#and Reading's historic city center are all about four minutes away

[anthrofreshtodeath]

If you feel like writing two separate prompts or combining them. Thanks!

15 please come home and

28 accidental touches

Let's do 15! It's kind of long. I honestly have no idea what this is - but reserve the right to flesh it out into a full, sprawling story if I want to? Agh, anyway. Here we go! Thank you all for sticking with me as I put these out at a glacial pace.

___

Jane pats her pockets a couple of times before she locks her door. Front, back, breast. Her wallet’s there, her phone’s close to her chest, and she’s got her keys in her hand. Her badge rests deep in the inside of her black leather jacket, invisible but available. 

“Shit,” she curses, because her guide ID rests somewhere inside the apartment, probably on the counter. She’ll need that for work. She jiggles her key in the lock until the door opens, metal and heavy and groaning when she pushes against it. This place is old in the lead-pipes-from-the-sixties way, not the late-eighteen-hundreds way her condo in Boston had been. Sometimes, she thinks about her old place with regret, how she should have kept it instead of selling it in her hurricane hurry to get out of the city. For all the ancient shit she encounters every day on her current assignment, life feels stuck in a flip phone, video rental kind of vibe that she thought she’d left in the academy. In Boston, life had, for all its modern courtrooms and BRIC software and smartphone ubiquitousness, moved at a historical pace. 

Maybe it was the family.

Jane had roots in Boston since the early twentieth century; Rizzolis hadn’t been here in Napoli since 1910. There’s nothing that the modernity here offers her in terms of mirrors - she cannot yet see herself, even though everyone around her looks like they could be a long lost cousin. And perhaps they are, but she knows no one. 

Except her coworkers, perhaps, at both of her jobs. Her narc one and her cover one. 

With a whoosh she’s back in, and she walks past the cluttered kitchen - no ID on the counter - to the small dining room table. Francesca Ricci, guida turistica di Pompeii, it reads. She hangs it around her neck and zips her jacket up over it. The gray sky hangs heavy over Naples’ city center, and so she’ll need to keep it dry. She also foregoes her motorcycle helmet next to her ID - she’ll ride the metro into work today because she doesn’t want to get pelted by rain on her bike if she takes the autostrada. 

So, with her backpack still on her shoulder, she exits a second time, and trots down the stairs to the street. She weaves through her fellow commuters on their own way, and she thinks about popping into the bar just a few storefronts from the station to get a coffee. But then, she’ll have to sit, have to look at the paper just to feel right, and she doesn’t really have the time. Instead, she motors on her long legs to Piazza Garibaldi station and swipes her pass to get on the train. 

She sees some familiar faces, a man who always puts his headphones away before getting off one stop from now, a couple of students who always talk about the same professor in a rich blend of new Neapolitan, Italian, and thirst. 

The closest open seat happens to be right behind those two students, who smile cordially when Jane passes to park herself in the next row’s aisle seat. She slumps, and drops her backpack between her flat-heeled boots, stopping to stare down at them to give her mind some rest. She lets it wander: the stickysweetness of their infatuation settles in her chest, webbing between her lungs, not quite reaching her heart where it’d cause an overdose. Here, four thousand miles away from home, she remembers the fullness of love without the sting of it. 

Luckily, she never has to listen for long, even though she yearns for simpler times when she does - in the best of ways. In that way that makes a heart feel light and easy, like things could go back to that simplicity. In a few minutes, the train signals its stop at Pompeii Scavi, her stop.

She picks up her bag and off she goes, past the exit and into the ticket sales area for the heritage site itself. “Ciao, Roberta,” she says when she waves to the elderly woman manning the closest ticket window. She doesn’t stop, but she smirks and scrunches two fingers in a wave when Roberta calls out a huffy greeting after her, saying something about always in a damn hurry. 

Roberta reminds Jane of her grandmother because they both speak the same kind of stuck-in-time Neapolitan when Jane’s around. Even though Roberta knows Jane only as Francesca, a name chosen for her brother. Jane goes right up to Porta Marina and pulls her sign from her backpack, because her first group is in five minutes and she is, above all things, prompt. 

She is also undercover, so she likes to arrive before them, watch them come in and cluster. She’s been installed because she can be inconspicuous - she ushers rich, whiny merigan’ (her grandmother’s word) through one of the richest historical sites in the world, all while keeping an eye on the Camorra men who’ve been muscled in as guards so that their bosses can keep the drug trade strong and gobble up the restoration contracts that Pompeii requires. And she looks like every other Italian doing it, except the polizia di stato like that she speaks native English and knows the grounds like the back of her hand.

That had only taken copious amounts of adderall and a few sleepless weeks to learn.

Her Italian is pretty good, too. The Neapolitan’s coming back from her childhood, and the adderall also helped the acquisition of standard Italian. She really had jumped in feet first, intent on making a life in a place her family had made life for centuries before they decided America was the best place to be. Sometimes, when she’s wandering across Pompeii’s main drag, or whispering in la Villa dei Misteri, she wonders what they’d think of her: giving it all up, running back to what they left behind so that she can nurse her ailing heart. So that she can hide.

The first of her group of ten point to her sign, however, breaking her out of her reverie, so she waves them in. “Hey hey! You guys with All Star tours?” she asks, though she knows they are. They nod, and she puts her sunglasses on. It's overcast, rainy Italy and all that, but she can’t really do a tour without them. She knows the guys she’s tailing have no idea who she is - that’s the beauty of being a foreigner - but she still refuses to show them the whites of her eyes. A habit from her DCU detective days. “Perfect. Let’s all uh, gather over here, and we’ll wait for the rest of you before going in. So - tell me: where is everyone from?”

___

Maura has paid for the private tour, because she knows the professor arranging it and, well, she has the money. It’s been literal decades since she’s been in Pompeii, the last time for her sixteenth birthday - one last hurrah before her last year of boarding school, before she headed to BCU for undergrad. She hadn’t been very sober during that visit, and of course she regrets it, not only for the lack of memories but for the shame that she’d let girls she barely knew and didn’t like pressure her into it. 

She doesn’t feel much better this morning, just a couple months away from birthday thirty-six and jet-lagged into melancholy.

Well, perhaps that is a non-truth. Not a lie, per se, but the melancholy was firmly in place when she boarded an overnight flight at Logan, one that spit her out in Naples. A car service, courtesy of her mother - quite European in her no-questions-asked approach to the situation - delivered her here, to Porta Marina. To Charles, Professor Cavalieri’s French grad student, whose eyes sparkle when they see her. She looks put together, of course, as she always does, even though she feels a little underdressed. Jeans, riding boots, a light sweater and a scarf over its neckline. April south of Rome can still be a little chilly, so she’s guarded against the weather, but not against the feeling that everyone around her disparages her for not wearing head to toe designer. Charles only notices the slope of her curves in those jeans, the elegance of her features. 

He stammers. “Uh, uh, D-doctor Isles, yes?” he manages when she approaches. She moves right past the rest of the tourists, in a line that will probably take an hour to get through, and smiles at him. 

“Yes, and you must be Charles. The professor has told me so much about you,” she says, and they kiss twice on each cheek, clasping one another’s biceps loosely. “About your expertise regarding the ruins here.”

“He has told me about you, too,” Charles says. When he pulls away, he’s collected himself, returning some sharpness to his eyes. His French accent is actually very slight. “He was shocked that you are here. He had heard that Doctor Faulkner was in the States, with intentions of finding you.”

Cavalieri knows Maura through Ian, who knew him through his undergraduate work in Switzerland. Maura did not know, until this conversation, that they still talk. She goes pale, she can see it in her hands when she brings them up to cross her arms. Funnily enough, they haven’t spoken as of three weeks ago. Or, if they had, Ian hadn’t disclosed… well. “He was. He isn’t any longer. And neither am I,” she recovers. They both chuckle. One drop falls from the Southern Italian sky onto her nose. “Are we ready to begin?”

“Of course,” Charles says. “Let’s make our way to the forum.”

“That sounds perfect. And Charles? There may be a time or two that I wander off on my own. Don’t worry about me. I’ll find you. Or…” she pauses to pull her phone from her bag, “I will text you.”

__

“And if you see those indentations in the stone, that’s where the wooden planks would have gone, and this,” Jane toes the grass and weed-covered stone underneath her and her long arms reach up close to those indentations, “bottom area is where those gladiators we talked about would have… shit. Slept. Would have slept. Above is where the… uh, give me a minute, would you? Come, come here. Come inside. You all can touch.”

Maura Isles, spector behind this entire enterprise, is standing in the ancient street, heels over the rivets made by ancient carts pulled by horses, that had delivered life itself to the city. By the thunder of Jane’s heart, rattling in her chest, the carts still run. The Camorra man Jane’d been watching for the entire tour, spending more time on his phone than guarding the ruins, has slipped away, and she cannot bring herself to care.

Maura is here. 

“Hey!” She shouts, in case the mirage, the ghost, shimmers away into the late-spring fog. “Maura!”

But, Maura doesn’t move. Maura stays put, and Maura smiles. “Hi,” she says softly, an awful lot like a real person. A real, American, Bostonian, medical examiner person. Jane shakes her head. “My god, you look…”

Jane narrows her very sleep-deprived eyes. She runs a hand through barely brushed black hair. “Like shit?” she snarks.

“I was going to say tired,” Maura replies quietly. Her hands clasp in front of her hips, and she laces her fingers together to give them something to do. “You look so tired. And like you’re not eating. Are you eating?”

Jane scoffs. “That isn’t any of your business. I’m working. You know what? I’m working. Which, by the way… how did you find me? How on Earth did you know I was here?”

“I… he’s gone,” Maura says. Jane leans against one of the old stone walls around them and crosses her arms in defense. She is long and she is gaunt. She is haggard and very angry. “He left almost a month ago. I’ve been trying to find you since then.”

“That’s…” Jane summons all the venom, all the ire she can. She grits her teeth for the effect. “None of that is my business. You made that abundantly clear.”

“I never said that,” Maura counters. The way Jane wafts toward her, the scent of despair and righteousness, Maura might topple. So her hand goes to that same wall near Jane’s shoulder. “I said I needed time. And you gave it to me in spades. Hell, you gave me time and an entire continent. I am lucky that my mother has contacts.”

“You sicced your mom on me?” Jane, incredulous, drops her hands so that they ball into fists at her sides. 

“I was willing to do anything to find you. You’ve been gone for six months. I’ve spent almost all of those figuring out where you went.”

“Allora, già sai,” Jane shouts, loud enough for several tourists to turn their way. She yanks her tone down to a poisonous whisper. “Now what do you want.”

She doesn’t ask, she demands. And it pains her because Maura is on the verge of tears, Maura is telling her that Ian is gone, and Maura has come all this way to see her, but a heart broken is a heart reluctant to open. 

“I want you to come home. Please, come home,” pleads Maura. The watery begging pulls Jane forward, but so do Maura’s hands on the lapels of her jacket. Surprisingly strong, and intoxicatingly warm. “I… I need you. I thought I needed him and the whole time he was there, I… was so empty for you,” Maura confesses. “I needed filling up and you were nowhere to be found.”

“Well you found me,” Jane is deflated. Jane closes her eyes as her last defense against the onslaught.

“So, will you come with me? Come back home? My mother would even lend us her plane,” Maura senses an in, a lowering of the defenses, so she takes it.

“No,” Jane says. When she opens her eyes again, they are resolute. But then, there is a smile. “I’m not goin’ anywhere. And, if you really want me to come around? For there to even be a chance of moving forward? You’re not goin’ anywhere, either. For a while.”

Maura cocks her head, confused, but oh is she smart. “Europe?” she asks. Jane frowns. “Italy.”

“Napoli,” Jane corrects. 

“For how long?” Maura asks, and she hasn’t said no.

“For however long it takes,” Jane says. “And you learn to work with me again before you, before we…”

“Love again,” Maura supplies, giddy off of chance.

“Ah! Ah,” Jane holds a finger up in the air. “That’s a forbidden word,” she nods in the direction of Charles, who has stayed respectfully close, but also respectfully behind. “He with you?”

“My tour guide, yes,” Maura tells her.

“Ok then. You know what’s not a forbidden word? Surveillance. Which is what I’m doin’ here. So, tell him to fuck off, join my group, and I’ll fill you in on the train.”

“The train? Like… the metro…?” Maura scrunches her nose.

“The train. You’re doin’ Napoli. With me, remember? That means public transit,” Jane says. She waits for about a dozen more people to pass, hand on Maura’s back, and then guides them over together. “Don’t worry, I’m sure your mother can get you a car once you settle in.”

Maura laughs. “Yes, Detective,” she responds.

“We’re gonna have to work on that accent,” Jane jokes. “But somethin’ tells me you’ll be a quick study. OK, Americani! Let’s keep it moving! Let me show all where the gladiators duked it out, left everything on the field, so to speak. And boy, do I mean everything.”

Something told the both of them, when they returned to Jane’s group, that they would find themselves on such a field not very long from now. Whether opposite each other or with each other, only time would tell.

[sandhu-59]

Hilton's president and chief executive officer is Christopher J. Nassetta. In 2007, he became a part of the team.

Prior to this, Mr. Nassetta served as Host Hotels & Resorts, Inc.'s president and chief executive officer, a role he had since 2000. Executive Vice President when he first joined Host Hotels & Resorts, Inc. in 1995, he was named Chief Operating Officer in 1997.

Venue

A EVENT SPACE IN TORONTO

Private Parties

Community Events & Fundraising

Religion Events & Celebrations

Corporate Events

Anniversary Parties

Sweet Sixteens

Birthday Parties

Weddings and Private Bashes

Meeting type

Meetings and conferences at Hilton

Challenges

The Hilton Hotel in Reading creates a cozy environment that makes guests feel as though they are living in their own homes. The famous shopping center, the Thames River, and Reading's historic city center are all about four minutes away.

[basicjetsetter]

The Fall of Deus

♡ Pairing: Mob!Peter Parker x BlackFemale!Reader

♧ Setting: The Terrace Room in The Plaza Hotel, New York

♤ Warnings: Heavy Suspense, Language, Adult Themes, Violence, Gambling, Drinking

♢ Word Count: 6.5k

☆ A/N: No joke, this took me about two years to conceptualize. Two freaking years. But I can 100% say it was worth it to write every word. This is by far one of my most creative works and I love that I get to finally share it with you all. Please hit like if you enjoy it, leave me a lil’ comment and a reblog if you love it. Happy reading!

You couldn’t help but notice and admire how pretty the sky appeared when it was tinged in the auroral haze of an autumn morning and backdropped by the twinkling glass panes of New York’s notorious skyscrapers. Though autumn’s end isn’t for a couple of weeks, the lukewarm season allowed Manhattan a preview of winter’s frigid air. The city's constant roar hummed down to a distant lullaby as you walked up the steps and in through the doors of the Metropolitan Detention Center.

It’s an impressively modern building, one you’ve become intimately familiar with in the past couple of years. Everything inside screams order, from the plain white, bleach-scented linoleum floors to the rows upon rows of caged boxes containing a range of one-time offenders, serial criminals, and constant jailbirds. The first time you ever entered the establishment, it struck you just how much the atmosphere felt devoid and depraved, almost as if hope and happiness got stopped, frisked, and turned away at the door. You never liked staying more than necessary.

None of the four guards stationed along the main lobby walls paid you any attention as you marched up to the reception desk. Their inattention didn’t spawn out of contempt but out of fear. They knew who you were here for.

The receptionist, on the other hand, wouldn’t care if the Queen of England herself hop-scotched through the front entrance, bowed, and bestowed him the coveted Royal Crown on a jewel-encrusted platter.

He certainly never took an interest in your frequent visits. The first time you set foot into this building, a bright-eyed attorney anxious to speak with her first client, the oaf of a man merely grunted at your carefully constructed introductions and waved you off like a pesky fly. On a typical day, your exchange of words consisted of him curtly asking you to state your business while he half-listened to your response and stabbed at his keyboard with blunt fingers. Detaching his gaze from the monitor might have required exhaustion of his half-assed energy.

Today wasn’t unlike any other day. Phillips told you your client's location, even though you both knew the area by heart. Third floor. Cell Block E. Number 7. Always Number 7. Lucky Number 7.

Most of your ordinary clients got shipped to this facility and locked up with the rest of the inmates until you picked up their case. Unlike this particular client you planned on springing today, those other men lacked the say-so to determine their cell. None of them came close to his status. They didn’t have the power nor the money to hire a personal attorney, and none of their crimes could ever match those of the calculated, cunning man who controlled all New York's avenues and boulevards.

In the streets, he’s known as Deus. Depending on how close you are in his circle, he's either Parker or Pete. The name in the system is Peter Benjamin Parker. Your fiancé.

| Last Evening  |

“Stop fidgeting with your collar, Peter.”

“This fucking bowtie keeps… shit… it keeps choking me.” He growled out his frustration. “I’m going to fire that damn stylist.”

You threw him an exasperated glare as he ripped off the accessory. “Maybe if you hadn’t told him to pick any old bowtie, you wouldn’t be whining so much.”

“Remind me again why you're forcing me to wear this, anyway?” He paused for effect, placing his hand under his chin like Rodin’s The Thinker, and then snapped his fingers in dramatic realization. “Oh, right! Because Stark is a pretentious asshole, who thinks tuxedos are mandatory at all events thrown in his honor.”

Peter may hate the idea of wearing a formal tuxedo for the whole night, but you were going to enjoy every last minute of him in that attire, mainly because he resembles a model who stepped right off the page of a GQ cover. The low-lighting in this limousine certainly did its best to heighten your mood, highlighting the sharp angles of Peter’s clenched jaw. You’d have to remember to send Pepper a Thank You basket for planning the event as Black Tie.

“Can you at least pretend to get along with Tony tonight?” To see if his jaw could tighten any further, you coyly add, “He is the new Governor of New York, after all.”

Mission accomplished. Peter leaned his head back against the headrest and rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hands, the light that glinted off of his platinum Rolex creating a scattered array of lights against the black leather seats. You pried your eyes off the extension of his neck as he spoke. “Great,” he huffed. “That’s exactly what I need right now. A gloating Stark who’s now legally duty-bound to hound my ass. One more thing to think about.”

As the limo pulled up to a slow halt in front of the Plaza Hotel, you grabbed one of Peter’s hands and held it until his eyes met yours. You gave him a reassuring smile and said, “Everything’s going to be alright, baby.”

The driver opened the door before Peter could speak and held out his gloved hand for you. You’ve been to the Plaza Hotel on many occasions, mostly business, and yet the sight of the château-styled building at night, with its myriad of lit windows and its luxurious lobby never ceased to leave you breathless. The view effectually took your gaze away from Peter’s tux, but not for long. The moment he stepped out of the limo, bathed in the golden light of the building, you felt transfixed all over again.

Peter discreetly tipped the driver and then turned to face you, clearly not as impressed with the Plaza Hotel as you were. He placed his warm hands on the swells of your hips and pulled you in front of him. His eyes appraised you, from your stiletto heels to your tight-fitted, off the shoulder evening dress, traveling up to your chunky Senegalese twists elegantly laid over your shoulder. He let out a low whistle and said, “If looks could kill…”

You straightened his collar and opened up the top button of his gingham dress shirt for both your sakes, then swiftly leaned in and planted a chaste kiss on his lips. “You’re not too shabby yourself, Mr. Parker.”

He wolfishly grinned as you quickly detached yourself from his borderline caressing hold. You knew he’d want more than a short kiss, but you couldn’t afford to get sidetracked tonight.

“Behave,” you chided.

“And if I don’t, future Mrs. Parker?” he prodded, a huskiness in his tone that sent a delicious shiver through you. His steps slowly brought him closer and closer to where you stood, and you weren’t sure if you’d have the will power to move away again. One proper kiss wouldn’t hurt…

A disembodied voice groaned in your ear. “Book a room!”

Peter chuckled unabashedly. “Sorry, Ned.” Though he tried to appear unaffected, Peter made an effort to clear his throat and tugged at his collar. “You ready on your end?”

“Yeah. Mic’s clear. Computer’s up and running. I’m all set. Can’t say the same for you two.”

You glance accusingly at Peter, who waggled his eyebrows at you. “We’re ready. Sorry about that. You know how Peter gets when I wear twists.”

Ned verbally shuddered. “Don’t remind me. I still refuse to sit on my couch, by the way, even after washing it four times! You owe me a new couch, dude. For my trauma.”

Peter half-heartedly grinned at the ground and said, “Dude, if we pull this off, I’ll buy you a whole new furniture set.” The one half of his grin faded away, replaced with a grim line of determination and sobriety. “Where’s he at?”

A few clicks rang through your ear-piece, then Ned replied, “Not far. About twenty minutes away, on Queens Boulevard in Elmhurst. Might be a while before he reaches the Plaza, though. There’s a jam on the bridge.”

“Cool, thanks. Keep us updated.” Peter didn’t want you to catch his expression, but you didn’t need to directly see it to realize he’s in business mode, cold and calculated, little to no warmth or playfulness left in his brown eyes.

Copying your move, he took your hand and held it until you both stared at each other. Briefly, with your eyes locked in place, he searched for any sliver of doubt, giving you one last option to ditch and save face while he executes the plan solo. You did not doubt that he and Ned could somehow pull it off without so much as a hiccup. Odds always work in Peter’s favor. For the past three years that you’ve known him, he’s never lost a gamble. Tonight, though, the gamble must include you, a new piece to his complicated game—a variable. If anything were to head south, the last thing Peter would want is to implicate you.

You understood the risks: the potential loss of your career, your squeaky clean record, and possibly your life. You wouldn’t be here, with him of all people, if you didn’t trust the plan. So you didn’t sway, letting your eyes confirm where you stood on the matter. I’m sticking with you. This exchange passed in absolute silence, ending with a small nod and a lingering kiss to your palm.

It’s always surprising to see Peter without a trace of humor or good-nature in his eyes. It took you a while to acclimate to his night and day demeanor and even longer to trust which emotions were real and which served a purpose. As he slides a cocky smile back onto his face, one that graces every part of his features, and holds out his arm for you, you knew. He’s in his element.

The game’s begun.

♢ ♤ ♡ ♧

Not even five seconds into the Terrace Room and your jaw hit the floor. Pepper sure knows how to out-do herself.

The room displayed the same historic French charm as the outside façade, but much more grand, decorated with multiple crystalline chandeliers, large stone semicircular archways, and classical art adorning the ceilings. Somehow, Pepper’s touch of cream-colored table cloths, bouquets of immaculate white peonies, golden napkins, and floating candle holders added the perfect ambiance for Tony’s celebration.

True to his fashion.

The Man of the Hour is currently giving his speech at the head table as the Maître D’ checks your reservation and prompts a server to escort you and Peter to your table. It’s located not too far away from Tony's, near a stone wall and a divider separating the other tables. You weren’t entirely familiar with the three people who were already seated, but they graciously offered quiet nods of welcome. Peter grabbed your chair for you and smoothly pushed you in before taking his seat next to you while you strained to catch the last bits of Tony’s speech.

“… and I can truly say that without you, my amazing colleagues, friends, and organizers present tonight, this win would not have been possible. I thank you from the bottom of my heart. And um, yeah. Thank you, all.” Tony lifted his champagne flute into the air with a flourish and a winning grin. Peter rolled his eyes. “Here’s to an awesome four years as New York’s new Governor.”

Everyone stood up to give him a round of applause, Peter’s claps more grudging than encouraging, but you were glad he put in some effort. When he looked your way, you flashed him a loving smile and mouthed Thank you. He rolled his eyes again, playfully this time, and quirked his mouth up in an amused grin.

Live music picked up as soon as Tony took his seat, soft jazz that blended well with the onslaught of muffled chatter and clinks of silverware against glass plates. Servers incrementally brought out the main course of roasted beef filet dressed in tomato tarragon sauce and a side of arugula salad. Peter stifled a chuckle as he heard your stomach growl when a server placed the plate of food in front of you.

