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#@ the video game industry burn to the ground let a new life rise from your ashes etc
eridan-ampora · 1 year
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I have found a new game quality take that disproportionately frustrated me, but I don't know whether to rank it 4th or 5th on the list of how hot of a take it is. "I never liked Legends Arceus because it has Switch game performance issues, and I can't tolerate Switch game performance issues anymore. And even if it weren't for that, the gameplay is just a laundry list of quests, and come on. I want to play Pokémon, not do my weekly grocery shopping."
thats such a silly thing to complain about cause like, every single pokemon game is just you zipping around the region doing stuff cause some adult gave you a cute little task
honestly i have. so many feelings about pla. but ultimately i think it's a great experience & i'm really glad so much of the stuff they were experimenting with is getting pulled forward into more pokemon games.
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marypsue · 6 years
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Imbalance, 10 / ?
Well, tumblr disappeared my original post, so let’s try this one again. 
Previous chapters can be found on AO3 under MaryPSue!
Liliana can't breathe.
She feels pretty stupid about it, actually. She knew there was probably some kind of evil wossname from beyond their plane of existence on the loose, using the circle she herself had broken to get in and eat the universe. She smelled smoke as soon as she set foot in Storm's apartment - hell, she'd taken the batteries out of his smoke detector when it had started going off - but saw no sign of candles or incense or anything that might be causing it. And now she's choking to death on evil smoke from somewhere beyond her plane of existence. Who could possibly have seen this coming.
Well, serves her right. She just hopes the others don't find out how she got killed, she'll die of embarrassment.
"It's all right," Storm says, somewhere in the whispering haze, his voice friendly and comforting, smooth and even and easy to listen to. For the first time, Liliana understands why other people waste their time watching Storm play video games. "You never really had a chance. None of us did."
"Don't...patronise me...you little asshole," Liliana coughs out. She knows as soon as she does that she's made her fatal mistake. Should have saved her breath instead of trying to be a smartass one last time. Her lungs burn, her throat is on fire, her vision blurry either from the tears stinging her eyes or the clouds of billowing, soft grey smoke tracing hypnotic swirls through the air. Her knees, then her shoulder, smart as she hits the ground, but even that's muted, muffled somehow by the smoke.
"It's useless trying," Storm says, sympathetically. "I understand now. No matter how hard you fight, no matter how many battles you win, there's always something bigger and worse waiting in the wings. You can fight and fight your whole life, and any ground you might gain will just be taken back after your death. It means nothing." His smile is bitter and aching. "All you're doing is wearing yourself out, trying to fight the inevitable. You can rest. It'll all be over soon."
Liliana sucks in one final breath, preparing to curse Storm out, but all she gets is a lungful of bitter smoke. Distantly, she thinks she hears Storm say something about endings or silence or some edgelord crap, but it's impossible to make out over the rising whispers. The edges of her vision are darkening, tunneling away into pinpricks of grey as the smoke steals her oxygen. Her last, fleeting thought is to hope somebody will figure out something happened to her and check up on Mavis and Mookie before they both get so hungry they try to eat each other.
And then there is light.
...
The Plane of Thought is home to all kinds of fantastic inventions. Its inhabitants have shaped metal and lightning around ideas that, on other planes, would have been accomplished with advanced spellwork.
And they've managed to come up with things that the other planes would never dream of. Stones of Farspeech are a complicated enchantment capable of incredible communication across continents. But no one, yet, has thought to connect them all together so that the same messages can reach everyone, all over the world, at nearly the speed of light. And no one, yet, has engineered a twenty-four-hour news cycle to make sure those messages get hammered, repeatedly, into every mind around the world. Over, and over, and over again.
"...new report indicates that, without dramatic policy and industry changes, global temperatures will rise enough to render the Earth uninhabitable within the next thirty years..."
"...despite widespread protest, the unpopular piece of legislation was passed on Friday. Legal challenges are expected..."
"... natural disasters compounded by extreme weather..."
"...allegations of sexual misconduct dating back to the early nineteen-seventies..."
"...will walk free..."
"...unable to afford the necessities of life..."
"...human rights violations..."
"...hate crime rising..."
"...unexpected cancellation of hit series Ray Donovan..."
"...corruption..."
"...collapse..."
"...devastation..."
"...despair..."
...
"Yes," the man at the door deadpans. "This is a bad time."
"Oh," Rowan says. "Sucks to suck, huh?"
"Yeah," the man at the door says, and shuts it in Rowan's face.
Rowan stares at the door. The door does not stare back at Rowan, because it's an inanimate object. That should mean it can't laugh at him, either, and yet, somehow, that's exactly what it seems to be doing.
From somewhere behind the impossibly smug door, Rowan can hear another voice - familiar, but in the way the voice of a teacher you had in elementary school is familiar - complain, "What'd you do that for?"
"He can come back with a warrant," the guy who opened the door snaps, and then the conversation veers into Spanish that's a little more advanced than what Rowan vaguely remembers from eighth grade.
Rowan stands on the doorstep for another moment or two, feeling the hot flush of embarrassment creeping up the back of his neck. The door does not reopen.
"Okay," Rowan mutters to himself, turning away from the door. He does not add, "Now what?". He's uncomfortably aware that no one else is going to answer that question for him. "Well, shit."
He starts down the walk, vaguely considering whether Liliana will be upset if he shows up early to pick her up. He doesn't like to admit it, but something about that Storm guy she hangs around with makes him indefinably but distinctly uncomfortable. Nothing personal, just...Rowan gets the strong impression that the guy's watched The Craft one time more than is strictly healthy.
Maybe Indigo's home. Maybe all that reading she - or he, or maybe they, Rowan hasn't checked in yet today - did on the D&D planar system will give him some clue. Rowan's still not sure if Gary Gygax was just plugged in to some fundamental truth of the universe, or if something about the Story and Song somehow made D&D-like shit real, but the end result is the same. Rowan's extensive knowledge of the Wiccan and neopagan traditions is less useful, practically, than some nerd with a 5e Monster Manual.
He has to admit, it does sting a little.
He's halfway down the walk when the door behind him swings open and a voice - familiar, but in the way that a celebrity's voice is familiar - calls, "Hey, do you really know anything about magic?"
Rowan turns. Joaquin Terrero waves one red-sparking hand at him.
“Sorry about that,” he says, looking at his own hand. “I can’t, uh, make it stop.”
"Well, shit," Rowan says.
...
"Hey, Griffin. Question."
"Shoot."
"Are we...are we going to get to...fight something, at some point?"
