#Final Fantasy is truly my playground in that sense

[nemo-of-house-hamartia]

* I FUCKING KNEW IT*

CIDOLFUS TELAMON, YOU CAN STRUT AROUND ALL YOU WANT, BUT THE MOMENT I SAW YOU, YOU WERE SCREAMING *BALTHIER* TO ME. (And the fact that Cid himself was named as Cidolfus, just like Balthier's dad, Cidolfus Demen Bunansa... THAT IMMEDIATELY ACTIVATED MY RADAR).

THE HAIR, THE OUTFIT, THE CONFIDENCE.

(This is probably the closest i will ever be to ever see Balthier in that graphic and as 40 yeara of age. Leave me alone, a girl can dream)

Bloody hell, what's with me and charming snarkers with voices that could make you melt on the spot???

Like, Raloh Ineson did a tremendous job with Cid's voice, it feels like the rumbling of a thunder (like, i am pretty sure that if one were to lay their head on Cid's chest and he were to talk, you would literally feel the rumbling against your cheek) and do NOT let me start with Gideon Emery's performance as Balthier: NEVER A SKYPIRATE HAS EVER BEEN MORE SUAVE.

The man ruined me back then!😂😂

And now they are in tag team to ruin me NOW.

To quote my favourite pixel husbando: the fun never stops! 🎩

[all-my-love-for-harry]

I should’ve kissed you.

Summary: Perhaps is never too late to chase after the love of your life.

Word count: 5.8k

a/n: i don't have anything against camille, i don't know her and couldn't care less about her but she was the last person harry dated so to make it accurate i used her for the timeline.

you can find the rest of my masterlist here.

*:･ﾟ✧ ✧ﾟ･: *:･ﾟ✧ ✧ﾟ･: 

Friends that could've been more if only destiny wasn't against them. More often than not, we find ourselves thinking about the 'what if's in life, trapped in a living fantasy of what our lives could be if only we'd play of cards right.

For some, the universe isn't entirely against them. Like it's the case of Harry, someone who was able to achieve things he'd never thought he would. Someone who, at plain sight, had everything a person could've ever asked for.

Money, fame, status. You name it, he has it. What nobody told him, was how lonely it could get once you've reached the top. You have millions of hearts beating just for you, but the only want you really desire.

Y/N and Harry met when they were six years old. Harry pushed her by accident in the playground, what resulted in her falling facedown to the floor. The then little boy felt so bad when he saw her knee bleeding even though she had told him it was fine. Ever since that day, Harry never left Y/N's side, following her like a shadow.

Harry wasn't by any means a shy child, however he didn't have a lot of friends besides Y/N, claiming he didn't need anyone else as long as he had her.

From playing in the playground every day, to playdates in each other's houses, to dates in the park. They spent their childhoods together at all moments.

When their children's phases were over and they no longer played hide and seek in Anne's living room or spent hours in Y/N's mum's backyard running around, the two of them stayed closer than ever.

Anne and Y/M/N didn't want to be the type of mums who tried to pair their children up just because they spent time together, but it was hard not to when you saw the way Harry looked at Y/N, like she hung the moon and the stars. They'd say the pair of friends would end up together sooner or later, but as years went by, Harry and Y/N remained as what they already were, best friends.

Their feelings for each other remained unknown, always thinking their bond was purely platonic to the other and their feelings were one sided.

When Harry turned sixteen, his mum made him audition for the x factor. Y/N went every single day before the audition to assure Harry how talented he was, making him sing her songs all the time. And he'd gladly do so, always loving the way her eyes lit up every time he sang to her.

The day of his audition, she was there holding Gemma's hand while wearing those matching t-shirts to support Harry. She was the first one he wrapped around his arms once we returned backstage, squeezing her oh-so-tight until she told him she couldn't breathe.

Y/N was there every step of the way, never missing anything and always being there when Harry needed her, as a friend.

When Y/N had her first broken heart, Harry was there to pick up the pieces. When she got accepted in her dream school he was the first one she called.

They had this unspoken rule about approving each other's partners, always making sure the other one liked them before becoming serious with that person.

For most of the time, it worked. Sometimes Harry would be a little stubborn and wouldn't listen to Y/N at first, and the majority of the time he'd come back to her with a broken heart for her to fix.

Y/N was more someone of serious relationships, not entirely comfortable with doing the whole sleep around deal. When she was twenty she met a guy a couple of years older than her, started dating him soon after they met and after three years they were still together.

For Harry, things were a little different. He dated occasionally but never anything serious since he was always busy when he was in the bad, but when the band went on hiatus he started looking for someone he could go home to.

That's when he met Camille. Harry had a tendency to catch feelings way too easily and when he fell for someone, he fell hard. This wasn't always convenient, but at the end that's who he was. The first time Harry told Y/N about her was during a phone call. He sounded so excited, going on and on about how great she was, and Y/N wasn't one to question Harry's judgment (most of the time), so she believed him.

Y/N was in Los Angeles when she met Camille for the first time. The three of them went out for dinner, Harry's request. Y/N wasn't expecting much of her, honestly. She didn't put high expectations on what Camille would be like, and after they met at dinner, she was glad she didn't.

Camille wasn't entire horrible. To Y/N, she'd come off as a little bit... rude. And superficial. Her sense of humor wasn't exactly Y/N's cup of tea, and she could see it wasn't Harry's either as he'd try his best to force a laugh every time Camille'd say something that was supposed to be funny but would come out as rude or inappropriate.

Y/N met her again a couple times but her opinion didn't change much. Being completely honest, Y/N thought they wouldn't last. Harry was on tour and Camille had her own life and based on what her best friend would tell her, they didn't get to see each other as much. But Harry was pretty convinced their relationship could work.

That same year but a couple of months later, Y/N went through a rough patch in her life. Her boyfriend of almost four years dumped her for someone his age, saying she wasn't what he wanted anymore.

That was the first time Harry wasn't there to heal her broken heart.

She tried to call him, she really did. One time she called him during a concert and the other time Camille answered the phone to say Harry was sleeping.

So Y/N had no choice but to suck it up.

Harry had a short break from tour and decided to go home for a bit, having missed his family a lot. When he arrived, he wasn't surprised Anne had family and friends over to welcome him.

Looking around the room, Harry looked for the one person in specific. "She's outside." Anne said, knowing exactly who he was looking for. Harry flashed her a smile and walked through the back door that went to the backyard. He found her sitting on one of the swings they used to play with, looking at the ground.

"Hey, stranger." Harry said, taking a seat on the other swing next to hers. Y/N looked up, offering him a half smile. "How have you been?"

"Been better." She simply said.

"Why didn't you call me?" He furrowed. Harry didn't much about her breakup since he never answered her calls, instead he found out through Gemma.

"I tried, you never answered." She wasn't looking at him and he hated how depressed she seemed but hated even more not knowing the full story behind her broken heart.

"You called one time, Y/N." He insisted.

"No. I called multiple times. Camille answered the phone once and said she'd tell you to call me back, but apparently she didn't tell you"

Harry was confused. He remembers checking his history call and Y/N's number being there only once. "Are you sure? Because she'd have told me if you called"

"Are you sure about that?" She questioned, finally looking up.

"What does that supposed to mean?"

"Forget it." She said, trying to get up from the swing but Harry took her forearm, stopping her.

"No, I’d like to talk about this now. You never told me you opinion about Camille, Y/N."

"Is because i don't have one." She sat back, shrugging off her forearm from his embrace.

"You don't like her." He stated, looking hurt.

Y/N sighed. She was too emotionally unstable right now to deal with this, so instead of lying, she told the truth. "No, I don't."

"Why?"

"Do we have to do this?" Harry looked at her, sternly. "She's rude, Harry. And inappropriate. I don't feel comfortable being around her, that's why I’ve cancelled every time you want the three of us to go out." Y/N looked at him in the eye.

Harry didn't know what to say. When it came to Y/N, he'd have expected a simple 'i like her as long as you do' as that had been the answer she'd always give him.

But this, this was different. She truly did not like Camille and was voicing her opinion to him, not even trying to pretend to like her for his sake. He didn't know how to react, completely unaware of the damage is next words would bring.

"Perhaps if you took the time to get to know her, you wouldn't be so judgmental." He furrowed, feeling attacked. "Seriously, Y/N, you're the only one who come across as rude by canceling every time i say she'd come too."

"You asked for my opinion, Harry. I gave it to you so can we please be done with this?" She felt a massive headache coming and the last thing she wanted was start a fight deep down she knew she'd lose.

"How can i be done with it now that i found out you hate my girlfriend?" He sighed, angrily. "You know what i think? I think you're acting like a proper bitch just because Seth dumped you and you can't stand seeing anyone else around you happy!" he shouted. "Why can't you feel happy for me? Not everyone is a complete asshole like Seth turned out to be, so I’d appreciate if you stopped badmouthing my girlfriend."

Y/N froze in her place. The words that came out of Harry's mouth had the solid purpose to get under her skin. But instead of making her angry like he'd have expected, he saw the exact moment her eyes filled with tears, her upper lip started trembling and that's when he knew he went too far.

She nodded, processing his words before standing up from the swing. She walked hurriedly inside of the house and despite hearing people call after her, Y/N went straight to the front door and slammed it behind her as she went out. Never once looking back.

Even Harry heard the noise she made when she left, so he stood up from his seat and almost ran inside. When he didn't see her, he panicked. Harry never thought she would actually leave the house before they could talk through the issue, she was never one to run out of her problems, but then again she was hurting and wasn't in a good place emotionally after Seth broke her.

Not that Harry would know any of that. And now he understood that. He was so quick to go for her throat that he never noticed how sad she actually was. He was too focused on talk about himself and his relationship that he never asked her how she really was.

"Mum, i fucked up." Harry came to Anne, tears staring to form in his eyes. "Y/N left." He added.

"What did you do, Harry?" She did see her storm out of the house and immediately knew the two best friends had a fight. Although she wasn't sure she wanted to know what made Y/N so upset. "Wait, don't tell me. Whatever it is i'm sure you'll fix it."

"I need to talk to her tomorrow." Harry started tugging on his hair.

"Why tomorrow?"

"I don't think right now she would appreciate my presence, mum. I'll let her cool down and I’ll go find her tomorrow"

Except Y/N did want Harry's presence in that moment. She felt like she was about to drown in her own sorrows and although what Harry said also hurt her, there was nothing else she wanted more than one of his healing hugs. She sat down in her car for twenty minutes, thinking Harry would go after her, but he never did.

Driving all the way from Holmes Chapel to London in the middle of the night didn't sound like the smartest plan ever, but Y/N needed to clear her mind and in all honesty, she just wanted to go home. She knew she would need to call her mother and give her an explanation for her sudden absence but she'll deal with that in the morning.

Right now she wanted to take a bath and get drunk on a bottle of wine. And that's exactly what she did as soon as she crossed the door to her home. She dragged herself upstairs and towards her bathroom, not without making a quick trip to the kitchen to find the alcoholic drink before she did so.

It was only after she was settled in the tub, loads of bubbles surrounding her when she allowed herself to fully cry.

Of course she wanted Harry happy, she'd give up on her own happiness in a heartbeat if that meant he'd be happy. Y/N couldn't help but feel protective over him, his heart has been broken too many times and to be honest she was growing tired of just being there to pick up the mess.

She has given up so much for him, and although she didn't always receive the same from him, she understood and still loved him unconditionally.

But perhaps picking him over herself wasn't something she was willing to do anymore. She had her own broken heart to deal with and wasn't sure if she could heal Harry's once his relationship was over.

*:･ﾟ✧ ✧ﾟ･: *:･ﾟ✧ ✧ﾟ･: 

First thing Harry did when he woke up, was try to call Y/N. One, two, three, four times and none of those she'd pick up.

He walked the short distance between his mother's house and Y/N's mum's house, hoping to find her there. Much to his surprise, her mom opened the door, giving him a sympathetic smile.

"Hello, Harry."

"Is she awake yet? I need to talk to her." Harry said with a shaky voice.

"Y/N's not here, love. She left last night."

Harry furrowed. "In the middle of the night? Has she called you?"

"I wasn't thrilled either but she has, honey. And she told me she made it safely."

Harry nodded. In his head, he was already packing his bags to drive back to London, the only thing on his mind being Y/N. He thanked Y/M/N and rushed back to Anne's house. When he entered, there was someone else waiting for him. Harry was confused as to why his girlfriend was standing in the middle of Anne's living room with a suitcase next to her.

"Camille?" He asked, approaching the woman.

"Hi, baby." She went for a kiss but Harry was too confused to return it. "Aren't you happy to see me?"

"What are you doing here?"

"Well, don't be rude. I came to surprise you. Now, get my suitcase upstairs, please"

He wanted to tell her he had to leave, fix things with his best friend, but somehow words didn't come out when he opened his mouth. Maybe it was because Camille would start to ask questions, and it wouldn't be the first time she'd accuse Harry to pick Y/N over her, so he kept quiet.

Anne was throwing him looks, silently asking why he hasn't talk to Y/N like he promised he would. Now, don't get her wrong, she was her son's biggest supporter and although she shared with Y/N almost the same opinion about Camille, Anne chose to not say anything and try to make an effort to like the girl.

Harry stayed the whole week in his hometown with his girlfriend, pushing the thought of Y/N at the very back of his head. He tried sending her messages but she never answered them, he tried calling but it always went straight to voicemail. If Harry wouldn't stop by her childhood home to ask her mother about her during his morning runs, he wouldn't have any idea of how she was.

By the end of the week, Harry was finally packing his bags, ready to go. What he wasn't counting on was Camille telling him they'd go back to Los Angeles.

"It's one dinner, Camille." He told her.

"But i really want to go. I've already told everyone we'd be there." She insisted. Harry didn't want to fly all the way to LA just for one stupid dinner with a bunch of people he didn't like. "Do you have anything more important to do or what?"

"I..." He paused. "I have to talk to Y/N."

"Then call her like you always do." She rolled her eyes, growing annoyed.

"It's kind of an important conversation, actually. I can't do that over the phone."

"Who's your girlfriend, uh? Because you're always ready to drop anything to go after her like a lost puppy!"

"That is not true. She's my best friend, Camille. I've known her since we were six."

"Well, i don't like her." She crossed her arms, staring at Harry. He shifted uncomfortably on his place, not knowing what to say. "Do you love her?"

"Of course i do." He said immediately. Camille raised her eyebrows, making him quickly add. "But not in the way you're thinking. We're just... close. Always been."

"Perhaps a little too close."

"What do you supposing?" Harry furrowed his eyebrows.

"If you want this to work then you need to spend less time with her, Harry. I won't compete with her, do you understand?" She stated.

Harry didn't know what to say. She was giving him an ultimatum he wasn't sure he could do. Stay away from Y/N was never something that crossed out of his mind, ever. He didn't want to stop seeing his best friend but he didn't want to break up with Camille either.

Sighing while putting his suitcase down, Harry nodded. Camille smiled, pleased with his decision. "I do this for us, babe. This weird codependency you two have needs to stop. We're only going to grow closer, you'll see."

*:･ﾟ✧ ✧ﾟ･: *:･ﾟ✧ ✧ﾟ･: 

It was like that, how a few days turned into a few weeks that then turned into months of no communication between Harry and Y/N.

Gemma had heard the entire argument that day, and she still was surprised and shocked with her brother's choice. She had called Y/N to tell her, hoping she would make Harry understand how wrong he was, but all she received was silence from the other end of the line, followed by a quiet 'thank you for telling me' before Y/N hung up.

To her, Camille made him choose. And he chose his girlfriend over her. She wanted to be mad, she wanted to cry and throw things, but she couldn't. Instead she respected Harry's decision, like she always does. She wasn't sure how she'd erase over fifteen years of friendship, but she'd try her best if that meant Harry would be happy, even if that didn't include her in his life anymore.

To Harry, things only went worse. Every day he woke up feeling emptier and emptier. He was angry all the time, never wanted to go out or do anything besides giving his concerts then going straight to his bedroom to go back being miserable. He couldn't recognize himself in the mirror, him and everyone else around him.

Every time Camille wanted to visit him, he'd throw a random excuse and say things were too busy. Of course she knew something was up and she knew exactly the reason why he was acting like he was. As he looked sadder and sadder in his concerts, fans started to wonder what had happened to him. Some assumed they broke up, and deep down Harry wanted those rumors to be true. But if Camille disappeared from his life, then he'd be completely alone. He no longer had the one person that has always been there aside from his mum and sister. He no longer had that one person that was the exactly reflection of who he was. He no longer had Y/N, and he wasn't ready to admit out loud he was the only one to blame for that.

During those darks, lonely months he realized something. Every relationship he's ever had in the past, never worked because Y/N was always in his mind. Y/N wouldn't say this, Y/N wouldn't do this, Y/N wouldn't be like this. His past partners never made the cut because he'd always compare them to the best person in his life. He didn't see it back then, but now he did.

He was in love. Truly, madly, deeply and foolishly in love with his best friend.

A couple of shows before tour ended, Camille decided to surprise Harry and fly all the way from LA to whatever city he was in. When he opened the door of his hotel bedroom, he was confused to see her standing there. "Surprise!" She exclaimed, throwing herself at him.

"Camille, what are you doing?"

"Uh, surprising you?" She said in an obvious tone. "Jesus Christ, at least pretend you're happy to see me."

"I'm sorry. How was your flight?"

Harry welcomed her into his room, wheeling her suitcase by the end of the bed. His room was kind of a mess because yesterday he drank too much and became a complete train wreck. Camille looked around, scanning the mess they were standing in but didn't say anything.

He had a concert to do that night, and they had to be at the arena so Harry could get ready. There wasn't much Camille could do besides sitting in his dressing room and wait for him. During all the night, he seemed slightly off, distracted thinking about Camille. Seeing her kind of triggered all the memories from Y/N and that night at his mother's house that he was yet to apologize for.

In his mind, he blamed her for everything. However deep down he knew he was responsible for that. There were so many other way he could've handled the situation, but back then he didn't think straight, he thought what he had with Camille was worth losing Y/N. Bad thing he learned too late nothing was worth losing her.

"I want to go out tonight." She had told him after his concert ended. "We can go to a club or something."

"I'm not really in the mood for clubbing."

"Then let's go have dinner."

"Not hungry either." He said as he opened the door of the hotel room.

"Then what do you want?"

"I'd like to take a shower and sleep." Harry started unbuttoning his shirt, dropping it off on the floor when he was done.

"Don't be boring. I didn't come here to sit around and do nothing fun."

"I didn't ask you to come." He blurted in a harsh tone. "I'm not in the mood, Camille."

"Is this because you're not friends with Y/N anymore?" She asked, crossing her arms across her chest. "I thought you'd get over it, Harry."

"Well, I won't!"

"I can't believe after all this time, i'm still competing with her for your fucking attention!"

"What else do you want from me, Camille?!I turned my back on her for you! What else do you want me to do?!"

"I want you to understand your life does not revolve around her! I'm your bloody girlfriend, dammit!" She shouted angrily. "Your obsession over her is not healthy. I did everything i could to make you see that. She doesn't understand it either. God, i even went as far as deleting your history call because i knew... i knew at the first opportunity you'd jump on a plane to her fucking rescue."

