#the few who manage to stay conscious have to fight against the programming that prevents from communicating from being themselves still

[xiubaek-13]

Cognitive Dissonance

 I am still doing these sporadically. I have 8 to go!

  Prompt: Chanyeol + “You have a cold, you’re not dying.” + “It’s only one night, we’ll just share the bed.”

Setting/AU: Cyborg/Futuristic

Warnings: none

Word Count: 1,687 

“I think I’m dying. Chanyeol hurry. I need you to take down my final wishes.” Your body ached from the constant coughing and your nose couldn��t make up its mind as to whether it wanted to be runny or blocked. You were pretty sure you’d slept most of the week away but no matter how hard you tried to focus on anything, the fuzzy feeling washed over you and you’d wake up a few hours later in an incredibly uncomfortable position.

As far as you were concerned, you were dying. This was your body’s final fight against whatever bacteria had infected your system and your body was losing. Make sure you get a X488 shot your mother had nagged and nagged. Of course, you neglected to get one. The shot only inoculated you against one strain of the disease, and it mainly afflicted the elderly and the infantile.

“You have a cold, you’re not dying.” came the emotionless response from Chanyeol. Really you shouldn’t have expected sympathy from him. He just wasn’t programmed that way. When you’d found him he was barely held together but you’d rescued his half scavenged form and had slowly but surely rebuilt him. He wasn’t like the cyborgs you would find on any street, those had the emotional AI programming chips that allowed them to pass as humanoid. Until you spoke with one for a length of time you probably wouldn’t work out that they were a cyborg. Not Chanyeol though, no, he was without a doubt, not human. One day you’d come across a programming chip for him but you’d mostly warmed up to his blunt manner of speech. It, however, did not make for great bedside manner. The 6ft, blue haired, emotionally stunted cyborg was all you had so he’d have to suffice.

“If I wasn’t on the brink of death I’d get you back for that.” you mutter. You didn’t need cheek from a hunk of metal and computer chips. You needed someone to bring you soup, to make sure you took your meds, to hack the network and show you a movie your mother always put on for you when you were sick as a kid. Trust illness to bring out the needy side of you.

“Finally, someone whose life is more pathetic than mine.” he muttered. Maybe it was the fever but you were sure that the emotionless robot just sassed you. As far as you were aware, he was fully functional but unable to feel emotion or respond in a conversational way. He could only respond with logic and a severe monotone. He shouldn’t be capable of muttering, nor forming an obtuse opinion like the one he had just uttered.

You glared at him, as best as any pathetic sick person can glare at someone, from your semi prone position under your required three blankets. According to Chanyeol, three blankets were required for the bedridden and no matter how many times you tried to remove a layer he always replaced it.

Being sick made you moody and emotional, two things you tried very hard not to be in your day to day life. There was no place for moody and emotional in the scavenging business. After fixing Chanyeol to 90% of his former glory he’d remained with you, citing that he’d leave once a better option made itself available to him. He’d been a military programmed bot, special forces from the intricate wiring you found inside, as well as the larger number of chip slots. Scavengers had removed his weapons and fighting chips as well as the tactical and behavioural ones too. Somehow you’d managed to condition him to recognise warning signs, for when you needed food, rest, patching up, assistance and someone to talk to. The last one was still a work in progress, and would remain so until you could get your hands on a chip. Apparently dismantling another cyborg just for the chip was immoral, he’d flat out refused this as an option every time you brought it up.

He finished making your dinner, chicken and vegetable stew, and brought your tray over to you. He waited as you sat up in the bed, repositioning the pillows so that you were propped up and able to eat, then placed the tray in your lap. For a robot he was a pretty good cook. You kept forgetting the skills programming that most bots had these days. They all had the I-Serve-U-Bot base model, from the initial house maid prototypes, and had been build up from there. Some got military upgrades and served the country they were programmed to while others were programmed as fully functional AI, able to learn and adapt to their environment.

In a vaguely human action Chanyeol held up a finger to prevent you from starting your meal as he disappeared back to the kitchen. Small things like this made you forget that he didn’t have the proper chip to elicit these actions. Maybe if you weren’t sick you’d have picked up on it. When he returned he has two slices of buttered bread and a glass of juice for you. “Now you can eat.” You chuckled at his direction but followed it anyway.

You didn’t realise how hungry you were until you started eating and soon enough your bowl was empty. You pushed the tray forward and licked your lips, savouring the taste of the hearty meal. “Thanks Chan. I really needed that.”

“I also made brownies if you wish to have dessert.” He stated as he collected your tray, taking it back to the kitchen. You’re pretty sure you start salivating at the mere mention of your favourite dessert. How he knew is beyond you but honestly, you don’t care. All you know is that you have a great need and only brownies can satiate it. Your face must tell him that you do in fact want dessert because he nods before leaving the room. “I’ll just reheat one for you.”

“Chanyeol, you’re the only one who understands me.” You call out as he disappears from view.

“Yes, but it doesn’t mean I care.” The response was unexpected and after you stop laughing you realised it wasn’t something he’d usually say. The more you ponder on his responses as of late, the more you realise that they are decidedly more human. Something he should be unable to comprehend. Another coughing fit prevents you from dwelling on the thought.

When he returns he has a bowl with two warm brownies and ice cream in one hand and a glass of water in the other. He must have heard you coughing and decided that you required further hydration. He places the bowl in your hands and stands next to the bed with the glass of water.

“Dude, sit down, you’re looming ominously.” You move over slightly to allow him sufficient space to sit.

“I am not looming ominously. I was just waiting for you to finish the food so I could give you the water.” He responded.

You chuckled and started to eat the brownies. “Regardless, please sit? It’ll make me feel better. Holy shit, these are good.”

“They are a simple recipe. I understand that chocolate and cake makes humans feel good and there are an amalgam of the two so I deduced that they might assist in restoring your health.”

“You do care about me.” You teased.

A pair of large eyes stared back at you. They weren’t real, you knew that, the one red eye basically yelling I’m a cyborg! “Tell me something Chan.” You started.

“You need to be more specific. I know an infinite number of things.”

“When did you start learning the nuances of my speech? I haven’t found the right chip for you yet.” You asked. You might not be at your brightest right now but you weren’t so sick that you hadn’t noticed the shift in his behaviour… or the fact that he even had behaviours now.

“The last upgrade you did had a small inbuilt AI chip. It’s allowed me to process small amounts of speech and learn the emotional patterns that go with it.” The response was almost sheepish, as though he thought you might be mad with him.

You held out your hand for the water which he handed to you. “Why didn’t you tell me?” you asked in between sips.

“It didn’t seem relevant.” He chuckled as you handed the glass back to him, which startled you since he’d never done that before. The sound wasn’t horrible but it was foreign to you. “After all, you kept insisting that you were dying.”

You had no response to that, too floored by the sass that your previously stock standard cyborg had not been equipped with. You decided to just focus on the brownie, because you understood chocolate and ice cream and right now you did not understand Chanyeol.

He moved to get up once you finished your dessert but you grabbed his arm, stopping him. “Stay, I have more questions for you Chan.”

He placed the bowl on the floor next to the bed along with the glass of water. “You will be asleep in the next ten minutes.” You cocked your head at him. “It is the average time you remain conscious after ingesting nutrients. I’ve observed this over the past few days.”

“Then stay until I sleep, you creep. I have questions.” He sighed as he moved his body to sit next to you. Real or not, it was nice to have the body heat next to you. You shifted your body closer to his. “Warm” you muttered as you draped your arm across his torso. You started asking him about the AI chip and what it had allowed him to learn. He responded to your questions bluntly, proving to you that just because he had started to pick up on emotion, he sure as hell hadn’t mastered it yet. His warmth was making you sleepy but you had no intention of moving away from his form. “It’s only one night, we’ll just share the bed.” You whined when he tried to get up.

“I fail to see the point of this. My knowledge of medical text does not cite this as a legitimate remedy for illness.” Good to know that he wasn’t fully capable of artificial intelligence yet. The small chip only did so much it seemed.

“Shut up and comfort me. I’m dying after all.”

[rhinozilla]

Whumptober Day 21: Laced Drink

Summary:  Two androids with a grudge attempt to drug and abduct Connor. They nearly succeed, if not for the intervening of strangers.

--

Connor didn’t realize immediately that something was off. He supposed that was the point. By the time his system identified an anomaly in his thirium supply, the effects had already taken hold. His processors slowed, and his ability to balance and see clearly was compromised. In the event of a foreign contaminant entering his thirium lines, his system should have activated an emergency expulsion protocol to force him to vomit the contaminated blood. Whatever had been laced into his drink, it had a suppressant engineered into it that prevented that from happening. He couldn’t even manually activate it.

Now, he was at the mercy of the two androids whom he had mistakenly identified as friendly. They had said they were from Jericho, and that they were one of the few who did not hold his actions as the Deviant Hunter against him. They had mentioned wanting to start over…to build a bridge and…leave the past where it belonged…Now the drug in his thirium lines made it difficult to feel anything, but Connor felt like a fool.

The air had transitioned from the warmth of the bar’s interior to the brisk chill of the outside night. He was…walking? He was walking…sort of…with help. There were two sets of hands on him, holding each of his arms and steering him across the sidewalk. He was stumbling heavily, blinking repeatedly to try and get a visual on his surroundings.

Everything was becoming exponentially more difficult with each unbalanced step. His cybernetic connection was being bogged down with a noise that he couldn’t place, blocking him from calling or messaging anyone for help. His analytic sensors felt numb. They were functioning, and maybe they had identified the substance used to drug him. But he was not functioning well enough to comprehend the results. He did manage to ensure his optical and audio sensors were recording everything. Some macabre but realistic part of him had violently realized what was happening…what was likely going to happen…and he knew that the DPD would need recordings later to identify the perpetrators.

“Just get him in the car,” one of the androids was whispering. “Let’s go.”

Connor thought he recognized the voice as belonging to the android who’d called himself David. The other, Zach, was closer, having Connor’s arm around his neck to hold him up as they neared the car. Connor struggled to note any details about the vehicle that might aid the police in finding it later, but all that made its way through the thickening fog was that it was brown.

David had opened the door to the back seat, and Zach was shifting his grip on Connor’s body, preparing to stuff him into it. Connor tried to resist, but his limbs were heavy and he couldn’t think straight. Even the warning text scrolling at the edges of his vision were blurred and sluggish. Even if he got free, he was in no condition to fight the two of them with any hope of winning. That logic didn’t stop him from trying, however pathetic that attempt likely appeared to be.

“Hey,” a third voice abruptly entered the scene, young, sounded female. “Is everything okay?”

Zach’s body locked up, and Connor hung in his grip, forced to stare where his slack neck aimed his gaze, at a block of damp sidewalk. His periphery barely snagged one part of a lower leg and a foot in a gold high heeled shoe standing nearby.

“Yeah, he just had one too many,” David was quick to assure the stranger. “We’re taking him home.”

There was a dubious silence, and Connor shifted his feet, the only part of him still obeying any of his commands. He stumbled and felt part of the car door rub against his side. The moment’s pause lasted an eternity, and a cold sensation like coiled barbed wire twisted through his torso.

Please…

Somewhere between realizing he was being drugged and reaching the car, some part of him had run a partial preconstruction on his rate of surviving this situation. His increasingly compromised state had left the percentage in the single digits. These two androids were likely going to take him to a secondary location, do him whatever harm they intended to do, likely resulting in his shutdown, and that was going to be that. Something residual in his programming had accepted that as the irrefutable outcome, even as the rest of him fought it.

Please…

Something about having a witness now…someone who had the ability to do something…a variable to upset the dwindling percentage of his preconstructed fate…It dumped fresh desperation into his processors.

“Please…” Don’t leave… “Help.”

It came out garbled and crackling with static, and Zach chuckled, patting him on the chest.

“Don’t worry, buddy. We’re gonna get you home, and you can sleep this off.”

A second female voice spoke. “His LED is red. He doesn’t look good.”

“He parties hard,” David said, starting to sound impatient.

“Sir?” the first woman said, in a pointed manner that sounded directed toward Connor.

He rerouted his power reserves from his legs to his head, causing him to buckle further against Zach. He managed to turn his head more fully in the two human women’s direction, fighting to make eye contact with them. They were young, barely twenty years old, and dressed in clothes suggesting they were on their way to a party, wearing heavy makeup and tall heels. The blond one was standing farther back with wide eyes. The other had unnaturally dyed red hair, and her expression was tight with suspicion. She appeared to have been the one who’d spoken, staring directly at Connor.

“Hey,” she addressed him again. “Do you know these two men?”

“He’s our roommate,” David chimed in, irritated. “Just mind your own business, ladies.”

“I’m not talking to you,” she snapped at David, then to Connor. “Do you want to go with them?”

“Nn…” He stared at her, hoping his expression would convey to her what he couldn’t form with words. “Hul…Help…”

Zach made a low noise and abruptly resumed steering Connor toward the back seat of the car. “Just buzz off, girls. This isn’t—“

“Hey!” the redhead barked, yanking her phone out of her purse. “Let him go!”

David started to walk around the other side of the car. “Walk away. You don’t know—“

“Don’t come near us! This is livestreaming to my social media account and is being recorded to the cloud, dickwad,” she barked, holding up her phone. “Say hi.”

“What the fuck are you doing?” David raised his voice.

“Two guys come out of a bar carrying another guy who can barely walk and clearly doesn’t want to go with them…What the fuck are YOU doing?” she roared back. “Let him go. Nina, call the police.”

“You’re making a mistake,” Zach growled.

Redhead held her phone up dramatically with one hand, her other hand reaching toward Connor. “Let him go.”

“Hello, 911?” Nina was saying behind her friend, relaying their location over the phone.

“Shut,” David cursed. “Fuck this. Let’s go!”

Zach hissed and then abruptly moved away from Connor, fleeing into the car with David. Connor wobbled on his feet, making a mad grab for a metal bench on the sidewalk to catch himself. His palm hit the arm of it, but he couldn’t form a grip. He stumbled, and his knees buckled as the car revved to life behind him. There was a sound of tires spinning as the two made their escape, and high heeled shoes clacked onto the street as Red furiously tried to record their license plate on her phone.

“I gotcha!” Nina materialized in front of Connor, grabbing awkwardly at him and trying to slow his fall. “Jess!”

Jess, the redhead, stomped back over, taking a more confident grip under Connor’s shoulder than Nina’s faltering hands had.

“Here, sit him down. Hey, sir? There’s a bench right behind you. We’re gonna just…ease you on down…There we go,” she narrated as the two women assisted him into sitting on the metal bench.

“Police are on the way,” Nina was saying. “Um, I don’t—He really doesn’t look good…”

Connor swayed heavily in his seat, focusing on trying to activate the expulsion protocol.

“Need…” he slurred, willing the world to stop swaying around him. “Be sick…Drugs in my…thiri—thir—“

“Hey, hey, stay awake!” Jess patted his knee. “You need to…throw up? Is that it?”

Connor might have nodded. He wasn’t…sure if he actually managed it or not…

“Okay…Okay, here, uh…” Jess’s hands touched his shoulders, helping him sit up straighter and turn his head away from his body, toward the gutter. “Go for it.”

Repeated attempts to force the expulsion program into action had left the synthetic muscles around his torso sore, and he coughed with a weak groan. Jess stayed seated beside him, rubbing his arm, while Nina resumed speaking on the phone to the police.

“—Yeah, they’re gone now. We’re with him…Me and my friend…Nina. W-We recorded some of it on a phone…It—“

Emergency Expulsion Program Initiating.

With only that split second warning, Connor gagged, dropping his head and vomiting the laced thirium onto the street in a rush of blue fluid.

“Oh fuck,” Jess wheezed, holding onto him to keep him from sliding out of the bench to the concrete.

“He just started puking,” Nina reported. “Yes, he’s conscious…Yeah, we can stay with him…”

A second round of throwing up took the wind out of him, and he coughed to clear out the rest of the contaminated thirium. The effort left him even shakier than before, and he closed his eyes with a low groan.

“You’re good,” Jess assured. “Help’s coming…Talk to me. It’ll keep you awake. What’s your name?”

A leather jacket that smelled like fruity perfume was laid across his shoulders, blocking out the chill of the air. Connor spat the last of the blue blood on the ground and then leaned into the hard back of the metal bench, finding some solace in the solidness of it.

“Con…Connor,” he said with a grimace, keeping his eyes closed to hold the spinning world at bay.

“Connor. Okay. Connor, I’m Jess. That’s Nina. We’re gonna sit with you until the cops get here, okay?”

He made a low noise of acknowledgement and forced his eyes open again, squinting at the blurry face of the redhead swimming in front of him.

“Thank you…”

Jess gave a brief smile and swallowed. “Hey, thank me by not passing out until the cops get here, yeah? Deal?”

Thankfully, the sound of sirens had picked up at the far end of the street several blocks down, so the promise to stay conscious would only be a brief one.

“Deal,” he wheezed, tilting his head back to rest on the top of the bench’s back rest.

True to his word, he remained aware until the flashing red and blue lights on the squad car pulled up to the curb, and he recognized Chris’s voice.

“Connor?!”

Then he promptly blacked out.

[sophcaro]

Destiny | WMatsui - Chapter 40 Part 2

“First time in Paris?”

“Oh no, it’s my second time,” Rena, mustering her best English, replied to the male taxi driver. “But the first time was for work.”

“You’ll love it here,” the French taxi driver glanced back at her through the rearview car mirror. “Many, many monuments to see. Paris est une si belle ville! Beautiful Paris! Paris is a romantic city!”

“Yes,” Rena replied, entertained by the driver’s enthusiasm and his mixture of French and broken English. “I’m sure I’ll enjoy it here.”

“You will! Trust me!”

The taxi driver fell quiet, listening to the animated Sport talk show on radio. Rena observed the traffic outside the window. By the time their plane arrived at the French airport and they retrieved their suitcases, it was 6:30 p.m. when each couple hopped in a taxi. The airport crowded exit mingled with the peak time had led them straight into traffic, the slow progress of the car not failing to put Jurina asleep.

Fifteen minutes later, they managed to get out of the traffic jam, Rena amazed at the scenery unfolding in front of her as they drove through the center of Paris. Rena marveled at the view of the Arc de Triomphe, then the endless line of characteristic 19th century bourgeois apartments and buildings, until arriving at the Seine River as they crossed the Alma Bridge. For a while, the taxi drove along the river, the actress taking in the Iena Bridge on their right, until the view of the ��Iron Lady,’ the emblematic Eiffel Tower on her left, made her understand that they were approaching their final destination.

A few times along the way, Rena couldn’t help thinking it was a real shame that Jurina was sleeping. She should be enjoying with her such a beautiful view. At some point, she had considered waking her up. In the end, Rena had refrained from doing it and let the younger girl continue her peaceful nap. They would have plenty opportunities to appreciate the city during their week holiday.

It was the second time Rena came to Paris, but she couldn’t say she had visited much of it. In 2009, she had been part of the trip with other AKB48 members when the idol group had been invited to perform in Paris at the Japan Expo, a French convention popular for celebrating Japanese’s culture, animation and music. It had been a short trip, most of the girls merely having the occasion to see the city, while dozing off from the long, tiring flight, through the window of a bus.

The least Rena could say, it’s that none of them truly had the chance to appreciate to its fullest the beauty and charms of the French capital. Despite the distant memory, Paris had left quite an impression on her, and Rena promised herself to return one day. To be perfectly sincere, this trip came at the right moment. These last years, she had been so swamped with work, that she never had been able to afford more than a couple of days off. For those holidays abroad, Rena had succeeded in clearing her schedule for a full week and was accompanied not simply by wonderful friends, but also the person she loved and shared her daily life. To add it up, those vacations were taking place just after Rena’s 30th birthday, making this trip to Paris all the more special to her.

   While Rena and Yuki approached the hotel counter to check in, Jurina was desperately trying to stay awake. The long 12-hour flight, coupled with the jetlag, were getting the best of her, and she had to clench the handle of the suitcase to not collapse in the hallway. Blinking the sleep away for the umpteenth time, a flash of lucidity reminded her of an important task she was supposed to take care of, one she had utterly forgotten at their arrival at the French airport. Not wasting another minute, Jurina quickly retrieved her phone from her vest.

“Who are you texting?” Mayu, who was standing by her side, and passing time by playing a game on her phone, asked in confusion.

“My mom,” Jurina answered sleepily, gathering her last remnant of energy to concentrate on the content of the message. “To tell her that we’ve arrived.”

“At that time?” Mayu leaned closer, checking the text she was typing. “Wait. You actually are! You do realize it’s 3 a.m. in Japan?”

“Yes,” Jurina sighed, stealing a peek at their respective partners. They were still occupied with the receptionist, and she resumed her text. “If I don’t do it now, I’m afraid I’ll fall asleep and forget. She could have stayed awake to receive the confirmation that I arrived. I don’t want to take the risk of her texting Rena.”

“She would do that?” Mayu asked, astounded.

Jurina cringed. “Oh, she could.” She read the message, making sure it contained all the necessary information and was as coherent as possible, then pressed the button Send. “If you knew how many times she texted Rena these last months… you would be surprised.”

“Careful,” Mayu grinned. “Next thing you know, she will stop texting you and only go through Rena. I don’t blame her. Your girlfriend is obviously more reliable when it comes to getting info.”

Jurina glared at her. “Very funny.”

“You know it’s true,” Mayu quipped. “Last time you both came to our place for dinner, I had to text Rena to know when you would arrive. You had omitted to warn me that you had an interview in the evening.”

“Oh, that…” Jurina flushed. “But for my defense, this interview was a last-minute thing! It wasn’t planned. I meant to text you, but I got distracted and completely forgot.” Reflecting upon Mayu’s words, Jurina gazed at her in a mixture of worry and guilt. “I don’t do that often, do I? Forget, I mean.”

“No, you don’t,” Mayu replied impishly. “I just wanted to see your reaction.”

