#this is a scrap because i did not look at a reference and the off-ness outweighs the fuck-it returns

[nhura]

What's up guys I'm going to be a panelist at RATIOCON 2024 giving an improvised presentation on how silly and weird this guy is

[faggot-vampire-dies-epicly]

Celebrate

Summary: It’s your birthday, and Vanessa wants to make something special. She decides to bake you a cake even if she has never baked anything before. What could go wrong? | Words: 759.

Warnings: Cursing, fluff, kissing, a little hurt/comfort??? Established relationship. Fem!Reader.

A/N: Hey! This is super short. Honestly this is just self-indulgent. A gift for myself since today is my birthday! I hope you enjoy. Also the title is a reference to that one FNAF 1 poster that says "Celebrate."

Main Masterlist | Vanessa Masterlist | AO3

When she first found the recipe online, Vanessa was sure she would be able to pull it off perfectly.

But she was wrong.

At first it seemed easy enough.

She bought all the ingredients after you left for work. When she arrived home, she prepared her work area, and soon enough she was ready to begin.

“Preheat the oven,” she read on the recipe. Vanessa raised her eyebrows slightly. “Exactly how much time do I have to preheat it?” She thought, but did it nevertheless.

Vanessa also realized you two didn’t own an electric mixer, so she had to make the cake's icing by hand. She scratched her head, sighing and decided that the best thing to do was to start as soon as possible.

She followed the instructions for the icing adding the eggs on at a time when she realized that the mix looked off. She realized that the recipe said “only the egg yolks” while she had used the whole eggs. Vanessa contemplated it for a moment, before deciding that a little mistake was not worth scrapping the whole thing, so she kept mixing, hoping that that would fix it.

It ended up looking thinner than the website showed, but she shrugged it off.

Next up was the cake mix. She added all the ingredients at once, and started mixing.

An impressive number of lumps formed in the mixture, and Vanessa had to whisk until her arm grew tired to try and break them apart. In an attempt to ease it, she added more milk than needed, and now it had a texture that was too watery. So she added more flour, but when inserting the measuring spoon into the bag, it became unstable and ended up falling off the table, spilling half of its content onto the kitchen floor.

She groaned, staring at the mess. Vanessa was starting to get frustrated. This was supposed to be something easy for her. She wanted it to be perfect for you. Because you deserved it.

Vanessa did her best to fix the disaster, and then she continued working on the cake.

This was not going the way she expected. She ended up with a cake with a burnt bottom, an undercooked top and the icing was thin and too liquidy.

She felt like crying, and looked at the watch on her wrist. It was almost time for you to come home, there was no way she could fix the cake in time.

The sudden jingle of your keys snapped her out of her desperate trance. You were home.

She sighed, looking at her “masterpiece.”

“Darling, I’m home,” she heard you say from the living room. Her heartbeat quickened, she felt the need to hide or run away but she resisted it.

Vanessa tried to calm her nerves as she took off her apron, and at that moment, you entered the kitchen. “Hey, Ness, what–”

You stopped in the middle of your sentence, staring at the mess in the kitchen. Dirty dishes, eggshells on the counter, some spilled cake mix and finally, the cake itself in all its messy glory. Your eyes widened.

“Hi, sweetheart,” she said with a wry smile. “I tried to make something special for you.” She pointed to the sad cake on the kitchen counter.

You opened your mouth, but no sound came out of it, and for her that was the last straw. Vanessa let out a breath she didn’t know she was holding and sobbed.

You broke out of your astonishment. Quickly approaching her, you asked, “Oh, no. Darling, are you okay?”

She sobbed again, “I tried to do something nice for you. But I failed.” Vanessa tried to wipe the tears out of her face. “It didn’t matter how hard I tried, I kept messing up. You deserve better than this.”

You let out a shaky breath, and pulled her into an embrace. You stroked her back, drawing circles to help her calm down.

“Ness, you don’t need to do everything perfectly. Just the fact that you try is enough.” You reassured her. “Not everything is achieved on the first try, and to me, your intentions are what mean the most. We’re here to support each other in every step of the way, right?”

She pulled away slightly, her face was tear stained but there was a small smile on her lips. “Right,” she whispered.

“Thank you for the cake, love.” You murmured, looking down at her lips.

She smiled more broadly and leaned in to kiss you softly.

“Happy birthday, sweetheart.”

A/N: Reblogs are appreciated!

[lionheartslowstart]

What Happened Was...

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Disclaimer: It is in no way, shape, or form, my intention to shit-talk my ex to his friends or family. I am merely recounting the events of the last few weeks of our relationship from my own perspective. I am using my blog space to vent my feelings and express myself. It is not at all my intention to attempt to garner sympathy or coerce people to “take sides.” Frankly, I don’t give a shit about that. I just want to move on and live my life, which is exactly what I’m trying to do, and writing this is part of that process.

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About two weeks ago, a very intense, five-year, on-again off-again relationship I was in ended very abruptly and explosively. I’ve mostly kept quiet on the matter, but I feel like it’s time to share my side of the story. 

Please bear in mind, this post was written over the course of several weeks, because spoons, and so I apologize for any lurch-y-ness or gaps in the story.

I have always referred to my ex as “Kevin,” and, as usual, every name I use in this post are aliases.

I have to go back to the beginning of our relationship for any of this to make sense. When Kevin and I started dating, it was magical. We fell in love very quickly, and spent every waking moment together. I loved him in a way I had never loved anyone else, and things were good. For a time. I am going to say right now that, while in many ways I was an excellent partner, I was not the perfect girlfriend. I struggle with several mental illnesses, and have for some time. When Kevin and I first started dating, I had done some work on myself, yes, but not enough. I engaged in toxic behavior that was inexcusable. I would demand reassurance, to the point of exhausting Kevin. I would flip out if he attempted to leave during a fight, and if he succeeded, I’d blow up his phone for hours. I dissociated frequently, and expected him to drop everything every single time I had a breakdown. It was not good. He did not deserve to be treated that way, and I’m sorry for subjecting him to those behaviors.

However, I wholeheartedly believe that is where my fault in this story ends. Instead of sitting down with me and discussing his feelings, instead of pointing out what I was doing and telling me what I was hurting him, he began to disengage. This started a little before the one year mark. His fuse would light faster. He would get angry when I was upset. Rather than tell me my behavior was unacceptable, he would tell me my feelings weren’t valid. He was always right, and I was always wrong. He never apologized when he hurt me, and I had to literally beg him for scraps of attention, affection, and reassurance. These behaviors fed directly into my own, and it became a vicious cycle of him violently pushing me away, and me desperately clinging to him. My behaviors were unacceptable. But so were his. And I maintain that, had he actually opened up to me and told me how he felt and explained what he needed, our relationship may have been salvaged. Though I must admit, I don’t know if I want to be with someone who is capable of dismissing someone’s feelings thusly. I don’t know that I want to be with someone who can look at me so coldly, so apathetically, and tell me “your feelings aren’t valid.” (Sound familiar? *Cough cough* Shawn *cough cough*)

While this was the main point of contention in our relationship, there were other problems. Kevin is a slob. It’s not a secret. He doesn’t take care of himself or his living space. He doesn’t even clean up after himself (ie. putting food back in the fridge or putting his dishes away when he’s done eating). This resulted in me doing all of the cleaning. And when I asked him for help, or told him I felt taken for granted, I was met with accusations of nagging, and that my expectations of him were unfair and unrealistic. (Granted, I do have OCD, but I think he used that as an excuse. I would have been happy to go back over things he’d already cleaned. If he at least tried first, it would have made my job easier, and I would have at least felt like he was contributing.)

The first year we lived together was also a nightmare. Kevin was hit with a pretty bad depressive episode. He quit his job and pretty much played video games all day. That was fine with me. I understand what it’s like to be mentally ill, and would never judge anyone for that. What I did have issue with was the way he treated me. During this time, Kevin was unbelievably nasty. He was rude, he was a bully. He took me for granted and barked at me. It was horrible. I kept telling myself he was depressed and to cut him slack, but, as I always say, mental illness is not an excuse to treat people poorly. And the more I put up with it, the worse it got.

Even later, overall, Kevin was just not a good partner. He did the absolute bare minimum to be considered such, and it was usually after a lot of begging and pleading on my end. When I went to the grocery store, I would always pick up food I knew Kevin liked, because he was at my place so much. When Kevin stopped at the grocery store literally on the way to my place, he didn’t even call to ask me if I wanted anything. Almost every single interaction between us was initiated by me, unless we hadn’t spoken for several weeks (aka, when I started pulling away from him). He lived with me for two years, completely rent free, and never even offered to pay a dime back, which honestly wouldn’t bother me at all if he was a half-way decent partner. He consistently invalidated me, blamed me, made me feel crazy and too expectant, and left me feeling more alone than I should have felt in a romantic relationship.

(We also had problems in our sex life, but I won’t get into that for a lot of reasons.)

This is obviously all summarized, but I’m sure you get the gist. Essentially, Kevin used my behavior from the first year or so of our relationship as an excuse to treat me very poorly. Rather than share his feelings with me, he shut down more and more, and my behaviors became reactions to his own toxicity, rather than toxicity originating from my own issues. Even after I started working on myself, and I really did, Kevin would still use my past behaviors as an excuse to be abusive towards me. I bent myself into a pretzel to try to be what he wanted (demanded) me to be. It was never enough. I poured my heart and soul into that man and relationship, and it was never reciprocated. By the end of our relationship, neither of us felt safe being truly vulnerable with the other. Neither of us felt safe enough to tell the other how we felt. And while we did have many problems, this was the pattern that pervaded throughout, and was the root of pretty much all of them.

After we broke up, we basically stayed together. What I mean by that is we still put effort into our relationship, though we were technically no longer in one. We still loved each other, and still wanted to be together. We wanted to find our friendship again, which we had lost during the romantic relationship. We wanted our dynamic to be better, and to regain the trust and safety that had been destroyed.

Kevin made it very clear from the beginning that he needed to focus on himself, that he was not focused on the relationship, or even our dynamic, to a degree. I accepted that, knowing that was the healthy route to take. However, I myself struggled with that. Because I’m me, I still poured a lot of energy into our interpersonal relationship, I still asked for a LOT of reassurance in regards to us having a future together (Kevin was always honest and told me he was not comfortable providing certain answers but always said what he was able, and I appreciated that). I made my relationship with Kevin my priority, instead of my relationship with myself. That was unhealthy, and it only served to hurt me more in the long run, especially since Kevin was off doing his own thing, and as a result, the effort he put in to working on our issues was minimal, especially compared to my own. Towards the very end, in the last six months or so, things definitely changed. But it was still extremely minute, and not enough, especially after so many years of abuse and trauma between us.

Kevin also was adamant that he needed space. I admit, I was not good at this part. For the first year after our break up, I was still very clingy and anxious. However, in the second year, I got a lot better at this, partially because I went back to school, and started investing more in my friendships with others. I also want to add here that, while I at least tried to be respectful of Kevin’s needs, he never really put effort into what I needed. But more on that later.

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So this is where the story changes. In March of 2020, right before Covid exploded, I attended a party where I met a man I will call Thomas. Thomas and I clicked instantly, and began seeing each other, despite the fact that we live four hours apart. Kevin knew about Thomas, and while he was unhappy that I was seeing someone else, acknowledged that, as we were no longer together, I was free to do what I wanted.

From the beginning, I made it clear to Thomas that I did not intend to get serious with him, and I made it clear to Kevin that Thomas was not someone I could see myself getting serious with. It began innocently enough. I liked Thomas, and being around him made me happy. Seeing Thomas served as both a reminder that I was indeed single, and a distraction from focusing all of my attention on Kevin. He was giving me things Kevin could not (or would not), like intimacy, vulnerability, and above all, he made me feel special. He made sure I knew he valued me and appreciated me.

Time passed, and I continued to view Thomas as, more or less, a fun, shiny toy. But things changed for me when I went to visit him in April of this past year. I honestly don’t know what. Perhaps my heart began to feel closer to the man who was treating me the right way? We had known each other for a year, though we hadn’t seen each other too often due to the distance, as well as Covid. It was also around this time that Kevin began to pull away from me again, a pattern I was accustomed to. He had just used a great deal of energy helping me deal with a stalker situation, so I figured he needed the space. (I’d like to add that Kevin was truly phenomenal during that period of time, and I will forever be grateful to him for that. Although, I do wonder if perhaps he was so invested, not because of his love and loyalty to me, but because of his own intense hatred towards that individual. I’ll never know, though my instinct tells me the latter, but either way I’m eternally grateful for his support.) But with that space from Kevin, along with the picture Thomas had painted for me to compare, I was able to reassess my relationship with Kevin in a new, much harsher light. My heart made its choice.

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Long story short, after zero contact between us for three weeks, I got a random message from Kevin in the middle of the night telling me how much he loved and appreciated me. I was hurt, angry, and incredulous, and instead of going the fuck to sleep and dealing with it in the morning, I called him at four in the morning to initiate “the conversation.” I fully acknowledge that this was not the correct way to handle this situation. In my defense, I felt emotionally ambushed. I was under the impression that Kevin was pulling away. It had been almost a month since I had last heard from him at all. And then all of a sudden he’s saying all these things to me I had been dying to hear a few months ago?

My emotion brain (whom I have dubbed Bianca) was not having it. I gave into an old impulse, which sucks because I’ve done a lot of work on that, but hey, I’m only human. So yes, I cop to that. I didn’t broach the subject well, I should have waited and given myself a chance to collect my thoughts. I ambushed Kevin just as much as he ambushed me. Still, I maintain that, no matter how I had handled it, even if I had done everything “perfectly,” there still would have been some pretty violent fallout.

I’m going to skip a lot here, not because there is anything I don’t want to share, or anything I’m ashamed of, but because I am TIRED and, frankly, I am sick of dealing with this and thinking about this, and I just want to move on. So all I will say is that there were two separate days of confrontation between Kevin and myself, during which he almost succeeded in winning me back. But I held my ground, and while we did (regretfully) bounce back and forth between making up and fighting, in the end, we (more or less) mutually decided we could no longer continue a relationship.

The only other piece of information I will add here is that I would have been content to continue a friendship with Kevin (at the time). I had told him from the beginning that I would always love him, always want him in my life, and I had meant it. And he always reciprocated. However, on that last day, he told me he “doesn’t go backwards” (a very interesting way to phrase returning to what was once a close friendship), and that he could never just see me as a friend or someone he’d want in his life. And all that tells me is that all those times Kevin told me he’d always love me, always want me in his life, and always see me as family was a lie. Or at the very least, he was not forthcoming about the conditions.

I would like to share just some of the things Kevin said to me during these two final days. They’ve been on my mind and I need to put them out there, as is my fashion, in the hopes that they’ll then be out of my system.

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He acted as if “allowing” me to sleep with other people over the two years of us being broken up was a compromise, and that him wanting us to be monogamous but NOT in a relationship was somehow reasonable or fair. 

He even went so far as to say that he had “allowed me to manipulate him into a polyamorous relationship.” I never called it that, I never asserted that’s what it was. He was the only one to ever call it that (jokingly, I had thought). As Kevin and I were not in a relationship (something he reiterated often, especially during the first year we were technically broken up). He did occasionally refer to me as his girlfriend to strangers and acquaintances, but told me himself it was because it was easier than explaining the entire situation. As time has passed, I’m beginning to see that Kevin always made sure to twist everything to fit his narrative. I was his girlfriend when he wanted me to be, and not when he didn’t. This is only one example of many.

He told me very intimate and romantic things that he had never said before, including (but not limited to) that he wanted to be the father of my children, and that he was ready to get back together, and work on ourselves together, as opposed to apart. And then he acted hurt and angry that I didn’t innately know these things because of other things he had said and done. Like I should have just intuited them.

Side note: In addition to the sheer audacity that I should be a mind reader, these statements were actually extremely hurtful to me, because it felt like Kevin waited until the buzzer to say these things, and others like them. You know, as opposed to saying them when he felt them so I would KNOW. And Kevin can say all he wants that it was because he didn’t feel safe to tell me, but a) while that’s valid, that doesn’t mean I’m wrong for acting as I did because I didn’t know, and b) I find it extremely suspicious that he SUDDENLY felt safe to tell me at the eleventh hour, when he knew he was about to lose me. As my best friend, Juliet has said to me, it seemed like every time I got close to leaving Kevin, both during and after our relationship, Kevin would always say and do just enough to get me to reconsider and stay.

