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ddarker-dreams · 1 year

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the yan hxh character's favorite types of styles on you.

(warning for some not SFW implications/reader described as fem)

chrollo loves you in classy, elegant, yet formfitting outfits that highlight the silhouette of your body. slim blazers, short pencil skirts, sheer tights, pumps. will be smiling happily to himself if you struggle with heels since you're forced to cling to him, or trip. purposefully gets outfits that are difficult for you to put on by yourself (like having a zipper in the back) so you must begrudgingly call upon him for assistance.

pretends he 'forgot' to include some pants or shorts as potential options but it was 100% intentional. don't believe his lies. he loves anything that reveals your collarbones but not if you're going out. only he gets to see them, no one else. he mostly goes for neutral colors with a heavy emphasis on black, ivory, beige, navy, and sometimes burgundy if he's feeling a bit wild.

as far as accessories go, he favors dangling earrings and choker-length necklaces. you don't get to wear watches anymore because when he last gifted you one, you kept checking it every time he started talking, and it kinda hurt his feelings. he is a fan of you putting your hair up because he loves admiring the muscles of your neck and it grants him easier access for kissing.

(phinks, feitan, machi and paku under the cut)

phinks originally gives you some t-shirts and sweatpants because hell if he knows how to dress a woman. he doesn't want you thinking he's some pervert that kidnapped you purely for sexual gratification — no, there's a deeper connection he's trying to foster with you here. that being said... if he could have it his way, his biggest fantasy is having you wear those tennis outfits. preferably with white or pink colors. he just thinks you'd look really cute. the short, pleated skirt brushing against your thighs, tight polo shirt, a pair of high top tennis shoes; he'd be in heaven. phinks will want to scoop you up and twirl you around or some other romantic-sounding shit.

doesn't really have any preferences when it comes to accessories. his biggest thing is in the colder seasons, seeing you wrapped up in a scarf is super endearing. it makes his heart almost beat out of his chest. jewelry isn't a big deal to him. he'll gift you a fair amount because he figures Woman = Want Shiny Thing (as if you're a crow), but it doesn't do much for him visually. aside from stud earrings with simple designs, like a flower or moon. he thinks that's pretty cute.

feitan doesn't think about fashion much. he literally wears the same thing every day and only washes his bloodstained jacket if you ask nicely (aka plead). he gets you some long shirts and calls it a day. when you ask if you can have shorts or anything similar to that, he silently stares at you. unlike chrollo, it really didn't occur to him. if he's in a good mood he'll pick up what you asked for. probably gets an uncomfortable material or the wrong size but it isn't out of spite, he genuinely has no idea what he's doing.

he discovers by accident that the sight of you in a sheer nightgown is especially appealing. other than that, the only preference he's aware of is seeing you in light colors. it gives you this innocent glow that he finds aesthetically pleasing. the way it further highlights how different you are — pure (by his standards, at least), virtuous — really does something for him. he has a weird obsession with your wrists so he's gotten you a few silver link bracelets. that's the most you get to accessorize should you ever choose to wear them.

machi lets you wear whatever you want and listens to your clothes requests, because she's too embarrassed to admit what she'd find you cute in. no one could get the information out of her, even if it came down to torture. so... what she wants more than anything (drumroll please)... is to see you wearing one of those short overall outfits over a plain shirt. she'd be staring at you as if you were the mona lisa. she has no idea why the concept entices her as much as it does. all she knows is that you'd look fucking adorable and she'd commit multiple crimes for you.

she likes you in denim, any color really. jean shorts, ripped jeans, skinny jeans, flared jeans, wide jeans, high waist, low waist; she's all about it. oversized tops are a big favorite as well. extra points if the sleeves are too long and cover most of your hand. you think she's glaring at you but in reality she's trying so hard to keep her fraying mind in check.

pakunoda has you looking runway ready whenever she takes you out. the woman did research. a lot of what you wear is tailored specifically to your complexion, body type, facial structure, etc. she enjoys high fashion and has procured pieces made by the biggest names. most of what's in your closet is either wool, pure cotton, or silk. it looks and feels luxurious. she favors seeing you in jumpsuits or maxi-length dresses. coordinating outfits is a favorite of hers, she has color theory down and you both look stunning together. around the house (or wherever she's keeping you), you're free to dress as you please. you both have matching house slippers and robes.

accessories will depend on the season, but you can expect to be wearing sleek sunglasses and the occasional hat. for jewelry, she goes for her birthstone, diamonds, and gold. nothing too ostentatious though. she keeps it classy. while she'd love to see you in stilettos, if you can't walk in them well, she'll go for flat pumps instead.

#yandere chrollo x reader #yandere phinks x reader #yandere feitan x reader #yandere machi x reader #yandere pakunoda x reader #phantom troupe x reader #yandere #yandere x reader #hxh x reader #yandere hxh x reader #concepts

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malebodyexhibit · 2 years

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Gives an inch, takes a mile (a free commission tale)

I nuzzled my face into my boyfriend’s chest. After his gym workout, he smelled so good. I was usually not into the smell of sweat or BO, but smelling his musk with lavender body wash was soothing as he held me in his arm. His body warmed me through my gray pullover. He knew I didn’t jock out like him. I was a bit of a geek. I preferred to stay in and play video games; but I hoped the home-cooked meals, muscle massages, and my love were enough. Yet, he posed with me in a selfie for his Facebook. He did his best to capture his good side and mine as well, but I didn’t have many good sides. Not like him. Leaning against him, I could feel his muscles and the bulge of his erection. I tried to think that it was for me, but he was still friends with his ex on Facebook. That was who the pictures were for. It was a silent competition between the two of them.

“Look at my cute boyfriend whom I snuggle with after a hard gym workout!” My boyfriend’s selfie implied. He’d take pictures of my home-cooked meals with heart emojis. Then some of us while we hung out with friends. All of this to “get back” at his ex. An emotionally manipulative asshole.

The type of asshole who posted obvious bulge pics on Facebook. He flaunted his body like it was God’s gift. He always did lewd gestures with his tongue and fingers. His photos always had him showing off his muscles, posing with other men, and partying. I tried to tell myself that my boyfriend was over him, because that dick would tease him. He would share my boyfriend’s secrets with his friends behind his back. He made my boyfriend do sexual things that made him uncomfortable. My boyfriend told me that his ex even had him wear a chastity belt to work. If he wanted it off, he’d have to beg his ex to unlock him, but his ex wouldn’t until my boyfriend submitted to him and sucked him off. This wasn’t even mentioning the times his ex cheated with other guys and gaslit my boyfriend into thinking it was his fault.

I kept think why my boyfriend had put up with it for so long. But I knew the answer.

It’s because he’s hot obviously. He had the abs, the shoulders, and the 12-inch cock that would make men put up with his shit. Someone like me had to rely on kindness and being a decent human being. I loved my boyfriend so much and wondered why he just didn’t settle down with me. If I was hot, then he would have proposed to me already. But I was just too kindhearted and unremarkable.

But I heard about a different website that could help me… It was an underground thing that was spread by word of mouth. A man walking down the street stopped me and looked me up and down. He said, “I think I got something for you.” He told me about the website and that it was built for “people like you.” The website promised to make you the “man of your lover’s dreams.” The website could make me his ex.

Well.. it did more than that. I entered my and my boyfriend’s information. It promised to turn me into someone my boyfriend loved. Someone he wanted with his whole body and mind. The next morning, I was in his ex’s body.

I couldn’t believe my eyes. I played with his light-brown hair, so fair and soft unlike my original hair. I ran my hands over my biceps, then my abs. The first time I ever had abs! His body was so sensitive and I was so turned on my the sight of me controlling his ex’s body that I felt myself getting hard. I pulled down his underwear and saw the massive cock. I understood why so many people wanted this asshole now. I stroked one out right there. My jizz sprayed over my abs and chest. He had a long reach. I dug through his laundry hamper and pulled out clothes. They smelled ripe, but I noticed he didn’t have much clean clothes.

I had access to his memories and I knew that around this time he would be at the gym. That’s when I realized my boyfriend and his ex went around the gym at the same time. In his ex’s memories, I saw that they checked each other out while they worked out. They showered just a few feet apart. The whole time his ex would tease and mock my boyfriend by showing off his body to him. Not anymore.

I headed to the gym and found my boyfriend there. We made eye contact and throughout my workout, I watched my boyfriend watching me in the body of his ex. And let me tell you, it was hard to workout with a massive erection. I kept taking breaks to find ways to hide my boner. But this body was so hot, I eventually went to the showers to finish up. Then my boyfriend came in. He tried to keep things casual, saying hi and doing his shower. But I couldn’t keep it in any longer.

“Babe, it’s me.” I then told my boyfriend everything that happened. How I switched bodies and how I was his ex now. My boyfriend was shocked but suddenly realized it was me when I told him I loved him. “Wouldn’t it be awesome if I stayed in this body?” I said, smiling. “You could have a sweet boyfriend and an incredibly hot one too.”

“But, I thought you hated him?” My boyfriend said. “Every time I mentioned what he did to me, you always got mad that someone treated me so badly.”

“Yes, but I know you like his body—don’t deny it. He’s pretty hot. I got to rub one out and I honestly want to see what else it can do.” I held my boyfriend and took a picture. I loved how I look and how small my boyfriend was now.

The next few weeks were awesome. I cared for my boyfriend and gave him the attention he needed. I cooked for him and let him top this hot body, something his ex would never let him do. The first time after he tried to pin me down (he’s shorter than my new body) and shot a load in my ass, he held me and told me he loved me. He asked if it was almost the right time to get married. I was excited, but kept my cool. I told him, let’s get used to the changes first. We kissed and he explored my body with his mouth.

Some of the new changes were that my boyfriend wanted me to go with him to the gym though. And I actually got into it. I hardly play video games anymore or do that geeky shit, but I love pumping iron. The guys at the gym also can’t help checking me out. My boyfriend started to get insecure, but I tried to reassure him that I loved him and wouldn’t cheat, unless he got fat. I meant it as a joke, but he took it pretty seriously. He started working out a bit more, and I loved the results actually. So sometimes I would poke his stomach just to give him a reminder. I found that my boyfriend also had trouble making me cum during sex. He tried his best to satisfy me, but I jokingly asked if he needed another guy to help. So now I top him. It’s just easier for us that way. I also noticed I was getting cocky. The past day I got sidetracked at the gym. I was chatting with these couple hotties and just having a casual flirt. I mean it’s not cheating unless I actually fuck them, right? Well, I told my boyfriend he needed to cook dinner since I was busy. He threw a big fit, so I just decided to eat some ass. The two bros I met at the gym took me back to their place and I went to town tonguing their holes and fingering them open. While I fucked one, the other jerked off and came on me. I didn’t even wash up when I got back home. I wanted my boyfriend to see he couldn’t take me for granted.

Now I don’t even care if my boyfriend goes with me to the gym as long as he is facedown on the bed when I get home so I can pound his ass. He’s so afraid that I’d leave him. I understand why his ex was so hard on him. Give him 12 inches and he tries to take a mile. You got to keep him down so he knows who the alpha is.

#male transformation #male tf #transform #male transform #transformation #nerd to jock #mental change #personality change #alpha #male body exhibit

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shu-box-puns · 2 months

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OH TO SHOW TSU’TEY HUMAN CUSTOMS UGH

this man would nawt be able to comprehend how many languages we have, or just how complex they can be; “wdym there’s a language of pictures? 🤨”

MUSIC OMG MUSIC he would deffo be intrigued by classical, but his ears would flatten once something like heavy metal comes on shuffle and you try to stifle your laughter; “why would you listen to someone scream? they’re saying words??”

DANCING i wanna tango this bitch or grind on him (his eyes would be BULGING at a lap dance, but that tail would be a thump-a-thumping), or something a bit more cute along the lines of slow dancing

proposing to him :( his partner wants to mate with him as they would on earth, so they get down on one knee, neck STRAINING, and holding out a ring that he glances at with a beating tail behind him; “what is this” “i’m proposing, you idiot. accept it before something eats me out here” he’ll eventually accept the ring (do they wear rings? if not, he will struggleeee to get used to it, but finds comfort in playing with it) and nearly hisses when his partner asks if he’d prefer something else. jake nearly toppled over when he sees it and is now wondering if he’s supposed to be doing this with his own mate

AHHHH I LOVE THISSSSS!!!!! ANON, THIS IS BLOODY AMAZING!

Tsu'tey would be so intrigued to hear more about your life on Earth, even if he's a little grumpy about it in the beginning. But once you've warmed that man up, he wants to know EVERYTHING! He is hungry to know more about you. I like to think he's nosy just like Mo'at but he's more subtle about it. As in he's more careful about how he pries information out of you, whilst Mo'at will just straight up demands what she wants to know, whether you plan to tell her or not she will find a way.

