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minecraftbookshelf · 8 months

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Gone Fishing

Mr. InTheLittleWood I know you’re in your tags on here, walk away from this one.

(No, this isn't Marriage of State, that is still with my beta, this is something i started writing for Mermay and then semi-abandoned until these past couple of weeks.)

Mildly Dark Comedy Urban Fantasy Adventures featuring Sleep Deprived Martyn, Selkie!Scott, and Swan Maiden!Cleo and Pearl.

AO3

Rating: T on AO3

Wordcount: ~4k

Characters: Martyn InTheLittleWood, Scott Smajor, ZombieCleo, PearlescentMoon, bonus appearances by JoeHills (with accompanying breaking of the fourth wall) and Rendog.

Relationships: Gaslight, Gatekeep, Girlboss + Martyn (its not quite Divorcee Quartet imo) Background Martyn?Ren and Referenced Past Flower Husbands

Warnings: Off-screen murder and on-screen blood spatter, kidnapping, selkie tropes and the adjacent concepts

This is directly inspired by that one tumblr post (I'll link it if i ever successfully find it again) that starts out "swan maidens would be hella built and down for violence, actually" and ends with "a swan maiden and a selkie team up and do violence"

3AM calls directly after the full moon are officially Martyn's nemesis. Nonetheless, he listens to the flustered emergency dispatcher stammer through a semi-explanation of the situation. (Murder. Kidnapped mythicals. The usual. He's not even on call this week; how and why is he the only Hunter in the area?) He hauls himself out of bed, knocks on Ren's door on the way out to let him know he is leaving and grabs his keys. He pauses, halfway out the front door and texts Ren because there is no way he'll remember given that he probably didn't even wake up when Martyn knocked, deep asleep and dead to the world in a way only exhausted werewolves can manage.

It's a bit of a drive; some fancy, palace-like mansion outside town on the far side. About as far away as it can get while still being in Martyn's district.

He gets two more calls on the way over, one from the same dispatcher, one from the police on the scene, practically begging him to hurry up with all the usual frantic desperation of humans who've never encountered magic before.

He stops for coffee.

It's a right mess by the time he does arrive; multiple police complete with flashing lights. The press (complete with their own version of flashing lights) a coroners van, at least five ambulances, and an arch-fey lurking by the tree-sized bush sculpted into a pegasus.

Oh no.

Joe Hills gives a jaunty wave that Martyn returns on autopilot.

There's only one reason Joe Hills ever leaves Tennessee.

One cup of coffee is not enough to deal with Cleo.

Much less what they usually drag with them.

Maybe-if Martyn is really, really lucky-Cleo was flying solo when they got mixed up in whatever the hell this is. (Even if they tend a bit more towards arson than murder.) Maybe its just them and not any of the rest of their crew.

He slips through the frazzled crowd of medical and law enforcement personnel, taking note of the battered and sickly looking people sitting in the backs of the ambulances, all of them visibly Not Exactly Human. He recognizes the vampire in the nearest one. Her missing persons case has been sitting on Jimmy's desk at Guild HQ for almost six months now with no new leads. She's sipping on a blood packet while a nervous paramedic hovers just out of her immediate reach.

Now he just has to find someone who knows what's going on-

"Hiyaa!"

Oh no.

Scott Smajor is sitting in the entryway of the stupidly fancy house, wrapped in a shock blanket, practically beaming at Martyn around the paramedic who is very clearly just trying to do their job and is not being paid enough for this.

Martyn can relate.

Scott's smile is wide and bright, his eyes are glassy and feverish, and he's visibly shaking. There is blood spattered on his clothes. And that is just what Martyn can see around the blanket.

He should revisit that offer from the Syndicate. He's pretty sure their annual salary is double what the Guild pays. More than enough to make up for not being a strictly legal operation. Half the stuff Ren brings into their apartment would get them both imprisoned in a pocket dimension somewhere for centuries anyway, might as well go all in.

With a resigned sigh he sucks it up, sticks his hands in his pockets, and strolls up to the front steps.

"Well if it isn't our favorite friendly neighborhood black widow," he says, dry as summer in purgatory. Already piecing together the picture to form something of a complete answer to the question of 'what happened.' "Fancy meeting you here."

Scott actually has the audacity to look offended. "Excuuse you. Most of my husbands are still alive."

Based off the amount of blood spatter on his clothes and the presence of the coroners van, Martyn is going to assume that the most recent one isn't.

'Clothes' is a bit of a generous term. Scott is wearing what most people would consider appropriate-if a bit risque- for clubbing, and what Martyn recognizes as what Scott wears when he's hunting. Most strongly indicated not by what he is wearing but by one very specific and important thing he isn't. This kind of scenario usually ends in at least a week of headaches and several different levels of bureaucratic hell for Martyn that he has to deal with all on his own because Jimmy and Scott are apparently fighting or something and Jimmy reuses to touch anything to do with this nonsense with a fifty foot pole. That could also just be Jimmy deciding to be smart for once and growing a backbone at a time extremely inconvenient for Martyn in particular.

Every day, Martyn regrets getting mixed up in mythical society. If he'd known it outstripped even the smallest of small towns on the 'everyone knows everyone' front he would have run so fast in the other direction. No matter what Grian had to offer. And now he's stuck here.

"Speaking of husbands," Scott purrs, craning to look around the paramedic, ostensibly at Martyn but he's really not as subtle as he thinks in the way he scans the driveway around Martyn's car. "Where is your partner?" He's hiding it well, but his jaw is tense and his eyes pinched. It's probably been hours since he was Separated.

"So what kind of trouble did you get yourself into this time?" Martyn ignores his question and brushes past it, offering an alternate distraction he is actually willing to play along with. He does not have the energy to deal with the drama surrounding his partner and said partner's ex(?)-husband, especially when Jimmy isn't here to give a hard time over it. It already gets brought up way too much every time Scott pops up yet again, dancing merrily back and forth across the line between victim and perpetrator in yet another one of their cases.

"Are you the Guild agent?" A loud voice demands from behind him.

Martyn whirls on his heel, far more ready to trust Scott at his back than some random police. (Not that he would ever admit it.) "I am!" he responds brightly, deliberately irritating in the way he knows best. "What happened here, Officer?"

The policeman, clearly someone important by the lack of wear and tear on his...everything, pulls himself pompously up to his full, rail-thin height and peers down at Martyn over his nose. "Aren't you lot supposed to keep your rabble in check?"

Oh, its going to be like that, is it?

Martyn fixes a blandly polite smile on his face and slips his voice into something a little bit more professional. "That still doesn't answer my question. What happened here?" Behind the officer he can see Joe Hills, still lingering amongst the topiary, eyes fixed on the officer's back. Suddenly it is a lot more reassuring, knowing there is an exit strategy for the people without the protection of a government employee ID. Even if that exit strategy is one of the most dangerously unpredictable beings Martyn is aware of. Which really is saying something.

"That," The officer (Hughes, his nameplate says) jabs a finger over Martyn's shoulder, presumably at Scott. "Has murdered an upstanding citizen and has the audacity to claim immunity!"

Martyn cocks his head to the side. "From where I'm standing, you're pointing the finger at a selkie missing his skin, so yeah, there is probably immunity involved."

"Well first of all," Cleo announces their presence as they emerge from the depths of the house, trailed by a very nervous looking police officer.

They stop in the doorway to drop a bundle on Scott's head, the dark mass makes contact with his bright blue hair and unfolds to drape over him. By the time Scott has discarded the shock blanket to wrap himself in his pelt instead, Cleo has stepped past him to stand shoulder to shoulder with Martyn. They're taller than Officer Hughes, which a very petty part of Martyn appreciates. The crisp white feathers of their own skin tickle his arms as they cross their arms. There is blood spatter on their feathers.

"He didn't kill the asshole," they continue without so much as looking at Martyn. "He physically couldn't. I did. And I'd do it again."

Cleo is hardly new to scenes like this, neither are they squeamish. The combined records of the entirety of their little squad speak to that. But something about this one clearly has them rattled and angry. At least Officer Hughes is here to take the brunt instead of them turning it on Martyn.

"Chapter four of the Magical Coexistence Treaties, Section B, Paragraph 13; 'Should the autonomy of any selkie, swan maiden, or similar being be violated, any and all members of their pod/flock can take whatever measures they deem necessary to right and/or avenge the wrong and secure the freedom of the violated party or, should the victim have perished, obtain were-guild from the one who harmed them.'" Cleo rattles off the sentences that Martyn knows by heart at this point, from the frequency he's encountered them in more or less this exact context with this exact cast.

They point at Scott. "Selkie." They point to themself. "Swan." They gesture back and forth between the both of them. "Pod, flock, whatever you want to call it. And given I just retrieved his skin from the asshole's locked personal office I think his autonomy was violated enough." Their voice is deeply sarcastic in the way that only Cleo can be. Martyn is half-surprised Officer Hughes isn't on the ground bleeding from it.

"And all that was before we found the dungeon in the basement." They turn to Martyn, brushing Hughes off with as much concern as if he were a fly. "He was a collector, apparently. And he'd been at it awhile."

Martyn looks around the assembled ambulances and their occupants with a new, more critical eye. A starved and weakened vampire, a silver-collared werewolf, two nervous and twitch sirens (wrapped in damp blankets as a paramedic with a lock-picking kit fiddles with the muzzles fitted around their faces. Martyn makes a mental note; someone with flexible skills set like that might work out at the Guild. And they can always use more medical personnel.) an emaciated naga. As he turns back two more paramedics emerge behind them, carefully wheeling out a criminally (literally) small tank containing brackish water and an insensate mer.

Oh this is going to be so much paperwork.

Martyn is very glad the guy is dead. At least that means he won't have to work on a prosecution on top of everything else.

"There's more inside," Scott says behind them. Martyn glances over his shoulder and is glad to see him looking a lot less feverish and pained than before with the return of his pelt. "I got a grand tour. He's got a dragon-hide hanging on the wall in the library and a whole hall of displayed...parts."

So much paperwork.

Jimmy had better enjoy that vacation. They'll still probably be sorting this all out when he gets back.

"He was going to put me in a concrete enclosure, Martyn, he showed me. It's so ugly. Almost as bad as the rest of his house."

Of course that is equally offensive to Scott's sensibilities as his entire free will being stolen. That tracks.

There is still an elephant in the room that Martyn hasn't sen hide nor feather of at all.

"Pearl?" He asks Cleo, almost dreading the answer.

"Left already."

Suspicious, but at least it means he only has to deal with Gaslight and Gatekeep here. Or whatever they call themselves.

This time.

Because this is not the first time The Terrible Honeypot Trio, as they are unofficially referred to at Guild headquarters, have used this exact legal loophole to go after a creep or two. The murder is outside the norm, admittedly. Usually they limit themselves to theft and arson. It's a very lucrative racket for them and they have it down to a science. Dress Scott (its usually Scott; Cleo is scary and Pearl has a stab first ask questions later policy) up, flaunt his selkie status, and dangle him in front of a bunch of rich guys and see who takes the bait.

And every angle of it is legal.

Multiple Guild members are of the opinion that, whatever their (financial) motivations they are also providing a valuable public service. Their trail of victims is also a trail of overall shitty and predatory people that the Guild can make sure get nailed for something else, whether mythical or mundane in nature.

Ultimately, given that all someone has to do to not end up as a target of 'The Three Gs' is, you know, not abduct someone, they've never had a very convincing entrapment case leveled against them. Though a few of their victims have tried.

This one likely won't be, given that his blood is currently smeared all over Scott's clothes and Cleo's face.

Hmmmmm.

Martyn squints thoughtfully at the spatter on Cleo. It's hard to tell, since they've clearly been doing things, he's not going to think too hard about what, and its been smeared quite a bit...but that doesn't look like murder spatter. That looks like adjacent to murder spatter.

Which means, given that Scott couldn't, Pearl was probably the one who actually killed the asshole.

Honestly, that tracks.

Cleo and Hughes are in some kind of stare down now, Martyn would wish the officer luck but honestly, he hopes Cleo eats him alive. He ignores the two of them and turns back to Scott, who's still sitting on the front step, leaning against the door-frame. He looks tired and is shivering a little, but winks at Martyn when he notices his attention. Getting his pelt back has cleared away most of the lingering discomfort or shakiness and as annoying as it is how unruffled he seems after having just witnessed a murder at what was very clearly close proximity, it is reassuring to have him back to his usual demeanor. Despite having made a career out of it, playing the victim really does not suit Scott at all.

"See something you like?"

Martyn snorts a laugh and nudges the discarded shock blanket with the toe of his boot. "You should probably take this back."

"Awww," Scott coos at him, head cocked to the side. "You do care!"

"It's like, 6° out and you're wearing fishnets," Martyn says, somewhat proud of his deadpan and also for resisting making a joke about how fishnets seem a bit on the nose. "It's making me cold just to look at you."

Scott rolls his eyes, but concedes enough to drag the shock blanket over his lap. "You realize I don't really get cold, right? It's like, a whole selkie thing."

"Yeah, when you're in seal form, which you're very clearly not, at the moment."

"It doesn't just go away," Scott grumbles, but tucks the blanket more securely under his knees anyway.

Martyn is going to blame his fussing on still being in post-full moon mode. He'd been throwing blankets and pillows and soup at Ren all afternoon and is going to have to pick right back up where he left off when he gets back home. Ren is notoriously terrible at self-care after a transformation.