As another server leaned in to pour you a glass of wine, you held out a hand and gave him a polite smile. “No, thank you. May I just have some water, please?”

The young man nodded, but Peter piped up before he could head off. “Got anything stronger back there? Bacardi? Whiskey? Rum?”

“We have Vodka, sir,” the server stuttered out.

“Excellent. I’ll take a whole bottle of that,” Peter grinned and pressed a couple of $100 bills into the man’s palm. Peter’s effect on people never got tiring to witness. He and the server appear to be around the same age, somewhere near the 25-year mark, yet Peter's vibe reduced the server to stutters. You’d say the tux assisted with his air of importance, but you’ve seen Peter have that same effect on businessmen while wearing a shirt that read “I lost an electron. Are you positive?” and plaid pajama bottoms.

The server vigorously nodded. “Right away, sir.”

“Don’t drink too much,” you cautioned in a tone low enough for only Peter’s ears. “You know how you get, and I don’t want Tony to have an excuse to place cuffs on you.”

Peter scoffed and mumbled around a bite of salad, “If I looked at him wrong, Tony would cuff me.”

“Now that’s a little presumptuous, ain’t it, Petey?”

You jumped up from your seat and wrapped Tony up in a hug he warmly returned. “Congratulations! I’m so proud of you, Governor Stark.”

Tony waved a hand, yet a big smile remained plastered on his face. “Ah, come on. It was bound to happen. Policy is the new name of the game, but I’ll sure miss that courtroom. You missy, on the other hand, deserve all the praise in the world. Best and youngest attorney in the whole state. Mentored by yours truly.” He trailed off, glancing in Peter’s general direction. “Though I question why you waste your talents on the likes of him.”

Now sitting ramrod straight in his chair, Peter slanted his eyes toward yours as you silently pleaded with him to be cordial. Once he brought his eyes back to Tony, he jerked up his chin in recognition. “Stark.”

Tony nodded at Peter. “Baby-faced Criminal.”

“Hey, now!” Pepper swooped in, pulling Tony back a little so she could see you better. “Just look at you! Always a beauty in everything you wear,” she gushed, then put on a stern face for Tony and Peter. “No roughhousing, tonight, boys. I mean it.”

“I was just making a valid critique on my star pupil's decision to become the Personal Attorney to a well-known arms dealer, is all,” Tony defended. He threw up his hands and drew up an innocent expression that might have worked had it not looked so derisive.

Pepper, pursing her lips, nodded sagely. “Right. Okay. So you were being an ass?”

“Pep!” Tony protested incredulously. Peter didn’t even try to hide his triumphant smirk.

You rolled your eyes in defeat. Oil and water can never mix, no matter how hard you try. No, Tony did not take the news of you becoming Peter’s PA well, and he’s made sure to rake you over the coals bout it every time the chance arises. You’ve been Peter’s attorney coming up on two years, and there’s not a sign from either of them that the grudge will ever be let go, not even for your sake, though they do try when threatened.

“I want you two to say something nice to each other and then let the rest of the night go on in peace. Go ahead,” Pepper ordered, indicating for Tony to go first.

Tony took in an excessive amount of air, then puffed it out. “Alright, Parker. Um… I like how you ostensibly don’t know the rules to a Black Tie Event.” He ended with a gesture to Peter’s lack of a bowtie. The poor thing lies in a mangled heap on the floor of the limousine.

Peter ticked up his eyebrow. “I like how the stick up your ass seems to reach new heights every time we speak, Stark.”

Pepper sighed and grabbed Tony’s arm. “Not exactly what I had in mind, but I’ll take what I can get. Come on, you. There are many more guests to greet.” She tugged him along, throwing you an apologetic smile over her slim shoulder as they walked away.

Almost out of earshot, you could hear Tony say, “He calls himself Deus, for Christ's sake!”

They left you two in heated silence. Peter refused to meet your glare, instead choosing to chug down the freshly set out champagne flute filled with Vodka. He immediately flushed as he poured himself another glass full.

“Peter—” you started.

“Don’t say it. I tried, alright?” He slumped against the back of his seat, then shot you a surly frown. “You didn’t even mention our engagement to him. Again.”

You looked down at your untouched food, suddenly not hungry.

Peter’s eyes narrowed. “Were you ever going to tell him?”

An anchor of guilt plummeted to the pit of your stomach, chasing away the desire to eat anything for the next few hours. Your answer came out sounding whittled and nearly swallowed by the music. “Pepper knows.”

“And that tells me all I need to know,” said Peter, pushing away from the table and taking the bottle of Vodka with him.

You tried to stamp down the rise of startled panic by clearing your throat and evenly asking, “Where are you going?” A high octave managed to slip in on the last word.

“To socialize. Play some cards. Place a few bets. Criminal stuff. You want in?” He didn’t wait for you to answer, moving further and further away as a wave of hot anger replaced your shame. “Oh, my bad. Sorry. I forgot you probably don’t want your mentor seeing you ruin your perfect image with, what was it? The likes of me?”

He swaggered off, not a mere hint of his hurt evident in his show of arrogance.

You gingerly sat back in your seat, careful to ignore the inquiring stares from those who caught most of the argument. Your nails came close to puncturing your palms, and if your jaw clamped any tighter, it would snap. An annoying, persistent inner voice chimed out, He’s right, you know. It was probably Ned.

You understood Peter enough to know that Tony not being clued in on your engagement wounded him. He told everyone in his life about you—told Aunt May the second you finally agreed to go on that first date with him, nearly shouted to all the rooftops in Queens “SHE SAID YES!” when he proposed three months ago. Yet here you are, dragging your heels on telling Tony, one of the most influential people in your life, that you’re marrying the love of your life. He wouldn’t understand. Or, rather, he would, and he’d abhor your decision.

You’re not sure you could ever explain to Tony how Peter is your favorite star in the night sky. A big, glowing ball of light you spend hours upon hours admiring and appreciating. One that just burns brighter than all the rest.

Your engagement ring sparkled at you, winking as you moved it side to side and marveled at the simple yet elegant details of the inlaid sapphires and diamonds. Peter told you he picked it out a week before the proposal, but you knew he carried it around in his pocket for months, biding his time, waiting for the perfect opportunity. When he asked, you couldn’t say yes fast enough. At that moment, Tony and his aversion to Peter never crossed your mind, but it’s lingered ever since.

Guilt returned as a salve for your anger.

“Trouble in paradise?” asked a woman sitting at your table, a slight accent in her voice. She appears to be young, almost too young to be at this function. The glimmer in her eye and the hitch in her smile denoted a wise person. Goddess braids sat on top of her head like a crown, and she’s wearing a simple black dress with pearl studs that nicely accentuates her dark brown skin.

You uncurled your hands and blew out a held-in breath, kindly smiling back. “Something like that.”

She held out a hand. “Shuri Udaku.”

That name came with an inkling of recognition, but you couldn’t quite place it. You shook hands with the young woman, giving her your name. When you momentarily looked at your clasped hands, your eyes dropped down to catch the jewelry on her wrist. They weren’t pearls like her earrings. They were onyx and emblazoned with ivory symbols on each bead: Kimoyo beads, a technological revolution currently sweeping the nation, manufactured only by one woman. The realization hit you hard. “Hold on a second. The Shuri Udaku? Founder of Vibranium Tech, Shuri Udaku?”

“The one and only,” she answered, her smile growing wider.

This confirmation launched you into a field of questions and acknowledgments. It turns out she knows of your work as New York’s youngest attorney, but you know a bit more about her line of work because Peter always voiced his interest in her growing business. On the surface, Vibranium Tech is like any other technology company, issuing out new and improved ways of communication and medical treatment. In the underground, there’s been rumors of her interest in creating weapons—technological weapons unlike any the arms dealing business has seen before.

You didn’t want to bring up that facet of knowledge just yet. The normal conversation worked wonders on you, loosening your tense muscles and clamped jaw, all of them singing sweet relief once your body naturally released the tension.

“So, did I hear Tony correctly when he said your partner is the Deus?”

You winced and found yourself searching the room for a glimpse of your fiancé. He’s commandeered a table in the back of the venue, showing off his black and gold deck of playing cards to a group of interested guests itching to play a hand.

“Yeah, that would be him.”

“That’s so badass,” Shuri mused, leaning in conspiratorially. “Is he like the mob bosses in TV shows and movies? Like does he have henchmen? Bad-temper? High-speed car chases with the police?”

You genuinely laughed. “Not exactly. Henchmen, kind of. Bad temper is rare. And he’d never shut up about having a high-speed car chase with the police. No, he’s a little more lowkey than all that.”

Long ago, back when you were innocent to the life Peter led, you assumed that that’s precisely what it entailed—an exhilarating life of high stakes, exorbitant amounts of money, strong-armed goons, and reckless shoot-outs. That might be the case for a few bosses, but not Peter. He’s too strategic, and the ins-and-outs of his trade are too complicated to pin on just one person.

“Well, I, um…” she stopped, considered her words. You unconsciously drew in closer. “I may have a business offer for him.”

You kept your smile on, but it felt more commercial-like than friendly. “What type of offer?”

Shuri gulped down a generous amount of her red wine, then darted her eyes side to side before speaking lowly. “Would he be interested in high powered weapons?”

You raised your eyebrows but kept up your cool front. “Depends. In exchange for what?”

“Protection.”

A voice in your ear announced, “He’s here.”

You ignored it, focusing on Shuri. “From who?”

Shuri peeked around again to make sure no one paid any attention to your private conversation, but her examination stopped at the entrance. “From him.”

You cautiously slid your eyes to the main entrance, heart hammering a thunderous rhythm in your chest.

Brock Rumlow. Peter's rival and leader of a group named the Scorpions. A peddler/enforcer for the East Coast's largest mob: Hydra. Of course he’d try to pressure Shuri for the weapons.

He didn’t come dressed according to the occasion, opting for his usual tight-fitted black Tee and gray tactical pants. The visible half of his tattoo, a scorpion’s tail curling out from the cuff of his shirt, stood out against his tan skin. Two other men stood behind him, wearing almost identical clothes to Rumlow and sporting the same scorpion tattoo on their right bicep, not exactly hiding that they carried concealed weapons. All the voices in the room hollowed out to stiff silence, and even the band took its cue to halt. Your eyes found Tony in time to see his jaw tick for the briefest moment, and then he slid right back into a restrained version of his good cheer.

“Hey, hey! This is still a party, people,” Tony called out, addressing the guests. “Eat, talk, have a good time.” He signaled to the band to pick up the music, then crossed the room to chat with Rumlow. You’ve never seen him so keyed up.

You touched Shuri’s hand comfortingly, not taking your eyes off Rumlow. “I’ll see what I can do.”

She deflated gratefully. “Thank you.”

You nodded, already out of your seat and rushing to the back of the room, stopping short once you arrived at Peter’s table. He’s thoroughly invested in this round of poker, glancing back and forth from his cards to the nervous twitches of the five men and one woman at the table. You recognized four of them: Judge Nicholas Fury, Lieutenant Steve Rogers, Manhattan’s Chief of Police Sam Wilson, and District Attorney Natasha Romanoff. Sweat is perspiring on Steve’s forehead, Sam’s leg can’t stop bouncing up and down, and even Natasha, a woman known for keeping her cool while in the line of fire, is chewing on her lower lip. Fury's not fazed. He just seems tapped out.

From what you can estimate, about six hundred dollars lies in the middle of the table.

Sam and Steve speak at the same time. “I’m out.”

The other men followed suit, muttering their defeat. Fury dropped his cards down on the table facedown.

Peter wickedly grinned, zeroing in on Natasha. “Got any last words?”

Natasha squinted her eyes at his taunt. “Kiss my ass, Parker.” She put her cards down face up, showing her hand, and quirked up an eyebrow that dared him to top that: three Queens and a pair of twos. Full House.

Peter laid down his hand. Four 3’s and an ace. Four of a Kind.

A chorus of fucks circled the group as Peter cleared the table of the crumpled bills. Two new bottles of opened Vodka sit on the table as well, along with seven shot-glasses. Steve’s glass remains untouched, but the others look like they’ve drained two shots each.

“Bucky’s gonna kill me for losing so much money,” Steve muttered, twirling around his wedding band.

Sam sadly shook his head. “Dammit, man. I thought we had him this time, too.” He eyed Peter with suspicion. “What you got, kid? X-Ray vision?”

Peter ran a hand through his hair, causing a few curls to escape its sleek style. “Nah, jus’ luck.”

“Yeah, well, here’s to hoping your luck runs out,” said Fury, raising his shot glass and slamming it back.

You inched closer to Peter’s side. He reeked of alcohol, and his eyes are glazed over. You wonder how he’s even capable of sitting up, let alone playing people out of their money.

“Peter,” you whispered, putting your hand on his shoulder. His muscles tensed, but he didn’t shake you off. “Rumlow’s here.”

The remaining people at the table began to disperse in a collective gripe of loss. Peter didn’t say anything, only jerked his head in acknowledgment.

Your hand itched to slap him back into reality. “Peter, baby, listen. I’m sorry. I’m so, so, so sorry. I should have told Tony about our engagement.” Desperation sapped into your words. “It was stupid and childish not to, and as soon as I get the chance, I’ll tell him. But for the love of God, this is not the time to—”

“Well, well, well! Look who we got here! Deus, in the flesh!” boomed a disturbingly baritone voice. Rumlow, shadowed by his two men, plopped down in one of the empty chairs, sitting right across from Peter. He glanced at Peter first, then languorously landed his gaze on you. “And who’s this pretty lady you got here?”

“My fiancée,” answered Peter monotonously. He said it as if the words synonymously meant: just some chick. A dull kind of ache slashed through your chest as you dropped your hand back down to your side and took two steps away from him.

Rumlow pretended to miss the interaction, appearing to be in deep thought, and then clapped his hands once. “Oh! The attorney. I don’t believe I ever formally introduced myself.” He offered his large hand to you, grinning with his whole teeth on display. “Name’s Brock Rumlow.”

You reluctantly let him take your outstretched hand. His skin is blazing hot, to the point where your hand nearly felt suffocated. He brought it to his lips for a small kiss that twisted your stomach in knots. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Rumlow.”

Rumlow winked. “Pleasure’s all mine, sweetheart. And call me Brock.”

“Fuck do you want, Rumlow?” Peter bit out, picking the cards up off the table and shuffling them.

“Ooh,” tsked Rumlow. He made sure to lay another grin on you just to irk Peter. “Come on, Parker. Can’t a guy just enjoy some company once in a while? It’s not like I’m doing anything wrong.” He watched Peter’s movements, the cards haphazardly sliding back and forth from one hand to the next. “Playing cards, huh? You up for a quick game?”

You butt in with a pressed laugh. “Actually, we were just leaving.” Drunk Peter is overly confident. If Rumlow found that out, you knew he’d take Peter for everything he’s worth.

“So soon?” Rumlow glanced down at his watch. “It’s not even ten yet. What’s the rush?”

Peter cut you off. “No rush. I’m staying. You play Draw Poker?”

“ ‘Course I play Draw Poker, but that seems too simple for you, Parker. Don’t you wanna make it hard for me? A little Texas Hold ’em?”

“Draw Poker,” said Peter, splitting the deck against the table and flexing the cards enough to have them rapidly collapse into place. “Take it or leave it.”

A dark, mischievous smile brewed on Rumlow’s face as he watched Peter fumble with the deck and, at some point, entirely losing his grip. You discreetly watched him size up his opponent, dismayed to find that he likes the assessment. Hair is stubbornly falling into Peter’s eyes, eyes that anyone a mile away could point out are bleary and bloodshot. The flush from earlier deepened on his neck and flashed scarlet across his face—an easy target for a skilled player.

“Deal me in.”

The first game played out exactly as you feared it would. Rumlow and Peter agreed on a $100 ante to get the ball rolling, both pulling out a single bill from their pocket and placing it in the middle of the table, then they settled for a pot-limit. Though Peter’s shuffling skills lacked his usual finesse, he expertly dealt each of them a hand of five cards.

You leaned against the back wall with your arms crossed over your chest and watched the game unfold. Rumlow processes his hands at the speed of a bullet, snapping his eyes to his cards once he’s drawn, and immediately discards the ones he doesn’t like when it’s his turn. Other than the minutest crinkle in the corner of his left eye, you couldn’t tell when he felt confident or when he bluffed. He gave nothing away, not even an involuntary scratch to his five o’clock shadow. He was so in the zone he began to partake in the Vodka bottle close to his side of the table, swigging straight from the mouth.

On the other hand, Peter moved as if a millisecond was the equivalent length of ten years, scanning his cards more than several times with pursed lips, looking up at Rumlow, scanning his cards again, once, twice, three times, then reluctantly discarding some. He frequently shoves a hand through his hair to keep it out of his eyesight, but the same unruly strands find their way back to impede his vision. He scratches the shell of his ear when he’s about to draw, and Rumlow’s picked up the tell.

Rumlow never even had to do more than call. The confident drunk in Peter always raised.

The pot increased to about $1400 before Peter folded his hand.

As Rumlow collected his winnings, he suggestively lifted his eyebrows at Peter. “Care for round 2?”

Confident drunk Peter never backs down, even when he’s the dumbass who can’t remember that he’s brought fists to a gunfight.

You step back up to the table and put a restrictive hand on Peter’s wrist to keep him from picking up the cards. “Enough, Peter. You’re done. Let’s go home.”

“No, I’m not done,” he said, snatching his arm away from your touch. “Go talk to Tony or somethin’. I’ve got this.”

Rumlow caught your bewildered stare and shrugged his broad shoulders, a gesture that didn’t match his cocky smile. He has Peter right where he wants him, and there’s nothing you can do to stop him because Peter is a willing participant running on alcohol and no critical judgment.

You should have left right then and there, but your feet stayed rooted to the floor. You couldn’t leave Peter like this. Sighing, you pulled up a chair to the table and sat beside Peter.

“Don’t worry. I’ll go easy on him,” said Rumlow, putting on a smile too sardonic to be comforting. Too artificial to be genuine.

His lie didn’t surprise you. The hole Peter dug himself did.

The second round went similarly to the first. Flash decisions from Rumlow and molasses-like contemplation from Peter. This time, though, the ante came up to $200. As far as you knew, Peter is only carrying about $2500 in his pockets.

By the time the fourth round started, Peter’s Rolex lies on the table. The ante is up to $1000. Somehow the pot-limit became no-limit.

By the fifth round, Peter made paperless bets. Ante is $10,000. Rumlow knew Peter’s pockets went deep, and he’d keep at it until he struck gold.

Nothing you said stopped him. Peter hadn’t won a single hand. He’s desperate for at least one good hand; he’s got something to prove.

Rumlow kept drinking with each win.

By the seventh round, a crowd is around the table, watching in horrified interest as Peter raises the bet to one million dollars. The most significant amount you’ve ever seen him bet. So far, he’s held this hand for three draws.

Peter’s hair lost all semblance of its previous style, hanging over his forehead in disarray. He’s hunched over in his chair, his jacket’s off, and he’s rolled up his dress shirt’s sleeves to his elbows. His group’s signature tattoo stands out stark against his inner wrist: a roughly sketched spider.

Rumlow, eyes now as bloodshot as Peter’s and face just as flushed under his tan skin, asks, “Think you got something, Parker?”

“Do you?” Peter countered.

“I just might.” Rumlow ran a finger against his bottom lip, then smiled at his hand. “Why don’t you say we make this last Showdown a little more interesting, eh?”

A terrible queasiness wrapped around your gut.

Peter listened intently, his silence Rumlow’s indication to continue.

“$10 million. And the best trading routes. Including foreign connections. I want everything you got.”

You turned to Peter, placing your hand on top of his until he finally looked at you. Your eyes begged him to listen to you for once tonight. “Please don’t do this.”

His reply sounded tortured. “But I can. I have to.”

“Is winning really worth losing everything?” you asked, your voice cracking.

Rumlow chuckled ominously. “Oh, that’s not everything, sweetheart. We both know what’s left.” He gave you a meaningful stare.

Your eyes widened in disgust.

Peter snapped his gaze to Rumlow. “She’s got nothing to do with this.”

“No, but I want her. Imagine having New York’s best attorney in my arsenal. How many charges has she saved your sorry ass from, Parker? Five? All felonies, right? You lucky son of a bitch.” Rumlow’s smile is sinister. “Not that lucky tonight, huh?”

Peter spoke through gritted teeth. “Back off, Rumlow.”

“To have Deus wrapped around her finger, she must be pretty damn good. Is she, Parker?” goaded Rumlow, ignoring Peter’s warning. “Is she any good?”

Instinct controlled your hands as they seized Peter’s cards before he launched himself over the table and landed an ear-splitting blow to Rumlow’s jaw. Rumlow must’ve known the punch was coming. Still, he hadn’t expected the impact to be that forceful because his eyes blinked in astonishment. The two men behind Rumlow didn’t react fast enough, missing Peter as he stood above Rumlow, grabbed the handgun hidden in the waist of his pants and pressed the muzzle deep into Rumlow’s temple, finger on the trigger.

Rumlow shifted his eyes up to Peter. “Did I hit a nerve?”

Peter’s voice is lethally calm. “Say one more goddamn word about her and you’re dead.”

“Put that gun down, Parker!”

Tony. Shit.

Peter squared his jaw, never taking his eyes off of Rumlow. About six off-duty policemen and the venue’s guards have their weapons trained on Peter.

“I said put the gun down! Now!” Tony had pushed his way through the crowd, Sam and Steve right behind him. You didn’t notice until now how quiet the room became, everyone holding in a collective breath.

“Put it down, son,” Steve gently ordered. He spied Rumlow’s men, their hands tightened on their guns, and shook his head. “Don’t even think about it.”

Peter didn’t move a muscle. His chest rapidly rises and falls with each breath.

Sam, holding a pair of cuffs in his hand, tried getting through to him. “It’s over. Drop the gun, kid.”

A slow grin spread across Rumlow’s face.

“Peter,” you spoke softly.

His red-rimmed eyes met yours.

“Everything’s gonna be alright. Just put the gun down, okay? Please.”

Two heartbeats passed before his grip on the gun slackened, and he begrudgingly lowered his arm.

Steve and Sam seized on the opportunity. Steve disarmed Peter while Sam restrained Peter’s arms behind his back and tightened the cuffs around his wrists.

Rumlow massaged his injured jaw. “Guess that means I win, Parker.”

Sam yanked Peter back before he could charge at Rumlow. When Peter looked your way, he saw you still held his cards. “I’m still in play.”

“Wait,” you protested. Sam began to guide Peter up to the entrance. “Peter, I can’t—”

He nodded his head furiously, talking over his shoulder as Sam lead him away. “Yes, you can. You know you can, baby. Play the hand.”

You stared helplessly at Peter’s retreating form. It was all on you.

Rumlow watched, unperturbed; his cards still held tight in the hand that wasn’t nursing his jaw.

Slowly, you lowered yourself down into Peter’s chair, sitting directly across from Rumlow’s smirking face. Tony stared at you incredulously. It’s the first time you’ve ever seen him rendered speechless. The room’s chatter never recovered, either. All eyes stay glued towards the standoff.

The game is in your hands. Exactly as planned.

[celiabowens]

Book recommendations, Literary Fiction edition(?)

A companion to this post (which should be updated, at some point lol)

Short Story Collections: 

Salt Slow by Julia Armfield: grotesque and disquieting collection about women and their experience in society, how they view and perceive their own body and desires. Pretty strong mythic, magical realism, body horror elements in here.

The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks: fascinating collection in which Sacks reminishes some particularly odd stories of patients who had to cope with bizarre neurological disorders.

Home Remedies by Xuan Juliana Wang: a collection focused on the Chinese millennial experience. Stories about love and loss, family, immigration and the uncertainty of the future. (also there’s an extremely beautiful short story about a pair of Chinese divers that broke me forever!!!)

Bestiary: The Selected Stories by Julio Cortázar: unforgettable selection of short stories that mix surreal elements to everyday life and apparently ordinary events. Would also recommend All Fires the Fire by the same author.

