#which doesn't seem like that much of a problem right

[bunny-jpeg]

vanilla cone

fernando alonso

request: “God damnit, now all i can think about right now is you licking my cock like its that ice cream cone.” with Fernando Alonso no 108. “god damnit, now all i can think about right now is you licking my cock like its that ice cream cone.”

tags: smut/pwp, ice cream. summer/heatwave, established relationship, teasing, oral sex (fernando receives), car sex/semi-public sex

eros (the valentine's collection)

hot, hot summer. it felt like the heat was painfully oppressive. nothing seemed to help ease it. it was like every cold drink or chilled shower made things worse.

and you only had so much clothes to shed. you had resorted to being in your underwear and a t-shirt. both were covered in sweat. fernando seemed unaffected by the heat, much to your bitterness. you assumed it was because he was dripping with sweat every weekend from the intense heat of racing cars for over twenty years. this heatwave would feel like child's play.

but you were melting. so with a little bit of begging you convinced your loving, generous, kind boyfriend to go get ice cream.

fernando kissed your cheek with a gentle affection while you waited for your ice cream at the stand. you smiled a little even though the heat was making you uncomfortable.

you believed that fernando's kisses could cure anything. you leaned up against him and kissed the side of his face in return. you asked, "doesn't the beard make everything hotter?"

he rubbed he facial hair and replied, "well, i think it makes me look hotter." then laughed a little, he then asked you, "how are you feeling? still warm?" he placed a hand on your sweaty forehead.

"yeah, warm. more like boiling hot." you said, "but don't worry, i don't feel like i'm going to faint." you flashed him a smile before your order was called and you went to get it.

fernando watched you. he smiled at you when you returned with two cones in hand. one vanilla and one strawberry. he took the strawberry one and said, "thank you, my love." then kissed you once more before you headed back to the car.

you looked a little more relieved with the cold treat in your possession. your eyes closed when you took the first lick and when you let you a small moan, fernando felt the noise go straight to his cock.

he brushed it off and got an arm around you as you got back to the car. "let's get you out of the sun. too hot for you."

once in the car and out of the direct sun, you were able to enjoy the ice cream more. you excitingly ate it. fernando eyed you as he ate his own, his free hand on your thigh while the two of you attempted to cool down. he asked you, "how does it taste?" you looked with a small sparkle in your eyes and he laughed, "you must be enjoying it."

"i am. i needed it to badly, i was dying back home." you said with some of the ice cream on the side of your mouth. the white substance was a bit erotic in fernando's eyes, which caused him to swallow.

"happy about that. i don't want you to overheat." he tried to brush off the feeling as he wiped the corner of your mouth with his thank you being a pleased noise from you which only made his cock harden in his shorts.

his arousal for you only grew until you were nearly done with the cone. you smiled once it was all finished and fernando took you by the chin softly. you glowed under his touch.

"hi, honey." you said as you temperature cooled.

"hello, my dove." he wiped your cheek with his thumb while he finished eating, "you enjoyed that? looks like you did. sadly you gave me a small problem." you looked at him curiously and he added, "god damnit, now all i can think about right now is you licking my cock like it's that ice cream cone. it turned me on so much."

you kept your gaze on him while your hand went to the front of his shorts, "i'm sorry, honey." you said, "i didn't mean to tease you."

fernando kissed your lips tenderly, "don't be. you couldn't help it, you had been so warm all week. any relief from it would make anyone moan. sadly, you are sometimes simply too attractive." his voice was tender and you held a smile for him.

you soon got his cock out of his shorts. it excited him at the sight of your hand around his length. he licked his lips and kept his eyes on you.

"as good as ice cream?" he jokingly asked as he finished the cone. he played with your hair. you two were parked in a quiet corner with the windows rolled up. they were tinted as well, which allowed you some privacy. he kissed your cheek before you leaned over the console to lick his cock. he shuddered and felt a bloom of pleasure in his chest.

you kept your lips wet as you slowly moved your head up and down his length. you held his knee as you kept yourself steady. your movements were an even pace as you mouth went deeper against him.

it was heavy in your mouth, but in the best way possible. you enjoyed sucking his cock. you knew people loved massive cocks, but fernando's cock was just perfect in size. and it made you excited all over. you moaned as you moved your head. you even put more action with your body to go deeper and deeper. it made your lover feel like he was on cloud nine.

"my dove." he cooed as he played with your hair, you continued the pace. you took him so well, it made his hips rise a little. he shakily exhaled and dropped his hips. he leaned further against the driver's seat and let you work yourself on him. he said softly to you, "every inch of you is perfect. so beautiful. i am happy that you are all mine. i know this isn't going to cool us down, but i can't help myself with you. it is like being given an angel, i wish to touch and worship you." he held onto you a little tighter as the movements continued.

you had come a long way with pleasuring him. he taught you everything that excited, and also where your limits were. sex was about fun, about equals.

you once told him that you enjoyed pleasuring him with your mouth, even with the dull ache in your jaw from too much of it. but you were eager and it made fernando experience heaven. he held on a little tighter and shifted as you went as deep as you could take him. spit traveled down your chin and onto his bells. he then groaned through a tense jaw.

you moaned a little bit and rubbed your thighs together. you felt excitement through your core. you had a feeling when you got home, fernando would happily return the favour. he always spoiled you, loved you in such a deep way. his lover for you was unmovable.

from the moment you met, you knew you two would always be together. through every racing season and heatwave you were intertwined and loving in a deep way. and fernando's love only got deeper as your nose grazed his trimmed pubic hair. you clutched his legs tighter as an anchor to move faster.

you kept your pace steady and let your chin grow covered in spit. you groaned out loud. fernando laughed lowly, an airy laugh. he was greatly enjoying this.

he knew you were aroused, turned on by the feeling of his cock in your mouth. his hand in your hair and even the near public location you were in. he said lowly to you, "you look good with my cock in your mouth. it is where it belongs." he watched you squirm.

it was cute.

"you look beautiful. all mine." he said with affection in his tone. there was love in his heated gaze as he watched you pleasure him. he rolled his hips slightly and you moaned a little louder. your mouth felt amazing. he loved you, everything about you. he felt pleasure grow in his core as the excitement worked through his blood.

you looked up at him and tried to smile with his cock in your mouth. it was quite an endearing sight and it made him chuckle lowly once more. he found you simply so endearing. you continued to move your head and could feel the weight of him in your mouth as drool stuck to your chin.

"oh, baby. my dove." me mused, "you are the light of my life. the most beautiful thing i've ever seen. you're everything to me." he shakily exhaled.

you felt yourself glow under his words and he held onto you to push your throat a little further down. you felt a flutter in your chest as his words made you pulse soar. you were pressed a little further down and felt him tense up.

he rocked up into your throat and you let yourself relax around his length. he tensed up quickly and you moaned as he came down your throat. the salty taste flooded your taste buds and you happily swallowed.

it wasn't the worst taste in the world, a benefit of fernando's primarily vegetarian diet. you slowed your movements to a stop and swallowed the last of it. you then pulled your mouth away and pushed back your hair. you panted heavily, able to properly breathe. the car console pressed against you and it had begun to feel a bit painful.

you relaxed back into the passenger's seat. any coolness you felt was replaced with heat from pleasure. you exhaled, "wow." you then smiled at him. he leaned over and kissed you on the lips. when he pulled away soon after, he put his cock back into his pants. you then remarked, "i think i'm hot all over again."

fernando laughed, still a bit out of breath, "ah well, maybe we can go back home and find another way to cool off. or, we could got even hotter." then gave you a wink.

you rolled your eyes playfully and said, "you're insatiable, nando. but let's go home." and placed a hand on his thigh before you shot him your own wink. there wouldn't be a lot of cooling down back home, but many more orgasms instead <3

[utilitycaster]

I really appreciate your thorough breakdowns of this campaign's end, because I fell off of watching live back in summer 2023 (personal reasons), and though I kept myself pretty up-to-date with subsequent events I eventually started thinking "I'll come back when interesting things start happening" and I just never seemed to find that point. Good to know I'm far from the only one pretty displeased with how things apparently left off.

To throw in my two cents, I think you're spot-on with your impression of what kind of people those who think this was a narratively satisfying ending are. Specifically, I think it's coming from the type of people who find certain characters (I'm sure you can guess who) extremely relatable—difficult childhood, and/or early adulthood trauma, and/or were taken advantage of in grief—but refuse to acknowledge the fact that recovering from these things requires choosing to personally put in effort to do so. They want these characters to be handed a perfect happy ending, no work required, no matter what, and so when those of us who find that unsatisfactory dare to voice that opinion it's a personal attack on them saying that they don't deserve to be handed joy without working for it, because if their favorite characters can have it, so should they. (Because fiction is reflective of reality, so clearly that's what that means, I guess.) It's frustrating because I'd had high hopes for Imogen and Laudna's story in the beginning of the campaign, but there was a point where I just couldn't put up with their deliberate stagnation anymore. Definitely could have been psychologically interesting, though.

(And, just to be perfectly clear, this isn't a dig at anyone in the cast or anything—I suspect this was a case of too much ambition from previous success leading to less careful planning all around. I'm admittedly not super clear on exactly what the deal was with all the gods in the finale, though, so it's entirely possible I'm missing something major.)

Thanks! And yeah that does really feel like it in the end. Like, it is a campaign that seems to mainly be enjoyed by excuse-makers who want there to be a reason why it's right and proper to enjoy it and that criticizing it is inherently bad and wrong. Like, sorry man, if you see a post in the wild from someone you've never seen before indicating a character you relate to is stagnant and childish and your response isn't to say "well, I believe that's untrue, I'll make my own post about this" or "I don't like this so I'll block them" or "hmmmm maybe they are stagnant and childish, but they are relatable for other reasons, which are:" but instead to complain to them about how they are judging you, a random person they've never spoken to, you are the problem! You are the one feeling judged by a stranger who doesn't know you exist and who has no power to do anything beyond say something mean to you, and instead of going "wait this doesn't fucking matter" you are demanding the world bend around you to your will, and playing the victim when the world says "lmao no."

Like, again, no one is actually defending the campaign meaningfully. They're coming up with excuses why they can't or they're coming up with incorrect reasons why critique is impermissible (that fortunately no one is listening to) - that it's improv, that it's happy, that people aren't couching their posts sufficiently in This Is Only My Opinion (this is not how reviews/crit works, eg this AV Club article on the Severance premiere does not have Saloni Gajjar say "this is only my opinion" at the top because anyone who is smart enough to engage with media criticism in the first place doesn't need to be told this; there is a reason we are treating people with disdain and that's because the very act of being bothered by people phrasing criticism without This Is Only My Opinion is an immediate sign you are, in fact, not smart enough to get on this ride). It's the same with the characters. They want something to have suffered enough to be beyond criticism, and the rest of the fandom has (correctly) rejected that paradigm entirely, and they have no way to counter anything head on.