"Right," Cleo is suddenly there, looming threateningly over Martyn's shoulder. "Martyn, can you tell this idiot that he's not going to be able to arrest us so we can get on with it all."

God, Martyn hates inter-departmental politics. He leans back to peer around Cleo's shoulder at Hughes. "They're in my custody, you can't have them."

He ignores Hughes' subsequent blustering to give Scott and Cleo his full attention. "Is there anything else either of you needs, or can we get out of here?"

The sun is just starting to peek over the horizon. Martyn has spent the past several days taking care of a worn-out and antsy werewolf he is supposed to be dead asleep right now. He will send a preliminary report into HQ (text his boss a two sentence summary) and then he is done. This can be someone else's problem until he's had a minimum of twelve hours of uninterrupted sleep. The murder part has already been done anyway, what's left sounds like it is much more in Research & Preservation's jurisdiction. And Medical. He'll be sure to add a whole extra sentence to that effect.

Scott and Cleo exchange a glance and shake their heads. "Didn't bring anything," Cleo says with a shrug. "I got what I came for."

Scott kicks at their ankle but also looks kind of touched. For a second and only a second, because those two don't do sappy emotions. He then kicks the shock blanket back off and begins hauling himself to his feet. Cleo gives him a hand up and he wobbles on his high-heeled boots but stays standing. Given how shaky he still looks, Martyn is counting that as a win.

He's starting to think Scott might have been separated from his skin for more than just a few hours this time. He's usually completely shaken off the effects by the time Martyn shows up. He's never seen this level of severity.

The two mythicals wander over, Scott still holding onto Cleo's arm, pacing carefully to try and hide the way he is leaning on them for support. Cleo, being Cleo, blatantly ignores the entire situation but still slows their usually brisk stride to accommodate.

"You'll have to give us a ride."

"What?" Visions of his bed vanish before Martyn's eyes at Cleo's declaration.

"You heard me," Cleo repeats, heading towards the edge of the crime scene, Scott only staggering a little bit as he keeps up. "Now where did you park, I'm ready to be rid of this place."

Martyn opens and closes his mouth a couple of times, "Excuse me?" He looks back at the topiary Joe Hills had been standing by. 'Had been' turns out to be the important part of that sentence. "What happened to-"

"He had to go pick his kid up from school, keep up, Martyn." Cleo yells over their shoulder without looking back. "He has a schedule to keep and you took too long. HE was just here to take down the wards."

"Wards?" Martyn rushes to catch up to them. "This is the first you've said about wards. What kind of wards?"

"The kind that keep people like us out," Cleo snaps back, not slowing down at all. "What kind do you think?"

They beeline directly for Martyn's car, pull open the passenger door, and push Scott into the seat. The entire time Martyn has known Cleo, they have never given up the front seat for anyone.

Martyn wonders just how close their luck came to running out this time.

Cleo closes the back seat door behind themself and then the two of them are looking at Martyn impatiently through the windows, as if he is the one acting weird.

There are not enough braincells in Sleep-Deprived Martyn's head to untangle all of this. He gets in the car.

He gives both Scott and Cleo a onceover while starting it. Now tthat they are out of sight of the masses, Scott is slumped against the door, face pale and eyes closed. Cleo is being very deliberately casual in a very Cleo way, and their face is pinched and the line that shows up on their forehead when they are stressed is definitely line-ing. The hand they have held up, pretending to pick dried blood out from under their nails, is shaking.

"Can we get chicken nuggies?" Pearl asks, her face very suddenly right in Martyn's.

Martyn does not yell or flail. Just for the record. And he certainly doesn't scream or jump.

Pearl just stares at him, eyes eerily blank behind her usual 'thrilled with violence' sparkle. She must have been laying down in his back seat. She's sitting in the middle now, next to Cleo, spattered with even more blood than the other two, in a way that bears out Martyn's theory on who actually killed the homeowner.

Her expression turns wheedling and she leans forward even more, propping her chin on the back of Scott's seat. "Nuggies?"

How is this Martyn's life.

"Fine," he sighs as he pulls out of the fancy big circle drive, leaving the oversized house and all its horrors behind them. "We can get chicken nuggies."

Ren wakes up, for a given definition of "wakes up" at...some point. Checking the clock would require opening his eyes and, between the sandy sensation and general lingering exhaustion, he doesn't really want to do that.

He can feel the sun through the curtains and his window face west. So afternoon sometime.

His stomach rumbles.

Perchance he should investigate the kitchen.

A moment of consideration and he decides it still isn't worth opening his eyes. He wraps his comforter over his head and around his shoulders as if it were a winter cape and stumbles towards the door. It takes a few moments of groping around but he manages to find the doorknob and free himself from his confines.

He can smell coffee.

Coffee and people and fast food and...blood?

Instantly set on edge, the clinging territorial instincts from the moon reaction to unexpected intruders in the home, Ren finally cracks one eye open.

Half of the sofa is taken up by a blurry white mass that, after a few blinks, solidifies into a swan sleeping on a pile of messy blankets, head tucked under one wing. A very familiar swan that is awakened enough by Ren's racket to raise their head and give him a displeased hiss, before going back to sleep, settling deeper into their impromptu nest.

His attention is pulled away from Cleo by a shuffling from the kitchen.

Pearl Moon waves at him from where she is sitting on the floor, leaning up against the partition between kitchen and sitting room, halfway through a tub of Ren's ice cream. Ren blinks back at her.

Major is sitting at the kitchen table across from Martyn, who has his face down on the surface of said table and is giving off the general smell he does anytime his emotions are best summarized as "I don't want to be here anymore."

Major looks back over his shoulder and beams at Ren, "Oh good, you're up! Come take a look at these!"

Ren shuffles closer until he can see what exactly it is the selkie has spread all over the table.

It's quite the variety, all placed carefully on Ren's good tea towels. Several trinkets of questionable origin, a cursed box of some kind that smells of fae magic, some mundane jewelry, and a small collection of potion vials. Major taps one of the un-enchanted necklaces proudly. "How would you price this lot?"

Martyn groans against the table top. "Could you at least not conduct your illegal sales in my kitchen when I'm here?"

Ren pats him on the shoulder and does his best to wake up enough to give the haul a more critical look. "Hard to say without a close examination but at least a couple thousand."

Behind him, Pearl makes a disparaging noise. "Only a couple thousand?" She says around a mouthful of ice cream. "Wow, that's cheap."

She shakes something that makes a jingling sound. "Now come look at mine!"

Martyn groans again and shoves his chair away from the table. "I'm going to go get food, if this is what you are doing now." He heads for the door.

Ren takes his chair as Pearl scrambles to her feet and joins them at the table, pulling things willy-nilly out of the pockets of her bright red jacket. He certainly wasn't planning on business on a day off when he hadn't even opened the shop, but Cleo and friends were always a good source of dubiously obtained items.

Martyn closes the front door behind him and Ren can hear him grumbling his way down the stairwell.

He can smell cheap chicken nuggets and his stomach rumbles. Hopefully Martyn brings some of those back with him.

#rain rambles #trafficblr #selkie au #life series gaslight gatekeep girlboss #inthelittlewood #smajor1995 #zombiecleo #pearlescentmoon #renchanting #rain writes fanfiction #long post is long #rendog

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rockitmans · 1 year

Note

In case you're still taking numbers: 23. If this is too late, feel free to ignore!

You're not too late! I'm gonna try and do as many of these as I can

23. in relief

from the kiss list / see the rest

Notes: don't be deceived by how this starts it's actually super fluffy I promise 😅

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Blaine is running late. Usually this wouldn't bother Kurt. He doesn't make it his business to keep close tabs on his roommate, generally speaking. But it does bother him today because:

a) Blaine Anderson, neurotic sweetheart that he is, is almost never late. He plans routes with the sole goal of shaving off thirty seconds of travel time. He has an actual pocket watch for God's sake. And,

b) Kurt has lived in New York for five years now and he has never experienced snow in the city like this.

It's like a celestial being has dumped icing sugar directly over New York. It went from normal grey and slightly miserable looking to the sparkling white of a particularly fantastical Christmas card so fast, that Kurt feels like it happened between breaths. And, to coin a phrase, it's showing no signs of stopping.

The blizzard, because that's all it can be, is billowing across the city in huge icy gusts. The snow continues to fall. Kurt is sure that it's already up to his knee height just from a cursory glance out the window. And Blaine is out there. In that.

Kurt pulls out his phone and quickly taps out a message.

Kurt: Where are you?

His finger hovers over the send. Maybe he's jumping the gun a little. He's not out here trying to be an alarmist for no reason. He adds a smiley face to make it seem more bright and breezy and sends it off.

He marches agitatedly back to the window seat and peers out again, staring at the snow like he can make it stop through sheer willpower. He wants Blaine to be here. With him. Drinking hot cocoa and curled up next to him, watching old movies. Not fighting a storm, outside and alone.

Kurt's phone buzzes and he snatches it up. But it's not Blaine. It's an emergency alert for weather. No fucking kidding. But, worse than that, it's quickly followed by a news flash telling him the trains are now closed and no longer running.

The spool of worry that was just starting to unravel in Kurt's belly, drops and spills, unfurling uncontrollably until he's almost sick with it. He's aware he's barely given Blaine five minutes to answer the text but he starts a call to him anyway. It goes straight to voicemail. He swallows painfully.

He knows he's jumping straight to panic with no real evidence that anything is wrong. But he's received too many devastating phone calls in the last few years alone, to ever believe that things Like That could never happen to People Like Him. That bad things couldn't happen to the people he loves.

Blaine is more than a roommate. They've been together since the dorms at NYU. He's Kurt's best friend, his study buddy, his partner in crime. Kurt needs to know he's ok.

Kurt's phone buzzes again and he scrambles for it, but this time it's his dad.

Dad: Saw the weather alert kiddo. Hope you and Blaine are safe at home and you're stocked up.

Kurt: I'm home. But Blaine isn't back from work yet.

Kurt: I'm worried about him.

Kurt types out the message with the vain hope of a child whose parent is going to magically fix everything. Even though he's way too old for all that.

Dad: Well he's probably just been delayed by the storm. He'll be back any minute. Let's give him ten before we panic. You can always call him.

Kurt doesn't want to admit he's already called and that he doesn't feel particularly soothed by Burt's practicality. So he just sends back a thumbs up.

He calls Blaine again. It goes straight to voicemail. Kurt takes a steadying breath. He's letting the fear fuel him. Maybe all that's happening is that he keeps calling Blaine at the exact same time Blaine is trying to call him. That roommate psychic link they have that means they know exactly what take out food the other person needs in times of crisis is just in full effect. He resolves to wait for a few minutes to see if Blaine will get through.

It's painful. He takes to pacing, staring at the blank screen of his phone. The screen only reflects back his own pale face, mirroring his own stress. He unlocks it again, feeling squashed by his inability to do anything practical. He goes back to his message to Blaine to check the read receipts. It was never even received.

He moves toward the door and grabs his coat before he even knows what he's doing. Some instinctual part of him was really about to march out into a snow storm to… what? Where would he even begin looking for one tiny human in a city of millions. Blaine's probably not even out there. If he has any sense, he's hunkered down with a friend or colleague that lives nearer to his work.

Sensible thinking doesn't curb the growing terror. Kurt just knows that life without Blaine in it, is not a life that he really wants to contemplate, ever, and that's far too big a thought to try and explore right now. Not with his heart trying to claw its way out of his throat.

He slowly puts his coat back on the hook.

And that's exactly when the door opens and Blaine is walking through it, snow in his hair. "Holy hell, it's freezing out there," he says and he sounds so… normal. Cheerful even.

Kurt has to accept that all things considered Blaine is only twenty five minutes late home at most. But seeing him here so suddenly, whole and smiling, makes embarrassing tears spring to his eyes.

Blaine notices that he's standing right by the door and lifts an eyebrow. "What are you doing?"

"Where were you?" Kurt gasps before he can even attempt to act cool.

Blaine looks confused but then he seems to clock Kurt's expression and he softens instantly. "Were you worried? I'm so sorry. They closed the trains so I had to get off at a stop early and walk the rest of the way. Disaster."

"I called you…"

"Ah." Blaine ducks his head and pulls his phone from his pocket. It's spidered with vicious cracks. "Bad day to smash my phone."

Kurt looks from the broken phone to Blaine's face. He's pink from cold and his curls are loose and damp from the melting snow. He's beautiful. He's perfect and alive and he's here and God is he in trouble.

"You idiot," Kurt snaps. "You absolute idiot."

He doesn't even think. Fear and relief mingle into blind action. He grabs these lapels of Blaine's coat and hauls him forward. Straight into a crushing kiss. Blaine drops his phone again.

Kurt feels Blaine's ripple of surprise all the way down his body but then he relaxes and, after a moment, his lips respond under Kurt's. Kurt softens all at once, his mouth gentling and his hands feeling across Blaine's shoulders and back and down his arms, subconsciously checking that he's truly okay.

Blaine moves with him, turning his nose to tuck against Kurt's cheek and it's freezing but Kurt doesn't care. His arms have settled comfortably over Blaine's shoulders and he presses their chests flush, greedy to feel Blaine's responding heartbeat thumping against his.