Novels:

How Much of These Hills is Gold by C. Pam Zhang: one of the biggest debuts of 2020, it follows two recently orphaned children through the gold rush era. An adventurous historical fiction piece that focuses on themes like gender, identity and immigration, this is one of my favorites 2020 reads so yeah, I’d really push it in anyone’s hands to be honest.

Burial Rites by Hannah Kent: historical fiction inspired by the last days of a young woman accused of murder in Iceland in the 1820s. A quite bleak, but beautiful novel (the prose is stunning).

The Mercies by Kiran Millwood Hargrave: historical fiction novel set in Norway in the 17th century, following the lives of a group of women in a village that recently (barely) survived a storm that killed all of the island’s men. 

The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead: the 2020 winner of the Pulitzer Prize. The book follows the lives of two boys sentenced to a reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida. A bleak, but important book, with a shocking final twist (side note, I’ve been recommended The Underground Railroad by Whitehead as well, but I haven’t gotten to it yet. If you’re looking for something quite peculiar, if a bit less refined when compared to The Nickel Boys, The Intuitionist is a quite odd pulpy noir set in an alternate NY about...elevator inspectors *and racism*). 

The Leavers by Lisa Ko: haunting book about identity and immigration as the main character is apparently abandoned by his own mother (an undocumented Chinese immigrant) during his childhood. Mainly a story about living in between places and constantly feeling out of place. 

The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa: when everyone would probably recommend Murakami (not much against Murakami besides his descriptions of women and their boobs), I suggest checking out some of Ogawa’s books. The recently translated The Memory Police, published in Japan in the mid 90s, is an orwellian dystopian novel set on an unnamed Island where memories slowly disappear. Would also really recommend The Housekeeper and The Professor, a really short novel about a housekeeper hired to clean and cook for a math professor who suffered an injury that causes him to remember new things for only 80 minutes. 

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong: Ocean Vuong’s debut novel, following a son writing a letter to his illiterate mother. The book seems quite polarising due to Vuong’s writing style (his poetry background is really quite clear and the book doesn’t really follow a regular narrative, rather than portrays events and memories in brief flashes), but I loved it and I’d really just recommend going into it without knowing much? It’s a beautiful exploration of language, family history, trauma, sexuality and more.

Exist West by Mohsin Hamid: this book was fairly popular when it came out (in 2017 I believe) and was often incorrectly marketed as magical realism. Hamid’s book is a brief and quietly brutal journey with a few fantastical elements, following a couple trying to escape their city in the middle of war, as they hear about peculiar doors that can whisk people far away. The doors are, of course, a quite effective metaphor for the immigrant experience and the book does a great job at portraying the main characters’ relationship. 

Family Trust by Kathy Wang: this has a really low rating on goodreads which...wow i hate that. Family Trust is a literary family saga/drama about a Chinese-American family residing in the Silicon Valley. It’s often been compared to Crazy Rich Asians, but I believe it to be more on the literary side and definitely less lighthearted. 

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee: historical family saga (one of my favorites tbh, I’m absolutely biased, but this book deserved more hype) set in Korea and Japan throughout the 20th century, following four generations of a Korean family. While I wasn’t the biggest fan of the prose, the book has really great characterisation and absolutely fascinating characters. (I’d suggest checking out eventual TW first, in this case). 

The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker: another recent read, The Silence of the Girls, while not faultless, is a pretty good retelling of The Iliad, narrated through Briseis’ perspective. The prose can feel a bit too modern at times, but it provides the reader with some really strong quotes and descriptions. 

Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng: and also Little Fires Everywhere by the same author, to be honest. If you’re looking for really really good family dramas, with great explorations of rather complex and nuanced relationships? You should just check out her stuff. Vibrant characters, good writing, and some superb portrayal of longing here. 

Nutshell by Ian McEwan: i’m starting with this one only to grab your attention (if you’ve even reached this part lol, congrats), but McEwan’s one of my favorite authors and I’d recommend almost everything I’ve read by him? Nutshell, specifically, is a really odd and fun retelling of Hamlet...told from the pov of an unborn baby. But really, I’d also recommend Atonement (of course), The Children Act, Amsterdam? All good stuff. 

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles: I’ve read this book this summer and, while I’m still unsatisfied with the ending, I’d thoroughly recommend this? The novel follows Count Alexander Rostov, who, in 1922, is sentenced to a lifetime of house arrest in the Metropol, a luxurious hotel in the center of Moscow. A singular novel, funny and heartbreaking at once, following a vibrant cast of characters as they come and go from Rostov’s secluded life. 

Human Acts by Han Kang: from the bestselling author of The Vegetarian (which honestly, I thoroughly despised lol), Human Acts focuses on the South Korean Gwangju uprising. It’s a really odd (and at times grotesque) experimental novel (one chapter is narrated from the pov of one of the bodies if I remember correctly), so one really has to be in the mood for it, but it’s a really unique experience, worth a chance.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon: sort of a really chunky historical adventure novel following two artists in 1940s/1950s NY, who create a superhero and use him to wage a one man war on the Nazis. A bit slow in places (the pace can be uneven at times and the book is quite long), but an enjoyable novel that does a pretty good job when it comes to exploring rather classic themes of American contemporary fiction: the American dream and the figure of the artist (I think there’s a particularly interesting focus on how the artists navigates the corporate world and its rules) and their creative process.

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel: this is a pretty classic rec, the book really got a lot of hype when it came out? It’s a dystopian-ish novel set after civilisation’s collapse, following a post-apocalyptic troupe (of Shakespearean actors). It’s a really odd, but surprisingly quiet book. Not sure if a pandemic is exactly the right time to read it, but I thoroughly recommend it. 

The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng: I feel like this book is extremely complex to summarise to be honest. In short, it’s a book set in Malaya at the end of the 1940s, following a woman who, after surviving Japanese wartime camps, spends her life prosecuting war criminals. But truthfully this book is about conflicts and contradictions and in particular about remembering and forgetting. Lovely prose. 

The Secret History by Donna Tartt: and also The Goldfinch. I’m sure no one really needs me to introduce Donna Tartt?

The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton: quite cerebral mystery set in New Zealand in 1866. Honestly you have to be a patient reader who enjoys novels with a pretty complex structure to like this, but if you’re into this sort of challenging read...go for it? It’s a book of interlocking stories (with 10+ pov and main characters) with a really fascinating structure based on astrological charts, which provide insight to the main characters’ traits and personality as the mystery unfolds.

The Hours by Michael Cunningham: ok...do not watch the movie first. The Hours is an incredibly difficult novel to describe to be honest: it begins by recalling the last moments of Virginia Woolf’s life, as she’s writing Mrs. Dalloway. The book focuses on three separate narratives, each one following a specific character throughout a single day of their own life. Goes without saying that I’d suggest being familiar with Mrs. Dalloway itself first though.

An Artists of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro: not one of Ishiguro’s most famous works (most start reading his work with Never Let Me Go or The Remains of the Day), but probably my favorite out of those I’ve read so far. The novel follows  Masuji Ono, an artist who put his work in service of imperialist propaganda throughout WWII. Basically a reflection and an account of the artist’s life as he deals with the culpability of his previous actions. 

Stoner by John Williams: I feel like this is an odd book to recommend, because I don’t think someone can truly get the hype unless they read it themselves. Stoner is a pretty straight-forward book, following the ordinary life of an even more ordinary man. And yet it’s so compelling and never dull in its exploration of the characters’ lives and personalities. Also, I’ve just finished Augustus by the same author, which is an epistolary historical fiction novel narrating some of the main events of Augustus’ reign through letters from/by his closest friends and enemies. Really liked it. 

Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien: back to integenerational family sagas (because I love those, in case it wasn’t clear lol), Do Not Say We Have Nothing follows a young woman who suddenly rediscovers her family’s fractured past. The novel focuses on two successive generations of a Chinese family through China’s 20th century history. While not every character got the type of development they deserved, the author does a good job when it comes to gradually recreating the family’s complex and nuanced history. 

There’s probably more but I doubt anyone’s going to reach the end or anything so. There’s that lol.

[dragonrajafanfiction]

The Andes Mountains

There was no flying above the Andes in the afternoon. His two so-called helpers had already loaded up the truck, but the young archeologist Daniel Emmert couldn’t help but try one more time at his precious extraction site. He’d been working here for the past month, following the lead of what he thought would be a career launching breakthrough: The discovery of a lost ancient mountain city.

Although the outlines on the satellites were questionable, he was so persistent that his conservatory gave him a single grant to go search. After all, he was one of their best students.

The grant was barely enough to pay for tickets and lodging. He had to pull from his own bank  and beg his parents for enough money to get the equipment he needed. Even then, he ended up selling his car after getting ripped off by a man claiming to be a guide.

After paying far over price to get his small team up the mountain, as soon as the guide heard the words ‘lost city’, his face fell and he turned pale as a ghost even under his tanned wrinkled skin.

“I’m sorry, Senor,” He said regretfully and refused to guide him any further. He held up his hands, palm out, and backed away, shaking his head. “Just go back. Go back and don’t come back here with that.”

He refused all money. He didn’t explain. 

These people and their superstitions were going to be the end of him. In the end, he’d spent two weeks with his map and his satellite scans before finally setting down a spot to dig. The thin air exhausted his crew. Out of the four, only two remained after the others got altitude sickness and had to leave. The other two barely worked, taking many smoke breaks and partaking in the alcohol they’d brought along.

Daniel was on his own down to the last day.

As he knelt over the bare patch of dirt again, he felt his frustration rising. There should have been something here. But he’d found nothing, not even a single scrap of pottery. He checked his map and kept tediously brushing. If he found nothing, it wasn’t because he didn’t look.

A dull muffled ringing came from his pack and he sighed to himself. It could either be the college, his professor, or his parents. He winced against his joints and hobbled to the sat-phone receiver.

“Yes.”

“Hello. Is this Mr. Emmert?” Said an unfamiliar woman’s voice.

“Speaking. Who is this? I’m a bit busy.”

“Oh I know. Your failed expedition ends today?”

The words cut deep. “If you’re here to mock me, I don’t have time.”

“I’m not. I’m here to fund your next expedition.”

“Is this a joke?” He laughed. “It’s not funny.”

“I certainly know your reputation at the conservatory, but… I can tell you that it’s undeserved. There’s something in those mountains. I’m here to tell you where it is and fund your work for the next three days. I just need your verbal consent.”

Daniel removed the phone from his ear and stared at it. If this was a scam, it was the most specific scam he’d ever encountered. He put the phone back to his ear. “Look, this is really tempting but I don’t know who you are. How do you know you’re not in organized crime?”

“It doesn’t matter if the cat is white or black so long as it catches mice. I can tell you where what you're looking for is and you go back as a hero rather than a failure. The Boss would rather pay you for your efforts considering your struggle for funding.”

“Are you spying on me? What’s in it for you?” 

“There’s a specific artifact we need, the rest is yours. The payment is for the object and the labor.”

Daniel’s throat had gone dry. He checked his watch. He was out of time. It was either stay here with this mysterious funding, or head out and take the long flight home. 

“Alright. I’ll accept.”

“Good. The funds have been forwarded to your account. I’m also sending you the coordinates. In an hour, you’ll receive more supplies by chopper. Send those other people away.” She gave an amused chuckle. “You were close. Oh and by the way, it’s in your best entrance to deny my involvement.”

The phone line cut. Still in doubt, Daniel made his way to where his laptop was still open. 

“Senor! Let’s go!” The men shouted from the truck.

“One more minute!” Daniel opened his bank account page and stared in silence for several moments.

“Uh… you can go on without me.”

“What?” The driver leaned out of his window, not sure if he’d heard correctly.

“You can go on without me.” Daniel slowly closed the laptop. “I’m staying.”

There was a brief silence but then the truck engine roared and the truck turned around and made its way down the dusty trail. 

As promised, within hours, a large black helicopter flew overhead and a large cargo of supplies was lowered by ropes. Attached was a note in pink plastic. “Here is a drawing of the artifact we need. Contact us when you find it and someone will retrieve it from you. Do not open it.”

The object was what looked like a small jewelry box. How was he supposed to find something so small? But with this large amount of supplies, he could be here for many days. He set up a tent, a nice camp stove, plenty of food and water purifiers. There was even a small radio to play music by.

Daniel was soon happily working at his new dig site and made his first exciting discovery within hours:  What seemed to be a paving stone, carved with strange symbols. He took ample pictures of it for his personal catalog. It was like nothing he had ever seen before in his life. He thought he had stumbled over a new Incan historical site, but now he wondered if he had found something altogether new.

The days passed but there was no sign of the box, but they weren’t calling him to pester him. This was his work at its best. Alone in the vast wilderness, with nothing here but the ancient relics. The uncovering operations revealed more stones and an entire floor full of depictions of snakes, mouths open, fangs out. He was familiar with depictions of flying serpent gods like Quetzocoatl, but these didn’t resemble anything he’d ever studied.

On the third night, a loud hum woke him up.

It started out distant, before sweeping directly under him launching him out of his sleeping bag in a panic, before fading into the distance.

He opened the tent and looked outside with his high beam flashlight. The darkness was all encompassing. Outside the light, it was nothing but deep inky blackness. His heart pounded in his chest. He didn’t imagine it. He even felt it.

He waved his flashlight into the dark, but there was nothing there. Whatever it was, it felt like it was underground. “An earthquake?” He said to himself.

The next day, the sun broke over the peaks and there, in the middle of the digsite, was the box. Untouched by dirt, it shined with a reddish light even without the full light of day.

Frozen in place, Daniel suddenly felt like he was in a real life Indiana Jones movie. Places like these weren’t supposed to be real. He stepped carefully over to the box. In the center of the lid, a bright red jewel shined, held between the mouths of two serpents. He slowly, carefully moved to pick it up.

As though pulled by a magnet, picking it up felt like working against an invisible force that held it fast to the ground. As soon as it was in his hands he couldn’t help but marvel at it. The box was locked, held shut by a simple pivot latch. He tucked it under his arm and made his way to the phone.

 It rang once. “You found it?” Said the woman’s voice.

“Look I don’t… I don’t know what this is about, I… What is this place?”

“Stay where you are. We’ll be out to retrieve the box shortly.”

“Why won’t you…” The phone cut off.

He turned his head, another sound was approaching this time, the engine of the truck. “They came back for me?”

He immediately knew the men he was working with before were not the ones coming back for him. This truck was different and was bristling with men with automatic weapons. Terrified, Daniel held up his hands. “Don’t shoot!”

The tip of the rifles was the last thing he ever saw. It felt like he was suddenly pushed to the ground and his world ended.

----

Half a world away, Mingfei Lu received a message on his phone, but he wasn’t awake to retrieve it. Erii rolled over and grabbed the phone. When she saw who it was she turned to the sleeping Mingfei and pressed her finger to his cheek, deeper and deeper until he stirred.

“Mmph… Five more minutes.”

Her fingertip curved, digging her nail in.

Mingfei let out a soft hiss. “What’s the big idea!”

She shoved the phone in his face to silence him. “Huh? Enxi?”

He sat up and she observed him carefully as he took the phone and read the message. “Someone got there before us…?” His eyes widened slightly but then his expression dimmed into sadness.

Erii tilted her head, curious.

“I promised no one would get hurt.” He murmurred. “I underestimated things.” He curled on hand to his forehead and a bitter smile curved his lips. “I would like to keep this world the way it is. But everything I touch just seems to wither.”

He continued to stare at the phone and Erii felt her unease grow. He spoke again. “There’s only one other person who would know the location of that dig site.”

Erii gave a short series of gestures. “What was there?” she asked.

“Oh?” Mingfei lowered his hand, his bitterness brightening into innocent surprise. “You know that old story? The one about Nuwa?”

Erii shook her head.

“Long, long ago, the four Dragon Lord pillars were broken; the nine Dragon Kingdoms collapsed. The sky did not completely cover the land; The land did not hold up the sky all the way around. The world burned with inextinguishable fire and the sea flooded the land without receding.”

“Great beasts ate the innocent. Flying monsters snatched the elderly and the weak.”

“A man named Nüwa used alchemy to create five-colored stones in order to patch up the sky. He cut off the legs of a great turtle to set them up as the four pillars and stopped the floods. The wild beasts were all killed so the world was at peace again.”

Mingfei who was never a studious person in the past suddenly rattled off this ancient legend as easily as his Senior Brother Zihang.

“One of the stones was there. Nuwa wasn’t a human. He was a dragon.” Mingfei looked at this phone again. His eyes glittered, swirling with a sudden golden fire. His brows knitted together in barely suppressed anger. “It is likely, the whoever is after the stones is trying to wake up the King of Sky and Wind.”

He slowly put the phone down. “If he knows what’s good for him, he’ll stay down. But who am I really kidding?” He suddenly chuckled, unable to stop himself from laughing. “They’re all idiots!”

Erii watched concerned, as tears squeezed out of his eyes and his laughter became tinged with sorrow. “Soon I will be the only one left again. Why is it always this way?”

Her arms encircled his shoulders and she rested her head against him. She felt him sigh.

"Erii. You'll stay with me.  Won't you?"

She looked up at him and smiled giving an okay sign.

Mingfei felt the deep sadness and loneliness in his heart loosen for just a moment.  Though he would soon be the last of his kind, with Erii, things wouldn't be so bad.

---

It was mid afternoon when the message came to the Executive Department. An SSS assignment from none other than the Chancellor himself. Mr. Baldwin opened it up to examine its contents. An artifact, stolen from a draconic archeological dig. The Executive Department was to recover it.

[thewatchau]

Scrying Magic and Enchantments

Most of the lore in the upcoming series will be edited compilations of dozens of posts from the last two years. While there are some minor new details sprinkled throughout, I’ve attempted to post significant new information in a “Watch AU Fun Fact” post so you don’t have to read all of these HUGE posts to find them.

THIS ONE IS DIFFERENT. Scrying is a relatively new concept in this AU, and thus had almost no lore around it outside of a few questions answered on discord. I fleshed it out considerably while writing this post, to the point where releasing these new lore tidbits in fun fact posts would be extremely inefficient and pointless. Therefore, almost EVERYTHING in this post is new lore. Have fun! :D

Other Posts in this Series:

How Magic Works in The Watch AU • Souls: Magic’s Origin, or Vice Versa? • Becoming a Mage: Ranks and Unlocking Magic • Becoming a Mage: Magical Focuses • Magic in Nature •  Fae Folk and the Fae Realm •   Magical Fields of Study • Enchantments and Wards • Magical Records • Scrying Magic and Enchantments • Shapeshifting Enchantments •  Healing Magic and Enchantments   • Animal Communication Magic • Translation Magic • Alchemy • 

In This Post:

The Definition of Scrying Magic and Enchantments

The Limitations of Scrying due to distance, skill level, and magical interference.

Noteworthy Usages of Scrying, feat. its historical lack of use in Duilintinn, the changeling rescuers of Tandeli’s Magos Perdidos, and the strange phenomenon of “Argentum Inanis”.

Definition

Scrying is a magical ability that allows the user to see a visual, soundless recreation of present events taking place in a specific location. 

Scrying can take the form of pure magic or an enchantment. The former sees a mage simply scrying for information from within the confines of their own mind. The latter has a mage enchant an object with scrying ability, allowing the information to be witnessed by others. 

Scrying also refers to the theoretical magic of peering through time. However, extensive research into the subject indicates that this type of scrying should be impossible for mortal mages. While some have proposed that the term “farseeing” be used instead of “scrying” to distinguish normal scrying from this theoretical phenomenon, this never took off; thus, the term “scrying” almost always connotes its practical form in public vernacular. 

Scrying does not fit neatly into any one field of magical study, but can be applicable to Soul Magic, Life Magic, and Enchantments, depending on its usage. It is popular among Mages with a focus themed around discovery, sight, perspective, and distance. 

Limitations

Like all forms of magic, scrying magic is severely limited by scale. The further away you are from the target you are attempting to see, the more soul energy it will require to maintain the spell, increasing at an exponential rate.

For example, while a mage with an average level of scrying ability could probably scry something less than a mile away for an indefinite period of time, to scry something in a two mile radius would only be feasible for about an hour; a four mile radius, less than ten minutes. 

Phrased differently, if you stood in the center of one of Duilintinn’s regional capitals, such as Fionport or Monacoil, you’d be able to scry anything within the city walls for about an hour. In the center of Cordoire, you’d be able to scry for maybe ten minutes. 

These numbers assume an average level of skill for a mage with a focus that allows for scrying and a decent amount of practice using such abilities. Like all magic, the scope of a mage’s ability to perform various feats of magic varies heavily based on focus, skill, passion, and energy levels. 

Additionally, scrying carries many of the same limitations as a Magical Record. Since magic will react violently upon colliding with magic from another source, severe magical interference has the potential to heavily distort the results of a scrying session. For these reasons, it is impossible to scry directly into a Fae Garden, only rendering a chaotic blur of non-information as soon as the scryer attempts to look beyond the garden’s edge. 

Noteworthy Usage

Due to magical interference, scrying is not used very often in Duilintinn. Its ecosystems are inundated with high concentrations of natural magic, making it extremely difficult to get a clear reading. Moreover, in the case of The Watch, not only would it be impossible to scry into the Western Forest for The Enemy, but even when The Enemy is within the kingdom’s borders, the amount of magic surrounding him alone is enough to scramble anything we might see. 

However, other kingdoms have used scrying to great effect. In particular, Tandeli’s Magos Perdidos - an organization designed to support changelings in Tandeli - uses a constant rotation of scryers to find and rescue changelings in dangerous areas after they have been “reborn” into the Mortal Realm. 

Additionally, scrying has become more relevant in Duilintinn after Lord Marvin’s research into “Argentum Inanis” was uncovered in October 1615. While little is known about this mysterious alchemical process, the result seemingly functioned as a scrying enchantment, imbuing a black sphere of unknown material with the ability to not only scry for unprecedented distances, but somehow through time itself. It’s unclear how this is possible; ordinary scrying magic can only scry through space, not time. Regardless, these discoveries will likely bring newfound attention to the study of scrying magic within The Watch.

[xxfanfiction-emo-trinityxx]

The Grace of the Phoenix Witch - Party Poison x Reader

Request: Hi, I really love your work, and was wondering if you could do a Party Poison oneshot where reader was a Fabulous Killjoy but got killed several years ago. Suddenly, she makes a reappearance and none of the fabulous know how to react except Party. Some fluff at the end would be awesome! I love your work, and you're awesome!

Reader: female

Warnings: angst, grief,

Word count: 2 452

Party stared at the old mailbox in the middle of the desert. Flowers and little mementoes were arranged in front of it, dozens of layers of color coated the metal, and in some places it was breaking of. He stared at the word that was written right under the slit for the letters. ‘Love’ was spelled out in red cursive writing.

Yeah, he had known what love felt like, he still did in some way, when it came to his brother, or his friends, but he was sure he would never feel love in that way again as he had felt with her. She had been his world, had been the reason to keep fighting. How long had it been now? Three years, maybe four? Was it crazy that he still came to the shrine in the middle of the desert to send letters to her? The Phoenix Witch surely did not deliver all of his letters to her, nor did she read those letters he had written for her, begging her to bring his love back. She probably had never listened to the hours filled with prayers that he had spent in front of the mailbox, asking someone, be it the Phoenix Witch, Destroyer, or any kind of god, to bring her back. Back in the days, before he had been an outlaw in the Californian desert, before BLI had destroyed the world, and turned it into their own little playground, he would have been sent to see some councilor of sorts. Someone to help him cope with the loss, but without BLI she would be alive anyway; he would not need to grieve.

The small line of brighter blue at the horizon announced the new day, and Party got up from the dusty ground. Another night spent out here, another night grieving over someone he could not have back. Of course there had been times when he thought about ending everything, just to be with her again, but he needed to fight, the world still needed him to fight, Kobra needed him, and so did Jet and Ghoul.

