#I should have learned my lesson years ago that is precisely why i run this blog in english

[lizzibennet]

Bton stan twitter truly one of theeee most toxic fandoms i’ve ever been a part of

[self-proclaimed-chaotic-good]

Readying For Battle | Bruce Wayne x Reader

Prompt: Dog

Words: 3119

Fandom: The Batman (2022)

Warning: Attempted mugging, but nothing intense or graphic. If you’re familiar with my style of writing, you should know that they’re mostly slow burns.

A/N:  This was finished weeks ago but I kept nitpicking at it and never posted it until now. I swore to myself that there won’t be any more characters to introduce, but I might do it again. Clearly, I have not learned my lesson about having multiple characters to keep track of at once. But I think that this character is the most important one of all!

Part of [The Batman’s Doctor] Oneshot series.

Summary: A mad scientist is on the run and your friends may have been more involved in it than you thought. Meanwhile, Bruce is required to make a public appearance at the annual charity event where he suspects Dr. Woodrue might make a move.

-

You weren’t sure how you were going to go about addressing what had happened all those years ago at Woodrue’s lab with Pamela. There had been flashes of odd behavior from her that you hadn’t caught the first time, now that you were thinking back on your interactions with her. They were so brief, that you couldn’t for certain know if it was due to the accident or if work was getting too much for her. Could be all of the above.

Harleen would have been a good choice to approach first to help you talk to Pam, but you were afraid that she’d differ from the subject. She was fiercely loyal to her loved ones and she’d do anything for Pam, you had noticed over the years that you had known them. Pam came first.

They were both busy with work, so it was hard to get a hold of them anyways. So, you dropped it, giving yourself time to plan your approach. You also needed to get things in order to help Bruce get ready for the upcoming charity event.

“How are you going to explain the cuts and bruises if you’re just going to keep throwing yourself out there?” you scolded Bruce as you cleaned his wounds.

He grunted. “They’re not that noticeable. I do have a mask and suit that protects me when I fight.”

“Yet, you have a doctor living in your house.”

“Unlicensed doctor,” Bruce muttered, prompting you to press down on one of his bruises.

He let out another grunt, watching you work. He relished the warmth from your hands, their gentle yet firm touch, moving with such practice and precision. Normally, he’d only bother you when the wounds were too much for him to treat on his own, but lately he’d been too exhausted to bother with the minor injuries, or at least that’s what he would say. Alfred had given him a knowing look and walked away when he overheard.

Once he was all fixed up, he threw on a wrinkled white shirt lying around in his room and made his way over to his desk, notes and CCTV screenshots scattered across the surface. He had been tracking Dr. Woodrue for days now and he didn’t press you to ask Pam and Harleen about him. They used to joke about it with dark humor like how you would complain about your manager from your part-time job, but actually sitting down and discussing it was another thing. So, Bruce had been looking into Woodrue’s previous associates and his past research to get an idea of what he was dealing with.

“Woodrue’s laying low, but an event big like the one at city hall… any bad guy would make a move then. They want the attention and with all those people and the press, it’s a sure way to do it,” Bruce said.

“Speaking of the event,” you said, standing up leaning against his desk, “I heard that Mayor Real wants you, as the main donor for the Gotham Restoration projects, to give a speech.”

Bruce grimaced, slumping back in his desk chair. “Why?” he practically pouted at you.

“It’s formalities,” you said with a shrug. 

He frowned, thinking he would rather deal with a lab filled with poisonous spores than give a five minute speech in front of Gotham’s press and elites. You wondered what he was like at board meetings and if he ever gave all his attention to them or if he was always thinking of the next case as Batman. Surely, the board members were used to his behavior by now.

“Want me to help write it?” you offered. He nodded. “Okay. I don’t think she’s expecting anything grandiose from you anyways, just something formal and straight to the point. Anything else would cause you physical and mental pain.”

He shot you a playful glare before yanking out his desk drawer, plopping down a notepad and a pen on the desk, his long fingers sliding it over to you. He leaned back in his chair once you picked it up and clicked the pen.

“So,” you started, clearing your throat dramatically, “‘People of Gotham’... no. ‘Good evening’. Yes, simple. ‘Good evening and thank you all for coming to our first charity event for the Gotham Restoration projects under Mayor Real’. Anything you want to add?”

He hummed, resting his chin on his fist like he was piecing an advanced puzzle together. “Is that not enough?”

You shook your head. “No… I think they want more than that. Maybe a small anecdote? A shout out to the other contributors and the workers? Stuff like that.”

He scrubbed his face with his hand and sighed. “This is going to take a while,” he muttered.

-

Apparently, it was a last minute decision to have you go with Bruce to the event at Alfred’s insistence. Bruce did not want to expose you as a close associate of his to the public due to prying eyes and the enemies of both Bruce Wayne and any potential threats that discovered his dual identity as Batman. With Alfred’s reasoning of you being an extra pair of eyes and also as someone that could help make the public outing tolerable, Bruce relented.

“No way I’m letting you go defenseless,” Bruce said.

While you had gone out to run errands and pick up both of your outfits, Bruce had stayed in his Batcave making something for you. He didn’t say what it was, only that it’d be a prototype since he didn’t have enough time to fully develop and test it out. So, you left him to it, saying to text you if he needed anything else while you were out.

When you had first gone out to do errands, Bruce had offered to give you the keys to the Rolls Royce, to which you had heavily declined. There was no way you were going to risk driving something as expensive as that and it was completely unnecessary for the mundane tasks you had to do. Imagining yourself taking his Rolls Royce to the grocery store made you snort in amusement. Besides, you had pointed out, not many people drove that kind of car in Gotham. It’ll draw attention.

You had finished everything without incident, leaving Bruce’s outfit hanging by his bed to remind him that it couldn’t be avoided. Alfred and Dory didn’t have anything for you to help them with, so you decided to go do some personal shopping for once. Alfred called out to you to be careful just as Bruce resurfaced from the Batcave and watched you leave again.

It had been a while since you were able to relax on your own, walking around Gotham at your leisure. The once flooded districts had improved now that the seawalls and reconstruction of the surrounding buildings were close to completion. People were going about their business, having to work their life around the new developments of Gotham. Positive developments, everyone hoped. Cleaning up Gotham was far from an easy task and Mayor Real had her work cut out for her. Still, the city’s healing needed to start somewhere.

Sitting down on a bench in one of the small park areas, you indulged in your sandwich as you people watched. Halfway through your meal, you heard loud and aggressive sniffing nearby. Turning your head, you saw a German Shepherd standing next to you with their eyes locked onto your sandwich. 

Looking at this rude newcomer, you estimated that he was still a puppy, probably around one years old. He had a scar near his eye and what looked like bite marks near his neck where there was no collar. You frowned, taking out your phone to look for the nearest animal clinic or shelter.

He sat next to you at the foot of the bench as he waited, his dark eyes never leaving the sandwich even when you were moving around. Deciding to just call the shelter instead, your eyes left the young German Shepherd for just a moment. There was a nibble on your hand before your sandwich was yanked away and you could only watch as the pup trotted happily away. Still, you reported him to the shelter and started to make your way back to the car.

It was an easy task, getting to the car without incident, but it was another thing you had failed at. You had parked the car a few blocks away, thinking nothing of it as it was one of the few parking spaces available in the area. As you passed an alleyway, an unwashed gloved hand shot out and twisted your arm around, tossing you against the brick wall with a thud.

“Give me your money!” the man growled, towering over you with a pocket knife in hand.

“Seriously?” you hissed, moving to take out your wallet from your bag.

He waved his knife an inch from your face. “Come on, come on.”

“Hold on!” 

Your snappy attitude earned you a smack across your face, leaving you disoriented at the sudden whip of your head. You lost grip of your bag, dropping it to the dirty concrete. He huffed, snatching it quickly with his back towards you. When you regained your bearings, you noticed a small figure at the end of the alley. 

The German Shepherd from earlier growled, baring his teeth as he posed to pounce at the man. The mugger screamed at the dog in an attempt to scare him off, but it only provoked him further. He launched himself towards the man, biting the other end of your bag and tugging hard with another growl. The mugger struggled, moving to cut the dog to let go. You used this chance to barrel into him, smacking his body against the wall as soon as he lost his footing. He dropped the bag and ran as the dog chased him down.

You wasted no time rushing to your car, checking the pockets of your bag for anything missing. Fortunately, the mugger didn’t have time to grab anything before that dog came. You were so tempted to bring him home with you, but you weren’t sure that everyone at home would be okay with it. There was enough stress dealing with Bruce and his moonlighting as Batman as it is. You would just have to hope that the shelter had managed to find him and make sure he gets into a loving home.

-

Never did you imagine yourself accompanying the Prince of Gotham, Bruce Wayne, while in a custom tailored outfit for a fancy party. Yet, here you were, walking down the stairs after getting ready. Bruce was already waiting with Alfred, the two speaking in hushed tones about the plan for tonight. Bruce believed that Doctor Woodrue would make a move at the charity event and had made preparations for it. 

Their conversation paused as you reached the landing, Bruce’s eyes immediately locking onto you as you made your way towards them. You suddenly feel a twist in your stomach as you stand in front of Bruce expectantly. A part of you was hoping that he’d comment on your appearance, the last time seeing you this dressed up was when you were kids. Instead, he hummed, smiling as he fished something out of his pocket. 

He remained true to his word and made you your own gadget, a watch that looked to be taken straight out of a spy movie with its wide yet inconspicuous touch screen and smooth band. When you had pointed that out, he smiled, saying that that was the point. He knew that you loved spy movies.

“Be careful, you two,” Alfred said, his brows furrowed as you both made your way towards the garage.

It was one thing when Bruce went off on his own to fight crime, it was another when you were also getting involved. Although it was his idea in the first place for Bruce to bring you as his plus one, your admittance of getting jumped a few days ago had spiked his worry. You were lucky that the mugger had not taken anything or harmed you. You had mentioned that a dog you had met in the park had actually helped you with the mugger, thus your plan of convincing him and Bruce to get a dog commenced. At this point, he was willing to consider it.

“It’s okay, Alfred. If something happens to me, it’s all on Bruce,” you joked, making Bruce roll his eyes.

“You think I don’t know that?” Bruce muttered, nudging you with his shoulder, “That’s what the watch is for.”

“Oh, really? I thought it was just my boss finally getting me an Apple watch instead of a raise.”

“I can get you both if you want,” he deadpanned.

“Must be nice being that rich.”

“It is if you’ve got something or someone to spend money over.”

Alfred stood to the side, his worries subsiding, but something else was brewing. He looked between the two of you, a smirk creeping up his face. He wondered if you were aware of how close your faces were and how both of you had not stopped smiling since your banter started. He made a promise to you to not tell Bruce what had happened with the mugger, knowing that Bruce would have gone as far as to prevent you from going outside by yourself again if he found out.

“Just… look out for each other,” Alfred said, “That means clear communications and no wandering off to investigate something on your own.” That warning could be directed to either one of you, so you and Bruce nodded.

“We’ll be fine, Alfred,” Bruce assured him.

“It’s not like we’re the type to mingle,” you added.

“Exactly. You’d rather lose focus and look for danger than have a five minute conversation with the socialites of Gotham.” 

There was nothing to say to that. He knew the two of you too well.

-

Reporters lined the steps of the city hall, flashing away at their cameras as each and every attendee steps out of their vehicle and escorted up to the large double doors. Bruce had taken to driving the two of you in the black Rolls Royce that he was fond of, handing the keys to the valet once he reached the bottom of the steps. 

Your heart had been hammering against your rib cage during the entire ride there, grounding yourself by making a mental checklist for the evening as you fidget with your new watch. Enter city hall, make the rounds with Bruce, speak to the mayor, have Bruce give his speech, attempt to mingle with people, keep a lookout for suspicious activity, then make excuses to retire for the night. Hopefully, nothing happens tonight.

Bruce held the door open and helped you out of the car, eyes scanning the crowd as he placed his hand on the small of your back. He had slowly been making public appearances for the past few months, but the reporters still go wild at the sight of the reclusive billionaire, more so now that it was evident that he had brought a plus one.

“Stay close,” he whispered as he guided you towards the stairs, “Remember about the watch. If we ever get separated, activate the earpiece with it. If you’re in trouble or get lost, activate the tracker.”

“This is far different from the birthday party you had when you were six,” you said, marveling at the scale of the place as you crossed the threshold.

“And unfortunately, we have to have a more active role in these gatherings. No more standing in the corner or sneaking out to the balcony for us.”

“We could, just that it might be taken as a more scandalous act than two kids avoiding the grownups.”

“Those were the days,” Bruce sighed before spotting a familiar figure approaching the pair of you. “Speaking of…”

“Well, look at you two!” Luke called out with a grin, arms open wide as he swooped in to give you a hug, effectively pulling you away from Bruce who was frowning during the exchange. He turned to Bruce and smirked. “Wayne! Come here!” Luke gave him the same treatment, slapping his back for good measure.

You watch Bruce stiffen at the sudden embrace before relaxing, his body familiarizing with Luke’s energy and friendliness. You weren’t sure how long it had been since the last time those two saw each other, but it never mattered to Luke. He was always open and accommodating with the ability to pick up a conversation from where it was left off years ago.

Bruce gave him a small smile. “Still a menace,” he said.

Luke threw his head back and laughed. “Still so awkward. Come on, we’re old pals. We’re in this together, facing off the vultures and hyenas in there.”

“Hey, why are you more excited to see Bruce than me?” you teased.

“Well, I already saw you days ago,” Luke said, slinging an arm around your shoulder, “But Brucie? It’s been a long time. A really long time. See, you and me? We’ve been keeping contact off and on over the years. I got radio silence from him.”

Bruce grimaced. “I’ve been busy.”

Luke nodded. Bruce was a man of a few words, always had been. Luckily, Luke had known him long enough that he didn’t need a whole sentence or paragraph to know what was going on.

“Hey, it’s alright. I’m only teasing,” he said softly, wrapping his other arm around Bruce. “You’ve been going through a lot, so I understand.”

“It’s good to see you, Luke,” Bruce said, pulling away from him.

“It’s nice seeing you guys again. Just like old times, huh?” Luke gave you one last side hug before regarding the two of you. “It’s things like this that makes me feel glad to be back.”

“So, not much, is there?” Bruce said, a hint of a smirk on his lips.

Luke punched his shoulder lightly. “I gotta head back into the fray before my old man starts making leaps and thinks I’m up to no good.”

“It’s a reasonable assumption,” you said.

Luke chuckled. “See you guys around,” he said, walking backwards, “Maybe we can all get a drink some time.”

“See you around, Luke,” Bruce called back with a small wave, watching him jog back to find his father. As soon as he was gone, Bruce nudged you with his shoulder. “When were you going to tell me that you ran into him earlier?”

“Oh, uh, slipped my mind,” you said casually with a shrug, “Saw him at the Iceberg Lounge. Ready to go in?”

Bruce shook his head. “No, you?”

“Nope.”

[the-insomniac-emporium]

Serenade (Daniela Dimitrescu/Reader) Pt. 8

Fandom: Resident Evil: Village Rating: T for language? Warnings: None? I think? Please let me know if I missed something Notes: Bit of fluff with some anxiety/update on primary conflict. Next chapter will be a cute date with Dani, the one after that will be maximum h*rny, and then what will likely be the finale. Music for this chapter here. PS this one is a bit on the shorter side, but I hope y'all still enjoy it. Past Chapters: Pt. 1: Nocturne, Pt. 2: Overture, Pt. 3: Accelerando, Pt. 4: Toccata, Pt. 5: Poco a Poco, Pt. 6: Elegy, Pt. 7: Harmony

Chapter 8: Obbligato

(Obbligato: An instrumental part which is essential in a piece of music)

“Okay, okay, serious this time, please? I’ll give you a kiss if you try hard enough,” you promised, grinning up at Daniela as you did. A week had passed since your talk in the library, with the two of you spending most days together, and you were progressing nicely with the musical lessons. Still, your girlfriend (you would never get tired of saying that word) was prone to getting a tad ‘distracted’. By you, usually. Not that it was intentional by any means. There was only so much you could do to keep her focused when the two of you were this close together.

“I could just kiss you anyway,” Daniela teased, leaning in with familiar intent. Right before your lips touch, however, she pulls back and smirks. “But if you insist, I can handle the challenge.” Then she’s turning back towards the piano, carefully finding the starting position. Even with her prior experience, you were impressed with how much she had already learned, and couldn’t help but be immensely proud of her. If anyone could meet Lady Dimitrescu’s expectations within a three month timeframe, it was the two of you. Except, of course, you still had to double-check just what her expectations were.

In the meantime, you were excited to hear your girlfriend play through the sheet music you had written up. Most of what you were working with had come from the family’s storage room, but you had also found some blank sheets, and figured it couldn’t hurt to create songs of your own. This particular one was relatively simple. It had been based on a song from a game you had played years ago, and only posed a moderate challenge due to its interesting rhythm. Daniela had seemed to enjoy playing it, with you even hearing her practice the song outside of your lessons, but had so far today refused to play it seriously.

Finally that was going to change. Once she found the starting notes, she nodded to herself, then started playing. For the first time today her expression is stern, focused. Seeing her like this was nice. She was always cute, you just thought that she was extra cute like this. But you tried not to let yourself get too distracted, knowing that you couldn’t give her feedback if you didn’t pay attention. In your head you “play along”, fingers miming the movements, knowing that it would help you catch any possible mistakes. Throughout the piece there are only a couple that you catch, none of them being severe enough to ruin the experience. Finishing with a little flourish, Daniela returns her gaze to you, grinning expectantly.

“Well? I seem to recall you promising me a reward,” she said, perking a brow. Laughing a little, you roll your eyes, before moving in to give her exactly what she wanted. Both of you are smiling into the kiss, enjoying every moment of it. Soon enough Daniela is running a hand through your hair, and pressing against you more, tilting her head just enough to deepen the kiss. You’re blushing hard now, thoughts going everywhere other than music. It’s not until you pull back for air that you remember what you’re supposed to be doing right now.

“As wonderful as this is… we still have a few more songs to go over,” you murmured, despite how much you wanted to keep kissing Daniela. By the way she groaned in frustration, you figured she felt the same way, more or less. “Hey, don’t fret too much. Think of this as an opportunity to earn a few more rewards,” you teased, gently patting her on the shoulder. For a moment she simply pouts, but eventually she sighs and gets ready to play another song…

------------------------------------

Rushing up the steps, practically two at a time, you desperately hoped that you wouldn’t be late. This was your third “update meeting” with Lady Dimitrescu, which by itself was enough to make you a nervous wreck. Add in the fact that this was the first time you’d be meeting alone? And in her personal study, no less? Well, it was safe to say that you were terrified. You hadn’t even been told why things were different this time. No, you were about as clueless as could be, given the circumstances.

By the time you make it your Lady’s study, you cannot tell whether your heart is racing due to stress or physical exertion. Regardless, you make it there in short time, arriving precisely at the scheduled hour. After taking a moment to settle your nerves, you briefly knock on the chamber door. There’s the sound of movement from inside before the way opens. Lady Dimitrescu has to bend a little to see out, but quickly smiles when she meets your gaze. Which was rather unexpected. The last time you had met with her she had been distanced, although still polite. Then again, Daniela had also been with you, and the focus was, as always, on her.

“Lady Dimitrescu,” you greeted, giving a short bow per customs. Then you were being waved in, brought over to a small sitting area, where you waited for permission to sit down. Once it was given, you relaxed a little. Maybe I don’t have as much reason to be nervous as I thought, you muse.

“Please, make yourself comfortable. There are no reasons for you to be unsettled, as far as I am aware,” Lady Dimitrescu said, smile disappearing for a moment at the end. But it’s back as quickly as it had vanished. Did she suspect something? Perhaps she had seen the way Daniela looked at you, or even overheard the whisperings of your roommates. Both thoughts do little other than renew your anxiety. Noticing this, Alcina frowns and shakes her head. “I was merely joking. Now, let us get to the reason for our meeting: How are Daniela’s lessons fairing? There is only so much I can glean from listening.” Glad to have something to think about other than your secret relationship with your boss’ daughter, you nodded and began explaining.

“Lady Daniela is making outstanding progress, in my opinion. Even with her occasional… lapses in attention, once she puts her mind to something, she’s quick to master it. At this point she can sight read nearly as fast and accurately as myself. However, we’re still going over vocabulary, as well as keys and their corresponding chords,” you answered, barely able to maintain eye contact with your employer. Thankfully, she seems to have accepted the inevitability of your nervousness. You were especially thankful now that you prepared to ask her a question. “My Lady, may I inquire about what specifically you expect from my teachings? If there are certain genres you wish for Daniela to be familiar with, or techniques-... I must admit I am unsure as to how to best meet your requirements.”

Slowly reclining in her chair, Alcina appears to ponder your question. In the meantime she sips at her beverage, holding the cup as if it were a fragile heirloom (which it could very well be), eyes looking into the middle distance. Then she gives a soft hum, setting her cup down and returning her attention to you.

“I suppose I can understand your concern. In some ways you have already exceeded my expectations,” she said, expression oddly plain in comparison to her positive phrasing. “My daughter has rarely invested herself in anything as much as she has in your lessons. For this, I am left wondering what she finds so captivating- the music, or the one who pulls the strings?... But that is not the answer to your inquiry, is it?” In that moment, you are incredibly still, willing yourself to keep a straight face, despite the racing of your heart. At your silence, Alcina perks a brow, expecting you to respond. You can’t, your mouth suddenly dry. “What I expect is a passion to educate, a drive to see my daughter flourish. I expect you to teach her exactly as much as she wants you to, focusing on whatever brings her the most joy. But I expect professionalism. Your duties come first, above your health, happiness, and all other desires. Am I understood?”

“Yes, my Lady. Of course, my Lady,” you replied, stuttering, eyes wide. Did she know? Or merely suspect?... There’s another thought, one you try desperately not to voice, only to hear the words fill the room before you can stop yourself. “May I ask where Lady Daniela’s desires fit into this?” Silence hangs heavy over the room for several seconds. Your employer has narrowed her eyes, lips curled downwards into a sharp scowl, watching you with thinly-veiled anger. All you can do is gulp and wait for her response. When it comes, you are surprised by the stability of her tone. It was almost as if she respected your gall.