...
The alarm on Marial's implant cuts out abruptly as she and Dead Guy Gary reach the third floor.
Gary gives her a hopeful look, but Marial shakes her head. "It'll keep going off. Every four hours." She's exhausted, and her left arm is starting to ache, her fingers numb and tingly. She keeps jumping at little noises, thinking it's either Barry or one of Gary's zombies, and she's shaking so badly that it takes her three tries to turn the handle on the door out of the stairwell. This is really too much excitement for one lifetime.
...
"Yes, you are. In fact, you're going to get to fight something very, very soon."
...
Lup gives her scythe a sweeping stroke through the air. There's a noise like paper tearing, and a burst of stinging grey smoke billows out of the hole she's cut into the Astral Plane. It disperses quickly, but leaves a bitter smell lingering in its wake.
"Well, that's probably not a great sign," Lup mutters, under her breath, and then ducks through the opening in the air.
Taako turns to Magnus, but Magnus isn't there. Taako just sees the soles of his boots following Lup through the hole in the air. His voice drifts back through the planes. "Taako! Are you coming?"
"Let me just - let me ask you something. What part of 'Taako's good out here' keeps giving you all so much trouble?"
Magnus doesn't answer, just leans back through the hole in the air, grabs Taako by the collar, and yanks him through.
The hole in the air closes seamlessly behind them.
...
"Okay, but Griffin, how soon is 'very, very soon'?"
...
"What is all this commotion?" someone asks, pleasantly, as Marial slips out of the stairwell. "I thought we dealt with the fire alarm. I've lost two appointments already."
Marial mutters a curse under her breath. She’d really hoped the alarms would have cleared everybody out, but the professionally-(if garishly-)dressed woman with her dark hair in a sleek coil at the back of her neck leaning against the reception desk is standing between her and the cardiac clinic. And doesn't look like she's about to evacuate anytime soon.
On the other hand, Marial's a patient here, and she has a legitimate medical concern. And whoever this is doesn't seem like she wants to stop doing her job and leave until she can personally see flames licking out of the walls around her. Maybe Marial can use this to her advantage.
She takes a step forward, already working up a sheepish smile and a story about a mispulled fire alarm, and the woman standing by the reception desk turns to meet her eyes.
Marial stops in her tracks.
There's nothing immediately and obviously wrong with this picture, which makes it worse. Marial finds herself searching the woman's expression of detached, professional curiosity as it fades into concern, her carefully-applied makeup and enormous eighties Jem and the Holograms earrings, the hall around the reception desk, the friendly but confused smile from the guy behind it, for something to explain the sudden wave of sickening dread that crashes over her. Marial ends up studying the helpful sign listing directions to the different departments so that she doesn't have to meet the woman's kind grey eyes. She's never noticed before that psych and cardiac are on the same floor.
"Can I help you?" the woman asks, and the hall seems to bounce it back to Marial strangely, giving it a mocking, sarcastic tone.
"I - I don't think you can, actually," Marial stammers. She can feel the way Dead Guy Gary's gone tense beside her, prickling like a wall of static shock. She wants to ask him if he can tell what's got his back up, but something tells her that talking to thin air in front of this woman would be a bad idea. "I need the cardiac device clinic."
The woman smiles, broadly, stepping away from the reception desk and towards Marial. Marial takes another step backwards.
"I think what you need is a little dose of perspective," the woman says, still smiling, still friendly. That strange mocking echo in her voice seems to be growing stronger, picking up harmonics from somewhere. Marial takes a third step backwards and finds herself backed up against the stairwell door.
...
"Well, uh, right about - right about now, actually."
...
The Astral Plane is spooky.
Well, okay, so a place where dead people go to their eternal rest is always gonna be spooky, but the Astral Plane is spookier than necessary. The last time Magnus saw this place, it was through an enormous gemstone mirror, but it had seemed...peaceful. With the whispering ocean of souls, even a little bit...tropical? Of course, your umbrella and swim trunks would have to be black, but - yeah, he could imagine taking a beach vacation there. A very, very creepy beach vacation.
But this time, as he follows Lup across the dark, formless ground and waits as she chooses where to slice open another portal, Magnus can't imagine the pina colada that would make this palatable. It's just so quiet. The shifting sea seems to be still for once, and he doesn't think it's his imagination that the ethereal blue light it casts is getting dimmer and dimmer. If Magnus squints, he thinks he can make out a faint grey haze casting a pall over it and soaking up its light. He's willing to bet actual human currency that, up close, it smells strongly of smoke.
"Hey, uh, Lulu?" Taako asks, and though his voice is deliberately nonchalant, Magnus can hear the tightness in it. "You done something new with the place? Really working the, the old, 'abandon hope all ye who enter here' vibe."
There's a little frown creasing the space between Lup's eyebrows as she glances distractedly back at them.
"Look, I've been a reaper for less time than you've been dating one," she says. "But no. I don't think any of this is right."
Magnus rests a hand on the head of his axe as he looks around, just in case.
There's another burst of smoke that leaves them all coughing when Lup opens the portal to the Plane of Thought. It still dissipates quickly, but the smell seems to linger longer this time.
They're in a wide, airy, square hall, its walls painted a pale yellow, a huge plate-glass window overtop of a desk just beside them. There are printed signs labeling everything and offering directions down the hall, and all put together, it reminds Magnus of the Halls of Healing back in Neverwinter.
"This better not take too long," Taako complains. "I have an, uh, a guest appearance on, uh, uh, uh, Beat Bobby Mindflayer booked for tonight -"
"It's gonna have to wait," Lup says, warningly.
Magnus follows her line of sight.
The three people standing by the heavy metal door don't seem to have noticed them yet. As Magnus watches, though, the figure to the left - the skeletal figure, flickering in and out of visibility and crackling with red lightning - slowly, slowly turns, and stares directly at him. He's unmistakably a lich, but instead of the red robes Magnus is used to, or even the traditional necromancer's black, he seems to be wearing an extremely ugly neon tracksuit.
The woman standing beside him, in the day-glo suit and enormous earrings, also turns in their direction, and Magnus stumbles backwards. She's got to be the female lich Lup had mentioned, the one who still had her body. There's just something about her eyes -
The girl standing between the two neon horrors half-turns, her breath catching in her throat, her eyes wide and frightened. That's all Magnus needs to see. He pulls his axe free, and, ignoring Lup's shout of "Magnus, wait -", rushes in.