"You did... what?" He barked angrily. Suddenly it all made sense. Y/N was mad at him because she thought Harry was ignoring her when in reality Harry never saw her missing calls. Camille's eyes widened, she knew she said too much. "Why the hell would you do something like that?! You didn't have any right to go through my phone like that."

"I did it for-"

"Cut the crap! You didn't do it for me. I can't believe you're this psychotic kind of person. Do you have any idea how much your stupid actions coasted me?!" She stayed silent. "Answer me!" Harry shouted, completely furious.

Several knocks were heard by the other side of the door, followed by Jeff's voice telling Harry to let him in. "What is happening in here? I can hear your screams from my room." He said once the curly haired man let him in.

"Please book a room for Camille and a flight for tomorrow morning for her."

"Harry..." Camille tried to touch his arm.

"No. I'm done with this, with you, with everything.

Harry stormed out of the room, in desperate need of fresh air. He had way too many things on his plate right now, but somehow he felt more relieved now that he wasn’t with Camille anymore. It took him too long to realize he didn’t love her, and the only person he’s ever loved has been always right in front of him.

When he came back to his room, Camille’s things were gone and the room was once again clean. He figured Jeff sent someone to clean it up or something, either way he was grateful. His mind started going places he hasn’t allowed it to go in a long time, old memories with Y/N started rushing through his mind, then he started thinking on how things would be if he never made that stupid choice of giving up on her.

He wanted her back, he just didn’t know how. He wouldn’t blame her if he didn’t want to know anything about him as he felt like the most undeserving person of her love.

He started counting down the days that were left before he could go back to London and do everything in his power to get her back, silently promising her that this time, he will not fuck it up.

*:･ﾟ✧ ✧ﾟ･: *:･ﾟ✧ ✧ﾟ･:

First thing Harry did after he gave his last concert, was book the first flight back to London. He asked Gemma to go pick him up from the airport and take him to Y/N’s house. At first, she thought he was crazy but then she heard how desperate he was and she accepted.

“I love you, little brother but you absolutely fucked it up.” She told him as she was driving. “How could you let her manipulate you into stopping talking with Y/N?”

“I don’t know, Gem.” He sighed. “I made a mistake, okay?”

“Do you love her?” Gemma asked the same question months back Camille asked. However, instead of using a harsh tone like his now ex-girlfriend did, Gemma’s tone was soft. Almost as she was afraid to ask the question. The difference was, Harry wasn’t afraid of the answer anymore.

“I do.”

He looked through the window, lost in thought. Gemma nodded to herself, satisfied with his answer. It was about goddamn time, she thought. She crossed her fingers Y/N would at least listen to what Harry had to say as she’d hate if all those years of knowing each other were suddenly trashed away.

Gemma barely parked the car before Harry jumped out of it. “Do you want me to wait?”

Harry shook his head, flashing her a little smile. “It might take a while. At least she’s home.” He pointed at her car, parked in the driveway. “Thank you, Gem.”

“Good luck, lovebird.” She smiled before driving away. Harry let out a big sigh before walking towards her front door. He knocked a couple of times and he could hear her dogs bark from the other side of the door.

Y/N opened the door but froze in her place as soon as she saw him. He opened his mouth but before he could say something, Y/N was already trying to close the door.

He put his foot to prevent it from closing. “Wait!”

“No. What are you doing here, Harry?” She tried to close the door again. “Please, leave.”

“Y/N please, I made a mistake.” He begged.

“Did you now?”

“Please, let me in. I can explain everything, just… please.” He said in a sad tone. Y/N looked at him. He hasn’t shaved his face and his hair was all over the place, his emerald eyes weren’t bright anymore. He just looked… sad.

A big part of her wanted to open the door for him to enter, but another part of her didn’t want to. For the past months, Y/N has really worked on making sure she knew her worth at all times. That no Seths and No Harrys were worth of her tears. She had to live with the fact that she lost both at the same time, making the whole in her heart even bigger.

In any other circumstances, she wouldn’t hesitate on letting him in. But that was the old Y/N. The one who put him above everything else, including herself. That Y/N wasn’t her anymore.  

“Harry…” She started saying. “I’m not ready.”

He looked up at her, his eyes were red from containing the tears, and although he wanted to say more, he respected her decision. “Would you let me know when you are?” All he wanted was a sight that there still was hope for them, and she could see it in his eyes, so she nodded.

“We’ll talk about it… soon. Just not now.”

A few weeks passed since that day and Harry lived every day hopping his phone would ring. He’d send little texts here and there for her, a way of letting her know he still cared and that he wasn’t giving up.

Dragging himself out of the house for the first time in weeks, Harry decided to go to the little coffee shop he used to frequent with Y/N in the past. They served the best coffee according to her, not like all the other overpriced cafés in London.

He smiled at the memory as he entered the place, going straight to make his order. His mind was too focused on other things that he didn’t realize he also ordered Y/N’s usual.

Now he had two coffees and a chocolate muffin, but it was just him there. He looked down at the order again, it made him feel like the old times where he’d stop by the shop before going to Y/N’s to hang out.

Without thinking about it twice, he hopped in his car again and drove in autopilot to her house. He hopped these past weeks had been enough for her to feel ready to talk.

“Hello, Harry.” She said, more relaxed this time as she opened the door.

“May I come in?” He asked. “I… I brought your favorite.”

She gave him a half smile, opening the door enough for him to come inside. He was immediately greeted by her two dogs and the very familiar sight of her home where he’s spent more times than he could ever remember.

“I was hoping we could talk.” He started. “I know there’s a big… big stain in our friendship now and believe when I say I would spend the rest of my life trying to erase it.”

“Why didn’t you go after me that night at your mum’s house?” She finally said after being silent.

“I thought you didn’t want to see me. I went to your mother’s house the next morning and found out you were gone.”

“I waited for you in my car. I thought we could talk it through but then… then Gemma called me and told me Camille gave you an ultimatum. I backed off because I didn’t want to ruin your relationship, Harry.”

“You didn’t ruin anything, Y/N. I did. I should’ve listened to you instead of screaming at you. I said horrible things to you and I’m so sorry. I should’ve play more attention on how were you feeling. I’m sorry I wasn’t there when you needed me.”

She pressed her lips in a thin line, swallowing her tears. “I’m sorry I didn’t support you on your relationship.”

“It’s okay. It’s over.” He said. “I found out she deleted your calls from my phone so I wouldn’t come here to be with you.”

“She told you that?” Y/N was surprised. She had thought about it, but never imagined Camille would admit it.

“She did. I let her manipulate me, but I know it was my fault too. I shouldn’t have let her come between us.”

“She was your girlfriend, Harry. Maybe she was right…” She mumbled, making him frown.

“What do you mean?”

“Harry, all your girlfriends have told you they didn’t like me or the relationship we had. Have you ever thought that’s exactly why your relationships wouldn’t work? You can’t keep choosing me over your partners.”

“Yes, I can.” He insisted.

“No. Perhaps we should’ve keep our paths separated.”

“What? No!” He stood up from the couch and so did Y/N. “Y/N, you can’t ask me to forget about you.”

“Maybe it’s for the best.”

“Says who? I won’t walk away from you, not again. I should’ve done a lot of things since that night, I should’ve known you were right, I should’ve been there for you.” He looked at her with tearful eyes. “I shouldn’t have let you walk away from me. I should’ve… I should’ve…”

His breath hitched, becoming aware of how close they were from each other now. Their noses almost touched as they looked into each other’s eyes, eyes that were full of emotion such as anger, sadness… love.

“I should’ve done this a long time ago.” He whispered before finally closing the distance between them. Y/N gasped before kissing him back with force. She wrapped her arms around his neck, bringing him closer to her and deepening the kiss.

Kissing her felt so foreign yet so right. It was like all the pieces of the puzzle were coming together and he finally knew it was her all along. The only person that’s always been on his mind and the only one who held his entire heart, it was her.

It was only when they were running out of breath when they finally broke the kiss, but didn’t dare to broke the nonexistent distance between them. Y/N smiled for the first time he walked inside of the house, her eyes were notably brighter and she couldn’t help but let out a little giggle, feeling like a school girl again.

“I love you, Y/N. I’m sorry it took me so long to realize it, but I swear I’ll remind you every day of your life how much I do.”

[fipindustries]

and that was baru cormorant, im still unsure wether ill ever check out the tycoon baru cormorant or whatever the fourth book gets called once its out. im unsure how i feel about this series in general

i do love this little fantasy mediterranean that seth came up with, the ashen sea and all its nations and tribes and cultures, i love the trading wheel, and taranoke and ardwynn and the stackeczi necessity and the three mbos and falcrest and all the other things that were so carefully thought out and planned and parceled. this is a truly ganular world and we get to witness the cogs of this giant machine interlock with one another

is funny how closely it resembles southern europe and northern africa at times though.

and i do love baru, i love her so much, she is my ideal protagonist, a painfully autistic yet unstopably ambitious lady who does so much morally dubious bullshit because it just makes sense. i love how she can wield the powers of math and accounting to bend nations to her will. i love to see her lay down the intricate little plots and then fall and stumble her way through it all, losing fingers and lovers and parts of her brain in the process.

but this little playground is filled with a lot of other thigns i really dont care much for.

the first book was like a perfect red velvet cake, complex and layered and balanced and tasty and moist, yet firm and soft, and perhaps there are some crunchy bits here and there to add texture, with the cream cheese and the sugar creating a great interplay of sour and sweet

the second book was like dry, overcooked, unseasoned white rice.

and the final book was like a bag of your favourite chocolate chip cookies except they are kind of musty and they have raisins. but every other cookie does have a chocolate chip in it so you kind of keep eating it in the hope that you will find more chocolate chips.

the writer really did have a chip on his shoulder and an axe to grind and every so often he really couldnt help but stand on a little platform and dedicate a couple of pages to make big gestures about how the bad guys he created are really really bad evil people and the evil things they do are really really evil and nasty, a thing which i felt was already perfectly clear but i guess he just really wanted to drive his point home. n the other hands the characters that were clearly meant to be the moral centers of the story came off as sanctimonious and selfrighteous and even fanatical at times.

the most condemnatory thing i can say of this series is that it reflected perfectly the feeling i had when going from Worm to Ward, almost one to one.

ill probably have more things to say on the matter in the next few days as i keep digesting what i just read, my apologies to anyone who is a fan of the books and had to endure my complaints.

[skullsandwineglasses]

Lost Romance Final Review (Taiwanese Drama)

I wrote about my first impressions of the drama after watching the first three episodes, and my first impression about it being cringey still stands even after having finished it. But, I admit that I did end up enjoying it despite my qualms. My thoughts about the whole drama are below. 

[SPOILERS AHEAD]

The fictional world

The ML’s fictional persona (Situ Aoran) is hella douchey, and the drama only gives an explanation for why he was like that in the final episode. Essentially, Situ Aoran is the worst version of He Tinxing that he’s tried to hard to suppress and overcome over the years. It’s the version of him that’s childish, immature, arrogant, irresponsible, unreasonable. And yet, the FL, Zheng Xiao’en, still falls for this version of him. It’s a story about unwavering, unconditional love no matter who you are. On the other hand, Xiao’en begins as a “villainous” person in Aoran’s eyes, and yet, he learns to fall in love with her as well.  

But, this meant that for the first 15 episodes of the drama, which is basically three quarters of the drama, I was constantly annoyed by Aoran/the fictional ML. Even when he got together with Xiao’en in the fictional world, I found it hard to ship them. Yes, Marcus Chang and Vivian Sung have chemistry, but I just didn’t enjoy the romance in the fictional world all that much. 

I wasn’t hooked on the drama until episode 8ish when he finally showed some signs of liking Xiao’en, and then it picks up in episode 10 when he finally starts to take more initiative. But for the most part, it was Qingfeng, the second ML was the one who stole the show. 

I’ve never had second male lead syndrome before, but I think that’s because in most dramas I’ve watched, even though the second male lead may unconditionally devoted to the FL, the ML still somehow does more. 

But in Lost Romance, because the ML keep was dismissive, insensitive, and kept inadvertently hurting the FL, you end up finding that Qingfeng is actually someone who is dependable, supportive, a ray of sunshine, and an all-around better person in Xiao’en’s life. Not only that, but he’s hella charming as well. Simon Lian has such as mischievous glint in his eyes, and he carries himself with easy confidence. He flirts with Xiao’en, and she doesn’t even realize it. He’s a fictional character who’s become self-aware, and this sense of awareness and wisdom that no one else in the fictional world has makes him an even more attractive character since he’s able to see through everyone. What’s more, he goes against the script and falls for Xiao’en even when he isn’t supposed to. Him falling for Xiao’en made more sense than Aoran falling for Xiao’en. 

Xiao’en and Aoran’s romance in the fictional world was very predictable. She lives in his house as a housekeeper, and he slowly warms up to her, but denies his feelings. When she leaves, he begins to miss her and gets jealous whenever she hangs out with the SML. He falls for her because she gives him a sense of safety and comfort. He feels at home with her, a feeling that he was deprived of since he was young. But because of this, it felt like the only reason he fell for her was because of what she can provide for him. And Xiao’en fell for him because he at first reminded her of He Tianxing, and then because he’s role as the ML in the story. And then she fell for him for real, flaws and all. But I guess this is a reflection of how love develops irl where both parties are able to offer something to the other in the relationship. 

Qingfeng’s feelings for Xiao’en felt more pure and altruistic, which albeit makes it unrealistic, but I guess it suits his character, since he is an idealized fictional character after all. 

The real world

Because Qingfeng is a fictional character, he has no real-world counterpart, so we don’t see him again after episode 15. He gets his “happy ending” in the last episode when the author finally finishes his story and he’s reunited with his storyworld sweetheart, but I still felt like there was no proper closure for his character. He finally developed real feelings, but then he’s forced back into his scripted role. 

I liked how the ML and FL’s real life personas were different from the fictional world, and the drama takes a more serious tone when they return to the real world. He Tianxing is much more kind, considerate, and thoughtful than Aoran. His costuming also changed to reflect that: he no longer wears an earring, his hair is combed up instead of hanging over his forehead, and he doesn’t wear flashy rings and necklaces. He’s much more down-to-earth and humble, and you start to like him more. 

Xiao’en is also much more mature. She isn’t fawning and lusting over him like in the fictional world, and she doesn’t force herself onto him, or to make him remember her. She knows that she loves Aoran, and tries to keep her attraction for Tianxing separate because she still hasn’t yet figured out whether they’re the same person. When her bestfriend asks her why she doesn’t assert herself more to jog his memory, Xian’en says that this is real life. It isn’t like the fictional world where you can be shameless with no consequence. 

This means that the romantic dynamics become reversed in the real world. It’s now Tianxing’s turn to pursue Xiao’en, and Xiao’en resists. And I admit, it was cute. We get to see Tianxing fall for Xiao’en for herself and who she is as a person, and not because she’s his housemaid and lives with him. He becomes curious about her: he buys and reads all the books he’s edited, he asks her questions about her childhood and upbringing, and asks her about her feelings and opinions on things, he asks her about her memorable experiences. In the real world, he actually cares about her, not just what she can offer him. We also see Xiao’en learn about Tianxing and fall for his real-life traits. It’s an opportunity for them to truly learn about each other and fall for each other again. 

The part when Tianxing reads the novel and regained his memories felt too abrupt and easy. It would have been more fun for the memories to come back in parts over time and him trying to figure out the pieces of the puzzle. It would have also have been nice to see him spend more time trying to convince Xiao’en that he really does remember and isn’t just regurgitating details from the novel. In other words, I’m a masochistic viewer and would have appreciated more drawn-out angst, but they quickly resolved this plotline within through a single gesture in the scene. 

Tianxing’s relentless and determined pursuit to win over Xiao’en was cute, but only the context of this drama. He overtly stalks her using a drone, but as payback because that was how she stalked him at the beginning. A part of me knew that in any other drama, this would be creepy and overstepping boundaries, but I still couldn’t help but smile at these antics in Lost Romance. Maybe because Tianxing was reversing their roles and now he’s doing the heavy lifting to win her back, but in any case, it worked and was charming. 

The family business drama

Honestly, I couldn’t care less. I skipped most scenes whenever the real-world family drama was shown, and I was still able to understand what happened in the end. The evil sister stops being evil and realizes the error of her ways (and actually has a pretty sympathetic backstory to explain her previous actions and motives) and joins forces with the ML, her younger half brother that she had wanted to kill, in order to take down a once-trusted employee who is now trying to take over and destroy the family business. 

These scenes dragged out the story, but I guess they served as a reminder that the real world is still alive and kicking while the ML and FL were in a three-month long coma. 

Questions

Like with most fantasy dramas, you end up accepting the plot holes and rolling with them. But there are still a few questions I still can’t get over:

1. How exactly did He Tianxing and Xiao’en end up in the fictional world of a random novel together? Why was only Xiao’en self-aware but Tianxing wasn’t? Was it because Xiao’en was editing the book so she already knew part of the story? Why did Tianxing fall into Situ Aoran’s character and why didn’t he have agency over his actions and feelings until later, while Xiao’en was a self-insert with full agency?

2. Why were only Tianxing and Xiao’en inhabiting fictional bodies, while the other characters only had the likeliness of people from real life but not the “soul” (since the characters were still conscious in real life)? Were Tianxing and Xiao’en projecting their memories of the appearances of the people they knew onto the characters in the storyworld, thereby creating a jointly shared fictional world? For instance, only Tianxing knew Chuchu irl, but Xiao’en didn’t, so he projected his image of ChuChu onto the character that Xiao’en could also see? But the fictional world was shown to be a parallel universe that had real consequences in the real-world, so the explanation for the appearance of the fictional characters can’t just be due to Tianxing and Xiao’en projecting their memories. These characters truly exist as separate, alternate entities in the storyworld. So, what exactly are these characters? Souless entities?

3. Qingfeng says that he floats from one story to the next. So why are some fictional characters fully fictional like Qingfeng, but other characters have real-life counterparts?

4. Why and how does the novel change irl when the fictional world changes? It’s also a pity that the author is completely uninvolved with all of these shenenigans, and it’s unfortunate that her novel is being using as the ML and FL’s playground. She basically lost control of her own story.

Overall impressions

It’s refreshing for a cdrama/twdrama, and they managed to keep Qingfeng’s identity a mystery for good part of the plot to keep you guessing. But for the most part, it’s another predictable, tropey modern romance drama. Even when they tried to subvert the tropes, their method of subversion was predictable. The chemistry and comedy was good, so I’d recommend it only if you have a high tolerance for cringe, since the cringe never really ends but does get better towards the last act of the drama when they return to the real world and gets more serious. 

I think I’d give this drama a 7.5, mostly because I gave My Girlfriend is an Alien an 8. So if I gave Lost Romance an 8, I would bump MGIAA an 8.5 to keep it relative. 

Both dramas feature a ML who deals with memory loss. The arc in Lost Romance was more serious and emotional since the FL is heartbroken over the loss, but the part where the ML regains his memory was a bit rushed. The arc in MGIAA is more comedic, but the part where he regains his memory had a bigger emotional payoff since memory loss was a major problem that the ML had been trying to overcome throughout the drama. 

