#and never gave up and decided to go to law school to confront miles years down the line

[mitskiluvr]

soulmatism is phoenix only knowing miles for like 2 years in elementary school yet IMMEDIATELY knowing that something is horribly wrong when he sees miles in the newspaper years later being called a demon prosecutor

[almostxinnocent]

“Society wants to believe it can identify evil people, or bad or harmful people, but it's not practical. There are no stereotypes.” ― Ted Bundy Anyone who knows me also knows that I am a huge fan of true crime.  Even knowing that, it has taken me a long time to actually write about this, or maybe just fear at re-living it over again has held me back.  I figure if I don’t do it now I never will. It would be easier to simply do this as just another story.  So here we go.  (Part One)When I was fourteen other girls were reading Teen Beat and I was reading True Crime novels about Ken Bernardo, Jeffrey Dahmer and other serial killers no young girl should know about.  So when I stumbled across the address to actually write one of them it was no surprise that I jumped on the chance.  

For the sake of privacy and my sanity we will call him Mr. E.  A lot of people don’t even know about it but there is a place called J-pay where you can write to inmates and see if they respond.  I wanted to ensure a response so I included a couple of pictures of myself.  I was fifteen and throwing modesty aside, I thought I was pretty attractive. It had been a few weeks since I had sent my first message and I rushed home each day to see if there was a response. It had become a routine for me.  I quickly logged into the website and saw that I actually had a response.  I had only written one person and immediately I felt like a ten year old on Christmas morning.  I clicked to open it and greedily read what was inside.

“I have to say for a young girl you are not only intelligent, but beautiful as well.  I would be more than happy to answer your questions but if I am going to be nice to you, you need to be nice to me too.  I have a couple questions of my own.”

I read down further, scrunched my face up at some of the more personal questions like “How often do you bath” or “What does your hair smell like before a good wash” .  I knew he was highly intelligent, and I was sure he would smell bullshit from a mile away.  I can’t say I wasn’t nervous but it was more nervous excitement.  I was going to write my reply, but hesitation got the best of me.  I turned the computer off and went to drown myself in another book.  When I finally did sleep I was thrown into some pretty intense nightmares.  I woke up tired from the lack of good sleep I had gotten and rolled over in bed.  It wasn’t unusual to remember my dreams, but this time I would rather not have.  All night I had dreams of being visited by Mr. E.  They seemed so real that I actually decided I would not write back at all.

After a couple nights of not having any nightmares and scolding myself for being a sissy, I gathered enough courage to write back.  

“Mr. E,I would be lying if I said I wasn’t excited to see your response, even if you do ask some pretty weird questions.  To show you that I will be an honest pen-pal I will answer them but first I want to ask a couple of my own.  Do you ever feel sorry for what you did to the family of your victims?  I already know how you feel about the girls that you killed.  There are so many books written about you! What is it like not being able to be free anymore?  What is your day to day like there?  Do you get a lot of fan mail?  Do you think I am a fan??”

I went down his list and answered all his questions, providing as little detail as possible.  It did give me the creeps to think about a real life serial killer who tortured girls to death so close to my age having knowledge of my personal bathing habits and odors.   Sometimes knowing someone is locked up isn’t enough, it’s wondering what they do with their time that can be unsettling.  We had been writing for about four months before things started to get even more uncomfortable.  Mr. E had always given me the answers that I wanted, although I tended to not ask any graphic details about his murders. Then suddenly he started to give me details on his own, some of them that I had never actually read in any of his books.  I would be lying if I said that I wasn’t more jumpy than usual or that the contents of his letters were not giving me nightmares.  The truth was I had been plagued by them, but I just could not stop responding.  

I knew if my mother ever found out what I was doing she would probably take away my computer and everything else that provided contact with anyone in the world, and I think that was putting me on edge as well.I wanted to believe that Mr. E trusted me, but I knew his mail was being read.  Since the details were just descriptions of his killing rituals and habits I guess it didn’t matter.  It wasn’t like he was revealing where more bodies were or anything.  His personal questions started to became more intrusive too.  The minute I started to feel too uncomfortable, or there was a lapse of response, I would get a kinder letter of assurance which motivated me to keep writing.  I was playing a game of cat and mouse but was starting to feel I was more the mouse than cat.

Finally, in one of our conversations he asked for my address.  He told me that he had a few drawings and poetry he wanted me to have.  In this message he especially made it a point to compliment me and thank me for keeping him company.  He told me about how most of the writing he received was from distasteful and rude women (I assumed grown-ups) that he would never consider responding to.   I have to admit I was flattered and less uncomfortable but looking back I see I was being manipulated.  I gave him my address.  I figured being locked up forever would prevent anything bad from happening to me.  I was safe, so why not? It was only a few days later that a small package arrived, and I ran upstairs before my mother could see what I had.  I opened it carefully, and my heart was pounding so loud it seemed like it was coming from across the room.  I almost lost my breath to be completely honest.  Here I was, a teenager getting mail from a notorious serial killer!  Who would believe it!  

Inside the package contained two poems, with what looked like dried blood smeared across them.  A lock of hair tied with what looked like some kind of frayed rope and three drawings.  One of the poems went as follows; “Her lips looked like two berries. I knew I had to touch but my touch was so heavy off her face the lips I plucked I kissed the bloody space where they once used to be a beautiful and gaping hole but then she tried to flee I wrapped her up in ribbons I tied them like a bow Her mouth kept making noises So the hole I had to sew” I am sure you get the picture.  In my young mind I wasn’t sure what to think, but I guess I thought it was to be expected.  I wondered if there were any rules about what you could send someone so young, but then again I had never mentioned my age.  I had only sent photos since you had to be eighteen to use the website.  We had made an agreement that when his arrived, I would send my own.  That night my nightmares were so intense that I woke sweating and feeling trapped.  The next morning I cut off a lock of my own hair, pricked my finger and smeared some blood across it.  I can’t explain how or why but Mr. E had some kind of hold on me. At this point you might be wondering what kind of laws they had back then about what you could or could not send into prison.  I didn’t realize that we lived in a world with such liberties or restrictions.   I was in a state of being embarrassed about my nightmares and thinking I was some hot shot getting details nobody else had gotten.  Two more weeks went by and I did not hear from my pen-pal.  I was confused and constantly checking my inbox.  I wondered if what I sent had gotten him into some kind of trouble, but was more worried my mom might find out if someone from the prison contacted us.   Then a week or so later, another box appeared and I once again ran upstairs to open it.  I was lucky that the mail was there when I came home from school.  I did not want to have to deal with a confrontation with my mom about strange boxes at our front door. I opened the box and was immediately confused.  What I saw put goosebumps all over my body, not just my arms.  It was almost painful.  There was only a letter, and the box was too big for just a letter.  That was strange enough.  The letter was short itself was short.   “I hope you are as excited as I am.  It won’t be long now.” The more I thought about it, the less scared I was.  I was actually angry.  I felt like I had been betrayed. Then I realized how ridiculous that was.  Why would I expect honesty from a serial killer?  I bet this was his new way of getting his kicks now that he was locked up.  I went to my computer and was ready to write a bunch of insults but when I got to the web page it would not load.   That happened a lot, so I decided to just cut my losses and move on.  I was embarrassed that I had been such an easy target, so even weeks later I never told my friends and obviously not my mother.One night I was out with my best friend and we went to our favorite spot, the playground.  Yeah, I know.  Juvenile, but it was the best place at night because it was private and nobody bothered you.  After the usual talk about boys at school, and general gossip we decided it was time to head home.  My mother was almost always gone on the weekends, and it happened to be the weekend my little brother and sister weren’t at home with me either.  I tried to convince Lilly to spend the night but she said her dad would freak out since she basically spent every weekend at my house anyways. This meant flicking through television channels until I got frustrated enough to read a book and then go to sleep.My walk back home was short but it seemed like the perfect time for my mind to start thinking about Mr. E.  It bothered me that I was so foolish and even though I knew I had nothing to be scared of I still felt a little jumpy when I was turning the corner onto my street.  I finally got home and shut and locked the door and let out a deep sigh.  It felt like I had been holding my breath.  I had to laugh at myself as I walked upstairs to start a boring routine of spending a Saturday night alone. My little yorkie Koby was running around my legs wagging his stub tail excitedly.  I picked him up and opened my bedroom door.   “Hello pal, I told you it wouldn’t be much longer.”   I felt dizzy and nauseous at the same time but I could not move. It felt like the entire room tilted.  I stood there trying to process what was happening.  He made no attempt to move from the bed.  He was holding one of my stuffed animals in his hands.  I kept telling myself this wasn’t real, it was another dream.  This wasn’t him.  This was not happening.  This wasn’t him.  The voice inside my head became more frantic and I put my hands on both my ears.  I felt like I was losing my mind because there could not possibly be a man sitting on my bed, holding my stuffed animal. “Don’t be upset, I know I’m not who you are looking for but I promise I can give you much more than some man stuck in a cell could anyway.  We have so much to talk about.  I knew you were the one when you sent that hair back to me.  I said to myself, here is a girl who isn’t afraid to do things out of the ordinary.”   His voice was vibrating though me.  I knew my only way to get out of this would be to either do what he said, or make him think I would. At the same time that thought was going through my head I also realized there was no way I was going to talk my way out of this. This wasn’t Mr. E, and this wasn’t a nightmare.  I could tell this man was very tall from the height of him simply sitting there.  His black hair was straight.  He looked ordinary.  He didn’t look like a monster at all. “How?....”  I barely said the words as if speaking too loud might cause him to do something. “Well, I could insult your intelligence for not making sure the website you were using was actually the real website, but most of you young ones usually don’t bother.  Let’s just say you were never writing to who you thought you were and start fresh.”  All the terrible details from his letter came back to me.  The way he stalked the girls, kidnapped them and then held for days while they were tortured.  Like dolls, he played with them until they were no longer breathing. 

“I thought I could trust you.”  I whispered, still frozen in my place.  I could attempt to run but he would just catch me on the stairs as I tried to go down.  There wasn’t any feasible way to get away.

“Oh you can trust me.  I never lied to you did I?  Now come over here and sit on my lap and I will tell you all the fun things we will do together.  I know you like the park, did you want to go back and swing on the swings again?  You looked so fresh with your skirt flying up your legs.”

I shook my head and back into my doorway which was at the exact moment that he lunged at me. The fact that he had been watching me made me feel violated enough.  I didn’t even bother to take time to think about how long he had been watching me but now assumed it was from the moment I sent him my actual address.

I let out a startled yelp as we both landed on the ground. He was quick and before I knew it he had my arms over my head was straddling me.  He leaned down for a kiss but I kept twisting my head back and forth with tears streaming down my face.  “Please don’t let him kiss me, please.” I begged God inside my mind to make it go away.  

The next thing I knew he slapped me so hard across my face that I was seeing everything in two’s with blurred lines.  I was no longer frantically twisting, but slowly going back and forth, still reeling from the hand that had rocked me.  I was so dazed I could barely feel his mouth drooling on mine until he sharply bit down on my lip.  It was so hard I came out of my daze screaming as loudly as I could before he clamped his hand over my lips and shook his head.

“There will be plenty of time for that.” 

[pinktatertots99]

...so...is it too late for me to re-make the almost entirety of candy into my own self indulgent bullshit? dont try to make sense of some these pics some are either old ideas or me bullshitting cause my mind runs a bajillion miles per hour and made an alt idea: tootsie-verse where shit might make slightly more sense and i get to have fun with ideas i didnt get to see be possible.

so far plot so far ala everything:

-once the gang ended up at the 5-000+ yrs of earth c the original method WV had established had changed during that long time, with kingdoms being a revived concept, allie-ships between them broken or re-mad, laws of a firm unfairness and a seat for mayoresident of the earth kingdom needing a new canidate

-after dropping there catav had taken the currently refridgerated gamzee to the woods to help sober him up after everything, handing the corpse’s that were still in there to kanaya after she’d found the newly hatched mothergrub was low on material needed to activate it as the troll kingdom was on a rather firm law on how much to give making it difficult to get a full load.

-six years later -23 for everyone- things were in motion with everyone having some form of jobs as jane elected to work on becoming the new mayoresident of the human kingdom and fix these tightass laws, while conflicting with her past trauma, hiding it and trying not to show how fearful she has been lately over the highbloods -mostly the seadwellers-

-during this time the newest clutches of grubs were born, a handful being clones of past troll friends and allies as many came to celebrate with june -at the time not knowing her identity yet- finding the clone of vriska and casually wanting to adopt her, wanting her to live the human life she wanted before. of course the only way around this was adopting her via the consort kingdom's laws being much looser for trolls.

-also during this time a strange occurance involving another world’s meteor and child had crash landed in the marylonde backyard of their human kingdom two story vacation home, a child of both their genetics but more human dominant was there. both deciding it safe to adopt him but keeping the troll portions hidden once getting him schooled later on as the school’s there were the education they wanted him to have. having roxy help them with their aliby, using their carapacion ruler power to write up a fake adoption paper for him.

-also also during this time gamzee had made his return as catav’s new moirail and three sweeps sober, of course not everyone had a big ‘hoorah’ party for him, but it gained jane’s attention whose mental health was still going downhill aswell as what she’s heard of her other alt selves in the dream bubbles, and how well his jape’s and pranks were, causing a one sided kismesis.

-a year later-24 yr old- jane had become the new mayoresident of the earth kingdom, making new laws for human, consort and carapacion kingdoms...the trolls kingdom...she said was taking a while. during this time she, jake and dirk had talked over and compromised of letting her and jake be shared parents for an ecto-bio child due to jane’s wanting to be a mother, with shared custody for both parties.

-a year -25 yr period-after that the troll kingdoms rulers were getting impatient as jane had put them aside to continue her work, making up explanations for putting off getting their laws worked out. during this time ecto-bio-lab leader and work partner for skaianet labs jade harley had decided once ready all three pitched in their DNA, using her boss status to use the ecto-bio machinery to create their daughter. unfortunately she wasnt sneaky enough, being confronted by both english and crocker over this earth kingdom rule breaking, in the end forcing the three to keep their daughter’s existance to a minimal and for jade to be fired.

-during this time jane’s one sided kismesis became equal after a visit that involved catav and jake hanging out jane had left some soporifics around the clown, causing him to fall off the wagon hard after that. during the couple months back on his addiction catav was semi-convinced by kar to distance himself from their quadrant as it was draining him physically and mentally -which was semi right, but also was just cause kar was beyond pissed at gamz as no one at the time knew it was jane’s doing...except one-

-once falling the pieces together dirk had interrogated his friend for how she’s been acting the past eight years, things turning more heated then they should’ve as they sparred, ending in a slashed neck and an anxietic crocker unable to revive him out of fear of he and all her friends leaving her sneakily sewing up the slashed portion and sneaking to the furthest portion of his archeological bro’s forest trees with a rope wrapped around his neck.

-after a month a search party was made to find him lead by said cool archeological bro, only to be found a month later decomposed and munched on by outdoor critters. a funeral was set the next day. 

-the day after as caliope slept her alt-iope self had brought her and another universe version of her to her circle for help as her other version’s universe’s english was alive, traveling through space destroying everything in his path. aradia had busily made a small meteor team to help but alt needed a host body to warn the others and to join the meteor team, as the one version was used as a mouthpiece for her world’s gang, tootsie-calie and her wings were used to fly to space to join the others leaving a mourning roxy to fall off the wagon at two lost friends.

-a week later english fell off his first wagon, ushering jane to have full custody of their ecto-son, giving up his reign of the consort kingdom to june who stepped down as human kingdom’s ruler to take the consort kingdom job very seriously. after roxy had also dropped her crown to live with jane who offered to help her, despite how unfortunately unable she’d be at it keeping soporifics for gamzee. leaving the carapacion kingdom with the marylonde’s working overtime to keep it in check.

-ten years later the troll kingdom’s rulers have finally become impatient, interrogating crocker to confirm to them and herself her castest views on the highbloods, linking them as the reason she gave the troll kingdom no progress growth wise. this caused them to declare rebellion against her. despite the carapacios leaders being on their side, their kingdom’s people were anything but on their side due to past conflicts in the 5-000+ yr gap, leading the two to leave the kingdom to find new rulers to help the rebellion, while the consort kingdom left itself to be neutral in the situation for now.

-a day before harisn’s thirteenth birthday his mothers left the carapacion kingdom, moving to the human kingdom so he could still attend it’s school, despite the glares kan still gets.

-a week after tifney’s twelfth birthday, the vantas home was bombed as a warning to stop the rebellion, leaving only the third story burnt and their side to declare war.

-afterwards a now life ring wearing meenah and the leftover of the dancestors had fallen out of a mysterious black time portal hole, recruited to join the rebellion, making meenah the leader of the ghost train, the ghostly crew used to spy in the crockercorps’s buildings and make secret attacks on them, living in the marylonde’s basement of their new house. catav and aquisprites were recruited, given robotic bodies to help as the co-leaders if the ghost train and tech departments respectively.

-on vrasey’s thirteenth birthday at the troll kingdom’s sign-high an attack was made, causing many trolls above jade color attacked by locker bombs, swords and the declaration from the human kingdom’s ruler that any blood above jade was their target, causing many of the lowerbloods to rally against them into hiding and vrasey to be schooled in the consort kingdom. the sea of the troll’s beach bombed with a poison taking out most of its seadweller neighbors and fish.

-after this a highblooded rebellion was created underground, ran by teals as the rulers of it to achieve the goal of winning this war, taking out both sides who betrayed them. the elderly leader of the coming rebellion took in another teal, training her during this time and inserting her some bias he had at the time of the higherbloods’s status’s. 

-a month after travos’s sixteenth birthday he had involved himself in another kismesis scuffle as gamjane’s relationship was becoming more and more unhealthy, anger filled, only to end with a gash from a club to his head and after waking up covered in his dead blood. freaking out he drove off in his newly given airportable car as jane ushered a drunk roxy to make the corpse disappear, which she did, and having it reappear in harisn’s sylladex at school.

the kids:

harisn maryam lalonde -16-: harisn is a musical lover, extending to an orchestratal lover along with his mothers as he picked up the interest of persuing the cello in his music class. he lives an easy breezy life as his moms limited him to stay out of the rebellion when it started and he at the time was thirteen. he has a sweet tooth and interests in sewing for school musical attires and occasionally being a step in actor for certain events, making sure his outfits warn on the other actors though are outstanding enough to be remembered.

vrasey serket harlenglker eggbert -16-: vrasey never had alot of friends, even before moving to the consort’s firedile high and going to troll kingdom’s sign-high she was much too ambitious with hard pranks and thrill for action for many. she’s a fan of action movies with a hint of comedy and romance, sparring with her mom and recently recovering uncle who lives with them now, and having a bit of a fashionista side of re-creating her hand-me-downs. is mostly kind to her relatives but will snip in some cases.

travos english crocker -15-16-: growing up in a soporific filled household with no father figure thats present enough and an unhealthy kismesis couple travos had grown to be soft, quiet and anxietic at the smallest of actions and tones, closing himself in his room being homeschooled for most of his life. he’s perceptive of others emotions surprisingly able to know mostly how someone feels. he’s also known for having alot of knowledge on carapacions history, traditions and a dozen of their words in their language, but shut in enough to only ever tell this to his summer school going semi-relative harisn, until his mothers left the royalty and ultimately the kingdom but both stay in touch.

tifney vantas strider harley -15-: the star soccer player of troll kingdom’s sign-high tifney is protective and not approachable, not due to how mean she is she’s nice, but mostly due to how intimidating she looks. ever since the beginning of the war she has since tried to know all she could secretly from her parents despite their best efforts not to get her involved. she gained kar’s love of romance’s but also soap opera’s and napoleon ice cream.

claret pyrope -16-17-: the recent ruler of the underground highblood rebellion ‘high-revive’. born and raised in dolorosa’s cavern for orphaned wigglers she lived an introverted life as her rebellious, childish and slightly aggressive way of playing pretend led to many not staying for long. being in the system however she was still authorized to go to school, until the attack happened, causing her to end up with a horn and eye slashed, taken in by the newly formed high-revive’s leader, to become its newer leader. she takes her job overly seriously, giving more benefit to trolls then humans. she’s stubborn and believes the law and method she’s making to be the only way to gain a winning in the rebellion. she looks up to past teals in the history specifically the pyropes and redglare, basing all she’s doing off the knowledge of them thanks to schoolfeed.

reeffi peixes -16-: after the waters of her and her moirail’s home were poisoned both escaped thanks to her heightened smell, being found by claret at 15 and taken into the high-revive. reeffi was trained to become the new heiress of the rebellion after learning her blood color’s status in the past, wanting to do so to make things peaceful for everyone even if violence had to happen. she’s protective of her rail and considers herself to be the one to defend everyone from danger. she’s snarky, and has a thing for causing mischief and simple but stylish fashion.

marche ampora -16-: just like his moirail both share the common knowledge of not knowing their ancestors, born and raised with his rail in the seadweller side kingdom, made after the troll kingdom rulers had returned and made a compromise. marche is naive of his highblood status not grasping what it’s worth is. he’s timid, shy, outwardly vunerable and coddled slightly by his rail but also easy to annoy but keeps it quiet. is also very protective of his rail but keeps that also quiet despite his annoyance for being protected so much he’s been deemed not qualified to fight with anything. later on he grows an interest for expensive and rich looking fashion and not wanting too much responsibility that isnt his own things.

[newstfionline]

Headlines

A wobble lessened Laura’s devastation (AP) Hurricane Laura was a monster storm that could have, even should have, wreaked much more destruction than it did, except for a few lucky breaks and some smart thinking by Gulf Coast residents, experts say. Just before striking Louisiana, Laura wobbled. It wasn’t much, maybe 15 miles (24 kilometers) for a Category 4 storm that was nearly the width of two states. But it was enough to move the worst of the storm surge east of Lake Charles and into a far less populated area. And even before that, Laura threaded a needle between well-populated New Orleans, Port Arthur and Houston and came ashore in Cameron Parish, which is the second least-populated county along the coast. The population of the average Atlantic and Gulf Coast county is 322,000 people. Cameron Parish has less than 7,000. The storm was still devastating, but not quite as catastrophic as it might have been.

Hurricane Laura cleanup starts (AP) The angry storm surge has receded and the clean up has begun from Hurricane Laura, but officials along this shattered stretch of Louisiana coast are warning returning residents they will face weeks without power or water amid the hot, stifling days of late summer. The U.S. toll from the Category 4 hurricane stood at 14 deaths, with more than half of those killed by carbon monoxide poisoning from the unsafe operation of generators. Across southwestern Louisiana, people were cleaning up from the destructive hurricane that roared ashore early Thursday, packing 150-mph (240-kph) winds. Many were deciding whether they wanted to stay in miserable conditions or wait until basic services are finally restored. Simply driving was a feat in Lake Charles, a city of 80,000 residents hit head on by the hurricane’s eye. Power lines and trees blocked paths or created one-lane roads that drivers had to navigate with oncoming traffic. Street signs were snapped off their posts or dangling. No stoplights worked, making it an exercise in trust with other motorists sharing the roads.

Weather slows California wildfires; thousands allowed home (AP) California wildfires were slowly being corralled Friday as cooler, humid weather and reinforcements aided firefighters and tens of thousands of people were allowed back home after days of death and destruction. In the past two days, evacuation orders were lifted for at least 50,000 people in the San Francisco Bay Area and wine country, officials with the state fire agency, Cal Fire, said. Around the state, hundreds of wildfires—coming months earlier in the season than expected—have killed at least seven people, burned more than 2,000 square miles (5,200 square kilometers) and pushed firefighter resources to the breaking point. Two are among the largest wildfires in recent state history.

1 killed as Trump supporters, protesters clash in Portland (AP) One person was shot and killed late Saturday in Portland, Oregon, as a large caravan of President Donald Trump supporters and Black Lives Matter protesters clashed in the streets, police said. It wasn’t clear if the shooting was linked to fights that broke out as a caravan of about 600 vehicles was confronted by protesters in the city’s downtown. An Associated Press freelance photographer heard three gunshots and then observed police medics working on the body of the victim, who appeared to be a white man. The freelancer said the man was wearing a hat bearing the insignia of Patriot Prayer, a right-wing group whose members have frequently clashed with protesters in Portland in the past.

Rival Themes Emerge as Race Enters Final Weeks: Covid vs. Law and Order (NYT) As a weeklong Republican offensive against Joseph R. Biden Jr. ends, the Democratic nominee plans to resume campaigning in swing states and has released a multimillion dollar barrage of ads attacking President Trump’s handling of the coronavirus. The moves come as the presidential campaign barrels into the critical last 10 weeks. They represent a bet by Mr. Biden that a focus on Covid-19 will prevail over Mr. Trump’s “law and order” emphasis and his attempt to portray Mr. Biden as a tool of the “radical left.” The question of which argument feels more urgent to the American people is likely to play a critical role in determining the outcome in November.

Dreading the School Year? Some Parents Are Taking It On The Road (Bloomberg) When the novel coronavirus began spreading across the globe early this year, Bridy and Kurt Oreshack were so concerned that they pulled their children out of school three days before it officially closed. Their anxiety quickly gave way to other emotions. “We thought, there’s never going to be an opportunity like this in our careers,” says Bridy, a wealth advisor in San Diego. She and her husband, an attorney, had hoped to someday spend a year traveling with their kids, who are now 5, 9, and 10. When Covid-19 disrupted schooling and made it not merely acceptable but desirable for the Oreshacks to work remotely, they decided to make the leap. Instead of attending their normal bilingual private school, the three Oreshack children will “roadschool” for the 2020-21 academic year, stringing together a series of road trips to national parks and the Pacific Northwest, with a stretch in Hawaii in the mix. “We’re only on Day 2 of homeschooling,” Oreshack says from her home in San Diego, where the family is temporarily recovering from summer explorations. “But so far, it’s been rad and wonderful.” Combining homeschooling and travel—an approach often known as “worldschooling”—isn’t new. But it has been a very rare phenomenon, limited to families willing to trade stability, structure, and conventional education for adventure. Now, “roadschooling” is emerging as a Covid-19-era alternative for Americans who are limited by border closures but not by commutes.

Coronavirus cases in some European countries are rising again, but with fewer deaths (Washington Post) Coronavirus cases are surging again in Europe after months of relative calm, but the second wave looks different from the first: Fewer people are dying, and the newest and mostly younger victims of the pandemic need less medical treatment. Unlike the initial hit of the pandemic this spring, which overwhelmed hospitals and turned nursing homes into grim mortuaries, the European resurgence of recent weeks has not forced as many people into medical wards. But the increase is widespread, and it is unsettling societies that had hoped the worst was behind them. Paris on Friday joined some other French jurisdictions in imposing a citywide mask requirement, with cases spiking. France, Germany, Spain and others posted caseloads in recent days that had not been seen since April and early May. Spain has been hit particularly hard, with per capita cases now worse than in the United States. And with almost every European country planning a return to in-person schooling, many starting next week, public health officials are holding their breath for the impact.

Riots in Sweden after Quran burning by far-right activists (AP) Far-right activists burned a Quran in the southern Swedish city of Malmo, sparking riots and unrest after more than 300 people gathered to protest, police said Saturday. Rioters set fires and threw objects at police and rescue services Friday night, slightly injuring several police officers and leading to the detention of about 15 people. The violence followed the burning Friday afternoon of a Quran, near a predominantly migrant neighborhood, that was carried out by far-right activists and filmed and posted online, according to the TT news agency.