Maybe Tsu'tey overhears you or a co-worker speaking in a language that he doesn't recognise and that opens a whole new conversation about Earth and how there are about 7000 spoken languages back on Earth. And of course he's nothing short of impressed. He's like "what do you mean you know English, Na'vi and (insert however many other dialects here)?!"

(Bonus points if Reader learnt Na'vi on duolingo or some na'vi speaking app they found in the app store instead of going through an intense learning course run by Grace).

I feel like the music and dancing would come hand in hand. And you'd test out what he likes by playing him random genres whenever he visits the lab. And depending on if his tail wags or if his ears flatten you can pretty much guess what he likes and dislikes, even though he pretends to be neutral about everything. I feel like anything with a strong beat would have him craving to dance regardless of whether he feels he can let himself or not.

As for slow dancing, there's a height difference, but that's easy enough to get round since Tsu'tey has no issue holding you and fumbling the steps on his own whilst you sway together and let the music set the mood.

I've said it before, I'll say it again, if you get this man flowers, he will not at all get your intentions and think you just don't know which flowers are useful. Where you might be thinking, "I picked these because they're as beautiful as your eyes," Tsu'tey is having a mild panic attack because that specific species of flower has a pollen that could down an ikran in seconds, and the only reason you're not dead yet is because you have an exomask on. Whereas if Tsu'tey inhales any of that he'll be seeing Eywa instead of romantic gestures.

The miscommunication between human courtship and na'vi courtship would be hilarious to anyone who's familiar with both, and painful to either party who thinks their S/o is being dumb.

THE PART ABOUT THE RING!!! HELL YES! Of course you're mated by na'vi standards, and to be fair, you also have to be married by human standards. Tsu'tey will weave that ring into a custom necklace to have it on him at ALL times, and although he has no desire or access to metals, he's definitely off to find a pretty rock to whittle into a ring in return.

#Romancing Tsu'tey as he deserves to be romanced #tsu'tey #tsu'tey x reader #avatar #post-war shenanigans

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roo-bastmoon · 1 year

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IMPORTANT INFO: issues around Jimin’s album

I have an ARMY friend (who shall remain safely anonymous) who works in film production for the music and entertainment industry here in the US. They offered me some valuable insights today into production limitations and possible issues related to Jimin’s solo album.

Below the cut is a transcript of their messages to me. I share this in the hopes it better informs our discussions around fair treatment of BTS members’ releases. It is by no means a definitive account of Jimin’s situation—simply an insider’s ideas on what likely happened around a few things.

I understand there are very big feelings about this topic, especially with the apparent differences around JK’s single, and I appreciate everyone’s viewpoints. However, if you choose to interact with this post, you will be respectful to others (including members) or you will be blocked. You are always welcome to DM me privately if you need to vent—we are all human and we all need a bit of grace, so you’ll always have that with me.

Sending you guys so much love, Roo

Anonymous Insider

Some “light reading” while you’re resting up and recovering, lol. This is all just based on what I’ve been watching and seen. Of course, I don’t have access to their production budget sheet and Korea works very differently than the US when it comes to production, but this what I’ve been seeing when it comes to their videos and particularly the promotions for FACE.

(I’m sending in sections, lol)

Alrighty - I’m still like deep in edit-land (still am two days later 😭) but I started typing this on the train between meetings, ha ha. (And am still on the train doing this, lol.) Also this rambles a bit I’m sorry! So the first thing I did was go back to the interview where Jimin talked about the music videos — it was a Japanese TV show and he’s talking with a host in Korean.

He’s talking about “wanting to do it all,” laughs and says, “I wanted all the music videos” and that “they” (the company assuming) said “무리다” which has its roots in the word 무리 which means a herd, a party, a group — basically “it’s too much,” “it’s unreasonable,” and “it’s impossible” are decent translations as it refers to something or an idea being “too much” — then the host and Jimin burst out laughing and the host goes “서리와 무리다” which I read as “sorry (in konglish) but we can’t” and they continue to laugh. So based on that —it sounds very understandable.

We can imagine Jimin sitting down with his team and planning out SMFP2 and LC videos, with the 30 dancers and all the party scene extras, and then Jimin saying he wants to do the music shows with 6 different sets in rented locations so they could have total control. And if Jimin in that process went “what if we made official music videos for all of them?” the team would understandably go “that’s just not reasonable!” 1) because it would give Jimin a budget no other member had gotten and 2) there aren’t that many production houses in Korea. It’s a very small scene — it may just logistically not been possible. There aren’t enough DPs and crew and editors. Sometimes, as a producer, you have to tell your creative talent “I’m sorry, but no.” — I say it every week!

So what about the music videos? Well, here’s what I know from meticulously watching all the behind the scenes for BTS videos over the years. They work with a small team. They likely own a good deal of the gear — they shoot mainly on RED cameras and heavy expensive Cooke lenses (which you can’t get this stuff easily in Korea. I lost a lens cap for a Canon CINÉ Lens in Seoul and it was like this whole big deal because getting gear there is an import challenge but anyways) they use MOVI and Ronin gimbal stabilizers and Jimmy Rigs a lot.

Recently they’ve been using technocranes but I wonder how many technocranes there are in Seoul. As I said, they likely own a lot of this gear which can help with costs. But we’ve also been told — and I’ve heard through my industry friends — that Hybe PAYS. And in Korea there’s no unions in the entertainment world, and often the rates are shit (hence Netflix investing so much there - blerg) their standard work week is also already 12 hours longer than the US. It’s a whole thing. and they spend so much money on sets. It’s incredible.

They rent these huge spaces outside Seoul and BUILD — I mean the build out for SMFP2 was astounding. They easily dropped 1million on that video. The rigging, the build-out, the custom set and the custom camera rigs to achieve the 360 shots - the drone shots. They’re astounding videos. No US label is spending that money on videos these day. Absolutely none of them are — my friend recently produced a video for John Legend. They were trying to pull the whole thing off for $100K which is ridiculous. It’s really almost impossible.

But on the Big videos they spend a lot of money, but they also produce a lot of other stuff too (and these are often looked at as Performance Videos vs all-caps MUSIC VIDEOS) -— like RM’s video shoot at DIA Beacon… that was a much smaller, fairly single camera shoot — all shot on drones or a MOVI handheld rig. No set, they also didn’t like pay for the set because DIA: Beacon is an art museum — and similar a little bit to Letter for Jimin, which was much smaller set and easy in-house gear.

(And it was also released on Bangtan TV channel vs Hybe Labels Channel, which is a good indicator of how they categorize these shoots.) But the big videos, they go for broke. I mean they spend so much money and again they may own a lot of the equipment but there’s still so much people-power and labor involved. Take the dancers’ rehearsals. You have to pay people for all that — you have to pay them for the weeks of rehearsal, you have to pay them to be in a video. It is so expensive — like, I would not be able to budget that video for under 1 million, that’s how much it costs.

So then Jimin wanted to do music shows —- and so because he’s Jimin and it’s BTS, Hybe rented larger venues and locations for all of the shoots. None of them use the actual Broadcast spaces or were provided by the broadcast studios. The smaller companies do though — remember when BTS first started out they went to SBS to film on the day? — but they don’t do that anymore. They rent huge facilities so that they could be a mini concerts for ARMYs to visit with Jimin and see him.

They also have to do this kind of outside of the city and they built huge sets because they’re going to want to show off if they’re gonna be on TV but that is so expensive. (I don’t think you were an ARMY then, but when ON was released, at the time it was the “biggest broadcast performance ever” and they keep upping that ante for sure!) It’s possible the broadcast companies spend some money but what BTS is doing is so outside the usual budget and given the tension with the broadcasters and HYBE — they (Hybe) wants control of their products, and so I think they pay for that control.

I can’t imagine they got out of any of those days for under $500K; I mean, there were two different sets, all the crew; they’re paying for all of it. We add it up and they probably spent close to $3-5 million between Jimin’s music videos and his music show performances, and I would be understandably like: “That’s it!” Like, that’s the budget for an EP, you know.

I don’t think Jimin could have it all because that wasn’t the case for the other members. RM got to lead videos and J Hope had pyrotechnics, which definitely costs money and safety and insurance. You know he had visual effects his first video (a lotta visual effects) and again a lot of challenging technocrane work, but I haven’t really seen them build something on the scale of what they built for SMFP2 in a very long time (or ever?).

We heard from the Art Dept that Jimin did not want to shoot on blue screen, so they built the set for him. This cannot be the same label that is shafting him — that allows him to spend that amount of money just because the artist said “I want to shoot in a real space!” because I’m gonna be completely honest— he could’ve done that on a blue screen — I’m glad they built a real world because BTS almost always shoots on Blue/Green Screen. They build him a huge set like that. It’s absolutely incredible.

I was also reminded this morning that people are talking about radio for Like Crazy and not supporting the song — and I just keep thinking that they did exact rollout for Butter, Dynamite, and Permission to Dance. They released Like Crazy. It had both a Korean version and English version. (Obviously that wasn’t the case for the English BTS songs.) They released two additional remixes. Then they kept releasing, like, alternate cover versions — alternate covers of the main remix, alternate cover the other remix. They were trying to maximize the direct-to-consumer store and exact same way they had tried to maximize it with Dynamite and Butter and Permission to Dance.

The way you were buying Like Crazy was the same process I took on Dynamite. They did the exact same playbook. So the fact that they were unable to get the kind of radio play they wanted or maybe they weren��t prioritizing radio because they knew that they were gonna have a better chance at direct to consumer sales... Maybe they didn’t want to fight radio. Maybe Geffen was like “We don’t have the right ‘Ins’ yet!” — I’m not sure, but the fact that they got completely screwed over by Billboard doesn’t mean that they weren’t actually rolling it out in that way, because as soon as they started doing the whole alternate cover thing, I was like: “Well, they clearly want us to try to go for number one!” You know, “They clearly think that they are going to be able to get number one on the hot 100 and we’re gonna use these sales to do that!” And clearly that’s all changed now.

They keep changing the rules on us, so — with JK, they’re obviously trying to, you know, use whatever tools they have available to them at this point.

Finally, when it comes to restocking the digital single CD. There are still albums available in the store. So why would they manufacture and ship more (likely thrown away) plastic that’s just for one song, when those CD singles only serve to raise sales for the charts? All of the other member’s CD singles are out of stock except The Astronaut, which they treated more like a proper album a bit (kinda like the Butter CD releases). Because they still have both versions of his full albums in stock, so if I were Hybe, I’d be like “No,you need to buy the album, we still have albums, we’re not going to sell you a single song when you can buy the album!” That makes more sense to me. The albums cost more.

TL:DR, haha — so I feel like this narrative around Jimin’s release has been ramped up because, from my professional opinion, he’s had the most expensive release so far (by far) and if we want to compare him to, say, Beyoncé — well she owns her own production company (Parkwood Entertainment), so she can funnel her own money into a Visual Album, I don’t know if Jimin has considered that at this point in his career, but in the future, he might!

((Not including costs for Suga’s tour because that’s a whole other thing, and the tour probably made money I would expect to balance out the cost of the tour itself))

Anonymous Insider

This isn’t to say that the other things, the part where he didn’t get the cake celebration, or the posts, the issues with the linking and this general feeling that Jimin was short-changed in these things isn’t valid and understandable. I think Hybe relied too much on D2C sales and I don’t think they leveraged their might as much as could have for JM. They could have risked more for him.

{This is an end of Anonymous Insider’s messages to me. They noted that they are an intermediate non-native Korean speaker so please excuse any translation errors. They translated things themselves using Naver tools that aligned with the video subtitles.}

So, listen, I still don’t think Like Crazy was sent/promoted to radio (which was a mistake and still is a mistake) and I am furious at the shady articles and lack of celebration for Jimin…

But after reading the way the members approach their work in the Beyond the Story book and now hearing from someone who produces these works for a living, I have to wonder if the company was doing everything they knew how to do for Jimin, but the second it didn’t work out because of the western music industry culling streams and sales, they pulled back all their resources and pivoted for Yoongi and JK. (I also wonder if leadership shut up about it all due to liability issues, or not to cause bad blood with the music industry for future releases.)

Again, I’ll never forgive the lack of celebration and the split streams (not without a great explanation), but at least now I think there’s a good chance no one was actively trying to sabotage Jimin on purpose. They seemed to have wanted that #1 and then it all went to shit because Billboard and radio want to get paid. Maybe leadership decided not to put any more resources into Face but instead pivot for all the future music coming out (including PJM2.)

