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mclalan · 9 months ago

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Corp Zomphis, 2020s Design Speculation

I want to talk about Corp Memphis again— that corporate style of gangly, dead-eyed characters trapped in a neoliberal purgatory, posed between pot plants and spreadsheets.

I don't need to go too far into describing it. Heaven knows there are already so many takes on it that you're probably sick of hearing about it. However, I think a succinct description of it can be found at the end of that Wired magazine article from a few years back:

Wired: Corporate Memphis: The Tech Industry’s Favourite New Art Style

"But, despite all this, it may not be worth lamenting the immense reach of Corporate Memphis or the design possibilities we’ve been deprived of because of it. The style is, after all, simply a reflection of big tech, and how it has constructed a world with users on one side and executives on the other.

A more interesting and visually rich digital space would mean more than coming up with a new illustration style—it would require a change in how the tech economy is run. Until then, Corporate Memphis is likely to stick around, bendy arms and all."

This touches on why Corporate Memphis looks the way it does: it's a reflection of the material reality it's made in and the economic conditions it serves.

To work in a design job today often involves being a "multi-practitioner"— corp speak for a jack of all trades. You might have multiple platforms to manage, need to create a mix of media (motion graphics, branding, illustrations, etc.), and produce multiple pieces of content, all for some pointless product consumed by placated consumers.

And that’s all in a day's work, to be repeated the next. It's gruelling, unforgiving, mind-numbing work—especially if you take pride in what you do. Life doesn't become easier, but it does become bearable if the medium you're working in isn't fighting against you. A style that can work across platforms, can be easy enough for anyone in the department to use, but versatile enough to allow effort when there's time and money. It's homogeneous to the point where the messy, qualitative complications of art direction don't come into play. You can download a vector stock or make it in-house with relative ease and speed, and it looks good enough. The consumer, despite being fatigued by it all, seems to find it good enough. And that's what marks the style really: it's "good enough." It's a style linked to speed and practicality in the face of intense demand and pressure, low industry wages, accessible skills for entry levels, and high corporate barriers as everything's locked within Adobe's infrastructure.

But its strength as this homogeneous vector glob style, with its lack of any real individual identity, is also its biggest weakness. Although I'm sure some designers might enjoy working in this style, it's not really a style designed for creative individual expression. It's called "corporate" for a reason. If you want something different, you might be tempted to try freelancing...

Outside the corporate design department, you might think you're finally free to create in your own style, no longer having to work in that dreaded Corporate Memphis one anymore. But it’s hard enough to work in your own individual style under the best of circumstances. That's because the whole economy is based on the same structures of endless content production for algorithmically optimised consumption that allowed Corp Memphis to thrive, so you're still facing familiar obstacles—creating vast amounts of content, quickly, for wide and insatiable consumer audiences. So, in a way, we have this algorithm-enforced market of content, favouring those who have optimised their style to be better seen by it. It's no wonder Corporate Memphis has endured past its welcome.

However, despite all that, illustrators and artists still plod on. They end up making stuff, somehow navigating these systems— either playing them like a fiddle, outright rejecting them, or going accelerationist about it, like with something such as Corecore. Self-expression can take many forms, and that potential untapped capital value is tantalisingly mouthwatering to corporate capitalists.

Corp Memphis is optimised to a fault. It's too polished, too automated, and fits too well with the well-oiled design apparatus. Thus, it's developed a semiotics to reflect this—it's cheap and it's perceived as cheap. That's why an art director (typically) won’t just stick some Corp Memphis imagine on an album cover or use it to illustrate a particular lifestyle magazine. It wouldn't suit it, it's signalling the wrong stuff. Culture, art, ideas, aesthetics are reflected in work created by practitioners with an artistic vision, or that taps into what's going on in the present. And this is reflected in their art style, something Corp Memphis can't easily do, if at all.

That's why there's still a kind of fringe freelance industry with a speciality in design identity, otherwise known in the industry as "creatives", albeit small and closely gatekept by the likes of legacy institutions such as Goldsmiths and corporate industry leaders like The HudsonBec Group. If a corporation needs design to be spiced up with some kind of creative identity, it'll turn to these agencies or freelancers from this background rather than use Corp Memphis.

But the sad thing is how a corporation doesn't have total control over the process and thus can't control the value and pricing since they have to deal with hiring these pesky freelancers. But how does a corporation even know who to hire? With moodboards, of course! It’s easier to hire someone in-house with "good taste," who can simply curate hot practitioners to hire, like a dragon collecting .png gems. Although a corporation will try to get the best deal it can, these pesky freelancers can potentially negotiate a price for themselves, especially if they’re some big shot who holds a lot of cultural capital.

But another benefit of a moodboard is that it can be converted into a design guide. Simply share the sorts of designers and illustrators that a corporation dreams of hiring but with a cheaper designer, and ask if they can copy the desired style for less. Failing that, they can just outright steal the style anyway. If the creator is small enough, who cares?

But the value and cultural capital that corporations must seek outside their infrastructure, the very thing Corp Memphis cannot do, comes at the price of what Corp Memphis can do. Freelancers are annoying to corporations. They’re inconsistent, outside their remit, and expensive—since any level of lost capital is an expense. And worse of all, they don’t own them. Work made in-house in a corporation is completely theirs to be used forever, however they see fit. A freelance gig is limited to the contract, and typically you have to keep paying for different uses, or pay a lot if it’s expected to be used for something big.

How dare these skilled workers... sorry, freelancers, leverage themselves. If only we, the corporation, could control and treat the work of freelanced art direction like we do Corporate Memphis. Well, maybe we can—with AI.

AI is a whole can of worms of its own. But I will outline how AI shares a lot with Corp Memphis in terms of mechanics, but it's not "good enough" like Corp Memphis is in terms of its aesthetics.

Let's put it like this, if Corp Memphis is above a stock image, which is above clip art, which is above a farting Elsa asset-flip mobile game, then AI-generated images are below that, sharing the same disdainful semiotics of a YouTube thumbnail. AI renders are synonymous with trash, with viewers combing over images seeking out any sniff of AI to decry it. This is, of course, unfortunate for corporations, because AI is wonderfully cheap and efficient to produce. The problem with even "the best" AI is that it still reeks of AI, because it's trained on relatively limited data sets that are the wrong semiotics that corporations typically use and that their consumers are typically familiar with. It's not consistent with typical standards and trends. But even the AI art styles synonymous with AI are really that of unfortunate ArtStation artists whose work has been stolen, scraped, and trained into these models. But none of it is directed, follows trends, or should I say, reflects trends favoured by brands.

Design industry standard work is also bolstered by their industry standing. Their "credibility" sets them apart from, as Mark Zuckerberg puts it, the worthless creators and publishers who ‘overestimate their value’. Sure Zuckerberg might say design is worthless, but let's not forget that Facebook Alegria, the design language developed for Facebook by the mega studio Buck Design in 2017, pretty much started Corp Memphis! I don't know how much that would have cost Zuck, but given how huge Buck is, I don't know, close to $1 million if I had to speculate. So what Zuck is actually saying is you are worthless, without your titles and industry standing, and are ripe for the scrapping.

I still think it would appear crass to the wider public if someone as tactless as Zuck were to steal wholesale from something like It’s Nice That's list of featured artists, due to the "prestigious" tutelage and culture capital of such trendy practitioners. Good luck if you're on your own though.

There's also the issue of copyright. I've no idea how litigious David Rudnick is, maybe he wouldn't even mind, but perhaps it would be legally safer to just hire a copycat of him rather than train an AI on his work. There's no shortage of copycats of him after all, and they'd probably do a better job than AI anyway.

No, a corporation if it wants to avoid all this mess will instead use AI this way:

Step One: Moodboardism

Directed by their little Pinterest moodboards and Instagram saves, a corporation will find the next latest and strongest trend that they want to utilise, be it Y2K or whatever's current on the human ant colony-as-algorithm site, Carri Institute's aesthetics.

Step Two: The Sellout

Hire an on trend freelancer with a large sack of money marked with a dollar sign to do a year's worth of graphic content in a particular on trend style. This is all then fed into their in-house AI database model.

Step Three: Rise and Grind

It's then handed over to the in-house sweatshop graphic designers as the latest toolset that they have to use. They're now tasked with grinding out prompts in this trendy style with the consistency, efficiency, and speed once only achievable with Corp Memphis.

So congratulations, now we have AI that isn't generic Facebook shrimp Jesus trash; it'll be its own unique trash. And sure, perhaps some AI artefacts might come through, but that's what the in-house graphic designers are for— to Photoshop those fingers. The corp no longer needs to put up with some meddlesome expensive freelance art director, as the AI model is consistent enough that someone in-house can direct it, just like Corporate Memphis. And even then, if it still comes across as AI-ish, the hope is that for the general public, it's "good enough", just like Corp... You get the idea.

And this is possible because a freelancers' perceived autonomous strength as corporate mercenaries is also their biggest weakness. They think they can dance with the devil and win, making essentially veneers for capitalists, never once thinking the corporations will one day come to extract capital from them too. Corporate Memphis is never going to die; it's going to mutate into a corporate zombie... Corp Zomphis?

Why bother hiring individual skilled freelancers to do a job in a specific style when you have a year's worth of art, seeded by one of them, to prompt out your own "unique" designs in their style. It's more efficient and cheaper to approach design as a egragore hungry for its next feed, rather than pay for a single illustration. But you'll just have to trust me when I say that I'm not making this up; annual hires to train their own ai is genuinely what big corporation are doing.

But what about the industry, are they just gonna let it happen? I don't know. But I think freelancers don't typically see themselves as a working class, but instead as individualistic, competitive even, little businesses. This is why I think corps will be able to steamroll over freelance designers and illustrators with AI driven Corp Zomphis, because there's no solidarity amongst designers and illustrators, unlike US animators with their union and perception of themsleves as workers. If one freelancer rejects that devil deal to make the annual quantity of prompt feed for a corp, then the next hire will. I remember even hearing the AoI stressing how it wasn't a union, as if union was a dirty word. Instead its existence is to help one interface with their corporate client overlord. Well, soon enough that interfacing will be about betraying your industry freelance brethren to a corporate egragore, basically turning everything into a potential Corporate Memphis reskin. If Corporate Memphis is the design logic of the economy of the 2010s, then I wouldn't be surprised to see people nostalgic for it in the future, if the speculative 2020s model I've described turns out to be true.

#mclalan #art #illustration #corporate memphis #design #essay writing

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spacetimewithstuartgary · 1 month ago

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A multitude of protoplanetary discs detected in the galactic centre

For decades, astronomers have discovered hundreds of protoplanetary disks – structures believed to represent the early stages of our own solar system. However, most of these discoveries lie within our neighbourhood, which may not reflect the extreme conditions found in other parts of the Milky Way. Among the most dynamic and turbulent regions is the Central Molecular Zone (CMZ) near the Milky Way Galactic Centre, where high pressure and density may shape star and planet formation in fundamentally different ways. Studying protoplanetary systems in the CMZ provides a rare opportunity to test and refine our theories of solar system formation.

An international team of researchers from the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Peking University (KIAA, PKU), the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory (SHAO), and the Institute of Astrophysics of the University of Cologne (UoC), along with several collaborating institutions, has conducted the most sensitive, highest-resolution, and most complete survey to date of three representative molecular clouds in the Milky Way’s CMZ. Their observations revealed over five hundred dense cores – the sites where stars are being born. The results have been published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics under the title ‘Dual-band Unified Exploration of three Central Molecular Zone Clouds (DUET). Cloud-wide census of continuum sources showing low spectral indices’.

Detecting such systems in the CMZ is exceptionally challenging. These regions are distant, faint and deeply embedded in thick layers of interstellar dust. To overcome these obstacles, the team utilized the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in the Chilean Atacama Desert, an interferometric telescope that combines signals from antennas spread over several kilometres to achieve extraordinary angular resolution. “This allows us to resolve structures as small as a thousand astronomical units even at CMZ distances of roughly 17 billion AU away,” said Professor Xing Lu, a researcher at Shanghai Astronomical Observatory and the Principal Investigator of the ALMA observing project.