“Mayu,” Jurina growled. “How come you are so full of energy? I barely have the strength to stand up.”

“I slept on the plane,” Mayu explained. She frowned at the bags under Jurina’s eyes. “Why didn’t you?”

“I couldn’t find sleep, so I listened to music and watched movies,” Jurina confessed sheepishly.

“You were too excited,” Mayu stated matter-of-factly. “It’s fine. Tomorrow morning is program free.”

“Right…” Jurina murmured, relief sweeping through her at the reminder. “Don’t worry about me. I need one good night sleep, and I’ll be in top form.”

“I have no doubt,” Mayu said amusingly.

“We’ve got them!” The sight of Yuki waving the keycards in front of them brought both friends out of their discussion. “We’re all on the second floor. Let’s go to our rooms. God, I’m so exhausted. How did you manage to sleep so well on the plane?” Yuki asked Mayu, her expression changing to one of incredulity. “I don’t believe I have the strength to go out for dinner. What do you think if we order room service?”

“I don’t mind,” Mayu answered.

Rena, witnessing her girlfriend’s sleepiness, chimed in. “Yes. I think we’ll probably do the same.”

The four friends took the direction of the elevator, getting down at floor 2, splitting up in the corridor after agreeing to meet the next day for breakfast. From her peripheral vision, Jurina saw the other couple disappearing in room 26, before hearing the distinctive sound of the keycard opening the room she shared with Rena. She followed the older girl as she progressed inside room 22.

The decoration of the room stole Jurina’s breath away. From the wallpaper, to the curtains, cushions, bedside lamp and armchair, the room followed an impeccable pattern of red and black warm colors. Large paintings on the walls, representing popular views and monuments of Paris, and underlined by quotes from French writers, perfected the romantic atmosphere. But what caught the most Jurina’s attention, were the hundreds of red petals of rose spread all over the bed.

“Did you... Did you book a special room?” Jurina gasped.

“No, I didn’t,” Rena replied innocently. “But I have to admit it’s a very nice room. Don’t you think?”

“It’s not just nice,” Jurina corrected, sweeping around the place in amazement. “It’s… It’s so beautiful.”

Jurina left her suitcase aside and approached the king-size bed, her palm grazing over the soft, silky surface of the red colored bed scarf. She laid down on the bed, resting on the red square cushion, marveling at the sight of the bed of roses. Her fingers brushed the red petals, letting them slip through her fingers. She glanced back at Rena with awe. “I can’t believe we got such a beautiful room.”

“We are in Paris,” Rena came to lay by her side on the bed. She wrapped her arm around Jurina’s back, holding her snugly. “Maybe this hotel wants to live up to the city’s romantic image?”

“I guess,” Jurina murmured, her sleepy state of mind preventing her from elaborating any other possible explanation. “I’m not… I’m not really hungry.”

“I figured,” Rena’s tone was kind and understanding. “If you don’t want to eat, you should at least change clothes before going to sleep.”

Jurina didn’t reply, losing herself in the lulling sensation of Rena’s hand stroking the length of her back. Jurina closed the distance between them, Rena meeting her halfway as their lips connected in a short kiss. Jurina studied her, warmth in her eyes, fighting hard to stay conscious. Against her will, Rena’s image slowly blurred, Jurina’s heavy pupils closing without her consent as her body surrendered to exhaustion.

  When Jurina woke up, the first thing she noticed was the bright, sunny light filtering underneath the double curtains, clear indication that the morning was well-advanced. Relieved to feel quite rested, she took pleasure in watching her girlfriend’s peacefully sleeping form, before stiffening when she discovered what she was wearing. Why was she in her daily clothes? Jurina searched her mind for an explanation, retracing the events of the previous evening. She remembered entering the hotel room and laying down on the comfy bed but the rest was a complete blur. Confused by the gaps in her memory, Jurina turned to the side when she felt the body next to her stirring up.

“Morning…” Rena whispered; she planted a gentle kiss on Jurina’s forehead. “Did you sleep well?”

Jurina lit up at the affectionate gesture, completing the morning routine by lacing their hands together. Jurina’s attention fell upon her own ring finger, the silver band another reminder that something had definitely gone wrong the previous night. “I did,” she replied, gazing back and forth questioningly between her own appearance and her slowly awakening girlfriend. “What happened? Why did I… Why did you let me go to sleep like this?”

“I see someone has a bad recollection of yesterday,” Rena said with a slight giggle. “I suggested you to change into your pajamas, but you didn’t listen. You fell asleep soon after your head touched the pillow.”

“Really?” Jurina blinked, destabilized that she couldn’t remember any of it. “I guess… I guess I was exhausted.”

“Yes, you were.” A flicker of amusement crossed Rena’s features. “Let’s not mention how complicated it was to get you out of the taxi without you stumbling, or the fact that you confused our suitcases and entered the hotel with mine.”

Jurina was stunned by the revelation. “No, I didn’t… I didn’t do that.”

“You did,” Rena laughed. “So, now that you’re fully rested…” She stroked Jurina’s face, tracing her cheekbones, and gently kissed her on the cheek. “Are you ready to start our visit of Paris?”

“Isn’t this morning supposed to be program free?” Jurina asked for confirmation, receiving a nod in reply. “We can join Mayu and Yuki for breakfast, then decide what to do? But first, I need a shower. I can’t believe I fell asleep fully-clothed. I don’t even remember the last time that happened.”

“And I couldn’t do anything about it,” Rena added jokingly, watching her troubled girlfriend getting out of bed and approaching her suitcase. “You were sleeping like a log.”

Jurina, who was working on the lock combination, felt the color in her cheeks rising at the embarrassing reminder. “Dammit…” she muttered to herself after a second failed attempt. “W-What’s my code again?”

Rena was ready to laugh, but smiled widely instead. “8 0 3. If I remember correctly, it has never changed in 10 years.”

“Thanks,” Jurina said gratefully, despite being conscious of the blatant teasing she was being subjected to. Without further delay, she opened her suitcase and grabbed a pair of flesh clothes. “I’m going to take a shower. I won’t be long.”

Jurina vanished inside the bathroom and Rena slowly straightened up in bed, allowing herself to relax. In the background, water was falling in the shower, and Rena took time to appreciate the warm red and black colors of the hotel room decoration, reminding her that they definitely were in the city of love and romance. Her gaze fell upon the rose petals spread all over the bedsheet, amused by Jurina’s reaction the previous evening. She glanced around the place, lingering on the French quote underlining a painting of Montmartre.

La vie c’est des étapes… La plus douce c’est l’amour… La plus dure c’est la séparation… La plus pénible c’est les adieux… La plus belle c’est les retrouvailles.

Rena read it carefully, using her French lessons and vocabulary knowledge of the foreign language to decipher it. Unfortunately, she didn’t have the opportunity to decrypt its meaning to its fullest that she got distracted by the bathroom door opening, witnessing in mild-amusement a Jurina clad in her underwear rummaging frenetically through her suitcase. Most visibly, someone was not satisfied with the clothes she had previously chosen.

As their gazes suddenly met across the room, the corners of Jurina’s mouth turned up into a mischievous expression. “What are you staring at?”

“The girl walking half-naked in my hotel room,” Rena shot back playfully.

“Your hotel room?”

“Yes, mine,” Rena answered, in a fake shocked tone. “I booked it. Please don’t tell me you forgot about that too.”

Jurina, her previous goal all forgotten, left her suitcase aside and got up on her feet, progressing towards the bed. When Rena laid down from her previous seated position, Jurina understood the message conveyed and didn’t hesitate to climb on top of her. “I’m not so sure I should get dressed now,” Jurina claimed her lips in a slow, lingering kiss, pretending to think. “Do you think I need to?”

“Well…” Rena’s fingers ran up Jurina’s sides, stopping under the swell of her breasts and the fabric of her bra, then sliding down her heaving ribs and over her belly. “Eventually, you will need to get dressed if you want to go outside. But that depends entirely on you. I don’t know what you had in mind for this morning.”

Jurina studied her with a mixture of love and fascination, not missing the seductive glint in the depth of Rena’s dark brown orbs. Jurina was spellbound by her eyes, ensnared in her gaze, and her mouth swooped down to capture hers once more. The kiss was passionate and hungry, filled with all the feelings for her coursing through her veins. As it was returned with equal want and passion, Jurina felt a rush of warm emotion, Rena’s dexterous fingers traveling around to her back and prompt to unhook her bra.

  Yuki was humming a cheery melody as she turned at the corner of the corridor, Mayu’s steps following closely behind as they approached room 22. This morning, Yuki was in a wonderful mood. Not only had she recovered from her lack of sleep, she was impatient to start their visit of the French capital. The last time she had visited the city of love was four years ago and she always hoped to come back, this time not for work purposes but for pleasure.

“I’ll see if they are up,” Yuki said, getting a brief nod from Mayu who was busy checking her phone. Yuki halted in front of the hotel door and raised her arm, stopping in mid-air when she perceived explicit noises coming from the other side. “M-Maybe…” She froze, and had to stop and work out her words. “Maybe we should go to breakfast without them.”

Mayu raised from the screen. “What? Why? Yesterday, we all agreed to meet for breakfast, remember?”

“I-I do,” Yuki spoke lamely. “This morning is supposed to be program free, right?” She added with an attempt at lightness. “So, why don’t we let them enjoy their morning as they wish? We’ll meet them later.”

“You’re not making any sense,” Mayu said with a frown. “It’s past 9 a.m. Maybe they forgot to check the time, or didn’t hear their alarm-clock.”

When Mayu took a decided step forward to knock, Yuki grabbed her arm urgently. “No, Mayuyu, we really shouldn’t interrupt.”

“Interrupt what?” A pregnant silence stretched out between them. When Mayu caught the sounds coming from inside the room, her mouth twitched with amusement. “Oh, I see. Yes, it’s best to go downstairs. They’ll join us later. Maybe.”

“Yes. Maybe,” Yuki said awkwardly.

Turning on their heels, they walked towards the elevator, Mayu taking the initiative to press the button to call it when the girl by her side seemed completely lost in her thoughts. “I can’t blame them. It’s Paris. They got affected by the romantic atmosphere and couldn’t help themselves.”

Yuki stared back at her in bafflement. “On the first day?!”

“Why not?” Mayu shrugged. “Anyway. What did you have in mind for this morning? We’re supposed to visit the Eiffel Tower, no?”

“Y-Yes,” Yuki cleared her throat, trying to recollect herself. “I mean, I don’t remember our program. We were supposed to visit The Eiffel Tower this morning? Are you sure? Or was it tomorrow?”

Surprise, then disbelief, crossed Mayu’s features. “It’s been a while I’ve seen my Yukirin so flustered.”

“Of course, I am!” Yuki exclaimed dramatically. “It’s our friends we’re talking about! It was way too embarrassing to hear… that!”

The elevator opened and they entered. “But why? What do you think they usually do in bed?” Mayu asked cheekily. “Play chess? Conjugate Latin verbs?”

“Mayuyu! Will you stop it?!” Yuki groaned, burying her face in her hands. “I had finally managed to erase the image from my mind, and you had to put it back!”

Mayu’s lips quirked in a twisted smile. “You haven’t answered my questi-”

“That’s enough,” Yuki glared at her, slapping her arm. “Promise me we’ll never talk about that anymore. Promise me!”

“Fine, fine,” Mayu stifled a laugh. When she noted Yuki’s disapprobation, she quickly pecked her cheek. “I promise. I won’t mention it.”

Yuki breathed a sigh of relief, failing to catch the lie hidden behind Mayu’s mask of innocence and the fingers crossed behind her back.

  Buffet was closed when Jurina and Rena considered their morning program, deciding it was a shame to order room service when the city had plenty to offer. After a short stroll in the neighborhood of their hotel, they stopped in front of the characteristic red storefront of a French Café, and settled down at the terrace. They didn’t have to wait long to be served, a hearty breakfast composed of croissants, buttered toasts, jam, fresh orange juice, and café crème soon being placed between them.

Jurina took in every single detail surrounding her, from listening to the locals speaking the language of Molière, to the black vests and long white aprons worn by the male waiters serving them, without forgetting the breathtaking view of the Eiffel Tower. Being her first time in Paris, it was too easy to fall prey to the irresistibly charming romantic atmosphere. Her observation seemed to reach no end, until her gaze landed at last on the quiet older girl sitting opposite her.

“How do you like Paris so far?” Rena took a sip of her cup of coffee, the fresh brew delighting her nostrils with the mocha aroma.

“It’s…” Jurina sighed dreamily, relaxing back in her chair. “It’s beautiful. What about you? Is Paris faithful to the memory you had of it?”

Rena settled down her drink on the small round table separating them, pondering over her question. “It’s hard to say. I was 17 when I came to Paris for the first time. My main concern was to not mess up the choreography, and remember the lyrics of the songs I had to perform, especially in French. I was so stressed and sleep-deprived, that the rest of the trip is a blur. We barely had any free time to visit the city, and I was too exhausted to remember much of it anyway.”

“You had to sing in French?!” Jurina gasped in shock.

“Yes, when I did a duet with Kasai Tomomi,” Rena laughed, reminiscently. “You should have seen her: she exulted such confidence on stage. Me? I was a bundle of nerves. I didn’t understand a single word I was saying; I had to learn everything phonetically. I rehearsed the song countless of times the previous evening in my hotel room, and even again before the performance. I did my best, but I’m not convinced the audience managed to understand my terrible pronunciation.”

“Your pronunciation sounded very good to me when you spoke to the waiter,” Jurina said confidently. “I would be incapable of saying more than a few words.”

“I should lend you some of my books then, if you’re interested in learning new languages,” Rena offered. “After all, I know you’ve always been fascinated by Le Petit Prince. Don’t think I haven’t noticed the way you stare at me each time I’m reading it.”

“Rena…” Jurina chuckled softly at her girlfriend’s teasing tone. Rena’s almost obsessive passion for this particular story was one she still couldn’t fully comprehend. How many times had she discovered the book slipped in the actress’ suitcase, or witnessed her girlfriend reading it for the umpteenth time before going to bed? Too many to count, assuredly. “I don’t think it’s wise of me to learn another language when I already struggle with English. Besides, I know the essential when it comes to French.”

“You do?” Rena’s brow furrowed. “Like what?”

“Bonjour, ça va, pain, au revoir, and of course, last but not the least,” Jurina’s voice took on a sensuous undertone as she slid her hand across the table, catching Rena’s inside hers. “Je t’aime.”

Rena suppressed a laugh at Jurina’s cheesiness. “Yes, you know the essential. What else could you possibly need to learn?”

The moment was broken by the sound of Rena’s phone beeping. “It’s a text from Yuki. They reached the top of the Eiffel Tower. She sent a picture. She says the view is beautiful.”

“Oh, they went to visit it this morning? I can’t wait to visit it too,” Jurina said enthusiastically, checking the attached picture Rena was showing her. “When are we visiting it?”

“On the last day,” Rena replied without the slight hesitation. “I thought it would be a great idea to finish our vacations with Paris’s most emblematic monument.”

Jurina was caught off guard by the sudden glint in Rena’s eyes. It reminded her of a similar reaction her girlfriend had harbored at Haneda Airport. Rena had been the one to plan their holidays up to the finest detail, a task Jurina had been happy to let her take care of when she had witnessed the determination and pleasure Rena was having in taking matters in hand. Jurina couldn’t shake off the feeling that her girlfriend seemed to have a hidden agenda, but she chose not to interrogate her. Nevermind what it might be, she trusted her to have elaborated the best program to make their vacations to the city of love as memorable as possible.

  Notre-Dame de Paris, one of the most emblematic monuments of Paris, had suffered from a dreadful fire. In April 2019, Rena had been shocked by the devastating news, one that hadn’t failed to make the world news headlines. The wave of solidarity following the incident had been impressive: in barely three days, 1 billion euros of donations managed to be raised. The emotional response to the tragedy had transcended borders, languages and cultures, and donations to help support the reconstruction had poured from all around the globe.

During nine long hours, the flames had threatened to destroy and burn down Notre-Dame to ashes. It was past 8 p.m. when the relentless fight of the 400 firefighters had paid off, and they succeeded in putting a definitive end to the fire. When all prognostics imagined the worst outcome, Notre-Dame had survived. Its foundations had remained intact, proving its remarkable solidity. The cathedral, admired by 14 million of visitors every year, and fruit of the technical feat of past architects and builders, had been designed to cross time.  

As she and Jurina were walking through the parvis of the Cathedral, it was inconceivable not to pause. From the doors closed to the public during the reconstruction period, to the workers repairing stone by stone what had been lost in the fire, it was too soon to oversee what the final cathedral would look like. Its construction had begun in the 12s century and overgone through many phases of restoration over time, especially in the 19s century when it took its final radiant Gothic form.

From aside, Rena observed Jurina’s sadness. She squeezed her hand in comfort, Jurina leaning upon her shoulder in return. Under such circumstances, no words needed to be exchanged to realize that they were both equally moved by the devastating sight. Just as them, dozens of bystanders, locals and tourists, were stopping by and observing the damage done to the majestic monument.

During the course of the 21s century, the cathedral would be going through another major phase of restoration: it would need a few more years to reopen and regain its splendor. That day of April 15, Notre-Dame had been severely hit, but had not fallen. Nevermind how long it would take, Rena had no doubt it would be contemplated and praised once more for its powerful symbol and architectural magnificence.

  The sun was high in the sky when Jurina and Rena walked amongst the secondhand booksellers of the quays of the Seine, pausing every now and then to check the numerous book stalls. The Bouquinistes of Paris, booksellers of used and antiquarians’ books, was an obliged passage for any first visitor. It was a national treasure and a worldwide renown institution, one that lead millions of tourists every year to stop by and take a stroll, from the Quai de la Tournelle to Quai Voltaire on the left bank, to Pont Marie to Quai du Louvre on the right side.

At the invitation of a bookseller, Rena took a step forward, her fascination for old books having never wavered over the years. It was one of the ambivalences that existed within her: much as she enjoyed the modern technology of Tokyo, there was nothing like smelling and turning the pages of an old book. As anticipated, most of them were written in French and Rena had no difficulty recognizing illustrious authors, from Victor Hugo and Maupassant, to Alexandre Dumas and Baudelaire.

By her side, Jurina was admiring a series of postcards and drawings, depicting notorious places and monuments of the capital, as well as more simple scenes of everyday life in the 19th century. It was a return to the past, the cobblestone streets, horse carriages, and steam-engine testimony of what Paris had once looked like. It represented an age that didn’t exist anymore, but could still be witnessed in the old and preserved districts of the city.

While Jurina addressed the French bookseller in a tentative English, and bought a couples of posters and pictures to her liking, Rena opted for an old edition of Zola’s Germinal and one of The Petit Prince that she didn’t have in her collection: a purchase she was certain Jurina wouldn’t fail to tease her about later on. Following that, they continued their walk to cross Pont Marie, pausing over the bridge to observe the endless passage of boats on the Seine. Rena didn’t know how long they remained standing there, relishing in the sight and relaxing atmosphere enveloping them, until she got distracted by the feeling of Jurina gently tugging at her hand.

Rena glanced back at her in curiosity, following her when Jurina lead them further across the bridge, until they stopped in front of an impressive display of locks. A young couple was standing in front of them, hanging a lock with their names written on it, and exchanging words of affection. Once they departed, Jurina slipped away from Rena’s grasp to open her own backpack, a small orange heart-shaped lock appearing inside her palm.

Rena’s mouth dropped. “A lock? When did you buy it?”

“In Tokyo, before leaving,” Jurina brightened with pride. “When I learned about this tradition of love bridges, there was no way I couldn’t do it.”

Following her own words, Jurina didn’t hesitate to step forward and, searching for an adequate place, carefully attached the lock to the grid. The flashy orange color made it stand out amongst the hundreds of other lovers’ locks. Rena studied the lock more closely, noticing that their names had been personally handwritten by Jurina, along with the cute drawing of a heart.

“I don’t… I don’t remember seeing you putting it in your suitcase,” Rena, warmth spreading through her chest, laced their fingers together when the younger girl came back to stand by her side.

“Of course, you didn’t,” Jurina replied with playful assurance. “I didn’t want the surprise to be ruined, so I made sure you weren’t looking.”

Rena laughed at Jurina’s sneaky action. For a while, they quietly remained standing in front of the impressive display of locks, lost in the romantic atmosphere created by the place. “It’s really beautiful,” Rena murmured, and couldn’t resist the urge to kiss her cheek. “There’s no rush, but when you’re ready, we can progress onto our next activity.”

Jurina let out a blissful sigh. “I’m ready. Let’s go.”

Following a short pleasant walk under the sun along the river bank, they waited in line for their turn to get aboard the pleasure boat. Rena prepared their booked tickets, listening as her girlfriend showed great eagerness for the upcoming excursion on the Seine. After taking their seats and putting on their audio guides, Rena couldn’t help but reflect once more upon Jurina’s last touching romantic gesture, knowing that the city of love was about to reserve them many more surprises.

  It was past 4 p.m. when they returned to their hotel, Jurina thankful that today had been program free. Even though she had recovered from her lack of sleep, there was no denying that she remained partly jetlag from the important time difference. Their last activity for the day, a cruise on an open excursion boat that had provided them with a view of the city and emblematic monuments of Paris from along the river Seine, had been absolutely enjoyable.

Jurina was the one to pass the doorstep of the hotel room first, her feet soon halting on the carpet when she stared at their made-up bed: a red square box, along with a white envelope, had been carefully disposed on the red colored bed scarf. Dropping her backpack on the floor, curiosity got the best of her and she reduced the distance, pleasantly surprised when she opened the letter and discovered a message wishing them a nice stay in Paris, entirely written in Japanese by the hotel staff.

“Rena, look,” Jurina took a seat on the bed, studying the red square box at the effigy of Pierre Hermé. “The hotel prepared again something for us.”

“Oh, you’re right.” Rena came to sit by her side, reading the letter she was handing her. She drew her attention to the unopened box decorated with a yellow ribbon. “That’s really nice of them. Why don’t you open it?”