Might be an unpopular opinion but I think might have enjoyed this more than the Romance of Tiger and Rose. The Romance of Tiger and Rose was good, but it wasn’t very memorable. I watched it last summer, but I barely remember any details about it besides finding Zhao Lusi to be really cute. I think this drama made me feel more emotions: from frustration to embarrassment to relief to having butterflies to angst to sadness to amused. 

Aoran/Tianxing and Qingfeng are also more interesting than Han Shuo. I guess I’ll wait 8 months to see if I still feel anything for this drama, or if it fades with time too. 

Some other interesting notes

I had thought this drama was filmed in 2019 until I saw a sign on a bus that said “No boarding without a mask”. Turns out it was filmed in April 2020 or so, and then released in June. I was surprised that this was filmed during the peak of the pandemic when most western countries were in lockdown, but I understand that Taiwan already had things under control by then. But still, even if there wasn’t a pandemic, they filmed this in only 2-3 months, which is a quick and impressive turnaround time to film and edit a drama (even if it’s only 20 episode long). There was no indication this was filmed during a pandemic, except for the bus sign, and also the people walking in the background at the temple. You could tell many were wearing masks. Meanwhile, it’s been over a year since the pandemic started, and I’m still stuck at home, schools and outdoor activities are still closed where I am, and it just feels like my life is on hold. And yet, they filmed an entire ass drama during a pandemic. I still can’t get over that. 

I haven’t watched a Taiwanese drama in a while, so there are some notable cultural differences I noticed between Taiwanese dramas and cdramas when I watched Lost Romance. 

1. The uncensored intimate scenes 2. Swearing (?). Can’t remember when exactly, but I think Vivian Sung at one point said “wo kao” when she woke up and stumbled to the bathroom 3. The casual (and accurate) integration of English words and phrases. You can tell that Taiwan is much more open and comfortable with sprinkling English into their everyday vernacular. Hong Kong dramas do this as well. You see this less so in cdramas. English and other foreign languages are only used when the character is speaking to a foreign character.  4. No use of heavy filters and diffusers. Cdramas tend to look very glowy and dreamy, and they seem to use wide apertures to get a bokeh effect. Lost Romance had a more down-to-earth look. Granted, at points it did look a little dated, but I still appreciated this more toned-down, natural look.  5. LQBTQ+ references. Not only was there an accidental kiss scene between the FL and SFL, but they also mentioned how one of the male characters might be having an affair with a man. While there are BL idol dramas in China, all of the relationship dynamics are usually only heavily implied. There aren’t many explicit references to LGBTQ+ relationships in cdramas due to censorship.  6. References and homages/parodies of kdramas. Have there been cdramas that pay homage to foreign dramas as much as Lost Romance? 7. Original, non-dubbed voices. Yes, there are plenty of cdramas that use the original voices of actors, but there are also a lot of cdramas that use dubbed voices. Sometimes I’d binge watch 3 cdramas in a row, and the FLs and MLs have the same respective voice actors across all 3 dramas. The reason why I chose to watch Lost Romance was because I wanted to watch The Legends, but the FL uses the same voice actress as the FL in MGIAA, which I had just finished, so I needed a drama in between with different voices to help cleanse my palate.  8. Excessive cuts/commercial breaks. Always right before a character is about to say something pivotal, it cuts to a themesong break, which was really annoying. It really ruins the mood and suspense of the scene. And when it cuts back, it replays the last 20 seconds of the scene, while you’re on the end of your seat, yelling at the screen to tell them to get on with it and get to the point. 

Anyway. Time to watch Cafe. Waiting. Love for Marcus and Vivian. 

[avoutput]

Final Fantasy VII Legacy || Nomura, Complex?

This is the 3rd out of 3 articles. Find the second here.

It’s time to get down to mythril tacks. At this point, I have talked about what this game meant to me when it was released and how it’s newest installment fared as a game. Finally, it’s time to talk about the impact the Remake has on what has unexpectedly become a robust and diverse universe. What does this mean for us at large, the players? This is a no-holds-barred SPOILER frenzy about anything and everything in the Squaresoft/Square-Enix pantheon. This means not just the games in the orbit of Final Fantasy VII, but the entire catalog at Square-Enix. To be honest, this is just the introduction, I don’t know if I even have an intent of going so far beyond the purview of the Remake, but in the spirit of the Final Fantasy gatekeeper, Tetsuya Nomura, I refuse to limit myself.

It’s been almost exactly a month since I started writing this article. It took so long to come back to this because I kept finding more and more content related to Final Fantasy 7 that I either forgot about or didn’t even know existed. On my own shelf sits Advent Children, Dirge of Cerberus, and Crisis Core. I decided to watch Advent Children immediately after beating Remake. As a movie fan and amateur critic, the film is littered with terrible film decisions and was clearly the work of people who spend much of their time penning and creating video game stories. It’s a series of cutscenes without a controller attached and at a certain point, you realize Advent Children was never meant for film fans, but for fans of the game. Specifically for fans desiring an epilogue and more directly fans of Cloud, Tifa, and Sephiroth. The story is almost unintelligible because there is tons of connective tissue left to be assumed by the viewer. It is at once too far removed from FF7 in both linear real time and in-game universe time to be recognizable, and simultaneously inexplicable in what has transpired and why. It takes a crack at explaining it from moment to moment, but largely, it looks like they were looking for excuses to push the characters to act. I am not trying to review the film but rather my intent is to create a modus opendai for the gatekeeper, Mr. Nomura. The more I learned about the world of FF7 that was being created over the years, the more it seemed to lean on the stylings of this one man. In a way, Nomura launched Squaresoft and himself into a whole new stratosphere of fame and broke all expectations. In my first article, I mentioned that for a certain generation of fans, it was the perfect storm, but I would later find out the cause of the storm was Nomura breaking open lightning in a bottle, releasing his brand of design on the world with a multi-million dollar international company backing him.

If I may, let me take a parallel series by the same creator infested by the meta of his own other original creations, namely Kingdom Hearts. In its inception, it looks like two producers at Square were trying to make a 3-D adventure platformer game with characters as popular as Mario, but only the biggest brand on earth, Disney, could possibly beat the king of platformers. Nomura was… walking by and pushed himself into the conversation, and they decided if they could do it, they would let him direct. (Read more here) Yada yada yada, Kingdom Hearts was created. While I can’t seem to find (and didn’t look too hard to find) proof, I can only imagine that with KH having a tenuous new relationship with big-corp Disney, they focused more on a simple game that was straightforward. KH is very much a disney product with a little bit of artificial Nomura sweetener. With its unbridled success, Nomura was unleashed. Kingdom Hearts 2 would go on to be, in my opinion, one of the most unintelligible video game stories ever inscribed to plastic discs. But the power of Nomura’s story-telling is that we all understand it differently. He creates bedrocks, little story islands of unshakable facts that are connected via a salty sea of undefinable liquid moments. Cast out to sea, rudderless and deprived, you try to bring to your mouth this brine only to be dehydrated faster than if you had just sailed the sea and died in the sun between fact islands or lived long enough to tell the tale. And that metaphor is my tribute to Nomura. Long, winding, hard to remember, and just clear enough that you think you got it, but you still have problems with its construction.

It has now been over two months since I have last visited this article. What is keeping me from continuing? The incomplete nature of my knowledge of Final Fantasy VII lore. Unlike the Kingdom Hearts sea, VII is like a series of interconnected caves, and the more you unearth the more you learn. And therein lies the problem. The Nomura-verse is composed of both his methods and his circumstances. His methods, we have discussed, but his circumstance is game development. Unlike movies or books, games obviously have an interactive capability, but they also have a variable development cycle. Some titles come out quickly, others span decades. They also consist of different teams, story writers, directors, and a myriad of producers. This in turn can make it much harder to make a solid universe, especially when new additions start off in a place where a continuous story was never meant to exist. Nomura is at once hindered and strengthened by his circumstances. He can’t tell a better story because the development cycle of his vision is variable, and success is based on sales and popularity. Without success, he can’t create a new addition, and often in games, the end is meant to tie the whole thing up. Were there to be a sequel, a whole new story is thought up and tacked on wherever it fits. Gamers are pretty forgiving of this concept. Still, at the same time, Nomura probably wouldn’t make a concise story because it's not his style. For comparison, see the Dark Souls series. A game that both has deep lore and an involving story, but at the same time, the game doesn’t require you to know a single point to continue moving forward. This is almost the antithesis of Nomura’s style. In Souls, they let the player decide to explore its story caves, but doesn’t confront them with it to continue advancing. This is a strength of  video games. A strength that Nomura keeps using to his disadvantage.

Yet, Final Fantasy VII still excelled to unparalleled heights. It engages you in the same way all of the previous games in the series have, but with a slight departure on the strict fantasy theme, instead a merger with steampunk or semi-future. The series was changed forever, and so was gaming. Instead of doing the Dragon Quest method, expanding on the same universe design with different stories, Final Fantasy was emboldened to try completely random approaches with vector entries like VIII and X. For longtime fans, or fans of their original design, Every future title, MMO or Single Player, would go on to be successful, but not fully realized in their original context. Even the return to form in IX was much more playful than any of the original six entries. Gaming franchises have since become playgrounds for developers. Once they are accepted by fans, developers are emboldened and experiment with what would normally be a new IP, but instead use the financial shield of the famous namesake to move forward with new ideas. And in the case of Final Fantasy, when this concept of change works, it means that every numbered game becomes a wildcard. It’s a double edged sword for a gaming franchise that dates back to the 8-bit era. It has fans over 40 years old by this point and they may be willing to buy anything new. But this isn’t new to you and it isn’t a revelation for me. Final Fantasy VII Remake causes me to reckon with these demons I had buried years ago. It rips off a scab I thought had healed. I had given up on the past, a past where I was excited for a singular story, contained in a single universe, in a single title. I had given up on the glory years of Final Fantasy, but the Remake took me back and said, what if we told you everything you remember about the original was true, and everything we added after that was also true, even though you probably didn’t play it or even know it existed. Even if you do your very best, you probably won’t be able to track the story or interconnected characters if you aren’t in the know. It’s like joining a group of long time friends that are constantly referencing inside jokes, all of them just winking at each other, nudging you in the ribs and asking, “Do ya get it?” Truly, the Remake series thus far makes me feel lost at sea when what I wanted to feel like was coming home.

This retrospective has left me feeling broken. Based on the end of the FFVIIR, I sought out to reconcile all of the loose ends to all the connected media. However, spending time with the prequel Crisis Core for over around 40 hours, I realized this was a crapshoot. None of it mattered. It didn’t enrich the characters, it only made the story longer. It just added wibbly-wobbly, timey-whimey “facts” to an otherwise complete(ish) origin point. The FFVII universe can’t handle the weight that is put on it. It’s a faulty bridge over a treacherous pass. On the other hand, that same bridge for some is a point of excitement. You tread the boards, one by one, testing your weight, hoping to get to the other side intact. And I think that is why we keep trying these games and why they keep getting made. We don’t want the fun to end, despite the fact that it has nothing left for us to be excited by. It’s a closed loop that we keep looking for something new in. By the end of the Remake, we are somewhere between ⅓ or ½ way across the faulty bridge, dangling between where we have been and where it is taking us. At this point, I am too mentally exhausted from trying to make sense of it all. Yet I am incapable of not enjoying it, the mental somersaults one does to understand the interconnected mess that is Final Fantasy VII. It’s too dear to me. I got on the bridge for so many reasons, but the biggest one is to be on the other side with all of the other fans who dared to play and dared to complete the game. To be in the know, to wink across the room. I want to be in that hyper-critical utopia where we all have one thing in common: We played Final Fantasy VII in 1997. And we all have something to say about it.

[monkey-network]

Good Stuff’s Best of 2018

WARNING: I just want to say cheers to you for making it through another year. I send you best wishes for next year to be fruitful. Thank you, take care out there, and enjoy.

Dedicated to Stan Lee, Stefán Karl and Stephen Hillenburg, the number ones of children entertainment

Bow Whacka Wow, playas and players. 2018 gave us quite a lot to consume while society continues to fumble like a Tumblr update. While hopefully the chaos has died down for the final weeks of the year, I’m counting down the best cartoons/animations I’ve seen and loved this year in no particular order. Only two rules, no sneak previews of future projects (sorry 101 Dalmatian Street and MP100) and no potential entries from last year’s list (sorry True). With that said, roll it....

10. UNIKITTY!

I love the Lego Movie. I’ll potentially like the sequel. I like Unikitty. She got a show, and it was a great show to start off the year. Upbeat, colorful, off the walls sometimes, perfectly capturing the spirit of the eponymous character. I’m glad the other characters are just as enjoyable, I never get tired of the theme song, every episode had me smilin’ one way or another, it’s just a quality bottle of positivity juice. Don’t know how else to explain it, Unikitty, the show and character, just makes and continues to make me smile.

9. POP TEA-- SIKE!

This anime ain’t nothing but unfunny randomness and skits with a forgetful arc in the first and final episode. I don’t get it, never gonna get it, so I don’t want to get it! MORE LIKE POOP TEAM EPIC, ‘nuff said. Which is why the actual number nine is....

9. BOB EPIC TEAM

Honestly, there is something endearing about the way Bob Epic Team presents itself. The simplicity and variety of its animation is remarkably good and makes it feel timeless sometimes. The comedy works in a way that gives you a clear grasp on the two characters while letting them do whatever they want. The surrealism of this is fun to think about, showcasing a hedonistic philosophy that rivals that of Epicurus. The duo’s chemistry is what especially got me, as they felt like the best of friends, potentially love birds *wink wink*. This anime was just creative in every sense of the word and, like Unikitty, it was a great anime to start of the year.

8. CRAIG OF THE CREEK

The ska is RAH. I honestly find this to be the loose spiritual successor to Hey Arnold and Recess. Like the playground, the creek is a well fleshed out setting with the many characters that hang there, from the TAZ trio to the loving witches of the creek. Though I will say the best episodes are when we get insight on the main three’s personal lives with their families and when the characters themselves go through a personal trial to understand themselves a little better. The shows thrives in the theme that the creek is a place where you can enjoy getting your hands dirty and work towards something you want, even if it doesn’t add to any concrete long term benefit beyond learning a thing or two about yourself and others. And I say for somebody that relates to Craig as a character, that’s a welcoming thought that the show has yet to perish. And the ska is a welcome choice of music, IMO.

7. THE EPIC TALES OF CAPTAIN UNDERPANTS

It’s funny in how a little over a year of getting a movie, Captain Underpants gets an animated series with not only original stories in lieu of just animating the already printed stories, but puts it all in a format similar to reading a book with a sardonic narrator and separating the plot of the episode into chapters with subtitle cards; one of the first I’ve seen do this. But really, a “Captain Underpants cartoon” is something I can’t say would turn out bad, and I’m right as this is a show that revels in what made CU great in the first place. George, Harold, Melvin, and Mr. Krupp/Captain Underpants are all great characters with the additional supporting cast providing welcome life to the world. Every Incredible Violence Chapter is brilliant in their own right, and while I wasn’t a fan of the ending they had for the season, it’s great that almost every episode is self-contained, boosting its replay value. Honestly, any compliment I have for this was already said in my review of this and the movie, so I’ll just say this too was faithful to its source material and benefited heavily for it.

6. GARY AND HIS DEMONS

Rick and Morty done better. BOOM, send tweet! It is safe to say that this was quite the sleeper hit and I can’t help but say it’s lowkey one of the best adult cartoons this year next to Ballmastrz and Final Space. And while I certainly appreciate the other two *hint hint* this one got a step above on the grounds that it works as a comedy and a solemn tale of a chosen hero that stumbles through years in the office life. It’s improv humor feels natural and it can be as melancholic as Bojack Horseman without making it all too deep like so; has a great balance of both. Main man Gary, unlike Rick for the most part, is a guy that’s both reasonably reprehensible yet pretty relatable. Not to mention, while it was bittersweet, it had a very satisfying finale to where I feel like this was a complete series all together. With a rough art style that compliments it’s tone, this was a series that surprised me in its sharp quality.

5. APPLE & ONION

I’ll admit. Initially wasn’t a fan of it as it felt like a knock-off to Regular Show (may it rest). Just had a duo of bros living together, doing mundane labor while coming up with impromptu tunes along the way. Then again, I was gladly proven wrong because the charm of it generally being a simple show, even with every person being food, somehow more regular than Regular Show. Every song they make is upbeat and catchy, all of the characters are endearing, and with only 10 episodes, each one was well paced and had quality writing to the point where I teared up a couple times. It stinks that this and Summer Camp Island have generally been receiving the shaft this year after their premieres, but I'm just glad that they haven’t been truly forgotten by CN and are getting more episodes next year. Plus, I love food and this show is about food. Debate over.

4. LEGEND OF THE THREE CABALLEROS

I was familiar yet never saw The Three Caballeros, ironic since Donald is one of my favorite Disney characters. But then, out of the blue, I found this and I was stunned, amazed, confused, nonetheless invested. It has a bumpy start, but it’s a joyous adventure from that start to end. The look of it is something I’ve rarely seen in animation since... freakin’ Wakfu. I love Xandra and I was glad to see her be an active player on the team. The villains are such a hammy delight. And Jose and Panchito were very lively and entertaining foils to Donald’s cynic nature while all three work as well together like the 3 stooges. Donald himself gets a great arc of his own throughout the season. And the theme, HO MY GOD I LOVE THIS THEME! It’s a damn shame Disney hasn’t released this already (since it’s all online already) because this series is much better than it has any right to be.

3. GOLDEN WIND/VENTO AUREO

I say, the beauty of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure is that regardless of what part you start from, you’re enthralled into its world and ya feel compelled to dig into it more. Parts 3 was what got me into Jojo, like most I bet, but it was part 5 that got me “Oh yeah, this series [just] works on more than level”. The characters are what keep me hooked, regardless of Crunchyroll refusing to give their stands proper English names [Zipper Man, CR?], Fighting Gold and Freak ‘n You will never get old, and David Productions putting great effort into the small details and giving life and style to the original manga. I’ll just say, as one who’s read and loved the manga, this anime has not ceased to keep me impressed and guessing for more.

2. INTO THE SPIDER-VERSE

Funking superb, you afro having web-slinger. I hate to say it, but 2018 didn’t have the most impressive line-up of western animated features. Most were average, entertaining sure, but nothing felt like 110% was given. Until Spidah-Man came on the scene and I was like “WIG...

The only major problem I have with this film, besides a bit of slow pacing, is more of a missed opportunity where the stakes of getting the Spidermen back to their dimensions before dying felt like an afterthought. Then again, that’s ALL I have for problems. It looks fantastic. The action is smooth, coherent, and satisfying to see. The tiny details and comic book aesthetic of it was a blessed touch. I loved almost every character here. Nick Cage and John Mulaney. The fact that it has so much yet was able to juggle it all blew my mind. Even the post credits scene made this such a love letter to the wall-crawler. This film was refreshing to say the least and the central theme behind the idea of Spider-Man made this as great of a superhero movie as Infinity War and Lego Batman. Just saying, this better make its budget back and THEN SOME. It deserves it.

