#year 4 round 3

[omgcpbracket]

Year 4 Round 3

4.12 Coach III vs 4.22 Check

[chiropteracupola]

"What Grows on the Oak," 2024.

it's the time of year, once more, for an original spooky story!

The oak trees lie across the hills like low smoke, soft and near, and the road dips down into the valley, as inviting as any road has ever been, but the girl on the bench of the buggy on the hilltop makes no move to follow it.

Rose looks out down the road and over the hills, and taps her fingers beside her on the bench. It’s a quiet enough afternoon that there’s little other sound but the high thin sound of insects, and the wind in the long grass, and Rose’s fingers, tapping. The horse, still in harness, looks up and flicks its ear, as if in protest at the sound, and Rose sighs and forces her hand still.

There is a girl in the nearest tree, Rose notices — the fact of it is idly categorized, without true interest. All the same, the light is catching in her hair, dashing shadows over her face as she sits draped across the curve of a branch, and Rose cannot look away from her.

The Fosters, at whose door Rose waits, have no daughter — no children but the one still-toddling son, who Rose remembers as a colicky, twitchy boy. Besides, this girl looks nothing like Mr Foster and his wife, for her hair stands out about her head like a bundle of mistletoe, pale as sun-worn wood. She is, perhaps, their hired girl. Rose is struck by envy, suddenly, that the Fosters’ hired girl had the time to shinny up a tree in the last light of evening, and still would be paid for her work…

Rose sighs, leaning her chin on her hand. Perhaps it is enough for her to be her father’s driver, and to have bed and board in his house — perhaps some day there will be money for school again, in San Francisco or even out east. And perhaps it is not enough, and perhaps there will not ever be.

“Hello, doctor’s driver,” says a voice at Rose’s elbow. Rose yelps in surprise, then turns. It is the girl with the mistletoe hair — dry moss hair — hair like a cloudy day in August.

“No, you’re his daughter, are you not?” asks the Fosters’ hired girl, and Rose nods. “Miss del Llano, that’d make you.”

“Just Rose, please.” She’ll be Miss some other day — not now, in her too-short skirts and with her plait hanging over her shoulder.

“May I come up?” asks the girl.

“Surely,” says Rose, and the girl has swung herself into Rose’s father’s accustomed seat in a fluttering of pale skirts.

“Your father is the doctor — what does he do here? “He is a leech, then? A bloodletter?”

“Don’t be silly, he’s not medieval!”

“Hm-mm, I shall believe you when you prove it me,” says the girl, laughing, and leans her chin on her hand to make herself Rose’s mirror. Side by side they sit for a while, and the dark gathers in across the hills until oaks and grassland alike are made one mass of shadow. Somewhere in the trees beyond the road, a horned owl utters its deep, melancholy cry out into the dusk.

“If ghosts had telephones, I should think they’d sound rather like that,” says Rose, the early chill of after-sunset driving her quite easily to a morbid sort of cheer.

“How the times change,” says the girl, with an odd, but not entirely unhappy, look in her eyes. “No, my dear; ghosts use the same telephones as you and I, as you well know.” Rose does not know, well or otherwise, much at all about ghosts, so she nods, and feels a little more of the girl’s weight settle on her shoulder.

“You have very cold hands,” says Rose, and the girl from the oak tree smiles and taps at Rose’s cheek with clammy fingers.

“I always have, I’m afraid.”

“It’s no bother, really.” And so they sit and watch the sky, the falling-dusk and the distant fog that creeps over the hills, until there’s light, sharp as a door opening.

Rose turns, and it is only Dr del Llano, leaving his patient with his hat in his hand. She turns back, and the Fosters’ hired girl is gone.

“How is Mrs. Foster,” Rose asks, without any particular feeling in her voice, and her father shakes his head in reply. But the road down into the valley, where lies the town, is before them, and Rose is pleased enough at the journeying that she asks no further questions.