By reconfiguring the array and observing at multiple frequencies, the team performed ‘dual-band’ observations – capturing two different wavelengths at the same spatial resolution. Just as human vision relies on colour contrast to interpret the world, dual-band imaging provides critical spectral information about the temperature, dust properties and structure of these remote systems.

To their surprise, the researchers found that more than seventy percent of the dense cores appeared significantly redder than expected. After carefully ruling out observational bias and other possible explanations, they proposed two leading scenarios – both suggesting the widespread presence of protoplanetary disks.

“We were astonished to see these ‘little red dots’ cross the whole molecular clouds,” said first author Fengwei Xu, who is currently conducting research at the University of Cologne’s Institute of Astrophysics in the context of his doctoral work. “They are telling us the hidden nature of dense star-forming cores.”

One possible explanation is that these cores are not transparent, homogeneous spheres as once thought. Instead, they may contain smaller, optically thick structures – possibly protoplanetary disks – whose self-absorption at shorter wavelengths results in the observed reddening. “This challenges our original assumption of canonical dense cores,” said Professor Ke Wang, Fengwei Xu’s doctoral supervisor at the Kavli Institute.

Another possibility involves the growth of dust grains within these systems. “In the diffuse interstellar medium, dust grains are usually just a few microns in size,” explained Professor Hauyu Baobab Liu at the Department of Physics of National Sun Yat-sen University, who led the radiative transfer modelling in the study. “But our models indicate that some cores may contain millimetre-sized grains, which could only form in protoplanetary disks and then be expelled – perhaps by protostellar outflows.”

Regardless of which scenario proves dominant, both require the presence of protoplanetary disks. The findings suggest that over three hundred such systems may already be forming within just these three CMZ clouds. “It is exciting that we are detecting possible candidates for protoplanetary disks in the Galactic Centre. The conditions there are very different from our neighbourhood, and this may give us a chance to study planet formation in this extreme environment,” said Professor Peter Schilke at the University of Cologne, Fengwei Xu’s doctoral co-supervisor. Computing resources and technical support at the UoC’s Institute of Astrophysics contributed to the result.

Future multi-band observations will help to further constrain their physical properties and evolutionary stages, offering a rare glimpse into the early processes that give rise to planetary systems like our own, even in the most extreme corners of the Milky Way.

IMAGE: ALMA-images of the Milky Way's Central Molecular Zone. The research team suspects that protoplanetary discs are forming in its clouds. Credit Fengwei XU (PKU); ALMA Partnership; Laura Pérez (NRAO)

#science #space #astronomy #physics #news #nasa #astrophysics #esa

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canmom · 6 months ago

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Where do you read and find web comics?

that's a great question!

these days the scene is kinda dominated by platforms like webtoon and tapas, which heavily favour vertical-scrolling infinite canvas formats. these environments are aggressively competitive, and getting to the top of the popularity pile requires a pace of work that makes even the manga industry look downright reasonable. I wrote a little about one such comic back in 2022. the 'portal' format applies similar pressures as webnovel sites - somehow that's come down to favouring high-concept premises which can be spelled out in a title, and a fairly homogeneous art style. in general you'll see a lot of romance and isekai.

that said, traditional page-formatted webcomics are absolutely still around. usually I read them on their websites - you can use an RSS reader to keep up with updates for most comics, but I fell out of the habit of that years ago.

as far as finding them, there's not really any centralised place to find them, but often webcomics will promote other authors, and there's organisations like hiveworks which serve to cross-promote members of their network. most webcomics have a 'links' page. it's rhizomatic or some shit.

if you are coming back to webcomics, 'I used to read this comic, is it still going' can also lead to a lot of pleasant surprises - you wouldn't believe the number of webcomic authors who turn out to have transed their gender when you come back a few years later (or maybe you would). 'spend years writing a comic instead of transitioning' is a strangely common pitfall [edit: though I'm not sure 'spend years transitioning instead of making a big creative project' is like. a better strategy lmao. they're both big expressions of agency, it doesn't really matter what order you do em.]

some authors tend to stay on a single perpetual epic that will likely last until they die, but others like to write multiple projects, and usually if you enjoy one thing by a person you'll enjoy the others. for example, @bigbigtruck wrote the excellent The Less Than Epic Adventures of TJ and Amal back in the day, and is presently writing a story about stormchasers with a very similar vibe. Evan Dahm of Rice Boy went on to write some rather cool comics like Vattu.

webcomics review blogs can also be a good place to pick up recs. yes homo, now defunct, put a few things on my radar (I disagree with many of their opinions but that's part of the fun of it lol), as has thewebcomicsreview.

along similar lines, forums can be a good place to look - back in the old old days, I used to be a big fan of a D&D comic called The Order of the Stick and hang out on its forums a lot, and they had a pretty active board for talking about other webcomics (a large part of which was devoted to literally hundreds of threads for the club of posters making fun of a really mid comic called Dominic Deegan: Oracle for Hire - don't ask me to explain that...) these days I bet there are webcomics discords that function similarly, though I couldn't tell you which ones off the top of my head.

if you're willing to part with a little bit of money, events like the Shortbox Comics Fair are a good way to gather a huge stack of one-shots. I picked up a bunch in the last one of those, I should really write about them.

honestly I should really just draw up a list of comics I've liked, catch up on the ones that I fell off the update schedule on, and put that list on my website somewhere. writing full reviews is fun but time-consuming and I don't want to make promises with how incredibly ADHD I am (the 'comics comints' series lasted a mighty three posts, and of all the writing-about-stuff projects, the main ones I'm trying to get going again are the tftbn and umineko liveblogs), but it is happy-making to spread the word about good shit I've read. I used to liveblog webcomics quite a bit, you can see some of them over here. (I never got around to migrating the Homestuck sideblog.)

ultimately, word of mouth is queen here. all these suggestions are just different flavours of "find people who like the sorts of things you like and read the stuff they like" in the end!

#comics #webcomics

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unhinged-summer-fun · 8 months ago

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common grounds (oshamir) - chapter 19

Pairing: Osha Aniseya x Qimir "The Stranger"

Warnings: here there be smut muahaha

A/N: Dividers by me, many thanks to @desertbcrnnobody for beta help and also my high school physics teacher for fuckin me up about the nature of the universe and macrophysics

series masterlist

chapter 19: ins and outages

Osha remembered another lesson from her high school physics class, some weeks after the three-stage collision lesson. Her teacher had said the earth spun incredibly fast, too fast for anybody to really ever notice it. But there were signs of movement: sunrises and sunsets, weather, gravity itself—all those things were already so integrated into daily life on earth that it felt like the earth wasn’t even spinning at all, if one grew bored enough.

What would happen if it actually did stop spinning? Osha asked back then.

The look her teacher had given her seemed better suited to a man who’d stepped on a landmine’s pressure plate.

We would all die, he said. A simple and brutal truth. Everything would die.

And then we won’t have to worry about the midterm on Tuesday, because there’d be no such thing as midterms, or Tuesdays, or even the concept of worrying—because nothing would be alive to feel anything at all. The world would go… smooth, I think, like a marble. If the arrested motion were sudden enough, perhaps some tectonic plates would break off and go spinning into orbit. The earth would stop spinning, but everything not held down would keep moving—and that’s everything. And once homeostasis was reached, and there was nothing left but a homogenous mess of what used to be…

Things would be quiet. They would be quiet, because there would be nothing else left to be. All this would happen in less than a second—microscopic fractions of a second, before there were no more seconds at all.

Qimir’s sudden, total stillness didn’t portend the complete evisceration of the world around him, but his face held some of that devastation—just a microscopic fraction of it.

Osha didn’t know what to say to jumpstart things again, to reset something like gravity, but just before her blood went cold, he took a deep breath. She watched him, unmoving, as he broke the tableau and sipped his coffee—like he hadn’t just terrified her with the complete shift in his body language.

“I assume she was speaking with Vernestra?” he asked, voice carefully free of any inflection.

Osha still didn’t know what to say. Perhaps he’d been the axis, and she’d been the planet wiped out to a glassy, smooth marble. It wasn’t his world that was ending. He seemed… fine. Sipping his coffee, speaking evenly.

“She was,” Osha said, sticking to the bare truth. “They were talking about, um, working together again. I didn’t know what that… meant.” Even though Indara had kind of put the cart before the horse on that one.

He hummed, but there was a distinct lack of life to it.

This was a bad idea.

As he spoke, he kept his eyes away from her, focused instead on the middle distance. “Idise is a private investigator,” he said plainly, mostly to the wall. “About fifteen years ago, Vernestra hired her to follow me and report on my activities.”

Osha nearly vibrated with the sudden, flooding rage that swept in as her fears were confirmed. How dare she show her face at the Temple and get all cozy with Qimir after that?

“That was how we met,” he said. “I’d been gunrunning for the Hutts for six months when they brought her snooping to my attention—they told me to handle her. So I go out one night and lead her to where I wanted to rush her.”

“What?” Osha whispered. She felt like she’d be sick, forcing herself to take steady, even breaths through her nose.

“I had nothing to lose. I was slowly starving to death because, in those days, all I’d eat was black-market pain medication. If that wasn’t going to kill me, something else was bound to. I was just going through the motions.”

Her heart still didn’t slow as he kept going.

“And then she—” he laughed.

Laughed.

Wait, what?

“I lead her to this parking lot, and Idise just—rushes me. Just how I was going to rush at her. She comes at me with some—I think I called it kung-fu shit back then—she ended up breaking my nose before she put me in a one-handed submission hold that still almost makes me pass out—”

He was… smiling. It was a rueful, unhappy smile, but it was clear he took some actual joy from this memory. What the fuck?

“—but the specifics aren’t important here. She asked me who the hell I was to Vernestra Rwoh, and why the hell did she want to watch me so badly. I don’t know exactly what I said, but I told her the truth, I know that much. Told her I was a loose end. And that much is true now as it was then.”

He’d told her as much, more than a week ago—in his office, talking about destruction and conspiracies.

“I told you I was street fighting back then—the Hutts ran kind of the same fight night deal that Unplan does, but people often left that ring in body bags, not ambulances. I was in that ring for-fucking-ever. That time is just as fuzzy as my time at the Temple, probably worse, because of the drugs. I thought Idise was trying to kill me at first, I absolutely believe it’s not beneath Vernestra to put a hit on someone like me.”

He said it so casually it made Osha’s heart stop.

“But then, this P.I. chick breaks my nose, almost has me throw up and pass out, then she starts babbling about some conspiracy with the Temple, how she’d been piecing shit together and found a bunch of people who knew but were hushed up about it. I told her… I told her I didn’t care.”

“Wh—?” Osha wasn’t certain what she was reacting to: Idise knowing about the corruption in the Temple, Idise admitting that knowledge to Qimir, or his ultimately nihilistic attitude towards all of it. He cared, Osha knew. He had the capacity to care, deep as trenches.

Her thoughts must have shown on her face, because when he met her eyes again, his jaw flexed, chewing back whatever words he was going to say in favor of something else.

“I was in a bad place, Osha. I lived every day like I thought it would be my last, and not in a good way. My spine had been fixed by surgery when I was 17, but by the time I turned 19, I was in immense pain every single day—no support net, couldn’t get a job, hadn’t finished high school since Vernestra ‘homeschooled’ me. No money, no friends, no home. All the titles and accolades I’d won for Vernestra had been sanitized, marking the Temple as the victor against another fighter. And the prize cash was held in a trust I never ever saw. I had nothing.

“All I had was my pain, and I didn’t even want that. So I numbed it with drugs; the Hutts were more than happy to provide them as payment for my services.”

He drained the rest of his coffee, looking mildly disgusted.

“What happened after that?” Osha asked. He got up, getting himself another cup and sitting down before speaking.

“Obviously, I couldn’t kill her in the end. I pursued it for a while, it kept me occupied. She outfoxed me mentally, outclassed me physically, and knew more about me than I knew about myself back then. And somehow, breaking that routine, the dull violence and crime the Hutts tasked me with, it snapped some sense back into me. I didn’t want to kill her. I didn’t want to kill anybody. I didn’t want to hurt anybody, not on the streets, not in the ring. I’d seen other guys do it. But I couldn’t—” His voice tightened around an invisible chokehold. “I just couldn’t.”

