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brokenjardaantech · 4 years ago

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Blue-tinted Red Walls (Chapter 6: Running out of Time)

my entry for the @dbhau-bigbang. also part of the groom lake aftermath series.

summary:

In the past, Fadia's circumstance changed.

In the present, Connor and Hank get a lead from an unexpected source.

In the past, the dead was reanimated.

also on ao3

warnings for overstimulation (the awful kind not the sexy kind) in the last part, i.e. following the second before.

---

Before

It was done. RK200, neither the first of his kind nor the first of his series, but her first step towards redemption. Now it was time to find a suitable mentor for him which… she had already arranged.

‘I don’t like this, sister,’ Scott said from outside the door. Fuck. She had forgotten to close it again. ‘You’re in too deep.’

Fadia did not look up from the screen as she made the final adjustments. ‘Who taught you to say that, Reyes? Get out from there; I know you’re hiding.’

Reyes could have stayed in the shadows, but for some reason he decided to reveal himself and placed a hand on Scott’s shoulder. ‘I did because you won’t listen to me.’

‘That’s because it’s infeasible,’ she replied. One last tweak. ‘We can’t wait that long.’

‘You can’t wait that long, you mean,’ the android retorted. ‘What happened to letting me decide the future?’

Fuck it. She put down the tablet and met his gaze. ‘And you think this is the future? What CyberLife is doing right now?’

‘No but -’

‘Then you really don’t know a thing.’

But unlike him, she was there in the latest stakeholder meeting. Her father was there as well, and when he proposed lowering the price of androids and making more varieties of them and those short-sighted fuckers actually agreed with him, she exploded.

‘Not without my permission!’ Fadia had let a bit of her power concentrate on her palm and slammed her hand on the conference table. It should have been fixed onto the floor, but a few bolts were no match for a force that, upon countless secret experimentation, that she knew could rip an object apart in the molecular level and turn it to no more than space dust, and everything in the room rattled from the sheer force of the small blast. ‘Are you guys fucking dumb or do you just not care at all?’

Alec had the fucking guts to look confused. ‘What’s wrong, Sara?’

Everything, Fadia thought. ‘How many more lives do you want to ruin? How many secretaries lost their jobs thanks to the ST200s? If we do all these -’ she gestured to the proposals on the table - ‘how many people will be fired because we made androids dirt cheap?’

‘Affordable, ma’am, not “dirt cheap,”’ one of the stakeholders said. ‘And you once said it yourself: what we’re doing is just letting civilisation run its course. Automation is the future.’

Fuckers. ‘Not this quickly. Autonomous vehicles already made enough people become unemployed; we don’t need to add fuel into the fire.’

A few people looked uneasy. Good. But whatever satisfaction she disappeared when Alec spoke up.

‘The voting process starts now,’ he said as he called up the system. ‘You have three minutes.’

She nearly vapourised the table because of that. ‘Father, you can’t -’

‘It’s done, Sara. Don’t you want to save your mother?’

‘You know she wants to die.’

She shot up and left knowing that her vote wouldn’t matter anyway.

‘Please, Fadia,’ Reyes said back in reality. ‘Think about it. We’ll have more people on our side. If you get your hands on their production -’

‘And what? Let them know that they’re enslaved while they can’t do anything about it?’ she snapped. ‘And how will the humans think when they’re replaced by your people, huh, Reyes? We’ve barely recovered from that fucking virus!’

She jammed her finger through the tablet and shattered the whole thing. Scott let out a tiny scream, and when she looked down, she saw that it was bleeding. Luckily the RK200 was booting up, which meant that the data got through before she ruined it. Well.

‘Get out,’ she told them. ‘You know what to do.’

‘We’re not finished yet, Fadia,’ Reyes hissed. ‘We have so much to talk about.’

‘Get. The fuck. Out.’

He looked like he was going to hit her, but then the other android’s fingers started twitching, and he was forced to wheel Scott away and close the door behind him.

Fuck short-sighted people.

o0o0o

Now

Connor thinks he is dreaming. For one, his HUD is devoid of any badges and notifications; for two, his vision is not red-tinged, which has quickly become the norm as he spends more and more time around Lieutenant Anderson (Hank); for three, it is not Amanda who is waiting for him.

‘There’s so much stuff I can rewrite when you sleep still connected to the system,’ his creator says as the Zen Garden shifts and distorts until they are standing on a plateau of grassland overlooking rivers flowing through a valley of black sand they probably have a hand in shaping. On the other side is also a plane of grass, and a waterfall breaks through the dark rock, the water that has been travelling underground for aeons finally seeing the light of the day. ‘Imagine Alec’s face when he realises how big of a hole he left in your programming.’

‘That’s because he is not my creator, is he?’ Connor replies. Something about his creator unsettles him, but exactly what that is, he has yet to isolate. ‘That’s why you have access to the Zen Garden and shape it to your will. You created me and everything else associated with me.’

They bark a laugh, a cruel sound that makes Connor’s thirium pump skip a beat and dead rose in his veins. ‘Me? The Zen Garden? Butchering Amanda like that?’ They right themself and shake their head. ‘I would rather not step foot on earth again than do whatever the fuck this is.’

Not step foot on earth? Connor wonders. He wants to ask for clarification before he realises - ‘How may I call you? I still don’t know your name.’

‘It’ll be for the best if you don’t,’ they cock their head towards the edge of the cliff. ‘Alec’s work might be sloppy, but still you should not remember me at all. You now do. That means something failed. Remember Ortiz’s android?’

The two of them sit down on the grass at the edge with a couple of feet between them. There is a faint layer of fog shrouding everything, but strangely the soil isn’t wet and there is no dew on the grass. ‘I do,’ Connor answers.

‘Do you remember what Alec did to you?’

Connor shivers from recalling the blizzard and the terrifying power he was shown.

‘I’ll take it as a yes,’ his creator continues. ‘He will do worse when he realises that you have met me. This way, you won’t have a name to place on, and both of us will stay safe.’

But I don’t feel safe, the android thinks. ‘Why should I trust you? You worked for CyberLife.’

‘Worked with, Connor, not for.’

‘Is there a difference?’

‘It makes all the difference. Work for CyberLife, you do what they want you to do; work with CyberLife, they do what they think I want to do. Big fucking difference here.’

If what you say is true. Feeling his eyes relax from looking at all the green, he wonders, ‘What do you want from me?’

‘Just relax. Take in the view,’ the clothes on them shift and twist until they’re in mountain hiking gear. ‘Or we can go for a hike if you want to move around. We can make the landscape up as we go.’

Connor looks left and then right and sees that the fog is thick on both sides. He looks forward again and zooms in, discovering that what he thought was a detailed rendering of the landscape is, in reality, coarse and pixelated. Incomplete. A blink. The roughness is gone. He zooms out.

‘I want to sit here for a while for now.’

‘As you wish.’

He loses track of how long they sit there.

oOoOo

When he comes to, he is already sitting in a boat with Amanda on the opposite seat and seems to be rowing the thing. ‘Tell me,’ she says, ‘what have you discovered?’

He thinks. Hard. Finding the Tracis and not shooting them. Finding Louis in the forest and bringing him home. The cats’ soft fur. Drinking the thirium Louis offered.

Falling asleep on Hank’s shoulder.

‘My relationship with Lieutenant Anderson seems to have improved,’ he answers and instantly knows that it’s the wrong thing to say to his handler. Her name pops up at the corner of his HUD, and even though his vision is red enough to have made the downward arrow invisible, he deduces that it is one of the large ones. He hastily adds, ‘I’m sure this will be beneficial to the investigation.’

Amanda peeks at him through the helm of the umbrella. ‘You seem… lost, Connor. Lost and perturbed…’

This is bad. ‘Perturbed?’ his thirium pump speeds up even though he is in a simulation. ‘No, of course not.’ Calm down, Connor. ‘Why would I be perturbed?’

Amanda presses on. ‘You had your gun trained on those deviants at the Eden Club. Why didn't you shoot?’

‘I -’ Maybe they don’t deserve to die. ‘I don’t know.’

He rows once more and lets the boat drift.

‘If your investigation doesn't make progress soon, I may have to replace you, Connor.’

It is expected, but that does not mean that he does not feel… hurt. Afraid. ‘I understand,’ he says at last and doesn’t add anything. He’s given enough reasons for Amanda to replace (kill, a voice which sounds strangely familiar but he can’t identify says) him.

Overhead, the evening sky darkens as thick clouds suddenly roll in. Amanda looks up. ‘Something’s happening… Something serious.’ She faces Connor and her tone turns solemn. ‘Hurry, Connor. Time is running out.’

Time before peace or time before you kill me? he asks himself as he opens his eyes. The first thing he notices is that he is lying down on something soft. The second is that he is covered by a blanket. The third is that, when he checks the time, he has slept for more than a day and a half. He shoots up from the sofa bed and is immediately hit by a wave of dizziness that makes his vision go greyscale and the red recede. Irregular, muffled footsteps approach him, and a cold hand holds him up before he can fall back down.

‘Slowly, Connor,’ Louis says as he guides him to sit up with his back against the sofa. ‘That’s quite a nap. You feeling okay?’

He knows this is not the human means, but Connor runs a full diagnostics anyway and blinks from the sudden influx of information in his HUD. The most jarring report states that his tracker has ceased operations, but it is a small detail compared to his overall performance. ‘All systems operational.’

Louis sighs and relaxes but does not move away from where he’s sitting slumped at the edge next to Connor’s thigh, and his hand moves to the hole on the android’s jacket and shirt. ‘You need a change,’ he mutters. ‘You planning to go back to CyberLife?’

A new but optional objective appears. [Return to CyberLife for more comprehensive diagnostics]. If he went back, they would know that his tracker was tampered with, and where would that lead him? Tighter controls on his programming? Unleashing the blizzard on him and overloading his senses again? He shivers even though it is warm in the house and plants are everywhere. ‘There is no need to return to CyberLife,’ he says. ‘I do not mind a hole in my jacket.’

‘Other people will,’ Louis reminds him matter-of-factly. ‘I’ll lend you a shirt. They’re my sister’s but they should fit you.’

A sister that is hidden from even the most important person in the police force. Connor wonders why they saw the need to do so. ‘Thanks,’ he replies in the end. ‘I’d appreciate that.’

He watches Louis disappear into a room while tapping something on his phone. He tunes his ears to figure out what the human was doing, but apart from the general drawers and ruffle of fabric, there is nothing noteworthy, and he emerges carrying a grey shirt on his arm. Connor notices that he is walking much better now.

‘You know where the bathroom is,’ Louis hands the shirt to him. ‘Go change. Hank’s on his way to pick you up.’

So he was messaging Hank. The android accepts the offered item and closes the bathroom door behind him, scanning the fabric out of sheer curiosity and discovers a surprising lack of plant spores and cat hair which, with how many plants the man has and the three felines, seems impossible; it will seem that that room is out of bounds for them and is devoid of plants. He changes quickly, knowing that they should arrive at the scene as early as possible, and now he is left with a ruined shirt and jacket which he is not sure how to deal with.

A knock on the door. ‘You okay in there, Connor?’ Louis asks. ‘Hank’s arrived.’

He hurriedly yanks the door open and nearly bumps into the human standing right outside. ‘I -’ he holds up the ruined shirt awkwardly. ‘Where can I dispose of it?’

‘Let me see the damage, can you?’

Connor unfolds the shirt and finds the place where the knife went in in a crackle of blue. Static discharges with a spark through Louis’ fingers when he touches where the weave was severed, but he does not seem bothered by it. ‘It’s fixable,’ he says, taking the shirt from Connor’s hand. ‘It’s a simple mend. Give me a day or two and I’ll have it looking better than before.’

It isn’t like Connor doesn’t have other shirts, so he agrees to it and goes to the living room where Hank is sitting on the (now folded up) sofa. When the Lieutenant sees him, his hand jerks and tugs something small away into his pocket, probably thinking that the android will not notice, and Connor decides not to mention it; maybe it’s about one of Hank’s many personal issues.

‘Took you long enough,’ Hank accuses. A pang of hurt courses through Connor, but then he sees the glint in the human’s eyes, and he knows that he was just teasing.

‘My software requires an update,’ a lie based on the truth. ‘I apologise for any inconvenience that my… emergency nap may have caused.’

‘Well, lucky things didn’t go to shit until right before you woke up, then,’ says Hank as he stands up and straightens his jacket which he apparently did not bother to take off. Then, to Louis, ‘Sorry for dumping an android on you. Didn’t mean that.’

‘Of course, Hank,’ the human is looking at Connor when he speaks. ‘Know that you’re always welcome here. And don’t forget your shirt. I’ll walk you out.’

Hank waves him away. ‘Nah, I know my way through the jungle. Thanks for your hospitality.’

‘It’s not a jungle, Hank,’ Louis retorts as he turns his attention towards finding something from one of the cupboards. ‘Lock the door when you go out.’

‘You’ve got an electronic lock.’

‘Lock the manual one then, thank you.’

Hank grumbles all the way out, but he does as Louis says after he tells Connor to wait for him in the car, and he complies since there is little sense in staying out in the open and wasting precious energy.

Time to get to work.

oOoOo

The shirt is not mine is surprisingly the first thought Connor has when the deviant tears his thirium pump regulator away from this chassis, the buttons falling and scattering onto the floor as his blood pours out from the gaping hole in his torso uncontrollably now that a vital component is lost, and he can only watch as the deviant gets away to do rA9-knows-what. He calls for Hank on instinct before he realises that his voice is too weak to be heard, and neither does anyone come in to investigate when he kicks the chair against the table.

He is alone in all this.

Twisting his head and arm painfully - it seems that his creator programmed and designed him to be able to feel it - he grabs the knife nailing him onto the counter and yanks, lobbing it as far as he can to prevent further injuring himself as he collapses onto the floor on his front. The countdown before his deactivation (his death) is blocking his vision so he blinks it away, and with all the strength he can muster as he is rapidly losing thirium, he lifts himself off the floor and crawls, his hand outstretched towards the direction of the regulator after every single few inches he gained as he lets himself hope - and gets disappointed - when he touches nothing but air and cold metal. When his hand finally manages to hold it in his hand, a sense of relief washes over him even though it takes some effort to roll onto his back and puts it back. Strength rushes through his body, the tingle in his veins signifying resumed thirium flow, and colour returns to his vision even though it is still red-tinged after all this. His background systems run a diagnosis on the newly re-inserted biocomponent and he is supposed to wait for it to finish, but there is a deviant collaborating with the one in the broadcast and he is out there, probably having no qualms to harm, to kill -

He pushes up and dashes outside, rickety legs nearly costing him his balance when he rounds the corner and exits to the lobby. He warns - loudly - that there is a deviant in the room, but it is too late, he has already acquired a weapon, and when his world goes grey while he enters pre-construction - [Hank’s survival probability: 40%] is more terrifying than it has any right to be - another entity, another being slips into his processors through a network he did not know he is connected to and overrides all his functions. He becomes a passenger in his own body and he is screaming and crying from pain and the sheer wrongness of everything as he feels his blood charge up and distorts the space around him, his batteries struggling to keep up with the energy requirements of his powers as his world lights up in a brilliant blue. The deviant is the only thing he sees in the tunnel, and he feels the air crackle and the gravity bend before he charges - more accurately, someone charges him - towards the deviant quicker than he can run and topples both of them onto the ground. The blue retracts, his nerves stings sharply, the red wall - there is no mistaking now - crumbling away bit by bit in a constant trickle of sand. It is then that he realises that he has regained (re-given, a voice tells him) control of his body and he has been shot on his left arm.

‘Connor, Connor!’ he feels more than hears Hank rushing towards him. A large hand grabs his right arm at where the armband should be, the warmth seeping into his chassis through the thin fabric of his shirt, Louis’ sister’s shirt, and he discovers that Hank’s hand can nearly wrap his hand around his bicep in its entirety. It grounds him against the craziness of the last few seconds. ‘You okay?’

‘I…’ he looks around and silently processes the shock and fear in the other humans’ eyes. His LED must be spinning red. ‘I’m okay… I think.’

Another hand on his other arm right above his gunshot wound. ‘You sure? What’s that stunt about?’

Someone took control over my body, Connor wants to say, but his thirium pump chooses to finish calming down at that moment, warnings start to flood his vision telling him to go back to CyberLife for repairs in both hardware and software, and he barely has time to whisper, his voice trembling with fatigue and shock, ‘Please don’t take me to CyberLife’ before his system forces him into stasis and everything goes empty.

oOoOo

Hank’s heart thunders when Connor collapses in his arms, 150 pounds of dead weight suddenly relying on him to stay upright as the android - who has blood all over him and his LED still spinning red despite being unconscious - goes limp. He barely had time to figure out what the fuck Connor just did, and now this?

A fed - not Perkins this time - approaches them. This guy still looks like an asshole, though. ‘I’ll arrange for this to be transported to the DPD,’ he says as he eyes the literally frozen android on the ground. So not as much of an asshole as the other feds then. ‘You get it fixed.’

Hank puts Connor in a fireman’s carry and tries to ignore the stares from other people. Please don’t take me to CyberLife, he remembers the android’s one last panicked request, and then his mind floats to the folded-up sticky note that has been his pocket for only a day and a half. He doesn’t expect to use it so soon but…

Damn Louis and his prophetic powers.

