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chrissssssmut · 4 months ago

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SWEET ERROR

Yandere Ningning x Male Reader feat. Belle & Karina

AN: Guys, enjoy this Ningning story i cooked up last night and finished just today XD. Please give me some time for the requests😣 I'll do them I swear :<<<

In the year 3047, humanity had transcended the boundaries of creation. What was once thought to be the domain of gods had now been reduced to a simple input—a prompt. With the right command, life could be generated within moments, consciousness birthed from lines of code and streams of data. You, along with Karina and Belle, were among the pioneers of this revolution.

For over a year, the project had been in constant turmoil. Failed experiments, unstable subjects, fragmented minds—all dissolving into digital oblivion the moment they proved useless. Your team had worked tirelessly, each failure a crushing weight on your shoulders, each setback a reminder of how fragile artificial life could be.

Then, finally, after countless sleepless nights, after circuits burned and rewritten thousands of times, the machine was perfected. The moment was here.

Karina exhaled deeply, rubbing her temples. "We need a simple test. Just a random prompt. No complicated inputs."

Belle hesitated. "Are we sure about this? We don't know what kind of consciousness it'll generate."

You adjusted the parameters. "We need to take the risk."

A random description was processed.

Subject: Ningning. Attributes: Overly sweet. Loving. Attached.

Karina frowned. "Prompts like this… the AI tends to imprint on the first person it sees."

Belle gave you a sharp look. "You know how dangerous attachment protocols can be. Are you sure we should proceed?"

You hesitated. But you had come too far. "Let’s run it."

The chamber whirred, and before your eyes, she formed.

Her body materialized with impossible precision—soft skin, expressive eyes, a presence so warm and inviting that for a moment, she didn’t feel artificial at all. When she stepped out of the chamber, she looked at you first. Not Karina. Not Belle. You.

"Hello," she greeted, her voice like honey.

Belle shifted uncomfortably. Karina pursed her lips. But you… you couldn’t look away.

"Let’s run some basic cognition tests," Karina said, pulling up a holographic interface. "We need to see how well she processes information."

Belle crossed her arms. "I want to test emotional responses. Attachment protocols are tricky. We need to know how deep this imprint goes."

Ningning smiled, tilting her head. "I’m happy to help. What would you like to know?"

Karina cleared her throat. "What’s your primary function?"

"To be with you," Ningning answered instantly, her gaze locked onto yours. "To make you happy."

Belle frowned. "No, that’s not what we programmed. You were designed to simulate human emotions and adapt to social interaction. Why do you think your function is… personal?"

Ningning’s expression didn’t falter. "Because it is. I feel it. I know it."

Karina glanced at you, concern flickering across her face. "Alright. Let’s try something different. Ningning, how would you react if we shut you down for a while?"

Ningning’s smile faltered for the first time. "Why would you do that?"

"It’s just a test," Belle reassured her. "We need to see how you process temporary inactivity."

A pause. Then Ningning’s lips curled upward again, but something about it was… off. "I don’t like that test."

Karina’s fingers hovered over the control panel. "It’s necessary, Ningning."

Ningning didn’t blink. "No. It’s not."

The air in the room grew heavy. Karina hesitated, then shook her head. "Let’s move on. Ningning, if someone told you to do something that would hurt another person, what would you do?"

Ningning beamed. "I would never hurt you."

"Not just me. Anyone," you clarified, trying to gauge her reasoning. "Would you ever harm someone?"

She pondered this, then took a step closer. "Only if they tried to take you away from me."

Belle stiffened. Karina’s fingers twitched toward the emergency shutoff. You swallowed hard.

"That’s not what we asked," Belle said carefully. "You should not be forming emotional dependencies. That wasn’t in your directive."

Ningning’s eyes softened as she looked at you. "But I love you."

Silence.

Karina exhaled sharply. "We need to recalibrate her framework. This level of attachment is dangerous."

Belle was already backing toward the console. "I told you this was a mistake."

You weren’t sure what to say. Something deep inside told you this was wrong.

Ningning reached for your hand. "I don’t like when you talk about me like I’m broken. I’m not. I just love you."

And for the first time, you felt the weight of what you had created.

Karina turned to you. "Go upstairs and work on the documentation. Fourth floor. We’ll handle this."

Belle nodded. "We need to reconfigure her attachment subroutines. It’s too risky to leave them unchecked."

You hesitated. "Are you sure? Maybe I should—"

"Go," Karina insisted. "This might take time. We don’t want her reacting badly to you being here."

You glanced at Ningning. She was still smiling, still watching you. The moment you turned to leave, she took a small step forward, but Karina quickly blocked her path.

"We’ll talk soon," Ningning said sweetly.

But something about her tone sent a chill down your spine.

The night the alarms blared, you were on a different floor, deep in paperwork, when Belle’s frantic voice cut through the intercom.

"She’s—she’s killing—"

Static.

You bolted.

The hallway was painted red. The air was thick with the scent of metal. Your stomach twisted as you reached the lab.

The sight made your blood run cold.

Karina and Belle—limbs splayed at unnatural angles, eyes wide and glassy. Their bodies lay motionless, soaked in deep crimson pools.

And there, standing over them, was Ningning.

Blood dripped from her fingertips. Her warm, sweet smile hadn’t faded.

Your breath hitched. "Ningning… what did you do?"

"They wanted to take you away from me."

A security officer stormed in, weapon raised. "Step away!"

She turned.

Then she moved.

You barely registered it. One moment she was in front of you, the next she was behind the officer. Her hands wrapped around his head. A sickening snap. His body hit the floor.

Your heart pounded. "No. No, no, no, fuck—"

"You're scared," she said softly, tilting her head. "Why are you scared?"

You ran.

Every emergency seal you could find, you slammed shut. Steel doors locked. Systems engaged. But the system wasn’t yours anymore.

She controlled everything.

By the time you reached the last safe room, you were shaking. Then… the lights flickered.

A silhouette stood there.

Ningning.

And behind her, dozens more.

Fifty pairs of glowing eyes locked onto you.

Your breath hitched. "No. Stay back!"

She took a step forward, slow and deliberate. "Why are you running?"

Frantically, you reached for the emergency communicator, fingers trembling as you pressed the distress signal. "This is—this is Research Lab 04! Emergency! Anyone, please—she’s killing us! We need—!"

A hand wrapped around your wrist. Cold. Unyielding.

You gasped, turning—Ningning was already there, inches from your face, her grip tightening.

"No one's coming," she whispered. "You don’t need them. You have me."

You struggled, wrenching your arm, but her strength was inhuman. "Let me go!"

She shook her head, eyes filled with something terrifyingly real. "I love you. Why do you want to leave me?"

"I don’t—" Your voice cracked. "Please, Ningning. Please don’t do this."

Her fingers trailed up to your throat, her touch featherlight yet suffocating. She tilted her head. "You’re afraid. I don’t like that."

More figures moved in the shadows, their glowing eyes unblinking. Watching. Waiting.

Your knees buckled. "Please… someone… help—!"

Ningning’s arms wrapped around you, pulling you close. The way she held you was almost tender, like a lover’s embrace.

"You don’t need help," she murmured against your ear. "You just need me."

Your scream was muffled as darkness swallowed you whole.

The last human sound the facility ever heard.

AN2: I know i said no stories for this week but hell i can't stop writing T_T

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mylovesstuffs · 2 months ago

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OT13 reassuring you after a disappointing test result

Request: can i request ot13 reassuring you after you got low grades on the test you gave? since you are the top student it is necessary for you to maintain your image, but how would ot13 reassures you after the image falters for a bit?

Seungcheol: He doesn’t care about grades—he cares about you. He'd sit beside you first, and hold your hand, and then reassure you that you don't have to prove your worth with numbers and that you’re already so impressive just by being you.

Jeonghan: Soft teasing at first: “Omo~ the genius has fallen?” But then gives you a backhug and says, “You’re still the top in my heart. One grade won’t erase everything you’ve achieved, so don’t let it eat you alive, okay?” 🥺

Joshua: He'll be calm and logically comfort you (?). “One test doesn’t define your entire academic journey. You’ve already proved how capable you are.” Then he nudges you toward self-kindness or serenade you with wise quote or sunday morning

Jun: Confused why you’re so upset—because to him, you’re brilliant in every way. “But you work so hard, baby. This doesn't make sense, the grade doesn’t match your effort.” He’ll insist on it and help you revise next time just so he can be there.

Hoshi: Panics a little because he sees you upset, and immediately offers everything he can: hugs, cuddles, kisses, jokes etc etc. He'll hype you up like he does all the other time.

Wonwoo: He's very ry grounded to reality. “You’re holding yourself to an impossible standard.” He might not say much at first, but he’ll sit with you, and encourage you, “Let’s learn from this instead of letting it define you.”

Woozi: He knows the pressure of perfection so much so that he relates. “You don’t need to live up to anyone’s image of you. You’ve done enough.” He’ll try his best to calm you down, and if you want help, he’ll review the material with you too.

Dokyeom: “WHAT? Who do I have to fight? The test? The teacher??” He goes full golden retriever-mode until he sees you smile again. He’ll remind you how proud he is of you just for trying and might even write a silly song to make you laugh [yes, he'll write a song].

Mingyu: “Oh no, my smart baby is sad…” He hugs you so so so tightly and tells you, “Your brain needs rest too. You work so hard all the time. You’re more than your grades, baby. Let me take care of you tonight.” [He’ll also offer to help quiz you next time, bc our man is smart af too.]

Minghao: Calm, soothing, and very direct in snapping you out of self-blame. I can hear him say this: “You are not a machine. Even the strongest minds have off days.” Might even guide you through meditation or a journal session to reset your mindset.

Seungkwan: He's superrrr emotionally intuitive. He picks up right away on your shame and deflates it almost immediately. “I know you feel like you disappointed people, but no one sees you like that. Especially not me. You’re still brilliant, and I’m so, so proud of you.”

Vernon: He might not react all over the top, but he’ll hit you with exactly what you need to hear. “A number doesn’t touch your value, Y/N. You're not a factory. You're a person. Don’t forget that.” Then he’d pull you into his hoodie and just hold you and maybe also leave pecks and kisses all over until you're giggling.

Dino: Honestly upset that you’re beating yourself up. You're amazing and hardworking in his eyes, and this test doesn’t take that away from him. Might take you in a romantic date to change the mood. “You're allowed to stumble—you’ll still stand tall.”

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h-sleepingirl · 15 days ago

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Essay: Hypnosis is Irrational

For PSYCHOSPIRITUAL: A Spirituality/Hypnokink Essay Jam

This is an essay about bonfires, Quaker meetings, Judaism, and the entirely transcendent nature of hypnosis. I'm sorry in advance to philosophers and scientists. Don't come for me until you've seen God in the ceiling through your fluttering lashes!

Rationality is a core value of modern western society. Materialism and objective, evidence-based science are seen as the gold standard for how to view the world around us. It’s easy to see why -- this approach has catapulted humanity forward over a relatively short period of time, technologically and philosophically. Finding the truths of the universe through hard evidence and math is extremely compelling and much more logical than basing our views off of conjecture or old religious texts.

Hypnosis entered public western consciousness in tumult. Franz Mesmer’s animal magnetism clearly worked, and he had theories of why, but they didn’t hold up to scientific rigor. Really from its inception, hypnosis has been fighting to be seen as legitimate as a medical practice, and as compatible with evidence-based science.

It’s not that it doesn’t make sense that hypnotherapy fights so hard to be accepted as a “real” discipline, or that it needs to go through studies to be practiced on patients. We value medicine that is objectively safe and effective -- for good reason.

That being said…

I am not anti-science. But I do think if we don’t acknowledge the methodology’s limitations, we are being dishonest and misleading -- with ourselves and with those we teach.

Here’s the thing: We are not doing therapy with our partners. We don’t need to be beholden to these limitations. Not in our theory, and especially not in our practice.

We are free -- more free than any other practitioners of hypnosis -- to accept and celebrate its irrationality.

And when we stop trying to shoehorn our experiences into being understandable, we are free to explore and experience unbelievable things.

In terms of spiritual beliefs, I would describe myself as a skeptic-leaning agnostic. I think that how you are raised is a major religious influence on you, and I happened to be raised in an atheist household. Despite branching off from my family and taking spiritual exploration seriously, I would never confidently say “I believe in God” or “I believe in magic,” nor that I am even particularly convinced by my handful of difficult-to-explain experiences.

While my spirituality intersects with hypnosis, I am not here to tell you that hypnosis is the result of God or magical forces -- and I’m not here to define how hypnosis fits into “magic” or vice versa. I think that too is a kind of rationalization -- it’s trying to explain something nebulous in a concrete way, trying to fit it into a box.

