#I love when cartoony characters are shoved into realistic settings and you can think about how they could work

[cicicolorao]

Some quick ray headcanons framed around Laserhawk Rayman’s college years. Thanks to Stitch (@aiienloser) for helping me out with the specifics!

Click Read More to read a buncha them!

- Pescatarian, since a lot of the Glades is covered either by beaches or swamps (looking at you Rayman 2). Longer fangs keep those fishies from slipping away! However most of his diet consists of fruit! Need that glucose for energy.

- His tongue is reaaaaally long, and alongside his stretchier skin it lets him grimace to scare enemies away, or taunt them. However, it also allows him to get himself a nice nectar snack from flowers and pollen! A nice stroll around makes Ray a particularly big pollinator. :)))

- in general a lot of his body is very elastic, and his bones have a bit of give. It makes him real bouncy, and makes landing from big distances less shocking to his being.

- Speedy mother fucker. From running to climbing, Ray’s good at parkour and gymnastics, and uses that speed as an advantage, since he’s kind of a glass cannon.

- Doesn’t have a standard sleep cycle like most animals, however this is just a common trait of beings from the Glade of Dreams. He can stay awake for weeks, only to take a “nap” for days on end. If left undisturbed, he could even sleep for years, without eating. Just means that he’s lethargic when he wakes up.

- His body parts connect to each other with a sort of energy similar to magnetism, and with concentration that energy can “stiffen” up, creating the facsimile of arms and legs. His limbs can extend up to 5 feet away from his body, but with practice they can go further. If they do go further, the energy thins out.

- His hair doesn’t have a hairline, it extends down to his face to look like peach fuzz. The peach fuzz is also found across his body where you’d find body hair. The longer strands in his head can move similar to a tail, either consciously (like helicoptering to glide), or subconsciously (like when he emotes). It’ll move on its own even when it’s brushed back.

[ineffablefool]

Some meditations on being a fat human being, in the era of Good Omens series fandom.  Not n//sf/w, really (hi my name is Jack I’m ace and supremely uninterested in sexytimes), but really personal and also long, so I’ll stick it behind a readmore.  I suppose if another fat human being had thoughts they wanted to tack on, they could reblog to do so, but I don’t expect this to be a particularly rebloggable thing.  Just thinkin’ out loud (via clickety fingies).

I have been... okay, more or less, with how my body looks, for a while.  (Minus all the things about it that make me get “she” and “her” and “ma’am” everywhere I go, with exactly three glorious exceptions in the ~4 years since I realized that those weren’t right.  That is a whole ‘nother bucket of bears.)  I’ve been on Tumblr over on my main account since 2013, and the entire time I’ve been immersing myself in fat positivity and in fat activism by wonderful accounts like ok2befat and bigfatscience and thisisthinprivilege.  So I’ve been basically okay. 

It sucks how hard it is to find clothing that I like which doesn’t completely exclude my particular set of proportions.  It sucks that my saint of a boss had to literally fight our HR department to change the company policy on flights for business, because the previous policy would have forced me to fly 18 hours in an economy-class seat much smaller than I am when I visit India in a couple months.  It sucks that my body is still the “oh, is this disgusting thing a dealbreaker for you” question on dating websites, and that it’s still the butt of every third Trump joke.  It sucks.  But I’ve gotten better over the years at the skill of seeing my body as not the problem, but an innocent bystander in everyone else’s bullshit.  Clothing and plane seats and humor don’t spring from the earth to be harvested and consumed raw.  People decide how to make them.  People can decide differently.

Anyway.  I’ve been pretty much okay with Body.  Body’s fine.  It’s a good pal.  It gets me where I need to be, and it lets me run around in little circles pretending to be an airplane when I’m bored.  I spend some time with it in partial states of undress now and then (I’m too much of a germaphobe to ever be a naturist, let’s put it that way), just so I can keep myself familiar with what it really looks like.  Y’know how the horror movie monster is really scary up until they actually show it?  Same thing, except fewer blood squibs.

But here’s all this Good Omens stuff.

A lot of the fandom has embraced the slight pudginess of Michael Sheen’s Aziraphale, and a lot of artists are putting that into their work.  And a blessed wonderful few aren’t stopping there.  They’re drawing Aziraphales that are more than just a tiny bit pudgy, sometimes that are just plain fat, unquestionably, not just “a little larger than the very thin rendition of Crowley” or “wearing a lot of layers” or “the clothes are just cut that way”.  Really, really adorable renditions of fat angels who are clearly loveable and clearly loved because look, the artist drew them together, Crowley is right there and he doesn’t have that look on his face by accident.

