#Depending on how well this goes (so far it's not my red model paint has inexplicably been refusing to dry properly)

[hysterical-random-things]

Sorry for the lack of transformers art posting, I've been possessed by the need to do customizations and am currently putting my focus on that vs anything else

[jolynej]

may i ask some hc's for a bisexual artist reader dating bruno, giorno and doppio? 🥺 👉👈 (bonus: reader gets to flip off/ smack diabolo for interrupting dates lol) - 🎨

yes! sorry it took so long, honey! this was really fun to write!! hope you enjoy, bby!!

all characters are 20+ in this piece!

CW: implied nsfw, a curse word in Doppio’s part

• Immensely impressed with your artistic and creative capabilities, no matter your preferred medium. Each time that you present him with a finished copy of your work, his cerulean eyes light up, and his amber lips tug up to reveal a proud, dazzling smile. He gets worried that some of his compliments may sound repetitive, so he has developed a habit of commenting on and praising the most random aspects of your work. From anyone else it’d be odd to hear about that ‘handsome shade of green’ or the ‘fascinatingly sexy technique’ you used, but it’s Bruno, and you wouldn’t expect anything less

•If you’ll indulge him, he’s a big fan of sitting back and watching you work. Full warning though — those odd comments of his are in full abundance! The man truly hangs on to everything that you do and is very anticipatory of how your piece will turn out. But he is far from overbearing. He knows how bothersome it can be to have someone hovering over your shoulder, and he makes sure to allow you to have more than enough breathing room and space to work

•On special occasions such as anniversaries or your birthday — or even just on a random Tuesday, the man just loves surprising you, let’s be real — he’ll gift you art supplies. From brushes to paints, to art programs and aprons, Bruno has given you an array of art-related items. The moment you say that you’re eyeing something in particular or are running low on a particular supply, he mentally catalogues that information away for later

•100% into paint and sips! He signed you up for one as a date idea, and he found out that he really enjoyed himself. It’s a fun way for him to loosen up, relax, try something new, and to, of course, spend time with the person he loves most. He’s a bit of a giggly drunk, and he has definitely made you, and some other angry patrons, mess up due to his loud gasps and snorts and wheezes that he makes because he made such a silly little dolphin, wheeee!!

•Bruno offers to model for you — nude, if you don’t mind certain things popping up. He acts all suave and nonchalant when he proposes the idea, but when it comes down to the actual event of him posing on an ivory-colored sheet draped over a chaise lounge with one hand propping up his head and the other sat upon his thigh, he’s trying everything he can to keep himself from getting turned on. But there is something about the distinct way in which your eyes are narrowed in pure concentration, because of him, that gets him going

•He’s a good critic — he’s fair and offers constructive criticism but is never harsh nor rude, plus, he’s quick to remind you that he knows next to nothing about art and what exactly goes into the creation of your pieces, so he tells you to take his suggestions with a grain of salt, it’s just his way of trying to get you to challenge yourself and achieve even great heights! Still, Giorno always finds something in your latest piece that he admires, and his compliments are always very genuine

•Definitely hangs your work up in his office and whenever someone comments on the work or asks who the artist is, he just smirks and says in a knowing, smug tone that he’s intimately familiar with their other work and that he’s grateful for the exclusive access that his position as don has given him. Whether or not the innuendo is lost or not on the other party is solely dependent on their own inference

•Giorno will absolutely surprise you with your own art studio and/or gallery to display your pieces. While the actual work and planning that went into this took months of proper organizing and hours of him touring different venues to search for the perfect place, the don makes it seem so nonchalant and casual when he calls you out of the blue to tell you to meet him at ‘x address’ at 6:00 PM sharp for your birthday present

•If you have any plants in your works, then he may surprise you with a fresh cut flower or fern or even a potted sapling, depending on the specific species of flora that was featured in your piece. Don’t be shocked to find a vase of roses or hydrangeas or forget-me-nots, or any flower for that matter, on your kitchen counter when you come home from work. He leaves a handwritten note in gorgeous cursive that says something sappy along the lines of ‘I hope this bouquet blooms new inspiration, amore’

•Much like Bruno, he’ll be happy to model for you, and he’ll have no qualms about doing so nude, if you ask, but he probably won’t bring it up otherwise. He’s very patient and does a great job staying still for you, and he will also create a few spontaneous vines and blossoms to better accentuate his chiseled features, stringing the delicate petals through his golden hair and dotting a few at his feet

•Since the boss has him traveling all over, he’ll commission a small self-portrait of you to keep with him when he’s away. He’ll ask for a new picture every few months, which he explains is because he wants to keep up with your change in appearance, be it a new hairstyle/color, new glasses, a new piece of jewelry that he adores on you, etc... but honestly, he just wants to have as many pictures of you as he can — you’re just too lovely!

•Doppio brings up making one of those giant canvas pieces where you both cover yourselves in paint and make love on the canvas together. He had overheard Squalo and Tiziano discussing it one day, and he immediately found himself torn between whether you’d look cuter in pink or blue paint — or both. Doppio would love to sit and have his portrait painted; but alas, that wouldn’t go over well at all with the boss, so this, to him, is the next best thing! Plus! It’s a testament to the love that you both share, and no one has to know how it was made!

•During his travels, he’ll visit little gift shops and will mail back postcards that feature the work of local artists or photos of the scenery or native wildlife. He writes you a cute ‘I miss you’ letter and signs it with a tiny doodle, a heart, and in cursive he ends the note with a simple but intimate ‘your Doppio’ You should plan on making a scrapbook one of these days due to the amount of postcards that you’ve received over the years!

•You have a date night where you both paint along with an episode of Bob Ross, and to put it kindly, Doppio’s painting ends up on the fridge and not on your living room wall, but he’s still proud of himself, considering it’s his first time painting. A few days later, Diavolo walks by the refrigerator one day and asks you why ‘that tasteless shit’ is on display, causing you to scowl and smack him clean across his disgusted face

“Ah, tesoro...” Doppio winces, rubbing his cheek, red and hot from the impact of your harsh slap. “Why does my face hurt?”

[shesawriter39049]

|UNWRAP ME| M|

Pairing : Jimin X Reader (Ft a lil Tae)

“There’s a bow on my panties because my ass is a present!”

About- Honestly, you were just trying to prep gift bags for your company’s holiday party! But Jimins stressed, and needs a little brain reset sooo….I guess we’re prepping gift bags later!

Or- The company has quite a few deadlines to hit before you guys close for the holiday! Jimin’s in charge of talent and everybody’s fucking up…but in your line of work it’s a domino affect! So if his crew falls behind ultimately everybody’s behind! Hints Jimin’s stress and frustration....

WC: Sneak peek (1k)

WARNINGS: (FULL THING): Teasing, light edging, dirty talk, top/bottom OC, top/power bottom Jimin, hand restraints, unprotected sex, over stimulation, fingering (F receiving), biting/marking kink, VERY light degration kink (he playfully calls her a “little bitch/slut” once) light come play, light spanking

FINAL NOTE: This is a stand alone smut drabble within my OT7 poly universe called “7 DEEP”. Short AU SUMMARY: Your husband Namjoon and yourself run a successful Adult Film Entertainment Company called “Onyx” with your 5 best friends from college who you also happen to be in an open relationship with! P.S. If you’re new here Kookie joins the party a little later….

*Pierced Jimin/Red haired “Dope” Era Jimin meets 2020 Jimin!?

*Also it should go without being said but Jimin, IS Westernized, he’s from LA in this ffs!

*In true Rocki fashion I decided to do holidy prompts late af & did not finish in time for the main Holiday but w/e! Note, there is some backstory here bc this was set to be the 1st of 3 holiday prompts!** ___________________________________________________

Sunday, December 14TH, 4PM 

“Alright, so you wanna hear some bullshit?!”

K, well that’s apparently Jimin, musing around a mouth full of fries! I love how no one even bothers to knock, give notice they just show the fuck up! Whenever...

Cute.

I swear it sounds like your running a damn liquor store because there’s an obnoxious amount of bells and mistletoe hanging above the door almost acting as a doorbell at this point. Just casually Fa-la-laing together, echoing throughout your entire apartment every damn time the door opens! Honestly, your slowly regretting giving Jin and Tae free reign with decorations because that shits annoying as all hell!

Gaze still focused on your original task, not even looking in his direction “Don’t trip over the-“ There's a loud thud, followed by an obscene groan, accompanied by an even louder “Fuckkk!” Which solidified he did in fact trip over the ....

“....Box with Jin’s other Christmas tree in it ...” The words kinda died off your tongue at this point because well, clearly the warning did not fare well! “If anything’s broken I’m totally snitching just so we’re clear” Sassing over a half empty glass of spiked eggnog.

Now that you’ve finally looked at him, you find yourself hiding a smirk behind your cocktail as well! The boy is fine, you’d give him that! Looking like a model off duty, in his low cut white v, neck hidden beneath a distressed leather jacket! Topping off the look with a pair of chunky combats and disrespectfully tight dark wash denim jeans! I swear they damn near looked painted on, aviators resting on the bridge of his nose! Gucci backpack slung over his shoulder, Starbucks in one hand, and some brown bag full of grease in the other! Jimin recently went back red, looking dangerously close to the same 18 year old you met, at UCLA almost years ago now!  Just a boujier version, it’s like this Jimin’s from Calabasas instead of the Bay! Though your down for both options if we’re being real!

Not that Jimin’s not equally as good of company as well, you were honestly just expecting Tae! The two of you were starting to put together the gift bags for next week's holiday party! Hints the hot ass mess all over the floor of your living room, it’s a disgusting pile of shopping bags and boxes! Everything from Amazon to Saks Fifth, at this point you aren’t even sure where the fuck your floor starts or ends! One thing you do know for damn sure is Hobi’s going to have an aneurysm If he sees it! Sooo, hopefully Tae shows up sooner than later...

It’s become a tradition, or at least since the companies been profitable enough to do so! First off, you’re love language has always been a combination of “Gifts” and “Acts of service, so shit like this is essentially second nature!

However, quality time has slowly slipped its way into the mix over the past couple of years as well! Especially considering it’s almost a luxury for the seven of you at this point but you try not to complain! I mean Namjoon and yourself just did an interview last week for Forbes 30 under 30 for fucks sake! But anyway, like I was originally saying this little party is your way of trying to give your staff a combination of all 3 said love languages!

Above everything else you all work your asses off well, aware this is far from a 9-5, yet they give you their best constantly! Yeah, it was built on the backs of you and your boys but it wouldn’t be were it is now without everyone else! So, with that being said the schedule is as follows! 

1.Bust ass and hit all of your year end deadlines by December 22nd. 

2.The holiday party is on the 23rd...

3. Thennnnnn....after that the companies closed until the 2nd of January! 

Well kinda, if we’re being real the 7 of you never fully stop working, but you damn sure plan to try! I guess it’s the beauty and the curse of having damn near everything accessible on your phone! I swear this morning Joon was washing your back whilst you read him the latest profit/loss update from Jin soooo......that’s that!

Everyone else however....off duty with pay!

Which brings us back to the original task at hand before Jimin showed up,prepping the gift bags that get handed out at said holiday party! The invite list is pretty exclusive honestly,outside of your staff, and there plus one, the other guests are typically the immediate crew/ talent used throughout the year on various productions! Oh, there’s also special little packages mailed out to a couple of the company's sponsors as well! So all together were looking at at least 100 gift bags give or take! Of course at this stage you guys go all out but that’s not what it’s about! It’s legitimately the thought that counts!

Little gestures like this just remind people that you care,that they’re on your mind even if they aren’t currently doing you a favor! That’s what sets Onyx apart, all the little things you do without even thinking about it! Coffee, donuts, catering on set for long shoots,or even the little kits Jimin brings with him to set for the models! Fully stocked with soothing cream, heating pads, the full nine! It’s actually sad how much of a rarity it is in your line of work! 

Obviously, it goes without saying that those types of gestures aren’t feasible for everyone....However there’s companies worth more than you that do amples less!

But anyway back to Jimin and Tae! As I mentioned when the door originally opened you were expecting a mop of silver locks as opposed to red! Baby boy ran out to pick up the custom gift bags from this Indie vendor in WeHo. Hint’s why you were expecting Tae instead, now, why Jimins here I have no damn idea! Clearly we’re about to find out and apparently it’s “Some Bullshit!”

Honestly outside of checking his OOTD you didn't truly look at him. Far too busy propped on top of your oversized dining room table sorting through a manusery of  “Thank you” cards!

Eyes flicking to the left ever so slightly as you hear him shuffle closer “I-yeah sure what bullsh-wait are you eating my DoorDash?!”

It’s the way you constantly have to remind yourself that jail will not be like Orange is in the new black! Because I swear you damn near chucked this martini glass at that fire engine red dome of his!

Jimin just shrugs, a little nonchalant and unenthusiastic, almost as if he’s inconvenienced actually...

“Mmm, depends on perspective” He deadass just stuffed two more fires in his mouth! You're literally going to strangle him! It’s borderline painful how hard  your jaw tick, eyes narrowed in his direction!

Brows arched so damn high your gonna end up needing Botox from the permanent crease embedding within your skin. “Perspect-your literally eating-“

Holding a solitary finger in your direction “Tae just text me and said look at your phone and text him back...with like, a million pouty faces. Also, different note, who changed the decorations I placed on the mantle?! “

Jimin’s hand is now resting on his hip, legitimately angry about these damn decorations! I think his neck even did a couple rolls in the process, and I’m willing to bet,before he leaves they will be swapped out again!

A frustrated groan attempts to leave your throat  though it goes unacknowledged as your lacking any ounce or bite! Far too fond of both of your boys to truly be agitated at the moment! Actually that’s a lie, you high key wanna punch Jimin but it’s fine ....

“That, would be Jin, he said they clashed with the table decor” Pointing to all of the gold, and maroon colored decorations donning the marble coffee table “So, if your pissed go curse him out because I could give less than a damn! Now where the fuck is my phoneeee”

Hopping off the table causing your oversized UCLA Alum hoodie to hike over your ass. Said ass is covered or barely covered considering your cheeky, red, ruffle little panties are in fact assless! A cute little bow perched right on top of your tailbone, as if to direct the eye where to go….

Jimin is now choking on stolen fires and yeah there’s a smirk on your face as you grab your phone!

Mmmmhmmmm...and to think, maybe if he wasn’t being such a brat you’d let him unwrap one of his gifts a little early!

“Baby now he’s calling meeee” Anddddd he’s whining, wiggling his phone like it’s on fire! Ya know, moments like these in fact remind you that Tae and Jimin are the youngest!

“Oh for fucks sake!” Huffing in his direction snatching the phone and bag of Five Guys away in the process!

“Yes baby?” It’s actually terrifying how quickly your tone, and entire demeanor just switched! Somewhat reminiscent to how you’d see a mom scold one child then baby talk another all in the same breath! 

Jimin without a doubt noticed too, lip jutting out in a pout and no matter how many times you roll your eyes you still find yourself leaning forward kissing it right off! He moans into it and you Instantly taste the tangy seasoning from your fries, especially once he tries to swipe his tongue past the seam of your lips. The feeling of that tiny piece of metal playing in his mouth almost distracted you, but alas...the notion immediately reminds you why you were irked to begin with! Without even thinking you lean back into nipping at his bottom lip, though...this is Jimin we’re dealing with here! So whatever you thought you’d achieve is now dead, because a needy little whine just rustled in the back of his throat 

Speaking of love languages,there’s another called “Physical Touch” which has the words Jimin Park written all over it. So with that being said you really should’ve already been prepared for whatever’s about to unfold.

It’s subconscious at this point, head dropping down to the crook of your neck, nosing up a vein like a neglected puppy! Squeezing your waist hard enough to damn near engrave his thumb print in against your hip bones! Well, clearly he doesn’t want you going anywhere anytime soon!   

So what do you do instead? Place the bag of food on the bar, hold the phone in one hand and bring the other up to play in his freshly dyed locks! I swear this man is a second away from purring so maybe he’s not a puppy after all. Suddenly his ring clanned fingers trickle down your spine heading south, flexing his palm to squeeze down around the swell of your ass! Shifting you forward so your chest to chest...

So, here you are trying to cater to both of your boys at once...lord help you!

