#scope of work sow

[av-industry-blog]

📝 AV Pros, Ever Felt Overwhelmed Writing Project Plans? 🤯

Planning an AV project can be like solving a jigsaw puzzle blindfolded. Complex tech jargon, missed details, and endless revisions - it's a headache. But don't worry, you're not alone, and there's a solution.

Our latest blog post is here to help: 🧩 Learn why writing a Scope of Work can be so daunting. 📝 Get simple tips to create clear and effective project plans. 📊 Discover how to avoid the common mistakes that can derail your AV projects.

Read the blog post now - it's your key to mastering the art of Scope of Work:

Because in the world of AV, clarity is your superpower. Share this post to help your fellow AV enthusiasts! 🚀🔊

[widowromanova]

Sniper (part 1) - Natasha x Female Reader

warnings: mentions of violence (guns etc.)

word count: 1244

You've been trying to catch and stop Natasha for as long as you can remember; you finally see her again, after 3 years.

a/n: inspired by a prompt I saw on TT that suddenly gave me insane motivation to write

Your former work for SHIELD, coupled with the glowing recommendation Fury had written for you, had opened doors you never thought possible. High(er)-level intelligence agencies had practically lined up to recruit you, and it wasn’t long before you found yourself entrenched in a new world of operations and classified missions. Your current boss, a calculating and ambitious higher-up with ties that ran deep, had recently assigned you to a high-priority duty. The mission was clear but personal - the kind that made your pulse race and your resolve waver. After three years of chasing her, she was finally within your grasp.

Natasha Romanoff had become chaos, her cunning mind orchestrating a series of events that threatened to destroy global stability. She manipulated world leaders, sowing distrust among allies and tearing apart her long-standing professional relationships. Whispers of a bio-weapon project capable of targeting populations only added to the growing unease among those who suspected her involvement. Yet, to the public, and even some former allies, she maintained an innocent facade, always frustratingly one step ahead. She had made her plan clear to you all those years ago:

Natasha had locked her piercing gaze onto yours. "You know how bad it's gotten, Y/N. The leaders are puppets, and the people-” she paused, “they don’t even realize they’re asleep.”

“You can’t seriously believe getting rid of all of it is the answer,” you’d argued, the weight of her words settling uneasily. Her lips had curved into a faint smile, not of humour, but of certainty.

“It’s not about belief. It’s about necessity. Only through destroying one thing can we rebuild something that works. Governments, alliances - they don't work. They need to be erased.”

“Erased? Do you even know what you sound like, Natasha? And replaced with what? You?”

She paused.

“If that’s what it takes.” Her voice had been calm, no sense of hesitation, her conviction chilling. “Survival of the fittest. No corruption. No weakness.”

At the time, you’d thought it was just frustration talking, the cynical musings of someone who’d been through too much. But now, you realised she’d meant every word. Natasha wasn’t just dismantling the world’s structure - she was forging it into her vision of perfection. And you had been too blind to stop her then.

From then, you knew every move she made was deliberate - you had known her to be an incredibly smart woman ever since you met her. And of course, your history with her proved to be of convenience to organisations, though you were frequently hesitant to speak her name.

The night air was cold, the city sprawled out beneath you in a labyrinth of lights. The sniper rifle before you felt like an extension of yourself; "That sounds ridiculous," you thought, but every inch of the weapon's polished surface was familiar to you. You leaned into the scope, propped up on your elbows. Silence, broken only by the occasional hum of traffic below. You knew, of course, that Natasha would never trust anyone else to do work for her, she was after all a self-proclaimed "lone wolf" (you had always made fun of her for that). You couldn't see her yet, but you knew she was coming.

Your superior had instructed you simply: to wait, and then take the shot when you saw her. Each minute that passed, the tension in your shoulders grew, your thoughts tightening into a knot of uncertainty.

You adjusted the focus on the scope, making sure every inch of the room was visible, your pulse steady. You felt your warm breath mix with the stinging cold of the air around you, manifesting into a puff of smoke.

There you saw it, her gleaming red streaks of hair.

For a moment, the city below seemed to disappear, the noise fading into a distant hum. All that remained was the image of her, framed perfectly in your sight. Your heart beat a little faster, not from the tension of the mission, but from something you hadn’t allowed yourself to feel in years. The memory of her, the way she used to make you feel. You held your breath, the moment heavier than anything else you had ever done.

And then, as if she could sense your gaze, she turned. Her head shifted slightly, just enough to catch a glimpse of the reflection in the window across the street. You froze as her eyes locked onto yours through the scope. The world blurred around her stare, and everything you had told yourself about this mission - about her - faded into the background.

She knew. The realisation hit you like a punch. She had always been sharper than anyone gave her credit for, but in this moment, it wasn’t just about strategy. It was a silent acknowledgment, that you were no longer just playing a game of cat and mouse. Her lips barely parted, as if she were about to speak - though the words never came.

The silence between you was deafening, the weight of it pressing in from all sides. You didn’t know if she would move, if she would even give you a chance to make the shot. The corner of her mouth was slowly tugged up her face, the faintest smirk forming as if she knew exactly what you were feeling: she could sense the panic radiating from your skin. Of course she knew, she always knew.

Your trigger finger twitched, the red spot on her forehead suddenly becoming painfully obvious. She slowly raised her empty hands up to the air as if to surrender, the smirk still prominent on her face. Her right hand began to form a gun shape, her fingers curling into a mock trigger, and with a playful yet mocking precision, she brought it to her temple. She paused, and then, with a small grin, mimicked pulling the trigger, the "pew" sound escaping her lips exaggeratedly. It was a cruel game of control. The image of her - carefree, taunting - causing your finger to tense on the trigger.

You watched as she lowered her hand slowly, the smirk still playing on her lips, her eyes never leaving yours. "Come on, you still have it in you, don’t you?" she taunted through the wiring in the room feeding directly to your ear, her voice a low, amused whisper.

The mockery squeezed at every nerve in your body. Every instinct told you to act, to end this, but you faltered. She was still the woman you once knew, the one who had shared everything with you, and now she was daring you to pull the trigger.

"You know where to find me," she whispered again.

In an instant, the room’s lights flickered, a low hum filling the air. Before you could react, the lights completely blackened, plunging you into suffocating darkness. The only sound that filled the silence was your own breathing, shallow and sharp, as rage set in once again. The weight of the rifle in your hands seemed heavier now as you dropped onto your arms in sudden exhaustion.

The lights flickered back to life, but the room was empty. Your heart skipped a beat as you scanned the space, your eyes darting from corner to corner. Nothing. As if she had never been there at all.

You lowered the rifle slowly. She had just given you the slip again. You clambered up, kicking your equipment out of your way in your anger.

"Fuck."

a/n: part 2 coming soon ;)) (promises of SMUT SMUT SMUT)

[pointlesscandies]

Babe’s books, themes, and foreshadowing in THK

The Taming of the Shrew:

We can learn a lot from Babe's books. He started the series while reading the taming of the shrew: a clear callout because thk loosely follows its setup. That framing is still there, but we've moved out of the scope of the story told in the taming of the shrew. And so Babe has started a new book.

By episode 6 he's switched to reading Othello.

If you aren't familiar with the play. This is not good news.

Othello:

Othello is about deception, manipulation, and sowing distrust. It's about how easily people can turn on each other based off what they believe to be true: even when it's not the truth.

We're already seeing these themes play out in episode 6.

In Othello, a character manages to turn everyone against each other by preying on their insecurities and weaknesses. It's what the detective and Lily have been doing and so far it's working.

Othello does not have a happy ending.

But if Style, Fadel, Kant, and Bison are able to look past what they believe to be true and stand together despite the manipulation from all sides, they can start a new story.

[beardedmrbean]

Columbia University students and Jewish advocates called on the Ivy League school Thursday to crack down on the scores of anti-Israel rioters who took part in a violent takeover of a campus library.

The elite Morningside Heights school has already handed down at least 65 interim suspensions to students who were part of Wednesday’s Butler Library chaos pending further investigation, a school official told The Post.

Another 33 individuals, including those from affiliated institutions, and an unspecified number of alumni were also barred from campus, the official said as Columbia faced pressure to take strong action against the agitators.  

“What happens the day after? We need to see serious consequences,” Joseph Postasnik, executive vice president of the New York Board of Rabbis told The Post, calling for “some Old Testament” justice.

“This happened during preparation for final exams — they don’t qualify as serious students,” he said of the rioters. “There should be harsh consequences — people were assaulted. Columbia needs to come down hard or this activity will happen again and again.”

Postasnik’s sentiment was echoed by the Columbia Jewish Alumni Association, which said it was “dismayed at the violence, destruction of property and antisemitic acts by protesters” at the library, while still thanking the school for calling in the cops.

“We look forward to Columbia holding these students accountable for their actions so that the 99% of Jewish and non-Jewish students can do what they pay for — focus on learning.”

Officials vowed that any student or staff member who broke Columbia’s rules could expect to be held accountable.

“We will use the full scope of our disciplinary system, and have already suspended students involved,” it warned.

Dozens of masked thugs stormed the campus library in the afternoon as students studied there. The protesters committed acts of vandalism and injured two campus security guards in the melee, prompting the school to call in the NYPD hours later, administrators said.

While the NYPD arrested 81 rioters at Butler Library, the latest numbers of protesters suspended or barred from campus suggest many more rabble-rousers were involved.

In all, 62 women and 19 men were cuffed by NYPD cops and have since been released with tickets or summonses for trespassing or criminal mischief, law-enforcement sources said. Their identities were not released.

Four summonses were also issued to rowdy participants by Special Patrol Officers at the school, officials said.

Acting Columbia University president Claire Shipman put out a video statement Thursday morning condemning the “substantial chaos” caused by the mob, and hinting that “the disciplinary proceedings will reflect the severity of the actions,” but did not give further specifics.

Shipman said the disruptive protest forced some 900 students from the library reading room, many of whom left their belongings behind in the chaos.

She condemned the rioters for intruding on hard-working pupils whose studies were interrupted.

“It’s a big shame and a big offense to students who are trying to study for the finals. It’s an unbelievably considerate disruption that does frankly nothing for their cause,” agreed Natan Rosenbaum, 22, a junior studying American Studies.

He called the library break-in “completely inexcusable.”

“This is nothing more than sowing chaos and anarchy and I’m glad it was shut down,” he told The Post Thursday, praising Shipman for having the cops bust up the demonstration.

Elisha Baker, also a junior, called the mob’s actions “outrageous and unacceptable,” and said she was grateful for Columbia Public Safety officers holding the ground, despite being far outnumbered.

“I am looking forward to seeing any students involved disciplined for their behavior. There is no place for those actions on a college campus,” she said.

Although it was quiet on the Morningside Heights campus a day after the violent episode, Matan Barak, 22, an Israel Defense Forces soldier on vacation, said he feared further escalation was still possible.

“What are they waiting for? For something worse to happen?” he said of the university administration.

As for the protesters’ frequently repeated refrain of “free Palestine,” Barak said, “If you have never been in Israel, how could you cheer on a team you’ve never been to? If you’ve never seen a basketball game, how could you cheer a team you don’t know?”

He was incredulous that the students involved in the riot were allowed to remain on the rolls.

“Why do they still have people that go to school here that want to kill Jews? That’s what they want to do,” he said.

Columbia stressed it was quick to act when the mob stormed the library and was in line with protocols put in place in recent months.

Columbia has been locked in tense negotiations with the Trump administration over demands it take meaningful action to curb antisemitism on campus — which has erupted in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas terror attacks that killed over 1,200 people.

President Trump threatened to yank around $400 million in federal funding if the school failed to comply, and in March Columbia agreed to adhere to many of the requirements in principle, chief among them forbidding mask wearing by students engaged in violations of university policies.

Nearly all of Wednesday’s rioters were wearing masks while flagrantly flouting the rules, and the university’s response will be something of a referendum on how strictly it intends to follow the newly implemented prohibitions.

University guidelines dictate officers can ask an individual on campus to briefly pull down their mask so they can be identified — with any refusal to do that and show a school ID possibly leading to a person’s removal from school grounds or even an arrest for trespassing.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said the feds would be reviewing the visa statuses of those involved in the mayhem.

[tf2occontest]

The Intern VS The Jack of All Trades, Wolfgang Stahl (+ "Bluey")

(Full matchup list here)

Alright team, here's a recap: This is a contest to determine who amongst you will take the top of the leaderboards and be hired at TFI! Simply put, whoever gets the most votes gets to move on, and whoever doesn't... Well. They'll be put down swiftly and cleanly. :}

So, mann your stations, because here are your next contestants! Vote for your favorite mercenary who you want to win the TF2 OC Contest! - P

OC INFO UNDER THE CUT!

