#trying to also resist the Hunger for Data as i know it is just an emotional desire to assert some semblance of control

[whentherewerebicycles]

i swear to god i do more work in three hours in this job than i did in ten months at the other job lolllll. but i can’t even be too resentful towards old job because 1) i’m out of it and never have to think of it again YIPPEE and 2) the timing of that job (specifically my lead escalating shit to Unbearable Misery Levels) enabled me to be in exactly the right place & right time to apply for this job.

[wethotcrazy]

SYMPATHY IS A KNIFE (ii)

pairing: Yuki Tsunoda x Fem! Driver! Reader

word count: 5650

hii so this is part 2, and as a little heads up this might turn into a slow-burn friends to lovers. please bear with me as the story progresses.

part i part iii part iv

The weeks that followed her crash with Alonso were grueling, but Yn fought through each race, clawing her way back into the points. She returned to form with a quiet, relentless focus, each finish in the top ten a reminder to the critics that she was here to stay. Slowly, the headlines turned from doubt to recognition, her name no longer just a novelty but a force.

And, little by little, Yn’s walls began to come down. It was subtle at first—she’d laugh a little longer when Yuki cracked a joke during briefings, her eyes softening, her defenses slipping just enough for him to see the glint of the Yn he’d known before. There were still days she would pull away, retreat into that place where she kept her hunger and drive guarded, but Yuki noticed that she wasn’t so quick to shut him out anymore.

One night, after a successful P6 finish, Yuki found her in the paddock, lingering with a rare look of satisfaction on her face. He came up beside her, hands in his pockets, offering his usual lopsided grin.

“Sixth place,” he said, nudging her gently. “Not bad for a rookie. People are starting to take you seriously now.”

She let out a short laugh, but it was softer than he’d expected. “Guess they don’t have a choice. I’m not giving them one.”

Yuki nodded, noticing the way her eyes flicked to the ground. There was pride there, but also something else—a quiet acknowledgment that maybe, just maybe, she was finally allowing herself to believe in her own success. “You don’t have to prove it to anyone but yourself, you know.”

Yn looked up at him, a glimmer of vulnerability breaking through. “It’s hard not to feel like I have to prove it every day, to everyone.”

“Then let me prove something to you,” he replied, his tone lighter. “Come out for dinner tonight. No data, no analysis, just good food and people who actually like you.”

She raised an eyebrow. “People who actually like me? That’s a stretch.”

“Trust me,” he said, grinning, “there are a few of us.”

That night, she found herself at a small, hidden-away restaurant with Yuki, Pierre Gasly, and Lando Norris, who had tagged along after overhearing Yuki’s invitation in the drivers’ lounge. It was strange at first—Yn felt exposed, like she was stepping into unfamiliar territory, still unsure if this was a step too close, a distraction she couldn’t afford. But as the evening went on, she realized that these were the same people she raced against each weekend, the same people who understood exactly what it meant to stand on that grid and bear the weight of expectations.

Pierre, all charm and laughter, quickly got her talking about her first season in Formula 2, and Lando joined in, teasing her about a race they’d both barely finished after a wild lap one collision. She was surprised to find herself laughing, and even more surprised by the ease with which it happened, the tension ebbing away as the stories flowed. It was different from the camaraderie in the junior leagues, but there was a sense of mutual respect here that she hadn’t allowed herself to see before.

Later in the evening, Yuki caught her eye and gave her an encouraging smile. She felt herself relax, realizing that he hadn’t stopped trying to lift her spirits, even when she’d resisted. He’d waited patiently for her to meet him halfway, to let herself enjoy this.

The next race weekend, Yn felt that shift even more. In the drivers’ briefing, Pierre gave her a quick nod, a little smirk that said he hadn’t forgotten the night before, and Lando winked as they settled into their seats, making a quiet comment about "taking it easy on him" this time. Even Fernando Alonso, her nemesis in the notorious clash, gave her a measured glance, his respect clear without needing words. It was unspoken, but the ice had begun to melt.

During the race, Yn battled hard, scraping her way up from a P12 start to a P7 finish, her performance sharp and precise. In the closing laps, Yuki was on her radio, urging her on, and she could hear the pride in his voice when she crossed the line.

Afterward, in the cooldown room, Yuki sidled up to her, an easy grin on his face. “That’s two in a row. Might have to start watching my back soon, huh?”

She chuckled, nudging him. “You’d better. Wouldn’t want you to get too comfortable up there.”

For the first time, the ribbing felt real, like something she could lean into without the fear of letting her guard slip too far. In the post-race interview, she answered questions with a bit more ease, even allowing a genuine smile to show as she spoke about the team’s hard work and how grateful she was to be competing at this level. The harsh scrutiny was still there, of course, but she felt it less sharply, like its blade had dulled, if only slightly.

As they headed back to the garage, Yn lingered for a moment, watching the cars being prepped for the next race, the hum of mechanics and engineers filling the space. Yuki came up beside her, the two standing in companionable silence.

“You know,” he said eventually, keeping his voice low, “you’ve changed since the start of the season.”

She looked over at him, raising an eyebrow. “Oh yeah? And how’s that?”

“You don’t look like you’re trying to outrun everyone else’s expectations anymore,” he said, his gaze warm. “Now it looks like you’re actually racing.”

She felt a small smile tugging at her lips. “Guess I finally realized that I don’t have to do it alone. It doesn’t make me weaker to let people in… as long as they know I’m still here to win.”

He laughed, nudging her shoulder. “I’d expect nothing less. And trust me, nobody’s forgetting that anytime soon.”

For the first time in months, she felt like maybe, just maybe, she could allow herself to breathe. The hunger was still there, burning stronger than ever, but she was learning to balance it, learning that strength wasn’t something she had to carry alone. For the first time, she felt like she was standing alongside her competitors, not against them—and that they weren’t just rivals, but people who understood the fierce love she had for this sport, and the drive that made her who she was.

But the last few races had been a test of her patience and restraint, but Yn felt the spark beginning to wane as her car lagged just behind where she needed it to be. Every race was the same: a battle fought hard, inching closer, yet never quite close enough. She was slipping down the grid, the points slipping further out of reach. It didn’t matter how much she pushed; her car wasn’t holding up to her demands, but she refused to accept that. She refused to be anything less than perfect.

Determined to prove herself, she started taking risks she wouldn’t have before, squeezing her car into spaces with centimeters to spare, braking later, accelerating earlier, trying to shave any possible millisecond off her time. She was more aggressive, forcing her way through corners, even if it meant clipping a wing or bumping wheels. Yuki noticed it, too—how her eyes blazed with that fierce hunger, how she didn’t back down even when it might cost her. He tried talking to her, reminding her to pace herself, but she just brushed him off, insisting she had to push harder. There was no other option in her mind.

But her relentless drive hit a wall in the form of a brutal, unforgiving engine failure. It was a promising race, and she was within reach of a potential top-five finish when the engine sputtered and cut out entirely, leaving her coasting uselessly on the track. It took her a second to register it before the frustration exploded within her.

“Are you fucking kidding me?! Ah… this fucking car, it’s a fucking joke right?! shit.” Her voice echoed over the radio, laced with a fury she couldn’t contain. 

Her engineer’s voice crackled through the earpiece, calm and steady as they tried to soothe her. “Yn, please calm down. Bring it back in. We’ll review the data and see what happened.”

She punched the steering wheel in a rare display of emotion, swearing under her breath as she coasted to the side, finally yanking off her helmet in frustration. She could feel the eyes of her team, her fans, the cameras—all of them watching her as she paced by her car, gesturing angrily before finally slamming her helmet down, the taste of defeat bitter on her tongue. All she’d wanted was one shot, and it had been stolen from her, just like that.

The post-race press had a field day with her outburst. Headlines plastered with her image showed her storming away from the car, her helmet clutched tightly in her hands, her face twisted with frustration. Critics didn’t hold back, with articles condemning her demeanor, calling her “hot-headed,” “reckless,” and “immature.” Pundits questioned her character, her “temper,” insinuating that she was cracking under the pressure. The criticisms were brutal and skewed, with some even suggesting that perhaps she didn’t belong in Formula 1 if she couldn’t handle the competition.

“Her behavior’s unbecoming of an F1 driver,” one commentator noted with a sharpness that made her blood boil. “We’ve seen rookies come through and handle their failures with dignity. She should take a page from some of her peers, learn how to be gracious in defeat.”

The comparisons stung the most. They lauded other drivers for their “calm under pressure,” for their “measured responses,” twisting every emotion she showed as a sign of instability or proof that she wasn’t up to the challenge. It wasn’t just a critique of her as a driver; it was a full-blown assault on her as a woman in a sport still dominated by men. Every failure, every mistake, was amplified, dissected, and weaponized.

Yuki saw the articles too, his jaw clenching as he read through the unfair critiques. He knew how hard Yn worked, knew that her frustration was born from the same unrelenting drive he had seen in himself and so many others on the grid. It was just that when she showed it, it became a spectacle, a flaw they couldn’t wait to tear apart.

That evening, he found her sitting in the garage long after the others had left, staring at the empty spot where her car usually sat. She looked exhausted, the fire in her eyes dimmed to a dull, flickering ember.

“Yn.” He approached carefully, taking a seat next to her on the floor. “I saw what they’re saying.”

She scoffed, her voice laced with bitterness. “Let me guess. That I’m too emotional? That I’m a poor sport for being upset when things don’t go my way?”

Yuki didn’t sugarcoat it. “Yeah. They’re being idiots. It’s unfair, and it’s… it’s total bullshit.”

She looked down, fiddling with a loose thread on her racing suit. “You know, if any other driver on the grid got this frustrated, they’d call it passion. But for me, it’s a ‘temper problem.’ I just want to race, Yuki, but it feels like every mistake I make has a thousand people ready to pounce on it. And no matter how hard I work, no matter how much I push, it’s never enough.”

Yn was right. Every other diver on the grid got to be as frustrated or as angry as they wanted over how the race turned out, yet they had never had their character and demeanor be questioned and critiqued like hers. 

Yuki could only nod, understanding how different their situations were. 

They sat there for a while longer, just the two of them in the quiet of the garage, the weight of the situation filled the air thick. Yuki could feel Yn slipping back into herself.

It started with a few stray comments in the press, subtle and insidious. Reporters speculating on whether Yn’s recent guarded demeanor meant she was “cracking” under the pressure, her confidence misread as arrogance, her ambition painted as recklessness. The critiques hit harder as the season continued, comparing her to male drivers who had the luxury of aggressive reputations that only added to their mystique.

“Volatile.” That was the word most often splashed across headlines, capturing every moment she showed emotion, every interview where her frustration broke through the calm she worked so hard to maintain. And the comparison game began—who was she trying to emulate? Was she trying to live up to the male-dominated standards in the sport, or worse, was she letting her temper get in the way of real talent?

What stung most was the constant measuring of her against Yuki. Headlines dissected everything from her lap times to her post-race interviews, comparing her every move against her teammate, as if her accomplishments and setbacks couldn’t stand on their own. “Tsunoda Outshines Teammate’s Volatility,” they read. “Tsunoda the Team Anchor; Yn’s Performance Under Scrutiny.” She was no longer Yn, the rookie with promise and fire, but Yn, the volatile woman—impulsive, reckless, something to be managed, contained, tamed.

It was impossible not to feel every accusation like a weight pressing down, each word digging into her sense of self, twisting her love for the sport into something painful. She began to retreat, putting her walls back up, afraid to let herself be seen beyond the helmet and the points she could score.

The next race weekend, Yn fought her way through the practice sessions, chasing the consistency that critics claimed she lacked. When the car didn’t perform to expectations in qualifying, she threw herself into hours of analysis, barely speaking a word to anyone, keeping herself wrapped in that cold determination that left little room for warmth or laughter.

Yuki tried to get her to relax, but she could sense his hesitation, his silent worry each time he glanced her way, like he was walking on eggshells. His usual, easy jokes only drew a tight-lipped smile from her before she returned to her data, her focus unbreakable but brittle. He was trying to help, but every word, every supportive gesture felt like sympathy, a reminder of how far she’d fallen in everyone’s eyes.

By race day, Yn was in her own world, the world she knew best—her focus sharpened to a blade’s edge, her mind locked on the points, the precision, the hunger for a win that drowned out the noise. The lights went out, and she poured herself into every turn, fighting through the grid with a calculated aggression that sent her up the field, position by position, unwilling to let anything hold her back.

The radio crackled in her ear as she took P10, her engineer’s voice breaking through her concentration. “Nice work, Yn. Let’s keep pushing—we’re on for points.”

But she wanted more. She needed more. She pushed herself harder, forcing past competitors with a focus that bordered on ruthless, aiming for P8, then P7, clawing for every inch of track. Every sharp turn, every daring overtake was her way of silencing the voices that questioned her place on the grid.

She was climbing, closing in on P6 when she went into a corner too hot, her tires locking up briefly. She managed to hold her line, but the slight miscalculation dropped her back, just enough for the car behind to take advantage. The frustration flared, her hands tightening on the wheel as she tried to make up the time.

Yuki’s voice came through her radio, calm but steady. “Yn, don’t overdo it. You’re doing great—just keep it smooth and stay in the points.”

But to her, staying in the points wasn’t enough. She needed to break through, to prove every critic wrong with something impossible to ignore. She pushed even harder, desperate to climb those final few places.

When the race ended, she’d managed to hold onto P9. It was a respectable finish, another points finish to her name. But the adrenaline, the aching hunger for more, gnawed at her, leaving her feeling like she’d failed somehow. In the media pen afterward, reporters crowded in, questions buzzing around her, ready to dissect her every move.

“Yn, do you feel that your performance today was enough to prove your critics wrong?”

“Some say you’re too aggressive on the track—do you think that’s true?”

“What’s it like competing against Tsunoda, a more experienced driver, while you’re still finding your footing?”

The questions stung, thinly veiled accusations that she was still falling short, still not living up to the unspoken standards set for her. She kept her responses curt and focused, deflecting where she could, but the tightness in her chest lingered. Even with points, the narrative felt the same, as if she’d always be fighting an uphill battle to simply be seen for who she was.

Later, in the quiet of the paddock, Yuki found her sitting alone, still in her race suit, staring down at her hands. He sat beside her without a word, just letting the silence settle around them before he spoke.

“You know, you were amazing out there today,” he said softly, a warmth in his voice that she hadn’t let herself hear in days. “P9 is no joke, especially after the weekend you had.”

She kept her gaze on her hands, her fingers curling around the fabric of her gloves. “But it’s not enough, Yuki.” Her voice was tight, strained. “It’s like… no matter what I do, it’s never good enough for them. I feel like I’m being torn apart, analyzed for every mistake, every moment I let myself feel anything.”

Yuki’s hand found hers, a small, grounding gesture. “The public can be ruthless,” he admitted. “But they’re not the one in the car, you are.” a reminder from Yuki of how far Yn has gone from karting and now in F1.

Yn let his words sink in, feeling the weight of them like an anchor in the storm of criticism swirling around her. She looked at him, his expression so unguarded, so full of that familiar, unwavering loyalty he’d carried for her since their days in the Red Bull junior team.

“I’m just… tired, Yuki. I’m tired of being everyone’s spectacle.”

He nodded, squeezing her hand gently. 

A silence stretched between them, but it was different this time—softer, less heavy. She felt the weight in her chest loosen just slightly, a reminder that maybe she didn’t have to carry it all alone, even if the world wanted her to.

She let herself lean into Yuki’s support, into the reminder that her worth went deeper than the headlines, the criticism, the comparisons. She was here for something bigger, something she was still discovering, but something worth fighting for, not in spite of the world, but because of everything she knew she could be.

[namisweatheria]

OKAY WOW THANK YOU ALL FOR YOUR RESPONSES TO THIS. I saw someone say they want to draw fanart, and absolutely no pressure or anything, but I would be THRILLED. I mean, I already am thrilled with the enthusiasm this has received, truly thank you!!

Someone mentioned Usopp backing Sanji up in fights, and I was only thinking of the gag potential before but now I'm considering it more seriously. Something I've long wished for in One Piece is more combo-moves. If AU Usopp and Sanji always fought side-by-side to make up for their individual weaknesses, I think it could be SO cool. Even the simplest combination techniques can be difficult, but are so compatible with their two fighting styles. Sanji kicking someone up into the air so Usopp can shoot them down, Usopp shooting someone with one of his special trapping plants and Sanji taking them out- for them it's remarkably easy.

(Adding Chopper into their It's Okay Not To Have Monster Strength [Like Some People] club and having some combo moves with him, too, could be so sweet.)

It'd be fun if Nami and Zoro had combo moves too. Oh my god, remember when Zoro drowned himself in order to force Nami to save him, because he knew she would? I'm imagining that, but in battle. Doing his part of a combo move, which leaves him lethally vulnerable unless she finishes it. Forcing her to face her fears and fight, in the most irritating way possible. Holy shit. He would have the absolute best time tormenting her with this, I can just see his shit-eating grin. Oh, that's evil. He would.

Even when female characters in shounen get to fight, and aren't just relegated to support roles, it's normally in a much less gritty and visceral way. It's often tactical moves from a distance, magic or technology involved, some kind of wand or gun or avatar used. Personally that has created an insatiable hunger in me for tooth and nail bloody fists shounen women violence. So while Nami's abilities are more suited to powering-up Zoro's, it's important to me to try to get creative and think of another way. Not that her intelligence shouldn't be utilized, it should, but so should her muscles! For me. For my sake.

I loved when she used to just hit people with her staff directly, lol. OH HEY THAT REMINDS ME! I HAD A BEAUTIFUL TIME-SKIP ERA NAMI THOUGHT! What if instead of old wizard men collecting data from their lofty sky-ship, it was rough-and-tumble middle-aged-and-older butch women collecting geological and climate data on-the-ground in extreme conditions. They HAVE a sky ship but only to get between insane locations of weather extremity. Don't you know the most reliable data is collected in-person! So Nami's huge Time-Skip Power-Up is becoming largely immune to extreme temperatures and lightning, being able to see through fog, and being unaffected my unstable and dizzying environments. (Due to a combination of One Piece-typical 'If You Train You Can Just Do This' logic and scientific modifications.)

That way she could hit people with lightning AND her staff at the same time >:) Also it would be wicked and I think about on par with Canon Sanji's Post-TS and then Post-WCI flying and cyborg damage resistance.

I've also been thinking about Sanji's obsession with gender roles and how that would be effected by all this as well. He seems to enjoy being saved by Nami and Robin when it happens, but that might be only because 1) Their opponents were women and 2) Their normal dynamic is still overwhelmingly him saving them, so his idealized self-image of being a dashing prince charming who saves the beautiful woman isn't threatened.

If those two things were no longer true, well. >:) I THINK HE WOULD SUFFER. >:) And I think Nami would put up with a lot less shit. She wouldn't be able to hide behind him when she's scared, because he'd get himself killed against opponents she could take down herself. Nami would not do that. Sanji would still try it. Nami would be forced to make him see reality. There's only so much getting in the way in dangerous situations due to misogynistic ideals that a person can take. That could be a very interesting confrontation...

I think afterwards, he'd have to learn to disentangle his care-taking, protective instincts from heterosexual gender roles. I think he'd end up doing his dashing protector act at Usopp, lol. Who would love it. And in a cool older brother way at Choppa. Who would also love it. Wait it'd end up so cute.

Of course Nami's already formidable lesbian powers would increase to an un-foretold scale, as she'd be in there saving random women herself rather than sending someone else.

God, okay, there's still a lot more to think about but I have stuff to do so I have to leave it for now. But, basically: Monster Trio Nami AU. It's good for everyone!

I really miss the romance dawn trio where it's Zoro and Nami on either side of Luffy. The monster trio is great and everything but it does make me sad how Sanji took Nami's place. I miss the times when Zoro and Nami would threaten someone simultaneously, weapons drawn in sync. It felt so good in a gender way.

I've only just started thinking about this but I'd love to create things for an AU where Sanji just never gets that strong, and Nami powers up alongside Zoro and Luffy instead. I think it could be good for both Nami and Sanji's characters in different ways.

