#it is also. however. now past midnight in my timezone

[a-cat-in-toffee]

i might not even change her hair im just trying to figure out what i like tbh

[s4ijoh]

meet me halfway (across the globe). suna rintarou

SUNA RINTAROU X GN! READER

GENRE: slice of life; facetime call; fluff

WORD COUNT: 1.4k+

WARNINGS: established relationship; mentions of stress

in which suna is somewhere far away…

[10:22] rin: “you up?”

[10:23] rin: “big game tomorrow morning.”

[10:23] rin: “cant’ sleep. need to see u.”

the phone buzzing on the bedside table startles you out of your morning somnolence. the empty spot in bed next to you feels a weird type of unfamiliar. you drowsily stretch your arms out, reaching for the ringing device while dragging out a loud yawn.

you are taken aback by surprise once you take a look at the numbers displayed on your phones lock screen: 10:25am. its already past midnight in his timezone. he shouldn’t be up this late.

swiping through your phone's screen, you waste no time in dialling his number once you come across the green facetime icon and luckily, it is only a brief moment until he is picking up and oh boy are you met with a sight to behold. if it werent for your concern, you could’ve just stayed there, marvelling in awe at your boyfriend, sitting shirtless against the headboard in all his glory. his pale skin is gleaming a beautiful shade of orange under the dim light of the table lamp thus reminiscing a statue made of gold; his tousled, black feathery hair sticking in all different directions yet with just a few loose strands cascading down the sides of his temple and framing his face in such way that made him look effortlessly handsome.

he looked as beautiful as ever. however, despite the apparent picture perfect scenario, you would be a fool not to notice the clear signs of restlessness showcased on his features nonetheless.

“sorry, did i wake you?” suna apologizes tenderly with a doting frown on his face once he notices your lids still heavy with vestiges of somnolence just barely peeking from the bottom of the screen. your phone is propped up on your chest, the lower half of your face hidden away from him as you refuse to get up from your comfortable position laying under the warm blankets.

“dont worry about it, baby.” you hurriedly push his apologies aside whilst rubbing the sleep off your eyes to try and not make him feel too bad about it “you know you can call me anytime. im always waiting for you on the other end whenever you need me”

he offers you a subtle smile, although its odd — its weak, not sincere. it is not the usual signature smirk with a teasing remark on the side you earn whenever you say something cheesy. it is also hard to miss the darkening spots growing under his tired eyes, his usual sparkly green orbs now nearing dull, heavy with underlying frustration. it made it all crystal clear.

rintarou is not an outwardly emotional person and definitely not one to voice his concerns. his pleas for help were often left unspoken and it takes a sharp eye to see through his unwavering surface. for the most part, the blank expression he's seen wearing most of the time did a pretty good job at shielding his feelings yet his eyes often betrayed him.

he had taken off a couple days ago to somewhere foreign for an important match. you know how sometimes, before a decisive match takes place, he lets pressure get to that pretty head of his and relies on you to keep him grounded and soothe his racing mind. for the longest time, he had been capable of keeping his emotions at bay and deal with his troubles on his own but ever since you came around, rintarou found himself growing selfish and craving your comfort, finding solace in your reassuring words and warm embrace.

you miss the old days when your lover was just at an arm's length and all it took was for him to say the word for you to drop everything and come running to his house, to hold him in your arms and make it all feel better. you remember people in highschool claiming suna was bound to fade into the background given his lazy tendencies and lack of enthusiasm. (what a waste of potential, they would say) suna would shrug. he never payed any mind to it — you praised him on his unshakable nature. it should be a major ego boost for rintarou to know that, not that many years later and against the spiteful tongues of some of your classmates, he made a name for himself as a first division professional volleyball player, thus proving them wrong.

however, he still has quite a few demons to tame inside his head. one of which was self-doubt.

you let your eyes roam his tired features for a moment. “you need to get out of your head, rin”

suna knew you could read him like an open book. you made him feel vulnerable under your scrutinizing gaze. he felt exposed. to have you stare directly into his naked soul was intimidating, more so than to have you stare at his nude body, like you have done dozens of times before. but just like you did with his body, you had taken your time to get to know every corner of his soul. you knew him like the palm of your hand — both mind and body.

“i know.” he tears his gaze away from yours, looking down while running a hand through his disheveled hair and down to scratch his neck in frustration. “tell me how have your days been?”

the silence of his hotel room was eating him whole and he needed you to distract him. most of the time, suna was fond of the silence. after a rough day he found comfort in laying down in his bed and basking in the quiet. he found peace in it. sometimes it was in the quietness of his own little world that he found the solution to his problems. but upon your arrival to that mysterious world of his, your voice soon became his favorite sound. he craved you to fill in the silence that he once treasured.

and so he listens. suna listens as you talk throughout the night (who would’ve guessed you had just woken up), rambling on about your days as other trivial things — namely how you could never get used to starting the day without his morning cuddles. he found it endearing how you seemed to speak enough for the two of you. he was a man of few words so he was lucky to have found someone to fill in the silence for him. and so he listens until his eyes start progressively feeling heavy, your voice lulling him to sleep.

“hey, baby” he calls in a barely audible raspy voice. suna lays down on his side under the cold unwelcoming bed sheets, holding his phone next to his face on the pillow “put your pretty face on the phone”

a soft smile crawls its way up to your flushed face at his sugar coated words, his voice although drowsy sounding sweeter than saccharin. you were so lost in the lovely image of him that you failed to notice that your face was barely on the frame, just your eyes peeking shyly from the bottom of the screen.

you shuffle in bed, turning on your side to mirror his position. its almost as if you’re not a hundred miles apart and he's lying right next to you, if you squint hard enough.

“there you are” he mumbles weakly under his breath, a loving smile on his pillowy rosy lips that you miss dearly.

his eyes appear weary through the screen yet he never fails to look at you with the utmost love. dumbfounded, you wordlessly stare at each other as you fall into a comfortable silence that is however, filled with a hundred unspoken words.

his love is quiet, hesitant at times but never shallow. he felt deeply and feared he wasn't the best to put it into words so sometimes, his love, it hides beyond lingering stares and shy touches. it remained unuttered most of the time but words are futile when he has shown his devotion to you countless times before.

“hey rin. you think you can go to sleep, now?” you notice him fighting the urge to let his eyes close shut, battling to stay awake for a little longer to try and memorize your face for later so he can dream of you tonight.

he simply nods with his eyes shut, too sleepy to pronounce a single word.

“call me tomorrow after the game, alright?” he nods yet again, noticeably starting to drift away at last but not before muttering a quiet i love you before the last hint of consciousness leaves his body, eliciting a tender smile from you.

“i love you, rin. ill meet you in your dreams tonight.”

[a/n]: so! writing this fic made me realize that im undeniably in love with suna and he now owns a 51% share of my heart. (oikawa. ill never forget you. its not you its me (suna) maybe its time i move on. 🤒 jk jk ill have both pls and ty 🥰)

anyways ye i guess im back from my mini hiatus (as a full suna whore) :))

this is honestly a word dump, initially this was supposed to be like... what.. 500 words long? i just thought of the prompt “put your pretty face on the phone” and the rest is just me pouring my love for him into words ah-ha. (you probably noticed how it is unnecessarily cheesy 🙄)

just for the record!! i havent finished season 4 just yet 🐸 lmao. i took inspiration off of nooras (@/inarzki) characterization of suna because she was the one who made me fall in love with him in the first place.

[e-milieeee]

haunted

Summary: When Gabriel goes a step too far, Plagg has decided he’s had enough. 

Meanwhile, Gabriel Agreste has discovered that his house may or may not be haunted, because a vengeful spirit certainly seems to be after him. 

Notes: basically plagg being a little gremlin and trolling gabriel like he deserves. ft. gabe’s 3 remaining braincells. based on this post by @hamsternamedmarinette and @snail-noir im sorry its so crappy lol 

haunted

“Well,” Adrien is saying as he trudges inside the room and kicks the door shut. “There’s that, then.”

Plagg flits out from his shirt. His face is set in an angry mask, tail sticking straight up. “That’s that?” he echoes. “No, that’s absurd! Your father’s absurd! He should come back here and I’ll give him a piece of my mind and—”

Adrien squeezes his eyes shut. “Plagg, it’s fine. Forget it.”

Plagg makes an angry noise in the back of his throat. “So you’re just gonna take that? For weeks? He has no right.”

In his hand is the piece of paper—now crumpled—that his father had shoved into his fingers before he stormed off: the schedule for the fashion show. It runs for a week, but there’s also a terrifying amount of preparations to be done two weeks prior—all of which his father had decided he needed to be present for.

“I can’t risk making father angry,” Adrien settles with.

Plagg folds his arms. “Fine,” his kwami says curtly, in a manner of speaking that Adrien always finds hard to argue with. “Hypothetically speaking, then, if your father found out his plans had been cata—destroyed, would you be allowed to go out?”

“Plagg, I’m not going to break into my father’s study as Chat Noir to cataclysm his work just so I can go out with friends.”

Plagg smiles at him. It’s the smile Adrien had often gotten before he’d discovered the toilet paper in his washroom all scratched up and littering the floor. “Don’t worry,” comes the reply. “You won’t have to.”

***

Gabriel Agreste’s study is locked, but that doesn’t prove a problem for the small black shape that slips through the doors like they’re made of nothing more than mist. It’s dark, but cats have always seen better at night anyway.

There, on the top of his desk, lies the designs for the first set of clothes that are to be showcased. Meticulous notes. Fabric samples. Timing and schedules. Signatures and contracts.

The small, black cat picks the folder up with two paws. Then it crumbles into dust.

***

“Nathalie, did you touch the folder on my desk?”

It’s been a long morning—Gabriel had been up at 4 AM in an attempt to see if he could get an edge on Ladybug and Chat Noir. It had been horrendous to find someone to akumatize so early, and by the time he’d pinpointed his victim—forty five minutes later—he had nearly fallen asleep. He’d been pummelled by Ladybug and Chat Noir. Absolutely pummelled. And then, as if the situation couldn't help but get worse, Audrey Bourgeois had called him at six (just when he was about to go back to bed) and told him she couldn’t make it to the fashion show.

That woman had no regard for timezones. And no regard for him, either, because part of the marketing for the fashion week was Audrey’s attendance.

Gabriel was considering akumatizing himself when he realized the manila folder on his desk—that had been there when he left the night prior—was nowhere to be seen.

He searches through all his files. Crawls under his desk. Checks his lair. It's gone.

“Nathalie!” he bellows again, and she comes barrelling through the door to his office.

“What is it, sir?”

Gabriel takes a deep breath. “Have you seen the files for the fashion show? It was in the folder on my desk when I left.”

“Sir, I haven’t been in your office since last night, and I’m certain I saw your files there. Are you sure you haven’t misplaced it?”

Misplaced it, yeah. That’s what it was. Probably.

Now, what he needed was a nap.

***

The files do not turn up. Gabriel sends Nathalie to print them out again. The most important stuff is stored on his computer, but there are signatures he’d spent weeks getting.

He locks the files in his drawer the next time he gets it.

***

Tuesday morning finds Gabriel Agreste feeling much more refreshed. He even joins Adrien for three minutes during breakfast.

He walks into his office to find his favourite coffee mug in smithereens on the ground.

The files are still stored safely in his drawer. But there is a big, ugly tear across the dress he’d been working on for the past three months.

Gabriel screams.

***

Gabriel Agreste isn’t a fan of security cameras in his office. Especially because anyone with some hacking ability could possibly get their hands on the tape, and the last thing he needs is someone seeing him descending into his lair, or opening the safe behind his painting. Really—there’s simply too many sketchy things he’s done in the office for him to trust putting a camera there.

But he installs two of them nonetheless. His coffee mug could be an accident. But that rip on the dress? No, the only explanation is that it was intentional. But how?

Gabriel thinks of possibilities until he gives himself a headache.

***

“Father seems stressed lately,” Adrien notes to Plagg. There’s not much time for himself between busy schedules, but the moments in between he catches to talk to his kwami. The past week, stuck alone in his room with barely any interaction with his friends, has been draining. He cherishes the precious minutes he gets to spend with Plagg.

“Does he?” Plagg asks in a tone of practiced disinterest. “Well, he does have that really important fashion week thing coming up.”

“He asked me if I’d broken into his study a day ago, but he always locks his study. I think some of his files were missing.”

“Oh?” Plagg replies. “That’s terrible misfortune.”

“Father says he thinks a thief snuck in in the middle of the night and stole them, but we have security cameras all around the house and nothing happened.”

“Spooky.”

“Plagg…”

Plagg only shrugs. “Perhaps your house is haunted,” he replies disinterestedly. “Good thing you’re not scared of ghosts, Adrien.”

***

The house is haunted, and Gabriel cannot sleep.

The most terrifying part of watching the footage is that he sees nothing. There is no movement. No nothing. But then, the next morning, his files inside the locked drawer have disappeared.

Nathalie asks him about the dark rings around his eyes. He drinks two more cups of coffees in response.

***

Gabriel’s eyes are burning, but he’s determined to stay awake.

He likes to think himself neat and meticulous, but even he has his breaking point—his desk is littered with coffee cups, and he’s resorted to drinking energy drinks to keep himself awake. There’s less than ten days until the fashion show starts. It’s been so heavy on his schedule that he’s barely found time to akumatize three three people the past week.

Ladybug and Chat Noir must be having a field day while he’s sitting miserably in his office, waiting to catch the thief, too exhausted to summon up more akumas.

The clock ticks past midnight. Gabriel nearly faceplants into a coffee mug.

Another cup of redbull.

By the time it’s two in the morning, nothing shocking in particular has happened. Every time the flashing light of a car drives past the front of the house he starts, sits back down, and struggles to keep his eyes open.

It’s 2:04 when a crash sounds outside of his office.

Like a madman, Gabriel scrambles up from his seat. He knocks over a half-finished mug of coffee in the process, but that doesn’t matter. The door of his office slams open. He trips on a rug. But he gets up and runs like he’s never run before.

With all the force he can muster, he slams his palm down on the light, and the once-dark staircase and hall become bathed in golden light. The chandelier flickers twice and he stares down at the hall with half the mind to wonder if he’s going to finally see the ghost.

Gabriel is the only one in the hall.

He checks once more. Then again. Then again. But there is no one there, no source of the crash—

Oh, no.

The painting he’d bid at an auction twelve years ago—one that had cost a fortune—has fallen off the wall and face planted into the floor. The sight of it physically hurts Gabriel, and he’s scrambling towards it in a mixture of fear and anger when another noise sounds in his office.

In the months of being Hawkmoth, Gabriel Agreste has felt a generous range of emotions. But never has he felt such bone-chilling fear.

He heads back up the steps with robotic movements numbly. Down the corridor. Into his office.

There is no one there, and the mess that has been made is moreso his fault than of the invisible thief—or ghost—but then Gabriel sees one of his locked drawers open and the contents inside dumped unceremoniously on the ground.

The next day, when Nathalie finds him out cold on the ground, he attributes it to the exhaustion and the amount of coffee and energy drinks he’d consumed. But deep down, Gabriel knows that it’s the terror that’s finally caught up.

Either way, he faints.

***

Gabriel is confined to bed by a very concerned Nathalie. She usually heeds to his instructions, but the rare insistence from her and his own fatigue lands him out of commission for the day. It doesn’t stop him, however, from giving her a set of instructions.

“First, my office,” Gabriel croaks. His throat hurts—he must’ve caught a cold as well. “Please clean everything up and reinstall the locks. And then… and then…”

He thinks of the missing files—three times—and grits his teeth. “Cancel the fashion week.”

Nathalie’s jaw drops open. “Sir—”

“I know,” Gabriel mutters. “I just… I’m left with no choice. I’ll reschedule. Make up some excuse.”