“What did you DO for me over these past two years?” Absolutely disgusting. I’m appalled that he would ask me such a thing. Firstly, the two years we were “not together” can’t be looked at in a vacuum. The entire relationship exists as a whole, and to try and separate the two parts is not only impossible, but it does both of us a disservice. The very short answer to Kevin’s ludicrous question is that I changed. I worked on myself, even if it was initially for the wrong reasons, and I continued to put effort into being a better partner, even though I was exhausted and running on empty from the previous three years. I did my best to give him the space he needed, even if I wasn’t always successful. I still held him in the place of “boyfriend,” even though it wasn’t technically his place anymore.

Meanwhile, Kevin asserted that he had been this perfect, amazing “not-boyfriend” over those two years, and that is just unequivocally false. I feel confident in saying that he did not do NEARLY as much work on himself as I did, nor on being a better partner, and he still actively engaged in many of his toxic behaviors from our relationship. At one point he actually compared me to Shawn, my primary abuser, which, while I won’t super get into right now, is one of the lowest forms of betrayal I can think of, for many reasons. And it wasn’t even really a comparison. He straight up said the words “you are Shawn.” I think it says A LOT that I was not only willing to forgive him for it, but actually forgot about it completely until Juliet reminded me.

“You’re coming away from our relationship better, and I’m coming away worse.” In saying this, he attempted to take credit for my growth. And that makes my blood boil. As I said to him, I came away from our relationship just as broken, if not more so, than I did entering it. I picked myself up off the ground and put myself back together. While I may have initially started working hard on myself and my problems to win Kevin back (honestly just writing that makes me want to throw up), the work I did was MINE. I changed. I did the work. I put in the effort. And over time, I started doing it for me, NOT him, because it made ME happy. Honestly, how dare he. It’s also an extra slap in the face, because I did so much for him over the course of our relationship, SO much, and he’s still the same miserable person he was. And I have witnesses. I honestly don’t think he’ll ever appreciate everything I did for him. (And that’s not to say he didn’t do anything for me. He did. But it was not to the same degree, and he gave up on me much faster than I gave up on him.) If Kevin is a worse person now, it has nothing to do with me.

“I used to be the focus of your attention, and our relationship used to be the focus of your attention, and now it’s Thomas.” Or something to that effect. This also really pissed me off. One, Thomas is not my focus. I am my focus. I spend as much time as I do with Thomas and talking to him because he makes me happy. There is also the fact that I’m still waiting on some footage for my reel (editing takes time, y’all), and as such can’t do much career-wise right now anyway. I find it interesting, if not insulting, that Kevin would jump to the conclusion that my focus is just bouncing from one person to another, as opposed to focusing on myself. Which brings us to point two. I find the hypocrisy absolutely disgusting, that Kevin seemed to want to be the center of my focus. When, from the beginning of those two years, he had been explicit with me that our relationship and myself would not be his own focus. I think this one statement, in and of itself, even without considering any of the other awful things he said, speaks volumes to Kevin’s character and intentions, whether he’s aware of it or not.

He was very upset that, I knew the whole time he needed space, and when I finally started respecting that need, I abandoned him. Now, as I said, I was not always great at giving Kevin space, and I cop to that. But I tried my damndest, and I maintain that there were absolutely times I was successful. There are two parts to this, one valid and understandable, one...not so much. The first part is that Kevin and I have different needs. He needs a lot of space, and I need at least some semblance of attention and affection. That doesn’t have to be hanging out all the time or talking every day. But a text here and there is nice. Even just a “hey, thinking about you.” Whatever. Anything. That may just be another reason why Kevin and I are not compatible. It is what it is. However, the second part of this was the language he used. He said that I knew he needed space. Sure. I did. And I did my best to give him that, going against my very nature. But Kevin knew what I needed too, and he put ZERO effort into providing me with that, often under the guise of “I don’t feel safe enough to appreciate you.” (Which like, what is that?) Or, if he did put effort in, it was internal and not enough to be visible to me. This motherfucker went radio silent for three weeks. Three weeks. Nothing. Nada. And then he showed up expecting me to fawn all over him? No. Absolutely not. And it makes me genuinely sad that he doesn’t see how selfish that is. Maybe that would be chill for someone else, but not me. It only continues to prove that Kevin never really considered my needs or made them a priority. It was always about him.

Speaking of, he kept asserting that I was not taking responsibility for my part. Not only was I continuously taking responsibility throughout these various conversations (like out loud saying, “I take responsibility for XYZ”), but all I’ve ever done over the five years we were on and off was take responsibility, including for things that were NOT my responsibility. I continuously allowed Kevin to manipulate me into apologizing for having feelings, or expecting him to be a decent partner.

Kevin maintained that he wasn’t angry I met someone else, as he was always aware that I could potentially meet someone else, but he was angry that THOMAS is the one I’m getting serious with because I promised it wouldn’t be him. I call bullshit. I don’t think Kevin ever really believed I’d fully leave him, and I don’t think it would have mattered who it had been. I believe wholeheartedly that, no matter who it was, what happened, or when it happened, this would have been the outcome.

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This is, of course, not everything. There are quite a few more interactions that took place in this timeframe, in the past, and even in the immediate aftermath that I would rather keep private, for a myriad of reasons. Also, as I said, I’m fucking tired and just want to be done with all of this. I have Steve blocked across social media. I have no interest in being in his life or having contact with him. I am thrilled I have gotten to keep most of the friends I made through him, and, while many of those people are also still friends with him, that doesn’t matter to me. I’m just happy I have so many people who want to be in my life.

There are some songs I can’t listen to anymore, and some I’ve been listening to on a loop. I’m still processing everything. I still have days where I’m heart broken and in mourning, and even feel like I’m missing a small piece of myself. There are far more days where I am incomprehensibly angry. I’m sure, over time, I’ll reach a neutral calm (though I’m certain the anger will rise even more before then). But in the meantime, I’m taking it day by day, examining my feelings in each moment. I’ve also come to some interesting conclusions on my own, about Steve, our relationship, and even Steve’s relationship with his last girlfriend, an extremely close friend of mine. I am extraordinarily lucky enough to have a small selection of people I have been sharing all of this with. Words cannot describe how blessed I feel to have such a strong support system of loved ones who are unwavering in their love, encouragement, validation, and patience.

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I’m not as demanding as some people think. I just want to feel loved and appreciated. I want to not be taken for granted, or taken advantage of. I want to feel special. I want have someone who knows what they’ve got, and works to keep it. Aren’t these things that everyone wants? Shouldn’t this be the bare minimum? And it genuinely doesn’t take a lot to make me feel those things. Like I said, a text here or there. A thank you when I do something nice or helpful. Someone who’s willing to hear me out when I’m upset, especially since, at this point in my life, I’m almost always calm and reasonable when I approach conflict, including in the last year or so when I would approach Kevin. (In fact, I made extra care to be calm and reasonable when broaching possible conflict to Kevin because of all of our issues and history, and, ya know, feeling emotionally unsafe.) Honestly, even just someone who doesn’t tell me my feelings aren’t valid is nice. Truth be told, I don’t really need a lot of the things I do for my partner(s) fully reciprocated, because I know I love intensely and most people aren’t capable of those things. Though I’ve got to be honest, having someone in my life who IS capable of those things is really awesome.

Thomas shows me every day what love is supposed to look like. When we’re together, he makes me coffee in the morning without me having to ask. He randomly grabs me and pulls me in in the middle of the street to kiss me or tell me he loves me. He looks me in the eyes when he says “I love you.” He apologizes when I tell him he’s hurt me. He listens to me when I talk. Better yet, he remembers what I said. We communicate effortlessly. He reassures me without me even needing to ask. There is unbridled honesty between us. I know his past and he knows mine. He calls me “my queen.” UNPROMPTED. It feels like I’m living a God damned fairy tale. He makes me feel SAFE, LOVED, and SPECIAL. I literally cannot remember the last time I felt those things, and definitely not all three at once.

I have no idea what the future holds for us. We are long distance, though close enough where we can see each other every few weeks. But honestly, for the first time in my life, I’m not thinking too far ahead. I’m happy right now, and that’s what matters. I’m just going to keep living my life one day at a time. I’m going to do the things that make me happy, and only keep those who fill me with joy around me.

I feel so light, so unburdened. I feel as if I’ve broken free of chains I became so used to I stopped seeing them. God, who knows what I’m capable of now.

[fullymechanized-consoomer]

40K factions and you

Space Marines:

Your favorite flavor of ice cream is vanilla, but occasionally you might try some Neapolitan, if you’re feeling dangerous. You’re faction’s lore is designed from the ground up to accept your self-inserts, and the models are some of the easiest to paint in the entire range. None of this matters because no matter how unique you think your super-cool “realistic marines who use real tactics maaaaan” are they’ll always come out looking like a slight variation of the ones below

8th edition has finally allowed you to feel a tiny sliver of the unbalanced and over-costed hell other factions have been stuck in for years, but unlike them, daddy GW is more than willing to spend a little extra on his bulky good bois so they still get all the coolest gear and lore. Like vanilla, small children love them, but they grow out of both eventually. 

edit: it was only a matter of time before GW stamped its foot down and made the inevitable decision that its favorite kid needs to be busted again. Then again in all fairness they toned down their overpoweredness from “godlike” to merely “demi-godlike” 

Imperial Guard:

You’re a big “history fan”. You’ve seen Enemy at the Gates, watched some history channel shows about Nazi wonder weapons, and make 54 karma post on r/history_memes recycling debunked Eastern Front jokes. Only your intelligent eye is able to conflate this factions obvious Metal Slug levels of cartoonish design and tactics with realism, and you make sure to remind everyone else of said realism by comparing your tabletop exploits to your military experience in the reserves. Everyone used to like you back when the faction was actually made up of underdogs and under appreciated, but the Guant’s Ghosts references have gotten kinda stale, and no one appreciates the brass balls of these Starship Trooper knockoffs now that 8th edition supports and rewards the very same mindless horde tactics the Guard used to be mocked for in Lore. Despite having some of the most tried and true designs in the game, as well as an incredible amount of options, you will quickly find how limiting the only “realistic” army is in terms of customization and paint schemes, as anything but camo, grey, or tan looks goofy and reveals how silly this faction actually is. 

edit: If your army consists of wrapping 30 guardsmen around basilisks I recommend you take a short fall down a long flight of stairs. Fuck you, Evan.

Eldar:

You’re a real shooter. You know what you like and you stick with it, cause lets face it, it takes a lot of loyalty to stick with these arrogant pricks. Their designs are unique but dated, their lore is a uneven mishmash of 40k grimdark schmultz Tolkien telephone, and Oliver Twist-esque whipping bois for whenever GW writers need to remind us how cool Space Marines are. But none of that matters because you know the truth: Eldar can kick tons of ass on the board, and look good doing it, as their unique designs lends them to all sorts of brilliant color combinations

And unlike other armies their rare design updates improve on their aesthetic while keeping their 40k-ness, something that is becoming increasingly rare in this era of Tacticool marines and Fantasy-creep. Just don’t expect to be taken seriously by anyone but the old-heads.

Edit: Leave it to the whipping bois to be outshined in their own event and get a single model update. Thanks GW, very cool. 

Dark Eldar

You are one of two people: a meta hopping smooth brain who only jumped ship once these guys got one of the best updates in 40k history, or a true intellectual who understood their hidden merit all along. Other faction players like to make fun of you for being edgy, when in reality you know that the Dark Eldar are just a bunch of sociopathic theater kids. They, like you, know how fucked from top to bottom this universe is, and instead of getting depressed they exclaimed “how can we be the best cartoon villains we can be?”. Despite having a relatively bare army list, the fact that these d-bags come in 3 flavors of crazy in a single army offers a ton of variety: the mustache twirling villainy of the Kabals, the crazy bloodstained snuff-stars of the Wych cults, and the BDSM horror show of the Covens. All three offer substantial benefits and drawbacks and must be played carefully in order t- 

Who am I kidding? You’re just gonna stuff  a bunch of Kabal warriors into Venoms and zoom around the map, aren’t you? Enjoy that speed, because your abysmal save stats wont protect you anything more than a furiously thrown walnut. At least your corpses will look rad clad in some of the grimest armor and gear in the game. 

edit: no longer anywhere near as dominent as they were in the earlier years of 8th, but they still look slick as hell and play great. 

Orks

Your IQ randomly jumps from 20 to 200 throughout the day. There is no predicting this, no planning around this, no stopping this. You’re best bet is just to go along with it, and that’s why you play Orks. Orks are roudy good-time buddies who love slapstick slaughter, not having thoughts, and occasionally pulling of cunning plans that human savants would struggle to comprehend. Orks seem to be the only faction that know what joy is, which is why you as a player spread it to everyone else. Yes, the memes and screaming can be a bit much to others sometimes, but like with any other mentally handicapped child  everyone around just grits their teeth through your bad episodes if it means not upsetting your unique sensibilities. And considering that this army’s aesthetic revolves around cobbled together nonsense, you have a lot of uniqueness to give. Orks are easily the most creative faction in the game when it comes to conversions. Nothing is too goofy, too dumb, or too silly to scrap together. As for performance on the tabletop? Go ham. This is an army that rewards merry bullshit and randomness. Remember, you didn’t pick Orks to win, you picked them to have fun. 

edit: So are Orks actually getting anything or what? GW’s plans for this faction is as chaotic as the minds of the ADHD scrambled minds who play them

Necrons

You have a very specific taste in... funky weird-science space Egyptians. Seriously, these guys are practically a completely different army to what they were a decade ago. Gone are the terminator references and eldritch lore nonsense, and here to stay is senility and glyphs. You lie to yourself, saying that you’re not really sure why you chose Necrons, but I know the truth: you chose them because they used to be busted. They used to be unfair. They used to be able to take out top-tier tanks with their version of pea shooters and come back after every turn. So overwhelmed were you by their dazzeling stats and bullshit cheese your brain’s wiring fried and the erratic firing of billions of flayed neurons made you think Necrons had cool lore and interesting models. But now they’ve been nerfed to hell, and you’re no longer stuck in that lasting state of sensory overload. Like a drunk snapping awake with a hangover you come to the painful reality: Necrons are kind of dull. So like me, you put them away in a shoebox forever, leaving their fragile sculpts to slowly fall apart.

Edit: FUCK WHERE IS THE SHOEBOX WHERE DID I LEAVE IT OH GOD OH OH NO OH FUCK THEY’RE ALL BROKEN MAYBE I CAN PUT THEM BACK TOGETHER BEFORE 9th EDITION LAUNCHES I’M SO SORRY FOR WHAT I DID TO YOU NOW MORE THAN EVER I NEED YOU, I NEED MY BOOOOOOOOYS!!!

Tau

You will forever be hated by the community unfairly. You are accuse being anime - and this is true - yet the Eldar get away with being copied wholesale from 80′s space anime and no one seems to notice. You are made fun of for your bad melee, despite having one of the most comprehensively designed niches in an otherwise sloppy game and dominating with nearly every edition. You are made fun of for your lore, despite being largely separate from the cliches and story traps that everyone else has fallen into. You are hated because you are different; hated because you are Asian. 

Tau are an anomaly in 40k: a completely new faction that wasn’t directly ripped off of some other franchise and with an aesthetic that is wholly their own. I won’t be making fun of them because they get enough of that, and you don’t deserve it. Just know this dirty secret: Tau outsell almost every other xenos faction, and despite the supposedly unanimous hate are probably one of the strongest factions in terms of play-style and modelling in the franchise. 

Edit: The tau are grittier than ever, happy now? They still do the same thing they have always done anyways.

Chaos

Unlike the DE you actually are edgy. You worship satan, you throw rocks at homeless people, you start fires because your dad doesn’t spank you enough. Chaos are the closest things that this cluster fuck of a universe can get to being the main villains. Their lore is at once intricate and stupid, both childish and metal as hell. You play chaos because getting your fingers pricked by the models’ spikes is the closest you can come to feeling anything anymore. Just like the chaos lore you love to hype yourself up, to puff your chest and revel in the darkness inside, but when confronted you tend to fold like wet tissue paper. You’ve stopped playing public games with these guys, because the other players don’t understand you and abuse the meta and make fun of your painting skills and  everything is so unfair and don’t you think that chaos marines should get buffs for their points cost, fuck?

Edit: The new models are slick and more power-metal minivan than ever, though the rules are still abysmal despite GW desperately wanting everyone to takes these guys seriously for once. 