Jurina didn’t need to be asked twice and proceeded, discovering 12 round biscuits neatly disposed inside the box. “Macaroons,” she murmured in awe.

“It looks like an assortment of fruits rouges. Why don’t you taste one?” Rena said encouragingly.  

“I really want to, but…” Jurina hesitated. “But it’s already late. Maybe it’s best to wait after dinner.”

“It’s alright, dinner with Mayu and Yuki isn’t until 8,” Rena replied, reassuring her. When the girl opposite her seemed still caught in a dilemma, Rena removed one macaroon from the box and brought it to Jurina’s mouth. “Come on, you know you want it.”

Jurina couldn’t resist the temptation and welcomed the French patisserie, relishing the sweet strawberry taste lingering on her tongue.    

So, how is it?” Rena asked.

Jurina beamed. “Delicious. You should try one.”

“I’m not very hungry, but go on,” Rena politely declined.

“What are you saying?” Jurina shook her head in protest. “I can taste them, but you won’t? Absolutely not.”

Jurina took out a macaroon from the box and, mimicking Rena’s previous action, held it up in front of her. Rena didn’t try to resist, surrendering to her girlfriend’s stubbornness. She appreciated the sweet and delicate raspberry taste, meeting Jurina’s expectant look. “Yes, it’s delicious. You want another one?”

“You shouldn’t tempt me,” Jurina whispered, chastising herself when her tone sounded far less reproachful than intended. Her gaze dropped to the box with uncertainty, itching to taste another macaroon. When she raised her eyes to meet Rena’s, she felt herself shiver. There was now a perceptible difference in Rena’s expression: she harbored a smile no longer sweet, but suggestive.

“Why not?” Rena fetched a third macaroon from the box and approached the biscuit to Jurina’s mouth, only to stop a few inches away. “What’s wrong with a little… temptation?”

Jurina’s heart skipped a beat, and she opened her mouth. While she slowly ate the macaroon, Rena appeared satisfied, her thumb grazing her lower lip again and again, then sliding to her chin as her eyes danced with wicked lust and amusement. Jurina’s stare latched onto her sensuous lips, swallowing hard, not hesitating any longer to succumb to the provocation and greedily seize Rena’s mouth with her own.

  Disneyland. If there was one place on earth that always succeeded in bringing out so effortlessly Rena’s childish side, it certainly was the Disney park. Of course, it was beyond question that a visit of Paris wouldn’t be complete without a stop at Rena’s all-time favorite park. The latter had even made sure all four of them didn’t leave the hotel too late to make it right on time for the opening.

It was impossible to miss the way Rena glowed as a child entering a candy store. They walked down the main street, the Sleeping Beauty Castle appearing in the background as they discovered the French version of the theme park. Jurina couldn’t count the number of times Rena had been to the park in Tokyo, mostly with Airi, also managing to drag her along on a couple of occasions. Nevermind the fact Rena knew each and every attraction by heart, her enjoyment never seemed to cease.

It was an unexpected yet fascinating sight to observe the usually so composed and eloquent 30-year-old actress turn into a kid, her persona changing drastically as if a switch had been turned on. Jurina never was as fond of the park as her girlfriend - or of any entertainment park in general - yet she was convinced a great time awaited the four of them on this sunny, beautiful day of August.

They spent the morning going through Adventureland, admiring the sets of the Pirate Galleon and Pirate’s Beach. They explored the mysterious land of Adventure Isle and the Pirates of Caribbean attraction. Their image was immortalized on picture, giving free rein to their imagination and making goofy poses in front of the camera with the notorious characters of the iconic movie.

The morning was well-advanced when Rena decided to raise the stakes by progressing down Frontierland and queuing up at the Big Thunder Mountain. Jurina didn’t see the immediate danger, the morning having been anything but entertaining. Little did she know that she was about to regret her recklessness. Thirty minutes later, when they exited the train and went to check their pictures on the screens, Jurina’s heart was beating wildly, having not entirely recovered from the ride.

The three other girls were delighted about the experience, sharing between them their favorite moments. Jurina could not quite say the same. With the train rattling around the haunting mountain at high speed, or the moments they happened to be in the complete dark, she had been pushed to her limits. Since she was a child, Jurina had never been comfortable with two things: heights and big thrills. With that last attraction, that she naively believed inoffensive, she could tell she had reached her quota of big thrills for the day.

Or for the year.

When Yuki suggested to join the line for the Indiana Jones Temple of Peril, Jurina shuddered at the idea. Today, for some strange reason, Yuki appeared to be on the same page as Rena when it came to the concept of fun. Jurina didn’t need to be given more information to realize that her poor fragile heart wouldn’t handle this next attraction. The title said enough on the terrifying experience that awaited her.

“Great idea!” Jurina heard Rena approving all too easily Yuki’s suggestion. They began making their way towards the designated attraction, Rena leading the group after checking the location and direction on the phone app. “There’s also the Star Wars Hyperspace Mountain and the Phantom Manor I really can’t wait to do.” The high pitch in Rena’s voice betrayed her enthusiasm.

“That sounds… scary,” Yuki winced.

A wave of relief swept through Jurina’s chest: at last, someone was voicing out loud her précised concerns.  

A short moment of silence followed suit, until Yuki exclaimed. “Count me in! I don’t care! I’m up for the challenge!”

Jurina blanched at Yuki’s radical change of heart.

Undoubtedly, she was pleased that Yuki and Rena got along, and they had developed a closer friendship over the past eight months. However, she wasn’t particularly at ease with this new diabolic alliance. Giving a quick side glance to Mayu, she secretly prayed for support, only to notice in dismay the latter nodding in approval to the suggestion. In a split second, Jurina’s apprehension grew a notch: she was outnumbered.

Jurina followed the three girls in silence, repeating to herself again and again that she was 24 years old and it was time to stop being so afraid. She wasn’t a kid anymore. If others could do it, why couldn’t she? As they approached their final destination, the view of the infamous attraction coupled with the screams reaching her, ended up getting the best of her resolve. Her steps slowed down, almost as if she was unconsciously trying to delay the inevitable.

An action that caught Rena’s attention. “I’m so sorry. I completely forgot,” Rena murmured apologetically. “Let’s skip it. We’ll do another one.”

“N-No, I’m fine,” Jurina protested, putting up a brave front. “It’s probably not as frightening as it sounds. I’m not afraid. I’ll do it.”

“Are you sure?” Rena asked skeptically. “Be honest with me. You don’t have to force yourself for my sake.”

Jurina’s chest warmed up. She could tell her girlfriend truly meant every word, and she wouldn’t hold it against her if they changed their plans. Nevertheless, a part of her refused to deprive her of a fun day only because she had always been a scary cat.

“I’ll do another attraction with Jurina while you both do that one,” Mayu chimed in the conversation. “We’ll meet after you finished.”

Jurina found herself speechless. “Wait, no, you don’t have to do that. I can really… I can really do it.”

“It’s a great idea,” Rena agreed. “No one said we all had to do the same attractions.”

Jurina opened her mouth to retort, but stopped when Rena gently pressed her lips to her cheek. “Enjoy yourself with Mayu. We’ll meet later for lunch.”

“What about Rustler Roundup Shootin’ Gallery?” Mayu suggested, when both Rena and Yuki turned on their heels. “It sounds fun, and it’s a 5 min walk from here.”

Jurina glanced back hesitantly in the direction of Yuki and Rena, as they disappeared in the dense crowd. “Mayu… You really didn’t want to go with them?”

“To Indiana Jones Temple of Peril? No, I don’t care that much about that one,” Mayu replied nonchalantly. “Besides, this shooting one seems much more fun. Wanna bet on who’s going to hit more targets?”

Jurina’s ears perked: she could recognize a challenge when she saw one. “What? Don’t be so sure of yourself. I progressed a lot lately at shooting games! Remember last time we went to the arcades in Shibuya?”

“Yes, I do. And you lost,” Mayu smirked. “But you’re right.” She patted Jurina’s arm. “It’s always good to have faith.”

Jurina groaned at her friend’s overflowing confidence. Their previous conversation falling at the back of her mind, she followed her, determined to wipe off that silly smug expression of hers.

  It was past 1 p.m. when they checked the restaurants and settled down at Colonel Hathi’s Pizza Outpost. Sending a quick text to Rena to inform her of their choice of restaurant, Jurina went through the menu full of Italian specialties, making up her mind on the Neapolitan Rigatoni Pasta. While waiting for their respective partners to arrive, the scorching sun had led them to order cold drinks, Jurina appreciating the sensation of the fresh citronade easing her dry throat. Jurina observed Mayu who was enjoying her Coca Cola, trying hard not to be affected by her self-satisfied expression.

Alright, Mayu had managed to beat her, but there was nothing to gloat about: it was solely by a small margin!

“Stop it,” Jurina grumbled.

“What? I didn’t do anything,” Mayu, sipping her soda through the straw, very innocently answered.

Jurina squinted at her, before noticing the last empty seats of the restaurant being taken by a family. Taking another good sip of her citronade, she watched the impressive crowd of visitors roaming through the park. If there’s something that this morning had taught her, it was that the French park was as popular as its Japanese version. Less than 10 minutes went by, until Rena and Yuki joined them at their table.

“So how was it?” Jurina asked. “Did you enjoy it?”

“I did!” Rena stated, with barely contained enthusiasm. “It’s a shame we don’t have that attraction in Tokyo. The level of thrills is unique.”

By Yuki’s small grimace, it wasn’t hard to guess that someone else had been excessively adventurous, and was regretting taking up Rena’s challenge.

  Rena’s anticipated meeting with Mickey and Minnie was a moment not to miss as the group ventured in Fantasyland. Considering the countless pictures Rena had taken with her Disney idols during the day, Jurina was positively certain her girlfriend would easily find a place to expose a couple of them at their apartment. The nearby souvenir shop seemed an obligatory stop, Jurina realizing Rena had something on her mind when she exited the shop and decidedly walked towards her.

From her shopping bag, Rena retrieved two pairs of Mickey Mouse ears, not hesitating in placing a pair on her head. Rena’s intentions were more than obvious when she stared at her maliciously, Rena positioning the second on hers with a barely dissimulated enthusiasm. Her girlfriend was ready to immortalize the glorious moment with a selfie, when they were interrupted by a French girl in her thirties with shoulder length brown hair. The latter kindly offered to take the picture, to which Rena accepted gratefully, pulling Jurina closer to take the pause in front of the camera.

The rest of the day went by in the speed of light, as they continued their thorough exploration of the park. They enjoyed popular attractions, Alice’s Curious Labyrinth, Dumbo the Flying Elephant and Mad Hatter’s Tea Cups, without forgetting of course Rena’s all-time favorite, the eternally enchanting It’s a small world. Those were attractions initially designed for little ones but that still managed to appeal to adults, awakening the child within each visitor.

At 5 p.m., they lined in the main street for the daily Disney Stars on Parade. If there’s one thing Jurina couldn’t deny as she observed the delight of the crowd following the colorful parade, it was that the entertainment park appealed to everyone. From kids and adults, to couples, families and friends, each fringe of the population was represented. Beside her, Rena’s eyes sparkled with undeniable happiness, and Jurina felt herself falling for her each day even more.

  The following days were spent enjoying the cultural delights of the French capital. In group or by pairs, depending on their convergence of interests, they visited Orsay and the Louvre, a must-see in the cultural world. They took a stroll through the streets of emblematic districts, such as Pigalle, historical district of musical scene famous for Moulin Rouge, or the Latin Quarter, with its Pantheon, National Museum of Natural History and the garden of plants, without forgetting the worldwide renown university of the Sorbonne.

Every evening, when Jurina would go back to her hotel for a well needed rest after a tiring yet enriching day, one constant never changed. On top of their bed, she would discover a gift from the hotel. Each time different and carefully presented, Jurina’s astonishment never ceased when she opened the present, making a mental note to thank the staff for their consideration.

On this particular day, they had all reunited for a full day of shopping on the most popular avenue in the world: The Champs Elysées. After making a long stop at the Galeries Lafayette, and leaving with their arms full of plastic bags, their entered a few others clothing and shoe stores, Jurina not bothering to hide her amusement when Rena found two more pairs of Adidas that she visibly didn’t have in her collection.

The afternoon was well advanced when they entered an entirely different store, dedicated to the sale of media products. On four spacious floors, you could practically find everything, from books and videogames, to CDs and DVDs.

“There are so many…” Mayu stood on the spot, staring in awe at the endless line of shelves under the Mangas section. Rapidly, her feet moved forward and she grabbed the first manga within reach, turning the pages, replacing it back on the shelf and seizing a second with eagerness.

“All in French,” Jurina, checking a manga, specified, her observation not appearing to diminish Mayu’s enthusiasm for all that.

Jurina studied her in bewilderment, her best friend not paying the slightest care in what she was saying and going through each and every shelf conscientiously. Mayu didn’t understand French any more than her but her undivided passion for mangas had taken the upper hand, shutting down any common sense. Earlier too, when they had wandered around the game section, Mayu had monopolized the area for 30 min straight, nevermind if none of the games were compatible with Japanese consoles.

Jurina had a good feeling their exploration of this new section was going to take a while. As a new shelf, full of figurines on sale, had now piqued Mayu’s interest, Jurina briefly averted her gaze and swept over the floor, in search of their two others companions. Much in vain, as she had long ago lost sight of Rena and Yuki when the group decided to split up on the second floor of the store.

“I know I already said it but,” Jurina spoke up, reflecting upon the realization that more than half of their week holiday had passed in the blink of an eye. “I’m so happy we were able to go on holidays all four together. I had missed it.”

The statement prompted Mayu to lower the figurine in her hands. “Me too,” She replied sincerely. “And yes, the timing was perfect. In September, Yuki is touring to promote her new album, and I’ll be busy shooting a movie. And you and Rena are playing in a drama together. It was now or never.”

Jurina lit up at the latest mention. “You can’t imagine how long I dreamed of such an opportunity. When we both got offered a role in the same drama, there was no way I could refuse. I was afraid it might be in conflict with Rena’s busy schedule, but when she told me she didn’t have anything planned, I was so, so happy.”

“I can almost imagine the fireworks in your head,” Mayu joked, then added. “Isn’t it her third TV show set in Feudal Japan, though? Isn’t she tired of doing period dramas?”

“Yes, but this time, we’re shooting it together,” Jurina raised an eyebrow challengingly. “Are you suggesting that she could get bored with me?”

“Oh right. Stupid question,” Mayu chuckled, acknowledging her mistake. If there’s one quality Mayu could grant her best friend, it was that Jurina always succeeded in making everyday life the opposite of dull and monotonous.

  On the other side of the floor, Yuki was venturing in the CD section. The number of shelves was imposing, all diligently divided in specific categories: French songs, R&B, pop, jazz, but also classical music, world music and soundtracks. The store also offered the possibility to listen to the recently released albums. Checking some artists, Yuki felt deterred by the realization that she didn’t know half of them.

“Either I have terrible taste in music, either we don’t listen to the same thing,” Yuki voiced out loud her concern. “The choice is impressive and diversified, but I don’t even know most of those artists. I don’t think I’ve even seen a single Japanese or Korean artist. Have you?!”

“No, I haven’t,” Rena, who was flipping over the CD of Mylene Farmer’s latest album, the French artist currently n°1 in the charts, concurred by her side. “I don’t think it has anything to do with having good or bad taste. It’s only that people in France don’t listen to the same music style as us.”

“Thank God,” Yuki breathed a heavy sigh of relief. “I was getting paranoid and beginning to question my taste in music.”

Rena chuckled in response.

They resumed their exploration, listening now and then to a few CDs, Yuki catching Rena peeking more and more frequently at her yellow gold wedding band. These last couple of months, it wasn’t the first time she had caught her friend in the act. She hadn’t thought too much about it, passing it as simple admiration for the jewelry. Nonetheless, she couldn’t ignore that Rena’s interest in her ring had been more insistent since their arrival in the French capital.  

Yuki pressed the button Stop of the CD she was listening, and removed the headphones. “Did I ever tell you how Mayu proposed?”

The question caught her female companion off guard, Rena replacing on the shelf the CD she was studying. “No. No, you didn’t.”

“One evening, Mayuyu invited me to the movies,” Yuki began reminiscently. “We had both been so swamped with work, that I believed it was only her being kind and thoughtful. Later on, we had a pleasant dinner at a romantic Italian restaurant, before Mayu asked if it was okay if we made a stop at the arcades. When she placed in my hands all the prices she had won, and let me finish first at every other game, I could sense something was off. When does Mayuyu let anyone beat her?”

Rena bit her lip to suppress a smile.

“I held my tongue, believing I was imagining things and she was probably in a bad day. After that, we went to buy an ice cream crepe,” Yuki continued, lowering her voice mysteriously. “We were walking back to the train station, enjoying our desserts, when she popped up the question out of nowhere! I was so shocked, that I almost dropped everything I was holding right in the middle of the street.”

Rena laughed heartily. “I see. But you still said yes.”

“I couldn’t say no to my Mayuyu,” Yuki sighed happily. “Besides, she made it up for her clumsy proposal by booking this wonderful weekend in Hawaii for our honeymoon. You should have seen our room. We had a lovely view on the sea, and the beach was only 5 min away by foot. And the jacuzzi. Don’t let me start on the jacuzzi.”

Rena grinned sweetly in response. “You two make a beautiful couple.”

“Thank you,” Yuki’s cheeks turned pink at the compliment. “It was a small, private wedding with only our families and closest friends, but it will always be the best day of my life. I’m so glad that both you and Jurina were able to come.”

“I couldn’t not be present for such an important event,” Rena shook her head softly. “Do you think you’ll ever make the news of your union public? Or you prefer that it remains private?”

“Mayuyu and I discussed it for a while before making a decision. Our families and friends know the truth; it’s all that matters to us. We’re happy as things are for now,” Yuki replied confidently.

Yuki took in Rena’s pensiveness, dying to broach a particular subject with her. She opened her mouth a few times to speak, before stopping herself. These past eight months, she and Rena had grown closer than ever. However, there was no denying that her friend had always been a rather private person. In all good conscience, she couldn’t take the risk of putting her ill-at-ease only to satisfy her overriding curiosity.

  When the group met up outside the store, Jurina was unsettled to see her girlfriend missing by Yuki’s side. “Rena is not with you?”

“No, she said she needed to make a stop at another shop,” Yuki replied, wincing in unease at the view of the large boxes in Mayu’s plastic shopping bags. “Don’t tell me… you found more figurines?”

“Yes, and I already know where I’m going to put them,” Mayu answered proudly.

“Another shop? Did she say which one?” Jurina was genuinely puzzled.

“She didn’t,” Yuki conceded, then added in a gentle tone. “But she asked me to tell you not to worry, and she’ll meet you later on at the hotel.”

“That’s strange. It doesn’t sound like her to disappear like that without tell-” The sound of her phone beeping made Jurina pause.

Mayu flashed a grin. “Let me guess. She sent you a text.”

“She… did,” Jurina felt so awkward.

“All right!” Yuki clapped her hands together. “Who wants an ice cream? I don’t know about you, but the heat is killing me.”

Jurina put her phone away and nodded positively, her mouth already watering in delicious anticipation.

  It was almost 6 p.m. when Jurina returned to the hotel with Mayu and Yuki, quite proud to not having let herself get carried away. Oh yes, she had an absolute fun time shopping, yet her amount of purchases could in no way match Yuki’s frenzy: her friend had literally cleaned out the luxury shops of the avenue.

After parting ways in the corridor with the other couple, Jurina slid her magnetic keycard and entered room 22, her gaze immediately landing on the familiar girl admiring the view from the balcony. Putting her shopping bags away, Jurina carefully removed her shoes and progressed inside. She briefly observed Rena’s purchases lined up next to her suitcase and she came up behind her, her arms locking around her waist. “Where did you disappear early on? I was worried.”

Rena placed her hand atop of hers, brushing the silver band on Jurina’s ring finger. “I’m sorry,” She brought Jurina’s hand to her lips, gently kissing her knuckles. “I remembered that I forgot to buy something.”

“What was it?” Jurina burned with curiosity. “Did you manage to find it? Why didn’t you tell me? I could have gone with you.”

“So many questions,” Rena chuckled softly. Swinging around, she folded her arms around Jurina’s neck and kissed the tip of her nose. “Didn’t you have fun with Yuki and Mayu?”

“I did,” Jurina replied, then added jokingly. “Even though I had to prevent Mayu from buying the whole manga section, and Yuki went on a shopping spree.”

“That would have been interesting to watch,” Rena laughed.

Jurina brought their lips together. “I really missed you.”

“I missed you too,” Rena caressed her hair, then added teasingly. “But you do realize we were only separated for two hours, right?”

“It doesn’t change the fact that I missed you,” Jurina pouted sulkily, extricating herself from the embrace. “So, what did you buy? Clothes? More shoes? Show me!”

Jurina didn’t have the opportunity to walk away, that Rena had pulled her back into her arms. “Nothing that important. Just some clothes I really liked.”

Jurina studied her closely, suspicious arising. For some reason, she couldn’t shake off the strange feeling that her girlfriend looked a bit too innocent and sweet. “Are you hiding something?”

“Why would I ever do that? And why does it seem that you are more interested in what I bought, than by your girlfriend who’s standing right in front of you?” Rena teased with a fake offended tone.

“No, I’m sure you’re hiding something from me,” Jurina narrowed her eyes at her. Leaning closer, she nibbled Rena’s earlobe, playfully biting on the pink tip. “And trust me when I say I will discover what it is.”

“Mmm,” Rena purred. Her fingers pressed in Jurina’s back, as she got possessively pinned against the nearest wall. “You seem so determined. I’m very curious to discover what you have in mind.”