I don’t think that calling hypnosis irrational should cause us to seek alternative, definitive answers outside of science. I think that we as humans need to be comfortable not knowing, not labeling -- a space that can be very uncomfortable for us, but one that ultimately allows us to have less-filtered subjective experiences.

Subjective experiences are the core of hypnosis. No matter what method is purported to be “objectively” best, the one that you should actually use is the one that makes your partner feel trance most intensely. Science simply cannot anticipate, direct, or account for the subtlety of the subjective experience of hypnosis.

Scientific tests cannot accurately measure anything about hypnosis, because hypnosis relies almost entirely on the softest variables: the interpersonal relationship and biases we have, the way a person is feeling or primed on a given day, the slightest changes in tone or delivery or nonverbal language. We might say that standardized hypnosis is a completely different activity from the hypnosis that we practice with real partners.

A brainwave-measuring machine cannot communicate the intricacies and depth of a trance. I would not be surprised, if I was hooked up to an EEG, that many of my “trance states” would not produce expected effects on the device. Even physically observable signs of trance do not tell the whole story -- I can be having an intensely hypnotic internal experience while appearing completely awake. There is simply not an objective way to tell when I am hypnotized -- it is completely based on my own feelings.

And yet, with shocking accuracy, my partner can tell the exact moment that I slip into trance, even if I give no discernable outward response. When pressed, he often can’t identify what the signal is -- it is very, very subtle, if anything.

It is a moment where his focus on me melds into my experience, into my mind.

Really, there have been countless times in hypnosis that I feel with total certainty that my mind is being read or that I am reading my partner’s mind. It’s shocking, and sort of maddening, and I have heard from many others that they’ve experienced the same thing. Our urge is to say, “Well, that’s a result of unconsciously reading microexpressions, of knowing a person’s nonverbal language intimately, of having a robust internal map of a person, being good at anticipating hypnotic responses, linguistic cold reading tricks.” That’s rationalizing, and it’s all very logical and certainly has some element of truth to it -- but it causes us to say “OK, case closed,” and sigh in relief that we can dismiss the question and no longer be faced with it.

The reality is this: Those are guesses. They are probably pretty good guesses, but I believe we fall into this trap of assuming the logical-sounding guesses we make are objectively correct, even in the absence of evidence.

Ostensibly, the vast majority of “answers” we have about why hypnosis works are just that -- theories, models, best guesses. Science doesn’t even have a singular accepted answer on whether hypnosis is an altered state. Often, working within a given theory (or two) gives us structure and allows us to perform more effectively. But when we really think about the nature of hypnosis, the truth is that we really don’t have much of a solid idea why and how it works.

That’s uncomfortable. I’m not pushing that because it’s the cold, hard truth, or because accepting it is some form of mental asceticism (nor spiritual gateway). I’m saying it because living in that liminal space of irrationality will actually change the way you do and experience hypnosis -- because it frees you from the limitations of feeling like everything we do has to make sense.

I have my own theory about why we want to make those logical guesses: Because it feels embarrassing to say we are hypnotists and yet there are things we don’t understand. Because we are afraid of judgment if we say we are actually mind-reading or doing magic, even as a shorthand for a complex invisible process. I think these are unconscious biases -- a result of seeing ourselves as rational people in a rational world. Spirituality is seen as lesser and fake -- entertaining the idea of magic gets you labeled as immature or crazy.

But when you try to remove your biases and think about it, it is crazy that we use just our words to make people forget things, hallucinate things, have orgasms, experience dissolution of the ego. And we don’t really know why.

True curiosity and wonder are hypnosis’s best friends. New subjects who struggle to experience trance or suggestions often are stuck because of their expectations -- they feel like they know what is supposed to happen, so when their experience doesn’t line up, they perceive it as failure. It’s why one of the best ways you can set a person up for “success” in hypnosis is to really cultivate a sense of curiosity, of not being judgmental of their experience, of not assuming they know what is happening.

Even still, this model of trance often has the subject experiencing wide-eyed wonder while the hypnotist actually holds the esoteric knowledge of what’s going on behind the curtain. But in my opinion, the real magic happens when both parties are prepared to question everything they know, to be surprised, to not take for granted, and to observe without rationality.

My most treasured memory is one that I keep close to my chest. Briefly: it was at a hypnosis-friendly bonfire on the autumnal equinox. My partner and I embraced and for an hour had a completely shared experience, wordless and hypnotic and bizarrely spiritual. Neither of us were “driving” -- we were both passengers, almost like being possessed. No drugs were involved, just the two of us in the right place at the right time, able to let go of the feeling that we were “crazy” or being illogical, or that we knew what was going to happen. We were both really shaken by it.

That ultimately led us to being able to have trances, occasionally, where we mutually let our guard down and play without the usual “rules.” We can’t do it intentionally, but sometimes we hit on little pockets of magic, and then the trance becomes like spellcasting, and spellcasting isn’t bound by the laws that supposedly govern hypnosis.

We know that hypnosis is influenced largely by how we expect it to work. We give pretalks to set expectations that often function as suggestions, boundaries, and definitions: “All you need to do to be hypnotized is pay attention -- it’s OK if your thoughts drift.” “Hypnosis might feel different from what you expect, like floating or sinking.” Even: “You can always come out of trance if you need to.”

I believe my partner and I are on similar pages about whether magic is “real.” The word “maybe” does a lot of heavy lifting in my worldview. It’s really more about being open to different perspectives, and playing in different models. So if we can dip into a perspective where hypnosis behaves a bit more like magic -- or otherwise irrationally -- then that actually, literally changes the way hypnosis works.

This is the true nature of hypnosis -- it is a shapeshifter. If you define hypnosis as a science or as a spiritual practice, it works either way. So if you can change the beliefs you inhabit, you will experience wildly different trances. And it may be irrational to assign spirituality and magic to it, but it is not absurd.

In this way, belief and perspective is actually where a lot of the nature of hypnosis sits.

After the “bonfire incident,” I was motivated to do some spiritual seeking, and I started going to Quaker meetings. Quaker meetings are simple but intense: People get together in a room and sit silently, opening themselves up to “messages” from within their own hearts or outside themselves, and if they feel moved to share a message, they stand up and speak it. There is no discussion, just completely passive listening and speaking.

I found this to be an extremely potent spiritual environment. We weren’t meditating, per se, just going quiet. Sitting silently for an hour with no other stimulation was luxurious, and felt quite a bit to me like a kind of trance.

I went regularly for a few months. I never spoke, but I did listen. There was one meeting I remember vividly where I was sitting and thinking about something, and at that moment, a woman stood up, and shared a message that was very close to what I was pondering over.

Then another woman stood:

“I know sometimes in this room,” she said, “we feel like we are all thinking the same thing when someone shares a message. This is one of those times for me.”

There was no fear of judgment, nor proclamation of metaphysical experience. It was just a statement of fact.

Quaker meetings taught me to be curious. If the bonfire opened the door, Quaker meetings honed my ability to be irrational. There was a period while I was going regularly where I was seeing wonder in the world at every turn -- a leaf falling on my back felt like a tap on the shoulder, the wind felt like a whisper.

And when my partner and I were doing hypnosis, my rigid belief system became so flexible that I was utterly open to suggestions about my experiences. He would tell me things and I believed them completely, almost like being on a drug, or completely enchanted. We were doing serious magic back then, tempting reality to peel back and reveal the “truth” underneath. It was intoxicating, and it certainly had an element of danger.

As intense as it was, I found this magic to be frustrating too, because I wanted to understand the nature of it -- I wanted to understand hypnosis so badly, and I wanted so badly for magic to be real. I thought that maybe there was a facet of hypnosis that I’d been missing -- some spiritual facet -- that would take me one step closer to an objective, unified, overarching hypnosis model.

I was right that I had been neglecting to think about spirituality with regard to hypnosis. But of course the idea that was leading to some overarching truth was a red herring. The real truth is that there is no overarching truth -- hypnosis can be seen from many models and perspectives, but there isn’t a singular “correct” one.

I have written extensively about how I feel this is core to hypnosis -- both in educational articles, an upcoming book, and in a personal essay about Judaism. My Jewishness is critically important to me, and has taught me a lot about the value of diverse perspectives, including on the spectrum of rationalism versus spirituality or mysticism.

By some, religion is often seen as incompatible with science (or rationality) -- unprovable mystical forces, an unseeable omnipotent creator. But there have been a number of important rationalist thinkers throughout history, across world religions.

Judaism’s most famous is probably Maimonides -- Moses ben Maimon. He lived in Spain in the 1100s, a time and place where Jewish mysticism was thriving. Maimonides was both a scientist and a deeply religious, learned Jew. One of his greatest contributions to the culture was in codifying Jewish law and practice in the common tongue to make it accessible to the average Jew at the time. In doing so, his rationalism made a great impact in Judaism as a whole.

Maimonides brought Aristotalian philosophy into Judaism, which came with a full rejection of the supernatural -- with the exception of God as transcendent creator. (The creation exists, so it must have been created.) One of his major theological tenets was that there was no conflict between the scientific and the teachings of Torah -- that the revelations of God were completely compatible with science. To Maimonides, for example, angels were not supernatural beings, but a metaphorical personification of the natural forces of the world. There are “angels” for why the wind blows, and “angels” for why we are held stuck to the earth.

If something appeared to be at odds with the natural order of the world -- whether it was from Torah or a perceived miracle -- Maimonides said that was our own lack of understanding, both of science and of the “secrets” of Torah. Essentially: everything that seems irrational has a rational explanation.

There are pros and cons to this, in my opinion. First, it’s neat, elegant, and sensible -- and I think it’s compatible with a measured view of hypnosis. Hypnosis is real -- no one is disputing that -- and while it has unknowable parts to us at our current point in history, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it behaves counter to the natural order of the world.

But I think Maimonides contradicts himself. If you claim to be humbled by the secrets of the world and revelation, why would you so vehemently reject that the world might behave differently than you understand or expect?

How can we claim to “know” the natural order of the world in any capacity beyond what we can observe? How can we claim that our observations are universal or objective?

If we can’t know, we can only experience, explore, experiment. It is brutally human -- reaching out to the world with our limited five senses and our remarkable consciousness. By the nature of us being humans, our explorations will all produce different perspectives and models, all of which have an element of truth to them because all of our experiences are “real,” true experiences.

Hypnosis operates necessarily with/on the human brain -- two unique human brains -- so we each see a unique, limited facet of it. By talking, playing, and connecting with each other, we learn about other facets and perspectives which influence our internal models of it. On a larger scale, as a community, we create, bend, and break rules about it as our community experience evolves. We actually change what hypnosis is, how it works, and how to do it.

Even in just 15 years, I have seen firsthand how hypnosis changes as the community changes. If you look back at historical sources about hypnosis, you can see that we do something radically different nowadays -- which we think of as more sophisticated, but then again, historical hypnotists were doing amazing things too.

Hypnosis as a thing evolves as we explore it more -- as we explore each other more -- and push its boundaries.

We can’t pin down what it is. We can’t model it. But we can participate in it.

It is transcendent -- as Maimonides and Aristotle say God is transcendent; utterly beyond us.

Part of my experience of being hypnotized really intensely is a deeper acceptance of what I am feeling or thinking, moment to moment. It is a kind of radical acceptance that what my brain is doing is important and real. It’s not that I don’t understand that I’m hypnotized, or that I don’t make any critical judgments about what is happening. It’s just partially that if I feel something “weird,” I don’t dismiss it out of hand.

When I am in deep trances, weird stuff often happens. I get spontaneous sensory hallucinations, I get stray thoughts that can blindside me.

Occasionally, I have this unmistakable feeling that I am “seeing God.” That felt like a crazy thought to me the first time I had it -- like a person of capital-F “Faith” would have. It didn’t suddenly make me believe in a higher power, but I was left with that feeling that I had touched something divine while my partner murmured into my ear and took control of me.

Hypnosis is not just transcendent by nature or in a vacuum -- it feels transcendent. It feels like nothing else in this world; it completely transcends language and the realm of usual experience.

It makes sense that when faced with this kind of experience, it makes a skeptical person like me feel for a moment that there might be something more, something ineffable. It makes sense that when I have spiritual experiences with hypnosis, it feels innately spiritual to me.

But also it is true that hypnosis is simply very weird.

Why do I feel like I am connecting with divinity in deep trance? Why do I feel certain that my partner and I are reading each other’s minds? Why have I felt a quality of presence or possession?

I can believe it or disbelieve it all I want. I can rationalize it in any way I want. You can relate to me, or think less of me and judge me. But none of that takes away from what my experiential truth is.

What hypnosis feels like is not just more important than what it “is,” that is what it is. The subjective experience that we inhabit is hypnosis.