The frightened girl, the one Magnus had pegged as a helpless captive, throws up both hands. And then she throws a fireball the size of a basketball down the hallway at Magnus' head.
...
"I'm gonna need you boys to roll initiative."
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onlinemarketinghelp · 5 years
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Maybe She’s Born With It, Maybe It’s Entrepreneurship. https://ift.tt/307It0V
To be an entrepreneur is to be different. Ask any successful entrepreneur and they’ll tell you that they feel it every day. Entrepreneurs don’t want the same things everyone else does. The idea of a stable 9-5 office job? Just the thought would send a shiver down their spine. 
Instead, entrepreneurs are driven by a passion to do something new, to push the boundaries of what’s possible. But often, entrepreneurs have trouble sticking to the rules. They might have struggled at school, forced to spend hours listening to teachers drone on about subjects they have no interest in.
In fact, some of the most successful entrepreneurs never made it through college. Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and Travis Kalanick of Uber were all college dropouts. Increasingly, high schoolers are choosing to skip university altogether, feeling that the education system hasn’t kept up with the pace in which new technologies and industries are emerging. 
Larry Summers, the economist and former president of Harvard University agrees, “Not enough people are innovating enough in higher education. General Electric looks nothing like it looked in 1975. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or Stanford look a lot like they looked in 1975.” 
Add the explosion of student debt, and the fact that almost half of millennial graduates feel that their degree was “very or somewhat unimportant” to their current job. It’s no surprise then that so many young people are questioning the path they just assumed they’d be traveling down. 
Emma Reid is part of that new generation. She’s one of many young entrepreneurs who are carving out their own path, outside of the expected school-to-university track.
I called her up to hear more about her story. She takes us back to her beginnings as an 11-year-old entrepreneur, hustling to make $100. Then she takes us through the journey to building a $500,000 ecommerce business that she later walked away from. Through honesty and vulnerability of the realities of what it takes to succeed, Emma shares her experience as an entrepreneur. 
Emma Reid the Entrepreneur
When I first came across Emma on Instagram, I could tell she was different. The 22-year-old Australian has built a following around her ecommerce advice and mentoring services. Through it, she’s committed to sharing the reality of life as an entrepreneur, without the smoke and mirrors. 
The world of ecommerce gurus is crowded, but Emma stands out. In a sea of gurus posing next to lamborghinis, Emma proudly displays her own – a blue 2004 Toyota Camry with sun faded paint. “Cars are not assets,” she declares. “That’s why I don’t need a fancy one.”
She doesn’t need to try to come across as the biggest, baddest ecom hustler. For Emma, entrepreneurship is natural. 
School on the other hand? She hated it. 
“It just didn’t interest me,” she says. “I wasn’t learning at my own pace, and I wasn’t learning things that I was really passionate about learning. But when I was learning online stuff, it just really excited me and I’d get obsessed. I could never do that with school.”
So at age 16, she decided she would skip university and devote herself to a different path. After all, she’d already found her passion online. Choosing not to go to university, Emma says, “opened up some doors for me and opened up my mind to other avenues. I realized that you can make money doing other things. And you don’t have to go and get like that piece of paper.”
Instead she credits much of her success to to video games, and the fact that she’s been at this entrepreneurship thing for a while now. 
Beginnings of Entrepreneurship
At 11 years old, Emma started her first online business. Flashback to the pre-Facebook days, and Emma was spending all her time on the social networking game Habbo Hotel. The site allows you to create a virtual character, build your own hotel, and furnish it with little pixelated furniture. To build the lushest pixel-hotel, you’d need to have enough Habbo credits, an in-game currency that could be purchased with real-world dollars. 
Sensing an opportunity, Emma found a loophole that allowed her to spend her pocket money on Habbo credit gift cards, buy in-game furniture, and then flip it when prices went up. Then she could then sell onto other players for cold hard cash. Each transaction, she’d make a small margin. 
“I made about 100 bucks doing that, which was pretty fun at 11,” she says. 
An avid gamer, Emma believes that video games are ideal breeding grounds for entrepreneurs.  “I’ve met a few people that were really into video games that are entrepreneurs,” she says. “Often they’re successful because they’re used to leveling up, gaining experience, and the grind. Also when you’re young and you’re involved in online marketplaces with in-game currency, I think that can give you a different relationship with money.”
At 16 came her next business idea. Over the previous few years, she’d been spending her time building up followers on her Tumblr blog, and had amassed over 100,000. She installed advertising on her page, and as traffic grew, so did her revenue. She’d heard of affiliate marketing, and realized she could use the traffic on her blog to generate money through affiliate links. Soon, she was making thousands of dollars a month.
What she didn’t realize is this was a big no-no in Tumblrs books. She’d violated their terms of service. In one swift moment, all 100,000 of her Tumblr followers were gone. Ouch. 
She immediately realized how vulnerable she’d been by having her whole audience contained on someone else’s platform. It meant she had to play by their rules, and in the end, they had all the power. 
“I learned a lesson that you have to control the traffic. Otherwise if you’re just on someone else’s platform, then they can shut you down.”  
She stored the event away in her mind, another business lesson learned. 
It was some time in 2016 when Emma first heard about dropshipping. She’d come across a post on a forum detailing the process of running an ecommerce business without holding inventory. 
Her entrepreneurship senses tingled.
“I spent probably 10 hours reading the entire thread,” she says. “Then I chucked up a store on WordPress on my new fitness blog, and got a sale that first day.”
Her first product? Bracelets with fitness quotes attached, a clever product match for her blog filled with stretching routines and fitness advice.  
She was about six months in and her business was growing, to the point she was processing hundreds of orders a day. But then things came apart. Customers began to email her, asking where their products were. They hadn’t received them. She didn’t know what was happening, but reached out to her supplier that was handling the deliveries. “I had around 300 orders, and then the supplier didn’t fulfil any of them,” she says, sighing.
The situation quickly descended into a nightmare, as more customers complained that their order never turned up. “I had to process all these refunds. No other suppliers had it, and I just didn’t know what to do. It was too late.”
Pro Tip: Having a great supplier makes all the difference to your success. Check out our guide to finding the best dropshipping suppliers. 
The Rise and Fall of the $500,000 Store
Then in May 2018, Emma decided to try dropshipping again. This time, she built her store with Shopify and used Oberlo to connect her store to suppliers’ products. 
She began scouring Instagram for potential audiences to sell to. She already knew she wanted to focus on selling jewelry (more on her product strategy coming up), but she needed to find an audience to target. On Instagram she came across a niche community of animal lovers, and began interacting with them. 