We highly encourage you to take a peek to make your decision!

The Intern

@queensqueercourt

Image credit: @/queensqueercourt

YOU KNOW THEM! YOU LOVE THEM!! The ever so fashionable intern makes a stance once again! paired with a improv pen shiv, stapler gun and rifle, they're ready to hit the battlefield with something never seen before!

These teens accidentally stumbled on the battlefield during their job orientation, and as a reward for surviving the battle unscathed they got a brand new responsibility: fighting in the field alongside the mercs! Simcha is a fun good-hearted rapscallion from Denver, and Tirzah is rebellious punk from New York City! help them win and who knows! maybe they'll get a paycheck for this!

The Jack of All Trades, Wolfgang Stahl (+ "Bluey")

@mickmundane

Image credit: @/mickmundane

You know him, you love him--it's everybody's favorite everyman, the one-of-a-kind Wolfgang Q. Stahl! This Jack of All Trades hails from the great state of Arizona, but don't get it twisted--he's no Phonecian. A veteran of war and a helping hand, this middle-aged man has climbed mountains great and small for work, and it seemed to him like TFI would be the next best place to be!

At least, that's one half of the story.

Was his life stolen from him, or did a twisted reflection follow him down from that lonely mountain peak? What happens to the parts of yourself that you ignore, run from, and leave behind? The anger and grief that you sowed--not for the world, but for yourself--will come back to haunt you, face-to-face. It's only a matter of time.

Keep your chin up, Stahl. We'll look out for each other.

In gameplay, The Jack of All Trades is marketed as “a class for the multiclasser”, a Support class which offers a varied but sometimes laid-back fill-in-the-gaps type gameplay experience for any of those micromanagers on your ideal team. He comes provided with his own stock weapons, including:

Primary - Scoped Shotgun ; Based on the Remington 870 hunting shotgun with a scope attached. Range is limited compared to stock Sniper but can still pack a well-aimed punch when scoped or unscoped.

Secondary - Dual Pistols ; Based on the 60’s Browning Hi-Power pistol. Dual wielded with a slower shooting speed but higher ammo capacity & caliber compared to stock Scout.

Melee - Hunting Knife ; Serrated Buck knife with his family name engraved on the handle. -75% Health upon backstab.

The Jack of All Trades is made a unique class due to his gimmick item:

Gimmick - The Backpack ; Can hold and use up to five items from ANY other class (Ex. Picking up a dropped Engineer Wrench to repair a dispenser), as well as hold or use ammo crates or medkits. 

The Backpack would open a HUD upon selection with five slots to choose from, and any items within can be used either for yourself or distributed to other teammates. Got a Scout in need of healing but no Medic around? Pass a spare medkit to him. The Pyro wants to try the Backburner an enemy dropped on death but you got to it first? May as well hand it over!

Upon spawning or respawning into a match the Backpack will generate with a random assortment of items (or nothing at all if your RNG is bad enough), but cannot be refilled by supply closets. If you want to refill your bag without dying, you’ve got to pick it up from enemy (or ally) drops yourself.

In baseline TF2 gameplay, swapping out weapons from fallen enemies of the same class is already an existing mechanic--this just takes advantage of that. Any weapons you pick up as a JOAT also only have the remaining ammo of that weapon, and when that is depleted, they’re no longer usable and will disappear from the Backpack.

Yes, this does include throwables like Jarate or Mad Milk--or sometimes even a special new throwable, the Blood Bag! Whose blood is it? It’s his. :] He has O- and is very proud of that.

[mashbrainrot]

there is someone out there who insists on putting horrible comments on fics, in people's tumblr inboxes, anywhere they can get their grubby little paws. often just the usual fare for pathetic trolls - rape threats, suicide bait, the odd racial slur... occasionally, they branch out and try their hand at slightly more insidious attempts to sow discord between people.

they mostly don't make an impact, however, not only because they are so transparent, but also because anyone who has ever come into contact with this person knows full well who they are, and knowing that sort of makes the whole thing vaguely laughable.

however, now and again they sort of... widen their scope a bit, and just on the off chance that they might send their little attacks to anyone vulnerable, or unknowing, I just wanted to let you all know that they really are just the work of one very sad individual who has nothing better to do with their time. they're not a real threat to anyone, except maybe themselves. please please don't take anything they say to heart. just block, report, turn off anon comments, anything you need or want to do.

I'm not sure if they'll get bored – they haven't yet, and frankly I don't think they have much else to sustain them besides perhaps deleting and remaking endless tumblr blogs – but ignoring them wholeheartedly is genuinely what is best for you, and that is what is important.

so, look after yourselves. they're just a troll.

[aalinaaaaaa]

2024 In a Gift Box

Hey, everyone, greetings after another year that has flown by all too quickly! Featuring new friends, a few awards and 400% more holidays (rip my wallet lol), this has been a wild year for me. And that's only half of it.

For some strange reason, my desire to write increases with the hecticness of my life. Much of Obsidian Sapphires' revival/troubleshooting phase occured during the latter part of the year, from October onwards (though I had been tinkering with its plot for some time now). All because I woke up one morning with the solution to a plot hole appearing in my head.

Anyway, preambles aside, here's a few major highlights from my year (in writing terms):

First up, thanks to @druidx for the Year in Review Tag! The premise of the tag is to post one's favourite five or so pieces that they've written throughout the year.

To be truthful, some of Obsidian Sapphires' scenes would make this list only the respective chapters for them aren't completed yet 😅

A Pawn for a Greater Cause — I had a ball writing the starting dialogue, and the prompt gave me a few revelations regarding Petrius' character.

Regrets — This made me cry at 1am, the catharsis was unreal.

To Perpetuate Life — Amazing how almost falling asleep gives me ideas. This piece helped me answer a few questions about Orlaith's backstory, and also gave me extra questions surrounding the lore.

Blue Moon — This feels like a nice deviation from my usual style, it's more dreamy and whimsical. Also, this reminds me to go and work on its second part, lol (because the scope was too big for one piece)

That angsty pining scene — This is not posted as one scene, but rather in splinters because parts of it are dripping in spoilers for Obsidian Sapphires. However, I enjoyed writing this scene too much not to post some snippets.

WIP Roundup

First things first, an ode to the WIPs that I've put on ice to focus on Obsidian Sapphires.

The Lady's Lament, a brief idea born out of a plot bunny inspired by a plot on Wattpad. The idea sprouted in April 2023, but it lives on in the form of worldbuilding ideas for South Arobyre.

And then also, Flamebearer, one of my oldest wips but also arguably my most complex one. It's a story of grief, religious dilemmas and romantic/familial drama, all under the backdrop of sociopolitical turmoil. It's going to take a lot of research and planning, that much I know. Hence why I want it to be as perfect as I can make it, when I have the knowledge and writing practice to do it justice.

In April this year, one of my Flash Friday pieces (Duel to the Debt) sowed the seeds for another piece (An Endless Round) in May, and later on Soulswapped derived from it. I intended it to be a short enough story, a novella of sorts that would be woven into a larger compilation, but it's become its own thing. Already, I think it may get a sequel. But I'll cross that bridge when I get there.

Obsidian Sapphires

So its progress this year has been skewed. Like, 'a lot of its progress spawned in October or thereafter' sort of skewed. I woke up one morning and the cogs for the rigmarole surrounding what is currently Chapter 2 all clicked, to the point I yanked out my laptop and starting writing notes until I had to run for class.

Since then, I've had a bunch of ideas, but currently I'm deliberating on the story I wish to tell. It seems more cohesive and easier to plan for when I cut Eshani's perspective out, but at the same time, cutting her perspective would cut or at least hide much of her character development. That and I love her to bits, and she may/may not be a readers' favourite also.

In terms of actual tangible content, bits of the angsty pining scene got posted, as did sections of the first and second chapters. It even came with a few memes, lolololol. (And there's more memes sitting in my gallery/Scrivener notes, this story's quite memeable honestly).

The antagonists got their time of day, however brief so far. And not just the lead meshai, but also the septet of folks angry at the meshai and his fellows.

And this gets onto something that has existed as tags and headings and brief little mentions. A collection of pieces, leading up to answers surrounding some major events in the history of the country Obsidian Sapphires is set in.

That would be This Blood-Stained Charcuterie. It is going to be the anthology of short stories and one-off pieces surrounding Morilast's High Councillors (and indeed, the Court's other denizens and its namesake himself!). A lot of juicy details surrounding certain characters' backstories are going to feature here, I can't wait to get into it. (It's also my excuse to figure out all the bits of lore and convoluted ancestries [who murdered who], lol).

When I finish with Obsidian Sapphires, that is about when I'll start releasing this one. The title could change upon me getting to the end, but we'll see.

Flash Fiction Friday

I started doing these pieces in late 2023, so it's been about a year since my first one (Contemplations). In all, I've completed a total of 28 pieces so far :D

The masterlist came about in early January, because I was inspired by other people who had masterlists for their pieces. It's very satisfying to see it develop from a few pieces to what it is today, a decent few pieces.

Whatsmore, it reflects the trends in my writing, such as the wips that the prompts inspired me for, and what periods I was consistently doing it week-by-week and when the major gaps were.

For whatever reason, I have a tendency of getting inspiration for these at about midnight or so. Even if I get a handful of basic notes written down, it may not still be until late in the night that I can get a piece together, lol.

To commemorate the end of the year, I've started a series known as Flash Friday Flashbacks to celebrate what I've made and show off behind-the-scenes when it comes to notes, context, deleted scenes, etc.

There are a few pieces left in this year's version, which will be reblogged close to the end of the month (to celebrate the New Year).

Next year's edition is going to feature the December 2024 pieces in addition to all the 2025 stuff (which hopefully is a lot). There will also be a 2025-specific masterlist too.

Writeblr Community Events

What is writeblr without its community? It's beyond a pleasure to be part of a group so lovely and talented, everyone has something amazing going for them.

As part of this, there are some people here who create events, discords and/or other initiatives that bring people together. Shoutout to everyone who has done/is doing something along these lines ❤️

Special mentions in my case go to:

@flashfictionfridayofficial for taking the prompt submissions, making the posts, and reblogging everyone's stories (with fantastic comments) every week

@writeblrsummerfest for making a lovely event spanning the entirety of August, encompassed by a well-organised theme and all

@bardic-tales for establishing the @creators-club and doing all the various types of ask/tag games to foster interaction and support

@agirlandherquill for her first ever Writemas! These prompts are impeccable and it was really fun looking forward to the next day's prompts! I wish I could've participated more, but alas, that's how the cookie crumbles. (Also, high five, we're in the same timezone, woo!)

Plans for 2025

Continue with Obsidian Sapphires — I'd love to get the draft finished

Doing as many of the Flash Friday prompts as well

Reblogging people's posts more and hopefully improving at reaching out to people

Learning to draw is something that I've always wanted to do, but I want to get focused with it this year. It would be cool to put my characters in visual form

Getting a handle on the lore and background information needed to compile This Blood-Stained Charcuterie

The Tags

That brings this post to its natural course, the end. Merry Christmas everyone ❤️🎄

Giving a Year in Review Tag to everyone who is on at least one of my taglists (ask, comment, etc to be added/subtracted): @mr-orion @the-ellia-west @guessillcallitart @thereadingfoz @glassstardust22124 @original-writing @honeybewrites @ashirisu @drowsy-quill @oliolioxenfreewrites @theglitchywriterboi @seastarblue @gioiaalbanoart @rae-butter @corinneglass @midnight-and-his-melodiverse @outpost51 @mundanemoongirl @scarletteflamerald @ceph-the-ghost-writer @flock-from-the-void @mattresses-and-macaroni @limitlesswritingvoid

...As well as all these people I'm tagging here: @winterandwords @finickyfelix @wintherlywords @anyablackwood @cherrybombfangirlwrites @kaylinalexanderbooks @angelfevr @thatndginger @thepeculiarbird @ominous-feychild @oh-no-another-idea @space-writes @veneritia @the-golden-comet @jev-urisk @cljordan-imperium @an-indecisive-nerd @mauannacreates @laureleavess @theeccentricraven @paintedbutton (@/bardic-tales, @/agirlandherquill, both of you are tagged for this too)

...And most importantly, here's a tag for everyone in the audience!

Here's to a hopeful 2025! 🎉

[meret118]

The Russian disinformation plot revealed in a Justice Department indictment this week may just be the tip of the iceberg, according to newly unsealed court documents.On Wednesday, the DOJ announced it would seize 32 internet domains linked to a larger Kremlin scheme to promote disinformation and influence the 2024 election. The Russian campaign, known as Doppelganger, uses AI-generated content to create “fake news” boosted through social media with the aim of electing Donald Trump.