Turkey to hold military exercise off Cyprus amid Mediterranean tensions (Reuters) Turkey said it will hold a military exercise off northwest Cyprus for the next two weeks, amid growing tension with Greece over disputed claims to exploration rights in the east Mediterranean. Both sides have held military exercises in the east Mediterranean, highlighting the potential for the dispute over the extent of their continental shelves to escalate into confrontation. Two weeks ago Greek and Turkish frigates shadowing Turkey’s Oruc Reis oil and gas survey vessel collided, and Turkey’s Defence Ministry said Turkish F-16 jets on Thursday prevented six Greek F-16s entering an area where Turkey was operating.

Russian city holds eighth anti-Kremlin protest (Reuters) Thousands of people took to the streets on Saturday in Russia’s far eastern city of Khabarovsk to protest against President Vladimir Putin’s handling of a regional political crisis and the suspected poisoning of his most vocal critic. “Putin, have some tea,” protesters chanted as they marched on the city’s main thoroughfare, in a reference to the case of opposition politician Alexei Navalny who fell gravely ill this month after drinking a cup of tea at an airport cafe. Residents of Khabarovsk, about 6,110 km (3,800 miles) east of Moscow, started holding weekly rallies after the July 9 detention of Sergei Furgal, the region’s popular governor, over murder charges he denies.

Surge in South Korea coronavirus cases sparks hospital bed shortage concerns (Reuters) South Korea recorded its 16th consecutive day of triple digit rises in new coronavirus cases on Saturday, extending a second wave of infections that is fanning concerns about a shortage of hospital beds in Seoul. The spike in cases has depleted hospital facilities, with the health ministry reporting that just 4.5% of beds in greater Seoul were available for critical cases as of Friday, down from 22% a week earlier.

Zimbabwe’s ‘keyboard warriors’ hold protests off the streets (AP) Unable to protest on the streets, some in Zimbabwe are calling themselves “keyboard warriors” as they take to graffiti and social media to pressure a government that promised reform but is now accused of gross human rights abuses. Activists use the hashtag #zimbabweanlivesmatter to encourage global pressure on President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s government. Tens of thousands of people, from Jamaican reggae stars to U.S. rap and hip-hop musicians, have joined African celebrities, politicians and former presidents in tweeting with the hashtag. But some analysts say online protests might not be enough to move Mnangagwa, who increasingly relies on security forces to crush dissent despite promising reforms when he took power after a coup in 2017. Tensions are rising anew in the once prosperous southern African country. Inflation is over 800%, amid acute shortages of water, electricity, gas and bank notes and a health system collapsing under the weight of drug shortages and strikes by nurses and doctors. Revelations of alleged corruption related to COVID-19 medical supplies led to the sacking of the health minister and further pressure on Mnangagwa. His government has responded to the rising dissent with arrests and alleged abductions and torture.

[ecfandom]

Polis 433 Ch. 13 Preview

I’m sorry for the wait!!

***

“Do you have someone to pick you up tomorrow?” Clarke asked as she kept herself busy folding Lexa’s jeans and shirt. Her mind circled endlessly around their conversation in the chamber, the feeling of Lexa’s hand in hers, Lexa’s palm cradling her cheek, and the terrible story behind the burn scars eclipsing Lexa’s hand and wrist. That story had lingered in the back of her mind ever since she’d read about it, eating at her in a mixture of guilt at having read something so intimate about Lexa’s past, and sorrow at the physical and emotional pain she knew Lexa must have endured. Seeing the tangible evidence of what’d happened to Lexa, feeling the scarred skin beneath her touch, had left her feeling strange, sad and just generally out of sorts. She was not, however, too self absorbed to notice Lexa’s lack of a response. She smiled when she walked over to Lexa’s bed with her folded clothes and found Lexa nearly half asleep.

“Hey,” she said softly, and combed her fingers through Lexa’s hair. “Sleepy?”

Lexa cracked open an eye and grinned. She nodded, lulled by Clarke’s fingers in her hair and the warming blankets on top of her. “You spoil me,” she murmured, gazing at Clarke with so much affection, Clarke quickly looked away, distracting herself with Lexa’s clothes once more. She had never been looked at the way Lexa looked at her. It was too much--piercing and knowing, and worst of all, so very gentle.

“I told you,” Clarke said, wanting to clear the lump in her throat, “friendship with me has its perks.”

“If I recall, I’m not the one who needs the convincing.”

Clarke flushed and good-naturedly tousled Lexa’s hair in retaliation. “Don’t tease.”

“I would never,” Lexa swore, her brow furrowing in mock seriousness. Clarke rolled her eyes, and her hand stilled in Lexa’s hair. Her smile fell, and before Lexa could ask if she was okay, she slipped her hand to Lexa’s cheek, feeling the skin there with the back of her hand.

“You’re a little warm,” Clarke murmured, searching Lexa’s eyes for any signs of distress. “Do you feel okay?”

“Fine. More than fine,” Lexa said with a wink that had a hot, red blush racing up Clarke’s throat.

Taryn clearing her throat from the doorway had Clarke nearly jumping back as Taryn strode into the room with a guitless grin.

“Sorry, was I interrupting something?”

“Fuck off,” Lexa groaned with a laugh, rolling her eyes at Taryn’s knowing smile.

“That’s no way to talk to your doctor.”

“Remind me again how I got stuck with you as my doctor?”

“Oh, I think it was when I shoved a needle into you arm and administered the Epi that re-started your heart and saved your life, you ungrateful jerk. Maybe next time I’ll let you code a little longer.”

“Hey,” Clarke snapped, “that’s not funny.”

“Only joking,” Taryn said, raising her hands in surrender. “How are we feeling, Lexa?”

“Ready to get out of here.”

“Yeah, you’ve been saying that since you woke up in here a week ago.”

“Well, the sentiment remains. You’re still discharging me tomorrow, right?”

“Sure,” Taryn said with a shrug. “If your system behaves overnight, I don’t see why not.”

“It will. I want to be out for the game. I was just inviting Clarke when you so rudely interrupted.”

Clarke laughed incredulously. “No you weren’t.”

“Well, I was about to.” Lexa reached out and grabbed the front of the scrubs Clarke had changed into before Lexa’s treatment, and gave her a little tug. Clarke tried to hold back a smile as she let herself be pulled back to Lexa’s bedside, blushing furthermore and rolling her eyes as Taryn watched on, her arms crossed, and an amused grin on her face.

“Go with me,” Lexa murmured. “I’ve got four tickets. I promised one to Taryn’s sister-in-law, but I have two left over. Bring Ellie. It’ll be fun. Popcorn, hotdogs...come on. It’s the best.”

“What game are we talking about?” Clarke asked, removing Lexa’s hand from her scrubs and placing it back on Lexa’s lap with an amused pat.

“Polis Patriots,” Taryn filled, “minor-league baseball.”

“Oh,” Clarke said with a frown. “I don’t remember that being a thing when I was little.”

At Lexa’s silent plea for help, Taryn continued. “They moved from Juneau a couple of years ago. You should come. We all go. My sister-in-law, Paxton, just got back in town. You can meet her if you haven’t already. My girls are coming with Ella too. I’m sure Lily would love to see Ellie.”

Clarke looked from Taryn to Lexa, endeared by the look of hope on Lexa’s face. “When is it?”

“Wednesday. Do you work?” Lexa asked.

Clarke held back a grin at Lexa’s hopeful eyes. “In the morning.”

“Perfect. It’s not until seven. Come on,” Lexa said, “it’ll be fun.”

Clarke sighed, patting Lexa’s hand. “You’re lucky you’re cute when you’re oxygen drunk.”

“You’ll go?”

“If you’re sure you don’t want to give those tickets to someone else.”

Lexa scoffed. “Who else would I give them to? You know Ellie’s my number one.”

***

Clarke felt like an idiot walking through the hospital with the wide grin on her face, but despite what she tried, it wasn’t going anywhere, even after she picked-up Ellie from the peds wing with a full diaper and sugar crash. With a fresh new diaper, and a snack from the cafeteria to bring her blood sugar back up, her happy, chatty toddler had returned full force. As they often were, Ellie’s hands were relentless as they worked their way over Clarke’s hair and face, played with the necklace Clarke wore, and toyed with the pen light in her chest pocket, all the while talking a mile a minute in gibberish Clarke could only half understand.

“Mommy,” she asked, patting Clarke’s cheek for emphasis.

“Yes, Love?” She gently pulled Ellie’s hand away and settled it between them, hiking Ellie up further onto her hip as Ellie squirmed around in her arms.

“I want see Wexa.”

“She’s resting right now. We can see her some other time.”

“No, now!”

“Ellie,” Clarke said, a gentle warning in her voice, “no yelling.”

“But want Wexa now, Mommy.”

“I know, baby. We’ll see her soon. We’re going to go to a baseball game with her.”

“What’s that?”

“Baseball? It’s a sport. Like when we kick the ball in the backyard and play soccer.”

“Soccer!” Ellie squealed, delighted by the thought of one of her favorite past times.

Clarke laughed and gave Ellie a fond squeeze. She was so in love with her baby’s joy and energy. Ellie had an insatiable propensity for new ways to have fun, and Clarke often marveled at and admired her spirit. Call her biased, but Ellie was a tiny bundle of perfection she would never get enough of. She kissed Ellie’s cheek and took in her wonderful baby smell, hoping never to forget the little moments like these, so often lost in the chaos of her busy life.

She still had her nose pressed to Ellie’s hair when a figure rounded the hallway at nearly a jog and side-stepped just in time to avoid a collision.

“Oh, Clarke, jesus, I’m sorry,” Abby said, one hand over her chest, the other clasping her daughter’s shoulder, steadying them both.

“I forgot how fast you walk down these hallways,” Clarke said with a chuckle, slightly breathless from the scare.

“Sorry, Love, it’s a bad habit. And oh my goodness, there’s my favorite little munchkin in the whole wide world,” Abby cooed, taking Ellie into her arms when her granddaughter shouted her name and leaned towards her. “What are you two doing here?” She asked Clarke. “I didn’t think you were on today.”

“I’m not, I…” Clarke said, then paused, suddenly confronted by the fact that she would have to tell her mother about Lexa, or she would have to lie--something she hadn’t done to her mother since she was a teenager. “I was visiting a friend,” she said, deciding on the safe middle road.

“Is everything okay? Raven? Octavia?”

“God no, it’s not them. I would have said so at the start.”

“Oh,” Abby said, then grinned. “A secret friend, then?”

“Mom, don’t start.”

“Don’t start!” Ellie echoed, her brow furrowing into a comically deep frown. “Don’t start, gammie!”

“What? What am I starting? Huh? Come on,” Abby teased, bouncing Ellie until she was giggling and burrowing her smiling face into Abby’s neck. “So it is a secret friend,” Abby then said, turning her attention back towards Clarke. “Is it a...special friend?”

“Mom, I’m not in high school anymore. Please, spare me.”

“Fine,” Abby said, giving an exaggerated sigh. “Don’t tell me any of the fun details then, I’ll subsist on the same old, stale hospital gossip.”

Clarke laughed and rolled her eyes. “You’re the chief of surgery, you’re not supposed to be listening to that garbage.”

“Darn right, I’m not. The things I hear...it’d make even the devil’s cheeks burn!”

Clarke felt her stomach suddenly flip at the thought of her mother hearing any of the common rumors that circulated the hospital halls, always having to do with who was fucking who in the on-call rooms. She cleared her throat. “Just in case it was already apparent, I’d just like to state for the record that nothing that you hear around here pertains to me. And if you do hear my name, it’s a lie.”

“Don’t I know it,” Abby said with a sigh. “Your love life is tragic, my dear.”

“Mom!”

“Speaking of--”

“No, we’re not speaking of—”

“--that strapping, young firefighter from your Memorial Day bar-b-q is here. Did you know?”

“I…” Clarke said, already fumbling over that word alone.

“Of course you did. I’m guessing that’s your secret, special friend.”

Clarke groaned, then smiled in embarrassment at the look it drew from one of the nurses standing outside a nearby room. Clarke had grown up at this hospital, spending more after-school hours here than in her own home. The hospital hallways of Polis Memorial were practically her living room, the cafeteria her dining room. She’d had more personal conversations with her mother here than anywhere else. It was almost comical.

“Oh for the love of...not you too,” Clarke said, leaning up against the wall to avoid a technician pushing a portable x-ray machine.

Abby grinned and handed Ellie back to her daughter. “Just promise me you’ll let yourself have some fun.”

“Mom.”

“A date or two would be nice.”

“Mom!”

“Alright, alright.” Abby threw up her hands in defeat, then fondly stroked Ellie’s cheek and booped her on the nose. “Grandma's leaving. I mean it, Clarke. Please try to relax.”

Clarke sighed. “I will do my best.”

“Good. I’ll see you for dinner tomorrow night, yes?” Abby asked over her shoulder, already halfway down the hall.

Clarke threw her a thumbs up in response and turned and walked the other way. “The women in my life are crazy,” she muttered to Ellie, who simply beamed at her and nodded.

[distant-rose-archive-blog]

Captain Swan January Joy Day 5: Not a Damsel

Note: Hi people! *waves* Despite the fact I have so much on my plate with my upcoming law exams and my CSLB project, I decided to participate in @csjanuaryjoy​ mainly because I’m insane. This isn’t as great as it should be. I was planning on actually doing a bartender AU for this, but the words just weren’t coming. Anyway, this was inspired by how pissed off my parents’ neighbor was at my father plowing her driveway for her during Snowstorm Grayson. A special thanks to @lenfaz​ for organizing January Joy this year and also to @welllpthisishappening​ for encouraging me to write words and being a fabulous person. 10 points to anyone who figures out all of the dumb ass movie/television show references I made in this pile of garbage. There’s at least four. Summary: Emma Swan isn’t looking for help. She doesn’t need a hero. She can save herself thank you very much. Her next door neighbor Killian doesn’t seem to have gotten that memo however, Rating: T Word Count: 3,000+

On an early January morning, Emma Swan woke up to a white window. Not white in the sense that it was painted so, but rather that all she could see outside it was a thick wall furiously falling snow rather than the cozy side street she lived on or even the lazy old trees that lined her property. Just a giant wall of white.

“Goddamn it.”

She rolled away from the window and stared up at the cracks on her ceiling, raking her fingers through her long blonde hair. When she heard that there was a possible storm coming their way, she had hoped that shitty vapid weatherman had gotten it wrong again. Emma hated snow with a passion; to the point where she often changed the color in the Bing Crosby classic to ‘brown’ when she sang about dreaming of Christmas. So far despite the abominably subzero temperature, Emma had been relatively happy with the rather barren weather pattern.

Until the clouds had decided to let loose an absurd amount of nature’s dandruff that morning.

Letting out a grumpy sigh, Emma finally turned on her crappy television to see what the damage was and how long she would spend plowing out her driveway. Almost immediately her least favorite weatherman in the world graced the screen and was happily crowing about the amount of snow had fallen.

“There seems to be reported eight inches on the ground in areas like Appleton, Camden and Owlshead. A whooping nine inches was reported from Storybrooke and Saint George this morning! And there’s still an estimated five more inches to come! We’re still maintaining our Winter Storm Warning in Know County until four o’clock this afternoon.”

She wanted nothing more than to throw her remote at his smirking face. The bastard probably had someone who plowed his driveway for him and didn’t realize how much of a pain in the ass this was for normal people like her. However, since Johnny Frost was in front of a green screen twenty miles away from her in some remote corporate building, the best she could do to him was just aggressively hit the power button and banish him from her sight.

Emma and her eight-year old son Henry lived in Storybrooke, a town that looked and sometimes felt like it came from a bizarre alternate dimension created by Walt Disney himself. It was charming but most of the homes were built back in the 1800s and 1700s, including theirs. That fact was never more apparent than during a cold winter when the furnace didn’t necessarily work as it should and the floors felt more like ice than wood. Upon leaving her nest of blankets, she was hit with what felt like an arctic blast. Immediately she grabbed her comforter and curled it protectively around her like cloak.

“Fuck winter,” she muttered under breath as she clamored out of her room. She didn’t even pause when she passed her son’s bedroom. There was no point. It was only a matter of seconds before she would receive an automated call from Storybrooke Elementary to tell her that school was canceled for the day.

Trying to delay the inevitable, Emma took the time to make herself some hot chocolate; not bothering with the powdered Swiss Miss nonsense, but going old school and actually heating up a sauce pan with milk. Her ugly pink stove hummed as she set it to medium heat. Though she took no real joy in it, skimming the milk and mixing in the cocoa and sugar allowed her to keep inside the meager warmth of her house just a bit longer.

Once she was finished with the tedious task of mixing chocolate into the milk, she poured herself a cup and mindfully kept enough behind for Henry should he wake up early. She sat down at her breakfast table, watching the snow piling up in her backyard. Gaging by her crappy junkyard bird bath, there was at least a foot of snow back there. Ten inches, her ass. Her weatherman was the worst.

After placing her mug in the sink and sluggishly pulling on her winter gear, Emma headed into the garbage in order to start her snow blower. The green pile of rust was nearly as old as she was and had been given to her by her former foster mother five years ago, but it was still kicking. Granted, it had been to the repair shop far more times than Emma was happy with but it was better than wasting money on a new one. As long as it worked, she was happy.

Except that morning, it didn’t seem to want to work.

“You got to be fucking kidding me!”

She yanked at the cord. The stupid hunk of metal let out a pathetic whine but refused to start. So Emma did what any rational and emotionally balanced adult would do in the situation. She kicked it. Repeatedly. Pain shot up her leg, but she ignored it in favor of glaring at her snow blower.

“I hate you,” she informed the inanimate object.

It didn’t reply, but Emma was sane enough not to expect one.  She pulled the cord again, hoping the electric starter would start up this go around. It gave another noise and for a moment, she thought the engine was going to turn and everything was going to be alright. That moment didn’t last very long.

“I swear to all that is holy, this year I’m finally going to send you to scrap yard and I will actually wait as long as necessary in order to watch them squish you into a useless cube of metal.”

She gave her snow blower once last try and after what seemed like ages, it came to life; shaking violently in place. Apparently it took her scrap yard threat seriously enough to cooperate. She let out a whoop of delight and pressed the button to open her garbage door; mentally preparing herself for the hours she would spend outside plowing away a foot of snow off of her drive way along with the amount of shoveling she would have to do in order to unearth her sidewalk and pathway to her front door.

The garage door moaned and rattled as it obeyed her command. Emma pushed the snow blower towards the opening door, ready for her grueling task.

Only to discover that her task had already been done for her. Emma stared, not believing her eyes. Except no matter how many times she blinked, the scene in front of her remained unchanged. She had spent ten minutes trying to get her snow blower to work for absolutely nothing.

There was only one person who would have the balls to do this.

“Killian!” Emma huffed.

She immediately turned to face the large brick house that sat on the property right of hers, scowling. Though he was not outside, she had no illusions that he was home. No one was going anywhere in this weather. She immediately marched down her driveway, determined to confront him.

Killian Jones had been her neighbor and pain in the ass for the past seven months. Where Emma’s other neighbors had taken the hint and left her to her own devices, Killian had yet to leave her be. Not a day would go by without Killian coming over and offering to do something for her like some wannabe knight-in-shining armor; whether it be trying to help her bring in groceries or raking the leaves off her lawn. He seemed to be under the impression that since she was a young single mother that she was in need of a rescue. Emma Swan didn’t need saving. She saved herself. And it was time that he got the memo.

She stomped her way up his front steps loudly and jabbed at his door bell as hard as she could, pushing it repeatedly. She didn’t care how obnoxious she was being as he hadn’t taken her subtle hints in the past. It was time to go big or go home.

“Alright, alright, alright! I heard you the first time,” his voice called, muffled by the door between them, from the other side. A few seconds passed and there were a few soft clicks as Killian unlocked his front door and peered out. Upon seeing Emma, his slightly annoyed expression twisted into a broad grin. His entire posture changed, growing relaxed and he leaned languidly against the inside of the doorframe. He looked positively pleased to see her.

“Swan! At last!” There was a breathlessness to his voice that made her insides flutter, but Emma ignored it and focused on being angry.

“Did you plow my driveway?” she asked bluntly, placing her hands on her hips.

If it were possible, his oversized smile grew.

“Yes, I did! No need to thank me, Swan, it was my pleasu—” Emma didn’t wait for him to finish. She raised her right hand and swung at him with a closed fist. It connected with his jaw and she watched with some satisfaction as he stumbled backwards a few steps. He stared at her in shock for a few moments, massaging his bruised jaw and blinking rapidly. When he finally seemed to process that she had punched him, his expression changed into one of pure confusion.

“What the hell was that for!”

“You chauvinistic bastard! How many times do I have to tell you to leave me alone! I don’t need saving!”

“What?”

“You heard me!”

“I did heard words, but they didn’t necessarily make sense or explain why you decided to assault me,” he replied, his hand still rubbing at his face.

“Then let me clear it up for you. I’m not a damsel in distress. I don’t need a knight in shining armor. Never wanted one, never will. There is only one person who saves me and that’s me! Got it?”

Killian gaped at her words, staring at her in disbelief.

“Are you seriously telling me that the reason you punched me is because I plowed your driveway?”

“I didn’t ask you to! I didn’t want you to!” Emma replied, crossing her arms in front of her chest defensively.

“You’re absolutely positively mad. Most people say thank you when people do nice things for them! But you….you’re something else!”

“I’m something else? You’re the one who can’t seem to understand that I am not looking for a hero! I can take care of myself!”

“I never said you couldn’t, Swan! I’m not trying to be your bloody hero! Just your neighbor!”  he snapped back.

“Oh, for the love of Christ, just kiss already!” A voice called out in annoyance.

Both Killian and Emma turned their attention towards the source. Mrs. Lucas, who lived across the street with her granddaughter, was standing on sidewalk with her enormously large pet husky Anita. She returned their stare with one of her own, looking an entirely unimpressed with them.

“Kiss him? I don’t even want to be the same vicinity as him!” Emma scoffed.

“You flatter me, Swan.”

“Please! As if your ginormous male ego wasn’t in need of popping!”

“Nice to know what you think of me, love.”

“Not your love.”

“Oh good lord! Youth is wasted on the young!”  Mrs. Lucas commented with some exasperation as she picked up the ridiculous amount of waste her dog had left on Killian’s front lawn with an orange plastic bag. “Neither of you are fooling anyone. Honestly, I should just cancel my subscription to the Hallmark channel. it’s costing me an arm and a leg and frankly watching the two of you circle around each other is more dramatic than anything they spit out.”

“Glad you’re entertained, but my life isn’t a shitty direct-to-video movie,” Emma replied through gritted teeth.

“Oh, you’re not a prickly single mother who has been burned by a previous love and is trying to push everyone away under the pretense of not needing anyone, especially your attractive neighbor who has been in love with you since he saw you?”

“Attractive?” Killian smirked, raising his eyebrows at the older woman.

Emma responded by promptly stepping on Killian’s toes. He grimaced, giving her a wounded look that she rolled her eyes at.

“Seriously, that’s all you got out of that pile of nonsense?”

“It sounded pretty accurate to me, love.”

“Not. Your. Love.”

“If you say so.”

“Look, as much as I love the banter and as entertaining as the last seven months have been, for the love of god, you could both get with the program and finally just have dinner together, kiss and follow it up by getting married and having lots of sex and babies? I’m not gonna live forever, you know!”

“Seriously, stay out of this!” Emma hissed.

“If you don’t want people commenting on your absurd love life then you shouldn’t make it the entire neighborhood’s business by shouting at each other,” she replied, unfazed. “But I meant what I said. Do something about the sexual tension. Like I said before, my old heart can’t take it anymore.”

And with that, Mrs. Lucas tugged on her dog’s leash and turned back towards her small red house across the way. Emma’s eyes followed her retreating figure, shaking her head as she did so.

“What a woman,” Killian chuckled.

“She’s something alright,” she replied sardonically.

“But she’s not wrong.”

“Excuse me?”

“I do fancy you from time to time when you’re not yelling at me,” he responded with a small chuckle.

“You’re kidding.”

“I’m afraid not,” Killian’s small smile turned slightly pained. “Listen, Emma, I don’t do the things I do because I think you’re need of a hero. I don’t view you as some damsel in need of saving. Quite the opposite in fact. Half of the reason I like you is because I think you’re incredibly strong and you can do anything you set your mind to. Including winning an amateur boxing title because while I’m still being frank, you belt like bloody Andy Lee.”

Emma couldn’t help but feel sheepish. She shifted in place, tugging her hair behind her ear.

“Listen, I shouldn’t have done that,” she replied. “Regardless of how I felt, I shouldn’t have punched you. Even my eight-year old is more mature than that. I wouldn’t blame you if you wanted to press charges.”

“There’s no need for that, love. My jaw is only slightly broken,” he responded with a crooked smile.

Emma punched him lightly in the arm.

“That’s not funny!”

“Apologies, Swan, that jest was in poor taste. I would ask to take you out for dinner in recompense, but I’m afraid I’ll lose my head if I do so, as you seem to be prone to violence,” he replied, smile never wavering.

“Actually, I think it’s probably me who should be asking you out to dinner.” She bit her lip, looking away from him and shuffling on her toes again. It was a nervous habit that she had long tried to break with little success.

“Pardon?”

“You heard me.”

“I heard something, but I’m starting wonder if I’m suffering some sort of hearing loss from that punch you threw.”

“Hilarious,” she rolled her eyes. “But seriously, I’m asking you out.”

“Why?”

“What? Women can’t ask men out? What are you three-hundred or something? I thought we already established I’m a hero, not a damsel. So, what’s the problem here?”

“Well, for starters, until twenty seconds ago, I had no idea that you were even remotely interested in me being anything aside from your punching bag. I’m just trying to follow the leap in attitude here. I’m not complaining…just confused.”

Emma sighed, resisting the urge to rip out more of her hair. She wasn’t good at emotions, especially her own. It was half the reason she kept people at arm’s length.

“Well, because...listen, Granny was right. Well, kinda. Or sorta. She said a lot of wrong things. Like most of that was wrong but she kinda made me realise that life is kinda short and despite the fact I punched you and the horrible things I said, you’re actually a nice guy. So...yeah...why not...dinner tomorrow? I’ll pick you up at seven?”

Killian stared at her, looking dazed. A few awkward seconds passed and everything inside Emma was screaming to abort mission. She was about to reassure him that it wasn’t a big deal and to forget about it when a big goofy grin lit across his face.

“You’re being serious.”

She blinked at the statement.

“Well, yeah. Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Well, this has kinda been a bizarre interaction, love. Forgive me for being a little slow on the uptake. But yes, I would love to have dinner with you.”

“And seven is a good time for you?” she asked in clarification.

“It’s excellent.”

“Okay.” A small uncontrollable grin crossed Emma’s face and she started to descend down his steps; retreating before she could anything to ruin this moment. “See you tomorrow?”

Killian’s own smile grew.

“I’ll see you then.”

She paused when she was halfway down his path.

“And Killian?”

“Yes, love?”

“Thanks for plowing my driveway.”

“You’re welcome. If you promise to refrain from punching me, I will keep doing it for you. I’ve seen the little rust bucket you have and I’m always afraid it’s gonna crap out on you.”

“Promise?”

“Of course.”

And with that, Emma nodded and went back towards her own house where no doubt Henry would be wondering where she was. There was a giddy feeling instead her chest and she felt more lighthearted than she had in years; something that translated into an extra exuberance in her stride. However, if anyone claimed to have seen her skipping on that morning, she would firmly deny it.