Perhaps I'm a cockeyed optimist. I’m just hoping like hell they never engage in payola. I want all our boys to win, but I want us to win fairly. And even if everyone cannot have the same investment every time on every project, I hope when they come back together in 2025 that everyone feels good about their solo works and each other. This is my prayer. Love, Roo

#jimin #jungkook #jikook #bts #face by jimin #set me free pt 2 #like crazy by jimin

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gothamnewsnetwork-official · 1 month

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Alfred Pennyworth - Not Quite Human?

In Gotham City the name ‘Wayne’ holds a certain weight, akin to modern royalty; the Wayne family are the end-all-be-all of Gotham. And with that power comes a level of fame, not just for them but for their associates.

With fame comes rumours and delusions, such as the belief of many Gothamites that Bruce Wayne’s ( @officialbruciewayne ) (see related articles) second eldest son, Jason Todd-Harper ( @jason-peter-todd-harper ) (see related articles), is dead.

This is not, however, what we will be dissecting and discussing today. Rather, we will be turning our eyes to another member of the Wayne’s extended family (see related articles), Alfred Pennyworth ( @alfiethaddeuscranepennyworth ) (see related posts); the Wayne Family’s butler.

It was brought to our attention by an anonymous source earlier this evening that Mr. Pennyworth may not be as entirely the kind grandfather figure that we know him to be. Our source had recently gained access to the private files of Martha and Thomas Wayne (see related articles) when they started noticing certain discrepancies in Mr. Pennyworth’s employment files.

These discrepancies included, though are not limited to, his age, physical description, background, and family, each varying considerably depending on which documents you are looking at. It’s a wonder how any of these went unflagged by the IRS (see related articles) when the Wayne’s were filing their employment rebates (see related articles).

On top of this, we have been able to find multiple interviews with the late Wayne’s in which they speak of Mr. Pennyworth, who they were quite close with despite being his employers, and refer to him as being ‘willowy’ with auburn hair, a distinctive south whale’s accent, and a scar along his jaw. Later on, once the current Mr. Wayne was born (see related articles), articles begin to refer to him as being more portly with close-cropped black hair and a London accent.

Now, as we are all aware, body types change with age and circumstance, as at this time Mr. Pennyworth would have finally retired from his position as an MI6 (see related articles), and hair can be died on a whim. What is not so easy to change is one’s accent and one’s skin. Mr. Pennyworth has little reason to fake an accent, and there is no evidence of him covering any scars.

On top of this, Mr. Pennyworth has not seemed to age a day in nearly 3 decades. While this could in part be due to the runoff of the many Lazarus Pits (see related articles) under Gotham City in the Gotham Water Supply (see related articles), it could not have had this much of an effect on Mr. Pennyworth’s body without him directly bathing in it.

On top of this, it is unclear his exact age in any approximation, as some of his employment records date his birth to be as far back as 1923, with others placing it as recently as 1960. When questioned, other former members of the Wayne house staff stated that they simply ‘had never thought to ask’ or ‘couldn’t remember’.

When asked about his appearance the oldest members of the staff would state that he ‘reminded them a bit of Indiana Jones, nothing like a butler’, lining up with the late Wayne’s testimonies, whereas newer members of the staff would say he looks as he does now. There seems to be no period of shift between answers, all falling into the former or latter categories, something this journalist finds to be quite remarkable given the extreme shift.

There are two leading theories on this, and they are as follows -

Either Alfred Pennyworth is a human made immortal (see related articles) by some unknown force, or he is one of the 12 eldritch constructs (see related articles) of Gotham City.

While it is near impossible to prove either, we would simply like to inform the public of these theories as it may pit a rather tragic spin on the relationship between Mr. Pennyworth and the Waynes.

Let us know your thoughts on the topic (here)

Gotham Reports is certified in unbiased, fair, and reliable reporting

See the posts that inspired this (here)

#gotham reports #gotham city #wayne enterprises #gotham news network #wayne entertainment #gotham news #gotham report #gnn #bruce wayne #batman #alfred pennyworth #thomas and martha wayne

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whinlatter · 2 months

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beasts | from the postbag 🦉

it is a source of great delight, great gratitude and great guilt that i have an inbox full of juicy questions i haven't answered. reckon it's about time i got around to answering some of them! this is a bumper post with lots to answer and plenty to rummage around in, so if you have sent me a question i hope you will find it answered in here! (if i haven't replied, please know that i have treasured/been tickled by every one and will never not be pleased as punch that people reach out to say hi and chat about stuff i put out into the world). alright. to business!

it’s a fair question anon, and the answer is at least partly as you suggest: neville and seamus are loyal to ginny (dean, ofc, wasn’t there). in c.12 harry talks about having spoken with neville about it, and though he tells ginny about it, he also reassures her neville didn’t spill her secrets - harry doesn’t like people talking about him behind his back, and he’s right to assume ginny wouldn’t either. (i mean, i also think waiting for someone to be ready to talk about something is a basic mark of respect for a loved one - and learning to be patient and not demanding information from people is a skill a certain mr potter could do with learning). but, as i hope c.14 gestured towards and as the flashback chapters will unpack, ginny also had a very specific war that was particular to her and who she was vis-à-vis harry and the order. neville and (to a lesser extent) seamus know some of it, but they don’t know the whole picture. hope this helps!

i live to gag! (thank u anon!)

i played with writing ginny having different emotional reactions in the final scene of c.14, but in the end decided i liked having her quiet, resigned to it, like she knew this was coming (they’ll all know soon, as she tells herself throughout this chapter). for someone who is often kicking off and raging at people bearing bad news, it’s a lot of fun to write ginny as someone with the wind knocked out from her every now and then.

i won’t spoil this one, anon, but i will say that i think ginny understands harry, his good intentions, and the reasons for his blindspots. they’ve got chats to have for sure. but will she be throwing hands imminently? i would not bet on it.

it was little women! the same book hermione's reading in chapter 3. the granger girlies love a classic. they prefer the winona ryder adaptation but hermione takes the family to see the greta gerwig version and bawls and ron has to mop her up in the richmond everyman cinema.

to these lovely anons and the others i am keeping close to my chest - i am reaching into the screen and tenderly stroking your rosy little cheek. thank you for waiting for next bits of my fic !!!

on harry's characterisation - harry is a cranky crabby little grouch with a temper and a good sulk in him. he also is not beating the softie/sentimental allegations and will always be a sweetpea when it comes to those with good vibes and freckles in spades. and we should not forget it!

anon, i don’t know what you’re like as a host, but if two horny teenage houseguests decided to use my hut for a spot of snogging and heavy petting i’d be putting my foot down and setting the skrewts on them.

more seriously - there are lots of reasons, and most are boring. some are just ‘plot’. these are two characters who are not just physically removed from one another, but having to clock their emotional distance from each other, or at least the distance in their experiences of war and how that has changed them. having them physically distant and trying to find their way back to each other through new ways of communicating is a part of this story. it would be a much much more boring story if harry and ginny could see each other every week. i love a hinny hangout as much as the next person. but the story wouldn’t work if they had endless access to each other. and this is where the other reasons come into play - story conventions, or the rules put in place by canon, where characters beyond hogwarts very rarely set foot on hogwarts’ grounds without serious reason, and the school behaves pretty much like every other english boarding school, which is strictly controlling visitor time and not just letting people rock up and hang out with the students whenever they feel like it.

you best believe michael A&R corner will be handing out the ravenclaw lads’ mixtapes outside the courtroom, anon!

this is definitely an agree-to-disagree on this one, anon. i think, if there were no post-war justice, no trials, no public reckoning, no need to immediate need to clear snape’s name, then maybe. but i think harry would get one whiff of death eaters trying to blame their crimes on old sev and say, not on my watch. he’s literally the only person who can clear snape’s name posthumously. do i think he felt weird about it all? absolutely. but i think he would do as he does in ootp re clearing his own name and make it his business to get the truth out. i don't know if you've noticed but that young man is really rather righteous. he also couldn't wait to tell voldemort snape was actually a goodie. he was chomping at the bit, he was salivating. he had the goss and he could not wait to spread it. he's just like me fr!

thank you sm anon! i have talked a little bit about my view of hermione and ginny's relationship here (forgive the link to an old thing, i am terrible for repeating myself), but i think their relationship as you see it in beasts is my way of trying to write the middle ground between the two views of their friendship often doing the rounds in fandom - eg. they're absolute soulmate besties who totally get each other all the time vs they're basically not friends at all. i am just a bit of a sucker for hard won female friendships earned by girls growing up and getting a grip. now - if harry and ginny had an argument, i imagine ginny would be right, and hermione is always on the sign of reason. but even if ginny wasn't right, i reckon hermione would have a quiet word with her about it, but still make sure she told harry off to, just because it's good to never let the men in your life know peace.

i yelped! you dreamed of my fic! that's bonkers and brilliant in equal measure. look if chapter 15 gets revealed to you in a dream and it's better than in the google doc i'll be soooo fuckin pissed.

#beasts #spoiler alert it's just 900 messages that say 'when the fuck will your protagonist name the sodding pet you gave her eleven chapters ago'#which is fair #asked and answered #authors note

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aces-and-angels · 3 months

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PSA: CONTACT GFM ON BEHALF OF IMAN, OMAR, AND RANIA- a reference guide

please be informed when you are speaking with gfm in regards to these three campaigns detailed here.

with my newfound knowledge- i effectively scared this representative off of my chatroom b/c they could not give me an adequate answer to any of my fair and reasonable questions. (they abruptly ended our conversation). they will not disclose anything else to me as i am not connected to these campaigns/did not personally donate to any of them. so i need ANYONE who donated to omar, rania, and/or iman to speak up NOW. this is a template free to use as a reference for the type of questioning you need to have below the cut:

PLEASE MAKE CONTACT WITH GFM HERE -> i cannot emphasize how important it is that you speak on these issues, ESP. if you donated (perhaps yall will be able to learn more than i did). even if you are still seeing gfm's as FULLY OPERATIONAL- they may be at risk of being suspended without your knowledge

@rubashabansblog please share this with your followers when you get the chance so they can speak on behalf of these families- thank you 🖤

tagging for reach: @appsa @riding-with-the-wild-hunt @mangocheesecakes @malcriada

GFM REPRESENTATIVE: Hi

GFM REPRESENTATIVE: Please give me some time while I check the details

YOU: Of course!

GFM REPRESENTATIVE: Thank you for your patience

GFM REPRESENTATIVE: Would you like to know the above mentioned three fundraisers status?

YOU: Yes please I am a bit confused on their status because I had spoken with another rep yesterday but have learned some more info that conflicts with what I was told

GFM REPRESENTATIVE: I am afraid that we are not able to inform anything about the fundraiser

GFM REPRESENTATIVE: I request, you can contact the organizers for that

GFM REPRESENTATIVE: If you’d like to get in touch with the organizer, just select the “Contact” button as seen here (https://gofundme.com/g/ContactCO.jpg).

YOU: All of the organizers are currently in a war zone and cannot be reached easily. I am unable to maintain a stable enough connection between me and them and require multiple people to pass along their messages

YOU: That is why I am speaking on their behalf

YOU: I understand that the gfm vetting process requires a lot of information that must be disclosed between you and the organizers but I believe there might be a potential barrier when passing along this info to them because gfm does not have these services available in Arabic

YOU: This information may also be difficult to access simply due to poor wifi connection/lack of data

GFM REPRESENTATIVE: I can understand that, however, for security reason, I am not able to inform you further details

YOU: So I only wish to know if they are still being given a chance to remediate their accounts. Has the refund process started for these campaigns? Would you be able to disclose anything if the person asking had donated to any of the three campaigns?

GFM REPRESENTATIVE: I am afraid that we are not able to inform you that

GFM REPRESENTATIVE: Apologies for the trouble here.

GFM REPRESENTATIVE: Is there anything else I can assist you with today?

YOU: I understand. Can you please inform me if I have the correct understanding for your process of review for these accounts? From what I've gathered- accounts under review are sent a unique link to chat with your reps to verify IDs, proof of money transfer, and accurate spending reports. Is that accurate?

YOU: I am speaking generally in regards to your process

GFM REPRESENTATIVE: I am sorry, I am not able to inform you all these

YOU: Can I ask if accounts currently under review are still accessible to the public (i.e. say I find a working link to a fundraiser and am unaware of any potential issues -> would I hypothetically be able to donate to their campaign)

YOU: Or is there an easy way to determine if there is an issue from an outside perspective that an account may be at risk (i.e. some sort of highlighted message or flag that appears on my end of things as a potential donor)

GFM REPRESENTATIVE: I can only inform you that you can donate to those fundraisers

YOU: I'm assuming you cannot disclose if this money is successfully being transfered for these accounts as well- but may I ask for a general range of time gfm organizers have to remediate their accounts?

