#their last resort

[percontaion-points]

TLR chapters 23 & 24, epilogue

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Chapter 23

Chapter Twenty-three COLE

This is the third to last chapter. There are fucking 17 pages in this chapter. SEVEN-FUCKING-TEEN.

You’d think after this hellacious experience with the hurricane and power outages they’d rethink a return visit to Siesta Playa, but I know better. They’ll be flocking here more than ever come next August. I shiver just thinking about it. Maybe I can convince Paige to take that week off with me. We’ll book a trip somewhere, anywhere.

Awfully bold of you to presume that the two of you will be together in a year.

“Promise me you won’t break my heart,” she says with a teasing tone, but I see the reality in her eyes. The truth lurking there. The concept of breaking her heart is laughable. I think my body would self-sabotage in an effort to keep her happy and safe. But she can’t comprehend that, so I just say, simply, “I promise.”

If this was book one of whatever, I would laugh over how shitty that this promise is going to be. BUT… It’s a stand-alone book! So I don’t give a shit!

“Oh . . . wow. Okay, so? What’s the plan? Tell me everything.”

Chapter 23 summary: Cole goes to a meeting with Todd, who is back on track for his “fire half of the staff to save us even 5c!” nonsense. However, as Cole sits in on the meeting, Cole tells the readers that he now has proof of a tiny fraction of the misuse of company funds Todd has been doing… FROM ONLY THE PAST YEAR. One of the bigger thing is that he bought himself a Corvette on the resort’s dime. Todd talks about how the CEO is coming in tomorrow, but Cole is certain that there will be something else discussed at this meeting other than Todd’s “brilliant lay-off plan”. Cole then dinks around until it’s time to meet up with Paige. When she shows up, he takes her back to his house. A good chunk of the chapter is spent describing what his house looks like, but I feel like I’m at the point now where I honestly don’t give a shit. Inside, he fingers her, and then they jump into the ocean. However, we don’t get a graphic sex scene, and skip ahead to hours later, after both dinner AND sex. It’s a little disappointing.

Chapter 24

Chapter Twenty-Four COLE

As if to make up for the 17 page chapter 23, this chapter is barely 2 pages. MAKE UP YOUR FUCKING MIND.

I can see the rage setting in for Scott—$86,924’s worth of rage.

I’m sorry, but $86k is seriously not that much money. I was expecting millions embezzled. Like go big or go home, buddy. Especially when you stop to consider that the dude literally purchased a Corvette.

“Also, sir, there’s one more thing I’d like to discuss before Todd gets here . . .”

Chapter 24 summary: Todd’s meeting with the CEO, Scott, was supposed to start at 11. However, hours before that, Cole had a meeting with Scott, where he presented all of the evidence of embezzlement. Scott is obviously flabbergasted over the entire thing, and calls down to accounting to get all of his proverbial ducks in a row. Cole is obviously quite pleased with himself. And happily accepts the offer of Todd’s job.

Epilogue

The two security guards should have been enough on their own. They were supposed to escort Todd to his office so he could collect his personal items. Then things took a turn when Todd tried to carry out cash that he was apparently stowing in one of his desk drawers. The money was in a nondescript duffel bag that screamed illegal, though he claimed it was just his gym clothes. Never mind that Todd hasn’t seen the inside of a gym since ’87.

How fucking stupid does he think people are?

“Be my friend, Paige. Grind down on me.” Mama MIA.

[Image description: A meme featuring a close-up of actress Emma Stone, with an exaggerated expression of disgust and exasperation. Her eyes are wide, mouth agape in a forceful expression of shock or disapproval. The text overlayed on the image states: "I HAD TO READ THIS AND SO DO YOU" in a bold, sans-serif font. The background is a light brownish-tan color, suggesting an interior setting, with some out-of-focus elements that seem to be part of a room. The lighting is adequately strong enough to see details of her expression. Emma is wearing a yellow top and has a light reddish-pink lipstick. End description]

What! Under Todd, our budget was laughably small. There was no way to keep all our equipment up to date, and all our complaints fell on deaf ears. When we worked up the courage to bring it up with him, Todd would inevitably shoo us out of his office with a brush-off equivalent to Here’s five dollars . . . don’t spend it all at once, kid.

