past. I also believe that this can be done across multiple mediums, and I spend my money with black creative professionals to make these experiences extend beyond my words. For the last two years, I've run my stories on sites and Instagram to great reception. I like to craft complex experiences that offer looks at character backgrounds, side and backstories, full websites for each title, and more. I also provide encyclopedias, maps, audio journals, and other ways to get into each world. During these last few years, I've run into a lot of walls, jumped a lot of hurdles, and tried my best. I've worked with amazing black artists, voice actors, and actresses, musicians, designers, and more. I trust my ability to run a project, especially when it comes to planning and finding talent. My overall goal is to run a team of black creatives that crafts novels, graphic novels, audio experiences, and animated series for a dedicated audience.

Why I Need Help Long story short: I have the skill, I have the marketing/website building/business experience, and I have the drive. There's a lot I can do on my own, but there's also a lot that gets left behind because I don't have the money I need to proceed at a steady pace. I need help with funding so I can focus, hire the right people, and craft these stories the way they deserve to be crafted. I have thus far spent over $60,000 of my own money on my projects over the past two years - the writing and site-building are easy for me; the rest has to be hired out. I have art, site costs for hosting, domains, templates, specific plugins, and maintenance, audio (and vocal artists to pay), musical, and editing costs. I'm by no means rich or even particularly financially stable. I have taken on tons of extra clients for my digital marketing business, transcribed hundreds of hours of audio for dirt cheap, and taken out personal loans. I even worked a second full-time job along with my full-time business last year to afford to produce the content I love. It's starting to take a toll on my mental health. I plan on continuing to fund these projects out of pocket (and finding ways to do so), but having financial help, however big or small, would allow me to move a lot faster and with less stress. It would let me flesh out ideas and concepts that I have had to scrap because I can only physically handle so much extra work. I run a full-time marketing business from home, homeschool my autistic 10-year-old, and generally have a busy life. Some of the strain is taking a toll on me, and I don't want to give up. Having some financial backing could allow me to drop a client or two after a few months and focus on the work I love to do.

How You Can Help I mainly need a start—a sort of base. I want to emphasize that I plan to continue to provide the main bulk of funding for my projects. I know my goals are ambitious, and I know each step will take time and money. I welcome any help to make the process smoother and to get around the initial hurdles. I'd like to have ebooks and novels offered on my site by the end of the year (along with the free serials and stories). Funding means that I can broaden the projects, include more free aspects to my sites, and secure direct financing through sales of ebooks and audiobooks sooner. It also means that I can offer MORE stories, whether they are online only or fully fleshed out novels and sites. I am swamped with trying to work enough to cover all my bills and creative projects, so I lose a lot of time I could spend plotting and writing. If I have better funding, I can get my stories out quicker (and with fewer mistakes).

The Initial Stories Let's talk about my stories! If you're familiar with my work already, you can skip to the next section. My main story site is Maybe Trey . Currently, I have two big titles and a bunch of smaller ones that I am seeking help with funding: Astrid the Devil

Astrid the Devil is the complicated story of a girl who inherits not only her family's features and DNA, but their fears, struggles, and fights. It's the story of a condition called Devil Syndrome, the women who suffer it, and the monsters that devour them. It's the story of the fight to save the people you love at the expense of innocent lives. At its core, Astrid the Devil is the story of a woman who inherits the chaos of three generations before her. It's a look at what is truly passed down to our children, and how they're left to fight our battles in the aftermath of our failures. It's the tale of an indescribable monster and the women who struggle to defeat it. It's a journey into how their every decision could save or destroy an entire world. Astrid the Devil is the story of Astrid Snow, but her story can't be told without the story of the women before her.

Vicious: On MaybeTrey  and The Vicious site (in progress)

Somewhere, a war is brewing.  That's the only thing that's for sure to Junnie Gorton, a young horned girl suffering from a debilitating disease called Horn Rot. She typically dealt with her low survival rate and abnormally large horns by escaping the world with her best friend, Lewish. Now she's forced to figure out which side is which, save her entire species, and find out the truth behind the sudden uprising in her home. Horn Rot, a highly contagious and violent disease spreading through horned people, is causing mass amounts of madness and death. Normal horns grow in ways that will pierce, suffocate, and maim their owners, and the only one who can stop it is Junnie's mother, Lyria. As Lyria falls deeper and deeper into an anti-social revolt, the country reels. While Junnie broods, her entire species must prepare for mass extinction. Her brother plots with a group of people with less than good intentions and Lewish is quieter than usual. In a civilization brought up on extreme violence and competition, Junnie and Lewish try their best not to get swallowed by their culture, their lives, or their horns.

Bunni and Bosque :

Bunni lives. Bosque dies. We all know how this story starts. Bunni is obsessed with destruction and death. She comes from the healthiest Horned family in her country. She's from the oldest, purest bloodline in the world. And she's bored with it. Bunni spends most of her time trying to escape her duties as a pureblood. She wants things dirty, messy, foul, inconsistent. Having parents that are willing to kill to keep their bloodline pure is annoying. Knowing that she'll live a long, full life, produce more perfect children, and die unscathed is agonizing. Bunni wants something to mourn. We all know how this story ends. Bosque is destined to die an agonizing death, alone on his family's land. He's watched everyone he loved and grew up with perish. Sometimes it was because of their disease. Sometimes it was because of the malice and hatred of others. While he's absolutely withdrawn and satisfied with his life, Bosque has never had a chance to live it. He spends his days basking in the sun, bathing in wood baths, and contemplating the end. Bosque isn't interested in joining the rest of the world. He'd rather die out, alone, where his family belonged. Bosque wants to go peacefully. But neither expected to meet each other one day in a supermarket. Neither expected to fall in love, lust, and every vicious and dirty thing between. Neither expected to be so right for each other, all while being wrong for everyone else. You know the end of this story. Bunni lives, Bosque dies. But maybe something will change.

My smaller titles, Bunni and Bosque /Aite and Jude, can be found at Maybe Trey .

The Business Plan

The initial phase of my business plan is to get the sites populated with ebooks and audiobooks for sale. I also have prints that can be sold. Right now, I am in the audience-building phase while I save up for editing the full novels. 

In terms of an actual business with which to publish the stories, I already have a registered publication company in Illinois: Wolfless Studios LLC. I took this step earlier this year with plans to self-publish Astrid and Vicious. So that is paid for and done.

I have also gotten initial editing done on the first six chapters of Astrid, though it will need to be edited from the beginning again once everything is said and done. I've spent over $1000 on that so far, and it would go a lot faster if I didn't need to save up to edit each chapter.

Astrid the Devil is fully plotted, outlined, and only needs the last three chapters. Bunni and Bosque and Vicious are newer, but plotted and already deep into character development (all being shared across social and Wattpad for audience growth). Aite and Jude and other shorts are plotted, and three other unshared stories are plotted and at the editing phase.

Other costs and ways I would use the funding (I would still put in my own money and do as much on my own as possible):

Initial $30K

$6000 - $7000 Line and Copy edits for Astrid (currently at 250000+ words/expecting over 300000 at $0.02 rate)

$6000 - $7000 Line and Copy Edits for Vicious

$3000 - $4000 Line and Copy Edits for Bunni and Bosque

ISBN Purchases (Separate ISBN for each format for each book) - https://www.myidentifiers.com/identify-protect-your-book/barcode

Covers for Astrid/Vicious/B&B Print Versions

Site Hosting Costs and Maintenance for 2 Years

Site completion for all stories

Initial store and app development

40K - Marketing and Graphic Novels

Social, Print, and Web ads

Email Marketing Campaigns 

Booths at Decatur Book Festival (depending on COVID)

Social ads and promos

50 to 60 pages

First two chapters offered as free promo with email sign-ups

Audio journals for each character

Situational audio journals

Encyclopedia for Astrid (finishing up)/Vicious

65K - Hires and Next Phases

Ability to hire a Full-Time Editor 

Audio Series for each (professionally done)

Vicious Graphic Novel

Additional Title Added

Short animations for both Vicious and Astrid (with plans to fund more with book sales)

Fleshed out Story Sections (Novellas for each character of each series)

Short comic series with Astrid and Vicious side characters

Possible to plan out monthly subscription service with new stories and 'story package' deliveries

75K -

Astrid the Devil Graphic Novel

Vicious Graphic Novel

Astrid the Devil Animated Short

Ability to hire part-time Web Developer

Additional bigger title

Anything Over - I ascend into pure light. And also, I can add titles, cover more mediums, and eventually expand my publishing to other black creatives.

From there, I should be able to handle the funding via sales of books, comics, audio, and more. Again, I will always offer mostly free content across the sites.

I believe in proof of concept, and I have diehard fans on my social platforms. With no outside funding, I've been able to a lot on my own. I'd love to expand my business into one that does the same for other black authors, artists, voice actors, and animators somewhere down the line. 

Thank you so much for your consideration. I appreciate all my readers, present and future, and I appreciate any help!

See incentives and more on the actual campaign: https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-trey-publish-black-paranormal-horror-stories

Thank you so much!

[lifewithdavefarts]

DaveFarts - Episode 10 “The Elevator” [Episode List] After visiting a friend’s house, Tim and the gassy-as-usual Dave take a really slow elevator together.

The Elevator

I took a quick sip of beer as our friend Adam left the living room to get another can in his fridge. What was left was a weirdly awkward silence and Dave, with his own beer, glaring at me.

“Dude,” he whispered. “It’s been a hour. I thought you were gonna tell him.”

I chose Adam as the first non-Dave bud to come out to, but it ended up being surprisingly hard to do. It’s not like Dave was forcing me or anything, or that Adam was a bad person; on the contrary, Dave was simply there with me as my emotional support in case things go south (but we both know they won’t) and Adam was, well, just Adam. Dave’s rightful reaction to me not coming out as planned didn’t bother me and as I said he wasn’t there to intimidate a confession out of me.

“Look, I don’t feel ready, okay?”

“You’ve been talking about the weather for 20 minutes.” he hissed. “What’s next? Geology?”

I chuckled. “Actually, this reminds me that they found this weird rock in South Amer-“

“I can’t believe this.”

“What’s not to believe? You take a big shovel and-“

“And I’m gonna dig my own grave if you start talking about rocks.”

I chuckled again. I know he wasn’t really mad.

Annoyed? Maybe. But mad? Nah, that’s a stretch.

He had all the rights to be annoyed though, but in the end it was my decision to make and he knew this.

We kept whispering as we heard Adam rummaging the fridge like some kind of raccoon longing for a cold drink.

“Look.” I said. “it’s late now anyway. Let’s just leave. Sorry I wasted your time.”

“Fine.” he replied. “Let’s finish our beers first at least.”

“That goes without saying.” and I took a long sip.

Truth is that I hadn’t any real reason to hide my homosexuality from Adam or any other of my buds actually. First, we’re in our 20s, we’re all mature and open-minded here. And in the end, excluding the whole fart-thing going on with Dave, they were all like him, chill guys. Adam, despite always sounding like someone who wants to have none of your shit, or anyone’s shit really, more than once proved that it’s just a facade and not-so-deep down he’s always ready to listen and back you up whenever you needed it. He did just listen to me talking about the weather for 20 minutes, so either he’s fascinated by the subject or knows I’m trying to tell him something else and is just patiently waiting.

The thought of wasting both of my buds’ time in a way or another kind of bothered me to be honest, so I was more than okay with wrapping things up and just leave, which me and Dave did mere minutes later.

“See you bro.” my bud said to Adam, standing by the door, as we went outside in the hallway, not far from the stairs and the elevator “Tim wants to talk about rocks so I’m taking him out of here before he kills you with boredom.”

“The one they dug up in Colombia?” Adam asked, much to our surprise.

“Yeah.” I answered. “They know it’s andesite but it has some interesting carvings on the surface and-“

A startled “What the fuck.” from Dave echoed in the hallway and the entire apartment building.

“What the fuck indeed.” Adam uttered, rather excitedly, completely missing the point. “This could change the archeo-history of the entire region.”

“I heard enough.” Dave said as he walked towards the elevator.

Both me and the other rock-enthusiast laughed at his reaction.

“By the way, I’m going to join you for a bit as I gotta walk the dog.” Adam remembered, reaching for a leash behind him.

“We’ll see you outside then.” Dave replied and then turned to me. “Tim, elevator, now.” he ordered.

“You sure, guys? You remember that thing is slow as shit, right?”

“We’ll be fine.” my bud said, patting my back. “I guess I’ll make Tim last longer then.” he joked.

“That only happens when you call me ‘daddy’” I joked back, as we walked towards the elevator, leaving our common friend behind.

“Rrrright.” Adam said. “I’ll get the dog while you two solve your sexual tension. See you outside.”

I pressed the button to summon the lift, Dave’s arm still around my shoulder as if he had something to show me. Truth to be told, I somehow knew where this was going.

As the panels of the door opened, we stepped into the elevator cab. I pressed the “G” on the control panel. I heard a mechanical noise and the elevator started its long, slow descent (we were at the 10th floor), after the doors closed behind us of course.

It was a cold evening and the cab wasn’t any warmer. I turned to Dave, who was wearing a dark blue hoodie and a pair of grey jeans. He looked at me with a smirk, hands in his jeans pockets; he raised his eyebrows and, without warning, a loud thunder echoed in that enclosed moving space.

The roaring fart had a slow start, with some interruptions, actually a sign for how big it was, but Dave, being an expert, quickly tamed the gassy beast and properly “tuned” the sound of the blast after a couple of seconds, keeping a consistent pitch, while also making it sound loud and deep. It felt like he was ripping one of those huge “when the girl finally leaves” farts, only, well, Dave-sized, which is always a sight to behold… hear? In this case there was no girl so he probably simply held all of his farts in to not ruin “the moment”, in case I wanted to come out back at Adam’s place (with beer acting as a bonus fuel).

A silly smile was drawn on my bro’s face as the fart kept going strong and proud, sometimes reaching some incredibly loud moments. He chuckled a bit and even winked at me when the blast made some particularly “meaty” noises, if that makes any sense. The fart was impressive on his own but Dave “interacting” with me while still masterfully passing gas was incredible as well (and, of course, hot).

The number 6 on the control panel lightened up and only in that moment I realized two things: the first being that the elevator was indeed slow as fuck; the second is that around 40 seconds passed and neither Dave nor his fart “flinched”. I was widely aroused by that and I felt the air around us getting more and more “polluted”, but not in an unbearable way actually. The blast kept echoing inside the elevator and I’m pretty sure that it could have been easily heard, albeit a bit muffled, by anyone taking the stairs.

Dave farted in my face many times, but no fart reached the length and power of this one, which is saying a lot. My bud’s butt-burps normally last around 6-12 seconds and don’t get me wrong they’re amazing, but man, maybe this one rip would have been too much to endure even for me: it simply wouldn’t stop. It’s like there was a loud engine in the elevator which couldn’t be turned off as I couldn’t hear anything else.

I was instead the opposite of turned off and teasing bastard Dave Maning knew this and, as usual, had no issue with it. At this point it was a race between Dave’s longest fart and the world’s slowest elevator.

We were now at the 3rd floor and my bud probably wanted to do a “big finale”; he was visibly pushing the blast out now, as if he wanted it to last as long as possible, a smirk still drawn on his face. He closed his eyes and the sound made it look like another fart was ripped over the sound of the previous fart, as if two audio channels in his ass somehow overlapped. The sound was of course louder than ever; the smell now, and only now, getting a bit hard to get used to. But to be honest, Dave’s skills as a sound designer alone were impressive enough.

A big part of me, mainly the one between my legs, wanted to get on my knees and plant my face in his denim ass before the fart faded out, but I knew that would have been too much even for such a chill guy like him. I’m sure he wouldn’t hate me or anything at this point but we both know there are some untold boundaries and honestly it’s better this way. I know how lucky I am to have someone like him around (farts or not).

My farting bro probably read my mind as he slowly turned around and got closer, again without affecting the fart’s quality and, being a bit taller then me, basically farted on the upper part of my hip. It almost made my entire body shake due to its power and it felt good. Now I really wanted to bend down as if I was tying my shoes but what stopped me this time was also the thought of… not surviving. I was familiar with Dave’s farts but this was absurdly powerful even for him.

And finally, as Dave resumed his previous position, again looking at me, the fart stopped, followed by my friend letting out a relieved whistle, and then an immature cackle.

Not even 2 seconds after that the elevator reached its destination, stopping as well. I jokingly clapped my hand and shook my head in disbelief. “Bravo!” I said, as if I just watched some fancy stage play.

Dave simply smiled and turned his back at me to face the exit, as we both waited for the just-as-slow panel doors to open.

“At least not all the time here was wasted.” he laughed.

“Bro, we had a beer together. That’s never a waste of time for me.” I replied.

“Wow. Rocks, gay and cringe. You got it all, Tim!” he replied.

We both laughed at me being needlessly cheesy and finally stepped out of that gas chamber. Someone stepped in the cab as we left it and the doors closed, leaving us in the hallway at the ground floor. We heard muffled coughing noises almost immediately and we laughed again, as we knew the disgusting reason. Poor, innocent soul.

“Ok but bro” Dave then said, looking a bit more serious. “You gotta do it someday. Trust me you can trust all of us.”

“I know man.” I replied, as we walked towards the exit “Next time I meet Adam, doesn’t matter where and when, I’m gonna tell him that I’m gay.”