“No, of course I wasn’t ignoring you, I was just busy-yes Tae. You wanna put what in a what,Now?”

~~~~~

Hiii, as I mentioned above this was kinda last minute, I wrote out prompts on the 21st, then adult life kicked in. I actually had my own little office Christmas party to plan (Nothing on this scale obviously because well, we know the way the real world is rn) However because of that I couldn’t truly work on this until the 24th. However it’s been a long time since I wrote/wanted to write so I opted to just post it anyway! Hopefully the full thing will be up by the 28th at the latest.

I have also attached the overall masterlist for this AU!

7 DEEP 

[script-nef]

Fluff alphabets | Kageyama Tobio

Others: Hinata, Oikawa,  Tsukishima

Category: fluff

Affection: How affectionate is he? How does he show affection?

It depends on the location but he’s generally very affectionate and loving. 

Not so good on the “confessions of love” or “love serenade” front but expresses them through little things he does for you.

Like picking up your favourite snacks on the way home or trying to teach you volleyball so you understand what’s happening when you visit his matches or practices. When you look into his eyes, there’s nothing but desire and love for you.

Baby: Does he want to start a family?

He wouldn’t mind and leaves the decision to you.

He’s not all that good with kids but there’s no doubt that he would try his best to be a great dad for his children.

*spoiler alert* So you know how his parents weren’t around all that much in his childhood? He doesn’t want that for his babies. He’ll make sure to be involved in his children’s lives and be as attentive as he can be. And hopefully play some volleyball with them.

Although to do that, he wants to put them off for a while because he’s currently incredibly busy as the best setter in Japan. He’s also thinking of you because you’re successful in your career right now and doesn’t want to take that from you.

Cuddles: Does he like cuddling? How often does he like hugging?

Poor boy is touch-starved and intends to never have you feel the same way.

Hugs you whenever he sees you: after matches, returning home, watching movies, cooking dinner and on and on and on.

He would rest his head on your shoulder or head and squeeze tightly. Or sometimes fiddle with your hair. And hope that you understand how much he loves you through these small acts of affection.

Date: What is a typical date?

It’s usually watching movies/TV shows or teaching him cooking. Since he’s entire childhood was volleyball-based, he missed out on classic shows like Doraemon, Pokémon and animes. So you try to help him become educated.

The food front is abysmal. There’s a theory that when he was born, his volleyball stats were maxed but everything else was sacrificed in its stead.

Other times it’s going shopping because he has an absolutely terrible fashion sense or doesn’t try at all. Everything is either black or grey so you try to give him some colour which works out perfectly because hello? Japan’s next top model is ready to be contracted over here. Effortlessly beautiful and catches everyone in the shop’s attention.

Experience: How much has he dated before? How does that reflect in this one? 

You’re Kageyama’s first significant other!! *party blowers and confetti*

He was incredibly clumsy and confused when it comes to dating and being a boyfriend, but years of practice helped him. He regularly asked for what you wanted and expected from him and did his best to achieve that. And now he can understand your moods from the smallest signs.

He didn’t understand boundaries very well but as soon as you say something like “please stop”, he immediately leaps back and apologises. And he remembers what he did wrong so he never does it again.

Fight: Do you fight often with him? How does it usually end?

Fights don’t happen often and even then, it ends pretty quickly.

He can’t concentrate on anything if he knows you’re mad at him and tries to understand anything he did wrong to make sure those kinds of arguments never happen again. He goes around asking everyone for their help and opinion on the matter and tries to find the fastest way to fix the relationship.

If you did something wrong, he doesn’t back up. No matter how much he loves you, you have to apologise if you’re the cause. He is quite stubborn when he knows he’s in the right.

Gentle: How does he treat you?

In the beginning, he barely even held you because he didn’t understand how his strength should be adjusted for you. Slight paranoia of “what happens if I hurt them?” crept into his mind.

So when you asked if he didn’t like physical contact, he panicked and confessed his predicament. You laughed and said “I’m not a glass doll. Besides, if you don’t try, are we going to stay in this relationship with no touching at all?”

So after months of careful and tentative touches, he got a hang of it and is now completely gentle whenever he initiates physical contact.

Hand: Does he like holding your hand? How often?

Kageyama is fascinated by the size difference between your hand and his.

Holds your hand as frequently as he can and fiddles with your fingers. Often interlaces his fingers with yours and loves how your hand fits perfectly into his.

Impression: What was your first impression of him?

Not that great (Feat. Death glare and lack of vocabulary)

You visited one of his matches in high school and caught him just glaring at you with the most piercing eyes. It made you think “Does he hate me or something? I’ve never even spoken to or seen him before!”

Needless to say, it threw you off and made you kind of avoided him whenever you went to their matches. He was secretly dejected when you would slip away from his sight. He was just staring at you because you were so radiant and beautiful that it took his breath away. 

Thankfully, after talking to the third years, the misunderstanding cleared and you started hanging out with him. 

Jealousy: Does he get jealous easily? What sets him off?

He doesn’t get jealous easily because he trusts you and knows you love him with everything you have like he does for you. 

Rare occasions where he gets annoyed is when you become a fan of other setters and praise them for their skills. He’ll sulk and say “I’ll beat them all so you can see I’m the best.”

Kiss: Is he good at kissing? When does he kiss you?

His kisses are soft but pretty long. Just spends the entire time pressing his lips against yours and doesn’t even dare to do more than that. 

If you want to do deeper than that? Then you gotta start it, because this boy is too scared of making you feel uncomfortable. 

Love: Who said “I love you” first? And when does he say it?

You. Definitely you. This boy was seriously too shy when the relationship started to give away anything.

He immediately replied “I love you too” once you admitted it.

Nowadays he says it before falling asleep, whispering against your ear.

Memory: What’s his favourite memory with you?

The first “date” you had with him, when he came over to your house for a tutoring session. You weren’t going out back then but it’s one of his most treasured memories.

It was his first time being alone with you and he thought about how perfect you were. How patient and understanding you were even though he couldn’t comprehend anything.

It was also the day he learned the most about you through your chatter after the session.

Nickname: Does he give you a nickname? Do you have one for him?

You have some for him like Blueberry, Prince Charming (in exchange for the King of the Court), volleyball dork and so on

He doesn’t have any for you. He prefers to call you by your name because he thinks it’s beautiful and most importantly, it’s your name. Would shorten it but he never calls you that in public. Our boy is too shy //^//

Open: How open is he about his feelings?

The weird thing about Kageyama is that once in private, he confesses his feelings for you like it’s a fact. No hesitation, no embarrassment, just his overwhelming love for you. In fact, it makes you blush a lot because of how unashamed he is.

But if someone else asks him about his feelings for you, he clams up. Sometimes he even refuses to look at the person and hides his face because of how red it became. He can eek out an incredibly quiet “I love them” and that’s it.

PDA: Is he fine with PDA? How far can he go?

He’ll turn into a flaming blueberry but tries to do it if you want to.

His limit is kissing on the lips. Hugging and hand-holding is “okay” but the edges of his ears will be tinged in red and hot to the touch. If you initiate the kiss, he becomes unresponsive and needs to rest for a while.

If someone manages to snap a shot of you two kissing and upload it for the world to see, he’s never going to live it down. He’ll be so embarrassed but also happy that the world can see how much he loves you.

Quirk: Habits or something he does which is unexpected?

He gives you manicures.

You asked him once when he was taking care of his nails and he responded with “do you want me to do yours?” and boom your nails have never looked better.

Does his best to make yours amazing and neat as possible, working at each cuticle with Bobby Fischer intensity. It’s to the point where you have to push his head away and say “Sweetie, your face is a centimetre from my nails.”

Expands his skills to painting as well. How he found the time, you will never know.

Relax: What activities do you do with him to relax?

Taking naps together. Kageyama runs on a tight and strict schedule which stresses him sometimes, so the best thing you can do with him is to take afternoon naps.

Just talk or sing quietly and he’s out like a light. He demands you sleep cuddled with him even if it’s in the blazing heat of summer. Even bought 2 fans to convince you that you would be fine while snuggling him.

Support: How supportive is he of your dreams? What do you do for him?

No matter what you do or what you want to do, this boy is there to back you up and encourage you every step of the way. Will try to help you even with limited knowledge with your work and tries not to bother you when working.

He loves it when you come to his matches and cheer him on. Every time he scores a point or sets a really good toss he turns to you at the end of the rally. Whenever you smile and wave to show your support he gets these explosions in his chest and it keeps him going no matter what.

Talk: What does he like talking about?

Most of his talk would be about volleyball (of course) or you.

Everyone knows he loves volleyball with his entire heart and most of his social life revolves around it. But for the first time in interviews or when chatting with fans, he would finally say something from his personal life if it has to do with you.

To you, he recounts all the things he did that day and how much he missed you when he comes back home.

Umbrella: What’s their favourite weather/season?

Kageyama likes cold winter days, preferably when it’s snowing. It’s the best when he wakes up with you and sheets of snow are covering the roads. 

Making sure you’re warm, wearing hats and gloves, he would build snowmen and get into snowball fights with you. Due to his infuriating athletic prowess, he always wins and leaves you soaked from head to toe.

“Why cover me in all these layers if you’re going to drench me with snowballs?!” 

“You’d get hypothermia if you don’t though.” (lmao does he even know what hypothermia is)

But he makes up for it with cuddles and hot chocolates

Vaunt: Does he like showing you off?

Not really. He doesn’t hide you from the world or deny that he’s dating anyone because he’s so proud of you and this relationship which impacts him in more ways he can express.

But at the same time, he doesn’t want your privacy to be invaded and therefore doesn’t give out personal information like names. He does, however, share bits like “they got a promotion” or “We tried painting together. It didn’t end well.” The viewers understand the extent of his love for you when they see him smile when talking about you. 

World: Where does he take you for vacation?

He doesn’t really care for vacations but knows you like them. That’s why he listens and writes down all the places you said you want to go to, even if it’s in passing. Like Sapporo during the Snow Festival or the beaches of Okinawa. Paris or Hawaii.

And even places which he thinks you might like from all your previous comments and remarks.

X-ray: What happens when you’re injured or sick?

If it’s a physical injury, he knows how to take care of it due to his years of playing volleyball where he came into contact with tons of athletes getting hurt. Like sprains, pulled muscles, bruises and cuts—he’s got it under control.

If you’re running a fever, then he’s a bit more panicky. Searches up how to take care of someone who's sick and reads so much even though he might not understand all of them. Tries and fails to cook some soup or porridge but brings you lots of tea and medication.

He tries his best not to get injured or sick because he knows you’ll worry and doesn’t want to burden you :( But loves it when you nurse him.

Yearn: How much does he miss/pine for you when apart?

Because of his and your work, mornings and afternoons are spent apart and he doesn’t like it one bit, not at all. He’s always thinking about you and is restless if he doesn’t see or hear from you. 

But he also doesn’t want to be overbearing or controlling. So he waits for you to contact first most of the time. If he’s had a bad day, then he’ll call you first.

Checks up on you a lot by messages and calls, receiving looks of surprise from all his teammates. He loves it when you send him videos of yourself telling him to cheer up and endure the time apart.

ZZZ: Does he have sleeping habits?

He’s a calm sleeper and doesn’t really move around when snoozing away. Tossing and turning, sure, but nothing more than that.

Besides, he’s pretty much anchored in place with you in his arms.

[heartofsnark]

Can You Feel The Sun? (Chapter Three): Maybe God Is Just A Cop We Can Fast Talk

Notes: I’m trying to test out not stockpiling chapters and just post whatever I got when I got it. So, we’ll see how it goes. Additionally, apologies in advanced if my work is a bit more fucky on spelling and grammar from now on out. They use to have some degree of beta reading, but now it’s the wild west. It all depends on my brain, which is smooth. 

Word Count: 13,335

Chapter Warnings: Canon typical violence, death, entirely too on the nose foreshadowing, f/f sex scene, cunnilingus, vaginal fingering, masturbation, sex toy use, nipple sucking, dirty talk that may or may not be cringe (I had fun)

If you haven’t yet, you can read the previous chapter here!~

V takes a deep breath as they pull into the parking garage of a large apartment building complex, her nose wrinkles. August has settled into Night City, air humid and thick, the stink of trash filling her lungs at every breath. The smell of NC in summer and a landfill are only a few degrees removed from one another. Jackie is in the passenger seat, nearly pressed shoulder to shoulder. Wakako is paying them to rescue some corpo chick, a gig V would usually roll her eyes at, but the apartment is a known Scavenger hideout. Without someone stepping in, the woman will be ripped apart, organs and cyberware chopped out to be sold. Corpo or not; no one deserves that.

The merc covers her lips with chapstick and a little above, so she smells the balm and not Night City, then dabs some on the inside of her mask as well. The trick reminds her of when her mother would have her and Eira smear homemade balm under their noses before going to pick through landfills; telling them stories of old plague doctors who’d shove cloves into beaked masks to avoid the stench of death. The chapstick isn’t quite so strongly scented as the mash of camphor, menthol, and coconut oil her mother would use. But it strikes that nostalgia bone nonetheless.

“Still not used to the smell?” Jackie taunts her, grin pulling at his lips.

“God, no,” she quickly signs, her choker translator off as she pulls on her mask.

“It grows on you.”

“Six months in and the only thing that’s grown on me is you.”  Her mask takes over translating her signing, though she’ll have to shut it off when they get in.

“Was that almost a compliment?”

“A compliment? From me? Wouldn’t dream of it.”

“Pff, real funny,” he rolls his eyes, “chick we're looking for's somewhere in this building. Probably crawlin' with the pendejos that kidnapped her. Eyes and ears open, all right?"

“Opening my ears isn’t gonna help much, but alright.”

“You’re real close to my last nerve, chica,” he says but he’s smiling.

“Love you too, Jack, now, the fixer give you any tips?”

“I’m not your mother,” he tries to mimic the older woman’s voice, “just do what I pay you for, it’s easy work. Sh, yeah.”

“Okay, let’s do this.”  

With that Jackie and V leave the car, stepping out into the garage. The taller of the two checks his two pistols, ensuring the gold emblazoned weapons are loaded and ready for the mess that surely awaits them. There’s no telling how many Scavvs are here, the body hacking gangers the equivalent of cockroaches. She checks her own .50 caliber pistol,  it’s loaded and she has a knife strapped in a holster on her thigh.

“Elevator. This way.” Jackie nods towards the elevator in the parking garage, leading the way as V follows behind. Dirty elevator doors open for them, the words NO FUTURE scratched across the stained metal. The two mercs step inside, V leaning against a graffiti covered wall, leg shaking with anxiety.

A digital interface, T-Bugs avatar appears at the elevator button panel, flashes of code as the runner quickly hacks through it without needing an apartment key. The doors close and the rusty elevator lurches into movement, heading up.

“Target's Sandra Dorsett. Target's biomon went mute a couple hours back. Suspected abduction. Target could've possibly flatlined already. Not sure you're in time,” Bug’s voice comes through V’s hearing aids, subtitles on her mask for good measure, as the runner delivers her warning. That’s always a risk with rescue jobs, but they have a decent track record for getting to people in time.

“We're in time, Bug,” Jackie corrects her, “ we. Sure, you're on phones, but… that don't make you any less a part of this squad.”

"Squad… Charming.” V can nearly hear the Bug rolling her eyes.

“Awww, c’mon Bug, you know we need you.”

“No arguments there, without me you gonkbrains probably be shot to death by turrets or sitting in jail by now. “

“And without us, you’d have to step foot outside your apartment.”

“A true horror,” Bug mocks, a scoff in her voice as the elevator stops, doors opening, “focus now, You’re lookin' for twelve thirty-seven.”  

V and Jackie step out of the elevators, greeted to trash strewn apartment halls, graffiti scratched across every inch. Hands on their iron, the mercs make their way down the hall. With a thought V mutes the translation tech in her mask, linked to her neuralware, that way a stray hand gesture won’t give them away.

“Han, is that you?” An older woman starts to step out of her apartment.

V quickly waves her hand, signaling the woman to make herself scarce and she nods before running back in. Between the Scavenger’s victims and the innocent residents; there’s a lot of room for potential casualties. Low profile is essential if they want to do a clean job.

“Target should be inside, but I got zero eyes on her biomon. Fingers crossed it's not too late. Ugh, hate this life or death shit,” T-Bug explains as they reach the door they need, “try hacking the door, think you can trip it on your own, V?”

V’s fingers itch to just pry the damn thing open or try to pick the lock, despite knowing the former would give them away and the latter is impossible with the electronic model of door. The young merc brings up the scanner of her mask, running a quick scan of the door and sending the quick hack through. It slides open, Jackie able to slip inside with her following close behind.

The doorway opens into a wider room and V’s heart sinks. The sticky cloying smell of blood claws its way through anything, so thick in the air that her efforts to block out the city smell are rendered useless.  There’s a steady but slightly muffled thrum of electronic music coming from the other room, not a Scavenger in sight, but their handiwork paints the room. Low grade medical equipment, a shitty old school heart monitor attached to a woman in a ripperdoc chair. The woman is dead, no monitor or scan needed to know that. Body ripped open, entrails spilling out, red spattering down the black leather of the chair. Blood paints the walls around her, her skin a sallow lifeless shade of gray. Her abdomen is a mess of bloody organs and half ripped out implants.

“Are we fuckin' late?! Is that her, is that our target, V?!” Jackie calls out, voice low and edged with worry in his voice as he tries to scream and whisper at once, gesturing with his gun as he points at the corpse.

V doesn’t bother to open her scanner, looking over the woman’s body, it's not hard to know this isn’t their target. No high up corpo would pack this crap. What implants remain are cheap and poorly installed, the ones around her eyes have left the skin creased and scarred. Worse quality than what someone would find in the poorest of Nomad clans. Likely, a joytoy, or perhaps a Maelstrommer as the shitty over the top implant installation is common among the gang.

“No,” V signs, looking up at Jackie, his eyes on her to subtitle the ASL, “our girl is protected under echelon II corpo immunity, this is back-alley black market crap, no corpo in their right mind would walk around with this shit.”

Jackie nods, his shoulders losing a little of their tension as he moves up to a door, the music louder as he just opens the door peeking through, trying to get a feel for the room before they go through. Judging by the music and the still fresh blood mingled with the older stains, the Scav haunt is still being used. Jackie pulls away from the door and presses against the wall next to it.

“V, mira, eyes up, pendejos ahead.” Jackie warns her as she puts her hands to the door, trying to peek through the crack, the music louder and less muffled with the door cracked. V can see plastic sheets, coolers, chop shop equipment as they butcher people. Through distorted bloodied plastic hung from the ceiling, the pendejo in question standing in front of a cooler, back turned.

“Drop him quiet, V.”

V takes a deep breath and counts the music beats, waiting for the tempo and volume to rise before she opens the door, hiding the creak of it behind the pumping club style music. The merc drops to a crouch as soon as she walks through, creeping up behind the Scavenger, pushing through plastic sheets, she unsheathes her tactical knife.

In one swift movement she stands and kicks out the man’s knee, bringing him down low enough to grab his face by his mask and pull him towards her. He has a mere moment to struggle in her grasp before she then sinks her knife into his skin, piercing the flesh and arteries where his neck meets his shoulder. He goes limp in her arms and she pulls her knife out with a twist, before she shoves him forward into the cooler. The lid shuts with a slight thud, drowned out by the music.

“Nice, couldn’t have done it better myself, chica,” Jackie praises as she wipes her knife off on her pants, red smearing across the black fabric.

“On your toes. More bodies incoming, they're almost on you,” Bug warns as the mercs move to the next room, creeping through the garbage strewn hall and going around a bend, an open doorway showing a group of Scavs.

Whether thanks to music or their own lack of intelligence, the gang members don’t hear them as they find a nook around the corner to hide. V pressing her body tight against a fridge, Jackie not far behind her.  The dark spot, appliances, and trash does well to hide the two from sight.

“Fistfuck these reapers. Oye, V! They're comin',” Jackie warns as two of the Scav start to come around the corner, “wait for your chance. Pick the prick off. “

Tucked away the two mercs aren’t noticed. She watches as the two men walk by, following a path down the hallway without noticing them. V tries to hear what they say, straining to hear over the music, something about scoring big, a chick with “preem ass chrome”.

“Cabrones… thick as locusts. Let's wait and plan a spree.”

V gives a nod, trying not to comment that they’ve already discussed this. Stealth has never been Jackie’s strongpoint, he talks too much, can’t stand the quiet. She watches as the two gang members turn their backs to the mercs. They stop at the end of the hallway to stand guard and V goes to move.

“Let's take 'em… Suerte.”

She tries not to shake her head, not to sign at him to stop talking. She’ll tease him for it later, the two stay in a crouch, creeping up behind the two Scavengers. The merc gets close enough to feel the warmth coming off the gang member's body, V and Jackie lunge at the same time. Jackie snaps the Scav on the left’s neck and V slices the throat of the one on the right; two men dead at their feet. She rummages through the freshly dead corpses pockets, adding a few eddies and a Max Doc to her own.

“All down, limp meat. But probably not the last of 'em,” Jackie says as they start back towards the corner, staying low and...mostly...quiet as they reach the open doorway, “Move on, move up. Right behind you, V.

Their hideaway corner has an open doorway in the room that leads to another larger room, windows at the far end and around  Shelves and cabinets of ammo and grenades fill the room, should be easy enough to stay out of sight. Three men that she can see, one closer to the doorway, easy grab. And if they time it right they can grab the other two in tandem.

V raises her knife to her chest, pressing the hilt to her skin, then pounces on the nearest ganger. She yanks his head back and onto the blade, the weapon piercing up through the base of his skull, as she drags his body back. He’s already dead by the moment she’s dragged him from the room, dropping his corpse where he won’t be seen.

“Careful, once you get the next two,” Bug warns, voice low, “goliath ass Scav the next room over.”

“Gotcha,” Jackie whispers as they start to make their way back into the room where the next two are.

V stays to the left side of the room and Jackie goes to the right, both staying low and close to cover. The younger takes a deep breath, the clutter and way the room curves means they’re out of sight range, making it harder to coordinate. Nonetheless, she mentally counts to three and jumps her target. She grabs the gang member by the chin, wrenching up his face as she slams her knife into the front of his throat,ripping it out with a spray of blood.

“What the fuck!?” A voice, deep and masculine yells out, just as Jackie snaps his target’s neck. A bulking mass of a man, around Jackie’s height has scrambled to his feet; a heavy machine gun in his hands.

“Fuck, eyes on you!!” T-Bug warns just as a bullet tears through V’s bicep, superficial, no pain as adrenaline spikes.

And the chaos starts as the bullets begin to fly, V grabs her pistol, takes aim into the room and starts fire while moving. Jackie doing the same, the pair scrambling behind a cabinet, crouched and facing one another. His sweaty forehead nearly smacking into her mask. The room around them tears and shatters with each bullet fired their way, none managing to hit them, she doesn’t think the ganger saw where they took cover.

Their pistols can’t cut through the rapid fire being shot their way.  Her heart is pounding, her fingers tight on the trigger, HMG’s need a cool off time. If they wait it out, his gun will overheat and they’ll have a window. And if he’s not coming to pick them off, playing the distance game, it means he’s dead set on protecting something; got to be Dorsett.

“Gun’s going to overheat, then we’ll get our chance,” V signs and speaks to Jackie at the same time, miscommunication not something that can afford right now. Her voice is rough and out of breath, her face wet with sweat behind her mask.

“Hijos de puta! Our target’s gotta be through there, V!”

“I know I know,” she squeezes his shoulder with one hand, the other still signing, “once the gun overheats , we’ll rush him and finish this up.”

“HMG should only have a few more rounds before then, but won’t be long before it cools back off. You got a tight window,” T-Bug informs them, able to keep better track of it when not in firing range.