Again, guests are literally paying to do these activities. Why the hell would you cut the department for something like that?

His mischievous gaze says, All right, Paige. Game on.

Epilogue summary: Todd continued to embarrass himself by refusing to go quietly. He also did even more illegal stuff, like trying to take cash that he’d squirrelled away in his office… None of which actually belonged to him. And then he hurt several guests on his way out, even when the actual police showed up to forcefully remove him. After that, the story quickly devolved into the “and they lived happily ever after” business. It was so tedious, and I think we could have done without half of it. Cole and Paige were so happy. They moved in with each other. Paige got promoted. Yatta-yatta-yatta. I don’t care. At least the story is over now.

[bunnys-bookshelf]

So you know that TBR I planned for June??? Yeah, that didn’t happen. My mood readers understand. I DID finish 3 of the books I was reading from May, but I started more so my book count as of right now, is still 7, which is only one less than last May. But maybe I’ll finish them all this month🤣 Anyways, this was a good reading month. I enjoyed all but one of my reads. Read a life changing 5 star book❤️ Gave Freida McFadden another shot and was pleasantly surprised. And I really enjoyed Icebreaker when I honestly thought I wouldn’t.

[thankstothe]

🧾📈~

[sophsun1]

Interview With The Vampire – 1.04 | 2.06

[silveme]

King of minding his own business

This was a secret Santa gift for @hetuniversumzingtvoormij !

[90s-2000s-barbie]

Papa Roach - Last Resort (2000) 🪳

[peace-hunter]

"can megatron see the ghosts?" sometimes :)

haunted au

[goddessofbees]

So a couple of people have mentioned the jewelry I put on the phantom sibs and I wanted to explain them kinda like a character sheet of my headcannons

If anything is hard to read, sorry 😔 my handwriting might suck... and the spelling....

Yes I know I spelt jewelry wrong.

[starcurtain]

Hey! I apologize if this question has been asked before since it seems like a pretty obvious one, but where do you think the idea of Aventurine being a sex slave came from? Other than the obvious factor of it being something fun for the fandom to mess around with, I mean.

It's something I kind of took for granted as being true before playing his quest, but after finishing it I realized there wasn't really any indication. The only thing I can really think of is his master's comments about him having a good body. Is there anything in his behavior you can think of that would lead to this conclusion if it wasn't a popular fan interpretation already/kind of just an easy conclusion to reach with a slave character?

(also kind of related but what do you think of the idea that he sleeps around/with his clients to make deals? he's obviously willing to sexualize himself with the boob window, but that doesn't necessarily mean he goes further.)

As far as I can tell, the idea that Aventurine was involved in sexual slavery comes from three (maybe four) places:

First, the comment from the master about Aventurine's appearance. People were holding this comment up as refutable proof that Aventurine was used in sexual slavery on top of being tossed into the Hunger Games; however, the response from other players on this interpretation, especially the Chinese side of the fandom, was very mixed, with a lot of people pointing out that the context in the game probably meant the slave master was talking about Aventurine's ability to attract attention from fans watching the literal Sigonian Hunger Games, rather than having a direct sexual-slavery connotation.

Second, the comment from Sparkle about stripping naked and getting on his knees for Sunday. This one has way more implication in English than I think it might for an Eastern audience, actually. In English, this pretty much sounds like Sparkle saying Aventurine trades sexual favors for success in his gambles. However, I suspect the original intention in Chinese was more about humiliation. Western audiences don't have as much history with honor-based prostration, i.e. accepting corporal humiliation as a form of reconciliation that Eastern audiences might be more familiar with. And in any case, Sparkle is Sparkle. She probably just went for the lowest blow she could think of here.

