#and would probably be thrilled to have some clubs or library activities

[wiisagi-maiingan]

[somedaylazysomeday]

Aim - Part Three

Crosshair x fem!reader (no use of 'y/n') (pre-O66)

Crosshair meets you at 79s while you're both on leave.

Rating: Explicit. Minors DNI

Word Count: 5,200

Warnings: Jealousy, depictions of alcohol consumption, misunderstandings, unprotected sex, creampie

Previous | Masterlist

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Clone Force 99 hadn’t been an active part of the GAR for very long, all things considered.

Yes, they liked to brag about their “100% success rate”, but they had only started participating in the war effort after it had been raging for over a year. It had been a little scary to be assigned to the commando squad when they were still green, but they had needed a communications specialist. 

Not that they had wanted you there, of course. Hunter could track better than any human in the galaxy, Crosshair didn’t see the value of communication in general, and Wrecker had already been able to program his explosives to detonate at the same time. Tech probably could have functioned as a commspec, but he had his hands full serving as pilot, translator, and occasional medic. 

At long last, they had warmed up to you - other than Crosshair, who had been an ass since the moment you met him. But you functioned as a solid member of the team, counted as one of them by anyone who mattered. 

All of that was a long way of saying that you were thrilled to participate in the Batch’s leave. 

You had likely been the only one looking forward to being on Coruscant. The rest of Clone Force 99 was too used to combat. They didn’t want, like, or trust the idea of being on leave, no matter how long it would be before the opportunity came back around. 

Hunter hated Coruscant. His sensitivity to noise and electrical signals made the ecumenopolis a special kind of hell for him. 

Wrecker was fine with all of it. He liked the stimulation and having plenty of people to talk with.

 Tech had immediately found several shops with scrap parts he wanted to tinker with and libraries with books on how to do certain things with those scrap parts. 

When you had asked Crosshair if he was excited, he had simply glowered and continued cleaning his Firepuncher. 

Before you landed, you had talked up going to 79s. The Bad Batch had been skeptical, but you had insisted that the clone-friendly club was a great place to drink and dance and have a good time. Yeah, it was subject to GAR curfew, but you also knew that the Coruscant Guard purposefully left it until the end of their patrol so drunken troopers could stumble back to the barracks in peace. 

Hunter had begged off because of the noise level, but you were hopeful that the others would show up at least once during their time planetside. 

79s was one of your favorite places to spend time on Coruscant. Most of the friends you had left behind spent their free time at some club or another, and it wasn’t a stretch for them to come to 79s instead of going somewhere else. A few of your friends were seeing troopers, so they often ended up at 79s even without you asking for them to be there. 

You enjoyed your time assigned to Clone Force 99. Crosshair was difficult to work with - a fact you knew he enjoyed - but you had managed to form friendships with each of the troopers. However, you nearly forgot them in your first two days planetside. 

You never seemed to be alone in that time. Friends you hadn’t seen in months appeared to spend time with you, taking you to favorite restaurants or going to see a holofilm. You shopped for new clothes and visited a museum you loved. You drank and ate and laughed and danced, doing your best to forget about the war while you did. Other than your time at 79s and the occasional Coruscant Guard sighting, you were nearly successful. 

Your efforts were stymied a little since military fever seemed to have swept through your friend group. At least three of your friends were in serious relationships with clone troopers. Whatever the others knew about those relationships, they wanted something similar, so they went to 79s every night the club was open. And, due to recent efforts to boost morale, 79s was open every night of the week.  

“What about you?” your friend Naalna asked, leaning in so you could hear her over the thumping music pounding through the 79’s speaker system. “You aren’t dating anyone right now?” 

“I-” A dozen images flashed through your mind: Crosshair snarking at you. You grinding against Crosshair’s thigh armor to get off. Crosshair staring up at you as you rode him. You beaming when you coaxed a reluctant compliment out of him. “No, I’m not.” 

Naalna shook her head. “It’s because you’re stuck with a commando squad. Commandos are supposed to be super hot, but there’s only four of them in a squad. Arro is on a Star Destroyer and he’s cleaning up. Maybe you should ask to be reassigned.” 

“Maybe,” you echoed weakly. 

“Wait, wait,” she rushed out, catching at your arm. You stared at each other for a beat, Naalna’s mouth working noiselessly for a moment before she managed, “Are any of them hot, though?” 

You smiled despite yourself. Tipsy Naalna was a force of nature. “Yeah, they’re all hot.” 

“Well, yeah, I mean…” she gestured around where you were standing, “Clones, I know. But are they hot?”

“I promise you, they’re hot,” you repeated, laughing openly then. “The sergeant has a tattoo of a skull on half his face and gorgeous long hair. And that’s just one of them.” 

“Never mind,” your friend decided. “You can’t transfer. I need you to introduce me to them. Right now. Especially that sergeant you were talking about.” 

“Three seconds ago?” you teased. “I would love to introduce you, Naals, but none of them are here right now. They’re not really 79’s kind of people.” 

She pouted. “Well, in that case, you should go dance with that guy. He’s been watching you all night.” 

You tilted your head quizzically, turning to look where she was pointing. A crosshair tattoo on an angular face flashed with a beam of colorful light and you swallowed reflexively. “Yeah, maybe I will. Do you need anything before I go?” 

“Nah, go get him!” Naalna pounded the rest of her drink and a nearby trooper immediately offered to get her another, so you took her at her word. 

Of course Crosshair had chosen a place across the dance floor from you. He was always looking for the best vantage point he could find. Still, you made your way over to him easily enough. There was an art to making it through a dancing crowd, and you considered yourself an expert. 

“Thought you weren’t interested in 79’s,” you said by way of greeting. 

Crosshair lifted a single eyebrow, glancing purposefully around the room. “Knew I wouldn’t see you this week, otherwise. You’ve been spending all of your time here.”

“Not all of my time,” you protested, shaking your head at yourself when you realized that he had purposefully put you on the defensive. “But a lot of it. I’m glad to see you, even if you’re not being fun right now.” 

“Fun?” he repeated, disgust dripping from the otherwise pleasant word. “I’ve never been fun.” 

“That’s not something most people brag about.” You glanced at the bar behind you. It was still packed, but the emptiest you had seen it all night. “Aren’t you going to offer to buy me a drink?”

Crosshair scoffed. “I’m the guest here. You should be buying me a drink.” 

“Fair enough,” you agreed. “What do you want? Actually, never mind. I’ll guess.” 

You saw just enough of his darkening expression to make you smile as you sashayed toward the bar. 

The bar really wasn't as busy as it had been earlier and you tended to be served faster due to the fact that you stood out from among the gathered clone troopers. You had chosen a Corellian whiskey for Crosshair. He seemed like the type of person who would enjoy it, and you wanted to treat him. Not that he could ever know that, of course. Even something as simple as mid-shelf whiskey would be seen as unacceptable charity. 

When you were back with the drinks, Crosshair had managed to find a table. That was a trick in the crowded club, but a single look at his glowering face told you exactly how he had done it. 

You set the whiskey down in front of him before you took a seat, smoothing your skirt under you so your bare skin wouldn't touch the sticky chair. By the time you were settled, there was a careful blankness on Crosshair's face. 

“What's wrong?” 

“Nothing.” 

With narrowed eyes, you watched him take another sip of his whiskey. “You don't like it, do you?” 

“It’s fine,” he bit out. 

“You don’t have to like it,” you informed him. “In fact, here. Switch me. I’m in the mood for a whiskey tonight.” 

Before Crosshair could object, you had swapped glasses with him. He stared down at yours in concern and horror. “What is this?” 

“I think they called it a Felucian Flower.” You shrugged. “It’s pretty good, especially if you’re in the mood for something sweet.”

Crosshair studied the drink like he thought it held a trap of some kind. You were getting ready to tease him in an effort to push him into trying it, but he squared his shoulders and took a cautious sip of his own free will. 

You had to bite back a chuckle at the picture he made. Crosshair had managed to scrounge up a set of civvie clothes somewhere, and they leaned heavily toward dark, muted colors. Between the outfit and his perpetual scowl, Crosshair presented a certain picture to the galaxy, and it was decimated by a glass of bright-colored alcohol.

Felucian Flowers were almost always layered drinks in vibrant colors. Sometimes they were garnished with fruit, flowers, or glitter, or had different candies mixed into the drink itself. By those standards, Crosshair’s drink was fairly tame, but it still made you smile.

He caught you grinning at him and immediately lowered the drink so he could glare unencumbered, but you saw the lack of tightness in his expression. He had liked your drink, after all. Of course, you couldn’t say that or he would get upset.

“Well, like it or not, you’ll have to finish that,” you said instead, nodding at the Felucian Flower. “I’m drinking the whiskey and I’m not making another trip up to the bar right now.” 

Crosshair muttered something that sounded uncomplimentary, but you chose to ignore him. It helped that your friend Mori appeared toward the dance floor, waving you over. 

“I’ll be right back!” you promised, rushing off toward her.

After you had finished saying hello, Mori leaned in. “Who is that trooper you’ve been hanging out with tonight? He’s delicious.” 

You glanced back at Crosshair. You agreed that he looked delicious, but you got a great deal of pleasure imagining how he would react if he knew you were discussing him in those terms. “That’s one of the commandos on my squad.” 

“And how long have you been hooking up?” she asked casually. 

“Mori!” you protested. “What are you talking about?” 

“Please.” Mori looked from you to Crosshair and back, then nodded to herself. “We both know I’m right. And if you haven’t slept with him, it’s happening soon. You’ve been staring at each other all night.” 

“Mori, you don’t… I’m not going to… Crosshair is an asshole.” You made your declaration at a lull in the music - not loud enough to be heard any further than a group or two away, but enough that a few people nearby started to laugh. You smiled awkwardly. “I’m not hooking up with him. I hope I have more self-respect than that.” 

Mori gave you a skeptical look, but a nearby Devaronian male took a step closer with a smile. “In that case… Can you give him my comm frequency? He sounds like my type.” 

You took a beat to recover from that redirection. “Uh… sure.” 

The male beamed, scrawling digits onto a piece of flimsi. He folded it neatly and handed it to you. “Tell him I’d love to see him. Thank you!” 

“Not a problem,” you said through lips that had gone numb. 

You said goodbye to Mori and went back to Crosshair, the flimsi still clutched in your fist. Crosshair didn’t greet you when you came back, his eyes flicking from your face to your hand and then to the dance floor. You sat beside him, taking a healthy draw from your whiskey, and looked at the dance floor, too. The Devaronian preened, clearly putting a little extra flair in his dancing in an attempt to entice Crosshair. 

You drained your glass. 

“Ready to go?” 

You arched a brow at Crosshair, who nodded down at your empty glass. “Looks like you’re in a hurry to get out of here.” 

“Maybe I’m going to get another one,” you countered, adding in a mutter, “Or five.” 

Crosshair frowned at your petulance, but you couldn’t pull your eyes away from the Devaronian. He was gorgeous and tall and his horns gave him an air of dramatic strength. Compared to him, you felt small and boring and petty. Very, very petty. 

You tucked the flimsi in your pocket. You would decide what to do with it after you’d had a few more drinks. 

“Don't let me keep you.” 

Crosshair's tone was enough to push you into a truly reckless mood. You wheeled to face him directly, already glaring. “Are you gonna fuck me or not?” 

His eyes searched yours, flicking back and forth until he found what he was looking for. “Yes. Come on.” 

Crosshair stood and started winding his way through the people who immediately stepped in to steal your table. You trotted at Crosshair’s heels, snagging his wrist when the crowd got thick enough to cut you off. When someone collided with your linked arms, almost pulling you apart, Crosshair caught at your hand, threatening them even as you thrilled at the realization that you were holding hands. 

Thankfully, he didn’t lead you somewhere romantic. You ended up in a storage closet. Well, presumably it was used for storage. It was empty when you stepped inside, and you glanced around for a confused moment. 

“Probably used to store the cleaning droids,” Crosshair muttered, jerking his chin toward the docking station that ran along one wall. “Good enough, princess?” 

You shrugged. “Not the best place, but it’s private and clean enough. Works for me, I guess.” 

“You don’t have to sound so excited.” Sarcasm dripped from Crosshair’s voice as he closed the door behind you both. There was the faintest echo in the empty room and you worried about what would happen when you started getting loud. 

Then Crosshair’s lips brushed the side of your neck and it got harder to care about who might hear what. You leaned backward against him, and his length pressed against your ass. You were fueled by jealousy, irritation, and stark desire. Since those emotions were exactly what seemed to fuel Crosshair every day, you couldn’t be shocked that he was equally ready to go. 

Blindly, you reached behind yourself and cupped him. Even through the barrier of his grungy civvie clothes, you could feel him jump at the attention. Crosshair’s hand wrapped around yours, keeping you away from him for a moment before he pressed your palm against his cock.

Crosshair thrust twice into your grip before he pulled himself away and began to strip. You took your cue and got to work undressing. Your club outfit left little to the imagination and didn’t take long to remove, but Crosshair still managed to be faster. 

He studied you with a critical eye - almost enough to make you self-conscious - and began to arrange his shed clothing into a oblong shape on the floor. 

“What are you doing?” you asked, after observing him for a beat and failing to figure it out yourself. 

“Floor would be too cold. Fixed it,” he grunted. “You’re welcome.” 

“I’m not laying down here,” you objected. “There’s not enough cloth on the planet to make me put my bare ass on this floor.” 

“It’s your turn to be on the bottom,” Crosshair reminded, squinting up at you. 

“I didn’t realize we were taking turns,” you snipped. “Why don’t you lay down and I’ll let you be on top the next two times?” 

“You don’t let me do anything,” he spat. “If anything, I let you be on top last time. If you have such a problem with the idea of your ass on this floor, get on your hands and knees.” 

You crossed your arms, smirking at the way Crosshair’s gaze flicked helplessly down to look at the way it had pushed your breasts together and upward. “On a duracrete floor? That would last a minute, maybe two, then I would have to move. Maybe that’s all the time you need, but I-” 

Crosshair stood, planting a hand on your shoulder. His fingers curled around the nape of your neck as his thumb pressed into the base of your throat. He pushed with his palm, walking you slowly backward until your shoulder blades met the chill of the wall. 

“You,” he growled, “are such a pain in my shebs. I don’t know why I put up with it.” 

“Well, the sex is pretty good,” you reminded with an impish grin, swallowing convulsively when his thumb dug deeper into the base of your throat. 

“It is,” he conceded. His hand left your neck, but only so it could skim down the front of your body. At last, both hands seized your hips and shoved them violently backward, pressing the curve of your ass against the wall as well. “Ready for me, princess?” 

“Yes,” you said, half in answer to his question and half because Crosshair had finally dipped his hand between your legs. He didn’t do anything mind-melting, to your utter disappointment. Instead, he swirled a tight circle around your entrance as if to check that you had told the truth, then urged your thighs wide enough for him to fit between them. 

The lights were too bright, the angle was awkward, and the room smelled faintly of chemicals and engine oil. Somehow, your desperation was enough to overcome all of that, and you pressed impatiently against Crosshair as he tried to line himself up. 

“Hold- still,” he bit out, hissing as the head of his cock slipped between your folds without catching on your entrance. 

You were trying to stop moving, but the feeling of his length running across your sensitive clit was too strong. Your hips jumped helplessly as he tried again, and you managed to line up with each other the second time. 

