#I had to downsize this thing FOUR TIMES!!!!!

[forgetful-river]

Aradia August Day 18: Doomed Timeline

[reflectionsofgalaxies]

i wish i could tell the crows

[wandascosmic]

your boyfriend, he's upset (4)

wanda maximoff x fem!reader

part four of 'you belong with me' series

summary: basically a wanda series inspired by jim and pam from the office

word count: 2596

tags: slight homophobia, best friends to lovers, reader's so in love, wanda's as oblivious as it gets, to reader's feelings and her own, reader messing with sam even more, wanda joins in on the pranks, we hate vision in this one

part 1 part 2 part 3 part 4 part 5 part 6 part 7 part 8 part 9

“Hey,” Sam whispers to you as you’re reading over your files by the copy machine. “So, listen, I was thinking that it might be a good idea if you and I formed an alliance, you know, ‘cause of the downsizing.” 

You nod slightly, still keeping your eyes on your papers but acknowledging the fact that you’re listening to him. There was a rumor going around that Tony was possibly being forced by corporate to remove a couple of his staff, and because Sam was Tony’s biggest suckup, naturally he was worried about being laid off. You and Wanda had talked about it earlier, and you both weren’t too worried, since you knew you would remain friends. Plus, the only good part about your job in your opinion was seeing Wanda every day, so that would probably be the driving force that would make you miss this place at all.  

“Would you like to form an alliance with me?” he asks lowly, like the two of you were on some sort of top-secret mission. 

You meet his gaze, narrowing your eyes and looking over your shoulder as if to ensure no one was eavesdropping on your conversation. “Absolutely, I do,” you respond under your breath, imitating his spy-like tone of voice. 

“Good, good,” Sam answers, crossing his arms and scowling around at the members of the office. “Okay, now we need to figure out who’s vulnerable, and who’s protected,” he points a finger to emphasize his point. 

Sam continues to speak about his plan for the two of you, but you don’t hear him over the excitement bubbling up in your chest as he presents to you a way you can finally get back at him for all the times he’s annoyed you. Your mind runs through a million different ideas of how to prank him, and you try not to smile to give it away, doing your best to maintain a serious expression.  

“Just one other thing, and this is important,” Sam states, and you snap out of your thoughts to play your role once more. 

You lean closer to hear him clearly. 

“This alliance is completely secret, ok? You cannot tell anyone about this.” 

You nod, holding out your hand for him to shake. He takes it with a firm grip. 

*** “An alliance?” Wanda asks with a laugh.  

“Oh, yeah,” you shrug, leaning over her desk, acting nonchalant but giving her a look to indicate that it’s a joke to you too. 

“What does that even mean?”

You break out into a smile. “I don’t know, I think it has something to do with ‘Survivor’, but I’m honestly not sure,” you joke. 

Wanda chuckles at your jest. 

“It’ll definitely involve spying on people, and we may build a fort in accounting,” you finish amusingly as she grins. 

“Y/N!” Sam interrupts from across the room, your head snapping up to turn towards him by the fake tree in the middle of the office. 

He narrows his gaze at you and Wanda suspiciously. “Can I talk to you for a second about…the paper products?” he lies, beckoning you over with a gesture of his hand. 

“Good luck,” Wanda whispers to you. 

You wink at her before walking over to meet Sam in the kitchen. 

Wanda watches your retreating from with a smile and an amused shake of her head. 

***

Slamming the door closed, Sam wastes no time in confronting you. “Did you tell Wanda about the alliance?” he accuses, pointing a finger at your chest. 

“What? No-” you respond as if his accusation is completely ludicrous.

“Just now!” Sam shouts at you. 

“Oh,” your eyes widen in fake realization. “Oh, no, no, no, Sam, no. I’m using her,” you clarify. “For the alliance.” 

Sam looks at you skeptically. 

“Who knows the most information about this office? Wanda!” you explain. 

“Right, that’s good, keep doing it,” Sam says, watching Wanda work at her desk in suspicion through the kitchen window. 

“Well, I’m trying to,” you answer. “Do you see what I’m doing?” 

“Mhm,” Sam continues to analyze all of Wanda’s actions. 

“But listen,” you get his attention, turning him back around to face you. “I’m gonna have to talk to her a lot, all right?” Sam nods. “And there may be chatting, and giggling, alright? And you gotta just pretend to ignore it, got that? Wipe it away.” 

“Done,” Sam says. 

“All right,” you acknowledge, patting him on the back and leaving the kitchen to head to your desk. 

***

“You’re not gonna believe this,” you tell Sam in the parking lot between the cars, pacing back and forth with your arms crossed and a scowl on your face.  

“What?” he asks with worry. 

“Bruce and Nat,” you pause, stepping closer to him. “They’re forming an alliance,” you admit. 

“What? How do you know?” he asks disbelievingly. 

“I saw them talking at lunch,” you lie. In reality, they were talking about their favorite sandwich shop in New York and they let you join in on the fun. You actually managed to learn a lot more about the history of ham and cheese. “And if Bruce is in HR, and Nat is in accounting, think about it.” 

“Oh, they are forming an alliance!” he grunts angrily, kicking the tires of a red car in front of the two of you. 

“Okay, listen,” you tell him. “We need to assume that everyone in this office is forming an alliance, and is therefore trying to get us kicked off.” 

“God, damn it! Why us?” he asks up at the sky. 

You hold his shoulder as he makes eye contact with you. “Because we’re strong, Sam. Because we’re strong.”  

***

“Hey, Y/N? Can I talk to you for a second?” Wanda asks, her arms crossed as she comes up to your desk, seeming as if something was weighing her down. 

“Sure, what’s up?” you ask, swiveling around in your chair to face her. 

“Um, I don’t know, I’m just going a little crazy,” she explains. “‘Cause I keep overhearing all of these conversations between Tony and corporate.” 

Sam’s ears perk up as he hears Wanda’s confession from his desk next to yours. 

“And they’re all about like, staff issues,” she continues.

You smirk as you see Sam’s brows furrow out of the corner of your eye as he pretends to keep reading his magazine.  

“Oh, no,” you respond, leaning your elbow on your chair’s armrest and putting your chin in your hand. 

“Yeah,” she agrees. “And he’s making me take notes on all these meetings, and I’m like, “These people are my friends,”” she says with worry. 

“Right,” you acknowledge. 

“But he’s all like, “This is confidential, you can’t tell anybody,”” she imitates. “But I don’t know, I just feel like I need to tell somebody, you know?”

“Yeah, of course,” you assure her. 

“Anyways, just promise me you’re not gonna say anything?” she asks you nervously and pulling her sleeves over the back of her hands. 

“I will not tell anybody,” you promise. “This is between you and me.” 

“Okay,” she says with relief and blows out a puff of air. You get out your chair and follow her back to her desk. 

“I didn’t know you were an actress, Maximoff, that was perfect,” you whisper to her, stopping at reception, and drumming your fingers on the table.

“All in a day’s work, L/N,” she repeats your phrase back to you with a cheeky grin as she sits back down.

You shake your head in amusement. That was all her idea too. Leaning on your elbow and putting your head in your palm, you admire her quietly as she starts typing on her computer, giving you small smiles every now and then. You sigh softly, she’s so amazing.

***

“Okay, here’s the deal,” you let Sam know in the kitchen, locking the door and peeking through the window to make sure no one’s listening. “Wanda says that one of the alliances is meeting in the warehouse during Jennifer’s birthday party later today.” 

“Oh my god, we have to be there!” Sam responds. 

“I know! But it’s gonna be a little tough because there’s no good place to hide down there,” you explain. 

“No, no, yes there is behind the shelves- oh my God,” Sam’s eyes widen. 

“What is it?” you ask with curiosity. 

“I know exactly what to do.” 

***

“This is not what I had in mind, Sam,” you say as he steps into the large cardboard box in the middle of the warehouse. 

“Shut up, this is gonna be perfect, Y/N. It’s got a central location, and it’s the perfect cover. I can see and hear everything,” he answers. 

“Okay, good,” you respond, as he sits down in the box. “Wait, this isn’t gonna work, the lids open,” you let him know. 

“So tape it down,” he answers obviously. 

“I can’t do that,” you squat down at his level. “You won’t be able to breathe.” 

He rolls his eyes. “Look, I can breathe just fine, okay, but if it makes you feel better, I’ll poke holes in the box.” 

“Thank you, okay,” you nod, standing up and closing the lid. 

“God, you’re so needy, Y/N,” he says. 

“Yeah, thank you, Sam,” you say sarcastically. “So, do you want me to stay here, and you know, stand next to the box?” 

“No,” he retorts, opening up the lid from the inside. “You need to go upstairs to the party, so people don’t notice that we’re both gone.”

“Right. That’s good.” 

You poke a couple of holes in the box as well as two peepholes before taping the lid shut.  

Letting Sam know that you’re finished, he tells you to leave to go to the party. “All right, let me know if you hear anything,” you tell him, walking backwards slowly, and trying your best to hold in your laughter. 

Once you’re at the bottom of the staircase you turn to rush upstairs to let Wanda know about what your shared scheme has led to. 

***

“He���s in a box?” Wanda asks disbelievingly as she looks up at you from her chair. 

“Wanda, he’s in a box!” you laugh, eating a bite of Jennifer’s birthday cake and leaning further over her desk.  “He’s downstairs, in a box, on the floor near the shelves.” 

Wanda laughs. 

“I’m serious! Go down there, check it out, and work your magic,” you say as you point your fork at her with a mischievous grin. 

Wanda bites her lip in mischief, nudging her head towards the stairs for the two of you to go mess with Sam even more. 

Wanda steps down the stairs loudly to make sure Sam can hear her arrival, while you trudge behind her as quietly as possible ready to watch the scene unfold before you.

Stopping at the last few steps, you point towards the box Sam is in, and Wanda walks towards it, pulling out her phone. 

“Hey, where are you?” she says as if she’s on an important call. “Yeah, we were supposed to meet here.” 

You bite your fist to hold in your laughter. 

“What?” Wanda says with fake shock. “Oh my gosh,” Wanda says as she covers her mouth to hold in her laughter. “That ties in perfectly with something that Tony was telling me earlier!” The two of you look at each other with enormous grins as you both notice Sam trying to tear open the box from the inside with his pocket knife. “Yeah, I just don’t know what people, in like, accounting are gonna do,” she says as if she’s stressed. “It said specifically that-” 

Sam falls over in his box and the two of you nearly burst out in hysterics. 

With Sam letting out a groan of pain, Wanda shuts her phone and runs towards you with a huge smile on her face and grabs your hand absentmindedly, the two of you unable to control your laughter as you both make your way back upstairs. 

***

“Wanda!” you say excitedly as you run around her receptionist's desk to stand behind her chair. “I have something that totally tops the box.” 

“Oh, tell me, tell me,” she says eagerly looking up at you. 

“Okay,” you start with a big smile on your face. “I have just convinced Sam that he needs to go to Stamford, and spy on our other branch.” 

Wanda muffles her laughter with her hand. 

“No, no, no!” you continue. “But before he does so, I told him that he should dye his hair to go undercover.” 

“Oh my god,” Wanda says, putting her head in her hand as she tries to stop her overwhelming urge to fall to the floor in hysterics. 

The two of you break out into a fit of laughter together, and in the heat of the moment, you wrap one of your arms around her shoulder and place your palm there and hold her hand with the other. 

“If we can get him to drive to Connecticut, and put peroxide in his hair,” you continue through your laughter, the two of you unable to stop your giggles. 

“What the hell is this?” 

Your heart drops as you hear the sound of Wanda’s fiance. Stopping your laughter immediately, you take a big step away from Wanda and turn your head, making direct eye contact with Vision. 

“What are you trying to cop a feel or something, L/N?” he asks in anger. 

“No, no, no-” you try to explain. 

Vision’s anger overcomes him further and he starts to stalk towards you in rage. You take a couple steps back in fear away from him. 

“Vis! Hey, hey, stop!” Wanda interrupts, putting herself between the two of you and placing the palm of her hand on Vision’s chest.

Wanda looks at you wide-eyed as Vision continues to glare daggers at you. 

“God, I don’t even know how to explain this,” you say awkwardly, rubbing the back of your neck. Whether that was in fear or nervousness you didn’t know, but this was definitely not an ideal situation. “Um,” you clear your throat. “Sam asked me to be in an alliance,” you state, almost laughing at the ridiculousness of the situation. “And, um, we were, we’ve just been messing with him, you know, because of the whole alliance thing.” 

“Yeah, it’s just office pranks,” Wanda explains to her fiance, rubbing his arm to calm him down. 

“Exactly, it’s just office pranks,” you agree. 

“An alliance, what the hell is he talking about?” Vision asks Sam who stands by the fake tree. 

You look at Sam, silently apologizing and urging to explain the situation. 

 “I have absolutely no idea,” Sam replies, ignoring the situation before him and plopping down at his desk to make his sales calls. 

Your mouth parts slightly in shock. 

Vision looks at you angrily. “C’mon,” he tells Wanda, shoving her in the direction of the door while never breaking eye contact with you. Wanda tries to give you an apologetic look as she walks out but you don’t manage to meet her gaze as her fiance continues to intimidate you. 

Once Wanda’s outside, Vision stalks even closer to you, and at this point you’re nearly completely back to back with the wall. “You know she’s not gay, right?” he tells you venomously. 

Gulping, you nod. 

He narrows his eyes at you in anger, before finally deciding to walk out and follow his fiance. 

Standing awkwardly at Wanda’s empty receptionist’s desk, you walk quietly towards the ledge and lean onto your elbows, and sigh softly into your hands.

part 5

[bisexualmikisayaka]

there are 100% blind spots in Andor (especially when it comes to race) that the writer’s room just kind of fails at but i think it’s possible that many of the difficulties with this episode (and more we may see in the future, i suspect) come with looming budgetary, timeline, and season constraints. like, gilroy mentioned that there were some monetary constraints and things had to be done cheaper by mid season, and you also have the fact that you now need to get four characters to a reasonable endpoint so that their appearances in future media seem like a logical progression, and also deal with everybody else in your fairly large ensemble cast in the meantime (huge issue with deciding to downsize from five seasons to two).

i think there’s a lot of reasons to critique things like cinta’s death or bix’s miraculous recovery - both of those seem like they should have been given much more weight and screen time rather than being shoehorned in for maximum Plot Twist Energy at the final moment. but there simply is none of that screen time to spare - we have to tie up luthen, kleya, perrin, leida, sculdun, lonnie, deedra, syril, wilmon, partagaz, vel and bix’s story in like six episodes. so like… yeah, of course all the characters are being thrown together in increasingly ridiculous ways, and the relationships that were painstakingly developed earlier are now getting speedrun. i don’t love it either - it leads to writing decisions that have problematic real world implications, as well as decreasing the overall quality of the show - but it at least makes some sort of sense why it’s happening.

[mariacallous]

On March 27th, Sahil Lavingia walked into the Secretary of War Suite, in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, to attend an all-hands meeting of the Department of Government Efficiency. Lavingia had been a DOGE employee for two weeks, part of a small team embedded at the Department of Veterans Affairs. So far, it had been an unexpectedly isolating experience. Lavingia communicated over the messaging app Signal with another member of the V.A.’s DOGE team, but there didn’t seem to be a Signal channel where he could interact with the rest of DOGE. Instead, Lavingia would watch Elon Musk, who led the initiative, engage with his allies on X. Lavingia told me, “You’d see where the dolphins were swimming—like, now we’re looking at D.E.I. contracts—and so you’d swim there, too.”

Before coming to Washington, Lavingia lived in New York, where he worked at Gumroad, an e-commerce site that he’d founded more than a decade earlier. He wasn’t really a MAGA guy, but he had always thought it would be interesting to work in government, and he admired Musk. In October, at a tech meetup at the New York offices of the venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, Lavingia talked with someone who later introduced him to a DOGEstaffer. The staffer put him in touch with a DOGE engineer, who connected him with a DOGE recruiter. The calls didn’t last much longer than five minutes. “All the questions were about ‘When can you move to D.C.?’ ” Lavingia said. Eventually, Lavingia told me, he talked to Steve Davis, the president of Musk’s Boring Company, who asked if Lavingia could code. Yes, Lavingia said. A few weeks later, he got a text: a job had opened up at the V.A. “I felt like, O.K., finally, that’s some information,” Lavingia said. He started in mid-March, making an hourly wage of about thirteen dollars.

President Donald Trump formally created DOGE by executive order on his first day in office, rebranding what had been the United States Digital Service, a kind of internal tech consultancy for the federal government. Musk’s allies quickly staffed it: Davis, who had helped Musk overhaul Twitter, effectively became C.O.O., and Chris Young, a Republican political operative who had led Musk’s super PAC, became a senior adviser. On February 2nd, Wired identified six young computer engineers, all in their late teens or early twenties, who were working for DOGE. The young coders, collectively dubbed the “DOGE kids,” had set up shop at the Office of Personnel Management and at the General Services Administration, where, according to Politico, some of them appeared to be living, having furnished four rooms with IKEA beds. That cinched the cultural image. DOGE was the tech industry’s outpost in government, the department that would move fast and break things.