Third, the general assumption that if Sigonian slaves were being chained, branded, beaten, sent to death matches, etc., it seems logical that they would also be taken advantage of in other ways. I honestly think this is probably the fairest take--many, many real slaves around the world faced (and still face!) sexual abuse, so if slaves from Sigonia were treated so poorly you could make them fight to the death for entertainment, it stands to reason they were probably also not safe from other forms of assault. We also have no idea what happened to Kakavasha in any of the years between his being a tiny child fleeing the massacre and then being purchased as a slave as a late-teens-early-twenties person. That's a very long time for a child to have to survive on their own on an extremely hostile planet and not face risks of all kinds or end up needing to do unspeakable things to survive. So I think this is at least not that far-fetched, although it's important to say there's nothing in the game that directly confirms this.

And fourth: I read a tweet semi-recently that stated that one of the Chinese (or maybe it was Japanese) names for a quest Aventurine was involved in was actually a reference to a book about a teenage sexual assault survivor. However, when I tried to verify this myself, I couldn't find any quest Aventurine was in that was based on a book about sexual assault in either English, Chinese, or Japanese. It's possible I just missed something, but I'm taking this one with a bit of a grain of salt currently, since I can't confirm it personally.

Regarding your other question, about whether I think Aventurine sleeps around to make deals...

I definitely think he does not, for one major reason.

First, I will admit that Aventurine is definitely willing to use his appearance to his advantage. This is pretty obvious. He wears incredibly flashy clothes, baths himself in cologne, overloads on glittering golden jewels, and absolutely calls attention to his appearance when working with clients.

We see him actively doing this in his Moment Among the Stars video, where he is clearly using his looks as an equal tool (to his wealth), to daze his target.

It's not an accident that he says things like "Use me as you wish," with all the explicit connotations preserved. The implication is there. However, unless he was absolutely backed into a corner, I think that implication is all it will ever be.

The reason I think this is that the devs go out of their way to give Aventurine three fairly noticeable physical behaviors in his in-game scenes:

For one, he has some of the most closed off body language of any character in the game.

Aventurine's default conversation pose is arms crossed directly and tightly in front of himself. This is like "Defensive Body Language 101." By crossing your arms, you put a symbolic barrier between yourself and the person you're speaking to, and also ensure that your hands are up and available in case you actually need to physically defend yourself.

Virtually all of Aventurine's conversations take place from this stance, no matter who he is speaking to (from the Trailblazer all the way to Topaz). He deliberately closes his pose off and tightens up his silhouette, which just sends a glaring "Don't touch me" message.

This closing off is also blatantly apparent when you compare it to the deliberately open poses he strikes while trying to make himself seem accessible to others (like tempting clients) or seem powerful (to intimidate):

Complementing this habit of closing himself off is a second noticeable aspect of his body language: He frequently avoids eye contact to the point that he even holds conversations while entirely facing away from the person he's speaking to.

I might be a bit lenient and say maybe he's doing this to on purpose to be mysterious, whoo~~ But... in all honestly, he just does this with everyone, even with Ratio while trying to talk about an actual important issue (wanting to look into Acheron's real identity). Hell, even the fake Aventurine does it to himself!

We can even say that wearing the rose-tinted glasses in the first place is another intentional barrier, one Aventurine deliberately removes in specific moments to give people the (false) impression that he's "letting them in" to his circle:

Now, this might be a bit more complicated in Aventurine's case, because eye contact has a whole extra meaning when eyes are the defining trait of your species and come with particularly challenging racial stereotypes. So it may be that Aventurine is simply used to conducting conversation while looking away to minimize racial prejudice against his eyes' unique appearance.

However, I'd also argue that the devs deliberately turned his entire model away in cutscene after cutscene to create a clear sense of being inaccessible, unapproachable, and unwilling to engage in the physical intimacy of standing closely, directly facing, and staring at his conversation partners.

While he faces away, he controls both the figurative and the literal direction of conversation, forcing people to keep their eyes on him while he is free to move as he pleases. Over and over again, it just says "I want to be the one in control. I'm not afraid to show my back to you, but you are not welcome to come near me."