She’d spend all day and into the night working on the animal jewelry store. But it didn’t feel like work. The hours would happily melt away, as she entered a state of flow. 
“I was working pretty much 100 hours a week. I was obsessed with it, and just testing everything and scaling.”
Her store began to pick up sales. Slowly, slowly, then all at once. 
By early December, the holiday season was in full force and shoppers were purchasing more than ever before. 
“Everyone was buying for Christmas, so I scaled up my ads,” she says. “I was spending over $5,000 a day.” 
As demand for her products skyrocketed, her supplier began to fall behind. 
“Everything was going crazy but my supplier was taking a while to send because they didn’t have enough stock to keep up,” she says. “I was trying to send to fulfilment centers at that stage, but I started a bit too late. The stock wasn’t arriving in the US fast enough.”
Customers were eagerly waiting on Christmas presents, but they weren’t arriving in time. 
“I had to refund a lot of people, do a lot of customer service,” she says. “That was really bogging me down.” 
Her store had made over $500,000 in revenue, but after spending all of her free time processing refunds and dealing with angry customers, she was burned out. History had repeated itself from her first store, but this time it was at a much bigger scale. 
“I actually quit the store because I didn’t hire out, and I didn’t put systems in place.”
“I wanted to do it all myself because it was so fun for me. But eventually problems happen and you’re so focused on fixing your problems that you can’t hire out once it’s too late.”
So she turned off her ads, shut down her store, and stepped away. “I decided let’s just leave it there, try to recover a little bit and plan what’s next.”
Learning to Master Her Mindset
From the outside, Emma’s business looked like a success. After all, she’d made over $500,000 in revenue in less than a year. 
But it left her feeling exhausted and altogether defeated. She needed some time away.
“I picked a few hobbies and read a lot of books and reflected and kind of figured out where I was gonna go next with this,” she says.
And as she read books like Can’t Hurt Me by David Goggins and How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big by Scott Adams, she began to see how she was holding herself back. 
“I realized that I was doing way too much myself, and that I needed to actually connect with people and work on myself,” she says. “I realized I needed to build up the foundations, build some confidence to actually go on camera, or go to events and talk to people or hire people.”
Ever since she began her entrepreneurship journey selling Habbo Hotel game credits, she’d been doing it alone.
“Now I’m starting to see that you definitely need to be in that environment where you’re around more people and brainstorming, throwing stuff at each other and improving on ideas,” she says.  “That’s how you can really grow.”
So in mid 2019, in an attempt to push herself outside of her comfort zone and meet more entrepreneurs, she started publishing videos on YouTube and Instagram. She’s started a new store too, and has made over $30,000 in revenue so far. In her videos she proudly shares her successes, but more importantly, her failures. 
“Showing your flaws and failures alongside your success is so important,” she says. 
With a change in her mindset and her burgeoning new store, Emma has set her sights on something bigger than she ever imagined before. When I ask her where she’ll be in five years, she answers confidently, “I’ll be starting a multi-million dollar white-label brand.”
I can’t help but believe she’ll do it. 
Unpacking the Four Secrets to Emma’s Success
1. Jewelry is a Winning Product
Since her first dip into ecommerce, Emma has stuck by one product type – jewelry. “It’s lightweight and small and you can price it higher,” she says. The weight of the product matters too, because you’ll be able to score free or very cheap shipping from your supplier. That means you can pass those savings onto your customers, making a more attractive offering. 
But more importantly, jewelry isn’t just jewelry. “There’s lots of different niches that you can relate jewelry to,” Emma says. “So you can sell fitness jewelry to people who are really passionate about fitness, or animal jewelry to people who are really passionate about their favorite animal.”
Check out some jewelry product ideas you could target to animal lovers:
2. Look for Niche Communities
One of the best ways to set yourself up for success is to look for an audience that is deeply passionate about the niche you’re thinking of targeting. You might choose dogs, babies, fishing, or beauty. These are all things that people will gladly spend their time and money on. 
To find these audiences, Emma first turns to Instagram. “I do a lot of research on Instagram using hashtags, you can find these small little niche communities on there,” she says.
Since you know yourself best, it can be useful to consider yourself as the ideal target customer, and to interrogate your own likes. 
“It also helps to look at your own hobbies, and what kind of audience you’re in. Ask yourself what you’d be interested in buying. You could also consider your friends, what their hobbies are and what they’d be interested in buying. Actually show them a product and ask them what they think about it,” says Emma.
3. Try a 1+ Product Store
As a rule, Emma says, “I just don’t really believe in general stores.” Instead, she’s found success through setting up 1+ product stores. That is, creating a store where all your marketing focuses on one product, but within the store you also offer complementary products that you can use to upsell. You might sell different colour or design variants of the same product, or other products within the same niche. 
In the end, you’re targeting the same audience with all your products, but offering them the chance to toss a few other products they’ll like in their basket before checking out. 
“When you can really focus on one product and one audience then you can really dive deep into that and figure out exactly how to promote to them and create a brand around that,” says Emma. “But if you’re spreading yourself so thin on lots of different products, then you’re not going to go that deep and really make it work.”
4. Try Free Traffic Methods
Especially when you’re in the early stages of building your business and trying to test your products on different audiences, it pays to think about free traffic methods first. But as Emma warns, with free traffic strategies what you save in money you’ll pay for in your time. 
“It takes a lot of time and energy, but anything free usually does.” she says. “But if you have a really limited budget, or are super new in the ecommerce space, then I highly recommend going this route.”
Emma shared her two most successful free traffic tactics. 
Instagram interaction and comments: “I tried to figure out who my ideal customer was, and what hashtags would they be posting in, then I commented a lot on the pictures. In the early days, I was being pretty spammy by following everyone I could, and not leaving valuable comments. It wasn’t until I changed my approach that it started to get results. I began interacting like a real human and actually having conversations with people. I was building a community, not just an Instagram page. I would try to do 100 comments a day. Try to get to know your audience. Build up some sales, some pixel data, and some profit to use for ads later.”
Ambassador programs: “After commenting so much, people started to naturally reach out and wanted to be ambassadors for the products, so I made an ambassador program. I didn’t send out free product but the ambassadors get a 40 percent off lifetime discount, as well as 20 percent commission when someone buys through their 20 percent off code. This code is personalized, like NAME20. The real kicker is, I made a lot of initial sales from the ambassadors buying the product themselves. Since they got 40 percent off and wanted the product in their hands to create better content. And the more ambassadors you have posting about you, the more of their friends start asking to join. Then it snowballs.”