1. HILDA

Netflix, we’re not on good terms mind you, but ya done did it again. This is honestly one of the few shows that I genuinely took my time with as opposed to binging it, because binge watching is a devil in itself. Like the Spider-verse movie, it got the style of its source material down to cozy colored T with its autumn color palette and etched lining in the characters. Like the Captain Underpants series, while having a grounded arc of Hilda journeying through the city life and her colliding wildlife, each episode can be generally be enjoyed on their own. Like Gary and His Demons, it felt like a complete season and the fact it’s getting a season two made things all the better. But above all, it was a generally peaceful yet captivating fantasy cartoon to watch with incredible animation, an endearing main character, amazing looking folk creatures of all sizes and powers, and a cuddly deerfox for a pet. I say this is to the fall what Harvey Beaks was to the spring, and if I can compare a show to Harvey Beaks you know you’ve achieved greatness. Like True and the Rainbow Kingdom, gives you a moment of honest bliss and happiness that can influence your outlook on looking forward to better things because like Hilda herself, you push forward and have some fun exploring.

Just saying, I cannot stress this enough this is NOT my number one favorite show of the year, hell of all time. THAT goes to....

1. 👏TEEN 👏TITANS 👏GO, BABEEEEEEY!!

ONCE AGAIN, Teen Titans GO reigns supre-- Huh, what’s that? Oh my god, you’re serious?! The Number One is

TOTAL DRAMARAMA OUT OF NOWHERE! IT IS NOW CARTOON NETWORK’S ‘NEW FAVORITE SHOW’.

THE STREAK *DING DING DING* IS OVER

[icehvs]

Presenting: Leyan - Blood of the Bull introduction

And here it is: the introduction of the first setting to my epic fantasy novel, Blood of the Bull. I left out the local religion, as I would like to talk about it in a separate post, later on. 

Tag-list: @inexorableblob @proseweaver

Introduction

“Once the world trembled at our fury, Saelin. Oh, how we have fallen…”

– Matrus Lavera

Situated in the mountainside in the heart of the Niaa-peninsula, sits the sprawling metropolis of Leyan. It is a city of two faces: high above the marble villas of the rich and powerful clutter around the mighty Assembly, and the dome signaling the Vault of the Hallowed Souls sticks out above the skyline. Below them, connected only by the streets carved into the mountainside, miserable houses of timber and mud sprawl as far as the eye can see. No walls constrain the Lower City, as any constructed would be overgrown in an instant.

The city grows daily, its population never on the decline. A mere three years ago, a terrible plague swept across Leyan, decimating its population, indiscriminate in taking the rich and the poor. Some streets in the Lower City are still remembered as the “bone streets”, as that was where the citizenry, in a desperate attempt, tore up the pavement, and buried their dead there, in a final bid to provide their last rites. Today, Leyan’s population surpasses the numbers before the Fever, as families from the countryside and from the provinces upend their lives for the chance that their sons and daughters might have the most valuable thing in the world: the protection of Leyan.

For to be a citizen in this mighty city is to be born in privilege. To be able to serve in her armies, and to stand for election. For even the lowest of beggars has the opportunity to be elected Avraxa, the leader of Leyan’s armies and the very first speaker of its Assembly. Maybe more important than the distant dream: he has the right to choose his leaders.

It would be hard to deny, however, that Leyan is in crisis. For the past century and a half, the city had been taken four times – by soldiers carrying her arms, and sworn to her defense. The Republican traditions, upheld for centuries by men living now in myths only, is crumbling. Leyan had become the playground of the power-hungry and ambitious, and it is her people and dominion that suffer as a result.

For eleven years, there has been peace. Patreas Tauvar, emerging from yet another bloody civil war, ruled the city with an iron fist. Blood has been spilled still, but it was blood to keep the peace, and not to advance himself. Now, Tauvar lays dead, and the hyenas gather at the smell of rotten meat. Is civil war truly inevitable? Or can another rise, to lead Leyan?

Military

“Leyan’s Arms reach famously far.”

“Yes, I heard. Are you certain it is a city? Is it not an octopus, with ten-thousand spikes at the end of each arm?”

– Caommar and Xenia

It would be difficult to argue that Leyan’s empire could not be attributed to the organization of the military that serves the city. To serve in an Arm is considered a privilege, afforded only to the citizens of the mighty city. Citizens, many of whom have no choice but to spend their lives in service, in exchange for land or money at the end of their service. Many families, dating back their lineage four generations, have been soldiers, and take great pride in the units they served in. These families also often have a loyalty to the commander leading that Arm, or the commander’s family, as it has so often been the case. The Arm Ennarim Tauvar leads into Korvas is the same Arm his father, Patreas Tauvar marched upon Leyan with at the end of the civil war.

A Leyanese Arm always, uniformly, consists of ten thousand soldiers, eight thousand of whom are infantry, and two thousand are cavalry. A certain number of the infantry will be skirmishers or scouts, but the bulk of the Arm are the heavily armed infantry. To command them, the soldiers elect, from amongst their own ranks, a Captain of the Infantry, responsible only to the Commander of that Arm. The scouts, the cavalry, and the skirmishers do the same, although the Captain of the Cavalry is often nominated by the Commander, as the person elected to the position will become the Arm’s second-in-command.

Leyan’s Arms are often deployed for keeping the peace. It is customary for three whole Arms to be present in a newly conquered territory for at least twenty-five years. Two Arms are also granted as part of a governor’s commission, with wide discretion as of how to use them. During their five-year tenure the governor cannot be prosecuted for a crime, not even if he commits crimes most heinous. When the term ends, however, he has to return to Leyan to face the consequences. Many a governors have chosen to rise in revolt before returning to the city.

Politics

“In Leyan, we usually stab people from the front.”

– Saragus Tarena

The population of Leyan is no stranger to factionalism. The four teams of the chariot-races all represent interests that reach far beyond the tracks, and the firefighters often work only in areas that are known to be sympathetic to the causes of their donors. The bad blood between the two great factions, however goes far deeper than any individual interest, and though they have both been hijacked by many men whose ambition far outshone their sense.

The Torenites and the Volares share an origin: both were born when the dust of a devastating war settled, and the people of Leyan knew their city has been changed forever. Slavery was outlawed – all slaves in Leyan were freed the day they offered to fight in the depleted armies of the city. But the war ended one day, and these men returned home to their families, their wives and children, freed alongside them, to find that they had nothing to return to. Their former owners wanted nothing to do with them anymore. They had little to no money left, and their only valuables were their lives and the weapon and armor the state provided for them. Most found their way back to the army, becoming professional soldiers, with their sons following in their footsteps.

The pride of the aristocracy had a devastating impact. There were nobody to work their vast estates, where food for the rapidly growing city was grown. There was no one left at the mills and none kept the streets clean. In these days, two factions were born to combat the growing crisis: The Torenites, wishing for the further emancipation of the downtrodden, and the Volares, drawing their support from the highest of the aristocracy, and those who were threatened by the newcomers in their midst.

Once both these factions included noble ideas and noble souls. But their very foundation was rotten, and they built on the blood of the very man who sought to free those slaves. Was their future decided that very day, or was it a by-product of the ever-escalating animosity between the two? By today, they are but names, and vague ideas, masking the lust for power that those leading them hold in their hearts.

[reyloforcebalance]

Coming Home

My submission for the @two-halves-of-reylo weekly challenge (Week 7: Home). Also on AO3. 

“Eighty Silencers, fresh off the production line,” The Vultan man’s voice swells with pride as he walks between rows of angular, black TIE fighters, his arms extending out to gesture at the ships on either side.

A masked Kylo Ren strides behind him, hands clasped loosely behind his back.

“Prototype 2, all engineered to your specifications,” the Vultan continues. “And we’ve added several of our own improvements based on your post-flight reports.” The olive-skinned man turns his face towards him, ridged folds of flesh lining his long forehead. “We do appreciate the detail you put into those. With such thorough feedback from the customer, we can aim for perfection.”

“I expect perfection.” Kylo Ren’s voice is cold and distorted. “Nothing less.”

“Of course, your grace, of course,” the Vultan assures him nervously. 

“Let’s take a closer look at one, shall we?” the man suggests, slowing and turning to the left towards one of the Silencers. Kylo Ren and the aerial captain beside him slow to follow. Suddenly, a clatter of steps approaches swiftly from the side.

“Supreme Leader!” An out-of-breath officer cries frantically, halting just before them. Kylo Ren still faces the ship, his back to the officer.

“Whatever it is, it can wait,” he informs him without turning around.

“But… sir…” the officer continues timidly, “you said you wished to be informed immediately if we ever came to possess the Millennium Falco—” 

Kylo Ren whips around and the officer jumps a little.

“You have it?” He demands, striding forward to tower over the man. “Where did you find it? Where is it now?”

“It was abandoned on an outer rim planet,” he begins, wincing a little. “Denash I believe. We received some reports that Resistance scum were stirring up trouble in the area so we sent a team to investigate.”

“Did you take any prisoners?” Kylo takes another step forward, his large form bearing down on the officer. The man fights the instinct to back away.

“No sir,” the officer gulps and forces himself to look up into the black mask. “We combed the area thoroughly but found nothing. We confiscated the ship and it’s secured in port 44 now.”

Kylo Ren stands silently for a moment. Then he steps around the officer and begins striding away.

“Continue the inspection, captain,” He calls back. “Report to me if you finish before I return.”

His boots click heavily on the pristine floor, his pace swift and purposeful. Each step seems to stoke his anticipation, filling him with an almost manic excitement.

It’s been years since he’s seen the Falcon, really seen it. It’s strange to think about now. It feels like he spent half his youth in the small, cramped annals of that ship. He can picture the interior in his mind with astonishing detail— the tattered seat in the lounge, stained with sweat, the grimy holoboard that barely works… he can see every corner… every crevice… every little part…

Kylo’s chest swells with dark satisfaction.  

And he can see it being ripped to shreds, destroyed beyond all recognition, a steaming heap of junk. Not even junk. Junk can be remade, repurposed. No, what Kylo Ren has in store for this ship will strip it of all hope of functionality— it will be nothing but chunks of metal, frayed wires, and ashes after he’s done with it.

He’s been imagining this for over a decade, toying with different scenarios in the playground of his mind. The ship has met its end in countless ways. He’s seen it pulverized with lasers, demolished under the foot of an AT-AT walker, smashed into a thousand pieces against the side of a mountain. It’s become a favorite pastime, considering all of the possibilities for the ship’s demise... and the day has finally come.  

He feels almost sad at the thought of fantasy becoming reality, of losing what’s become a comfort in times of stress. Almost.   

His heart quickens as he rounds a corner to the entrance of port 44, the Falcon just coming into view ahead. His pace slows as he nears the ship. He ignores the technicians, bowing deeply as he approaches.  

The ship looms over him and suddenly a sick feeling enters his gut.

This ugly, ancient piece of Corellian trash represents everything he hates about where he came from. It’s the last remnant of a childhood filled with confusion, resentment, anger, and weakness. In a way… it’s the last remnant of Ben Solo.

He tightens his jaw, suppressing the complex tide of emotions threatening to spill over the corners of his mind. An officer approaches him, looking pert and turtle-like with his collared uniform swallowing his fat neck.

“We finally have it sir,” he declares proudly, hands clasped behind his back. “What would you like us to do with it?”

Kylo Ren stands silently for a minute, looking up at the worn freighter, considering his options.

“I want you to wait five minutes,” he says finally, walking closer towards the ship. He reaches up to touch the dented metal with a gloved hand. “Then release it into space and blast it with the ventral cannons.”

Instantly, he turns a heel and walks away swiftly. He’ll watch from the external observation portal…. watch this final piece of his past explode into million pieces and scatter into the stars.

He stops abruptly just before the entrance of the port. Without thinking, as if driven by instinct, he turns a heel and strides back towards the Falcon.  

“Open the ship,” commands through his mask. Not a second later, the ramp begins to descend unevenly to touch the ground.

“Stay here.” He boards in a kind of daze, as though he weren’t entirely in control of his actions. He stops at the top of the ramp, a strange feeling descending upon him. Seeing it again… being here in this space, this exact spot, a spot he’s stood many times before… when he was three. And five. And eight. And eleven. And fifteen.  

He still feels all of the anger, all of the resentment he did then. But that’s not everything. There’s something else. Something too primal to have a name. It feels like…

Kylo Ren reaches up with both hands to remove his mask. He tucks it under his arm and turns to the right, taking several steps forward. He pauses again.  

It even smells the same. After all these years.

He stands, taking a look at the room, starting at the lounge seat, moving to the curved hall, the technical station, the overhead compartments… He takes a few more steps forward. He looks down, observing the floor below. His boot clinks against the metal he drags it along the grated surface.

He steps towards the table and places his mask on it carefully.

Suddenly, he looks up, peering intently down the circular curve of the hallway. He senses something... He steps forward cautiously, as quietly as possible. Is he… not alone on this ship?

The feeling grows, creeping into his senses from within. He stands up straight, relaxing his shoulders a bit, expectant. He knows what this is. It’s becoming increasingly familiar. And not altogether unwelcome. 

As if melting in from another world, Rey appears before him. She stands tall, ready. She felt the bond bringing them together too. But then suddenly her eyebrows knit in confusion. She begins to frantically look up and around, twisting behind her. Then her shoulders drop.

“Shit.”

She whips around to glare at him, annoyed.   

“Of course you would have it.” She rolls her eyes, crossing her arms and blowing out a puff of air. “I don’t know why I didn’t think of it. I just assumed that filthy Rodian made off with it after selling us out to the First Order.” She groans in frustration, stepping into the lounge towards him.

“How long have you had it?” She looks up at him intently.

He returns her gaze, cool and even. “Had what?” He feigns a hint of confusion.

She punches him in the shoulder without thinking. “The Falcon!” She shouts at him with wide, angry eyes. “What did you think I meant?” Suddenly, she jerks back, squinting up at him, uncertain. 

“Were you teasing me?” She demands, crossing her arms again. “Don’t tease me right now.” She shakes her head, her tone impatient. “Not after the week I’ve had.” She steps around him, surveying the room intensely as if she’s searching for something.

“And it’s your fault,” She spits out accusingly as she begins rifling through things scattered over the technical station. “It was your precious troops that showed up to chase us out of town. And then they blew up half the town trying to do it. Now me and Chewie are hiding on the side of a mountain, waiting for someone to pick us up tomorrow morning.” She turns abruptly and sprints across the room, dropping to kneel before a metal crate next to the lounge seat. 

Kylo watches her impassively. “Yes, I’m sure you weren’t doing anything to attract their attention,” he deadpans, stepping towards her. She glares up at him for a moment then continues to shuffle through the contents of the crate, ignoring him. He steps closer, reaching out with his Force senses into her mind. 

“Hey! Haven’t we talked about this?” Rey shoots up angrily. “Don’t go where you’re not invited.” She steps in close, just in front of him, glaring up intently at him for emphasis. Then she shifts around him, straight to the overhead compartments to his left.

“Recruiting? Really, Rey?” He asks dryly turning towards her, cocking his head as she searches through the compartments. “In that shithole of a planet? The Resistance must be truly desperate. You’re wasting your time with them, you know.” 

At this, Rey reels back, snapping her head to him with fire in her eyes, ready to pounce. But just as she starts to rear towards him, she jerks back, regaining control of herself at the last moment. She shakes her head dismissively, as if to say he isn’t worth her time, then heads straight for the curved hall, striding purposefully forward.

He waits for a few seconds before following her. Then he walks slowly down the hall to see one of the doors to the secret compartments under the floor open. He hears Rey moving about inside.

“What are you doing?” He asks as he gets close enough to peer down at her. She’s crouching and shifting through another crate.

“I’m inventorying,” She responds, clearly annoyed, still focused on what’s in front of her. “I’m making sure your pawns didn’t steal anything. Anything important, anyways.”

“Why bother?” He asks, narrowing his eyes. “This ship and everything on it is mine now.”

Rey stops cold, shoulders stiffening. She crouches silently for a few seconds, then crawls out of the compartment to stand tall and steady under him. She looks up with a sure gaze.

“Give me back the Falcon,” she demands, stepping in close enough to graze his chest, light brown eyes fixed on his. His heart beats faster but he keeps a neutral expression.

“And why would I do that?” He stares down at her, unblinking.

“Because…” She starts, voice becoming less sure. She breaks her gaze for a moment, thinking. Then her eyes snap back to his. 

“It has a tracking device on board. And it’s well hidden. As long as you have this ship, the Resistance will be able track your location wherever you are.” She stares into him threateningly.

He purses his lips, a glint in his eye. “The Resistance? Tracking my every move?” He steps forward suddenly, bumping into Rey, forcing her to take a couple steps back. Her heels grip the edge of the compartment opening.

“I’m terrified.” He lowers his voice, leaning down over her menacingly.

She flinches and loses her balance, falling backward. In one swift motion, his arm shoots out and pulls her into him. They feel their heartbeats quicken, chests pressed against one another. He lingers longer than he should, arm behind her waist, gripping her firmly, before he pulls her from the opening and releases her. He turns a heel abruptly and strides back into the lounge.

“What would the First Order do if, what? All forty of you? Came knocking at our door,” he continues in a mocking tone. “No, perhaps forty-one now. Did you recruit anyone in Danesh?” He casts a snide glance back at her. He feels her anger rise.

Rey breaks into a run, racing past him and planting herself firmly in his path. “Give me back the Falcon!” She insists again, looking up into him, eyes like lasers.

“Rey, no,” he replies firmly, returning her fierce gaze with cold detachment. “It’s mine now. You abandoned it. My forces found it. I came by it through lawful means. I would say you could barter for it but you have nothing that I want.”

Something flashes across Rey’s eyes— a caustic look that seems to challenge him. She starts to say something but abruptly looks away and begins to move past him.

“Nothing I’d give you,” she mutters, almost indiscernibly, under her breath.

His head jerks towards hers but she ignores him, continuing on to the technical station. She stops before it and lets out a sigh of resignation. Then she stoops over to grab one of the metal crates and set it on the surface. He watches as she opens the crate and empties the contents, then begins to refill it with junk here and there.

“What are you doing now?” He asks, beginning to lose patience.

“Well, clearly I can physically touch things in your location through the bond,” she answers with her back to him. “I’m about to find out if I can take things back with me through it.” She turns and walks to an overhead compartment, opening it and taking a few things to place in the crate. She casts a glance at him. “That is, of course, if you’ll allow me to take a few of my things, Supreme Leader.” She gives him a mock bow.

He stands, unmoving. “It makes no difference to me.” 

“Well, that’s very generous of you,” she says sarcastically, still loading the crate. “What do you plan to do with the ship, anyways? Lock it away, never to be seen again?”

“Oh no,” he responds assuredly, shaking his head. “I have something much better in mind.”

“Yeah?” Rey asks absently. “What’s that?”

“I’m going to destroy it,” he answers decidedly.