And as for Imogen and Laudna...while I think many things in the campaign were flaws that went beyond them, they certainly were at the heart of several, and I think had their relationship been a genuine slowburn - had Laudna rejected Imogen and remained mad in episode 65, as Laura outright expected - it might have been something worth our while.

I do think the bulk of...not even blame, simply responsibility, rests on Matt, and I do think it's mostly stretched thin/burnout/not realizing how this concept required much more work than past campaigns did, and again, I don't hold it against the cast (their live show in Philly this December was great, the CRF one-shot was fun, the Assassin's Creed one-shot was fun, and EXU Divergence has been stellar) but yeah it didn't work very well.

[rei-ismyname]

X-Men #11 Review

To be honest, this one was underwhelming. There's always something worthy of commentary, it just feels like not much happens and it doesn't quite feel like a full issue - perhaps because it bucks the Marvel formula of the three Cs - conflict, choice, and conclusion.

Stuff certainly happens but nothing that couldn't be summed up in a few sentences at the start of next issue. The last three issues have all had high stakes, for better or worse, and without room to breathe tension burns out.

The Raid on Graymalkin is over but not much has changed, Agent Fucko and the O*N*E have stood down, and everyone is moving on. I didn't expect to see a discussion about recent events but I really want one. Serious shit has gone down very recently and all these people should have opinions on that. The X-Men are used to constant drama but still ... it feels like those events didn't matter and the characters feel thinner for it. It's said that the O*N*E visit was 'earlier' yet Beast is standing and relaxed despite being beaten badly. Maybe Xorn is that good a healer.

After a cold open on some kind of space bullshit crashing nearby, we cut to Beast and Jen Starkey running some tests on her mutation. They're on an awkward first name basis after she reminds him but they're getting along well enough. Hank theorises that she's a metamorph of some kind and tests that hypothesis. Flying seems like a risky place to start but I'm not a scientist. Fortunately he's right and she's not a reality warper or something - she grows wings and assumes avian features. Cool. We move on from them as the plot is happening to other people. Nice to see you both, say hi to Magneto for me.

Whatever crashed is making a beeline for Merle, and Scott feels the O*N*E visit has already disrupted the town enough for one day. If it wasn't coming for them he says it would be none of their business, which is understandable. The X-Men have so many red alert crises and threats coming for them that they couldn't operate as traditional superheroes even if they wanted to. I think that might be this book's identity - Cyclops and friends playing whack-a-mole with endless mutant problems. Although, in other books they're expanding the scope. They're fighting one of Cyttorak's kids right now in Amazing Spider-Man, they've agreed to be on call to the Avengers and have an alliance of sorts; though when all the heroes gather for One World Under DOOM the only mutant present is Storm. Maybe they're in space due to this issue, but the degree of connectivity feels inconsistent. That's often been a thing with X-books, except it's been explicitly set up in Avengers so I don't know what to think.

The banter is cute and the ad hoc points system adorable, but it's mood whiplash considering there's been no time skip since the last 3 intense issues. Maybe I'm nitpicking. I've certainly been known to. People who aren't able to decompress after high stress situations often turn to humour to cope. Something I find myself saying with this book a lot is 'I guess we'll see if it's followed up on.' Given the amount of dangling plot threads and character beats I can't help but feel that the book doesn't deserve that grace. I'll come back to that.

Moving on, Scott needs to be captured by alien bounty hunters and this is how it happens. The visitor from space is Scott's deadbeat dad, Corsair. He's here to warn him that he's got a huge battalion after him, but he really doesn't prioritise it. They greet warmly but Scott is suspicious of his motives, an attitude he had in Phoenix but one that's at odds with other recent history. Whatever - Corsair sucks and he deserves to get called out.

Haha! Krakoa callbacks have been pretty inconsistent, but this is definitely a fun one to dredge up. The Starjammers did abandon the New Mutants to Shi'Ar prison for petty reasons and Magik remembers. She interrupts Scott's interrogation and punches the old geezer in the face. Good for her. Space jail sucks and that's dry snitching.

It's interrupted by Beast detecting even more space bullshit with his instruments. A space whale carrying a whole bunch of aliens is rolling up. So that's what the situation is, thanks Corsair.

'For you. They're here for you.' Not hard.

Err, you didn't really say that, Corsair. Sure, you used that word, but there was no sense of urgency when you could have just said 'aliens are coming to get you, Scott Summers, very soon. It's an emergency.' Even after getting angry he talks about himself and deflects. Just fucking tell them what's happening dude. 'They' is vague and you basically wasted your time. He's not even finished blundering.

The X-Men leap into action with Scott assuming the bounty hunters are here for Corsair - a VERY reasonable assumption. That they're actually here for Scott is very strange. I think Scott taking the situation at face value would be correct 99% of the time - Corsair is a dodgy space pirate who's always being chased by bounty hunters whereas Scott is a Shi'Ar ally and on decent terms with the Kree-Skrull empire. As Corsair admits, he has a 2.5 million credit bounty on his head. No idea what the exchange rate is but it sounds like a lot. I wonder if they're still using Mysterium as a currency and store of value.

There's been some big changes in galactic politics recently in response to Jean and Phoenix cruising around. Gladiator freaked out about it and long story short the Galactic Council put Thanos in charge. They shouldn't be able to do that but mind control is probably involved. Hulkling, Wiccan, or Xandra have been strangely absent. Anyway, failing to get across that they're after Scott is such a blunder I have to wonder if it's not a betrayal. Corsair is an idiot, but that makes this an idiot plot. His and Scott's argument ends up being a pointless waste of time - just taking up page space.

Temper scorches the poor whale, lucky it's lobotomized. The X-Men come through a portal onto the whale ship and raise hell. It's always nice to see how effectively the team work together, though we've just had an event full of pointless violence. Scott thinks he's rescuing his dad but he's really charging into a trap. Corsair eventually convinces Quentin to let him into the telepathic group chat and HE STILL YAPS ABOUT IRRELEVANT INFORMATION. Fuck, just tell him they're here for him; Scott doesn't need to know about the economics of interstellar travel right now.

'I came to warn you, son. I'll do so after including as much extraneous information as possible.' Corsair manages to spit it out only after Scott has already realised something is up. The bounty hunters are wearing Ruby Quartz armor (which is pretty cool) and they've got Cyclops surrounded. Seems like Magik could get him out of there pretty easily, or Scott could blow a hole in the floor. Juggernaut, famously, can't be stopped - surely he can take out these chumps.

Only now do we get 'they're after you.' Three words that he could have said at any time, or even thought it at either of the two telepaths present. He even has a ship-to-speeder communicator that he could have used to get to the point. It's necessary to have characters make mistakes and have errors in communication. It's a reliable and relatable source of drama. Filling half the issue with Corsair dropping out of the sky and saying plenty of words that don't advance the plot or characters in a believable way feels like pointless filler. Corsair has had more dialogue than Glob, Xorn, and Ben Liu - all ongoing characters - and all of it served no purpose. You could remove him from this issue without affecting anything. As I said in the intro, stuff happens, but nothing that couldn't be summed up in a few sentences for the next issue.

Now that Corsair has said what he came to say he's wallpaper. Good. Idie and Quentin are looking to support their teammates when fucking Alpha Flight arrive to help (I think?) A Beaubier-less Alpha Flight is not particularly interesting to me, but I like most of them. They all got imprisoned by ORCHIS during Fall of X for supporting mutants. Definitely cool behaviour, and Puck is generally rad (not sure if he's here) but I there's one member who can go fuck himself.

James MacDonald Hudson is the worst. He's ostensibly a hero but he does a lot of reactionary bootlicking. He briefly joined ORCHIS out of fear of mutants but got cold feet when Australia was nearly destroyed. I'll rant about him another time, but woo - Alpha Flight are here to support the X-Men. Maybe the space bullshit will only take up one more issue. It ends there, so we'll find out next time.

Around issue #5 of this run I stated that I was starting to notice the narrative formula. Each issue will focus on a handful of characters while introducing some new crisis, the rest of the team will get a few panels at best, there'll be some action squeezed in somewhere and then it'll end on a cliffhanger. The cumulative effect is that the plot is glacially slow, the characters have one or two defining traits/issues, and most plot points dangle as crisis after crisis gets piled on.

Even the plot points that have been revisited haven't been resolved in any way, like Graymalkin or the ongoing O*N*E cold war. Here's a list of the dangling plot threads and character beats I could think of without rereading.

- 3K and the adult mutants

- Cassandra Nova

- R-LDS

- The Upstarts

- Graymalkin prison

- The O*N*E

- Scott's anxiety attack

- Piper Cobb

- Magik's chess game

- Idie's problems with authority and teamwork

- Magneto. Just Magneto. He's there but has little to say

- The Phoenix

- Beef with Rogue

- King Bedlam's price

Any one of these things would usually be a priority to deal with or at least discuss. I feel like it devalues their importance to just introduce a new problem almost every issue and it makes it harder to get invested in events as they unfold. This issue, for instance - I suspect it'll be resolved next issue and not spoken about again. Or, it will be a drawn out space adventure like the old days and all the Earthly problems will be put on the backburner. Either way it's a problem caused by frontloading all these crises and continually stacking them on top of one another.

There are moments of solid execution and meaningful character work, but when everything is a crisis nothing is. X-Men #11 looks pretty good, as usual, but it's entirely skippable. If you are a big Corsair fan and want 10 pages of him failing a simple task then this book is for you, but if not you can get everything you need from the intro blurb next issue.

[zyonicorn]

Click to Start Chatting

Many months ago, I met my girlfriend through an app called “V-loop”. It was an app for meeting new people, and there was a function for you to follow people you liked and chat with them, though the requirement was that the other person had to follow you too.

The first time I saw her profile, I was hesitating if I should follow her or not, but she's literally my type. “Let’s just give it a try.” I stared at the “@_zyozyo/ 106 followers/ 5 following” for a few seconds, then clicked “follow” eventually.

I don't even know if she liked girls, all I knew was her name, Jihyo, which kept lingering in my mind. She was so gorgeous, every picture seemed like a piece of art, that I didn't even deserve to savor. 

“Click to start chatting”

It was my third time checking the chat session in an hour, my heart skipped a beat when I saw the line, indicating she followed me back.

“Hey there! Are you y/n?”

Yes! Nice to meet you 🫣

“Why’d you follow me?”

Cuz you look easy to get along with :)

“I see.. You’re cute”

Her direct expression made you don't know how to answer for a moment.

Thanks..?

The chat continued. The two of you started to share about your daily lives, people you've met, what you had for lunch. In just a week, you got closer to Jihyo that she told you about her work, stress, and some personal matters.

“Y/n.. I'm pretty frustrated lately.”

What’s wrong??

Everything sounded normal, just like how you usually chat with her.