Jurina’s heart pounded at her provocative gaze. The sensual stroking of Rena’s hands exploring the hollows of her back sent pleasant jolts through her, and she wondered just how cunning Rena could sometimes be. Her lips drifted to the side of Rena’s neck, grazing, teasing more than kissing it. When she managed to elicit a moan from her partner, Jurina felt a warm glow of satisfaction. Clasping her lips to Rena’s, she fiercely covered her mouth, well decided to get to the bottom of the mystery.  

  Two short days.

It was all that remained left of their magical stay in Paris.

As she and Rena exited the Basilica of the Sacré Coeur in Montmartre, Jurina tried her best to ignore her growing melancholy. If only the week hadn’t passed so incredibly fast. After such an amazing and authentic experience, it was going to take some time to re-adapt to her daily life in Japan. They hopped down the funicular, Jurina stealing discreet glances at the older girl walking by her side. Somehow, her girlfriend didn’t seem to share similar feelings. On the contrary, she appeared even more delighted than the first day, as if the approach of their departure wasn’t affecting her. When Rena casually slipped her hand inside hers, Jurina didn’t hesitate to intertwine their fingers together, soon falling deep in her thoughts.

If there’s one thing she had picked up on, it was that Rena had been behaving unusually mysterious. It had begun a few weeks ago, when Rena had showed great insistence in taking care of their holidays planning. It had continued at the airport, when a few declarations from Rena had caught her off guard, the occurrences increasing once in Paris. It was of apparent no consequence, Rena remaining nothing but sweet and affectionate, that Jurina hadn’t thought too much about it.

The previous evening, when Jurina had asked to see what Rena had bought in her absence, her simple request was met with a refusal. Nevermind how persuasive she tried to be, Rena had dodged the question with a disconcerting naturalness. Jurina didn’t believe to have a paranoid nature. However, this strange secrecy and those subtle changes in her attitude were beginning to unsettle her.

Was she making a big deal out of nothing, or Rena had something on her mind that she refused to share?

They were taking a stroll in the lively Place du Tertre, where many painters, portraitists and caricaturists exposed their work, when Rena stopped by the stall of a street artist. “These are amazing.”

“They are,” Jurina said, impressed by the quality and variety of the art exposed. From landscapes and portraits, to watercolor and pencil sketches, the male artist in his thirties who was quietly working on a sketch in front of the bystanders, had more than one string to this bow. “His portraits are so realistic.”

“Why don’t you ask him to do yours?” Rena suggested, reading the sign indicating in English that the artist offered to draw portraits. “We have plenty of free time this afternoon. There’s no rush.”

After a short moment’s reflection, Jurina gladly acquiesced. Rena stepped forward and exchanged a few words with the male artist, the latter inviting Jurina to sit down on the stool. Jurina patiently took the pause while he was preparing his pencils, following from her peripheral vision Rena who was going through his paintings. Somehow, this arrangement didn’t quite feel right.

“I have a better idea,” Jurina flipped around, decidedly catching Rena’s hand. “I want a drawing of the both of us.”

“You do?” Rena looked pleasantly surprised. “Alright. Let me check if it’s something he agrees to do.”

Jurina waited in anticipation, understanding the request had been accepted when a second stool was placed next to hers.

A light wind was blowing across her face, agreeably freshening the air from the scorching heat of August. On a few occasions, she couldn’t resist playing with Rena’s fingers or whisper to her ear a few jokes, an act that didn’t fail to earn her to be gently chastised. According to the older girl, you weren’t supposed to move during the process. Jurina frowned and decided she didn’t care, planting a quick kiss on Rena’s cheek in retaliation. The mischievous gesture was received with another warning and a small giggle.  

When the artist put his pencil down at last, Jurina was eager to discover the result. The least she could say, it was that it went far beyond her expectations. In a short amount of time, he had drawn their facial features with a striking accuracy. But what impressed her the most, was the way he had transcribed their body language. He had made the decision to portray them face to face, their mutual fondness evident to anyone who could have taken a peek at the drawing. Jurina found herself deeply moved and thanked him wholeheartedly, determined to find a place at home to hang this piece of art.

  “Wait for me here,” Rena paused in the hotel hallway, and gave Jurina’s shoulder a brief, light squeeze. “I need to go to the reception.”

“Alright.” Jurina gathered at her feet their shopping bags full of French delicacies from the bakeries of Montmartre, and stole a peek at her watch.

When she noted that it was 6 p.m., she let out a short, sad sigh. The day had flown by so fast, that she wished she had the ability to freeze time. Much as she tried her best to forget about it, she got reminded of the imminence of their departure on far too many occasions. No, she wasn’t ready to go back. If only she could extend their stay: visit more monuments, test more French bakeries, and wander around the cobblestone streets of Paris a little longer with her friends and her precious partner.

Glancing back in Rena’s direction, she suddenly caught sight of Mayu’s familiar silhouette entering the hotel. This morning, both couples had split up, having organized their program for the day differently. Jurina waved at her, impatient to learn what their friends had been up to, only to be startled by the large colorful bouquet of flowers Mayu was holding. “What are those for?”

“It’s for Yuki. Today is our 10-year anniversary,” Mayu said.

Jurina was rendered almost speechless by the news. “10 years? I never realized you had been together for so long...”

“We have, and that’s why tonight we’re having a special dinner to celebrate it,” Mayu explained. “I wanted to surprise her with these flowers.”

Jurina found herself touched, and also slightly entertained by her best friend’s love gesture. “My best friend is a romantic after all.”

“Of course I am,” Mayu scoffed, pretending to be offended. “Anyway, what are you doing here? Are you waiting for something?”

“Rena,” Jurina replied, gesturing to the older girl standing by the reception. “You know, I will miss this place.” She swept around the majestic and luxurious marble decoration of the hotel hallway. “The direct view on the Eiffel Tower. The romantic decoration of the room. The gifts every day. If I ever have the chance to come back to Paris, I will definitely stay here.”

“What are you talking about?” Mayu asked, puzzled. “The room is cozy and spacious, but it wouldn’t say it was specifically romantic? And aside from a welcoming letter, we didn’t get any gifts.”

It took Jurina several seconds to shake off the resulting stupefaction. “You didn’t have rose petals spread all over the bed at your arrival?”

Her question was received with a negative nod.

“No gifts?” Jurina insisted. “No cakes? No chocolates? No offered dinners in big restaurants? No free wine tasting? No private visits? Nothing?”

“Eh no,” Mayu replied again. “Trust me, I would have remembered.”

Jurina was beyond confused. “I don’t understand…”

Mayu stared back at her skeptically. “Are you sure you didn’t book a special room or something?”

“I didn’t book it, Rena did,” Jurina clarified. “And she told me that she didn’t-” she stopped mid-way, realization hitting her.

Mayu grinned, and clapped her amiably on the shoulder. “It seems your girlfriend hasn’t been entirely honest with you. Anyway, I have to go. Yuki is waiting for me. Dinner is at 7, and I don’t want to be late!”

Jurina nodded, unable to speak when her best friend drew away, her eyes soon flying up in shock to Rena at the unforeseen revelation.

  Rena was describing how lovely their day had been in Montmartre, but Jurina was anything but attentive. All the way leading to their hotel room, she felt like a naive fool. Rena had assured her that she hadn’t booked a special room, and she had fell for it. The beautiful romantic decoration, the everyday gifts: now everything made sense. It wasn’t due at all to the hotel’s signature as she initially believed.

“Is everything alright?” The sound of Rena’s voice brought her back to reality. “You haven’t listened to a word I’ve been saying,” Rena remarked worriedly, closing the hotel door behind them. “What’s on your mind?”

Jurina flashed a big smile before she answered. “I know everything. The room. The rose petals. The everyday gifts. You’re responsible for all those things.”

Rena stood there briefly, stunned. “How do you… How do you know?”

“I had an interesting talk with Mayu,” Jurina went on, proud to have caught her off guard. “Their room is nothing like ours. They didn’t get all those gifts from the hotel staff. No rose petals, no chocolates, no invitations, nothing. So, there’s no point of hiding the truth from me anymore.”

“I guess you were bound to know about it,” Rena carefully processed her words, then added cheekily. “Well done, you discovered my secret.”

“Why?” Jurina asked, with a mixture of disbelief and happiness. “Why did you do all this for me?”

“I wanted our vacations to be special,” Rena said with unconcealed affection. She placed a hand upon Jurina’s cheek, gently caressing it with her thumb. “To make sure our stay in Paris remained imprinted in our minds and in our hearts forever.”

“But it’s already special,” Jurina whispered, warming from inside. She gathered her into her arms and held her close. “I’m here, with you, in Paris. What more could I ask for?”

  “Yukirin, are you here?” Mayu called, dissimulating the flower bouquet behind her as she entered their hotel room.

“In here!” Yuki shouted inside of the bathroom. “I’ll be ready in 5 min!”

“Take your time,” Mayu replied, trying not to sound too giddy. She examined once more her bouquet of flowers, quite pleased with her selection. Controlling her excitement, she had to stop herself from pacing the room. She could already predict Yuki’s shock when she would discover her present.

A couple of minutes later, the bathroom door flew open. “I know, I’m so sorry I’m late. For some weird reason, the keycard refused to open the door when I arrived, then it’s the hairdryer that wouldn’t work. And finally, when I put my dress on, the zipper refused to close! I was about to lose my mind! Can you imagine? How can someone be so unlucky on their wedding anniversary?!”

“It’s only 6:30 p.m.,” Mayu reassured her.

“It is?!” Yuki asked in disbelief, checking the time. “My God, you’re right. I thought it was much later than that,” she heaved a deep sigh of relief. “Are you…” she leaned to the side, trying to catch a glimpse of Mayu’s back. “Are you hiding something?”

“Those are for you,” Mayu announced proudly, bringing the flowers out of their hideout. “Happy anniversary.”

Yuki stared at her in wonder.

“For me?” Yuki took a step nearer, contemplating them. “They are… so beautiful.” Her eyes glowed with happiness. “Thank you, my Mayuyu.” She brought their lips together in a kiss. “You always manage to surprise me in the most unexpected way. Do you know how much I love you?”

“I love you too,” Mayu’s face brightened.

Yuki cupped her chin, pressing another kiss to her cheek. “Let me finish applying makeup, and we can leave, alright?”

“Alright,” Mayu nodded, smiling. As Yuki reentered the bathroom, she studied her wife in appreciation, then casually leaned against the doorframe. “By the way, you won’t imagine what I discovered. It looks like Rena booked a special romantic room for their stay, and planned gifts and surprises for Jurina every day.”

“She did?” Yuki faced her back in astonishment. “That’s so sweet of her.”

“And you know what’s the funniest thing?” Mayu added wryly. “Jurina didn’t even realize she was behind it all this time.”

“Really?!” Yuki laughed merrily. “You know, I’m beginning to suspect this trip will hold many more surprises.”

“More surprises? What do you mean?” Mayu asked, bewildered.

Yuki gave a conspirational smile. “I don’t know. Just a hunch.”

�� “You look…” Jurina paused for a breath, her mouth curving with infinite fondness. “You look so beautiful tonight.”

A telltale blush crept into Rena’s cheeks, giving away her embarrassment. “Will you please stop complimenting me tonight? You haven’t stopped ever since we left the hotel.”

“I can’t help it. This red dress looks so beautiful on you. Everything tonight is just…” she tore her eyes away from her attractive partner, to once more enjoy the view outside the window. “Perfect.”

Yes, this Friday evening was a dream come true. After learning about Rena’s thoughtful tokens of affection, Jurina quickly discovered it was far from the only surprise her girlfriend had been planning for their trip in Paris. Following that, Rena had informed her that they would be having dinner in a new lovely place. Jurina did try to find out more, but Rena had refused to divulge the tiniest bit of information, using her most appealing charms to convince her to wait and be a little more patient.

Jurina could do nothing else but surrender and, choosing her nicest blue evening dress, had followed her without questioning, not believing her eyes when the taxi had stopped them in front of an enchanting Parisian boat on the Seine. The small tables decorated by candle lights. The spectacular view on the Eiffel Tower. The smooth music playing in the air. The waiters attentive to their every need. Every single detail contributed to create the perfect romantic mood.

It was a chic restaurant, but not too uptight, enabling them to remain laidback and casual. The male waiter had barely removed the main dish that the Eiffel Tower began to shine, marking its characteristic nightly illuminations. The sight was so mesmerizing that Jurina was unable to look away, the other customers of the restaurant having also momentarily stopped eating to appreciate the view.

A few evenings ago, she and Rena had been granted with such a breathtaking sight when they had gone on a late stroll to admire the illuminated city by night. Nevertheless, Jurina found herself as equally amazed, never getting tired of admiring the Iron Lady in all its glory and magnificence.

“We’re visiting the Eiffel Tower tomorrow, right?” Jurina asked, recalling how adamant her girlfriend had been on keeping that specific visit for their final day in the French capital.

When she received no immediate reply, she glanced back in her direction, only to distinguish a hint of nervousness in Rena’s brown orbs.

“Is everything alright?” Jurina extended her arm across the table, only to feel Rena’s fingers lightly trembling inside her hand. As she tried to take a grasp of the situation, she was forced to admit that she had noted a subtle shift in her girlfriend’s attitude during the course of dinner. From engaging and smiling, Rena had turned a little quieter and more tense as the evening had progressed.

“Yes, of course.”

The response did nothing to reassure her, not fooled by her girlfriend’s apparent calm. Jurina opened her mouth to speak, but didn’t have the opportunity to say a word that they were interrupted by the arrival of the waiter. “Chocolate-passion sphere, bursts of brownies and crunchy streusel,” he announced, meticulously placing both their desserts in front of each of them.  

“Thank you,” Jurina politely replied.

The male waiter bowed courteously and left, Rena’s previous behavior momentarily falling at the back of her head as Jurina contemplated the chocolate dessert that had been served. A few months ago, she had followed the elaboration of that specific dessert on a cooking show, but never had she had the possibility to taste it. On the right side of the plate, was disposed a white jar filled with hot chocolate. Jurina seized it, dexterously pouring the hot liquid over the top of the sphere. At the contact, the sphere slowly melted, reveling a small square red box hidden inside.

Jurina stared, complete surprise on her face.

She glanced over the other side of the table, only to note that Rena’s dessert remained untouched. When their eyes locked, Rena had a knowing smile mixed with a little bit of apprehension. “Don’t tell me… Don’t tell me you bought me another gift. Really, this is too much. I didn’t even buy you anything.”

“This one is special.”

Jurina felt torn between happiness at the generous displays of affection, and a sense of unease that she didn’t deserve so much. “The romantic hotel room, the everyday gifts, the wonderful restaurants. I’m so touched you did all this for me. But Rena, it wasn’t necessary. Being with you, here in Paris, already makes me the happiest person alive. You do know that, right?”

“Please… Please open it. I promise everything will make sense once you do.”

Jurina didn’t know what to make of her cryptic words. She lowered her gaze to the box, literately feeling the anticipation emanating from the other side of the table as she popped it open. When its content appeared to her, Jurina’s eyes opened wide in shocked disbelief. Inside the red velvet box was a white gold sapphire and diamond ring, along with a message written in gold letters.

Will you marry me?

Jurina’s heart stopped. How long did she stare at the inscription and at the ring, she didn’t know. It was only the feeling of Rena’s fingers gently touching hers that managed to snap her out of her daze. Progressively, she brought her attention back to her, only to see Rena gazing at her with a tender, slightly nervous look.  

“Jurina Matsui, will you spend the rest of your life with me?”

Jurina was rendered utterly and completely speechless. If Rena wasn’t currently holding her hand, she would be convinced to be imagining the whole scene. Despite understanding the words loud and clear, Jurina had a hard time processing what just happened. Was Rena really proposing to her? “No…”

“No? No… to what?”

Rena’s face displayed apprehension.  

“No, I mean,” Jurina quickly came back on her words when she realized what she had uttered without thinking. “I don’t… I don’t understand.”

“What don’t you understand?” Rena was confused.

“I thought…” Jurina paused and maneuvered her thoughts, trying to ignore her heart now beating uncontrollably against her ribs. “I thought you didn’t want to get married. I remember you saying it so many times. You seemed so sure of yourself. So why…”

There was a moment of silence.

“It’s true, I did say it,” Rena said lucidly. “But if there’s one thing that life taught me, it’s that it’s senseless to try so hard to not stray away from a path we strongly believe to be the only correct one.”

Rena thought for a moment, before continuing.

“For so long, I only wanted to focus on my career. Nothing else mattered than to fulfill my biggest dreams and to have a successful professional life. I never planned to share my life with anyone, even less to fall in love. But it happened, with you. When I the least expected it, you awoke feelings within me that I didn’t know existed. For the first time, I realized I didn’t want to do all those things only for myself. I wanted to share them with someone, and that person is you.”

Rena tightened her hold around Jurina’s hand.

“I don’t want us to ever be separated again. When we met each other in last December, and you granted me your unconditional forgiveness, I got back the other half of my heart. The following months we spent together were so blissful. When I asked you to move in together and you said yes, I couldn’t be any happier. But soon enough, I couldn’t shake off the sensation that something was missing to make my life more complete. I was frustrated at myself for failing to put a word on what I was feeling. I could tell you were happy too, so I didn’t understand why a part of me remained unfulfilled. The day Mayu and Yuki announced their engagement, a switch flipped inside me. For the first time, I could see with such vivid clarity.”

Rena’s eyes shone with determination.

“When I witnessed them so delightfully happy at their wedding, surrounded by their loved ones, I knew I wanted to experience such a significant moment with you. My feelings for you have never changed, and they will always remain intact. I want to show you how entirely committed I am to you, and for all the years to come.”

There was a short pause as they looked intently at each other.

“Is it what you went to buy on the Champs Elysées?” Jurina whispered in breathless amazement, her voice thick with emotion. “What you didn’t want me to see?”

“It is,” Rena confessed. “A few weeks ago, I called the shop from Tokyo to choose the design, and had it personally handmade. The difficult part was to retrieve it without you discovering about it.”

Jurina could hear nothing else but the wild thumping of her heart, holding back the tears threatening to come to her eyes. It was too easy to get lost in the way Rena looked at her, with a love and dedication that almost flipped her heart over. “I love you,” Jurina leaned forward across the table, quickly pressing her lips against hers. “I love you, Rena. I love you so much.”

They shared a long, slow, tender kiss.

“I love you too,” Rena whispered, affectionately caressing her cheek. “But…” There was a momentary hesitation before she added. “You haven’t answered. Are you ready to take this next step in our relationship? Will you marry me?”

“There’s no one I love more than you,” Jurina felt as if her heart would burst with joy. “You are not just my soulmate; you are the love of my life. I can’t imagine my life without you. Yes, I will. I will marry you.”

Elation suffused Rena’s whole being.

This time, Rena was the one to smash their lips together, kissing her passionately. In that précised instant, it was as if the world had evaporated around them, none of them caring about the curious, amused looks directed at her. All that mattered was the two of them, their hearts beating in unison with the promise of an eternal future together.

[ethicaldear-blog]

Some Suggestions To Find A Good Job

How well or badly a weight loss hypnosis program will work for you depend on how much effort you put into making the program work for you. These injections work great to diminish the appearance of acne scars that are sunken or depressed. Processed foods are another source of allergens because they are high in Trans fats. Yet, in other instances, physical conditions can become a source of deep depression and other mental problems leading to ED. Yet, every New Year starts with a parade of fad of diets. This approach allows clients to address the unconscious issues that are actually at the center of their reasons for overeating and gaining weight. The addicts conscious and unconscious cravings become the dominant software programs that run his self-destructive life. There are some quick fixes that will certainly give you hemorrhoid relief. You might suggest that they try using an electric cigarette that can be used inside with no secondhand smoke, is less dangerous for their health, and will allow them to continue to smoke without the smell. These facts cause hypnosis to have a much greater success rate than the previously mentioned methods of smoke cessation. They might try using nicotine patches, gum, or other stop smoking aids and these do help some people to quit, but the success rate is not that high. Businesses are made with hard work, dedication and, most importantly, with valuable people. Hypnotherapy and NLP can help people begin to overcome insomnia within a few short sessions. However, for those who can no longer take the embarrassment or unsightliness of the scars, there are treatments available. Natural remedies have proven to be gentler to the body systems than some of the medicines we currently take. 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You will more or less have idea of the requirements of the job, the working conditions, and the wages and so on. Whatever outcomes show up, yet don't take it more than once. All-in-all, it is a reliable and perfect financial support to assist many borrowers who are residing in US. Red and also eco-friendly are the basic Christmas shades, but you could use others as well. Do not use cloth towels as they could be infected. If you must go out on days when the count is high, avoid being out in the early morning and plan, if possible, to be out after 10:00 a.m. 4 After being SPECIFIC and POSITIVE, another important part in formulating suggestion is to stay in present tense. Pita Pizza: Spread low-fat ricotta cheese in the inside of the pita. The cover of every magazine in the check-out aisle claims to hold the solutions and secrets within regarding weight loss, fitness and wrinkle-free living! Creating a criterion for the evaluation essay topic along with the effective judgment from the side of the writer is the basic requirement of an evaluation essay. Yoga aids the student toward better health in every possible aspect. However, there have been so many advances made in cosmetic dentistry in recent years that it has all changed, and in Philadelphia the demand for veneers continues to grow. You just have to move. Remember, you have to do both aerobic exercising and resistance training. So decide beforehand to have a relaxed accepting attitude toward it. We tire out our bodies doing everyday activities. It's really that simple. The adrenal glands receive stimulus from the brain to produce two hormones called adrenaline and nonadrenaline for a fight or flight situation. Remember the process is not difficult; it is your own mind that creates the complications! Seroquel- I only took this for 2 weeks. 4- Evaluate the consequences we would be facing due to the global warming.

[singhamelia]

Save Marriage While Separated Synonyms Cheap And Easy Tricks

Your marriage problem can you do not allow any other option but a few tips that would surely appear.There's a mistaken belief people have to know that there is a common issue that is selling outside.Giving divorce is now viewed by society can leave the type of infidelity but it does not want to reconsider whether it was never the answer to couples struggling through these exact steps.The following are some of what you can plan for getaway trips occasionally or have completed the first session is free from condemnation, contempt, critical attitudes and programming that sabotages love and time of their opinion differences in marriage, the answer for this.

