#without either of them breaking it or dropping it. that's the entire video.

[btr-rewatch]

That time Nickelodeon gave the boys a little camcorder and had them film their own behind-the-scenes videos to promote the show

[steddie-as-they-come]

Eddie's hanging out in Family Video during Steve and Robin's shift, just being a general nuisance, when it begins.

The other two are talking in low voices in the back corner, discussing something Eddie can't hear. Normally he'd get up and go over there, insert himself into the conversation, command their attention, but he's too busy judgmentally rifling through Family Video's paltry horror movie supply to care that much.

He sneaks a glance over, and then he sees it.

Steve presses a kiss to Robin's forehead.

Eddie has to drop the tape he's holding before he does something stupid like break it out of jealousy.

And he knows, okay, he's heard it no less than eight million times, they're platonic with a capital P. That doesn't stop the little green monster in his chest from rearing its head.

It doesn't stop there, either. Eddie starts to see Steve kiss the rest of the Party. Simple little forehead kisses and temple kisses and kisses on the crowns of their heads, like he's their parent, which, well, he is. He does it when Dustin needs comfort. He slings an arm around Lucas and pulls him close for a kiss on the temple when Lucas makes a particularly good shot for basketball. He does it to Max, on one of her bad days. He even does it to Mike absentmindedly, who makes a feral screech like an angry cat before everyone starts to laugh at him. And of course, he and Robin are always all over each other.

But he won't kiss Eddie.

It's stupid that he expects it. They don't know each other. Steve's been with this group, been saving them from monsters and scientists and torturers for forever.

Eddie still wants in on it. If only to indulge his pathetic little crush on the former King of Hawkins High.

One night, Steve hosts a movie night, and Dustin invites Eddie along. He goes, because of course he does, and takes a seat on the end of the couch as Steve puts in the tape.

Eddie immediately forgets what the movie is, because Steve sits down next to him. His entire brain is a fuzzy kind of static that only intensifies when Steve scoots closer.

"Sorry," is the first word Eddie registers out of Steve's mouth, and he hastily tries to collect his thoughts. Steve moves closer, which doesn't help.

He peers around Steve and sees the kids all trying to squish onto the couch. "Scoot over, Eddie!" Mike shouts, and Eddie moves as close as he can to the arm of the couch. Steve follows, arm around him and thighs pressed close together.

Okay, then. Eddie can die happily tonight, apparently.

Something jumps at the screen, and Steve flinches.

Eddie learns a new thing about Steve that night. Apparently, when Steve gets frightened, he pulls everyone within reach towards him, like he's trying to shield them with his body. Eddie finds himself hugged to Steve's chest and has to employ breathing exercises to get rid of his new little...problem.

He somehow makes it through the movie without spontaneously combusting, a feat nothing short of a miracle. The kids run to the kitchen and Eddie can hear Dustin pick up the phone and say, "Hello, Paulie's Pizza?"

Steve sighs and gets up. "I did not say they could order pizza," he grumbles. He extends his hand to Eddie, and after a second of bewildered staring, Eddie manages to grab it and pull himself to standing.

Robin's sitting on the couch still (she had been on the other side of Steve), and she watches this interaction with an unreadable expression on her face.

Well, unreadable to Eddie, anyway. Steve and Robin proceed to have an entire conversation with just facial expressions, and Eddie is left in the dark about it.

Steve finally rolls his eyes and stalks into the kitchen. He distracts Dustin with a kiss on the top of his head, then steals the phone. "Hi, yeah," he says, and Eddie recognizes that voice as his King-Steve-takes-what-he-wants voice. "No, that's right. Two medium pepperoni pizzas and a side of garlic knots, yep."

He listens, then says, "I'll be over to pick it up," then places the phone back on the receiver with a click.

"I'm going to get the food." he announces to the room at large. "Eddie, you coming?"

"Sure?" Eddie slings his leather jacket from the back of one of the kitchen table chairs and slides his sneakers on.

The drive is quiet. Multiple times, it looks like Steve wants to say something, but he never does. When the two of them walk in to get the pizza, Steve grabs both boxes. "Can you get the door, Eds?"

Eddie wants to tease him about the new nickname, but he chooses not to, opting instead to nod and say, "Sure thing, Stevie." He pulls open the glass door and says, with a mock bow and a grand gesture, "Your majesty."

Steve rolls his eyes. "Thanks." He (finally!!) goes to kiss Eddie.

However, Eddie is not as short as the kids (and Robin) who Steve normally does this to. Eddie's pretty sure the kiss is supposed to land on his forehead.

It lands on his mouth.

Pretty shoddy kiss, as it were. Mostly, Steve kisses the corner of Eddie's mouth.

Both of their faces burn red. If not for Steve's sports-playing, monster-killing reflexes, the pizzas would be on the ground right now.

"Sorry!" Steve says, hurrying out to his car and tossing the food in the backseat. "Sorry, I don't know what I was thinking."

Eddie slides into the passenger seat. "Finally!" he says.

"What?"

Eddie rolls his eyes. "Steve, I've been the only one who you haven't been bestowing kisses upon for weeks now. Sorry if I'm excited to be included in the group."

Steve starts the car. "But...those are all platonic kisses."

Eddie scoffs. "What, and kissing me wouldn't be?"

Steve is silent.

"REALLY?" Eddie yells. "Wait, wait-" He leans over the center console. "Steve Harrington, if you wanted a kiss, a romantic kiss, you could have told me before cuddling with me all night!"

Steve sighs. "Fine. Eddie Munson, I'm going to kiss you romantically."

And he leans in.

Eddie's obsessed with the curve and dip of Steve's mouth against his. He greedily cups his hand against Steve's face, his other hand propped up against the center console. Steve tastes like the soda he was drinking earlier, mixed with something richer and deeper that's wholly, entirely Steve.

They break apart at a small crackle from Steve's inner pocket.

"Henderson," Steve says exasperatedly. "That kid is so damn impatient."

"Steve!" Dustin's voice comes from the walkie Steve pulls out. "Have you gotten the pizza yet?"

"Yes, you little shit, we're coming back now." Steve sighs. "Oh! Henderson, find Robin. Tell her it happened."

Eddie shoots Steve a confused look, but Steve just holds up a placating hand, a slight smile on his face.

"OH MY GOD STEVE!" comes Robin's voice on the walkie. "HELL YEAH!"

Steve cackles and leans back in to kiss Eddie, who happily accepts.

[thelostconsultant]

Sounds like a plan

pairing: Lando Norris x reader

note: Lando loves you. Now that it seems like he has a fantastic year, there's only one thing that can make it even better.

You were minding your own business as you sat on the couch with your laptop resting on your thighs, going through the script of the first episode of the second season. It was based on the book series you had written, your baby, so you only gave them permission to make the series if you had a say in how they adapted the story. So far there had been no arguments; you all sat down to make the outline of the season, discussing certain details, then the script writers got to work. Then the revision was up to you, the chance to give them your feedback and make changes if you felt like something just wasn’t right.

But this time you could barely focus because in the last ten minutes you could feel your boyfriend’s eyes on you. It’s not that he was busy scrolling his phone or watching the TV while looking up at you every now and then. No. He was staring at you without a break. “Lando, what is it? Why are you staring at me like that?” you asked when you had enough.

He looked taken aback. “I can’t look at my girlfriend?” You shot him a serious look which made him yield. “Okay, okay, I was just admiring the view… and thinking about something,” he added mysteriously.

“What would that be?” you wondered as you closed the lid of your laptop.

For long seconds he was watching you without an explanation, the only sound leaving his lips being a thoughtful hum. But then he took the laptop from you to place it safely on the coffee table, then patted his lap to make you sit there, straddling him the way he always loved to have you. With a small laugh, you crawled over to him and took your place, sneaking your arms around his neck before placing a soft kiss on his forehead. Lando’s hands were resting on your hips, fingertips digging into your flesh as he held onto you.

Instead of spitting out what he’d been thinking about, he captured your lips in a kiss, smiling to himself when you returned it with the kind of passion he’d been missing so much while he was away. Spending so much time apart, either because he had a race weekend, or because you had to be in L.A. to work on the scripts, surely made him feel lonely sometimes. Yes, you did have video calls, you did send messages together all the time, but having you like this was always entirely different.

Now, he didn’t want you to drop the script supervision project, he knew that was important to you. But it would be nice if you could come to more races, maybe working remotely like you did now. And who knew, maybe he could go with you when you had to show up in the States. He just wanted to spend more time with you, and this need was growing with every single day that passed. So, as he thought about what to do or say, he came to the logical conclusion that maybe it was time to make you see just how serious he was about this relationship.

“I need to ask you something,” he began as he pulled away, one of his hands moving to cup your face. Even though you let out a questioning hum as if you were interested in what he wanted to say, you were still trying your damn best to lean closer and kiss him again. He could see the lust in your eyes, but as flattering as it was, he had something important to tell you. “Babe, pay attention to me, okay? Just a few minutes, I swear, then I’m all yours.”

With a defeated sigh, you nodded and rested your forehead against his. “I’m all ears,” you said quietly.

Lando took a deep breath, trying to put his thoughts in order. “I love you. I could give you an hour-long speech about how much, but I hope you already know that. This year has been so amazing, you moved in, our car began to work, and I won races and had several podium finishes, and… I don’t know, even if I don’t win the championship, there’s one thing that could surely make this year almost perfect,” he said. He couldn’t help but smile when your eyes widened, giving away that you could sense where he was going with this. “Ending the year with the thought that you will marry me would be the cherry on top. What do you say?”

At first, you were just watching him in silence, your beautiful eyes still wide open, lips slightly parted from the surprise. He was beginning to worry, but then your lips curled into a smile, and you pressed your lips to his, kissing him so fiercely like your life depended on it. Though Lando truly enjoyed it, he knew this gesture wasn’t enough to make him loosen up, so he pulled away and gently grabbed your chin to make you focus on what he had to say.

“Use words, baby, I need to hear you say it,” he told you, his voice desperate from the need for the confirmation.

“This sounds like a plan. Let’s just elope and get married in peace, somewhere away from the crowds,” you told him.

Lando took a second to think about it. “I want a big wedding. I want to show you off, I want our friends to celebrate with us. But,” he added the second he noticed you were about to object, “I hear you, I know you’re right, so let’s elope first, and then we can start to organize a big wedding where we celebrate with our families and friends. How does that sound?”

“Perfect. I love you.”

“I love you, future Mrs. Norris,” he replied with a short laugh before kissing you again.

[gyeomsweetgyeom]

[11:04 pm]

(cw: f!reader, idol!reader)

This was likely the best concert you'd ever been to. It was lively, fun, and the best time you'd had in a while. And you're an idol! You sang along to all the songs and danced with little to no worries in the world.

The next song started, a familiar beat started, your favorite song. You turned to Jaehyun excitedly squealing as the instruments started up. He smiled at you brightly, nodding his head along with the music.

“Ooh, don’t we look good together?” Bruno Mars started singing.

You raised your arms, swaying side to side, singing along without a care in the world. This night had been amazing. Ever since becoming an idol, there had been very few times where you felt free out in public. You always felt like you had to lol over your shoulder, be proper, and on your best behavior in case something got you in trouble.

There were always cameras pointed at you, but not tonight. Bruno Mars had a running habit for his shows which worked out great for you as an idol, your boyfriend who was an idol, and other celebrities who very rarely got to be out in public without the fear of a camera on them. You and Jaehyun were lucky that both your companies supported your relationship, but that didn’t mean all fans did. Even though your relationship was confirmed, you and Jaehyun very rarely went out publicly just for your own comfort. The lack of cameras and phones at this camera made it all the more exciting on top of the fact that you both loved Bruno Mars.

The cameras around the venue jumped around to different people in the audience as the song went on. “Fellas grab your ladies if your lady fine,” Bruno sang.

The band paused, “I said fellas grab your ladies if your lady fine.” The cameras jumped to a couple, as the woman was pulled in and given a kiss. You hadn't realized the cameras were going to jump around the audience and show the fellas grabbing their ladies.

“Let’s try this again, fellas grab your ladies if your lady fine,” Bruno Mars sang again. Before you could even process the image on the screen you felt Jaehyun wrapping his arms around your waist before dipping you back into a kiss. You laughed loudly, cupping his cheeks before placing a chaste kiss on his lips.

You stood upright, just catching the screen showing the two of you before switching to another couple as the line repeated once more as the song kept going.

You and Jaehyun danced the night away with each other, singing at the top of your lungs without a worry in the world. It hadn't even crossed your mind that surely people, fans of either you or Jaehyun, might break the rule of no phones and catch sight of you.

When you were both in the van ready to head home, the serotonin boost dropping to a tired calmness. Jaehyun let out a laugh, leaning over to show you his screen. Someone had captured the entire video of you and Jaehyun from one of the big screens. You could see the dazzling smile on Jaehyun's face and the look of surprise on your face as he dipped you back. You had been so in the moment that you hadn't even heard the sharp rise in cheers and volume when you and Jaehyun appeared on the screen.

It was a cute video and you were glad someone had captured it. Scrolling through the comments, it looked like people agreed. The video had been posted almost an hour ago and already had over 100 thousand reposts. You were even trending! Some people in the comments even admitted to not knowing who either of you were but wanted to become fans.

You handed the phone back with a smile, "someone said that if I ever get tired of you, they'll take care of me. They offered to take care of all my plants while I'm away and make me dinner every night."

Jaehyun playfully rolled his eyes, "most of the comments were about you. I forget how much the internet adores my girlfriend."

[crookedkryptonitebeliever]

Ok regarding that “can i make Yves do my homework if I give him my childhood pictures” ask, exactly how much access does Yves have to our lives? Does he have images or videos from when we were still a baby or would they be new information to him?

A bunch of my baby pictures and videos are lost because my dad lost the computer that had them but we recently found my aunt’s old camera filled with our childhood pictures, it was a pleasant surprise for us but would it be for Yves too?

It absolutely is. If Yves was there with you while your aunt showed you the photo gallery of her old camera, Yves would momentarily lose a bit of inhibition and let his pupils dilate to a maddening degree before instantly constricting it back to appear normal. It's a rare, super deluxe edition photos of you, there isn't anything else like it out there as they're most likely not uploaded to the internet or a cloud based service, where he could easily hack.

Him coming across media from your childhood or at least during those early days where people still go to and get their photos developed, is like winning the lottery for him. Because, although he tries to collect everything relating to your existence, there is only so much he can do in a day. He rather prioritizes the present and the future, as the past is the past; neither you nor him can change it, he can only understand or connect it to your current behaviours or thought patterns.

He does have some information about you as a baby or a child, but that is if they're "readily available" to him. (I.e., it can be found in predictable places like in your childhood home.), that is why, Yves would try to build a good relationship with people you grew up with, to extract information.

Despite being reclusive as he is, Yves would never fail to attend every and any family gathering he is invited to or expected to come. Encouraging that drunk uncle to drink more if he knew he has something to say about you, bribing your relatives with gifts and career opportunities, perhaps even drugging that really difficult and combative cousin to make them more bearable to interrogate.

As soon as he knew your aunt could be another goldmine of your data, he would get to work. Wasting no time building a rapport with her, it's a piece of cake given how obsessive and manipulative his nature is.

Inevitably, your aunt will come to love him and see Yves as family. By extension, her relationship with you will skyrocket too, she will invite you to her place much more often even though she might not be the most sociable person in the first place. Yves will find a way to make her bend to his whims.