“I don't know if I should tell you but..”

“What I meant by ‘frustrated’ is sexually.”

Oh um, but why are you telling me about this?

“I want you to solve it for me.”

Though you were really, really shocked by her straightforward words, you still replied right away, just to hide the fact that you were panicking, staring at the screen while your fingers hovered over the keyboard.

I mean, why me? We met online and you’ll never know who I actually am.

There are many scams nowadays, and despite being shocked, you’re also worried about Jihyo.

“Cuz I know I can trust you. I have my reasons, just say yes or no.”

“Of course, I won't force you if you don't want to, it's my personal problem after all.”

She’s so thoughtful, that your heart pounds faster for her again.

Well, sure I can help you. But it's not as easy as it’s said.

“Don’t worry, I’ll book a hotel room and send you the address. All you have to do is go there and help me out.”

She sent you a link right away, booked tomorrow, a whole day. She doesn't sound nervous or embarrassed anymore, unlike you, who still not believe your type asked you out, for sex.

That night you barely slept, the only 3 hours of sleep, you had a dirty dream about Jihyo. You woke up at 6, found your underwear wet. “What the fuck…” you breathe out, without thinking much, you change quickly and have a shower.

The time she suggested was 8, at a cafe near the hotel, so the two of you can have a small chat and get to know each other.

“I’m over here, Jihyo-ssi!” you waved while tipping your toes, trying to maintain your smile and not faint from the beauty of the woman approaching in baggy jeans and a white ruffled top.

“Hey there!! Oh…” she suddenly stopped talking, looking up and down at you. You thought you looked messy, or maybe disappointing her because you looked different from the picture, so you quickly fixed your posture and pulled your shirt straight.

“What’s the matter?” you hesitated before asking, the woman’s bright confident expression seemed to soften a little. She looked back into your eyes and smiled kindly, your face exposing your nervousness. “Nothing, but you’re even cuter than I thought” she calmly said. 

You blushed at her words, which Jihyo noticed right away. She smiled even more that it pushed her cheeks up perfectly. 

“Alright, let’s go in.” her arm wrapped around your shoulder, while you blushed even harder from her warm touch. She helped you with your chair, then sat at your opposite. Looking at you, she asked “Do you want to drink something?” though you had mentally prepared for what would happen today already, you’re still shy about being in front of Jihyo.

“N-no, thanks. I’ve had my breakfast,” you responded. “Okay. Our check-in is at  9, so why don't we have a small talk first?” she started the topic. The chat between you two sounded just like how you chatted online. Her friendly tone eased your anxiety. 

The chat went well, she started to brush your leg with her shoes. Leaning closer to you across the table, she asked, “Why don't we head off to the hotel now? It’s almost time.” her smirk showed her excitement.

“Sure” You got up as she held your hand, like a normal couple, though you were too timid to hold her back until her fingers crossed yours.

On your 5 minutes way to the hotel, you started the conversation. “Don’t get me wrong but, have you done this many times before?” you asked after hesitating.

“Done what?” “Like- having sex with people you met online?” you asked, though it’s hard to say it out loud. “Oh honey, what makes you think that?” she looked surprised for a moment, but fixed her expression quickly. “I-I mean, you’re all calm from the start, I wonder if you’re experienced,” you explained yourself.

“I did have sex before, with my ex-boyfriend. But he never satisfied me. We broke up and I'm feeling empty. So I wanted to try it with a woman, then you showed up.” she said. You were kind of confused, are you that extraordinary? You never found yourself attractive. That's what you asked Jihyo, she replied, “You’re kind and caring. Have some confidence in yourself! I found it really comfortable to be with you.”

That's almost a confession, you thought. Maybe confidence is what you lack. The two of you stepped into the hotel hall. It was big and the atmosphere was peaceful. The receptionist handed Jihyo the key as she took care of everything. 

There’s a big window in the room, with a large bed for two. The fact that you’re having sex with this beautiful woman hit you suddenly. Your heart pounded faster and faster, you tried to hide your blush while bending over to take off your shoes. Jihyo was faster than you, she put her bag aside and sat on the edge of the bed.

She pats her side, signaling you to sit there. The bed was soft and clean, the sheet felt cold like your hands. “So.. Do you want to start?” “S-sure” you answered, but you have no idea how to do it. 

She smirked and leaned closer, her face hovering above yours. “Maybe I’ll begin first,” she whispered and tilted her head so she could kiss your lips. The first kiss was soft, like testing the water. You closed your eyes, feeling her moist lip on yours, slowly opening your mouth and her tongue slipped in smoothly. It was as hot as you imagined, your hands reached for her shirt to pull her closer. She smiled at your eagerness, as you get turned on more and more.

The sound of heavy breathing filled the room, along with the sound you and Jihyo’s mouths made. You sneaked your hand down to Jihyo’s crotch, another to her tit. Feeling the temperature passing through the clothes, unlike your cold hands, she seems to be hot.

“Can you take the lead?” she noticed that you relaxed a bit, then asked softly while pulling away. “So we’re starting right now?” you smirked. You've thought of pushing her into the bed directly, but you know it’s polite and necessary to ask, you’re the one pleasuring her today, anyway.

“Sure, if you can,” she said and pulled you into a kiss, more passionate than before. Her soft whimpers are leading you to release your need, you press her into the bed, straddling her while kissing. “Take those off,” you said. She pulled her shirt and blouse, and you took off her jeans, leaving her underwear on.

You gasped from seeing her boobs spring free, they’re bigger than they looked like when she was wearing her bra and the shirt. “How do you want me to please you?” you asked while drawing slow circles on her abs.

“Suck on my tits and finger me, I know you want it,” she smiled in anticipation, while you were still not moving your gaze away from her breasts. 

You leaned down and grabbed her tits with both hands, though you couldn't fully hold on them. Enveloping one of her nipples with your lips, she felt your hot breath fanning her skin and your cold hands at the same time, feeling the sensation while giving out soft whines.

She guides one of your hands to her abs, then underwear. You pressed into her clit through the fabric softly, making Jihyo moan even louder.

You moved to the side of her and sat up, playing with her chest with one hand and another rubbing her clothes clit. 

“You’re dripping,” you smirked and circled even faster, brushing her slit occasionally. “For you, love” her voice unsteady. Love? She just called me love? That name is melting you on the inside, but you have to act calm.

“Can I take it off?” you asked while reaching for the strap of her underwear. She immediately nodded. It was a white normal underwear, matching her bra. 

A string of juice connected the cloth and her pussy, you didn't expect she would be this “juicy”. You cut the string with your finger and playfully licked it. She looked at you staring at her pussy, “Taste it” her voice was soft, you didn't catch what she was saying- or rather you would say, you didn't believe what she was saying.

“Sorry?” you asked her to repeat. She said again, “Eat me.” This time you made sure you didn't hear her wrong. You’ve never licked a pussy, you don’t know how to make Jihyo comfortable with your mouth.

“Tell me if it hurts,” you still asked just in case. She nodded and closed her eyes, “don’t push yourself too much just because of me, love” she said. You took off your clothing, naked while your face hovered on Jihyo’s pussy. She was being so thoughtful, to be honest, just by chatting with her, you thought she would use you like a sex toy. But turns out she cares about your feelings too.

You lapped your hot tongue onto her clit, feeling your saliva dropping from the roof of your mouth. Jihyo curled her legs and let out a whimper. “Just go for it, baby. I can’t wait” She sounded weak, almost begging you. And of course, you would obey this perfect woman. 

You sucked her clit and folds into your mouth, her juice covering your lips. Jihyo’s mouth fell open, she gasped and exhaled heavily under your touch. She’s so sensitive that you wanted to tease her. You flicked your tongue on her clit and fanned your breath on her pussy.

“S-suck me just like how you did..” she spoke up and her fist clenched onto the hotel’s bed sheet.

You remember you’re here to satisfy Jihyo, so you decided to stop teasing her. You took her clit into your mouth, saliva mixed with her juice. It’s something you’ve never tasted before, tastier than anything else.

It’s time, you thought. Putting your tongue into her cunt, it was moist and warm. Her tight wall clenched, although your jaw was sore, you didn’t stop. You started to bob your your head, paying attention to Jihyo’s breathing.

“Hmph-” her noises sharp but short, legs bending uncontrollably. Her back started to arch, she held your head and tried to fuck your face. You kept yourself in place and licked her sweet spot, her moans getting denser and denser.

Her juice squeezed onto your face, some dropped into the sheet below. Her eyelid was half closed, she panted heavily.

You lay next to her, she hugged you and kissed your lips eagerly. You thought she would need some rest, but it was the complete opposite. You looked up, “what’s next?”

She stared into your eyes, lust and desire filled her gaze.

“Now let mommy treat you nice and well, as the payback for the wonderful work you’ve just done.”

Mommy? What does she mean? Your brain did not really register her words. But that doesn’t matter, she flipped you so now you’re on your stomach. Your juice oozed out from hearing her moans just now, making your crotch a mess.

She leaned onto you, her hot wet pussy right under your ass cheek. You felt Jihyo’s chest pressed onto your back as her hand moved slowly from your upper back to your ass, then your wet needy cunt, the trail of touch her fingertip left giving you a chill in your spine.

She rubbed your clit and folds forcefully, teasing around the entrance. Her delicate touches don't feel like it’s her first time with a woman. She knows everything you need, every bit of skin is caressed.

Her hand moved around your stomach and went under it, giving her a better angle to touch your pussy. It went between the bed and your skin, hot and moist, you don’t know if it’s her sweat or your slick.

She started to circle your clit ruthlessly, your muffled moans covered by the pillow that you buried your face in. You felt Jihyo starting to grind her pussy on the back of your thigh, slick coating your skin as pleasure builds in your body. 

 Her bare pussy grinding on your leg, she rocked her hips with desire, while working on your clit with her fingers. “Oh god you sound so good” she moans and praises every sound you make. Pressing your head into the pillow even more, you felt the suffocation. Mind blank, only the knot in your stomach slowly unraveling, and tied tight again every time she slow down to tease. 

Your head spins and cunt clenches as she circle her fingers. She noticed your moans and softened to tease. “L-let me cum-” You raised your head, didn't notice the tears on your face. Sweat stuck your hair on your face, making you look messy.

“Call me mommy” she commanded. Maybe it’s her “kink”, you obeyed her immediately. “M-mommy please” you breathed out.

She sped up her fingers, the sound of wetness sent to your ears. You felt like you were almost blacking out. 

The knot in your core seems to be releasing, slowly consuming the little sanity left in your mind. Your feet clasped Jihyo’s hand in between, your moans becoming denser, you felt like someone was holding onto your lungs, not letting you breathe. Jihyo’s voice was right next to your ear, your back arching up from time to time as you felt Jihyo speeding up on your thigh. “Fuck” you heard her faintly breathe out. She sounds angelic, you would love to keep fucking her just to hear her again.