She dips her head. “Noted, sir. Is that all?”

Gabriel gives her a miserable nod. She’s halfway out the door when he remembers.

“Nathalie!” he yells. “Get me a shaman, too.”

***

“The fashion week is cancelled.” Adrien looks up from practicing piano. “Father is sick, I think, which might be why. Nathalie looked super stressed when I saw her before my lessons.”

“Cancelled?” Plagg echoes dispassionately. “Huh. That’s too bad, I guess.”

“No, that’s good! I mean, it’s not good that my father is sick and Nathalie is stressed, but… at least I won’t be hounded about preparations. I even got permission to go out today.”

“Huh,” Plagg replies. He settles himself into his wheel of cheese. “I guess you’re lucky after all, then.”

Notes: yeah idk what i wrote but master fu is the shaman they hire and he finds out gabriel is hawkmoth and arrests him and the end if u wanna know what happens next 

Here’s my fics masterlist! 

[justtrying-studyblog]

Headaches and Possible Heartbreaks

So it's been a bit, hasn't it? I'm afraid that there is not much to update you guys on, and at the same time, there's so much to say. I have plans for a longer post explaining where I've been and reflecting on the milestones I've passed in these past few months. For now, I will settle for a little life update.

So remember back in my good ol' biology IA post, I was saying that I decided not to go to my dream university cause it was causing too much anxiety???

Well...

I'm going there now! At least, I'm trying to go there. It feels really late to be saying this as it is already August and the semester starts in September, but I have known since April (I just can't remember if I updated you guys).

The thing is, remember how there was all that anxiety about me not getting the right bio score because it was all dependent on my IA.

Well...

I didn't. I passed the class with a four but I needed a six. It's heartbreaking to see how much work I put into that class and paper not pay off.

But Sara, you say. Didn't you write that paper in three days? What do you expect?

Well, judgy reader, I'm asking myself the same thing. The foundation of my work was three days of constant exhaustion due to just working and reading and rereading. But it was still only three days. However, after I got notes back on it, I almost completely changed the paper and I was feeling very confident about it, but I guess confidence doesn't always pay off.

Or maybe sometimes it does? My teacher told me she graded me at a 6, which would've been spectacular and I would've been over the moon to actually receive that grade (frankly I would've also settled for a five). But seeing that four burn onto my screen the day my results came out was as if it were burning through my heart and mocking me. I was heartbroken to hear that I only got a 4.

Of course, I immediately reached out to my DP advisor to see if I could appeal my score and I also reached out to the university to explain my situation and my scores. 34 days later, I am still nowhere and don't even know if I'll be attending this university in a month.

To say I'm stressed is an understatement. I've been ping-ponging between the school and my DP coordinator and I feel as though I still have no answers. This school truly is the one of my dreams, but maybe dreams are only for the sleeping.

Right now, I'm trying to stay up till 2 am to actually be able to call the school since they're seven hours ahead. It's hard staying up for some reason, which is ridiculous cause I can accidentally stay up way past midnight on any given day just reading, but for some reason, since this time it's actually imperative that I do, it's hard.

Time is moving at a snail pace as I try to find answers for how my life is going to pan out. Yes, I have a backup plan, but that doesn't mean I want to actually use it since it would mean me not starting school until the spring semester.

I just really need this to work out. I really need to go to this school. And I really need some sleep. Wish me luck, guys! As always, ✨Stay safe and pick a school in a manageable timezone ✨

[luciaas]

hi cuties !! i’m cami, a twenty year old gal in the gmt timezone from the land of leprechauns aka ireland. this is my lil ball of sunshine, lucia caverly. you can find out all about her below ! i’m so excited to get to know all of you and your lovely muses and if anyone wants to plot, feel free to hmu here or on disc <3

lucia marie caverly

age —  twenty-three

nickname —  luci

hometown — tribeca, new york

sexuality — bisexual

zodiac — scorpio

birthday —  october 27th

postive traits —  spontaneous and ambitious 

negative traits —  erratic and stubborn 

background:

childhood — lucia had a happy and comfortable childhood. she grew up in her family home in tribeca as an only child with both of her parents. her mother, catherine caverly, is a real estate agent while her father, laurence caverly, is a defense attorney. both of them came from money and influence so their lavish lifestyle wasn’t new to them. she was very sheltered as a child and was never exposed to anything besides what was in her lil perfect bubble.

teenage years — lucia had decided that she wanted to go to public high school, despite her parents wanting to send her to a private school. while it took her a while to convince them, eventually they agreed. she was a social butterfly throughout high school, she spoke to anyone and everyone. she was kind, friendly and approachable. within her first year, she had been exposed to things she could’ve never imagined for herself and even managed to get herself a boyfriend, daniel, who she was completely enamored by. they were together for their sophomore and freshman year and shared the same friends. in her junior year, she found out that daniel had not only cheated on her with her, then, best friend but he had also stolen multiple of her father’s expensive watches from their home. when she found out, she was completely heartbroken. she suddenly went from wholeheartedly trust most people, to trusting no one. she couldn’t tell if people genuinely wanted to be her friend, or if they just wanted to use her for her wealth and her influence. by her senior, she was a completely different person. she had dropped most of her friends and had become a notorious party girl, quickly started to fall into the ‘rich kid’ stereotype after befriending a new group of people from her social parents’ circle. the company she started to keep and the choices that she made caused many people to resent her, including her parents. when her parents tried to reign lucia back in, it only made her find different ways to live her fast paced lifestyle. 

moving to wickery falls —  after showing up at home completely wasted after a wild night out, lucia’s parents decided to enroll her into a private all-girls boarding school. she hated every minute of it and it was here that she realized the extremities of the ‘rich kid’ stereotype. her life was the complete opposite to what it was only a few months prior. there was no partying, no staying up past curfew and it was impossible to even try sneak out. she had tried. after enduring this for the rest of her senior year, she realized that she couldn’t stand the idea of acting like the stereotypical spoiled brat and hated that she had become so paranoid and guarded with everyone. she decided that new york wasn’t the place for her and she wanted a fresh start. her father agreed to let her leave new york as long as she attended law school. as lucia wasn’t passionate about much, she took the deal and quickly found herself living by herself in an apartment close enough to wickery falls university, where she now found herself enrolled as a law student.

life in wickery falls — lucia started fresh and felt herself becoming who she used to be. she found herself taking up a bartending job at the midnight pleasure. she adores her job and the dynamic she has in wickery. she also doesn’t hate law school. so that’s a plus. however, despite her fresh start, lucia has never lost her partying tendencies and she doesn’t think she ever will.

personality:

effervescent — lucia’s vivacious and enthusiastic spirit is captivating and is what generally attracts people to her. she is lively and lives for the thrill and this attitude is contagious to those close to her, which makes her fun and exciting to be around. confidence and a positive outlook is something she never seems to lack.

candid — lucia is nothing if not truthful and straightforward (except about her own situation lol). she says things how they are, but is considerate and careful as to how she words it. honesty is something she doesn’t struggle with. she is the type of person who you can trust to give you their utmost honest opinion but also the person to keep you in check, even if she can’t keep herself in check sometimes.

assertive — lucia’s confident and forceful personality can sometimes come off as intimidating but once you get close enough to actually speak to get and get a sense of what she’s like, intimidating is the last thing she is. she still struggles with lowering her guard.  

erratic — her unpredictable behaviour makes lucia either fun or dangerous to be around. she takes spontaneity to another level and more times than not, this ends up with her, and anyone involved, in trouble. sometimes, she needs someone to knock her down a peg and keep her in line but she is difficult to deal with at times due to her being.

stubborn — when lucia sets her mind on something, she does it. she is strong willed and stubborn, like her father. it’s hard to change her mind when it’s already been made up. her strong opinions and adamant nature can make her difficult to deal with, but everyone has their thing, right?

a lil more about lucia: 

she’s a complete adrenaline junkie and lives for the thrill

she’s very outgoing and spontaneous and open to almost anything

she’s truly a lil ball of sunshine once you get to know her

she’s very strong-minded, independent and charming

she’s also very caring and has a big heart for those close to her

she’s more of a love ya and leave ya kinda girl since daniel broke her heart <3

she’s the biggest flirt you’ll ever meet and is very open about her sexual nature

*promicuous girl plays here*

she can lowkey be a bad influence to those who aren’t used to her lifestyle

she loves anything coconut scentered

her red lipstick is her staple, it is also her favourite colour

she knows the words to every ABBA song

wanted connections

best friend / ride or die: lucia’s rock, someone who keeps her in check and supports her despite all her faults.

party buddy: someone who lucia can always rely on for a good time. they can keep up with her and her antics and never back down from a bomb party.

friends with benefits: self-explanatory!!

enemies with benefits (maybe turns into something more??) : give me all the angst

literally anything... i’m down for all the plots

[lu-undy]

Chapter 7 - SBT

Here is Chapter 7!

Lucien pushed the door and entered. It was now past midnight. He neatly removed his shoes and went straight to his bedroom. The Frenchman changed for his pyjamas, throwing the map that he had bought off Joe on the bed and slid between the cool satin sheets. He adjusted his pillow against the bed head and sat against it. He wasn’t tired, neither was he sleepy, but given the local time, a bit of rest would help his body melt into the new timezone. 

He slid a hand under his bed and retrieved his briefcase. After switching the night lamp on, he read through it again, his eyes lazily following the letters but not really getting the meaning from the words. Lucien raised his nose off the file and looked around him.

“Oh…?”

He hadn’t seen that piece of paper on the night table, next to the telephone. He took it between his long and slim fingers and read through it. It was a list of phone numbers for various services offered both by the hotel themselves but also by some shops around it. Lucien’s eyes scanned through it quickly until his eyes stopped at the last line.

Extra pillow - 99

He smiled. An extra pillow in the context of a hotel was not an extra pillow. Although it does get one to a more comfortable state to sleep, some would argue, and it most definitely warmed up one’s night…! 

Non, number 99 called for some company to distract one of his daytime troubles and ease him into Morpheus’ arms after a bit of, well, physical satisfaction. 

“Pfff…”

Lucien tossed the paper away. He didn’t need that. Non actually, it wasn’t that he didn’t need it, but rather that he couldn’t remember the last time he had needed it. After that woman disappeared off his days, he had lost any shred of life in his body and his mind and accepted his new companion. Her name in French was: 

La Solitude.

Like with anyone else, he usually didn’t need much for her to fall for him. However, the other way around couldn’t be further from the truth. The Frenchman had grown a heart of stone over the years and was now desensitised to softness, in any form that it came. But that’s exactly what made him fall. She was the only one slim enough to slip into his heart and finish to seal it completely. Any hope, any ray of light, any candle that shyly shone, she blew away and extinguished.

Lucien had lived a long enough life. He had suffered enough and had seen it all. Yes, yes, it was all so good to love, feel the flutters of the heart and whatnot but, it all came at the dearest price. So he had taken the reasonable, some would argue inhuman, way out. 

He remembered that day. Lucien had put anything he owned with as much as a shred of sentimentality in it and put it in a cardboard box. He put the cardboard box in a tin one. He didn’t have much so the box wasn’t much bigger than a dictionary. He didn’t take a coat and stepped out of his parisian flat. The Frenchman had walked in the streets, under the rain, the lamp posts showering him with their lights irregularly. He had walked and walked until he had found himself in front of a gate. He pulled it but it didn’t move a jot.

Merde…

Lucien put the tin box down at his feet and noticed the chain and padlock on the gate. He shook his head. His hair was stuck to his forehead as he was entirely soaked and the rain trickled down his face. He didn’t want to do it. He had sworn to himself he wouldn’t anymore.  

Pfff…

He sighed and the metallic sound of the drumming of the raindrops on the tin box pushed him to make up his mind. He put a hand in his pocket and retrieved a couple of pins. In a few seconds, the padlock fell to the ground and the chain slid lazily to the floor. 

Lucien entered the park. It was the middle of the night. He walked until he didn’t know where he was anymore. Everything was dark and he could only see the tall and menacing silhouettes of the trees surrounding him. 

Bien…

He dropped to his knees and dug a hole with his knife. For every stab he gave to the ground, he could feel his heart rip further apart. When the hole was big enough, he lowered the box to the ground and covered it back with the dirt he had carved away with his blade and his naked fingers. 

Voilà.

Lucien had now buried his memories, pictures of happier times, objects that rhymed with affection, passion and love. They were now under the ground, as was his heart.

When he got back home that night and switched on the lights in his lonely flat, she was waiting for him. La Solitude. She congratulated him, she was proud and applauded him into his new life. That night was the first that he shared with her, and she never left him since.

La Solitude.

That was his extra pillow and had been so for decades. 

Lucien shook his head. Why did he have to think about it again? He had made up his mind. He had left her at the airport in Paris. Or did she follow him there? He turned his head to look and sighed. 

“Fallait-il vraiment que tu me suives?”

[Did you really have to follow me?]

There she was, lying on the bed, as naked and raw as she could get. She gave him the impression that his bed was an ocean and him, stranded on a narrow plank, the result of the shipwreck of his life.

He lit a cigarette and smiled, as if he was mocking his own poor old self before opening the map on his lap and holding the list of his contacts in his hand. He spread the map completely and methodically went through the names on his list, trying to locate the addresses precisely. 

“Ah, j’ai besoin d’un stylo…”

[Ah, I need a pen...]

He got off his bed and soon came back with a pen and an ashtray. He resumed his position on the bed and after an hour or so, he had circled the positions of all his contacts. 

“Très bien.”

[Very well.]

Lucien read the file and tried to remember who did what. This one was an undercover agent, this one a beggar, this one had a convenience store, this one was a tailor… He leaned back a bit and realised that the circles were reasonably well scattered across the city. He nodded to himself and exhaled the smoke of his expensive menthol cigarette.

As soon as the day came, he would start and meet them. But for now, a nap would do, even if it was short. Lucien crushed his cigarette end in the ashtray, folded the map back and put his file neatly away in his briefcase before sliding it all under his bed. He then pulled his pillow down and laid on his back. He looked to his left, she was staring at him, with her big dark eyes. Lucien switched off his night lamp and closed his eyes.

The next day, the Frenchman went to Victoria’s restaurant.

“L!” She came to his table.

“Good morning, V.”

“What can I get you?”

“A black coffee, please and what pastry would you recommend to me?”

“I’d go for a bit of lemon tart, you seem like the lemon tart type.”

He smiled and nodded. 

“Your instinct is right, I like lemon a lot, Victoria.”

Her eyebrows jumped.

“You know my name? What are you, a spy or something?”

“Maybe.” He smiled. “Actually, what would you like to have with me?” He asked. 

“Oh, uh, not sure I can.” She looked around her and indeed there were no other clients. “Alright, get me some hot chocolate, maybe!”

“Fine, add it to my order.”

“Thanks, L! I’ll be a minute!”

And in a minute she came back with the man in a suit’s order.

“Pray take a seat.”

She did as she was told and they shared their breakfast.

“So…” She said between two sips. “You know my name but I don’t know yours.”

“And it is better this way, so I shall remain L.”

“Fair enough. Have any plans for today?” She asked.

“I need to visit a few people.”

“Friends?”

“More like professional contacts.”

“Oh, I see… What’s your job anyway?”

“I am looking for one.”

“What kind?”

“I used to be a singer back in France. I hope I can bring a bit of the classics of my country in the local musical landscape here.”

“Hm… Not a lot of places where you could do that. Also, by the looks of you and the way you talk, you aren’t a pub singer, are ya?”

Lucien shook his head.

“May God protect me against it ever…”

Victoria laughed.

“I can give you a few suggestions. There are a few restaurants posh enough for you.”

“I would gladly appreciate that, thank you.”