And then the fire slows, lightening and nearly stopping, Jackie and V both jump over the cabinet, seeing their chance and not hesitating to take it. They rush towards the room, the man cursing when he sees them charging and the door begins to shut. V skids into the wall and Jackie slams against it just as the door fully closes, cutting off their access. The older merc digs his nails between the door and wall, trying to pry it open with a grunt, but it doesn’t budge. Crow bar, crow bar, something, there has to be something.

Then a gunfire blasts through the wall, narrowly avoiding V. They missed their window and he can shoot through the wall. This is great. This is fantastic, exactly what they fucking need!

“Head down, Jaina, take cover!” Jackie yells out, yanking V back behind a shelf with him.

“Fuck!”

“Need options Bug, you got eyes on this shithole!?”

“Uh, lemme see, room he’s in connects to a balcony, the window to get in is small. V might be able to slip through to him.”

“How do I get there?”

“Got a window on the left, gimme two secs to grease the lock.”

“If I get his attention elsewhere, could you break down that door?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Jackie nods as they put together their new plan, “flank him and draw his fire! I’ll do the rest!”

V sees the window Bug is talking about, her interface over it as it slides open, she easily jumps through, a closed in balcony cluttered with equipment, more trash that nearly trips her as she reaches the next window. The industrial shutters are damaged and broken, allowing her to peek through, the goliath, as Bug put it, is inside. A shaved head and face of mottled cyberware. She grabs the lowest rung of the shutters and rips the already broken mess up; then fires three shots at the man. They hit but don’t bring him down, only streaking blood down his leather jacket, he swings the gun to face her.

A loud boom rings out, metal screeching, as Jackie busts the door down. His boots pound against the floor and he slams into the Scavenger, the gang member’s body hitting the wall with a thud. Jackie rips the HMG from the man’s hands, raising it high above his head and bashing the gang member’s head in with it. Blood streaking the wall behind him and the ganger falling limp on the carpet. V climbs through the window, giving the Scavenger

“That’s the last of them,” T-Bug tells them, “time to find our target.”

“Question is, where the hell is she?” Jackie asks as V makes a beeline for the one door she sees. They’ve gone through the rest of the area, it has to be it. It's the last damn room in the apartment or whatever.

“Look around, gotta be there somewhere.”

“Holy fuck.”

V’s breath catches in her throat when she swings that door open; the horror of the front room was just a taste of what these people are capable of. White linoleum stained ruddy with blood, a bathroom with fluorescent lights making the ghostly gray of the corpses stand out. The bathtub is jammed full, naked bodies bleeding the ice water red, hanging out to smear crimson over white porcelain.

“Jesus christ… ” Jackie breathes out as he steps in behind her.

V swallows the nerves and bile down, rushing to the bathtub.  The first body stacked on top is a man, skin cold to the touch and no pulse in his neck, she moves him aside. Can’t save them all, can’t save them all; she tells herself. As she checks and moves bodies, finding only one with some warmth still clinging to her body, top level chrome in etching her cheekbones and down her bare chest. Her nose and mouth barely above the ice water, it’s a miracle she wasn’t drowned under the weight of the others who weren’t as lucky.

“Think I got her. Got our target!” She yells out as she pulls the woman halfway from the tub, sitting on the edge of it. V’s fingers numb and sting all at ones from the ice, she delicately brings the woman’s shaved head to her lap. Ice water soaking through her jeans and chilling the skin beneath.

Sandra’s eyes are just slightly open, not alert, but V can pick up on some movement behind them. Pulse at her neck faint, albeit consistent. Bad shape, but not gone. The instinct to keep checking the bodies, the need to see if they can save anyone else, pulls at V. But she has to secure Sandra, has to attend the one she was sent after and at the very least she knows has a fighting chance.

Jackie stands at the door looking in and keeping guard, there's likely more Scavengers in the building, if they catch wind of what’s happened in their nest. They’ll storm in and they can risk the gang members opening fire into the room, snuffing out anyone's chance of living. Her stomach churns, once they secure Sandra they can check on the others.

“We make it, she alive?”

“She’s hanging in, I think,” V’s fingers twitch with the need to sign her words, but the need to support Sandra’s neck  and head wins out. She’s not sure if the poor woman can process or feel anything right now, looking nearly catatonic, but...maybe a touch that doesn’t hurt can be of some comfort through it all.

“V, jack into her biomon. Need to know what we're dealin' with.”

“Ooh, this does not look good…” Jackie breathes out, green eyes running frantically over the bathroom, taking in the sheer horror of what they’ve found.

“She’s not alone here, Bug, there’s bodies stacked up, crammed together, like slabs of fucking meat. I’m not sure if anyone else is alive, I- fuck.”

“We’ll do what we can for them after, keep it together. And if she survives, she won’t even remember, tiny scar on the subconscious in the long run.  Jack into her biomon.”

“Jacking in,” V slots her personal link into Sandra’s biomon port, information lighting up her mask's interface, “Sandra Dorsett. NC570442. Trauma Team Platinum.”

“Platinum? Shit, Trauma shoulda swooped in if she sneezed,” Jackie scratches the back of his head, the question clear, where the fuck is Trauma?

“Guessin' they jammed the transmitter sig. Lookin' at a hacked biomon, firmware reconfig or a neurovirus…”

“Carajo, T-Bug! You ain't seein' this place. This is tubs, ice, hooks and cleavers.” Jackie explains.  Scavengers are brutal, crude, rudimentary; anything too high tech isn’t coming from them.

“Hmm… Scopmuncher's hack, huh. Got an idea. Check her neuroport. Find a shard? Yeah, pull it - that'll be what's muting the biomon.”

V gently maneuvers the woman’s head, nails rubbing over her shaved hair, seeing the two standard neuroports behind her right ear. One with a shard placed inside. She’s heard stories of infected shards, where removing them ends up causing more harm than whatever’s on them. But, she trusts T-Bug.

“Shard found, removing it now.” She gently pulls the shard from Sandra’s neuroport, pocketing it for now, in case it’s needed later.

“Check the biomon. Anything change?”

“Greetings, Sandra,” an artificial voice explains,  “If you are conscious, assume recovery position now. An emergency evacuation unit has been dispatched and is due to arrive at your location in 180 seconds.”

“Trauma will be here in three.”

“Your premium plan will cover 90% of the projected costs of your rescue and treatment,” the biomonitor warns and V can’t help but roll her eyes, capitalism and healthcare, a match made in hell.

“Ay, pobrecita,” Jackie shakes his head, “let's get her off that ice.”

V nods, pulling her jack from the naked woman’s biomonitor and gently bringing Sandra’s body up and into her arms. She lifts the woman bridal style, water soaking her arms as she stands up. Sandra’s body starts to shake and convulse, leg unintentionally kicking at V’s arms.

“Shit!”  V curses out loud, hitting her knees as she brings Sandra to the ground. The woman’s body twitches and convulses, eyes rolling back into her head, as a ghastly choking sound comes from her mouth.

“She's flatlining!”

“V, need to know what's going' on!”

“Jackie, airhypo, now!”

“¡Ey, catch chica!”

Jackie throws the airhypo and the merc snatches the green first aid hypodermic out of the air. V quickly presses the tool to the center of Sandra’s chest and pushes the needle into her skin, shooting the compressed adrenaline into her system to stabilize her. Sandra’s body stills and relaxes, her chest still falling and rising steadily. V breathes a sigh of relief and pushes her mask onto the top of her head; sweat stinging her eyes and her lungs demanding she breathe freely. She swallows hard and blinks, Sandra still stable on the floor.

“Fuck..I, target seized but we got her stable,” V recounts to T-Bug and shakes her head, still in shock at just how close they came to this woman dying in her arms.

“You alright, jaina?”

“Yeah, yeah, I just, yeah. Uh, fuck...”

“I getcha, got a stomach of steel, but this is….”

The merc is used to death, seen it firsthand many a times and dealt it to many a people. But she’s always prided herself on not taking innocent lives, every target she’s ever killed, every person she’s put in the grave had a healthy share of blood on their hands.  She knows that doesn’t necessarily make it right, doesn’t many it doesn’t cause any harm, most monsters still have someone who loves them. And as a corpo, maybe Sandra isn’t truly innocent, V wouldn’t know for sure.  But she doesn’t deserve this, this horror, neither do any of the people stewing in ice water.

She’s always been surrounded by death but in this  bathroom, with her knees pressing against bloody tiles, she feels like she’s choking on it.

“We’re gonna get you out here, safe and sound, I promise,” she tells the woman in her lap, maybe more for her own benefit than for the woman who can’t hear her. She picks Sandra up again and turns towards Jackie, “Scavs will scatter the second they see Trauma, hate to ask this, but once they show up, we need to see if we can save anyone else, you mind checking out the bodies in the tub while I handle her?”

“Course, gotta save who we can.”

V nods, thankful that Jackie and her are on the same page. There’s a steady whirr of engines and the young merc takes Sandra out to the balcony, in the faint distance she can see the Trauma Team aircraft incoming. Wind picks up as they draw ever closer, sweeping up and blowing trash around from the area. It feels nice on V’s bare sweaty face, but she tries to tuck Sandra a little closer to her chest, trying to keep the unconscious woman warm, which seems almost ironic in the heat of the city. The aircraft pulls up beside the balcony with flashing lights and V cringes at the whirring of its turbines, turning the volume down on her hearing aids.

“Landing, stand clear. Initiating security protocol. Follow all instructions. Stop in the doorway!” The speakers on the aircraft boom and V would flip them off if she weren’t holding Sandra.

A little step extends out to the balcony and holograms mark out an area she isn’t supposed to step into. Then the Trauma Team members come out, four individuals in green uniform with white helmets, guns drawn, holsters of equipment hanging off of them.  Two of the workers lay a gurney down in front of V.

“Place the patient on the ground!” A man yells at her, gun drawn. She rolls her eyes and does as asked, gently placing Sandra on the gurney.

“Five steps back. Now,” one of the workers demands, then shoves V back and away from Sandra, gun still pointed at her as the others rush to take the woman into the aircraft.

“There are some other people...” she switches on the translator in her choker to sign, but they ignore her.

Of course, Sandra is the only person in that tub who means anything to them, because she has money. She can just hear them over the turbines as they start to assess the woman’s condition, loading her in the aircraft, the last worker following behind. The young merc sighs watching as the vehicle flies off, as much the Trauma Team system boils her blood, their doctors are well trained. Sandra is in good hands.  After a moment she turns back to the entrance to the apartment, Jackie waiting in the doorway. His hands empty.

“No one else…” She starts to sign then trails off, seeing the look in his eyes.

“All dead long before we got here.”

“Fuck…”

“Let's get outta here,” he claps a hand against her shoulder as they start to leave, “Elevator gets us to the garage direct.”

“Good work. Shitshow's over. Cuttin' my wires now. See ya in the near future,” T-Bug says her goodbyes, cutting off her connection to the mercs.

Good work, somehow those words ring hollow when there’s a tub of corpse not three feet away. There’s a heavy weight in V’s chest, they did what they were paid for, one person is safer now because of them. All things she should be proud of, but she can’t help but still feel hollow and bitter about this entire thing. Her head still hangs low as she follows Jackie out of the apartment.

“Listen, chica,” he gets her attention, “got this thing. Mind if I borrow your wheels?”

“A thing?”

“I got a date with Misty, but… heh, I can't take the metro! How's that gonna look for me?”

“Alright, alright, I’ll help you out, I guess,” she signs, feigning annoyance, though they both know she’s happy to help.

“Ah, savin' my ass, V, thank you. How about I drive you home, eh?”

“Please, I feel like I’m about to drop any minute,” she admits, body heavy with exhaustion and head starting to hurt from all the commotion. Even the translator tech’s voice is starting to make her head throb.

The elevator doors open, welcoming the two mercs as they scurry inside, V leaning all of her weight against a wall as Jackie hits the buttons. Doors closing, it starts to move, and V’s thankful for every second that gets her closer to her bed. It's an unusual feeling, she’s not typically this worn out after a job. Adrenaline is a hell of a thing, she’s learned, most jobs leaving her still riding that high and looking for ways to burn the excess energy. But, all she wants right now is to crawl in bed and pretend the world is a kinder place, 

“Oh, almost forgot. Should get Wakako on the halo - tell her the job's done.”

V gives a short nod before pulling Wakako up on her phone, it rings a few times before it projects the image of the older woman, V keeping it on speaker so Jackie can hear the call.

“Ahem! V? How did it go? Our client is alive and well?”

“Of course.”

“Splendid. Your payment awaits you - ready to come and grab whenever you like, even right away. But I guess home is the only place you wish to be now. The NCPD has surrounded Watson. The district is closed. If you are to make it past the cordon, you must move fast.”

“Shit, thanks for the warning, catch you another time,” V signs her goodbye as she hangs up and groans, thunking her head back against the wall. Of course, just her luck. The elevator doors open and Jackie leads the way out to the garage, V following closely behind.

“Gotta get going if I’m gonna make it home tonight,” V mentions as they reach her car, she doesn’t want to have to crash on his garage or his mom’s place if she can help it.

“Leave it to me, chica, I’m driving.” Jackie tells her with a little grin pulling at his lip as he climbs into the driver seat and she plops down into the passenger side.

Jackie revs the ignition and starts fiddling with the radio, while V cranks the air conditioner. She tosses her mask into the backseat for now, fiddling with her hair. The pull out of the parking garage as Jackie finds a song he likes, kind enough to keep it on low volume for V’s sake, she finds herself sinking into the seat, watching the city pass by from the window. Trying to focus on the neon lights that pass her by and not the negativity that’s threatening to overtake her mind.

“Can’t stop digging Night City,” Jackie tells her following a few moment of silence, save for the radio.

“Place definitely has an energy to it.” They drive past what she assumes is a joytoy arguing with a man, advertisements that flash so vividly in the night, street vendors peddling over the top food items. Noisy, smell, chaotic, and messy; the essence of Night City

“Nah, chica, it's more than that. Morgan Blackhand, Andrew Weyland, Adam Smasher. Legends are born here!”

“You and me, the next ones up?” She signs, playfully raising an eyebrow at him.

“You know it, jaina.”

“And we’re not gonna need a corp to do it.”

“Swear to god, V,” he shakes his head, grinning, “only merc I know who don’t get all tingly when I mention the greats.”

“Not saying they aren’t badasses, but being the best of the best is easy when you got a billion eddie corp in your corner. Blackhand was in Militech’s pocket, Weyland was on Petrochem’s payroll and Smasher is a certified Arasaka cocksucker,” she explains, fingers cramping from spelling the names as quickly as she can so her tech will translate it right, “but you and me are going to do this right, reach the top without the corp’s dick in our mouths.”

Being a legend may always be Jackie’s dream more than it’s hers… But she’s been growing into it more and more with each passing day.  She’s enjoyed the ride so far and wants to keep up the momentum. While by no means a perfect life, she’s happier than she’s been in a long time. Independent and doing a job she loves more often than not. Though, there’s still something missing… that she can’t quite define. As they keep working their way up that ladder, she’s only feeling more and more like she’s where she belongs. It only gets better from here, so long as her past stays there. V can’t help but think hitting the big leagues is what’s really going to put all the pieces in place, herself included.

“Damn right we will, V. Blackhand’s gonna wish he was us.”

“Blackhand is dead.”

“Psssh, you really believe that, chica?” He looks at her like she’s grown a third head.

“You don’t?”

“Hell no, Blackhand’s out there somewhere, sitting pretty after blowing Arasaka Tower off the map.”

“No one’s seen him since the tower fell, anyone in the tower when it came down is dead, you don’t survive that shit.”

“No one has ever found his body or Silverhand’s!”

“Because it was buried under rubble,” she’s signing frantically and grinning, the little stupid argument lifting some of the gloom off of her, “wait, who the fuck is Silverhand?”

“Silverhand, the ro-,” Jackie pauses, eyes going to the rearview window, she follows his eyeline, a van behind them, “hey is it just me or, argh, van’s on our ass, we got a tail, V!”

V gets a hand on her iron and turns in her seat to try to grab a better look, she can see the holographic mask glitching green and red on the driver. The van jerks into the left lane, speeding up to pass them, then in the very next moment pulling in front of them. V’s brows furrow, what are they doing? Then the double doors to the van open up, two masked gang members opening fire on the mercs.

“Scavs! ¡Hijos de puta!”

And V’s half out the window, sitting on the sill of it,  in the next instant, firing back at the Scavs. Bullets whirl by and V tries to maintain a steady hand as she shoots off shot after shot, aiming for the gangoons heads. Gunshots ring out through the night, bullets whiz past V and blow holes in her car, as she keeps blasting right back. People from the streetways scream, terrified of being caught in the shoot out.

“Come on, V, shoot!”

“Keep it steady,” he side mirror explodes as a bullet hits it, “fuck!”

With a thought, V shuts off her hearing aids, the world going quiet around her. Unable to hear the screaming and racket as she focuses only on shooting the Scavs. Blood sprays, a bullet ripping through a gang member’s head, their body going limp and spilling onto the road. The vehicles swing through a right turn, Jackie a thankfully empty chunk of sidewalk before swinging back out to the road. V reloads her gun as a bullet tears through her hip, not fatal but it hurts like a bitch. She fires off two more shots, catching the last member in the back of the van just as it takes a quick left turn.

But the curve comes back to meet the stretch of highway they’re on. She fires off a few shots as it goes, trying to tear through the tires before the gangers greet them again, but to no avail. The Scavenger van takes the short curve and comes back through the exit, taking the left lane to drive alongside them. V tries to fire a shot at the masked driver, but her aim is off, only blasting out the last of the van’s intact windows.

The van’s door opens, another masked gang member blasting at the mercs as the cars struggle to stay neck and neck. A sharp pain lodges in V’s shoulder and she blows the man’s brains out in her next shot. Only the driver remains and she starts blasting without hesitation, knowing they can’t easily shoot back and has no more friends covering his ass. One last bullet connects with his temple, his body going limp and the van going onto the street, crashing into a building.

She breathes, blinking, heart still pounding in her chest. There’s blood still coming from her wounds and wind whipping around her as Jackie drives. She pulls herself back into the vehicle, bending a knee and keeping one foot in her seat with the other back on the floorboard, because she can’t be bothered to sit properly. She catches Jackie’s lips moving and flips her hearing aids back on.

“Ears were off, mind saying it again,” she signs and can’t help but shrink when she sees the glimmer of annoyance on his face, the tension of the situation no doubt making what’s usually a minor request feel a bit more aggravating.

“Are you okay? You need me to take you to Vik’s?”

The mark on her hip and bicep from earlier are minor, just scratches where bullets skimmed the skin. It's her shoulder that could warrant some concern. She flips on a light in the vehicle, craning her neck to get a better look at the injury. The entry wound isn’t too bad, low caliber, just some blood steadily weeping from her shoulder. V rolls and shifts her shoulder, a tightness to the movement. She touches around her shoulder blades, no exit wound. V rubs around the wound, feeling the injury. Something solid within her flesh, not far from the entry wound.

She knows Vik says not to remove the bullets, that it can cause more harm digging around in the wound, but if she leaves it the thing will annoy her forever. With adrenaline still spiked, heart still pounding and these injuries still feeling like stings at most, it will hurt more later than it will now. So, V digs her fingers into her own wound.

“What are you-”

V finds the bullet beneath her skin and digs her nails into it, ripping it from her flesh, bloodied metal now exposed. She rolls her shoulder, it’s bleeding a bit more, but the movement feels better, more free.

“ Jesus christo, V! Fuckin’ hate when you do that shit!”

V laughs at his reaction, her pisspoor first aid never failing to make Jackie uncomfortable, she tosses the bullet out of the window. She rubs her bloody fingers off on her pants, before pulling at her shirt, a little hole where the bullet struck.

“More bummed about my shirt than anything, Vik doesn’t need to see my mug tonight,” she signs, as if she doesn’t have a hundred more black crop tops.

“Fine, but don’t call me bitching if you’re hurting later tonight.”

“Oh, ‘cause you’re one to talk.” She signs quickly, whipping around in her seat to face him.

“The hell’s that supposed to mean?”

“Hijo de la chingada, V, Misty, this is it for me, I’m done for ahhhhh,” she whines aloud, dropping her tone and trying to mimic Jackie, grinning when he scrunches his face in response.

“I was sick!”

“Well, yeah, that’s what happens when you eat your weight in cheap-ass sushi!”

“It was all you can eat!”

“Pffft,” she sputters and squeals, laughing at his excuse, “Swear to god, Jack, only man I know who can take three bullets to the chest and keep going, but a tummy ache knocks you on your ass!”

“And you’re the only woman I-oh shit.”

Police lights cut across the bridge to Watson, a full police cordon blocking the way. At least four or five NCPD units standing between V and her bed. Because of fucking course they are. She groans and thunks her head  against the seat in frustration.

“Fuck me.”

“‘Preciate the offer, chica, but we gotta run that one by Misty first.” Jackie winks and she makes a gagging noise at him in return. But she’s unable to control the warmth the joke brings to her cheeks. That’s not a mental or emotional road she’s ready to venture down, she shuts the light off in the car, the last thing they need is pigs catching sight of the blood and deciding to give a shit.

Jackie slows the car down as they pull up to the blockade, he’s calmer than her, he’s been fast talking the NCPD his whole life. While no stranger to cops, they’ve been a more sporadic presence in the former nomad’s life, leaving her to fiddle with her choker. She turns off the translator tech, prepared to break out the puppy dog eyes and soft broken little voice if she has to.

A female officer saunters over to the driver’s side window, hair pulled back in a tight ponytail and silver cyberware etching her forehead and chin. Her eyes are hidden behind a pair of dark shades.

“Watson's on lockdown till further notice. Necessary security measure,” she explains to the mercs. V can’t help but eye the bulky security robots, ready to blast them to smithereens if the NCPD deem it ‘necessary’.

“Officer, ma'am! Damn are we ever lucky we ran into you,” Jackie greets the officer, turning up the charm.

“Really… What's it that makes me so special?”

“Uh, a heart of gold? 'Course only somebody with a heart of gold can understand just how much I need to get back to my girl.”

“Your… girl?”

“Hm… that's a shame.”

“C’mon, look at him,” V slings her forearm onto Jackie’s shoulder then rests her chin there, making puppy dog eyes at the officer, “no model citizen maybe, but he’s a good kid.” She pats his chest for added effect.  

There’s a grin pulling at Jackie’s lips and she struggles not to smile in return, wanting to laugh at the silliness of it all. The officer sighs and turns away from the pair, the two taking the moment to make faces at each other, trying to make the other break and laugh.

Let them through. But they're the last,” she turns back to the mercs and they try to force serious expressions, “OK, on your way.”

“You have a good evening, now, officer… ma'am,” Jackie nods and starts to drive through the blockade.

V pulls away from Jackie’s side, instantly feeling colder away from his warmth, she twists to look forward. Watching neon lights and city people walking by. Sometimes it feels surreal. Not minutes ago she was shooting gangoons in the back of a van. Not an hour or so ago, she was pulling a woman out of an ice filled tub. Yet, the world keeps spinning, couples and families walking down the same streets her and Jackie have nearly died in so many times. No, no storm clouds, if she digs that hole she’ll need an excavator to get back out.

“So, you can be nice when you feel like it,” she signs and talks, content to use her voice at the moment, just her and Jackie after all.

“When am I not nice?”

“Uhhh, always!”

“I'm always never not nice!”

“Puh-lease!”

“And what about you?”

“What about me?”

“Oh, Jackie, I can’t possibly talk around strangers, you, Misty, Mama Welles, and Vik are the only people I can talk with.  But the moment it’s time to pull out the wool over a pig’s eyes, suddenly, you’re real talkative!”

“Tone is an important tool in manipulation, my eyes can only do so much.”

“Keep that in mind when you beg me to order your food for you.”

“What? No!”

Jackie laughs, warm and deep in his chest at her offense at the mere notion of having to be in charge of ordering her own lunch from now on. It's just so much easier to have Jackie do it, waitresses are much more used to weirdness in Night City, but there’s still that odd little look when she starts signing and her translator tech does its thing. Jackie still laughs about the time he made her order the lunch over the phone and they hung up as soon as they heard the artificial voice, assuming it was some scam.

“Oh shit…” V says, soft and low as they pull up towards an intersection, two men holding guns aiming at  a driver’s side window, some poor bastard panicking behind the wheel.

“Outta the car! Now! C'mon! Ain't got all day!” The armed man screams at them and V’s fingers twitch to grab her iron. Then a large police aircraft vehicle comes flying in, lights flashing.

“Check it out, V. Shit's goin' down,” Jackie says, trying to hunch down behind the wheel, which does nothing to hide his six foot five form.

“Aa, shit, they're here!” One of the gang members yells and they’re screaming at each other to shoot. A small group of officers deploy from the aircraft vehicle, the led blue adornments to their uniform and odd helmets that cover their eyes tell her they’re MaxTac. The officers start firing back at the gangers.