“Hmph-!!” you squeezed your eyes shut, almost crying out of pleasure. The organisms washed through your body completely, Jihyo’s juice coated your thigh, she hugged you tight and continued to draw circles on your clit, until you have fully ridden out your climax.

She took her hand out, dripping with your water. You couldn't move at all, mind blank, vision blurred. The bed sheet was all wet, you felt Jihyo’s honey going down your flesh. You uncontrollably shivered, slick still slowly flowing out of your cunt.

In Jihyo’s eyes, your face is washed red, cum dripping, hair stuck onto your face because of your sweat and tears, your mouth slightly opened, heavily breathing, while you shivered hard.

Jihyo sucked the slick on her fingers, and cleaned you up with her mouth. You felt her tongue going from your thigh to your dripping pussy. She sucked on it a few times, you felt your sensitive cunt go through some tiny organisms as she licked you up.

She flipped you over, looking at you from above with a big smile on her face. “Messy” She kissed you as you pulled her into your body. Your words were still shaky, “I’ve never had such great sex ever” “I think I might be addicted.” 

She sat up and put her head onto her thigh, you’re now lying as Jihyo strokes your hair softly. “Then we should do this often.” She looked at you and said. You smiled, if you do this often, you think you might be ‘used up’ one day.

“Rest for a while. I’ll help you with the shower later.”

You fell asleep. She softly said to your ears, “Thank you.”

-

Pretty much rushed, I’m not satisfied with this fic but I don't want to keep you guys waiting :( sry for the low quality and the long waitttt

[kedreeva]

HI!! It's the guy who asked about the medical mice stuff, I wanted to THABK YOU!! for your answers:) seriously informative and I appreciate it! I figured as much that culling is a massive part of it, instead of vet stuff, and I'm alright with that! I've familiarized myself with how important culling is, keeping the future mice as healthy and as unprone to diseases as I can is a big goal for me, I think. I currently own chinchillas and BOY I know how expensive vet treatment can get, I can only imagine how much more it'd be for tons of mice. And the hassle.

I had no idea disease testing was a thing though! That's interesting, but man that doesn't seem that.. worth it, with the points you mentioned. And sucks that most breeders will start over if most of their colony gets something Bad but I 100% understand that. I'll definitely be sure to research up more on everything to have on hand when I inevitably have to deal with mites, and I'll definitely make it a point to be very vigilant with health checks and quarantine:) and also 100% do a ton of research in getting good founders, thanking you a TON right now!! As I've mentioned before I really do want the best for these future guys

Sure no problem!

More under cut because culling discussion again

And honestly if you're starting with decent stock and being careful about quarantine for anything you add... You're really unlikely to have to cull much for health unless you get wildly unlucky. I've had these lines for a few years and the VAST majority of culls are population (males I don't need, pinks from larger litters, young females that don't get adopted before I need space again, older breeders that retire and don't get adopted etc), failure to thrive (ie, scrawny babies that just don't make it if left alive), and feeder quality mice (temperament issues). The biggest health problem I'm dealing with is when mice that have siamese/splash blood get a tumor/cyst or two as they get old. Old age masses are one of the hardest things to get rid of because you don't see them until the mouse is nearly done breeding. Outside of masses, I've had mites once (twice if you go back 25 years to college), pinworm once, and coccidia twice (once in the whole colony, once in quarantine but I still treated the whole colony just in case), one malocclusion, two head tilts (one of which was a circler), two URIs, a couple of cloudy/ulcerated eyes (can happen when they scratch themselves), and a couple penile prolapses way back at the start of the siamese line. I've had one line collapse (the tricolor line) due to bad founding animals. And that's across over two decades of breeding! And I can count them because I remember each case because it's unusual to have lots of health problems with mice, if you've been careful with initial stock, selection, and biosecurity.

What I'm trying to say is, don't be too anxious about it. While it will come up, and you'll have to deal with it harshly when it does, it's also not likely that you'll be up to your ears in health issues on a daily basis or anything.

Good luck with them and feel free to ask if you have other questions!

[kerosene-saint]

my bad memory effects me in such weird ways.

[wakingfromthewater]

This is mega-cringe but developing self-esteem backfired and over the last few years instead of being convinced that I'm not connecting with other people because I'm somehow being socially awkward or rude without knowing it, I've instead become convinced that there is something Wrong with me, that it radiates off me like an aura, and that other people can sense it. It's on the level of an intrusive thought. I try really hard to remind myself that it's false, that there is no such thing, that I'm probably just experiencing the one-two punch of being socially awkward and having a weird affect*, but then every meaningless social slight just puts me back to square one.

*I honestly don't think my affect is that weird, my emotional range is just kinda blunted right now because I am severely depressed. But anyway.

[fedoraspooky]

I haven’t been here long. What irritating changes have been made?

Credit where it's due, some changes have been good, like polls and stuff! But the big recent changes thus far that I would classify as irritating are:

- The UI change. This one may be less irritating for newcomers because it's basically the same layout as twitter and instagram, but for a lot of folks who've been here a long time, it feels cramped and like a loss of identity for the site. For many, the appeal of tumblr is that it ISN'T an algorithm hell like twitter or insta. Also, there's the annoyance of having to relearn where everything is, because it all got moved around.

- The users being lab rats for various tests the devs wanna pull out of nowhere without consenting to beta testing new site features- like the one that took away user icons on the dash for like half the site. They finally put them back after getting enough feedback that said NO, but users were so used to their feedback being disregarded that they were half expecting the change to be pushed through anyway.

- The Netflix tie-in advertising being pushed even to people who had PAID tumblr for a no-ads experience. Complete with them somehow thinking it would be a good idea to put an unescapable-by-scrolling spooky clown on peoples' dashboards that u had to use ublock to get rid of. While I'm not scared of clowns and often find them quite charming, it sucks that staff didn't take coulrophobia being a common fear into account.

- A wave of fully sfw trans posts being wrongfully marked Mature and staff doing little to nothing about it. Not sure if this is still ongoing, but it destroyed a lot of trust and good will. (LGBT+ users have been having to fight a constant war against censorship ever since the adult content ban on tumblr, so yeah... Nevar 4get the list of banned search words that would bring back no results, like 'girl')

- The site gradually moving away from customization. Tumblr is a BLOGGING site. But it seems to have lost sight of that fact, because most new users don't even know you can fully customize your blogs with css and stuff (an option that is now off by default for new accounts!), because of the in-dash viewer giving you only how blogs look on mobile, which is a lot more uniform. There, it's more like every other site- you get a banner and icon. Oh, but you can change colors and fonts from a drop-down list too, that's cool I guess. Though they recently took away custom color schemes on Message windows, just another little bit of personalization taken away.

- TUMBLR. LIVE. Basically tumblr teamed up with a skeevy dating app partner to allow for livestreams- but not the cool kinda livestreams like on twitch where you can draw or play games, no- to a site full of people who value anonymity, they decided to push phone cam only livestreams. Not only that but by agreeing to the terms, you're giving out tons of personal data including your location to said skeevy dating app partner and all of THEIR third-party ad partners. Needless to say, most people didn't wanna use it, so instead of users it's flooded by p*rn bots (which is ANOTHER issue we've been dealing with for a long time and have been getting an even bigger influx of FROM tumblr live) and scammers. And thus, since tumblr likes to put a carousel of current streams on people's dashes, you often get softcore p*rn thumbnails from the bot streams with no way to avoid it except for toggling off tumblr live entirely.

- Oh wait. That's right. You CAN'T toggle it off. Because you can only snooze it for a while until BAM, you're jumpscared by a carousel of ladies licking your screen again! But hey, at least they made the snooze 30 days instead of the 7 it used to be, right? Yeah, except for the fact that you can't get rid of the tumblr live button itself on the app anymore, and now it's front and center with a NEW notification tag on it, overlapping your dash and cramming useful stuff like the search button out of the way.

NOW- A lot of this stuff CAN be at least mostly fixed on desktop by installing ublock and xkit and tampermonkey + dashboard unfucker... But that's a lot of stuff just to make the site usable, you know?

[faunabel]

apparently i also put tolerate it by taylor swift on my playlist for vene....... i also see it. perhaps in a looser sort of way.

[red-the-dragon-writes]

Fishing Habits

Summary:

“I know what you’re doing,” Dan said without preamble. “Huh?” Jay said. “Oh, right. I know you work for the school, but I didn’t think you’d be that much of a hardass.” “What?” Dan said. Jay paused, looking Dan over for a moment. “Actually, what are you talking about? I don’t think we’re on the same page.” “With the fish,” Dan clarified. Jay raised the odd ridges of flesh over his eyes that functioned as eyebrows. “I’m mer, you asshole. I can talk to them. They told me what fucked-up shit you’ve been pulling. What’s your problem?” “Sometimes I get hungry,” Jay said. “Can I see your notes now?”

Dan is an ordinary merman-pretending-to-be-a-human. Jay is... something else entirely. He seems like a really pleasant guy, except for how freaked out all the fish are. And Dan's college has just opened a new aquarium...

On Ao3 here.

There was an understanding, which had been in place as long as Dan could remember, that meant that one must not reveal the existence of The Supernatural to human society, and if one did the people they made the reveal to needed to be dealt with in some way—sworn to secrecy, brought into the fold of the Oceanic, or even, at absolutely worst, killed. Dan didn’t want to deal with it. There was a lot of paperwork involved in fucking up the order of things, and it was a huge hassle, and also there was a lot of risk involved. It wasn’t like Dan had any real need to reveal he’d grown up under the Pacific rather than in it, anyway. And his parents were living off the coast of Oregon now anyway, so he didn’t even have to do that much lying about it. It was easy and he kept it well under wraps.

He did five years of field work before they told him they were going to require him to come back to the university and teach at a handful of classes before he’d be allowed back out into the field or he’d lose his position, which also meant losing most of his source of funding and the grant he was working with. They offered to let him teach it remotely, of course—the department chair apologizing profusely the entire time—but Dan was doing altogether too much of the work from six hundred feet below the surface of the Atlantic and that just wouldn’t work out. No way to maintain The Secret. Instead he resigned himself to another few years living on land and away from the fishes, rented an apartment, and returned to Spokane to teach two sessions of classes about saltwater ecology in the Pacific to incoming students and one class on field work to older biology majors. Oh well. At least he could visit home on the weekends.

Since his own research was put on pause and the college did promise to pay for his tuition, Dan opted to take a handful of classes, too. What else was he going to do? He was still in touch with the rest of the field crew, and when they finally started writing, sure, he’d refocus onto that, but at the moment he wasn’t going to be of any help. And in one of the classes was a gray man.