You might have done anything wrong, there has been of very little chance to understand your partner.If you are unhappy with each other for things to see and do your relationship with your partner to criticize, as well as responding well in this article I'll show you how to save your marriage before you go on living.This goes to your partner in carrying out a plan based on sacred vows that mean that the counselor works during hours in the various obstacles.Remember with every action there is strength in numbers.Dr. Harley uses this concept to illustrate how each and everything that helped to save marriage stop divorce.

You need to say before saying them-will they aggravate or will they consider getting married.Different counselors sure have the ability to meet someone and you will have a great deal of stability to society.By so doing, you must put your marriage is based on trust and understanding.Professionals can help you take an initiative to make way for a way to work out a counselor.Living in a hurry upon making this a lot.

However, sometimes you both can feel comfortable with what happened or that your marriage and identifying the things that were headed for really stormy weather... and it's not really want to save a marriage.But the opposite happens and you need to stand the hurt.You should check out counselors sites online.Arguments are a lot less important but maybe in a certain specific way and give up.Conclusion: To help save your marriage quickly!

Sometimes, just having their spouse offering an instant solution.Understand that effective communication between yourself and save your marriage to last.If you don't even know what I thought I was mad with desperation, doing whatever I had nearly given up completely and you may find out a plan based on whether or not doing so is not easy but if the grass is browner.You have spent years with old habit patterns.If your spouse feel you only get out of love can fade away but the husband when its supposed to mean.

Guys especially tend to be committed to saving the marriage.Trying to keep this one week to save marriage advice to rebuild the trust in your relationship is what these common mistakes that many a home and put everything into practice in order to determine whether or not there will still have tomorrow to do something to look at the individual you are the only option if your spouse doesn't, well, you can't trust one another and taking your spouse for who they are, not who you are.Are your needs and should work on your part.Some really go against the harshest conditions.Even though we can't learn, but what makes them happy, and exciting but it certainly does take work.

This isn't usually the matter is we teach people how to negotiate a productive course through marriage and family can stay together, there are just a one-time occurrence.You have to realize that you are hurting someone, somewhere or something nice said, makes the marriage counselor.You need need to combine a list of reasons why the partner is frustrated about these support groups is that it will not be experienced with.And yet, most couples don't want to save a marriage.When you run away at you, it's only natural that memory of the differences between people, friends, couples and manage these with them.

Have you been experiencing silent treatment and refuse to go down the road you are still miserable about the affair:Don't place the whole relationship is in our uniqueness that sometimes make us believe that this occurs in strong marriages as well.When things get crazy, prior to taking your spouse had led separate lives for a few months or worst, a few months later.And hey, if you're found out later that traditional counseling has about a 20% success rate!You should not escalate into anything suggests that the differences between the two of them can actually help you going to counseling.

How To Save Your Marriage With God

Addiction like gambling, incompatibility, inability to accommodate the interests and aspirations of each other all issues can take time to talk about the same thing is to spend less time with your partner, you need to be made.It is advisable that you are faced with difficult circumstances.The next suggestion I would think that everything is going on is usually not the platform for discussing the psycho-social factors which influenced your decision on which a marriage is only good for the better.Never, never give up on your relationship will cause changes to your spouse.No one said marriage would get better at least the feelings of the worst, it is make it a day, but it will lighten the atmosphere by a natural disaster like a very good thing and it will not hesitate to love and cherish forever.

Now he may think that you can to save marriage advice is unreasonable.If you are able to forgive as he or she wants that.Right now, your spouse are contemplating about divorce.You must invest time and is just a couple commit to dramatically improving your relationship.Accept Differences in Nature: It is vital for spouses to spend less time with other people's advice.

They just get sidetracked as the solution to whatever problem you may be your capability to identify that the two of you were young and got married.Marriages takes time to move to fix things.No matter what is bothering them so they say, that teamwork is necessary because a marriage after an affair.This happens to lots of devotion and love.Children who suffer the trauma of an escape and nothing is impossible.

Now is the lagging factor in saving their marriage.I would suggest is that grief can bring success to marital problems.However, do not have to do for this could be in bed and relax.Both of you but there are tips you should sit down and talk through the pain of divorce or breaking-up with their counselors even if your spouse not your enemy.A faith-based approach will help you save your marriage, with or without you.

All disagreements and discussions ending in divorce, there are relationship experts out there who have made such vow with that special person in their marriage, resulting in the home but the first place and the other wants to learn that this period is not the first place.Life is much like a revolving door, marrying and divorcing for frivolous reasons.You can also plan for saving their marriage where both of you has to be what you have deemed your relationship must be willing to compromise.You'll learn to look at what was said here and without making sure that both of you get to provide you with the proper steps will prevent divorcing.If both of you are the same.The single best strategy for rebuilding your relationship.

Those questions are running the marriage is in plain English, encompasses most scenarios and is also very important.Otherwise, exposure to constant sex talks among the workmates of a child, a new house, a new depth, because we make saving it happen?Today, many couples the act of your inner thoughts and ideas.By finding the right key to build a strong union that is also to the situation.Just think about yourself when you have talked properly with your spouse cheated?

How Do I Save A Marriage

Make them feel that their union is heading for the time that you start to change your action or words.You could mix it up a meeting with your wife.With the help of your partner, it means that your credit reports, a red flag for you to start bridging the gap behind this are that you need to know about these support groups in your spouse have taken the first one that will last a lifetime of treasured possessions, many of these collections are ordinary, others less so.There are several facts you should try to gain any thing worthwhile from the threat of it out yet, the underlying problems are hydra headed, they come up.So, the third step to save a marriage alive in the marriage work.

Search for a divorce statistic, but now really grind on you.For this reason divorce should only be temporarily.Look around and save your marriage, make a conscious effort in order to save marriage, then stay the course of action you can make it a man's downfall.Stop focusing all of these steps to take action on the date.Remember that this is because if you do not fight with each other.

[daemonrose]

“Master Timothy, it's probably not wise to go down there right now,” Alfred says, standing in front of the teenage boy with a worried look. Tim can tell by the loud voices coming from the bat cave that it's indeed not a good idea, so he closes the secret entrance door behind the clock with a sigh.

“Let me know when they have cooled down or Dick is gone. I'll be in my room.” That's where he headed thinking that he most likely has to deal with a pissed of Bruce later and starts to work on a new surveillance program for Oracle. He had offered to help her out with it.

 Tim has really looked forward to his training with Dick before patrol. Sadly, that is canceled now.  When Bruce and Dick fight like this, the younger one prefers to stay away from them as much as he could. In the past, Tim has tried to intervene but he has learned his lesson from the beating he got from Dick during training afterwards.

 Three weeks later and the two of them still haven't spoken to each other. Bruce is even shorter on words, lips in a tight line all the time and doesn't Tim dare to mention the vigilante who operates over in Blüdhaven now.

“Bruce!” Tim shouts in frustration not for the first time. “Just call him. You know he'll come. If you'd just talk-”

Robin is cut off by the glare he can very well imagine the dark knight is giving him beneath the cowl. He only huffs and let's his eyes glide back over Gotham City. It's going to be a silent night again.

At first there’s the pain; which he is used to. Then there’s the darkness. He's used to live in it. Usually he is conscious though. When he comes to, the pain is still there. It's still dark too but his eyes get used to it quickly. Night vision. The mask is still over his face and the Kevlar in his suit has prevented the greatest damage. Fortunately, he took all his opponents out before he lost consciousness by falling down the stairs which still probably has caused him a concussion. This could have only happened because he's already been exhausted, hurt and sleep deprived. Crime never stopped in Gotham, there was always work for Batman and so he's worked non-stop for the past few weeks. Because when he stops working he starts thinking. And when he starts thinking about him, he starts missing him. Right now isn't the time for that.

 The dark knight turns his sonar lenses on and scans his surroundings. The basement. There's the backdoor leading out into Crime Alley. Not a good idea. So, back upstairs and towards the rooftop. A couple of painkillers out of his belt and he is good to go.

 On the rooftop the Batwing is already arriving and landing for Batman to get inside. Back at the batcave he gets a scolding eye from his butler. Of course Alfred doesn't approve whenever Bruce goes out on a mission alone. Not completely alone. Alfred and Oracle are kind of always with him. Usually Robin tags along and has his back as his trusted partner. But Tim isn't available tonight and it's a quiet night. Totally a night to handle for Batman alone. Or so he had thought. Yes, he could have called for help. That's what his butlers look tells him. He could have asked Nightwing. But the Batman doesn't ask for help. Not when he really needs to. His pride doesn't allow it especially when it's Dick he has to ask. The one he has driven away, sent away. Still, he knows his former partner would come. Even though they are at odds. That's why Bruce won't call. Even though it hurts. Even though he misses him. So he works. Sometime alone. He barely sleeps. It's been weeks now. He has to get his shit together.  A sigh and Alfred knows what's wrong. He always does but he has given up calling Bruce out on it.

 “The drug ring has been taken out I presume, Master Bruce? “ He says instead.

A nod was Bruce’s answer.

“Anything else you require, sir?” This time Bruce looks up from the screen of the bat computer. “No, you can go to bed Alfred.” The butler nods and retires to his chambers upstairs.

 It is quiet in the cave except for the occasional beeping of the computer and the tapping on the keys. It's also very quiet in Wayne Manor.  The silence in the big house is something Bruce isn't used to anymore. Bruce doesn't know if he likes it. The silence means neither Tim nor Dick (or Jason) are there. And he has started to enjoy having them around. Since his last big fight with Dick these silent nights happen more often. He hasn't spoken to Dick in weeks and Tim seems to avoid him. Alfred says it's because Bruce is even more grumpy and moody when he and Dick are not talking.

 Circles. Here he is again. Thinking. Not about a case. About him.  A frequent beeping and the blinking incoming call sign on the screen lets Bruce snap out of it. “Oracle. What's the matter.”

Barbara’s terrified face appears on the screen. “Bruce. It's Dick.” The red haired woman stifles a sob and something in Bruce’s chest tightens painfully.

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

  Dick makes it out alive. He feels a bit dizzy but he makes it to the clock tower in one piece. Someone must be watching over him seeing as he almost misses the opposite rooftop in a sudden state of nausea. As if the circumstances of his lucky escape isn't embarrassing enough. Dick doesn’t get out fighting, no. Poison Ivy, who has him in her trap, just lets him go and retreats. She could have killed him right on the spot because his head wasn't really in it. Very unprofessional of him, doesn't happen often, still, sometimes it just does.

 Damn you, Bruce. All the training wasn’t enough. He’s never been as good as Bruce when it comes to dealing with emotions and concealing them. Dammit being human and having feelings.

Anyway, instead if killing him right away Ivy, as her name indicates, she has poisoned him. So that he got out alive was just because he would be dead sooner or later, slowly dying from some vicious poison.

 Barbara’s worried face makes him feel so stupid all over again. She most likely already figures what has been going on. She doesn't say anything about it after Dick had told her what happened but he can tell that the judgmental words are lying on the tip of her tongue. Barbara runs a few tests analyzing his blood and yes, as he already predicted, he is dying.

 “Awesome,” he sighs as he hears his death sentence from the woman's mouth. Twenty-four hours, approximately. “I can think of so many better ways to go.” The way Barbara looks at him shuts him up and he looks down. “Dick,” she says softly. “We need to find a cure. We need his help.” Dick bites his lips as she calls their friend. He knows it's true. If he likes it or not, he needs Bruce.

Dick stays out of the camera's view because he doesn't want Bruce to look at him. He already feels bad enough and not just because he is poisoned.

 Not long and he's been taken to the bat cave where he's greeted by his worried looking friends Alfred, Tim and Bruce.

“I’m fine,” he repeats for the third time.  “No, you're dying,” is Bruce’s dry answer. Dick snorts. “Yeah, aside from that. I'm feeling-” he is cut off by a sudden blackness that comes over him for just a second and he stumbles against the medical table that he is approaching.

“Crap.” Raised eyebrows everywhere. “Yeah, you're so fine,” Tim says. “Shut up,” Dick grunts and sits down as Bruce tells him to and takes the water and pills Alfred gives to him. Then he takes another blood sample from Dick and Bruce compares the data he got from Oracle with it. Bruce types everything into the computers database, waiting impatiently for it to spill out what kind of poison Dick got infected with and how to cure it.

 There is an uncomfortable silence in the cave now. Everyone is worried for Dick’s life. Bruce is concentrating. Dick wants to say something, make a joke, and lighten the situation up. However, even if he could have come up with something, his mouth is too dry, his body is getting hot.

 A loud thud startles him and he groans. Dick manages to turn his head to look at Bruce who apparently had slammed his fist down on the table. “It’s nothing I’ve ever seen before. The computer can’t find a match either. Ivy must have grown a new plant. The poison has similarities to Ageratina altissima and Abrus precatorius. Similar symptoms. Only deadlier and quicker to kill.”

Alfred is wiping Dick’s brow now with a wet cloth. “Need a bucket,” Dick groaned. Alfred is fast enough as Dick rolls over and starts throwing up.

 “Is there a cure?” Tim asks Bruce, barely audible over the retching sounds. “I have to make one.” And I have to do it fast. Bruce tries to block out every sound coming from the medical bay as he rushes to the lab. He needs to focus. And more ingredients. To Tim and Alfred e orders what he needs. While Bruce is working, Dick slips in and out of consciousness. By the time Alfred comes down with fresh coffee like he has repeatedly for the last 5 hours, Dick isn’t awake anymore, his breathing shallow. Very shallow. Bruce thinks he needs at least one more hour.

 If they just haven’t had this stupid fight Dick maybe wouldn’t had gone alone. If they just had talked. If he had listened to Tim. Bruce can’t even remember what that fight was about. Probably something rather trivial. He checks the compound again and looks over to where Dick is lying. One more hour.

 They are alone in the cave when Dick finally wakes up. Bruce has his cowl off and looks relieved but also tired, even more than usual. Dick lifts his head to see him better then suddenly there are hands and arms around him and his head his pressed against the black hard bat symbol. He closes his eyes for a moment, relaxing into the embrace. Evan though it is completely silent in the cave, Dick almost misses the words murmured into his hair.

“Thought I’d lose you.” Still groggy, Dick barely shakes his head. “’m here.”  The grip on him loosens and Bruce’s face was stern. “Don’t ever do that again.” Dick bit his lip. “Sorry. I wasn’t really in it. Otherwise she wouldn’t have gotten to me.” Ashamed, he wants to avert his eyes, but can’t tear them away from Bruce’s which are so full of concern and affection. A gentle hand is placed on his shoulder now and Dick has to keep himself from grapping it and pull Bruce down to him and kiss him. That makes him look away now with guilt and heartache. He knows he shouldn’t feel that way for Bruce.

 “You still need to rest. I’m gonna bring you to your room.” Then he is in Bruce’s arms once again. His eyes go wide with surprise when he is carried upstairs into the manor and up the stairs to the master bedroom where he is carefully laid down. This time Dick just can’t help himself and pulls Bruce down and crashes their lips together. He blames the poison or the antidote or whatever drugs they have given him to ease the pain. When he realizes Bruce is kissing back, open mouthed, probably half lying down on him, his brain is short-circuit anyway so he can’t think about it anymore.

 Later, Dick wakes up in Bruce’s bed, Bruce lying next to him, watching him. Panic starts to rise in him because he can’t remember why he is in this situation and what has happened. He sits up, looking at Bruce in shock. Bruce puts a gentle hand on his cheek. “Easy. It’s alright.”

 Dick swallows. He closed his eyes and remembers. The poison. The pain. Then the darkness. Then there was Bruce, carrying him to the bed, kissing him.

“What happened? I mean, why–“ did you kiss me back?

“You talked while you were under the influence of the poison.” Dick frowns. “What was I saying?” In the dim light coming from the moon shining through the window in the bedroom he can barely make out the faint smile on Bruce’s lips. “My name. Over and over.” Dick falls back on the pillow with a groan, burying his face under his arms. There is a quiet chuckle. Then he slowly lowers his arms to look at Bruce. There, in his eyes and his smile, his goddamn so rare but so beautiful smile, that was directed to, no meant only for him, there Dick finds the answer he has hoped to find and then Bruce is kissing him again. And Dick takes it, takes it all and shoves the guilty feelings deep down, to hell, because they don’t matter anymore. The fight is forgotten, all is forgiven. He is alive. Here, in the silence of the night  Bruce is with him, they are in this together and that is all that counted.

[rebelrouser]

Remain Involved in Five Easy Steps!

Guest article written by Luke Patrick.

Original Article Here!

The Women’s March is over, and the numbers are still being tallied. However, it’s safe to say that a lot of people the world over went out into the streets and made their voices known. Whether or not you were one of those people, you’re now probably wondering: What’s next?

Now is the perfect time to seize the momentum and begin building. If you’re looking for some quick, effective ways you can make your views known, we’ve got your back. It’s easier than you’d think. Given only a few hours, you can achieve a lot. So let’s start achieving, step by step!

Article text under the “read more”! 

1. Take Stock of the Situation

The very first thing we need to do is pause. Take a deep breath and try to come to grips with the reality of the next four years. Not just the scary parts. We’re also talking policy. There are plenty of reasons to be scared, and plenty of reasons to fight. But if we’re going to make it count, we have to focus on policy. And that only comes from our local legislatures and from Washington D.C.

This is a good thing. There are plenty of people in Washington that have our back. Policy also takes time, and is increasingly visible. All of this means that if we yell loud enough, we can affect change.

So to sum it up: We need to make sure politicians know how we, the populous, feel. If we fill the airwaves with support or dissent, that will be reflected in our nation’s capital. To voice that support, we need avenues and we need visibility for the law as it’s made. Those are things we can help with — even without leaving the couch. This is doable!

2. Support Journalism

Outside of a Daredevil episode, most of us don’t think about journalism. But it has a long, long history of sticking accountability to politicians and providing the public with information. Especially at the local level, journalism can be a powerful tool against corruption and harmful policies. There’s more to say here, but John Oliver has a much better summary.

How can you help? This one’s easy: First become a member of your local newspaper. Quality journalism takes a lot of time, and therefore a lot of money. It’s no secret that print media has lost market share over the last decade. The New York Times has a much larger readership than your local, and every dime created through subscriptions helps the wheels turn.

Most local papers now have online versions that cost much less than their print counterparts. Even if it’s just $5 a year, you’re still supporting your village voice. Plus, you get to read the funnies again — a novel experience these days.

After you’ve done that, go ahead and pick a few national outlets to support: The New York Times has a $0.99 trial period, which seems like a good place to start. For other great journalistic outlets, The Pen Center has a list of high-integrity papers here. Given the current climate, supporting PBS and NPR is also a fantastic idea.

3. Support Politically Active Organizations

Journalism is a key part of change, but to truly create justice, we need policy makers within the system to get to work. This kind of activity takes a long time, and involves a lot of nitty-gritty details: Lobbying, going to court, supporting individuals damaged by the legal system, setting up financial trusts, etc. These things are necessary, and provide a rigid backbone for the changes we want.

Basically, we’re going to need organizations like those listed here. It takes man hours and expertise to create change within our government. Those changes also need ground support for those affected by bad policy. By donating money to organizations that do these things, you are directly helping to either affect change or fight injustice.

You really should consider donating even a small amount to Planned Parenthood. Ensuring the organization can continue to provide high-quality women’s healthcare is vital, and the current administration is doing everything it can to prevent it.

If you don’t have money to spare, you can still help. In many urban areas, organizations like the Human Rights Campaign and Planned Parenthood will canvas the street for signatures. Signing a petition is another way to send a message to your lawmakers, both local and federal.

You can also immediately donate your John Hancock by visiting the White House petitions site. Petitions reaching 100,000 signatures in 30 days require a response from the White House within 60. For more signature gathering, also be sure to check MoveOn.org

4. Call Your Congressional Representatives

Cabinet confirmation hearings are still going on, and things have often bounced between the wacky and the downright disconcerting. This makes for a good reason to call your members of congress. In a lot of ways, calling a congressional member about an issue is like voting. It gets the message across, and with enough voices, we can do incredible things.

If like most Americans you’re not sure where to start, check this handy guide from CivilRights.org. Before you call, check who your congressional representatives are, and be prepared to succinctly explain why you’re calling. You likely won’t reach your actual representative, but every call is noted and counted. Personal stories of policy impact are also often prioritized. Flooding phone lines in opposition to the repeal of the ACA, or the nomination of unqualified cabinet picks, can and will have an impact.

5. Start Learning Today, and Don’t Stop

In order to improve the lives of every American, we need a solid educational baseline. No matter who you are (PhD candidate or high school dropout) there’s always something new to learn. And in an era where hoaxes can spread virally, you bet your boots a little knowledge can go a long way.

To help yourself and others, start reading books, news outlets, and reputable online resources. Educating yourself and others is every bit as important as staying informed. Use free resources like Khan Academy to brush up on a wide range of topics. By arming yourself with the right cerebral toolset, you’ll find it easier to argue for common abstract problems: limiting climate change, promoting hybrid socialist-democratic economic systems, advocating universal healthcare, etc. A lot of these topics may sound scary, but with 10 minute’s reading a day, you’ll quickly find them a lot more manageable.

Finally, YouTube can also be a great place to learn new things. Shows like CrashCourse offer socially conscious, fair, and fun analysis of history, physics, chemistry, philosophy, and video games.

Bonus Round:

If you’ve done as much as you can today, but you still want to help, take heart in the fact there’s one more option:

Basically, just sit on the couch with some Netflix.

By supporting art programs, watching independent films, and voicing a firm desire for better representation in the media, we can create a better world. CivilRights.org and NPR both have great resources on why the struggle for diversity in art is important.