He kisses Blaine until Blaine's mouth and cheeks are warm again. He kisses Blaine until Blaine's hands have moved to cup Kurt's jaw and neck and the small noise he makes shows it's obvious that he's not just being kind, and humouring Kurt's moment of madness, he's as lost in it as Kurt is. He kisses Blaine because he can't ever imagine stopping. And Kurt thinks oh.

It's Blaine that eventually breaks it, moving back only enough to rest their foreheads together. "Please tell me that wasn't just a 'thank God you're not dead' kiss," he breathes into the space between them. He sounds like he's trying to make a joke but the vulnerability and hopefulness are tangible.

"Not just that," Kurt assures. He feels dizzy and warm. And some things are starting to make a lot of sense. "I um… might be having an epiphany."

Blaine huffs a small laugh, intimate in its closeness. "Took you long enough."

Kurt wants to ask about that but there's too many thoughts crowding for space. "Let me make you a hot drink," Kurt says instead, pressing another soft kiss to Blaine's mouth to show it's not a rejection. Blaine needs to warm up and Kurt needs to de-stress and now is not the moment for life changing conversations. There will be time for all that.

~~~

Later, once Blaine is showered and dressed in dry clothes and Kurt has coaxed him into drinking two cocoas and they're wrapped around each other while they watch Wizard of Oz, Burt texts again.

Dad: I didn't hear anything else so assumed Blaine was safe. But just wanted to double make sure my third son was home.

Kurt smiles. Burt has always adored Blaine since the moment they became roommates in the dorms. Kurt's eyes slide to Blaine. He's resting in the vee of Kurt's spread legs, his back to Kurt's chest, his loose curls tickling Kurt's chin.

Kurt ducks down slightly to press a kiss to Blaine's clothed shoulder and Blaine turns into him, brushing his nose against Kurt's cheek. It feels so natural, being with Blaine like this. Kurt doesn't one hundred percent know what this means for them yet but he does know one thing. He opens the text from his dad back up.

Kurt: Yes. Blaine is home.

#klaine #klaine fic #klaine fanfiction #glee #my fic #the kiss fics #asks #little-escapist

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jiminrings · 1 year

Text

jealous 478jk smut drabble sneak peek :O

Jungkook looks at you like he’s lost.

There’s this wide-eyed look to him, the origins in it embedded for a reason you can’t decipher. He doesn’t exactly look like he’s mad even when his jaw is clenched, and he doesn’t precisely look sad either while his brows are furrowed. Jungkook’s at a loss for words, even when you’ve thoroughly explained your impending absence for the next week.

“It’s an artist retreat, baby,” you repeat, tracing along his fingers while he’s stuck in a trance. “We’ve already watched the first season of it, remember? It was a different cast the first time but this time, I’m included,” you test out your explanation at the tip of your tongue, confused when he still doesn’t speak. “We’re all just… basically gonna have fun together.”

Your husband doesn’t speak about it. He’s thinking about it longer than necessary even if you’ve already made your decision because after all, it’s your career and he’s your biggest supporter. There shouldn’t be any qualms about your incoming reality show stint as a promotion for your newest drama, not at all — is what he’d like to think.

Jungkook doesn’t reply to your explanation whilst helping you pack until your phone dings face-up, the pop-up notification hovering above your home screen of him carrying Hwayoung in his arms. He shouldn’t be bothered, really. The preview of your groupchat with your co-stars (that just conveniently has Yoongi’s face as the photo) and its pings have long been playing in the background for the past month now.

Jungkook doesn’t open his mouth except when his eyes catch the tiny text, the message immediately met with laughing reactions.

Min Yoongi

| i bet my car jungkook’s gonna try and fit in y/n’s suitcase LMAOOOOOOOOO

“I know what it is,” he suppresses the urge to roll his eyes, passive-aggressive as he folds all your underwear into tight bundles with the way he’s clenching his fists. “You sure I can’t come?”

You only chuckle, tickling Hwayoung on her sides as she’s propped up in the bed because while your husband’s packing your things for tomorrow (and on late notice too because you’re already leaving for your schedule tonight), you’re packing her bag because she’s staying with your parents for the next three days.

Jungkook doesn’t know what to do with himself, actually — he knows what he does best and that’s being your husband and Hwayoung’s dad, but with both his girls gone for the next few days, he’s a little lost.

Doesn’t know what to do with himself when he’s lost in his own thoughts of how you continue to be even more popular and with that, you’re prone to have more articles and rumors attached to your name. His alone time hasn’t even started and yet, he’s already internally going down the rabbit hole of what he searched up last night; that you despite being married to him, you and Yoongi are each other’s soulmates.

It’s stupid; he really thinks it is. He finds shippers stupid and also the countless threads where everybody just talks for the sake of talking, saying that the way Yoongi looks at you can’t be rivaled by the way he does.

He finds picture slides and videos annoying when you and Yoongi are in it and it’s to the tune of the most recently trending, cloying nostalgic song, both the posters and the people in the comments saying that you and Yoongi must be each other’s greatest loves — just conveniently (and rudely) skipping over the fact that you have a husband and a kid.

“I’m pretty sure you can’t, Jungkook,” you snort, ruffling his hair.

Jungkook tamps down the rising guilt of selfishness because the tiniest bit of him doesn’t want you to go on that trip. He doesn’t want you to go on that show because the hype between you and Yoongi will only ramp up, your names about to be linked more often than it already is.

Your husband tries to keep his selfishness at bay when he drives you up to the shoot location and hugs you closely– longer than what is needed for a couple who’ll only be apart for a week. He still smiles (although tightly and a little forced) when your co-stars who are mostly men to begin with, promise to take care of you and make sure that you won’t go home with even a single mosquito bite.

There’s too much time in his hands, most of them he doesn’t even really need alone because he thinks that its best use is when he’s with his family. Jungkook knows that he’s needy and he’s trying not to be clingy so much but he thinks this time, it’s not only in his head that you were barely giving him something to go by.

There were no rules about not using cellphones during shoots and given that you were the only actor in your team that had a husband and a child, you were given more leniency in all aspects.

Jungkook tries his hardest not to be clingy because his only check-ups on you are whenever it’s time for meals and before sleep. He’s tamped down his selfishness to a minimum and yet at the first time you answer for the past two days that he’s tried checking up on you, it’s in the context unlike what he’d imagined.

| brb yoongi’s teaching me how to fish lol

Of course he is. Of course that for the first time you reply to him, it just had to be on the duration where no fish are biting on your bait while Jungkook thinks that probably, Yoongi’s out there chuckling beside you seeing the array of his previous, one-sided texts.

He dials you immediately, swallowing down his growing annoyance just because he really, really wants to hear your voice.

“Can you talk right now?”

“Yeah! What’s up?” you perk up at the sound of him, making him relieved that you’re not looking to drop the call anytime soon.

“So I’m looking into-…”

Of course Jungkook gets interrupted when he was about to relay his plan of possibly bullying Jimin into letting him crash your schedule (when the cameras aren’t rolling) just to visit you.

Of course it’s Yoongi who interrupts him.

“Y/N! Is that Jungkook again?” he yells in the background, the distinct voice of the guy being heard all the way through the other side of the line. “Eat up while the food’s still hot!”

Jungkook has no words to say — especially when you don’t give him any chance to do so.

“He’s — yeah, yeah! I’m coming,” you yell back but despite the volume, Jungkook doesn’t even flinch; he just clenches his jaw. “Gotta go, baby. Yoongi’s the boss, I don’t wanna get on his nerves tonight.”

It wasn’t your yell prior that makes Jungkook’s ears ring; it’s your soft-spoken yet urgent tone when you say to him that you’ll get going because Yoongi’s the boss. It’s what makes his teeth grind together and the pulse in his neck grow because you’re in a hurry to go get dinner, because you don’t want to get on Yoongi’s nerves tonight.

The flush rises in his neck and for all the wrong reasons, his skin warm from the rising irritation that just begs to manifest into something more tangible — something more memorable.

Without a second thought, your husband gets into his car and starts the long drive to you, brewing in anger the entirety of the four hours that it gets to you. They all fly by quickly just as how he weaves in between cars, the angry honking no match to the noise inside his head.

Jungkook walks right past the staff who’s packing up equipment for the next day because almost everybody’s gone into sleep, not stopping for the stunned faces and the excited squeals, not even for Jimin who squawks at his unexpected presence and the way he walks inside the main house with a mission.

It’s easy to spot your room despite having no knowledge of it at all because of course, your co-stars had the decency to give you the biggest and solo room anyway. Jungkook walks past discarded card games on the hallway and even bumps with a Doberman that’s half his size, the dog sniffing at him right before he enters your room.

You don’t flinch because you think it’s one of the lovely and doting producers giving you a face mask because you forgot to pack one, but when you turn — you flinch because it’s Jungkook.

It’s your husband in the flesh, clad in his gray sweatpants and a short-sleeved shirt that’s worn-out perfectly to the point that it stretches across him perfectly. If you couldn’t read him before you left, you certainly can now.

Your mouth opens and closes but you can’t find the words, lips parted open in surprise as you try to reel in his presence.

“Your husband can’t come, but Dongwook’s dog that’s the size of a horse can?” he scoffs, trudging towards you with his hands in his pockets. He doesn’t even greet you hello.

“Kook, I love you but-…” you start, looking up to him automatically but you stumble on your words when he hooks his arms around your back and presses you to him tightly, the pout he has on his face when looking down on you making you shut up.

“But?” he tilts his head, the smile on his face too empty yet provoking that it gives you goosebumps. “Why are you withholding yourself, sweetheart?”

“What are you doing here?” you whisper-yell once you’ve had the semblance to actually reply, trying to pry yourself out of his hold but he doesn’t even loosen up one bit. “You can’t be here!”

“Says who?” Jungkook questions, a hand raising to get your baby hair out of the way. He’s doing it so slowly that you hold your breath, his thumb lingering on your cheek when you can only watch him closely. “What are they gonna do, fire you? They can’t do that to someone who gets their ratings up.”

“What are you going on about, Jungkook? Why’d you drive all the way here?”

Your husband laughs– actually laughs and even throws his head back but you can’t find what’s exactly so funny about it, your confusion only spurring on him more. He thinks that sometimes, you could be so humble to the point that you’re clueless — painfully too clueless to the point that he’s driven the hours just to instill something in you.

“Can’t I just miss you?”

There’s that frown again on Jungkook’s face that intimidates you more than it annoys you, one that weaponizes him to trace the tip of his nose from your hairline to your cheek until he settles his face to your neck, making you swallow the lump on your throat when you automatically open up to him.

“I, I missed you too,” you confide, the shudder that racks through you when he suddenly bites at the sensitive spot between your neck and shoulder enough to make you hyper-aware. “Stop. Yoongi’s sleeping next door.”

Jungkook’s face was buried in your neck one minute ago but at barely the blink of an eye, your husband’s face is right in front of you, jaw clenched and eyes glazed.

His breathing’s staggered, the thumb that had only been pressing against your shoulder now on your chin, tilting you up to look only at him.

“There you go again,” he snickers, the pout he has on his face sickeningly sweet. Jungkook pries open your lips with only his thumb and puts the pad of it flat on your tongue. “You’re a fucking brat, y’know that?”

“Excuse me?” your eyes widen, words slurred from his thumb in your mouth. You try to pry him off you with no real fight as you put a hand on his wrist, but he only chuckles lowly at your attempt of handling the reins.

“What, you’re offended that I called you a brat?” he asks, moving both his large hands this time to grab ahold of your face. Jungkook comes even closer that the sight of him makes you almost cross-eyed, his voice low yet venomous. “What’re you gonna do, huh? Run to Yoongi?”

“W-why would I run to him?” you ask in confusion, brows furrowed as you try to make sense of everything; the slick smoothness between your legs, however, not being rocket science to figure out.

Jungkook laughs to your face.

“Why are you so confused, hm?” he whispers. “Didn’t you say he was the boss? Surely, you don’t wanna get on his nerves, do you?”

You think back to what you’d said hours ago, making sense of your rushed words. “I didn’t mean it that way.”

It’s too little, too late for Jungkook no matter how sincere you are, his mind already being made-up.

“And I don’t care,” he smiles, eyes dark and dimples deep when he delivers his sentiment. “This is long overdue anyway, don’t you think? Thanks to your crush on Yoongi-…”

“I don’t have a crush on him.”

“I didn’t say you can talk back to me. Didn’t even tell you to speak,” he spits, his hand splayed across your nape tightening slightly when he speaks against your ear. You have no plan on escaping his hold but he grips you like you’re going to anyways. “Thanks to your slip-up though, you’re gonna learn whose nerves you don’t actually want to get on.”

Jungkook inhales your innocence and exhales his selfishness, the smile that appears on his face coming across determined; desperate enough to put you at his mercy.

“I need to put my brat in place.”

RRRRRRRRRRAHHHHHHHH U GET JEALOUS 478JK!!! wanna read the full piece now? this, along with other exclusive drabbles, will only be exclusively available on my patreon :-)

p.s., don't worry!! i'll still post a 478 smut drabble (aka on the baby blue floor couch scene) available for everyone to read!! it'll be up on patreon for early access though (and yes it wud still be posted on tumblr), so i'll release a sneak peek here once i wrap it up!!

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lacefuneral · 1 year

Note

hi!!! i love for custom blog theme,, do you have a link to the code or creator 0:?

ya!

so my theme is actually a heavily modified version of redux edit #1 by lopezhummel (current url: holyaura). i always remind users that most tumblr themes are old and that you'll need to replace all instances of "http://" in the code with "https://" so tumblr will save the theme. i had to do it with this one