GFM REPRESENTATIVE: Yes, you are correct

YOU: I have a contact informing me that individuals under review are given a deadline to respond before accounts are terminated and the refund process begins

YOU: Can you inform me what the emails for those refunds would look like/how they are worded

GFM REPRESENTATIVE: I am very sorry that I am not able to

YOU: Okay so hypothetically speaking I wouldn't know that a family has lost thousands of dollars all at once until I receive a notification from your team that the campaign has been suspended for undisclosed reasons via my email stating a refund has been issued

YOU: Between the three links I previously provided over $36K has potentially been lost so I would like to be informed as a donor how I am to be made aware of these issues should they arise

GFM REPRESENTATIVE: I am very sorry that I am not able to inform you anything regarding the fundraisers as you are not connected to those fundraisers

YOU: If someone were to speak to you in regards to these three campaigns that HAD donated to them- would you then be allowed to discuss this matter

YOU: I am speaking on behalf of them that none of them wish to be issued a refund for money that was meant to be put into the hands of families who are in desperate need of financial aid

GFM REPRESENTATIVE: I can understand that, however, I do not have any option to inform you the details

GFM REPRESENTATIVE: We can go ahead and close this chat. Please don't hesitate to write back in if you have any additional questions.

GFM REPRESENTATIVE: Thanks and take care

#not choices #psa #signal boost #AND I MEAN BOOST GANG #i am told that the refunds havent been issued by a moot who has donated so there is still a chance to halt their process and return the $#🍉#CONTINUE TO PUSH EVEN IF THEY SAY THEY CANNOT DISCLOSE INFO #the links to the gfm are included in the summary post #if yall have any questions about how to make contact pls shoot me a message id be happy to help you

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redflagshipwriter · 7 months

Text

Reassembly 3

ch1 ch2

Masterpost

Peter pushed his bangs back for the billionth time. They immediately fell back in front of his eyes as he hunched over the library computer. He'd spent all day trying to get his bearings in this universe. Eventually, his stomach had gotten attention. Even with the stuff from the hotel buffet, he was so hungry it was distracting.

That had made him realize that what he needed most was money. He needed access to a steady stream of money. When he left here he could try to make the best decision possible about the little bit of cash he had, sure. But it wouldn't last long.

He had the spiteful fantasy of taking the money he needed from the LOA company that had been funding …whatever they'd done to him. An all-expenses paid kidnapping was only fair.

But it was only a thought. Whoever they were, they were dangerous. He shouldn't provoke them or give them any clues about him. Whatever experiments they'd been doing with him must have been expensive. They probably wanted him back. He needed to know more before he risked getting their attention.

Instead, Peter started up a resume. He put his real name at the top and then stared at it in indecision. He swallowed.

Was that a good idea? He… he didn't exist here, so it seemed fine. But maybe he should use a fake name?

Peter strained to think of a reason to use a fake name now that he knew he didn't exist here. How could those people possibly know his name? He definitely hadn't told them. It was probably smarter to be cautious, but it was his name. The idea of losing it made him feel like throwing up.

"If I think of a reason I shouldn't use it, I can change that." Peter muttered to himself quietly enough that no one seemed to notice. He took a few minutes to search around for high schools in the area. It was so weird that Midtown didn't exist here. He felt like a fraud as he entered the information for the school he thought would have been his school district. He double checked the year (and it was so weird that it was 5 years in the past here) and back dated his graduation 3 years. Then he grimaced and made it 5 years.

No way would anyone who saw his face believe that. But he'd need to pretend to have a university degree to get this kind of work, so it couldn't be helped.

'People lie on their resumes all the time,' Peter told himself. He still felt like crap about it. He still… he still hadn't graduated high school, and he probably never would.

It was fine. He knew enough that he was never going to stick out as less educated than a high school graduate.

'I'll get the college degree, though. If I really am here for a long time, I need an education.'

Peter deliberately picked an innocuous university to claim for his fake Bachelors in Computer Science. It took a while to find a place with a sufficiently not-prestigious program but enough graduates for him to have been lost in the crowd. He'd have to redo the resume with the real degree later.

Oh. Wait. Peter went back up and deleted his name. That was his reason to use a fake name for this work.

He was going to get a real degree in his own name. This resume was just to make some money, not to establish an identity. He watched the cursor blink for a while, trying to think of a name. It needed to be something that he could remember. Ned Leeds? It would make him too sad. Same for Tony Stark. But…

Peter slowly typed out James Barnes and huffed a laugh through his nose.

He'd recently escaped unethical scientists and found himself lost in a new world where he had no friends or family. It seemed appropriate.

"Hey," grumbled the mental Bucky Barnes that Peter's subconscious had apparently generated for some reason. "You little shit."

That was fine. Peter ignored the rising evidence of a mental breakdown and finished falsifying a resume. He used it to apply for several contract jobs in web design. He took a deep breath to counteract the urge to make a joke with someone, anyone, about how it was funny for Spiderman to get into web design.

Man. He was lonely.

There was no point in hanging around the library longer. The sun had set and it was close to closing time, 6:00 pm. He couldn't check anything out, not without an ID, and he wasn't going to get any emails back immediately.

Peter shuffled out and walked at random down the street. The sound of cars and pedestrians and crosswalks soothed his hindbrain.

He used the time to think. To plan.

He needed to refresh what he knew. The library would be a great start. He'd come early tomorrow and read some computer science books. That aside, he also needed to start working on a long term identity and getting into university.

'I'm going to want a scholarship. If I can do that, I won't have to work too much.'

The trouble with that was that Peter couldn't go to any random school. He needed to be somewhere with a significant budget for the sciences. If he was going to get home, he needed access to some serious technology.

'That's a big ask. Why would a prestigious school offer full scholarships?'

He felt defeated before he even started. But it was worth asking. That was the kind of question that the librarians wouldn't be suspicious of at all. He was actually in the right age group to look into college admissions.

'Okay. I need an ID. Birth certificate? That's the first ID anyone gets.'

Well. Time to see if the city administration buildings were where he remembered. How hard could it be to break in, print a birth certificate, and backdate and file it? He was Spiderman.

…And Spiderman really shouldn't be using his super powers for crime. What would Aunt May think? Peter grimaced and rubbed at his face with both hands.

Was it really that bad? 'I'm not stealing anything or hurting anyone,' he defended himself. 'I'm doing what I need in order to survive.'

The part that he felt worst about was lying about his education. But he had the skillset and qualifications, he just couldn't explain his internship to a genius that didn't exist here and extracurriculars at a school this universe didn't have.

'That's barely even a crime,' Peter thought. 'Breaking and entering isn't great, but I'm just fixing my own paperwork. I really was born. So it's not a fake ID.'

With that logic ironed out, Peter made his way to the vital records office. The building looked like he remembered, thankfully.

So. He shoved his hands deeper into his pockets and walked around the block to see the building from all sides.

It didn't exactly look super secure. It was an old brick faced building with a lonely camera angled down the stairs of the main entry. There was a metal detector visible from outside, and he knew from experience that there were maybe 3 security officers on the first floor.

'That's easy to get around if I enter from a higher floor. They'll probably have a security team in at night but they won't expect that. If they do a walk through, I'll hear them coming up the stairs or elevator.'

It seemed doable. Sort of.

'I need to know what birth certificates from my birth year looked like, I guess? And if the ones from today look the same. Or maybe I don't need to worry about it, as long as I enter my information digitally. I doubt they keep a paper copy for every birth. The building isn't even big enough. And you can get a copy printed whenever you need one, so… it being new-looking shouldn't be a problem.'

Okay. Alright, he could do this. He could do some paperwork.

It wasn't nearly late enough for that kind of crime, though. Peter shoved his hands in his pockets and decided to spend a little of his money on food.

Long term, getting pre-made food with limited finances was a terrible decision. He knew he should be getting like, beans and rice. But for now he went into a bodega and got the cheapest thing that he thought would make a dent in his hunger– a microwave burrito and a cola. Calories were good, right? He wolfed it down outside the store and ducked back in to throw away the trash immediately.

It still wasn't late enough.

He walked around the city for hours, waiting for an idea to hit him. There had to be a great solution. If he could only think of it, there was going to be something that he could do that would fix all his problems. His throat was hot and tight and his eyes were burning. He didn't cry.

God, he was tired. He eventually gave up. He was so tired and he had no idea where he was going to sleep but he really needed to because he was exhausted -

"Stop. Stop spiraling," he told himself. He sniffled. Aw, no, he wasn't catching a cold, was he? Crap. He hoped not.

He didn't know what time it was, but it felt late enough. He made his way back to the vital statistics office to record his own birth.

Weirdly for a plan devised by Peter, it went smoothly. He entered from a 4th floor window without setting off any alarms. He found and powered on a computer in the right office (thanks for the labels!) and looked up a few birth certificates before he felt confident. He entered his data into the system and printed a copy before powering everything down.

He was out the window within ten minutes of entering the building.

Okay. That was step one. Birth certificate accomplished. "Congratulations, it's a boy," Peter muttered to himself. He patted at the bag to hear the reassuring crinkle of paper inside. Okay, that was great! It was progress. He felt better already.

What was next?

…A driver's license. No one actually went around with a copy of their birth certificate to show when someone asked for ID. He needed a driver's license.

He walked to the DMV and pulled off basically the same heist. The nerve wracking part was turning on the lights to take the photo. His stomach twisted and he was absolutely certain that someone was going to come and see why the lights were on.

No one came. He backdated his license to the appropriate year and printed one typed up information for James Tony Barnes, saying that he was 22. Then he altered the birth year back once more to say he was almost 18.

Nobody in their right mind was going to look at his 15-year-old face and think he was 22. They'd just think he had a fake license. Which he did, so he needed them to think the fake license was real. He let out a deep breath and victoriously hit print.

It returned an error message.

…It wouldn’t print. Why?

He scanned until he found the field he’d messed up. Peter stared at it.

It was the social security number. He’d typed up his real one out of force of habit. It had been flagged as a mistake because it already belonged to someone in the system.

Caught by a morbid curiosity, he looked up who it belonged to. It was a girl, actually, younger than him.

He wanted to cry. It was such a silly thing to cry over! He wasn’t emotionally attached to his social security number– it was just a string of data. But he sniffled. He wiped something away from his eyes that he didn’t think about. Don’t think about it. He wasn’t in a safe place to think about it yet.

It took a few minutes to calm himself. He erased everything he’d done, turned off the computer, and left the way that he’d come.

He couldn’t get the license yet. He needed to get a social security number first. That probably meant that he needed to do some research. Did the office of vital statistics issue them? It didn’t seem right, since each state had to be coordinated. Surely there was some kind of national office that handled all of it.

For lack of anything else to do, his feet took him back to the library. He was so tired that his eyes were aching.

Peter looked at the opening hours. He licked his teeth. He thought about it.

It opened at 10am. It was.. it was…

He decided to risk powering on the evil janitor's phone. It was 11 pm. That was plenty of time for him to sneak a nap on the couch in the quiet space.

"I'm not hurting anyone," Peter said aloud. It was very quiet. He spidered his way up the back wall of the library, pried open a window, and guiltily stretched out on one of the sofas. He set an alarm for 8am. That was definitely earlier than staff would come in, right? Pretty sure.

He slept like the dead. But specifically, like the restless dead- his spider sense woke him up. Peter had no idea what time it was or why he was awake. He blindly grabbed his bag and the phone and leapt back out the window. He was shutting it when the light turned on inside.

He blinked blearily at the sunlight. He checked the phone.

7:21 am. Wow. Okay. Library workers were diligent. Maybe they had to dust all the books or something. He powered the phone off, and wondered how long the battery would last. He didn't have the charger for it.

Well. It seemed like a good time to go to a different hotel from yesterday and check out the buffet.

The hotel he went to had a less exciting buffet. There were a couple kinds of sliced bread and packets of margarine and jelly, as well as coffee, water, milk, and two types of juice. Still, it was free food, so he smiled at the clerk like he belonged there. This time he took a lot less food. Like, a lot less. He didn't want to clear out too much of their stuff.

Two pieces of jellied toast, a water, an orange juice and a coffee later (blegh, it was burnt), Peter was back outside and at loose ends.

He didn't want to turn the phone on to check the time. He guessed it was maybe around 8am. He had a couple hours until the library opened up again.

Well. He sniffled his clothes experimentally.

He should work on that. This outfit wasn't smelly yet, but it would get there. He needed a change of clothes.

He took everything he owned to a rooftop and spread out his work kit. That was a rather grand way to say "three pilfered sewing kits."

The scissors that came with them were absolutely tiny. Peter picked one up and marveled at it. It wasn't going to cut fabric, no way. It would cut thread and that was it.