My voice echoed in the building and through the stairs, but I didn’t care.

“You’re… gay?”

Okay, I cared.

We both turned around, puzzled.

It was Adam, right behind us (with this dog on leash), descending one last set of stairs before ending up in front of us. Somehow he’s been slower than the elevator, which both me and Dave found hilarious but I also had other emotions going on that moment.

Dave patted my shoulder encouragingly and stepped back: it was my time to shine.

“Yep.” I simply said. “I wanted to tell you hours ago but I didn’t have the guts to do it.”

Adam just stared at me with a confused expression.

I didn’t feel as nervous as I anticipated. “Yes, Dave knows it…” I quickly added, noticing him staring at my other straight bud. “And I asked him to not tell anyone.”

A moment of silence followed and those always feel like they last hours.

“I mean you two clearly have been dating each other for years” Adam joked. “So it’s no surprise, really.”

“WHAT WE HAVE IS SPECIAL!” Dave shouted, jokingly faking a desperate reaction.

I simply laughed and before I could process how well everything was going I felt Adam doing something very unusual for him: he hugged me.

“I’m glad you told me, man.” he simply said. “You know you can count on us.”

I know times have changed and all but this felt like a victory. Every time I’m gonna come out to a friend of mine it’s one step closer to the peak of a mountain and once at the top I will finally-

“Fuck, I forgot my phone.” Adam said, patting his pockets. “I’ll just take the elevato-“

“NOOO!” both me and Dave screamed, knowing that it was still a deadly gas chamber.

Adam simply replied with an annoyed expression and went for the stairs, the dog just behind him.

“Oh hey by the way.” I asked. “What took you so long? You said the elevator was slow but somehow we made it here before you.”

“Don’t underestimate me.” he replied. “It’s just that I heard some weird noises echoing through the stairs and me and another guy tried to understand what it was.”

Dave tried to not to burst into laughter, while I simply smiled like an idiot. Adam and his dog then went up the stairs and left us in silence, not until my gassy bro decided to break it the way he usually does.

A loud fart erupted and echoed through the building, only lasting around 4 seconds this time.

“There it is again!” we heard Adam say, a couple floors above us.

Me and Dave shared an amused look and went outside trying to not laugh like immature idiots. I felt the cold weather all over me, which was relieving considering the gas trap I’ve been trapped into only minutes earlier.

Despite a slow, yet really entertaining elevator ride, and my awkwardness, no time went wasted today.

“I’m proud of you, bro.” Dave said, this time serious, but still smiling.

“Wow.” I replied. “Straight and cringe. You got it all, Dave.” and winked at him.

“Don’t get too cocky now, rock nerd.”

I was rock-hard, to be more precise that’s for sure, but that was a detail I’d take care of later, perhaps thinking back of that absurd elevator ride. Whenever I’m with Dave, I’ll make sure we’re never taking the stairs again.

End of Episode 10

[skloomdumpster]

Can we talk about the cinnamontography of Fate please

I

Anooon! What's up with anons spoiling me lately to hear my bafoon takes? Anyway, obligatory disclaimer that I'm REALLY bad with cinematography and it took me three years of movie school to understand what I should've learned in the first semester :)) Read this bs at your own risk >:)

Unlike costume design and plot where I had this huuuge huge rant, I think I cam summarize my feelings here as "not interesting enough". As far as my understanding goes cinematography is how you place your camera, or rather, your characters/world before your lenses and what you're trying to communicate with that.

Fate feels pretty standard and generic regarding this. I think they have only a handful of beautiful shots and that actually communicate something deeper than just simple back and forth, and they also have a handful of disgusting shots that make me, a self declared stupid individual on this matter, look at it like ??? the FUCK.

I don't have long coherent thoughts, so I'll just paste here the pretty and the ugly ones and ramble a bit:

The Pretty Ones

1x01 - The Specialist's training grounds:

I really adore this entire sequence. Camera wise its very purposeful and beautiful. It shows us how the training grounds integrate with the school and I like that it shows all of them actually exercising in different ways, having their own matches and going off on their own. I can really get a feel of how Silva commandeers and oversees their training. Also really adore the rhythm on how they cut between wide shots, to full shots, then medium shots then a back and forth between medium shots and close ups. It makes the scene feel dynamic, the close ups are used to convey familiarity between Sky/Riven and it just flows very quickly, despite being a long sequence.

1x01 - Bloom's face off with her parents:

I think this is a GREAT example of good cinematography in the show, because I fucking hate this scene. Bloom's anger feels real and this is largely because of the framing in this. B starts telling the story to Aisha and we cut to a super close up, we're in Bloom's mental state. We don't know yet what is happening. I like that we zoom out to set the scene, but not enough to remove us from Bloom's deep concentration. Then the harsh cut to Mike removing her door, medium shot, very jarring with what we were just watching, which makes sense because it takes Bloom by surprise! This entire scene has amazing face acting, both Bloom and Vanessa's actresses are talented enough to show their emotions on their faces and they edited with all the audio overlapping, so when B is speaking it's Vanessa we're seeing and vice versa. It's just a little bit more spicy than the average of the show which is to show us the character that is speaking and then so forth and I think it really adds here! Also adore that the camera stays in the hallway when Bloom enters her bedroom, showing us the day turning to night, instead of just harshly cutting to a dark scene! I like the camera, the audience, entering her room slowly, we're prying those memories out of her! Just overall beautiful framing and acting here.

1x01 - Bloom watching her parents:

This fucking scene. Okay this is NOT the greatest example, I think of all the ones mentioned so far is one of the worst. But it does have some pretty cool ideas: Bloom standing outside her family home, having her parents appear very tiny first and hammer in that she's an outside, she's looking at this life through a window. When her parents say "we love you" and we don't see their face, we only see Bloom's in a medium close up, giving in to a full body shoulder, hanging up and choking down the tears. Standing there gazing out to this life where she doesn't belong anymore, where she's just been told she doesn't belong. All while not moving the camera, all in Bloom's face and body acting!! Beautiful. Really beautiful, a trust vote for the audience. Bad point of the scene: giving us the inside of the house, especially showing Vanessa's burn marks up close. If they hadn't been cowards and given her actual full body burns, then we could've done this entire shot far away and outside the place and it would've been 10/10. It's a 7/10 as it stands.

1x02 Saul and Farah walking together: beaaautiful shot, so haunting, so in synch. Oof

1x 02 - The girls find the Burned One's destruction: this shot right here and how haunting it is! How the camera makes it look like this large battle field, when it's actually just five fallen people and probably no distance at all! Literally going over the girl's head! Making them smaller in comparison to the stretch of destruction they just walked in. Pretty!!

FINALLY, the prettiest shot in the entire show:

1x05 - Terra and Riven talk

The DISTANCE between them, the fixed camera, the awkwardness. Riven fully emotionally open and disarmed, legs open, chest open, hands out. Terra holding herself tight, hands clasped, legs shut, arms squeezed in, looking away. A literal friendly battle going on as their background!! God, I don't think i've seen a shot that wordlessly communicates so much so easily in a WHILE. This is the fucking highlight of the entire show, I'm not taking criticism on this one.

The Ugly Ones

Okay this post is pretty damn long, so I'm just going to include two scenes. But there are plenty more :))

1x05 - Sky facing off Silva

This scene is a "framing mistakes 101" . Sky is not the illuminated one, he's not the one who should be under the light. He's metaphorically the one in the dark! And yes, words could be said about this actually meaning Sky is innocent vs Silva's not, but I think it would be much more meaningful if we went with the different approach. Also, in this scene they overuse super close ups so much, it gets boring to watch, none of their facial expressions are groundbreaking and telling us anything new. In the two previous scenes with Bloom's close ups, Bloom snarled and nearly jumped her mom and the other one she was literally in pain while pretending not to be. There are so many things being said through her face. In here Sky is just confused and we know this by the plain dialogue, why do I have to keep seeing his face and then Silva when he speaks and then Sky- It's just boring.

1x04 - Sky and Riven's face off.

There IS such a thing as trying too hard. This scene tries so badly to be edgy and artsy, to be creative! All it manages it's to be nauseating to watch, difficult to comprehend and poorly executed. These two are best friends fighting over something that's been brimming since the pilot of the show, implicitly since before s1 starts. Riven straight up says more than one deep insecurity of his. And YET we have this weird stiff camera, a whole half a yard between them, zero emotional impact. Riven goes on to throw on Sky's face that he's a hypocrite and nothing NOTHING lands! We're so caught up with the camera twirling around that all the emotional punches fly out of the window.

[storysofmyown]

Seven stages of love Chapter 7, Epilogue: Philutia

Summary: Ever since the Celestial War, since they all fell, Asmodeus has  dedicated himself to his sin. Not caring about anything else, but  drowning himself in the pleasure and ecstasy of it all. But not anymore,  now he cant even handle the idea of it. But, what else is there to want? After so long of having indulged in his sin, what is there than  Asmodeus is looking for, something that will fill him, and that wont  drive him to destruction? Perhaps his brothers can help him with that. Warnings will appear in each chapter.  

Read on ao3

Word Count: 1818

Trigger Warning: None that I can think of. If you find any feel free to let me know so I can add them!

The house of lamentation was in an absolute uproar. Noises coming from every room in the house. Lucifer had his classical music on an all time high, his own way to shut away the noises that were coming from the kitchen, as Belphegor and Beel attempted to make some horrific concoction that went against Solomon's own cooking. As well as Mammon’s music that was blaring from his room, apparently having entered a context where the louder he listened to music, the more opportunity he had to win, meanwhile Leviathan was showing Satan an anime, the music of the intro being able to be heard through the entire house as it fought with that of his brothers. Except from one demon, who although had been having a messy head, who's words and screams were louder than all the noises in the house, was now oddly quiet. As he smiled at himself in the mirror.

Asmodeus placed the perfume bottle down, picking up the earrings Mammon had given him in exchange for having sold his designer shoes. They were quite pretty, for having been a gift from Mammon. The demon let out chuckle, it was...odd. Being able to look at himself in the mirror once more, gone the feeling disgust. A few days ago, he would have been to the point we're if he caught a glance of himself in the mirror, it would have been broken in a million pieces, accompanied by the blood that would have been pouring from his wounds. But now...now he was once more able to smile at the demon reflected in the mirror. A real smile, not like the ones be had given for so many years in order to fool himself and convince the corroded carcass of a demon to go out into the world.

Now, he was able to see himself. The real Asmodeus, the one that had been locked away from all that pain and all those desires, the one that wasn't controlled by the feeling of lust and the sin that had place a chain around his wrists and a leash on his neck. Finally allowing himself to breath the perfume of roses that lingered in his room, instead of the despair that came from his mind. Now he was ready to go out into the world again. But the world that he wanted to go out to, wasn't the same as the one he thought he needed. And he just hoped they would like the new Asmodeus, along with what he had to say, and how he wanted to say it.

"Asmo?"

Belphegor’s voice made Beel stop mid bite, looking in the direction his brother was. He had just entered the kitchen and was looking at the two with curiosity, not only that but he had adorned himself in the usual clothes he would wear to go out. Although, those were less...loud.

"Hi!" He spoke in his usual cherry tone, making the twins look at each other.

"You look nice." Beel spoke, food still in his mouth before he finished the bite.

"Are you going out?" The youngest leaned against the counter, fluffing the pillow in his hands slightly before his eyes fell on the older brother, who was ravaging the cabinets searching for all kinds of things.

"Nope! I was actually thinking of doing a movie night." The click of the bowl as it was set down on the table, and the crinkling of the bags, made Beel hungry, but aside from that, it attracted some other demon into the kitchen, who had been avoiding finding the eldest all afternoon.

"Yo, y'all cooking something?"

"Mammon! Perfect timing~" The fifth eldest grabbed onto the Avatar of greed's arm, pulling him into the kitchen and proceeding to place the bowl on his hands, already full. "Here, see that Beel doesn't eat them yet." As he spoke, he started taking cups out if the cabinets, and ice from the fridge.

"Oi, hold on. You can't just grab me and pull me like that-, Beel!" Mammon glared at his younger brother, who’s hand was almost already inside the bowl, mumbling an apology as he retracted it. "What are you even doing?"

"He's doing a movie night." Belphegor spoke, although none of the demons in the room knew if he was awake of asleep.

"We are making a movie night! None of you are escaping." Asmo stated, placing the cups, already full, in a tray. "Here, Belphie, you take this to the room. Beel, would you be a dear and search for some more food? We know it won't be nearly enough for all of us. I'll go get the others! You three wait for me in the living room~"

After searching through his home for the remaining of his brothers, two of them being more reluctant to participate, as he had expected. He and Lucifer went to the twin’s room and came back with an array of pillows and blankets to get comfortable all over the floor, at which Levi complained, only to be quickly shut up as they reminded him the position he took to play. Asmo finally managed to get all of them into the living room just in time to catch Beel almost eating from the bowl he had entrusted Mammon to protect. After a couple of more complaints, and a silent glare from Lucifer, Asmodeus finally managed to have all his brothers sit down.

"...ok, so you have us all here. Now what?" Leviathan asked, a little annoyed at having had his game taken away from him, just when he was about to beat a hard level.

"Now, we obviously watch a movie, dummy~" Asmo spoke from his position as he set up a DVD player, making Satan frown.

"I didn't know we still owned one of those."

"Hold on, isnt that-"

"Yes, Levi, this is yours. I think you saved it a long time ago in the attic." Asmo said, turning the device on and place a DVD inside the player, quickly hooking it up to the tv and sitting between him brothers, shoving Belphie to the side, effectively waking him up. "Now, get cozy, we are spending the whole night together~" he chuckles, only for some of his brothers to groan, although, none of them tried to get away from him and just smiled as the movie started.

It had been a few hours, and the known Avatar of Lust, along with the rest of his family, had went on to go on with their movie night. Well, movie night was to put it highly, in fact, they were watching some videos. This was what the Avatar of Lust truly wanted to do, spend time with his family, as he remembered how important they were. Videos from all the years they had spent together. Recorded in old cameras that at the time where the best technology possible. Old phones and pictures, them all sharing their own thoughts and stories behind all the images that flashed by. At first, they all seemed to be surprised that those were the 'movies' Asmodeus was referring too. But after a while, they grew fond of the idea, basking in the old memories and even sharing even older ones from the time they fell and fond times they remembered from the celestial realm, telling Satan all about them. Although, a certain older demon noticed how the young Avatar or Lust got slightly increasingly nervous each time it moved to another section. Until it got to a video, the quality as of the D.D. D’s they used now, and it showed Asmo, in his room, alone.

"...uh, hi?" The Asmo in the video spoke. By his state, they all could tell he had been obviously tired when recording this. "So, I'm...making this to put my thoughts in order, I guess?" He looked directly into the camera. "...but as I pressed the button I realized that...all I have in mind and all that I truly want to say is...thank you..."

The audio paused for a moment, an obvious distressed Asmo taking a moment to collect himself, the brothers all looked at the Asmodeus that was currently sitting between them all. Wide eyes in shock. The demon could feel the eyes on him, making a light pink come to his cheeks as he watched himself in the video. A slight feeling of shame, no, perhaps embarrassment at having decided to approach the situation in such a way.

“Asmo what is-” Lucifer was cut off by the video finishing, the screen turning dark. All brothers looking confused at Asmodeus, who could barely muster the courage to look at any of them, so, instead, he kept his sight glued to the floor, before speaking.

“I know…I have been difficult lately, and that you all have had a hard time dealing with me and…and all my questions. But…after speaking with every single one of you…” A small smile comes to his lips as he remembered the conversations, and what they had meant to him. They way they had opened his eyes to the world he had been missing, and to the one he had submerged himself in so deep there was no light anymore. “…I realized what it is that I was lacking. So, thank you, my dear brothers and…”

He pauses again, letting the silent set in his words to his brothers. It had been a long journey. And at first, he had felt so lost…like there was no way he could ever truly understand what was missing, or where to even beginning searching. But thanks to his brothers, and without even realizing it, he had been actually searching what it was missing. And he now understands. He understood better than anything else, better than even his own sin and his own mind and buddy, that the answer for what he needed laid right inside of the house of lamentation. Within himself, and one of the few ways he could start learning and reconnecting with who he was, was right around him.

With his family. With his big, stupid, loud, noisy family. The one that had watched him crumble and instead of mocking him had helped him get back up slowly. And now he was taking the first step after having been rebuilt slowly, the first step of the journey he had yet to complete. But that he wasn’t worried about, because he had his family. And to grasp and fully understand the thing he needed; the Avatar of Lust wouldn’t need to go anymore. And for him that was more than okay, because that meant he could stay close to those who had helped him trough it all. To those who would keep helping him. And to the six demons he only had one thing to say, and it the same thing he had to say to himself.

“I love you all”

Philutia: Self love

******

Hi, well, here we are, at the end. I am honestly surprised I managed to finish this in time, but hey, here it is! I really, really hope you all had enjoyed this fan fiction as much as I enjoyed writing it, and I guess I will see you all on my next fic obey me fic XD

Take care!

Previous chapter

Other works

[gumnut-logic]

Who do you save, John? (Bit 8)

Bit 1 | Bit 2 | Bit 3 | Bit 4 | Bit 5a | Bit 5b | Bit 6 | Bit 7 | Bit 8

This one hurt my brain. Writing Jeff is a challenge. I’m just leaving this here and walking away calmly. I hope you enjoy it anyway :D Many thanks to @scribbles97​ and @godsliltippy​ for the help when I screamed lots.