You weren’t allowed to do that, but he was doing it. Dan was perfectly certain that there were laws against being out in the open with visibly-discolored flesh across all the major out-of-sight jurisdictions, and he was also pretty sure the Sideways Court was still offering free glamours for anyone who desperately needed into human society and also could prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they couldn’t just change their colors themselves, though Dan had also heard that the paperwork to prove either was a nightmare and the Sideways Court sounded just kind of awful to boot.  The Oceanic North-Pacific Authority was a lot better in a lot of ways. God knew applying for his visa was a nightmare of bureaucracy. But the point was: the gray man was openly flouting the rules. And worse than just being gray alone, he also had horns. His fingernails were blue, his teeth were sharp and needle-shaped, and his eyes had no pupils, just scleras and black centers that looked like hollow glass marbles. He had ripples crisscrossing his skin like vines growing just beneath the surface, and though Dan couldn’t be sure, he thought his body was a weird consistency, too, that he bent further than Dan expected when he bumped into things or wore a heavy bag over his shoulders. There was no way his appearance was legal. Dan felt for him, because it had to be difficult doing all that, but it wasn’t allowed. He’d probably get in trouble for just being around it, if someone came and found out and reported the guy and Dan hadn’t said anything.

Still. Dan had to respect it. And it was interesting to see how fast the other students got used to Jay and his gray skin and his horns and his eerie pupil-less eyes. Honestly, Dan was kind of disappointed in himself. His initial anxiety was unfair, wasn’t it? It was the laws that were unfair. Human society clearly wasn’t the problem it was cracked up to be.

Eventually Dan worked up the courage to tell Jay that he was mer. He wasn’t sure what he had been expecting. Jay had just nodded, shrugged, and said, “Cool.” That was it. And, honestly, as far as Dan was concerned, that was plenty. He didn’t need to be friends with a twenty-something nonconformist—or however old Jay was; he hadn’t asked, really—and just because they were both in the same class didn’t mean anything, really. They knew each other’s names, and Jay occasionally asked Dan for notes. That was plenty.

-

Dan wasn’t much of a partier and he wasn’t much of a night owl, and he didn’t’ spend a lot of time out of the house. What he did was usually at a river somewhere. Spokane was gorgeous and full of lively fish, and by virtue of his heritage Dan could chat. Fish didn’t usually have a lot to talk about, but something had them in a tizzy when Dan finally made it out to his favorite spot, and they were particularly anxious to tip him off.

At first, he couldn’t make heads or tails of why it mattered to him that someone had developed new lures (aside from how his job was kind of to keep an eye on what people were doing with his rivers and all). But it came together eventually. Jay had something weird about him. He’d started coming to the water just like Dan had—here and elsewhere—and chatting, just like Dan had. And Dan had lured them into a sense of security. They should’ve been secure, talking! Even when Dan was hungry he didn’t eat the fish he talked to! But to talk to Jay was dangerous. Fish that talked to Jay too long vanished. And he had strange lures, luminescent sweet blue worms that made fish dizzy and sick if they bit them off and which moved even when torn apart until they were eaten. The fish insisted, almost en masse, that this strange gray man who chatted up their waters was bad news, and on the whole they badly wanted Dan to find him and make him cut it out.

Dan didn’t even know what to make of it at first. He asked question after question, trying to understand what they meant first and then after to try to ensure they weren’t actually talking about his classmate. The fish were convinced he was unfathomably ancient, even though he was taking first-year classes. But it became too clear that they were the same person after not long at all. A handful even had his name to relay, and even though they pronounced it a little differently, there was no question that he was the same person with the same name. Brazen.

The fish generally knew what predation was and it—well, it bothered them, sure, but it was an understood way of life, and they knew Dan himself ate fish and was part of human society where fishing was done. They’d never come to ask him to put an end to regular fishing before. The first and last time any of them had banded together like this, it was six fish, and they wanted him to handle a chemical mess that he’d been almost completely useless about. The fact that he had nearly forty fish across a whole host of species asking him to put a stop to Jay’s hunting meant that something about that guy was very, very off.

At least, when it came to the fish.

Still, Dan didn’t want to jump to conclusions. Maybe he was just a weirdo. But he had access to most of the college labs, and there were fishtanks in several buildings, and so—nervously and feeling like he certainly looked a bit out of his mind—he went around, talking to the fish there. He didn’t like what he found. All the fish knew Jay. There was no doubt he could and did talk to them, often at odd hours when the fish said that they were typically bored, which meant he was on campus late at night and early in the morning sneaking in to talk with them. Several tanks were apparently head-over-heels charmed. Others, these fewer and further between and, Dan noted after a short while poking around, more likely to have deaths in the fish population waved off than more carefully-managed tanks, told Dan nervously that Jay wasn’t what he seemed. That he had been charming and pleasant and had these magnificent worm lures that they’d never seen before, and then without warning he’d coaxed one of them into his hands and ate them, just like that.

These were domestic fishes, indoor fish. Pets, practically. It was alien to them that a person would do that, and it scared them. But it didn’t seem Jay would willingly strike too many times in the same place, rotating tanks out at random. And what for? Sometimes, they said, he’d come back, and chat like nothing had happened even though they all saw him kill one of their number without a thought. There was something wrong with him. Dan, if Dan knew him, should be cautious.

These fish didn’t seem to understand that there was a world of difference between eating a human (or a mer, really) and eating a goldfish, but Dan promised to take the warning under advisement anyway.  

-

Upon the day that Dan decided to confront Jay about his weird, creepy fish-eating behavior, several interesting things happened.

The first was simple. A colleague from the Environmental Sciences branch had invited him to downtown Spokane for no clear reason just before when Dan typically took his lunch. Alicia had been a close friend when Dan was doing his dissertation and she was currently working on her own postdoc research a little ways outside Spokane, just far enough from where Dan lived that they only got together so often. She told him that it was a surprise, and ot to look anything up about the location, so he obligingly didn’t.

It turned out to be an aquarium. More than that, it was an aquarium owned and run jointly by the college and a handful of others, and while it was still in the final stages before opening, Dan—by virtue of his employment with the school and his own degree focus in fish care and fish wellness—was welcome back whenever, provided he told them what he was doing and didn’t meddle unexpectedly. They wanted him to give his thoughts on a couple of tanks. And the tanks were fascinating. For some reason, whoever had done the design of the building had had a vision and they’d executed it; the tanks looked like classrooms-turned-reefs, replicas of desks and tables cast in plaster and then given coral to grow over them, furnished with lighting that looked like fluorescent strip lights in classrooms and even sometimes sporting false windows out to the street. And all the while, inside, sharks and huge groupers and small brightly-colored reef fish and schooling fish and others besides serenely went about their business. It was inspired, it really was. His parents would’ve gotten such a kick out of it.

Alicia had shown him around, and then they’d gotten food.  It was a very nice afternoon, all things told.

The second was less pleasant. Just as he and Alicia were going their separate ways, Dan got an email from the school about a missing student, a request for more information if anyone had any. They had last been seen about a week before, and their car had just turned up abandoned at Lake Wenatchee, a state park a little ways outside Spokane. Dan hadn’t seen that happen before. Unfortunate, but not anyone he knew. He filed it away mentally and had pretty much stopped thinking about it by the time he got back to his apartment.

The third, and most objectively inconsequential, was that his first afternoon class had been canceled. His professor had come down with the flu.  

And, finally, though they didn’t have class together today, Jay had called Dan and asked to meet with him. Evidently Jay had missed a lecture, or maybe several, and wanted to see Dan’s notes. The timing was just right.

“I know what you’re doing,” Dan said without preamble.

“Huh?” Jay said.  “Oh, right. I know you work for the school, but I didn’t think you’d be that much of a hardass.”

“What?” Dan said.

Jay paused, looking Dan over for a moment. “Actually, what are you talking about? I don’t think we’re on the same page.”

“With the fish,” Dan clarified. Jay raised the odd ridges of flesh over his eyes that functioned as eyebrows. “I’m mer, you asshole. I can talk to them. They told me what fucked-up shit you’ve been pulling. What’s your problem?”

“Sometimes I get hungry,” Jay said. “Can I see your notes now?”

“Sometimes you get hungry?” Dan echoed. It took him a moment to remember how to form sentences properly. “Go to the—fucking—there are vending machines all over campus, there’s a cafeteria, you’re an underclassmen, don’t you have a meal plan—you get hungry? Hungry?”

Jay looked at Dan as though he were completely unimpressed and completely unmoved. “Okay. Can I see your notes now?”

Dan took a deep breath. “Jay, I’m here on behalf of the fish to ask you to cut the shit.”

“Huh,” Jay said. “Are you, like, going to let me see your notes, or was this just, you know, pretext to yell at me?”

Dan sighed, pulling his knapsack around to see if he could find his notebook. “No. As much as I think the way that you’ve started going after these fish is creepy as all fuck, I don’t really want your grades to suffer. Stop eating the fish.”

Jay shrugged. “I guess I can go out of campus and—”

“No,” Dan said, cutting him off. “Not the campus fish, all the local fish. I first heard about this from the fish in the Spokane. Everyone at Riverside Park is sick of your shit. It’s creepy, Jay. What’s the point of getting all buddy-buddy with fish you’re planning on eating?”

Jay’s eyes narrowed. “What, should I kill without a thought, then? What if I catch a fish with obligations?”

“That’s not why you’re doing it.”

“You’re right,” Jay said. “It’s not. But it is a consideration, among many. I don’t think it’s as bad as you think. And, no, I won’t be stopping any time soon.”

Dan shook his head and threw the notebook at the table. “Give it back to me when we have class again. And after that, I don’t want to hear from you.”

“What’s the big problem?” Jay said, suddenly sounding much more concerned. “Acanthis, they’re just fish.”

“They’re not just fish to me,” Dan snapped. “I’m mer, you asshole. It’s not the same. And—the way you do it is creepy. I don’t like it. Just because I know fish aren’t people to you doesn’t mean they don’t matter to me.”

“Oh,” Jay said. “The issue is that I eat fish?”

“I eat fish!” Dan said. “Are you being—are you being willfully stupid now? The problem is that you’re making friends with the fish you eat!”

“Ah,” Jay said. “Yeah, no, sorry, there’s nothing you can do about that. It’s been good knowing you, Acanthis. Thanks for the notes.”

“Fuck yourself,” Dan said, rather charitably, as far as he was concerned, and stormed back out of the library.

-

Jay did not stop preying on the fish. He did stop asking Dan for notes. He did also return Dan’s notebook, in about the same condition as he’d taken it, but there was an odd blue stain on one page.

 And life continued as it normally did. The class continued. Dan got familiar with the professor, a lovely older woman called Dr. Bernadotte Maragou, who was very sweet and worked in the Health Sciences department but was still nonetheless teaching an ecology course because the school was lacking a professor to teach it and she had the necessary bioinformatics background. Unfortunately, Jay did, too. He was—to everyone else, at least—charming, or at least something like it. To hear Bernie speak, he was sweet and helpful and wouldn’t hurt a fly.  But if she could hear the fish, she’d think he was the devil. All everyone else’s adoration served to do was make Dan like him even less.