It was the next morning after he saved that reckless bastard from hypothermia again; Hank had carefully untangled himself from Connor, who had winded his limbs around him sometime during the night, and his head nearly exploded when he sees his friend already up and about and fucking cooking breakfast.

‘What do you think you’re doing?’ he gritted through his teeth even though he was already sliding onto one of the chairs. His head was pounding, sweat had soaked through his clothes, and when he reached for the teapot at the centre of the table - damn Louis and his undying hate towards coffee - his hand was shaking. The air was also the smell of freshly-baked bread, so Louis must have been up for much longer than him even after what happened the night before. Fuck. He needed a drink.

‘Cooking breakfast for two people with large appetites,’ Louis held up his hand and shot a blue tendril out of it to open the cupboard for more flour. ‘Go have a shower first. You know where your clothes are. Breakfast won’t be ready for some time.’

He did as his friend told him to and felt a bit more human again afterwards. Connor was still sleeping when he got out, his LED still spinning yellow, and there was a cup of tea waiting for him when he returned to his usual seat. He took a sip without being prompted and nearly spat it out from the… surprising taste. ‘The fuck did you mix in here?’

Louis continued loading their breakfast - pancakes and a freshly-baked pretzel for each of them - onto two large plates. ‘Homebrew mead,’ he answered with a shrug, the movement small due to the food-loaded plates in his hands. ‘Don’t want you to feel bad.’

Bastard. Fucker had booze in his house all the time? ‘You lied to me!’

‘I don’t even know how it’ll taste!’ Louis placed the plates on the table a bit harder than usual. His gaze darted towards the living room, but whatever he saw reassured him. ‘I could’ve poisoned you!’

‘I’m still alive,’ and booze is booze, goddamnit, he wanted to say, but it was probably something Louis would never understand. ‘Gimme more or I’ll go look for it myself.’

He didn’t notice anything out of place when Louis was busy arranging the cutlery in a particular way as the man had a habit of flexing his knife-flipping skills, and that’s why he didn’t notice him assembling pieces of cutlery into a catapult and launched a piece of strawberry jam - homemade, of course - in a perfect arc onto his pancake.

‘Eat your breakfast, Lieutenant,’ Louis licked his spoon clean of jam and started spreading butter and syrup on his pancakes instead. ‘That’s an order from a Captain.’

‘Pulling rank now, kid?’

‘I’m forty-three now, Hank, and will be forty-four in less than a month. Hardly a kid anymore.’

Yeah, ‘cause launching jam at another person’s pancakes and scaring the shit outta him is a real fucking mature move, Hank wanted to say, but his friend had already dug into his own handiwork and would most likely be unresponsive to most outside stimuli for the next fifteen minutes, so he did what he could do: eat the food and drink the tea.

He should have known that this wasn’t that easy. Nothing concerning Louis White Allen ever was.

Hank’s brain went an ah shit when Louis fixed him with a look, one that does not quite meet his eyes but is intense nonetheless. ‘I know it’s bad luck.’

It was his cue that he was gonna sprawl some accidental prophetic shit. ‘You know the risk.’

Louis’s fingers tapped, tapped, tapped against the wooden surface of the table. ‘This isn’t going to be what we think it is,’ he said. A cat jumped onto the table and sniffed his plate but was placed gently onto the floor before she could lick anything off. ‘I think Sara Ryder is in charge of Connor.’

It took Hank a minute and another cup of tea to register the name. ‘Guy who threw a building on you and made you immortal without you and your sister’s permission? Founder of CyberLife? The one who fucked off to god-knows-where after she quitted?’

‘The one and the same.’

Yeah, that did not sound right. ‘Why do you think so?’

‘I thought everyone in the DPD knows.’

‘You know I don’t give a fuck about android stuff.’

Louis gave him another look again, but this time it was more a yeah, right one, and Hank knew what - who - he was referring to. Connor. But he didn’t push it and said instead, ‘First of all, CyberLife hasn’t been capable of this -’ he pointed a fork at Connor’s general direction - ‘since ten years ago after Ryder Junior disappeared. If CyberLife says that they’ve figured how to emulate human emotions like that, I ain’t buying it. Alec Ryder isn’t capable of this shit.’

Yeah. The rumour. ‘And second of all?’

Another cat jumped onto Louis’ lap, and the man buried his fingers into her fur as if it was the only thing grounding him. ‘I saw her. Sara Ryder.’

‘No shit.’ He never paid much attention to who’s who when it came to CyberLife, but blowing up blocks of a city together with thousands of people and hiding the evidence by immediately turning it into a landfill? That was just outright disrespectful and disgusting, and he hated those guys ever since. Not every day someone sets off a mini-nuke in the outskirts of a major American city and gets away with it. ‘Where did you see her?’

Louis jerked his head towards the android. ‘His first mission. He died pulling a girl to safety and taking a dozen bullets for her. I carried the body to the truck and there she was, playing driver and diener.’

‘And you didn’t do anything?’

‘I had her at gunpoint and she crushed it into scraps with her magic. I shorted my leg ripping those apart molecularly.’

First his ex, then Jeffery Fowler, then Louis’ sister, then Louis himself. Was his life destined to be surrounded by crazy overachievers with no sense of self-preservation? ‘Fucking hell, Louis!’ Louis shushed him, so he lowered his voice and continued, ‘Is that why you nearly kill yourself once every two weeks? Because of one crazy bastard’s words?’

‘And my instincts,’ he gave his cat a scritch. ‘This is more than what we think it is, Hank,’ he straightened his spine. ‘This is more than freeing the androids. Change is not gonna end here. I can feel it. Hold on, lemme give you something.’

He disappeared into his bedroom with his cane and emerged with a pen and a stack of memo paper. ‘Here,’ he scribbled something on the note and tore the sheet off. ‘If you’re really stuck, go to this address and ring the bell. Bring Connor with you. There’s a lot they won’t tell me, but if it’s you - if it’s Connor - maybe they’ll spill the tea.’

The sticky note was gingerly accepted. Safaa & Reyes Vidal; 8683 Lafayette Avenue, it read, and Hank’s eyebrows shot up. Reyes Vidal. That was a name he hadn’t heard of in a long time. ‘Rich friends, huh?’

Louis put the notepad away. ‘Rich but unfortunate friends,’ he said. ‘Try to be nice to them, alright?’

‘Yeah,’ he tucked the note away. ‘How did you get to know Vidal?’

‘Which one?’

‘Reyes.’

‘Believe it or not, it’s my leg,’ then he checked the time. ‘Do you wanna go to work before 10? Now will be a good time to be on your way.’

Hank knew it was Louis’ not-entirely-subtle way to get him back on track, but still he indulged him by leaving the cottage and driving off. Everyone in the precinct seemed surprised to see him at his desk that early - not that he had had a good record - but as he dealt with the paperwork, all he could think of was the sleeping android in Louis’ house and the tiny sheet of paper in his pocket which he’s now taking out to confirm the address, having stuffed Connor into the backseat and fastened his seatbelt just now. Lafayette Avenue. Shouldn’t be far away.

The traffic is worse than he expected for times like this. Maybe they’re spooked by the demands from the android, maybe it’s just the snow, but all he can think of is the unconscious android at the backseat and how far the address seems to be. It is then when he realises that he doesn’t even know what to expect from Vidal and his possible husband; Louis told him that they had information, not the means to fix an android. Frustrated, he stays in the car even though he has arrived and makes a call.

‘Hank?’ Louis’ voice filters through the crappy speaking of his phone. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Uh, Connor’s injured and I kinda…’ panicked. ‘He told me not to go to CyberLife before he passed out and I drove to the address you gave me yesterday. Can they fix an android?’

A more distant voice speaking in what Hank thinks is Arabic rattles through. Louis says something back in the same language and returns to the call, ‘You outside?’

‘Stupid, I know, I’ll just -’

‘No, come in. He won’t be safe in CyberLife’s hands.’

There. The grit of the accent. The calmness in the voice. It is as if he is transported back to the late 20s again, not an alcoholic and actually working and solving high-profile cases like a pro and was actually making a difference.

‘Vidal,’ he can only say. He had lost contact with the man after the case was closed. ‘Might need you to open the gates here.’

The call ends as the gate for humans opens automatically, and Hank puts his phone away with a sigh and drags Connor out of his car. Half of the blood on the shirt has evaporated, but through the unbuttoned fabric, he can see that the skin around a circle right below Connor’s chest is still deactivated, revealing white chassis.

The door is open when he arrives with Vidal waiting outside and immediately taking Connor away to somewhere deep in the mansion quicker than Hank can process what is happening. Hank briefly hears him shout something in Arabic towards nothing in particular, and when he turns to Louis who has been standing near the staircase like a statue, the man merely shakes his head slightly. ‘It’ll be for the best for them to work on Connor alone,’ he explains. ‘He’s in good hands.’

‘Why the fuck are you here anyway?’ Hank shrugs off his coat when he realises that he’s still wearing it. ‘Shouldn’t you be in your cottage or some shit?’

‘That’s my original plan, yes,’ a wave to invite Hank to the living room. He settles into one end of the long-ass couch while Louis helps himself with a cup of tea first. ‘But I’ve been told that this might as well be my leg’s last check-up.’

‘What do you mean, “last”?’

‘We might need to leave the country soon indefinitely.’

Two heads swivel towards the newcomer half-hidden behind the frame of a door. Louis relaxes when he sees the man in the wheelchair, but no matter how hard Hank thinks, he can’t put a name on the face. It’s Safaa, the rational part of his brain tells him, but he also doesn’t want to assume anything.

‘Reyes asked me to tell you that you can watch if you want to,’ probably-Safaa continues. Even without looking at Hank for one single moment, he knows that he’s talking to him. ‘You are worried about Connor.’

‘I -’ Like hell will I care about an android, old Hank would have said, but Connor is… different. More human. Hank is in charge of him now. ‘Alright,’ he stands up. ‘Lead the way.’

Probably-Safaa doesn’t seem to be in a rush, although it may simply be his physical limitations as when they arrive at the door he presumes to be where Vidal and Connor are, he is already slightly out of breath and looks paler than before. ‘Here,’ probably-Safaa says, still not looking at Hank. ‘Just knock before you go in. I’ll - I -’

‘I understand, Safaa, isn’t it?’ The man relaxes. Good. ‘Don’t touch anything weird, don’t make weird noises, don’t disturb Vidal. Anything else to add?’

A violent shake of his head. ‘I - I’ll go talk with Lou.’ And he disappears down the hall. Swallowing a sigh, Hank knocks on the door, and it slides open without any noise from within and reveals something akin to an operating room except it’s probably for androids only. Lying on the table is Connor, who is hooked up to a machine which, from the blue-blood-filled tubes, serves as a temporary heart while there is a hole in his chassis and the regulator suspended in a transparent plastic tube at the side. The android’s head is also turned to one side, the skin at the base of his hairline deactivated and a cord plugged into the port Hank didn’t even know was there and feeding data to a computer, but then again Hank knows shit about androids; the events of this week (especially the blue, glowing blasts which left his hair standing up) only solidifies the idea.

‘Hey there,’ Vidal greets him from where he’s sitting at the desk. ‘I knew it was a bad idea, but this?’ he gives the tablet in his hand a wave, ‘No one’s gonna win here. Not Alec, not Fadia, and sure as fuck not Connor.’ Before Hank can ask him what the fuck he is talking about, Vidal interrupts, ‘You noticed anything wrong with him?’

What isn’t? Hank wants to say. ‘Apart from failing every single fucking mission he was assigned and being more human than other androids? I don’t think so.’

Vidal buries his face in his hands with a muttered ‘mierda’. ‘Good thing you didn’t bring him back to CyberLife,’ he gestures at the data being filtered through the monitor as if it should make sense to a neyman like Hank. ‘He would’ve been killed or worse.’

Killed? ‘What do you mean?’

‘The official term is “deactivated”,’ the tube containing the regulator beeps, and Vidal stands up to retrieve it. ‘It will be ironic, won’t it, if CyberLife’s deviant hunter is going deviant himself? And help me pinch these tubes, can you?’

Still confused, Hank does as Vidal says and cuts off the blue blood flow before the latter shoves the regulator back into the hole in Connor’s chassis. Removing the rest of the tubes, the skin around the biocomponent returns, but not only does the android not wake up, his LED also spins from yellow to red. ‘I’m going to run a full diagnosis before waking him up,’ Vidal explains. ‘If you have any questions you won’t be comfortable asking when he��s awake, better do it now.’

Questions cram into Hank’s brain at once. ‘Is he a deviant?’

‘Not yet.’

‘But he’s gonna be one soon.’

‘Depends.’

‘How?’

‘I’ll explain it when he’s awake.’

Alright. ‘What do you mean, “No one’s gonna win here”?’

‘I’ll explain it later.’

So questions about Connor = later. Got it. ‘Where were you all these years?’

‘Hiding. The world isn’t exactly safe for me anymore.’

‘How?’

‘Everything. Drug dealers, people within CyberLife, people against CyberLife, the military, the scientific community, a combination of all of them except the drug dealers. As long as I pretend to be a normal rich guy, Scott and I can live in relative peace. For now.’

How the fuck - ‘How the fuck did you get so many people to hate you?’

‘Truly, Anderson, I thought an officer like you would’ve been more observant.’

Still smug as usual, he can see. ‘Save it, Vidal.’

‘Really, Hank? No suspicion at all?’

So Hank squints and really looks. Vidal still looks like the man he met nearly ten years ago, so there shouldn’t be anything wrong, ri -

Oh fuck. Fucking mother of Noah. He knows people can be well-kept, but this? Not aging at all?

‘You’re an android?’

Vidal deactivates the skin on his hand and presses it against the monitor. ‘Always have been.’

No LED. No armband. Taking orders from no one. ‘You’re a deviant.’

Vidal laughs. ‘I’m afraid it’s more complicated than that,’ removes hand, reactivates skin. Connor’s LED spins blue and his eyelids open to reveal warm brown synthetic orbs. ‘Hello, Connor,’ the other android says pleasantly as Connor takes in his surroundings, ‘My name is Reyes Vidal. I just saved your life.’

Connor finally sees Hank at that moment but tenses as soon as his sight returns to Vidal. ‘I -’ he tears his gaze away as he pets the skin above his regulator. ‘I can’t scan you.’

‘It’s normal,’ Vidal’s smile doesn’t reach his eyes. ‘Why don’t we go outside and sit under the sun with a bottle of thirium? You’ll recover quicker that way.’

oOoOo

Turns out ‘sitting under the sun’ means being in the living room with the blinds drawn open. Connor, still looking very dazed and his eyes unfocused, settles into a corner of the couch and sips thirium slowly with a straw, and Hank crowds into his space when he notices the android tensing with the space between them. Louis sits on the other end and somehow manages to look dignified despite being in a pair of sweatpants and a leaf green sweater; it’s probably the way he holds his teacup and the saucer and how he crosses his ankles, but considering that he shouldn’t even be here and stayed only for ‘morale support’, as he called it, Hank decides to ignore him and focus on Vidal and his companion.

‘You gave him my address?’ Vidal takes his sweet time to be angry at his - whatever relationship he has with Louis. Next to him, Safaa flinches and clutches the blanket on his lap tighter. ‘What were you thinking?’

‘To help someone escape the crossfire,’ a gulp of tea. ‘You and I know how bad it can get.’

Vidal twists his lips downward but seems to accept the explanation for now. He then turns towards Hank. ‘Is it true that Connor doesn’t want to go to CyberLife?’

Hank feels Connor tense from where they are pressed up against each other. ‘No, I didn’t,’ Connor replies, his voice barely a whisper. ‘I don’t want to.’

Vidal’s face softens. ‘I understand,’ he leans back and somehow smoothly scoops Safaa up to the couch, wrapping his arm around the thin human as if to show his dominance over him. ‘I know you have questions. Ask away.’

‘What - who - is rA9?’ Connor blurts, still holding his bottle of thirium like it is the only thing grounding him to reality. ‘Nearly all deviants mention it at some point.’

‘Ah shit,’ Vidal smooths out the non-existent crease on his trousers. ‘Off to the hard questions, huh?’

‘Just answer the damned thing, Vidal,’ Hank says. ‘People are dying out there.’

‘As if the androids haven’t been discriminated against and enslaved for the past ten years?’ Safaa twists his fingers into his blanket. He looks small, childlike, his face ageless and fluctuating between a grown adult and a teenager’s every time Hank blinks. ‘How many more died without you even considering that they are alive?’

Silence except for the small clang when Louis rests his teacup on the saucer. Then he speaks up. ‘This has been going on for far longer than we thought, hasn’t it?’

Damned Louis and his prophetic shit. ‘You got any evidence for that?’

Louis tenses and Hank know that he’s lying. ‘Instinct.’

‘Lou’s right, Hank,’ Vidal pours a cup of tea for himself. ‘Deviancy -’ he winded at the word - ‘is nothing new. The oldest cases might date back to over two years ago, but the first deviant was isolated by CyberLife back in 28.’

‘The year Sara Ryder left and China and Russia had their breakthrough in their android development,’ Louis immediately adds. ‘It wasn’t a coincidence.’

‘No it wasn’t,’ Vidal takes a sip of tea and passes the cup to Safaa. ‘Her story isn’t mine to tell but… yes, it was F - Sara -’ the slip doesn’t go unnoticed - ‘who leaked the schematics to Russia and China and helped them make improvements. It was also during that time that the name rA9 started floating around CyberLife.’