“Today’s announcement exposes the scope of the Russian government’s influence operations and their reliance on cutting-edge AI to sow disinformation,” FBI Director Christopher Wray said in a statement about the charges. According to records, the plan was well known at even the highest levels of the Russian government—and Russian President Vladimir Putin himself may have been aware of the campaign.

Of particular note, the documents released Wednesday included an affidavit that noted a Russian company is keeping a list of more than 2,800 influencers world wide, about one-fifth of whom are based in the United States, to monitor and potentially groom to spread Russian propaganda. The affidavit does not mention the full list of influencers, but is still a terrifying indicator of how deep the Russian plot to interfere in U.S. politics really goes.

The Doppelganger program and its “Good Old USA Project” aimed to mimic mainstream media outlets to push pro-Russian policies through fake social media accounts. Documents show that the Kremlin specifically targeted Trump supporters, minorities, gamers, and swing-state voters by spreading far-right conspiracies and capitalizing on existing divisions in U.S. politics.

[changbunnies]

Crave, Part 2 (18+)

♡ Pairing: Romantic Demon!Hyunjin x Human Fem!Reader

♡ Genre: supernatural au, demon au, age gap relationship typical in monster fucker fics, coworkers to lovers and love triangle vibes :')

♡ Word Count: 6.5k

♡ Summary: "The more a thing is perfect, the more it feels pleasure and pain." - Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy. In which Hyunjin, a demon from the nine circles of hell, finds himself impossibly infatuated with the very human he once set upon himself to destroy.

♡ Warnings: this is a part 2! read part 1 here, more immoral behavior and thoughts + ideas from hyunjin ofc, supernatural abilities, themes of possesiveness and jealousy, more talks of sinful acts / feelings from the perspective of a demon, reader's age is not specified but it is implied to be at least mid twenties.

♡ Notes: sorry ya'll it took longer for this to come out than i intended, i wasn't feeling well so i was resting ;v; and tbh i still don't feel well but i really wanted to keep writing so i powered thru to get this done!! this part is story focused but dw, explicit smut is coming next <3 the focus here is building up their relationship so that the smut feels like a natural development and they aren't just instantly in love lol i hope you enjoy it!

♡ Disclaimer: please read responsibly, and remember that this work is fiction and meant strictly for imaginative fun. the idols used in fics are more accurately faceclaims and personality outlines for imaginary characters, and should not be interpreted as factual representations of existing people.

How do you make a human fall in love? A question that is perhaps simple in theory, but Hyunjin hasn't wooed a human in centuries, and much has changed since he last blended in with society. In the modern age of technology, sin is at the most rampant it's ever been. The common man can access all manner of sin from the palm of his hand with a single device, and it has made the act of integrating into human society an unnecessary practice for demons. 

There's a plethora of human sin to feed from at any given moment, and obsolete is the need for a demon to blend in with the humans that walk the earth, no longer required to be a snake in the community garden just waiting for their moment to strike and consume. Though an outdated method to obtain their wants, integration with humans can still be done, if only the demon in question wishes to do so- and as Hyunjin has come to realize, he does if he wants to win over the object of his desire. 

Despite how long it's been since Hyunjin walked among them, he wasn't ignorant of modern human culture; he still had to be well-informed if he wanted to be effective and efficient in sowing the seeds of sin in feeble minds, after all- his work in the second circle required such knowledge, and it was also a benefit when it came to deciding which soul he would drink from to sustain himself. 

He knew perfectly well how to use most modern technology, knew how to dress in a manner that was unique to his own tastes but suited the trends of the era, and whatever "pop culture" knowledge he lacked, as it was called by humans, he could blame it on things such as "preferring to stay off social media," or "not watching much tv or playing much games," and most would take it as a fair, reasonable enough excuse, even if the person asking questions of him could not relate to his answer. 

In the last century especially, most of Hyunjin's public outings were limited to a few hours at most, spending that entire time scoping out who'd sustain his cravings the most. Nightclubs in particular were an easy place for Hyunjin to get a quick fix of the lust he needed, sustaining him well enough when his preferred love-drenched lust was still being built to its peak. 

Despite all his experience in human matters, there was something that posed a problem for him initially. Since moving into your lavish suite, you worked from home- a luxury Hyunjin assumes you have from a high ranking position within whatever company you work for (especially if this is the kind of place you can afford to live in on a single salary.) But if you only ever left the house long enough to run errands, how was he supposed to meet you organically? And further still, how does he meet you in such a way that makes contact with you consistent, that makes you want to talk with him and be in his presence? 

He could, theoretically, stage a meeting, pretend to be a neighbor entering the building at the same time or "accidentally" bump into you while shopping for something he has absolutely no use for, only to then charm you the moment your eyes lock with his. The problem with that approach is that charming you defeats the purpose of what he wants; for you to have genuine, real love for him, and only him. And asking you out after meeting you just once, in a situation where you have no reason to connect with him further, could be uncomfortable or off-putting in the eyes of women. What woman likes to be hit on by a stranger while she's grocery shopping? 

Hyunjin's human form is attractive, sure, but looks can only carry him so far when it comes to making a woman fall for him. His appearance is useful for one night stands, but he needs to show you more substance than that if he wants you to desire him beyond the physical- and he was sure based on his observations of your character that you weren't vain or superficial enough to fall for him based on looks alone. 

Thankfully, he didn't have to ponder on these questions for much longer, because only a few short days after you finished all your unpacking and decorated your apartment to your liking, you returned to work. He could tell easily enough what your destination was when your routine suddenly deviated; for the first time since moving in, you had turned on a repeating alarm for 6 A.M, and your choice of business casual clothing and subtle, office appropriate makeup told him all he needed to know. 

Hyunjin followed you there, naturally; presence hidden, lingering in the shadows with the intent to best establish how to infiltrate your work environment. As he expected, you held a high ranking position inside a corporate office- head of human resources for one of the many subsidiaries of some conglomerate Hyunjin had never heard of, as typically there is no need or reason for him to be well versed in human's business dealings. 

Becoming someone you work with directly would be the best route, he was sure. Whether on equal ground or as someone answering to you on a team, it was the option that gave him the most opportunity to create a connection with you, and maybe be the start of one of those sappy office romances that humans seem to enjoy in their media. 

It was fine if there were no employment openings- it'd be simple for Hyunjin to create one by exerting his influence over a human's mind. He'd pick out whomever you liked the least, someone who bothered you either overtly or simply by being an inefficient worker, and he'd take their place. He could plant the idea of a career change, a desire to move across the country, or simply get them fired should the gentler, subtle approach be deemed too time consuming for Hyunjin's taste. 

Of course, Hyunjin knew jack fucking shit about how your job truly works or what would be required of him if he was on your team, but that was fine too- it would be easy for him to fake his performance when necessary, and charm any who questioned his work abilities. He wouldn't enjoy lying to you directly if there was ever a need for it but, well.. The ends justify the means, don't they? And while he wouldn't charm you for love, certainly it wouldn't hurt to do so to make him appear a better worker than what he would be in reality, right? 

No matter what his hypocritical justifications were, he’d do anything necessary to make you his, even if it meant having to lie at times. It was a foreign feeling, being conflicted about lying when typically lying came second nature to a demon, but he supposed his infatuation for you is what makes it feel different. Is that why truth was considered a godly virtue? It was the first time in his life that just the thought of lying, before it could even be an act done in the first place, felt.. wrong.

Maybe because on some subconscious level he recognized that love woven from lies isn’t true, no matter how much he’d wish it to be. Even if you fell sincerely in love with him, would it still satisfy him to have gotten there based on tricks and lies? When he determined that the answer to that question was a firm “no,” he vowed he would do his best to keep lies far from his lips when it came to you, even if that made his goal more difficult to achieve. Strange, how this was easily the most human he’d ever felt. 

In a way, it is almost natural to feel this way, to be met with internal conflict for the first time in ages; most demons are born directly from human sin, after all. What is he, if not the physical manifestation of a human who has fallen from perfection? More powerful than a mere human though he was, his proverbial soul still held an innate inclination towards sin, the struggle with temptation and decadence inherent to his very being, as hypocrisy and corruption went hand in hand with sin, hand in hand with the very human condition he would oft wrongfully deny he felt.

And that wasn’t the only human emotion that came to him when he watched you at work for the first time. Most of the morning was spent rather uneventfully, Hyunjin’s time dedicated entirely to scoping out the environment and determining where he’d best fit within your corporate world. He observed the people on your team, who was designated where and what their duties were, keeping track of what feelings and opinions you had for whom, looking out for who he would be able to effectively replace.

Without warning, he sensed it, felt it, tasted it- love, seeping out of your pores, heart suddenly alight and a smile that should be reserved for him lingering on your lips. Jealousy pricked Hyunjin’s skin before he could even fully process the scene before him, a deep fondness in your eyes as a man that Hyunjin could only assume was from another department approached you with a smile of his own.

Shit. It was expected that he would find out who you loved eventually, but he didn’t anticipate that it would be here, in the very environment he was setting up to be the stage for your romance with him. The man asked you questions and talked in ways you’d expect to hear between friends or coworkers- “how’d the move go?”, “are you settling in well?”, and “you should invite me over sometime!”

It was the last statement that made Hyunjin’s eye twitch with suppressed anger, not much liking the idea of the person you’re in love with being alone with you in your apartment. Every time you giggled at something he said or blushed when the man held your gaze, it nearly made him sick with envy. Fuck him, he didn’t deserve you, Hyunjin thought, I'm better than him in every conceivable way, that should be me.

This man didn’t love you the way you loved him; Hyunjin could tell, could feel the platonic affection that radiated from him. And instead of being happy about the implication that Hyunjin would have no rival for your affection when he pursued you in earnest, it almost made him more pissed off. This guy didn’t even know how fucking perfect you were, didn’t seem to notice the way your eyes sparkled with affection, how your heart raced when he hugged you, or the bashful smile that lingered when he invited you to share your lunch hour with him.

He’s a complete fucking idiot for not being head over hells for you- you, who’s only sin is lust, who is beautiful, intelligent, humble, and positively radiant in presence without even realizing just how much value she truly has. It’s okay, he has to remind himself, it’s a good thing his one-sided rival doesn’t share your sentiment; because when Hyunjin shows you how beautiful you are, treats you with the reverence you deserve, your heart would surely shift to beat for him instead. He’ll make sure of it.

You let out a sigh as you comb through the next resume that found its way to your desk, exhausted from the amount of interviews you've conducted today. This was probably your least favorite aspect of your job if you were being honest; being the head of human resources put you in charge of all recruiting efforts, scanning through countless applications to determine who was the best fit for the company, but you never enjoyed doing it. 

It always makes you feel guilty to determine someone else's worth based on a flimsy piece of paper and interview first impressions, where nerves are almost always at their peak as the person sitting across from you makes their best conscious effort to impress you. It is also not a job you can delegate to someone else on your team, unfortunately; your place at the top of the HR department made all hiring decisions entirely up to your own discretion. And apart from the guilt of knowing you couldn't hire everyone that walked through your door, it was so tiring to go over the same questions multiple times a day with a myriad of strangers. 

Hwang Hyunjin was the name of the last person you'd be interviewing today (much to your relief) and you hoped he'd be the person to wow you in the end, as you have lukewarm feelings to who you've met thus far. Despite the impressive credentials on most resumes you reviewed, none of the people you'd met seemed to be a good long term fit for the company; some of them would likely only be good as temps, needing to be let go unless they showed substantial improvement in the areas they were lacking in. 

It was a terrible thing to judge someone based on whether or not they were able to calm their nerves or had enough charisma, but when working for corporate conglomerates you can't afford to be meek. It was okay to be shy and reserved in your personal life, many people in the office were, but for the sake of professionalism you're required to have the ability to put meek tendencies aside. If the interviewee couldn't speak with confidence, then you had reason to believe they'd crack under the daily pressures of speaking with representatives of other departments or when handling sensitive negotiations. 

Unfortunately, you don't typically have the luxury of giving applicants the benefit of the doubt or the ability to give them the opportunity to change your first impression of them. You take a glance at the clock hanging above the door to your office, opposite of your desk; it's just a few short minutes until you meet your last applicant, and you pray he'll be the person you've been looking for. Despite how desperate you are to fill the hole in your team after Mina's extremely abrupt resignation and move out of the country, you still don't want to hire just to fill the gap she left- you want someone capable and confident on your team. 

You take one last passing glance at the man's resume, making sure you're familiar with his education and work history, not wanting to be mistaken on any of the details listed. A short succession of knocks are heard on your door a few moments later, and you look up from the resume you're rereading to see Nayeon opening the door just enough for her head to come into view. "M-Ma'am, H-Hwang Hyunjin, uh- he's here for his interview," she speaks in a timid voice, face flushed the brightest pink you'd ever seen on her. 