Sisters of Battle

GW writers and designers hates Catholics and they hate women, so naturally they hate Sister of Battl. They also hate you for playing them. Because of this SoB are a monument to neglected potential. They have one of the best female armor designs in fiction, great lore, and an interesting playstyle that relies on faith/determination based feats of strength and valor... but GW hate Catholics and women, so SoB get shafted everywhere all the time. More often than not you will be disappointed reading about their exploits as they continually get unfairly slaughtered, corrupted into the horny service of the pervert god, or used as receptacles for blood-based paint when the writer’s favorite faction needs to fight demons. With no plastic models in sight for over a decade everyone began to come to the slow and dreadful realization that GW was looking to Squat our favorite estrogen warriors, until a new revamp was announced. Unfortunately the beta rules look as lackluster as ever, but that’s fine, because as a SoB fan you have learned to expect that GW hates you, Catholics, and women. 

Edit: GW found God and got woke because now they love women and Jesus’ one true Church, but let it be known that reformation doesn’t occur overnight, as the SOB’s faces still betray GW’s lingering discomfort in the female form:

Their rules are fun, and if every codex was designed like it 40k might actually be a fun game

Tyranids

nom nom nom nom nom nom nom nom nom nom nom nom nom nom nom nom nom nom no- and that’s it that’s the Tyranids. I don’t know anything about them besides that, and neither do you, cause that’s their lore. Yes they have cool models, but next to no reliable updates. I’ll pray for you.  

Edit: it really looks like GW has just completely forgotten about you poor souls huh? The Night King, a character who is closely associated with the totally-not-reconned-Tyranid-invasion, comes back and not one word about you guys. They don’t even actively hate you like, say, they hate the Eldar. It’s just... apathy. 

Grey Knights

HAHA AHAHAHAHA HA HA UHAHAHA HAHAAHAHAAHAH HAHA ha ha Ah......... he. hehahaaaAHAHAHAHA HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

edit: I hope you all realize that Grey Knights are far too specialized in fighting the permanently under performing forces of chaos to be 40ks “elite among elite.”  You and your entire faction has been made completely obsolescent by the Custodes. The rough times will continue, say hi to the Squats in heaven will you?

Custodes

You are either insufferably full of yourself or a fine practitioner of the model making craft. Most likely though you are neither, and you picked them because you only need gold and red paint to make them look good. Custodes are the space marine’s space marines, and they’re better than you and everyone else. period. At least in lore. On the table their incredible individual stats and elite status are reflected in points cost, so for most large games you will be fielding what amounts to any other faction’s skirmishing army. Unfortunately, since 40k is a stat-sheet battler that favors raw bulk of rolls and stats over the quality of them, you’d be hard-pressed to do well in any serious game. However, for the luminous of mind, the small size is a blessing in disguise since you don’t need to buy and paint as many units as the other armies, and no matter how hard the guard player trashes you his 50 unpainted manlets will never look as good as your 15 gloriously crafted golden Chads. Stick to smaller games, and the individual strength of each model will make up for the glaring absence caused by their loss.

Ironically enough despite being an elite faction from a relatively obscure part of 40k lore, these attributes make Custodes the perfect casual player’s faction. It is my personal theory that if GW didn’t grossly inflate their prices to such a high degree everyone would have a Custodes army. 

Oh yeah, Henry Cavil plays these guys, because of course he does. 

[twitchesandstitches]

Boys Night at The Hellscape

Steven Universe, Equius Zahhak, Grimlock, and a traveler named Riddle who often comes along with the Fleet attempt to have a boy’s night out but wound up in a hellscape, where it seems an army of fiends wants to fight them!

Steven wants to talk; Grimlock wants to murder the shit of out the fiends for giggles; Riddle is just so done with all this, and Equius is doing his best to keep these ruffians sensible. And there’s the minor problem that Molog Bal, Daedric Prince of Schemes and Domination, apparently has a vendetta against the Fleet, but that is a Later Problem.

(Riddle is an OC from a friend of mine that I’ve been meaning to do something with, for a bit.)

The sky was no sky at all, a flat shade of… the eye hurt, trying to look at it, because there was no sky, but mountains twisting up and continuing, at such a horrifyingly vast scale that it occupied the trillions of miles that would have filled the sky. Clouds of acid dripped their sulfuric rain down and melted the unwary horrors beyond, rivers of vitriolic fluid sluicing down.

The ground, the mountains, and everything else looked disgusting. Grimlock reached down and pinched a bit of it, rubbing it between his metal claws. It made a red smear, stinking a familiar coppery scent. “Blood,” he said. “It’s all blood.”

Steven Universe, a huge and rather feral man built on the same broad lines as his infamously imposing mother, made a fade. Considering that he was over eight feet tall, packed more mass than you found in a group of humans, and had a mouthful of recursive tusk/fangs, it was strange how cute the expression was. “Oh boy, that’s nasty.” he leaned down and sniffed it, looking sick and irritated at once. He pinched at a rock, which came apart into little bits, and he spat into his hand, mixing up the gravel… and blood streamed out. He wiped it away. “Ugh, it, it feels wrong.”

“Blood of the damned,” said the third of their party, a man named Riddle. Of average size, a chunky pear-shaped body and a distinct resemblance to a famous wizard tyrant (though lacking his serpentine features), he wore a complicated battle harness that resembled a fancy spandex suit. Compared to the others, he looked deceptively small. “Blood of the damned. The entire plane is made out of all the blood shed by evil plans ever since time began. Rivers of the stuff, flowing here in some… weird, metaphysical way. And it makes more world.”

The fourth of their group, and the last, studied it pensievely. He was a troll, and thus a little over forty feet tall, standing tall on digitigrade legs he had modified to look like hooves. Cybernetic implants ran all over his body, and his arms (big even on his massive, hyper-masculine build) were entirely robotic hydraulic wonders. He was Equius Zahhak, rumored descended of an ancient troll known in folklore as the Blue Arrow, and he had been the designated ‘sensible person’ of this little field trip.

It was custom amid the Fleet for at least one person to do their best to try to be a rationally-minded and logical sort, just to rein in the impulsive behavior and frenzies of berserker-ness that permeated the average Fleet child. Equius was content in this role.

“That portal,” he said solemnly, “Should not have sent us here.”

“Nope,” Riddle said. Equius gave him a somewhat wary look, thinking about how he tended to just turn up as a passenger for a bit. Frequently. He was often seen in the company of Miss Wicke, a senior scientist and Pokemon caretaker and one of the Fleet’s strongest mothers, and he was likely the father of many of her children. They seemed to keep it more or less private.

Riddle was a mystery. He turned up now and then, with unusual powers quite unprecedented in the Fleet or among any they had encountered, coming with them for a time. And then he would leave. In the chaotic nature of the Fleet this sort of thing happened a lot, but usually not with passengers living among them; they came for festivals or hitching a ride, and settled down or went on their way.

He was, in short, apparently very well named. Equius distrusted him, in a polite and respectful way, but then he distrusted almost everyone that wasn’t from the Fleet. He saw himself in pretty much the same role as the Big Daddy creatures they had liberated from the Miscella core world; protectors and guardians, and he kept a keen eye on all potential uncertainties.

Steven was less encumbered by fears and he extended to pretty much everyone a universal love and acceptance that was a Fleet model of behavior; everyone strived to be as perfectly nice and kind as him. His continuing dislike of this place was pretty obvious. “Um, I don’t mean to say a swear but… we’re in Hell. Aren’t we.”

Grimlock glanced up. Flying above them were vast reptilian things like serpents but, instead of scales, faces sewn into their sides screamed endlessly, weeping tears that fell from their sides in a stream of a noxious fluid, best not to speculate on what it was. Various winged figures flew, not dissimilar to many bipedal reptilians but somehow… wrong, as if putting on their form could not hide the fundamental horror of their nature. Various parts of the ground liquified into rivers of blood that was also burningly hot, so hot it should have boiled but was magically preserved into a kind of lava. In the distance there were buildings of black metal and spikes, upon which were impaled people being tortured in terrible ways for their great sins in life… and vast war machines, powered by the toils of the damned, moved onwards to a background noise rumbling low and deep.

It sounded like screaming. So many voices screaming together it reached a thousand pitches so low it was a pressure more than a sound.

“Yup,” Grimlock said. “Definitely Hell. Well. A Hell. Dunno about there being a single one.”

Riddle gave him a look. “How do you know that?”

Grimlock returned the look. For a robot who was infamous for his emotional outbursts, assuming he wasn’t just faking them on the spot, he could do a really good enigmatic expression. “How do you know more than they do?”

“I’ve been around. I’ve heard stuff. You?”

Grimlock indicated the land as some awful frog/dog hybrid burst out of the ground, jaws wide and filled with hooks. He grabbed it and twisted its head off without even looking, and set the body on fire with a arm-mounted flamethrower. “Did a few stints with the Dinobots in a few places like this. We got real lost and stuck and just had a fun ol’ time beating the scrap out of every damn thing in sight. That’s a pun, by the way. Damn, and they’re the damned… eh, whatever.” he paused, lost in memories. “Happened a few more times, and then we stayed on purpose, killing all the fiends we could, working our way up to gutting an evil murder god or something. Be a good trophy. Heh… like to see Pearl manage that.”

Steven frowned. “Don’t talk mean about my sword mom.”

“Yeah, okay. Point is, they sealed us up for a few hundred years until we busted loose and got right back to killing. That was fun!” Grimlock joyfully snarled out a plume of flame, thrilled by these memories of righteous slaughter. “So… freeing! Fighting literal embodiments of pure evil! Monsters without pity, or remorse, that deserve none! Actual evil incarnate! No second thoughts, no worry about the moral implications, just ripping apart things that deserve to die. It’s real freeing fighting something like that.”

Equius nodded. “I suppose I can imagine the appeal.”

Riddle grimaced. “ Every time I hang out with you, Grims, you wind up getting nostalgic over murder or something. Don’t you have non-stabbing hobbies?”

“Well, I run a scrap heap art show back on the Fleet,” Grimlock noted. “But that’s not too cinematic.”

Steven, alone, looked to the hellscape beyond, including the pseudo sky. “Something big is coming,” he said, looking queasy. “I don’t… guys, this feels wrong.”

Grimlock sidled in front on hm in a wholly protective and unconscious way. “Stick with me, kid. You stay tanky, I’ll keep the rest of you safe.”

Riddle scowled. “I can fight fine, too.”

“Prove it, meaty!” Grimlock laughed, positively daring him to respond in kind.

Equius sighed. “Can we please stow the bravado-”

“NEVER.”

“-Something is coming!”

A great cloud of rotten dust came up as approximately two thousand feet came marching up, and they squinted at the mass slowly approaching them.

Fiends. ‘Demon’ was a bit of a generalist term these days, often referring to any supernatural being that was broadly humanoid, had a combination of horns or tail or wings, but it didn’t quite refer to evil creatures anymore. Demon was a general description. Fiend was more suitable for describing things that were, quite simply, elemental beings of concentrated evil in the same way that frost giants were elemental cold. They were wickedness, malice and the pleasure of hurting people given a voice and will.

They came now, a huge army that was organized reasonably well, if along old-fashioned paths. At the front were the smallest ones, twenty-foot high beasts suited towards speed, carrying supernatural analogues to firearms fused to their forearms and extended carapaces on the other that served as shields.

Behind them were the dedicated long-range fighters; monsters that were mostly gun or cannon, their jaws gaping and shoveling up all the blood-stone they could get, digesting it into ammunition. Others resembled bows, twisting themselves into gruesome shapes so that imps could slot in arrows over twenty feet long and thick as trees.

Close range fighters, riding dreadful flesh-eating monsters and ready to ride in and leap upon the foe: bloodthirsters, fiends hungry for the thrill of battle and emaciated with the bloodlust. Larger creatures, and at their feet moved the more mobile fiends and those serving all the other purposes of warfare, and these grew progressively bigger, living siege engines and equals to mortal machine-titans, growing bigger and bigger until the largest towered over the entire army, roaring defiance at them.

The army stopped, staring at them.

Shortly thereafter, a tall and spiky fiend that seemed to be mostly folded tendons in elaborate armor, and a sword as big as he was, rode up on something that looked kind of like a horse but mostly like a mix-and-match of various deadly creatures. “Good day, mortals,” it said cheerfully.

“Um,” Steven said, perhaps surprised to see a talkative fiend. “Hello.”

“Don’t talk to the fiend!” Riddle hissed, nudging the much larger man. “What if it enspells you!?”

“I know but… I’m not going to be rude!”

“I am a fiend,” the speaker stated, apparently interested by this debate. “Who cares about my feelings? I don’t even have any. I just assume the appearance of them for interaction purposes.”

“Okay but that’s still no reason to be rude.”

“Bored now,” Grimlock said. “Gonna kill it now.”

“Please, wait!” Equius snapped.

“I gotta. He’s just too annoying to live.”

“Let him say his piece, please?”

“Oh, fine…”

The fiend cleared its throat, dislodging a few gross bits. “I speak on my behalf, the great and mighty Daedric Lord; he who is the Lord of Schemes, Architect of Domination. This realm has, happily, fallen to his conquests and, aha, perhaps so shall you. I suppose you are wondering how you arrived here when, no doubt, your portal excursion was to bring you somewhere more palatable to your tastes?”

Riddle’s mouth opened. “How do you know- oh. Oooooh. You messed with our portal, didn’t you!?”

Grimlock growled, a primordial noise out of nightmare that made them all feel extremely uncomfortable. Even the fiend looked uncharacteristically concerned. “Ah. Well… it was naughty of me, but my lord greatly wished to test his powers against your own! For you see…” He wiggled a finger at them, scoldingly. “Your mother fleet has done much to frustrate his plans!”

“Okay…?” Steven said, warily.

“Going about all the multiverse, interrupting tyrants in their plans to dominate. Interfering in ancient schemes without even meaning to! Blundering right into planets and upsetting careful plots by liberating the populace and then breeding with every single sapient species, and making new ones on the spot! To say nothing of all this dreadful liberty coming across from you introducing new technologies into places that were being perfectly miserable and isolated without them.” It sighed. “I expect the Enemies in the Upper Planes are quite pleased with your lot but… really. This is just bad manners!”

“I hate this guy a lot,” Grimlock said flatly. “I’m going to step on him now.”

Riddle, however, looked thoughtful, as if remembering a report he had seen somewhere. “...Recently conquered a realm… Lord of schemes and domination… oh, shit. You’re working for Molag Bal!”

The fiend looked impressed. “Oho, you caught that one right away.”

“Who?” Steven said.

Grimlock looked surprised. “Don’t tell him anything!” He hissed to Riddle. To Steven, he said, “You’re better off not knowing!”

But the fiend continued. “You see, my lord wishes to match his military might against the power of you four. After all, against one of the last knights of Cybertron-” He indicated Grimlock. “A walking tank boasting impenetrable defense-” This was said to Steven. “A fascinating anomaly such as yourself,” This was to Riddle. “And of course, a blueblood troll with ample boosts to his strength, and gear to accommodate it! Why, this should be a most entertaining diversion for you, yes?”

“Flattering me won’t save you from ending up dead,” Grimlock said indifferently.

Equius sighed. “Then, you will attack no matter what we say. And I expect we cannot leave, one way or another, until this is done.”

“But of course. And you did intend on having a… what’s the term… boy’s night out, yes?”

“...Right. Okay.” Equius drew from his belt a pair of gauntlets that interlocked into his arms. Quad shotgun barrels extended out from each knuckle and loaded up with trick ammunition and projectile gadgets, while the forearms deployed mechanical repeater crossbow arms. The punches stored up energy, the crossbows released it into his very finest shots. “Not at all what we had in mind, but I see no alternative.”

Steven grimaced, his arm swelled up and in a flash of light, producing a curiously organic-looking pink shield, it’s face adorned with the image of a lion. “No one ever just wants to talk things out!”

Grimlock drew from his body an integrated sword as massive as he was tall, its appearance volcanic, it’s black blade bursting into flame as his heroic spirit flooded into it. The Blade of Simfur itself, said to have been wielded by the chimeric machine-god Onyx Prime, passed down through the line of kings of Simfur. “You really think you can talk to fiends.”

“I have to try. No matter how hopeless it seems.”

“...Heh. I gotta like someone that’s ridiculously brave.”

Riddle spread his arms, and magical mandalas materialized around his arm, absurdly complex and ready to summon forth the spells of his choosing. They flickered red, trying to tap into the energies of the multiverse and having to make do with the essence of this hellrealm; he looked queasy and disturbed feeling it flow through him.

The fiend raised his weapon, and brought it down on Steven. “Then let the game commence!”