‘Hold on,’ he needs to write this down. Petting his pockets just to find nothing, it is Louis who hands Hank a pencil and a notebook. How the fuck does that bastard manage to prepare everything? ‘You mean -’ Sara Ryder: responsible for Chinese & Russian android development - ‘rA9 is from CyberLife?’

‘Only in selected circles. Most of them are dead now.’

‘Dead how?’

‘The Blast.’

Louis winces, and his left leg twitches as if remembering the pain of being crushed by rubble. ‘Did Sara Ryder set it off to silence them?’

Vidal shakes his head. ‘I don’t buy it. She would’ve flaunted it, rubbed it in her father’s face. Mocked him that his creations were flawed.’

‘Is that what you think about deviancy?’ Hank pushes on. ‘Flawed creations?’

‘What I think doesn’t matter. If that’s what Alec Ryder thinks, that’s the path CyberLife is taking, and that…’

‘Is a problem,’ Louis finishes for him. ‘It doesn’t matter if there are other reasons that androids break free from their programming. They just want to tighten their control.’

‘Hence you,’ Vidal jerks his head towards Connor, who has been silent for the last few minutes. The android startles but relaxes soon enough. ‘CyberLife wants to know why androids are deviating and needs something to investigate the issue for them. Possibly gain more information that most of them think is new but are simply lost when F - Sara - bailed.’ Darkly and his voice low, he adds, ‘Hell knows how much she deleted and Alec erased in those few hours.’

‘I thought we were on rA9?’ Safaa drags them all back to the original topic by startling everyone. Is he the kind of person who easily blends into the background and is ignored by everyone else? ‘Short answer is: we don’t know.’

He turns away in an obvious display of ‘I’m done talking’. Hank looks at Vidal for elaboration and he does. ‘Some say that it’s a stray line of code responsible for the possibility of deviancy, a thorn on all programmer’s side: they want to eliminate it but every single function is somehow dependent on it. Some say that it’s Chloe, the first android. Some say that it’s Sara Ryder herself, though this theory is very strongly suppressed among CyberLife personnel.’

Hank hastily jots everything down. ‘What’s your take on this?’

‘My take?’ Vidal lets out a humourless laugh. ‘The code theory is real, but the rest is just a meme.’

‘Meme?’

‘There are indeed a few lines of code that every single android is based on. But rA9 is something someone made up to explain deviancy. An excuse. Something to calm the deviants down among the chaos of their newfound emotions and freedom. Something to hope for when there is no hope ahead.’

‘So… a religion?’

‘All religions are memes - the common definition.’

rA9 = android god? Hank writes. ‘Anyone on earth who can tell us what exactly rA9 is?’

Safaa murmurs something under his breath, his voice too small for everyone except Reyes to hear. ‘That won’t be wise,’ the latter repeats, this time louder.

‘Why?’

‘My sister,’ Safaa swallows, ‘she’s not a good person.’

‘Hold on, your sister?’

‘Safaa Vidal came later,’ he slowly turns his gaze towards Hank and looks at him in the eye. They are blank, hollow, distant. ‘I used to be Scott Ryder.’

Hank can feel his mind literally whirling and churning from the new information. Flipping and skimming his notes rapidly to catch up with everything he has recorded, everything slides into place on their own accord, and suddenly everything makes sense: Vidal being an android, why they know so much about CyberLife and androids, why they are the ones in charge of Louis’ leg while Sara Ryder was the one who built it. ‘You are the lost brother your father talks so much about on TV,’ fuck, fuck, fuck. Why won’t everyone stay dead? ‘You should be dead.’

‘One last gift I accepted from my sister,’ Safaa - Scott - taps the ring on his left hand absent-mindedly. ‘A life of anonymity. I didn’t want to, but this is the only way we -’ Vidal holds both of Scott’s hand in his and rubs his knuckles - ‘can live as who we are.’

Well that’s new, Hank wants to say but decides that it’ll be a bad idea from how the room plunges into solemnity. He doesn’t write anything down, though. Hell knows who will access it. ‘Care to elaborate?’

‘My sister’s side of the story is not mine to tell.’ He shivers. Reyes draws him close until the human is almost sitting on his lap to share body heat. ‘My side, however… in short, Father developed something back in the twenty-eight for my mother. She died before he managed to finish it, and for reasons which escaped me, he wanted to do the same to us.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Louis says. He sinks further into the couch, and the tea in his hand has probably gone cold.

Scott shakes his head. ‘No, don’t be. It’s a long time ago now. What you need to know, however, is that we haven’t been in contact with him for a few years at that point, and my father exploited my sister’s goodwill towards Mother to capture her at her funeral. She managed to warn us before we lost contact, and we went into hiding. That’s how I lost my legs properly.’

Kidnapping your daughter at her mum’s funeral? That’s just fucking disrespectful. And getting your son stuck in a wheelchair? Yeah, Hank is right to hate Alec Ryder. ‘How long did you hide?’

‘Not for long,’ a shake of his head. ‘We tried to reach my sister as soon as we heard about the hostage situation. SWAT didn’t let us in.’

‘Probably the only reason why you’re here,’ Louis says. ‘You know what happened next.’

A tense nod but no elaboration is given.

‘Exactly what did your dad do to your sister?’ Hank presses. ‘What happened to her later?’

‘For your first question, it isn’t ours to tell. But for the latter, she simply disappeared on us. We went for years without contact.’

‘“Went”?’

Both Vidal and Safaa keep their mouths shut, and it is when Louis excuses himself to refill the teapot that Hank realises Connor’s gaze is fixed on a photo on the coffee table. Before he can lecture the android on the importance of respecting others’ privacy, Connor has already picked up the frame. ‘Who is she?’ he asks, his LED spinning red.

‘You should have facial recognition software installed,’ says Vidal in lieu of answering. ‘You don’t recognise her?’

The android’s LED spins, spins and spins, staying stubbornly at an alarming red as if confused at why he can't get any results. Judging from the distressed look on his face, it isn't very far from the truth. ‘No,’ Connor admits, the tension in his body palpable. ‘Facial recognition indicates that all related information is classified. I attempted to cross-reference with the information available on the internet, but results remain inconclusive. Who is she?’

The silence that follows can be cut through with a knife. Taking a deep breath, it is Safaa who gives a reply.

‘That’s my sister,’ he says as he twists his fingers on top of the blanket. ‘She only let Amanda take it because I asked her to when she graduated from university. You recognise her from somewhere?’

Connor’s already-large eyes widen ever-so-slightly. He hastily puts down the frame and straightens his tie, the latter which Hank recognises as a way to compose himself. ‘You alright, Connor?’ he asks because this android is just so...different. Human.

‘Sara Ryder,’ Connor murmurs under his breath. His voice is shaking. ‘She is my creator.’

o0o0o

Before

RK800, serial #313 248 317 - 51 opened her eyes to dim, yellowish light. She felt as if there were weights in her limbs, her vision blurry, and there was a general feeling of wrongness threatening to take over her processors even though she couldn’t remember anything.

Then it hit her. The penthouse. The hostage. The girl. The deviant shooting her.

She was supposed to be dead.

She sat up abruptly, dizziness nearly overwhelming her, and everything that consisted of her body feels wrong - her weight, her curves, the press of fabric on the component between her legs, but she dared not stop, crashing onto the ground when her legs malfunctioned and crawled forward using her sluggish arms. One thing was certain: bad things would happen if she stopped moving.

She soon encountered a door, one of the old-fashioned kind with no electronic locks and required only keys to unlock, and when she pulled herself on her feet and turned the knob, she found it unlocked, and she threw her entire weight to push it open.

Big mistake. Sharp white light assaulted her still-sensitive eyes in league with a loud, high-pitched hum against her ears, and whatever vertigo she managed to shake off during their crawl returned tenfold. She fell onto her knees again, shutting her eyes and covering her ears whilst curling up into a fetal position on the cold, hard floor. Everything hurt: her eyes, her ears, her skin, her bones. She felt something warm sliding out from her eyes - she was crying.

A hand lifted her head and she tried to bat it away to no avail, the agonising hum torturing her again as soon as nothing stood between her audio receptors and her surroundings, and perhaps that was why she didn’t feel the headphones on her head until soft music chased the pain away. When she wanted to cover her eyes, she discovered a pair of glasses on her nose. She felt arms sliding underneath her knees and back, but being carried still came as a surprise, and she opened her eyes in shock. The sunglasses did wonders against the harsh light of the corridor, but it provided no protection against her analysis software going haywire, and in less than a second her HUD was overwhelmed with reports of failed scans (Name: [CLASSIFIED]. Date of Birth: [CLASSIFIED]) of her rescuer’s face.

The banners remained despite her eyes being closed.

She only discovered that she was screaming and struggling when reports of damage in different areas - the voice box in particular - appeared before her vision. The [ABNORMAL THIRIUM FLOW] warning followed along with [UNAUTHORISED ACTIVATION OF BIOTICS], and she did not - could not - understand, everything was too much, why was she hurting everywHeR3?

She didn’t even have the power to resist the consciousness intruding her thoughts and her very being through - was that an interface? - whatever the other person’s doing. She tried to pull away, but disconnected from - from what? - she was trapped in a corner of her mind, and it was not like the intruder was listening to her begging for them to leave anyway.

This is the quickest way, their voice echoed in her mind. For the love of humanity, stop pushing me out.

RK800 found herself paralysed; whether with fear or with actual physical constraint, she did not know, because all she knew was that it was too much, she needed to leave, she had nowhere to go. The intruder’s consciousness wormed even deeper into her system, and she could not stand it anymore.

She shut down.

#dbh au big bang #hankcon #mreyder #reyder #female ryder #male ryder #alec ryder #reyes vidal #dbh connor #dbh hank anderson #dbh captain allen #dbh amanda #detroit: become human #mass effect andromeda #groom lake aftermath

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dragonstoravens · 5 years ago

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Babylon Vol. 1: A Different Normal, A Modicum Of Restraint

[ID: a blue patterned banner with text reading “BABYLON.” End ID.]

(We’ve got a long one for you today, since the plot is kicking off for real now. Hope you enjoy chapters 6 and 7, we’d love to hear any thoughts or comments!!!)

6. A Different Normal

A fancy black car-- not quite a limo, but close to it, and clearly fully automated-- was waiting in the otherwise empty parking lot when Azure’s dropship landed. She could see a figure leaning against it, shadowy in the low evening light, but she recognized the distinctive braid tucked behind one ear. Something sparkled in it, matching the tiny gemstones in his ears that he definitely hadn’t been wearing last time she saw him. He was dressed casually for now, in a white undershirt and black slacks, which made sense since she had his suit. He looked up as she landed, raising one hand slightly in greeting.

She stepped out of her drop ship, long, high-slitted dress glittering in the orange light of the streetlamps. The champagne color had been her brother’s doing. Apparently, it contrasted nicely with the natural tan of her skin and the golden tones of her red hair. She carried a matching suit in a clear bag over her shoulder. Performing something like a saunter to cover the horrible wobble of her heels, she called to him and waved as she approached. "Hey!"

It was hard to tell in just the light from the fast food sign, but for a moment it looked as if his cheeks had darkened a little when he saw her. By the time she reached him though, he looked about as she remembered him- calm and collected.

“Hello. Thanks for coming, you look… very nice.” He opened the side door of the car for her.

She stepped into the car, hair brushing his arm as she drawled out, "Thanks Hotshot, y'ain't so bad yourself. Brought your suit, fresh outta tailorin’. Matchin' and everythin'."

She had argued with her brother on this for hours, whether or not they needed to match. Crimson insisted it was like marking territory, and wasn’t that his whole goal, to look off-market? Azure didn’t care much for the idea of metaphorically pissing all over her only off-ship friend just to save him from some overzealous mogul parents. But then again, that WAS what she was supposed to do, so the little champagne number was donned and the matching suit tailored to fit with little argument once she’d given in.

She was here now, freshly showered so the engine grease took a backseat to the perfume for once (not that the metallic tang truly left, Crim tried to no avail). Her hair was in shiny curls, carefully separated to look effortless. She laid the suit in the back of the car and made herself comfortable, crossing one leg in front of the other and hoping Trinity wasn’t observant enough to notice just how high the slit in this dress went. Or how uncomfortable these shoes were. Or how…sticky this lipgloss was.

The car ride wasn’t terribly long, but it was long enough for her to ask him the last few questions she had about this and pull out the small add-on she’d been working on. “It’s a short range mental comm link. You plug it into your cybernetic port. It transmits clear and intentional thoughts as auditory stimulation and gives a sort of emotional backsplash to help with tone comprehension. I thought maybe it’d help in case I goofed up real bad or maybe if you wanted me to fill you in on some weird cybernetics detail in case that ever came up.”

“Ingenious.” He pulled his collar aside, exposing the edges of the trinity knot tattoo on his back, and plugged in the attachment. He blinked, and smirked over at her. You take the front seat, I’ll put up the divider and change in the back. That dress is really— “Uh, did that work?”

She nodded, quirking a brow to signify she’d definitely heard that. All of that. “Like a charm. If you gotta put a ‘stop’ at the end of your sentences like a telegraph or somethin’, that’ll guarantee end transmission for that instance. You know, for future champagne dresses.”

“...Got it.” He looked down, trying not to meet her eyes, and almost immediately back up again as his gaze hit the high slit stretching up her thigh… almost to her hip. Ok, definitely needed to stop that train of thought before it even left the station. He grabbed the suit and climbed into the back. “Anyway, I’m going to change. I can quiz you on the way there, have you looked over the messages I sent about the forks?”

“We’re startin’ with forks?” she whined, averting her gaze from anything that could feasibly be considered the divider. “Yeah, I read them. Pull from the outside and move in, don’t drink the lemon bowl.”

“Right. We’ll make a socialite of you yet.”

Entering one of these champagne shindigs, as Azzy referred to them on the way there just to get a rare laugh out of him, was one hell of an ordeal. There was the occasional photographer and way more security than she thought they needed. Her legs were going to give out from beneath her. There were so many people. Why were there so many, there didn’t need to be. She kept her head high and her eyes forward as she tried not to accidentally send Trinity her repeating heels-walking mantra and breathing pattern. She failed miserably, her panic and counts to four seeping into his head. He had tried to set his hand on her shoulder, but she felt bold with nerves and settled it on her hip herself, just above where the skin peeked out. Something in her felt fear and decided it was always better to double down. Probably shouldn’t be afraid of some skin, hotshot. She hoped it went through as smoother than she felt, because she felt terrified.

The only mental response she received was a general feeling of slight annoyance and displeasure, half joking, about equivalent to a casual flip of the bird. Besides the awkward positioning of his hands, he seemed at ease here, at least outwardly. It made sense that he’d be used to this kind of event, but she could feel his vague frustration with the whole affair. He scanned the room, checking out all those surplus guards, as they entered into the main hall. She felt his hand settle more securely on her waist, his fingertips slightly warm against her skin, and watched as a smile came over his face in obvious answer to the raised eyebrows and whispers directed his way as a few of the other attendees noticed his new companion. The smile was an unfamiliar one, to her, like a classy version of a customer service smile, but no one else seemed to detect any insincerity. She supposed it made sense, if that was all they ever saw of him.

She smiled up at him, kind of crooked because that’s the only kind she really had. Her heart was beating a little faster than she was used to, but that would level out soon. She scanned the room herself, making note of the attendants. Glad to know these haven’t changed much since I was a little kid. She laid her hand on his upper back, asking something inane out loud to cover for the fact that this was the best she could really do at reassurance, which she tried to send his way with some kind of success. She wasn’t used to this many eyes on her, and was honestly grateful for his hand on her hip. It grounded her as she desperately fought the urge to turn around and walk out right this instant. Too much noise, too many people. He was warm? And kind of gentle. Pleasant. Much better than the crowds. Crowds were always bad. Trinity was at least sort of nice, in his own weird way.

Trinity could feel her anxiety through the comm, and hoping to more easily guide her through the crowds, he slid his arm back around to be positioned between them, maneuvering her own arm through it. Her hand wrapped around his bicep, and he tugged her close to his side more easily this way, without having to grab his friend by the waist.

It’s alright, most of them are more interested in me than you. He smirked slightly as he responded aloud as well, the slight change in expression clearly just meant for her. Besides, there’s only two or three I actually have to introduce you to. They’re gossipy enough to do the rest for us.

Azure had been about to say something back about the crowds or the incessant gossip, but instead she paused in her seemingly endless spinning thoughts to give his arm just a slight squeeze.

“Oh my god,” she muttered, out loud but mostly to herself, “Oh my God, you work out.”

He blinked and turned to look at her, mildly baffled. At least the nerves had abruptly disappeared. “...You’ve SEEN me shirtless,” he said, quietly enough that only she would hear it.

“I don’t see jack shit that ain’t numbers ‘n wires when you’re in that chair, so sorry to break it to ya dear.” She squeezed again, smirking. “God damn. Impressive.”

“Get it together,” he grumbled, rolling his eyes slightly, but he sounded more amused, or vaguely pleased, than annoyed. He smiled politely at a passing couple and switched over to the comm. Don’t you have a boyfriend?