Want to Learn More?
The One Product Store: This Entrepreneur’s Simple Formula for Success
10 Unique Dropshipping Products to Sell in 2019
The $0 Ad Budget: How They Grew Their Business Without a Single Advertisement
Dropshipping Niches That Are Steady, Not Trendy
The post Maybe She’s Born With It, Maybe It’s Entrepreneurship. appeared first on Oberlo.
from Oberlo
To be an entrepreneur is to be different. Ask any successful entrepreneur and they’ll tell you that they feel it every day. Entrepreneurs don’t want the same things everyone else does. The idea of a stable 9-5 office job? Just the thought would send a shiver down their spine. 
Instead, entrepreneurs are driven by a passion to do something new, to push the boundaries of what’s possible. But often, entrepreneurs have trouble sticking to the rules. They might have struggled at school, forced to spend hours listening to teachers drone on about subjects they have no interest in.
In fact, some of the most successful entrepreneurs never made it through college. Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and Travis Kalanick of Uber were all college dropouts. Increasingly, high schoolers are choosing to skip university altogether, feeling that the education system hasn’t kept up with the pace in which new technologies and industries are emerging. 
Larry Summers, the economist and former president of Harvard University agrees, “Not enough people are innovating enough in higher education. General Electric looks nothing like it looked in 1975. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or Stanford look a lot like they looked in 1975.” 
Add the explosion of student debt, and the fact that almost half of millennial graduates feel that their degree was “very or somewhat unimportant” to their current job. It’s no surprise then that so many young people are questioning the path they just assumed they’d be traveling down. 
Emma Reid is part of that new generation. She’s one of many young entrepreneurs who are carving out their own path, outside of the expected school-to-university track.
I called her up to hear more about her story. She takes us back to her beginnings as an 11-year-old entrepreneur, hustling to make $100. Then she takes us through the journey to building a $500,000 ecommerce business that she later walked away from. Through honesty and vulnerability of the realities of what it takes to succeed, Emma shares her experience as an entrepreneur. 
Emma Reid the Entrepreneur
When I first came across Emma on Instagram, I could tell she was different. The 22-year-old Australian has built a following around her ecommerce advice and mentoring services. Through it, she’s committed to sharing the reality of life as an entrepreneur, without the smoke and mirrors. 
The world of ecommerce gurus is crowded, but Emma stands out. In a sea of gurus posing next to lamborghinis, Emma proudly displays her own – a blue 2004 Toyota Camry with sun faded paint. “Cars are not assets,” she declares. “That’s why I don’t need a fancy one.”
She doesn’t need to try to come across as the biggest, baddest ecom hustler. For Emma, entrepreneurship is natural. 
School on the other hand? She hated it. 
“It just didn’t interest me,” she says. “I wasn’t learning at my own pace, and I wasn’t learning things that I was really passionate about learning. But when I was learning online stuff, it just really excited me and I’d get obsessed. I could never do that with school.”
So at age 16, she decided she would skip university and devote herself to a different path. After all, she’d already found her passion online. Choosing not to go to university, Emma says, “opened up some doors for me and opened up my mind to other avenues. I realized that you can make money doing other things. And you don’t have to go and get like that piece of paper.”
Instead she credits much of her success to to video games, and the fact that she’s been at this entrepreneurship thing for a while now. 
Beginnings of Entrepreneurship
At 11 years old, Emma started her first online business. Flashback to the pre-Facebook days, and Emma was spending all her time on the social networking game Habbo Hotel. The site allows you to create a virtual character, build your own hotel, and furnish it with little pixelated furniture. To build the lushest pixel-hotel, you’d need to have enough Habbo credits, an in-game currency that could be purchased with real-world dollars. 
Sensing an opportunity, Emma found a loophole that allowed her to spend her pocket money on Habbo credit gift cards, buy in-game furniture, and then flip it when prices went up. Then she could then sell onto other players for cold hard cash. Each transaction, she’d make a small margin. 
“I made about 100 bucks doing that, which was pretty fun at 11,” she says. 
An avid gamer, Emma believes that video games are ideal breeding grounds for entrepreneurs.  “I’ve met a few people that were really into video games that are entrepreneurs,” she says. “Often they’re successful because they’re used to leveling up, gaining experience, and the grind. Also when you’re young and you’re involved in online marketplaces with in-game currency, I think that can give you a different relationship with money.”
At 16 came her next business idea. Over the previous few years, she’d been spending her time building up followers on her Tumblr blog, and had amassed over 100,000. She installed advertising on her page, and as traffic grew, so did her revenue. She’d heard of affiliate marketing, and realized she could use the traffic on her blog to generate money through affiliate links. Soon, she was making thousands of dollars a month.
What she didn’t realize is this was a big no-no in Tumblrs books. She’d violated their terms of service. In one swift moment, all 100,000 of her Tumblr followers were gone. Ouch. 
She immediately realized how vulnerable she’d been by having her whole audience contained on someone else’s platform. It meant she had to play by their rules, and in the end, they had all the power. 
“I learned a lesson that you have to control the traffic. Otherwise if you’re just on someone else’s platform, then they can shut you down.”  
She stored the event away in her mind, another business lesson learned. 
It was some time in 2016 when Emma first heard about dropshipping. She’d come across a post on a forum detailing the process of running an ecommerce business without holding inventory. 
Her entrepreneurship senses tingled.
“I spent probably 10 hours reading the entire thread,” she says. “Then I chucked up a store on WordPress on my new fitness blog, and got a sale that first day.”
Her first product? Bracelets with fitness quotes attached, a clever product match for her blog filled with stretching routines and fitness advice.  
She was about six months in and her business was growing, to the point she was processing hundreds of orders a day. But then things came apart. Customers began to email her, asking where their products were. They hadn’t received them. She didn’t know what was happening, but reached out to her supplier that was handling the deliveries. “I had around 300 orders, and then the supplier didn’t fulfil any of them,” she says, sighing.
The situation quickly descended into a nightmare, as more customers complained that their order never turned up. “I had to process all these refunds. No other suppliers had it, and I just didn’t know what to do. It was too late.”
Pro Tip: Having a great supplier makes all the difference to your success. Check out our guide to finding the best dropshipping suppliers. 
The Rise and Fall of the $500,000 Store
Then in May 2018, Emma decided to try dropshipping again. This time, she built her store with Shopify and used Oberlo to connect her store to suppliers’ products. 