He patted the old metal of the mailbox and smiled a sad smile.

“Tell her I still love her, will you,” he asked quietly, hoping the Phoenix Witch was listening to his words.

He got back to the diner before any of the others woke up, he always did. They had no clue that he spent most of his nights out under the stars, next to the only connection he might have with his love.

He was just digging into a can of the disgustingly mushy power pup, when suddenly the transmitter over the defect stove started blinking and bleeping. Party buried his face in his hands, too tired to jump to his feet immediately, before he slowly got up, and picked up the receiver.

“Someone there,” a voice crackled through the speaker, distorted and hard to understand.

“Yeah, it’s Party,” he answered, “What’s up, Cola?”

“Our sensors picked up a signature just outside zone six, a little north east from where you guys are,” Cola answered, the cracking in the speaker suddenly dying down, allowing Party to clearly hear the other man clearly, “someone’s out there.”

“BLI, probably,” Party yawned.

“No, we would have seen them coming from the city, it’s someone, something from outside. Think you can go check it out?”

Party rolled his eyes. Seriously, he was tired. Why did it always have to be them when it came to checking out weird stuff?

“Sure, consider it done,” he answered and hung up the mic without saying goodbye. He definitely was not a morning person.

To say his fellow Killjoys were not happy about being woken up, and immediately having to drive out into the desert, would have been an understatement. Groaning and complaining they had wriggled into their clothes, and pulled their masks on, before flopping down into the Trans AM.

Party sat behind the wheel, speeding over the open roads of the desert, the car causing clouds of dust to rise in the air, painting the route they were taking.

Soon they started to close in on the position Cola had given Party, and he slowed the car down.

“Everyone, get ready,” he commanded, spotting his brother, who had fallen asleep again, yanking his head up, while his fingers immediately closed around the ray gun at his side.

Party threw a glance on the small, grey box that was placed loosely on the dashboard. On dark green background a small red dot moved closer towards the center of the white circle on the screen, signaling that they had almost reached the unusual heat signature, which was displayed as the red light.

“It it’s another one of these mutated coyotes, I’ll kick Cola’s ass,” Ghoul muttered.

The other Killjoys blew air threw their noses in agreement, not in the mood to laugh at the black haired man’s relatable feelings.

The red dot moved closer and closer to the center of the display, but outside the car, the Killjoys were unable to spot what might have caused the heat signature. Slowly the car came to a halt, and Party, still upset over the early morning mission, but now intrigued, climbed out.

The sun had not even risen over the hilltops yet, the sky was a strange pinkish grey, and the air was still cool, when his boots hit the sand. Just to make sure, he yanked his yellow mask down into his face before he pulled his ray gun, and started wandering around aimlessly, searching for the faintest hint of what had made Cola call them out here.

Behind him, the other three also got out of the car, bandanas pulled over their mouths, and sunglasses hiding their eyes. Wordlessly they spread out, systematically searching the area around the car, even though neither of them was sure what exactly they were searching for. Anything bigger than a cat and alive would probably do.

It did not take long for Party to give up. He was tired from barely sleeping. The few minutes he had dozed off in front of the shrine in the cold, itchy sand, could hardly count as recovery from yesterday’s exhaustions, and yet he found himself drawn out there time and time again. The disgusting breakfast definitely did not help his mood either, and the more he thought about it, all he really wanted was to see this beautiful face, which he saw every time he closed his eyes, one last time, in real life. Party’s mood had, he had to admit that, reached a historical low.

With hanging shoulders he scuffed back through the dust to the Trans AM. Let the others search until they give up, he thought to himself, at least no one could complain they had not done their job then.

He opened the door to the backseat, and sat down, his feet dangling outside the car, before he let himself fall back against the seats, staring up at the ceiling of the old car. It felt like yesterday, yet like an eternity away that he had rested his head in her lap while they had been sitting in the back of the Trans AM. She had run her fingers through his hair, her perfect eyes had sparkled joyfully, and her lips had formed the most beautiful smile he could have ever imagined.

They had loved each other in the way that dreamy little children imagine love to feel like. It was pure, without any dark secrets, honest, deep. They had been loyal to each other, and while they were not sticking together like lovesick teenagers, instead very well able to go their own way when it came to missions, even when they lasted weeks, at the end of it all, they had always found themselves back in each other’s arms, safe and protected, even in a world where safety was a mere illusion.

Party wiped his eyes with the back of his hand, trying to dry the tears that were burning in them. Even after years he could not forget her, still loved her. That was crazy.

“Guys?”

The nervous voice of Kobra cut through the eerie desert morning silence. Party immediately sat up, almost banging his head on the ceiling, jumped out of the car, and ran over to where his brother was standing. He had pushed the sunglasses up into this blond hair, and pointed to a piece of colorful fabric which hung in a dry bush, and only now had become visible in the light of the rising sun.

Carefully Party stepped forward, and picked up the dark magenta scrap. It reminded him of her, but then again, everything did.

“Someone must have been here,” Kobra whispered wide eyed, running his fingers over the silky fabric, before lifting his head and looking around hastily, as if he expected to suddenly be surrounded by BLI.

Before Party had more time to consider how someone could just randomly end up out here in zone six, why they were there, or where they came from, Jet’s call distracted him.

“Over here!”

Sharing a quick look, Kobra and Party both stormed over to where Jet was pointing his ray gun at something that, in the dim light of the young day, resembled more a rock then a person. At second glance though Party recognized a brown jacket and dusty, green trousers that stuck to a figure which lay face-down in the sand, the hood pulled over their head.

Jet waited until his friends had reached him, their weapons ready to fire, then he stepped forward, and carefully slid his boot under the side of the body before turning it around.

The brown jacket fell open, revealing a magenta shirt that stuck to the torso of a young woman. Long strands of hair fell into her face, but Party recognized her anyway. Gasps of surprise and a few curse words mumbled by Ghoul filled the silence, none of them able to believe what they saw, but Party did not care. His world slipped out of control, as he stumbled forward, falling down on his knees next to her. She stirred slightly as he pulled her head into his lap, his fingers desperately running over her soft skin, clawing into her hair. He leant down, pressed his forehead against hers, tears dripping from his eyes uncontrollably as he felt like he would explode from happiness.

You woke up a while later. The once familiar smell of someone who meant the world to you immediately filled your nose, and your fingers wrapped into the rigid, smooth material of a leatherjacket. The humming of a motor, and the bumping of tires on uneven ground stirred memories of a dystopian nightmare, before you remembered everything; everything from the white monster that was BLI, over Doctor Death Defying’s podcast, the colorful masks which the Killjoys hid behind, the fiery red hair of your lover, to the laser beam that had hit you right in the chest and killed you.

But there was one more thing. The picture of a masked figure slid into your mind. Dark feathers seemed to replace the hair, except for a few dreadlocks, on which colorful pearls lined up. Around the figures neck multiple necklaces were hung, shimmering against the deep black of the coat they wore. Scarred, claw like hands reached out, presenting a paper to you which you recalled taking and slipping into your jacket, before everything went black.

Your throat was dry, and your eyes were burning when you blinked them open. Familiar blue of a jacket, burning red hair, the grey ceiling of the Trans AM. You took a deep breath and tried to focus on the face leaning over you. Hazel eyes stared down on you, red from crying, and before you even had time to smile at Party, he pressed his lips against yours. He still tasted exactly the same as you remembered, maybe even better. There was the smell of the repelling power pup, the dull aftertaste of whatever he was drinking as a replacement for coffee, and a minty freshness, which you had never been able to explain. His lips were hot and chapped, and you almost forgot how to breathe, so hard was your heart beating. He pulled away far too early for your liking, his hands cradling your face and weaving into your hair.

Finally you were able to take in the rest of your surroundings. Ghoul was driving the Trans AM, repeatedly checking the mirror and smiling as he saw your open eyes. Kobra sat in the passenger seat, but he had turned around to poke his head into the back of the car, the biggest smile you had ever seen, on his face. Jet sat behind Ghoul, your legs resting on his and he was patting your knee while watching Party, who had your head resting in his lap, and you happily.

You took another deep breath, but were lost for words. There was so much you wanted to say, ask them if you had really been dead, if really there had passed as much time as you felt it had, but you did not. Deep inside you knew it was true, and you felt the rigid paper against your chest.

For a while you were riding in silence, no one dared speaking. Party and you were just staring at each other, as if trying to make up for the lost time, and the others discretely paid attention to the world outside the car.

Finally you moved your hand to your jacket and pulled out the note you remembered having been given. It was folded in the middle, and addressed to Party, so you showed the piece of paper to him. Curiously he took the note from you, his eyes skipping over the single line that was written on it.

“I listened to every word of prayer – The Pheonix Witch”

He blinked a few times, wondering how this was possible, but then again, did it matter? No, no it did not. Not right now anyway. What mattered was that you were here, here with him, in his arms, safe, alive, smiling, giggling. He felt the heat of your head against his knees, watched the way your eyes crinkled as you smiled at him.

He’d pay the shrine one last visit, maybe together with you. He had to thank the Phoenix Witch somehow, maybe by leaving some food, or a drawing for her. Yeah, he wanted to do that. It was the least he could do. After all, it did not happen every day that they got the grace of the Phoenix Witch.

Taglist (if you want to be added or taken off, pleaese let me know):

general: @justawriterinprogress  @jayloverthe3rd @robinruns

MCR: @deadlovers

[crystalninjaphoenix]

Chaos Theory

Part Four

(One boy has been found! Now what about the others? More puzzles to solve.)

If anyone was walking through the streets of the historic section of the city at 1:40am, they would’ve been surprised to see the two men sitting on the curb, staring intently at the blue screen of a laptop. Jackie had the computer carefully balanced on his knees, JJ leaning on his shoulder as he watched. “And add to the list of things this guy knows about me,” Jackie muttered. “My freaking email! Yaaaay.”

That is a bit disturbing, JJ signed, frowning. How could he know all this?

“Look, as someone who’s hacked before, I can tell you that very little on the Internet is entirely secure.” Jackie opened his email, immediately noticing a message from an email address: 4d6164@gmail.com. “But still, this guy must have some crazy skills. I’m starting to think he supplemented any cyber stalking with regular stalking. You know, following us around. Maybe placing spy cameras in hidden locations.” He clicked on the email he’d received, opening it to see it was completely blank, except for an attached zip folder called “Set 2.”

That seems a tad excessive, doesn’t it? JJ asked, but he stopped, reconsidering. Well, actually, this entire idea is excessive. If he wanted to go after you, he didn’t need to invent this entire twisted game.

“That’s true. But some people just like to fuck with others.” Jackie downloaded the zip file, then found it in the laptop’s Downloads folder and unzipped it. “What worries me is that I’ve never even heard of this guy...”

The “Set 2″ zip folder had just one file inside: 2.png. Frowning, Jackie clicked on it. What popped up was a black-and-white image of a staff, with wings sprouting from the top, two snakes twining around its length. “Oh! This, this! That’s a...uh..” Jackie bit his nails a bit, thinking.

JJ looked at him, then finger-spelled a word. C-A-D-U-C-E-U-S.

“Yes! Caduceus!” Jackie shook his head. “Man, my brain is all over tonight. More than usual.” He took a deep breath. “You know what this is? It’s a medical symbol. Henrik has a sweater with a caduceus on it, Jack got him it for his birthday one year.” Guess they now knew who the second set of puzzles was for.

Focus, Jackie, JJ implored. But is this all there is? I don’t understand what this could be pointing to, other than...who’s next.

“Well, with your puzzle I had to play around with editing an audio file.” Jackie closed the image and opened the laptop’s photo editor. “Might as well start doing the same for this picture. I mean, obviously not audio editing, but you know.”

The very first thing Jackie did when opening up the editor was click on the brightness slider and slide it all the way to the brightest setting. And words immediately appeared in the previously black area of the caduceus’s staff. Jackie leaned closer, tilting his head to the side. “ ‘Follow the skulls’...” he read out loud. His brows furrowed. “Well that means nothing.”

JJ waved his hand in front of Jackie’s face to get his attention, then signed, Perhaps it relates to some clues in the city around us?

“Maybe. But I don’t have any idea what that could be referring to.” Jackie tapped his fingers against the laptop’s edge. After a moment, he started playing around with more sliders on the editing program. After turning up the contrast, something else appeared. “Whoa, hey, what are these?”

A string of figures were now wrapping around the edges of the picture. Small words in the top left corner said “Start here.”

It must be some kind of code, right? JJ asked. They’re numbers, but they go too high to be a simple alphabet substitution.

“Yeah, but there are letters too.” Jackie began reading the string out loud. “68 74 74 70 73 3a 2f 2f...I have no idea what this is. But I guess that’s what Google is for.” He opened up the website, plugging ‘cipher decoder’ into the search bar. An overwhelming amount of results popped up. He blinked. “I...I don’t even know where to start.”

Trial and error? JJ suggested.

Jackie’s face fell, a gray cloud falling over his expression. His eyes darted to the small clock in the corner of the laptop.

Perhaps there is one that could identify the cipher when you type it in? JJ suggested. But other than that, we don’t really have much of an option.

“...you’re right. You’re right.” Jackie took a deep breath. And another. “Okay, let’s start.”

It took five minutes to find a decoder that gave them something recognizable after plugging in the code from the picture. It turned out to be a url for a YouTube video, which Jackie immediately typed into a new tab.

“Oh! Uh, there’s earbuds.” Jackie handed one of the buds to JJ. “We can listen together. I know we could just take out the earbuds and listen with the laptop speakers, but just in case...” Just in case of what? He wasn’t sure. But JJ took the earbud anyway, awkwardly putting it in.

Jackie didn’t know what he was expecting, but it certainly wasn’t...this. He physically leaned backwards at the sound of the intro: “Yo, what’s up guys? I’m Chase, and welcome to Bro Average!” He had to pause it for a moment, just to bask in the confusion. “I-I thought...” he said slowly. “Was...was I wrong about who...?”

JJ looked confused as well. Perhaps it’s both of them?

“But there are four sets? I-I don’t...?” Jackie shook his head. “Nevermind, it’ll make sense later, once we actually get to them. Because we’re going to. In time.” Jackie laughed. JJ gave him a concerned look that he waved away. “I-I’m fine, let’s just...see if there are any clues here." He pressed play.

It looked like any other video by Chase. In fact, Jackie thought he’d seen it before. It followed the same format at first. The music, the shots of Chase hanging out, the attempts at trickshots that always failed at first. Chase once said he liked to include the fails so the viewers would know he’s no better at these than anyone else, and that anyone could do the tricks if they tried. But then—

What was that? JJ signed quickly.

“I don’t know.” Jackie paused the video. He used the arrow keys to go back, but when that failed to pick anything up, he resorted to using the comma and period keys on the keyboard to go frame by frame. Until he finally managed to capture the image that had popped up for a split second: A hollow red circle, divided into fourths, with a red skull in the center. There were also a few strange dots and dashes along the bottom.

Am I correct in assuming Chase didn’t originally have those in his video? JJ asked. But then, how did that get there? Is it possible to put images in a video on the web?

“No, but...” Jackie tapped the screen. “This is on a different channel.” Indeed, instead of Chase’s BroAverage channel at the bottom of the video, the channel name was a string of numbers with a few letters that looked similar to the encoded url that had been hidden in the .png of the caduceus. “That means the video could’ve been downloaded, then edited and reuploaded. There could be more of these...actually, there probably are. The image said ‘follow the skulls,’ I bet it meant ones in here.” He frowned. “What are these dashes? Morse code?”

JJ nodded in agreement.

“Well, great, guess we’re going to have to write these down and find another decoder—”

Jackie. JJ raised an eyebrow. I know Morse code.

“You do?” Jackie blinked. “I didn’t know that. Since when?”

Since... JJ paused. 1923, I believe.

“Oh. Okay. Well, that saves us some time. Here, I’ll just open up Notepad and write down the code on this image, then we can see if there are more images sneaked into the video.”

There were. Five more times, the image of the red skull appeared, each time accompanied by more Morse code. Jackie copied the code into a page on Notepad, and once he was sure there was nothing else hidden in the video, he passed the laptop to JJ. JJ glared at the code, then slowly began the process of translating. Jackie looked around the dark city while he worked, legs bouncing. The city was always empty at night, but it seemed even quieter than normal. He didn’t like it.

What if the gamemaster was somewhere in the darkness right now? He said he’d be watching. How? What if he was following them? Or were there cameras, invisible eyes, dangling in the shadows? Making sure they didn’t break the rules and get help? What time was it? How much was left? Though he didn’t want to, Jackie began wondering what would happen if he failed. He knew the basics, of course, he’d never see the others again. But what would happen to them? Would it end with something as simple as a gunshot? Or would it last longer? Maybe they wouldn’t be killed at all, maybe they’d vanish into a worse fate—

JJ tapped Jackie’s arm, and Jackie yelped. JJ sharply withdrew his hand, then asked, Are you alright?

“Y-yeah, I-I just was, um...thinking. You startled me. Are you done?”

JJ clearly didn’t think Jackie was actually alright, but he nodded. I’ve finished. I believe it’s an address.

“Here, lemme see.” Jackie scooted closer. It was indeed a simple address. “Spiralnest Street...that’s in the north part of the city. It...it’s dangerous there.”

Well, we don’t have much of a choice, do we? JJ signed, sighing.

“No. No, we don’t. We’re going to have to be quick, and hope we don’t attract any attention.” Jackie closed his eyes, preparing himself, then opened them again. “We can’t take public transportation, nothing runs this late at night. Neither of us can drive, and even if we could, we don’t have a car. How fast can you run?”

JJ bit his lip. Not as fast as I would like.

Jackie looked at the time on the laptop. He watched the numbers change from 1:56 to 1:57. His stomach twisted sharply. “Okay. Okay. We have time. We’ll be quick.” He shut the laptop, putting it back in the box. “Let’s go.”

He stood up, and JJ did as well. He grabbed his hand and the two of them started running.

And somewhere else in the city, a man sitting at a desk leaned back in his chair, staring at a screen on a bank of monitors. Three hours left. They were still ahead of schedule, but now only slightly.

He reached over and switched cameras, checking first on a room with two people behind a sheet of plexiglass, then another with a single man lying unconscious on the floor. Good. Nothing had changed.

He stood up. By his calculations, it would take them anywhere from thirty minutes to an hour and a half to reach their destination. Enough time to drive over there and set up the final puzzle of Set 2. He chuckled.

He couldn’t wait for this part. It was a classic, one of his favorites. Though he had a feeling Jackieboy and his friends wouldn’t appreciate it as much.

[rogers-metaphor]

Lessons In Falling in Love: Chapter Nine

Permanent warning/disclaimer:  this will be a story that contains smut, will have cursing, and other themes like these. So, if you’re under the age of 18, please skip this story. Also, everything in this story is completely fictional and not based on real life!!!!!!!! It’s for dramatic and entertainment purposes only.

A/N: Thank you to everyone that has read, commented, reblogged, or liked my story. This one is a labor of love and i appreciate every single one of you. This chapter is a lot of different things happening and some smut. Let me know what you think!!

previous chapters: One, Two, Three , Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, 

my masterlist

Christmas was coming. Selene and Joe shopped around for his family, then Nova and Gwil. It felt better than past holiday seasons for Selene. She usually hated the holidays they were always stressful and never fun, but with Joe they were fun.

He drove around with her to look at all the lights. They sang christmas songs on the radio. They talked about christmas pasts and traditions. They talked about Selene’s upcoming birthday and what they were doing. Joe said he had a surprise planned but wouldn’t tell her what, only to pack for a weekend and pack a fancy dress.

“I’m sick of people let’s go back to your place and cuddle up.” she says, as they make their way from the busy mall. He purses his lips and shakes his head.

“Let’s go back to yours.” he says and she wonders why, but doesn’t push. She’d be staying with the night with him anyway so there was no point in asking.

Things seem alright until later when they’re getting closer in bed, and she making moves on him and he seems distant, like he’s forcing himself to do something he doesn’t want to do. She’s sat on his lap, kissing him deeply but he doesn’t feel like he’s into it. She stops, and tries to find his eyes.

“What’s going on?” she asks.

“Nothing.” he sighs, brushing it off pulling her in to kiss him. She stops him.

“Doesn’t feel like you’re here.” she sighs.

“Just tired.” he shrugs, and his phone buzzing on her end table has him turning his head so fast it might snap off. She watches as he clearly contemplates answering it, he seems to be weighing his options and consequences. She reaches for it and he also rushes to grab it. She gets it before he does.

“Hi! this is Joe’s phone he can’t make it right now please-“ she is going on without letting the other person talk and he snatches from her hands. “Joe what the fuck?” she asked. His demeanor instantly turning cold.

“I’m going to go now.” he snaps, practically pushing her off his lap. She looks at him confused, annoyed, and angry.

“What is wrong with you?” she asks, watching as he begins to grab his things.

“Nothing!” he snaps, “Nothing is wrong Selene, I’m just not in the mood!” his voice is full of anger.

“Stop saying that. Your words are way different from your actions, Joe.” she folds her arms as he runs his hand over his face. “You say you love me but you do things like this... and I get no explanation. If you’re not in the mood you don’t have to get defensive and leave… You can just say that.” He sighs.

“You don’t think I love you?” he asks.

“It’s just you tell me that, but you’re so far away. It’s like you’re on a different planet sometimes. I thought we were past you being scared and closed off.”

“Guess not.” he shrugs. Silence.

“Come back to bed.” she says, quiet and desperate. She wants things to work out and feel normal again. She watches the contemplation cross his mind again, she could see it. His eyes falling, going off to the side. His lips pursing and pouting. He looked back to her. “Let’s just go to sleep… forget about everything.” she practically begs. He sighs and nods, making his way back over to the bed.

“I’m sorry.” his voice is in a whisper, but it’s heavy. She feels it pang in her chest, but she brushes it off. Like she’s done so many times before. She can’t stand to see him go. So she settles for his sorry and let’s him climb back into bed. She doesn’t care, she likes the way his arms wrapped around her feel. He whispers again, “I’m sorry.” it sounds like he’s saying it for  another reason.

Silence. As much as her throat burns with things she can’t bring herself to say. She lets it sink to the back of her head and takes his arms around her as a truce.

Things seemed to be better in the following days. They made up various times the next morning and laughed and talked like nothing happened.

Then, came Christmas. Selene was happy, again to be with Joe’s family. Bringing gifts to the children and then staying up to help his sister wrap gifts for them, eating cookies as if Santa came. Joe held her close to him as they sat by the fire. It was a stark contrast to the following day that was hectic, full of opening gifts and making another huge dinner. It was still fun, and she laughed a lot and drank delicious wine. She received gifts from his family and when they were in bed at the end of the night, Joe passed her his gift. She took it in her hands and hesitated to open the square box.

She looked at him again, her eyes unsure. He nudged her with that stupid smile she was falling more and more in love with. She opened the box slowly and carefully finding a little sunflower pendant inside. It was small but beautiful and shiny. Instantly she loved it, and she felt tears welling in her eyes.

“Perfect gift, from a perfect man.” she hummed, leaning up to kiss his lips.

“I wouldn’t say perfect man.” he chuckles and she scrunches her nose at him, but smiles.

“Help me put it on.” she says, turning around to let him place it around her neck, letting it sit against her chest. “I’ll never take it off.” she sighed. “It’s to pretty.”

“Even if you’re mad at me?” he chuckles as she cuddles into him.

“Yes even if I’m really really mad at you.” she giggles into a soft hum, laying against his chest.

Then it was the drive back home, but not quite. They drove past their town and toward the opposite end of where they started, Joe’s surprise for her birthday. She watched all the signs as they passed. Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and then she knew.

D.C.

Joe was taking her to one of the most historic places in the country.  She felt the rush of excitement as they got closer, her face lighting up the moment the reached the city. The beautiful hotel that was close to all of the museums. She grabbed his hand with her free one, the other held onto the sunflower pendant tightly, wiggling it back and forth on its gold chain.