Osha knew she was probably crazy for it, but she believed every word he said. She accepted every ounce of darkness he shared with her. Without hesitation or reluctance, she took his hand and held it tight. I’m here, she conveyed. I believe you, and I’m still here. It gave him bravery, she thought.

“Idise kept trying to talk to me, even after I tried to tell her off, tell her the Hutts wanted her dead. But she wouldn’t listen. She was focused on me joining her crusade against the Temple. I’d tried doing that before, throwing bricks and making threats against them. And it’s a truth I took too long to learn, that a lot of unfortunate people took too long to understand: the Temple is just too big to beat.”

Osha’s flare of indignance was difficult to obscure.

“But Idise had this idea. If enough people—people who know, you know—stand against the Temple, they might actually be able to do something. They couldn’t sue us all—that was her logic. I didn’t care, though. I was still starving, I was just a little more scared, now. I kept avoiding her, but she’d find me. Tell her off. Avoid her. She found me. Rinse-repeat.” He stopped again, taking a few breaths. Shaky inhale, shaky exhale. “Then the Hutts caught wind that I hadn’t—handled her.”

Osha’s blood finally went cold. “Shit,” she whispered.

He nearly tripped over his words, trying to speak quickly just to get this story over with. “It’s a—it’s a story not worth telling. It’s not important right now. When they were done with me, I was completely fucked up. They left me for dead out in the street. And then—”

With the curtains drawn back from the morning sunlight, they could hardly tell the power in the apartment had gone out—if it weren’t for the power-down bwrhhhh that seemed to come from the walls. Just as fast as the power had gone out, it returned.

Damn winter power outages.

“Keep going, please,” Osha said when he didn’t immediately speak up.

He looked like he wanted to protest for her sake, but nodded. “Idise found me. Took me somewhere safe. I got back on my feet. Got my diploma, then started college. I didn’t want to, but I tried to pay back Idise by helping her dig for information about Vernestra and the Temple. She didn’t have as much as she made it out to seem.”

“What—hold on, what about Vernestra hiring her?”

He nodded, an oh yeah expression on his face. “She’d fed Vernestra enough to get some information in return. When Vernestra’s stories started not adding up with what she had found out herself, she knew she had to get out of the spider’s web while she could. She told Vernestra that my trail went cold when I joined up with the slugs—code for I don’t wanna get involved with the Hutts. Two weeks after parting ways with Vernestra, Idise broke my nose in a parking lot.”

The wry little smile on his face was confounding.

This wasn’t what Osha thought she’d hear from him. She’d anticipated vitriol and a history of deceit, of… anything but nostalgia. She felt incredibly silly for making wild assumptions about Idise and her history with the Temple. Osha’s vitriol toward her at the gym all at once felt so stupid and embarrassing. She’d been telling the truth.

I’m not working for her. I wouldn’t do that to him.

“You told me you stopped searching for evidence,” Osha said.

He nodded. “I did. Almost a decade ago. Called off the hunt two years into pre-med. Before, my days were spent cramming science, my nights were spent helping the team follow any lead to take down the Temple. One half seeking to do no harm, one half only seeking harm. It was eating me up—scraping me raw. It was… I was in a dark headspace.

“One day, my advanced chemistry professor shared the basic formula for homemade explosives. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I was obsessed. Night and day, my thoughts were consumed by the idea of ending the Temple just to stop having to think about it all the time. I never told Idise the real reason why we needed to stop; I told her it was just not feasible to continue, and I shut it down. She was never satisfied with my reasoning. But I shut it down, and eventually I graduated, I got my job, postgrad—wouldn’t have been able to safely learn all the delicate parts of the body if all I did was think about how I could use that knowledge to break the person who broke me.”

His eyes flickered, first to her, and then away as a cloud of shame settled over his head.

Fuck. Osha remembered similar states of obsessive, all-consuming despair. In the years following her injury, she remained in a floating, numb state of hopelessness. Very often and very easily, her mind would spiral into dark places she couldn’t claw her way out of, though most of her maladaptive daydreaming ended in a grave with her own name on it.

She empathized with him; she wouldn’t have wanted to continue either. Forgetting, remembering. They’re different pains that make you wish you had the other.

“But, eventually, the pain wasn’t all I had. Idise is a seeker. She’s a bloodhound, and she is fantastic at what she does. She saw that I had things… missing. She’d already found Paul, Kana, and Medora for me. She didn’t find it, but she was part of Unknown Planet, and brought me into the fold there. She’d found an outlet for the anger that was still there no matter how much I denied it. I owe her my life, a hundred times over. It’s hard to be friends or friendly with someone like that, but we’re close. It feels like fate brought us together, and now fate won’t let us part.”

It felt fucking cheap to ask, but Osha did anyway. “A lot of people at Unplan think you two were… involved. Were you?”

He startled at the question, his face incredulous. “Absolutely not.”

That seems a bit of an overreaction. “Uh, is there a reason why not?”

“Aside from the fact I’m very much not her type, we know each other too well, have been together through too much for me to feel anything but that bond. There’s no way I could be vulnerable around her like I can be with you. You’ve met her. She’s fucking intense.”

He wasn’t wrong. “Intense is a word for it,” she agreed, trying not to let her fluttering heart get the best of her. “But why do you think she was at the Temple?”

“What was said?” That wasn’t an answer.

Still, Osha relayed what she remembered about that day, and then halted when she realized another crucial piece of information she was leaving out.

“What is it?” he said, fingers laced beneath his chin. He’d been frowning through her story, deep in thought.

Why can’t we go back to dry humping in his bed?

“I’m… she also uh. Kinda cornered me at Unplan when I was working out later that week. She must’ve known I’d thought the worst of the situation and wanted to… I don’t know, clear the air.”

But Qimir’s expression had gone thunderous and dark. Rage simmered on his features like he was made of boiling magma. He was pissed. He held none of that anger for the violation toward his own privacy, but when it came to Osha, his temper flared like the goddamn sun.

“And what else did she say?” he asked, his voice gone tight. This wasn’t protectiveness over her, she realized. Why is he so angry? What the fuck happened between them?

“She asked me if I knew where you were. I didn’t tell her anything, of course. And then she said Vernestra didn’t want to hire her to follow you again.”

His throat bobbed, words swallowed down.

“What?” Osha said. “What aren’t you saying?”

He exhaled slowly, closing his eyes. The anger wasn’t so much boiling as it was now simmering, cooled off enough for him to form logical thoughts. “If she’s not following me, who else do you think she would want Idise tailing?”

“What—?”

He reached for her hand, squeezing once. “Who else at the Temple has been mistreated, injured, erased, overworked, and brought down enough to have one hell of a motive to tear it all down?”

Oh.

Fuck.

“Yeah, fuck,” he said.

Just like that, the perfect morning they’d started with had been balanced back to a net zero.

Q: Leave Osha out of this.

UNKNOWN NUMBER: I was wondering why I couldn’t text you.

UN: You break that phone on purpose too?

Q: She’s not a part of it, no matter what you’re doing.

UN: If she’s involved with you, she has no choice.

UN: What were you doing in Khofar?

UN: Didn’t take you for a cabin-in-the-woods type.

Q: Leave it alone.

UN: No :)

UN: What were you doing in Khofar?

Osha woke up from her afternoon nap, still on day one of limbo. Three days remained before Sol and Mae and the whole Temple returned from Theed. When she checked her phone, there were no new messages, so she suspected Mae hadn’t asked Sol what he wanted to talk to them about just yet.

She didn’t know what to do about Vernestra hiring Idise to keep an eye on her, and Qimir just said he’d handle it. In the context of his story, she didn’t feel too good about that assurance.

“You’re being fucking stupid, Osha,” she muttered, getting up to get ready for work.

Kana and Medora were there when she arrived.

Paul, and Kana, and Medora.

Hold on, who the fuck is Paul?

“You alright there, Osha?” Kana asked when Osha hadn’t finished taking off her coat to hang up. She jumped, turning around to hide her embarrassment.

“Sorry! Still waking up a little bit.” She shook her head.

“Been there. Go make yourself a coffee, girl.”

“I think I might,” Osha said, smiling at Medora.

“Did the power go out at your place, too? I’m glad I was already here when it happened.”

The wintertime sometimes messed with the badly-weatherized power grid, knocking out power in parts of the city. Osha had come back from Qimir’s to a bunch of clocks blinking 12:00 and had spent the better part of her afternoon resetting everything.

“Yeah,” she sighed. “Pretty lame.”

Kana picked up their conversation again. It warmed her to know they didn’t feel the need to keep secrets from her.

“So the police got involved?”

“Yeah, they wanted to question her but I told them to fuck off.”

“I mean she’s four, don’t they have any better leads than a traumatized toddler?”

“That’s what I told them!”

Osha closed her locker and tied off her apron. She wasn’t trying to hide that she was listening in, but she wasn’t trying to involve herself in their conversation either—no matter how intriguing it sounded.

Medora seemed to catch onto that, turning to her and bringing her into the conversation herself. “Have I ever told you what my day job is, Osha?”

She shook her head. “I figured you didn’t need one; they tip you so well here.”

Kana barked a laugh. “A flatterer!” he crowed, leaning back in his chair.

Medora just threw him a look before she said, “I’m a youth counselor for the FDO.”

“That’s amazing,” Osha said, smiling warmly.

“I always wanted to help out. I spent all my time in the medical wing of the building growing up. Asked a billion questions of all the doctors there.”

She sounded like Mae, constantly asking questions and endlessly curious. At the end of the day, she was kind, thankful, and caring.

“So you always knew you wanted to be a doctor?”

“Pretty much,” she said, shrugging.

“Medora’s being humble for no reason, she got her doctorate same year as Q. They were neck and neck for summa and magna cum laude their whole last year.” Kana sounded so proud, lauding his siblings’ accomplishments.

“It wasn’t a race, you idiot,” Medora grumbled. “I’m still surprised Paul let you go to art school.”

“Yeah, well, Paul knew the fuckin’ apartment needed someone in the humanities, or we’d all starve. Has Q cooked for you, Osha?”

She remembered the smoke alarm interruption from earlier that morning. “He’s… tried to.”

Kana laughed again, pretending to wipe tears from his eyes. “Imagine a house of four grown adults, and three of them have Q’s cooking skills.”

“Who’s, um.” Her mouth went dry the moment before she could say—

“Paul?” Medora said, her voice pitched high. “What the shit, Q doesn’t talk about Paul? Does he talk to you at all? Or does he do that brooding thing the whole time?” She did an (accurate) impression of her brother’s raincloud demeanor.

“We talk,” Osha said, stepping in to defend Qimir. “He’s kind of tight-lipped about some things from his past, but he’s told me quite a bit.” Obviously not enough.

“Well, you know his spine issues as a kid,” Kana said. “Paul ran the pediatric spine clinic Q got treated at. Did the surgeries himself when he—” The sharp cutoff, combined with the grimace, said when he broke his back at 17.

Osha nodded, signaling that he didn’t have to rehash it. “You still keep in touch?”

“Idise managed to track him down after the clinic mysteriously shuttered,” Medora said, playing with the end of her braid. The mention of Idise still brought a sick little twist to her stomach, but Osha was learning to accept that embarrassment and move on. “Q was with him a few months by then, recovering from that horrible car accident. Then she found Kana, and I was just about to age out of the FDO when she found me. She brought us all back together again, after everything.”

“That’s—that’s really great,” Osha said. Car accident. They either didn’t know the Hutts had messed him up and left him for dead, or they didn’t know that Osha knew the real story.

Her awkwardness was overshadowed by fraternal teasing. “Ooo, when she found you, so romantic, Medora.”

Her face flushed a little pink, and she scowled at Kana across the breakroom table. “Shut up.”

Kana checked the clock after antagonizing her with another teasing grin. “Moonrise is in five. Let’s lock in.”

“Got it.”

So Medora absolutely had a crush on Idise. It made sense why Qimir was so adamant that he was never with Idise like that. But if Kana was aware of Medora’s crush on Idise, why would he tell Osha otherwise? The thoughts followed her through her shift, but there were enough things to do at the bar that her daydreams only skimmed the surface of those quandaries—though that surface was obviously still distressing.