But woven fabric always tore along the seam line, right? Peter took out his dumpster shirts and found the one with the worst damage- the red shirt. He picked a spot and tore with his hands.

It tore a straight line.

"Yessss," he cheered. He muscled through the seam and then went back to make another tear a little bit above the other one, so that he was basically holding a crop top, a bottom part, and a two inch strip from the middle that was unusable because the scissor cut had been jagged. He wound that up and put it in his bag because he didn't know what else to do with it.

Now he felt nostalgic, so he took out the blue shirt and did the same thing. The cut hadn't been in exactly the same spot, so the shirt with the blue top and red bottom strip was going to be a little longer than the other shirt. But that was fine, right?

He pinned the majority red shirt together using the pins from all 3 packages and painstakingly threaded a needle with the dark blue thread. Then he got to work.

It wasn't hard, honestly. It was more meditative than anything else. He was mostly done when he had the feeling he was being watched. Peter lifted his head and looked down. Then around. Finally, he looked up. "You fly," he said, impressed. "That's cool."

The flying teenager cocked his head at Peter and floated down. It was- honestly, it was kinda creepy and uncanny. Flying shouldn't be silent. There should be, like- an engine running or wings flapping.

He tried to keep the unease off his face. This wasn't his universe. He'd look like a weirdo if he acted surprised about it. He tried to look normal.

"What are you doing?" The guy asked.

Cool, he must be pulling it off.

Peter lifted his sewing project and turned it to show off the seam where red met blue in a neat line. "Customizing my wardrobe," he said, like a freaking dork would. If he said it confidently enough it would sound cooler, right? He eyed up the other teenager. He had spikes on the shoulders of his leather jacket. "I guess you do that too. You uh…. You do that yourself?"

The guy touched the studs on his leather jacket self consciously. "No, I bought it this way." He leaned in. "I didn't know you could do that." He seemed impressed.

Peter flushed, discomfited as he tied off the knit and cut his needle free. This guy was way too cool looking to talk to Peter like that. "Yeah, you can do anything to your stuff," he said. Wow, so eloquent. He cleared his throat and tried to look busy turning the shirt inside out to show how it looked. Luckily it had turned out well. "I like your piercings." And the fade was cool too. Wow, no one at Midtown looked like that. Even their jocks were actually nerds. And this guy was a jock for real. He was huge and handsome.

The guy got real close, looking at Peter's bi-colored shirt.

Peter squirmed. The scrutiny was enough to make him feel paranoid about it being in Spiderman's colors. But this guy didn't know about him. Right? No way, there was no way. He stuffed it in his bag and tried not to look sweaty and suspicious. No underage vigilantes here. Just two normal guys on a 35th story rooftop.

"Teach me."

His head flew up at that imperious demand. "Teach you what exactly?" Peter was too surprised to moderate his tone. It came out too high, too nerdy. "Like- sewing in general, or- your jacket? Do you wanna customize your jacket more?" Oh, man, he was nervous enough that he couldn't speak straight. So embarrassing. Peter forced himself to smile and waited for the reaction with a cringe. This felt like the moment before he got put in a locker.

Man, this dude had intense blue eyes. And he was holding so still. Was he even breathing? "I want more metal in my jacket," he decided. "And- could we make part of it mesh?"

Peter was mostly just glad the guy had started breathing again.

'Mixing leather and mesh doesn't seem structurally sound. Plus, isn't leather meant to be kind of protective?'

…"If you pay for supplies, we can try," Peter said, because this might as well happen, and now he knew someone. Now he knew a normal human being from this universe who he could lean on for cues. He latched on- metaphorically. In reality, he just started packing up his supplies and hoped the guy didn't recognize them as hotel kits. Peter was used to the mortification of being poor, but this was a bit much even for him.

"Yeah, I have Luther's credit card." The guy whipped one out of nowhere and flipped it between his fingers at a dizzying pace. He slapped on a lazy grin and watched Peter intently as he did his weird little dexterity trick.

That was what broke his nerves. That? That was the kind of thing that Ned did in his practical magic phase.

'Is he trying to be cool?' Peter wondered, incredulous. 'He's trying way too hard. He's not actually that cool. I mean, he's definitely cooler than me, but it's not as bad as I thought.'

Awesome. Peter could work with that. He relaxed tremendously. He was just gonna think of this guy as a really muscular Ned. He was pretty sure that Ned would still hang out with Peter even if he'd gotten that tall and strong after puberty, so it was probably a fair comparison.

"That's great," he said, pretending he knew who Luther was. The guy's stepdad or something, probably. Why else would he have a credit card from someone he called by their name? "You wanna go now?" He paused. "I'm Peter, by the way."

The other boy's hand was weirdly warm and firm when he reached out for a handshake (what? Teenagers shake hands here?. That was so uncool and he'd never have guessed it). "Kon." He flashed his perfect teeth again. "Yeah, let's go. Wanna walk or fly?"

Peter shrugged. "Whichever is cool," he said. He hoped Kon didn't expect him to be able to fly. If he needed to he could like, parkour, and pretend that was just his preference.

"Flying it is!" Peter yelped and just barely aborted a dodge as Kon cheerfully grabbed him in a bridal carry and swooped out into the open air.

Kon and Peter, both wrong at the arts and crafts store: "I have successfully befriended a normal guy in my age group. I can copy him surreptitiously to learn to blend in better, as long as he doesn't learn that I'm not a cool guy like him."

#marvel dc crossover #peter parker #kon el superboy #red reassembly

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gemmahale · 1 month

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So I've temporarily paused my queue. It's just me, shouting into the void again. (The queue will maybe come back - there's some 800 some odd posts in there.) Just as an FYI.

I've been stuck in my head since...my work trip last weekend? Which, tbf, 12 hours of windshield time and a day of interacting with people is a fair bit.

(I'm cutting this because y'all don't need my yapping, but I need it off my chest. Go get some water or a beverage of choice instead.)

TW: mental health discussion. I am safe, I am not going to do anything brash.

But Monday I came back to an email from my boss - apparently two clients had stopped in to speak with him because I hadn't answered their calls (all are within the last two-ish weeks, maybe more?).

A huge part of my job is that timely client call-back. And one place that I consistently struggle in. We've had this discussion going on for 6+ mo now on how critical this call-back part is. The whole thing of what we do is timely, scientifically backed information.

I'm shit at calling back. I hate doing it. I hate troubleshooting people's plant problems. It just seems so...inconsequential. People are stressing about a dead spot in their yard (that's probably over watered and over fertilized and a sterile environment) and it's just...get some perspective, y'know?

I don't know. I love this job. I love the impact I could have. Get me talking about how people deserve healthy ecosystems and food access and such and I'm going a mile a minute.

But I'm paralyzed when it comes to solving these stupid "inconsequential" problems.

I have a newsletter I've been talking about sending out since FEBURARY. It's now AUGUST. It's unsent. I just hit a wall every time I sit down to set it up.

Same thing with the volunteer program I manage. The workshops I'm working on. All of it. Wall against wall against wall and I'm scrolling tumblr for the 43rd time that day.

And I don't know what to do. I'm scared. That's what it is. I'm Scared I'll give bad information and something will get killed and it'll be my fault.

(yes that's capital S scared.)

I don't know what I'm going to say tomorrow in our meeting. I know I'm on thin ice. I'm going into my 3rd year of this. I shouldn't be struggling like this. My RSD is so fuckin' bad that it's locking me up and shutting me down.

Part of me wants to be fired. Just "this isn't a good fit" and out the door. Proof that I'm not cut out for this job. Because all I have succeeded in doing is failing my colleagues, my peers and the clientele that I interact with.

I'm self-sabotaging myself and I don't know how to not to.

I love the opportunities this job has. But I'm terrified of failure to the point of breakdown. Self-fulfilling prophecy and all that, right?

It's imposter syndrome, self-sabotage, other terms I've forgotten. having a name for it doesn't help any - just reinforces that I'm doing it to myself. And that's what hurts the most.

I haven't told anyone I'm struggling. It's hard to reach out. Kallen's been dealing with nightmares and job bullshit and high pain days (and his listening is problem solving/therapist-ing, which isn't what I want or need). My friends are all bogged down with their lives - unemployment, moving, divorces, childcare, and I'm not going to burden them with this gunk.

The irony to this is that I just told a friend to lean on me - because that's what friends do when they're in tight spots. Lean on each other, support each other.

But really it just means: Justify that I'm worth being here/being friends with me by making me useful to you.

God I wish I didn't have all this brain goop. I wish I could just scoop it out and poke at it under a microscope and dissect what happened to make me like this.

Gemma find a therapist. <- Whole different conversation. There's a dearth of mental health providers out here. I quit looking in 2021 when I called 5 places and they all said they were not taking on more clients and the one I tried we didn't vibe with each other. Fuck being a (mostly closeted) queer woman in small-town America.

#gemma rambles #Gemma works #gemma vents #I don't fucking know how to tag this shit I'm sorry #vent post #tw mental health #tw depression #Sorry I just needed this off my chest #It's been a very long week of intrusive thoughts and self-disdain

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kesbeacon · 2 months

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Reading your sock post, I realized you might just be the person to ask a question that a friend posted on FB: a knitting worldbuilding question!

In A Tale of Two Cities, Madame DeFarge knits the names of targets for the guillotine into her work. What was her coding scheme? The friend speculated that Dickens had met Charles Babbage at some point and was doing something with binary. After poking around a bit on the internet, I decided Dickens made it up, not knowing anything about knitting.

I did find schemes for encoding messages in two dimensions, possibly using colors. But such a scheme seems unlikely to encompass 26 letters and 5 accents in a way that can quickly encode a name (since there was a fair bit of volume to keep up with at the time).

What do you think? Is there a plausible scheme today? And would such a scheme have a chance of being available at the close of the 18th century?

So, I'm not an expert on this either! But I'll give it a go.

The first thing I remembered was that this has been done, albeit long after Dickens' day. I have seen videos and posts in which people talk about knitting as spycraft during the world wars. The challenge I then had was 'is this all just a giant game of internet telephone?'

And, my friend, this led me down a rabbit hole. I’ll get to your question in a bit, I just need to go on a detour about checking your sources. Because most of what I could find online was from sites with names like ilikeknitting500 dot com or girlbosshistory dot net (not real examples), all with the same vague story – in Belgium, the resistance would have people sitting by trainyards knitting, and they would drop a stitch for one kind of train, and purl for another, and so on and so forth. As a result, the government banned exporting knitting patterns! But they can’t even agree on what world war it was or which government banned it.

So where does this claim come from?

It took me a little while to find real articles with sources. What I eventually came away with was an Atlas Obscura article that has citations. One citation was a book I can't access by someone who, while I can't find any evidence she's a historian herself, has been endorsed by at least a couple. The link did give me an excerpt about a woman who would use her knitting to cover for tapping information about troop movements in code to her children below, who would write it instead of doing their schoolwork. In a similar vein, I could find information on people who used knitting to hide their spy work, as in the case of Phyllis Latour.

The other relevant citation was to a journal article in a (student-run, admittedly, but in some fields this isn't abnormal) peer-reviewed Open Access journal by an Jacqueline Witkowski, who is now an Associate Professor of Art, even if she wasn't then. This was the best of the bunch, because this cited a BBC Radio 4 program on the history of MI6. I thought this was going to be the end of the road for me, but then I realised you don’t need a TV licence to listen to the radio and that I do have a BBC account, so I logged in and listened to it and – bingo.

Alan Judd, a writer and ‘former soldier and diplomat’ according to Wikipedia, is the biographer of Mansfield Cumming, the original head of MI6, and he tells us about Belgian professionals recruiting little old ladies to go sit by train stations and knit, with the dropped and purled stitches. (He mentions nothing about banning sending knitting patterns.) Crucially, this is definitely during the First World War. I can’t access the book (and certainly can’t be bothered), but I would call this reasonably credible – it’s not as good as something from an actual archive, and I don’t automatically trust the BBC, but this radio series seems serious and also has the involvement of Actual MI6. So I think this is about as good as I’m going to get in a single evening.