The sword broke against his shield, in a massive shockwave that knocked him off his steed. Steven sighed and jumped up, and laid a hand against the fiend. Then he grabbed and somehow threw it straight off the ground, into the air, and Grimlock’s fist slammed into the ground while meeting the fiend in route.

Grimlock’s punches were entirely capable of smashing through mountains and planetary cores. The fiend was reduced to a bloody smear. “‘Bout damn time,” Grimlock grunted.

And that was the signal agreed about earlier, unknown to them, and the two thousand fiends charged, in orderly fashion, and the four heroes charged to meet them.

It really wasn’t fair to the fiends, of course, but when you dealt with people who benefited from the powers of the Endowed Fleet, what could you do?

[pleiadesounds]

Where To Start With,  Pt 1

 This week, Harry Fanshawe from UK noiseniks Modern Rituals acquaints Kai with the inimitable Silver Jews, while Kai in turn shows him the finer points of British post-punk stalwarts Wire. 

  Kai Woolen-Lewis Wire are, for me, one of the great bands in the history of punk music. Whereas a lot of other bands you’d describe as such would subsist largely on folklore and be a calamity if judged on their incarnation in the present moment, Wire however seem to be one of the rare bands who have managed to be both very influential (if you need punk credentials, they were covered by Minor Threat and if you need trendy floppy haircut credentials, they were covered by My Bloody Valentine) and forever forward-thinking - bridging the gap between the pompousness of progressive music and the snarl and brevity of punk, a bridge between what were two ultra-partisan camps. Though they’re contemporaries of elder statesmen of British punk like the Sex Pistols and The Buzzcocks, there’s far more of an art-school vibe to Wire - one gets the impression that they must’ve stood in stark contrast to the image and the attitude of their peers, with cerebral and challenging songs that refused to succumb to the immediate hedonism of the punk music of the time. One gets the impression that they have far more in common with genre outliers like Patti Smith, Pere Ubu and Kraftwerk than with any of their counterparts in the British punk scene. 

 When I first saw them, at the Lexington in London 4 or 5 years ago, they played almost entirely new songs, with only a few songs from their “seminal” LP’s included in the set. Now that the horror of not knowing many of the songs has worn off, it’s a clear sign of their continuously forward-looking approach. With seventeen studio albums and god knows what else in the way of releases, here’s where to start with Wire - despite their huge legacy, absolutely not a legacy act…

 Playing Harp For The Fishes

 KWL Even after decades of churning out consistently stark, highly original songs, Wire still absolutely excel - although lots of their current and recent material is a lot more digestible than in their early years - this, from 2017’s Silver/ Lead is big slow-grooving song which gives an excellent idea of the kind of discomforting experimental noise Wire have always dealt in. A steady rhythm section struggles against all matter of ethereal out of key guitar, weird oscillating noises and throbbing synth lines. Musically and lyrically challenging and abstract without ever feeling overwrought. Sardonic without any hint of bitterness. Dense without even a smidgen of unpalatability. Is it always so? Aye.

Harry Fanshawe Wire for me have always been a band on the periphery of punk history. Not to say that is rightly so, but they're a band that I've seen has being earmarked as integral by the nerdier music fans (I mean that with fondness). Take Joy Division, they formed because they saw the Sex Pistols, but they made something much deeper and more meaningful. My mental placement for Wire has had them alongside the likes of Killing Joke in that history (weirder and less easy to associate with the common idea of 'punk'), and I feel like their evolution has been similar. Like you say this track favours simplicity with the steady beat, allowing a nicely sized canvas to throw as many different colours at, which they do with the layers they chuck on top. That is an approach that I see as being more contemporary of today than the 70s (favouring simplicity and excelling in it has really come back in the last few years). It shows how adaptable this band has been over the decades. 

Lowdown

 KWL Wire’s first album Pink Flag has gone down in music history as one of the seminal British records of the early punk movement, largely down to it’s combination of abrasiveness, melody and brevity. 21 songs in 36 minutes, often fleetingly abrupt, played at breakneck pace and infused with an abstract sense of humour and an art-school sensibility that set them miles apart from their contemporaries. This one, Lowdown, sounds like a soul single on 33rpm; a fascinating disco dirge and highlight of a pretty highlight-heavy first LP.

 HF Right back to the 70s and for me that Crazy Horse vibe is straight in there. This is the THE Wire album. Fight me. Musically, it's a whole different sound to the last song, it's got vibe and groove and all the amazing characteristics of the best 70s bands. Vocally I find it more alike the stuff of the 2010s, though I reckon that's probably debatable! It's obviously got that old school, British punk oi! to it and today they're much calmer. But you can hear it. For anyone who knows Kai and his musical projects of the last few years, this riff is SO Kai.

 Marooned

KWL Here’s an older one - from 1978’s Chairs Missing. The jump between Pink Flag and this in the space of a couple of years is absolutely insane, and the jump from this to the next year’s 154 is also pretty nuts. A highlight on a rich, chilling and unique record of challenging post-punk, Marooned is slow, meandering and awash with oceanic wetness, big synths and sheet glass guitars, with Newman singing about hanging out on a sinking iceberg - both sonically and in terms of sheer epic-ness of scope, it’s closer to Pink Floyd than to any of their genre contemporaries. I put this on at a house party once and the atmosphere nose dived and the whole room just totally explicably got really fucking awkward. Take what you want from that, I guess.

 HF Forward a couple of years and the Pink Floyd sounds are in there, the experimentation is kicking off and yeah we're sat on a soft synth cloud here. It is a massive jump and I love that, I fully dig that 'fuck it who cares what anyone thinks I wanna try that'. I reckon that idea is nicely reflected in your house party play of it. I know that feeling, I did it with Primitive Man myself around a bunch of posh hipsters listening to surf rock in Cornwall. Lasted like less than 2 seconds. Proper wankers. Anyway, point is Kai, it's their loss. The tune slaps.

Map Ref 

KWL By 1980’s 154 - so called because at the point they recorded it, they had played live 154 times - Wire had cemented their place as both stalwarts and genre outliers by following up the seminal Pink Flag with the enormous impenetrable curveball-shaped Chairs Missing. 154 is full of big bangers and awkward, atmospheric synthesiser-led songs - this by the way is one of the big bangers. Lyrically it seems to be a geography nerd gushing about the enormous epic expanses of landscape that make up the American midwest. Before you go look it up, the Map reference is somewhere called Centerville in Iowa or Ohio or something. Map Ref has a chorus I frequently cite alongside “That’s When I Reach for my Revolver” or “The Girl Who Lives on Heaven Hill” as a contender among underground punk rock’s biggest fist-in-the-air choruses.

HF Again, 70s vibes are rife, the energy of the rhythm section just holds it all up so strong. Weirdly, I find his voice sounds loads like Blake Schwarzenbach [Jawbreaker, Jets to Brazil]? Any influence on him there? Who knows. Way more in the way of vocal melody here and the vibe is moving more along the way bands like Talking Heads were at the time. Definitely a banger. Love the lil satirical 'chorus' drop in there. As for landscapes inspiring songs, fuck yeah why should it always be about people? I mean animal rights punk is usually dreadful and dull, let's talk about something inanimate for once.

 Blogging

 KWL Brazen, streamlined and groovy, with a chugging downtuned riff and a glorious uplighting chorus - Blogging showcases Wire’s admirable ability to follow their own pretty standard formula and keep churning out highly original and interesting songs. The lyrics deserve a mention - it’s a hard enough endeavour sometimes for those of us born in the 90s, but if you were in a band that existed in 1976, the current musical landscape must be a pretty soul-destroying place to exist. Actually scrap that. If you were alive at a time when art seemingly meant something or was worth anything, now must be a horrible place to live. “I’m blogging like Jesus/ I tweet like a pope/site traffic heavy/ I’m YouTubing hope” 

 HF Totally agree Kai. Today is a fucking terrible time to be alive if you're interested in anything related to the notion of 'art'. It's all been rehashed and overdone. It's everywhere to be seen and no longer has a sacred place. It's been abused and overused for petulant causes. Everyone's a fucking artist and that's killed the concept. Can't believe how much this reminds me of Jets to Brazil, why!? I suppose we can forget about the present if we stick to Wire's back catalogue.

Circumspect

KWL A product of extensive periods of down-time on their part, which saw the members working on other projects - Colin Newman’s Githead in particular is worth a mention - 2008’s Object 47, so called because it’s the 47th Object in their back catalogue - is a really great record and a hidden gem in Wire’s back catalogue for me. Dispensing with the distortion and the abrasion, Wire made a record of sparse, infectious guitar-based songs that you can really lose yourself in, and this is one of the songs in which I have most frequently lost myself. A slow circular guitar arpeggio, laid-back drums and lush vocals result in an almost Manchester-esque slow disco pills-thrills-and-bellyache vibe - this is Wire at their most hypnotic and enjoyable. 

 HF Slowcore Wire! Yeah this is one of my favourites from this list. Having time away from something can let you come back to it without as much creative control or care, and refreshing your image of what the thing is in the first place. Step away, come back more naturally. This is softer, but it's still as weird as anything else they made in the last 20 years. Pretty banging video too, mind. It feels like you're in one of those dreams where you try and run but you got sandbags on your feet. But in this one, it's Drew Barrymore from Donny Darko and she's apathetic as fuck.

Bad Worn Thing

KWL Their first album properly “back” after a period of sporadic activity through the 2000s, Red Barked Tree is the sound of a band of fifty-somethings consistently at peace with the idea of re-defining what their band IS, without at any point ever stepping on the toes of their older selves. Another album highlight (with acoustic guitars) Adapt, sums it up pretty nicely. "Go east / Go north / Go south / Go west / Leave mouths open / With your best / Adapt to change / Stay unimpressed”. Bad Worn Thing finds the band both tapping into 2000s alternative music and subjecting it totally to their musical and lyrical interpretations. An upbeat, undeniably British-feeling slice of sauntering pop, one that makes me feel like I’m taking an afternoon walk through a British urban landscape to the shop on the first sunny day in weeks - all while giving a pretty caustic account of Britain’s ongoing relationship with its past and by implication, it’s future. “Follow me, no explanation/ the future sold the chancellor paces/ the growing pains associated with a past that no-one faces.”

 HF This feels so much more British than much of what we've had from them on this list so far. This is Britpop Wire. Dam right they sound like they're back, they have something new to say, they're older and more jaded, but they still have something to say. I love the 'overcrowded nature of things' repetition. Like they've come back to this messy DIY music thing and it's a fucking full house. So you gotta build your own. Mind you, I'd say Wire have always lived in the garage.

Used To

KWL Another huge cut from Chairs Missing - and a perfect example of what critic Simon Reynolds called Wire’s “strange clockwork geometry” - a blissful piece of post-punk psychedelia and definitely one of the climaxes of a record that enjoys an embarrassment of rich, blissed out moments. I would definitely cite Wire’s work in this period as proof of the utter compatibility of the experimental, expansive, forward thinking music of the 60s and 70s and the abrasiveness and brevity of punk. Indeed, it sounds like bullshit now, but the same A+R man who signed Pink Floyd and the Sex Pistols was responsible for EMI’s acquisition of the band while they were still in their infancy. For me, basically everything that made the years 1976-1979 so exciting and vital in the history of unpopular music is represented in this album, whether it be this, the Beatles-on-glue vibes of ‘I am the Fly’ or the aggressive minimalism of ‘Being Sucked in Again’, the album just gives and gives and gives. An absolute classic.

 HF Very pleased we went back to this to close. Absolutely loving the post-punk psychedelia tag on this baby. Again, everything you say above that I hear in this record is their observant nature as a band to look back at the twenty years before them and incorporate what's important, what's wrong, what's right and the relationship of all that against their own stronghold. It reinforces their importance and their place in all of this. Not everyone, hardly anyone, has the ability to be the originator of something whilst being so observant (the latter being one of the most troubling things for humankind) at the same time. A perfect place to end with Wire: it repeats, it talks, it stays with you for a moment and then it's gone. Thanks Kai.

 Silver Jews

Harry Fanshawe Like many of us, my summer last year was consumed by the release of David Berman's new album under the 'Purple Mountains' moniker and then his sudden death. I'm sure many of us also went back through his entire catalogue once we'd exhausted our ears of his latest and last offering. Silver Jews have always been a standout band for me, usually sitting with things like Leonard Cohen or the Velvet Underground in my poor attempts at genre categorising. 

What's always stood out to me in this way, making it something I've struggled to place with more contemporary artists, is the looseness in the music and the corresponding looseness in its lines between music and prose. Like Leonard or Lou, SJ have a truly unique way of delivering and intertwining music and meaning. Where the new Purple Mountains record is much more polished in its production, my fondness for the old Silver Jews records has always been like that of an old, familiar room; their rusty structures and broken floorboards bring with them more character and heart than any solid new build could and, given last summer’s events, it now holds a very special place in my heart.

KWL I remembered having heard about David Berman’s suicide because many of my most misanthropic and refined friends had been especially despondent about it - it seems I missed the boat on that particular opportunity to be saddened by the loss of a great artist, so having this opportunity to go back and be able posthumously introduced to him has been a strange experience - cool that Harry and I have these different perspectives on his work and death…like reading a sentence with a full stop at the end, or something.

 Albermarle Station

HF A tender country offering inhabited by old ghosts, broken bridges and ivy covered screens. This song always reminded me of travel, of the lingering memories from recent events in recent places bouncing around the mind after an experience somewhere with people. All whilst anticipating the next destination. There's a train station near my parents’ house and as a teenager I used to travel from it a lot to see friends. That place hasn't changed at all in the 15 years since, and the rare occasions I go there now just bring back all of it; all the old ghosts while I sit and wait near the ivy covered screens and the rickety old bridge.Travel is a time that allows for rumination and retreat, and that can be savoured in all of its broken glory. 

KWL A surprising first listen - I’m not sure exactly what I expected, maybe something a bit glossier and more upbeat, but this is great - ramshackle, melodic and with lyrics that will take a million listens. It sort of reminds me of Red House Painters but with wit, self-deprecation and genuine insight in place of abrasiveness and machismo. Berman is a prepossessing and fascinating figure in light of his suicide, I should imagine before just as much and also considering the esteem in which a lot of people held and hold him. Maybe you led me there but this song definitely feels like they have a foot in the past, in those old, deserted spaces you pass through on the way somewhere.

 New Orleans

 HF From that slightly out of tune guitar at the start to the doubled up lazy groans about the trouble in the stairs; to me this song is the dusty corner of an old house, the gold in the cellar, and it's not the house you think it is. Keeping up with a nostalgic line of thinking, this track captures the 'otherness' of the past, the distance it eventually takes, even when it can be so well set in stone by old artefacts and rooms. It beholds the length of reflective nights and the depth of their texture. Trapped inside the song where the night's are so long, we count sheep to find soothing sleep. An early banger from Berman.

 KWL This is also great - there’s something hugely admirable about a song being able to be this rickety and cobbled-together-sounding while still being so evocative. It’s like, they could probably have recorded it without the out of key guitar lines or the drums losing the beat, but they didn’t - and there’s beauty in the imperfection. The song has that ‘On The Beach’ feeling of the end of a long, drunken night, when the ash-tray is full and the kitchen needs tidying before bed. But you’ll do it in the morning.

Tennessee

 HF Clearly a trend is setting in here: the slowest country SJ numbers titled by places. Aside from the obviously amazing play on the title word in the chorus, this love song has some of the best one-liners as far as I'm concerned. Here's one: 'Punk rock died when the first kid said "Punk's not dead, punk's not dead”'. Here's my favourite: 'We're off to the land of hot middle-aged women'. Is this an optimistic look to a future with a spouse? As far as I care to know, the whole song is. Punk may be dead but love isn’t.

 KWL I always knew you had a type, Harry. Another piece of rickety out of tune folk-country storytelling that somehow plays with superficiality and reaches into the darkest depths at the same time. A bit of cutesy word-play and a really lovely key change in the middle of the song - this is actually going really well, isn’t it. I’m guessing the lady singing is Berman’s wife, just because the whole atmosphere just feels very close and personable - listening to these songs of Berman being in love and happy and stuff is startling in this current context. A great song.

Sleeping is the Only Love

 HF What's that? Another love song? Maybe! As blurred as it seems deliberately to be about loving someone and how incredible a good night's sleep is. As someone who troubles with sleep, I can agree that there are times when I would crawl over broken glass and hot coals to make it to sleep. I also love the reflection from that onto the peace had with a good functioning relationship with someone you love. Sleep and love intertwined.