“You look grouchy,” Kana commented two hours into their shift. She hadn’t been avoiding him, but the question of his false implication about Qimir and Idise had her wondering what he had to gain from it. “S’on your mind?”

Osha winced, wiping down the same section of the bar as she’d done for the last twenty minutes. It was slow tonight. Had everyone in the city gone to Theed with the Temple?

“Why did you—” Osha cut herself off, turning back from where her body had started moving to face him. She faced away.

“Why’d I what?” he asked, moving to her peripherals.

“It’s uh, nothing.”

“Let’s take a break.”

She heard the order for what it was.

They grabbed their jackets and went to the back parking lot. Osha’s heart pounded, wondering what he would say to her. Kana was her boyfriend’s brother but also her boss. And here she was thinking that things couldn’t possibly be weirder than when Mae was on shift with her at the cafe.

Kana lit a cigarette and offered one to her. She accepted it impulsively.

“You seem overwhelmed,” he said, lighting one off the other.

“I am overwhelmed,” Osha said, all her breath leaving her in a whoosh. She fidgeted with her sleeves until she could take a drag.

She’d smoked a little in high school, out of sheer stress and the lack of anything better to do. Cal had thought she was so cool, smoking behind the school auditorium. She’d kissed him so he could know what it tasted like, but he’d coughed so hard he almost puked, then sweetly asked to try again. That was near the last time she smoked—because smoking led to Cal’s interest, which led to Cal’s kissing, which led to Sol almost pounding a 17-year-old’s face in.

Osha was a touch out of practice, but smoking came back to her as easy as fighting.

“Qimir is an enigma. I wasn’t lying to you when I said he’s lonely and prefers it like that.”

So he knew what she was stressing about. “Were you… testing me? That night?”

He shrugged. “Suppose I was. Medora’ll give you the official shovel talk when the time comes, but you can’t blame me for looking out for my brother.”

She doubted Mae would risk giving Qimir the shovel talk. She didn’t even want to think about Sol meeting him—though, history proves they already know one another.

“That’s fair,” she said, looking out at the dark lot. “How’d I do on your test?” she asked. She hoped she didn’t sound bitter, but her emotions had been out of wack since she arrived.

“I certainly wouldn’t have put you on my shoulders if you failed,” he said dryly. She finally realized what was so uncanny about this conversation. He sounded different from how he’d spoken indoors—he wasn’t running his words together or using that city drawl Osha never got the hang of. Compared to how he was speaking to her now, the voice he used inside was closer to Qimir’s doofus accent.

They really were brothers.

It made Osha laugh—too late to be laughing at his remark. “What?” said Kana.

She shook her head, smiling. “I’m just glad I know you all.”

It put him at ease, a fond smile taking over his face. They smoked in silence for a minute—until the lamps above them suddenly powered down, dimming almost to total darkness before clawing their way back to illumination.

Damn it. She’d just reset the appliances.

Kana didn’t seem too worried about it, continuing their conversation as if nothing had happened.

“I know Qimir would never say as much, but Paul’s absolutely his dad—and Qimir’s Paul’s son. Me and Paul, we don’t got that kind of relationship. We’re tight, and he’s family, but he’s not my dad like he’s been for Qimir and Medora.”

“Did he encourage them to pursue medicine?”

“That’s a way to put it,” he said, chuckling. “I’d say he was the damn reason for it.”

“That’s cute,” Osha said, smiling. The anxiety in her chest seemed to float away with every drag on her cigarette. “My dad’s…” Oh shit. She’d walked herself into this corner. She didn’t want Kana looking at her how Qimir had looked at her after that welterweight comment. She settled on, “Weird.”

“Weird?” Kana laughed. “Weird how?”

Weird how Sol seems deeply involved in this whole fucking mess. Weird how Sol seems way too okay letting the Temple hang albatross after albatross around his neck. Weird how he fucking passes out on my couch on my birthday because he doesn’t know when things have gone too far. Weird how he insists on family dinners but never lets us act like a family. Weird how Qimir clearly hates him but never talks about it. Weird how Sol had a framed photo of him in the room full of memories he didn’t care to dwell on.

“Just… weird. He adopted me and my sister hella fast after our—well, after we lost our family. And it’s been seventeen years, but he still hasn’t gotten the hang of fatherhood. Family dinners with him are really awkward.”

Kana didn’t pry, picking up on Osha’s discomfort. “Well, we all usually get together once every few weeks just to hang out at Paul’s place. Just to shoot the shit, take walks together. I think you’d like it. Paul’s a good guy. I hope you meet him soon.” I hope Qimir invites you soon, he was saying.

It sounded so nice—but Qimir had never mentioned Paul in the first place. There was so much Osha had no idea about. Qimir’s life was still unfolding in front of her—like a map that started out as small as her palm but folded out to the size of a beach towel. She’d been fairly adamant about her position on deception, especially where omitted information was concerned. Even so, each new answer only brought twice as many questions. It was so difficult to keep up with.

And eventually, it’d catch up with her, a warning voice intoned in her head.

But she stayed in the moment. “I’d like that, too. He sounds nice,” she said.

Kana put out his cigarette and tossed it in the metal receptacle by the door.

“Does Qimir join every time?” she asked, doing the same.

Kana’s hand stilled on the handle of the service door. He looked over his shoulder at her, just the glint of his eye shining in the shadows.

“Not for the last three months.”

O: [IMG_9322.HEIC]

?: Is your shift over?

?: You look beautiful.

O: Yeah I’m omw home now

O: All the damn lights are reset ugh

Osha got a wicked impulse.

O: Wanna come over?

She forced herself not to look at her phone for the entire drive back to the apartment, equal parts nervous and excited for whatever his answer might be. When she parked, she finally checked her phone—

The knock on her window made her scream.

After a few adrenaline-fueled seconds, she finally recognized Qimir’s bewildered face through the glass. “What the fuck!” she laughed, near about to pass out.

“Sorry,” he said, muffled through the glass.

She finally looked at the text.

?: Yes I’ll be there when you park.

Sent ten minutes ago.

She got out of the car, fueled by the urge to slap him silly and kiss him just the same. The second urge won, her hand twining in the scarf around his neck and pulling him down to her. She kissed him right there with her car door between their bodies, remnants of her fright still racing through her veins.

He pulled away, humming and happily content. Then he stopped, frowning. “Were you smoking with Kana?”

“Howwww the hell do you know that?”

“You taste like his cigarettes,” he said. It felt ridiculous to imagine him jealous—

Oh.

He was jealous.

“I can go brush my teeth,” she said lamely, basically gawping up at him. Maybe wash my mouth out, maybe get punished over a knee—now that’s a thought—

“That won’t be necessary,” he said, gathering his composure again.

Before it could settle, before logic could win, she rattled the bars that kept the beast in him locked away. Osha stood on tip-toes, moving her hand from his scarf to his hair to pull him down again. If her nails slightly pressing into his scalp bothered him, the low, pleased growl he gave in return didn’t say so.

Qimir’s hands went to her shoulders, maneuvering her around the side of her car door so he could kiss her up against the freezing surface. She squeaked at the sudden cold against her back, but he didn’t care. He was ravenous, kissing and licking into her mouth like he wanted to erase any claim left by someone else. Like he’d go so far as breathing against every inch of her skin that was stained with phantom tobacco so she wore the scent of anybody but him.

For fuck’s sake, Kana was his brother. Why did it turn her on so much to think he was acting this way because Kana gave her a cigarette?

She didn’t give a shit, taking as much as he gave her. She was slightly stunned when he pulled back, fixing her with a sharp glare.

“Smoking is very bad for you.”

Then he resumed, lips trailing down to her jaw, her neck, that soft spot behind her ear that made her shiver when he ran his tongue over it. Osha’s breathy laugh sounded so ridiculously wanton in response to his chiding. She kept her hand in his hair as he worried his teeth over her sensitive skin. He must have reached where she’d sprayed a bit of perfume earlier, because his low moan made her insides go to jelly and her knees threaten to buckle.

“M-maybe we can go inside?” she asked, sounding weak to her own ears. Round two, yes please.

He found a place to pause; lips still formed around her pulse—all he’d need to do is bare his teeth, and he’d be that wolf again, demanding submission.

Maybe it’s about time I bare my neck for him, too…

“Inside,” he agreed.

Qimir walked a half-step behind Osha, one hand perched at the small of her back. She looked down into her bag to search for her keys, cursing under her breath as she rummaged.

There was a sudden yank at her belt loop, tugging her two swift steps to the right—to avoid walking into a neighbor passing them in the hall. The neighbor ignored them, just as wrapped up in their world as Osha was, but Osha turned her surprised look up to Qimir, who released her and re-settled his hand at the small of her back. He just shrugged, a smug smirk threatening to surface on his lips.

She finally found her goddamn keys, but then spent another few seconds trying to decipher which one meant open door.

That hand at the small of her back smoothed its way to her hip, another joining at the other side as he stood behind her. Her ability to concentrate took another horrific blow—practically at death’s door, and all his fault.

“I like these jeans,” he said conversationally, as if he was talking about some medical journal he’d read recently. “You make them look nice.”

She wasn’t sure that was how clothing-based flattery was usually structured. She didn’t respond, eliminating key by key by—

Another yank at her belt loops, this time pulling her back into him. Her hips made contact with his, and she jolted a little when she realized he was hard behind her. Holy shit holy shit key gods, please—

There.

The door swung open, and they stole inside like bandits. She would have thought he would want to continue that next logical step (so logical. The most fucking logical thing ever) from what he’d started on the doormat, but his eyes suddenly filled with curiosity that stopped all ardor in its tracks.

He was in her apartment.

The revelation struck her just seconds after it did him. She felt giddy with it. “You ever see the other floorplans here?” she asked, awkwardly making a show at playing host to him.

“There’s more rooms in this one,” he said, both truthfully and sarcastically.

“Your powers of observation are stunning, Coach Lo.”

He leveled an I’m not playing, you’re gonna get it if you push me look at her, one she responded to with a coquettish smile. They removed their shoes and she turned on a few lights to point out the obvious: kitchen, living room, bathroom. She scowled at the blinking 12:00 on the stovetop in the kitchen.

“That’s Mae’s room over there, and—”

MYAHHHH???

“You haven’t met my other roommate,” Osha said, rushing to the cat tree in the corner. She scooped up the cute ball of fur in her hands and returned to Qimir, who was still taking in the living room—more specifically, he was looking at the bookshelf, pulling out random books to peer at in the light. When Osha approached, he gave her his attention. “This is Pip. Pip, this is my stranger.”

He sighed deeply. “Fuck you for holding something cute while saying that.” He sounded actually tormented by it—I am so oppressed, my girlfriend is using her kitten as a shield against my horny nature.

Osha loved pushing his buttons.

Pip seemed to like Qimir, using his sharp kitten claws to traverse the sleeve of his black denim jacket up to his absurdly broad shoulders. Osha could have died at the image of Qimir’s surprised face when Pip came and bumped his cold little nose against his jaw.

Then Pip descended down the back of his jacket, his claws making little tiny scratch noises. “Oh no—” Osha said, stepping in to help.

Pip had lodged himself right in the center of Qimir’s shoulder blades, where even his long arms couldn’t reach him. He grunted as he tried to get Pip back to safety, and Osha just started to laugh—though it was well past quiet hours in her building. Pip made a series of feline battle cries, hanging onto his conquered jacket with imperious greed.

“Oh my god, this is insane,” Osha laughed, finally prising her cat off of his jacket. “You naughty boy!” she declared, kissing the top of his head. “Good job, Pip.”

Qimir took the opportunity to remove his jacket, laying it over the back of her couch like it belonged there. She finally understood why he reacted so intensely to her wearing his clothes—this was another sign of his possessive nature. Staking his claim, leaving his things about, touching her books.

With intent to sleep in her bed.

It was a queen, and with his size, it’d be a tight fit.

I bet he likes a tight f—

To sleep. They would be sleeping.

Wait, was lewdness on the table? Could she ask for lewdness?

“Are you hungry?” she asked, covering her bases before they slept.

He shook his head, but something in his eyes told her otherwise.

Osha ensured Pip was cared for, sleeping soundly in his bed, before she took Qimir’s hand and led him to her bedroom.