these are the modifications i made to the theme. i edited this theme over the course of at least a year or so and don't quite recall how i did all of these things. but to the best of my ability:

i moved the "left side img" to the right side of the screen. i also made this element "responsive" so the image will never get cropped when you resize your screen. this was a bitch and a half to figure out and i truthfully do not remember how i did it

i deleted the text in the drop-down navigation so it appears as a little line that is otherwise not noticeable. this type of theme, the "redux edit," used to be very popular because having a drop-down menu let you cram a bunch of links that lead to sub-pages on your blog. i've done away with my sub-pages, but i still like the format of the "redux style" tumblr theme, for its minimal UI and for its customization options.

i separated my mobile description from my web description for formatting reasons. basically, most elements in tumblr themes are connected to specific text fields and toggles. i simply went to the section that was connected to my blog description and deleted it. the web description has to be manually typed inside of the CSS/HTML editor when i want to change it. whereas my mobile description is whatever i type in the "description" box of the normal tumblr theme editors.

i added code someone else made ("NoPo" by drannex42 on GitHub) which allows you to hide posts with certain tags on them. i did this to hide my pinned post, as it looks bad on desktop.

i replaced the tiny pagination arrows at the bottom with images that literally say "next" and "back" because the arrows were far too small/illegible. i know they aren't centered in the container i'm not sure how to fix that lol

i added a cursor

i installed a working music box ("music player #3" by glenthemes), and then added music by uploading MP3 files to discord and then using the links of those files as the audio sources. iirc i also had to make this element responsive and i aligned it so it would sit on the left side of my screen. i made the "album art" for each one the same strawberry pixel art

the moth is just a PNG i added and then moved around so it was behind my sidebar using the options that came pre-packaged with the theme

if you want something like the strawberry shortcake decoration at the top (called "banner" in the theme) your best bet is to google "pixel divider"

theme didn't support favicon so i added that in so i could have a little heart

ALSO:

this theme is. really weird about backgrounds. any background that i have ever set for it, i've had to do weird shit in photoshop. like making the background HUGE, mirroring it, etc. - because it would crop the image weird, or there would be a gap where there was no image. idk man, it's haunted. i'm sure there's a way to fix this but i am NOT tech savvy enough. anyway, patterns are probably your best friend. and if you DO want something that isn't a pattern, it's going to take a lot of trial and error. but i love this theme so i deal with it 😭

the sidebar image and the floating image do not scale. if your image is 1000 pixels, it will display at 1000 pixels. you'll either have to edit the code so that the theme scales the image for you, or resize any images before you add them

my white whale of theme editing (aside from the Weird Background thing) is that i cannot get infinite scrolling to work. i have tried every code out there. all of them break my theme. it makes me sad because like. i have music there for a reason. the idea is that people would listen to it while they scroll. unfortunately, the way it's set up now, the music will stop every time someone clicks "next" or "back" 💀

anyway sorry for rambling but i hope you enjoy the the theme and customizing it in the way that you want to!

#replies #spinchs-field #spinchs field #tumblr theme

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serenity-unlocked · 8 months

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(Quick attempt at) Happy Kiss-themed AO3 Site Skin

I made this completely on a whim. Because seeing @/ao3commentoftheday's recent site skin related posts started putting ideas in my head.

At first, I was just gonna add a header image and change basic colors with the Wizard thing. But I quickly realised that changing things with the Wizard didn't change *everything* I wanted it to change. So, I went down a bit of a rabbit hole... This ended up being a bit of a "What kind of Site Skin can I make in just a few hours and restricted to mobile-only" challenge.

There are two options for the tags:

1 (Which I do think looks nice, but might not really use myself much): colored boxes around tags, with colors depending on tag category

2 (the one I would use myself): bold colored text before each tag category in a work

You can find all the code needed for this skin here. Also includes instructions on how to alter the header image's size to better fit desktop. (Also, please check the end notes on it to see the references I used for making this!)

(A few more ramblings under the cut)

Please note this isn't anything super complex. There are actually places where things might look weird. (As an example: You can see in these preview images that the summary and stats appear in white (what I actually intended) when looking at works from a tag's page. BUT, for some reason, it appears in yellow on an author's page.)

(Overall, just keep in mind this is literally my first time trying to mess around with CSS *this* much.)

Other cool things I wanna point to because I am happy I managed to figure them out:

Links you haven't visited before show in white. Links you have visited before show in cyan.

When you hover on a tag, it gets highlighted in pink (as seen below:)

Despite it for some reason also affecting the text on an author's pages, I *am* happy I managed to figure out how to change the color for 'Find your favorites' and 'News' on the home screen. Because otherwise the default color was absolutely *unreadable* on the dark blue.

#boueibu #boueibu happy kiss

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lovenpeace-pkmn · 10 months

Text

offscreen post

//(note: set a few days ago, shortly before this post. mostly under the cut because this got kinda long)

[Concordia knocks on the door to an apartment in Nimbasa. “Be good, Cartwright," she says softly. The phone in her hand beeps in response.

The door is opened by a man with warm brown skin, blue hair, and a cane. He gives a sunny smile. “Connie! Hello! You brought the Porygon?” She holds up the phone and he says, “Good, good. Come inside!”

Connie follows him into a warmly-lit apartment. A Tynamo and a Bronzor watch her curiously. “Sit down for a moment, okay?” Tam says. “I just need to finish cleaning this up.” He gestures to a table where some kind of mechanical device sits, partially disassembled.

Connie sits on the couch, goes to open her texts, then thinks the better of it and sets her phone down.

“Any luck finding manufacturers?” Tam asks.

“No, I am afraid not. I have been somewhat busy these past few days.”

“Huh. You heard what’s been going on in Castelia?”

Unexpectedly to both of them, Concordia bursts into tears.

“Oh, dear Palkia, are you alright?”

“I’m—sorry, sorry, I should not be crying…”

“No, I…think that’s reasonable to be upset about, actually. Can I…” Connie nods, and Tam sits down on the couch next to her.

“I’m sorry,” Connie says again. “I just…everyone I know is terribly upset about this, I have spent two days answering phone calls and trying to comfort people and talking them down from arson—most of my friends are former Plasma members, we are not exactly known for making rational decisions when it comes to Pokémon welfare—my siblings are furious, and I have to keep reminding them to eat and sleep—” Connie puts her head in her hands. “I am so tired, Tam. Everyone needs me to be strong, but I am so tired. And it seems that every time I look away Minskt escalates things to new heights of corruption, and I have to start all over again…”

“Do you, um…do you need a hug?”

Connie nods miserably and lets him wrap his arms around her.

After a moment they break apart. Connie stands up, face a little red.

“We, um. We should get to work on the Porygon thing…”

“Right…right.” Tam stands up as well, rubbing the back of his head. “The scanner’s right back through here… You said you don’t have her Pokéball, right?”

“Yeah, N couldn’t find it…”

A stream of electric light comes out of Connie’s phone and congeals into the form of Cartwright the Porygon. She chirps curiously as Tam leads them into a room lined with worktables and machinery. A 3d printer hums away in one corner.

Tam goes to one of the machines and starts flipping switches. “Arright. My machine’s not connected to the PC network, so we can check her registration data, but if we alter it, it’ll glitch out next time she links to the network. It’s a whole mess and I spend a lot of time sorting out reg data corruption for clients who thought they could change their traded ‘mon’s nickname at home…”

“You can release her, though, right?”

“Oh, yeah, that’ll be no trouble if that’s what you want. Sort of in a legal gray area, but—her trainer’s dead, yeah? And she doesn’t want to go back to the company he worked for?”

“Yeah.”

“Alright, Porygon, come sit here,” Tam says, pressing some buttons on one of his machines. Cartwright hovers down to sit on the table next to it. Tam presses another button, and a beam of light flashes out to scan her. A few seconds later, the machine’s screen lights up with the scanned information. “…Um.”

Connie leans over curiously to see the screen. “Um what?”

“Connie, this Pokémon is legally owned by the company, not by the trainer. I’m all for Pokémon autonomy, but—”

“We cannot send her back," Connie says quickly. "She says they are going to erase her memory if she goes back.”

“I know, I wasn’t going to say we should—” Tam stops. “Erase her memory? That’s awful!”

“Exactly.”

“I—yeah, okay, this is very justified, I just…you understand this is super illegal, right? Are you sure you want to do this, like, right after Castelia’s law enforcement pulls that?”

“We already have the Porygon,” Connie points out. “Might as well be in for an Ampharos as for a Mareep, no? And they will be distracted. This new change will cause more chaos in their ranks than anything.”

“Okay. Yeah, okay.” Tam takes a deep breath and pushes his glasses up. “Pory, you got anything you want to save from your reg data before we delete it?”

Cartwright shakes her head, then vanishes into the machine for a moment. She types across the screen, “Status: ready rready ready! Begin procedure,” and then rematerializes onto the table.

“Okay. Here goes nothing… Wiping registration data now.”]

#werepersian arc #electric dreams arc #and tangentially #jammer tech hunt #offscreen post #pkmn irl #pokeblogging #pokemon irl #//to steal a tagging convention from ao3: no beta. we die like sada and turo

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ketchupkio · 11 months

Note

hey ho, op of the totk rant about the sandbox approach to totk here, i read your tags and i just wanted to add that i am german and played the game with the original japanese audio and german text, i like to call the things as the names i know them as even if i know the english version of them as well :D

i understand that you like the sonau tech stuff (personally i found it super clunky and mostly too tedious to deal with .. also i just like walking or riding around gdfhkbndj) and i get that, i totally do! and im not trying to argue against having that sort of movement in the game, but the EXECUTION of it!

like you could have achieved the same kind of movement and abilities with shiekah tech, you have all the parts from guardians, you could make flying maschines too! even more effiecient with guardian legs beign able to step over stuff that wheels get stuck on- and after zelda is in charge now shiekah tech could have been developed further again since she liked it too and wouldnt impose any rule against it, the time reversal for example could just have been the stasis rune but taken further- and if you had zelda as your companion, you could have an ability to losely attached the pieces you want to build (like with the shiekah arm prosthetic i gave link for the rewrite im doing for example) and zelda does the actual building to make it work in a quick little animation- for nearly everythign the sonau are used for the shiekah basically already had it and its driving me nuts that they instead undid it all only to .. do it again but worse o-o

sorry for the lil rant hdbksbfsbfkjd

YEAH I TOTALLY AGREE!!! The stuff that they wanted to implement could have been done much better with more ✨nuance and finesse✨ than the actual execution, and the reason given that the Sheikah tech just magically disappeared one day???? Bullshit. No one acknowledges this, and there are still Sheikah tech parts in the towers and the tech labs??? It obviously didn't ALL go away bc it's still there in those specific places. I don't know how the tech that's lasted 10,000 years up to this point, that works regardless if we take the tower warp pads as evidence, would know that the Calamity is gone and just disappear. It didn't go away once you did all the shrines, and you could argue that the monks were the last living part of it that would know if Link did it or not???

It's just. It's stupid, and very evident that the director was different from one game to the next. Totk kind of undoes the message that botw had and that just makes me angy (not to mention the blatant lore crimes that we're all going to have to work around if we wanna make the whole timeline make sense. I want to tear my hair out).

It would be better, as far as the botw shrines go, to just make them inactive. The door closes, the light goes out, the warp pad turns off. The totk shrines are plopped around because that's a Rauru thing, and they look like they're going to disappear anyway once his spirit is at rest, bc it's just a big rock, a decorative stone thing, and some sand. They're not part of the landscape like the botw shrines were.

Really, I only like the Zonai tech for the hover bike part and the steering stick applications, everything else I don't usually touch (though rocket shields are fun as a replacement Revali's gale). Like a lot of people have done really cool things with it, but I'm not those people 😂😂😂 I just have my One Thing that I use to get around scary places and it pulls left pretty hard so it's far from perfect.

The same thing could have been accomplished many different ways without introducing the Zonai. Like I would have given anything to see the Twili come back with their lore entwined with the Sheikah (bc the Sheikah probably learned how to make their stuff from the Zonai! It would make sense if the game acknowledged it).

Hahaha,,,,, I could go on about this forever tbh. My opinion on totk as a whole is: fun to play but disappointing. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Now all we can do is fix it with fanfic.

Though that was a good idea on how to re implement the Sheikah stuff! If you're cool with it, I might use it :3c (not for a whole retelling of totk, just for like. Flavor in the au I'm working on bc I was already planning to ignore the botw shrines disappearing.)

#Never never ever apologize for lore dumping like that #I love this stuff so much #loz #Totk #Replies #long post

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enddaysengine · 2 years

Text

Leuke Island

Sometimes when you are researching you end up going off the beaten path. This is one of the reasons I love urban fantasy games - the real world is filled with history, myth, and folklore, which is absolutely EVERYWHERE once you start to see it.