I think Sanji's whole thing about being made to feel subhuman for not being strong enough could be explored in such an interesting and even more powerful way if he really never got that strong. If he didn't ever have to be the warrior, if just being a cook like he always wanted to be was enough. Of course all the Strawhats contribute to the fights, but if he had more of a supportive role like Chopper that could be so interesting when it comes time to explore his insecurities. Going from 'the standards you were being held to are completely unreasonable and there's nothing wrong with being human' to 'you don't have to be strong at all, it's okay to just be you' could be soooo good. HE WOULD SUFFER SO MUCH MORE. But I think he'd end in an even healthier place. The journey could be so interesting.

AS FOR NAMI!!! She could be more like Zoro, fighting with the words of someone she lost in her mind. Bellemere told her to never lose to anyone, that girls have to strong too. It could be such a good what-if parallel to Kuina. If Kuina had a supportive adult encouraging her that she can be strong too, if her father hadn't been sexist, she could have gone just as far as Zoro does. The proof that her gender never made her inferior fighting right alongside him. God it'd be soooo satisfying and it'd make the message so much stronger. Also, Nami's slow development of becoming braver could be in the forefront. She'd have to fight herself so much harder to constantly be on the front lines. Plus, the comedy of an incredibly powerful person being a scaredycat is too good.

Which of course brings up, what happens to the scaredycat duo? I think the answer is related to what happens to Sanji's advice to Usopp in Water Seven. I think just because AU Sanji isn't strong, that doesn't mean he becomes any more fearful or less likely to put himself in harms way. Instead of the background gag of Nami and Usopp cowering together, it could change to Usopp constantly having to brave the battlefield to drag Sanji back out of it. I think they'd fight a lot, but very differently from Zoro and Sanji's fighting. Usopp gets mad because he doesn't want Sanji to get hurt, and it's hard to be truly hostile to someone with those kind of intentions.

Remember when Usopp reassured Chopper that 'it's okay to run away, just do what you can do'? And some of the others kinda made fun of him, like, 'That's your motto eh Usopp?'. He was telling Chopper what he wanted to hear, but much later we find he didn't really believe it, not when it's for himself. He also told Chopper it's okay when Merry's mast broke under his watch, "because we can replace the mast, but we can't replace you!" I think AU Usopp would be saying this kind of thing to Sanji all the time. They'd be very close. So when Usopp's insecurity gets the better of him in Water Seven, it's a huge betrayal for Sanji specifically. How could he say those things to him if all this time, he didn't really mean them? If it's not true for Usopp, where does that put Sanji?

It could go a lot of other ways too, though. Maybe their close relationship based on not being the strongest and being okay with it together would enable Sanji to talk Usopp down from leaving. Or, bad version, Sanji could take it just as personally as Usopp does, since Usopp is to him what Merry is to Usopp, and they both leave. God, they'd all be so heartbroken. Lots to think about...

As for Nami, I think she'd be a lot closer with Zoro. They'd be bickering all the time, but it would have that trust that Zoro and Luffy have underneath it. That if one of them needs a break, the other is there to pick up the slack. This is already their dynamic in a different way, both acting as secondary leaders, keeping things from getting too out of control. To me the best example of that is Whiskey Peak, when they're the only two who weren't fooled. I think it would help both of them retain their silliness if they were always on equal footing, fighting side-by-side. Some of my favorite East Blue moments are the couple of times they played jokes on the others together, and I think we'd see a lot more of that. When you trust the person next to you to be perfectly in-step with you, it's a lot easier to have fun even in dangerous situations.

I think especially Zoro needs help keeping his goofy side, and for Nami it'll help her get over her fears to have her reliable best friend right there egging her on. I just think they'd have a lot of fun!

Nami & Usopp, Zoro & Sanji, they're both fun dynamics, but I'd love to switch it up. There's just so much possibility to explore...

[sugarylawliet]

bells (L lawliet x reader)

> warnings: ANGSTTT, major death note spoilers

> i know i altered the rain scene a bit and combined it with the monster speech but i thought it fit nicely okay let me live 😫

     It wasn’t easy, working as part of the kira case. You knew that better than anyone. You knew that when you begged L to let you join the task force, and by the sorrowful look in his eyes in response to your request, he knew it too. What he also knew, though, was that you wouldn’t give up. No matter how many times he warned you of the dangers, “Y/N your heart could stop any minute,” “Y/N you’d have to say goodbye to your normal life,” “Y/N this puts us both in danger and i can’t lose you,” he knew all too well you would never let up. You would just persist on begging and begging, because you’re just like him. Stubborn. That’s just the thing he loved about you, but also the part of himself perhaps he hated the most. And so, he let you join the task force.

Now almost a year into the investigation, the large band of japanese police and american FBI agents dwindled down to a dedicated few, those who were willing to put their lives on the line to find kira. That few was you, L, Light Yagami, Cheif Yagami, Matsuda, Aizawa, and of course Watari. Misa tagged along too, living in the task force headquarters with everyone else though you weren’t sure exactly why. Maybe L kept her around because he couldn’t let go of the idea that she was the second kira. Stubborn. Though you didn’t agree with his theory, it wasn’t so bad having another girl around HQ.

“Hey Y/N, have you seen Ryuzaki around?” Light asked, walking into the main room placing a hand on your shoulder as you sat eyes glued to the surveillance footage you were to go over.

“Hmm, no actually. Haven’t seen him anywhere. Why, what’s up?” You turned around to face Light, the short nail of your thumb trapped between your front teeth; a habit you picked up from L.

“I don’t know it’s just... weird,” Light removes his hand to rub the back of his neck, “Usually Ryuzaki is always here going over something for the kira case, honestly it’s like the man never sleeps!” He lets out a laugh, and you smile too. It was hard to resist Light’s charm, he just had that effect on people. So charismatic, he couldn’t possibly be kira. Could he? “I guess it’s just strange not to see him anywhere.”

“Yeah, you’re right. I’ll look for him, I could use a break anyways.” You push yourself away from the desk, standing up from your chair to stretch with a groan before heading up the stairs- you had an idea of where he might be.

“Let me know when you find him, I’ve got some case stuff I want his opinion on.”

“Yes sir officer Yagami!” You did a soldier salute in his direction mockingly.

“Don’t call me that,” Light laughed with a wide smile and narrow eyes, a bright laugh that filled the echoey room. You smiled warmly. He wasn’t kira.

                                                     _____________

You push open the heavy metal door leading to the roof top of the tall building HQ was located at, your eyes meeting with a slouched figure drenched in rain water. You had a feeling he might be here.

“L!” You called, walking out into the heavy rainfall to collect him. What the hell was he doing out here? He paid no attention to your calls, only continuing to gaze outward at the buildings below.

“L! L, what are you doing out here? You’ll get sick, come on!” You approached him, tapping on his shoulder to get his attention.

“I hear the bells, Y/N,” L took in a deep breath, taking his time to inhale the scent of fresh rain water and cold crisp city air. His dark eyes were clouded with thought, though you couldn’t tell which thoughts.

“What are you talking about? C’mon, let’s get inside.”

“Y/N love, I fear we may be parting ways soon.”

“Huh?”

“I believe I may have bitten off more than I can chew, Y/N. I’ve encountered a monster. A monster who always tells lies. Lying monsters are a real nuisance, you know? They’re much more cunning than other monsters. They pose as humans even though they have no understanding of the human heart; they eat even though they've never experienced hunger; they study even though they have no interest in academics; they seek friendship even though they do not know how to love. I’ve encountered this monster and, well, I’m afraid I might be eaten by it. Because in truth,” He takes in another thoughtful breath, pushing his raven hair dripping with water away from his forehead, “I am that monster.”

Amongst the hard rain pattering against steel, the scattered cracks of thunder, the sound of your own heavy breaths, it all felt silent. So silent it hurt. You couldn’t breath, sure you felt yourself taking in breaths but it wasn’t enough. Your lungs felt cold and wet. It was like L stole your language capabilities, like he reduced you to a little kid who only used their vocal chords to cry. You wanted to cry. You wanted to say ‘L, what do you mean?’ but in your chest you knew what he meant. Because you heard the bells too.

“L,” You began,

“Lawliet.”

“Hm?”

“Lawliet,” He turned to face you, running his hands down your arms before taking your hands, enclosing your fingers in his, “That’s my real name. Lawliet.”

You blinked hard. Were you choking? Suffocating? “We’ll be alright,” You smiled, letting out a stiff breath, “You didn’t get the name ‘best detective in the world’ for nothing, right?”

L lightly moves a hand to the back of your head and places a soft kiss to your lips. You kiss back, tasting the remnants of buttercream and black coffee on his chapped lips. You rake his dark hair through your fingers before he pulls away all too soon.

“Mhm. Let’s go inside love, you’ll get sick.” He hummed.

                                                    _____________

Your eyes flutter open, hand instinctively floating to the space next to you expecting to find L, but all you felt was the smooth linen of hotel bed sheets fuzzy with loose balls of thread and cotton. You groan, rubbing the sleep from your eyes as you turn on your phone. Almost 9 AM? That’s late. Why wouldn’t L wake you?

You make your way down the stairs into the main HQ room, where the whole crew was gathered around a table studying the black notebook they collected from the yatsuba case. L, though, sat at his same chair, staring intensely at seemingly nothing, biting on his thumb nail.

“Ryuzaki, what’s the meaning of all this?” Matsuda asks raising his voice, “You’ve somehow gotten approval from another country to use the notebook for an execution?!”

“Watari, excellent work, thank you.” L ignores him completely. “First things first, please make arrangements to transport the notebook immediately.”

“Ryuzaki-” Light this time, “What are you trying to do?”

“I’m gonna try out the notebook for you.”

The task force all let out an audible gasp, including you.

“Ah, Y/N, you’re awake. I let you sleep in, I hope you don’t mind. You needed rest.” 

“Wh- Ryuzaki, are you crazy? We know the notebook’s power is real, we’ve seen it before, how else do you think kira operates?!” You dismissed.

“And besides, who’s gonna write the name? If someone starts writing in the notebook, they’ll have to obey the 13 day rule and keep writing names forever!” Matsuda adds.

“It’s already been worked out, the person who will be writing names is a criminal scheduled to be executed in just over 13 days. If he’s still alive 13 days after writing the name, he’ll be pardoned from execution.”

You move closer to L, sitting in your usual seat next to him and take his hand, “But still...to sacrifice a life?-”

“We’re very close!” L yells, raising his fingers to rest at his temples, dropping his hand from yours. You look down at your feet. “If we work this out, the entire case will be solved.”

The flash of red from the monitors before you pulls your attention back up, the room illuminating a cherry hue like the toppings from L’s cake. An alarm begins to blare in your ear, sending your heart rate up as you jump from your chair. Matsuda holds on to your shoulder, concern painted all over his face. Jeez, he looks more scared than you. That’s Matsuda for you. 

“What’s going on?! A blackout?!”

L sat calmly at his chair like nothing was wrong. You knew he wasn’t calm. He wasn’t chewing on his thumb. He was staring up at the red flashing monitor with a furrowed brow, his eyes full of deniel. Worry. L Lawliet, worrying. Who would have guessed. 

The red hue of the computer screens flashed white all at once, one sentence displayed in black letters: All Data Deletion. 

“Watari!” L cried. You had never seen him like this.

“Data deletion? What the hell is going on?!” Chief Yagami yelled impatiently. 

“I told Watari that he should erase all information in the event that something were to happen to him.”

“If something were to happen... you don’t think?...”

“Where is the shinigami?!” L yelled.

You all frantically searched around the room, mumbles of “Where’d it go?” and “I don’t see it” filled the air. Tears brimmed your eyes as you scanned every corner of the room. This couldn’t be happening. This wasn’t happening.

“Everyone,” L called, “The shinigami-” He cut himself off, inhaling a quick sharp breath with wide eyes. He was still. No, no, no, no, no please this wasn’t happening. His metal spoon dropped to the floor with a loud clatter before he himself fell onto the cold tiling. 

“Ryuzaki!” Light dove for him, cradling him in his arms as he lay silently struggling for air. You rushed over as well, sitting on the other side of him. You grasped his hand and brought it to your heart. “L, L, Lawliet, you’re fine, it’s okay stop it! This isn’t funny, STOP!” You yelled at him through voice cracks, struggling to swallow back sobs. He only stared back with wide eyes. Could he even see you? You brushed his thick ebony hair behind his ears and leaned in close. You could feel his shallow breathing on your nose. “It’s okay, it’s okay, you’re alright, right? We’re gonna be alright?” You begged of him. Did you expect him to respond?

Slowly, almost with hesitance to admit defeat, his eyes fluttered closed. No, god this wasn’t real. You were dreaming. “L! L stop it! Wake up, please just wake up. You can’t leave me here just wake up please!” You sobbed into his chest. It wasn’t moving. All the nights you fell asleep to the rhythm of his chest moving up and down with his breaths and his heartbeat following along- it was all gone. this was nothing like that. He was gone. And so you cried harder. Your throat hurt- sore from the sobbing and screaming. It was all you could do. 

“Y/N...” Aizawa placed his hand on your shoulder, “Y/N, I’m sorry. it’s time to go.”

“Nuh-uh” You hummed through cries. You couldn’t bring yourself to say no. L would want it. But you weren’t letting him go. You weren’t giving up like that. Stubborn. 

Aizawa crouched next to you. “I know...” He whispered. “You have to let go.”

You shook your head, you pleaded, begged for him to not take him. You needed him. But Aizawa was stronger than you. He walked around you, picking up L bridal style and taking him out of the room.

“No, no, please, Aizawa please! I need him, please,” You reached for L’s limp hand, but it only lifelessly fell from your grasp as Aizawa walked away.

You helplessly begged for L back, still crying tirelessly on the cold floor. For Aizawa to just let you hold him; keep him. Please, he’s fine, just let me have him, I’ll take care of him, please, I just need him. But nobody listened. It hurt. You almost thought you were next to have a heart attack because it hurt. And no matter how long you laid there crying, shaking, you didn’t stop. It didn’t stop hurting. Because you were stubborn. Just like him.

[digi-tama-in-your-pocket]

Sloppy little v-pet guide

It feels like the virtual pet community on tumblr is super small and mostly favors Tamagotchi, I feel way unqualified to do this, but here’s a quick, super basic guide to the modern Digimon virtual pets that I know of ( I say modern but I use the term loosely because they’re all very much nostalgia bait )

If you really don’t know anything about virtual pets at all... they’re little LCD key chain games, pet simulators, you feed them and train/play with them to fill up their heart meters, clean up their poop, put them to bed, treat injuries and sickness, watch them grow into new forms, and try to keep them from dying, Digimon sets itself apart from the rest by connecting to to other Digimon V-pets to do battles and more. 

One thing to note is that Most, if not all V-pets can connect to each other even if they’re not the same version. They have a very basic battle system in place if they’re different versions, but it’s slightly more involved if they’re the same version. ( There’s even a fan made device that can connect them to battle online and play in an online digimon game )

Last thing i’ll say is that if you are thinking of getting a Japanese v-pet, all the ones I mention here  are in english, with the exception of the digimon’s name, but that can be looked up by looking over one of the evolution trees on Humulosmon’s website, Digitama Hatchery. 

Perhaps I should move this to it’s own FAQ section on my blog but who even opens people’s blogs anymore? With that out of the way, let’s get this started under a read more!

Digital Monster Ver. 20th ( AKA the DM 20th )

This is the most accessible and affordable Digimon V-pet on the market right now. So affordable that even though Bandai has issued slightly improved versions in Japan for twice the price, most Japanese fans prefer to import these from overseas to save money. Some people have sighted them at Target for $5 but you’ll typically find them for $20.

They look just like the original Digimon virtual pet, but they are actually a special 20th anniversary edition that has some new features... new features that, for some reason, Bandai are not advertising at all, and I don’t know why.

New features not in the original virtual pet include:

Choose from all 5 of the original digimon eggs on one device

Battle the AI opponents in a Colosseum mode 

Raise two digimon at the same time

Your two Digimon can tag-team battle, and some can even fuse into a new digimon ( this is called Jogress, short for “joint progress” )

Put your digimon down for a nap for up to three hours hours in case you’re busy

Keep a log of all the different Digimon you’ve raised, giving you a goal to fill it out

New forms that were not present in the original virtual pets

New unlockable eggs with special digimon inside

You can actually load your save data, so if you need to take a break from your v-pet or you have a low battery, you can just pop out the battery without fear of losing your digimon or your log book progress.

This is the v-pet i’d recommend to everyone who’s interest in Digimon V-pets. It does have it’s downsides though. This v-pet is programmed to poop a lot more frequently than other v-pets for some reason, which becomes a real problem if you’re busy or you over sleep ( pro-tip, set your digimon’s clock ahead a bit so it wakes up when you do. All Digimon wake up at 7AM ), there are also some exclusive eggs locked to certain colors of the device. You’ll have to do a little research on that. Digitama Hatchery has all the info you need on that subject.  It’s also fairly basic compared to other virtual pets, but not by a lot. And lastly, you cannot pause this pet. ( Pro tip, actually you can, but you have to press the reset button to do it )

As mentioned earlier, there is a new version of this device called the Digital Monster Ver. Revival, exclusive to Japan. It lessens the poop frequency, and has a proper pause funtion instead of naps. But it’s twice the price, so I’d say you just put down $20 on the western release.

Digimon Pendulum Ver. 20th ( AKA the Pen 20th )

These are a lot like the Digital Monster Ver. 20th. But instead of being a special reprint of the original virtual pet, they’re a special reprint of the Digimon Pendulum, which didn’t come out in the west as far as I know. The main difference here is that instead of button mashing to battle and train, you shake the device repeatedly.  You have to get to know the rhythm and number of shakes your digimon requires to get the best results.

The key difference between this v-pet and the one above:

They poop a lot less frequently than the DM20th, even when there’s two digimon

The sound is very different

You still get multiple eggs on each device, but with far more exclusives.

You can pause them by putting them to sleep when it’s not their natural bed time

Device makes a subtle sound when the Digimon poops so you know when to clean it

They wake up at 8AM instead of 7AM

A lot more of the digimon can Jogress, in fact most of them can

The eggs are somewhat themed ( beast, aquatic, robots, evil, good, ect. )

These Digimon are very desireable, but they’re also unfortunately very overpriced compared to the DM 20th, as they only came out in Japan. I don’t even want to mention how much I paid to get two of them...  They come in four colors, Silver black, Silver Blue were wave 1, and Beelzemon, and Dukemon themed devices were wave 2... The wave 1 and wave 2 devices share a lot of digimon, but they do have some exclusives.  On top of that, I hear these are prone to losing their save data, so it’s recommended to reset it every time you change the batteries, and handle with care.

Digimon Pendulum Z ( AKA the Pen Z )

This is a lot like the Digimon Pen 20th, but it’s not a special anniversary reprint. It is actually a continuation of the original Pendulums.  So sadly, you only get one egg in these devices. But, the Digimon you can obtain are mostly new Digimon that have not featured in a virtual pet before, and some even make their debut on these devices.  They’re also a tad bit more nuanced. Here’s the key differences between the Pen Z and the Pen 20ths.

One Egg per device like the original 90′s v-pets, which means no tag-team battles

You can only raise one Digimon at a time, but you can “Back up” your Digimon, essentially preserving them in suspended animation where they won’t age or get sick, so you can raise another Digimon. You can have up to three Digimon on your device this way.

Evolution trees are slightly bigger

Hearts fill up and deplete in halves now, and older Digimon can have more hearts than older v-pets

The device tells you how many times you need to shake it for battles, removing the guess work and making it easier

New close ups on your digimon’s face when they perform strong hits

Digimon went back to waking up at 7AM

RPG elements added to the Colosseum, your Digimon now has a level and can earn EXP to get stronger, and to effect what they evolve into. You get a congratulations screen when you beat this mode.

In Colosseum mode you fight three digimon in a row, with the third one being a stronger “boss” digimon

Single use items that can completely fill digimon’s hearts, change their performance in battle, double EXP, and more

Your digimon can have a random event trigger, usually it finds an item or an enemy worth lots of EXP when this happens.