She began scouring Instagram for potential audiences to sell to. She already knew she wanted to focus on selling jewelry (more on her product strategy coming up), but she needed to find an audience to target. On Instagram she came across a niche community of animal lovers, and began interacting with them. 
She’d spend all day and into the night working on the animal jewelry store. But it didn’t feel like work. The hours would happily melt away, as she entered a state of flow. 
“I was working pretty much 100 hours a week. I was obsessed with it, and just testing everything and scaling.”
Her store began to pick up sales. Slowly, slowly, then all at once. 
By early December, the holiday season was in full force and shoppers were purchasing more than ever before. 
“Everyone was buying for Christmas, so I scaled up my ads,” she says. “I was spending over $5,000 a day.” 
As demand for her products skyrocketed, her supplier began to fall behind. 
“Everything was going crazy but my supplier was taking a while to send because they didn’t have enough stock to keep up,” she says. “I was trying to send to fulfilment centers at that stage, but I started a bit too late. The stock wasn’t arriving in the US fast enough.”
Customers were eagerly waiting on Christmas presents, but they weren’t arriving in time. 
“I had to refund a lot of people, do a lot of customer service,” she says. “That was really bogging me down.” 
Her store had made over $500,000 in revenue, but after spending all of her free time processing refunds and dealing with angry customers, she was burned out. History had repeated itself from her first store, but this time it was at a much bigger scale. 
“I actually quit the store because I didn’t hire out, and I didn’t put systems in place.”
“I wanted to do it all myself because it was so fun for me. But eventually problems happen and you’re so focused on fixing your problems that you can’t hire out once it’s too late.”
So she turned off her ads, shut down her store, and stepped away. “I decided let’s just leave it there, try to recover a little bit and plan what’s next.”
Learning to Master Her Mindset
From the outside, Emma’s business looked like a success. After all, she’d made over $500,000 in revenue in less than a year. 
But it left her feeling exhausted and altogether defeated. She needed some time away.
“I picked a few hobbies and read a lot of books and reflected and kind of figured out where I was gonna go next with this,” she says.
And as she read books like Can’t Hurt Me by David Goggins and How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big by Scott Adams, she began to see how she was holding herself back. 
“I realized that I was doing way too much myself, and that I needed to actually connect with people and work on myself,” she says. “I realized I needed to build up the foundations, build some confidence to actually go on camera, or go to events and talk to people or hire people.”
Ever since she began her entrepreneurship journey selling Habbo Hotel game credits, she’d been doing it alone.
“Now I’m starting to see that you definitely need to be in that environment where you’re around more people and brainstorming, throwing stuff at each other and improving on ideas,” she says.  “That’s how you can really grow.”
So in mid 2019, in an attempt to push herself outside of her comfort zone and meet more entrepreneurs, she started publishing videos on YouTube and Instagram. She’s started a new store too, and has made over $30,000 in revenue so far. In her videos she proudly shares her successes, but more importantly, her failures. 
“Showing your flaws and failures alongside your success is so important,” she says. 
With a change in her mindset and her burgeoning new store, Emma has set her sights on something bigger than she ever imagined before. When I ask her where she’ll be in five years, she answers confidently, “I’ll be starting a multi-million dollar white-label brand.”
I can’t help but believe she’ll do it. 
Unpacking the Four Secrets to Emma’s Success
1. Jewelry is a Winning Product
Since her first dip into ecommerce, Emma has stuck by one product type – jewelry. “It’s lightweight and small and you can price it higher,” she says. The weight of the product matters too, because you’ll be able to score free or very cheap shipping from your supplier. That means you can pass those savings onto your customers, making a more attractive offering. 
But more importantly, jewelry isn’t just jewelry. “There’s lots of different niches that you can relate jewelry to,” Emma says. “So you can sell fitness jewelry to people who are really passionate about fitness, or animal jewelry to people who are really passionate about their favorite animal.”
Check out some jewelry product ideas you could target to animal lovers:
2. Look for Niche Communities
One of the best ways to set yourself up for success is to look for an audience that is deeply passionate about the niche you’re thinking of targeting. You might choose dogs, babies, fishing, or beauty. These are all things that people will gladly spend their time and money on. 
To find these audiences, Emma first turns to Instagram. “I do a lot of research on Instagram using hashtags, you can find these small little niche communities on there,” she says.
Since you know yourself best, it can be useful to consider yourself as the ideal target customer, and to interrogate your own likes. 
“It also helps to look at your own hobbies, and what kind of audience you’re in. Ask yourself what you’d be interested in buying. You could also consider your friends, what their hobbies are and what they’d be interested in buying. Actually show them a product and ask them what they think about it,” says Emma.
3. Try a 1+ Product Store
As a rule, Emma says, “I just don’t really believe in general stores.” Instead, she’s found success through setting up 1+ product stores. That is, creating a store where all your marketing focuses on one product, but within the store you also offer complementary products that you can use to upsell. You might sell different colour or design variants of the same product, or other products within the same niche. 
In the end, you’re targeting the same audience with all your products, but offering them the chance to toss a few other products they’ll like in their basket before checking out. 
“When you can really focus on one product and one audience then you can really dive deep into that and figure out exactly how to promote to them and create a brand around that,” says Emma. “But if you’re spreading yourself so thin on lots of different products, then you’re not going to go that deep and really make it work.”
4. Try Free Traffic Methods
Especially when you’re in the early stages of building your business and trying to test your products on different audiences, it pays to think about free traffic methods first. But as Emma warns, with free traffic strategies what you save in money you’ll pay for in your time. 
“It takes a lot of time and energy, but anything free usually does.” she says. “But if you have a really limited budget, or are super new in the ecommerce space, then I highly recommend going this route.”
Emma shared her two most successful free traffic tactics. 
Instagram interaction and comments: “I tried to figure out who my ideal customer was, and what hashtags would they be posting in, then I commented a lot on the pictures. In the early days, I was being pretty spammy by following everyone I could, and not leaving valuable comments. It wasn’t until I changed my approach that it started to get results. I began interacting like a real human and actually having conversations with people. I was building a community, not just an Instagram page. I would try to do 100 comments a day. Try to get to know your audience. Build up some sales, some pixel data, and some profit to use for ads later.”
Ambassador programs: “After commenting so much, people started to naturally reach out and wanted to be ambassadors for the products, so I made an ambassador program. I didn’t send out free product but the ambassadors get a 40 percent off lifetime discount, as well as 20 percent commission when someone buys through their 20 percent off code. This code is personalized, like NAME20. The real kicker is, I made a lot of initial sales from the ambassadors buying the product themselves. Since they got 40 percent off and wanted the product in their hands to create better content. And the more ambassadors you have posting about you, the more of their friends start asking to join. Then it snowballs.”