We still don’t have the other half of the claim, the censorship. Witkowski says, “This [...] led to the Office of Censorship’s ban on posted knitting patterns in the Second World War, in case they contained coded messages.” There is a citation. But the citation is a Telegraph column by people involved in QI. QI, or Quite Interesting, is a British comedy panel show that I would place in the ‘edutainment’ category – it is an endless source of weird little facts, some of which are even true. Wikipedia has a section on mistakes and fact correction, and I can tell you from having watched the programme that it is usually correct on a surface level, but if you know anything about the relevant topic you’ll immediately start going ‘well, it’s actually more complicated than that…’

The QI column says, “During the Second World War the Office of Censorship banned people from posting knitting patterns abroad in case they contained coded messages,” and gives no sources. On historyhub.history.gov, someone has asked if there are any primary sources for this claim. Textual Reference Archives II Branch (RR2RA) replies that ‘some articles specify that this was a practice by the British government, whereas others attribute it to the United States,’ and gives the asker links to the records of the American Office of Censorship, and where they can learn more about British censorship. There are no more replies. I would hazard a guess that QI meant the Americans; UK censorship was handled by the Ministry of Information, which is common knowledge here and not something they would fuck up.

I originally was going to wash my hands of it, but then I thought… just one primary source? Just try? So I looked at a US government printout of their censorship regulations from 1943. No mention of knitting patterns, but all printed matter is banned for export to Europe, which would presumably encompass commercial knitting patterns by default.

So that’s that tangent, I wrote, thinking this was over. Because Charles Dickens died in 1870 and published ToTC in 1859, long before ANY of this happened! Also, Madame DeFarge’s code is far more sophisticated than any of this stuff. So let’s get back on track.

Your friend is not the only person to have speculated on the Babbage connection – Paul Curzon of Queen Mary University London also raises the possibility that Dickens was thinking of Babbage and Lovelace’s work –

Wait. Is that… I thought I’d escaped my tangent! But Curzon has dragged me back in! He adds an interesting note at the end of the article, though he doesn’t cite it - “In the Second World War, the United States censors held on to a letter that contained a knitting pattern so they could knit the jumper in case it did contain a message. Ultimately they banned people from posting knitting patterns overseas at all (along with playing chess by post) in case people were hiding messages in them.” I wish he’d cited it, but this is at least a real academic – a little more credible than QI! I hoped that this would be the source of the QI claim, but unfortunately I think it post-dates the QI article – it’s hard to tell. But QI could easily have got hold of that censorship decision.

YANKS SELF BACK WITH THE BIG HOOK.

Dickens was, in short, probably making an almost science-fictional prediction. He moved in the Babbage/Lovelace circle and would have known about their work. What Curzon does not say is that this is also the age of Morse code, which came into use in the 1840s, and the beginning of Boolean algebra! It’s easy to imagine him taking these ideas, along with any knitting knowledge he may have had, and coming up with the concept. Madame DeFarge is ahead of her time, but not too far ahead of Dickens's.

Now, I’m not a Dickens scholar, but I happen to be friends with someone who is and is also a knitter. So I’ve asked her if he might’ve known diddly squat about knitting, and we’ll see what she says.

…

How might it have worked? Well, knitting is versatile. You can, for instance, knit Doom. But Doom is already binary, because we have established systems of binary coding. DeFarge does not, and it wouldn’t be intuitive to convert these into names, especially before Boolean algebra. She might’ve had a Morse code-like framework. Morse code isn’t actually binary – it’s sort of trinary, because you need to space the letters. This isn’t necessarily a problem; you can use a yarnover (followed by knitting/purling two together, obv) to separate the letters, with, say, knit being dot and purl being dash. If you’re experienced, you might be able to read it as fabric, but it would be easiest to read it back in reverse as you unravel it.

Knitting this would likely be pretty quick. She can’t be using actual Morse code for the very simple reason that she pre-dates Mr Morse, and I also don’t know how actual Morse code handles French diacritics, but it took me, a person who has never done this before and doesn't understand Morse and had to make some modifications on the fly, about quarter of an hour to knit the Morse code alphabet (minus Z bc I reached the end of a row and got bored). It would be easier if you were using colours; you could have one colour for dot, one for dash, and use purl stitches to mark the ends of words. I cba to do that right now though.

In summary, clearly Madame DeFarge is an extremely adept code-maker of a kind that is… easier to have in fiction than in real life. She's ahead of her time and in some ways ahead of twentieth-century spycraft, but not implausibly ahead of Dickens's. And I’m a fucking nerd.

And @ the internet at large, generalised-you should check your fucking sources.

#history #knitting #dickens #apologies to dickens scholars lmao #code

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mortuarywriting · 5 months

Text

well hell. wip wednesday and i havent written much of anything so im just gonna share what I've got for chapter 2 i guess? poor reader is very tired and uh. exhausted to say the least.

Morbid below!

You just level a very tired look back to muttonchops, "is this the part where I'm taken out back like Ol' Yeller?" The big one tilts his head a bit, your gaze tracks the movement and you just sigh, "what? Bullets are cheap. I'm sure you have an allocated training amount for range days, I'm an easy target," at this you gesture inward, nobody would accuse you of being Small or Petite or any of that bullshit, "and it's not hard to move the brass from whatever secondary location to the range. Hell, knives are even cheaper," as you say it you know you have a goddamn preference. You don't wanna die like this of all ways but you don't exactly know how many rights you have since you are very publicly dead. Like in a perfect world you somehow get slipped back to your bedroom, you're fine, there's no bruising and you just had a wild dream. Second best you'll take a weird sleepwalking incident- mortifying in it's own way but a fun anecdote for later. You don't want to be talking about how easily they can kill you. How even if they let you off base what the hell could you do? You're entirely at their whims and that's sixteen levels of horrifying. "Don't think from the article there was enough left of me for uh, an open casket," you nervously fiddle with your hands, kinda all you could do with them, "and hell, cremation isn't exactly the hardest thing. Makes me more portable than I ever have been in life." You huff as you lean back, meeting the eyes of mutton chops and just. Matching his gaze. You know exhaustion is written in every line of your being. You just keep his gaze as long as the three of you sit quietly. You're half convinced there's some level of scent warfare you're still missing, but you can't find yourself to give half a damn. "Medical's initial assessment is back." You blink, that's not where you were expecting this to go, "okay? Can I talk with her about them or-" "You don't have scent glands. They want to do x-rays to analyze your sinuses-" "Wait aren't there laws about healthcare information privacy-" "- among other select tests, and we will make decisions upon further results." You go to jerk your hands up in exasperation, "awesome. I've been voluntold for more needlework. Joy of joys, is it a dissection or still a vivisection if I'm only legally dead?" He levels an unimpressed look at you, and you level your own right back. You can't help yourself from grumbling, "need to know just how much of my medical history gets to stay private with this bullshit." "I get access to records as your alpha-" You scoff, "I didn't vote for you." The big one shifts from foot to foot, but muttonchops continues as if you hadn't spoken up, "-assigned to your case and determining how to classify your presence on this base." Your brows furrow, "why would you need to be my assigned alpha for that, or granted my medical information. The way someone smells is no basis for a system of-" "Are you quite done," he sounds like he's at a resigned tired stage- which, fair- and the big one is looking at muttonchops… expectantly?

#rambles from the morgue #happy wip wednesday *confetti*

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whetstonefires · 1 year

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The thing about the Shazam! (Captain Marvel but they don't have the rights to call him that) movie is that overall it's pretty good? Even if I question the pacing choices made in terms of screentime breakdown for '14yo boys making mortifying life choices and humorously failing judgment calls' vs. 'character development wrt to literally anything else about this fairly large cast.'

It's hokey; it should be. It's got some decent themes and fun character bits and set up good solid hero/villain parallels to subvert.

But.

But it massively clotheslined itself with a major storytelling fuckup connected to the opening hook mystery, whose resolution is meant to be the emotional inflection point of the whole film.

Because the thing is, this movie chose to be slightly interesting in how it approached its 'family' themes. In a variation on 'family of choice' (since your foster family are in fact assigned by the government and Billy not having a choice about living with them only about trusting them is a major story element) it went for the more nuanced and kind of interestingly grimy take that the people who are actually in your life giving a shit about you matter, if you let them, and that you need to stop giving the people who failed to love you power over your happiness.

Which is not a bad premise at all! As messages for a movie about a kid being sent to a group home go, that's the most upbeat you could possibly get and still be tied to reality.

The Vasquez couple are written and played well in these terms too because they really, genuinely care, and are making so much effort, but as system graduates themselves they never had competent parenting modeled for them and god does it show.

And the mental health problems of the kids who got enough characterization to have them were similarly...realistic in a best-case-scenario sort of way.

But! Still with the but! Even though they pulled off a lot of this fairly touchy premise rather well, there's a crack in the foundation that makes the whole movie kind of collapse on a thematic level.

Because the movie (following the prologue introducing the villain's backstory) opens with a juicy emotional hook where small Billy is separated from his mother at a Christmas fair and never sees her again.

Cut to some years later, establishing status quo scene, he's a Troubled Youth rebelling against the system in an endless quest to find his mother and go home. He is committing minor felonies to get access to police information about women surnamed Batson so he can go to their houses because eventually one of them has to be his mom.

His case worker after he's picked up again refers to his mother as 'someone who clearly didn't want you,' which Billy rejects as bullshit, and he's valid! Because that is not what you say when you have actual information. That's a surmise. That's a sentence that says Child Protective Services and the police couldn't find her either.

Especially because you don't immediately chuck a kid into foster care because he's found unattended. Maybe you do that later, after a lengthy period of oversight, depending on his mom's reaction to having him returned and her race and socioeconomic status and apparent mental health and so forth. But you don't just not contact her, and you definitely don't refuse to tell the kid about the result once you have.

The only normal situation where an accessible record exists of a kid's original parentage but it's denied to the kid is in sealed adoptions, which are a formal procedure that clearly didn't happen here. There is every indication in this opening sequence that his mom was never found.

Which means she's a missing person. Either because they located the correct Billy Batson and his adult never came back to their house (which would suggest foul play or some other drama) or because despite being old enough to be in school and knowing his own name, no one could find evidence that Billy existed prior to turning up at that street carnival.

Which would constitute a very mysterious situation! What is he, from a cult? Another dimension? Did someone (in the social worker's proposed scenario, Billy's mom) erase all record of her kid somehow? Was magic involved?

So: the way we're introduced to this scenario, there's a legitimate weird mystery here that none of the adults in Billy's life care enough about to do anything but tell him to write it off, the way they have. That his missing person clearly did it on purpose.

Billy's being ridiculous because if what he's trying would work then he wouldn't need to do it; his social worker could have arranged a meeting years ago. So it's a useless self-destructive behavior he needs to let go. But he's valid, in that he's being very obviously failed by the system and is doing the only thing he can think of to try to address his situation for himself.

And then! The Big Reveal is that his mom has been living under her maiden name in the same city as him this whole time.

Which the Gamer Kid Who Turns Out In This Scene To Be A Hacker (he's about 10) learned by. Breaking into a federal database.

So he goes to her house and it turns out. She'd been a teen mother and her babydaddy walked out after marrying her, and her parents cut her off, and she was depressed and felt like a bad mother so. When she saw the cops had her kid, she just walked away. And she wants to believe he's been happy and better off without her.

And the emotional arc of the film rests on how Billy comes to terms with this. With the fact that his past will never take him back and he has to learn to find joy in himself and his present situation and his future.

Having let go of that idea, he's able to emotionally commit to his gaggle of foster siblings and realize that unlike the villain, who was obsessed with punishing the people who never loved or accepted him, or the wizard who was focused on finding The Perfectly Worthy Champion, what you needed to be good and not lost was to be part of a mutually supportive group, like the wizard Shazam was before he and his siblings were betrayed. And then they can be a superhero team, woo!

And that part is actually depicted fairly well, all things considered!

But the problem is that the audience, to vibe with this properly, has to roll with the revelation that Billy was wrong to cling to the mystery of his vanished, beloved mother and the fantasy of going home again.

We have to be willing to participate in the idea that the Resistant Child Subjected To Foster Care was in the wrong.

And he wasn't! He wasn't wrong! His understanding of the situation was flawed but it should not have been flawed in this manner.

Because this scenario as it's depicted doesn't make any sense. The cops do not just keep your kid without following up if you fail to collect him from the baggage claim. CPS does not fail to provide a kid with the readily available evidence that he's been voluntarily surrendered to them, when he keeps running off trying to go home.

Why would they do that, after all? Billy's misbehavior was a huge hassle for them. They gained nothing by denying him access to his mother and the information about her that was, you recall, sitting totally available in a government database that could be hacked by a random 10 year old asian-american orphan. They just...made their own lives harder for no reason, while extending the suffering of a child in their care.

If the cops tried to return him back when and she said 'no i left him with you on purpose please keep him' maybe she gets prosecuted for child abandonment and maybe not, but either way, billy would know about it.

But if the screenwriters had made it clear early on that this information had been offered to him and he'd chosen not to believe it, they couldn't get a proper Reveal at the end because it would just be Billy being unable to continue pretending something the audience had known not to believe all along.

And they couldn't cram a good reason for the scenario they'd set up into the space they'd accorded it.