Warnings: blood.

For @5hadow-alpha​​  cos they wanted Shopping and a Tracy brother. They got more than one, and I got more than I expected.

-o-o-o-

Eos let off a burst of frustration and blew out three LEDs on Thunderbird Five.

John would not be happy.

John could be as unhappy with her as he liked just so long as she could get in contact with her father.

There were men fleeing the rooms her father was hidden in, but none of them were a Tracy.

And she still had no contact.

Whoever had put the interference in place around the suit shop, knew what they were doing. She had disabled the cloak that hid the presence of the interference, but there was no remaining avenue to travel to any of the communication devices in those rooms.

She could ping off the IR tech, her father and his brother’s comms and vitals monitors, but none of the brothers were wearing them!

It was so frustrating. She would speak with Brains. She flung off several routines and threw a tiny part of herself into processing a new design for comms and vitals that stayed with the human body and didn’t get discarded at whim!

Frustration slipped into anger and fear joined the party.

Kayo offered random platitudes, but Eos wasn’t human. She wanted her father and only his presence could assuage her anxiety.

At least Kayo was on approach to the building.

“Eos!”

John’s voice shut down all her processes, her entire being redeploying immediately to focus on his signal. “John?” It came from his comms. A flick of digital switches and she had visual.

Thunderbird Five groaned with Eos’ relief, its digital superstructure flexing under AI emotions it was never designed to support.

“We need medical assistance. Virgil has a gunshot wound to the chest and is in difficulty.” Audio picked up the Commander’s voice in the background yelling Virgil’s name.

“Help is on the way.” Medical services were indeed outside the building. She pinged Penelope with that information.

The woman started running as she spoke into her comms.

“John, are you well?” Her voice sounded small despite amplification.

“I’m okay, Eos.”

Something in his voice revealed his lie, but Eos was unable to narrow down the frequency. “John?”

“I’m gathering up comms. The family will be back online shortly.”

“Thank you, John.”

A pause.

Another yell from Scott.

“Get those medical personnel in here. Chest decompression, blood replacement, cardiac stimulation and life support.”

“Yes, John.”

“Thank you, Eos.”

“You’re welcome.”

-o-o-o-

They lay Virgil down, flat on his back. Alan’s fingers were on his brother’s pulse when it faded.

“Cardiac arrest.” He set his shoulders to apply chest compressions. Pushing Virgil’s bloody shirt aside, Alan stretched his fingers to locate the optimum position. His palms made skin contact and Alan leaned forward only to cry out when his arm reminded him loudly that he was injured too.

“Breathe for him.” Scott nudged him aside, sleeves rolled up over arms almost twice the size of Alan’s. “I’ve got this.”

And then it was simple mechanics. He tipped Virgil’s head back and, in rhythm, breathed for his brother.

Somewhere in the back of his mind, Alan knew exactly what he was doing and the fear was screaming at him. But Alan was a professional, this body was a rescuee who needed saving.

Numbers flew.

His father was on his knees beside them, but there was no time to acknowledge anyone.

Virgil, c’mon.

Scott hissed between his teeth. “Virgil, don’t do this.”

His big brother’s hands pressed down hard, beating a heart that was likely strained and confined by pneumothorax. They needed equipment and they needed it now.

“Where the hell are those paramedics?!” Scott’s voice was hoarse.

Kayo appeared at some point, Gordon by her side.

Alan, lightheaded by forced breathing that his brother was barely accepting, didn’t respond to either of them.

Virgil, please!

And suddenly he was being shoved aside. A bag replaced him; its hiss regular and cold. New hands and new voices surrounded Virgil. Scott was yelling.

Alan registered the tube they stuck in Virgil’s side and Scott’s cry as they finally got a heartbeat.

Actions and words began to blur as Alan’s own heart beat took over his hearing.

Then Virgil was moving, propelled up and away by a hover stretcher. Scott ran with it.

Alan remained sitting on the floor.

Blood all over his hands, his heart beating fast and hard enough to drown out almost everything.

“Alan?”

He blinked. His father’s grey eyes caught him from where the older man was still sprawled on the carpet.

Drying blood stained the grey of his suit all down his front.

His hands were darkening red.

Alan hitched in a breath and it almost strangled him. His adrenalin began to wane and with it a tsunami of emotion swelled and threatened.

He held it back.

And still his heart beat so fast.

So fast.

“Alan?”

Get up. He was an emergency responder. This was still an emergency. He was still in the danger zone.

Stumbling, he pushed himself to his feet.

It was a mistake.

The world dissolved into sparkles and dark spots.

He clutched a hand to his head. His heart just wouldn’t stop.

“Alan!”

Daddy?

Someone else called out his name. Gordon? John?

Scuffle. Running feet.

Someone swore.

The sparkles gathered into darkness and whisked him away.

-o-o-o-

Jeff was ever so proud of his sons. Ever so proud.

Scott and Alan worked in concert like a well-oiled machine, keeping Virgil alive.

Alive.

Please god.

His own hands itched to assist, but Scott’s eyes were fire and Alan’s determination a physical thing.

He could only watch two of his sons fight for the life of their brother.

Virgil was almost grey under the splattering of red, the silk of his deep green shirt only working to emphasize that colouring.

John appeared from the change rooms; shirts clutched in his hands. No doubt the comms they had all been missing. Eos was likely unhappy if he could predict the AI’s response to the situation.

John’s grim expression would seem to agree.

“Where the hell are those paramedics?” Scott’s expression was strain and pain. His shoulders and arms pressing down on Virgil’s chest in a horrible way.

Jeff ticked off forced heart beats in his head.

Gordon and Kayo ran into the room. Kayo immediately grabbed Timothy, securing his restraints with some of her own.

Her eyes flicked in the direction of Virgil, fear in their depths.

Finally, paramedics rushed in behind Gordon, the aquanaut stepping out of their way.

Alan was nudged aside as Scott gave a sharp status report between compressions.

A needle and tubing appeared and expert hands released the pressure in Virgil’s lung cavity.

There was silence as Scott ceased compressions, his fingers reaching for Virgil’s carotid.

A frozen moment.

Another.

“We have a pulse!”

The bag remained on Virgil’s face.

“We move him now.” Scott’s voice was sharp and despite the paramedics having their own chain of command, there was no denying the Commander of International Rescue.

Virgil was manhandled onto a stretcher and whisked away. Scott glanced at Jeff once, his son’s worry so desperate. A blink and he was following the hovergurney.

Another blink and his two eldest sons were gone.

The sudden silence in the room threatened to strangle. He had to get up. He had to follow his son.

Alan sat across from him, a frown on his face. So pale.

“Alan?”

Those blue eyes blinked and stared. Jeff’s heart lurched.

He reached for his cane.

So pale.

“Alan?”

Gordon and John looked over, frowning in unison.

Stubborn determination flickered in Alan’s eyes and he pushed himself to his feet.

All the blood drained from his face.

“Alan!”

Gordon and John were moving, but Jeff was closer and he threw himself at his youngest just as Alan crumpled.

Jeff barely caught him. The eighteen-year-old wasn’t a big man, but Jeff came in at an odd angle and his own strength was compromised. The former astronaut went down with his son, Alan’s weight as limp in his arms as Virgil’s had been minutes before.

The gasp that passed Jeff’s lips was more a sob.

“Alan? Son?”

“Eos, get those paramedics back in here! Alan’s collapsed.”

“Yes, father.”

Jeff lowered his youngest to the carpet and ran vitals.

Breathing laboured.

Heart rate fast.

Likely blood loss.

Shock.

“Dad. He is going to be okay.” John’s voice was ever calm.

Gordon was applying pressure to Alan’s arm.

More paramedics barrelled into the room.

Quick fingers. John’s sharp report.

And another son was whisked away.

Jeff found himself half sprawled on the carpet of a suit shop surrounded by blood stains.

“Dad?”

He looked up to find John kneeling in front of him. He belatedly realised John’s hands were on his arms.

“Dad? Are you okay?”

“I have to go with Allie.”

“Gordon has gone with him. He is going to be okay.” Turquoise pierced his heart.

“Virgil…” But the sentence wouldn’t finish.

John visibly swallowed. “Is in good hands.”

He needed his cane.

He needed his sons.

Lucy screamed at him in the back of his mind.

He had to look after his children.

Blood on the carpet.

He grabbed for his strength, found it failing, but he swore at it and reached for his cane anyway.

His fingers wrapped around the smooth wood, their tips brushing across the simple carving his second eldest had etched into the surface. A stylised Thunderbird, wings spread in defiance.

Virgil smiled at him in his mind’s eye.

Jeff Tracy grit his teeth, set the cane’s foot into the damaged carpet and pushed himself to his feet.

“Dad?”

John’s voice was so gentle.

Jeff straightened his shoulders and caught his son’s eyes.

“John.” He put it all in his son’s name. He needed to be there.

The fingers on his arms tightened just a little. One hand let go as John stepped back.

There was a desperate love in those turquoise eyes…and in his quiet reply.

“FAB.”

-o-o-o-

Next

[cheezritsu]

Haikyuu Couple Aesthetics (pt 2)

part one here!

Kageyama Tobio: couple workouts, linked pinkies, lingering touches, butterflies in your stomach even after years of knowing him, parting his sweaty bangs after a gruelling match, sitting in your lap during study sessions. The childhood friends couple; always attending his games, setting a separate ringtone for when he calls at 2 am from another country, his thumb caressing your cheek when he kisses you, walking home after practices with his face washed with sunset; tiny, barely there smiles meant for your eyes only; mundane tasks as dates, buying magazine covers with his face on them; knuckle kisses, massaging his tense muscles after long, grueling days; pressing your foreheads together, looking deep into his love filled eyes; always following your advice, wrapping his arms around your waist and breathing in your scent; recalling old memories with his grandfather, cooing over baby pictures, having each other as your phone background, being prideful for him, trophy husband jokes; standing up for him no matter what. Slow, unsure kisses, even after so many years; always saying “see you later” and never goodbye, soothing his worries with a hug, knowing what he means even when he’s quiet. You two are the star crossed lovers, never quite separated as long as you’re in love. 

Hinata Shoyo: 8 hour phone calls, tan lines, bruised arms, giving Natsu advice like she’s your sister; the sunshine couple; constant encouragement, sitting on the back of his bike and going down hills, Marvel movie marathons, talking so much you forget to eat, reading Shonen jump together, him teaching you volleyball, showing up to all his matches; the number 10 proudly across your chest; brushing away his frustrated tears with the back of your hand; video calls with 12 hours between you two, spontaneous dates, convenience store slushies, being shown off to his friends, pinky promises, cheek kisses, running through the streets with intertwined hands, laughing maniacally; making any day an adventure, getting meat buns at 2am, sitting in the stands at practices, learning Brazilian recipes, smiling contently as he tells yet another story about Brazil; holding his face so gently he might cry, hugging him like he’ll vanish under your fingertips; never whispering “I love you,” only screaming it so everyone can hear. Proud smiles, even in hard times. You two are Icarus and the sun, your fierce love the one thing that keeps the wax from melting under your wings. 

Azumane Asahi: braiding each others hair, linking pinkies, slightly mismatched appearances, long, ambling walks home while the sun sets; comforting whispers, spinning hugs, promise rings, the sweet couple; always having the right words, modeling his designs, long distance calls on Saturday nights, dried roses, brown sugar boba tea, framed couple photos, bubble baths, fingers tangled in each other’s hair, running errands as dates; sleeping in his tee shirts while he’s away, stealing glances at one another, shoulders always touching on train rides, still blushing whenever your hands brush, being his personal cheerleader, having a mailbox with both your names on it, at home haircuts, rainy day dates; softly kissing each other awake; candid photos, monthly anniversary gifts, a comforting touch always close at hand. You two are Orpheus and Eurydice, willing to plunge the depths of hell to stay together. 

Iwaizumi Hajime: late night FaceTimes, learning to skateboard, insulting one another as a love language, stuttering out “I love yous”, couple workouts, being in each other’s profile pictures, bullying each other at any given moment, double dates, matching denim jackets, couple outfit of the day posts, melting into his arms, airport reunions, stealing his food during dates, the laid back couple; stealing his hoodies, long walks filled with easy conversation, having a dog as a child, being dubbed “Iwaizumi’s cool partner,” wherever you go; late night convenience store runs, sunrise hikes, arm wrestling competitions to win arguments, protective arms around your waist as you sleep, unironically calling him “Iwa-Chan”; cheesy Disneyland California couple photos, staying up with him as he studies for exams, rubbing the tension out of his shoulders, listening to his old Seijoh stories, being loved by Makki, Mattsun and Oikawa, resting a comforting hand on his chest, taking pictures of him in the background at sports events, taking pride in everything each other does. Not so much saying it love you,’ but seeing it. You two are the moon and the ocean; tidally locked with one another, and never wanting it any other way. 

Ushijima Wakatoshi: taping his matches on tv, wearing his coats when he’s away, champagne flutes, fancy dinner parties, the classy couple; musky, dark cologne, tacky souvenirs from countries he’s visited, indoor plants everywhere, cooking breakfast together whenever possible, courtside seats at his games, peaceful silences, quiet vacations, fancy dinner dates, pearl necklaces, first class flights, monogrammed luggage, smiling at your shared last name, french manicures, laced hands, moonlit walks, promise rings, handwritten letters, traditional weddings, feather light kisses to your knuckles; listening to his voice to fall asleep, mindless touches, secret smiles, ironic heart emojis, learning each other’s love language, sitting in his lap while he watches matches, coming home together after long days apart, fluffy white robes, his and hers sinks, forehead kisses, patiences, evenings spent reminiscing with Shiratorizawa, never losing sight of what’s important: each other. Accepting him no matter what, squeezing his hand for reassurance, saying ‘goodbye’ just so you can say ‘hello’. You two are like wild ivy, growing and entangling in one other until you’ve become one. 

Tendou Satori: watching anime until the sun comes up, taping his bruised fingers, singing his impromptu songs, cheering loudly for him at games, exchanging memes for hours, the silly couple; walking home with swinging intertwined hands, comic shop dates, playful banter, calling him “miracle boy” with a seriousness that makes him blush; bullying Goshiki, amusement park dates, stuffed animal presents, incoherent love notes, keeping pictures of you in his wallet, making chocolates in the dead of night, singing loudly in the shower, tickle fights, sneaking into his dorm when you can’t sleep, coming to his defense whenever, wherever; spit shakes, inside jokes, teasing whispers, learning tiktok dances, anime hoodies, cooing over his baby pictures, protective glares, shoulder touches, identical laughter, falling deeper in love with every passing second. You two are a hurricane; a force to be reckoned with with no intentions of stopping. 

Bokuto Kotarou: Being Akaashi’s worst nightmare, screaming songs in the car together, throwing rocks at each others windows in the dark, laughing on the phone underneath blankets, kisses every time you see each other; the inseparable couple; always knowing when he needs a hug, playing with his hair, wearing his jersey to volleyball matches, spoiling him at any chance, staying in bed an extra five minutes, trying new restaurants every other day, getting lost in the city for hours, constant snapchats, good morning texts, surprise visits at work, piggy back rides, ice cream on summer days, friendship bracelets, comedy movies, Polaroid pictures, bear hugs, beach dates, sleeping with his head in the crook of your neck. Hands always touching, nose kisses, spikes dedicated to you, air kisses across crowded stadiums, posing for paparazzi, the entire world knowing your name because he can’t keep your name out of his mouth for ten seconds. You two are remnants of the same star, finding one another across space and time. 

Semi Eita: dyed hair, eyebrow piercings, walls lined with guitars, dive bars, muffled singing from the shower, sake shots, world tours, chain necklaces, wearing his merchandise, karaoke dates, fishnet stockings, luxury hotels,the sexy couple; being his muse, velvet sofas, singing duets in the kitchen while making breakfast, dazzling smiles, having a makeshift recording studio in your living room, papers littered with song lyrics, starving artist budgets, breakthroughs at 4am, meeting his old teammates at concerts, silly audio recordings of meaningless conversations, “babe, listen to this!” the intimacy of sharing headphones, pressing kisses to his calloused fingertips, having more amps than furniture, spending hours in comfortable silence untangling his chords, the rush of listening to his new songs, constantly being on your toes, kisses that make your heart stop, being so proud of him. Long days spent slaving over work, his soft voice smooth like honey. Agonizing practices, staying by his side no matter what. You two are Bonnie and Clyd; absolute ride or dies through thick and thin. 

Kozume Kenma: watching all his videos, popping by work to give him lunch, singing softly while doing laundry at his house, making out in his gaming chair, soft, the intuitive couple; teasing fingers up your thigh, expensive gifts, housewife jokes, blanket burritos, at home dates, Speedrunning videos games, botched apple pies, having delivery on speed dial, curling his hair behind his ear before kisses, cat cafes, Gucci sunglasses, jamming to video game soundtracks, DND game nights, being in the background of his live streams, owning cats like children, bingeing on convenience store snacks, horror movie marathons, making fun of Kuroo, carding your hands through his growing hair, quick, stolen kisses, feeling completely at home with one another; watching cartoons till one am, matching stickers on your Nintendo switches, animal crossing weddings, sharing scarves, waking up curled into each other with the afternoon sun through your blinds, genuine and ugly laughter; smiles so soft you think you’re imaging them, listening to him pour his heart out about a game that broke him; ever laughing at him, slowly slipping to sleep while he plays video games, pressing a kiss to the crown of your head. You two are video game protagonists, falling in love like the universe intended you to. 