These things are expensive, but not as expensive as the Pen 20th, and are some of the newest virtual pets you can get. In fact, wave 2 of the Pen Z has not even been released yet. You can only get them by pre-ordering through Premium Bandai, they ship out in April, so act while supplies last. You can only pre-order them in packs of three unfortunately. No individuals.

Digital Monster X Ver 1-3 ( AKA DMX, DMX2, and DMX3 )

Here’s the last modern Digimon V-pet I have any kind of experience with. The Digital Monster X. These ones are the most nuanced yet in my opinon, and they have my favorite mechanics.  Also, they come with lore I guess?  If you slip your hands in between the cardboard packaging, you’ll find a tiny comic... of course I can’t read it. But it goes something along the lines of... “ King Drasil, the king of the Digital World, created some kind of virus to kill off Digimon and solve an overpopulation issue, but the Digimon mutated the “X-Antibody” that makes them resist the virus and are rebelling against King Drasil”, it’s wild and weird and I guess there’s more lore that I haven’t dug up yet and a TV special I’ve not seen yet... anyway, onto the pet..

This one no longer has the shaking mechanic and goes back to button presses. But it adds in a new mechanic of it’s own called the X Antibody Indicator...  Actually... this is technically a continuation of the Pendulum X, which introduced the X antibody, but I don’t know much about that v-pet, so I won’t go into it.  And once again, we only choose from one egg this time.

They came out in three waves, each having two devices in each wave, and those devices have some exclusive digimon, but a lot of shared Digimon, so you’ll have to make your own call on weather or not you want more than one v-pet per wave. 

This thing is a lot like the Pendulum Z, so I will use that as a basis, here is what makes this different from the Pendulum Z aside from the shaking mechanic going away

XAI rolls, a new mechanic that involves rolling dice. You do this once daily to determine the random events for the day, you do it before the colosseum to determine how difficult it will be that day, and you do it before each battle to effect how easy it is to land a strong attack.

Colosseum mode battles are now called “areas” and have pixelated Landscapes to make it feel more like a Quest mode rather than a series of battles

Colosseum mode will eventually start throwing more than three enemies at you. Your digimon’s hunger will deplete in the Colosseum, if you make it far enough, there are rest areas in which you can feed your Digimon.

Even larger evolution trees

A lot of evolution trees are locked until you advance far enough into the Colosseum

Most of the Digimon are “X-Antibody” counterparts of existing Digimon ( this won’t mean much on the little pixelated screen, but if you look up their key artwork, you’ll find that they look very different with much more intricate designs than their original counterparts. Think “Alola Pokemon” )

These things are great, probably my favorite mechanically speaking, however, I don’t much care for the X-antibody Digimon, or the Rosters of each V-pet.  And while I did follow an evolution guide on Digitama Hatchery, I often didn’t get what I was aiming for, so maybe I didn’t know what I was doing, idk, it was my first Digimon V-pet outside of the DM20th, so I was still learning.

These ones are also fairly expensive, I probably spent more than I needed to just buying one of these, when I paid the price most people sell two of them for. Only other major warning I hear is that the wave 1 devices have very bad screens that display things way too dark. So keep that in mind...  BUT, before you buy, these things are strongly rumored to be releasing in the west. Meaning they’ll likely be sold for a cheaper, more reasonable price.. the rumor was that they’d be announced early this year, so i’ll give it until March.

And there you go, a little  guide to modern Digimon V-pets. Hope it helps someone, anyone, make a decision if they’re interested at all in these little things. 

These are only the modern V-pets, there’s loads of older pets that likely go for obscene prices, you’ll have to do your own research on those. I really don’t know much about the upcoming Vital Bracelet, and honestly I don’t know if i’m going to get it if it’s tied to fitness. Seems like a poorly timed release during the pandemic if you ask me. And the “Digivice” that looks closer to the devices you see in the anime is not so much a virtual pet as it is an LCD mission mode game.  I have ZERO experience with those but I have ordered one recently, i’ll come back and talk about it when it gets here.

And remember, check out Humulosmon’s website, Digitama Hatchery for tons of resources. At the very least, it’s a good way to see what your Digimon is meant to look like instead of trying to interpret the pixel art yourself.

[hhhhhhhappycow]

Prince of Tennis 2019 Hunger Games AU:

(Aka something I half-daydreamed after reading the Hunger Games prequel and watching the Prince of Tennis live action series):

When 15 year old Lu Xia volunteers as the tribute for District 4, even the peacekeepers are bewildered as to whether he can do that. After all, he spent the majority of his childhood in the Capitol with his mother. However he was born in District 4 and returned there the year before to live with his father in the Victor's Village, and so they allow it.

People talk, as they always do, wondering whether this was why he returned to them at all, why he kept to himself and always seemed to be training for something. It was.

The 15 year old boy he took the place of, Ah Mu, sobs with relief and gratitude and sorrow for this stranger who has certainly saved his life.

His father, the famed Victor, Lu Xiangqian, only watches in silence as his son walks toward the stage. There is no pride in his face, only terror.

Next they call the female tribute, and nobody steps forward for Qi Ying as she moves towards the stage, dwarfed by all those around her. She knows she doesn't stand a chance.

Lu Xiangqian is silent as he accompanies his son on the journey to the Capitol. Although he does not say anything, it is clear that this brings back memories of his own Reaping, 20 years previously, when he was just an unknown boy from an impoverished family, and not yet an underdog success story lauded by the Capitol. He has not been there in years, had returned to District 4 shortly after marrying and remained there even when his Capitol wife left him, taking their infant son with her, to return to her home. He is met with cheers and screams in the streets.

Also accompanying them is Qi Na, Qi Ying’s aunt and a fellow previous Victor. She won her own games two years after Lu Xiangqian, and although not quite as beloved a figure as he is, she too is welcomed in the Capitol. In spite of the quiet life she has enjoyed since her own games in the Victor’s Village of District 4, she takes it upon herself to mentor both Lu Xia and Qi Ying, determined that one of these small children will make it out alive. Still, her heart breaks every time she looks at them, realizing she will at some point likely have to make the choice between saving her niece and saving her former mentor and friend’s son.

Lu Xiangqian cannot bring himself to mentor his own son, and he knows that Lu Xia would resist all attempts for him to do so. Instead he spends time talking with the others at the training centre, giving tips when he knows Lu Xia is listening in. In particular, he finds himself bonding with a plucky young boy from District 8, Qiao Chen, who somewhat reminds him of himself.

Despite Qi Na’s advice for them to make allies, Lu Xia keeps to himself, and Qi Ying sticks close to his side. He makes no effort to befriend her, but he does not send her away either.

During training, they meet some of the other tributes.

Mu Siyang is the Career tribute from District 2, although he is not the standard Career as Lu Xia thinks of them. Siyang trained along with several other boys from his year, and managed to best them all. At 17, despite being a year younger than is usual for volunteers, the mentors from District 2 believed him to be far more capable than any of their 18 year old trainees, and so prompted him to step forward. Siyang, who had long since accepted that he would one day be reaped, merely did as he had been asked, with little complaint. He is tall and strong and by far the favorite to win, even favored by the Head Game-maker's own son, Ji Jingwu. His one weakness, which he hides from the tributes, is an old arm injury that occasionally acts up. Like Lu Xia, he largely keeps to himself, although he seems willing to train with others when they approach him.

Another unusual choice for a Career- and also a favorite for victory- is 17 year old Zhuo Zhi, from District 1. Similar to Siyang, he was supposed to volunteer in the following year, at 18. However, at the Reaping, it was his younger brother's name that they called, and the 18 year old who was supposed to volunteer- Guan Yue- remained silent, knowing that Zhuo Zhi would take his place. Lu Xia immediately marks him, aside from Siyang, as the toughest competition. Zhuo Zhi is careful not to practice his skills in front of the others, and there are rumours- supported by his high scores from the Game-makers- that he has no weaknesses. He seems to spend time with Siyang the most, seeking out his company and joking in an interview that they were both clearly fated to be in the games together this year rather than the following year.

Yan Zhiming, an 18 year old from District 3, is seemingly omnipresent in the training arena. He watches his competitors train with a sharp gaze, gathering data on all of his opponents. He takes the time to learn all of their strengths and weaknesses. It is only when Zhang Baiyang from District 7, tired of being watched, snaps at him to actually pick up some skills while he can or his data isn't going to be of any use in the arena, that he realizes he needs to learn to put his information to use.

Although not a Career, and despite only being 16, Zhang Baiyang is another favorite to win, strong and steely and determined. The only problem is he does not do so well with interviews, acting sullen and withdrawn in a way that comes across as sulky rather than arrogant. He puts maximum effort into training, although he himself does not seem confident in his ability to win. When Yan Zhiming approaches him with the offer of an alliance, he is reluctant to accept, but ultimately agrees after a seeming change of heart. Neither of them know how long it will last.

Qiao Chen, also aged 16, is from District 8 and is considered more of a dark horse in the competition. While he does not have the strength of the Careers or Baiyang, he is agile and has high endurance. His cheery attitude also endears him, both to the viewers and other contestants. Although not Baiyang, who gets fed up with Qaio Chen following him and trying to copy his strength exercises. At the prompting of Lu Xiangqian, he attempts to ally himself with both Lu Xia and Qi Ying, trying to earn their trust. Lu Xia remains suspicious that this is either just a ploy or that his father is orchestrating it solely for his benefit.

He Xinglong, 18, is from District 11 and is considered another dark horse. In interviews he is mild-mannered and friendly, but when talk turns to family, his face turns hard and he announces that he promised his father he would come home, and that he intends to keep that promise. He is up there in terms of raw strength, although in the training sessions he spends more time working with the paints and learning to camouflage and hide himself. Asides from Qiao Chen, he is the only one Lu Xia may consider as a potential ally.

While not a favorite to win by any means, it is not considered outside the realm of possibilities for Chi Dayong, an 18 year old from District 5, to emerge victorious. He is an all-rounder, strong and intelligent, although he is somewhat slow and tends to trust others perhaps too quickly. To the surprise of many, Siyang seems to befriend him, becoming the only person other than Zhuo Zhi (and occasionally Yan and Lu Xia) that Siyang speaks with. He seems to be aware of the fact that he will not win, and is simply striving to stay alive for as long as possible.

Despite the rumours and the fact that the girl from his home of District 6 is, Tang Jiale, also aged 18, is not a morphling addict. His twitchiness comes from nerves only, as like Dayong he knows he is unlikely to live. While he is nimble and quick, he is not necessarily strong and he lacks stamina. He becomes close to Dayong over the course of their training, and by the time the two head into the arena they have a strong pact: If they're going out, they're going out together, at least.

Huang Jing and Ma Xiuwen are from District 9 and District 10 respectively, and deep down they both know they will not last long. Still, both boys are just shy of 15, and are in denial about their odds, doing their best in training to gain skills and strength in spite of the fact that their mentors have already abandoned them as lost causes. Together they copy the moves that Siyang does, trying to emulate him, and even Lu Xiangqian and Qi Na offer them advice. Huang Jing reassures Xiuwen that their training will pay off, that the two of them will make it right to the end, but he knows his words are empty.

The first time that anybody pays attention to Qi Ying is during the interview stage. She departs from her script and speaks of the atrocities, both awaiting them and in their home districts. Her speech is heart-rending poignant and heavily edited by the time it reaches the Capitol.

Lu Xia does not say much in his interviews, only stating that he is here to beat his father's records, although he does, to the surprise of many, defend Qi Ying.

Jiale and Dayong drum up some popularity in the interviews, with their clear affection for each other being viewed as an inspirational friendship by many. They both secretly wonder how much of it is built on the need to survive.

Another popular duo, for a different reason, are Baiyang and Qiao Chen. Their squabbling during training comes to a head during the interviews, and members of the Capitol gossip about the potential for a passionate showdown between the two once they enter the arena.

Siyang's interview only gains him more respect: He is introspective, intelligent, and calm, speaking about the event that is about to unfold with sorrow but also a resignation that is mature beyond his years.

Zhuo Zhi plays up the mysterious angle, bantering with the host (and Jiale, in an unexpected friendship that some of the audience love) and smirking throughout. The only time he cracks slightly is when his brother, who he volunteered for, is mentioned: That is when his determination to get home is truly revealed.

Lu Xia is slowly starting to realize that winning the Hunger Games may be harder than he initially thought.

[jade4813]

The Lies We Tell Ourselves, Chapter 4

Fandom: Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist

Title: The Lies We Tell Ourselves

Rating: PG (I’m assuming it’ll stay there?)

Pairing: Zoey/Max

Synopsis: Max would do anything for Zoey. Including posing as her fake boyfriend to give her father one last “big moment” to celebrate with her. Nothing could possibly go wrong. After all, it’s only his heart that stands to be broken. Right?

Chapter: 4/?

Author’s Notes: Takes place after Zoey’s Extraordinary Glitch.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

“So, you want to go on a date tonight?” Max asked, wheeling his chair around the edge of her desk, his tablet balanced on his lap. He saw her shoot a quick glance towards Joan’s office and resisted the urge to follow her gaze. Joan had taken the news of their “relationship” in stride – though, given her current romantic situation, she couldn’t exactly do otherwise. However, she had exercised enough oversight to order that Max report directly to her for the foreseeable future, heading off any accusations of preferential treatment. Still, if they were going to sell the fiction of their relationship, Zoey and Max had agreed they needed to act like a couple, even at work. And that meant being seen going on dates.

And – if Max was very lucky – maybe even flirting in the hallways. But he was getting ahead of himself.

“Ah, sure,” she agreed. “That’d be great.” When she offered him a small smile, he returned the gesture and wheeled back around to his desk. Their first official fake-date. He couldn’t wait.

As it turned out, however, fate had other plans. With Tobin and Leif tackled the next phase for Chirp, it was up to Zoey and Max to troubleshoot the newest problem with the SPRQ Watch. A little after four, Joan called them into her office to notify them that the watch had developed its newest glitch: it was swapping heartrate and step counter data, leading to wildly inaccurate (and somewhat alarming) readouts for both. When she declared they weren’t to go home until it was fixed, Max inwardly groaned. So much for their date. Their fake-date, he corrected himself quickly.

But later that night, hunched over his computer with only Zoey for company, he decided the situation could have been worse. At least he got to be with her.

“You know, you don’t have to stay,” she called out to him, leaning back in her chair to stretch.

Max was a little taken aback by her offer, and he replied, “It’s all right. I’m happy to help.”

She threw him a slight grimace. “Max, please. It’s silly to ruin your whole night. I can take care of this; I think I’m pretty close to identifying the problem. It seems silly for us both to stick around.”

Although he wanted to argue, he changed his mind when he got an idea. “If you’re sure?” he asked, standing and reaching for his jacket.

Zoey looked a little surprised. “Of course I’m sure! Go on! I’ll see you tomorrow!”

But she wouldn’t have to wait that long. When he returned to the office twenty minutes later, she was sitting quietly at her desk, staring morosely at lines of code. “Max? What are you doing here? I thought you went home.”

He held up one of the two bags he was holding, and he saw the exact minute the smell of the food it carried made its way to her desk because her eyes went wide and she straightened in her chair. “You really thought I’d abandon you here by yourself? I thought you knew me better than that,” he chided her gently. “I went for a food run. I figured if we couldn’t go out for our date – our fake-date – then I’d bring our fake-date back here to us.”

“That’s…very thoughtful of you,” she remarked, though she hesitated and threw one last look at her computer screen.

He knew what she was thinking. “Give me five minutes while I set up in the conference room, but then you really need to take a break to eat. The glitch will still be there after dinner, but you won’t be if you pass out from hunger. Plus, brains work better with food.”

“I had food!” she protested, her voice following him to the conference room. “I got some chips from the vending machine earlier!”

“Cheetos are not food,” he called back over his shoulder, sliding the door shut behind him with his foot. Glancing at her desk one more time to make sure she hadn’t followed, he hurried to set the scene.

It took Zoey more like six minutes to find a stopping point in the code she was reviewing and make her way to the conference room, and when she did, he smiled at her gasp of surprise. “What is all this?” she asked.

He held her chair for her as she lowered herself slowly into her seat, looking at the meal he’d spread out before her. “Deli sandwiches from that place you like down the street. They were out of all the good sides, so I’m afraid I was stuck with kale chips.” He paused, considering, before acknowledging, “Which I’m not entirely sure are an actual food. But if we get desperate, I’m sure the vending machine still has some Doritos I can scavenge. I figured you were probably sick of coffee by now, so I got you a cup of hot tea with a little honey instead.” Just the way she liked it.

She nodded absently, as though she was still trying to take it all in. When he saw her finger the edge of the Happy Birthday tablecloth in amazement as he joined on the other side of the table, he threw her a wry look. “Okay, so the convenience store a couple blocks away was pretty low on options. But a first date requires a certain amount of panache. Even a fake one. And this was the best I could do under the circumstances.”

“It’s…amazing. No, really. It’s perfect,” she rushed to reassure him. “But are those really a good idea?” she asked, nodding at the cluster of birthday candles he’d stuck into two cupcakes – makeshift candelabra – in the middle of the table. Darting a cautious look towards the ceiling, she looked around for a sprinkler system.

“Oh, right,” he agreed quickly. He’d been so swept away by the idea for this impromptu date, that thought hadn’t occurred to him. “Maybe we should blow those out. Getting soaked would probably put a damper on the ambiance.”

Zoey picked up one of the muffins and handed him the other. Before blowing it out, however, she suggested, “What do you think? Should we make a wish?”

One corner of his mouth quirked upward. He already had everything he wanted. Well…almost. “Why not? I guess it is tradition.” He watched as she closed her eyes, pondering her own wish. In the faint light of the candles as they cast a soft glow around her face, Max thought she had never been more beautiful. Then she pursed her lips and exhaled quickly, extinguishing the flame.

When she opened her eyes again and saw his candles were still lit, she threw him a puzzled frown. “You didn’t make a wish?”

“I was waiting for you to go first,” he answered. It wasn’t a lie, but it also wasn’t entirely the truth. He’d been too captivated by her to even remember he was holding candles of his own. “I didn’t want to take the chance that we’d confuse any potential wish-granting fairy if we both went at the same time.”

She pressed her lips together, trying not to reward his bad joke with a smile, and he closed his eyes. He didn’t have to ponder his wish. It was the only thing in the world that he really wanted. I wish… a voice in his mind whispered softly as he prepared to blow out the candles. I wish…

As they cleaned up after their meal, Zoey remarked, “There’s something I should probably tell you. I actually…well, I was afraid this would be weird. Going on a date with you. A fake date. Going on a fake date with you.”

He threw her a bland look. “Our first romantic fake-date is basically an impromptu birthday party that is somehow set nowhere close to either of our birthdays. That’s not weird?”

He answering bubble of laughter washed over him, sending shivers down his spine. “Okay, weirder,” she acknowledged. “This is actually…very sweet. I just thought, you know…we’ve been friends for a long time. I figured it would be awkward to transition that into a romantic relationship. Even a fake one. Didn’t you?”

Picking up a stray kale chip – which he was still convinced wasn’t real food – he popped it in his mouth as he shrugged. “Not really. I always figured the best relationships start with friendship. If the person you love is also your favorite person in the world, why would it be weird?” Not wanting to spoil the mood by reminding Zoey of the lingering shadow of his own feelings, he focused his attention on his empty chip bag, crumpling it into a tiny ball as he and joked, “I always thought it would be like hanging out with your best friend, only, you know, with more kissing.”

“Are we going to be doing that?” she asked softly, her words freezing him in his place. His arm had been lifted to toss his garbage towards the trash can, but he lowered it slowly to the table as he considered her question. “Kissing, I mean,” she clarified, though it was hardly necessary.

Max sighed, pulling his attention away from the mess as he met her eyes across the table. “Honestly? I don’t know.”

“I wouldn’t bring it up if it weren’t important,” she reassured him, skirting the edge of the table to stand by his died. “But when we were at dinner with David and Emily the other night, she started asking me questions when we were in the kitchen cleaning up.”

“Questions? What kind of questions?” he asked, surprised that she hadn’t mentioned it before.