The hotel room was beautiful just like the one in New York, the only difference being the view. It came with the territory. She was excited, to spend her next couple of nights with him. They were exhausted from traveling so they laid in bed and napped. Then they went to eat food at the small bar in the hotel, then to check out the pool. Eventually the ended up face down in their pillows, too tired to do anything else. The last thing he says to her before they both drift off, is “Happy Birthday.”

Selene woke up to Joe’s soft lips trailing up her arm and to her face. She groaned, pulling he covers up and over her face, though Joe pulled them off her.

“Happy Birthday, baby.” he coos, ”We have a lot to do today.” he continues kissing her forehead, her nose, her lips.

“Just a few more minutes.” she whines, and he chuckles. His lips landing on that sweet spot just below her ear. “Joe…” whines again, a hand coming up to tangle in his hair. She bites on her bottom lip, squirming as he kisses her down her her chest and up to the other side. He hums against her skin, as it begins to burn hot, goosebumps rising all over her body.

“Get up.” he chuckles, though his tongue is working against her skin, followed by his teeth nipping at her. She let out a high pitched cry as he did, her body arching toward him. He chuckled again, his lips slowly moving up her jaw and over her chin. “Do you want me to stop?” he asks, and she rapidly shakes her head no, causing a mischievous grin to spread over his lips. His lips kiss down her chest, between the valley of her breasts that rose and fell as her heart beat faster beneath it all. Trailing along the pendant he got her. His fingers moved against her stomach, and down her thighs, which immediately spread for him. He hummed in appreciation as he pulled at her shorts, she moved so he could rip them off her, tossing them to the side. Her eyes hadn’t really opened yet, but she brought them open, to watch Joe marvel at her lacy white and yellow flowered underwear. “are these for me?”

“No.” she pouts, folding her arms over her chest. “Not everything is about you, Joe!” she argues and he snickers moving toward her. His lips meeting her sensitive thighs. He kissed over them, her center tingling as he took his time, his fingertips massaging into them. Usually Selene was self conscious of them, they were thick. Joe seemed to love them, though. His head moved up to her center. He kissed over the lace, humming as he pushed his nose against her warm center. “Fuck.” she whimpered, just watching him indulge in her. He pulled them down and off her in a swift motion and came back to her, his tongue licking a warm swipe up her slit.

“You taste so fucking good already.” He mumbles, his tongue pressing into her. He hummed causing her to press her hips toward him. His words turning her on as he licks his way up to her clit, humming as he audibly sucked on her. She moaned, her hands gripping the bed sheets beside her, her mouth falling open, as her breath hitched. He continued licking and sucking, humming and moaning into her wet pussy as she whimpered and cried out beneath him. He seemed to be enjoying himself as he neared her orgasm, pushing his face deeper into her, his eyes peering up to catch her face flushing red. Her lip quivering as he held her thighs in place tightly. His long fingers digging into her skin, was a bit painful though she felt to good to care. She rolled her hips up to him, almost without realizing it.

“Fuck… Joe.” she cried through gritted teeth.  “Happy birthday to me…” she moaned. He pulled a hand off thigh and curled two long fingers inside of her, causing her to moan in a guttural low tone, her entire body beginning to melt into the mattress. Her head growing so dizzy she felt like she’d pass out, her moans pouring out of her, uncontrollably.

“Cum for me, baby.” he growls, “Good girl.” he groans as she came undone beneath him, her whole body shaking, his name spilling off her lips like a prayer. The entire orgasm rolling over her body like a hot wave, her skin burning right up. She felt like she could cry, as tremors pulsed through her still. She hummed and sighed as he kissed her thighs. “These are incredible.” he mumbles against her sensitive and goosebump covered thighs. He moves his lips back up to her clit, french kissing her.

“Joe!” she squirmed. “I-I can’t.”

“I don’t know, i think you’ve got another one in you.” he smirks as he laps his tongue over her clit again. She groans, pressing her hips up so that she’s closer to his mouth. “Are you sure you don’t want it?” he asks, pulling away, his now dark eyes intently watching her. She moaned at the loss of contact from him, he kissed sloppy wet kisses around her thighs again.

“I want you.” she sighs, still shaking slightly.

“You want me?” he asks, his thumb rolling over her clit sending a shock throughout her body. He crawls up to her mouth, placing a chaste kiss against her lips. “Tell me how bad you want me.” He muses, and his hand snakes down between them, his finger rolling against her clit again, keeping her on edge.

“God, i want you.” she whimpers. “Please, Joe.” she begs. “Anyway you want me.” she muses back, it was enough for him. He grinned.

“Turn over.” he practically growls, she doesn’t waste any time, turning onto her stomach. He quickly takes his pants off, before returning to her his hard erection pressing against her warm and wet center. She shivers, rising her ass against him, and he slides his cock against her wet folds. She whimpers as he’s teasing her.

“Stop teasing me.” she whines, through gritted teeth. He obliged, burying his cock into her tight and wet pussy. Slowly he sinks into her, making her groan and arch toward him even more, as he begins grinding into her, his own voice beginning to grow raspy and rough against her cheek.

“Happy now?” he growls, as he’s roughly pounding into her, she doesn’t respond in words, she moans as her cheek pushes into the pillow. He isn’t satisfied with her response, and he tangled a hand into her hair, firmly grasping it to pull her head up just enough. “That’s… not… an answer.” he growls, but his composure falters with a high pitched moan.

It’s quiet beside for the sound of rapid panting and skin on skin, both of them just taking in the moment. Their orgasms building. She was close since her last and felt her body get more and more hot as he continued to thrust into her.

“I know you’ve got another one, princess.” he hums against her cheek. “I can tell you’re close… god.” he moans, “So fuckin’ perfect.” she lets out a whimper. She can’t form words, even if she tried her head wasn’t thinking straight. His fingers lace with hers as he grows impatient in his thrusts. She can feel the intensity, her teeth clenching together, her brows furrowing, she feels like she’s going to cry. “Cum for me.” he demands, and like perfect clockwork she lets go, with a cry. Her eyes watering at the feeling. She can barely handle it when he comes too. This time she shakes, along with her voice as she audibly quivers. “You want another, baby?” he asks and she can barely speak, but lets out a harsh breathy laugh.

“If you want to go out today, I think we should stop.” she giggles, and he does too. Kissing her cheek quickly before slowly moving from her. This was the perfect way to start her day.

She really had to learn how to walk again while she got ready to go out, though she felt rejuvenated. Powerful even.

The museum was fun, and she held Joe’s hand as she moved through the exhibits. Looking at every piece of history they had in them. She knew they’d only have time for one, since she took her time to look at everything. She was having so much fun and she still couldn’t wait to see what else he had planned.

Dinner was amazing. She dressed up and sat in another candlelit restaurant that was romantic and intimate. He got her ice cream and had an ice cream cake delivered to take hotel later when they got back. It was sweet and romantic and the perfect way to spend her birthday.

The end of their night was spent first slowly kissing. A different pace than it ever been before. A stark contrast to their usual pace. It was slow and passionate and she could feel their love, like they were on fire. With every touch from him her skin burned in the most soothing way. Every moment spent kissing made their hearts race in sync. Even as she moved on top of him, and he kissed down her skin. She could feel everything vibrantly, like electric.

When he laid her down he was soft, his usual roughness had vanished and he took his time with everything. Even when she tried to be impatient he shook his head and moved slowly. He made sure she felt everything, loving the sweet sounds she made. It was different to both of them, but it was the best feeling in the world. It felt like everything fell into a perfect place. Her heart soared like it hadn’t before.

He always took care of her after, always so sweet and soft. Even more so now. She felt tears in her eyes as he gently ran his hands over her skin, still hot. It was all to perfect, and to much to process. Every doubt in her mind had faded within the last couple of days, and she felt a sense of security and peace. Like nothing could go wrong. Like everything was perfect.

The whole time they spent away had only seemed to bring them closer. She could feel it. Physically she could feel the warmth and energy that surrounded them. As they made their way back home, she had never felt so free and safe with him.

They didn’t care what their new year’s eve plans were, just that they’d be together. Gwil was throwing another party, and the two would be attending.

“I just have to stop home for a bit, grab some clothes and I’ll be back.” he smiles bringing her in for a kiss.

“I’ll see you later.” she hums, though a week later, she had stayed in the blissful haze. “I love you.” she says, and as always a hand is holding onto the sunflower pendant.

“I love you.” he smiles, with one last kiss before he’s out the door.

Nova and Selene helped Gwil clean up the house and set up before any guests would arrive before heading off to the store to grab some extra things they missed before. The two girls shopped down the aisles picking up what they needed, talking and laughing. The place was a madhouse, busy with the rest of the last minute shoppers.

“I don’t know, Nova… I really love him. Like more than I ever thought I could. I dream about the rest of our lives together.” Selene gushes. Nova giggles.

“You’ve always dreamed about your wedding. You sure he’s the lucky man?” Selene giggles and nods rapidly.

“Think so. I know it’s early but I see it all.” she gushed again.

And then like the strangest twist of fate, she sees him. He’s walking the opposite way and he doesn’t see her, and she decides to surprise him. Her lips spreading into a smile as she watches him round the corner.

“What are you doing?” Nova asks confusion clear on her face.

“I just saw Joe. I’m going to surprise him.” Selene explains, and she creeps toward the aisle, slowly turning hoping he hadn’t faced her way, he hadn’t. He was still facing away from her, and as she slowly approached him she stopped, dead in her tracks.

“We have to get these, you used to love them.” A woman with blonde hair tied up walked toward him, Selene already knew something wasn’t right. She watched as she wrapped her arms around his neck, with bated breath she watched as he laughed briefly. Her heart sank down into her stomach, that churned as she felt her breath leave her lungs. She was stunned, and he hadn’t noticed her. She felt like she was going to pass out. She felt everything had gone

It was Nova that pulled her away, rushed her out of there as she began hyperventilating. Falling back into a shelf and dropping the things she had in her hands.

She couldn’t even process the fact that she had gotten home. She could hear Nova and Gwil but they sounded far away. It felt like she was in a tunnel, and she was trying to process what she had witnessed in the store. She couldn’t seem to make sense of it. She had seen it with her eyes and still didn’t want to admit what she had just seen.

Her heart was broken and she felt empty.

[sashatrr]

Breathe with me. Chapter 16b

Chapter 16a here

Liam and Lina spent  few more days in Antwerp, mostly staying in their suite or visiting different pubs. 

Friday night they checked out and drove to Brugge. 

Next day Lina instantly fell in love with this city. She was charmed by everything. Neat streets, ancient buildings and bridges, white painted carriages pulled by horses, charming cafes all over the streets and small souvenir stores. 

She couldn't resist and bought a few laced tablecloths and napkins. In the end, Brugge was famous  for it. Endless chocolate stores that were selling chocolate in any form, including those that you wouldn't buy for  you kids. 

That part Lina found the most amusing. 

They bought all possible kinds of  chocolate candies, pralines, in Leonidas and some cute looking, but useless for both of them antique bells, ashtrays and candlestick on swap meet. 

Lina tried to stop Liam when he was buying a fifth candlestick but he shrugged it off. 

-We are just shopping for  home - He said adding three 18th century jewelry boxes to the bunch he already picked. 

They spent day in a park. Liam laid a blanket in the grass by the river in a trees shadow. A weather was hot and lots of people came out to get some chill by the water. They spent all day napping, reading books on their phones or lazily talking about everything and anything. 

Only now Liam fully accepted the fact that he was totally in love with Lina. He was terrified and happy at the same time. The connection they formed in New York, was growing stronger with each passing day. 

It was a new level of relationships. Before it was mostly physical attraction that grew only stronger, but at the same time, as they were learning more about each other, Liam was more and more attracted by her personality. 

She was so different from the women he used to be with. They always remembered who were they dating, except of Vivien. With them he always knew that he must give something in return, that they expect favors for their families, sooner or later they will try to take advantage. 

Vivien never asked for anything, never tried to use their relationships or persuade him into anything but also he never had a deep feelings for her. With Lina he always knew, he felt that she wants him for himself, she always saw a man in him, not the crown, money or influence. Now and then she was even snapping at him or treating him just like regular man. He would lie if he said that he isn't enjoying it. 

In a few more days they continued their trip and went to Gent. It was a less impressive city than Antwerp or Brugge. Brugge would always remain  Lina's favorite because of its special atmosphere but she enjoyed Gent as well. The city center was small and cozy. Two days were enough to explore it fully. 

They visited a medieval castle, Gravensteen. It was mostly empty inside so Lina had to use her imagination to picture everything that the voice in headphones was telling about each room and events that took place here during different times. It wasn't the usual boring historical lecture but a funny one. The last room was showing all kinds of executions and the voice was telling her about several examples of it that took place in this castle. Off course, there was also a story of a witch hunt. After visiting a castle, they ate Belgian waffles in the street cafe and returned to the hotel. 

-What do you say if we go to Amsterdam next?-Liam asked at the dinner. 

Lina winced and shook her head. 

-Liam, don't get me wrong, this trip is amazing, I never expected to come here at all but it's overwhelming. I am sure that if we visit one more city, It will all mix up in my head. Actually, it already did. 

-Then what do you say if we spend next two weeks on the beach? - Liam himself was a bit tired of constant change of places and flow of impressions. He already visited most of those places in the past but now, being here with Lina, seeing it with her eyes like for a first time, he felt just as overwhelmed as her. 

-As long as there won't be any tours, I am in. - Lina agreed. - I guess I'll go shopping for bikini tomorrow. 

-Doubt that you will find anything decent here. I suggest we stop in Paris for day or two.-Liam suggested. 

-Really, Liam? - Lina arched an eyebrow chuckling. - Shopping for bikini in Paris? I am sure that I can find something here. 

-I promise you, there will be no tours in Paris unless you will want to see some landmarks.

-You are to much-Lina said giving up. It must be nice to go to Paris for bikini shopping on a whim. That was his life.

Lina was so used to having Liam all for herself, to walking holding hands with him, to shopping together, to eating in street cafes and other things that normal couples enjoyed, that she kept forgetting most of the time who was he. It felt right and natural. Her feelings grew stronger every day but sometimes her inner angel would remind her that what they have is not real, she borrowed her time with him from another woman. The one that was his wife, the one who had to be here with him, the one he had to hold in his arms at nights.Lina was trying to to push those thoughts away but they would return to her more and more often with each passing day. She tried not to think about the future and the time when he would have to leave her behind. Lina wanted to live in this borrowed month forever. 

Day after that dinner, Liam and Lina boarded jet in Brussels Airport and very soon landed in Paris. A flight was really short. 

-Wow, that was fast. - Lina said getting up from her seat.- I didn't even have a time to freak out. 

-You did great-Liam tenderly caressed her cheek and placed a gentle kiss on her lips before to lead her out of the jet to the waiting car. 

Paris was bustling with activity, hordes of tourists on the streets and endless stream of cars.

Their car stopped by a fancy looking four floors building. Liam helped Lina to get out of the car and she stared at the building. 

-We are not staying in the hotel?-she asked surprised. 

-No-Liam replied and rushed her inside. - We should be careful here, I am afraid that even sunglasses won't save me if someone will spot me here. It's one of our family residencies. 

An elevator carried them to the third floor and Liam unlocked a door leading Lina inside. 

Despite a surrounding luxury, Lina found herself calm and not so impressed as she would be just some weeks ago. She was getting used to this lifestyle and it was scaring her. 

It was a two level apartments surrounded by terrace that was opening a breathtaking view on les Champs. Lina and Liam spent the night in another conversation learning more and more about each other, enjoying the view and  two bottles of Chateau Lafite. Nor Liam or Lina wanted to think about what will happen later. He knew that going back to his reality, Palace, Madeline and his duties will be a difficult process but he was pushing those thoughts aside. A life of ruler was demanding from him to sacrifice much of his heart desires but never in his life he felt so helpless  as in the moments when he thought about his life after this so called honeymoon. 

Next morning a car took them to Galeries Lafayette where Liam headed straight to Lafayette Coupole where, despite Lina's protests, they purchased much more than one bikini. 

-Baby, it's ridiculous  to come all the way to the Paris just for one bikini.

They went from one boutique to another leaving each with a few bags and boxes of clothes, shoes, lingerie or accessories. 

Lina felt helpless not wanting to cause a scene or to get into the fight, but decided that time has come for conversation with Liam. 

That night, sitting on the terrace, Lina tried to start it but either Liam didn't want to hear it or simply couldn't understand her feelings about it.

-Lin,there is nothing wrong with shopping. Everyone go shopping. 

Frustrated she stared at Liam. 

-There is a normal shopping and there is a Julia Roberts shopping, Liam. With only difference, I am not a prostitute you hired to escort you. 

Amazed Liam stared back at her. 

-What are you even talking about? I've got no idea and for God's sake, don't ever use that word again. 

-Pretty woman, that's what it is about. - she almost yelled at him. 

-Yes, you are a pretty woman indeed. Does it upset you? - Liam asked leading conversation away from the subject. 

-Unbelievable, you are taking a couch tonight. - Lina growled getting up from a chair. 

-Baby, not to upset you but there are three spare bedrooms here.-Liam chuckled.  

-But you are still sleeping on the couch. - she answered, headed inside and loudly smashed a door shut behind her. 

Thirty minutes later, Liam claimed his place in the bed again much to Lina's pleasure. Her anger faded away approximately five minutes after shutting a bedroom door. She already missed him. 

Following morning it was still dark outside when Liam and Lina woke up, had their morning coffee and headed to airport. It was a long thirteen hours flight, they landed late at night and a car drove them straight to the hotel. 

Liam picked Komandoo Maldives Island Resort

because of secluded villas where he could avoid running into someone he knew or someone who could recognize him. He refused the butler and a chief  services just to be sure that there won't be anyone to leak this information to the press. 

Their villa was facing ocean and straight from their veranda they could get to the private beach. Every night they would take long walks along the shore, sometimes swimming in the ocean and making love. Some days they spent by the pool or inviting spa masseurs for couple massage.

Two weeks flew by very fast. Never in her life Lina was happier than on this island but she felt as time slips through her fingers, every morning she was waking up xmarking one more day from her mental calendar and before any of them was ready, it was time to return to New York. 

The weather back in New York was matching Liam's sullen mood. From the airport they went straight to their new apartments. 

By the door they were met by muscular looking woman in a grey suit. 

Three of them headed to the living room where Liam introduced woman to Lina. 

-Lin, it's Mara. She came here from Cordonia two weeks ago and was studying the city to prepare for her service. 

Mara extended her hand to confused girl. 

Lina shook it and looked up at Liam. 

-A service? What kind of service?- she asked him. 

-Mara will be your driver and assist you with anything you might need but my priority is to make sure that you are safe. 

-Excuse me? - after receiving no further explanation from Liam, she looked at Mara apologetically and grabbed Liam's  wrist pulling him towards bedroom. 

She loudly shut the door behind them and snapped at Liam. 

-Is she going to spy on me? - she yelled at him. - What does it mean? What gives you a right to assign your personal spy to me? - Lina grabbed a pillow from couch and threw it in Liam's  direction.

Reflectively, Liam caught it and threw pillow back on the couch. 

-Whoa, calm down, Lin. Nobody is going to spy on you. I already explained that she is only here to help and protect you. - Liam tried to defend himself. Maybe that was a bad decision but he knew that he won't sleep at nights imagining her being thousands of kilometers away from him all by herself. 

-Protect me from what, Liam? I survived for twenty three years all by myself. I know how to cross the road and use a subway. Why all of sudden I need extra protection? Because I am your mistress? - she spat out a last word. - Did I fall asleep and suddenly woke up in fifty shades of grey? Where is your red room then? 

Liam was struggling to keep up with Lina, he heard that combination of words before but couldn't recall what was that about. 

-What Red room? Which shades? What are you talking about? - he asked trying to sound calm but not defensively. 

-It's a movie, Liam. A kincky billionare falls in love with a simple girl. Only he wasn't married and had more respect for her than you show for me.-Lina stopped herself in time before next words would leave her lips. 

Despite being angry, she knew that some words you could never take back. She didn't want to make any threats, especially since she knew that no power in this world can make her to leave him right now. 

She had no idea how to make him to listen, how to make him to ask her before to make a decision for both of them. For a third time he failed to keep his word and discuss his decisions with her. 

-How am I disrespecting you? I am taking care of you! We already discussed it and you were fine with it! - Liam snapped back. 

-I wasn't fine with it! And we didn't discuss it! You promised me not to decide anything without me before we flew to Europe but it's a second time you are doing it since then. - Lina grabbed a pillow from the couch again and began to beat it on his chest making him to step back with each hit. 

Liam teared a pillow from her hands, threw it on the couch and quickly moved behind Lina. He caught her hands with his, pressed them to her lower belly holding her tight against his body. 

-I apologised, baby. And I promise you that she is not here to spy on you. I will feel better all the way there knowing that you are not alone in New York. - He tried to make Lina to look at it from his point of view. 

-I am not alone, Liam. I have my family and Nicci. I'll be all right. I don't want your spies here with me. - she began to calm down a bit. 

-That's our first. - Liam chuckled into her hair. 

-First what? - Lina asked. 

-First fight, off course.-Liam beamed all proud of himself. 

-First of many if you won't stop this. I refuse to be followed by your spy, call her whatever you like. 

Liam felt that storm has passed and led Lina back to the living room. 

-Mara, from this moment on you will be taking orders only from Lina. You can not… spy on her-he shot Lina a look-and you can't give me any information without her consent. 

-Understood, sire. - Mara nodded. 

-You can go now.-Liam dismissed her and waited till she walked down the hall and disappeared from a view. 

-Are you feeling better now? - he asked Lina. 

-No, mister Grey. - she replied with sarcasm in her voice.-Bit it's a start. Just know now that if you misbehave, I will send Mara after you. - she chuckled. 

Rest of the day flew by like one second. Their fight was quickly forgotten. Both knew that it will be their last night together until Liam could find a time for another visit. 

Next morning after breakfast Liam changed from his jeans, that became his casual clothes during past month, into suit. Sad Lina was watching him, following his every move with her gaze. Her heart was bleeding. She couldn't imagine how can she live without his constant presence in her life now. The future looked grey, rainy and depressing without him. 

Liam kept a blank face but his emotions and thoughts were similar to Lina's. He only hoped that he can dive into the work to survive those first days until he learns to live without her again. He hoped that it will become easier with each passing day but deep inside he knew that it won't. 

Lina walked him to appartments door and rose on her tiptoes to give him a lingering kiss on the lips. 

-I am bad at saying good bye. I'll miss you. - she said swallowing back tears.

 -I will come as soon as I can, I promise. I'll miss you too, baby. Take care of yourself. I… - he stopped himself before he would add anything else and pulled her into tight embrace. After a few long minutes they parted and Liam walked out of the door. 

Next chapter

@indiacater @drakesensworld @annekebbphotography @hopefulmoonobject 

@jared2612 @carabeth @dcbbw

[basicjetsetter]

Part I

♡ Pairing: Peter Parker x Black!FemaleReader

▹ Warnings: Mild Language, Triggering Content

▹ Words: 4.6k

▹ A/N: Buckle in. This is going to be a long ride.

“No way!” Your friend Manda squeals. “Those were the exact words?!”

You smoosh a frantic hand over Manda’s mouth and shush her, then slightly pop up from your seat to scope out the packed bus, making sure none of your schoolmates heard her outburst. To your relief, only a few close students glance over with little interest and barely anyone in a wider radius catches Manda’s words over the buzzing clammer of other conversations. Blowing out a satisfied exhale, you turn back to your friend, removing your hand from her mouth with a teasingly reproachful frown. 

“Tell the whole world, why don’t you?” 

She giggles, “My bad. But can you blame me? This is huge!”

Thrilled warmth floods into your cheeks from her enthusiasm. She’s right. This is huge, and you might have secretly sought this exact reaction because only Manda’s trademark, earsplitting squeal stamps news with the seal of authenticity. It’s real. You heard your Destined Words.