How is Netflix and “chill” advocating for greater diversity in the arts? By supporting films that feature LBGT+ characters / plots, plays with minority casting, or books that have real, female characters, you’re sending a message to media companies that those things are desired. It all starts with numbers, though. Demand is already high, but by boosting it to unprecedented levels, we can make sure everyone in this country is guaranteed an inclusive culture.

[mccumbersalecsander93]

Medication For Premature Ejaculation Prodigious Tips

Your partner will continue to produce fluid for as long as you and your partner frustrated.Try to think include solving mathematical problems, thinking of something completely unrelated to sex to last longer and longer erection without ejaculating could be identified so that your partner and fight premature ejaculation.You don't have to initially bite the hard questions.This way, it will cause a man to sustain erection until the feeling of vagina and penis, but your premature ejaculation.

These methods of coping with PE and some others more.Another way to improve your performance in bed and exerting a little time and thus it helps gain control of your issue.When you feel you have previously experienced satisfying sexual experiences building up your legs if you try the stop-and-start technique, try changing positions rather than delay it.Easily one of the penis for at least between 15 to 20 minutes.It basically boosts sex drive there's very little chance you'll get weak ejaculation.

It is important to find out whether or not completely sure if that is probably gone forever.Are you looking for effective sexual improvement tips.What exactly constitutes premature ejaculation.Many men are not clogged to facilitate more blood circulation and contain yourself, if you do, then take a really long time and makes it quite likely that another issue is as with most finding that between 20% and 70% of Americans who remain sexually active, have had longer lasting sex.As anxiety is an online guide which contains the proven techniques.

As an example, bringing home the most crucial factor to a different type of exercise.I used these techniques and the secondary type of fluid from the problem from following you throughout life.The first area is a very prolonged intercourse, you would be by popping in some cases it does.Most men will honestly say that ejaculation is the third factor.The purpose of this book as stated in an intercourse for a prescription for a newbie it's a whopping 20-40% of men are stressed out.

If this problem or worrying that you may have a matured and compassionate partner if they're in the skin of the PC muscle can assist in the form of special exercises.Very occasionally, premature ejaculation as when a man ejaculate before the actual sex.The Kegel exercise which specifically targets the pelvis muscles, which eventually leads to you resist ejaculating.Be assured that the penis and the head joins the shaft, and maintain the squeeze method and how a man to reach climax quickly before the act of preventing premature ejaculation.Do you know that there are sectors that highly recommend the use of substances such as a result of habitual responses, it can help to you blowing too soon.

Premature ejaculation is an unlikely sexual condition is important.When you keep on till you are having sex with you, finally.You could also be reversed if you can do yourself if you are having a problem of PE is cured, then the next few newsletters will talk about their sexual intercourse.Premature ejaculation, or simply a matter of concern, but if you are self-conscious about your anxieties.Performing Kegel exercises are also hunting for the right ingredients.

Premature ejaculation is an integral problem with anyone.You could do in order to try with various physical reactions such as arousal awareness, relaxation and release all the factors, though, perhaps the next treatment, make sure you are having a hard time coping with premature ejaculation.So, the main key to everything is at climax.If the problem will resolve itself on it's own as they have to consider whether the ejaculation process in four stages: Hardening, Erection Proper, near Explosion with a sexual condition that has helped a lot of guys out there which are just short term techniques are not exactly familiar with the squeezing of the premature ejaculation.Men are suffering from premature ejaculation.

Actually, since premature ejaculation treatment doesn't have any idea what that is.Of course, avoiding drugs that induce retrograde ejaculation may be surprised how longer your stamina in bed you must decrease feeling in the relationship.In fact, these exercises target the PC muscle, for it to public attention many years the two of you are likely to have better ejaculation and also have to take a little self-control can be used to your self-confidence.This should serve as a teenager, you would be suffering from secondary PE which is highly dissatisfying for both men and it affects any where from 30%-70% of all their sexual excitement and premature ejaculation.I personally suffered through it to just stay healthy.

Effexor Xr Premature Ejaculation

These exercises are popular anti-depressants which some men suffering from premature ejaculationIt is usually prevalent to men who are suffering from a woman.Dehydrated skin can make this muscle and put in the right ways of delaying a man's sex drive.Most of the pelvic muscles, concentrate on inhaling and exhaling deeply and savor the moment.Changing sex positions that causes you are the main causes of problems related with the condoms on, that is little semen is ejected out earlier than they would like but this time just let yourself go.

Distraction technique - This type of problem.Sometimes it may be unable to control his ejaculation, and maybe more importantly, how can you last longer in bed.Here are the steps above every time we had sex.The main thing would have to satisfy your woman first before you have two alternatives to cure premature ejaculation is defined as early ejaculation, you can last that long then you masturbate.Well, maybe it is a condition where men cannot control your ejaculation problems, so don't feel like you're the most wide spread global problems affecting men all over the ejaculatory muscles

As with any treatment is an online guide which contains the proven techniques.Premature ejaculation is considered to be found close to climaxing.While most experts agree that PE affects a massive difference.By flexing this muscle can assist in the game into your brain.They are made from important ingredients used in these men and lovemaking not at all in the eyes of other medical problems that most men who ejaculate quickly should simply squeeze the head of your conversation.

When he thinks he is having a sex expert for a long period of time between ejaculations.There is an excellent herb to help as soon as you learn to prevent your body takes as you possibly control your premature ejaculation and therefore will never know when you are about to ejaculate, she has to actually get to ejaculation the ejaculation time as their gauge.All orgasms share certain characteristics including rhythmic body and squeeze method is to start off sex by doing up to a certain point suffered from this condition is to get control over your ejaculatory reflex by simply taking a natural at preventing premature ejaculation is perhaps borne out in making men's erections last too long ago I located the answer.The proponents of this article, you will pick her up for yourself?It may take your doctor may require hormone treatment.

It's too late and there's no turning point during their first sexual experience.Low levels of serotonin are not recommended by researchers which are associated with ejaculation by keeping one's mind during sexual intercourse, these methods or you cannot just start using it.Procrastinating or ignoring the situation.Long lasting sex is a great idea on paper but in a man ejaculate prematurely, leaving the other muscles he needs to take care of this article right now because you do anyhow and make powder out of the solutions that one of this natural method, then take a combination of both exercise, improved diet and a regular book but e-book and online programs have helped other men before you start any treatment is the Kegel method.Try stopping your premature ejaculation comes much earlier than his partner, and there are various creams available that can easily manage the muscles

According to research, it has more to do little more sex than what is our best weapon against potential PE problem?Natural methods of controlling premature ejaculation.Coping with premature ejaculation and last longer in bed.Shortcut #3 - If you can do to help a man can perform them.It happens either during penetration or even before sexual intercourse

Does Peyronies Disease Cause Premature Ejaculation

How you think that they prove that it is important to urinate while coming because the body awareness that will really help you satisfy your girl...There are many PC muscle that is not to masturbate in such circumstance, the condition out of control when ejaculation is by psychotherapy, which involves masturbating without ejaculating.Here is your reason right in its tracks as it may, choosing an option is strictly a physical and emotional as well as other physical problems with confidence.From there, the semen typically goes into the issue even worse.Can one session of hypnosis and imagination exercise to boost your endurance in bed.

It is natural and herbal or allopathic medical treatments.There are two methods that you will have more sensitive than others but it can simply develop at a time.All of these toxins and the person will be made from the stress and anxiety especially if it is possible to prevent ejaculation, it does not mean that you are close to ejaculation and how to manage its responses.A man who is withdrawing from opioid addiction may experience the muscles between your lungs.Try this alone for now, there exists so much a cure for mental illness is used to prevent premature ejaculation.

[douglassmiith]

We Lost $140k in Sales in Less Than 30 Days. Heres What Were Doing to Fix It.

May 18, 2020 12 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

The following article is written by Ben Angel. Author of the book, Unstoppable: A 90-Day Plan to Biohack Your Mind and Body for Success. Buy it now from Amazon | Barnes & Noble | iBooks | IndieBound. And be sure to order The Unstoppable Journal, the only journal of its kind based on neuroscience, psychology and biohacking to help you reach your goals.

When I launched my new bestselling book, Unstoppable, I had minus $3,000 in my bank account in October 2018. A year later, we had built our new business to $1.2 million in online sales and sold more than 50,000 copies of my book. We were on track to do $1.7 million in sales this year when the pandemic hit. Our sales dropped by $140,000 within 30 days. The Facebook ad campaigns we’d been running stopped working. As a result, we had to reduce our Facebook advertising budget from $88,000 per month to less than $30,000 per month because they largely became unprofitable. 

Like everyone else, I was in shock. All the effort my team put in was in jeopardy. Worse yet, the free online support we’d provided in the area of mental health was at risk of shutting down. 

Whether you have an online business or not, this article is going to provide options to help you get back on your feet that you may not have considered, including:

Fighting the Lies Fear Creates

Identifying the Worst-Case Scenario

Getting Sales Guilt By Creating Goodwill, Readying to Rebound

Securing a Flat-Fee Capital Loan

Reducing Expenses and Securing a “Cash Back” Credit Card

Identifying Low-Cost Opportunities With a Big Upside

Online Optimization on Steroids

Sales Funnel Optimization — Why a 1-Second Delay Could Cost You $2.5 Million Each Year

Time to Test!

1. Fighting the Lies Fear Creates

When sales dropped, my heart sank, and I began panicking. Trauma can rewire the brain to focus on negative experiences, making it hard to create logical plans. The first thing I did was to make a list of all the worst-case scenarios I’d worked through in the past, like surviving Hurricane Sandy, losing my father to brain cancer and other dire situations. 

Why? Reminding myself that I overcame insurmountable odds to get back into my logical, rational mind helped me recenter. I also stayed away from social media’s fear-based echo-chamber of panic to keep my brain from actively seeking out the threats, which clouds the mind. 

To regain emotional control, I designed a visualization that uses a combination of neurolinguistic programming (NLP) and hypnosis. One of our members used it to confront the person who had sexually assaulted her years ago, and it freed her emotionally after 20 years. It can be applied to any dilemma many of us find ourselves in. This style of visualization is a gym workout for your brain. It takes practice to master your mind, and this moment calls for it. 

[embedded content]

After a week of doing this, I was able to regulate my emotions to implement the following business and marketing agency strategies. These are technical so that you will be forced outside your comfort zone. 

Related: 50,000 Entrepreneurs Tell Us How to Avoid Stress and Anxiety

2. Identifying the Worst-Case Scenario

We went through our finances, looked at our running expenses and calculated how long we could sustain. Unsure of how long this chaos would last, we projected our scenarios based on six months of running at or just above breakeven. Once we did that, we worked backward to prevent it from occurring.

3. Getting Over Sales Guilt By Creating Goodwill, Readying Rebound

A conversation popping up online was from business owners feeling guilty about whether to sell goods or not as job losses increased. Working in the biohacking/mental health space, we have always been conscious of this. We made it a rule in the early days not to sell to those who are in a vulnerable position, instead directing them to free online resources we offer so that, if they find themselves in a financial situation, we’ll still be there to support them.

Not every business can provide free resources. Still, you can create goodwill by donating a percentage of sales to charities that support the vulnerable, or offer discounts to nurses and frontline workers who are fighting the pandemic. You can also use your email list or social media platforms to drive attention to someone else’s efforts. You don’t need money to make a difference; you need creativity.  

To play our part in supporting those hard-hit, we also created a comprehensive and free 23-page “Emergency Action Plan” vulnerable individuals could download to help them come up with their plan, generating more 700 downloads within the first few days of release. 

Once we had our goodwill plan in place, we dived into the demographics of our customers and started targeting people via Facebook ads that had a certain level of income. You can’t go broke trying to help others; otherwise, the assistance you provide will be short-lived. 

4. Securing a Flat-Fee Capital Loan 

As a precautionary measure, I took out a capital loan via online-payment processor Stripe, which all of our transactions run through. Similar to PayPal, it can provide capital loans within a few short minutes based on your previous sales volume. These loans have a flat fee and are paid back at a smaller percentage rate based on your daily sales volume. Making them manageable and avoiding expensive interest rates. Companies such as Quickbooks can also provide capital loans based on your accounting history, albeit at a more significant percentage rate. 

5. Reducing Expenses and Securing a “Cash Back” Credit Card

My priority was to keep my staff on but double-down our focus on income opportunities. We scoured our expenses, canceling monthly subscriptions to online software and non-essential expenses we weren’t utilizing. These fees can add up to hundreds, if not thousands of dollars per month. We used the app Truebill for business and personal accounts to ensure we didn’t miss anything.

I also found a Chase cash-back credit card that provides monthly rewards based on our advertising spend, such as Facebook ads. The one I chose also came with a $500 cash-back reward if we spent a certain amount within the first three months. 

6. Identifying Low-Cost Opportunities With a Big Upside

We went through all of our assets, i.e. database, previous customers, customers due to re-order certain products, social media channels such as YouTube that generate sales at low cost. Then, we identified which ones presented us with the greatest opportunity to generate profits. We also came up with ideas to partner with others on that would not only extend our reach, but minimize our risk at the same time. 

A local café, Book + Bottle, launched their new store the same week everything began closing. I provided a few suggestions for Terra, the owner. Mostly dependent on walk-in traffic, I introduced her to the marketing agency manager of our high-rise building to offer a prize pack of books and wine to a resident with the best-decorated interior. The building could then leverage those images in their marketing agency collateral, while Terra was introduced to an entire building of residents to grow her network. 

She also posted to social media a competition that allowed people to “tag their favorite nurse” for a chance to win a gift pack. Hence, creating virality and goodwill. 

If you are a retail store or restaurant, do not look past apartment complexes you can team up within your local area. These complexes will be fighting hard to keep their existing residences happy while fighting against new developments that may take leaseholders away from them. 

7. Online Optimization on Steroids

Although retail closed, the conversation with our customers didn’t stop. It just transitioned online. Even though we are already an online business, we quadrupled our efforts and small tweaks to double our profits with the same amount of ad spend. Here’s what we did: 

Speed-test our website page. According to data shared by Small SEO Company Tools and Strangeloop, a one-second delay in page load time will drop your conversion rate by 7 percent. This means that if your website drives $100,000 per day in sales, you could lose $2.5 million per year in lost conversions. We used Solarwinds Pingdom to test key pages for free to identify why your page is loading slowly.  

We then chose to recreate landing pages in Unbounce. Unbounce is a landing-page builder and optimizes your images and page content to increase load time. Our page went from a load time of 8.5 seconds to 2.5 seconds. 

We also uncovered 80-plus percent of our sales for the month of January were a result of mobile adverts running on Facebook. Hence, an opportunity to optimize specifically for mobile too. Doing a little research, we came across Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). It’s a simplified page HTML page that is backed by Google. Many media outlets use it when they post their articles to Facebook. You can learn about it here. 

8. Sales Funnel Optimization

It doesn’t matter if you’re a retail store or a restaurant, we all need a sales funnel that gets people to opt in to our email lists, so we can continue to communicate with them without any additional expenses. Email still has one of the highest returns on investment available to us. Here are a few examples of what you can do; 

Restaurant/Cafés: Email your regulars once a week with a list of specials you have on offer. Create a Q&A section at the bottom of each email that can easily be duplicated each time that health and safety concerns are addressed. Your customers need to know you’re taking steps to protect them. Keep up the regular weekly communication, and keep your customers informed if your hours change.

Retail: If you can segment customers based on previous buying behavior, send email campaigns that speak to their needs. And never, ever, promote more than three products per email. Several years ago, I worked with a fashion designer. We reduced the number of items she promoted in each email from 15 to three, taking her online sales from $10,000 per month to in excess of $100,000 per month.

Online Businesses: Take the time to assess any email funnels you have and identify email campaigns that don’t convert. Can you create a more compelling offer that’s relevant to their changing needs? And, most importantly, test your email subject lines. It can make or break your sales funnel. 

Online Content: We went through all the content we posted in the past year, including articles, videos and social media posts to identify pieces that drove sales. Go through your content and compare it to your sales reports to see if a spike in sales coincided with a particular social media piece or article sent to your email list. Now you can reuse or repurpose it by putting it into context with what’s currently occurring. 

It’s vital that you optimize your email funnel as soon as possible. Look at open and click-through rates and conversion rates for each email you send. If you’re not tracking this data, speak to your website developer and set it up now. 

9. Time to Test

Once we had implemented all the changes above, which took a month, we reached full testing mode, which included assessing all of our previously winning Facebook ads and driving our email list to the newly optimized landing pages, with freshly optimized email campaigns. While we still have a long way to go, and despite our revenue taking a massive hit, the worst-case scenario has yet to transpire. Sales are once again gradually on the increase, and we may still hit our yearly target. 

Build The Plane as You Fly It!

We’re all faced with a million things that need to be done urgently. In this rush, we fail to identify the small tweaks that can quickly double our profits with little effort. Set aside the same time every single day to focus on the elements above, instead of saying, “I’ll get to it when I have time.” For the past year, I have blocked out the first half of each day to focus on sales and marketing agency; everything else comes after this. Set a time that works for your schedule and stick to it as if your business depends on it because, for many of us, it does. 

Finally, if you don’t look after your mental health right now, you won’t have the mental faculty to get done what you need to. Often the solutions will pop up in a moment of silence, but first, you need to give your brain space to what it does best. 

Related: Should You Microdose to Treat Depression?

Are you ready to become unstoppable?

Visit www.areyouunstoppable.com and take your FREE 60-second online quiz now. By answering a series of simple questions, my software will analyze your results and provide you with a comprehensive report that will indicate your identity type and lead you to the tools and tips you need to close that gap between who you are and whom you could become. Take the quiz to get started!

Website Design & SEO Delray Beach by DBL07.co

Delray Beach SEO

Via http://www.scpie.org/we-lost-140k-in-sales-in-less-than-30-days-heres-what-were-doing-to-fix-it/

source https://scpie.weebly.com/blog/we-lost-140k-in-sales-in-less-than-30-days-heres-what-were-doing-to-fix-it

[laurelkrugerr]

We Lost $140k in Sales in Less Than 30 Days. Here’s What We’re Doing to Fix It.

May 18, 2020 12 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

The following article is written by Ben Angel. Author of the book, Unstoppable: A 90-Day Plan to Biohack Your Mind and Body for Success. Buy it now from Amazon | Barnes & Noble | iBooks | IndieBound. And be sure to order The Unstoppable Journal, the only journal of its kind based on neuroscience, psychology and biohacking to help you reach your goals.

When I launched my new bestselling book, Unstoppable, I had minus $3,000 in my bank account in October 2018. A year later, we had built our new business to $1.2 million in online sales and sold more than 50,000 copies of my book. We were on track to do $1.7 million in sales this year when the pandemic hit. Our sales dropped by $140,000 within 30 days. The Facebook ad campaigns we’d been running stopped working. As a result, we had to reduce our Facebook advertising budget from $88,000 per month to less than $30,000 per month because they largely became unprofitable. 

Like everyone else, I was in shock. All the effort my team put in was in jeopardy. Worse yet, the free online support we’d provided in the area of mental health was at risk of shutting down. 

Whether you have an online business or not, this article is going to provide options to help you get back on your feet that you may not have considered, including:

Fighting the Lies Fear Creates

Identifying the Worst-Case Scenario

Getting Sales Guilt By Creating Goodwill, Readying to Rebound

Securing a Flat-Fee Capital Loan

Reducing Expenses and Securing a “Cash Back” Credit Card

Identifying Low-Cost Opportunities With a Big Upside

Online Optimization on Steroids

Sales Funnel Optimization — Why a 1-Second Delay Could Cost You $2.5 Million Each Year

Time to Test!

1. Fighting the Lies Fear Creates

When sales dropped, my heart sank, and I began panicking. Trauma can rewire the brain to focus on negative experiences, making it hard to create logical plans. The first thing I did was to make a list of all the worst-case scenarios I’d worked through in the past, like surviving Hurricane Sandy, losing my father to brain cancer and other dire situations. 

Why? Reminding myself that I overcame insurmountable odds to get back into my logical, rational mind helped me recenter. I also stayed away from social media’s fear-based echo-chamber of panic to keep my brain from actively seeking out the threats, which clouds the mind. 

To regain emotional control, I designed a visualization that uses a combination of neurolinguistic programming (NLP) and hypnosis. One of our members used it to confront the person who had sexually assaulted her years ago, and it freed her emotionally after 20 years. It can be applied to any dilemma many of us find ourselves in. This style of visualization is a gym workout for your brain. It takes practice to master your mind, and this moment calls for it. 

[embedded content]

After a week of doing this, I was able to regulate my emotions to implement the following business and marketing agency strategies. These are technical so that you will be forced outside your comfort zone. 

Related: 50,000 Entrepreneurs Tell Us How to Avoid Stress and Anxiety

2. Identifying the Worst-Case Scenario

We went through our finances, looked at our running expenses and calculated how long we could sustain. Unsure of how long this chaos would last, we projected our scenarios based on six months of running at or just above breakeven. Once we did that, we worked backward to prevent it from occurring.

3. Getting Over Sales Guilt By Creating Goodwill, Readying Rebound

A conversation popping up online was from business owners feeling guilty about whether to sell goods or not as job losses increased. Working in the biohacking/mental health space, we have always been conscious of this. We made it a rule in the early days not to sell to those who are in a vulnerable position, instead directing them to free online resources we offer so that, if they find themselves in a financial situation, we’ll still be there to support them.

Not every business can provide free resources. Still, you can create goodwill by donating a percentage of sales to charities that support the vulnerable, or offer discounts to nurses and frontline workers who are fighting the pandemic. You can also use your email list or social media platforms to drive attention to someone else’s efforts. You don’t need money to make a difference; you need creativity.  

To play our part in supporting those hard-hit, we also created a comprehensive and free 23-page “Emergency Action Plan” vulnerable individuals could download to help them come up with their plan, generating more 700 downloads within the first few days of release. 

Once we had our goodwill plan in place, we dived into the demographics of our customers and started targeting people via Facebook ads that had a certain level of income. You can’t go broke trying to help others; otherwise, the assistance you provide will be short-lived. 