It’s in the hills and on the road that Rose meets, again, with the oak tree girl, the mistletoe girl, the girl with hands like marble in the shade. Once again, Rose is waiting for her father while he attends a patient, and, lazing in the sun, Rose has pushed the sleeves of her shirtwaist up to her elbows.

And then the girl is there again, with her shock of cobweb hair moving, ever so faintly, in a breeze that doesn’t seem to reach as far as the buggy-seat.

“Hello, my pretty-lovely,” says the girl, putting her hand out to the horse still in its traces. Though usually affectionate, the horse puts back its ears and pulls its head away.

“I don’t know what’s gotten into her,” says Rose, half-laughing. “Save your sweet words for someone who wants them, all the same.”

“Has she a name, then?”

“Other than Morgan, for what she is? Not at all,” Rose replies. Neither she nor her father have ever thought of one, for all that they’re fond of the hardworking little mare. “And have you a name, then?” For she’s remembered, now, that her oak-tree girl had never told her of it.

“I’m called Saro,” says the girl, and again swings herself up beside Rose. “What does your father do here, my Rose?”

“Oh, I oughtn’t say,” and Saro looks back at her with a stare of please? and Rose laughs and says anyway. She shouldn’t gossip, but she leans in close anyway, and whispers that “Old Man Lucas has got the clap, and him a widower these ten years!” Saro’s mouth twitches at the corners — she can’t hide her laugh for long, and it bursts, bright, out from her.

“I shall tell, I shall tell!” says she, and Rose coughs on her own laugh with a still-merry “Don’t!”

“You’ll have to catch me and make me, first!” and Saro leaps down from the buggy and runs, her skirts, her hair a flash of white in the golden-dry grass. And Rose, her spirits raised beyond what a grown girl such as herself should permit, follows. She’s less fleet-footed than Saro, earthbound still, stumbling on furrows in the land, catching her heels in ground-squirrel burrows.

Saro, she’s sure, is holding back for her benefit — letting herself be caught. And Rose does catch her, knocking her off her feet and into the grass. Saro’s laughing-merry still, her hair stuck full of grass-seed and foxtails. Close-to, Rose can see the freckles that dapple her cheeks and nose, the squint of her dark eyes when she smiles. Saro flicks Rose’s cheek, the snap of her fingers like a prickle of frost, and Rose lies there in the dusty field, entirely lost.

But Saro’s on her feet again before Rose can blink, before Rose can reach out to her, and Rose is standing, blinking in the sunlight, stumbling back to the buggy as she dusts bits of dry grass from her skirt. She buttons the sleeves of her shirtwaist again, the cuffs of which don’t quite come to her wrists anymore, and laughs when her father hands her up into her seat like a lady.

“The best whip I ever had,” he says, perfectly straight-faced.

“Gee-up!” says Rose, holding the reins in one hand and imagining herself perched atop a stagecoach. But even for all her imaginings, she’s as good a driver as her father says, and draws the horse into a gentle trot to see them home. It’s hill and dale down into the valley, hill and dale again like a song, and in the inner slopes lie trees in amid the dust-golden grasses of summer. Beneath the sparse, spreading branches, it is suddenly cooler, then warmer again, as the horse steps evenly onward and back into the sun.

“That’s mistletoe, you know,” says Dr del Llano, as he’s said a thousand times before, and points up at the gray-green mass that clings among the summer-sparse branches of an oak.

“Isn’t that for Christmastime?” asks Rose.

“It’s an odd thing we bring it in for the Nativity,” muses her father, still looking back at the tree as they pass it by. “Poison, that — and it chokes the life out of the oak tree, too. Not a kindly thing, mistletoe, but we hang it up with the flor de Nochebuena all the same…”

He doesn’t speak after that, but sings instead, an out-of-season hymn of sons newborn and deaths already foretold. If the verse telling of tombs ought to be grim, Dr del Llano doesn’t make it so, and so the story of gloom and gravity is nothing but a blithe eventuality, predicted all light-hearted by a man very certain of the truth of it.