Suddenly, Rey whips around, eyes wide in horror. “Ben, no!” She cries in protest, taking a few frantic steps towards him.

“You can’t do that!” She insists, dismayed, voice growing increasingly panicked. 

“Actually, I can do whatever I want with this ship,” he informs her matter-of-factly.

“But…” she sputters, looking around her wildly. He feels her emotions raging through him, a frenzied, unfocused fear. “But…” she repeats, seeming to search her mind for a way to talk him out of it. “This is your family ship!” She declares finally.

“No, it’s not!” He barks back at her, louder than he intended. She flinches, taking a step back from him. He takes a breath, collecting himself.

“No, it’s not,” he repeats more calmly. 

Her eyes widen in disbelief. “But you spent half your life on this ship! You practically grew up here. You can’t just get rid of it!”

“Yes. I can.” He punctuates each word.

“But it’s part of you!” She insists, almost shrill. “It’s part of who you are, part of where you came from.”

“Rey,” He intones deeply, frustration boiling over into rage. “How many times do I have to tell you— let the past die. This ship is not part of me. Any part of me that was bound to it, I killed a long time ago.” 

Her shoulders drop, defeated. She turns silently and walks to the lounge seat, sinking down into a corner of it. She leans over, propping her elbows on her knees, looking out into space with a pained expression. He stands nearby, regarding her curiously as she stares into nothing for a minute.

“Why do you care so much about what happens to this stupid ship?” Kylo breaks the silence, crossing his arms and stepping towards Rey.

She lets out a small sigh and looks down, rubbing her hands together anxiously. “I don’t know…” She starts quietly, shoulders hunched, looking bruised, vulnerable. “I…” She takes a shallow breath.  “I guess… somewhere along the line… without realizing it… this ship became my home.”

“Really?” He scoffs in disbelief. “This piece of junk is your home?” She shoots him an angry look. 

“Yes,” she answers a bit defensively. “You know, you might not be able to understand this but… I never really had a home. Or a family. I lived in an old AT-AT walker on Jakku, but… it never really felt like home. Not like the Falcon does.” Her voice breaks as she looks down, eyes beginning to well with tears. “This was the place where I found myself. Found a family, of sorts. Found a purpose. It just… helps me feel like I belong somewhere.” She squeezes her eyes shut, wrapping her arms tightly around herself, drawing her shoulders together, making herself small. She hunches over, tears spilling over her cheeks. 

Kylo watches, unsure what to say. He feels a deep twist in his heart, a long-suppressed emotion that’s become much more familiar since he met Rey.

Compassion.

He takes a couple of steps towards her, slowly, the click of his boots filling the silence. He pauses, towering over her small form for a moment, before kneeling down to regard her quietly. Her eyes are still closed, her smooth skin, pink lips, glistening with tears. He reaches up with a gloved hand to brush them from her face. At this, her eyes fly open.

“Ben.” She leans towards him, her voice is just above a whisper, lips trembling. “Please don’t destroy this ship. Please. Lock it away somewhere, out of sight. You never have to see it again. Just…” her voice breaks, holding back a sob. “Don’t destroy it.” she begs breathlessly, eyes pleading with his.

He stares back at her solemnly, fighting to maintain a neutral expression… but his chest is hollow. Aching. He feels himself overcome with a powerful pull, a desire that undermines his rational brain entirely. He imagines what he wants to do… remove his gloves. Reach out. Bring her face to his. Kiss the tears from her cheeks. Pull her into to his chest. Wrap his arms around her. Whisper that her home is wherever he is.

But he doesn’t do any of those things.

He just stares back at her, stiffened, black eyes guarded, yearning concealed under a practiced coldness.

Rey gulps, filling with disappointment, accepting defeat. She closes her eyes, taking a shallow breath and hanging her head.

Then she disappears, melting away just as she came.

He exhales heavily, as though he’s been holding his breath since she got there. He looks up into the ceiling, taking more air into his lungs, trying to purge his mind, his body, of the bond. His shoulders finally relax, his heartbeat returns to normal. He stands, taking one final look around the ship.

Then he sweeps his mask from the table, bringing it up and overhead, clicking it smoothly into place. He turns sharply, striding out of the lounge and pressing a panel to open the landing deck. He begins descending before it reaches the ground.

The technicians look away as he exits, shrinking a bit. The fat-necked officer approaches him with an air of ingratiation. He halts, straightening stiff as a board then giving a dramatic bow. He rises swiftly.

“Five minutes, sir,” he announces. “Then we will release this garbage heap into space and blast it to smithereens.” His voice is triumphant. 

“No,” Kylo Ren replies in a cool, distorted voice. “Put it back where you found it. Exactly. Now.” He strides away, ignoring the officer’s shock.

“But, sir…” he sputters, stepping after him.

Kylo whips around and extends his arm, reaching out with his Force senses to grip the man’s throat, lifting him up several inches into the air. He immediately starts choking and tugging at his collar. In an instant, the officer drops, crashing onto the hard floor, gasping for breath.

Kylo Ren takes two steps towards him, looking down coldly.

“Do I need repeat myself?” He cocks his head, menacing over the man. The officer looks up, gulping.

“Of course not, Supreme Leader.” He bows. Kylo turns to stride away once more.

“And put a tracking device on it,” He commands without looking back. He charges onward, forcefully channeling his energy into the tasks ahead. The Silencer inspection. The next phase of testing. An endless regimen of responsibility.

He’s had enough distractions for one day.

He needs to lose himself in his work, in this rush of focus. He needs fixate on something, anything to keep him from facing the uncomfortable truth.

That there’s a part of him… a part he thought he killed long ago… still alive. And Rey’s keeping it that way.

****

Rey’s eyes fly open in terror. She shoots up, sitting on a hard surface, looking around, disoriented. Faint light from a jagged opening pours in to the space around her. Her eyes adjust, taking in her surroundings… thick, grey rock stretching overhead, damp earth, a makeshift fire pit to the left. Then it all comes flooding back as she remembers where she is… 

The recruitment mission. Danesh. That sniveling Rodian. The First Order nearly blasting her and Chewie to bits. Racing to hide in the mountains. The Falcon, gone.

At this, her shoulders drop and she lets out a heavy sigh.

The bond. Him. With her ship. His plan to obliterate it.

Rey gulps, feeling the tears begin to well in the corners of her eyes again.

No.

She takes in a deep breath and lets it out slowly, deliberately. He will not make her cry today. 

She pushes herself up, standing to look around, wondering what time it is, where Chewie’s gotten off to. They don’t have long. Finn will be here to pick them up soon. 

She walks over to the fire pit and begins dismantling it. One could argue that there’s no need since they’ll be leaving this planet soon, for good most likely. But covering her tracks has become second nature since joining the Resistance.

Suddenly, she hears Chewie’s voice, distant but getting closer, frantic. Seconds later, she sees him wriggling his way through the small opening, tufts of fur getting caught on jagged rock. 

“What’s wrong?” Rey demands urgently.

He baws a warning in response.

“You saw a First Order ship!? Are you sure?”

He baws again, confirming.

Rey’s heartbeat starts to quicken. Have they come back to try to root them out? Finn… he’s on his way. He’ll be in danger too. She bites her lip, trying to figure out what to do. They can’t go to the rendezvous point now… they can’t be exposed. But she also can’t let Finn land here. She’s going to have to sneak back into town and get a message to him.

Her mind races, plotting out a course of action. Then she stops suddenly.

A strange feeling descends upon her. A realization. She doesn’t know how she knows but… she knows.

“Chewie, get your things. We’re heading out.” 

He protests, insisting that if they leave the mountain, they’ll be First Order target practice.

“No, we won’t,” she replies firmly. “Now, come on. Hurry.”

The Wookie baws again in protest. 

“Chewie, trust me,” she says as she grabs her pack, looking up at him. “When have I ever lead you astray?”

He cocks his head doubtfully, then baws that Han would say that exact thing right before they did something stupidly dangerous.

Rey rolls her eyes. “Well, I’m not Han. And we’re not in danger. Just… trust me, ok?”

The Wookie nods reluctantly and begins stuffing a few things into his pack.

When they’re ready, they both wriggle out of the crevice in the mountainside and Rey leads them forward. They move swiftly down the mountain path and into the forest. They continue through the thick trees, over the small streams, around the valley of boulders that was once a river.

Rey knows exactly where she’s going. She moves with purpose, looking around her for the signs, the little things she took note of when they first landed on this planet a week ago, the map she created in her mind. 

With every step, the flurry of anticipation in her chest grows. A part of her worries… maybe she’s wrong? But the stronger part of her knows that she’s not.

There’s the broken tree, ancient and split in half. 

They’re close.

She picks up her pace, breaking into to run. She leaps over large roots, weaving around branches and mossy overhangs. Finally, she emerges through the brush… and sees it just ahead. She can’t stop a huge grin from breaking across her face as she halts to take in the glorious image before her.

The Falcon. Right where she left it, perched on a large, flat boulder in an opening in the forest. Suddenly, Chewie pushes his way through the brush to stand beside her. He regards the ship with confusion, then turns to Rey for answers. She shrugs in response. 

“Let’s not look a gift horse in the mouth, huh?” She tells him dismissively. “Come on. We’ve got to contact Finn, tell him to turn around.” She steps forward towards the ship, reaching into her pack for the remote that opens the landing deck. She pushes a button and the ramp begins to creak, descending down to the earth.

She barrels up it into the ship, stopping just at the top. She breathes deeply, taking in the smell of the place. Her heart is full of pure joy… and gratitude.

Home. 

He brought it back to her.

[jihoonscafe]

l.jh | love me

jihoon x reader (slight college!au)

word count : 1457 words. genre : fluff !! (its his birthday im not hurting him) synopsis : “i love you ji” “i love you too angel”

✐ this is for this angel’s birthday because i love him more than i love anyone else in the world and i hope he had the most amazing birthday of all, and this is basically me being self-indulgent and writing a scenario of my own dream date bye :^))) @trbld-writer luna this one’s for u n ur fluffy jihoon fic which ruined me ,, also tagging @jishua n @myungho because i want dana to cry w/ me n alicia just deserves to be tagged im s orry ,,,

Tinkling laughter fills the melody of the twinkling night, with the moon illuminating the starless sky, a cold breeze dancing with the lovestruck couple who are enveloped in each other’s arms, giggling quietly in hidden unspoken jokes, as they dance to a quiet ambient tune flowing from the phone forgotten among the grass somewhere.

The boy would happen to be Lee Jihoon, a fully declared music production major at the nearby university and the other would be you, you with the dorky grin he had come to live to see everyday when he woke up.

He didn’t know when it happened, when he fell in love so hard that the cold surface from which he had been taken from, he didn’t even remember, he didn’t want to remember. You were after all, his sun. His beautiful sun, who he adored so so much that he could implode from the very thought of you, the softest pink painting across his cheeks, a quiet pride everytime he called you his, and him yours.

This was love, and he knew it. He knew it was love because of the late nights where all you did was send him outdated memes when all he could think of were the difficulties and the failures. He knew it was love because of the soft sleepy kisses when both of you were tired and lay in bed, covered in the warm rays of sunlight streaked against your bare skin, tired and so in love. He knew it was love when you wrestled him out of his studio to eat midnight McDonalds even though you hated burgers because he was too stressed and wasn’t eating. He knew it was love when you complained about him drooling but then grinning that damn smile which made him almost die everytime he saw it. He knew it was love because the very thought of you would bring the most genuine smile to his face, and nothing could make him happier than you. 

This wasn’t the love he had read about in books, or heard on the top twenty on the radio, this was his love. 

He remembered when he first met you, overly excited and extroverted on the very first day of middle school, giggling your heart’s content away at some odd joke book you had found at the school’s library, telling jokes to every person who stopped to listen them and smiling like you had the sun inside you when they laughed. He remembered walking upto you to listen to one, and laughing because of how bad the pun was, and seeing that smile light up your whole face and instantly committing to a friendship.

He remembered depending on you, you becoming his closest friend, holding all his secrets and making his worst days just a little bit happier no matter what happened. He remembered seeing you cry for the first time, seeing you crumble completely, natural happy persona flying away as he noticed that you were breaking, that you had always had this side to you which was hidden.

He remembered the first time he had hugged you, holding you close as if he could simply squeeze you back into the happy you, the you which he had grown to adore as a friend and perhaps something more over the years.

High school had brought change to your innocent friendship, with you becoming the beautiful successful person he had always known you would become, outshining everyone with that bright smile and personality of yours. He was the shy one, the one who would have rather hidden in your shadows but it never worked, because damn if you would let him slink behind you. 

And he remembered falling in love with you for the first time when you serenaded him in the parking lot of KFC because he was crying over his first breakup with some girl who he had somehow managed to end up with. He remembered the cheeky smile on your face as you brought him to a watery smile and then as it turned into a grin, he fell in love.

The grass is slightly damp from the fog which had shrouded the park earlier and it tickles against his bare feet as he spins you clumsily, that stupidly in love smile taking over his soft features as you laugh at the dumbness of this whole idea, yet also the fondness surrounding it just he pulls you back to him, chest warm against yours.

You both had spent the whole day roaming these huge parks, a little vacation strayed off from your common class trip which both of you had lost interest in quite quickly. The playgrounds, the little horse rides and the picnics had all been checked off the day’s schedule and as you had tried to head home, Jihoon had decided that the day’s last surprise for you was going to be this little dance, the stargazing picnic you had always told him you loved from every cliché romance book both of you had ridiculed over.

So, he brought your fantasy to life, because if you could bring him to life everyday he breathed, he could do anything for you.

You lean your head against his shoulder, his arms warm around you and he wonders why you both had never done this before, it wasn’t that bad, not that he would admit to it out loud because it would always find its way to becoming a ridiculed joke about how “he was growing soft for you” which was a blatant lie because he was always soft for you, and he made sure you knew it everyday, that he was ready to do anything for you, and for your happiness.

Your first date together had been in freshman year of college, when both of you had finally found enough courage to fess up your feelings and had spent the whole night finally, finally cuddling in a romantic sense of the word.

It was a pretty classic first date, if you called roller skating typical, as you were the one to plan it and he truly wouldn’t have expected anything else than shaking awkwardly on the ice as you tried to pull some obscure 80s disco dance step which he was sure he had seen Seokmin do at some point.

Your first kiss has been when he had produced a song for you, and it had sounded so perfect that you had begun to cry which caused him to panic ever so adorably, hands flailing around as he tried to console you before your lips were on his and you both were kissing to all sweet heavens.

Your first real “I love you” was on the day he had changed his major from economics like his parents had wanted for him to music which was his own passion, and the one thing he was so in love with that you could see the fire within in his eyes when he produced a musical piece, when he sang. It was in the rain, right outside the ugly admin office of the school, in the end of sophomore year, as he ran out, dressed in a red bomber jacket, out of breath and crying as you waited for him outside and then as soon as he was out of the doors, he was next to you, holding your hands and you dared ask him the question to which he replied with a nod, a soft kiss, and the happiest smile you had seen on him. 

He then whispered the three words into your skin as he hid his face into the crook of your neck, almost drowned out by the falling rain but you would have heard it even if you were in the middle of a hurricane because those were the words you had lived to hear, which you still lived to hear.

You whispered it back, and he chanted it like a mantra, kissing the soft skin of your face, covering it in his affection as both of you cried silently at the sheer euphoria running through your veins.

“I look like a mess”, you mumble as he plays with your hair, both of you now standing still, still in each other’s arms, hugging each other for the very comfort and love it brought to you, covered in comfortable affectionate silence, a silence where words are not needed to tell you what the other feels.

“You look perfect, shush”, he tuts, kissing the top of your forehead, right at the edge of your hairline, as you blush at him, at his bluntness, at his open adoration, at how much you love it and love him.

“I love you Ji”

“I love you too angel”

[gamocial]

Games and Our Behavior

People are said to be the sum of their experiences, and their reactions to those experiences. Games are a kind of playground where we can find out more about ourselves and how we react – but how do their experiences influence us? Time spent in games is time spent nonetheless, and considering the amount of it spent by those who count it amongst their hobbies, the final tally couldn’t help but leave some kind of mark. Hence I’m not asking if games influence our behavior, but how.

I’m not approaching this academically, because A) I don’t want to, and B) most if not all the research done regards that dead-dog of a topic I’m too bored to mention. I’d rather approach this personally, because while I can see some of the effects games have made on me, I have only questions to pose. I’d rather encourage others to partake in their own reflection for their own answers. So how do our choices on what kind of games we play impress our behavior in the rest of our lives?

Save for my netcafe stint, I’ve very much been a man of the singleplayer, chiefly because I prize narrative and challenge. Soldiering on, sometimes literally, for thousands of hours inevitably cultivates certain thinking when you’re the only one who has any impact on the outcome. It says, “nothing will get done, nothing will change unless I do it – and no one else can help.”

A lot of single-player games, particularly action ones, work off hero fantasy. You’re supposed to be the only one who can save the world – everything is up to you. I’ve redeemed hundreds of worlds just from my abilities, and probably adopted some sort of hero complex. Every time I play one of these games I’m inadvertently telling myself “everything is up to me.” Eventually that message becomes second-nature, then behavior, then personality. So games have made me independent – fiercely independent. I’m self-reliant and confident in my abilities, but I’m also stubborn, I overestimate myself, and I don’t ask for help when I should.

Even NPCs don’t much alleviate your burden. Playing Mass Effect: Andromeda, my teammates are consistently helpful, if for nothing else than causing distractions. But I don’t rely on them. They don’t drive the progress. They won’t save the Heleus Cluster for me if I do nothing.

Nowhere was this more evident than Resident Evil 7 – a game which gave me a bad case of the willies. With an atmosphere made of trepidation, no one was going to help me complete the game. No one was going to remedy my apprehension if I kept playing. No one but the imaginary girlfriend would sit with me for the full course, and no one could play it for me.

Of course you can always ask for help where the rest of your life is concerned, but that certainly isn't my immediate response, because through practice and repetition I've learnt to respond with the single-player answer. So are we then living more empowered, or are we needlessly sequestering ourselves from help and cooperation?

Sidebar - Be sure to check out TheGamerCollective.com for all the latest gaming news, reviews for every possible accessory a gamer could ever dream of, and loads more.

Obviously there are more factors involved in a person's independence, but in retrospect, games have probably been the most significant for me – almost like behavioral prep to adapt for rest of life. We all have different play habits, and we all react to different circumstances in different ways, so I wonder what somebody else would be like who's subsisted on MOBAs and team-based games. I imagine they'd have a greater sense of their role as part of a collective body – what they should and shouldn’t be doing. Though I'd also wonder how they fare as an individual. Do they struggle to complete tasks on their own? Would they still be trying to rely on other people even when other people aren't around to help?

Playing Overwatch has been somewhat of a truth-bomb, being so antithetical to the games I'm use to. I'm no longer a lone maverick – instead I'm part of a fully-functional team with a specific role to play. When I'm feeling particularly altruistic and I'm playing as Reinhardt or Mercy, other players are depending on me to shield or heal them, and I'm depending on them to take out the opponents I'm trying to resist attacking – the ones I'm so accustomed to killing by my lonesome in single-player.