He hadn’t said much since they walked in, keeping all his observations to himself. Even here, he took his time to take her room in.

Qimir lived quite the spartan life, hardly keeping any personal effects in his home, his car—hell, the most clutter she’d seen was in his office, but that seemed like the exception to his rules. Osha hadn’t been joking that first time she met him in his office; her room was chaotic but it was her.

She tried looking at her room from his perspective. The bed looked perpetually unmade, the comforter hopelessly tangled within the confines of the duvet cover. Her desk hadn’t been used since high school, and currently housed her very tiny, very new makeup collection. The desk chair had instead become a chair closet, holding a pile of laundry—oh fuck, was that one of her bras?

Maybe this wasn’t a good idea.

But he wasn’t looking at the lacy bundle that may or may not have been a bra—his eyes were on the windowsill, one hand reaching for the small purple butterfly—

“Don’t,” she implored, not really sure why. He’d freely touched plenty of things in her apartment until now—herself included—but the little crystal figurine seemed too precious for her to share with him tonight. “Please,” she added, though they were sure she didn’t want to say it.

Qimir retracted his hand, watching Osha now as if she were the new object of his interest. “It’s beautiful,” he said, not looking at it.

“I sometimes forget it’s there,” she said.

“It was the first thing I saw. It caught the moonlight just right.”

She hadn’t ever looked at it in the moonlight before. In the dark moments before sleep, she could never bear to look at it, lest it invite nightmares of her last moments with her mothers.

But he was right; it sparkled and glittered the way it had that day in the shop. The cool moonlight made the purple seem regal, faceted reflections and refractions cast upon the windowsill like bold splashes of light.

She said nothing more, holding out her hand for him to come closer.

Wanna come over? she’d asked him. She wished she’d been more specific, because now that he was here, she had no clue what to do with him.

He seemed to have his own ideas, though.

He stepped into her space, one hand on her hip and the other coming to tilt her face up to his. But he didn’t kiss her; not just yet. He came close, looking her over with a face of yearning intensity she was becoming familiar with.

“You’re beautiful,” he said.

She didn’t shy from the compliment; she didn’t want to run from this, run from him and all his feelings. If she was allowed to feel as deeply for him as she did, then she wanted him to feel the same. And she’d never know it if she kept running from every declaration he made to her.

“Thank you,” she said simply.

Qimir smiled like he knew the amount of growth and healed self-esteem it had taken to reach this point. He rewarded her with a kiss, just a simple lean and they were one.

Osha closed her eyes and fell against him, arms wrapping around the back of his neck. His hands grasped her close, like he dared any other to separate them. Their kiss wasn’t feverish, but the heat rolled like a campfire, an eternal flame to keep them warm in this lonely, dark winter.

Especially when the goddamn power went out—and didn’t seem to come back on after the usual fifteen seconds.

They didn’t move apart, quietly laughing at the absurdity. “All fuckin’ day,” she giggled.

“Well, I guess that means it’s lights out,” he said, teasing.

She shoved her palm against his shoulder playfully. “I’m not sleepy, are you?”

Instead of answering, he simply kissed his way down her neck, humming as if in thought. “Hungry.”

She blinked in the dark, even as stars danced before her eyes at every little zing of feeling he gave her. “I just asked you if—”

“Not for that,” he interrupted, on the wings of soft, dark laughter.

Oh fuck.

His teeth joined the distracting mix, dragging down to where her shirt lay open at the front. “You’re hungry?” she asked, voice going a bit high. Her inexperience had to have shown sometime—why not now?

But he didn’t withdraw. He was offering her something, something he knew was new to her. He nodded, smooth and comfortable just doing what he was doing—but she knew that a single word from her would have him going full bodice-ripper romance hero.

At least, she hoped so.

She moaned softly as his lips wrapped around the delicate line of her collarbone, indulgent like he was savoring her. She buried her fingers in his hair and was rewarded with a hot, sudden exhale through his nose. But he still didn’t bend. A hand in the hair won’t do it, Osha.

She tried pushing her hand up under his shirt, splaying across his toned stomach. But it didn’t make him snap. Touching isn’t consent, Osha, her logical brain reminded her.

“Well, I’m more than happy to feed you if you’re hungry,” she said, a little breathless as she pulled on his hair. She chewed her lip, hoping he understood her correctly.

Even in the pitch darkness, she could tell just how dark his eyes had gotten. Qimir’s face was open with want, not a single ounce of desire shuttered behind his expression. “Alright,” he breathed, and then moved.

He had her lying across her bed in under a second; his body pressed atop hers like he’d done that morning and kept her pinned in place. Her belated gasp came against his lips as he claimed hers in another kiss. This time, he didn’t straddle her, keeping his body angled slightly to the side of her, curling around her supine form.

His hand mimicked what hers had done just a moment ago, splaying across her lower tummy beneath the edge of her shirt. She was still mostly in her work clothes, save her shoes. His hand spanned so wide, his thumb and pinky touching both her hipbones simultaneously. She always felt so small when he did this, truly feeling their size difference.

But then his hand moved, pushing up, up—teasing right at the edge of her bra before it moved back down, pressing gently on every rib his fingertips passed. She groaned, half in frustration and half at how good his touch felt. She must have been starved for it before to react this much to his touches. That had to be it—she couldn’t have been responding just to him.

On the downward pass, he skimmed over the waistband of her work pants, fingertips brushing over the seam at the middle. “I can feel you; you’re so hot for me, Osha,” he murmured. “Will you be wet if I touch you right now?”

She could only whine, overwhelmed by his attentions. When his hand moved to cover the entire area, she repeated the noise, this time raising her hips needily. He moved his hand up and down over her, and yes, yes she’d be wet if he touched her.

“I guess I’ll have to find out, won’t I?” he chuckled. Deftly, he undid the button and fly of her work pants and let them stay like that. His mouth kept up a steady stream of commentary in her ear as he touched her.

“You’ve probably got the prettiest pair of panties on for me—and just absolutely ruined them, haven’t you?” he said, lips brushing her ear softly enough to make her shiver. “There’s nothing like soaked lace over a hot, wet pussy—love to see you like that someday, pretty girl.”

Osha’s moan seemed obscenely loud in contrast to the quiet room, the soft murmurs he was giving her.

“Good girl, telling me how she feels.” He kissed her cheek so gently and chastely that right now, it seemed filthy. “Wanna hear every noise you make from her on out. Don’t you dare hide them from me.” His fingertips brushed over her clit, through her soaked panties—making her gasp. “That’s right, that’s for me.”

For a while, he just rubbed her over her panties, nearly to the point where she was sure he wasn’t going to move past that—but then his hand drew back and then he was pushing beneath them, trapped under that wet cotton he’d only gotten wetter. She moaned helplessly at the feeling of his direct touch on her pussy—how long had it been since she last touched herself not to the thought of him? This was so, so much better.

His rough fingertips spun tight little circles over her clit, occasionally dipping down to where she was wettest to slick the way. His tongue matched what his fingers were doing—drawing wet little spirals that left a cool trail in its wake. It made her shiver and sweat all at once. He would never push them in, though, always just dipping his fingertips in—like a penitent man crossing himself with wetted fingers from a cathedral font.

She grew impatient, bringing her hands down to shove at her bottoms. The elastic snapped against her as it crested the ridge of his knuckles, but she didn’t give a fuck. Her hands went next to her work shirt, unbuttoning the front with fingers that trembled in their eagerness.

He moaned her name at the sight of her undressing for him, though his hand remained where it had been, stilled for now. When she sat up to remove her bra, he sucked in a breath but didn’t stop her. All she knew, in the spinning room that was her mind, was that she needed no clothes and more him.

At the revealed skin, he marveled, expression awed as he beheld her as some kind of sacrament. It should have intimidated her to be so clearly regarded as a holy thing. But Osha was used to being worshiped, even 17 years out of practice.

One thing she knew about worshipers was that they would kneel.

Her hand found his hair, and with ease, she pushed him toward the edge of the bed, pushed him down, pushed him into place between her thighs. She knew this much, at least. He finally looked like how he’d teased—hungry. No, starving.

Then she pulled him back to her.

His lips never once stopped moving, whetting their thirst by wetting them with her. She moaned, low and long as he hauled her legs up over his shoulders. Just barely, she could make out the feeling of the scar on his back beneath her heel. With how hunched over he was as he ate her out, she needed only to lift her head a few inches off the bed to see it. His tongue pushed into her, then out—not testing the waters or stretching, but consuming. She swore softly under her breath and shifted her hips up a little for him to go deeper, to take more.

She wasn’t freaking out how she thought she would. For years and years, thinking about some faceless, imaginary partner would inspire all kinds of anxiety in her. But now, with her stranger here, none of those worries were even on the same planet. She was relaxed, blissfully relaxed beneath him, above him, wherever he wanted her to be. Her orgasm was ready to step in if she wanted it to come, but for now, the intimacy of Qimir’s head between her thighs was enough to pull a satisfied sigh from her lips.

She felt his lips twitch against her—smiling. Qimir was now taking his time, laving his tongue over every inch he could get at. She could live like this forever, teetering on a thinning platform of pleasure and joyfully falling over the edge whenever she wanted.

His eyes met hers through the darkness, glinting with the moonlight streaming in through the window. She wondered what the look was for a moment before he concentrated his lips to suck at her clit, leaving room for a finger to press gently inside of her. She moaned weakly, the unfamiliar feeling making her head spin even as he held still, letting her get used to him.

Testing how it felt, she bit her lip and squeezed around his finger. All his breath left him in a whistling wheeze, eyes practically rolling back in his head. She did it again, and his other hand disappeared from where it’d rested on her thigh. She didn’t see where it went, but by the rhythmic motions of his shoulder, she could guess what it was up to.

He pressed another kiss to her clit before he added another finger. He was a large man, and his hands were absolutely proportionate to that standard—the stretch was a pleasant burn within her, equal to stepping into a too-hot bath and letting yourself bear the heat until it was tolerable. The burn became tolerable very quickly, with how loose-limbed he’d made her.

“Mm?” he hummed against her clit, letting his lips brush back and forth against it for a moment before resuming his sucking kisses.

“Yes,” she rasped, her voice all but abandoned her. “Yes.”

For so long, she’d been denied what she wanted, been second-guessed to the point of defeating herself, been forgotten and pushed aside by those she cared for. Qimir knelt before her as the antithesis to her very negative expectations. He encouraged her to not only want but ask, and take. Experimentally, she tightened her fingers in his hair and pulled her back up to her mouth. He moved with grace, his fingers still pushing in and dragging out of her with the same steady rhythm that was rattling her composure with aplomb. In the absence of his mouth, his thumb took up the mantle, rubbing tight little circles in time with the rest of his hand.

His bare chest pressed against her—when had he taken his goddamn shirt off?—and near his hips, something incredibly hot and wet touched her bare thigh. She was too busy kissing him to look down at him, too busy tasting herself on his lips to care.

Tension thrummed beneath his skin, as if his bones were made of struck tuning forks. She wasn’t certain of the reason, but she guessed it had something in common with his pouty face when she pulled him away from the meal he was making of her.

“Fuck, Osha,” he said, his pitch all over the place as he balanced on the tightrope of self-control. He rested his forehead against hers, meeting her eyes just like that morning. “Can I make you come like this?” he asked breathlessly, his fingers curling a little, searching for—

“Ah! Fuck, please, there, please,” she whined, practically squirming beside him.

“So beautiful when you come, can’t wait to see it again,” he said, his movements speeding up only minimally as he sought to abuse the angle that had her crying out for him. “C’mon, baby, wanna feel you. Wanna taste you all fucking day, stay down there for the rest of my fucking life if you wanted me to.”

She almost laughed, for she’d been thinking nearly the same thing. But she couldn’t laugh, not when he was moving just like that and she swore the power was coming back on with how bright the stars flared in her eyes. She garbled out half his name, the syllables sounding foreign on her tongue. “Wanna come,” she whined.

“I know, baby, I know.” His voice took on a deeper edge, dark and sharp like obsidian. “I wanna make you come, too, wanna know this pussy so well you don’t have a goddamn choice but to come when I want you to.” The words blazed through her every vein like a wildfire, all-consuming and inevitable. “Get you to come on my tongue, too, so only I get every fucking drop of you. I’ll never share you. Never.”