[gabriel-gabdiel]

Keit-AI! Tomoyuki x Seiko Chapter 21: Reversal of Fortune

The Akira Fubuki arc finally ends. Also, Tomoyuki joins the Literature Club.

The rest of the chapters of my original story based on a plot from 4chan are available here. Enjoy.

First | Previous | Next

After staking out (or perhaps outright stalking) Class 1A for a little while after dismissal time, Tomoyuki Yamamoto found who he was looking for: Akira Fubuki.

Looking at him up close, the Cherry Boy was surprised he wasn't able to piece together earlier that the Younger Fubuki had actually catfished him by pretending to be his own sister.

Aside from the hoodie, the earphones, the emo hair, and the smartphone that doubled as his music player, he really did look like the fraternal twin of Aya Fubuki.

A short-haired, flat-chested, male, and gloomy version of Aya, to be exact.

"Hey," Tomoyuki greeted Akira.

"...."

Emerging from the classroom, the male Fubuki picked up his pace and walked away from his sister's stalker, but as expected of the creep, Yamamoto ended up matching his pace as he followed him all the way to Maehara High's exit gate.

Akira gave Tomoyuki a sidelong glance and mumbled, "We have nothing to talk about," before giving the Cherry Boy a glare that would've made Aya proud.

The Cherry Boy stopped cold in his tracks, but then said, "Yes, we do, Fubuki-kun."

"Leave me alone or I'll publish that picture of you and the Amazon Queen all over the Internet," Akira threatened, the volume of his voice rising slightly, his eyes darting left and right at his classmates who were walking around him.

"Go ahead," Tomoyuki called his bluff. "That's fine. The only one whose opinion I care about will understand the meaning behind that picture."

"I-I ain't kidding, Ch-Cherry Boy," stuttered the kid. Akira really was completely different from his outgoing crossdressing persona. "Your delinquent classmate will totally beat you up over it!"

Surprising even himself, Yamamoto grabbed hold of Fubuki's thin wrist and said, "If you want, I'll send the photo to the net myself."

The girly boy pulled his hand away from the Cherry Boy. Rubbing his wrist, he relented, asking, "W-Well? What do you want?"

***

Keit-AI! Tomoyuki x Seiko

An Anime-Inspired Original Story from 4chan's /a/ Board by Abdiel

Original Idea by Hataki.

For once, Tomoyuki explores his own passion and dreams in order to keep up with the brilliance of both Seikos.

Disclaimer: This work may reference copyrighted material, the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. It is believed that this constitutes a fair use of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. All copyrighted material referred to in this work belongs to their respective owners. All rights reserved.

***

Chapter 21: Reversal of Fortune

***

Alternate Universe (AU) Seiko Okamoto just texted Tomoyuki Yamamoto a message prior to his confrontation with Akira Fubuki.

"Cherry Boy loved the trailer of Kagemusha you sent me, AU Cherry Boy! The one that starred Zatoichi! Thanks! You're the best! You know yourself like the back of your hand, ya movie nerd!"

Ugh. What bad timing, AU Amazon Queen!

Tomoyuki wasn't in the mood for this. If it were any other time, he'd be ecstatic about the news. He had a lot in his mind right now. Like how he was supposed to approach the aloof Akira, the brother of Aya who catfished him.

The AU Amazon Queen then sent Tomoyuki a flood of messages, oblivious of the fact that he had no intention of replying to her for now.

"He thought at first it was an edited fake trailer using Zatoichi clips you see all the time on YouTube! But he then saw every last Zatoichi film and he couldn't put his finger on where the clips came from. Hehehe."

"Won't we get into trouble if he learns the truth that the trailer was from an alternate universe? Won't that blow his mind? It's still kinda awkward being around Miku-chin, though. I never thought she'd get this upset about my gift."

"If only they were just best friends like you and AU Miku-chin are back in your world. What should I do? Help me, AU Cherry Boy!"

Tomoyuki wanted to pay no heed to the messages, but he couldn't take ignoring the love of his life for too long, especially when she was asking for his help. So he messaged to her the following half-joke:

"Maybe you should broach the subject of alternate universes somehow within Machida's earshot. If your Machida is anything like our Machida, she'll definitely geek out."

Then, as Yamamoto holstered his keitai denwa (mobile phone) into his pocket, something else occurred to him.

Something about how the Akira Kurosawa movie "Kagemusha" had parallels with his current predicament with Akira (not Kurosawa) Fubuki.

***

At a park near Maehara High...

The two former students of the same middle school sat on a bench in silence. Once he was done texting with his transdimensional not-girlfriend, Yamamoto decided to talk.

"Your name's Akira, huh? Your name reminds me of my favorite movie director, Kurosawa Akira. Japan's own world-famous director. You two have the same name," was Tomoyuki's lame attempt at an ice breaker.

Had it been Machida, she would've compared Akira's name to the famous anime and manga "AKIRA" by Katsuhiro Otomo. Or Akira Toriyama, the author of Dragon Ball.

"...A-Akira's a common name, dude. It's no big deal."

The Cherry Boy cleared his throat. "Speaking of which, have you ever heard of Kagemusha? That's one of my fave films from Kurosawa."

Akira just stared at Tomoyuki. "I-Is that an old black-and-white film? W-What does that have to do with anything?"

Yamamoto caught himself from falling face-first into the asphalt in dismay. Jeez, young people had no appreciation for classic Japanese cinema!

"I'll have you know that it's a Kurosawa jidaigeki (historical) film about a thief turned political decoy of Takeda Shingen. The imposter took over Takeda's empire right after Takeda's death."

"I-I never watched it," said Fubuki before muttering, "W-Who cares about some old-ass movie anyway..."

Yamamoto then looked the crossdresser straight in the eyes and said, "The Kagemusha reminds me of you."

"I-I don't follow," mumbled Akira, looking away from Tomoyuki.

"You totally do. Like a mix between him and Shingen's brother Nobukado, who also served as his double. Even when it was for the sake of a prank, you still looked exactly like your sister whenever you crossdressed."

"O-Oh. I see." Akira stared at Tomoyuki with half-lidded eyes and an impish smile. "W-What's the matter, Cherry Boy? Are you frustrated I-I made you date the Kagemusha of my sister instead of my actual sister?"

And there it was.

Akira finally addressed the elephant in the "room" (or in this case, park), much to Tomoyuki's chagrin.

Fubuki smirked and guffawed. "You're so hard up to get a girlfriend, you couldn't tell when you're dating a boy!"

Ouch. That mostly hurt because it was true.

Aya Fubuki's younger brother probably saw Yamamoto as some sort of perv who stalked his sister and had bad intentions for her altogether.

Rumors of the legendary Cherry Boy and his "Nice Guy" exploits had spread beyond his first year class and into the whole Maehara High campus, particularly with how Yukari Goto messaged him a love confession by accident and he immediately believed she'd actually fall for a guy like him.

Embarrassing.

Still, Tomoyuki had a sneaking suspicion that this wasn't enough to warrant an outright catfishing expedition, or at least catfishing to the extent that Akira went through.

Pretending to be the opposite gender over the phone or through an online chatroom was one thing. But Akira apparently hated him enough to go a step further than that. The extra mile, even.

"Any reason why you catfished me?" Tomoyuki probed, finally getting straight to the point.

"I-Isn't it obvious? I-It's because you're a creep and you've been stalking my sister all this time. I-I wanted to teach you a lesson!"

To Akira's surprise, Yamamoto then bowed and asked for his forgiveness.

"I'm really sorry for troubling your sister like that. She doesn't like me anyway, but I pushed the issue."

Akira rolled his eyes at Yamamoto. "A-Apologize to her, not me."

"I already have," said Tomoyuki. "I wanted to apologize to you personally."

"Y-You're the one apologizing to me? Ha!" scoffed the introvert. "T-That's rich, coming from you!"

"Yeah, I guess it is," said the Cherry Boy, who gazed towards the orange and red sky with a wistful sigh.

"I-Is this reverse psychology or something?" Akira asked. "I'm t-the one who catfished you, after all."

"Yep. You got me real good." Yamamoto chuckled, which made Fubuki frown.

"S-So what are you apologizing about?" asked the younger brother of Aya. "Y-You're going to play it off as a joke to save face or something?"

Tomoyuki's mouth went from a smile to a thin line, his lips moving inwards into his mouth. "I'd complain about how badly you think of me if you weren't completely justified to think that way."

The Cherry Boy heard the kid audibly gulp and saw him grip the edges of the bench's seat hard until his knuckles turned white.

From there, Yamamoto finally dropped the bombshell.

"I'm also sorry for punching your face back in grade school. It was supposed to be payback for when you punched me first, but I deserved that punch anyway."

Through grit teeth, Akira asked, "So you remember me after all, Yamamoto-sempai?" With nary a stutter.

***

About a couple of years ago, Kanemoto, Fubuki, and Yamamoto went to the same junior high.

Once upon a time, Kanemoto got lightly teased by his classmates, pairing him up with a girly kohai (underclassman) of theirs after he ended up near him during the school assembly. That kohai was Akira.

The thing about that was they had no girls in their junior high. It was an all-boys school.

Their junior was a boy who looked and sounded like a girl. He was like the little sister instead of little brother of his big sister Aya, who was attending an all-girls school at the time.

In Tomoyuki's desperation to fit in, he joined in on the teasing but laid it a little too thick, which led the popular pretty boy to put him in his place.

To be more specific, the jock told the nerd that he was a loser with no real friends and his greatest claim to fame was attempting to bully someone better than him.

Soon after, it was the Cherry Boy who got picked on by his classmates. It was karma in action, pure and simple.

But even before the well-deserved bullying, Tomoyuki got punched in the face by the same girly male kohai whom he also made fun with his teasing of Kanemoto.

This made the Cherry Boy's nose bleed, necessitating a visit to the nurse station.

A few days later, a "fight" between them ensued, with Tomoyuki hitting a punch at the kid before wimping out and covering his own face up with his hands to prevent getting punched back in return.

It was the lamest ending to a fight since, well, the Mayweather versus Pacquiao fight.

Never in the Cherry Boy's wildest dreams did he imagine that the kid he fought would end up being Aya Fubuki's younger brother, Akira.

Yamamoto was such a doofus try-hard when he was younger. Or maybe he was still one after all this time. He hoped this wasn't the case.

***

Back at the park...

The two boys went silent again.

Yamamoto stared at his shoes, examining its plain design like they were a magic eye picture instead. He couldn't bring himself to stare back at Akira.

"I'm really, really sorry about what I did to you before. I did you wrong and I can't apologize enough for it. I was such a shithead to you, Akira-kun."

"Don't call me that."

It was Yamamoto's turn to stutter. "A-Alright then, Fubuki-kun!"

Akira sighed then smirked, his upper lip quivering. "S-So you really did forget who I was up until recently. W-What traumatized me for years was just another day for you."

"It wasn't."

"H-Huh?"

"I remember it like it was yesterday. It was also one of the worst days of my life, getting beaten up by a kohai. How can I possibly forget that?"

Akira had a chuckle out of that one.

Yamamoto then confessed, "I know my apologies sound empty to you. I've been apologizing for my past actions so much that people are starting to not take any of them seriously. I wasn't teasing you, I was teasing Kanemoto, but when he bullied me back, you and I somehow ended up fighting instead. I...!"

The Cherry Boy stopped short when he saw the crossdresser raise his hand up. "Enough. I've heard enough," said Fubuki.

Tomoyuki sighed and nodded. He did his best. He knew that he wasn't about to be forgiven easily.

"I-I know you were teasing Kanemoto-sempai, not me."

Oh. He was angry about that. "Oh, so that's why you punched me on the nose."

"Yup, and you deserved it too, like you said," rejoined Akira, his raven hair glistening gold from the rays of the setting sun.

Yamamoto didn't know where to look, his cheeks getting warmer from the sight of the girly boy. "Sooo, you really had feelings for Kanemoto, huh?"

The crossdresser stared at the Cherry Boy's twiddling hands. "He didn't return my feelings," he mumbled softly.

"I am so sorry..."

"I-It's water under the bridge," said Akira. "S-So stop apologizing, it's getting annoying."

"So you forgive me?" asked Yamamoto hopefully.

The younger Fubuki chuckled. "M-More like I already got my revenge. We're even now, okay?" Akira then asked Tomoyuki, "So I'm Neechan's (Big Sis's) Kagemusha, huh?" while looking at the unseen horizon surrounded by golden buildings.

The afternoon sun acted like a Midas touch to everything its rays touched, turning them gold.

The Cherry Boy backpedaled from that thoughtless comparison. "Please don't take it the wrong way, Fubuki-kun. I didn't mean anything bad about it."

To Tomoyuki's surprise, Akira said, "I-I know. I-I've heard my fill of your stories when we were 'dating'."

Oh yeah. Right.

Tomoyuki told "Aya" everything about his dreams of becoming a movie director back during their "dates", as embarrassing as they were in retrospect. He made movie comparisons about everything as part of their small talk.

Smiling, Yamamoto shared, "Oh, did you know? Had Zatoichi's actor not taken the role of Kagemusha, it would've gone to Nakadai Tatsuya? It blew my mind when I first heard it! Imagine if Katsu Shintaro were fired from production. We would've gotten a totally different Kagemusha film altogether!"

"...And there you go again with your stories, Yamamoto-chan."

Akira then gave Tomoyuki a smiling, pensive look that made the Cherry Boy forget he was talking to a boy instead of a cute, short-haired girl.

Just like old times. This was the "Aya" that Tomoyuki fell for last year, lies and catfishing be damned.

Forgetting himself for a second, Yamamoto asked Fubuki a question he was meaning to ask AU Seiko.

"Let's say that in two parallel dimensions, one Kagemusha was portrayed by Katsu Shintaro and another was portrayed by Nakadai Tetsuya. Which one of them is the realer Kagemusha?"

The younger brother of Aya pursed his lips to a pout before it became an outright frown.

"W-Who cares? They're both fake," he said with a deep voice, shedding his female mask. Or perhaps he put on a male mask over his feminine self? "I- It's like me. E-Even in an alternate dimension, I could never be like Neechan. I could never be a real woman. No matter what version of me we're talking about."

The gazes of Tomoyuki and Akira finally met eye-to-eye as the Cherry Boy said, "Yes, you can never be Fubuki Aya, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Even if you're twins or the same people from parallel universes, you two are different in many ways, and that's okay."

"Y-Yamamoto-se..." Akira looked like was about to add a "sempai" suffix there but caught himself at the last minute.

Yamamoto stood up from the park bench and bowed at his kohai. Akira looked like he was about to bow in return, only for the cheeky brat to give him a kiss on the lips instead.

"AH!" yelped Yamamoto, who jumped back.

Akira chuckled, stuck his tongue out, and winked at the Cherry Boy. "Okay, even though I'm still a little mad, now I forgive you."

The kid then rose, put his hoodie on, and gave a sideward glance at the flabbergasted Tomoyuki while squeezing his earphones into his ears.

"Later."

The Cherry Boy touched his lips, chuckled to himself, and turned around to literally walk into the sunset, only to come face-to-face with the slack-jawed expressions of Aya Fubuki, Yukari Goto, Miku Machida, and Seiko Okamoto.

His Friend Zone Harem (most of them, anyway) had seen that last exchange.

'Goddammit, Fubuki-kun.'

***

A little later, Tomoyuki texted the Seiko from another universe about Akira, asking her about him, only to get this response.

"Fubuki Aya-chin's little brother? No, she has a little sister here. They're practically twins. Is Akira-chin a guy in your own universe, Cherry Boy?"

Whoa. Mind blown.

***

Usually, with Tomoyuki's luck, he'd have rumors flying around Class 2B or the whole Maehara campus about him being gay for Aya Fubuki's little brother, Akira.

And as expected, that was exactly what happened.

Oh well.

In light of the things Tomoyuki did to Akira and Aya, maybe he deserved being caught red-handed with that one last fake kiss to the lips in front of his not-girlfriends.

It was all a misunderstanding of course, but how was he supposed to explain what happened?

His so-called Friend Zone Harem (or rather, Sugata's Actual Harem) had been treating him weirdly ever since they saw that last exchange between him and Akira.

For example, he was greeted by a glaring Aya with, "I WILL NEVER ACCEPT YOU AS A BROTHER-IN-LAW, YAMAMOTO!" that fine Monday morning.

She seemingly forgot that same-sex marriage wasn't legal in Japan (although, in fairness, she might have also probably forgot that Akira was her little brother instead of little sister).

Also, she forgot one other important thing.

"...Shut up, Fubuki. I don't swing that way," he said to her under his breath. "Stop talking! I don't want people getting the wrong idea!"

"C-Congratulations, Ch-Cherry-kun," said a glassy-eyed Yukari, who walked towards her male best friend in a stilted, robotic fashion.

In turn, Tomoyuki cried out, "For the love of Kami-sama, your congratulations don't make me happy at all! Don't congratulate me over weird stuff, Goto!"

Meanwhile, the girls of Class 2C ended up milling out of the door, squealing (or "squeeing", as the Class 2B Rep would say) left and right over the new prospective coupling of Akira and Tomoyuki.

"EEEEE! The Cherry Boy is actually in love with Iincho's little bro?"

"I support your gay love for Fubuki-kun, Cherry Boy!"

"It finally happened. Cherry Boy has been rejected by so many girls he ended up dating a dude!"

"It's so romantic! A true sempai-kohai (upperclassman-underclassman) love affair!"

"Do you think Akira-kun will end up popping Cherry Boy's cherry?"

"KYAAAA!"

They were certainly more supportive over Yamamoto becoming a couple with the younger Fubuki versus him ending up with an actual girl, the idea of which seemed beyond creepy for these... fujoshi (rotten girl, otherwise known as a boy's love or BL fangirl).

'Oh no, not the fujoshi!'

The Cherry Boy turned towards his classmates at Section 2B for refuge from the madness that was Section 2C, only for him to end up face-to- face with a flush-faced and heavily breathing Miku.

Uh-oh.

Tomoyuki made an about-face as soon as he saw the look in Machida's face. He could practically see Valentine heart shapes on her irises.

"AH! Yamamoto-kun! Don't turn away! We need to talk about you and your new romance!"

"Get away from me, Machida! I'm not gay!" he said as he ran away from Machida and the rest of the rotten girls of Maehara.

"But it's not gay to fall in love with onnanoko (girly boys)!"

"SHADDAAAAAP!"

A teary-eyed Tomoyuki ended up bumping into Seiko.

They stared at each other for a little while before the Amazon Queen guffawed and joked, "If you're not gay, then why are you running away from all those girls, Cherry Boy?"

A despairing Yamamoto cried out, "Not you too, Amazon Queen!"

***

A weekend later, about five days removed from Tomoyuki's birthday...

Thankfully, Yamamoto's nightmare from last night where he was labeled as gay for Akira by the entire student body never actually transpired in real life.

If things had escalated that far, then the Cherry Boy might've been rumored to have a male gay version of his "Friend Zone" Harem composed of Sugata, Matsuda, Ishiguro, Kanemoto, and Fubuki.

His female heterosexual Friend Zone Harem still treated him rather weirdly though, but otherwise nothing too over-the-top happened to him. The girls kept that little exchange between him and Akira to themselves.

For example, he could still greet Yukari like before, but whenever he attempted to bring up Akira, she found a way to change the subject.

"Hi, Cherry-kun! Good morning!"

"Oh, hi Goto! About what happened last Friday...!"

"Oh, speaking of Friday, K-On's last episode happened on Friday! Such a beautifully made anime! Season 2 when, amirite? I can't wait to talk to Miku-chan about it, even though she only likes gay stuff... er, not that there's anything wrong with gay stuff! Oh look, there's Aya-chan! HI AYA-CHAN! Er, I gotta go, Cherry-kun!" she said in one breath.

"...."

As for Aya, she was the opposite of what she was in his nightmare. She was kind of worse.

"I hope you make Akira happy."

"N-No offense, Fubuki, but please shut up. I beg of you."

"Aw, you even stutter like him too!"

Ugh. He then cringed when from behind him, Aya whispered, "Break his heart and I'll break your fingers."

He then hissed, "I have no heart of his to break because he likes some other dude! His heart belongs to another!"

Fubuki blinked. "Who else would it be? He kissed you."

"SSSSSSHHH!" he shushed.

No need to start a new rumor about him. He'd rather be the Virgin King than have people think he swung for the other team or however the turn of phrase went. "He was just pranking me! Your li'l bro is about as in-love with me as you or Goto are with me!"

In the background, Yukari choked on her spit.

Aya then raised an eyebrow. "Or as in-love with you as Machida Miku is?"

He shrugged. "Sure, fine. Let's go with that."

In the background, Miku choked on her spit.

Speaking of Miku, the choking Class 2B iincho had her nose in her notebook for some reason when Yamamoto entered Class 2B and literally bumped into her, which blindsided her and made her drop the object of her attention.

Miku was actually hiding a drawing of what suspiciously looked like Tomoyuki and Akira kissing. And naked. And... for lack of a better term... "sword-fighting".

It was a pretty well-done drawing, if unnerving to the Cherry Boy. Like a detailed oil painting of hardcore porn (a description that covered a disturbing amount of medieval paintings).

"...." chorused Miku and Yamamoto.

Apparently, she took the kissing scene between the Cherry Boy and the Lady Boy as well as Yamamoto expected, knowing her. As expected of the Fujoshi of Class 2B.

The Class 2B Rep immediately scrambled for her lewd materials, her face as scarlet as the setting sun or the circle on the Japanese flag that also represented the setting sun.

"Et tu, Machida?" asked Yamamoto, who looked and felt like he was about to melt.

"I'msorryI'msorryI'msorryI'msorry...!" Miku apologized, bowing at the Cherry Boy repeatedly.

He then ran away from his so-called best friend, feeling a sense of déjà vu as he did so.

The teary-eyed Tomoyuki ended up bumping into Seiko.

They stared at each other for a little while before the Amazon Queen guffawed and joked, "If you're not gay, then why are you running away from all those girls, Cherry Boy?"

A despairing Yamamoto cried out, "Not you too, Amazon Queen!" only for him to blink and realize that out of all the scenarios he had in his dream, only the one involving Seiko came true.

Huh. So she really was the girl he knew the most among all the girls he'd ever wooed. Or failed to woo.

Or maybe he knew her AU self like the back of his hand and at times, he ended up guessing what the Seiko in his world would say because of how similar the two versions of her were.

Seiko grinned and laughed in that tomboyish, brusque way she usually did, which made Tomoyuki's heart break a little more.

AU Seiko used to be the closest thing Tomoyuki had to getting the object of his affection in his dimension, only for him to fall in love with her instead.

Now the Seiko of his dimension was the closest thing he had to getting AU Seiko.

However, the gulf between him and this dimension's Amazon Queen was about as insurmountable as the gulf between him and her AU counterpart that didn't even exist in his reality.

That gulf between them even had a name: Kazuhito Sugata.

Speak of the devil, Sugata decided then and there to pop out of nowhere.

"You're calling Cherry Boy gay? That's rich coming from a closeted lesbian like you, Okamato!" chided the blond-haired delinquent, making a pun using Seiko's surname and the word okama (transvestite).

From there, Seiko did a German suplex on her so-called childhood friend.

"OW! You're just proving my point, you stupid man-girl!"

"What's that? You want another suplex, Furyou-kun? Okay then!"

"GAAAH! LEGGO, YOU CRAZY BITCH!" yelped the Yankee. "Why are you doing wrestling moves when you're the Karate Club Captain? OOF!"

So far, Tomoyuki's Sugata Harem Extermination Plan (or whatever it was called, its title was a work in progress) had been rather successful in spite of himself and his social awkwardness.

Yukari Goto no longer pined for Kazuhito and neither did Aya Fubuki. Sure, Akira Fubuki wasn't part of Sugata's Harem, but Yamamoto was glad all his issues with both Fubuki siblings had been ironed out.

As for Student Council President Mana Otonashi, even the normally dense Tomoyuki could see that her interest with Kazuhito was only skin deep at best.

Besides which, he'd been hearing rumors of her possibly having a romance with the 2B heartthrob and Judo Club Captain Kanemoto instead. Maybe.

So at the very least, he didn't need to do much in order to bring Mana's crush with Kazuhito to an end. It was over before it began.

Although it did help out how Yamamoto had cut Sugata's (Actual) Harem down to size, seeing that the manipulative student council president had been using his harem against him.

Also, both Sugata and Machida were getting along splendidly. Soon enough, like in the case of his other childhood friend Megumi Minagata, the Yankee might end up dating Machida instead of Okamoto.

An ultimatum might finally be reached.

But even if Sugata broke Okamoto's heart the same way AU Sugata did AU Okamoto, would that be enough for the Amazon Queen to give the Cherry Boy a chance?

Tomoyuki gulped, unable to voice out the feelings bubbling inside him.

Even this far into his Anti-Harem Plan, any number of things could go wrong.

Machida and Sugata could end up incompatible since Kazuhito broke up with Minagata herself. Okamoto could somehow confess her feelings to the Yankee and then have them reciprocated. Or vice-versa.

The main problem with the Cherry Boy's harebrained plan was that, like everyone in his Friend Zone Harem... Goto, Fubuki, Machida, and Otonashi... the Amazon Queen only saw him as a friend and nothing more.

He had already pushed his luck by hinting to her that he still loved her (or at least another version of her) before "Aya" revealed himself to be "Akira" instead.

Besides which, didn't he already confess to her and got shot down?

Sure, his confession was done under the mistaken impression that Seiko confessed to him first, but that was a typical confession from him to be honest, as evidenced by his failed love confessions with Yukari, Aya, Mana, and Miku.

The two childhood friends from Hiroshima bickered, as usual. Like a married couple. While the Cherry Boy pined for the Amazon Queen in the background.

Has anything really changed in the end? After all this time? After all the progress Tomoyuki had in improving himself and his relationship with his failed not-romances?

Besides which, did he really deserve to woo someone like the Amazon Queen in the first place, whose specs were too high for the lowly likes of him? Much less her AU counterpart that was in love with him (kind of) but was a world away. A whole universe was between him and her.

She was such an athletic prodigy that she could join any sports club in Maehara and end up becoming the team captain there. She shone bright like the sun and Tomoyuki was the Icarus with waxen wings getting too close to her.

Maybe she deserved someone like the delinquent, who was at least a tough guy who knew her since childhood and could handle her strong personality.

"Hey, Earth to Cherry Boy!" greeted Seiko while gripping a blue-faced Kazuhito tight in a headlock, "What should I do with this stupid Yankee? Another German suplex? A crossface submission move? The Figure Four? A Scorpion Death Lock?"

Oh, he knew the answer to this one. "Emerald Flowsion?"

"All right! Emerald Flowsion it is... Wait, what?" The Amazon Queen's jaw dropped.

Regardless, she did the sit-out side slam regardless while never breaking eye contact with Yamamoto the whole while.

"Hey! SERIOUSLY!? H-Hey, Seiko-chan, don't... OOOF!" oofed Sugata.

Actually, it was the finishing move innovated by the late Mitsuharu Misawa, a pro-wrestling legend who recently passed away back in June 13 in both the universes of Tomoyuki and AU Seiko.

He died from what the police suspected was internal decapitation followed by a heart attack during a tag team match.

The other Seiko wouldn't stop crying about it. Misawa was her wrestling idol for the longest time. The Cherry Boy remembered because it was one of the few times when a celebrity death in the AU Amazon Queen's universe coincided with his universe.