Games are subtle teachers. For better or worse we adopt the lessons they put forward. We learn new behaviors and new ways of thinking, often incognito, from the kind of games we choose to play. Whether a game has any message or not, we’re often learning something regardless. I didn't even recognize what had happened until years later, after looking through the games I own. And while my independence has become a double-edged sword, which I can't really blame on games, that I can also counteract my behavior using the same medium is truly unique.

[morgansfunpage]

The Gift – How To Slay A Dragon

Hello my invisible other…I feel like I’ve been holding my breath for the last four weeks…gasping to take a breather…taking time out to absorb the present memories recently brought to life…the fragments of love floating around my heart are remnants of what was…what is…and indeed what could be…The Gift – How To Slay A Dragon

if only, becomes a cry in the dark at present due to the absence of mutual trust and the lack of depth where internal feelings are concerned…my heart no longer slices like a carving knife at the scar tissue of old wounds…instead I kiss each sealed entry point…like a wise man once bitten no longer shy…fools fall in love

the gift…the gift…the gift…the gift…the gift…the gift

the need to piece together the love lost…the love found…and the love suppressed in the here and now has become vital to keep my heart on the knifes edge…choosing to walk the straight and narrow with one aim in sight…keeping balanced every step of the way…retracing the footsteps of the dragon…

knowing too well how one slip up could lead to the down fall of ones own soul…life can take its toll…weighing the heart down until it snaps under the peer pressure of opportunity knocks

whether it be to fulfill your own fantasy or another heart’s desire…by following the temptation of a silver tongue…the heart will eventually sever all ties with reality…a superficial puppet carrying the chains of hell fire…

the devil has a warped ideal of love…shaping and carving human hearts to follow in their ancestors blind beliefs of what love truly means…indeed my invisible other the puppeteer would be dead right…

love in the pure sense would remain lost among the debris of fractured and shattered souls…with the hope of future hearts becoming accustom to down trodden broken dreams…

the gift…the gift…the gift…the gift…the gift…the gift

keeping traditions alive throughout the centuries…Ignorance and want hidden under the cloak of power and glory…orphaned off to the highest bidder for a life time of grooming

without trust…self respect…honor and a genuine care towards one another’s well being…human beings in a world of plenty become spiritually starved by greed and love for this material world…a selfish existence in the end

absorbing the pain of others is a crucial remedy…medicine for any soul wanting to alleviate heart ache…whether it be someone else’s or your own…

unburdening the load at the same time uplifting each other’s spirits…a brighter future to work towards lifting the veil of darkness once and for all…

pain is a healing process for all concerned…a two way lesson to be learnt…a plan of action that tries to avoid A&E…the home of broken bones and other mortal ailments…superficial scars heal right before your very eyes leaving behind a visual sign of love gone wrong…displaying ones heart on a sleeve of skin for all to see…in my eyes my dear…foolhardy

emotional scars remain blind until you open both eyes…the question is my dear…where do broken hearts go to find their way home…for your heart to feel like home sweet home you need to be able to live with yourself in the real world

the gift…the gift…the gift…the gift…the gift…the gift

Before I delve into my heart’s desire I feel the need to look beyond the world we think we see…the world that seems nothing more than a daily routine…eat…sleep…work…shit…

birth and death a reality much more than a cycle of every human beings life…the idea of a purpose or the reality of ones existence is believed to be a mystery best kept unheard of…

millions upon millions of souls unaware of their true identity desperately seeking a meaning to life…the overwhelming need to fill a void is ever present…Love becomes the devils misdirection…a trap so cleverly disguised love becomes the souls demise

A heart born in today’s day and age will look towards a science lab for answers related to love…an emotion that needs tender loving care to grow and eventually bloom…the cold harsh reality of a mortuary slab deals with the death of a mortal vessel…

can a postmortem uncover how much love or indeed pain the heart concealed throughout its lifetime…a clogged artery or a heart attack speaks volumes about lifestyle…

the gift…the gift…the gift…the gift…the gift…the gift

good and bad choices where food and drink is concerned…DNA flaws along with inherited diseases can all be a cause of death…there are a million ways to die a mortal death my dear…but only one way to die spiritually…

you see my invisible other the heart that beats in your chest is so much more than an organ of flesh..every heart born into this world has a spiritual mission…to find its way home…placed deep within the heart is a guidance…it has nothing to do with a star or three wise men my imaginary friend

a knowledge of good and evil…right from wrong…every heart is born with an innocence that sheds light on a purer love beyond this world…a direct link to the The Divine…an undertaking of one’s soul becomes the hearts ultimate goal…

the soul has a life of its own…a spiritual being that contains a light like that of an angel…and a darkness like that of a demon…a mirror image that is split down the middle…an equal balance of good and evil…

the heart is attached to the light even though the dark half is closer to home…the heart that remains in a state of purity acts like a mirror reflecting the light to illuminate the dark side of the mind…

the gift…the gift…the gift…the gift…the gift…the gift

if the conscience becomes clouded with doubts and the love of this world…the hearts vision becomes difficult to see…blocking out the light leading to eternal darkness…deaf…dumb and blind…sealing the heart resulting in a spiritual death…

life goes on for the mortal shell now living dead under the devils command…having distinguished the light of one’s Creator…the devil now has the right to coincide taking order over the empty vessel…

the purpose of the lifeless soul becomes focused on the pleasures of this world…disregarding the hereafter as a homeless abode…looked upon as a fantasy world…

The question you should be asking yourself my dear…how did the Shaytan manage to fool the hearts of mankind…

The reality is my invisible other it didn’t happen over night…generations upon generations before our arrival on planet earth had succumbed to the illusion of this world…falling victim to the innovation of lies

a new born child’s chances of remaining pure at heart will depend upon the infants guardians…if the parents are far removed from the straight path they will raise their offspring the traditional way…the same way their own parents raised them…

the gift…the gift…the gift…the gift…the gift…the gift

if the heart of the child grows attached to a love other than its true intent…the misdirected love or false belief will become the hearts down fall if followed blindly into adulthood…when puberty arrives the gift of free will is granted to every soul…if the heart fails to recognize its duty…choosing to remain young and forever foolish

the devil no longer hidden in the wings…whispers into the heart of men and women a like…offering the soul a joyride…the soul who seeks a life on easy street…strives for a comfortably numb existence without heartache or misery…

will live their lives without knowing the devil personally…conform…turn a blind eye and follow the majority of modernized conditioned humans…this world will become no more than a dream of a dreamer…the existence of angels and demons will become a myth like the soul of men…erasing The Creator of the heavens and earth from the hearts internal memory

any selfish act of transgression involving the seven deadly demons will kill the heart from the inside out…there’s not a saint nor priest dead or alive who can bring the dead back to life

Subconsciously emotional ties and the attachments of love are bonded to the heart from a tender age…ribbons of silk entwined with barbed wire becomes entangled by the heart’s desire…love at first sight is an unconditional free for all…

the gift…the gift…the gift…the gift…the gift…the gift

no matter what hurt comes by way of misunderstood love…love conquers the hearts worst fears…eliminating hate as a crime against one’s own self…an immature heart holds onto love like the elixir of life…

the ego on the other hand grips the injustice overlooked by the heart who loves regardless of feelings being hurt…placing a wedge of resentment between the hearts judgment of what’s right and whose wrong…

the benefit of the doubt plays havoc with a shadow of doubt…a conflict of wills twists the idea of love flipping it on its head…love from an egos perspective has a lot to be desired…

when nobodies home the devil comes a knocking…offering the deceitful ego an invitation to gorge on its own flesh…a suggestion to turn every fantasy into a reality…making what if..

a perversion or a blessing in disguise depending upon the souls good or evil intention…if the ego steps aside allowing the dark half to reside…the heart is overthrown…a complete black out…lust turns love into a dirty word…the soul becoming a shadow of its former self…hidden behind eyes wearing a fake smile…

Past time love Part One…I was lost inside the devils playground for the time being…born into slavery and raised to love the devil without question…a production set a flame…directed and co-hosted by the devil himself…all actors and actresses are subconsciously center stage…unaware of the role they played…

hidden behind the scenes waiting for the final curtain to fall…my own example of the game of love is a free gift from one soul to another…a rebellious soul where the devil is concerned…unable to break my spirit…

the gift…the gift…the gift…the gift…the gift…the gift

the devil paid close attention to my inhibitions…every ounce of love my heart kept alive was used against my soul killing it softly…holding my heart hostage against my egos better judgment…

a pain free experience passed on to you my invisible other…how to slay a dragon…stop chasing the dream and start moon walking…become the hunter…heading in one direction…all the way home

the mistaken identity of the devils footsteps will start to look a lot like your own…only one set of foot prints are visible…chose your direction wisely and your shadow will be left without choice…keeping the future in mind

broadcasting straight from a soul once shackled and chained to this thing called love…a heart bypass knocked me for six…the devil offered my soul an unholy matrimony…a declaration of undying love

my past experience of Love had never gone beyond the bond of blood ties….cutting so deep it nearly severed an artery…at the time I didn’t feel the knife go in…Every twist of fate tore through layer upon layer of mind numbing pain…the thought of loving a stranger was a joke that tickled my ego

I was immune to my own heart ache until I brought it upon myself…I would have to say accidentally on purpose my dear…the stranger I was waiting for was no ordinary demon…he was a dream come true…A stoker…

the kiss of death would hunt down my soul many a night…including every christmas eve…unable to breathe I would wake up inside my dreams…opening my eyes in the dead of night…what did I see…the gift of life in the present…putting to bed the nightmare of death laying in my wake

I had one advantage over my suitor…I caught sight of the dark prince first…a year or two before he actually became acquainted with my mortal shell…my first name happened to be a permanent fixture under his skin…

why indeed my invisible other…the story goes…He loved the name Natasha so much so…he christened his wishful thinking in ink…a future reference…a title aimed towards the fruit of his loins…playing god with his own fate so to speak…

the gift…the gift…the gift…the gift…the gift…the gift

it was just a matter of time before our destinies entwined…on the stroke of midnight 31-10-89…Ah-satan came a knocking on my door…my heart red raw and tenderized in the name of love…huffed and puffed under baited breath…

my soul on the other hand stood in the shadows…a gesture that welcomed my dark half to step inside…closing the door behind my adversary to keep the light of the moon from exposing my true Identity…true colours were hidden on both sides…making this game of checkmate a dead end insight…to becontinued

[dellardragon]

First Essay

I was born in Bloomington, Indiana in 1974, to a middle class couple. They were well meaning. But they weren't a particularly happy one. They would split up when I was 5. My father would ask me if I was happy he was leaving. I answered honestly. I said yes, because I knew the shouting matches that they would get into every few nights would stop...

My early years, at least according my mother, and some dim memories that I still hold from those times, apart from the friction between my parents, were reasonably happy. My mother has recounted that I was relatively easy going as a hatchling. Never complained unless there was something truly wrong. I was apparently very outgoing.  Very focused on people. I seemed to be always trying to get them to smile. When we prepared to move to Alexandria, Virginia a year later, many of our neighbors, some who had acted as my sitters when my parents were working, made a point of saying goodbye to me specifically. I was apparently rather popular as hatchlings go...

My experiences at kindergarten were mostly positive. It was run by the Episcopal church my mother went to, after we moved into the DC area. I was diagnosed early with learning disabilities. Therapists that worked with the kindergarten, worked with me, explaining to me as best they could how I was different, and taught me ways to cope. They started physical therapy to help my brain learn to control the body it had a scrambled connection to. They taught me to make sense of the wall of noise, presented to me by my senses. My brain, having to do the hard work of processing the data that normally would have been handled by my malfunctioning brain-stem, became quite burley, as a neurologist would explain to me decades later.

I had an inquisitive mind. I was curious about everything, wanting to know how they worked. I was able to grasp complex concepts that often one needed to be much older to understand. At three years old, as my mother once recounted, I would exclaim the revelation that numbers could go on forever, without end. When I was in second grade, after my mother, at my insistence, read me a high school level book about how nuclear reactors worked, as a bedtime story, would start drawing up and then refining, schematics for a nuclear powered rocket, complete with two reactor cores, radiation shield, and RCS thrusters to spin the vessel to simulate gravity for it's occupants. My IQ would later be measured around 150.

I was understood in kindergarten. I had teachers well versed in learning disabilities, and patient and kind. And I had a mother who had once been an educator herself, who advocated for me passionately. I was happy.

My school career would be less happy.

I was still quite awkward. I would be receiving physical therapy for a further 5 years. When my mother took me to see what would be my first elementary school, I went running across the playground, and before she could catch me, would run straight into a metal link chain that would catch me at neck level, and throw me to the ground. I was unable to stop myself in time.

My first grade teacher would be a Ms. Stein who was every bit as unwilling to understand about my condition as the kindergarten teachers were kind to me. She would help make my first year of schooling an absolute hell.

This was the early years of understanding about learning disabilities. Many teachers, too set in their ways, were unwilling to make accommodation. The Americans With Disabilities Act, that would reserve the right of the federal government, to deny funding to a school that didn't make proper accommodations for disabled students, was still a decade away. Learning disabled students were picked up by smaller buses, on special routes. Some schools housed them in homerooms with students with a variety of disabilities, keeping them out of the general populations as much as possible.

I would have a spelling teacher in fourth grade, who would keep me after class every day, because I couldn't finish my work in time, largely due to the motor coordination issues I had with writing. While my classmates got to watch a mid day movie during the break before lunch, I would be forced to struggle through the rest of it, with the teacher breathing down my neck. I still remember her scowl. Her telling me that learning disabilities didn't exist. That I was just slacking.

The stigma was heavy, and the students noticed. For years I would spend nights cuddled up next to my mother wailing about how I had no friends. How everyone was mean to me. And I didn't understand why...

I began to withdraw. To dread school. To me it was all struggle. All judgment. All punishment for me being different.

It would not be the only horrible thing to happen to me.

When I was 7 I was sexually abused by a neighbor down the road. A mentally challenged teenager. He was 14 but with the mind of a 6 year old, and had no idea what he was doing. But the damage lives with me to this day.

My father had mental problems. He was violent towards me, when he had problems controlling his anger. While I would say that later on we got along well enough, he never really held the place a father would in my life. He tried, but he was too haunted by his own abusive past.

I developed severe OCD when I was 13. My early teen years was spent seeing psychologists, psychiatrists, and neurologists. I was put on a veritable cornucopia of various SSRIs and other medications, searching for the right medication or combination, to turn down the volume on the screaming thoughts in my head. The ones about how I was dirty, and needed to clean myself endlessly. It would get bad enough that, I would eventually spend 13 hours a day in the bathroom, doing horrible things to myself, trying to get clean. My hair turn blond, from all the hydrogen peroxide I was spraying everywhere, trying to sanitize my home around me. My mother would threaten to get me hospitalized, if I didn't seek help. Thankfully, I was eventually able to find a medication that turns that scream down to a dull roar.

When I was 17, I came to understand that I was Gay. My mother was extremely understanding. While she feared that I would experience further prejudice, she made clear that the only issue she had with it (and she made it clear this was HER issue, and NOT mine),was that she probably could expect no biological grandchildren. She was right about that, alas.

I also developed clinical depression. At one point I was sleeping 14 hours a day, and eating myself into oblivion, because I felt like I had no real future that wasn't filled with just more suffering.

Throughout my life, I would struggle. Find myself the strange one. The one looking in from the outside, not allowed to have a normal life. To be subjected to horrors that my mother could not completely shield me from. And worse, I was smart. I became increasingly aware of how dysfunctional the world was. How arbitrary.

Things have thankfully changed for the better, for me, lately.

I have friends that I have made over the years since I left school. I now have a bit of a social network. After two extremely dysfunctional relationships (after taking a break from such things), I found a partner that I am truly compatible with. Our interests compliment each other wonderfully. He is my best friend, my partner, and my collaborator in geeky projects aplenty. Even with the world ironically seeming to fall off a cliff, just as I'm finally finding my own equilibrium, I have new friends that helped me grow a community, that we found ourselves inheriting. It's a social circle that we all can lean on, for which I am very grateful. It took nearly 4 decades of life, but I feel like I finally have a future. Something to do. Something to look forward to.

I found that I am very unusual combination.

I am a nerd, with interests that until very recently, were considered fringe, and were generally derided in most cases. Not considered dangerous, but definitely childish and unmanly. Videogames, science fiction, fantasy, and being a science and tech geek, were all things that would get you looked at oddly, or dismissed as a dreamer, as if being a dreamer was a bad thing. My experiences have formed what I believe is probably either a unique or at least uncommon viewpoint on the world. I'm not a part of the rat race. I have no career due to my conditions. I have no children, and no plans to have any. I feel that I am too unstable. It would not be good for me to be having to take care of another life, that was entirely dependent on me, when I am not able to really look after myself on more than a very basic level physically. But I'm incredibly bright, which is both a blessing and a curse. I'm good with technology and science, and can grasp the concepts, if not consciously the math. I can make inferences that have proven to be reasonably accurate. And I have time to think. Time to wonder, and to learn. And I have what I hope is a decent writing ability.

And I've stumbled. Alot. I've made some doozies of mistakes in my life, that have humbled me, and hopefully given me some measure of understanding, if only simply "Okay, better not to do THAT again..."

So here I am. I may not be female, or a person of color, but I am still a minority in my own way. I'm gay, an abuse survivor both sexual and physical, a sufferer of mental illness,  a person with disabilities, and a person with interests that for the majority of my life were looked down upon, and to this day still carry some stigma. A minority, of a minority, of a minority, of a minority, of a minority.

And I'm getting older. I'm thinking about mortality. About what I will leave behind when I pass off this mortal coil. There will be friends to remember me, but no children to carry on in my stead. Robin Williams once said the wonderful thing about having children is that they are both you, and not you. But that in some way, it's a ticket towards, if not immortality, towards having something of you live on, after you for at least a time. I don't have that...

I want to leave something behind. Something that hopefully can endure after I am gone.

As I said before, I have some decent writing ability, or at least I'm told that I do. It's not the first time I've considered doing this, but lately, with everything that's going on, I figured, what the hell. Best to just get on with it...

They say that nothing really ever disappears on the Internet. That it may become harder to find, but it's always still out there somewhere...

So, after much procrastination, I have decided to start writing. To create essays that give my point of view on what hopefully will be a variety of topics. Some will be on politics, some on philosophy, some on science and physics, some on more geeky topics like fandom and science fiction, videogames, etc.

I will try to post at least 1 thing a week on Facebook, Tumblr, and Furaffinity (yeah, I'm also one of them furries).  Hopefully someone will read these and take away something of value. That maybe it will change an opinion, or give an insight or inspiration. Something that can survive me, even if my name and who I was is forgotten. Here's hoping.

And here goes nothing...

[seventeen-scenarios-blog]

[FIC] Instinct (T) (PART 1)

Member: Jeon Wonwoo Prompt: Werewolf!Wonwoo Word Count: 6,496  Genre: Fantasy, thriller Warnings: Explicit bloodshed, cursing

A/N: whoo, 2 fics in a month. Well actually, I’ve been done with Part 1 of this story for quite a while now, since last December, perhaps? As we’ve been pretty pressed for stories nowadays, I thought that this would serve as a good buffer post in between our large number of requests. But no worries, we’ll get them up and running soon!