Want to Learn More?
The One Product Store: This Entrepreneur’s Simple Formula for Success
10 Unique Dropshipping Products to Sell in 2019
The $0 Ad Budget: How They Grew Their Business Without a Single Advertisement
Dropshipping Niches That Are Steady, Not Trendy
The post Maybe She’s Born With It, Maybe It’s Entrepreneurship. appeared first on Oberlo.
https://ift.tt/2IrnGKX September 18, 2019 at 12:13PM https://ift.tt/30sdFmK
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marypsue · 6 years
Text
Imbalance, 10 / ?
Previous chapters can be found on AO3 under MaryPSue!
Liliana can't breathe.
She feels pretty stupid about it, actually. She knew there was probably some kind of evil wossname from beyond their plane of existence on the loose, using the circle she herself had broken to get in and eat the universe. She smelled smoke as soon as she set foot in Storm's apartment - hell, she'd taken the batteries out of his smoke detector when it had started going off - but saw no sign of candles or incense or anything that might be causing it. And now she's choking to death on evil smoke from somewhere beyond her plane of existence. Who could possibly have seen this coming.
Well, serves her right. She just hopes the others don't find out how she got killed, she'll die of embarrassment.
"It's all right," Storm says, somewhere in the whispering haze, his voice friendly and comforting, smooth and even and easy to listen to. For the first time, Liliana understands why other people waste their time watching Storm play video games. "You never really had a chance. None of us did."
"Don't...patronise me...you little asshole," Liliana coughs out. She knows as soon as she does that she's made her fatal mistake. Should have saved her breath instead of trying to be a smartass one last time. Her lungs burn, her throat is on fire, her vision blurry either from the tears stinging her eyes or the clouds of billowing, soft grey smoke tracing hypnotic swirls through the air. Her knees, then her shoulder, smart as she hits the ground, but even that's muted, muffled somehow by the smoke.
"It's useless trying," Storm says, sympathetically. "I understand now. No matter how hard you fight, no matter how many battles you win, there's always something bigger and worse waiting in the wings. You can fight and fight your whole life, and any ground you might gain will just be taken back after your death. It means nothing." His smile is bitter and aching. "All you're doing is wearing yourself out, trying to fight the inevitable. You can rest. It'll all be over soon."
Liliana sucks in one final breath, preparing to curse Storm out, but all she gets is a lungful of bitter smoke. Distantly, she thinks she hears Storm say something about endings or silence or some edgelord crap, but it's impossible to make out over the rising whispers. The edges of her vision are darkening, tunneling away into pinpricks of grey as the smoke steals her oxygen. Her last, fleeting thought is to hope somebody will figure out something happened to her and check up on Mavis and Mookie before they both get so hungry they try to eat each other.
And then there is light.
...
The Plane of Thought is home to all kinds of fantastic inventions. Its inhabitants have shaped metal and lightning around ideas that, on other planes, would have been accomplished with advanced spellwork.
And they've managed to come up with things that the other planes would never dream of. Stones of Farspeech are a complicated enchantment capable of incredible communication across continents. But no one, yet, has thought to connect them all together so that the same messages can reach everyone, all over the world, at nearly the speed of light. And no one, yet, has engineered a twenty-four-hour news cycle to make sure those messages get hammered, repeatedly, into every mind around the world. Over, and over, and over again.
"...new report indicates that, without dramatic policy and industry changes, global temperatures will rise enough to render the Earth uninhabitable within the next thirty years..."
"...despite widespread protest, the unpopular piece of legislation was passed on Friday. Legal challenges are expected..."
"... natural disasters compounded by extreme weather..."
"...allegations of sexual misconduct dating back to the early nineteen-seventies..."
"...will walk free..."
"...unable to afford the necessities of life..."
"...human rights violations..."
"...hate crime rising..."
"...unexpected cancellation of hit series Ray Donovan..."
"...corruption..."
"...collapse..."
"...devastation..."
"...despair..."
...
"Yes," the man at the door deadpans. "This is a bad time."
"Oh," Rowan says. "Sucks to suck, huh?"
"Yeah," the man at the door says, and shuts it in Rowan's face.
Rowan stares at the door. The door does not stare back at Rowan, because it's an inanimate object. That should mean it can't laugh at him, either, and yet, somehow, that's exactly what it seems to be doing. 
From somewhere behind the impossibly smug door, Rowan can hear another voice - familiar, but in the way the voice of a teacher you had in elementary school is familiar - complain, "What'd you do that for?"
"He can come back with a warrant," the guy who opened the door snaps, and then the conversation veers into Spanish that's a little more advanced than what Rowan vaguely remembers from eighth grade. 
Rowan stands on the doorstep for another moment or two, feeling the hot flush of embarrassment creeping up the back of his neck. The door does not reopen.
"Okay," Rowan mutters to himself, turning away from the door. He does not add, "Now what?". He's uncomfortably aware that no one else is going to answer that question for him. "Well, shit."
He starts down the walk, vaguely considering whether Liliana will be upset if he shows up early to pick her up. He doesn't like to admit it, but something about that Storm guy she hangs around with makes him indefinably but distinctly uncomfortable. Nothing personal, just...Rowan gets the strong impression that the guy's watched The Craft one time more than is strictly healthy.
Maybe Indigo's home. Maybe all that reading she - or he, or maybe they, Rowan hasn't checked in yet today - did on the D&D planar system will give him some clue. Rowan's still not sure if Gary Gygax was just plugged in to some fundamental truth of the universe, or if something about the Story and Song somehow made D&D-like shit real, but the end result is the same. Rowan's extensive knowledge of the Wiccan and neopagan traditions is less useful, practically, than some nerd with a 5e Monster Manual.
He has to admit, it does sting a little.
He's halfway down the walk when the door behind him swings open and a voice - familiar, but in the way that a celebrity's voice is familiar - calls, "Hey, do you really know anything about magic?"
Rowan turns. Joaquin Terrero waves one red-sparking hand at him.
“Sorry about that,” he says, looking at his own hand. “I can’t, uh, make it stop.”
"Well, shit," Rowan says.
...
"Hey, Griffin. Question."
"Shoot."
"Are we...are we going to get to...fight something, at some point?"
...
The alarm on Marial's implant cuts out abruptly as she and Dead Guy Gary reach the third floor. 