The head of him pushed inside of you, all that such an abrupt thrust could manage. Crosshair pressed you back against the wall and followed you there, sinking into you until your hips were flush. Your head fell back, thumping gently against the wall behind you as you stared blankly at the too-bright lights. 

You and Crosshair hooked up occasionally, but it was never often or regular enough for your body to get used to his. The feeling of him stretching you was delicious, falling perfectly between ‘not enough’ and ‘too much’. 

“You good?” Crosshair asked roughly. 

It made you pull your gaze down to him and you found Crosshair watching you with dark eyes. You grinned at him in a silent dare. “Yeah, just waiting for you to actually get started.” 

The smirk took a moment to form on Crosshair’s face, coming together slowly but with intent. “Oh, princess… You aren’t ready for me.” 

You had just parted your lips to make a comment when he ground himself as far inside of you as he could manage. The simple motion put pressure against your clit while stretching your channel around him. It pushed the pleasure in a new direction, twisting it into something intense enough to empty your thoughts entirely. 

Crosshair gave a short, mean laugh. “Unfortunately for you, I don’t feel like waiting for you to catch up.”

And that was all the warning you got. You braced the moment you saw the determination on his face and you still felt like you were too late. 

The force behind his thrust was strong enough that it rattled your teeth and made you clutch at his shoulders for balance. Even the wall against your back seemed less steady than him, and both seemed steadier than you. You widened your stance, both to accommodate Crosshair and to give yourself a better center of balance. 

It still managed to be awkward. Not uncomfortable, and certainly not enough to stop, but the pose was killing your spine and your knees were already irritated. Crosshair was probably feeling the same way with the way he had to half-squat so he was at the right height. 

You raised one leg, wrapping your thigh up and over his hip. That adjustment immediately made things better for you. It wasn’t perfect, but your leg was out of his way without you having to fall into a split to give him access to you.

Crosshair’s next thrust was a little smoother, and he made a small noise of surprise when he bottomed out in you. You were busy congratulating yourself on your spatial reasoning when Crosshair tapped your other thigh. 

“Jump up.” 

You laughed at him, and it wasn’t until his eyebrows lowered that you cut it off abruptly. “You were serious? You can’t hold me up. I would break you in half.”

Crosshair started to look a little pissed off - unflattering, since he was buried in you at that particular moment. “Jump up.” 

He repeated the exact same words as before in exactly the same tone, but the second time, they were punctuated with a sharp smack against your ass. You jerked, forcing him a little deeper with it, and you glared. 

“Fine,” you grumbled. “It’ll serve you right.” 

You didn’t give him much time to brace, thinking that he would deserve it if he did fall. It wasn’t until your foot had left the ground that you remembered that you would fall, too, but it wasn’t as if you could stop. 

Crosshair caught the back of your thigh, supporting you with his grip as he adjusted his stance. The slight wobble he gave made your heart pound as you clung to him, but he corrected his balance in a second or two. 

The sudden show of strength was surprising and arousing. A soft, “Oh,” escaped you, almost a sigh as you watched the muscles of his abdomen and arms tighten. 

Crosshair looked down at you from inches away, a smirk curving his lips. And then he was fucking into you with everything he had. 

You were pinned against the wall almost immediately. Crosshair didn’t need the help keeping you positioned, but his hands had drifted to your ass, leaving you to cling to him as best you could. Your leg muscles were strong - even stronger since you had been assigned to a commando team - but you were struggling to stay wrapped around him with the pleasure turning your limbs to jelly. 

Crosshair’s fingers sank into the cheeks of your ass, gripping and squeezing to hold you on him. Occasionally, he would move back to your hips so he could hold you a certain way to reach deeper inside of you, but he seemed to enjoy the way your hips were bucking and pumping to match his thrusts. 

He was deep in you and stayed deep. There were no sharp stabs with his hips, no violent suddenness to his movements. There really wasn’t room between you for that. This managed to be just as intense. He was spearing into you, his cock never leaving you even when he withdrew. Instead, he pulsed his hips against yours, forcing the muscles of your core to clench and spasm around him. 

It was an interesting sensation, all-consuming. Instead of vacillating wildly between emptiness and fullness, there was never a moment when he wasn’t inside of you. The intensity was all that shifted, and you had never felt so… claimed. 

Your head sank forward until your forehead bumped his shoulder. You leaned forward just enough to nip at his collarbone, smirking when he hissed. Crosshair smacked your ass again in revenge, grunting, “Brat.” 

Despite the intensity of it all, you weren’t sure you were going to come that way. The pleasure had risen quickly to a fever pitch inside of you, but it had plateaued. Still, you were enjoying yourself, and you could tell that Crosshair was getting close. His motions were jerkier, less rhythmic. 

It wasn’t neat or elegant. It was fucking, plain and simple - furious and possessive and a little mean, but it was exactly what you had needed. 

“Hold on, princess,” he warned. You weren’t sure what you expected, but it wasn’t for him to let go of you. 

You gasped, clutching at his shoulders as your legs gripped tighter around his waist. Crosshair seemed unconcerned with your struggle, gripping your jaw and angling it to one side. He pressed his lips to the taut line of your neck, sucking fiercely. At the same time, he dropped his other hand between you to rub frantically at your clit. 

The sound you made was loud and plaintive, a perfect soundtrack to accompany the tightening of your core around Crosshair. “I’m going to-” 

He hummed against the tender skin of your neck, and it even managed to sound sarcastic. Instead of answering you, he applied more pressure with his lips and rubbed at you even faster.

Which, you supposed, could be considered an answer. 

You choked on air as your body clenched around Crosshair’s still-thrusting cock. Half a wail burst from you, and the only way to cut off the rest was to bite him again. 

Crosshair cursed loudly, hips stuttering against you as he spilled heat into your core. He stumbled once, leaning more heavily against you as his knees wobbled. You dropped your legs, trying to catch yourself if he fell, but his hands had gone back to your ass and he kept you pinned there, stuffed full of him while your feet dangled helplessly. 

Thankfully, he caught his balance again, lowering you slowly to stand before he withdrew from you. Liquid immediately started trickling down the insides of your thighs. Crosshair didn’t seem to notice, studying the bite mark you had left on his chest. 

“Really?” you asked irritably, gesturing between your legs. He hadn’t asked if he could come inside of you. But honestly, you had been too far gone to tell him to pull out even if he had asked. 

“I should be the one saying that,” Crosshair snarked back, fingertips coming up to trace the mark. You hadn’t meant to center your teeth around his nipple, but it was perfect. As you snorted, he looked up at you, and it got even funnier. 

“Now, you’re doubly Crosshair,” you said between giggles.

His expression was stern for a moment before he cracked a small smile. “This is more of a bullseye than a crosshair.” 

“Consider it a nickname, then,” you said, wincing as shifting your weight had pushed more cum from you. “Can you hand me that towel?” 

Crosshair picked up the small towel you had gestured to, but crouched in front of you instead of handing it over. He stared between your legs for a moment, then longer, until you started to feel uncomfortable. “Crosshair?” 

He glanced up at your face, then back at your pussy. He began cleaning you up with gentle strokes up your thighs until he had gathered the worst of it. “You good?” 

“Yeah, I’ll just be a little sticky until I can get to a refresher.” Crosshair nodded slowly, watching you shiver as he stroked the towel over your swollen lips. “Are you good?” 

Crosshair’s expression smoothed, turning back into the indifferent mask he wore every day. “Of course. Get dressed. We need to get out of here.” 

You both got dressed in silence. To your surprise, it wasn’t tense or cold or dismissive. When had you and Crosshair grown so comfortable in each other’s presence? 

It wasn’t until you had worked your way back into the main room of 79s that something broke the peace: Mori. 

Your friend approached, a slight unsteadiness to her gait that told you she was working her way through tipsiness and toward being drunk. “Hey! Where have you been?” 

“Around,” you answered evasively. “Where have you been?” 

“Here, looking for you,” she said, tilting her head suspiciously. “That’s a pretty big hickie for someone who’s been ‘around’. Thought you didn’t like him?” 

“She doesn’t.” Crosshair sounded like he couldn’t have cared less about it, either.

“He’s okay,” you hedged, feeling incredibly uncomfortable.

“Then are you going to call that Devaronian guy?” Mori asked. 

Crosshair’s expression darkened, glancing at you as if waiting for you to respond.

“I said, are you going to call that Devaronian guy?” Mori repeated, leaning closer. She was obviously speaking to Crosshair by that point. “He seemed really interested in you. Didn’t she give you his frequency?” 

“Yeah, she did,” Crosshair confirmed, glancing at you slyly. “I’ll probably comm him later. He was attractive.” 

“He was hot,” Mori corrected. “If you decide to pass, give me his frequency. I’ll let him down easy, maybe see if he likes girls, too.” 

“I’ll let you know.” 

Mori smiled at him, gave you a quick hug, and rushed off toward the dance floor. You watched her leave, trying to prolong the time you had before Crosshair started to gloat…

“So.�� It was a single word, but the smugness dripped from it. Your shoulders slumped. This was going to be bad. “He was interested in me all along. And you withheld the frequency he gave you for me.” 

“You want it?” you asked, fishing it out of your pocket and holding it out to him. 

Crosshair plucked the flimsi from your fingers, eyes gleaming. “Is that why you bit me, princess? Staking your claim? Marking your territory?” 

“And you’re so selfless?” you shot back. “How bad is this hickie?” 

“Barely noticeable.” He was self-satisfied enough that you wished for a scarf. Clearly, it was terribly obvious. 

“We have to go.” You tugged fruitlessly at your low collar. There was no way it could stretch far enough to cover the mark, but it made you feel slightly better to try. 

“Why?” Crosshair asked, lifting a single brow. “Worried someone else will try to snap me up?” 

“Shut up.” 

“Maybe I won’t. Now that I know you’re jealous, I can-” 

“We can leave now and I’ll let you be on top for real,” you interrupted, watching his expression heat once more. “Or you keep talking and I’ll let you find someone else to torment. Your choice.” 

“I commed for a transport five minutes ago, princess,” Crosshair told you, pointing to the comlink on his wrist. “Let’s go. I hate clubs.”

---

Author's Note - Welcome to the first post of Fanfic February 2024 - The Final Year! There are 28 more fics from various franchises on the way, one for every day of the month. The tag is #fanfic february 2024 if you want to follow along (or block).

Thanks for reading! I, like all authors, thrive on feedback, so feel free to let me know what you thought!

[sayonarasanity]

Reverberation

Chapter V

link to AO3

Chapter 1 - 2 - 3 - 4

notes: the song that will be mentioned in this chapter is She's a Rainbow by Lola Marsh and also here is the Spotify link. I highly recommend you to listen to it especially while reading that part. it's truly an incredible song

The first year of high school passed by in the blink of an eye. Between the adjustment of classes, advanced math, and literature, teachers of idiosyncratic character treats and a variety of teens in the class he didn’t even understand the period between September and June. If he was being honest there wasn’t much noteworthy difference between middle school and high school except for the lessons and maybe some physical changes among his peers as well as himself. Save for the height part. Apparently, he wasn’t gifted like that giant Mike or the very sophisticated Erwin Smith.

There was nothing much to do during the summer break. He worked alongside his uncle in the market to at least gain some money and not spend his whole time lying on his bed, sweaty and gasping for a breath while a single leaf on a tree begged for a tiny breeze to make it wiggle. He read some books, watched some TV shows, played soccer with the other boys in class; Mike, Erwin, Oluo, Guther, Eld and even Moblit when or if they were around. Went to the beach with the same squad in addition to girls like Petra, Nifa, Nanaba and Hanji.

Most of his time was spent with Hanji, of course. On the roof, in the attic, in each other’s rooms, sometimes at the library—because the heat didn’t stop Hanji from being a complete nerd—and sometimes she helped him in the market while stuffing his mind with countless  mind-blowing  topics.

And so came the second year of high school.

And it took Hanji only two weeks to be late for the first class in the morning.

“I can’t believe you actually slept in,” Levi told her after she came inside the class during the break, gasping, her face flushed red possibly from running, hair dishevelled and absolutely not  combed,  and sat down on her desk in front of him.

She was trying to adjust her breaths as she turned over to face him. The dispersed, brown strands were covering her face, some of them had stuck on her reddened cheek and forehead. After the not so successful haircut, Levi had given her, she had also gotten bangs. Courtesy of her mother. “I was reading a book last night.”

“And?” He raised a brow.

She pushed the glasses up, and leaned in closer, putting an elbow on top of his desk. “I couldn’t sleep.”

“What kind of book could possibly make you stay awake all night?”

“It’s called The Blind Owl.” She shivered as if a chill had gone through her body. “It was the most disturbing thing I’ve ever read. And the thing is I couldn’t stop reading it because it was also ridiculously intriguing,” she sighed and rubbed her eyes under her glasses. “It cost me my sleep though.”

“That bad, huh?” Levi asked, but it was obvious from the dark circles under her eyes.

“I mean, it wasn’t that bad actually. It was masterfully written for sure. It was just—”

“Disturbing.”

“Yes. There is no other word to explain it.” She ran a hand through her dispersed hair, but her fingers got stuck between the knots. Then she looked at her wrist and groaned frustrated. “I forgot my hair tie.”

One of the things the almost six years of friendship with Hanji had thought him was to collect the items she had a habit of forgetting, mostly in his room. He had a drawer full of her lost, black hair ties. He kept a few on his pencil case or sometimes, like today, he carried one of them on his wrist. “Here,” he said extending it to her.

“What would do without you?” she whined as she took the tie from him.

“You wouldn’t survive a day,” Levi pointed out. It wasn’t even half-joke.

“Agreed,” she nodded. She had finished tying up her hair. Now her face was more on display, the flush on her cheeks was nearly gone. Levi realized that her nape was not covered with the too-short strands that couldn’t make it into her sloppy, little ponytail.

His hand moved instinctively, naturally even. “Your hair has grown long again,” he told her with a frown. And when his fingers touched her bare nape, she winced quite clearly for his frown to get deeper. He retreated his hand upon her reaction.

Her hand held the place he had barely touched seconds ago and when she noticed his expression she laughed. “God, your fingers are cold.”

Levi folded his hand as a fist, pressing his fingertips on his palm to see if his fingers were indeed cold as she had said. His body temperature was low, it was no news to him but at the moment his fingertips was not that cold for her to give such a reaction. Maybe because she had run here it was her body which was unnaturally hot, he reasoned, not really satisfied but he would accept it for the time being.

“Do you want me to cut it?”

“No,” she objected, avoiding his stare. “I’ll use it like this for a while.”

Her hand went on rubbing her neck, it seemed like an almost unintentional, absent-minded motion at this point.

“I made some research,” Hanji said when the silence got a little awkward for their standards. She then looked through her bag with both hands and slammed a wrinkled piece of paper on his desk.

“What’s this?” He examined her inelaborate handwriting but couldn’t understand the overall concept of what was written. Meanwhile, Hanji brought a pen over the page and underlined two words that were written in capital letters.

ROSE and SINA.

“These two are the best universities of the country,” she started to explain. “Both in terms of education and in terms of different opportunities for students. Student clubs are very much active also the campuses are huge.”

Levi had heard of the universities of course. They were named after the cities they were located in. Sina was almost three hours away from their town and Rose was even further in the opposite direction. But they had to leave the town at some point if they wanted to receive a good education. As Hanji had told the two of them were probably their best options and if they manage to keep their grades high enough there was a chance for both of them to make it into the same university. But, which one?