Suna Rintaro: Black sports cars, luxury apartments, Adidas track pants, fresh Nike sneakers, black and white everything; the aesthetic couple; matching outfits, silver rings, flashing lights, hazy bars, rolled blunts, hip hop beats rattling through your car speakers, late night texts, slow, languid kisses; rainy days, bedroom eyes, button down shirts, chipped nail polish, saying “bruh,” instead of “babe,” petty insults, wandering hands, dipping out of family reunions, noise complaints, throwing snacks into each other’s mouths, having your orders known at a restaurant, red solo cups, ash trays, house parties, spinning a record and listening to it for hours, laying on the floor with nothing to do; silk sheets, midnight drives, stupid jokes, lazy smiles, fist bumps, the inherent romanticism of not being romantic; bathroom selfies, upsetting the twins, always being one the same page, wilted flowers, tracing the outline of his lips before diving in for a kiss, trusting one another completely. You two are silver screen lovers, having the romance all teenagers would die to have. 

[number-one-micoverse-fan]

Everybody Knows That Dom Has Depression Except For Dom

It’s what it says on the tin, fellas.

----------

“And I have a couple of pre-made meals for you too!” Miranda heaves a giant refrigerated bag onto the table, beaming at Dom as she rips open the velcro and starts pulling out stacks of tupperware containers.

“Pre-made…?” Dom ventures, watching with growing wonderment as the stack of containers continues to grow. That bag must be bigger on the inside.

“Yeah, meals that are already cooked up and ready to go,” Miranda explains, finally setting the bag aside and walking around to open the fridge. There’s plenty of room inside for the castle of tupperware, “So you can just pull one out, stick it in the microwave, and you’re all set! It’ll be great for those days when you’re too tired or worked too late to make something.”

Dom blinks, considers, makes a soft noise of agreement. He absently hands containers to Miranda as she fills his refrigerator. He’s trying to figure out why someone would spend this much time on him. The only conclusion he manages to come to is that he definitely needs to find a way to pay Miranda back for her generosity.

He doesn’t deserve this kind of attention.

*******

“I—I’m so sorry about this!” Dom is scurrying around the house in the pre-dawn gloom, lit only by the sodium yellow burn of the streetlights through the window and the dim light over the kitchen sink. He’s flustered and tired, his tie undone around his neck, his shirt half tucked in, and his hair a mess.

“It’s fine,” Jake is hovering in the doorway to Dom’s kitchen, his hands wrapped around a thermos of of coffee. His expression is sympathetic, if a little strained, “Seriously, it’s not a big deal.”

“I know, I know,” Dom says in a stag whisper, struggling to do up his tie and tuck in his shirt at the same time, harried and fretting and continuously glancing towards the stairs to the second floor of the house, “B-but it’s just—it’s so early and—“

“I was already up anyway.”

“—you have Milo—“

“Dan’s still at the house for him.”

“—this meeting was so last minute—“

“Employers can be jerks.”

“—but Cody—“

“Dom.”

“—I didn’t want him to wake up alone—“

“Dom!” Jake snatches at Dominic’s shoulder, stopping the other man in his tracks. Dom’s eyes are wide and worried, heavy with exhaustion and stress. Jake gives his best comforting smile, changing his grip to a gentle pat,

“It’s okay. Honestly. I’m happy to help. You’re a—a friend. And you’d do the same for Milo, yeah?”

Dom swallows, takes a deep breath and smooths the front of his shirt down, “Yeah. Of course. Thanks Jake.”

“Anytime.”

*********

Cody flops onto the couch next to his dad and offers him a bowl of popcorn.

Dom takes it hesitantly, his brow furrowed, “I thought you were going to spend time with Milo…”

“He needs to do homework,” Cody says, settling into his spot. The light from the television reflects off his glasses, “And I wanna hang out with my cool dad!” He beams up at his dad, honest happiness on his face, “What’re we watchin’?”

“O-oh, um…” The hollowed out cavern in Dom’s chest is suddenly flooding with warmth and it makes a wobbly smile spread slowly across his face, “I…I dunno, actually, I just…had the TV on. Was there something you wanted to watch?”

“Mmmm, not really. Maybe we should channel surf until we find something good!”

“Okay…”

Dom flips through some channels rather absently, asking Cody about his day, about homework, about the MiCo channel. Cody happily rambles at him about everything and Dom listens, questions, smiles until his smile can’t get any bigger. He’s not really paying attention to the television, watching Cody talk and gesture animatedly about his latest attempt at catching proof of ghosts. The teen is lit up, literally and figuratively, glowing in the blue-white of the screen, smile flashing in the shadows, hands directing his words, a conductor of his own story.

“—so the audio should be finished by—ooh! Wait go back! Go back!”

The remote almost falls out of Dom’s hands as he fumbles to change the channel again. The sports cast flickers to something softer; a crowd of people milling about or standing in lines in a large indoor area. There are tables and booths set up in the background, but the foreground is dominated by a table at which sit a middle-aged woman and an older man in a tweed jacket. On the table between them is an intricately designed lamp with a garish shade made of bright glass and brass swirls. The man in the tweed jacket is indicating areas of the lamp with a pen and talking about the authenticity of the item in a low rumble of a voice.

“The…Antique Roadshow?” Dom questions, glancing at Cody.

“Yeah! It’s kind of cool to see what historical stuff shows up and to learn the history of it,” Cody says, “Also, sometimes, me and Milo would play this game where we would guess if something is haunted or not and then try and decide what kinda ghost is doing the haunting. He gets bored of it real quick though.”

“Hm…” Dom looks back at the—frankly hideous—lamp on the screen, “Well, uh, I don’t know a lot about ghosts but…if there was a ghost haunting that thing, it would probably be someone really annoying with no taste.”

Cody laughs, “I think I would feel bad for anyone who was stuck haunting that! It’s ugly!”

Dom finds himself chuckling along with him, “A, uh, I think the word is…ostentatious?”

They both laugh.

They’re still laughing an hour or so later, when the popcorn bowls are empty and it’s gone dark outside. Cody has tucked himself against Dom’s side, Dom’s arm around his shoulders, holding him close.

The cold, bitter hole that had been chewing him up on the inside is long gone. It’s nothing but tenderness and warmth and little rays of sunshine. Somewhere, in the back of his mind, Dom knows it will come back. But it’s gone, for now. And he’s warm.

He’s happy.

*********

“Ah! Here! Lemme help with that!” A burly arm sweeps out of nowhere and scoops some of grocery bags from Dom’s struggling grip. Most of the grocery bags, really.

“Thanks…” Dom breathes, sending an uneven smile up at Dan, “Sorry about the trouble…”

“Not trouble at all!” Dan’s own smile is wide and bright and honest, his stride confident and comfortable as he follows Dom to the front door, “I was just coming home and you looked like you needed some help. And it never hurts to help.”

Dom only hums in response, holding open the door to let Dan sidle past and set the groceries down in the kitchen. The house is quiet—Cody’s out, probably getting into trouble with Milo—and Dom feels selfish for enjoying the peace of it. He’s exhausted, drained, his entire body feels heavy and his thoughts are muddy. He sinks into a chair at the kitchen table and rubs his eyes. He still has to put away the groceries and make some dinner and he should probably shower and maybe he should fold those clean clothes he hasn’t touched in a week and when’s the last time he vacuumed and—

“Long day?” Dan’s voice cuts through the deluge of thoughts threatening to drown him. Dom sighs into his hands, can only nod in response because even talking feels like it would take too much energy, “Sorry you had a rough day, buddy. But, hey, lookit that! You still went and bought groceries and you’re home now! So you can relax, just a for a bit. Take a breather, Dom, you look like you need it.”

His fingers tangle in his hair as Dom raises his head to explain that while he appreciates Dan’s advice, he really doesn’t have time to sit about and daydream. But he finds himself struck a bit speechless because Dan has put all the groceries away while Dom’s just been sitting on his ass feeling sorry for himself. It doesn’t shock him that Dan knows where everything goes, just that Dan would even take the time to do it. Dom could have done it, he’d just needed a minute.

Dan’s still smiling as he folds up the paper bags and stows them in the pantry, “Oh yeah, almost forgot—would you and Cody like to join us for dinner tonight?” He straightens up, hands on his hips, a life preserver to a man floundering in a sea of responsibilities and fears, “I’m making lasagna and I always make way too much of it. And it’s been a while since we’ve had dinner together.”

The relief that makes the burdens of the day slough off his shoulders makes Dom feel like he could float away. It buzzes in his chest, louder than the nasty little voice that says he’s lazy or that he’s taking advantage of Dan’s good nature.

“Thanks, I…I’d like that…”

********

Miranda hands him a small stack of thick, hardcover books. They’re a little banged up and well loved, the spines soft and their corner dented, but they’re well cared for all the same. Dom cycles through them—there’s four of them and all of them are about woodworking of various degrees. He glances up at her, half from confusion and half from wondering if she’s trying to say something.

She’s twirling a strand of her hair around her finger, something he recognizes as a bit of a nervous habit, a twinge of uncertainty, “A coworker had a bunch of old books they were getting rid of. Brought in a couple of milk crates worth of them. I know you like working with your hands and—and building stuff, that kind of thing. So I thought I’d…snag them for you.” Her face is a delicate shade of pink and she keeps glancing at him from under her lashes.

Dom looks from her to the books. He opens the top book to a random page, skims a description of re-scaling an existing design to make a miniature version of it. He might have gotten caught up in it completely if he hadn’t been hyper away of Miranda standing in front of him.

He lets the book fall closed and smiles at her. That pleasantly warm feeling is curling in his chest again, pooling wonderfully in his stomach until his cheeks flush,

“These are—they’re awesome. Wonderful, Mira. I love them. Thank you.”

Miranda’s smiles explodes and she throws her arms around him. Her lips touch the corner of his mouth and Dom feels soda bubbles burst inside him like fireworks.

*********

Something a little like frustrated panic clutches tightly at Dom’s throat when he hears a knock on the front door.

It still feels like its on the verge of choking him when he opens the door and finds Milo standing there with a folder clutched to his chest.

“Hi, um, I know Cody’s sick but I brought his homework from school so if he feels kinda better sometime he won’t get behind in class.” Milo is unusually subdued, no doubt missing his usual partner in crime and as equally worried about Cody as Dom is.

“Thank you, Milo, that’s very kind of you.” Dom runs a hand through his hair, realizes it’s shaking and quickly takes the offered folder from Milo before the teenager can notice.

Milo rocks back on his heels, glances from Dom to the house behind him and then back to Dom, “Um. Dom—um—Mister Bridges—uh, I know—um. That is, uh…” He fidgets, fumbles, wrinkling his nose as he searches for the right words and Dom is more than prepared to tell him that no, he cannot see Cody, Jake would hang him for it if he did, when Milo blurts out,

“Do you need help with anything?”

“You ca—I…I’m sorry, what?”

Milo’s ears are red, “I, uh, d-do you need any help? With anything?” He’s tugging absently on his hoodie strings, self conscious and still rocking back and forth on his heels, “You’re probably—well I know—um. Shoot. Y-you’re taking care of Cody so I wanted…to ask…if there’s was anything…you needed help with…”

Dom hesitates, wants to tell Milo to just go home because he’s a teenager and he’s been in school all day and he deserves to enjoy his youth. But Milo’s expression is so earnest and he certainly looks like he’s been worrying and fretting all day. Dom wants to think that maybe Jake or Dan put him up to this but Milo’s still got his school bag slung over his shoulder which means he hasn’t even been home himself yet. Dom can’t fight the soft and gentle smile that appears on his face,

“Go ask your dads if they’re okay with it first. Then maybe you can help me tackle these dishes, okay?”

Milo brightens instantly, “Okay!” And he scurries off to burst into the house next door.

To be honest, Dom doesn’t expect him to come back. But he does, full of energy and ready to go. He’s a bit infectious and soon Dom finds himself caught up in the whirlwind that is Milo Junior. Dom spends his time flitting up and down the stairs between Cody’s room and the kitchen and by the time he’s gotten some food in his son and coaxed him to go back to sleep, Milo has washed and put away all the dirty dishes in the sink.

“Shhh! Don’t tell Jake I know how to load a dishwasher!” Milo hisses in a loud whisper as he shoves Dom’s dishwasher closed with a clunk, “I’ve been doing it bad on purpose so he stopped asking me!”

Dom laughs. It feels bright and hot and brilliant inside him, spilling liquid honey up his throat,

“Your secret’s safe with me.”

********

Miranda’s humming something, her fingers carding lazily through Dom’s hair. Her other hand is draped over his chest, their fingers woven together, puzzle pieces that click together perfectly. Dom’s free hand is resting at the base of his throat, his thumb idly rubbing against the edge of the top button on his shirt. He has his head on her lap, his eyes heavy and lidded and unfocused. In this moment, he simply is. He is safe and comfortable and the warm gentleness of the whole thing has him floating on a delicate cloud of candy floss and downy feathers, lethargically sinking into a hot bath of love, attention, and affection.

More out of habit than anything else, Dom glances at the clock on the television stand. It takes his tired brain a moment to process the time, but once it does, he jolts into alertness,

“Dinner! We—we gotta get ready if we’re gonna make it!”

He goes to get up, already dreading the notion of being out in public where people can see him and judge him and make their assumptions, where he has to communicate with those who don’t understand him, where out there will never be as safe as in here. It makes his stomach clench and his appetite sink rapidly into a tar pit of nausea.

“Wait.”

Miranda presses a hand to his shoulder, steers him to lay back down in her lap. Dom holds her wrist, brow furrowed,

“Mira, our dinner…”

“Let’s just…stay in.” She says in a low voice, leaning over him. Her golden hair frames her face in the lamplight, curtaining them both off from the rest of the world, “We can order some pizza or something, I don’t mind. I’d like it to just…be you and me.” She leans closer and the heat rises in Dom’s face, “Just the two of us,” She’s a breath away and Dom can smell peppermint and lilacs and just a hint of that clean, slightly chemical scent that follows a doctor everywhere,

“Together.”

If they kiss, no one would be able to see it past the golden cascades of Miranda’s hair.

Her hand stays in Dom’s and he forgets about how relieved he is that they’re staying home because he’s too busy falling in love with her all over again.

********

Cody sets a glass of water down in front of Dom, smiles when Dom looks up at him with a question on his face.

“I was getting one for myself so I got one for you too,” Cody says with a shrug, “You looked thirsty!”

It’s not until Dom takes a drink that he realizes how parched he is.

It also strikes him that he hasn’t gotten up from the table in several hours. His joints pop and groan in protest when he stands up.

The numbers and words on the bills in front of him were blurring into obscurity anyway. He’s going to check on what Cody’s up to instead.

The bills are long forgotten as he spends the rest of the day watching his son play video games, simply enjoying the enthusiastic company.

********

Dom pushes his safety glasses to the top of his head and gives up starring at the miter saw with a heavy sigh. He’s not going to be getting anything done today.

He wanders to the front of his garage and sinks down onto the pile of lumber by the open door facing the street, peeling his work gloves off his hands and dropping them onto the wood beside him. He feels heavy, like something’s pushing down on him, crushing him slowly into the dirt. All the plans he’d made for the day feel pointless and empty.

He feels pointless and empty.

And stupid.

He’s staring an infinite black hole into the pavement between his peeling sneakers when someone’s approaching footsteps make him raise his head. It feels like lifting a thousand ton weight.

Jake is standing a few feet away, hands in the pockets of his slim jeans, his button up open to show a faded band t-shirt underneath. His expression is carefully blank but he’s chewing on his bottom lip in a manner that suggests there’s a thousand thoughts going through his head.

“Hi,” Says Dom and his voice sounds flat and lifeless and it makes his throat close up.

“Hey,” Jake nods, shifts his weight awkwardly, “Mind if I, uh, take a seat?”

Dom pats the lumber next to him and Jake eases down, glancing at the wood as if checking for splinters. His hands leave his pockets and his fingers get tangled in each other, twisting in and out and over as he fidgets. Dom can see the movement out of the corner of his eye but it’s much easier to keep staring at the sun bleached pavement.

“Thought I would have heard your power tools going by now.” Jake says in a somewhat forced conversational manner. Dom shrugs, makes a noncommittal noise. Jake sighs, takes a deep breath, lets it out again, finally says in a stern voice,

“Dom. You have depression.”

That startles him out of his stupor enough to turn and look at Jake, “What? What, no. I don’t.”

Jake frowns, not in disappointment, in something like solidarity and determination, “Yes, you do.”

“No, I—“

“Dominic, I literally have depression. I know what I’m talking about.” When Dom opens his mouth to protest further, Jake cuts him off,

“You feel tired almost all the time, even when you’ve gotten enough sleep. Sometimes you don’t sleep at all and sometimes that’s all you do. You either eat too much or you don’t eat at all or you eat just enough to keep going, even when you feel nauseous at the idea of food. You get frustrated with yourself because you can’t do what you want, you feel like you never have enough energy, and you blame everything on yourself.” Jake’s talking faster now, words spilling out, a floodgate of awful truths and buried thoughts cascading out in an awful tidal wave that’s black as pitch, “You feel like everything is your fault and nothing will ever be okay ever again and you’re going to be stuck in this hellish tar pit for the rest of your life! Because there isn’t anything better! There’s nothing outside the tar pit and you’d rather let yourself sink to the bottom and drown there than try to struggle anymore because you’re tried and you’re hurt and no one can ever understand how hard it is to live like this! And even though you hate yourself for giving up you just can’t do it anymore!”