“NCPD's apex predators at work, gonk out there nothing but a midday snack.”

“Wonder why they’re busting out MaxTac for this? Just looks like a regular carjacking to me.”

“Who knows, corpo behind the wheel? Got a quota to meet?”

“To put on a show of intimidation.”

“Might be onto something with that one,” the gangers are shot dead, bleeding out on the ground around the car they tried to jack, “welp, shows over.  Poor bastards… but they had it comin'.”

They pull away from the conflict, nothing but the hum of the radio playing as Jackie drives her home. Her leg is bounces softly in the floorboard, her fingers tapping at the window sill, occasionally catching the wind. The feeling she’s more accustomed to after gigs, a restlessness, adrenaline and energy boiling over. Maybe she won’t just drop once she gets home, no longer bone tired. Oddly enough, the shootout seems to have lifted her spirits. She’ll take a high stakes, high adrenaline car chase over the bone weariness ther rescue put her in.

Jake is in Heywood, so he won’t be able to get through the cordon. Cecelia is probably working at Tom’s Diner tonight. If she’s near the end of her shift, V might be able to score a lay and late night pancakes. Her mood is still a bit too sour to hit up a bar or club for a stranger, but still feeling the need to work through this energy and tension. She was dreaming of nothing more than hitting the pillow, seeing if she could sleep soundly tonight, but now she doesn’t think she’ll be able to sleep at all unless she gets some energy out.  She gets out her holophone and opens up Cecelia’s contact.

“Whatcha doing, jaina?”

“Texting Cecelia,” V shrugs, shoulder twinging in pain,  “y’know how it is.”

“Of course, shit gets the blood pumping, why you think I always got a date night planned after a big gig?”

“Thought that was so you could steal my car?” She teases, typing up her message to Cecelia but not sending it yet.

“That too, but after you nearly die, just gotta do something to feel alive.”

“I think we might just be perverts.”

“Eh, that too,” he laughs as they pull into her apartment complex’s parking garage, “we’re here.”

“What about you? Not likely to make it back to Heywood now…” She asks, holding her thumb over the send button, if Jackie can’t get back through he’ll be crashing at her place and she doubts he’s going to want to sleep on the couch listening to her and her fuckbuddy go at it.

“Chill, V. They'll let me through.”

“Sure about that?”

“Oh yeah. I'll play nice Jackie again,” he stops the car near the elevator doors, “go, have some fun, lord knows you need it.”

He sticks his hand out, V smacking her palm into his own, a quick shake then they bump their fists together. His hand practically engulfs her own, that foot and a half of size difference obvious even in the contrast of their hands. One of these days she’s going to strain her neck looking up to talk to him.

“Tell Misty I said ‘hi’.”

“I will. Ahí luego.”

Goodbyes said for the night, V grabs her mask from the backseat and steps out of the car, her joints and injury protesting the movement. Her combat boots stomp against the pavement as she calls up the elevator, giving a final wave to Jackie as he pulls out of the garage. She leans against the wall, on her good shoulder, sending the text to Cecelia.

V: you @ work???

The elevator dings and V steps inside, cringing at the sudden bright light of the elevator, a stark contrast to the dimness of the garage. Video screens play ads for energy drinks and cyberware; everything under the sun. Everything in neon bubblegum colors or horrific details, because shock value sells nearly as well as tits.  Her holo buzzes and V checks a text from T-Bug, the runner knows she’d rather text than call but the sudden message is strange nonetheless. Bug only reaches out when it has something to do with a job.

T-Bug: Forgot earlier,  a runner I know has something you could probably use. It's a runner shop outside of Kabuki.

For some reason she’s not shocked at all that Bug would text in full grammatically correct sentences. V can’t help but think the world would implode if T-Bug ever sent an emoji or emoticon.  But gifts are a little unusual for her, but for some reason the experienced netrunner is convinced she can teach V the craft.

V: thanx bug, thats sweet of ya~!

She’s promptly left on seen, no indication of Bug typing anything back,  and V can’t help but laugh. The more T-Bug acts skeeved out by her affection, the more she wants to tease her with it.

“Good evening, Night City!~”

The screens cut to Night After Night, the host Ziggy Q coming to sit at his desk, green hair and gold suit twinkling under his stage lights. V rarely watches this kind of thing or watches TV as a whole if she’s being honest, just more noise, but she finds herself unable to help watching as the elevator starts to move.

“My first guest for tonight is the president of The Church of El Yahu, The Last Emancipator and the bane of Arasaka’s PR department; one Reverend Colver.”

The camera cuts to an older man dressed in black and beige, seemingly lost among the neon pinks and yellows of the stage. He sits down on the plush magenta couch, nodding towards the host.

“Praise be to thee our Father in heaven.”

“And ouuur second guest is Karina Lee, host of the Chip In program, which promotes the use of cybernetic implants,” a woman with a thick dark afro of hair comes onto the stage, “ how’s life treating you beautiful?”

“Can’t complain, Ziggy,” Karina tells him, she looks much more in place than the Reverend as she sits down next to him,  bright clothes and heavy gold cyberward indented in her jaw, “thanks for having me.”

“Now, I’d like to have us talk about the most exclusive and highly sought after implant on the market today, Arasaka Corp’s Relic. But maybe we ought to make sure our fair audience is up to speed,” Ziggy says, waving a dramatic and manicured hand towards the camera before focusing back in on his guests, “Karina, what is the relic exactly? In a word, if you could?”

“In one word? I’d say, immortality.”

“Immortality? Really?”

V can’t help but roll her eyes at the dramatic wording and the over the top expressions the host makes. Nothing can make someone immortal, that's a pipe dream, even if it is possible it will never be feasible on a mass scale for anyone who isn’t rich. TV types always got to exaggerate, she figures.

“That’s right, the relic allows you to transfer the consciousness from a dying person, finding a new home for their soul on a transferrable chip. This person, they’ll never leave your side, a companion with you  forever in your own consciousness. Just imagine if-”

“Child, child-” the Reverend cuts her off, “think for a moment about what you’re saying! This relic is an abomination that feeds on human misery! It is an unnatural likeness, a golden calf born by false prophets! What’s more, this technology is just another tool of coercion and corruption, only the wealthy and powerful elite will have access. And they will pay any price in exchange for a chance at this so-called immortality. Arasaka speaks of preserving the soul but they can promise nothing more than a heartless, mindless, algorithm speaking with the voice of the departed.”

“Well, that is true that Arasaka Corp has specifically limited access to the relic in order to-”

“The promise is a lie,” the Reverend starts to stand, gesturing emphatically, “an evil lie, motivated by greed and lust for power-”

“HA, now that is rich,” Ziggy cuts off Colver’s ramblings with a laugh.

“Excuse me!?”

“False promises, greed, a lust for power,” Ziggy rolls his eyes, “well sounds an awful lot like a church to me!”

“Wha- how dare you?”

“Do you not promise a life after death? Do you not charge funeral fees to a family in mourning? Maybe the Reverend is just afraid of a little healthy competition, huh?”

“Competition,” the religious figure scoffs, “you believe everything in this world can be counted, measured, rationalized!”

“And wouldn’t we be right?” Karina interjects, “we can construct artificial brains, create new consciousnesses!”

“But I ask you why? What does that give us? Are we as a people on this earth any happier for it? You claim that this relic gives eternal life, but all I see is an eternity of suffering. Rather than say goodbye, we haunt ourselves with their voices, their presence, but-”

“What do you folks think? Who holds the truth, is it Ms. Lee or maybe Reverend Colver? That is up to you!” Ziggy gestures at a screen behind him, showing the two guests,  “Send Colver or Lee to 7892 to cast your vote and enter your name for a chance to win tickets to this year's playoffs! Until next time, Night City, toodles!~”

V sighs, as the program cuts out and more ads start to be blasted at her. The conversation a heavy one, now tinkering around in her skull. The idea of keeping a dead loved one around as an imaginary friend… she thinks of her mother instantly, the person whose death most gravely impacted her. If she had her mom still lingering around, sitting in her head, it sounds...strange. A part of her thinks she’d love it, to have her mother back, but eould she ever see it as her mother? Committing herself to a fantasy like that, it doesn’t sound healthy, at all. Death is natural, learning how to say goodbye is part of life, right? She can’t imagine her spending all her time talking to a ghost from the past.

Her holophone buzzes in her pocket and she realizes the elevator is on her floor, probably has been for a few minutes. She shakes her head, she doesn’t need anymore heavy shit in her skull. The relic has nothing to do with her, anyway. Wondering about what if’s and could be’s won’t get her anywhere. V gets her holophone from her pocket, a text from Cecelia, a much needed distraction and relief. She starts to text her regular hookup as she makes her way to her apartment.

Cecelia: Yeah, be off in an hour, why?

V: i have a proposition

Cecelia: ???

V: bring me pancakes and i make you cum ;)

V’s flirting skills continue to impress absolutely no one, but Cecelia is still into the merc,  so that’s really on her at this point.

Cecelia: Will you pay me back for the pancakes?

V: yee

Cecelia: Drop by your place around midnight, sound good?

V:  pls and thanx! :3

V slips the phone back into her pocket, opening her apartment door and slipping inside. She shuts the door behind and starts stripping off her clothes, she needs a shower before Cecelia gets here. The waitress probably wouldn’t be too excited to come in and see V covered in a layer of sweat and blood.  Clothes off she takes her hearing aids out and puts them on her desk before she makes the beeline for her shower.

She cranks the water up as hot as possible and steps under, her shoulder and scratches sting, but she focuses her energy on washing the blood and sweat away. V washes through her hair, muscles relaxing at the feeling of hot water pouring down on her, the smell of rose scented shampoo and conditioner lingering in the air as she washes.

She’s tempted to touch herself under the water, her soap slick thighs clenching together. It's tempting, still just riding that adrenaline high, it’d be nice to find some relief. But the bullet wound in her shoulder should be attended to first, she dug the bullet out in the car, but the injury still could use some first aid. She didn’t have anything to stitch it closed and she’s not sure it’d be the smartest idea to stitch herself in a moving car, not that she hasn’t done it before.

V shuts off her shower, ignoring her swollen clit and the tension in her core. She steps out of the water and stands in front of her bathroom sink, her reflection showing in the mirror. The merc grabs her first aid kit, getting out the stuff she needs to suture her shoulder.

Vik will bitch at her for it later, call her work shoddy, but she’s been taking care of her own injuries for years.  She doesn’t need to run to him for every little thing. She pats it dry first, leaving pink stains on her bathroom towel, then she pours some antiseptic peroxide on it. A curse on her lips at the sharp sting, she cringes and takes a deep breath, preparing the needle and suture. The needle pulls through her skin with a harsh pain, as she pulls her skin back together with a quick crude stitch.

Content with her oh so shoddy work, she finishes drying off and leaves the bathroom, dropping her dirty clothes in a laundry hamper to be mended and washed later. She checks the time on her holo, still thirty or so minutes before Cecelia said she’d drop in. V throws on an oversized black tee shirt and a pair of shorts it completely covers. Her skin feels warm, still smells like roses and honey, something about the warm cozy feeling makes that little fire inside come back.  She clenches her thighs together again, mentally cursing her sex drive, libido, hormones, whatever it is that makes it so she can put a needle through her bloodied skin and still want to cum immediately after.

There's a skip in her step as she rushes to scoop her phone and hearing aids off her desk, putting them on the little circular table next to her bed instead, so they’re easily in reach. Then she plops herself onto her bed, atop the covers and blankets, she sinks into them. She feels warm, skin soft and clean to the touch. When she stretches slightly in her bed, she feels a soft sound leaving her lips.

Her breasts feel soft under her shirt, squeezing and groping herself over her clothes. Sensitive pierced nipples stiffening under the fabric, she pinches them lightly, whimpering at the pressure. She presses her head back against her pillow, biting her lip as she puts a hand underneath her shirt, teasing her breast directly, playing with her piercings.  Each touch makes her slicker, makes her clit swell and beg to be touched.

V shoves a hand down into her shorts, pushing two fingers through the lips of her wet cunt. She presses them against her clit, groaning as she begins to rub, quick messy circles. Focused on just getting there, a harsh pressure and quick pace, squirming her hips against her own hand as she builds herself up. Pleasure pools in her center, building upon itself, growing higher and higher with each stroke of her clit.

A blue light goes off, strobing and bright enough to illuminate the room. Her phone buzzes on the side table with a notification. Someone knocking on her door, she wipes her slick fingers off on her thigh and quickly puts her hearing aids in.

“V!~ It’s Cece!” The older woman’s voice rings out and V jogs to the door, feeling like she’s about to combust.

She opens the door and Cecelia quickly steps inside. V hates the diner uniform, a yellow dress and apron. But Cecelia manages to be beautiful in anything, why on earth she wants anything to do with V is beyond the merc’s comprehension. She’s tall, though nearly everyone towers over V to some extent, with a cute shaggy pixie cut of dark hair. Olive skin with a dusting of freckles and amber eyes, far too beautiful to be rolling around in bed with some nomad turn street punk.

“I got extra honey and syrup for-”

She’s cut off by V’s lips in the middle of explaining what’s in the little white diner container. Her words dying on the merc’s tongue, V presses in deep, tasting all she can of Cecelia’s mouth, finding the taste of coffee and cigarettes awaiting her. A bitter taste, one she despises, but she ignores for the sake of her own lust. She presses the taller woman against the closed door, hands grabbing at the curve of Cecelia’s hips, pulling up on the dress of her uniform.

“V, V,” Cecelia breaks away from the kiss, panting, “you're gonna crush your pancakes.”

V rolls her eyes, taking the container from Cecelia’s hands and quickly placing it on her computer desk. Then she’s shoving a hand under the waitress uniform, Cecelia keening as V slips her hand into the older woman’s panties. The merc buries her face into her partner’s neck, licking, sucking and biting at her skin as she works her fingers against her clit. V braces her other hand against the door, sharply biting the expanse of skin against her lips. She gazes up at her fuckbuddy, the woman’s head thrown back against the door as she whimpers, V’s hand doesn’t stop working. She rubs the same two fingers she had on herself just moments before over Cecelia’s clit, the bundle of nerves swollen and slick. The merc’s hand is soaked in it already, she finds herself wondering if she’d find a puddle on her apartment floor if she looked down.

“You’re smoking again,” V whispers against Cecelia’s neck, marveling at the bruises her teeth have left behind. She knows the effect her voice has in these moments, so rarely heard by Cecelia, and when it is it’s husk with lust.

“So-” V twists her wrists and sinks those two fingers inside, “sorry, I fuck, V, stre-fuck-stressful day, I fuck, fuck, fuck!”

“That hardly seems fair, what did I taste like?” V pumps her fingers steadily, feeling slick run down her wrist.

“Li-aH, ah, uh, honey, you ta-taste like h-oney, al-always do~!” Her hips squirm to meet V’s thrusting fingers, trying to chase her own pleasure.

“So, you get honey and I get to lick the inside of an ashtray?”

“I sa-said,” V adds a third finger, speeding up her movement, “Fuck, I’m sorry!’

“Hmmm, I don’t think sorry cuts it here, Cece.” V starts to rub her thumb clumsily over Cecelia’s clit, watching the woman moan and squirm. Her thighs are vice tight around V’s wrist, teeth sinking into her lip. She’s close.

“V, fuck please, I, fu-uck!” She whines and pleads, V’s not even sure what for, if it’s too much or not enough.

“Fine, I’ll forgive ya, but I gotta get the taste out of my mouth first.”

V drops to her knees, yanking Cecelia’s underwear down to her ankles just to bury her face between the older woman’s thighs. The merc uses her hands to keep her partner’s legs spread and gives a heavy messy lick of Cecelia’s clit, ensuring her tongue piercing makes contact with the sensitive nerves. Already built up to near orgasm, Cecelia screams out, the lick sending her right over the edge. Slick gushes onto V’s mouth and chin, coating her tongue in a heavy layer that she swallows before she starts licking again. Pubic hair scratches at her nose as she laps and licks at Cecelia’s cunt. Licking her through orgasm and prolonging it into another, and another, drawing the high out with every lave of her tongue. Cecelia squirms and thrust her hips, sloppily humping against the merc’s face, she knots her fingers in V’s bleach blonde hair. It becomes too much, orgasms drawn out to long, tears forming at the corner of Cecelia’s eyes.

“St-stop!”

V pulls away instantly, face a flushed mess of slick and lust. She slowly pulls away from Cecelia, standing up, the taller woman’s knees are buckled and she’s leaning all her weight against the door. The two pant, each catching their breath and V looks down on the floor, her suspicions confirmed at the wet droplets, Cecelia managing to drip down onto the wood.

“I, uh, take it you’re a little worked up tonight?”

V makes a wiggly ‘kind of’ hand gesture, winking at Cecelia, smirking. She can’t help but feel a sense of pride looking at Cecelia; panting, neck marked, underwear around her ankles, and still dripping.

“That taste better than cigarettes?” Cecelia asks, smiling and still out of breath as she kicks off her heels and  steps out of her panties towards V. She cups V’s slick sodden chin, amber eyes soft as she brushes her thumb across the younger woman’s bottom lip.

“Much.”

Then their lips connect again, the sweetness of slick cutting down on the bitter taste of Cecelia’s bad habit. They lick into each other’s mouth, press into each other, pull away slightly; all to fall back into it. V starts pulling at the buttons of Cecelia’s uniform, revealing inch after inch of cleavage. She pushes it down off the older woman’s shoulders, leaving her in nothing but a bra. Heavy breasts surrounded by black lace, but only for a moment then V’s greedy hands unhook it, pulling the last bit of fabric from Cecelia’s body.

“On the bed,” V signs and speaks, words slurred with desire.

Cecelia gives a soft laugh and V discretely scratches at her hearing aid, the device starting to rub the inside of her ear raw, sex sweat irritating it. This type of tech became completely waterproof millennia ago, but they can still chafe. Refocusing her attention, she stares at Cecelia laying down in her bed. A beautiful face is no doubt what first drew her eye to the waitress, but Cecelia’s curvy soft figure was next. Large breasts that spill over most of her bras, a soft stomach, and thick thighs. A contrast to V’s own body, the merc more petite and curves more...subtle.

V doesn’t hesitate another moment, straddling Cecelia’s waist, the older woman’s hands instinctively reading for the merc’s hips. A twinge of pain when Cecelia’s unknowingly brushes against the small injury there, V ignores it in favor of pulling her shirt off over her head, throwing it onto the floor. She expects eyes raking over her small pert breasts, a look of desire in Cecelia’s eyes. But finds concern instead, fingers reach out to V’s shoulder, nearly brushing the crude stitches.

“What hap-”

V grabs Cecelia’s wrists and pins them to the bed, burying her lips into the older woman’s neck again. She sucks and bites, hoping the action gets her point across; don’t touch that, don’t ask that, don’t push. V likes fucking Cecelia. They are fuckbuddies, but Cecelia has a way of asking questions, wanting to know more beyond how skilled the merc is with her tongue. So, she has to steer it back on course, latching her mouth around one of Cecelia’s breasts, sucking and licking at her nipple. Cecelia moans and whimpers when V teases her chest, giving the other breast the same treatment and pulling off with a wet pop.

“Fuck, point made, V,” Cecelia swallows hard, “you still have any straps laying around?”

“Want me to fuck you with it?”

“No, uh, wanna watch you ride it”

V’s never scrambled so fast to get her toy box out from under her bed, a little chilled at leaving Cecelia’s warmth, she pulls her treasure trove out. She chooses a toy, essentially double sided and strap strap on. One end is a vibrating bulb likes shape and the other a dildo. V strips off her shorts before clambering back onto the bed. She lightly taps Cecelia’s thigh, licking her lips when the brunette spreads them for her.  The ribbed bulb slides easily inside of Cecelia and her high pitched whine lets V know it’s doing its job, pressing on the g-spot, when theyfuck it should grind against her clit too. Once inside, the rest of the toy sticks out, making it look like Cecelia has a slick black silicon cock.

Then V turns the vibration on, Cecelia screaming out as it buzzes and vibrates inside of her. V can’t help but laugh at her overstimulated and sensitive partner, she pins Cecelia’s hands back down to the mattress and straddles her. Her wet neglected cunt hovering just over the vibrating dildo, she kisses at Cecelia’s jaw. The brunette’s eyes are closed tightly, face contorted in pleasure as the toy works it’s magic.

“Thought you wanted to watch me?” V teases, smirking against Cecelia’s skin, then sinks down on top of the toy.

V whines and whimpers as the vibrating toy fills her, Cecelia grabbing her hips, amber eyes now firmly watching the blonde. Moans and squeals echo throughout the room. V fucks herself on the toy, Cecelia’s hips thrusting up to meet the movement, slamming the toy further into her each time. They’re both sensitive, Cecelia from being overstimulated since she walked in the room and V from neglecting her own needs until now.  Heavy squelching noises ring out where the toy plunges in and out of V’s cunt; mixing with the buzzing of the toy  and the clap of their flesh meeting on each thrust. There’s a tension in V’s center that grows tighter and tighter inside of her, pleasure building upon pleasure. Each slide of the toy inside of her brings her closer and closer to her end.

She lets go of Cecelia’s wrists, the hunched over position getting uncomfortable, V shifts her hands back onto the brunette’s legs, leaning back to support her weight that way. Then Cecelia thrusts, angle slightly changed and hitting impossibly deep, too much, too much. The tension snaps and V’s overwhelmed by pleasure, she bounces on the toy through her orgasms, yelling out as she rides out the waves of ecstasy.

A soft whine leaves V’s lips, when she starts to come down and the buzzing toy is too much, Cecelia looks about ready to pass out and V realizes there’s no way all the slick where they connect is from her.  The merc whimpers pulling off of the toy and turning off it’s vibrations, earning a sound from Cecelia who gasps when V gently pulls it out.

The toy is soaked; their thighs and the bed where their hips met too. Too tired to care about organization right now, V casually throws the toy to the side, she’ll clean and store it properly later. She instead collapses next to Cecelia, the two gathering their breath.

She’s not sure how much time passes, just laying next to Cecelia, but V’s heart rate and breathing calms down. Ther merc yawns, her ears hurt worse now. But, the orgasm was worth it. Her stomach is starting to hurt too.

“Your pancake are probably cold by now,” Cecelia tells her with a laugh and-

Oh fuck, V forgot her pancakes. She jumps out of bed, stumbling on her way to grab her food

“Did you just trip over a used dildo?”

“Not answering that.”

V brings the food back to the bedside table,  throwing her oversized shirt back on, before climbing into bed with her meal. She folds her legs and sits the meal in her lap, facing the side of the bed with Cecelia sitting next to her.

“You mind if I borrow some sleep clothes?”

V gives a thumbs up, opening her food container, her stomach growls and she realizes she hasn’t eaten since probably noon. Cecelia got her a stack of pancakes covered in honey, maple syrup, and whip cream. Even a little carton of milk packed tightly in with the food, probably her attempt to keep V from drinking too much Nicola.

“I assume that also means you’re okay with staying the night? Marlow’s at her dad’s this week, so the apartment’s kind of lonely…”

Another thumbs up, taking a big bite of food as Cecelia starts to look through her closet. Anything that fits V properly will be too tight on the brunette, but V’s collection of oversized sleep shirts should be fine. The merc watches half heartedly as Cecelia pokes through the old tees, already having devoured half of her pancake stack.

“Samurai?” Cecelia raises an eyebrow, looking at a bagging black and red shirt, the one she kept that originally belonged to Ava, “you listen to dad rock?”

“Not mine, don’t wear that one!”  V quickly signs with one hand, sometimes she wears it and can still convince herself it still  smells like her old love… She doesn’t want it smelling like anyone else and maybe that’s stupid, maybe that’s weird, she doesn’t know or care. It means something to her. She doesn’t know or give a fuck about the band on it, some shitty punk group no ones given a damn about in years, but it belonged to Ava. That’s what matters.

“Okay, no problem,” Cecelia seems to understand, not noticing or at the very least not mentioning V’s odd tension around it. She instead throws on an oversized white shirt before coming back to the bed.

The shirt on V reaches past her knees, but on Cecelia it hits around the mid thighs. V feels the brunette’s warmth as their sides touch, sitting close together. V shoves another chunk of pancakes in her mouth, nearly inhaling it.

“At least drink some milk, you and that friend of yours are the worst about chewing your food. I swear, I’ve seen you both choke five or six times in one meal.”

V nods and grabs the little carton of milk, her stomach dropping when she sees the back of it. A woman’s face stares back at her, a little different, more cleaned up and hair on her head,  but still bone chillingly familiar. Sandra Dorsett, a little message under her picture asking if anyone’s seen her.

“Something wrong, V?” Cecelia puts a hand on her back, rubbing gentle circles, then her eyes fall on the carton, “you know her?”

V shakes her head, because she doesn’t, not really. And even then, it's a moot point, the ad is old and Sandra is safe now… probably.  Not like V actually knows, she could have died in the Trauma Team vehicle, before they even made it to the hospital. And god only knows what the long term effects will be and she’s the lucky one.

“Well, they found her, from what I heard.”

V raises an eye at Cecelia, turning to face her a bit more.