Mrs. Foster dies soon after. Rose sits in the church as the priest says the first of the masses for her, the first of seven that her widower has paid for. She waits at the door while her father makes conversation — how she wishes he would hurry up! But the doctor in his black coat and the priest in his cassock are two crows alike, and so she is there in the doorway until her father says ‘good-by, Padre’ and comes to join her. Rose hardly has the time to shut her hymnal closed over the catalog tucked inside before he bustles past her, eager now to be on his way.

“Damned quiet place now that the mine’s shut up,” he says on the walk home, and Rose nods, though she does not remember the mine-town as her father does. She knows that there is no more coal to be had here and no more sand, and that with the mine has gone much of her father’s custom. Without black-lung and burns and broken bones, there is far less for a doctor to do in these hills.

But there is no other doctor than Juan Soto del Llano, with his limping step and his rosary about his neck and his rattletrap of a horse-drawn buggy with his only daughter to drive it, so he goes on as he has, and mends up broken bones and offers fever-cures to farmers and their wives, and to the valley townsfolk nearer home.

Henry Freeman is twenty-two, the bright young son of a new-money farmer. He is sickening for something, he is grey-faced and cold and his eyes do not focus.

Dr del Llano is at his door with hat in hand — money passes from the elder Mr. Freeman’s worn hand into his, and the doctor closes the older man’s hand over the coins. Out on the bench of the buggy, Rose scoffs and shakes her head. The fog-touched night is cold even through her coat, and she shivers involuntarily.

“He oughn’t to do such things,” she says, to no one but herself. But all the same, Rose turns her head, and Saro is there beside her, smiling.

“What oughtn’t he do?” asks Saro, with the questioning merriment in her voice that Rose has come to like so well.

“He doesn’t ask for payment, when it’s hill sickness,” and, seeing Saro’s quirk of the mouth, the way the question lurks in her well-dark eyes, Rose continues. “Father doesn’t know what it is, still, and he can’t mend it. It cannot be consumption, for it doesn’t settle in the lungs, but all the same — it is as if something is drawing out the life from them, every one.”

“So your Henry Freeman shall die, then,” says Saro, blunt.

“Don’t—“ says Rose, and stops, cold. “Who are you?” she asks, and looks Saro in the eyes, the brown of them so dark that Rose can barely find her own reflection. And the girl with the mistletoe hair reaches out, and pulls her hand across the golden curve of the hill as if she is stroking the grass that lies like dry cowhide on the ground.

“You know my name, doctor’s daughter, is that not enough?”

“Saro—“ Footsteps, and Rose’s head turns without her willing it. Doctor del Llano still has his sleeves rolled up, the edges wet from scrubbing. He doesn’t let them down again as he drags on his coat, hauling himself up to the buggy-seat as if held down by a great weight.

“Father—“ says Rose, and looks to Saro beside her, but even as she turns back, Saro is gone again.

“I’ll not talk of it,” he says, and hauls his bag into the buggy. It might well weigh as much as all the world. Rose huffs, and pulls her arms against her chest, and sets them on the road again.

And so it goes, over and over again — the Misses Hayward, unmarried, a few years older than Rose herself — Martin Foster, only three — the widow Ruiz, whose husband died down the mine before Rose was born. All of them greying, cold, dying quick. There is sickness in the hills, and it is sickness that the doctor cannot cure, and Rose — Rose finds that she barely cares. She stands in the church, once more, at Lillie Hayward’s funeral, and cannot look at the coffin, but only turns her head to search for wild light hair among the townsfolk in the pews.

But Saro doesn’t come to town; that’s not the place for her, Rose knows. How could she stay anywhere else but where the wind drags the points of oak leaves down the sky, where the tall grass parts under her hands like water?

So life goes on as it did before — the spiders building their webs across the age-grey clapboards of the doctor’s house by the old mine, the oak leaves stuck by their prickling edges to the drying wash, Rose’s father singing softly in his parents’ Spanish as he stocks his black bag at his desk in the front-room.