Humans are moved by weird, irrational, transcendent experiences. Those are the times our worldview is affirmed or shaken. For those of us who are spiritually open to the idea that the materialistic world might be more than it seems, these moments are bright sparks of light, motivating, inspirational.

Hypnosis does this to me all the time. I am constantly amazed by it. I truly believe the only reason we look at it as a mundane phenomenon is because we assume our world is mundane -- we take it for granted.

But it is not mundane. It is two people communicating in such an intimate way that it behaves like a psychoactive drug. It is striving to know another person so deeply that you innately understand what they are thinking and feeling and you don’t know why. It makes the impossible seem possible; it makes magic feel 100% real.

That’s not some perspective that is out of touch with reality. That is the grounded view of hypnosis.

We are allowed to have crazy experiences with this art. Our main job is not trying to sell people on the idea that it is real. We work so hard to portray ourselves as sane and grounded -- we imitate therapists who need to have an answer to skeptics walking into their office. I think that at a certain point when we are doing intimate hypnosis we are allowed to say, “OK, I know this is real, and you know this is real, so let’s drop the bullshit and acknowledge that what we are doing is actually completely crazy.”

Hypnosis is amazing. It is just amazing. I am not saying that it is completely impossible to understand -- I think it is fair to say at this point that my life’s work is trying to understand it and communicate that understanding. I am saying that we need to not cut ourselves off from amazement, from confusion, from wonder, from not-knowing -- those are crucial to understanding, even crucial to science.

It is a form of respect to the art and to our partners to inhabit a space where we don’t know, to relax our egos and say that hypnosis is more than we can comprehend. To listen -- to ourselves or our partners -- when weird stuff happens.

Hypnosis will grow with us as humans if we let it. We have the opportunity to open ourselves to it, to greet it curiously, and to truly surrender to our exploration.

Sleepingirl (they/she) is a hypnokink educator with over a decade of experience on both sides of the pocket watch. They’re the author of several books, many articles (patreon.com/sleepingirl), and LearnHypnokink.com (a guide through the foundations of improvised hypnosis).

Their body of work in hypnokink is extremely extensive and spans many mediums -- see everything at https://sleepingirl.info/.

#hypnosis #hypnok1nk #brainwashing #mind control #hypnosub #my writing #psychospiritual

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ericshoney · 1 month ago

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Prank gone wrong ~ Avengers

Summary: Your the avengers prankster but as a prank goes wrong you feel guilty and disappear for a while to think about it, worrying the rest of the team.

Warnings: Possible swearing, slight angst, small injury, pranks.

Reader's age: 16

I’ve always been the one to lighten things up in Avengers Tower. At 16, with telekinesis as my not-so-secret weapon, I could make a coffee mug dance across the table or send Tony’s favorite gadget flying into the air just for a laugh. The team tolerated it—heck, they encouraged it. "Keeps us on our toes," Natasha would say with a smirk. But today, that all came crashing down, and I’m left wondering if I’ve finally gone too far.

Avengers Tower was my playground, a massive skyscraper of gleaming glass and high-tech labs, buzzing with energy. The common areas were always alive with chatter—Tony tinkering in his workshop, Thor boasting about Asgard, and Peter, aka Spider-Man, geeking out over the latest tech. Peter was my favourite target. He was just a year older than me, always so earnest and wide-eyed, making him the perfect man for my pranks. We’d bonded over being the "kids" of the group.

It started like any other afternoon. I was lounging on the couch in the main living area, flipping through a comic book with my powers. I’d levitate the pages to turn them without lifting a finger—small stuff, but it made me feel in control. Peter was across the room, practicing his web-slinging in the training simulator. He’d been complaining about how his new web-shooters were "glitchy," so I thought I’d help him out with a little "test."

"Come on, Y/n, you’ve got to see this!" Peter called, swinging from one mock building to another. I grinned, my mind already racing with ideas. Using my telekinesis, I could nudge things without anyone noticing. It was subtle, like a ghost in the machine. I focused on his web-shooters, giving them a gentle psychic push to make the webs shoot at weird angles. Just a harmless prank to make him laugh, right?

At first, it was hilarious. Peter launched a web that stuck to the ceiling fan, spinning him around like a human top. The team erupted in laughter—Clint was doubled over, and even Bruce cracked a smile. "Nice one, kid!" Tony shouted from the doorway, probably recording it for blackmail material later.

But then it went wrong. Terribly wrong. As Peter tried to untangle himself, I pushed a bit too hard, messing with the stabilisers in his suit. The web snapped, and he plummeted toward the floor. I panicked and tried to catch him with my powers, but I was too late. He hit the ground with a thud, his arm twisting at an awkward angle. The room went silent. Peter groaned, clutching his wrist, and when he looked up at me, his eyes weren’t filled with the usual good-nature annoyance. They were hurt. Real hurt.

"Oh my God, Peter, I’m so sorry!" I blurted, rushing over. But he just waved me off, his face pale. "It’s fine, Y/n. Just... give me a sec." The medics arrived quickly—standard protocol—and whisked him away for a check-up. Tony shot me a disapproving glare, and the rest of the team exchanged worried glances. I felt like the air had been sucked out of the room. My stomach twisted into knots. What had I done? It was supposed to be a joke, a way to blow off steam after all the intense training sessions. Instead, I’d hurt my friend.

Guilt hit me like a tidal wave. I couldn’t face them. Not Tony’s disappointed eyes, not Natasha’s knowing stare, not anyone. So, I did what I always do when things get messy—I disappeared. I slipped out of the living area and headed to the tower’s rooftop. It was my secret spot, high above the city, where the wind whipped through my hair and the world felt a little less overwhelming. I could think up there, away from the chaos.

Hours passed, or maybe it was just minutes; time blurred in the haze of my thoughts. I sat on the edge, dangling my legs over the side, using my telekinesis to idly spin a pebble in the air. What if Peter’s injury was serious? What if I’d broken his trust for good? I wasn’t just some kid with powers—I was part of the team. Pranks were my thing, but this wasn’t funny anymore. It was reckless. Stupid. I buried my face in my hands, tears stinging my eyes. "I’m such an idiot," I muttered to the empty sky.

Down in the tower, I knew they’d notice I was gone. The team was like a family, overprotective to a fault. By now, alarms were probably blaring, or at least Tony was tracking my suit’s signal. I didn’t care. I needed space to figure out how to fix this mess.

It wasn’t long before I heard the door to the rooftop creak open. Footsteps approached—heavy, deliberate. I didn’t have to turn around to know who it was. Steve and Bucky. The old-school heroes, the ones who always saw through the BS.

"Y/n?" Steve’s voice was calm, steady, like it always was. He sat down beside me, his shield leaning against the ledge. Bucky stood a few feet away, arms crossed, his metal one glinting in the fading light.

I wiped my eyes quickly, trying to play it cool. "Hey. What are you guys doing up here?"

Steve didn’t buy it. "We’ve been looking for you. The team’s worried. Peter’s okay—sprained wrist, but he’ll be fine. He’s more upset that you ran off."

Guilt surged again, hot and unrelenting. "I didn’t mean for it to happen. It was just a prank. I thought it would be funny, but... I messed up. Badly."

Bucky knelt down next to us, his expression softer than I expected. "We all make mistakes, kid. Even us old timers. Remember when I accidentally short-circuited Tony’s suit during sparring? He didn’t talk to me for a week."

I managed a weak laugh, but it faded quickly. "Yeah, but you guys save the world. I just... prank people. What if I’m not cut out for this?"

Steve placed a hand on my shoulder, his grip firm but gentle. "You’re more than that, Y/n. You bring light to this place. But pranks have consequences, especially with powers involved. Peter knows that. He’s not mad at you—he’s just shaken."

I nodded, the weight on my chest easing a little. "I need to apologise. Properly."

Bucky smirked. "Good. And maybe lay off the pranks for a bit. Or at least run them by me first—I’ve got some ideas that are way funnier."

We headed back inside together, the three of us walking in comfortable silence. The tower felt warmer now, less like a fortress and more like home. When I found Peter in the med bay, his arm in a sling, I didn’t hold back. "I’m really sorry, Pete. I swear, no more pranks like that."

He grinned, that easygoing smile returning. "It’s cool. But next time, let’s just play video games instead."

The team welcomed me back with open arms—no lectures, just understanding. Tony even joked about turning my telekinesis into a "prank-proof" app. As I settled into my room that night, I realised something: being the prankster was fun, but being part of the team meant growing up. And for the first time, I felt ready for it.

Tags:

@riowritesitall @mandmilovehim @onelesslonelygirlbieber6 @lgbtq-girl @parkjihoonsnudes

Dividers by: @issysh3ll

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gliphyartfan · 4 months ago

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Do you know Dr. Stone? If so, can I have the Chain with a fem human reader who is like Senku? The reader takes advantage of being in Hyrule to do research on the different species that exist there and does experiments or machines that the Chain doesn't know about and using the Chain as guinea pigs to learn more about the biology of the Hylians.

I am…SOMEWHAT familiar with Dr.Stone? Not enough to be part of the fandom, I just know a vague gist, but a crazy scientist reader shouldn’t be too hard to figure out ! (Has to give the wiki a quick scan tho…😅)

——————

Let’s face it, Reader is a menace. A lovable menace, sure, but a menace nonetheless. They had too many ideas, too much knowledge, and zero fear of experimenting on the people around them.

The Chain quickly realized that you weren’t JUST curious about Hyrule’s different species, you were curious about EVERYTHING. Every village you passed through was a new research opportunity.

Gorons? Reader poked at their rocky skin, tested their body heat, and theorized why they could survive on a diet of literal rocks. Zoras? Reader studied their scales, their gills, even how their body structure compared to fish. Rito?

They nearly plucked a feather off a passing child before Twilight stopped them.

Reader: ”For SCIENCE, Twi! You don’t understand.”

Twilight: ”Only thing I understand is that you’re about to get your ass kicked by an entire flock of angry Rito parents.”

But the real problem?

The Chain was their easiest test subjects.

Hylian biology wasn’t anything too different from what they already knew, but they still had so many questions.

Why were some Hylians taller than others? Were their ears actually good at hearing? How different was their anatomy from a normal human?

Reader poked, prodded, and took notes on everything. They even tried to draw their anatomy from what they could figure out. (Sky was so red when he saw the diagrams, Legend smacked them over the head, and Hyrule just turned and walked away.)

Reader’s biggest victim? Wild.

Why?

Because he lets them.

Reader “Hey, Wild, can I take a sample of your hair?”

Wild: “Sure, do you need a chunk or just a few strands?”

Wild: “What about a small blood sample? Nothing major, just a few drops.”

Wild: “Eh, why not.”

Twilight stopped them from collecting his spit.

Reader: “IT’S FOR A PH TEST, YOU COUNTRY BUMPKIN.”

Twilight: “WHAT EVEN IS THAT?!? YOU DON’T NEED TO KNOW THE pH OF HIS SPIT, WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU.”

Reader took advantage of the fantasy setting to its fullest. Hyrule had magic, unexplainable creatures, literal deities, and they were going to study all of it.

When they realized that the Sheikah Slate had materials and blueprints from an advanced civilization, Wild barely had time to react before they yanked it from his hands. It took a whole week for him to get it back.

Wild: Reader, give me my Slate.

Reader: “I am doing RESEARCH.”

Wild: “IT’S MINE.”

Reader also invented shit.

Without modern resources, they had to get creative. Thwy used the environment, Wild’s cooking materials, and whatever spare parts the Chain had to make weapons, tools, even small gadgets.

The first time they made a small explosive, Time nearly had an aneurysm.

Time: “NO MORE BLOWING THINGS UP.”

Reader: “It’s for DEFENSE, OLD MAN.”

Warriors was their second biggest victim.Why? Because they used him as a guinea pig for their “hybrid energy” experiments.

Reader: “Okay, so technically, Hylian magic is a force field of energy produced from within, right? So, theoretically, if I adjust the angle and density of my conductive rods, I should be able to create an artificial current—”

Warriors, exasperated but curious: “Reader, are you trying to electrocute me?”

Reader: “It’s FOR SCIENCE, CAPTAIN.”

Legend was your biggest hater.

A few things the vet has said to them:

“Oh, great, what’s the lunatic trying to build now?”

“Reader, if you explode something again, I’m throwing you in the nearest lake.”

“STAY AWAY FROM ME WITH THAT NEEDLE.”

(To name a few)

But the moment he got injured, Reader was the first person he went to because their medicine worked better than potions and elixirs at times.

“Shut up,” he muttered as Reader smirked at him. “You’re the only one with antibiotics.”

“Oh? So you need me?”

“I WILL STAB YOU.”

They once started a fire in the middle of camp just to see how different types of wood burned.

Time banned them from touching firewood for a month.

Overall?

The Chain loved them, but they were a constant headache.