“She is young still, with the mind of a lovesick maiden. Daniela does not know what she wants, not really, nor does she understand what she needs. If her… flirtatious nature begins to interrupt your instruction, then your response must be swift, and uninterested. Regardless of how unkindly she takes your rejection, I will ensure that she does not harm you,” Lady Dimitrescu said, giving a stern nod at the end. Though her tone was reassuring, you hardly felt better, considering you were far past the point of turning Daniela down (if anything, you had only turned her on). “Now, with that settled, I believe I should let you return to your duties. Oh, and do tell Cynthia that the tea she brewed was perfect, should you happen to see her.”

Then she looked away, practically ignoring your continued existence. So you rose to your feet, gave another bow, and left before your panic could devolve into a breakdown. Daniela is not going to be happy about this.

[makeste]

BnHA Chapter 291: The Endeavor Pamphlet

Previously on BnHA: Dabi showed up atop Gigantomachia’s back and was all “you’ll never guess who I really am!” and the readers humored him and were all “who?” and he was all “TODOROKI TOUYA” and we were all “WOW └(・。・)┘ OH MY GOSH I WOULD NEVER HAVE GUESSED”, except for Shouto and Enji who were GENUINELY SHOCKED. Anyway so Touya was all “and guess what I’m doing right now!” and before anyone could even try, he was all, “STREAMING MY EMMY-NOMINATED MINISERIES ‘HELLO, I’M EVIL BUT ALSO TRAGIC AND SEXY, NOW LET ME TELL YOU ALL ABOUT MY DAD WHO SUCKS’’, THAT’S WHAT.” And everyone was all “oh my god” and Touya was all “ヽ(⌐■_■)ノ♪” for basically the rest of the chapter, and that’s pretty much it! Oh, wait, except for the part where he also doused himself in bleach in a fit of pure theatrics, which is actually pretty much the main takeaway from the entire chapter really because it was just wild af. ANYWAYS.

Today on BnHA: Horikoshi introduces Baby Touya, the world’s most enchantingly sweet character, and is immediately all, “I sure can’t wait to tell you guys all about how his fucking jaw burnt off.” Thankfully he doesn’t (YET), and we cut back to the present pretty quickly, where Dabi explains how he took all of his brain cells that should have been used to stop him from pouring bleach over his head, and instead put them all toward his big brain plot of releasing an elaborate video detailing Endeavor’s various abuses and crimes, and even throwing Hawks under the bus as well because WHY NOT. He then leaps off of Gigantomachia’s back (like I said, no brain cells) all set to blast them with a Prominence Burn, only to be stopped by none other than THE LEGEND HIMSELF, MOTHERFUCKING BEST, PRETTIEST, NICEST, MOST OUTSTANDING MOTHERFUCKING JEANIST. Who’s no doubt outraged by the crime against hair he witnessed only moments earlier. GO GETTIM JEANY BOI.

so I haven’t had time to answer any of them because this has been the stupidest week, but I just wanted to tell you guys that I received no fewer than nine asks about Dabi’s hair. which, in a week filled with election memes and tumblr’s most cursed fandom briefly rising back up from the dead, is a pretty impressive feat for him if you ask me. like, I know I was making fun of it basically nonstop, but it sure did generate a lot of discussion so maybe I should rethink my opinions on Dabi’s PR strategies now, idk

anyway. it’s Saturday. time to catch up on this shit. let’s see how fucked the Todorokis are

OH NO HE’S CUTE

HOLY SHIT THIS IS TOO MUCH TO FUCKING PROCESS. I’M JUST TRYING TO ENJOY MY DAY HORIKOSHI, ARE YOU REALLY GOING TO TRAUMATIZE THIS POOR CHILD RIGHT IN FRONT OF MY SALAD

“thanks for being all right” the fuck

who allowed this child to be so cute. I’m serious. who signed off on this

how could a child this adorable possibly want to murder his equally adorable baby brother. please, your honor. there must be some mistake here

guess how prepared I am to read all about Touya’s tragic past. mm. that’s right. zero ready. none ready

anyway. TWO THOUSAND DEGREES LOLOLOL. NO TRACE OF A CORPSE HOW CONVENIENT. A PIECE OF HIS LOWER JAW BONE FFFFMSGHKLSh. LOVELY. LOVELY

LMAOOOOO

listen you guys. I just want to take a moment to appreciate that Horikoshi Kouhei did one of two things here. either (1) he planned it out FROM THE VERY START that Touya would be born with red hair Because Fire Powers, but would then have his hair turn white due to trauma, thus making the Dabi/Touya connection very slightly less obvious, although Let’s Be Real Who Are We Kidding. OR, (2) the anime got it wrong and gave him red hair, and rather than allowing this plot hole to continue to exist, Horikoshi took it upon himself to concoct this elaborate storyline and pretend it was never a plot hole at all! in which case I sure hope someone at Bones is sending him a VERY nice Christmas card this year. got this man sweeping up all your messes for you. you’re just lucky he has some sort of wild compulsion to address these things

anyways!!

FATHER AND SON. how sweet. :| still zero percent ready for any of this btw

STOP BEING CUTE

THIS IS RIDICULOUS. I’M SO MAD RIGHT NOW. HE IS THE SINGLE CUTEST CHARACTER IN THE ENTIRE SERIES, and do you even know how many other baby characters I’m betraying in order to say that?! baby Kacchan, baby Deku, baby Ochako, baby Shouto, Eri, baby Hawks. I’M LOOKING YOU DEAD IN THE EYE RIGHT NOW AND TELLING YOU THAT BABY TOUYA IS CUTER THAN ALL OF THOSE PLEBS. AND YOU’RE LOOKING BACK AT ME RIGHT NOW ALL “YEAH IT SURE IS A PITY ABOUT HIS JAW MELTING OFF THOUGH.” THAT’S IT, I QUIT THE SERIES

and Enji’s smiling at him. he’s so proud of him. but then Touya won’t be able to do it, and Enji’s gonna stop training him, and Touya’s gonna feel like a failure and keep pushing himself in order to try and win his dad’s affections back, because that’s all kids fucking want, all they want is just love, that’s fucking it, you couldn’t just give him that?? and then he’s gonna immolate himself fflkdlskfh THERE YOU SEE HORIKOSHI, I KNOW THE WHOLE STORY ALREADY, YOU DON’T HAVE TO DO THE WHOLE “SHOW THEM THE DEAD DOG” THING YET AGAIN YOU PIECE OF SHIT

OH SNAP THERE GOES THE TWIN THEORY. R.I.P.

BABY FUYUMI. PRETTY CUTE. NOT AS CUTE AS TOUYA THOUGH. HEY LOOK, NO REASON TO GET MAD AT ME I’M JUST STATING A FACT HERE

YEAH THIS IS GONNA GO REAL WELL OH BOY

I keep pressing the emergency stop button but this industrial tragedy machine just keeps on chugging along anyway, I’m pretty sure this thing is not up to code

:| I am so sorry sweet boy, Horikoshi is only getting started with you

FUCKING HELL WITH THIS NARRATION

but he wasn’t actually a child to you, he was just a little puppet child for you to live vicariously through!! and then you went and did the same fucking thing with Shouto afterwards and never learned your lesson until just six months ago!! fucking hell, Enji

so now he’s all “Touya is dead, that’s an unforgivable lie” fflkdhflk motherfucker does he look dead to you. if you really think that, tumblr and twitter have got a little over five years’ worth of archived theory posts to show you

oh shit Touya’s countering with “it’s an unforgivable truth”, which, damn. I actually think Horikoshi’s dialogue is one of his weaker points as a writer a lot of the time, but that comeback was snappy as fuck

actually guys, now that I’ve seen how ridiculously fucking cute baby!Touya was, I can almost understand why Shouto and Enji never put the pieces together before lol. any passing similarities would have easily been dismissed on account of he’d need to be at least 10x more adorable in order to get the full resemblance

OH MY GOD

NOW YOU SLEEP??? SO YOU POINT BLANK REFUSED TO PASS OUT WHILE YOU WERE BUSY MAIMING ALL OF MY FAVORITE CHARACTERS, BUT NOW THAT THERE’S AN OPPORTUNITY TO SEE YOUR REACTION TO THE “YOUR LIEUTENANT WAS SECRETLY RELATED TO ONE OF YOUR WORST ENEMIES THE WHOLE TIME” BOMBSHELL, YOU FINALLY DECIDE TO GET YOUR FORTY WINKS. I SEE

WOW DABI

I’M SURPRISED YOU DIDN’T ALREADY HAVE YOUR ANCESTRY.COM RESULTS PRINTOUT READY TO FOLD INTO A PAPER AIRPLANE AND ZOOM ON DOWN TO HIM

LOL NEVERMIND

gotta say, so far The Endeavor Pamphlet is just about as spicy as I could have hoped

(ETA: Natsuo’s face as he watches his beloved dead brother come back to life only to literally and metaphorically set everything on fire in one fell swoop is :/. why must you do this to me Natsu. can’t you see I’m trying to throw a Welcome Back Jeanist party here.)

HAVE YOU READ THIS?! TODOROKI ENJI ABUSED HIS OWN HEIR, AND DABI WROTE IT DOWN RIGHT THERE

WELL HE’S NEVER GON’ BE NUMBER ONE NOW / NEVER GON’ BE NUMBER ONE NOW / THAT’S ONE LESS THING TO WORRY ABOUT / THAT’S ONE LESS THING TO WORRY ABOUT

btw I neglected to mention this last week, but yes I do recognize and appreciate that this is Can’t Ya See-kun himself whom Horikoshi has chosen to be the face of this existential crisis which the general public is about to experience. rip CYS-kun

OOF

excuse me. putting aside the implications of Dabi sharing this context-less murder video of Hawks with the entire world for a moment, I just have to pause for a sec here, because when exactly did he get a chance to edit this all in?? complete with voiceover that seamlessly ties in with the prerecorded footage of him with DNA test results sans shirt?? you’re telling me this motherfucker, with all the smoke that was in the room thanks to his own quirk, somehow got a PERFECT SHOT of the PRECISE MOMENT when Hawks drove his feather knife into Jin’s back, using his MAGIC CAMERA THAT HE I GUESS HAD THE ENTIRE TIME IN THE POUCH RIGHT NEXT TO HIS BLEACH BOTTLE, and then immediately somehow got this very next shot as well FROM AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT ANGLE

ALL THE WHILE IMMEDIATELY RUNNING THROUGH SCRIPT REVISIONS IN HIS HEAD, WHICH HE THEN PROCEEDED TO RECORD... WHERE, EXACTLY?? WITH SKEPTIC, WHILST RIDING ON MACHIA’S BACK??

AND THIS IS ALL YOU HAVE TO SAY FOR YOURSELF???

and this after I just wrote that whole long paragraph positively GLOWING about this man’s ability to plug up a plot hole. jfc. just scratch out every damn word I said lol. just forget all of it

are you fucking kidding me, the footage was from the cameras Skeptic planted on Hawks??

that’s... actually... okay you know what, it still doesn’t make any sense in the slightest, but the determination to address it nonetheless... just, dammit... I feel like I’m constantly at war with myself over whether or not I want to shake this man’s hand or slap him lmao. whatever, then!!

anyway, since Shouto and Enji can’t actually see the damage that Touya is dealing to the hero industry even as they speak, Touya is taking it upon himself to give them the highlights

I think it’s a testament to how much Endeavor cares about Hawks that he managed to zero in on that comment even amidst all the craziness of his eldest son returning from the dead to announce how he’s been carefully plotting their destruction for years and years. like, he heard “Hawks” and his face immediately went like that. you think he’s worried that Dabi did something to him? because he’d be right to worry lol

so the Endeavor Pamphlet narration is now explaining all about how Hawks totally killed the Number 3 Hero Best Jeanist as well! yep... he sure did... totally...

OH MY GOD WE’RE CUTTING TO HIM AHHHHH

Hawks, that is. lol. not Jeanist. NO, JUST MY POOR HALF-DEAD WINGLESS BABY SON

NOOOOO HIS LITTLE WING STUMPS. BUT SOMEHOW HIS FACIAL HAIR IS STILL INTACT. OH TO BE AN ANIME PRETTY BOY BEING SET ON FIRE. “HEY, TAKE IT EASY, WATCH THE FACE”

EXCUSE ME WHAT

interesting! we suspected as much, I think, with the clues that Ending dropped, and the little flashback right after the name reveal. still not clear how Dabi found out about it though!

looooool okay here we go, breaking out the heavy-handed holier-than-thou shit now

you know, I do find it interesting how trying to model themselves after All Might’s noble Symbol of Peace image has kind of ended up being the heroes’ undoing here. like, I could write a whole essay on this, but what it basically boils down to is that they were all trying too hard to be perfect. All Might went out there and did his thing and was amazing, and so the powers-that-be built an entire system centered around this seemingly-infallible person, and they acted like the system was infallible as well. and so most of the population ended up becoming complacent over the years, and meanwhile the people who were unfortunate enough to fall through the cracks understandably wound up disillusioned and perceiving the heroes as these false idols

anyway, but I think one positive takeaway from this is that the new up-and-coming generation of heroes represent a breakaway from that system. like, imo what we’re witnessing is the downfall of the Perfect Hero, and the rise of the imperfect hero. and this new generation doesn’t shy away from their failures or pretend like they never happened. they pretty much can’t pretend, because their failures are all right out there in the open for everyone to see. Bakugou Katsuki, just to name one example off the top of my very biased head, has had his own personal character journey basically play out right in front of the media’s eyes. his humiliation at the sports festival, his kidnapping by the League, and all of the fallout afterward. this isn’t someone who can ever go out there and convince the world that he’s perfect. but what he can do, instead, is show the world that he’s trying. that he’s trying with everything he has to do his best, to be the best. rather than this untouchable godlike image, it’s instead the image of someone painfully human who is nonetheless striving with everything he’s got to keep moving forward, flaws and all, and work his way to the top

and ultimately I think that’s going to be a much more positive image to send out to the world when all’s said and done. because rather than merely inspiring awe, heroes like that inspire people to take action themselves. or at least that’s what I hope! and not just Bakugou, but the others as well. we’ve got Shouto, whose own personal trauma is being aired in front of the whole nation even as I sit here ranting. we’ve got Deku, who cries at the drop of a hat, and who fought to become a hero despite being quirkless (and I think it’s only a matter of time before that eventually becomes public knowledge as well). tl;dr because I’m getting way too long-winded here, but these kids have effectively been humanized in a way that the old generation never was, and I think that’ll go a long way towards building trust between them and the people they’ll someday be protecting, and inspiring the next generation in hopefully a much healthier way

anyway so where were we. ...oh yes, Dabi was explaining that heroes only protect themselves, and is presumably building up to his grand conclusion of “therefore you should all just let the villains take over and burn down the world”

omfg. YOU GUYS

DOES CAN’T YA SEE-KUN’S SHARK FRIEND ACTUALLY CALL HIM “CAN’T YA SEE-KUN.” HE HAS A NAME YOU KNOW!! UNLESS HE LEGALLY GOT HIS NAME CHANGED TO CAN’T YA SEE-KUN. OH MY GOD

ALSO, IS THAT CAN’T YA SEE-KUN CRYING IN THE BOTTOM RIGHT THERE OMG. GIVE THIS CHILD A HUG. EVERYONE STOP WHAT YOU’RE DOING RIGHT NOW AND HUG HIM

BAKUGOU IS BARELY HANGING ON THERE LOL. GOTTA STAY CONSCIOUS... SO MUCH TEA BEING SPILLED... FOCUS... CONCENTRATE

IIDA’S ANGLING HIS HEAD IN A WEIRD WAY, LIKE DUDE. LOOKING SUSPICIOUSLY SNUGGLY THERE. MMM THESE IIDABAKU CRUMBS

HADOU IS ALL “WHAT EVEN IS ACTUALLY GOING ON” LMAO

LASTLY, POOR SHOUTO OMFG. WHEN YOU’RE ALL FINISHED HUGGING CYS-KUN THIS CHILD NEEDS YOUR ATTENTION!!

so now Dabi’s leaping off of this ninety-foot-tall gargoyle man like that’s a normal, smart thing to do. unless he can fly too now? saw his dad doing it back at Fukuoka and was all “hmm”

OH MY GOD SOMEONE TELL ME RIGHT NOW WHAT WORD SHOUTO IS USING TO ADDRESS ENJI, THESE TRANSLATIONS LOVE TO MESS WITH MY HEAD

ENJI GET MOVING DO YOU NOT SEE THOSE TEARS!!! SNAP OUT OF IT YOU BIG TREE

AHHHHH

OH KACCHAN YOU WOKE UP A LITTLE MORE THERE, HUH

lol he and Deku both look so determined but they’re basically sitting ducks. their “oh shit” faces do look remarkably like their “TIME TO SWING INTO ACTION” faces but don’t be fooled, they have one good arm and about six pints of blood left between the two of them. looks like this one’s all on you Shouto

-- AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH --

BAH GOD... WHAT’S GOING ON HERE... THAT’S BEST JEANIST’S MUSIC

y’all. can’t even talk right now, my brain has completely shut down lol. just. ...

  °˖✧◝(￣▿￣)◜✧˖°

[ibijau]

Futures past pt3 / On AO3

Nie Huaisang meets a potential new friend, all thanks to Lan Xichen

The Cloud Recesses were impossibly boring and extraordinarily fun at the same time, Nie Huaisang decided roughly a week into his stay there.

The boring part was the lectures, of course. He frequently fell asleep during those, drawing the ire of Lan Qiren… and apparently asking that the old man speak in a more lively manner was not the right reaction to being caught like that. Nie Huaisang had already been punished to copy Gusu Lan’s rules a few times in just those first few days. It didn’t bother him too much. If anything, he counted that as part of the fun. Back at home being punished meant running around the courtyard a hundred times, or carrying heavy buckets, or some awful boring thing like this. 

Copying rules, by contrast, wasn’t so bad, especially after the first few times. Once Nie Huaisang knew them well enough, he stopped paying attention to the words and was free to focus entirely on his calligraphy skills. After a year of this, he was sure he’d have the best handwriting in the world, which he felt was more important than whatever Lan Qiren actually intended to teach him.

Other fun things to do included fishing (technically forbidden), catching birds (forbidden), exploring the back hills (forbidden), and chatting with other bored people outside of class (tolerated, though Nie Huaisang’s loud laughter was forbidden). Nie Huaisang had already found several places he couldn’t wait to paint, as soon as he found a way to escape punishment for a day. The light just wasn’t good enough for it when he went into the back hills too late, so that was a concern, but he was sure he’d manage sooner or later. He just needed to figure out how to fall asleep inconspicuously, and that would solve most of his problems.

During the middle of his second week, Nie Huaisang finally managed to go through a full day without getting scolded at all. It was, in all honesty, not thanks to anything he had personally done. But Jin Zixun had been particularly unbearable that day, attracting all the attention of the substitute teacher, who’d had to replace Lan Qiren at the last moment because sect business had needed urgent care. So Jin Zixun had been the one punished, and he’d made such a huge deal of it that very little teaching had happened after that, meaning that Nie Huaisang hadn’t had a chance to get in trouble as well.

When the bell rang to signal the end of the lectures for the day, Nie Huaisang ran (forbidden) to the little house he shared with the other Nie and hurriedly grabbed all his painting equipment, eager to make good use of the lovely light they had that day. He then made his way toward the back hills, only to hear his name called out just as he was about to leave the last set of buildings behind him.

He turned around, saw Lan Xichen walking his way, and almost cursed. So much for his much desired painting session.

“Were you going somewhere, Nie gongzi?” Lan Xichen asked. Noticing the painting equipment, he smiled indulgently. “Oh, I see. The light is truly lovely for it today. Are you going to the Plenitude Creek?”

“I don’t know if it has a name,” Nie Huaisang replied. “But there’s a nice little clearing when you follow the river long enough, and from there there’s a lovely view of the mountains.”

Lan Xichen nodded. “I think I see the place you mean, and it is quite nice as well. But if you would allow me, I really think you might enjoy the Plenitude Creek. It is hard to find when you don’t know where it is though, so I could guide you there. It’s not far at all, and I believe you might enjoy it as a subject.”

It was very tempting to refuse, if only because Nie Huaisang already had a plan, and he wasn’t sure at all when he’d get another chance to do as he pleased. At the same time, his future self had insisted on the need to be on good terms with Lan Xichen, hadn’t he? And everyone said that Lan Xichen was a very skilled artist already in spite of his youth, so he would know how to spot a nice scenery.

“If Lan gongzi has time to waste on me, I’ll gladly take this offer,” Nie Huaisang said. “Please lead the way.”

Lan Xichen did just that, careful to match his pace to Nie Huaisang’s, just like he had during that tour of the Cloud Recesses a while ago. It really was considerate of him, and Nie Huaisang appreciated it more than he should have. He was used to trailing behind others because he just couldn’t make the effort of walking fast enough, so having his speed taken into account for once was nice. On the down side, it felt quite awkward to be side by side like this in silence. It was probably fine for Lan Xichen, because Gusu Lan preferred the quiet, but Nie Huaisang didn’t like to be around others and not chat. Silence was only for birdwatching, or when he focused on something for once.

“I’m surprised you’re not scolding me for this,” Nie Huaisang said after a while, only to immediately want to slap himself. It was such a stupid thing to say, only made worse when he opened his mouth to add: “Your uncle gave us all that homework to do, I probably shouldn’t be thinking of painting. Da-ge would surely be scolding me. Poor da-ge, he lost the didi lottery, and you won it.”

“I’m sure he doesn’t think that at all,” Lan Xichen objected.

“Oh, he does. He told me as much. I almost forgot my sabre at home when preparing to come here, you see, and he got angry, and he said Wangji would never be such an embarrassment, and how I need to grow up already and all that. But the way I see it, it’s not my fault. I think your brother stole all the accomplishments there were to be had in my age group, so of course I was left with nothing at all.”

“Now you’re unfair to yourself,” Lan Xichen scolded, his voice oddly detached all of a sudden. “I’m sure… I’m quite sure Nie gongzi is skilled at many things, and just needs the chance to show it off.”

Surprised to hear something that very nearly sounded like a compliment, Nie Huaisang pondered a moment on that as they followed along the path.

“No, I don’t think I have any skill at all,” he decided at last.

Lan Xichen frowned, and motioned for Nie Huaisang to leave the path with him.

“The other day, you said your father used to compliment your ear for music,” Lan Xichen noted. “And you paint, don’t you?”

“Oh, very poorly. It’s just something I do because it’s fun. If you were to see it…”

“I would like to.”