She waved her hand in the air in a vague gesture. “Oh, I don’t know. Just…questions.” When he just stared at her, she huffed and admitted, “All right, so it kinda felt like a cross-examination, but she’s an attorney. You know how they are. I guess she thought we were acting a little weird.”

He frowned. “Weird how? You think she suspected the truth?”

Zoey looked down, her hands fiddling idly with a discarded napkin. “I don’t know. Maybe not that so much as…um…well, that our relationship may not be…going…well. I tried to explain that we just hadn’t been dating for very long so we were still in the awkward phase of our relationship, but I don’t know how long she’ll buy that.”

With a heavy sigh, Max ran a hand through his hair, trying to gather his thoughts. “Wow. Why didn’t you tell me about this?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. I wasn’t sure how to bring it up, I guess. And, anyway, I thought it probably wouldn’t matter because we would, um, get used to…everything before we saw them again. I’m not trying to push you or anything, if you don’t want to kiss me –”

“That’s not the problem,” he interjected, shaking his head. “The problem is that I do want to kiss you. And that makes this…complicated.”

“But does it have to be?” she asked in a small, pleading voice. “We don’t have to overcomplicate this. We can just think about it like…like shaking hands. But with our mouths.” She gestured vaguely at her lips, which didn't help his ongoing battle to not stare longingly at them, imagining what they would feel like to kiss.

“So, basically, it’s nothing like shaking hands,” he pointed out in a dry tone.

Her tone was apologetic as she explained, “Like I said, I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.”

She had a point, and he knew it. But that didn’t make this any easier. “I…I’m trying, Zoey. Can you give me just a little more time?”

She nodded. “Yeah. Of course.” The silence that fell between them was uncomfortable, filled with all the things they weren’t ready to address between them. Finally, she took a step back and said, “Anyway, I should probably get back to work.”

He nodded, gesturing at the table. “Go ahead. I’ll come help you when I’m done cleaning up.” He leaned over to collect the rest of the trash, but when she disappeared around the corner, he straightened with a sigh.

He should have realized Emily wasn’t going to be easily fooled. She was a very sweet person, when you got to know her, but she wasn’t the most trusting soul on the planet. She was also very protective of the people she cared about. If anyone was going to greet their story with skepticism, it would be her.

Max grimaced as he tossed out the rest of their trash. He knew he needed to get past this. He just didn’t know how. How could he kiss her and not want it to be real?

Because it was for Mitch. Because the whole reason they were in a pretend relationship was to make him happy in his final days. If he wasn’t going to commit wholeheartedly to their charade, what was the point? It had been unfair of him to offer to be Zoey’s pretend boyfriend if he wasn’t willing to follow through.

Or was that just an excuse? He ignored the question.

“Zoey, wait!” Max called out, following her out into the main office area.

“Yes?” she asked, turning around. She was standing by the hanging wicker chairs, where she’d sung her heart song to him not long before, but he tried not to think about that.

He stopped a couple of feet away from her, feeling inexplicably awkward and unsure. “You’re right. There’s no point in doing any of this if I’m not willing to do what it takes to sell it.”

She hesitated. “Are you sure? I really don’t want to make you do something you don’t want to do.”

Max bridged the distance between them. “I’m sure. If it’ll make Mitch happy, it’s worth it, right?” She nodded slowly. “But I think…it’ll probably be a little weird. Our first kiss, I mean. Maybe we should – ah – get it out of the way now. So that we seem more comfortable with each other when we’re in front of your family.”

Zoey blinked in surprise and took a half step back? “Really? I don’t know if that’s necessary –” she protested weakly.

“You think we should have our first kiss in front of Emily? That’s like putting chum in the water. There’s no way she wouldn’t pick up on it!”

After a moment’s hesitation, she nodded. “I see your point. Okay. If you’re – if you’re sure.”

Moving slowly, as if a sudden movement would scare her away, he reached up and cupped her face in his hands. “Close your eyes,” he whispered.

She did as he asked, then opened one eye and gave him a mildly suspicious look. “Why?”

Max grinned. Did she think he was going to prank her or something? “Because the first fake-kiss in a fake-relationship is very serious business. If you’re staring at me, I’ll get nervous and blow it, and then you’ll think I have terrible fake-kissing skills and fake-breakup with me,” he teased.

Biting back a smile, she closed her eyes again. Taking a moment to steady his breathing, he brushed his thumbs lightly across the high ridge of her cheekbones, down the soft skin of her cheeks, and along the curve of her jaw. He could do this. None of it was real. He just needed to remember that.

Leaning down, he hesitated when his mouth was inches from hers. The feel of her breath against his lips made him shudder with longing. It’s fake. None of this is real. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s all fake.

“Max?” she breathed, her voice soft and uncertain.

Before he could second-guess himself, he closed the distance between their mouths. It’s not real. He felt her lips part on a tiny gasp and moaned, one hand sweeping down her waist to her side as the other caressed the nape of her neck, toying with the soft curl of hair that wrapped around his fingers. It’s not real.

Her hands hovered above his chest, but when he wrapped his arm around her waist and pulled her in, she fisted her hands in his shirt and clung to him. He felt her murmur something against his mouth and hesitated, but her hands swept up his chest to his shoulders. It’s not real, he reminded himself. Then she wrapped her arms around his neck, sweeping her tongue against his lower lip in a silent invitation.

It was enough to shatter his self-control. Crushing her against him, Max lifted her off her feet as his lips parted and he poured all of the love he’d struggled to hide from her for years into his kiss. Zoey…oh, god. Zoey. He sucked her lower lip into his mouth, scraping it softly with his teeth. He couldn’t count the number of nights he’d spent thinking about her, fantasizing about her kiss. But even in his dreams had never captured the softness of her lips, the warmth of her breath.

She tasted like honey.

Zoey made a soft sound as he turned with her in his arms, and he smiled against her mouth. “God, Zoey, I –” he began. I love you. He caught himself before he could say the words that would reveal him. The words she didn’t want to hear. The reminder was like a splash of cold water, pulling Max out of his romantic haze.

It’s wasn’t real, he reminded himself.

But it felt real.

Embarrassed that he’d allowed himself to get carried away – and ashamed that he’d allowed himself to forget it was all an act, if only for a moment – he rushed to put her back on her feet and step away. His body nearly betrayed him, his hands reaching to hold her again, and so he shoved them into his back pockets and retreated another step.

Should he apologize? She had lifted her hand to her mouth, her fingers pressing against her lips as she stared at him with wide eyes. Unable to meet her eyes, he looked down, absently smoothing the wrinkles in his shirt caused by her hands. As he often did when he wasn’t sure what to say, he resorted to humor. “So, uh, that should do the trick, don’t you think? I can’t imagine even Emily would be suspicious after that.”

“No, I don’t think so,” she agreed softly.

He ran a hand through his hair, which he realized only belatedly had been mussed by her hands. “I should – should we get back to work, or -?”

“No! That’s okay!” she blurted, confirming his worst fears. He had crossed the line – if not with his actions, than with the way they betrayed his emotions, reminding her of feelings she didn’t want to face. “I’m almost done here, anyway. You can head out.”

His stomach sank. While he normally would have insisted he remain to help, he needed some distance from her. Not to mention time to get his head on straight. “Okay. Yeah. Right,” he mumbled. His hands still ached to hold her, and he didn’t trust himself not to give in to the urge, so he shoved them into his pockets as he turned to go.

It wasn’t real. It wasn’t.

At least…it hadn’t been for her. The problem was, it had been for him. So what was he going to do now?

[selfships-in-spanish]

For the vampire! AU, where the boys are the vampires, I can imagine Ona getting shot/injured while on a separate case, and the boys have to put aside their urges and bloodlust to get her to a doctor and tend to her. Which is EXTREMELY difficult because their senses are directly attuned to the presence of blood, hers specifically - Simon-Data Anon

Simon-Data anon, let me give you a box of chocolate boxes (if you dig that) as a thank you because my askbox has been BLESSED.

(I gotta reply you all but I’m trying! ;_; Lot’s of stuff and I wanna take my time to reply them well, you folks deserve it)

But please have this! :D I wrote it mostly half-asleep so there are probably mistakes and such. Sorry :_)

It was a stupidly simple case. Or at least, it should have been. 

Ona should have seen the clues, the signals; that is her goddamn job. But instead, she led herself into the wolve’s den without backup. 

The leads got her in a small and peaceful town, next to a deep forest that went on forever. There she searched for more clues, checked the ones she already had to make sure they were correct. She thought the trail went cold when suddenly one of the evidences they had lead her to the tiny house near the lake. Ona left a text message to Hank, telling him she found something and that she would discuss it with him in the morning over a nice and good cup of coffee from the cute café near the DPD.

But now she was bleeding on a dirty old wooden floor from a gunshot.

It turned out drug dealers were involved, and they did not want the police to snoop in. They made it clear when they just went for her head the moment she stepped into the seemingly empty and abandoned lake house, prompting a close combat fight with toppled furniture and smashed walls. She had the upper hand, but their fight ended with a second person appearing with a gun and directly shooting her.

Ona heard the one she was fighting against curse something, probably a “fucking stubborn bitch”, before they left her to bleed on the floor and taking her discarded gun with them. She saw him limping and for a moment she felt a surge of pride and satisfaction. But it wasn’t long lived.

The pain was unbearable. Her whole body hurt, the man went to hit her with all his strength and no matter how much training she did, it still hurt and bruised like hell. But the gunshot was as if molten iron was being poured into her like a never-ending stream of pain. Ona tried to crawl out of the house and to her car, to call for help, look for anything usable or her phone that went flying God knows where, but the truth was that she was going to die out of a bleeding gunshot because she was a fucking stupid, reckless idio–

A sob threatened to escape. She felt pathetic. 

The drowsiness from blood loss was racking through her whole body. Ona wanted to close her eyes, wishing to wake up from this nightmare. The adrenaline from before was almost gone, and she didn’t have enough strength to crawl over her phone; it got knocked out under a crate, getting stuck on its edge. She didn’t know if to feel relieved that her attackers didn’t see it, because she didn’t have enough strength left to get it. So close yet so far. 

Breathing was harder now, the pain not letting her gather her wits for a very tiny and fleeting moment. But Ona had to get to the phone, call for help, call for an ambulance, for Hank, for–

Her vision was getting blurry, and she didn’t know if it was because of the tears or because she was succumbing to unconsciousness before finally dying. Fuck.

When did she close her eyes? 

No no no, not now, she couldn’t close them. She couldn’t, not now, she had to get back. She…

Voices. There were voices. Did her murderers come back? Just to make sure and finish the job in case she did survive?

Cold and gentle hands turned her around, carefully holding her and peeling her clothes to reveal the gunshot wound. An inhuman growl tore out of the stranger’s throat, a faint glint to where the eyes were supposed to be, although the shadow was… familiar. Ona tried to say something, but her mouth barely moved when she called out for help. Her fingers twitched in an effort to lift her arm, but she was so, so tired. The arms that were holding her gently tightened their hold, pulling her body close to the stranger’s in a hug. Ona was confused by the weird show of affection from someone she didn’t know or recognise, but as she was held by the stranger, she could see perfectly combed hair and a few rebellious strands falling on their forehead. And also honey eyes that shouldn’t be shining bright as they were doing right now. Ona swore she saw that hair and alabaster skin before… maybe in a dream. It couldn’t be, could it? Blood loss was making her delirious?

The sweet scent of her pierced through the brother’s acute sense of smell. It was fresh, sweet and determined as the day they met her for the first time— a tiny cut making them want to go feral— but they also could smell fear and desperation. They did not like that smell on her. Unknown to their precious human detective, they kept tabs on her just to make sure no other vampire or creature decided to play a quite deadly game, but this time it were humans who decided to hurt her.

The brothers thought they could resist it, but her blood flowing steadily out of the wound was making Connor lose himself piece by piece. It was calling him. Only a taste, a brief kiss on her skin, his tongue lapping up the outside and careful to not touch the wound... But deep down if he had a taste, he knew what would follow. Her blood made them both him and Richard retreat to their baser instincts, to hunt down their prey and have themselves a feast. It smelt like nothing else before, so full of life, so rich...

Connor’s mouth started to water and he had to swallow the spit threatening to spill alongside the guilt of wanting to claim this human as his, when the human didn’t even know of their existence. Yet.

“What do you think you are doing, brother?”

Connor caught himself before he licked his finger clean of her blood. His fangs were bared, his breathing harsher, and he even was tempted to snarl at the intruder. He didn’t realise he was about to do so until Richard’s glint in his eyes defied him. One look at his brother and Connor knew he was barely restraining himself, but he was holding onto his precious will of iron better than Connor himself. Such was the power of their darling detective’s blood on them.

“She doesn’t have much time.” Connor willed himself to stop looking at her soaked shirt, and carefully laid her down again to take off his coat and put it on her. He picked her up again in his arms and stood up.

“I’ve located the ones who did this to her.” Richard took off one of his leather gloves as Connor approached him at the front door. He let his thumb brush against her unharmed cheek, carefully avoiding the blood. “I hope you’re hungry.”

“I’m famished”.

“Good.”

Needless to say that they were faster than an average human, and probably a car, so it came in handy to run through the forest until they reached their own car. The nearest hospital was, thank God, close, and they made it in time to get her into the ER. They let the doctors and nurses do their job, watching her disappear further into the hospital. Connor clutched his blood-soaked coat, his hand squeezing the fabric harshly.

When the nurse turned around to ask them for details and where they could go clean themselves a bit, they were already gone. Connor and Richard hated the smell of hospitals anyways, the reek of death and disease was too much. But also the scent of her blood was too distracting. She was safe in their hands. Their detective was a strong-willed human, and she would survive.

But the fate of those who harmed was going to be quite different.

It was easy to locate their detective’s room after dealing with her attackers. They sated the bloodlust and hunger her blood made them feel, and let themselves be extra vicious for having attempted to end her life then and there. They left behind them a true carnage that looked like a wild animal had its fun. But now they were high on adrenaline themselves, sated and the rich flavour of life running through their veins. It was a pity they tasted horrible. 

Connor was wiping the corner of his mouth with a handkerchief Richard gave him as they were about to turn around the corner that lead them to her room’s corridor. The brothers saw police outside her door and they both grunted, displeased. The brothers would have to get inside in another way; Richard wasn’t feeling like manipulating that human’s mind. 

Thankfully the window opened easily enough. They stepped inside with all the grace one could do so (Richard was always better at sports), dusting off briefly their clothes. She was sleeping and the beeping machine at her side told them she was stable and alive. Connor smiled, pleased by her strength and will to live. She would do a perfect mate if she—

She let out a sigh, frowning slightly as Ona briefly moved her head to the other side, unconsciously baring her neck to the brothers. Twin sharp intakes of air could be heard, eyes zeroed on her pulse point. The brothers could still smell her blood, although not fresh like when they found her, and their ears caught the sound of her steady heart beat. The thrumming of her pulse was deafening, its call worse than a siren’s luring out an unfortunate sailor. They both knew they just fed themselves, copiously, but it was right there, pulsing inside her veins, begging to be tasted for the first time…

The scrunching of her eyes and twitching nose signaled that she was waking up. Connor and Richard unconsciously walked closer to her bed, their figures looming over her resting body, as they took in every tiny movement. Slowly, the human detective opened her eyes, the drugs pumped up into her body making it very difficult for her to focus, but she saw two familiar shadows over her. She sighed tiredly, and closed her eyes again.

“I’m dreaming again, aren’t I?” her voice was just shy of a barely audible whisper, even more difficult to understand by the way she was drawling every word. “Of handsome strangers.”

“You think of us handsome?” Connor was amused. This wasn’t the way he thought the first real conversation between them would start.

“I’m sure you are. You must be. You are in my dreams.” Ona frowned. “This sounded like that Disney movie.”

Both brothers chuckled, leaning over her and resting their arms on her sides, mindful of not squashing any tubes or her bruised body.

“Then, are we your charming princes?” Richard caressed her cheek with his finger, softly.

“You haven’t even presented yourselves properly. Not very prince-ish of you.” Ona managed to open her eyes again, turning her head in the direction of the caresses. She was greeted with the clear sight of one of the strangers’ faces. Finally. “Oh fuck me, you are handsome.”

Connor took her hand, free of tubes and needles, as he openly laughed. He gently kissed her knuckles, letting the softness of her skin brush against his cold lips.

“If that is your wish…”

“I’m not in the perfect state for that, you rascal.” Ona managed a weak chuckle. “I just got shot and my ass kicked.” her gaze was met with smiling brown eyes.

She was used to the nights where the twin shadows would visit in her dreams. They were oddly comforting, if not weird at first, and always seemed to have her in the highest form of veneration. Ona would wake up feeling guilty of dreaming of such things, thinking of herself as an egocentric and needy individual. She didn’t know why she dreamed of handsome strangers, or why they did all kinds of things they promised in heated whispers against her skin. But right now? She welcomed all kind of comfort.

The finger on her cheek descended slowly, tracing her jaw first and then her neck, following her pulse.

“You should buy me a drink first.” The finger and the thumb brushing her knuckles stopped at the same time, twin eyebrows raising. “For. You know. If you wanna do that and…“ Ona took a deep breath, exhaustion clawing her to go back to sleep. “and all the things you promised me. Or just chat. I don’t know. But drink first.”

“You will have whatever you desire for, Starlight.” She felt those lips kiss her hand again, as cold fingers brushed a few strands of hair out of her face. “You only have to ask.”

“Tell me your names, then. So I can finally know the two imps haunting me in my sleep.”

“Imps? We have been that bad?” Connor’s teasing smirk made her snort.

“Handsome imps, but with no manners.”

The finger on her neck resumed its ministrations, going back to her jaw and then her chin to turn her to face its owner.

“I’m Richard.” Icy eyes pinner her on the spot, unable to look away from their sheer intensity.

“And I’m Connor.” As if Richard freed her from his spell, Ona turned her head the other way to gaze into deep pools of molten chocolate. She felt as if she would drown in them.

Connor went to open his mouth again to say something, but noises from outside the corridor made him stop. He clicked his tongue, displeased at being interrupted. Connor had the thought of sending the nurse away with a simple mind control trick, but he knew their darling had to rest and regain her strength.

“Sadly, our time is over for today.” Richard stood up, eyes glued to the door as if he wanted to destroy whoever dared to interrupt their time with their precious detective.

“It seems we have run out of time, yes.” Connor leaned further into her, letting go of her hands to cup her face, and his voice a soft and velvety purr. “We will see you soon, Moonbeam.”

His lips brushed softly the corner of her mouth. It was a chaste kiss, a gentle press of lips, but it felt as if her skin was on fire. Her heart beated faster as she took a sharp breath. Not wanting to feel left out, Richard bent over, mimicking Connor’s actions. Her mouth followed his as he retreated, unconsciously wanting more.

“Rest now and regain your strength, teacup. We will be watching over you.”

“Now you are guardian angels?” she had a tired smirk on her lips.

Richard chukled, but it didn’t hold the same mirth as before.

“I doubt there is a place in heaven for us.”

Confused, but completely fatigued from being awake, Ona didn’t comment on that. Maybe the next time they showed themselves on her dreams she would ask more about it. About them. Ona watched Connor and Richard open the window of her room, which confused her even more, and the next time she blinked they were gone with the curtain flowing on the chilly night breeze. Her eyes closed, not being able to be awake any longer.

The next time she woke up, rays of sunshine filtered through the drawn curtains and the sounds of people outside could be heard. Ona turned her head to see a vase full of beautiful and fresh flowers on her bedside table. The nurse told her later, when she was changing her bandages, two handsome men came to bring them to her, but following protocol, the hospital didn’t let visitors to come unless authorised to do so. The nurse handed Ona a handwritten note attached to it with a teasing smirk and wiggling eyebrows. Surely it was a nice and juicy gossip for the nurses on that wing of the hospital.

Ona read the note written in a beautiful penmanship when she was alone, feeling as this was something intimate and reserved for when she was on her own devices.

“Get well soon, Starlight. We owe you a drink indeed.

Yours truly,Connor & Richard.”

Ona took a sharp breath, regretting it later when the gunshot wound protested.

That… hadn’t been a dream? 