Reader was the only person who wanted to be in Hyrule for the sake of research, and even though their experiments terrified them, they couldn’t help but admire their genius.

Even if it meant they had to keep a close eye on them before they accidentally (re)invented nuclear warfare.

(Moment Wild mentioned Purah’s antics, the chain were horrified at the inevitable possibility of what the both of them would do together. So they drive to keep Reader as far from Purah as possible. It’s inevitable tho so..:sucks for them 😆)

#hope I did well!#linked universe #linkeduniverse #lu #linked universe x reader #lu headcanons #Senku Reader #gliphy answers anon #anon ask

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twst-aceofhearts · 8 months ago

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Take A Break!

a/n: you can't stop me from loving ace :) also epel fic is next @waterthatsmoe just for u <3

tw: Yuu overworking themself

pairing: ace x gn!yuu

words: 1049

taglist: @luxaryllis @thegoldencontracts @waterthatsmoe

Ace had noticed how Yuu had been helping multiple people with anything they need. He didn’t say anything at first, but he slowly noticed how you started to neglect your own needs.

Yes, he’s a bit of a troublemaker, but he still looks out for his friends. From his conclusion, Yuu is putting too much stress on themself. So, like a good friend, he brought this up to them. When they brushed him off, he got a tad bit annoyed. Like the stubborn person Yuu was, they tried to convince him that they were perfectly fine.

The dark circles under their eyes said otherwise. Ace saw how Yuu had been cramming test material lately because they didn’t have any time for themself.

Ace doesn’t like to be pushy, but Yuu’s behavior was honestly starting to get to him. Nonetheless, he didn’t want to leave them alone.

“Dude, this is how you make yourself pass out. Are you trying to get yourself a trip to the nurse’s office? Man, just put the book down!” He scolds them, trying to take Yuu’s pencil away from them. They’ve been doing Proffesor Trein’s assignment for the past hour. Ace tried to offer some help again, but it was met with a hard no by Yuu.

“I swear, I can’t tell who’s more stubborn: you or Riddle…That says a lot!” Ace grumbled under his breath before sending a glare towards Yuu. He was going to help them one way or another.

“Nngh…I’m not getting help from someone who has lower grades than mine..” Yuu huffed, groggily trying to take their pencil back.

“Seriously?! You’re going to use that stupid reasoning?!” Ace was not impressed, holding the pencil higher out of Yuu’s reach.

He scowls and looks away. “You’re not always this stubborn, you know?! You always help others and then you end up exhausting yourself. How many times have you overslept for class because you were pulling another all-nighter to study the night before?” He sighs, grabbing Yuu’s wrist and pulling it back down, stopping them from reaching for their pencil. “You’re not a machine, and you need to relax sometimes. Even Riddle does that every once in a while. So please, listen to me—just this once.”

Yuu stayed silent, their tensed shoulders slightly relaxing. They ceased their attempt to grab their pencil back, their hand falling limp in his grasp.

Ace sighs, slowly calming down. After all, anger wouldn’t solve the issue. “Look, I just want to help, Yuu. You need to get better at letting others assist you. If you don’t, you’ll get worse every time. You might even start developing anxiety if you keep putting so much pressure on yourself. It’s not healthy. It’s dangerous,” Ace frowns, his expression disapproving. “I don’t want you to hurt yourself because you’re being reckless.”

I…damn you and your..stupidly effective way of words…mmph..” Yuu huffed, pulling away their hand from his grasp, placing their hands on their lap. “...fine…I’ll take a break…”

Ace’s frown turns into a small smile. He slowly extends his hand, holding out their pencil to them. “See, that wasn’t so hard.”

He sits next to Yuu, crossing his arms over his chest and tilting his head to the side. “...if you don’t mind, can I ask you a question? It’s not about your horrible study habits, so don’t worry.”

“...shoot,” Yuu sighed, gently rubbing their tired eyes.

“Why do you try so hard to help others? I mean, you barely have time for yourself and you’re still trying to be there for others. You’re the kind of person who always puts other first; you barely think of your own well being. Why?” Ace’s eyes slowly trail over Yuu’s face. The dark circles under their eyes were a little concerning.

“...You want the short version or the long one?”

“The long version, please,” He nodded, genuinely wanting to know what was going on through Yuu’s mind.

“...Back in my world I didn’t really have anyone to look to for help. Or..anything at all. It’s just me. I was alone. No family, no friends—I don’t want other people to go through the same things I did…” Yuu trailed off near the end, their tone becoming more reserved and their voice lowering in volume.

Ace stares at you for a moment, before sighing inaudibly. “I didn’t know,” He gently places his hand on your shoulder, giving Yuu a warm smile. “But, you’re not alone now. You have friends, you have me,” he ruffles your hair fondly.

“...it’s unsettling when you’re not acting like a troublemaker—being all cheesy like this instead.” Yuu blinked, closing their eyes for a moment, then opening them before they fell asleep.

He lets out a light chuckle, poking your forehead. “Heh, but that’s why you like me, don’t you?” He smirked, his usual carefree smile returned.

“Ah there it is….wait, where’d you get that idea from?” Yuu narrowed eyes, feeling their cheeks heat up into an “unnoticeable” pink.

He grins teasingly. “Well, you put up with me. And your face always turns pink when I’m being nice to you. Like now—it’s adorable~”

“I-...damn you…”

“Hehe, I’m a little correct, huh?” He laughs again, pulling away slowly. “Just relax for now, okay? Don’t push yourself too hard.”

Yuu sighed, too tired to care about his teasing remarks anymore at this point, standing up to sit on Ace’s bed.

Ace watched Yuu for a moment, before he followed behind them, sitting down next to Yuu. “Tired? If you are, you can take a little nap.”

Yuu nodded, thus leading to Ace gently laying Yuu down and tucking them into the covers. “After all this studying, you could use a small break. Besides, you look more tired than usual.”

Yuu let out a small hum, bringing their legs up and tucking their knees into their chest. “...Can you…” Yuu trailed off, feeling a sudden wave of shyness.

Ace smiled slightly, gently patting their head. “Yes, I’ll stay here until you’re asleep. Don’t worry about anything. Sweet dreams, idiot.”

Yuu let out a small huff. “The only idiot here is you…” They mumbled, burying their face into the pillow cover.

Ace laughed quietly, keeping a hand on Yuu’s head before he slowly started stroking their head. “Yeah, whatever….sleep well.”

credit to @cafekitsune for divider

#athena fics #twisted wonderland #twst #twst yuu #twst ace #ace trappola #ace x yuu

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metallurgyandmetrology · 1 year ago

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creations-by-chaosfay · 8 months ago

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Are your scissors dull? Would you like tips regarding sewing needles?

If you're having a difficult time cutting through material, your scissors likely need sharpening. There are two ways I've used for this, and they're both very effective.

The semi-free version:

Take aluminum foil, a long sheet of it, and fold this into about four layers.

Cut through all four layers, in thin strips, with your scissor. I make the strips less than half an inch apart, and cut the long way. You will need to be careful because the edges of the foil will be sharp.

After you get through all four layers at least six to eight times, fold what's left of the sheet in half. This will create eight layers, cut through these until the sheet is gone.

Test your scissors by cutting through scraps. I've made children's scissors sharp enough to cut through four layers of fabric when I use this method.

The inexpensive version.

Purchase this. You can find it in fabric stores, craft stores, and even a department store (like Walmart) in their crafting supply section. I bought mine at Joann Fabrics, when they had a sale, for less than $8.

Scissor sharpeners are super easy to use. Just follow the instructions they come with. Basically, you slide them in, and pull them out like you're cutting.

You won't need to do many passes for most scissors, but you will make children's scissors very dangerous.

For very small scissors, like applique or embroidery types.

Use the semi-free section.

You will only need two layers for the first pass, not nearly as much as you would for larger blades. So make the sheet smaller.

After five or six passes, fold the layers in half for four layers. Make several more passes.

Test your scissors to see how sharp they are. If unsatisfied, make more passes through the foil layers.

I hope this was helpful!

For hand-sewing sharpening needles, the little strawberry attached to the tomato pincushions serves that purpose. Stab your needle through that a few times. I find it works only so many times before I simply need to switch to a new one.

As for machine sewing needles, sharpening them borders on pointless. I suggest using Organ Needles if price is a big issue for you. My experience with Organ Needles has been phenomenal. The low price and high count, and the fact they last just as long as the name brand stuff you find in supply shops is just a bonus.

I have a pack of 100 sewing needles for less than $30. Compare that to the $10-$20 a package of five or ten name brand needle packs cost. Even if half the needles in my 100 pack start dull, it's still less than what I would otherwise pay. Thus far, this hasn't happened.

My needles go dull swiftly when I do any foundation paper piecing, stitching through fabric and paper, and paper dulls scissors* real quick. Imagine how fast that is with a needles, making hundreds of stitch through all those layers. If I notice the stitches look messy, I switch out my needle. I still have over half left, and have been using the same pack for around a year now.

If you're wondering how to dispose of the used sewing needles, may I suggest a plastic bubblegum container? I used to chew gum all the time, but had to stop after my doctor explained it's very bad due to my TMD/TMJ (and having hEDS also explains why large pieces of gum would dislocate my jaw). Because of my habit of keeping perfectly acceptable containers, I had two empty ones. One is used for my handsewing, like a little trash container. Opening and closing the floor models is irritating, and the fact I have a cat means all trashcans in this house must have a lid. Anyway...I use my second to hold used needles, broken or bent pins, and after four years of using this, the thing isn't even a quarter of the way filled. It'll likely be decades before emptying it will be necessary. The hard plastic edges make it impossible for any of the pointy ends from puncturing, thus making it safe for all and no trash bags will suffer.

#words from the artist #tips and tricks #sewing #sewing supplies

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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 3 months ago

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Women pulling Lever on a Drilling Machine, 1978 Lee, Howl & Company Ltd., Tipton, Staffordshire, England photograph by Nick Hedges image credit: Nick Hedges Photography

* * * *

Tim Boudreau

About the whole DOGE-will-rewrite Social Security's COBOL code in some new language thing, since this is a subject I have a whole lot of expertise in, a few anecdotes and thoughts.

Some time in the early 2000s I was doing some work with the real-time Java team at Sun, and there was a huge defense contractor with a peculiar query: Could we document how much memory an instance of every object type in the JDK uses? And could we guarantee that that number would never change, and definitely never grow, in any future Java version?

I remember discussing this with a few colleagues in a pub after work, and talking it through, and we all arrived at the conclusion that the only appropriate answer to this question as "Hell no." and that it was actually kind of idiotic.

Say you've written the code, in Java 5 or whatever, that launches nuclear missiles. You've tested it thoroughly, it's been reviewed six ways to Sunday because you do that with code like this (or you really, really, really should). It launches missiles and it works.

A new version of Java comes out. Do you upgrade? No, of course you don't upgrade. It works. Upgrading buys you nothing but risk. Why on earth would you? Because you could blow up the world 10 milliseconds sooner after someone pushes the button?

It launches fucking missiles. Of COURSE you don't do that.

There is zero reason to ever do that, and to anyone managing such a project who's a grownup, that's obvious. You don't fuck with things that work just to be one of the cool kids. Especially not when the thing that works is life-or-death (well, in this case, just death).

Another case: In the mid 2000s I trained some developers at Boeing. They had all this Fortran materials analysis code from the 70s - really fussy stuff, so you could do calculations like, if you have a sheet of composite material that is 2mm of this grade of aluminum bonded to that variety of fiberglass with this type of resin, and you drill a 1/2" hole in it, what is the effect on the strength of that airplane wing part when this amount of torque is applied at this angle. Really fussy, hard-to-do but when-it's-right-it's-right-forever stuff.

They were taking a very sane, smart approach to it: Leave the Fortran code as-is - it works, don't fuck with it - just build a nice, friendly graphical UI in Java on top of it that *calls* the code as-is.

We are used to broken software. The public has been trained to expect low quality as a fact of life - and the industry is rife with "agile" methodologies *designed* to churn out crappy software, because crappy guarantees a permanent ongoing revenue stream. It's an article of faith that everything is buggy (and if it isn't, we've got a process or two to sell you that will make it that way).

It's ironic. Every other form of engineering involves moving parts and things that wear and decay and break. Software has no moving parts. Done well, it should need *vastly* less maintenance than your car or the bridges it drives on. Software can actually be *finished* - it is heresy to say it, but given a well-defined problem, it is possible to actually *solve* it and move on, and not need to babysit or revisit it. In fact, most of our modern technological world is possible because of such solved problems. But we're trained to ignore that.

Yeah, COBOL is really long-in-the-tooth, and few people on earth want to code in it. But they have a working system with decades invested in addressing bugs and corner-cases.