“But?”

“But” she carried the pen over the word Sina and drew a circle around it. “Since Sina is a technical university, I think it is a far better option for us considering the departments we want to study.”

Levi hummed thoughtfully. She did have a point.

“Also,” she continued, eyes glittering. “Great professors like Keith Shadis, Theo Magath and Darius Zackly are teaching there. Imagine the lectures…” she shrieked with excitement and wiggled in her seat. “It’s gonna be so fun!”

Levi shook his head at her quite early thrill and snatched the pencil out of her hand. He drew an arrow to the word Sina and wrote elegantly above: GOAL. “Sina it is then.”

Hanji took the pencil back and while nodding she scratched the word he had just written and instead, bringing the pencil a little to the crosswise she wrote: DREAM.

She looked at him then as if to confirm, with a bright smile on her lips and eyes full of the glitter of the dream she held so close to her heart. It was contagious. Levi felt his lips curling up, and maybe a tiny bit of that lustre in her eyes had reached out to his own. And he thought that maybe it wasn’t that hard after all.

How naïve, a sly, foreign voice whispered in the back of his mind. Little boy, how naïve.

-

“So, what’s going on between you two?”

Hanji lifted her eyebrows upon Nifa’s question and moved her stare to whom the question was directed. Nanaba gulped her bite with seemingly a little more force than necessary and blinked innocently at Nifa. “What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean,” Nifa wiggled her brows, smirking mischievously at their suffering friend. “You and Mike.”

Petra hid a chuckle behind her hand as Hanji bit her cheek inside to stop her smile from shaping so obviously. They were sitting in the backyard of the school on an arbour for lunch. There was still for about half an hour until their next class and from the looks of it, Nifa had decided to use it for some gossip.

“Nothing,” Nanaba answered nonchalantly then she brought the straw of her peach juice to her mouth and took a very long sip. Hanji didn’t miss the faint blush on her cheekbones. “We’re friends.”

“You’re a little too close for being friends, don’t you think?” Nifa asked with a sweet voice, dropping her chin on top of her intertwined fingers, smiling.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about?” Nanaba brushed her off, taking another bite from her sandwich.

“Stop tormenting her, Nifa,” Hanji interrupted just as Nifa was about to say something else. “She can tell us when she feels like it.” Hanji then smirked at a very pissed Nanaba, who was glaring at her so hard Hanji thought she could catch flames just by responding to her stare.

Suddenly, someone dropped something in front of her with a loud “pat” and Hanji looked down, startled, to a packet of chocolate milk, then looked up to a frowning Levi.

“Did you eat?”

“Yep!” Hanji rested her chin on her palm and smiled at him. “Did you?”

He nodded silently and gestured at the milk standing on the wooden table. “You’re gonna pay me back for that later.”

“Stingy,” she murmured as he turned his back to her. Hanji saw the other boys gathered up around a bench a little away from where she and the girls sat. And before Levi went too far away, she shouted behind him, “When shall we meet again?”

He glanced at her above his shoulder. “After school,” he said, flatly.

“Come on, Levi!” She lifted her chin from her palm, disappointed. “You should’ve said “when the hurly-burly is done”, I thought you were better than that!”

He turned his whole body to her this time, walking backwards. A smirk played on one corner of his lips, midday sun caught his eyes, and her heart skipped a beat. “And you should’ve asked, “in thunder, lightning or in rain?” I thought you were better than  that , genius.”

Take him and cut him out in the little stars.

Levi was beautiful. Hanji recalled the day she had first realized it, the faint yellow leaves and the crackling sound of fire. The realization had hit hard, and she couldn’t have understood the reason why right away. It was startling that was for sure but after some thorough and logical consideration, she had decided that it was all about being a teenager.

It was that simple. Thinking a boy was beautiful was natural. Besides, it wasn’t just Levi. Erwin, for instance, was attractive. With a sharp chin, bright, blue eyes and that shiny yellow hair that always looked so soft like cotton. He wasn’t necessarily beautiful though but attractive still, handsome even.

And he will make the face of Heaven so fine.

Levi turned his back to her again and Hanji snorted, opening the straw of her chocolate milk. “He got me bad.”

When she put the straw between her lips for a long sip, she realized the silence that has settled on the table and when she took a glance above her glasses, she saw the three other girls looking at her.

“What?” she asked after gulping.

“What’s with you two?”

“Huh?”

It was Nifa again and this time the question was directed at her. “You and Levi?”

Hanji blinked, trying to reason her question. “What about us?”

“You seem close,” Petra added instead of Nifa. Her hazel eyes curious as she observed Hanji. “Like real close.”

Hanji frowned and pushed her glasses back to their proper place. “We are best friends.” They seriously hadn’t understood it for a year?

“I bet everyone thinks you’re dating,” Nifa said laughing.

Oh? “That’s ridiculous,” Hanji said, shaking her head. “Why would I date my best friend?”

Nifa shrugged, and Petra looked thoughtful. “How long have you been friends?”

Hanji didn’t know why but she felt her stomach curl. “Since we were eleven.”

Petra hummed and the conversation seemed to be over like that. Hanji chewed the plastic stick thoughtfully and with distress, she couldn’t find the reason why. The curl stayed solid in her stomach, sharp and insistent. Absently she noticed that Petra was staring somewhere with a strange expression in her eyes and when Hanji followed her stare, she saw Levi standing in front of the bench the other boys were sitting. Mike who was standing next to him had wrapped an arm around his shoulders, and he looked content, his features relaxed, his black hair looked smooth touching his forehead.

That all the world will be in love with the night.

Goddamn Juliet, she thought bitterly, frowning she took her eyes away from him. Goddamn Shakespeare.

*

“What did you want to talk to me about?”

It was Wednesday afternoon on a nice autumn day. Near them was a tree slowly getting peeled off its leaves, and the clouds were reflecting the orange light the sun created. It was also reflecting on her ginger hair, making it shine almost yellow.

“I, uh…” Petra cleared her throat, squeezed her hair behind her ear as the blush that had appeared on her cheeks gradually became more visible. “This is harder than I expected.”

Levi raised his brows. He had been wondering what Petra wanted to talk to him ever since she asked him if they could meet after school in the backyard this morning. He had found it a little awkward because it had felt like she wanted to talk to him in private and he couldn’t have thought of any reason why she would wish for that.

“You look nervous,” he told her.

“Well, of course, I am,” Petra laughed, not a cheerful one. “I am trying to…”

She let out a sharp breath as if she was angry at herself and she wasn’t looking at him too. Her eyes were scanning their feet, her fingers were fidgeting, brows furrowed.

And Levi was quietly getting an idea about why she wanted to talk to him.

“Just tell me,” He tried to encourage her, feeling his own heartbeat getting faster abruptly.  

Finally, she looked up at him, her cheeks painted crimson and she took a long, deep breath before she said, “Would you like to go to the cinema with me?”

“Oh,” he said.

Not the kind of reaction he should’ve given apparently. Petra bit her lower lip anxiously at first, searching his eyes. He must be pretty shocked for she looked a little discouraged upon his reaction. But within seconds she gathered herself up, her shoulders held high.

“I… liked you since the seventh grade,” she said, the blush spread from her cheeks to her neck, but she continued to be resolute without looking anywhere else than him. “And I thought that there is nothing wrong with asking a boy out if that boy doesn’t seem to be doing it anytime close.”

Levi felt his own cheeks heating up. Admittedly, he had never realized Petra had such feelings for him. “Sorry.”

Petra laughed, somewhat forcefully. “It’s okay,” she gulped, and a weak smile vibrated on her lips. “Just don’t be harsh if you’re gonna say no.”

Levi considered her offer quietly. Petra had always been a good friend and she was a nice person too. Kind, tidy and even funny. She loved painting and drawing and was pretty gifted at them as well. And she smelled fresh, Levi guessed it was because of the softener she used on her clothes, her hair was soft, and her eyes were pretty.

“When do you want to go?”

Said pretty eyes glittered as she beamed at him. For a second, in the back of his mind, he saw a very similar image belonging to another girl with auburn hair and hazel-brown eyes who had a smile that reminded him of the rainbow after rain and sun.

“What about this Friday after school?” Petra asked, excitedly.

“Sure,” Levi responded, trying to smile and ignore the weird feeling in his stomach.

*

When he stepped into the roof, the night was chilly, the sky was full of transparent, quietly moving clouds, the stars were shining behind them, the Wanning Gibbous was hanging low on the horizon, and Hanji was standing on the edge of the roof, her head laid backwards.

Levi didn’t even know if he breathed, his heart jumped to his throat as he threw his schoolbag to the ground and walked closer to her from behind cautiously. “Hanji, what the fuck are you doing?”

“Watching the sky,” she replied, smiling.

Levi felt a muscle move on his jaw; his heart was beating so loud it almost hurt his ears. He focused on adjusting his breaths. In and out. “Don’t be ridiculous. Get back down.”

Hanji shrugged and Levi nearly had a heart attack right then and there. He felt his eyes widen, and his breath hitched. “I feel closer to the clouds like this.”

“Hanji,” he took slow, careful steps towards her. The night breeze was toying with her dispersed hair, her face was tranquil, her eyes never left the sight of the clouds. The smile that was drawn on her lips was unmoving like it was craved there by the hands of a masterful sculptor. And he watched her, his heart still beating fast and loud, his breaths irregular, and his eyes wide, and he thought about—

Stars

how free she looked at that moment like she belonged to the sky, the stars and the moon. As if they shone for her only.

hide your fires.  

Brown hair and brown eyes but Hanji was luminous. She kept the colours hidden, had a brush and a palette ready in her hand. The murky night did nothing but to contrast the light, she had a way with the world which made her stood out among the dullest of sounds and faces. Even on top of a derelict building, she was—

Let not light see—

the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

He grabbed her wrist, inhaling hard and thick then he drew her back with a quick move of his arm. Her body turned and crashed against him, and he stumbled backwards a few steps, but he kept his balance, wrapping his arms around her waist securely, without any intention of letting go. He vaguely heard the surprised shriek Hanji made upon his unexpected move. And he half-expected her to push him back, to laugh it off and to say that he was being dramatic again. That nothing was going to happen anyway, it wasn’t like she was going to jump.

Yet instead, her arms circled his neck as she rested her cheek on his head and at that very moment Levi realized that he had never thought of losing her, of what would happen if she were to leave his life. Just like he had never imagined a day without the sun rising. The thought was uninvited and unwelcomed, and it cropped a fear in his heart so profound, he drew a shivering breath in before he buried his face on her neck. Then he pushed that thought deep down to the dungeon in his head never to see daylight again.

“I’m okay, you know,” Hanji spoke after seconds.

“Stupid,” he said, holding her tighter. “Stupid four-eyes.”

“Mm,” she muttered, amused. Then she started to move left and right making him follow her movements as if they were dancing. “I’m going to let all the world know that Levi Ackerman cares for me.”

Levi placed his forehead on her shoulder, pressing hard. “Someone needs to care for your sorry ass, or you’ll drop it down a goddamn building.”

She laughed, and it felt so good to hear it he immediately craved the sound soon as it faded away. Hanji stopped moving afterwards, then put her hands on his shoulder to push him slightly back. He withdrew reluctantly but kept his hands on either side of her waist not ready to let go just yet.

Her eyes were somewhat misty as she watched him, as the sharp peak of a mountain lost behind a grey fog. Levi frowned at her, searching for a sturdy branch to hold and to obtain some kind of a clue about what she was thinking. He came back empty-handed, and Hanji snapped out of it soon after, smiling at him brightly and warm. Her hair was all over her face, her glasses were askew, and he brought a hand up to fix them.

Then he flicked her forehead instead.

“Ouch!” She exclaimed, touching the slightly damaged skin.

“That was for almost giving me a heart attack,” Levi said nonchalantly and walked past her to grab his schoolbag. Then he sat down, bag between his legs as he searched for the snacks he bought after school.

“Geez, I’m sorry,” Hanji muttered as she placed herself next to him. “But you were just being dramatic. I wasn’t going to jump anyway.”

*

So, here was the thing, he needed to tell Hanji.

But he didn’t know how. Through all those years they had been friends, there had never been a secret among them. He knew everything about her. From the fact that she had fed a frog in her room when she was only seven without telling neither of her parents and how she accidentally killed the poor animal by forgetting to feed it properly. And to the very first crush, she secretly had on a boy who didn’t even know who she was when she was ten. Each and every detail in between had been craved in his head, everything about her was a book he had learnt by heart, and he knew that for her it was the same.

He didn’t understand why he was so unwilling now about telling her about Petra. Frankly, he was going to tell her yesterday but when he saw her standing on the edge of the goddamn roof, he had forgotten all about it in a second. Thursday, which was today, he couldn’t have found a chance to talk to her alone and tomorrow was Friday. And he had no idea what the hell he was supposed to do.

Levi traced the shadows on the ceiling with his eyes, lying on his bed. It was near eleven pm but he didn’t have any sleep. Should he call Hanji? But no. It wasn’t something he could tell on the phone. It would be absurd and out of nowhere—

His phone started to vibrate on the bedside table.

He jumped a little, surprised at hearing a sound other than the voices in his head then stared at the phone for a while until he decided that it was going to ring till he opened it. And so, he did.

“I thought you had fallen asleep,” Hanji spoke before him as he lied back down, eyes fixed on the ceiling.

“I was trying to,” he lied.

“Oh, sorry,” she apologized without sounding a bit sincere. “But this is more important than your sleep so…”

He raised a brow. “What did you learn again?”

“A lot of things. But that is not the reason why I called.” Levi heard some clatter he guessed it was the pressing of the computer keys. “I found a new song.”

He exhaled, wearily. “Seriously?”

“Wait before you judge,” she said. “Do you remember the time when you said, this is going to sound weird but, I was a rainbow?”

“No.”

“I hate you,” she said, darkly. “It was our first time in the attic. I had told you about –”

“I know, Hanji.” He rolled his eyes. “Of course, I remember.”

She grunted and said some things he couldn’t quite pick clearly under her breath. “You don’t really deserve this but since I’m a nice person I’ll let you listen to it.”

He snorted, lips curling on the corners, and he waited for the song to start. And not long after, he heard the first notes, then a soft voice of a woman followed. He also heard Hanji accompanying quietly behind, murmuring the lyrics alongside. Then he closed his eyes to focus on the song properly.

Dearest, I'm broken

My body is unspoken

How could I be loved?

Wake up in the morning

Feeling uncertain

Like a burning old scar

For I remember

The joy I’ve had as a child

Various colours I’m hiding inside

She’s a rainbow

And I am

A difficult man

It was as if the song, the lyrics, the notes, the singer’s voice were each had little hooks, they captured his soul relentlessly. He felt captive, unable to move. The song made him feel way too many things, with an intensity that nearly choke him as he lied there. His throat felt tight, even after the song ended, notes faded, and all he could hear was Hanji’s regular breaths a complete opposite of how his heart pounded at the moment.

“So?” She asked when he was unable to speak. “What do you think?”

Levi cleared his throat, he needed to talk dammit. “It was nice.”

“Just nice?” She didn’t sound pleased at his response. “But you have to listen to it every day Levi so that you wouldn’t forget me.”