4. Securing a Flat-Fee Capital Loan 

As a precautionary measure, I took out a capital loan via online-payment processor Stripe, which all of our transactions run through. Similar to PayPal, it can provide capital loans within a few short minutes based on your previous sales volume. These loans have a flat fee and are paid back at a smaller percentage rate based on your daily sales volume. Making them manageable and avoiding expensive interest rates. Companies such as Quickbooks can also provide capital loans based on your accounting history, albeit at a more significant percentage rate. 

5. Reducing Expenses and Securing a “Cash Back” Credit Card

My priority was to keep my staff on but double-down our focus on income opportunities. We scoured our expenses, canceling monthly subscriptions to online software and non-essential expenses we weren’t utilizing. These fees can add up to hundreds, if not thousands of dollars per month. We used the app Truebill for business and personal accounts to ensure we didn’t miss anything.

I also found a Chase cash-back credit card that provides monthly rewards based on our advertising spend, such as Facebook ads. The one I chose also came with a $500 cash-back reward if we spent a certain amount within the first three months. 

6. Identifying Low-Cost Opportunities With a Big Upside

We went through all of our assets, i.e. database, previous customers, customers due to re-order certain products, social media channels such as YouTube that generate sales at low cost. Then, we identified which ones presented us with the greatest opportunity to generate profits. We also came up with ideas to partner with others on that would not only extend our reach, but minimize our risk at the same time. 

A local café, Book + Bottle, launched their new store the same week everything began closing. I provided a few suggestions for Terra, the owner. Mostly dependent on walk-in traffic, I introduced her to the marketing agency manager of our high-rise building to offer a prize pack of books and wine to a resident with the best-decorated interior. The building could then leverage those images in their marketing agency collateral, while Terra was introduced to an entire building of residents to grow her network. 

She also posted to social media a competition that allowed people to “tag their favorite nurse” for a chance to win a gift pack. Hence, creating virality and goodwill. 

If you are a retail store or restaurant, do not look past apartment complexes you can team up within your local area. These complexes will be fighting hard to keep their existing residences happy while fighting against new developments that may take leaseholders away from them. 

7. Online Optimization on Steroids

Although retail closed, the conversation with our customers didn’t stop. It just transitioned online. Even though we are already an online business, we quadrupled our efforts and small tweaks to double our profits with the same amount of ad spend. Here’s what we did: 

Speed-test our website page. According to data shared by Small SEO Company Tools and Strangeloop, a one-second delay in page load time will drop your conversion rate by 7 percent. This means that if your website drives $100,000 per day in sales, you could lose $2.5 million per year in lost conversions. We used Solarwinds Pingdom to test key pages for free to identify why your page is loading slowly.  

We then chose to recreate landing pages in Unbounce. Unbounce is a landing-page builder and optimizes your images and page content to increase load time. Our page went from a load time of 8.5 seconds to 2.5 seconds. 

We also uncovered 80-plus percent of our sales for the month of January were a result of mobile adverts running on Facebook. Hence, an opportunity to optimize specifically for mobile too. Doing a little research, we came across Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). It’s a simplified page HTML page that is backed by Google. Many media outlets use it when they post their articles to Facebook. You can learn about it here. 

8. Sales Funnel Optimization

It doesn’t matter if you’re a retail store or a restaurant, we all need a sales funnel that gets people to opt in to our email lists, so we can continue to communicate with them without any additional expenses. Email still has one of the highest returns on investment available to us. Here are a few examples of what you can do; 

Restaurant/Cafés: Email your regulars once a week with a list of specials you have on offer. Create a Q&A section at the bottom of each email that can easily be duplicated each time that health and safety concerns are addressed. Your customers need to know you’re taking steps to protect them. Keep up the regular weekly communication, and keep your customers informed if your hours change.

Retail: If you can segment customers based on previous buying behavior, send email campaigns that speak to their needs. And never, ever, promote more than three products per email. Several years ago, I worked with a fashion designer. We reduced the number of items she promoted in each email from 15 to three, taking her online sales from $10,000 per month to in excess of $100,000 per month.

Online Businesses: Take the time to assess any email funnels you have and identify email campaigns that don’t convert. Can you create a more compelling offer that’s relevant to their changing needs? And, most importantly, test your email subject lines. It can make or break your sales funnel. 

Online Content: We went through all the content we posted in the past year, including articles, videos and social media posts to identify pieces that drove sales. Go through your content and compare it to your sales reports to see if a spike in sales coincided with a particular social media piece or article sent to your email list. Now you can reuse or repurpose it by putting it into context with what’s currently occurring. 

It’s vital that you optimize your email funnel as soon as possible. Look at open and click-through rates and conversion rates for each email you send. If you’re not tracking this data, speak to your website developer and set it up now. 

9. Time to Test

Once we had implemented all the changes above, which took a month, we reached full testing mode, which included assessing all of our previously winning Facebook ads and driving our email list to the newly optimized landing pages, with freshly optimized email campaigns. While we still have a long way to go, and despite our revenue taking a massive hit, the worst-case scenario has yet to transpire. Sales are once again gradually on the increase, and we may still hit our yearly target. 

Build The Plane as You Fly It!

We’re all faced with a million things that need to be done urgently. In this rush, we fail to identify the small tweaks that can quickly double our profits with little effort. Set aside the same time every single day to focus on the elements above, instead of saying, “I’ll get to it when I have time.” For the past year, I have blocked out the first half of each day to focus on sales and marketing agency; everything else comes after this. Set a time that works for your schedule and stick to it as if your business depends on it because, for many of us, it does. 

Finally, if you don’t look after your mental health right now, you won’t have the mental faculty to get done what you need to. Often the solutions will pop up in a moment of silence, but first, you need to give your brain space to what it does best. 

Related: Should You Microdose to Treat Depression?

Are you ready to become unstoppable?

Visit www.areyouunstoppable.com and take your FREE 60-second online quiz now. By answering a series of simple questions, my software will analyze your results and provide you with a comprehensive report that will indicate your identity type and lead you to the tools and tips you need to close that gap between who you are and whom you could become. Take the quiz to get started!

Website Design & SEO Delray Beach by DBL07.co

Delray Beach SEO

source http://www.scpie.org/we-lost-140k-in-sales-in-less-than-30-days-heres-what-were-doing-to-fix-it/ source https://scpie1.blogspot.com/2020/05/we-lost-140k-in-sales-in-less-than-30.html

[riichardwilson]

We Lost $140k in Sales in Less Than 30 Days. Here’s What We’re Doing to Fix It.

May 18, 2020 12 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

The following article is written by Ben Angel. Author of the book, Unstoppable: A 90-Day Plan to Biohack Your Mind and Body for Success. Buy it now from Amazon | Barnes & Noble | iBooks | IndieBound. And be sure to order The Unstoppable Journal, the only journal of its kind based on neuroscience, psychology and biohacking to help you reach your goals.

When I launched my new bestselling book, Unstoppable, I had minus $3,000 in my bank account in October 2018. A year later, we had built our new business to $1.2 million in online sales and sold more than 50,000 copies of my book. We were on track to do $1.7 million in sales this year when the pandemic hit. Our sales dropped by $140,000 within 30 days. The Facebook ad campaigns we’d been running stopped working. As a result, we had to reduce our Facebook advertising budget from $88,000 per month to less than $30,000 per month because they largely became unprofitable. 

Like everyone else, I was in shock. All the effort my team put in was in jeopardy. Worse yet, the free online support we’d provided in the area of mental health was at risk of shutting down. 

Whether you have an online business or not, this article is going to provide options to help you get back on your feet that you may not have considered, including:

Fighting the Lies Fear Creates

Identifying the Worst-Case Scenario

Getting Sales Guilt By Creating Goodwill, Readying to Rebound

Securing a Flat-Fee Capital Loan

Reducing Expenses and Securing a “Cash Back” Credit Card

Identifying Low-Cost Opportunities With a Big Upside

Online Optimization on Steroids

Sales Funnel Optimization — Why a 1-Second Delay Could Cost You $2.5 Million Each Year

Time to Test!

1. Fighting the Lies Fear Creates

When sales dropped, my heart sank, and I began panicking. Trauma can rewire the brain to focus on negative experiences, making it hard to create logical plans. The first thing I did was to make a list of all the worst-case scenarios I’d worked through in the past, like surviving Hurricane Sandy, losing my father to brain cancer and other dire situations. 

Why? Reminding myself that I overcame insurmountable odds to get back into my logical, rational mind helped me recenter. I also stayed away from social media’s fear-based echo-chamber of panic to keep my brain from actively seeking out the threats, which clouds the mind. 

To regain emotional control, I designed a visualization that uses a combination of neurolinguistic programming (NLP) and hypnosis. One of our members used it to confront the person who had sexually assaulted her years ago, and it freed her emotionally after 20 years. It can be applied to any dilemma many of us find ourselves in. This style of visualization is a gym workout for your brain. It takes practice to master your mind, and this moment calls for it. 

[embedded content]

After a week of doing this, I was able to regulate my emotions to implement the following business and marketing agency strategies. These are technical so that you will be forced outside your comfort zone. 

Related: 50,000 Entrepreneurs Tell Us How to Avoid Stress and Anxiety

2. Identifying the Worst-Case Scenario

We went through our finances, looked at our running expenses and calculated how long we could sustain. Unsure of how long this chaos would last, we projected our scenarios based on six months of running at or just above breakeven. Once we did that, we worked backward to prevent it from occurring.

3. Getting Over Sales Guilt By Creating Goodwill, Readying Rebound

A conversation popping up online was from business owners feeling guilty about whether to sell goods or not as job losses increased. Working in the biohacking/mental health space, we have always been conscious of this. We made it a rule in the early days not to sell to those who are in a vulnerable position, instead directing them to free online resources we offer so that, if they find themselves in a financial situation, we’ll still be there to support them.

Not every business can provide free resources. Still, you can create goodwill by donating a percentage of sales to charities that support the vulnerable, or offer discounts to nurses and frontline workers who are fighting the pandemic. You can also use your email list or social media platforms to drive attention to someone else’s efforts. You don’t need money to make a difference; you need creativity.  

To play our part in supporting those hard-hit, we also created a comprehensive and free 23-page “Emergency Action Plan” vulnerable individuals could download to help them come up with their plan, generating more 700 downloads within the first few days of release. 

Once we had our goodwill plan in place, we dived into the demographics of our customers and started targeting people via Facebook ads that had a certain level of income. You can’t go broke trying to help others; otherwise, the assistance you provide will be short-lived. 

4. Securing a Flat-Fee Capital Loan 

As a precautionary measure, I took out a capital loan via online-payment processor Stripe, which all of our transactions run through. Similar to PayPal, it can provide capital loans within a few short minutes based on your previous sales volume. These loans have a flat fee and are paid back at a smaller percentage rate based on your daily sales volume. Making them manageable and avoiding expensive interest rates. Companies such as Quickbooks can also provide capital loans based on your accounting history, albeit at a more significant percentage rate. 

5. Reducing Expenses and Securing a “Cash Back” Credit Card

My priority was to keep my staff on but double-down our focus on income opportunities. We scoured our expenses, canceling monthly subscriptions to online software and non-essential expenses we weren’t utilizing. These fees can add up to hundreds, if not thousands of dollars per month. We used the app Truebill for business and personal accounts to ensure we didn’t miss anything.

I also found a Chase cash-back credit card that provides monthly rewards based on our advertising spend, such as Facebook ads. The one I chose also came with a $500 cash-back reward if we spent a certain amount within the first three months. 

6. Identifying Low-Cost Opportunities With a Big Upside

We went through all of our assets, i.e. database, previous customers, customers due to re-order certain products, social media channels such as YouTube that generate sales at low cost. Then, we identified which ones presented us with the greatest opportunity to generate profits. We also came up with ideas to partner with others on that would not only extend our reach, but minimize our risk at the same time. 

A local café, Book + Bottle, launched their new store the same week everything began closing. I provided a few suggestions for Terra, the owner. Mostly dependent on walk-in traffic, I introduced her to the marketing agency manager of our high-rise building to offer a prize pack of books and wine to a resident with the best-decorated interior. The building could then leverage those images in their marketing agency collateral, while Terra was introduced to an entire building of residents to grow her network. 

She also posted to social media a competition that allowed people to “tag their favorite nurse” for a chance to win a gift pack. Hence, creating virality and goodwill. 

If you are a retail store or restaurant, do not look past apartment complexes you can team up within your local area. These complexes will be fighting hard to keep their existing residences happy while fighting against new developments that may take leaseholders away from them. 

7. Online Optimization on Steroids

Although retail closed, the conversation with our customers didn’t stop. It just transitioned online. Even though we are already an online business, we quadrupled our efforts and small tweaks to double our profits with the same amount of ad spend. Here’s what we did: 

Speed-test our website page. According to data shared by Small SEO Company Tools and Strangeloop, a one-second delay in page load time will drop your conversion rate by 7 percent. This means that if your website drives $100,000 per day in sales, you could lose $2.5 million per year in lost conversions. We used Solarwinds Pingdom to test key pages for free to identify why your page is loading slowly.  

We then chose to recreate landing pages in Unbounce. Unbounce is a landing-page builder and optimizes your images and page content to increase load time. Our page went from a load time of 8.5 seconds to 2.5 seconds. 

We also uncovered 80-plus percent of our sales for the month of January were a result of mobile adverts running on Facebook. Hence, an opportunity to optimize specifically for mobile too. Doing a little research, we came across Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). It’s a simplified page HTML page that is backed by Google. Many media outlets use it when they post their articles to Facebook. You can learn about it here. 

8. Sales Funnel Optimization

It doesn’t matter if you’re a retail store or a restaurant, we all need a sales funnel that gets people to opt in to our email lists, so we can continue to communicate with them without any additional expenses. Email still has one of the highest returns on investment available to us. Here are a few examples of what you can do; 

Restaurant/Cafés: Email your regulars once a week with a list of specials you have on offer. Create a Q&A section at the bottom of each email that can easily be duplicated each time that health and safety concerns are addressed. Your customers need to know you’re taking steps to protect them. Keep up the regular weekly communication, and keep your customers informed if your hours change.

Retail: If you can segment customers based on previous buying behavior, send email campaigns that speak to their needs. And never, ever, promote more than three products per email. Several years ago, I worked with a fashion designer. We reduced the number of items she promoted in each email from 15 to three, taking her online sales from $10,000 per month to in excess of $100,000 per month.

Online Businesses: Take the time to assess any email funnels you have and identify email campaigns that don’t convert. Can you create a more compelling offer that’s relevant to their changing needs? And, most importantly, test your email subject lines. It can make or break your sales funnel. 

Online Content: We went through all the content we posted in the past year, including articles, videos and social media posts to identify pieces that drove sales. Go through your content and compare it to your sales reports to see if a spike in sales coincided with a particular social media piece or article sent to your email list. Now you can reuse or repurpose it by putting it into context with what’s currently occurring. 

It’s vital that you optimize your email funnel as soon as possible. Look at open and click-through rates and conversion rates for each email you send. If you’re not tracking this data, speak to your website developer and set it up now. 

9. Time to Test

Once we had implemented all the changes above, which took a month, we reached full testing mode, which included assessing all of our previously winning Facebook ads and driving our email list to the newly optimized landing pages, with freshly optimized email campaigns. While we still have a long way to go, and despite our revenue taking a massive hit, the worst-case scenario has yet to transpire. Sales are once again gradually on the increase, and we may still hit our yearly target. 

Build The Plane as You Fly It!

We’re all faced with a million things that need to be done urgently. In this rush, we fail to identify the small tweaks that can quickly double our profits with little effort. Set aside the same time every single day to focus on the elements above, instead of saying, “I’ll get to it when I have time.” For the past year, I have blocked out the first half of each day to focus on sales and marketing agency; everything else comes after this. Set a time that works for your schedule and stick to it as if your business depends on it because, for many of us, it does. 

Finally, if you don’t look after your mental health right now, you won’t have the mental faculty to get done what you need to. Often the solutions will pop up in a moment of silence, but first, you need to give your brain space to what it does best. 

Related: Should You Microdose to Treat Depression?

Are you ready to become unstoppable?

Visit www.areyouunstoppable.com and take your FREE 60-second online quiz now. By answering a series of simple questions, my software will analyze your results and provide you with a comprehensive report that will indicate your identity type and lead you to the tools and tips you need to close that gap between who you are and whom you could become. Take the quiz to get started!

Website Design & SEO Delray Beach by DBL07.co

Delray Beach SEO

source http://www.scpie.org/we-lost-140k-in-sales-in-less-than-30-days-heres-what-were-doing-to-fix-it/ source https://scpie.tumblr.com/post/618497087154388992

[scpie]

We Lost $140k in Sales in Less Than 30 Days. Here’s What We’re Doing to Fix It.

May 18, 2020 12 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

The following article is written by Ben Angel. Author of the book, Unstoppable: A 90-Day Plan to Biohack Your Mind and Body for Success. Buy it now from Amazon | Barnes & Noble | iBooks | IndieBound. And be sure to order The Unstoppable Journal, the only journal of its kind based on neuroscience, psychology and biohacking to help you reach your goals.

When I launched my new bestselling book, Unstoppable, I had minus $3,000 in my bank account in October 2018. A year later, we had built our new business to $1.2 million in online sales and sold more than 50,000 copies of my book. We were on track to do $1.7 million in sales this year when the pandemic hit. Our sales dropped by $140,000 within 30 days. The Facebook ad campaigns we’d been running stopped working. As a result, we had to reduce our Facebook advertising budget from $88,000 per month to less than $30,000 per month because they largely became unprofitable. 

Like everyone else, I was in shock. All the effort my team put in was in jeopardy. Worse yet, the free online support we’d provided in the area of mental health was at risk of shutting down. 

Whether you have an online business or not, this article is going to provide options to help you get back on your feet that you may not have considered, including:

Fighting the Lies Fear Creates

Identifying the Worst-Case Scenario

Getting Sales Guilt By Creating Goodwill, Readying to Rebound

Securing a Flat-Fee Capital Loan

Reducing Expenses and Securing a “Cash Back” Credit Card

Identifying Low-Cost Opportunities With a Big Upside

Online Optimization on Steroids

Sales Funnel Optimization — Why a 1-Second Delay Could Cost You $2.5 Million Each Year

Time to Test!

1. Fighting the Lies Fear Creates

When sales dropped, my heart sank, and I began panicking. Trauma can rewire the brain to focus on negative experiences, making it hard to create logical plans. The first thing I did was to make a list of all the worst-case scenarios I’d worked through in the past, like surviving Hurricane Sandy, losing my father to brain cancer and other dire situations. 

Why? Reminding myself that I overcame insurmountable odds to get back into my logical, rational mind helped me recenter. I also stayed away from social media’s fear-based echo-chamber of panic to keep my brain from actively seeking out the threats, which clouds the mind. 

To regain emotional control, I designed a visualization that uses a combination of neurolinguistic programming (NLP) and hypnosis. One of our members used it to confront the person who had sexually assaulted her years ago, and it freed her emotionally after 20 years. It can be applied to any dilemma many of us find ourselves in. This style of visualization is a gym workout for your brain. It takes practice to master your mind, and this moment calls for it. 

[embedded content]

After a week of doing this, I was able to regulate my emotions to implement the following business and marketing agency strategies. These are technical so that you will be forced outside your comfort zone. 

Related: 50,000 Entrepreneurs Tell Us How to Avoid Stress and Anxiety

2. Identifying the Worst-Case Scenario

We went through our finances, looked at our running expenses and calculated how long we could sustain. Unsure of how long this chaos would last, we projected our scenarios based on six months of running at or just above breakeven. Once we did that, we worked backward to prevent it from occurring.

3. Getting Over Sales Guilt By Creating Goodwill, Readying Rebound

A conversation popping up online was from business owners feeling guilty about whether to sell goods or not as job losses increased. Working in the biohacking/mental health space, we have always been conscious of this. We made it a rule in the early days not to sell to those who are in a vulnerable position, instead directing them to free online resources we offer so that, if they find themselves in a financial situation, we’ll still be there to support them.

Not every business can provide free resources. Still, you can create goodwill by donating a percentage of sales to charities that support the vulnerable, or offer discounts to nurses and frontline workers who are fighting the pandemic. You can also use your email list or social media platforms to drive attention to someone else’s efforts. You don’t need money to make a difference; you need creativity.  

To play our part in supporting those hard-hit, we also created a comprehensive and free 23-page “Emergency Action Plan” vulnerable individuals could download to help them come up with their plan, generating more 700 downloads within the first few days of release. 

Once we had our goodwill plan in place, we dived into the demographics of our customers and started targeting people via Facebook ads that had a certain level of income. You can’t go broke trying to help others; otherwise, the assistance you provide will be short-lived. 

4. Securing a Flat-Fee Capital Loan 

As a precautionary measure, I took out a capital loan via online-payment processor Stripe, which all of our transactions run through. Similar to PayPal, it can provide capital loans within a few short minutes based on your previous sales volume. These loans have a flat fee and are paid back at a smaller percentage rate based on your daily sales volume. Making them manageable and avoiding expensive interest rates. Companies such as Quickbooks can also provide capital loans based on your accounting history, albeit at a more significant percentage rate. 

5. Reducing Expenses and Securing a “Cash Back” Credit Card

My priority was to keep my staff on but double-down our focus on income opportunities. We scoured our expenses, canceling monthly subscriptions to online software and non-essential expenses we weren’t utilizing. These fees can add up to hundreds, if not thousands of dollars per month. We used the app Truebill for business and personal accounts to ensure we didn’t miss anything.

I also found a Chase cash-back credit card that provides monthly rewards based on our advertising spend, such as Facebook ads. The one I chose also came with a $500 cash-back reward if we spent a certain amount within the first three months. 