“Mine,” she breathed. She felt that whole-body lurching sensation that typically preceded her more devastating orgasms. “You’re mine.”

“I’m yours,” he vowed to her. “Only yours.” He kissed her, hot and filthy and fucking delicious.

She whined, her muscles tensing around his fingers to tease at what’s soon to come.

“That’s it, baby. C’mon—oh, fuck,” he groaned as her back arched off the bed towards him. He brought his mouth down to suck at her breasts, tonguing at her nipple between declarations. “Attagirl, that’s my girl, good fucking girl, come for me so pretty.”

She was pretty sure she had shed a few goddamn tears, between all the praise and the overwhelming orgasm he gave to her. This, too, was another language of him to learn. She wanted more. She wanted to be fluent in his desire, too. She kissed him back as best she could, though it was all very messy and wet and unrefined. Her ears were ringing, and she couldn’t fucking move even as he carefully withdrew his fingers from her. She could only watch as he brought them to his lips, first licking the pad of his thumb, and then sucking his two gleaming, wet fingers into his mouth.

And then there was his other hand, moving over his cock in harsh, quick motions. His self-pleasure looked almost violent, and even in her post-orgasm haze, she found herself flushing even hotter at the obscenity of it all. He’d gone from sacred to profane in an instant, a heathen wildman seeking to—

A groan wrenched its way from his throat, declared to the air a moment before hot splashes of his come striped over her belly, even up to her breasts. She felt marked, claimed for him alone. She reveled in the feeling, depraved as it was. She moaned for him, tugging him into relaxation once he finished coming and only shook in place, the aftershocks hitting him hard.

She kissed all over his face, just babbling whatever came to mind. “Fuck, you’re so good, Qimir. So good to me, I love—I loved watching you come,” she whispered, her words coming quicker after her little blunder. With any luck, he didn’t catch the slip-up.

He melted against her side, their slightly sweaty bodies curling together in peace. He said nothing, more contented to simply lay beside her and melt into the coverlet while she all but vibrated with energy. His hand lay limp against her thigh, curled slightly as if to protect her clean skin from the mess on his palms.

She kissed his forehead and got up for them, navigating through her pitch-black apartment with ease of familiarity so she could wet a washcloth and return to him. He hadn’t moved except to roll over on his back, stretched out across the bed.

Yeah, he’s definitely not going to get any personal space in this bed if I have anything to say about it.

He made a noise as she started to clean herself up in the moonlight. He frowned, moving to take the cloth from her and do it for her, but she shook her head. “I’m okay, you just relax.”

He still pouted, but did as she told him to. The small thrill of power whenever that happened always took her off-guard, but she didn’t mind.

She cleaned off her thighs and pussy first before wiping his come off of her belly.

“Did I miss anything?” she asked once she was pretty sure she got all of it.

He shook his head, still mute—but not concerningly so.

Osha stepped closer, acclimated to the darkness enough to see him. She folded the cloth into a clean square and knelt by his side, very gently wiping down his face while he stayed obediently still for her. She followed with his hands, then his own belly, and when it came to the rest—

He took the cloth from her then, thank god.

She pulled on some sleep clothes for herself, and only after she had did he roll into motion, slinking to the floor beside her. He would sprinkle many kisses against her shoulder between stretches, and thank goodness for her sleepiness, because she would have been giggling and tittering at each one otherwise.

If they didn’t whisper goodnight, then that was their secret.

Osha shouldn’t have been doing this shit again.

The first time was bad enough, with Mae just ten feet away in the shower as Osha went through her phone. This time was worse, going through Qimir’s phone while he figured out lunch.

“Can I give Pip some turkey?” he called to her. She nearly fumbled his phone onto the floor.

“Yeah, but not too much! Not even if he asks nicely.”

She wasn’t sweating as she scrolled through his texts, but it was a near enough thing. Seriously, does he save any numbers besides mine?

And then one caught her eye.

UNKNOWN NUMBER: What were you doing in Khofar?

A quick peek at the thread made Osha 99% certain that this was Idise. So she put the number in her phone and waited until he was gone to send a single text.

O: I think we need to talk. You said there were things I should know, and I want to know them.

Idise responded with a place and time.

CHAPTER 20

#unhingery #common grounds #osha x qimir #oshamir #oshamir fanfiction #star wars fanfiction #the acolyte #the acolyte fanfiction

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hylianengineer · 27 days ago

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TIL that ceramic has what appears to be essentially the same breakage pattern as stone. I can see the bulb of percussion and everything.

I didn't think to take a photo of the cool broken porcelain before throwing it away but here's what it looks like on a rock.

This is one of the ways stone tools can be made! This piece isn't much of a tool yet, although the flakes can have sharp edges, but you could keep chipping away pieces until it was the shape you wanted - and that's exactly what our ancestors did. (And some people still do; I learned very basic flintnapping in an archaeology class.)

The piece of porcelain my dogs broke didn't have visible ripples and I've never been good at finding erailure scars even on stone, but there was an excellent bulb of percussion.

Which is fascinating. It DOES kind of make sense, since ceramic is made of clay which is a type of dirt and some rocks are just dirt that's been fused together under heat and pressure for a long time. Also if you fire clay at a high enough temperature it becomes what we call vitrified - which is derived from a root word that meabs glass. Vitrified clay doesn't look or feel much like glass but it does become very hard.

You know what else is like glass? Obsidian, one of the best materials for stone tools, because of its homogenous composition and ability to form sharp edges. Obsidian is pretty much just volcanic glass, and human-made glass will break in the same way.

Interestingly, many ceramic glazes are essentially just colored glass after they've been fired. They contain silicon, which turns to glass when heated, and that's what gives most glazed ceramics their smooth, shiny finish. My broken porcelain wasn't glazed, though, and I don't think it was fully vitrified either.

#hylian rambles #my anthropology degree strikes again #i am never getting archaeology out of my head #undescribed #stone flakes #I'm scared to tag this archaeology least the real archaeologists come after me #they seem very nice but i am only a lowly recently graduate of a ba anthropology progra #I'm an environmental scientist i only dabble in archaeology

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idexindia · 5 months ago

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High Pressure Homogeniser: What You Need to Know

When an equipment (called homogeniser) forces a liquid sample through a system to break it, reduce particle size and homogenise it, the process is known as high-pressure homogenisation. Depending on the specific system setup, a high-pressure homogeniser may employ a combination of shear forces, impact, and cavitation to achieve the desired effect. The end goal is to create a uniform, stable mixture of substances, often by breaking down larger particles into smaller, uniform sizes. Smaller particles reduce the chances of phase separation, ensuring better consistency, texture and lifespan of final products. The process is most commonly used in industries ranging from pharmaceuticals and food production to cosmetics and biotechnology.

#Nanoemulsions #High Pressure #Nano-Suspension #High Pressure Homogenizer #IDEX India

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genizer-homogenizer · 8 months ago

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Choosing the Right Homogenizer: Valve-Type vs. Microfluidic Jet High-Pressure Homogenizer?

High-pressure homogenization is widely used in industries like pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, food processing, and cosmetics for tasks such as achieving uniform particle sizes, forming stable emulsions, and producing consistent suspensions. Two commonly used technologies for this purpose are valve-type and microfluidic jet high-pressure homogenizers. Understanding how each one works and their…

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#high pressure homogenizer #microfluidic #microfluidic homogenizer #valve homogenizer

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high-pressure-homogenizer · 10 months ago

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youtube

Genizer Hand Driven High Pressure Microfluidic Homogenizer up to 30,000psi. The Portable Hand-Driven Homogenizer is a cost-effective, lightweight tool for concept testing, reaching pressures up to 30,000 psi. Its compact design enables easy hand operation without compressed gas, making it ideal for small-scale formulations and a versatile alternative to air-driven units. It handles nanodispersions, nanoemulsions, cell disruption, and encapsulation in polymers, liposomes, and oils. The homogenizer can also function as a high-pressure pump for sanitary applications, such as liposome extrusion, with adjustable pressure settings of 10,000 psi, 20,000 psi, and 30,000 psi, and reduced dead volume by replacing the pressure gauge with a plug.

#genizer #high pressure homogenizer #homogenizer #lab equipment #Youtube

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helen0086 · 7 months ago

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Efficient Preparation of Analytical Grade Phycocyanin from Spirulina

Abstract: In order to produce analytical grade C-Phycocyanin (C-Phycocyanin) with low cost and high efficiency, this paper used Spirulina obtusususus alginatus powder as the raw material, and extracted C-Phycocyanin with ultrasound coupled with high-pressure homogenization with high efficiency, and purified the extracted C-Phycocyanin through salting out, dialysis and glucose gel column G-75, so that the purity of the extracted C-Phycocyanin could reach the analytical grade, and the changes of the components in the purified extract were analyzed with SDS-PAGE and UV-absorbance. At the same time, SDS-PAGE and UV-absorbance were used to analyze the compositional changes in the purified extracts. The experimental results showed that the high pressure homogenization coupled with ultrasound method could effectively improve the yield of alginate blue protein, and the optimal combination of extraction conditions was as follows: 390 W ultrasound for 2 min, ultrasound 2 s/interval of 2 s, 60 MPa for 3 times, and the yields and purities of alginate blue protein in the crude extracts were 131.2 mg - g- 1 and 0.69, respectively, which increased 51.07% and 51.07% compared with those of the high pressure homogenization and ultrasound alone, respectively. The yield and purity (A620/A280 ) were 131 mg - g- 1 and 0.69, respectively, which were higher than those of high-pressure homogenization and sonication alone by 51.07% and 58.15%, respectively, and higher than those of the previous reports. After two steps of ammonium salting out (12% ammonium sulfate and 50% ammonium sulfate) and dialysis, the purity of alginate could be increased to 1.09 (＞0.7), and finally purified by 25-min glucose gel G-75 chromatography, the yields and purities of alginate (A620/A280) were 107.65 mg-g-1 and 4.23 (＞4.0), which were up to the standard of analytical grade, and the recoveries reached 82.05%, and the yields were higher than those reported in the previous report. The recoveries were 82.05%, and the L ∗ a ∗ b ∗ values of the analytical grade alginate were 58.07, - 15.44 and - 17.86, which were mainly related to the purity, concentration and the source of the raw materials. The use of SDS-PAGE gel electrophoresis provides technical support for the production of analytical grade algal blue protein at low cost.

Because of its high nutritional value, Spirulina is widely used in human and animal health supplements, such as food and feed, pharmaceuticals and personal care, etc. Among all the functional components, the protein content is the highest (up to 60% ~ 70% of the dry weight), and the content of essential amino acids reaches up to 8%, which makes Spirulina an all-natural protein food source with comprehensive nutrition[1-2] . According to the difference of absorption spectrum, the algal bile protein in Spirulina is mainly divided into C-phyco cyanin (C-phyco cyanin), A-phyco cya- nin (A-PC) and R-phyco cyanin (R-PC), of which the algal cyanin accounts for 20% of the dry weight of Spirulina, and can be used as a natural pigment in food, cosmetics, etc.[3] . It can be used as a natural coloring for food, cosmetics and so on[3] . Phycocyanin is a kind of multi-chain protein, mainly composed of α-subunit (two cysteine and two methionine residues) and β-subunit (three cysteine and five methionine residues), in which each subunit contains 160 ~ 180 amino acid sequence, and α3 β3 cyclic triplet and (α3 β3 )2 hexamer are the main forms of phycocyanin[4] . Meanwhile, the chromophore of phycocyanin is mainly derived from phycocyanin (linear tetrapyrrole compound), which is connected to the carrier protein through the thioether bond. C phycocyanin solution shows cobalt blue in water, while A-PC solution is bright water blue, and the maximum absorption wavelengths of C phycocyanin and A-PC are 620 and 652 nm, respectively[5] .