The words break off into a ringing silence.

Jake is trembling slightly, shivering in the summer heat, because it feels so damn cold all of a sudden. His eyes are bright and hard but there are tears clinging to the corners and his jaw in clenched and his gaze pins Dom to the spot with accusation and something like desperation. And maybe not a hint of fear. Dom wants to look away, to shake his head, to tell Jake he’s got it wrong. But, god, he can’t.

Not when Jake’s dropped his guard like this.

To his eternal shame, Dom’s eyes get hot and his lower lip trembles. He drops his face into his hands with a muffled curse, trying to push it all back down, trying to bury it all back where it belongs deep inside him where it can’t bother anyone else.

“Dom, please…” Jake’s hand is on his shoulder, squeezing, grounding, reassuring, “I’ve…I didn’t want to say anything, I really didn’t because—I know it’s such a hard thing—personal. And I wouldn’t have said—I would have left this alone if I thought you were…” He trails off, steels himself, takes a shaky breath,

“Cody came to talk to me.”

Dom looks up at him, can’t decide if he’s horrified or in despair or hurt. Jake looks apologetic, his expression crinkling up and his hands shaking, holding himself steady despite the lingering threads of fear tugging at him to run from the situation.

“Cody?” Dom croaks, hates that he sounds so damaged, hates that it’s another thing to prove Jake right, “Is he—“

“Cody’s fine, this was a while ago.” Jake’s gaze darts away, comes back, drops to his knees, looks up at Dom again, “I just…wasn’t sure how to approach you about it.” A weird, slightly manic and cynical chuckle rattles out of his lungs, “I guess now’s a good a time as any.” Seriousness falls back into place, a door clicking shut but the key still in the lock,

“He approached me because…because he knows you’re hurting. Dom, he came up to me and he was trying hard not to cry and he told me “I think my dad’s sick and he won’t get help”.”

Dom thinks his heart shatters into a million pieces when he hears those words. His shaking hands fist into the front of his paint-stained shirt and he makes a choked off noise that desperately wants to be a sob, but Dom refuses to let it be.

Jake expression is desperate, begging, pleading for Dom to understand, “He knows something’s wrong and he wants to know how to help you. I know this probably isn’t something you want to hear, that it’s—it’s such an impossible thing to try and process but, Dom, he’s just a kid and he knows that you’re not doing okay.”

And Dominic Bridges finally breaks.

Right there, on a pile of lumber in his garage, talking to his neighbor, he puts his face in his hands and he cries.

Because he knows Jake is right.

And it kills him.

********

“It’s okay, I’ll be right out here for you,” Miranda says quietly, squeezing Dominic’s hand in her own, “I’m really proud of you for doing this.”

Dom is shaking in his seat, his leg bouncing insistently, cold sweat sticking to the back of his shirt. His mouth is dry and every time he swallows that just seems to make it worse. He feels like his voice is stuck somewhere in the vicinity of his shoes and he wants so badly to trample it as he runs out the building.

But there’s a fee for canceling appointments after 24 hours and Miranda has taken the time to come with him and she’d be so disappointed and—

—and Dom actually wants to try.

So when the therapist steps into the waiting room and calls his name, he takes a deep breath and stands up. His legs are jelly and he thinks he might pass out and some part of him is screaming that this is a waste of his time and money and he shouldn’t be here. But when he glances over his shoulder at Miranda before he walks through the door, she gives him a huge smile and makes a little heart with her hands.

And Dom thinks that maybe, just this one time, he can try and do something for himself for a change.

[rhetoricandlogic]

By: Catherynne M. Valente

Art by: Thais Leiros

Issue: 7 September 2020

9199 words                                                                                   

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Variations in Luminance

Big Edie was a useless piece of shit.

Johanna Telle found the most significant relationship of her life on a Saturday afternoon in late May, sitting on one of those excruciatingly handmade quilts crafty stay-at-homes used to make out of their precious baby’s old clothes and putting a deep, damp dent in the buttercup-infested lawn of 11 Buckthorn Drive, Ossining, New York. A four-pointed Arkansas Traveler star radiated out around her, each of the four diamond patches so exquisitely nailing the era of the quilter’s pax materna that Johanna pulled out her Leica and snapped a shot before the homeowners could stop her: The Pretenders, Captain Planet Says No Nukes, Got Milk? and a Hypercolor tee subjected, as so many had been, to the indignity of a commercial dryer until it finally gave up the thermochromic ghost, its worn cotton-poly blend permanently stuck on a sad blown-out pink.

And Big Edie in the middle, ugly as all the sins of man, with a box of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Second Edition modules on the eastern point of the compass, a mint condition Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Sewer Lair Playset to the west, a working laserdisc player up north, and down south, one beefy hardcase Samsonite in Executive Silver with a handwritten sign on it promising a complete set of signed first edition Danielle Steel hardbacks inside. A steal at $300, suitcase included.

Still life with late 80's/early 90's. Johanna loved it.

But she only had eyes for Big Edie. The absolute and utter trashbeast technological abortion winking up cheekily at her from within a nest of vanished childhoods.

She’d driven all the way out into the golden calcified time-bubble of the Hudson Valley after the ephemeral promises of an estate sale. The people here had so much money they never had to grow or change or evolve past the approximate epoch of their children’s most precocious years. That’s how Johanna had gotten a Hasselblad for $90 and a fake phone number a couple of years ago at a fuck-Gam-Gam-just-get-rid-of-this-junk free-for-all in Stonybrook. You just crossed your eyes and hoped the kids were the type to tell everyone who never asked that social media was a disease and didn’t sully themselves with Google or eBay.

This was clearly the case on that late-May Ossining afternoon. The card balanced against Big Edie’s case read:

Does Not Work. $50 OBO.

Johanna Telle smiled in the perfect post-processed sun. The EDC-55 ED-Beta Camcorder retailed for a cool $7700 in 1987. Just over sixteen grand in 2015 funbucks. It could produce over 550 lines of resolution in an age where high definition was barely even a phrase. Automatic iris control, dual 2-3 inch precision CCD imaging, Fujinon f1.7 range macro zoom, on-the-fly audio/video editing, capable of recording in hi-fi stereo and most impressively for its time, native video playback. Angular black and matte silver bug-ugly design. The last glorious 13.5-kilogram gasp of the Betamax world, still in its hardcase shell, that particular shade of tan that meant Serious Business for the Terminally 80's Man.

In digital terms, Big Edie was prehistoric. Big Edie was fucking Cretaceous. If there was a camera set up on a tripod to record what happened when the primordial soup stopped being polite and started getting real, Big Edie would have been a top-tier choice for the discerning prosumer.

Big Edie was archaeology.

Johanna whipped her faded seafoam-green hair to one side and hefted that machine corpse onto her dark brown shoulder. She was comically heavy. The weight of a dead world, its concerns long quieted.

Johanna Telle, when she was paying attention, when she was happy, in those moments when she was most definitively Johanna, saw down to the deeps of things. It was all she was really good at, in her estimation. She saw that world, le regime ancien, projected onto the back of her skull like a drive-in theater screen.

When she was little, she’d sat criss-cross applesauce in her mother’s lap in a kind of mute blue nirvana, watching a crew send an unmanned submersible in a metal cage down the icy miles to find the HMS Titanic. Before her father left them, before they lost the house, before the hundred little fatal cuts of getting from one end of childhood to the other. Long beams of light broke the black water of forgetting and scattered across that ghostly bow and found what had been lost. Impossibly lost. Forever. Johanna had barely been able to breathe. She knew herself then, in that terrifying way you know things when you are small. The warmth of her mother’s chest rose and fell behind her, an entire universe of protection and presence. A gentle little prick of the aquamarine pendant she always wore against Johanna’s scalp. The familiar smell of Pink Window, her mother’s signature Red Door knockoff, pulsing off her clavicle. The tinny voice of a rich man floating out of the blue ocean. Later, when the neighborhood kids played games on their unforgivably Spielbergian suburban streets, hollering I’m the Incredible Hulk or I’m the Pink Ranger or I’m Tenderheart Bear, Johanna would call out something nominally culturally appropriate but whisper the truth to herself, which never changed, no matter the game or the streets: I am the exterior lighting array on Robert Ballard’s Argo ROV unit.

Johanna put her eye to Big Edie’s viewfinder. The black cup pocked gently against her cheekbone. Such a nice feeling. Like holding a girl’s hand for the first time. She stared into inert darkness.

“It only takes these weird old tapes,” someone said from outside Edie’s warm lightless innards. A friendly, well-hydrated, nicely-brought-up male voice, full of solicitude, exhausted, heartbroken, hanging in there, like the orange kitten in the old poster.

Johanna didn’t look up. She amused herself picturing the kitten putting its paws on its hips and whistling regretfully through its sharp teeth at the $50 OBO paperweight before them. She suppressed her not-very-inner snob. Yes, dear, ED Super Beta II and III series cassettes. You can still get them, anywhere between $35 and $50 a pop. You can still get anything if you don’t care what it costs.

“There’s one stuck in there. Made a nasty sound when I tried to lever it out. I don’t have any others, though. Dad didn’t stick with this one for very long. I put his digital cameras around by the hydrangeas, way better. You want me to show you?”

“Does it turn on?”

“Nope. Well, not unless it’s a Tuesday and the moon is in Pisces and you’re standing on one foot or some shit. I keep the battery charged up, though. I heard you have to do that or it degrades. I’m Jeff, by the way.”

Of course you are. That’s what they always name soft orange kittens like you.

Johanna’s fingers slid down Big Edie’s flank and found the raised plastic goose-pimple that marked the power button as easily as a practiced accordionist settling onto C Major. She pointed the lens at the bereaved child of its former owner and hit the big red square.

A firehose of light white-watered through the generous 1.5” black and white viewfinder into her cerebral cortex. In the middle of it stood, not the hang in there kitten, but a tall handsome guy in his late twenties or early thirties. Big emotive eyes, tennis shorts, dark polo shirt, with a shimmer of beard-stubble six or seven hours deep, hair the cut and style of debate team and law school and firm handshakes and warm decades ahead in a secure center-right Senate seat.

A shard of glass punched through his chest. Black monochrome blood sheeted down over his shorts and his long, grey, summer-muscled legs. His neck whipped hard to the side, like he’d suddenly seen an old girlfriend and was about to call her name, but when he opened his mouth, a jet of dark liquid spurted onto the quilt of his so-loved childhood clothes. It cut across the white block-print Pretenders in a clean spattered line.

“What’s the verdict?” Jeff asked. That voice like a clean fingernail cut through Johanna’s attention. She yanked her face up off the viewfinder. Jeff’s fine blond eyebrows arched curiously before her in full color, waiting to find out if that old Betamax monster still had juice. If the moon was, in fact, in Pisces. He shoved his hands in the pockets of a paint-splattered pair of jeans.

Johanna glanced back down into Big Edie’s gullet. It was waiting down there, that death-image of silver and ichor.

“I like your shirt,” she said. The walls of her throat stuck together. Inside the camera, that charcoal polo dripped silent-film blood onto his new white tennis shoes. Outside, he wore a slim-cut celery-green tee with Newport Folk Festival 2010 stamped across his chest in a faux-rustic font. She could look back and forth between them. Back and forth. Black and white. Color. Black and white. Grey and green. Green and grey. And wet, dripping jet-onyx blood. All that faded thermochromicity blazing back onto the scene to react with the not live but definitely Memorex heat-death of Jeff from Ossining.

Big Edie went down for the count.

The image guttered out like a pilot light, a sound both grinding and whining shook through her, and she rather ungracefully peaced out.

“$30?”

“All yours,” Jeff grinned.

He took Johanna Telle’s money and strode off across the mown lawn, through the labyrinth of his late father’s obsessions, the sun on his shoulders as though it would never leave him.

Aliasing

It’s much easier to pry a stuck tape out of a machine when you’re not that bothered if you break it. Get a screwdriver and a Sharpie and believe in yourself. It came free with significant but impotent protest, trailing a tangled mess of ropy ED Supra Beta II behind it. Johanna wound the mistreated tape back through the cartridge with the pen the way kids would never do again, and she would have been perfectly content for the rest of her days on this maudlin, over-saturated planet if she could have said the stupid suburban sun got in her eyes and that’s all she really saw.

But Betamax tells no lies.

Johanna sat on the floor of her apartment like the kid from Poltergeist all grown up, heavily medicated, and a cog in the gig economy. A massive daisy chain of converter cables hooked Big Edie up to the living room flatscreen, each one coaxing the signal five or six years forward from 1987 to the slick shiny present day.

The reflected video image washed her face in color. A forgotten pleasure, like the taste of ancient Egyptian beer. You used to always see your shot in black and white when you looked through the viewfinder. You only got to see the colors when you reviewed the footage. Inside the camera was another planet. Color was a side effect of traveling from that world to this one. Step from Kansas into Oz, cross your fingers for fidelity, saturation, hue, hope those shoes still look as red as they did before you crammed them through a lens.

So. No more black and white artsy viewfinder image. Now it was straight outta Kodachrome. But this tape sat in Big Edie’s time-out box for thirty years. Chromatic degradation slipped and popped all over the image, sickly green blooms, hot orange halos, compression artefacts, uncanny edging that rimmed this and that object in weird chemical colors.

Johanna watched a factory-direct 70's mustache-dad with tennis socks up to God’s chin helping his small, yet unmistakably Jeff, son unwrap a record player on Christmas morning. Big Edie came standard automatic fade-in and fade-out, so everything transitioned elegantly, creating a subtle sense of deliberate editing where none truly existed. Fade to black, then a slow melt into a hopeless lacrosse game, small children running nowhere, hitting each other with sticks too big for them to hold properly.

Another bloom of darkness.

A school play, reedy, vulnerable pre-adolescent Jeff dressed as a cloud fringed with silver tinsel rain, twirling and twirling, technique-free, his arms stretched out. Then another and Johanna presumed this was Jeff’s mother, the maker of the T-shirt quilt, 80% Diane Keaton, 20% Shelley Duvall, a white-wine flush on her cheeks, smiling up at the man with the camera in frank, unguarded affection and not a little desire, her shoulders bare above a strapless summer dress the color of the hydrangeas she probably hadn’t even planted yet.

Such wildly un-special moments, clichés of heart-beggaring authenticity, carefully cut out of the flow of time and pasted into the future, selected for immortality for no particular reason, random access memories transfigured into light that cannot die—but can get stuck in a metal cage for want of a Sharpie and a flathead.

Time travel. The only real time travel, unnoticed and uncredited because it was so unbearably slow. In the present, you use this astonishing machine to freeze the past. And you send it to the future. One second per second.

The image cut to black and then it was 2015 and Jeff selling off a lifetime of his father’s lovingly dragon-hoarded objets d’American masculinity. Standing on a lawn with catalogue-ready light and dark green stripes in the grass. Talking not to the man who produced and directed his childhood but to Johanna. She can hear her own voice on the recording.

Does it turn on?

He makes a joke about the moon and tells her his name. Sitting alone in the dark, Johanna realizes he was flirting with her, and she has a second to wonder what his mustached father’s name was before the glass smashes through his sternum again and blood streams down to soak a just out-of-frame blanket stitched together from mass-marketed polyester and lost time.

Johanna ran the tape back. Then she watched it again.

Back. And again.

She was still doing it when the morning broke into her apartment without announcing itself.

Five weeks later, she’ll be down to two or three run-throughs a day. An article will swim across her feed.

Late Night Four-Car Pile Up on I-84 Leaves Two Dead, Seven Injured.

Jeffrey Havemeyer of Westchester County, NY, 34, remains in critical care.

Johanna will feel nothing. She’s seen it a thousand times already.

Overclocking

“Sit there,” Johanna tells her cousin’s daughter, pointing at a cracked leather barstool.

Anika is nineteen, in her second year at Columbia. She is everything Johanna is not: mentally stable, tall, good hair, vegan, grounded by parental encouragement and affection, prone to healthy relationships, able to commit to an exercise regimen. The twenty-first-century girl. Johanna has always found her fascinating. Scientifically. It’s like hanging out with an alien. Your whole ecosystem is based in carbon and abandonment and trash, and you just always assumed those were the essential building blocks of life, but it turns out they’re totally unnecessary and sentient beings can just as well be made out of palladium and love and sensible choices instead, look at this actual good person right here, you have the same nose.

Johanna’s arthritic Great Dane watches them coolly from his massive fluffy bed.

“Your hair looks like a badger,” Anika says.

It’s been some time since Ossining and quilt and the hydrangeas and what Johanna has come to think of as the glitch. Technical difficulties. Runtime error. It’s late summer. Sweat darkens Anika’s hairline under the expected carefully messy topknot. The boroughs are one long incessant screech of twelve million window-mounted air conditioners and the smell of warm garbage bags, round and shiny on every doorstep.

Seafoam green softheart mermaid look out; icicle-white collarbone-length brutalist bob with black tips in.

“I like to think of it as ermine. You know, royal cloaks and all that.”

“Did you know ermines are just regular stoats with their winter coats on?” Anika helpfully informs her. “Not special at all. Fancy weasels. Glam weasels.”