The majority of their conversations would be about you, only sometimes Yves would talk about something else if it meant he could keep the drive to spill more about your lore going. His sharp ears and mind will pick up on clues as to where he might find more pictures or writings about you. He would then break into your aunt's home to give it a thorough shakedown and leave without a trace. Yves would repeat this process until he's positive that she has nothing left to offer. That camera is getting fucking stolen and replaced with a duplicate.

It didn't matter if your aunt was a minimalist or a severe hoarder, he would go through all her things just to try and find pieces of your puzzle. He would wade through cobwebs, dust piles, rat droppings and mould if he had to, Yves isn't scared to get dirty to obtain what he wants, "squeamish" isn't in his vocabulary.

When she is robbed of all your essence, Yves would become distant. Not hostile towards her, just cold and indifferent. He would still maintain some sort of relationship with her though, in case she becomes useful again later. As of now, he either puts his entire focus on your current peripheral and direct life, or start to hunt other members down- from his snooping, he had learned of other people who may have valuable input about your childhood.

All of this is happening in the background. You wouldn't suspect a thing, there wasn't a dip in his attention for you. In fact, he may have gotten a lot more smothering, as Yves would be shaking at the thought of testing out his new theories and hypothesis that were birthed from his new knowledge.

He just loves you so much that he couldn't help himself but to get greedy. Yves wants all of you; past, present and future. And any version of you that could have been.

[sommerregenjuniluft]

can you believe on twitter people are starting to make regulus be fem

*GASP* THEY DID WHAT??

dunno if fem stands for identifying as female or presenting more feminine but yeah i sure can and Actually what a coincidence, would you look at that nonny, i dug this out of the depths of my docs just for you~

enjoy 1.7k of fem regulus (that i wrote for the jegulus microfics a few months back that took a life of its own and i never finished lol)

It had started with a debt.

No, that’s not true– actually, it had started with Professor Slughorn.

He’d sat down on his desk—yes, on, not at, long colorful knitted robes fluttering as he maneuvered himself into a pretzel. He’s a very strange man, that one, Pandora wagers he’s possessed by multiple old spirits, Shakespear and Van Gogh being only two of them—and had tapped a finger against his temple conspiratorially, “I’ve cooked another something up for you guys in here.”

Whenever Slughorn cooks something up in that cauldron of a head of his it’s either brilliant bordering on manic genius or it’s entirely stupid.

The given assignment is to write a song and produce a music video for it. Their final this semester.

Which sounds easy enough, but Slughorn had stressed multiple times that he wanted to be wowed as he’d slurped on his open coconut.

Which means they’re gonna have to put in a shit ton of effort.

“Form groups of five and figure it out,” he’d clapped his hands twice and then slid off the desk and went to leave as students started moving around the room and erupting into hushed discussions.

They’d pretty quickly figured out that Barty and Regulus would come up with the lyrics, they’d done it often enough, sometimes by accident when the brownies Pandora occasionally baked were a whoopsie too strong. Evan had leaned back with a grin and told them not to worry about the soundtrack and Lily and Pandora had already fallen into a tangent about cameras and equipment and location, possible props and friends they could rope into staring.

That’s when Regulus had taken her snake bite piercing between her teeth to smother a mean grin at the idea that popped into her head.

She plops down on her brother’s usual table in the yards, chunky platform heels propped on the bench and long legs on display under her mini skirt. Drives a hand through her wild mane and smiles sweetly, “Hi Jamie.”

As expected, his jaw drops slightly as James’ gaze breaks eye contact and takes on sliding down Regulus’ form where she’s propped herself deliberately right next to his meal.

Another voice at the table pipes up before the object of Regulus’ attention gets the chance to, “What do you want, Reggie?”

Regulus tilts her head, curls falling over her shoulders, eyes not letting off her target, “That’s none of your concern, Sirius.”

James licks his lips, “Hi Reg, how can I be of assistance to you today?”

Regulus leans forward with a smile, noticing the way James’ eyes flit down her low cut shirt for a second, “Remember that one time you’ve dared me to let the whole hockey team drink body shots off me?” Voice honey thick, the Just so you could get a taste goes without saying.

Behind her Sirius chokes on his lunch.

But James’ grin widens and he raises an eyebrow intrigued.

Regulus cards her pale fingers through James’ messy, black hair, makes it just a bit more messy as he looks up at her through his rounded glasses with those baby cow brown eyes of his and the corners of Regulus’ lips tug, “I’ve come to collect my debt.”

Evan produces a banger beat over the course of a single all-nighter that Regulus and Barty write their songtext to, tipsy as fuck on vodka lemon sodas out on Regulus’ small as fuck student housing balcony in the dead of night, moonlight just bright enough to see the pen of what they scrawl down onto the paper of their sketchbooks.

Regulus had left Lily in charge of the planning of availability on the location and the hockey team and Pandora to come up with a range of outfits to choose from for Regulus and the boys.

Evan finishes the song in record time for Regulus to record the vocals to and when it’s mixed and ready Evan’s grin is so bright Barty drives the girls out of the studio to do whatever debauched things to his boyfriend on the couch in there which one, Regulus doesn’t want to worry her pretty little head about too much since it’s her fucking voice– and two, means the song fucking slaps.

Barty also comes up with a slutty and good enough choreo that’ll give the video the dynamic it needs and together the four of them sweat away a few afternoons blending into evenings in front of the mirrors while Lily does whatever magic she does organizing.

Regulus hates that she’s not into girls in times like this.

It takes some time, obviously, you don’t just finish a song overnight and it takes a few weeks until almost everything is ready for the video shoot.

Regulus is sitting curled up on her desk chair while Pandora absolutely just takes her fucking closet apart, Ipad in one of her tiny hands, the Greedy Pinterest board open.

There’s already a pair of trainers and another pair of pointy, glittery heels thrown haphazardly on the end of her bed over the formerly neat sheets as well as a pair of black overknees and a cute lace-y, sage green bra that Regulus didn’t even know she had.

“Here,” Pandora blindly throws something over her shoulder at Regulus. They’re some older, white basketball shorts with black highlights. “Put these with the heels and the green top.”

Regulus does as told, albeit an eye roll that’s nearly painful as Pandora throws some white Nike socks after her. “Those too, babe.”

Another few beats pass where Regulus is bored and Pandora is rummaging and then she says, “Oh. my. gods,” and turns with a shiny faux leather bra hung loosely on her index fingers and a bright smile on her face, “You absolute slut.”

Regulus takes the compliment and gives her a sweet grin and a wink.

Pandora’s eyes take on a milky quality and then she asks, “Can you still do a split?”

Regulus takes a step into the middle of her room and falls into a nearly perfect split without any warm-up.

Pandora rolls her eyes at the showing off, badly containing another smile, “Again, I love you,” and then, a more contemplating expression, “How much do you think you think you can milk James of that debt of yours?”

Regulus scoffs, pointedly looks down at herself where she’s still sitting wide legged and at ease on her bedroom floor.

Pandora’s grin sharpens, “Text him you’re gonna need an old jersey and matching uniform shorts of his.”

And Regulus does just that. And if she sends the demand on Snapchat with a picture of her still in a split that’s none of anyone’s business but hers and Jamie’s.

James, as captain of the hockey team, is courteous enough to let them in with his own keys early in the morning of the shooting day.

They check out the rooms and halls for good spots and start bringing in bags and setting up equipment.

And James is just…helping.

Sticking around the whole fucking day actually.

Xeno and Mary have joined at some point with coffees, donuts and breakfast bagels, bless their fucking souls.

And when everything is as set in place as it can be it’s time for Regulus to change into the first outfit and start filming and James is still just…there.

Hovering with the crew, jostling elbows with Barty and Evan and peaking over Lily’s and Pandora’s shoulders and throwing Regulus glances and toothy smiles from across the room, showing no intention whatsoever to leave and come back later with his fucking team.

——— NSFW

James encourages the jerky movement of Regulus’ hips against his thigh, grip unrelenting on her waist as he leans impossibly closer, dragging his thumb along Regulus’ plump bottom lip, “You’d come like this, wouldn’t you, princess?”

Instead of answering Regulus sucks the thumb into her mouth, laving her tongue around it sloppily and making James breath stutter on the exhale.

“Fuck, good little slut– so desperate for it,” James says as he watches the movement of Regulus’ lips transfixed, continuing to get her off against his leg, “Want me to fuck you, don’t you, baby?”

And Regulus’ mouth drops around the sudden moan as her pace stutters, her eyes pricking with tears of the overwhelming toomuchnotenough and the degradation and sweet pet names and James’ lewd fucking mouth.

He pulls his thumb away and grabs at her ass with both hands, pulling their fronts flush together, two hard lines pressing at each other, “C’mon, princess, words.”

Regulus’ hands ball into fists at the front of James’ soft cotton shirt as she nods hopelessly, brows knit and voice husky, “Want you to fuck me.”

In the next blink James has her turned in his arms, palming at her stiff cock and pulling her ass back into him, his other arm coming around her front. Trailing faintly up her stomach, eliciting goosebumps, then grabbing at her breast and pressing a wet kiss on the side of her neck as a thumb brushes over a hard nipple behind the lace and Regulus groans.

“Be a good girl and stay down for me, yeah?” James rumbles into Regulus’ ear, nuzzling at the curls around her ear and the next moment there are calloused fingertips pressing into the nape of Regulus’ neck and she’s being pushed down against the counter.

James spanks her once across her right ass cheek for good measure it seems, another stay, and Regulus is helpless against the whine that crawls out of her, long hair falling into her eyes when her temple thumps against the marred, red countertop as James sinks to his knees behind her.

The hockey player palms at the swell of her thigh, right under the seam of her ass and kneads, warm humid breath puffing against Regulus’ entrance and she shivers against the exposure of the chilly air, whines something that sounds too close to Jamie and the man does nothing but keep looking and fucking chuckle. Bastard.

And then, “Oh, baby,” a groan and a bite to Regulus’ ass that has her whimpering pathetically, “Prettiest pussy, gonna get you all nice and wet for me.”

Regulus moans, and James hums as he dives in face first, grip strong around her thighs and tongue wet, slowly coaxing the tight ring of muscle open.

[thatbirdrestaurant]

Fairy Tail Restaurant AU but literally every single headcanon for it is things that happened at my current restaurant job.

Laxus is the manager who wants to fire everybody and is so tired, Gray, Natsu, and Erza have been working there so long they’ve probably broken child labor laws, and Lucy and Wendy are the newbies.

Wendy tried to pick up a rack of freshly cleaned glasses but it slipped from her fingers and the entire thing shattered on the ground. Lucy, who was standing just a few feet away, got glass all over her leg and found a shard in her shoe a few hours later.

Natsu and Gray once argued on the clock, but they did it in front of the entire dining room. That’s the closest Laxus has gotten to having a good reason to fire someone.

Erza and Lucy went outside during a dinner rush to grab more napkins, and one of the cooks closed the door on them without checking if anyone was outside. The door locked automatically, neither of them had their phones, the cooks were not responding to their pounding on the door, and it took five minutes for someone to come find them.

Mira (bartender) dropped a full bottle of tequila, stared at it for a few seconds, and announced she was “going on break,” which just means smoking for two-five minutes in the back while debating your life choices.

Lucy turned the corner a little too sharp while the kitchen floors were being cleaned and ate absolute shit in front of her entire section.

Natsu accidentally threw a customer’s credit card into the trash because they forgot it on a napkin that Natsu did not pay attention to.

Levy (to-go orders) was stuck on the phone with a customer for twenty minutes because they kept changing their mind on the order, and Laxus had to take the phone from her, tell the customer they either needed to make a choice or order somewhere else, and put them on hold for ten minutes.

Wendy jokingly told Erza not to fall in when she said she was going to the bathroom. Five minutes later, Erza came up to her and told her that she did, in fact, fall in.

Levy dropped a metal pan on the ground in the kitchen, making a very loud noise that made everyone turn their heads. Once they realized what was happening, Natsu said, “I thought that was a gunshot.” Everyone agreed and Lucy pointed out that they all thought it was a gunshot, and none of them even attempted to get away.

Everyone knows that Gajeel (cook) has been arrested, but they don't know why, and there's an active debate on what he did to end up in jail.

The first time Lucy yelled at the cooks, she cried for five minutes because she felt so bad.

On a slow day, Laxus had everyone pull out the booths so they could deep clean, and a party of ten came in while every single booth was pulled out.

Laxus sent Lucy home early on her first closing shift, and when she asked if that was okay, Laxus looked her dead in the eyes and said, “We don’t pay you enough for you to care this much.”

Bickslow (busser) showed Wendy and Lucy Weird Al YouTube videos on a dead shift for an entire hour before they clocked out and went home.

One of Lucy’s buttons popped off while she was taking a table’s order and landed in one of their waters.

A table threatened to walk out on Erza and she took their drinks away and ignored them until they actually left.

Gray puts his tables in time out if they're being too rude to him.

Erza lied to a table and told them Gray is autistic because they thought he was being rude; he wasn't, he just naturally sounds like an asshole. The table felt so bad for complaining that they tipped him 30%.

Mest got fired for doing cocaine in the back.

[artiststarme]

Van Vandalism

The not-so-long-awaited van vandalism fic based on this snippet! I hope you guys enjoy it and if you have any title ideas, please let me know in the comments!

~*~*~*~

Eddie was having a rough time. While the events of Spring Break were in his rearview, he was still facing the consequences of being branded a freak murderer by the police in a small town. The overzealous Christian townsfolk, now aware of his glaring differences and eccentricities, seemed to make it a goal to make his life as hard as possible. Eddie could hardly leave his trailer without being chased with metaphorical pitchforks. Whether it be by threatening to kick his ass at school or vandalizing his van in the grocery store parking lot, the people of Hawkins were relentless. Eddie didn’t really care about the threats to his own safety or even some minor beatings, he’d gotten used to it through his years of high school. 

However, when the townsfolk started to come after Wayne is when Eddie got concerned. Wayne had lived in Hawkins his entire life and now the people that he grew up with, the people he was friends with, were turning on him because of Eddie. They were spray painting nasty words on the trailer, slashing the tires on the van, and smashing the windows on Wayne’s truck. And Eddie and Wayne? They were losing their patience. They didn’t have the extra money to fix the windows or keep replacing tires. Wayne was pulling doubles at the plant to try to bring in some more money and Eddie was picking up shifts at the garage but they still weren’t bringing in enough to cover for the damages. 

One day after school, Eddie came out of the building to find all four of his tires slashed. He couldn’t even safely walk home either because old Herbert Green and his son had threatened to jump him the day before. So, he stood on the curb staring at his van for three minutes before tears started to drip down his face. 

He didn’t deserve any of this. He didn’t hurt anyone. All he’d ever done was try to create a safe space for outsiders, the people that couldn’t feel safe anywhere else, and now he was paying the price. He wasn’t a murderer! He was just a gay metalhead kid who liked nerdy shit and couldn’t focus in school. But in the minds of all the townspeople, everything about him was grounds for a lifetime in prison. 

He was still staring at his van when he felt a hand wrap around his upper arm. Eddie didn’t even think before spinning around with a fist in the air. 

“Woah,” Steve said as he ducked out of the way of the punch. “Jesus Christ, Munson! I can’t get another concussion, do you even know what Robin would do to me?” 

Eddie sighed in response and sagged against his van, Steve’s hand still wrapped around his bicep. “Sorry dude, you scared me. I wasn’t expecting Sir Steve to be back at his abandoned castle. Which quest hast summoned you to return to your former dwelling?”

Steve’s eyes squinted like they always did when he tried to translate Eddie’s language into modern English. God, it was one of Eddie’s favorite things about him. After a moment, the squint left his eyes and his mouth opened in understanding.