Ona noticed there were numbers at the very end of the note. It looked like a phone number. Ona got out of her thoughts at the sound of Hank barking at the officer on the door to move the fuck out and let him see his fucking reckless detective. Ona smiled at that, knowing Hank probably drove like his life depended on it the moment he got notified one of his detectives got shot.

All his temper and angry words disappeared the moment he stepped into the room. The officer outside was smart enough to let the Lieutenant pass. When he saw her tired smile, Hank let out a relieved exhale. She was okay, everything was okay. He took a chair and sat down next to Ona. He rubbed his hand across his face, letting out a tired sigh.

“Don’t ever scare me like that again, understood?”

“I’m sorry, Lieutenant.” at least she had the decency to look truly ashamed. She knew Hank’s baggage and she knew what a mess Hank must have been until he got here.

“It’s Hank to you, you cork.”

Ona laughed at Hank using one of her own curse words.

“Hank.” After a moment of silence, Ona turned her head to him. “Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it, kid. Get well soon because we all miss you and we can’t stand Reed being a snotty asshole anymore. Tina can only hold him in line for so long.”

“¡Ahá! So he does behave when I’m around!” Ona grinned.

“Only because you whooped his ass that time and put him in his place. He fears you.”

“Good. He should.” Ona’s grin turned to a satisfied smirk.

Hank chuckled. He patted his jacket until he found what he was looking for. He waved the object so Ona could see. A twix fun size bar. Ona’s stomach made its presence known.

“This is for you for when you are better AND a good girl who listens to her doctors. Don’t do like the last time you got injured.” Hank’s knowing ‘dad’ stare made her feel like a scolded child.

“I won’t, I promise.” she was not pouting. Nope.

“You better.” Hank knew Ona would probably launch for the chocolate candy bar the moment she was alone, but he let her have that tiny pleasure. Only when he wasn’t looking. 

But Hank had to get serious.

“Now, I know you are tired and need to lie down and heal, but I need you to tell me what happened and what did you see.”

“I know.” 

Ona took a deep breath and began explaining everything, what she saw, what she discovered, the leads and then the connection to drug dealers. Her attackers also got her gun, so maybe they could track it and lead to them. She even included the one or two random strangers that helped her out. Ona only had vague memories of that and couldn’t remember much, just that someone found her, but she omitted the late night visit. Ona needed to look for the truth about that first. Also Hank didn’t have to know about the massive amount of wet dreams she got at night. Nope. TMI!

After talking about more details and then changing the topic to random things, Hank parted with one last gift: her phone with a newly cracked phone screen. Just her luck. At least she didn’t lose all the info in there and the photos, of course. That counted as a win.

Once Ona was discharged from the hospital, with a few days off and a phone call from Fowler that she was on weeks of desk duty just in case (because they all knew she would lie about being okay and would end up opening her stitches again), and well, she wasn’t too happy about it, she dug her purse for the note that was delivered to her alongside with the flowers. Ona was chewing her lip, contemplating if to press the call button or chicken out and mull over it for the entire week. She decided to suck it up. 

She pressed the call button.

Anxiety was gnawing at her insides as the dial tone rang. Maybe she did dream it? Maybe it was a untasteful joke from one of the nurses that heard her talk in her sleep? Maybe it–

“I thought you would never call, Starlight.” Ona was greeted by the voice she heard all those nights, all those whispers and filthy promises– “So, how about that drink we promised you?”

“Yeah, hi! Uh… about that… how about, uh… uhm, tomorrow night?” Ona’s voice trembled.

“Tomorrow night, Green Bee at 8?” Ona could feel the purr in what she assumed was Connor’s voice.

“Tomorrow night. Okay. Perfect.” Ona closed her eyes. She was being an awkward mess but Connor didn’t seem to either notice it or mind it. She was absolute garbage at this. But her questions nagged at her to get to know the truth behind all this.

“See you soon, teacup.” That probably was Richard. It was quieter, deeper, but with a touch of fondness in it. “Enjoy your day and don’t overexert yourself.”

“A-ah, yeah! You too. You both. I won’t. Thank you, hahah...”

A sultry see you tomorrow reached her ears, making her embarrassingly squeak out a reply. She could do this. She was a goddamn detective, she got into worse situations and even more dangerous too.

No amount of training or experience got her ready to see them both waiting for her in front of the new and fancy restaurant, looking as if they stepped out of one her multiple dreams. Well dressed, hair perfectly styled with those rebellious strands falling on their foreheads as always, and twin smiles that greeted her when she approached them both.

They were very much here and very much real.

She had more questions than ever.

[newstfionline]

Wednesday, February 24, 2021

First Arctic Navigation in February (Bloomberg) A tanker sailed through Arctic sea ice in February for the first time, the latest sign of how quickly the pace of climate change is accelerating in the Earth’s northernmost regions. The Christophe de Margerie was accompanied by the nuclear-powered 50 Let Pobedy icebreaker as it sailed back to Russia this month after carrying liquified natural gas to China through the Northern Sea Route in January. Both trips broke navigation records. The experimental voyage happened after a year of extraordinarily warm conditions in the Arctic that have sent shockwaves across the world, from the snowstorm that blanketed Spain in January to the blast of cold air that swept through Canada in mid-February, moving deep into the South as far as Texas. The Arctic is warming more than twice as quickly as the rest of the world and the area covered by ice there has reached historic lows multiple times over the past 12 months. The melting in the region is already in line with the worst-case climate scenarios outlined by scientists.

Biden mourns 500,000 dead, balancing nation’s grief and hope (AP) With sunset remarks and a national moment of silence, President Joe Biden on Monday confronted head-on the country’s once-unimaginable loss—half a million Americans in the COVID-19 pandemic—as he tried to strike a balance between mourning and hope. “We often hear people described as ordinary Americans. There’s no such thing,” he said Monday evening. “There’s nothing ordinary about them. The people we lost were extraordinary.” The president, who lost his first wife and baby daughter in a car collision and later an adult son to brain cancer, leavened the grief with a message of hope. “This nation will smile again. This nation will know sunny days again. This nation will know joy again. And as we do, we’ll remember each person we’ve lost, the lives they lived, the loved ones they left behind.” He said, “We have to resist becoming numb to the sorrow. We have to resist viewing each life as a statistic or a blur or, on the news. We must do so to honor the dead. But, equally important, to care for the living.”

Texans Needed Food and Comfort After a Brutal Storm. As Usual, They Found It at H-E-B. (NYT) The past week had been a nightmare. A winter storm, one of the worst to hit Texas in a generation, robbed Lanita Generous of power, heat and water in her home. The food she had stored in her refrigerator and freezer had spoiled. She was down to her final five bottles of water. But on Sunday, as the sun shined and ice thawed in Austin, Ms. Generous did the same thing as many Texans in urgent need of food, water and a sense of normalcy: She went to H-E-B. “They’ve been great,” she said, adding with just a touch of hyperbole: “If it hadn’t been for the bread and peanut butter, I would have died in my apartment.” H-E-B is a grocery store chain. But it is also more than that. People buy T-shirts that say “H-E-B for President,” and they post videos to TikTok declaring their love, like the woman clutching a small bouquet of flowers handed to her by an employee: “I wish I had a boyfriend like H-E-B. Always there. Gives me flowers. Feeds me.” For many Texans, H-E-B reflected the ways the state’s maverick spirit can flourish: reliable for routine visits but particularly in a time of disaster, and a belief that the family-owned chain—with a vast majority of its more than 340 locations inside state lines—has made a conscious choice to stay rooted to the idea of being a good neighbor. “It’s like H-E-B is the moral center of Texas,” said Stephen Harrigan, a novelist and journalist who lives in Austin. “There seems to be in our state a lack of real leadership, a lack of real efficiency, on the political level. But on the business level, when it comes to a grocery store, all of those things are in place.”

Hunger in Central America skyrockets, U.N. agency says (Reuters) The number of people going hungry in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua has nearly quadrupled in the last two years, the United Nations said on Tuesday, as Central America has been battered by an economic crisis. New data released by the UN’s World Food Program (WFP) showed nearly 8 million people across the four countries are experiencing hunger this year, up from 2.2 million in 2018. “The COVID-19-induced economic crisis had already put food on the market shelves out of reach for the most vulnerable people when the twin hurricanes Eta and Iota battered them further,” Miguel Barreto, WFP Regional Director for Latin America and the Caribbean, said in a statement.

Prison riots in Ecuador leave 62 dead (AP) Sixty-two inmates have died in riots at prisons in three cities in Ecuador as a result of fights between rival gangs and an escape attempt, authorities said Tuesday. Prisons Director Edmundo Moncayo said in a news conference that 800 police offices have been helping to regain control of the facilities. Hundreds of officers from tactical units had been deployed since the clashes broke out late Monday. Moncayo said that two groups were trying to gain “criminal leadership within the detention centers” and that the clashes were precipitated by a search for weapons carried out Monday by police officers.

Mount Etna eruption lights up Sicily's night sky (BBC) Mount Etna is erupting again, and its hot lava fountains are illuminating the Sicilian sky. The eruption began earlier this week, and Etna has since been spewing massive orange plumes of smoke and thick clouds of ash. Etna is Europe's most active volcano, and it erupts relatively often. The last major eruption was in 1992. Its eruptions have rarely caused damage or injury in recent decades - and officials believe this eruption is no exception. Stefano Branco, the head of the National Institute for Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV) in the nearby city of Catania, told Italian news agency AGI earlier this week: "We've seen worse."

Cow science (Foreign Policy) A new national exam on cows developed by the Indian government-backed National Cow Commission has been shelved following controversy over its less-than-scientific contents. The curriculum for the test involved erroneous claims about the virtues of Indian cows that were widely ridiculed by the country’s scientific community. Among the “facts” on display: That Indian cows have a special “solar pulse” in their humps which can supposedly convert sun rays into vitamin D that is then passed on to milk, and an assertion that Indian cows are “strong” whereas foreign cows are “lazy.” The issue of cows, considered sacred by Hindus, and their treatment has become even more of a cultural wedge issue in India following the rise of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government, with sometimes deadly results. Attacks by vigilante “cow protection” groups killed 44 people between 2015 and 2018 according to Human Rights Watch, with Muslims among the majority of those targeted.

Japan creates Minister of Loneliness to fight COVID-19 suicides (New York Post) Japan just appointed a Minister of Loneliness—to try to combat its exploding suicide rate amid COVID-19. Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga named Tetsushi Sakamoto, a cabinet member already trying to beef up the depressed country’s birthrate, to the post. Suga noted earlier this month that Japanese women, in particular, have been struggling with depression since the coronavirus pandemic began about a year ago—with nearly 880 female suicide victims in the country alone in October, a 70 percent increase over the year before, the BBC reported. Japanese suicide expert Michiko Ueda told the BBC that part of the problem involves an increasing number of single women in the country who don’t have stable employment. “A lot of women are not married anymore,” she said. “They have to support their own lives, and they don’t have permanent jobs.”

Facebook Strikes Deal to Restore News Sharing in Australia (NYT) Facebook said on Monday that it would restore the sharing and viewing of news links in Australia after gaining more time to negotiate over a proposed law that would require it to pay for news content that appears on its site. The social network had blocked news links in Australia last week as the new law neared passage. The legislation includes a code of conduct that would allow media companies to bargain individually or collectively with digital platforms over the value of their news content. Facebook had vigorously objected to the code, which would curb its power and drive up its spending for content, as well as setting a precedent for other governments to follow. The company had argued that news would not be worth the hassle in Australia if the bill became law. But on Monday, Facebook returned to the negotiating table after the Australian government granted a few minor concessions.

U.S.-Saudi ties (Foreign Policy) The families of the three U.S. service members killed and 13 others injured by Mohammed Alshamrani, a Saudi airman who went on a shooting spree at Naval Air Station Pensacola in 2019, are suing Saudi Arabia’s government, alleging that the kingdom failed to screen him appropriately before sending him to the United States for training. The families are filing the lawsuit against Saudi Arabia based on a 2016 law that allows U.S. citizens to sue foreign governments over terrorist attacks—legislation that was initially passed in order to allow the families of 9/11 victims to bring a civil suit against Saudi Arabia.

Italian Ambassador Among Three Killed in Attack on U.N. Convoy in Congo (NYT) For Luca Attanasio, Italy’s ambassador to the Democratic Republic of Congo, humanitarian work was at the core of his mission. The 43-year-old had moved with his wife to the capital, Kinshasa, in 2017, where their family grew to include three young daughters. He rose to the rank of ambassador in 2019, the pinnacle of his diplomatic career. On Monday, Mr. Attanasio was among three people killed in an attack on a humanitarian convoy near the city of Goma, the World Food Program and Italy’s Foreign Ministry said, the latest in a wave of violence in that part of the central African nation. The deaths of Mr. Attanasio; an Italian Embassy official, named by the Foreign Ministry as Vittorio Iacovacci; and Mustapha Milambo, a driver for the World Food Program, have rattled the international diplomatic community and drawn condemnation from across the globe.

Flood damage and insurance (NPR) Right now, over 4 million houses and small apartments in the contiguous United States are at substantial risk of expensive flood damage, and the cost of flood damage to homes will increase by 50 percent over the next 30 years according to the First Street Foundation. As the climate changes, places that were perfectly safe to live in will no longer be as sure of bets as they once were, and the costs are about to be a serious reality check. The National Flood Insurance Program is $36 billion in debt because of underestimated risks. Over the next several years, FEMA plans to raise rates up to 18 percent a year until prices are accurate, starting this October.

[makeste]

BnHA Chapter 229: The Real Me

Previously on BnHA: Dabi fought a dude who could control ice. For like three pages. Then we cut to my boy Twice, who had located an unconscious Toga (who as you recall had her blood blown up a couple chapters back, so yeah) and was understandably freaking out about how to get her some help. To make a long and somewhat confusing story short, you know that long-haired guy who hacked Giran’s phone? Turns out he has the power to create human puppets or some shit, and he created a bunch of Twice duplicates and sent them to capture the real Twice (who you might also recall has some traumatic history involving clones of himself). Seems they want to use Twice’s quirk to create a backup clone of Re-Destro, just in case history repeats himself and he ends up kicking the bucket like his great-great granddad. Wouldn’t that be sad. Re-Destro getting murdered. Wouldn’t that just be a darn shame. Anyways so let’s see where this leads.

Today on BnHA: The Villain Flashback Arc continues with today’s installment featuring, you guessed it, more villain flashbacks! We learn more about our little buddy Twice who was apparently orphaned as a young teen and subsequently found himself alone in a cold and uncaring world. Honestly you guys, after reading this I’m amazed that he’s still as nice of a guy as he is. Anyway, so he used his quirk to clone himself because he was lonely, and the clones and him engaged in a petty crime spree or two, and then somehow or other it all led to the whole murderfest that fucked up his head so badly. Back in the present, a struggling Jin tries to escape and help Toga, so Skeptic orders his puppets to break Jin’s arms. They do so, but this has a curious side-effect that Skeptic may not have been expecting. Namely, that having that much damage dealt to him makes Twice realize that he definitely is not one of his clones, and is in fact the real deal. This appears to at least temporarily cure his split personality woes, and the chapter ends with him creating about a dozen duplicates to go fuck up the Liberation Army’s day. Hell yes.

(All comments are my unspoiled reactions from my initial readthrough of the chapter. I did a quick edit for grammar and clarity immediately afterward, but aside from that there are no changes.)

hey guys, sorry I’ve been inactive all week; I’ve been sick and haven’t really had much energy. I still am sick, but I appear to have reached the stage of exhaustion where I’m all “eh, fuck it, yeah sure whatever” where it’s ironically easy to motivate myself to do stuff because I have no willpower to resist, lol

so anyway. we’re apparently not missing a beat, picking up right where we left off last week with Twice’s mask being pulled off by one of the gorilla puppets

wow and they’re just like. flinging him aside

DON’T FLING MY BOY NO!! AND GET AWAY FROM TOGA

AHHHH

shit, how creepy is that? are they cold because they’re just ~puppets~ and not actually real, living people? what a disturbing touch

now we’re cutting back to Skeptic, who’s giving the puppets orders and addressing them as various letters of the alphabet. how can he tell them the fuck apart

meanwhile Giran’s asking what they’re doing to his pal. ;_; Giran you continue to be the best

and Re-Destro’s forcibly directing his attention elsewhere, but he’s also answering his question, strangely enough

that’s a lot of detail to be giving the guy when you could have just smacked him and told him to shut up. these villains are so confusing

but I guess they’re just telling him all this to taunt him more, because now Skeptic is bragging that he learned about Jin’s psychological disorder from Giran’s client data

hey btw I don’t think I’ve said this yet, but fuck this guy so hard for taking advantage of Twice’s trauma and using it against him. what a shocker, the Meta Liberation Army of dickheads pulls another dickhead move. these guys are so classy

oh my fucking god you guys Giran is getting hotter with each fucking chapter though fffffffff

if you’d told me a month ago that this dude would be nipping at Aizawa and All Might’s heels for the title of BnHA’s most eligible bachelor I would have called you a liar and a thief, yet here we are. good lord

that said, I appreciate that he’s thinking about how hard it’ll be on poor Twice, but they also just said they’d kill Toga as well, so I imagine that part of it would be pretty hard on her too. just saying

SDLFKSDLFHK SPEAKING OF

FUCK ME YOU GUYS I ALMOST LEAPED TO MY FUCKING FEET, WHAT THE FUCK. DON’T TELL ME THEY’RE GOING TO SNAP HER NECK. HOLY SHIT

SOMEONE BETTER SAVE HER OR I’M GOING TO FLY OUT TO JAPAN AND GIVE HORIKOSHI MY STUPID COLD. THAT’LL SHOW THAT BASTARD. HAVE SOME BRONCHITIS YOU PIECE OF SHIT

AND TWICE IS WATCHING ALL PANICKED AND SCREAMING THAT HE’S GOING TO KILL HER

AT FIRST I WAS CONFUSED AND WAS LIKE, DOES HE BLAME HIMSELF FOR GETTING HER IN THIS SITUATION? BUT THEN I REMEMBERED THE CLONES AND THAT YEAH IT’S LITERALLY HIM KILLING HER THOUGH OMGGGGG

AHHH HE’S SO CONFUSED THIS IS SO CONFUSING

I’M TOO SICK TO DEAL WITH TWICE’S EXISTENTIAL CRISIS YOU GUYS, IT’S REALLY FREAKING ME OUT, HELP. THE FUCKING PANELS ARE ALL WOBBLY-LINED AND THEY KEEP ZOOMING IN ON HIS FACE AND SHOWING HIM ALL BUG-EYED SCREAMING “WHO AM I” OVER AND OVER AGAIN OH GOD

OH SHIT!?!?