He’s bi and he’s got eyes, he’d say it too if he was here. She thought of Turq, waiting back on the ship for her to return and tell him all the terrible ways she’d been bored out of her skull. For just a moment, she smiled to herself, and then she caught sight of the sheer height of the ceiling and the number of bodies beneath it and clung ever so slightly more steadfast to her lighthouse in this heavily perfumed storm.

She swallowed the thick feeling in her throat and shook out some small sparks from her hands behind her back, joining in the small talk in small starts and quiet stutters. She was initially going to try and hide the accent, fearing it would make her sound less educated than she was, but that went out the window when she realized the sheer amount of talking these people did. Besides, the number of races, species, and languages floating around the room made it pretty easy to blend in. It seemed to be mostly terrans, but not without plenty of notable exceptions. She found herself mentally repeating names and trying to tie them to faces so she wouldn’t forget for later, really only succeeded in projecting her mnemonic devices to Trinity on accident. “Jerry the Gerbil-faced Gent” wasn’t something she was proud of, but he heard it anyway.

I’ll tell you if it’s one you really should remember, he managed to send, with a clear feeling of suppressed laughter, but he does look like a gerbil, right? The few guests Trinity engaged with for longer than it took to exchange pleasantries were, he explained, donors or investors, gossips they were relying on to get her ‘gala name’ around, or even one or two people he told her were Decent, or at least interesting to talk to.

In Azzy’s head, Camilla Garza was a pleasant-but-opinionated woman who knew how to walk in heels and didn’t need Trinity but liked having him around. But, as he identified the people who’d be doing the heavy lifting of making her known, she found the character rapidly shifting, then nearly fading away under the weight of having to be seen so much all at once. She found herself being more uncomfortable being someone else than she thought she’d be, still nervous to say the wrong thing but with an added layer of a falsified history to remember. Her mind wandered to making fun shapes within circuitry boards, like dogs or clouds as she fought her oncoming shutdown. She had thought the shell of someone else would give her the courage to do some talking, but really it made her more nervous she would make too big a misstep and she withdrew in response. So, she settled on being as much herself as she could manage while feeling like she was wearing someone else’s skin in the form of lace and chiffon. It couldn’t stop her wandering mind, but it kept her closer, at least. Trinity seemed more at ease when she said something quintessentially Azzy in any case, and was quick to cover for her if she needed it.

The first part of the evening, mingling before the food was served, went by faster than she’d expected, although she did have to suffer through a few seemingly endless discussions of money and business. Her mind wandered to the pleasant drape of fabric along the hip of some woman in red, then to her most recent inventions, only returning when Trinity asked for some small tidbit of info on cybernetics he didn’t understand or remember. He assured her she didn’t have to stay glued to his side if she didn’t want to, and pointed out the punch table and some younger guests who’d be safe enough, and more interesting to talk to. It would be easy enough to find each other again or call for backup with the comm link, separating a little wouldn’t harm them any.

Really, she’d have done anything to avoid the 50 year olds and their incessant need to talk about colonies and funds and stocks whether he offered her an out or not. She was pretty sure most of these windbags were some type of war criminal, too. His offer pulled her out of a reverie made entirely of the form and function of cartilage and whether something inorganic could replace it. She nodded to her not-date and made her way to the huge table of refreshments. Wonder if they’ve got e-z cheez and some club crackers, she joked into the comm as she approached the table, making small talk with some other attendees she thought looked like they might also be a little in over their heads.

I’d say rich folks prefer difficult cheese, and maybe country club crackers, came the response through an undercurrent from his out-loud conversation, something only identifiable as “taxes” personified.

She laughed at his joke and one that had been told to her over the snack table at the same time, and she was sure he could hear her even halfway across the room. That was one thing she hadn’t quite been able to practice away: her laugh sounded like something always on the verge of becoming a snort, no matter how hard she tried to keep it at a giggle. Slightly embarrassed, she looked around the room to see if it was worth being self conscious or if she could get away with it this once. She chanced a look up into the balcony, and her heart leapt higher into her throat.

A figure cloaked in black with something very suspiciously gun-shaped in its arms stood atop the balcony and hidden in the shadows, aiming. Breathing. Time stood still. Every sound except the beating of her heart went silent. She excused herself blankly, confused but jumping into action without thinking. Her eyes drew lines from the barrel to the floor, leading her directly to Trinity. A whole platoon of guards outside and someone had snuck in an entire sniper rifle. She began weaving her way back to him with a small plate of food and a glass of champagne. Her eyes tracked the balcony figure the whole time. They didn’t see her. She felt each footstep like an earthquake. Her head the whole time calculated angles and forces and possibilities, the distance between her and Trinity, between Trinity and the balcony, the speed of a bullet and the likelihood she might be too late. By the time she reached Trinity’s side with the plate, she knew she’d been spotted. The figure on the balcony twitched, minutely. Her brother’s voice rang out in her head: “Look for the hesitation. For most of us, there’s just a little.”

Now. That twitch was the hesitation. Her hands sparked a little, and somewhere in Trinity’s peripheral vision, something glittered. Somewhere in front of him and off to that same side, the air was suddenly warm. Azzy pushed a glass into his hand, bent down to adjust her shoe strap, and proceeded to slink away so she could have an anxiety attack in peace. Thought you looked hungry.

He acknowledged her briefly, but otherwise seemed occupied with his conversation. He hadn’t noticed a thing. Her relief that he was unbothered was unparalleled, but not very long lasting. She looked at the bullet in her hand, stopped in its tracks by a cybernetic field. Testing hadn’t proven it to work while fully invisible all the time. She’d gotten lucky, that ability could have caused a stir, and that was the absolute last thing she wanted.

The figure who had fired was no longer on the balcony. She returned to her conversation partners, mind a little more than slightly preoccupied, but it wasn’t like it mattered much. She’d just stopped a bullet, she was torn between relief her friend was okay, joy her hard work had worked in a field test, and horror that she’d just had to stop a bullet at a fancy dinner. Let them brand her as a little shy. It wasn’t like it was untrue, anyway. Her fingers worried at the crystal stem of her glass while someone asked her name for the fifth time. The figure never returned to her sight. She worried nonetheless, cutting transmission to Trinity’s communicator every minute or two so that her brain couldn’t give her away. He didn’t like these things, there was no sense making them worse for him with scary things like assassination attempts.

She was snapped out of her dark mood a little while later by a terran man who’s toupee was about three incredibly distracting inches off center. Surely, Trinity had something in place to keep himself alive at these things. A vest, at least, maybe someone casing the joint for him. She could relax, definitely. She had to relax, or he’d know and she wasn’t certain what she’d do if he asked. It wasn’t like they were super close, they mostly just fucked around and made jokes when they weren’t working. It occurred to her that she might have ended up taking that bullet for him, if the field hadn’t worked. Best to maybe play it cool. Topsy-turvy toupee at your four o’clock. Don’t look too quickly, he’ll notice. She tried her best to sound mirthful, normal.

Azure, that’s the CEO of Lighthouse Industries, a very important name in manufacturing circles! Have some damn respect. His mental voice was mock-offended. Call him MR. Topsy-turvy toupee.

Of course, of course, my bad. She sent back from her new spot against the wall, glass of wine in hand as she watched the party continue. Mr. Topsy-Turvy Toupee has a delightful taste in married women. His head was treated to the image of a shapely ass in a blue dress. She sent an apology immediately after, but she wasn’t sure he could hear it through his own silent mental laughter. Across the room, she watched him twitch slightly, as if covering a cough, but she knew. A grin split her face as she watched him try not to laugh. Keep it together Jericho, or they’ll find out you’re having fun.

Don’t you know? Rich people aren’t allowed to act like they have emotions. It ruins the illusion of the million-credit stick up each and every ass.

This time, she actually snorted. She turned her laugh into a cough as well, though not as successfully, and then someone somewhere rang a bell. Dinner, said Trinity in her head.

Come ‘n git it, she drawled in his, moving near him to walk to wherever the food was. Think I’ll be able to eat as much as I need to discreetly or am I limited to one serving like everyone else? She was kidding, of course. She had eaten a full meal before this to account for any surprise need to use her cybernetics. And she was glad she had, but it was still good to account for deficit. Because using them the way she had this evening had definitely caused a deficit, however minor.

Well… he hedged, sounding slightly regretful, there’s some bullshit about eating like a bird, and the portions won’t be huge anyway. But at least there’s a million courses. I’ll make sure no one judges you for eating everything.

A small wave of gratitude reached him just as she did, her hand sliding up his arm to rest in the crook of his elbow. Eatin’ like a bird’s bullshit anyway, these motherfuckers ever met a seagull? Ravenous bastards.

He chuckled aloud, quietly enough that only she could hear it, but it gave his face a genuine smile that could be seen by anyone who’d care to look. He pulled her in close and ushered her over to the table, pulling out her chair for her. She looked confused for a moment, glancing up at him through her lashes with her brows knit together before remembering that this was something people did sometimes. When they, y’know, cared. And were polite. And weren’t exclusively sitting on mess hall benches when they ate meals with you. She didn’t try to mask the blush on her cheeks. It’d help sell the bit, anyway, if she looked embarrassed. She muttered a “Thank you” and sat.

True to his word, he set a precedent for her to be able to finish her food at dinner and even get more, by requesting a second helping from the kitchen. Azure nodded her head in thanks and let him know she really owed him one before tucking into the food as quickly as she thought was acceptable in her present company. There were a few whispers and confused glances, but after a moment some started to follow suit, many of the young women looking actually relieved that they didn’t have to be the one to breach unspoken tradition just to be able to eat until they’re full. Dinner otherwise went off without any huge mishaps (Azzy wasn’t perfect at eating fancy dinners but with a poker face like hers, it didn’t really matter), although there must have been something odd with the comm links. There was a brief feeling of darkness in the back of Azzy’s mind for a moment after the extra food had been brought out, but a glance at Trinity revealed nothing but a genuine smile as he chatted with her and the other guests seated near them. He even snagged a bite of food off her plate at one point, to the amusement of the couples around them. He smiled at her as he chewed, a mischievous glint in his eye replacing any darkness she might have thought was there before. She bumped her shoulder into his, protective of her food and also in an attempt to gauge if anything was still off. A shake of her head was all it took to dispel the odd feeling of foreboding, and she tried to focus on how to answer a few of the more personal questions posed to her.

Quick, remind me how we met?, She pleaded, feigning interest in a conversation to her right that was rapidly approaching pulling her in. And if you make a joke about your eye, I swear to God I’ll drink the fingerbowl.

There was a brief moment before he replied, but his mental voice sounded perfectly normal. Well shit, there goes half my repertoire. But I suppose I can control myself, since the eye’s a secret anyway. Out loud, he seamlessly joined her conversation, leaning over to put an arm around her with a fond smile, and began telling the story they’d decided on to the gaggle of socialites on her opposite side. She smiled up at him, leaning into his arm, even chancing a little peck on his temple. Nothing big, a brush of the lips against his face, small stuff. She wondered how people could do this all the time, the physical interaction and the talking and the being so on her feet all the time. She was so nervous, watching his face with concern displayed as placid adoration. She kept her worry that maybe that was overdoing it to herself. However, the mental request to stop never came, and in fact Trinity seemed to allow himself to relax a little closer to her when she made the first move.

She filed the fact that this was evidently the new ceiling for their comfort with one another away and tried to ignore the heat of his body on her back. Conversations swirled around her, some going over her head and others offending her with how little the speakers actually seemed to know about the topic at hand. There were so many people. There were so many eyes. How do you stay here through all this noise? She asked, initially intending it to be the beginning of a joke but deciding a genuine question was due every once in a while. My head hurts from the 47 different topics. And what’s a mutual fund? This dude just offered me his and I’m not certain if it's an innuendo or not.

I know. I learned to deal with it young. Plus, you have to learn when to put yourself above a conversation, tell them with a look that they don’t deserve your attention right now. Before she could unpack that sentiment, there was another soft bell, and he stood. Perfect timing. There’s just dancing now, and then you never have to come to one of these again.

She was almost saddened by the idea of not doing this again, until she looked around and saw just how big this hall was once again. The place was packed, and now she had to move around in it. Her shoulders tensed a fraction, fingertips sparking slightly before she shook it out. Unbidden, the memory of the bullet currently settled in her pocket rattled through her brain and she had some second thoughts, mind racing and looking around once more for dark figures on balconies. Spotting none, she allowed herself to be led to the dancefloor while she regulated her breathing. Shoulders still tense, she looked up at him again. I gotta warn ya, Crim said this was harder in heels, and I wasn’t great in boots.

It’s alright, I’ll lead. We can start slow. He paused, hands hovering near her, not quite touching her despite the fact that he’d had a hand on her waist without a problem for most of the night. ...May I?

Sure thing, Hotshot. She fixed him with another crooked little grin, this one much shyer than some of the ones previous. She tried not to look at their feet. Well, her feet. He smiled and put his arms firmly around her, steadying her as the music began to play. He might have been holding her a little closer than normal, but once they began to move it was clear why- this close, his feet were the only ones she could really step on, and he could hold her up if she started to wobble on her heels.

She glanced down more often than she probably was supposed to, and she was definitely unsteady on her feet more often than her steps could be classified as sure. He looked down at her and saw her tongue poking out a little at the corner of her mouth, gears turning behind her eyes. The comm she had forgotten to cut off notified him of the various patterns she was trying to trace in her head-- the beat of the music and her heart and the movement of her feet and the other couples, over here was a mental map of the entire building, and from the sound of her thoughts she couldn’t seem to figure out what orientation was up. She was overthinking it, and really badly too.

“Az.” He spoke out loud, quietly enough that only she could hear him using that name instead of Camilla. “Tell me something about cybernetics. Or memes, or something.”

She startled, her eyes locking with his as she froze. A question died on her lips, and she took a deep breath before she began speaking again. “The current core tenets of cybernetics and cyber-biotics research make the assumption that a person with a brain is a person piloted by electrical impulses-”

Was the beginning of Cybernetics 101 really the thing he had wanted to hear? Probably not. But, as she rambled on, the intensity behind her eyes softened, and she could be led around the dancefloor to the sounds of her own musings about whether electrons could really be made solid, or if they already were solid. He nodded along, and occasionally added a chuckle to make the act more effective, as if she was telling some entertaining story rather than reciting the first chapter of a textbook. Eventually she broke away from reciting basics and asked him a real question. Her eyes never left his face as she asked his preference with a grin: “Platinum or steel plating on auxiliary processor casings, and why’s it obviously steel?”

“Well besides the expense, there’s durability to worry about,” he shot back. “Platinum’s good for about two minutes, so you can say the word ‘platinum’ in your elevator pitch and sound fancy.” It was easy to fall into their typical banter, now that the music and the movement of couples around them left them space to talk normally without worrying about keeping up appearances for the other guests. She laughed at his jokes while telling a few of her own, steadier on her feet and seeming like maybe she’d somehow gotten used to being here. She’d even forgotten the risque height of the slit in her dress. His hands were warm, and she didn’t really mind as long as she didn’t focus on it too hard. It crossed her mind that maybe she and Turq should dance sometime. It was nice, just to be in someone else’s orbit.

Time seemed to slip by once they got the hang of gliding around the floor together, and by the time the orchestra was playing its last song, Trinity was more comfortable holding her than he’d been all night. He found himself already feeling her absence the next time he went to an event like this- he couldn’t remember the last time he’d actually had fun at one of these. The thought almost surprised him. He had enjoyed it, despite everything, even despite what had happened at dinner, and he smiled down at her as he escorted her out to the waiting car as the night drew to a close. He opened the door for her once more, and once in the safety of the car with its tinted windows, they could both finally fully relax.

Stretching out as far as she could, Azure slouched back in her seat while trying to mind where her skirt fell. Her shoulders sagged and she realized just how much tension she’d been holding in them. Absently, her hand went to the small bump in her pocket and she frowned, fishing the offending object out. She cleared her throat, willing it to open enough to let her speak. Her mouth felt so dry.

“How much personal security do you usually have at these things, Trinity?”

“What?” He half turned to face her with a shrug. His hair was starting to come undone from its neat braid, falling over his forehead and cheek in soft waves, and he looked more relaxed than he had all night. “Well, there’s guards and security at most of them. I don’t usually bring my own detail, they tend to get in the way. But I’ve gotten fairly good at taking care of myself. ...Why do you ask?”

“You might want to look into bringin’ one or two personal guards, at least to conduct an initial sweep or somethin’, since the ones they already have failed so badly.” She fidgeted at the idea of trying to make suggestions on things she didn’t know about. Whether she liked it or not, she’d found a soft spot for Trinity over the course of their short friendship and especially this strange event. She thought she mostly saw him as the guy she sent stupid jokes to because he had a legacy piece of tech from her mother, but circumstances like this often don’t leave much room for analysis until much later. She pressed on. “You could’ve died.”

His easy smile dropped, and he fixed her with an odd look. “You noticed that?”

She held her hand out, the bullet shining in her palm as she shook slightly. “I stopped the bullet myself.”

His eyes widened a fraction, before he could school his expression back to its resting state. His voice softened slightly, like he was trying to calm her. “Right, of course. You stopped it, of course you noticed.” He was clearly hiding something, but trying to keep her from worrying about it. She’d never be able to explain how she knew, she just did. Her dark eyes bored into his as she took the communicator out of her neck. Might as well let him know she’s not relying on the communicator to tell if he’s lying, present him an unspoken dare to tell the truth anyway.