 KWL All these love songs have taken on a very strange overtone, now. This one has somewhere in it a snapshot of Berman and his wife settling down to the quiet life in Nashville - it’s all pretty beautiful, and it’s very impressive to go about making so intricate a love song about something as banal as sleep. I think there’s a snapshot here of the kind of intimacy that goes beyond the sexual - where somehow sleeping next to someone is the most intimate thing of all - the rolling over, the arms going to sleep, the waking up, the bad breath. The real deal.

 Punks in the Beerlight

 HF A song for the addicts! After a hot summers day, what better than the transcendence found in the cooling of a beautiful summers night? How could you make that even better? I guess you could smoke the gel off a fentanyl patch? This song is for a long summer night where you can go and run away into the night with a friend, find the nicest, deadest park around and watch that sun go down. And what comes after we exhaust our routes for escape? Let's not kid ourselves. It gets really really bad. Gotta love that 80s glam section after the first chorus too.

 KWL Ok, so I feel I need to state here that Harry’s article has sent me down a deep rabbit hole of SJ/David Berman appreciation. It’s strange to find him here, at this point and I just wonder what it would have been like to have been like “I hope David Berman’s doing okay” at random intervals in life. This is easily the most conventionally beautiful song on the list so far and somehow it examines some of the darkest corners of the human experience. It reminds me of the beauty of being in love - all other markers fade into unimportance, rendering the rich paupers and the poor rich beyond dreams, together; a beautiful juxtaposition, part love song, part junkie memoir.

 Advice to the Graduate

 HF 'Your third drink will lead you astray.' Let's follow on from the last theme. 'So you've got no friends and you wander through the night. And now you watch the sunrise through a rifle-sight'. This song speaks for itself.

 KWL This song seems to be quite strongly advocating the “school of life” diploma - that when you finish all the arbitrary self-building, that there’s a big wide world to step out into that’s all misery and addiction and what’s your deep critical analysis of Edgar Rice Burroughs going to do for you then? It sounds so slack, a borderline The Shaggs influence - Berman said that all of his favourite singers couldn’t sing, and it doesn’t sound like he or his backing band was much better. A genuine advert for keeping the musicians out of music…

K-Hole

 HF I've never understood the appeal of a K-Hole, I suppose that DB doesn't either, since he compares it to the feeling of being left alone. Though he does still reserve his fondness for booze as a trustworthy fallback during tough times. Perhaps that's it; it can go too far. I love the string arrangements in this song, it feels outback and rural, the lyrics appeal to that sense of dusty distance too.

 KWL I have a real soft spot in my heart for when the music of a song seems to run in tandem with its lyrical content, and I must say lots of the instrumental here feels like an out of body hallucination of a country song - large swathes of the song feel like Alice in Wonderland or that first Pink Floyd record that sounds like a Kaleidoscopic Circus.  

Dallas

 HF You know the way a city can change completely in character when night hits. When all the blazing sunlight lifts and leaves you with the purity of a place. It's like a deep breath of fresh air after a heavy day, you can feel your spirits lift as the weight peels away. This is a great, simple example of DB, highlighted best in the last lines: 'Poor as a mouse every morning, rich as a cat every night, Some kind of strange magic happens, when the city turns on her lights’.

 KWL The lyrics to this really grabbed me too - but not so much in respect of the city at night, but the string of non-sequiturs that pepper the song, something that DB is obviously really great at - painting those little pictures. There’s the bit about his shrink’s former NFL career, the eroticism of CPR, “our record just went aluminium” - all absolutely amazing. I’ve heard hundreds of songs about hundreds of places, but they never came as unique or as vivid as this.

 I Remember Me

 HF Another example of being a sucker for the whimsical. 'I remember you and I remember me': through the years you can lose the old parts of yourself. When you're in a relationship these losses double, and when you look back in your 'now' state to the person you were right back at the beginning, and the person they were, it makes you appreciate the whimsical and the romantic because they are so short-lived and random. Even though you change through those years, that change enables each quirk and trait that you might look back on and miss. So soak it up while it's there lest you regret its disappearance. In this story, the characters end up apart, but whether or not you do, know that even if you are still together, parts of you can always remain apart.

 KWL This is the best song on the list, for me - absolutely gorgeous and very very moving indeed. Somehow, Berman manages to sum up in his songs and in his writing that life is a huge collection of these tiny tiny moments, and maybe if we looked more closely at the tiny moments, the enormousness of life might not seem so terrifying. A sort of temporal looking after the pennies, so to speak. This one screams “don’t wait for the perfect moment, it’s now”. 

How to Rent a Room

 HF A great ender for this list. 'I want to wander through the night as a figure in the distance even to my own eye'. 'No I don't really want to die. I only want to die in your eyes'. If only…

 KWL Further research into the life of DB has directed me towards the fact that his father represents the worst of the worst of the American Republican corporate lobbying parasite - against environmental protections, the minimum wage, health warnings on tobacco, labour rights and trade regulations, to name just a few, and whose son Berman seemed ashamed to be. I just looked through the lyrics to this and they genuinely seem to be a letter to his dad, who he called “a despicable man … [a] human molestor … an exploiter … a scoundrel” saying “I’d rather be dead than your son.” 

 Thanks for this Harry, it’s been a real pleasure and a great introduction to a fascinating man and his band. May he rest in peace.

For the full playlist, click here

[quicksilversquared]

The Crocodile Glasses

When knock-off copies of Jagged Stone's super-awesome Eiffel Tower start popping up, Jagged is not pleased. Still, it doesn't take long to come up with a solution- he just needs to release his own official line of sunglasses! And naturally, he needs one Marinette Dupain-Cheng to design them for him. Now, if only Marinette could figure out how to execute some of Jagged's more out-there ideas...

(AO3) (FF.net)

When the first reports of knock-off Jagged Stone sunglasses came in, the singer-slash-songwriter was furious.

"A designer made those specially for me and I won't have someone else profiting from her work," Jagged told Penny as he filled out the paperwork for the report. His assistant loyally copied down every word for the press release. "That's not fair to her."

"Will you be releasing an official Jagged Stone Glasses line, sir?" Penny asked. "That way your fans can buy the glasses legally and the designer can get a portion of the sales."

Jagged Stone perked up at the suggestion. "Yes! Perfect! What do we need to do to get that started? We would need to get in contact with a sunglasses manufacturer, right? You could do that, couldn't you Penny?"

"I can do that." Penny made a note. "Do you want her to design any other sunglasses so you can have a variety to offer?"

And that was how Marinette found herself getting a call at eleven o'clock at night from the rock star's assistant, asking for three more sunglasses designs.

"Jagged wants the Statue of Liberty- in American colors, of course, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and one other- oh, let me think, he was throwing out ideas left and right- oh, right. The Loch Ness Monster. In Scottish flag colors."

Marinette could only blink blankly at the phone in her hand. The phone call from Jagged Stone's assistant had been out of the blue in the first place, and it was just getting weirder and weirder. "Those are some...interesting designs," she managed. "Uh, why does he want these all of a sudden? Is he doing a world tour?" Marinette had rather been under the impression that Jagged Stone had just finished a world tour and was taking a break to work on a few new songs.

Penny laughed at that. "No, not at all. Jagged wants to release a line of sunglasses and I suggested that he have more than just the Eiffel Tower ones. Since we're in another country, if you could just draw the prototypes and then Jagged can decide which ones he'd like best. I suspect that the Loch Ness Monster will get scrapped, but Jagged wanted four sunglasses to start with and he was running out of ideas."

"Should I experiment some, maybe?" Marinette suggested. A couple ideas that she wanted to play with were already bubbling up in her mind. "Come up with some ideas of my own?"

"Perfect! Yes, yes, definitely. That sounds great. You can send designs as you make them and then once you've exhausted your ideas we can chat a bit more about which ones are most likely to work out." Penny sounded more than a little excited by Marinette's suggestions. "Great! I'll give you my email so you can send me the designs. Thank you so much, Marinette. Jagged is very excited to see what you come up with."

"Of course," Marinette managed before Penny ended the call. As soon as she was sure that the call was definitely ended, Marinette set her phone down and let out a long, high-pitched squeal of excitement.

"That's great, Marinette!" Tikki squealed, swirling up into the air and doing a little dance. "You're getting noticed! And you're going to be designing a line of sunglasses for a rock star! That's going to look fabulous on your resume!"

"Yeah," Marinette said breathlessly. A small smile spread across her face. "Yeah. If I can pull this off...it's gonna be great."

Marinette ended up buying a whole new sketchbook to dedicate solely to Jagged's sunglasses designs. She used the new notebook for two reasons: one, so she wouldn't tear out all of the pages in her design sketchbook as she made draft after draft of the designs Jagged had suggested and a couple of her own, and two, because the pages were large enough for her to make full-size sketches. If she so wanted, she could cut the pieces out, fold them in the right places, tape them on normal glasses frames, and wear them around.

Of course, that would require actually finishing the designs. Marinette was having a little trouble with them.

"They're cheesy and a bit out there, and I realize that Jagged's style is a bit cheesy and out there, but there's a thin line that I need to walk here. It can't be so out there that it gets ugly." Marinette let out a frustrated breath and flipped to a clean page to start to sketch whatever came to mind. She had been too focused on Jagged's suggested designs and not enough on her own. Maybe experimenting a little would get her creative juices flowing again.

"Are you doing any other country-themed designs?" Tikki asked as she watched Marinette draw. "Like the Eiffel Tower and Statue of Liberty?"

"Maybe. I don't know what else I could do." Marinette let out a long sigh. She reached for her computer and pulled up a search for country symbols. The list she got wasn't quite what she was expecting- it involved a lot of random animals instead of national monuments, like she had been kind of hoping for- but she scanned it anyway. Even she probably couldn't pull off cow-shaped glasses or cherry blossom glasses (they just wouldn't fit with Jagged Stone's aesthetic, not at all), but the Canadian maple leaf would probably be pretty easy, and while the Komodo Dragon from Indonesia would probably confuse a lot of people, a crocodile would make a lot of sense. It would also be really cool if she could make something like that.

The only question was how on earth she would color crocodile sunglasses. With the national symbols and monuments she could just use flag colors and patterns, but Fang's skin color just wasn't interesting enough for Jagged Stone-worthy sunglasses.

"I'll just figure out how to center the crocodile on the glasses before worrying about how to color it," Marinette sighed after a moment. She flipped the page again and started sketching a base glasses frame. "I would make the tail go around the side of the head, but then you just don't see it. But if I just do a straight tail, there's just a blobby thin stick sticking out of the side of the glasses. It would stick too far away from the head."

Tikki looked pensive as she floated down to settle on Marinette's lamp. "Maybe you should look up pictures of crocodiles and see if you get any ideas. It helped you think up ideas for glasses!"

"It wouldn't hurt to check, I guess." Marinette set her sketchbook aside and reached for her computer again. The first few photos that came up weren't much help- half-submerged crocodiles did not a good reference make- but a photo in the third row showed a crocodile whose tail was curled back on itself.

Perfect. As long as the tail didn't double back so much that it bumped the wearer's nose, that would eliminate the problem of having the tail stick out too far and risk breaking.

And of course, it didn't take too long for Marinette to hit another snag.

"Crocodiles are hard," Marinette grumbled as she erased yet another line. "So many bumps and the proportioning and ugh, this is going to look awesome if I can ever get it right but it's so hard."

"You could probably do a simple outline to start," Tikki pointed out. "So you can get the tail curl right and make sure that the design can go over your nose before you go to all the effort of making it more accurate."

Marinette perked right up. "You're right, Tikki! That's important."

A few minutes later, Marinette was cutting out her simplified crocodile glasses outline. She tossed the scraps of paper from the outline to the side so she could fold her paper glasses.

"Okay, I'm definitely going to have to do something with the nose area," Marinette said as she tried to settle the glasses on her nose. "Uh, let me attach these to actual glasses frames. It's a little too flimsy on its own."

Marinette set the paper glasses aside as she reached for one of the pairs of sunglasses she had littering her desk and the tape she had sitting nearby. A few minutes later, she was trying the glasses on again.

"The crocodile will have to arch out a little around the nose," Marinette decided with a sigh. She made a couple small snips and crimped the paper until it curled around her nose instead of pressing against it. "I'll have to make notes in the design I send to Penny. This is getting so complicated already!"

"It looks interesting!" Tikki said, flying around in front of Marinette. She beamed at her Chosen and then realized that Marinette couldn't see anything. Tikki paused, then asked, "Do you want me to take a picture of you with your phone so you know what you look like?"

"That would be great, Tikki. Let me just grab- uh-" Marinette reached out, patting her desk as she searched for her phone. Her lips turned downwards as she continued searching. "Oh, hold on a minute-"

"I got it," Tikki said, dodging Marinette's hand. "Just sit back and smile."

Marinette sat back and smiled. Tikki let out a tiny squeak when the phone nearly wobbled out of her grasp, but she caught it just in time and took a fairly clear picture.

"That doesn't look awful," Marinette said a minute later as she looked at the picture. "It's obviously nowhere close to finished, but I can see where it's going."

"I think Jagged Stone will like it," Tikki said as Marinette set the glasses aside. "You just have to find the right pattern to go on it!"

"Ooh, I don't even know where to start with that," Marinette sighed as she glanced around her desk. Her tablet was around here somewhere; if she could find it, she could just whip up a couple basic designs to kind of get an idea of what direction she wanted to go to try-

Instead, she spotted the remnants of the page she had cut the paper sunglasses from, sitting on top of the CD that she had designed. The CD was facedown, and the design was showing through.

And it looked awesome.

"That's perfect," Marinette breathed, freezing as she stared at the paper draped over the case. The CD was too small to fill the entire cutout, of course, but there was just enough of it for Marinette to visualize how it would look when it was finished. "Oh my gosh, that's perfect. It's not just a random patterns, then, it's actually Jagged-related-"

"What is?" Tikki wanted to know immediately. She zoomed around Marinette's head impatiently. "Have you thought of something?"

"More like the universe thought of something, and I saw it." Marinette pointed to the CD and the discarded page, fingers already itching to get working on putting glasses and pattern together. "If I remove all of the text from the pattern that I used on the back and then extend in a bit- oh, it's gonna look awesome!"

Tikki cheered.

By the end of the day, Marinette had gotten very, very frustrated with the crocodile glasses. Her breakthrough with the coloring for the glasses had been encouraging, but she had hit another roadblock not long after that. The crocodile outline was proving nearly impossible to get right. Marinette had gotten the proportioning right reasonably quickly, but getting all of the little bumps and curves right was difficult, to say the least.

"This just isn't working," Marinette sighed as she erased another line. "I just can't get the outline right. I practically have to trace... a... crocodi-" A pause. "Hmm."

"Hmm?" Tikki asked.

"That actually might be a good idea. I'd have to find a reference photo and use my tablet and make sure I don't mess up the layers, but it would be faster than doing this." Marinette pushed her sketchpad to the side and reached for her tablet, energized once again. It didn't last long. "Okay, now let me look up a few pictures for- oh no!"

Tikki immediately shot over. "What's wrong?"

"I've been totally ignoring my homework! I got so caught up in designing that I completely forgot to do my homework!" Marinette shoved her tablet aside again and flung herself across the room towards her backpack, immediately in a panic. "And I'll be going to the movies with Alya tomorrow, so I need to get it done now!"

"You don't need to panic, Marinette! The movie won't take the whole day!"

Backpack in hand, Marinette raced back to her desk and started pushing things aside, clearing a good work space so that she could spread out her books. "Maybe, but what if there's an akuma attack? Ooh, and I had gotten so good at planning ahead and getting things done in case an akuma popped up last minute!" Marinette flipped frantically through her pink planner until she got to the right page. "And I have so much to do this weekend, too! I have a reading for Literature and then a paper for Physics and-"

"Are they all due on Monday?" Tikki asked as Marinette continued to list homework off at lightning speed.

Marinette checked. "Most of them are! There's only a couple that are due Tuesday, but I can't put them off because I'll get homework Monday night, of course, and-" Marinette suddenly paused. "Oh. I suppose I could do the stuff that's due Monday morning first. I can always get some stuff done over lunch- unless there's an akuma, of course- and unless my luck really sucks, then there shouldn't be an akuma that night, too, and I can just really buckle down then."

"That sounds smart, Marinette!"

The glasses designs got pushed further and further to the side as Marinette plowed through her assignments. By the time her eyelids were drooping closed, she had finished almost all of her assignments for Monday.

"I'll get up and finish those first thing tomorrow," Marinette said as she yawned her way up to her loft. "I want to get them done before Alya comes over."

Tikki giggled. "You, get up right away? I'll believe it when I see it!"