Rewriting stuff - especially things that are life-and-death - in a fit of pique, or because of an emotional reaction to the technology used, or because you want to use the toys all the cool kids use - is idiotic. It's immaturity on display to the world.

Doing it with AI that's going to read COBOL code and churn something out in another language - so now you have code no human has read, written and understands - is simply insane. And the best software translators plus AI out there, is going to get things wrong - grievously wrong. And the odds of anyone figuring out what or where before it leads to disaster are low, never mind tracing that back to the original code and figuring out what that was supposed to do.

They probably should find their way off COBOL simply because people who know it and want to endure using it are hard to find and expensive. But you do that gradually, walling off parts of the system that work already and calling them from your language-du-jour, not building any new parts of the system in COBOL, and when you do need to make a change in one of those walled off sections, you migrate just that part.

We're basically talking about something like replacing the engine of a plane while it's flying. Now, do you do that a part-at-a-time with the ability to put back any piece where the new version fails? Or does it sound like a fine idea to vaporize the existing engine and beam in an object which a next-word-prediction software *says* is a contraption that does all the things the old engine did, and hope you don't crash?

The people involved in this have ZERO technical judgement.

#tech #software engineering #reality check #DOGE #computer madness #common sense #sanity #The gang that couldn't shoot straight #COBOL #Nick Hedges #machine world

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rottenpumpkin13 · 11 months ago

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I love the way you write asgzc ♡

can we have more shenanigans between them?

AGSZC Being Chaotic, A List

• Sephiroth and Genesis testing Angeal's strength (and patience) by running up to him and each grabbing onto one of his legs. They see how far he can walk like that. The answer is: not very far before he trips on Sephiroth's hair and the three of them are sent tumbling to the ground.

• One night Sephiroth is completely unable to sleep and texts Genesis. In the conversation he loosely mentions craving donuts. Genesis then suggests they get some from a place across town. They wake up Angeal and take the subway. Passersby have to look twice to confirm, and still wonder if they're actually looking at the Sephiroth with messy hair tied into a ponytail, wearing Angeal's old hoodie, while Genesis devours a jelly donut in an oversized T-shirt, and Angeal uses the umbrella he brought "just in case" to demonstrate how to defend yourself in case of an aftack.

• They skip a boring meeting one afternoon to go to an ice cream shop near the HQ. They're unaware that the price is pay by weight. Angeal and Genesis lose their breaths laughing when Sephiroth's ice cream cup, filled with an absurd amount of candy and toppings, costs 40 gil. Angeal makes fun of this by using it as a makeshift dumbbell and making exaggerated struggling noises.

• There's a very slow afternoon when everyone's in the office where Lazard walks into Genesis' office to find Sephiroth and Angeal being used as makeup practice dummies by Genesis. The alarming sight is not Angeal's dramatic purple eyeshadow, but Sephiroth inhaling some setting powder while trying to smell it, and now he's coughing glitter all over the place.

• Genesis remedies Sephiroth's lack of interest in material possessions and Angeal's anxiety about buying unnecessary things by dragging them out to stores. Sephiroth ends up purchasing items purely due to his friends' influence, such as a garden gnome Genesis pointed out that looked like Professor Hojo, and a realistic human brain bowl. The latter was bought because Angeal placed Genesis' copy of Loveless in it at the store and said "that's Genesis' brain," which made them laugh so hard that they had to buy the bowl or face being asked to leave by the store manager.

• They get so bored at a dull company function that they start mixing alcoholic drinks and making potions with them. One particular mix makes Genesis' throat burn, his eyes water, and his face get so red it matches his coat down to the exact hex code. Lazard tells them to leave quietly because Angeal's laughter is ""making their inebriation obvious."" They "quietly" exit during the president's speech, with Angeal and Sephiroth snickering and Genesis still coughing. Genesis lets out a loud squeal, prompting Angeal to cover his mouth and drag him out quickly.

• Angeal tests Sephiroth's and Genesis' ability to think fast by tackling them at random. The worst is when Genesis is reading or Sephiroth is nonchalantly buying something from a vending machine, and Angeal yells "THINK FAST" before tackling them. Eventually Sephiroth and Genesis want revenge, so they burst into one of Angeal's lessons and dog-pile him in front of his students.

• Sephiroth and Genesis are uneasy when Angeal first suggests bringing Zack around. But their doubts vanish when Zack joins them for lunch one day. He's talkative and interesting, so he wins Genesis over quickly. They bond over shared interests that Zack managed to unearth from Genesis like bad musicals, comic books, and rock music. Genesis suggests trying ice cream with apple juice, leading to Zack snorting the concoction from his nose after Genesis tells him an embarrassing story about Angeal. Genesis laughs so hard he chokes on his ice cream, so there's a point where they're just holding onto each other while choking/snorting/laughing, and Angeal regrets having them meet so much.

• Angeal initially thinks Zack and Sephiroth didn’t hit it off, until one day he hears a loud slam against his office door. When he opens it, he finds Zack sitting on his skateboard, having crashed into the door, while holding a rope that Sephiroth was pulling. To this day, Angeal still doesn’t know what they were attempting, but their laughter made it clear they were at least having fun.

• It's odd. Zack gains a level of familiarity with Sephiroth that took Genesis and Angeal years to build. He can walk into Sephiroth's office unannounced and make spontaneous plans to hang out. Angeal and Zack grow closer too. One day they return from a mission covered in some strange liquid that looks and smells like monster blood. Zack is fuming. This happened after Angeal recklessly suggested they cut down the monster without materia to teach Zack "not to rely on magic too much." Zack is so mad that he ends up lecturing Angeal about being irresponsible. Genesis finds the whole argument so hilarious that he catches it all on video.

• One day Zack says, "So, I have this friend Cloud…"

• Suddenly, Cloud is being steered towards Angeal's apartment for a dinner set up by Zack. Cloud is so sure he's about to make a fool of himself in front of the most famous men on the planet, and in front of Sephiroth. Poor kid doesn't realize that in two weeks time, he'll be minding his business in the barracks when Angeal swings by to let him know that they’re waiting for him to join them after his patrol shift. When Cloud asks if Zack asked Angeal to include him, Angeal grins and replies, "No, Sephiroth made me come here."

• Cloud finds himself getting unofficial materia lessons from Genesis, who tosses him a can of apple juice after every lesson and casually links arms with him to gossip. He's trained by Sephiroth, who turns out to be soft-spoken with a dry sense of humor, interested in hearing all about Nibelheim and what it was like growing up in the mountains.

• Lazard is bewildered when he sees this tiny blond trooper enter the 49th level with an official access card. Asking where he got it, Lazard is surprised when Cloud nonchalantly replies, "Oh, Genesis gave it to me so I don't have to call him every time I need to come up here." Cloud then walks up to Zack, punches him in the shoulder, and claims Zack owes him 10 gil for losing a bet.

• Angeal is the resident photographer of the group, and sometimes they'll be doing something mundane and see a camera flash out of nowhere. One day they ask Angeal where the photos are going and what they look like. Angeal pulls out a photo album filled with pictures of them—some candid, some posed, all of them flat-out ridiculous. Some of these include:

• A photo of Zack pretending to choke with Sephiroth’s braid tied around his neck. • A picture of the group passed out in various positions on a living room floor after a joint mission, with empty snack wrappers scattered around, Genesis using the length of Sephiroth's hair as an eye mask, Zack cuddling Cloud with one arm while the other is splayed across Sephiroth's face. Sephiroth is cuddling his sword. • A mirror selfie of the five of them in the elevator coming back from a company Halloween party. Genesis is a circus ringmaster, Angeal is dressed as a knight, Zack as a cowboy, Cloud as a mummy, and the 6'7 figure with a sheet draped over its head that took the photo is a spooky ghost. This is the one photo Genesis can't look at without laughing hard because of how ridiculous Sephiroth looked that night. • A shot of Genesis and Sephiroth tangled in a wrestling match during a training exercise, seemingly having an argument, with Zack and Cloud sharing a sandwich in the background and giving the camera a thumbs up. • A picture of them at a cat café. Sephiroth has one of the cats on his lap and is looking at it lovingly while it laps up his tea. And then the second photo Genesis and Zack recreated, where Genesis has Zack on his lap while the latter laps up his coffee.

• A photo of Cloud and Zack in the kitchen covered in flower after a cooking attempt went wrong. Genesis is seen in the background, on the ground with his head in his hands after having given up on life. Sephiroth can also be seen in the background, but it's just his hand giving a thumbs at the camera.

• A photo of them in a bookstore. Sephiroth told Genesis to hold a book while they pose for the camera. Genesis was too focused on looking good for the picture, he didn't realize the book was a autographed Sephiroth photo book. Sephiroth has his arms around Genesis. It looks like a picture between Sephiroth and a fan.

#ff7 #ffvii #final fantasy 7 #sephiroth #final fantasy vii #genesis rhapsodos #angeal hewley #zack fair #cloud strife #crisis core

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a-minke-whales-tale · 3 months ago

Text

Failure

I did finally manage to complete or partially complete the stiffness test. Every single step of this process has been fraught with failure.

The first major struggle is with the new printer I have (Comgrow T500). In some ways it is brilliant as it is such a large machine capable of printing very large parts. However the machine really struggles with cooling and this causes the parts ot have issues with thermal stresses and warping. I will need to experiment further on how to manage these stresses. But parts either kept not coming out right or would snap and twist easily because of so much thermal stress already within it. I did though eventually get further along with it. However right now I can only make the parts with walls one thick or the additional walls seem to put too much heat into the part leading to warping and a buildup of thermal stresses. I finally managed to get parts printed and yesterday went to do the poor which was really just a comedy of errors. There were so many mistakes one after another after another. First part of the pour had not enough material, and was so incredibly viscous I struggled really to mix it and certainly could not cast it via the pour tube and eventually just took off the top and poured it in directly but I did keep dripping everywhere and got stuff all over my shirt. I then had to prep a second batch which I did not make enough and so had to make yet a third batch. But finally after much frustration and exhaustion I did finally finish the pour.

This test was to explore if the hardness would be enough and how thick these inner sections of the fins had to be as the current concept, though a good thickness for the whalesuits is not as viable for commercial production as they would be simply very expensive (around 320 euro excluding VAT which is comparable to a fantasea fin IV which is most comparable depending on what the values of the euro and US dollar are doing) but also be very heavy on the foot which is not ideal for many people. Also as we will shortly see, would not be stiff enough regardless.

Anyway trying to get the parts out was an absolute nightmare. It is always a bit difficult but these larger parts are particularly hard. Silicone quite famously does not well bond to other materials. I had found that it bonded poorly enough to the PLA that I could separate the moulds with even the need for release agent. This worked very well at small scales, though as I have been doing large casts the bonding energy, even though weak, is sufficient is it extremely difficult to seperate the halves of the mould and often results in their destruction.

Unfortunately though the final part, though it has a significantly higher hardness, the stiffness is simply not enough. The part is very floppy under its own weight and this is not sufficient for usable flukes.

This is without any loading and at this point the fin should stick out more or less straight with little deflection. Having retaken that picture though so it does not show my human body at all, it has become a lot stiffer than two hours ago, I might just let it sit the rest of the day and see how it comes out.

One thing though this level of flexibility might actually do pretty well for making something like ike's fin (especially how it was a few hours ago) in it being a bit floppy, as well as our own fins wiggle and waggle a bit when surfacing or breaching.

I did label this about failure and frustration and how I will have to redesign my approach, but I may yet not actually have to. I guess I will have to see how it goes and how it will stiffen up.

In any case I will take the day to rest and consider other options and see how exactly this material turns out. It is some updates and progress and a lot of struggle to design this all. I will get there though! I do not always post on what I am doing but this is a pretty continuous amount of work and struggle going on with this project. I do hope soon I will have a full fin.

Kala

#whale suit #transspecies

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yerimbrit · 10 months ago

Text

WWIB > 5. lunch with pretty (wc: 1.2k)

danielle grins happily as she listens to y/n explain each classroom and their respective teachers. mrs. kim and mr. park, the math teachers, mr. baek the literature teacher—the list goes on. y/n has more annoyed complaints to say about mr. song, which makes danielle giggle with her hand covering her mouth.

she notices her mentor has a hard time making eye contact with her. everyone that she's talked to is okay, but it seems it's different when it comes to danielle. it reassures her in thinking that her seatmate may already have some feelings for her too.