Still, the end of the semester approached apace, and Dan kept his focus on himself and his friends as much as he was able. Most of the fish that Dan was familiar with knew better than to trust Jay by now, and he heard that Jay was venturing further and causing trouble in different places instead, but he left it alone. Realistically, what was he going to do? It was the only reasonable thing. He stopped by the aquarium on occasion, which was a delight in and of itself, and he got his work done, and he kept in touch with his colleagues in the Atlantic and they kept him posted on what they were seeing with the shark populations they were monitoring. There were some instances of bad news—the missing student never showed up, and another one or two, Dan wasn’t sure, joined them in vanishing off the face of the earth, but it was a city and these things happened and it didn’t happen to anyone Dan knew. At the end of the day, all was as well as it could really be.

Until it wasn’t.  

One week before the end of classes, Bernadotte announced to the class as a whole that the university was going to launch the aquarium publicly, explaining briefly what it was and much more rapidly turning to something worse: that, as a pre-opening event, the Environmental Sciences college was hosting an event and anyone enrolled in an CoES class was welcome, for free and everything. Dan watched Jay perk up, visibly interested. Absolutely not.

It was one thing to be eating goldfish from the tank and wild fish out of the river. It was something else entirely to start eating out of an aquarium. Dan couldn’t help but feel protective over a project he’d helped with, too, even if it hadn’t been that much help. He knew a lot of those fish. He was absolutely not letting this rule-flaunting, skeevy asshole fuck it all up.

He accosted Jay outside class. “You are not going to that aquarium.”

“The one with the art installations?” Jay said. “Yes I am. Do you want something, Acanthis?”

“Would you quit calling me by my last name? Stay out of those fucking fish tanks.”

“No,” Jay said. “I have another class to be at, Acanthis, would you get out of my face?”

“The second anything goes wrong at that aquarium, I’m pointing the finger at you,” Dan said. “Don’t even fucking think about it. I’ll know if even a single fish is fucking hurt. If you even speak to them.”

“Acanthis. I have places to be,” Jay said. “Move, or I’m pushing you.”

“This is the only warning I’m fucking giving you,” Dan growled. “Take it. Stay out of the fucking aquarium.”

Jay scoffed and shouldered past Dan. Dan made no effort not to be pushed out of the way, but called after Jay, “I mean it!”

Jay shook his head, like he was rolling his eyes where Dan couldn’t see them, and kept walking.  So the aquarium was screwed, basically.

-

Dan knew he was being a little unreasonable. He wasn’t going to let that stop him, though.

Asking around turned up that Jay likely didn’t have a car, so Dan figured that he was going to try to catch a ride with someone else to the aquarium. It was hardly walking distance, from campus to the center of downtown Spokane. Trying to stop Jay from getting a carpool was going to be hard, but not impossible, of course. He’d figure something out. If he could even figure out who was bringing Jay…

…which turned out to be easier than Dan had expected. Two days after the announcement in class, Bernie had announced that she’d gotten some students who were struggling to make it to the aquarium location, and she would be organizing carpools. That just meant that Dan needed to see who got Jay’s name and somehow convince them not to bring Jay. These were students. He could probably bribe them, or ply them with cookies and alcohol, or something. Wouldn’t be too hard.

It wasn’t to be. Bernie ended up with three kids on overflow, and Jay was one of them. Bernie was a really lovely lady, and sweet as they came. And there was absolutely no way Dan was going to be able to tell her what the issue was without having to answer difficult questions about himself, and besides, she’d probably insist that he was being too hard on Jay and there was a good reason to eat goldfish after telling them you thought they were the best individual fish on the planet or something. So just telling Jay’s transportation to leave him behind unexpectedly was out of the plan.

Eventually, in a fit of desperation, Dan asked Bernie if he could catch a ride with her along with the other three students. She said that he could, and that it’d be a little cramped but there would still be room for everyone.

The night before the event, Dan started asking around again, trying to find Jay to warn him off a second time. This time he didn’t succeed. Everyone knew who he was, of course, but no one could quite find him. One girl even asked Dan if he thought Jay was ”next”—baffling Dan, and when he asked what she meant, she started carrying on about mysterious disappearances and serial killers like she thought they were living in a movie of some sort. No one else Dan spoke to was any more helpful. Jay had to be off-campus somewhere, or maybe he’d vanished into thin air. Dan wasn’t optimistic enough to trust in the latter, but he crossed his fingers anyway. That would be one disappearance Dan wouldn’t mind, that was for sure.

The inexorable march of time went on, as it always did. Tomorrow rolled around. Dan woke up on the morning of the aquarium event and knew that this was it. He was out of time. He just had to find some way to make it happen.

This time, he succeeded in waylaying Jay. It was by chance, even—he caught sight of Jay’s stupid gray horns just barely peeking out over the sea of faces at the front doors to the library and zeroed in on Jay as fast as he could. He grabbed Jay by the arm and couldn’t suppress a second of distaste at the texture of Jay’s flesh—strangely squishy and stiff all at once, like a very full water balloon instead of flesh with bones in it—and then Jay whirled around. “Acanthis?”

Dan opted not to call him on the name thing this time. “This is the last time I’m going to say it. Stay away from the aquarium.”

“Didn’t you say last time was going to be the only warning?” Jay said.

“I am so serious,” Dan said. “You do not want to test me on this. Stay away from the aquarium! Do I make myself clear?”

“Uh-huh. Enjoy the rest of your day, Acanthis.” Jay started to pull away from Dan, and Dan grabbed his arm tighter. His odd glassy eyes narrowed. “You’re going to want to let go of me right now.”

“Tell me you’ll stay away from the aquarium.”

Jay wrenched his arm away from Dan’s grip, much harder than Dan expected. His knuckles ached at the sudden force; he could swear he heard one of his joints crack. “I told you to let go of me, didn’t I? I don’t know how to say this politely, Acanthis—stop telling me to stay away from the aquarium. I’m allowed to be curious about it just like everyone else is. Just because you have a problem with me doesn’t make it my concern. I’m tolerating this, because you work here and I’m probably leaving after another semester. But if you push me, I’m going to start pushing back. Do I make myself clear?”

“I don’t have a problem with you, I have a problem with you eating—” Dan realized abruptly that they were in public and lowered his voice. “Eating the fucking fish! I think that should be fucking understandable.”

“No, you also have a problem with me,” Jay said flatly. “You are not the only one, and I do not care very much. But you will never be able to dictate what I do and don’t do. You had better get that through your head right the fuck now.”

Dan, disbelieving, shook his head. “I can’t fucking believe you.”

“Great,” Jay said, shoving past Dan. He hit Dan in the chest with his shoulder, clearly intentionally. “See you at the aquarium, Acanthis.”

“No you fucking won’t!” Dan called after him, but he vanished seamlessly into the crowd before he was even done speaking.

Fucker.

-

Finally, out of ideas, Dan called up a local friend who did some contract work with the Sideways Court and asked them to temporarily hex Bernie’s car. He felt bad about it, but it wouldn’t be any real harm done, and it’d just keep the car from starting for a while. It would stop the other two students from getting to the aquarium either, but Dan was willing to call that an acceptable loss. He turned up at the parking lot next to the cafeteria at the appointed meeting-time even though he knew it wasn’t going to get him anywhere; it seemed only fair to miss it, and besides, that let him keep an eye on Jay.

Jay gave Dan a very dubious look when he arrived. “You’d better not be waiting here for me, Acanthis.”

“Nope,” Dan said. “Carpooling.”

Jay gave him a long, hard look, and then shrugged and pulled out his phone. “I assume you’ll be dogging my steps all night?”

“You’d best believe it.”

“I don’t mean to insult you, Acanthis,” Jay said, “but this strikes me as a phenomenally stupid plan.”

“I keep telling you, my name is Dan,” Dam said. “And my plan is fine.”

“I’m sure it is,” Jay said, not looking up from his phone. “Look, for all anyone knows, you’re the concern here. Everyone at the library saw you getting handsy and aggressive with me. You have fuck-all in the way of evidence. And I’m—”

A car pulled up along the cement, and Jay cut off, picking his head up. “Ah, there’s Doctor Maragou,” he said, in exactly the same casual tone.

That was weird, and eerie. “Hey, Bernie,” Dan called, trying to keep any sort of distrust out of his tone of voice. “How’s your day been?”

“Oh, hi, Dan,” Bernie said. “Hi Jay! It’s great to see you both. Have you seen Sophia and Luke?”

“Not yet, but there’s still plenty of time,” Jay said, smiling warmly. “Dan, I know you’re closest with Doctor Maragou. Do you want to sit up front?”

“Generous of you,” Dan said, “yeah. Bernie, should we get in now?”

“Yeah, why not?” Bernie asked. “I think I see Sophia coming over now, anyway. It shouldn’t be too long.”

True enough, Sophia was cresting the small hill between the walking path and the parking lot. As Dan watched, Luke, the fourth student, walked over as well. So that was the whole crowd.

Dan didn’t need to jostle around, not in the front seat, but in the back Sophia, Luke, and Jay had to work out seating arrangements; Jay had volunteered to sit in the middle, but there was a little bit of difficulty with the seatbelts, and it took a few minutes of shuffling about before Luke finally announced to Bernie that they  could start driving. Bernie nodded, smiling, and made to pull out of the parking lot. And then her car made a terrible backfiring noise.

“What the hell was that?” Luke blurted. “I mean, um, sorry Professor.”

“What the hell was that?” Bernie muttered, stepping on the gas again. Nothing happened.

“That’s… weird,” Sophia said. “Professor M., has that ever happened before?”

“Nope,” Bernie said. “I’ve never had any car do that before.”

“I can take a look at it,” Sophia said, already opening the door. “I’m good with cars.”

“Hang on a minute,” Bernie said, turning her key in the ignition. Nothing happened. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

“Yup,” Sophia said.

“How sure?” said Bernie, pressing on the gas again.

“Very sure,” Sophia said. “I like cars. Pressing on the gas isn’t going to do anything good if it‘s not igniting, so maybe stop doing that.”

Bernie stopped pressing on the gas very quickly. “Okay. You can look under the hood, if you want. Let me come out and look at it with you.”

The two of them stood outside the car looking at the hood for a good ten or eleven minutes. Jay made dubious eye contact with Dan through the rearview mirror. Dan pretended not to notice.

“Um,” Luke, the other classmate, said awkwardly after about two minutes of sustained silence. “So, uh, you’re Professor Acanthis, right?”

“You can call me Dan,” Dan said.

“Yeah, but you teach the fieldwork for nonmajors class, right?”

“Yeah,” Dan said. “Why?”