Your brows furrow ever so slightly in wonder and concern at her out of character demeanor; Nayeon is among the most confident and well spoken employees on your team, and you've never known her to stutter or appear so off kilter. "..Right, send him in," you say after a moment, wondering if her attitude shift is due to the stranger you'd be meeting shortly; if that is the case, you'll have to talk to her about it once the interview is over- you wouldn't want to hire someone the people on your team are uncomfortable around. 

She nods and opens the door further, the silhouette of the taller man coming into view just slightly behind her. "Right in here," she mutters, stepping to the side and motioning for Hyunjin to enter your office. It becomes immediately apparent what the reason for Nayeon's abnormal behavior is; Hwang Hyunjin is easily one of the most beautiful men you've ever seen in your entire life. 

Black hair that just begins to touch his shoulders tucked neatly behind his ears, a few strands left untouched to frame his face, accompanied by wide circle glasses that seem to further enhance his beauty. He's dressed well, his suit modern and sleek but not overly formal for the setting, his accessories tasteful and understated, as they should be in an office environment- just a simple, long chain necklace and small, almost dainty hoops on his pierced ears. 

The reason that a man this gorgeous would even be applying to work here when he could easily make a fortune being a model is beyond you. You're quick to correct the initial surprise on your face, hoping that the man you'll be interviewing didn't notice how struck by his beauty you were when he stepped in. And how could you even know that he did notice you had a reaction to him- and not because of any overtly obvious expression of attraction, but because he could hear the beating of your heart with his inhuman ears, its steady rhythm taking a sudden, erratic jump the very moment he first stepped through the door. 

Nayeon is quick to close the door behind Hyunjin once he has stepped fully inside your office, leaving you in privacy for what will likely be the most difficult interview you have ever conducted, and not for the reasons you would've otherwise expected. "Have a seat," you speak clearly, as if your heart wasn't stuttering just mere moments ago, motioning for Hyunjin to take one of the chairs sitting opposite of your desk. "Pleasure to meet you, Hyunjin," you say after he's taken a seat, politely holding out your hand to shake his.

"Likewise, ma'am. I'm grateful to be considered for this position," he responds with a smile so effortlessly charming that you have to once again remind yourself that this is a professional setting and you shouldn't be thinking about how handsome the potential new addition to your team is. If you were a worse woman with lesser morals, you'd hire him on appearance alone- his flawless skin, plush, soft, almost inviting lips, and the little mole that sits daintily under his left eye are all positively bewitching to look at. 

You collect yourself after a brief mental scolding, deciding to get straight into the most pertinent questions you have once he's settled in his seat, opting to waste no time in getting straight to the point. While this approach does make the interview more tense for the applicant, you find it best to go about it this way to make sure they're truly ready for the sort of discussions that will be expected of them should they get hired. You don't expect perfection, but more accurately determination- if they can maintain a confident air about them under pressure, that's typically a good indicator to you they'll be a good fit for your team. 

Equally, you don't mind if they stumble over their words a few times throughout the course of the interview as long as they show the ability to bounce back from any slip ups. Error is expected at some point, as we are all human- you just want to assess their ability to come back from a mistake when speaking, and to see if they are able to maintain their composure in situations that may not be the most ideal or comfortable. 

The ease at which Hyunjin answers your questions has you convinced that he's perfect. He speaks confidently, coming across as self-assured and charismatic, not at all stuttering or faltering when you ask him to speak candidly with his own words. You appreciate a well rehearsed answer of course, but you like to ascertain whether or not the person you're considering for the job is able to maintain confidence when not using an internal script or reciting their memorized resume. 

Some struggle to do so, losing confidence in themselves the moment they are expected to go off the cuff, while others find it to be a trick question of sorts, as if you're baiting them to say a flaw that would place them out of consideration for the position they're applying for. What you value most on your team is adaptability- it's okay to falter for a brief moment, as long as they are able to collect themselves quickly and continue where they left off. And Hyunjin's ability to do just that is utterly astounding. 

He has an almost effortless sort of confidence and charisma about him; something unique and special that you don't often see, a state of being that isn't learned, but rather is innate to who he is. Even when he briefly pauses or lets out a small "hmm" as he thinks about his answer to your question, it never feels like he's struggling to find his answer- more accurately, it seems that he already knows what his answer is, and is just pondering on the best way to phrase it before speaking. 

It seemed that even his unrehearsed, unfiltered answers were nearly perfect, his ability to speak leaving you almost in awe. Truly, in the year and a half it's been since you were promoted to head of human resources, you'd never conducted an interview where the person you were speaking to seemed this effortlessly natural and comfortable in what is otherwise a tense situation. Honestly, you'd be a fool not to hire him right on the spot- his ability speaks for itself, and you're confident that any weaknesses he has can be corrected quickly and easily with more experience in the work environment. 

So you congratulate him, smiling as you once again hold out your hand and welcome him as part of your team. And Hyunjin smiles too as he takes your hand in his, knowing that this is just the start of what is his grand plan to make you his.

In the months it’s been since you first hired Hyunjin, he’s come to learn so much more about you than he did just lingering around in your apartment, and with that has come an even deeper appreciation and desire to have you. Your good nature, which he knew you had from little interactions at shops and cafes, was now able to be fully seen by him- from the way you cared about your team, treated them like equals despite the fact that you were their superior in rank, and how you encouraged and fostered true friendships between everyone on your team. 

You held so much sincere care for everyone around you, and you lead with compassion and kindness at the forefront. If someone was sick, having an off day due to mental health, or simply felt the pressures of life weighing them down, you always met them with compassion, encouraged them to get better, and never made them feel bad about themselves for any small slip ups that occurred while they were struggling with something. 

Of course, in this line of work it’s vital that they show up always ready to do their utmost best and show others the best versions of themselves, but you weren’t some militant manager that expected people to always be at 100%. It’s unrealistic, and hypocritical to expect perfection, so instead you always did your best to accommodate them when they were low, and that consideration resulted in your coworkers and employees having a great deal of respect for you, and caused them to always put in their best effort. 

By extension, your care for your team resulted in equal care towards you, and it seemed they greatly missed you when you were absent due to your move. They had fine enough leadership while you were gone, sure, but it wasn’t the same without you- the one who made them feel comfortable, secure, and made them want to perform well at their jobs. What Hyunjin felt watching you was something akin to pride- and it was strange, as he had never felt pride for someone else before, usually not even for himself. 

He just liked seeing you succeed, if he had to guess; he liked knowing the woman he desired was not only beautiful in body but also in soul, just as he suspected her to be when he first came to put aside his anger and truly know her for who she is. What a happy accident it was, that he happened to be gone when you finalized your move to suite 13; because otherwise how would he ever have known what it was like to care about someone other than himself? To understand what it is that makes a human God’s greatest creation? 

He gets it now, he thinks- why God prioritized humanity, why he loves them despite how flawed and drenched with sin they are. And again, it occurs to Hyunjin how hypocritical he was before, and continues to be even now, how foolish it is for him, the very embodiment of sin, a being who is supposed to uphold depravity and ruin, to be infatuated with you, who is the very image of benevolence.

Hyunjin got to see so many new sides of you, sides that didn’t make themselves known within the 4 walls of your apartment, sides that made him fall for you more and more. A demon can’t experience love the way a human does, but he thinks this is the closest to love a creature like him will ever have. Obsession, longing, desire.. Isn’t that all a manifestation of love? Perhaps one does not need a true heart and soul to experience what love is, maybe all that one really requires is feeling. 

Most sins are a feeling- lust, pride, envy; all are an emotion you feel strongly within your gut, a natural reaction that cannot be prevented from pricking your skin or making your stomach twist. It’s innate, woven into the DNA of every creature with higher understanding. With all that mind, who is to say a demon can’t love? Maybe it won’t be felt in the same way a human feels it, but if love is a feeling, and sins are a feeling, then what truly prevents him from knowing love? 

As equally as he learned about you and himself, he also learned about the man you had developed feelings for- Yunho. According to Nayeon, who was apparently a wealth of information when it came to the subject, you met Yunho in college and have been friends with him since. You grew quite close in your time studying the same major, and as fate would have it, you both ended up working for the same conglomerate after college. 

While you ended up here, promoted to head of the department when the opening became available, Yunho worked for a different subsidiary within the same building; so while you technically worked for different companies, you shared the same CEO, and had ample opportunity to meet and talk during the company lunch hour and maintain the friendship you had in college. 

Well, he imagines you would’ve still been friends with Yunho regardless of where the two of you ended up in life after graduation, but still seeing him daily certainly didn’t help you get over the college crush you had on the man. And you had tried to move on- you’re not stupid, you know Yunho doesn’t feel the same way as you, but your relationships never worked out as you’d hoped, and you’d always be left still battling your unrequited love for your best friend. 

Though you are always professional, it was obvious, at least to the other women in the office, that you had deep feelings for Yunho. They could always tell in the way your face changed when he was near, displaying a timid smile that only ever showed up for him, the flush on your face subtle but recognizable to those who knew you well.  

And by extension, it became increasingly obvious to the rest of the office that Hyunjin was down bad for you, and hated seeing you with Yunho. His face too always changed when Yunho arrived, though in an entirely different way from you- Hyunjin would be positively seething with jealousy, always failing to mask the frown of disapproval when Yunho stepped into your office to talk and invite you out for lunch outside the building. 

And Hyunjin, who was always a gentleman anyways, was even more so when it came to you- holding open doors for you when walking somewhere together, carrying stacks upon stacks of heavy paperwork so you wouldn’t have to do it, memorizing the way you liked your coffee so he could get it for you and you could focus instead on your work. The only time Hyunjin ever wasn’t smiling, it was when you were giving your affection to Yunho, and it was painfully obvious how bad he wanted you. 

If Hyunjin was trying to keep his feelings a secret, well.. He failed to do so at every turn. Everyone in the office could tell how he felt, and while they would never admit it, most were just waiting for the day he’d ask you out, as it seemed to be more and more inevitable that he would. Some who had been your coworkers since long before you were even promoted and knew of your unrequited feelings, hoped that Hyunjin could be the person to finally give you the happiness you deserve. 

Even you yourself began to suspect that Hyunjin liked you as more than a friend or coworker, because why else would he go so out of his way for you? Why else would his face change whenever he saw Yunho? You can still remember the way his smile dropped when Yunho stepped into the room when you were having lunch with your team, how Hyunjin subtly clenched his teeth and tightened his fists, how he’d practically glare at the man before replacing his expression with the most forced smile you’d ever seen him have for the sake of professionalism. 

Were you being delusional? To say Hyunjin is fucking gorgeous is an understatement- he’s practically ethereal. And while you wanted to move on from your stupid school girl crush on Yunho that continued to grip you all these years later, wasn’t it too much to fantasize about Hyunjin being the person to finally make you happy? He could have anyone, and you couldn’t understand why he’d want you of all people when he could easily bag someone more impressive than you. 

You did well for yourself, but you didn’t consider yourself particularly desirable.. Maybe years of unrequited love and failed relationships made your confidence tank more than you realized, at least when it came to love and romance. And while there were other couples in the office, you worried it’d be unprofessional of you to date someone who you are technically the boss of.. Shouldn’t you be more concerned about the power dynamic instead of worrying about whether or not you were desirable enough for Hyunjin to want you? 

God, you really needed to get your priorities straight before you did something stupid; and certainly you were just reading too far into things. But still, while your feelings for Yunho didn’t go away, you still couldn’t deny that your heart would race whenever Hyunjin smiled at you, couldn’t ignore how goosebumps would erupt on your skin when his hand lingered on yours as he handed you a perfectly made cup of coffee, couldn’t help but linger on the the thought of what a perfect lover he must be.

As if sensing you were thinking of him, you hear a knock on your door, breaking you out of your thoughts and seeing Hyunjin crack open the door. “May I?” he asks, and you smile politely with a nod, motioning for him to enter your office. “Hey Hyunjin, what’s up? Need something?” you ask and he shakes his head, sitting on the chair in front of you. “Nothing work related, though I do want to ask you something,” he replies, and immediately your mind wanders to delusional territory again, though you quickly try to shut it down. 

“What is it?” you ask, trying your best not to fill your brain with the thought of Hyunjin making a move on you. Be professional for God’s sake. “I was wondering,” he starts, looking at you with that charming smile that is so natural to him and you always have to stop yourself from folding over, “If you don’t have any prior obligations today, would you like to have lunch with me?” 