“You, man. The kids called and said the basketball team fucked up your tires. Thought you could use a ride,” Steve said and shrugged. He was still wearing the ugly Family Video vest over a gray polo that hugged his shoulders in all of the right places. “Eddie?”

He shook his head to snap out of it. No straight guy wanted their gay, albeit still in the closet, friend checking them out when they’re trying to do them a favor. Or so Eddie would imagine. 

“Um, yeah. Yes please. I do need a ride. This is the third time they’ve pulled this shit and I won’t be able to afford new tires for a good three weeks. Fuck, how am I going to get to work now?”

Steve hummed before lightly smacking Eddie’s shoulder and ignoring his affronted glare. “I know! You can use my car! I mean, you’ll have to drop me off at work before school and pick me up after but other than that, I don’t really go anywhere anyways. You can just take the Beemer to work, school, and wherever else you go.”

Eddie was absolutely dumbfounded. Sure, he and Steve had become good friends after Spring Break but he was going to inconvenience himself by letting him take his car? “Stevie, I can’t take your car. What if you need it? It’s too much-”

“Eddie. Look man, you can use it for however long you need to. If I need it back, I’ll call you for the keys, okay? Just give me rides to work and pick up the kids if they need to go somewhere. The little shits aren’t riding their bikes anymore.” Steve told him and pressed his keys into the palm of Eddie’s hand. “Now, leave the van for now and give me a ride back to the video store, I still have 6 hours left on my shift and if I’m not back by the end of my break, Keith is going to lose his shit.”

Eddie just smiled and shook his head. He still couldn’t believe that Steve “The Hair” Harrington was actually a good dude. He’d dragged his sorry ass out of hell, lied to the cops to be his alibi, and now was loaning him his car just to make Eddie’s life easier. How’d he get so lucky as to have Steve in his life? Now if only he could get him to switch from the Tears for Fears moaning from the speakers to Metallica. 

When they pulled up to Family Video, Eddie made a move to get out but Steve just grabbed his arm with a, “hey, wait. Where are you going? Your shift at the garage starts in 20 minutes.”

“Yeah so I have to go. If I start running now, I can make it before my lungs give out and kill me.” Eddie said, shaking him off.

“Dude. I was serious about you taking my car, I wasn’t just going to have you go out of your way to drive me to work in my own car. Take it and be back to pick me up at 11:30, okay? Have a good shift,” Steve murmured, patting Eddie’s hand and running into the store. 

And then Eddie was left in the car alone, utterly bewildered and still reeling at Steve’s generosity. But he did have to go to work so off he went. Driving in the Beemer was a lot different than driving in the van. Firstly, there were no weird banging sounds coming from underneath the hood or any screeching noises of the brakes. The ride was silent aside from the horrendous pop music squealing from the radio station Steve had left on low. Next, the ride went smoother. Eddie didn’t have any jocks tailgating him or blonde-haired mothers glaring at him from the curb. He did receive a couple of double takes when other drivers realized it wasn’t Steve Harrington driving his signature Beemer but Eddie enjoyed the looks of shocked befuddlement. Huh, maybe Steve was onto something.  

(What Eddie didn’t know is that everyone that took a double-take wasn’t wondering why Eddie Munson was driving his car but instead, when had Steve gotten back together with Nancy Wheeler?)

When Eddie finished his shift at the garage though and made his way to pick up Steve from work, goddamn Officer Callahan pulled him over. He hated this fucking guy. He especially hated how cocky he looked as he strolled up to the driver’s side window and leaned against it. 

Eddie could only glare at him completely unimpressed as he asked, “can I help you, Officer?”

“Why, as a matter of fact, I think you can! You see, all day we’ve been getting calls of a curly-haired imposter joy-riding around in Steve Harrington’s BMW. Can you explain that?” Officer Callahan was smirking as he explained himself, obviously finding joy in interrupting Eddie’s peaceful night. 

“I’m not joyriding, I went to work and now I’m picking him up from work. Steve lent me his car because someone slashed my tires for the third time this month. You’d know about that though, right? You know, considering I’ve tried to file a report each time. You ever going to do anything about that by the way?” Eddie rebutted. 

“You expect me to believe that Steve Harrington let you, Eddie Munson, borrow his car? How much grass have you smoked?” 

Eddie just sighed in frustration. “Look Callahan, I’ve tried to be nice but you’re pissing me off. Here I am, a law-abiding citizen, and you’re just accusing me of these heinous crimes? Grand theft auto, drug use, what’s next… murder? Oh wait! We’ve been there and I was found innocent of that too! Let me leave or next time I see the Chief, I’m going to tell him that his least favorite deputy was harassing me. Do you want Hopper mad at you? Is that what you need in your life?”

“What… um no. You don’t have to do that. Just, just get where you’re going and make sure Harrington gives us a call at the station about his car. Um, have a good uh night,” Officer Callahan said while awkwardly ambling back to his car. 

Then, Eddie was off again. This time with heavy metal blasting through the Beemer speakers and through the open windows into the wind. He was going to pick up Stevie and treat him to a night full of movies, weed, and junk food like he deserved.

@doubleb11 @nburkhardt @zerokrox-blog @newtstabber @i-less-than-three-you @carlyv @trippypancakes @straight4joekeery

(@anzelsilver you're the only person who reblogged the snippet so here's a tag to the whole fic!)

[thewitchandtheassassin]

Last First Kiss (Jean Grey x Reader)

Summary: Sometimes you wonder if he’ll ever learn.

Words: 921

Warnings: Mild violence, Jean’s unpredictable powers, maybe language?

A/N: There isn’t a version of Jean I haven’t loved. They did Sophie Turner dirty in writing but she put her whole heart into it and you can’t convince me otherwise.

Taglist: @natasharomanoffswife​ @natasha-danvers​ @aaron-despair​ @username23345 @xjiasx​ @nowthisisliving27 @higherfurther-romanova​ @summergeezburr @imnotasuperhero @miscmarvelwritings @captain-josslett @onlyafewfindtheway @hayleyokami @b-5by5  @evilcr0ne​  @everything201197​  @lostandsearching​ @marvels-writings​​

-X-

Rolling your eyes at Scott’s latest attempt to flirt with Jean, you studied the uncomfortable redhead inching away from the younger Summers brother from your perch on a tree limb a few feet away. Normally you’d step in before it got to such a point but Jean had begged you to let her handle him after you nearly beheaded him the last time he refused to take “no” for an answer. In your defense, he’d threatened to take his glasses off – “let’s see if you can walk off my powers, (Y/N), if you’re so special,” – so you simply reciprocated with a similar threat of your own except...

You were a woman of few words.

It sucked that it’d cost you an entire day rebuilding the marble statue he’d crashed into, but it was a fair price to pay. Especially since Peter had recorded Scott flying through the air, his screams turning more to shrieks as he neared the statue before dissolving into whines as he smashed through it.

And yes, you kept that video – and replayed it often.

Watching Scott grip Jean’s wrist roughly, you dropped to the ground silently. His voice was growing loud and she was clearly trying to break the hold without using her powers. Despite the control she’d gained over the years, she was still hesitant when it came to those in the mansion, fearing it would slip and hurt someone she cared for.

“Why do you always say no?! I know you like me, so why won’t you go out with me?” his question was posed jokingly but there was real heat beneath it. He was truly angry she kept turning him down, refusing to understand she wasn’t interested in him. “I get you, Jean. I know what it’s like having dangerous powers but that’s why we work! You know what I think? You say no because of (Y/N). Because she doesn’t like me.”

“I don’t want to go out because I don’t see you like that,” Jean argued, the energy around them becoming unstable as her panic and anger rose. “The last time we did anything just the two of us, you kissed me. Without asking. And got mad when I said I didn’t want to be your girlfriend. I don’t like you like that, Scott. Right now, I barely like you at all.”

It didn’t take a rocket scientist to see her deteriorating control as Scott’s grip didn’t waiver despite Jean’s irritation, so you decided you’d stayed out of it long enough. Reaching for the scruff of Scott’s neck as you neared him – intent of dropping the man-child to his knees – a sudden screech echoed through your mind and he released his hold on Jean immediately, hand flying to his ear to try and block out the noise.

Eyes jerking to the redhead, you saw the familiar blankness wash over her features. You’d seen it too many times. In fights, during her training sessions…

“Hey, Jean,” you called out, forcing the hesitation and pain from your voice. “You’re okay. He let go.”

Emerald eyes flickered to meet yours, recognition fleeting as the screeching suddenly ended. You were the last person she ever wanted to hurt and everyone knew that. The professor often called you her anchor; the one tangible thing that kept her tethered to this plane whenever her powers overcame her. The one voice her mind sought after when all others fueled her misery and rage. You often teased her about it – joking that it clearly made you soulmates – but you were starting to believe there was something deeper there.

Either way, you were her safety when nothing else felt okay.

Despite noting your presence, the absence of “Jean” was obvious. Scott was stumbling away from her, trying to separate himself from the noise rattling in his brain but you were worried he might find himself in a worse predicament if she became anymore agitated. You couldn’t care less for his safety, honestly, but you knew she’d feel nothing but utter guilt if she hurt him.

Steeling your nerves, you cupped her cheeks and dragged her emotionless stare towards you. It was unnerving to see such a lack of warmth residing there but you remained steady. You could see bits of the mask fracturing but Scott’s whimpers were growing frenzied.

“I’m sorry,” you whispered, crashing your lips to hers.

Was it your best plan? No. Could it blow up in your face? Hell yes. Did you regret it? No…? Maybe…?

Did it work?

Yes.

Scott’s sudden gasp of air was almost heavenly as she yelped against your mouth, hands flying to your shoulders as Jean became Jean again, the energy lingering dissipating into nothingness once more. You could see the surprise in her eyes as she took in the current state of your actions before she melted against you, which truthfully surprised you in return. You tried to create a bit of distance – to explain or to apologize, you weren’t terribly sure – but her lips moved tentatively against yours, a silent plea that you were happy to fulfill.

It was shy, a gentle brushing of mouths, but it was the purest kiss you’d ever experienced. There was fire low in your belly but you didn’t think much of it, only savoring the embrace you’d never really thought you’d have.

Eventually separating, her head fell to your shoulder. Nose grazing your neck, she whispered, “You kissed me.”

Face burning, you nodded. “I did.”

“…I hope you are the last first kiss I ever have.”

[marisoft-paint-adventures]

Pgs. 309 - 384

so there’s this guy.

he has an intro.

and

he’s pretty cool.

he’s so cool he has a shitty galaxy reflection in his shades.

his name is David and his room looks like this.

Dave’s room is the most kind of guy room ever, I can just feel his entire personality here, and I can also feel the “this dude has no parental guidance outside of an equally unorganized brother” energy.

Dave is just a hyperspecific Guy, a real type of Guy, he’s even described as liking obscure bands and shit, Hussie was airing something out when making him.

Anyway, these are your copies of the beta you received in the mail recently. You've labeled them with your name in BOLD RED PRINT to distinguish them from your BRO's copies, who labeled his in kind. Neither of you really gives a shit about this game or has any intention of playing it, but you'll be damned if you'll let that get in the way of your campaign of one-upmanship.

the Lalondes and Striders have a lot of parallels going on between each other with their dynamics and situations. 1 thing that sets them apart is that the perception of an insane mindgame rivalry seems to be more truthful on Dave’s end compared to Rose. Rose thinks that even a fucking fancy pillow is some kind of symbol of scorn and spite in the waterfall of irony and insincerity. while there’s not much seen out of Dave and Bro’s relationship on a normal day, the stupid ass stealth moves that Bro pulls out in order to get Dave’s goat really implies that there is a genuine absurd rivalry going.

also they’re just brothers. when there’s brothers in fiction, they either hate each other or like each other but still fuck with each other just for the sake of Being Brothers.

Dave: Bleat like a goat and piss on your turntable.

You would never consider allowing any fluid even remotely resembling urine to touch your beloved TURNTABLES. That would risk breaking them, and a world without the gift of your godly science just doesn't sound like a place you want any part of. While you're at it, you might as well wipe out human civilization with a meteor or something ridiculous like that which will probably never happen. That sort of thing only happens in stupid idiot movies for stupid idiots.

You will however contemplate bleating like a goat for IRONICALLY HUMOROUS purposes at a later date.

Dave is so lame.

FUCKING APPLE JUICE BABY. YEAH LOVE THAT SHIT. TOP 3 FRUIT JUICES ON THE TIERLIST WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.

he’s gonna say it, he’s gonna say the thing.

yeah this is the OS design I’m attached to the most, I grew up with Windows 7 which basically did everything Vista did but a bit more glassy, so this is up my fucking ally. look at those GRADIENTS, look at all that GLOSS, it’s so fucking good.

HE SAID IT.

I love Hussie’s fake UI I love it.

I also love Dave Strider’s blog, he said the n-word on it

not joking you can check for yourself.

FUCKING SWEET BRO AND HELLA JEFF YEAAAAAAAAAAAAA.

SBAHJ is so damn interesting because it’s the Homestuck thing that has the furthest reach out of the entire comic but at the same time people don’t even know it’s Homestuck.

true story: my 1st ever exposure to Homestuck without even knowing it was when I was like 12 years old and watched a fucking VanossGaming GMod video in which they played that masterpiece SBAHJ map.

seeing a giant shittily compressed texture that just said AIDS which spun around in a circle and fucking instantly killed anything it touched was literally formative for my sense of humor.

the backstory is also absolutely beautiful, imagine dropping your armature Gamer Webcomic™ on the Penny Arcade forums only for Future Homestuck Artist Andrew Hussie to come in and completely shit on your comic by turning it into the worst form of art you have ever seen which would then turn into its own popular comic.

I really like the utility of SBAHJ as an in-universe source of memes and in-jokes for all the kids to reference rather than forcing relevance by shoving in memes that were popular at the time. it really helps make Homestuck feel... not exactly timeless per say, but more relatable in way that supersedes generations.

I say this because I fucking know for a fact real ass memes come in later on in the comic and they get really fuckin annoying.

I would kill someone for a Midnight Crew adventure, you would not believe how far I would go for this to be real.

TT: In some cultures the persistent refusal of a lady's invitation to play a game with her would be a sign wanton disrespect. TT: Either that, or flagrant homosexuality.

STOP JOKING ABOUT DAVE LIKING MEN YOU DO NOT KNOW OF THE FUTURE CONSEQUENCES IT HAS.

it is here where Dave and Rose immediately become the best fucking character dynamic ever.

TT: Sometimes I wonder how you are ever allowed to pay for meals in restaurants. TT: It must be hard to keep a low profile when you're always overhearing awed voices whisper, "It's that guy who has a blog." TG: seriously TG: dudes be worshipping me left and right TG: i cant hardly walk down the street without stepping over torsos of the prostrate TT: Navigating the urban landscape I'm sure is difficult enough without an obstacle course of deferential flesh and skyward asses. TT: Perhaps adapting the art of parkour to your unique environment would help? TG: yeah! TG: i mean damn TG: like theres this scruffy little shit at my feet TG: an orphan or something i dont know TG: face flush on the pavement TG: im like dude you listening for a stampede of buffalo or something? TG: he braves a look at me then gives my shoe a little kiss and scurries the fuck off TT: Heavy is the crown. TG: yeah TG: not kicking oliver twist in the fucking face every day is my gift to the world i guess

also the little "yeah!" he does in excitement of parkour before he corrects himself back to serious coolguy mode is fucking perfect.

aw what the fuck put that shit away.