“Caught it on the news just before I clocked out, they haven’t released the footage of the rescue yet, but apparently she was pulled out of some Scavenger hideout. Trauma Team got her and say she’s going to make a full recovery, so, good news…” She drags it out, like she’s testing V’s reaction trying to see if she can get anything from the merc.

“It’s good,” V signs, Cecelia’s eyes falling to the mercs hands, “but, you know Scavengers… there was probably twenty, thirty more bodies there, left to rot because they didn’t have enough money for Trauma to care.”

“Yeah, it's fucked but, hey, one person is better than none.”

“I guess… I hear even the people who get saved are fucked up afterwards. They don’t remember anything, until something triggers a flashback and next thing they know they feel like the worlds crashing in on them.”

“Won’t be easy, for sure, I can’t even imagine what that poor girl has gone through, but people are resilient.”

“Got to be,” V signs, chewing her lip, “the world’d eat them alive otherwise.”

“You got a good heart, V, you know that?” Cecelia tells her, tucking a strand of hair back behind the merc’s.

“Gross.”

“Yes, yes, I know, big bad merc can’t have feelings, fear her, blah blah blah,” Cecelia rolls her eyes and V blows a raspberry at her. Then stands to put what’s left of the food on the side table, the brief moment of vulnerability putting her off her pancakes. Cecelia always manages to pry something from her.

“Let's get to sleep, before I kill you,” she signs, then gestures to Cecelia to get to bed.

Cecelia curls up with V’s pillow, nestling into the sheets while V pulls out her hearing aids, rubbing at the raw skin. Putting her hearing aids back down, she sees the text notification on her phone. From Jackie, the message is short enough to display in the preview window.

Jackie: got big news, chica! B-I-G BIG!!! talk to you in the morning, hehehe!~

V lets out a huff of air, smiling and rolling her eyes all at once. He’s dramatic, always has been. His idea of big news is probably some new restaurant he found, maybe he won some eddies on a boxing match.  She shakes her head and puts the phone aside for now, crawling under the covers. Cecelia lifts an arm, allowing V to curl up close with her head on Cecelia’s chest as she drifts off to sleep.

[dairyfarmresidences36]

Living in Costa Rica - A First Week of Adventures and Shopping

I'm encountering Costa Rica starting from the earliest stage - in a real sense. Because of my semi-far off area and the way that I don't yet have a vehicle implies I'm putting my soles to the ground and getting a move on all over a mountainside looking for day by day necessities. During my first week, the entirety of my time from waking to resting was spent dealing with easily overlooked details to cause another house and area to feel like home.

We are living in Las Nubes de (the billows of ) Coronado, Costa Rica. To get to our area; start in the Focal Valley of San Jose, go Northwest up into the mountains past Guadalupe, through Moravia, at that point through Coronado lastly up to San Rafael/Las Nubes. For better reference, an online guide is accessible here: Las Nubes de Coronado, Costa Rica, C.A..

We're up here in the mountains where the climate is continually Spring-like, the hummingbirds go to day by day to the blooming trees, Junior picks from the trees nectarines and bananas and from the brambles red and green peppers. 500 meters beneath us is a functioning dairy farm total with bull pulled trucks for moving around feed grasses and keeping in mind that we stroll by both milk cows and chickens nibble street side. The evenings are cold, yet we have an extraordinary huge chimney that keeps us warm and comfortable ... we simply need to discover a hotspot for more kindling (one of the many, numerous things on my extremely, long plan for the day)

The transport from Coronado runs around each half-hour and the last stop is 400 meters underneath our home. Junior and I have been bringing the transport down and back from Coronado day by day at an expense of 310 colones ($00.62) every route for the two of us. In Coronado we generally invest energy at a Web bistro, eat a supper and do some looking for family things like food and cleaning supplies. At that point it has returned to the transport terminal to get our transport for the ride up. The last 400 meter climb up to the house with our rucksacks and packs of buys can leave you short of breath.

One of our more critical excursions to Coronado included my discernment that all ATM's are made equivalent. In the states I never stressed over how minimal expenditure was in my pocket because of the immense number and dependability of ATM machines. In Coronado there are just two ATMs that I am aware of: one at Banco de Costa Rica (BCR) and the other at Banco Nacional (BN). Without giving an excessive amount of consideration I spent my way down to around 100 colones and when I went to the ATMs for more cash, I was denied admittance to assets by both. Junior and I gazed toward the peak, realizing that some place near the top was our home ... so away we went - strolling roughly 7 kilometers up and up and up and up .... furthermore, up! About 90 minutes after the fact we were home and sore - and yet, it was somewhat fun. All things considered, many travel from around the world to climb the mountains of Costa Rica and we had the posh issue of expecting to finish a climb only for returning home! See here Dairy Farm Residences

Friday, February 29th we got an opportunity to see somewhat a greater amount of the space on account of John's companion Arne. Today Junior and I took a taxi to San Antonio de Coronado (a territory underneath Coronado) to meet with Arne for a little shopping. The nearer you get to the capital city of San Jose, the really shopping assortment you need to browse. In our movements we went to stores in the barrios of San Pedro, Guadalupe and Moravia.

In Costa Rica there is an assortment of store (tienda) decisions going from minimalistic living space front stores (in a real sense) to the immense markdown and club outlet center (like a Sam's or Costco).

* Home-front stores regularly marked as a "pulperia" or "abastecedor" are typically situated in the front part of a construction or building that is generally a home. A basic sign out front or simply a sign painted on the structure indicates this sort of tienda where you can get a speedy bite fix like a pack of Funions and a Coke.

* Supermarkets can likewise be little owner shops up to bigger stores frequently alluded to as "Scaled down" or "Uber Supers". A basic food item chain comprising of medium sized stores in numerous spaces of Costa Rica is designated "Pali" (possessed by Wal-shop, articulated: dad LI). Pali is like U.S. based Aldi Food Stores in that they give essential staples like milk, beans, rice, snacks, cleaning supplies, and so on - complete with a sack it-yourself administration. Basic food item chains that more take after standard U.S. supermarkets are MasXMenos (another Wal-store possessed chain), Smaller than normal Uber Super, Uber Super and others. In these stores you will discover most all that expected to stock your home - even Jif crunchy peanut butter!

* Claim to fame Stores can again be little owner shops or corporate retailers that sell a specific kind of product like garments, furniture, gadgets, pet supplies, and so on, and so forth

- I bought a PC APC Back-UPS flood defender/battery back-up (model # BE350R) for $40.80 from a PC/gadgets chain called Group3C (Grupo3C) that has stores in Costa Rica, Nicaragua and El Salvador. The name of the Costa Rica store is called COC.CO (I think :o) situated in San Pedro.

- Subsequent to shopping a few bargain retailers (see underneath) I wound up tracking down a more ideal arrangement on a microwave at a forte store called El Verdugo in Moravia. My buy was a Haier 1,000 watt treated steel microwave (model # MWM10100SS) for $101.80

* Rebate or Club Stores offer the shopping experience of a Sam's Club or Costco. Hiper Mas (a completely possessed Wal-shop auxiliary - seeing a pattern?!) and Value Savvy are two of these sorts of stores ... be that as it may, anyplace, shop these stores against one another and claim to fame stores for cost and item. Actually like a club offering free beverages and comps, the way these all inclusive resource stores work together is to draw you in for some limited items while charging distribute more for different things. All in all, in case you're not cautious - net increase goes to the house.

- Value Shrewd club store model costs (Moravia store, 02/29/08):

+ Philips 50" Plasma - $2,600.00

+ Frigidaire Clothes washer (model FWS9333FS) - $475.00

+ sofa set (Sovereign sofa-bed, bed skirt, 3 little ornamental pads, 2 cushion cases - no sheets) - $70.00

+ cover (a delicate sovereign measured) - $38.00

+ sharp cheddar - $13.00/2lb bundle

+ bed pad (standard) - $10.60

+ sofa cushion (little delicate square) - $14.00

+ pistachios - $9.20/2lb bundle

+ sausages (enormous pack) - $8.00/37 franks

+ trail blend - $7.40/2lb bundle

+ Land-O-Ice Nectar Ham lunch get-together meat - $5.20/1lb bundle

+ Land-O-Ice Turkey Bosom lunch meeting meat - $5.40/1lb bundle

As illustrated, costs for specific things in Costa Rica might be higher than in the U.S., Canada, Europe, and so forth - however work and administrations are typically a lot less expensive in Costa Rica than somewhere else. Unfamiliar occupants, retired folks, and so on wind up purchasing the costly clothes washer and grass hardware at that point pay homegrown workers to run them (ie: employ a house keeper/cook/grounds-keeper ... indeed, even on an unassuming or retirement pay).

* Private Bilingual Essential (grade) School - $200.00/month (with many included additional items; soccer group, acrobatic, dance, cheer driving crew, math club, and so forth)

* Exercise center Enrollment - $13.00/month (complete with Vigorous exercise, Step Preparing, Turning, Tae-bo and classical loads and hardware)

* Hair style - $3.00 men and $4.00 ladies

* Supper for 2 - $10.00 including some espresso or soft drink each

Because of the greater expenses for some 'once buy' things, numerous unfamiliar inhabitants that live, have second or summer homes or simply invest a lot of energy in Costa Rica decide to make specific acquisition of gadgets, machines and different things somewhere else on the planet and bring or have them delivered to Costa Rica as an expense reserve funds measure ... yet, be cautious!

The absolute most ideal approach to carry anything into the nation is to actually convey it in your gear when you travel. Nonetheless, Costa Rica has sorted this out as well. In the wake of showing up in Costa Rica, your sacks will be x-rayed for un-announced things (indeed, I said in the wake of showing up - as in, after you have recovered your baggage and before you leave the air terminal!) So utilize your best judgment in rounding out those traditions statements. You are permitted a specific dollar measure of new things per each such countless months too utilized individual things with no traditions charges. Knowing this, on the off chance that you are bringing any new thing into Costa Rica and you don't anticipate announcing it as new and available, it is ideal to eliminate the new thing from its unique bundling before putting it in your baggage.

[outspokens-ar]

new  york’s  very  own devin  bahar was  spotted  on  broadway  street  in  louis  vuitton  ankle  boots.  your  resemblance  to  bella  hadid  is  unreal.  according  to  tmz,  you  just  had  your twenty-third birthday  bash.  while  living  in  nyc,  you’ve  been  labeled  as  being  a  workaholic,  but  also  loyal.  i  guess  being  a  libra  explains  that.  three  things  that  would  paint  a  better  picture  of  you  would  be  messy  silk  sheets,  red  wine,  and staying  in  on  a  saturday  night.  (  female  &  she/her  )  +  (  katie,  21,  she/her,  est  )

I’m incredibly excited for this to be back so, hello, hello, I’m Katie and here’s a long ramble about my bby bean Devin !

BACKGROUND ;

Devin I. Bahar was born to Isabella Corine Bahar, an ex-model who retired when she got married, becoming far more attracted to the ‘rich housewife, bow down to me’ aesthetic than continuing to work, and Damian Ethan Bahar, a lawyer coming from a long line of family lawyers that were known for working important, high-profile cases.

The relationship she holds with her mother is strained due to the woman’s materialistic nature and her goal of marrying off her daughter for as much money as possible. Her eyes are always on a far bigger and shinier prize, no matter how good her life already is.

Her relationship with her father, miraculously, is healthier than the one she has with her mother, simply because she has absolutely no relationship with the male. He took off when she was younger, cutting off all contact with his daughter without a second thought and he hadn’t bothered to make any effort to try and have a relationship with her.

In fact, when she had attempted to start some form of a relationship with him after she turned eighteen, he completely rejected her and wanted nothing to do with her and it ripped her apart far more than she was willing to admit to herself or anyone else.

Even now, she isn’t sure if the complete cut in contact is due to her mother or if it was simply because she didn’t live up to his expectations, didn’t deserve his love. Either way, she has attempted to move on from it after the rejection, even if she still has that small hole in her heart over it.

Due to how strained her relationship is with her mother, she moved out of the household the day she turned eighteen, having managed to save up enough money to support herself, wanting to get away from her as soon as possible. However, the woman is still her mother and she does still attempt to have some form of a relationship with her, even if it sends her into a horrible mindset whenever she has a conversation with the woman.

CAREER ;

She first began modeling at the age of 16 for a commercial project. She also starred in the "Swan Sittings" by Lesa Amoore, alongside actor Ben Barnes, before appearing in "Smoking Hot" by Holly Copeland. She also modeled for Hanna Hayes' F/W 2013 collection, alongside various other commercial projects, including campaign work for Chrome Hearts during 2013 and 2014.

She was then signed to IMG Models in 2014 and her career started shooting off from there.

She never actually planned to become a model, she actually wanted to be a photographer when she was younger and planned to go to school for it. When it came to the point where her focus turned towards college, she ended up heading towards visual arts, fashion design, and graphic design. Out of that, she discovered her passion for clothing and that’s what began her journey of designing clothes, a project she started along with her modelling career.

Since the start of her career, she has won over a dozen different awards that range over her multiple different career-interests. Managing to make a name for herself as a model and fashion designer.

As much as she enjoys photography, she puts most of her focus onto modelling and continuing to add to her own clothing line full-time. This leaves photography for her spare time as more of a hobby, however, she does step in to help other high-profile photographers from time-to-time.

PERSONALITY ;

She identifies as pansexual and has always been very open to sharing and talking about her sexuality.

Has always put her foot forward to support charities, organizations, and projects that support the entire LGBTQ community. Along with making sure to put her focus into other charities and organizations, she’s always been the type of person to ‘give back’ and to put her support into the things she believes in.

Devin suffers from intense depression and anxiety. For the most part, you would never know, she does well but, every once in a while she goes into a deep rut. She won’t talk to anyone, doesn’t want anyone around, generally entirely depressing and doesn’t want to bring other people down when it comes to it. It takes a lot of trust and a special type of friendship for her to allow you to be around during that time considering, most of the time, she’ll go completely off the grid the entire time. However, at the same time, she openly talks about her battle with depression and anxiety. She doesn’t ever want anyone to feel alone and she tries to involve herself with as many campaigns and projects that involve supporting those with mental illness as possible.

Along with this, she also has this back and forth with affection. She either hates being touched or gravitates towards it, it really depends on her mental state at the time and the general relationship she has with the other person involved. It can be difficult, one day she’ll be ready to give you a bear hug and the next day, she’ll shake if you try to shake her hand.

On a more positive note, she tries to be as positive as she can, to a reasonable extent. She never wants to take life far too seriously but, obviously, doesn’t want to take it for granted either. She’s the type of person you go to if you want clear-headed advice but you don’t want to be talked down to at the same time. Or if you want ridiculous jokes while also getting some kind of pep-talk.

Really the mom-friend but probably won’t ever admit to being the mom friend.

EXTRA INFORMATION LINKS ;

blog’s full navigation;

you can find links to just about everything here.

full about page;

if you want statistics, a more in-depth background, extra facts, and some other things, you can find a bunch of stuff here.

spotify playlist;

a mess but, ay’ check it out.

pinterest board;

a highkey mess but, ay’ check it out too.

connections page;

my page with connection ideas, some are specific but most are really used as templates for plotting. i’ll also update this with any taken-current connections.

wanted connections tag & side blog;

i’m also terrible with coming up ideas so, I have a sideblog to reblog things for wanted connections ( the top link will lead to the tag ), but it also has a tag for extra muse posts if you’re interested.

This is officially too long for an intro so, I’m gonna’ end it there, but if there’s anything else you’d like to know about my bby bean that wasn’t on here or on any of her other pages, absolutely hit me up because I can ramble for hours tbh. And if you’d like to plot, 100% slide into my dms and we can figure something out, or if we had a plot before the revamp and you want to keep it — let me know and we can keep rolling with it ! Also, feel free to hit me up here or on d*scord @ katie#7666 for plotting and such ! 

[ofblueyes]

New York’s very own Devin Bahar was spotted on Broadway street in Louis Vuitton ankle boots. Your resemblance to Bella Hadid is unreal. According to TMZ, you just had your twenty-third birthday bash. while living in NYC,  you’ve been labeled as being a workaholic, but also loyal. i guess being a libra explains that. Three things that would paint a better picture of you would be messy silk sheets, red wine, and pretty lingerie. &  ( female & she/her )

Not only have I not written an intro post in 5ever, but I’ve also managed to screw up my glasses two hours before working on this so, stick with me here because this might be a mess, even though I mostly copy and pasted from my old af intro. Anyway, I’m Katie, twenty-one, in the est timezone, and I use she/her pronouns and here I am going to attempt to introduce my bby Devin to you.

If you want to check out her statistics and you want to read a lot more in-depth about her background click here!

✧ backstory

Devin I. Bahar was born to Isabella Corine Bahar, an ex-model who retired when she got married, becoming far more attracted to the ‘rich housewife, bow down to me’ aesthetic than continuing to work, an Damian Ethan Bahar, a lawyer coming from a long line of family lawyers that were known for working important, high-profile cases.

The relationship she holds with her mother is strained due to the woman’s materialistic nature and her goal of marrying off her daughter for as much money as possible. Her eyes are always on a far bigger and shinier prize, no matter how good her life already is.

Her relationship with her father, miraculously, is healthier than the one she has with her mother, simply because she has absolutely no relationship with the male. He took off when she was younger, cutting off all possible contact with his daughter without a second thought and he hadn’t bothered to make any effort to try and have a relationship with her.

In fact, when she had attempted to start some form of a relationship with him after she turned eighteen, he completely rejected her and wanted nothing to do with her and it ripped her apart far more than she was willing to admit to herself or anyone else.

Even now, she isn’t sure if the complete cut in contact is due to her mother or if it was simply because she didn’t live up to his expectations, didn’t deserve his love. Either way, she has attempted to move on from it after the rejection, even if she still has that small hole in her heart over it.

Due to how strained her relationship is with her mother, she moved out of the house the day she turned eighteen, having managed to save up enough money to support herself, wanting to get away from her as soon as possible. However, the woman is still her mother and she does still attempt to have some form of a relationship with her, even if it sends her into a horrible mood whenever she has a conversation with the woman.

✧ career

She first began modeling at the age of 16 for a commercial project. She also starred in the "Swan Sittings" by Lesa Amoore, alongside actor Ben Barnes, before appearing in "Smoking Hot" by Holly Copeland. She also modeled for Hanna Hayes' F/W 2013 collection, alongside various other commercial projects, including campaign work for Chrome Hearts during 2013 and 2014.

She was then signed to IMG Models in 2014 and her career started shooting off from there.

She never actually planned to become a model, she actually wanted to be a photographer when she was younger and planned to go to school for it. When it came to the point where her focus turned towards college, she ended up heading towards visual arts, fashion design, and graphic design. Uut of that, she discovered her passion for clothing and that’s what began her journey of designing clothes, a project she started along with her modelling career.

Since the start of her career, she has won over a dozen different awards that range over her multiple different career-interests. Managing to make a name for herself as a model and fashion designer.

As much as she enjoys photography, she puts most of her focus onto modelling and continuing to add to her own clothing line full-time. This leaves photography for her spare time as more of a hobby, however, she does step in to help other high-profile photographers from time-to-time.

✧ personality

She identifies herself as pansexual and has always been very open to sharing and talking about her sexuality.

Has always put her foot forward to support charities, organizations, and projects that support the entire LGBTQ community. Along with making sure to put her focus into other charities and organizations, she’s always been the type of person to ‘give back’ and to put her support into the things she believes in.

Devin suffers from intense depression and anxiety. for the most part, you would never know, she does well but, every once in a while she goes into a deep rut. She won’t talk to anyone, doesn’t want anyone around, generally entirely depressing and doesn’t want to bring other people down when it comes to it. It takes a lot of trust and a special type of friendship for her to allow you to be around during that time considering, most of the time, she’ll go completely off the grid the entire time. However, at the same time, she openly talks about her battle with depression and anxiety. She doesn’t ever want anyone to feel alone and she tries to involve herself with as many campaigns and projects that involve supporting those with mental illness as possible.

Along with this, she also has this back and forth with affection. She either hates being touched or gravitates towards it, it really depends on her mental state at the time and the general relationship she has with the other person involved. It can be difficult, one day she’ll be ready to give you a bear hug and the next day, she’ll shake if you try to shake her hand.

On a more positive note, she tries to be as positive as she can, to a reasonable extent. She never wants to take life far too seriously but, obviously, doesn’t want to take it for granted either. She’s the type of person you go to if you want clear-headed advice but you don’t want to be talked down to at the same time. Or if you want ridiculous jokes while also getting some kind of pep-talk.

Really the mom-friend but probably won’t ever admit to being the mom friend, but she knows she is.

✧ wanted connections

you can find my connections page right here with a random list of wanted connections along with a list of current connections! If you’d like to plot, absolutely slide into my dms!

[lovemesomesurveys]

Describe your most recent purchase: A sweatshirt and a couple shirts. 

Did you enjoy the last movie you watched in theatres? Yesss. I loved Joker.

If you make surveys, where’s the last place you saw a survey made by you on another person’s site?

Do you take the subway train often (if your city has one)? I’ve never taken one.

What shoes did you wear today? None so far. I don’t think I’ll be going anywhere today.

Who was the last person to leave you a comment on Facebook? My aunt.

Does your sibling have a significant other? Both of my brothers are single. 

When and why is the last time you cried (or at least, shed tears)? A couple days ago. I wasn’t feeling well and I just get extra moody and emotional.

Have you ever cried at a real wedding? No.

How would you feel if a girl asked your boyfriend out for a drink? Uhhh. I mean, it would depend I suppose. Obviously I wouldn’t be okay with some random girl. Probably not even a coworker to be honest. I wouldn’t want to get in the way of him having friends, male or female, but I can’t say that I wouldn’t feel some type of way about it. I should be able to hang with who I want, so of course he should as well. Unless I felt uncomfortable for some reason with a certain person in particular, in which case I’d talk to him about it. And the same goes if he felt uncomfortable about someone I was hanging out with.

Do you use Skype? No.

What do your flipflops look like? I don’t wear flip flops.

Any idea what you want for your next birthday? botox? fuck, i’m turning 30. VOMIT. <<< Hahahah aw damn, I’m turning 31. :O Anyway, no I’m not even thinking about that right now. Christmas is coming up!

Describe a poster on your wall. It’s a painting of a giraffe in a sweater. Super cute.

Are there any gadgets of yours that need charging right now? Not at the moment.

What do you use to remove makeup? Makeup wipes.

Do you have articles of clothing that are leopard print? Nope.

Tilt your head up and look straight ahead. Describe what you see. My bookshelf. 

Which awards show would you wanna go to the most (e.g Oscars, Grammys etc.)? One of the music ones.

Any idea what time you’ll be going to bed tonight? I go to bed around 2 or 3 every night.

Do you think George Clooney is hot? Nah.

Name some models you think are hot. Alexander Skarsgard. ha. He’s an actor, but he does model for photoshoots and he’s been the face for the different products like Calvin Klein cologne and currently for Clark’s shoes.

Have you ever participated in local magazine cover girl searches? Lol no.

Have you ever bought a lottery ticket (and even better: won?) I’ve bought a few, but nope never won. Sigh.

What colour is your keyboard? Black with white letters.

Do you keep the plastic/paper/whatever bags after you buy stuff? yes, i have a plastic bag full of plastic bags that hangs on door. doesn’t everyone? <<< Yep.

Do you own any high waisted pants? No.

What’s the craziest thing you’ll ever do to your hair? Bleaching and dyeing it red was the craziest thing I ever did the first time I did it, but it became the norm.  

Do you know anyone who has two different coloured eyes? Nope.

Does your significant other like the same colour as you do? Single.

Do you wanna be a pirate or an elf? Elf like Buddy, ha.