“Forget you?” Was she kidding?

“We don’t know where life would take us,” Hanji told him, her voice calm now. “It’s the reality of the world. I’m just guarantying myself.”

Oh, so she didn’t know? That no matter where life carried him, no matter how high and wild the waves would be it would change nothing. The sun would rise from the west, and all the world would crumble, melt and disappear. But he wouldn’t forget her.

“What if you forget me?” Levi redirected the question to her, wondering her answer.

“I wouldn’t,” she said, not hesitating.

“How do you know?”

“If I’m a rainbow then that would make you the sky, remember?” Some distinct shuffling came to his ears, and he imagined her lying on her side, the phone still on speaker resting on top of her pillow. “Whenever I look up at the sky, I will think about you.”

“Sappy,” he whispered, ignoring the aftershock her words caused.

She chuckled in response and yawned loudly. “Only for you, clean-freak.”

*

Friday after the last class ended Hanji gathered up her things quickly. It had been an incredibly long and tiring week. She couldn’t wait to spend some time with Levi on the roof, just talking about things that didn’t matter, things that were easy to speak of because they were still young and had years ahead to take them seriously.

She waited for Levi outside, leaning against the school building as he went to the bathroom. She busied herself with observing the exhausted students leaving the school borders, chattering between themselves. It was getting chilly and the black denim jacket she was wearing didn’t do a good job at protecting her. She pulled the sleeves of her sweater to her palms to at least cover her hands. She spotted Petra a few inches away from where she was standing. She was walking back and forth, fiddling with a piece of paper she held in her hands. Hanji found it a little strange but shrugged, deciding it wasn’t her business.

Finally, among the rain of students that walked through the school gate, Levi appeared. His face and some parts of his hair damp, indicating that he had just washed his face.

“Feeling refreshed enough?” Hanji asked, smirking.

“Yeah,” Levi murmured, and he looked around briefly.

“Come on,” Hanji pushed herself up from the wall. “Let’s go. We better grab something to eat on the way. I’m starving.”

She had taken only a few steps when she heard Levi calling out to her quietly. “Hanji.”

“Mm?”

He appeared to be uneasy as he looked at her, brows knitted, and lips pressed. Curiosity rose within her swiftly as she expected the words he was about to say.

“I can’t come to the roof with you today.”

Of all the things she thought about that was the least, she had expected to hear. Her stomach started to burn again, and she imagined a cauldron inside. Burning so fiercely and it never promised anything good. “Why?” Hanji asked, sounding just as surprised as she possibly looked.

Levi’s eyes moved to somewhere above her shoulder. She wanted to trace his stare but was too busy observing his expression, a little anxious, tense and what? Embarrassed? But why?

“Levi?”

“I… am going to the cinema,” he blurted eventually, his eyes finding her again. “With Petra.”

Cinema… with Petra?

“As a date?” She sounded bewildered again as if she couldn’t believe her ears. It wasn’t something to be that surprised about considering their age, hormones and everything. But it was Levi. Levi… It had always been the two of them, now imagining him spending time alone with someone else—she hadn’t prepared herself for that.

“I guess,” Levi rubbed his neck. Oh, he was shy about it too? Was he excited, was he looking forward to it? Was he going to hold her hand as he held hers? Did he even  like  her? When had this thing happened anyway?

“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”

He seemed guilty, and he should be too. They were best friends for a reason. If she wasn’t going to be the first one to know about his first  date, what was the point to it?

“It happened just this Wednesday. I couldn’t find a proper time—”

“This Wednesday?” She tried not to reflect her disappointment in her voice. “It was two days ago, mind you. You had plenty of time.”

“Hanji—”

“Did you ask her out?” Hanji went on, not giving him any chance to speak. “How long have you liked her?”

“It’s not—” He frowned, his jaw tightened, and a blaze came to life in his eyes. “She asked me.”

“Oh? How brave!” She felt like laughing and somewhere deep inside she knew that she was exaggerating, that she should be happy for him instead. Yet the disappointment was much heavier, and it stood out so blatantly, so arrogantly that it didn’t give her any time to think reasonably.  

“Hanji, don’t.” He stepped forward but she withdrew in an instant.

“Have a nice date,” she said, and she failed at hiding the sarcasm behind. And she thought she saw a flickering of hurt in his eyes but didn’t stay long enough to acknowledge it. With a final look she gave to a confused Petra, she walked out of school. And the cauldron bubbled, bubbled and it burned, and it hurt. Then Hanji wished it would turn the wildflower to ashes to its roots so that it wouldn’t spring again. Wishful thinking it was because the wildflower was already the reason why the flames come alive in the first place.

*

Hanji didn’t quite remember when or how but she was sitting on the swing on the park near Levi’s house, the park they had buried the dead bird all those years ago. Strange how the years passed. She felt old for some reason despite the fact that she was only sixteen and life hadn’t even started for her yet. But she yearned for that little girl now, playing snowball fight with a boy who drank a little too much tea and swore a little too much for their age. Then she cursed at herself for being so frail, for letting her emotions draw the road she would walk.

The streetlamp near the park had a weak light. It trembled from time to time, squeaking as if it was at death’s door. She pondered it was a good metaphor as to how she felt now. Exaggerating? Maybe. But Levi had become such a constant in her life, it felt like the time Jack had crashed her glasses. She remembered how blurry everything seemed and how dizzy she had felt.

“Hanji?”

She blinked and following the voice she lifted her eyes up from the ground. It was Erwin, standing in front of her, with a curious expression painted on his face. What was he doing here?

“Are you okay?”

“Huh?” Hanji shook her head, realizing that she had been blinking at Erwin absently. Then nodded, voicing a half-hearted chuckle. “Yeah, I’m fine. What are you doing here?”

He sat down on the swing next to her, dropping his school bag on the ground. It was a funny sight. A boy of Erwin’s age and height sitting on a child swing. His legs were much too long for that, but he used them to move back and forth slowly.

“I was just passing by,” he said, shrugging. “What are you doing here alone? Where’s Levi?”

She didn’t need to be reminded of the fact that whenever someone saw one of them alone, they immediately wondered where the other was.  I am acting like a child.  Then she started to move back and forth herself, holding the chains on either side. “He is on a date,” she informed Erwin. “With Petra.”

Then the movements of her legs fastened to the point where she had to curl them so that they wouldn’t slow her down. She used her body against the wind, it ruffled her hair, and her hair blocked her vision. And she thought about Levi who was with Petra and Petra who was kind and pretty. Petra who had shiny hair which was always combed and tidy. Petra who was funny and nice and—

“Hanji!”

Ah, her vision was blurry. Had she dropped her glasses again?

“Hey, slow down!”

She couldn’t slow down but someone, Erwin, she remembered, made her. He was holding the sides of the swing, kneeling down in front of her, he looked into her eyes. Hanji noticed his eyes were a different kind of blue not so fierce like the winter ocean, but kind and worried at the moment. Yellow, thick eyebrows knitted, “Are you okay?” Erwin asked.

It was the second time he had asked the same question and it confused her a bit. Did she look that bad? “Yeah,” she confirmed. Her voice came out cracked.

Then Erwin reached out with his hand. Hanji waited silently as he wiped her cheek with his thumb and under her chin with his knuckles. His hand shone under the shrieking light of the streetlamp when he withdrew it, with tears, she realized with a startle. She lifted her hand then, her eyes wide and touched her damp cheek.

“I can walk you home if you’d like,” Erwin offered with a voice so gentle Hanji thought she hated it. Hated because she didn’t want pity when she was the one that had brought this upon herself.

She blinked at her wet fingers, her sight getting blurry again and used her other hand to adjust her glasses.  She could walk herself home, and she opened her mouth to say that much to Erwin. But words betrayed her half-way and what came out was, “I’d appreciate that,” instead, as she accepted, silently. “Thank you.”

[rsadelle]

The best books I read in 2020

I read 167 books in 2020, which is a little more than one and a half times as many as I read in 2019. (I had a crisis of counting at one point when I read a string of novellas, but ultimately came down on the side of if I can check out the ebook from the library as a single volume, then it counts as a book for the purposes of my list.) Only ten of those are books I reread, which is a fairly low reread number/percentage for me. The large number of books I read this year made it extra difficult to narrow down a small number of the best ones, which is why this list is longer than in previous years. It is, in fact, long enough that I have put it behind a cut to spare your dash.

Top 11 fiction books/series I read for the first time in 2020

Bread Alone trilogy (Bread Alone, The Baker's Apprentice, and Baker's Blues) by Judith Ryan Hendricks - I so enjoyed this trilogy about bread baking and figuring out your life and building a home/community and love. I read it at the beginning of the pandemic, when everyone was baking bread, and it was one of those things I was sad to finish because I didn't want to leave the characters.

Never Have I Ever by Joshilyn Jackson - I have read a lot of suburban housewife with a secret books over the last couple of years. This was an excellent example of the genre with the good use of a thematic motif and a second secret reveal after you learn what you think is the biggest secret. Content notes: I had to skim a few chapters because of the large amount of weight and disordered eating content (which is relevant to the character), and there is sexual abuse of a young teenager by an adult as part of the story.

The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin - This was such an interesting concept and done so well. It was one of the most popular books my sci fi book club read this year, and the New Yorker in our group said it was her favorite New York book ever. The most disappointing part of this book is that it's the first book in a trilogy and the other books haven't been published yet. Content notes: eldritch horror and realistic racism.

The Sci-Regency Series (My Fair Captain, The Englor Affair, My Regelence Rake, Diplomatic Relations, and My Highland Laird) by J.L. Langley - The delightfully ludicrous premise of this series is that there is a gay Regency society in space, which makes for some really fun romances. I've loved this series for over a decade, and I was thrilled to reread the first three books before reading the two new books that came out this summer. I recommend reading the novels in order, as there is an overarching plot involving the Intergalactic Navy that is interesting and ongoing without overshadowing the romances. Content note: these are on the erotica end of the romance spectrum, which means they have very explicit sex scenes. I wrote a lot more about this series in a Yuletide promo post comment.

The Most Fun We Ever Had by Claire Lombardo - I was so sad to finish this book! I have read a lot of commercial/literary fiction about families in the past few years, and this might be my favorite. I found the characters really compelling and enjoyed seeing their differing perspectives. I didn't want to leave this family.

Throne of Glass series (Throne of Glass, Crown of Midnight, Heir of Fire, Queen of Shadows, Empire of Storms, Tower of Dawn, and Kingdom of Ash) by Sarah J. Maas - This YA fantasy series shouldn't work given its constant escalation, and yet, somehow it does. I greatly enjoyed it, and I cried more than once at the last book. This is a series where I recommend not reading anything about future books until you've read all the books before them so you can enjoy the continual reveals. These are very much genre novels, and if you don't like the genre, these books will not be for you. Content note: there is a lot of genre-typical violence.

The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai - I admit that I was mildly skeptical about this book given that what I knew about it was that it was a story about the AIDS epidemic where one of the two timelines is about a woman trying to reconnect with her daughter, but I ended up loving it. The two alternating timelines fit together beautifully, and I thought it did a good job of not eliding the horror of the AIDS epidemic experienced by the gay community in favor of the straight woman's experience. I do remain skeptical of how many awards it won; while it was a genuinely excellent book, I also know that awards bodies love dead queer people.

We Set the Dark on Fire and We Unleash the Merciless Storm by Tehlor Kay Mejia - I loved this YA dystopianish (more cultural class divide than apocalypse or singular villain in control) duology about queer women falling in love while working toward revolution. The world building was good, the plot was good, and the romance was good.

Sisters of the Vast Black by Lina Rather - This novella about an order of nuns who travel through space in an organic slug-like spaceship was absolutely wonderful. It deals with issues of faith, purpose, central control, and doing what you can to make the world a better place.

Sorcery of Thorns by Margaret Rogerson - I loved this YA novel in a sort of Regency-ish setting about a girl who grew up in a library full of magic books and her dealings with some sorcerers, complete with a romance. Content note: attempted mental coercion and institutionalization.

The Wren Hunt and The Wickerlight by Mary Watson - This is a YA duology about rival druid groups in modern day Ireland. I found both books totally compelling with interesting druid politics and magic. It was also really interesting how well we get to see the worst of both sides of the rival druid groups in the two different books.

Top 5 books/series I read and then thought about a lot in 2020

The Twisted Ones by T. Kingfisher - A friend recommended the author to me. This particularly book is a supernatural horror novel I don't necessarily recommend. However, I have continued to think about elements of it since I read it. (Before you @ me about the author's other work, this was the third of her books I read and the other two were in the more beloved fantasy novel genre.)

The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal - I actually didn't like this book that much. We read it for a book club, and it had an interesting concept that wasn't super well executed. However, I have thought about elements of it a lot since then, particularly in comparison to some of the other sci fi I encountered this year.

Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir - I don't know how much "I actively thought about these a lot" describes my actual experience of having read these, but given their popularity and the number of conversations I had about them, I can't omit them from this post entirely. I liked the first one once I figured out what kind of story it actually was, had absolutely no idea what was happening at any point in the second one, and discovered with both of them that I have a much more limited vocabulary than I thought, at least when it comes to death-related words. I am invested enough that I will read the third book when it comes out, but probably won't read any more of the author's work beyond that. If you want to know more about what I thought, I wrote a very spoilery post about them.

The Sixth World (Trail of Lightning and Storm of Locusts) by Rebecca Roanhorse - This is a pair of novels set in a post-apocalyptic world where there's a magically/divinely-erected wall around Dinétah (the Navajo lands). The worldbuilding and characters are so interesting, and it's a series where some of the details stuck with me and I would randomly think of them. I'm looking forward to reading one of her other books in a few months for my sci fi book club.

Wild Mercy: Living the Fierce and Tender Wisdom of the Women Mystics by Mirabai Starr - This was one of two books about women mystics I read and disliked this year, and the more disappointing of the two as I'd heard an interview with the author that I found interesting. I continued to think about this one a lot in an angry, "and another thing!" way, which did help me articulate more of the things I dislike about new age-ish framing of "feminine" wisdom/divinity/knowledge.

Top 3 non-fiction books I read in 2020

The Vagina Bible: The vulva and the vagina - separating the myth from the medicine by Dr. Jen Gunter - This is probably better as a reference work than as a straight read-through, but it was interesting enough to read straight through. The book is deeply rooted in science and facts, and she has a whole chapter on "Vaginas and Vulvas in Transition" specifically about anatomy for trans people.

Here All Along: Finding Meaning, Spirituality, and a Deeper Connection to Life - in Judaism (After Finally Choosing to Look There) by Sarah Hurwitz - This is a useful, contemporary introduction to Judaism from someone who shares a lot of my values. The first half is an introduction to Jewish thought, while the second half focuses more on spirituality and practice. The book is part general introduction and part spiritual memoir. I found it deeply inspirational and I added it to a wish list of books I want to own copies of (I read it as a library ebook) because I would like to both reread it in hardcopy where I can easily flip back and forth and use it as a resource for further study and reading.

You Can Draw in 30 Days by Mark Kistler - You may remember that I wrote more about this when I originally finished reading the book. I found it a gentle, funny, helpful book to teach you the basics of drawing.