(There are book renditions floating around too where people have headcanoned a fatter Aziraphale, but I’m still talking miniseries right now.  Also, there are plenty of sort of... cartoony/stylized/silly renditions out there with fatter Aziraphales, but I’m not really talking about those either.  There’s a sort of area of artwork where the style or the scene being depicted is such that my brain is surprised when any of the characters is fat, because this is a pretty drawing of two people kissing or whatever and therefore obviously they have to both be thin.  Obviously.  Internalized fatphobia nonsense.  But that’s the kind of artwork I’m thinking when I type all these zillions of words.)

And that’s a choice, to say “I’m an artist and I’m going to draw this character who is worth being the recipient of a 6000-year-long love, and that character is fat, and that’s just how it is”.  And to keep doing it in one piece of art after the other.

speremint was the first artist I noticed doing this, drawing an Aziraphale who is loved by Crowley (the sacred apple tree art still cracks me up, poor Crowley) and who is definitely fat and who is adorable, and if you’ve read the notes on any of my fics you know that she singlehandedly changed how I picture my headcanon’d Aziraphale.  Then I discovered that dotstronaut and lonicera-caprifolium and toastedbuckwheat are out there too, giving me lovely art to shove into my eyeballs and extend my lifespan potentially indefinitely.  I bet there’s more I haven’t noticed yet.  I want there to be like a hundred more I haven’t noticed yet.

And this all ticks over into the second half of what’s apparently a manifesto at this point, boy it’s a good thing I’m a fast typist, which is the fact that in addition to being a fat human, I am also romantically and aesthetically attracted to fat humans.  It’s something I’ve pretty much literally had no opportunity to ever express, because in my Real Life I don’t really admit to having feelings per se and also I am... not the type of human who is the recipient of romantic thoughts from others.  Or who would ever act on my own unless the other party said something first.  (Which nobody ever has since 2006, you guys.  Supremely not the recipient of romance over here.)

So there’s this fandom environment where a fat character is being celebrated and loved, and I started writing fanfiction for the first time this century, and all of a sudden there’s a place for me to express feelings that I’ve been sitting on since I finally realized in about 2001 what it was about that one guy in high school that made me want to hug him, even though I also couldn’t stand his attitude.

Going through my fics from oldest to most recent, it is clear that I am getting more and more comfortable with that expression.  It’s getting ridiculous.  At this rate, in three weeks’ time I’m just going to be writing “Aziraphale is fat and beautiful and I just want to cuddle his belly forever” over and over again for five thousand words at a stretch.

But that means Brain is thinking a lot about how Aziraphale is fat, and beautiful, and perfect exactly how he is.  And then Brain looks down at Body and is like “hmm.  Same hat.  ineffablefool is fat too.  Therefore, [insert math lady meme here]”.  And I will be, like, “okay, so if Crowley were to put his hand on Aziraphale’s belly, what would that feel or look like?  How would his internal narration describe it?  Well, there’s a belly right here, let’s do some science.”  And then the thoughts that I start associating with the experience of my own body are completely good thoughts, all of them, because they’re going to be going in Crowley’s head.  And my written Crowley is never going to be anything other than madly in asexual romantic love with my written Aziraphale, and is never going to see him as anything other than perfect, physically, no matter what he looks like.

And it’s just being a really good positive feedback mechanism, I guess is the tl;dr version.  External validation (via art, via others’ fics, via comments on my own fics, btw if you’ve left any of those then you are also helping extend my lifespan, especially the people who come back to comment on each new story, yes I recognize you and I do a little happy dance every time a familiar name pops up, please rejoin me on Monday I’m going to post my dickwheelie letters fic) is all well and good.  But the mental loop of “own body can be used for realistic descriptions of a fat body -> descriptions based on own body are all lovingly positive -> own body is therefore described by self as lovingly positive” is... it’s nice, is what I’m saying.  It’s very nice.  Last week I expressed, out loud in a group of coworkers, my desire that something be more size-inclusive.  Do you even know how many deaths I would once have suffered rather than say something like that in mixed company.  But why shouldn’t I say it!  There’s nothing wrong with my being fat!  In fact, it’s within the realm of possibility to see it as a positive thing, so let’s just all admit that we have eyes and then move on!  Geez!