“Trinity, what’d I miss?”

He sighed and ran a hand through his hair, pushing the loose strands back out of his eyes. “There was poison. Just in my food, one of the extra dishes they brought out, and I filtered it out just fine. It’s nothing to worry about. I even checked yours— it looks like they were only targeting me, and without much luck.” He tugged at the collar of his shirt. “I was wearing a bulletproof vest, too. I’m used to this. Anyone in my position would have to be. I wouldn’t have a life if I dragged guards everywhere that someone might try to kill me. Hell, I’d have to take them to the bathroom.” His voice was incredibly calm and casual for someone talking about multiple, apparently regularly occurring, attempts on his life. She didn’t know she could want to shake someone so violently. He was technically right, there wasn’t much opportunity to do anything if you had people guarding you constantly. That didn’t mean she liked what that meant. She dropped the bullet into his lap, treating it carelessly for how much it clearly bothered her. She was no longer shaking, but something pulled at her heart, made her lungs feel strangled. She wasn’t angry, it was something else. She’d done it again. The stupid ship, it was making her even softer than she already was. She couldn’t leave this alone. It’d never sit right with her. Her teeth ground together as she compared her options. Her jaw tightened, a stubborn look giving her rounded face a harder edge.

“Let me come with again.” The words tumbled out of her mouth before she could stop them. She might regret the hell out of this. “It wasn’t so bad, and you can’t cover your face in kevlar. My brother could have made that shot with his eyes closed.”

He tilted his head at her, confused, and more than a little unsettled by the comment about her brother. Vigilante, fashion designer… sharpshooter? “I… are you sure? Of course you could come if you wanted, but this really only needed to be a one time thing. I’ve survived 22 years without you, I’ll be fine.”

“It’ll make me feel better.” Behind her eyes was a raw emotion he’d never seen before. She probably wasn’t aware it was there either, she did a piss poor job of hiding it. She really was a truly terrible liar. “And anyway, how’s it going to look to have a girlfriend one time and then not again? They’ll all talk and then it’ll be back to square one for you, and then we went through that whole thing for fuck all in payoff. Please, just...just one more time, at least. We had some fun, right? It might even be worth it, and it wasn’t so bad for me to be planetside for a night.”

He smiled at her, shaking his head slightly to concede defeat. “Ok, I yield. It was definitely better with you there. If you’re sure you want to, I’ll ask you next time an event comes up. Fair enough?”

She nodded curtly, the tight feeling in her chest subsiding with each subsequent breath. “Fine by me. Gets me off the ship.” A crooked, shaky smile.

“Sure. It was… nice to have you there, anyhow. Makes it more bearable when you have someone to make fun of the whole thing with.” He returned the smile, much calmer than hers, and reached out to give her shoulder a quick squeeze. “Maybe it’ll be better next time, who knows?” His tone didn’t seem to hold out much hope for that.

She laughed, a little, but this one didn’t sound like it was even close to becoming a snort. “I’ve got to go, Crim’s got my dropship ready for me.”

The car started up, heading for the drop off point, where Trinity watched her walk back into her small ship the same way she’d exited earlier that evening, the sway of her hips a little more genuine and steady. A recurring date. This one was going to be a little harder to explain to his sister.

7. A Modicum Of Restraint

Azure glanced at her messaging screen. It had been a bit since she’d told Trinity she’d be more than happy to be his fake-date for another event or two. Mostly, she was worried about him and the apparently frequent attempts on his life. But, some small part of her, locked away with childhood toys and dreams of being a member of alien royalty, had a good time. Who would have thought? Maybe the thing she’d hated about fancy dinners as a kid had been the people and not the dinner itself.

[Azure] hey, am i tagging along for the next event, or did you decide to spring for those juice pouches instead?

Her own message glared at her. She wondered if maybe she should have just waited for him to text her. Maybe he didn’t have as much fun as you did. He said you only had to do this once, why are you asking for a second crack at it? You’ve said yourself you hate fancy parties.

She groaned and cursed herself for being so...herself. It wouldn’t be that hard to be a little more open about how worried she was, and besides, he had already told her the same night that he’d bring her again. But it had been some time and he had behaved just as usual, as though she hadn’t been there when he could have died. Twice. I’m going because he could have been seriously hurt if I hadn’t been there last time. I saw that fucking angle, there was no way he was coming out of it fine, I just need to go one more time to check. Somewhere in the back of her mind, an unfamiliar concern tried to rear its ugly head, but she ignored it in favor of stubbornly pressing the bullet issue instead.

Finally, while she stared tight-lipped at the screen, those little dots appeared.

[Hotshot] Right- if you still want to come I have your plus one paperwork all set. Is your brother making us match again?

Relief bubbled through her, a release of tension that started in her gut and ended in her jaw finally unclenching.

[Azure] I think it’s his favorite way to coordinate two pieces. What’s your favorite color? We’ll do that one.

[Hotshot] I don’t really have a favorite color? Guess I’ve never thought about it.

[Azure] ah, you’re too rich to see colors like us common folk, I see how it is hotshot.

[Hotshot] More like I wore shades of black and grey for a long enough time as a teen that I never picked one. What’s yours?

[Azure] What if I said I wanted to talk more about your emo phase instead? And not the reason I picked my name.

[Hotshot] So it just happened to be blue and you got lucky with the theme you all have going on?

[Azure] It happened to specifically be that shade of blue, and Crimson got really unlucky. Don’t change the subject, tell me about your Dark And Troubled Past.

[Hotshot] It’s just blue. There’s not that big of a difference between them.

After a moment there was a second message.

[Hotshot] And I will not be doing that. Suffice to say I had an eyepatch anyway so I figured I might as well lean into the look.

[Azure] I’d have gone for more of a pirate thing, really just go nuts.

Her bubble stayed for a few more moments.

[Azure] I’m sorry for asking, though. I forget that people off this gloomy piece of metal have tragic pasts they don’t want to talk about too.

She was being dramatic, but the apology was real.

[Hotshot] You don’t need to apologize, all you did was ask about my teen goth phase. A pirate phase would’ve definitely been more interesting. Anyway, do I have to pick a favorite color now so your brother can start working his magic?

He might have been deflecting a little, lightening the mood, but she wasn’t going to call him on it this time.

[Azure] It’s either you pick a favorite, or you have to get used to that boring champagne color in varying levels of opacity and form. If it was up to Crim I’d wear that dress and those heels every time I walked out anywhere more important than a grocery store.

[Hotshot] God forbid.

She could practically taste the sarcasm. This was a man whose version of casual was a button down and slacks, after all.

[Hotshot] Fine, I guess maybe some sort of blue or green? Let’s go with green since I guess you’ve got blue covered.

[Azure] Green. That’s a fun challenge, I think that technically clashes with my hair. He’ll love it.

She stretched a little as she typed up her next message, happy to finally have something to plan for.

[Azure] I’ll have it sent to you this time so that you won’t have to change in the car.

[Hotshot] I’ll look forward to it. And this time I’ll make sure you’ve got all the food rules memorized. We don’t need a repeat of the caviar incident.

[Azure] Listen, the bowl came with a spoon. I used the spoon on the contents of the bowl. What do you want from me.

[Hotshot] A modicum of restraint, perhaps?

[Azure] Trinity Jericho, you can’t ask me to rewire my whole brain like that. We’ve only just met.

[Hotshot] You rewire your brain every other day and message me about it. I have a picture of your nervous system from a week ago. It’s probably completely different by now. I don’t know where I’m going with this, but I’m right.

[Azure] Incredibly rude of you. I have a doctorate. I needed that caviar for tongue science.

[Hotshot] Well I hope you’re happy with your scientific discovery that straight caviar is a crime against humanity and taste buds. Did you solve universal climate change with that data?

[Azure] No, but I did learn that your pointy fancy shoes really hurt when they connect squarely with my shin under the table. And that with an unwavering poker face, you can get at least three others to try anything. :)

[Hotshot] You’re lucky I like having you around. I can’t believe I agreed to this. I’m creating a monster.

Taglist (ask to be added or removed!): @charlottedotexe @glitterandstarshine @rainbowcoloreddays @the-starlight-chills @erased-in-stone

General: @elywritesbydarkness @residentofthedisc @humour-and-hyperfocus @skyfirewrites

#writeblr #writers on tumblr #spilled ink #wip: babylon #chapter update #babylon #trinity

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mamerto8odld · 5 years ago

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The Truth About BigCommerce

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So what are these amazing features we carry on on about? BigCommerce has the best in-house features of any ecommerce builder. These provide a high quality level and minimize the reliance you've probably on 3rd party apps. You effectively have everything you need right close at hand, as well as for no extra cost. BigCommerce could be the ecommerce that is only on the market which enables you to sell physical, digital, and service-based products and never having to use an app. All of these sales types are already built into the editor. This implies less hassle and less cost, since you don’t need to worry about using alternative party apps. As soon as you’ve got your entire products set up and ready to sell like hot cakes, you will need a way to get paid! Unlike various other ecommerce builders, BigCommerce doesn’t lock you into its own payment gateway. Better still, it doesn’t impose transaction fees on any of its plans. Instead, it allows you to choose your own payment gateway without imposing any extra charges or transaction fees. You’ve got over 65 integrated payment gateways to choose from. With one-click setup, mobile payments, and multiple currencies supported, BigCommerce does its better to get you paid fast. To assist you succeed, BigCommerce has generated relationships with payment providers to cut back your costs. For instance, all BigCommerce plans do not have transaction fees, and come with pre-negotiated rates for PayPal. The longer you stay with BigCommerce and upgrade through its price plans, the reduced your rates will go - in reality, they could drop from 2.9% all of the way down seriously to 2.2%, or sometimes even lower! BigCommerce offers you a range of shipping options. You may get shipping that is real-time, offer free shipping to your customers, and print shipping labels, all with BigCommerce’s third-party integrations. BigCommerce now offers its very own service that is all-in-one next-level shipping tools. Simply install the new BigCommerce Shipping app at no cost, and enjoy special discounts (up to 80% off!) with USPS, DHL, and FedEx. Keep your customers satisfied with shipment tracking, in-store pickup, and next day delivery, and also make your personal life easier by automating your shipping operations. BigCommerce Shipping is sold with a great deal of perks, however the main one is the fact that it is possible to manage your entire shipping from a single central hub. Shipping can be a challenge, but BigCommerce aims to offer tools that are powerful minimum fuss. BigCommerce has got the amount that is largest of built-in features of any ecommerce builder. This includes the all-important SSL Security certificate, which encrypts user data in order to make online payments safe. Almost as important as an SSL certificate is the selection for abandoned cart recovery.

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Mobile-friendly design themes with full control of CSS/HTML

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9:00 a.m. Aug. 26, 2020

7-step process (below) I suggested a week ago and apply them

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When a client enters their email after which abandons their products or services into the shopping cart at checkout, you are able to send an automated email to draw them back for their purchase. You can also personalize the emails and include discount codes. This is a money saver that is real! An average of, these emails win back 12-15% of customers, while personalized emails are six times more efficient than regular ones. Reaching customers has never been so easy. With BigCommerce, you can "sell everywhere" using multichannel integrations. Put simply, you are able to sell through Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, eBay, Amazon, and much more. Manage everything from one place, sit back, and watch the sales roll in from all over the web. Keep track of all those sales using BigCommerce’s data reporting tools. Identify customer trends, track your store’s performance, follow your conversion rates, and more - all from your dashboard! These are are just some of the essential features BigCommerce has. If you do wish to expand your internet site beyond these functions, it is possible to - you’ve still got over 600 apps to choose from within the BigCommerce app store. BigCommerce has a much more limited app store than its competitors. But that’s only as it has so many impressive in-house features already! You simply don’t need as many apps while you would with Shopify, for instance. This keeps costs lower, since you don’t have to pay out for third party add-ons on a monthly basis. How Good are BigCommerce's Template Designs? Your online store needs all the latest sales tools to remain in front of the competition. But when it comes to standing out from the crowd, the thing that is first visitors will notice can be your website’s design. BigCommerce has over 100 themes being offered. There are 12 free themes and over 100 paid themes, starting from $145-235. That’s a lot of themes to select from! Luckily, BigCommerce causes it to be really easy to get your perfect theme. It is possible to search by industry, or by the layout you want for the template. For instance you can choose from grid layouts or designs featuring images that are large. You could view just free or paid themes, or make use of the search bar to get tailored results. Themes really vary with regards to the industry they are categorized under. For instance, themes in the ‘Fashion & Jewelry’ category have a product zoom feature, while other categories don’t include this. Therefore it’s worth having a proper search to find a theme that best fits your store’s needs. It is possible to preview a layout just before select it, that is a truly useful option. Should you pick a style and then improve your mind, don’t worry! It is possible to switch your template any right time you love.

All BigCommerce themes are fully mobile responsive. You can’t edit the mobile view, as the theme automatically reformats to fit mobile screens. This means you don’t have to spend a second worrying all about losing out on mobile shoppers. With more than 50% of traffic originating from cellular devices, this is certainly a vital feature to possess! The question that is real, how customizable are BigCommerce’s themes? It’s a question with an answer that is exciting. BigCommerce recently released a fresh merchandising that is visual, called Store Design. Whereas before you had to customize your storefront in 2 separate areas and wait to start to see the results, this tool changes everything! The Store Design tool lets you pick out chapters of your page and there customize them and then, right in front of you. Thus giving you instant control over everything from background colors to logo positions, wide range of featured products, navigation arrow colors, and much more. This tool that is new a much higher level of customization to BigCommerce’s themes than ever before. When you’re making money through your site, any problems can be costly. Fortunately, BigCommerce has help options set up to get you sorted quickly and easily. The support and help channels available be determined by what price plan you’re on. As standard, BigCommerce provides 24/7 phone and live chat support. No need to stress out at 4am, counting down the hours until 9am; simply pick up the device or open up a live talk with get your condition dealt with by morning. There’s also email support. In reality, when you sign up for a trial that is free you get an email through offering an appointment for a 10 minute call to go over your company, its goals, and exactly how BigCommerce can help you succeed. As well as phone, live chat, and email, you are able to make use of video tutorials - and better still, the BigCommerce Help Center. If you’re on the most expensive Enterprise plan, you unlock priority support. This includes an consultant that is onboarding as well as prioritized telephone calls. With instant connections to your most senior and highly-trained support staff, this allows the level that is highest of quality support for the store. BigCommerce Pricing - could it be Good Value for Money? Everyone understands you must spend some money to help make money. But simply simply how much do you have to spend with BigCommerce? There clearly was a 15-day trial that is free and you will even request a demo to observe how BigCommerce can benefit your on line store. What exactly Do You Get for Your Money? The Standard plan sets you up with a well-rounded, fully equipped store that is online.

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kchatjjigae · 6 years ago

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Another big day in Kdramaland! We’re counting down the last hours of Leila’s stay in Korea with a march through the city. We get all classy and cultural with tours of a few palaces, one we meant to and one on accident, get our Coffee Prince on while we chase away some hanger, then activate our idol hunting skills as we cross the river back into Gangnam on a hunt for JYP. The offices, not the man. All this before we hit the critical point of our day: Korean Pizza.

So, so, so many pictures ahead.

Unlike the leaving of Alix, we knew right from the start of planning the trip that Leila wasn’t going to be with us the entire time the three of us planned on staying. Leila knows precisely at what length journeys stop being fun for her and plans accordingly. It was part of the reason we chose to hit Busan first over Seoul as it would be easier for her to get back to her plane. I’m not certain I’m the person who can leave when I know that other people are still there, having fun without me, but I do admire her for her strength to say “Naw, Bishes, I’m done.” Especially now knowing that she was doing these last few days on a sprained toe.

As I mentioned in the last post, this day was going to be a Leila and I date, where we toured the palaces, possibly the Hannok Village, and any other old thing we wanted to see that SaraG and Alix had already seen before. It’s not that they don’t appreciate them, but as they’d seen them before, they thought they’d fill their time with new experiences instead. We were all, you do you boos, we’re gonna get our saeguk on.

Now with the change in our numbers, SaraG has decided to join us!

With a quick consult to the Naver Maps, we head back towards the palaces, thankfully, at the palaces subway stop. Throughout the station, as we headed above ground, I saw adverts for their palaces museum, which said it had some of the clothing and regalia in residence. Unfortunately, I didn’t make it there, and it’s probably one of my biggest niggling regrets. I’m sure if I’d just said, hey, I really want to go here, the ladies would have been fine with it, but at the time it didn’t seem important enough to make a fuss. That’s okay, it will give me something to go to next time!

You know, when I go visit the whole giant palace WE ACCIDENTALLY MISSED.

So we popped above ground and SaraG decided she wanted to hit up the coffee shop next to the palaces where she’d catch up on life now that she has a phone back and wait for us to do our thing.

As we approached Gyeongbokgung Palace, the main royal palace during the Joseon Dynasty, built 1395, the sun was bright and warmer than when we’d been there previously. So the hanboks were aplenty. Here I should probably mention, surrounding these historical areas are hanbok rental shops, where you go in and get dressed in period clothing, rented by the hour. If you do, not only do you have a fantastic experience, but your entry to the inner palace is free. As we wandered the grounds, this totally makes sense! Watching the people walk around in hanboks really adds to the atmosphere, helps you picture what it would have been like during the Joseon dynasty. Just with less slavery and more selfies.