The same jitters from when you woke up this morning skitter up and down your spine, sharpening your senses to the max, making it easier to recall the words that floated into your subconscious—words from a bodiless voice. Your Soulmate.

I’ve got you.

Your mind handles the precious words like a porcelain tea set, carefully deciphering the voice pitch and attempting to match it to a face, knowing its efforts lie in vain because the words’ owner only becomes apparent when they speak them to you.

Some inner part of you distinctly translates the words into a comforting assurance, an assurance one might receive after coming home from a long day’s work and walking into the soft embrace of a lover. It weaves itself around your mind like a consoling safety net, painting an image of a lover better than you’ve ever imagined and everything you’ve ever hoped for.

You couldn’t have hand-picked a better day than today, Midtown High’s field trip to the MoMA, to gush over the words with Manda while admiring spectacular, thought-provoking art pieces. One of the perks of going to Midtown High is their fantastic field trips. You circled this Friday on your calendar at the start of the semester because while you loved being in a school centered around technological sciences, you were excited to study artists’ colorful, eclectic expressions and how their cultural personalities materialize in the stroke of a paintbrush.

“You’re so lucky,” Manda says, trying to pull off a pout. Her vibrant smile triumphs. “Only three days after you turn eighteen, and you hear your Destined Words. I’ve got four more months before I file a complaint.”

You sympathetically rub her shoulder, her oversized, long-sleeved denim jacket rough to the touch. “It’ll come. Just don’t wait for it.”

“Oh, I know it’s coming. I just want it to be something as cute as yours, you know.” She shudders, “My cousin Alonzo said his Destined Words were ‘Sure, whatever.’ Can you imagine that? Finally being mature enough for your Soulmate and that’s the first thing they say to you? I mean, sure, he and Tanya are super cute together, but ugh. Those words?”

You snicker, “Let me guess. You’re expecting a grand gesture?”

Manda nods with a dead serious face, though she could never truly pull it off with her full lips and Cabbage Patch Doll cheeks. She’d have a better chance at getting away with murder than intimidating someone with her cute little frown. “If I don’t hear the words ‘Where have you been all my life, you breathtaking, drop-dead gorgeous goddess,’ then I’m demanding a full refund.”

You blankly stare at each other for a beat before you crack, both of you laughing until your sides ache and you’re gasping for air, not caring for the teachers' hushes from the front of the bus.

“I just can’t believe I finally hear the words, you know,” you say as the laughs fade. “It’s like a fairytale come true.” You lean your head against the cool glass window, watching the placid cerulean waves come into view as the bus drives onto a bridge. “I wonder what they’re like, if I know them. If they’re nice. My mom says she already had a mega crush on my dad, so when he said the words, it already felt like they were together.”

Manda sighs dreamily. “I bet they’re cute. And super smart. Those words seem kind of thoughtful, too, so that’s a bonus. And, hey, don’t worry so much.” She gently knocks her shoulder against yours. “They’re going to love you.”

You weren’t scared that they wouldn’t love you. Everyone who finds their Soulmate never doubts that that is their person. What pins a tiny knot of anxiety to the pit of your stomach is how it will happen.

As a young girl, you spent countless nights dreaming of the sequential events leading up to the day you finally met your Soulmate, orchestrating the moment like a scene from all the rom-coms you binged. Your person accidentally bumps into you either in a hallway or on the bus or in the lunch-line, gazes deep into your dazed eyes, then declares their love for you with some cliché phrase before scooping you into their arms and planting a kiss on your expectant lips.

I’ve got you.

The sweet words drifting in your head do their best to ease away the anxiety. You have nothing to worry about. The meeting will play out the way you fantasized, if not better. All because of those words.

“We’re all gonna die!” Ned Leeds shouts from the middle of the bus.

All heads snap to the right windows. In an instant, densely packed bodies swarm from the left side to the right, sandwiching together to search for what Ned was staring at, some opening the windows and craning their necks for a better look. You grunt as someone digs their elbow in your ribcage to see more, and you tensely shove them against the back of the seats in front of you before peering out of your window.

It’s a sight no eyes could miss. A large, metal donut levitates in the clear sky, an obstruction not there mere seconds ago. You gasp in wonder, but not fear. Surely, the Avengers, Earth’s mightiest heroes, will have this taken care of before the sun sets.

The bus driver, an old man with a smile as sly as a fox and pearly white hair, casually calls out, “What’s the matter with you kids?! You’ve never seen a spaceship before?”

“He’s got a point,” you shrug as Manda gapes at the driver with incredulous eyes, then rounds on you as you calmly sit back down. “We always get so worked up over these aliens, and nothing ever really happens. The Avengers got it handled.”

“You sure? Because that looks a little menacing.” Manda worries at her lower lip, anxiously sneaking peeks out the window. Many students stay plastered to the scene.

“Positive.”

✦ ✧✦ ✧

The appearance of the metal donut effectively sullies your experience of the MoMA. None of the tour guides thoroughly explain the paintings' and sculptures' meanings or historical relevance. Instead, they string together incoherent sentences about person, place, and time as they gape at the video feeds live-streamed to their phones. Even Manda stays glued to her screen, chewing on her lower lip so hard you're surprised she hasn't punctured it.

Fifteen minutes into the tour, aggravation chafes into you like sandpaper, rubbing your skin raw. You waited months for this trip. Months! You'd be damned if a few pesky aliens took this special day away from you. You weren’t afraid. You had no reason to be.

Fed up, you take matters into your own hands and stealthily break away from the group, tip-toeing back to an intriguing wall of paintings and observe it by yourself. 

One painting catches your eye early, drawing you to the middle of the wall to study it further. Its tag reads The Lovers, René Magritte, Paris, 1928, Surrealism, Oil Painting. There are two people, a man and a woman, painted with white cloths shrouding their faces as they share a seemingly intimate kiss. You lean in closer, noting the almost murky atmosphere and how it lends to the mystery of the kiss. What did Magritte want you to think when you analyzed this piece? What questions did she want you to ask? 

You derive two: Is love mysterious and complicated as the atmosphere suggests, or is it intuitive and straightforward as the veiled lovers suggest? And, would the love still be the same once they lift the veils?

Beep. Beep. Beep. All the phones in hearing range chime out three urgent trills, nearly ejecting your soul out of your body. Clearing your head with a shake, you pull your phone out of your back pocket. You don't even have to unlock it. The news alert flashes up like a hazard light. Tony Stark Missing.

You blink. What the hell is going on?

"Are you seeing this?" Manda whispers, sidling up to your side.

You nod, at a loss for words. Iron Man is missing? How? What happened? Did it have something to do with the metal donut? 

You blink harder and take another long look at the notification, hoping it was a typo or missing a few words, words like Tony Stark Missing Iron Man Suit. Hell, even Tony Stark Missing Cheeseburgers. Anything but what's on your screen.

Somewhere in the background, Mrs. Kramer, your Art teacher, roll-calls the students to the front entrance. "Okay, guys, time to cut the field trip short."

Your shoulders sag. This can't be happening. Is it really that serious?

"Peter? Peter?" Mr. Dell calls out, clenching onto a clipboard with shaking hands. "Has anybody seen Parker? Peter Parker?" he inquired, looking over the students' heads. A bead of sweat gathers on his forehead, even though there is virtually no heat in the building, and it's a breezy, 72-degree late-spring afternoon in New York City. "Where does this kid always sneak off to?"

Ned stuttered out, "He, uhm, Pe-Peter left early, sir. Family emergency."

"An emergency? Was it so important he couldn't at least notify the supervisors?" Ned bobbed his head up and down, keeping his eyes stapled to the floor in a manner that hinted at no further comment. Mr. Dell huffs, "Alright. But he's getting detention, and I have half a mind to put you in there with him, Leeds."

Ned's face screws up in a chastised grimace. "Sorry, sir. Won’t happen again."

Your eyes linger on Ned as he pulls out his phone and rapidly taps at the screen, probably sending a strongly worded text to his best friend, rebuking Peter for roping him into his antics and nearly earning him a week's detention. You don't know much about their friendship, but they appear tied to the hip at school. 

Ned's a nice guy. Reliant to a tee. You had the pleasure of partnering with him on an art project in Kramer's class a few weeks back, spending a considerable amount of time joking while diligently rendering an interpretation of Van Gogh's A Starry Night on a five-by-five foot canvass. During that time, he often complimented your paint-smeared overalls and your hair's ever-changing up-dos. He seemed like such a great friend to have.

Peter, on the other hand, is a tough nut to crack.

You only ever shared one class with Peter Parker. Spanish last semester. You remember him being too antsy for your liking, always checking his watch impatiently, answering questions too fast, bouncing his leg up and down, acting like he had someplace better to be and better things to do. His impatience never made sense to you until you heard some girls in the locker-room whispering about his Stark internship and how lucky he was to be working for the Tony Stark. 

When the internship suddenly halted, and Peter landed himself in the longest detention sentence you'd ever heard of, you started to take more notice of him only because he was around more often. He was sort of cute in a boy-next-door kind of way with his science pun tee-shirts and smooth, tousled brown hair. For a brief time, you fleetingly considered asking him to Homecoming, but the futility of such a question wasn't lost on you. He noticeably crushed on Liz Toomes, and you were confident Peter's pining for her meant destiny twined their paths.

But Liz is gone now, and there's a growing 90 percent chance Peter's set his sights on MJ. Brooding quirky girl ending up with boy-next-door, now that match made perfect sense, just like a rom-com, or even better, an 80's teen romance.

Manda tugs on your arm, her hands forming a shackle around your wrist. "Come on. They're getting back on the bus without us."

Sure enough, you two were nearly the last ones in the entrance, the remaining students filing out of the door. You rush after them and reach the bus doors right before they shut, huffing in unison. Manda doubles over and grasps her knees, heaving.

"Here," you gasp. "We're here."

Your driver tuts, swinging the doors back open. "Good thing you two made it in time. This bus waits for no one, not even me. Come on," he says, waving you inside. "Let's get this show on the road."

You trudge back to your designated seats, collapsing against the plastic covering as the adrenaline subsides, replaced with the forgotten dread of the trip's abrupt end. You lean over and peer out the left side windows when the bus rolls over the bridge again, surprise rattling ominously over your bones as you find the metal donut gone from the sky.

Where did it go? Did the Avengers get rid of it?

Your hand still clamps your phone. An annoying, slight tremble in your hands trips up your fingers as they try to type in your passcode, but you succeed on the fourth try. You scroll through your social media, hoping beyond hope that someone captured the Avengers' victory or something close to a victory, something that proves the news headline wrong. Stark's probably lying low, too beat down to show his face to the press.

The far-fetched lie makes you internally flinch. You don't know much about the guy, but you're more than a thousand percent sure Stark wouldn't hide from the press if he won anything.

A sinking horror clogs your chest as you obsessively watch clip after clip, onlookers recording some unconscious guy in a red cape being invisibly bound and trailing after the commanding hand of an elongated, greyish-blue alien. Spider-Man tries to get the red-caped guy back, swinging through the city and dodging billboards, his webs clinging to the departing ship's underside, Iron Man flying into the sky after them.

It’s bad. Oh, sweet heavens, it’s bad.

Maybe it’s not that much of a big deal. Yeah. Yeah, it’s probably nothing. The end of the videos suggested the Avengers gained the upper hand on the fight, so maybe, just maybe, the alien was fleeing—fleeing… with a captive. Hurtling off into God knows where with Iron Man and Spider-Man onboard.

It’s fine. It’s fine. It’s fine. 

Your back flattens to your seat and your unseeing eyes meld to your phone, the thunderous beats of your heart stifling the rest of the world into silence. The air is thinning. 

Your ears are buzzing. 

A vice clenches your chest.

It’s fine. It’s fine. It’s fine. 

The dubious mantra and vague words of your Soulmate blend into an all-consuming cacophony of words, gelling together in a chant of solace. 

It’s fine. I’ve got you. It’s fine. I’ve got you. It’s fine.

By the time the bus drops off the students at Midtown and you and Manda quietly walk in the direction of home, the mixture of affirmations fans away the panic settling around your chest, bringing back a semblance of your earlier confidence, or rather, what was left of it, which wasn't much.

Outside the apartment complex, an overwhelming amount of residents’ windows glow, most of them probably stuck to their couch, replaying the recent events on any major news network and speculating the whereabouts of our mightiest heroes.

It takes a while to dawn on you that you and Manda are the only ones standing outside. On the entire block.

Nothing stirs. Even the bodega on the corner appears closed for the day.

It's five o'clock on a Friday afternoon and there’s plenty of light left.

Emptiness pours out of every alley like ink spilling from a broken bottle, blotting the whole surface of the street with the absence of human activity. A tree's rustling leaves are so startling your breath locks up and you jump. Manda doesn't say anything, recovering from the sudden noise herself.

Leaving the deserted streets behind, you and Manda glumly walk up the steps of your apartment complex and up to your residence on the third floor. The apartment is eerily silent as you toss your keys on the kitchen counter and lock the door behind Manda.

"When are your folks getting back from their honeymoon again?" asks Manda, shrugging out of her jacket and toeing off her sneakers, leaving them propped against the wall by the door.

Habit controls your body as you open the fridge, grab two Sprites, set them down on the counter, then reach for the half-finished bucket of Red Vines from the top cabinet shelf. "Sunday morning, I think. They only have the weekend off. Want some pizza? I can call up Joe's."

"Please and thank you," she says, plopping down on the couch. The old thing croaks, its springs wheezing under the unwelcomed weight.

The maroon monstrosity is a family heirloom, dating back to your grandparents' time. Mom loves it, claiming it adds the right amount of character to the drab living space, knowing fully well that anyone with fashion sense would never describe any space she inhabits as drab. Dad is adamant that it's one spill away from handing in its resignation.

Picking up your house phone, you confirm, "Extra-large cheese and olives?"

You don't know why you ask. Ever since the inception of your infamous best friend "crash-overs," cheese and olive pizza starred as the staple meal: that, and a bucket of Red Vines your dad occasionally steals from. Maybe you asked for normalcy or maybe to confirm Manda's plan to stay for the rest of the night. What you do know is you don’t want to be alone.

She hums a distracted yes, turning on the TV and upping the volume to listen to Channel 10's news reporter recount the fight between Iron Man and the alien.

Though already burned in your memory, the images douse your body in bone-chilling fear.

You turn your back and dial in the order, not at all surprised that Joe's is still up and running. Once the employee confirms your order and promises a speedy delivery, you grab the drinks and candy and place them on the coffee table, ignoring the TV.

"C-can you turn it to something else?" you quickly pipe up as you sit next to Manda, unsuccessfully hiding the tremor in your words. "I don't think I can stomach the news right now."

"Yeah, sure." Slow and reluctant, Manda switches the input and goes into Netflix. "Anything you wanna watch?"

"Teen Wolf."

Manda groans, "Again? We've seen that a million times."

"Oh, come on," you groan back, playfulness strained in your words. "It's a classic. You can't say no to a classic."

She gives you a dour frown, one that still couldn't land an inch of seriousness on her amber-colored cherub cheeks, until she relents from the weight of your puppy dog eyes.

"Fine, but only because of Michael J. Fox. Next time, I'm picking."

Neither of you really pay attention to the movie or touch the pizza when it arrives. In fact, for most of the night, Manda scrolls through her social media, watching what you can only assume are today’s events. Sometimes she’d put the phone down when you politely asked, but it unfailingly ended up right back in her hands, so after a while, you stop asking. When the movie’s end credits roll around, and you dress into your pajamas, put away the remaining slices of pizza, and call it a night, both of you climb into your bed. She is still scrolling.

You try and force yourself into REM sleep, keeping your eyes shut until you hear Manda’s heavy breathing beside you. The clock on your nightstand reads 9:53 p.m.

Yawning, you curl up into a tight ball on your side of the bed and wish your mom and dad were here to help you get out of your head. Manda can’t do it when she’s so caught up in hers, and you don’t think you’d be able to tell her how scared you are. It’d only scare her more.

Tony Stark is missing. Manda would have screeched her head off by now if anything changed.

I’ve got you.

Yeah, but Tony Stark, the freaking Iron Man, is missing.

I’ve got you.

You can’t possibly understand how bad this is.

I’ve got you.

You audibly huff against the reassuring words, but they eventually do the trick in temporarily pushing the worry away, allowing you to fitfully slip into dreamless oblivion.

Seven hours later, you wake to a text from your mom. The sunlight is so bright in your room you lower your phone’s brightness all the way down, squinting at the small letters.

-Coming home early bbygrl. Dad says hi and he misses you lots hunny bun. xx

A titanic-sized weight lifts off of your shoulders—something you hadn’t even known was there until you re-read your mom’s text and verify the timestamp.

They’re on their way home, where it’s safe and you can all keep an eye on each other. Niagara Falls is just a six and a half-hour drive from here and Mom texted two hours ago, so they’ve got a couple hundred miles left. You don’t care about the distance. As long as they’re coming home, you’re fine. You can wait.

The morning’s activities in your residence pass into a weird déjà vu of last night. Manda is awake before you, sitting on the couch with a bowl of cereal in her lap and the TV turned on to Channel 10, the volume slightly lower from last night. A bit peeved, you ask her to switch it to some cartoons while you pour yourself a bowl of Frosted Flakes.

She goes back to scrolling on her phone, sparingly taking bites of her soon-turned soggy cereal. You perch on the arm of the couch, far away from Manda's screen, and munch on your cereal in silence. This whole situation sucks enough without Manda’s constant doom-scrolling, but her utter silence is wearing your nerves thin.

Three full episodes of SpongeBob play on before you heave tempered sigh and set your finished bowl of cereal on the table and face Manda.

“Do you have to do that?”

She doesn’t even spare you a glance. “Do what?”

Unbidden anger flows through you like magma spewing from a freshly erupted volcano, flaming into your veins and flaring your heart rate as you yank her phone away and toss it behind the couch.

Manda stares at you like you’ve lost your mind. She may be partially right.

“Why the hell did you do that?”

You scoff, “Oh, I don’t know, maybe I like talking to my friend once in a while. Maybe it’s mentally damaging to watch the same thing over and over and over again, and I was just trying to save you from brain rot.” You stand up and cross your arms over your chest, letting the rage propel your words. “Seriously Manda, give it a damn rest.”

“Why?” Manda crosses her arms too, glowering up at you, close to achieving a convincing frown. “Because you’re ‘positive’ nothing’s going to happen, right? It’s just aliens. No prob.”

You hold your tongue, waiting for her to air out all her frustrations because she’s right. She’s right to throw your words back at you. Yesterday morning you were totally sure of the Avengers, and not much has changed. You still firmly believe they’ll win whatever this fight is with the aliens, but you know scrolling through your phone for updates won’t do anything but boost your anxiety, like it’s doing to Manda.

When you think the coast is clear to speak, you lowly say, “I get it.”

“You get it? You get it? No, mama, you don’t get it. Because, see, if you got it, my phone wouldn’t be collecting dust behind your couch!”

“You needed a break, Amanda!” You shout back at her. “That phone’s never left your hand since you got here.”

She snaps her fingers as if she reached an epiphany. “Attention. That’s what it is. I haven’t given you enough attention today and you’re feeling left out of the spotlight. Newsflash, hon, the world doesn’t revolve around you. Other things are happening besides you hearing your Destined Words.”

“Wh-what?” you balk. “That… no, that’s not what this is about.” You’re not even sure where she even came up with the conclusion that you needed something as stupid as attention right now. Did she think you were that self-centered?

She cocks her eyebrow challengingly, “Alright, then tell me what it is. I’m all ears.”

“Me hearing my freaking soulmate has nothing to do with this! Nothing! And I’m not some attention-starved lunatic. Christ, Manda,” you roll your eyes, letting your hands fall with a slap against your sides. “It’s about you watching the news all day like… like this is the end of the world or something. We’ve gone through this. New York has gone through this. Alien attacks are nothing new, and I’m tired so sick and tired of you…”

You slow down, raising a soft hand to your chest—strange, tugging sensations sprout somewhere deep, deep down within you. So deep you're not sure it's actually there.

“Sick and tired of me what? What?” Manda pressed, the almost-frown lessening as your head tilts. “What’s wrong?”

You gradually shake your head. There’s no conceivable way to articulate what’s happening to you because it’s unlike anything you’ve ever experienced. You feel… tingly, like every single hair follicle on your arms and legs rise, standing on high alert.

“Something’s not right.”

The tugging intensifies dully. You gasp against it, desperately clawing at the front of your shirt with the pads of your fingers, seeking to protect something tangibly nonexistent. It’s like someone’s fingers pinch a taut guitar string inside your chest, pulling on it with increasing pressure, pulling it further and further until it can’t move an inch, holding it the apex in a deathly promise that, with one final tug, the string will give.

I’ve got you.

Everything happens within a second.

You whimper out an anguished yelp as the string abruptly snaps.

Manda leaps to her feet and grasps your shoulders, begging to help.

Then, right before your eyes, Manda’s body begins to dissolve.

“M-Manda...? Amanda, wait! NO!”

She falls away into a pile of ash on your floor.

You drop to your knees, screaming.

And so does the rest of the world.

...

Part II

[wardoftheedgeloaves]

China Story Time II: Learn Programming and Epidemiology the Very Hard Way

I haven’t posted more than two installments of my promised series on Chinese historical linguistics and dialectology. In lieu of progress on it, please gather round the campfire and enjoy this entirely unrelated story about the time I taught the summer camp from hell in Shenzhen. (Dialectology tie-in: we once had a cabbie who only [?] spoke Canto.)

I wish to emphasize that this story has not been embellished.

Summer in China is a sultry and slow-paced affair for the private-school English teacher--you stop teaching seriously in late May, school gets out in late June, and you don’t have to be back until early September. Your pay is good enough that you’ve got savings to last you the summer, but you could always use a bit of spare cash. Unless your social situation is good, your isolation (and the weather) doesn’t help your work ethic too much. Your life is lived at tea houses, reading thinkpieces and books and procrastinating on writing more thinkpieces and working on your Mandarin and getting around to that damned monograph. (Alternative English-teacher mode: hit the bars prowling for locals who may or may not fit within the (n/2)+7 rule, demolish a couple of six-packs’ worth of alcohol, hit the hay at 2:30 in the morning, wake up at noon, repeat. I was luckily never this much of a degenerate.)

As in the US, the affluent Chinese parent often sends their offspring to summer camp for some educational enrichment and peace and quiet at home. So it was that a recruiter offered me, and another English teacher (we’ll call him...Nick) in Chengdu, the chance to earn 7000 kuai (~$1050) each teaching programming in Shenzhen. A class in the morning from 9-12, repeated from Monday to Friday, with a chance for a second week in Lu’an, Anhui. Plane tickets and accommodation included, other details vague. Technically illegal--you’re not supposed to do any work outside of the job sponsoring your visa--but nobody cares about summer camps.

To learn programming, the students (and we) are provided with little inch-by-inch-by-inch plastic cubes with wheels called “Pocket-bots” or something of the sort. These are actually rather nifty little gadgets. You connect to them with your phone or computer in a spacious computer lab (or so the brochures say) and click and drag instructions to create and run programs. E.g., you might tell the bot to go forward for 10 seconds at speed 10, then check to see if it was on white (rather than black) paper, and sing a little song if it is, then turn left and repeat. The software allowed you to do if-loops, for-loops, and while-loops at the very least, which is pretty good for small kids. Satisfied that we would have the equipment needed to teach the class, we packed our Pocket-bots and arrived in Shenzhen on a sticky, hot, sunny July morning.

Now, a word on Shenzhen. In 1978 when Deng took the wheel, Shenzhen was a sleepy little fishing village of thirty thousand people whose only interesting feature was that it was right next to Hong Kong. This made it perfect for the early-80s experiments in capitalism, and over the next four decades it exploded (it now has 12 million people and a standard of living on par with Western Europe). As a result of its early rise to wealth and power, it’s home to the first private school in China, founded 1994. However, private schools in China tend to be boarding schools, and boarding schools tend to be out away from the city center where land is cheap and distractions are relatively few.