“Yeah, no problem.”

“But tell me, V....”

“Yeah?”

“Why help me?”

“I don’t know. You’ve just landed here and if I’d just landed in France I feel like you’d have done the same.”

“Not a lot of people would think as you do, or agree with you.” Lucien said.

“Well then, only a few people aren’t idiots, which is common knowledge, isn’t it?”

Lucien chuckled.

“You speak the words I would expect from someone much older than you.”

“Maybe. Maybe that’s why you’re offering me a hot chocolate.”

He nodded with a smile.

“Maybe indeed… But what about you? Do you have any plans for today, apart from serving an old man his coffee before he starts a long day?”

“Well, hopefully serving him his lunch and his dinner…?” She pushed her luck.

“You might be lucky enough for that, who knows…?” He mysteriously answered and they both chuckled.

“Cool. But yeah, apart from that, not much. I’ll go running tonight, some dinner, I’ll try to revise for my exams and hopefully not fall asleep too soon on my book!”

“Ah, what do you study?”

“Spanish. It’s a correspondence course.”

“Oh, I see. What would you like to do once you pass your exams?”

“Who says I’ll pass them? This job takes me most of my time. And then I need to go help Joe and a few other folks before I can hit home.” Victoria’s look saddened.

“But you like what you study, non?”

“Yeah, I do. I’d like to pass my exams and then I can start looking for a proper job, one that I really want.”

“What would that be?”

“Teacher. I’d love to teach Spanish to people. Pfff, I wish I had more time and energy to study.” She lowered her eyes.

“I can help you if you want.”

Victoria frowned  as she listened to the Frenchman continue.

“You help me settle in Australia, and I help you with your Spanish, what do you say?” He raised an eyebrow.

“Wait, you know Spanish?” She asked.

“Por supuesto, Señorita.” He nodded.

[Of course, Miss.]

“Wow, wait, how many languages can you speak?”

“Enough to survive, I suppose.” He answered. “But that does not answer my question. ¿Quieres aprender el español conmigo? Puedo enseñarte si quieres.”

[Do you want to learn Spanish with me? I can teach you if you want.]

The Frenchman extended his hand to her.

“I have no money though…” She protested.

“Do I look like the sort of man who needs money?” He raised an eyebrow with a smirk and saw her eyes jump from his jacket, to his vest, and his watch.

“No, true…”

“As I said, let us make this a trade: I help you conquer Spanish and you help me conquer Australia. So…?”

She shook his hand firmly.

“Alright then! Thank you so much!”

“De nada. Do bring your homework with you at work and I shall help you with it.”

[You’re welcome.]

“Will do! Thank you so much again…!” 

“My pleasure. Now, about those places you could recommend. I have a map that I have bought from Joe’s. He sends his regards to you by the way.” 

Lucien splayed the map on the table.

“Oh, that’s nice of him. I’ll bring him his pills tonight, I didn’t have the time yesterday…”

“Here is the pen…” He handed her a black biro. “Show me where and I will go.”

“Right so, what kind of experience d’you have? Cause I feel like some places have the right style for you but you might not have the CV for it.”

The Frenchman couldn’t hold back an arrogant scoff. 

“Oh, V… Pardon my impoliteness.” He cleared his throat. “Ahem, well, I have sung in the most prestigious places in my native country. By that, I mean the most sought after restaurants. Places where you would only meet people that you hear about on the television.”

“You shittin’ me…?” She asked.

“You will discover that I am not a man of many jokes, V.”

“Well then, let’s see…” Her eyes eagerly scanned the map. “Your first port of call could be this place at the corner between this street and that one. It’s relatively new so they can’t really afford to turn anyone down.”

“V…?”

She raised her eyes off the map to meet his light blue ones.

“Yeah?”

“Come on, let’s be ambitious here. What is the best restaurant here? One where not everyone can get a table and if you do, you have to know someone who works there already?”

“Wow, wow, wow, L…! No offense but they don’t take a newcomer just like that there?!”

“Leave that to me. Just point it on the map.”

“You’ll never get the job, even if they were lookin’ for someone!” She exclaimed.

“And I can wager anything you’d like that not only I will try, but I will obtain this position.”

Victoria raised an eyebrow and pouted. Her eyes darted left and right. Lucien stared at her arrogantly, he spoke with such self-confidence...

“Alright. If you get the job, you get me a table there for dinner.”

“Consider it done.” He answered.

“Hahaha! So, yeah, that’s the place you want to go…!” 

The young lady placed a cross on the map and the Frenchman bent forward to take a better look at it.

“It’s bang on the center of the center.”

“What’s the restaurant called?”

“The Queen me!” She answered triumphant.

“The Queen you?” He answered.

“Yeah, the Queen Victoria!” 

“Ah, well, then I just need to tell them that V herself sent me and I should get the position, non?”

“Pfff, you can try…!” She chuckled. “I know a lot of people in this city, but no one who goes there.”

“Not yet…!” Lucien added with a wink.

“Yeah, well, don’t forget your bet, old man. You get that job and you owe me some good dinner there, eh!”

“I shall not forget, do not worry.”

A voice cut them in the background.

“Victoria? Where are ya? We need you back here!”

“Oh, sorry, I’ll have to go.” She stood up and took the empty cups and the plate.

“Ningún problema, Señorita. I shall retire too. I have a long list of people that I shall visit.”

[No problem, young lady.]

He folded the map back neatly before putting it back in his inner pocket. Lucien followed her back to the counter and she took his payment.

“V?”

“Hm?”

“Muchas gracias.”

[Thank you very much]

“Oh, uh, de nada?”

He nodded.

“Victoria?!” The voice called from the kitchen.

“Yeah, yeah, can’t you live without me for a second?!”

The Frenchman laughed and left. As soon as the door of the restaurant closed behind him, he started his itinerary. The closest one was the beggar. Lucien walked in his direction. The path was clear in his head such that he could pay a bit of attention to his surroundings. The streets, the walls and shop windows rolled before his eyes and like the reel of an old movie, they slowly changed to older wood, and older colours, washed out and sometimes blackened by the years. 

He lit up a cigarette and walked, looking up left and right. Lucien could feel the eyes of the people on him. Who was he? Clearly a foreigner, a madman, someone who didn’t know where he was, he was clearly lost. And look at him, he was smoking in his expensive light beige suit, the light sheen of which shone delicately. Ah, he finally stopped. Wait, did he drop a yellow note to that beggar?! Bloody hell…!

Lucien could almost hear the whispers of the million eyes on him. He didn’t mind it. 

The homeless man saw a pair of polished brown italian shoes stop in front of him. He lowered his head and extended his  plastic cup. When he saw the fifty-dollar note land, his eyes opened wide and his bushy eyebrows unfrowned like the Red Sea to let Moses through. 

“Thank you good Sir…” He said, his voice weak and fragile. Lucien understood that he was a much heavier smoker than himself.

“Je t’en prie, mon ami.”

[My pleasure, my friend.]

The beggar raised his eyes.

“Je viens pour discuter.”

[I have come to have a chat.]

“Who’s the good Sir?”

“L.”

“L’s stopped for years, Sir. He’s out.”

Lucien chuckled and was about to answer when a child came running to them both. 

“Uncle Jack! Uncle Jack!”

“Told you to not come when I’m in business Nick….”

“But they said it’s urgent…!”

“Who?”

“Them above! They sent this!”

The child extended a piece of paper to the beggar.

“‘Scuse me, Sir. Urgent matters apparently.”

“Take your time.” Lucien answered and put the cigarette back between his lips. He looked at the young boy. He mustn’t have been more than twelve and behind him, a few of his friends were waiting on the pavement.

“Bloody hell… We’ll all be damned… Nick, get Tommy to replace me.”

“Alright!” The kid darted away and the beggar stood up. 

Lucien realised that he was taller than him now that he was standing.

“‘m sorry to not have believed you, L. Follow me.”

The Frenchman nodded and did as he was told. After a few minutes’ walk, both men found themselves in a dead end.

“Right, now we can talk… Vous pouvez m’appelez Maurice.”

[You can call me Maurice.]

Both men shook hands and Maurice removed his large hat to look his colleague in the eye.

“Enchanté, Maurice.”

[Pleased to meet you, Maurice.]

“How can I help the legendary L?”

“Introduce me to your trade and to your city first.”

“Ah, here we go then…”

“But before we dive into the matter, allow me to say that your accent is perfect. I cannot hear a shred of French in your English.” Lucien said.

“Well, I had a good accent to start with and now I’m perfectly transparent.”

“As all beggars should be.” Lucien added and his friend nodded.

“Yeah you’re right. So yeah, my trade? I’m the king of the street, posh or dirty. I hear the wind and the word that it carries. You need to know something or pass on a message? Come to me.”

“How shall I find you?” 

“The kids. See one with green on the soles of his shoes? He’s mine. You tell him what you need and you’ll get it.”

“What can you provide?”

“My business is mostly intel’, but I can also arrange deliveries for letters and reasonably small packages.”

“What about the children?”

“They’re all orphans. We pay them and teach them how to use their money. Most of them find a job as early as they can and we encourage them to. Some of them even go to University.”

“We?” Lucien asked.

“There are a few adults of course. I can’t manage all those kids on my own. But of course because they’re kids, they’re hard to find during school time.”

“Who shall I go for then?”

“Same code.”

“Green soles?”

“Yeah, green soles. We’re a fairly big network now.”

“Understood. Anything you can tell me about my target?”

“Not much beyond what you know. We were the ones to spot him here. I had a hard time believin’ it so I went and checked myself.”

“So we are confident?”

“More than a hundred percent. It’s him, the bastard.”

“Any idea of what his main activity is?”

“Not precisely. But things are on the move. Big wallets are landing in Oz, more and more by the day. He’s preparin’ something big, don’t know what yet, but we’ll know it soon enough.”

“Fine. Keep me posted.” Lucien walked towards the exit of the dead end.

“Will do.”

“You know where to find me?” The Frenchman asked.

“Yeah, and thanks for the money.” Maurice added.

“Bah, I just needed your attention.” 

“Not the one in my cup.”

Lucien frowned.

“Bastian’s got new shoes now.” Maurice winked.

It took a second but the spy remembered the shy, young man who worked in his hotel.

[gargaj]

A breakdown of the Revision 2020 Threeway Battle shader

Those of you who have been following this year's edition of Revision probably remember the unexpected twist in Sunday's timeline, where I was pitted in a coding "battle" against two of the best shader-coders in the world to fend for myself. Admittedly the buzz it caused caught me by surprise, but not as much as the feedback on the final shader I produced, so I hope to shed some light on how the shader works, in a way that's hopefully understandable to beginners and at least entertaining to experts, as well as providing some glimpses into my thought process along the way.

Recorded video of the event

But before we dive into the math and code, however, I think it's important to get some context by recounting the story of how we got here.

A brief history of demoscene live-coding

Visual coding has been massively opened up when graphics APIs began to introduce programmable fragment rendering, perhaps best known to most people as "pixel shaders"; this allowed programmers to run entire programmable functions on each pixel of a triangle, and none was more adamant to do that than a fellow named Iñigo Quilez (IQ), an understated genius who early on recognized the opportunity in covering the entire screen with a single polygon, and just doing the heavy lifting of creating geometry in the shader itself. His vision eventually spiraled into not only the modern 4k scene, but also the website ShaderToy, which almost every graphics programmer uses to test prototypes or just play around with algorithms. IQ, an old friend of mine since the mid-00s, eventually moved to the US, worked at Pixar and Oculus, and became something of a world-revered guru of computer graphics, but that (and life) has unfortunately caused him to shift away from the scene.

His vision of single-shader-single-quad-single-pass shader coding, in the meantime, created a very spectacular kind of live coding competition in the scene where two coders get only 25 minutes and the attention of an entire party hall, and they have to improvise their way out of the duel - this has been wildly successful at parties for the sheer showmanship and spectacle akin to rap battles, and none emerged from this little sport more remarkably than Flopine, a bubbly French girl who routinely shuffled up on stage wearing round spectacles and cat ears (actually they might be pony ears on second thought), and mopped the floor up with the competition. Her and a handful of other live-coders regularly stream on Twitch as practice, and have honed their live-coding craft for a few years at this point, garnering a considerable following.

Just a sample of insanity these people can do.

My contribution to this little sub-scene was coming up with a fancy name for it ("Shader Showdown"), as well as providing a little tool I called Bonzomatic (named after Bonzaj / Plastic, a mutual friend of IQ and myself, and the first person to create a live coding environment for demoparties) that I still maintain, but even though I feel a degree of involvement through the architectural side, I myself haven't been interested in participating: I know I can do okay under time pressure, but I don't really enjoy it, and while there's a certain overlap in what they do and what I do, I was always more interested in things like visual detail and representative geometry aided by editing and direction rather than looping abstract, fractal-like things. It just wasn't my thing.

Mistakes were made

But if I'm not attracted to this type of competition, how did I end up in the crossfire anyway? What I can't say is that it wasn't, to a considerable degree, my fault: as Revision 2020 was entirely online, most of the scene took it to themselves to sit in the demoscene Discord to get an experience closest to on-site socializing, given the somber circumstances of physical distancing. This also allowed a number of people who hasn't been around for a while to pop in to chat - like IQ, who, given his past, was mostly interested in the showdowns (during which Flopine crushed the competition) and the 4k compo.

As I haven't seen him around for a while, and as my mind is always looking for an angle, I somehow put two and two together, and asked him if he would consider taking part in a showdown at some point; he replied that he was up for it - this was around Saturday 10PM. I quickly pinged the rest of the showdown participants and organizers, as I spotted that Bullet was doing a DJ set the next day (which would've been in a relatively convenient timezone for IQ in California as well), and assumed that he didn't really have visuals for it - as there was already a "coding jam" over Ronny's set the day before, I figured there's a chance for squeezing an "extra round" of coding. Flopine was, of course, beyond excited by just the prospect of going against IQ, and by midnight we essentially got everything planned out (Bullet's consent notwithstanding, as he was completely out of the loop on this), and I was excited to watch...

...that is, until Havoc, the head honcho for the showdowns, off-handedly asked me about an at that point entirely hypothetical scenario: what would happen if IQ would, for some reason, challenge me instead of Flopine? Now, as said, I wasn't really into this, but being one to not let a good plan go to waste (especially if it was mine), I told Havoc I'd take one for the team and do it, although it probably wouldn't be very fun to watch. I then proceeded to quickly brief IQ in private and run him through the technicalities of the setup, the tool, the traditions and so on, and all is swell...

...that is, until IQ (this is at around 2AM) offhandedly mentions that "Havoc suggested we do a three-way with me, Flopine... and you." I quickly try to backpedal, but IQ seems to be into the idea, and worst of all, I've already essentially agreed to it, and to me, the only thing worse than being whipped in front of a few thousand people would be going back on your word. The only way out was through.

Weeks of coding can spare you hours of thinking

So now that I've got myself into this jar of pickles, I needed some ideas, and quick. (I didn't sleep much that night.) First off, I didn't want to do anything obviously 3D - both IQ and Flopine are masters of this, and I find it exhausting and frustrating, and it would've failed on every level possible. Fractals I'm awful at and while they do provide a decent amount of visual detail, they need a lot of practice and routine to get right. I also didn't want something very basic 2D, like a byte-beat, because those have a very limited degree of variation available, and the end result always looks a bit crude.

Luckily a few months ago an article I saw do rounds was a write-up by Sasha Martinsen on how to do "FUI"-s, or Fictional User Interfaces; overly complicated and abstract user interfaces that are prominent in sci-fi, with Gmunk being the Michael Jordan of the genre.

Image courtesy of Sasha Martinsen.