So those are some of my thoughts on being a fat human being, in the era of Good Omens series fandom.

now if I can just score a hot fat ace Ineffable Significant Other out of this fandom, I’ll be set

[sophieakatz]

Thursday Thoughts: The Right Medium For The Right Story

I’m a bit obsessed with the topic of adaptation – and by “a bit obsessed” I mean “I wrote my undergrad thesis about it.” Adaptation is a kind of re-telling; you take a story that was told before, and you change some things when you tell it again.

For example, West Side Story is an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. It’s the same basic story, but it’s set in 1950s New York instead of 1300s Verona, and the warring “families” are rival gangs instead of members of the nobility.

But there’s another kind of adaptation here that’s perhaps even more important than the change of setting – the medium. While Romeo and Juliet was originally a stage play, West Side Story was a musical, and later adapted again into a film. Adapting a story across mediums changes the work just as much, if not more, than anything else – or, at least, it ought to.

Minor spoilers for The Hunger Games books and movies as well as Disney’s Aladdin and The Lion King ahead.

[Image: The Hunger Games movie poster]

A Rose By Any Other Name Is Different

As a writer, I firmly believe that you must find the right medium to tell a story in. If you later change the medium, then something about the story is going to need to change as well. As much as a reader might want the film of a book to be completely loyal to the original text, a story originally designed as a novel is not going to work if you simply transfer it page-for-page onto the screen. This is because there are fundamental differences between books, a textual medium, and films, a visual medium.

My favorite example of a book-to-film adaptation that shows a clear understanding of the necessity of change is the Hunger Games franchise. Suzanne Collins’s books are told from a first-person perspective, giving the reader insight into Katniss’s thoughts the whole way through. Because we are hitchhiking along in Katniss’s mind, we get a lot of exposition about the world through her memories, and we know exactly what she thinks and feels about everything that’s going on. Importantly, this includes her confusion about how much of her affection for Peeta is real or just for the Capitol audience.

The Hunger Games film, on the other hand, is shot in a traditional third-person manner. Consequently, in the adaptation process, we lose Katniss’s point of view. We don’t get so many of her memories, aside from a brief dream sequence. We also lose her inner conflict about the performed romance (though the sequel, Catching Fire, plays catch-up on that point).

The filmmakers could have tried to make the film more like the book by adding a voiceover to explain what Katniss is thinking throughout the film, to sidestep the limitation of not actually being inside Katniss’s head anymore. Plenty of films do that. But The Hunger Games does not.

Instead, the film leans into the differences between the two mediums, seizing the opportunity to explore things that the book could not. While we lose Katniss’s inner voice, we gain everything that Katniss could not see. We get scenes of President Snow talking politics with Seneca Crane, making the viewer aware of the greater stakes of Katniss’s behavior in the Games much earlier than Katniss herself is. We also see the riots in District Eleven as they happen, instead of learning about them much later. In the third film, Mockingjay, scenes of Katniss’s work creating promotional videos with the rebellion are paired with the actual acts of rebellion that her words have inspired (I particularly love the “hanging tree” sequence at the hydroelectric dam). The effect is haunting, and it all truly drives home the magnitude of what’s going on.

As a result, the Hunger Games films remain true to the heart of the story without trying to shove a square peg into a round hole. A rose you read about in a novel might smell just as sweet as one seen on film, but only if you acknowledge that you can’t depict the rose in the exact same way in a book as you would in a movie.

[Image: The 2019 Aladdin movie poster]

Anything Is Possible… But Not Always

The current trend of live-action Disney film adaptations provides us with a fascinating case study in the power of adaptation, and of how well the adaptors succeed in transitioning a story from one medium to another. The original animated films (which themselves are mostly adaptations of oral fairy tales – but that’s a whole other blog post) and the new live-action and/or photorealistic CGI films are, of course, both films. But the kind of story you can tell in traditional animation is different than the story you can tell in a more realistic “live action” style.

(Not to mention that the kind of story you can tell in a mainstream media production today is different than the stories told twenty-plus years ago, representation-wise… but again, that’s a whole other blog post.)

Animation is a medium of imagination. That’s why animated fairy tale movies have always done so well. The un-reality of the medium lends itself to depicting the kinds of fantastical transformations typically told of in fairy tales. The viewer can suspend their disbelief and forget about the rules of the real world while watching an animated film. It’s much harder to forget those rules when the people on the screen are human actors.