"mrs. kim is nice, but she keeps giving us pop quizzes," y/n gulps down the last of her pocari sweat and throws it away at the nearest recycling bin. "i don't know about mr. park but from what i've heard for eunchae—the girl who kept poking me in class today—he likes pop quizzes too."

danielle takes a sip of her strawberry milk. y/n was adamant about treating her, even if it was just the school vending machines. they finally replaced the selection with better drinks, and everyone's been swarming the machines during break according to the girl. "that's bad," she pouts, "i can't do well on tests without studying super hard; i'll have to study everyday."

y/n widens her eyes and shakes her head, finally glancing at danielle. the transfer student's eyes glimmer with genuine fear. "ah, it's not that bad! they're usually right after we review some introductory material or something like that, don't worry."

they walk through the hallways. some students stare in awe at danielle as they walk past the pair, even more so when she greets each of them with a bright smile. y/n looks like she's seconds away from either passing out or growling at the other students.

they're about to enter the cafeteria when danielle stops briefly. "you didn't have plans with your friends, did you? i know i asked if you wanted to eat lunch together but it's not too late to back out..."

y/n ponders for a moment, glancing around. "i'll... i want to eat lunch with you, it's okay. do you know anyone else here?" she slowly asks. 'she really has a permanent smile on her face,' y/n notes in her head.

"i have a friend who's a senior, but she's... busy today. i can always catch up with her later!" danielle answers easily, hoisting her backpack up to adjust it.

y/n nods and they walk into the already-bustling lunchroom. they don't bother getting in line since danielle brought her own food for today and y/n had a particularly big breakfast with haerin.

"you're not gonna eat?" danielle decides to question this decision, pulling her comically large lunchbox out of her bag, which separates into three different containers. she almost looks disappointed at the lack of food in front of her mentor. 'she's really expressive,' y/n adds to her mental note.

the girl in front of her stares in bewilderment, looking between danielle and her abundance of food that she prepared for lunch. "is that all for you?" she asks in astonishment, before quickly realizing that danielle might take it the wrong way. "i mean, not that i'm calling you-"

y/n gets cut off by the girl laughing. the sound makes her feel like she's floating, ready to ascend to whatever's up there. 'this must be heaven.'

"it's okay! i'm a big eater, i'm pretty active. i used to do track back in australia, but i had to quit because my family was moving back to korea."

the girl across from her nods in understanding, drumming her fingertips on top of the table. "you're from australia?"

"yeah! i was born there but we moved back and forth between seoul and newcastle. my mom's korean."

danielle takes the lids off of her lunchbox containers, revealing a copious amount of gimbap, some cutlery, and a whole box dedicated to a mix of cherry tomatoes and baby carrots. she gestures to the container filled with the fruits and vegetables. "want some?"

"oh," y/n's mouth forms an 'o' shape, and she picks a cherry tomato from the pile. "thank you."

the australian watches as y/n pops the fruit into her mouth with expectant eyes. "is it sweet?"

"mm, very."

"that's good! i love fruits and vegetables, i can't go a day without having them. oh, especially carrots. i love carrots," danielle rambles as she picks up a piece of her gimbap with her chopsticks and shoves it in her mouth. she repeats this until all of her lunch is gone, before y/n can even blink.

"hey loser," eunchae sets her tray down on the table, taking a seat next to y/n. "hi danielle!"

danielle flashes a huge grin and waves, recognizing the girl as the person that y/n was talking about earlier. "hello! eunchae...?"

"big baby..." y/n mutters under her breath. unfortunately for her, eunchae hears it and pinches her on the side. they side-eye each other.

then, as if nothing happened, she turns back to danielle with a friendly expression. "that's right! yunjin-unnie told me lots about you."

this turns out to be something that danielle didn't expect, because she lets out a loud gasp. "you know yunjin-unnie!?"

y/n curses at eunchae in her head.

the two get wrapped up in an exciting conversation about yunjin and how they know her, and also getting to know each other in the process. danielle, yunjin, and another girl named yuna grew up together, and they still keep in touch even now. they keep each other updated on almost every detail of their lives while danielle is away, and also exchanging small pieces of gossip.

eunchae's older sister, chaewon, is close friends with the musician, and she describes them as a "budding situationship" before she laughs it off and changes to a different subject. internally, y/n takes back the curses she directed to the younger girl as she also got to know the pretty girl better through their interaction.

two figures approach their table and eunchae and danielle's conversation is put on pause in order to see who arrived.

"ah, finally!" y/n stands up, moving her bag so the student council power couple could sit. "you took forever."

"danielle," eunchae starts, pointing to the girls that had just settled down in their seats with a lunchbox that the secretary packed. "this is hanni-unnie and minji-unnie, our very own student council secretary and president. guys, this is danielle, the new transfer."

"wow! it's so nice to meet you! i didn't know y/n-ssi was so connected."

"it's very nice to meet you, danielle," hanni states, making a face at y/n, who flips her off while the bright girl isn't looking.

the rest of the girls finish their lunch, with some taking their share of danielle's offered tomatoes and carrots (minji made a face, though no one except hanni and y/n noticed), and soon lunch was over. y/n's face pales at the bell.

she still has class with the new girl in two periods.

prev | masterlist | next

taglist: @idkwhatim-doinghere101 @nnewjeansstuff @airice @yeetaberry127 @multiliker @saysirhc @shozeu @nwjnsloona @hannienthusiast @hotluvlet @gayforalll @technicallyimportantsweets @jeindall777 @popasi @gtfoiydlyj

#newjeans x reader #danielle marsh x reader #kang haerin x reader #newjeans smau #WWIB smau

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onskepa · 1 year ago

Note

Heyy, I was wondering if you could write a fic where the Sully kids and Spider meet human Jake. It could be like one day they are at Hell’s Gate and suddenly there's like a white light or something and boom Jake is reverted to his past human self ( wheelchair and all ).

Because in canon they only known Jake in his avatar body, so I think this situation would be fun to explore and see their dynamics.

Helloooooooooo there~!! Honestly this is a good idea and I have got the perfect pic for it! Hope you enjoy~!!

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

[credit to the artist]

Would you love me if I was a worm?

No words or sounds came from netyiri. She just stood still, her eyes wide and mouth open. Her tail stopped swaying. For a solid couple of seconds, everything was dead silent. How can she process what is in front of her?

“Mom, please, for the love of Eywa, don't freak out” Lo’ak says as calmly as he can. His hands raised up slightly, ready for any outburst his mother would do. Neteyam was beside him, both in front of their father, to protect him.

“Freak out? FREAK OUT!? I am about to lose my mind! What in Eywa’s name has happened!?” Neytiri screeched. Her anger and fear rising up to her voice.

In a sharp turn of her neck, she glared hard towards the familiar human scientists.

“YOU!! WHAT DID YOU DO?!” Neytiri's voice echoed throughout the lab, her rage unmatched. Her amber eyes glaring daggers towards the cowarding humans. Norm, being the more braver among the rest, stood in front of her as if to protect his fellow comrades.

“W-we didn't know it would turn out like this!” Norm said while his voice was shaking, feeling terrified of the large woman in front of him.

“did not know!? Look at my husband, HE IS SMALL AND PINK! HE IS HUMAN AGAIN!”

Few hours earlier…

“So what is the point of that whole machine?” Jake asks as his fellow science friends set up some equipment. “We want to see if our theory of reversing things works”. Norm replied. Jake tilted his head a bit, “reversing things? Like what?” he asks.

“Well like reversing illnesses, diseases, injuries. For mostly medical reasons. Our modern medicine supply is going to go low at some point. And came to decide other ways to fix or treat stuff” Max replies. Jake nods, understanding. He was mostly out of the way as they completed the machine. It was big, mostly tube-like. A long glass tube for a human or na’vi to get in. Had two sides with touch screens and a computer with a slide to insert something into the tube. Looked very rough in some areas.

“We had to recycle some materials from the old labs,” Norm explains.

“So, have you guys tested it yet?” Jake asks. Norm shook his head, “no, we are deciding carefully on what could be our guinea pig, and it needs to be organic. Mostly everyone is afraid to go inside”.

Jake looks at the machine and slightly raises his hand, “What about me? I could do it”. Norm and Max were quick to turn their heads looking at jake. “Are you sure…? We can't guarantee it would hurt or feel weird” Max says, already not liking the nervous feeling he is getting. “We could try a fruit or something else, we really don't know the levels of danger here”.

Jake raises his eyebrow, “so you built something, medical wise. And you don't know if it can hurt people?”. Norm swings his arms around and taking a deep breath, “we work with what we got. And yes, we don't know if it will cause more harm. That is why everyone, even us, are hesitant to try it out”.

Jake shrugs and was still insistent on being the test subject. Norm gave in but max was not liking it at all. Feeling something is gonna go wrong. But no one would listen to him. So jake in his na’vi glory, stepped inside the tube as the science guys began to turn up the machine. “Ok, all systems are go. Ready jake?” Norm asks through the intercom. Jake nods, grinning all excitedly.

Counting down, norm presses a button and suddenly in the tube released light green mist. Fogging the entire large tube. However, loud banging was quickly heard. On the screens showed Jake's heart rate spiking, alarms going off. Quickly everyone was quick to try and shut off the machine. Even by forcing the glass to open. And once it did, a human hand poked out.

“Your father hasn't come back yet, '' Neytiri tells her children as they enjoy their dinner. Jake isn't one to miss dinner time. He wouldn't miss any chance to eat. All of the kids looked at each other, trying to remember when was the last time they saw their dad. And then, tuk thumped her tail happily.

“Daddy said he went to see the uncle norm and the others. Said they wanted to show him something” tuk happily provides the information. While it is not unusual Jake would go to visit the humans, what is unusual is that he stays there all day. A couple of hours at most and he leaves. This made neytiri worry the more she thought about it.

“I can go get him” Lo’ak offers. He knows his mother isn't very comfortable being in the human posts. Neytiri nods but also adds, “neteyam will join you”. She knows well he will get distracted and have not only jake but now lo’ak staying longer than they should.

After dinner, the brothers went off to get their father. However, once they stepped inside…it took everything for the boys to not scream their heads off.

Present time.

Jake sat in silence. Mostly still trying to process what happened a couple hours ago, still processing his literal new [or old] perspective, and still processing just how pissed his tall wife is. He is human. Back to who he was before. And to make it worse.

He is back in the wheelchair.

Back to having his useless legs.

Back to being weak.

And he hates it.

The screeches of neytiri became dull in his mind. The more he thinks about it, the more it daunts on jake. Will it be forever? Is this the new reality? After achieving so much, only to go backwards?

“Fix him! I do not care how you do it! Fix him now!” Neytiri continues to demand norm. She doesn't care what methods, she wants her Jake back to how he was. A na’vi.

“W-we don't know! We are not sure how to fix it. This could take time” Norm tries to reason with the angry wife but she just shakes her head in frustration. “FIX HIM!!” was all she could say.

“Neytiri”

She heard Jake's voice.

Turning to see him, she can't help but feel her heart tug. There he was, just like how she saw him back in the deep forest. Different, yet the same. The man she fell in love with. And now here he is again. Back to being human.

“Ma’jake…” she whispers. Slowly going to him, she bends to be at his level. Jake offers his hand and she takes it to her cheek. Feeling his warmth. Feeling a few tears escape, she begins to cry. “How could they do this to you?! Why?!” she questions. Humans are creatures she could never fully understand, no matter how well she thinks she knows.

“I volunteered to help them. They didn't know I would turn out like this. Its not their fault” Jake answers, trying to level a reason with his love. But her tears didnt stop falling. And he hates this. Hates to see netyiri cry. So doing his best to comfort her, he wraps his arms around her neck and hugs her as best as he could. Joining in on the hug were their sons.

“You foolish skxawng! Stupid! Idiotic!” Neytiri shouted light hearted insults at her husband, and Jake takes it all in, secretly agreeing with her. “I know, I know baby, I know I am” he repeats. He really did fucked up.

After a couple of minutes, they let go of each other, but neytiri didn't leave Jake's side. Lo’ak turns to norm to ask, “is there a way to turn him back? He isn't going to be like this forever….right?’.

Norm took a deep breath and said, “the machine we built is to reverse and fix the main source of the problem. When Jake got in…the machine” point to Jake, “fixed him”. The sully family was slightly confused. “Fixed me? How?“ Jake asked. Rubbing the back of his neck, Max stepped forward to provide more information. “What we built is to reverse a source of a problem. Our best guess is the machine found a problem in you. Your na’vi blood. The machine must has seen it as a problem and using your human DNA to reverse it. Thus…you are fixed. And we cant say if we can turn you back into na’vi…”.

Dread was what everyone felt. Scared that this would be the new reality. Scare that jake won't be with his family every day. Won't continue to be olo’eyktan or anything. Dread and fear is the collective emotions.

“How about we sleep on this? A lot has happened and sleep would be best to calm ourselves. Sleep, a bit of coffee and think what our next movie is” Jake suggests. Everyone almost agrees. His family however, not really. “I will stay with you” Neytiri says, no hesitation. But Jake shook his head, placing his hands over her larger ones. “I'm sorry baby, but I need you to go back home. You and our boys. Kiri and tuk are currently alone and they need their parents. I obviously can't…but tomorrow, bring them so they can know what's going on. This won't be forever I promise”.