While researching the Patreon post on Macaria, I ended up tangenting into the reading about the Blessed Isles on which the ancient Greek dead reside. Unlike the way Planescape and Pathfinder interpret all afterlives as taking place in other dimensions, the ancient Greeks believed at various points in time the Islands were physical places people could travel to (although at other times, they were also part of the Underworld proper). Those islands have been placed everywhere from Sicily, to The Canary Islands, to the Azores, to Bermuda.

So as I’m reading the Wikipedia page on Elysium, I see a bit where Achilles has been linked with an actual island in the Black Sea. I dig this, because I’ve been researching Pontus for a different project and I feel like people underestimate how far north Hellenic culture made it in Eastern Europe. Since I’m on wikipedia, I hover over the link to get a preview of the page and since I saw the Greek name I ignore the title and go straight to the text. Sounds neat, there was a temple, it was a major religious site for Black Sea colonists, and formal worship of Achilles is not something I’ve seen a lot of (albeit, I’m not a classicist).

Then I look at the island’s English name. And I fucking start swearing.

You see, I knew this island. Anyone who’s paying attention to the Ukraine war probably knows this island. Its proper modern name is Zmiinyi, but in English it is often called Snake Island.

Yeah, that’s the island where Ukrainian soldiers told a Russian warship to go fuck itself. That very same tiny little island where a bunch of Ukrainians made their stand against Russian aggression - that was once holy ground for Achilles.

While I definitely have a headcanon about what that island is like in Scion’s World, I’m not about to gamify the conflict in Ukraine because that would be a millions different types of crass. It’s staying firmly inside my brain. But I couldn’t not share this. And I also can’t get the image of Achilles giving a Russian warship the finger out of my head.

Bibliography

Burkret, Walter. Greek Religion. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006.

Rusyaeva, Anna. “The Temple of Achilles on the Island of Leuke in the Black Sea.” Ancient Civilizations from Scythia to Siberia 9, no. 1-2 (2003): 1-16. Https://doi.org/10.1163/157005703322114810.

#Mythology #Trivia #Things you discover while researching

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aloudplace · 5 months

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Dirty thoughts 13

Loki sent me back to our rooms in New Asgard to think about it.

Those were his exact words. Take some time alone to think about it.

He wouldn't let me answer until I had, though I knew the instant he put that box in my hand what my answer would be.

Immortality is no small burden, he told me gravely. You would outlive everyone you know--all your human family and friends. It's not a decision to be made lightly.

He closed his mind to me again then, and he was oddly stiff--almost formal--which made me suspect that he was very much afraid I would say no.

Silly man.

It was a bizarre concept, though. Four thousand years with Loki? Plus, immunity to all disease, rapid self-healing, near-perpetual youth...it was hard to wrap my head around.

I went home and sat in the center of our big bed with the little box resting on the coverlet before me, replaying the conversation in my mind.

The spell is attached to the ring, he said, staring at me with that bizarre stillness about him, mind utterly closed. If you accept, the spell will activate when you put it on, and your life force will be linked directly to mine. As long as I live, you will live.

There doesn't have to be a ceremony? I asked.

He shook his head. The spell is activated by clear intention.

He never actually asked if I would marry him, which was more than a little irritating. But Thor had declared he would grant the use of the spell only to couples who wanted to marry, so...

Leave it to Loki to propose marriage through inference.

The spell itself only required a deep emotional bond between two people in order to function.

The bond is what will allow me to share my life force with you, he told me gravely.

Well, the bond was no issue. But I kept coming back to four thousand years. For some reason, it made my heart trip with anxiety.

I opened the little box and looked at the ring inside. It was silver and gold woven together in a design like a double-S, made up of two snakes biting each other's tails. Loki's symbol. I'd seen it on some of his armor and weapons, and embroidered on his Asgardian clothes as well.

The thought of wearing it made me flush with happiness. At that moment I wanted him so badly I could hardly breathe.

I pulled my phone out and texted him, Exactly how long do I have to think about this?

Within seconds he answered, As long as it takes.

I smiled, typed, Ok, I'm done.

But my thumb hovered over the send key for a long time, and suddenly my heart was pounding again. Anxiety gripped me so hard my eyes actually began to water.

I was terrified, I realized. Not of being immortal, but of being tied to Loki for four thousand years.

In a hurry, I deleted Ok, I'm done and typed, What happens if you get tired of me?

It took him a few seconds longer to respond this time, but the answer was reassuringly... Loki.

What nonsense are you babbling now?

Tears spilled down my face even as I laughed. Don't be a jerk. I'm kind of freaking out.

He responded, Because you believe I will cast you off someday?

Yes, I sent back. And then, quickly, No. Dammit. I don't know. I'm scared of the possibility, I guess.

He didn't answer right away. I swiped the tears from my face and added, Terrified, actually.

The next four minutes seemed to stretch on and on, waiting for him to respond.

Finally, he said, Have you been harboring this fear for the last three years, as well?

Shit. I had, of course. But I'd decided from the beginning to take things as they came, refusing let myself project at all. Even after Thanos came and went, and we started picking up the pieces, I never allowed myself to wonder where we would end up, Loki and me.

I honestly never expected quite this level of commitment from you, I confessed, feeling stupid. Or any, really.

My phone buzzed almost instantly with his response.

Rude.

I giggled a little and replied, Honest.

And maybe unfair, I realized, with a sting of shame.

I could almost imagine Loki looking down at his phone--his deep, martyred sigh. His response surprised me though.

What can I say to reassure you?

Oh, Loki...I stared at those words and felt a wave of love so intense it made me start crying all over again. It was unfair of me to have doubted him all this time, wasn't it?

I looked at the ring. Thought about the last three years. Going to bed with Loki every night. Waking with his face in my hair and his arm draped over my side.

I remembered the look in his eyes the first time I told him I loved him. That wild gleam of happiness and the way he'd held me, kissed me.

The first time we made love after the snap came back to me as well. God, I'd cried so long, and so hard. But Loki had been there, silent and helpless, holding on for dear life. Afterward, he took me so gently. Tenderly. Like I was made of glass. And when I came in his arms, he'd cried a little too, silently, face pressed into my neck as he rode me through the waves of pleasure.

His feelings then had been very clear--for the first time. His need. His love. He didn't actually say the words until months later, but...he hadn't needed to, and he knew that.

In three years we'd had at least a hundred fights. Every single one had ended with laughter. Kissing. Lovemaking.

He might close me out for hours or even a whole day, but in the end, he always opened to me again. Showed me the fears that made him pick fights or try to boss me around. So many fears.

Loki had been scared all along, too. Questioning his worth. Wondering why I loved him so much--what I saw in him that he couldn't see in himself.

But he'd still asked me.

I can give you the next sixty years. Can you give me the next four thousand?

I looked again at the ring. Picked it up with trembling fingers.

It had been close to ten minutes and I hadn't answered his text, I realized. He must be tied in knots.

I looked at the glowing words on my screen.

What can I say to reassure you?

Nothing, I sent back. I'm okay now.

Then I set the phone down and held the ring up between the thumb and forefinger of my right hand.

The door swung open and Loki was standing there in his green shirt and lab coat, tensed as though for battle.

I blinked. "What are you doing here?"

He looked at my face, and then at the ring in my hand. "I live here," he said, with a ghost of his usual sarcasm.

"But I thought you were--"

"Banner sent me off. I was too busy texting you to get any work done." He looked at my face again, hand falling away from the door. "What, exactly, did you mean by 'I'm okay now'?"

"Uh..." I watched him cross the room to the bed. "I thought it was pretty self-explanatory."

His face creased with irritation. "Humor me."

God, I loved him so much. And man, he really did look good in a lab coat. He'd put his hair back again. I looked down at his legs in those snug black jeans.

"Hey," he snapped his fingers. "Up here. Focus."

I smiled into his face and some of the tension left him.

"I meant I'm okay like I don't need to be reassured," I said dutifully.

Apparently, that wasn't quite clear enough. He frowned at me, eyes narrowed, mind shut tight, emotions in a tangle--fear and hope and irritation.

He looked pointedly at the ring again, still held up in my right hand.

"I was going to put it on," I clarified.

That did it. He released a slow breath and tension seemed to flow out of every muscle.

"You scared me," he grumbled.

"Sorry. I didn't mean to." And then, looking at his jeans again, I added, "You are super-duper pretty, did I ever tell you that?"

His expression darkened into one of his, I'm about to do dirty things to you looks. A year or two ago he would have disparaged my 'ridiculous human colloquialisms,' but this time he didn't even smirk. He simply murmured, "You could stand to say it more often."

"You are so pretty it hurts to look at you," I said, drinking the rush of his gratification and the swell of love that poured off him.

"Put it on," he said softly.

I held the ring out to him. "In my culture, the husband does that part."

His eyes glittered. I'd used the word husband very pointedly, and he understood exactly why. He took the ring, and then my left hand when I extended it to him.

"Four thousand years," I said, looking up at him.

His gaze became hooded. "Four thousand years."

And then he slipped the ring onto my finger.

Green light burst from the little metal band and shot across my body in a blinding flash. An instant later it was gone.

I looked down at my body. "Is that it?"

"That's it," he said.

I took my hand back and looked at the two snakes intertwined on my finger. "I don't feel any different."

"You aren't."

"Oh."

We shared a long, measured, meaningful look. Loki's green eyes cataloged my face. It felt good to just look at him.

Abruptly, I realized something. "I need to get you a ring."

He smiled. "If you like."

"Are we going to have a wedding?"

He nodded.

"It won't be legal though."

"It will according to Asgard," he said impassively.

"Mm. Good enough for me. Can we consummate now?"

His laugh made me tingle all over with pleasure.

"Absolutely," he replied, crawling onto the bed and over me so that I had no choice but to lie back or be knocked over.

"Will you leave the lab coat on?" I asked as he bent to kiss me.

"Mmm. Whatever you like."

I let him kiss me once, taking his tongue and sucking it gently.

When he pulled back I said, "How about the lab coat and nothing else?"

Loki burst into laughter--totally unrestrained this time--and I pulled him back down with arms and legs until I could feel his chest and belly shaking against me.

"How about the lab coat and nothing else at all?" I suggested, bobbing my eyebrows.

His mouth flexed with lingering amusement, eyes glittering. He understood immediately what I meant and I was deeply pleased to find that he felt no resistance to the suggestion whatsoever.

"You'll have to let go if you want me to undress," he said.

"Mmm..." I let go and sat up to watch as he began to strip, lying the lab coat beside me on the bed and casting the rest of his clothes on the floor.

When he was naked, I handed him the lab coat and he smirked. "You're serious about this."

I nodded.

Sighing, he put the crisp white garment back on. His cock stood out stiffy between the open edges.

"Now the rest," I said impatiently.

He pursed his lips a little, but his pale skin flushed blue from head to toe, eyes going crimson, graceful lines rising along every inch of exposed skin.

Now it was my turn to sigh. It had taken more than year of coaxing and bargaining to get him to this point. He wouldn't let me see him like this every day, but he seemed to accept that I liked it.

"Come here," I murmured, scooting to the edge of the mattress and holding out my arms to him.

He came and stood between my knees, face serious, red eyes warm and hungry.

"Make love to me," I whispered, touching his chest, his belly. Bending to kiss the tip of his cock. "I want you so much."

With one hand on my shoulder, he tipped me back onto the mattress, and then he just stood over me for a few seconds, looking.

He leaned down and pulled my skirt up, gaze heating when he found I still wore no panties.

I lifted my legs around his hips to pull him closer and he chuckled, teeth very white against those azure lips.

"Inside, Loki," I murmured. "Quick."

"Not quick," he admonished in a low voice, settling over me on extended arms. "Nice and slow." He shifted against me and pushed inside.

I gasped, moaned softly.

"See?" He murmured, red gaze hooded with pleasure. "You're bruised from earlier."

I shook my head. "Feels good. Ride me hard."

"No." Loki withdrew for a slow, gentle thrust. "Like this." He pushed deep, paused to peel my dress off over my head and then pulled my bra down around my waist.

Then he bent to suck my breasts, holding them with both hands, thrusting slow, so slow. I dug my bare heels into his lower back and pushed up against him.

He retaliated by pulling out, pinning my legs together between his own and thrusting inside again with all his weight pressing my hips down. The position made me feel deliciously helpless. Even more so when he took hold of my arms and held them above my head.

We both looked between his body and mine, watching him fuck me. The sight of his long, azure cock moving between my legs made me crazy. I begged him to do it harder and he ignored me, pumping in that same languid, dominating rhythm until I started writhing and bucking beneath him.

"Hush," he murmured. "You like it slow. You come so hard when I draw it out like this."

It was true, of course, but the pleasure built so high before he finished it that I lost myself entirely. Twisted and fought, trying to wiggle my legs free so I could have some control again. Wanting to wrap my legs around him and move myself on that hot, rigid column.

It didn't work, of course. Loki just kept pumping away, making low sounds of pleasure as I struggled, holding my arms with one hand so he could touch my breasts with the other.

Towards the end, my begging must have moved him because he murmured, "Let me make you come like this and you can ride me afterward. I'll lay nice and still for you, I promise."

"My way?" I gasped, aching, burning all over with unresolved pleasure.

His cock dipped deep inside me, jerked a little, withdrew. He was getting close.

"You way," he agreed darkly.

"Can I...use the cuffs?" I panted, struggling to hold myself still.

His thrusts came a little harder, a little faster. I heard myself start to keen as the orgasm gathered.

"Yes," he breathed. "Whatever you want."

"Loki," I whimpered. "Oh God, oh God!" The pleasure pulsed and rose--and rose, and rose--until I thought I would die.

"Ready?" he asked in a low, melting voice, strained now with his own impending orgasm.