Rose leans against the desk, chipping at the varnish with her fingernails. In concession to the afternoon heat, the eastward window is flung open, and the thinnest breeze flicks at the pages of the last Sears catalog laid idly within her reach. She has begun to resent the sun — she closes her eyes, hunting darkness for darkness’s sake, and thinks of Saro in her white skirts, standing candle-slender in the dusk between the hills, Saro’s hands that are always cold, pressed softly against Rose’s face, her neck, her chest.

Telephone, its jangling sound sharp in the late-summer quiet — her father’s soft noises of questioning and assent — the practiced movements of putting harness to the horse. But for all that the interruption is sharp, there’s a pleased rise in Rose’s heart nonetheless, for if she is lucky, she will see Saro on the road.

She reins in the horse when her father tells her so, and hands him his bag as he jumps from the buggy — once he’s gone, Rose allows herself a secret smile. It’s early in the evening now, with the light all golden, her father’s horse with its dark mane a-gleaming in the last of the sun. Rose has a flask of coffee with her, brewed black as her father’s coat. She drinks most of it, hot and bitter, never mind that it had been meant to be shared. It doesn’t keep her awake — she drowses, head on her arms, and feels a breeze like soft hands stroke along her neck.

Today she has a headache. Her face is hot, even with her collar unbuttoned and her hat laid aside in her father’s seat. The day is warm, and the air tastes of dust, hot and dry in Rose’s throat. Saro’s hand on her cheek is as sweet and cold as anything Rose has ever snuck from the ice-house. Saro’s mouth against her neck is a cool draught.

“My dear sweet Rose,” says Saro, quiet, with only the barest hint of her usual merriment. “You’ve been ever so patient, even while I took my time with others.”

“Mm,” says Rose, and lets the weight of her body press up against Saro’s cold frame. Perhaps — perhaps that cold could leach the heavy heat from her head, the feverish blur from her eyes.

Saro’s fingers are at the buttons of Rose’s shirtwaist, now, the full breadth of her hand an ice-print on Rose’s chest. Saro from the oak tree, Saro with her hair like mistletoe. The hills rise golden around them, the wind rushing in Rose’s ears without touching her skin.

“May I?”

“Please,” says Rose, at the last, and lets Saro draw away the last of her living warmth.

[fisheito]

hiya l'il-- medium?...large?? Assorted Sizes-Guy

oh thanks! i could always use more spices-

. what am i supposed to do with this.

[project-sekai-facts]

How exactly do they manage to have such long gaps between focus songs like with toya? Like it's not like they can just skip his focus events bc of event cycles, so do they just make songs that don't have him as the focus for his events? Or was he just on the far end of the cycle each time (beginning of the last cycle, late this cycle)?

Until rotation 4 (the current one), he’s always been the second VBS event. This time round, he’s the fourth, due to how the story worked out with 3rd anniversary arc enders and all that. Songs are commissioned specifically for event stories and their focus characters, so it’s not like they’ve given one of his songs to someone else, it’s just that he hasn’t had a unit event in ages due to natural story progression. Same applies to Rui, but at least he’s getting an event this month.

[writeouswriter]

Had a great time playing Sims today (spent 3 and a half hours searching for and downloading custom content and never once turned on the game)

[icewindandboringhorror]

More misc. daily life pictures and such

[britneyshakespeare]

you know i'm also glad i was able to be a long-term sub for a para at the middle school for the last few weeks of the last school year bc once people's typical college semester ended, getting jobs in the sub management software fucking sucked. all these fuckin college kids popped outta nowhere and crept into every corner and everything was like you had to grab it as soon as possible, which is also just the worst bc like, summer is around the corner and that's 2 months where i don't get to earn that regular income.