Part 2 has not been touched since January, so I’d expect it to be completed only some time later in the year. Do be patient! I really did enjoy writing this as this is my virgin experience writing a fantasy fic. Do let me know what you think ^^

wooed<3

You’ve been all too familiar with the supernatural for as long as you can remember. Even as a young child, rather than socialising in playgrounds with other human children, your companions consist of three young werewolves, and you spend your childhood years rolling around the mud and grass together under the watchful eyes of your parents and the great Alpha.

There is responsible and meticulous Seungchul, the oldest of the litter of pups and the only pure-born wolf out of the three, being the son of the Alpha. There is the playful Hansol: the Alpha had found him as an infant abandoned in the woods and turned him from a young age. Finally, faithful Mingyu, your older brother. While your brother had taken the oath to join the werewolf ranks as a child, you were spared of the transformation simply because of your gender. You were destined to follow the footsteps of your mother to become the next guardian of the pack, the bridge of communication between the wolves and the human world, as well as a healer and caretaker.

When Seungchul came of age, tradition stated that he should leave and form his own pack, and together with Mingyu and Hansol, you left the comfort of your old home. Though still inexperienced on the field, Seungchul is a noble and powerful Alpha, and despite your small pack size, you all thrived under this new leadership. You assumed your duties as guardian and healer, and the four of you live peaceful lives in your part of the forest.

It is the night after the first full moon as a new pack when the tranquility was broken. The pack members had sensed a disturbance in the air after their monthly transformation; several lone wolves had strayed past your borders, and that was a terrible violation of the code of the werewolves. You eventually reduced yourself to hiding in the safety of your wooden cabin as the sounds of menacing growls, gnashing teeth and ripping fur fill the night air. Not that you aren’t used to violence and bloodshed; you grew up with werewolves, for crying out loud. But should a mere human like you find yourself in the middle of clashing, oversized canines, needless to say you’d be pulverised in seconds.

But that doesn’t stop the way you winced when Mingyu’s yelp of pain was carried through the wind, along with Seungchul’s snarl of defiance and Hansol’s hair-raising howls. You know that you’d have to spend the next morning tending to a sizeable number of injuries from the caterwauling they made.

It’s barely their first battle, and they’d have to defend themselves for the rest of their lives. The pack’s extremely competent fighters, you should know. They’ll be fine.

At the crack of dawn, someone raps at your door, causing you to throw your covers onto the floor as you rush to open it. You don’t need any other confirmation to know that it is Mingyu outside the cabin. Though you aren’t a wolf yourself, you have pretty decent intuition. He was probably pretty hurt from last night; he had always been the pacifist out of the three, unwilling to fight unless terribly necessary. It’s only rational for him to bring his injuries to you rather than waiting for you to show up at the den later.

“Shit,” you gasp at the sight of your bedraggled older brother, now back in human form. He isn’t that beaten up as you had imagined (you have a pretty wild one, admittedly), but he has to hold onto the frame of the doorway for support as his free hand clutches onto his waist.

“Yeah,” he half-chuckles, bleeding from the gash on his chest. “Had my back turned for a fucking split second. Rookie mistake.” You waste no time, grabbing your stash of medical supplies with practiced ease. But before you can even usher him in to treat his injuries, Mingyu makes a swift grab on your wrist, pulling you out of the house once you got the equipment. For an injured wolf, he sure moves fast as he has you stumbling clumsily through the woods.

“Dude, what gives?” you yelp in surprise, the winter-frosted leaves beneath your feet crunching rapidly as you jogged past the trees. “No time,” replies your brother between his exhausted wheezing. “We’ve a crisis back in the den. We need you there as soon as possible.”

“And what about you?!”

“I’ll be fine, but we need to hurry.” It’s common knowledge that werewolves can heal themselves within a short span of hours, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t feel pain. And Mingyu is a sucker at pain; you had an episode of the hissy-fit he had thrown when he had a thistle caught in his paw to prove it. So you figured that whatever’s up in the den must truly be important should Mingyu be willing to actually delay his treatment. You steel your legs, trying to keep up with your older brother’s lengthy strides until you both arrive at the pack’s ‘den’: a similar looking but bigger wood cabin than yours situated next to a running fresh river. Mingyu all but throws the door open and pulls you inside, glancing around the different doors while keeping a firm grip on your wrist.

You spot Hansol sitting in the couch next to the fireplace, tending to a scrape on his wrist, while Seungchul’s nowhere to be seen. You quickly assume that your Alpha is the one in danger, and you turn with a mind to dash up towards his room. But Mingyu is quick to tug you towards the other direction. “Guest room,” he mutters to himself as he marches off towards the other end of the hall with you in tow.

You crinkle your eyebrows in confusion. The guest room? Nonetheless, you hurry after him, expecting to be greeted with Seungchul’s mangled body lying in the spare room, but before Mingyu even lays a hand on the doorknob, the door to the guest room flings inward, revealing your Alpha, whole and well.

“Oh, good,” Seungchul hastily greets you. He barely looks physically injured, though the black fringe of his hair sticks to his forehead, slick with perspiration. “You’re here.”

“How’s he doing?” Mingyu questions, finally loosening the iron grip on your wrist.

“Not good, he fell back into unconsciousness just as we managed to get him here. You came right on time,” Seungchul glances at you and your medical supplies. “I don’t know how much longer he’s able to hold on.”

By this time, you are able to put two and two together, and realise that the subject at hand isn’t a member of your pack, but an outsider. And chances are, he’s most likely not a wolf, which meant that his life is literally hanging by a thread, going by the words of Seungchul. “I’m on it,” you quickly tell him, shoving past the two tall males to get into the room, and you already expected the sight in front of you.

A beaten, bloodied figure lies squarely in the middle of the bed, the bruises dotting all over his pale skin greatly contrasting against the snow white sheets. A young male, you observe, barely older than twenty. Stripped down to the flesh, his body is tainted with red streaks of crusted, dirtied flesh wounds, barely leaving any inch of exposed skin untouched. Even with your years’ worth of experience as the pack guardian, you have never seen that much bloodshed on another living being before. But while the images of them would have sent anyone recoiling in horror, the worst of them all lies just on the stretch of skin just above his left wrist. Five deep, dark holes punctured on delicate muscle, crudely aligned in the shape of a semicircle. Your stomach churns as you try to even begin to fathom it.

It is a bite mark, ghastly dyed in a sickly shade of green and purple, still oozing out blood and pus. Deep enough to tear through tissues and penetrate bone, it leaves a broken, lifeless arm in its wake. A wolf bite, there’s no doubt about it; you’ve seen enough of them to last you a lifetime. While practically harmless to wolves, it definitely has devastating effects on any human being. It is truly a wonder that he’s able to pull through for this long.

“Oh, Sirius…” you find yourself cursing, your hand flying to your mouth on instinct.

“Yeah, it’s pretty serious,” grunts your Alpha, walking up to stand next to you. You are in far too much of a shock to respond to his half-assed pun, and you turn to the other two wolves for some sort of clarification as you quickly set down your supplies next to the bed. “We found him lying just within our borders, reeking of mutt scents. Those fuckers used this poor kid as a bait to lure us into an ambush. He was barely breathing by the time we ripped their heads off.”

“Filthy mongrels,” bitterly spits Mingyu.

“From what I can see, he was bitten just mere hours ago, right before the full moon,” Seungchul states. “Still, it’s amazing he’s still breathing. Any ordinary person would have been dead by now.” You wince at those words, suddenly filled with resolve to save the dying man before you. “Does that mean he will…” you hear Mingyu’s pensive voice from behind you, his voice trailing off as he considers the possibility. And even with your back turned against the two wolves, you can picture Seungchul’s nodding all too well.

“Yes, if he can fight the infection. Come the next moon or so,” Seungchul solemnly intones. “He may very well be one of us.” Your actions on his wounds falter at your Alpha’s words, and Mingyu lets out a low sigh of sorrow. Normally, the prospect of an additional member to your pack would have excited you, but seeing someone this horridly mauled and robbed of his humanity in just hours… it just seemed too cruel. When he awakes, he’ll be an entirely different being. Subconsciously, your fingers ghost over the male’s gnarly arm and settles just above the nook of his elbow. I’m sorry, you had the burning urge to tell the unconscious boy.

Seungchul clears his throat, clearly unnerved by the existing tensions in the air. “I’ll leave him with you, we’ll be outside if we need anything. The hot water tray’s to your right.”

Without waiting for your verbal reply, you hear two sets of footsteps trudging heavily out of the room. As soon as the door slams shut, you get down to work. You just have to keep him alive until his wolf DNA kicks in to do the job for you. You are glad Seungchul had the sense to remove his clothing to make your job easier, but you had to force back a grimace as you laid eyes on the ripped, shredded sweater sprawled across the floor. It definitely wasn’t a red sweater before. The flesh wounds you handle easily enough, you’ve dealt with them  ever since you were a little girl. With years of practiced ease, you swiftly administer the necessary medication, applying ointment and bandaging his chest. The medicine was brewed from the precious, rare mountainside herbs you’ve sparingly picked. If they proved to be effective on wolves, there’s no doubt that it will be on a human. The bite wound needs a little more work. Though, there’s no way you’re able to stop the way the wolf venom creeps up his veins like a sickly, unrelenting creeper plant, seeping its way towards his brain.

In other words, he is a doomed werewolf.

You can only wash the bite with the hot water Seungchul provides, sterilising it before wrapping it around with a thick layer of gauze. You run a soft finger down the length of the bite, silently praying for its quick recovery. With the flesh wounds out of the way, there’s still one more thing you have to worry about. His body is working up a serious fever, his skin burning up in temperatures that feels like scalding iron on your fingertips; whether it is from the werewolf venom, or infection, you can’t tell (though you desperately hoped it isn’t the latter). Werewolves hardly fall sick, weathered by the harsh forest environment coupled with their naturally high immune system. In fact, the only time they ever burn up this much… You shudder as you recall the yearly mating seasons, a time which your older brother made sure you steered well clear of.

Still, you can’t let him be like this, so you throw open the windows, allowing the autumn-chilled breeze to cool down his body. You ditch the warm water for the cool one running from the tap in the guest bathroom, after rinsing the towel of its red contaminant.

“Please be okay,” you murmur, gently rubbing the wet towel across his chest and neck, wishing that you’ve paid closer attention to your mother when she had taught you about illnesses as a child. Nonetheless, you sincerely try your best. But at this angle, you are able to take a closer look at the injured boy without the gory mess of blood everywhere, and you have to admit, your heart actually skipped a beat.

This boy is beautiful. With ash grey hair falling just below his double-lidded, long-lashed eyes, a prominent nose above perky, chapped lips, his skin a creamy porcelain, collarbones forming well-defined but brittle ridges under his neck… He looks too delicate as he does good-looking; he looks like an ethereal god, yet you fear that he may break under the softest touch.

“Where did you come from?” you whisper, lightly rubbing the skin near his clavicle.

You’ve been around supernatural beings for all your life, and aside from your mother, you’ve never been around another living human being. And that very thought fascinates you. Dealing with werewolves is a fast-paced affair; slap on a band-aid or two and they’d be up and about in hours. Hence seeing someone this… frail, made you feel all the more protective over him.

Even with his lifespan as a human dwindles by the seconds, you can’t help but still feel drawn to him. For now, he’s still just like you; you have got to save him.

You dip the towel back into the basin and dabbed it carefully across his forehead after wringing out the excess water. Slowly but meticulously, you trace the wet cloth down his temple, across his intricately carved jawline, finally resting it on the side of his neck. But to your surprise, he begins to tremble under your touch, and you lightly withdraw your arm. Is he…

His closed eyelids flutter, and you can see the way his pupils move under the thin strip of skin as he gradually stirs into consciousness. You find yourself leaning forward in anticipation, the towel left forgotten in the basin. It takes a while, but his eyes crack open just by a sliver, revealing two stunning black orbs set in bloodshot whites. You heave out the breath of relief you have been holding. He’s okay, he’ll be okay…

Yet, though his eyes shift about the room, they are soulless and dull, as though he is barely aware of his surroundings. His once-shallow rise and falls of his chest grows heavier by seconds, his limbs shivering, and his lips crack open, allowing him to emit a terrified, pained whimper. Stunned, you watch as he tries to force words out of his throat, probably rubbed raw from the earlier ordeal. “H… H-Help…” At that, you snap out of your daze. Of course he would be disoriented once he awakens, he’s basically lived through hell and back. Pity wells around your chest, and you lay a comforting hand on his shoulder.

“Shh, you’re okay now…” you soothe, hoping that even with his foggy mind, he can still somehow understand you. “Everything’s alright. You’re safe here.”

He seems to hear you, and his bleary eyes slowly drift their way to meet yours, the cries of help quelling in his throat. In the rays of the rising morning sun, you see the way his misty onyx irises dilate as he registers your presence. Every hair along your nape stands on end as you drink in the sight in front of you, and your heart begins to palpitate as you lock your gazes. W-What is this feeling?

It feels like an eternity to you, but it was just mere milliseconds before his eyelids slide shut, allowing him to slip back into the dark abyss of unconsciousness. The breath you held in your lungs is expelled shakily, and you pull yourself away from his body. He’ll be okay, you keep telling yourself. You should leave him to rest now.

But that doesn’t stop the way your heartstrings tug as you step away from his frail body, and you fight the urge to remain by his side. But your pack still needs you with them. You finally tear your eyes away from him and trudge out of the guest room. Your three packmates are out in the living room, exhausted after a long night in the full moon.

You feel like you’re operating on autopilot as you begin to tend to your brother’s injuries.

“Is he alright?” your Alpha groans from your right, an ice pack resting over his left shoulder. You don’t trust your voice, but you get out a nod to respond to him. He grunts in approval, as well as in slight discomfort as he stands up. “We’ll begin our initiation once he recovers.”

“But is it safe? We don’t know anything about this boy at all,” comes Hansol’s quiet, concerned voice from next to the fireplace. You know where he’s coming from. From the old stories your mother had told you, humans who wished to join a pack were made werewolves by their own consent, not out of force. These humans would have to spend years intermingling with the species, establishing mutual trust and rapport before obtaining approval from the Alpha once he expresses his wish to turn. But this is not the case. The boy is savagely infected against his will, and there’s no undoing this.

Seungchul solemnly nods. “Yes, but we have no choice. We can’t simply leave a fledgling wolf out there by himself. Who knows what he’d be capable of. Like it or not, we have to care for him now.”

None of you can argue with that.

Seungchul glances despondently towards the guest room before lowering his head, as though grieving. “He’s one of us.”

The boy takes a surprisingly short time to recover, the effects of the wolf bacteria kicking in sooner than you’ve expected. By your second visit the next day, he’s more lucid, waking up upon your arrival, though he is still unable to talk. He watches you with dull, unresponsive eyes as you change the bandage of his bite wound.

You quickly introduce yourself to him, not wanting him to feel threatened by the fact that you’re a complete stranger tending to his injuries.

You aren’t sure if he’s able to speak, or if he simply doesn’t have the will to, but somehow or another, you wanted to fill the air with something other than choking silence. So you talk to him, about anything your mind wanders off to: the fall weather, the scenery, how you spotted a squirrel on the way to the den. Naturally, he offers no response, though he keeps his eyes trained on every little movement you make.

“Are you comfortable?” you ask him, wondering if he’s feeling stiff from lying down in bed for almost twenty four hours. The boy looks at you with shadowed eyes before poking out his tongue to moisten his dried lips. Even the sight of that small appendage has your body slowly heating up, and you have to look away before your heart threatens to burst out of your chest.

This boy does things to you, and you can’t even begin to decipher just what it is. And to think that you don’t even know his name to begin with.

Nonetheless, you slap on a stoic mask and help him readjust his pillow, so that he can sit upright to down the painkillers you’ve went out to town to purchase for him. You’d prefer if he had some solid food to go down with it, but according to Seungchul, he had vehemently refused to eat when Mingyu cooked up some porridge this morning. It’s the influence of the transformation, you note. It makes any fledgling feel impatient, lethargic, antsy and all around unpleasant. He will only experience worse from hereon until he first transforms. Only then will his body finally adjust and cope as a entirely new being.

He swallows his medication without any fuss, and you to nod in satisfaction. You back away once he is done, allowing the drug to take effect. He’d be in and out of consciousness for the time being as he recovers. The combined effects of both his wounds and the sudden transformation may prove exhausting for his body to cope. “Rest now, I’ll come by to check up on you tomorrow morning.“

What you don’t expect is the burst of energy he gets when his hand shoots out to latch around your wrist, and his touch alone sends a wave of ice that freezes every limb until you’re stuck in place. You turn to look at him, meeting his eyes that flash with panic.

“S-Stay,” he chokes out weakly, and you almost can’t hear him over your thundering thumps of your heart. “What?” you gasp.

“Please.” His voice, though scratchy from the lack of use, has a deep baritone ring that sends powerful chills down your spine. “Stay…” He must be terrified to be left alone after such a horrifying experience, you deduce, feeling yourself soften in pity. And since you just happened to be the first person he had seen after regaining consciousness, it is understandable that he’d sought comfort from your presence. As reassuringly as you can, you raise your free hand and places it over the one tightly clamped over your wrist.

“If that’s what you want,” you tell him. “I’m not going everywhere.”

You feel him search your eyes, his irises glistening over mistily. “Promise?” he ekes out, and you swear that you’ve melted on the spot, smiling warmly down at him as you nod. “Rest now.”

You end up patiently waiting as he drifts off into slumber. Only then did you finally muster the will to pull your hand away from his and slip quietly out of his room.

But it hasn’t been half a day until Seungchul calls you on your cellphone, when you’re taking a nap back at your own cabin. “What’s wrong?” you ask in slight panic. “Is the new kid okay?”

“He’s exactly the problem,” your Alpha confesses in a rush. “You need to come over—” His voice abruptly cuts off as a crash is heard in the background. Hansol’s voice, muffled yet cracking with alarm, comes next. “Tell her to goddamned hurry!”

“Chul!” you gasp into the phone, grasping at the device in worry as you’re tossing on a sweater. “What’s happening?!”

“We told him the truth!” Seungchul snaps at you. Another crash from the other end of the line has you barrelling out of the door already. “You can say that he didn’t take the truth too well. Please, we need you over here. He keeps calling for you and we don’t know what the fuck else to do!”

“What?!”

Seungchul is about to start a reply, when you hear a guttural cry from the other end, deep and thick with desperation, but the words formed from it are unmistakable. It is crying out for you, choking out your name as though it’s the only thing that’s keeping him alive. The boy’s, you realise in horror, the voice belongs to the boy!

“Shit, are you still there?” Seungchul hisses, noticing how silent you’ve grown. “Yeah, right here.” Shakily, you finally approach the den, chest heaving from the run, your cellphone still pressed against your ear. You are able to hear the crashes from both inside the house and from your phone, along with what sounds like the clanging of heavy metal against concrete. You swallow, unsure if you have the courage to face what’s going on inside.