So this place is in the middle of nowhere, or as close to the middle of nowhere as it’s possible to get in the Pearl River Delta. It’s surrounded by forested mountains (Guangdong is surprisingly hilly). It’s about 95 (35) degrees, humid as hell, and in direct sunlight--July, south of the Tropic of Cancer. We’re in the kids’ dorm rooms (luckily we each get our own private dorm room with a private, cold-running shower.) We drop our bags, wash up, and go meet the kids.

And it turns out that a fifth of them are Americans! You see, this wasn’t just a programming camp--it was also an English and cross-cultural experience camp. Approximately 15 high-school kids from Florida and California were being flown out, all expenses paid, to be big-brother/big-sister with the Chinese kids, who were in late elementary school. The chaperone (we’ll call her Margaret; in fact I can’t actually remember her name, but it definitely wasn’t Margaret), the mother of one of the kids, was thoroughly perplexed--but, hey, a free trip to China.

So Nick and I go and look at the teaching rooms (this is about one in the afternoon). These aren’t the sparkling, spacious computer labs we saw on the website, oh no. We have a couple of primary school classrooms no more than about five meters by six, with laughably tiny kindergartner-sized chairs and tables. There’s a smartboard, which we can barely get to run and which we can’t connect to our computers to show the programs the kids are supposed to run. There’s no free access to the wifi. Instead, we have to get our teaching assistants to put their login credentials on every single device that needs to connect to the wifi--and since you have to have wifi to connect to the robots, well. In other words, it’s going to be a s***show, and we’ve got five mornings of it ahead of us.

We know the inevitable talk/confrontation with our boss/program coordinator is going to be a disaster, so we leave for a few hours to try and find a six-pack of Tsingtao. Remember how I said this was in the middle of nowhere? It was in the middle of nowhere. We walk out of the gates for a full kilometer (possibly more; the road meandered, and the terrain was by no means flat) past construction sites and dense forest bordering on jungle until we finally, finally reach an air-conditioned convenience store nestled between auto-repair shops, low-rise tile-walled tenements, light industry and eight-kuai noodle parlors. (Those of you who have been outside of a major city center in China will know the kind of neighborhood I’m talking about--not dangerous, by any means (except for the traffic), but boring, sprawling and not overly prosperous.) But they have beer, and we knock back two each along with a good liter of water.

We have a chat with the supervisor at about 9 o’clock that evening while the kids are engaging in...god, I don’t even recall. I think the Chinese kids were in bed, while the Americans were playing cards and vidya. Now readers who have spent much time in China or with Chinese organizations will know that it is a faux pas in China to admit fault, and an even bigger faux pas to play hardball to get somebody to admit fault. The result, usually, is deflection--our supervisor didn’t know about any of this, it wasn’t her fault, she would ask her boss to try and improve things.

(I don’t wish to come across as too hard on Chinese culture here. I think this is really a situation where American and Chinese culture are doomed to clash, and clash badly. If you fuck up in the US, you’re supposed to admit fault and apologize, at least theoretically--deflection and white lies are infuriating on the receiving end and the natural reaction is to start tearing them apart to get an admission of contrition. In China, the convention is often that you tell a white lie or deflect to save face--and if the other person you’re talking to is Chinese, they’ll often accept that even if it’s not really believed. The result in Chinese-American communication can be an arms race, where the American will get ticked off at the deflection and perceived dishonesty and start playing hardball, which prompts more deflection. Looking back on it now, it was clear that trying to play hardball with our supervisor was pointless--we were never going to get good computer labs or WiFi, and the only thing to do was to figure out something to do. But knowing that we’d at least theoretically been hired to teach programming, we endeavoured to do our best. (Remember, between flying all the Americans over and the company’s profit, the Chinese parents were getting fleeced.) Nick had recently discovered the stern precepts of Jordan Peterson after catching herpes-type-2 (that’s the bad kind) of the mouth from a liaison with his dermatologist, and reminded me that it was our duty to do the best we could by the students.

Day one: Monday.

There are about 70-75 kids in the program between the Chinese and the Americans, so we have about 35 each at least in classrooms of about fifteen square meters, sitting on tiny little kindergarten chairs at tiny little kindergarten desks (not so much of a problem for the Chinese elementary-schoolers, much more uncomfortable for the American high-schoolers). Our teaching assistants spend most of their time in the back playing on their phones after they’ve set the WiFi on each device, which takes about an hour to get worked out. (Remember, three-hour class with a fifteen-minute break). Each room has an underpowered air conditioner which succeeds in reducing the temperature from the mid-30s C to the upper 20s (from about 92 to 78 in freedom degrees) if the windows are closed, at the cost of any breezes.

And we run into the first problem. Your device uses WiFi to connect automatically and effortlessly to a nearby Pocketbot. That’s not a problem when you’re in a spacious computer lab with ten other people and a strong signal. When you’re in a tiny little room with thirty-five other people and a network that wouldn’t have been out of place in the last years of the Clinton administration, well. 

Some kids couldn’t connect to their bot at all. Others were controlling four robots at once with a single device. Some were able to stay connected through the session, others’ internet kept crapping out every ten minutes.

After an hour and twenty minutes of this, we call a twenty-minute break.

easternestablishmentarian: “What the fuck do we even do?”

Nick: “No idea. Start in on the basic ideas of programming. Have the teaching assistants translate.”

We do. The teaching assistants are not all that happy about having to play translator, particularly since their English isn’t very good and the concepts are, well, complicated! I had some success in doing the teacher-as-robot routine you see in intro programming classes, where you have to tell the teacher exactly what to do (Keep going! *teacher-bot crashes into wall*), and extended this up to about half past eleven by making it a group activity where the Chinese kids had to direct their American big-sibling robots around the room. We spent about another fifteen minutes trying to do something, anything, with the robots--remember, we couldn’t show our laptop screens on the smartboard, which didn’t work, so we had to draw the program with chalk. At about 11:45 we just call it quits and let them leave for lunch early.

Right after lunch (which, incidentally, was extremely strange--the cafeteria staff had been instructed to try to make some sort of Chinese-Western fusion, with results like spaghetti with both tomato and soy sauce. If only they’d just stuck to good local dishes, of which there are hundreds, but oh well...) we call an emergency meeting with Margaret.

Margaret: You guys aren’t going to bail on us, are you? I have no clue what’s going on.

Me: No, but it’s clear that there’s no way to do programming and the kids’ll hate it. Let’s just do a regular summer camp.

Later that day we go back out for more beer and sketch out a plan. We don’t have WiFi or devices worth a damn, so electronics are off. However, we do have a campus of at least twenty or thirty acres filled with small fields and six-story dorms and classrooms connected by a labyrinth of walkways. (During the school year, the school is home to about three thousand students, all boarding, so it’s the size of a couple city blocks at least.)

We call a meeting with our supervisor.

Nick: This isn’t working. We can’t do programming.

Supervisor: Well, do you have any other ideas?

Nick: We could do sports and games.

Supervisor: Oh, I think that will be wonderful!

(Nick, later: “How much are these parents paying again?”)

Day two: Tuesday.

We start with Sardines, which degenerates into chaotic hide-and-seek but keeps them occupied for a good hour and a half. The teaching assistants are sent to look for athletic equipment like basketballs, which they’re not too happy about. Midway through break we run out of cups.

Us: “It’s 35 degrees outside and we don’t have enough water. There are only two water dispensers for 80 people and no more cups.”

Teaching assistant: “Oh, well, we didn’t know we would run out. I don’t know where the water is, maybe they can bring some tomorrow.”

Us: *sigh*

We discover that some air-conditioned buses (dlory! dlory! hallelujah!) stop right in front of the school and run towards a major commercial center. We go out for hotpot.

Nick: “So, fun fact--I’m actually on a spousal visa. I married a local chick for visa purposes.”

Me: “Huh.”

Nick: “Yeah, we divorced, but the immigration department doesn’t have access to divorce records and my visas’s still valid. Can’t technically work on it, though.”

Day three: Wednesday.

Capture the Flag, followed by semi-structured time in which the Americans are divided into groups, assigned Chinese students, and instructed to create activities. We run out of cups again.

Nick: *drinking straight from the water dispenser tap*

Me: “Didn’t you say you caught...”

Nick: “Shut up, easternestablishmentarian.”

Me: “...”

Me: “There are seventy-five kids here.”

Nick: “Just shut up.”

I buy my own personal supply of bottled water that afternoon. He did agree to only fill up a bottle from that point onwards.

Us: “Supervisor, please tell us--will there be WiFi when one of us teaches programming with the robots in Lu’an in Anhui?”

Supervisor: “Oh, uh, I don’t know, I am not going to Anhui.”

Us: “Please find out.”

Day four: Thursday. 

It being sunny and slightly cooler, we take the kids on a hike through a back trail that goes by a farm and into the woods. Guangdong proves to be home to some terrifyingly large arthropods, none of which are aggressive.

After lunch, we debate who will go on to Lu’an. Nick makes a good case for needing the money, so I cede it (in part because Anhui is a notoriously boring and underdeveloped province, and Lu’an is only its second- or third-biggest city).

Us: “So, supervisor, please tell us.”

Supervisor: “Oh, yes, there is no WiFi for the summer camp in Anhui, I asked.”

Us: “But Nick’s going to be teaching robots again?”

Supervisor: “Well, maybe he can also teach something else, like English, but yes, it’s a robot camp.”

Us: “But you need WiFi to work with the robots.”

Supervisor: “Oh, I’m not the supervisor in Anhui, just here in Shenzhen, so I didn’t know.”

Day five: Friday.

After a laughably pointless closing ceremony, we collect our paychecks (in cash) and head into Shenzhen, where Nick tries to send it out. 

Bank teller: “So, uh, what are you doing in China?”

Nick: “I’m visiting family, it’s a spousal visa.”

Bank teller: “OK, so I don’t think this is possible, you have the tax form?” (note: this is quite common for foreigners, even those on legal visas--foreigners’ money has all sorts of systems and regulations surrounding it that most bank tellers don’t know how to handle (because there are so few foreigners), and to avoid losing face they will often just tell you that it’s not possible to do what you want to do.)

At this point, I’m starting to shake my head furiously in Nick’s direction--get us out of here before they start asking questions about where this money came from and call immigration. After two hours, we give up.

Me: “You could have gotten us deported.”

Nick: “Nah, man, they’re just clueless bank tellers.”

I fly back to Chengdu the following day seven thousand kuai richer, while Nick hangs on until Sunday and then flies to Lu’an with the Americans, where another group of Chinese kids get their parents fleeced for robots that don’t work (though, as he told it, things worked out fine, kind of.) The kids, incidentally, were great about the whole incident--the Chinese kids I think in part because their lives are so structured that just getting to run around was a breath of fresh air for them. The Americans were fairly willing to work around the absurdity. Nobody got deported and nothing’s appeared in the news about an epidemic of the sort of disease that schoolchildren aren’t supposed to get.

So we come to the moral of the story, children: all’s well that ends well, and buy your own water.

[ionecoffman]

83 Things That Blew Our Minds in 2018

Most “Himalayan” pink salt is from the Punjab area of Pakistan, not the actual Himalayas.

Hippos poop so much that sometimes all the fish die.

In addition to the supermassive black hole at its center, the Milky Way galaxy may be home to thousands of smaller black holes, invisible to even our finest scientific instruments.

There’s a parasitic fungus that doses cicadas with the hallucinogen found in shrooms before making their butts fall off.

The Arctic Ocean is now so warm that its floating sea ice can melt even during the coldest, darkest times of the year.

You can make thousands of dollars a week charging electric scooters.

When your eyes look right, your eardrums bulge to the left, and vice versa. And the eardrums move 10 milliseconds before the eyes do.

More than 2 million years ago, well before Homo sapiens evolved, one of our ancient-human relatives lived in what is now China.

Women who have had six to 10 sexual partners in their lives have the lowest odds of marital happiness, according to one study.

When Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium opened in 1930, the inland aquarium had to ship a million gallons of ocean water by train from Key West, Florida.

Twitter is the preferred social network for nudists to meet and connect online.

The population of older adults who misuse opioids is projected to double from 2004 to 2020.

The data economy didn’t begin with Google or Facebook in the 2000s, but with electronic information systems called a relational databases, first conceived of in 1969.

At their most voracious, wildfires can grow 100 feet high and consume a football field of forest every second.

People with autism are 10 times as likely to die by suicide as those in the general population.

The number of exclamation points now necessary to convey genuine enthusiasm online is, according to most internet users, three.

An “ice tsunami” killed a herd of musk oxen in February 2011 and kept their bodies perfectly entombed for seven years.

Ten thousand years ago, the people who lived in Europe had dark skin and blue eyes.

Facebook sent huge volumes of data about you and your friends to millions of apps from 2007 to 2014, and you have no way to control—or even know—how that information gets used.

A fishing cat is a water-loving cat species that lives in swamps, quacks like a duck, and dives from riverbanks to snag unsuspecting fish.

Astrology is experiencing a resurgence among Millennials, fueled by meme culture, stress, and a desire for subjectivity in an increasingly quantified world.

In the beginning of 2018, Amazon had 342 fulfillment centers, Prime hubs, and sortation centers in the United States, up from 18 in 2007.

Ivy League universities took nude photos of incoming freshman students for decades.

Some fundamentalist Christian groups think the spread of implantable technology is a key sign of the impending apocalypse.

The shopping mall put a cap on consumerism as much as it promoted it.

Bees stop buzzing during total solar eclipses.

The scientist who advised the production team of Interstellar made so much progress on his research in the process that it led him to publish multiple scientific papers.

High fibrinogen content can help a blood clot stay in a shape like putty—even if it gets violently coughed up.

Many butterflies in the nymphalid group can hear with their wings.

Some scientists think the reason you want to squeeze or nibble on a particularly cute baby is to snap your brain out of the euphoria that cuteness can summon, making you able to tend to the baby’s needs.

In the fourth quarter of last year, 25 percent of all new office space leased or built in the United States was taken by Amazon.

The first scooter was invented in 1990 by a guy who really wanted a bratwurst.

The streets of Boston carry an average of four gas leaks a mile.

In August, Oxford University’s Said Business School came up with a clever way for homeless people to receive cashless donations: Donors could scan the barcodes on homeless people’s lanyards to send them money.

Don’t worry if you forget all the facts you read in this article by tomorrow—that’s normal.

Many doctors have difficulty accessing the health records of patients treated previously at another facility; less than half of hospitals integrate electronic patient data from outside their system.

The original indigenous American dogs are completely gone, and their closest living relative isn’t even a dog—it’s a contagious global cancer.

Donald Trump can’t really send a message directly to your phone. In fact, the president’s ability to address the nation directly in a time of crisis, available since the 1960s, has never been used.

In 1995, a man in Germany realized his pet crayfish was cloning itself. Clones of that crayfish have now spread all over the world.

Four hundred years after Galileo discovered Jupiter’s largest moons, astronomers are still discovering some tiny ones.

The fastest someone has ever hiked all 2,189 miles of the Appalachian Trail is 41 days, seven hours, and 39 minutes. That averages out to roughly two marathons a day.

The lifespan of a meme has shrunk from several months in 2012 to just a few days in 2018.

Elon Musk’s $20 million SEC fine might make his ill-advised “funding secured” tweets the most expensive ever.

Thousands of horseshoe crabs are bled every year to create a miraculous medical product that keeps humans alive.

Single-celled microorganisms can survive in lab conditions that simulate the icy environment of Saturn’s moon Enceladus.

Only 10 major hurricanes have ever made landfall along the Southeast Atlantic coast, if you don’t count Florida.

Animals that live in cities are sometimes found to outperform their rural counterparts on intelligence tests.

Jupiter’s famous Great Red Spot is shrinking.

The paleontology consultant for Jurassic Park had a Tyrannosaurus rex eat a doppelgänger of another researcher with whom he had academic beef.

Some people think tennis balls are green while others think they’re yellow, and the disagreement has a lot to do with how our brains perceive color.

Conservatives tend to find life more meaningful than liberals do.

It’s easier for spacecraft to leave the solar system than to reach the sun. Thanks, physics.

Despite giving away hundreds of millions of dollars to charity, the Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen was worth $20 billion when he died, 48 percent more than when he signed the Giving Pledge in 2010 and promised to give away at least half his wealth.

China consumes 28 percent of the world’s meat—with the average resident eating 140 pounds a year.

Europa, a moon of Jupiter, may be covered in 50-foot-tall blades of ice.

You can reconstruct a pretty decent record of historical whaling intensity by measuring the stress hormones in the earwax of a few dozen whales.

Doing a good deed—or even imagining doing a good deed—can boost an athlete’s endurance by reinforcing his or her sense of agency in the world.

A science adviser on Stargate: Atlantis imagined a fictional astronomical phenomenon called a binary pulsar system for the show. Years later, such a system was found in real life.

The lowercase g in Google’s original logo is really, really weird.

Sixty percent of gun deaths in 2017 were suicides.

From 1984 to 2015, the area of forest in the American West that burned in wildfires was double what it would have been without climate change.

An astrologer came up with the phrase “super blue blood moon” to describe a celestial event that’s much less scary than it sounds.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal caused 42 percent of Facebook users to change their behavior on the platform, according to a survey conducted by The Atlantic. Ten percent of those people deleted or deactivated their accounts.

In the absence of federal regulation or good research about how skin-care products work, communities of citizen scientists have started compiling pretty decent resources.

The figure-eight trajectory flown by the Apollo moon missions was the very same path followed by fictional astronauts in a classic silent film from 1929, Woman in the Moon.

After one year in America, just 8 percent of immigrants are obese, but among those who have lived in the U.S. for 15 years, the obesity rate is 19 percent.

There’s a spider that makes milk.

Goats love to feast on weeds, and you can rent dozens of them to landscape your lawn.

Some people have a bony growth on the back of their heel, called a pump bump, that makes it hard to wear pumps and other kinds of dressy shoes.

Astronomers can still detect ripples in the Milky Way caused by a close encounter with another galaxy hundreds of millions of years ago.

China built its rocket-launch facilities deep inland to protect them during the Cold War, but decades later it actually makes launching rockets into space more dangerous.

The folks who make Piaggio scooters hope you might buy an R2D2-like cargo robot to haul a case of Aperol home from the market.

Shifting the pitch of an audio recording can make it sound like an entirely different word.

Kids under the age of 8 spend 65 percent of their online time on YouTube.

A reservoir of liquid water may lurk just a mile beneath the ice-covered surface of Mars’s south pole.

When people overdose in public bathrooms, many service workers become the unwitting first line of medical responders.

Some people think that quantum computing will bring about the end of free will.

Mouse urine is a major cause of asthma for poor kids in Baltimore.

The House of Representatives’ longest-serving member, Alaska’s Don Young, was first elected to his seat after his opponent died.

In September, Hurricane Florence dropped about 18 trillion gallons of rain over the Carolinas—enough water to completely refill the Chesapeake Bay.

Europe suffered its worst carbon dioxide shortage in decades (think of the beer and the crumpets!) because of a closed ammonia fertilizer plant. Yes, these two things are related.

Americans spent $240 billion on jewelry, watches, books, luggage, and communication equipment such as telephones in 2017, twice as much as they spent in 2002, even though the population grew just 13 percent during that time.

People get more colds in winter because chilly temperatures make it easier for microbes to reproduce inside your nose.

Article source here:The Atlantic

[travelonlinetipsofficial]

10 Best Romantic Things to Do in Paris

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10 Best Romantic Things to Do in Paris

Spending time relaxing together, just the two of you, is another way to celebrate love. In Paris there are countless ways in which to paint the town a Valentine red, but one of the most intimately romantic is to spend time together at a small, intimate theater on the Ile Saint-Louis. This gem, the Theatre de L’Ile St. Louis, is a 35-seater and has nightly programming, both of concerts and plays. What’s even better, an assortment of top-notch restaurants on the little island in the center of Paris, are less than a 5-minute walk away.

Another intimate way to celebrate the You that is the 2 of you, is a spa experience. Relaxing in the steam room, enjoying a glass of champagne in the hot tub and finishing with a massage is a romantic dream come true. The ultimate discreet Parisian spa is Sensation Spa in the 7th arrondissement. Or you could always spend an evening at Le Grand Rex, Europe’s biggest movie theater found here, in Paris. Located in the Grands Boulevards area, this gorgeous, historic movie theater is surrounded by trendy bars and eateries for before or after. 

Paris is a city full of the emblems of love. Of course, the notion of romantic love is a relatively recent social concept, springing up first in historical references only in the late 17th c. It is even thought that the origin of the English word “romance” originates from a French vernacular dialect. Perfume, too, is credited to France. Le Grand Musee du Parfum is a sensual way to explore the art of scent with one another.

To celebrate love & romance in the City of Love, one needn’t wait for Valentine’s Day. Any special occasion or any special moment enjoyed by lovers can be revered as a sort of private Valentine’s moment.  On this list, you will find just ten (of the dozens and dozens of possibilities here in Paris) recommendations of how to pay homage to this most noble of human emotions – love. To start with, book yourselves tickets online for L’Atelier des Lumieres. This immersive digital art experience, highlighting chosen artists, has been a hit since it first opened its doors in Paris a few short years ago. It is a family friendly activity, too, just in case your ‘date night’ includes the little ones. On that note, the Palais de la Decouverte is another immersive, experiential excursion that can be enjoyed ‘en deux’ or ‘en famille.‘ Their current temporary exhibit is devoted to L’Amour and understanding the physiological science behind it. 

So, even though each year Valentine’s Day is the holiday that focuses all of us romantics on the romantic nature of love, for lucky Parisians, romance is just a state of mind. And this is a sate of mind that, with some discipline, you can embody every day of the year. For example, simply take a walk across the famous ‘Lover’s Bridge,’ the Pont des Arts at sunset or sunrise, to get that rush of romance. 

The Eiffel Tower of course beckons seductively to all who visit Paris. So to give your visit that extra shot of romantic, start at the Trocadero which affords a wonderful view onto the Eiffel Tower in the near distance.  And for those looking to pay tribute to Love itself, there is Le Mur des Je T’Aime a whole, wall dedicated to declarations of love. 

      A newer edition to the city’s cultural landscape, this aptly named ‘Light Workshop’ for the City of Light, draws you into an immersive art experience. Housed in a cavernous building in the trendy 11th arrondissement, once you step through the black doors, you enter into not just the chosen artist’s world, but his/her imagination, too. Digitally projected images from the artist’s repertoire and life are projected on all walls, the floor and the ceiling, creating a swirling light show all around you. It is a sort of Sound & Light show 2.0…but the immersive experience, the sound of music and narrative that accompanies the spectacle and the overall sensory stimulation makes this better than going to the movies. It’s also a great family activity.

Recommended for Romantic Things to Do because: An instant hit in the City of Light, this art-come-alive show by Culturespace draws spectators in and keeps them enthralled for the duration.

Paige’s expert tip: This is an all-ages activity. Many of the spectators walk around the floor space and then find themselves a spot to just sit back, gaze around and take it all in. The spectacle lasts about an hour, give or take, but you can stay as long as you like if you want to catch it on repeat.

Read more about Atelier des Lumieres →

A contemporary art museum dedicated to exhibiting and then supporting the artists even after the exhibits through the purchase of their work, this beautiful museum is a favorite of many Parisians. It is nestled in the Montparnasse district of Paris, hence it is central and accessible. The foundation collaborates with other city institutions to expand its exhibiting reach. The wildly popular, ‘We The Trees,’ temporary exhibit was extended several months and some of the auxiliary audio-visual media material can still be accessed on the site. This isn’t the only example of dynamic curating that the young team at the Fondation has a penchant for, so check the website to see what’s current. Likely there will be something that appeals to your artistic senses. And the grounds, in the summer time, are a welcoming, shady place to take a breath and enjoy an outdoor snack.