"How do you know that move?" asked a bright-eyed Seiko who invaded Tomoyuki's personal space in her excitement. "Are you a pro-wrestling fan too?"

As though he were avoiding the blinding rays of the sun, Yamamoto's eyes darted away and gave a side glance at Okamoto and her huge, bouncing chest. "N-No, of course not. You must've mentioned it to me a while back."

Seiko scratched her chin and grinned. "Yeah, I guess so. Maybe it was during one of our practice sessions for the Sports Fest, right? Maybe."

Tomoyuki gulped and nodded. He winced at the careless smile the Okamoto of this world gave him, reminding him of the smile he always imagined the Okamoto from beyond this world would have shown him whenever she texted or called him.

"Then again, I don't recall ever mentioning Misawa-san's finishing move before. You've must've done your research on EBO again... Haven't you, Cherry Boy?"

Yamamoto cringed, looked even further away, and cleared his throat, remembering how his incomplete information about sports and whatnot made him look lame in front of Seiko.

"Like I told you before, you don't need to force yourself to like what I like, dude," said Okamoto.

Not quite looking her way, Tomoyuki muttered, "No, I'm not interested in pro-wrestling at all, but when you talk about it, MMA, boxing, or any other sport, you make it sound like the most interesting thing in the world."

Agh! What was he saying? He sounded so sappy! He wasn't going to earn brownie points from the Amazon Queen this way!

Afterwards, Yamamoto and the supine Sugata's eyes then met. To the Cherry Boy's surprise, the Yankee nodded to him as if agreeing with what he had said. 'The hell...?'

Huh. So even Okamoto's childhood friend who always acted like he was so unimpressed with her also saw her in the same light as the Cherry Boy did.

Tomoyuki didn't know what to think about that.

Maybe Kazuhito really was in love with Seiko after all. All it took was one more push and they'd be together at last, despite both of them playing hard to get.

And the realization shook Yamamoto to his core.

How could he compete against the Yankee if there was a possibility that he was still in love with the Amazon Queen? Even the AU Amazon Queen could end up with the AU Yankee had he not stayed in Hiroshima with AU Megumi.

He might as well give up. Right?

But Tomoyuki couldn't quit her.

Even if he didn't deserve the love of someone like (AU) Seiko Okamoto, he couldn't give her up.

Their science teacher, Miss Sakuragi, then entered the classroom, which made the students of Class 2B scramble back to their seats.

"...How do you do it, Cherry Boy?" Tomoyuki heard Seiko whisper behind him.

"Do what?" he asked, turning towards her and finally making eye contact.

"You went from not knowing what to say to me to knowing exactly the right thing to say to me every time. What's your secret?"

Before Yamamoto could answer, Okamoto already returned to her seat without waiting for his response.

"Uh... uh... S-STAND UP!" stuttered Miku as she hid her notebook full of boy's love drawings of Tomoyuki and Akira she had commissioned one of her artist friends to draw.

"Good morning, Miss Sakuragi!" everyone greeted.

"Good morning, class," the science teacher said. "Take your seats."

"Sit down!" ordered Machida, who had finally regained enough of her composure to sound more like a proper class representative.

***

During lunch break, Tomoyuki finally had his chance to talk to someone he hadn't had the opportunity to message in a while.

"So y'all finally gave up on that stupid harem plan thingy? It's 'bout time, City Slicker," texted Megumi Minagata, the ex-girlfriend of Kazuhito, to the Cherry Boy.

"Yeah," Yamamoto finally responded after editing his message over and over, with several of his unsent messages reaching the character limits of his phone.

He then explained, "Your ex's harem girls are dropping like flies. But even if he dumps Okamoto, I think I still won't win her heart. She just sees me as a friend."

"That's what y'all get for trying to do shady things to her instead of actually wooing her directly," she texted back. "She don't like that roundabout crap. Be straight with her."

He wanted to retort something back to Megumi, but he got nothing to reply with.

She was right. He had spent too much time falling in love with Seiko's AU version to woo the crush he could actually, physically interact with.

But maybe he was merely spoiled by AU Seiko. She was the Seiko that was already in love with him by default and by no "fault" of his. She wasn't even really in love with him either, but instead with his alternate universe counterpart.

"So? What's your master plan now?" asked Minagata.

He couldn't answer that either. Instead, he replied about something else entirely. Something that had been bothering him since the Sports Fest Volleyball Tournament.

"Okamoto is pretty amazing, isn't she? In our last Sports Fest, she was the MVP of Class 2B. She won the relay even after Machida tripped in the middle of it, and she almost won the volleyball tournament in spite of me being part of the team. Had she not spent her energy on the relay, she would've creamed 2A on her own. Was she always this amazing?"

"Hey, don't change the subject," came Megumi's first message, followed by, "Yep, that sounds exactly like Seiko-chan, all right. You just can't stop her when she gets going. She's stubborn to a fault but that's part of her charm."

"Right? As expected of the Amazon Queen," he wrote, adding, "I can't explain it properly, but anything she does becomes fun for me too, even things I'm normally not interested in. I don't even care about boxing, pro-wrestling, or MMA, but when she talks about those topics, I can't help but get hyped. Know what I mean?"

"Oh, absolutely," Minagata replied, adding, "She has always been an overachiever since I met her. We can barely keep up with her, Kazu-kun and I. It's almost like she's in another dimension, sometimes. A true alpha."

'Tell me about it. Both versions of Seiko-chan are like that,' Tomoyuki thought before texting back, "I want to keep up with her. I want to exist beside her. I want to live life the way she does. To the fullest."

"Hey," began the country bumpkin from Hiroshima, "You're starting to sound like someone I used to know. Watch yourself."

The Cherry Boy didn't heed Minagata's warning.

Instead, he took a picture of a poster he saw on the bulletin board regarding a certain club looking for new members. For future reference.

***

At dismissal time, near the exit gates of Maehara High...

"Cherry-kun! Nice timing! It's time for us to go to the Go Home Club!"

Tomoyuki heard Yukari Goto jokingly greet him, referring to the "club" that students who had no clubs belonged to, such that when it was dismissal time, they tended to "Go Home" instead of attend to club activities.

"You're going straight to work at that convenience store gig, right? Come on, let's go!"

Yamamoto stared at Goto blankly before stating, "Um, I'm actually part of the Literature Club now."

"Say whu...?" asked Yukari, doing a double-take. "Since when!?"

The Cherry Boy scratched the back of his head. "Would you believe since now?"

"You... You... YOU JERK! Every time with you! TAKE THIS! My love, hate, and all of my sorrow!"

"OW! What gives? What'd I do this time? And how'd you do that thing with your twin tails? OW! STOP IT! MY EYE!" screeched Tomoyuki as he cringed from the wrath of Yukari whipping her long twin-tailed ponytails back and forth at his face.

***

So two things happened.

Tomoyuki joined the Literature Club and scored pretty high on the initial test for it, much to the delight of the teacher heading the club, Miss Juri Kitamura. Yes, the same advisor and homeroom teacher of Class 2B.

All newbies had to take an English and Japanese language proficiency test to see how well they'd score and what level of reading they could handle.

He felt a little proud in crushing both tests.

There weren't many things he was actually good at, so being a little good at reading, writing, and language boosted his ego just a tiny bit.

Also, as a side note, Miku Machida was the class president of the Literature Club.

Well, okay then. Sure. This was yet another thing she was good at.

Yamamoto considered going to the Drama Club instead, but he didn't know how to act. At all.

There was also the Anime and Manga Club, but he had no idea how to draw either. Not to mention, it was a total sausage fest of lonely male nerds in that club, with it mostly being composed of sophomores from Class 2D.

Furthermore, there was no such thing as a Movie or Film Club in Maehara High. This was the original reason why the movie fanatic Tomoyuki never bothered joining any clubs. None of them matched up with his deep-down passion and interests.

The only club that usually filmed anything in the school was the Drama Club.

They recorded all of their theater productions on video, but from time to time they tried their hand at making actual films rather than just filming what happened on stage. They made use of the Audio-Visual department of the school every time they did so.

Therefore, it was indeed a shame that he couldn't end up in the Drama Club instead because he had for the longest time loved the art of filmmaking and appreciated the worldwide masterpieces of cinema.

He couldn't exactly write a script for the theater geeks to adapt either, since they usually just went with the classics of Shakespeare or Noh Drama.

Then again, he was kind of glad he had a familiar face with him in the club he ultimately decided to join.

To be honest, Tomoyuki expected Miku to be part of the Anime and Manga Club herself, what with her doing things like making doujinshi manga (self-published comics) that she sells at Comiket (Comic Market, a comic book convention that occurs twice a year).

She was friends with fellow fujoshi that drew the type of lewd doujinshi she wanted to make on the down low (since she couldn't draw herself), buuut that wasn't enough incentive for her to join the "creepy" Anime and Manga Club full of lonely nerds regardless.

Full of thirsty "Cherry Boys" like himself who wanted a girlfriend that was also interested in nerdy things.

Wait. Come to think of it, why were Tomoyuki and Miku best friends again?

Oh right. The moment that he swore never to attempt to woo her again, Machida was content to put him in the Friend Zone.

Like deep in the Friend Zone. Not the Ross and Rachel from "Friends" kind of Friend Zone. More like the Ross and Phoebe kind of Friend Zone.

Also, he wasn't that big of an anime maniac as the people from Class 2D. More like most of his knowledge of anime and manga was from the Class 2B Rep herself.

But at least with her rejection of his romantic advances, she kept her word that they could still be friends. Unlike that bitchy Student Council President Mana Otonashi, who screwed with him every chance she got.

Even though he barely read any worthwhile English, Russian, French, or local Japanese literature, he had a decent grasp of the language and he could use his movie knowledge in the Literature Club instead, particularly the films that were based on books.

Like "Lord of the Rings" by Peter Jackson. Or the "Harry Potter" film series. Or "Of Mice and Men". Or "Lord of The Flies". Or "Hakuchi (The Idiot)" by Akira Kurosawa. Or even "The Ring" horror film series.

These were all based on novels of some sort.

Actually, things went swimmingly well with the Literature Club. Surprisingly well. As if it were a club that fit like a glove in accordance to his needs and interests.

The only thing he was afraid of was him losing his part-time job over his decision to join a club. But he wasn't quite sure about how serious he was about either the Literature Club or his cashier work.

Every day, they were assigned books to read and reports to submit, just like in the case of their school work. And every day, he received praise for his work on every activity, which motivated him further and reminded him of why he joined the club in the first place.

For once, he felt like he was doing something for himself instead of trying desperately to seek approval from others.

Then, one day, after he played the trailer to Ran by Akira Kurosawa on his cellphone for the thousandth time to strengthen his resolve, he made his decision then and there.

It was a trailer to a movie that existed in a parallel world, starring Tatsuya Nakadai: The same actor who played the titular character in Kurosawa's Kagemusha instead of Shintaro Katsu, who was the Kagemusha in Tomoyuki's universe.

He still couldn't help but get misty eyed every time he watched this "lost work" by Kurosawa.

Once he had gathered enough confidence and courage from all his initial club activities, he soon wrote the first few words of his own short story.

It was all thanks to this birthday gift sent to him by the other Seiko.

***

Apparently, Tomoyuki was more motivated about his Literature Club membership than even he realized. Even though he ended up keeping his convenience store clerk job, he found himself scribbling on his notebook or saving notes on this cellphone in between breaks.

It'd been a long time since he felt passionate about something other than trying to get a girlfriend then failing in a spectacular and cringe-worthy fashion.

Like he was living the kind of life Okamoto had been living as this sports goddess oozing with pure talent, potential, and athleticism.

It was even enough for him to ignore whispers from his clubmates about him being a try-hard teacher's pet because he kept acing all of the tests and activities given to them by Miss Kitamura.

All the same, back at their clubroom, Tomoyuki wrote and wrote. He fulfilled more and more of the requirements of the club, such that he was even giving Miku a run for her money when it came to scoring high with their club activities.

"Very good, Yamamoto-kun! Aside from the purple prose and run-on sentences, you're getting the hang out of essay writing. Have you ever written anything else before? Like short stories or something?" asked Miss Kitamura to Tomoyuki after handing him his graded test paper.

Scratching his cheek while his eyes darted away at his buxom teacher, the Cherry Boy gulped and said, "N-No. I haven't... written anything serious or... anything. Just small stories and... terrible-looking doodles for manga."

His homeroom teacher for Class 2B chuckled and winked. "Well, you're a little diamond in the rough, methinks. Maybe you might even have talent for it. Keep at it."

He smiled back at her words of encouragement, bowed, and went back to his seat as Miss Kitamura called on the next club member.

His heart raced from acing yet another activity. It made him feel... things in ways reminiscent to when AU Seiko first confessed her love for him over the phone. Like he felt appreciated and loved for being him.

He never felt more alive in all his life. Was this the kind of rose-tinted life he would've been leading had him and AU Seiko lived in the same universe?

"How's your new story coming along?" whispered Machida after taking a peek at the notebook of barely legible handwriting from Tomoyuki. "Have you finally gotten off of your butt and started writing that romance of yours about lovers from different dimensions?"

"No, that's different! Also, if you want me to show mine, you better show yours too!" teased Yamamoto back.

A blushing Miku covered her face with her own notebook full of scribbles and notes right after impudently sticking her tongue out at her fellow... writer, was it?

Yeah, Tomoyuki was kind of a writer now, wasn't he? Even if he was an amateur at it. 'Ain't that a kick in the head?'

Speaking of which, he shouldn't get ahead of himself. All he was doing was making a rough or even sandpapery draft of a story.

But he did have fun exchanging story ideas and getting feedback from the Class Rep. Even though despite her cheery demeanor, she was stricter than even Miss Kitamura in pointing out the grammatical and continuity errors of his work.

He gave her feedback in kind though for her stories too. Although he didn't really care for any of her boy's love or young adult romance ones.

He also outright turned down reading any stories featuring him and Akira Fubuki. Or Kazuhito Sugata. Or Kanemoto. Or especially Ishiguro or Matsuda. Seriously.

He also thanked his lucky stars that Machida was embarrassed and self-aware enough to not share with him any of her, uh, more mature BL stories and outlines for her erotic doujinshi manga for feedback purposes.

She finally got the hint that he had no interest in discussing which guy should be seme (on top) or uke (at the bottom) in a pairing she made up for original stories or her fan fiction.

To Miku's chagrin, Yamamoto quite frankly skewered all of her literary work and outlines for the club, taking note that they all followed the same tired clichés of misunderstandings, arguments, and forgiveness. Rinse and repeat.

"But that's how all shojo manga (girl comics) stories ended! Don't knock 'em all down for following the same formula!" she'd complain.

"Yeah, sure, but... surely you can come up with some new and interesting twist on the formula, right?" he'd point out. "So that it doesn't come off as derivative."

To her credit, although she hated him for his devilish frankness, she didn't want him to pull his punches on his critiques either, especially since whenever he did offer praise she appreciated it doubly so.

That was also the way he liked his constructive criticism from her. She even quickly corrected many of his run-on sentences, repeated phrases, mixed metaphors, and purple prose as though she were an advanced version of a cellphone autocorrect.

She'd make a great editor for a book or manga publishing house someday.

What frustrated Yamamoto about Machida's otherwise excellent, detailed, and mostly grammatical feedback was when she said his stories were "okay" or "fine" plot-wise but said nothing more about them.

He didn't know how to improve upon "okay" or "fine".

"There's nothing wrong with the story, Yamamoto-kun!" Miku would insist.

"Buuut...?" Tomoyuki would then prod.

"'But' what? 'But' nothing! I just said the plot is fine! Jeez, Cherry Boy," she'd then say with enough exasperation for her to forget how embarrassed she'd normally be when calling Yamamoto the slang term for "male virgin".

Regardless, he was so inspired by the progress of his writing and the high scores he'd been getting from his club activities that he even began writing the first page of a long-form story with a premise that didn't conclude after 4,000 words.

In a few hours, one page became 10 and 10 pages became a chapter. That chapter then turned into 3 chapters. Then 9 chapters.

In just a few days, he was churning out chapters and word counts that would've taken him the better part of three months to produce. Like he'd suddenly been possessed by hypergraphia or the intense desire to write or draw.

As though he were a man possessed. He was on a roll. The scattered puzzle pieces in his life had started to finally falling into place.

***

"Wow. You joined the Literature Club? Good for you," said AU Seiko after updating Tomoyuki about how it went with her love triangle with AU Tomoyuki and AU Miku.

As a by the way, AU Machida did geek out about the prospect of alternate universes after AU Okamoto broached the subject jokingly while discussing the possible origins of the Kagemusha Trailer (from Yamamoto's universe) sent to AU Yamamoto for his birthday.

This distracted the previously upset AU Miku—who in their dimension had a closer relationship to AU Tomoyuki—over not giving the object of their affection a better gift than AU Seiko had.

As a downside, she wouldn't shut up about the Multiverse Theory the whole time they were together.

"The Literature Club is actually the perfect fit for you. You were always the creative type. I mean, judging by the Cherry Boy in my world."

"Thanks a lot, Amazon Queen," said Yamamoto, who couldn't stop smiling after revealing his decision to join a club for once. As though he felt somehow closer to the AU version of his crush by doing so.

Or at least worthier of her love.

It was as though he could see her back as he raced with her in his imagination, like he was about to catch up with her as she shone brightly as always did like the shooting star that she was.

"Come to think of it, our Cherry Boy... my Cherry Boy... the other you... is part of the Film Club."

He chuckled and rolled his eyes. "Of course you'd have a Film Club in your universe. That's how it always works, doesn't it? What we have, you don't have, and vice-versa."

The Amazon Queen giggled in return. "I'm just glad you're seeking your own passions outside of all this love business. But don't get too distracted by your club and forget about wooing the other me or anything."

Thoughtlessly, the Cherry Boy reassured, "The reason I joined the Literature Club is to impress the other you. Kind of."

"...Wait, what? How does that work?" AU Seiko asked in a... questioning(?) tone that took Yamamoto aback.

Did he say something wrong?

***

Back at the cafeteria, while Miku and Tomoyuki ate their bento and discussed their activities at the Literature Club, two familiar figures approached them.

"So the rumors were true. Yamamoto has left the Go Home Club and joined Miku-chan's Literature Club instead," said a smirking Aya from Class 2C.

"I-It's not my club! Jeez!" replied Miku with a sigh before munching on an egg roll. "A-And Yammamoto-kun is doing excellent work at our club, for your information!"

'Gee, I wonder how the news spread so fast,' thought Yamamoto before sparing a glance at Yukari, the girl beside Fubuki who couldn't meet his gaze "for some reason".

Making an apologetic chopping motion with her hand once she mustered the courage to look him in the eye, Goto asked, "Can we join you?" before sitting down anyway and not waiting for a response.

Huh. Even the aloof Aya followed Yukari's lead this time around and sat down with them on the same table. They didn't normally eat around Miku when he was around.

Him joining some club wasn't that newsworthy.

Miku and Tomoyuki sat opposite to each other, so the Class 2C girls ended up sitting together with each of them, with Aya sitting beside Machida and Yukari sitting beside Yamamoto.

"Congratulations, Miku-chan," said Yukari with a wide grin while covering her guffawing mouth, which prompted the Class 2B Rep to shush her with a blush.

"Don't congratulate me! Jeez!" the bespectacled girl pouted at the twin-tailed girl. "Congratulate Yamamoto-kun!"

"Stop bullying her," reprimanded both Aya and Tomoyuki in unison at Yukari in that familiar parental way they'd tell off a misbehaving child, much to their surprise.

Fubuki stared at Yamamoto for a hot minute with a blank expression on her face before turning her attention back to Miku and Yukari.

'Whew. I thought she was going to be mad,' he thought.

"Bullying her? Stop bullying me!" said Goto with a sniffle and wide deer-in-front-of-headlights eyes.

"Now, now! Let's not fight over something trivial!" said Machida, who took on a motherly role as she patted her friend's head.

Once everyone settled down, Yukari asked, "What have you two lovebirds been up to in your little club anyway?" before munching on some convenience store steamed meat buns herself.

With a "playful" kick to Goto's shin from under the table, Miku said, "We're in the middle developing our individual writing style, so I was concerned that Yamamoto-kun couldn't keep up. But it turns out he's a natural at writing. I'm so proud of him."

Tomoyuki nodded. "And I've been recommended several books I haven't read to help me find 'my voice' or something. The club members there are really friendly and nonjudgmental about book choice. Some of them even cover light novels, like Slayers or Suzumiya Haruhi. It's pretty... comfy going there, to be honest."

He then saw the Class 2B Rep giggle, which made him inquire, "What?"

"Oh, nothing. It's just that all our classmates in the club call you the Film Snob," said Machida. "All your book recommendations were made into films one way or another."

The Cherry Boy palmed his face in embarrassment. "Aw man. Fine, I don't read many books that aren't films! Jeez, they're the ones being snobs!"

"Your new nickname is at least less embarrassing than your current one, Cherry-kun," quipped the bouncy Yukari.

Aya took a sip of her bottle of iced tea then asked, "So what does Seiko-chan think about you joining the Literature Club, Yamamoto-kun?"

"Huh? Er... Pardon?" asked Tomoyuki, feigning ignorance. Internally, he groaned.

Ugh, this again. Both AU Seiko and Not-AU Aya should mind their own business it came to how he went about wooing Not-AU Seiko.

What was up with those two anyway? 'It's not like I abandoned wooing Okamoto just because I became a member of a club. It's actually quite the opposite.'

Fubuki smacked her lips, thought for a minute, and said, "Just curious what Seiko-chan thought about you getting a club after all this time. My little brother told me you two have become quite close, so I'm wondering if you had asked her what she feels about it."

Tomoyuki cringed, recognizing what Aya implied even as both Miku and Yukari tilted their heads inquisitively at the both of them. "She's... fine with it. She thought it was cute and the perfect fit for me."

Oh man. And here he thought now that the whole stalking jig was up with Akira crossdressing as Aya, the Elder Fubuki would let up on him a little bit. Be nice to him for once.

But old habits die hard and one of the girls that made him infamous among the girls of Maehara was now putting his feet on the fire once again.

So that tattletale Akira told his big sister about the shenanigans they were up to at the hotel. Man, that sentence sounded so wrong and naughty in his head.

Then again, did the Fubuki brother also confess to the sister about how he was disguising himself as her in order to pull a prank on the Cherry Boy? Maybe he merely came clean to her and all, confessing everything.

Wait. Aya already knew about his crush on Seiko, didn't she?

Well, yes, of course she knew that he had a crush on (Non-AU) Seiko! The Maehara High grapevine was thick and accommodating of various grape pickers.

However, what must've sealed the deal for her was seeing Okamoto act all weird after she played his fake confession to Miku on her phone.

He knew better than to be presumptuous of the Amazon Queen's intentions, but for all intents and purposes, he interpreted the way she acted as... jealousy. Or maybe he hoped it was jealousy on her part.

Miku then asked Aya, "Oh really? What happened between Yamamoto-kun and Seiko-chan?"

A cold sweat dripped from the nape of Yamamoto's head as Fubuki's stare traveled back and forth from him to Machida. She then said with a cattish grin, "That's a secret."

The clueless Machida then told Tomoyuki, "But still, you and Aya-chan are closer together now than before, right? I'm so happy for you two," without a hint of jealousy, irony, or sarcasm from her sweet voice.

He hoped this clued Yukari in on how the bespectacled Class Rep really felt about him romantically.

***

To Be Continued...

It just occurred to me that Tomoyuki Yamamoto is kind of like the infamous Christian Weston Chandler or Chris-chan, complete with his "Sweethearts" or his version of the "Friend Zone Harem".

Also, his dream of making his Sonichu webcomic a serious thing even though it was just him plagiarizing existing content and lazily fusing them together is also reminiscent of Tomoyuki's obsession with Kurosawa's Kagemusha.

How about that?

Farewell, Abdiel

[friend-clarity]

New Jersey Kosher Market Shooting

Dec 11, 2019  |  by Dr. Yvette Alt Miller

Two adherents of the Black Hebrew Israelites attacked a kosher grocery store in New Jersey, murdering three civilians and a detective, and wounding others.

Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop said Friday it’s his opinion that the shooters who killed a police officer and three civilians on Tuesday afternoon had an even more sinister objective – killing students at a religious school next door.

“My opinion is that as more info comes out it’ll become increasingly clear that the target was the 50 children at the Yeshiva attached to that store,” the mayor wrote on Twitter just after 8 a.m. “We will never know 100% but the doorway to the yeshiva was 3 feet away (and) it seems he goes in that direction 1st.”

The two attackers, who identified with the Black Israelite group that is known for their anti Semitic views, killed four people during Tuesday’s rampage.

The same day, President Trump issued an executive order expanding Title VI of the Civil Rights Act to protect Jewish students on U.S. college campuses who are increasingly facing strident anti-Semitism.

“They mostly trade in anti-Semitism,” explains Heidi Beirish, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC)’s Intelligence Project, which tracks extremist groups, of the Black Hebrew Israelite movement. “They call (Jews) sometimes devilish imposters or devils, because they think of themselves as the true Israelites.”

The extreme group has roots in the 1800s, when some fringe Black Pentecostal preachers in the South began asserting that far from present day Jews being the “real” descendants of the ancient Israelites, black Africans were, and it is the descendants of America’s former slaves who are the “real” Jews, The movement gave birth to many factions, some of which are peaceful. But some factions have become extremist and angry. “Although most Hebrew Israelites are neither explicitly racist nor anti-Semitic and do not advocate violence,” the SPLC noted, “there is a rising extremist sector within the Hebrew Israelite movement” that foments intense hatred of Jews and calls for the death of slavery of Jews and Whites.

In the past decade, hostile, anti-Semitic Black Hebrew Israelite branches have proliferated, with dozens of new Black Hebrew churches springing up, particularly in the Northeastern United States. Members confront and harass both Jews and Whites. Black Hebrews gained attention in January 2019 when four racist Black Hebrew members spewed racist bile at a group of students from Covington Catholic High School when they visited the National Mall in Washington DC on a school trip. One student’s face-off with a Native American drummer, who later said he was trying to heal over the hateful rhetoric, went viral.

More recently, groups of Hebrew Israelites from South London gathered to terrify and scream at Hassidic Jews on Shabbat in the North London neighborhood of Stamford Hill, which is home to the largest Hassidic population in Europe. Police were called to the scene on September 7, 2019, after a group of 20-30 Hebrew Israelites gathered and screamed insults at passing Jews.

The London group said they went by many names, not only Hebrew Israelites, perhaps contributing to confusion about just how big their hateful cult is and what they stand for.

On Tuesday, December 10, 2019, two Hebrew Israelite members in New Jersey took their hate much further, writing an anti-Semitic manifesto. Though police have not released this document, they described it as brief and “rambling”. It seemed to call for violence and death to Jews.

The two killers, whose names I won’t dignify by using here, a woman aged 50 and a man aged 47, were wanted for murder in connection the earlier killing of Jersey City resident MIchael Rumberger, who was killed by a blow to his head and was found dead in the trunk of his car in Bayonne, New Jersey, on December 8.

Two days later, a veteran Jersey City Detective, Joe Seals, spied the killers in a cemetery in Jersey City. Realizing that they matched the description of suspects in Mr. Rumberger’s murder, Det. Seals approached the pair, who shot him dead in cold blood. Det. Seals, a 40-year-old married father with five children, was left dead on the ground in the cemetery.