Sasha's idea is simple: make a few basic decent looking elements, and then just pile them on top of each other until it looks nice, maybe choose some careful colors, move them around a bit, place them around tastefully in 3D, et voilà, you're hacking the Gibson. It's something I attempted before, if somewhat unsuccessfully, in "Reboot", but I came back to it a few more times in my little private motion graphics experiments with much better results, and my prediction was that it would be doable in the given timeframe - or at least I hoped that my hazy 3AM brain was on the right track.

A bit of math

How to make this whole thing work? First, let's think about our rendering: We have a single rectangle and a single-pass shader that runs on it: this means no meshes, no geometry, no custom textures, no postprocessing, no particle systems and no fonts, which isn't a good place to start from. However, looking at some of Sasha's 3D GIFs, some of them look like they're variations of the same render put on planes one after the other - and as long as we can do one, we can do multiple of that.

Rough sketch of what we want to do; the planes would obviously be infinite in size but this representation is good enough for now.

Can we render multiple planes via a single shader? Sure, but we want them to look nice, and that requires a bit of thinking: The most common technique to render a "2D" shader and get a "3D" look is raymarching, specifically with signed distance fields - starting on a ray, and continually testing distances until a hit is found. This is a good method for "solid-ish" looking objects and scenes, but the idea for us is to have many infinite planes that also have some sort of alpha channel, so we'd have a big problem with 1) inaccuracy, as we'd never find a hit, just something "reasonably close", and even that would take us a few dozen steps, which is costly even for a single plane and 2) the handling of an alpha map can be really annoying, since we'd only find out our alpha value after our initial march, after which if our alpha is transparent we'd need to march again.

But wait - it's just infinite planes and a ray, right? So why don't we just assume that our ray is always hitting the plane (which it is, since we're looking at it), and just calculate an intersection the analytical way?

Note: I would normally refer to this method as "raytracing", but after some consultation with people smarter than I am, we concluded that the terms are used somewhat ambiguously, so let's just stick to "analytical ray solving" or something equally pedantic.

We know the mathematical equation for a ray is position = origin + direction * t (where t is a scalar that represents the distance/progress from the ray origin), and we know that the formula for a plane is A * x + B * y + C * z + D = 0, where (A, B, C) is the normal vector of the plane, and D is the distance from the origin. First, since the intersection will be the point in space that satisfies both equations, we substitute the ray (the above o + d * t for each axis) into the plane:

A * (ox + dx * t) + B * (oy + dy * t) + C * (oz + dz * t) + D = 0

To find out where this point is in space, we need to solve this for t, but it's currently mighty complicated. Luckily, since we assume that our planes are parallel to the X-Y plane, we know our (A, B, C) normal is (0, 0, 1), so we can simplify it down to:

oz + dz * t + D = 0

Which we can easily solve to t:

t = (D - oz) / dz

That's right: analytically finding a ray hit of a plane is literally a single subtraction and a division! Our frame rate (on this part) should be safe, and we're always guaranteed a hit as long as we're not looking completely perpendicular to the planes; we should have everything to start setting up our code.

Full disclosure: Given my (and in a way IQ's) lack of "live coding" experience, we agreed that there would be no voting for the round, and it'd be for glory only, but also that I'd be allowed to use a small cheat sheet of math like the equations for 2D rotation or e.g. the above final equation since I don't do this often enough to remember these things by heart, and I only had a few hours notice before the whole thing.

Setting up the rendering

Time to start coding then. First, let's calculate our texture coordinates in the 0..1 domain using the screen coordinates and the known backbuffer resolution (which is provided to us in Bonzomatic):

vec2 uv = vec2(gl_FragCoord.x / v2Resolution.x, gl_FragCoord.y / v2Resolution.y);

Then, let's create a ray from that:

vec3 rayDir = vec3( uv * 2 - 1, -1.0 ); rayDir.x *= v2Resolution.x / v2Resolution.y; // adjust for aspect ratio vec3 rayOrigin = vec3( 0, 0, 0 );

This creates a 3D vector for our direction that is -1,-1,-1 in the top left corner and 1,1,-1 in the bottom right (i.e. we're looking so that Z is decreasing into the screen), then we adjust the X coordinate since our screen isn't square, but our coordinates currently are - no need to even bother with normalizing, it'll be fine. Our origin is currently just sitting in the center.

Then, let's define (loosely) our plane, which is parallel to the XY plane:

float planeDist = 1.0f; // distance between each plane float planeZ = -5.0f; // Z position of the first plane

And solve our equation to t, as math'd out above:

float t = (planeZ - rayOrigin.z) / rayDir.z;

Then, calculate WHERE the hit is by taking that t by inserting it back to the original ray equation using our current direction and origin:

vec3 hitPos = rayOrigin + t * rayDir;

And now we have our intersection; since we already know the Z value, we can texture our plane by using the X and Y components to get a color value:

vec4 color = fui( hitPos.xy ); // XY plane our_color = color;

Of course we're gonna need the actual FUI function, which will be our procedural animated FUI texture, but let's just put something dummy there now, like a simple circle:

vec4 fui ( vec2 uv ) { return length(uv - 0.5) < 0.5 ? vec4(1) : vec(0); }

And here we go:

Very good, we have a single circle and if we animate the camera we can indeed tell that it is on a plane.

So first, let's tile it by using a modulo function; the modulo (or modulus) function simply wraps a number around another number (kinda like the remainder after a division, but for floating point numbers) and thus becomes extremely useful for tiling or repeating things:

We'll be using the modulo function rather extensively in this little exercise, so strap in. (Illustration via the Desmos calculator.)

vec4 layer = fui( mod( hitPos.xy, 1.0 ) );

This will wrap the texture coordinates of -inf..inf between 0..1:

We also need multiple planes, but how do we combine them? We could just blend them additively, but with the amount of content we have, we'd just burn them in to white and it'd look like a mess (and not the good kind of mess). We could instead just use normal "crossfade" / "lerp" blending based on the alpha value; the only trick here is to make sure we're rendering them from back to front since the front renders will blend over the back renders:

int steps = 10; float planeDist = 1.0f; for (int i=steps; i>=0; i--) { float planeZ = -1.0f * i * planeDist; float t = (planeZ - rayOrigin.z) / rayDir.z; if (t > 0.0f) // check if "t" is in front of us { vec3 hitPos = rayOrigin + t * rayDir; vec4 layer = fui( hitPos.xy, 2.0 ); // blend layers based on alpha output colour = mix( colour, layer, layer.a ); } }

And here we go:

We decreased the circles a bit in size to see the effect more.

Not bad! First thing we can do is just fade off the back layers, as if they were in a fog:

layer *= (steps - i) / float(steps);

We have a problem though: we should probably increase the sci-fi effect by moving the camera continually forward, but if we do, we're gonna run into a problem: Currently, since our planeZ is fixed to the 0.0 origin, they won't move with the camera. We could just add our camera Z to them, but then they would be fixed with the camera and wouldn't appear moving. What we instead want is to just render them AS IF they would be the closest 10 planes in front of the camera; the way we could do that is that if e.g. our planes' distance from each other is 5, then round the camera Z down to the nearest multiple of 5 (e.g. if the Z is at 13, we round down to 10), and start drawing from there; rounding up would be more accurate, but rounding down is easier, since we can just subtract the division remainder from Z like so:

float planeZ = (rayOrigin.z - mod(rayOrigin.z, planeDist)) - i * planeDist;

And now we have movement! Our basic rendering path is done.

Our little fictional UI

So now that we have the basic pipeline in place, let's see which elements can we adapt from Sasha's design pieces.

The first one I decided to go with wasn't strictly speaking in the set, but it was something that I saw used as design elements over the last two decades, and that's a thick hatch pattern element; I think it's often used because it has a nice industrial feel with it. Doing it in 2D is easy: We just add X and Y together, which will result in a diagonal gradient, and then we just turn that into an alternating pattern using, again, the modulo. All we need to do is limit it between two strips, and we have a perfectly functional "Police Line Do Not Cross" simulation.

return mod( uv.x + uv.y, 1 ) < 0.5 ? vec4(1) : vec4(0);

So let's stop here for a few moments; this isn't bad, but we're gonna need a few things. First, the repetition doesn't give us the nice symmetric look that Sasha recommends us to do, and secondly, we want them to look alive, to animate a bit.

Solving symmetry can be done just by modifying our repetition code a bit: instead of a straight up modulo with 1.0 that gives us a 0..1 range, let's use 2.0 to get a 0..2 range, then subtract 1.0 to get a -1..1 range, and then take the absolute value.

vec4 layer = fui( abs( mod( hitPos.xy, 2.0 ) - 1 ) );

This will give us a triangle-wave-like function, that goes from 0 to 1, then back to 0, then back to 1; in terms of texture coordinates, it will go back and forth between mirroring the texture in both directions, which, let's face it, looks Totally Sweet.

For animation, first I needed some sort of random value, but one that stayed deterministic based on a seed - in other words, I needed a function that took in a value, and returned a mangled version of it, but in a way that if I sent that value in twice, it would return the same mangled value twice. The most common way of doing it is taking the incoming "seed" value, and then driving it into some sort of function with a very large value that causes the function to alias, and then just returning the fraction portion of the number:

float rand(float x) { return fract(sin(x) * 430147.8193); }

Does it make any sense? No. Is it secure? No. Will it serve our purpose perfectly? Oh yes.

So how do we animate our layers? The obvious choice is animating both the hatch "gradient" value to make it crawl, and the start and end of our hatch pattern which causes the hatched strip to move up and down: simply take a random - seeded by our time value - of somewhere sensible (like between 0.2 and 0.8 so that it doesn't touch the edges) and add another random to it, seasoned to taste - we can even take a binary random to pick between horizontal and vertical strips:

The problems here are, of course, that currently they're moving 1) way too fast and 2) in unison. The fast motion obviously happens because the time value changes every frame, so it seeds our random differently every frame - this is easy to solve by just rounding our time value down to the nearest integer: this will result in some lovely jittery "digital" motion. The unison is also easy to solve: simply take the number of the layer, and add it to our time, thus shifting the time value for each layer; I also chose to multiply the layer ID with a random-ish number so that the layers actually animate independently, and the stutter doesn't happen in unison either:

vec4 fui( vec2 uv, float t ) { t = int(t); float start = rand(t) * 0.8 + 0.1; float end = start + 0.1; [...] } vec4 layer = fui( abs(mod(hitPos.xy, 2.0)-1), fGlobalTime + i * 4.7 );

Lovely!

Note: In hindsight using the Z coordinate of the plane would've given a more consistent result, but the way it animates, it doesn't really matter.

So let's think of more elements: the best looking one that seems to get the best mileage out in Sasha's blog is what I can best describe as the "slant" or "hockey stick" - a simple line, with a 45-degree turn in it. What I love about it is that the symmetry allows it to create little tunnels, gates, corridors, which will work great for our motion.

Creating it is easy: We just take a thin horizontal rectangle, and attach another rectangle to the end, but shift the coordinate of the second rectangle vertically, so that it gives us the 45-degree angle:

float p1 = 0.2; float p2 = 0.5; float p3 = 0.7; float y = 0.5; float thicc = 0.0025; if (p1 < uv.x && uv.x < p2 && y - thicc < uv.y && uv.y < y + thicc ) { return vec4(1); } if (p2 < uv.x && uv.x < p3 && y - thicc < uv.y - (uv.x - p2) && uv.y - (uv.x - p2) < y + thicc ) { return vec4(1); }

Note: In the final code, I had a rect() call which I originally intended to use as baking glow around my rectangle using a little routine I prototyped out earlier that morning, but I was ultimately too stressed to properly pull that off. Also, it's amazing how juvenile your variable names turn when people are watching.

Looks nice, but since this is such a thin sparse element, let's just... add more of it!

So what more can we add? Well, no sci-fi FUI is complete without random text and numbers, but we don't really have a font at hand. Or do we? For years, Bonzomatic has been "shipping" with this really gross checkerboard texture ostensibly for UV map testing:

What if we just desaturate and invert it?

We can then "slice" it up and render little sprites all over our texture: we already know how to draw a rectangle, so all we need is just 1) calculate which sprite we want to show 2) calculate the texture coordinate WITHIN that sprite and 3) sample the texture:

float sx = 0.3; float sy = 0.3; float size = 0.1; if (sx < uv.x && uv.x < sx + size && sy < uv.y &&uv.y < sy + size) { float spx = 2.0 / 8.0; // we have 8 tiles in the texture float spy = 3.0 / 8.0; vec2 spriteUV = (uv - vec2(sx,sy)) / size; vec4 sam = texture( texChecker, vec2(spx,spy) + spriteUV / 8.0 ); return dot( sam.rgb, vec3(0.33) ); }

Note: In the final code, I was only using the red component instead of desaturation because I forgot the texture doesn't always have red content - I stared at it for waaaay too long during the round trying to figure out why some sprites weren't working.

And again, let's just have more of it:

Getting there!

At this point the last thing I added was just circles and dots, because I was running out of ideas; but I also felt my visual content amount was getting to where I wanted them to be; it was also time to make it look a bit prettier.

Post-production / compositing

So we have our layers, they move, they might even have colors, but I'm still not happy with the visual result, since they are too single-colored, there's not enough tone in the picture.

The first thing I try nowadays when I'm on a black background is to just add either a single color, or a gradient:

vec4 colour = renderPlanes(uv); vec4 gradient = mix( vec4(0,0,0.2,1), vec4(0,0,0,1), uv.y); vec4 finalRender = mix( gradient, vec4(colour.xyz,1), colour.a);

This added a good chunk of depth considerably to the image, but I was still not happy with the too much separation between colors.

A very common method used in compositing in digital graphics is to just add bloom / glow; when used right, this helps us add us more luminance content to areas that would otherwise be solid color, and it helps the colors to blend a bit by providing some middle ground; unfortunately if we only have a single pass, the only way to get blur (and by extension, bloom) is repeatedly rendering the picture, and that'd tank our frame rate quickly.

Instead, I went back to one of the classics: the Variform "pixelize" overlay:

This is almost the same as a bloom effect, except instead of blurring the image, all you do is turn it into a lower resolution nearest point sampled version of itself, and blend that over the original image - since this doesn't need more than one sample per pixel (as we can reproduce pixelation by just messing with the texture coordinates), we can get away by rendering the scene only twice:

vec4 colour = renderPlanes(uv); colour += renderPlanes(uv - mod( uv, 0.1 ) ) * 0.4;

Much better tonal content!

So what else can we do? Well, most of the colors I chose are in the blue/orange/red range, and we don't get a lot of the green content; one of the things that I learned that it can look quite pretty if one takes a two-tone picture, and uses color-grading to push the midrange of a third tone - that way, the dominant colors will stay in the highlights, and the third tone will cover the mid-tones. (Naturally you have to be careful with this.)

"Boosting" a color in the mids is easy: lucky for us, if we consider the 0..1 range, exponential functions suit our purpose perfectly, because they start at 0, end at 1, but we can change how they get here:

So let's just push the green channel a tiny bit:

finalRender.g = pow(finalRender.g, 0.7);

Now all we need is to roll our camera for maximum cyberspace effect and we're done!

Best laid plans of OBS

As you can see from the code I posted the above, I wrote the final shader in GLSL; those who know me know that I'm a lot more comfortable with DirectX / HLSL, and may wonder why I switched, but of course there's another story here:

Given the remote nature of the event, all of the shader coding competition was performed online as well: since transmitting video from the coder's computer to a mixer, and then to another mixer, and then to a streaming provider, and then to the end user would've probably turned the image to mush, Alkama and Nusan came up with the idea of skipping a step and rigging up a version of Bonzo that ran on the coder's computer, but instead of streaming video, it sent the shader down to another instance of Bonzo, running on Diffty's computer, who then captured that instance and streamed it to the main Revision streaming hub. This, of course, meant that in a three-way, Diffty had to run three separate instances of Bonzo - but it worked fine with GLSL earlier, so why worry?