Recommended for Romantic Things to Do because: Nestled in an accessible Montparnasse neighborhood, this museum’s popularity with the local Parisians is understandable once you’ve visited.

Paige’s expert tip: Don’t be fooled by the name, this foundation is looks, acts and feels like a museum. It is devoted to contemporary art and its philosophy is such that the foundation purchases a substantial portion of the art it exhibits. Hence, it is more than just a place of display.

Read more about Fondation Cartier →

This museum in Paris is devoted fully to the art of perfume. It is a private museum funded partially with state funds and partially by private investors. Perfume is as integral to French culture as couture, fine wine and art. That there had not yet existed in the French capital a museum wholly devoted to perfume, unaffiliated with a perfume brand, was seen as something of an empty space that needed filling. The museum’s location is just a block or so away from the French White House, the Elysee. It is devoted to sensory perception and has been designed to be highly interactive. Visitors are easily and luxuriously drawn into testing their olfactory senses and playing at finding the scents that most please them. In the four floors of the perfume museum (including the Roederer-like champagne cellars basement) of the renovated private mansion, the visitor is introduced to the history of perfum and its importance at the King’s court especially Versailles. The upper floors are devoted to sensory and smell perceptions. This is a museum that is certain to appeal to both young and old, male and female.

Recommended for Romantic Things to Do because: Walking through the garden of scents installation is a delightful way to test your olfactory senses.

Paige’s expert tip: Experts tell us that our sense of smell is inseparably intertwined with our memories. Here you can make beautiful memories together while exploring your sense of smell and the making of perfume, with your significant other. In the four floors of the perfume museum (including the Roederer-like champagne cellars basement) of the renovated private mansion, the visitor is introduced to the history of perfume and its importance at the King’s court especially Versailles. The upper floors are devoted to sensory and smell perception. Walking through the garden of scents installation is a delightful way to test your olfactory prowess.

Read more about Le Grand Musee du Parfum →

This is Europe’s largest movie theater and its location right on Grands Boulevards means it’s walking distance from the major department stores and one of Paris’s best shopping districts. With 2,650 seats it was purportedly modeled after NYC’s Radio City Music Hall. It opened in 1932 and its kitschy interior is still a mix between Art Deco and neo-classical Oriental. Best to see for yourself, and you can, as there is a 50-minute tour of the cinema that you can take year-round. The theater is not to be confused with its dance club, the Rex Club, which is adjoined and whose entrance is just a few yards down the way (known for its electro-pop music). Le Grand Rex is hands-down the most most impressive movie theater, in terms of largesse, d�cor and history, in Paris.

Recommended for Romantic Things to Do because: This is Europe’s largest movie theater and a Parisian landmark perfect for a date night out on the town.

Paige’s expert tip: Take the 50 minute tour of the cinema, offered year-round. There is also a nightclub just next door, by the same name. So after your movie is finished, you can continue your night by dancing in the club just a door down.

Read more about Le Grand Rex →

Ever felt like escaping back to childhood? Where there was magic, model trains, life-sized unicorns, dragons and pretend kings and fairy princesses? This museum offers you exactly that kind of escape. It’s probably one of the least famous museums in Paris, which will make it all the more magical when you discover it. Yes, it’s a favorite of families, especially at the holiday times, when the museum puts all its rides into action and the grounds become one big old-style amusement park. But there is also such romance here, full of nostalgia and a time when carousel horses were hand carved out of wood and painted by a master craftsman. Come with your significant other and you will be sharing in these delights with the person who matters most. It will be sort of like watching the sunset together – infinitely better when the moment is shared.

Recommended for Romantic Things to Do because: It isn’t every day that you get to walk through a 19th century carnival grounds come alive. This one is interactive and authentic.

Paige’s expert tip: Every year at the end of the year, the ten days or so between Christmas and the start of the new year, this museum puts all its rides in action and has puppet masters, street performers and tap dancers animating the entire grounds. It becomes much more than a museum at this time, it becomes an interactive fair ground come alive from the 19th c.

Read more about Musee des Arts Forains →

This museum, set in the Hotel Biron, is a tribute to one of the world’s finest sculptors. Thanks to Rodin’s own donations, the facility offers a wealth of objects, including terra cotta, bronze and marble creations. Plaster and wax studies are available as well, along with his sketches, drawings, engravings, and his own collected art. Among the items on display are “The Kiss” and the sculpture that brought Rodin much fame, The Thinker. The museum is now re-opened after 3 years (2012 – 2015) of renovations on the main building, Hotel Biron, which is an early 18th c. building. The gardens are an idyllic draw unto themselves. They were also the setting for the scene where former First Lady of France, Carla Bruni, played her role for Woody Allen’s film, Midnight in Paris. A café in the gardens offers refreshments.

Recommended for Romantic Things to Do because: This is a museum that offers as much viewing outdoors as indoors. It’s a pleasing blend for all in your party, whatever the weather.

Paige’s expert tip: Just one euro gets you entrance to these magnificent gardens, a gorgeous place to quietly sit and read a book. It is also favored by art students who bring their sketch pads for some still-life practice.

Read more about Musee Rodin →

Paris is often considered to be the city of love, ideal for romance, and epitomizing that Paris aura is the Le Mur des Je T’aime, aka the I Love You Wall. This understated work of art is in a Paris park (Square Jehan Rictus Place des Abbesses in Montmartre) amidst flowers and trees, which add to the romance of the wall. What makes this wall so appealing for love that it has become the meeting place for romantics? On the black wall are 311 declarations of love in 250 different languages written in white. It’s a simple, but powerful work of art paying homage to one of the most powerful phrases in all languages: I love you.

Recommended for Romantic Things to Do because: To escape from the city and indulge in relaxation and rejuvenation without having to go anywhere is the key to an excellent urban spa getaway.

Paige’s expert tip: Look up how to say “I love you” in several different languages and then search for them on the wall. This is a fun game to play with kids or to create a bit of fun competition between you and your significant other to see who can find each phrase first.

Read more about Le Mur des Je T’aime →

The Pont des Arts, a pedestrian bridge across the Seine, connects the Louvre with the Latin Quarter while offering some of the city’s most stunning views. It is also known as the Lover’s Bridge since lovers have been coming here for centuries to gaze into one another’s eyes. In recent years, the phenomena of Love Locks has swept not just Paris but romantic spots throughout the world. Alas, this bridge, however, became one of the epicenters for this cultural tradition and its 19th c. railings crumbled under the weight of all that love. The city replaced these with plexiglass panels. In the evenings it is a popular spot to come share a bottle of wine that special someone, and also just to sit and revel in the sounds of the street musicians, the passersby and other lovers such as yourselves, while basking in the breathtaking views.

Recommended for Romantic Things to Do because: Gazing at the sunset from this bridge with Notre Dame in one direction and the Grand Palais/Eiffel Tower in another is a timeless moment.

Paige’s expert tip: Last summer the bridge’s metal paneling began to give way under the weight of all the Love Locks fastened to them. So the city has started a campaign called #LoveWithoutLocks, a digital wall where you can post your declarations of love.

Read more about Le Pont des Arts →

A more charming ‘community theatre’ does not exist anywhere! Located on the ancient, historical and aristocratic Quai d’Anjou; at the end of a short covered passageway full of flowers and flora, is where you’ll find this little theatre. There is something going on nearly every day, often piano recitals at 6:30 in the evenings, and even more entertaining fare, such as theatre or musical variety shows from 9pm. This intimate little theatre is famous for its elegance as well as its programming. It seats a total of about 30 people on plush, red velvet theatre seats. The box office opens about 30 minutes before the show. Or you can reserve in advance and buy you tickets online. Check their website for upcoming shows, concerts and theatre pieces. Even such greats as Michael Lonsdale have headlined plays and presentations here, so be prepared to be charmed and pleasantly surprised.

Recommended for Romantic Things to Do because: With all the wonderful theaters to choose from in Paris, this one remains the most intimate and, certainly for a romantic evening, the best location.

Paige’s expert tip: There are few places in Paris more romantic that the Ile St. Louis. It becomes even moreso, the more you hear about its storied past and the greats who have called this little island in the center of Paris ‘home.’ A winning romantic evening is the following: A piano recital show at the only theatre here on the island, followed by dinner at any of the magnificent restaurants to be found within a short 5 minute walk. Or, reverse the order, and do the 9pm show after dinner.

Read more about Theatre de L’Ile Saint Louis – Paul Rey →

Located next to the Grand Palais, this science and technology museum (museum of discovery is the literal translation) is smaller and older than the Cite; des Sciences, and it has a charm all its own. Created in 1937 to help people understand scientific methods, the museum brings in excellent temporary exhibits to augment its permanent displays on physics, biology, electricity and astronomy. The real philosophy behind this museum is that most of us learn and comprehend scientific theory better when we have a chance to experience it. So many of the temporary and permanent exhibits here are hands-on. That’s a feature that is sure to make the kids, big and small, crack a smile. It also has a wonderful collection of original Da Vinci designs. Note: explanations are often in French only. METRO: Champs Elys–es-Clemenceau (line 1 or 3)

Recommended for Romantic Things to Do because: This is an interactive, fascinating science museum for young and old that happens to be just steps from the Champs-Elysées.

Paige’s expert tip: This museum is even better when you, or someone in your party, speak a bit of French. However, there are designated multilingual “scientific mediators” whose passion for science helps transmit the understanding of some of the basic scientific principles, like electricity.If yçu’ve ever visited the Exploratorium in San Francisco, you can easily draw comparisons to this immersive museum. Recent temporary exhibits include ‘De l’Amour,’ an exhibit dedicated to the physiological science behind love.

Read more about Palais de la Decouverte →

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18 Best Things to do in Portland, Oregon

On the USA’s west coast, Portland, Oregon is the state’s largest city yet a haven for lovers of nature, quirky characters, charming neighborhoods, and small city life.

Among the food trucks, craft beer, and historic buildings in downtown Portland, the locals thrive to keep Portland weird. In the city center are an abundance of green spaces, rose gardens, hipster cafes, street art, and amazing ice cream.

Best Things to do in Portland Oregon

Portland, Oregon, USA skyline at dusk on the Willamette River.

This comprehensive guide to the best things to do in Portland will help you explore the city’s weird side and see why it’s one of the most interesting places in the US. Interested in exploring Oregon? Check out our guide to the best things to do in the Beaver State.

Powell’s City of Books

In a city that embraces the old with vigor and substance, it’s no surprise that Portland is home to the biggest new and used bookstore on earth. Powell’s City of Books is a local institution. It’s an independent bookstore that covers an entire city block of Portland’s northern downtown.

Even if you have no plans of picking up a novel to enjoy some light reading, exploring the store is enough of an adventure in itself. Check-in and grab yourself a map so you don’t get lost roaming the aisles containing over four million books.

We love getting on the water when visiting any city, book this Portland dinner cruise through downtown Portland to see the sights along the Willamette River as you enjoy a delicious three-course dinner with entertainment and narration.

Forest Park

As the city’s biggest park and one of the best things to do in Portland, Forest Park must find its way onto your itinerary. Even in what is a growing city, the park is an excellent place to enjoy fresh air and feel a world away from the bustle of downtown.

Throughout Forest Park Portland, you will be inundated with amazing views, whether that be Mt Hood or the Willamette River. The endless miles of trails will take you to iconic spots like the Pittock Mansion or the spooky Witch’s Castle, where ghosts roam under the moonlight. Switch it up with a bike ride, or pack a picnic and soak up the scenery.

Or better yet, book this Portland Bike Tour to explore the Willamette River, sample donuts, learn about the neighborhoods and see the city from a different perspective.

Portland Art Museum

If you enjoy your art, then one of the top things to do in Portland is to explore the Portland Art Museum. Near the Portland State University campus, the art museum features work from across the globe and also focuses on Pacific Northwest Native American Art.

You could spend a full day wandering the halls and taking in several masterpieces, stunning photography and iconic prints. However, even with just an hour or two, you can still make the most of the experience.

Pittock Mansion

One of the most prominent Portland attractions is the Pittock Mansion. The dramatic mansion was built in 1914 in the French renaissance-style. The Pittock family, who called it home, were major players in developing Portland, Oregon, into the city it is today.

Consisting of over 40 rooms and 16,000 square feet, the Pittock Mansion is well worth exploring on a guided tour. However, its location within Forest Park makes it the perfect spot to relax on your adventures through the woods.

International Rose Test Garden

Known as the City of Roses, Portland is home to the stunning and public Rose Test Garden. Found within Washington Park, you will discover over 500 varieties of roses sources from around the globe. The roses are sent here to test viability and the plants characteristics.

Although open year-round, the garden is best seen between the months of May and September. During that time period, more than 10,000 rose bushes bloom in unison, backed by the incredible views of Mt Hood. After the garden, wander over to the iconic ice cream shop Salt & Straw for some distinctive ice cream flavors.

Pearl District

Many cities have amazing examples of rundown districts born again and old neighborhoods with a ‘rags to riches tale’. Portland’s version of this is the Pearl District. Once home to warehouses and disintegrating brick buildings, the Pearl District is one of the best places to eat and drink in Portland.

The Pearl District is home to several fantastic art galleries, cafes for your morning cup and some of the best dining in the city when the tummy starts to grumble. Fans of craft beer will also delight in the neighborhood’s selection of delicious brewpubs, none more popular than Deschutes Brewery and Public House. Return in the evening when the laid-back district presents some of Portland’s best nightlife.

Washington Park

If you’re wondering what to do in Portland if you don’t have a car, then wonder no more. Washington Park is a sprawling urban oasis that is easily accessed with the help of Portland’s light rail.

Just 20 minutes from downtown, those visiting Portland will quickly fall in love with this open space. Bring your walking shoes, as there are 15 miles of trails to stroll while you will also have the chance to visit the Oregon Zoo and the International Rose Test Garden.

Columbia River Gorge

Following the immersive Historic Columbia River Highway, venturing to Columbia River Gorge is the perfect choice for those seeking a day trip from Portland. Spanning 80 miles along the river and soaring canyons, you will get the full fix of Oregon’s spectacular scenery.

Although you will have an abundance of epic lookouts along the way, make sure to leave time for the trip to Multnomah Falls. The Insta-famous waterfall is worth braving the crowds for, thanks to the memorable 542ft drop into a cascading pool. You can reach the falls by following the 5-mile Wahkeena Falls Loop Trail, which passes a total of 6 mesmerizing falls.

Book this highly rated Columbia River Gorge Waterfall Tour for an afternoon at the Columbia River Gorge including, Multnomah Fall, the Portland Women’s Forum, the Crown Point Vista House, Latourell Falls, and Shepperd’s Dell.

Portland Saturday Market

One of the best things to do in Portland on the weekend is to visit the Portland Saturday Market. Held every weekend from March until Christmas Eve, you will discover over 150 arts, crafts, and food vendors. They help make the market the largest fair of its kind in the United States.

Wake up early and partake in some fresh food shopping, or return in the afternoon to try some unique Portland eats under the Burnside Bridge. Cuisines hail from all around the world, including Thai, Nepalese, Greek and even some homegrown fresh catch and desserts.

Portland Japanese Garden

When exploring Washington Park in southwest Portland, stopping by the Portland Japanese Garden is a must. Although you will find plenty of green space to explore when in Portland, the garden is a unique attraction that stands out.

Seen as one of the best Japanese Gardens in the United States, you can easily find a moment of Zen among the stunning aesthetics from wooden bridges over creeks to traditional rock gardens. Try the matcha tea as you sit in the peaceful open spaces catching glimpses of the towering Mount Hood.

Old Town Chinatown

One of the best places to start your adventures in Portland is within that city’s Old Town Chinatown. As one of the most historic neighborhoods in Portland, Old Town harbors the secrets of the city’s early days, including the infamous Shanghai Tunnels.

Also known as the Old Portland Underground, these tunnels used to connect the suppliers at the port directly to the businesses via, you guessed it, tunnels. That was until shady happenings continued to occur within the confines of the tunnels. Organized crime would not just take the produce but kidnap the port’s sailors, also known as Shanghaiing.

Over time, the historical accuracies have blurred, but a tour of the tunnels is one of the best things to do in Portland.

Tom McCall Waterfront Park

Placed along the Willamette River, which divides Portland, the Tom McCall Waterfront Park is a beautiful spot to take in the river. Throughout the day you will find locals walking and jogging the Waterfront Park Trail, taking in the views of the city, park, river and port.

Come here to not only enjoy some peace but also to visit the Oregon Maritime Museum, the Salmon Street Springs or the smallest park in the world, Mill Ends Park. If you have arrived in time for sunset, continue on to Broadway Bridge for views of the colorful sky. Later, walk across the bridge for a night among the brewpubs in southeast Portland.

Alberta Arts District

Northeast Portland once had an infamous reputation, but over the years it has transformed into an artists’ hub and a neighborhood for expression and creativity. From this, the Alberta Arts District was born.

Based around Alberta Street, you will discover a youthful community of art galleries and homegrown boutiques. What will come as a shock to no one is that the district comes with an abundance of murals and is the best spot for street art in Portland. Come with no plan and simply get lost walking the streets, hitting up some great brewpubs, cafes or street vendors along the way.

Voodoo Doughnut

The debate rages on about whether Blue Star Donuts are better than Voodoo Doughnut and no time in Portland would be complete without sampling at least one. Blue Star may be a local favorite, but the wild and innovative nature of Voodoo Doughnut makes it a memorable and must-do experience.

Voodoo loves to push the boundaries when it comes to creative donut-making. Where else can you find Capt’n Crunch toppings? So truth be told, they may not be for everyone, but there is only one way to find out.

The line is always out the door but moves quickly, so straddle up for a sweet treat adventure!

Oregon Zoo

Combining your favorite exhibits with conservation and fun education, the Oregon Zoo is one of top best things to do in Portland with kids. The zoo comprises five main sections featuring different continents and unique ecosystems. So your crew can circle the globe while getting an unobstructed view of the world’s most iconic animals.

When exploring the zoo, you won’t go hungry with multiple restaurants and coffee shops to choose from. Head to Growlers for pizza or order your lunch online and pick it up at AfriCafe, so your day doesn’t miss a beat.

Another great option to see wildlife is at the Portland Audubon Society.

Pioneer Courthouse Square

If downtown Portland had a gathering place, this would be it. The square is an urban park within the heart of the city, a spot where post-work festivities begin.

Beyond being a meeting point, the beautiful square is vibrant throughout the year. Concerts and festivals occur almost weekly, with Tuesdays and Thursdays bringing free lunchtime concerts to locals.

However, the atmosphere in ‘Portland’s living room’ reaches its peak during the winter festival season. Festivals include Winter Lights and the Holiday Ale Festival, a celebration of the state’s best craft beers.

Mississippi Avenue

If the question is what to do in Portland at night, then the answer is Mississippi Avenue. Mississippi is another neighborhood in Portland that has risen to fame based on its social vibe and arts. The main drag, Mississippi Avenue, provides the goods with quirky shops, food trucks, and homes that are now trendy restaurants.

The daytime brings plenty of walking adventures as you meander your way down the street. However, at night, this is the place to go to experience Portland’s live music scene. The standout among the bunch is Mississippi Studios.

Timberline Lodge

Along with the Columbia River Gorge, a trip to Timberline Lodge is a great way to experience the world around the Portland city limits. 90 minutes from downtown Portland, the Timberline Lodge is the base for many outdoor activities.

On the edge of the monstrous Mount Hood, this is the place to go for year-round skiing and big mountain hiking trails. Better yet, save the energy and ride the gondola up to 7000ft with epic views of the summit.

After the return journey, cozy up in front of the Timberline Lodge’s fireplace and have dinner at what feels like the top of the world.

Want the lowdown on hiking around the Portland area, from the Oregon coast to the Cascade Range? Check out our guide on the best hikes in Oregon.

Where to stay in Portland

There are several worthy areas in Portland to stay, from Mississippi to the Pearl District and Old Town, while southeast Portland provides many budget options. Below, we have listed three hotels to suit each budget.

Budget – With a vintage vibe and exposed brick, the Society Hotel is a top choice among budget travelers. Within walking distance of the Pearl District, a mouthwatering food scene, and Northwest Portland, you’ll have it all at your fingertips. Check rates and Reviews on TripAdvisor / Booking.com

Mid-Range – In Portland’s Northwest District, Park Lane Suites & Inn brings fantastic amenities at a great price. With a beautiful interior, well-equipped kitchen, and plush sofa, you’ll feel right at home. When you’re ready to explore Portland, the Lan Su Chinese Garden and Powell’s City of Books are steps away. Check rates and reviews on TripAdvisor / Booking.com

Luxury – With a rooftop terrace, indoor pool, and enormous suites, the Hampton Inn & Suites will be the perfect home in Portland. Within the Pearl District, you are close to all the action in the city center, the best Portland restaurants, and the Portland Art Museum. Check rates and reviews on TripAdvisor / Booking.com

Unique – Jupiter Hotel – We stayed at this hotel and loved its quirky vibe. A mid-century motor inn turned boutique hotel in the heart of Portland just minutes from downtown, the Pearl District, and the Rose Garden Arena. Check rates and Reviews on TripAdvisor / Booking.com

Where we Stayed: We also stated at The Benson a historic landmark hotel in Portland that was founded in 1913. With a European flair it is a Four Diamond hotel. Check rates and reviews on TripAdvisor / Booking.com

How to get to Downtown Portland

The major arrival point for Portland, Oregon, is through the city’s major airport. Portland Airport is 9 miles from downtown Portland and the best way to travel is on the MAX light-rail train. The trip takes just under 40 minutes to complete, starting at 4:45 am, with the last train at 11:50 pm. Tickets cost $2.50 for adults.

Taxis and ride-share services provide alternatives. Depending on traffic, a trip takes anywhere from 20 to 40 minutes. Costs for a taxi hover around $35.

Shuttles are another common option. Some Portland hotels provide free shuttle transfers.

Amtrak also connects to Portland via several western USA cities.

Getting around Portland

One thing that quickly becomes noticeable as you travel around Portland is just how great bicycles are and how bad the car traffic is.

That doesn’t mean you should rule out hiring a car when in town. In fact, to enjoy the coast and the mountains on either side of the city, then you’ll need four wheels.

However, with great public transportation, you can get almost anywhere within Portland.

Bus – The TriMet bus system operates over 80 lines throughout the city. You can plan your journey on their website and attain arrival times and details of each stop. Beware that there are fewer services in the evening and the vast majority end after 1 am.

Light Rail – If you are downtown, then using the MAX light rail and the Portland Streetcar are two easy ways to get around. The light rail is reasonably extensive and easy to use. For trip planning, you can download the app on the TriMet website.

To make life easier and cheaper, grab a Hop Fastpass Card. Use all forms of transport without having to worry about cash.

Bicycle – Portland has an abundance of bike lanes and a strong bike share system. Drivers here are also more aware of their two-wheeled counterparts than elsewhere in the States. The bike-share system is called Biketown. Have your pick of 1500 bikes stationed at 180 different locations throughout the city.

Car Rental – Local traffic has an infamous reputation and can slow down your adventures around Portland. You can compare car rental prices for Oregon at RentalCars.com

SmartPark garages are a great option for when you can’t find a spot to park. But in general, you will want to save your car for day trips further afield.

Taxis – Cabs are readily available at all hours, while Uber and Lyft operate in great numbers.

Best time to visit Portland

Thanks to the impressive nature, there really isn’t a bad time to visit Portland. Sure, it can get pretty cold in the winter, yet the soaring mountains provide ample exciting opportunities from skiing to mountaineering.

However, with an abundance of urban spaces and flowers blooming in unison, spring is the best time to visit Portland. The cherry blossoms come to life and the city’s atmosphere awakes from the winter slumber.

Summer and fall present also present great travel opportunities. The urban parks pack out in the summer with festivities and markets galore. While in the fall, the foliage is worth the price of entrance all by itself.

Now that you’ve explored Portland, why not check out another outstanding Oregon city. Explore our guide to the best things to do in Bend!

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