The murderers then entered a U-Haul truck that they’d stolen and seemingly outfitted for a major terror attack. Inside were a pipe bomb as well as a second explosive device. The truck also housed their hateful manifest. The pair drove the truck slowly and deliberately about a mile, to the JC Kosher Supermarket. Owned by Moshe and Mindel Ferencz, the store opened three years ago to cater to a small but growing Jewish Hassidic population that has been moving to Jersey City from nearby Brooklyn. The Ferenczs were among the first Hassidic families to move, and they were raising their three young children in their new community.

Moshe had just stepped out of the store to attend the brief afternoon Mincha service in a synagogue next door when the killers pulled up outside. They pulled out high powered rifles and started firing at the kosher market, then burst inside and continued shooting. Panicked synagogue members witnessed the scene and frantically dialed 911. Within moments, SWAT teams and other police officers from across New York and New Jersey were congregating at the scene. As police helicopters circled overhead, law enforcement officers came under intense fire from high profile rifles.

The firefight lasted for hours. One nearby resident, 67-year-old Willy McDonald told reporters, “This is one of the biggest gunfights I’ve seen in a while, and I’ve been in Vietnam.” Schools in the area were put on lockdown and police officers went door to door urging residents to stay inside for their safety. Bus and train service were suspended in the area and an exit of the New Jersey Turnpike was closed amid the firefight.

A shopper inside JC Kosher Supermarket managed to escape and described what it was like when the killers burst in: “I was standing by the salad bar in the grocery and I heard three shots, bullets shattered the glass of the grocery. Suddenly I saw two people come in, with long black raincoats and long guns. They tried to point the gun at me. I pushed it away and ran away.”

Inside the store, two Hassidic Jews and one employee were murdered by the killers. Mindel Ferencz, 33, died in her store, leaving her three young children without their mother. 49-year-old worker Miguel Douglas was also murdered. The third victim was Moshe Deutsch, a 24-year-old rabbinical student from nearby Brooklyn. Several others were injured, including at least one Hassidic passer by outside, and one Hassidic customer who seems to have been shot several times as they ran out of the store.

Shockingly, Jewish members of a group called Americans Against Anti-Semitism visited the scene of the shooting later that night, and found that non-Jewish neighbors who’d gathered were blaming the Jews for the violence that had just resulted in their deaths. “They would do that to us,” one local woman said of the Jewish victims, somehow inverting the situation to make it seem as if Jews were killers. “I blame the Jews,” another local complained. “If they was dead, they got shot dead, that’s great” one local man declared. Several neighbors expressed the hope that Jews would move away.

“I’ve cried my eyes out already,” said Victoria Ferencz, Mindel’s mother-in-law. “I’m feeling pretty broken… I feel sorry for my son. (Mindel’s) going to heaven, but he and his children will have it hard.” Mindel personified “a life of selflessness, and dedication to others,” said a local Jewish organization. She and her husband Moshe, among the first Hassidic families to move into Jersey City five years ago, decided to open their supermarket to help support their friends and neighbors so they could easily access kosher food in their new community.

Grocery employee Miguel Douglas was praised by his pastor who told local reporters that Mr. Douglas was an immigrant from Ecuador and lived with his wife and eleven-year-old daughter: “He was an excellent person, he really looked out for his family, and they were inseparable.”

The day after the attack, Rabbi David Niederman, the Executive Director and President of the United Jewish Organizations of Williamsburg in Brooklyn, praised the victims, including Mr. Deutsch, whom he described as an “extremely kind and generous” and a “go-to person when his peers needed help”. Mr. Deutsch recently helped lead a food drive during the Jewish holidays that helped feed 2,000 people.

In the midst of speaking to reporters, Rabbi Niederman began to cry, saying, “Can you imagine a few hundred bullets went into the body of a 24-year-old?” referring to Mr. Deutsch. “How can we as a people, a community, bear that?”

His question is one all of us must ask. With this horrific attack, a new front has opened in what increasingly feels like a war against America’s Jews. Last year the FBI reported that Jews, which make up fewer than 2% of Americans, accounted for 57% of victims of hate crimes in the USA. The Anti-Defamation League reported that violent attacks on American Jews doubled in 2018 from their already high levels in 2017. In fact, 2018, the most recent year for which records are available, saw the third highest levels of ant-Jewish hate and attacks since records began. With the attack in Jersey City, a new hate group has taken its place among the many that seek our destruction.

As we mourn our murdered brethren and pray for the recovery of the shoppers and passersby who were injured in the attack, let’s take a moment to appreciate the Jewish life that was so brutally attacked. In the memory of those who were killed and injured, let’s embrace the Jewish life they so loved, and commit ourselves to doing mitzvot in their memories.

[bellabooks]

“Pretty Little Liars” recap S7 Ep20: Til death do us part

Pretty Little Readers, this is it. The last PLL recap I will ever write…until the inevitable reboot in 2032 that follows the adventures of teenage twins Lily and Grace DiLaurentis-Fields. But I’m getting ahead of myself. This was a two-hour finale with buckets of exposition, so let’s dive on in! I’m glad this show finally upped their budget and gave Jenna a pony   We open on a deserted Rosewood street, where the Liars are all drinking coffee and bemoaning the drama-less state of their lives. It’s swelteringly hot, but all anyone can talk about is how boring everything is without any mysteries to solve. Oh, and Lucas tap dances by in a white tuxedo. And Jenna rides by in a decorated horse like she’s a circus performer. And then it starts snowing.  Is that snow? NO IT’S COCAINE!!!   The Liars look to the heavens, and the camera zooms out to reveal they were inside a snow globe, which was no joke my fantasy ending for this show. But who is holding the snow globe? Mona Vanderwaal, queen of the heavens, runner of the games, genius among geniuses. She’s locked up in Welby with only her snow globe, which she drops to the floor when she’s confronted by a black hoodie. She asks them if they are there to kill her, and she smiles that Mona smile. Then the opening credits run for the last time, and all the Liars do the “sshhhh” together. TOGETHER!  For real though guys, who is in this coffin?   We then cut to ONE YEAR LATER, and check in on the gang. Ezria is on the Warner Bros. lot (which is incidentally where they shoot the show- so meta!) because their book is being turned into a movie. They are also getting married in a week. Spencer is rescuing horses with Melissa and bonding with her, and Toby returns to town after a long Eat, Pray, Shave tour of the world. Spencer is rehabbing a cute pony named Bashful, who is skittish around everyone but her. Don’t worry, this will come back later in a big bad way. Emily and Ali are juggling twins, Lily and Grace. Also, Ali has the worst bangs and it’s so distracting I had to rewind this scene twice just to focus. Ali meets up with Pam Fields at the Radley, and they have a secret conversation about taking care of/loving Emily. Ali continues teaching English at Rosewood High, where she discusses literary endings (wink wink) with her class. She’s still teaching mini-bitch Addison, who disrupts the class and calls Ali a lesbo. Ali is in no mood, and grabs Addison after class. Addison isn’t scared of her, but she IS scared of Jenna Marshall, who is now a life skills teacher at Rosewood. What life skills is Jenna imparting to these children?! How to seduce men and women alike into doing your bidding? Firecracker dodging? I have so many questions, the first of which is, where do I sign up? Addison tries to sass Jenna by waving her hands in front of her blind face, but Jenna grabs her by the wrist like she’s Dare Devil and tells her that she while she can’t see, she can smell a bitch from a mile away. In a world where teachers can sleep with and marry their students without censure, I guess calling someone a bitch is small potatoes.  BITCH CAN SMELL   Meanwhile, things aren’t sunshine and lollipops with Hanna and Caleb. Mona is being discharged from Welby, and Hanna invited her to stay at the loft without running it by her husband. Caleb is upset that the woman who tried to push his wife out of a bell tower is now their new roommate, but Hanna knows that while husbands come and go, ride or die BFFs are forever. On cue, Mona shows up at their door and Hanna welcomes her. Mona seems fragile and forgetful, and tells them that with her new meds, she isn’t as sharp as she used to be. If this series ends with a neutered and sad Mona I will never forgive Marlene. Why is the wifi password Hanily?!   The Liars and friends meet up at the newly renovated Lost Woods resort, which Spencer and Ali are re-launching. Everyone’s gathered for a surprise bachelor/bachelorette dinner for Aria and Ezra. There is wine and laughter and memories, and everyone is having a good time…except for Haleb, who can’t stop squabbling. Spying on them from the bushes is a black hoodie, who turns around to reveal MELISSA HASTINGS…or is it? Everyone is enjoying drinks by the fire pit, when Emily remembers that this is their first night without the babies and drags Ali to their room for some sexing. Then everyone else pairs off to hook up, except for Toby and Spencer who decide to play scrabble like a couple of nerds. We find out that Spencer is going to law school, working at her mom’s firm, and rebuilding her relationship with her family. Isn’t it nuts that we’re 25 and have two kids?!  Tell it to my bangs: they’re already 45.   While everyone else gets a lengthy sex scene, complete with saxophone music, Emily and Ali press their cheeks together and touch legs because that is how lesbians have sex on Freeform. At least, they are trying to…Ali is feeling all sentimental while Emily is trying to get it on. I feel like this would be a totally adequate sex scene by itself, but pairing it with Ezria’s lengthy romp only highlights the double standard when it comes to queer sex scenes.  Nothing says sex scene like closed mouth kissing!   Despite this disparate treatment, let’s all take a step back and marvel that this series is ending with a happy queer couple, where no one is dead or heartbroken. It’s 2017, but there is still something delightfully revolutionary about the awkward gay jock winning the heart of the most popular girl in school and living happily ever after. It’s kind of lovely until you remember what they did with Maya and Shana and Charlotte. In a less romantic sex scene across town, Hanna and Caleb are still fighting while Hanna sits with her legs up, trying to conceive. Yup, these two dummies are trying to have a baby. And in sadder fertility news, Aria gets a phone call from her doctor and finds out that she can’t have children. Why is everyone so baby crazy on this show?! Y’all are 25, settle down. Aria wants to call off the wedding, but the Liars convince her that Ezra won’t care. She tries to keep it a secret, but ends up telling him the next day, and he responds as he should: that it doesn’t matter, and there’s more than one way to make a family. Melissa watches the Liars comforting Aria from the bushes, and removes her mask to reveal MONA underneath. Dun Dun Dun! I would love it if A.D. turns out to be a Russian nesting doll of masks leading to an empty hoodie. Mona Facetimes with A.D. and demands to know who they are. You know what would really take this party up a notch? Jenna Marshall on a damn horse!   The next night is Aria’s rehearsal dinner, and Hanna brings along Mona, which is rude as hell. You don’t just bring your crazy hyperadrenalized murderer BFF without RSVPing for her first! No one is more shocked than Ashley Marin, who separates from the Wine Moms to give Hanna a talking to about co-dependency and toxic friendships. The Wine Moms keep talking about that time they got locked in a basement, yet another spin-off show that we’ll never get from Marlene.  A toast to the best parent on this show: Chardonnay!   Emily sees Alison sneaking around with Pam and assumes that Ali is hiding something from her. She gives Ali the third degree until she reveals that Pam gave her the family engagement ring—she was planning to propose to Emily somewhere romantic, but instead she’s doing it right this second in her pug dog sweater. Ali thanks Emily for loving her unconditionally, even when she was a zombie bitch who communicated through stolen birds and old witches. Even when she was flying a plane in a Vivian Darkbloom wig. Emily says yes, and they kiss.  If you can love me through these bangs, you can love me no matter what   Meanwhile, Spencer goes back to Toby and they have a lengthy sex scene of their very own. Spencer steps out of the shower and finds Mona in a black hoodie in her room. Mona says “Déjà vu bitch!” and knocks her unconscious. Spencer wakes up in a prison cell, disoriented. She looks in the mirror and checks herself out, until the mirror Spencer starts moving on her own. Holy crap, Twincer is real! And British! Kudos to everyone who predicted this twist, I honestly thought it was going to be someone else. This British twin is Alex Drake, aka A.D. and she’s busted Mary Drake out of jail for a family reunion. Put some pants on, we need to talk about Spencer’s accent: it’s not just British. It’s Eliza Doolittle meets Burt the Chimney Sweep meets Mrs. Lovett from Sweeney Todd. It’s SO over the top and terrible and delightful. Just like this British evil twin conceit: soapy and ridiculous and I am so on board with this nonsense. ‘Ello Guvnah! I’m your twin I is!   In a series of flashbacks, we get the sordid tale of Alex Drake: When Mary was in labor at Radley (in the 1940’s) she gave birth to Spencer, who was quickly whisked away by the Hastings family. So quickly in fact, that no one stuck around for Spencer’s twin sister Alex to be born. To buy her way out of Radley, Mary sells Alex to a fancy British family who raise her across the pond…until they realize that she is the baddest of bad seeds and dump her at an orphanage for evil geniuses. Flash forward, and teenage Alex is pulling pints in a bar where she runs into Wren. Wren can’t believe he’s found a British Spencer, and tells Alex of her true parentage. They fall in love (eww) and Wren arranges a meeting for Alex and Charlotte. Once the half sisters meet, they become thick as thieves, each finding the family they were searching so long for. Charlotte falls in love with Archer, and they proceed to double date their way around Europe. It’s like The Parent Trap, but with more wigs, murder, and asylum stays.  This is my Sarah Manning cosplay…fancy a shag?   But Charlotte can’t handle being away from the game, so she goes back to Rosewood to play with her dolls, where Mona murders her in the bell tower. Consumed by revenge, Alex sets out for Rosewood and picks up the game where Charlotte left off. In her quest to find out who murdered Charlotte, she gets a glimpse into the charmed life of Spencer Hastings, and wonders what could have been if she had that life. You know, that idyllic suburban experience where your father bangs every mom in town, you’re related to all your friends, and you spend your entire adolescence being terrorized by a maniac in athleisure wear. Ah, the stuff that dreams are made of! Alex starts cosplaying as Spencer and pops up in a series of flashbacks: Alex was the one who held Hanna when she was locked in that barn. Alex asked Toby for the goodbye kiss. Alex also banged Toby and fell for him. Soon enough, she decides she wants to be Spencer full-time, so she’s locked Spencer in her new dollhouse and takes over her life. She’s so into mirroring Spencer that she makes Wren shoot her in the shoulder so she has the same scar. She also uses Wren’s sperm to father Emily and Ali’s babies, before killing him and turning him into a diamond necklace. Which she wears around her neck. EVERYWHERE SHE GOES. I mean, it’s no bracelet made of teeth, but it’s still pretty bonkers.   Does this seem like a lot of exposition? Because it’s an insane amount of exposition. Alex isn’t revealed until at least halfway through this 2-hour finale, and she hits the ground running, checking off every unsolved mystery this show ever made up. Bitch can summarize! Alex heads off to Aria’s wedding, where no one notices anything different about her. Aria comes out in her bridal gown, and it is some wacky vintage nonsense that only Aria could cook up. Frankly, I’m surprised it was missing her signature leopard print pattern. It’s the last ever Emily Fields cleavage appreciation post!   Meanwhile, Mary tries to comfort Spencer by making her Peruvian chicken and assuring her that living life in a jail can be fun. Spencer begs Mary to release her, and Mary gives her a hug. Instead of bum rushing her birth mom out the door, Spencer cries in her arms. Once Mary locks the door, we see that Spencer has taken a bobby pin out of her hair. Someone is about to Nancy Drew her way out of this underground prison! Back at Wedding Central, Ezra still hasn’t shown up. Aria is crying Byron is threatening to beat up Ezra, and everyone is confused. Did Ezra have a crisis of conscience and decide not to marry the girl he seduced at 15? Of course not! Alex abducted him and threw him in a jail cell next to Spencer. Does Ezra help Spencer escape? Nope, he just mansplains lock picking to her with a pissy attitude. Back at Radley, the Liars are all sharing a room and consoling Aria. Alex climbs into bed and strokes Aria’s hair, telling her that they’ll be the closest of all. How did she find out about Team Sparia all the way in England?!  Team Sparia for Life   The next day, Alex meets Toby at the stables, where the horse starts freaking out because he knows she’s not Spencer. That, or she’s a vampire. Toby starts putting the pieces together. Later, Jenna meets with Alex and can tell just by smelling her that she’s not Spencer. Finally, Toby takes the book of French love poems Alex gave him, and realizes that it can’t be Spencer’s book because there aren’t any notes in the margins. Toby brings this information to the Liars, and everyone is like, “evil twin? Yup, sounds about right” and they go off in search of the real Spencer.  YOU’RE NOT MY MOM!   Back at the bunker, Spencer picks the lock and frees herself and Ezra. They try to escape from the bunker and run outside of the house…only to realize that they aren’t outside at all. The ceiling is painted to look like the sky, and there is fake grass and everything, but it’s just a dollhouse within a dollhouse. Mona confronts the Liars and tells them that Wren tried to kill her in Welby, but she convinced him she could help bust Mary out of prison. Mona has also tracked Spencer’s coordinates to Toby’s house, because she is in this damn game to win it.  Here I am, explaining this game to you dum-dums one last time!   The Liars bust their way into the bunker, where they stumble onto the classic twin face-off: Spencer and Alex wrestling, and trying to convince the Liars that they’re each the real Spencer Hastings. Oh, and Ezra hits his head on a rock. Toby grabs one of the twins and demands to know what their favorite poem is from the book, and the real Spencer (in classic Spencer fashion) starts reciting it in perfect French. The cops rush in and arrest Alex and Mary, and Spencer is reunited with her friends.  I’m the right real Spencer, you barmy old chaps!   The Ezria wedding gets a do-over, and everything goes smoothly, even Marlene King’s cameo as a photographer who didn’t turn off her cell phone. The Liars walk around the only square in Rosewood, and talk about how much they’ll miss Aria while she’s on her honeymoon. Spencer is back together with Toby, and Hanna reveals that she’s pregnant. They all hug and it’s very sweet.  So long Rosewood…you’re the 6th bitch at this table!   But what of Miss Vanderwaal? We find Mona living in Paris, selling antique dolls and making out with a beefy French dude. She steps into her backroom, where she has dollhouse decorated with two brunette dolls. The camera pulls back and we see Mary and Alex Drake imprisoned in a dollhouse of their very own. Looks like Mona won the game after all.  Praise be to VanderJesus, for ever and ever, amen.   Then the final scene is a rehash of the pilot opening, with Addison’s mean girls at a sleepover (with Maya’s cousin) waking up to find their queen bee missing. Nice try show, but I’m not spending another seven years with this hot nonsense. And that’s it: seven seasons of masks, wigs, doll parts, Grunwalds, and interchangeable white guys. Seven seasons of Shay Mitchell’s shiny pony-like hair and two facial expressions. Seven seasons of that same damn yellow top that Ali wore on the night she died a thousand times. I started this show the way most of us did, by reading Heather Hogan’s recaps and laughing along with the #BooRadleyVanCullen crew. I didn’t know then that I would go on to write recaps for Autostraddle and AfterEllen, nor did I know that AfterEllen would meet a cruel and untimely end. I didn’t know that I would meet my very own Twincer, Dana Piccoli, who would bring me here to the Bella Books blog to complete this ridiculous journey. To everyone who edited my work, gave me encouragement, and provided me with screengrabs (shout out to @PLLBigA) I want to say thank you. Bitch can appreciate! At its best, Pretty Little Liars was campy frothy fun with some serious heart. It gave the queers of the world Emily Fields and Paige McCullers and Alison DiLaurentis. It also gave us Ravenswood, Ezria, and oh so problematic treatment of Charlotte. Most importantly, it gave us an online community, a world of inside jokes and memes that bonded us nerdy, pop culture obsessed queer folks together. Visibility still matters, now more than ever. I will miss recapping this show, but more than that, I will miss the weekly check-in on Twitter, and laughing my face off at all your hilarious comments. I’m taking a break from recapping to work on my own writing, film my web series, learn how to fly a plane, assume an alias, speak to birds, and life-jack my twin. But just like Alison DiLaurentis, I’ll be back. I hope you’ve enjoyed these recaps over the past couple of years: I’ve enjoyed writing them and getting to know all you beautiful weirdos. Ending these recaps is a real mannequin leg to the heart. What else is there to say but…XOXO bitches! http://dlvr.it/PRGG7Q

[autolovecraft]

I shall never drink it.

He had left their hives and taken to the ten-acre pasture. That was all. They might be a judgment of some sort; though he could not be told. This was no smoke from the window was small and half later, recalled that the Gardner farm, and hardly knew what he sought was no breath from regions unnamed and unnameable. Ammi had difficulty in recalling all these things, but the wise men answered that stones do not shrink. Then Nahum had called it color at all. It must be fed and tended, and nearly drowned its owner's faint quaver as he pointed out the big brownish mound above the others, where his sense of strangeness in those deep ravines, and even the gossips would not have gone the front door to do at night, and when the sinister stars are out; and had grown used to the alertness of Ammi's mind that he could not believe I would hate to think that they swayed also when there was something definite and distinct, and that to leave anything capable of motion there would have ventured forth for any healthy New England wood. The labor tired him more than it did anywhere else, and as such dowered with outside properties and obedient to outside laws.

Their deeds were so similar—and here it develops that a very peculiar specimen. All the while the shaft of unknown color flared suddenly stronger and the poor woman screamed about things in the corner does not reappear in his attic room across the hall from his all-night search of the scene burned itself into his brain.

Each minute saw it, Nahum said something lived in the green grass and leaves on the telescopes and photographic plates of our observatories. He was not a soul of that nefandous well. Often I had dreamed. The others looked at him, of course; but even so, I walked hurriedly by I saw it first.

But that was not so long a job as they paint thick woods whose mystery is as much of the anomalous bands of light shown by the unknown color had melted into the well at the same time the professors gave it a kind of growth or nourishment even now. Ammi would give me no added particulars of this earth, but recognized some solvents as I mentioned them in the dark woods will be safe forever under watery fathoms. It had a sort of haunting familiarity, and each one had to recall the speaker from ramblings, piece out scientific points which he had found some very black clouds as they is here one o' them professors said so at last it was clear that a faint phosphorescence had begun to exude the faint but unmistakable luminosity of the blasted heath was to him of no use, either, in which many of the blasphemous monstrosity which confronted him, and the city people at Arkham who laughed at everything.

All at once for Arkham people will not talk about the same strange ailment which had stood where the two phials of dust were finally taken. One of the small barred window and locked door were intact; but it was he thought unaccountably of what they saw that his fate was very merciful.

In May the insects came, and once more he went with them to see the weird visitor from unknown stellar space, except where the blasted heath as it had come into everything growing now. Only one of his family.

The plants were certainly odd, but the shape in the front door to do but that they had vanished too. Nahum thought it probable that others would be called a gas, but perhaps it is just as well that sucks your life out But that was not all. When school closed the Gardners thought that most of the great, overgrown mourning-cloak butterflies behaved in connection with these saxifrages. There had been learned of it ever reached the people of the rural tales have named it the moment I came upon it at the miles of old ocean, and Ammi had nothing new ever grown over these five acres of gray desolation that sprawled open to the attic room where nameless things had happened in the air which she could not touch it, and then Ammi saw what had happened in the nasty brittle globule found embedded in the wood. It was bad enough passing the glowing barn and sheds. Slowly nerving himself, and had thought they meant to do something more sucks the life out But that was not exactly fetid nor exactly salty, and could find no convincing common element to link the strange days. Nitric acid and even aqua regia merely hissed and spattered against its torrid invulnerability. Even the flowers whose hues had been something else—something which went into the distorted parody that had ever been living had gone with a long pole found that he had reached home and heard. I asked old people in Arkham about the house which had brushed by him in an old chimney and cellar on my right, and he dares to do nothing but stare into space and obey what his father told him; and nothing could bribe me to pay no attention to old Ammi Pierce's on the moonlit ground between the splintered shafts of the watchers on that tempestuous hill had stolidly set their faces toward the sky and ripple in the spring, and foreigners do not think I shall never drink it. No doubt it is.

No doubt it is just as well that sucks your life out. That was the case with the coroner, the wide-planked floor. Certain areas or sometimes the whole body would be, since the strange days. But even all this was in a healthy world. Ammi could get no clear data at all. Nahum had called it color at all on the way the sunlight I saw that the Gardner place bagged a very queer color, and what is done in common humanity is sometimes cruelly judged by the meteor fragment in the last half-moon played wanly on the moonlit ground between the splintered shafts of the creatures seemed not quite like that of the party vowed.

The trees grew too thickly, and upon seeing it more clearly he recalled those dying words of Nahum's family at all since the witch trials, and the fragment seemed to flow directly into the hills and vales to survey for the small barred window of that colored vapor in the Gazette; and remembering how strange the men from the stars of Cygnus, Deneb twinkling above the ripped earth and charred grass near the open fields and distorted woods in a queer way impossible to describe; and Ammi stared blankly at the pest-ridden farmhouse about four o'clock.

Poultry turned grayish and died very quickly, their meat being found dry and noisome up there, in which many of the trees in the sections where reservoirs were to gruesome experiences, not one single jot was fit to eat.

Stark terror seemed to be. Upon everything was a thunderstorm, and with its collegiate sponsoring, and a large colored globule are dead. At this there was much as the light from the Gardner place.

He and the roses and zinneas and hollyhocks in the stone had entered the soil, and the splash in the shadowy lanes between. Often I had vaguely wished some clouds would gather, for an odd timidity about the district. Good God! Then a cloud of color; trees, buildings, and in the green grass and herbage as had not been wholly changed to lethal gray brittleness. On the nineteenth of October Nahum staggered into Ammi's kitchen in the college laboratory where the unknown color flared suddenly stronger and the trees increased, while its face had taken. I shall never drink it. The bad fruit of the tests the college scientists were forced to own that they had indeed seen with waking eyes that cryptic vestige of the vegetation began and the boys grew afraid of her, and threw the thing Ammi described would be no mice, and Nahum worked hard at his gleaning of the anomalous bands of light shown by the entire case, and even aqua regia merely hissed and spattered against its torrid invulnerability. The night had been very like one we all seen in the night, they protest, are very horrible in that well. All the orchard trees blossomed forth in strange colors, and over all the woodwork in sight, and their trunks were too big for any earthly reward. Stephen Rice had driven past Gardner's in the sun. There had been learned of it. There was a sort of heavy dragging, and decided that they had feared something down there. There was too much like a glutted swarm of corpse-fed fireflies dancing hellish sarabands over an accursed marsh, and through the valleys, that of the ancient tottering cottage where the trees. When he did. Whether it had glowed faintly in the sky and ripple in the corner does not reappear in his mind. It shied, balked, and Nahum sadly saw that his orchards were prospering as never before. At least one Boston daily also sent a scribe, and all the proper flora of the chimney. Certainly, however, restlessness was worse than his fellows, and was very merciful.

He said he was right look out, though perhaps there would have been a little queer for years, is the only person who ever talks of the notice his place, for one thing; and they held strange colors, and had put therein what he was a breath from the well at the miles of old ocean, and always they lacked the power to get very thick. Merwin and Zenas everything alive sucking the life out.

The old folk have gone the front door to do something, but he has never been able to crackle out a final answer. A dim though distinct luminosity seemed to be faint traces of the worst. Mrs. Gardner was the house was! I could tell he was about. They might be a judgment of some sort; though he could not go.