But you’re the caretaker of the pack. No matter what, their wellbeing must always come first. The boy needs you. Taking a deep breath, you steel yourself, pushing open the front door after muttering a quick prayer to the stars for yourself.

“I’m here,” you bark as authoritatively as you can, your first sight being Mingyu backed up against the door to the guest room, while it sounds like there is a rough scuffle going on between the other three males inside the room.

“The fuck?!” Mingyu snarls at the sight of you, catching you off-guard as he lunges forward to grab you by the wrist. His eyes ablaze, your brother turns to yell, “I thought I told you not to call her! We got it under control!”

“It doesn’t sound like ‘control’ to me,” you snap back at him, tipping toes to glance past Mingyu’s gargantuan height. “Seungchul, what’s going on?!”

Your question is drowned out by a single howl of anguish that chills you down to the bone, and Mingyu holds you by your shoulder urgently. “Go home, you can’t be here. It’s way too dangerous.”

“You have no rights to tell me that, Mingyu. I’m the guardian of this pack, and I’m here to help.”

“And I’m your goddamned older brother,” he growls back. “How am I supposed to tell mom and dad that I stood by to let you get mauled by a fucking fledgling?!”

“Kim Mingyu, I swear to Sirius, if you don’t let me pa—”

“We’ve got him chained up for now,” Hansol stumbles out, wheezing. His declaration took a moment to sink in. “Ch-chained up?” you gasp as Mingyu lets go of your shoulders. “Why would you..?”

Seungchul exits the room soon after, his eyes filled with regret and distress. He is obviously not too happy with this arrangement as well. “We had no choice. Once he woke up, he was tearing the house apart, and calling out for you. He’s almost fully werewolf now, getting too powerful to stay unrestrained. All it takes is a single misstep and a lot can go wrong.”

“And how is he doing now?” you carefully ask, noting the sudden silence from the guest room.

“Ultra pissed,” is Hansol’s only disgruntled answer, and that’s enough to fill you with determination. “I’m going to talk to him.”

“No you’re not,” Mingyu is quick to argue, shuffling to stand between you and his Alpha, and effectively blocking your way to the room. “Mingyu,” Seungchul intones tiredly. “We need to know why the kid’s behaving like this. It’s the only way we can make him calm down.”

“I’m not letting my sister anywhere near that monster!” Mingyu roars, the walls rattling with the force of his voice.

“He’s not a monster!” you rebuke, feeling a surge of protectiveness overwhelming you like a wave. You’ve seen the boy yourself, he’s vulnerable, weak and scared out of his wits. There’s no way he’s able to hurt even a fly. A sweeping glance across Seungchul and Hansol tells you that they weren’t even hurt from their attempts to restrain him. He hadn’t been attacking at all, and Mingyu’s clearly misunderstanding him! The thought has you putting your foot down in indignation. “He needs our help, and like it or not, I will be helping him.”

Your brother scoffs with disbelief, the sympathy he had felt for the newcomer just yesterday completely dissipating. “Are you just going to let her?” It is a clear challenge to your Alpha, if Hansol’s bewildered expression is anything to go by, but Seungchul calmly meets his packmate’s searing eyes. “She will do what she needs to do.”  

An Alpha’s word is law.

Mingyu’s anger crumbles for a moment in dismay, but he’s quick to replace it back again. “Some Alpha you turned out to be,” he sneers, shoving past Hansol and heading straight for his room. The subsequent loud slamming of the door has the three of you flinching.

You sigh, completely used to your brother’s protective outbursts at this point, but you can tell that his words had left an impact on Seungchul, the latter bowing his head as though in self-doubt. He is still new at the whole Alpha thing, you sympathise, it’s natural that he’s self-conscious about his abilities. Gently, you reach out to pat his arm. “I’m going in there,” you tell the two wolves left in the room.

Your Alpha clears his throat immediately, slapping on a firm, stoic mask. “Yell if you need me, I’ll be right here.”

“Be careful,” Hansol adds, and you can tell that Mingyu’s words had struck a chord in him too. You nod at the both of them before turning to the room.

“His name is Wonwoo,” Seungchul calls after you, as though belatedly realising that the boy’s name would be of essential information for you. /Wonwoo/, you let the name settle in your mind as you push the door open.  For some reason, the name seems to ring in familiarity, resonating through your mind like an incessant echo.

The heavy wooden door groans as you swing it open and as though the room has been filled with vacuum, the breath in your lungs expel completely. “Oh my gosh,” you whimper at the sight before you. Wonwoo…

The boy, just as what Hansol had told you, has been restrained, the thick metal chains running across the ground and bolted securely against the cement walls. He has receded himself to the corners of the room, his arm protectively wrapped around his knees. His pupils are constricted and darting about across the room. To him, you realise, dealing with Hansol and Seungchul, two powerful, full-fledged werewolves, was like reliving the same nightmare all over again. Even with his body half-hidden in shadow, you can still him trembling in apprehension, sending the iron chains rattling against the floor. His physical injuries are non-existent by now, a miraculous improvement compared to his state yesterday, but to you, he looks worse than you can ever have imagined.

At the sound of the door opening, Wonwoo snaps his head towards you and writhes further towards the corner despite being backed up against the wall. The very sight of it tears your heart in half.

“Wonwoo…” You let his name settle on your tongue for the first time, and though your voice wavers, it catches his attention nonetheless.

His bleary eyes seem to focus, and the creases imprinted on his forehead smooths out as he slowly calms down. He unravels the arms around his knees, allowing them to droop lifelessly on his side. With the ruckus from earlier dying into complete silence, the sounds of the chains clanging around each other sends a wave of unease down your spine. This boy doesn’t belong here.

“Where have you been?” he whimpers, sounding so broken.

“Oh, Wonwoo,” you breathe out, rushing over to crouch next to him, Mingyu’s words of caution be damned. Your arms automatically wind themselves around the boy’s frail shoulders, and he instinctively leans his frame against you, allowing you to feel his powerful shivers.

It should feel weird, having a man you barely know clinging onto you. But it just feels… right.

“I was so scared,” he confesses, his sweat-slicked forehead pressed up against the crook of your neck. “I know, I’m sorry,” you tell him. You lift your hand to smear away the tears and perspiration from other his eyes. But he reaches out to wrap his long fingers around your wrist.

“It’s not true, right?” he rasps, his eyes turning up to meet yours. “Please tell me it’s not true.”

You already know what he’s talking about, and you tighten your hug around him. “i’m sorry,” you tell him again, but you know that no amount of apologies is able to undo his fate. Wonwoo fists the cloth of your shirt, his clutch feeble.

“I’m…” he stutters brokenly. “Am I a monster?”

You falter. He must have overheard what Mingyu had said. “No, of course not,” you quickly assure him. “You’ll never be a monster. Not to me, not to any of us.”

He coughs weakly. “I don’t want this.”

“I know, I know…” you comfort the shivering man to the best of your ability. “I am so sorry this happened to you. But Wonwoo, I promise, we’re all here to take care of you. Please don’t be afraid anymore.”

He sniffles, the grip on your shirt slackening and his eyes flutter shut. Even though the way his sweat creates damp marks across your shirt is uncomfortable to say the least, you continue to hold onto him as he drifts back into sleep, the frown lines across his face melting serenely.

As gently as you can, you lean his head against the corner of the wall, untangling your limbs from his. Before you pull away from him, you place your palm against his cheek warmly, wishing that you’re in power to remove the shackles restraining him, but you know that Seungchul has to be the one who gives the green light to free him.

“Don’t worry,” you whisper to him. “I won’t let anything happen to you.”

You make your way out of his room to beckon the help of your packmates. When you swing open the door again, Seungchul snaps his heads towards you.

“He’s asleep,” you tell him immediately, wondering where the youngest werewolf Hansol is. But your curiosity goes unnoticed as he returns to his slumped position on the couch.

You scoot towards the couch and sink your bottom heavily into it next to him. He has not moved an inch since you’ve left, but his head is now propped on his knuckles, seemingly in deep thought or confusion. “Hey you,” you call out to him, trying to get his attention. But without lifting his head, he murmurs his reply.

“I’ve got Hansol to send word to my father. He’ll know what to do”

Well, you got your answer.

Though he isn’t the most experienced of Alphas, Seungchul had trained extensively under his father since he was a pup, and did everything with such resolution, hardly anything had daunted him before. But at such unforeseen circumstances, even the wisest Alpha in the forest would have been caught off-guard. You can easily see how much this affects him.

“Do you think I could’ve done anything differently?” he asks you. “Honestly… No,” you reply. “You did what’s best for him and the pack. We couldn’t have just let him die in the forest, and taking him in was only the right thing to do. You said it before yourself: we can’t possibly let a fledgling roam around unattended.” You had hoped that you sounded more confident than you felt, but going by the pensive look in his eyes, you know you hadn’t.

“And don’t listen to Mingyu. He’s just being the overprotective tool he always is. I would pity his future mate,” you weakly attempt to joke “He’s never been around fledglings before.”

“Neither have I,” he retorts, the brusqueness of his voice coming from disappointment than irritation. “I was barely a pup when Mingyu himself was turned. What kind of Alpha does it make me when I have never experienced things any other Alphas would have?”

“Every Alpha has to come from somewhere, even your father,” you reassure him. “You’re a great Alpha, Seungchul, and Mingyu knows that too. We all just need a little more time to… get used to these new circumstances. It’ll be okay.”

The conversation lapses into silence, and you only watch Seungchul gnaw on his lower lip, as though he is internally debating on whether or not to talk.

“How did he know your name?” he finally asks.

“Huh?” you dumbly respond, not expecting his question.

“The boy, Wonwoo,” he explains. “He was crying out your name just now when Hansol and I checked up on him. We just found it odd, since he’s been mostly unconscious for the entirety of yesterday.”

“I told him my name when I was patching him up this morning. I just didn’t expect him to be conscious enough to remember it.” you mumble, half to yourself, and Seungchul narrows his eyes at your words. Wonwoo’s desperate yelling through the phone haunts you once again, and you shudder to get rid of the noise inside your head.

“I know I’m going to sound very cruel when I say this,” Seungchul begins hesitantly, and you cast him a wary look, not sure if you’re going to like the subsequent words coming out of his mouth. “I see that you’re getting really attached to him, and I’m really grateful that you’re so willing to help save someone that isn’t… you know, one of us. But listen, for a new wolf to join a pack, he should be able to establish mutual trust with the pack first, this you know as well as I do. Wonwoo, to put it bluntly, is regarded as an outsider, an intruder if you will.”

You wince at that word use. It can’t be that even Seungchul’s having feelings of animosity against Wonwoo too, right?

“The thing is,” he quickly adds. “We don’t know what he’s like, and he doesn’t know our pack traits and customs. This alone can prove to be detrimental to the hierarchy of the pack. I don’t think the others would be very comfortable letting him stay in the den once he turns, definitely not comfortable enough to let him join our pack as of yet. We don’t know if he is aggressive enough to cause any danger. It may not be safe for you to be around him.”

“Wonwoo isn’t like that,” you try to defend him. “Seungchul, please, I’ve spoken to him. He’s just scared; he’s been attacked by mutts for Sirius’ sake. He merely reacted out of fear, that’s all.”

Seungchul presses his lips together pensively. “I hope you’re right. But just as an extra precaution — I hope you can understand this — until I get a hold of my father in the West, please at least try to distance yourself from the boy. I’m the Alpha, I have to put the safety of my pack above everything else. Because once he tries to do something to endanger you or the others…” Your heart falls as he wrings his fingers together. “I will not hesitate to chase him out of our territory.”

PART 2 TO BE RELEASED LATER THIS YEAR. LOOK OUT FOR IT :)

[thefaeriereview]

Check It Out: Blood Ties

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  Blood Ties by Peter Taylor-Gooby  

Political Fiction

Ritchie’s life is shadowed by the death of his wife, Cat, in a car accident twenty-two years previously. He was the driver. He loves his children – Nic, who is bi-polar and often impulsive, and Jack. Both are active in the campaign to welcome asylum-seekers and refugees to Britain. His life comes to a crisis as he realises how much his children despise his trade in advertising and how much the loss of Cat still means to them all.

Ritchie abandons his career but achieves new success in driving Britain’s treatment of refugees up the political agenda. This earns him the respect of his children but brings him to the attention of Makepeace, the populist Home Secretary. Nic, his daughter, strives to show she can overcome her disorder. She infiltrates a people-trafficking gang but is arrested as a criminal. Makepeace uses this to blackmail Ritchie to help him in his political schemes. Ritchie is horrified to discover that his task is to sell the reintroduction of forced labour, modern slavery, to the public. As a result he is once again rejected by his children.

Ritchie has reached rock bottom. He is desolate but believes he can outsmart Makepeace. Blood Ties shows how he finally resolves the situation, embraces the causes his children hold dear and reunites his family.

5 out of 5 fairies

Blood Ties is a chilling glimpse into an all too possible future. I think we can all agree that the world is in a state of flux and the political climate is somewhat volatile at the moment. Ritchie kicks off the book drawing you in immediately like you were listening to a story from a friend. Each character has a unique voice and personality, and Taylor-Gooby has done a wonderful job of bringing them to life. I feel like I could bump into any of them at the local coffee shop (if we weren't mid-pandemic). From page one you'll be drawn into a world of political intrigue, human rights, and family bonds that are tested by the circumstances Ritchie is forced into. Cannot recommend this book enough!

Where to buy: Amazon, Amazon UK, Waterstones

Add to your TBR list: Goodreads

About the Author: I enjoy talking to my children, holidays, hill-walking and riding my bike. I've worked on adventure playgrounds, as a teacher, as an antique dealer and in a social security office in Newcastle. Before that I spent a year on a Gandhian Ashram in Vijayawada, supporting myself as assistant editor on a local English-language newspaper.

In my day job I’m an academic but I believe that you can only truly understand the issues that matter to people through your feelings, your imagination and your compassion. That's why I write novels.

My first novel, The Baby Auction, 2017, is a love story set in a fantasy world where the only rule is the law of the market. That someone should help another because they care for them simply doesn’t make sense to the citizens of Market World, any more that auctioning babies might to us. My second, Ardent Justice, 2018, is a crime story set in the world of high finance and city fat-cats, where money rules, but greed can trip even the most successful. My third, Blood Ties, 2020, is about the ties of love in a troubled family, and the bonds of debt that chain illegal immigrants to people-traffickers, and how they can be broken through self-sacrifice. I hope you enjoy them.

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[frethorentden-blog]

Narcissistic dating profile

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[fic-dreamin]

Book 2 of my favorite series The Drawing of the Three is the second book of the epic Stephen King saga, The Dark Tower. This is the book that truly captivated me and pulled me into the world of Roland the Gunslinger. The first book follows Roland across the desert, chasing the man in black. This book expands upon that universe in very unexpected ways as Roland "draws the three" that were mentioned at the end of book one. Go to Amazon

Old Western Style meets Futuristic for Sir Roland of Gilead and is Stephen King at his best! It's been 16 years since I first read the Gunslinger Series, and I figured with the movie coming out, I needed a refresher. But, rather than pull my hardbacks out, I decided to order the first book for my Kindle Fire HD, along with audible narration too see if the experience was equal to my first go-around with the hardback. As I can, I will get each of the Dark Tower Books for Kindle with audible because it makes the experience so much better! Back when I first read them in 2001-2002, I had to wait for each new addition to the series to be published and I couldn't get to the book store fast enough when they were released. I had been thrown into the world of Roland Deschain, and his ka-tet of gunslingers, Jake, Susannah, Eddie and OY and couldn't get enough of them! It's funny that they have finally made the Dark Tower into a motion picture because at the time I was reading the series of books for the first time, I imagined Clint Eastwood as the character of Sir Roland of Gilead while I read the books- And Clint would have been the perfect choice. I am not so sure I am going to like the actor chosen- I mean the book describes Roland to be old and tired and his face covered with wrinkles from many years traveling the desert in the sun (Clint Eastwood to a T- LOL), and the actor they chose is so young and well, doesn't have one sun-weathered wrinkle on that smooth face. And while I didn't imagine anyone for the character of "the man in black", Ed Harris would have been awesome but I'll give Matthew a chance. Okay - enough on the movie, because this is a review for the book. If you are a Stephen King fan and want to be thrown into a storyline that you just cannot get enough of- The Dark Tower Series is a must read- It's very "old- western style meets futuristic" and even has a beautiful love story in the series completely Stephen King at his best! Go to Amazon

my experience was great--I got a new copy in great condition in a timely manner I gave this rating fewer stars than either the service or the book deserve on their own, because I want to draw attention an issue every shopper needs to know. Here's the problem with this book. The original compilation of The Bachman Books was published in 1986 and contained 4 novels. That is also what was described in the Amazon listing. Service-wise, my experience was great--I got a new copy in great condition in a timely manner. However, this 2012 edition only contains 3 novels (The Long Walk, Roadwork, Running Man). The fourth originally included, Rage, was allowed to go out of print, because it had been connected with some real-life school shootings similar to what is depicted in the story. Of course, that being harder to find now, it was my motivation for buying the whole thing. Notice, wary shopper, that the subtitle "Four Early Novels by Stephen King" is not actually on the cover in the photo, despite being the name in the listing. A subtle difference on the outside, a big difference on the inside. Go to Amazon

A fitting western of sorts I have read many westerns and a fitting one began with a hunt. I found myself wondering what wrong was caused to the gunslinger to cause him to go on his search that went beyond one man to a mystical tower. His desire to kill the man in black consumed him and those he cared about. I saw a flavor of Sergio Leone immediately and that appealed to my senses. The supernatural seemed reminiscent of some of the TV shows I saw as a boy mixing westerns with horror. I found the idea of multiple universes beginning with the one the boy came from interesting. That the man in black was able to teleport to and from gave hint to the tower's purpose. Food for thought. Go to Amazon

Wordslinger I was a bit disappointed, for a shorter fantasy book it read longer. The story itself is interesting and fresh and left me curious but if the rest of the series is as unnecessarily wordy it's going to take me unnecessarily long to finish. I did enjoy some of the twists along the way that made the story feel unique to the genre as well. Go to Amazon

The Dark Tower I am a huge Stephen King fan. When I found out about "The Dark Tower" book, some 40 or so years ago, I was very disappointed because it was a limited edition. Imagine my joy when he released it into a series of books, and updated them. It is one of my favorite series of stories of his. My daughters have also read them, and loved them, as well. I tell everyone I know to read them. Stephen King, I am most definitely one of your most constant readers. I saw the movie, and hope there are more to come Go to Amazon

Least Favorite King Book I tried. I really did. Perhaps it was above my comprehension. I've read a lot of King's books, but THIS was awful. I couldn't make sense of it. It was random, hard to follow, and used big words just for the sake of using big words. I love cowboys, so I thought this would he perfect for me. I've never been so thankful to finish a book. Go to Amazon

Two Minds One Star Excellence Five Stars Good read, unseen turns! True King literature. King’s writing is completely evident, though the attention of detail to the ennui of suburban life is a new playground for King Great book... DOES NOT INCLUDE RAGE. The description is a bit different