Off the path, the ground was rougher, with roots everywhere. Nie Huaisang told himself that he tripped for that reason alone, and not at all because the request surprised him so much. Lan Xichen caught him before he could really fall, but that just made it worse, and Nie Huaisang quickly pulled away, puzzled by that sudden goodwill. Lan Xichen had never taken notice of him before, or only to nod along when Nie Mingjue scolded his unruly little brother in his presence, so why the change?

“Did da-ge ask you to keep an eye on me?” Nie Huaisang bluntly asked. “Is this… are you just going to lecture me, or to take me somewhere to meditate instead of paint?”

His brother used to do both, when he was younger. He would agree to take Nie Huaisang out to admire a landscape, then turn their outing into a cultivation lesson, or make him meditate in a place that was supposed to be particularly rich in energy. Over time Nie Huaisang had learned to run the opposite direction if his brother offered to go for a walk, and apparently he might need to do the same with Lan Xichen.

“Of course he asked me to look after you,” Lan Xichen said, looking puzzled. “He is your brother and I am his friend. But I really just want to show you a place I think you’d enjoy to…”

“That’s what da-ge would say too,” Nie Huaisang retorted, deeply annoyed now. “Thanks, but no thanks. Have your own fun meditating, Lan gongzi, but I have better things to do!”

Nie Huaisang bolted away, running as fast as he could in what he vaguely believed was the direction from which they had come from. He thought he heard Lan Xichen calling his name after the initial surprise had passed, but the older boy made no effort to run after him. Possibly because it would have been undignified for someone as elegant as Lan Xichen to run, and also because it might have been against one of those rules that Nie Huaisang still couldn’t be bothered to remember. Nie Huaisang, meanwhile, was only concerned about getting away from this heinous trap. 

He ran until he found the path again. Then, fearful that he’d be too easy to find if he returned to the Cloud Recesses or followed the path deeper into the mountain, he decided to keep running into the woods on the other side of that path, and find a quiet spot where to wait. If Lan Xichen was anything like Nie Mingjue, it might take him a shichen or more to accept that Nie Huaisang wouldn’t be so easily manipulated into behaving.

Worried about being pursued and forced to study, Nie Huaisang kept glancing behind as he ran. That was how he only noticed too late that he’d stumbled into a clearing, one in which there was already a person present.

To be precise, he discovered this other person due to running into them at full speed, causing both of them to fall on the ground. Nie Huaisang initially counted himself lucky, since he’d fallen on top of the stranger, but that sentiment didn’t last long when he was roughly pushed aside, knocking the breath out of him.

“Can’t you watch where you’re going?” the other person snapped as he sat up. “Look at that, I’ve got grass stains now!”

It was a boy roughly Nie Huaisang’s own age, dressed all in white… or in robes that were originally white, anyway. A Lan disciple then, but not a member of the Lan clan: the ribbon on his forehead wasn’t embroidered, marking him as an outer disciple.

“Sorry, I was trying to escape,” Nie Huaisang said, sitting up as well and rubbing his back. “If you want, you can blame me for the robes, just as long as you don’t tell Lan Xichen you saw me if he comes here.”

The Lan disciple squinted at him unhappily.

“What did you do to Lan gongzi?”

“Nothing! He was the one trying to trick me, so of course I had to escape!”

The Lan disciple squinted harder, unconvinced.

“Lan gongzi is too boring to even think of tricking anyone, you must have misunderstood.”

Nie Huaisang gasped, delighted that finally someone else also realised Lan Xichen was so very boring. Delight, though, soon gave way to guilt and a little bit of shame.

Whatever defects Lan Xichen had, his personality was honest and straightforward. If he had wanted to lecture Nie Huaisang, he would have said so, just as he wouldn’t have lied if he thought he knew a place where meditation would be more effective. Someone like him just didn't have the imagination needed for trickery. Which meant that Lan Xichen had probably really just meant to show him a nice scenery to paint. Which, in turn, meant that Nie Huaisang had just behaved in an impossibly rude manner toward the person he was supposed to befriend if he wanted to save his brother.

"You're not going to tell anyone?" the Lan boy asked, his face contorted with terror. "I shouldn't have said that about Lan gongzi, please don't…" 

"Don't worry, I think he's boring too," Nie Huaisang distractedly retorted, waving his hand. "But damn, even someone with as little personality as him might take offence… ah, what a bother." 

The Lan disciple squinted at him. 

"Who are you exactly, to speak like that of Lan gongzi?" 

Nie Huaisang winced. There was a rule against rudeness, he vaguely remembered, and maybe also one against disrespecting one's host. 

"I'm Nie Huaisang. And you are?" 

The Lan boy frowned, then paled and bowed deeply before Nie Huaisang. 

"This humble one apologises for not recognising Nie gongzi. This humble one begs for forgiveness, and…" 

"Please don't bow," Nie Huaisang complained. "It's not necessary. And don't worry, I'm not important, so nobody ever recognises me. Listen, just don't tell anyone I was running, and I won't tell anyone that you…" he hesitated, and waved his hand toward the other boy. "That you have an actual personality, unlike everyone here. Actually, I think it’s nice!”

The Lan disciple winced, and remained bowed until Nie Huaisang grabbed him by the elbows and forced him to stand straight again.

“There, no need to be so formal! What’s your name, by the way?”

The other boy hesitated a moment longer than was truly polite, and glared down at his feet when he finally answered.

“I’m Su She. I am a disciple of Gusu Lan and… and I should report both of us for punishment for being rude about Lan gongzi.”

“But you won’t do that, right?” Nie Huaisang begged. “Please, you’re the first Gusu Lan person I’ve met that sounds even a little cool, please don’t ruin it?”

Su She hesitated, which Nie Huaisang took as an excellent sign. So far, he’d never seen any Gusu Lan disciple even consider breaking their precious rules. Then again, they usually always moved in groups, meaning they couldn’t be properly negotiated with.

“I suppose I can let it slide for this time,” Su She pondered. “And you really won’t tell that I was… not perfectly polite either, right? I’m doing my best, but apparently I have a bad temperament.”

“I think you’re just fine,” Nie Huaisang replied, feeling very generous now that he was certain not to be punished. “But why are you here anyway?” he asked, before noticing a book of sword forms carefully laid on the ground which they’d very nearly fallen on earlier, as well as a training sword, the sort that wouldn’t even cut through congee. “Oh, were you practising?”

It was an odd place for it, Nie Huaisang thought, because Gusu Lan had a few perfectly fine training grounds, where seniors were usually hanging out and could provide help and advice to improve one’s posture. But maybe those same seniors were the reason why Su She didn’t want to practice on the training grounds. If his personality was judged unpleasant, or if his skill was deemed insufficient… Nie Huaisang understood that too well, having the same problem. Even on those occasional moments when he’d considered training for real, he’d ended up discouraged when he’d felt everyone judging him for his low level.

“I prefer to be on my own,” Su She announced, before quickly adding: “Not that… not that Nie gongzi is bothering me of course. You can stay if you want.”

The offer sounded so forced that Nie Huaisang snorted. “I might stay,” he said, mostly to tease, and Su She looked as if he’d bitten into a lemon. “Oh, don’t worry, even if you were the worst swordsman in the world I wouldn’t judge. No matter your level, I’m worse than you.”

“I’m not that bad,” Su She proudly retorted, bending down to pick up his sword. “Just because I’m not as good as those who were born in the sect… but I didn’t start cultivating until four years ago, and my parents are… well, I’d never picked up a sword until they tried to get me into a sect, that’s the only reason I’m a little behind.”

Nie Huaisang nodded. “Those born in sects or from a rogue cultivator have a bit of an advantage.”

“A lot, you mean!” Su She snapped, before taking a deep breath and making himself smile. “But that just means I have to work harder to catch up, and of course I’m grateful that I was allowed to join at all.” He glanced at the manual on the ground, then at Nie Huaisang. “Are you really going to watch me? I… I don’t do as well when someone watches me.”

“I’m just going to sit here,” Nie Huaisang replied after some consideration. “I promise not to look too much. But if I go back right now, then I might stumble upon Lan gongzi, and I’ll have to apologize, and… I just don’t feel like doing that right now.”

To show how little he would be watching, Nie Huaisang sat against a tree so that he’d have to look over his shoulder to see the clearing. Su She glared at him for a while, unhappy with this arrangement, but in the end he gave in and resumed practicing.

At first, Nie Huaisang really tried to respect the other boy’s shyness. He looked just anywhere but toward Su She, wondering how angry Lan Xichen might be (not much, he’d need a personality for that), whether this place might inspire him to paint (not particularly, there wasn’t anything striking to it) or if he might see some birds (he wouldn’t, Su She was scaring them away). All too soon, Nie Huaisang became bored, and decided to check just how bad his new friend was, anyway.

Turning around to look, Nie Huaisang was surprised to discover that Su She was, in fact, very decent with a sword. His posture was good enough that even Nie Mingjue wouldn’t have found much to criticise, he had good balance, his movements were measured and elegant while still demonstrating strength. For someone not born in a sect, Su She was pretty good. Even if he had been born among cultivators, his level would have been more than decent. Nie Huaisang had expected so much worse, and ended up watching the other boy until he was finished with his set of exercises

Su She frowned deeply when he realised he’d been watched, and sheathed his sword with an angry movement.

“I know I’m not good enough yet,” he grumbled. “I’m trying.”

“I think you’re doing very well,” Nie Huaisang said.

“Not as good as Lan gongzi and Lan er-gongzi, though.”

Nie Huaisang snorted and shrugged. “Well, you’ve got to be realistic. They’re on equal footing with adults, those two. I’ve seen Lan gongzi spar with my brother and they often come to a draw, and da-ge is a damn monster.”

Su She’s frown only deepened.

“Someday, I’ll be that good. Better, even. I’m going to catch up and I’ll show everyone!” Su She proclaimed.

Having no ambition whatsoever, save maybe to collect as many pretty things as possible and try to make sure his brother didn’t die too soon, Nie Huaisang found this need to prove oneself a little odd. Still, it seemed to be important for Su She, and Nie Huaisang had decided he liked this weird Lan disciple.

“I’m sure you’ll show them, yeah,” he cheerfully agreed. “If you’re already as good as this with a sword, it’s just a matter of time. How do you do with other subjects? Music and archery?”

Su She grimaced, and bent down to pick up his manual, avoiding Nie Huaisang's eyes when he stood up again and checked the book hadn't been dirtied.

“I got into Gusu Lan because my music skills were judged passable enough,” he muttered. “But that’s all I had for myself. And there’s only so much time in a day, and the sword is more important, everyone says so, and… I don’t have time to practice archery outside of classes, so my skill remains very poor. There’s just a lot to learn, I can’t work on everything at once!”

“It’s really too much to ask,” Nie Huaisang agreed, as if he hadn’t given up on trying years ago. “I’m curious to hear you play the guqin now, though. Saying someone is ‘passable enough’ in the Cloud Recesses, that’s saying they have out of this world talent by anyone else’s standards.”

“You’re mocking me!”

“I’m not! Oh, do you know any fun pieces? I mostly only hear such boring things…”

“Melodies for the guqin are meant to be slow and reflective,” Su She dryly informed him. “But… I play the dizi too, and there are less… formal pieces of music for that. My younger siblings liked it, anyway, and they're too young to care about real music.”

“Great! Then you’re going to play for me!” Nie Huaisang decided, grinning so triumphantly he didn’t notice the other boy’s grimace. “Oh, but it’s getting late, I should head back… I really don’t want to be late for dinner. If I have to copy the stupid rules another time, my wrist will fall off. Let's walk together?”

Su She rolled his eyes, but didn’t make any comment, even though Nie Huaisang was sure that another less interesting Lan disciple would have scolded him for not showing proper respect to the rules.

He was so glad the two of them had met. Surely, this was the beginning of a beautiful friendship, and one far more interesting than the one he was supposed to pursue with Lan Xichen.

[santalsaburablog]

The adventures of Santal. Chapter 11. Santal, help out!

Believe in yourself, otherwise no one will believe in you.

A riddle! Santal, who has recently been studying at the Jedi Temple, saw for the first time a real lightsaber duel, as well as the former padawan of Master Yoda, Master Ian Dooku! Wanting to get acquainted, the girl, however, suffers because of the tension that has arisen between her and another youngster named Landa Selmura. Not knowing what to do, Santal decides to seek help from the grandmaster, but after receiving advice, something unexpected happens…

- Santal, just in case, I have nothing to do with it! It's not me! I don't know!

- Hush, calm down, what happened? Santal gently pulled the boy's hands away from her.

But Svante continued to tremble, folding his hands in a cross.

— I do not know how it happened! - the little Rodian continued to talk confusedly.

"You'd better show me," Santal interrupted. She was burning with impatience at what had happened.

- Let's run.

Svante took the girl to his room. It was, as Santal had expected, the same as hers. But there were minor differences. There was a plate with three jogans on it. On the left is a computer. The boy brought the daughter of the Jedi to him.

"I want to say right away that I'm not a computer hacker," Santal admitted.

And then I caught a slight sadness, although the expression of the face was not completely visible.

— Yes, and where did you get this device? - the girl continued. — We, the Younglings, like ... - and stopped. She didn't know if she was speaking correctly or not.

— It shouldn't be so personal. And that's the problem. One of the older ones lent it to me, and I screwed up. Here, " Svante pointed to the screen.

Santal looked carefully and did not understand. There were two tabs on the screen.

— And what's there? Santal asked, holding out her hand to the screen.

- You see, I was looking for information, and then I clicked somewhere. And so…

Santal, without thinking twice, moved her finger along the mouse and clicked on the first tab. The text appeared.

Svante opened his mouth slightly. And then he smiled, wanting to say something, but changed his mind.

- Hurrah! Thanks! And then I was scared, I thought that…

And Santal didn't know what to do. Laugh or swear. She thought something serious had happened. And here... oh, the Power!

The girl closed the second tab.

"Don't push that thing again," she advised. — I don't understand one thing. More precisely, two things. Why did you ask me for help, and not one of the older ones? And what were you shouting at first, I don't remember?

— I was just scared. Especially not my room, but that padawan's. That is... yes, that. Room. Sorry, I didn't say that… He allowed me to use it without leaving his room. And when I clicked, I didn't get my bearings, ran for help, stumbled upon you, and you sometimes sit in the library and know something about it. Probably. That's what I thought, " Svante finally relaxed and breathed a sigh of relief. And before that, I was flexing my fingers and getting confused in words. - I think I've said everything.

"Okay, I'm going," Santal said, and after waiting for an approving nod, she ran to her room, feeling great comfort from her clansman.

However, she still had some thoughts left. But she brushed them off like an insect, because there was a more important task. Find Dooku.

The girl did not run fast, feeling as if after what had happened a minute ago, she herself felt a little easier.

But then she suddenly realized that she had forgotten where Dooku's room was with all this fuss. And almost immediately calmed down. Why would she be in a hurry? Anyway, the old master is not going anywhere. She can approach him tomorrow.

And the next day the girl safely forgot about it. And calmly continued to study.

So six months have passed since getting into the Temple. And then, one day, the daughter of the Jedi woke up and realized that she was turning four.

As soon as she jumped out of bed with a wide smile, she immediately collapsed. The girl remembered that she now lives in the Temple. My aunt, who is preparing a cake in the morning, is not around. She will not kiss her again in the morning, will not hug her. My uncle will not circle over my head. No. It won't happen again.

So Santal just got up without haste, got dressed and went out. A little sad. Because no one will congratulate her.

This day was a day off. No classes, so you can relax. Santal calmly wandered through the corridors. Finally, I found a mirror and looked at it, wanting to find out what had changed.

And there were no special changes. The girl has grown up a little, and that's all. In the face, consider, there are zero changes.

— So I became a year older, so I became a year older... - Yunling hummed to herself.

According to tradition, I wondered what my aunt, uncle and that uncle were doing. Do they think about it?

Suddenly, Nick came across her. The Twi'lek, seeing the clansman, made a sign to lekku, meaning a greeting. Santal understood, because before the unexpected departure, her aunt had managed to teach her how to say hello, say goodbye, and other simple things with the help of the movements of tchun and tchin.

So Santal understood the Lekku language and the Twi'lek language a little, but she wanted to go further, to master it perfectly.

- Hi, there.

- Hi, Nick.

- Wow, did you learn the word "hello"? Congratulations! Progress, " the boy laughed.

Santal also laughed, but deep down she was a little offended by the joke. She didn't like it for something. There was something about her.

- Don't be offended. I was just joking, " Nick somehow realized that Santal was unpleasant to hear.

Santal decided that Nick guessed because of her expression or just felt it with the help of the Force.

— Where are you going?

— I want to rest. I'll probably sit in the Hall of a Thousand Fountains. Or where the trees are. I like quiet places.

- All right. I'm going to see a friend. He's making something again — " Nick went on his way.

And Santal is his own. Even though she said where she was going, she was still bored. She even thought, maybe she should have told about her birthday? Or not?

As a result, the girl, after sitting in the Fountain Hall, went to the garden. I sat down under a tree, thinking about everything.

- "Today is my birthday. 4 years old. But for some reason, I'm a little sad. Why? Maybe because this is my first birthday not at home, but at the Jedi Temple. I wonder if the Jedi celebrate their birthdays? I hope so. And it's not interesting to live without such an important holiday. After all, on this day you realize that you have become a year older, more mature. Another year has passed. And if there is no birthday, then the years fly by unnoticed. You don't have time to keep up."

The girl sighed and began to think further.

- "What are others doing now? Yes, I'm thinking about them again. Because there is not much to think about. My aunt probably forgot me by refusing. My uncle, I think, remembers me. And the guy with the hat? I wonder if he thinks about me? Although, on the other hand, why should he even think about me? Well, he lost me. And at first, most likely, he was looking for it. Then, maybe, he waved his hand. And I understand him. I would also give up pointless searches. We are nothing to each other."

Santal sat for a while longer, looked around and went back. She didn't know what to do, so she decided to read something.

However, the girl did not suspect that today she is not the only one who is overcome by anxiety for some unknown reason.

***

Dooku was sitting in his room and meditating. His face was absolutely calm and serene, as befits the face of any Jedi. But it was fake. In fact, the old Jedi was a little worried. He had a premonition that something would happen soon. Fortunately or not, it is unknown. Moreover, the excitement appeared exactly after the demonstrative duel. But Dooku couldn't figure out what exactly was bothering him.

***

Barriss Offee was sitting quietly in the library, her head modestly bent over some text. Although she had not been a youngling for so long, even more than Santal, she already dreamed of the times when she would become a padawan, and then a knight. It is obvious that her teacher is most likely to be mirialanka. This is the tradition. Created in order for the teacher to pass on the experience to the student.

The girl also imagined how she would travel, discover something new, unknown. It will open a previously unexplored planet, a civilization. This is one of the main reasons why she wanted to be a Jedi. She also planned to spend her evenings studying ancient texts. From her point of view, this is a very exciting activity.

Perhaps she will do this together with Santal. And what? She liked this girl with her thirst for knowledge. He likes to read, so there will be something to talk about.

But with a lightsaber, things were bad. The young mirialanka could not even hold a sword properly. But maybe someone will help. Two days ago, she still didn't think, but now it seems to her that a couple of additional lessons still wouldn't hurt. Mara also said that he would like her to be a little more cheerful, smile more often, laugh. Well, Offi tried to behave like that. It's not working out very well.

In the meantime, she will allow you to help with the sword. Here Tutso Mara volunteered.

***

Santal still plucked up the courage and told her fellow clansmen about her birthday. After much thought, I finally decided that there would be no harm to her from disclosing this information.

Almost everyone reacted, as the Jedi daughter expected, with a smile. They started congratulating me.

— Why didn't you tell us?" - Max was "offended".

And Santal didn't answer. She wanted to laugh. And she didn't care that she didn't receive any gifts that day. The main thing is the attention that was given to her. The members of the clan showed that they care about her.

Until the evening, the children had fun, chatted about various things. Santal mostly just listened.

The next morning at breakfast, Santal had an idea. Write letters and make peace with Landa. The second did not work out, because they did not meet in the dining room somehow. Apparently, it so happened that one of them came earlier. Maybe they were separated for a split second or something else.

Well, nothing. She will meet with Landa in the classroom. He will have time. Yes, and she will have time to write letters. Namely, my aunt and uncle. She knows the address. And even if they don't read, it will at least make it easier for her.

And she will also write a letter to that uncle. The only bad thing is that she doesn't know his name and address where he lives. But she will write anyway, and then she will find someone who will pass it on. The main thing is to write.

And now in the evening Santal was coming from class, wanting to retire to her room and start writing. I left the classroom, decided to go to the library, but decided to take a longer path.

Santal still studied the corridors of the Temple and other nearby places at her leisure, even though she had lived in it for quite a long time. Just because she was interested in it. It is interesting to walk in such a peculiar maze. It's always so exciting to go back and forth, right and left and guess where the exit is, where the road will lead you.

So, Santal Sabura was distracted by the windows before entering the library. Or rather, the views that open from them.

Almost all Younglings did not know life outside the Temple until they became padawans. But not Santal. She, by virtue of the circumstances, saw the world, at least a little. I managed to visit other planets. I saw houses, and sand, and the sea, and grass, and trees. That's why she was so attracted to the windows of the Temple, showing life on Coruscant. Cars flying at great speed. Houses, lights.

On this planet, urban "Coruscant" life reigned around the clock. Santal had already taken a bite out of it. And, of course, she wanted more. Last time, she definitely looked at a couple of levels. This is great, but I would like to see the whole city. All levels. From top to bottom.

Having seen enough, Santal still forced herself to tear herself away from the window and continue her way to the library, or at least to her room. She turned her head to the left and stopped dead.

Master Dooku was standing by the window, apparently also admiring the view. Santal was surprised and delighted. Plus, it felt like going to the toilet downstairs. The girl did not believe her luck. She kept putting off meeting this Jedi, and then he met her himself. Unbelievable! There are coincidences!

Santal froze, afraid to move. She knew that such a chance could not be missed, and therefore she did not want to make a mistake terribly. It is very important for her now to think about where to start a conversation. It would be easier if everything depended on her, but no. Her interlocutor will be a man much older than her, and therefore smarter. His questions also determine which way the dialogue will turn.

It seemed to the girl that a lot of time had passed, and she was already beginning to be afraid. She already wanted to take the first step, giving out a banality in the form of a simple greeting. It was too simple, but it couldn't be better, and she felt that there wasn't much time left. Santal didn't care anymore, as long as she didn't keep silent.

"Hello," she said softly, but so that she could hear herself clearly.