Oh no. He’s adding fuel to your delusional fire. “Just us?” you ask, trying to mask your hope or the way your heart is picking up speed. You really want to be chill about the invite, but you really can’t help but hope the invitation means something more. He’s perfect, how could you not? You’re only human, after all. Isn’t it natural to want someone this fucking beautiful to want you? 

“Yes, just us. You don’t have to consider it a date, but.. I would be happy if you did,” he smiles, head tilting to the side in an almost playful display, and your heart jolts. He’s not just playing with you, right? He wouldn’t, would he? But you have to ask, “You make it sound as if you want me to consider it a date. Are you saying you like me?” 

“That’s exactly what I’m saying, ma’am,” he replies without hesitation, confidence fully on display. It’s as if the possibility of you saying “no” has never crossed his mind. Well, you’d probably be confident too if you looked anything like him; you don’t imagine he’s been rejected often. And well, you certainly won’t be the person to hit him with his first rejection either; you’ll have to ask a third party to handle the necessary paperwork if things go well between you and Hyunjin, as the head of the department can’t approve and oversee her own consensual relationship agreement, but it’ll be worth it, you think. 

After all, if someone this beautiful and seemingly perfect wants you, why deny yourself the opportunity? Even if it doesn’t work out, maybe he’ll be the person to finally help you get over your stupid crush on your best friend that’s been going nowhere for years. Apart from his beauty, he’s always been chivalrous and attentive towards you, a true gentleman in every sense of the word. And even if it's only for a brief time, you think he can make you feel happy, desired, truly cared for.

You’re about to tell him you’d love to, when your door unexpectedly clicks open, your eyes moving past Hyunjin to see Yunho standing in the doorway. Hyunjin immediately scowls, having half a mind to rip him apart once the day is over, though he does his best to temper his aggravation. Can’t let himself lose face in front of the one he loves after all; he’s not sure you’d still be up for a date with him if he displayed his jealous, possessive tendencies this early on (not that he did a very good job of hiding them to begin with.)

“Shit, sorry- am I interrupting a meeting?” Yunho asks, and Hyunjin rolls his eyes, turning his gaze back to you instead. “No, nothing like that,” you answer, shifting your gaze back to Hyunjin, who for the first time looks concerned that you’ll turn him down. It’s subtle, but his eyes are softer, nearly pleading, though he tries his best to not display the desperation that lies underneath- the desperation for you to affirm that you like him too, that you want to go on a date with him, that you want to give him a chance. 

“Oh, good,” Yunho sighs in relief, knowing that sometimes your work bleeds over into the lunch hour. He glances at Hyunjin, a slight frown forming on his face. He’s never spoken to the guy, but Yunho would have to blind to not notice that Hyunjin hates him for seemingly no reason. “Well, uh- I’ll let you get back to whatever talk you’re having. I’ll see you for lunch when it's over?” Yunho asks, and you can see Hyunjin swallow, hands tensing as he waits for your reply. 

Please don’t reject me, his body practically screams, and you almost can’t believe that the confident man that you know is looking this nervous over potential rejection because of you. “Thanks, but I’m actually having lunch with Hyunjin today. Maybe next time?” you answer, smiling at Hyunjin to reassure him that yes, you are going on a date. No, you won’t be picking Yunho over him, despite the history that lies there.  

Relief instantly spreads through Hyunjin, and he returns your smile, his confidence returning as if it’d never left in the first place. “Oh,” Yunho blinks in surprise; that’s.. unexpected. You’ve never prioritized someone else over him before. Huh. He feels.. strange. Jealous..? No, that can’t be right. Why would he be jealous? Hyunjin stands, offering his hand to you, which you accept before you stand yourself. 

“Are you ready, ma’am? I know this cafe you’ll just love, but we have to hurry if we wan’t to make it back before the hour is over,” Hyunjin smiles, turning away to face the door, and subsequently, an almost bewildered looking Yunho. You miss the way Hyunjin shoots your best friend a smug, almost triumphant smirk; a smirk that says I’ve won, she’s mine. And even as Yunho watches the pair of you walk towards the elevator, hears you tell Hyunjin he can call you by your name when it’s “just the two of us,” suddenly he feels incredibly stupid. 

Even as he’s left standing there, watching the elevator doors close with just the two of you inside, he can feel his gut twist as Hyunjin shoots him one last smirk, one that affirms something Yunho is just now realizing- there was a reason Hyunjin hated him. All this time, Yunho was a rival for love, and he just lost the race without ever having actually participated. 

He scoffs, laughing at himself in near disbelief. What an idiot he’s been, and what a moment to realize it. He knew you had a crush on him, but what did he expect? That you’ll always be there, just waiting for the day he’d finally miraculously return your feelings after all these years? Of course you’d move on eventually; and maybe Yunho didn’t want to admit he found your infatuation with him to be a comfortable ego boost, now hit with the epiphany that his newfound jealousy over the loss of your affection is ugly and twisted. 

And truly, Hyunjin had him beat. Somehow, he knew that this was the end of your feelings for him. How ironic it is to lose due to his own complacency, his expectation that you’d always be there no matter what relationships you found yourselves in. How arrogant and selfish he’d been, assured that no matter whom he slept with or pursued, you’d be there just waiting for the day he’d finally ask you out. And now Hyunjin has you, and he’s certain he’ll never let you go.

[victusinveritas]

With luck this will be a gift link to Masha Gessen's new piece in Christo Grozev and why Putin wants him to jump from a barred hospital window, fly in a small plane with tragic engine trouble, or otherwise exit his mortal coil.

In case that link doesn't work (try it, Masha Gessen deserves your clicks even if the NYT is, to put it mildly, complete ass a lot of the time). I've posted the text of the article below the cut. It's a long, necessary read.

Interpol had been looking for a disgraced finance executive for weeks when Christo Grozev, an investigative journalist, found him, hiding in Belarus. Grozev had become expert at following all but invisible digital trails — black-market cellphone data, passenger manifests, immigration records — in order to unmask Russian spies. These were the sleeper cells living in Western countries and passing as natives, or the people dispatched to hunt down dissidents around the world.

He identified the secret police agents behind one of the most high-profile assassination plots of all: the 2020 poisoning of the Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny. That revelation put Grozev in President Vladimir Putin’s cross hairs. He wanted Grozev killed, and to make it happen the Kremlin turned to none other than the fugitive financier, who had been recruited by Russian intelligence. Now the man that Grozev had been tracking began tracking him. The fugitive enlisted a team to begin the surveillance.

The members of that team are behind bars now. The financier lives in Moscow, where several times a week he makes visits to the headquarters of the Russian secret police. Grozev — still very much alive — imagines the man trying to explain to his supervisors why he failed in his mission. This gives Grozev a small measure of satisfaction.

On May 12, after a lengthy trial, Justice Nicholas Hilliard of the Central Criminal Court in London sentenced six people, all of them Bulgarian nationals, to prison terms between five and almost 11 years for their involvement in the plot to kill Grozev, among other operations. The group had spent more than two years working out of England, where the ringleader maintained rooms full of false identity documents and what the prosecution called law-enforcement-grade surveillance equipment. In addition to spying on Grozev and his writing partner, the Russian journalist Roman Dobrokhotov, the Bulgarians spied on a U.S. military base in Germany where Ukrainian soldiers were being trained; they trailed a former Russian law enforcement officer who had fled to Europe; and most embarrassingly for Moscow, they planned a false flag operation against Kazakhstan, a Russian ally.

In the past two decades England has been the site of at least two high-profile deadly operations and more than a dozen other suspicious deaths that have been linked to Russia. Yet the trial of this six-person cell appears to be the first time in recent history that authorities have successfully investigated and prosecuted Russian agents operating on British soil. The trial and its outcome, then, are victories. They are small ones, however, relative to the scope of the threat. The Bulgarians seem to be only one part of a multiyear, multicountry operation to kill Grozev. That in turn is only a small part of what appears to be an ever-broadening campaign by the Kremlin, including kidnappings, poisonings, arson and terrorist attacks, to silence its opponents and sow fear abroad.

The story of the resources that were marshaled to silence a single inconvenient voice is a terrifying reminder of what Putin, and beyond him the rising generation of autocratic rulers, are capable of. The story of how that single voice refused to be silenced — in fact redoubled his determination to tell the truth, regardless of the very real consequences — serves as a reminder that it’s possible to continue to speak and act in the face of mortal danger. But the damage that was done to Grozev’s own life and the lives of the people around him is a warning of how vulnerable we are in the face of unchecked, murderous power.

The wrecked fuselage of an airplane, on which someone has placed a large bouquet of flowers.

The downing of flight MH17 sent Grozev down a rabbit hole in search of answers.

A decade ago, Grozev, like much of the world, was stunned when a Malaysian passenger plane was shot down over eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 people onboard. Russia and Ukraine immediately blamed each other, Russia unleashed a torrent of disinformation, and the West seemed confused. At the time, Grozev was living in Vienna and helping run a company that owned a string of radio stations. But he had always been afflicted with an insatiable hunger for information. Back when the Communist government of Bulgaria fell, he broke into one of his country’s embassies and spent two weeks reading through piles of documents marked “burn after reading.” (“Everyone in the embassy was snitching on everyone else,” he later told me.) He stopped only when the police showed up.

When the Malaysian plane went down in July 2014, he started looking at Flightradar24, an online service that tracks the movement of aircraft around the world, and he quickly fell down a rabbit hole.

His fascination with Flightradar24 set Grozev’s second career in motion. He joined Bellingcat, an innovative outlet that was practicing a new kind of open-source investigation. Using geolocation data and a trove of variously sourced videos and photographs, the Bellingcat team pinpointed the missile launcher used to shoot down the airplane, traced its route from Russia to eastern Ukraine, identified senior Russian military intelligence officers who were involved, and ultimately determined that Russia was responsible for downing the Malaysian plane, a finding later confirmed by professional investigators and the United Nations.

In later investigations, Grozev expanded his tool kit to include black-market databases such as Russian passport data and cellphone logs, which allowed him to name the Russian military intelligence officers who most likely poisoned the defector Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in England in 2018. The following year, when a former Chechen rebel leader was gunned down in broad daylight in a park in Berlin, Grozev used passport and travel data, as well as a deep analysis of Russian government records, to identify the assassin, Vadim Krasikov, a Russian national who was later convicted of the crime in Germany. And in 2020, when Navalny, the Russian opposition hero, was nearly killed by poisoning, Grozev used a massive data set of airline bookings to identify a group of men who had been trailing Navalny for at least three years, and then traced them to a chemical weapons research lab run by the secret police in Moscow.

Most great ventures of Grozev’s life involve Karl von Habsburg, his best friend, who, in a narrative detail not out of keeping with the novelistic sweep of Grozev’s life, is the grandson of the last Austro-Hungarian emperor, Charles I. Together Grozev and von Habsburg once rode into Timbuktu, Mali, with troops that liberated the city from Islamist rebels. At another time they started the first all-Ukrainian-language radio station in Ukraine. Around 2020 von Habsburg had become connected with a group of filmmakers. Grozev’s hunt for Navalny’s would-be assassins seemed like it would make a great documentary, so the team drove to Germany, where Navalny was undergoing rehabilitation.

On Dec. 14, 2020, Bellingcat co-published Grozev’s findings about the people behind the Navalny attack.

The same day, the disgraced finance executive who had been recruited by Russian intelligence hired a team to follow Grozev. That financier was Jan Marsalek, who had gained international notoriety when his fintech company, Wirecard, was consumed by one of the biggest financial scandals in European history. Roughly $2 billion was missing. The company’s chief executive was arrested. Marsalek, a clean-cut 40-year-old who had served as the company’s chief operating officer, disappeared.

He was a logical choice for the Kremlin’s assignment. As a fugitive of the West, he had a strong incentive to stay in Putin’s good graces, whatever it took. And as a Vienna-born Austrian, Marsalek knew well the city where his target, Grozev, was living.

The first time I met Grozev in person was in 2023, at a New York City screening of “Navalny,” the documentary that started with his investigation. He appears in it prominently: all 6’3”, 200-odd pounds of enthusiastic nerdiness. It was later that night that law enforcement informed Grozev his life was in danger and he should not return home to Vienna. By this point, the Bulgarians had been tracking him for more than two years. A friend put Grozev up in a Manhattan townhouse, and he began his life in exile.

A middle-aged man wearing glasses and looking slightly to the side.

“He can see structures that others cannot see,” Grozev’s friend said. “He is like a truffle hunter.”Credit...Jack Taylor/Getty Images

A few weeks later, the producer Geralyn Dreyfous brought him to an event for Amal and George Clooney’s charitable foundation. As they were walking in, Grozev glanced at his phone. His sister, who lives in Bulgaria, had texted that she had been unable to reach their father, who lived in Vienna. “He went pale,” Dreyfous told me. “And just then George Clooney was there to greet us. Christo stepped away, I told George Clooney what had happened and he immediately went to Christo: ‘You can’t go back there. It’s just a ruse to get you to go back there.’”