Dave’s Phat Beat Machine may be a silly joke about shitty fucking DJ machines that have weird pre-made beats and sound effects but some of this shit slaps when you play them at the same time ngl. 11 and 12 together is really fuckin good.

also Captain Planet is in this flash.

maybe Dave is cool, no one else could catch and open that apple juice with such finesse.

this is a really great series of expressions, he is so mad. he can’t stop thinking about PISS.

HE’S SO MAD.

oh god.

oh god they’re here.

You glance at one of the many RADICAL PUPPETS in your BRO'S collection and nod in approval. Is there anything not awesome about your BRO? No, you think not.

this is not cool this is very not cool.

why is the little man in the SHOWER, bro does not BATHE, he is made of WOOD.

he is simply having a terrible, terrible day.

why did he do this.

HOLY SHIT IT’S DAVE’S IRONIC SELF PORTRAIT.

this is why Dave’s sylladex shit is the best sylladex shit, sheer frustrating mathematics leading to renaming items into weird synonyms and yelling out shit to fucking send out swords.

LOOK AT HIM.

he changed his tune so fast, he went from imposing and about throw down to just...

:o

now how will he play the funny Sburb??? what will he do to get out of this situation- WIZARD.

GIANT, STONE, WIZARD.

girl is not having it.

it is here we get the entire downlow of this maddening mother-daughter relationship through the totally not biased eyes of Rose. I mean look at this shit:

Your mother clearly has no real affinity for these damnable things. She only collects them to spite you. If anything, she finds them even more repellent than you do. She's just a committed woman.

A while ago you gave this as an ironic gift to your MOM for mother's day. You even customized it with a drink holder to support one of her ubiquitous ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES. She "liked" the gift so much, she had it bronzed and put on this pedestal. She even left it plugged in so it can still be turned on now and then. But never to do any cleaning. It never leaves this display.

The PRETTY PRINCESS DOLL has been sitting there for months, ever since your mother got this abomination for your birthday as a totally PASSIVE-AGGRESSIVE gesture. You decided to make it much less abominable by knitting Her Majesty a new head and new arms. Now it brings a mischievous smile to your face whenever you walk by. Your mother hasn't removed the doll yet, and probably never will. She would never be the one to blink first.

This was a drawing you did of your cat JASPERS when you were younger, along with a poem about him. Your mother bought this ostentatious $15,000 frame for it, and had it welded to the door.

Using the colorful MAGNET LETTERS, you recently left a succinct message, which may or may not have been directed toward anyone in particular. But you couldn't find the letter W, so you just stuck two V's together.

Your mother then purchased a fresh pack of W's and left them there for your convenience. Appreciative of the thoughtful gesture, you left her a sincere THANK YOU NOTE, which you had legally notarized, and then marked with a drop of blood.

But part of it was touching the floor, so your mother was kind enough to lift the lower portion of the document with a VELVET PILLOW.

this entire cavalcade of fucking overly professional stupidity really just symbolizes the daily Lalonde struggle. again, way more of an actual thing compared to the baking menace in Washington, Rose does not feel loved enough, she projects contempt onto every action of her mother, even if they’re completely genuine, who’s also literally an alcoholic. but at the same time, this is ridiculous. I can bet that the mere thought of any of this coming off as mean-spirited to Rose is just flying over Mom’s head because she’s too busy cleaning shit or getting drunk. she’s so sincerely nice but also too damn ignorant, while at the same time going completely overboard in every sense just because she can. “oh look at this!! my daughter’s very own drawing!!! it’s so nice!!! let me put it in an expensive frame and then weld it straight onto the fridge!!! :)))))” and then Rose sees this and just goes “SHREW!!! DAMNED SHREW!!!” meanwhile Mom’s just taking this as “oh she’s spelling words on the fridge!!! :))))) but she has no Ws..... :((((( I’ll buy some for her!!! that will satisfy her needs!!! :)))))” and I guess Rose takes a break from the absolute scorn she’s building up in her system to make the most polite ass note all like “Dearest Mother Lalonde, I thank thee for this humble present.” and notarizing it with BLOOD. of course this has to end with Mom walking in, seeing this note and going “how thoughtful!!!” and then sliding a god damn pillow just for the presentation.

it is my firm belief that the Lalondes are just kind of off the fucking wall inherently, literally all of them just do wacky shit like this without question.

fandom mischaracterizations are so frequent that they’re not even a surprise, but this concept of Rose being this completely serious and levelheaded girl who’s always moody and brooding and never puts up with stupid shit is something I cannot understand how anyone picked up from her. she has a sense of humor, a really damn good one, a lot of the comedy can be attributed to her dialogue. she’s not dead serious, she literally knits Lovecraft monsters in purple for goofs and does something like the above while no one is around. and in no possible way is she running on full logic and reasoning because she plays weird mind games with her mom and later on just goes insane and destroys shit for the hell of it. there really is more to Rose than just “goth = serious smart.”

a lot of this extends to Kanaya as well because I guess people just write the 2 of them as the same person, as we all know, couples can’t be together unless they completely overlap on the Venn diagram of their personalities, hobbies, and interests, but that’s for later.

AND THEN SHE PAYS FOR THE FUCKIN MAGNET. WHO DOES THIS.

MOTHER JUMPSCARE.

And of all things to be doing during a power outage. She's up to her IRONIC HOUSEWIFE routine again. That mop bucket doesn't even have any water in it! What an absolute madwoman.

I like how Rose calls this some kind of weird irony chore that no sane individual would do without a hint of joking, she really expects too much out of Mom. a real core part of this relationship is how Rose assumes that her mother is operating on the same high level thinking as her, when in reality she’s just doing actual housewife stuff genuinely. the bucket being empty is even part of Rose overthinking all of this, Mom’s using a Swiffer, she doesn’t need water, she just brought the bucket because it completes the housewife look.

I don’t know if that latter part was intentional or if Hussie just didn’t know how Swiffers worked.

NYOOM.

SICK TRICKS.

ah fuck.

the Strider household is such a very specific home aesthetic of “complete fucking disaster, the likes of which you have never seen, owned by 2 dudebros who like Eminem.” this visual style is so poignant that the best way Dave fixes a window is with straight black tape, how classy.

big fan of how everyone talking to Jade starts to smile, she just has that energy. I mean look at Dave, you see that single raised pixel? that’s him smiling! he’s got joy! and he’s so much more genuine when he’s talking to her too, she’s literally the one person in the friend group where he can drop the whole image of “I am so fucking Cool and Real and Awesome and Swag.” they play off of each other really damn well, no wonder DaveJade is a really big ship.

TG: say hi to your grand dad for me too ok GG: ._. GG: yes i guess an encounter with him is almost certain GG: it is usually........ GG: intense!!! TG: well yeah isnt it always with family

this is the non-embarrassing parallel to John talking about Dad with Rose. Dave’s probably thinking to himself, “ah yes, she too knows of the struggle of high octane anime fights in the middle of the house.” meanwhile Jade’s talking about yelling at a corpse.

also JADE KNOWS THE FUTURE??? HUHHHH???? HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE???????????

[yfmconfessions2]

THE puff anon is back once again💪 AND IM HERE TO DROP SHIT!!!

Puffs glasses are so thick. Like he cant see shit without them. And if anyone takes them away he will start throwing hands with everything but the person. He once hit a wall so hard it practically cracked and he could barely use his hand for a week and Axel (who stole his glasses) was terrified to come near him for that week.

He actually likes kids but only the ones that can behave and dont cry their eyes out every two minutes. If they do, he starts going insane and will NOT hesitate to fight a literal child.

Puff and the band were wanted by the police so many times that atp they can call the cops their friends.

Pulls the dumbest pranks known to man and finds them hilarious. Like he gave Benatar a glass of water that was literally filled with kilograms of salt, and proceeded to laugh so hard he cried when Benatar struggled to get the salty taste out of his mouth for 10 minutes.

ALSO when Puff laughs like really REALLY hard his laugh goes silent, and then it turns into maniac cackles. If anyone ever heard him laughing that hard at night they ran away immediately.

Hates bugs with a burning passion. If theres at least one spider near him he will slap it with anything he has until it turns into a liquid.

Puff LOVES spicy food but his stomach cant handle it. He will devour 10 spicy noodles at once and then cry in the bathroom for half of the night. But does he care? Absolutely not. He can and WILL do it again.

I bet he once saw Benatar crying and he wasnt the reason of that so he went "Geez pull your shit together pussy." And walked away, a few seconds later Puff came back with a tissue and just sat down next to him, acting as if he didnt give a damn.

He plays video games every chance he gets. That man will rot in his room for 20 hours a day playing Call of Duty, proceed to tell 30 people to kill themselves and then go out of his room and look like he came back from the death

He cant aim for shit. Literally cant. Game wise AND real life wise. He wanted to throw a rock into a wall once out of pure rage but hit a random person that was far away instead. He was never seen in that spot ever again.

Puff's either desperate for a relationship or doesnt give a damn. He will go and literally beg a girl in a random club to be with him and the next day he breaks up bc "Lol nah, ur not pretty i was drunk." And then regrets it so he wants to find a new chick again.

He has a love-hate relationship with horror movies. Like once in a while the whole band has a movie night and Puff always says they should watch a horror movie bc all of them are scared and he isnt. Axel, Benatar and Dee Jay just look at each other and just smirk. When they turn on the movie and the first jumpscare appears Puff literally screams like a small girl, and then just says that he felt something sharp. Hes just a pussy BUT WILL HE ADMIT IT? Never.

Never read a whole book in his entire life.

His favorite ice cream is salted caramel and lemon.

Talking bout lemons, he loves sour shit. Like he can devour a whole lemon without cringing while everyone looks at him like: 😨

AAAAAND THATS ALL I GOT FOR NOW! I HOPE U ENJOY READING THOSE BC THERES A BIT OF THEM LMFOAAO

HI PUFF ANON 🤩🤩🤩

YOU SHOULD MAKE A WEEKLY MAGAZINE THAT COMES IN THE MAIL I WOULD SUBSCRIBE IMMEDIATELY

i love these thx snookie 🥰

[degradedkai]

you dragged me into your rarepair hell so now you must read my brain thoughts. (Or DazChuuSig or whatever the f/ck it's called headcanons)

Dazai puts bandaids all over sigma for no reason except he says bandaid=boring sticker and you need to stick stickers on things.

Onetime when sigma was making cookies he asked dazai to take the pan out of the oven and dazai did it without oven mits on and dropped the pan on the floor because he burnt himself.

Chuuya has watched sigma about have a stroke while taking his binder off and he just watched unsure of what to do and questions how he got there.

Sigma doesn't watch a lot of TV so he doesn't care what's on unless it's a kid show. However, onetime when he was sitting with Dazai and Chuuya the teletubbies came on and instead of letting dazai change it, he made him keep it on out of morbid curiosity. He watched the entire episode with the most horrified facial expression and then made Chuuya pay for on-demand so he could watch more episodes to try and figure out what the fuck the teletubbies are.

i have no idea what the ship is called either tbqh. i've been calling it sigsoukoku/sigkouku?? the doc i'm writing it on is just called "2 switches 1 top" lmao

-PLEASE let him put little hello kitty bandaids on him. space ones too. and ones w firetrucks.

-YEAH HE'D FUCKIN DO THAT. HE'D MAKE SIGMA KISS IT BETTER TOO

-oh god please sigma getting his elbows stuck (i always seem to do that to myself) and just fucking crying bc he's stuck but he doesn't want chuuya to rip the binder but chuuya doesn't know what else to do to help other than break his goddamn arms so they both just panic cry

-TELETUBBIES PLS GHURFISKJ man the three of them would just sit on the couch completely spaced out and watch those dancing fruit stimulation videos for hours

[cq-studios]

Questions for 15 Friends Tag Game

Tagged by @corishadowfang ^^

Rules: Answer the questions, then tag 15 people.

ARE YOU NAMED AFTER ANYONE?

Not that I know of. I think my middle name was after someone but, if that's the case, I don't know who.

WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOU CRIED?

This weekend watching Days. That game breaks me every time.

DO YOU HAVE KIDS?

Nope and don't ever plan on it.

WHAT SPORTS DO YOU PLAY/HAVE YOU PLAYED?

Uhhhh, none.

I tried out for the basketball team twice in elementary school but didn't make the team either time. That school, and especially the coach, had it out for me though (I am neurodivergent had behavioural issues so they didn't let me do much).

If it counts, I was on the Improv team in middle school. That was a ton of fun and I would've kept doing it into highschool if the teacher who was in charge of the competitions didn't retire (no one stepped up after that)

Other than that not really anything.

DO YOU USE SARCASM?

Oh definitely. I grew up in an incredibly sarcastic household lol

WHAT IS THE FIRST THING YOU NOTICE ABOUT PEOPLE?

Uhhh, I haven't really thought about it...

Probably hair? That's how I tend to recognise most people, which is most definitely unreliable (thanks for that brain lol).

Shout out to that one time my friend got a drastically different haircut than usual, didn't tell me, and I didn't recognise her until she spoke to me lol

WHAT’S YOUR EYE COLOUR?

Brown.

SCARY MOVIES OR HAPPY ENDINGS?

Definitely happy endings. I have absolutely no tolerance for scary things.

My pour soul got nightmares so easy as a kid I wasn't allowed to watch Scooby Doo because it would keep me up at night lol

ANY TALENTS?

I'd feel weird saying anything artistic, because honestly I consider those skills more than talents (since they're something I actually work towards improving and not something that I can just do for some reason lol).

So alternatively, I think my talent is simultaneously have the worlds worst and best balance. Like I can fill up a cup completely (and I mean completely, there's a meniscus and everything) and I can bring that up to my mouth without spilling a drop, but at the same time, there have been several occasions where I have fallen out of chairs while doing nothing but colouring. I can walk across a completely rounded balance beam (like curtain rod look and size) eyes closed and backwards, but walking I'm tripping every other step.

I can also quack like a duck so convincingly I've tricked hunters lol

WHERE WERE YOU BORN?

I'm not entirely sure...

Somewhere around the southern Quebec-Ontario border I think?

WHAT ARE YOUR HOBBIES?

Drawing, animating, reading, writing, and playing video games (and doing stuff for local theatre productions if that counts).

DO YOU HAVE ANY PETS?

Yes, currently I have a dog, Neve. She's a Golden Retriever-Labrador mix and she's very strange.

My brother also has a cat, but she lives in the basement and I never see her lol

HOW TALL ARE YOU?

I couldn't tell you the last time I measured my height, but I'm only a bit taller than my mom (4"11 and a bit), so probably 5"-5"1.

FAVOURITE SUBJECT IN SCHOOL?

Chemistry.

I love chemistry. I love balancing formulas. I love the experiments and demonstrations (even if when I was doing them I kept burning my hands... I swear I was being careful I'm just cursed lol). I love learning about all the elements properties and stuff. The math isn't awful (like in physics). And it makes me feel smart.

DREAM JOB?

My dream job is whatever I have to do to be able to make my own show (my current plan is making an indie studio) and also being able to make a living off of doing tables at cons.

I'm actually slowly but surely working towards both right now. A lot of just saving and planning at the moment but I'm getting there.

Gonna start applying for grants soon-ish, so wish me luck lol

I don't really have 15 people to tag so, uhh, open tag I guess lol

[gascon-en-exil]

Making Some Book VIII New Heroes Predictions

Now that we've gotten the trailer for the final New Heroes banner of Book VII, it's time to look ahead to what the next year may bring in terms of new characters to be added to FEH. Two years back I made an entire video out of this topic on my channel...but that's a lot of work and I'm about to dive into the Super Mario RPG remake over there, so I'm doing this the easy way this time.