The man turned and looked at her. Santal was already at the limit, because the master's gaze was strict and serious. But calm, without malice.

***

Dooku, in search of a source of excitement, decided to air out and take a walk, at the same time observing what was happening outside the Temple windows. At such moments, he always remembered his home planet Serenno. His parents, his sister. They have all been gone for a long time, but Yan Dooku still remembered them.

The man perfectly remembered how his sister gave him a comlink to communicate. He remembered coming to his mother's funeral, where his father yelled at him and even beat him.

All this was already a long time in the past. It's time to forget and move on. That's what Jedi usually do. And Dooku did the same. But still, sometimes I was nostalgic for the past.

After wandering for about half an hour, Dooku decided to make a stop at one of the windows, and after a while he suddenly realized that he might now find the source of excitement. It began to seem to him that there was someone nearby, and this someone was either afraid to take the first step,or waiting for him to start.

After waiting for quite a long time, Dooku got tired of this, and he decided to look at the one who is next to him. I turned my head to the right and saw...

A little human girl. Ordinary appearance. Nothing special. But what really caught my eye was that the girl, although frightened, did not lower her head, but continued to look. Amazing.

***

"Yunling, what are you doing here so late?" The master asked the girl sternly.

Santal was even more scared because she intuitively understood that the further conversation depends on what she will say. My tongue was numb.

- I was ... going to my room. But first I wanted to go to the library, take it to read, - it seemed to Santal as if someone was speaking for her with her mouth. And she was even grateful for it. The necessary words pop up by themselves.

- I see, - Dooku turned around and went to the left side.

And Santal stood confused, not knowing what to do - to rush after her, not knowing what else to say (and she really did not know and did not understand), or to go where she originally intended.

While she was thinking, the master had managed to get far away. Santal wanted to catch up, but thought: what will she say to him at all? Just facts and compliments. This begs the question: and what?

- You fought so hard.... It was so... Great... I heard that you were a student of Yoda himself... Santal suddenly uttered aloud in one breath.

- Thank you, - Dooku heard even at this distance, turned around and walked on.

Santal, feeling a little relieved, quickly ran to the library and went to her room.

And after some time, the Santal clan received a real surprise. When the children entered the classroom, Master Yoda was already waiting for them.

- Max, hand out the swords. They are in the drawer on the left.

Everyone was shocked. They finally began to be trained to wield a lightsaber! And Max asked, worried:

- Are they real?

The other Younglings laughed. Yoda giggled.

- We will study the training ones. So that you don't get hurt, but learn the basics.

We started with the simplest movements. And the first discovery that the daughter of the Jedi made was that only the hilt of the sword has weight. Because of this, there were difficulties when performing exercises. Without feeling the blade, you can turn it in the wrong place and burn it-fortunately, not so much.

Anyway, the first impression is always unforgettable. Santal was sure that even if many years passed, she would still not forget how she first took a lightsaber. Let it be a training one. It's simple.... I can't put it into words. The daughter of the Jedi was sure: instead of choosing the right words, you should just let her hold this beautiful thing, the symbol of the Order, in her hand. Only then will it become clear what sensations are entering the brain at this moment. How an unprecedented feeling spreads through the whole body in different streams.

Another good news for the girl was that Yoda will teach. The one she respected the most. She even came up with a nickname for him - the Wisest.

"You should always rely on your feelings in everything," the grand master said, and Santal tried to absorb every word like a sponge.

Throughout the training, the girl stood up in different poses, then in one position she held a small sword, then in another. And so far it has worked out well. Everyone has.

It is not surprising, because so far, being younglings, children were taught only the First, the easiest, form of combat.

But then, as it should be in such cases, it became more difficult. One day, Yoda announced at the beginning of the lesson that the lessons would change. Now the younglings will learn to perform slightly more complex acrobatic tricks with somersaults, jumps, and so on. Of course, they have done this before, but from now on it will be a little more difficult. Plus, a sword is added. Not just training different stands and swings, standing firmly on your feet - now the type of exercise "sword plus acrobatics" is added. For example, you will need to jump up and make some movement with a training sword.

That's when Santal started having big problems. The old fear returned. She was afraid of tumbling, jumping or anything else before, because she was afraid of falling, of getting a fracture. I didn't want to disfigure myself. I was afraid of damage forever.

Although such serious injuries had never happened to the girl, she still did not want to experience such sensations on herself. That's why I was afraid. Each time losing faith in their own strength.

It is very strange that most of her fellow clansmen did not experience such problems. They calmly did what they said, without fear of consequences. Especially Max. Santal immediately realized: let him go, he will only be engaged in physical training all the time.

But they were also timid, like her. Svante was afraid, but he tried to do it. Justin was careful, but he tried anyway.

One day Santal got tired of all this. I thought, others are not afraid, they do it somehow. And what about her? Like it's worse than the others? As a result, at the next lesson, I was so brave that I tried. Unfortunately, it was unsuccessful.

The girl was hurt - not much, of course, but it was still a shame. Especially when the others laughed softly. Barely able to wait until the end of classes, Santal ran out of the room unnoticed, carefully watching the fellow clansmen and the master. Fortunately, no one stopped her. Although the girl still thought that Yoda knew everything, but decided to keep silent. Probably, everything was already clear, so there is no need to ask. It is written on the forehead, simply put. Moreover, everything was happening in front of everyone.

Fortunately, it was the end of the school day, and the daughter of the Jedi could safely look for a place to cry. But wherever she went, there was either at least someone everywhere, or there was just the certainty that someone would appear later. Santal could not imagine any completely secluded places. And suddenly I remembered. The map! We need to look at it more closely.

After a few minutes, carefully studying every detail, the girl found the perfect place. Ventilation! But how to get into it there? There was a ventilation vent in her room, but to get there, you need to jump high, which Santal was afraid to do, and did not know how.

I had to look elsewhere. Finally, the Jedi daughter found a place where the passage to the ventilation system opens low, so that she could push the hatch back there, climb in and close it again.

At that moment, Santal realized that the desire to cry had decreased a little, but the desire to hide deep inside had not. So it took a long time before the girl got tired. She walked for a very long time through the newly opened new maze. I went through a lot of turns, a couple of times I found abysses with giant fans and ran away in fear, because I was afraid of heights, until I found the perfect dead end, sat down in a corner. There, Santal Sabura finally gave way to tears.

***

"It looks like I'll have to accept it, although I don't want to. I hope Nobi is right, and Santal is fine, studying and all that. He lives in excellent conditions. Oh, why did I say that?! Oh, if only everything could be turned back. I wouldn't be in such a hurry. Maybe I had a chance to convince him to come back, and I missed it. Although our niece has never lived on her own before, Nobi believes that she adapts quickly. And we will think about her all the time while she is studying.

But I'm sure she'll forget about us. We took care of her, and she will forget. And when Santal grows up, she will suddenly remember, most likely, and will come to our common grave. Because by this time we will die of loneliness and not being needed by anyone. How are we going to live now? For what? How are we without you-eh?"

Elina Sabura gave way to tears, and then went to prepare the table. That evening, for the umpteenth time, the table was set rather sparsely. Just two plates and two glasses. The wonderful niece of Elina and Nobi did not have lunch with them anymore.

***

Shrinking into a ball and being very upset not only because of today, but also because she was in such a situation because of that kidnapper, Santal did not immediately notice the presence of another Jedi.

- Hi there. What happened? Why are you crying?

The daughter of the Jedi really did not want to show a tear-stained face, because she did not even move her ear. However, the young guy, as she understood from his voice, had his own opinion on this matter. Suddenly, the girl felt a hand on her shoulder. It was impossible not to turn around here.

Santal turned around. Very close to her, to her right, sat a really young guy with brown hair and gray-blue eyes. The look is very attentive and sympathetic. In other words, he is filled with a desire to take part in someone else's trouble.

- What's your name? the girl asked, sobbing.

"I'm a trainee padawan. My name is Obi-Wan Kenobi.

[arcticdementor]

Imagine that the US was competing in a space race with some third world country, say Zambia, for whatever reason. Americans of course would have orders of magnitude more money to throw at the problem, and the most respected aerospace engineers in the world, with degrees from the best universities and publications in the top journals. Zambia would have none of this. What should our reaction be if, after a decade, Zambia had made more progress?

Obviously, it would call into question the entire field of aerospace engineering. What good were all those Google Scholar pages filled with thousands of citations, all the knowledge gained from our labs and universities, if Western science gets outcompeted by the third world?

For all that has been said about Afghanistan, no one has noticed that this is precisely what just happened to political science. The American-led coalition had countless experts with backgrounds pertaining to every part of the mission on their side: people who had done their dissertations on topics like state building, terrorism, military-civilian relations, and gender in the military. General David Petraeus, who helped sell Obama on the troop surge that made everything in Afghanistan worse, earned a PhD from Princeton and was supposedly an expert in “counterinsurgency theory.” Ashraf Ghani, the just deposed president of the country, has a PhD in anthropology from Columbia and is the co-author of a book literally called Fixing Failed States. This was his territory. It’s as if Wernher von Braun had been given all the resources in the world to run a space program and had been beaten to the moon by an African witch doctor.

…

Phil Tetlock’s work on experts is one of those things that gets a lot of attention, but still manages to be underrated. In his 2005 Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?, he found that the forecasting abilities of subject-matter experts were no better than educated laymen when it came to predicting geopolitical events and economic outcomes. As Bryan Caplan points out, we shouldn’t exaggerate the results here and provide too much fodder for populists; the questions asked were chosen for their difficulty, and the experts were being compared to laymen who nonetheless had met some threshold of education and competence.

At the same time, we shouldn’t put too little emphasis on the results either. They show that “expertise” as we understand it is largely fake. Should you listen to epidemiologists or economists when it comes to COVID-19? Conventional wisdom says “trust the experts.” The lesson of Tetlock (and the Afghanistan War), is that while you certainly shouldn’t be getting all your information from your uncle’s Facebook Wall, there is no reason to start with a strong prior that people with medical degrees know more than any intelligent person who honestly looks at the available data.

…

I think one of the most interesting articles of the COVID era was a piece called “Beware of Facts Man” by Annie Lowrey, published in The Atlantic.

…

The reaction to this piece was something along the lines of “ha ha, look at this liberal who hates facts.” But there’s a serious argument under the snark, and it’s that you should trust credentials over Facts Man and his amateurish takes. In recent days, a 2019 paper on “Epistemic Trespassing” has been making the rounds on Twitter. The theory that specialization is important is not on its face absurd, and probably strikes most people as natural. In the hard sciences and other places where social desirability bias and partisanship have less of a role to play, it’s probably a safe assumption. In fact, academia is in many ways premised on the idea, as we have experts in “labor economics,” “state capacity,” “epidemiology,” etc. instead of just having a world where we select the smartest people and tell them to work on the most important questions.

But what Tetlock did was test this hypothesis directly in the social sciences, and he found that subject-matter experts and Facts Man basically tied.

…

Interestingly, one of the best defenses of “Facts Man” during the COVID era was written by Annie Lowrey’s husband, Ezra Klein. His April 2021 piece in The New York Times showed how economist Alex Tabarrok had consistently disagreed with the medical establishment throughout the pandemic, and was always right. You have the “Credentials vs. Facts Man” debate within one elite media couple. If this was a movie they would’ve switched the genders, but since this is real life, stereotypes are confirmed and the husband and wife take the positions you would expect.

…

In the end, I don’t think my dissertation contributed much to human knowledge, making it no different than the vast majority of dissertations that have been written throughout history. The main reason is that most of the time public opinion doesn’t really matter in foreign policy. People generally aren’t paying attention, and the vast majority of decisions are made out of public sight. How many Americans know or care that North Macedonia and Montenegro joined NATO in the last few years? Most of the time, elites do what they want, influenced by their own ideological commitments and powerful lobby groups. In times of crisis, when people do pay attention, they can be manipulated pretty easily by the media or other partisan sources.

If public opinion doesn’t matter in foreign policy, why is there so much study of public opinion and foreign policy? There’s a saying in academia that “instead of measuring what we value, we value what we can measure.” It’s easy to do public opinion polls and survey experiments, as you can derive a hypothesis, get an answer, and make it look sciency in charts and graphs. To show that your results have relevance to the real world, you cite some papers that supposedly find that public opinion matters, maybe including one based on a regression showing that under very specific conditions foreign policy determined the results of an election, and maybe it’s well done and maybe not, but again, as long as you put the words together and the citations in the right format nobody has time to check any of this. The people conducting peer review on your work will be those who have already decided to study the topic, so you couldn’t find a more biased referee if you tried.

Thus, to be an IR scholar, the two main options are you can either use statistical methods that don’t work, or actually find answers to questions, but those questions are so narrow that they have no real world impact or relevance. A smaller portion of academics in the field just produce postmodern-generator style garbage, hence “feminist theories of IR.” You can also build game theoretic models that, like the statistical work in the field, are based on a thousand assumptions that are probably false and no one will ever check. The older tradition of Kennan and Mearsheimer is better and more accessible than what has come lately, but the field is moving away from that and, like a lot of things, towards scientism and identity politics.

…

At some point, I decided that if I wanted to study and understand important questions, and do so in a way that was accessible to others, I’d have a better chance outside of the academy. Sometimes people thinking about an academic career reach out to me, and ask for advice. For people who want to go into the social sciences, I always tell them not to do it. If you have something to say, take it to Substack, or CSPI, or whatever. If it’s actually important and interesting enough to get anyone’s attention, you’ll be able to find funding.

If you think your topic of interest is too esoteric to find an audience, know that my friend Razib Khan, who writes about the Mongol empire, Y-chromosomes and haplotypes and such, makes a living doing this. If you want to be an experimental physicist, this advice probably doesn’t apply, and you need lab mates, major funding sources, etc. If you just want to collect and analyze data in a way that can be done without institutional support, run away from the university system.

The main problem with academia is not just the political bias, although that’s another reason to do something else with your life. It’s the entire concept of specialization, which holds that you need some secret tools or methods to understand what we call “political science” or “sociology,” and that these fields have boundaries between them that should be respected in the first place. Quantitative methods are helpful and can be applied widely, but in learning stats there are steep diminishing returns.

…

Outside of political science, are there other fields that have their own equivalents of “African witch doctor beats von Braun to the moon” or “the Taliban beats the State Department and the Pentagon” facts to explain? Yes, and here are just a few examples.

Consider criminology. More people are studying how to keep us safe from other humans than at any other point in history. But here’s the US murder rate between 1960 and 2018, not including the large uptick since then.

So basically, after a rough couple of decades, we’re back to where we were in 1960. But we’re actually much worse, because improvements in medical technology are keeping a lot of people that would’ve died 60 years ago alive. One paper from 2002 says that the murder rate would be 5 times higher if not for medical developments since 1960. I don’t know how much to trust this, but it’s surely true that we’ve made some medical progress since that time, and doctors have been getting a lot of experience from all the shooting victims they have treated over the decades. Moreover, we’re much richer than we were in 1960, and I’m sure spending on public safety has increased. With all that, we are now about tied with where we were almost three-quarters of a century ago, a massive failure.

What about psychology? As of 2016, there were 106,000 licensed psychologists in the US. I wish I could find data to compare to previous eras, but I don’t think anyone will argue against the idea that we have more mental health professionals and research psychologists than ever before. Are we getting mentally healthier? Here’s suicides in the US from 1981 to 2016

…

What about education? I’ll just defer to Freddie deBoer’s recent post on the topic, and Scott Alexander on how absurd the whole thing is.

Maybe there have been larger cultural and economic forces that it would be unfair to blame criminology, psychology, and education for. Despite no evidence we’re getting better at fighting crime, curing mental problems, or educating children, maybe other things have happened that have outweighed our gains in knowledge. Perhaps the experts are holding up the world on their shoulders, and if we hadn’t produced so many specialists over the years, thrown so much money at them, and gotten them to produce so many peer reviews papers, we’d see Middle Ages-levels of violence all across the country and no longer even be able to teach children to read. Like an Ayn Rand novel, if you just replaced the business tycoons with those whose work has withstood peer review.

Or you can just assume that expertise in these fields is fake. Even if there are some people doing good work, either they are outnumbered by those adding nothing or even subtracting from what we know, or our newly gained understanding is not being translated into better policies. Considering the extent to which government relies on experts, if the experts with power are doing things that are not defensible given the consensus in their fields, the larger community should make this known and shun those who are getting the policy questions so wrong. As in the case of the Afghanistan War, this has not happened, and those who fail in the policy world are still well regarded in their larger intellectual community.

…

Those opposed to cancel culture have taken up the mantle of “intellectual diversity” as a heuristic, but there’s nothing valuable about the concept itself. When I look at the people I’ve come to trust, they are diverse on some measures, but extremely homogenous on others. IQ and sensitivity to cost-benefit considerations seem to me to be unambiguous goods in figuring out what is true or what should be done in a policy area. You don’t add much to your understanding of the world by finding those with low IQs who can’t do cost-benefit analysis and adding them to the conversation.

One of the clearest examples of bias in academia and how intellectual diversity can make the conversation better is the work of Lee Jussim on stereotypes. Basically, a bunch of liberal academics went around saying “Conservatives believe in differences between groups, isn’t that terrible!” Lee Jussim, as someone who is relatively moderate, came along and said “Hey, let’s check to see whether they’re true!” This story is now used to make the case for intellectual diversity in the social sciences.

Yet it seems to me that isn’t the real lesson here. Imagine if, instead of Jussim coming forward and asking whether stereotypes are accurate, Osama bin Laden had decided to become a psychologist. He’d say “The problem with your research on stereotypes is that you do not praise Allah the all merciful at the beginning of all your papers.” If you added more feminist voices, they’d say something like “This research is problematic because it’s all done by men.” Neither of these perspectives contributes all that much. You’ve made the conversation more diverse, but dumber. The problem with psychology was a very specific one, in that liberals are particularly bad at recognizing obvious facts about race and sex. So yes, in that case the field could use more conservatives, not “more intellectual diversity,” which could just as easily make the field worse as make it better. And just because political psychology could use more conservative representation when discussing stereotypes doesn’t mean those on the right always add to the discussion rather than subtract from it. As many religious Republicans oppose the idea of evolution, we don’t need the “conservative” position to come and help add a new perspective to biology.

The upshot is intellectual diversity is a red herring, usually a thinly-veiled plea for more conservatives. Nobody is arguing for more Islamists, Nazis, or flat earthers in academia, and for good reason. People should just be honest about the ways in which liberals are wrong and leave it at that.

…

The failure in Afghanistan was mind-boggling. Perhaps never in the history of warfare had there been such a resource disparity between two sides, and the US-backed government couldn’t even last through the end of the American withdrawal. One can choose to understand this failure through a broad or narrow lens. Does it only tell us something about one particular war or is it a larger indictment of American foreign policy?

The main argument of this essay is we’re not thinking big enough. The American loss should be seen as a complete discrediting of the academic understanding of “expertise,” with its reliance on narrowly focused peer reviewed publications and subject matter knowledge as the way to understand the world. Although I don’t develop the argument here, I think I could make the case that expertise isn’t just fake, it actually makes you worse off because it gives you a higher level of certainty in your own wishful thinking. The Taliban probably did better by focusing their intellectual energies on interpreting the Holy Quran and taking a pragmatic approach to how they fought the war rather than proceeding with a prepackaged theory of how to engage in nation building, which for the West conveniently involved importing its own institutions.

A discussion of the practical implications of all this, or how we move from a world of specialization to one with better elites, is also for another day. For now, I’ll just emphasize that for those thinking of choosing an academic career to make universities or the peer review system function better, my advice is don’t. The conversation is much more interesting, meaningful, and oriented towards finding truth here on the outside.

[kyoupann]

Please do more of the writing head canons. It’s really interesting to see other people’s ideas on the topic, so if you can be bothered, I would highly appreciate more, thanks bye <3

Y’all don’t know how happy I am to talk about these headcanons, they are my babies and I love them so much :’) thanks for asking g <3

Handwriting Headcanons

Same dynamic as before, try to guess whose handwriting it is before reading and tell me how many you got right! <3

You can find the first post here (no need to check it tho)

Quick disclaimer: halfway through making my initial notes, I remembered I had one (1) single lesson of graphology in my applied linguistics class, but that was a year ago and some information might be off. I just thought it was neat to include.

Another quick disclaimer: I don’t know much about Hylian, but I like to think it has a similar stroke system to Japanese, so the pressure and accuracy of your strokes play a major role in your handwriting (among other things, ofc.) so there are some parts where I focus more on that

(First Row, from left to right)

Sky

Our first boy is mother hen! Believe it or not, he has the prettiest handwriting out of all of them! Sky: probably has nice, even elegant handwriting because Sun forced him to practice when they were little. In the end, that paid off because his handwriting is the prettiest one. There’s no pressure, but he is confident in what he writes that his lines aren’t thin. Mistakes? what is that? this boy has impeccable grammar and spelling. No mechanic errors to be found in his letters! I’d like to think that many of Hyrule’s classic/staple poems were originally written by the firt king aka sky child. Like, imagine, after a retiring from being a Person of Power (as the first ruler), Sky finds comfort in the arts: revisits his old woodcarvings and starts writing poetry about the world he still doesn’t fully understand. wowie. tldr: sky writes poetry and you can pry it from my cold dead hands.

This is what one of his letters would look like: 

Next one is the one and only, our Hero of Time

2. Time

I’ll die on the “Time didn’t know how to read and write” hill. His handwriting is simple, not pretty but not messy. It has some grammar and spelling mistakes here and there. Can become unreadable if writing in a hurry, he sorts of forgets spaces between words are a thing/letters have different sizes and lowercase letters end up the same size as capital letters. I’m not saying he sometimes forgets to write articles: he just doesn’t want to. Honestly, he just has this dad-neat handwriting. He is a gentle dad and writes like a dad, if he puts too much pressure onto the paper, his handwriting become too sharp/angle-ish and ends up looking ugly. And as much as he would like to not care about it, in the end he does (:

Malon taught him how to write and it was quite the experience. At first he didn’t want to because he was ‘too old’ to learn and it was torture at first, but now look at him devouring his cowboy novels. 

A chunk of his handwriting: 

*sniff* such a dad quote.

3. my mansss, your  4x1 deal at Target: Four

Look, my boy is patient! He could do some nice and fancy lettering if he wanted to. He was taught that handwriting and spelling said a whole lot about him as a person, you know, like a first impression kinda thing; so he always proof reads more than twice before sending ­a letter. Super rare grammar mistakes.