Initially, it was hard to know how seriously to take the new venture, whose name derived from a meme coin. A senior figure at a conservative think tank predicted to me that DOGE would yield nothing more than a government report that would get stuffed away in a drawer. But DOGE staffers were soon identifying contracts to cancel and employees to let go. On January 28th, the Office of Personnel Management sent most federal employees an e-mail titled “Fork in the Road,” which warned of involuntary downsizing to come and offered them the chance to resign with eight months of pay and benefits. (Musk had sent Twitter employees an e-mail with nearly the same subject shortly after he bought the social-media company, which he rebranded as X.) Those who stayed in their jobs were soon required to document, at the end of each week, five things that they had worked on. A series of lawsuits accumulated in DOGE’s wake, but its actions seemed to be producing results. At the end of March, the Times estimated that the federal government had potentially been cut by twelve per cent.

Lavingia and other members of the DOGE team at the V.A. had prepared a list of accomplishments to present at the all-hands meeting. There were about fifty people in the room at the Secretary of War Suite, a surprisingly small number, Lavingia thought, if this was all of DOGE. When Musk walked in, he asked attendees to share their recent victories, and pontificated about how broken the government was. “It was this very surreal scene,” Lavingia said. He tried to engage Musk in a conversation about a project, but “everyone looked at me like I was weird, like, ‘Why are you trying to get feedback from your boss?’ ” At one point, someone asked how many I.T. workers there were at the I.R.S. It turned out to be more than seven thousand. (The agency has a total of around a hundred thousand employees.) A member of DOGE’s I.R.S. team said that he thought the tax agency needed an “exorcist.” “Elon was, like, ‘Wait, seriously?’ ” Lavingia recalled. After a few hours, Lavingia left, disappointed. “It’s almost like this is one of the things you get for working at DOGE,” he said. “You get to hang out with Elon once in a while.”

Lavingia had already grown skeptical of the effort. At the V.A., he’d initially planned to update what he’d been told was an outmoded and fragmented human-resources system, but it seemed to be working just fine. “DOGE never had an information flow that was, like, ‘Hey, Elon wants us to do this,’ ” Lavingia said. “You’re asked to give a lot, but you don’t get any access to information.” In April, he returned to New York, working remotely on improving the V.A.’s internal chatbot, VA GPT. In early May, he gave an interview that was published in Fast Company, in which he said of the government, “It’s not as inefficient as I was expecting, to be honest. I was hoping for more easy wins.” Not long after that, his access to the V.A. systems was cut off; he was fired.

Later that month, Musk announced that he, too, was leaving DOGE, after a run in which he had impressively stretched the definition of what a “special adviser” to the President could do. In Trump’s White House, with its long red ties and compulsory praise circles, Musk wore novelty T-shirts and baseball caps, and attended meetings with his four-year old son, X, whom Trump pronounced “a high-I.Q. individual.” He installed a Starlink satellite system on the White House roof, and sold Trump a red Tesla on the White House lawn. Trump obligingly climbed into the driver’s seat and assessed the car’s interior. “Everything’s computer,” the President observed.

At Musk’s sendoff in the Oval Office, Trump presented him with an oversized White House key and said that his work on DOGE had “been without comparison in modern history.” But the relationship between the two men, always transactional, had turned into a bad deal for both of them. DOGE had achieved far fewer savings than Musk had anticipated, leaving Trump backing a budget bill that would add trillions to the deficit. Musk’s work for Trump, meanwhile, had alienated liberals and centrists, tanking Tesla’s sales and stock price. In the Oval Office, Musk had a black eye, which he said he’d got after his son hit him in the face. A reporter asked him about a recent Times story alleging that he had used ketamine and other drugs extensively on the campaign trail. Musk said, “Let’s move on.”

Within days, Trump announced that he was withdrawing the nomination of Jared Isaacman, Musk’s business associate, to run NASA, after “a thorough review of prior associations.” Musk called the Republican budget bill a “disgusting abomination,” and later started a poll on X asking if it was time to start a new political party. Trump seemed to take this personally, posting that the easiest way to save money in his budget bill would be to “terminate” the “Billions and Billions of Dollars” in government subsidies that Musk’s companies received. “Elon was ‘wearing thin,’ ” the President wrote. “I asked him to leave, I took away his EV Mandate that forced everyone to buy Electric Cars that nobody else wanted (that he knew for months I was going to do!), and he just went CRAZY!” Musk responded, “Such an obvious lie. So sad.”

For a few hours on June 5th, the President and the world’s richest man went back and forth, until the fight landed on the subject of many rabid internet disputes—the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. “Time to drop the really big bomb,” Musk wrote. “@realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day, DJT!” (Trump addressed the claim, telling NBC that he was “not at all friendly” with Epstein.)

At that point, many of the most experienced and talented government workers had left their jobs. Those who remained were often forced to pare back the mission and the scope of their work. Jacob Leibenluft, a senior Biden official, told me, “What DOGE has done, what the Administration has done, is cause a remarkable exodus of talent—of people who have built years and years of knowledge that is critical to the government functioning and who would, under normal circumstances, pass that knowledge on to the next generation of civil servants.”

Lavingia thought that the rupture between Musk and Trump had probably marooned many of the remaining DOGE employees, too, some of whom are still embedded in agencies throughout the federal government. It was also possible, Lavingia told me, that DOGE’s strength and its weakness had the same source. He’d seen from the inside that DOGE had no real internal structure. “At the end of the day,” he said, “DOGE is just Elon.”

Dawn on the Potomac River: rowers, joggers, a quickening column of jets descending toward the runways at Reagan National. Culs-de-sac empty; park-and-ride lots fill; the Beltway clogs hellishly. The federal government is everywhere. It is downtown, in the marble buildings near the White House, a sort of nineteenth-century visual trick to lend the appearance of Greco-Roman permanence to what remains a somewhat tenuous political project. But it is also in the Baltimore suburb of Woodlawn, where ten thousand people work at the Social Security Administration’s headquarters; on the brick campus of the National Institutes of Health, in Bethesda; and in the sprawl of the defense contractors out toward Dulles. This is not the political D.C., but the projects are vast. I recently asked a former senior official at the S.S.A. if she’d been worried when Trump won. “Not really,” she said. “My focus was on the solvency crisis.”

Conservatives tend to inveigh against the federal apparatus in Washington; liberals mostly defend it. But the operations of government reflect both Republican and Democratic ambitions. Paul Light, a scholar of public service at N.Y.U.’s Wagner School, has estimated that federal contractors outnumber civil servants by two to one. Elaine Kamarck, of the Brookings Institution, has found that the majority of federal employees now work in security-related fields—thirty-six per cent of them at the Department of Defense alone. For the most part, the U.S. government is organized not to pursue transformative change but to create systems of accountability, and the growth of its expenditures is mostly tied to the sheer scale of what it is keeping tabs on. Federal spending has quintupled since the mid-sixties, adjusting for inflation, to about seven trillion dollars a year. The number of federal workers has basically stayed flat.

People cheat the federal government all the time, in all kinds of ways. Waste exists at every level. In 2011, Boeing was found to have been grossly overcharging the Army for spare helicopter parts; a four-cent metal pin, for example, was billed at $71.01. In 2020, Harvard returned $1.3 million to the Department of Health and Human Services after a public-health professor allegedly overstated how much time she’d spent working on an overseas AIDS-relief grant. Jetson Leder-Luis, a professor at Boston University who studies health-care fraud, told me that, within Medicare and Medicaid, “you get everything from doctors reclassifying procedures to, like, organized crime.”

Leder-Luis likes to cite a study that he and some colleagues conducted on fraudulent billing for dialysis transportation. Medicare has long reimbursed patients too sick to get to dialysis on their own for the cost of ambulance rides. But some unscrupulous actors (Leder-Luis thinks they were mobsters in Philadelphia) realized that it was possible to pay kickbacks to relatively healthy dialysis patients for ambulance rides they didn’t need. Word spread; between 2003 and 2017, Leder-Luis and his colleagues estimated, Medicare spent around five billion dollars on fraudulent ambulance rides. “The F.B.I. has videos of some patients walking in and out of ambulances,” Leder-Luis told me. Dialysis costs make up roughly one per cent of the federal budget. If there was that much fraud in dialysis transportation, Leder-Luis said, imagine how much there is across the entire public sector.

In recent years, wonks in both parties have begun to focus on government inefficiency as a problem. On the center left, the so-called abundance movement calls for a thinning of regulation, to allow the country to more easily create housing and clean energy. On the Trumpist right, the prevailing view is that the government has been overtaken by left-wing ideologues and the only solution is to clear-cut the bureaucracy. Trump spent the campaign promising to purge the federal government of wokeism; his advisers were committed enemies of foreign aid, consumer protection, and the Department of Education. Project 2025, a nine-hundred-page playbook for a conservative President to “dismantle the administrative state,” called the independence of the bureaucracy an “unconstitutional fairy tale.”

The last major campaign to remake the Washington bureaucracy was championed by Vice-President Al Gore, during the Clinton Administration, and developed under the name Reinventing Government. The idea was to bring the public sector up to date with the internet. Kamarck, of the Brookings Institution, was its lead staff member. She leveraged the government’s own expertise: teams of civil servants from other departments were embedded with each agency to streamline and improve its processes. Eventually, the Clinton White House got Congress to pass more than eighty separate laws related to the Reinventing Government initiative. “If you want these changes to be permanent,” Kamarck told me, “the only way to do it is to get them in law.”

DOGE was conceived in something like the opposite fashion. In the spring of 2023, Vivek Ramaswamy, a biotech entrepreneur who had recently launched a bid for the Republican Presidential nomination, invited a New York lawyer named Philip Howard to meet with him at his campaign headquarters in Columbus, Ohio. Since the nineties, Howard has been a guru for business leaders interested in civil-service reform. Ramaswamy wanted to test out some ideas for remaking the federal bureaucracy. As the meeting progressed, Howard had the sense of an “over-intelligent mind spinning into some new theory that creates a new reality that’s not actually connected to reality.” At one point, he recalled, “Vivek was saying, ‘I think the President can really shut down agencies.’ I said, ‘You know, Congress establishes an agency. Do you really think the President can just . . .’ And he said, ‘Oh, yes, yes, it’s fine.’ ” Howard later told one of Ramaswamy’s advisers, “I really don’t think Vivek should go public with this, because it’s just not credible.”

A week after the election, Trump announced in a formal statement that “the Great Elon Musk, working in conjunction with American Patriot Vivek Ramaswamy, will lead the Department of Government Efficiency.” Initially, the two co-chairs seemed poised to occupy separate spheres. Ramaswamy would spearhead a deregulation effort; Musk would focus on cost cutting. In a joint op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, they said that they would work closely with the Office of Management and Budget, which is often described as the federal government’s central nervous system. Before the election, Ramaswamy suggested in an interview that the White House could simply fire all nonpolitical appointees whose Social Security numbers began with an even digit or ended with an odd digit. “Boom, that’s a seventy-five-per-cent reduction,” he said. A month later, Musk was asked how much money DOGE might save taxpayers. “I think we can do at least two trillion,” he said.

But during the transition Ramaswamy and Musk increasingly disagreed about how to make the government more efficient. Ramaswamy, who had apparently come around to the fact that significant cuts would require an act of Congress, began meeting regularly with a small group of legislators. Musk mostly did not attend. A source close to DOGE told me that Musk seemed to regard members of Congress as irrelevant, sometimes referring to them as “N.P.C.s,”—non-player characters—the often mute and nameless figures who populate the backgrounds of video games.

Musk was more interested in cutting spending via the executive branch, and spoke often, according to the source close to DOGE, of a need to “control the computers.” In meetings, Ramaswamy resorted to using metaphors from the tech world to emphasize the importance of deregulation, calling the government’s rules “the matrix” and insisting that DOGE needed to rewrite its source code. Musk was unmoved.

On the eve of the Inauguration, CBS News quoted a White House insider saying, “Vivek has worn out his welcome.” The following day, Ramaswamy left DOGE. Musk, in the faintly stuffy office he inherited in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, reportedly installed a large-screen TV, so that he could play video games; he sometimes slept there. A prominent conservative told me that, online, people were devising ways to influence Musk’s efforts. “You do it by tweeting at Elon and sucking up to him,” he said. “He’s like a prism, and all of social media kind of feeds to him through X.” The trouble, he said, was that “Elon goes on these destiny quests, sometimes looking for something that isn’t there, and then a lot of the government is on a destiny quest.”

Danny Werfel spent much of his career in the federal government. He worked as a policy analyst in the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, as a trial attorney in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, and as controller at the Office of Management and Budget. Most recently, as Biden’s commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, he was given the rare opportunity to not only run the government but also change it. Congress had pledged eighty billion dollars over ten years to modernize the I.R.S. and bring its collection of taxes up to par with the efforts to evade them. Werfel had expanded the agency’s Large Business and International Division, its enforcement efforts targeting cryptocurrency and high-net-worth individuals, and its investments in artificial intelligence and other technologies. As late as December, 2024, he was still hiring the next generation of civil servants. At the I.R.S.’s annual holiday party, employees were invited to have their photo taken with him; one young man, after the camera clicked, said, “Thank you, Coach!” He was a new hire, right out of college. A decade earlier, he and Werfel’s son had played in the same northern-Virginia Little League. His father, it turned out, also worked at the I.R.S.

After Trump won, Werfel “wasn’t a hundred per cent sure” that the new Administration would continue the I.R.S.’s modernization efforts, but he tried to engage with it in good faith. In early January, representatives from Trump’s transition team and DOGE met with I.R.S. leaders over Zoom to discuss the handover of power. Werfel’s team had rehearsed the scenario, fine-tuning the language that they planned to use. “We said, ‘Look, we know you have a remit for shrinking government from a people standpoint,’ ” Werfel recalled. “ ‘Do we have that right?’ And they didn’t argue—they agreed. We said, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if you could do that and also improve or maintain the performance of the I.R.S., and its collections?’ And it was, like, ‘O.K., we’re listening.’ ”

Werfel promised the Trump officials that, with a little patience, the I.R.S. could employ fewer federal workers and bring in more revenue. The more effective tax regime that Werfel had been building was not just funded; it was half assembled, like the Death Star. He urged the Administration to give it time to become fully operational. “Think of it as spans across a stream,” Werfel said. “Some of the spans are complete, and you can drive across and automate. Some of them are only halfway complete, so you can’t drive until you finish the span, and some of them you need to build before you begin.” Werfel proposed that the Trump Administration commit to reducing the agency’s personnel in the course of two to four years, and that it “modernize strategically,” to insure that fewer people didn’t mean less revenue or worse service. “That was our pitch,” Werfel said. “It resonated in the moment.”

Hours after being sworn in, Trump signed twenty-six executive orders, restoring the federal death penalty, withdrawing the U.S. from the World Health Organization, placing a ninety-day pause on foreign aid, and eliminating diversity-equity-and-inclusion programs across the federal government. The executive order establishing DOGE seemed, by comparison, to describe a humble purpose: “to implement the President’s DOGE Agenda, by modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.” Musk, though a frequent presence in the West Wing, was technically an unpaid adviser.

One area of focus for both Musk and the Administration was eradicating what the Tesla founder called the “woke mind virus.” DOGE soon boasted of cutting more than a billion dollars in D.E.I. contracts. But what, exactly, qualified as a D.E.I. program was open to interpretation. At Social Security headquarters, civil servants were directed to scrub mentions of “diversity” and “equity” from grants, publications, and performance evaluations. Laura Haltzel, who was the associate commissioner for the Office of Research, Evaluation, and Statistics, told me, “It was, like, ‘O.K., this is incredibly inefficient. But we’ll get through it.’ ”

For twenty-five years, Haltzel’s office had operated a research-and-grant program to study the effects and the viability of the Social Security system. Recently, the program had been awarding points to potential grantees if they partnered with institutions that served minority populations, such as historically Black colleges and universities. Because of this, Haltzel told me, she was ordered to shut down the entire program, a request that she viewed as absurd. The program was not focussed on race or gender. It predated the term “D.E.I.” by decades. Haltzel’s boss had petitioned the Office of Management and Budget not to end the initiative altogether, to no avail. “They said, ‘You’ve got to kill it,’ ” Haltzel said.

Similar changes were under way at the I.R.S., where workers were deleting references to “diversity,” “equity,” and “inclusion” from the service’s employee handbook. A senior I.R.S. official told me, “If you could measure enforcement actions by month, I bet you’d have seen a significant decline in February, because everyone was worrying about what to do about their jobs.” On February 4th, Musk posted a survey on X: “Would you like @DOGE to audit the IRS?” Two weeks later, seven thousand of the agency’s probationary employees—those who’d been hired in the past year or so—were fired. An I.R.S. employee told ProPublica, “It didn’t matter the skill set. If they were under a year, they got cut.” (A federal court later ruled that the firings were unlawful.)

Many of the fired employees had focussed on curbing tax evasion by the country’s wealthiest people. The Yale Budget Lab estimated “very conservatively” that, if DOGE cut half the I.R.S.’s employees, as it had reportedly considered doing, the reduced workforce would cost the government four hundred billion dollars in lost tax revenue, far more than the savings in salaries. Werfel used the analogy of a backpack: if you are filling a backpack, you start with the thing that is most important to you, and then find room for the rest. “They didn’t start by filling the backpack with efficiency, or collections,” Werfel said. “They filled it with job cuts.”

One evening, his wife wondered what had happened to the Little League player from the Christmas party. It turned out that he had been fired that day; he’d been given an hour to vacate the I.R.S. headquarters. His father had walked him out the door.