What we didn't necessarily realize at the time, is that the DirectX 11 shader compiler takes no hostages, and as soon as the shader reached un-unrollable level of complexity, it thoroughly locked down Diffty's machine, to the point that even the video of the DJ set he was playing started to drop out. I, on the other hand, didn't notice any of this, since my single local instance was doing fine, so I spent the first 15 minutes casually nuking Diffty's PC to shreds remotely, until I noticed Diffty and Havoc pleading on Discord to switch to GLSL because I'm setting things on fire unknowingly.

This is fine.

I was reluctant to do so, simply because of the muscle memory, but I was also aware that I should keep the show going if I can because if I bow out without a result, that would be a colossal embarrassment to everyone involved, and I only can take one of those once every week, and I was already above my quota - so, I quickly closed the DX11 version of Bonzo, loaded the shader up in a text editor, replaced "floatX" with "vecX" (fun drinking game: take a shot every time I messed it up during the live event), commented the whole thing out, loaded it into a GLSL bonzo, and quickly fixed all the other syntax differences (of which there were luckily not many, stuff like "mix" instead of "lerp", constructors, etc.), and within a few minutes I was back up and running.

This, weirdly, helped my morale a bit, because it was the kind of clutch move that for some reason appealed to me, and made me quite happy - although at that point I locked in so bad that not only did I pay absolutely not attention to the stream to see what the other two are doing, but that the drinks and snacks I prepared for the hour of battling went completely untouched.

In the end, when the hour clocked off, the shader itself turned out more or less how I wanted it, it worked really well with Bullet's techno-/psy-/hardtrance mix (not necessarily my jam, as everyone knows I'm more a broken beat guy, but pounding monotony can go well with coding focus), and I came away satisfied, although the perhaps saddest point of the adventure was yet to come: the lack of cathartic real-life ending that was taken from us due to the physical distance, when after all the excitement, all the cheers and hugs were merely lines of text on a screen - but you gotta deal with what you gotta deal with.

A small sampling of the Twitch reaction.

Conclusion

In the end, what was my takeaway from the experience?

First off, scoping is everything: Always aim to get an idea where you can maximize the outcome of the time invested with the highest amount of confidence of pulling it off. In this case, even though I was on short notice and in an environment I was unfamiliar with, I relied on something I knew, something I've done before, but no one else really has.

Secondly, broaden your influence: You never know when you can take something that seems initially unrelated, and bend it into something that you're doing with good results.

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, step out of your comfort zone every so often; you'll never know what you'll find.

(And don't agree to everything willy-nilly, you absolute moron.)

[joysmercer]

Creator Tag Meme 2019

Rules: It’s time to love yourselves! Choose your 5 favorite works you created in the past year (fics, art, edits, etc.) and link them below to reflect on the amazing things you brought into the world in 2019. Tag as many writers/artists/etc. as you want (fan or original) so we can spread the love and link each other to awesome works!

I was tagged by @b99peraltiago. This was so fun, thank you!

In chronological order—

the world is not a wish-granting factory

This was definitely one of those fics that I felt like I had to write because there wasn’t any other fic that said exactly what I wanted to say, and I’m quite proud of how it turned out. It was (at the time) one of my longest and more ambitious pieces, and I learned a lot about outlining and writing different types of scenes—dialogue, introspection, angst, fluff, etc—through the process of writing it.

a summer rain is passing over, and it feels like a dream

I’m not going to lie; when I first got the prompt for this (thank you @storyinmyeyes!) I was a bit worried about whether or not I could pull it off. It was difficult to start—I kept procrastinating on the small things like deciding when it would take place or which play they would go see, and writing fluff after so many angst-fics was weird—but once I got into the swing of things, the words just flowed and I completed the entire thing in just under two hours, and I really like how it turned out!

languages, mac & cheese, and love

This is by far my most popular fic on ao3, but when I saw it getting so much attention the day I posted it, I couldn’t figure out why. I wrote it after having three successive not-so-fun conversations and shared it the day after with no intention of even timezone-reblogging it, so I was pleasantly surprised to see that it was something others actually enjoyed reading. Because it’s definitely a unique take on Amy’s character and the most self-indulgent thing I have ever written, I didn’t think it would resonate with so many people, but I’m very happy that it did.

2 AM and he calls her…

This is my most popular fic on here, and again, I was surprised to see so much of positive feedback on it, because of all the risks I took in certain sections (especially in the beginning). Looking back, though, I’m very glad with the decisions I made, because it made me more confident to try new things in future fics as well. The only thing I would change now is maybe the title, and that’s only because I ended up with “Breathe (2 AM)” by Anna Nalick stuck in my head for two weeks after posting this.

in daylights, in sunsets, in midnights, in cups of coffee (how about love?)

This fic was so completely different than anything I had ever attempted to write before: a Dianetti AU that I knew right off-the-bat would be a minimum of 10k words long with more fluff and dialogue than angst and introspection. I’m not going to lie when I say it was really, really hard to plan out and write this, especially because I didn’t have a coherent outline until two weeks before fics were due. However, this was also the fic I had the most fun with—because I had basically no expectations, I let myself play around with the plots and characters in ways I probably wouldn’t have in a peraltiago-centered fic, for example. 

I have no idea who’s been tagged in this already, so please feel free to consider yourself tagged if you see this and want to do it too (or ignore me if I tagged you and you don’t want to do it): @amyscascadingtabs @amydancepants-peralta @darkrosemind @feeisamarshmallow @voldy-morts @storyinmyeyes

[archiveddvrpg]

Congratulations, ART! You’ve been accepted for the role of EDMUND with an approved FC change to Max Irons. Admin Minnie: I knew this was a winner while reading your plots Art, but it was your para sample that really left me speechless. The way you showed us how he had suffered and how he had ached, all that bitterness and resentment and ambition and pride... it was so clear how deep your love for Edmund goes. I am thrilled to see someone with such an intimate, intense grasp on Easton’s soul. Please stay forever, and please ruin us for the rest of your life! Please read over the checklist and send in your blog within 24 hours.

WELCOME TO THE MOB.

OUT OF CHARACTER

Alias | Art

Age | 19

Preferred Pronouns | He/him

Activity Level | Well here’s the thing about quarantine. I will be spending the next two-three months in a house, all day, every day, with consistent access to a laptop. I also lost my job and because the US economy is a flaming pile of garbagé, I don’t imagine getting another any time soon, especially since all my skills are in food. All this to say, I believe I will be incredibly active, outside of my Skype’d classes and grocery runs and whatnot.

Timezone | MST

How did you find the rp?  | A discord friend DM’d it to me after I went on a rant about Edmund and the layers to his “Thou, Nature, art my Goddess” soliloquy. They know me so well, and acceptances were literally in like six hours from when I got the link, so I sat my butt down, put down my real-world obligations for a moment, and typed this whole thing out like I was writing an unstarted essay due at midnight.

Current/Past RP Accounts | All my old RP writing is from years ago and is, frankly, really really bad. Thank you for making this optional.

IN CHARACTER

Character | Edmund or Easton Craven. I love Daniel Sharman’s wonderful, gorgeous face with my whole heart (hello gay awakening), but I’d like to use Max Irons instead, if at all possible.

What drew you to this character? | So, my love of Easton/Edmund actually began about a year ago, when I cut my hair and started playing around with names and different clothes. I was in a Shakespeare class at my college, and it was a requirement that we perform a monologue. It didn’t need to be Broadway-worthy, we just needed to deliver it, and we could do this as often as we liked. I performed two. One from a play we had read and analyzed, as my professor asked, and I did another. That second one was Edmund’s “Thou, Nature” soliloquy. It was the first time I performed as a guy to an audience that thought I was a guy, not a girl playing dress up. So I have a really strong emotional connection to Edmund, regardless of the form he’s in.

I was really excited by this particular version of him, however, because I thought it played right along the line of a monstrous asshole and charming young man doing what he can to deal with the hand dealt to him. He’s both of those things, to me, and I really enjoyed that you brought that forward. Edmund, from the source, reminds me of Chris Evans’ character from Knives Out, in a way? Completely self-motivated, selfish and cruel, and yet really fun and charming, as long as it isn’t you he’s screwing over at the time. I know he isn’t that character and I’m honestly really glad for it. I just found a similarity there.

I just really like those kinds of characters in fiction, and that, combined with my emotional ties and vague debt to the source character, meant I arrived and started writing as fast as I could.

What is a future plot idea you have in mind for the character? |

These are all ideas, nothing here is set in stone, and are entirely dependent on the beauty of the other writers free will.

Some Twelve or Fourteen Moonshines Lag of a Brother: From the get-go of this awful experience known as the human existence, Easton has existed just slightly behind Everett, just enough to keep the guy freezing in the shadows. It’s the last name, the mannerisms, and the goddamn eyes that sit in his skull. It is a truth, acknowledged by both me and him, that there is an association to Easton he really wishes wasn’t there. This is why I want someone to look at Easton and see Easton, not a Craven.

Now, I want to pause here, and say that Easton is a lying snake of a man that would and probably will sell out his own family for one corn chip. He is completely self-centered, convinced of his superiority, and willing to bleed the world dry to get the pound of flesh he is owed. I want someone to see this, to realize there is a snake curled around the Capulet’s necks, willing to bite and kill every single one of them if it means he gets to sit comfortably on a throne of gold and bones. Because that is what he wants, he wants the world to pay for every second of misery he endured in his life. But he is charming, slippery in the way only the truly awful can be. He’s accepted the labels thrown at him and become them, which is its own kind of armor. Who doesn’t love a bad boy?

But beyond all that, he is rotten through and through. I’d like his armor to crack and reveal the duplicity underneath, maybe around someone like Maeve or Catherine, someone that might not be believed right away. I love the idea of Easton being the wolf among some very dangerous sheep, but the really, truly awful ones not realizing. This could produce a really fun dance, where the two parties involved both try really really hard to overthrow or remove the other from their position while still trying really hard to maintain a veil of normality.

But that dance is what makes this all so terribly fun. They’re on a rock, doomed to eventually die, and Easton wants his power, but why can’t he play a few games while trying to get it?

I Grow, I Prosper: Easton, poor guy, was brought into the world and then spent the next twenty-six years being told his existence and all the things that came with it were his fault. They weren’t, or at least they weren’t in the way he had been told his entire life. He has learned to move past the label of “bastard” or “illegitimate”, meeting all such claims with the certainty that he must act the part. But does his position fulfill him? Does his current lot in life spark joy? I think not! He is a captain, yes, but so is his brother. He is, at best, on equal footing with his brother and at worst, he is the younger brother desperately following behind Everett as a living shadow yet again. Easton needs to be more than Everett. He’s wanted this his entire life. The whole city needs to look at Easton and see him, not his brother, and then Easton wants to rub it in Everett’s face, lord it over him for the next century at the shortest. That is the general idea behind this plot: Everett surpassing and overcoming his brother. The fact that he’d end up lording over so many others is really just a plus!

This plot would require effort. Loads and LOADS of plotting and communication on my part, and a whole lot of cutthroat, stepping-on-literally-everyone-else-in-Verona from Easton. He is going to have to exploit the hell out of Celeste and the information she can get him, potentially leading to her downfall just so Easton can succeed. He will need Rafaella and Tiberius to trust him almost unconditionally, which, just from what I’ve seen poking around the main, seems pretty much impossible. And of course, he has to successfully and continually one-up Everett, which might be the hardest job of all, given the whole awful tangle of EmotionsTM that Easton has towards him. It’s hard for him to be clear-headed when he wants to tear Everett into little tiny pieces with his bare hands.

But hey, that is, again, the whole point of this plot: the destruction of the legitimate son. Eliminating the sun so the moon can rule 24/7.

My Services are Bound: No matter how ambitious, how desperate Easton is to rule the world, he doesn’t yet. He works for the Capulets and he is a tool used to further the wishes of those above him in this terribly illegal food chain where dog eats dog. No matter how much Easton wishes it was different, it isn’t, at least not at the moment, and he must bide his time until something better happens.

Yes, Easton is a tool, and I want him to be reminded of that. He has the ambition to rule the world, can picture himself with a crown he may never hold, but he is a knight on the chessboard. I want his ego to be checked, I want him to be taken down at the knees and reminded of the situation he is in, who he works for. Now, ideally, this would come from the Capulet family themselves and not a rogue Montague or something.

The Capulet family, in order to win this war they’ve found themselves in, need their tools to be obedient and ready to deploy at a moment’s notice. This is not the case with Easton. He’s a rebellious man, more loyal to himself than any of the lofty ideas the Capulet heads have surrounded themselves with. So the family he serves would need to get Easton back in line, somehow. They’d need to remind him who he is and whom he serves no matter what it took and use whatever tools at their disposal. This could potentially happen after Easton completely blows off a mission he was handed to advance his own agendas, which I think would probably be the best choice as it would probably send these awful shrieking sirens off in the Capulets.

I want this particular plot because Easton is so assured that he will be able to make the world pay and yet he’s just one man against so very many others.

Are you comfortable with killing off your character? | Oh most definitely. As a writer, I am a firm believer in conditional happy endings, probably because I play so many video games. In order to get a happy ending, in order to survive, the character has to do all the right things. The likelihood of Easton doing all the right things is just tiny, absolutely microscopic.  

IN DEPTH

I was going to do both, but I’m running out of time so…

In-Character Para Sample:

There is something beautiful in standing alone, where there are no silent reminders of how Easton arrived in this world, how he stepped into it screaming and no one cared to change that. There were no side-eyes, reminding him of how unwanted he was, how utterly unworthy he was to bear the name “Craven”. No hands hiding giggles at the boy his mother ran from and his father hid away. Here, under the bowed ceiling in the transept of the Capulet’s cathedral, there was only him and God.

“I hope,” Easton began, fingers lightly running across the back of a pew likely not used for praying, “that you know what is coming.” The eyes that proclaim a taint to his family’s name were raised to dance across the ceiling. “If word is to be believed, you, an old man in the sky, a Father,” he spat out, “brought me here. Placed me here upon this Earth to do whatever it is I so wish.” A smile, small and dangerous with heavy promises was birthed on his face, an expression that could not have been more familiar to his muscles. “I suppose that’s all a father has ever done for me. Perhaps,” he mused, lightly tapping his chin as he continued to wander aimlessly among the seats of a flock absent. “Perhaps I should be grateful that both You and him are both so delightfully hands-off.”

“I suppose this rock is where You chose to put all Your bastards, isn’t it? Shoved them away from Your kingdom, making them fight for their place in Your home despite them all being Your children?” The noise that escaped Easton’s mouth was not fit for the place he stood in, but it hardly seemed to matter to him as he collapsed into a pew, feet raised to rest on a Bible, feet that had stood in a man’s blood not hours before. “I suppose that must be how it is, because we’re all made in Your image, aren’t we? And that man had to learn it from somewhere.”

His head fell back, eyes closed to the beauty above him in a silent condemnation for Who it was built for. “You’ve released yet another snake into your garden by making that woman my mother and handing me the Craven name, you know.” The observation was quiet, laced with the bitterness of cyanide, perfected over years of similar declarations. The words were familiar, not on his tongue but rather to his mind, the idea similar to ones he had kept close for years.“I have crawled in the dirt on my stomach for too long because of You, and I shall take a throne and dare You to steal it from me.”