The 2 authors I read the most in 2020

Jennifer Lynne Barnes - I read fifteen of her books in three weeks in January, when I was still working full time, and a sixteenth after it was published later in the year. Her books are fast-read YA novels that are deeply engaging and generally have some sort of mystery element to them which may or may not involve family secrets. She has a tendency to write variations of the same characters, which meant that I enjoyed mentally mapping the characters from various books onto characters from other books. Also, her werewolf trilogy does one of my favorite werewolf story things that you almost never see (but it doesn't happen until the end of the first book, so I won't spoil it by telling you what it is). Many of her books involve violence, so heed the summaries or email/message me if you want some content notes.

Laura Lippman - I read nineteen of her books this year, eighteen novels and a non-fiction essay collection. She's an excellent mystery writer with a distinctive voice. The time I read four of her books in four days, I found myself thinking in her style. Even if I hadn't otherwise enjoyed My Life As A Villainess, her essay collection, it would have been worth reading just for the kicker on "The Thirty-First Stocking." Content note: her novels frequently involve violence or its aftermath.

[ecllas]

                                           ⏤ meet ella

BASICS

name: eloise “ella” grace dawson

Age: 17

Grade: sophomore

House: seton

Cabin Room: cabin 2, room 1

How long have they been at Broadripple: a year and a half

Where are they from originally: boston, ma

Extra curricular: swim team member, women of broadripple, chamber choir

TRAITS

Positive Personality Traits: daring, imaginative, friendly, fun-loving, thrill-seeking

Neutral Personality Traits: romantic, inquisitive, book-worm, theater geek, fantastical, talkative, curious

Negative Personality Traits: impulsive, careless, immature, pushy,

FACTS

ella never wanted to attend broadripple. she was sent to the school due to her parent’s inability to control her rebellious behavior

the final straw for her parent’s was ella’s involvement with a rather unsavory young man, one too many nights sneaking out her bedroom window, and two one-way tickets to new york hidden in her blue journal.

ella is technically a middle child but was raised as the eldest. her older brother is a half-sibling from her father’s relationship with a woman proceeding his marriage to her mother. it’s something of a scandal and remains a tense knot in the dawson family dynamic. regardless, ella has always gotten along well with  both of her siblings. due to restricted contact with her parents and little brother, most of ella’s correspondence is with her older half-brother.

ella has always loved to swim. it was once a hobby that brought her and her father together. however, as ella has grown older her father’s expectations for her performance have also inclined. split between an unspoken and unrecognized desire to please her father and the uncompromising weight of his standards, ella’s love for swimming as faltered. she switches from being a determined and competitive teammate to a lax participant content to enjoy the pool as a recreational activity rather than a sport

it was not ella’s choice to participate in the women of broadripple club. her father’s strong encouragement ( what others may call threats ) pushed ella into dragging her feet into one of the meetings. although she wouldn’t otherwise admit it, ella actually enjoys women of broadripple, mostly when they listen to her obviously amazing ideas. while she might complain about how boring the meetings are, she genuinely enjoys the time she shares with the girls at her school.

ella’s deepest passion has always been books. ever since she was small she was an avid reader, perusing her father’s library and climbing on her mother’s lap so the two could spend the afternoon reading together on the parlor sofa. stories came to her with the same ferocity and ease. before she could write, ella was telling stories. to her older brother, her younger brother, her parents, to the trees in the backyard, students on the playground, and her darkened ceiling in the middle of the night. her mother still holds on to a spiral notebook filled with ella’s first attempts at ‘stories,’ a jumbled mish-mash of letters that didn’t form real words, but ella would fervently assure were telling a story ( and thus would promptly rehearse her most recent magnum opus )

ella attempts all genres but her most frequent is fiction. although, as of late she has made more attempts at poetry and a few meager attempts at song writing at the encouragement of her swim captain, damian fitzgerald.

ella lives for the rush. it prompts her reckless behavior, rule breaking, and frequent ‘explorations’ out of the dorms ( or cabins ) after lights out. it also fuels her love for acting and theater. although she doesn’t have any lofty aspirations for becoming an actress, she lives for the opportunity to perform on stage, study a character and embody them for an audience. she considers it a study for her own literary pursuits as well as a hobby she can enjoy shamelessly, as her father has been content to keep his hands out of it.

HEADCANONS

ella’s favorite artist is Daughter. don’t even get her started on it because there is a high probability it will make her emotional. she actually owns all the CDs daughter has released and keeps them in a decorative box under her bunk. an ‘emergency stash’ in the unfortunate case of a zombie apocalypse that takes out her spotify account in the wake of complete fallout.

ella has a favorite bracelet. she is almost never seen without it, although she will occasionally put the bracelet in the pocket of her backpack if teachers are being especially obnoxious about the dress code. it has an adjustable wrist with a silver sparrow figure.

ella always, always has her light blue moleskine journal on hand. it’s messy, filled to the brim with sketches, quotes, lyrics, ideas she haphazardly wrote on the corner of her chemistry notes, pictures etc. the original strap is worn down with use and as a result ella has macgyvered an additional ribbon onto the journal to keep it secure. it is her most prized possession. she is very secretive with its contents and will go out of her way to keep it hidden from prying eyes. she can often be seen hunched over it, scribbling away, far more involved with the world she is creating on the page than the one surrounding her.

her favorite food is cinnamon rolls. rather than eating cake on her birthday, her mother baked a pan of home made cinnamon rolls drizzled with creamy icing. the closure of the copper kettle was particularly devastating because it meant the loss of the best cinnamon rolls in the area. sure, the local bakery had decent enough cinnamon rolls, but they were never quite as good. as a connoisseur of cinnamon rolls, ella holds her opinion on the subject in high regard.

ella deeply enjoys singing but is rather shy about it. while she may participate in chamber choir, she’s more a supporting vocalist and little more. despite every aspect of herself being unabashed and open, ella is very secretive with her singing. the only time she has ever had any form of ‘solo’ was with damian fitzgerald after a night of drinking. although she looks back on the event with some embarrassment, it has encouraged her to try to be a more confident performer and incorporate singing into more of her creative works

the transition from the dorms to the cabins has caused a bit of a shift in ella’s writing as of late. with so many strange occurrences piling up, ella finds the subject of her prose leaning towards macabre portrayals of hungry, consumptive woods and sudden vanishings. although ella has playfully teased freshman with a few spooky variations of the edith lynch tale, she mostly only ‘believed’ in the story because it was more exciting than letting it be little more than small-town folklore. now she finds herself leaning into the rumors more and more, although her motivations are rather self-serving, seeking inspiration for her writing and other projects rather than genuine concern.

QUESTIONS ABOUT THE RETREAT

What do they think about The Retreat? 

Ella has mixed emotions about the retreat. she’s excited to finally have an excuse to be off campus, but bemoans the lack of wifi and other luxuries she’s always taken for granted. in spite of being a self-proclaimed lover of adventure, she has little experience with camping. she has enjoyed day-hikes, but long stretches of time in cabins is very out of her element. family vacations included hotels, European cities and sandy beaches, not centipedes, several students to a room, and mosquitos. there are times where ella enjoys and thrives in the environment, making the best of her situation, clowning about with her peers, or digging into her writing. there are also times where she wishes she could cuddle up in her air-conditioned dorm room and binge-watch avatar: the last airbender on netflix with wendy sanderson without risking a spiderbite.

Do they have any previous experience with camping or other outdoors?

ella has 0 experience camping. she has gone on day-hiking trips and brief vacation to mountain resorts, but it has always been a very upscale experience.

What does their cabin bunk look like? How will they decorate their space?

ella decorated her space as much as she could to make it feel like her own. she has pictures and quotes pinned up on the wall along with a few glow-in-the-dark stars ( each with their own made-up constellation ). she strung up a few paper lanterns from her dorm room and always has a flashlight handy for late night reading under the covers. above her bed, either on the ceiling or the bottom of the mattress above her, ella has secured a tapestry of the night sky. as an individual with many books, she’s had to be creative with her storage. she has one ‘shelf’ she made out of command hooks and a cloth bag that contains her ‘current reads’ and rests on the wall closest to her head. the others are stored beneath the bunk or in a duffle bag.

Do they believe in the supernatural? To what degree?

ella believes in mermaids, aliens and changelings more than she believes in demons or bigfoot. and even then she believes in them in a whimsical, day-dreaming sort of way rather than as a scientific pursuit. in a sense, she ‘believes’ in things because of how they make her feel rather than genuinely believing in them. she doesn’t want to prove such things exist. she finds far more enjoyment in the mystery of it all. that being said, recent events have shifted her perspective a bit. although ella plays it cool, she is unnerved about everything going on in her school. although a rather brave girl, being in the woods has shaken her more than she initially thought. for how much she’s fantasized about running off into the darkness herself, now that she’s halfway there she’s beginning to doubt her willingness to leave the security of four brick walls and a sturdy gate behind.

Are they easily spooked?

not exactly. in fact, ella is more likely to investigate something ‘spooky’ rather than flee. if another person scares her, she’s more likely to react with laughter and teasing than to be upset. but she does get spooked by strange shadows or sounds, often enflamed by her overactive imagination. she just choses to face her fear as an opponent rather than flee from it.

AND FINALLY

A very dumb but (hopefully) fun quiz made by your admins, please share what result you got

“the lord will protect me from any evil” !!!! I have no idea how this bitch got it, but somehow she did?? guess god is also a fan of cinnamon rolls, reckless endangerment and a rad story.

[phonaesthemes]

a list of asks

@padawanyugi tagged me in this, but Tumblr decided to eat any notification that I got tagged, so I’m glad I saw it on my dash because I like filling these things out. Thanks for tagging me! I may have typed A Lot.

Favorites: What types of books do you enjoy? Tell about what you’ve read recently (Or maybe about a book you hated recently!)I like spec-fic and sci-fi, although less “hard” science fiction, and I also enjoy fantasy. I read a lot of YA even though I’m in my 30s just because it seems easy to find a story I want to read and I’m not usually in the mood for dense prose.

I’ve been rereading the Wheel of Time series since it’s getting an Amazon TV show; it was my first non-LOTR fantasy series and I love it to death, warts and all, although I love joking about the weak points with other people who’ve read it. I think the last other thing I read was A Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue, which was a queer YA historical fiction, and it was a lot of fun. I wish I’d had access to all these queer stories when I was an actual teenager, but better late than never.

What types of music do you like to listen to? Share five songs from your music library. I really do like a bit of everything, although I gravitate towards certain genres more often depending on the season or time of day, so I’m going to cheat and pick 5 per season. Summer for me is lots of peppy pop (pride playlists!), punk and rock and punk-adjacent stuff, just upbeat stuff in general. -Weekender, by The Royal They -Break My Heart, by Dua Lipa -Toutes les femmes savent danser, by Loud -Ruby Soho, by Rancid -Womanarchist, by Bad Cop, Bad Cop

In the fall, my inner goth kid craves darkwave, goth rock, dramatic folk, roots rock, and also anything that reminds me of Halloween. -Iuka, by the Secret Sisters -Bela Lugosi’s Dead, by Bauhaus -How’s It Gonna End, by Tom Waits -Under the Milky Way, by The Church -I Put a Spell on You, by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins I could go on about the Christmas music I like at length (Boney M’s Christmas album slaps, ngl) but I’ll just skip that and say that I listen to more classical and piano pieces in the winter. I’m terrible at remembering names, so artists only: -Ludovico Einaudi -Chopin -Debussy -Saint-Saëns -Dvořák And in spring I’m usually just depressed af and listen to whatever. -FML, by K.Flay -Weird Part of the Night, by Louis Cole -Juodaan Viinaa, by Korpiklaani -P.O.H.U.I., by Carla’s Dreams -Marryuna, by Baker Boy

Do you have a show or movie that you can just put on anytime and it’s your comfort? Definitely Star Trek. I’ve rewatched the various iterations (except TOS) so many times. Also Mean Girls and Bring It On, idk why.

Do you have a favorite dessert? Tiramisu or creme brulée! Or macarons. I don��t eat dessert really unless I’m at a restaurant.

Do you have a favorite cold drink? Sparkling water, hands down.

Do you have a favorite game? The hours I have put into the SIms in my lifetime is probably shameful, although I haven’t played in a while. Don’t Starve is another contender for hours played, but I am also really fond everything by Amanita Design

Do you have a favorite part of your self care/beauty/health routine? I haven’t been doing it much lately since I’ve been dealing with some uncertain health issues with my joints (actually have a rheumatologist appointment later today), but savasana after a long yoga workout is borderline ecstasy.

Do you have a favorite type of take-out food? Indian for sure.

What’s your favorite type of exercise/physical activity? I have a love-hate relationship with running. I don’t actually love it but I love how I feel after. I really enjoy yoga. I love playing in the water at the beach, bodyboarding and swimming.

Pick between: (you choose the context)

Cook or bake? (I love cooking A Lot)

Space or ocean? (Hard to pick, but I grew up by the ocean and it’s 100% my happy place)

Chocolate or vanilla?

City or suburb or rural? (I grew up in an isolated rural village and I miss the quiet and the slower pace of life, but I do not miss the lack of amenities and opportunities, or the smalltown gossip. I also don’t drive bc of epilepsy, so I’m fucked as far as transport in rural settings.)

Past or future?

Shower in the morning or evening?

Mac/Apple or PC/Android? (Linux in general!)

Sing or dance?  (I don’t have an amazing voice but I can carry a tune without it being painful, and I love singing along with songs.)

Get up early or sleep in? (I actually love sleeping in but with two kids, early morning is my only time to myself, so I wake up before 6 most days AGGH.)

Shoes, socks, or bare feet? (Hate socks. I’m barefoot at home all year round.)

Marker, crayon, or pencil? Pen!

Tea, coffee, or hot chocolate? (Coffee in the morning, tea later on.)

Random questions:

Have you ever had any pets? (Had dogs and a cat as a kid, and as an adult I’ve had betta fish and cats, and I have a cat currently.)

What is your academic background/job field? I did my undergrad in linguistics, and I am currently a stay-at-home dad lol. I do freelance editing and transcription on the side. I don’t think I’ll ever work in my field bc I really don’t have the energy to go to grad school.

What’s something random that you’re into (even if you aren’t good at it)? I signed up for a Cape Breton step dancing class in university and I loved it.

Are you good at putting away your clean laundry right away? It depends on the day, but generally yes. Mine and everyone else’s. When I lived alone? Absolutely not.

What’s one of your pet peeves? Someone trying to have a conversation with me when they have the radio or TV on. I can’t follow what you’re saying if someone else is speaking! I hate having that stuff on as background noise in general.

What’s something you’re pretty good at? I’m a great cook.

What’s the most recent nice thing you bought for yourself? A new conditioner ig? lol

Can you sew? I can mend a small tear or sew on a button, but it’s been years since I did more than that.

What’s a chore you hate (or a chore you enjoy)? I hate vacuuming so much. So much. Maybe if I had a better vaccuum cleaner I wouldn’t mind it, but I just feel like I’m fighting with the stupid thing, getting caught up on its own cords, caught on furniture, can’t quiiiite reach a spot... HATE IT. I like shoveling snow sometimes, though.

Tell us a fun fact about yourself. I am 20 years older than my youngest sibling, and five minutes younger than my “oldest” sibling.

Never have I ever... Gone fishing, even though I’m from a fishing community.