*When I refer to "premium" units in this post, I'm talking about ascended, rearmed, or attuned heroes. Also legendaries and mythics, if it's outside the context of New Heroes banners.

Guaranteed banners

Engage

Definitely one, possibly two again this year. IS is breaking up the cast by country, so an Elusian banner with the royal sisters, Goldmary, and whichever of the guys polls highest is an easy prediction. I'd say Solm as well, but it's already such a natural fit for the January special banner theme that we may have to wait for then to see those characters all together. 2024 is doubtful there for that, considering we just got a special Timerra. It's possible we may see a DLC-focused banner, like what happened with the Wolves - and IS will absolutely push Zelestia as a new character even though Zephia's already in the game.

Everyone's also predicting that Engage will sweep the next CYL with at least three of the four slots, so that in combination with a standard array of seasonals, a likely appearance on the fallen banner, and the odd legendary or mythic (legendary m!Alear at some point is all but assured) will lead to complaints of Engage fatigue.

Thracia

Unless you count ascended Ced or Sara backpacking for desert Linde (I don't), we haven't had a new FE5 unit in Heroes since March of 2022. The poor game is long overdue, especially because aside from Engage it's the title with the most potential new units to add. Granted that those characters aren't exactly popular, but with a whopping nine women still missing from its roster FE5 can lock down the key headlining waifu demographic in a way that almost every other game would struggle to at this point. There's a plot-relevant magical waif (Linoan), a loli (Tina), a dancer (Lara), a wyvern rider (Eda), or a pegasus knight to follow up on 2022's Karin (Misha). Again, none of them are especially popular, but Thracia could make up a viable banner easily even without help from Heroes fanservice. I'd expect one sometime between January and April, when the New Heroes events lack OCs.

Path of Radiance

The Tellius games alternate books, likely because of the significant roster overlap. Book VII got a Radiant Dawn banner, so here we are. Since FE10 poached Lucia though, FE9's only got Calill for a new female addition. Prediction for the banner would be Calill, a premium female character (one of Mia, Ilyana, or Nephenee, maybe Mist?), a Heroes OC, and some male unit. Largo would be logical, but I could see a more random pick like Zihark or Tauroneo.

Three Houses

A surprising number of Fódlan characters are still stuck in alt hell despite the years of fatigue. There's enough of them in fact for two or possibly three more New Heroes banners without significant help from OC padding. We've already seen multiple examples of IS using characters' Hopes designs for lazy premium alts, so I'd also expect more of that.

2023's banner was all Lions (and Rhea), so next year's will focus on a different house. If it's the Deer, I'd guess Lorenz, Leonie, premium Lysithea or Marianne, and either a Heroes OC or whichever of Raphael or Ignatz polls better. If it's the Eagles, Dorothea and Caspar are locks as well as premium Bernadetta most likely, along with Heroes fanservice or possibly regular Manuela. After those two ideas have been used up, the few remaining members of the roster are very likely doomed to something like the recent Echoes banner where they've got to split it with multiple OCs. The handful of male non-student characters who got dropped from the Hopes roster (and also Rodrigue from Hopes itself) are probably out of luck entirely bar the odd GHB like Cyril got a few months ago.

Oh, and fallen m!Shez possessed by Arval is pretty much a lock next year too. Fódlan is amazing for those wanky fallen banners.

(New) Mystery of the Emblem

Archanea closed out Book VI a year ago and hasn't been seen since, so a comeback in 2024 is reasonable. Complicating matters is that despite the abundance of missing units, most of them are 1) male and/or 2) utterly forgettable. The waifu picks are Midia, Cecil, Marisha, and Yuliya...not exactly inspiring options. As 2022's banner was ostensibly taken from FE1/11 owing to pre-corruption Hardin and as FE3/12 have more options for new units, that would be the more likely play. Will we finally see a banner that forces IS to turn an earlygame cleric into a headliner? Historically those characters have fared poorly in Heroes (we're still missing all of Edain, Lana, Safy, Elen, and Laura), but half of the options for new women are just that.

Fates

Last we saw FE14 New Heroes they were opening this book, so it's a reasonable expectation later on in Book VIII. Even though Fates still holds the largest percentage of Heroes's total roster, it surprisingly has a handful of characters it can still offer. That's especially true for the second generation, although because that was the focus of the last banner IS may be alternating them. The waifu options in Gen 1 - Mozu, Scarlet, and technically Fates Anna - aren't inspiring, but it's not like Sophie and Mitama left over in Gen 2 are much better. Throw in a premium royal or two and/or a Heroes OC and call it a banner.

Assuming two Engage banners, that's seven of the ten New Heroes slots. Those below are ones I'm less certain of - but something's got to fill out the holes in the schedule.

Wild Cards

Genealogy and Binding Blade

Both reasonable options although they're kind of running low at this point. FE4's banners alternate, so the next one should be Gen 1...which has only Edain and an assortment of men that even fans of the game are hard-pressed to care about. FE6 has, uh...Elen? I did say IS hates earlygame clerics.

The one thing that would certainly bolster the prospects of either of these games would be a remake announcement, which would offer tons of options for premium alts and potentially drum up interest in missing early picks like both games' Christmas knights and such. It would be odd if we didn't get any kind of development announcement for FE in 2024, and a remake would be perfect filler while IS works on whatever the next big release is planned to be.

Sacred Stones

Seems to be a favorite among the FEH staff considering how often it shows up on summer banners despite its age and low level of waifu bait potential, and the last time it got a New Heroes banner was near the start of this year. Too bad it's down to Ismaire as far as new female characters go.

Blazing Blade

Unlikely as it's just now getting a new banner, and it too is running out of viable options. With Isadora getting added, Vaida's the only female character from the game left.

Awakening

Technically overdue since it last showed up in October of 2022, but it's been running on fumes for years. We're talking just Vaike and Laurent here. Even Kellam got a seasonal! I expect that FE13 will be the next victim of a double OC banner. Speaking of which...

Echoes

...Not happening. We all saw that travesty last month. Jesse and/or Nomah might be added sometime in 2025, if IS even bothers.

[alarawriting]

52 Project #53: After The Chicken Story

And here it is, the bonus story, a sequel to the one I started this project with.

*********

Things have been kind of crazy around here the last few years, not just because of the pandemic, but there’s been a lot going on. Gotta say that mostly, those years haven’t been real great for us. Lots of changes, some good, some bad, some eh, but that’s life, right?

So my oldest daughter went to college to become a marine biologist, and now she’s on an expedition to study the Kraken in the harbor. Gotta say I didn’t expect it. Not because she didn’t show any interest in marine biology, she was crazy for it when she was young, but because every girl around here seemed to want to grow up to be a marine biologist, kind of like every girl when I was growing up wanted to work with horses. Except my wife, she’s terrified of them. Most of the kids who wanted to be marine biologists did not end up that way, but my daughter’s working on a master’s degree in it. Wants to do all this stuff with conservation and the Bay. Which, I guess, the Kraken  lives in the Bay and if we piss it off enough by dumping crap in its home territory so there’s no food for it, it might burn the city down again, so there’s a good conservation argument for you.

My oldest son, the ninja, has actually left the country; he’s gone to Japan to study under ninja masters at some ninja school. Either that, or break into working for Nintendo, because what he really wants in life is to make video games. Being a ninja isn’t a profession for him, it’s a way of life. I miss the kid, he never writes home. Would it kill him to drop us a note on Discord? But it sounds like he’s happy, which is the important thing.

And my younger son has a web comic going. Well, it’s not exactly a web comic, more like one of those mixed media things where he’s got comic pages and audio files and animations and mini-games and all that kind of stuff, about, supposedly, a fictionalized version of himself going into the tunnel under the road and traveling to the Underworld. It’s like, Dante’s Inferno as rewritten by Gen Z. Not literally Dante’s Inferno, I think he’s only ever read the Wikipedia article about it, but similar concept. Surprisingly, it’s mostly a dark comedy. I haven’t asked him if any of it is true, because I don’t want to know.

My youngest kid’s not doing nearly as well, since we brought back her timeshadow from the moon. I never took her seriously when she used to say she had a clone on the moon; turns out that, while a timeshadow is technically not a clone, she did actually have a copy of herself up on the moon. (Nowhere near my family’s barbeque grill. I’m starting to think I’ll never see that thing again.) The thing about timeshadows is, if your timeshadow touches you, it merges into you and then you have all of its memories, but if it had problems, you probably got them too. And living on the Moon for most of your life is not good for timeshadows any more than for regular humans, so when they merged, my kid got frail and weak – not as bad as someone who’d lived on the Moon their whole life, in the weak gravity, but worse off than she was. She didn’t get any taller, though. The timeshadow had shot up like a string bean, side effect of Lunar gravity, but when they merged, my kid got the deficits and not the benefits.

I wish it hadn’t happened and part of me regrets bringing the kid back from the moon, but the thing about a timeshadow is, it’s not entirely real, but it has thoughts and feelings just like the real human it’s a copy of, so what was I gonna do? Leave someone who is essentially my daughter up on the Moon without family? My daughter has lost enough of her childhood memories that she no longer has any idea how the timeshadow got on the Moon or why she even had a timeshadow, and the daycare she used to go to is out of business, so I don’t think there’s any way I can find out.

Things got kind of bad for my wife, too. The last time I talked about things, it ended up looking like we were going to buy our annoying neighbor’s house after my wife harassed her into leaving the neighborhood. Well, that didn’t happen, because my wife lost her job, and then ended up with breast cancer. They had to take them off. She looked into getting breast missiles but the damn things are too hard to reload, so she got pockets instead. Now if she really wants to keep something safe, she can stick it in her boob, not just in her bra. I always thought that those things were only for drug smugglers, but my wife wants to be able to go to the beach by herself and keep her credit cards and ID on her person when she goes in the water, and apparently she can seal up the pockets to be waterproof. So far evidence suggests she’s cancer free and the thing never made it out of her breasts, and that’s good, so things could be worse. The people who did buy the annoying neighbor’s house are nice folks, a Hispanic family where the father works in some kind of industrial chemistry as a scientist… I think. At least, he’s got some crazy shit in his swimming pool.

And then, my idiot boyfriend let the Fae know his true name. He’s a trans dude and very proud of the name he picked. He wasn’t going to go deadnaming himself when the Fae dude he met asked if he could have his name. So now his paperwork is not going through, and some stupid thing keeps happening every time he tries to legally change his name, because apparently the Fae now own his name. He’s considered changing it to a different name, but once you start to think about yourself as a name, that’s apparently your True Name. So he could maybe solve the issue of the paperwork, but he can’t solve the problem that fairies know his name and keep calling him. Sometimes he tries to sleepwalk straight out of the house; we’ve found him in the middle of the street in a fugue state, or talking to people we couldn’t see. My wife’s been trying to help him with the paperwork, but since she’s had her own battles to fight, it hasn’t worked so well.

We still have chickens. But now we also have a 2 dimensional dog, a cockatoo who works tech support, and approximately seventeen cats. I can’t really keep track of them all. They’ve cleared out the rat population, which is good, because Orion the assassin cat has been getting up in years and isn’t quite as murderous as he used to be, but they break out into two clans and the clans feud like the Hatfields and McCoys. We’re not at war with the city over the chickens anymore; now it’s the yard. Mostly about the Fae circles, but also about mowing the lawn, which, you try mowing over a Fae circle. And tell me how it went, fifty years when you pop back into reality, if you ever do.

Anyway, this story isn’t about the chickens, or not nearly so much as the last story was. It’s more of an explanation of why things ended up the way they did.

So first off, work. Now, I’ve been working from home from before it was cool; got my own IT company, works with Amazon Web Services helping other businesses deal with them. When my wife lost her job, she started working here as well, which was just as well because then when she got cancer, she could get all the time off for chemo and stuff that she needed. A year or so later, when the news about the pandemic first hit, business was jumping. Everybody wanted to get into the cloud and not have to come into the office anymore.

Huh, actually, no, that’s not where it starts. Let’s start with the two dimensional dog.

So my youngest kid really wanted a two dimensional dog. They’re pretty rare, on account of being two dimensional. You ever hear of a paper tiger, well, this is a paper dog. They’re not really two dimensional, but something about, most of their mass is phased into a different dimension and we can only see the part of them that intersects with this plane? They can be very intimidating because you look at this dog, you think, goddamn that is one skinny dog, and then it comes up to you with its jaws hanging open, panting, and it looks like a smile. A giant smile. A giant, very toothy, very scary smile. This is a dog you want to keep happy because you don’t know what it will do if it’s not happy. They’re very tall, and very long, and very very skinny, but the mass is there, as you can tell when the dog jumps up on you.

Ours came from Russia. Well, her parents came from Russia. Well, her ancestors. We’re not really sure when it was that Russia engineered two dimensional dogs, but we know that when the Soviet Union fell, people over there started selling these dogs to the US because they were weird, and rich people love weird, and Russians after the collapse of Communism really wanted the money. Then some people who probably weren’t all that rich spent too much money on the dogs so they could look richer than they were, and ended up having to sell off puppies for a lot less than they wanted when the dot com boom busted. My daughter wanted one ever since she heard about them. She was super into science and math, and the idea of a two dimensional dog really appealed to her.

My wife’s ex used to have one he got from a rescue, but we went looking for the rescue and found out it had to shut down after they accidentally accepted a Hound of Tindalos, and you know how that goes. So we had to buy our dog. Her name’s Svetlana and she will do anything to get some peanut butter, regular butter, cheese, potato chips… you know, anything you might imagine your teenagers would clean you out of. Being that she’s two dimensional, she will absolutely slip through any crack in a door you leave, including the fridge door if you don’t shut it all the way. We’ve lost so much butter that way.

Now, Svetlana loves cats. Loves cats. Before we got her fixed, she loved them in a kind of not-entirely-PG-rated way, but even after that, she really wants to play with cats. She is six times as tall as a cat. Cats do not want to play with her. At the time, we had three cats – Orion the mighty hunter/assassin cat, Odin the grumpy ancient man who our best guesses had at 24 years old then, and Tiamat, the tortie who thought she was human. Well, who at least thought she deserved to be able to get chicken out of the refrigerator and sit at the dinner table. They had their normal cat idiosyncrasies; Tiamat liked Rice Krispies but hated fish, Odin enjoyed sleeping in the litter box, and Orion liked to cross-dress. Well, not sure you can call it that since female cats don’t generally wear frilly doll dresses, either. But the kids – and my boyfriend -- thought it was fun to put dresses on him, and while the others would immediately divest themselves if you tried to make them wear anything, Orion seemed to enjoy his dresses. He’d even head-butt the kids if one of them was holding a doll dress, until the kid put the dress on him. None of these cats wanted anything to do with Lana.

Coincidentally, my boyfriend’s parents in Canada had a bunch of local feral cats who’d just had kittens. You see where this is going.

Sylph was a pretty little Siamese kitten who enjoyed playing with my boyfriend’s parents’ dog. We thought she’d make a good friend for Lana, and because she had a sister she was inseparable from, we didn’t want to separate them. So we ended up with Raven as well, a solid black cat who became the photographic subject of many memes about how the void wants chicken.

Lana, big dumb goofy nerd that she was, got too enthusiastic about playing with the kittens. The kittens didn’t appreciate it. Then the kittens turned into teenage female cats, at which point we discovered that Lana is actually a lesbian xenophile… ailurophile? You can’t call it bestiality when they’re all beasts. This was more than a little disturbing, and we all wanted to return to our illusions that our dog loved our cats in a wholesome friendly way, so we arranged to get them all fixed, Lana first.