He inhaled, once, a desperate attempt to calm the words he could feel rising like acid in his throat. It didn’t work, though Easton didn’t try very hard. He rarely did when alone. “I am owed this, you miserable old bastard,” he hissed out from behind his teeth, sounding like the snake he had just claimed to be. “I will take everything because this is Your fault, and I will make your precious sheep pay for every inch of Your mistake. It’s mine, I deserve it.” A hand was clenched into a fist in his lap and Easton shifted forward, only to slam it into the wood of the pew ahead of him. “It’s mine.”

He stood suddenly, coat rising around him like smoke rising around a fire, warning the world of the danger just over there. Turning on his heel, he left the cathedral without a look back, without a fear of God. And though there had been no one around, the air hung heavy with a question. Just which father had he been addressing?

Extras: If you have anything else you’d like to include (further headcanons, an inspo tag, a mock blog, etc), feel free to share it here! This is OPTIONAL.

I submitted this through an Easton mock blog! There was going to be stuff there but my laptop crashed and I need to eat dinner!

[hes-writer]

Lunar New Year

Summary: Harry celebrates Chinese New Year with Y/N’s family

Warnings: fluff?

Word Count: 1.1k

Disclaimer: I am NOT Chinese though, I have researched and am quite familiar with the traditions. I’ve also consulted my friends who do celebrate it. If there’s any generalized info that I’ve used incorrectly, please message me about it! 

Harry was amazed at the culture. He and Y/N woke up early this morning in order to visit the city’s Chinatown to watch the traditional performances of the dragon and lion dances. The beat of the drum thrumming as the performer’s mallet hits it rhythmically while the two-person ensemble danced to it was unlike anything he had seen before. At one instance, the head of the dragon was headed straight for him and Harry cowered back in alarm but eventually relaxed once he realized that it was part of the routine. It was more intimidating since the fiery red and orange ‘tail’ swayed angrily, framing the head dauntingly. 

“You should’ve seen your face!” Y/N laughs, pointing at Harry and reenacting the emotion that plastered his face the moment the dragon faced their direction.

“Y/N,” He whines like a child. “I didn’t know okay,”

Y/N pinches his cheeks as he pouts cutely, keeping an eye on her mother who was currently leading them out of the square and in the busy streets.  

“Yeah, yeah it was your first time,”

Y/N is Chinese and Harry—having had not one Asian girlfriend before—was very new to the culture. Sure, he’s spent time in Japan in the past years, but he is educated enough to know that the cultures are observably different. Having met each other a year before, this was the first time when their relationship was concurrent with the annual Lunar New Year.

***

“It’s the year of the Pig, Harry!” Y/N was seated on the couch, computer on her lap with her reading glasses on.

“Year of the Pig? What’s that about?” He questioned having little knowledge of the topic and has only heard about it minutely.

“Yeah! Every year, there’s a different animal sign according to Chinese Zodiac,” She paused her actions, speaking to him in a factual tone. “Last year was the Dog and in a week’s time, it’s going to be the Pig,”

Harry appreciated the Y/N was willing to answer his question about her culture without demeaning his cluelessness about the topic.

***

And so, the day goes on with him exploring the booths of Chinatown. He voluntarily tries the rare snacks that are only appearing during the occasion. He tries the street food, the traditional dumplings and learns more and more about the meaning of each symbol and why it’s historically important for them.

He was warned not fill up too much on food while they were out as dinner tonight would be robust. Y/N’s extended family will be visiting for the New Year, essentially meaning that he will be fully immersed in an experience so totally new and educating for him. He is definitely excited.

Currently, his arms are slowly being accompanied by plastic bags, carrying decorations to slap on the walls of Y/N’s family’s house later in the afternoon. His eyes couldn’t get enough of the red color; symbolizing good luck. A red lantern hangs above his head, the walls of buildings being plastered in pictures to depict prosperity. The paintings are mostly pigs because of course; it is the year of the pig.

—-

The house is packed with relatives who have not seen each other since last New Years greet and check in on one another’s life. Walls were decorated in spring couplets, adding authenticity to the otherwise normal home. The floors were cleaned a couple days prior to ‘sweep away the dust’—hiding away the past, bidding farewell and paying close attention to the coming of new year.

Harry overhears that Y/N’s second cousin is pregnant and next year, there would be another addition to the family. He also hears not-so-positive things being passed around the house and he doesn’t know if he should laugh or not given that he is the ‘newest’ addition to the family. Well, not exactly. He hasn’t asked Y/N’s mother yet about his plans to propose—he knows it’s only been a year and sometime when he and Y/N got together, but he is absolute about his feelings for her.

The reunion dinner itself was delicious.  Countless options were placed on the large table ranging from fish, beef, pork and vegetables served as choices for the family. Large servings were either ordered or cooked to suffice the hungry stomachs of the guests. Hot pot was one of the big sellers, Harry discovers as watched Y/N’s mother make broth about three times and he himself had offered to wash the enoki mushrooms while Y/N cut the tofu in cubes.

Eventually, the mass of the crowd gathers in the living room. The television was hooked up to a karaoke machine where the passionate aunties sang to their hearts desires. However, it was paused to bring order to the next event happening. Most of the adults grasped red-colored envelopes in their hands and Harry wanted to know where they got it.

“Psst, Y/N! Can I get one of those too?” Harry pokes Y/N’s hip since she was standing beside him while he sat on a chair.

She nods, asking an elderly woman on her other side if she had any extras. She receives about four envelopes and gives them to Harry.

“What are these for?” He runs his fingertip over the gold characters.

“You put some money in it and give it to the kids. It’s for good luck,” She answers, smiling down at him while letting her forearm rest on his broad back.

Harry opens the envelopes, shifting a bit to grab his wallet in his pocket. He pulls out a couple hundred bills and stuffs them neatly in each red letter.

The time comes to hand over the envelopes. He gives one to Y/N’s little cousin who was only two years old.

“What do you say, Cindy?” Y/N asks.

“Fank you, Hawwy,” She answers shyly, eyelashes fluttering as she bats her eyes at him. His heart melts at the cuteness and he squeezes one of her cheeks gently.

“No problem, bubs”

Some of the adults head outside the house to light the fireworks just in time to welcome the Lunar New Year. It was a well-known tradition; with its confetti and sparklers igniting right before their eyes.

“We used to stay up all night,” Y/N speaks, laying on Harry’s chest while they watched her family laugh when her uncle fails to light up a cracker. “But they’re getting older now so they only stay up till midnight”

Harry chuckles, looking up in time to see the first successful firework explode into the starry night sky.

“3...2...1, Happy New Year!” The happy family cheers, hugging one another.

“You know we still have other relatives to visit tomorrow and we also have to video chat my grandparents. I'm sorry if this is troublesome to you,”

“It’s fine, lovie. I’m so glad to be spending this with you,”

---

Happy Lunar New Year to anyone who celebrates it.

Since it’s Chinese New Year is today (timezone) I thought it would be nice to write about Harry spending time with Y/N during this occasion.

Let me know if you like it! Requests are open :) 

[diregate]

Tarot Reading Commissions now up

So after much thought and even much much more hesitation (and a lot of positive motivation by a lot of people), I’ve decided to open up tarot reading commissions. This will serve as a way to keep myself stable, both mentally and financially, as I am staying by myself while studying in university. The amount I get from doing this will tend towards alleviating costs of living (this place doesn’t come with a kitchen, so most of my foods are instant foods/takeouts) and purchasing of study materials if the need arises.

Stuffing everything below the read-more, because this post is getting long.

Disclaimers on tarot reading: I do not read minds or the future, the cards do not read minds or the future. 

I personally have no experience in doing fortune spreads e.g. Twelvesmoon spread (or any equivalent that involves ‘how will this month of the year look like’, that’s for horoscopes). If you really want to, I won’t say no, but just take it with a huge grain of salt, since even I don’t really trust those. 

There are possibilities when my reads are completely off, and if I am, I apologize. I cannot agree on refunds, but I will however leave the commissioner to decide to pay before or after a reading session.

What can I do for you?

I have two versions of reads to offer to people who are interested: Simple and Complex spreads.

The simple spreads are, well, simple. They are fast, elegant and great if you want to skip out on the unnecessary clutter that comes with reading tarots. The simple spreads I offer usually use only 2-4 cards. If we are reading real-time (I’ll come to this point later), it may take about 5-10 minutes from shuffling.

For simple spreads, you ask me what you are looking for. If you have a particular spread you would like to choose for me to use, let me know as well. These questions can be specific or vague, but being more specific helps in the reading, and deciding the spread to use.

The complex spreads are a little different. In real-time reading, this can take minimally 30 minutes for me to finish reading it all out to you. The spread takes at least 5 cards (as of now, I do not have spreads that exceed 9 cards). If you want your best buck for bite, have been puzzling between several problems, or just really like to see how people read tarots, I recommend this way. I’ve done a decent number of these reads for others.

With these kinds of spreads, I ask you a few short questions, that you can answer with a few words. The first question will always be somewhere along the lines of “Are your problems rooted in the past, or are you more worried of the future consequences?”, and subsequent questions will be adjusted from there. I try my best not to use default lines, so that everyone’s experience can be unique.

How can I do reads for you?

I will offer my Discord to people who are buying a read. Alternatively, Tumblr messenger is also a way to reach for me whether you want to have me post the read there, or if you would like to find me for other reasons. Email is fine too, but only through requests. There are two main methods to how we can arrange this, depending if timezone permits.

Real-time Read: This will be tricky, but more often than not I prefer this style of reading. I say this is tricky because I live in GMT+8 timezone with full time undergraduate studies. (My) Weekends are also off limits for this style of commissions in general due to personal reasons. For a rough gauge, midnight PDT = 3 PM GMT+8.

All reads in this format can be done over iM, and while I do support voice, I have a preference not to as my place can get noisy and disruptive.

Post-read Draft: Easier to handle, especially if time does not permit an arrangement between us. I do the read request, then give you a full script of what I’ve read, through iM or a PDF document sent through email. Most simple spreads can fall under this category, as it’s a much lower density of words and makes for an easy ‘morning coffee’, so to say.

For both, clarifying on certain meanings can be done, just ask me about it.

What are the costs of the commission?

Simple spreads cost 5 USD, while complex spreads cost 15 USD. Prices can be negotiated if needed.

Real-time reads and post-read drafts do not affect prices. Nor do the decks I use. Clarification of reads do not cost anything as well. 

Payment can be done before or after the reading session. Tips are also welcome. Most payments would be done through Paypal.

What cards do I use?

For those interested, I use the Lost Tarot of Nostradamus deck, and the Steampunk deck. I am also currently learning on using the Tyrian Tarot deck as a support deck. As such, most of my spreads come from these three, though I also experiment and invent custom-tailored spreads for some more specific requests. 

I’m unfortunately not putting links in, in case the post disappears because of Tumblr algorithms, but they should come up easily in searches.

For those who are interested, I implore you to ask; for those who would like to commission me, I thank you for it; for those who are taking a passing glance, I’d enjoy if you spread the word. 

[shadowreine]

The Art of Falling in Love - Chapter 4

Fandom: Mystic Messenger

Pairing: V x MC (reader/custom MC)

Chapter Summary: In which MC has a chat with some of the boys.

Note: Finally an update! October was kind of a busy/stressful month, so I apologize for the wait. Thanks so much to everyone who’s been reading/liking/commenting on this fic so far. It means a lot to me. <3

Chapter 4: Candid

Once you returned to your apartment after dinner, you were ready to finally collapse into your bed and sleep, especially after such a long, eventful day. However, sleep eluded you. You lay wide awake, tossing and turning, your mind running at a million miles a second. You thought about the party, what went well and what didn’t, and what suggestions for improvements you could posit to RFA. You thought about the GCA and made a mental checklist of all the paperwork you had to submit in order to obtain a visa for working abroad…which brought to mind the fact that even before you could start that step in the process, you needed to stop procrastinating on working on your lesson plans for the upcoming semester—which was two weeks away, no less—and you needed to do a good job. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be needing a work visa at all. You let out a groan in the darkness of your bedroom, knowing that these anxious thoughts would never let you rest.

Ever since Hana had suggested your class could focus on art this semester, you couldn’t shake the idea. It was a good idea, and you were very low on ideas at the moment. The only problem was that you never really considered art as one of your strong suits, so you didn’t think you could excel at teaching it… But Hana was right, children love doing art. Maybe she was also right about asking Jihyun for a little help…

“Jihyun, Jihyun…” you said out loud, testing out the name. “Jihyun…”

V was a punchy name, short and straightforward. It was a good moniker for a hip photographer. But Jihyun was soft, almost a whisper, a pleasant sound sliding off the tip of your tongue. Now that you thought about it, it suited him better than V ever did.

Part of you regretted declining his offer to have dinner with him because you didn’t know when you’d have the chance to see him in person again. You imagined he’d be busy trying to get resettled into the city. He’d likely want to find a new place to stay. Maybe he wanted to meet up with others he might’ve lost contact with. He’d probably be caught up doing his own thing for a while, and you’d rejected your only chance to catch up with him.

Though, you couldn’t have just canceled on Hana. You had responsibilities, you had your own life. You had to make compromises. Wasn’t that adulthood? You couldn’t just drop everything because someone from your past decided to turn up again.

But… you just really wanted to see him.

You let out a sigh and turned onto your side, frustrated that your thoughts were keeping you awake. You grabbed your phone from the nightstand and checked the time. It was half past midnight.

Might as well check the messenger, you thought. Throughout the evening you’d received RFA app notifications, but you hadn’t been able to check any before now. Opening the app, you logged in and read the past chat logs. Only Zen and Yoosung had been there. Zen had entered the chatroom sometime after he finished his show, and Yoosung was taking a break from LOLOL. Zen told Yoosung about how Jaehee had waited for him outside the backstage door with her girlfriend Soomi (along with a dozen other rabid fangirls clamoring for his attention), and he sent a selfie of the three of them. Zen was the focus of the picture, of course, while Jaehee and Soomi stood together behind him, leaning so that they were in frame. This was the first time you saw what Soomi looked like. She was cute and petite, her blonde hair cropped short in a stylish bob. Jaehee and Soomi had matching poses, both winking at the camera and holding up their hands in a peace sign. They looked like they were having a great time, and you couldn’t feel happier for them.

Zen and Yoosung then spent the rest of the chat lamenting how much they wished they had girlfriends too and feeling sorry for themselves. Your eyes glazed over as you scrolled to the bottom of the chat. By now you knew very well how much the RFA boys, except perhaps Jumin, regretted the lack of romance in their lives. Sometimes it was cute that they had so much love in their hearts that they wanted to share it with someone, but more often than not, it got repetitive and eye-roll inducing, so much that you wished they could just find someone already so they could stop moaning about it.

Once you reached the bottom of the chat, you logged out to the main user interface to check everyone’s status updates. As you looked at the row of user icons, you started to feel like something was missing. The icons felt too big, as if there could be room to fit one more comfortably among them.

Then you realized why: Jihyun’s icon was missing. It had been missing for a long time, actually, but now that he was back in the country, it felt wrong not to have him in the messenger.

After Jihyun left to go overseas, Jumin asked Seven to revoke his access for security purposes. He wouldn’t have had time to log into the messenger on his travels anyway, so there’d been no point in keeping his profile active. Even though you were about to travel abroad yourself, you couldn’t see yourself staying away from the messenger for too long. RFA had become like family to you, and you’d want to keep in touch no matter how far away you went.

You wondered if Jihyun still had the same phone he used two years ago, or if he’d deactivated his service altogether. Come to think of it, since he wasn’t on the messenger, you realized you had no way of contacting him.

A window popped up on your phone screen indicating that a new chatroom had been opened. You looked at the time–it was almost one o’clock in the morning. Who could be online at this hour?

You entered the chatroom. Seven greeted you.

707: Hello, pretty lady!

MC: Seven, you’re still awake.

707: Yup. So are you, I see.

MC: Can’t sleep.