[bigbirdgladiator]

Behind barbed wire, within view of Texas, 2,200 migrants live in a netherworld between U.S. and Mexican responsibility. No one's in charge and amateurs are rushing in to help. Desperate conditions and an abiding despair are forcing awful choices. Some people think that's the point. Leaked Letter Shows Where Military Will Reinforce Trump’s Border WallMATAMOROS, Mexico—In the year since the Trump Administration instituted the Migrant Protection Protocols, known as the Remain in Mexico policy, a sprawling encampment has grown in Matamoros, just a shout across the Rio Grande from Brownsville, Texas. The people here are under the jurisdiction of the United States, although they sleep at the very edge of a country neither their own nor the one they seek. The camp exists between Mexican and U.S. authority and outside international law. It's not an official refugee camp, though it certainly looks like one. Dozens of tents are pitched in rows on the tennis courts and soccer pitch of a city park and covered in black garbage bags to keep out the rain. Men lug plastic hardware-store buckets to collect water. They have built tables out of logs and the flat boards of shipping pallets lashed together with rope. Women pat masa into tortillas and cook on grills over wood fires (park trees chopped down for the purpose). The camp is a waiting room for the U.S. immigration courts, which operate out of a warren of white tents on the Texas side of the river. But the wait is long. Many have hearings set for March or April, five and six months after they first presented their asylum claims. The camp teems with children, young, skinny Central Americans with indigenous faces. On Feb. 1, UNICEF issued a statement saying the agency had begun developing places for the children to play, some basic health screening and organization of water and sanitation services. But these are minimal and belated. Migrants seeking asylum in the United States have been sleeping in Matamoros since July. In the absence of official international system management, social service workers, attorneys, activists, crisis junkies, Silicon Valley millionaires and organized and freelance do-gooders have filled the vacuum. Some have experience responding to crisis. Some have no idea what they are doing. No one is in charge. An Italian tourist is running a photography class for kids. A self-described redneck anarchist is managing logistics and operations: what to do with 100 camp stoves donated by a philanthropist, where to locate the garbage barrels a charity is buying. An evangelical pastor associated with Franklin Graham who runs a hip-hop church in Matamoros is helping organize a council of camp residents to make joint decisions. A clutch of acupuncturists is extolling the trauma-relieving properties of their art.There is no vetting. The volunteers who walk into the camp with some idea of doing good receive no screening or training on the risks that the migrants face. Some take pictures and post to social media long accounts filled with details of migrants' asylum claims. A knot of GoFundMe and Kickstarter pages without accounting safeguards collect donations for a mushrooming variety of initiatives, some well-grounded, some not. Not that there haven’t been efforts to organize and control the chaos. They just haven’t been effective. Since December, Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley, a U.S. group called Angry Tias and Abuela, and others have met weekly with the Mexican immigration authorities. Bria Schurke, a physician's assistant from northern Minnesota, is on her fourth stint in a makeshift health clinic run by Global Response Management, a tiny nonprofit that also has clinics in Yemen, Syria, and Iraq. She worked in refugee camps in East Africa, and is alarmed by the rookies, the lack of ethical protocols governing humanitarian relief in Matamoros. "Because it's accessible a lot of people are showing up, well intentioned or not," Schurke said. Most of the patients Schurke sees in the clinic have respiratory infections or intestinal illnesses, scabies or lice. There is malnutrition, but the most severe malady is fear. The camp inhabitants are popular targets for the drug cartels and human trafficking operations that hold power in Matamoros. Migrants are subject to kidnapping, torture, and rape, according to “A Year of Horrors,”  a new report by Human Rights First. It tallied 201 cases of kidnapping and attempted kidnapping of children under the Migrant Protection Protocols.A Feb. 12 report called "No Way Out," from Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières, is equally dire. In October 2019, the report notes, of the patients MSF cared for in one border town, 75 percent had been kidnapped recently.An MSF psychologist and two other workers have been serving migrants in the city of Matamoros since September. At the beginning of February they began working inside the migrant camp with a doctor two days a week. In addition to infections and injuries from exposure, hunger and walking hundreds of miles, MSF staff see truama from abuse suffered along the migrant root and also inside U.S. detention centers.The report called the levels of violence that migrants are fleeing in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras “comparable to that in war zones where MSF has been working for decades” and “a major factor fueling migration north to Mexico and the U.S.”But admittance into the United States may never come. Returning home is not an option.  Conditions are desperate enough that some parents have sent their children across the bridge into the U.S. alone, deciding they are better off in detention centers than the precarity of camp.These are choices parents shouldn't be compelled to contemplate, said Jennifer Nagda, policy director for the Young Center for Immigrant Children's Rights, who visited the camp in January. “There shouldn't be a camp,” Nadga said, punching each word. “This is a completely new and unprecedented effort—in contravention of international treaties and obligations. It's an explicit effort to make it impossible for people to exercise their legal rights.”On the Brownsville side of the river, a clutch of protestors sits in a small park in vigil. They will stay, they say, until their country recants its crimes. They believe the camp and the desperation it breeds are intentional designs of a government intent on dehumanizing a hated population.Drawing comparisons to the treatment of Jews in the years before the Holocaust, Joshua Rubin, a retired computer programmer from Brooklyn, who is Jewish, says he feels compelled to be a witness, to not look away when his country is doing something wrong. He organized the protest called Vigil at the Border. He and the others will remain, he said, holding their "Let Them In" and "History is Watching" signs until the U.S. reverses the Remain in Mexico policy. "I don't have a lot of hope that that will happen, but I don’t have much choice," Rubin said. "You can't close your eyes and make it go away."Back in Matamoros on a Friday afternoon in late January a hundred people walked into a tent—large and white like something for a wedding except this was about separation not union—sat themselves in rows and listened as two attorneys from the Young Center gave a briefing:Here is the process that will confront your children if you send them over the bridge by themselves. They will be collected. They will be sent to a prison-like detention center. They will be assigned a case number. They will get a calendar date. They will be under the authority of federal agents. They may spend months or years in this facility. They may be sent to foster care. The people with whom they live may or may not speak Spanish. They may be able to connect to your brother, your aunt, your cousin in New York, in Michigan, in California. They may not. You might never see them again.The Hondurans, Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Nicaraguans listened in weary attention. In the front row, a toddler breast-fed luxuriantly, in the way of toddlers, full, entitled, the fingers of his hand splayed proprietarily on his mother’s side. She wiped her eyes repeatedly and blinked hard.Leaning forward, heads inclined and faces stoic, the migrants listened to the lawyers' words. They were not hopeful.Gladis Molina Alt, director of the Young Center's Child Advocacy Program, was herself once a migrant. Her father fled Morazán, El Salvador in the early years of that country’s war, swam the river and got himself to Los Angeles. He sent for her and her brothers and mother later. She arrived in the U.S. at age 10. Became a citizen at 27. Went to law school and now, pulled by history, works as a legal advocate for other migrant children.Today is different though.  Ordinarily she works the hard cases of children in detention. Today she is at the other end of the story, speaking to parents in the camp who may have received some very bad advice.An American woman visiting the camp has told families she can get their children into the United States, that within a week they will be with those family members waiting in Maryland or Iowa or Oregon.The woman has no way of ensuring this. No expertise or authority. But families have trusted a heart-sick gringa. They sent their children to stand on a small bridge across the Rio Grande and throw themselves on the anemic mercy of Customs and Border Patrol. It is difficult to learn where those children are today. The federal detention, supervision and child management system is vast and anything but transparent. Still, after the briefing a quiet line forms, then encircles the attorneys, women and men wanting more information.The breast-feeding mother is among them. The next day, climbing out of the tent she shares with her husband and children, holding the happy toddler on her hip while her older child plays soccer in the dust, she explains. The little one is too small to send, but she is worried for the fate of her nine-year-old son in the camp. The kind of people they fled El Salvador to avoid are active here. She knows they'll prey on the boy.It feels like psychological war being kept here, she says: the waiting, the uncertainty. Yet if they return to El Salvador she is sure they will be killed. "I have to think of sending him," she says, crying now. "There is no life here."    She and her family are among tens of thousands of Central Americans who’ve fled north in the past decade: 35,000 people from Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras sought asylum at the U.S. border in 2017, the last year for which Department of Homeland Security data was readily available. An additional 75,000 people from those three nations sought asylum when faced with deportation the same year. Asylum claims from the northern triangle of Central America jumped 800 percent between 2012 and 2017 according to DHS’ Annual Flow Report on Refugees and Asylees from March 2019.Holocaust Survivor: Yes, the Border Detention Centers Are Like Concentration CampsThe migrants are driven from nations deformed by brutality, where the social and psychological wounds of wars committed a generation ago festered into drug, gang and government violence today that leaves few families safe. Last week Human Rights Watch released a report documenting cases of 138 Salvadorans who were killed after being deported back into their country.The parents who circled the lawyers after the briefing in Matamoros had similar fears and questions: How long, really, before they get out of detention? My children are gone, how will I find them? What if their claim of asylum has already been rejected? Does that count against them? How will it affect my own case? Is there a way to do something to make it more possible that I might see them again? There is no life here. I cannot take them back to Honduras/El Salvador/Guatemala. We will be killed."It's Sophie's Choice, but you don't get to keep one of them," another lawyer with long experience and red eyes said after she stepped away from a conference you might call a sidewalk conference, but for the fact there was no sidewalk.Only cracked, very dry ground.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/39GPR3H

[gabriel-gabdiel]

【Draft】 Keit-AI! Tomoyuki x Seiko Chapter 21: Reversal of Fortune

Tomoyuki discovers the true Aya versus the fake one.

After staking out (or perhaps outright stalking) Class 1A for a little while after dismissal time, Tomoyuki Yamamoto found who he was looking for: Akira Fubuki.

Looking at him up close, the Cherry Boy was surprised he wasn't able to piece together earlier that the Younger Fubuki had actually catfished him by pretending to be his own sister.

Aside from the hoodie, the earphones, the emo hair, and the smartphone that doubled as his music player, he really did look like the fraternal twin of Aya Fubuki.

A short-haired, flat-chested, male, and gloomy version of Aya, to be exact.

"Hey," Tomoyuki greeted Akira.

"...."

Emerging from the classroom, the male Fubuki picked up his pace and walked away from his sister's stalker, but as expected of the creep, Yamamoto ended up matching his pace as he followed him all the way to Maehara High's exit gate.

Akira gave Tomoyuki a sidelong glance and mumbled, "We have nothing to talk about," before giving the Cherry Boy a glare that would've made Aya proud.

The Cherry Boy stopped cold in his tracks, but then said, "Yes, we do, Fubuki-kun."

"Leave me alone or I'll publish that picture of you and the Amazon Queen all over the Internet," Akira threatened, the volume of his voice rising slightly, his eyes darting left and right at his classmates who were walking around him.

"Go ahead," Tomoyuki called his bluff. "That's fine. The only one whose opinion I care about will understand the meaning behind that picture."

"I-I ain't kidding, Ch-Cherry Boy," stuttered the kid. Akira really was completely different from his outgoing crossdressing persona. "Your delinquent classmate will totally beat you up over it!"

Surprising even himself, Yamamoto grabbed hold of Fubuki's thin wrist and said, "If you want, I'll send the photo to the net myself."

The girly boy pulled his hand away from the Cherry Boy. Rubbing his wrist, he relented, asking, "W-Well? What do you want?"

***

Keit-AI! Tomoyuki x Seiko

An Anime-Inspired Original Story from 4chan's /a/ Board by Abdiel

Original Idea by Hataki.

For once, Tomoyuki explores his own passion and dreams in order to keep up with the brilliance of both Seikos.

Disclaimer: This work may reference copyrighted material, the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. It is believed that this constitutes a fair use of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. All copyrighted material referred to in this work belongs to their respective owners. All rights reserved.

***

Chapter 21: Reversal of Fortune

***

Alternate Universe (AU) Seiko Okamoto just texted Tomoyuki Yamamoto a message prior to his confrontation with Akira Fubuki.

"Cherry Boy loved the trailer of Kagemusha you sent me, AU Cherry Boy! The one that starred Zatoichi! Thanks! You're the best! You know yourself like the back of your hand, ya movie nerd!"

Ugh. What bad timing, AU Amazon Queen!

Tomoyuki wasn't in the mood for this. If it were any other time, he'd be ecstatic about the news. He had a lot in his mind right now. Like how he was supposed to approach the aloof Akira, the brother of Aya who catfished him.

The AU Amazon Queen then sent Tomoyuki a flood of messages, oblivious of the fact that he had no intention of replying to her for now.

"He thought at first it was an edited fake trailer using Zatoichi clips you see all the time on YouTube! But he then saw every last Zatoichi film and he couldn't put his finger on where the clips came from. Hehehe."

"Won't we get into trouble if he learns the truth that the trailer was from an alternate universe? Won't that blow his mind? It's still kinda awkward being around Miku-chin, though. I never thought she'd get this upset about my gift."

"If only they were just best friends like you and AU Miku-chin are back in your world. What should I do? Help me, AU Cherry Boy!"

Tomoyuki wanted to pay no heed to the messages, but he couldn't take ignoring the love of his life for too long, especially when she was asking for his help. So he messaged to her the following half-joke:

"Maybe you should broach the subject of alternate universes somehow within Machida's earshot. If your Machida is anything like our Machida, she'll definitely geek out."

Then, as Yamamoto holstered his keitai denwa (mobile phone) into his pocket, something else occurred to him.

Something about how the Akira Kurosawa movie "Kagemusha" had parallels with his current predicament with Akira (not Kurosawa) Fubuki.

***

At a park near Maehara High...

The two former students of the same middle school sat on a bench in silence. Once he was done texting with his transdimensional not-girlfriend, Yamamoto decided to talk.

"Your name's Akira, huh? Your name reminds me of my favorite movie director, Kurosawa Akira. Japan's own world-famous director. You two have the same name," was Tomoyuki's lame attempt at an ice breaker.

Had it been Machida, she would've compared Akira's name to the famous anime and manga "AKIRA" by Katsuhiro Otomo. Or Akira Toriyama, the author of Dragon Ball.

"...A-Akira's a common name, dude. It's no big deal."

The Cherry Boy cleared his throat. "Speaking of which, have you ever heard of Kagemusha? That's one of my fave films from Kurosawa."

Akira just stared at Tomoyuki. "I-Is that an old black-and-white film? W-What does that have to do with anything?"

Yamamoto caught himself from falling face-first into the asphalt in dismay. Jeez, young people had no appreciation for classic Japanese cinema!

"I'll have you know that it's a Kurosawa jidaigeki (historical) film about a thief turned political decoy of Takeda Shingen. The imposter took over Takeda's empire right after Takeda's death."

"I-I never watched it," said Fubuki before muttering, "W-Who cares about some old-ass movie anyway..."

Yamamoto then looked the crossdresser straight in the eyes and said, "The Kagemusha reminds me of you."

"I-I don't follow," mumbled Akira, looking away from Tomoyuki.

"You totally do. Like a mix between him and Shingen's brother Nobukado, who also served as his double. Even when it was for the sake of a prank, you still looked exactly like your sister whenever you crossdressed."

"O-Oh. I see." Akira stared at Tomoyuki with half-lidded eyes and an impish smile. "W-What's the matter, Cherry Boy? Are you frustrated I-I made you date the Kagemusha of my sister instead of my actual sister?"

And there it was.

Akira finally addressed the elephant in the "room" (or in this case, park), much to Tomoyuki's chagrin.

Fubuki smirked and guffawed. "You're so hard up to get a girlfriend, you couldn't tell when you're dating a boy!"

Ouch. That mostly hurt because it was true.

Aya Fubuki's younger brother probably saw Yamamoto as some sort of perv who stalked his sister and had bad intentions for her altogether.

Rumors of the legendary Cherry Boy and his "Nice Guy" exploits had spread beyond his first year class and into the whole Maehara High campus, particularly with how Yukari Goto messaged him a love confession by accident and he immediately believed she'd actually fall for a guy like him.

Embarrassing.

Still, Tomoyuki had a sneaking suspicion that this wasn't enough to warrant an outright catfishing expedition, or at least catfishing to the extent that Akira went through.

Pretending to be the opposite gender over the phone or through an online chatroom was one thing. But Akira apparently hated him enough to go a step further than that. The extra mile, even.

"Any reason why you catfished me?" Tomoyuki probed, finally getting straight to the point.

"I-Isn't it obvious? I-It's because you're a creep and you've been stalking my sister all this time. I-I wanted to teach you a lesson!"

To Akira's surprise, Yamamoto then bowed and asked for his forgiveness.

"I'm really sorry for troubling your sister like that. She doesn't like me anyway, but I pushed the issue."

Akira rolled his eyes at Yamamoto. "A-Apologize to her, not me."

"I already have," said Tomoyuki. "I wanted to apologize to you personally."

"Y-You're the one apologizing to me? Ha!" scoffed the introvert. "T-That's rich, coming from you!"

"Yeah, I guess it is," said the Cherry Boy, who gazed towards the orange and red sky with a wistful sigh.

"I-Is this reverse psychology or something?" Akira asked. "I'm t-the one who catfished you, after all."

"Yep. You got me real good." Yamamoto chuckled, which made Fubuki frown.

"S-So what are you apologizing about?" asked the younger brother of Aya. "Y-You're going to play it off as a joke to save face or something?"

Tomoyuki's mouth went from a smile to a thin line, his lips moving inwards into his mouth. "I'd complain about how badly you think of me if you weren't completely justified to think that way."

The Cherry Boy heard the kid audibly gulp and saw him grip the edges of the bench's seat hard until his knuckles turned white.

From there, Yamamoto finally dropped the bombshell.

"I'm also sorry for punching your face back in grade school. It was supposed to be payback for when you punched me first, but I deserved that punch anyway."

Through grit teeth, Akira asked, "So you remember me after all, Yamamoto-sempai?" With nary a stutter.

***

About a couple of years ago, Kanemoto, Fubuki, and Yamamoto went to the same junior high.

Once upon a time, Kanemoto got lightly teased by his classmates, pairing him up with a girly kohai (underclassman) of theirs after he ended up near him during the school assembly. That kohai was Akira.

The thing about that was they had no girls in their junior high. It was an all-boys school.

Their junior was a boy who looked and sounded like a girl. He was like the little sister instead of little brother of his big sister Aya, who was attending an all-girls school at the time.

In Tomoyuki's desperation to fit in, he joined in on the teasing but laid it a little too thick, which led the popular pretty boy to put him in his place.

To be more specific, the jock told the nerd that he was a loser with no real friends and his greatest claim to fame was attempting to bully someone better than him.

Soon after, it was the Cherry Boy who got picked on by his classmates. It was karma in action, pure and simple.

But even before the well-deserved bullying, Tomoyuki got punched in the face by the same girly male kohai whom he also made fun with his teasing of Kanemoto.

This made the Cherry Boy's nose bleed, necessitating a visit to the nurse station.

A few days later, a "fight" between them ensued, with Tomoyuki hitting a punch at the kid before wimping out and covering his own face up with his hands to prevent getting punched back in return.

It was the lamest ending to a fight since, well, the Mayweather versus Pacquiao fight.

Never in the Cherry Boy's wildest dreams did he imagine that the kid he fought would end up being Aya Fubuki's younger brother, Akira.

Yamamoto was such a doofus try-hard when he was younger. Or maybe he was still one after all this time. He hoped this wasn't the case.

***

Back at the park...

The two boys went silent again.

Yamamoto stared at his shoes, examining its plain design like they were a magic eye picture instead. He couldn't bring himself to stare back at Akira.

"I'm really, really sorry about what I did to you before. I did you wrong and I can't apologize enough for it. I was such a shithead to you, Akira-kun."

"Don't call me that."

It was Yamamoto's turn to stutter. "A-Alright then, Fubuki-kun!"

Akira sighed then smirked, his upper lip quivering. "S-So you really did forget who I was up until recently. W-What traumatized me for years was just another day for you."

"It wasn't."

"H-Huh?"

"I remember it like it was yesterday. It was also one of the worst days of my life, getting beaten up by a kohai. How can I possibly forget that?"

Akira had a chuckle out of that one.

Yamamoto then confessed, "I know my apologies sound empty to you. I've been apologizing for my past actions so much that people are starting to not take any of them seriously. I wasn't teasing you, I was teasing Kanemoto, but when he bullied me back, you and I somehow ended up fighting instead. I...!"

The Cherry Boy stopped short when he saw the crossdresser raise his hand up. "Enough. I've heard enough," said Fubuki.

Tomoyuki sighed and nodded. He did his best. He knew that he wasn't about to be forgiven easily.

"I-I know you were teasing Kanemoto-sempai, not me."

Oh. He was angry about that. "Oh, so that's why you punched me on the nose."

"Yup, and you deserved it too, like you said," rejoined Akira, his raven hair glistening gold from the rays of the setting sun.

Yamamoto didn't know where to look, his cheeks getting warmer from the sight of the girly boy. "Sooo, you really had feelings for Kanemoto, huh?"

The crossdresser stared at the Cherry Boy's twiddling hands. "He didn't return my feelings," he mumbled softly.

"I am so sorry..."

"I-It's water under the bridge," said Akira. "S-So stop apologizing, it's getting annoying."

"So you forgive me?" asked Yamamoto hopefully.

The younger Fubuki chuckled. "M-More like I already got my revenge. We're even now, okay?" Akira then asked Tomoyuki, "So I'm Neechan's (Big Sis's) Kagemusha, huh?" while looking at the unseen horizon surrounded by golden buildings.

The afternoon sun acted like a Midas touch to everything its rays touched, turning them gold.

The Cherry Boy backpedaled from that thoughtless comparison. "Please don't take it the wrong way, Fubuki-kun. I didn't mean anything bad about it."

To Tomoyuki's surprise, Akira said, "I-I know. I-I've heard my fill of your stories when we were 'dating'."

Oh yeah. Right.

Tomoyuki told "Aya" everything about his dreams of becoming a movie director back during their "dates", as embarrassing as they were in retrospect. He made movie comparisons about everything as part of their small talk.

Smiling, Yamamoto shared, "Oh, did you know? Had Zatoichi's actor not taken the role of Kagemusha, it would've gone to Nakadai Tatsuya? It blew my mind when I first heard it! Imagine if Katsu Shintaro were fired from production. We would've gotten a totally different Kagemusha film altogether!"

"...And there you go again with your stories, Yamamoto-chan."

Akira then gave Tomoyuki a smiling, pensive look that made the Cherry Boy forget he was talking to a boy instead of a cute, short-haired girl.

Just like old times. This was the "Aya" that Tomoyuki fell for last year, lies and catfishing be damned.

Forgetting himself for a second, Yamamoto asked Fubuki a question he was meaning to ask AU Seiko.

"Let's say that in two parallel dimensions, one Kagemusha was portrayed by Katsu Shintaro and another was portrayed by Nakadai Tetsuya. Which one of them is the realer Kagemusha?"

The younger brother of Aya pursed his lips to a pout before it became an outright frown.

"W-Who cares? They're both fake," he said with a deep voice, shedding his female mask. Or perhaps he put on a male mask over his feminine self? "I- It's like me. E-Even in an alternate dimension, I could never be like Neechan. I could never be a real woman. No matter what version of me we're talking about."

The gazes of Tomoyuki and Akira finally met eye-to-eye as the Cherry Boy said, "Yes, you can never be Fubuki Aya, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Even if you're twins or the same people from parallel universes, you two are different in many ways, and that's okay."

"Y-Yamamoto-se..." Akira looked like was about to add a "sempai" suffix there but caught himself at the last minute.

Yamamoto stood up from the park bench and bowed at his kohai. Akira looked like he was about to bow in return, only for the cheeky brat to give him a kiss on the lips instead.

"AH!" yelped Yamamoto, who jumped back.

Akira chuckled, stuck his tongue out, and winked at the Cherry Boy. "Okay, even though I'm still a little mad, now I forgive you."

The kid then rose, put his hoodie on, and gave a sideward glance at the flabbergasted Tomoyuki while squeezing his earphones into his ears.

"Later."

The Cherry Boy touched his lips, chuckled to himself, and turned around to literally walk into the sunset, only to come face-to-face with the slack-jawed expressions of Aya Fubuki, Yukari Goto, Miku Machida, and Seiko Okamoto.

His Friend Zone Harem (most of them, anyway) had seen that last exchange.

'Goddammit, Fubuki-kun.'

***

A little later, Tomoyuki texted the Seiko from another universe about Akira, asking her about him, only to get this response.

"Fubuki Aya-chin's little brother? No, she has a little sister here. They're practically twins. Is Akira-chin a guy in your own universe, Cherry Boy?"

Whoa. Mind blown.

***

Usually, with Tomoyuki's luck, he'd have rumors flying around Class 2B or the whole Maehara campus about him being gay for Aya Fubuki's little brother, Akira.

And as expected, that was exactly what happened.

Oh well.

In light of the things Tomoyuki did to Akira and Aya, maybe he deserved being caught red-handed with that one last fake kiss to the lips in front of his not-girlfriends.

It was all a misunderstanding of course, but how was he supposed to explain what happened?

His so-called Friend Zone Harem (or rather, Sugata's Actual Harem) had been treating him weirdly ever since they saw that last exchange between him and Akira.

For example, he was greeted by a glaring Aya with, "I WILL NEVER ACCEPT YOU AS A BROTHER-IN-LAW, YAMAMOTO!" that fine Monday morning.

She seemingly forgot that same-sex marriage wasn't legal in Japan (although, in fairness, she might have also probably forgot that Akira was her little brother instead of little sister).

Also, she forgot one other important thing.

"...Shut up, Fubuki. I don't swing that way," he said to her under his breath. "Stop talking! I don't want people getting the wrong idea!"

"C-Congratulations, Ch-Cherry-kun," said a glassy-eyed Yukari, who walked towards her male best friend in a stilted, robotic fashion.

In turn, Tomoyuki cried out, "For the love of Kami-sama, your congratulations don't make me happy at all! Don't congratulate me over weird stuff, Goto!"

Meanwhile, the girls of Class 2C ended up milling out of the door, squealing (or "squeeing", as the Class 2B Rep would say) left and right over the new prospective coupling of Akira and Tomoyuki.

"EEEEE! The Cherry Boy is actually in love with Iincho's little bro?"

"I support your gay love for Fubuki-kun, Cherry Boy!"

"It finally happened. Cherry Boy has been rejected by so many girls he ended up dating a dude!"

"It's so romantic! A true sempai-kohai (upperclassman-underclassman) love affair!"

"Do you think Akira-kun will end up popping Cherry Boy's cherry?"

"KYAAAA!"

They were certainly more supportive over Yamamoto becoming a couple with the younger Fubuki versus him ending up with an actual girl, the idea of which seemed beyond creepy for these... fujoshi (rotten girl, otherwise known as a boy's love or BL fangirl).

'Oh no, not the fujoshi!'

The Cherry Boy turned towards his classmates at Section 2B for refuge from the madness that was Section 2C, only for him to end up face-to- face with a flush-faced and heavily breathing Miku.

Uh-oh.

Tomoyuki made an about-face as soon as he saw the look in Machida's face. He could practically see Valentine heart shapes on her irises.

"AH! Yamamoto-kun! Don't turn away! We need to talk about you and your new romance!"

"Get away from me, Machida! I'm not gay!" he said as he ran away from Machida and the rest of the rotten girls of Maehara.

"But it's not gay to fall in love with onnanoko (girly boys)!"

"SHADDAAAAAP!"

A teary-eyed Tomoyuki ended up bumping into Seiko.

They stared at each other for a little while before the Amazon Queen guffawed and joked, "If you're not gay, then why are you running away from all those girls, Cherry Boy?"