Have you ever purchased anything online? Uh, yeah. I pretty much do all my clothes and accessory shopping online now. My Christmas shopping as well.

What’s your favourite classic Disney movie (no, Camp Rock doesn’t count)? It is a Disney movie, though. Anyway, my top faves are Alice in Wonderland, Winnie the Pooh, and Toy Story.

Gold or silver accessories? Both.

Would you have minded living in the 18th century? Well, being where we are today I would mind if I had to go back and live during that time.

Have you ever been called a skank/slut because of the way you dress? No.

Name all your friends whose name starts with the 4th letter of your first name. Blah.

What websites do you absolutely have to visit daily (or at least, every time you get to go online)? Proverbs31.org, Tumblr, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook. Have you ever ridden an elephant? No.

Where did you get that outfit you’re wearing now? The leggings were a gift and the shirt is from Kohl’s.

Are you a fan of acrylic nails? Not for myself.

[des-shinta]

So As I’ve been in a state of burnout for a significant sect of the year, I’ve been picking up number of Bandai models to relieve my stress, since building things I find a relaxing endeavor, and they’ve been making me feel better.

(no, most of these were not built this year.  Only 7 of them in the first picture were ‘new’.  The rest are bits and pieces of my older collection I’ve happily been able to unbox and display for the first time in years.  Also: Hi Zoids models that didn’t get enough love during their release tenure!) I’ve actually been building models and Figures for years and years--I started out Heavily as A Lego kid--and since Gundam Wing Aired on Toonami in the late 90′s I’ve infrequently bought bandai’s various models as well, but most of the ones I built back then were...well, demolished by my younger step-brother.   My first ones were low-grade 1/144′s ToysRUs’ Got back in that boom, and they weren’t sturdy at all, thus had no chance to survive.

They’ve since been replaced with all MG’s from that series. Well, except for that 1/100 scale HG Altron that was first released in 1996.  that P-Bandai one is stupid expensive, and Altron’s Endless waltz Redesign is the only one of them I OUTRIGHT hate. It was around 2005-ish when I got into it again, when my parents got me for Christmas the 1/60 perfect Grade RX-78-2.  It took me about Eight hours to build and I did it all in one sitting...but it wasn’t sturdy at all.  It couldn’t even lift its arm if the rifle was in it, it wouldn’t stay up.   All I had it do was just stand there...Menacingly.

So from there on out--with the rare exception--I started to intermittently find and get as Gifts ones from the 1/100 Master Grade line.  THOSE--for the most part depending on what types of hands the figure uses and how well they even hold weapons--have been more my jam despite their 50~ish dollar price point.  Large enough they’re not easily smashed, small enough that they’re pose-able and easy to display, and with enough Complexity in their construction with the various implemented gimmicks to give me an immense feeling of satisfaction to see them done and on Display.  Yeah, there’s a LOT more variety and accessories to be found in the 1/144′s these days--in part thanks to the Gundam Build Fighters series making customization even easier than ever between that scale’s market--but I just don’t get the same thing out of them, despite only about 6 or less MG kits being made a year, with some of them being Shunted off now to Premium Bandai’s services to become stupidly overpriced for what they are and what’s supplied...even though I DO have a few P-bandai ones as well.  Stupid obsession with the Astrays, Tallgeese III, and Form/Equipment change gimmicks...

Hell, I’ve even experimented from time to time with custom Color palletes, with one of the first to get that treatment being the sword Impulse that desperately needed more contrasting colors (also thank aura that bandai’s finally releasing the Blast Impulse MG...even if it IS P-bandai so the display isn’t oddly missing a mech).  I’ve got the MG of the Sengoku Astray still in its box (with a bunch of other Gundam seed Mechs I haven’t build yet ‘cause I adore Gundam Seed’s mecha design and will be using those to unwind between overtime shifts this December)  and when I build it, I’m going to repaint all its red parts yellow to Give the Gundam that kind of resembles Kamen Rider Gaim’s Kachidoki arms the full Kachidoki color treatment.  Think I have Enough spare pieces from wrecked stuff to try building it a Custom Tanigashima “DJ Gun” Rifle to go with it as well.

Also the Gunpla hobby led me to doing the papercrafting thing for cheap-to-make Figurines or accessories or even scale props like the scaled-to-figure Gurren Lagann Giga drill pictured above, which I’ve moved onto doing custom templates for on occasion--

--case in point, the 1:1 scale pepakura Pandora Box--

--And my Gate of Ouroboros Broadsword which was a papercraft template I mapped onto Foam to get it near-damn-perfect...after I made a MK 2 of the original ‘cause the original ended up way too heavy.  I can basically trace a lot of my fun crafting stuff to being inspired by the creativity that goes into this kind of thing, and the work of other crafters and cosplayers, and then seeking to try applying that myself from all my learned habits.

But outside of the expected Gunpla you can find in Hobby stores and...for some reason Barnes and Nobles, which has retained a market throughout that time despite Bandai of America’s Idiocy thanks to bluefin Distributions, I’ve started tracking down some of bandai’s other model offerings.  Specifically, the Figurise standard and Minipla lines.

For those not in the know, Super Minipla’s are basically model kit versions of previously released mecha toys, only with a far smaller scaling from their DX Counterparts which you then build yourself.  They seek to retain all of the originals play gimmicks where possible, but come off a LOT more pose-able by their end than the DX toy bricks. Featured above is the Minipla of the Super Galaxy Mega (Astro Delta Megazord) From Denji Sentai Megaranger/Power Rangers in Space.  and this thing is *PERFECT*.  Despite it being half the size of the DX toy, it retains *EVERY* single play feature the original had (transformation, combination, weapon accessories, the works), but has fully pose-able limbs in every single part of it.  The freaking thing cost me $80 when back in 1998 the DX toy versions cost a total of $60, and yet factor for inflation and the impossibility of re-aquiring the 20-year-old vintage toys and this thing was *SO* worth it to get back my second-favorite sentai/PR Mech.

Hell, it’s not just the DX toys they compete against.  On the Right is the Super Robot Chogokin Gaogaigar with Goldion Hammer, and on the left is the Minipla figure of the same mech and weapon.  Both actually retailed for around the same price points on release, but there’s a more distinct compare and contrast between them. The SRC one has better paint apps, is constructed on a metal frame and has metal parts all over it, has distinct limb joints and proper articulation with a screen-accurate scale structure to it and has some weight to it so isn’t likely to topple over easily.  Frankly of the two...it just looks better in person.  Whereas the super minipla, while not perfectly in scale and doesn’t have the brilliance of the colorization to help it, Retains the transformation and combination gimmicks of the original toys which give it a lot more value to collectors that can’t afford the Full DX figures which bear the same.  Its Joints are also a LOT Tighter so the feet and arms aren’t likely to slip, and while not as good as the SRC, the screen-accuracy is far better than the original Takara-based DX toys or even the later Bandai remakes of them after Bandai bought the rights from Takara.  And with the right hand and hammer being a hell of a lot lighter, when I get this thing on a display stand it’ll be able to do more than just stand with the hammer planted on the ground.

The Figurise standard line instead is a model kit version of an anime/live series action Figure--Mostly limited to Dragonball and Kamen Rider figures right now But Digimon ones for the line are coming soon-- with them ending up in competition with Bandai’s SH Figuarts High-quality-Figure line, albeit with a lower Pricepoint than the SHF since you make it yourself and some of the paint apps are replaced with stickers, and their ease of mass production makes them more available than the SHF’s by comparison. Sorry I don’t have the best picture of the figure on hand, but for those not familiar with the character, it’s the Pink/Neon green/black-colored character that’s surrounded by Gundams (the pic was taken in the midst of a bedbug crisis where we were packing everything up in our apartment so it wouldn’t end up damaged)  The Character is Kamen Rider Ex-aid action gamer Level 2, and up close it’s near indistinguishable from the SHF for the character. And yet...I kind of felt like I got more out of the FRS figure than the sole SHF I have, simply because I put my time into putting it all together.  Yeah, the markings are stickers instead of painted on, but if those fade or start peeling?  I can paint-app it myself.  It has all the details I want, it moves how I want it to, and it came with a great stand for it to be placed in a fantastic jumping pose.    I actually want to find more of those for Kamen Rider Figures from the series I like, as I think it’d be better than dealing with the SHF’s which...well, depending on the figure?  Are notorious for production line issues.  while some models can have loose joints or frail pieces (which can be fixed with an easy application of super glue.  And any other scratches, chips and imperfections?  Yeah, those will be my fault, and won’t result in me feeling as if I got gyped in the purchase.

Sadly though, these figures aren’t exactly created equal.  On a limb I picked up the super minipla Shin getter robo set After My Roommate showed by GR Armageddon and we loved it; and...Eeeehh.  They’re not terrible, but they’re lacking for the expectation I had with the Minipla’s.  I think Kaiyodo’s Revoltech Figure line did better with these guys--out of print as may of those figures are now.  Black Getter 1 (Left) actually does look great with the Ragged cape and gun and razor arm...but the ball joints It, Getter Dragon (center) and Shin getter 1 (right) are constructed with do NOT like to stay together.  I can’t pose them at all without risking them toppling over or falling apart.  I think the Revoltech ones are bigger as well, making for better display pieces than these guys who’d be beaten out by 1/144′s.

hell, this mazinger Z Model was a 1/144, and it’s in scale with the Master grades. ...Mazinger mechs be big. But that brings us to a more recent addition via Tsuburaya and Studio Trigger.

One of the newer Additions to the minipla Line has been the Gridman figures, thanks to the anime series SSSS Gridman putting that franchise back on people’s Radar.  I had Gridman’s toys (when the series was imported and adapted into the series Superhuman samurai Syber Squad) when I was a kid and adored them...

..and sure enough, when I built the Thunder Gridman one, it was like popping back to a little piece of my childhood.  Same play gimmicks to them, and while the scaling is not the same, the engineering is all there to invoke the proper good pieces of nostalgia. To the point it resulted in the best thing about these guys, and It almost didn’t happen. When SSSS Gridman was airing, I ended up enjoying myself so much by its end I jumped at the chance to preorder the DX mecha figures that Good Smile company was releasing.  Unfortunately, the seller turned out to be a con-artist, and never shipped me the figure...though i did get my money back thanks to buyer protection.  I saw vid’s on it, and it looked pretty good...but it was completely out of scale and reasonable relation with the old Gridman Toys.  So when I heard about the Minipla’s going out for a lot less than the DX’s original and jacked-up price points?  I put in an order with someone I knew who was reliable for these...and really, I should’ve done so from the start.

The super Minipla Gridman Figures...are all perfectly in scale with each-other, and share all the same connection ports. I can put the SSSS Gridman Figures into the older Gridman armors.  That’s Primal Fighter Gridman wearing the Thunder Gridman armor (right).  Hell, I can swap the arms of the Gridman figures so the effect components can be put in the older ones as well as they use common components across the board in their construction.  I think in the future I’m going to put PFGridman in the king armor (left) as well, as the SSSS-Gridman figure has slightly Longer legs which would make the King Gridman armor scale better.  Because of this, I ended up a lot happier with these guys that I would likely have been trying in vain to get another decently-priced DX one, or even the Actbuilder release of the SSSSG Stuff that did scale with the minipla’s. So Bottom line?  I really like models, they help me relax, and I’ve been discovering some cool stuff this year that Bandai’s done which I wouldn’t have if I weren’t trying to find a way to vent stress.  Thank you disposable $16+ an hour Income for making such possible.

[larksinging]

hey it’s @transrobro ‘s birthday today! happy birthday jay!!!

i thought it was only appropriate to take two of their favorite things and mash them together: rvb and rwby! actually this is based on an au jay came up with, i just expanded a few details for this fic. even so i hope you enjoy! 

now for the sappy part: jay not a day goes by that im not happy i started talking to you more. youve been such a wonderful presence in my life and someone i am just always made better by knowing. and this year youve done a lot to stand up for yourself and take care of yourself and i am SO proud of you for that! i hope you have a great birthday today because you have absolutely earned it 

The metals doors slide open and Alaska steps into the briefing room, the white of her armor tinged in glittery blue from the holographic projections. She steps up to her appropriate spot at the edge of the table, not quite interrupting the Director and everyone he’s gathered. Her stance is stiff and formal. 

“Agent Alaska reporting for duty, sir.” She holds her posture as a few other Freelancers on the other side of the table glance up at her.

She thought she’d be the first one here, but obviously she’d been beaten. If she wasn’t at attention, she’d go stand with Michigan and her red-and-gold armor. Already gathered as well are Arkansas and Oklahoma, but you always see their green and pink together. There’s also BM and Vermont, and she thinks she even sees Hawaii in the corner. 

“Ah, Alaska,” The Director drawls, “Good timing. We were just about to begin. You wouldn’t want to be late for your own mission briefing.” 

“Of course not,” Alaska agrees. She can almost feel Hawaii rolling her eyes. 

“Very good. In that case, let’s begin.” He pulls up the holographic image of some kind of alien ruin. “You’ll be recovering some artifacts from this crash site. Since they require simultaneous extraction, I’m sending two teams.” 

He spins the image and highlights something in one of the lower sections. “Agent Alabama and Agent Hawaii--” He nods and the two of them step forward, “You’ll be recovering the first artifact.” 

“No problem,” BM drawls. Hawaii nods in agreement. 

“Meanwhile, Alaska.” He moves the hologram to highlight a spot at the top of a spire. Of course she’s always sent on the missions with heights. “You’ll be working with...” 

Michigan, she internally begs. Michigan’s never dropped below second place, when she even drops below first. Either Okhlahoma or Arkansas would be fine two, they’re both skilled. Vermont’s pretty sweet and shy, but good in the field, so she’d take her. Or even Tenessse, despite her dramatic flair, is hell with a gatling.  As long as it’s not Rhode Island and his stupid crush. Or worse yet...

“Sorry I’m late! There was, um, kind of a problem with the lockers, and--” Oh no. 

“Agent Oregon,” The Director nearly sneers. “Do try to arrive on time from now on. I’d nearly changed my mind about assigning you to this mission.” Oh no. “You’re working with Agent Alaska. She’ll catch you up on the details.” 

Alaska looks over at her partner. Oregon -- or RG, rather, just like her sister -- has her helmet off and slung lazily in the crook of her arm. It’s as obnoxiously red as the rest of her armor, which honestly makes her look like one of the sim soldiers. And, the worst thing is, RG is beaming at her. 

“Oooh, I’ve always wanted to work with you,” RG says. Alaska braces herself. It’s not the first time people have fawned over her. She joined Project Freelancer to get away from her name, but it turns out a Schnee is still a Schnee, no matter what she goes. 

“Your armor’s ability is so cool and versatile and I have so many combination ideas,” RG is practically bouncing, “And you give great reports.” 

Wait, what?

“Depends on your definition of great,” BM mumbles as she passes, patting RG on the back and nearly knocking her over. Which nearly knocks her into Alaska. She hurriedly shoves RG off of her and dusts herself off. 

“Let’s get going,” Alaska simply says and turns on her heels. 

-

While technically the mission was a success, Alaska’s not satisfied with it. Her own performance didn’t so much as nudge her score. No doubt because she was spending most of the mission bickering with her partner. If it hadn’t been for her suit’s enhancements, RG would’ve never made it up the side of the building. 

Green flickers in the corner of her vision. “I believe you’re overthinking this, Agent Alaska,” Omicron says. 

“I’m not overthinking this,” She snaps, “I’m thinking about this a perfectly reasonable amount. I--” 

“Ooh, is that your AI?” 

Alaska’s head snaps up as RG approaches her. Alaska closes her locker and glares. Omicron clears his throat in amusement and then flickers away before she can glare. It doesn’t matter, because her eyes catch on RG pulling off her helmet. In the light of the briefing room she didn’t see how RG’S short black hair is tipped with red that can’t be natural, or how she has striking silver eyes that almost look through her. Alaska swallows thickly. 

“Yes,” She replies stiffly.

“That’s cool. I’ve got Psi here.” An AI flickers into place next to RG, faintly hazel in color. He waves to Alaska, who frowns. 

“Wait, you already have an AI?” 

“Yeah, I guess?” RG rubs the back of her neck. “The Director thought I was ready.” 

“I thought you just joined the program,” Alaska says through grit teeth, “And you already have an AI? There’s no way you’ve earned that.” 

“Whoa, hey,” RG narrows her eyes, “What’s with you? I just wanted to talk to you because I wanted to find someone else who understood. I mean, Michigan’s got... Epsilon, right?” 

“Kappa.” 

“--Right, and Hawaii and my sister are up soon, but...” 

“You think I want to talk to you?” Alaska can see Psi getting nervous, and Omicron activating to try and calm her, but she ignores them. “After your stunt on the mission?” 

“Hey, that worked out! We were fine!” 

“No thanks to you!” A part of her knows that isn’t entirely true, but she doesn’t want to admit it. “You’ve been trying to aggravate me all day! Ever since you mocked my reports--” 

“I wasn’t mocking you,” RG interrupts her, now deadly sincere. “I actually meant what I said? I like your reports.” 

Alaska stares. “What?” 

“You put more detail into them than anyone else.” RG rocks back on her heels and shrugs. “Yeah, they’re really long, but some of the stuff you include is really useful. Like the other week I read your report on the Chorus mission, and you were the only one who included the exact model of vehicle that Hawaii caught. Sooo I could look it up and calculate the tensile strength on that ribbon-gun she likes, so I could give suggestions for that combo move she uses with BM!” 

“The one they use all the time?” Alaska blinks at her. “You came up with that?”

“Yeah.” 

“And you figured it out because of my notes?” 

“Yeah!” 

Nobody’s ever complimented her on that before. Not genuinely. Everyone thinks she’s pretentious and too focused on her rank, but she just wants to be thorough. And here’s this newbie prodigy telling her how good they are. Something bubbles in her chest, but Alaska can’t put a name to it. 

“Maybe I’ve misjudged you,” She admits slowly. “Would you... like to spar sometime? I could give you feedback on your form, or something like that.” 

The smile slowly spreads across RG’s face. “I’d really like that.” 

-

Anyway, the rest of that is a story for another time. Too bad, I know.

Instead, let me paint you a picture: it’s late afternoon and yet the moon rises high over the walls of the gulch. Alaska goes off on patrol, but so little happens in this box canyon that she’s really just using the excuse to get away from BM and Hawaii being obnoxious and obvious back at Red base. 

She goes up along one of the cliff trails that run along the sides of the gulch. This one leads to a nice vantage point of Blue Base, which is a great strategic advantage for no purpose. They’re only play fighting with Rhode and the rest of Blue Team. Really, it’s just a nice spot for some peace and quiet. 

Except that RG’s already beaten Alaska there. RG sits at the edge of the overlook with her feet swinging off the edge, her sniper rifle laid neatly beside her. 

Alaska hesitates for a moment. RG glances back and notices her, then simply scoots to the side a little bit. Alaska takes the invitation and sits carefully beside RG, her own knees tucked closer to her chest. 

“Do you ever wonder why we’re here?” RG asks. 

“I was going to ask you why you were out here,” Alaska counters. 

“That’s not what I meant!” “What did you mean?”

“I mean, why are we here in this random canyon?” 

Alaska frowns behind her helmet. “I thought... random was the point?” 

“Mmmm. I guess so.” RG leans back and tilts her head up to the sky. “This place is kind of nice at night.” 

“Do you... come out here a lot at night?” 

“Sometimes. Sometimes it’s nice to stargaze. Even though I don’t recognize any of the constellations here.” 

“I could teach you sometime.” 

RG looks over at her. “What?” 

“My sister taught me the constellations. Even ones in the far reaches of the galaxy, like here.” Alaska looks up at the sky, purposefully not looking directly at RG. “I could show you, sometime.” 

“I’d really like that, Alaska.” 

“You can thank me for it later.” 

They say later, but they stay until the sun sets. In the darkness, nobody will see if their hands overlap. 

[lovelyladydarling]

task 001. dig a little deeper: lady darling edition

BASIC INFORMATION.

What is your character’s full name ? patricia elizabeth darling How is it pronounced ? puh-trih-shuh uh-liz-uh-bith dar-ling Is there a meaning behind it ? patricia means “noble” and is the female version of “patrick,” but it was a family name her mother gave her. lady was just something sweet they called her when she was younger and it stuck as a nickname over “pat” “patty” or “trish.”  Does your character have any nicknames ? lady, pidge (from tramp) When and where were they born ? december 24, 1993 in san francisco, california  What’s their zodiac sign and what traits do they most relate to ? capricorn. lady is very hardworking and responsible, but she’s aware she can be a bit distant at times when it comes to her more intimate relationships. she holds family very close to her--especially the family she’s made in carthay herself. she’s very stubborn, holds her own, and can definitely get a bit hot-headed at times.  What’s their nationality ? american. What’s their occupation ? jewelry model.  What gender do they identify themselves as ? cisgender female // she/her

PHYSICAL APPEARANCE.

What’s their eye color ? brown Do they wear glasses or contacts ? reading glasses, but not prescription Hair color ? caramel brown Have they ever dyed their hair or wanted to ? she gets highlights pretty often or goes darker, but never strays from brunette.  Height ? 5′6″ // 167.64 cm Body build ? tall & lean Do they have any birthmarks ? she has a small birthmark above her left hipbone. Do they have any piercings or tattoos ? ear piercings // no If not, do they want to get some ? she’s recently been wanting to get a small tattoo somewhere, but she’s not sure where.  Do they have a healthy life style ? she works out pretty frequently and tries to eat well, but carbs tempt her back every time she goes for a salad.  How easy do they get sick ? she catches colds pretty easily, but doesn’t often get really sick.  Any marks on their body ( injuries, … ) ? no permanent scars or injuries to speak of! she broke her arm once when she was 8 playing with the neighborhood kids, but that’s the only major injury she’s sustained throughout her 25 years.  What’s their personal style/how do they like to dress ? lady likes to dress in a sort of girly business casual style most of the time and will occasionally go for a more “laid back” look if she’s just out and about. she frequents sundresses when the weather is nice and switches her footwear between sandals, heels, or a classic pair of KED sneakers. she tries to dress comfortably but still keep everything chic enough to be photographed in, just in case.  What is their favorite and least favorite feature about themselves ? her favorite feature is her eyes and her least favorite would have to be her shape. she often feels like her body is too straight and narrow and wishes she had a few more curves. 

PERSONALITY.

Positive traits ? fun-loving, caring, loyal Negative traits ? jealous, stubborn, hot-headed What do they consider to be the best and the worst part of their personality ? lady considers her loyalty to her friends to be her greatest strength and has a hard time choosing between her extremely jealous nature and stubbornness as her worst. she’ll overtly deny her jealousy to people if they ask because she doesn’t want others to notice such a negative trait in her, but she knows it’s a big fault of hers.  Are they more extroverted or introverted ? lady is definitely an ambivert--she’s a bit of both. extroverted with her friends, introverted with strangers. she can’t strike up a conversation with anyone and prefers to keep to herself when out in public, but has no problem approaching a friend in a room full of strangers to talk.  Any talents ? lady is very good at painting, but doesn’t often share that with people.  What are their fears ? lady is terrified of ending up alone or not being enough for the people around her.  Do they have any phobias ? claustrophobia (small spaces) What is their soft spot ? lady has a huge soft spot for anyone that will bring her dinner and just sit and be with her, anyone who remembers small details she tells them, and puppies.  List 3 pet-peeves they can’t stand ? excuses for bad behavior, bailing on plans last minute, and calling people out via social media. 

EDUCATION.

How far did they go in school ? Are they still studying ? lady completed high school and went to study studio art in college, but ended up leaving after 2 years when her modeling career took off.  Do/Did they like school ? she really enjoyed college and would love to go back, or even just take a few classes for fun. high school was a take it or leave it thing for her--she didn’t mind it, but she wouldn’t choose to go back.  What type of student are/were they ? she’s always been a good student. she doesn’t cause trouble, she shows up on time, leaves on time, and turns in her assignments. she maintained a b+ to a average in high school and really threw herself into her college courses. she practically slept at the arts annex during portfolio review.  What is/was their favorite subject ? art was always her favorite subject, but she enjoyed history and english as well.  And their least favorite ? any sort of advanced math--trigonometry, calculus, etc.  What were they/would they have been voted as “most likely to…” in the yearbook ? lady was actually voted most likely to sell a painting by age 25, which was oddly specific to her but she wasn’t particularly close to many people in high school so she figured it was the best they could come up with. 

FAMILY.