"Yes! Please, oh God, please, make me come!"

He growled with satisfaction and sped his thrusts just a little--just enough to tip me over the edge into a slow, agonizing climax, pleasure rolling up my body in scalding waves.

I screamed raggedly, bucked and bucked, desperate for the extra stimulation. Loki's hand slipped between us. His thumb found my clit and made me whimper-- stroked me once, twice--ratcheted the pleasure up from that slow, rolling burn to a bright explosion.

He rode me hard enough then--but for just a few seconds as he came--that I did feel the bruising, deep inside where he touched my cervix.

A moment later he was lying on top of me in a panting, sweating heap, both of us shuddering and twitching.

"Mmmph," I grunted. "Loki..."

He rolled dutifully to one side, and then onto his back.

Still breathless, limbs watery, I crawled on top and collapsed, cheek on his heaving blue chest.

"I hate it when you do that," I mumbled.

His chuckle was so deep I actually felt it more than heard it.

"You do not," he countered.

'It's like pleasure torture," I said grumpily. "It feels good, but so good I want it to stop."

His hand found my back, slid down to cup my behind. "You should see how you look, though. And your pussy is like a vice when you come that way."

"You really enjoy it that much?"

"I wouldn't agree to let you cuff me if I didn't," he answered wryly.

I sat up, straddling his hips.

Crimson eyes rolled lazily toward me. "Already?"

"You know how this goes," I said, reaching back to unhook my bra and then tossing it away. "You're the one who wound me up."

My inside were still hot from it. Nerve endings buzzing with unrelieved arousal.

Loki conjured the special cuffs he'd made for me--well, for him. They looked like regular handcuffs, but he's used seidr to make them unbreakable, somehow. Loki couldn't be trusted to play helpless if I bound him. He'd broken two pairs of cuffs and several lengths of silk bondage rope since the first time we'd tried it.

"Against the headboard," I ordered softly.

He looked up at me, radiating sexual aggression, dominance. Letting me bind him made him crazy.

But he sat up and scooted back towards the head of the bed with me in his lap, holding onto his shoulders to keep my balance.

He stuck his wrists out dutifully and let me cuff him to the heavy slatted frame. I'd made him spell the headboard, too. He'd broken and repaired this one twice already.

Once I had him cuffed I wasted no time pushing him back so he was half reclined on the pillows with his arms raised above his head. Then I climbed aboard, and even though he wasn't completely hard again yet, I worked his length up inside me, watching his face flicker with lust.

I started riding him immediately--hard and fast. I loved having the freedom to take my pleasure like this. I could bring myself to orgasm two or three times before he climaxed--more if I concentrated on staving him off.

"How many times today?" he asked darkly, watching my breasts as I worked myself on him.

God, he was certainly hard now.

I didn't answer him--I was already close. I put my fingers between my legs and his gaze snapped to my hand. A few seconds later I came, gasping and bouncing in his lap.

"Bloody hell," he cursed softly. "That was fast."

"What's my record?" I panted.

"What?" Lust-glazed red eyes rose to my face.

"How many times before you come? What's my record?"

"Four, I think."

"Before I let you come?"

He nodded, gaze dropping to my sex as I started moving again. "I take it you're going for a new record today."

"We'll see," I breathed, touching his chest with both hands. Watching the muscles in his belly flex.

"I like I when you do the figure eights," he murmured, gate hot on my rolling hips.

"Mmm. You're so hard already." I shifted to get that thick column at just the right angle and Loki's eyes rolled back a little when I started bouncing again.

Oh God, that's it.

"You're getting tighter," he rasped, eyes nearly closed. "Coming again?"

I rode him harder for a few seconds, stiffened and cried out in answer.

"Bella, you'll kill me," he groaned.

I brought myself twice more. Made Loki suck my nipples while I took him. Turned around and rode him the other way, with my back to his chest.

He started thrusting somewhere around my third orgasm, but he held himself back from climax without my assistance, which I thought was very generous of him.

By the fourth time, he looked like a wild animal in bloodlust, crimson gaze slitted, watching me like he would eat me alive.

I rose from his lap and stood straddling his chest.

"Suck me," I said softly.

His expression went so dark it made me shiver. He leaned forward and brought me with his mouth, glaring up at me the whole time.

And when I slumped down across his thighs afterward he growled, "Let me go and I'll fuck you as hard as you ever dreamed I would."

I looked up at his face, and then at his cock. Both were flushed. The latter impossibly stiff. The look in his eyes was so intense--so predatory--that meeting his gaze made my stomach drop. I'd seen him like this before, of course. Right before he started breaking cuffs and headboards to get at me.

"I'll take care of you right now," I said. "Just stay still."

He growled, long and low and wordless. His arms tensed. He yanked on the cuffs and made the whole headboard tremble and creak.

"Loki, don't," I warned.

"Suck me," he demanded, deep and guttural. "Ride me, dammit. I'm going to split this bed in half if you don't make me come soon."

"Okay," I said soothingly, climbing into his lap again. "Like this?"

"Gods, yes," he groaned as I sank down on him. "Do the figure eights."

His eyes fluttered when I obeyed.

"Your breasts," he rasped. "Let me suck them."

I leaned forward obediently and lifted my chest to him, gasping when he bent to take one nipple in his mouth. He sucked so hard it made me whimper and dig my nails into his shoulders.

"Faster," he rasped, switching breasts.

I obeyed, riding him far more roughly that I needed to for my own pleasure, outrageously stimulated my the animal look of pleasure on his face. Touching the ridges on his cheeks while he sucked me and panted against my breasts.

Only Loki could somehow manage to be utterly dominating while chained helpless to the headboard. It might have been amusing, if it wasn't so damned arousing.

I came again just before he did, surprising us both, making him snarl and sink his teeth into my flesh, hips jumping under me, jolting me roughly.

"Don't stop," he growled fiercely. "Don't you dare stop!"

At last, he came, head thrown back, body rigid, blue skin sheened with sweat. He made a sound like nothing I'd ever heard before. Low and ragged, furious. The hairs stood up all over my body. His cock was so big inside me, hot and heavy, jerking wildly.

"Loki," I breathed, when he went limp, slumping back against the pillows, against the headboard.

I rested myself gently against his chest, heart still beating fast. A little frightened, if I was honest. I'd never seen him like that before--never heard him make such ferocious sounds.

It turned me on. But it also scared me. I was sort of worried that I had pushed him too far.

"Loki?" I murmured hesitantly, when his pulse had begun to slow, my cheek resting at the base of his throat.

"Bella," he answered limply.

I lifted my head. "Are you okay?"

Blue lips curved. He looked at me with slitted red eyes. "Fine," he murmured. "Uncuff me, please."

I reached up and set him free. He tumbled me down onto the pillows immediately and folded himself around me with a sigh.

"That was..." I trailed off, looking for an appropriate word.

"Fantastic?" he rumbled drowsily.

"That's one way of putting it."

He shifted against me, lifting his head a little. "You didn't like it?"

"I did. Of course I did. You just...scared me a little there at the end."

I felt his lips in my hair. "You have nothing to fear from me, ever. You know that."

He was right of course. I did know that.

The last of the tension bled away. Loki's breath became soft and even. I felt myself getting drowsy.

"You were magnificent," he murmured, surprising me.

I blinked. "Yeah?"

He was replaying it his mind, drifting towards sleep.

"The way you order me to do things," he mumbled. "So softly. But utterly commanding. Turns my cock to stone."

I smiled, flushing a little. It had taken a lot of effort to be so bold with him in the beginning. I still felt embarrassed sometimes afterward.

"And the way you ride me," he went on, words a little garbled with sleep. "Use me. Gods. Nearly came when you told me to suck you. Weren't even touching my cock."

"Loki..." I said softly.

He made a low humming sound of pleasure. "Love you, Bella. Ought to tell you every day."

I kissed his chest, and then his chin. His eyes were closed, black lashes showing thick against his blue cheeks.

"I love you, too," I said, kissing his mouth very lightly. "So, so much."

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trustbravo · 2 years

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Jquery mobile html5 video player

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This whole process has been an extremely valuable learning experience for me.Īlso, a shout out to the creator(s) of Media Element for creating an awesome media player plugin. I'd like to thank Team Treehouse for providing another great project idea through their "Front End Web Development" techdegree. I corrected both mistakes, and BOOM it finally worked. I also hadn't formatted the milliseconds appropriately in the data-start and data-end attributes. I discovered that there were twice as many span tags as I had thought because I had completely forgotten about what might be inside the media player plugin.

I spent awhile trying to make the highlighting event handler work before I decided to debug it through the JavaScript console in Chrome's Dev Tools.

I'm not sure if it's a bug or something I missed when coding. However, once you hit the "play" button, the video's dimensions return to what they were programmed to be, and the video plays normally.

For some reason at times, before playing the video, the dimensions of the black video screen are not what the actual dimensions are they will be bigger or stretch thin.

I added a header and a footer as bookends to kind of package it all together.

You'll notice that the end product does not EXACTLY match the provided mockups because I thought the mockups looked too.plain.

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zip file containing the Media Element plugin from their documentation on how to install it is found at, and their documentation on how to use it (and style it) is found at. The version of jQuery that I am using is v3.3.1 from.All of the JavaScript has been successfully run through JSHint it only mentions some ES6 standards.

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All of the CSS code has been successfully run through the W3C CSS validator there are no errors.

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All of the HTML has been run through the W3C HTML validator.

anyone can click on any part of the transcript, and the video will fast forward to that point in time.

the transcript is synced with the video so that as the video progresses, the transcript text will turn a different color.

a jQuery plugin that redesigns the look of the video's controls.

This web page has three features of note: I built a simple web page (with a mobile-first design) that showcases an interactive video in HTML5.

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circlesbanana · 2 years

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devandahlcourte-work-in-progress · 2 years

Text

Section 21. 2 chapters, ending with chapter 79

I am reposting these first eighty-two chapters (in 22 sections) plus the prologue and the preface.

These posts will be the updated versions from my DeviantArt account, and since Tumblr may not display all the text correctly (it destroys anything I had in italics or underlined) I would still recommend reading everything there, on DeviantArt. They will also include internal links that navigate between the chapters on DeviantArt and will take the reader off Tumblr if clicked.

This came about because I noticed search engines were finding random sections of my book and displaying them along with some other people’s blog posts.

Okay, so that’s why I installed those internal links in each one… so that if anyone gets to a random section by way of a search engine and would like to read the story from the beginning, they can.

Only then did I realize that it wasn’t getting it’s search results from DeviantArt, but from old Tumblr.

There’s another problem at work here besides unrefined searches…

There is a new species of virus on the internet that likes to eat ancient Tumblr posts and barf them back up infested with adware - spyware - malware etc. The virus goes by names like TumGIR, TumBIG, TumPIK, or Tum(anything else but ‘blr’). The caps were added by me for emphasis so that maybe you can double check in case you’re not looking at an actual Tumblr post right now but one of these so-called “mirror” sites.

If you’re looking at this text through one of the counterfeit Tumblrs that I mentioned, then no link you click (assuming it even copies it with my links intact) will take you out; it will redirect you and show you all of the spam ads it wants to. So read carefully what url is showing on your browser right now.

If it is one of the untrustworthy ones I would suggest closing your browser window and doing whatever else you normally would in order to reset settings.

As far as my science fiction novel entitled “If And Only If,” the safest way to find it is by going to my Instagram:

@michelle.de.vandahlcourte

From there you can click on the link in my bio. It will take you to the beginning of the story on DeviantArt… the safe one! No malware.

P.S. None of this is Tumblr’s fault! It’s the malware/adware/spyware developers who are stealing people’s tumblr posts.

The actual content of this page appears below here👇

Section 21. 2 chapters, ending with chapter 79

↩️return to previous section, section 20

↩️↩️…and if you arrived here because of a search engine and you would like to read this story from the beginning, click here.

Swifty

The dude at the top seemed older than the rest. An authority figure perhaps? Would he be the one in charge; the one with whom Swifty would have to negotiate? If he was in charge, hanging back and staying at the top near the ship’s entrance seemed like a piss-poor leadership trait. Even if the woman was a specialist with her weapon and it was appropriate to just let her do her thing undistracted? Still, a bit closer to ground level on his part might be better for morale. But maybe he had some logistical reason for being deployed there – he suddenly looked familiar as well – perhaps something to do with tending to the ship.

It might also be that he wasn’t in charge, Swifty realized as he caught himself being both ageist and sexist, so he told his internal dialogue monster to nix the judgmental crap until he had chances to talk with them. The button that the guy had been hovering over on some holographic control panel retracted the ramp and bolstered the notion that he wasn’t necessarily in charge but rather had been posted there… overseeing some aspect of the ship.

The ship! It ended up being quite large compared to a Gay Deceiver, notwithstanding “bag of holding” rooms within, revealing not quite Battlestar or even Enterprise scale, but resembling an aircraft interior of C-5M proportions. Still trying to speculate as to the leader’s identity, he reasoned that pretty-boy gym-queen had been the only one to speak to him yet, but Priyanka-Power-Ranger (as he’d nicknamed her) was, so far, the clear bad-ass of the group.