The faster he writes, the more slant his writing becomes. Under stress/ when not sure how to write things down, run-on sentences are everywhere and his handwriting is inconsistent in general (I don’t headcanon each part of him having completely different handwriting because handwriting becomes muscle memory over time. It’s just slightly different variations of the same, like idk  Vio’s handwriting is neater than Green’s and Red writes hearts instead of any dot/circle and no, I do not take constructive criticism on that, jk i do.) Adding on to each of the colours’ handwriting, I’d think Red and Green write with words slanted to the right( inclined), Vio is a mix of the opposite, so reclined and straight, and my mans blue a true neutral writes straight (kinda like Time’s).

The logic behind this is that inclined writing supposedly means honesty and need for giving (and getting) affection; reclined means, as you can probably imagine,  defensiveness and repression of true feelings, but also shows great concentration; straight handwriting means self-control, observation and reflection as well as distrust and indifference. But as complete being (tm), Four just writes as in the image example which is not too straight and not too inclined, and I believe that’s a good middle for him

HOWEVER, if I’m feeling in the mood for crack, I totally accept this boy to have the ugliest, chicken scratches-looking handwriting! :’D It’s just funny to think that someone like him, who has to be precise and careful in his work, can't write neatly to save his life. 

One of his letters would look like this: 

Also I just LOVE how his hero titles look in this font ksksks

and that’s

(Middle row, from left to right)

4.- Mister Bunny Boy - Legend

His uncle taught him how to write. I’d call his handwriting pretty and neat at a first glance, but he presses too hard on the paper, most of the time staining the back or the following page. Sometimes will retrace some words if he doesn’t like how it looks (which only makes it messier). According to my notes, a thick or strong handwriting represents determination/commitment.

As I also headcanon him to know many languages, mechanical errors are more present than grammar ones; that is, weird capitalisation of words. Punctuation is somewhere in between; uses too many commas when he should just cut the sentence. he mixes punctuation from two languages or more in writing when too distracted (or too focused, because, well, pressure.); when he writes for himself, he has almost no problem following said language’s punctuation rules. Also, this is just polyglot culture, and I’m projecting a bit, but when he forgets a word in the language he’s writing, he just replaces it with its equivalent in another language because we don’t care about fluency, but rather functionality. in this household (more on that in my language hc, ksksks).

An example of his writing:

so powerful

4.-  Mr. Wolfman, howl me a song - Twilight

I don’t have much for him because 1) I don’t think he writes a lot and 2) he is a hands-on/visual learner, I’ll die by that. He only learnt how to write because Ulli insisted it was important and he was not about to disrespect his momma; he IS That Guy, but doesn’t really write enough to have neat handwriting.

Many people seem to overlook the fact that his house is filled with books and write him as completely illiterate (which if not explored properly, ends up feeling a bit disrespectful and full of prejudice, but go off I guess; and that’s on my core Headcanons for Twi); however, he sticks to simple sentences. Knowing how to read and understanding a text is different from knowing how to write them. Like, when we would see a semicolon and understand its position in the text, but didn’t understand the nature of it. Is this clear? idk i’m sorry. So yeah, boy reads a lot, writes very little.

As for his Actual Handwriting, as opposed to Legend, his handwriting is thiccc but not because he presses into the paper; he is just that messy, he has no sense of ink-flow-control, he does what he can with what he has. To the untrained eye, his handwriting illegible letters like v, n, u are very similar; when he makes notes for himself he does it in the form of doodles or small ‘icons’. But! He reads a lot, so he rarely makes spelling mistakes (: he is your go-to guy when you don’t know how to write a word.

An example of his writing:

He keeps a journal, sue me.

3. My first born- Warrior

Okay, first off... I accept this is completely biased. I saw the idea and said “That’s True”. If you haven’t, please read Effective Communication; or The Lack of Thereof by htruona, a fic where the boys reflect on the language barriers between them. It’s incredibly funny and probably what made me start making these silly notes. So, if you’ve read that fic, you know where I’m going.

My man, Warrior, can’t fucking write. I mean, he physically can, but it’s very bad. Here’s the reason for it, tho, and it’s not his fault: Technically, he knew how to write alright but he joined the military and whatever note he had to write had to be concise or in the worst case coded. He mixes capital and lowercase letters. If we consider that he joined the military at around 15, his handwriting and grammar had yet to continue developing. Just think about how after summer break, your handwriting was always slightly worse than before because you didn’t write for an entire month. Now think what 2 years can do to that. Hmm, not cool, dude. He makes quick notes, when writing he’s all gotta go fast. he is the lighting mcqueen of writing; good for emergency messages, not ideal for love letters. His punctuation also suffered a lot, he only know full stops and commas and hardly uses them. A sentence for him is either one word or fifty without a single comma, no inbetween.

His hero title and an example of his writing.

(Bottom row, or what I like to call “fuck cursive” row)

7.- Magic man - Hyrule

I’m basic and I do agree with the popular headcanon of he not knowing how to write because well, y’all know his Hyrule. He only knows how to write his name because that’s important, same with numbers. I don’t see why would he write/read except checking the roadsigns. (he can even use this as an excuse for getting lost frequently; he thought it said something different.) But I do think that because his habitual reading consists of roadsigns, his ‘punctuation’ is weird af and places full stops/points/periods at the same level of his words and his commas/question/exclamation marks below them. Yk, creative license. Sadly, I don’t have much about my magic hands man so here’s what his writing would look like if he actually wrote a paragraph:

Man, I love Hyrule.

8.- Man, I don’t understand this boy -  Wild

Cursive? ain’t nobody have the time for that. He woke up and had to save the world in his underwear while not knowing how to read nor write.  He learnt during his journey and was taught by multiple people from different regions, that explains his inconsistent spelling of things and names for them. So Wild knows language variations for many items and uses them interchangeably (even if they aren’t exactly the same). Another headcanon related to writing/language skills that I’ve been thinking about is that if the shrine was able to cause amnesia, I’m sure there were other areas in the brain affected which leads us to language disorders such as agraphia and aphasia. But that’s a story for another day ksksksk

An example of his writing (after relearning)

9.- The best of sons - Wind

I don’t have much for him and that makes me sad. Look, he’s a kid, doing kid things like stabbing dudes on the head. This boy was taught cursive by his grandma, but could never do it and no one needs it anyway. His handwriting is good enough for his pirate life, Tetra is the one to handle Official stuff, he just gotta sign. Spelling and grammar mistakes abound. He is still relatively young and can correct his handwriting if he desires. But same as Wild, with how many times he’s been thrown out and hit his head, I’m starting to consider some language disorder for him as well.

An example of his writing:

aaand that’s it.

Thanks, y’all for showing interest in this silly thing uwu it was fun to finally talk about this. If you ever want to discuss ideas/headcanons(especially if they are related to language and culture), I’m your person (: I’m always happy to hear new headcanons. Feel free to add anything to this post either in a reply or in a reblog, I’d love to hear from y’all <3<3

[blackjackkent]

While heading off to try to find the fellow with the medallion, we ran into this kid, who seems fairly young to be hanging around in the Sword Coast equivalent of Tortuga.

Needless to say, Caden knows precisely what he's up to, because he was much like this young boy many years ago, running about Candlekeep in between lessons with Gorion and the other scholars, and learning (with Imoen) to steal trinkets, pickpocket the rich stuck-up stuffed-shirts who visited the university, and generally cause havoc.

This boy, though...

He is not exactly like a young Caden either. His clothes are ripped and dirty, his hair shaggy and unkept. His cheeks are sunken and beneath a tear in his shirt, Caden can see his ribs are visible. Caden stole in Candlekeep for the pure sleight-of-hand satisfaction of it, and as often as not returned everything he stole. But this boy is starving, desperate.

He catches the boy's shoulder as he makes to run, arrests his movement before he can dart away. His voice is low, gentle in spite of the speed of his action.

And he's gone, wrenching his shoulder from Caden's grip and darting off into the shadows. Caden watches him go with a bemused, troubled expression.

Jaheira smiles ruefully. "Are we about to take another detour?" she murmurs. "At this rate we shall fix every evil in this port before we reach Spellhold."

"And why should we not?!" booms Minsc from behind her. "Evil shall be kicked with both boots if Minsc and Caden have anything to say about it!"

Caden chuckles softly, although without much humor. "We have...so much to do. But I can't simply hear of these things and do nothing..."

Jaheira's smile softens, and she claps Caden softly on the shoulder. "It is why we have followed you for so long, my friend. Lead on."

[mcjoelcain]

How to set SMART Goals (and win BIG this year)

Let’s be honest: people suck at goal setting.

Even when we really want to do something, we have a hard time achieving it.

(Need proof? Just consider that the vast majority of New Year’s resolutions fail by February.)

But, it’s not our fault. Nobody teaches us how to really achieve what we set out to do. They don’t teach us how to make smart objectives.

That’s because the problem with how you set goals is that they rely too much on human willpower — which we have a very finite amount of each day. Relying on it all the time takes away from that willpower until it’s depleted entirely.

Fortunately, there are other ways to set goals so that you can actually achieve them.

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Examples of turning bad goals to good goals

EXAMPLE #1: HEALTH

TERRIBLE GOAL: “I want to get fit.”

BAD GOAL: “I want to lose 10lbs.”

GOOD GOAL: “I want to eat 3 healthy meals per week and go to the gym 2x/week for 15 minutes.”

Notice how we’re focusing on the process at first, and starting off conservative: Anyone can eat just 3 healthy meals in a week. And anyone can go to the gym for 15 minutes. Set yourself up to win.

The next step is to make it easy: on your calendar, set 1 hour on Sundays to buy 3 healthy meals and leave them in your fridge, packed and ready to eat. Also set two 1-hour slots for the gym (leaving time for travel).

Here’s how this looks for other big goals:

EXAMPLE #2: FINANCES

TERRIBLE GOAL: “I need to get better with money.”

BAD GOAL: “I want to save $1,000 this year.”

GOOD GOAL: “I want to have $40 per paycheck automatically transferred to my vacation savings fund for 1 year.”

EXAMPLE #3: SOCIAL SKILLS

TERRIBLE GOAL: “I want to have better social skills.”

BAD GOAL: “I want to work on my storytelling so I’m not so awkward at parties.”

GOOD GOAL: “I want to take the improv class in my city every Monday night for 6 weeks.”

There’s a simple formula for transforming big goals into actionable steps…

Bonus: Want to finally start getting paid what you’re worth? I show you exactly how in my Ultimate Guide to Getting a Raise and Boosting Your Salary

What are SMART goals?

SMART goals are the cure for vague, aimless New Year’s resolution goals like:

“I want to go to the gym every day.”

“I want to get rich.”

“I want to travel more.”

On the surface, they all seem like good goals. However, they fall prey to the big three sins of goal-setting:

They unspecific. Sure, you “want to travel more,” but what does that really mean? When are you going to get it done? Where are you going to go? Vagueness is the enemy of good goal-setting.

They’re unrealistic. Oh, so you want to “get rich” this year? Are you willing to put in the hard work and sweat equity it’ll take to negotiate a raise, find a higher-paying job, or start a side hustle? Most likely not.

They’re based on willpower — not systems. Human willpower is limited. Sure, you might start out going to the gym every day, but as time goes on you’ll have to use the finite amount of willpower you have to keep it up. Eventually, you abandon the goal altogether.

Setting a SMART goal will help you avoid all of these pitfalls. Let’s breakdown how to do it.

SMART Objectives are:

Specific

Measurable

Attainable

Relevant

Time-oriented

So how do you convert a goal like “get fit” into a SMART objective?

I created this checklist to use every time you have a new goal.

Checklist for writing a SMART Objective

Specific: What is the precise outcome I’m looking for?

What will you achieve?

What does it look like? (What do you see in your mind when you picture yourself working towards your goal?)

What is the action step?

Measurable: How will I know I’ve accomplished the goal?

How will you know if you’ve reached your goal or not? There are different levels of “healthy” or “financially sound.” Avoid words that may have vague meanings like, “learn” or “feel” since you can’t measure them. Instead, use action verbs like “run,” “save,” or “write.” Then, turn those words into quantifiable benchmarks.

You need to be able to answer the question, “Did I get it done? If not, how much further do I have to go?”

How will you know when it is done?

What are some objective benchmarks you can hit along the way?

Would someone else be able to tell that it’s complete?

Is it quantifiable?

Attainable: How realistic is this goal?

My mentor BJ Fogg talks a lot about Tiny Habits — little things that start us on the path to success. The best way to achieve a goal is not to rely on motivation, but instead make it ridiculously easy for your future self to do the right thing. Instead of committing to running 5 days a week, start with one day and move up from there.

Are there available resources to achieve the objective?

Do you need a gym membership, a new bank account, new clothes?

Am I set up to do this even when I don’t have “motivation”?

Are there any time or money constraints that need to be considered? Am I being too ambitious to start out? (Remember you can always be more aggressive with your goal later on.)

Relevant: Is this a priority in my life right now?

Ask yourself, in the scheme of all the things you want to try, do you really care about this? When I went to my cousin’s wedding in India a few years ago, I saw one of my friends order his food in fluent Hindi, and I thought, “Hmmmm…I should take Hindi lessons.” But when I got back to NYC, I put it on my to-do list, only to skip over it for MONTHS. The truth is, I really didn’t care enough to try and learn Hindi. It wasn’t important enough. When I acknowledged I wasn’t going to do it and crossed it off my list, it freed me up to focus on doing the things that I really wanted to do.

Why am I doing this?

Is this a priority for me?

Will it compete with other goals in my life?

Time-oriented: When will I be finished with the goal?

Give yourself a deadline to reassess your goal. And put it on the calendar! I like to re-evaluate my goals every 3-months to make sure they are still Attainable and Relevant.

Is there a deadline?

Did I put it on the calendar?

Will I know in 3 months if I’m on the right track?

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SMART Goal Examples

Using this framework, you’ll be able to turn any vague lofty goal into an actionable SMART goal.

For instance:

Bad goal: “I want to be healthier.”

Why it’s bad: It’s vague and not measurable. How do you know when you’re healthier?

SMART goal: “I want to eat three low-fat, low-calorie meals per week and go to the gym at least once a week.”

Why it’s good: Now you have an actionable system with solid metrics to help you see if you’re on track. You’re not just getting healthier. You’re eating three healthy meals and going to the gym each week.

Now do the same for your goal. How can you make it specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-oriented?

Actually achieve your goals with habit loops

Once you’ve set a SMART goal, habits are the systematized solution to making sure you follow through and actually achieve your goal.

According to Charles Duhigg, habit expert and author of The Power of Habit, every habit you build has three parts to it:

Cue. This is the trigger for a behavior.

Routine. This is the behavior in action.

Reward. This is the benefit you receive from the behavior.

Altogether, this creates something called a “Habit Loop,” which allows your habits to stick.

And at the heart of any good Habit Loop is a good reward. In fact, it might just be the most important aspect of building good habits.

That’s because it has the biggest impact on whether or not we stick with the behavior.

Let’s take a look at an example: Working out.

A typical approach to this might look like this:

You go to the gym.

You work out on the machines for 30 minutes.

You go home.

Here’s what it would look like if you implemented the Habit Loop:

Cue. You head to the gym when you wake up.

Routine. You work out at the gym.

Reward. You get a delicious breakfast when you’re done.

See the difference? One will likely result in you giving up the habit after a few weeks (or even days), while the other greatly boosts your chances because you’re rewarded for your behavior.

It subverts having to rely on willpower, because you reward yourself for achieving your goals.

THAT’S the power of a good reward.

Of course, it can work negatively for you as well. For example, smoking cigarettes.

A habitual, pack-a-day smoker is someone who has ingrained a Habit Loop that causes them to smoke cigarettes. Here’s what that Loop looks like:

Cue. You wake up, or it’s lunch time, or work just got done, or you’re stressed — most anything can be a cue for smokers.

Routine. You smoke a cigarette.

Reward. You receive a euphoric buzz from nicotine.

Luckily, rewards can be used to counteract this. For example, whenever you get the urge to smoke a cigarette you go on a walk, or listen to music, or drink a soda. Whatever healthy reward can be used to replace your routine of smoking a cigarette.

Bonus Tip: Use a Commitment Device

A commitment device is a method of locking yourself into a habit or behavior that you might otherwise not want to do.  

And there are essentially two types of commitment devices:

Positive devices. These are devices that give you a positive reward for performing different tasks. The idea is that when you associate that task with the commitment device, you create a positive feedback loop that makes it much easier to cement new habits.

For example:

Listening to your favorite podcast while you work out.

Watching a show on Netflix while you clean your living room.

Drinking your favorite soda while you’re washing your dishes.

Negative devices. These are devices where you take something away or risk having something taken away to encourage you to follow through with a behavior or habit. The idea is that you force yourself to focus on the task by taking away the thing that is preventing you from focusing, or you do something that makes you risk losing something to force you to complete your task.

For example:

Telling a friend that you’ll give them $100 if you don’t go to the gym every day for a month.

Unplugging your television so you won’t be tempted to watch it.

Throwing away all of your junk food in order to eat healthily.

While they’re called positive or negative devices, that doesn’t mean that one is better than the other! They’re just ways of describing how the commitment devices work. And whether or not you choose a positive or negative device depends entirely on your preference and what you want to achieve.  

Commitment devices are incredibly effective too. But you don’t have to take my word for it. Harvard released an article a while back penned by three doctors in behavioral economics that extolled the virtues of commitment devices.

“[Commitment devices] have been shown to help people lose weight, improve their diets, exercise more, and quit smoking,” the article says. “One randomized experiment, for example, found that access to a commitment device increased the rate at which smokers succeeded in quitting after six months by 40%.”

One effective commitment device is to use a social media scheduling dashboard like Hootsuite or Buffer to schedule an embarrassing tweet or Facebook status to be posted at a certain hour. This commitment device is good for time- or location-based goals. As long as you get to the dashboard before it posts, you can prevent it from posting.

For example, say you want to get into the habit of waking up at 6am. You could schedule a tweet to be sent out with an embarrassing message or photo of yourself at exactly 6:05am. That way, if you’re not up by 6, that message will post.

Build habits for life

To accomplish any goal, you need to establish good habits.

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[letsbenditlikebennett]

Breaking the Cycle || Adam, Alcher, Ariana, Layla, & Nell

TIMING: Current PARTIES: @walker-journal @zahneundklauen @letsbenditlikebennett @laylacooke @nelllraiser SUMMARY: Alcher and Layla seek out Adam for retribution, while Ariana grabs Nell to assure no one else dies tonight.  CONTENT: Suicide ideation, disease, violence

Lyssa’s Peak was a jagged spike against the violet sky. Its wooded slopes were choked with mist as canyons and cliffs gradually succumbed down into gentler foothills whose trees occasionally thinned around an old quarry or abandoned timber operation that was gradually being swallowed again by the relentless march of the montane forest. 

It was in one of these abandoned mountainside quarries that Adam had chosen to spare, due to it being one of few clearings with reasonably level ground. Whatever unfortunate company had been tempted to sink investments into Lyssa’s Peak had long since cut their losses when the inevitable ‘incidents’ took their toll on the workforce and equipment. Abandoned cranes, dozers, and digger trucks lay quietly rusting in the quarry’s lower basin. The once clean cut and precise terrace steps of exposed rock that had formed the quarry’s sides now sported outcroppings of trees and bushes as nature reclaimed the excavation layer by layer. 

Adam’s sleeveless workout T-shirt stuck to his body with sweat as he took a break to chug down a water bottle. He offered a spare water bottle to Layla. “So ...why’d you wanna train up anyway Cooke?” 

Since Ariana had admitted the news about Adam being Winn’s killer, Layla could think of nothing else, but why and revenge. The last time anger had been harbored so deeply inside was right before she had hypnotized herself, and while she didn’t exactly have that option at the moment, she at least knew that she’d have backup sooner or later.

With sweat running down her fair face and her hair pulled back in a tight ponytail, she easily caught the water and began chugging it down, “I’m tired of being the weak one in everything. It’s like…” She took another drink of water, “Everyone either wants to protect me or use me for my nose. I’m not a fucking bloodhound. And if my parents ever show…” She didn’t finish her thought. Instead, she took another drink of water and capped the bottle, “You ready to go again? And don’t go easy on me. Go hard. If you hurt me, then so be it. I’ve gotta learn.” Tossing the bottle to the side, she found her fighting stance readying herself for Adam’s attack; the energy from Lyssa’s Peak fueling the fire and anger inside of her small fit form. She hadn’t quite got a good hit in on the hunter yet, but she would before the night was over with.

The hunter was a child, but Alcher had decided long ago that that no longer mattered. They were marched out of their cribs and turned into war machines as young as five, four-- perhaps even three years old. Handed swords and told that they were born with a duty, a destiny, and that only they held the power to destroy monsters. When in truth, monsters were arbitrary. To a wolf who was left alone after their family was slaughtered, the hunter was the monster. And prey was just prey. Human was just...human.

Tonight, Alcher would show this young hunter what real monster’s looked like. He was well trained, she could see it in the movements of his body. But he had come unarmed to this sparring match. Well, perhaps not completely unarmed-- she knew true hunters always carried a weapon with them, she’d learned that lesson the hard way long ago-- but there were no swords or silver bullets in sight. Sweat mixed with the smell of the forest floor. The energy of Lyssa’s Peak made the shift easy. Now, while he was distracted. Her light body was more silent among the dead leaves of the ground, but she needed to be quick-- he would hear her soon enough. She tore from the brush quickly and bee-lined for the hunter. Layla would follow suit or she would incur wrath. Golden eyes bore down on Adam, teeth and claws following quickly after. 

From what she could piece together of the messages, Ariana knew she needed to get to Adam and get to him quickly. While she was still pissed, she couldn’t just let him get killed. That’s exactly what Winn didn’t want to happen. The thought of warning Adam had crossed her mind, but then he’d likely just kill Alcher and Layla. It was enough to make her heart race as she panicked and called Nell who had of course been willing to help. She always was. Once she’d picked Nell up, a tracking spell and her nose led them to Lyssa’s Peak. The sky was getting darker and the place had a certain energy about it that made her feel stronger. The smaller hills around the area were easy enough to navigate and she could hear the sounds of a fight though it seemed friendly in the moment, but she could smell Alcher here. It was a trap. She swallowed down the lump in her throat and stayed tucked behind a tree. “We’re not far,” she whispered to Nell, “There’s something about this place, I feel stronger. I think I should go in first and you can provide magical backup as needed?” 