What extracurriculars did/do you do in school? In high school, I played trumpet in band until the band got dissolved from lack of funding. I played soccer one year, was in a play another year. We had an art club for like a semester that I was in. In university the first time round, I did step dancing and intramural hide and seek  Second time around, I was in the linguistics club to help with assignments. (We were very much encouraged to work in pairs or groups for a lot of different classes. The only thing was that you did need to list your group members on the assignment so the prof knew who you worked with. My first morphology class in particular, we had a whole homework club where a huge portion of the class got together to work through assignments and help each other understand, and the prof would quite often show up. </tangent>

Deeper questions:

How’s your quarantine/last few months been? The cabin fever was really bad before the weather warmed up. I struggle with seasonal depression every spring, and it’s gotten much worse since we moved to Edmonton because of how long the winters are. (Snow from September to May/June? Fucccck.) It’s frankly horrifying to look at what’s going on in the US, but even though we have far fewer cases here, I’m really anxious that we’ll see another wave soon. Otherwise, I think I’ve adjusted. Home-schooling, hand-sanitizing, social distancing, masks...All feels kind of normal now, which should maybe concern me.

What do you think of human nature/society/etc.? I am like the least philosophical person you will meet so I don’t think I really have many thoughts.

What’s something you are insecure about? Writing my L2 if a native speaker is gonna read it.

What do you think is the meaning of life/reason that humans exist in the universe? I don’t think there is one, and that doesn’t bother me.

Do you think you’re better (whatever that means to you) than you used to be? Definitely. My adolescence and early adulthood was rough. I was dealing with a lot of trauma, untreated bipolar disorder, and I self-harmed for a very long time. I could not imagine making it to 30, let alone being stable and happy. I actively avoided thinking about the future because it made me spiral. But I was lucky enough to get help, consistent help from a doctor I clicked with, and it made a world of difference. I think younger me would be disappointed at how mundane my life is, but I’m thrilled to be boring because boring means no life-upending mood episodes. I have a happy partnership and two delightful kids and I couldn’t ask for more.

What are your thoughts on religion? I’m not religious and my own experience being raised in the Catholic church was frankly traumatic, but I know that it’s a source of comfort and community for many others and I think that’s awesome for them.

Do you think that there are aliens out there? I think so, although I think that we may not even know what other kinds of life to look for and may not recognize it even if we find it.

What’s something that’s been on your mind recently? We’re moving cross-country in less than a month (driving, no less, nearly 5000 km) and I still have so much to do to get ready aosjdoajdoasijdoaijsd

[malcolmbrights-archive]

adopted / mama bear’s everyone / is a flirt /  is sarcastic and witty, but friendly and fun-loving / might come off as reserved and serious, but is charismatic and talkative to the point where you want her to shut the fuck up sometimes / very adventurous and a bit of a thrill seeker, but also enjoys spending nights in reading or watching netflix / bisexual af and probably has several exes, but not many people she’s actually slept with - except for when she was a teen and a bit self-destructive / has a 14-year old and the baby daddy or mama walked out of their life suddenly / confident in herself / has her own successful bakery that’s also a bookstore. she decided on it after she decided not to become a psychiatrist  / will drag you out to lunch or will make you dinner, if you are friends / is very active in the community and is usually making acquaintances through work, talking to strangers, or through her family / loves champagne /  her neighbors probably know her because she likes to throw little potlucks / is a waterbug and practically lives in different pools / likes art / likes to go out dancing / enjoys intense games of scrabble and crossword puzzles / does archery / morning runs are her jam / likes to bake / nice cars vroom-vroom / a nerd

At the age of two, claudia was adopted by Susanna and Ivan darling. Susanna could not have children and Ivan wanted them. Both the darlings were attentive parents, even though they were busy with their own personal lives. Susanna, a former socialite, worked as a television host in New York city. Ivan worked as the owner of a hotel chain (The darling). They adopted other children, who they loved dearly, and were very supportive of claudia while she was growing up. Since the darlings were busy people, when they weren’t around, the young children were usually in the company of nannies. claudia found herself growing attached to her nannies and saw them as her extended family. And while her nannies were great and helped her grow into the woman she is today, they all would come and go throughout her life.

One nanny in particular had grown rather fond of her, and claudia grew fond of her as well. Her name was Delphine and she would read with her and her siblings every night. A majority of the books were silly – mostly Dr. Seuss and Shell Silverstein. While others stuck with her and helped shape her adult life. Although the detectives in Nancy Drew and Sherlock Holmes were fictional, claudia found their search for answers admirable. She began to pretend to be those detectives and began to search for the hidden truths and secrets found in the lives of people around her.

While Susanna thought it was wonderful that claudia had found a new interest, she wanted claudia  to branch out and try new things. Susanna got her to try piano, ballet, fencing; but claudia always wound up interested in her search for truth. The more Susanna tried to push her away from her new-found hobby, the more invested in it she became

During this curious phase of her life, claudia learned her family’s picture-perfect life wasn’t as perfect as it seemed. With all this information in mind, she finally opened her eyes to the fact that the world was flawed and that everyone made mistakes. She found that beautiful, because she was reminded that no one was perfect.

When she was thirteen-years-old, claudia went to private school. It was this age where Delphine quit to go live with her family in France. The loss of claudia crushed her like nothing else had, but she trooped through it with the support of her siblings and parents

In private school, she was meant to learn manners and good behavioral skills. However, Claudia became even more invested in her education and speaking her mind - occasionally getting into fights with some of the other girls. . While making friends was hard at first, she managed to find a few people who were worthy of her time and attention. Being around this small group of people led her to believe that she really enjoyed talking to others and that she was interested in learning about what made her friends act the way acted and that pushed her to learn what made them who they were. claudia’s friends helped her get in touch with a more humane side of herself, helped her become more charismatic, along with more open to others and their stories. In the end, though, she did choose her studies and reading books in the library over her friends. With summer classes, determination and an intense dedication to her studies, claudia graduated two years early.

During university, claudia focused on achieving her goal of becoming a psychiatrist. While attending school, claudia found herself testing out the waters of various clubs, even joining a sorority for a short period. To her, university was freedom. It was a reminder of how much she could do to make something of herself. She was moderately homesick, though, and often wrote and called her family to see how they were doing.

Away from school, the start of her residency proved to much more exciting than she thought. Always on the move, always distracted, Clarossa enjoyed keeping busy; it was one of her favorite things about her job. After receiving a job with the emergency psych unit and working her ass off , claudia randomly decided she didn’t want to be a psychiatrist and decided to change her career path: she wanted to have her own bakery. So instead of continuing, she ended up going to culinary school to study the art of baking. She did a great job there and had a blast learning the ropes and used her creativity and love for art to make complex designs for cakes and cupcakes. Her teacher told her that she had a lot of potential and that if she opened her own shop she’d probably get a lot of attention. 

but instead of owning her own shop, for a few years, claudia worked at the bakery of a friend’s. she enjoyed it because she enjoyed her friend's company. however, after dating her friend and eventually having a child with them, when they broke up she had to quit her job and moved to new york city to start a business of her own. but instead of simply being a bakery, she made the bakery into a bookstore as well. it was everything she wanted because she loved books and had always taken comfort in them due to delphine’s influence. she wanted others to feel the joy she felt when she read or found a book that could change their life forever. so she kept up with the bookstore and invited and met people from all walks of life due to it. 

[kkemtal]

Anecdotes

April 19, 2020

               In this quarantine crisis, it doesn’t feel like some sort of an incarceration for me. Maybe for some people who have extroverted energies, probably they’ll suffer with boredom and loneliness. Not their counterparts like the ambivert me. I’ve been feeling weary and exhausted since I began by my almost 7 months of duty in a bank. Although it was fun and productive and all, I still feel the need to shut myself out from the world and rest to charge up and be with myself again. Never have I thought this alarming circumstance would ever come, but I perceive this enhanced community quarantine (ECQ) as both a blessing and a curse. This implementation yields positive changes to our nature.

Imma just gonna drop five random anecdotes from my 22 years of life experience. Just to see, to wonder about these experiences and soak myself to a spiral of thoughts, living up with angst. Besides that, I guess I needed to relax myself by writing down my thoughts. It’s mentally accommodating to declutter what’s bothering me – laziness. Here it goes:

 Grade Three

There’s this classmate of mine who’s really pretty and haughty. The type of girl who would pick out fights for fun and look down on others. Our relationship was slightly complicated because there were times that we’re friends and other times as enemies. However, what underlies our relationship was our subtle mutual crush to each other. I feigned that I’m truly disgusted by her just to conform gender roles right after the moment she confessed to me by stealing my assignment notebook and wrote on one of the pages that she fancied me before she distributed it to me. It was innocent and adorable.

 Basketball

Gosh, way back in Grade 5, I really miss the times in going to stores with my friends to have an early snack time before attending our first classes. Buying coke and junkies, sharing good laughs over the silliest stuff and oh, I would not forget drinking Cobra. Felt I was such a good girl gone wild type of rebel till our stomachs got troubled. One time, my long-time ex best friend who became popular in the long run throughout school years, joined with us. She was wearing a pink dress and I think we had a special school event at that time. After we done snacking there, we went straight up to the basketball court and took advantage of the whole empty space to play basketball before the guards would catch us. While we’re playing, my tomboy friend couldn’t stop laughing at my ex best friend’s armpits all sweating. It was obvious by just the look on the wet strain on her dress beneath her arms. It evokes such nostalgic elation from this childhood moment.

 Post-

Back in 4th year college, while I was slowly transitioning into my better self after my last toxic relationship, one of my ex-boyfriend’s classmates who has liked me ever since first year college, incessantly comforted me throughout the darkest days of mine when the wound I got from the relationship was fresh. Let’s call him in a pseudo name, Polo. I knew deep down that Polo was befriending me back again, but this time he became much more confident than the last time we interacted during the same classes we took in the beginning of college. While I was on my hectic schedule, sometimes he would hit me up to accompany me for instances, bring me to go lunch with him and his friends, join in library with me and study together, out to malls. He was all sweet and all but I couldn’t feel yet to reciprocate his feelings, although I did kinda liked him before but it’s a frivolous feeling. Now, post-college, I got a job in a bank and coincidentally, sometimes he would visit in the same bank where I was assigned for work for his personal transactions. Everytime he’s there I was kind of reluctant to start a conversation with him due to either sticking to my banking errands or just simply wanting to get noticed by him. Of course, he's surprised when he found out that I was working there. For every post-bank visits, he’d randomly hit me up in Facebook Messenger about seeing me and how he couldn’t muster up the courage to approach and talk to me simply because he saw how busy I was or he was plain timid. We chatted for awhile and he mentioned he will be working in Dubai for awhile. Currently, he is. Do you think he could possibly be one of the future candidates as my lifetime partner? We will never know!

 Library Crush

Library is like the university’s haven for the most chilled and introverted people like me. Playing games, sleeping anywhere, making thesis, doing studies, all these unforgettable moments my college self had embraced. There was this girl who mostly stayed here by just hanging out with her geeky, jovial Finance clique. I was kinda surprised that she shifted to the same course as me. She has black short hair, almond shaped eyes, skin’s brown as Latina, stands somewhere between 5′2 to 5′3 and a healthily slim body. She was the apple of my eye. Sometimes I would get butterflies from my stomach all churned up when I caught her looking at me from a distance across the library. It’s as if we shared long distant glances of gaze to keep up the inner thrill. Certainly, it was not a sexual attraction like I want to fuck her kind of way. It’s a kind of attraction like hey, there’s a pretty girl kept looking at me and I was so flattered by that kind of way.  I never got the chance to talk with her during Finance classes because we never ever went to the same classes. I have no idea how I find her pretty by her mediocre appearance until I remembered that she performed an intro dance presentation along with the other Finance talents during the Finance party in third year college. She was so amazing that she’s the one who stood out the most. Then I learned that she was one of the officers in the international youth club that I joined in back in fourth year college. My attraction towards her vanished in a snap the moment she spoke with us in a group activity. It totally turned me off watching her having difficulty in speaking English. I was disappointed.

 Breaking Dawn

During the era of Twilight film series, I began to fall in love upon discovering the music genre indie when the final song was played out in last scene of Breaking Dawn Part 2 before the credits rolled in. I earnestly searched for that song with the few highlighted lines I memorized from the first time I heard it. It was called Speak Up by The Morning Benders, currently hailed as POP ETC. I felt I found my new comfort that truly speaks to me with the esoteric style of music. POP ETC, The 1975, Foster the People, Cults, Grizzly Bear, these bands have reigned my mind. Modernizing the old classics so innovatively, never been unimpressed. Today, I still listen to this type of music ever since I was 14 years old.

- kkemtal/k.k.k.u.

[wot-tidbits]

Brandon Sanderson in Bulgaria 28-29.03.17, report-ish

Brandon Sanderson visited Bulgaria. Sentence that in my wildest dreams I have never dreamed that I could write with both hands. Besides that I was able to follow his every step, to take my minute of glory and books to be signed. On the top stays a classical dramatic moment with the gift – signed book.

I'm sure you know what it feels like as you used to watch someone on the monitor so many years and suddenly you realize that in fact this person is physically in front of you, in flesh and blood. For a split second you are able to realize it, but most of the time you are eluded from the surrounding reality. I feel that most of the time I spent in it to try to establish that Brandon is physically available and we are in one area /mall, disco club /, one city, one country. The event is over,  he continues to live and breathe and doing normal human things. I will stay with this experience and would still continue to think that it was a dream. It cannot be true. In a remote, commercially unattractive Bulgaria such things do not just happen like that!

Still what happened under line:

28 March 2017, Mall Bulgaria

It was just another ordinary day for the small Sofia’s mall in the outskirts of Vitosha mountain. As of early afternoon, nothing portends that the literary event of the year in Bulgaria will take place only a few hours later. At least in this mall unlike other lobbies, there are benches and comfortable random couches where you can sit and to read undisturbed. The organization showed up around 16.00/4pm. They ordered a banner, two rows of chairs, speaker and brought volumes of books, hoping to tip some money for organization. (to hire a mall has costs, though being not one of the famous). At 17:30/5.30pm to 18:00/6pm it began to feel the swelling flow of people to the event. The stand with books sold like hotcakes, formed a crowd of fans, which reassured me that  we won’t be ashamed before the foreigners despite of announcing the organization at the last moment.

For some Bulgarian miracle, all started on time, and they used a scene so Brandon to be seen everywhere. Audibility with microphone was excellent, as the sound of my live recording is the smallest flaw. It started with around 30 minutes questionnaire. Brandon is an extremely nice man, paying high attention to any of the questions, even seeking to further develop and add things that are not known even to the global audience. It was very funny and informative. Then we moved on to the fun part of the evening – the signing. Brandon was responsive to each one fan and signed any book (some decided to bring their libraries). And my glory moment came and went – a photo, a question and signed books with text I wanted, (being “officially recognized” with my WOT nickname, my most favorite non-canon line and with my blog).  What more a modest fan can dream for?

After dinner on the top floor, at 22.30/10.30pm I looked at what is happening and there revealed unimagined image – the tail apparently had not moved and those who came after work filled the numbers permanently. Brandon signed the book of every single person who came. Despite the late hour and the working day, the Bulgarian fantasy community succeeded to show its number and to impress Brandon that he has fans in Bulgaria. And what I used as a joke, it became truth - the mall closed after midnight. Sanderson showed being heavily trained for the long hours of signing and heroically endured to the last man.