And, in fact, that's a third aspect of his character's body language that I am sure the devs did not include accidentally: More so than other characters, many of Aventurine's conversations are conducted from weirdly far distances. Like, half the time he's talking, he's standing all the way on the opposite side of the room!

This habit of speaking from a-larger-than-normal distance is apparent in the first scene with Himeko...

And then in just about every other conversation too:

The bubble is twenty feet in every direction.

Like yes, he does approach and have conversations like a normal person... sometimes... But it is significantly more noticeable with Aventurine than with other characters that he often conducts whole conversations--even with his allies--from a distance. Just genuinely weirdly far apart.

Leaving space for Gaiathra, I guess.

And it's because these significant decisions were made with Aventurine's in-game body language that, when he deliberately alters his own behavior, it is instantaneously noticeable.

In 2.0, he closes the distance, the glasses come off, and he gets directly up in the Trailblazer's face.

It's uncomfortable not just because the player is suddenly being loomed over, but because this behavior has already been subconsciously established for the player as out of character for Aventurine.

The barriers the character himself was putting up are deliberately stripped away so that he can use physicality and demanding eye contact to intimidate his target. He has to reverse his own normal body language in order to come across as domineering (and, I guess if you're into that, appealing in a domineering manner).

And ummmm, just a tiny aside here because I can't resist:

This does mean that when the game goes out of its way to demonstrate Aventurine altering his own normal habit of distant and defensive body language, it is absolutely intentional.

Yes, this is a Ratiorine post in disguise. There literally isn't any other character in the game that Aventurine is shown being comfortable standing so close to and interacting with in this manner. This doesn't occur in every one of their scenes, but Ratio is the only character that this happens with repeatedly. It's not an accident that the devs literally added "They were walking side-by-side" as flavor text.

But look, I'll be fair: There's a great example of this in Aventurine's scene with Acheron too, where he closes the distance and attempts to make eye contact with her--seeking her guidance and closeness--and she is actually the one stepping away, speaking with her back turned, demonstrating her power and control (and issues with connection!) in that scene.

Anyway, this was a whole longggg tangent into analyzing Aventurine's body language, but my point is that, overall, the devs deliberately adjusted his model's actions in-game to give the impression of a person who clearly wants to be in control of every interaction he has with other people, who insists on distance over intimacy, and whose stances and habits suggest that he is significantly less accessible and open than his "Use me as you wish" motto might suggest.

Long story longer, I think that there is almost zero chance Aventurine is willingly ceding control over himself or the actions expected of him to anyone he isn't 100% comfortable with, and I think that using physical intimacy of any kind would be an absolute last resort for him. Frankly, he comes across as more likely to shoot himself in the foot than let someone he doesn't trust lay hands on him.

To me, he reads very much as "You may look, but you may not touch."

[aingeal98]

I love that Barbara's slightly grey morality during her history as Oracle is just something half the batfam cannot acknowledge for the sake of their own mental health.

Steph: Oooh you used to work with the Suicide Squad? Did you ever have to kill people?

Babs: Well I-

Dick: Of course she didn't!

Cass: Barbara would never kill how dare you.

Babs, knowing full well everyone in the room knows that's a flat out lie:... Yeah sure. Let's go with that.

[percontaion-points]

TLR chapters 21 & 22

Click here for the rest of the series!

Click to see the rest of the snark & image descriptions

Chapter 21

You’re going to get it, Paige. Just remember while it’s happening . . . you asked for it.

Chapter 21 summary: They sit in bed, eating their snacks and watching a movie. Then Paige goes to get another shower, claiming that it’s their run from the construction zone, but in reality, she’s doing her pre-sex scrub. In bed, she brings up the incident from six months earlier, and Cole confesses that there isn’t a day that goes by when he doesn’t think about that. She also confesses that she thinks about it a lot, too. They start kissing, and it obviously gets heated. He gets her off with his fingers, but then goes to leave. She’s a little upset about that, but he insists that he wants for her to think about it some more… As if she hadn’t told him that she’s pretty much been thinking about it for the past six months. He goes into the bathroom to brush his teeth, but Paige follows him in and starts teasing him. She ends up giving him a BJ.