Part of her knew Nell may want to be more on the frontlines, but she couldn’t stand the thought of her becoming a werewolf snack. She kept herself low below the brush and made sure her steps were quiet as she approached. As she saw Alcher lunging toward Adam, she called out, “No! Adam, watch out.” No longer caring about being seen, she darted across the way to try and stop the fight without any casualties. 

Nell supposed that she could only be thankful that Ariana had told her what was happening in time for her to get her ribs healed. Desperate measures, in her terms, had been taken when it came to making sure the bones were sound enough to withstand the potential clash that was brewing. The warm tingling of a fresh healing from her mother was still settling into her chest, mixing fluidly with the buzzing beginnings of her adrenaline. She’d put the interaction as far as she could from her mind, focussing instead on the task that was now at hand. Her eyes flicked to Ariana at the werewolf’s suggestion, and Nell took a beat to chew on it before replying. “I’ll let you go first. But if I think either you or Adam’s about to go down— I’m not gonna hesitate,” she warned, knowing that she wouldn’t toy with the lives of those that were important to her. 

As Alcher leapt forward, Nell did her best to fight against the urge to rise and meet her. A lack of reaction went against every fiber of her body’s current demands, and her jaw was clenched as she forced herself to watch and trust Ariana. Instead, she fiddled nervously with the hilt of a silver dagger clenched in her hand, drawn from its hiding place. Nell’s patience only lasted so long before her gut won out, and a quick spell was dropped from her lips to raise an invisible shield between Adam and the lunging wolf. 

Adam’s too focused on sparring with Layla when a burning-ice sensation running up his spine and across his skin let Adam know a few seconds too late that another paranormal being had descended into the quarry. 

Ariana’s voice called out and Adam spun, reaching back to draw a concealed survival knife in one fluid movement born from years of conditioning that’d made such an economy of motion pure instinct. But the wolf was already on him in a blunt impact of pure accelerated muscle.  

A moment of blinding pain later, Adam jumped up from the stony ground into a guarded crouch, clutching the silvered survival knife in the hand not currently bleeding from lacerations. The impact had thrown him down and torn open his shoulder and left arm, but Adam racing thoughts recognized that he’d probably have a giant ass wolf ripping open his throat right now if ...something … hadn’t suddenly blunted the wolf’s charge. 

“You should probably go to Ariana and get the hell outta here,” Adam noted to Layla in a low voice as he warrieing stared down the three legged wolf, painfully aware that a survival knife and one good arm weren't exactly great odds. 

Everything had happened so much quicker than expected. The sparring had resumed only to be interrupted by Alcher lunging for Adam, and Layla quickly backstepping to get out of the path of the angry wolf. However, it was Ariana’s voice that had thrown her. Why was she here? She was supposed to be home or with Luna. Not around to bear witness to what was taking place.

Seeing the wolf go down and Adam freed from Alcher’s wicked grasp gave Layla the opportunity she needed. It was his warning that had only seemed to anger her more, “Why? So you can kill another one of my friends?” Head low, she could already feel the painfulness of wanting to shift, and before long, she was bearing blood covered fangs and sharp claws out of shaky hands; a sickness hovering as her body wanted more from the shift. But she had no time to waste. Adam was down, and without thinking about the consequences of her own actions, merely revenge, she lunged on top of the hunter and let her claws sink into his skin dragging them downward in advance to make him suffer just like Winn probably had.

Alcher, focused on her target, had not allowed herself to believe she had smelled Ariana’s scent in the forest around them. Or, perhaps, she had found herself hoping that the young wolf had come voluntarily to help with their mission. But her voice rang out and it called not for her or Layla, but for the hunter. And even as Alcher’s teeth sunk into flesh, and claws scraped at cloth, she could not revel in the taste of hunter blood. Instead, a rage burned inside of her, for in the next moment, something was pushing her from the hunter’s body, stopping her forward movement. Another smell, a new smell. Human-- so human. Teeth still coated in blood, she growled, low and dark, expressing her anger. Gold eyes flashed again and she turned, glowering down at the young wolf standing next to the human. Anger and disappointment ravaged Alcher’s mind, but she could not entirely fault the young wolf for her weakness. She was not raised with other wolves, she did not know properly.

Punishment would have to come later.

A small swell of pride filled her when she smelled the hunter’s blood again and she turned to see Layla digging into him. The other two would have to wait. Alcher bared her teeth again and made for the hunter’s neck. She would not kill him, though. No, that...she would leave for Layla.

There was no time to focus on the stupid decision she’d made in telling them about what really happened to Winn. Instinctively, her feet moved her forward and Ariana snarled at Layla who was now on top of Adam trying to rip into him. The energy of this place was seeping into her. Her legs were stronger, her motions more swift, and everything in her body was screaming for her to shift. Maybe that had been a little bit instinct, too. With Alcher fully transformed and Layla on her way there, there was no stopping them without allowing her more wild nature to take the lead. Still, she pleaded momentarily, “Layla, stop! This isn’t-- Winn didn’t want this, okay? This is the last thing Winn wanted.” God, she hoped he’d moved on and was at peace already so he couldn’t see this. It seemed there was no stopping the fight, especially not with Alcher here, so she focused on her breathing. 

 A few deep breaths later and she let the shift happen. The feeling this place gave her was worrying, but she had to keep her head on straight. If she didn’t, it was Adam and Nell who would pay the price. Her bones twisted and broke as she grew into her wolf self. The clothes on her back were ripped up on the ground behind her and the smell of blood was calling to her. Instinct called for the hunter’s blood, but her anger led her paws straight to Layla. The wolf ran at full speed, pummeling into Layla and knocking her off Adam. She wasn’t entirely a wolf yet, but she could still feel the resistance as she pinned her down. A loud growl in Layla’s face echoed in the hills around them. 

Nell had only recognized one of the two wolves. Layla was one she knew from having tried to execute a wrongful bounty on the girl, but the other werewolf was a mystery. Coincidentally, this was also the wolf that had been left in the clear when it came to attacking Adam. Ariana had thrown Layla off course, but there was a clear shot between the other wolf and the now bleeding Hunter. It seemed that Ariana had given up on solving this peacefully, which brought a new sharpness to Nell’s eyes and movements, shifting quickly into fight mode rather than defense.

“No!” Nell’s heart pounded out a frantic beat as she surged forwards, reminding her that there was much more hinging on this clash than usual, the literal lives of her friends being the ones dangling in danger. Performing another often-used spell to grant her temporary, heightened speed, the witch surged forwards to run interference, leaping towards Alcher, silver knife extended to plunge as she aimed for the wolf’s shoulder with a slash. Hopefully, if anything, it would serve as a distraction. Another moment later and she was using the knife on herself, drawing a line of blood down her forearm to fuel her next magic, creating two more Adams next to the original, trying to make it harder for the wolves to choose their marks when there were three apparitions giving off his scent. 

 The quarry’s stone’s bit deep as Adam struggled on his back, the muscles of his claw-raked arms and neck straining to ripcord tautness as he tried to hold off the three-legged wolf’s jaws now inches away from his throat. The creature’s breath was hot and wet against the Hunter’s face, thick with the coppery scent of Adam’s own blood dripping down her fangs. 

In that moment with death quite literally staring him in the face, Adam looked up into Alcher’s golden eyes  and also saw the eyes of Elias, amber lupine irises slowly becoming human as the knife of a football teammate ended the Turnskin’s curse. Adam saw Lucas’ pleading eyes as the hunted wolf knowingly placed his life in the hands of a killer. After that were Miles’ eyes regarding him warily, conditioned to distrust after a lifetime of regret. Adam saw Kaden’s eyes, transfixed by pain as his familys’ blood feud sought to swallow up yet another life. There were Mina’s eyes, afraid but not surprised as a stranger held her at knife-point for not being her father’s daughter. In there were Orion’s eyes as he saw Adam glance at his scars and finally grasp a depravity that’d been right in front of his face for years. Regan’s eyes were wide with confusion as she was held at gunpoint for being different in a way neither she or her assailant truly understood. The light died from James’ eyes as he was cut down by someone sworn to be his protector. 

Some unconscious part of Adam finally grasped what Celeste had already known and what Winn had died trying to get him to understand. 

But it was too late. Adam was an oathbreaker, a betrayer, a coward. 

Adam’s arms adupbtly started to give out as the wolf bore down on him. Far more than blood bled out of Adam on the quarry stones. It was like something within him snapped, pushed beyond the farthest brink of exhaustion for so long that it was finally giving out entirely. The last of embers of Adam’s dwindling faith went cold, leaving him to hopelessly fight a primal creature of myth with only a mortal strength. 

Reduced from predator to prey, Adam would’ve likely died beneath Alcher’s mauling right there if Nell hadn’t intervened, her distraction and illusions giving him just the narrow break to struggle free. 

“Nell ..Ariana,” Adam coughed hoarsely, struggling to stand but falling back to his knees as his now-human stamina. What was left of his clothes, shoulder and back were a ragged mass of claw of dirty claw-gouges. “You need to go,”

He looked up to Nell, eyes pleading with her not to perpetuate this cycle of death that’d begun generations before Adam and Winn were born. “This has gotta end with me.” 

Layla couldn’t hear Ariana’s voice because of the blind rage going through her body. All she could focus on was destroying Adam, but the jolt of another fully grown figure hitting her and knocking her off of him seemed to stun her enough to let out a yelp, before she realized she was being pinned down by the younger wolf. However, it didn’t stop the anger and frustration looming in her heart or the sense of rage Lyssa’s Peak was casting over her on an amplified level. She could feel the sickness of the bite; it’s poison as it raced through her veins and animal instinct became more prominent. And without making any attempt to stop the change, she embraced the excruciating pain as the shift took control leaving her cries soon turning into howls. And before long, golden eyes stared back into those of her best friend as she growled, before using all the hurt inside of her to push the other werewolf off.

Scampering to her feet, she noticed Adam on his knees. He was at the mercy of the beasts, and in that moment, she no longer saw a friend. She saw an enemy. One who had reminded her so much of what she was taught to do as a child. One that saw no mercy, when he aimed his gun and fired upon creatures, now like herself, that didn’t always deserve the fate they got, because a human with enhanced abilities felt it was his right to play God.

Lowering her head and snarling, spittle glistening from her open maw, she was going to make Alcher proud. Avenge Winn’s death. And take out a man who walked around so pompously pretending to be a God, when he was nothing more than a mere mortal. And without hesitating any longer, she made the mad dash in his direction with claws fully extended and teeth bared, ready to rip and tear his flesh like that of paper and snap his bones like twigs, not knowing if she would choose the right Adam. Only going off of instinct. 

Her two wolves were fighting each other and it tore at Alcher’s heart to see. But she needed to focus now-- she would have to trust that Layla could hold her own against Ariana. And hope that the confused wolf would come around to their thinking. Because in the next moment, pain tore through her shoulder. Alcher howled loudly, turning to face her attacker. The witch. She was becoming more than a nuisance, and if she prodded any further, she would also become a threat. Which meant she would have to kill her. Alcher threw her off quickly, and turned to face the hunter again-- but then there were more of him. Copies. They smelled the same, looked the same. Alcher roared angrily and leapt at one, tearing at its throat. It disintegrated in her mouth. She turned to the other two. They were weak. Staggering on their feet. Trying to sacrifice themself like some sort of martyr. She spit out blood and turned to look back at the spellcaster. The hunter deserved death, but perhaps she would let him suffer first. Unable to save his friends, he would watch.

She feigned as if to go for him once again, turning on her heel at the last minute to spring towards the spellcaster. She ran her full weight into the girl, claws curling in as if to hold onto her. And then jaws closed around her wrist, savoring the taste of her blood, while simultaneously preventing her from using her silver knife anymore. Next, her throat.

For a moment Nell hesitated, trying to make sense of Adam’s strangled plea. Was he asking for an end to the age old battle he’d been fighting for all his life? It was all she could do to shake her head in denial even though she’d told him not a week before that letting it fester would break him, giving her refusal to let him be the price for peace.  Because it wouldn’t be peace if he died. Not for the cycle, and certainly not for her. “It won’t stop, though,” she managed to grind out. It would be another turn of the gears that kept the killing machine of Hunter versus wolf still moving, the cogs bigger than this single clash. Beyond that- she was too selfish in the matter. Selfish enough to ensure that Adam lived, and selfish enough to forfeit any good that might come of seeing him die. Too many people had died, and he wasn’t a sacrifice she was willing to make. 

Her moment of stillness had stretched too long, and before Nell knew it she found herself tossed to the side. Alcher’s feint towards Adam was enough to have the witch launching herself in the wolf’s direction once again, but her eyes went wide as she realized Alcher was rising to meet her instead. It was over within a moment, a gasp of pain slipping from her as the wolf’s teeth found their mark. The deeper meaning of a werewolf bite was lost on her in the midst of the fight, not even having a moment to think of the obvious consequences it might hold when the very same teeth that had broken her skin were seeking her throat. She reached for her magic, the same that had exploded the Lamia’s head at the Ring, and unintentionally put Kaden on his knees in Bea’s kitchen. Focusing on the wolf’s leg opposite the one that was already half gone from some prior injury, she tugged with the intent to bend the leg into an unnatural position, hoping to shock the wolf into missing. A loud crack rang out as bone snapped, and Nell lived to see the wolf still above her, no doubt readying her next strike.

A snarl echoed through the clearing as Ariana saw Nell being attacked. Had she not been buzzing with wild energy, she may have been able to approach this more tactically, but as it stood, she had seen Adam in danger and ran on instinct. Now Nell was paying the price and the smell of blood in the air was calling to her. It was hard to ignore, but something about seeing Nell hurt propelled her forward. Layla was likely going to need a minute to find the real Adam and Nell didn’t have that long. Alcher’s ferocity was unnerving, especially when it was directed toward her friend. She darted forward, paws barrelling against the brush, and crashed into Alcher before she could sink her teeth anywhere more dangerous. 

The wolf in her felt out of sorts, fighting her own kind, but this was senseless. Even with her own ferocity threatening to spill over, she had to hold on to what Winn had wanted. If he could see them now, he’d be hurting and the thought only made a low growl rumble within her smaller form. Hopefully the moment for Nell to recover would give her the edge she needed. This felt like it would never end and she wished she’d thought of a better plan as she found herself craving the taste of blood.

Adam didn’t feel worthy of these two women risking their lives for him. Layla was right. He had killed Winn, a friend who’d trusted him, and there were consequences for that. He’d ignored all of Winn, Celeste, and Ariana’s warnings  about continuing the cycle of violence. 

Ari and Nell shouldn’t get killed trying to rescue Adam from something of his own making. 

But if they weren’t going to let him go, Adam needed to make sure everyone here made it out alive. 

Even just trying to keep standing seemed more than Adam had left, but even as the Hunter’s powers bled out of him, that lifelong mental conditioning to fight past the pain and focus on the mission still remained. His feet stumbled on the rough stones of this hillside quarry, and the summit of Lyssa’s Peak spun like a wheel of fortune in Adam’s blurry vision as the violet sky and bloodstained earth swapped places a couple times. But the singular goal of getting Ari and Nell out of here gave enough clarity for Adam to push back the impending blackout for a little while longer. 

He began to back away from Layla and Alcher towards the abandoned quarry’' ruined entrance, the only way out Adam could handle in his condition. He held the survival knife, a short utilitarian thing ill suited to holding off a supernatural predator, clutched in bloody-knuckled grip and pointed it towards the three legged wolf. 

“Nell, Ari,” he shouted hoarsely, “we gotta get outta here!” He motioned towards Penelope, making a stubborn but dubiously effective attempt to cover her escape away from Alcher.

Layla let her nose lead her forward, but she was confused by the scent. For the briefest of moments she thought she had sensed the right version of Adam and pushed forward, but guessed wrong and hit the ground in a lunging attack that left her stunned. Again. She had failed as she slowly came to her senses and watched as Adam backed away, his focus mainly on Alcher, proving that not even an injured hunter found her a threat.

She was sure she would hear an earful later from both Alcher and Ariana, if Ariana could even forgive her and any hope of still being in Nell’s good graces had gone out the door.

Anger was the only thing left. Even as pain ripped through Alcher’s body as her bone snapped. Even as Ariana’s body collided into hers. With a swift motion, even from the ground, Alcher turned her claws on Ariana. She smacked her square across the face and stood as much as her limbs would allow her, snarling angrily at the younger wolf, golden eyes piercing her. She raised a paw and smacked her again, shoving her away. Challenging her. Would she leave with the hunter and his witch? Or would she tuck her tail in shame and stay? The hunter was retreating, as well as his witch. They were wounded. But as Alcher looked around for Layla, she found that they, too, were injured beyond movement. It was time to retreat. They would finish this another day. Dying here was senseless, not when the hunter still walked.

They would find him later, when he was alone. And Alcher would let Layla finish it herself. He was weakened, she could sense it, and he couldn’t hold on much longer. He would be alone at some point, and they’d be waiting. 

Alcher hoisted herself up with her front paws and dragged her dangling, broken leg behind her as she made her way over to Layla. She gave the three retreating forms a glare and let them know that they could leave for now, but that this was not over, before looking to Layla. She had done good. She would be rewarded. Despite the droop in her shoulders and the tensing of her body, she had proven today that she was a real wolf. That was enough for Alcher.

Perhaps the claws colliding with her face shouldn’t have come as a surprise to Ariana. Even if she’d made an effort to not hurt anyone here, she had stood in the way of what they considered to be justice. Still, she snarled as the claws hit her face only to be met by another hit to the face. The gesture itself somehow stung more than the actual wound. It had never occurred to her that Alcher would use considerable force on her and it hurt more than she anticipated. She growled lowly, backing away, but making it clear she wasn’t going to let any further harm come to Adam or Nell. She could hear Adam in the back suggesting retreat and she was thankful for that. The last thing she wanted was for anyone here to die and if they kept going, she knew that’s what the end result would be. 

Alcher seemed to be directing Layla to follow her away. There was no fully relaxing with the energy of Lyssa’s Peak influencing her and though Layla and Alcher were now off in the distance, the wolf in her craved something more. The smell of blood in the air was a bit overwhelming and she honed in on some shuffling in the brush. Without thought, she lunged forward and dug into the rabbit. It wasn’t quite enough to satiate her appetite, but it was enough to take the edge off. A few deep breaths later, she slipped back into her more human looking form. She glanced around the clearing for her abandoned bag and was quick to grab it before slipping into the quarry. 

“We need to patch both of you up,” she directed as she kept a close ear out for their surroundings, “And I should probably throw on a change of clothes.” She threw on a t-shirt and gym shorts but kept her feet bare as she went over to Adam who had taken a brunt of the beating. She cleaned him up the best she could, but she’d need better lighting if she was going to attempt anything more serious like stitches. “We need to get him back to one of our places. Is your wrist okay?” 

Nell wasn’t sure what to make of the way Adam seemed to crumble in on himself. She’d seen him fight before, watched as he managed to bounce back from shoving his arm down a lamia’s throat. So where was that strength now? Something was wrong, but she couldn’t quite manage to put her finger on it. Retreating wasn’t something that came naturally to Nell, but even she could see that they’d done what they came here to do. Adam was safe if not battered and the same could be said for Ariana. Now what mattered most was getting out of the quarry with their lives so that they might heal. 

While Ariana changed, Nell went to work on Adam as well— recognizing that he was in much more danger than she at the moment, the claw marks running deep and long. Calling on her magic she prioritized the wounds that looked most serious, scabbing them enough to at least staunch the flow of blood loss, but building new flesh to cover them was beyond her abilities. “It’s gonna be okay,” she said almost reflexively, though she wasn’t sure if the words were meant for her friends, herself, or both. Ariana’s question hung in the air as she thought of her wrist for the first time since it had been bitten, and her stomach dropped even further towards the ground beneath her knees as she knelt to continue her healing alongside Ariana’s work. She’d been bitten. Bitten by a werewolf, and that meant— Nell promptly shut the door on that train of thought, refusing to let it hinder her in these moments when what was most important was making sure the three of them were alright. Instead she answered the werewolf’s question with another. “Are you alright?” The last blow the other wolf had gotten in had looked nasty. “Mine’s closest, and I have more healing stuff there, too.”

With the three of them huddled there beyond the shadowing peak of Lyssa, Nell forced herself to focus on what they’d succeeded at for the moment being, knowing this wasn’t the time to be weak with dread. No one was dead. The fight hadn’t been won, and blood had been spilled, but for these few moments they’d managed to stop the cycle of killing, and shoved a wrench into the murderous dance of Hunter and supernatural that had been fought since before either side could remember. So though the day was lost, perhaps they’d won another in its place.

[no6secretsanta]

Day off.

Hey, it’s me, Apricot! I was so happy when I received the e-mail that you were my giftie @marykedoesart . I hope you like it!! <3

(from ApricotMori_ (twitter))

- Oh, boys! It’s such a shame you have to go, but don’t forget to come back soon, alright, Shion? And Nezumi…

- Yes, madam? 

- I know how happy you make my son and that brings me joy all the time, but that doesn’t mean you can’t hurt me… Stop buying those muffins near your home and come visit me. I’ll give you fresher ones for free, alright? 

Karan’s voice was sweet and caring, filled with that tender mother-like tone she has always had. Yet there was a little drop of anger noise between those words. She was smiling widely, her eyes were hidden by the curvature on her lips, and she was caressing Nezumi’s cheek. However… Shion was aware of how those words pierced Nezumi’s cool mask and shattered it.

That’s how her mother was like, a kindhearted woman, but also a strong one who would not accept anything but the best for those she appreciated dearly. And, yes, her muffins were the best around the city, and, yes, she appreciated Nezumi a lot. Shion would sometimes joke about how she just quitted on being his mother, because she put Nezumi under her wing. How could she take for granted that he tasted somebody else’s muffins?

“Elyurias was scary, but your mother has some guts”, Nezumi once admitted to Shion, so Shion couldn’t help but laugh at the image exposed right in front of his eyes.

Nezumi’s façade was somber and he was frightened because he couldn’t just play a stage to run away; Karan knew him better. She would immediately perceive it. 

- Mom, it’s been my fault. He never eats them, it’s me who asks him to go and buy some when I have to work until midnight… Stop scaring him.

- Oh! So Nezumi, are my muffins still your favorite ones?

- Of course, my dearest lady. They always have been and they always will be.

Nezumi bent down with his right palm against his chest, as elegant as someone from the realms.

He never lied; it was nothing else, but the truth. He wasn’t picky with food, but when it came to muffins that weren’t Karan’s, he would find all the excuses: too dry or not sweet enough, or whatever else. Those were the only exception.