The police found Grozev’s father dead in his house. Two days later, the Metropolitan Police in London arrested five Bulgarian nationals who, they said, had been conducting surveillance of Grozev and his writing partner, Dobrokhotov. Despite the movie star’s wise advice and law enforcement authorities’ stern warning, Grozev did in fact return to Vienna — “on a cargo plane to a neighboring country, to not leave a trace,” he texted me. The Austrian authorities did not conclude that Grozev’s father had been the victim of foul play. The family was not given access to his body.

Back when he lived in Russia, Dobrokhotov had lost a couple of journalism jobs apparently for being too outspoken, one time shouting at Dmitri Medvedev, who was then Russia’s president, about censorship and “shameful” policies. So in 2013 Dobrokhotov launched his own publication, The Insider, which has grown into a remarkably comprehensive mix of analysis and investigative stories, many of them co-written by Dobrokhotov and Grozev. “They are joined at the hip,” Dreyfous, the producer, said. They seem to think in unison.

In the summer of 2021, Russia cracked down on independent journalists in what in retrospect looks like clearing the deck before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Police seized Dobrokhotov’s electronics and passport. So he left Russia — on foot, walking through the woods to Ukraine, carrying only a small backpack with some clothes, an academic book and a bottle of Hennessy cognac. His family later joined him and they settled in the UK.

Around that time, one of the team of Bulgarians, Vanya Gaberova, a young woman with long brown hair, added Dobrokhotov as a friend on Facebook. “Roman is very easy to befriend if you are pretty,” Grozev noted. When the same woman sent Grozev a friend request, he saw that she had a few connections to people in his network, so he accepted the request, too.

Orlin Roussev, the head of the spy cell, and his Moscow-based handler, Marsalek, discussed using the new Facebook connection to seduce Grozev and perhaps make a compromising video. “We can definitely record something for Pornhub too,” Roussev texted. Marsalek advised proceeding with caution. “I hope she does not fall in love with him. I had that problem before with a honeytrap.” (According to Grozev’s investigations, Marsalek’s work for Russian intelligence began when he himself was honey-trapped.)

If Gaberova did make any attempts to seduce Grozev, he didn’t notice. His son, Chris, a medical student, casually diagnoses him as both “an A.D.H.D. kid” and “definitely autistic.” Grozev’s friends describe his uncanny ability to see connections. “He looks at an Excel table with 300 rows and 90 columns and immediately spots a pattern that it would take me three hours to identify,” Maria Pevchikh, who was a close associate of Navalny’s, told me. “He can see structures that others cannot see,” von Habsburg said. “He is like a truffle hunter.” But he is often oblivious to the actions and feelings of women, including his own wife of three decades.

Grozev had the good sense to marry a woman who is, by all accounts, his temperamental opposite. (His wife, Stefka Grozeva, declined to talk to me for this story.) In contrast with her impulsive, risk-loving, restless husband, she is stable, fond of rules, an introvert. She has worked as an accountant for most of her adult life.

In the film “Navalny,” Grozev confesses that he has spent more than $150,000 on black-market databases and says that if his wife knew, “she wouldn’t be my wife.” He didn’t seem to consider that she would eventually see the film. And when the time came for both of them to attend the premiere in Copenhagen, he neglected to warn her.

At the end of the screening, she booked a separate cab back to the hotel. Months later, Grozev told me that his wife was not speaking to him, though she occasionally agreed to attend events with him. He seemed mystified.

It was more than a year after that premiere that Grozev told me, excitedly, that he had figured out what bothered Stefka: That line in the movie had turned her into the butt of a joke. He started telling interviewers that there was nothing funny about having deceived his wife. “I figured it out, and I fixed it!” he told me.

In the summer of 2023, Grozev made a breakthrough in his own case.

Grozev works by analyzing massive amounts of data. He might start by trawling through cellphone records, to draw a picture of a suspected spy’s life: Never starts work before 10, always calls his parents on a Sunday. Then he can focus on anomalous phone events, such as a weekend work call, to reconstruct the chronology of the person’s travels and actions.

As part of his ongoing project of identifying Russian spies, Grozev had long been looking at a man named Stanislav Petlinsky. Now in his early 60s, Petlinsky appears to have been groomed for his job since childhood, like the characters in the television series “The Americans.” He had spent most of his adult life outside of Russia, but Grozev noticed that he still had a Russian cellphone number, and that a person who had access to that number — Petlinsky’s assistant, perhaps? — was using it to schedule appointments for someone at a medical lab in Moscow.

Using a massive leak of Russian medical data, Grozev located the lab’s records and found several patients who were connected to the number. One of them was Alexander Ivanovich Schmidt — a conspicuously Germanic surname, he noted. Schmidt’s record listed a birth date one week away from that of Marsalek, the fugitive financier. Russian intelligence covers, Grozev had long observed, tend to use a falsified birth date that falls under the same Zodiac sign as the person’s real birth date. It was a clue.

A poster bearing the face of a clean-cut man hangs in what appears to be a subway station.

When the fintech company Wirecard was consumed in a huge financial scandal, Jan Marsalek, its chief operating officer, disappeared.

According to the Moscow lab’s records, which he analyzed with the help of his son, Chris, the patient named Schmidt had been having his blood glucose levels checked. Another clue: colleagues at Der Spiegel, the German magazine with which Grozev frequently collaborates, had confirmed that Marsalek had diabetes.

Grozev also checked airline logs. An Alexander Schmidt, born on the day listed in the lab’s medical record, had been using a French passport to travel on Russian airlines — including, a source told Grozev, on trips to Libya, where Marsalek has invested in a cement factory.

Grozev knew he had found Marsalek. And the best part, he told me, was that he had done it the way he had imagined, as a child, that Sherlock Holmes would have found someone.

Starting in winter 2022, Grozev used his many behind-the-scenes connections to help negotiate what would become the biggest East-West prisoner exchange since the Cold War: the swap that would free the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and 15 others from prisons in Russia and Belarus. Grozev’s primary goal was to free Navalny, who had been behind bars for a year. Grozev wished for this outcome so dearly that, for all his analytic brain power, he had even allowed himself to believe Petlinsky, the superspy, when he said he could help make it happen. But that was a lie.

Amid a sea of flowers and a photograph of Aleksei Navalny, a woman reaches out to touch a wooden Russian Orthodox cross.

Grozev was involved in negotiations that he hoped would result in the release of Aleksei Navalny. In February 2024, Navalny died in a Russian prison.

Grozev and I met up a couple of days later, in the most depressing of all the odd places we’d had lunch over the preceding year: the food court in Brookfield Place, an upscale shopping mall in Lower Manhattan. It was as sterile as the apartment Grozev was then renting, one of those furnished hotel alternatives.

He was toggling between two different explanations for what we both assumed had been a murder. Was Navalny killed to prevent Western negotiators from insisting on his release? And if so, was Grozev somehow culpable? Or was the murder part of an escalation of Putin’s attack on dissidents, a sign that he no longer cared about even a semblance of deniability? “If it’s the beginning of a new wave, that’s really scary,” he said, “because it will affect people like us.”

He didn’t have to explain what he meant. My connection to Grozev is more than just journalistic. We share a bond, along with hundreds of other people, of being persona non grata in Putin’s Russia. Across the globe, members of this club live with the suspicion that they could be targeted by Russia for surveillance, kidnapping or assassination. Around this time, female Russian opposition journalists and activists living in exile were falling ill, apparent victims of a series of poisonings. These weren’t fatal, but they produced alarming effects, including signs of psychosis.

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Every time Putin’s exiles hear about incidents like that, we look for all the ways in which we are different, all the reasons we’ll be spared: We are not so well known as to draw attention, or we are too well known to be attacked. We haven’t been as harsh or as political in our statements, or it’s been long enough since we left, or we had the good sense to settle in a safe country.

It’s always a fool’s errand. Investigative journalists work by finding patterns, and terror works by being random. When two women we knew received confirmation that they had been poisoned and others experienced alarming symptoms, it started to feel as if anyone could be a target and everyone was. When other acquaintances seemed angry, impulsive, not themselves, both Grozev and I wondered if they had been poisoned, too — as though living in exile with a target on your back weren’t reason enough to act erratically.

Sitting there in the shopping mall, Grozev told me that police officers had recently found text messages in which the Bulgarian spies described breaking into his Vienna apartment two years earlier. Perhaps to lighten the mood, he read me some of the texts.

“‘We entered the apartment, headed straight for the safe.’”

“Wait,” I interrupted him. “You have a safe?

“Of course not.” He did not have a safe. He was forever losing things — his laptop, his driver’s license.

Grozev heard about the break-in more than a year after the fact, but when he told his family about it, his daughter, Sophia, remembered that right around that time they had seen a man taking photos of the two of them at an Indian restaurant. They both remembered what he looked like, and Grozev was able to connect him, through photos on Facebook, to the Bulgarian woman who’d made the friend request. Sophia picked the man out of a photo lineup, and the police confirmed that he had indeed been in Vienna the day of the break-in. Thus a sixth suspect was arrested, and Sophia started thinking about following her father into investigative journalism.

Grozev was shaken. “The whole time, my son was playing video games in his room. If he had just gotten up to pee, they would have killed him.” Beyond that, he was struck by the extent of the surveillance footage that the police showed him, and the fact that it included his father’s apartment. “I now think it was 50-50 that he was killed.”

When he visited his family, Grozev was now under extremely tight security — “sentries 24/7” was how he described it — and this wasn’t helping his marriage. “Weeks under house arrest with police on the premises probably showed how unsustainable it is,” he told me when he returned.

Grozev was becoming a person without a past. He lived in exile. His parents were both dead. His adventures with von Habsburg were suspended indefinitely. His marriage was floundering. His access to the physical objects from his life before January 2023 was uncertain. All he had was a small black backpack with his laptop, when he could remember where he left it.

With little choice in the matter, Grozev started getting used to New York. He developed a work routine and started shaving again. Marsalek, the former high-flying finance executive, was settling into an unglamorous life in Russia. Grozev tracked him to a vacation in a sad tourist trap in the North Caucasus. “And we are sitting here,” Grozev said to me. It was one of those summer days when all of New York looks like the setting for a rom-com. We were seated outdoors, having good food. “Little moments of revenge,” he said.

The trial of Grozev’s would-be assassins began at the end of November last year at the Old Bailey, the Central Criminal Court building in London. The plot against Grozev was deadly serious, but the details, as they emerged in more than 70,000 archived text messages, hours of video and an entire binder of charts illustrating the timing of operations and the flow of money, were at times ridiculous. The leaders of the group used the aliases Jean-Claude Van Damme and Jackie Chan; they referred to the lower-ranking members of the spy ring as the “minions,” a term to which they were apparently so committed that among the objects entered into evidence — and passed around to the members of the jury — was a surveillance camera that had been hidden in the flower of a Minion toy from the “Despicable Me” movies. The second in command conscripted both his live-in girlfriend and his mistress into the espionage operation, concealed the existence of each of them from the other and lied to both about having cancer, at one point sending a photo of himself with toilet paper wrapped around his head to convince one of them he was recovering from surgery. She believed him.

He had told the women that they were working for Interpol, and said the same thing to his mistress’s ex-boyfriend, when the Bulgarians recruited him. In a police interview played for the jury, the ex-boyfriend was asked, “Who are Interpol to you?” “From the movies,” he said. “Just, uh, chasing criminals.” He added, “Right now, the dumbest thing I have ever done in my life.”

Half the group pleaded guilty to espionage charges, so in the end only those three — the two women and the ex-boyfriend, the man whom Grozev’s daughter identified — stood trial. Gaberova, the youngest defendant, and Bizer Dzhambazov, the second-in-command, were arrested when they were in bed together. Gaberova screamed at her lover, “What have you done?” Her defense attorney pointed to this as evidence that she herself never considered that she might be doing something wrong. Gaberova told the court that she thought that Grozev was “a bad journalist.” All three defendants, it seemed, had been fools for love.

Watching the trial unfold was a surreal experience for the spies’ targets. On at least one occasion the group had been able to book an airline ticket for one of their members in the seat next to Dobrokhotov; using a hidden camera, she captured a long video of him and noted his phone passcode. Dobrokhotov learned that he had been under surveillance almost from the moment he walked out of Russia in 2021. In Vienna, he had rented a room on Grozev’s street. The spies, too, were renting on that street — directly across from Grozev, a couple of doors down from a new, remarkably good espresso bar. “We always wondered how it stayed in business, given that Christo was always the only customer,” Dobrokhotov told me. The espresso bar closed after Grozev left Austria and the spy ring was busted.