“That’s perfect. I myself am a decidedly unspecial glam weasel.”

Johanna adjusts the tripod under Big Edie. It took Johanna weeks to gut the old girl, order parts, and convince her that modern life truly was worth living. Nothing really wrong with her at all, other than the audio-visual equivalent of osteoporosis and a bad back. Johanna loved the work. Data was invisible now. Stored on sand, transferred on air, transcending physical form. Light talking to light. But not Big Edie. She was very visible. Gross and awkward and tangible. The girl would never be good as new again. But she was good enough.

“No you’re not, you’re amazing,” Anika says softly, and Johanna can hear the little girl she’s known in that grown-up, gonna-save-the-world-with-believing-it-can-be-saved voice.

Johanna ignores this obvious lie.

They’ve already done a few shots with the Hasselblad, the Leica, a couple with her phone. She doesn’t really know why she’s putting on a show. Anika wouldn’t question just sitting in front of an old Betamax camcorder for a few minutes and then heading off for Hungarian pastries and a good full-body-cleanse political rant. But it feels important that today has the appearance of a plausibly professional kind of thing. Not that Johanna is using her.

Which she is.

Johanna doesn’t have access to a lot of people at the moment. They find her offputting. Not user-friendly. An unintuitive interface. Carbon-based.

“Can you let the blinds down halfway?” she asks.

Anika does. Slats of August light and dark slash down her face and torso (like glass slicing through skin) like an old pre-lapsarian end-of-programming test screen. It would be a gorgeous shot even if the shot was the point.

“I mean it. This apartment, your work. Margot. Mapplethorpe.” The Great Dane’s floppy black ears perk up at the sound of his name. “I love it here. You’re living the dream.”

Johanna hesitates with her forefinger over the record button. God, she remembers how much she hated it when people told her college wasn’t the real world and she had no idea what it was like out there, as if studying and working full-time wasn’t more work and less fun than the barren salt flats of adulthood between your twenties and death. But she wanted badly to shovel the same shit for Anika now. The only way you could look at this place and see a dream was through a lens that had never touched reality.

This is fine, she tells herself. The Havemeyer Glitch is not a thing. Just a shill for Big Coincidence. It’s not like he died. And besides, nothing bad can ever happen to Anika. She is a palladium-based life form. So this is fine. It’s for science. You will take beautiful footage of your beautiful niece-once-removed, and buy her a walnut kolachi, and she will tell her mother what a nice time she had.

“Margot moved out last week,” Johanna says without emotion. Margot moved out three months ago. She left a purple brush in the bathroom. Long black hair still tangled up in it. Johanna can’t bring herself to move the last cells of Margot that exist in proximity to Johanna’s cells.

“Oh,” Anika replies gently. “So that’s why you changed your hair.”

Johanna hits record.

For eighty-seven seconds, the only thing Big Edie has to say is that Anika Telle was born for the camera, a portrait of her generation, artlessly artful, a corkscrew of loose dark hair hanging forward to catch the light, one grey bare leg tucked up beneath a billowy sack dress with small elephants printed on it, the other not quite long enough to touch the peeling floor. Her expression genuinely, infinitely, but entirely temporarily sad for the misfortunes of someone else. See? This is fine. Tell her to say something. Recite Shakespeare. Or Seinfeld.

Deep in Big Edie’s viewfinder, Anika’s left eye crumples in a wet gush of pearl and black. Her head rockets back, shrouded in mist. She coughs, gags, tears streaming from her remaining eye. She’s still sitting on the barstool in Johanna’s apartment with silvery botanical wallpaper behind her, the tall window, the August sun, the half-drawn blinds. But the Anika in the camera wears black leggings, a puffy black winter coat, a black surgical mask. White duct tape criss-crosses the back of her jacket to form the words: #NOJUSTICE. She’s older, the lingering baby softness in her jaw gone, her hair a buzzed undercut. The cords on her neck stand out as she runs, her face ruined, blind with pain, stumbling, looking over her shoulder as she bolts on the video feed from one end of the living room to the other. Out of nothing, a cop in riot gear steps out of Johanna’s kitchenette, grabs the back of Anika’s skull in one hand and shoves her down. Anika-in-black falls to her knees, sobbing, puking into her mask, holding one hand to the hole where her eye used to be, screaming silently into Johanna’s (Margot’s) red paisley rug.

Johanna yanks her head up out of the sucking desaturated pit of the camera.

Mapplethorpe snores loudly. Trucks beep in reverse outside the apartment building. Anika sighs softly, bored but not rude. She scratches a mosquito bite on her knee. “I really am sorry. I liked Margot. She was good for you, I think. Got you out of the house.”

All the blood has either rushed to or drained from Johanna’s head. She can’t tell which. All she can hear or feel is her own pulse slamming itself against her eardrums.

“Do you … want me to do something?” Anika asks uncertainly.

Johanna shuts the camera down quickly. The image at the bottom of the viewfinder clicks out of existence. She tries to talk, but there’s no talk to be found. Just the burning hot green-on-red afterimage of a crystal brown eye collapsing in its socket, over and over.

“Come on, Auntie J,” Anika says finally, hopping lightly off the stool and bending down, scratching Mapplethorpe between his spotted shoulder blades. “Dinner’s on me. Malaysian okay? Maps can have a curry puff, can’t you, baby?”

Test Pattern

An experiment that cannot be repeated is evidence of nothing.

Johanna establishes a beachhead in Owl’s Head Park. Back supported by a black walnut tree. Bare toes clenched in a sea of tiny white flowers and clover-infiltrated grass. Big Edie propped against her breastbone, lens stabilized by knees on either side. Mapplethorpe’s yellow lead loops around her ankle, but the big fellow has long passed his days of running off after unsuspecting children. He munches philosophically on a pricey organic broth-basted rawhide shaped like a braided ring.

She finds a target, hits the button, rolls footage for a few minutes, tracking them as they throw frisbees for far-inferior dogs or kick soccer balls or kiss on picnic blankets or drag giant wooden chess pieces across a giant board or just walk aimlessly, whatever Saturday afternoon moves them to do. She doesn’t look through the viewfinder into that hellworld of black and white. Just presses buttons.

Turn it on.

Shut it off.

Find someone new.

Repeat.

She chooses at random. No more Anikas. No one is special, or unspecial. It doesn’t matter who they are or what they look like. They’re just data. That man, that woman, that child, that set of twin babies, those skaters, that guy sleeping with a James Patterson book over his eyes. Compressed data to be converted later.

Johanna’s brain checks out and begins a speed run through the five stages of grief over the death of a reliable reality. Denial: you’re losing it, change up your medication, girl, it’s not real, it’s not anything, just a stupid old camera that you bought because you are stupid, at best it’s old footage coming through on an old tape.

Stop recording. New person. Girl in green skinny jeans with a sketchbook.

Anger: fuck this, fuck you, fuck estate sales, fuck Robert Ballard, fuck the Columbia School of Law, fuck sad elephant print fabric, fuck hydrangeas, fuck curry puffs that make my dog poop out his soul, fuck Betamax you dumb drooling obsolete idiot tech, fuck me, fuck my dad, fuck Jeff Havemeyer’s dad, fuck I-84, fuck Margot, fuck the linear flow of time, fuck everything, life is garbage and this is proof. Why is this happening to me?

Stop. Scan. Record. Lanky white-dude dreds fuckboy in a vest but no shirt.

Depression: Of course it’s happening to me, because I am garbage and this is proof, and whatever cosmic hazmat disposal dump site got its back end trapped in my camera would only open the gates to a warped maladjust like me.

Stop. Scan. Record. Old man on the bench with god-tier eyebrows and a yellow plastic sunflower in his lapel.

Bargaining: I’ll just watch this back tonight and whatever happens, afterward I’ll tip Big Edie in the bin and never tell anyone. And then I will straighten up and clean my apartment and go on Tinder and eat leafy greens five times a day and see Anika more often and make amends and buy an exercise bike. Okay, Elder AV Club Gods? Deal?

Stop. Scan. Record. Kid on a dirt bike with (elephants) puffins on her dress.

Acceptance.

Acceptance.

Acceptance is Johanna sitting cross-legged (criss-cross applesauce) on Mapplethorpe’s bed while he snoozes jowlfully on the couch. She braces herself for red slicks of gore and bone. For Jeff and Anika redux. Once is luck, two is coincidence, three is a pattern … or at least time to wake up and smell what your inevitable descent into psychosis is cooking.

But that’s not what Big Edie has for her.

Not entirely, anyway.

Entropic Coding

Gloppy August sunlight washes out the image. Everything is overexposed, too bright, unforgiving. His thin chest rises and falls with his breath. He watches a small blue and white bird hop nervously down the iron rail of his park bench. A cerulean warbler, Johanna notes with supreme irrelevance. Closer to him, then further away, then close again. He crumbles a crust of brown bread on his tweedy knee and waits knowingly. This goes on long enough that Johanna starts to relax. It isn’t going to happen again. The bird will give in, and eat, and Johanna’s life will resume the program already in progress.

Then the sunlight cools, then it darkens, then it is a dim nothing-watt lamp with a tacky early 60's cherry pattern on the shade. The branches of black oak and Dutch elm in Owl’s Head Park still reach into the frame like kids who’ve spotted a news crew, showing off in the background, dying to get on TV. But the bench and the octogenarian perched on it have become a mustard-colored corduroy sofa and a young man with his head in his hands. Vaguely Scandinavian mid-century wooden end tables bookend the couch. A clock with thin brass spikes radiating out around it ticks over a clearly decorative fireplace. Above the man hangs a proto-Bob Ross painting of standard-issue lake/pines/mountain/lonely boat in a dizzying array of shades from brown to brown. Children’s toys cover the floor. At least one boy and one girl. Maybe more. Wooden blocks, a rocking horse with yellow yarn hair, green plastic army men. Donald Duck and Bugs Bunny and Snoopy staring lifelessly at the ceiling in a triple rictus of frozen grimaces. A book of Connie Francis paper dolls with most of the smiling valium-glazed Connies already carefully cut out hiding under the formica coffee table. A Funflowers Vac-U-Form Maker-Pak Johanna recognizes from a box of crap her grandmother let her play with the year they had to live with her because, no matter how she tried to pretend it was an adventure, her mother had no options left. You squeezed out perfumed lucite goo into molds and made “Daffy Dills” and “Tuffy Tulips” that looked like crystals in the sun until you got bored and broke a vase just to get some attention. A Spirograph and stacks of spiralled paper, scattered across the avocado shag carpet like ticker tape after the parade has gone. Like mystic offerings before the massive, inert cabinet television that probably weighs more than everyone who lives here put together. The kinds of toys you lift off a flea market shelf with joy and reverence, despite the peeling paint and chipped edges and missing vital organs.

But these are all new.

A wind moves through Owl’s Head Park and dappled shadows in the jaundiced light of the living room move across the man, the sofa, the table, the TV, the toys, the cherry lampshade.

The man on the yellow sofa looks up.

He is so young. Perhaps thirty-five, perhaps not even that. His incredible, architectural eyebrows are dark brown now; he has all his hair. He’s still wearing a suit, but this one has wide lapels, no tie, a plaid pattern that will crown endcaps in Goodwill until the sun burns out. He looks exhausted. Someone’s been smoking all night and it was probably him. maybe not just him. Butts overflow a pink pearlescent ashtray under the cherry lamp. About a third have frosted coral lipstick prints glowing on their filters, each one fainter than the last.

Johanna braces herself for the shard of glass or the ruination of his eye or gunshot or gas leak, whatever is about to break this poor soul in half. Her heart rate spins up into the rhythm of a jet propeller carrying her into nothing and nowhere. Her stomach muscles clench for impact.

But: the man gets up. Wipes his palms on his wrinkled pants. Walks across the room. Stops. Bends down to pull one perfect yellow Vac-U-Form Funflower out of the pile of misshapen attempts. Slides it into his lapel. The man leaves the house. He closes the door behind him so gently it doesn’t even click. No sound at all until his car engine starts outside, and then that’s gone too.

In the margins of the image, the cerulean warbler flies off with a cry. The shadow of his little body flickers over the empty room.

Fade out.

Fade in on the girl in the green skinny jeans and peasant blouse lying with her sketchbook under the willow tree.

Johanna makes it five people and ten minutes sixteen seconds deep by the overlarge alarm-clock-style timestamp before she scrambles off the dog bed and shuts the whole rig off.

An hour later, she gets out of bed and pads back to the living room on tiptoe, as if afraid to wake Margot’s brush. Blue light washes her cheeks and her hands and her walls and Johanna doesn’t move until it’s over.

Then she hits rewind and starts over from the beginning.

Image Burn

Mapplethorpe makes it another year before turning his creaky back on that big dog life. Since Johanna got to keep him through the quiet post-apocalypse of their union, they agreed Margot could have his ashes.

She looks the same. Just the same. As if Margot stepped out of the day she left and into today with no interruption in continuity. Johanna knows that dress, the navy blue vintagey thing with white piping and a little too much room in the torso, but that she refused to take in or give up on, because at thirty-seven, she might still have some growing left in her.

“Your hair,” Margot says softly. She steps gingerly over the map of cables and playback devices that have replaced living breathing life for Johanna and sits uncomfortably in the old bisque-colored armchair (falls asleep re-reading Harry Potter in it during a snowstorm five years ago; Johanna drapes a crocheted blanket over her and squeezes the bare foot hanging over the overstuffed arm gently, fondly). She sits as though she is trying to hover, as thought it might burn her to stay.

“What about my hair?”

“It’s … shocking.”

“It’s my hair.”

“I assumed you would have gone puce or checkerboard by now. Your actual hair hasn’t seen the light of day since high school as far as I know.”

Johanna only dimly recalls that she used to care about things like wilding her hair. It seems like a fact about a stranger. Like something she would see on Big Edie and use to pinpoint a date.

They make small talk. Margot is leaving the city soon. She’s bought a house in Providence with her wife, two blows Johanna absorbs expressionlessly as a cascade of words concerning Victorian architectural flourishes and small, private ceremonies patter down around her ears like raindrops. Mrs. Margot was apparently called Juniper, because of course she was, bet you call her June-bug too, gross. She was joining the obstetrics team at Rhode Island Hospital. Margot would teach very well-scrubbed scions of the even-better scrubbed at a private prep academy in the fall. Plant heirloom squash. Adopt three-legged rescue Labradors.

What are Johanna’s plans? If she has a gallery show before September, Margot would love to come. Anyone new in her life? How is Anika?

Well, Marge, I plan to shoot weddings and graduations and bar mitzvahs in which the cakes have significantly more artistic value than my entire self until I die alone pitched face-first into my takeout massaman with no dog and no stomach lining and no friends except a magic camera, can I get you a 40%-off Pinnacle buttered-popcorn-flavor vodka straight up, because that’s where I am right now.

But she doesn’t say that. She would never say that.

Instead, she decides to ruin Margot’s life. And in that moment, she genuinely believes it’ll work.

“Can I show you something?” Johanna says.

“Of course. Always.” Margot brushes her hair out of her eyes, now and a hundred thousand times in that chair, in this light. “New work?” Miss M was always her first audience, first viewer, the only other eye she trusted.

“Sort of. Mostly I just want you to tell me I’m not crazy.” And she doesn’t realize how entirely true that is until it’s out of her mouth and loosed on the dusty air.

Margot frowns. “You don’t look well. I didn’t want to say. Are you still drinking?”

Johanna laughs bitterly as she flips through the input options on the flatscreen. “Why would I not be drinking? Drink is friend.” She shoves delivery detritus off the couch to make a space: receipts, plastic bags, black takeout containers, breath mints and fortune cookies and after-dinner toffees.

And they watch together. Side by side. Just the same. Like it is before. Like she will pick up her purple brush again tonight and run it through her hair and come to bed and tomorrow will be years ago and the film of them will run forward from the splice.

Rather, Margot watches. And Johanna watches Margot.

The colors waver on her face like she’s underwater, staring up at the parade of strangers fading in and out before her.

The old man/young man on the park bench and the mustard-corduroy sofa.

The girl in the green skinny jeans under the willow and sitting at a bistro table with fake electronic candles as a man walks in, says her name uncertainly, kisses her cheek, orders an old-fashioned.

The guy with white-boy dreds and a vest with no shirt steps off a bike path and into a gorgeous apartment in no way decorated by a man who would wear a vest with no shirt even once, all minimalist monochrome, and a woman in pajama pants and jade chip earrings sobbing get out get out not one more minute I’m done get out.

A kid in a Spider-Man hoodie swinging upside down from a jungle gym and lying on his couch, a teenager, playing Madden on XBox, yelling to an invisible mother that he’ll mow the lawn, yeah yeah, just one more game.

And worse. A boy’s face fades into his forties on the subway. He asks why he’s being pulled over. A gash blooms on his beautiful brown neck. A student drinking alone in a bar ages fifteen years and loses twenty pounds between sips of house red. She waits for someone with frantic energy and when somebody shows up, gives her a little wax paper packet, leaves her to it, her fingers start to turn the color of corpses on the wine glass. A volunteer museum docent grows red rings and bags around his eyes but loses his wrinkles. Somewhere between the Ancient Greeks and Mesopotamian pottery, gets out of a Camry, locks it, and runs toward an appointment, wholly unseeing the baby in the backseat, asleep in a puffy lavender knitted hat.