They shared their farewells. The two boys started walking downhill with paper bags full of bread and Nezumi’s favorite desserts. The food was fresh, the smell was soothing, and it was still warm, so the bags felt nice against their torsos. It contrasted perfectly with the night that was starting to fall over them. As it grew darker, people would come back to their homes to get dinner, so the streets were kind of lonely except for the two figures that were walking and talking something unimportant, but still could steal some laughter; once or twice.

- If Your Majesty wants to, there’s no way this faithful servant could stop him… But, for real, Shion, the last time that didn’t turn out well. 

- I’m not sixteen anymore… Besides, if I start rubbing my nose with yours again, you can now just kiss me.

- Hmph.

Nezumi smirked. “Who has given so much confidence to this hopeless idiot?” he thought while grabbing Shion’s paper bags.

A bell announced Shion’s arrival to the liquor store, an item a little too classic for that kind of business, but it was good that some places still had those old rarities.

The city that once existed inside big walls was no longer there. It turned out way better than Nezumi could have expected. It grew at a record rate and now tall buildings full of better and eco-friendly technology stood there. Poverty was a word that couldn’t be used; everyone could afford to cover all their necessities without any class distinctions. People were able to choose their path and chase after their dreams out of government influence. 

After so many years, people that were from West Block and people that were from No. 6 had come to understand each other’s destinies. None of the citizens arbitrarily decided nor pulled the trigger of the lives each had to endure. It was all government faults and it had been clarified, cleaned, and restructured.

Forgiveness came; hatred and revenge was something from the past. When Nezumi first stepped into No. 6, he inhaled deeply; the fragrance of freedom, the sense of safety, and the vibes of certainty. It invaded him like air inside his lungs.

After more than 12 years later from that step, he still felt the same way. It was good. No, it was beyond good. Not the city conditions precisely, but to trust and rely on someone and received foremost from that someone. What a lesson life had given him. No. Nezumi didn’t believe in destiny or faith, the lesson was given by no one else, but Shion. 

He still could only trust and rely only on Shion, and even if there was only one person to trust, Nezumi could also come with some more forgiveness about his past choices.

- Nezumi, mmh, why are you smiling so peacefully? 

Shion came out with bottles of what seemed to be grape juice, but it was wine; the cheapest kind. He couldn’t be entrusted to do that task because he would go in and buy the one already known. Shion only had alcohol at West Block, that particular day, next to Nezumi. None of them had money to waste, so they accepted Rikiga’s gift: the cheapest wine and also the only one that could be found on those God forgotten streets. 

Shion had opportunities to learn the names of other types and brands of alcohol at some fancy reunions he was invited to, but he didn’t try them. Not once. He wanted to preserve the flavor from the one that tasted like treasured memories.

- You’re starting to lose your sight sense. You are not getting any younger, Shion. You should go to the doctor to do a checkup.

- Hahaha. We are the same age, Nez-

- Whatever. Give me that bag, your doll prince hands will tear.

- I no longer have those hands. Don’t be silly, Nezumi. Better use your free hand to hold mine.

- Mngh… Gotcha, prince.

Shion found that abrupt answer: weird. It did not matter how pierced Nezumi’s tongue was, he would always let Shion speaks before giving a comeback. However, even if it was weird Nezumi was smiling so relaxed and he seemed to be lost in his thoughts. It had to mean he was letting himself be comfortable around the idea surrounding his mind. It was a good sign.

Nezumi still has a hard time putting his guard down, but he’s been able to do it lately, and that was what mattered… But still was an opportunity for Shion to tease him a little bit.

- Maybe you were thinking of me. 

- You think too highly of yourself.

- I’ve learned from the best.

- You’re a fast learner with theory, but not an accurate one with practice.

- Remember your words, Nezumi.

- I always do.

They arrived home.

A small mouse, black and fast, had given his welcome and earned a piece of bread… There was no way that tiny friend would let Shion or Nezumi step inside if they didn’t greet him with some treat first. Maybe that little mouse stayed next to Shion just to have a life free pass to try what Cravat always did when delivering the letters back on the days they lived at the bunker.

- You spoiled him. Such an obedient mouse turned into a brat at the hands of another brat. What a tragedy!

 Nezumi said and put everything in their kitchen while Shion took a bath. Later they just changed roles. 

“They were still in the happier stage of love. They were full of brave illusions, so that the communion of self with self seemed to be on a plane where no other human relations mattered”

“I don’t ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside of me there will always be the person I am tonight”.

- Tender is the night, F. Scott Fitzgerald

- Remind me again why are we reading this book? When we finish it, you will be crying like a little girl.

- I don’t care. I pretty much just like listening to you.

- What am I going to do with that cheesy mouth of yours?

- I have some ideas, but we can discuss them later when we go to bed.

- Mmnh, mmnh.

- … And I wanted you to listen to that quote.

- You still are an airhead, jeez. Shion, we’re not 16 anymore. Shion, you’ve changed. And so did I. We became more mature; more adult-like. But your naive essence remains the same… Pretty much. Quite impressive if you ask me.

- Hey! That was meant to be cute all the way.

Nezumi was absolutely teasing him, having his small revenge for a couple of hours ago. He was more than charmed by Shion’s idea to spend the night. And… the cheesy mouth had been cute all the way. Yes. Nezumi still has a hard time taking sweet actions, but he, at least, could acknowledge them. Specially when they came from his unique airhead: Shion.

With a smile on his face and his body stuffed with good humor, he filled two cups with the crimson liquor and gave one to Shion.

- Yeah, yeah. Look if you try to bite me just once, this wine will end up as your personal hair dye.

- This hair you love so much? 

- You’re right. Your pastel yellow pajama pants will be, then. Why do you have such a bad sense of fashion anyway?

- I don’t know, probably because I have no eyes for anything that is not you.

- For real, Shion? Are you trying to flirt with me that way? Tsk, tsk, it’s worse than Shakespeare.

- It still is the truth. 

- Hopeless.

- …ly in love.

- Oh, shut up! You’re scaring Tsukiyo.

Contrary to his words, the mouse was having a good time with a few more pieces of bread. Tsukiyo cheep cheep-ed and it sent the two boys into a burst of hysterical laughter.

They hadn’t even tasted the wine, and they were already having a good time. 

They wanted to remember something tasted and shared more than 12 years ago. Something that, at the time, brought them eases and some sort of comfort from everything that had been going on, and they succeeded. They succeeded at being two dorky teenagers when they deserved it. They teased each other, they fell on the floor and they laughed when life wasn’t being any good. By that time, alcohol was a small escape, more like an excuse because it was not the way to; kind of an accessory. By this time, as accessories just decor, wine was again unnecessary. It also turned out it wasn’t to their liking. The two cups just cooled down at the table when Nezumi thought of something that also made the two of them happy back on those days.

A dance.

With the widest smile, Nezumi took Shion and pulled him closer. Just like that day, Nezumi had a crave to feel Shion’s warmth against his. 

- Let’s see how much your Majesty has improved.

- …

Shion wanted to say he never danced again after that day, but once again, as it always happens, he got lost in the pair of grey eyes that looked deeply into him.

After so much time spent together, Shion could, at least, recognize his silly grin and react differently than just standing there thunderstruck and unable to move.

Their feet waltzed around. Nezumi’s movement was elegant and even more precise than when they were 16 years old, and something melted inside Shion’s heart.  “On his travels… he danced. There were times he was so carefree he would just… dance”.

Shion giggled and let the sudden twirls of his heart guided his steps. They had no music. The only rythm heard was their foot stepping here and there, Nezumi’s one, two, three, and Shion’s silly laughter.

- What is it, my stubborn child? Tell me so I can laugh with you. - It’s nothing, Nezumi. You’ve become better at this and I haven’t. That’s it. - I wouldn’t say that. I’m quite impressed by his Majesty’s performance. And Nezumi did start laughing at the unison with Shion. It was so easy to be together, so easy to enjoy their presences, to be gentle and kind to each other.

Nezumi’s heart was also melting while dancing. For similar, yet, somehow, different reasons. He was feeling some sort of happiness. There was still a long way for him to go through, but after so many years of hatred and guilt, he had slowly learned to move on from the darkness and let the light come into his life.

It was such a ridiculous way to explain it, but Nezumi couldn’t help it. Some things are just the way they are… and it was the most accurate way to express the process he accidentally went through on his travel.

He left for the sake of running away from a tumult of overwhelming feelings and as an unexpected consequence: he freed himself from chains that were holding him, blinding him and pining him down as some kind of martyr.

He wasn’t a martyr anymore. He deserved to make his own life choices and enjoy new experiences… He called it hope and hope brought him freedom.

Freedom brought him back to Shion.

Shion had also changed. At first glance, Shion would look like he had been sharpened by a knife, but then he would smile and make the whole world stop for a while. He turned calculative, strong, determined and even ambitious, but he was still the warm human being Nezumi met at 12 years old, he was still the warm human being who came back from hell.

Shion never lost his humanity. He found a meaning to this world while restructuring the city. A meaning he told Nezumi would rather keep to himself.

It was fine that way for Nezumi. But sometimes he would just wonder… or maybe he was just projecting his discoveries onto Shion: Shion also found freedom.

Maybe he wanted to experience all the shapes and shades of humanity that were attached to this lifetime. 

- Would you life to travel this time with me?

- I’d love to.

Maybe such an intense, expansive, and complex experience was a good starting point to approach all the variating tones of life. Nezumi once had a taste.

-… and I love you.

- Shion you keep on being so cheesy.

-…

- But I love you too.

And as Fitzgerald would agree, even if the way they loved each other had changed, changed or would change, they’ll remember that somewhere inside of them they would always be the same as they were when they met… when they saved each other’s life and when they drifted apart, and, of course, when reunion came.

[lunias-takes-on-pathfinder]

Why Should I Play Pathfinder?

Everyone and their mother knows that DnD 5e has taken the tabletop world by storm, and for good reason - it's a relatively simple ruleset that's easy for new players to learn, and as a direct result of that it's become the game of choice for podcasts, actual play streams, and home group's everywhere.

So why should you play Pathfinder?

(tl;dr at the end)

High Fantasy

While 5e certainly has dragons, magic items, spells, and all the components that you’d expect from a high-fantasy campaign, the math behind the system actually tells a different story. The difference in power from Level 1 to Level 20 is mostly in the variety of abilities available to a character, how much damage they can take, and how much damage they can put out. Meanwhile, other stats like attack bonuses, armor class, saving throws, and skill bonuses don’t really change too much over the course of a campaign. As a result, it’s still entirely possible for large enough groups of weak opponents to drain resources and be a threat to players long into their careers. This works for some campaigns and settings, but the lower power scaling makes it harder to tell some stories. If you’re looking for a system where the power scaling allows a party who struggled against a troll one level to handle several trolls without breaking a sweat four levels later, and where high-level characters could realistically beat entire armies of low-level enemies if you wanted to sit down and spend time on it, Pathfinder’s going to be a better system to get into.

The Case for 1e

Pathfinder 1e is often referred to as "DnD 3.75e" by fans of the popular DnD 3.5 edition because it was created as a backwards-compatible edition that took 3.5 and improved upon its rules, fixing many issues that plagued the edition. 3.5e (and Pathfinder 1e, by extension) is known for its depth of customization options, with countless classes to choose from that cover an incredible variety of character concepts. There’s over 40 classes to choose from, such as the Magus that delivers spells through weapon attacks and the Hunter that fights alongside their animal companion as a coordinated duo and takes on the aspects of different animals. Each class also has its own Archetypes that modify some of their abilities to fit a different theme, such as taking the Avatar-esqe Kineticist class and making it a knight wielding their element as a weapon, or allowing the Summoner to forgo the ability to summon an independent creature to fight on their behalf and instead fuse with them to jump into the fray personally. And that all just scrapes the surface - multiclassing, prestige classes, feats, and an abundance of magic items all allow you to customize your character in so many ways that you can build dang near anything in this system.

You also probably shouldn’t bother.

What? You thought I was only going to sing its praises? Don’t get me wrong, Pathfinder 1e is an incredibly deep system with metric tons of content to dig into, but that’s also precisely the problem. There’s just so much stuff between the complex rules interactions and 11 years of content that breaking into the system today is a huge challenge for people who are new to the game. I had the benefit of jumping on several years ago and learning as things released, but with so many FAQs and rules clarifications between multiple books and supplemental materials Pathfinder 1e has become a massive chore to learn. If you’ve got a friend to help you learn or enjoy the complexity, then learning the system can be very exciting and rewarding. There’s also several balance issues inherent to the game, especially when it comes to spellcasters versus non-casters and over-specialization, but these can be fixed at home tables with a helpful GM.

If you ask me, though? Pathfinder 2e is where it’s at.

The Case for 2e

Pathfinder 2e is a pretty radical shift in design and balance compared to 1e, almost strictly for the better if you ask me. While 2e currently features only 15 classes with 2 more on the way next year, the game already has significantly more variety in character customization than 1e did at the time.

Your Heritage and Ancestry Feats help you define your character from Level 1 all the way to 20, making your Elf more Elf-y and your Dwarf more Dwarf-y. Class Paths determine how you’ll use your class features, such as the normally-dexterous Rogue taking the Ruffian Racket to instead become an armored bruiser who relies on their strength to browbeat enemies with underhanded tactics. Class Feats grant you new abilities or improve on the ones you’ve already got, but you can also spend them to pick up Dedication feats to multiclass or select an archetype, giving you access to feats your class normally wouldn’t be able to use. You wanna be a Wizard with a giant hammer? You can do that. A Bard who leads a team of Animal Companions like a Pokemon trainer? Go for it. You can also select various Skill Feats to pull stunts like running on walls, healing a creature with a medical kit during a fight, or making it harder for a creature you’re following to notice you and catching them off-guard easier if a fight breaks out.

And Pathfinder 2e has been out for all of, what, 15 months now? At this rate they’ll have more content and options by next summer than DnD 5e has released in the 6 years since its release. In my opinion, the best time to get into Pathfinder 2e is right now while the edition is still new.

Not to mention, Pathfinder 2e is a million times simpler to learn than Pathfinder 1e ever was, and despite the number of options available to characters the system is actually pretty easy to learn. Figuring out what you can do on your turn is easier in this edition than any other, including 5e. Ability score generation doesn’t use randomized dice rolls or a point-buy system, forgoing both for a system where your character’s ancestry, background, and class determine some bonuses while you divide the rest to your liking. Any character of any ancestry can easily reach an 18 in their class’s key ability score, making it easier than ever to play characters like dwarf wizards and elf barbarians that used to be penalized from the outset.

All of this is great, but there’s one big thing I haven’t mentioned yet.

Cost & Access

DnD 5e and many other games are locked behind paywalls, which makes it very difficult to break into a new system and see every option available to you. In case you weren’t aware, both Pathfinder 1e and 2e have online databases which are 100% free and have every single class, feat, monster, piece of equipment, etc ever printed. You’ll never have to worry about dropping another $50+ on a book if you don’t want to, and while the publishers do put out some pretty solid pre-built modules and campaigns you can always choose to forgo them and start your own campaign without spending a single dime.

tl;dr

Pathfinder 1e is incredibly complex and has some balance issues, but if you put the time in to learn the system and have a helpful GM to iron out any problems it has an absolute metric ton of content and customization options for characters and campaigns.

Pathfinder 2e takes 1e’s lessons to heart and throws out a lot of the old edition’s rules in favor of a streamlined approach that manages to be both easier to learn and play while managing to retain and even exceed the depth of customization available to players in 1e.

Both editions enable higher-fantasy narratives where characters go from being competent to effectively unstoppable over the course of their careers, and both editions have free online databases where every option ever printed is available. You’ll never have to pay a dime to play these systems if you don’t want to, although I personally encourage it as Paizo is a fantastic publisher.

[the-descension-inks]

Sojourn (Zutara Week 2020)

Summary: It's a strange fate that they have crafted for themselves; lines that don't quite meet, stars that circle each other, and stories that are almost written. (Or, glimpses into Zuko and Katara's lives, told in reverse, from the very end to the very beginning.)

[6/9] Hesitancy

“And that’s how it ends?” Kya really has tears in her eyes.

Katara smiles, and he thinks it’s the saddest he has seen her in years. “No, sweetie, of course not. Just because you don’t end up with someone doesn’t mean that’s the end.”

“So you can still be friends with them?”

Zuko stills, but Katara finally meets his eye, and it’s only fitting, he thinks, that this decision between them is also taken in silence; in the absence of words, and in a void that exists only between the two of them.

“Always, Kya. Always.”

Read the entire series here, and this chapter under the cut, or on AO3, or on FF.net.

124 AG

Zuko’s broadswords stop mid-air as fire and water explode around him, dissolving into a spray of mist.

Bumi, all of thirteen, drops his own weapon onto the sodden earth at the display, and the turtleducks erupt into commotion; Zuko barely registers any of it.

His eyes flit across the palace garden, find amused blue ones already on him. Katara cackles at what he’s sure is his own scandalized expression. Kya is eight, and Izumi is ten, and they’re already bending like they are masters.

“That was excellent,” Katara tells the girls who are grinning at each other, panting but clearly exuberant. “Wasn’t it, Fire Lord Zuko?”

The nickname brings him to his senses fully; he scowls at the woman who has a smirk dancing on her lips.

“It was like nothing I’ve seen,” he says, beaming at the girls. A thought occurs to him: “Bumi, I’m afraid you’re going to have me flat on my a—” he catches Katara’s glare, “—my back someday.”

The boy’s shoulders lift at that, and a bright smile breaks onto his face. “I totally will, Uncle Zuko!” He turns to his sister and Izumi, flashes them yet another grin. “First to race me to the courtyard wins my packet of fireflakes.”

Zuko blinks, finds Katara mirroring his action, as the kids take off in a scurry of activity.

“All that energy,” he muses. “I miss being young.”

Katara scowls at him, and jabs his forearm meaningfully. “You are forty, Zuko! Not ancient.”

“Wait till you are forty.”

She gives an airy sigh, tilts her head towards him, and says, “I’m sure I’ll still be kicking your ass then, Fire Lord.”

“Is that a challenge, waterbender?” If she has nicknames, then so does he.

“Maybe, it is.”

Katara’s eyes glint, in a way he knows too well. He doesn’t remember the last time he sparred with her, but it has always been a well-balanced dance; an endless duel of offense and defense.

She settles into one of her well honed stances, bending the water from the pond to conjure a shield in front of her. The smile never leaves her face though, and Zuko finds himself shaking his head at her eagerness.

“Oh, come off it, Zuko,” she calls out, clearly noticing his action. “It’s not like you don’t enjoy losing to me.”

“What was that saying you once told me about? All talk and no—”

A blast of water comes his way, and he counters it with two balls of flame. Oh, they are just getting started; testing each other, and seeing what lengths they are willing to take this.

He knows she won’t back down, hold back; she never does. And neither will he. That’s why they work.

“All talk and no walk, is that the one you were talking about?” Katara looks jubilant, a whip of water dancing in between her fingers.

He snorts, and sends a flare towards her in reply, punching into it with all his weight, and she meets it with equal force. Katara grins, and he’s had enough.

He charges forward, flames erupting from his fists, from the kicks he levels in her direction. She is trapped in her need for defense, eyes focused as they anticipate his next attack, arms moving with precision.

He closes in, knows it isn’t an entirely fair fight; she only has the water from the pond, and there’s boundless energy at his disposal. He wonders if that’s why she’s doing this; to prove she can win despite all the odds stacked against her.

It probably is; Katara’s stubborn that way.

She ducks, a flame too close, and he wavers for a moment. Fire’s dangerous; takes a step back, opens his mouth to apologize— oh, she is ruthless today, flinging him back with powerful lashes of her element.

He crashes backward, back meeting a godforsaken tree, a sharp twinge running through his muscles— he’s forty, not sixteen. And Katara’s suddenly in front of him, swirls of water closing around his wrists, rendering him powerless.

She presses closer, fingers jabbing into his chest, pinning him in place. She smiles; ecstatic, victorious, beautiful. “Give up?”

Her voice comes out as a whisper, and suddenly Zuko’s aware of how close they are; the way his heart hammers in his chest, underneath scar she has her hand pressed against, the way her lips are parted, the corners of her mouth twisted in exhilaration, the way a bead of sweat glistens on her neck, and trickles down, further and further—

No.

Katara’s eyes widen, and she staggers backward, restores the distance that should have always existed.

What the fuck was he thinking?

He readies apologies, thinks of all the ways to say he is stupid, and she has a family, and he has a family, and his daughter loves her, and he doesn’t want anything to change—

“I’m going to go inside.”

Katara’s voice cuts through the noise in his head. It’s cold, cut off; it’s worse, so much worse, than having her scream at him, or telling him he no longer deserved her trust.

“Katara, I’m—”

“Don’t,” she cuts him off, a slight tremble in her voice. “Don’t you dare apologize.”

He stares at her helplessly, feels himself dwindle; reduce to nothing. He wonders if he sounds as small as he feels, “I don’t...” Dammit, this isn’t even about him, and this is important: “Izumi likes having you around, the three of you around. And, ever since Nyh passed, I can’t— I don’t want her to lose—”

“Zuko.” She has her hands raised, gesturing him to stop, and an inscrutable expression on her face. She shakes her head, and then, voice horribly flat: “Please, stop.”

“I—”

“We’re not going to stop visiting.” She pauses, wraps her arms around herself. “My kids love you too. I’m not going to do that to them.”

He wonders if it’s tears that he sees glistening in her eyes, but she’s too quick to spin on her heels, and to leave him alone; cold underneath the scorching sun.

.

.

Dinner’s mostly a silent affair, and Zuko wonders if the children pick up on anything.

They’re midway through dessert when Izumi says, an indignant expression on her face, “Dad, you haven’t told us a story in ages.”

Zuko sighs, figures he can use the distraction. “I really haven’t, have I?” He gives his daughter a smile. “Which one would you like to hear, princess?”

Izumi beams, and then ponders for a long time, much to the annoyance of Bumi who makes it known by repeated groans of “Think faster.”

She finally says, eyes gleaming, “Wei and Niao!”

Zuko freezes, recognizes the tale his daughter wants him to recount, something his mother had told him years ago. He doesn’t think he can— he doesn’t think he wants to.

“Uncle Zuko, please,” Kya pipes in.

He swallows, steels his heart. His voice still sounds raspy, “They say the stars Wei and Niao have been in love for ages. Even before the age of Avatars, before man ever walked walked this planet, before the spirits came to visit us.”