Who are your character’s parents ? jim and ruth darling.  How would your character describe them ? lady hasn’t seen her parents in a while, as she was sent to live with her aunt sarah when she was 14 years old due to an incident with her younger brother. she loved her parents dearly and would drop anything she was doing to help them, even now. they were incredibly caring and protective of her and her brother, so she doesn’t fault them for doing what was best for him by sending her away.  Do they have any siblings ? one younger brother, 13 years her junior: noah darling. Are they close with their family ? she used to be, but now rarely hears from them save for a card on her birthday. she would still do anything for them if they needed her. 

ROMANCE & SEXUALITY.

What’s their romantic and sexual orientation ? heterosexual Are they seeing anyone right now ? james sullivan, for publicity sake.  Have they ever been in an relationship ? as long as hers and sulley’s counts, yes! otherwise, she doesn’t know if she’d consider any of her previous relationships as counting.  Have they ever been in love ? yes.  How easy do they fall for someone ? it takes a lot of work to really get lady to fall for someone. though she desperately wants a family of her own after hers imploded due to her carelessness, she’s very guarded because of it as well.  In their view, why didn’t any past relationships work out ? she’s been caught up in someone else.  What do they look for in someone ? she wants someone to put in even half the effort she knows she could give. she wants passion alongside the comfortable moments and the moments of “i can’t believe this part of my life.”  Do they believe in love at first sight ? or fate ? no, not particularly love at first sight...fate, perhaps. though she believes one can control their own fate if they so choose.  What’s their views on romance ? Do they go after it or avoid it ? lady loves the idea of romance, but she’s not sure on the logistics or how to get it. she doesn’t particularly like how her heart and her brain tell her different things.  Did they have their first time already ? How was it in their point of view ? yes and somewhat disappointing--some guy she dated in her first year of college for about 6 months that she grew tired of and broke things off with. she thought she loved him at the time, but realized it was only an infatuation.  What is their view on sex ? it’s fun, but she’s started thinking of it as something more as she’s gotten a little older. she’s not trying to save herself (that’s over & done with) but she does prefer to save sex for people she’s truly connected with and feels a deep love for.  What are their turn ons and turn offs ? turn ons, she prefers someone else taking control, longer hair, and breathy words. turn offs, she’s not a fan of someone grossly inexperienced, with poor hygiene, or a messy room (or wherever the sex is happening, honestly.)  Were they ever cheated on or have they cheated on someone ? to her knowledge, she’s never been cheated on. she may have kissed some other boy in high school while “dating” another boy, but she couldn’t have been more than 15. she’s never cheated in her adult “relationships.”  Do they want to get married in the future ? absolutely.  Have kids ? definitely. 

QUIRKS.

Are they right or left handed ? right handed.  What’s a word that’s always on their lips ? serendipity.  Is there a saying they keep on repeating ? don’t judge a book by its cover.  Do they curse ? when she’s particularly angry, yes.  What’s their worst habit ? jealousy.  Do they drink or smoke ? How frequently ? both occasionally, moreso when she’s left alone and doesn’t know how to handle what she’s feeling without being inebriated. that’s very rare, however, and she usually reserves her vices to a glass or two of red wine.  Are they an early bird or a night owl ? early bird.  How tidy is their room ? immaculate. lady loves having a place for all of her things. there’s hardly a shoelace out of place in her room.  How long to they usually take getting ready in the morning ? depends on what her plans are for the day, but her average routine takes about 25-30 minutes. it’ll go a bit longer if she has something planned with james, especially a nighttime outing. 

FAVORITES.

What’s their favorite color ? tiffany blue.  Favorite movie ? 10 things i hate about  you.  Music Genre ? pop? Food ? italian.  Book ? currently, meddling kids by edgar cantero Favorite non-alcoholic drink ? iced dirty chai latte Ice Cream Flavor ? neopolitan  Indoors or outdoors ? a bit of both. 

[misscinico]

Indigenous Representation in Animated Movies

You know me, always making articles about people of color and their representation in media, specifically animated media for children. So I decided to focus on indigenous representation and which characters are good and bad representation in fairly well-known movies. This isn't in any particular order either.

For this list, I chose heroines that have heritage from a country that is predominantly industrialized because of the conquest of a foreign culture. Mainly tribes where they no longer speak their original language and there race is no longer the majority even though they are the natives of that land. The typical assumption of "indigenous peoples" mostly involving the Americas and American territories.

Side Note: If you don't like political correctness or really just the sensitivities of people of color, you probably won't like reading this article. Also this is just my personal opinion I really don't mind If you think differently.

Nita - Nita is a heroine that is often overlooked despite being from a largely successful and well-know company, Disney. I personally think she is probably the best indigenous representation of this list, even if she isn't necessarily my favorite, she is one of them. Nita is kind, brave, funny and an overall interesting a human character to watch that is a great Inuit role-model. She drives a plot, she makes her own decisions and her culture is taken seriously and not presented as a novelty. She also is presented as a daughter of the chief which is the princess-esque position of power that is extremely common in cartoons. The movie doesn't really showcase that too much, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing since Nita really is her own character despite the trope she fits into. She gets a perfect score 10/10. It's only a shame that she isn't more well known.

Pocahontas - This representation is probably the most polarizing. Pocahontas is based off of a real American legend the chief's daughter Matoaka most commonly known as Pocahontas (meaning Little Mischief). Since this is a greatly romanization of history it's seen as poor representation. I'm under the person belief that so long as the movie isn't presented a fact that it's a harmless fictional rendering of the story. Pocahontas is actually one of my favorite Disney Princesses if not my favorite. Even though I think her character is great, being a strong independent woman with a recognizable position, I can't deny that her representation is brought down by the sheer insensitivity of the real historical figure. While there's nothing wrong with her character in particular the the fact there wasn't much consideration for the Powhatan people's historical figures demotes Pocahontas to about 7/10 ranking. Not bad, but could be improved solely based on context.

Nani - She's a wonderful character taking care of Lilo and trying her best to be a hard worker for her sister's sake. Someone actually being portrayed as a human trying to make ends meet. She's a fine character even if she doesn't do anything particularly extraordinary. The only problem I really have with her portrayal is that it seem like she will lose Lilo in the end if it weren't for others. She's seen as poor and unfortunate and the situation doesn't really care about her heritage. This isn't a bad thing, because it's true, in Hawai'i a lot of Natives struggled with poverty and being taken care of by the government. It's important to showcase this and it's great that it was done like this, but role-model wise is kind of paints a negative image more so than a uplifting one. Nani still gets a 9/10 ranking, because she was excellently done, but she's not a perfect score because of her being seen as kind of the downtrodden.

Moana - Her representation is a lot like Nita's except she's also the main character. Similar to Pocahontas, but not insensitive toward the real event of colonization. The culture represented in this movie is extremely well-done in this movie, probably the best of any Disney or animated movie in general. Being Polynesian myself it's one of my favorites and one of the movies I have the least amount of problems with. Moana gets a 10/10 ranking. Disney did great work with this one.

Tiger Lily - This representation is egregious. Honestly the whole "red man" bit is stereotypical and, depending on how you look at it, racist. Tiger Lily herself is rather cute and is portrayed as a noble character who also is also kind of an adventure piece. It fits the narrative of "the noble savage" and the save the girl and get rewarded for it. It's almost worse because she's a child and yet she's treated like the native "sex piece" trope. Seeing native girls as trophies more so than characters or people. Tiger Lily isn't completely unjustifiable though. Like I said she has noble moments (even if they can be seen as stereotypical) and she does have fun and dance like a child. Still her representation is extremely poor. Her ranking is 4.5/10 and I think that's being generous.

Chel - Chel can often be written off as a sex piece character too. After all she clearly partakes in it and users her sexuality quite often. The only difference as she's not presented as a trophy. She is her own character, she actually does drive the plot, and she has her own plans. Her use of her sexuality is entirely her own decision. Does this empower her or is it still poor representation because the authors are taking away any modesty she could have simply for the purpose of making her eye candy. Nothing wrong with some sexy character design, but she's also a side character and a thief. It's not a very positive light and definitely not a good role-model. All of the main characters are thieves, so can that be overlooked as well? I don't know, because she's definitely her own character that in a sense goes for what she wants and is portrayed as human with flaws. She even voiced by a Latina as well (like most of the characters on this list, she's voiced by her own ethnicity). I'd say that her representation needs to be improved, but it's not bad. It isn't anything worth getting upset over for sure. It's a fair portrayal regardless of what her race happens to be. Her ranking is 6/10.

Marama - She is from the Chilean animated movie Ogu and Mampato in Rapa Nui She's a kid that's a side character that's kind of along for the adventure. Overall there's only good things to say about her character. She's smart, funny, a go getter, and she helps progress the film. She isn't overtly mentioned as the chief's daughter, but it is heavily implied. So she has a nice position. She a fine role-model for kids, and the only real thing I could complain about would be her design. She's given blue eyes and light skin. As a Polynesian this isn't the worst though because we can have light eyes and skin, it's just that blue eyes tend to be more of a Melanesian/European trait than Polynesian so it can be seen as white-washing. Overall it's good representation especially from a kids movie that was in a country far removed from Rapa Nui. She gets a 8/10 ranking.

Nakoma - I almost didn't include her, but she is a well-known character in animated media, but there isn't much to say. She's much like Pocahontas, given being in the same movie, she isn't given any real depth or recognizable position, but she's a good character. Representation wise probably better than Pocahontas because she isn't meant to represent a real person in history. Obviously I love Pocahontas much more, but as far as good portrayal Nakoma beats Pocahontas by a fair amount of points. Her ranking is 9/10. She could be a perfect score if she was a main character, but she still has really good role-model traits that I think are often under appreciated.

To read my article in all it’s glory on my original fanpop post click here

[violetosprey]

BTD: Rire/Cain Compare and Contrast

One thing I like about the BTD and TDDUP games is that pretty much every single character in the series is unique.  Hardly any of them line up in the same format as any other the others (due to occupation, objectives, level of sadism, personality, etc.).  Actually out of the entire series, there’s only really two characters that come close to being “carbon copies” : Cain and Rire.

This used to bother me a bit, but it doesn’t anymore because when you put a little more thought into it, the two couldn’t be anymore different.  It’s about time I put my thoughts onto paper though so I stop trying to lump these two together all the time :P

Game spoilers below.

First off, laying out the most important fact here:  It doesn’t matter how “similar” these characters are in the context of the games because they are created/owned by two different people.

Rire is owned by Darqx.  Cain is owned by ElectricPuke.  

Sooo I could technically end this post right here just for that sake.  These were two friends with two separate characters for their own universes.  They have full knowledge of the other’s character.  I don’t know who had their character first, but really this isn’t the case of either of them copying the other.  It’d be worse in my opinion if a creator kept dishing out the same exact type of character each and every game with just a different coat of paint on them so to speak.  Both creators are pretty good though with their character diversity :)

1) Why Rire and Cain feel like the same “model”

Well they both happen to be supernatural beings of the “dark” variety (one’s a demon, and one’s a fallen angel) who are very charming when you first meet them, but reveal themselves to be complete sadists later on.  They’re pretty overpowered, so you’re completely at their mercy.  They both do physical torture, as well as mess with your mind.  They are torturing the MC simply because they’re bored and they found the MC “interesting.”  It is highly likely you will end up dying when you meet them (though same with most any of the other BTD boys).  And they’re also incredibly difficult to please.  They want a victim who will fight back a bit, but they also don’t like a victim who is totally “uncooperative.”  Sometimes they don’t even mind a little submission from their victim or the victim even showing willingness to engage in certain activities.  Really, they just want someone to “play” with who keeps them on their toes.  Also, I’d have to double-check, but I think they’re even the same height XD

So yeah...pretty similar on the surface.  I have to admit though that these two are my 2nd and 3rd favorites out of all the BTD characters, so clearly I didn’t really mind how the setup went :P  

2) Why the two characters function completely differently underneath the hood

First off, appearances.  While snappy dressers I have to say, they’re EXTREMELY different in the looks department.  Rire’s got this luscious hair in a short ponytail while we have Cain sporting this more, almost delinquent look, with his hair dyed red in the middle (it looks fantastic slicked back though!).  Rire’s also got a little more chest hair and same facial hair, and Cain seems slightly...leaner I guess?  Overall, I find Rire’s appearance to look a bit older to me.  Certainly more of a mature gentleman.  Cain doesn’t look so young that he’d pass for a teenager, but he’s definitely got a “younger adult” look in comparison to Rire.  Which is hilarious considering that Rire is actually at least a couple thousand years younger than Cain I believe :P  

Second, the setup/predicament that MC walks into.  Both you meet in a nicer establishment.  With Rire, it ends up becoming a one-night stand the MC gets into that goes horribly wrong, resulting in them becoming a prisoner in their own house at Rire’s mercy.  Cain you meet by chance, have a nice little chat with, then you actually leave but he kidnaps you shortly afterward.  Instead of your home, MC is actually taken to where Cain stays.  So with one, your natural safe zone has now become a prison, while with the other you get taken far away to a place that’s unfamiliar to you that you have no power to leave yourself.  They’re both scary in different ways.  This kind of leads into the next bit.

Third, their restrictions.  Fun fact, Cain is likely the more powerful of the two.  But the funny thing is Cain doesn’t have as much freedom to move about as Rire does.  Rire is a demon royal and the king of his demon sector where he’s from.  Every now and then when he gets bored, he’ll pop into the earth realm to mess with some poor unfortunate soul.  It’s implied he’s done this on more than one occasion.  The only reason he doesn’t linger too long there is because a) he’s probably satisfied once he’s had his fill and b) if he’s the king, he’s probably got to make sure he’s not absent for TOO long from his sector, least some up and coming demon get the idea to usurp him.  Gotta let your people know you’re still the boss :P  Otherwise, no one’s probably looking for Rire to come back (he’s supposedly a bit of a tyrant).  

Cain on the other hang has actually broken out of prison recently (how recently is up for debate).  There are indeed other angels stronger than him looking to get him back in his cage, and of course he doesn’t want to go.  So he’s smart enough to keep out of sight long enough when he’s on earth.  When he goes to find a new toy though, he wants to savor the “playtime” more;  So he kidnaps them and brings them to his hiding place.  I guess you could say Rire has more freedom but less time when he’s enjoying himself, while Cain has more time to enjoy himself but less freedom to move about.

Fourth, powers.  Rire’s a little more physical, using mostly his tentacles (ichor) to torture someone.  Seeing as he can sprout as many as he’d like, keep people at a safe distance, and they can become both liquid or solid, he can get pretty creative.  He seems to have SOME control over a person’s psyche, but I think Darqx confirmed isn’t not really full on mind control.  He’s got more control of demons underneath him.  And it depends on how strong the person’s mind is (that’s why you can break free from it).  He’s likely got highly regenerative abilities.  He...MIGHT have teleportation, I can’t remember either in the game or Darqx’s notes (he might just be super good at sneaking up on you honestly).  And of course, he can take your soul if it’s part of a “deal.”

Cain’s got a larger repertoire of abilities.  He’s got a bit more mind control capability it would appear (according to Puke’s notes, more like getting people to admit truths and a minor telepathy bond).  So Cain’s a bit more capable of messing with your mind than Rire is.  Cain can disguise his physical form, as well as physically transform others into fallen angels or demons.  In one ending, it is implied he can either take control of someone’s soul...that or it’s more like “your soul belongs to me now” while you physically keep it.  Not sure.  He can heat things up (like boiling the bath) and manifests objects like roses and chains.  He seemed to be able to use “invisible forces” such as barriers and a weight on the MC as well.  He’s got quick regeneration, and he DEFINITELY can teleport.  So Cain’s more of a wild card than Rire because with the array of abilities he has, you won’t necessarily know where the danger is coming from before it’s too late.

Fifth, end game play.  Rire’s looking for a “quickie” in more ways than one.  The more entertaining the person, the longer he lets them live.  Ultimately though, you’re going to meet your doom at the end.  If he doesn’t like you enough, he’ll just kill you.  On the slim chance that he does end up liking the MC...then he gives them the choice of whether or not to live.  If they say they choose death, he gives it to them.  If they say otherwise...then he actually takes the victim’s soul for his collection.  I am aware now from reading Darqx’s blog that Rire can do a “mark” thing on someone he likes as a way of ownership...but a) that is probably INCREDIBLY rare for him to do, and b) I have no idea what happens after that (if he either takes his victim back home with him, or if he just lets them “free roam” and he comes back to “play” with them whenever he likes until he gets bored...and probably kills them).  My guess is he doesn’t really ever take any of his victims home.  If he ever feels “affection” for anyone...I have a funny feeling it wouldn’t be a good thing either.  He just plays with his victims wherever they’re at, kills them or takes their soul, and goes on his way.

Cain’s actually hoping for something a little more long-term.  He’s gone through the trouble of wandering around incognito when he’s a wanted criminal, so hopefully when he spots someone he fancies he doesn’t have to go replacing them too fast.  Like Rire though, he’s initially thinking of torturing and inevitably killing his victim.  UNLIKE Rire though, you do have a very slim chance of getting on Cain’s better side for a better ending than being trapped in a bottle for all eternity.  If you prove to remain entertaining to Cain, but he still will see you as a toy that’s beneath him, he’ll turn you into his demon minion.  If Cain feels more affection with you, he may start to view you as an equal.  Then you gives you the choice of either leaving of your own free will (sadly you can’t return to Earth though- gee thanks Cain :P), or staying with him and becoming a fallen angel.  Puke’s implied the MC has become more of Cain’s equal if he does this.  While again, still very difficult to gain Cain’s favor, my guess is the reason you’re more likely to meet a better end with Cain than you are Rire is because Cain was once a human.  Cain’s lived a long time, and while he is no where near good, he’d be more capable at sympathizing with others.  He also seems to have “quiet and thoughtful moments.”  Rire’s pretty much the very text book definition of a “demon.”  Cain’s a tad more complicated (but still very sadistic).

Yeah I just had to do this so I would stop lumping these guys together.  I love them both a whole lot and appreciate even the more minor differences between them.

[suzanneshannon]

Now THAT’S What I Call Service Worker!

The Service Worker API is the Dremel of the web platform. It offers incredibly broad utility while also yielding resiliency and better performance. If you’ve not used Service Worker yet—and you couldn’t be blamed if so, as it hasn’t seen wide adoption as of 2020—it goes something like this:

On the initial visit to a website, the browser registers what amounts to a client-side proxy powered by a comparably paltry amount of JavaScript that—like a Web Worker—runs on its own thread.

After the Service Worker’s registration, you can intercept requests and decide how to respond to them in the Service Worker’s fetch() event.

What you decide to do with requests you intercept is a) your call and b) depends on your website. You can rewrite requests, precache static assets during install, provide offline functionality, and—as will be our eventual focus—deliver smaller HTML payloads and better performance for repeat visitors.

Getting out of the woods

Weekly Timber is a client of mine that provides logging services in central Wisconsin. For them, a fast website is vital. Their business is located in Waushara County, and like many rural stretches in the United States, network quality and reliability isn’t great.

Figure 1. A wireless coverage map of Waushara County, Wisconsin. The tan areas of the map indicate downlink speeds between 3 and 9.99 Mbps. Red areas are even slower, while the pale and dark blue areas are faster.

Wisconsin has farmland for days, but it also has plenty of forests. When you need a company that cuts logs, Google is probably your first stop. How fast a given logging company’s website is might be enough to get you looking elsewhere if you’re left waiting too long on a crappy network connection.

I initially didn’t believe a Service Worker was necessary for Weekly Timber’s website. After all, if things were plenty fast to start with, why complicate things? On the other hand, knowing that my client services not just Waushara County, but much of central Wisconsin, even a barebones Service Worker could be the kind of progressive enhancement that adds resilience in the places it might be needed most.

The first Service Worker I wrote for my client’s website—which I’ll refer to henceforth as the “standard” Service Worker—used three well-documented caching strategies:

Precache CSS and JavaScript assets for all pages when the Service Worker is installed when the window’s load event fires.

Serve static assets out of CacheStorage if available. If a static asset isn’t in CacheStorage, retrieve it from the network, then cache it for future visits.

For HTML assets, hit the network first and place the HTML response into CacheStorage. If the network is unavailable the next time the visitor arrives, serve the cached markup from CacheStorage.

These are neither new nor special strategies, but they provide two benefits:

Offline capability, which is handy when network conditions are spotty.

A performance boost for loading static assets.

That performance boost translated to a 42% and 48% decrease in the median time to First Contentful Paint (FCP) and Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), respectively. Better yet, these insights are based on Real User Monitoring (RUM). That means these gains aren’t just theoretical, but a real improvement for real people.

Figure 2. A breakdown of request/response timings depicted in Chrome’s developer tools. The request is for a static asset from CacheStorage. Because the Service Worker doesn’t need to access the network, it takes about 23 milliseconds to “download” the asset from CacheStorage.

This performance boost is from bypassing the network entirely for static assets already in CacheStorage—particularly render-blocking stylesheets. A similar benefit is realized when we rely on the HTTP cache, only the FCP and LCP improvements I just described are in comparison to pages with a primed HTTP cache without an installed Service Worker.

If you’re wondering why CacheStorage and the HTTP cache aren’t equal, it’s because the HTTP cache—at least in some cases—may still involve a trip to the server to verify asset freshness. Cache-Control’s immutable flag gets around this, but immutable doesn’t have great support yet. A long max-age value works, too, but the combination of Service Worker API and CacheStorage gives you a lot more flexibility.

Details aside, the takeaway is that the simplest and most well-established Service Worker caching practices can improve performance. Potentially more than what well-configured Cache-Control headers can provide. Even so, Service Worker is an incredible technology with far more possibilities. It’s possible to go farther, and I’ll show you how.

A better, faster Service Worker

The web loves itself some “innovation,” which is a word we equally love to throw around. To me, true innovation isn’t when we create new frameworks or patterns solely for the benefit of developers, but whether those inventions benefit people who end up using whatever it is we slap up on the web. The priority of constituencies is a thing we ought to respect. Users above all else, always.

The Service Worker API’s innovation space is considerable. How you work within that space can have a big effect on how the web is experienced. Things like navigation preload and ReadableStream have taken Service Worker from great to killer. We can do the following with these new capabilities, respectively:

Reduce Service Worker latency by parallelizing Service Worker startup time and navigation requests.

Stream content in from CacheStorage and the network.

Moreover, we’re going to combine these capabilities and pull out one more trick: precache header and footer partials, then combine them with content partials from the network. This not only reduces how much data we download from the network, but it also improves perceptual performance for repeat visits. That’s innovation that helps everyone.

Grizzled, I turn to you and say “let’s do this.”

Laying the groundwork