“What is this?” Margot says. “Glitch art? Datamoshing? Like Planes and Jacquemin? What program did you use? It’s really seamless.”

“No program.”

“What do you mean ‘no program’? This is a practical effect?” Johanna chuckles mirthlessly. The screen shimmers. “Where did you find all these actors?”

“No, look, you’re not seeing. You have to look. The calendar in the apartment. The clothes the girl in the bistro is wearing. Do you recognize any of the players in that Madden game?”

“You know I don’t care about sports. I wouldn’t recognize any player’s name five minutes after I heard it.”

“Okay, fine. The song on the radio when the guy gets stuck in traffic.” She pauses it, waits for Margot to catch up, to see the faint cursive 2026-At-A-Glance calendar on the inside of the pantry door in that perfect sleek flat, the unfamiliar controls on the car dash. “I’ve never heard that song. You’ve never heard that song. Because that song doesn’t exist, on any service, in any catalogue, anywhere.”

“I’m sure that’s not true. Come on, you couldn’t possibly know that for certain, Jo.”

But Margot doesn’t see. Margot isn’t Robert Ballard’s submersible lighting array. She doesn’t know how to crawl into an image and live there. What she does glimpse in Johanna’s pleading eyes is the weight of time. Time she has spent searching for these things, for connections, hoping, honestly hoping, to find that song buried on some indie compilation CD with some revoltingly photoshopped jacket art and a discount sticker. And a thousand other objects like it. Books on televisions, limited edition toys, tie-widths, license plates, worse, more scattered, atomized, randomized information that never coalesced into anything but Johanna’s increasing silence and solitude. She vibrates so intensely it looks like she is sitting still.

And so, slowly, knowing how it sounds, hating how it sounds, Johanna explains about Big Edie as more strange moments unfold before the not-really-that-long-lost love of her life; naked bodies, and there are a lot of them, in embraces violent and lovely or both or neither, strangers meeting, over and over, in different clothes, different hairstyles, different seasons, a child abandoned in an airport in Reno, calling for her mother, surrounded by slot machines ringing in cherries and oranges, tears rolling down her face. And at the end of the reel, Jeff and his glass heart, Anika and her shattered eye, the long staircase into images that has become Johanna’s life.

Margot says nothing for some time. It is a terrible, sour nothing that lingers far too long in the air between them.

“So you think your camera shows … what? Death?”

“Maybe. Sometimes. But not always, not even often, really.”

“Then what if not that? The future? Like the calendar.”

“That’s closer, I think. Better. But at least a third of them are the past.”

“How do you know?”

“Well, the man in the living room is 1970. You can tell by the Updike book on top of the TV. That was the first edition cover, and it’s pristine. You can figure it out, sometimes. If you care about these things. If you know too much about garbage. And you know I know too much about garbage, M.”

Margot smiles faintly, but it is very faint.

“But also I went back to the park and talked to the guy. His name is Antony.” Johanna scratches at the back of her hand. “Antony left his family. In 1970. Just up and walked out on Grace, Walt, Irene, and Amelia, who he’d married when she was fucking seventeen. The proverbial running out for a pack of cigarettes. Left them like they were just … a skin he was molting.”

Margot looks for a way to shut it off, but Johanna doesn’t help her find it. Why should Margot get to turn away from it? Why should she escape?

“Fine,” she says coldly. “What is it then?”

Johanna takes a deep breath. “So whenever you transfer or transmit or store data, especially a lot of data, like audio or video or both, it gets compressed, and in the process, you lose a little bit of it. Maybe a lot, like MP3s were always straight garbage compactors for sound. Maybe only a little bit. Maybe so little you wouldn’t even notice. But in order to fit the storage device or the bandwidth, in order to save information or share it, you have to … you have to harm it. And that creates distortion. Halos. Noise. Warping. Busy regions in the image. Blocky deformations called quilting, and visual echoes called ghosts. They’re called compression artefacts, and that’s … that’s what I think these are. Distortions created by the present and everything else getting compressed, crushed into one stream. Halos and noise and warps and quilts and ghosts. A lot of words for damage. Just damage.

“But the answer is: I don’t really know what it does. Technically speaking, it’s a problem of parallax. Catastrophic parallax. A vast difference between the apparent object and the actual object. And for awhile, I thought it showed the worst day of your life. Which, odds are, for some percentage of people, is going to be the day you die. But not for everyone. Not for Antony. See, nothing ever went right for him after he left. Two more divorces and a dried-up retirement fund. Grandkids he isn’t allowed to meet. Lung cancer he picked up working a big gorgeous free man’s HVAC repair shop. But it took him almost his whole life to understand any of it. To process where he fucked up. What he lost when he thought he was barreling down the highway to a big gorgeous free man’s life. Big Edie knew it in an instant. She had his number faster than a speeding therapist, and that number was 1970. So it seemed to make enough sense. When I shot old people, Big Edie usually spat out the past. Young people mostly turned up older on playback. The future. That kid playing Madden. Madden 23, to be exact.” She points to him on the projection. The hole in his sock. The length of his hair. The name on the Patriots’ QB jersey.

“Do you actually expect me to believe your camera recorded something in 2023? Jo, come on. I’m really busy, and frankly, I’m not in the mood.”

“Just listen. Because then there was this. A wedding. Mr. and Mrs. Nathaniel and Lucy Vaclavik.” She fast-forwards through scene after scene. Johanna can tell just the sheer number of them is starting to look bad on her, and the manic sizzle in her voice isn’t helping, but she can’t stop herself.

The creams and golds and pops of understated rose-shades of a high-end matrimonial spread flood the screen. The bride waves her lily-dripping bouquet in the air. The Hudson River throbs with sunset behind her. Her hair sparkles with carefully applied glitter. Eyeliner and brows that date her nuptials as surely as a library stamp. Her new husband, in a grey tux, bends down to kiss her expertly neutral-frosted lips and their unified families clap like a gentle river of approval. The picture flows smoothly to the edge of the frame. No ghostly picture-in-picture. No shadows cast from other places, other times.

Margot smiles politely. Johanna knows she is losing her (has lost her). “I don’t get it.”

“I didn’t either,” she confesses softly. “I shot this no differently than the others. But what you see is what I saw. What Big Edie saw. No parallax. No difference in images. I rolled tape and the wedding marched right through the lens and back out again and it was just a wedding, no more or less. Nothing else has been like that. And the next day we got right back to business-as-horrible. I couldn’t figure it out. Why was it special? What was different? The thing is … he killed her. It made the news for about thirty seconds in April. They found her in the woods in Connecticut. But, you know, hedge fund guys aren’t that good at forensics, even if they’re 100% current on all CSI franchises, so they caught him pretty fast. So maybe … maybe Big Edie doesn’t record the worst thing that ever happened to you. Maybe it’s something so much smaller than that. The moment when the worst thing that ever happens to you sees you coming. Turns toward you in the dark. I think, once she married him, he was always going to hurt her. Because that was in him, an egg or a seed or a tumor, whatever you want to call it, a future that no longer has the option of not happening. The flowchart flows until you meet that person at that conference and then there’s no more choose your own adventure, you’re going to fall in love and they’re going to bankrupt you or betray you or just … disappoint you until there’s nothing left but cynicism swirling around at the bottom of your heart like tea leaves. Or leave you in the woods in Connecticut. I don’t know, maybe it’s just a huge ugly regret machine. And mostly I will never understand these. What happened to the Madden kid or the girl in the bar or why getting stuck in traffic on that particular day was so important to that man’s whole trajectory, or any of them, because that stuff doesn’t come across the AP like Mrs. Vaclavik. They’re just moments, unconnected, pulled free of every other moment.”

The wedding fades out and the two women wince together as a man they do not know pushes a woman they have never met against a wall. Blood trickles down her temple where she hit a picture frame and she looks up at him with unbelieving eyes.

“Enough,” Margot says. She grabs the remote. Shuts it all down. Turns to Johanna and touches her face. Touches her. No one has touched Johanna in a year. It is an alien burn. It is Margot. It is the past and the future and death, stroking her hair and making enormous eyes at her while the constituent atoms of their dog look on from the coffee table.

“I miss you so much,” Johanna whispers, and wishes she could have thought of something better, more elegant, more memorable, but her need banishes pretty words.

“Don’t,” Margot answers with finality. The finality of Providence, Rhode Island and heirloom squash varietals and Harrington Preparatory School and June-Bug and poor Mapplethorpe in a box.

“What do you think?” She cannot help that either, the need for her approval, her regard, the perfect full absent moon of her gaze on Johanna’s work, Johanna’s self.

“Honey … I think you need help. This is … this is nothing, J. It’s a bunch of slice of life shots of nothing in particular and three or four gory jump-scares. You taped over some movie of the week with a lot of nonsense. And I’m supposed to believe it’s what, magic? It’s you stalking strangers. Listen to yourself. Catastrophic parallax? You’re manic, you need care.”

But Johanna can’t hear that. “Okay, but that’s just exactly what I mean. Do you know what catastrophe means? It’s Greek. It just means a turn. A turn down or a turn under or a turn inside. A turn away.”

“Jo, this is basically a conspiracy theorist wall and you’re unspooling more red yarn. This is not an X-File. This is you not coping. As usual.”

“No, you don’t understand. I’ll show you. Just stand over there, I’ll shoot you for a few minutes, a few seconds, and you’ll see.” And what will Big Edie see? Margot leaving that hot, humid, unretrievable night, Margot packing up boxes for Providence, Margot right now, right here, telling Johanna she will never believe her? One of them, maybe, surely. What else was even possible?

“No,” Margot whispers firmly. “You don’t need me. And you definitely don’t need to ride that camera any harder. I’m not going to enable this. You just need help, baby. Professional help. That’s all. I have to go.”

“Wait—”

“I have to go.”

There is a disentangling, a hurry to go back, edit, remove even the idea that physical contact was made. Margot excuses herself to splash water on her face and Johanna sees herself in the mute black monitor, sees as the ex-moon of her night sees: a woman so thin her clothes don’t fit, who smells sour, whose hair hangs limp and unwashed, whose face has grown lines it didn’t have even a few weeks ago, degradation lines, juddering through the frame of her face.

Margot emerges awkwardly, chagrined, her familiar elfin face not one cell altered from the day she left, her voice echoing against every surface: I’m so fucking lonely, Jo, I’m lonely even when you’re here. Especially when you’re here. I’m lonely right the fuck now and I’m looking at you.

She holds up something in her hand. Something purple. Something precious.

“Forgot my brush,” she says softly.

And then she is gone.

Ghosts

Johanna puts it off for a long time.

Why bother? What use could it possibly be to her? What use is any of this? You couldn’t do one single thing with it. The shot was too tight to predict the future. Fight crime? Protect the innocent? No. The camera crowded the subject, an unbearable idiot intimacy that took away everything but the seeing itself.

But eventually, she was always going to do it.

Johanna watches herself on the flatscreen. Watches herself get up in Big Edie’s face. Fix the focus, back up to sit on the same barstool that held Anika all those ages ago, shifting awkwardly as she looks into the lens like an actor breaking the fourth wall.

She knows what she will see. She is calmly certain of it. She shouldn’t have bothered running the tape back for this little screening. She saw it the first time, when she was seven. When she was thirsty in the middle of the night and padded quietly out of her room to get a glass of water. Out of her room and past her father sitting alone in his armchair, the moonlight crawling in after him through the window, grasping at him just before he shot himself and her life … turned. There never was any hope for her. She was turned before she got one foot in the world. It wouldn’t be a prettier shot now.

The compression artefact burns out from the center of her nuclear-powered selfie. Her stomach muscles seize up the way they do when she just barely reaches the tipping point of a roller coaster and enters freefall, down the rails into her old house, the rugs, the stain on the ceiling, the off-kilter hang of her bedroom door. Her father’s face. Her mother’s soft snoring from the bedroom.

But that’s not what she sees.

No moonlight. No armchair. No 3 a.m. drink of water in a seven-year-old girl’s hand. It is just Johanna, seafoam green hair and all, walking on the lovely light and dark stripes of green on a lawn in Ossining, in sunlight direct from a photography lab, approaching a quilt made of old T-shirts and the objects it carries. She bends down and presses her warm thumb into the patch of Hypercolor shirt, waiting for the fabric to change color, to unsuffer the damage of too-constant exposure to the very thing that it was designed to react with, which of course it will not, can not, ever again.

Johanna touches her own face on the television, that seafoam green girl who still had Margot and Mapplethorpe and opinons about everything, that familiar face, yet better-fed and better-loved and almost obscenely untroubled. An ancient version of herself, suddenly unearthed at the bottom of the sea.

Finite State Machine

Johanna puts Big Edie up on Craigslist, all her specs laid out like a personal ad: enjoys long walks on the beach, getting lost in the rain, composite video output, and turning everything you point me at into an avant-garde film-school short. If you can’t handle me being haunted, you don’t deserve me being way more work than the camera app on your phone.

She lowballs the price. She means it. She can change her artefact. She can let it all go, like Margot said. Get care. Be normal. Cope. She can take that moment in Ossining and make it nothing. Make it just another random memory on a compilation tape of the decades fading in and out, like the little tinseled cloud boy turning and turning on his forgotten school stage, meaningless, untethered, beautiful and sad and without connection to anything before or after.

And then anyone could. The boy who doesn’t want to mow the lawn. The girl meeting that man at the bistro. Lucy Vaclavik. Antony. Jeff. Anika. Anyone. The long white beam of the Argo’s exterior lighting array sweeping through that dark and missing the great hulking skeleton in the blackness, brushing gently by, just barely, just by inches, finding nothing but open water.

She doesn’t answer a single query.

Six months later, Johanna doesn’t even remember what it’s like to leave the house without Big Edie. The pockets of her original-issue carrying case bulge with new tapes.

[ollyisonit]

Here’s a little peek behind the scenes of what Follow My Voice looks like with the lights on! Yes, the ghost that helps you looks like a giant tic-tac, don’t worry about it ;). If you want to hear more about the challenges of creating a game that was entirely sound-based, check out my post on the ludum dare website or keep reading under the cut: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/follow-my-voice/holy-smokes-thanks-yall-or-on-designing-a-game-with-no-audio

Wow!!!!! After an absolutely hectic 48 hours of development and a super fun month of playing other people’s amazing games, it looks like Follow My Voice ended up finishing in 1st for Audio and 5th for innovation! SWEET CRIMSON THAT’S INCREDIBLE!!!!!! Making an entirely audio-based game with no visuals was definitely an interesting challenge, and I had loads of fun trying to figure out how to make the game actually playable without feeling insanely difficult or unfair.

By far the biggest challenge in this game was figuring out how to let players orient themselves in 3D space without being able to see. Normally if you’re walking around with your eyes closed, you can feel around in the dark with your hands to find obstacles or tilt your head to hear sounds coming from different directions. However, if you’re blind in a video game, you don’t have access to all the extra senses you would have in real life (like balance or proprioception) so navigating in a game without visuals is significantly more difficult.

In order to work with this fundamental lack of information, I made few design decisions that restricted the way level design and player movement worked:

1: The Level is Completely Flat

One thing I noticed very quickly is that when you’re wearing headphones, it’s almost impossible to tell if a sound is coming from above or below you. In real life, if you wanted to figure that out you could tilt your head from side to side, but without using a VR headset or some extremely wacky controls that’s not possible to simulate. I made the level flat to take away that ambiguity.

2: The Player Can only Look Left/Right

Have you ever been playing a dark first-person game (not an edgy game, just a game where there’s not a lot of light) and gotten stuck because it was too dark for you to realize that you had been staring at the floor the whole time? Take that problem and multiply it by a thousand and you get Follow My Voice. This is another situation where in real life you could use your other senses (in this case balance) to figure out whether you were standing upright, but you can’t bring that sense into a game (especially an entirely audio-based game) without some extremely wonky controls. Once again I solved this problem by just getting rid of it; if the player can only look left and right, then they can’t get stuck looking at the floor.

3: Beacons! Beacons! Beacons!

Giving the player a way to figure out what direction they’re facing is probably the most important problem to solve in a game like this. If the player doesn’t know which way they’re facing, they can’t get their bearings and the level will devolve into a nightmare of running in circles and crashing into walls (or at least, more of a nightmare of running into circles and crashing into walls than it is right now). My solution for this was making sure to always have at least one sound playing at a stationary location at all times. The ghost’s constant whispering doesn’t just serve as a goal for you to move towards; it also serves as a beacon to remind you which way is forward.

4: EVERYTHING MUST MAKE A SOUND

Okay this one seems kind of obvious, but if sound is the only information you’re giving to your players then you better make sure that absolutely EVERYTHING in the level provides auditory feedback in some way. Here’s a quick list of some of the most interesting sounds I added to help players navigate:

There are three different surfaces that players can walk on in each level (water, rocks, and crunchy), and each one makes a different footstep sound. Placing these different surfaces strategically gives players more landmarks (oh ok I crossed water again, I must be going backwards) and helps separate out the different areas of the level

When you’re walking into a wall, you’ll hear a grinding sound coming from the direction the wall is in. This both lets you know that a wall is there (otherwise it would just seem like the player stopped walking for no reason) and also helps you keep track of where the wall is relative to you so you can more easily follow it or turn away

I don’t want to get too deep into how I calculated footsteps in this game, but basically I did everything I could to make sure that the player had what felt like a consistent stride length so that you could use footsteps to gauge distance with decent accuracy

I don’t want to post the full level layout here cause that would spoil the fun of bumbling around in the dark, but if you’re interested in checking this game out grab a pair of headphones and prepare to travel deeper and deeper (roll credits) into the darkness!