Every incoming Administration enjoys an unusual power in its first weeks, since the new Cabinet secretaries have not yet been appointed, and thus cannot yet object to changes at their agencies. The White House’s pause on foreign aid raised a particular panic in the Kinshasa office of the United States Agency for International Development. The following weekend, rebels from the paramilitary group M23 took control of the Congolese city of Goma, part of an ongoing conflict that Congolese citizens had long blamed on Western nations, including the U.S. There were rumors of protests in the capital. Meanwhile, dozens of senior U.S.A.I.D. officials had been placed on administrative leave, scrambling the aid workers’ lines of communication to Washington and clouding the question of who was running the agency.

On the morning of Tuesday, January 28th, many U.S.A.I.D. workers had already sent their children to school on a bus and boarded a shuttle to the U.S. Embassy when they received messages telling them that the situation in the capital might no longer be safe. The vehicles turned around, bringing their passengers back home. According to a senior U.S.A.I.D. official in Kinshasa who filed an affidavit in federal court under the pseudonym Marcus Doe, one U.S.A.I.D. worker reported that protesters were setting fires outside his residence. A little later, he requested an evacuation—his front gate had been breached. On social media, Marcus Doe could see videos of looting, and outside his own home he could hear protesters chanting. He and his wife called their kids inside and locked the doors.

Leaders at the Embassy decided to evacuate the staff, but the executive order pausing foreign assistance had made it harder for U.S.A.I.D. personnel to figure out how to fund their travel. Staffers were losing access to the agency’s internal payment system, and officials in the Congo were reluctant to authorize an expenditure, for fear that they would be accused of circumventing the executive order. Employees sought a waiver from U.S.A.I.D.’s acting administrator, a career official named Jason Gray. It was approved, but only after Marcus Doe and others had started evacuating. “I began to feel an intense sense of panic that my government might fully abandon Americans working for U.S.A.I.D. in Kinshasa,” Marcus Doe recalled. He and his colleagues began coördinating with contacts at other foreign-aid organizations. They made it across the river to Brazzaville by boat that night, with an allotment of one carry-on-size bag per person.

The new deputy administrator of U.S.A.I.D. in Washington was Pete Marocco, a former marine who, during the first Trump term, had left his job at U.S.A.I.D. after subordinates filed a thirteen-page memo accusing him of mismanagement and workplace hostility. In a closed-door meeting with lawmakers in March, the Washington Post reported, Marocco called U.S.A.I.D. a “money-laundering scheme” and said that he was examining whether foreign aid was even constitutional. “What we’re seeing right now is Pete’s revenge tour,” a former senior U.S.A.I.D. official recently told NPR. “This is personal.”

Musk shared Marocco’s dim view of foreign assistance. On January 28th, while U.S.A.I.D. staff were fleeing Kinshasa, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, told reporters that DOGE and the O.M.B. had discovered that the Biden Administration planned to purchase fifty million dollars’ worth of condoms for Gaza. Musk posted on X, “Tip of iceberg.” In recent years, U.S.A.I.D., in its efforts to combat H.I.V. and AIDS around the world, has earmarked around seventeen million dollars annually for condoms, including allocations to the province of Gaza in Mozambique; none of the money went to the Palestinian territories. “Some of the things I say will be incorrect and should be corrected,” Musk later said, during an appearance in the Oval Office. “Nobody’s going to bat a thousand.”

By early March, the State Department had announced the termination of more than eighty per cent of U.S.A.I.D. contracts and all but a few hundred of its ten thousand employees. Musk had posted on X that the agency, which was placed under the direct administration of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, was “a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America.” But it could be difficult to decipher which parts of its mission were progressive and which were conservative. On February 13th, Andrew Natsios, who had been George W. Bush’s U.S.A.I.D. administrator, testified about the cuts before the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Natsios had helped lead a faith-based foreign-aid organization, and as the agency’s administrator had increased grants to religious groups. In his testimony, he stressed that many faith-based organizations would close without U.S.A.I.D. funding. Natsios recalled, “I could see the expressions on the Republicans’ faces: ‘Wait a second. No one told us that before. Are you telling me we’re going after our base with these cuts?’ ” He told me that the night before his testimony he’d had dinner with executives from several of the largest Christian N.G.O.s. They were livid. “Ninety per cent of them are on the verge of insolvency,” he said.

The Trump Administration’s campaign against foreign assistance was widespread. On February 28th, Marocco, accompanied by DOGE officials, staged an “emergency board meeting” outside the Inter-American Foundation, which supports civil-society organizations in Latin America and the Caribbean; Marocco announced that he was now the president and C.E.O. and moved to dissolve the organization. On March 5th, officials at the United States African Development Foundation, which invests in small businesses on the continent, managed to keep DOGE officials from coming inside; the next day, the officials returned with U.S. marshals, entered the building, and changed the locks. The following week, DOGE officials arrived at the United States Institute of Peace, an independent nonprofit founded by Congress which works to prevent and resolve violent conflicts around the world. U.S.I.P.’s leadership believed that the institute represented a kind of boundary on the DOGE project—an organization funded by, but not part of, the federal government. (Although most of the institute’s board members are appointed by the President, it was established as an entity separate from the executive branch.) When DOGE officials presented one of U.S.I.P.’s lawyers with a resolution firing the institute’s president, he rejected it as invalid. A few days later, DOGE returned with the police and took over U.S.I.P.’s building. (A federal judge later ruled that DOGE’s actions were unlawful.)

The role DOGE employees played in these closures was not especially technical. But they offered the White House a way to avoid potential bureaucratic obstacles. “The reality is that DOGE has become the instrument for carrying out the will of the President,” a senior foreign-aid official told me. “The game changer for this Administration has been its ability to use this instrument in frankly unlawful ways to carry out its will.”

Before DOGE, U.S.A.I.D. had played a leading role in collecting health data in poorer countries on child and maternal mortality, disease incidents, malnutrition, and access to clean water. Now the ability to gather that information—“the early-warning system for the next pandemic,” as Natsios put it—was gone. A network of aid companies had established a global supply chain for medications, antiretrovirals, and vaccines. It’s now unclear what will happen to the contracts for that system, which cost a few billion dollars a year, paid for by U.S.A.I.D. “There’s no way of doing this stuff without big contractors, because they’re worldwide contracts,” Natsios said. “No N.G.O. can fill that gap.”

DOGE officials were encountering a simple budgetary truth: radically paring back D.E.I. and humanitarian programs didn’t save that much money. U.S.A.I.D.’s spending in the most recent fiscal year had amounted to around forty billion dollars, less than one per cent of the over-all federal budget. But Natsios emphasized that, as a result of the cuts, the U.S. would be confronted with a more challenging world. In the next two years, he expected to see increased mass migration and instability because of famine. He was, he noted, an avowedly anti-Trump Republican. “But the responsibility for this belongs to Musk,” he said. “He is the one getting away with murder.”

By mid-February, small teams of DOGE officials were embedded at most federal agencies. (The original executive order had called for teams of four: one team leader, one engineer, one H.R. specialist, and one attorney.) They were often not a natural fit. A conservative policy analyst who spent time in the Department of Education’s headquarters this winter told me that the DOGE team was largely siloed off, interacting only with a couple of senior staffers, and that its members seemed particularly worried about the possibility of being doxed online. “Your standard political appointee came out of the Heritage Foundation, and has a family and works nine to five and then goes home,” the conservative analyst told me. “The DOGE guys are completely different. They are sleeping in some corner of the building, just looking at their computers. So they’re really seen almost as these exotic animals that can’t be touched.”

Erie Meyer, the chief technologist of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, was at first cautiously optimistic about DOGE. A veteran of the U.S. Digital Service, she had long advocated for more efficiency in government. “I thought, At least the President will have technical people advising him,” Meyer told me. She was a political appointee from the Biden Administration; she had no illusions about her own future. In January, she worked to identify projects that might interest the incoming Administration. Meyer told me, “I basically said, ‘If you want them, here are some easy wins.’ ”

On her last day at the C.F.P.B., Meyer noticed a group of five men wandering around the executive suite; one of them was trying to open the deputy director’s office, but it required a key card. She recognized another from the news—a blond twenty-three-year-old former SpaceX intern named Luke Farritor. Meyer walked out and introduced herself. Were they looking for the printer, she asked, trying to think of an innocuous explanation for jiggling door handles in the executive offices of a government agency. No, a slightly older man, “schlumpy in that D.C. way,” as Meyer put it, told her. It turned out that he was Chris Young, the DOGE leader who’d run Musk’s PAC. He and Meyer made small talk for a minute, and then the group left.

The C.F.P.B., the brainchild of Senator Elizabeth Warren, was created by Congress in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis to protect Americans from financial manipulation. Its databases are filled with details of open investigations, including the names of whistle-blowers and their specific allegations. Meyer became increasingly worried about DOGE’s attempts to access the vast stores of personal and corporate data housed at the C.F.P.B. On January 31st, a longtime Treasury official named David Lebryk, who led the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, which sends out payments on behalf of government agencies, resigned after clashing with DOGE officials over their access to the payment system. Lebryk was well regarded across the government, and his resignation reverberated. As a former Social Security official put it, “When it’s, like, ‘Oh, DOGE is trying to get in and Lebryk took a bullet to prevent it,’ that’s pretty concerning, right?”

On February 7th, Musk posted on X, “CFPB RIP.” Later that day, Russell Vought, the director of the O.M.B. and a DOGE ally, sent an e-mail to C.F.P.B. staffers saying that he was assuming control of the agency. Vought, an original architect of Project 2025, has been outspoken about his desire to defund government programs and fire career civil servants. “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said in a private speech in 2023. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.”

Vought ordered all C.F.P.B. employees to stop work; eventually, more than a thousand of them were placed on administrative leave. One of the C.F.P.B.’s leaders e-mailed Mark Paoletta, the general counsel at the O.M.B., asking if the agency could at least resume monitoring companies and “was just told no—you have no authority right now.” The union representing most of the agency’s employees sued, winning a preliminary injunction to halt the dismissals. At that point, the C.F.P.B. entered a kind of zombie state, which an enforcement attorney described as “just turning on your computer to stare at it for eight hours with nothing to do.”

The Social Security Administration was under the direction of Michelle King, a career official who had recently been elevated to acting commissioner, when the DOGE representatives began to arrive, in early February. First came Michael Russo, a longtime tech executive who was appointed as the S.S.A.’s chief information officer; then came a coder named Akash Bobba, who had recently graduated from U.C.-Berkeley. According to a senior S.S.A. official, Bobba arrived “sort of spilling over with laptops and cellphones belonging to other agencies he was already working with.” King and her team grew wary when Russo asked for direct access to the main Social Security data files—among them the Death Master File, on which the S.S.A. records each number holder who has died. The senior S.S.A. official said, “It just was never totally clear what Mike wanted access to the Death Master File for.”

Russo and Bobba were set up in an office, working with a small group of anti-fraud officials from the S.S.A., but Bobba had not yet received the credentials necessary to access the S.S.A.’s data files. Steve Davis, incensed, started reaching out to senior S.S.A. officials. “It was ‘S.S.A has got to be the worst agency in the whole government,’ ” the former S.S.A. official said. “ ‘There’s no reason that this hasn’t happened yet. Make it happen.’ ” Russo demanded that Bobba be allowed to visit the S.S.A.’s main data center. “There is absolutely nothing to see there—a loading dock, some security, a bunch of computers,” the former S.S.A. official said. “But their view was they didn’t trust any of the permanent staff at S.S.A., so they needed Akash to get directly in.”

On February 11th, Musk joined Trump in the Oval Office and told reporters that his team had found “crazy things” happening within the Social Security system, including benefit recipients who were a hundred and fifty years old. Employees at the S.S.A. were mystified—virtually no one who had been dead more than a month was receiving benefits, and certainly not a hundred-and-fifty-year-old. S.S.A. officials, unable to reach Musk or Davis directly, tried to explain the situation to Russo, hoping that what they said would percolate up to Musk. “What was weird about that period was everything seemed to be coming through DOGE, rather than from the O.M.B. or from the White House, but it was almost impossible to get any information up the chain,” someone who temporarily led a government agency this winter told me. “They would never let us interface with them directly, since that was sacred. So it was like a really bad game of telephone.”

That Sunday, Musk posted a chart suggesting that there were three hundred and ninety-eight million active Social Security numbers. “Yes, there are FAR more ‘eligible’ social security numbers than there are citizens in the USA,” he wrote. “This might be the biggest fraud in history.” S.S.A. officials were peeved. A week earlier, a few of them had patiently explained to Bobba that the chart contained not the number of people receiving Social Security benefits but, rather, the total number of people without death records. When officials asked Bobba about Musk’s post, he said, “I told him everything you told me. He just tweeted it anyway.”

Meanwhile, the relationship between King and the DOGE team had deteriorated. On February 14th, S.S.A. leadership placed Leland Dudek, a sixteen-year veteran of the S.S.A., who had been working closely with DOGE, on administrative leave. Dudek posted a defiant message on LinkedIn and spent the weekend searching for a new job. Meanwhile, Davis called another S.S.A. official. “I have the agency’s complete executive roster,” the official recalled him saying. “I’d like you to go through it with me and tell me your thoughts on who should be fired.” King resigned, and Dudek received an e-mail from an official at the Office of Personnel Management notifying him that his administrative leave was lifted and he was now in charge of the entire agency.

Dudek did not think that the S.S.A. should fight DOGE directly. “Elections have consequences,” he wrote in an e-mail to Social Security employees. In March, according to a recording obtained by ProPublica, he urged the staff to be patient with the “DOGE kids.” But he was also committed to keeping the agency functional. The DOGE team wanted to lay off the S.S.A.’s probationary workers. In meetings that included representatives from the O.P.M. and the G.S.A., and congressional staffers, Dudek went through the list of potential layoffs: How many were veterans or military spouses or worked in customer-service positions? Surely, Dudek said, President Trump would not want to let those people go. The total number of cuts dwindled from what might have been fifteen hundred to less than two dozen.

Dudek wanted to keep the checks going out and limit the personnel losses. But, in doing so, he was forced to make compromises. In April, a DOGE official named Aram Moghaddassi, an ex-Twitter engineer who was embedded with both the S.S.A. and the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, sent Dudek a request to take away the Social Security numbers of sixty-three hundred immigrants who had been allowed to enter the country during the Biden Administration. Doing so would make it impossible for those individuals to work legally, open bank accounts and lines of credit, or access government benefits. In a separate memo, the Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, explained that the cancellations would “prevent suspected terrorists who are here illegally” from having “privileges reserved for those with lawful status.” Dudek determined that the simplest way to make the change would be to add all the names to the Death Master File, a move he soon authorized. The former Social Security official, who by then had left the agency, told me, “This was the one truly totalitarian thing the agency was asked to do.”

In the five months since DOGE officially began its operations, the scale of its projected savings has steadily dwindled. Musk revised his original promise of two trillion dollars to one trillion. In May, reporters from the Financial Times went through the “wall of receipts” that DOGE had been posting online, which now claims a hundred and eighty billion dollars in savings. They concluded that “only a sliver of that figure can be verified.” The Times, which has made a series of similar findings, reported, “The group posted a claim that confused billions with millions, triple-counted the savings from a single contract and claimed credit for canceling contracts that had ended under President George W. Bush.”

DOGE has reportedly cut more than two hundred and eighty thousand government jobs—U.S.A.I.D. and the C.F.P.B. have been effectively eliminated—and the fate of much of the rest of the bureaucracy is now in the hands of federal judges. But even if DOGE’s accounting is taken at face value, the effort has still slashed less than three per cent of the federal budget. Zachary Liscow, a chief economist at the O.M.B. during the Biden Administration, wasn’t especially surprised by the small numbers. The total cost, including pay and benefits, of all civilian personnel across the federal government, Liscow said, is just four per cent of the budget. The entire non-defense discretionary budget amounts to about nine hundred billion dollars—one-seventh of the total. Liscow, who is now a professor at Yale Law School, said cutting government personnel is unlikely to lead to savings, since fewer people helping with oversight often allows the costs of contracts to balloon: “If, in the name of efficiency, they cut a bunch of I.R.S. employees who pay for themselves many times over, it makes you wonder what motivates them.”

The savings that DOGE uncovered were supposed to help pay for tax cuts—one Trump operative even conceived of “DOGE checks,” through which money would be returned to the public. But the Republican budget in Congress would now add three trillion dollars to the national debt. “It’s a lost opportunity,” Howard, the lawyer and conservative regulatory specialist, told me. DOGE “was not focussed on any vision of how to make government more efficient—just on cutting. They didn’t have any vision of duplication, or of how to create more effective operating systems. You can fire the paper pushers, but if the law says you’ve got to push this paper, and there’s no one left to push it, that’s a formula for paralysis.”

Veronique de Rugy, a leading libertarian thinker at the Mercatus Center and one of the thirty-four named authors of Project 2025, also initially supported DOGE. But she eventually grew disillusioned with what she regarded as its almost singular focus on culture-war issues. In March, she wrote, in an essay for Reason, “For all the talk about cutting government waste and fraud, the DOGE-Trump team seems mostly animated by rooting out leftist culture politics and its practitioners in Washington.” She was especially concerned by the ways in which DOGE seemed to be expanding, rather than curtailing, the powers of the executive. “Being a libertarian right now,” she told me, “is like being punched in the face with your own ideas by a drunk teen-ager.”

Even before Musk and Trump’s blowup, some of DOGE’s main lieutenants, including Davis, were quietly exiting. Their departures offered a reminder of the essential imbalance between the bureaucrats’ enduring stake in the structure of government and the fleeting and contingent interest of Musk’s team. After Musk’s departure, Vought, at the O.M.B., became the face of what remained of DOGE, which made a certain amount of sense: without the new-new gloss of tech, the project would revert to a more mundane, institutional form.