29 March 2017

The next day, the events continue with a great online interview at the office of bookstore Ozone. Despite a brief technical problem, the conversation also was very entertaining. One of the questions was sent by me, so another memorable moment was added. But the most precious yet to come. In the final they gave Brandon a bowl with names of all sent questions. For some reason I was enthusiastic that I have a chance.  First name was chosen, second, third, no luck. Once the fourth name passed me, I shrugged and the reconciliation made through its way that I won’t be chosen. While in this minor tone my crumpled enthusiasm suddenly as thunder the fifth name turned out to be mine. Classical drama! Never say never, I guess? The gift – signed book was not my goal as much as the thrill, the sudden burst of surprise and joy that crazy luck landed on my shoulder once in a lifetime.

Fantastic tale took to it last touches at evening with a lecture at a disco club. Brandon Sanderson delivered a lecture about writing in a place being pitch dark. We couldn’t move away without the famous Bulgarian innovation, could we? I think we start the beginning of a new global trend among writers' workshops. 

Again attendance was excellent and the audience being active. Instead of the scheduled time, Brandon despite last night's tiring adventure strained forces and extended the talk with one hour, allowing for new questions and answers. So, I was able to witness my first WOT tidbit live – event which I have only read in so many reports. Fortunately here I didn’t have to write a lengthy report – the lecture was recorded and accessible. Until that moment the thought of living up to my URL name never existed. But now I had this incredible luck. Two hours imperceptibly passed and the story ended with the hope that we have left great impressions and maybe someday Sanderson will return (supposedly summer of 2018, according to his words, more wishful thinking than a promise). This guy didn’t show any sign to be tired - six hours to late night, interviews, two-hour lecture and nevertheless he made effort for another half hour of signing at the club. He is out of this world.

Brandon Sanderson has long earned a place among my favorite authors, but seeing live his enthusiastic, humble and cool factor cemented a very pleasant personality, a huge spiritual wealth of so-called "precious cinnamon rolls" to be kept at all costs. When you meet with him, you cannot hate him. He is so awesome and so kind to every single fan. He didn’t show any moment of disrespect or boredom. How many authors can talk for like five minutes at a signing with complete strangers from hardly known country, then to pick up the phone and tell their agents probably the following lines “I am going to Bulgaria next year. No, I don’t care how small the Bulgarian market is. Deal with it!” ???

Two days unreality passed and I still sit in disbelief that it happened - not any but my favorite author to see him in flesh. There are not many "celebrities" who I would like to meet outside the monitor, but I had immense happiness that I can say at least with one of them, this is accomplished, even if it was for a minute or two.

I am baffled that somehow there is only my live video recording in full the first public contact of Brandon Sanderson with Bulgarian audience. Also I have access to recordings for almost literally every step of Brandon in Bulgaria (a blogger meeting, the mall, the online interview and the lecture) - another inconceivability that became a reality. Only if someone had managed to take a picture how he eats "cucumber soup". (or tarator) 

via Brandond Sanderson’s Twitter

The biggest minus of the organization was the complete lack of coverage of any TV Bulgarian media. This utter shame for the "culture" journalists can hardly fit in a few lines. So many people never had the chance to understand that Brandon Sanderson was coming to Bulgaria. The final details were revealed just ten days before the event – too short time to organize leave, transport, hotel and so on… It almost felt like we got some of the ta’veren luck that we can describe these two days as successful.

What to say for final words. It was real blessing. A dream which I have never dreamt to come true. If you have such opportunity to meet with Brandon Sanderson, take all efforts to make it. It is bloody well worth it.

Let the Light keep you safe.

LightOne

[nolensvillehomehappenings-blog]

Construction Tour of Nolansville Highschool (Video)

We here at Nolansville Home Happenings are always excited to hear about fun, new construction projects in our area so we thought we’d share this little gem with you all - a tour of our very own Nolansville Highschool. We’ve provided the transcript for ease. Enjoy!

Cory Mason: Today we're at the site of Nolensville High School. I'm joined by Principal Bill Harlin, and we're going to be looking at the high school and what's going on. There's a lot of activity going on here, so it's really cool.

Bill Harlin: Yeah. We've got a lot of progress happening at Nolensville High School right now. We're excited about the stage we're in in the construction process. As you can see and as you will see today, there is a lot to be excited about.

Cory Mason: So you're going to give us a tour and kind of show us around?

Bill Harlin: Yeah. Come on in.

Cory Mason: All right. Let's check it out. All right, Bill. Where are we right now?

Bill Harlin: We just walked in the front hallway, heading towards the atrium. Right here behind us is going to be the front office where my office will be. All of the assistant principals, counselors, secretaries, they will all be in this particular area. My friends from Franklin and Summit High School will probably recognize this space. It's very similar. At Summit High School, actually, everything in this building that's on the right is on the left at Summit, so very similar in design except for a few upgrades.

Cory Mason: Okay, now here we are in the atrium. Can you tell me a little bit about this?

Bill Harlin: Sure. This atrium area is really the common space that our students will have as they move to their particular classes. This area opens up into the library, which is just over here, and then behind us, they are starting to put the glass in for the cafeteria in this particular space. Also, as we walk down this particular corridor, that will be the area that leads to the athletic gymnasium spaces, locker rooms and so forth. So this is really the central hub of all of the activity at Nolensville High School.

Cory Mason: Bill, how many students are you expecting in your first year?

Bill Harlin: Year one we anticipate about 500 students. With all of the new construction going on in Nolensville right now, there's no telling exactly how much we'll end up with, but that's what our prediction is at this point.

Cory Mason: Excellent. All right, let's go check out the rest of the school.

Bill Harlin: All right.

Cory Mason: All right, Bill. I know where we are now. This looks very familiar. This is the library, right?

Bill Harlin: Yeah. This library design is very similar to all of the high schools that we have in Williamson County. This will be home to a lot of studying, a lot of research that's going to happen and take place, a lot of instruction, and certainly, our teachers will be in here for faculty meetings and for professional development. So we hope to have a really great place for that at Nolensville High School.

Cory Mason: Here we are now in the performing arts center. Can you tell us a little bit about it?

Bill Harlin: Yeah. You can see a lot of work is going on right now. This is the last part of the building, really, to be under construction and to be finished out. You can see the shell of everything is coming along really well. We should have a 455-seat theater in this particular part. This same part of the area will also house the band room and the chorus room, so we're very thrilled about this particular section of the building.

Cory Mason: All right, Bill. Now we're upstairs, and this is a unique feature that's really unique to Nolensville High School.

Bill Harlin: Right. One of the suggestions that came out of the Summit High School design from our friends at Summit is they suggested actually more floor space on the second floor for student meetings. One of the outcomes of that is this great multipurpose space that we have for students. It is like a second floor commons area. What we hope to have is a place for ... have technology set up. If we want to have meetings, class meetings or we want to have club meetings, we can do that in this space. It could be a potential lounge for some students or a collaboration space for studying as well. So I think it's going to serve our students extremely well, and I'm appreciative of Summit High School for coming up with that idea.

Cory Mason: Bill, I want to ask you about the athletic fields and everything that's going on there, because they're coming along really well.

Bill Harlin: Yeah, we're really excited. Behind me, directly behind the building, we'll have a soccer field, a practice field in the middle, and then right next to that will be our football field and track. What's exciting to see today is that they are actually paving the track. You can see the concession stand coming up and also the equipment building, so really, really coming along with that particular part of the project. Even to the far side of the property, you can begin to see where they put in lights for the tennis courts as well. Still yet to be developed would be baseball and softball fields. Those will be coming soon.

Cory Mason: Excellent. Let's go check out a classroom.

Bill Harlin: Great. Let's do it.

Cory Mason: All right, so this is a typical classroom, I guess.

Bill Harlin: This is the basic classroom space. We'll do a lot of great instruction in here. It could be used for any one of the core subject areas in this particular space. We're going to change things up a little bit. Now that we've come along in the age of technology, we don't need as much of the shelving space. We'll actually have more functional space for mobile technology, laptops, mobile devices, those kinds of things. Again, kind of progressing in the wave of the future a little bit for our particular space, but it looks great and not far from being finished.

Cory Mason: Excellent. Let's go check out the gym.

Bill Harlin: Okay, great.

Cory Mason: All right, Bill. Now we're in the gymnasium. The first thing you notice when you walk in the doors are the school colors up on the walls.

Bill Harlin: Yeah. We have royal blue, silver, and it is a true silver [inaudible 00:05:25], and black. We're really excited about the detail in this particular gym. It'll be able to host a lot of tournaments, certainly a lot of practices and fulfill that, and we hope to have some great game nights for basketball in Nolensville.

Cory Mason: As principal, what are you looking forward to most?

Bill Harlin: I'm looking forward to having students in here, seeing the community come in and enjoy a lot of the events at Nolensville High School. I certainly can't wait to see our students working in their classes, seeing great instruction, and seeing them do some wonderful performances. It's always a privilege to have a front-row seat in the lives of high school students.

Cory Mason: Thank you for showing us around. The school looks great. It's coming along wonderfully. We'll see you back here in August of 2016.

Bill Harlin: Sounds great, Cory.

Cory Mason: All right. Thanks.

If you’re interested in checking out the Nolansville Highschool Construction, you can visit the school at 1600 Summerlyn Dr, Nolensville, TN 37135.

[ecllas]

                                              M E E T   E L L A

1. Full Name?

Eloise Grace Dawson

2. Preferred Names or Nicknames?

Ella. Only her parents call her Eloise, and when they do it’s never a good thing.

3. What does their name mean? Does it have any significance in their family? Do they like their name?

The name Eloise means ‘famous in war,’ in French and ‘healthy’ in German. The name Ella means ‘beautiful fairy woman,’ and ‘light.’ The name Grace means  ‘eloquence, beauty, kindness, and mercy.’ Although Ella relates to these varying meanings in different ways, from her fierce courage to her romanticized way of viewing the world, she wasn’t named for them. Her great-great-great-grandmother was named Eloise, and ever a man dedicated to honoring family and tradition, her father thought it would be a suitable name for his first-born daughter. Funnily enough, Ella’s ancestor Eloise was also known for being a brash-spitfire. The family has several antique photos of Eloise marching with suffragettes at a rally in 1919, as well as a picture of Eloise at what was presumably a speakeasy sometime in the 1920s, puffing on a cigar with pearls draped around her neck, playing poker at a table surrounded men in white shirts and three-piece suits. Ella likes to think they’d have gotten along. She also feels a sense of pride in the history surrounding her name.

4. Age and Date of Birth?

Ella is 17 years old and her birthday is December 15.

5. Gender and Pronouns?

Female. She/her.

6. Hometown?

Boston, MA. She was raised in a townhouse in Beacon Hill.

7. Does your character fit into any well known archetypes or tropes?

The Black Sheep

The Lovable Rogue 

The Storyteller

The Dreamer

8. How long have they been at Broadripple?

Ella became a student at Broadripple during her Sophomore year. She was originally attending a private school in Boston where she lived with her parents, but after being caught sneaking out of the house with a rather unsavory young man ( and after one too many second chances in the eyes of her parents ) Ella was shipped off to Broadripple Academy. She hasn’t been able to go home since, spending every weekend, holiday, and break at the Academy that they are able to. In the words of her father, this was to “prevent her from being a bad influence on her little brother.” But Ella suspects it’s a prolonged act of punishment that will never end.

9. What led them to apply to Broadripple? Was it a decision made by them or by their parents/guardians or somewhere in between?

The Dawson’s are a legacy family, and although they initially intended to keep their family close together, Ella’s disobedience, rebellion, and reckless behavior pushed them to sending her to Broadripple. They believe the Academy will be able to ‘straighten her out,’ pushing her into maturity through rigorous course work, high expectations, and the watchful eyes of the nuns.

10. Whether they’ve been at Broadripple four days or four years, do they enjoy it? Do they like Broadripple?

Ella does not enjoy Broadripple. She likes some of the people and classes, but ultimately she feels trapped. Her ability to leave campus is limited, and her parents try to keep her on a tight leash so she can’t make any ‘poor life choices.’ She would probably enjoy the school more if it felt less like a prison.

11. What house are they in? Do they care very much about their house?

Ella is a legacy student in Seton. She doesn’t carry much house pride, perhaps in spite of how much her father values their identity as a Seton Family. However, she is very fond of the color blue and has been long before she became a student at Broadripple. This is the extent of her passion for the Seton Legacy.

12. Who do they share a dorm with, or are they on their own for the moment? What are they like to live with? Are they clean or messy? Early risers or night owls?

Ella is roommates with Gwen Prescott, and it is most definitely not a happy pairing. Ella finds Gwen’s incessant need to follow the rules frustrating. Her domineering personality, demand for no boys in the room, and meticulous attention to the cleanliness of the room makes Ella want to spend as little time there as possible. That being said, although Ella isn’t anywhere neat as Gwen, she isn’t especially messy either. Her desk tends to get messy rather quickly, as it is the place she happens to ‘drop off’ everything, including her jackets, homework assignments, in-progress books, and discarded articles of clothing she feels won’t fit her outfit and she hasn’t put away yet. Her bedside table is always stacked with books and her bed is made, but not tucked in - she prefers her bed to look comfy and soft rather than sterile and pressed. Ella is an odd combination of both. She finds something about the night invigorating. Because of this she is prone to sneaking out. However, Ella has a hard time relaxing. This makes sleeping in challenging, as she is often compelled to go out and do something with the limited free time she has. 

13. How is your character’s dorm decorated? Is it bare or bursting at the seams with personality? Any particular sentimental items from home?

Ella’s portion of the room is thoroughly decorated. String lights line the walls above her bed all the way along her ‘half.’ Polaroid pictures are stuck in the frame of her mirror and taped to the walls. On the wall above her bed, Ella has a full-sized world map speckled with push-pins of places she wants to travel to. Her walls are crowded with quotes from books, poems, and songs she has found meaning in, art prints. The storage space beneath her bed and her bookcase are stuffed with books, most of which are dog-eared, framed by notes scribbled in margins and dashed with highlighters. Under her bed she has a box of CDs - her Just In Case jams. Essentially, a compilation of the music she knows she couldn’t live without in the case of a zombie apocalypse or the collapse of the internet. 

14. What is their favourite subject at school? Do they even have a favourite? Why?

Creative Writing. Ella has been passionate about story-telling and writing ever since she was a little girl. Any time to completely immerse herself in the subject makes her immeasurably happy. She probably gets a little ‘too into it,’ in the eyes of her classmates, especially those who took creative writing as the ‘easy’ writing course. She’s the person who brings a 30-page short story to workshop, much to the chagrin of her peers.

15. Are they involved in any clubs? Which ones?

Ella is involved in Women of Broadripple and Chamber Choir.

16. How does your character feel about Broadripple’s Unofficial Clubs? Do they know about them? Are they a part of any of them?

Ella doesn’t have any strong opinions about Broadripple Unsolved. If anything, she thinks they’re pretty cool, mostly because she finds the notion of sleuthing around at night for clues or using an ouija board to try and contact a ghost to be thrilling. Ella has a complicated relationship with the Broadripple Boy’s Club, mostly because she loathes bullying and finds the people who participate in it to be, generally, lame as hell. However, she can’t deny the undeniable draw she feels to ‘bad boys’ with inflated egos who smoke cigarettes and have a penchant for getting in trouble. The Unofficial Chastity Club is something Ella rolls her eyes at, mostly because she thinks it perpetuates a stigma around sexuality that she doesn’t approve of.