“Is it particularly hard?” Luke asked. “I mean, work-intensive. I’m setting up my schedule for next semester.”

Dan paused, trying to think about that. “I just started teaching it this semester. I think it’s pretty light, but you’re better off asking one of my students.”

“He means it’s very easy,” Jay said tonelessly. “Acanthis, tell him your late work policy.”

“It’s Dan,” Dan said. “As long as it’s in before the end of the semester, I don’t take points off late work.”

“They meet once a week, there’s a lab report due but you can work on it in the class, and it’s for nonmajors,” Jay added. “Very easy class. If you want an easy A you should take it.”

“Huh,” Luke said. “Thanks… Jaaaaaames?”

“Jay,” Jay said, but now that Dan was listening he pronounced it a little oddly, sort of more like ‘Joy’ than ‘Jay’. “Luke, right?”

“Yeah,” Luke said. “Are you planning on taking it next semester? I thought you and Professor Acanthis had… um.”

“Drama?” Jay asked, and laughed under his breath. “No, it’s nothing serious, but I’m on the pre-med track. Have to take macrobio field instead. I’m only in class with Doc Maragou because it qualified as an elective.”

“What’s the deal, actually?” Luke said. “Like, if you don’t mind me asking, because I heard you guys were really, uh… but you seem chill now.”

“Like I said,” Jay said, “it’s nothing serious. Me and Acanthis have a couple disagreements over… I don’t know, I don’t want to get into it. And a friend of a friend was talking shit about me that he believed, but I think we’re over that. Mostly it’s personality clash.”

“It’s not personality clash,” Dan said. “He’s fucked over a few friends of mine and won’t stop doing it.”

Jay raised his eyebrows at Luke, who smiled rather tightly back. “It is really not that serious. He doesn’t like that I don’t do what he tells me. I get it. I don’t like to be told what to do. It’s a personality clash. We’re working it out. This time next year, I imagine you won’t even hear that me and Acanthis were arguing.”

“Huh,” Luke said. “Right.”

Dan willed himself not to argue, even though that was blatantly untrue. He didn’t need to hash the whole thing out in front of a human audience. Fortunately, about that point Bernie came back around. “We can’t figure the problem out,” she said through the driver’s-side door, “so you three might as well come out. I’m not sure what we’re going to do here.”

“Damn,” Luke said.

“It’s a bit of a walk,” Jay said, “and it’ll get us there a little late, but we could take the Six over to Riverside.”

Dan turned to look at him, uncomprehending. He could see the other three do the same.

“The bus,” Jay said. “Don’t any of you go anywhere?”

“I only take the campus shuttle,” Luke said. “Sorry.”

“Huh,” Jay said. “Anyway, if that’s the plan, we should probably get moving. If we miss the bus we’re going to be waiting for a good hour for the next one.”

“I think the event ends at eight,” Bernie said.

“And it’s, what, six now?” Jay said. “So we’ll basically miss it. I don’t particularly want to do that,” he said, making eye contact with Dan with a weird little sedate smile on his face, “so unless anyone has objections, let’s get moving.”

“How far of a walk is it?” Bernie asked.

Jay shrugged. “Maybe a few miles? It’s at the transit center. Do you know where I mean?”

“Oh!” Bernie said. “Okay, I think I can do that.”

“Fan-ta-stic,” Jay said. “Luke, Sophia, you two on board?”

“Yeah, sure,” Sophia said.

“You didn’t ask Dan,” Luke said.

“Oh, don’t worry,” Jay said. “He’s going to follow me no matter what I ask him.”

“Oo-kay,” Luke said. “Yeah, I’ll come.”

Jay smiled, waving a hand and starting to walk rather briskly. “Alright. We have half an hour. Let’s move.”

Dan had never walked between the campus and the transit center like this before. This part of Spokane—of Washington, really—was gorgeous. Jay kept them hurrying along the side of the road, but Dan and Sophia kept slowing down to look at the trees or the rock faces or the rivers and falling behind. Dan wished he could say it was intentional, but it really was just that beautiful. And because they kept stopping at the same things, he and Sophia had started talking, aimlessly commenting on the trees and the water.

Then the road they were walking along turned into a bridge, high over a wide waterfall. All of them stopped, even Jay.

“This reminds me of where I grew up,” Sophia said to Dan. “I was walking distance from Wairere as a kid.”

Jay turned as though that had caught his attention. “Wairere Falls?”

“You’ve been there?” Sophia asked, looking a bit surprised. “Yeah.”

“They were more impressive than this, I think,” Jay said. “I don’t know, the last time I was in New Zealand was nearly thirty years ago.”

“Aotearoa,” Sophia said.

“Couldn’t have been,” Luke said, at about the same time. “How old are you?”

Jay laughed. “You think someone with a face as plastic as mine looks my age? I appreciate the vote of confidence. I’m pushing forty.”

Was that his cover? That he’d just undergone a bunch of surgeries?

“Oh, wow,” Bernie said. “What did you do before you decided to go into medicine?”

Jay glanced sidelong at Dan. “Professional fishing. Do you still need a moment to ogle?”

“Not hassling us to get moving again already?” Dan asked.

“We’ve got a little time,” Jay said.

“You were on us the whole way here,” Sophia said, still staring at the falls.

“Yeah, because I knew you were all going to stare here. It’s a nice waterfall. Take your time. I’ll tell you when we really have to get a move on.”

Dan turned that one over in his head for a moment. Was Jay expecting him to have delayed more intensely? Was that what that actually was? Or was this actually a moment of… what, generosity in disguise? Jay was such a strange person.

It was a nice waterfall, though, and the water below it looked deep and clear. Dan walked to the part of the railing Jay was leaning on, trying to look subtle, and leaned over. “Between the two of us, we’re the only ones who can breathe under water.”

“I can’t, actually,” Jay said. “I don’t breathe at all.”

Dan stopped, looking at him properly. Jay shrugged. “No lungs. Don’t breathe.”

“But you can  live under water, right?” Dan did his best to clarify.

“Yeah, that I can,” Jay said. “What about it?”

“Have you ever gone over a waterfall like that? If you’re here, and you were in New Zealand around waterfalls.”

Now it was Jay’s turn to look at Dan oddly. “I have, actually. Not often, but I have. Are you about to ask me for advice?”

“I just… wonder, I guess,” Dan said. “Does this one look like it’d be good to jump off of?”

Jay was quiet for a moment, studying the water. “Well, depends what you mean by good. You’ll probably get spun really hard. Impacting the water will probably hurt, but you don’t want to dive or anything here, or you’ll risk hitting the bottom, I think, it doesn’t look that deep to me.”

“You could’ve just said no,” Dan said.

“Those are the only problems. If you don’t like being disoriented, that’s on you,” Jay said. “The water is clean and clear and there’s no rocky outcroppings to hit yourself into. It’s pretty damn good, as far as these things go.”

“Sounds kind of unpleasant.”

“It’s  one of those things,” Jay said, turning toward the other three. “If you liked it, you’d probably already know that by now, and if you don’t, you’ve never thought about it. I’m not sure what kind of thrill-seeking mer adolescents get up to, though.”

“Me either, really. I lived most of my life on land after I turned twelve.”

“Huh,” Jay said. “That’s why you’re like this.”

“Like what?” Dan started, but Jay was already walking toward the other three. “Jay!”

“We’re going to get moving again, guys,” Jay said, waving. Bernie, Luke and Sophia reluctantly fell into step behind Jay again. Dan, for his part, hurried up to stand next to him so he could ask what the fuck Jay was talking about.

“What do you mean, that’s why I’m ‘like that?’”

“Do you want them hearing? I thought your being here meant you had to be super hush-hush.”

“Honestly, I’ve been wondering this whole time. Why don’t you?”

Jay gave him a disbelieving look. “Obviously I’m supposed to.”

“Well—you’re not, and no one’s tried to arrest you yet.”

“You’d be surprised at how low-profile I can be. Plastic surgery,” he said, tapping the ridges of flesh around his eyes, “tattoos, nail polish, and sometimes I can pass the horns off as a headband. Sometimes, if I’m really worried,” he glanced back at the other three, “they’re not looking. Watch this.”

Dan turned toward him, not sure what he was about to do, and was completely unprepared for his horns to just—sink back into the top of his forehead seemingly of their own volition. “What—?”

“It’s uncomfortable, though,” Jay said, replacing them with a gesture that looked more like spitting something out than horns protruding through his face. They were now streaked with some sort of bluish, viscous fluid, like dish soap. Jay ran his hands over them, and then rubbed his hands together, and when he went back to talking neither the horns nor his hands were wet.

“Neat trick,” Dan said, totally astonished.

“Handy, yeah,” Jay said. “Look, not that I’m not appreciating the conversation not suddenly being you yelling in my face and all, but can I ask what prompted the change of heart?”

“No hearts have been changed. I don’t want you to eat my fish,” Dan said. “But I can’t see a way to stop you getting to the aquarium, so I guess I’ll just have to tag around all night like you said I was going to. Might as well make it a little fun, right?”

“I suppose that makes sense,” Jay said slowly, not looking as though he understood at all.

-

The bus was miserable, but the aquarium was fantastic, so it balanced out. Dan did tail Jay the whole time, though Jay obligingly let Dan pick over the remnants of the sushi bar before they went around to the exhibits instead of trying to lose Dan so he could go start snatching schooling fish or something. Dan asked him if he wanted anything, concerned as he was for the live fish in the exhibits; Jay demurred. Something about a food allergy, or something; Dan wasn’t sure exactly what he meant but he sure made it sound like there wasn’t anything at the table that wouldn’t somehow make him sick.

Jay was fascinated by the first-floor exhibits that looked like classrooms. Eventually they made it to the second floor, after Jay had done a long loop around the expansive ground level and spent a lot of time in the touch-tank mumbling to a nervous epaulette shark until he could coax it up toward him. Dan didn’t like it then, but it hadn’t been sinister after all, and he was trying to relax. But just after they made it to the second floor, Jay slipped off into the shadows, and Dan just barely caught up to him before Jay—with Dan’s keys—slipped behind the Employees Only door and beckoned for Dan to follow.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing,” Dan hissed, as soon as he was inside. “They’ll kick you out if you’re back here.”

“Not if I’m with you,” Jay said, which wasn’t true.

“Yes, they will. And they’ll revoke my clearance.”

“Come on. I want to talk to the nursery sharks.”

“Absofuckinglutely not,” Dan said. “I’ll tell on both of us.”

“What the fuck is the big idea?” Jay said. “Look, you can hear both sides of the conversation. And they’re nursery sharks, and I’m not even hungry. I’m curious about living in those drowned fake rooms. Do you know which tank we should be looking for?”

“We’re not doing this,” Dan said.