The live-action Aladdin hits all the same story beats as the animated Aladdin, but it makes several brief but notable changes along the way. There are just some things that the animated film could get away with that the live-action film could not.

For example, the Genie spends a lot more time in a “human” disguise than he does in his natural blue form. If you were on the internet at all when the first images of Will Smith as the Genie were released, then you likely saw the backlash – for a lot of people, it just felt weird. A blue character with cartoony proportions who is constantly shifting into different shapes and sizes works very well in traditional animation, but less well when it’s an otherwise normal-looking human guy who is just… blue. You can smush and stretch the 2-D animated Genie and nobody will bat an eye, but if you tried to do the same to Will Smith – ouch! It conflicts with our idea of what is possible in the real world, and a live-action film is always going to feel more like the real world than a 2-D animated film.

This is likely why Jafar does not transform into a snake in this movie. Jafar-as-snake is arguably one of the best parts of the original Aladdin film – it’s certainly one of the best parts of the Fantasmic show at Disney’s Hollywood Studios. It’s awesome, it’s terrifying, and it does not happen in the live-action adaptation of Aladdin. Jafar does a lot of other magic – mostly levitation, paralysis, and creating a storm – but he does not turn into a giant snake. The world of Agrabah established in this film is many things, but it is not established that this is a world where people can turn into animals. We do see some animals turning into other animals – Abu becomes an elephant, and Iago a monstrously huge bird – but neither of them remain transformed for very long. The audience’s suspension of disbelief will only go so far in a live-action film, and the filmmakers probably guessed, and I think correctly, that Jafar turning into a snake would not have gone over well in this medium.

Another thing that would not have gone over so well in live-action is the scene in the marketplace where a shopkeeper threatens to chop off Jasmine’s arm for stealing an apple. Just picture it – a man grabbing a young woman and threatening her with a sword, and they are both real people with real-people proportions, and it is a real sword instead of a cartoony dinged-up scimitar. In the animated film, the moment is quickly played off as funny, but here it would have been scary, much too scary for the first act of an otherwise cheerful film.

A savvy adapter sees and accepts what won’t work as well in their chosen medium, and so makes the appropriate changes.

[Image: The 2019 The Lion King movie poster]

Rules? What Rules?

Which brings me to the new “live-action” Lion King. Now, if you enjoyed this film, then I’m happy for you, and I neither expect nor want to change your mind.

However, this film does not successfully adapt its story from one medium to another. It keeps almost everything about the story, the music, and the dialogue exactly the same as before – but now, the world and animals are photorealistic. Throughout the film, I kept wanting to close my eyes and just listen to it, because the film that I was hearing and the film that I was seeing just plain did not match up with each other.

When Mufasa dies, Simba’s voice actor is obviously crying – you can hear the tears in his voice. But Simba himself is not crying, because real lions do not cry. The disconnect between what the viewer hears and what the viewer sees reminds us that what we are watching is not real, consequently breaking the suspension of disbelief and robbing the scene of vital emotion.

A musical and a nature documentary are two very different things which we watch for very different reasons. Put bluntly, this new Lion King imposes the rules of a nature documentary onto a musical. In a nature documentary, the animals must look and move a certain way which does not line up with human emotional behavior, and the world must look and behave in a certain way which features muted colors and subtle movements. A musical, on the other hand, is all about heightened human emotion – that’s why characters sing, because their emotions are so big that they can only be expressed in song! Musicals are also about visual spectacle over strict realism (with some exceptions – compare the elaborate stage effects of The Phantom of the Opera or the intensive choreography of Hamilton with the much more subdued The Spitfire Grill).

There are a few moments where the rules of the animal world line up with the rules of the Lion King story, to wonderful effect. For example, when Nala is telling Simba to return to Pride Rock and confront Scar, Simba paces back and forth in a real form of lion body language which reads to a human eye as frustration. The slouched-to-the-side way that lions sit looks a lot like the casual lean of a confident villain, giving Scar a marvelous aura of attitude. Also, the frantic, bouncy, here-and-there movement of a meerkat lines up well with Timon’s jumpy, shifty personality and dialogue, adding humor at key moments.