Pretty boy’s gentle hand on Swifty’s shoulder, along with the general direction of foot traffic, guided him to a room resembling more of a large aircraft cockpit than a Star Trek class 1 heavy cruiser bridge. He was directed to sit on a longish comfortable couch by PBGQ on his right where he now relaxed with him and vacuum cleaner guru on the far end - other side of pretty boy. He followed suit and strapped himself in as they did with a fairly obvious restraint harness. Meanwhile, older man and Prajina took the upfront seats where one would imagine the pilot and copilot to be.

Correcting himself mentally, he caught his mistake: he had privately designated her as “Priyanka” for a mnemonic assist, but just now accidentally thought of her as Pra – –

Holy shit! He realized why she looked familiar. Prajina actually was her real name and she was the representative of Mitternacht Cryptosystems with whom he had been planning to meet in Germany in only a few more hours... had he not been abducted, had a shootout with aliens, witnessed a corpse desecration, etc. It appeared he would keep his appointment with her after all, only a tad farther away from Stuttgart than they’d planned.

“Ms. Ranganathan??” he ventured, his voice sounding more awestruck than he thought it would…

“Please Swifty, call me Prajina, as we are already on a first name basis online. In fact, everyone I know just calls me Praji.”

He was briefly taken aback by the use of his old nickname – and also noticed the older gentleman smirking just a little when she said “Praji...” Meaning? An inside joke perhaps. But he at once recognized the guy. His face, anyway. He tried to think… Inside of book cover jackets and on the backs of book cover jackets. Topological Vector Spaces for Dummies or something? No. Hilbert Spaces? Got it!

“Of course, Praji, then. And Dr. Sohibnazarov I presume?”

One Spock-like eyebrow went up right before the professor smiled and said “call me Alex, please” and was then interrupted by Praji speaking about some mathematics on the very edge of Swifty‘s comprehension. The Ploughman’s Trophy winner quickly obeyed her by setting something else on a virtual holographic control panel that shimmered into existence in front of him. Swifty felt motion. No noise or mechanical vibrations however. Most aircraft or spacecraft he’d been aboard had some, especially for a behemoth like this. And those holo-virtual keyboards? Beyond state of the art. The whole thing suddenly had a much-more-advanced-than-any-nation-on-earth feel to it.

It contained two, well… Well-known humans. One he’d interacted with online for months and whose life and background had been thoroughly vetted, and another who’d been making substantial mathematical contributions to this world since the late 90s. This had fueled an impulse to forget about the “they’re-not-humans-but-really-aliens-in-disguise” theory. But what if? If they’re aliens and they are among us, why couldn’t they have been here for decades?

Trying to sound nonchalant and just innocently curious, he proffered “you are all mathematicians, then,” ending with a subtle question mark tone. And, suddenly remembering his nickname anomaly, he injected “and how did you ever learn that I was called Swifty? I’m just curious…” Then in the interest of sounding polite: “Sorry for all the rapid questioning.”

Praji turned slightly and serious as can be cut in: “actually, I’m a cop. And forsooth, there be no secrets hidden from ye temporal constabulary,” she ended, with a wink before going momentarily back to her keyboard.

Was she leading into a Harry Harrison joke? If she knew about “Swifty” then perhaps she could know of his love for all things Stainless Steel Rat-ish. Waiting for a punch line involving perhaps an Italian slang word for toilet, he saw the South-Asian-looking man raise a firm right hand and upon eye contact from Swifty said “biochemist and pharmaceutical chemist. And I am Padmanabhan Thiagarajan, but most people call me `Rajan.”

The pretty boy in between them (whose right hand he noticed was holding Rajan’s left, upon which the chemistry guru wore a wedding band) raised his left hand, waved it through the air flamboyantly and with outrageous theatrics sang “Fashion designer! And artiste! I’m Eric. Just Eric. We’re here by accident; just along for the ride like you. Except instead of accidentally blowing ourselves up with a rocket launcher like you were about to, we were almost killed by nerve gas in the year 2140 when Praji rescued us…” He tapered it off a bit under his husband’s more serious but still pleasant gaze.

Anyway, Eric‘s left hand had a wedding band of the exact same engraving style, so he took that to mean they were married... And immediately replayed the last couple of minutes to try and recall if he’d been in any way flirtatious with this hottie. No. Not unless smiling at his silly Arnold impression counted. But more importantly: 2140? The Future?

Yes, time travel! That would explain so much…

Whoa! “Ye Temporel Constabulary?” Praji wasn’t leading into a Harrison joke, pun, or whatever. She was seriously trying to say that she’s a “time-cop.” In all of his ponderings about the unexplained cases of the last three decades, he’d never thought to explore a time travel angle – always preferring the alien theories instead. A bunch of future technology getting accidentally sent to “the past” a.k.a. “now” might certainly look like alien-related phenomena.

“...and I chose Swifty,” she continued now that the craft was in stable motion and she could turn away longer while leaving Alex at the controls, “because I know you’re uncomfortable revealing your real name.”

Then as Eric began to unbuckle himself a bit, suggesting the “fasten seatbelt sign” could have gone off somewhere, Praji continued: “Might and Magic by Jon Van Caneghem; a sample character on a five-and-a-quarter inch floppy. At a nearby off-campus apartment on John Hinkle Street, one of your five apartment mates came in and saw you exploring the caverns under Dusk and was intrigued enough to ask for an explanation.”

It was like she’d been following him for decades. No one, ever, had been told the real story of where the nickname came from. Most simply assumed it was something to do with him being a runner in track and field events back in his school days. Wild!

“Not wanting to risk your own characters, you teleported back to the inn and saved your session. Then you used the sample disk to give him a tour. Serena, Crag The Hack, and Swifty Sarg were amongst the sample characters that came with the game. As you demonstrated what items were in Swifty’s backpack, the noob couldn’t comprehend that it was a sample character and thought you had chosen Swifty as your own name… a name which he found amusing for some reason. He began addressing you by it in everyday life. It caught on, among your suite mates only, and would have ceased to ever be mentioned again after your second semester there… once you parted company with them. Once they found out you were gay.”

She continued on pleasantly and Swifty was somewhat relieved that the future was a world where being gay was no problem at all as he saw Eric in the corner of his vision, still holding Rajan’s hand, and leaning over to say something quietly to his husband.

“It would’ve ended, but you chose to keep on using it when a video arcade game would allow you six characters... sorry to interrupt,” she cut herself off and reached for some kind of satchel with a red cross on it; a first aid kit? As she fumbled through it for something she asked with an altered tone “do you have any reason to think weightlessness might give you nausea? Ever gotten seasick, airsick, or puked after a wild amusement park ride?”

Swifty immediately flashed back to the recent insiders at NASA who got him aboard the “vomit comet” (without telling him in advance the plane’s real purpose) and surprised him with weightlessness. So the answer was a resounding YES. In truth he’d been an alternate or third string back-up or something for an astronaut who was supposed to ___________ ___________ ___________ ___________ on a satellite to allow it to ___________ ___________ ___________ ___________ and avoid enemy satellite ___________ ___________ ___________ ___________. (Thoughts redacted.) so “yes” was all he said, knowing what was about to happen and that all of those things would take too long to explain even if he had been able and willing to talk about them.

Unknown to him, Praji could simultaneously switch off or destroy every single man made satellite orbiting the earth in 2019 with a word to her people in Trieste, switch off the internet also, shut down all cell phone transmissions on the planet… Basically terminate all worldwide telecommunications. As it was, nevertheless he had to behave as if word these conversations might one day reach his superiors.

As he uttered his monosyllable, the trio of little envelopes attached together was sailing in a gentle arc into Eric‘s free hand. They looked like individually wrapped alcohol wipe packets.

He broke hand-holding contact with Rajan and tore the little packets apart, handing one to each man on his left and right. He opened his own and Swifty followed his lead. “Wipe on the inside of a wrist – either one – like this for about ten seconds,” Eric advised in the most serious tone he had yet heard him use.

“Yes,” Alex interjected, “and make sure Eric does it right this time!” as his husband and Praji both looked amused, Eric meekly complied. He surmised that Eric must��ve gotten sick on one or more previous voyages.

Swifty doubted that he would fare any better and made a thorough effort to wipe the transdermal anti-nausea drug all over himself, until Praji held out a little tiny waste vacuum to collect all their debris.

The weightlessness arrived as if on cue and Swifty felt nothing bad; if anything, he felt happy and on the verge of giggling from the freefall.

“Or,” she continued “when you were only allowed five characters you shortened it to SWFTY for your high score entry. Then came USENET. Alt dot everything and especially sci dot cryptography. Your sig file contained it and your plan.txt had it for when people fingered your account on that old VAX/VMS system. Then your angelfire / lycos page… but you were already with NSA by then and they told you to cut the social media crap out. Around ‘98 was the last time you used it online.”

21 years ago, he thought. She didn’t look old enough to have been born yet – then caught himself as it registered: she’s a time traveler! She might not have been born yet for centuries.

“I didn’t intentionally vet you so exhaustively. But one of my drone programmers was a bit more stringent than I thought he would be when we sent your ‘life story’ drone back in time to the ‘60s to gather intel about you.”

Swifty interrupted her: “you’ve really had drones following me my entire life?” The amazed cryptanalyst reflected, trying to recall if he’d ever seen any evidence of them.

“Not exactly, since they’re capable of reading your thoughts and memories, we only had to make them materialize every few weeks in some cases. And no, you wouldn’t have seen them. They were quite assuredly invisible. But that wouldn’t have mattered most of the time since they can read your thoughts in your sleep whilst hovering over your house a good thirty meters up. Only up until 2017 though. After that we – –”

She was interrupted this time by the spacecraft being rocked by some kind of turbulence… the first instance Swifty noticed the thing actually feeling like any kind of craft at all.

“Time barrier! Gay bounce to Eden.”

Eric

“Um, Praji? That’s the thing you asked me to let you know about? It’s almost at zero–” she interrupted Eric before he could finish reporting to tighten his seatbelt or harness or whatever over his shoulders, thanked him, said something technical to Alex as Eric looked concerned, and simultaneously did that superhuman speed movement thing to get back in her own chair. The other guys hadn’t attempted to loosen the restraints yet. She made it just in time to buckle her self in before the gravity came back on.

He felt useful having been asked to watch the timer. In truth she would’ve normally had no problem entrusting it to Alex, but he was still unknowingly on that same drug they’d given Swifty and was tending to romantic fantasies and reminiscing about their time together unless she made a point to bark something technical directly at him.

The return to gravity, Eric observed, was not at all a problem for this trip. It reminded him of flopping down onto a mattress after a manic session of jumping up and down on one; no further “sickness” at all this time, making Praji’s other little hand vacuum completely unnecessary he thought, patting himself on the back. He dared allowed himself a glimpse of the cute older guy. Calvin. That had been the character’s name in the movie. And one hundred percent certifiably gay according to Praji who admitted to having time “probes” watching the guy for his whole life; he tried not to smile too creepy when she talked about that, but hello!? She actually didn’t know what devices he was picturing. Oh well, different connotations for the same word, he supposed.

Calv- - - Swifty, looked equally relieved when they returned to normal gravity. And he was un-shyly honest in declaring right away that, yes, he too would probably be sick in zero-gravity. Humans of this time had some kind of space travel already. Right? Eric searched his memory and again was reminded that never paying much attention in school had been a poor series of choices. Some thing about landing spread eagle popped into his mind – a silly joke between him and an off-limits friend in the class whose current bf at that time had known Eric since summer camp days in their tweens. So he honestly kept his flirting controls on mute with the twink.

But the fact that the old twentieth century film narrator casually said the eagle thing had occurred in ‘69… had made them both lose it. Predictably what followed was: office, detention, call to Eric’s stepparents, their standard punishment for being – – he stopped himself from thinking about it. Street kids at Stonewall that same year: one had scalding water thrown on him by a parent before throwing him out at the age of 14; yes, gay kids back then had it so much worse. He wondered what Calvin – Swifty had had to endure.

Once again he tried to involve Rajan. There was something important he needed to text him about.

***hey. was i not supposed to say anything to Paul Dano here about us being from the future?

He thought to Rajan.

***after vag- Prajina’s kinda Long lecture about how we couldn’t accidentally negatively change history,

space-time-probability continuum, moving around within the five-space, everything that can happen to the state vector does happened to the state vector...

Sorry for the accidental text dump. It’s from that talk-to-text memory-aid thingy that switched on when it heard her speaking. Smart-ass software! It just assumes that I’m too stupid to comprehend –

and that I’ll need to go back over it later… OK, it kind of assumed correctly [(future laughing emoji)]

***anyway, I thought I saw you giving me a ‘look’ when I mentioned that part. Was i

Padmanabhan finished another file he’d been editing in his mind and texted back:

╬ ╬ ╬ it’s okay dear. That wasn’t the look. It was when you said “almost killed by a nerve gas.” Reminded me that I technically did get you killed! Both of us. If Wonder Woman here hadn’t shown up using some advanced alien technology that’s beyond my wildest imagination, we would be dead. To hear her tell it, it sounds like there exists a parallel universe right now where we are dead – and it’s my fault.

*** well don’t worry, we were lucky to get Super-Praji universe for our own consciousnesses (sp?) to be in

*** it’s not nearly as bad as the universe where you chose Boy Barbie instead of me and suffered the rest of your life regretting your mistake becau...

╬ ╬ ╬stop Rolla! There is NO other universe where I chose Boy Barbie! It will always be You in all universes [(rainbow row of every color beating heart animojis)]