ACTUAL TWICE FLASHBACKS OH SHIT?! I was not expecting this oh snap. I am so into this

anyway, so he’s thinking -- with surprising coherence -- that because of his rough appearance, people were always afraid of him growing up

but also, what was that part about him not having a family? so he was an orphan then?? Horikoshi you are aware that I already love Twice and am emotionally attached to him, yes? but like if you want to hit me with even more feels and fuck me up some more then be my guest I suppose?

anyway so whoever he’s talking to here says Jin, who is apparently sixteen here, evidently hit some dude with his motorcycle by accident. oh shit

and baby!Jin says the guy jumped out in front of him and he was obeying the speed limit and everything

and the man he’s talking to seems vaguely sympathetic but says that regardless, it’s usually the victim who ends up winning these cases, and that Jin may end up with a criminal record. “but don’t let it get to you.” oh, sure. yeah, let’s just look on the bright side here

he says that no matter how many times you stumble in life, you can always start over

well shit is it any wonder this kid ended up going the villain route and making a bunch of clones of himself to live his best life? I mean jeez, he had absolutely no one on his side and was slapped with a criminal record when he was only sixteen. that shit is rough

oh fuck me and it just keeps getting worse

well that’s nice. so make that homeless with a criminal record, then. jesus christ he was still just a kid

so apparently his parents died in a villain attack when he was in middle school, and he had no relatives. I guess the state didn’t give a fuck either, damn

I find it extraordinarily easy to empathize with, actually! that’s one of the things that makes you such a great character!

so I guess he originally ended up making a clone of himself just because he was lonely. okay wow. not only does Twice continue to be the most likable villain in the series, he’s working his way up there as one of the most likable and relatably human characters, period

look at this shit! he’s just a guy who had a run of bad luck and tried his best to cope with it in whatever ways he could. there’s nothing villainous about him, he was just someone whom nobody wanted. he had his entire future stolen out from under him in the blink of an eye and had nowhere else to turn. he just wanted some friends for fuck’s sake

and so then he and his merry band committed a bunch of petty crimes. but they just needed some cash so they could live! like, all he wanted to do was just chill out and be happy. I got your back Twice. it’s not your fault

and then the flashback just kind of cuts to him tied to the chair in the aftermath of the clone hunger games. so I guess that’s all the backstory we’re getting as far as that goes. ngl I would have really liked to see just a bit more of the lead-up to that specific event. he’s such a nice guy that it’s a bit hard to picture him just suddenly going “RAWR I’M GONNA MURDER ALL Y’ALL.” but what I’m thinking is that all of the tragedy in his past contributed to him forming his violent alter ego personality, and that one of the clones must have just snapped one day and the rest is history

anyway so now we’re cutting to his first meeting with my new boyfriend Giran

ah okay, so he’s scared because if he actually is one of the clones then just a tiny bit of damage would be enough to finally do him in

btw Giran, possibly the one good thing Re-Destro and his buds did was getting rid of that scarf and sunglasses though bud. if you decide to change up your look after all of this, I’m not going to complain. there’s a reason I thought you were just some douchebag this whole time. obviously I shouldn’t have been so quick to judge you, I realize that now of course

but seriously Giran who wears sunglasses at night indoors. I mean, idk, maybe you get migraines or something. but if not I’m just saying

regardless, questionable fashion choices aside, Giran is actually a super nice guy, a mensch if you will, and he is now casually changing Twice’s entire life in the span of a few sentences. awww

how the fuck were you planning on smoking that cigarette while wearing a paper bag over your face. ??

also, Giran on this page kinda reminds me of Sanji, if Sanji was, like, a beatnik about to throw down on open mic poetry night

anyway so that’s the end of our happy flashback, and now we’re back in the present with Twice resuming his freakout!

but in spite of his mental struggles, he’s shaking the puppet clones off and trying to dash toward Toga again omg!

up in his little tower Skeptic seems fairly surprised

in related news, fuck this guy so much. also he’s using one of his puppets as a chair, which is one of the creepiest touches Horikoshi has put in this manga to date. but also they mentioned last week that Skeptic makes the puppets out of any human-sized materials that happen to be lying around, so I kind of wonder if maybe this dude originally was a chair. the mysteries of BnHA

moving on though, yeah, Twice and Toga really do have a strong bond though, don’t they? their chemistry is as beautiful as it is strange

oh shit but they really did hit him though

FUCK YOU F AND G

FFFFF SON OF A BITCH

DLASFKJLKJ PLEASE DON’T YOU FUCKING PSYCHOPATH, I CAN’T WAIT FOR YOU TO FUCKING DIE YOU ASSHOLE!!!

motherfucker! and we just established that he’s afraid that a broken bone will be enough to kill him if it turns out he really is a clone!

-- holy shit, but. on the other hand, if it doesn’t kill him though, that just might be enough to cure him of that particular fear once and for all. oh shit, unexpected plot twist

though in this particular situation it probably won’t make much of a difference how sane he is if he’s still got two broken arms though fuuuuuuuck

anyway... gotta click to the next page... even though I really don’t want to, sob

aaaaaaaand they’ve broken them. well shit. at least it wasn’t graphic. he’s just hunching forward and screaming and his arms are facing the wrong way, fuck

and now Skeptic is all “your legs are next,” and uh, can Twice actually hear him, though?? like, what? did I miss something here? is he piping his voice in through the shed’s convenient sound system or something?

anyway he’s telling Twice not to struggle anymore, and Twice is muttering to himself all darkly about how much that hurt

and apparently Toga’s regained consciousness now!!

wow Skeptic, okay sure, go ahead and keep talking about how you’re about to kill Toga in front of his eyes. just keep on digging yourself deeper. it’s like he doesn’t realize there’s only one page left in the chapter and things are just about reaching a tipping point and our heroes (?! I mean they are, though, for this arc at any rate) have had just about enough of his bullshit

lol I can’t take the tension omg

please do something badass please do something badass please d --

oh snap

Twiiiiiiice ;_; so it’s like I thought. they unexpectedly cured you of your identity crisis angst

anyway I guess this chapter is a longer one than usual because it’s page 15 now and we’re still going! so I will now resume my “please do something badass” chant. c’mon Twice. kick some assssssss

YESSSSSSSSSSSSSS

THIS TIME I REALLY DID LEAP OUT OF MY CHAIR OMG. BOIIIIIIIIIIIIIII

LMAO ARE ALL OF THEIR ARMS BROKEN TOO. FUCK IT, IT DOESN’T MATTER. DEKU HAS SPENT APPROXIMATELY HALF THE MANGA WITH BROKEN ARMS AND IT’S NEVER STOPPED HIM*

*forest angst aside. and anyways that all worked out in the end, so

“wounded heroes are the most dangerous.” well fuck. given that we’ve just seen an exhausted and delirious Shigaraki eradicate an entire wave of people, and a bloodied and wounded Toga straight up murder one of the Army’s leaders, I think it’s safe to say we can apply this statement to villains too. and I for one can’t wait how dangerous a wounded -- but now sane -- Twice can be. motherfucker how I am loving this glorious arc

[n0nesse]

𝐅𝐑𝐔𝐈𝐓𝐘 𝐇𝐄𝐀𝐃𝐂𝐀𝐍𝐎𝐍 𝐏𝐑𝐎𝐌𝐏𝐓𝐒   ♡   𝐒𝐘𝐌𝐁𝐎𝐋 𝐌𝐄𝐌𝐄

  Instead of having people send these in I just wanted to do all of them myself!

🍍  :    how comfortable is my muse in their body? how do they feel about their height,  weight,  strength,  and body type?  how important is being attractive to them?  

All Scanners share virtually the same physical form, and all YoRHa units use the same base endoskeleton, though the hardware differs between function. They’re short and small-framed to save the maximum amount of materials while still being able to effectively perform their duties. 9S has never felt self-conscious about himself physically because he looks almost identical to every other Scanner and there was never any pressure on any of them to look a certain way like there is with humans. They have no ability to change their height or weight (though non-YoRHa androids can do so for aesthetic purposes if they choose) and it’s forbidden by their uniform code to modify their bodies anyway. 

Since coming to Koi, 9S is quite aware now that he would be very short for a human of his apparent age, but he doesn’t feel bad about it or anything, other than occasionally being irritated at getting mistaken for a kid.

🍅  :    how does my muse feel about plastic  /  cosmetic surgeries   &   procedures?  is it something they have done or would do?  do they mind if others do it?  

As mentioned before, it’s forbidden for YoRHa units to try and alter their bodies, even if it’s for something like a tattoo or piercing. 9S doesn’t feel like he has any reason to do so right now, but that might change in the future. He doesn’t care if others do it. It’s their choice to do what they want with their bodies, as long as they understand the consequences.

🍏  :    how stable is my muse’s physical health?  do they go for regular or semi-regular checkups by a physician?  do they have any diagnosed illnesses and / or take any medication?  how often do they get sick?

9S knows maintenance is extremely important, and he is fairly accident-prone it seems. He’s had a limb or two blown off by machines more than once. Although he’s not a Healer unit, he’s gotten used to performing repairs on himself in the field and gets fussy if he has to sit around and wait while someone else fixes him up or checks him for viruses. As an android, he’s immune to biological pathogens, so there’s never any reason to worry about that. Currently he is functioning just fine.

🍎  :    how stable is my muse’s mental health?  have they been diagnosed with any mental illnesses and  /  or conditions?  do they have any undiagnosed mental illnesses and  /  or conditions?  do they or should they attend therapy?  

An android’s mind doesn’t work the same way as a human’s, but it’s still very possible for their data to get scrambled or glitched due to trauma. 9S was supposedly wiped clean after every execution, but that doesn’t mean nothing ever remained, and every time he rediscovered the true reason for his partnership with 2B it became more and more painful to confront. 

9S does an excellent job at convincing himself he’s stable, but it’s quite easy to push him over the brink. His emotions are terribly repressed so one needs only to scratch the surface to draw them out. He really should talk to somebody about this but there are no therapists on the Bunker.

🍑  :    how meticulously does my muse look after their physical appearance?  do they spend a lot of time on their hair,  makeup,  grooming,  and clothing?  is there a particular reason why they do or don’t?  

9S really likes to be clean! Although it’s not necessary for androids to bathe, since their bodies are naturally resistant to dirt and moisture and they don’t sweat, he doesn’t enjoy getting all dusty or covered in machine oil and will wash himself off the first chance he gets.  He finds being dirty very distracting. Keeping one’s dermal layer repaired is a vial part of maintenance as well, so he mends any small cuts or scuffs quickly. 

🍒  :    how much does my muse value companionship?  do they constantly keep people around them,  or do they prefer to be alone often?  do they have or desire to have many friends?  do they see every meeting as an opportunity to make a new friend?  

Although Scanners are often solitary, 9S really enjoys being around others and will eagerly socialize with other androids. If only the resistance members wouldn’t stop trying to get him to run errands for them... He’s friendly with the other Scanners and will spend time with them if they’re on the Bunker together, though they seem to hold him at arms’ length for reasons he understands now. 

2B is a special case, being his bodyguard of sorts. She could even be considered his best friend, and though his feelings of fondness for her are genuine, they’re very complicated. He’s happy she’s here. He’s also thrilled to be making so many new friends on the islands and does his best to make a good first impression, especially with humans. 

🍇  :    how would my muse describe their childhood?  how much has it impacted the person they are now,  or will become as an adult?  around what age did they or will they start to mature,  and why?  do they wish to go back to their days as a child,  or have they embraced adulthood?  

9S was ‘born’ fully-functional and did not have a childhood of any sort. He didn’t even get to shadow a senior Scanner or anything, he was thrown right to the wolves. Such as it is.

🍐  :    how intelligent is my muse overall?  are they smarter than the average person,  or less than?  are they primarily self-taught,  or did they acquire most of their knowledge in school?  are they more street smart or book smart?  

Uncommonly clever and observant, even among his own kind, though prone to making reckless decisions when driven by his emotions or his insatiable desire for answers. 9S has access to vast informational databases he can draw from, even in his own archives, with even more stored on his Pod he could summon at any time... if his Pod was here.

🍉  :    which of the four seasons suits my muse best,  and why?  

Winter. Everything is buried, dormant, appearing quiet and serene on the surface.

🍌  :    is my muse inclined to help others,  or will they only do it when it benefits them,  if at all?  what makes them this way?  has it ever gotten them into trouble,  or inconvenienced them? 

9S doesn’t mind helping others, though he can get irritated if given tasks he feels will distract from his mission, or that are boring or too difficult. When it comes to helping the surface androids, they more often than not involve combat with machines and him and 2B risking their lives, which he finds completely annoying, and not fun, but he still does it anyway.

🍊  :    does my muse desire romance?  is it something they would actively seek out,  or prefer to happen more  ‘  naturally?  ’  what is their love life like?  do they have any exes or past flings,  or crushes?  

Relationships between YoRHa units are officially banned, though the rule is not enforced very strictly. 9S has a hard time comprehending the complexity of romance and prefers not to think about it, perhaps unconsciously convinced he doesn’t deserve to have anybody feel that way about him. 

🍓  :    how is my muse typically seen by others?  does it ring true to who they really are?  does their reputation matter to them? 

I would imagine, based on his youthful appearance and friendly, earnest demeanor, a lot of people would assume he’s a lot more naive than he really is. 9S lacks a lot of knowledge about how modern society functions, but that’s because he arrived 6,000 years too late to the party. He picks up on things extremely quickly and is quite socially perceptive. Fitting in is important to him, having come from such a conformist culture as YoRHa. 

🥝  :    does my muse have any  ‘  unusual  ’  habits, interests,  and  /  or talents?  do they hide it,  or are they proud of it?  

9S is more interested in human culture than most Scanners and especially enjoys collecting human-created media, particularly music, which he stores on his Pod and plays when he’s out scouting. He’s had a great time in Koi renting movies from the library, because entertainment options back home were extremely limited. He’s also gotten into fishing because of 2B.

🍋  :    what kind of diet does my muse have?  do they eat regularly,  or the standard 2-3 meals a day?  do they have to be reminded to eat,  or are they likely to remind others?  do they cook,  or have others cook for them?  do they eat healthily,  or not so much?  

As an android, 9S doesn’t require food to live. He can’t feel hunger or satiation. YoRHa units are powered entirely by the reactors in their black boxes, which only require water to function. Most of the time they can get all the fuel they need from vapor in the air they breathe, though in dry climates they’d need to find a water source. 

However, eating is an important communal activity, so they have a limited ability to do so. They don’t have stomachs or digestive systems. Any matter they consume is incinerated as soon as it’s swallowed. As a Scanner, 9S can analyze the chemical makeup of things he tastes, so he’s always putting weird shit in his mouth just to see what it’s made of. He enjoys eating with others, especially after difficult missions. It’s relaxing, even if the food is usually terrible because nobody has proper ingredients.

🥭  :    how important to my muse is their hometown,  or where they’re from?  are they proud of it,  or considered a hometown hero? did they move away,  or do they wish to?

9S doesn’t have a hometown, unless the orbital base he was manufactured on counts. He doesn’t like spending extended amounts of time there, because there’s not much to do, but returning is often required in order to meet with the commander and receive mission details. It’s kinda nice to be able to look down at Earth from space, though...

[secretpleasuresecretstash-blog]

5 Intermittent Fasting Tricks to Burn Fat Faster

intermittent fasting has gotten a lot of attention nowadays as there's so many benefits to be had from it it helps you lose weight helps you gain muscle and enhances your cognitive performance specifically it lowers insulin the fat storing hormone involved with diabetes it raises human growth hormone which does everything from increasing muscle mass and making you look better and live longer and it promotes the release of brain-derived neurotrophic factor a key hormone for growing new brain cells intermittent fasting is simple all you do is not eat for 16 hours of the day but this is a radical idea for most people considering we're encouraged to be eating all the time being told things like breakfast is the most important meal of the day and you need to eat six small meals to lose weight unsurprisingly hunger is the number one concern when it comes to fasting so let's take a look at how hunger works so we can better deal with it as Tim Russ said we often fear what we do not understand that our best defense is knowledge the first thing you should know is that hunger is not a simple equation of no food plus time equals more and more hunger in a very thorough series on fasting in his blog called intensive dietary management dr. Jason funk points to a study that shows that while subjects went over three days without any food the hunger hormone ghrelin gradually but continually decreased he says this means that patients were far less hungry despite not having eaten for the past three days this jabs perfectly with our clinical experience with patients undergoing extended fasting they all expect to be ravenously hungry but actually find that their hunger completely disappears this is because hunger is regulated by hormones like ghrelin and it comes in waves you do not get progressively hungrier the longer you go without food your body adapts to your regular eating schedule it knows when you usually eat so it comes to expect food and make you hungry around the same time each day here's a study from the medical university of vienna done on subjects participating in a 33 hour fast despite the early morning beam when people have gone the longest without food ghrelin was the lowest suggesting that they are the least and they're ghrelin didn't rise more and more the longer they went without food ghrelin rose at their normal eating times and it fell back down even though they didn't eat anything so when you start fasting it's important to know that hunger will arise and it is uncomfortable but it will come and go after a couple days your hormones will adapt to your new eating times and you will be less and less hungry until it's no longer an issue this is why many people say that the first four days are the hardest on adapting and readapting your eating times is uncomfortable but your body is very good at it I've been doing intermittent fasting with an eating window of about 2 to 4 hours for the past year and when I was first experimenting with fasting I actually tried eating once every other day to my surprise after only about 6 days of this I wasn't that hungry on the no eating day but like clockwork I started to get pretty hungry on the eating day right around the usual time I would eat another very interesting thing about this hormone ghrelin is that it may be making you hungry in order to get you to take in more salt it would be very important to have a hunger for salt as salt has many very critical functions it's needed by the heart to pump blood properly and it's a key component in cell to cell communication and the optimal transmission of nerve impulses to and from organs like the heart and brain low-salt has been shown to stunt growth increase insulin resistance and increase uric acid levels stimulating oxidative stress in the mitochondria leading to weight gain despite all this the standard low sodium guidelines of only 2.3 grams of sodium per day drastically underestimate how much salt the body really requires for optimal functioning a study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that an estimated sodium intake of at least 3 grams to 6 grams per day was associated with a lower risk of death and cardiovascular events in fact actually following the low salt guidelines posed a particularly high risk to health and intermittent fasting may have you requiring even more salt than usual intermittent fasting lowers your insulin levels this is great and one of the main goals of intermittent fasting but it's often overlooked that insulin retains sodium so the lower your insulin goes the more sodium your kidneys secrete losing a lot of sodium and other minerals can leave you feeling sluggish and hungry now your body really doesn't want you to lose too much sodium so one thing it does is it actually increases insulin levels in an attempt to retain more sodium a 1991 study done on 147 people found that a low salt diet significantly increased serum insulin in these people of course higher insulin is something you don't want so let me explain more about insulin and how it affects hunger when you eat insulin goes up and insulin helps you utilize carbohydrate for energy or stores it as glycogen which is basically linked chains of glucose this glycogen is stored in the liver or muscle and when you have too much glycogen the incoming carbohydrate will be stored as fat now different foods will give you a different insulin rise fat stimulates insulin a minimal amount while fiber less carbs provoke massive rises in insulin but the point is insulins job is to help you absorb and store nutrients next after about 46 hours after you eat insulin levels will have gone down and the glucose level in your blood starts to decrease this prompts the pancreas to secrete glucagon glucagon has almost the opposite function of insulin insulin stores food energy but glucagon pulls that energy out from your glycogen stores and your fat stores so if you're eating every two hours and getting six small meals a day you never let glucagon do its job and your body never starts burning into your glycogen or your fat stores not a good strategy for losing weight well what about hunger let's look at this study from 1986 they found if you inject an animal with insulin it will eat more adding insulin increases appetite if you have insulin floating around with no new glucose coming in your blood glucose will drop but insulin needs to be low for glucagon to use your fat or glycogen stores for energy with high insulin you have no access to your store to energy so it makes sense for extra insulin to promote hunger as the only way you can get new energy is to eat it and raise your blood glucose and as you might expect giving an animal glucagon reduced food intake so glucagon is decreasing appetite now they also infuse glucose into the animals small intestine and as you would expect it reduced food intake so it's of course not the case that carbs don't satiate you to some extent but if you're eating every two hours you're constantly pumping out insulin and the levels never go low enough for glucagon to do its job this explains why you can eat a bowl of cereal for breakfast or a huge plate of pasta for lunch and be hungry in just an hour or two refined carbohydrates like that will cause the body to overshoot with its insulin secretion so even after all the carbohydrates are processed after the meal you still have a bunch of insulin sitting around and making you hungry this overshooting with insulin also explains why if you binge eat at night you'll wake up starving in the morning so after a meal if you're patient glucagon will allow you to start running on your stored energy and you will be less hungry so while fasting glucagon suppresses hunger and is helping you to power the body by burning your stored glycogen and fat when you run out of the glycogen you're burning primarily fat for energy and your body enters the state of ketosis this produces a lot of ketone bodies which your body and brain will use for fuel it's a common misconception that the brain runs only on glucose in 1967 George Cahill found that the brain will derive two-thirds of its energy from ketone bodies made from fat though some processes in the body still required glucose but you don't need to eat that glucose your body makes its own glucose from things like glycerol and lactate this is called gluconeogenesis earlier we saw that high glucagon and low ghrelin during fasting will keep hunger in check but we can add ketone bodies to that list there's data that show that ketone bodies like beta-hydroxybutyrate also reduce appetite which isn't a surprise considering the act as an energy source for the body this is one of the reasons why a ketogenic diet or low carbohydrate diet has such great synergy with intermittent fasting these diets will keep insulin low and allow you to use fat for energy just like fasting will so if you're able I'd recommend trying to shift your diet to one that is high in good fat high in fiber high in micronutrients moderate on protein and low in carbohydrate you could even start eating like this before you begin intermittent fasting and you'll already be adapted to getting your energy from fat so you'll have less hunger and adapt to intermittent fasting easier you might be wondering why I said moderate protein many people assume a low carb or keto diet must have a lot of protein in it but that's not quite the case insulin is necessary for protein to be metabolized so you get an insulin rise when you eat protein but not only that when you eat more protein than your body needs to make or repair cells the excess will be broken down into glucose through gluconeogenesis in fact diabetics have been shown to have a 30% decrease in daily blood glucose levels just by restricting protein now there's one last thing about insulin and hunger it's how it interacts with leptin this satiety hormone essentially when you eat food depending on the composition of the meal your levels of leptin go up and you feel more satiated but when you have too much insulin it reduces leptin signaling your brain can't pick up on the leptin signal keeping you hungry in fact obesity which is virtually always accompanied by insulin resistance is also accompanied by leptin resistance if you want to stay satiated and full of energy rather than be hungry and lethargic you need to keep your insulin low lucky for you fasting seems to be the best way to lower insulin levels so while intermittent fasting is hard for the first couple of days it's helpful to know that your body and hormones are working in your favor making it easier and easier and if you get enough salt and minerals and eat high fiber moderate protein and low carbohydrate then you can make the whole says smoother

[livehealthynewsusa]

Myanmar women give birth in jungle as military lies in wait | Health News

On a stormy June night, Rosemary lay in labor in the darkness of her home in an abandoned village in Myanmar’s Mindat township when Mai Nightingale, a 25-year-old midwife, tried to stifle her screams.