But for most of the film, there is little to no bridge between the story that they are trying to tell and the medium that they have shoved this story into. The Lion King is not a realistic story. Audiences did not go see The Lion King in theatres in 1996 because they wanted to see a realistic story. They went to see a colorful, fantastical musical about talking animals with human emotions. Photorealistic CGI is simply not the right medium for that kind of story, and the story was not changed nearly enough to fit the new medium.

[Image: Cinderella’s Castle at Walt Disney World]

What Comes Next?

I see nothing wrong with telling a story again. As I said before, I love adaptation. It’s clear that today’s filmmakers, especially the filmmakers at Disney, are eager to try their hand at recreating the stories that they watched and loved when they were younger. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but there is a wrong way to do it, and I hope that future adaption films move away from that way.

One of the biggest things that Walt Disney loved about Disneyland was that, unlike the films, he could change things in the theme park if they no longer worked for the audience or if they could now be done better than before. I think he would be intrigued by the current culture of adaptation, and curious why today’s filmmakers aren’t doing more to explore the differences between mediums and the different kinds of stories that you can tell in different mediums.

Adaptation does not have to mean being stuck saying the same thing over and over. It could, and should, lead to us telling more stories, different stories, and better stories, because when it comes to adaptation, change is a good thing.

[miamaroo]

Northern Migration- Chapter 26 (Notes + Preview)

I hope you’re having a good holiday season, because I am currently lost in the sauce and I don’t know how to get back up. Either way, we’re going to be updating this a little bit sooner than I really should because I need the validation or something like that. Huh. Remember that this right here is brimming with a whole heck of a lot of spoilers, so beware!

Spoilers!

I am in the very unique position of being the only TAZ writer who has no idea how to write Angus. I definitely have his speech patterns pretty incorrect, like I’m certain he does not sound half as formal as I’m writing him to be. I think the problem is that since Stevie is the immature, pseudo-realistic 10 year old character, putting a cartoony genius character of the same age in the same story feels off. Now the solution to that would be to adjust Angus’s character so that he’s also more childlike, but I guess I’m just in too deep now to change anything.

I could probably get away with claiming that his formalness is a defense mechanism for being in a situation where he doesn’t feel safe. Whether I go with that reasoning or not has yet to be determined.

Shoving in a mention of Brian as someone who tried uncovering information about the Grand Relics was probably the least smooth I’ve ever been with these kinds of things.

I think in another like, Stevie would like Angus as a human being and would probably enjoy having him as a friend. As it stands now, she’s a bit too wound up by everything to not be on the defensive at all times.

Also shoutout to everyone who thought Stevie was swearing out Taako. Nope, it’s another ten year old!

And if I haven’t already butchered Angus enough, I will also concede that him realizing that they aren’t evil enough to agree to team up with them was also done really poorly. I will probably find some chapter in the future where that switch in perspective is explored more deeply.

Bane’s still relevant. Just in case you forgot.

So after 26 chapters, I’m finally giving Killian some love and attention. The upcoming arc is going to deal a lot with her past and how she came upon her mission to get rid of the Grand Relics, so I’m super excited for what’s to come. I still wish I had enough sense to squeeze more about her in sooner, but to tell the truth, there have been a few times where she’s vaguely mentioned a key part of her backstory that I don’t think anyone has really caught onto yet. I think it’s going to be fun to learn the complete tale and just be like “huh. that’s why she brought that up.”

As before mentioned in an earlier chapter, Killian forgot Brian so the person in her past she’s struggling to pin a name to is him.

Carey’s here and still relevant! I would not be a good TAZ writer if I didn’t let these two girls get together. Considering how much of this story I have left and hundred other plot threads I’m tackling, I’m probably not going to get them to the marriage level by the end, but goddamnit am I going to try to get them as far along as I can!

I’m also really bad at flirting in general, so who even knows if Killian and Carey’s flirting is as cute and awkward as I think it is.

Barry is not capable of growing a beard, but he can swing a mustache. The problem is that it always looks like a pornstache and everyone hates it.

That is Ren’s canonical last name, according to the Mysterious Package Company’s Taako’s School bundle.

Everything about the moon is a case study of how not to be subtle about worldbuilding, but I’ll be damned if I was just gonna dump like 500 words down the drain.

And I need to stop writing song lyrics. This is not a musical and I’m not good at them.

I think Barry is this weird combination of being calculating because he can perceive a lot about others but also awkward because he’s not really aware of how much more perceptive he is than the average person. He’s a smart dude and kinda forgets that not everyone is on his level.