***awww! [(watery eyes with running mascara animoji)]

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

“Did I hear something I shouldn’t have a few moments ago?” The interruption was in a pleasant enough tone, Eric noted, smiling pleasantly back at... Swifty. That’s it. (Note to self, stop calling him Paul Dano or Calvin Wier-Fields in your head – you’re enough of an idiot that sooner or later you’ll let it slip out.)

Swifty continued: “about being from the future, and time travel? Your secret’s safe with me.”

The conversation shifted to something with Praji over tech stuff as she intervened and assured him it wasn’t a problem, but Eric suddenly got a chill.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

***Um, Rajan? Ppl from this time didn’t have access to “thought texting” as my grandpa used to call it, right? I mean, he chimed in, talking about exactly what my concern was, right after I told you. But even in our time people can’t hack into a private session between us right?

╬ ╬ ╬ No Dear. He probably doesn’t even know “thought texting” exists. Both my grandmothers and my great uncle Ravi used to call it that also. The guy’s just very good at picking up on cues, verbal and nonverbal. He probably noticed the same “look” that you thought I was giving you, interpreted it the same way, correlated it with what was last sa...

***Ok, Hunk, I gets it. So our technology is still safe

╬ ╬ ╬um hmm

***good, because i love our technology.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Eric searched rapidly for a file from his friend Castadiva’s birthday bash about seven years ago, quickly found it in recents – because it was too good to not keep using frequently – and sent it to his husband.

It only took Padmanabhan a few seconds to burst out laughing at the vid scene of Eric doing karaoke to Kip Dynamite’s “Always and Forever.” He started the clip right at “Yes, I love technology… But not as much as you, you see… But I still love technology…” And then looped it. Neither of the other future people knew what silliness these guys were up to, so Young Rajan’s outburst seemed inexplicable to them also. He got it under control quickly, but still got a curious look from Swifty.

“Hey, so what are we doing now exactly? I mean we landed – back on Earth, right?” Eric ventured noting that they’d had gravity for a couple of minutes or so, not worried that blurting things out now and interrupting might be a problem; since they were all friends at this point, yes? Otherwise why make a special trip to save Swifty? This part of the voyage had made more sense than going back to the previous year and running a shuttle bus service had – presumably to get those people off the island but erasing their memories first, after much confusion…

Seeing Praji accidentally meet her great-great-grandmother when they were the same age…

Eric being “looped” for the first time… Not recognizing himself at first and actually checking himself out from a distance (weird), not realizing that it was him from 15 minutes in the future.

But yeah this made sense: rescuing a guy who’s in trouble, being attacked by bizarre things, and beating the bizarre things! Bizarre things which he’d learned had tried to kill him and his husband by placing a boobytrapped nerve gas canister in hell-hole. He had wondered how in the world they could have known they’d be there spelunking… then remembered: they’re time travelers also. Well, that’s gonna take some getting used to, he thought.

After a pause of a few seconds and more “button pushing” by the math geniuses up front, Eric got his answer: we’re not on Earth, but we are “Steppin’ Into Eden, Yeah, Brother” Alex sang deeply in what was probably the best mood he’d seen him in since being rescued. Well, Eric sympathized, he’d be cranky too if he woke up with the body and face of a decent looking older teen and suddenly got transformed into a late forty-something professor-type dude.

While Star Trek TOS wasn’t his forte, the things with music tended to stick more with him; he recognized the episode. “No poison fruit or corrosive grass burning the feet I hope?” Eric said, aiming for a friendly tone. He knew this guy only like 1% better when he knew Swifty.

Alex smiled at him, acknowledging that he knew the episode, but then he also threw in a quip that the planet was partly based on “Shore Leave” as well. Unless that one had a memorable song (it did have Finnegan mocking Kirk to Irish jig music, but no Spock on a lyre jamming with space hippies) he wouldn’t necessarily be able to conjure up any images just now.

Psiynet down. Not on Earth. Plus being in the past? Eric couldn’t look up anything Alex might say, on his future version of “the Internet” and display it in his mind like he usually did when trying to bullshit his way through intelligent conversation with Rajan’s friends. So not even a good chance of faking it. Rajan caught his eye and did that intuitive thing that Eric had been trying to teach him for two years. Yay! Gold star for you mister! All the info came flooding in on his mind monitor.

After only a couple of moments, which Eric appeared to be using to allow the professor to concentrate on his oh-so-important button-pushing, he implored (like a person who had seen the episode) and with genuine interest: “so there’s something here that will read our minds and make whatever we want really happen?? Can I make a damsel-in-distress dress like Yeoman Barrows wore?”

He nodded, swiveling his chair around to finally have a more proper conversation now that he’d stowed or switched off that holo control panel. “Far more elaborate than that. A whole renaissance masquerade ball full of people, if you’d like, in every outfit you can imagine,” Alex expounded as if lecturing to a class, but in his friendliest mood yet, “also far better than anything my silly Stalko-Taco can do.”

That perked Swifty up again. Not wanting to monopolize the conversation, Eric went back to editing another video clip to put in his head cloud for Rajan to see. To avoid staring off into space and making it obvious that he was composing DM‘s in his head, he pretended to be intensely studying some (presumably alien) hieroglyphic-type writing on one wall.

“You own Stalko Taco? Did you create, him… It? I’ve been tracking its activities for decades now!” Swifty interjected, suddenly seeming both excited and astonished.

“We know! That’s part of why we’re here; the inability of certain humans to forget about Stalko-Taco.” Before Alexander The Erudite could continue, Eric slipped in: “and yes, your first guess was correct, it is a he. At least the cartoon in the commercials used a male voice when it sang and talked…” he trailed off when he saw Swifty’s glazey-eyed look of puzzlement.

“Commercials?? Cartoons?” the confused cryptanalyst voiced what his state of mind obviously was, going by his facial expression.

It’s “creator” picked up again: “The commercial was for a regional fast food chain – in our time,” Alex motioned to Eric, “called Wokkon The Wild Side… with wok-on spelled W-O-K-K-O-N.”

“Oh! I had always thought it was just ’walk on,’ like the Lou Reed song” Eric had to slide in since his video edit was complete and pretending to stare at alien hieroglyphs was really boring him.

“Oh wow!” Swifty reflected, raising a thoughtful finger and appearing to recall something from distant past, “they had a place with almost that name when I was in grad school. But it was ‘wok on.’ Did they make it all the way to the 2140’s I wonder?”

“Mmm, probably not. A number of places right now – your time that is – are using the same name around the country. At least since I got here around ‘92, and most of them unrelated… And none of them are related to the one from Kentucky in the 2130’s or 40’s…

…The name wasn’t just a pun on the song, but also a nod to a place in England where the owner met her husband. Or maybe near where they had their honeymoon. I knew their kids, Xia and Yiming who had each sometimes hung out in the Oakey-Dokey parking lot with their various groups of friends. I truly hadn’t wanted to inflict any damage upon their property and always felt bad about it. Praji later helped me open a miniature wormhole back in the future, inside their safe deposit box at their bank, where I provided them more than enough money to cover the damages. They could even buy a new giant taco if they wanted.”

Swifty’s look was only slightly less befuddled as he held off on asking what an Oakey-Dokey parking lot was in order to take in more of the Stalko-Taco story. He’d dropped Butthead’s phone in Houston back on earth, but it was locked anyway so he wouldn’t have been able to use any recording app. He’d simply need to rely on his pseudo eidetic memory as well as he could. Alex continued:

“They usually do okay near university campuses or in college towns because the name makes them sound hip. That is, until people make the association with the song Eric was referencing. Then the politically correct reflex kicks in, amplified if it’s a college crowd,”

Alex paused for air and to see what Praji was motioning him about from the next room involving an antique cell phone looking thingy on the chair next to him. It might have been a satellite phone, Swifty pondered, but it was a model he’d never seen before. Too much wild new info to catalog – focus, he told himself. On the Taco.

So Eric, having searched for the lyrics in his own database offline, joined back in: “oh yes, it was a very insensitive way that the singer referred to women of African ancestry. Maybe by our century people forgot.”

“Anyway,” Alex resumed, “that same type of alien technology from ‘Shore Leave,’ or later – what was it,” he paused, tapping a finger to his chin to recall, “oh… Samuel L. Jackson, Dustin Hoffman,”

“Sphere!” Swifty buzzed in for the win. Eric honestly had never heard of the film even though he was considered an old-movie buff by most of his circle of friends.

“Yes! That was it. So now you’ve got the general idea of how the tech is supposed to work. And of course, just like in TV and movies, when someone who isn’t clued in on what it is or how to use it… just happens to stumble upon it,” Alex paused for a breath seeing that Eric was eager to speak up.

“Something silly happens, like you bring a four meter tall restaurant mascot to life! But why was it a taco and not an eggroll or something, or a giant blob of noodles like on Portlandia?”

Eric innocently babbled, getting a short laugh from Swifty. “And why would you wish for that?”

Swifty puzzled along as he digested this. But it was starting to make sense. The technology was Shore Leave / Sphere. The fact that it manifested as a giant taco was just part of the accidental use of the technology which Alex was just getting to.

“OK, time out. Eric, we’re getting a bit too far off the subject, and I can always explain more later.”

Alex added, “and no, I didn’t ‘wish for it,’ exactly” he chuckled, addressing Swifty. “It was 4:30-ish in the morning in a sleepy suburb in Kentucky where restaurants still close, and I was hungry! What I actually kind of wished, if anything, was that some employees might show up extra early to work and be willing to zap some food hot for me. I might have looked into this advertising gimmick’s eyes while thinking it. Since the alien device didn’t exactly understand human psychology and thought processes…”

“Stalko-Taco was born!” Eric clapped gleefully. “Oh, and Rajan texted me the explanation of why the restaurant chain didn’t choose a giant spring roll or bowl of noodles or anything, so, got it,” he sang, giving Alex a brief thumbs up.

Swifty took a turn at doing the one eyebrow thing but very subtle, as he was quite sure he hadn’t seen Eric pull out a phone or any other kind of device to get a text in the entire time they’d been chatting. But he reasoned they might have some other technology for that, since they were partial to holographic virtual keyboards, control panels, etc.

Before the professor could continue any longer, Praji came bounding in from the other “room,” which Eric now noticed resembled more of a cramped equipment closet.

She mainly attempted to address Alex, but also the room in general, but was about to find herself momentarily interrupted.

“That turbulen…”

Rajan cut in casually with “and speaking of the Oakey-Dokey!” He caused a little hologram of Prajina in roughly a help-me-Obi-Wan-size to appear in front of him. But with good enough resolution to see her smiling with sort of bluish-green teeth.

“Holy crap! Where’d you get that ridiculous thing?” Eric heard her laugh for the first time since he’d known her.

“Ranatunga, from the school paper, near the end of junior year. He gave me a copy,” Eric observed his husband to say as his smirky smile did that cute, slightly lopsided thing.

She explained to me and Swifty that she’d gone to see Alex at work on a slow night and decided to try the Mavis thing with the slushy machines. In another holo Alex was there with her, waving at the camera in his Kal-looking shirt.

“But the greens and blues obviously had dyes that overpowered the others,” Rajan resumed, “and gave her the turquoise effect,” he continued to explain to us.

***when he implied he’d worked at an Oakey-Dokey i thought mathboy meant as CEO of their corporate office (genuinely surprised future animoji) isn’t he like a trillionaire or something back in our time?

╬ ╬ ╬his dad thought it’d be a good experience for him. But their family does have a controlling interest; though im not sure if mathboy knew that at the time

Returning to “serious Praji” for a bit, she re-started: “That turbulence we had was actually due to a brane-quake, which the computer’s AI safety moiety reacted to.”

“Does that mean it’s all in our heads?” Eric asked innocently and honestly, thinking she meant “brain.”

She looked at Rajan who nodded almost imperceptibly and then Eric excused himself, rattling off: “oh, sorry, never heard of a B-R-A-N-E brane.”

More curious looks from Swifty, who had heard the term but was now more fascinated by how Eric was getting information. She continued “it was the Gay Bounce program, that Alex-the-Heinlein-fan suggested including, which brought us here. This emergency homebase that we created is in a pocket realm, outside of normal time and space. It does feature all the replicator technology or whatever you want to describe it as – for running simulations relevant to our mission, and for R&R. But we didn’t come here for pleasure this time. So masquerade balls and giant bunny rabbits will need to wait until we figure out why it detected a universe that was a hostile environment and bounced us here for safety.”

╬ ╬ ╬They named their spacecraft “Gay Deceiver” and Robert Heinlein’s…

Eric read carefully and grasped that the “Gay Bounce” didn’t refer to some kind of dance they might later do in a simulated nightclub on pleasure-world here.

***OK, thanks dear, but I DID already have sort of a notion about that one, since she followed it with the word “program.” wasn’t gunna to interrupt again.

Eric texted, lying small and whitely, as he had in fact been considering interrupting with a dance joke even though he did truly understand it to be a type of program run by the ship’s computer. He was not quite that stupid, but he would always happily admit that he was quite that silly.

“What part, of what universe” Alex said with a politely raised hand “were we trying to materialize in that the computer found to be hostile?”

“Earth. Just regular Earth in 2018. In Swifty’s home timeline a few months before the attack,” she answered ominously as Eric wondered how such an innocent time and place that produced Dua Lipa’s One Kiss could possibly have become “hostile.”

Continue on to next section…

If And Only If

by Michelle Viviénne de Vandahlcourte

No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

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