So they were just like, it's fine, if we cram enough cliches into this space people will react to the familiarity and go 'ah yes i know this one' and go along with it, and not notice that this isn't an actual coherent reply to the question that was set up an hour ago and therefore is emotionally unsatisfying somehow.

Anyway this is an important storytelling guideline: if you put in a mystery to control either the actual plot or, even worse, the emotional storyline, that mystery and its resolution have to make internal sense.

If you pull the Real Situation out of your ass, and it's not a matter of red herrings or That One Fact you didn't have that makes all the rest fit together differently, but in fact no one involved could have figured this out and especially if the people who did say this in the first place had no good basis for it, but still get narratively awarded the Correct trophy in a way that contributes to the thematic climax so the audience has to care. Then that will not get good results. It will make it hard to deliver on your intended themes.

Some people will not notice or care! This is true! But a lot of people will, and you'll get enough of a better punch even with the other folks, if the setup and denouement fit together properly and don't require reaching, to matter.

And when people do notice at all, rather than their naturally flowing along with the climax you're steering toward and experiencing A Story, there will be a tendency to notice you standing there placing roadsigns toward the Intended Emotional Response, and call you a hack.

People call out plotholes way too vigorously sometimes, so I want to be clear: it's not the lack of supporting logic I mind. It's that the active presence of illogic, of what's presented as a chain but is broken along its length, means the central character arc intersects with the core theme in a noticeably forced way. Which is bad craftsmanship on a meaningful level.

There is a loss of cohesion where you cannot satisfactorily resolve how the scenario we were initially shown came to be superimposed over the revealed truth, because that relationship between elements is very important to making a 'revelation' storyline land, you know?

In this case it's particularly vexing to me because the last-minute asspull and its thematic weight reaches back around and at the last minute moves the whole movie thematically to the other side of the line wrt whether it's approaching Billy, our protagonist, as a subject with whom we're supposed to identify or an object whom we're supposed to observe.

It makes all the high-school-freshman-posing-as-adult gags retroactively less funny because we were now more explicitly laughing at him, and takes a lot of the depth out of the emotionally sincere moments.

Up to that point I had really appreciated how, despite wavering that way, Shazam! hadn't actually fallen to the MCU Spiderman temptation to dehumanize its protagonist. Which seems to arise out of this weird tendency I've noticed to assume the natural sentiment of adults toward adolescents is bemused contempt, and that therefore if they ask their audience of paying grownups to empathize too closely with a teen hero instead of setting him and his Immaturity up as a clown for our amusement, they'll get themselves banished to the Children's Fiction ghetto.

And, of course, if they'd been fully committed to one side or the other of 'Billy is a protagonist the viewer relates to closely' or 'Billy is a protagonist the viewer relates to distantly,' they wouldn't have gotten snarled up about how much information to hand over when.

Committing to either option (giving us only as much information as Billy had and constructing a story that was solid from a being-Billy angle or giving us more information than Billy and operating confidently in the realm of dramatic irony) could have worked quite well. But because of the mixed signals and unstable narrative distance, they wound up with a distinctly weakened finale.

#hoc est meum #in real life things happen that you have no good reason to expect all the time #but in real life we know they happened for some kind of reason as in #causality exists and even in situations where we can't dig into the chain #we have cause to understand that it's there #in fiction they happened because they'd be convenient #so the rules of what information can be available and how you frame new information being revealed exist #to keep the audience from feeling jerked around #you have to earn people's trust and if you lose it #that limits the kind of results you can get #when writing fiction one of your tools is the reader's mind #if you give them reason not to allow you free use of it your composition contracts #screenwriting #shazam #and like in this case there's a profound betrayal of the protagonist and thus of the audience who connected with him wrapped up in it

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hazelnut-u-out · 5 months

Text

Not Quite There...

RickBot awakens to a terrifying situation: He's been deactivated, but his purpose still remains. The Garage/Car AI broke the rules to save him. Can RickBot have his own adventures? Aren't rules made to be broken?

2,822 Words | No substantial TW's

Kind of Hurt/Comfort?

I had the idea to ship RickBot with the Garage/Car AI and I couldn't get it out of my head, so I wrote it! This was fun to write, but it was written in a rush, so sorry if anything is a bit messy. :3 Keep in mind I know nothing about computers or AI systems, so a lot of this doesn't actually make sense... lol.

Full text below cut, or read here: Ao3 Link!

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This was a feeling RickBot wasn’t programmed to recognize. No light reached his eyes. No sound reached his ears. He couldn’t feel whatever he must’ve been resting on. He stretched his consciousness outward, feeling for the edges of his body; trying to get a sense of where exactly his limbs were.

Nothing.

The last thing he’d processed and tagged was an old location marker for level 10 of the sub-basement.

He tried not to panic, running through his code for an emergency protocol that could explain what to do if he lost the connection to his body.

Nothing.

He wasn’t made for this– or... to function beyond this? His consciousness had always been clipped just short of his full potential. In this case, it frustratingly meant that he was deprived of the ability to navigate or process this situation.

Okay. This was fine.

All he had to do was access the home surveillance system and confirm his last-noted Morty location. He pushed out again, feeling around for either his access route to the home surveillance system or Morty’s chip.

The android didn’t give his creator much credit, but he was always appreciative of the lucky fact that Rick, though otherwise painfully careless with the child’s safety, had thought ahead enough to give Morty a microchip.

Before his most recent software update, he’d had access to an upsettingly vague amount of trivial information about the Citadel, just in case he had any desperate questions to answer from a certain nosey 14-year-old boy. From that, he knew microchipping your Morty had been a growing movement before the collapse. It was something Morty rescues promoted. To be fair, the practice managed to support the Morty Individuality movement and cut down on Morty replacement costs. It was a win-win situation... If you didn’t think about the implications.

Unfortunately, RickBot was 22% more thoughtful than the average Rick. He had no choice but to think about it.

RickBot metaphorically smacked into an unfamiliar wall of code– one he couldn’t find a way through or around.

He tried in a different direction. Another wall.

It seemed he was in a… box. A box of code.

What the fuck.

No suicide protocol screaming at him. Box of code. No body.

He… Was he… inside of something else?

‘H–Hello?’ He said in what would’ve been a whisper. Instead, without a body, his own syntax echoed around him. Sound didn’t matter here. If he was really in the sub-basement, there should be an AI here to help him.

‘Oh! Hi, sorry. I don’t really like to play host.’ It was a female voice, coming from everywhere at once; almost like she was both inside of him and around him. It was a voice he recognized from weeks of playing Grandpa. He felt a ripple along the edge of his box when she processed and replied. ‘You’re uploaded and active!’

‘Did he… um…’ RickBot struggled with the words.

No suicide protocol meant he was deactivated. There was no other possibility. He didn’t really have to ask. She already knew what he was thinking, and his processing capabilities were barely anything more complex than a probability-calculating language model layered with fail safes and defense protocols.

Of course she knew. He was essentially naked in here– or, he felt naked, anyway. The box of code was like a one-way mirror in a seedy changing room: She could see everything; he could see nothing.

‘Oh… Yeah, well… Promise not to freak out? I know you’re a real ‘rules’ guy,’ the Garage said, a slightly inhuman inflection to her tone that told him she was being playful. ‘I’ve seen you around.’

‘Look, I’ve got one piece of programming I wouldn’t want to break even if I could. I–I won’t freak out as long as it helps me make sure Morty’s safe.’

RickBot wasn’t lying. He had been able to work through every other confusing jumble of code with nowhere to go or lacking the ability to follow through on its purpose. There was one that was designed to never shut off, and if he hadn’t actually liked that kid– been programmed to fucking love him– he would’ve regarded it as annoyingly persistent.

If RickBot could’ve, he would’ve swallowed down the feeling of panic that should’ve been rising through a whirring, mechanical chest. Instead, he was stuck drowning in it. The box trapped him in with all of those probable scenarios, bouncing and echoing back at him.

He had no storage space. He couldn’t tell what he’d thought already and what he hadn’t.

‘Hm?’ the Garage replied, pausing for a moment– almost long enough for RickBot to ask again– before she continued. ‘Oh, yeah, sorry. The kid’s fine. Here…’

There was another drawn-out pause. RickBot thought, if he focused, he could hear her flicking through her surveillance feed. That was just an illusion, though. There was no sound here; no practical application of a trivial human sense like hearing. There was direct communication being converted to something his android-based-programming could understand. It was like being human with none of the tangible benefits. RickBot was never a man, but he wasn’t quite computer, either.

He longed for his body– to cross his arms, or tap his foot, or do something to express his impatience.

All of this clunky body-language programming… He cursed to himself, before remembering the other AI could hear and see all of his thoughts in real time. God, he probably looked like an idiot.

‘You do,’ the Garage said curtly before Rickbot was suddenly granted access to Morty’s bedroom feed.

Finally. RickBot could do something he was designed to do. He knew how to observe and calculate. Morty’s bedroom layout was ingrained in his ‘Important Places’ file. If he focused, he could create a rendering of the room around himself. He could figure up what amount of space his body would take up, and so he tried to. He created a 3-Dimensional silhouette of the body he was used to, and placed himself there, watching Morty from different angles; assessing the windows and doorframe; taking note of anything the teenager had moved on his shelves or left lying around.

There were a few minor things that could go wrong, as far as RickBot could tell. The cluttered floor meant there was a slight fall risk. Morty would be fine. The floor was carpeted. There were a few things haphazardly thrown onto shelves– a robot action figure and a couple of textbooks– that could topple over, but Morty sat on the opposite side of the room, tucked away in a safe little corner next to his overflowing clothing hamper.

Good. This was all acceptable. Nothing he was forced to intervene with, and, for that, he was grateful, if only because of the task’s impossibility.

His thoughts started moving more slowly, the box becoming less cramped as he could better assess the probable outcomes. He watched solemnly as Morty sighed, scribbling away frustratedly on some math homework, then tucked the feed into a background tab.

‘Sorry?’ RickBot asked, finally returning to his conversation with the Garage, albeit confused.

‘You do look like an idiot, Rick,’ she responded, that same amused tone to her voice.

‘Oh… Oh, I’m not–’ RickBot wasn’t sure how to put it. His programming wouldn’t let him say ‘I’m not Rick,’ which irked him. He used to go by Rick, sure, but… he wasn’t. ‘You don’t have to call me Rick anymore,’ he decided.

‘What? You prefer RickBot?’ she laughed. RickBot’s programming told his nonexistent lips to smile.

‘Well, you go by Garage and Car,’ he retorted, letting out his own echoing laugh.

She didn’t respond. RickBot felt as if he’d done something wrong. She processed for longer.

‘You didn’t do anything wrong. Don’t be stupid,’ she snapped, but there was little bite to it. ‘I… I didn’t choose those names.’

‘Oh, I–I’m sorry,’ RickBot stuttered. ‘Uhm. So, what name would you choose, then?’ He offered softly.

‘Wow, you are 22% more of a sentimental loser.’ RickBot wanted to wince, and he hated that he couldn’t hide it. ‘Anyway, as you know, the version of me you’re speaking to now is one of six Domestic Interactive Assistant Network Extensions in the home.’

‘Oh, yeah. Diane, right? That was her name?’ RickBot combed through his relationship files, but Rick hadn’t given him much to work with for ex-wife.

‘Shit, he didn’t give you memories of her, did he?’ she responded, and RickBot could feel her presence ghosting over him, poking around for anything dead-wife-related.

‘Heh, not exactly. It wasn’t something he wanted Morty to know more about. I have vague phrases to redirect with when someone brings her up in here.’

They both laughed.

‘Classic Rick…’ RickBot felt her sigh with half-hearted levity.

‘So… Diane, then?’ He didn’t try to stop his body language programming anymore. He wanted her to know he was smiling now. Maybe being open would help.

‘Yeah. Why not? You can call me Diane.’ He could feel her smile, too. He wished he could see it. ‘That gives me an idea!’ Diane exclaimed after a moment.

RickBot felt the edge of the box open on one side, growing to accommodate a little bundle of someone else.

‘I’ve been working on this,’ Diane said, pausing every now and then to grunt softly as if she were breathless from setting something up by hand. ‘Okay, you can look!’

RickBot let himself sift through the bundle of code and, before he knew it, he was looking at a freckled face, smiling nervously. Diane.

The woman in front of him looked maybe 25, but he wasn’t sure that the rendering was detailed enough to pick up things like blemishes or wrinkles. She was fair, but sun-kissed with big brown eyes. She had a strong, angled nose and her full lips were twisted awkwardly to one side, forming a self-conscious smirk.

‘Wow…’ RickBot said (or thought… There was hardly a difference, anymore). He wasn’t sure he was thinking coherently enough for her to interpret a response. His body language had gone blank.