I have big plans for Johann for the future of this fic, so I’m trying to start pushing him and his emotional journey to the forefront, meaning that I can now start addressing questions like how does Johann feel about being rescued in part by someone he cognitively knows is one of the bad guys.

A lot of people have rightly been asking me why Julia and Davenport haven’t tried to undo the damage Wonderland caused via the Oculus. I am willing to admit that I initially figured that my reasoning with the broken bonds was obvious, but naturally I realized that I was wrong. I was super duper wrong. So here’s your in universe explanation.

For those who wants an explanation not through the lense of Merle: the Animus Bells breaks bonds, and since the Oculus can’t repair those bonds (especially with how thoroughly Edward and Lydia approached these things), any attempts of recreating missing limbs will ultimately not work. So for Davenport’s hand, the bond that allows Davenport to have a right hand is broken, so no hand can be added to his right side. Technically, can he give himself a gun for a hand? Yes, but let’s not. 

This chapter is a little weird because it has Davenport using texts to convey his thoughts, as a general note, I am having a fun time trying to figure out what body language I can give him that conveys what dialogue would normally do. In a way, it’s a fun writing exercise.

Davenport’s emotional recovery is going to be an up and down battle, but at least he’s starting it.

I came up with Merle’s speech at the end there all the way back before I even had that scene with a possessed Taako taunting Julia in the bar. And I’ve been hanging onto it for so long, just waiting for the moment I could write it down here and get it out of my system. And I’m just happy that it exists on paper now and I can stop worrying that I’m going to forget parts of it. 

Hopefully, I’ll be ready to update again either before the New Years or just in time for the one year anniversary of this fic. I honestly can’t believe that I’ve really been working on this for so long, and I hope that this thing will be finished before we see birthday number 2.

Here’s the preview of the next chapter:

Chin balanced on hand, Taako leans into the table and watches the scene before him break down—Angus, trying to heave a stack of books to the chalkboard Lucretia had set up in the kitchen while Stevie blocks his path. Both of them are tiny little twerps, but Stevie rocks onto the tips of her toes, holding the flat of her hand to the tip of her head as she tries to measure herself to Angus. “C’mon,” she whines. “I just wanna check!”

“Please— I have very important work I need to be doing right this moment,” Angus says, trying to look over the topmost book on the stack. His glasses threaten to fall off his nose.

Stevie jams her hand on top of his head, trying to keep him pinned in place. “Stop moving!”

Angus leans over, giving the nearest adult a pleading look. Considering that Lucretia went with Davenport to look for a few documents in his office, that meant Taako. “Um, please sir? A little hand?”

“Yeah!” Stevie crosses her arms over her chest, puffing out her chest in a huff. “You judge. Who’s taller?”

Rolling his eyes, Taako slinks to his feet. “Alright. If it gets you two to shut up already. Get back to back…” Angus puts his books down, making sure to stand with his back as straight as possible as Stevie practically bounces in her places. Taako circles them like a shark, finger on chin as he hums. “Hmm, this is a tough one.” They’re fairly close in height, but Taako knows which answer he should give if he wants the max amount of entertainment for the next few days. But when he places his hand on their heads, he realizes he doesn’t even need to lie.

He hides his grin, trying to look pensive as he steeples his fingers over his mouth. “I see.”

Stevie is all but buzz, trying to get her own hand in a position that shows the height difference that she can also see. “Spill it! Who’s taller?”

“There’s no easy way of saying this, but it looks like Angelo here just the tinniest, uh, slimmest bit taller.”

“It’s Angus, sir,” Angus chimes.

Stevie freezes. “Huh? No way!” She twists between him and Angus, frustration building on her face. “But—but—but I’ve always been the tallest in my class!”

[...]

Angus stares at her for a long moment, blinking as he puzzles through his situation. Taako can practically see the math around his head melt away the moment the lightbulb goes off. “Oh, I get it!” Angus grins, pointing a finger up like a real nerd. “You’re jealous I get to help while you’re still grounded.”

Stevie stares.

“Don’t worry,” Angus rambles, reaching for his stacks of books once more. “I’m sure you’ll get the opportunity to help in due time, though I’m not sure where since, while I don’t know you well, I get the sense that you don’t have any particular skills that could aid us—”

Stevie jumps onto him, tackling Angus into his stack of books.