And then Covid hit.

If you had pets you might remember that right after Covid started, the vets all turtled up, nothing but emergency appointments. Fixing animals was apparently not an emergency. Lana got done in time, but our little girls, not so much.

We did our best to keep them inside, but with all the secret tunnels in the basement, the rat warrens that come up in the laundry room, and the holes in reality that the wall squids made, we cannot in fact keep anything the size of a cat in, or out. I mean, cats can’t usually phase through walls, but they are one of the only animals on the planet fast enough to catch a wall squid, and if they tag the thing, they can often follow it right through its phase. Since they can’t actually enter the dimension the things come from, though, this generally leaves them outside whatever wall they were going through, which is fine when it’s the interior living room wall and not so great when it’s the wall covered with ivy outside. The only thing that keeps stranger cats from turning up in our house at random is ours are so damn territorial, and the only thing that keeps our cats in is nothing. Nothing can keep our cats in.

By the time we got Sylph and Raven rescheduled for their spays, they were both pregnant with kittens.

There are some vets that will abort kittens while spaying. Not the ones around here. Also they both had lots of them. Sylph had six, Raven had five. We have a tradition around here that kittens don’t get real names until they’re adults, they get temporary names. So Sylph’s six were Up, Down, Top, Bottom, Strange and Charmed, and Raven’s five were named after five members of Voltron, from the old series my wife grew up with, not the reboot. And she left out Sven. I think she forgot he existed.

As if this was not bad enough, Tiamat got pregnant. See, we’d never fixed her, because the one time we had an appointment, she managed to disappear, and she’d get fat and then thin again within weeks, not long enough to bring a pregnancy to term. We knew that her father and her brother were the same cat, so we figured she might have some kind of genetic abnormality preventing pregnancy. Nope! Or, maybe. Maybe she needed exposure to cat pregnancy pheromones to be able to bring a litter to term. She had four. We named them after the Three Musketeers plus D’Artagnan.

If you’re counting, you know that at this point, we had a total of twenty cats.

Meanwhile, we were hoarding food. Frozen and nonperishable, I’m not talking about stuff you have to refrigerate. We bought three new freezers (which took forever, because everyone else apparently had the same idea), filled them with meat (we hooked up with a butcher and got a whole cow, a whole pig, a whole emu, and a couple of deer), then filled our pantry and multiple bins with dry food. With Covid going on, we didn’t want to have to leave the house and go shopping any more than we had to. We even got dry milk. Which is disgusting, by the way, do not use it for your cereal, but it does tolerably well when the instant mashed potato box says to use milk to make mashed potatoes. We didn’t go full prepper with MREs and dehydrated food, but only because my boyfriend’s parents were preppers and he was able to advise us that that stuff tastes like shit.

Twenty cats produce a lot of cat poop. My boyfriend, whose job it was to clean the cat boxes, was frequently distracted by the Fae trying to call him. My wife and I were overwhelmed with work. My son the ninja helped out for a while, but then he got accepted to study under a ninja master. I thought there was no way he’d be able to go; we were in lockdown. Japan wasn’t accepting US citizens. Hell, Canada wasn’t; my boyfriend could go visit his parents because he was actually a Canadian citizen, but we were worried that he wouldn’t be able to come back, so he didn’t.

Ninjas, apparently, have resources that most ordinary Japanese citizens don’t. They came in a helicopter in the dead of night, and we only knew about it because he went to say goodbye to the chickens and woke them up and they started clucking, which set off the dog. We got outside in time to see my son disappear up the helicopter ladder, promising us, incorrectly, that he would write. You’d think ninjas wouldn’t use something as ostentatious as a chopper, but the truth is our city is lousy with choppers. Police choppers. News choppers. Medevac choppers. Elementary school bus choppers. Ghostbuster choppers. No one here blinks when they hear the sound of a helicopter overhead, and a blacked-out ninja helicopter looks exactly like a blacked-out police helicopter.

Since then we mostly hear about him through his brother, who does not have the level of detail sufficient to make my wife happy, but at least we know enough to know that his ninja cover is that he’s interning at Nintendo. Apparently ninjas do not really live in secret compounds where they dress all in black and train non-stop; the point of being a ninja is that you blend in, so ninjas get real jobs, and they’re plausible jobs that the ninja is good at doing. My son’s always wanted to make video games, so he’s in the best possible place, I think. I hope he’s doing well at learning Japanese, though. They only had French, German and Spanish in school and he somehow managed to skip out on learning any of them. I think the school decided that C++ counted as a language.

But this meant my son wasn’t around to help with the cats. My older daughter had moved out a while back while she was getting her degree, and she was living in her own apartment so she didn’t need to come back home for Covid like the college kids in the dorms did. My younger daughter hadn’t yet merged with her timeshadow, we didn’t retrieve her from the moon until the following year, but neither she nor my younger son were willing to be much help. Meanwhile, dry food, in bins, much of it in cardboard boxes that bugs can slip into, some of the bins chewable by mice. Plus, all the restaurants were closed, so the bugs and the mice and the rats all wanted to find someplace that still had food. And our house, as mentioned earlier, is porous to anything the size of a cat, or smaller.

First we had the plague of mealmoths, that infested everything we owned made of grain or nuts. We love nuts, and my wife is crazy for pasta, and we have rice, and cold cereal, and bread. The way you’re supposed to purge your house of mealmoths is throw out all your grains and don’t bring any in for two weeks. This was not happening. I wanted to build a cedar pantry, but a. very busy at work and b. not allowed to go to Home Depot, and not about to try to have expensive wood shipped to the house. The business was doing well, but not that well. I knew from my tunneling project and my attic renovation that if you need wood shipped to you, you end up having to buy way more of it than you need, which is why there are still piles and piles of lumber in my attic.

Instead we ordered tons and tons of jars and plastic cereal bins with bug-proof seals and stuff like that to store all our grains in, and my wife had to go through them all to identify what the bugs had already gotten to, and then throw bay leaves into all the containers. Apparently mealmoths hate bay leaves.

The dishwasher stopped working. By now, we could get repair people again, but the repair guy said that the wires underneath the thing had been shredded by mice, and he didn’t know how to fix that. We tried getting a warranty repair. Turns out warranty repairs don’t cover shredded by mice.

So we got a new dishwasher, and I stashed the old one in the garage, figuring I might be able to repair it once I had some spare time. Twenty cats managed to clean out the rats before they even got a foothold, but apparently they had been slacking when it came to dealing with the mice. It was understandable, given that most of those cats were kittens and three of the cats who weren’t kittens were occupied raising kittens. Odin was too old and there was only so much Orion could do by himself.

The world outside basically stopped. My daughter didn’t go to her middle school graduation, didn’t attend the school she’d been so enthusiastic about going to for high school, and then by the time they opened the schools again she was too fragile to walk around the school building. We tried to get her into a program where she’d get to still be attending school from home, but the school did not understand how a timeshadow merge could possibly have made her too weak to go to school, and they refused. Meanwhile, my son just stopped going to high school, basically marking time until he turned 18 and could drop out, working on his web comic. And me and my wife worked from home, and my boyfriend was on disability and didn’t work anyway, plus you really can’t work when the Fae are trying to summon you and you have to hide out from them. So nobody ever left the house. My wife would go out for groceries, when we weren’t doing Instacart or when she needed to pick up stuff for my home improvement projects, but aside from that, nobody went anywhere. Not even the yard; my wife used to garden, but we were busy, plus, Fae circles. No one wants to risk stepping in one of those.

When there’s no routine, when nobody has to leave and nobody has school and the people who have a job are working pretty much all the time, time disappears. I’d look up from my PC and find an entire month had gone by. It seemed like this was a bit much even for the liminal timelessness of no routines, and then we found the infestation of time flies. Fuckers love fruit. You know the saying, time flies like a banana, but we had a peach tree and apple trees and a mulberry bush and grapevines and tomatoes all over the place, and this apparently attracted the time flies, who then moved into the house after we killed the mealmoths. Time flies don’t look too different from regular flies; they look just like cluster flies, those incredibly stupid little guys who live in the walls and are too stupid to figure out how to get back into the walls once they get out, so we’d never noticed. They lay their eggs in fruit, but they themselves eat time, and they don’t care about bay leaves, or mint, which we were using to try to drive the mice off.

Problem was, with five people never leaving a house, hoarding food, and having twenty cats, as soon as the time disappeared the house became an utter disaster, and there was no way we could have an exterminator over. Also no way to call an exterminator anyway, because nobody was actually answering phone calls! Anywhere!! And we didn’t have the time to follow up on anything. It’s a miracle we got the cats fixed and managed to give some of them away. Not nearly enough, mind you. I don’t know whether we got rid of three or five or seven but we still have an absurd number of cats. And cats will chase mice, and wall squid, and Orion was willing to go after rats, but none of them were gonna touch a time fly.

We put up flypaper, of course, and rubbed mushy banana on it to attract them, but once the time flies have infested your house, you have a lot less time to get anything done, including getting rid of your time flies. Then the oven broke, but since we have two halves of a house, we had two ovens, so we didn’t do much to get it fixed. My wife wanted it to get fixed before Thanksgiving, but with the time flies, that was ambitious.

Then my boyfriend brought home a cockatoo. How he managed to find the time to get a cockatoo, I’ll never know. The family who’d owned the cockatoo apparently had to get rid of her because she was “wrecking our home.” I wondered, how does a bird you can keep in a cage wreck a house?

The bird decided she was my mate, and that my wife and boyfriend – who did most of the bird feeding chores – were her rivals in a harem anime. When I let her out, she wouldn’t let them come near me. Apparently the home-wrecking in question had not been literal destruction of a house, though she was capable of that too if she was bored enough. My boyfriend kept trying to win her over, but my wife had never forgotten about the birds who pecked her dog’s eyes out because the dog claimed that birds didn’t exist, and she was an introvert, so she was happy to go hide in her office all the time and never go near the bird.

Meanwhile, if I put Jessica – the bird – in her cage, she shrieked. All the time. Ever hear the Cure song “Like Cockatoos?” Where Robert Smith says that the night sang out like cockatoos, and it sounds all sad and romantic? Yeah, Robert Smith never went anywhere near a cockatoo. They do not sing. They screech. And they burble, and they talk, but when they’re bored, or angry, or angry and bored, they screech.

I couldn’t have Jessica climbing all over me while I was working. Sure, everyone loves when your cat photobombs the Zoom call, but the bird could talk, and did not give a shit about professional office language. I couldn’t have her screaming either. So I gave her a job. She was now Tier 1 tech support. One of her favorite things to say was, “What the fuck, Amazon?”  This endeared her to the customers, who were generally calling in because AWS had done something to screw up their day. She really enjoyed interacting with the customers, they liked her, and my existing tech support team liked having someone to semi-screen the calls. Of course, she couldn’t type what the customer’s complaint was into a ticket, but she could peck a touchscreen with a co-worker’s face and make a call to tell them what the complaint was, so they could enter the ticket.

Cockatoos don’t eat time flies, either, and the time flies loved the fruit in her bowl, so we started losing even more time. The bills didn’t get paid. There were gaps of three months in telemedicine visits that were supposed to have been two week follow-ups.

We got rid of the majority of the infestation when the summer ended and all the fruit had been harvested. Turns out that time flies really do not like caffeine. We used old coffee and painted it on bananas and apples, they’d come lay their eggs, and then the eggs would die because of the caffeine. We couldn’t do anything about Jessica’s food because you can’t feed caffeine to a cockatoo, but time flies don’t really like dried fruit so much, unlike Jessica, who loved it. They also don’t care for seeds or nuts. And we weren’t feeding the chickens fruit, and obviously neither the dog nor the cats ate the stuff, so we finally managed to take a breath, come up for air, look around ourselves -- and realize that now we had a massive roach infestation.

We tried spraying. We thought that would be enough. Then the new dishwasher stopped working, we got a warranty repairman, and he told us he couldn’t do it. Warranty wouldn’t cover it. When he took off the cover and showed us the little roach apartments, with the roaches sitting around their dining room tables feeding the crumbs they’d stolen to their four million children, looking up at us and giving us the finger (technically, the leg, but I knew what they meant), we realized that spraying commercial pesticide was not going to solve this. But now the fuckers had destroyed our second dishwasher, so this meant war. And without time flies draining all the time away, we had the resources to go to war.

I’d planned to spend the winter months renovating the bathroom. I didn’t mention our bathroom, did I? The new house, the one my wife’s parents bought, had two bathrooms – a nice big one on the upper floor and a tiny little water closet with just a sink and a toilet on the first floor. But in our original house, the one we owned, there was only one bathroom, and it was a galley where literally most of the length and width of it was taken by the bathtub, so to get to the toilet on the other side of the bathroom you had to slide along the wall like you’re making a home music video for “Walk Like An Egyptian” by the Bangles. Or else stroll through the tub. Or else use the rings I bolted to the ceiling joists for my ninja son and swing along the ceiling, but he was the only one who could do that. My boyfriend, a big guy, could barely use the thing. So almost immediately after we got the other house, everyone stopped using that bathroom and switched to the one next door, except for my ninja son because his bedroom was right next to it and it was convenient for him. Ninjas are good at slinking through narrow passages. Now that he had left, I’d planned to tear the whole thing out, and his bedroom, and replace them both with a normal-shaped bathroom and a slightly smaller bedroom.

I didn’t get the chance. We needed to do battle.

It hadn’t helped that some neighborhood ne’er-do-well, who was probably high as a kite, broke into our house in the middle of the summer because our dog was mouthing off to him, threatened the dog, told the cockatoo he’d fuck her up (we know this because she started saying “Gonna fuck you up!” every time we told her it was bedtime or that she needed to be quiet or stop climbing in my hair), and smashed all our fishtanks. Fortunately we had no fish. Unfortunately we had like five fishtanks because my boyfriend had wanted to rescue feeder goldfish and breed guppies for sale, so we’d filled up three forty gallon tanks and two twenties, plus a few tiny five gallons, and then due to the time flies we’d never gotten around to putting fish in them. This did terrible damage to the floor. We had the guy dead to rights on video, managed to actually get the city police to pick him up and a prosecution going, and then he jumped bail and fled, possibly through a Fae circle because no one ever saw him again. He was gonna owe us several thousand dollars for the floor damage.

After we got rid of the time flies, we discovered that the damaged floor had become completely porous to roaches, so what had probably started as a basement infestation had become a full blown house emergency. There were roaches in the cereal. (This was the fault of whoever wasn’t following the mealmoth protocol and leaving the cereal out of the protective plastic bins.) They’d destroyed the dishwasher and were working on the refrigerator. Every cabinet and drawer we had was entirely full of the little assholes, plus the condos they’d built in the dishwasher, plus several of our sealed bins of food that turned out to be less sealed than we’d thought.

Meanwhile the city had sold our house to some asshole lawyers in Ohio, because we hadn’t mowed our lawn, and we had allowed Fae circles to spring up there, which was considered a hazard. Which it was, yes, but only to us and people trespassing on our property, and how the fuck do you safely get rid of those things anyway? We had racked up several thousand dollars’ worth of fines for not being able to mow the lawn because of the Fae circles and not being able to get rid of the Fae circles because we couldn’t safely mow the lawn, and then the time flies interfering with our ability to remember to pay the damn fines before they ballooned. We were still in a state of national emergency at this point, the vaccine was right on the horizon but no one we knew had qualified to get it yet, and they wanted to make us homeless because we didn’t mow our lawn. This was absolute bullshit, and personally, I think may have been retaliation from people at Animal Control, who are not the same guys that fine you for your lawn but they work under the same overarching department in the city government. If we hadn’t gotten rid of the time flies, we might not have been able to respond in time. There was stuff in there that was nonsensical, like fines for having high grass and weeds in February, or for not having cleaned up the area where we put our trash cans in 2019, or for too many kites on the roof. Why does it even matter if there are kites on the roof? We put them there to distract local falcons away from our chickens! They can’t fly into the power lines, they’re tethered with metal cable!