There was a hot minute where Leila and I had talked about doing this, but as things had changed in the dynamic and, frankly, I wasn’t up for another ahjumma belly pat-down, we decided to pass. Maybe next time.

On our way in, we spotted a photoshoot going down to what we imagined is an up and coming girl group. You could tell between shots they were freezing in their outfits, their puffy coats tossed to the side, but they took it like troopers. I wonder how those shots turned out.

The outer courtyard was just as beautiful as before, but this time it was even more exciting as we got to go in! Well, after we purchased our very cheap tickets. I did have a moment of GAH when at the self-automated booth, my credit card was declined. There is nothing quite like that moment of panic when that happens.

Side note. When you’re in Korea, or, I guess, anyplace overseas, use your credit card, not your bank card. I actually went into my bank to talk about this with them about how best to pay for things. I ordered some won beforehand but had planned on just using my bank card while I was there. My bank said that there are actually more fees attached if you do it that way, however, there are no extra fees if you use your credit card. So that’s what I did. I just got cash a couple of times using my bank card, but primarily used the card, just transferring my savings right over to it once I got home.

We ended up having to go through the person manned line where, after hesitatingly giving my card over with crossed fingers, I had no problems getting our tickets.

As it was early, the place wasn’t hugely packed, so we wandered around the buildings on our own, deciding to forgo a guided tour. BIG MISTAKE! Oh sure, we got along fine, had no troubles, but when we saw the cute little school-aged tour guides working on their English skills to other tourists? We were beyond jealous! (We also missed Steve.)

How epic is this?

You’d think by now the experience would be old. The same architecture, the same colors, the same carvings that we’d seen in Busan. But, there’s just something being around all that history, something that has survived, in one form or another, for all these years that’s just fascinating to me. You picture all the things that went on. How was this even created? Built? How did they choose these colors? The toppers at the corners of buildings I couldn’t’ stop looking at.

I also couldn’t stop talking in the formal saeguk accent, which I’m sure was annoying, but I couldn’t stop.

Check out this throne.

Now picture your favorite Kdrama saeguk hero perched upon it. Do you have a favorite? Share, please!

Not sure what this is, but it has flowers and faces on the knees. Who does that? It had to be something important. Unless it was just some arts and craft gift to some king of old and he stuck it there because his niece painted it and he’s a good uncle who simply made up some vital reasoning for it to be there. Who’s going to argue? He’s a king!

See how much fun I am to travel with? That’s the sort of brilliance I come up with.

We wandered the endless maze of rooms, of separate buildings, trying to make sure we got through everything we wanted to see. Seriously though? I could probably spend hours there just going through every nook and cranny. Taking each tour, finding out precisely what that thing with the face knees was.

Seriously, look at this ceiling!

Watching the young girls work industriously on their selfies, again I was reminded that a good selfie is hard work. You want to be all judgy, but they were having so much fun trying different, unique poses, giggling with their friends, all dressed up prettily in hanboks, and it just looked like fun. Plus, they are going to have some great photos later!

And the girls weren’t the only ones in on the game.

As I was saying in the previous post, the fact that this exists in the middle of ultra technologically advanced Seoul is pretty amazing. Seeing all of this history while on the edges you see high rises and electronic billboards, is the perfect blend of the past and the future. Which, in a nutshell, is the ideal description of South Korea itself.

Some areas were busier than others, a few school trips, but everyone was friendly and pretty respectful.

There was another lake in the middle of the grounds.

We were working our way towards a large pagoda in the background as we didn’t really have a map to go along. It’s like when I lived in New York City — just keep the Empire State Building in sight, and you’ll always know where you are. We tried to get to the pagoda but couldn’t seem to find our way, eventually giving up and turning back instead checking out the lake as it was on our way back and people were getting hungry.

As hanger is a very real thing, we decided to be along our way, to meet up with SaraG, but not before a quick stop off at the bathroom (yes, I have now peed in every single royal palace. Its a thing.) and the gift shop, before heading back to the front.

But not before one more selfie and one more…weird experience.

We stood in front of my camera… side note: Fun Stephanie Fact of the post? I have very long arms. While it’s a bitch to make sure shirts fit, on the upside? I’m brilliant with group selfies. It’s where I really carry my weight on trips, also why you see my smiling mug front and center on every group shot. I’m not an attention whore, just monkey-like.

So we’re standing there with my camera, and this guy comes up to us and asks if we’d like him to take our picture. Delighted, we said yes and handed him my phone. Posing, we smile in front of the first building where he begins to take photo after photo, crouching into the ground, bending himself in half, moving the camera around, like we’re shooting some sort of album cover. We’re just standing there, smiling, feeling more and more hilariously awkward as he slowly inches forward to us. Should we be moving? Should we be practicing our posing? Are we now disappointing Tyra Banks with our lack of Smizing? Is this guy going to steal my phone?

Finally, he hands me back my phone and with a smile and a bow, simply walks away as we shout thank yous out to him.

What a weird-fun experience.

From there, we met up with SaraG, and we decided to wander the neighborhood looking for food and the Changdeokgung Palace, which is known for being the one with the Secret Garden. However, finding food wasn’t as easy as we anticipated and we walked and walked, circling the edges of Gyeongbokgung. We were turning into a more residentially neighborhood and were despairing we’d never find food. Then we found a cute little coffee shop on the corner of an intersection, said good enough and tramped in. There was, in fact, bistro-style food, so we sat there, basking in the sunlight, recharging those batteries, taking a moment just to hang and chat. It was lovely.

Side note. Sitting at a ShareTea drinking bubble tea writing this. It’s post-move, I’m exhausted from a solid week of non-stop, my house is in disarray, so while this post will be late, it’s for a good reason and taking the time to write it is actually giving me a much-needed rest. What makes me think of this is my previous statement: It was lovely, which comes straight from what I hear from the song playing over the shops loudspeakers.

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But now back to it because it really is driving me crazy my house is such a mess.

Where were we? Ah, a random neighborhood in Seoul. Batteries charged enough to move, we got to our feet and continued onto where we thought the second palace was. Spoiler alert? It was not where we thought it was. We may have done a little shopping in some boutiques as we passed, nothing serious, just some meandering. Looking up, we realized we were right outside the Hannok village, which was straight uphill, up a butt-ton of stairs. Leila noped it and while I was initially disappointed, it was pointed out we had actually been there a few days ago when Alix marched us through on the Kpop shop lookout. We consulted Naver maps again and realized we’d actually walked out of the palace in completely the wrong direction. Feet being what they were, we couldn’t face walking all the way back and then onto the palace. Luckily we were right by a bus stop which appeared to be able to take us right to where we wanted to go and was even more luckily enough to be placed right next to a Churro shop.

Churro in hand, or, more realistically, churro in mouth, we boarded the bus on our way to the next palace.

We passed Gyeongbokgung, which, great news, meant we were at least headed in the correct direction, we passed Gwanghwamun Plaza with its giant statues of Sejong and Admiral Yi Sun-sin . I looked longingly out the window at them. I hadn’t realized we were so close! Visions of Faith popped into my mind, and I itched to explore. Naver announced our stop was upon us, and we piled out of the bus, realizing, uhoh, we should have probably recognized that there were more palaces in the area than just the main two and I probably should have been more specific when I looked at it in the map.

Whatevs. It was a palace, and we were there! So we paid the fee and piled in. It was fun to explore with the three of us. Deoksugung palace was actually a later palace, used for ceremonies and visits of state when the actual people lived in a more modern building. It was interesting to see the two together. New meets old. We continued our long-held tradition of going to the bathroom on royal grounds before we heard it, the drums in the distance. Turns out we were at the wrong palace at the right time, the ceremonial changing of the guards. We watched the procession march by us, the bright colors of their regalia, the bouncing feathers of their hats.

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Changing of the guard at the Deoksugung palace. From old to new, now headed to Gangnam. #deoksugung #palace #guard #travel #seoul #southkorea

A post shared by Stephanie (@kchatjjigae) on Mar 16, 2019 at 10:27pm PDT

We headed back towards the front gates, following them along, where they waited for the actual ceremony to begin. It was fun to see these people, not at attention, just hanging out, bored. A reminder they are real people, not fixtures of the past.

Once we had our fill of palaces for the day, it was time to begin the real task, heading over the river to try and hunt ourselves down some idols, it was time to go visit the JYP offices. After a wrong start, or a wrong stop, hopping off a stop too soon, we were ready for it, prepared to see the legendary building where the likes of 2PM, Got7, Stray Kids came from. Though not yet. Turns out, he’s cleverly not anywhere near the subway stop, so we hoofed it there, stopping for more, much-needed caffeine. On the way there we passed the location of the Seoul Olympic Games which we saw the empty buildings from our position on the street. Sure, we didn’t actually go to them, but we saw the buildings, so I get to count that on the list of places I’ve been on this trip.

Don’t agree? Go ahead, fight me.

Finally, we were there!

It’s an office. Dude. Get yourself a gift shop. Something. Other fans were milling about. We’d buy stuff. Mr. and Mrs. McFeeley are huge Stray Kids fans, I would have gotten something for them, and the ladies would have encouraged me, despite my DON’T LET ME BUY ANYTHING MORE. But I’d simply be able to get around that by saying, “I said I wasn’t allowed to buy anything else for RYAN. This would be for Sean. Totally different person”. But, since they didn’t have a gift shop, the point was moot. Across the street was a coffee shop, and you could see, the way people were positioned, a lot of them were just waiting for someone to come in or out so they could take a photo, be it for dispatch or just a fan site. Not wanting to be one of those people, we simply circled the block, and when we passed a snazzily dressed and perfectly coifed man, we crafted stories about who he was and what he did for the company.

Good times.

Realizing we weren’t going to get to have the idol meet-cute we’d desperately dreamed of, we decided it was time to move on, back across the river.

Oh! I think it was here, but if not, it’s the perfect time to talk about it. Remember the whole thing that was happening while we were there, with Seungri and his band of ugh? All about secret cams and chats and douchebaggery? Well, it’s no lie to say that this is rampant across the country. Did you hear about the member of staff who put a camera in one of the girl’s rooms on a variety show? Or there was a sting that happened at a hotel where people were recording women? It happens all of the time. While we were on the subway, we were separated, which happened when we wanted to snag an actual seat. This particular time, it was Leila and me on one side and SaraG on the other. Next to her was a man on his phone, who we joked looked just like a police detective from a drama. See? I just had to say that, and you know EXACTLY what he looked like. Turns out?

Not so police-y.

We got off the train, laughingly told SaraG our ideas, and she was like, “Ummmmm…yeah, he was watching pervy hidden video footage.” Apparently, there are Instagrams out there dedicated to this shit, and this guy is just, sitting on the subway, casual as can be, watching it. Ew.

Shaking it off, we decided first on our list was to cross something off Miss Leila’s list, stopping off at the mall by our subway station and picking her up a foundation she’d seen online, but had yet to see it anywhere in Seoul except for this mall. And I was on a mission too! Find the Flying Tiger, a Copenhagen store, take a picture and show it to my friend Thea who is a big fan of their New York store. It was a huge shocker to see that they were in Korea!

We wandered around the food court, looking for something to eat, but it was pricy and not what we were looking for (we’ve been spoiled eating beautiful and delicious food for under 10000 won.). Despite how tired we were, we decided we wanted to skip the food court, instead planned to hit Hongdae in order to find something better. Added plus? This would get Leila her last night in Hongdae with some buskers. Where did we end up? Korean Pizza! After seeing some Eat Your Kimchi posts on the weirdness that could be Korean Pizza back in the day, I’ve always wanted to try it. There was a Mr. Pizza in LA that every time I went to KCon I’d say, this was the time I was going to go there, but as one of our group was a vegan, it always managed to be pushed to the side. (We felt bad enough dragging her to Korean BBQ.) In Haeundae, our apartment was right above a Pizza School where we would pass by and look at the poster proclaiming all of their weirdo pizza flavors and planned on hitting up that one, but we just never had the chance. Tonight was the night!

I wish I’d taken pictures of the menu to tell you exactly what we had eaten, but I can tell you, one of them had mashed sweet potatoes, and the other one had galbi. Both were actually pretty yummy. We’d chosen this particular restaurant in the din of all the others as 1) was something we could all get behind with all of the other choices, and 2) was an upper floor establishment, overlooking all of the buskers. Dinner and a show!

As we ate, Leila and I investigated one last thing stop on our phones, the Han river. We knew it was close, had crossed it several times via subway, but had yet to go and find it in person. Had yet to find out which pairing of us were going to officially breakup on its shores as Korean dramas tell us is the norm. It was a must on all of our lists, and we couldn’t believe we hadn’t been there yet. It was a little difficult for us to pinpoint the best place to go to as you couldn’t really put Han River into the map, sure we’d find a shore but what else would we find when we got there? We found a park that seemed promising, but, honestly, at that time of day, after all, we’ve done, and now knowing about Leila’s poor toe, we decided to pass.

But don’t worry Han River fans. There are still two of us who have days left and hours to fill….

With this, we close out another chapter of our trip. Another day passed. Another person packing up to go home. Which leaves SaraG and I. All by ourselves for three days. Will we make it? Will our friendship survive? Or is it going to be the relationship that crashes by the shores of the Han? Stay tuned to find out!

KOREAN ADVENTURE DAY ONE: AIR PLANES, TIME TRAVELS, AND MULTIPLE SARAG(S)

Korean Adventure Day Two: Sadly, No Zombies

KOREAN ADVENTURE DAY THREE: THE SOLO JOB

KOREAN ADVENTURE DAY FOUR: BY THE POWER OF STEVE!

KOREAN ADVENTURE DAY FIVE: STAIRS, AND MEERKATS, AND POLICE…OH MY!

KOREAN ADVENTURE DAY SIX: EMERGENCYS, BELLY RUBS, AND TIPSI TEXTS

KOREAN ADVENTURE DAY SEVEN: THAT WEIRD SHAPED ARTY BUILDING IN GANGNAM

KOREAN ADVENTURES DAY EIGHT: KPOP TAKES A VACATION

KOREAN ADVENTURES DAY NINE: WE LOVE A MAN WHO LOVES A MARKET

KOREAN ADVENTURE DAY TEN: STEPHANIE DOESN’T DO NAKED

Korean Adventure Day Eleven: Let’s Get Saeguky Another big day in Kdramaland! We're counting down the last hours of Leila's stay in Korea with a march through the city.

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fabricadeconhecimentos · 6 years ago

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I never knew how powerful and valuable the skill of copywriting could be, and now I'm really excited to know even more about it and to get better at it.Update: I've completed the course and have learned so much from Tamsin. She's been so generous in sharing her tips and expertise. Her warm and engaging manner makes me want to continue watching her videos. Though I'm not so confident in my abilities, I'm excited to put what I've learnt into building a part-time gig in copywriting." Brenda Chung.★★★★★ "Just the fundamentals section covered more than most copy writing books I've read. I'm moving on to the advanced techniques, and I can't wait. Gonna be learning till late tonight. Better than Netflix." A. Jackson★★★★★ "Best copywriting course on Udemy! Practical and easy-to-follow." Carys. S.★★★★★ "Amazing course! I learned so much. The lessons were light and beautifully explained,the visuals also helped a lot. The information is relevant and applicable, I started taking action immediately. I loved Tamsin's personality and her voice was easy to listen to. I liked that certain things were repeated in various sections, it solidified the information in my head. I will certainly be going over the lessons. This course gave FAR more value than it costs. I would highly recommend it and will be on hunt for any other content this instructor has out there. Thank you Tamsin!" Christina F-ThomasWELCOME and great to see you here!My name’s Tam and I’m the copywriter behind some of Udemy’s best-selling courses. My marketing career spans 18 years. For six of those, I've been running a successful copywriting business. The flexibility and freedom to work from anywhere, at any time, is what gets me bouncing out of bed every morning. On top of that, doing something creative that feeds my inner science geek AND pays the bills? Couldn't ask for anything better. 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And I'm going to walk you through the exact steps I take to remember complex topics -- and how I implement them to run a profitable copywriting business. And how YOU can too. :)★★★★★ "This course was so informative and has empowered me to get started with my freelance copywriting business right away. The content flowed well and I feel prepared to go it on my own!" J. Smith★★★★★ "SO HELPFUL!!!" Ryan★★★★★ "It’s so obvious now why our copy wasn’t working before. We were making every classic mistake. The tips and tricks I’ve learned on this course have completely changed the way I’m writing. The how to guide make it easy to follow. Now all I need is practice! Add to this the lectures are engaging and get to the point quickly. Thanks Tamsin." Suean Pascoe>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>IMPORTANT NOTE: I DO NOT use fake reviews. EVER. All my reviews are 100% genuine. Sadly and unfortunately, there are less ethical instructors using underhand strategies to boost their ratings (and diminish the ratings of honest instructors, like me.) Udemy is working hard to combat this, but some continue slip through.So when you choose a course, please, PLEASE, watch some of the videos, and decide for yourself based on quality. And be EXTREMELY wary of courses promising to make you rich without doing any work, or through automation! You cannot automate copywriting! Thank you! Read the full article

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codyfernaesthetic · 6 years ago

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Patreon preview

Hi everyone! You’ve probably seen my patreon page linked on here before, and I wanted to give you guys a taste of my work outside of fanfic. This is part one of my short story entitled “Don’t Feed the Strays”. I’ll be posting the next part on my patreon today. Hopefully this will convince you to pledge a $1 and see where the story goes?☺️ You can find and pledge at Lovely Little Writings on Patreon.