“Only the two of us were alone in the village. We closed all the doors and windows of the house and stayed calmly inside, ”said Mai Nightingale. “When she felt pain, I put a blanket in her mouth because we feared soldiers might hear her.” Like others interviewed for this article, Al Jazeera used pseudonyms for Mai Nightingale and Rosemary for her safety.

Rosemary’s labor had started the night before, but as soldiers neared her village in southern Chin State, she and the other villagers fled into the forest. But there was no adequate shelter from the incessant rain, so Rosemary and Mai Nightingale decided to take the risk of encountering soldiers and return the next morning.

“The situation wasn’t exactly favorable for the birth of a baby,” said Mai Nightingale. “We saw Burmese soldiers running towards our village, but we couldn’t turn back because [Rosemary] was already exhausted. “

Rosemary’s husband did not dare to accompany her because he feared soldiers might mistake him for a member of a local armed group. Since a February 1 military coup, civil defense forces, mostly armed with hunting rifles and homemade weapons, have appeared across the country to fight the regime, and Mindat has been a focus of resistance since May.

Consistent with tactics the military has used for decades to crush an armed rebellion and terrorize the population, soldiers launched disproportionate attacks on Mindat, including firing artillery, rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns into residential areas while imposing martial law, making the city empty. according to local media reports. Young men are particularly affected.

[JC/Al Jazeera]

Rosemary brought her baby shortly after the sound of the soldiers died down, and Mai Nightingale cut and tied the umbilical cord with a razor blade and string which she boiled in water for lack of other sterilants. Although Rosemary and her baby are healthy and unharmed, the circumstances of the birth illustrate the increasing risks mothers and newborns face in an escalating humanitarian crisis.

Mai Nightingale and two other nurses interviewed by Al Jazeera who care for mothers and newborns displaced by armed conflict say they are severely limited in their ability to deliver babies safely and that the physical insecurity of pregnant women and newborns amid ongoing violence.

“The greatest health risks for pregnant women and newborns are their lives. They can die in labor or afterwards from running as soldiers near their hiding place, ”said a nurse nicknamed Smile in Loikaw Township, Kayah state. “There is not enough medical equipment or medication … babies cannot be vaccinated or properly housed.”

Collapsing health system

The United Nations estimates that around 230,000 people have been displaced since the coup.

In addition to attacking civilians, the military cut food and water supplies to conflict-affected people, shot at refugee camps and churches of refuge, shot displaced people trying to get rice from their villages, and burned food and medical supplies.

Meanwhile, Myanmar’s health system has all but collapsed, leaving few options even for women willing to risk the risk of returning to their town or village to bear a child, or to be vaccinated or treated.

Ongoing strikes by medical workers amid a wider movement of civil disobedience have left state hospitals threadbare, while some health facilities have been shut down entirely. The military has also repeatedly attacked medical workers and facilities, and occupied hospitals.

My mother put her hand on my cousin and prayed. By the grace of God, she gave birth successfully

Smile, Myanmar nurse

Alessandra Dentice, Myanmar ad interim representative at the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), told Al Jazeera that the vast majority of pregnant women displaced since the coup did not have access to emergency obstetric care, while routine vaccinations for children “almost completely stalled are”. “.

“Without urgent action, we estimate that 600,000 newborns annually will miss necessary newborn care, posing serious risks to their survival and long-term well-being across the country,” she said, adding that around 950,000 children are also lacking vital vaccination services .

In Mindat, Mai Nightingale has so far helped three displaced women with childbirth. Two of them, she said, had to move on in search of safe shelter in the days leading up to the birth, causing them physical pain and possibly inducing labor.

[JC/AL Jazeera]

Mai Nightingale knows that it is extremely dangerous for women and their babies to provide medical care to pregnant women and newborns without a lack of facilities or hygienic equipment. “Although soldiers could arrest both the patients and me, I will continue to help people who need medical attention,” she told Al Jazeera. “There is no one who can help them.”

Pregnant women are also in a dangerous situation in Kayah state, where an estimated 100,000 people have been displaced since early June. On June 8, the UN Special Rapporteur on Myanmar warned of “mass deaths from hunger, disease and exposure” in Kayah due to military attacks and the blocking of food, water and medicine for those who fled to the forest.

Smile, a 24-year-old nurse, fled her village in Loikaw Town with her cousin, who was suffering from labor while trying to escape. “Artillery fell near the rock where we were hiding. That day was [my cousin’s] Due date but she couldn’t deliver… we had to get to safety, ”said Smile. “She had to carry heavy things while running.”

Smile remembered the advice of her mother, who was also a nurse, and had grabbed a delivery package with rubber gloves, tweezers and scissors on the run from the village. “My mom told me that even when the world is in chaos, medical staff can’t stop,” she said.

She and her mother rubbed alcohol into the equipment while her cousin’s husband built a bamboo and tarpaulin tent under which they gave birth to their cousin’s baby. “My mother put her hand on my cousin and prayed. By the grace of God she gave birth successfully without [heavy] Bleeding, ”said Smile.

But a tragedy struck some displaced mothers.

Little time to mourn

Khu Meh gave birth to twins on April 8 in a local clinic in Loikaw Township. One was born dead; With the other, a girl, Khu Meh fled home in mid-May. “We have traveled very far and moved from place to place and sometimes slept in the bushes,” she said. About three weeks later, the second twin died in the jungle while drinking milk on Khu Meh’s chest.

About 25 miles north, in Pekon Township, Shan State, Mary fled her home in the last week of May when she was seven months pregnant.

“The military fired every night … we were very scared to sleep at home,” she said.

She took shelter in a church, but after she was shot at on June 6, she fled again to a corn field, where, with the help of a local midwife, she gave birth to her fifth child, a young boy, under a bamboo and tarpaulin shelter.

The next week brought endless rain and Mary’s baby suddenly died. There was little time to mourn. Mary and her remaining children had to flee again a week later because of approaching soldiers.

[JC/AL Jazeera]

Although Myanmar saw both maternal and child under-five mortality rates decline between 2000 and 2017, it remained one of the riskiest places for young mothers and infants in Southeast Asia even before the coup, according to UNICEF.

The maternal mortality rate in 2017 was 250 deaths per 100,000 live births, while the under-five mortality rate was 48 children per 100,000 live births.

Al Jazeera has not been able to find data on maternal and child mortality among displaced populations in Myanmar since the coup.

Naw Winnie, a nurse from Demoso township in Kayah state, who was herself displaced by fighting, is now volunteering with a local aid group in the mountainous region from which she fled.

She told Al Jazeera that illnesses are common in young children. She has treated dozens of skin infections and diarrheal diseases, and fears that health problems will only increase due to poor hygiene due to factors such as the scarcity of clean water and the lack of toilets.

The rainy season began in June, making hygiene difficult and increasing the risk of catching colds, flu, or mosquito-borne diseases.

Naw Winnie also cares for more than 10 pregnant women.

She had originally planned to send her to a makeshift clinic near the foothills of the mountain, but the clinic’s volunteers and patients were forced to evacuate on June 16 amid heavy fighting.

Now she’s not sure what to do.

One of the women, now five months pregnant, had previously given birth by caesarean section, and Naw Winnie is concerned that the woman could bleed vaginally, but it is just too risky to have a caesarean section in the jungle.

“We don’t have access to safe and hygienic facilities or equipment to give birth to babies,” she said. “If I help with the birth of a baby without hygienic facilities, both mothers and babies will be at risk.”

source https://livehealthynews.com/myanmar-women-give-birth-in-jungle-as-military-lies-in-wait-health-news/

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s weekly politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

micah (Micah Cohen, politics editor): Greetings, friends and colleagues, and thank you for joining this later-in-the-week-than-usual politics chat! We’re doing it a bit late because we wanted to see how the Super Tuesday of the 2018 primary season played out. And so the question we’re interrogating today is:

What have we learned about how the 2020 Democratic presidential primary might play out based on the 2018 primaries?

Sound good?

julia_azari (Julia Azari, political science professor at Marquette University and FiveThirtyEight contributor):

perry (Perry Bacon Jr., senior writer): Great.

micah: OK, so let’s break this up into two parts …

First up: candidates.

What have we learned about the type of candidate Democrats want?

(Also, something to weigh during this whole chat: How sound is this entire exercise of looking at 2018 congressional primaries for clues about the 2020 presidential primary?)

perry: To start broadly, what I took from Tuesday (and the primaries more generally this year) is that Democrats are anti-President Trump but not behaving in the anti-party establishment way that the GOP did in 2010, 2014 and 2016. The party establishment candidates (for example, Dianne Feinstein, Robert Menendez, Gavin Newsom) won. Left-leaning voters in California managed to coalesce around Democratic candidates enough to get at least one into the general election in the House districts that Democrats think they can flip (that’s how it looks now, in any case).

In short, Democratic voters are open to party-backed candidates.

julia_azari: Perry is right, though I would also note the many anti-Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee stories that came out of California and other places.

It’s less obvious to me that a plurality, much less a majority of Democratic voters, are swayed by their suspicion of the party. But these things can burn slowly. And a vocal minority can really gunk things up for a party, especially if the more establishment parts fail to coordinate. Which is what happened for Republicans in 2016.

perry: Right. Some Democratic activists kind of hate the party. But they still listen to the party.

micah: Wait, isn’t that a little strong?

perry: Which part do you think is wrong, Micah?

micah: Not wrong, but I guess I’m trying to get a sense of degrees.

Clearly, there are anti-establishment forces in the Democratic Party.

But they’re 40 percent weaker than in the GOP?

10 percent weaker?

You know what I mean?

julia_azari: I don’t think that’s necessarily true.

I would argue that in the Democratic Party, those anti-establishment forces are more challenging to combine with a compelling policy/ideological/team-based message than in the GOP.

So, anti-establishment sentiment in the Republican Party was easily paired up with anti-Obama feelings (tea party) and anti-immigration feelings (Trump)?

What’s the comparison for anti-establishment Dems? Single-payer? Campaign finance reform?

micah: Ah, I see. That makes sense. But aren’t they still weaker than in the GOP?

perry: I would say closer to 40 percent weaker. Kevin de León is a pretty good candidate. He is very qualified. And yet Feinstein came in 30 percentage points ahead of him in Tuesday’s primary despite not being a particularly good fit for California, which casts itself as the “state of resistance.”

The big difference is that de León does not have a Fox News/Breitbart apparatus attacking Feinstein like a Republican would have.

julia_azari: Perry, it seems like we somewhat disagree on the big picture of how strong these forces are in the Democratic Party, but the media point is a really critical one.

micah: The closest a tea-party-like Democratic challenge has come (and please spare me the emails about how the tea party analogy doesn’t work — I know it’s imperfect) was in Illinois’s 3rd District maybe?

perry: Right. And the incumbent in that race was fairly to the right of the Democratic Party.

Tuesday’s results are bad for people like Howard Schultz, if the outgoing Starbucks chairman decides that he wants to try to run a campaign to take over the Democratic Party the way Trump did the Republican Party.

micah: Yeah.

But, Julia, you think those anti-establishment forces are even weaker than Perry does?

perry: I feel like I’m saying they are pretty weak in the first place.

micah: Yeah, that’s why I’m confused.

Julia thinks they’re stronger maybe?

julia_azari: No, I’m saying I think we are in danger of underestimating them based on what’s still a pretty small number of observations.

micah: That’s fair.

julia_azari: Trump didn’t happen overnight. Not to toot my own horn, but my piece on Trump and Paul Ryan illustrates how these kinds of forces built up over decades in the Republican Party.

micah:

perry: I think that’s right. I might consider, say, Bernie Sanders, more part of the Democratic Party at this point, in that he does lots of party stuff and the party kind of accepts him. Sanders, even though he is technically an independent, has moved toward the party, and the party has moved toward him.

julia_azari: The fact that the DCCC — rather than ideology or policy — has become a point of argument in Democratic circles and in stories about the primaries illustrates the legitimacy problems that parties now face. Who the f even knew what the DCCC was in 2006?

(Full disclosure/self-promotion: I am writing a book about party weakness right now, which emphasizes very long-term and slow-moving processes, including the erosion of party legitimacy.)

perry: So I think Julia and I disagree. It’s a very small sample size. But if I were Joe Biden, I would be happy with how well Feinstein did. And that the party elders did get their candidates in some of these House races.

julia_azari: If I were Joe Biden, I would be focused on the credibility of Feinstein’s challenger, so, yeah, we disagree — though I also admit that we’re extrapolating from not much data.

perry: Feinstein has moved to the left. She was famously for the death penalty but now is not, for example. But figures in the party, like Obama, were willing to embrace Feinstein even if she is to the right of where the energy of the party is right now.

She could have been treated like Bob Bennett or Richard Lugar but was not.

julia_azari: Those are good comparisons too. I certainly don’t want to suggest that the situations are identical. But to resonate, anti-establishment Dems need a message that is also about policy and ideas, not just being pissed at the DCCC and the Democratic National Committee. But at the same time, frustration with those institutions is a real phenomenon.

micah: OK, so we disagree a little about how establishmenty/anti-establishmenty a candidate Democrats might want in 2020.

Let’s talk other candidate characteristics.

There’s been a ton of talk about women doing really well.

From ex-FiveThirtyEighter Allison McCann (though, really, once a FiveThirtyEighter, always a FiveThirtyEighter — whether you like it or not):

perry: It’s totally different to nominate a female candidate for a House race than to nominate a woman to run for president after Hillary Clinton just lost.

micah: Case in point:

micah: Isn’t there research showing that voters are more likely to vote for women for legislative offices than for executive offices?

julia_azari: Here is a study that finds that media coverage is more gendered for those offices.

perry: 2018 is shaping up as the year of female Democratic candidates. But 2020 is about picking one person. And I wonder if Democrats start looking strategically in a way that likely discriminates against female and non-white candidates. I.e., Democrats will be asking, “Who can win Obama-Trump white voters in Wisconsin?” That’s why The New York Times is writing about the mayor of South Bend maybe running for president. (What I’m saying is that I doubt The Times would write a story about a black mayor of a smallish city considering a presidential run, since Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Eric Holder and Deval Patrick are rumored candidates. There is a bit of a media search going on for a white male candidate who is not from the coasts.)

julia_azari: People LOVE Pete Buttigieg.

perry: In other words, there will be lots more Democratic women running for president in 2020 than in 2016, just because there is no Clinton this time. She screened out lots of male and female candidates. But I’m not sure I take from 2018 that the Democrats are more likely to nominate a woman.

julia_azari: It depends somewhat on the way people interpret the 2016 loss.

Democrats could read that loss as, “People aren’t ready to vote for a woman, and we need to be ‘safe.'” (My rant about using the word “safe” that way is redacted for now.)

Or you could interpret the dynamics as fundamentally about status quo or not — and see Clinton for the unique figure she is, one who has been in the public eye for decades.

perry: But not really the way people interpret the 2016 loss, right? The consultants/donors, etc., have a big influence on who gets to the front of the line in the nomination process, and we know they are more male and white than the party overall. Some of them have concluded that it is about winning Obama-Trump voters.

micah: I guess that’s likely right, but won’t there be a hunger for a woman nominee among Democratic primary voters? Isn’t that what we’re seeing in these primaries?

perry: We could debate this for a while, but I think Conor Lamb is viewed more as a model for 2020 than Stacey Abrams among the people who matter in the Democratic Party.

julia_azari: I mean, not to be blunt, but that’s what we see in society.

micah: According to our count, woman have won ~70 percent of Democratic primaries against at least one man with no incumbent on the ballot.

julia_azari: There’s a real fever among left-leaning writers, etc., to recommend moving away from identity politics post-2016. I worry that the effect is to put white voters back at the center and neglect groups that have historically, well, been neglected.

Still, I think that there will be demand for a woman to run against Trump within the Democratic Party. Let me try to get my thoughts together about women on presidential tickets.

It is a short story of non-success. But women have been brought onto tickets at times of electoral distress. (Remember the brief Ted Cruz-Carly Fiorina ticket from 2016?)

micah: Oh what a moment that was.

julia_azari: In 1984, Democrats were facing a popular incumbent in Ronald Reagan. And they picked Geraldine Ferraro as the vice-presidential nominee to shake things up and draw attention — which she did.

In 2008, Sarah Palin was supposed to, I guess, create conservative excitement for the McCain ticket in a year when Republicans were very likely to do badly.

Hillary Clinton inevitability as president was a late-breaking narrative; otherwise, savvy observers had to know that after two terms of a Democratic president and a tepid economy, 2016 was an uphill battle for Democrats.

micah: But will 2020 be considered a time of “electoral distress” for Democrats? Won’t it be the opposite?

julia_azari: I am getting there, Micah.

micah: Sorry

julia_azari: It’s OK. I meant to warn everyone about the Hamlet-style soliloquy.

micah: lol

julia_azari: So 2020. There will be a surface narrative that what’s needed is a woman to take down Trump. But a very cynical reading of this evidence suggests that the most likely scenario for nominating a woman is a sacrificial lamb scenario, in which the party seeks these optics but is really pessimistic about its chances. Trump is an unpopular president, but incumbency is powerful.

I hope I’m wrong about this deeply cynical take.

micah: Cynicism has a good batting average in U.S. politics.

perry: I think the women winning this year are also fairly liberal, so that’s more what I take from these primaries: The party is open to liberal candidates. Abrams in Georgia, for example.

In other words, I do not expect a Democratic Leadership Council-style attempt to recenter the party during the 2020 primary.

julia_azari: Yeah, that’s a good takeaway.

perry: So I imagine it will be hard for the Steve Bullocks of the world (Bullock is the Democratic governor of Montana) — the kind of people who I expect will argue that Democrats are too left.

micah: Totally agree. You can imagine a scenario in which the party, as you both said, “moderates” (heavy scare quotes) on identity — white male — but not at all on ideology.

julia_azari: Yeah. As I pointed out on Tuesday in the live blog, support for LGBT rights doesn’t make one a radical among Democrats anymore, and the party is fairly uniformly pro-choice, though it means different things to different people. Left of the Affordable Care Act is probably the only way to run on health care. Younger voters are concerned about student debt.

micah: Any other candidate traits you’ve noticed before we move to issues/platforms?

perry: I haven’t studied this and don’t have data to back it up, but I feel like there is a generational thing going on. It seems like, Feinstein aside, the crop of Democrats winning this year is fairly young. That might be a bad sign for Biden/Sanders — the party is nominating lots of women/minorities and looking for fresher faces. (Biden is 75; Sanders is 76.)

julia_azari: Yeah. There were signs of that back in the fall — some party-building.

perry: I’m having a hard time, based on what I’m seeing now, seeing Democrats uniting around a person who is almost 80 years old.