707: Me neither. Still reeling from the high of the party?

MC: lol sort of. I got a lot on my mind right now. How was your evening?

707: Fine fine. It was pretty good actually!

He sent the emoji of him excitedly shouting “yahoo!”

MC: Good day at work?

707: Yup! I was super productive. Got everything done in record time… I see Zen and Yoosung are complaining about being single again. SMH. They’re just jealous that Jaehee has more game than them.

You laughed out loud. Sick burn, Seven.

MC: You’re not wrong, lol. Jaehee can be very sweet and charming when she has the chance to relax every once in a while. I’m happy that she and Soomi found each other.

707: They wouldn’t have met each other if you didn’t push Jumin to give Jaehee a vacation.

MC: Yeah… That’s true…

As if summoned, Jumin Han entered the chatroom.

707: WHOA that’s creepy, dude.

Jumin Han: What are you talking about? Good evening, MC.

MC: haha hey Jumin...that is a little creepy.

Jumin Han: ?

707: We were just talking about you.

Jumin Han: I see. I just read the log.

MC: I think you’ve read enough books on witchcraft that you’re starting to become a witch yourself, Jumin. Speak of the devil, and all that.

707: Hehe where’s your broom, witch boy?

You didn’t ask Jumin what he was doing up so late because he was always awake at this hour, either spending time with Elizabeth the 3rd or doing business with investors and companies in different timezones. On the rare occasion that you had a bout of insomnia, he would be in the chatroom, keeping you company until you finally fell asleep.

Jumin Han: Will Yoosung and Zen ever get tired of complaining about not having significant others?

MC: Probably not. Though, I feel like once they do get girlfriends, that’s all they’ll talk about on here.

Jumin Han: You’re probably right. I don’t know which is worse.

707: Jaehee is pretty modest about her relationship. They should act like her! Speaking of Jaehee, as I was saying before Jumin interrupted us with his creepy black magic, I think Jaehee has you to thank for meeting Soomi, MC.

MC: Oh, that’s more credit than I deserve. I just yelled at Jumin.

707: lmao you did yell at him

Well, you had typed in all caps in the chatroom, which was just as good as yelling. A few months ago, Jumin had swamped Jaehee with so much work that Jaehee broke down crying on the phone with you. You felt so awful and helpless at first, but after you did your best to console her and hung up, you decided that the only way to fix the problem was to go straight to the source.

Jumin was unreceptive to your suggestion at first, which you’d expected, but once you laid out all the reasons why it was a good idea to give her a break and why she deserved one, his cold, distant attitude started to irritate you. You tried to be civil, but the man was as stubborn as a mule sometimes. So you snapped and capslocked on him. Then once you said your piece, without warning, you logged out of the chatroom and called his phone to tell him off some more.

Jumin Han: I’ll admit I’ve never been yelled at like that before.

MC: I didn’t *yell*.

Jumin Han: You gave me a very stern lecture.

MC: Well, Zen yells at you on here all the time.

Jumin Han: I correct my previous statement—I’ve never been yelled at like that by someone whom I respect.

You knew that was high praise coming from someone like Jumin Han. Sometimes you couldn’t help but have the utmost respect for him too. After the incident, you learned that Jumin had been so stressed due to his father’s current romantic engagements and the prolonged absence of his best friend, and he had taken it out on his assistant. You felt bad for yelling at him, and you apologized to him personally on the phone the next day.

After that, he decided to give Jaehee three weeks of vacation. Jaehee was resistant at first, but you convinced her to take the offer. She spent those weeks off the messenger and met Soomi at one of her favorite coffee shops downtown. They hit it off rather easily, and the rest was history.

Jumin Han: Anyway, I am glad that Jaehee has found someone she cares about deeply. It seems to have made her more motivated in her work.

707: …

MC: sigh

Jumin Han: What? It’s true.

707: Only you would make something that’s supposed to be romantic into something totally not;;

Jumin Han: I don’t understand romantic relationships myself, so I see no point in commenting on it.

MC: I guess I can understand where you’re coming from. I’ve had enough of talking about romance for one evening.

707: Oh?

Seven sent his heart eyes emoji.

707: Who else are you talking about romance with, MC?

He sent the same emoji again.

“Oh crap,” you said to your screen. Suddenly the whole awkward conversation you had with Hana came back to you. You couldn’t very well tell Seven or Jumin that you and Hana had talked about Jihyun. You had to play it cool.

MC: Oh… I just had dinner with Hana tonight. She told me all about her new boyfriend.

Seven sent his gasping emoji.

707: The hot new actor Hojin Park! He and Hana were spotted smooching down in the Maldives last week!

Again with his heart eyes emoji.

MC: …Are you stalking my best friend, Seven?

707: It’s not stalking when paparazzi pictures of them are posted on every celeb gossip site!

MC: I am not going to talk gossip about my own friend. If I did, you’d probably try leaking it to the media for a quick buck.

707: They pay a lot of money for ~insider info~ you know.

You sent an emoji that depicted you giving a very unamused side-eye.

707: Fine, fine. I won’t ask about Hana’s love life. You need to lighten up, MC. Maybe you need a l-o-v-e interest of your own, eh?

The heart eyes. Again. You dropped your head into your hand. Why was everyone so hung up on romance this evening? You needed a change of subject, quick.

Thankfully, Jumin seemed to have the same idea.

Jumin Han: I think this conversation has derailed quite a bit.

MC: Thank you! Can we talk about something else, pls?

Jumin Han: I actually came onto the messenger to make a request of you, Seven.

707: Hmm, ok. What is it?

Jumin Han: I’d like you to grant Jihyun access to the messenger again.

Your phone almost slipped out of your hand.

Jihyun...on the messenger again? Weren’t you just thinking about that only minutes ago?

MC: Oh?

707: Oh, I didn’t even think of that. Does he want to get back on?

Jumin Han: No, but I imagine he’d like to be, once he gets a new phone, that is. He deactivated his old phone some time ago, and he needs to get another one first. I’ll pass on the information once it’s available.

707: …Do you think it’s a good idea?

Seven’s question took you aback. Why wouldn’t it be a good idea? You asked him what he meant.

707: …never mind. It’s nothing. When he gets a new phone, let me know, and I’ll add him back onto the messenger.

You didn’t know what to say. Where had his sudden hesitance come from? You would have thought Seven would be one of the more enthusiastic about his return. You remember Seven once telling you that he considered Jihyun almost like a father to him despite their relative close age gap. He trusted him more than anyone. In fact, back when you first met the RFA, you noticed there were secrets that Seven and Jihyun had kept between only them. Seven had come to Jihyun’s rescue at Mint Eye, after all.

...That was two years ago, though. The more you thought about it now, the more you realized that since then, Seven hadn’t spoken much about Jihyun at all. He certainly never brought him up in the chats of his own volition, and whenever someone else would mention him, he didn’t have much to say.

But he seemed happy to see Jihyun at the party earlier, didn’t he? Well, now that you thought about it, perhaps he wasn’t so much happy as he was shocked and…confused. Almost as if he had truly believed he never would see his old mentor ever again.

“We have a lot to catch up on, I think,” Jihyun had said. And Seven had agreed.

There was something tense about the exchange, some underlying thoughts and feelings that you couldn’t begin to decipher. That must have been what bothered Seven now. What was the missing link between them?

MC: You ok, Seven? You sound weird.

707: I’m fine. Gotta go, though. Long day.

He signed out of the chatroom before you could type another message.

Jumin Han: …

MC: Is it just me, or did something sound off about him? Does Seven not want Jihyun back on here?

Jumin Han: He seemed hesitant about it at the very least.

MC: Why? You don’t think it’s because he doesn’t trust Jihyun, do you? I know he had trouble with keeping secrets from everyone, even to Seven, but he just doesn’t seem like that kind of person anymore…

You weren’t sure if that were entirely true, but everything you knew about what he’d gone through seemed to indicate that Jihyun had had enough secrecy for one lifetime. The man you saw at the party didn’t look like someone who would harbor any secrets.

Jumin Han: I agree. I’ve been with him all evening, and he is definitely changed.

MC: …wait. You’ve been hanging out with Jihyun?

Jumin Han: Yes, he’s with me right now.

“What?” you said aloud. Jumin had been chatting with you all this time and Jihyun was with him?

MC: Really? Where are you?

Jumin Han: At my penthouse. I invited him over as a guest, since he currently has nowhere to stay.

You were typing to ask what he was doing, but your fingers froze over the screen when a picture popped up in the chat.

This time, your phone actually did fall out of your hands...and landed right onto your face, since you were lying in bed. You let out a pained shriek and massaged your nose. Then you jolted up into a sitting position and looked back at your phone.

Jihyun was in the photo. He was standing next to the dining table, across from where Jumin seemed to be sitting. He was pouring himself a glass of red wine. You could tell it was a candid picture because Jihyun’s eyes appeared as though he’d looked into the camera just as it was being taken, his brows raised in a half-expression of surprise. It was cute, actually. But that wasn’t what got your attention.

What got your attention was the fact that his hair was wet, sticking to the left side of his face. He had a towel draped over his shoulders, and he wore gray lounge pants and a white tank top...

MC: …

Jumin Han: He just got out of the shower. He’s jet lagged, so that’s why he’s still awake, if you were wondering.

You were actually wondering why his bare arms looked appealingly firm and smooth, and why his tank top clung so tightly to his slender but lean torso…but you weren’t going to type that.

MC: Um, thanks for the pic haha

Jumin Han: I thought I should prove to you he was in fact here.

MC: You didn’t need to do that lol. I believed you.

Jumin Han: He’s asking me who I sent the photo to.

MC: Oh...what did you tell him?

Jumin Han: You.

You blushed. Should you take a selfie of yourself just to make it fair? You couldn’t do that. You probably looked like a mess after tossing and turning in bed for a few hours… Wait, why did you care what you looked like? You’d sent less than flattering pictures of yourself through the messenger before.

Jumin Han: I need to go. Elizabeth the 3rd should be put to bed soon, and I’m going to keep Jihyun company.

MC: Okay. Tell Elizabeth the 3rd hello for me.

You debated whether you should add another line. Oh, why not?

MC: ...and Jihyun, too.

Jumin Han: Will do. Goodnight.

Jumin logged out, and so did you. You lingered in the main UI a little while longer, wondering what Jumin and Jihyun were up to right now, what they were talking about. Jumin must have liked having the chance to catch up with his best friend, especially considering how much you knew he’d missed him and worried after him since he left. You could only hope you got your chance, too.

You went into the messenger’s photo folders. Even though Seven had taken away Jihyun’s access to the app, he kept his photo folder untouched. You opened it and looked at the newest picture of him. Out of curiosity, you told yourself. Once it expanded across your screen, your heart did a flip in your chest, which was a sensation that utterly confused you. It wasn’t as if you weren’t used to being friends with so many pretty people. Part of the reason why it was so easy for you to initially believe that the RFA were AIs in a dating simulator was because they were all too good-looking to be real. Even now, you would catch yourself admiring just how beautiful Zen looked in his selfies, how well Jumin wore his business suits, how cute Yoosung and Seven were in an adorably nerdy way. Even Jaehee was exceptionally gorgeous.

Yet somehow none of them made you react the way you reacted to this picture of Jihyun. What was happening?

You reasoned it was because you’d never seen him like this. So candid, so...underdressed. You felt as if you shouldn’t be even be looking at it.

Get a grip, MC.

You exited out of the app, tossed your phone onto your comforter, and collapsed onto your pillow, trying desperately to wipe the image out of your mind so you could finally, finally, get to sleep.

[aarontveit]

AT ALL MY CANADIANS LIVING IN ONTARIO THAT ARE ELIGIBLE TO VOTE (OR 18+):

ELECTION DAY IS ON JUNE 7TH AND IT'S BETWEEN ANDREA HORWATH (NDP) AND DOUG FORD (CP). PLEASE MAKE SURE YOU GO OUT AND VOTE FOR THE NDP (NEW DEMOCRATIC PARTY) AND SUPPORT ANDREA HORWATH. PLEASE STOP VOTING FOR THE LIBERALS AND/OR CONSERVATIVES.

PLEASE VOTE.

IF DOUG FORD BECOMES THE NEXT PREMIER OF ONTARIO, HE ENVISIONS AN ONTARIO WHERE PRIDE IS BANNED AND TRANS PEOPLE DON'T EXIST. BLACK LIVES DO NOT MATTER TO THIS MAN. IF YOU NEED TO PROPERLY UNDERSTAND, UNDERSTAND THIS: DOUG FORD IS CANADA'S TRUMP.

I apologize for all the caps lock. I actually volunteer for the NDP party in South York/Weston full time and I know that my representative, Faisal Hassan, is going to win. I also know that in London, the NDP is going to win by a landslide, freeing that city of a terrible, terrible person from the Liberal party.

PLEASE VOTE.

Andrea is THE MOST LEGIT POLITICIAN WE'RE GOING TO GET and you should have been voting for the NDP this whole time. For proper history on this political party, please look up the man who was running them before; Jack Layton. He passed due to illness and he worked hard for his country until his dying breath. He was what a political leader should have been. We didn't deserve him. I remember attending his funeral in Toronto. It was an honour.

I'm on my phone and can't link it, but check out the NDP's site if you'd like. Also, until Wednesday at midnight (which timezone I don't know), a number of their donors are matching $3+ donations made between (I don't know when it started but it was like a couple or more weeks ago?) and Wednesday night at midnight to help fund their campaign and vision.

PLEASE VOTE.

The NDP has also acknowledged many things that other parties both past and present refuse to admit to. They are willing to acknowledge their faults and try to do better by their people. I'm twenty eight years old and maybe I've overlooked or missed some wrong doings by this party, and you would be right to call me out. I've been following this party since I could practically eat paste and understand "democracy" (I was a late bloomer).

However, if I've done this, then it means we now have to pick the lesser of two evils and that, in this moment is Andrea Horwath with the NDP. When June 7th rolls around, PLEASE VOTE. Don't decide to vote for someone else. Don't decide to sit it out. Don't deny yourself registration at a nearby polling station. Don't take away your ability to help yourself and to help other people around you; POC, lgbtq+, all these beautiful communities, these minorities. Don't let them suffer due to willful ignorance when the power was in your hands to make a difference.

One vote might not seem like a lot to you, but when everyone is thinking "it's just one vote," then it becomes more of a problem then we care to admit.

[pop-punklouis]

Hi Hope!

Happy happy birthday!! IDK if it's still your birthday, bc it is in my timezone and that's all I think I'm right on, but still. I'm a little sick so I only got round to this now 😭 I hope you have/had a wonderful day and I hope the year ahead brings you the bestest things and everything you can dream of 💞 and I definitely hope you find time to relax not just in this holiday season but throughout the upcoming year.

Re: shows. I see your point, and I do think it was kinda random that suddenly everything in the upside down is connected to ONE villain and it's a little complicated trying to make that connection. But I also kinda liked finding that out and spiraling over it what can I say I'm easy to please 😩 HOWEVER I think they could've done more with the mind flayer and esp the connection to Will like he deserves his moment I hate how they kinda just dropped it and I'm begging next season to revisit it. Season 2 was TOP TIER sigh.

Re: degree. As Louis said, faith in the future, y'know? I'm sure things will fall into place for you even though the uncertainty can be very scary. I FEEL you with the aspiring to me a mountain mama thing pls I keep saying I wanna disappear to like a remote island or something and live in peace 😩

Nooo that sounds so chaotic rip I hope your gifts are arriving in time etc some of my stuff is yet to come and I've just accepted my fate 💀 and we have a fake tree, we bought a gorgeous new one this time, chucked the old one. Never had a real tree :( so wouldn't know what it's like but it sucks that you couldn't get a real one this time especially when you're used to having one always :(

Re: color palette. Are you me?? Those are deadass the colors I'd pick for me too. I love earthy tones, I love all shades of green, and mauve, maroons. But also love muted shades, like pastels but with that grey tinge so it's even duller idk it's very calming to me.