There is something profoundly insulting about having your life turned upside down by people who call themselves Jackie Chan and Van Damme and can be convinced that toilet paper wrapped around someone’s head is proof of cancer surgery. Even the amount of money involved, at least in this part of the operation, was comparatively modest: just a couple of hundred thousand dollars.

The trial seemed to have an improvised, make-believe quality. Even the usual British court garb — the lawyers’ black gowns and white wigs, and the judge’s red robe with white fur cuffs — rather than elevating the proceedings, made it feel like everyone might just be pretending. Except for the fact that Putin clearly wanted these two journalists hunted down and killed.

In March, a jury handed down its verdict: Like the three who offered earlier pleas, Gaberova, Katrin Ivanova and Tihomir Ivanchev were guilty of espionage. Before the sentencing, Grozev submitted a two-page victim impact statement. With none of his usual humor and with little elaboration, he enumerated the devastating consequences of the Kremlin’s campaign against him: separation from his family, hypervigilance, anxiety, disrupted sleep, the expense of maintaining two homes.

The sentencing was televised. Grozev watched from a prosecutor’s office in a European capital with a group of law enforcement officers. It was, as he has become fond of saying, surreal. “I loved the delivery,” he said. “The judge made it clear that he didn’t buy their bullshit that they didn’t know” that they were working for Russia. The sentences, of five to 11 years, sounded longer than they were: Under U.K. guidelines, the convicted spies might spend only half of their nominal sentences behind bars. Gaberova, for example, will probably be released on parole in a couple of years.

The London press covered the case as a breakthrough. No longer would Britain look away while Russian billionaires used the country as their playground and Russian agents as their killing field. “In the U.K., this is the biggest spy case they’ve prosecuted since the Cold War,” Grozev said. “They see it as a slap in the face for Putin. In Russia, it is seen as an embarrassment — the six Bulgarians were disposable. They even have a term for it: ‘dropy,’ from the English ‘to drop.’” Nor was the operation a complete failure, from the Kremlin’s point of view: A trove of surveillance data on Grozev and Dobrokhotov had been delivered to Russian intelligence. “There will be new attempts,” Grozev predicted. “Other units will be eager to prove that they can do better. That’s how they work.”

Before he left New York for the sentencing, we met up for coffee. He was frustrated that he did not have access to all the evidence assembled by the Metropolitan Police. He was certain that he could find information they’d missed, clues that would help find others who were involved, enabling him to solve the biggest case of his life — the case his life may depend on.

It is clear to Grozev that he, and perhaps even more so Dobrokhotov, who is Russian, face a risk to their lives wherever they go in Europe. The United States used to be safe. But even under the Biden administration there were many Russian dissidents in ICE detention. The Trump administration has threatened to deport at least one dissident back to Russia, where she would almost certainly be imprisoned. The F.B.I.’s foreign influence task force, which used to protect foreign dissidents in the United States, has been disbanded. What if the Trump administration decided to do something nice for Putin?

Grozev reminded me that I too could be a nice gift, since Russia has a warrant out for my arrest. I pointed out that he was even more “wanted.” But where could he go? “I am disturbed by not knowing where my home is,” Grozev said.

His daughter is about to graduate from high school and his son is finishing medical school. For a long time, both had assumed they could join their father in the United States, but this no longer appeared obvious. Nothing did.

“Is your wife still your wife?” I asked.

“I believe so,” Grozev said. “We don’t see each other, but we are very friendly.”

By any measure, Grozev won this round. He is alive. Marsalek is stuck in Russia, and his minions are in prison in England. But here was the price Grozev had paid for surviving: his family, his home and the ability to feel safe anywhere in the world.

[archivalofsins]

For Futa Jackalope really did just turn to camera and say chicken says what. Like he called the audience cowards. Too afraid to judge Futa because it would mean judging themselves.

Jackalope was on it. This end of trial report he hit all the right notes- He was in all the right places. He saw the audiences weaknesses and he hit them over and over.

He said you had your fun sowing lets chat before the reaping starts and he went in.

Like damn no remorse.

"Or……maybe you just couldn’t bring yourself to find him “guilty”, because he reminded you too much of yourself……I’m just blabbing."

Even down to highlighting the faceless Futa showing that he could easily be any of us as he said it. Jackalope said,

"I take no prisoners; you will see an ending before the end. It will be shaped like every door you did not open and every life you did not live. Then in the face of your doubts you will keep walking forward because where you came from no longer exists. Time has an insatiable appetite and we are all on it's menu. Hahaha I'm such a kidder."

Back to what he really said and the thing that intrigues me the most. Jackalope throughout the second trial report kept highlighting that despite finding Kotoko guilty we proved through our verdict that her actions do work.

By finding everyone who she attacked/threatened Innocent. This continues the trend of Kotoko jumping on any sign of agreement to get to the conclusion she wants to end up at. That being her methods are correct. So just because we found her guilty doesn't necessarily mean we found her methods wrong.

The way Jackalope interprets the guilty prisoners change in verdict may be exactly how Kotoko will view it herself.

"But, to put it another way, if this is because he showed remorse, you could also say his “innocent” verdict was thanks to the actions of Kotoko Yuzuriha, right?"

Cuz think about it…….who knows how he would have acted without the pain, right?

Q.04 Would you make the same mistake again?

Futa: I don’t think so. I don’t think I could take this kind of pain again.

Q.07 What have you been into lately?

Futa: Finding a way to distract myself from the pain.

Well next up Kazui~

He’s a self-admitted liar, have you been able to solve the mystery?

Well given the little amount of information provided in contrast to Jackalope's statement on Yuno... I would have to say we haven't. Instead Jackalope just reiterates things that Es brought to attention in Kazui's second voice drama.

Not mentioning anything about cheating or marriage in the slightest.

Again very interesting in comparison to Yuno who Jackalope admits told us what she did herself without ever really honing in on what part of what she told us should be considered.

Just stating,

"She said it herself, so her crime became quite clear, hasn’t it? And that crime didn’t raise to the level of murder to you, I take it. Interesting. I guess that’s how it is in your era."

Yet in Yuno's second trial interrogation she said a lot of things. Including dismissing the audience previous judgments on her and the guards desire to project a sob story onto her.

Yuno Second Trial Interrogation

This situations bothersome-ness has won out./I won't be bothered.

"So, I am extremely cooled off." (-273.15°C) "That is all."

"That’s the real Yuno Kashiki, you could say. Cold and logical. Practical and unromantic. Getting her to interact is gonna be a heavy lift, I’d say."

"You want to make clear the truth...huh? Fu... Haha!"

"The result of doing looots of sugar-daddying: ...abortion."

...!

"That's probably my murder. Well, please go ahead and partake of the truth."

...

"How is it? Satisfied? Then, can we be done already?"

Yuno...you...

"You don't surprise much, do you? As I thought, you knew it from the song extraction."

Cold and Logical

Well, yes. As one possibility, I thought it was likely. That, going by Milgram's scope of interpretation for murder, it was possible.

"I'm sure. Well, I generally got the sense that that's how it was. I could feel it."

You could feel it...you say?

"I can hear it, while I'm in Milgram. It's probably the same for everyone else."

Practical and unromantic.

"Voices peeking in, digging around, and discussing my sins."

Interesting that she uses sins plural here not singular. Didn't note this previously but probably should have.

Something like that...

"Are those not the thoughts you were having? Not that I would know."

But you get my point Jackalope's end of trial report on Yuno confirms that what she said in her second interrogation was in fact the truth and nothing but it. However, he speaks very little on how we interpreted what we were told in contrast to other prisoners.

Just making a sweeping statement,

Interesting. I guess that’s how it is in your era.

But he does ponder an interesting thing,

"I wonder though, what decides the worth of a life?"

Playing on the abortion debate that her trial turned into before plainly asking,

"……don’t tell me, did this murder seem smaller to you than the murders of the other prisoners? Thought-provoking!"

Again playing on the idea the fans have ran with that Yuno should not even be here because she hasn't committed murder like the other prisoners. He says a lot and not that much while discussing Yuno but Jackalope's statements on her can be used to further scrutinize what's not said about Kazui.

Like I said he basically confirms Yuno was in fact telling the truth throughout her second voice drama but doesn't mention any of what was brought up in Kazui's outside of reiterating Es' points.

Of Kazui being a liar and self-pitying going as far as to call him emo and even praise us for being so accommodating to him despite his woe is me routine.

Jackalope even comments that he can't bring himself to be interested in Kazui,

"It all feels very emo and I can’t bring myself to be very interested in him, but the fact that you’re so accommodating to him, is commendable."

However, he reiterates another point one that he brought up from the beginning that directly contradicts a statement that Kazui made in his second voice drama,

"He’s the only one who has the strength to fight off Kotoko and Mikoto after all."

Kazui states in his second voice drama that if Kotoko and Mikoto were to team up that would be the end of him and Milgram. Contradicting Jackalope's statement in Es' voice drama that if Milgram were an all out brawl then Kazui would come out victorious.

So Jackalope basically goes he's still lying have you figured out what the lies are and then just goes here's one of them for free.

Now onto the other interesting one- Amane.

Amane's is interesting because Jackalope basically goes her life would be this way in and out of Milgram. Showing that his focus with Amane is not us being tricked into going easier on her because she's a child but a desire for the audience to go harder on her because she is a child.

Coddling isn't going to prepare her for the real world but neither is being unnecessarily cruel to her either. Even admitting that he himself doesn't know what made the audience find Amane innocent this time around and stating he's curious about the judgement.

Despite how vocal people said Amane fans were being- This again highlights that no, they weren't. Amane fans weren't pushing super hard or really loud. They weren't going around shouting at people to vote her innocent or bribing people to. Hell, the staff couldn't even write a decent bit for her part of the video because they don't know what caused this.

"I remember feeling a sort of awe at your resoluteness to your duties, being a kid didn’t mean you couldn’t be “guilty”, right? So, what was it that made you choose “innocent” this time? I’m very curious. Is it her, or her beliefs, or her birthright, or her fate…."

Whatever the circumstances may be, she is the one that has to bear the blame. That’s just how it is. Both in and out of MILGRAM, isn’t that right?

They were wrong for highlighting the tasing scene like this again. They went I'm about to make you feel bad if you voted this kid guilty fucking suffer rip to you I guess- you are the problem. Like there was no joking here Jackalope looked at the camera and went,

Jackalope: This is just how it is everywhere. Your vote won't change that. It won't lessen the weight of the blame on her shoulders. In or outside of Milgram.

The “It can’t be helped”, from the scum that can’t be helped. That makes them doubtlessly, clearly, absolutely, unequivocally, beyond any doubt, categorically, emphatically, GUILTY.

Then just went to Mikoto like that shit was nothing like it didn't just destroy my soul.

That concludes my fucked up things from the end of trial two report.

[moreespressoformydepresso]

Small, teensie little AU I’m contemplating writing to get back into the ✨vibe✨ so I can update my other fics:

The bars in the zoo are spaced just far enough apart that the slimmest, smallest tributes can fit through. The tributes decide they can use this to escape, but they’re guarded relatively well. So they work around it. On the day before the final interviews, they’re done planning. Bobbin, Mizzen, Sheaf, Teslee, and Treech sneak through the bars one by one and meet up just in front of the main entrance, since that’s an easy place to locate with zero knowledge of the zoo layout. They all have a job.

Teslee fucks with the security system of the zoo and cracks into the citywide system, adjusting it just subtly enough that none of the guards would ever notice. All it will take is one final technical nudge to quietly deactivate the whole thing, looping the cameras and disabling alarms all over the city. Circ will know exactly what to do when it’s time. Later, she also hacks into the Capitol’s peacekeeper tech to basically annihilate any and all tech advantages they had.

Bobbin, Sheaf, and Mizzen? Well, they’re all conspiring towards two goals. Gathering supplies and creating as much chaos as possible. At night, they do a lot of breaking and entering, leaving a trail of destruction and booby traps in their wake to get back at the Capitol for everything they’ve done and they make sure they are front and center on camera. Everyone has to know who did this. The next day is even worse, because now people know they’ve escaped and are on the loose. They amp it up, since they have enough supplies to last them they focus completely on sowing chaos everywhere they go. For a whole day, they terrorize the city.