What, then, was DOGE? Part of its pitch was that it would infuse government with talent, replacing diversity hires and ineffective workers with more adept ones from the startup industry. The young embeds who moved throughout the government, whom Musk raved about during his Fox News appearances, were an embodiment of this vision. But, in the end, the quickest way for DOGE to cut the government had nothing to do with technology. Lavingia told me that, during his two months at the V.A., he came to the conclusion that there were not actually so many people sitting around doing nothing. “To be honest, it is often worse in the tech industry, where you have venture money and low interest rates,” he said. “It can be pretty inefficient.”

I asked the former S.S.A. official, who had worked closely with several DOGE coders, what he thought of their abilities. “In general, they were all pretty talented for their level of experience,” he said. “If we’d taken them on as junior hires, they would probably have progressed pretty quickly in a hierarchical organization.” But, by design, they existed outside the civil service, with little guidance on what to do and why. “They all seemed pretty desperate for Elon to say that they were doing good,” the former official said. “There was a lot of ‘What does E. want?’ ‘Did you see what E. said?’ ” The former official compared the situation to the science-fiction novel “Ender’s Game,” by Orson Scott Card, in which a team of children who are invited by the military to play an elaborate video game are unknowingly operating actual weapons of war.

A conservative influencer familiar with DOGE made a similar point about Musk, saying that he’d attempted to transfer the partisanship of social media to the weights and measures of the federal government. “It’s true of a lot of people, and it’s definitely true of Elon, that you live on X and your psychology is merged with the cesspool of the modern internet,” the influencer told me. “Going in and deregulating things and cutting costs might have achieved the policy result. But he’s playing a different sport—getting people to hit him really hard and then becoming a savior to everyone who hates those people.” He added, “It’s not that the vitriol from the other side is an unfortunate side effect—it’s actually the point.”

When I spoke with Lavingia, he reflected on what DOGE had actually achieved. It had been blamed for mass firings and contract cancellations across the government, but, in reality, it had played the role of technological adviser to politically appointed agency heads. “There’s a lot of power that comes in that first hundred days,” Lavingia said. “But DOGE and Elon really mostly had soft power—they didn’t have hard power.” The hard power had come from Trump; the soft power depended on Musk’s influence over him. “The premise of DOGE requires Elon and Trump to really be aligned,” Lavingia said. “And it now seems that was kind of for show.”

[synthapostate]

@lastdaysofwar, Day 6: Consequences (Hannibal Chau, Newton Geiszler)

Business is booming, now that the apocalypse is canceled. It won’t be for long, but if there’s one thing Hannibal Chau knows how to do, it’s take advantage of a time-sensitive opportunity.

His boys have brought a lot home from the last harvest, and now they’re seeing to the disposition of all of it. It’s not as much as he’s gotten from other kill sites, though. Between him not being there to put the fear of God into anyone, his own people dropping the ball, and the PPDC’s sudden change in leadership meaning they didn’t even know what deal they had to honor…yeah, it’s all gone to shit.

So he’s downsized his organization a little ahead of schedule. The ones who kept their heads and grabbed everything they could in the time before he cut himself out of the kaiju’s belly—the ones who showed initiative, they get to keep their jobs. Everything else he needs, he’ll hire on fresh when he pivots to a new business model. Whatever that may be. He has ideas, but nothing worth committing to just yet. Nothing that would make him as rich as the end of the world.

“Boss.”

Hannibal half-turns from supervising the disassembly of a kaiju lung wall to see that Fang has popped up beside him. She’s a sharp one, that Fang. For twenty-five minutes, she was in charge of this operation, and she managed to get the best of the workers in hand. But her ambition doesn’t stretch as far as full-time leadership. He likes that in her. She’ll be a knife in his hand, not in his back.

“We have a situation?” he asks, because Fang is too smart and too competent to come to him with a problem she could handle on her own.

“Not a situation. You have a visitor. The new guy wanted to stick him, but I think you’ll want this one alive for now.”

“That so?” Huh. The new doorman has too heavy a hand, but, Hannibal always figures, better a guard who gets too twitchy than one who falls asleep on the job. Armed with a discreet, kaiju-derived poison that, injected anywhere on the body, takes out the target without giving them time to make a scene and makes it look, after, like it was natural causes—this guy’s been good at keeping the undesirables from getting into Hannibal’s personal space. But if Fang thinks this is someone he’ll want to see…hey, why not? He’s got nothing but time.

Since there’s nothing on the workshop floor too sensitive to be seen by anybody else in the business, Hannibal goes ahead and nods, the only indication his people need to let the visitor through.

A second later, he regrets it as that little kaiju freak’s voice screeches out, “Thank you so much, you know, it’s not like I had anything else to do today, I love having my time wasted—is that an acid sac?”

Hannibal strides up behind the geek while he’s too busy climbing all over the technicians to notice what’s going on around him. The workers don’t stop what they’re doing, but angle themselves in a way that blocks him from putting his hands all over the merchandise, to his frustration.

“Could you just—you can’t cut into it there, you haven’t even detached it from the gland yet, do you want it to explode in your faces? Look, here, you gotta cut here—”

Hannibal catches the little guy by the wrist and hauls him away from the sample. The twerp tries to shake him off, but he fights like somebody who had his lunch money stolen every day in grade school and never moved past it. Hannibal wrenches his arm around hard enough to get his attention without doing anything permanent.

“Ow, damn! Will you watch it? You meatheads are all so-o-oh…” He finally realizes who’s jerking him around, and a manic grin stretches across his face even though he looks about five seconds from pissing himself. “Heyyyyyyyy, Hannibal Chau, I thought you were dead!”

“Guess who’s back,” Hannibal says. “You four-eyed bitch.”

“Hah! Okay! That’s great, man, really great, love a good callback. You’re, uh, you’re really—really funny, you know that?”

Hannibal doesn’t laugh.

“Haha, okay, are you gonna kill me?” the kid asks.

“What do you think?” Hannibal says. He gives the little geek a shake that snaps a hysterical giggle out of him, and Hannibal has to fight down the urge to roll his eyes. This little pissant is the most irritating human being he’s ever met. “You think you can come back onto my turf with no consequences, huh?”

“Yeah, I did, ‘cause, again, thought you were dead. Why aren’t you dead? I watched a kaiju eat you!”

“I got better,” Hannibal says flatly. “Damn lucky for you, too. Or did you not think about what my boys would do to you if I wasn’t here to rein ‘em in?”

“Oh, I didn’t know you cared.”

“You’re kinda high profile these days. War heroes’ bodies are a little harder to dispose of. Not impossible, mind.” He gives the kaiju geek’s arm another jerk, because this nitwit’s getting over his fear faster than Hannibal likes, and he needs to remember his place. “You wanna tell me what you’re doin’ here, or should I break out the hydrofluoric acid right now?”

“Is that what you’re using? Shit, man, no wonder you’re having trouble disposing of the bodies. What, did you get that from Breaking Bad?” the twerp asks, and, okay, maybe Hannibal should have seen that coming. Geiszler has no sense of self-preservation, so why should he react normally to the threat of being murdered and his body dissolved in acid? If he weren’t such a pain in the keister Hannibal might get a real kick out of this guy, but he ain’t making idle threats, so he goes ahead and flips open his butterfly knife and jams it up behind the twerp’s ear, for the sake of variety.

“Start talking or I start removing pieces.”

“Aaaaaa-ooowwwwww, Marshal Hansen sent me!” Geiszler yowls.

“I’m supposed to know who that is?”

“The new marshal! Pentecost’s replacement! You don’t watch the news? Ow ow ow!” he whines as the blade bites deeper.

“What’d he send you for?”

“Cerebrospinal fluid! Come on, please, what did I ever do to you anyway?”

“I got half-digested because of you,” Hannibal reminds him. The geek’s eyes dart up and down, taking in the faint scars left behind by that damn thing’s stomach acid, and he nervously laughs again.

“Only half though, right? I mean—you look great, man, like, never better. And that’s gotta be great for your reputation—ow.” He whimpers as the knife slices deeper, blood running down his neck and soaking into his collar. Hannibal’s got no need to add to his collection of severed ears, but he does need this conversation to move faster.

“What do you need cerebrospinal fluid for, and what makes you think I’ll give it to you? Talk fast, ‘cause I’m gettin’ bored.”

“Sell! Not give! I’m here to buy it, okay? We have funding now!”

Huh. Well, that’s an interesting turn of events. Hannibal pulls his knife free and wipes it clean on the geek’s leather jacket before he puts it away. He doesn’t let go of his arm.

“Something tells me your ‘funding’ wouldn’t be a drop in the bucket next to my business. How do you expect to make this worth my while?”

“Promise not to take that knife out again?” Geiszler asks.

Hannibal doesn’t promise.

“Uh, okay, cool, man, way to establish trust. I’ll tell you anyway because I like you—don’t rip my arm off!” he whines as Hannibal’s grip tightens. “Look, you’re running out of material by now, right? No more kaiju tissues to process and sell, no more income for you. But what if—” He grins. “Someone? Had a way to make more?”

“You’re cloning the kaiju?” Hannibal snarls. Moron. Goddamn kaiju freak. No sense of self-preservation and not one single thought for the consequences of anything he does. Hannibal should have taken him apart the first time he stumbled in here, and saved everyone a whole lot of grief.

“Not whole kaiju,” Geiszler protests. “Parts! That’s all, just parts. Enough for me to study, and enough left over that you could do, like—I don’t know, whatever you need to do to turn a profit. You’d have exclusive rights, ‘cause honestly, who else do I even know? You’re my only black market contact—”

“I am not your contact. I’m a guy you seriously pissed off.”

“Okay, whatever, the point is I need stem cells, and did you know the kaiju have kind of an equivalent, but it’s not found in the bone marrow—”

“Stop talking.” Hannibal gives the little bastard a shove toward his office. They can sit down and negotiate an arrangement, but if he has to hear that voice grating on for one more second, he won’t be responsible for his actions.

And he has the feeling Geiszler ain’t gonna like his terms.

To be continued…

[sweeter-innocence-fics]

There's Always Time For Second Guesses (I Don't Wanna Know) (One-Shot)

Pairing: Tangerine x Reader

Work Summary: Tangerine x Reader Soulmate AU.

You're on vacation in Japan, trying to get away from the shitstorm that is your life, but you're not prepared for what's waiting for you on the bullet train to Kyoto.

Rating: Teen and up.

Word Count: 3519

Read on AO3.

Masterlists.

Taglist: @mcximffs @noz4a2 @rottenstyx @mrs-kai-anderson @ang3l1te @missryerye

Notes:

Warnings for snakes and sadness, general assassin stuff, blood.

Timeline probably doesn't line up with the timeline of the movie, whoops.

Update: There's now a sequel.

---

It was supposed to be fun. The sort of relaxing faux-adventure you get from travelling to the tourist-y destinations of another country. The precursor to a fresh start after everything in your life had gone to shit.

But that wasn’t meant to be. Your carefree vacation had turned into a nightmare over the course of a few hours.

There were people with guns on this train. There was a dead man bleeding out of his eyeballs. Over the course of your journey, the number of train passengers had thinned out, and none of them seemed as worried as you felt. It was like no one else was paying attention. You needed to get out of here, but the next stop wasn’t for another thirty-five minutes.

Heart in your throat, you decided to take your backpack and hide in a bathroom. It was close to one of the exit doors. You would wait until the train was pulling into the next station, and then you would run for it.

That was your plan at least. You sat yourself down on the closed lid of the toilet, trying desperately to forget the face of the blood-covered man. You could hear your heartbeat in your ears.

As much as you didn’t want to admit it, you knew exactly how to distract yourself. You’d packed your vacation to the brim, trying to leave yourself as little space for quiet reflection as possible. Maybe this was your penance. Now was the time to think about everything that had brought you here.

For starters, your boyfriend of four years had found his soulmate. It wasn’t as if you’d never considered this eventuality. After all, things like that happened all the time.

You weren’t ready, though, when you came home and found him sitting at the kitchen table with an expression half-guilty, half-ecstatic, the back of his hand stained a bright red.

He had tried to let you down gently; he really had. You hadn’t wanted him to feel guilty, either. It just as easily could’ve happened to you. You wished him the best, and then, when he was gone, you’d cried for three days.

A few days later, you’d found out that the company you worked for was ‘downsizing’ and you hadn’t made the cut. Redundant and freshly unwillingly single, you packed up everything you owned into your car and drove back to your parents’ house.

They had welcomed you back with open arms, but you could see the pity in their eyes. You hated that pity. So you made a decision. You took your redundancy money and decided to go on a trip.

You’d never been to Japan before, even though you’d always meant to. It was an exceptionally beautiful country, but you were still miserable. You had hoped that travelling would decrease the desire to check your ex’s Instagram for pictures of him with his new girlfriend, but it was still a compulsion that you were struggling to break.

You should just delete the app. It’s not like you posted much anyway. As you opened your phone and pressed on that little colourful camera icon, you heard a low hiss.

Your thumb paused over the Instagram app. “Huh?”

Probably the plumbing. It didn’t sound like any pipes you’d ever heard before, but Japanese toilets were different from the ones you were used to. Even though you weren’t using the toilet, you decided to flush, just in case.

A shape caught the corner of your eye, and before you could properly process what you were seeing, a scream ripped its way out of your throat.

A small, yellowish-brown snake slithered had slithered out between your legs. You launched yourself into the door, cursing the lock as you did so. Your fingers fumbled over it, and then, after an agonising moment, managed to unlock it.

You spilled out of the room and almost collided with a man in the process. You stumbled backwards, slamming the door and praying that the snake was now trapped inside.

Feeling unsteady, you almost lost your balance when a warm hand wrapped around your forearm, helping you stay upright. The man’s skin was hot against yours. Too hot. It burned.

He leapt back from you suddenly, and you fell into the wall, stabilizing yourself with one hand. Your eyes darted over him, trying to assess whether he was a threat.

With a jolt, you realised that you recognised him. You had seen him and another man talking to the dead man earlier. He was tall and handsome, with piercing blue eyes, but now, his hair was dishevelled and there were splotches of blood on his clothes.

You took a step back, away from him, but he didn’t seem to notice. He was staring at his hand.

It shimmered, like gold paint. A soulmate mark. Unbidden, your eyes found the spot on your arm where he touched you. It still burned. It had turned a rich, dark blue.

He looked at you then, his eyes roving over your face, trying to take you in. Your cheeks heated up under his penetrating gaze.

“There’s a snake in the bathroom,” you blurted out. You clutched your arm to your chest, cradling it through the burning ache. The man in front of you flexed his hand, and you realised that he must’ve been feeling the same thing. As you glanced at the now closed bathroom door, you had a sinking feeling of dread. “I left my backpack in there.”

“It’s okay, love. I’ll get it back for you.” He smiled at you then, and when you smiled back, you realised that you had never really been in love before.

Your ex was forgiven, the pain forgotten. If his girlfriend made him feel half as good as you did now, how could you possibly blame him for choosing her over you?

As he guided you back into the carriage, gesturing for you sit down, your smile faltered.

“Be careful? Please?”

He chuckled a little at that. “Don’t worry, love, I’m a professional. Just stay here and keep your head down, okay?”

Your heart thudded as you watched him retreat. You crossed your arms over your chest, trying to breathe. Today had been quite the day. You were sure you were going to cry as soon as you got away from this train.  

A moment later, your soulmate returned, holding your rucksack. He put it on the seat beside you.

“You need to get off this train, love. It’s not safe here anymore.”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to do.”

“Okay. We get to Nagoya in…” He checked his watch. “Twenty-five minutes. Let’s find somewhere to lay low.” There was no question as to whether or not you would go with him. Your trust in him was implicit and biological. In the space of a moment, he was yours and you were his. He took your rucksack again and slung it over his shoulder.

He took three steps and then stopped, turning back to you. “I don’t even know your name,” he said, almost apologetically. You gave him your name, and watched that smile spread across his face again. “Tangerine,” he said in response.

“Tangerine?”

“That’s my name. Tangerine.”

You were sure he was lying to you, but you could get into that later. He led you down the train until he found some unoccupied private cabins. He even held the door open for you so that you could go in first.

He was nothing if not a gentleman, evidently. You sat down in the seat next to the window and pulled your legs up onto it, hugging your knees. Tangerine put your bag in the overhead storage and then slid into the seat opposite you.

For a moment, neither of you spoke. You just looked at each other. This was the man that fate said you were going to spend the rest of your life with, whether you liked it or not.

He was certainly very handsome. He was smooth and polite and well-dressed (or at least he had been, earlier). Other than that, you knew almost nothing about him. There was one thing you were sure about though: he was dangerous.

“I saw you and your friend talking to that man earlier. The one who died,” you said.

His lips turned down. “My brother.”

“Sorry?”

“Not my friend. My brother.”

“Your brother,” you repeated. “Where is he?”

Tangerine looked out of the window, frowning. “Dead.”

Your stomach gave a lurch. “What?”

He turned his eyes on you again, and took a deep breath, like he was steeling himself. “There’s some things you should know about me, sweetheart. I am not a good person. I am not a safe person. If you stay with me then you could get hurt.” As he spoke, you felt your stomach sinking. “Me and my brother, we’re- we were- are assassins.”

He shook his head slightly. Until he’d stumbled over his words, the speech had sounded practised. You wondered if he had prepared for this exact moment, when he would meet his soulmate.

“What happened to your brother?” you asked in a small voice.