Question for the day: who would you say inspires you?

Hope you have a wonderful day/night love ♥️

~🌱

HELLO BABE so sorry i’m late answering this rip it’s been….. so hectic the past few days 💀 but i’m finally free so!

thank you for the birthday wishes means a lot hope youve been well! does it get cold where you live? it’s freezing here in georgia. the coldest it’s been in years like 9 degrees or something and we’re all just bundled up on the couch watching christmas movies lol

re: shows: PLEASE season 2 will always have my heart and i’m hoping they give will the main character energy he so rightfully deserves in the final season and end with him conquering the upside down as a full circle thing 👐🏼

and oooo that sounds nice. i’ve gotten used to our fake tree and the lights that came with it have a remote where you can change them and it’s nice and soft to just sit and watch ✨ are you doing anything tomorrow for christmas with your family? we’re having a dinner but otherwise it’s going to be pretty relaxed. might get waffle house for breakfast with my dad per tradition!

re: color palettes: pls it just means we have taste 💅🏼 the best color palettes to gravitate towards if i must say so myself 👐🏼 and ooo the grey with the pastels does feel more calming i agree

hmm what inspires me? i think my younger self. little me. she is what has driven my choices and behavior and just how i live life the past few years. i live for her. how about you? 💕

with it being officially midnight here: hope you have a very happy and warm christmas love u holiday pal!!! 💋

[hetbigbang]

D-DAY IS HERE

IT'S DEADLINE DAY!!

Art and Fics Due - September 26th, 11:59 PM (Midnight) PST (here is a timezone converter.) ~ We can't wait to see what you all have created and can't wait to share it with everyone! IMPORTANT NOTE: I will be sending out emails to our artists who were willing to pinch hit art, as we have one outstanding art claim, and we may delay Debut Day if it is not picked up. (There may also be a slight delay because the mods are sick and in school, but we are doing our best not to let that happen!) POSTING: In case you need a hand with posting or last minute questions, check under the cut for a rundown on how to post your final works to the 2018 Collection.

POSTING REQUIREMENTS Where do we post our completed fics? We are using AO3 collections, with the deadline for submission as September 26th, and the reveal date of October 1st. You can post them up early!! Post them up now, if you want! You can also post your fics anywhere else you like, just don't post them anywhere before the Debut Date. Everyone who has signed up for this challenge should have an AO3 account, but if you don't, you can still sign up. You can ask a friend for an invite code, or you can request from A03 here or at

ao3_invitecodes. If you are unfamiliar with it, here is the FAQ of AO3. Do not publish your fic for everyone to see at AO3. Instead, submit it for our 2018 collection. Only the author of a work can add it to a collection, and then the mods approve it and we'll reveal it on the Debut Date. Once you've done that, we are also asking you to drop an email to thehetbigbang [at] gmail dot com when you submit your work to A03, with the following information: Email Subject Line: (Fic or Art Submission. YOUR NAME.)

AO3 Name/LJ Name: (both) Fandom: Pairing: Artwork or Fic: (artwork for "Title of Fic, by Author") or (Fic: "Title, rating, and word count. Big Bang or Little Bang.") Summary: (if applicable.)

Further Posting guidelines below. (The pics used are for the old 2012 submissions, but just mentally adjust for 2018.) 1. Sign up for A03. You can ask a friend for an invite code, or you can request from A03 here or at

ao3_invitecodes. 2. DO NOT POST YOUR FICS/ARTS SO THAT THE GENERAL PUBLIC CAN SEE THEM. Double check after posting to make sure it doesn't get posted to the general audience. If it does, delete the work and start over. Instead, you need to allow the mods to collect your fic/arts so that we can reveal everything together on October 1st. Go here, to the 2018 Het Big Bang Collection, and go the "Post to Collection" button in the top right corner. The collection is currently open, moderated and unrevealed.

This will bring you to the normal template where you submit your fic/artwork. In the first block, you fill out all the tags: fandom, warnings, ratings, characters, pairings, additional tags, etc. In the second block, you fill out the preface information, including title, summary, and author's notes. 2a. For Artist: your summary line should include your author's name and the title of their story (if you know it). 3. In the third block, for "Associations" make sure the line for "Post to Collections/Challenges" lists "Het_Big_Little_Bang_Challenge_2018."

3a. For Artists: the next line, "Gift this work to:" should be filled out as well. Artist, you know your Author's A03 name, which should have been provided to you through your emails. If for some reason it was not, please contact your authors and get this name from them. Fill in the "Gift this work to:" line with your author's name. That will link your artwork to them. After the submissions have gone live on the Debut Date, we would like you to go back and edit your submission to add in a link to the specific story you created your artwork for. But until the entire big bang goes public, the main way you'll attach your artwork to the piece will be by identifying the author through gifting. When you finally get the chance to link to the story, edit your submission and use the HTLM coding: <*a href="INSERT THE URL HERE">Title, by Author. (Remove the *) You can put this in your author's note or summary. 3b. For Authors: After the submissions have gone live on the Debut Date, we would need you to go back and edit your submission to add in a link to the specific artwork that was created for your story. You don't have to "Gift this work to:" to the artist, but it'd be neat if you wanted to do so. When you finally get the chance to link to the artwork, edit your submission and use the HTLM coding: <*a href="INSERT THE URL HERE">Title, by Artist. (Remove the *) You can put this in your author's note or summary. 4. Formatting and coding guidelines are important. 4a. For Artists: AO3 video embeds are working from Youtube, Vimeo, blip.tv, Dailymotion, Viddler, Metacafe, and 4shared. So if you have a video, you upload it to Youtube for example, and then embed into an AO3 post. For images like artwork and icons and banners and cover art, use the <*img src="INSERT YOUR URL HERE"> HTML coding (remove the *). You can first upload your images at Tinypic or imgbox or a similar image hosting website, and then make an A03 post with the HTML coding. (*NOTE: As of 2017, photobucket no longers allows you to post and link without paying big bucks, so avoid photobucket.) 5. Submit your fic/artwork. You need to make sure when you hit "Post" that you see this text at the top of the resulting page:

"This work is part of an ongoing challenge and will be revealed soon! You can find details here: Het Big/Little Bang Challenge 2018"

6. Now, your fic should NOT be displayed to the general audience. It might not even show up on your dash, but fear not. You can still edit, add new chapters, mess around with it to your heart's content. We, the mods, unfortunately do not have access to your story. We cannot tell if it is properly formatted or not. THIS IS FRUSTRATING, but there's nothing we can do about it. We can only see your name. All works are titled "Mystery Works" until we reveal the entire big bang. So, please make sure your own fic is properly formatted. If you need to edit your fic, login and go to your dashboard. Go to the "Edit Works" button in the top right corner. From there, you can edit your works.

A03 will require you to format a header with all regular information on it. Remember to properly tag your works, including appropriate warnings. Both HTML and Rich Text are supported, and you can edit/delete, have multiple chapters, etc... 1. The Rich Text Editor lets you add formatting, links and pictures to text without using HTML tags. It also has an option for pasting from Word which will preserve some of your Word formatting, although please note that this is buggy. The Rich Text Editor is only available for your work text. 2. The HTML editor allows you to change the look of your text with HTML tags. It can be used in any place you can submit text, although some fields permit only a small subsection of allowed tags. You can see a full list of the allowed HTML on the Archive FAQ, but the standard HTML tags is as follows: b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, datetime, div, dl, dt, em, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, height, hr, href, i, img, ins, small, span, src, strike, strong, sub, sup, table, u, and more. Also, a few years ago,

anr was a saint and provided you with a post that explained "how to format a fic for posting in less than 30 seconds no matter the story length or amount of formatting" trick. The mods won't be overly picky about formatting. I'd prefer for all dividers and scene breaks to use <*hr> (remove the *) which creates a horizontal line that serves perfectly as a scene break. However, that's optional. You choose your own way to format. Other optional suggestions, just for uniformity sake's: How do I do Chapter Titles: Bold 'em. How do I timestamp and do locations: Italicize the dates and locations. How do I do subtitle stuff: Italicize it. There is only one major fail regarding format, and that has to do with paragraphs breaks. There must be a full line break between paragraphs. Example of doing it wrong:

Chapter One: The Invasion March 6, 2005 - The City of Atlantis Elizabeth ducked quickly behind a console and attempted to catch her breath. A flush of pink colored her cheeks and a thin sheen of sweat had appeared on her brow. If the situation weren't so dire, John would have been turned on. As it was, however, he couldn't give it much thought as he had to focus on the batch of Ancient zombies that were slowly staggering in through the Stargate. "At least they can't run," he offered lamely. Elizabeth spared him a glare. "Why can't they run?" "I don't know." John shrugged. "But they never seem to run. They always lurch. Maybe when they're brought back to life they don't get knees?"

Example of doing it right:

Chapter Two: Ancient Ex-Girlfriends Yes, They're Zombies Too Elizabeth peeked around the consol. "Oh, my god," she breathed. "Is that--" "Chaya?!" John squeaked. "Talk about creepy ex-girlfriends." Rodney scrunched his nose. "She doesn't look good in green." John cringed and crouched down lower. "Do you think she's their leader?" Elizabeth looked thoughtful. "Well, this may be better for us." She narrowed her eyes at John. "We can give them you in trade for a cease fire--" Something caught her attention behind John and she broke off. "No, wait. Look to the left! That's... oh, god, John. That's Teer!" John and Rodney stared in disbelief. "Damn you, Kirk!" Rodney groused, and hit John upside the head. "We're going to be killed by a legion of your dead ex-girlfriends!" "Okay, everybody calm down," John soothed. "Let's not overreact and go blaming--" "Hey, look, your ex-wife!" "What?!!"

Grammar and Spelling fail: If your fic doesn't look beta'ed, we will call you on it, which will create an AWKWARD situation for both of us. Having a beta is a REQUIREMENT. Grammar, spelling, proper paragraph structure, etc... these are all REQUIREMENTS. You need to give your beta ample opportunity to go over your fic for mistakes and edits, so remember to factor that into your deadline. Don't have a beta? Check out this post!

Can I post it to my journal a few days early to show my friends? No. The first time you show your fic for this big bang must be on Debut Day, on this comm. Mods will handle the revealing details. There will be more posts on that to come. Once the Big Bang collection goes live on Oct 1, feel free to post your stuff wherever. Also, please remember that extensions for final fic and art submissions will not be granted. Please make sure your stories and art are submitted no later than September 26th. If you absolutely cannot make it, contact a mod immediately - either via email at thehetbigbang [at] gmail.com, or on the Page-A-Mod post, or PM

red_b_rackham or

traycer_. Lastly, remember if you need some to cry, scream, flail, yell triumphantly, encourage, cheerlead, etc, don't hesitate to check out the support comm and throw up some posts for each other!

YOU'RE ALMOST THERE!!

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[myselfinserts]

‘ what do you want for breakfast? ‘

Milo Ewart-Falkvar’s daily routine began every morning athalf past four. He woke up, showered, and dressed himself in the suit of theday. He had a different one for each day, with other variants for whateveroccasion may present itself. Today was a Monday. The castle was closed to thepublic with guests coming on the ship later that afternoon around three. Sotoday, he wore the more formal looking Estmund Royal Staff Uniform. He’dalready sent out the reminders to everyone both one day and one week beforehand, so everyone should be prepared.

If not, he’ll ensure they will be.

As he adjusted the Royal Star on his cravat, he repeated hismorning mantra that he said every day since he’d started work in the castle as a young boy. Everymorning, he’d recite his name, his rank, and his quirk. It helped him adapt tochange and prepare his composure.

“My name is Milo Oskari Ewart-Falkvar. I am the Chiefof Staff, Majordomo, and Royal Advisor to His Majesty King Davis Gorlois Søren Sidero. Diplomatic Ambassador to the United Kingdom onbehalf of my country and my King, Head Chairman of the Estmund HistoricalSociety, and Administrative Director for Estmund Academy for Domestic Workers.My quirk ‘Donor’ allows me to be a 'fairy godmother’ of sorts to one charge ofmy choosing, allowing me to provide for them to the best of my ability byproviding them with gifts, tasks, and assistance whenever and wherever needarises. Gifts, however, vanish at midnight in whatever timezone I’m in.”

Once his wake up routine was completed, bed made and all, hehurried out of the room and down to the kitchens to join the morning staff forthe daily breakfast meeting, which started at half past five. There, everyonewas inspected, fed, and reminded of the morning duties. Everyone was soproficient, they did not need to worry about running behind schedule. By six onthe dot, everyone was off to work and Milo was able to head up to the king’sroom. Quietly, he went in, opened the curtains, and headed over to the bed.

“Good morning, my King,” he greeted, gently shakinghim awake. “It’s time to wake up.”

“Mhmh, don’t wanna,” Davis grumbled, burying his face into the pillow. “It’stoo early to be a people.”

Milo let out a gentle chortle. “Come now, my King. It’stime to wake up. You have to attend to morning duties, speak to Patricio this afternoon, and Monsieur Allardwill be arriving this evening for your requests.”

“Mh, I suppose I must people today then.” Slowly,Davis sat up, his long blue hair sticking out at every angle in curls andcrinkles. “What’s my morning look like, Milo?”

“To start,” he said, “what do you want forbreakfast?”

The king tilted his head in thought, his gaze distant as hetried to shake the exhaustion. “What is on today’s breakfast menu?”

“A selection of breads such as brioche, baguette, orcroisants that can be topped with your choice of butter, jams, or today’sraspberry-chocolate spread. For drinks there will be tea, coffee, chocolatemilk, and orange juice available for your choosing. And once you’ve finishedthose, you have the choice of either fromage blanc or a fruit compote.”

“Brioche, rose jam, and hot chocolate. I’ll go withfromage blanc with fruit as well, please.”

Milo nodded. “I’ll message the staff right away.”He wandered over to the closet, selecting the maroon suit with the red tie ashe sent the request to the kitchens. “Once you’re done with breakfast, youhave a meeting with the head of the Education Bureau and following that, abrief tutoring session with Madam Raylene to improve your French.”

“Right, right. Of course.” Davis let out a yawn,rubbing the sleep from his eyes as he tossed the blanket off. “And naptime is when again?”

The butler rolled his eyes, smiling affectionately as hebrought out the hairbrush. “Come now, sir, you’re well old enough to knowthat nap time isn’t until after your afternoon constitutional. Have to walkafter lunch for your health.”

This was the same song and dance they had every Monday sincethe King was a young lad. Most days he was more of a father than King Søren was, trying his best to raise the boy so that he would not growinto a cold, tactical ruler lacking in empathy and compassion. He’d watched foryears as this tiny tot grew into the Crazed Cat King of Estmund, first of hiskind. And the island had been the wealthiest and happiest it had ever been.Whenever Milo looked into the snow white eyes of the King, he couldn’t help butfeel pride.

“Alright, my King,” hesighed. “Come here and we’ll tie your hair back for the day.”

“I would like to leave itdown today,” Davis said. “I had it tied away during all ofyesterday’s activities in respect to the Estmund Church of Lady Seweryn. Iwould like to have it be free.” He blushed a little. “And also, Milo,I’ve told you before that you don’t have to keep calling me 'my King’ when it’sjust us. You’re like a father to me so…I would appreciate it if you’d call meby my name.”

Milo smiled softly. “Ofcourse, Davis. My apologies. Force of habit.” He held up the brush,nodding to the chair by the vanity. “Shall we prepare you for today?”

Davis practically beamed.“Let’s.”