Also they threatened to chop down our mulberry tree because it was in the way of the street light, which didn’t work anyway and which, when it did work, blinded people in my son’s old bedroom, which my younger son was going to move into as soon as we finished the bathroom renovations. Which as it turned out we couldn’t even start, but he moved in anyway because his room didn’t have a ceiling. His older sister had been exorcising ghosts from that room and somehow this made the ceiling fall in, so we’d been using cheap fake paneling in lieu of a real ceiling, and this does nothing to stop ghosts getting back into the room. So my wife put barbed wire around the mulberry tree. Well, it wasn’t really barbed wire, it was tomato cages she’d unraveled and linked into each other in a crazy way that made a fence with sharp wires sticking out of it in all directions. The city fined us for that, too, but she was going to challenge that in court, because no one was going to hurt themselves on it as long as they didn’t try to trespass on our property and mess around with our tree.

Anyway, so we paid off the lawyers in Ohio to get full title to our house back, and we paid off the city’s fines, which, due to lockdown, involved going to city hall, then going to the basement of city hall because the front door was locked, then giving several thousand dollars in cash to a garden gnome because someone at the city had thought it was fun and whimsical to replace the cash drop with a garden gnome. The cash drop was now in his mouth. Then we called every day for a month before we managed to get someone on the phone who could confirm that yes, the garden gnome had had the money and the city managed to get it out and put it on our account, but they wanted another $200 in interest because the time between us dropping the cash and them picking up the cash and putting it on our account was somehow our fault.

And all this time, we’re battling the roaches.

They’d proved themselves immune to pyrethin or whatever that stuff is in most commercial pesticides, whereas we had a house full of people who’d blow up with allergies when anything even slightly nasty was in their airspace, so no more pyrethin for us. We had to get by on organics. Cloves, lavender, mint, citrus – turns out there is a reason humans eat a lot of the stuff we eat, and it’s not just because it tastes good. It’s because it preserves your food, because pretty much every critter except for bedbugs and time flies hate the stuff. Mixtures of boric acid and sugar. Diatomaceous earth. A new dishwasher that’s fully enclosed so it’d be a lot harder for them to get in, and putting the old dishwasher into a gigantic garbage bag, then buying dry ice and filling the bag with it to try to suffocate them all. It worked, but the dishwasher was still toast, and once again, the warranty repair people wouldn’t fix it. The roaches might have been dead but the repair guy could plainly see the condos they’d left behind.

While this was going on, the second oven broke, so we had to get people in to fix them both. Guess what. No, no, you’ll never guess. No warranty repair. No repair at all, actually. The oven that had been under warranty turned out to have been fried by a pair of lovebird mice that had decided to get amorous right where their pals had been gnawing at electric wires, so when we turned the stove on, the current went through both mice, and now we had furry mice skeletons trapped forever in a posture that made it clear they’d been mating. The other oven was destroyed by roaches, and the repair guy, who we were paying for, not a warranty repair, refunded our money because he wasn’t willing to touch it.

We had no ovens and we were sick and tired of buying warranties that would never be honored, so we went to a place called Roy’s Discount Appliances, which was in the basement of a warehouse that used to belong to Toys R Us before they went out of business, and was a maze of ovens, dishwashers, refrigerators and washing machines that were used, refurbs, or on deep clearance because the manufacturer had discontinued them. Nothing like trying to shove two ovens into a minivan where you’ve removed the back seats, but you brought three people, so now one of them has to ride home sitting on the side of an oven and your tailgate won’t close so you have a bungee cord holding it down. We paid cash to get a 5% discount, and I strongly suspect some of those appliances fell off the back of truck, if you know what I mean.

Meantime, we’re repairing the floor. This means putting everything from the first floor of the house, except for the kitchen since it has a stone floor, into one of those portable rental units – not a storage facility because we wanted close access to it. The basement tunnels are prone to flooding, so we didn’t want to use them, also the staircase down there is a little too rickety for me to feel secure carrying my 80-inch television down it.

The city refuses to give us a permit for the storage unit. Says we have to pay our fines. We just did that. They record this stuff in cuneiform printed by dot matrix printers onto carbon sheets, so we have no way to tell if the fines they’re talking about are new fines, or the old fines that we paid cash to a garden gnome for, because we’re not organized enough to know where most of our mail is, so we don’t have the originals. Also we can’t read cuneiform. My wife’s dad can, but my wife doesn’t want him to know how big our fines are or how badly organized we are, and she thinks she could learn cuneiform if she had two weeks of free time. She does not have two weeks of free time. But my boyfriend makes friends with all the neighbors – he always did, but it’s especially been important since the Fae started calling him – and the Hispanic family with the chemist dad offers us their shed, which turns out to be significantly bigger on the inside, for less than we’d have paid for a portable storage unit. They’re just a couple of houses down the block, so it’s almost as good as a unit.

We spend a few months ripping up badly damaged tile and rug, all of which date from at least the 70’s and I always hated anyway, scrubbing off floor adhesive, and laying down a new hardwood floor, just us. By which I mean mostly just me, my wife doesn’t do handyman stuff (she helped with the scrubbing part, and she buys the supplies, but that’s it) and my boyfriend hasn’t really been useful for anything since the Fae started calling him. So now the roaches can’t get upstairs from the basement, but it’s too late, they have a beachhead here now, and so what we’ve just basically done is locked ourselves in with them. We start seeing more of the little fuckers. Now they’re getting into books and DVD cases and clothes hampers. Some end up in the bedroom.

You may ask why we don’t hire an exterminator. Remember the twenty cats? Maybe down to thirteen or seventeen or something by now – some of them spend all their time outdoors – but there are a lot of cats. And they’re at war with each other.

There’s the Canada clan – Sylph and Raven themselves have decided they are outdoor cats, but most of their kittens still live with us – and Tiamat’s clan, which includes Orion and Odin because Orion is one of Tiamat’s brothers (hopefully not the one who is also her father, but we got them from a hoarder’s kid going through his parents’ property, so we never actually found out), and she’s decided that Odin is less awful now that he’s a gazillion years old and she has the Canada clan to compare them to. My youngest daughter, who is mostly confined to her room due to physical weakness and compromised immune system, treats Tiamat’s kittens like they’re her own children (including carrying them around baby style, putting them in toy strollers she is way too old for, and occasionally putting one in a toy Pack n Play and then covering it with a large cardboard box as a “time-out”), so they have a home base. The Canada clan grew up in our bedroom, so they have a home base. The rest of the house is a war zone.

Whenever you walk through the house, there are cats hissing at each other, yowling, swiping at each other, chasing each other, the works. It’s still cold outside, so we can’t get them to go out and do their fighting outdoors like civilized cats. Our homeowners insurance dropped us when they found out about the tunnels in the basement. (They didn’t know we made the tunnels, and we didn’t admit to it, but insurance inspectors can be incredibly thorough when they want to be.) We haven’t been able to get a new policy yet. So my wife does not want a guy traipsing around the whole house where he might get tripped or scratched by warring cats. We’ve all learned to dodge, but an exterminator wouldn’t necessarily be experienced with being in a cat war zone.

It’s one thing to get repair guys into one or the other of the kitchens, they have doors and we can lock the cats out if we have to (I know most kitchens do not, in fact, have doors that can lock out the rest of the house, but we needed one back in the days when we had Angel, our beagle who we called that because as soon as you weren’t looking at him he would sneak into the kitchen and eat anything he could find, like the Weeping Angels on Doctor Who except with less neck breaking and more stealing your PB+J the instant your back was turned. That was before we had the other house, but we installed a similar door on the other house to keep the two dimensional dog from sneaking into our bedroom and pooping there.) It’s another thing to have a guy going all over your house while your cats are setting up ambushes for each other. And without homeowner’s insurance, we can’t risk it.

So it’s down to us. But we’re creative. My boyfriend has been seeing giant bugs that look like a cross between centipedes and beetles. Like the wall squid, they’re not entirely in our reality; he can see them because of his connection to the Fae. Well, my wife looks them up and apparently they are predators who eat bugs. We just have to get them over into our reality, and then figure out how to dispose of them. We can’t get frogs because the cats would attack them, and we can’t get an anteater because exotic animal, need a permit and besides, it’s not called a roach eater. We can bring the chickens inside to go roach hunting from time to time, but they poop all over the floor so the cure’s almost worse than the disease.

In our yard, there’s an old wooden gate that fell off the new house shortly after we got it, and instead of throwing it out, we leave it in the yard and move it around from time to time to kill weeds. The Fae made a circle on it. We carry the wooden gate into the house, and then my boyfriend leaves out sugar water to attract the centipeedles through the circle. Now we have centipede beetles the length of a human foot (which is mostly a lot shorter than the measurement named for it) in the house. Possibly this was ill thought out. The cats try attacking them, but it turns out, cats find centipeedles just as creepy as humans do, and the damn things have some pretty tough armor. It doesn’t take much before the cats get intimidated and leave them alone. Even Orion the assassin cat gives them a wide berth.

Turns out, the centipeedles are great at killing the roaches, but no one wants centipeedles in their pantry, or their silverware drawer. My daughter just literally stops eating off anything but her own private stash of sealed paper plates and plastic silverware because she’s so creeped out by the thought of either roaches or centipeedles touching anything she might eat off of. This isn’t great, the kid is already too thin and too easily put off her food. She was always picky, but apparently the timeshadow spent ten years eating moon cheese and is having a hard time stomaching Earth food, so now everything nauseates her, gives her a stomach, or is unappetizing in the first place.

One thing I will say for chickens: they’ll eat centipeedles. They don’t care, it’s all food to them. The cats have learned that chickens are much more of a threat and much less of a prey than they might think. Lana the two dimensional dog will happily chase the chickens, but she’s less two dimensional than she used to be. She doesn’t get enough exercise and she steals a lot of food, so she’s looking considerably more three dimensional than when we got her, which is good because it keeps her from slipping through closed doors, though bad in the sense that it’s not that healthy for her. There is enough clutter around the place, what with my tools, piles of lumber for the floor, and boxes of books that were deemed too heavy to carry over to the neighbors’ shed, that chickens have plenty of places to take shelter from a two and a half dimensional dog. And if we let Jessica the cockatoo out, turns out she thinks centipeedles are a fun piece of moving string to catch and tear in half. You’d think that a predator like a cat would be better at killing a centipeedle than a hookbill bird, but turns out, the centipeedles’ bellies are barely armored and the cockatoo has nearly opposable thumbs on her feet. She can flip them over, and then peck, peck, crack, done.

So we’ve got the chickens running around the place in chicken diapers to eat the centipeedles that we brought over from the lands of the Fae to eat the roaches, but we still have roaches and we still have centipeedles because it turns out you can’t control house bugs with predators. Spiders might be better at it and my boyfriend wants to get some, but my wife shoots that down.

I’m kinda at my wits’ end here, and then my youngest son wants to show me something.

So to understand this, I gotta tell you something about the layout of my house. We’ve got a full duplex, both sides, thanks to my wife’s dad. The front of the house is on a busy street, and my bedroom and my youngest daughter’s bedroom face that. The back of the house faces our deck, and my ninja son’s former bedroom (from the original side we had) and the guest room (from the new side we got) face that. Then there’s a room in the middle of our original house, that my younger son used to have, but now he’s moved into his older brother’s room. The bathroom is next to the boys’ bedroom, and also faces the deck.

Back a few years ago, before Covid, I did a renovation on my ninja son’s bedroom where I made it a little smaller, in preparation for making the bathroom wider. Then I didn’t have the opportunity to work on the bathroom. So there’s a narrow corridor between the bathroom and the bedroom. I threw together a quick and dirty closet to occupy some of that space, so the boys’ bedroom now has a closet in the corner that faces the bathroom and the deck. My younger son guided me over to this closet, and pulled up a trap door that I hadn’t known was there. There was a spiral staircase underneath.

So I went down the spiral staircase, of course, but I was freaking out. This hadn’t been here when I worked on the boys’ bedroom. I redid their entire floor, when they were so young they shared the room and my older daughter had the middle bedroom. There was no way this trap door could have been there when we moved in. There’s also no way it could be going where it’s going. My sons’ bedroom sits over the kitchen, but the kitchen has an addition in the back where we keep the laundry machines. This spiral staircase would theoretically be going right down into it.

Except it’s not. I’ve got pretty good spatial perception, so it doesn’t take me long to figure out that this very narrow little column is going between the two houses, at the edge where the kitchens meet the additions. I don’t know how it’s possible that I missed it. I’ve done so many renovations in this house. This is crazy.

The spiral staircase goes down underground and into a tunnel, which is not one of the tunnels my son and I dug to connect all the basements in the neighborhood. Technically this tunnel isn’t even in my basement; the foundation only goes as far as the original house, so the additions have no basement. This tunnel goes under my deck, then deeper underground, then turns, and comes up…

Ok, this is super weird. It’s a buried pillbox. This is like a basement, except what if your basement had a roof of its own rather than just being part of your house, and it was sticking out of the ground about two feet, with a lot of windows, and it was the size of maybe two rooms in your house put together, and it was at the back of the yard belonging to the neighbors with a swimming pool.

The room is mostly empty. There are tools, and some very iffy towels, and several empty beer cans, and a bottle of Windex and a really nasty roll of paper towels with spiderwebs all over it. I ask my son, “Did your brother know this was here?”

“I don’t know. If he did, he never mentioned it.”

“How long has it been here?”

“I don’t know, I just found it!”

There is no door, aside from the one we came in, and no staircase up to the ground level, but I open one of the windows and squirm through.

The fence around the neighbors’ swimming pool is about five feet tall, so I can see over it. My neighbors are sitting on their swimming pool. I mentioned the father’s a chemist or something, right? He’s got these substances that you mix into your water to change its solidity. They’ve turned about three quarters of their swimming pool into a semi-solid – a little bit squishy, their feet are leaving footprints in it when they walk around, but it holds their weight – and the remaining quarter, they’ve left as water so they can dangle their feet. There’s an entire entertainment center sitting in front of the pool, including a huge CRT TV, a VCR and a dozen super old video game machines like the Sega Saturn or the Nintendo GameCube, protected from the rain by a shade umbrella. Nothing is protecting this stuff from the water from the pool, though. They’re watching The Little Mermaid. I lean against the fence, and my neighbors notice me. The chemist greets me. “What’s going on, man?”

“I just discovered that this structure you have in the back of your yard is connected to my son’s bedroom.”

“Oh, wow,” he says. He gets out of the pool. He’s wearing swim trunks, but aside from his legs, he’s completely dry, since he’s been sitting on top of his pool dunking his feet and watching The Little Mermaid with his family. “You didn’t build that thing?”

“No, I didn’t build it.”

“But you built the tunnels.” I like this guy; he discovered the tunnels shortly after moving in, but he thought they were great. He wanted to get chickens himself, but there isn’t room in his yard with the swimming pool. The roof of the underground structure is completely covered with planter boxes full of tomatoes, peppers, flowers, herbs, and rutabagas. I don’t know why they’re trying to grow root vegetables in planters, but there’s enough foliage that I can tell what it is. The sign doesn’t help, it’s in Spanish. For obvious reasons I can read “tomato” and “jalapeno” and “serrano” in Spanish, but not “nabo sueco”, which probably means rutabaga because that’s what’s planted there.