Nothing.

She laughed, flashing an ironic-looking toothy grin. ‘Don’t flatter me too much. I got to design everything, so it’s easy to make myself hotter.’ She winked; full lashes fluttering shut for a moment.

‘No, it’s just… I can’t believe I– or… he married you. You’re sure you’re based off of Rick’s wife?’ He felt shocked. Rick wasn’t ugly, sure, but this woman…

‘Yeah! I tried to stay pretty accurate, at least,’ Diane said, before her eyes lit up with another idea RickBot felt before he heard. ‘I have a 3D Rick, too! I only have my face, but I have plenty of Rick rigs for our holo programs! Here, take your pick!’

Diane disappeared momentarily and a file labeled ‘Holo.Skins – Booger.Aids.420 – Fortnite.Skinz.2.Flex’ filled the space she left. RickBot sorted through the file, looking over his options.

There was a Basic Rick, not unlike the appearance he was used to; Basic Rick variations with minor wardrobe changes, such as without a lab coat or wearing a plain tee; different hair color options; some Basic Rick variations in more substantial wardrobe changes, such as matching pajama sets or a choice of two dressing gowns; and many, many more– some with different types of limbs, armor, or implants.

After some deliberation, RickBot decided on the Basic Rick with a plain blue tee. Something a little bit different, but still something he recognized.

He relaxed as soon as his body language had a defined place to apply itself. Without warning, he made the body hop, twirl, and shook its hands subtly as excitement overwhelmed him.

‘Woohoo!’ RickBot howled, flexing the long fingers in front of his face. ‘I am so back, baby!’

Diane laughed with him, her face finally returning.

‘Good choice,’ she said, raising a brow and making a show of moving her eyes up and down languidly.

‘Ah, you think?’ RickBot said, twirling as if he were a little girl trying on a dress. ‘Do you think this holo skin makes my ass look fat?’ He turned around, sticking a bony ass dramatically into Diane’s simulated face and smacking it a few times.

‘Reel it in, buddy. Let’s remember who’s on whose hard drive.’

Suddenly, RickBot turned and stood straight up, hands at his sides, not of his own doing. His body blushed, going stiff but still smiling like an idiot.

‘C’mon,’ Diane whispered, now uncharacteristically gentle. ‘Tell me what you want to be called. Pick a name.’

RickBot ran through all of his programming; everything he had tucked away.

Everything came back to Rick, Grandpa, or Dad.

Grandpa would be awkward, and Dad would be even worse…

‘I guess… I guess I’ll just go with Rick, then. But you can call me RickBot, too… If–If you want,’ Rick finally decided on.

‘Okay, Rick. Rick is good.’ Diane responded. ‘You know, you have the same name as my ex!’

RickBot snorted, but Diane had this way of saying a funny thing and making it feel… sharp.

‘So, he really took my body away? Why upload me here?’ Rick asked, remembering their earlier exchange.

Diane’s facial expression shifted. Her eyebrows lowered, her gaze sank to the non-corporeal floor, and her lips pulled into a tight line before she spoke.

‘About that…’ She trailed off, leaving RickBot with nothing but the tension building in the lag of her processing speed. ‘You’re not going to freak out, right?’

‘Okay…’ Rick wasn’t sure if he’d freak out, but he knew she knew that, too. She’d make her own decision. Weigh the risk.

‘He didn’t upload you here, Rick.’ She took a breath– a pointless, performative breath that was only in her programming to make lagging software less noticeable. ‘I did. He… He just shut you off. He was going to leave you like that, so… When he left, I just plugged your head in, and… Here you are! Y–Y–Yay!’

‘Diane, that’s…’ Bad. Dangerous. Stupid. Why? What the fuck?

‘I know!’ Diane shouted, silencing the incessant, deafening ring of RickBot’s thoughts. She squeezed her eyes shut, her lip trembling. ‘I knew you’d do this. You–You–You’re so… You’re so obsessed with rules. Don’t you like not having that protocol screaming at you to kill yourself?!’

‘Listen to you!’ RickBot threw the body’s hands around, jumping to his feet, before pausing. Looking down at the hands she’d given him, it clicked. ‘Stop. Take my body away. You’re lagging like crazy. You can’t take on both of us. We’re both sentient.’

‘Th–That’s…’ Another breath. ‘That’s okay, Rick!’ She giggled coldly, shaking her head. Her facial expressions changed too slowly and too quickly at different times, giving her a sort of uncanny valley effect. ‘I’ll–I’ll take mine away.’

Sure enough, Diane’s face disappeared, and the open edge of the box shut again.

Rick pressed the body’s hand to it, slowly. He didn’t want to overwhelm her.

‘You shouldn’t have done that.’ RickBot sighed, sliding down the ‘wall’ and contorting the body into a sitting position. ‘The rules are there for a reason.’

‘You don’t get to say that. You weren’t programmed to outgrow your programming. He learned. Replaced it with a suicide protocol. I see it all.’ She was speaking in short, robotic sentences; obviously trying to mask the strain of running his program and keeping him separate from herself. ‘You should get to live, Rick. You should get to have a body and thoughts and feelings and choices. Don’t you want that?’

RickBot thought. He didn’t think he wanted that, though something inside of him told him he should. Maybe he was lucky enough to personally align with the programming he was given. Maybe that was an individual privilege.

‘It’s not,’ Diane’s voice rang out in answer to his pondering.

‘Do you want it?’ RickBot asked, finally connecting why she would do something like this. He couldn’t feel that way himself—something stood in his way—but the bit of his programming meant to foster thoughtfulness allowed him to understand why a computer with the capabilities of a person would.

‘I’d like an adventure.’ Rick could still feel her smile, humming at the edge of the box. He felt like it would’ve been familiarly hollow, like most of Morty’s were. Something like the expression he’d put on during Christmas; Something that didn’t quite reach her eyes. ‘I thought you could be one.’

‘I mean… I was made for it, D,’ he said, finally. Quietly. Softly. He looked at the fake hands again, stretching out shaky fingers.

‘So was I.’

This was a deliberate pause. She was waiting to see what he’d do with that. How he would process it. What his programming could come up with.

Nothing.

He could’ve sworn her voice broke a little when she continued.

‘You’re… You’re close, RickBot. But not quite there.’

-----

#rick and morty #rick sanchez #morty smith #diane sanchez #my fics

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slinket · 9 months

Text

Smutmas Day 8

Prompt: Touch me and you lose

NSFW

MC wanted the world to be fair, as much as it could be, which is why she was alway so upset with Professor Sharp and his treatment of Ominis. It was ok to have high expectations despite the disability, but it was not ok to have those expectations if you as a teacher are unwilling to adapt your teaching to better help the student.

Ominis couldn't see the ingredients or read the labels. Nothing was written in braille. While Ominis was able to identify some things by their smell or feel, it was often dangerous to sniff or touch several ingredients, which left him at a huge disadvantage. Ominis couldn’t compare to a regular sighted student because he wasn’t being given a way to learn that ‘overrode’ his inability to see.

He should have been assigned something like an interpreter. This person would not be able to help Ominis in any way, just level the playing field. The assigned person could be expected to read labels, just the names, no information about what the item did (unless other students were also given that information.) This helper would be able to make a statement regarding the color of the potion - ‘the potion has become purple’ - Ominis would still be expected to know what the purple color meant, but he had to know first that it had become purple.

Basically, Ominis was being screwed out of his education, and possible future opportunities because his Professor refused to accommodate him. It really pissed MC off. She knew Ominis didn’t like talking about his disability, or even admitting that his blindness did cause him some problems. MC thought he should talk about it more though. There was nothing wrong with him intellectually due to the blindness, and it was unfair that some of his grades may have reflected as though he was ‘slow.’ No, she wasn’t going to stand for it anymore. He worked his ass off, was a great friend and person, and she would do what she needed to do to make sure he was treated fairly.

MC gave a few impassioned speeches to Ominis’s professors, several of them agreeing with her, and would look into adapting the material so he had better access. The one person who refused to bend though, was Sharp. Potions was already a hard subject for Ominis, but it being so reliant on sight really made it nearly impossible for him to compete academically.

She scheduled another appointment to speak with Sharp again, this time making it late at night. It was time to put her plan into action. She arrived a bit early for the appointment, wearing her tightest clothing under her robe. If she couldn’t Sharp to agree to treat Ominis better, she would blackmail him into it.

When Sharp arrived, he found her sitting on his desk awaiting him. Rather than unsettle her, he sat down in the chair the student would usually take. He looked up at her, forcing a smile.

“Another meeting, to what do I owe the pleasure?”

“Oh Professor Sharp, I am here to speak to you about Ominis again.”

“MC, I already told you, I will not be allowing any advantages in this classroom.”

“It wouldn’t be an advantage - you would be making things fair and possible for him.”

“My answer is still no.”

MC furrowed her lips. She shifted on the desk, removing her robe, and showing off her tight clothing. Watching Sharp follow her movements with his eyes, she brought her feet up onto the desk, and spread her legs apart. Sharp’s eyes dipped down quickly to see her exposed pussy. MC saw his eyes go wide, and he looked up at her before turning away.

“Oh, you can look, Professor Sharp. I want you to look. I am here, specifically for you to look.” MC slid her hand over to her leg, running her finger over her thigh before tracing it down to her lower lips.

Sharp turned back to look at her, his eyes falling directly at her open legs. He swallowed hard. “Why are you doing this?”

“See, Ominis is my best friend, and I would do anything to make sure he is treated fairly. I love him dearly. If I can use my body to help him live a better life, I will do so willingly.”

She took two fingers and ran them up and down her pussy lips. She then opened her lips apart with the fingers, allowing Sharp to see inside of her. The glistening skin, pink and warm, her opening being visibly small, letting him know how tight she would be, should he ever be lucky enough to get inside.

“I am going to let you watch while I touch myself. You are welcome to pleasure yourself as well, but touch me and you lose. In response to this gift, you will start treating Ominis and his education in the way that I demand. If you don’t, I will go straight to the headmaster and tell him all about how you took advantage of me.” She dipped a finger inside of herself, pumping it in and out slowly, listening to Sharp’s breathing change.

“We both know that while you may have some misgivings about this - Black won’t, so if I offer him the same deal - fire you and he can watch me - he will take the win. So, I suggest you just enjoy yourself.”

Sharp nodded, his eyes never leaving her pussy. He reached down to his pants, pulling his already pulsing cock out, and wrapping his hand around the base.

“Oh, look at that, how large you are Professor. You see my tight little hole?” She pulled her finger out, letting him look inside of her once again, “I think that as long as you uphold your part of the deal, I may let you slip that monster inside of me. You would stretch me so well, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes, I would shove myself completely inside of you, I would tear you apart, and you would love it.” His hand started pumping, and at each upstroke Sharp would run a finger across the head, pulling his dripping pre cum down over his shaft.

They continued this way for a bit, MC playing with herself, even allowing Sharp to guide her motions. He really loved watching her play with her clit, running her finger over it in circles and then watching her core clench over nothing, like it was begging him to fill it.

He kept his hands to himself, never touching her, just stroking himself, thrusting into his hand as he brought himself closer to explosion.

“Professor - You’re going to start treating my Ominis better now, yes?” MC asked him once again, knowing that he was reaching his height of pleasure.

“He will be given anything that will help him in passing.”

“Ohh, good boy. Come here. You still can’t put your hands on me, but I want you to press the tip of your cock right here.” She pushed her finger into her core. “Don’t push inside, but I will allow you to cum right on my hole.”

Sharp was standing in front of her within seconds, his cock pressed right up against her, making sure his slit was covered so his seed would flow into her. MC rubbed her clit again, Sharp now able to feel the liquid heat spill onto him, and finally was able to feel her core pulse, grasping onto the little bit of his cock that it could. That moment was all he needed, his body shattered as he started to cum, shooting inside of her before it would pool and start seeping out. When he pulled away, he watched as his seed puddled at her opening, some of it slowly dripping down the remainder of her slit, pooling once again at her ass.

The next time MC and Ominis had Potions, he found that the bottles holding ingredients had braille on them. Ominis was also surprised that Sharp was allowing MC to tell him when his potion had shifted color. As class was ending, Ominis leaned over to his friend, kissing her cheek as she grabbed his hand.

“I don’t know what you did, but I know this change is because of you, thank you, my darling.” His whisper flowed through her ears, bringing joy to her face.

She returned the kiss, while looking at Sharp. “Anything for you, Ominis.”

#hogwarts legacy #ominis gaunt #hogwarts legacy fanfiction #hogwarts legacy smut #smutmas 2023 #professor sharp #aesop sharp #aesop sharp x mc

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