Like, the ideal candidate might be someone who is anti-establishment and left like Sanders but not Sanders — someone who really speaks about #MeToo and Black Lives Matter and Dreamers in an articulate way. Lamb and Abrams are both strong speakers, fairly young, dynamic people.

julia_azari: My only other demographic observation is that the party seems poised to really highlight LGBT candidates. We’ll likely look back on this as a period when that really shifted in terms of representation. (Danica Roem’s national profile is an example of this.)

micah: OK, policy time!

Any thoughts about the platform that the 2020 Democratic primary will be fought over? We’ve gotten into it a little already.

perry: I don’t think the Democrats have a big divide on economic issues. The whole party is moving left, and the fight will be over, say, single-payer versus a huge expansion of Medicaid and Medicare.

And voters won’t know the difference.

julia_azari: Yeah, there’s likely to be some tortured language in the platform about single-payer.

perry: Most of these primaries have shown little in the way of policy differences.

julia_azari: I expect lots of symbolic agreement on diversity and immigration and upward mobility. The differences to be worked out in governing won’t be easy, but uniting under an electoral banner probably will be pretty straightforward.

perry: I do think there is a divide not on positions but on emphasis around, say, gun control, policing, abortion, immigration. Some of the Democratic candidates in these primaries have not been as loud and proudly liberal on these issues. I don’t think, say, Biden will say he is pro-life, but will he defend and back Planned Parenthood as strongly as Kirsten Gillibrand might?

I doubt it.

There is a core tension among Democrats over identity policy (how liberal to be on these issues) and identity in terms of the electoral coalition (is the goal to win more women, minorities, people who stayed home in 2016 or to win more Obama-Trump voters, who are mostly white).

That is a tension they are desperate to smooth over. And can’t.

micah: Do you all this Medicare-for-all will be a rallying cry or a litmus test?

perry : Medicare-for-all will be a litmus test for the most left candidates (so, say, Elizabeth Warren, Harris, Sanders), but I think Biden can avoid that and be fine.

micah: Like, to your point, Perry, I wonder if Democrats will focus on health care over, say, immigration because it plays across those divides (women/non-white voters vs. Obama-Trump voters).

perry: In the primary, they will all have the same position on health care, so I suspect there will be some incentive to be left on immigration or some other issue as a way to differentiate yourself.

Remember that Clinton sharply attacked Sanders in 2016 from the left over gun policy.

julia_azari: I’m honestly not sure how these things will play out.

The Democrats tend to have a bunch of issues that are broadly popular but have very concentrated opposition — gay rights, gun control. If the “win back Trump voters” sentiment is strong, who knows what priorities will be emphasized?

perry: This Seth Masket piece is good at capturing the Democratic divides. Like, abolishing ICE (the federal government’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency) is a live issue now. I don’t know how that would work, but which Democratic 2020 candidate is going to be like, “Hey, actually, we need ICE.”

julia_azari: I can’t see too many Democratic candidates saying, “Hey, we need ICE.” But I can see people suggesting that this is a “distraction” from “jobs.”

perry: And I can see that answer not lasting for 24 months (the 2020 campaign cycle).

micah: That piece from Masket (friend of the site) is interesting: “The language may be buried within discussions about interest groups, but deciding which groups to prioritize is a strongly ideological one.”

julia_azari: I wrote a response, but it’s a little academic.

One question I posed in that piece is how the fights between the parties will affect the fights within them. Historically, they’ve mirrored very closely. But now that the parties are pretty uniform in their basic ideologies, I think that might change.

micah: OK, final thoughts …

julia_azari: I think the Democratic Party is in the fairly early stages of a pretty big transition — from a patchwork group-based party to a more clearly ideological one.

This means there are a lot of directions it could go in 2020, and it’s not clear to me how the power dynamics will work in determining who gets to shape that direction.

perry: It’s easy for a party to unite in a midterm against the other party’s incumbent president. The trouble is figuring out the rest: 2018 is just so different from 2020.

I left 2014 having watched the Republicans finally figure out how to control their nomination processes and avoid having too many people who couldn’t win the general on their tickets. Then, they nominated Trump.

Democrats have figured out a populist message that works for a more diverse slate of candidates. But I don’t know if that will survive 20 candidates in 2019 and 2020 presidential debates — with the press and Trump trying to hype up their fissures.

[lovehaswonangelnumbers]

New Post has been published on https://lovehaswonangelnumbers.org/energetic-navigation-28-october-3-november/

Energetic Navigation 28 October – 3 November

Energetic Navigation 28 October – 3 November

By A Gift From Gaia

Progressively speeding up as we move deeper into the Solar Minimum and yet we have barely begun, the energy we find ourselves in is transforming those consciously aware rapidly, moving through realisations and releases almost hourly compared to how it was not so long ago when “things” would take “time”, of course, we realise that the “time” we took was again part of what required releasing and by releasing the lower aspects of this energy spectrum, the weighted time of the human linear way, it became Divine Time which simply showed the love within the energy, the light, and offers perfection in every moment. To exist in Divine Time is to be in a space of complete surrender, it’s a space where judgement would be self-sacrificing and defense creates internal wounds, Divine Time is the higher conscious view of Saturns playing ground and once you acknowledge our Lord and the rules on the gate he will gift you with the most magical experience as you release the restrictions of the lower octave programming we came to accept and be ruled by.

Breaking Free is a theme of energy that we have been surfing all this year, releasing from the Devil Tarot Card that represents the Capricorn energy, but as we know the Devil represents the low octaves of the human, the machine, the blind and so to use the old unconscious ways of the fear spectrum such as defense and judgment, blame and shame allows those loose chains to remain in place, those chains are not fixed, they are easily removed and so the choice to remain has always been yours.

The resistance creates disharmony, release brings magical celestial harmonics and with these Mars square Saturn and Pluto transits that are now reactivated for the next couple of weeks, the Mars square Saturn lined up yesterday and the Mars square Pluto is heading in now, we are continuing to learn how to ride this wild stallion, although perhaps some have mistakenly picked up the wild bull as it went charging past, see that’s a little different energy, the stallion holds heart, he can be tamed, the bull on the other hand doesn’t seem to hold the ability to connect, has no care, just wants to charge his angry self into every obstruction, and will eventually burn out his energy and most likely refuse to move for quite some time.

Both patterns, both rides are super important, those choosing the charging bull will no doubt learn to catch a ride with the stallion next time around and by that phase the chances are the bull will have allowed you to observe why you chose him, that the walls you had built up around, caked in unconscious belief systems posters and flyers to keep the truth of the wall hidden behind pretty dreamy pictures and fluff dressed in pity MUST come down.

This energy however you choose to move through is evolving us, taking us on lightspeed travels, zipping parts of our minds back into our ancient self, to retrieve data required for the now, and yet the next minute we are travelling with the ancient future self to receive the confirmation because the gems being retrieved are often beyond imagination and require boosts to fully understand the resonance and the codes held.

This means MORE raising of the physical body vibration, more listening to its requirements and acting in the moment as opposed to the old ways of waiting/weighting, which only ever slows us down, ignoring the most subtle signs of the body, even so much as making the request for thirst or hunger dissolve and opting for avoidance tactics signals to the body a lack of interest, a lack of unconditional love, there will be no self healing until EVERYTHING the body says is understood and innerstood, meaning we act upon everything, in the NOW because the now is the space in which we choose, now is The Creator of the ever evolving you.

This Mars energy we are experiencing is such a powerful clearing and creative energy if you understand how it behaves, and once that is understood we realise it is simply our own energy, emanating out from within and using the power of creation to highlight where our creation is not in harmony with our highest aligned timeline, and he is showing us the wounded masculine in its process of healing, as he is hot on the heels of the feminine, Venus, who is just one step ahead, Mars is focused, he is heading out of the underworld where he has been hidden behind the sun and he is now making the most out of this journey, fully aligned, fully committed to begin to unify with the feminine, the wounded masculine within is ready to support, ready to place his energy where it matters, within, to show his Queen her value, the true twin flame within, is ready to merge and become One very powerful light force energy.

What makes this more magical is that Saturn holds no expectation and the lesson is to realise it is the motion that matters, holding the awareness and making steady positive steps, in fact any speed or idea of rushing, pushing or charging ahead will only create an experience to understand patience, and again to step back into the flow of Divine Time allowing this to form so it can show you all the magical light gems along the way, and we don’t want to miss a single one, every light gem is so ridiculously valuable especially during this Dark Moon energy we have been surfing leading into todays Scorpio New Moon, which is opposing Uranus in Taurus, there is the bull again and he is acting rather jumpy with Uranus on his back, taking random turns, bucking and spinning, this is pure expect the unexpected energy, and for the cosmic surfers this is likely to bring a whole heap of new ideas and ways to underpin the new physical body vibrational upgrades you have been focusing on, this is something I noticed just a couple of days ago as myself and Reese, my son, have been adding some rather new and interesting things to our diets to assist on his road to recovery.

I would also like to just say a massive thank you to everyone who has been donating and sharing our fund, you have all encouraged him MORE than I could have imagined as he is now listening and open to trying natural ways to heal himself, a few days ago he would refuse ALL, didn’t believe anything would work other than the meds, we have so many new things and we are sharing them together, and yarrow tea seems to be quite a favourite. We had so many messages and a whole list of things to try which I read out to him, and talked to him about and just that, just by those messages of love from you all out there has helped him open up to receive and try more things to support this disease. We do have an awfully long road ahead of us though and we will still require some extra support as I am paying privately for Hydrotherapy sessions and so if these energetic navigation reports assistance you in anyway could I please ask for a small donation to the Help My Son Walk Again fund I have set up on GoFundMe (link below), however if you would rather donate through Paypal please do so using the email address – connect@agiftfromgaia.com or hit the link paypal.me/agiftfromgaia

What has been interesting to See in this is that there is a reflection of weakness, whilst I don’t have Ankylosing Spondylitis I have become aware we do have weakness in the same area which is why we are now healing this as One body, he is afterall a future version of myself, his template was created during times of dis-ease and of course this becomes the baseline frequency of his genetic makeup, so it makes sense we do this together.

But what this experience has been showing is exactly how this all works, how when you release all fear and restriction, when you listen to the requests of the body, when you care more, when you prioritise Self and plug only into that which nourishes, which incorporates all feeds that enter the field, then the experience becomes nothing short of enlightening and therefore rapid, the moment you release the push and the need what transpires is the flip, the rise and the expansion into new healthFULL experiences and by using the signposts being delivered by our celestial map it becomes an incredibly INjoyable transition.

The Scorpio New Moon energy takes us in deep, it allows so much to be seen and released to begin yet another transformative week that sees us welcoming in the backwards dance of Mercury in Retrograde, we are dredging the pool of Scorpio, we are digging away at the bottom and there will no doubt be more data to be found as ancient relics are unearthed giving us yet more clues as to why we find ourselves here and from these clues we will soon realise new paths opening up for us to journey.

This Mercury Retrograde is coupled with a solar wind prediction, we await the codes heading in and I will be back to translate. Stay present in the heart angels and open into pure acceptance for how the guidance moves us.

Please place a 💙 in the comment box to keep the heartbeat of A Gift from Gaia alive in the body of Facebook and please share the post or invite those you feel will resonate to this space, one small action can change the entire dynamics of a reality, you may just be turning on the light for someone lost in the dark.

Here is the GoFundMe page to support my son Reese and his healing, it is essential we get him walking now as we are already facing irreversible damage.

gf.me/u/v8gqjy

Thank you All 💙💙💙

*****

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[notwhelmedyet]

fic : Hellfire, Spitfire and the Fantasy of Choice

...so I locked myself into writing from Chromedome’s point of view in Seeing Double, but there were some things that could only be expressed from Rewind’s perspective. Hence, I’m writing a couple of very short stories to fill in the gaps!

This is a story that takes place in the same continuity as Seeing Double (link!). However, all you need to know from that is it’s set circa mtmte issue 33 and that Rewind doesn't get away from the DJD and is taken as a trophy. This is what happens next. Also delves a sliver of my interpretation of Rewind's life pre-Dominus.

Read on ao3 (link) or below

"Your toy threw it's leg at me," Kaon complained, holding up the leg. It had barely scuffed him. His silhouette cast a spiny shouldered shadow against the projection, cutting through the shaking image of Domey's lifeless body. They'd locked his neck joint that morning to stop him from turning the picture to face the wall, but the shaking wasn't even an act of resistance. Apparently it was his body's natural reaction to terror. How convenient for him that it served his purposes of also making them miserable.

Just like his leg. It was their fault for detaching the things and then leaving them within reaching distance. He'd pulled the other one close, ready to throw it at whoever next tried to touch him. Probably that awful little medic again. He shuddered and the video on the projection spluttered to a halt. It stayed black for a moment and then looped back to the beginning of the footage, Overlord's execution.

Tarn looked over at Kaon with narrowed eyes. "Are you frightened of the thing?"

"It's a nuisance. We should take the arms off, stop it from bothering us. It's much better now with the vocalizer cut off."

Rewind clicked irritably, "You are all dead." The odds of them ever having learned clickspeak were slim, but at least he still had the satisfaction. To punctuate the statement, he spelled out the threat again in sign language and then with several vulgar gestures he had stored in his database.

"It is a bit...feisty still," Tarn admitted. "Ask Nickel about cutting down on it's fuel, see if that quiets it."

"The projector's an auxiliary system, it'll cut out if we cut its rations much more," Kaon said.

"Mm, not if Nickel goes in and links it up with the emergency response circuitry. It's a fairly simple medical override. Like we did with Nimbus so he could enjoy more of his time in Helex's smelter without offlining himself."

"Ah, yes. That was enjoyable," Kaon agreed. Behind them, Pipes' paint bubbled and peeled, hands desperately trying to hold his spark in his chest despite the gaping hole. The image shook and shuddered.

Tarn walked over to Rewind and knelt, staring at him, head cocked. Rewind kept his grip on the leg. "Little thing," Tarn said, "you are comforted by the thought of resisting us. But the more you resist, the more pieces of you we will take away. Eventually you will only be the projector and your video and the silent scream you cannot voice. And what will be the point of resisting then?"

He got up and walked away. "Comm Nickel," he said over his shoulder. "She can do that coding before we hit the planet."

He wasn't sure what was going wrong, but there was something about the Energon that was making him sick. He'd been subsisting on the meager rations they gave out at the relief center for two stellar cycles, after he lost his position doing data entry to a new wave of Functionist propaganda. It wasn't enough, but it had been better than nothing. Now it hurt, an all around ache through his cabling but centered at his fuel pump, like something was clamping it tighter and tighter and the liquid couldn't compress. He found himself passing cycles counting kliks, trying to distract himself from the pain and then from the hunger when the pain was so bad he couldn't get up to get his ration for the day.

Disposables weren't allowed at the community clinic anymore. And even if they were, he had no Shanix to ply a medic with.

"You need a placement," one of his neighbors clicked at him. He had a weird dialect of clickspeak, this mech. He was one of the laser pointers and he'd come from somewhere far away, some patron who'd traveled from...maybe Tetrahex. Rewind couldn't remember anymore. Maybe his memory was corrupting.

"I am no slave," he said.

"Soon you won't be," the neighbor said. "Soon you'll be dead."

"Better to die free," Rewind said.

"You are stupid," he said back. "This can not last. When change comes, you will be dead and we will be free."

It took two of them to carry him to the Functionist center, where he waited eighteen cycles for an especially down on his luck patron to select him from the pens. He spent the next 67 stellar cycles in solitude, processing and storing astronomy datafiles. But that first fueling on real, uncut energon was like a taste of the afterspark. Sure, it was low grade and barely filtered, but it wasn't like it took much energy to sit in the dark and think. He composed poetry for a few stellar cycles, then switched to translating the classics from memory into clickspeak. First his own dialect and then what he could remember of that Tetrahexian laser pointer. When he tired of that, he started reanalyzing the starmaps he received for his own entertainment. The constellations became a tiny army of angry memory sticks surrounding the Functionist Council, bludgeoning them to death. He named each one. It was better than death, he supposed. He was pretty sure. He was nearly certain.

His next patron nearly had an army of memory sticks all his own, a cohort of seven. He worked in Iacon's local government and used them to file and access court records. The work was worse, more files about death, petty crime, addicts and abuse. But he got to walk again. There was a click in his left knee he didn't remember from before his first placement, but he couldn't be sure it hadn't started up earlier. He hadn't been very coherent those last months.

The luxury of that patron was the company. The Functionists had apparently completely brainwashed everyone into believing that the 'lower classes' could barely follow simple instructions, let alone be capable of mutual communication. They seemed to think the chatter of his coworkers was babble.

Which is what it was for Rewind for the first few deca-cycles. Clickspeak had changed while he'd been locked up playing with linguistics and they chittered in amusement at his odd turns of phrase. But before long he adapted and they were all on speaking terms.

"Allergy," Frame diagnosed. "You were allergic to crude Energon. They started using crude instead of processed at the relief centers right about that time."

"I'm allergic to it too," Buffer said. "Pretty common for our frametype, actually. Three of my old cohort were allergic."

"It's good you came in when you did," Frame said. "Even if you could have lasted through it, they closed the relief centers to 'disposables' not long after that. That's when I finally broke."

"I lasted another seven stellar cycles," Flicker said, adding a dismissive trill at the end. Rewind had been telling them about how his old Tetrahexian neighbor used to do that. He was never sure if it was only him or an actual dialect, but it had certainly become part of the cohort's pattern of speech. "Had a friend who was conscripted into mining and he shared rations with me until they reassigned him off-planet."

"A moment for the helpers whose fate we'll never know," Index said softly. They all looked over. Index had been selected the same time Rewind had, but had adapted to speaking far slower. He'd been given an assignment at the beginning of the Functionist upswell and had been alone storing financial records in a closet somewhere until the landlord who'd been his patron had finally gone bankrupt. Even Rewind's old clickspeak had been virtually unintelligible for Index at first.

"We are in darkness but may they have light," Rewind said. They all echoed him and cut their optics for a klik in respect. Then they jumped back to work before someone could notice. Rewind had never heard any of the six acts of gratitude before coming there, but he was learning their import to his new friends. It wasn't religious, but it made them feel less small and their suffering not just theirs but part of a community's.

Those stellar-cycles had been his happiest years until Dominus recognized his worth. He sometimes turned them over in his head, let the memory's now well-rounded corners comfort him with it's familiarity. None of that cohort had survived the war. Almost none of his frametype had survived the war and the bad years that lead up to it. But their deaths were familiar. Given long enough anything could become familiar and comforting. He turned those memories over and then he let the images projected on the wall wash over him, blunting the edges a little bit at a time.

The creature they called a sparkeater was nothing of the sort. He looked a lot like a turbofox, but some of the details didn't quite match up. Too much ruff around the neck. Rewind had seen the thing attempt to eat his friends' dead bodies and the first time it tried to lay down beside him he flinched away. It flinched back and ducked it's head down, scurrying off to some other corner of the ship.

When it tried again, Rewind was already delirious with hunger and lack of recharge. He'd never seen them feed the pet, he realized. Was it was only permitted to drink from their kills? If so, it would be even hungrier than him. There was no one in the lounge to watch the eternal feed at that moment, so he worked up the effort to click at it. "Maybe what you are is not your fault," he said. "Maybe you are good." It looked at him with enormous eyes and circled closer before curling up, nestled by the socket for his left leg. It was warm. "You are good," he said, experimentally. "I forgive you."

It hummed in pleasure, sending vibrations up through his frame.

If they hadn't taken his arms he'd have been tempted to pet the thing, maybe groom the spines of its coat into order. As it was, he drifted on the heady daze of too little sleep and the vibrations rumbling through his body. At some point he'd grown so weak that consciousness no longer felt real. It made the forgiving easier. "You are good," he said again. "You deserve better than this."