“Yeah, a few years back, but I had no idea this thing was even here. Most of the tunnels go directly between the houses, not under the back yards.”

“Cool. I thought it was yours, but I didn’t know for sure. Can I go inside?”

“Well, there’s no door, but if you want to come to my house we can go down the staircase from my son’s room.”

So we traipse back over to my house, and then up to my son’s bedroom, down the stairs, through the tunnel, and into the empty underground structure. “This gets a lot of light for a thing underground,” he says. “A lot of windows.”

“It’s nice. I don’t know what it’s doing here, but maybe I’ll install some doors to give you and me privacy, and then make a trap door in the roof. I might have to move your rutabagas, though. That way you can come in and enjoy the space, too. Maybe we’ll make it some kind of den. You play board games? Role-playing games?”

“Not in English, not the role-playing games. I used to have an 11th level paladin before we moved here, but I was playing in Spanish. Board games, it’s mostly been Chutes and Ladders or Monopoly or some shit like that.” His kids are younger than mine.

“Well, we can put some furniture down there if there’s a trap door to lower it through, and get some lighting in.” There’s only one lamp, a work lamp clipped onto one of the ceiling joists. Its bulb works but is very dim. There’s one power outlet in the place. I’m gonna have to trace it back to see if it’s my electricity or his. “Set up some board games, maybe a mini-fridge with beer and Coke. We could hang out sometimes.”

“Yeah, that would be good. You like zucchini? My wife has too much zucchini.”

“I don’t, but my wife loves it. I could trade you some eggs.”

So that’s how I made friends with the mad scientist guy down the block. No idea what company he works for but they make some crazy shit. That stuff that makes the pool solid? Amazing. I don’t know how he keeps it from circulating through the entire pool, though. Maybe he’s got underwater baffles up to control the flow.

I tell my wife about this thing, and she looks at me funny. “Uh, yeah. You built that.”

“I did not.”

“You did. You got drunk one night and you said you were gonna seriously screw with the woman who called Animal Control on us. Then you built a tunnel to her house.”

“How the hell did I build that entire basement structure thing?”

“Oh, no, that was already there. You just connected to it. Same way you connected to the city’s underground tunnels.” Yeah, truth is, my son and I didn’t really build the entire tunnel system under the neighborhood. There was already a tunnel the city made and we just dug connectors to everyone’s basement, few years back.

“When were you going to tell me about this?”

“Why would I tell you about it? You’re the one who built it. I thought you’d remember.”

Okay, maybe I need to control my drinking, but that was a stressful time, with that woman being responsible for me losing my two roosters to Animal Control. Roosters aren’t allowed in the city, because the city is sexist. Apparently I built the trap door, the entire spiral staircase, and the connecting tunnel in one night, and I made my wife, my boyfriend, and my ninja son help, and now I’m the only one who doesn’t remember it. That’s embarrassing. After that woman did that, and tried to stop us from rescuing our own chickens, my wife started anonymously harassing her and sending her moldy videotapes until she sold the house and left town. Gotta say I like the new owners a lot better.

I hang out with the scientist a couple nights a week, after we get some furniture in there. My wife goes swimming in their pool, but I’m not a big fan of swimming; I go to the bunker with him and we shoot the shit and drink some beers, while my wife and his wife talk about gardening and practice my wife’s very rusty Spanish. My wife learned about ten languages but isn’t fluent in any of them, although she can say “This beautiful green Earth will soon be mine!” in Japanese. Maybe she shouldn’t have learned so much of it from anime.

It’s not easy to admit to anyone that you’ve got a roach problem, let alone a new friend, but liquor lubricates a lot of conversational topics. Yeah, okay, so it’s not always beer we’re drinking. Sue me. I tell my friend about the roaches, and he tells me his company is working on this really amazing fantastic pesticide. It’s a fungus that destroys exoskeletons, and it infects bugs, and only bugs, and makes them do Cordyceps type bullshit where they crave light instead of hiding in the dark like verminous bugs usually do, so they come out where you can see them. Then you can kill them, or let the infection kill them. I’m kind of worried about zombie apocalypses but he assures me that the fungus cannot infect humans, or anything without an exoskeleton. That’s the only place the spores can grow.

That sounds awesome.

So we get some from him and we mix it with sugar and we put it down everywhere. Big rectangular squares around all the furniture. Up table legs and counter sides. All around the edges of the tables and the counters. We’re taking no chances. We pull out the dishwasher and oven and coat the bottoms and backsides of them. Normally this stuff would be scary expensive, but our pal is giving it to us for free – well, “free” meaning we’re giving him tons of ground beef from the cow we bought, plus weird organs because his wife knows how to cook them and me and my wife would have to google it, plus eggs. And my wife is helping his wife learn English, but that maybe doesn’t count because she’s helping my wife learn Spanish, so that’s a pretty even trade. We watch their kids sometimes too; we don’t have a swimming pool, but we do have practically every game machine released in the US and a couple that were Japan only, and a gigantic library of media on hard drive, most of which was legal. Well, somewhat legal. Well, a good bit of them, my wife borrowed from the library and then ripped to hard drive. The kids are not unhappy to come over our house, is my point.

By this point everyone is vaccinated and my friend’s workplace always was pretty safe because it’s a clean room, where people wear Tyvek suits over their entire bodies, and masks and goggles, long before Covid was a thing, and his wife doesn’t work and me and my wife work from home and their kids are still going to school online and mine aren’t going at all anymore. So we feel pretty comfortable sharing air even with Covid still going on. We’re seeing a lot more bugs, but my pal reminds me that that’s part of the goal of this stuff, to entice them to come out and bask in the sunlight so we can kill them more easily. His kids like to run through our house with water guns full of soapy water, shooting bugs (and each other, and my boyfriend, who plays with them). I don’t mind as long as they stay well away from the computer equipment and they clean up the water spills once they’re done. It’s free housecleaning. These kids are more helpful at keeping the place clean than my own kids have been in years.

Then we start to see clusters of the bugs stuck on the wall. It looks like spots of mold, but turns out to be mold-covered bugs sitting on the wall semi-stuck to each other. I’m allergic to mold. My friend says it’s not that kind of mold, am I allergic to mushrooms? And I point out, the spores, yes I am, because I used to grow mushrooms in my basement and they’d spray spores out every so often and my nose would run like it was training for a marathon. He’s chagrined, says he didn’t know, because yeah, of course these things are gonna come out in the sun and spray spores. Light makes them spore, that’s why the mold makes them want to go into the light.

So now I’m popping Zyrtec like it’s candy and there are more and more moldy bugs turning up. For some reason they really want to join up together, like the mold wants them to make a mold mat, so they all go stand next to each other, centipeedles and roaches and ants and fleas, all together. It’s getting flies and mosquitos and mealmoths, too; they don’t eat the sugar we mixed into the liquid suspension of spores, but if they land on the mold mat because they think it’s ordinary wall or floor, they’ll be joining it in a day or two. Spiders, too, presumably getting infected by eating infected bugs. It spreads outside because the house is porous and the bugs can go in and out; there’s a giant ant colony burrowed into the dirt walls of the tunnels I made a few years back, and those guys are coming up out of the dirt and making giant mold mats of ants on the sidewalk and in the grass. It’s pretty gross. My friend begs me not to tell anyone who asks about the product I used; apparently it was experimental and he could lose his job for giving it to me. Well, thanks, buddy, wish you’d warned me! He assures me this never happened in the lab. I’ll bet they didn’t have nearly so many bugs in the lab, and they were probably in terrariums or something where there just weren’t all that many bugs per habitat.

At the point where the outdoor walls start getting covered with mold mats made of ants and earwigs and the fleas that lurk in the grass waiting for unsuspecting cats to walk by, the city gets on my ass. Apparently my walls are covered with mold and I need to clean them off, it’s unsanitary and releasing spores. “You think?” I say with my red, teary eyes and in between violent sneezes as I fish for more Kleenex in my pocket. I cannot actually get anywhere near the mold mats, not without a full on respirator. We have N95 masks and safety goggles, but I try those things and a. the safety goggles immediately fog up so I can’t see and b. it doesn’t help, the spores are getting into the safety goggles and getting into my eyes anyway.

My wife, my boyfriend and the friend-who-got-me-into-this-mess step in to help out. They’re spraying the mold mats with bleach, which would kill the bugs even if the mold hadn’t killed them yet, and scraping them off the walls with shovels and brooms. The ones they find in the yard, they dig underneath and cover them with dirt, then copper fungicide because, unlike bleach, that won’t kill plants that try to grow in the dirt. My friend has some more weird chemicals he thinks might help, but frankly I’m done; I got centipeedles to kill the roaches and then I got this stuff to kill the centipeedles and the roaches and it’s just made matters worse. Everyone in the world is allergic to roaches but not nearly as badly as I am to this mold. I’ve graduated to Benadryl, and bourbon, which does nothing about the allergies except to help me sleep through them. My wife says I’m not supposed to drink while taking Benadryl but I ask you, how do you look at your walls covered with mats of dead bugs that are growing mold and not drink?

The ants apparently go everywhere. Other neighbors are ending up with mold mats on their lawn. This is getting out of hand. I joke about setting the neighborhood on fire, but my wife reminds me that setting mold on fire just spreads spores.

So that gives me an idea.

We’ve got this water main that’s been broken for, oh, ten years now. The city keeps coming out to fix it and it just doesn’t fix. First it was up the street, pouring water down our street for years, winter and summer, which meant the road would turn into a slick sheet of ice every winter. Then they fixed it so that now it forms a pond in the median right outside my house. Maybe eventually they’d have stoppered that up too, but they left a backhoe on the median and somebody stole it. Not me or my family, for once; we checked the cameras but they weren’t pointing at the backhoe so we never figured out who did it. Anyway, mold likes damp, but things that like damp don’t necessarily like serious amounts of water, right?

My friend and I hook up pipes to the broken water main, and connect them to hoses, and connect the hoses to pumps, and pull all the water up the street to some of the neighbors behind my house who paved their back yards. We empty out the furniture from the underground room and clean out our respective basements, first, and park the cars up the street on the hill above all this. Then we let the water go.

This floods the neighborhood.

Yes. Again.

Everything below the level of where we’re pumping the water main to gets flooded. Yards and basements fill with water and wash down the hill to the river, which is really more of a cranky little creek most of the time, and the river washes it all down to the bay, where it should be diluted to the point where it won’t hurt the crabs. My friend assures me that this mold was bio-engineered to not be good at handling a lot of water. It can drown, too, even its spores. If they’re floating in water and they encounter a crab, they won’t be able to germinate on its shell. This is very important because around here we love our crabs. Of course, all this disturbed some local ghosts – ghosts don’t like flooding – but honestly I feel like it’s just negligence if you still have ghosts. We had all those floods a decade ago, like the one my car floated off in, so everyone should have known by now that there are ghosts in the area and they don’t like floods, so get them exorcised pre-emptively. It’s kind of like not having fire extinguishers in your house, if you don’t get the exorcism done.

We go around to any of our neighbors with a mold mat on the walls, and spray it off with a power washer. So far thankfully none of them have ended up with mold mats inside their houses, which just goes to show you how much the gods hate my house. We do not admit that any of this is our fault, just being good neighbors and helping out, but unfortunately my neighbors know me too well.

So this is great. Our animals are free of fleas, there’s no flies or mosquitos around for once in our lives, the mealmoths and the roaches and the centipeedles are gone, there’s no ants. And this is true all over the neighborhood. The bees seem to be fine; bees seemed to know not to land on the mold mats, and we didn’t poison with sugared fungus outside, so there was nothing to attract them to the fungus. Wasps, unfortunately, are fine too, but fuck it, they’re pollinators and I have fruit trees so I guess that’s okay. So this all ought to be great, right? Everybody happy, the whole neighborhood free of bug pests?

The city is now fining me out the ass for “stealing water”, even though come on, it’s bubbling up from the broken water mains so much it made a mosquito-growing pond, and I’m the one who got rid of the mosquitoes. (For the larvae in the pond, we just used mosquito dunks, plus our stunt temporarily drained the pond.) My neighbors are suing me for various things, including pain and suffering, water damage to their yards, riling up ghosts, and the death of so many poor innocent little buggies. (Are you kidding me? There are people around here actively mourning the deaths of flies and roaches. What the hell is wrong with people?)

And that is why I have posted this GoFundMe. Because I got rid of an entire neighborhood’s worth of bugs, at least for this year – no illusions about them coming back next year now that we’ve washed away all the spores – and people are suing me for it. And I’m not willing to throw my chemist friend under the bus legally, since he could lose his job, so the defense “this guy told me it was okay” is not gonna help. And everyone who wanted to get into the cloud when Covid hit already has by now, so business is not exactly booming anymore. Anybody want to help a guy out?

[lifeasatargetedindividual]

So it's very obvious now, Uncle Sam has officially declared war on my mind and body. I suppose they feel they have a point to prove to me on who has the "biggest balls;" who can do the most damage. For an entire month now I've been dealing with the amped up DEW's and remote physical assaults against my body. Last night they induced severe insomnia in me, not allowing me to drift off to sleep until around or after 7 in the morning. The entire time I dealt with nothing but back to back attacks against my mind, but mostly my body. Never have they done it to that extent. Never. Although the V2K reported they took it that far for my posts and video on social media yesterday, I suspect as well this is their way of an extreme lash back for my stepping up with my advocation not just against Organized Harassment, but against the government in general. I keep being told, "You need to give up. Just. Give. Up!" and "You deserve it!" as I'm expected to submit to their demands for complete silence/submission. Even in the rare moments I'm completely quiet as they claim they want, they continue blasting me out. They ran a number on me last night up to this morning, but it still isn't enough for them apparently, as even right now I'm still being assaulted back to back to back to back. They're really getting off on it, and I know without it even being said, so is the background "audience" of everyone with access to watching my every move. The Program seems to purposely be trying to drive me crazy in a short period of time, with amped up tactics, all because of my social media advocation. I must have a lot of people's attention, even other T.I.'s, for my enemies to be fighting me so viciously. Constantly pulling at my clothes, constantly running what feels to be water droplets down my head and the back of my neck and down my cleavage, constantly touching me all over my body, constantly pulling and playing with my hair, constantly attacking my eyes and face, constantly playing with my legs, constantly bombarding me with intense heat waves and from time to time skin burning. Constantly, constantly, constantly. Nonstop. Never have they amped it up this much for such a long period of time. I'm not sure if I'm expected as well to drop down and suck the government's dick, along with Mister Brinley since the V2K pleasantly enjoys bringing his name up while bragging of making me suffer. The male voice I once referred to as "Michael" has even told me on several occasions, HE is Brinley. I know it's a lie because 1) that is not his voice and 2) the V2K is just a machine, capable of taking on anyone's voice. Either way it goes, I guess they want me to break down and cry my eyes out to use me yet again as a prime example of what they can do with their technology. I always keep it real: part of me wants to, just to get it out of my system. But I'm not much one for crying when I'm aware of over half the world watching me. They may get special invites to my suffering and struggles.

But my tears are my own.

I'm not all that great with shielding techniques because most of the ones I've tried have not worked for me. But considering the amped up tactics, I'm gonna give the research another try, see if I can find at least something that'll work in the meantime. At this point, I'm beginning to suspect, this may not only be the government lashing back, but an attempt to go in for the kill. They're too desperate in trying to get me to submit to them. Something's definitely up.