Chapter 22

A date. Who would have thought?

Chapter 22 summary: Paige wakes up to her mother calling again for an update. However, when Cole comes out from the bathroom, she hangs up on her mum in favour of necking on her new boyfriend. He says that the crew is working on getting the property all cleaned up, but that the dorms have been approved to move back into. Cole then invites her over to his house… Yes, he has a house, and doesn’t live in a dorm, because he’s more important than your average employee. Despite Cole telling her that he has to be downstairs in 5 minutes, he walks with her to her dorm. He looks at her photos on display, and she tells him about her parents. And that she’s also told her parents about him, but they think that Cole is her friend… not her mortal enemy. He kisses her goodbye, and promises that he’ll cook dinner for her tonight before he leaves.

[bunnys-bookshelf]

Rating: ⭐️⭐️.5

Recommend: eh not really

Review:

Alright I seriously considered DNFing this one. I started this as a pallet cleanser after reading Haunting Adeline and yeah it did what it needed to do. It was cute, wayyyy too cheesy but cute. I adored Paige. She was funny and entertaining. Cole, on the other hand was boring and dry. He almost has a “touch her and die” attitude which, in my opinion, doesn’t fit in fluffy romances. The banter was unnatural and the story was rushed, like do you hate him or love him because we can’t tell. I also feel like the author tried too hard to make Paige relatable by adding real life references(the Mario kart reference, the Mean Girls quote) but I also read it in like 2 days so I mean obviously I didn’t hate it. I was definitely sucked in. Over all though, 2.5 stars

[bamsara]

the lengths i go to avoid going to the er when in severe pain because they'll just stare at me like I'm a twat who's boohooing over nothing just to scratch at the doors of the urgent care at 6am because they don't put their business hours online

[robotpussy]

ok this is the first time ive ever had to do this but I really need the help right now. i know its going to be hard to get the full amount in the time that I have but any help would benefit me so greatly. i am putting the explanation under the cut as it is very long but TLDR:

I got into the film school of my dreams on a scholarship, but student finance will not pay for the full course fee because my university is independent, (£20k, SF can only pay £14.4k) so I have to pay the remaining fee (£5.6k) by June 1st. I cannot graduate if I don't pay this fee and I am under 2 months away from graduating. all evidence and explanation is under the cut.

gfm is here if the link above doesn't work

thank you to anyone in advance.

I have been studying filmmaking for 2 years at university and I am 2 months away from graduating. I got into this university through a scholarship that reduced the standard course fee in half. Usually, Student Finance/the government will pay for these course fees, but because my university is private, they are unable to pay the fee in full. My course costs £20k and Student Finance will pay £14,400 of this. This means I have to pay £5,600.

Here is the evidence and proof that I did get into my university on a scholarship and what my university offers in terms of fees:

I have been looking for financial support for 2 years (before I even started attending but had a confirmed place) and it has not been enough. I have contacted my local authority for years about the grant I am entitled to as a foster care leaver and the most I could receive was £2,000 that ended up going to paying my gas and electric bills.

I have also gone to many charities to ask them for support and many of the responses I got were "go to your local authority". I did find one charity that was willing to help me but the sponsors of the charity decided that I would receive a laptop and they would pay for the travel costs to my university for a year instead. I am eternally grateful for that but now I have nowhere else to go for this.

I would really appreciate any help I am already having a extremely hard time dealing my current eviction and I am on the verge if being homeless I would just like to get something off my back and I would rather graduate and get this over with. I am still actively working to find places that are willing to help me but in the time that I have now I would appreciate it if I could get something in the meantime.

[sariphantom]

Redraw of last year's art of Donnie at the beach. No matter how many times Leo begged him, Donnie REFUSED to tell him where he found that nice beach in the Hidden City.

Original version from 2024:

[moxyphinx]

it's just the two of us AMBER IMAN & EDEN ESPINOSA in LEMPICKA