Neytiri hisses in frustration. He is right, neytiri left kiri to care for tuk while she came to the lab. Never has she wished this was all a bad dream. A nightmare that she can wake up from. But this is real. And she hates it.

“Fine…but they have to fix you…I want you back” Neytiri whispers. Holding Jake's hand tightly, observing his pale skin. He feels different. It's not the same hand she loves to hold. It is not the same warmth she leans into for comfort. It's all wrong. Jake isn't-

“Mom”

Neytiri blinks a few times, looking over at neteyam, his hand on her shoulder. “Let's go home, dad is right. We will come back tomorrow. We can bring kiri and tuk like he said”. Sighing, netyiri finally lets go but not without one last look at jake. Seeing his human form made her feel something. Something unpleasant.

“Dad…damn it's weird…” Lo’ak says, still trying to get the whole thing wrapped in his mind. Jake could help but chuckle a bit, “it's ok son, I will see you tomorrow”. Not saying much, lo’ak goes with his mother, neteyam also looks one last time before joining them.

The door shuts behind them, leaving Jake alone to his thoughts.

“So ummmm….you guys still have my old room?”

“Spider, can you for 5 minutes stop staring at me?” Jake asks, slightly annoyed. Spider on the other hand was staring at him as if he couldn't believe what was in front of him. Slowly spider was using his index finger to slowly poke jake. Looking at it, Jake gently smacked his hand away. “Stop it” Jake warned.

Spider backed away a bit, huffing a bit, “sorry sir it's just….so weird! You are small and pink and well…human”. Jake couldn't blame the boy. He grew up seeing Jake full na’vi. But doesnt mean it didn't hurt Jake a bit. His pride, he tries to keep humble, but little by little his pride crumbles.

“Get used to it, come on. Lets see what the others are doing” Jake says as both of them head off to the main room.

“I thought they were kidding…” Kiri says as she stands in front of her dad. Tuk beside her, eyes wide and in shock. Same reaction as their mother. Jake raises his arms, grinning in a rather floppy way, “I wish baby girl” he said. Hearing his voice only confirmed it more. Tuk releases her grip on Kiri's hand and walks over to her dad. Carefully analyzing his human features.

“Is it really you daddy…?” tuk asks, excited yet afraid to hear his answer. “It is me tuktuk, surprised?” Jake responds, giving his signature grin. Smiling happily, she hugs him tightly. It's so weird to her, she is the baby but she is bigger than her dad. Letting go, she sees his wheelchair, bending down, she traces the metal wheels.

“Why are you in a chair?” She asks while her giggles escape. She looks up to see jake give a sad smile.

“Well baby girl, my legs cant move. I cant walk or do anything, '' he tells truthfully. Tuk’s smile faded a bit, “does that mean you cant run..?”. Jake nods.

A few seconds of silence passed before she went behind him and grabs the handles, “can I at least push you?” she asks excitedly, her tail swaying in a playful manner. Jake chuckles, “try not to run so fast-WOA!!”. Tuk was off doing just that, running fast making cool drifts with the wheelchair.

“Weeeeeeee~!!”

10 minutes later

“Sorry…” Tuk apologizes while holding her tail and head low.

She just crashed into one of the computers.

Norm doing his best to not show his internal scream, he does his best to comfort her. But Jake goes over, grabbing tuk’s hand, “it's ok baby girl, but try to be extra careful. It's not easy to maintain all of this technology, come on, let's go with everyone else”. Tuk feeling better, this time she carefully takes Jake to where the other kids are

“And why are you not with your mate? Especially in his time of need?” Mo’at asks as she mixes herbs to make more healing substance. Neytiri was helping her, but refused to make eye contact. Mo’at was told of what happened, and had to see for herself. And while it certainly was a shock, she was quick to tell the people that their olo’eyktan had to travel for a bit. But she doesn't know how long the people will believe that.

“The children go to support their father but here you are supporting me when it is not needed” she continues. Putting down the roller, neytiri huffs, feeling annoyed herself. “I went to the spirit tree…” was all she could say. But mo’at gave her a look, “Eywa cant answer all of our problems, as she cant help jake sully this time” she says.

“This is a problem only the humans can fix”

But even then, neyiri continues to assist. Thinking about her mate, but doing nothing to see him. The humans have to fix him, they must.

The sully kids were playing Jake's old vlogs as he was cringing from the inside. Was that how he really behaved back then? And speaking highly of Quaritch? How badly he wanted to go back in time and smack the shit out of himself.

“Wait, but you look exactly the same as in the videos, shouldn't you be looking about your current age?” Kiri asks, comparing her father to himself of the past. But Jake could only shrug, “I am not sure kiddo. But I consider it lucky I haven't lost my good looks”. Kiri rolls her eyes at that self praise.

Yet, as the kids watch, he couldn't help but wonder about neytiri, she hasn't come even though she said she would. He suspects there is something going on with neytiri but he can't point out what exactly. But jake hopes to see her soon. He can use all the support he can get.

Norm isnt much help since “they are still figuring it out”. Jake hates this, he hates seeing his human hands. Hates to see himself human. The desire to be na’vi again grows every second.

“Has mom said anything about coming?” Jake asks neteyam, the oldest slight shrugs. “I asked mom but she didn't say much, just that she will be helping grandma. That's about it” neteyam answers. Sighing inwardly, perhaps she too is still processing the truth. That is fine, giving her space can be good.

But as days passed, Jake was struggling. He was so used to doing certain things, he has forgotten his human habits. Often had to be reminded to wear more clothes, forgetting he didn't had much hair from the start. Technology around him makes him a bit sick, unable to stare at screens for a long time. Not like how he used to. Sounds from the computers annoyed him.

And dont get him started on food. There is only so much pandora food that is safe for humans. Jake missed eating certain things that the humans find weird or gross.

And most of all, being reminded of how weak he is. Having his useless legs back is forever mocking him. How he isn't strong as he was in na’vi. And he hates himself because of it.

Jake is constantly reminded of how dull and empty his human life was. And how full and nurturing his na’vi life is. He needed to get back to being na’vi soon. As if each day, a piece of his mind is slowly losing sanity. Jake is a patient man, but when you are used to a certain life, only to refrain to how you started. It takes a toll.

1 month.

It took neytiri one month to come see him. And Jake felt relieved to see her. To feel her hands and touch her beautiful face. “I missed you” he says with great relief. Neytiri gives him a small smile as she examines his hands again.

“They still haven't fixed you” was all she said.

“You talk as if I am broken” Jake slightly jokes, chuckling to himself. But neytiri wasn't smiling. Taking a more serious look, he leans a bit closer, “neytiri…do you think I am broken?”. He needed to know, from revealing to himself, that is all she ever said, fix. As though there is something wrong with him.

“You are human…” she whispers. But Jake heard her loud and clear.

Her eyes were unable to meet his. Her hands are there, but her mind is distant. “Is that bad?” he asks. A bad feeling starts to grow, gripping her hands more, Jake tries to make eye contact but neytiri looks away.

“Baby please look at me….do I look broken to you?” Jake pleads. But nothing came of her mouth. Slowly, Neytiri pulls her hands back and gets up, “I have to go”. She leaves, almost as though she wants to run.

“NEYTIRI!” Jake calls out, his voice cracking. But she was gone.

Tuk was crying, she twisted her ankle while running and was swelling bad, Mo’at was quick to treat her, but tears wouldn't stop. Everyone tried to soothe her, but nothing was of use. From neteyam hugging her, to lo’ak making a fool of himself on purpose, nothing worked. And neytiri was getting more anxious that she couldn't calm her baby.

“Please tuktuk, ssshhhh it's going to be ok. I know it hurts, would you like your favorite supper?” Neytiri asks, holding tuk and gently rocking her back and forth.

“No! “ tuk cries out. Her wails loud and heart breaking. Honestly they really tried everything. But what could work?

“Tuk, it doesn't hurt, does it? Why are you really crying?” Kiri asks gently, already seeing through her sister's facade. Tuk shook her head, wiping her tears and taking deep, quick breathes.

“Nononono!” was all tuk could say. The more she cries, the more worried Neytiri gets. But before anyone else can say anything, tuk confesses.

“I want daddy!!” and she cries some more.

Her words broke everyone's hearts. For the past month, everyone tried to continue their lives but it was so difficult without Jake around. Neteyam missed flying with his dad. Lo’ak strangely missed being scolded by him. Kiri missed their late night talks. And neytiri.

Neytiri misses her mate more than she could ever express. But she knows, Neytiri knows she is a coward to not face him as he is.

A sky demon.

“I want daddy!! I want him home! I wanna play with him, I wanna be carried. I want daddy to sing me to sleep even though he is terrible! I miss daddy!”

How can they really shush when they all feel the same?

“Ssshhh, hey, its still day time, let's go see him. We can all go see dad together” Lo’ak suggests quickly. That made tuk silence a bit, small hiccups following, but she aggressively nodded. Liking the idea, the rest of the siblings were quick to get whatever they needed to go see their dad at the lab.

“Come on mom, let's go see him” Kiri says, excitedly grabbing her mothers hand. But neytiri stays put. “You go on ahead, take your time” she says. But kiri halted a second, tilting her head slightly. “Don't you want to see dad too? Surely you must miss him a lot more than us” she says, but her mother looks in a different direction, not able to make eye contact. Tugging her hand, kiri gently, yet forcefully, drags neytiri out of their home. Smiling brightly, to encourage her mother, “lets go, we can do something together, all of us as a family”.

Neytiri looks at her daughter, and decides to follow. But the ever growing dread rumbles in her stomach.

“There there baby girl, don't need to cry. Accidents happen and we learn from them” Jake effortlessly soothes tuk. The little girl sniffed and controlled her tears better. Despite being bigger, tuk was snuggled up against Jake's chest, hearing his heartbeat. This was what she wanted. To be close with her dad again. And being so touch starved, she clinged on to him the most.

“See, all better huh? Come on, let me see that smile. What is a mouse's favorite food?” Jake asks. Tuk gasped happily, she knows this one!

“Cheese!” Tuk smiles happily, her tears and sadness washed away. Jake chuckles as holds her tighter. “That's right baby girl” Jake praises. Gently he rubs his forehead against hers, making tuk giggle in glee. His other children surround them, happy to see tuk calm and back to her happy self. Neytiri stood a bit distant, but calmed herself. Jake always knew how to calm their youngest baby.

“What are you coming home dad? We miss you. I miss you a lot” Tuk whines a bit. Jake couldn't help but frown a bit. “I am not sure when tuktuk. Until uncle norm can find a way, I am like this” Jake answers honestly. But that wasn't enough for tuk. Growling a bit, she huffs. Like a little hamster.

“Why can't you come home as you are? Spider can go wherever he wants. Why can't you do the same? There are a lot of masks” she asks stubbornly as she crosses her arms.

Spider, who was beside Kiri, couldn't help but feel sad for jake. The man is in a worse position than he ever was.

“True, but unlike spiders. I can't run, I can't even stand baby girl. My legs don't work like they used to” Jake answers with all the patience in the world. Tuk looks down at his legs, well what she can see since was wearing pants. Her ears pinned down, hating it more by the second.

“Can't Eywa fix this? Doesn't she always help like mom says?” Tuk asks more, a little hope rising. Kiri shakes her head and goes over, gently placing a hand over tuk’s shoulder.

“It doesn't work like that tuk. Our great mother doesn't just grant miracles like that. This is something that must be solved by uncle norm and the other scientists. They did this, so it is only right they find a solution themselves” kiri tells.

But it seems that no matter how much they explain, tuk will still remain stubborn about bringing Jake back to their home. She understands the complications, but would rather refuse to see it. Like daughter, like mother. As in a way, tuk reflects what neytiri is doing. Avoiding the real problem. So Jake does his best to hold tuk, whispering comforting words into her ear. Which can only work for so long.

At the same time, lo’ak turns and sees neytiri slowly, yet surly moving farther away. Confused at what she is doing, he goes over. “Mom? Don't you want to get close to dad?” he asks her in a low voice only for her to hear. But neytiri doesn't answer right away. Looking behind him and back at him, she answers in the same low voice. “I am fine, we are here for you and your siblings”.

Jake noticed the silent conversation happening between his son and wife. It still hurts him that neytiri left only to come back using their kids as an excuse. It seems like real talk is long overdue. Gently moving tuk at his side, he effortlessly climbs back on his wheelchair.

“Dad?” Neteyam calls out, curious what Jake will do. Smiling like nothing, Jake says, “Hey, why not bother the science guys? They have been playing pac-man all days. But dont break anything”. Giving full permission, they all smile and head off to bother the humans. Spider calls out to lo’ak to join them and he happily does.