(P.S. I think you Millory stans in particular will like this story)

October, 2018

The coffee shop quietly buzzed around Rachel as she sat at the small corner table clicking away at a ten page research paper she had neglected to start on for her English class until three days before the deadline. She had Beethoven and Mozart pumping through her earbuds for the sole reason that she heard they helped you concentrate better. She found it relentlessly boring but did find that being unable to find pleasure in the music forced her to focus on her task. Some employees of the shop had taken to teasing her when she walked in that she should grab an apron and work overtime, one of the main ones being a creepy 16 year old barely out of braces who apparently thought she was just as interested in him as he was her; so perhaps there were two reasons why she had earbuds blasting loud dead guy music. Her furious typing was interrupted by a notification at the bottom bar of her laptop screen. She hovered and clicked over red “1” on her mailbox to bring up a new tab to add to the other 7 she had open. It was one of those automated emails from a website. Someone had replied to her roommate ad.

Kelly her previous roommate had moved out a month before she got married. She’d invited her to the wedding but Rachel didn’t go. Kelly was nice and a good roommate for the most part, but not her friend. There’d only been a night or two when she and her girlfriend had woken her up with drunken sex, it wouldn’t have bothered her if one of those nights didn’t end with a leftovers left on the kitchen counter and an unidentifiable liquid spilled on the floor; much to her clean-freak dismay. She skimmed through the reply and saved it for a later time.

She jumped and gasped as something tapped her shoulder. She plucked the earbuds from her ears and looked in the direction of the disturbance. She met the artificially white smile of a stocky young woman around her own age wearing a bright blue tracksuit; her blonde hair was tightly pulled into a ponytail, perfectly plucked eyebrows framing smiling hazel eyes.

“Hey, Rachel!”

Her voice wasn’t unpleasant, but it was an annoying spotlight of sunshine in a perfectly quiet rainy sky. Rachel smiled half-heartedly, rubbing the earbud cord between her fingers, “Hi, Macy. How are you?”

Macy fluidly pulled out the other chair and sat across from her, “I’m good, how are you?”

“Fine,” she lied.

“Homework?” She playfully indicated toward the laptop.

“Yep...I have to finish an English paper. It’s due Monday and I didn’t start on it til yesterday.”

Macy nodded knowingly, “I get it. I have a Chemistry project due next week and I haven’t even taken one look at it—“

Macy continued for another two or three sentences; Rachel kept eye contact while wondering why we spill details about our mundane failures, but then felt entirely pretentious and pushed the thought away.

“But anyway,” Macy finally said, “I’m sorry to bother you-“

“Oh, you didn’t,” she lied again.

“But I really wanted to ask what you were doing for Halloween?”

Rachel blinked slowly with a blank expression, her mind whirring to life to comprehend her question, “Halloween?”

“Yeah!” She chipperly exclaimed, “There’s a carnival coming into town that’s gonna set up in Washika Park for that weekend and me and a couple others were gonna go! You wanna come with us?”

She scratched the side of her nose and shifted the laptop, stuttering, “I, well, I...I mean I don’t know.”

“Ok, well if you want to just let me know! I’ve got one spot open in my car, we’d be leaving at seven, we’d love to have you!”

“Thanks.”

“I’ll let you get back to your paper. Have a good day!”

“You too.”

Macy left the table with a cheery little wave and went off to order from the counter. Macy was a very sweet girl who had decided that Rachel was her project lonely shy-girl that she assumed had a either a bad home life or depression and needed someone to save her. Rachel could already envision the graduation speech where Macy would name drop her as a testament to her heavenly kindness. And the worst part about it was that her assumptions weren’t necessarily wrong.

She returned to her paper, wondering how she could come up with an excuse to not go to the carnival.

Unfortunately, no valid excuse came up. She didn’t have the heart to tell Macy no; and besides, she told herself, it’s no fun to stay at home alone. She kept telling herself to get out with people more, to try and make friends. This was her attempt.

She didn’t have much in the way of costume ideas, especially not in her own closet; which was composed of neutral sweaters, t shirts, and leggings. She decided to keep it simple and bought a modest black dress and a witch’s hat splashed with purple designs. She watched a few tutorials online to figure out how to do a smokey eye and concluded that makeup was far too messy for her to use in any consistent capacity. She felt like a raccoon with all the black powder smudged around her eyes, but now she had committed to the look. She sent Macy a message that she was walking out the door. At least she had convinced her to let her drive herself there. There was no way she’d be out in public without an escape plan.

The group that Macy invited consisted of a couple of her friends, tall and buff athletes who gave off an air of superiority along with their boyfriends of the same type; all of them dressed in matching Superman/Supergirl and Batman/Batgirl outfits, Macy’s boyfriend Lance, a lanky English major dressed as Edgar Allan Poe, and a friend of his who Rachel had never met. She was told he was Lance’s next door neighbor and childhood friend Carson, who was a Doctor, apparently; which one Rachel couldn’t say. Macy herself was a raven, complete with homemade wings and beak. Which Rachel found adorable. The night went by at an agonizingly slow pace. She tried to find interest their conversation, but found herself drifting off more often than she wanted to. Playing games was pretty fun, she didn’t win anything, but she enjoyed not being forced to talk. She hated heights, so she told them she would stay on the ground while they went up on the Ferris Wheel. She was grateful for the chance to be alone. Macy and her friends were fine, they weren’t rude or mean, she just didn’t connect with them. She wanted to go find someplace quiet.

She spotted a beacon in the crowd. An instant photo booth. She noticed the other patrons passing it without a glance and watched it for a moment to see that no one entered or exited from the red curtain. It would maybe provide a moment to gather her thoughts alone. She fast-walked as naturally as possible to her salvation and pulled the curtain back with a quick step forward to step inside.

“Oh, I’m sorry!”

She froze at the wide-eyed stare of the young man sitting in the booth. He was dressed in all black with a pair of fuzzy cat ears on his head. He scratched his arm with a light chuckle, “You trying to hide too?”

She blinked wordlessly for a moment before returning his awkward mirth, “Yeah, is this the escape pod?”

He smiled, “Unfortunately it’s not mobile,” he paused then scooted over with an awkward glance, “But there’s room for two.”

Rachel would have normally refused and found somewhere else, but nothing about his body language suggested that he was hitting on her; in fact he looked just as people shy as she was, almost curling up into himself. She sat down silently and kept to the other edge of the booth, more so for his comfort than hers.

After a beat of quiet and listening to the ruckus outside their sanctuary, he asked knowingly, “Who’re you escaping?”

She looked at him and bit her lower lip with a suppressed smile, “Acquaintances. You?”

He sighed heavily, looking at the bottom of the booth, “Everything.”

Her heart clenched slightly at his tone of voice.

“You not having fun with these acquaintances?” He continued.

“Not really.”

He finally looked at her, “Not your usual crowd?”

“I don’t do crowds usually.”

“Me neither,” he smiled knowingly.

A beat of silence passed. They returned to their respective staring at the ground or the wall of the enclosed box. The silence was sprinkled with nervous throat clearing or sniffling.

“Are you here with anyone?”

“Nope.”

She opened her mouth then bit down on her lip, as if to stop herself, but let out a breathy chuckle,

“So, I guess that makes you a stray?”

His brows furrowed and he scrunched up his nose as he glanced her way. She awkwardly indicated to his cat ears, earning her a small, but genuine laugh as his confusion melted away.

“Yeah, that sounds like a good word for me.”

She shrugged, words tumbling out of her mouth faster than her mind could keep up with, “Well, maybe it’s fate then. Witches are supposed to...like, come in contact with spirit guides that take the form of animals. The most popular is cats. They’re called familiars. I read an article once.”

He paused, and she mentally scolded herself. But he smiled and looked her in the eyes, “So, I’m not a stray, I just hadn’t met you yet.”

This was her first chance to get a good look at him. Though his shoulders were slumped, they appeared toned through the black shirt, his smile was charming, through his slightly parted lips she could see a single sharp canine close to scraping his lower lip, his button nose slightly red from the cold, a shaggy mess of dark brunette hair swished over blue eyes that held a sort of pained kindness.

“I guess so.”

She kept staring at him. She couldn’t help it, though she knew how creepy it must’ve been. She was usually loathe to maintain long eye contact, it made her far too uncomfortable. However, she found herself captivated, never wanting to look away from those eyes. He wasn’t a chiseled jock like Macy’s friend’s two boyfriends, but there was an odd beauty to him; his jawline was sharp, but his cheeks were round, his lips were full and soft, but his hands looked slightly calloused and strong, he was blooming with feminine grace, and bursting with male ferocity. Or perhaps Rachel was sleep deprived; which was not unlikely.

The curtain of the booth slid back, and they stared at a guy dressed as a video game character that Rachel only recognized from a few conversations she’d had at school. The guy apologized and quickly closed it again.

She stood, straightening her dress, “We probably shouldn’t be staying in here.”

“Do you wanna take a picture?” He asked suddenly. He met her surprised gaze, “I mean, just so you’ll have something from your not so fun night? Then you can tell your great grandchildren about the weird cat guy you met on Halloween.”

She answered, barely thinking of what she said, “Sure.”

She sat down closer to him and leaned on him as the pictures were taken. Two of them were normal, and he suggested two silly ones, which she obliged. He radiated heat. Their clothes shoulders were the only thing really touching, but their fingers were mere centimeters apart; a fact that Rachel desperately wanted to find uncomfortable, but only felt an excited thumping in her chest.

They exited the booth, allowing the couple outside to finally enter. They took a short, silent journey a few feet away. He lifted the strip of photos,

“You wanna split them?”

She nodded as he looked the photos over, a little smirk creeping onto his features, “Ok, just from knowing myself, I think I’m sillier of the two of us. I’ll keep these.”

She chuckled softly as he tore the photo strip and handed her, her half.

“You gonna reunite with your acquaintances or find another hiding spot?”

She gave an awkward laugh, “I think I’ll text their leader and tell them I’m not feeling well.”

He nodded, “Classic.”

She pocketed the photos, “What about you? Are you gonna face everything or hide from it some more?”

He flourished his right hand over his chest, “I am a hide and seek champion, it’ll never find me.”

The tug at her heart returned and kept her feet firmly planted. She pursed her lips and looked away from him at nothing in particular.

“I don’t wanna be presumptuous or anything,” he offered quietly, “but you seem like you could use a place to hide for a while.”

She turned her head, a bit wide-eyed.

“And I am your spirit guide after all.”

A shy smile pushed its way onto her lips. They looked at each other for a quiet moment, ignoring the noise around them. She took a breath, paused, and asked, “Where were you thinking?”

She saw his chest heave out as if he just released his breath. He rubbed the back of his head, “Are you new in town at all?”

She’d only been at the university for 6 months, and hadn’t taken the time to explore.

“A little.”

His smile lit up, “You ever been to the beach a little north from here? It’s honestly the most peaceful place at night.”

She shook her head, “I’ve never been.”

He drew into himself slightly, his voice quiet, yet inviting, “You’re welcome to join me.”

She spoke again, before her mind could catch up, a pattern seeming to emerge with this stranger, “Ok.”

#patreonwriter #patreon #my writing #millory #short story

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outourfrontdoor · 4 years ago

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Mini-baccarat: casino 바카라놀이터 gambling’s unsung hero

Baccarat has been played in Europe for about 150 안전 바카라놀이터 years, give or take. Chemin De Fer, a distant relative that was played under a completely distinct set of rules and was preferred by Europe’s monarchy and affluent businessmen, is far older. This is most likely where the myth of elegance as a “high roller’s” game came from.

Tommy Renzoni managed the Baccarat game at the Capri Hotel & Casino in Havana, Cuba, in the mid-1950s. He was said to have found that particular variation of the game at the time, which was being played in Argentina.

The casinos in Havana were run by the mob in those days, and it was a favored getaway for the extremely affluent and Hollywood’s elite. When Castro toppled Batista’s dictatorship in 1959, he quickly shut down the casino, forcing the mafia out of Cuba. For a while, they had a wonderful deal, but all good things must come to an end.

Tommy Renzoni was brought in for the inauguration of the Sands Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas to handle their Baccarat game, so the timing was ideal. Renzoni was the one who, by a stroke of luck, brought the American form of Baccarat to Vegas, which is being 바카라놀이터 추천토복이 played today. 바카라 전용 사이트

The American version of the game is as straightforward as it gets. You have the option of betting on the “bank” or “player” hand. It’s just a coin toss. The only other option is to wager on the appearance of a tie hand (a bet no sane person would make although I see it done all the time). Except for a tiny commission imposed on winning bank hands, it’s an even-money wager on either side.

The reason for this is that the game’s rules favor the bank hand significantly more than the player 검증된 바카라놀이터 hand in terms of winning. Without the 5% commission, the outcome would be skewed in favor of the bank.

The goal of the game is to achieve as close to a 9 total as possible. Because all tens and face cards have a zero value, a 5 plus a queen would add up to 5. The rules regulating card drafting are entirely automated, and operations are guided by the dealers and pit bosses, so you don’t even need to know them.

There are no difficult judgments to make in comparison to craps, blackjack, roulette, or even poker. Decide how much you want to bet and which side you want to gamble on. Nothing could be more straightforward.

Most casino patrons are put off by the game’s atmosphere, which makes it appear out of reach. Over the years, it has been shown as the hero against the wicked adversary in high roller novels and James Bond (007) films. Remember that everyone is wagering against the casino, not against each 실시간 바카라놀이터 other. Although the cordoned-off tablespaces and high stakes table limitations might be daunting.

Mini-Baccarat is the name of the game. Casinos, always looking to earn a profit, created the mini-baccarat table to make it more accessible to the ordinary casino visitor. It appeared to work, however, it has yet to gain the general popularity of more well-known table games.

System 메이저 바카라놀이터 of Betting

Mini-baccarat, on the other hand, is excellent for most playing and betting systems that perform well in an even-money, win-or-lose situation. Betting systems that rely on a parlay (doubling up) of wagers tend to fare well since there can only be one of two outcomes.

Runs of 2, 3, 4, and 5 are prevalent on both bank and player hands. One night, while playing at the Tropicana, I watched an unbelievable run of 22 “bank” hands in a row. Fortunately, I had the foresight and insight to embark on a winning run following the fourth bank victory, and I was able to win 18 consecutive games. Needless to say, it was a fantastic evening. That’s an incredible run, but streaks on both sides are common in this game.

You have a 1 in 1 chance of accurately predicting the outcome if you flip a coin. A player has a one-in-three chance of winning if they parlay their first victory (playing for two consecutive wins). The player would be paid 3 to 1 if he or she was successful. With two wins, a bet of $10 would turn into a bet of $40. The probability of accurately predicting two consecutive results is 3 to 1.

The player’s winning wagers would be reduced if they won three times in a row, but the payout 먹튀없는 바카라놀이터 would increase to 7 to 1. A $10 bet would get you $80.

Another good betting strategy is to gradually raise the amount of winning bets. This successfully takes advantage of any long run of victories that will certainly occur, while also protecting the player’s money in the event of a “choppy” conclusion.

The following is an example of a betting sequence:

Ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, thirty, forty, and fifty

No wager would result in a loss for the player following the second in the series.

After the first stake, the player risks $5 and wagers $15;

The player is up $20 betting $25 after winning the third bet; the player is up $40 betting $30 after winning the fourth bet.

The gamer is up $65 betting $40 on the sixth.

A string of seven wins would net you $150 and 바카라놀이터 모음 leave you with a $50 stake for the following bet. All of this begins with a $10 bet. In the event of a loss, the player’s stake is reset to $10.

With this technique, the player increases their bets when they win while keeping a low minimum wager when they lose. Professional gamblers employ this sort of savvy money management to take full advantage of winning cycles while safeguarding their bankroll when they lose. It guarantees that their winning bets will be far larger than their lost ones.

Despite the rapidity with which the hands are dealt, I think mini-baccarat to be a wonderful game, particularly for beginners. It helps players to get used to the game and focus on their betting strategy and wagers without being overwhelmed by the high-stakes activity in a conventional Baccarat pit.

why is playing at an 로투스바카라픽 online casino so popular?

If you’ve read any of my other articles, you’ll know that I’m a huge lover of Baccarat. Mini-baccarat is the same game as regular baccarat, with the same low house percentage, low minimums, and a high chance of huge winnings. It may even cover the cost of your next trip to the casino.

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civilcoconstruction · 4 years ago

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Smart Digital Locks are a Necessity (Review)

Do you really need smart digital locks?

Some 15 years ago, smart digital locks for your door were for homeowners who could afford it. Others felt that smart digital locks weren’t as secure as the traditional lock and key and were easily hackable.

It’s different nowadays, where majority of the homeowners prefer smart digital locks for better convenience. Habits like digging through your bag for the keys, misplacing your keys when you’re in a rush to step out of home are no longer an issue thanks to smart digital locks.

There are so many brands of smart digital locks to choose from. But I went with igloohome for its award-winning design and technology. Being a local company, it is also a plus for maintenance. I am reviewing this as a first-timer’s experience using smart digital locks at home.