He sighed deeply. “We were hired to retrieve something. A briefcase. And a person. Trouble is, someone else was hired to kill that person.”

“The man who was bleeding out of his eyes.”

“Right. Seems like this whole train is full of assassins. One of them took Lemon out. That’s why I need to get you out of here. I can’t lose another person today.” His eyes were starting to look very shiny. His hand was curled into a fist on his knee. Cautiously, you reached out and put your hand over it.

You watched as his expression smoothed out. His hand relaxed, and he let you turn it over, taking it between both of yours.

“I’m sorry about your brother,” you said softly.

“…Thanks.”

“You’ll come with me, right? When I leave the train?” you asked.

“I have to finish this job.”

“Why?”

“There’s people who’ll kill me if I don’t.”

“Sounds like there’s people who’ll kill you if you do.” For a moment, he smiled again. It was a reluctant smile, but it was still beautiful, because he was beautiful.

“You’re probably right about that. But still. I have to see this through. I’m sorry.”

“Why?” Frustration was edging into your voice. “What could be worth that?”

He didn’t answer right away. He ran his free hand through his hair, turning back towards the window. The two of you sat in silence for a few minutes before he spoke again.

“Okay. I’ll come with you. There’s nothing left for me here, anyway.”

You squeezed his hand. “Thank you.”

“What about you then? What brings you here? You’re not a local.”

It was your turn to frown. “I guess I was just looking for a distraction.”

“Well, you certainly found one.”

His expression was relaxed again. So you found yourself telling him everything. Your job. Your ex. Your parents. Everything that had been going wrong in your life that had led to you being here. He listened, lacing your fingers together and rubbing over the skin of your palm with his thumb.

The overhead announcement that you were about to pull into Nagoya almost made you jump. It hadn’t felt like twenty-five minutes had passed. Your heart began to speed up again.

Tangerine got to his feet and pulled your rucksack out of the rack above your head. Reluctantly, you stood up too. He swung the bag over one shoulder, and then held out a hand to you. When you didn’t immediately take it, he wiggled his fingers at you.

Okay. So he was cute too. Trying to suppress a smile, you took his hand.

It was a straight shot to the exit. There was a stretch of corridor about ten feet long, and then you would be off the train. You were almost at the door when Tangerine swore loudly, and then pulled you into the space next to the luggage storage.

You squeaked, almost losing your balance, but he put both hands on your shoulders. As the train pulled to a stop, his hands were the only things stopping you from falling into him.

“What’s wrong?” you asked once you’d got your feet under you.

“The man who hired me has got guards on the platform. If I try to get off this train, they’ll kill me.”

It felt like you’d been dunked in a bucket of ice. You’d been so close to getting away.

“What do we do?”

His expression was serious. “You need to get off the train.” You opened your mouth to protest, but he cut you off. “They don’t know you have anything to do with me. You’re just another passenger. They won’t bother you. Take this.” He pulled a wallet out of his pocket and grabbed a handful of cash. “Rent a car. Drive to Kyoto. I’ll meet you there.”

“Tangerine…”

He wasn’t looking at you anymore. He was scribbling something down on a scrap of paper. As he slid it into your hands, you saw it was a phone number.

“I know today must’ve been terrifying for you,” he said. “So if you don’t call me, I won’t hold it against you. My life is dangerous. I’d hate for you to get hurt. So if that means living without you…” He swallowed. “I can live with that, okay?” You gritted your teeth. Your eyes were stinging. “Come to Kyoto. Or don’t. I’ll understand either way. Okay?”

Your heart was beating hard enough to hurt. You were almost surprised he couldn’t hear it. This beautiful, stupid, dangerous man. You had only just met him, but you’d do anything for him. Even leave, if that’s what he wanted you to do.

You pushed up onto your tiptoes and kissed him. It was a clumsy graze of your lips against his, but before you could rock back on your heels, he grabbed your face and kissed you back properly. You gripped the front of his shirt, trying to pull him closer, but he pushed you away.

“You need to get off the train,” he said again, looking almost bereft.

You pulled him down to steal one last kiss. “I’ll see you in Kyoto.”

He handed you your rucksack. Resolute, you slipped it on and made your way out into the corridor. With your chin held high, you walked down the little steps off the train and onto the platform.

There were a lot of men in suits milling about, but as Tangerine had predicted, they paid no attention to you. You walked straight over to the car rental office without looking back.

*

The drive to Kyoto was almost two hours. The bullet train would’ve got you there in under forty minutes. You drove the speed limit, rucksack thrown haphazardly into the passenger seat, no question of stopping any time soon, but you still felt Tangerine getting further away from you with every minute.

There had been a lump in your throat ever since you’d left him behind. It would be just your luck to meet your soulmate and then have him die after you’d known him for less than a day.

You couldn’t think like that. You’d never make it to Kyoto if you had a mental breakdown on the drive there. Your eyes darted down to the new patch of blue colour on your arm. It was still as vivid as it had been when he’d first touched you. He was alive. That made it a little easier to breathe.

You were twenty minutes outside Kyoto when you reached the roadblock. There were police everywhere, and no way through. They were trying to direct you down a diversion, but you weren’t having that.

You pulled over to the side of the road and got out. You put on your best clueless tourist face and walked right up to the roadblock.

“Excuse me? Do you speak English?” you asked one of the cops. He held up a hand, telling you to wait, and then went over and spoke to another officer.

The second cop came over to you. “English?” he said.

“Yes. What happened here? Why is the road closed?”

He grimaced at you. “Bullet train derailed. Very bad.”

Your heart seized. You glanced down at your arm again. Still blue. His eyes traced the movement of your gaze right down to your soulmark, and a look of understanding crossed his face.

“My soulmate was on a train to Kyoto,” you said, trying to keep your voice steady.

“Not many people on this train. We found no survivors. Only dead.” At the expression on your face, he grimaced again. “Probably not your soulmate. Lots of trains come through here. Maybe on the next one?”

“Maybe,” you said shakily. “Thank you.”

He didn’t say anything else as you turned around to go back to the car. You slid into the driver’s seat, and took a shuddery breath.

Slowly, you unzipped your rucksack and rifled through it, looking for your wallet. In your hurry to get here, you had stuffed it into the top of your bag.

You flipped it open, and there, folded up in the space that used to hold a picture of you and your ex-boyfriend, was the scrap of paper with Tangerine’s phone number on it.

You smoothed it out on your lap. His handwriting was messy – though given the circumstances, you could hardly blame him – but it was still legible. With trembling fingers, you typed the number into your phone.

It was answered before the first ring had even finished.

“Hello?” Tangerine’s voice was in your ear, and your relief came in the form of a rush of tears.

“Tangerine?” you asked, and he said your name in return.

The rest of the phone conversation was hazy. You were crying through it. Eventually, he told you that he’d text you an address, and you needed to meet him there. You promised him you would.

*

It was dark by the time you drove up to the hotel. You pulled into a parking space, turned your engine off, and paused.

You were sure you looked a mess. You’d been crying on and off for hours. You looked at yourself in the rearview mirror and frowned.

“Stop being an idiot,” you muttered to yourself. Tangerine was your soulmate. He wouldn’t care if you were a mess. You took a few deep breaths, and then got out of the car.

The lobby wasn’t manned, so you went straight for the elevator. The floor numbers were handily written in both Japanese and English, so you hit the button for Tangerine’s floor and watched the doors slide closed.

It was very quiet here. The hum of traffic that had kept you company for hours seemed very far away now. You rubbed at your face, trying to get rid of any evidence of tears, to no avail. The elevator dinged.

Jittery, you made your way down the hallway and found the number of Tangerine’s room.

Here goes nothing.

You knocked on the door. There were footsteps, and a moment later, it opened a crack. A dark brown eye peeked out at you.

You were about to start apologising, saying that you had the wrong room, when the man took a step back, opening the door wider, and you recognised him as the man Tangerine had been with earlier. The man he’d called his brother. The man who he’d said was dead.

“Tan!” he called over his shoulder. “It’s for you.”

You heard another door slam shut, frantic footsteps, and then there he was, standing in the doorway.

He was wearing a white bathrobe. His hair, which had been slicked back earlier, was damp and curly. You liked it better that way.

He was no longer covered in blood, but you could see a couple of nasty cuts and bruises. You moved towards each other at the same time. He opened his arms and you stepped in.

He smelled like soap and aftershave. His skin was damp wherever it pressed against yours. He was so attractive that you felt a little light-headed.

A small, gasping sob escaped from your lips, and he immediately drew you tighter into himself, holding you.

“Shh, shh, love, it’s okay,” he murmured, guiding you back into the room. The door fell closed behind you.

You stood there for a moment, clinging to him like a lifeline. For his part, he seemed perfectly content to let you try to burrow your way into his chest.

Somewhere behind him, someone cleared their throat. Feeling a little embarrassed, you pulled back to see Tangerine’s brother lounging on a bed, a book propped open on his lap.

“If you two are gonna carry on like that, I’m gonna get my own room,” he said.

Tangerine chuckled, and then pressed his lips to your temple. “That’s probably for the best. Love, this is my brother, Lemon.”

“I thought you said he was dead?”

“It’s a long story, sweetheart. Come on. Let’s get room service.”

---

'‘Cause there’s always time for second guesses, I don’t wanna know If you’re gonna be the death of me, that’s how I wanna go.'

---

Sequel.

[tumble-tv]

Ghostbusters brainrot, because I can't stop thinking about it

This is just me talking about all the different units that make up the Ghostbusters business because I have zero self control. Long post, so there's more below the cut.

SLIGHT SPOILERS FOR GHOSTBUSTERS: FROZEN EMPIRE

There's the motorcycle unit, which is pretty self-explanatory. They're mainly used for small busts or quotes since they can't carry a lot of equipment on them, really just a downsized proton pack and one, maybe two traps depending on the model of the bike.

Then we have the Ecto units, from Ecto-1 to Ecto-3. Ecto-1 is retired due to it's age and how hard it is to repair and update to the times, so there's actually only two Ectomobiles available. All Ectos have top notch technology, but are still 1959 Cadillac Miller-Meteors. They are custom made for the Ghostbusters so that they can keep their iconic car model but still be functional in modern times. They have a gunner seat (as much as the mayor hates it), pull out rack for the proton packs (fits up to four packs), proton cannon, folding ramp for the remote trap vehicle, and drone trap. The Ectomobiles can fit one gunner, one driver, one front passenger, and three back passengers. These units are used for pretty much any busts.

After the Ecomobiles, we have the humvees, which are really just Ectomobiles but bigger, scarier, faster, and tougher. They also have a Super Slammer Muon Trap on top, and instead of the gunner seat being on the side, they're on the top like a regular gunner seat on any other humvee. They can fit one driver, one front passenger, one gunner, and two back passengers. They are known as Ghost-1, Ghost-2, and Ghost-3. There is a compartment in the back seat that carries four proton packs.

After the Busters we have the Cleaners, who arrive after the Busters do their thing and clean up after them. Sometimes all they have to do it take samples of whatever the ghost left behind, and other times it's a full on biohazard cleanup. The Slimer would've been a biohazard level cleanup for example, as well as the Pink Slime, but a spot in the middle of your hallway that created a sense of dread and cold would be a sample level cleanup.

Of course we have the receptionists, because without them Ghostbusters would not exist. They mainly take calls and send out crews, but occasionally help out during major events like Gozer the Gozerian, the Pink Slime, and Garraka.

We have the Paranormal Research Center, where, with time, had been expanded into a full facility with different units for different types of research. They also have an actual functioning containment system, with hundreds of containment units. Each has a database of what ghosts are in each unit and their full file and date they were caught. Once a week a researcher heads down to the Ghostbusters headquarters to gather all of the traps that had been filled that week to empty them into their containment system. The only ghost currently held under headquarters is Garraka, as it's too dangerous to move that one. The basement is fully off limits without authorization due to its containment. The Paranormal Research Center also has their own emergency units available in case of a major event. This is also where the majority of training for new Ghostbusters is done.

There is an entire wall dedicated to their standard gear (flight suits, boots, gloves) in the truck bay. This wall is almost exactly what the turnout gear racks look like for firefighters. Each Ghostbuster has their own little cubby to hold their gear, as well as a shelf above to hold any extras they may need. This cubby also contains a specialized jacket for cold weather (the red jackets that are seen in Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire and are worn by Lucky and Lars) and a helmet (Pacific Helmets WR5, for example). We've seen the Ghostbusters get thrown around enough to have a concussion at least once, and Janine probably had them ordered after the second time the boys came back from a call with welts on the backs of their heads.

After years of being in that falling apart firehouse, they finally have it renovated to fit their needs (and definitely splurging on the fun stuff). Think a glorified firehouse. There's a bar (in Venkman's name), recreation room, kitchen, gym, ready room, and bunk room. An entire floor is dedicated to offices and conference rooms, although those conference rooms are usually used for Super Smash Bros tournaments and gaming because they have large TVs that are awesome for multiplayer games. The containment unit used for Garraka is never touched, and the floor it resides on is off limits without authorization, as stated above. Of course it was renovated in a way, but the unit itself is never touched.

This will definitely be reblogged with more as I come up with it, and feel free to add on!

[freewillacquired]

PSA: Some important OOC things I need my RP partners to know

{out of mutations} Hello, everyone. I was just made aware by a (now former) friend that I unintentionally hurt them very badly to the point of them ceasing to write with me and to block me. That is absolutely their prerogative, and I don’t blame them at all for doing so, nor do I bear them any ill will for their choice. Everyone needs to cultivate their own safe spaces on this site and to do what is best for their own mental health.

However, the points that they raised in their final message to me were important and very much opened my eyes to how careless I’ve been with how I’ve conducted myself as an rper and a blogger, and as a friend in general. It also made me aware that things that I’ve been trying to handle on my own offline and to not let affect how I run my blogs or manage friendships… are things that I really need to make my friends and rp partners aware of, because they are having clear consequences.

You all deserve to understand how I work as an online person you connect with, so that you can each make individual choices on whether or not you wish to continue writing with me or interacting through messages in the future. I’ll place this below a cut, and if you read all of it, I thank you for your time.

I mean for this simply to be an informative post that will explain a little bit about what I’ve been going through lately and how it is affecting my ability to function online. Life has gotten very crazy for me, I am having memory problems, and I have way too much activity/muses/blogs. All of these things together have created some problems with how I interact with folks on this site, and so I want to explain a little so you all understand. If, after reading this, you decide that I am too high maintenance for you, that I can’t give you the level of writing or messaging interaction that you prefer, or if you have any other issues with what I say, I fully understand and support any decision you make going forward. I hope that by beieng a bit embarrassingly candid that I can prevent what I inadvertently did to my friend from ever happening again, because I feel absolutely horrible about it. Alright, let’s get into this.

I don’t go looking for new people to interact with on any of my blogs anymore. I’ve stopped following new people unless we actually start writing together, I never message new people because of my anxiety, and I don’t want to attract more activity because I’m not managing what I have now well at all. The past few years of my life have been disastrous for many reasons (work, family, health, etc.), and I am looking to downsize muses and blogs, so I don’t reach out to new people anymore. If they reach out to me, I do my best to accommodate them, because I have never been good at saying no or disappointing people as a consequence of my social anxiety. But otherwise, I don’t want to attract more activity when I know I already don’t have enough time and focus to maintain the activity I already have. So if you have followed me because of the rp etiquette of “if I follow I want to interact,” and I don’t follow back, it doesn’t necessarily mean I don’t want to write with you. Sometimes that is true. When I get followed I read the person’s rules. If I can’t find your rules, or if I see a rule that I feel I violate or would easily violate unintentionally, then I don’t look to write with you. However, there are times when someone follows and I think… oh wow, I’d love to write with them. But as I said, I have too many blogs/muses right now, so I feel it’s irresponsible to go looking for new connections when I don’t really properly maintain the ones I have. I don’t want to close my blogs for new interactions, per se, but I don’t go seeking out more activity either.

But the main reason I wanted to write this is to explain some issues I’ve been having with my memory lately. In the past four years, I’ve had Covid twice and I’ve been put on medications for an immunodeficiency illness, and both of those things have very much made my memory and my ability to keep track of things very poor. I am getting people confused on this site that I never did before, I weirdly repeat myself in posts, I am forgetting what I said in one thread vs. another, I’m forgetting to message people back, or I’ll promise to send in asks or whatever and then never do it. I also tend to get very confused between people who write the same characters, since all I have to go on is a url and an icon if I don’t know the person in real life. I’ve gotten rpers mixed up before because it’s all very jumbled in my head. Sometimes that makes people feel like I am being rude, inconsiderate, or that I don’t care about them, but that isn’t true. I genuinely just can’t hold onto thoughts and memories the way I could a few years ago. I’ve even had to leave my career field, for safety reasons because making stupid mistakes or forgetting to do things since my memory has been affected by Covid and my medications.

The issue of my memory is something that I’ve been in denial about because it’s a scary and upsetting thing, and I guess I’ve been trying to chalk it up to stress or whatever, but clearly that’s not the case, and I need to accept that I have a real problem. In recent months, I have not only gotten people mixed up, but I have done things like list the top 5 people of something and leave someone out, or say someone was the best or only person I wrote with when others write the same character, or replied to one person’s thread thinking I was writing to different person. Sometimes they are close friends of mine, or I’ve been writing with them longer than the ones I listed. Why would I not remember them? How could I screw things like this up? I don’t know. It’s disturbing to not be able to trust your memory, it honestly is.