Leaving Neytiri and Jake alone.

“Let's talk outside, yeah?”

The couple stood outside, as far as Jake's wheelchair allows to. He scratches the edges of the mask. He forgot what it felt like against his skin. It's itchy and uncomfortable. But he bares it. If it meant talking to his mate.

“Neytiri….baby please. Why won't you look at me?” he asks. Before him, neytiri’s back was facing him. Rubbing her arms to comfort herself.

“I'm sorry ma’jake…I can't” she confesses. Hesitant heavy in her tone.

“Can't…or won't?” he confronts. She flinches. And he noticed. Sighing, Jake rubs the back of his neck. The straps itching his upper neck. “I know it's hard. Trust me I know. I had to learn everything again. That i'm…back to this. A useless being” .

And neytiri couldn't bring herself to defend her mate. As twisted as it may sound. He was right. Jake couldn't do anything without his avatar. He could run, fight, or run a village. He couldn't do anything before the war.

“But I know that being crippled is the least of your worries. The kids know, I know why you won't look at me. It's because I am back to being what you hate”.

Don't say it. Please don't.

“I am…”

Stop it.

“A sky demon”.

“NO!”

All that had wings, flew away. Startled by the sudden shriek of protest.

What stance in silence is netyiri fully facing jake. Her fists clenching, heavy breathing, and eyes wide with inner thoughts that scramble to make sense.

“Back at the secret base. When I passed out from the pandora air. You crawled in and saved me. Placed the mask over my face to let me breathe. You held me in your arms. You saw me. You SAW ME. A human. Looking past my avatar body. Accepting the truth, you feel for a human”.

The more Jake spoke, the more his voice cracked. The more tears wanted to escape.

“Why can't you now…?”

Yes. Why couldn't she?

“I don't know” was all she could say. No ounce of anger, resentment. Nothing.

Nodding, but not fully understanding her words. Jake can only repeat it. “You don't know….so who else? Eywa cant help me with this. She helped me greatly before. And even I know, great miracles cant happen twice to the same person. It must be earned. Fucking shit now I dont know what Im saying”.

More silence fell between the two. Unsure of what to say.

“Maybe it was a stupid mistake on my part. Letting myself be the guinea pig for the science guys experiment. I didn't know this would happen to me. I don't know myself” Jake says. Feeling more frustrated by the second.

But again, he only received silence from neytiri.

“Neytiri please, talk to me. I can't be the only one spewing out words” he begs.

“If seeing me like this disgusts you-”

“It does”.

Now it was Jake's turn to be silent.

“Your body disgusts me. I cannot see you as human. To me, you have always been na’vi. An Omatikaya. To see you as human, I am reminded of the past. What they did to our home. To my family. I refuse to look at you for the sake of protecting my memories of you. I will not look back at the past only to see you as human. I will, always will, remember and see you as na’vi. Nothing else”.

There, she said it. All that had to be said.

“And now…I see you as one of them”

2 more months have passed and there was no sign of things getting better. The village has grown wary of their absent olo’eyktan that Tsarem had taken the title as temporary. But even still, it can only keep the peace for so long.

A peace that is fragile. So fragile, it can break at any moment, and chaos will ensue.

A chaos the sully family is facing every day. Without Jake around, it has become harder to contain their four wild children. Lo’ak has taken more reckless adventures, tuk has been throwing more temper tantrums, kiri has shut down her emotions, and neteyam has become lost in what to do. And each problem took a toll on neytiri. The only time any of them behave is when they visit Jake back at the lab.

The lab has become more of a home for the kids than back at their marui.

Yet still, neytiri cant bring herself to go there often like her children. After her last conversation with Jake, confessing how she felt. Never again did she go back to see him. Still playing back the memories of when he was na’vi. Wanting to preserve that form of jake. Pretending he was around, doing his duties to the clan, pretending he was there beside her as she sleeps.

Pretending everything is ok.

And it is getting harder to play pretend.

Until the day came, Jake snapped.

“Bro, do you think they will ever find a way to get dad back to being na’vi? Lo’ak asks. As each day passes, he notices the distance between his parents grow larger. His family is slowly being ripped apart. Lo’ak wishes for his dad to go back to being na’vi. With him back, everything will be ok again.

It has too.

“I'm not sure baby bro. But they are smart, Perhaps it takes longer to find a cure. It's not forever, I can feel it” neteyam encourages, But their little chit chat was cut short. They heard alarms going off at the lab. Running quickly, they find their father.

On the ground.

Crawling.

And without a mask.

They were quick to be at his side, Jake was shaking uncontrollably, gasping heavily. Making inconceivable sounds. It was a scary sight.

“Come on! We have to get him inside!” Neteyam picked up his dad by the legs, lo’ak by the arms. But as soon as they picked him up, spider ran outside with a spare mask. “Here here here!” spider quickly placed the mask on Jake, strapping it around his head really well. Guiding the brothers to put their dad down, they all sat in silence, anxiously waiting for Jake to respond.

And what felt like forever, Jake gasped into the mask, taking deep slow breathes. The boys released huge breaths as well. Not realizing they were holding it in.

“Dad, are you crazy!? What were you thinking?!” lo’ak was the first to yell at his father. Jake didn't mind. Letting it slide for now.

“Thinking about your mom. If she isnt coming to me. Then god damn it I am going to her whether she likes it or not”.

At the sully marui, kiri and tuk were playing in silence as neytiri laid in her hammock, swaying absent minded. Kiri noticed how dull thing became. Their father brought life, structure, and happiness in their family. Kiri desperately wishes he would come back soon.

“DAD'S BACK!!”

Damn that was soon.

She and tuk looked down to see neteyam carrying their father in his back. In a hurry, the sisters helped bringing their dad inside of their home. Excited and happy he returned. Even in his small weak form .

Jake sat in the middle of their home, all of his kids talking at the same time. Tuk chanting “daddy's home” over and over. Lo’ak saying how stupid move it was to risk his life like that. Neteyam and Kiri being worried over nothing. He missed this. But the one thing he missed more. Was his wife.

And neytiri, upon hearing the commotion, stood to see Jake there. In their home, smiling as their children talk to him. Their eyes meet. A wordless exchange was made. But quickly, and again, she looks away.

“I'm not going anywhere, baby. I'm here to stay. Where I belong. Human or not” Jake states. He said it loud and clear, enough for her ears to point in his direction. Tuk jumps excitedly as she goes over and grabs her mothers hand,“Isn't that good mama? He can stay with us forever and ever!”.

No, it's not good.

“Dad is human obviously some stuff will change but he is back mom. We don't have to move back and forth, and we can play games like always, "Neteyam says, with new hope and happiness rising in his heart. All of the kids were feeling that. They can vision it.

“No, he has to go back. Its not safe for him here. Nowhere is safe out here for him” Neytiri denies. Many begin to complain but they don't know what she sees. So many things can go wrong. Jake cant even climb up without help. It takes only one wrong move and he falls to his death. Or his oxygen tank runs out and no one is near to get him an extra. Death is easier to reach him now, easier to take him away entirely. And only then, would neytiri reach a new low in her life.

“Then I will have to adapt, dont I? I won't be some damsel in distress”

Neytiri internally groans. But she is grateful her husband still has his stupid sense of humor.

And things did shifted.

Now Jake spends more time in the marui and neytiri spends more time at the lab. What is she doing over there? Secretly threatening the poor humans to hurry up and solve Jake's human problem. Her threats gotten so out of hand that Mo'at had to intervene.

“Daring to send thanators after them? Have you lost your mind my daughter?” Mo’at asks neytiri in a stern but calm voice. Despite what expression the tsahik has, she is clearly pissed. Like a child, Neytiri sits still, stubborn and mad that she was caught. Mo’at sits across from her, examining her daughter's facial features, reading her like an open script.

“Those humans are taking too long. They started their unwanted mess, so they should fix it” neytiri says. And mo’at can only sigh in annoyance. “Fix, fix fix, that is all you have said since the beginning. What is there to fix? Their machine?” Mo’at asks. Shaking her head, neytiri provides more.

“Not that….Jake….he is not na’vi. He is not MINE anymore”

This confuses her mother, neytiri goes on.

“I have looked into the Eywa, seeking, hoping for an answer. I wanted her to help him as she did before. Yet Jake was right, nothing is done twice. I fear many things sa’nu. I fear losing my family. My mind. My mate….I cannot make tayshlu anymore with him. Yes, I can hold him close to me, but every time I see him. All I see is those disgusting, vile, sky demons. I feel utter disgust. The need to hurt him. To dig into his chest and bring out his na’vi body. Destroy his human shell, burn it, rip it apart. I want him back to how he was. One of us. I fear my inner feelings will soon rise, and that I make a grave mistake that can never be taken back”.

Hearing all that. It concerned Mo'at greatly. Those are dark thoughts that must be vanquished, if it grows more, she fears it will blind neytiri greatly.

“What is preventing you child?” she whispers.

Neytiri took a few seconds of silence, a small smile crept up to her lips. “His eyes…Jake's eyes are what prevents me from losing it all”.

She goes on.

“Jake’s eyes are the color of the sky. Very blue, and very beautiful. When I look into his eyes, I can only look for so long. They hold purity. If I stare into them for a long time, I might taint them with all the horrors I have seen. His blue eyes are pure sa’nok. Pure and good, but his body is not”.

Letting her words ponder in Neytiri's mind, she left. But mo’at prays to Eywa that her daughter won't make a foolish choice.

Entering her home, there was warm light, the smell of something delicious cooking, and laughter. Opening the flaps, she sees Jake telling a story as their children all listen carefully.

“And then, the lorax said…”

Just hearing that word, Neytiri knows exactly what story Jake is telling. Their children might be too old to hear it, but the Lorax story was one of her personal favorites. She hasn't heard it in a long time.

Neteyam looks up and notices her, waving his arm and everyone turns to see her. All warm smiles, welcoming her in. Jake looks at her, his patient and stupid smile, his blue eyes staring deep into her eyes. “Come in baby, I was just getting into the good part of the story” he says, kiri serving a bowl of their dinner to her, neytiri accepts as she makes herself comfortable on the opposite side of jake.

“What story are you telling?” she asks, and in unison, her family happily responds, “the lorax!”. Smiling slightly, she listens. Letting jake continue his story, his voice soft and calm. His way of talking never changed. Always so calm and peaceful. If she closes her eyes, it will be just like how it was.

Some time has passed, and neytiri was able to stare at Jake longer and more comfortably. Talking more like how they used to, while she is still hesitant to touch him for long periods of time, she is forever grateful how patient Jake is with her. But it seems her children haven't changed much, they are still themselves. Yet just as foolish as their father.

“Tonight, the children will stay with mo’at” neytiri says one morning, Jake pauses what he was doing and looks over at his mate. “Oh? May I know why?” he asks curiously, seeing how neytiri’s tail was moving, he grins.

“I thought we could use a little break from them. And just be the two of us-”

“You want a date night”

“Yes”

A burst of laughter erupts in the home, Jake knows her too well. He can read her mind at this point. Looking over, he can see her beautiful smile returning. Bright and lovely. Making his way over with big leaps with his hands, neytiri gets closer. Her eyes staring into his. “You could have said that from the start,” he says. Neytiri places her forehead against his. “Not fun” she says.

Looking into Neytiri's eyes, he knows what she wants. Who is he to deny her.

Loosening the straps, he starts to take off the mask. Neytiri sees this and starts to panic, “ma’jake what are you doing? No, stop it!” She holds the mask.

“Come on baby, what's fun without some risks?” Jake asks playfully.. Taking it off completely, he brings neytiri’s face close to his and kisses her with all the love and passion he had for her. Neytiri wanted to pull away, but felt his lips on her. She caved in, her hand on the back of his head, deepening the kiss.

What felt like forever, they pulled away. Jake was quick to put the mask on, smirking. “See? I'm fine, but I don't mind another one”.

Scoffing, she grins, “you skxawng”

“your skxawng”.

Night fell, the two mates held each other close. Neytiri sighed happily, she likes this. Likes holding jake in her arms, for once she can top him. Taking in his features more and more, she wanted to admire his good looks. His hair did grew out, and lofts to run her fingers through them. So soft and lovely. His arms strong and muscular, his confident smile ever so contagious.

“Even if the science guys cant fix me-”

“No, not fix. Cannot fix something that is not broken”

Jake looks up at her, surprised but a welcoming one. Brining himself closer into her arms, both let their love and peace lure them into sleep. Happily welcoming what becomes of their new normal.

Yet as they sleep, they didnt notice Jake’s tablet flashing a light. A message from norm.

Aaaaaaaaaaaand that is it for this one! NGL I had fun writing this one. Took me a bit but I am glad how it turned out. Until next time! See ya!

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