If the idea of combining precached header and footer partials with network content on the fly seems like a Single Page Application (SPA), you’re not far off. Like an SPA, you’ll need to apply the “app shell” model to your website. Only instead of a client-side router plowing content into one piece of minimal markup, you have to think of your website as three separate parts:

The header.

The content.

The footer.

For my client’s website, that looks like this:

Figure 3. A color coding of the Weekly Timber website’s different partials. The Footer and Header partials are stored in CacheStorage, while the Content partial is retrieved from the network unless the user is offline.

The thing to remember here is that the individual partials don’t have to be valid markup in the sense that all tags need to be closed within each partial. The only thing that counts in the final sense is that the combination of these partials must be valid markup.

To start, you’ll need to precache separate header and footer partials when the Service Worker is installed. For my client’s website, these partials are served from the /partial-header and /partial-footer pathnames:

self.addEventListener("install", event => { const cacheName = "fancy_cache_name_here"; const precachedAssets = [ "/partial-header", // The header partial "/partial-footer", // The footer partial // Other assets worth precaching ]; event.waitUntil(caches.open(cacheName).then(cache => { return cache.addAll(precachedAssets); }).then(() => { return self.skipWaiting(); })); });

Every page must be fetchable as a content partial minus the header and footer, as well as a full page with the header and footer. This is key because the initial visit to a page won’t be controlled by a Service Worker. Once the Service Worker takes over, then you serve content partials and assemble them into complete responses with the header and footer partials from CacheStorage.

If your site is static, this means generating a whole other mess of markup partials that you can rewrite requests to in the Service Worker’s fetch() event. If your website has a back end—as is the case with my client—you can use an HTTP request header to instruct the server to deliver full pages or content partials.

The hard part is putting all the pieces together—but we’ll do just that.

Putting it all together

Writing even a basic Service Worker can be challenging, but things get real complicated real fast when assembling multiple responses into one. One reason for this is that in order to avoid the Service Worker startup penalty, we’ll need to set up navigation preload.

Implementing navigation preload

Navigation preload addresses the problem of Service Worker startup time, which delays navigation requests to the network. The last thing you want to do with a Service Worker is hold up the show.

Navigation preload must be explicitly enabled. Once enabled, the Service Worker won’t hold up navigation requests during startup. Navigation preload is enabled in the Service Worker’s activate event:

self.addEventListener("activate", event => { const cacheName = "fancy_cache_name_here"; const preloadAvailable = "navigationPreload" in self.registration; event.waitUntil(caches.keys().then(keys => { return Promise.all([ keys.filter(key => { return key !== cacheName; }).map(key => { return caches.delete(key); }), self.clients.claim(), preloadAvailable ? self.registration.navigationPreload.enable() : true ]); })); });

Because navigation preload isn’t supported everywhere, we have to do the usual feature check, which we store in the above example in the preloadAvailable variable.

Additionally, we need to use Promise.all() to resolve multiple asynchronous operations before the Service Worker activates. This includes pruning those old caches, as well as waiting for both clients.claim() (which tells the Service Worker to assert control immediately rather than waiting until the next navigation) and navigation preload to be enabled.

A ternary operator is used to enable navigation preload in supporting browsers and avoid throwing errors in browsers that don’t. If preloadAvailable is true, we enable navigation preload. If it isn’t, we pass a Boolean that won’t affect how Promise.all() resolves.

With navigation preload enabled, we need to write code in our Service Worker’s fetch() event handler to make use of the preloaded response:

self.addEventListener("fetch", event => { const { request } = event; // Static asset handling code omitted for brevity // ... // Check if this is a request for a document if (request.mode === "navigate") { const networkContent = Promise.resolve(event.preloadResponse).then(response => { if (response) { addResponseToCache(request, response.clone()); return response; } return fetch(request.url, { headers: { "X-Content-Mode": "partial" } }).then(response => { addResponseToCache(request, response.clone()); return response; }); }).catch(() => { return caches.match(request.url); }); // More to come... } });

Though this isn’t the entirety of the Service Worker’s fetch() event code, there’s a lot that needs explaining:

The preloaded response is available in event.preloadResponse. However, as Jake Archibald notes, the value of event.preloadResponse will be undefined in browsers that don’t support navigation preload. Therefore, we must pass event.preloadResponse to Promise.resolve() to avoid compatibility issues.

We adapt in the resulting then callback. If event.preloadResponse is supported, we use the preloaded response and add it to CacheStorage via an addResponseToCache() helper function. If not, we send a fetch() request to the network to get the content partial using a custom X-Content-Mode header with a value of partial.

Should the network be unavailable, we fall back to the most recently accessed content partial in CacheStorage.

The response—regardless of where it was procured from—is then returned to a variable named networkContent that we use later.

How the content partial is retrieved is tricky. With navigation preload enabled, a special Service-Worker-Navigation-Preload header with a value of true is added to navigation requests. We then work with that header on the back end to ensure the response is a content partial rather than the full page markup.

However, because navigation preload isn’t available in all browsers, we send a different header in those scenarios. In Weekly Timber’s case, we fall back to a custom X-Content-Mode header. In my client’s PHP back end, I’ve created some handy constants:

<?php // Is this a navigation preload request? define("NAVIGATION_PRELOAD", isset($_SERVER["HTTP_SERVICE_WORKER_NAVIGATION_PRELOAD"]) && stristr($_SERVER["HTTP_SERVICE_WORKER_NAVIGATION_PRELOAD"], "true") !== false); // Is this an explicit request for a content partial? define("PARTIAL_MODE", isset($_SERVER["HTTP_X_CONTENT_MODE"]) && stristr($_SERVER["HTTP_X_CONTENT_MODE"], "partial") !== false); // If either is true, this is a request for a content partial define("USE_PARTIAL", NAVIGATION_PRELOAD === true || PARTIAL_MODE === true); ?>

From there, the USE_PARTIAL constant is used to adapt the response:

<?php if (USE_PARTIAL === false) { require_once("partial-header.php"); } require_once("includes/home.php"); if (USE_PARTIAL === false) { require_once("partial-footer.php"); } ?>

The thing to be hip to here is that you should specify a Vary header for HTML responses to take the Service-Worker-Navigation-Preload (and in this case, the X-Content-Mode header) into account for HTTP caching purposes—assuming you’re caching HTML at all, which may not be the case for you.

With our handling of navigation preloads complete, we can then move onto the work of streaming content partials from the network and stitching them together with the header and footer partials from CacheStorage into a single response that the Service Worker will provide.

Streaming partial content and stitching together responses

While the header and footer partials will be available almost instantaneously because they’ve been in CacheStorage since the Service Worker’s installation, it’s the content partial we retrieve from the network that will be the bottleneck. It’s therefore vital that we stream responses so we can start pushing markup to the browser as quickly as possible. ReadableStream can do this for us.

This ReadableStream business is a mind-bender. Anyone who tells you it’s “easy” is whispering sweet nothings to you. It’s hard. After I wrote my own function to merge streamed responses and messed up a critical step—which ended up not improving page performance, mind you—I modified Jake Archibald’s mergeResponses() function to suit my needs:

async function mergeResponses (responsePromises) { const readers = responsePromises.map(responsePromise => { return Promise.resolve(responsePromise).then(response => { return response.body.getReader(); }); }); let doneResolve, doneReject; const done = new Promise((resolve, reject) => { doneResolve = resolve; doneReject = reject; }); const readable = new ReadableStream({ async pull (controller) { const reader = await readers[0]; try { const { done, value } = await reader.read(); if (done) { readers.shift(); if (!readers[0]) { controller.close(); doneResolve(); return; } return this.pull(controller); } controller.enqueue(value); } catch (err) { doneReject(err); throw err; } }, cancel () { doneResolve(); } }); const headers = new Headers(); headers.append("Content-Type", "text/html"); return { done, response: new Response(readable, { headers }) }; }

As usual, there’s a lot going on:

mergeResponses() accepts an argument named responsePromises, which is an array of Response objects returned from either a navigation preload, fetch(), or caches.match(). Assuming the network is available, this will always contain three responses: two from caches.match() and (hopefully) one from the network.

Before we can stream the responses in the responsePromises array, we must map responsePromises to an array containing one reader for each response. Each reader is used later in a ReadableStream() constructor to stream each response’s contents.

A promise named done is created. In it, we assign the promise’s resolve() and reject() functions to the external variables doneResolve and doneReject, respectively. These will be used in the ReadableStream() to signal whether the stream is finished or has hit a snag.

The new ReadableStream() instance is created with a name of readable. As responses stream in from CacheStorage and the network, their contents will be appended to readable.

The stream’s pull() method streams the contents of the first response in the array. If the stream isn’t canceled somehow, the reader for each response is discarded by calling the readers array’s shift() method when the response is fully streamed. This repeats until there are no more readers to process.

When all is done, the merged stream of responses is returned as a single response, and we return it with a Content-Type header value of text/html.

This is much simpler if you use TransformStream, but depending on when you read this, that may not be an option for every browser. For now, we’ll have to stick with this approach.

Now let’s revisit the Service Worker’s fetch() event from earlier, and apply the mergeResponses() function:

self.addEventListener("fetch", event => { const { request } = event; // Static asset handling code omitted for brevity // ... // Check if this is a request for a document if (request.mode === "navigate") { // Navigation preload/fetch() fallback code omitted. // ... const { done, response } = await mergeResponses([ caches.match("/partial-header"), networkContent, caches.match("/partial-footer") ]); event.waitUntil(done); event.respondWith(response); } });

At the end of the fetch() event handler, we pass the header and footer partials from CacheStorage to the mergeResponses() function, and pass the result to the fetch() event’s respondWith() method, which serves the merged response on behalf of the Service Worker.

Are the results worth the hassle?

This is a lot of stuff to do, and it’s complicated! You might mess something up, or maybe your website’s architecture isn’t well-suited to this exact approach. So it’s important to ask: are the performance benefits worth the work? In my view? Yes! The synthetic performance gains aren’t bad at all:

Figure 4. A bar chart of median FCP and LCP synthetic performance data across various Service Worker types for the Weekly Timber website.

Synthetic tests don’t measure performance for anything except the specific device and internet connection they’re performed on. Even so, these tests were conducted on a staging version of my client’s website with a low-end Nokia 2 Android phone on a throttled “Fast 3G” connection in Chrome’s developer tools. Each category was tested ten times on the homepage. The takeaways here are:

No Service Worker at all is slightly faster than the “standard” Service Worker with simpler caching patterns than the streaming variant. Like, ever so slightly faster. This may be due to the delay introduced by Service Worker startup, however, the RUM data I’ll go over shows a different case.

Both LCP and FCP are tightly coupled in scenarios where there’s no Service Worker or when the “standard” Service Worker is used. This is because the content of the page is pretty simple and the CSS is fairly small. The Largest Contentful Paint is usually the opening paragraph on a page.

However, the streaming Service Worker decouples FCP and LCP because the header content partial streams in right away from CacheStorage.

Both FCP and LCP are lower in the streaming Service Worker than in other cases.

Figure 5. A bar chart of median FCP and LCP RUM performance data across various Service Worker types for the Weekly Timber website.

The benefits of the streaming Service Worker for real users is pronounced. For FCP, we receive an 79% improvement over no Service Worker at all, and a 63% improvement over the “standard” Service Worker. The benefits for LCP are more subtle. Compared to no Service Worker at all, we realize a 41% improvement in LCP—which is incredible! However, compared to the “standard” Service Worker, LCP is a touch slower.

Because the long tail of performance is important, let’s look at the 95th percentile of FCP and LCP performance:

Figure 6. A bar chart of 95th percentile FCP and LCP RUM performance data across various Service Worker types for the Weekly Timber website.

The 95th percentile of RUM data is a great place to assess the slowest experiences. In this case, we see that the streaming Service Worker confers a 40% and 51% improvement in FCP and LCP, respectively, over no Service Worker at all. Compared to the “standard” Service Worker, we see a reduction in FCP and LCP by 19% and 43%, respectively. If these results seem a bit squirrely compared to synthetic metrics, remember: that’s RUM data for you! You never know who’s going to visit your website on which device on what network.

While both FCP and LCP are boosted by the myriad benefits of streaming, navigation preload (in Chrome’s case), and sending less markup by stitching together partials from both CacheStorage and the network, FCP is the clear winner. Perceptually speaking, the benefit is pronounced, as this video would suggest:

Figure 7. Two WebPageTest videos of a repeat view of the Weekly Timber homepage. On the left is the page not controlled by a Service Worker, with a primed HTTP cache. On the right is the same page controlled by a streaming Service Worker, with CacheStorage primed.

Now ask yourself this: If this is the kind of improvement we can expect on such a small and simple website, what might we expect on a website with larger header and footer markup payloads?

Caveats and conclusions

Are there trade-offs with this on the development side? Oh yeah.

As Philip Walton has noted, a cached header partial means the document title must be updated in JavaScript on each navigation by changing the value of document.title. It also means you’ll need to update the navigation state in JavaScript to reflect the current page if that’s something you do on your website. Note that this shouldn’t cause indexing issues, as Googlebot crawls pages with an unprimed cache.

There may also be some challenges on sites with authentication. For example, if your site’s header displays the current authenticated user on log in, you may have to update the header partial markup provided by CacheStorage in JavaScript on each navigation to reflect who is authenticated. You may be able to do this by storing basic user data in localStorage and updating the UI from there.

There are certainly other challenges, but it’ll be up to you to weigh the user-facing benefits versus the development costs. In my opinion, this approach has broad applicability in applications such as blogs, marketing websites, news websites, ecommerce, and other typical use cases.

All in all, though, it’s akin to the performance improvements and efficiency gains that you’d get from an SPA. Only the difference is that you’re not replacing time-tested navigation mechanisms and grappling with all the messiness that entails, but enhancing them. That’s the part I think is really important to consider in a world where client-side routing is all the rage.

“What about Workbox?,” you might ask—and you’d be right to. Workbox simplifies a lot when it comes to using the Service Worker API, and you’re not wrong to reach for it. Personally, I prefer to work as close to the metal as I can so I can gain a better understanding of what lies beneath abstractions like Workbox. Even so, Service Worker is hard. Use Workbox if it suits you. As far as frameworks go, its abstraction cost is very low.

Regardless of this approach, I think there’s incredible utility and power in using the Service Worker API to reduce the amount of markup you send. It benefits my client and all the people that use their website. Because of Service Worker and the innovation around its use, my client’s website is faster in the far-flung parts of Wisconsin. That’s something I feel good about.

Special thanks to Jake Archibald for his valuable editorial advice, which, to put it mildly, considerably improved the quality of this article.

Now THAT’S What I Call Service Worker! published first on https://deskbysnafu.tumblr.com/

[crypto4all]

3 people who correctly predicted $10k Bitcoin today (and how)

Three completely different methods brought the same spot-on predictions.

Bitcoin is finally back above US$10,000, for the first time since February 2020, shortly before the massive crash of March. It was straining mightily and unsuccessfully to get past $10,000 a couple of weeks ago, but today it just abruptly pinged from around $9,700 to $10,200 in an hour flat.Seeing Bitcoin back above that psychological five digit mark is a heartwarming thing. It feels like Bitcoin is back where it belongs now and that everything is all right in the world once again.Of course, given the actual state of the world right now that just goes to show why the number one rule of trading is to not trust your feelings.In that vein, let's look at several different analysts who felt like Bitcoin was going to break $10,000 before it happened, and why they felt that way.Feeling the wind in your hairSome analysts are feeling the wind in their hair as they ride the Bitcoin rollercoaster out of the channel set following the 2017 highs, suggesting that Bitcoin may be on track to fundamentally shift out of its current price range.SourceThe timing is impeccable, because it lines up uncannily with the predictions laid out by the stock to flow model of Bitcoin valuation.More specifically, we hit the "red dot" phase of the model on 1/2 June (depending on timezone), as laid out by pseudonymous analyst PlanB, just hours before Bitcoin pumped above $10,000. So, quite a few of the "red dot" crowd were celebrating this price rise before it even happened.The red dot"The red dot" refers to the period immediately after the Bitcoin halving. It's called "the red dot" because improvised symbolism is the cornerstone of all faiths including the Bitcoin religion, and because red is the colour of certain dots on the chart below.SourceThe coloured dots on this chart are monthly Bitcoin prices, with the colour indicating how long until the next halving, and how long since the last halving.The darkest blue dots are Bitcoin prices the month before each halving, while the darkest red dots (of the kind that popped out today) come out in the month after each halving. So, wherever the blue flips to red, that indicates a halving. As you can see, red dots have very consistently predicted a major Bitcoin price run since as far back as 2012.In short, the red dot says that if history repeats itself, Bitcoin should see a major ascent this year to break $100,000 sometime next year. And now Bitcoin popped up above $10,000 just hours after the first dark red dot since 2016.The thing about the red dot idea is that it simply says market forces will ineffably propel Bitcoin to higher price tiers, and that the power of maths means Bitcoin is simply destined to rise. That theory existed long before the Federal Reserve overclocked its printing presses in response to everything that's happening in 2020.This poses something of a philosophical dilemma for anyone who wants to believe that the stock to flow theory predicts Bitcoin prices, while also attributing its price rises to other factors like quantitative easing or the White House's reaction to the ongoing protests, because it suggests Bitcoin prices would be doing the same thing regardless of what's going on in the world.Feeling it coming in the air tonightOther experts successfully called the rise before it happened by looking at more earthly factors, citing the general state of the world as a driver of Bitcoin prices, just generally feeling the vibe in the air and presumably tasting Bitcoin trading volume on the wind.The tightest prediction around probably belongs to Galaxy Digital's Michael Novogratz, who pulled off this call about an hour before Bitcoin prices jumped above $10,000.SourceBitcoin's "coiling" was pointed out by others, who noted that Bitcoin had been settling into a tighter price range over time, which usually heralds a big, sudden move in one direction or the other.The tension in the air may have given it the push it needed to go up instead of down when the time came. It's worth noting that the exact timing of the rise lines up closely with some of the US president's more fiery statements of the day."There was a sharp spike in the price this morning as US President Trump spoke to the press regarding the ongoing protests, which have been unfolding in cities across America. In the speech he proclaimed that he would “mobilise all available federal resources civilian and military”. This quickly made headlines around the world as the mobilisation of the military in the United States is a rare occurrence," points out eToro's eToro's Luciano Llorens. "For cryptoasset investors, this may have signified an escalation in the tension, and has no doubt caused some uncertainty over what could transpire in the coming few days."Novogratz's first prediction ("Bitcoin will rise to $10k") has come to fruition, but the second ("Bitcoin will rise even faster after $10k") is still in the making and may hinge on current affairs, Llorens said."In my opinion, Bitcoin, typically responds to depreciation of currency, global uncertainty and governmental instability. As we’ve seen this morning, the threat of using military action may have had a bullish effect on the asset. Any further instability in the US could put further upward pressure on Bitcoin," he said.Feeling itCraig "TraderCobb" Cobb also felt the move coming a full day in advance, as foretold in the charts. Some pretty high cap altcoins have been making major gains lately, he noted, and when people take profit against them they'll be trading back into Bitcoin."People trading the Cardano bitcoin cross will be taking profits back to Bitcoin when they do. Cardano/Bitcoin added 50% in 2 weeks. Due to the relative size of Cardano market cap wise with a 1.9 billion token value, the recent move higher is a lot of money to potentially flow back to Bitcoin," he wrote roughly 24 hours before Bitcoin made its move."Another example is Ethereum over the same 2 week period which has put on an impressive 14.85% against Bitcoin. Ethereum is the second highest by market cap behind bitcoin with $25 billion to its name which is another large amount of money if profits were to be taken and put into Bitcoin.""So here we have 2 of the big market cap players both having added impressive gains against Bitcoin recently. These moves will account for a large portion of the possible money flow back to Bitcoin," he predicted.That's exactly what happened. Bitcoin's sudden ascent initially dragged altcoins up with it, but then after Bitcoin crested $10,000 a lot of money bailed from altcoins back to Bitcoin, pouring gasoline on the fire and giving Bitcoin the cash infusion it needed to convincingly stay above $10,000.The gold line is Bitcoin, the light blue is ADA/BTC, the purple is ADA/USD.ADABTC chart by TradingViewWhere to next?Here we have three completely very different predictive methods, all of which looked at completely different things but somehow managed to paint the exact same picture, flagging down a price rise hours before it happened.Something else they all have in common is that they're all expecting further rises.The stock to flow model, or "the red dot" if you're feeling symbolic (and don't mind sharing your holy symbol with the Bindi and the Japanese flag) predicts future rises because the unstoppable weight of sheer math says Bitcoin prices should go up, and that's what the most consistent trend in Bitcoin says will happen.Meanwhile, Novogratz is predicting a further rise because that's where the zeitgeist is leading us, and Cobb suggests that Bitcoin at $10,000 could reawaken wider media interest and bring some new money in."We really need to see Bitcoin above $10,000 to get the media back and new money flowing in," he wrote. "So, the question for bitcoin is how can the current market players get us above $10,000 to get the media chirping and the new money in?""Bitcoin is the headline grabber, you won’t see anything in the news about the recent move of Cardano. Bitcoin needs to break above $10,000 for the media to come back to it."Feeling contrarian?The Bitcoin world appears to be feeling about as bullish as it ever has. But on the other hand, past performance does not guarantee future results, no matter how much it feels like it should.It's also possible that whales deliberately orchestrated this rise specifically hoping that a break above $10,000, in conjunction with the red dot and the general vibes of the times, would be enough to spur some retail FOMO. There are enough mysterious whales in Bitcoin's ocean to move prices in all kinds of strange ways.Plus, when we're asking whether Bitcoin is going to go up or down right now, the wisdom of the red dot is quite limited. It's all about tracing movements across years (with a yet-unknown degree of accuracy), rather than the day-to-day and week-to-week here. No matter how compelling or historically accurate it is, it can't indicate short, sharp moves of the kind we saw today."While the stock-to-flow analysis produced by PlanB has done very well to date in tracking the price of Bitcoin and predicting its future movements, my immediate concern would be correlating intraday movements in relation to a model that looks at data spanning multiple years," Llorens said. "Investors should also remember that any historical data is not an indicator of future performance."In the end, it seems the most accurate way of predicting the future is to wait until it happens. Also watchDisclosure: The author holds BNB, BTC at the time of writing. Disclaimer: This information should not be interpreted as an endorsement of cryptocurrency or any specific provider, service or offering. It is not a recommendation to trade. Cryptocurrencies are speculative, complex and involve significant risks – they are highly volatile and sensitive to secondary activity. Performance is unpredictable and past performance is no guarantee of future performance. Consider your own circumstances, and obtain your own advice, before relying on this information. You should also verify the nature of any product or service (including its legal status and relevant regulatory requirements) and consult the relevant Regulators' websites before making any decision. Finder, or the author, may have holdings in the cryptocurrencies discussed. Latest cryptocurrency news Picture: Getty Images Read the full article