and i have an odd resentment for the college kids who sub for that short gap between may and june and i dont know why. is it jealousy? is that a proper word for it? morally i know they are doing NOTHING wrong, and if anything they are doing good bc they're ACTUALLY WORKING!!!! like the sub shortages for the rest of the school year is fucking crazy. the few ppl who actually do show up to sub on a regular basis (AKA old retired teachers and me) get pulled in every which way and frequently don't even get a full half-hour break. i guess i just feel like, it must be nice for that job to be a convenient short-term thing for them. bc it's not, for me.

perhaps i feel some sort of pride in being useful and reliable at my shitty little unglamorous poorly-paid job in a public school district. perhaps i do. where were you college students in the dead of february right before the winter break week and peak flu season? huh? where were you? in your DORMITORIES? i bet. well i was here. in the hall

[benechillax]

man i think i’m 5 seconds away from a mental breakdown

[spxcesuits]

society if anime subs and dubs stopped using american terminology when describing school years/grades

[the-physicality]

i do think, aside from mercury bias, if bg had been in all season she would have been all wnba, first or at least second. i think people undervalue her because of the rebounding but she is 1000% the worst officiated player in the league, on both sides of the court. so the fact that she's been able to have the performance that she had is incredible, and that she didn't get the acknowledgment really just underscores how much people take what she does for granted.

[omgcpbracket]

Year 4 Round 3

4.14 Christmas In Madison I vs 4.25 Faber

[bookie-the-reading-junkie]

I went looking for wild grapes a week or so ago and was devastated when I thought there were none in the spot where I knew there used to be some, even last year. Because grapes can be very invasive and grow super fast, I'm pretty sure that they were cut back (or sprayed with some sort of weed killer) and the vines that grew back were too young for fruit, which has to be to a year or two old.

But success! I found some on accident! Also by train tracks lol

Since wild grapes are so tasty and I feel that everyone should try them if they have the chance. They are more sour, but they have such an intense favor and I love it. The juice stains super easily, including your skin, turning from a bright purple to a blue to a purply gray. unfortunate that the prettier shades can't be dyed (that I know of). It's not at that point in the season yet, but they can ferment on the vine and are quite the surprise if you eat it (the berries will wrinkle). My dad once saw a bird that was presumably drunk on fermented wild grapes.

however, as always when you forage something, you need to be absolutely, 100% certain what you're eating is not a poisonous look alike. The one I run into most often is poke weed which looks like this:

Poke weed berries are POISONOUS. they are identifiable with their pink stems, black shiny berries, and long leaves. In comparison, wild grapes have a "haze" on the skin (which is normal and safe to eat, it's basically natural wax) that can be wiped off, intense blue color, green stem, and the berries are spaced irregularly.

However, there's another much closer look alike (that I haven't seen, but is in many US states and Canada) called Moonseed, which is also very poisonous

These are NOT grapes. since they look practically identical, the best way to tell the difference between the two, you can look at the seeds: moonseed have flat, crescent shaped seeds (middle picture) while grapes have rounder ones. the left picture is a comparison between the two seeds. the leaves also look different. Grape leaves are serrated or toothed with three main points (actually not so different from maple leaves except rounder). Moonseed seems to have a few varieties with different leaves, ranging from heart shaped to closer in shape to grape leaves, but none serrated.

If you really aren't sure, don't eat it. Better to be safe than sorry. I am not a foraging expert, just someone who has been eating wild grapes for many a year.

(one final pic because pretty and it shows the leaves and berries off well)

[thedreadvampy]

The hipsters are truly descending on Leith. I thought this flavour of waxed moustache striped shirt pocket watch and sunglasses Coolest Kids At The Warehouse Rave Mr B fucker died out in like 2012 but no they're everywhere. moustaches waxed up to the heavens tweed in 26° spring weather.

my going theory now is that this style of hipster is just an inevitable symptom of gentrification at any point in history. assume when Londinium was first becoming a metropolis it was beset by moustachioed men in pinstripe toga with pocket sundials. twats.

[babyloniastreasure]

i have so much disappointment about summer 8 i dont even know where to begin

[sack-thing]

Yesss love getting inspiration again for new little extra content as I translate my script :')

[gleesongtournament]