When I don’t know people in person and all I see is a url and an icon, I sometimes get very confused. This has always been true for me, since way back with AIM in the 90s, but in recent years it’s been compounded by my memory issues. Thread plots and things get all jumbled in my head. I just wrote a thread the other day where I replied to someone and I thought I was replying to another person’s same version of that character. It was mortifying and I felt really bad. If this happens to you, or if I get your version confused in an OOC post, or if I compliment someone else’s version but not yours, it doesn’t mean your version is crap or doesn’t mean anything to me, it’s just that I’m having some focus and memory issues that are causing me to forget versions sometimes or to blend them together in my head. I will take greater care not to make such mistakes in the future, but when dealing with something like a buggy memory, it’s really hard.

People frequently change urls too, which is another thing that often throws me off, because then in my mind, it’s a totally different, new person until I have enough repetition to associate the new url with the person behind the old one. The number of blunders I’ve made recently with saying to people, “I’m sorry, who is this again?” has been staggering and very embarrassing for me. Like just having to ask that question is incredibly mortifying, but I need to do it more instead of trying to reply on my memory and then making very hurtful mistakes.

I have not been keeping up with things on this site as well as I should have in recent years, and that is a failing of mine. Personal relationships have suffered. Connections I’ve made here have fallen apart. I feel like it’s very much getting away from me in an overwhelming manner and I’m not sure how to fix it, other than downsizing blogs and muses, which I’m trying to do now. But that won’t fix my memory, so I’ll likely keep making mistakes even if I downsize. I ask that you please be patient with me, and if you think I’ve made a mistake or haven’t remembered something, please let me know. If doing that is too much trouble for you or you feel like you shouldn’t have to, I totally understand, and if you would feel more comfortable not interacting with me anymore, I respect your decision.

A word about how bad I am with messages… I have very bad social anxiety and messaging people sometimes causes me to have panic attacks or to feel very jittery or overwhelmed. For like, no reason. Even with good, close friends. It’s like…. brain, why. Because of this, I will usually not answer messages until and unless I am in a good headspace to do so. Or it could just be that I don’t have the time if it’s something I’m writing a really long reply to that I want to put adequate thought into. Whatever the reason, I frequently won’t answer right away because I need time to think of a response, or something else is making me anxious so I don’t feel up to replying. I fully intend to reply later, but then the poor memory kicks in, and I forget. Before I know it, I’ve sometimes got people angry that I have been ghosting them for months when I completely forgot I even got a message in the first place. I am kindly asking you to not take this personally. I’ve been doing a lot of this lately. Sometimes, to compound issues, this site doesn’t even tell me that I have messages in the first place, which for someone whose memory is screwed up, is seriously frustrating. I never ignore people unless I think they’re a bot, heh. So please, if you messaged me and I seem to just have completely ignored you, it's okay to message again and ask if I saw it. In fact, I encourage you to do that, because between Dumblr and my own memory, I have really been forgetting to message people back a lot lately, and it’s something I do feel badly about.

One thing I want to make very clear, is that I NEVER fault anyone for taking a hiatus, whether it’s three weeks or three years. Real life comes first, this is a hobby not a job, it should be fun, and if it ceases to be fun or feasible to keep up with then everyone needs to do what’s best for them, and I am perfectly fine with that. Hell, I’ve been taking more hiatuses in the past year than I’ve actually been around to write, because of various work, health, and family issues/obligations. I’m on a partial hiatus right now and likely through next week for jury duty, in fact. I never fault anyone for needing to step away. I’ve had people come back after like five years and still want to write and that’s fine. So if you’ve come out of hiatus and I’m “ignoring” you, it might be that I didn’t see your message, that I don’t remember who you were because of a url change or if it’s been many months or years, or that I don’t even know you’re back. Jog my memory as to what we were writing about, some of our plots and things, and I’m sure that I will remember. Unfortunately, my memory is just not great anymore, it’s a reality that I’ve struggled to come to terms with in recent years.

Also, and this is going to sound very rude I know, but it’s again… just my new normal and reality with regard to my memory. I really don’t have the time or focus to keep track of when everyone leaves or comes back from hiatus or for how long. Maybe this is bad rp etiquette on my part, but I don’t frequently read other people’s blogs or even scroll my dash that much anymore. I just don’t have the time. If I think of it for certain people that I haven’t heard from in a while or that I want to check in on, I may pop onto your blog, but most of the time I do tend to miss a lot of everyone’s OOC posts. I come on to write and then I go back to work (my current job is entirely online), or I go about my family obligations (I take care of my grandmother around the clock). Gone are the days when I used to keep in better touch with people or read all their OOC posts. It’s a combination of not having enough free time to do so and that I’ve really gotten crazy with the number of blogs and muses I have, and so I write with a multitude of people that I just can’t all keep track of. This is a problem of mine, I know, and I am in the process of whittling down my schedule and number of muses to help correct it as much as possible. But just because I didn’t know it was your birthday, or I didn’t like your hiatus post, or I didn’t respond to that post you wrote that said you were really sad and needed someone to talk to… doesn’t mean I don’t care. I do care a lot about people. I tend to soak up people’s problems and sadnesses like a sponge, unfortunately. I just don’t have the time to keep up with all the people I write with all the time. If there is something you really want/need me to know, message me. I know I said I often postpone replying for when I feel more up to doing so, but if it’s something very urgent or important, I will respond ASAP.

One last thing I was to address… please don’t let something that is upsetting you fester to the point where you’re seriously hurt by it. I never intentionally mean to hurt anyone. If anything, I am the most nonconfrontational, people-pleasing person you’ll meet. So if it appears that I’ve done or said or not done something that was really rude, or upset you, or that you feel was very wrong of me to do to you, I promise you it was not done with intention to hurt you. Please come talk to me about it. Don’t let it just sit for a long time and make you angry because I’m likely not even aware that you’re upset. I would like the opportunity to look at what happened and to address it, so that you can feel better and I can be made aware of what I did so as to try to avoid doing so in the future. The last thing I ever want to do to someone is make something into a painful thing they’ll carry with them for a long time. Believe me, I’m the kind of person who still remembers things from early childhood that hurt me and have stayed with me forever. Things have happened on this site, some my fault and some not my fault, that have haunted me for years because I end up feeling so terrible about it. I know that’s probably a product of my chronic anxiety, but even so, it doesn’t feel good at all and I would never want to do that to another person. So please bring something to my attention as soon as it happens so that it can be addressed, fixed, or at the very least explained.

Alright, I think that’s everything I wanted to address. I've tried to be as open and honest and I could possibly be. If this post changes your mind about wanting to interact with me, I understand. You all have to do what is best for you. I just wanted to be transparent with people because hurting someone badly really made me realize that this isn’t something that I can just dance over and hope it’ll all be okay. I’m now aware that it’s affecting real things and real people in negative ways, and so I wanted to make everyone aware.

Sorry for all the word vomit, but I thought this was very important to do. Again, if you’ve read to this point, thank you for taking that time to do so. I will continue to try to do as much as I can to conduct myself in a respectful manner with all of you, and I look forward to writing with those who still want to.

[zuzsenpai]

Full story (so far) of the work project from hell that's lost me vacation time, lost me sleep and hair, caused a number of panic attacks, and literally gave me my period when I'm not supposed to have periods and haven't had one in a year and a half.

I'll put it under a cut because I'm sure most of you don't want to read all this shit. I just wanted to vent and get it out.

So around the beginning of September, a video project request came into our office. The way it was explained to us by the project coordinator in marketing (who I will call "Sam"), was that it was going to be a TV spot as part of a big campaign that the CEO is requesting. The topic is letting people know that our healthcare network has a zillion awards for all 15 of our hospitals, compared to the other healthcare network in our area (this is a VERY common marketing strategy for us even though it's been proven the public does not give a shit which network has the most awards). It's a very dull "look at us and our awards and stats" video that, again, the public couldn't give a shit about. But the CEO wants it because ego.

We were told the video needed to be produced in two weeks, because the CEO wants to see the campaign ASAP. This means, for my team, that we don't have time to shoot new footage for this campaign. We were given a pretty mediocre script (we do not write the scripts), with directions to get it professionally voiced and to use old footage we've already shot in order to get this done in time.

That's where I became involved. I'm not a videographer (I do the animations and various other things). I know how to edit, and I know how to edit fast. But if this were a piece we had time for (that had a much better script), our video team of FOUR videographers would have handled this. But I got the project because of the bullshit reasons that I "know where all our footage is" and "can edit fast".

This was a week before I was supposed to go on vacation. I was supposed to go on vacation for a week and a half. My manager (who I will call "Betsy") KNEW I was going on vacation, but she still gave me the project. I know I should have given it to the video team and that point, but I didn't. That was my first and biggest mistake.

The higher-ups in marketing took their sweet ass time choosing an ending tagline and creating graphic design elements I could use in my video. I still didn't have them by the end of that week. We had our voiceover guy record half a dozen taglines that were supposed to be chosen from, just so something could be eventually edited in.

I had a draft that didn't include the tagline or graphic design elements ready by the end of the week. Meaning the day before I went on vacation. My second and almost just as big mistake was saying I would work on it over vacation. But honestly, this was for the CEO, and the VP of marketing hadn't approved my raise yet and I am always feeling like I would be the first on the chopping block if we needed to downsize the department. So I wanted to prove myself.

Anyway, while I was on vacation, I kept all the channels open: Teams, Outlook, etc. I had a VERY hard time relaxing because I knew at any moment I'd have to pick this project up. I also have massive burnout and just could not get myself to chill out. Anyway, a couple things happened by Thursday of that week: the tagline was finally chosen, the script changed and a whole 20 seconds was added to the video, and the graphic design elements came in. Keep in mind the project was supposed to have been done in two weeks. Meaning by the literal NEXT DAY. That wasn't happening at this point, so I was given a new deadline of a first draft by the following Wednesday.

I scrambled to coordinate the voiceover guy coming in again even though I couldn't be there. I scrambled even harder to find 20 more seconds of footage while I was over 100 miles away and had incredibly slow access to our video server. In fact, I could barely view or download video at all. I panicked for DAYS trying to get video downloaded, but it was just NOT happening.

I cut my vacation short and got in by Tuesday morning that next week. I had a single day to figure this video out. I was able to manage it by the skin of my teeth. I sent the draft on Wednesday and eventually heard back that Sam, the VP of marketing (who I will call "Ken"), and a few other higher-ups in marketing loved it. Great. The end!

Except the Chief Strategy Officer (Ken's boss), suddenly needed to approve it. I will call him "Ray". So Ray is new at his job and apparently needs to have his fingers in ever single piece of marketing that comes out of the marketing department. This is the opposite of how the old guy who retired used to do it. Ray is also the CEO's son-in-law. So, a Jared Kushner if you will. He's trying to prove himself and in the process, he is micromanaging to the extreme. But also it takes him forever to make decisions. Great combination there, all around.

It takes Ray over a week to even look at the video, during which I start getting other projects with quick deadlines. And when Ray does look at it, he comes back with the unhelpfully vague comments of "it's unsophisticated", "doesn't look like a sleek big city ad" and "is not emotional". So he rejects it and asks for a completely new video to be done, ASAP. Marketing collectively loses their minds in a bad way. The project coordinator (Sam) decides to inform me of this by immediately sending me an email outlining everything that was "wrong" with the video, despite having originally said he loved it. He told me a new one needed to be done and it needed to be done FAST. It needed to look like a polished, high budget, big city ad.

Well that wasn't getting done. I told him this. He didn't care. Ray gets what he wants. Even though Ray did NOT say that's what he wanted from the beginning. Even though I made a good video based on the shitty script I was given. The script that was supposedly approved by Ray himself. The script that had no story, was unemotional, and given an unreasonable deadline to get produced into a video.

This was last Thursday. I had a breakdown in my office, sobbing and hyperventilating. I decided I would finally bring in the video team. I needed one of them to do this. I needed to be done with it. I had 4 other projects with deadlines fast approaching (all of them animations, so I was the only one who could do them). Betsy called an in-person meeting with her, myself, and the 4 videographers.

I was still having a massive panic attack as I tried extremely hard to be normal in that meeting. I tried my best to explain to the team what I needed. The videographers were super angry on my behalf that I was even given the project in the first place, and they were extremely willing to redo the video from the ground up. I was grateful beyond belief. My video was scrapped, which sucks, but I didn't care at that point

A few days later on the following Monday (this past Monday), around 4PM, I was told that Ken decided we were going to go over Ray's head and "just edit the video we already have into a sleek, emotional, big city ad". Using the same script and most of the same footage. Just "make it better". Ken's reasoning was that this video was for the CEO and not Ray. And the CEO wanted it weeks ago.

Because this was an update to the existing video, Betsy informed me that I had to jump back on the project to make the edits. The edits that were a nebulous "make it better". I knew the project already and I can edit quickly. So it's mine again. Again, I had 4 other projects with deadlines of THIS WEEK. I had to send emails apologizing to a few people for not having the projects done.

So I spent Monday evening (at home) and all of Tuesday (yesterday) fucking around with the video. I asked the video team their thoughts on what would make it better and "sleeker", and they came back with things like "no amount of tricks and transitions is going to make that old footage look any better". So, unhelpful as fuck. Sam just kept saying "use tricks from big city ads! Just copy them! make it emotional!"

I did what I could. I found an emotional song, I used some flashy transitions, I slowed down some footage for dramatic effect, and I found a few pieced of stock footage that looked more "polished" than the footage I had. Granted ALL of the footage I originally used was local. It was our hospitals and our doctors and our staff. It just wasn't shot for this video. I tried to keep as much of that local feel in as possible, because I know the CEO likes that. I neglected projects for this. I stressed about this. Couldn't sleep. Got my fucking period after a year and a half on birth control.

I sent out a draft at 3PM yesterday. To Sam and Ken. Didn't hear back, but that's pretty normal (Ken sends work emails at like 10PM). 4:30 rolled around and I got up to leave. Betsy called me into her office as I passed by.

Betsy: I have something I need to tell you.

Me: ?????

Betsy: This morning Ken told me that we farmed your project out to [freelance video production company that we sometimes use].

Me: I'm sorry what.

Betsy: I didn't tell you because I didn't want it to upset you or hurt your feelings.

Me: But... then why did I work the project all day????

Betsy: Because I think we needed to show Ken what we are capable of.

Me: But that's irrelevant. He asked the other company to do it.

Betsy: Yes but I think he really wanted us to do it.

Me: So I sent a draft to Ken after he'd already farmed it out to the other company?

Betsy: Yes. But I sent him an email explaining it.

I didn't know what to say. I was furious. But Betsy is in charge of asking Ken for my raise, so I waited until I got to my car to start crying and screaming. I was in a bad state last night.

Got in this morning to an email from Ken just saying "Please find time to discuss tomorrow afternoon". So essentially a "see me after class". This could go one of three ways.

He could tell me he likes it and here are a few edits (unlikely, though he DID like the original and it's not too different from that?????)

He could tell me it needs a lot of work and changes and I need to do it ASAP (likely and stressful)

He could get mad I wasted my time, which is entirely Betsy's fault (likely and gets Betsy in a load of trouble)

The meeting with him is at 3PM tomorrow. I'm working from home because I need it at this point. I'm so sick of this. I'm so done. I'm even done typing about it right now because I am just so out of steam. I have so many deadlines and I'm so burnt out and I am so exhausted.

[pynkhues]

ooooooh would love your comment on this post (maybe just straight up under that post). considering your own stance on magnus' fortune 👀

https://www.tumblr.com/virginiaisforvampires/762167499843321856/hi-i-often-see-this-opinion-being-repeated-that?source=share

I mean, in terms of how it's possible for that anon's ask, I'd say that it's because a lot of the wealth Magnus left Lestat wasn't money, it was jewellery and artefacts that will generally gain value over time, so are probably worth eye-watering amounts of money now. Apologies for my crappy photos, haha (conveniently my copy of TVL is still on my desk), but:

(He then just looks at how beautiful he is in the pearlhandled mirror for like, four paragraphs lmao, I love this book so much).

But yeah, I mean, I disagree with that tumblr user's thesis that Lestat is very intelligent and invested well, honestly. I love Lestat a lot, which I think everyone on here probably knows at this point, haha, he was a formative character for me growing up and I love that we're getting such an incredible adaptation of him now, but Lestat sort of lacking intellectually is, to me, a pretty central (and charming!) part of his character.

He was an incredibly abused and neglected child - deliberately uneducated by both his parents, one out of a desire to control, and the other out of a lack of patience - and while for many children that can and does shut the world off, what I love about Lestat is that, especially in the books, it's bred this almost childlike sense of enchantment and wonder for him for every new thing he gets to experience.

And look, yeah, there is a pragmatism in him, which has I think been wrung out of being the only semi-competent person / the only true survivor in his family, and that pragmatism I think is probably what saw him hand over the wealth to an institution who could care for it, but at the same time, I don't know if I agree that Lestat likes to be a provider necessarily.

He invests in people because he loves them, and he gives them money because he has it (and probably feels a degree of detachment to it as a result of how he got it). Lestat buys the Theatres des Vampires and continues to send them money because he loved Nicki, and he invested in The Azaelia because he loves Louis - the fact that the latter was a good business investment and Louis a smart and capable businessman is incidental - Lestat would've invested anyway which we can basically see given the Theatres des Vampires has already had to downsize theatres and seems to be haemorrhaging money yet Lestat never cut them off.

I guess what I'm saying is that when it comes to everything - money included - Lestat's a character who thinks with his heart, not his head.