C phycocyanin is a kind of natural blue compound of algal blue protein which has been widely exploited, according to the purity grade of the ratio of the characteristic peak absorbance at 620 nm to the absorbance of the protein at 280 nm, when A620/A280 ≥ 0.7, the CPC is the food grade; when A620/A280 is 0.7~3.9, the C phycocyanin is the reagent grade; when A620/A280 ≥ 4.0, the C phycocyanin is the analytical grade[6] . When A620/A280 ≥4.0, CPC is analytical grade[6] . The higher the purity of C-cyhalocyanin, the higher its commercial value, and the price of food-grade C-cyhalocyanin is in the range of 0.9 Yuan-mg-1 , while the price of analytical-grade C-cyhalocyanin is about 105 Yuan-mg-1 [7]. In addition, it was previously reported in the literature that high-purity phycocyanin has bioactivities such as anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, anti-tumor, and immunofluorescent properties, and can be used as a pharmaceutical ingredient in healthcare as a natural ideal substance without toxic side effects [8-9], therefore, large quantities of high-purity phycocyanin have become an urgent need for realizing the high-value applications of phycocyanin at the present time.

Currently, physical, chemical and biological methods have been reported for the extraction of cyanobacterial proteins from Spirulina, such as ultrasonication, high pressure homogenization, repeated freezing and thawing, chemical solvents and enzyme processing[10-13] . Wanida[14] and others used Spirulina powder as raw material, and ultrasonic cell crushing method, 10 mmol -L-1 phosphate buffer, material-liquid ratio of 1:15, power of 750 W, time of 5 min, the final yield and purity of C albicans were 60 mg-g-1 and 0.52 mg-g-1, respectively. Tavanandi[15] et al. used Spirulina powder as raw material to extract algal blue protein by freeze-thawing method under the following conditions: 0.1 mol -L-1 phosphate buffer, 1:8 ratio of material to liquid, soaking for 4 h, freeze-thawing for 4 h, thawing for 1 h, and the yields and purities of C algal blue protein were 73.73 mg - g- 1 and 0.66, respectively.

Currently, there are some shortcomings in the methods of C alginate extraction, such as the use of ultrasonic cell fragmentation or freeze-thawing alone, the yield and purity of C alginate are relatively low, and freeze-thawing is more time-consuming, and chemical and enzymatic methods are more costly. The main purification techniques for C alginate include salting out[16] , column chromatography[17] , dual-phase extraction[15] , and membrane filtration[18] . Marina[19] and others used 50 ml of water for the analysis of the membrane filtration. Marina[19] and others utilized 50 kDa polyethersulfone membrane to ultrafiltrate the crude extract of cyanobacterial blue protein, and the purity of C cyanobacterial blue protein was increased to 1.5, and then after passing through an ion exchange column, the final purity of C cyanobacterial blue protein was 3.9, and its recovery was 79.7%. Ravi[20] et al. extracted the crude extract of C alginate from ultrasonic cell crushing, after 20%, 70% ammonium sulfate two-step starching, and then by DEAE-Cellulose anion-exchange column chromatography, the purity of analytical-grade C alginate was 4. 03. The existing technology of C alginate separation and purification has the problems of instability, unsuitable for large-scale application and low recovery rate[21] , in order to promote the deep processing of C alginate and its high-value application, low-cost, efficient and rapid production of high-purity C alginate has become the main direction of the current research.

Therefore, the aim of this thesis is to identify the molecular weight and color of the analytical grade C alginate obtained by ultrasonication-coupled high-pressure extraction-P,H, and, at the same time, to identify the molecular weight and color of the analytical grade C alginate obtained by SDS-PAGE and color analysis, so as to provide technological support for the low-cost and high efficiency of production of spirochaetal alginate and its high-value applications.

1 Materials and Methods

1.1 Raw materials, reagents and instruments

Raw material of Spirulina dried algae powder (Jiangxi Zhongzhao Bio-technology Co., Ltd.); Ammonium sulfate, sodium chloride, barium chloride, etc. are analytically pure (Guangzhou Xilan Science Co., Ltd.); Dialysis bag (8 000 ~ 14 000 Da, Beijing Soleilbao Science and Technology Co., Ltd.); Dextran gel column G-75 (Beijing Soleilbao Science and Technology Co., Ltd.); Electrophoresis kit (Beijing Soleilbao Science and Technology Co., Ltd.); Low-molecular-weight Marker (Beijing Soleilbao Science and Technology Co., Ltd.); Low-molecular-weight Marker (Beijing Soleilbao Science and Technology Co., Ltd.). Molecular Weight Marker (Beijing Soleilbao Technology Co., Ltd.); Electrophoresis Kit (Beijing Soleilbao Technology Co., Ltd.)

UV-visible spectrophotometer (UV-9000, Shanghai Yuan Analytical Instrument Co., Ltd.); desktop high-speed freezing centrifuge (H1850R, Hunan Xiang Instrument Laboratory Instrument Development Co., Ltd.); computerized ultraviolet chromatography (HD-3001, Shanghai Jiapeng Technology Co., Ltd.); high-pressure homogenizer (GJJ-0.06/100, Shanghai Taichi-Tongyi Light Industry Equipment Co., Ltd.); ultrasonic cell pulverizer (Ningbo Xinzhi Biotechnology Co., Ltd.); electrophoresis system (Bio-BAD); gel image analyzer (WD-9400, Ningbo Xinzhi Bioscience and Technology Co. Ltd.); ultrasonic cell pulverizer (Ningbo Xinzhi Bio-technology Co., Ltd.); electrophoresis system (Bio-BAD Co., Ltd.); gel image analyzer (WD-9413C, Beijing Liuyi Bio-Technology Co., Ltd.); colorimeter (TS7700, Shenzhen Sanyanshi Technology Co., Ltd.). 1.2 Optimization of extraction method and conditions of algal blue protein

1.2. 1 High-pressure homogenized extraction

50.0 g of spirulina powder was taken, and 1.0 L of ultrapure water was added to prepare spirulina solution, which was then processed in a high-pressure homogenizer for three times consecutively at the pressures of 0, 20, 40, 60 and 80 MPa, and the treated algal slurry was centrifuged for 10 min at 8000 r-min-1. The supernatant was subjected to a full-wavelength scanning (200-800 nm) and the absorbance at 620 and 280 nm was determined, The absorbance at 620, 280 and 652 nm was measured, and the yield and purity of the extracted algal blue protein were calculated at different pressures, and the above experiments were repeated three times.

1.2.2 Ultrasonic extraction

50.0 g of Spirulina powder was taken in a 2.0 L beaker and 1.0 L of ultrapure water was added. The cells were broken at 390 W for 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 min after 2 s of ultrasonication, and the ultrasonic cell breakage was carried out in a water bath at 4 ℃ to prevent overheating. After sonication, the samples were centrifuged at 4 ℃ for 10 min at 8000 r-min-1, and the supernatant was subjected to ultraviolet scanning at full wavelength (200-800 nm), and the absorbance at 620, 280 and 652 nm was measured to calculate the yield and purity of the algal cyanine protein obtained from different sonication times, and the above experiments were repeated three times.

1.2.3 Ultrasound-coupled high-pressure homogenization method for extraction of algal blue protein

The optimal conditions for the extraction of algal blue protein by ultrasonic crushing were 390 W, 2 s of ultrasonic power, 2 s of ultrasonic intervals, and a total processing time of 2 min; the optimal processing pressure for the extraction of algal blue protein by high-pressure homogenization was 60 MPa for three times. 50.0 g of Spirulina powder was taken into a 2.0 L beaker, and 1.0 L of ultrapure water was added and stirred well, then the cells were broken under the optimal conditions of ultrasonic crushing/high-pressure homogenization, and the broken solution was centrifuged at 4 ℃ for 10 min under the condition of 8,000 r - min-1, and the supernatant was subjected to the full-wavelength scanning (200-800 nm) and the absorbance at 620, 280, and 652 nm was measured. The absorbance at 620, 280 and 652 nm was measured, and the yield and purity of alginate obtained were calculated[22] , and the above experiments were repeated three times.

1.2.4 Determination of alginate (C alginate) content and purity

The absorbance at 620, 280 and 652 nm was measured, and the concentration, yield and purity of phycocyanin were calculated according to Eqs. 1~3[13] : Purity = A620 /A280

(1) where C:A- n,2 ,Ag6 21n∗ protein solution ()

The absorbance at 620,280,652 nm, C is the concentration of phycocyanin by volume (mg - mL-1 ), m is the mass of Spirulina powder (g), and V is the volume of phycocyanin solution (mL).

1.3 Salting and dialysis of algal blue proteins

The algal slurry obtained from the treatment was centrifuged in a freezing centrifuge at 4 ℃ and 8 000 r - min- 1 speed for 10 min, and the supernatant was taken, and the ammonium sulfate was added to 10%, 11%, 12%, 13%, 14%, 15% ammonium sulfate, and then stored in the refrigerator at 4 ℃ for 6 h, and then centrifuged at 8 000 r - min- 1 speed for 10 min, and then the supernatant was further supplemented with ammonium sulfate up to 50%, and then stored in a dialysis bag (8 000 ~ 14 000 Da) for 6 h at 4 ℃, and centrifuged at 4 ℃, 8 000 r - min- 1 for 10 min. The supernatant was further replenished with ammonium sulfate to 50%, stored at 4 ℃ for 6 h and centrifuged at 4 ℃ for 10 min at 8 000 r - min- 1. The resulting precipitate was dialyzed by dialysis bag (8 000 ~ 14 000 Da) for 12 h, and the endpoint of dialysis was examined by barium chloride.

1.4 Algae blue protein purification by column chromatography

A dextran gel column G-75 was used to further purify the dialyzed desalted samples. The dried dextran gel powder was soaked in distilled water for 24 h. The column was shaped as 2 cm × 50 cm with a bed height of 30 cm. The dextran gel bed was rinsed with PBS buffer pH 7.0 to bring the packing material into anionic and cationic equilibrium. The dialyzed samples were eluted with 0.1 mol-L-1 NaCl in a gradient (elution rate: 0.5 mL-min-1 ), and the samples were collected in tubes every 5 min. The absorbance at 620, 280 and 652 nm of the collected samples was measured and the concentration and purity of phycocyanin were calculated. The fraction with the highest purity was then scanned at full wavelength from 200 to 800 nm.

1.5 SDS-gel electrophoresis

The mass fraction of the separator was 15% and that of the concentrator was 5%. The electrophoresis voltage in the concentrated gel was 80 V for 30 min, and then 120 V for 120 min. After electrophoresis, the color was stained with Coomassie Brilliant Blue for 30 min, and the color was removed by decolorizing solution of acetic acid:dot:water = 1:1:8 until the color was removed.

1.6 Determination of color

The color was measured by TS7700 colorimeter, the light source for color measurement was D65, the spot diameter was 8 mm, 5 measurement points were selected evenly, and the colorimeter was calibrated with black and white boards, then the L ∗ a ∗ b ∗ value of each measurement point was measured and averaged, where L ∗ represents the brightness of the sample.

1.7 Experimental processing and statistical methods of data

The experimental data were analyzed using Origin Pro 9.0 and SPSS 9.0 software. All data were analyzed by one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA), and each group of experiments was repeated more than three times to ensure the accuracy of the data. Different letters represent significant differences between the data (P<0.05).

2 Results and analysis

2.1 High-pressure homogenization extraction of algal blue protein

High-pressure homogenization is a rapid method for cell breakage, which is mainly used to break the cell membrane by high pressure, and finally, the intracellular components are released[24] . Figure 1A shows the yield and purity of phycocyanin obtained from 50 g-L-1 Spirulina solution after three consecutive treatments at different pressures. The results showed that the C phycocyanin yield increased significantly with the increase of treatment pressure and reached a maximum value of 88.15 mg-g-1 at 60 MPa, and then there was no significant difference as the pressure continued to increase. In addition, the purity of C phycocyanin (A620/A280) increased significantly with increasing pressure, and was maintained at 0.63-0.66 (<0.7) from 20 to 60 MPa, and decreased to about 0.53 as the pressure was further increased to 80 MPa.