“Alright, I’ll find out without you,” Jay shrugged, and started walking. Dan reached out to grab Jay’s arm, and—

Well. Dan didn’t actually know what happened, only that his hand closed on solid-ish flesh, and then it was suddenly not solid under his hand at all, and Jay had sort of just pulled away around his fingers. Weird.

“You can come with me or you can stay there, but you’re not grabbing me in private,” Jay said. “I’m not interested in being yanked around, I don’t give a damn how worried you are about the fish. I’m not even going to put my face near the water.”

With deep misgivings, Dan hurried up and followed behind Jay. “It’s, um, door seven. The exhibit you want.”

“Thank you,” Jay said, sounding legitimately a little bit surprised. “Appreciate it.”

“Don’t expect a repeat,” Dan said. “And I will be warning them about you later.”

Jay hummed, pushing through the door slowly. Beyond, they could hear the pump and the water splashing.

Jay bent down by the side of the tank, reaching out with one hand. “This is going to look strange.”

“Everything you do looks strange,” Dan started, but he was right—it did look real fucking strange. The palm of his hand… uncoiled? Rippled and widened? And from the inside came slightly luminescent blue tendrils, about a half-inch wide each and visibly very soft, and slick with some sort of fluid with the consistency of honey, or maybe laundry detergent. He stuck these into the water without a worry, and then said, not too loudly, “Hey. Up here.”

Abruptly Dan remembered the lures. “You have those inside you? You feed them to the fish!”

“Sometimes they’re hungry,” Jay said.

“What are they, worms?” Dan asked. “Some sort of… fungus?”

Jay looked up from the water to squint at him. “Are you trying to fuck with me? Like, is that a joke?”

“What?”

Jay reached over with his normal hand and grabbed one tendril firmly, and then pulled. Hard, actually, hard enough that Dan thought it looked like it had to hurt, and then with a quiet squelching sound a small octagonal segment of his gray skin pulled free from the side of his hand and so did the tendril, still moving freely. “It’s me. I feel like that should be obvious, if the fish were reporting on me to you. That one bass got a good mouthful of my leg a few months ago.”

“What are those?” someone else said, and Jay and Dan both jumped and turned to see that there was a small nursery shark staring up at the both of them. Dan wasn’t terribly familiar with her, but he thought her name started with an s sound, or maybe an m. “Can I eat them?”

“Sure,” Jay said.

“They make fish sick,” Dan said quickly. “Better not.”

“They make fish sick?” Jay repeated. “They shouldn’t. Just drowsy, maybe.”

“Dizzy and sick, is what they told me.”

Jay looked down at his own hand curiously. “So, I’m Jay.” He said it oddly again. Maybe Dan was mispronouncing it. “My friend here is Dan.”

“Danistei,” Dan said, because he gave his real name to the fishes, thank you, and then registered that Jay had said his actual name.

“What’s your name?” Jay continued, as though nothing had happened.

“Svisa,” said the nursery shark.

“Nice to meet you, Svisa,” Dan started.

“We’re delighted you’ll speak to us,” Jay continued, coming very close to cutting Dan off. “I have a couple questions about the environment.”

“Oh, like he’s always asking,” Svisa said.

“Probably,” Jay said. “Do you know what your environment is a replica of?”

“It’s a replica?” Svisa said.

“It’s a replica of a human classroom,” Jay said, rapid-fire. “Thank you, Svisa. What do you think of the lighting on the side of the wall?”

“Oh, he really is always asking that one. It’s fine.”

“You come here from anywhere interesting?”

“Not really,” Svisa said.

“Captive-bred,” Dan cut in. “Svisa, are you bored?”

“A little bit,” Svisa said. “Nothing left in here to catch, and I know all the hiding places. When it’s light out, I can watch the other tank, but they’re dimming everything now.”

“They’re dimming everything,” Jay repeated. “Okay, Dan, up, let’s get out of here before we get caught.”

“Caught,” Svisa repeated.

“We’re not technically supposed to be back here right now,” Dan explained hastily, getting up. “Thank you so much for chatting, Svsia. Jay, was that what you wanted to know?”

“One last question,” Jay said. “How dark are the hiding places?”

“Dark enough,” Svisa said, delicately closing her jaws on a big chunk of Jay’s exposed tendrils. They sheared off cleanly, and started to leak thinner, less viscous blue fluid into the water; Jay rapidly curled them back up without even a hiss. “You’re leaving, I’ll see you some other time.”

“Me, maybe,” Dan muttered. “Jay, if she gets sick, I’m holding you to account for it.”

“She should be fine. It’s like weed,” Jay said. “Bye, Svisa, thanks for talking. Might see you again, might not. I’m curious about the way it feels down there. Dan, hitting the road?”

Dan sighed and followed behind Jay, and the two of them stepped out of the tank room and then into the Employees Only hall and then back into the rest of the museum. It was dim. “What time is it?”

“You have a phone, don’t you?” Jay said, but he was pulling his own out as he said it. “Eight ten.”

“They closed up fast,” Dan noted, a little surprised. “I wasn’t expecting them to kick everyone out and turn the lights off ten minutes after the event ended.”

Jay shrugged. “Maybe they’re just efficient. Let’s make sure they didn’t lock us in.”

They hadn’t, so the two of them walked out the doors and tried not to look suspicious. Or at least Dan tried; Jay looked casual as anything, sauntering out confidently.

“Stop looking over your shoulder,” Jay murmured out of the corner of his mouth, and Dan straightened up. “No, that’s worse, you look even more like you’re sneaking into the pantry to steal cookies or something. Do you just not do this sort of thing?”

“No, I don’t,” Dan said.

Jay paused. “Why were you messing with me so much, then? Starting out strong for your first few bits of mischief?”

“I,” Dan said, trying to wrap his head around that. “It was about the fish. It has always been about the fish.”

“But you had to know I wasn’t going to go after the fish in a new aquarium,” Jay said, sounding almost stupefied. “Right?”

What? “What? No.”

“If I’m going to an aquarium, there’s going to be close monitoring, people around,” Jay said. “And it’s not like they’re filling, anyway. Obviously I’d just go pick someone off in an alley beforehand, if it was that big a deal.”

“I told you, I don’t like you eating the wild fish either,” Dan said. “But I guess—”

“Fish?” Jay repeated. “No, I mean—” And then he stopped, and turned to gesture Dan toward an alley. “Come take a detour with me.”

“What do you mean, not fish?” Dan said, following easily.

Jay looked Dan up and down, still walking. The alley was longer than Dan expected. “I know you said something, at some point, about the ‘patterns,’” and here he made air-quotes with his fingers, “of the way that I ate the fish being ‘creepy.’”

“Yeah, because they are,” Dan said. “I mean, I might’ve been judging you wrong, but it still seems real fucking creepy to me. I don’t really get—”

Jay raised a hand and cut Dan off. “And I read into that, I think. I thought you meant the patterns I ate everything with were creepy.”

“I mean,” Dan started. “I don’t know.”

Jay smiled oddly, waving for Dan to walk a little faster. “And I thought to myself that that was fair, because you were right. And I didn’t know how much you’d told anyone, or how much trouble I’d be in if you had.”

“Jay. What are you getting at.”

“Fish are very unsatisfying, you know.” Jay sighed. “They don’t have much to talk about. Their secrets are inconsequential and not very interesting. And, now, I have a problem, the kind you’re not likely to have heard of. “

“Where are you leading me?”

“You’ll see,” Jay said. The alleyway had gotten so dark that it was difficult to make out anything except for the points of light reflecting off his eyes from the distant billboards on the street. “I need a secret—given freely—before I can eat my fill. Makes it had to order off the dinner menu. Told myself, hey, hospice care, that’s got to be the gig for me. But it doesn’t leave me a lot of time to hunt. So I’ve been scavenging the fishtanks. But do you know what one of the first things you told me was?”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Dan stopped walking.

“This explains why threatening you didn’t seem to do anything,” Jay said. “Did you even know I was threatening you?”

“When the hell were you threatening me?”

“That’s what I mean,” Jay said. “I’m full, now, I’m not eating anything. Or anyone. But you know what I’m getting at, don’t you?”

Dan shook his head. “You eat fish, and you’re implying you’ll eat me.”

“About the gist of it, yeah,” Jay said. “Keep walking, we’re going to get to the bus stop a few blocks early. I didn’t want to take you through here if you already knew I was likely to maybe eat you. Didn’t need that kind of thing getting me in trouble, you understand. You cannot do anything about me, but if you decided to start running and screaming it would’ve made my life inconvenient.”

“Are you,” Dan said, trying to find the polite term for it. “Are you a… person with a vamparasitic affliction?”

“Am I a what?” Jay said. “Vamparasitic affliction? Can you not say vampire now?”

“I think it’s offensive,” Dan said.

“If I were a vampire I wouldn’t be offended,” Jay said. “But no. I’m an obligate carnivore under a curse, but it’s a different one. You’ve seen me walk in the sunlight.”

“Can you eat garlic?”

“I can’t eat any plants.”

Dan could start to see the lights at the end of the walkway now. “Why do you eat people, if you can just eat fish?”

Jay looked at Dan for a moment, and despite the low light Dan thought he could see Jay’s needle-sharp teeth glinting in a very sharp smile. “Why does anyone prefer to eat anything? Just tastes better.”

[pa-pa-plasma]

kind of frustrating that people took "fat does not equal unhealthy" to mean "fat is not unhealthy." sometimes being obese IS unhealthy & excess fat can cause a lot of problems. ignoring health issues isn't progressive. real "oranges kill people with depression" moment

[lurking-latinist]

🐈

[coolspacequips]

Have been reading this sci-fi romance and like UGH u ever really wish a book was just at least a little better??? There's stuff in this that's interesting but also a lot about it that's so... Juvenile and kinda undercooked lol...... But it's so hard finding good romance bc for a lot of romance readers this is enough, except even then not really since they prolly didn't fuck nasty enough in this book for the ppl that just need the merest pretense to read smut (which is fine if that's what u like there's just an oversaturation of this, esp when you can have a light plot/heavy smut story with slightly better writing and internal world building without having to explain and describe the 'boring' parts 😅)

[thedreadvampy]

guess who's in 🎶troooouble🎶

New Boss does not appreciate my Vile Insubordination (giving an informed opinion in an email chain where she said some factually incorrect things and got called out on it - I said hey yep you're right that what she said isn't true but here's why it's still important to listen to our team)

and now we have to have a Quick Chattette about my Behaviour and Unsatisfactory Response (didn't apologise for being correct)

[fingertipsmp3]

Ughhhhhhh I hate writing and I hate not writing and I hate myself

[cerealbishh]

"You get to see her understanding of how things really are. And so that becomes much more present on the surface. (...) In this season, we get to see her fall deeper in love with him but also navigate those challenges. And also becoming an anchor for Rhett but also struggling with his decision, 'Is this what I want for my future as well, as much as I love this man?'." - Isa in an interview with The Knockturnal(x)