Also I just want to leave a shout-out here to all of the people who took the time to leave comments on this game, I do want to try developing this into a full title someday (Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram if you want to keep tabs) and your feedback has been super helpful (especially the stuff about the rocks)!

Thanks again and happy developing!!!!!!!!!!

[timetraveller29]

At Last

A Doctor Who fanfiction for #WhouffleWeek2020

Day 4 - Coat, outerwear / Food

Featuring the Thirteenth Doctor and Clara

The Doctor was working on a problem that had plagued her for not just days but weeks now. She danced around the console, from tweaking measurements one side to dials on the other, glanced at the displays, grimaced, then changed something yet again. It was proving difficult at the very least. She stopped and exhaled.

Maybe she should stop bothering about it.

But she couldn't help it.

It was so hard to be alone! And she adored her new TARDIS team, sure, but they didn’t know her. They didn't understand the darkness of her past, and if they knew, they'd probably leave her... just like so many companions had left her. And then there were others she had left behind...

The Doctor missed all of her friends with a burning constancy. Bill Potts, Missy, even Nardole! And she knew it was foolish to hope to find any of them, but there was a slight possibility that there was one person she could meet.

On second thought? Maybe it did make sense to give up.

She turned around slowly, boredly, expecting to see that same result she’d grown used to... null. Nothing. Zero. A blank space, and then she’d have to start all over again with a new plan...

Wait!

A wild, crazy grin grew on her entire face, a grin that popped at the eyes and wrinkled her nose.

“Yes,” she whispered. Then, louder and louder: “Yes, yesss, YESSS!”

And she prepared the TARDIS, pressing a number of buttons, turning dials, entering coordinates, until she finally gripped the lever in her hand. At last, long last! She felt the power course through her veins as she held off for a mere second, relishing what she was about to do. And down went the lever with a satisfying, resounding thrum from the engines...

She was off.

“So! Where to, next?” Ashildr said, in a distant and second-hand set of dimensions.

The room was white and blaring. They hadn’t been able to change the desktop theme yet. The manual hadn’t been particularly helpful, and it made Clara understand why most of the time the Doctor preferred to steer through trial and error...

“I don’t know,” she said to her, standing up and staring at the vision screens. One of them showed a rolling peach coloured ocean at a pearly white coast, one of the most gorgeous planets they’d visited in their travels. They didn’t get into nearly as much trouble as the Doctor would, though. That was heartening, what with her delicate... health... She placed a hand on her wrist, subconsciously looking for a pulse again. It had become a bad habit. She noticed, and scratched her ear instead. “Maybe we’ll just... Stay here for a while... We could just have a stroll, look at the view, and have a swim in the eveneing! Who knows what we'll find? And we could always leave the next adventure till tomorrow.”

Ashildr was unconcerned. “Sure, whatever you want.” She sat down on a chair and propped her feet on a footrest, both silver as the floor designs, with a journal on her lap.

Clara rolled her eyes. Her companion could be really unenthusiastic sometimes. Well, what she thought of as her companion.

“Right,” she said, “I’ll be out in reception if you need me... I’m gonna finish up some of that banana icecream from the pantry...”

“You know that eating is probably not recommended in your case, right?”

“It helps me think, okay? And so what if I don’t have a metabolism anymore, I still have senses!”

“Okay,” she said, holding up her hands in a concilliatory fashion, knowing it was a touchy subject. “Okay, go ahead.” And she went back to writing.

Clara glanced at the screen again. “What -?” She flipped her head around at Ashildr, then back again. “Do you –”

“I see it.”

“Should I -?”

“Go! Find out.”

She put her journal aside and stood to observe the second screen, the one that had changed. Her companion dashed inside to change into her waitress uniform. Well, what she thought of as her companion.

Meanwhile, the figure on the screen moved to the counter and sat down.

“Hey!” Clara said to her with a smile, entering the main hall of the diner at last.

It was like water bursting out of the ground in a barren desert. The Doctor looked at her, and everything came alive, fervently and insistently: the Ice Warrior in the submarine, the mummy on the Orient Express, the portrait of her in Time Lord Hell where it hung for billions of years, and the dazzling euphoria of bringing her back on Gallifrey... It filled her heart, and there was only one thing to be said...

“Doctor,” Clara said nodding at her confidently, interrupting her train of thought.

She raised her eyebrows, impressed.

“You recognised me! Clara Oswald, ever full of surprises.”

Clara grinned. “As are you!” she countered. “Where did you find your memories? Guess that Neural Block didn’t work on you for too long, eh?”

“Nah,” she said, broadening her shoulders. “It’ll take more than that to get you out of my head, Clara Oswald! Although I did have a lot of help... Tell me," she said, remembering her point, "how are you? I'm so sorry I couldn't help you more last time, that I –"

"Don't! Don't apologise," Clara shook her head, her ponytail bouncing with it. She looked serious. "You were so amazing, Doctor. This? Me being here, talking? That's all you! So don't ruin the effect by being humble. It doesn't suit you."

The Doctor closed her mouth. Oh, yeah. That's who she had been, after all: proud and entitled. And Clara was the same. Neither her past self nor Clara had ever dealt well with raw emotion. Good reminder; something she would have to work on this time around.

"No matter," she said. "So, go on," she added, raising her tempo to something more cheerful, "Clara, the Time Traveller! Have you travelled much? I see you've picked a scenic spot to park yourself. The vagabond life treatin’ you well?”

“I’ve had some okay adventures,” she shrugged. “Nothing too crazy, thanks to your esteemed absence.”

“Hah! Well, I’m glad you’re taking care...”

“And nice look, by the way!”

“Thank you! I was wondering if it suited me... Brand new face and all!”

“I love your new coat! Very Doctor-y.”

“Oh yeah? I thought you might approveñ”

“It’s gorgeous... On the other hand, the colours? Yellow suspenders? I can see there that you’ve started to call back the... ahem!... fez-like... fashion choices...” Clara read the growing offense on the Doctor's face and popped herself underneath the counter to hide –

“What's wrong with yellow? Plus! Fezzes! Are cool!”

She jumped out of her seat and began to lean across to get a glimpse of Clara and where she was hiding.

“No they’re not!” she teased. “Fezzes have never been cool, and neither are bowties! Come on, it's a new face isn't it, grow some new taste!”

“How dare you! You know I never criticised you for the way you –”

“Oh? Oh yeah?” She popped up from the opposite end of the long table, holding some plastic jars in her arms. “She’s got a face so wide she needs three mirrors!” she said trying to do a deep, gruff voice. The Doctor scrambled over the counter and raced to catch her, but Clara slipped open a door and locked her on the staff-only side. “Oh! Stay there,” she giggled, “stay there, or I’ll call in security!”

“Clara, let me out! – and I only said that because it’s true! What did you need three mirrors for?!”

“It helps to make sure my makeup is even! You know, the face colouring you never understood!”

“Well, I do now!” she lunged her arms forward to get at the latch and escape from her trap behind the counter but Clara slapped her away and raised up her hand, balancing jars dangerously with the other.

“Peace,” she called. “Peace offering! Doctor! Look, I’ve got banana icecream!”

The Doctor dropped her arms at that and rolled her eyes at Clara, who was comically supporting the jars between one arm and knee. Then she chuckled and gave her a warm smile, one that reminded Clara of the way the Doctor would look at her in a earlier, simpler times... “All right,” she said, leaning her elbows on the counter and raising her eyebrows. “Okay, we'll let it rest. Just for the banana icecream... Bananas are good.”

“That,” Clara said, settling herself on a stool and setting the ice cream between them, “That, we can agree on...”

The Doctor reached into a drawer to produce some spoons, her heart swelling. It was a strange thing, but it was so refreshing to be around Clara again, to be surprised, to be challenged, even criticised... to be known.

When the universe turns you upside down, there's nothing that can bring you back on your head like an old friend.

... All the while, Ashildr watched them and gave a heavy sigh.

She disabled the audio and stepped away.

It wouldn’t last, she knew. Even with her memories back, the Doctor would have to leave Clara once and for all. The girl was on the final thread of her life, maybe streached out a bit longer, but final nonetheless. There would have to be a goodbye, a difficult one, and simple comfort food wasn’t going to help either of them with that...

Still. At least it happened.

She turned a page of her journal, thinking.

Perhaps, in some cases, it’s better to focus on the good times you’ve had with someone, even the fleeting ones, instead of the pain they leave behind. Perhaps temporary happiness does beat permanent indifference.

Well... for mortals, at any rate.

She glanced up from her chair from time to time as they conversed, gesturing animatedly at each other, as the day wore on. Clara seemed to have forgotten about her plan to go swimming. She was so happy just talking to the Doctor, did she dare interrupt?

No. She smiled. This was what Clara had been waiting for. She'd let her have one day to herself, one day pretending to be alive and with the Doctor, at last.

[eat-the-richard]

Sonic’s 30th: What it could be and what it won’t be

Well folks, it's about that time again. Our beloved Sonic thee Hedgehog is turning the big three-oh this year.

I say that time “again” because, y’know, it seems like we just went through this. The last mainline Sonic releases, Sonic Mania and Sonic Forces, were both revealed as part of Sonic’s 25th anniversary. In a sense, that’s all us fans really have to look forward to anymore. Waiting for about five-or-so rotations around the sun to pass until SEGA can slap that big number next to Sonic’s mug to usher out as much celebratory marketing material as they can, all for the chance to get a smidgen of new video games to get our hands on.

This anniversary feels... different, though. Last anniversary SEGA had an absolute winner on their hands in Sonic Mania. There was no way the team behind that one could possibly mess up. And even if Sonic Forces turned out like... that, it at least made sense from SEGA’s perspective to greenlight a game like it during that time. But the five years since those games were announced have done little to assuage my worries about what exactly is planned for this year’s big game.

You see, Sonic has kind of vanished. He’s lost. M.I.A.. Which feels strange. Even during the supposed “dark age” of Sonic, he never really went anywhere. New games were still being produced like clockwork for a whole host of gaming systems. From mainline titles to spinoffs, dedicated Sonic fans had a lot to sink their teeth into back then. Since the release of Forces, all we really have to show for ourselves is a (personally) insignificant expansion to Sonic Mania and a new racing title which, frankly, didn’t set the world on fire when it was released. I suppose there’s a whole host of mobile titles that I didn’t mention but it’s difficult to get excited over yet another Sonic auto-runner. Perhaps most bafflingly, there haven’t even been many ports of older Sonic titles to modern hardware. If the mid-2000s were the dark ages of Sonic, perhaps right now we’re living in the “silent age,” where basically nothing is even happening and the franchise is at an eternal standstill.

The sole exception to this self-titled silent era was the Sonic movie, which I don’t think anyone anticipated being as big of a success as it was. Including the studio behind it. And especially including SEGA. It was utterly baffling to me that, upon the film’s release, there was nothing in the way of a tie-in game. Nothing directly associated with the movie. Nothing separate to release alongside the movie. Nothing. Some have speculated that SEGA was supremely unconfident in the film and it's hard to argue otherwise. It seems that, in a sense, the movie was a success in spite of the company the IP is linked with.

That’s why this anniversary feels more peculiar than the last one. At least Sonic was doing something in the early 2010s. Perhaps nothing groundbreaking, but he was at least around. If it hadn’t been for the movie, how in the world would the series be attracting new fans? This anniversary needs to be big. It needs to be the explosive re-emergence of Sonic to not only please the jaded oldies but the next generation of kids. And… I just don’t anticipate anything of the sort.

To me, Sonic Team has about four directions they could take the 30th anniversary game. Here they are, listed in descending order of likelihood.

4. A new “boost” game. Sonic Team ain’t opening that can of worms again.

3. A new “classic Sonic” game. While Christian Whitehead’s new studio has been deafeningly silent since forming, I believe that we’d have a bit more information about a Sonic Mania sequel by now if that was indeed in development.

2. Something entirely different.

1. Sonic Adventure 3 (or comparable analog).

Now, your reaction to that list may differ depending on your preferences and the year you were born. To me, something evoking nostalgia to the two Sonic Adventures is the safest and most likely choice for SEGA and Sonic Team. Just as classic nostalgia permeated through the 2010s, Adventure nostalgia will trailblaze full force through the 2020s. There are a lot of people whose only exposure to Sonic at all is playing Sonic Adventure 2 Battle on their GameCube. And the only way those people could potentially get funneled back into the series is through a proper Sonic Adventure 3, or at least something like it.

This, of course, says nothing about the overall quality of what this new Adventure title would be. And really, this is my main concern with the 30th anniversary. Can I even trust Sonic Team anymore to put out a good game?

Regardless of style, I’m unconfident to say the least. The staff that worked on the Adventure titles are not at SEGA anymore. The staff that spearheaded the “boost trilogy” of Unleashed, Colors, and Generations are not at SEGA anymore. And modern-day Sonic Team’s idea of something entirely different is, well, unappealing. Sonic Lost World proved that trying to change the core of the series for its own sake leads to a bland and uninspiring experience. And Forces? Oh… Forces.

Really, Forces is the main reason why I’m so disillusioned. Maybe it was that I was excited for the grand return of the boost. Maybe it was that I loved Generations so much that a proper sequel to it couldn’t possibly be bad. Instead of being a sequel to Generations, though, it tries to be everything at once. A game to appeal to the classic fans, the Adventure fans, the boost fans, those whole love complicated narratives, those who love the many characters this series has, and, obviously, the Original Character Artists™. Jack of all trades, master of nothing. A directionless, soulless game that in some instances is seemingly artificially-generated.

If this spectacular 30th anniversary Sonic game is something entirely different, it had to break an astounding amount of new ground. It had to rethink and reshape the series so drastically that, honestly, I don’t think it's very likely. I don’t think Sonic Team has even the slightest clue about what makes their flagship IP so appealing to so many people. If the nostalgia-fueled 2010s are any indication, SEGA only understands what makes Sonic so popular on a superficial level. 

They know we liked the 2D games, so now EVERY game has 2D in it! Oh, they didn’t like that Sonic has green eyes. Well, let’s bring back the CLASSIC version of Sonic. Let’s actually make him his own character who will also appear in every game! 

New zone ideas? LMAO how about we reuse the same set of classic levels over and over! Green Hill? YES! Chemical Plant? Of course! Let’s make an entire game that has both Sonics running around in a bunch of old zones. Wait, didn’t we just do that idea last year for Sonic 4 Episode 1? And aren’t we going to do that idea NEXT year for Sonic 4 Episode 2? WAIT DID SOMEONE SAY CHECKERBOARD PATTERNS IN WINDY HILL ZONE!???!!!! 

Oh wait, Christian Whitehead just pitched to us a brand new 2D Sonic game with classic physics and new levels? We’ll let him do it, but ONLY if it is ANOTHER nostalgia game that reuses old zones! 

Let’s inundate our fans with the same images of their childhood to activate their dopamine receptors! 

I can hardly wait for what this team’s idea of Sonic Adventure nostalgia looks like. Hope you really like City Escape.

Really, while such appeals to nostalgia are welcome the first few times, after a while it starts to get grating. Sonic Team leaning so hard into it during the 2010s reeks to me of desperation. As if the constant callbacks are the only thing the team knows how to do to link new games with the rest of the series. 

In actuality, fans don’t like Sonic because of the classic design or 2D-platforming or Green Hill Zone. They may like those things, but it isn’t why they continue to support the series. Fans love Sonic so fervently because, when he hits on all cylinders, he really hits. His games play in a supremely rewarding way where skill mastery is key. The better you are at Sonic, the better you feel while playing it. The personalities and designs of all of the different characters, from Sonic to Tails to Vector the freakin’ Crocodile, are not only distinct from each other but bleed through into gameplay in the way that they control and in how they are animated. Sonic’s best stories are ones that people can really relate to, dealing with a whole host of themes such as environmentalism, resisting fascism, surpassing expectations, and even the concept of free will among nonhuman entities. Not especially deep, but certainly thought provoking, especially for kids. All tied together with top notch visual and audio design that will stand the test of time. I’d posit that, while people like Sonic for a whole host of reasons, their starting point lies somewhere in the above explanation.

Hopefully, Sonic Team has realized by now that nostalgia will only get them so far. While a Sonic Adventure 3 would turn heads, it wouldn’t push the series forward. While a proper sequel to Sonic Mania would be a critical darling, it would continue to keep Sonic’s feet firmly planted in 1991. Sonic needs to evolve. He needs to change. And it seems like a change is happening. Roger Craig Smith, the voice of Sonic for the last 10 years, is no longer working with the series. The new TV series, Sonic Prime, is set to take place in a “strange new multiverse.” Even the Sonic movie refuses to lean on nostalgia too hard. 

So maybe the future will be set in unfamiliar waters. But if this is the case, I don’t want SEGA to half ass it. I want them to boldly step into that abyss with a vision of Sonic that appeals to the heart of the fandom. Because, even if it's been down recently, that heart is still beating, and after the abuse it's already taken, it’s going to take a hell of a lot to get it to stop. And if SEGA can get this heart pumping to its full extreme as it had in years past, we may have something legendary to look forward to.

They could also just release a bunch of old Sonic games on Switch. I’d like that too.