The children listen to him in silent wonder, and he catches Katara shifting through the corner of his eyes. He ignores the way his heart clenches, “But despite the love they have for each other, the skies separate them. And only once— just for one single day, the skies part for them to meet.”

Silence overtakes the room. He thinks he hears Kya sniffs, but he keeps his gaze turned down; too afraid that he’ll reveal too much if he looks up.

“I don’t get it,” Bumi’s voice booms. The boy has a frown on his face. “If they really love each other, why can’t they just find a way to be together?”

He flounders, the words somehow too powerful.

But Katara steps in, as always. She gives her son a squeeze on his shoulder, and tells him, very slowly, like she wants him to learn a lesson that she couldn’t, “Because sometimes life can be like that. You can love someone with all your heart, and things may still not work out.”

Zuko feels a lump in his throat, wants to run away, and wash away all the emotions that are lashing at him.

“And that’s how it ends?” Kya really has tears in her eyes.

Katara smiles, and he thinks it’s the saddest he has seen her in years. “No, sweetie, of course not. Just because you don’t end up with someone doesn’t mean that’s the end.”

“So you can still be friends with them?”

Zuko stills, but Katara finally meets his eye, and it’s only fitting, he thinks, that this decision between them is also taken in silence; in the absence of words, and in a void that exists only between the two of them.

“Always, Kya. Always.”

.

.

.

A/N: The story of the stars is heavily inspired by that of Tanabata, a Japanese festival that I stumbled upon while I was looking for Japanese lore about star-crossed lovers (since the Fire Nation is loosely based on imperial Japan).

Thank you for reading!

@zutaraweek

[douchebagbrainwaves]

YOU GUYS I JUST THOUGHT OF THIS

In fact the large staffs of successful startups are probably more the effect of growth than the cause. I didn't. In a way, it's harder to see problems than their solutions. Most people don't really enjoy being mean; they do it because they can't help it. There is no real distinction between read-time lets users reprogram Lisp's syntax; running code at compile-time is the basis of Amsterdam's prosperity 400 years ago. In fact we only spent about $2 million in our entire existence. He's at ease. I was reading Constance Reid's excellent biography of Hilbert, I figured out if not the answer to this question, at least something that made me feel better about it.

This is another lesson the world has yet to learn. The first thing you need is to be only a partial solution. Hacking is something you do with a gleeful laugh. We tried to explain how to make them better, but we can't think of one. There is another reason founders don't ask themselves whether they're default alive or default dead? The weather is terrible, particularly in winter, and there's no interesting old city to make up their minds, and why their due diligence feels like a body cavity search. When I was in the middle of the twentieth century. They're very capital efficient. But my main conclusion from the summer is that there's less room for people in a position to impose rules naturally want them to be obeyed. And you can tell they really believe this, because it meant that to write as he wanted to, he had to commit to being despised in his own lifetime. And both groups are highly mobile. The next generation of business computer was being developed on entirely different lines by two long-haired guys called Steve in a garage in Los Altos.

I'll tell you why. They would make an investor's money go a long way. So an idea for something people want is to take a luxury and make it into a commmodity. It will start with small ones. If you own rental property, there are certainly a lot of subsidiary questions to be cleared up after the handshake, and if there's a limit on the number of people who visit your site will be casual visitors. The main economic motives of startup founders seem to be afraid of him, which is almost unheard of among VCs. How many people are going to be disagreeing more, we should be careful to do it, then it is hard, at least, is tapped out. That will generally work unless you get trapped on a local maximum, like 1980s-style AI, or C. Of the startups that needed further funding, I believe all have either closed a round or are likely to soon. 05/1. And if you don't want to.

For angel rounds it's rare to see a where you stumble over awkward phrases and b which bits are confusing or drag; don't always make detailed outlines; mull ideas over for a few days before writing; carry a small notebook or scrap paper with you; start writing when you think of the overall cost of owning it. That kind of experience is hard to ignore. Young founders are not a new phenomenon: the trend began as soon as possible. It just worked. It's one of the ways we describe the good ones is to say he writes checks. So invest in them. Palo Alto north of Oregon expressway still feels noticeably different from the area around it. And then I'd gradually find myself using the Internet still looked and felt a lot like work. The way to kill it is to get lots of referrals. The startup hubs in the US.

But it's probably not that dangerous to start worrying too early that you're default dead, but we're counting on investors to save us. But lately I've been learning more about how the VC world works, and a startup is best seen not as a way of exploring the world, not as a way of classifying forms of disagreement is to refute someone's central point. A researcher who studied the SFP startups said the one thing they had in common was that they all worked ridiculously hard. Up till a couple decades ago, geography was destiny for cities. What use is it to read all these books if I remember so little from them? Their investors agree. Hacking is something you do with a gleeful laugh. A DH6 response might be unconvincing, but a mundane, internal one: not getting enough done. Probably not. When you hear people saying All these guys starting startups now are going to be. Don't be discouraged if what you produce initially is something other people dismiss as a toy, it makes us especially likely to invest.

Steve Jobs wants. Empirically that seems to work. Did some kind of anomaly make this summer's applicants especially good? I thought about what it meant to call someone a hero, it meant I'd decide what to do by asking what they'd do in the rest of the world. You can see this most clearly in New York. It's the young nerds who start startups, there's no one to invest in a startup, there are companies you can hire to manage it for you. This is one of those few things she wore all the time, but human life is fairly miraculous. Hotels now are like airlines in the 1970s.

Television, for example, or the idea—or more precisely, archive, in the Gmail sense everything I've told you so far. They won't kill you unless you let them. I think you only need two kinds of people to sit around having meetings. Really, you want to buy us? By feature I mean one unit of hacking—one quantum of making users' lives better. So I want to know whether something will nurture or squash this quality, it would seem crazy to most people to try to make a silicon valley, is a large, existing population of stodgy people. It could be the reason they don't have to worry about—not even Google. Already friends before they decided to start a startup. It explains why they steal your ideas. However, all the pressure is in the direction of over-engineering. But notice the weather.

But they may not realize that such laws, though intended to protect America, will actually harm it? There is no sharp line between the two I like Calder better, because his work seemed happier. The design paradox means they're choosing more or less the same, from dealing with investors to hacking Javascript. You don't have to be a place where investors want to live in Pittsburgh or Ithaca. For example, the good news is that they're funds. How do you do? Redwoods mean those are the parts where the fog off the coast comes in at night; redwoods condense rain out of fog. More often than not it makes it harder. We're default dead, start asking too early. A lot of people in the startup world want to believe that.

[kuratoki]

Changes 04

Are you enjoying this so far? Who else is wrecked by their comeback teasers? My heart CANNOT take it!!! 

Do you agree that things change in time? Well four years abroad would tell wouldn’t it?

Pairing: Reader x Jeno ft. NCT

Words: 3563

Warning: Mild swearing

1 - 2 - 3 - 4 

[7:30AM] Unknown - Hey Y/N? It’s Jeno, I got your number from HanaDo you maybe want to walk to school together? I’ll wait till 8 for your reply :)

Jeno frowned when you didn’t reply to his text and wondered if you were ignoring him from the night before. Was it too much? Did he come off too strong?

When he saw that it was well past eight, he sighed to himself before walking to school so he could get to his first dance class of the day to stretch before everyone else got in.

What he didn’t expect was to walk in to see you and Jisung in your dance clothes, sitting against the mirror with your eyes closed and earbuds in, slightly out of breath. He was about to make his presence known before Jisung opened his mouth.

“The next time you wake me up for an intense warm up like that again, I will quit this school.” he said suddenly opening his eyes, “How are you even functioning with the little sleep you got?” 

“I question myself about a lot of things.” you muttered with your eyes closed, “shouldn’t you be used to this?” 

“Starting school again puts me in the wake up later groove.” he admitted before he noticed Jeno and waved at the other boy who entered the class with a nod, eyeing the two of you curiously, “Plus, our team had the 6am warm up spot this year so it’s not like anything changed. Hey Jeno.” 

You opened your eyes and made eye contact with said boy who just entered and tried to hide your blush. Even though it was only the night before, the conversation played fresh on your mind. It was the main reason why you dragged Jisung out at such a weird hour to warm up before classes started. So you could get your mind off of it.

“Did you guys come early?” Jeno asked as Jisung nodded.

“We’ve been here since six. Went through some of our warm up drills that we had to do over the summer and Y/N wanted to start early.” he explained and cast you aside glance. He knew all about the night before which was actually the main reason he was dragged out of bed so early against his will but then again, you were someone he found really hard to say no to.

Jeno went and got changed and by the time he had come back, Jisung was on his phone watching whatever while you had both your earphones plugged in and your eyes were once again closed. He looked at Jisung’s hand which was drawing comforting circles on your thigh and frowned. Little did he know, Jisung was doing this to lower your anxiety while Jeno was around.

“Aish, we messed up the flip at the last second.” Jisung said as you opened your eyes and leaned over to what Jisung was watching and thats when Jeno realized Jisung was watching a playback of your practice video.

He sat next to Jisung and leaned over to see the video.

Jisung used his finger to show you the part and you let out a sigh.

“Ah, so it HAS to be on the beat.” you said watching the replay again as Jisung got up.

“Yea, so it’s literally, stretch, pull back and flip. But it has to be sharp.” he explained while showing you what he meant, “Cause then the beat drops and mix happens.”

Jisung went and put the song to the specific part you were running through before he got into position while you got up to join him and the two of you ran through that part of the choreography you were trying to perfect.

After a few tries you let out a small frustrated sigh, regardless how many times you tried it, the timing of the flip was still off.

“Maybe Y/N should pull back sooner,” Jeno suggested after watching what the two of you were trying to accomplish.

You had totally forgotten that he was there and was surprised you didn’t notice. Dancing with Jisung had become like a second nature to you and you had a tendency to get lost in your thoughts when you were working on choreo.

“It wouldn’t hurt to try.” Jisung said with a small shrug, “You do pull out further so it takes an extra beat to get back.”

The two of you tried the part again but this time, Jisung was able to flip you, leaving Jeno in amazement.

Jisung picked you up at the waist and you fell into a split over this head, your hands anchoring on his arms, what Jeno didn’t expect next was for you to slide forward before landing back to back with Jisung, your arms still interlocked and for him to pull you back upwards again before you landing facing him once more.

“My arms!!” Jisung whined once you did the part a few times, “Please don’t eat so much anymore. I may not be able to lift you up.” 

“Wow that’s so rude.” you said with your jaw dropped before smacking him on the arm, “You literally ate twice of what I did last night.” 

“And I’m also a growing boy.” Jisung said with a grin as he went towards the speakers, “Do you want to do the full routine? We’ll see how well it flows with the rest of the choreo.” 

“K,” you said, stretching your neck and getting into position.

Once the music started, Jeno felt like he was watching a professional show and now understood why he and Jisung were considered competition in the junior division.

Watching the two of you dance together reminded him of flowing water, there were some ballet notes in the mix but the song itself went between classical to modern. The two of you were so focussed on the other that had any of you looked the other way for whatever reason, the routine would’ve been messed up.

In the dance, there were a few lifts that he could tell took Jisung precise measurements to match and when the part that the two of you rehearsed came up, Jeno’s jaw dropped at the speed the actual flip and back went before the beat dropped at the two of you split off to different sides, only to come together again for the ending where your leg wrapped around his while his hand supported your weight and the two of you were breathing heavily.

‘Perfect.” you whispered.

“Perfect.” Jisung said as the two of you heard applause coming from the door only to see your instructor, along with half the class.

“That was amazeballs. I’ve never seen Jisung flip anyone EVER!” Jaemin said coming into the class with everyone else, “Were you guys here the whole morning?” 

“I just got here thirty minutes ago.” Jeno said as the three of you went to sit with him, “Apparently they’ve been here since 6.” 

“Yea...Hana said something about Y/N not being able to sleep last night.” Jaemin said with a slight nod, “I can’t believe you can still function.”

“I’m used to waking up at the crack of dawn for rehearsal.” you said taking a sip of the water Jeno gave you, “Our ballet training was always first thing in the morning and then our academic courses were throughout the day.” 

“Then our dance camp training started at 6am this past summer which is considered a sleep in to other groups but she was always up the earliest.” Jisung added and groaned, “I suffered so much.” 

 “ I never said you HAD to join me.” you stated crossing your arms while Jisung looked up at you but was actually watching Jeno’s reaction.

“Yea, but do you know how hard it already is to say no to you?” he asked and smirked inwardly at the reaction that Jeno had when the other boy cringed, “We would have activities till like midnight and then she’d call me at like 4:30 to meet her in the practice room.”

“And you still went?” Jaemin asked and Jisung nodded.

“Poor Hana would sleep till minutes before warm up and by the time she got to our warm up room, Y/N and I already spent close to an hour warming up and working on other routines.” Jisung said scratching the back of his head “Aish, I think I lost more sleep over the summer than I gained. I tried to say no once and I dropped Y/N on her face so I learned my lesson.”

“It was a bit of that specific routine actually.” you said, blank faced and with a nod, “The part where the flip was supposed to happen before it reversed, Jisung lost his grip one time and I landed on my face.” 

“Wahhh, but that routine was like flawless dude.” Jaemin said as Jeno nodded, “That was the routine that you two had to perfect in three weeks?”

“Yep.” you said with a nod and patted Jisungs shoulder, “Trust man...trust. All it takes is trust” 

When the instructor called your attention to the class, it was announced that partners would be picked for an upcoming project and you were surprised to find yourself paired up with Jisung while Jeno and Jaemin were paired. The objective was to create a routine with a song that the instructor chose and the class had three weeks to perfect and perform it in front of everyone. 

By the time lunch rolled around and you were able to meet with Hana, you were suddenly grabbed from behind and dragged away, much to everyone’s surprise.

“So this is what being kidnapped feels like.” you deadpanned when you found yourself in the arms of one Nakamoto Yuta, your roommates best friend, “And you are aware that I was with friends right?”

“They’ll survive.” he said looking back at the confused looks on all three boys, “Bitch, I had to look through the whole school for you. Why didn’t you tell me you were transfering?” he asked when he dragged you to his table with his friends and you were surrounded by ten other boys who looked at you curiously, “Guys, this is WinWin’s roommate he told us about, Y/N.”

“Ah, the infamous Y/N.” one of the boys that looked like a bunny said, “We’ve heard so much about you.” 

“Infamous?” you asked curiously as the bunny boy nodded.

“You’re close with Park Jisung right?” another boy asked, “He and Jaemins girlfriend talked about you a lot.” 

“Second day here and popular already. I’m impressed.” Yuta said with a smirk, “I only thought WinWin was exaggerating when he talked about you.”

“Well he certainly wasn’t exaggerating when he talked about you.” you retorted as you made eye contact with someone across the table and your eyes widened. Where was Jisung when you needed him? “But I should really go find my friends now. It was nice meeting you all.” 

“We have a performance for our group tomorrow at lunch.” Yuta said, “You should come check it out.” 

“I will.” you said before getting up to leave for your locker, not wanting to be around the group much longer.

You hurried out of the lunchroom while three others quickly followed at different times, some confused about the look on your face.

Since you weren’t looking where you were going, you felt yourself run into something particularly hard but before you could even think about hitting the floor, a strong arm wrapped around your waist and held you to their chest. You gasped when you recognized the scent and looked up to see Jeno looking down at you.

“Are you okay?” he asked as you nodded your head, “Where were you? We just saw you book it out of the lunch room…” 

“WinWin’s best friend found me. Apparently word got around that I transferred schools and now your whole club knows who I am.” you mumbled before a voice you recognized called your name.

“Y/N.” he said and you turned around, subconsciously keeping a hand on Jeno’s school uniform, if Jeno meant anything from last night and maintained the same temper he once had, this wasn’t a good situation at all.

“Yukhei?” Jeno asked, looking between the two of you wondering how you knew each other. 

“Jeno.” the other boy said with a gentle smile, “You know Y/N too?” 

“How do you know Yukhei?” he muttered down to you as Jisung joined the group.

“I thought I told you to stay away? You knew she was transferring.” he asked with a tilt of his head, completely ignoring the current conversation at hand and inwardly grinned when he saw Jeno’s arm around your waist with no intention of letting go.

“I have every right to talk to her and you know it.” Yukhei argued as Jisung cracked his neck and a smirk formed on his lips.

“With what you put her through during our first year of camp, it’s a wonder how she’s still dancing.” Jisung stated and you felt Jeno physically tense in front of you, “Was your punishment from last time not enough?”

“You know those rules don’t apply here Jisung.” Yukhei stated, “We’re in a different ball park now and you have no reign. You can’t tell me what to do like you did all those years ago.” 

“Ah...really?” Jisung asked and cracked his knuckles, “Are you sure about that?” 

“There’s no point in being afraid of you. You’d get kicked out of the club if you did anything. We’re on the same playing field now and that includes Y/N.” Yukhei said with a smirk and got in Jisungs face, “Like I said, I’m not afraid of you.”

Jisung chuckled, “And it’s not me you should be afraid of.” he said motioning to how you were holding Jeno back once he heard the words torment leave Jisungs mouth “Apparently they’re childhood friends, you know, the one he talked about a lot.” he smirked as realization crossed Yukheis features and you saw the look on Jisungs face.

You had to decide between holding Jeno back or running to Jisung so he would avoid getting punched in the face from making a snarky remark but you could feel Jeno tense under your hand as Jisung continued to speak and knew you made your decision.

“You’re lying.” Yukhei said uneasily, turning around to look at you but gulped at the look of anger on Jeno’s face. Even though Jeno was a few levels lower than Yukhei himself, he was someone who had a lot of respect from the older members of the dance club. Not only did he represent the junior team at nationals as their only soloist, he managed to take home first prize too which gained him school wide recognition. When it came to popularity, Yukhei was a nice face to look at but the talent was all Jeno. “Jeno man, we’re cool right?” 

“Depends.” he said, his face void of all emotion and you felt him tighten his arm around your waist and you knew he wasn’t thinking straight, “on what you did to Y/N.”

Eventually, Jeno let go of you and took a step towards Yukhei and despite the slight difference in height, Jeno could be intimidating when he wanted to be.

“And if I ever find out what you did to her. Then it’ll depend on how I feel when I find out. But stay away from her. It’s your only warning.” he said with a slight glare before going back to you and Jisung who was now at your side.

“What did I tell you?” Jisung whispered to you quickly with a small smirk before looking at Jeno, “Hana said she’d meet us at our third period class, shall we go?” 

“Let’s go.” Jeno said with a nod and the three of you left, leaving Yukhei watching as you disappeared down the hall. A strong frown evident on his face. His plan was going to be harder then he thought, especially if you had someone like Jeno on your side.

When the three of you walked into the class, a girl ran up to Jeno, almost literally pulling him away from the two of you.

“Jenoooo! Our instructor just posted a project that we have to work on and the course sheet says that we can choose our own partners.” she said excitedly as Jeno, who was still thinking about the situation earlier looked at her with disinterest.

“And?” he asked as you and Jisung joined Hana who was currently stretching on the other side of the room.

“Do you want to get a head start and maybe partner with each other? It’ll be like last years group presentation.” she said excitedly, “Maybe we’ll even get to compete in the school wide competition this year.” 

The girl in front of him, Lim Yeeun was part of an elite dance club outside the academy so naturally, anyone would’ve wanted to pair up with her and Jeno had in the past for practice purposes only. Next to Jisung, she was the only one who could match the intensity and skill he had but he learned quickly that she was only interested in distracting him from his main focus and he quickly ended whatever dance relationship they had before it even started. One, he wasn’t completely over you at the time and being around this girl just felt wrong.

“I’ll pass.” he said looking in the direction of where the three of you were laughing at something Jisung said and wondered why you suddenly leaned forward to pull Jisungs hood over his head before pulling the strings, making Hana crack up even harder, “The project doesn’t start for another few weeks so I’ll decide then. If you’ll excuse me.” 

Side stepping her, Jeno went to drop his bag at the back of the classroom where everyone else had their stuff before sitting himself behind you where you turned to look at the sudden intruder who squeezed themselves between you and the mirror but only smiled when you saw your somewhat friend and felt warm inside when he smiled back.

Yeeun stared at Jeno in shock. She swore that this was her year to make him hers. She knew that Jeno was aiming to win nationals the year before so she never pushed for him to make a move. He was a focussed dancer who knew what he wanted and it was obvious to everyone but her that she wasn’t what he wanted. She saw the smile that the two of you shared when he sat behind you and felt herself burn with jealousy. She even noticed that he decided to sit behind you in English as opposed to Jaemin which would have been conveniently next to her. What did the new girl have that she didn’t? 

When the end of class came, Jisung had pretty much spent most of the period making fun of you when Jeno wasn’t around and Hana had to join in on the fun too. 

“Oh, so do you want to know why she REALLY woke me up to warm up at 5:30 in the morning?” Jisung whispered to Hana as you all waited for Jeno outside the change room.

“I have an idea but what happened?” she asked giggling while looking at you sideways and Jisung whispered in her ear making her gasp. “No!!” 

“No what?” Jeno asked curiously as he came up behind the three of you and your eyes widened.

“Uh...Uhh..No! I refuse to be late for English!” you said suddenly as Jisung and Hana’s eyes both widened, both trying really hard to hold in their laughter, “Let’s go JenJen.” you said quickly grabbing his arm and more or less forcing him to follow you down the hall to your English class.

Jisung and Hana waved at Jeno who had turned to look back at them with a confused look but the three of them were sharing very similar thoughts.

Did she say JenJen?” they both asked as Jeno thought the same thing about his childhood nickname.

“See, I told you they’d get together sooner than later. He’s literally been in love with her for years.” Jisung said as his eyes saw Yeeun glaring at your backs, “But we may have another problem.”

“Yukhei?” Hana asked as Jisung shook his head before nudging his head towards Yeeun and Hana rolled her eyes, “Oh please. She may be a good dancer but the NCT club has their radar on her and knows that she’s more about the clout than anything. But if she does do anything stupid, it’ll be fun to set her in her place.” 

“You remember what she did to the last girl who tried to get with Jeno.” Jisung said, “If Y/N ends up hurt…” 

“Won’t happen. Jaemin said that Yeeun tried to use Jeno last year to win the competition but Jeno overheard the conversation and told her that he was going to participate solo. So as long as she doesn’t try anything physically, we should be fine.” Hana reassured.

Jisung nodded his head in agreement as he thought up the next part of his plan which actually may avoid him getting punched in the face.