And as everyone focuses on them, on all the havoc they’re creating and the fact they’re showing their faces all around the city but constantly evading capture, as they realize all their tv’s now constantly play the worst shows ever thanks to Teslee, they fail to notice the absence of the fifth and final missing tribute. As his fellow tributes draw all the attention and create panic, Treech spends the day exploring, jumping between rooftops and slipping through the streets like a ghost as he scopes out the city. All its hiding places, it’s corners no one notices, the weaknesses in the Capitol’s defensive lines and the way back to the districts. Night begins to fall. As Bobbin, Sheaf, Mizzen, and Teslee create one big spectacle right in front of the president’s mansion, the Capitol’s focus is on this show of rebellion. And as they watch the spectacle, they fail to realize a shadow of a boy slipping through the zoo, past the distracted guards, picking the lock of the enclosure’s gate and leading its unwilling inhabitants back out into the streets. No one notices when the systems shut down as a boy with glasses gives it one final nudge, and no one knows the four rebels in front of the President’s Mansion used the fire of the Panem flag they burned to mask their escape until all 24 of them were gone.

And no one ever finds out the train sent to collect products briefly housed 24 extra passengers that night.

[agentgrange]

Field Notes: NOAA Corps & MIDCON-RED

The smallest uniformed service in the United States, the NOAA Corps was created in 1970 as a direct successor to the Environmental Science Services Administration Corps and the Geodetic Survey Corps. The NOAA Corps legacy and relation to MIDCON-RED remains contentious, due to the lasting consequences of the Nixon administration and an interagency battle that still rages today. Originally the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration seemed a natural sister-organization under the Department of the Interior, with MIDCON eager to utilize it as an intermediary when working with the Department of Defense. White House staff and the Office of Management and Budget, ignorant of MIDCON's hidden objectives, were heavily in favor of merging it with the Department of the Interior to ensure NOAA's nominal mission of resource conservation remained intact without increasing the scope of the at-the-time-nascent Environmental Protection Agency. All the stars seemed aligned to provide MIDCON the front-facing uniformed agency it needed were it not for an unlikely stumbling block-- the war in Vietnam. 

The legend persists in the halls of government to this day. Facing increasing protests and domestic opposition to the war, Washington began stationing troops (up to 1500 at a time) in government offices across the country. Officially, they were there to protect federal offices from an increasingly militant anti-war movement. But anyone that knew Nixon chaffed at the concept of the increasingly paranoid commander-in-chief stationing armed forces within the halls of what seemed, to him, rival agencies flushed with political enemies. No one, especially MIDCON, wanted their offices garrisoned and heavily scrutinized-- much less ground zero for the next Kent State if protestors ever attempted to confront them. With pressure from MIDCON, secretary of Interior Walter Hickel sent a letter to President Nixon demanding that he "listen to the youth" and deescalate the situation. The letter leaked to the public, circulating in publications around Washington. Nixon, ever spiteful, torpedoed the Department of the Interior's bid for control of NOAA and assigned it to the Department of Commerce-- a move Washington insiders called "putting the fox in the hen house.” Not only was MIDCON robbed of its prize, but NOAA was placed under a department that would operate it in the name of commercial interests.

For everyone but Nixon, it seemed like an unmitigated disaster. Even the head of the Department of Commerce was taken aback, saying in his memoirs "I asked why we were so intent in winning this battle- and wouldn’t we be more focused on our essential mission if NOAA were placed elsewhere? The answer I received from those far more experienced than I in the governmental agency game was: 'Expand or die.'" In a latter passage he would write "Hiding my reservations concerning the headaches we would be inheriting, I congratulated the Secretary on his great victory. I grabbed a copy of the Stratton Commission Report and read the highlights on my way. I had never considered the possibility of our winning seriously enough to have really looked at the document. Fortunately the White House people with whom I was meeting had not read it either."

NOAA struggled severely under the Department of Commerce, who lacked the budget or interest to properly manage it. Largely left to languish in administrative hell, it was only a matter of time before the Office of Management and Budget audited the organization. With some political wrangling, MIDCON was able to sow anti-Commerce sentiment and convince a handful of key administrators of the necessity of an inter-agency taskforce to get NOAA back on track. Unofficially, it allowed the Department of the Interior to get their foot in the door and create an in for the Office of Mitigation and Defeat. It was an imperfect solution for an imperfect time. Even after the crisis had ended, MIDCON wouldn't soon forget how Nixon slighted them and the man's propensity for wiretapping anything and everything made having a frank, candid conversation with him on the nature of MIDCON impossible. One way or the other, he would need to be dealt with. So in 1972, a MIDCON agent under the cryptonym Deep Throat delivered confidential information on the Watergate Hotel break in to The Washington Post, taking precautions to make sure any investigation would lead back to an unaffiliated member of the FBI. 

Today, MIDCON remains one of the major contributors to the NOAA Corps despite the agency falling outside of the Department of the Interior. Acting under the guise of an inter agency taskforce, MIDCON will send agents to NOAA Corps training to receive a uniformed service rank before having them shuffled into US armed forces units around the world as "technical specialists." Without the (unknowing) aid of the NOAA Corps, MIDCON's ability to operate alongside US troops or outside of the continental US would be severely inhibited. 

[sataniccapitalist]

The 10 Core Myths Still Taught in Business Schools | Frankly 99

2025

(Recorded June 9, 2025)

Economics departments around the world teach a narrow boundary story of the way our world works. A narrative of infinite growth driven by consumption and money, which has dominated our culture and unknowingly shaped the way we live. But does this story really reflect our biophysical reality – or the full scope of humanity’s role within it?

In this week’s Frankly, Nate identifies 10 myths being taught in business schools today, and the massive implications these misconceptions hold for society. From the way we define value and the boundaries of success to the idolization of self-interest and human ingenuity, these so-called laws of economics were developed in a different world than the one we inhabit now. By exposing the unquestioned myths that are perpetuated in MBA education, Nate aims to sow the seeds of an economic system rooted in the real world – which may one day become a reality.

What would it take for the long-held “immutable truths” of economic theory to be questioned, and eventually changed to better reflect our material limits? How do we redefine "success" in a way that does not posit GDP as the main indicator of human or economic well being? Most importantly, if we shed ourselves of these delusions, how might we reimagine an economic system that centers the well-being of citizens, the health of the planet, and all of the species we share it with?

[lailoken]

What do you think happens to those frauds that take up the label of a practitioner only to cheat others out of their money? There's people who could be suffering from real curses/misfortune due to external forces they can't handle and turn to these individuals thinking they'd be of help only to be worse off. It honestly irritates me since this means the genuine people who can help them out receive more skepticism as a result.

I understand your frustration and disappointment better than you know.

One of the more upsetting and precarious situations that I occasionally have to deal with in my work is the untangling of issues caused or exacerbated by magical malpractice (a term I use to broadly describe magical services offered to the public in a way that is fraudulent, reckless, and/or malevolent.) It can be hard enough having to deplete my time, resources, and sense of security in order to aid others with their spiritual maladies; but there's something truly insulting about realizing that the very ailment I'm working to remedy was inflicted or inflamed by another practitioner claiming the mantle of Otherworld Intercessor.

As for what happens to these people, I think it probably depends. If they're entirely fraudulent in all they're doing—making up lies as they go—they will almost certainly have things blow up in their face eventually, purely from their lies piling up and becoming unmanageable. However, if they're not fraudulent about their magical experiences, but reckless or pernicious in the way they magically treat others, it's a bit harder to say. They may simply be acting rashly, in which case, they are probably worsening existing issues with their fumbling attempts to treat the issue. When this is the case, I think one's reputation will likely begin to speak for itself over time. Unfortunately, however, if a mage really doesn't know what they're doing, but is meddling with real and dangerous entities/magics, then they will more than likely end up hurting themselves down the line (and others may be hurt in the process as well.) More rarely, a practitioner may be sowing harm on behalf of a malignant spirit (knowingly or unknowingly). But if that spirit is potent in its own right, then the practitioner may still benefit greatly from the protection and bribery of said spirit. This is the trickiest situation to predict, as well as the hardest one to "clean up after."

Ultimately, I believe that many—if not most—practitioners who fall into the camp you describe will suffer in some way as a result of their folly and/or arrogance. I think the depth and scope of this retribution comes down to how badly one has managed to betray themselves, their peers, and their spirits. And overall, I do believe that people who sow harm—in any form—eventually experience a sort of divine retribution for the pains they've inflicted. I just think this is true for all people, to varying degrees, and I don't understand it to be an eternal or punitive system, like Western concepts of Hell do.

[tf2occontest]

The Trapper (Angel) VS The Jack of All Trades, Wolfgang Stahl (+ "Bluey")

(Full matchup list here)

Alright team, here's a recap: This is a contest to determine who amongst you will take the top of the leaderboards and be hired at TFI! Simply put, whoever gets the most votes gets to move on, and whoever doesn't... Well. They'll be put down swiftly and cleanly. :}

So, mann your stations, because here are your next contestants! Vote for your favorite mercenary who you want to win the TF2 OC Contest! - P

OC INFO UNDER THE CUT!

We highly encourage you to take a peek to make your decision!

The Trapper (Angel)

@vsc-art

Image credit: @/vsc-art

Trapper is a very paranoid man. Due to past events, his paranoia has gone from simple anxiety to hallucinations and very bad schizophrenia. Mann Co, using this against him, has put him on the field and used his quick to shoot mental state to fight. He’s usually a quiet guy, despite his loud appearance. He can get upset quite fast though, thinking people are always after him and will always attack, trust is not easily earned and is very easily broken. Mann Co. has prescribed him medications to “keep his paranoia calm”. They don’t actually do that. The medications keep his paranoia on edge, his adrenaline always pumping, always hallucinating. He’s only allowed to skip doses on ceasefire days as to not ruin his tremendously high kill count.

Aside from his lore, I feel like Trapper’s quick thinking should let him win! He’s a very lovable guy when he's not screaming his head off. Plus look at those big ol puppy eyes!!! His game mechanics are mostly listed in his ref, and yes, Engineer was the one to build his current prosthetic!! He has an hesitant relationship with most the mercs, but he’s not fully distrusting of them. He’s so sillay he deserves a nice big cup of chocolate milk. I love him and you should too!!!

The Jack of All Trades, Wolfgang Stahl (+ "Bluey")

@mickmundane

Image credit: @/mickmundane

You know him, you love him--it's everybody's favorite everyman, the one-of-a-kind Wolfgang Q. Stahl! This Jack of All Trades hails from the great state of Arizona, but don't get it twisted--he's no Phonecian. A veteran of war and a helping hand, this middle-aged man has climbed mountains great and small for work, and it seemed to him like TFI would be the next best place to be!

At least, that's one half of the story.

Was his life stolen from him, or did a twisted reflection follow him down from that lonely mountain peak? What happens to the parts of yourself that you ignore, run from, and leave behind? The anger and grief that you sowed--not for the world, but for yourself--will come back to haunt you, face-to-face. It's only a matter of time.

Keep your chin up, Stahl. We'll look out for each other.

In gameplay, The Jack of All Trades is marketed as “a class for the multiclasser”, a Support class which offers a varied but sometimes laid-back fill-in-the-gaps type gameplay experience for any of those micromanagers on your ideal team. He comes provided with his own stock weapons, including:

Primary - Scoped Shotgun ; Based on the Remington 870 hunting shotgun with a scope attached. Range is limited compared to stock Sniper but can still pack a well-aimed punch when scoped or unscoped.

Secondary - Dual Pistols ; Based on the 60’s Browning Hi-Power pistol. Dual wielded with a slower shooting speed but higher ammo capacity & caliber compared to stock Scout.

Melee - Hunting Knife ; Serrated Buck knife with his family name engraved on the handle. -75% Health upon backstab.

The Jack of All Trades is made a unique class due to his gimmick item:

Gimmick - The Backpack ; Can hold and use up to five items from ANY other class (Ex. Picking up a dropped Engineer Wrench to repair a dispenser), as well as hold or use ammo crates or medkits. 

The Backpack would open a HUD upon selection with five slots to choose from, and any items within can be used either for yourself or distributed to other teammates. Got a Scout in need of healing but no Medic around? Pass a spare medkit to him. The Pyro wants to try the Backburner an enemy dropped on death but you got to it first? May as well hand it over!

Upon spawning or respawning into a match the Backpack will generate with a random assortment of items (or nothing at all if your RNG is bad enough), but cannot be refilled by supply closets. If you want to refill your bag without dying, you’ve got to pick it up from enemy (or ally) drops yourself.

In baseline TF2 gameplay, swapping out weapons from fallen enemies of the same class is already an existing mechanic--this just takes advantage of that. Any weapons you pick up as a JOAT also only have the remaining ammo of that weapon, and when that is depleted, they’re no longer usable and will disappear from the Backpack.

Yes, this does include throwables like Jarate or Mad Milk--or sometimes even a special new throwable, the Blood Bag! Whose blood is it? It’s his. :] He has O- and is very proud of that.