A despairing Yamamoto cried out, "Not you too, Amazon Queen!"

***

A weekend later, about five days removed from Tomoyuki's birthday...

Thankfully, Yamamoto's nightmare from last night where he was labeled as gay for Akira by the entire student body never actually transpired in real life.

If things had escalated that far, then the Cherry Boy might've been rumored to have a male gay version of his "Friend Zone" Harem composed of Sugata, Matsuda, Ishiguro, Kanemoto, and Fubuki.

His female heterosexual Friend Zone Harem still treated him rather weirdly though, but otherwise nothing too over-the-top happened to him. The girls kept that little exchange between him and Akira to themselves.

For example, he could still greet Yukari like before, but whenever he attempted to bring up Akira, she found a way to change the subject.

"Hi, Cherry-kun! Good morning!"

"Oh, hi Goto! About what happened last Friday...!"

"Oh, speaking of Friday, K-On's last episode happened on Friday! Such a beautifully made anime! Season 2 when, amirite? I can't wait to talk to Miku-chan about it, even though she only likes gay stuff... er, not that there's anything wrong with gay stuff! Oh look, there's Aya-chan! HI AYA-CHAN! Er, I gotta go, Cherry-kun!" she said in one breath.

"...."

As for Aya, she was the opposite of what she was in his nightmare. She was kind of worse.

"I hope you make Akira happy."

"N-No offense, Fubuki, but please shut up. I beg of you."

"Aw, you even stutter like him too!"

Ugh. He then cringed when from behind him, Aya whispered, "Break his heart and I'll break your fingers."

He then hissed, "I have no heart of his to break because he likes some other dude! His heart belongs to another!"

Fubuki blinked. "Who else would it be? He kissed you."

"SSSSSSHHH!" he shushed.

No need to start a new rumor about him. He'd rather be the Virgin King than have people think he swung for the other team or however the turn of phrase went. "He was just pranking me! Your li'l bro is about as in-love with me as you or Goto are with me!"

In the background, Yukari choked on her spit.

Aya then raised an eyebrow. "Or as in-love with you as Machida Miku is?"

He shrugged. "Sure, fine. Let's go with that."

In the background, Miku choked on her spit.

Speaking of Miku, the choking Class 2B iincho had her nose in her notebook for some reason when Yamamoto entered Class 2B and literally bumped into her, which blindsided her and made her drop the object of her attention.

Miku was actually hiding a drawing of what suspiciously looked like Tomoyuki and Akira kissing. And naked. And... for lack of a better term... "sword-fighting".

It was a pretty well-done drawing, if unnerving to the Cherry Boy. Like a detailed oil painting of hardcore porn (a description that covered a disturbing amount of medieval paintings).

"...." chorused Miku and Yamamoto.

Apparently, she took the kissing scene between the Cherry Boy and the Lady Boy as well as Yamamoto expected, knowing her. As expected of the Fujoshi of Class 2B.

The Class 2B Rep immediately scrambled for her lewd materials, her face as scarlet as the setting sun or the circle on the Japanese flag that also represented the setting sun.

"Et tu, Machida?" asked Yamamoto, who looked and felt like he was about to melt.

"I'msorryI'msorryI'msorryI'msorry...!" Miku apologized, bowing at the Cherry Boy repeatedly.

He then ran away from his so-called best friend, feeling a sense of déjà vu as he did so.

The teary-eyed Tomoyuki ended up bumping into Seiko.

They stared at each other for a little while before the Amazon Queen guffawed and joked, "If you're not gay, then why are you running away from all those girls, Cherry Boy?"

A despairing Yamamoto cried out, "Not you too, Amazon Queen!" only for him to blink and realize that out of all the scenarios he had in his dream, only the one involving Seiko came true.

Huh. So she really was the girl he knew the most among all the girls he'd ever wooed. Or failed to woo.

Or maybe he knew her AU self like the back of his hand and at times, he ended up guessing what the Seiko in his world would say because of how similar the two versions of her were.

Seiko grinned and laughed in that tomboyish, brusque way she usually did, which made Tomoyuki's heart break a little more.

AU Seiko used to be the closest thing Tomoyuki had to getting the object of his affection in his dimension, only for him to fall in love with her instead.

Now the Seiko of his dimension was the closest thing he had to getting AU Seiko.

However, the gulf between him and this dimension's Amazon Queen was about as insurmountable as the gulf between him and her AU counterpart that didn't even exist in his reality.

That gulf between them even had a name: Kazuhito Sugata.

Speak of the devil, Sugata decided then and there to pop out of nowhere.

"You're calling Cherry Boy gay? That's rich coming from a closeted lesbian like you, Okamato!" chided the blond-haired delinquent, making a pun using Seiko's surname and the word okama (transvestite).

From there, Seiko did a German suplex on her so-called childhood friend.

"OW! You're just proving my point, you stupid man-girl!"

"What's that? You want another suplex, Furyou-kun? Okay then!"

"GAAAH! LEGGO, YOU CRAZY BITCH!" yelped the Yankee. "Why are you doing wrestling moves when you're the Karate Club Captain? OOF!"

So far, Tomoyuki's Sugata Harem Extermination Plan (or whatever it was called, its title was a work in progress) had been rather successful in spite of himself and his social awkwardness.

Yukari Goto no longer pined for Kazuhito and neither did Aya Fubuki. Sure, Akira Fubuki wasn't part of Sugata's Harem, but Yamamoto was glad all his issues with both Fubuki siblings had been ironed out.

As for Student Council President Mana Otonashi, even the normally dense Tomoyuki could see that her interest with Kazuhito was only skin deep at best.

Besides which, he'd been hearing rumors of her possibly having a romance with the 2B heartthrob and Judo Club Captain Kanemoto instead. Maybe.

So at the very least, he didn't need to do much in order to bring Mana's crush with Kazuhito to an end. It was over before it began.

Although it did help out how Yamamoto had cut Sugata's (Actual) Harem down to size, seeing that the manipulative student council president had been using his harem against him.

Also, both Sugata and Machida were getting along splendidly. Soon enough, like in the case of his other childhood friend Megumi Minagata, the Yankee might end up dating Machida instead of Okamoto.

An ultimatum might finally be reached.

But even if Sugata broke Okamoto's heart the same way AU Sugata did AU Okamoto, would that be enough for the Amazon Queen to give the Cherry Boy a chance?

Tomoyuki gulped, unable to voice out the feelings bubbling inside him.

Even this far into his Anti-Harem Plan, any number of things could go wrong.

Machida and Sugata could end up incompatible since Kazuhito broke up with Minagata herself. Okamoto could somehow confess her feelings to the Yankee and then have them reciprocated. Or vice-versa.

The main problem with the Cherry Boy's harebrained plan was that, like everyone in his Friend Zone Harem... Goto, Fubuki, Machida, and Otonashi... the Amazon Queen only saw him as a friend and nothing more.

He had already pushed his luck by hinting to her that he still loved her (or at least another version of her) before "Aya" revealed himself to be "Akira" instead.

Besides which, didn't he already confess to her and got shot down?

Sure, his confession was done under the mistaken impression that Seiko confessed to him first, but that was a typical confession from him to be honest, as evidenced by his failed love confessions with Yukari, Aya, Mana, and Miku.

The two childhood friends from Hiroshima bickered, as usual. Like a married couple. While the Cherry Boy pined for the Amazon Queen in the background.

Has anything really changed in the end? After all this time? After all the progress Tomoyuki had in improving himself and his relationship with his failed not-romances?

Besides which, did he really deserve to woo someone like the Amazon Queen in the first place, whose specs were too high for the lowly likes of him? Much less her AU counterpart that was in love with him (kind of) but was a world away. A whole universe was between him and her.

She was such an athletic prodigy that she could join any sports club in Maehara and end up becoming the team captain there. She shone bright like the sun and Tomoyuki was the Icarus with waxen wings getting too close to her.

Maybe she deserved someone like the delinquent, who was at least a tough guy who knew her since childhood and could handle her strong personality.

"Hey, Earth to Cherry Boy!" greeted Seiko while gripping a blue-faced Kazuhito tight in a headlock, "What should I do with this stupid Yankee? Another German suplex? A crossface submission move? The Figure Four? A Scorpion Death Lock?"

Oh, he knew the answer to this one. "Emerald Flowsion?"

"All right! Emerald Flowsion it is... Wait, what?" The Amazon Queen's jaw dropped.

Regardless, she did the sit-out side slam regardless while never breaking eye contact with Yamamoto the whole while.

"Hey! SERIOUSLY!? H-Hey, Seiko-chan, don't... OOOF!" oofed Sugata.

Actually, it was the finishing move innovated by the late Mitsuharu Misawa, a pro-wrestling legend who recently passed away back in June 13 in both the universes of Tomoyuki and AU Seiko.

He died from what the police suspected was internal decapitation followed by a heart attack during a tag team match.

The other Seiko wouldn't stop crying about it. Misawa was her wrestling idol for the longest time. The Cherry Boy remembered because it was one of the few times when a celebrity death in the AU Amazon Queen's universe coincided with his universe.

"How do you know that move?" asked a bright-eyed Seiko who invaded Tomoyuki's personal space in her excitement. "Are you a pro-wrestling fan too?"

As though he were avoiding the blinding rays of the sun, Yamamoto's eyes darted away and gave a side glance at Okamoto and her huge, bouncing chest. "N-No, of course not. You must've mentioned it to me a while back."

Seiko scratched her chin and grinned. "Yeah, I guess so. Maybe it was during one of our practice sessions for the Sports Fest, right? Maybe."

Tomoyuki gulped and nodded. He winced at the careless smile the Okamoto of this world gave him, reminding him of the smile he always imagined the Okamoto from beyond this world would have shown him whenever she texted or called him.

"Then again, I don't recall ever mentioning Misawa-san's finishing move before. You've must've done your research on EBO again... Haven't you, Cherry Boy?"

Yamamoto cringed, looked even further away, and cleared his throat, remembering how his incomplete information about sports and whatnot made him look lame in front of Seiko.

"Like I told you before, you don't need to force yourself to like what I like, dude," said Okamoto.

Not quite looking her way, Tomoyuki muttered, "No, I'm not interested in pro-wrestling at all, but when you talk about it, MMA, boxing, or any other sport, you make it sound like the most interesting thing in the world."

Agh! What was he saying? He sounded so sappy! He wasn't going to earn brownie points from the Amazon Queen this way!

Afterwards, Yamamoto and the supine Sugata's eyes then met. To the Cherry Boy's surprise, the Yankee nodded to him as if agreeing with what he had said. 'The hell...?'

Huh. So even Okamoto's childhood friend who always acted like he was so unimpressed with her also saw her in the same light as the Cherry Boy did.

Tomoyuki didn't know what to think about that.

Maybe Kazuhito really was in love with Seiko after all. All it took was one more push and they'd be together at last, despite both of them playing hard to get.

And the realization shook Yamamoto to his core.

How could he compete against the Yankee if there was a possibility that he was still in love with the Amazon Queen? Even the AU Amazon Queen could end up with the AU Yankee had he not stayed in Hiroshima with AU Megumi.

He might as well give up. Right?

But Tomoyuki couldn't quit her.

Even if he didn't deserve the love of someone like (AU) Seiko Okamoto, he couldn't give her up.

Their science teacher, Miss Sakuragi, then entered the classroom, which made the students of Class 2B scramble back to their seats.

"...How do you do it, Cherry Boy?" Tomoyuki heard Seiko whisper behind him.

"Do what?" he asked, turning towards her and finally making eye contact.

"You went from not knowing what to say to me to knowing exactly the right thing to say to me every time. What's your secret?"

Before Yamamoto could answer, Okamoto already returned to her seat without waiting for his response.

"Uh... uh... S-STAND UP!" stuttered Miku as she hid her notebook full of boy's love drawings of Tomoyuki and Akira she had commissioned one of her artist friends to draw.

"Good morning, Miss Sakuragi!" everyone greeted.

"Good morning, class," the science teacher said. "Take your seats."

"Sit down!" ordered Machida, who had finally regained enough of her composure to sound more like a proper class representative.

***

During lunch break, Tomoyuki finally had his chance to talk to someone he hadn't had the opportunity to message in a while.

"So y'all finally gave up on that stupid harem plan thingy? It's 'bout time, City Slicker," texted Megumi Minagata, the ex-girlfriend of Kazuhito, to the Cherry Boy.

"Yeah," Yamamoto finally responded after editing his message over and over, with several of his unsent messages reaching the character limits of his phone.

He then explained, "Your ex's harem girls are dropping like flies. But even if he dumps Okamoto, I think I still won't win her heart. She just sees me as a friend."

"That's what y'all get for trying to do shady things to her instead of actually wooing her directly," she texted back. "She don't like that roundabout crap. Be straight with her."

He wanted to retort something back to Megumi, but he got nothing to reply with.

She was right. He had spent too much time falling in love with Seiko's AU version to woo the crush he could actually, physically interact with.

But maybe he was merely spoiled by AU Seiko. She was the Seiko that was already in love with him by default and by no "fault" of his. She wasn't even really in love with him either, but instead with his alternate universe counterpart.

"So? What's your master plan now?" asked Minagata.

He couldn't answer that either. Instead, he replied about something else entirely. Something that had been bothering him since the Sports Fest Volleyball Tournament.

"Okamoto is pretty amazing, isn't she? In our last Sports Fest, she was the MVP of Class 2B. She won the relay even after Machida tripped in the middle of it, and she almost won the volleyball tournament in spite of me being part of the team. Had she not spent her energy on the relay, she would've creamed 2A on her own. Was she always this amazing?"

"Hey, don't change the subject," came Megumi's first message, followed by, "Yep, that sounds exactly like Seiko-chan, all right. You just can't stop her when she gets going. She's stubborn to a fault but that's part of her charm."

"Right? As expected of the Amazon Queen," he wrote, adding, "I can't explain it properly, but anything she does becomes fun for me too, even things I'm normally not interested in. I don't even care about boxing, pro-wrestling, or MMA, but when she talks about those topics, I can't help but get hyped. Know what I mean?"

"Oh, absolutely," Minagata replied, adding, "She has always been an overachiever since I met her. We can barely keep up with her, Kazu-kun and I. It's almost like she's in another dimension, sometimes. A true alpha."

'Tell me about it. Both versions of Seiko-chan are like that,' Tomoyuki thought before texting back, "I want to keep up with her. I want to exist beside her. I want to live life the way she does. To the fullest."

"Hey," began the country bumpkin from Hiroshima, "You're starting to sound like someone I used to know. Watch yourself."

The Cherry Boy didn't heed Minagata's warning.

Instead, he took a picture of a poster he saw on the bulletin board regarding a certain club looking for new members. For future reference.

***

At dismissal time, near the exit gates of Maehara High...

"Cherry-kun! Nice timing! It's time for us to go to the Go Home Club!"

Tomoyuki heard Yukari Goto jokingly greet him, referring to the "club" that students who had no clubs belonged to, such that when it was dismissal time, they tended to "Go Home" instead of attend to club activities.

"You're going straight to work at that convenience store gig, right? Come on, let's go!"

Yamamoto stared at Goto blankly before stating, "Um, I'm actually part of the Literature Club now."

"Say whu...?" asked Yukari, doing a double-take. "Since when!?"

The Cherry Boy scratched the back of his head. "Would you believe since now?"

"You... You... YOU JERK! Every time with you! TAKE THIS! My love, hate, and all of my sorrow!"

"OW! What gives? What'd I do this time? And how'd you do that thing with your twin tails? OW! STOP IT! MY EYE!" screeched Tomoyuki as he cringed from the wrath of Yukari whipping her long twin-tailed ponytails back and forth at his face.

***

So two things happened.

Tomoyuki joined the Literature Club and scored pretty high on the initial test for it, much to the delight of the teacher heading the club, Miss Juri Kitamura. Yes, the same advisor and homeroom teacher of Class 2B.

All newbies had to take an English and Japanese language proficiency test to see how well they'd score and what level of reading they could handle.

He felt a little proud in crushing both tests.

There weren't many things he was actually good at, so being a little good at reading, writing, and language boosted his ego just a tiny bit.

Also, as a side note, Miku Machida was the class president of the Literature Club.

Well, okay then. Sure. This was yet another thing she was good at.

Yamamoto considered going to the Drama Club instead, but he didn't know how to act. At all.

There was also the Anime and Manga Club, but he had no idea how to draw either. Not to mention, it was a total sausage fest of lonely male nerds in that club, with it mostly being composed of sophomores from Class 2D.

Furthermore, there was no such thing as a Movie or Film Club in Maehara High. This was the original reason why the movie fanatic Tomoyuki never bothered joining any clubs. None of them matched up with his deep-down passion and interests.

The only club that usually filmed anything in the school was the Drama Club.

They recorded all of their theater productions on video, but from time to time they tried their hand at making actual films rather than just filming what happened on stage. They made use of the Audio-Visual department of the school every time they did so.

Therefore, it was indeed a shame that he couldn't end up in the Drama Club instead because he had for the longest time loved the art of filmmaking and appreciated the worldwide masterpieces of cinema.

He couldn't exactly write a script for the theater geeks to adapt either, since they usually just went with the classics of Shakespeare or Noh Drama.

Then again, he was kind of glad he had a familiar face with him in the club he ultimately decided to join.

To be honest, Tomoyuki expected Miku to be part of the Anime and Manga Club herself, what with her doing things like making doujinshi manga (self-published comics) that she sells at Comiket (Comic Market, a comic book convention that occurs twice a year).

She was friends with fellow fujoshi that drew the type of lewd doujinshi she wanted to make on the down low (since she couldn't draw herself), buuut that wasn't enough incentive for her to join the "creepy" Anime and Manga Club full of lonely nerds regardless.

Full of thirsty "Cherry Boys" like himself who wanted a girlfriend that was also interested in nerdy things.

Wait. Come to think of it, why were Tomoyuki and Miku best friends again?

Oh right. The moment that he swore never to attempt to woo her again, Machida was content to put him in the Friend Zone.

Like deep in the Friend Zone. Not the Ross and Rachel from "Friends" kind of Friend Zone. More like the Ross and Phoebe kind of Friend Zone.

Also, he wasn't that big of an anime maniac as the people from Class 2D. More like most of his knowledge of anime and manga was from the Class 2B Rep herself.

But at least with her rejection of his romantic advances, she kept her word that they could still be friends. Unlike that bitchy Student Council President Mana Otonashi, who screwed with him every chance she got.

Even though he barely read any worthwhile English, Russian, French, or local Japanese literature, he had a decent grasp of the language and he could use his movie knowledge in the Literature Club instead, particularly the films that were based on books.

Like "Lord of the Rings" by Peter Jackson. Or the "Harry Potter" film series. Or "Of Mice and Men". Or "Lord of The Flies". Or "Hakuchi (The Idiot)" by Akira Kurosawa. Or even "The Ring" horror film series.

These were all based on novels of some sort.

Actually, things went swimmingly well with the Literature Club. Surprisingly well. As if it were a club that fit like a glove in accordance to his needs and interests.

The only thing he was afraid of was him losing his part-time job over his decision to join a club. But he wasn't quite sure about how serious he was about either the Literature Club or his cashier work.

Every day, they were assigned books to read and reports to submit, just like in the case of their school work. And every day, he received praise for his work on every activity, which motivated him further and reminded him of why he joined the club in the first place.

For once, he felt like he was doing something for himself instead of trying desperately to seek approval from others.

Then, one day, after he played the trailer to Ran by Akira Kurosawa on his cellphone for the thousandth time to strengthen his resolve, he made his decision then and there.

It was a trailer to a movie that existed in a parallel world, starring Tatsuya Nakadai: The same actor who played the titular character in Kurosawa's Kagemusha instead of Shintaro Katsu, who was the Kagemusha in Tomoyuki's universe.

He still couldn't help but get misty eyed every time he watched this "lost work" by Kurosawa.

Once he had gathered enough confidence and courage from all his initial club activities, he soon wrote the first few words of his own short story.

It was all thanks to this birthday gift sent to him by the other Seiko.

***

Apparently, Tomoyuki was more motivated about his Literature Club membership than even he realized. Even though he ended up keeping his convenience store clerk job, he found himself scribbling on his notebook or saving notes on this cellphone in between breaks.

It'd been a long time since he felt passionate about something other than trying to get a girlfriend then failing in a spectacular and cringe-worthy fashion.

Like he was living the kind of life Okamoto had been living as this sports goddess oozing with pure talent, potential, and athleticism.

It was even enough for him to ignore whispers from his clubmates about him being a try-hard teacher's pet because he kept acing all of the tests and activities given to them by Miss Kitamura.

All the same, back at their clubroom, Tomoyuki wrote and wrote. He fulfilled more and more of the requirements of the club, such that he was even giving Miku a run for her money when it came to scoring high with their club activities.

"Very good, Yamamoto-kun! Aside from the purple prose and run-on sentences, you're getting the hang out of essay writing. Have you ever written anything else before? Like short stories or something?" asked Miss Kitamura to Tomoyuki after handing him his graded test paper.

Scratching his cheek while his eyes darted away at his buxom teacher, the Cherry Boy gulped and said, "N-No. I haven't... written anything serious or... anything. Just small stories and... terrible-looking doodles for manga."

His homeroom teacher for Class 2B chuckled and winked. "Well, you're a little diamond in the rough, methinks. Maybe you might even have talent for it. Keep at it."

He smiled back at her words of encouragement, bowed, and went back to his seat as Miss Kitamura called on the next club member.

His heart raced from acing yet another activity. It made him feel... things in ways reminiscent to when AU Seiko first confessed her love for him over the phone. Like he felt appreciated and loved for being him.

He never felt more alive in all his life. Was this the kind of rose-tinted life he would've been leading had him and AU Seiko lived in the same universe?

"How's your new story coming along?" whispered Machida after taking a peek at the notebook of barely legible handwriting from Tomoyuki. "Have you finally gotten off of your butt and started writing that romance of yours about lovers from different dimensions?"

"No, that's different! Also, if you want me to show mine, you better show yours too!" teased Yamamoto back.

A blushing Miku covered her face with her own notebook full of scribbles and notes right after impudently sticking her tongue out at her fellow... writer, was it?

Yeah, Tomoyuki was kind of a writer now, wasn't he? Even if he was an amateur at it. 'Ain't that a kick in the head?'

Speaking of which, he shouldn't get ahead of himself. All he was doing was making a rough or even sandpapery draft of a story.

But he did have fun exchanging story ideas and getting feedback from the Class Rep. Even though despite her cheery demeanor, she was stricter than even Miss Kitamura in pointing out the grammatical and continuity errors of his work.

He gave her feedback in kind though for her stories too. Although he didn't really care for any of her boy's love or young adult romance ones.

He also outright turned down reading any stories featuring him and Akira Fubuki. Or Kazuhito Sugata. Or Kanemoto. Or especially Ishiguro or Matsuda. Seriously.

He also thanked his lucky stars that Machida was embarrassed and self-aware enough to not share with him any of her, uh, more mature BL stories and outlines for her erotic doujinshi manga for feedback purposes.

She finally got the hint that he had no interest in discussing which guy should be seme (on top) or uke (at the bottom) in a pairing she made up for original stories or her fan fiction.

To Miku's chagrin, Yamamoto quite frankly skewered all of her literary work and outlines for the club, taking note that they all followed the same tired clichés of misunderstandings, arguments, and forgiveness. Rinse and repeat.

"But that's how all shojo manga (girl comics) stories ended! Don't knock 'em all down for following the same formula!" she'd complain.

"Yeah, sure, but... surely you can come up with some new and interesting twist on the formula, right?" he'd point out. "So that it doesn't come off as derivative."

To her credit, although she hated him for his devilish frankness, she didn't want him to pull his punches on his critiques either, especially since whenever he did offer praise she appreciated it doubly so.

That was also the way he liked his constructive criticism from her. She even quickly corrected many of his run-on sentences, repeated phrases, mixed metaphors, and purple prose as though she were an advanced version of a cellphone autocorrect.

She'd make a great editor for a book or manga publishing house someday.

What frustrated Yamamoto about Machida's otherwise excellent, detailed, and mostly grammatical feedback was when she said his stories were "okay" or "fine" plot-wise but said nothing more about them.

He didn't know how to improve upon "okay" or "fine".

"There's nothing wrong with the story, Yamamoto-kun!" Miku would insist.

"Buuut...?" Tomoyuki would then prod.

"'But' what? 'But' nothing! I just said the plot is fine! Jeez, Cherry Boy," she'd then say with enough exasperation for her to forget how embarrassed she'd normally be when calling Yamamoto the slang term for "male virgin".

Regardless, he was so inspired by the progress of his writing and the high scores he'd been getting from his club activities that he even began writing the first page of a long-form story with a premise that didn't conclude after 4,000 words.

In a few hours, one page became 10 and 10 pages became a chapter. That chapter then turned into 3 chapters. Then 9 chapters.

In just a few days, he was churning out chapters and word counts that would've taken him the better part of three months to produce. Like he'd suddenly been possessed by hypergraphia or the intense desire to write or draw.

As though he were a man possessed. He was on a roll. The scattered puzzle pieces in his life had started to finally falling into place.

***

"Wow. You joined the Literature Club? Good for you," said AU Seiko after updating Tomoyuki about how it went with her love triangle with AU Tomoyuki and AU Miku.

As a by the way, AU Machida did geek out about the prospect of alternate universes after AU Okamoto broached the subject jokingly while discussing the possible origins of the Kagemusha Trailer (from Yamamoto's universe) sent to AU Yamamoto for his birthday.

This distracted the previously upset AU Miku—who in their dimension had a closer relationship to AU Tomoyuki—over not giving the object of their affection a better gift than AU Seiko had.

As a downside, she wouldn't shut up about the Multiverse Theory the whole time they were together.

"The Literature Club is actually the perfect fit for you. You were always the creative type. I mean, judging by the Cherry Boy in my world."

"Thanks a lot, Amazon Queen," said Yamamoto, who couldn't stop smiling after revealing his decision to join a club for once. As though he felt somehow closer to the AU version of his crush by doing so.

Or at least worthier of her love.

It was as though he could see her back as he raced with her in his imagination, like he was about to catch up with her as she shone brightly as always did like the shooting star that she was.

"Come to think of it, our Cherry Boy... my Cherry Boy... the other you... is part of the Film Club."

He chuckled and rolled his eyes. "Of course you'd have a Film Club in your universe. That's how it always works, doesn't it? What we have, you don't have, and vice-versa."

The Amazon Queen giggled in return. "I'm just glad you're seeking your own passions outside of all this love business. But don't get too distracted by your club and forget about wooing the other me or anything."

Thoughtlessly, the Cherry Boy reassured, "The reason I joined the Literature Club is to impress the other you. Kind of."

"...Wait, what? How does that work?" AU Seiko asked in a... questioning(?) tone that took Yamamoto aback.

Did he say something wrong?

***

Back at the cafeteria, while Miku and Tomoyuki ate their bento and discussed their activities at the Literature Club, two familiar figures approached them.

"So the rumors were true. Yamamoto has left the Go Home Club and joined Miku-chan's Literature Club instead," said a smirking Aya from Class 2C.

"I-It's not my club! Jeez!" replied Miku with a sigh before munching on an egg roll. "A-And Yammamoto-kun is doing excellent work at our club, for your information!"

'Gee, I wonder how the news spread so fast,' thought Yamamoto before sparing a glance at Yukari, the girl beside Fubuki who couldn't meet his gaze "for some reason".