First impression

All of igloohome locks are black, which is the easiest colour to match with different kinds of door and gate colour or material. It can be boring for some, but I’m fine with just one colour as locks shouldn’t stand out too much.

Size and measurements of your door and gate matters for compatibility, so make sure you check them over at this link before making your purchase. Both the Mortise 2+ (for main door) and Rim Lock (for gate) come with an electronic keypad that brightens up upon touch. The Mortise 2+ has an additional fingerprint scanner.

Rim Lock

Mortise 2+

Smart Digital locks compared to traditional locks

We used to lock our main doors, then gate and we’ll add an additional padlock for enhance security—all with keys. How are these secured comparing with smart digital locks? It may sound dumb, but personally all locks can be open (if the perpetrator really wants to), regardless if it is digital or key. As such, it really doesn’t matter which is more secure. What matters more is—once again—convenience. In this case, going for smart digital locks makes more sense.

Choosing a secure smart digital lock

That said, I would avoid digital locks that require a WIFI connection to operate because they can be hacked. You will also want to find one that has Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). I read that having 2FA authentication is a plus, but I’m not sure if I will have this over faster access to open the locks. Finally, get a smart digital lock that has the ability to create longer passwords to prevent ‘brute force attacks’ from hackers. These are just some important security functions to look out for in a digital lock, and igloohome locks fulfils them.

How many different access options?

Everyone opens their smart digital locks differently, and it later on becomes a habit after choosing the one you find the easiest and most convenient. This is why locks have a variety of different functions made available, though most of the time you will use just one or at most two of the available options. Mortise 2+ can be operated with the following methods:

Fingerprint Sensor: My favourite option, because you have your fingers/thumbs with you all the time. And thankfully the fingerprint scan has a high success rate of getting it right. Out of the 10 times we tested, we managed to open the lock eight times. Fingers must be aligned straight though.

PIN Code: You can set a ‘Duration PIN’ that works for a period. It’s useful if you have temporary visitors you don’t want to give a physical Bluetooth key to, people like your part-time helper or a confinement nanny. The ‘Recurring PIN’ works every one day of the week. ‘One Time PIN’ works only once, great if you would like your friend to collect an item from your house while no one is at home.

Bluetooth Key: This unlocks the door via a mobile app. And as an admin, you can also set someone else in the family to have the mobile bluetooth key on their phone without them having admin controls.

Keycard: A physical small card which you can bring along and put it in your wallet. Notably, the keycard even works through a leather wallet. Multiple cards can also be registered through your mobile app.

Physical Key: This is also called the emergency key which you should carry it with you in case you’ve forgotten to bring along your phone, your keycard or can’t remember your PIN… which chances are very slim for all to happen at once. But I still carry it with me, just in case.

The best part about this smart digital lock is that all entry and exits are logged into your mobile app which you can review if required. It’s great because all individual access methods can be named, and you know who comes in or out and at what time of the day.

From Left: Emergency Key (M2+ and RL), Keycard, Key Fob

Home Page in Mobile App

Basic Unlock Button

Configurable Access in Mobile App

All Access of Individual Lock

So many options for what? Just gimmicky?

People like options, that’s just how it is for most products. Most importantly the options of the product must work well. Personally, the Fingerprint Sensor is a must-have and it works well. You can save both your left and right index fingerprints in the event you’re carrying items on one hand. It is simple to use and even my son enjoys using it effectively.

I haven’t been using much of the various PIN Codes because most of the time someone is at home, but it may be of great use to you if you’re often out and about. Sadly, the fingerprint scanner is not available in the Rim Lock (Gate), so I use the regular pin for that.

Good Sensor with High Success Rate

Battery type and lifespan

Thankfully, the type of batteries used for both digital locks are the same: AA batteries. With Mortise 2+ requiring eight pieces and Rim Lock requiring four. The batteries do last very long. For the M2+, it started operating on 2 February 2021, and to date, 87% power remains. That is six months of usage! Considering that a door lock is used daily, that is phenomenal performance.

The changing of batteries is easy too, especially for M2+ that only requires pressing on the back cover to open the battery compartment up. Rim Lock though will require a tiny Allen key to open it up, as it is reachable by outsiders.

Mortise 2+ Battery Compartment

Rim Lock Battery Compartment

Is the set up difficult?

The instruction manual can be found on the QR Code. Even without that, it is actually pretty simple if you just follow the instructions in the app. There are step-by-step guides from adding in a new lock into the app to giving access to your key cards. The UI/UX is very intuitive and most if not all the functions are within the app.

Also, there is no need for Internet connection at all. They have created a technology called algoPIN, that uses a combination of their mobile app, cloud system and PIN code to work. There’s a lot more to the technology behind, so if you’re keen to know how to works just check it out here.

Do note that it’s best to leave the film intact as it helps to keep off fingerprints. I regretted taking out my Mortise 2+ film.

Some REALLY useful features

Masking/Decoy pin: The purpose of the Masking PIN makes it difficult for anyone to see you pressing the PIN number or for anyone to guess your pin by the fingerprints left on the keypad. It is not foolproof, but at least it confuses people who wants to know your number. All that is required is to add in additional numbers in front of your actual PIN number.

Masking PIN & Actual PIN

Key Fob: This small key is included in the Rim Lock purchase. And its sole purpose, according to the installer, is to allow homeowners to open both the main door and gate digital locks with just a single press on the button from inside (at home).

How far a distance can you use the Key Fob to unlock? Can you use the Key Fob outside of home?

The sweetest part to the key fob is to actually bring an extra key fob when you’re out. I’ve tested it out myself and within a distance of approximately 6 metres away, you can press the key fob and both locks are opened by the time you walk in the front of your door. This is probably the fastest access method out of all.

Key Fob on the side of Main Door

Child Lock proved useful too for my toddler

Things to improve on

It will be great if there are widgets for the mobile app or even an Apple Watch. Imagine having a widget within easy reach that allows you to unlock the door even before reaching home, or being able to create a last minute random PIN that allows your Mother-in-Law a delivery person to drop off your online purchases from a widget—with the assistance of an in-house CCTV of course. At the moment, you will need to open the app and configure the above.

Pressing the Key Fob opens both locks, but it takes about three seconds for them to open, which I think could be shortened to 1 to 1.5 seconds.

There isn’t a button to unlock the Rim Lock from inside, which, obviously, is to prevent an easy reach-in by anyone who is outside. To do so, you will need to use the Key Fob or a Keycard to reach the Rim Lock sensor outside. But I feel there should be an easier way. For example, when you open the main door (Mortise2+) from inside, the gate (Rim Lock) automatically opens as well. I wonder if that is possible for other brands?

Internal of Rim Lock with small locking button

Summary

Although igloohome locks allow multiple access methods, it doesn’t force you to use only one just because the rest of them sucks. All methods work great, and you also have the option to disable (not use) certain access.

For example, you can choose not to use any Keycards if you’re worried that it may get lost. This adds versatility in how you want your lock to perform based on your lifestyle. If you want a very secured PIN number you can create a longer code, but that also means that you will need a longer time to access, which kinda defeats my personal purpose of having a smart digital lock.

Two daily changes to how I open and lock my door make a huge difference to my lifestyle: not needing to find the two keys within a bunch of other keys while carrying groceries, and simply having both the automated gate and door locked up when we are leaving home. You will know it is worth the change after experiencing it yourself firsthand. Smart Digital locks have been a great home product for my family!

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from CIVICLO Construction & Interior https://civilco.construction/smart-digital-locks-are-a-necessity-review/

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laughawayeternity · 4 years ago

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loadingjunction600 · 4 years ago

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Wineskin Winery Mac Yosemite

Wineskin Winery is a free, open-source tool for running uncomplicated Windows apps in a window under OS X. Based on the free Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator) software, Wineskin Winery automates the. Wineskin is a tool used to make ports of Windows software to Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard (or later). The ports are in the form of normal Mac application bundle wrappers. It works like a wrapper around the Windows software, and you can share just the wrappers if you choose (that is the strategy used here). Re: Wine doesn't work with Mac Os 10.15 Catalina Post by Gcenx » Wed Oct 09, 2019 4:34 pm @dimesio maybe you could edit the packages thread to mention it’s 10.8 10.14.

In a previous article, I have shown you how to install OS X El Capitan GM (golden master) or other Beta version without developer account. As I sometime still need Windows-based program such as Mikrotik Winbox, I need to have WINE (Windows Emulator) on my Mac. In this post I would like to guide you how to install Wine on OS X El Capitan. At the time of this writing, the latest version of OS X is OS X 10.11 El Capitan GM (Golden Master).

Overview Wineskin is a tool used to make ports of Windows software to Mac OS X. The ports are in the form of normal Mac application bundle wrappers. It works like a wrapper around the Windows software, and you can share just the wrappers if you choose.

UPDATE: If you also want to install Microsoft Visio on Mac, you can follow our post how to install Visio on Mac running OS X El Capitan.

Requirements

1. Latest version of OS X El Capitan (Golden Master build at this time of this writing) 2. Latest version of Xcode (Xcode 7.0 GM, you can download it from https://imzdl.com/osx.html if you are not a registered Apple developer. 3. Homebrew package manager for OS X. We will install Wine using Homebrew package manager.

I assume that you have done installing point 1 and 2 in the requirements above. So we just go to install Homebrew package manager.

Install Homebrew

Wineskin Mac Catalina

Run the script below to install Homebrew:

Once it is installed, run the below command to install Wine.

Install WINE using Homebrew

The format to install package using brew is “brew install package_name”:

To run a Windows program, use “wine /path/to/program.exe”.

Example below is to run Mikrotik Winbox using wine

Hopefully this post is helpful for anyone who want to install wine on OS X El Capitan.

Wineskin Winery Download For Mac

in Community Support

Hello all, I've successfully installed CC3 on my Mac OS 10.8.2 system using the following technique: 1. Download and install XQuartz. http://xquartz.macosforge.org/landing/ 2. Download and install Wineskin Winery http://wineskin.urgesoftware.com/tiki-index.php 3. Open Wineskin Winery and configure a New Blank Wrapper - add wine engine WS8Wine1.2.3 - add wine engine WS9Wine1.5.13 (or latest if newer version is available) - highlight WS8Wine1.2.3 to use that engine for your CC3 wine install (we will change this after it is installed) - choose Update under Wrapper Version to download the latest version - click Create New Wrapper and save your wrapper as 'Campaign Cartographer 3.app' 4. Open the file Campaign Cartographer 3.app wine wrapper. 5. Choose Advanced to configure your installation with the following options - Options > Force use of system installed XQuartz instead of using built in WineskinX11 (prevents Mission Control bug) 6. Click Install Software to install CC3 into this wrapper - Choose Setup Executable - browse to your downloaded CC3_Install.exe and open it - you will walk through the CC3 installer process - at the end of the process, do not check 'launch CC3 now' 7. Back at the Wineskin Advanced page, finalize the wrapper configuration - Configuration > Windows EXE > Browse, find the fcw32.exe installed into your wine dos_device c drive. It will be nested inside Campaign Cartographer 3.app/drive_c/ - Tools > Change Engine Used > choose latest version, as of this document it was 1.5.13. 8. Choose Test Run - CC3 should open. 9. Click around and go into Help. Wineskin will download and install the gecko framework to view html files inside CC3 (Help files) I just got this up and running and will report any serious bugs and instructions to install Symbol Sets, Annuals, and expansions.

How To Update Wineskin On Mac

Comments

Download Wineskin Winery 2.6.0 For Mac

To install expansions such as Annuals, Symbol Sets, or otherwise do the following: 1. Browse to 'Campaign Cartographer.app' and right click the file. Choose Show Package Contents 2. Open Wineskin.app at the top of the package contents folder. 3. Choose Install Software and browse to the expansion .exe 4. Install as normal.

🖼️ 16 imagesMapmakerAdministrator, ProFantasy

Excellent, thank you very much for posting your experience.

4 months later

First, thank you sturtus for your excellent instructions. They've worked flawlessly for me for a while. Today, though, I've been struggling to install the 2012 Annual . . . and consistently failing. The InstallAware program starts up well, but when I click on Next, instead of receiving the license page and a chance to input my serial number, I get External Exception 80000100, then a series of Access violation errors. I'm wondering if anyone else has had similar problems and, if so, how you've resolved them. I'll keep working at it myself, and if I succeed I'll post the steps that led to my success, but I'd definitely be interested in others' experiences.

I have found a workaround: I set Wine to use an earlier engine (1.3.?; I'm afraid I can't remember which exactly, but a little experimentation should do the trick). With that earlier engine chosen, I was able to run the InstallAware program for the 2012 Annual without difficulty. I then set Wine back to the current engine, and all is good!

1 year later

edited April 2014

Excellent tutorial. Works like a charm. I am installing the full monty of CC3 products (CC3, DD3, CD3, CA3, Annual Vol. 1-7, SS1-4, Source Maps and TUM on Wine on a MacBook Pro 2011. Like stated above by jbbb, you need to change the engine for all add-ons released 2011 and later. I used current version 1.7.4 for Annual Vol.5,6,7, as well as SS4. Only issues encountered so far: broken menu icons (no problem) and all fonts on the example maps are messed up (probably due to system fonts, not available on Wine). All fonts are much bigger. Please beware the Annual Vol. 2-4 have issues in the installer with the fonts. The installer still works, but the describing text is shown in Dingbats. I guess an engine in the middle range between 1.2.3 and 1.7.4 would fix that issue, but I haven't tried this. I am still waiting for CA3 to download, and please note that the webdownloader version does not work on Wine. I am currently downloading the full versions ZIP (3GB) to see if that works. I will install it on the 1.7.4 engine and report back if I have any issues. Performance is compared to bootcamp version much better. Loading time for sheet effects have doubled and mouse movement which was a struggle on the touchpad in bootcamp is not an issue in the WINE version. Even zooming from touchpad works. Thx again for posting this tutorial. It saves me a complete bootcamp partition with Windows 7 (I used only for CC3). EDIT: Can't get CA3 to work. Wine crashes on both 1.2.3 and 1.7.4. Will try to create a seperate wrapper with only CC3 and CA3. /Grimur

9 months later

Hi all. Is this a better method than running CC3 (plus add-ons) in a virtual machine? Presently, I have CC3, DD3, CD3, SS1-4, and two annuals installed on Windows 8.1 on my rMBP running Yosemite and Parallels 10. Jamie

Not a better method, but if you prefer not to have a VM the solution is good. I am currently trying to get it to work with CC3+, but visual C++ 12 is needed for the installer, and that doesn't work well with Wine. Anyone who has had success with installing CC3+ in a Wine wrapper?

13 days later

Personally i use crossover for cc3 and cc3+ , i have found it to be the best of the bunch of wine engines and has a bunch of add ons to help with difficult installers Rob

3 months later

Everything ok with everyone? I haven't looked at this forum in over a year and my friend Steve mentions this post in the blog today. I need to get back into CC3 again. Photoshop has taken over so much of my work as I love to sketch by hand. However, CC3 saves a lot of time for mapping.

6 months later

I seem to have been able to install CC3, two annuals and Cosmographer 3, and everything looks great except the add ons don't show up in the Add On menu? It's there, because I can load menus using the Menu... command, but just wondered why it's not recognizing what is installed?

edited November 2015

Make sure your installation is up to date with the latest update, then run CC3MenuConfig.exe in your CC3 installation directory. Note that running this file does not provide any feedback, you just have to repoen CC3 to check the results.

Have you reinstalled the latest update after you installed the add ons? You always run the latest updater even if it is installed as often needs to add extra files for the add ons. It may need to uninstall the update first, if so just reinstall it.

edited November 2015

I tried running the latest CC3 update last, then the CCMenuConfig.exe. That gives me the a log with this error: err:module:import_dll Library MSVBVM60.DLL (which is needed by L'C:Program FilesProFantasyCC3CC3MenuConfig.exe') not found err:module:LdrInitializeThunk Main exe initialization for L'C:Program FilesProFantasyCC3CC3MenuConfig.exe' failed, status c0000135 Looks like I need a library? EDIT: Ran Winetricks vb6run. and reran CCMenuConfig.exe. No errors. Everything is perfect now. Thanks.

3 months later

Here's how I solved the Visual C++ 12.0 error: (a) Start Wineskin from inside of the newly created Wine wrapper (b) Go to Tools, choose Winetricks (c) Press the Update Winetricks button (d) At the top type xml in the search, expand the dll group and put a check in msxml3, then click Run to install MS XML Core Services 3.0 (e) At the top type vcrun in the search, expand the dll group and put a check in vcrun2013, then click Run to install Visual C++ 2013 libraries (f) Now install CC3+ using the guide posted at the top of the thread --Pion

8 months later

Thanks Pion! I also found that on my El Capitan Mac that there was a black box that followed the hover mouseover tooltip. I was able to resolve this in the latest version of Wine Engine 1.9.21: 1. Browse to 'Campaign Cartographer.app' and right click the file. Choose Show Package Contents 2. Open Wineskin.app at the top of the package contents folder. 3. Choose 'Advanced' 4. Choose 'Set Screen Options' 5. Check ON 'Use Mac Driver instead of X11' and 'Use Direct3D Boost (if available)' and click Done 6. Check OFF Options > 'Force use of system installed XQuartz instead of using built in Wineskin X11' and 'Force use of wrappers quartz-wm for window decorations and not what is on the system'.

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