Marinette... sort of got up right away. It took some prodding from Tikki.

"You need to work on your Physics assignment," Tikki reminded Marinette as her Chosen blindly whacked around, trying to shut off the alarm on her phone. "Come on, get up."

"That's hardly an incentive to get up," Marinette grumbled as she finally found her phone and turned the alarm off. "Ugh. Why did I ever plan to get up at this hour on a Sunday?"

"The sooner you finish your homework, the sooner you can get back to designing Jagged Stone's glasses," Tikki sing-songed, tugging at Marinette's blankets. "Or the sooner you can go to bed tonight!"

"Sleeeeeeeep."

"Nope! It's morning time!"

Marinette groaned and rolled over twice more until her feet dangled off of the bed. She dragged herself out of bed and down her stairs, groaning the whole time. There was a general rustling about as she got ready.

Marinette's phone chimed and Tikki checked it as Marinette continued to drag a brush through her hair, grumbling the whole way. The little kwami grinned, knowing full well that the text Marinette had just received would light a fire under the girl and really get her going- well, if it didn't distract her too much. Tikki would just have to spin it the right way.

"Nino and Adrien are going to join you and Alya at the movies!" Tikki called down to Marinette. "So if you want to be able to stick around afterwards and hang out with Adrien after the movie is over, you should hurry up and get started on your homework."

Marinette squealed and her sluggish speed suddenly quadrupled.

When Alya showed up hours later, Marinette was well into the last of her projects. It wouldn't be a problem to finish late that afternoon, or maybe that evening.

"I'll be sitting next to Nino, of course," Alya told Marinette as Marinette shoved both her normal sketchbook and her Jagged Stone sketchbook into her bag with a handful of colored pencils. "And we'll try to shove Adrien into the seat next to you."

"I can't wait," Marinette said, grinning as she slipped the strap of her bag over her head. "Are we meeting them there?"

"They're downstairs, actually," Alya admitted as they headed down the stairs to the Dupain-Cheng living room. "Your parents offered them samples and, well, you know that neither of them would turn samples down."

Marinette had to laugh at that. "Right. Did they just decide to join us so that they could swing by and get samples?"

Alya tapped a finger to her chin. "You, know, you might be right. I did suggest that we just meet them at the cinema, but they both insisted on coming by to pick you up."

Both girls were giggling when they entered the bakery. Adrien and Nino were standing by the counter, nibbling on cookies. Tom was holding several buns in his hands, clearly about to hand them over to the boys.

"Aha! We were right, Marinette. The boys were only joining us for the food," Alya announced. Adrien jumped and spun around, looking a little guilty. Nino polished off his cookie and took the offered bun, clearly completely unabashed by being caught.

"The company is good, too," Adrien offered, swallowing the last bit of his cookie. Mr. Dupain offered him a bun, and Adrien only paused for a moment before accepting the treat with a sheepish grin.

"Clearly," Alya said dryly. She rolled her eyes with a grin. "Come on, guys. We have a movie to watch."

Their movie outing went smoothly. Nino and Alya plopped themselves at the end of a row, forcing Adrien to sit next to Marinette. Adrien didn't seem to notice his friends' manipulation at all as he sat down next to Marinette with a grin.

"What's up, Marinette?"

"N-nothing much," Marinette managed. She had decided that she wasn't going to say anything about the glasses for Jagged Stone quite yet, at least not until the designs got approved. Maybe she would keep quiet until the glasses came out, so it could be a surprise. It still all seemed a dream, far too good to be true. Part of her was almost worried that if she mentioned the glasses commission to her friends now, Jagged Stone would suddenly change his mind and drop the project completely.

"Oh, don't give me that," Alya said, turning around so she faced Marinette. "I spotted a new sketchbook going into your bag today. Do you have a new project? Tell tell tell!"

"Nope, nothing new," Marinette claimed, wincing internally. She should have known that Alya's sharp eyes would pick up on that right away. "I just wanted to try something different with my sketchbook."

"Ugh, that's no fun," Alya grumbled. She pouted at Marinette and then turned back to talk to Nino, leaving Marinette to face Adrien.

"Anything new with you?" Marinette asked after a too-long pause.

Adrien shook his head. "Not really. I had a fitting yesterday for a photoshoot next week, though. And none of the shirts fit."

"Really?" Marinette couldn't believe that anyone associated with Gabriel Fashion would make anything the wrong size.

"Uh-huh. And they have to let out the pant legs a little as well." Adrien grinned. "I'm growing, apparently. Finally."

"Says the tall person," Marinette joked.

Adrien's grin grew. "I'm sure you'll grow. Eventually. Maybe."

The lights dimmed suddenly, cutting off their conversation before Marinette had to think up an answer to that. The movie previews and ads started playing as a few stragglers filtered in. Marinette relaxed into her seat as the movie started.

Just for now, she wasn't going to worry about her homework, akumas, or the list of glasses Jagged Stone had requested. She would deal with all of that later.

As it turned out, it was a very good thing that Marinette had gotten her homework out of the way before she went to the movies. Adrien had been free all afternoon, so they hung out for several hours before an akuma made their group scatter. By the time she and Chat Noir defeated the rampaging superhero, it was time for her to go home for dinner.

As she waited for class to start on Monday morning, Marinette couldn't help but fidget. She had managed to whip out her Statue of Liberty glasses the previous night, which meant that she hadn't had a chance to fiddle with her crocodile glasses design at all. She had hoped to have an outline at least started, but she hadn't even found reference photos yet.

So when Madam Bustier had to dash out of class to do a few last-minute errands before class started, Marinette didn't wait more than a few seconds before pulling up a search on her tablet. There was no shortage of photos of Fang- after all, where Jagged Stone went, Fang went- but very few of them actually had Fang in the kind of pose that Marinette needed.

"What are you up to?" Alya asked as Marinette kept scrolling down the page. "Is that Fang? Are you doing something else for Jagged Stone?"

...okay, maybe doing obviously Jagged Stone-related research while at school wasn't the best idea if she wanted to keep the sunglasses project a secret.

"Oh, no, I, uh," Marinette started, flailing a little for an excuse. Really, by now she should be a master excuse-maker with all of the times she had to lie to cover her tracks when she had to go fight akumas, but no such luck. It was nothing short of a miracle that no one had called her out on the increasingly shoddy excuses she made to get away for akuma attacks. Her eyes fell to her tablet, scanning Fang's photos for something, anything she could use as an excuse.

Her eyes fell on Fang's collar and her mind sped back to a post she had seen on a Jagged Stone discussion board ages ago. It had been a stupid comment for sure, and one that she wouldn't ever bother wasting any of her time on normally, but it would do.

"There was a post that I saw online recently that claimed that Jagged Stone was mistreating Fang and that his collar was way too tight," Marinette claimed, hoping that she sounded believable. "So I'm looking up photos of Fang and, like, Jagged rarely even has the collar on him, see? It's only when they're out and about and Fang might wander into the street or something. And then the collar is plenty loose."

"Don't even bother arguing with them, Marinette," Nino said with a sigh, turning around to join the conversation. "They're probably one of those 'animal rights activist' people that are so extreme that they can't stomach the idea of even the most responsible beekeeping."

"Beekeeping and collecting even a little honey, you mean," Adrien added. "I don't think anyone has any problem with just beekeeping for the sake of having bees around."

"Unless they're daring to have the bees there to pollinate their crops," Alya added with a roll of her eyes. "Because it's unpaid labor, y'know."

"I'm mostly doing it in case there's anyone on the board that might just blindly believe them," Marinette said before Alya could wander too far off topic. "I know they wouldn't be persuaded, but it's important not to just ignore it and let misinformation spread."

"I guess you're right," Alya sighed. She glanced over at Marinette's tablet again. "But why are you looking at so many photos? Wouldn't you just need a couple for your post?"

"It's for research," Marinette insisted. "I wanted to verify that Jagged Sone always has the collar really loose, and that they wouldn't just scroll down a little and come up with a photo that was taken at a bad angle or something." She glanced down and scrolled a little further. Finally a photo that matched the profile she needed popped up, and Marinette swiped to save it. She would have to find another photo for Fang's curled tail, but this photo- taken from the first row while Fang (and Jagged) were on stage- would be good enough for her to start getting her design started.

Alya shook her head as Madam Bustier walked back into the room, new papers in hand. "I'm telling you, you're spending too much time on this. But it's none of my business what you do with your free time, I guess. Fight internet idiots if you want."

Marinette smiled as she closed out of her search. Her secret was safe.

For now, at least.

After a few hours spent fighting her tablet and trying to get the layers to work with her, Marinette finished her crocodile outline. After that, it was no big hassle to clean up the CD cover background that she wanted to use and extend it a bit so that it filled the crocodile outline. Marinette spent a few short minutes getting the same pattern onto the glasses' arms.

"Where are you going to sign it, Marinette?" Tikki asked as she watched Marinette work.

Marinette glanced up, startled. "Sign it?"

"Yeah! Like you signed the hat!" Tikki plopped down to Marinette. "So people know that you designed it!"

Marinette bit her lip. "Oh, I don't know. I mean, it's Jagged's line of glasses. He might want his name on them, or maybe his logo instead."

Tikki frowned. "Do you really think so? Maybe you can have Jagged Stone's logo on one glasses arm and your signature on the other."

"Ooh, I don't know. I mean..."

"Chloe's glasses have the designer's name on them," Tikki pointed out. Then she looked at Marinette's anxious face again. "Or you can make two versions, one with your name on it and one without. That way, you can ask Penny and Jagged Stone. I bet they'll want to use the one with your signature! There's no harm in asking. Jagged Stone seems really nice!"

"I guess you're right, Tikki." Marinette looked back down at her tablet. "Maybe I can do it in black, so you could see it up close but not from too far back."

Tikki frowned but didn't argue. "If you're sure that that's what you want, Marinette!"

"I'm sure. I can alter the color on the other frames so it blends in just as well with those. I'll still have ask Penny and Jagged Stone if they want it on there, though." Marinette saved the page she had been working on before flipping to a clean page. She could just use the same kind of signature that she had used in the hat design contest- upside-down but with clear, easy-to-read letters written in her neatest cursive- but somehow she didn't think that it would be quite right on a pair of sunglasses. Maybe she could do tighter letters, tall and thin. It would be more compact and easier to see close up.

Marinette practiced her signature several times, trying to get something she would want to put on a label. Her biggest problem was that her letters were too spread out, no matter what she tried. If she wrote slower, trying to get the tight curls and slightly cramped letters, her lines would be wobbly even with the program's stabilizer. It was frustrating to no end.

"Could you Photoshop it?" Tikki asked after Marinette discarded yet another fail. "Compress a normal signature or something?"

"No, I-" Marinette paused, then frowned. "Actually, that might work. I wouldn't be able to start with a completely normal signature, of course, but that would be easier than what I'm doing now, I think. Thanks, Tikki!"

"You're the one who knows how to do things. I just poke you in the right direction." Tikki floated down to the desk and perched on a clear spot to watch Marinette work. "How many more glasses designs are you going to make? You've already made two."

"Jagged Stone wanted at least three more designs, but I want to do one or two more than that. He might not like one of them, so if I have extras then maybe I won't have to do a bunch of meetings."

"Do you know what else you're going to make?"

"Penny mentioned the Leaning Tower and the Loch Ness monster." Marinette selected the signature she wanted to manipulate with a few quick taps and slowly started compressing it. "The Leaning Tower's overall silhouette isn't too hard, but I'm not sure how I should do the little arches. I could have a textured sunglasses, but people would only be able to see that from close up, or I could do little cutouts, which could affect the strength of the glasses, or I could make the back part of the arches black, I suppose, or maybe I could just make it darker."

"I think the last one sounds best," Tikki said. "Or maybe a combination of the last one and the first one. That would be fun!"

"It might be more expensive, though. I need to keep that in mind." Marinette considered her signature, frowned, and did another. "And I don't even know where to start for the Loch Ness monster. The pictures I found earlier are all over the place with the head shape and I have no idea what to do for the bottom. I mean, I would assume fins, but..."

"And it might end up too similar to the Fang-shaped glasses. Maybe I can do some doodles but only go back to it if Jagged Stone asks. Penny did say that Jagged was kind of scrambling for ideas."

"I think he'll like the crocodile glasses better," Tikki said confidently as Marinette made a few alterations to her signature and tried compressing it again. It was almost perfect, so Marinette expanded it again and copied it carefully, making the small changes that she had marked. This time when she compacted it, the signature turned out perfect.

"That looks really professional, Marinette," Tikki exclaimed as Marinette saved the perfect signature and discarded the others. "I bet you could use that when you become a professional designer even, it looks so good!"

Once the crocodile glasses were finally finished, Marinette turned her attention to the Leaning Tower glasses. They would probably need some sort of counterweight so that they wouldn't press down strangely because of the tilt from the Leaning Tower, but she could worry about that later. Marinette spent a while experimenting with different techniques for the arches before Tikki reminded her that she did in fact have homework that she was supposed to be working on.

"This would be so much easier if Jagged Stone had come up with this idea during the summer," Marinette groaned as she cracked open her Physics textbook. "I could work on it whenever without having to worry about getting assignments done."

"But then you would be spending all of your time with Alya and her sisters or Manon, and you know perfectly well that they would see you sketching and not leave you alone about it," Tikki pointed out. "And you know that if any of your friends or classmates caught sight of Jagged Stone's logo, they would be hounding you about it." A pause. "I still don't understand why you aren't telling them yet."

"It doesn't feel real yet," Marinette said absently as she picked up her pencil. "And if I tell them, then they'll want to watch. I don't know if Alya could resist having a scoop like that." Marinette bit her lip. "I mean, I'm pretty sure that she could keep a secret, but if she said anything at home and her sisters overheard..."

The entire city would know by the end of the day. Alya's sisters were not known for their secret-keeping skills.

"Are you going to tell them once the designs are accepted, then?" Tikki asked. "Alya could probably keep quiet about it until the official announcement is made."

Marinette wrinkled her nose, attention already half on the problem she was staring at. "Mmm, probably not. Design acceptance to production could take months. I think I'll surprise them once the designs go public. It'll be funny."

"Alya will end you," Tikki predicted. The little kwami giggled. "And then she'll probably scream for ages. I can't wait."

Marinette stayed focused for several weeks, trying to balance schoolwork, akuma-fighting, helping her family, and fiddling with her glasses designs. The other glasses fell into place pretty quickly- a Leaning Tower of Pisa, Canadian red-and-white maple leaves, and Big Ben. Marinette did little adjustments to each, cleaning up designs and altering Jagged's logo and her signature to better go with each of the glasses.

Finally, after weeks of work, Marinette had the files ready to send to Penny.

"I think your explanation is perfectly clear, dear," Sabine said as she finished reading the email Marinette had composed. It explained a few things about the designs- the need for a small counterbalance in the Leaning Tower glasses, the small arch outward across the bridge of the nose with the crocodile glasses, the copies of the arms of the glasses, both with and without her signature- and also had a brief note about why there was a lack of a Loch Ness monster, though Marinette made it clear that she could definitely try to make something if Jagged Stone felt strongly about it.

"That's good. I don't know what else I could say." Marinette worried at her lip as she scanned her email. Letter, check. All of the attachments, check. It was really nerve-wracking sending in something that would (hopefully) go on her resume. She knew Jagged Stone would love the Statue of Liberty glasses, probably, and definitely the crocodile glasses, but the nerves didn't leave.

"It looks fabulous. Just hit send before you think about it too much." Sabine gave her daughter's head a loving pat. "Besides, they requested you. You don't need to worry about first impressions."

"That's true." Marinette moved her cursor over the Send button, still indecisive. "But maybe I should see if there are any more tweaks I could make-"

"Or you could wait until Jagged Stone and Penny give you feedback on your designs," Sabine pointed out. "These look fabulous. If they want any changes, it'll be based on taste, not on technicalities."

"I suppose." Marinette stared at the screen, then turned away and clicked fast before she could change her mind. She cringed, then slowly turned back to the computer.

Message sent.

"All right, that's great!" Sabine chirped cheerfully as Marinette closed out of her email. "Now, come on downstairs. We have a batch of macarons that need to be made and we're running a little behind today."

"Of course!"

Penny was far more enthusiastic than Marinette had expected. She responded right away, exclaiming over the designs. She thought that Marinette's signature was fine, but she had a small suggestion for changes to Jagged's logo on the glasses- instead of matching the colors, she suggested a black logo edged with gold for a pop. It was an easy fix, and then Marinette sent off the files again.