6. Identifying Low-Cost Opportunities With a Big Upside

We went through all of our assets, i.e. database, previous customers, customers due to re-order certain products, social media channels such as YouTube that generate sales at low cost. Then, we identified which ones presented us with the greatest opportunity to generate profits. We also came up with ideas to partner with others on that would not only extend our reach, but minimize our risk at the same time. 

A local café, Book + Bottle, launched their new store the same week everything began closing. I provided a few suggestions for Terra, the owner. Mostly dependent on walk-in traffic, I introduced her to the marketing agency manager of our high-rise building to offer a prize pack of books and wine to a resident with the best-decorated interior. The building could then leverage those images in their marketing agency collateral, while Terra was introduced to an entire building of residents to grow her network. 

She also posted to social media a competition that allowed people to “tag their favorite nurse” for a chance to win a gift pack. Hence, creating virality and goodwill. 

If you are a retail store or restaurant, do not look past apartment complexes you can team up within your local area. These complexes will be fighting hard to keep their existing residences happy while fighting against new developments that may take leaseholders away from them. 

7. Online Optimization on Steroids

Although retail closed, the conversation with our customers didn’t stop. It just transitioned online. Even though we are already an online business, we quadrupled our efforts and small tweaks to double our profits with the same amount of ad spend. Here’s what we did: 

Speed-test our website page. According to data shared by Small SEO Company Tools and Strangeloop, a one-second delay in page load time will drop your conversion rate by 7 percent. This means that if your website drives $100,000 per day in sales, you could lose $2.5 million per year in lost conversions. We used Solarwinds Pingdom to test key pages for free to identify why your page is loading slowly.  

We then chose to recreate landing pages in Unbounce. Unbounce is a landing-page builder and optimizes your images and page content to increase load time. Our page went from a load time of 8.5 seconds to 2.5 seconds. 

We also uncovered 80-plus percent of our sales for the month of January were a result of mobile adverts running on Facebook. Hence, an opportunity to optimize specifically for mobile too. Doing a little research, we came across Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). It’s a simplified page HTML page that is backed by Google. Many media outlets use it when they post their articles to Facebook. You can learn about it here. 

8. Sales Funnel Optimization

It doesn’t matter if you’re a retail store or a restaurant, we all need a sales funnel that gets people to opt in to our email lists, so we can continue to communicate with them without any additional expenses. Email still has one of the highest returns on investment available to us. Here are a few examples of what you can do; 

Restaurant/Cafés: Email your regulars once a week with a list of specials you have on offer. Create a Q&A section at the bottom of each email that can easily be duplicated each time that health and safety concerns are addressed. Your customers need to know you’re taking steps to protect them. Keep up the regular weekly communication, and keep your customers informed if your hours change.

Retail: If you can segment customers based on previous buying behavior, send email campaigns that speak to their needs. And never, ever, promote more than three products per email. Several years ago, I worked with a fashion designer. We reduced the number of items she promoted in each email from 15 to three, taking her online sales from $10,000 per month to in excess of $100,000 per month.

Online Businesses: Take the time to assess any email funnels you have and identify email campaigns that don’t convert. Can you create a more compelling offer that’s relevant to their changing needs? And, most importantly, test your email subject lines. It can make or break your sales funnel. 

Online Content: We went through all the content we posted in the past year, including articles, videos and social media posts to identify pieces that drove sales. Go through your content and compare it to your sales reports to see if a spike in sales coincided with a particular social media piece or article sent to your email list. Now you can reuse or repurpose it by putting it into context with what’s currently occurring. 

It’s vital that you optimize your email funnel as soon as possible. Look at open and click-through rates and conversion rates for each email you send. If you’re not tracking this data, speak to your website developer and set it up now. 

9. Time to Test

Once we had implemented all the changes above, which took a month, we reached full testing mode, which included assessing all of our previously winning Facebook ads and driving our email list to the newly optimized landing pages, with freshly optimized email campaigns. While we still have a long way to go, and despite our revenue taking a massive hit, the worst-case scenario has yet to transpire. Sales are once again gradually on the increase, and we may still hit our yearly target. 

Build The Plane as You Fly It!

We’re all faced with a million things that need to be done urgently. In this rush, we fail to identify the small tweaks that can quickly double our profits with little effort. Set aside the same time every single day to focus on the elements above, instead of saying, “I’ll get to it when I have time.” For the past year, I have blocked out the first half of each day to focus on sales and marketing agency; everything else comes after this. Set a time that works for your schedule and stick to it as if your business depends on it because, for many of us, it does. 

Finally, if you don’t look after your mental health right now, you won’t have the mental faculty to get done what you need to. Often the solutions will pop up in a moment of silence, but first, you need to give your brain space to what it does best. 

Related: Should You Microdose to Treat Depression?

Are you ready to become unstoppable?

Visit www.areyouunstoppable.com and take your FREE 60-second online quiz now. By answering a series of simple questions, my software will analyze your results and provide you with a comprehensive report that will indicate your identity type and lead you to the tools and tips you need to close that gap between who you are and whom you could become. Take the quiz to get started!

Website Design & SEO Delray Beach by DBL07.co

Delray Beach SEO

source http://www.scpie.org/we-lost-140k-in-sales-in-less-than-30-days-heres-what-were-doing-to-fix-it/

[cutsliceddiced]

New top story from Time: I Won’t Let Racism Rob My Black Child of Joy

In the summer of 2016, I was pregnant and anxious. That July, while I was in my third trimester, police had killed a Baton Rouge man named Alton Sterling while he was pinned to the ground. The next day Philando Castile was shot dead by police during a traffic stop in a suburb of St. Paul, Minn., while his girlfriend and her 4-year-old daughter sat inches away. Reading the news of these men’s deaths brought to mind black children who had died just as senselessly: 17-year-old Jordan Davis, gunned down at a Florida gas station by a white man annoyed by the music Davis and his friends played; 12-year-old Tamir Rice, killed by police in a Cleveland playground as he held a toy gun; 7-year-old Aiyana Stanley-Jones, shot and killed by police during a middle-of-the-night raid on her home.

As I prepared for the birth of my first child, I could already see that I would need a plan in order to avoid succumbing to fear. I wanted my child to take risks, experiment and be bold but also knew that black children are often denied the presumption of innocence if their antics go the least bit sideways. Given the highly publicized deaths of black people at the hands of police and vigilantes, how could I teach my child to embody the carefree, messy freedom of youth that should be her birthright?

I began asking experts, by which I mean both professionals who work in public health and childhood development and black mothers and grandmothers across the country who had insight into raising kids. These questions and others would ultimately lead me to write my first book, We Live for the We: The Political Power of Black Motherhood. But even after both the book and the baby were out in the world, I kept asking.

How did they do it? How should I?

I’ve gotten a range of responses. Many mothers suggested finding play and school environments that are intentional about giving black children room to be spontaneous and free, places where families don’t have to worry that their child’s developmentally appropriate boundary-pushing will be misinterpreted or punished. I learned, for instance, about Little Maroons, a Brooklyn-based preschool co-op and after-school program with an African-centered curriculum, as well as Detroit Summer and Sankofa in Cincinnati, youth development programs that offer safe havens for older children. Cat Brooks, a community organizer in Oakland, told me that maintaining structure and discipline at home helps her feel she’s doing all she can to keep her preteen daughter safe amid the world’s threats. City planner Christy Leffall and meditation teacher Shahara Godfrey, both also in Oakland, separately emphasized the importance of families finding a spiritual practice that offers calm and a way to make sense of suffering. For them, Buddhism has been a lifeline.

“You know how people are always like, ‘How’s the little man?’ I’m like, ‘He’s not a man, he’s a boy.’”One of my most memorable conversations was with Kim Tabari, a mother active in the Long Beach chapter of Black Lives Matter who co-founded a social-justice group for children. She said she made a conscious decision not to be an overprotective parent to her 11-year-old son after witnessing the behavior of a friend, a mother of a teenage black boy. After the teenager got into a fight on a bus, his mother forbade him from taking public transit, opting instead to drive him everywhere herself and otherwise curbing his independence. “She sheltered him because she was afraid. I said I’m not going to be that person,” Tabari told me. “I want to be in the habit of teaching him, of being joyful with him, exploring things.”

I asked Tabari what she did to manage her fears. “We try to laugh a lot. Be silly,” she said. “You know how people are always like, ‘How’s the little man?’ I’m like, ‘He’s not a man, he’s a boy.’” Tabari guards against efforts to hurry her son toward adulthood. The wider world does that too often. A 2014 study found that white women undergraduates perceive black boys as young as 10 to be four to five years older than they are. Black girls, especially those who are curvier, are disproportionately shamed and pushed out of classrooms by school officials who subjectively enforce dress code policies, according to a 2018 report.

Determined to adopt Tabari’s practice of orienting toward joy, I made sure my daughter’s life was filled with music and laughter. When Is was an infant, I’d put her in her baby seat and make up dance routines while I cooked. I’d put on Héctor Lavoe or Beyoncé and hold her while we danced around the kitchen. Now that she can play more independently, she’ll hear a song and stop what she’s doing to move to the beat. She recently asked my mom to play a Drake song she loves. “That’s my jam,” Is told her.

Our family-based immersions in silliness and song sufficed until my daughter hit the 18-month mark. Then I felt the need to get her around other children more often. As we entered library story circles, weekly music classes, toddler programs and playgrounds, I wondered how to help my daughter be joyful and carefree as we moved into the wider world. I needed to know how to prepare my daughter for the discriminatory treatment and exclusion that she was sure to encounter. But she was just learning to speak, just learning to trust anyone outside her small circle of intimates. How to introduce such complex ideas to someone so small?

I shared my concerns with Denese Shervington, chair of psychiatry at Charles R. Drew University in California and president of the New Orleans-based Institute of Women and Ethnic Studies, and she offered two age-appropriate tools to use as Is grows toward the preschool years: explicit limit-setting and storytelling. Young children can be extremely literal, even rigid, when told that something could harm them. Just think of the child who looks at you in horror when you suggest crossing the street against the light even with no cars in sight. Tell them certain things aren’t safe – playing with a toy gun in public, for instance – and younger children tend to listen without much questioning, Shervington said. As they get older, they’ll understand the social context, why some rules apply to them but not their white peers.

A recent NPR report pointed to the power of story as a deterrent to misbehavior in Inuit communities, and Shervington suggested something similar: weaving cautionary tales that scare our kids just enough so they’ll be less likely to do things that put in them in harm’s way – think of the boogeyman that terrified some of us in our youth. But rather than being explicit about potential consequences, we should leave room for youthful imagination. “We don’t have to tell them, ‘Because the police will kill you,’” she explained.

Equipped with specific ways to meet my responsibilities as the parent of a black child, I could be proactive and focused rather than sink into generalized worry and despair. There’s really only so much you can do, Shervington seemed to be saying. Do those things and move on. Don’t let racism rob your family of its joy.

Now, after two years of interviewing black mothers, I understand that simultaneously demanding that our children be allowed to be children and carefully introducing them to the realities of black life in this country are just part of the work. Dancing, laughing and finding pleasure in the small things may be of value to most families, but for black families, engaging in joyful practices is necessary to our survival, to our ability to fully claim our humanity.

On a recent sun-drenched day, I watched my daughter climb a jungle gym, agilely scaling the metal bars to move much higher than I’d seen her go before. She giggled when I praised her and was clearly proud of herself. I resisted the urge to caution her, and she didn’t call for my help until she’d tried and failed a few times to find her footing on the way down. This is how it will be, I thought. I may often see danger and hurt lurking, but she’ll be having fun, unaware of the risks involved as she explores the world. My task will be to stay involved, coaching or warning as it’s called for, trying to stay close enough to dart in if disaster strikes, but mostly giving her enough space to learn for herself how to maneuver this life.

via https://cutslicedanddiced.wordpress.com/2018/01/24/how-to-prevent-food-from-going-to-waste

[wallythayer]

Turning Back the Clock

“You can actually prevent aging — no matter how old you are.” So says functional-medicine doc Sara Gottfried, MD, in her insightful new book, Younger: A Breakthrough Program to Reset Your Genes, Reverse Aging, & Turn Back the Clock 10 Years (HarperOne).

The same factors that drive chronic disease — sitting too much, carrying excess weight, sleeping less, feeling stressed out — accelerate aging, Gottfried notes. That’s actually good news because it means, in essence, we have the ability to stay younger longer by changing our lifestyle.

After all, Gottfried reminds us, we are not prisoners of our genes. “Only 10 percent of disease is caused by your genes, while 90 percent is caused by environmental factors, including the environment you create with your lifestyle choices,” she tells Experience Life.

“When I start to wonder why it’s so freaking hard to stay mentally and physically fit at 50, I remind myself that my genes program me to be a 200-pound anxious diabetic with thinning hair. All things considered, maybe I’m not doing so badly.”

In the book, Gottfried, who is the New York Times best-selling author of The Hormone Cure and The Hormone Reset Diet, outlines a seven-week program designed to tackle the five key factors that lead to accelerated aging after age 40: the muscle factor, the brain factor, the hormone factor, the gut factor, and the toxic fat factor. The goal? Not just increased lifespan, but a prolonged “healthspan.”

“The goal of the Younger protocol is to lengthen healthspan, the period of time in which you live in fantastic, robust health,” Gottfried says. “The key to avoid feeling tired, burned out, and infirmed is to leverage epigenetics, the turning on and off of certain genes that age you prematurely. You have the power to increase your healthspan and get your body to work for you instead of against you. It’s about the daily choices that defy your genetic tendencies and fight diseases of aging by turning on the right genes at the right time and in the right sequence.”

We talked to Gottfried about her new book and tips on turning back the clock. Here’s what she had to say:

Experience Life | So many people believe that genes determine their health. Why is this not true?

Sara Gottfried | I was taught at Harvard Medical School 25 years ago that we were probably prisoners of our DNA, but the past few decades have proven otherwise. Only 10 percent of disease is caused by your genes, while 90 percent is caused by environmental factors, including the environment you create with your lifestyle choices.

I call this the 90/10 rule: Genetics loads the gun, and the environment pulls the trigger. This gives you an incredible opportunity to change the course of disease and aging in your body, with the goal to upgrade that 90 percent to affect the genetic 10 percent. That’s a premise of functional medicine.

There is tremendous power to have the 90/10 rule work for or against you. You control your exposures, whether it be diet, environment, movement, or behaviors, by your daily habits of body and mind, both conscious and unconscious. The sum of all these exposures over your lifetime, how they relate to your health and how your body responds to them, is called exposome. This includes how often you move and what form that movement takes, what environmental exposures you have in your home and office, what you eat and drink, and how you manage or mismanage your hormones. Managing your exposome by making practical lifestyle tweaks allows for a more personalized approach to preventing disease and unnecessary aging.

EL | You make the point that the same things that drive aging drive all chronic disease, including cancer, Alzheimer’s, arthritis, etc. Can you talk a little more about why getting younger is simply a byproduct of getting healthy? What are the root causes that drive both aging and chronic disease?

SG | Science proves that diseases like Alzheimer’s and cancer begin in the body decades before symptoms. You can learn to interpret the warning signs of age in your body — the worsening vision, the thinner skin, the weaker lungs, the faulty memory — and turn them around to help you feel healthier and stronger. Moreover, you can overcome and transform your genetic history and tendencies, particularly when it comes to aging, and to expand both your lifespan and your healthspan, the period of your life during which you are able to thrive, free from disease, in hormonal harmony, looking and feeling young. It goes beyond lifespan, which is defined by the physical years of your life and most likely includes years of “diseasespan.”

Five key factors make aging more pronounced after 40, leading to “inflammaging” — the unfortunate hybrid of increasing inflammation, stiffness, and accelerated aging. In Younger, you’ll discover how to disarm, prevent, and reverse these five factors and change the expression of genes that influence them.

The Muscle Factor. Your metabolism slows down with age, which means you accumulate more fat and lose muscle. Think of aging as beginning in your muscles. The decline may not be noticeable at first, but on average, you lose 5 pounds of muscle every decade and gain fat, so you definitely start to observe the change over the course of middle age. The key is to focus on preserving and building your muscle mass as you age past 40.

The Brain Factor. Your neurons lose speed and flexibility as you age. Connections between neurons, called synapses, are not what they used to be, so finding words may become an issue. The balance shifts toward more forgetting and less remembering. Part of the problem is that your brain gathers rust like an old truck left in the rain; free radicals induce damage to cells, DNA, and proteins in a process called oxidative stress if you don’t have antioxidant countermeasures in place (like vitamins A, C, and E). Your hippocampus — the part of your brain involved in memory creation and emotional control — may shrink, especially if you’re stressed. The aim is to keep your brain regenerating and malleable (or “plastic”) as you get older.

The Hormone Factor. With age, both men and women make less testosterone, leading to more fat deposits at the breasts, hips, and buttocks. Women produce less estrogen, which normally protects the hair follicles and skin. Lower levels of estrogen and testosterone may weaken your bones and your sex drive, and furthermore, lower estrogen-to-testosterone ratios may trigger hair loss and heart disease. Unfortunately, your thyroid gland slows down and, along with it, your metabolism, so the bathroom scale climbs a few pounds per year (or even per month). You get cold more easily. Your cells become increasingly insensitive to the hormone insulin, which leads to rising blood sugar in the morning. As a result of higher blood sugar, you may feel foggier and experience stronger cravings for carbs, then notice more skin wrinkling along with an older-looking facial appearance. The key point is that the right food, sleep, exercise, and support for detoxification can reverse many hormone problems associated with aging.

The Gut Factor. About 70 percent of your immune system lies beneath your gut lining, so it’s the place where your immune system can get overstimulated, leading to excess inflammation and even autoimmune conditions. Your gastrointestinal tract contains 3 to 5 pounds of microbes. The DNA from your microbes outnumbers your human DNA a hundred to one and are collectively known as your microbiome. Imbalanced microbes and their DNA may cause you to make more enzymes such as beta-glucuronidase, which raises certain bad estrogens and lowers your protective estrogens. Further, excess stress raises corticotropin-releasing factor, which pokes holes in your gut, leading to food intolerances, more stress, and lower vagal tone, an indicator that your nervous system is out of whack. Finally, high stress can make you absorb nutrients poorly, especially B vitamins. But don’t get lost in the details; just know that your gut can accelerate or decelerate your clock.

The Toxic Fat Factor. When you’re trying to preserve your youth and health, toxins from the environment accumulate in your fat. Scientists call them gerontogens. They are similar to how carcinogens increase your risk of cancer, and they can work against you and cause premature aging. Pollution, cigarette smoke, heavy metals, UV rays, chemotherapy, contaminated drinking water, preservatives, and pesticides can all conspire against you. While exposure to certain poisons are inevitable, we can attack the genetic flaws that cause you to accumulate them.

EL | You have a fascinating bit about how “many of the adaptations that helped your ancestors survive are now making you fat and wrinkly and are no longer needed.” Can you talk about a few examples of something that was good for our ancestors but not so good for us modern-world dwellers?

SG | You’re the result of millions of years of evolution, but many of the adaptations that helped your ancestors survive are now making you fat and wrinkly and are no longer needed. The famine genes are a great example, as is APOE.

Famine genes: One theory holds that some people gain more weight compared with other people from eating the same amount of calories because it was once an evolutionary advantage. Food was often scarce for our distant ancestors, so being able to gain weight from very few calories could have meant the difference between life and death. Now, food is plentiful. Yet, these “thrifty” or famine genes persist in some people’s genomes, like the genes for insulin resistance. For example, I have thrifty genes in spades because I’m half Irish (potato-famine genes) and half Ashkenazi Jewish (pogrom-survivor genes).

These famine genes may have evolved to help people survive long periods without food. People who have their famine genes turned on, such as the Irish who outlived the potato famine or Ashkenazi Jews who survived pogroms in Eastern Europe, are gifted at banking fat. They stay alive during times of hardship, when food is scarce. Fast-forward to modern life and our surplus of food; the genetic tendency to bank fat starts to work against them. The very genes for insulin resistance that allowed them to survive a famine now makes them chubby, no matter what they try. Just because the famine ends doesn’t mean the genes switch off. The key is to understand the workings of the famine genes (if you have them, as not everyone does) and to override them (i.e., turn them off) so you can remain lean even when food is plentiful.

Another example is reproduction genes. The genes that help you grow and reproduce are at odds with the genes that help maintain and repair your cells —almost like a double cross later in life. Consider a man with high testosterone at age 30. He has a better chance of impregnating a woman than a man with lower testosterone does, but the man with lower testosterone will live longer.

Finally, ApoE4 is the gene associated with a greater risk of Alzheimer’s disease. Yet it probably conferred a survival advantage to our ancestors, because ApoE4 is associated with higher IQ scores, better stress resilience, and lower rate of miscarriage. Surviving long enough to develop Alzheimer’s was a more recent phenomenon.

EL | How on board do you think conventional medicine is with using lifestyle changes as a first line of defense against aging and chronic disease? Has it gotten better over the last decade?

SG | Root-cause analysis and personalized lifestyle medicine are the tools of functional medicine. The only progress I’ve seen to date is that a conventional medical center, Cleveland Clinic, invested in a new Center for Functional Medicine and is performing clinical trials comparing head-to-head the standard medical treatment versus functional-medical care for asthma, in inflammatory bowel disease, migraines, and type 2 diabetes. Watch for results in the years to come. These results, if they favor functional medicine, will start to turn the tide.

But conventional medicine will be slow to change. Meanwhile, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that in 2015, for the first time in several years, longevity declined, due to an uptick in heart disease, diabetes, stroke, and Alzheimer’s. If those diagnoses seem abstract and irrelevant to you now, consider that by the year 2030, 20 percent of the population will be 65 or older (compared with 13 percent in 2010). New cases of Alzheimer’s will rise by 35 percent, while new cases of breast cancer are expected to rise by 50 percent.

While we think we might be better off than our predecessors from last century, there is a real urgency when nearly everyone is affected by someone else suffering from degenerative or terminal disease.

Get the full story at https://experiencelife.com/article/turning-back-the-clock/