Gary gives her a hopeful look, but Marial shakes her head. "It'll keep going off. Every four hours." She's exhausted, and her left arm is starting to ache, her fingers numb and tingly. She keeps jumping at little noises, thinking it's either Barry or one of Gary's zombies, and she's shaking so badly that it takes her three tries to turn the handle on the door out of the stairwell. This is really too much excitement for one lifetime. 
...
"Yes, you are. In fact, you're going to get to fight something very, very soon."
...
Lup gives her scythe a sweeping stroke through the air. There's a noise like paper tearing, and a burst of stinging grey smoke billows out of the hole she's cut into the Astral Plane. It disperses quickly, but leaves a bitter smell lingering in its wake.
"Well, that's probably not a great sign," Lup mutters, under her breath, and then ducks through the opening in the air.
Taako turns to Magnus, but Magnus isn't there. Taako just sees the soles of his boots following Lup through the hole in the air. His voice drifts back through the planes. "Taako! Are you coming?"
"Let me just - let me ask you something. What part of 'Taako's good out here' keeps giving you all so much trouble?"
Magnus doesn't answer, just leans back through the hole in the air, grabs Taako by the collar, and yanks him through.
The hole in the air closes seamlessly behind them.
...
"Okay, but Griffin, how soon is 'very, very soon'?"
...
"What is all this commotion?" someone asks, pleasantly, as Marial slips out of the stairwell. "I thought we dealt with the fire alarm. I've lost two appointments already."
Marial mutters a curse under her breath. She’d really hoped the alarms would have cleared everybody out, but the professionally-(if garishly-)dressed woman with her dark hair in a sleek coil at the back of her neck leaning against the reception desk is standing between her and the cardiac clinic. And doesn't look like she's about to evacuate anytime soon.
On the other hand, Marial's a patient here, and she has a legitimate medical concern. And whoever this is doesn't seem like she wants to stop doing her job and leave until she can personally see flames licking out of the walls around her. Maybe Marial can use this to her advantage.
She takes a step forward, already working up a sheepish smile and a story about a mispulled fire alarm, and the woman standing by the reception desk turns to meet her eyes.
Marial stops in her tracks.
There's nothing immediately and obviously wrong with this picture, which makes it worse. Marial finds herself searching the woman's expression of detached, professional curiosity as it fades into concern, her carefully-applied makeup and enormous eighties Jem and the Holograms earrings, the hall around the reception desk, the friendly but confused smile from the guy behind it, for something to explain the sudden wave of sickening dread that crashes over her. Marial ends up studying the helpful sign listing directions to the different departments so that she doesn't have to meet the woman's kind grey eyes. She's never noticed before that psych and cardiac are on the same floor.
"Can I help you?" the woman asks, and the hall seems to bounce it back to Marial strangely, giving it a mocking, sarcastic tone.
"I - I don't think you can, actually," Marial stammers. She can feel the way Dead Guy Gary's gone tense beside her, prickling like a wall of static shock. She wants to ask him if he can tell what's got his back up, but something tells her that talking to thin air in front of this woman would be a bad idea. "I need the cardiac device clinic."
The woman smiles, broadly, stepping away from the reception desk and towards Marial. Marial takes another step backwards.
"I think what you need is a little dose of perspective," the woman says, still smiling, still friendly. That strange mocking echo in her voice seems to be growing stronger, picking up harmonics from somewhere. Marial takes a third step backwards and finds herself backed up against the stairwell door.
...
"Well, uh, right about - right about now, actually."
...
The Astral Plane is spooky.
Well, okay, so a place where dead people go to their eternal rest is always gonna be spooky, but the Astral Plane is spookier than necessary. The last time Magnus saw this place, it was through an enormous gemstone mirror, but it had seemed...peaceful. With the whispering ocean of souls, even a little bit...tropical? Of course, your umbrella and swim trunks would have to be black, but - yeah, he could imagine taking a beach vacation there. A very, very creepy beach vacation.
But this time, as he follows Lup across the dark, formless ground and waits as she chooses where to slice open another portal, Magnus can't imagine the pina colada that would make this palatable. It's just so quiet. The shifting sea seems to be still for once, and he doesn't think it's his imagination that the ethereal blue light it casts is getting dimmer and dimmer. If Magnus squints, he thinks he can make out a faint grey haze casting a pall over it and soaking up its light. He's willing to bet actual human currency that, up close, it smells strongly of smoke.
"Hey, uh, Lulu?" Taako asks, and though his voice is deliberately nonchalant, Magnus can hear the tightness in it. "You done something new with the place? Really working the, the old, 'abandon hope all ye who enter here' vibe."
There's a little frown creasing the space between Lup's eyebrows as she glances distractedly back at them.
"Look, I've been a reaper for less time than you've been dating one," she says. "But no. I don't think any of this is right."
Magnus rests a hand on the head of his axe as he looks around, just in case.
There's another burst of smoke that leaves them all coughing when Lup opens the portal to the Plane of Thought. It still dissipates quickly, but the smell seems to linger longer this time.
They're in a wide, airy, square hall, its walls painted a pale yellow, a huge plate-glass window overtop of a desk just beside them. There are printed signs labeling everything and offering directions down the hall, and all put together, it reminds Magnus of the Halls of Healing back in Neverwinter.
"This better not take too long," Taako complains. "I have an, uh, a guest appearance on, uh, uh, uh, Beat Bobby Mindflayer booked for tonight -"
"It's gonna have to wait," Lup says, warningly.
Magnus follows her line of sight. 
The three people standing by the heavy metal door don't seem to have noticed them yet. As Magnus watches, though, the figure to the left - the skeletal figure, flickering in and out of visibility and crackling with red lightning - slowly, slowly turns, and stares directly at him. He's unmistakably a lich, but instead of the red robes Magnus is used to, or even the traditional necromancer's black, he seems to be wearing an extremely ugly neon tracksuit.
The woman standing beside him, in the day-glo suit and enormous earrings, also turns in their direction, and Magnus stumbles backwards. She's got to be the female lich Lup had mentioned, the one who still had her body. There's just something about her eyes -
The girl standing between the two neon horrors half-turns, her breath catching in her throat, her eyes wide and frightened. That's all Magnus needs to see. He pulls his axe free, and, ignoring Lup's shout of "Magnus, wait -", rushes in.
The frightened girl, the one Magnus had pegged as a helpless captive, throws up both hands. And then she throws a fireball the size of a basketball down the hallway at Magnus' head.
...
"I'm gonna need you boys to roll initiative."
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