Making an apologetic chopping motion with her hand once she mustered the courage to look him in the eye, Goto asked, "Can we join you?" before sitting down anyway and not waiting for a response.

Huh. Even the aloof Aya followed Yukari's lead this time around and sat down with them on the same table. They didn't normally eat around Miku when he was around.

Him joining some club wasn't that newsworthy.

Miku and Tomoyuki sat opposite to each other, so the Class 2C girls ended up sitting together with each of them, with Aya sitting beside Machida and Yukari sitting beside Yamamoto.

"Congratulations, Miku-chan," said Yukari with a wide grin while covering her guffawing mouth, which prompted the Class 2B Rep to shush her with a blush.

"Don't congratulate me! Jeez!" the bespectacled girl pouted at the twin-tailed girl. "Congratulate Yamamoto-kun!"

"Stop bullying her," reprimanded both Aya and Tomoyuki in unison at Yukari in that familiar parental way they'd tell off a misbehaving child, much to their surprise.

Fubuki stared at Yamamoto for a hot minute with a blank expression on her face before turning her attention back to Miku and Yukari.

'Whew. I thought she was going to be mad,' he thought.

"Bullying her? Stop bullying me!" said Goto with a sniffle and wide deer-in-front-of-headlights eyes.

"Now, now! Let's not fight over something trivial!" said Machida, who took on a motherly role as she patted her friend's head.

Once everyone settled down, Yukari asked, "What have you two lovebirds been up to in your little club anyway?" before munching on some convenience store steamed meat buns herself.

With a "playful" kick to Goto's shin from under the table, Miku said, "We're in the middle developing our individual writing style, so I was concerned that Yamamoto-kun couldn't keep up. But it turns out he's a natural at writing. I'm so proud of him."

Tomoyuki nodded. "And I've been recommended several books I haven't read to help me find 'my voice' or something. The club members there are really friendly and nonjudgmental about book choice. Some of them even cover light novels, like Slayers or Suzumiya Haruhi. It's pretty... comfy going there, to be honest."

He then saw the Class 2B Rep giggle, which made him inquire, "What?"

"Oh, nothing. It's just that all our classmates in the club call you the Film Snob," said Machida. "All your book recommendations were made into films one way or another."

The Cherry Boy palmed his face in embarrassment. "Aw man. Fine, I don't read many books that aren't films! Jeez, they're the ones being snobs!"

"Your new nickname is at least less embarrassing than your current one, Cherry-kun," quipped the bouncy Yukari.

Aya took a sip of her bottle of iced tea then asked, "So what does Seiko-chan think about you joining the Literature Club, Yamamoto-kun?"

"Huh? Er... Pardon?" asked Tomoyuki, feigning ignorance. Internally, he groaned.

Ugh, this again. Both AU Seiko and Not-AU Aya should mind their own business it came to how he went about wooing Not-AU Seiko.

What was up with those two anyway? 'It's not like I abandoned wooing Okamoto just because I became a member of a club. It's actually quite the opposite.'

Fubuki smacked her lips, thought for a minute, and said, "Just curious what Seiko-chan thought about you getting a club after all this time. My little brother told me you two have become quite close, so I'm wondering if you had asked her what she feels about it."

Tomoyuki cringed, recognizing what Aya implied even as both Miku and Yukari tilted their heads inquisitively at the both of them. "She's... fine with it. She thought it was cute and the perfect fit for me."

Oh man. And here he thought now that the whole stalking jig was up with Akira crossdressing as Aya, the Elder Fubuki would let up on him a little bit. Be nice to him for once.

But old habits die hard and one of the girls that made him infamous among the girls of Maehara was now putting his feet on the fire once again.

So that tattletale Akira told his big sister about the shenanigans they were up to at the hotel. Man, that sentence sounded so wrong and naughty in his head.

Then again, did the Fubuki brother also confess to the sister about how he was disguising himself as her in order to pull a prank on the Cherry Boy? Maybe he merely came clean to her and all, confessing everything.

Wait. Aya already knew about his crush on Seiko, didn't she?

Well, yes, of course she knew that he had a crush on (Non-AU) Seiko! The Maehara High grapevine was thick and accommodating of various grape pickers.

However, what must've sealed the deal for her was seeing Okamoto act all weird after she played his fake confession to Miku on her phone.

He knew better than to be presumptuous of the Amazon Queen's intentions, but for all intents and purposes, he interpreted the way she acted as... jealousy. Or maybe he hoped it was jealousy on her part.

Miku then asked Aya, "Oh really? What happened between Yamamoto-kun and Seiko-chan?"

A cold sweat dripped from the nape of Yamamoto's head as Fubuki's stare traveled back and forth from him to Machida. She then said with a cattish grin, "That's a secret."

The clueless Machida then told Tomoyuki, "But still, you and Aya-chan are closer together now than before, right? I'm so happy for you two," without a hint of jealousy, irony, or sarcasm from her sweet voice.

He hoped this clued Yukari in on how the bespectacled Class Rep really felt about him romantically.

***

To Be Continued...

It just occurred to me that Tomoyuki Yamamoto is kind of like the infamous Christian Weston Chandler or Chris-chan, complete with his "Sweethearts" or his version of the "Friend Zone Harem".

Also, his dream of making his Sonichu webcomic a serious thing even though it was just him plagiarizing existing content and lazily fusing them together is also reminiscent of Tomoyuki's obsession with Kurosawa's Kagemusha.

How about that?

Farewell, Abdiel

[lovehardenemycollector]

Behind barbed wire, within view of Texas, 2,200 migrants live in a netherworld between U.S. and Mexican responsibility. No one's in charge and amateurs are rushing in to help. Desperate conditions and an abiding despair are forcing awful choices. Some people think that's the point. Leaked Letter Shows Where Military Will Reinforce Trump’s Border WallMATAMOROS, Mexico—In the year since the Trump Administration instituted the Migrant Protection Protocols, known as the Remain in Mexico policy, a sprawling encampment has grown in Matamoros, just a shout across the Rio Grande from Brownsville, Texas. The people here are under the jurisdiction of the United States, although they sleep at the very edge of a country neither their own nor the one they seek. The camp exists between Mexican and U.S. authority and outside international law. It's not an official refugee camp, though it certainly looks like one. Dozens of tents are pitched in rows on the tennis courts and soccer pitch of a city park and covered in black garbage bags to keep out the rain. Men lug plastic hardware-store buckets to collect water. They have built tables out of logs and the flat boards of shipping pallets lashed together with rope. Women pat masa into tortillas and cook on grills over wood fires (park trees chopped down for the purpose). The camp is a waiting room for the U.S. immigration courts, which operate out of a warren of white tents on the Texas side of the river. But the wait is long. Many have hearings set for March or April, five and six months after they first presented their asylum claims. The camp teems with children, young, skinny Central Americans with indigenous faces. On Feb. 1, UNICEF issued a statement saying the agency had begun developing places for the children to play, some basic health screening and organization of water and sanitation services. But these are minimal and belated. Migrants seeking asylum in the United States have been sleeping in Matamoros since July. In the absence of official international system management, social service workers, attorneys, activists, crisis junkies, Silicon Valley millionaires and organized and freelance do-gooders have filled the vacuum. Some have experience responding to crisis. Some have no idea what they are doing. No one is in charge. An Italian tourist is running a photography class for kids. A self-described redneck anarchist is managing logistics and operations: what to do with 100 camp stoves donated by a philanthropist, where to locate the garbage barrels a charity is buying. An evangelical pastor associated with Franklin Graham who runs a hip-hop church in Matamoros is helping organize a council of camp residents to make joint decisions. A clutch of acupuncturists is extolling the trauma-relieving properties of their art.There is no vetting. The volunteers who walk into the camp with some idea of doing good receive no screening or training on the risks that the migrants face. Some take pictures and post to social media long accounts filled with details of migrants' asylum claims. A knot of GoFundMe and Kickstarter pages without accounting safeguards collect donations for a mushrooming variety of initiatives, some well-grounded, some not. Not that there haven’t been efforts to organize and control the chaos. They just haven’t been effective. Since December, Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley, a U.S. group called Angry Tias and Abuela, and others have met weekly with the Mexican immigration authorities. Bria Schurke, a physician's assistant from northern Minnesota, is on her fourth stint in a makeshift health clinic run by Global Response Management, a tiny nonprofit that also has clinics in Yemen, Syria, and Iraq. She worked in refugee camps in East Africa, and is alarmed by the rookies, the lack of ethical protocols governing humanitarian relief in Matamoros. "Because it's accessible a lot of people are showing up, well intentioned or not," Schurke said. Most of the patients Schurke sees in the clinic have respiratory infections or intestinal illnesses, scabies or lice. There is malnutrition, but the most severe malady is fear. The camp inhabitants are popular targets for the drug cartels and human trafficking operations that hold power in Matamoros. Migrants are subject to kidnapping, torture, and rape, according to “A Year of Horrors,”  a new report by Human Rights First. It tallied 201 cases of kidnapping and attempted kidnapping of children under the Migrant Protection Protocols.A Feb. 12 report called "No Way Out," from Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières, is equally dire. In October 2019, the report notes, of the patients MSF cared for in one border town, 75 percent had been kidnapped recently.An MSF psychologist and two other workers have been serving migrants in the city of Matamoros since September. At the beginning of February they began working inside the migrant camp with a doctor two days a week. In addition to infections and injuries from exposure, hunger and walking hundreds of miles, MSF staff see truama from abuse suffered along the migrant root and also inside U.S. detention centers.The report called the levels of violence that migrants are fleeing in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras “comparable to that in war zones where MSF has been working for decades” and “a major factor fueling migration north to Mexico and the U.S.”But admittance into the United States may never come. Returning home is not an option.  Conditions are desperate enough that some parents have sent their children across the bridge into the U.S. alone, deciding they are better off in detention centers than the precarity of camp.These are choices parents shouldn't be compelled to contemplate, said Jennifer Nagda, policy director for the Young Center for Immigrant Children's Rights, who visited the camp in January. “There shouldn't be a camp,” Nadga said, punching each word. “This is a completely new and unprecedented effort—in contravention of international treaties and obligations. It's an explicit effort to make it impossible for people to exercise their legal rights.”On the Brownsville side of the river, a clutch of protestors sits in a small park in vigil. They will stay, they say, until their country recants its crimes. They believe the camp and the desperation it breeds are intentional designs of a government intent on dehumanizing a hated population.Drawing comparisons to the treatment of Jews in the years before the Holocaust, Joshua Rubin, a retired computer programmer from Brooklyn, who is Jewish, says he feels compelled to be a witness, to not look away when his country is doing something wrong. He organized the protest called Vigil at the Border. He and the others will remain, he said, holding their "Let Them In" and "History is Watching" signs until the U.S. reverses the Remain in Mexico policy. "I don't have a lot of hope that that will happen, but I don’t have much choice," Rubin said. "You can't close your eyes and make it go away."Back in Matamoros on a Friday afternoon in late January a hundred people walked into a tent—large and white like something for a wedding except this was about separation not union—sat themselves in rows and listened as two attorneys from the Young Center gave a briefing:Here is the process that will confront your children if you send them over the bridge by themselves. They will be collected. They will be sent to a prison-like detention center. They will be assigned a case number. They will get a calendar date. They will be under the authority of federal agents. They may spend months or years in this facility. They may be sent to foster care. The people with whom they live may or may not speak Spanish. They may be able to connect to your brother, your aunt, your cousin in New York, in Michigan, in California. They may not. You might never see them again.The Hondurans, Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Nicaraguans listened in weary attention. In the front row, a toddler breast-fed luxuriantly, in the way of toddlers, full, entitled, the fingers of his hand splayed proprietarily on his mother’s side. She wiped her eyes repeatedly and blinked hard.Leaning forward, heads inclined and faces stoic, the migrants listened to the lawyers' words. They were not hopeful.Gladis Molina Alt, director of the Young Center's Child Advocacy Program, was herself once a migrant. Her father fled Morazán, El Salvador in the early years of that country’s war, swam the river and got himself to Los Angeles. He sent for her and her brothers and mother later. She arrived in the U.S. at age 10. Became a citizen at 27. Went to law school and now, pulled by history, works as a legal advocate for other migrant children.Today is different though.  Ordinarily she works the hard cases of children in detention. Today she is at the other end of the story, speaking to parents in the camp who may have received some very bad advice.An American woman visiting the camp has told families she can get their children into the United States, that within a week they will be with those family members waiting in Maryland or Iowa or Oregon.The woman has no way of ensuring this. No expertise or authority. But families have trusted a heart-sick gringa. They sent their children to stand on a small bridge across the Rio Grande and throw themselves on the anemic mercy of Customs and Border Patrol. It is difficult to learn where those children are today. The federal detention, supervision and child management system is vast and anything but transparent. Still, after the briefing a quiet line forms, then encircles the attorneys, women and men wanting more information.The breast-feeding mother is among them. The next day, climbing out of the tent she shares with her husband and children, holding the happy toddler on her hip while her older child plays soccer in the dust, she explains. The little one is too small to send, but she is worried for the fate of her nine-year-old son in the camp. The kind of people they fled El Salvador to avoid are active here. She knows they'll prey on the boy.It feels like psychological war being kept here, she says: the waiting, the uncertainty. Yet if they return to El Salvador she is sure they will be killed. "I have to think of sending him," she says, crying now. "There is no life here."    She and her family are among tens of thousands of Central Americans who’ve fled north in the past decade: 35,000 people from Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras sought asylum at the U.S. border in 2017, the last year for which Department of Homeland Security data was readily available. An additional 75,000 people from those three nations sought asylum when faced with deportation the same year. Asylum claims from the northern triangle of Central America jumped 800 percent between 2012 and 2017 according to DHS’ Annual Flow Report on Refugees and Asylees from March 2019.Holocaust Survivor: Yes, the Border Detention Centers Are Like Concentration CampsThe migrants are driven from nations deformed by brutality, where the social and psychological wounds of wars committed a generation ago festered into drug, gang and government violence today that leaves few families safe. Last week Human Rights Watch released a report documenting cases of 138 Salvadorans who were killed after being deported back into their country.The parents who circled the lawyers after the briefing in Matamoros had similar fears and questions: How long, really, before they get out of detention? My children are gone, how will I find them? What if their claim of asylum has already been rejected? Does that count against them? How will it affect my own case? Is there a way to do something to make it more possible that I might see them again? There is no life here. I cannot take them back to Honduras/El Salvador/Guatemala. We will be killed."It's Sophie's Choice, but you don't get to keep one of them," another lawyer with long experience and red eyes said after she stepped away from a conference you might call a sidewalk conference, but for the fact there was no sidewalk.Only cracked, very dry ground.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/39GPR3H

[ser11]

Review of Dice Angel by Brian Rouff

Review of Dice Angel by Brian Rouff At first glance, this book didn’t look very exciting, as the front is a dull gray color with dark gray lettering and a soft image of an angel worked into the words. However, just as the saying goes, we shouldn’t have judged this book by its covering. To our surprise, after picking this book up, it was hard to set it down! The chapters are short but are packed full with riveting information that entices you to keep reading. This book is the story of Jimmy D, a middle-aged bar owner whose life seems to be a constant string of bad luck. His ex-wife loves making his life miserable, his accountant fled town with all of Jimmy’s money, and he’s about to lose the bar to the bank. Finally things start to turn around when Jimmy is introduced to the Dice Angel, who gives him the opportunity to turn his life around through success at craps. Will luck continue to be in Jimmy’s favor? Or will he lose everything and have start over from scratch? You’ll have to keep reading to find out.

About the Book

Audience: Middle-aged Men and Women Author: Brian Rouff Genre: Fiction, Gambling-related Length: 38 Chapters, 242 Pages Point of View: First Person Narrative Publisher: Hardway Press Publishing Date: January 2002 Setting: Las Vegas, Nevada in the 21st Century

Brian Rouff Bio

Brian Rouff was born in 1955 and although he started off as a freelance writer who specialized in advertisement, he has more recently turned to writing books. Dice Angel was the first book that Rouff wrote, but he also wrote Money Shot in 2004 and one chapter of Restless City in 2009. In addition to that, Rouff has also been a regular contributor to the Las Vegas CityLife, a weekly newspaper and his own personal website, Living-Las-Vegas.com. Today, Rouff is a managing partner of Imagine Communications, which is a full service advertising, marketing, and public relations firm based in Henderson, Nevada.

Chapter Summaries & Thoughts

Chapters 1-5 The first few chapters are where you learn a lot about the narrator of this novel, Jimmy D. He tells you about his past experiences with his ex-wife, his daughter, Jenny, and his deceased father. You’ll learn all about the bar that Jimmy inherited from his father and you’ll be introduced to all of Jimmy’s friends.Instantly, you’ll feel connected to this man who is down on his luck and although he can be stubborn and insensitive at times, you’ll have a desire to see him come up on top. Early on, tragedy strikes, as the bar has been broken into and thousands of dollars have been strategically stolen from the slot machines inside Jimmy’s bar. Of course, Jimmy is responsible for paying that money back and so begins the slippery slope of Jimmy’s money problems. Soon his cards start getting declined and his checks start bouncing. Although Jimmy is started to get concerned, he’s distracted because his daughter Jenny is in town. You get to meet Jenny and see their loving father-daughter relationship that further makes you fall in love with Jimmy D. Chapters 6-10 Chapter 6 is where you’ll be introduced to Owen, Jimmy’s current accountant and ex-brother in law. He tells Jimmy that he can rest assured because the complications have been resolved. The next day after his encounter with Owen, his wife Sarah calls to inform him that Owen is missing and that he never came home that night. The bank called Jimmy the very next day to inform him that his entire life savings had been emptied and he no longer has any money in his accounts. As Jimmy’s bad luck continues to grow, he comes to the dismal realization that Owen had been embezzling money from him. If Jimmy doesn’t act fast, he’s going to lose the bar! He tries to get a loan from the bank, only to find that there is a lien on his property because Owen had failed to pay the businesses taxes. Jimmy has no choice but to get a lawyer  but has no luck finding one that will take his case seriously, so Jimmy starts turning to alcohol for comfort and by the end of this book, you’ll probably think he’s an alcoholic. Chapters 11-15 By Chapter 11, it’s time for Jimmy to tell Sarah everything he knows about her husband and through this we see his love and compassion for other people. He’s so kind and sweet to her that you grow more attached to his character. After meeting with his assigned lawyer Poon, Jimmy discovers that he is going to have to pay over $56,000 in just over a year or he’ll lose his bar. Believing that’s practically impossible, he strikes a deal with Poon, allowing his band to play at the bar regularly, as long as he can have a two-year extension on his debt. Poon’s band is unfortunately too awful to keep on staff, as they scare the regular customers away. Jimmy has no choice but to fire Poon’s band and reap the consequences, which in this case are him owing the complete $56,000 in cash by the end of the month. To make everything worse, Jimmy’s good friend, Zelasko, who happens to b a private investigator, calls to inform Jimmy that Owen’s past is untraceable and there’s no record of him prior to the time he started dating Sarah. Chapters 16-19 Pete, the homeless man, that frequently visits Jimmy after hours for a free meal and to give him advice will give him a business card that will change Jimmy’s life forever. The card reads “Dice Angel, I Will Bring You Luck at Craps, Ask for Amaris, 702-555-1431. (Just for fun, we called the number on the card to see what would happen, but unfortunately the number is no longer in service.) Jimmy exclaims that he would never become that desperate but takes the card and stuffs it into his wallet for good measure. He then goes on to explain to Pete that he has a bad history with gambling addiction and hasn’t been to a casino in over five years. Even though Jimmy knew this day was inevitably going to come, he still was bitter when he received a letter from the IRS the following day. Jimmy reluctantly decided it was time to tell his employees exactly what was going on and to his surprise, they were very supportive of him and even offered to work on tips alone for the next couple weeks. In hopes to put a dent in his debt, Jimmy starts selling off his prized possessions such as his auto-graphed Al Kaline Jersey and the Rolex that his father gave him when he graduated high school. He decided to clean out his wallet in hopes to find something that will help him collect more money when he sees the Dice Angel Card. As he was about to throw it away, he could hear Pete’s words, “What do you have to lose?” Chapters 20-24 Jimmy sets up an appointment to meet with Amaris at a nearby diner and when it came to be about fifteen minutes after the time they were supposed to meet, he suspected that he would never come. Amaris did come and brought her intense, vibrant personality with her. Their meeting was pretty typical, as they asked each other questions about themselves and Amaris took the time to explain her powers. Although Jimmy is still skeptical, he agrees to meet Amaris at Wild Bills Gambling Hall the next day. After Amaris slips away, he takes her tea-cup and plans to give it to Zelasko so he can do a background check on her. Since Jimmy did some investigating, we decided to do some ourselves. We looked into the Wild Bill Gambling Hall to see if it was an actual place and everything seemed to be just as described, a small casino just a few miles away from the main strip. This adds a certain amount of authenticity to the book that we truly appreciate. As soon as Jimmy gets back into action, his old habits start falling back in place and the bad luck he had before still followed him to the present day. After studying Jimmy’s every move, Amaris gives Jimmy a few pieces of advice that may help him naturally become a better gambler such as betting at a full table with friendly people and to not get defeated when things don’t go his way. Amaris noticed that Jimmy a deep hatred for money and she believed it’s probably linked to experience he’s had from a past life. Chapters 25-29 Amaris demands that Jimmy visits Dr. Arnie Gilman who is considered a Doctor of Parapsychology. While there, the doctor hypnotizes Jimmy so that his previous life could be revealed. While hypnotized, Jimmy is taken back in time to where he was a Holy Man that would collect money from peasants for God but would use it for his own selfish desires. When Jimmy woke up, he realized that he needs to learn to put others first in order to overcome is hatred of money. This was certainly a turning point in the story for Jimmy. The next casino that Jimmy and Amaris plan to meet is the Golden Gate casino, which also checks out when it comes to authenticity. Jimmy starts playing with a decent bankroll of $500 which he had to borrow from the bar. Amaris stood close by to Jimmy, speaking enchantments and working her magic behind the scenes. Jimmy started off on a roll but then quickly lost $200 and was very frustrated until he bet on the 11, winning $4,500 in a matter of seconds. Although Jimmy seemed to have luck on his side that night, Amaris decided they should stop while they were ahead. They depart and as soon as he gets home, Zelasko calls to inform him that Owen’s real name was actually Vincent Toledo, an old mobster that went off the grid years ago. The police found Owen/ Vincent dead body just several days ago and needed him and Sarah to go to the morgue to confirm that it was Owen, who it ultimately turns out to be. Chapters 30-32 After reading through all of Amaris’ past crimes, he decides to confront her which turns into him feeling like a jerk as she was quick to point out that most of her past crimes occurred when she was only a child. Overlooking some hard feelings, they decide to meet one final time, on Thursday night, in order to win the extra $50,000 they needed. For the first time in a long time, Jim has hope.  He thanks Pete for recommending him to the dice angel and is anxious for Thursday night to come. They decide to meet at Luxor Casino, another casino whose description matches just the way it’s described: a giant pyramid shaped casino which an Egyptian theme. Before Jimmy starts playing, Amaris gives him two simple pieces of advice: trust the universe and count your blessings. Chapters 33-35 Jimmy immediately starts winning right off the bat, first reaching $700 and then climbing up to $11,000 in a matter of minutes. He seems to be on a lucky streak that will just never end and their plan seems to be progressing perfectly at which point Amaris gets spotted and escorted out of the casino. Jimmy had managed to win just over $40,000 at this point, which would leave him about $15,000 short. He decided to go against his best instincts and continue gambling without her, winning an extra $20,000 before choosing to quit while he was ahead. In total, after taking out the $15,000 he owed Amaris, Jimmy was left with $60,000 to pay back his debts and call the bar. As soon as he came home that night, he called Poon to exclaim that e would be meeting with him tomorrow to pay his debts in full. This is where we though the story would end, happily ever after, but Rouff had a different idea.

A Surprise Ending

Jimmy gets a call from Sarah, explaining that her daughter Rachel had relapsed and was in critical care at the Desert Sun Hospital. Jimmy rushes to the hospital, only to find Sarah crying desperately, afraid that the hospital with move Rachel from their facilities due to a lack of funds. Jimmy, the honorable man that he is, gives up his entire $60,000 unanimously to save Rachel’s life. When we reach chapter 37, a few months have passed and the bar has already gone up for auction. Sarah pays a visit to Jimmy, revealing that she knows what he did to save her daughter’s life and that she is eternally grateful. Sarah also gives Jimmy a beautiful surprise by announcing that she won the auction and purchased his bar back with money she received from the government due to her husband’s death. Sarah invites him to be his business partner and he happily accepts. The last scene of the book is Jimmy going back to the pawn shop to buy back the watch his father had bought him as a child, showing Jimmy’s great appreciation and love for his father that is evident throughout the entire book.

Our Favorite Quotes from the Book

Jimmy speaking, “At that moment, I had a image of Steve Wynn, the casino mastermind, in a Uncle Sam costume. I realized that casino owners and the U.S Government were in the same business of taking your money, your property, and even your hope. At least the casino gave you free drinks.” This quotes sums up Jimmy’s personality perfectly, as it shows his blunt honesty. We also appreciate it because it shows just one of his many references to famous casino tycoons and players that add a strong element of authenticity to the text. Jimmy speaking, “In a single moment of clarity, I knew what had to be done. Before I could change my mind, I removed the bills from my pocket and placed them on Mrs. Burke’s desk.” We love this quote because it show’s Jimmy’s willingness to help Sarah, no matter what the cost. He doesn’t hesitate to help her sick daughter, Rachel, even though it ultimately means that he’ll lose the bar. This selfless act is a changing point in the book and it truly reflects Jimmy’s growth.

What Others Are Saying

Amazon gives this book 4.8 out of 5 stars, with over 125 reviews to back that up! Casino City Times said, “I highly recommend Dice Angel, the new novel by Brian Rouff, published by Hardway Press. It’s got a great story and is liberally sprinkled with wonderfully eccentric, though highly believable people.” John’s Jottings said, “Dice Angel is one hell of a fun read that should appeal to everyone whether you go to Vegas to roll the bones a couple of times each year like I do, or you simply enjoy fast moving quick hitting stories.” Curled up with a Good Book Reviews said, “Dice Angel’s pacing is perfect. Immediately drawn into Jimmy’s world and attached to his characters, my attention did not waiver once. However, it’s the surprise twists at the end that make the book a special read.”

Our Rating and Why We Recommend It

4.5 out of 5 Stars The only out-right downfall I see to this book and the one reason why it receives a 4.5 instead of a 5, is its wide use of profanities. We aren’t talking about a simple curse word here and there but instead you’ll find various profanities on every page. This may not offend everyone, but there are certainly people out there that will be offended. Another offending aspect to this book is Jimmy’s attitude and description of women. He’s very rude and loves throwing out sexual references that might leave a woman very uncomfortable. Regardless of the above criticisms, it was truly a wonderful experience reading through this book and getting attached to Jimmy and all of the other characters you meet along the way. Books written in first person narrative are also more personable and help you understand and connect to the characters. Also the immense amount of dialog also helped us understand all the characters in the book, but for those of us who don’t enjoy all the dialog, we would probably think it’s a bit excessive. Rouff did an excellent job of using detailed descriptions of everything that it was so easy to picture the scene he was describing. The chapter he wrote we short, never more than a few pages long, making it easy to read a chapter of the book when you only had a few minutes to spare. Click to Post