[thetreehousenews]

Land of Whispering Pines 🌲

Good morning! May the Great Spirit bless you 🙏

It's a beautiful sunny morning ☀️ here and the birds 🦜 are a-singin'' here in the Niagara Peninsula region of Ontario. Don't go to Ohio, go to Ontario, Canada ~♪♫♭~♪♫~ where the moose roam in the fields of Moosennee. 🍁 I certainly didn't waste time after my cereal to go sit out in my green space with my coffee. I almost drifted away to Wonderland in the warm morning sun. All systems appear to be operational, and everything is a go! Now, to turn on the juice to activate the brain for the day. C.O.F.F.E.E. ☕ Nothin' like a bit of humor to start the day. Well, some like their coffee black, I prefer mine with a little cream, and I pass on the sugar. I'm not a sweets person, but sometimes it doesn't hurt to throw in a little sugar when needed.

My only other plan for today, besides reporting the news, is to wash the windows. Maybe walk tomorrow. I don't miss my exercise. I use the cubie and the stair climber stand-up machine for at least half an hour per day. Now, onto the international news for the day. Thank you for reading the News.

TODAY'S DISCUSSION:

When and when not to Humor

Close follow-up of yesterdays Discussion Tree House News

TREE HOUSE NEWS🏡 June 27, at 100:35 AM

About using the humor side of things.

Example. Below is my own experience:

I once worked for a grouchy boss who never had anything nice to say at the start of the morning, grumbling like Scrooge. One morning, he and his wife, both dressed up as if they were going to a special occasion, I thought, 'That's good, I'll be the boss of the shop for the day.' As they walked into the room, he began his usual grumbling. I stood up, curtsied slightly, and politely said, Good morning to you, too, with a smile. His wife laughed her arse off. It worked, and I didn't forget that; it was the first tool I learned when I became a social worker, some years later - humor.

- Google Search -

Using Humor To Resolve Conflict:

What type of stress is relieved by laughing loudly?

Laughter is the Best Medicine - HelpGuide.org

A good, hearty laugh relieves physical tension and stress, leaving your muscles relaxed for up to 45 minutes after. Laughter boosts the immune system. Laughter decreases stress hormones and increases immune cells and infection-fighting antibodies, thus improving your resistance to disease. May 16, 2025

Usually, when I make fun of something, it's to lighten up a heavy topic. Better to laugh than get angry over something you can't do anything about, or the cat already got out of the bag, or it's already spilled milk. Ya can'ts put the spilt milk back in the jug!

BREAKING NEWS:

Senate votes to move forward on Trump’s ‘big, beautiful bill,’ though measure’s fate remains in question

Senate Republicans took a major step toward delivering President Donald Trump his “big, beautiful bill” late Saturday, though the fate of the giant tax cuts and spending measure is still in question as other hurdles remain.

After an hourslong push by Senate GOP leaders Saturday, the bill cleared a key procedural vote, 51-49. Republican leaders must now satisfy numerous holdouts still demanding changes to the bill. Trump’s multitrillion-dollar bill would lower federal taxes and infuse more money into the Pentagon and border security agencies, while downsizing government safety-net programs including Medicaid.

The timeline is extremely tight: Trump has demanded to sign the bill on the Fourth of July, but the measure must still go back to the House if it passes the Senate. Saturday’s vote allows the Senate to begin debating Trump’s bill, teeing up a final passage vote in that chamber as soon as Monday. In a late-night post on social media, Trump declared a “GREAT VICTORY” after the bill cleared the Senate, offering praise to four key senators who shifted their votes to get the procedural bill over the finish line...

Read More:

Updated 2:30 AM EDT, Sun June 29, 2025

- CNN -

UN nuclear watchdog chief says Iran could again begin enriching uranium in ‘matter of months’

The head of the UN’s nuclear watchdog says US strikes on Iran fell short of causing total damage to its nuclear program and that Tehran could restart enriching uranium “in a matter of months,” contradicting President Donald Trump’s claims the US set Tehran’s ambitions back by decades.

Rafael Grossi’s comments appear to support an early assessment from the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency, first reported on by CNN, which suggests the United States’ strikes on key Iranian nuclear sites last week did not destroy the core components of its nuclear program, and likely only set it back by months.

While the final military and intelligence assessment has yet to come, Trump has repeatedly claimed to have “completely and totally obliterated” Tehran’s nuclear program.

The 12-day conflict between Israel and Iran began earlier this month when Israel launched an unprecedented attack it said aimed at preventing Tehran developing a nuclear bomb. Iran has insisted its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes...

Read More:

Published 6:17 AM EDT, Sun June 29, 2025

- CNN -

Republican plans to overhaul Medicaid are already shaking up the 2026 midterms

Senate Republicans have yet to finalize their version of President Donald Trump’s sweeping domestic policy proposal, but GOP lawmakers up for reelection in 2026 are bracing for the political impact of the bill’s Medicaid cuts.

Sen. Susan Collins of Maine is pushing for a provider relief fund. Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina has warned GOP leaders about how many in his state could lose care. And Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa has picked up a crop of Democratic challengers campaigning off her “Well, we all are going to die” response to a town hall protester.

Tens of thousands of people could lose coverage in each of those three senators’ states, according to a KFF analysis on the version of the bill passed by the Republican-led House last month. Beleaguered Democrats, meanwhile, hope that laser-focusing on health care will help them chip away at the Republicans’ 53-seat Senate majority and take back the House. A key part of Democratic messaging has been to tie the Medicaid cuts, which would largely affect low-income Americans, to tax breaks for the wealthy...

Read More:

Published 6:00 AM EDT, Sat June 28, 2025

- CNN -

CANADIAN NEWS:

Teacher shortages persisted this school year. What's being done to fill the gap for the next?

Teacher shortages have become an issue for nearly every province and territory

For several months this year, Katherine Korakakis' kids had substitute instructors that were "not qualified to teach the subject," said the Montreal parent, whose province started this school year thousands of teachers short. "It wasn't a math teacher who was teaching math. It wasn't a French teacher who was teaching French."

She was already worried about learning loss after the pandemic, and scrambled to get her teens extra tutoring, a luxury she knows not everyone can afford. "Having a child score in the high 90s … one year in math and then having a non-qualified teacher coming in the second year and the child scoring a 50 — there's something wrong here," she said. Teacher shortages have become an issue in nearly every province and territory. Kids facing one substitute teacher after another. French taught by a non-speaker. Relying on uncertified adults to supervise classrooms.

While some governments suggest an aging workforce and growing populations are behind the shortages, teachers themselves point to working conditions. So what's being done to improve the situation for next year?...

'Just getting through the day':

Nearly 200 uncertified teachers now filling N.B. teacher shortage

Quebec relies on thousands of uncertified teachers

B.C. boy denied full-time class due to lack of school assistants

What's influencing shortages?:

Territory considering Whitehorse school's proposal for more full-time substitute teachers amid shortage

Ontario teacher shortage to worsen in 2027, ministry document warns

Job 'isn't worth the conditions that we're facing':

What's being done about shortages:

Launching new recruitment campaigns and strategies (N.B. and Alberta).

Funding programs for rural and remote teacher candidates to train in their home communities (B.C. and Alberta).

Bursaries for teacher-candidates or cash incentives for new teachers who relocate to remote regions (B.C. and Alberta).

Developing certification programs targeting those without formal qualifications already teaching in schools (Quebec).

What do aspiring teachers think?:

Read More:

Jun 29, 2025 4:00 AM EDT | Last Updated: 6 hours ago

- CBC -

♪♫NATURE'S SOUNDS AND MUSIC TO SOOTH THE SOUL♪♫

🌸 🌺 🪷 ~ Come with me to a gentle place to be ~ 🌸 🌺 🪷

[pupintransit]

At this stage post-op we are about three weeks out from the surgery. Things are healing fine, but not without some complications:

Wound dehiscence at the front of my canal. It'll heal on its own but kind of slowly. Plus according to the trans care nurse I saw it's likely to develop granular tissue, which is treated very easily but it's profoundly inconvenient nonetheless

Urinary tract infection. Search me how I contracted the fuckin' thing but we caught it early it seems. I was given some antibiotics at my last medical appointment, and I hope to christ they kick in soon cuz I had a fever of about 101.6 this morning. Cannot remember the last time I felt that physically weak and miserable. The other day I didn't have the strength to keep my legs prone to air dry properly

There's a hematoma underneath my vulva on my right side. It sounds worse than it is, and it seems to be going down on its own. Still, it is lengthening my recovery time for longer than I want, and it bleeds out of a pinprick sized wound on right side

Ughhhhhh.

Mentally I've been all over the place. I've been going through phases of regret and fear, which as I wrote about earlier this month I experience when I feel particularly bad. It passes just as i expect it too once the pain and dread stops. It doesn't make it any easier to deal with in the moment though. Sometimes you just have to ride the feeling out.

I get asked sometimes what it feels like to be cockless. The honest answer is that is that I don't know yet. I like how it looks and I love not having something dangle between my legs, but it still hurts. I won't be able to use my new parts the way I want to for at least a few more months. I'm still a little too swollen to find my clit too, and quite frankly I miss being able to cum.

I'm not fucking around with my health so despite all of the pain and fever I'm going through I'm still dilating on schedule four times a days and doing my hygiene routines as required. There are consequences if I don't, and I don't want to become complacent and stop. I've downsized to the blue and green dilators for the time being due to the pain caused by my dehiscence. I can always work back up to the orange one once everything heals up more. Right now I want to be sure that I maintain my depth and do so with the least amount of pain possible.

There's someone I follow online who has a Q&A section about their own gender affirming surgery on their social media who has a very salient point in one of the entries. I'm not gonna tag them and risk embarrassing them (but if you happen to be reading this please know that I think very highly of you!), but essentially their point was that, if you're asking someone if you should get bottom surgery of any kind, the answer is no you should not. Asking that means that you're still uncertain about whether or not it's the best decision. If you ask yourself if you want bottom surgery and the answer you come up with is "I don't know," that isn't good enough. For your own safety you need to wait until you are certain. That could take a very long time but it's still the most responsible thing you can.

I had several appointments with therapist and doctors in order to be sure this is what I wanted. When I am in my right mind I am confident in my choice and I don't regret it. You need to be sure you won't regret it too.

Anyway. My next appointment with the trans health care nurse is friday of next week. Luckily my husband is able to drive me since my brother isn't available this time and I really do not want to take transit for that long in order to get there. Ideally my UTI will have gotten better by then. I'll let y'all know how it goes.

[signs-of-the-moon]

Moon High: Chapter 14

Trembling legs and fluffed up fur were the sight that greeted Treeclan as their missing apprentices returned home. Cats had just begun to grow suspicious of their whereabouts by the time their paws touched the leaf littered floor. Wolfheart was the first to come up to meet them. His face shone with relief.

"Kits!" He called out, examining each of his frazzled children as they gathered around him. He expression shifted back to one of concern. "What's wrong? What's happened?"

Moonpaw pressed her body close to her father. Her heart was pounding in her chest, throat tight with thorns of grief that she fought to speak through.

"Skunkpaw...Skunkpaw's been kitnapped!" She choked out. Magpiepaw began to sob again, as if Moonpaw's words had been a remainder of what they'd witnessed.

The clan drew back in astonishment.

"Kitnapped!?" Sunpaw caterwauled. His ears folded back with panic.

"What do you mean?" Asked senior warrior, Oakfur.

"Who's taken him?" Brightsky demanded to know as she pushed her way through the crowd. She came to stand beside her family. The worry in her eyes barely masked the flame of fury which burned behind them; the passion of a mother's love. The desire to protect and save her kit was unmistakable.

"Twolegs..." Smokepaw began to explain. He held his posture upright, as the tremble in his pelt betrayed the brave face he was putting on. "The four of us were out playing in the woods when a pack of Twolegs came along. Their kits tried to play with us a bit. And then they tried snatching Skunkpaw."

"Sw-Swiftpaw of Grassclan interfered to help us flee," Magpiepaw chimed with a trembling mew. "And then...and then Skunkpaw was taken!"

A murmur broke out among the crowd as the clan exchanged wary glances. Some, Moonpaw could hear, were worried this meant the Twolegs were after the clan again. While others speculated Skunkpaw's kitnapping was planned. That Grassclan somehow coordinated it to happen; to downsize Treeclan's ranks. Moonpaw could hardly believe some of the things her clanmates were saying. But all fell silent as Blazestar took his place upon the Great Stump to address them.

"It's tragic what's happened to Skunkpaw, today," Treeclan's leader began. "He was a good cat, and would have made a fine warrior of Treeclan, had they gotten the chance." The blazing tom's orange gaze settled upon Moonpaw and her littermates, a darkness settled within them. It was as if he were silently judging them. Like he thought they were to blame for Skunkpaw's kitnapping. Moonpaw felt a pit form in her belly.

"What do you plan to do about what's happened?" Wolfheart asked his leader. He stepped in front of his kits bravely, even as Blazestar stared him down.

"There's nothing to be done," Blazestar answered simply.

"We need to send out a search party," Brightsky counteted insistently, eyes round. She looked from her mate up to Blazestar. "We need to find Skunkpaw!"

"We can't waste the energy looking for some lost apprentice," Blazestar grunted with a flick of his tail.

Brightsky reared back for a moment in surprise. Her mouth hung half agape as searched for the right words to say. "That apprentice is my son! I cannot sit by comfortably knowing that he's been kitnapped by Twolegs. Who knows what they will do with him. He could be hurt!"

"The answer is no," Blazestar's meow was hostile, softening as he continued to speak. "We'd be risking other warriors' safety by sending them into Twolegplace to search. The Twolegs hunt our clan enough as it is. I can't take the chance of that increasing. We've lost too many good cats recently, your son included. Besides, Skunkpaw is a brave tom. I know he will be alright, wherever he is. They're a great tracker just as you are. They'll find their way back to us if they can, I'm sure."

"Please, Blazestar. If there's a way to bring Skunkpaw back, then we must act." Brightsky's gaze hardened with seriousness as it met with the leader's. "I know you don't understand what it's like to lose a kit. But if it were one of your sons who went missing, wouldn't you do everything in your power to bring him home..?"

Blazestar was quiet for a few moments, head lowered slightly and eyes foggy with deep contemplation; or perhaps with fear of the possibility. "...Very well, Brightsky. We will send a patrol out to Twolegplace come sundown. If you're up for it, you may lead it. Bring whomever you'd like. But beware, and be safe. You will be held accountable if anyone should get harmed."

Brightsky dipped her head. "I understand. Thank you, Blazestar." Standing upright, the queen turned to speak with her remaining kits. "You three know Skunkpaw better than anyone. I'd like to ask you to join the search party, if you're up for it."

"Of course!" Moonpaw chirped, pelt tingling with excitement.

"We'll find that stupid fuzzball and bring him back home," Smokepaw agreed, looking a lot more relaxed than before. Although Moonpaw wondered if he was holding back his anxiety for the sake of his kin.

"I'll be going as well," Silverhawk meowed as she padded over to stand beside her fellow queen. "Skunkpaw's my apprentice. That practically makes them my son, too."

"And I want to come!" Volunteered Blazestar's son, Flamepaw. He scurried over to stand beside Smokepaw. "Skunkpaw's my best friend. I need to know if he's ok!"

"Alright," Brightsky agreed. "Anyone else? Wolfheart?"

Upon being prompted, Wolfheart raised his chin and gave a curt nod. "You couldn't get me to stay behind, even if all of Lionclan were attacking our camp."

Moonpaw let out a small mrrow of amusement. She loved when her father was so enthusiastic. And right now his determined demeanor would come in handy. It would rally the rest of the search party, to look as hard as they could for Skunkpaw.

"Well then...I'm going to wait in camp," decided Magpiepaw suddenly. "One of us should be here, in case Skunkpaw finds his way home alone."

Moonpaw knew that wasn't the only reason her sister was opting out of joining the patrol. She was too visibly upset still to serve as any help, and it was clear Magpiepaw knew that too.

"In that case," Blazestar meowed, stretching before jumping off his perch, "that should leave some room for me to join the search party."

"Blazestar?" Wolfheart questioned.

"I'm Treeclan's leader," Blazestar answered as he met with the other cats. "I have more lives to spare than any cat here. What's the point of having them if I don't go on dangerous missions like this? I'll come along, if only to act as bait should a dog, or Twoleg, or Starclan knows what else tries attacking. But I'm still holding you accountable in case that happens, Brightsky. "

Brightsky's eyes grew misty with gratitude. She dipped her head to the blazing orange leader again before lifting it to meet his eye. "Thank you," she mewed softly. "That should be enough cats, then. Our party will set out as soon as the last light fades."

"Oh, but can't I go too?" Tigerpaw asked eagerly as she moved to stand beside Moonpaw. Her yellow eyes were sparkling at the prospect of going into unknown territory.

"And me?" Sunpaw chimed, looking just as excited as he padded over to them.

"No, you're staying here with the rest of the clan," Blazestar asserted to Tigerpaw. Then he turned pointedly towards Sunpaw, "And you, certainly not! There's more than enough apprentices in the search party. We don't need more coming along to cause issues. "

"Not fair," Tigerpaw muttered.

"Then why does Flamepaw get to go?" Sunpaw questioned, though there was no agitation in his tone.

"Because Flamepaw is more aware of his surroundings. He's better suited for a mission like this. It's nothing personal against either of you."

Then, Blazestar turned his attention towards the search party. "I suggest you all see Mothsong, and get your traveling herbs. Before anyone else tries joining the patrol. You'll be needing all your strength to travel through the Twolegplace. I'll be along shortly."