The main reason may be that with the increase of the treatment pressure, the damage to the cell wall and cell membrane was gradually increased, resulting in the dissolution of more C-protein in the cells, and finally the C-PC production was increased[15] . At 0~20 MPa, with the increase of pressure, the dissolution of phycocyanin in the cell increased significantly, and the purity of C-PC was also increased to the maximum value, and then with the increase of pressure to 80 MPa, the destruction of the cell wall was further increased, and the nucleic acid, sugars, lipids and other substances in the cell were released, and the purity of C-PC was decreased. Figure 1B shows the ultraviolet scanning map of Spirulina C alginate obtained at 60 MPa (200-800 nm), which showed that C alginate had the maximum absorption peak at 620 nm, which was basically consistent with the characteristic peaks of the previously reported alginate, indicating that the treatment of Spirulina C at 60 MPa had no effect on the structure of the alginate. Therefore, 60 MPa was selected as the optimum pressure for the extraction of C alginate from Spirulina sp. by high pressure homogenization method, taking into account the cost-effectiveness of extraction energy consumption.

Fig. 1 Effect of different treatment pressures on the yield and purity of C alginate and UV scan (60 MPa).

2.2 Ultrasonic extraction of algal blue protein

Ultrasonic cell disruption through ultrasound to break the cell wall of biological tissues, promote the release of extractable compounds within the cell wall, enhance the solvent from the continuous phase into the cell, increase the release of compounds within the cell to increase the yield of extracted intracellular material[25] . Figure 2A shows the effect of sonication time on the yield and purity of phycocyanin. The results showed that the yield of C alginate increased significantly to 81.29 mg-g-1 in the first 2 min, then there was no significant difference in the yield in 2~4 min, and the yield decreased significantly to 68.62 mg-g-1 with the further extension of the time to the end of 6 min. Due to the cavitation and mechanical effects of ultrasound, the cell wall can be broken and the intracellular substances can be outflowed in a very short time[26] , which can increase the solubility of C-cell cyanobacterial proteins and thus increase the yield of C-cell cyanobacterial proteins. Under the condition of 2~4 min, ultrasonic waves had no significant effect on the cell wall disruption with the increase of time, and the yield was almost unchanged.

With the increase of sonication time (4~6 min), the system may produce too much heat, which may lead to the denaturation of C alginate, resulting in the decrease of the yield. At the same time, with the increase of ultrasonication time, the intracellular impurities continued to be leached out, and the purity of C alginate (A620/A280) decreased significantly from 0.6 to 0.48 (Fig. 2A). Figure 2B shows the ultraviolet scanning map (200-800 nm) of Spirulina C alginate obtained by ultrasonication for 2 min. The results showed that C alginate had the maximum absorption peak at 620 nm, which was basically consistent with the characteristic peaks of the previously reported alginate, and indicated that ultrasonication for 2 min had no effect on the structure of the alginate. Therefore, 2 min was chosen as the optimum time for ultrasonic extraction of algal cyanobacterial proteins, taking into account the cost-effectiveness of extraction energy consumption.

2.3 Extraction of algal blue proteins by ultrasound and high pressure homogenization

Fig. 3 shows the effect of high-pressure homogenization coupled with ultrasonication on the extraction of cyanobacterial proteins from Spirulina under the optimal conditions of high-pressure homogenization and ultrasonication. As shown in Fig. 3A, the yield of C-PC obtained by high pressure homogenization coupled with ultrasonication was significantly higher than that obtained by high pressure homogenization or ultrasonication, but the purity of C-PC was significantly lower than that obtained by high pressure homogenization or ultrasonication. The maximum yield of C- PC obtained by high pressure homogenization coupled with ultrasonication was 131.2 mg-g-1 , followed by high pressure homogenization + ultrasonication (124.3 mg-g-1 ), high pressure homogenization (86.85 mg-g-1 ), and ultrasonication (82.96 mg-g-1 ), which increased the yields of C- PC by 51.07% and 58.15% compared with that obtained by high pressure homogenization and ultrasonication, respectively. The yields were 51.07% and 58.15% higher than those obtained by high pressure homogenization and ultrasonication respectively.

The main reason for this is that the destruction of cell walls and cell membranes by the HPHMA coupled ultrasound method is much higher than that of the individual treatment, and the cell contents such as proteins, nucleic acids, chlorophylls and polysaccharides were dissolved in large quantities, which finally led to a significant increase in the algal blue protein content and the lowest purity (0.69)[15] . The results showed that the efficiency of alginate extraction by this coupling method was much higher than that of previous literature reports, such as Tavanandi[15] and others, who used four freeze-thawing methods for 4 h to extract alginate with a yield of 73.73 mg-g-1 ; Pan-utai[26] and others, who utilized ultrasonication to extract the alginate with a yield of 60 mg-g-1 after 5 min extraction; Ilter[27] and others, who used homogenization to obtain C-alginate with a yield of 0.69 mg-g-1 ; and others, who used the homogenization method to obtain C-alginate with a yield of 0.69 mg-g-1 . Ilter[27] et al. obtained a yield of 67.61 mg-g-1 of C alginate by homogenization; Kaferbock[28] et al. obtained a yield of 119.48 mg-g-1 of C alginate by pulsed electric field treatment for 7 h. Therefore, in order to obtain a higher yield of C alginate, it is important to use the same method as that used for the extraction of C alginate by ultrasonic extraction. Therefore, in order to obtain a higher yield of cyanobacterial protein, ultrasonication + high pressure homogenization was used as the most suitable extraction method for C alginate in the subsequent experiments.

Figure 3B shows the ultraviolet full-wavelength scanning results of C phycocyanin obtained by the four methods, and the results show that the samples obtained by the four extraction methods have four absorption peaks at 280, 400~450, 620, and 670 nm, respectively. Previous studies have shown that 280 nm is the characteristic absorption peak of protein, 400~450 nm is the characteristic absorption peak of carotenoid, 620 nm is the characteristic absorption peak of phycocyanin, and 670 nm is the characteristic absorption peak of chlorophyll[29] . From 3B, it can be seen that the samples extracted by the four methods have higher absorption peaks at 280 and 620 nm, indicating that the main substance in the extract is phycocyanin; and the absorption peaks of the sample extracted by ultrasonication + high-pressure homogenization are higher than those of the other three curves, indicating that this extraction method has the highest yield of C phycocyanin, but it contains more impurities, and its purity is lower than that of the other three methods, which is in agreement with the results of Fig. 3A. This is consistent with the results of Fig. 3A.

2.4 Ammonium sulfate salting out and dialysis purification of algal blue proteins

Purification of C alginate using ammonium sulfate is based on the principles of salting out and salting out. At low concentrations, ammonium sulfate surrounds the protein molecules, which are salted (solubilized). At high concentrations, the salt ions are very strong and bind more easily to water molecules. The binding of salt to water molecules leads to an increase in the attraction between protein molecules, which results in hydrophobic interactions and a decrease in the solubility of the protein molecules, leading to the formation of a precipitate[30] . From Fig. 4, it can be seen that the purity of C alginate increased and then decreased with the increase of ammonium sulfate concentration. When the concentration of ammonium sulfate was 12%, the purity of C-PC (A620/A280) reached the maximum value (1.09), and then decreased to 0.76. The purity of C-PC (A620/A280) reached the maximum value (1.09), and then decreased to 0.76. In addition, with the increase of ammonium sulfate concentration, the recovery of C-PC in the supernatant remained unchanged at about 90% from 10% to 12% of ammonium sulfate concentration, and then decreased significantly to about 69.5% with the increase of ammonium sulfate concentration to 15%.

The main reason may be due to the principle of salt solubilization, at the beginning of ammonium sulfate can make impurities (chlorophyll, carotenoids, etc.) precipitated, and the target product will not be lost, so in the supernatant of C alginate recovery remains unchanged and the purity of the increase. With the increase of ammonium sulfate concentration (>12%), too much ammonium sulfate can make the C alginate precipitate down and the target product will be lost, so the recovery of C alginate in the supernatant decreased. Therefore, in this experiment, 12% ammonium sulfate was used as the first step of salting-out to dissolve the cyanobacterial protein, and then the concentration of ammonium sulfate was increased to 50% to precipitate C alginate completely for subsequent purification.

2.5 Glucan Gel G-75 Purification of Algal Blue Protein

Gel column chromatography (GCC) is a method to separate and purify proteins based on their relative molecular masses. Previous studies have shown that C alginate is structurally composed of two peptide chains, i.e., α-unit (13-20.5 kDa) and β-unit (11-24.4 kDa)[30] . The separation range of dextran gel G-75 is about 3~80 kDa, therefore, dextran gel G-75 was chosen for the purification of C alginate cyanobacteria.

Figure 5a shows the elution curves of C-PC at the absorbance of 280 and 620 nm. At 25 min elution time, the elution peaks appeared at 280 and 620 nm, and the absorbance value at 620 nm was much larger than that at 280 nm, and the purity of A620/A280 reached the maximum value of 4.20 (analytical grade ＞4.0), which may be due to the fact that the heteroprotein with a larger amount of molecules needed shorter time to pass through the dextran gel column G-75, and the heteroprotein with a smaller amount needed longer time to be separated from C-protein [Figure 5a]. The reason for this may be that it takes a shorter time for the larger heteroproteins to pass through the dextran gel column G-75, while the smaller heteroproteins take a longer time to separate from C alginate[29] , resulting in a decrease in the absorption peak at 280 nm. The purity of C-PC can be improved by separating the heteroproteins from C alginate by column analysis. Therefore, 25 min is the optimal time for the purification of phycocyanin by dextran gel G-75 column.

Figure 5b shows that the UV scan of the algal blue protein collected after 25 min of dextran gel G-75, the absorbance at 620 nm showed a large increase, and the absorbance at 280 nm showed a slight decrease, which was mainly due to the removal of heteroproteins after dextran gel G-75, and the decrease in absorbance at 280 nm, 300~400 nm, and the weak peak at 300~400 nm may be caused by the absorption of disulfide bonds in the protein. The weak peak at 300~400 nm may be caused by the absorption of disulfide bonds in the protein. After the dextran gel G-75, the purity of C alginate was further increased from 0.85 to 4.2, which reached the analytical purity.

2.6 SDS-PAGE and color of analytical grade algal blue protein

After two steps of salting out, dialysis and 25 min column chromatography, the purified sample was freeze-dried, and the yield of analytical alginate was 107.65 mg-g-1 with a purity of 4.23, and the recovery rate reached 82.05%. Figure 6 shows the SDS-PAGE and color of the analytical grade alginate. From Fig. 6a, it can be seen that the electrophoretic lane of alginate dialyzed after salting out had more bands and the bands were not obvious, which indicated that the sample obtained had more impurities and lower purity. On the other hand, the purified phycocyanin by dextran gel G-75 column chromatography showed fewer and clearer bands, indicating that most of the impurities were removed by column chromatography. Thus, the electrophoretic bands showed the target protein and the purification result was satisfactory, which was consistent with the purity results of phycocyanin obtained in Figure 4 and Figure 5a. In addition, the molecular weight of C alginate was assessed to be about 17 kDa by comparison with the Marker sample. This is basically consistent with the molecular weight reported in previous papers and others[31] . Figure 6b shows the color values of phycocyanin obtained after column chromatography purification, with a brightness (L ∗ value) of 58.07, a redness (a ∗ ) of - 15.44, and a yellowness off[32] .

3 Conclusion

In this paper, we investigated the separation and purification process of analytical grade C alginate from Spirulina, in order to produce analytical grade C alginate with low cost and high efficiency. Firstly, the pressure of high pressure homogenization and the ultrasonic time of ultrasonic method were optimized respectively, and the optimal conditions of the two methods were used together to improve the high knotting of C alginate by 51.07% and 58.15% compared with different treatment methods and higher than that of the previous report. The salt concentration of ammonium sulfate on alginate was optimized(1) . After purification by column chromatography on an ammonium-pressure, min-glucose gel column G-75, the yield and purity of alginate were 107.65 mg-g-1 and 4.23 (> 4.0), respectively, and the recovery rate reached 82.05%. In addition, the purity and molecular weight (17 kDa) of the purified C alginate were verified by SDS-PAGE, and the results were basically consistent with those of previous reports. In this paper, we improved the traditional extraction and purification process to produce analytical grade C alginate with high efficiency and low cost, which can provide technical support for the wide application of analytical grade C alginate in Spirulina.

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#Phycocyanin #Spirulina #cPhycocyanin #Phycocyaninpowder

#healthy food #healthy eating #veganfood

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