And then came time for showing Jagged Stone what she had come up with. Since Jagged was in America but he wanted Marinette to hear his feedback as he saw the designs for the first time, they were doing a video call. Penny had printed out the designs Marinette had sent so Jagged could see them as they discussed each one.

Marinette was very, very nervous.

"Marinette!" Jagged Stone crowed as their video call went through. "Hey there! Penny keeps telling me how awesome your designs are, so I can't wait to see what you've come up with!"

"I can't wait for you to see them," Marinette said, hoisting a confident smile onto her face. Penny had liked her proposed designs, so she shouldn't be too nervous.

Penny appeared behind Jagged Stone on the screen, carrying a file folder under her arm. She settled in the chair and smiled at the screen. "Hello, Marinette. I think everything looks fantastic, but let's just get Jagged's stamp of approval, shall we?"

"Sounds good," Marinette said. She just hoped that her voice wasn't shaking too much.

Penny started off with the glasses that Jagged had suggested. He was absolutely thrilled with each of them and insisted on modelling each of the cardboard samples. He couldn't see anything through them, of course- the finished product would have the same slats as the Eiffel Tower glasses so that the wearer could actually see but it would be too much work to do the same on the cardboard prototypes- but Penny took pictures of him modelling each pair of glasses so he could see what they would look like. The two country-related designs that Marinette had come up were next, and both met Jagged's requirements.

"And we've saved the best one for last," Penny announced as Jagged Stone set the Canadian maple leaf glasses aside and looked at the photo Penny had taken with a grin. "Are you ready for this?"

Jagged Stone perked up. "There's another? Marinette, you've really outdone yourself this time!"

Marinette only smiled.

Penny pulled the crocodile glasses out of her folder and handed them to Jagged Stone. The rock star's eyes lit up as soon as he saw them.

"It's Fang!" Jagged Stone exclaimed with a grin, holding the glasses up to admire them. "That's great! And this pattern- it's from the album cover you did, isn't it? It's fabulous!"

Marinette could only grin.

"I need to have a pair or seven of these right away," Jagged Stone continued as he plopped the glasses on his face. He posed with them. "And- oh! Crocodile sunglasses! Do you want to know what idea that gives me?"

"What idea does that give you, Jagged?" Penny asked patiently.

"Crocodile sunglasses! Sunglasses for Fang!" Jagged Stone's hands flew into the air, nearly hitting Penny in his excitement. "We can match! They would just have to be a bit wider to fit Fang."

Marinette blinked. What?

Thankfully Penny looked a little puzzled as well. Her mouth worked wordlessly for a moment before she finally spoke. "...and how would the glasses stay on? Crocodiles don't exactly have ears that stick out."

Jagged Stone waved an airy hand. "Oh, I'm sure someone as talented as Marinette can figure something out. It wouldn't be a problem, would it, Marinette?"

...um.

"I, uh, don't exactly have a crocodile to try things on," Marinette managed, trying to think fast. She didn't want to just outright say no, though she couldn't deny that it was very, very tempting. She had an in with Jagged Stone and she wasn't going to lose it just because the rock star wanted something ridiculous. If she outlined why crocodile glasses couldn't be made, then maybe he would drop the idea on his own. "Uh. There would have to be something that the glasses would attach to, like a collar but, like, not so far back and not so loose. It would have to turn with Fang's head. I'm just worried that Fang might, uh, object to having something there."

Jagged Stone finally pulled the crocodile glasses off so he could see again. He looked pensive. "Hmm. I'll talk to my crocodile trainer. He might have an idea." Jagged beamed again, clearly sure that the problem would be dealt with in no time. "And what other modifications do you think we'd have to make for Fang's glasses?"

"The nose pieces," Marinette offered after a short pause. Were they really going to do this? Drat.

"They'd have to be angled differently, and maybe be longer and a little curved for more stability."

"We're supposed to go to Paris in three months," Penny said, checking her clipboard. "We could get the regular glasses into production stage in the meantime, and then once we're in Paris we could do an actual crocodile fitting. Marinette could make a rough cardboard prototype to test once we arrive." She sent Marinette a somewhat apologetic look. Clearly she had had the same reaction as Marinette to Jagged Stone's initial suggestion, but she wasn't going to be the one to argue.

"Perfect! I can't wait." Jagged beamed at Marinette. "I think these crocodile glasses are gonna be my new favorite glasses ever."

"There's just a couple small details left to talk about with the glasses design," Penny mentioned, pulling their attention back to her. "Marinette put your logo on the left arm of the glasses. I suggested that rather than matching colors, it might be better to have the logo black and then edged in gold."

"I like it!" Jagged exclaimed. "Very high-end. I like the size. It's big enough to see, but it doesn't overwhelm the glasses."

"And on the other arm is Marinette's signature. It's in a different color on each pair of glasses so it's more understated." Penny picked up the Canadian maple glasses and pointed to the signature.

Jagged Stone turned the crocodile glasses over and peered at the arm. After a moment, he seemed to find it. He frowned.

"Sir?"

"I don't like the signature," Jagged Stone announced. Marinette's stomach dropped. She had overstepped, she knew it, she shouldn't have put her signature on there at all-

Penny looked a bit concerned. She glanced over at Marinette. "Uh, sir..."

"It's too subtle. I can barely see it!" Jagged Stone waved his arms in the air again, gesturing wildly as he spoke. "Make it bright! I want to see it shine, Marinette! You know what would look good on all of these? Gold embossing! You put in a ton of work here, Marinette. People should definitely know that you made these."

Marinette blinked. Jagged Stone...wanted her to make her signature more obvious?

"I think that's a good idea," Penny agreed, looking much more on board. "It's a pretty signature. Very professional. We're already doing gold embossing on Jagged's logo. You're the one who did all of the work, so we should be able to see your signature on it."

"Right, of course," Marinette managed. "I'll make those changes right away. It shouldn't be too hard."

"All right. I think we're good here, then!" Jagged Stone beamed at Marinette. "I can't wait until these go into production!"

Somehow Marinette kept the secret through the months of delegations and back-and-forth with the sunglasses company with the designs. She managed to sneak away into the hotel and do the sunglasses fitting with Fang without alerting anyone, even Chloe. It had gone smoother than she had expected- Fang hadn't snapped at her at all, and he had been very patient as she made adjustments. He hadn't put up with having all of his vision obscured (Marinette had had to cut the slats in the cardboard prototype she was using and then she had to fiddle with curving the arms of the glasses so that they would dip downward out of his field of vision), but he didn't mind having the glasses strapped to his head once he could see again.

Jagged was delighted, Penny was pleased, and Marinette played fetch with Fang until an akuma attack popped up and she had to leave. The sunglasses were slated to debut in a month, when Jagged Stone would be starting another tour and introducing a few new songs, and everything was going smoothly. The first metal and plastic prototypes were out and looking absolutely fabulous.

Marinette couldn't wait.

The news of Jagged Stone's glasses line exploded immediately at school. Almost everyone knew that Marinette had been behind the original Eiffel-Tower-inspired pair, but the rest of the line was a mystery.

"The first pictures of the other pieces in Jagged's collection just showed up!" Alya announced between classes, waving her phone. "He's back in America for the start of his next tour, and he has Statue of Liberty glasses!"

Marinette smiled as her classmates crowded around the photos. There were a lot of comments about how nice the glasses were, though most of the class wasn't particularly interested in owning their own pair.

After all, there was very little point in wearing American-themed sunglasses in Paris.

Over the next week, pictures continued to show up. In Jagged's Canada stop, he wore the maple leaf shades Marinette herself had come up with. In London, it was the Big Ben glasses that Penny had suggested. In Italy, two Leaning Towers made themselves at home on Jagged's face. The crocodile glasses had yet to show up, but Marinette knew that Jagged Stone was saving those for last.

Two weeks after the first of the new glasses were seen, a photographer finally managed to get a photograph of the shiny signature on the side of the glasses. Reflected light obscured the first half of the name, but the second half was somewhat visible. The tabloids went wild trying to figure out who had designed the pieces. The signature didn't match that of any big designer, and it was just a little too shiny to make out the curling letters. The mystery added a whole other layer to the excitement surrounding the Jagged Stone glasses.

"Are your Eiffel Tower glasses going to be sold with the line, Marinette?" Alya asked one morning as she paged through the most recent article. "Because they definitely should be, they would fit in perfectly with everything Jagged Stone has shown so far."

"That would be super cool," Nino exclaimed before Marinette would respond. "One of your designs would be sold all over the world, then! That would just be...wow."

Marinette grinned. Oh, they didn't know half of it. "Yep, Jagged Stone contacted me to ask if it would be all right. I said yes, of course."

...technically, it wasn't a lie. Before Penny had even asked Marinette whether or not she would be willing to design more glasses, she had asked if it would be okay if Jagged Stone manufactured and sold glasses modeled after the ones she had made during Career Day. It was just...not the whole story.

Her friends looked suitably impressed.

"That's actually what inspired Jagged Stone to do the glasses line in the first place," Marinette added, just because it was so much fun to tease them. She grinned at the three dropped jaws that met that announcement. "Because there were knock-offs of my Eiffel Tower design being sold. That ticked Jagged Stone off, because I wasn't getting the credit, and so he decided to release them himself."

"That's great," Adrien started. He sounded a little hesitant all of a sudden, though, and Marinette frowned a little at that. Adrien fiddled with his lip for a moment, then added, "But credit isn't everything. I know it's important to have the recognition and all, but you made the design. Are you getting, y'know, paid at all for that?"

Marinette grinned again. That was sweet of Adrien to want to make sure that she was getting properly compensated for her work. "I am! He's overpaying me, really. Almost all of the profit for the glasses I designed goes to me. That's basically unheard of."

"He just wants the cool glasses," Nino guessed with a snicker. "That's actually really cool. I'll buy a pair for everyone I know."

Marinette couldn't help but laugh at that. "That's really not necessary-"

"It is totally necessary. I mean, it might take a little while if they're like, super-expensive, but it'll happen. It'll be my Christmas present for everyone this year." Nino nodded seriously. "Eiffel Tower sunglasses for everyone. It's gonna happen."

Her friends' high opinions of Jagged Stone ("He actually pays his designers! He didn't care about the money from the sunglasses!") lasted until Thursday of that week. That was when Jagged Stone debuted the crocodile sunglasses, accompanied by Fang with his own special crocodile-fitted pair. It would have gone just as smoothly as the other sunglasses introductions, had Jagged Stone not been asked about the new sunglasses as he headed from his hotel to the concert venue.

"Oh, yeah, I love these!" Jagged Stone enthused as he adjusted the crocodile glasses on his nose. "They're fabulous! It's Fang, can you tell? Of course you can, my designer did a great job on these!"

"And you even got a matching pair for Fang," the interviewer said as he jogged alongside Jagged towards the door, clearly intent on getting as much information as he could out of the rock star before he vanished into the building.

Jagged looked positively thrilled that the reporter brought it up. Or, rather, he was grinning widely. It was kind of difficult to see all of his expression with the sunglasses in the way. "Yeah! These are my new favorite pair of sunglasses, so of course I got Fang his own pair. He looks great."

Jagged fielded one more question before he ducked into the building to get ready for his concert, but Alya didn't even notice. She was too busy fuming that Marinette's Eiffel Tower glasses had been knocked from their status as Jagged Stone's favorite pair of glasses ever.

"I mean, the crocodile glasses are pretty cool, I guess," Alya grudgingly admitted as she ended the video. She turned around and Marinette hastily rearranged her grin (Jagged Stone had called the crocodile glasses his favorite! He had already said it to her, of course, but it was something else entirely to hear him say that on international television) into something more neutral. It was a good thing that she had been standing at the back of their group, or otherwise someone would have spotted her seemingly out-of-place grin. "But your glasses were his favorite!"

"Yeah, that sucks," Nino said, frowning. "But at least Marinette's glasses were his favorite for a year, right? Not many people can say that."

"And at least her glasses are getting released as part of his line," Adrien reminded Alya. "And he only thought of doing the sunglasses line because of Marinette's glasses."

Alya nodded. "That's true. Oh! And there was news about that too, actually." Alya waved her phone at them before realizing that the screen was off. She set it to the side before she could accidentally send the device flying. "Jagged said that the ads for the glasses would be appearing in Metal Lourd and other rock magazines in their next publication. The article I saw said that then we should probably find out about the designer for the new pieces then, too. They mentioned you too, Marinette," Alya added. "They said- oh, let me find it- they said that 'Jagged's line will also feature his iconic Eiffel Tower sunglasses, made by designer Marinette Dupain-Cheng.'"

"That," Nino said decisively, "is super cool. Don't forget us little people when you become famous, Marinette."

Alya snatched up a copy of Metal Lourd as soon as the next issue hit the shelves and hurried out to join the rest of their group in the park. Nino and Adrien hung over her shoulder as Alya paged frantically through the magazine looking for Jagged Stone's sunglasses ad. They had all insisted that Marinette get the best seat next to Alya, so that she could see her sunglasses in the ad really well.

Marinette didn't tell them that she had already gotten copies of the photos used in the ad.

"We can see the whole designer logo in these pictures, but it's waaay too small to read," Alya complained. The mystery had been driving the reporter up the wall. "Does anyone have a magnifying glass?"

"It looks like all of the glasses have it," Nino said, hanging over Alya's shoulder so far that Marinette was afraid that he was going to lose his balance and tumble forward. "Not just the new ones."

"Oh, that's weird," Alya said. She peered closely at the ad and then nudged Marinette. "Look, Marinette, they have your Eiffel Tower glasses here in the ad, but they have that gold signature on the arm, just like all the others do. The glasses company must have made a mistake-!"

Marinette let a small, impish smile slide onto her face as Alya, Nino, and Adrien all glanced her way. Her friends all looked confused for a few seconds, wondering why she wasn't upset that another designer's signature was on her work. She didn't say anything as she waited for them to figure it out.

Naturally, Alya guessed it first. She gasped, one hand flying to her mouth. "Wait. The signature on your glasses is the same as the signature on the others. You little-! You never said anything!"

Marinette burst out laughing as the boys finally caught on and let out twin shouts of surprise. "I wanted to surprise you! I was thinking of waiting until the official announcement came out, but-"

"I would have ended you. How in the world did you keep quiet about such a huge secret? I would have burst!" Alya exclaimed. "Ooh, how did I not guess sooner? I had an inkling that you might have a new project when you got that giant sketchbook, and then I spotted you looking at pictures of Fang and I still didn't figure it out until now!"

Marinette gave another small smile. Keeping a huge secret? Alya had no idea.

"And no wonder you weren't upset when Jagged Stone said that his new crocodile glasses were his new favorite!" Nino laughed. "Those are fab, by the way. I'm gonna need to buy a pair."

"Who altered the sunglasses for Fang?" Adrien wanted to know. He gaped at Marinette's grin. "Really? Wow! I wouldn't have had any idea where to start."

"I was a bit lost at first too," Marinette admitted. "Jagged just sort of sprung the idea on me during the design approval meeting. And of course I couldn't just outright say that he was crazy for even thinking about crocodile sunglasses... for a crocodile."

"They seem to work pretty well, though. Fang tolerates them and it doesn't look like he's wandering into anything."

"I had to alter the arms so that Fang couldn't see them," Marinette admitted. "He tried to throw them off when we put the cardboard prototype on the first time. I hadn't thought about that when I made it." She giggled as a particular memory hit her. "I had to look up the field of vision for crocodiles to figure out if Fang would even be able to see the glasses. He could, so I knew that I would have to make the slats in the model before Fang would stop trying to throw them off."

Alya let out another sudden shout of surprise and then waved the magazine at them all again. "There's an article about the glasses right here on the next page, and they guessed right about the designer! Look, look!"

They looked. Sure enough, one of Metal Lourd's writers had indeed noticed the matching signatures and had speculated that Marinette had been the one to design the other sunglasses. They had apparently also gone to all of the trouble to look very, very closely indeed at the signature and had managed to pick out Marinette's name among the golden sprawl.

"School is gonna be crazy on Monday," Alya said, elbowing Marinette teasingly. "Everyone is gonna read this and want a bit of your attention so they can hear about how you got the job. Speaking of which- I wanna know first! Talk, talk, talk!"

The sunglasses ended up being a smashing success. The original Eiffel Tower design and the crocodile design were the most popular by far, but the other designs sold reasonably well. Marinette found herself grinning whenever she spotted someone in the street or at school wearing glasses from Jagged Stone's line. It was a great feeling, seeing people wearing things that she had designed. She had almost died of happiness on the day that Adrien had showed up to school wearing a pair of the Eiffel Tower glasses. Marinette couldn't have possibly asked for anything more.