"Yes, Blazestar," meowed the search party, Moonpaw included. She followed behind her family as they made their way towards the weeping willow. Tigerpaw padded after her.

"This sucks!" she griped with an exaggerated pout. Sunpaw followed at her heels, giving a firm nod of agreement.

Moonpaw purred a little, brushing her tail along the tabby's shoulders. "Don't worry, Tig. I'm sure Blazestar will let you go on another mission in the future. But this one is serious."

"I know that," Tigerpaw growled a little. "It's not like I wouldn't treat it as such."

"But knowing you, you'd probably try and fight a kittypet to get answers out of them," Moonpaw purred, amusement in her tone. "And knowing you, you'd be more inclined to make some new friends while we're in the Twolegplace, Sunny." Tigerpaw's expression softened into a playful smile. She lifted a paw to bat at Moonpaw, then allowed the silver and white molly to go on ahead without her. She blocked Sunpaw whose mouth opened to quip something silly and unimportant before he gave up the attempt. Moonpaw waved her tail at her friends as she disappeared into the medicine den to prepare for the long search ahead.

~~~

The last of the day's light faded behind the horizon, just as the Treeclan search party crossed the border into Twoleg territory. The eyes of her clanmates flashed in the faint glow of the Twoleg dens in the distance. Moonpaw glanced between each of them. The blue eyes of her mother stood out the most. Determination was held within them.

"We should all split up," Brightsky suggested, voice low. "We'll cover more ground that way."

"Is it wise to let the apprentices go off on their own, though?" Wolfheart wondered with a nervous twitch of his whiskers.

"They knew what they were getting into when they agreed to help search. They'll be just fine," Silverhawk assured.

Though Wolfheart seemed a little skeptical, he simply nodded in agreement. Then he picked a direction and began walking in it, disappearing behind some bushes. The other cats in the search party went off too, leaving only Moonpaw and Smokepaw to linger where they stood.

"I'm heading in that direction," Smokepaw stated, pointing with his tail. "Try not to go too far."

"I'll be nearby," Moonpaw promised before swinging around. Her eager paws carried her forward. She stuck her nose out with jaws parted slightly to taste the air. But nothing familiar caught her attention. So she wandered off farther, following a row of Twoleg dens lined with white wooden fences. Each seemed unique beyond their borders; some blue, some brick, and some white as clouds. Only a few remained lit inside, while some nearly branchless trees loomed above Moonpaw's head. Each had a light source shining from a single protruding branch, casting Moonpaw's shadow along the dirt path she tredded. Moonpaw hoped the sight of her silhouette would not alert a predator to her presence.

"Hello there!" Moonpaw froze in place, slowly turning to see who had called out to her. In a garden just a fox-length behind her was a silver tabby kittypet. Her long fur swayed in the gentle breeze, and the yellow bell on her collar jingled as she carefully balanced herself on the fence posts marking the end of her territory. She had a warm smile on her face, and a curious gleam in her eyes.

"I've never seen you around here before. Are you new to the neighborhood?"

"No, I'm just passing through," Moonpaw replied, relaxing and raising her tail.

"Oh really? Where are you from?" The kittypet asked curiously.

"I come from the forest." Monpaw tilted her head in the direction of home.

The kittypet perked up at her answer. "Does that mean you're clan cat?"

Moonpaw wondered how a kittypet knew what a clan was. Still, she lifted her chin proudly at the acknowledgment. "I am.

The kittypet trilled in response. She seemed strangely elated by the news. "How neat. Oh my name is Misty, by the way!"

"I'm Moonpaw," responded the apprentice. She was glad to find someone so friendly here to talk to. Hopefully Misty would have some useful information to share.

"Yknow Moonpaw, you look kind of familiar. I wonder if we've met before? Or perhaps I've met one of your kin?" Misty queried.

"Actually, I'm here looking for one of my kin! Maybe the cat you're thinking of is the same?" Moonpaw started to grow hopeful.

"It's a possibility! Who is it you're trying to find? Your mother?" Misty guessed. Her eyes twinkled in a way that spoke of a secret longing she must be carrying. Moonpaw hated to disappoint her.

"No, my brother. They're a really fluffy black cat with white streaks, and the most kitten blue eyes you could ever find in an eight moon old cat. Do you think you've seen him?"

Hearing this, Misty deflated. "Oh. No, I'm afraid not..."

Moonpaw purred a little and forced a smile, trying to cheer both herself and the kittypet up. "Well, thank you anyways, Misty," she mewed with a small head dip. "By the way, what's the name of the cat you think I remind you of? Maybe I can ask around and help you find them."

"No no, it's alright. You just remind me of a cat I love... But she's moved on to live a grander life than I can give her here. I'm not trying to find her. I'd just hoped to find out if she's finally happy."

"Well, I'm sure she must be. But I'm also willing to bet that wherever your love is now, she's missing you too."

"That's a kind thought." Misty sighed. "I'm sorry that I couldn't be more helpful to you, Moonpaw. But I wish you luck with finding your brother. If I see any cat that looks like your description though, I'll tell them you were here."

"Thank you again, Misty. Goodbye," Moonpaw meowed, continuing to walk the dusty path ahead.

"Goodbye, little snowflake. Take care!" Misty called after her, her voice fading the farther Moonpaw traveled from her garden.

Moonpaw went back to her search, sniffing around for signs of Skunkpaw. Then she turned a corner three bear-lengths ahead and Smokepaw's scent made it to her nostrils. His voice quickly followed it.

"Moon, come here! I think I've got a lead!"

Bristling, Moonpaw raced to where her littermate waited. Then she skidded to a stop in front of another white fenced den. Here, Smokepaw stood atop the posts, a tom with a brilliantly ginger pelt beside him. The kittypet was chubby, with a long perfectly groomed coat and an odd trianglar head. Smokepaw seemed to be intrigued by the other cat, eyes gleaming as he looked at the pampered tom. Or maybe Smokepaw was just that excited about the information the kittypet had to share.

"Moonpaw, this is Oliver. He said he might have seen Skunkpaw pass by here!" Smokepaw mewed with excitement.

Moonpaw looked up at Oliver, squinting her eyes as his bright pelt glittered in artificial light. "Is it true? Do you know where our littermate is?"

Oliver gave a nonchalant shrug. "I might. I saw a cat matching the description Smokepaw gave earlier today. He was laying in the back window of a car as it drove past."

"A...car?" Moonpaw echoed, confused.

"A, uh," Oliver glanced at Smokepaw, "a 'monster', I think is what you wild cats call them." Smokepaw nodded in recognition, Moonpaw humming curiously. "Anyways, I recognized that monster. It belongs to some neighborhood housefolk. They don't live far from here. I could take you to their den, if you'd like."

Moonpaw perked up at the offer, nodding her head enthusiastically. "Please," she responded, almost sounding desperate. Oliver chuckled at her reaction. Then he gave his body a stretch, leaping down from his fence onto the dirt path. Smokepaw followed right behind, standing close to the other tom as the three cats began their walk to the mentioned Twoleg den. They padded around a corner or two, Oliver and Smokepaw chatting quietly as they went. Moonpaw hung back a little, keeping alert for possible danger. Eventually, Moonpaw started scenting Silverhawk nearby. She trilled out, trying to catch the Den Mother's attention. At her call, the silver and black tabby came trotting from up ahead, looking to the apprentice as she approached. She looked expectant, hopeful even.

"We've got a lead," Moonpaw told her. Silverhawk's eyes lit up. Then she turned back in the direction she came from.

"Wait here," she told the three younger cats. "Your mother's close by. She'll want to follow you." Then, the queen disappeared from sight again. After a few moments, Brightsky came running over, Blazestar and Silverhawk not far behind. She rubbed her flank against Moonpaw's as she joined her daughter alongside the two younger toms. Blazestar eyed Oliver suspiciously as he approached, while Silverhawk nudged Treeclan's leader to keep him from becoming hostile. Oliver tipped his head in greetings to the warriors, glancing between each of them.

"There's more cats looking for your brother?" Oliver asked Smokepaw, who nodded in response. "Wow. Who knew one kitten would be so popular." The kittypet's comment sounded playful. It was clear he wasn't taking the situation seriously at all. Moonpaw felt her belly twist as she realized that fact. Had Smokepaw not told Oliver about what happened to Skunkpaw?

"Popularity has nothing to do with it," Silverhawk replied, pulling Moonpaw from her thoughts. "Skunkpaw was taken from us. We want to find him because we care about him."

Oliver's eyes grew a little wider. His expression confirmed Moonpaw's suspicion. "Of course," he breathed, voice sounding softer, more serious now. "But I'm sure he's alright. No housefolk would ever harm their pet."

Although the kittypet's words were meant to be reassuring, it set off something in Blazestar. "Skunkpaw isn't a pet. He's a Treeclan cat!" He growled. But Oliver was left unphased.

"It's probably hard for a kittypet to understand," Moonpaw figured, glancing at her leader.

"Not true," Oliver countered, pointing his muzzle to promt the search party onward. "I have a friend who ran away to be a warrior. I understand the call to be wild...kind of. But maybe clan cats can experience a call to peace. There's nothing wrong with being a house cat."

Blazestar growled some more. But Silverhawk ran her tail along his spine, calming Treeclan's leader.

"But Skunkpaw was stolen away," Brightsky reiterated. "It's not like he came to Twolegplace willing."

Oliver hummed. "I guess in that case, it makes sense to worry. But Skunkpaw didn't seem too distressed when I saw him earlier. So he's probably fine."

"I hope you're right," Smokepaw murmured, moving closer to the bright orange kittypet.

A silence fell over the patrol as they snuck along. They hid a few times in the nearby shrubs when a stray Twoleg or two walked past. One had a small dog with it, who stopped to yap at the clan cats' hiding place. Moonpaw unsheathed her claws, ready to strike the mongrel should it stick its muzzle where it didn't belong. Instead, the Twoleg gave a harsh tug to its lead, pulling the creature back onto the desired path. When they'd left, the search party continued on again. Eventually a small den came into the view, near the end of the dirt path. A short brick wall surrounded it on all side. But the entrance was left ajar, just wide enough for cats to slip through.

"Are you sure this is the right place?" Silverhawk questioned quietly as the search party paused at the territory's threshold.

"This is where I've seen the monster rest," Oliver confirmed. Moonpaw peered past where the party stood, sweeping the territory for signs of the mentioned monster. But it was nowhere in sight. And the scent of it barely lingered in the air. But another scent did. Brightsky noticed it, too, Moonpaw realized. Her mother's nose twitched, mouth opening to draw the smell over her scent glands. After a heartbeat, her eyes lit up.

"I smell him...my kit!" Brightsky breathed, rushing ahead. Blazestar meowed for her to wait, but it was too late. Moonpaw moved to follow her mother as Brightsky stalked skillfully along the grass. She was approaching the Twoleg den as if she were hunting a prized squirrel. Moonpaw kept a few paces behind, glancing to see Blazestar and the others trying to catch up. Blazestar managed to pull ahead, running at full speed to round Brightsky and stand in her path. His posture was imposing, expression stern.

"What do you think you are doing? Don't just rush in without thought!" The leader hissed.

"I smell Skunkpaw," Brightsky repeated. She looked like she was trying not to cry. Her voice sounded so hopeful, nearly relieved. Blazestar was the opposite.

"I'm going to scout ahead," he meowed to everyone. "Wait here for my call." Then he turned, walking to the other side of the den. The rest of the search party gathered together, listening intently, in case of danger and news. Not long after, Blazestar caterwauled. Moonpaw was the first to find him. Blazestar had managed to find a way into the Twoleg den, a dark expression on his face. Moonpaw's heart dropped.

"Come see," he motioned for his cats to come through a window with him.

The inside of the den was dark, and cold. Walls expanded around them, as tall as trees. The place reeked of Twoleg. But the inside of the den was devoid of anything. No bedding, no strange objects. Just walls, a floor, and a few scraps of trash. The place looked abandoned. But Moonpaw could smell Skunkpaw in here, strongly. Even if the scent was growing stale. Brightsky caught it, too. She sniffed at the corner of a nearby wall, rubbing her cheek on it.

"Skunkpaw marked here. I can smell his fur," she mewed quietly. "He was here.... he left us signs that he was here...."

"But now..?" Silverhawk asked, glancing from Brightsky to Oliver.

"They must have moved away," the kittypet mewed in realization. "That has to be why Skunkpaw was in the car--uh, monster. House cats rarely get put inside of them. Unless we're going to the vet, or being moved someplace. And that would explain why the house is empty, too."

"So where did they go?" Moonpaw wondered. "Where did they take Skunkpaw?"

Oliver shook his head sadly. "I can't say... They could be anywhere. I'm...I'm really sorry."

Hearing his words, Brightsky sunk to the fuzzy floor. She let out a quiet sob, covering her muzzle with her paws. The rest of the Treeclan search party exchanged glances.

"...We can't give up yet," Smokepaw piped suddenly. He stood up taller, puffing up his chest. "Dad and Flamepaw are still out there searching. We should be, too. Just because the Twolegs moved camp doesn't mean they aren't still in the area. Let's keep looking!"

Smokepaw's speech seemed to give everyone the encouragement they needed to keep going.

With little hesitance the party slipped back out of the Twoleg den. Oliver helped Moonpaw and Smokepaw talk with other kittypets in the area, while Brightsky, Blazestar, and Silverhawk went off on their own again. They searched the Twolegplace for the rest of the night, sniffing around and yowling Skunkpaw's name until the sun began to rise.

At dawn's first light, Treeclan's search party gathered by the border, thanking and leaving Oliver behind. They each spoke of their findings; of discussions made and smells caught. But not anything important to share. It was as if Skunkpaw had disappeared from the earth. Depressed, the patrol made its way back into the woods, finally ready to mourn the lost apprentice with the rest of the clan.

[mousfri]

well apart from the autism and associated comorbidities, there's the generational fear of dark enclosed places, even ones we're familiar with (less curse, more ominous warning, methinks)

oh that and the curse of Houses with God Awful Vibes thing. i've lived in almost as many houses as years i've been alive, once in a repurposed asylum where i was sick the entire time i lived there, routinely found unexplained dead animals and weird smells, and the automatic lights would turn on IN AN ALARMED BUILDING while we were all away. the place was massive, and we lived in four rooms on the bottom floor, so we'd do sweeps with the Corpse Shovel and never found anyone.

the house i lived in two houses ago was genuinely the worst place i've ever lived. i'd get freaked out standing in the back garden in the sun. i'm moved out now, but my mum moved next door to that house, and i don't get any of the sudden bursts of paranoia that i used to get on the other side of the fence the houses share. i was convinced i was mad until my aunt came to visit and had the exact same reaction as i always did.

other examples: my nan is convinced my first home was haunted, my aunt outright refused to enter that ex-asylum, my uncle didn't buy his dream house because it felt off, my grandparents attempted to downsize and had the same issue.

this is less of a curse and more of a strange medical thing, but a bunch of us have got really minor birth defects. my mum's middle finger knuckles are about an inch further back than they should be so her middle fingers are her shortest. i've got one detached ear lobe and one attached earlobe. one of my,,, cousins once removed??? (matthew who Gives The Best Hugs) has the same deal as my mum but his toes.

[multistanisms]

Just an update, my dearies.

*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ *:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ *:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ *:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ *:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ *:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ *:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ *:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ

Now that the situation is less jarring and frantic and I can somewhat breathe easier, I'm more comfortable filling you guys in on some of what's been going on. Due to some ongoing issues with my apartment complex, I'm moving out well before my lease is up in July. I'm going to be downsizing to a camper on my parents' land for a while. We're working on getting everything fixed up so I can get out there no later than mid-March, but I should be able to start taking things out there in the next week or so. Things are progressing slowly, but there is progress to be had, so I'll take it.

Packing things has been quite the adventure thus far - since the camper is significantly smaller than my two bedroom apartment where I've been for four years...and I have definitely collected more things in that duration of time (but I have also gotten rid of things as well, thank goodness). For the camper specifically, one of my main priorities was my kpop collection (albums, light sticks and various freebies/concert stuff), because I do not trust a storage unit for those AT ALL. I also plan on taking my mangas and my TBR books with me. Obviously my clothes and blankets will come with me, as will one of the TVs I have, my laptop, my switch, etc (all of which won't take long to pack up, so it's near the bottom of my list).

The more difficult part at this moment is getting the money for a storage unit to house the vast majority of my belongings. This is mostly furniture; a sofa and loveseat, some shelves (there's twelve, but my parents are gonna take a few for my mom to use for her business supplies), a set of coffee and end tables, a dining room table and chairs, plus the two beds (a full size and a twin size) because the camper has a bed already. Alongside all of that will be my plushie/stuff animal collection, the remainder of my book collection (which is right at or over 200, I think? Maybe I'll count them once I can unpack them later on), and one of my tvs. I'm hoping when I get paid on today to get a storage unit and be able to start moving things to it in a week or so, depending on how often my dad can help since my car is not big enough for a good chunk of my furniture.

On top of the moving situation, I have freebies I'm making for the Taemin concert on the 18th, my own writing/typing up rough drafts to send to the betas, keeping things organized while I pack, plus bills and my job. It's been a lot and honestly, I'm surprised I've pulled through this so far, because honestly I am a mess. But we're getting things done, and that's the important part. I am waiting on betas to get back to me on things so I can schedule more updates, but once I have that, I will be able to update everyone.