And then her phone rang. It was Penny.

"Hey, Marinette! Would you be interested in doing another album cover?"

[mock-ing-bird]

In Defence of Sean Renard

As #Grimm draws to a close (Far TOO SOON), and it looks very like Season 6 is going to be Nick finishing off his ultimate enemy, Sean Renard; and resolving some unresolved questions to tie it all up in a neat and satisfying ending.

 There is a lot I need to know.

 At this point, I have to say that the ins and outs (rights and wrongs) of the stick that Nick found in Season 5 (keys and all that jazz) interest me a great deal less than getting the answers to some questions that have been burning a hole in my curiosity since Season 2 (or thereabouts).

Renard has done some very bad things, that cannot be denied, but somehow I have identified more closely with him, than Nick, from the beginning. It’s not that I don’t like Nick, it’s just that sometimes he makes me want to slap him hard.

  Nick is the White Knight, the hero that we are supposed to cheer for on his quest to handle a legacy that he never asked for and didn’t really want. In the main, he handles it with grace and determination except when it comes to Renard. For instance, once he knew what Renard was, when did Nick ever think about trying to lure Renard to his side and keep him there. Answer to this, never, really.

Renard always seems like an abused child/animal to me. He gets his strikes in first before anyone can strike at him. It’s an instinctive protective reaction to his past. And what a past! We don’t know much of anything really, it’s fairly sketchy, but we do know that Renard was yanked out of French Literature class (fancy boarding school methinks) by his mother, aged 13, to go on the run for his life. On the run from his father’s wife. We don’t even need to extrapolate that his legitimate half brother would like to kill him, that’s pretty much a given. Therefore you can bet money that his earlier childhood, close to his father’s circle of influence was probably not exactly a barrel of laughs either.

What do we know exactly? Renard is half Royal, an illegitimate son, he’s also half Zauberbiest. This doesn’t mean that much, he has a sort of half and half woge, he has no powers per se, (unless a sexy growl and enhanced strength can be seen as powers), he is, at best, a hybrid, with a foot in each world but really belonging in neither.

Side Note: We are told that King Frederick (Sean’s father) ‘loves’ his sons. There is exactly ZERO evidence of this. Oft repetition of something does not actually make it so.

So. Hand-wavy stuff. Sean Renard arrives in Portland (somehow), joins the Police Force, rises to be Captain. Living in Portland gives him a home, a degree of safety, stability, and as a Police Captain he has a measure of power and authority. Things that a life on the run, never knowing when one of his father’s assassins are going to catch up with him and his mother and kill them, has never given Sean.

So after years of just surviving, he has a home, a degree of safety and stability and some real comfort. Wouldn’t you, in this situation, fight tooth and claw to keep it? Since tooth and claw are all that Sean has known over most of his childhood and into adulthood, his actions are bound to be magnified by his life experience.

From the start of Nick’s knowledge about what Sean is, he has held the Captain at arm’s length. I do get why, I really do, but a truly smart leader would know that alliance is the best way forward. You build alliances to protect yourself and gather resources that will help you going forward. Sometimes those alliances have to come with a big measure of forgiveness and a line drawn under past events.

Would Sean Renard have been a tricky prospect? Sure he would. He’s part Royal, he wants power and authority. This is clearly an offshoot of his need for stability and safety, (after all power and influence provides a lot of security). However, a simple risk/reward analysis would also tell you that long term, alliance makes a whole heap of sense. Sean has protected Nick on a number of occasions, while these have dovetailed with his own interests, they still came at considerable personal risk. Sometimes, Renard’s actions to protect Nick have actually run counter to his own best interests. Had he taken the key, given it to his family, he would have been at less risk than handing the key back to Nick did for him.

Put crudely: If you acquire a puppy, don’t bother to house break it, feed it only scraps, chuck it out of the house when you have friends round, don’t then be surprised when it attacks your friends and trashes your house. It doesn’t know any better. That’s all on you. Okay, so Sean is less cute little Shih Tzu, more lone grey Wolf, but the principle’s the same.

Juliette and the Sleeping Beauty Curse (courtesy of Adalind). Renard gets a potion from Adalind’s mother, Catherine, drinks it to purify his soul so that he can wake Juliette. Renard drinks it (seriously, kudos, that stuff looked like one of my mother’s attempts at tapioca pudding… my stomach curled up in sympathy), he then goes through agony, or are we supposed to take away from that whole scene that staggering around your apartment, tearing your clothes off like your skin is burning you alive, struggling to breathe is perfectly normal and doesn’t hurt a bit. Because that was not what I took away.

HUGE UNANSWERED QUESTION: If Renard’s soul was purified for him to wake Juliette, was his more co-operative behaviour in Seasons 2 and 3 because his soul was purified, or was that just random?

Renard dies trying to save Nick from the effects of another curse (Adalind again). Yes, there was a convergence of circumstances that led to Renard being shot, but you cannot get away from the fact that he was trying to save Nick from another curse.

He dies. He is brought back to life by his mother (this is a one way ticket, if he dies again, he stays dead). But something comes back with him. As the evil grows stronger, it’s pretty clear that Renard is terrified…

HUGE UNANSWERED QUESTION: What effect did the presence of Jack have on Sean’s hitherto purified soul? (Without the answer to the other question it’s hard to say).

After everything that has happened, Nick is still holding Sean as far away as possible. I see Sean’s actions in Season 5 being less an embodiment of evil, and more an act of desperation. He’s not exactly been smothered with love or shown that he’s valuable to Nick (and yes, the knife cuts both ways), so him cutting his losses (kinda need the answer to the Jack question here to make a proper evaluation), given everything that has happened to him both through the story and what little back story we have on him, nasty as it is, it makes perfect sense. He’s frightened, vulnerable. He thinks he needs to get back to being the aloof man he was before Nick and Grimm-ness. He has powerful cause to regret helping Nick, and he’s never been taught any different. All Nick has ever done is shove Renard away unless he’s needed him for something. Even Rachel, appeared to offer him love that wasn’t for dynastic reasons… why wouldn’t Renard fall for that? Someone who apparently wants him for himself. It was a crock, but a frightened, vulnerable man, being offered everything he thinks he’s always wanted, and a chance to hide himself away again (the kinder, gentler Sean made him more vulnerable, and for what??) of course he’s going to take what he thinks he wants.

If that comes from punishing the one person who he sees as being the cause of all of his vulnerability for no personal gain (did he actually gain anything by protecting Nick, not really. He died, remember). But even after that, he’s still trying, and still nothing. Well, me, I would have chucked up the non-existent benefits of helping someone who doesn’t care about me, my help or my well-being for the chance at real stability in a heartbeat, believe me. And I don’t have anything like Sean’s excuse.

  Nick’s anger is understandable, but the fact that Nick is playing happy families with Adalind, and has a son with her, (don’t even get me started on how that happened), just infuriates me. Sean is Diana’s father. So yeah, Sean has come between Nick and Adalind and Nick’s son, but equally, Nick has come between Sean and his daughter. You cannot just airbrush Sean out of his daughter’s life. Boy, do they want to though.

Diana is clearly damaged. I feel as though Sean’s actions through the whole debacle of sending Diana away with Kelly Burkhardt were about giving her a life that Sean never had. It did not turn out that way, but since Sean has no reference points other than the knowledge that his paternal family are cruel and possibly actually insane, it was completely understandable. And Nick was involved too, yet somehow that whole circle was squared by having Nick and Adalind come together without any apparent additional consequences, and fall in love (yes, they make a cute, adorable couple, but my heart absolutely bleeds for Sean and Juliette/Eve).

[Hypocrisy 101: Reject girlfriend who saved your Grimmness and inadvertently became a Hexenbiest, for being a Hexenbiest. Fall in love with the Hexenbiest who raped you (hardly consensual sex if one of the parties to the sex is faking their identity), have son, and play happy families together (conveniently forgetting the whole “you find that attractive” moment when this Hexenbiest has her powers back, and the half-zauberbiest is standing there right in front of you)!! All the while hating the half-zauberbiest who has been (I grant you) a sneaky shit, but who has done his best to protect you from the second mentioned Hexenbiest’s attempt to destroy you.]

I don’t know what will happen in the end. Yes, Sean’s a sinner, but given everything that has happened, one way and another, he was already damaged long before the story starts, his association with Nick has had a negative impact on him personally. The man believes he is alone. He has acquaintances who use him, not friends. He’s never shown real love, or care or appreciation. He’s been through hell, several times, he has suffered and has never once had anyone show any concern for him.

Really, under those circumstances wouldn’t you choose the same?

However this pans out, I have always rooted for Sean Renard, and probably always will.

[veronicainvanuatu]

The Animals of Vanuatu Want to Say “Hi”

I have officially made it through training and am now a bonafide Peace Corps Volunteer here in Vanuatu. There is a lot that I have experienced in the  nearly three months I have lived in this country, and many of these experiences involve various animals. Every island is different, but some animals are found almost everywhere - and they all have their ways of saying hello.

SPIDERS

Spiders are EVERYWHERE. Anyone with arachnophobia should stay far away, or get used to the idea of always being scared. The upside of these, often ginormous, spiders is that none of them are venomous. The chant I like to use when I unexpectedly come across one is “it can’t kill me, it can’t kill me.” All the locals swear that the spiders cannot even bit you, and children love finding the largest ones and chasing frightened Volunteers with them (all in good fun).

The worst place I have found them is in my toilets. During Wokabaot Week in Paama I accidentally killed a tarantula that was chilling on the toilet lid. As I lifted the lid it ran from underneath the lid to behind it. Once I was done with my business I tried to slowly close the lid again, but the poor guy ran around and scared me so I dropped the lid. His poor guts were everywhere...

In Pele I had a spider that liked to call the inside of my toilet home and would often be just chilling in the bowl, just above the water, when I would come in. I would often kick the toilet to scare it into hiding. I’m getting better with the spiders, but I’m not quite to the point of being comfortable with them being there while I take care of things.

LIZARDS

                                  (Photo: lizard chilling on my shoulder in Worasiviu)

There are so many lizards here! They are all harmless, but a lot of people here have an aversion to them. They often find them creepy, and some people react to them the way many people in the states stereotypically react to spiders.

Seeing them run around always makes me feel good. The worst situation I have had with a lizard was taking a drowned one out of a bucket of water. In Worasiviu I had a water-seal toilet, meaning in order to flush it I had to dump water into the bowl from a large bucket of water. I found this poor lizard while grabbing water.

The very next day I found another lizard hanging out just above the water land, so I took him out not wanting another dead lizard to deal with. This guy jumped away as soon as I got him away from the bucket. The day after I got this guy out safely, I found yet another one chilling in the same place. When I took him out he ran up my arm and into my hair. I got him to chill out on my shoulder for a bit, which made my day.

DOGS

Oh, the dogs. There are a lot of strays here, and even those with a human family roam free. Often, the only way you can tell the difference between a stray and claimed dog is by the amount of fat on its body. Families will often tell you if they have taken in one dog. Often times claimed dogs will not have names, and sometimes strays will. It all depends on the dog and the people around them. Three dogs have stood out above the rest so far; one in Epau, one on Paama, and one in Worasiviu.

                                                           (Photo: Chocolate chilling in the yard)

My Host Family in Epau has a dog they adopted from a RPCV. His name is Chocolate, and he is a well-behaved, protective dog. He very much claims his human family and tries to keep other dogs away from them. When you sing out his name he gets very excited - his tail wags and he tries to jump on you.

                           (Photo: Blacky chilling just outside of my door on Paama)

On Paama I met the last Peace Corps Volunteer’s dog, Blacky. The last PCV took him in after all of Blacky’s siblings and mom died. He decided we needed to be friends as I entered village. During my week in the village I often found him waiting for me in the morning. He’s fairly small and not quite fully grown, so many of the other dogs would show their dominance over him. My favorite memory of him so far is of a very rainy day when the two of us hung out in my house. We both took naps inside while the rain poured out of the sky. Blacky is definitely a village favorite among the children and adults alike.

 (Watchman trying to eat the inside of a coconut - Photo Credit: Frances Loeb)

In Worasiviu, Watchman was definitely the star of the show. He likes to lead everyone from village to village on Pele. I do not know how he did it, but he always seemed to know when any of the trainees were about to walk from Worasiviu to Piliura or vice versa, and made sure to lead the way. The family that claims him is in Worasiviu, but he is definitely a dog of the entire island.

CATS

                                                        (Photo: Julie, my Worasiviu family’s cat)

I absolutely love cats, and Vanuatu is full of them.  Some families have them living close to their homes, and many use them as rat controls. Many are claimed by families, but like the dogs here they move around as they wish. Kittens are often carried around by children, or a cat will randomly decide they want your attention and jump into your lap (cats don’t really change anywhere you go in this regard). 

Cockroaches

People freak out over cockroaches in the United States, but here in Vanuatu they are often a very gross looking, important part of life if you have a VIP (drop) toilet. As freaked out by them we tend to be, they love eating excrement, which helps keep those toilets from filling up too quickly. They are also rarely out during the day, so if you get all your business done earlier, and you are lucky, you very well may not have to see them too much.

Flying Foxes (Bats)

The first time someone used "flying fox" in reference to a bat I was very confused. I was picturing some unknown animal, not all of the bats I had seen in a cave in Epau Village. In the right areas, at the right times, on the three main islands I have been to (Efate, Paama, and Pele) you can see flying foxes flying around. If you want to see a lot of cute baby ones find your way to a cave!

Foul (Chickens)

There tends to be a lot of foul everywhere walking around and eating any scraps they can find. You can often witness many rooster (often referred to as "cranky manfoul") fights throughout the day. The worst sound that you commonly come across is the sound of a rooster trying to have sex with a hen (the hen is never happy).

Chickens do play a very important role in Vanuatu life (though, not nearly as important as the pig). They are often the morning alarm for people in the village. This can initially be really annoying, but you eventually adjust to it, and I tend to sleep through it now. Aside from being an alarm, they are often killed and eaten for birthdays or other celebrations.

Bullock (Cows)

                                                             (Photo: Grazing bullock on Paama)

While you can sleep through the sound of a rooster crow, I do not think it is possible to learn to sleep through the angry moos of a cow. There are a lot of bullock in my village on Paama. During my wokabaot week one was tied to the pasture near my house and the Seventh-Day Adventist Church. I quickly got the impression that the bullock did not appreciate being that close to the church. Every morning around 6am the church held services, with the announcement bell being hit at 5:30am. The cow immediately responded by angrily mooing for two hours.

Nakato (Hermit Crabs)

                                            (Photo: A Nakato crossing Epau’s Bigfala Road)

Being made of a group of tropical islands, Vanuatu is full of hermit crabs (nakato). Many of us during training agreed that they are very cute, and would love watching them as they made their way around. The Ni-Vanuatu way of thinking of nakato is very different from the way many Americans view them as cute pets. Here they are seen as great fish bait. People often go out at night and collect them for their next fishing trip. When it comes time to fish they break the shell, rip off the legs, put them on a hook, and toss them into the water.

Crabs

                             (Photo: Crab crawling in my kastom ceiling in Worasiviu)

Sometimes you wake up in the middle of the night because something is making noise in your room. Usually that something is a rat, so you automatically assume rat every time. This time you grab your broom to try to chase it out of the room, but when you look up in the direction of the sound you find a crab crawling in your kastom ceiling. When this happened to me I had to decide whether to try to get it out of the ceiling (risking it falling and hitting the ground hard, or freaking out and attacking me) or to crawl back into my bed and try to ignore the sound of it. This night I chose the latter. The next day I saw no sign of the crab, but a few days later I did find the empty shell of its remains with ants carrying out the last of its meat. 

Pigs

             (Photo: Piglets running around Piliura. Photo Credit: Frances Loeb)

The pig is the most sacred animal in Vanuatu. Several people have them, and different areas have different practices and beliefs when it comes to pigs. In some villages the number of pigs you kill can determine your rank in the community; and in many communities pigs are part of the bride price. One belief that tends to extend across most, if not all, communities in Vanuatu is that the size and circular-ness of the tusk determines the pig’s value. Tusks were even used as a kastom form of money!

Pigs are often killed for traditional ceremonies (i.e. weddings, funerals, etc.). In many villages only the chief can kill a pig, but there are some where the chief cannot kill the pig. Instead, he gives another person permission to kill the pig for the kastom ceremony. 

I have another two years to meet even more animals here in the happiest place on Earth, and I cannot wait.