17. Does your character participate in any sports? If so, what made them join the team?

Ella is an avid member of the swim team. She’s adored swimming ever since she was a child and participates in the sport out of passion and enjoyment rather than a drive to ‘be the best.’ That being said, her father expects a lot out of her swimming and is prone to sending her harsh texts if she doesn’t ‘perform well’ at a meet. This has somewhat tainted her love of the sport. Although she can’t deny that one of the places she feels happiest at Broadripple is at the pool in the middle of the night when no one else is there.

18. What afternoon activities does your character do? Do they just do the one mandatory one or are they involved in multiple? Why?

Ella participates in two afternoon activities - drama and the seasonal musical. She’s a total drama nerd and enjoys performing on stage. The two activities complement each other, and Ella finds her experiences in both enrich her capabilities in the other. Additionally, she just finds them really fun. Occasionally, she volunteers at the animal shelter.

19. Do they miss their home when they’re at Broadripple? Do they often go home for the weekends or do they only go home during holiday breaks?

Ella’s hasn’t been home since she was sent to Broadripple. She misses her brother most of all, but her feelings towards her parents are complicated. She misses them and is saddened by the state of their relationship, but she also harbors a deep-set anger for the way they have treated her. Ella typically doesn’t go home during the holidays, either filling out special paperwork to stay at Broadripple or staying with a close family friend or relative.

20. Did your character know Izzy De Santis or Maggie Monroe?

She knew of them but didn’t know them personally. She finds their disappearance to be suspicious, especially since no one seems to know where they’ve gone. Ella has always had a wild imagination and what might have happened to Izzy and Maggie finds itself consuming more and more of her thoughts.

21. Has your character heard of Edith Lynch? Do they know the story?

Ella heard the story of Edith Lynch when she first came to Broadripple. She’d snuck out with a few older boys and they’d told her the story to try and scare her. Eager for the thrill, Ella demanded more details, which the boys were unable to provide. This led her to doing some thorough research at the Academy’s alumni and records section of the library. In short, she knows the ghost stories, the lore and the Academy’s sanitzied record of events, but she often finds herself questioning the truth.

22. How does your character feel about Nighmore? Have they noticed the recently closed shops yet?

Ella is grateful Nighmore exists because it gives her a brief respite from the campus, but ultimately its locations and activities are lacking. She’s taken note of the closed shops and is most impacted by the Kettle closing down. Ella adored their baked goods and found she often got a lot of good writing done there. Plus, it always offered a place for her to hide out when Gwen was in one of her moods.

23. Have you made any aesthetic Pinterest boards/WeHeartIt collections for this character? Or playlists? Anything you would like to share!

**under construction

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[lonelygloryrpg]

ANOTHER WIZARD JOINS THE FIGHT!

Congratulations, GREY! You have been accepted as the role of BENJY FENWICK with the face-claim of Edward Bluemel. We advise you to submit your account within 24 hours otherwise your role in the group will be reopened. You can review the next steps by clicking here. Welcome to the family!

The path to glory is a lonely one. Which do you dare to take?

the player  —

name: grey

age: 31

preferred pronouns:  she/her

timezone: AEST (Sydney); GMT +10

triggers: //**removed**//

ships and anti-ships: given how open all the characters are, i don’t have any particular thoughts about specific ships at the moment, and generally i’d have to see how things unfold during play with various people. Be prepared though, because anything long term would need to be the slowest of slow burns with where he currently is (though his mental state right now also leaves him vulnerable to emotional manipulation if anyone wants to go the fucked-up route).

preferred method of contact: discord, tumblr im

the tale  —

(tw: death)

Camden Prewett was the only child born to his parents, a pureblood couple living in South Wales. His father played Chaser for the Welsh team, while his mother (a Greengrass) worked part-time writing an advice column for the Daily Prophet. For a while, there was nothing to reveal that they weren’t the picture perfect wizarding family that they appeared to be.

As the years passed and Camden grew from toddler to boy, the lack of strange events about him started to cause his parents concern that only grew as more and more of his yearmates had outbursts of uncontrolled magic that changed the colour of their hair, caused sugar to coat the walls of their room, sent them floating near the ceiling, or - in one notable case - set their grandmother’s hair on fire. When he hadn’t so much as hiccuped a bubble by his fifth birthday, they started seeing a specialist at St Mungo’s. By his eighth birthday, his parents were telling people he was sickly and couldn’t leave the house – not that many of his previous friend’s still kept in touch as their parent’s carefully nudged them away.

It wasn’t until the September following his 11th birthday passed with no Hogwarts letter that his parents finally gave up hope and acknowledged their son was a squib. They enrolled him at Eton, where their correspondence was patchy at best. When he returned home for the summers, he found his father’s eyes sliding past him as though he were invisible and could see the blame in his mother’s eyes when the owl post came without any invitations to the high society events that used to fly thick and fast. The summer after he turned 17, he withdrew a small sum from the Gringott’s account his father had started when he was born (and eventually given up on adding to), converted it to muggle money, closed his eyes and stabbed at a map –  and went to Oxford instead of going home.

He didn’t exactly have a plan in mind, and what exactly might have occurred had he not walked past Fenwick Bakery and heard the familiar sounds of Welsh spilling into the street is likely a much sorrier tale. As it was, Mrs. Fenwick took one look at the scrawny boy dragging a school chest of books around with him as though it was the only thing he owned in the world (it was) and announced that he needed to be fed (he did). When he politely asked if they could direct him to a boarding house, Camden found himself caught in a whirlwind of activity that ended with him installed in the old study above the shop (“Nae, don’t argue lad. No one’s using it and our Ben went off to the Army last year, he did. Truth is, we could use a hand around the place from time to time.”).

Over the next several years, Camden worked part time at the bakery, put himself through Oxford University, fell in love with the Fenwick’s daughter Elizabeth and married her shortly after her graduation from the police academy (taking her name in the process), moved into the house directly beside the bakery and started a small accounting business which he ran from the same set of rooms above the bakery that he’d lived in previously. He gave little, if any, thought to the world he’d left behind.

Benjy and Anna were born three years later, Benjy following after Anna then as always. Both babies were healthy, alert, and apart from a tendency to cry when separated that the nurse said they’d grow out of, seemed as perfectly normal as sand. It never occurred to Camden, delighted with a life where nobody expected him to perform magic beyond the usual Dad-level magic of making food appear and hurts go away, that maybe magic wasn’t as done with his family as he was with it.

In retrospect, it probably should have.

‘In retrospect’ meaning after he’d walked into the twins’ room to find his toddlers giggling and playing with floating balls of coloured light and then gone and made himself a rather stiff cup of tea and had a bit of a sit down. And then down the street for a pint or two after he realised he was – somehow – going to have to explain the fact that both magic was real and that their children had it to Elizabeth.

For the most part though, the magical outbursts grew less frequent as they aged out of the most emotionally volatile years, although the two always shared a sort of uncanny awareness of each other. If one was out, the other always knew when they were coming home, moving to open the door before the other came into view of any of the windows. When Benjy broke his leg playing soccer in P.E., Anna started crying in her maths class on the opposite side of the school. Sometimes, they’d both wake up from the same dream.

(Camden was rather bemused to find how easily prepared everyone was to write that off. ‘Oh yes,’ they’d nod knowingly, ‘Twins. I know how that is. Why, I once knew a pair who…’)

Benjy, for the most part, was a quiet boy, a little shy and inclined to bookishness. He excelled at his schoolwork, did decently in the under-10s soccer team he joined, and the parents of his friends always commented on how polite he was. He liked spending time in the Bakery, helping Granna Fenwick knead the dough (and to this day still has a tendency to make his bread the muggle way).

Camden had sent one letter to his parents when he arrived in Oxford, another with an invitation to his wedding, and a third when the twins had been born. The first had received a vague set of well-wishes and a half-heartedly unconvincing reminder that he was welcome home; the second a note that they would be out of the country at that time and would be unable to attend (along with a set of magical tupperware that Camden had had to sneak out of the house before anyone attempted to use them) and the third an utterly impersonal congratulations card. Despite this, he wrote another when the twins received their Hogwarts’ letters, thinking they might be able to introduce the twins to some of their schoolmates ahead of time.

The letter he received back didn’t come from his parents at all. It came from their lawyer, with the news that his parents had died two years ago. It also contained the keys to two Gringotts vaults, with a letter explaining that his parents had set up the trusts on the off-chance one or both of their grandchildren should prove to have magic.

And thus went Benjy’s introduction to the Prewett family; they only cared if he had magic.

Anna was Sorted first, and the Hat had barely landed on her head when it sent her to the Hufflepuff table. Benjy’s turn, though, seemed interminably long. He clutched the edge of the stool, and thought longingly of just taking the thing off and going to sit with his sister. “Hufflepuff? Hmm, no, I think not. Oh, they’d take you, certainly, but that’s more about them than you. No, wouldn’t work, it’s all wrong for you. You’d stagnate. Ravenclaw, perhaps…” How long he sat there, balanced on the knife edge between two Houses, he never was certain. And perhaps, if the hat had sent him to Ravenclaw, his life would have followed a different path, an easier one.

A happier one.

Instead, it placed him in Slytherin, for reasons that took him seven years to understand.

Green was not a kind colour for a boy with a muggle name. It was the week before Christmas that things came to a head. Sent sprawling once again in the Charms corridor to a series of sniggers and drawling comments about mudbloods belonging in the dirt, flushed with shame and anger, he snapped back that he wasn’t a mudblood, he was a Prewett.

(It’s nothing compared to the shame that he feels at home, crying into his father’s shoulder because he hadn’t admitted Camden was a squib, had validated the belief that it mattered. He’s too young to know that that’s the root of his shame; all he knows is that somehow, in some way, he’s let his Dad down.

It’s the one and only time he claims the name of Prewett.)

He avoided as much as he could, tucking himself into hidden corners of the library with books and poured himself into his schoolwork to escape the slings and slights still aimed in his direction. The uncertainty of his blood status caused a general lessening in their volume, but the vitriol of those that remained took a nastier edge from those who decided that squib-born was worse than muggle-born.

Benjy… endured. He started to learn, in bits and pieces, to not react, to protect himself with distance.

(The winter break of his second year, he asks his mother how to disarm someone.)

It was his third year that bought a change in his circumstances. It came in two parts – the first, a skilfully convincing performance in duelling club that made several people reconsider certain choices in regards to the quiet boy. The second - an invitation from Slughorn, impressed by the boys skill in potions, to join the Slug Club. Anna was thrilled ( “You’re finally making friends! Oh Benjy!” ); Benjy knew the club was more about connections, and power, and influence – and he’d seen the effect of not having all three far too clearly to turn them down when they were offered.

It didn’t gain him acceptance, it didn’t make him friends, but it achieved what he’d wanted: to be left alone. And as the ice grew thicker and colder around him, he smothered the plaintive, lonely voice that asked if this is what he really wanted, and played the game. He learned to think not just of the moment but the turns and plays that loomed ahead, to manoeuvre his pieces into place.

(He doesn’t see the worry and concern in his family’s eyes as he withdraws even further into himself.)

After graduating with a high score on all of his N.E.W.T.S., Benjy took up an apprenticeship at St. Mungo’s on the recommendations of both Madame Pomfrey (who he had started assisting in the Hospital Wing after a few detentions in his second year) and Professor Slughorn. (Anna, watching her brother disappear each evening behind a towering stack of text books, informed him that he was crazy for extending school by another handful of years. Benjy informed her that she was crazy for hopping on a floating stick of wood for hours a day of risking her neck – and then made her read the sections of his textbook covering broken bones and impact traumas in detail.) He did well, though his bedside manner was noted as an area for improvement.

In the background, though, the war was still brewing, growing darker and grimmer as it went. When Benjy finished his apprenticeship, he strongly argued for moving somewhere else for his residency (to America, Australia… where ever, he didn’t care, as long as it wasn’t in the path of Voldemort). Anna had different plans, plans that were almost entirely opposed to Benjy’s. She didn’t want to leave, she wanted to stay and fight. There was a group, she said, fighting Him. And when they couldn’t fight they tried to help. (And besides, she’d just made first-string Chaser and she wasn’t going to start all over again, thank you very much).

Benjy could out-stubborn most people, but he could never stand up to his sister.  And so he ended up standing impassively behind Anna at their first Order of the Phoenix meeting, apparently unaware of the side-eyes and mutters his presence caused among those who subscribed to the idea that all Slytherins were evil incarnate or full of betrayal. Still, they thawed gradually, as they came back from mission after mission to find Benjy standing there, waiting silently with his medical supplies arranged neatly on the table, and asking no questions other than a few blunt ones about any injuries and their causes.

Benjy remained stiff, because he didn’t want to be ‘alright, for a Slytherin’ or ‘the good Slytherin’. He didn’t want to be the exception that proved the rule to them, he wanted them to realise that the rule itself was wrong. Still, Benjy’s chilly oddness became something familiar, and people started being more open with him about Order activities.

Six months later, Anna stumbled onto a gang of Snatchers going after a Muggle family and tried to intervene. Benjy was in the middle of examining a patient when suddenly he was choking on phantom blood, the taste on his tongue, struggled to draw breath and inhaled liquid instead. His nerves shrieking with agony as electric shocks bounded along them, burning the nerve path searingly as his heart convulsed under crushing weight and he struggled to breath, sight narrowing – and then, abruptly, horrifically, it stopped – and in it’s wake, a gaping emptiness as something that was never supposed to be torn was ripped out of him.

It wasn’t thought, it wasn’t planning, it wasn’t anything other than the purest fear and need and instinct that made him disapparate with no clear destination and nothing but a trace of shared sensation to follow but somehow, somehow, he made it.

She was already dead, left lying in the street with her eyes open. Besides the thin trail of blood escaping her mouth, she might have been simply stunned.

When he walked into the Order’s headquarters and laid her body silently on the table, many thought that would be the last they’d see of either of the Fenwick’s, that Benjy would take the opportunity to leave now that he didn’t have Anna holding him here. But three weeks later, he resurfaced again, still overly pale and with deep bruises under his eyes, in need of a shave. He didn’t talk, or meet anyone’s eyes, simply started to lay out his medical supplies again almost mechanically. (He became more active in meetings, which most ascribed to his sister’s death making things personal – they were right, to an extent, but not only in the way that they thought.)

Three months later, the Ministry fell and Benjy found himself in possession of knowledge that would quickly escalate him to the top of Voldemort’s Most Wanted if anyone knew he had it. Because he not only knew that Dumbledore was alive but how to find him – and the exact details of his injuries and recovery. This also, he found, put him into the odd position of go-between; when he got back from the Order, he’d fill in Dumbledore on what was going on, and in turn he’d try and vaguely guide things in the direction Dumbledore instructed, though he was limited to the occasional nudge here or there or dropping pieces of information that he’d ‘heard from a patient’, lest he give away Dumbledore’s secret.

[fresh-fruit-ninja]

CANADIAN-ISM

CANADIAN-ISM

I would say there could be two sides to a feeling of Canadian-ness in my experience as a consumer of products and media by our favourite, well actually, probably the only big book store in Canada, Indigo-Chapters, or as I nostalgically like to call it, Chapters. The first side, in which relates to my notions of traditional Canadian identity or values and traits I feel I am a part of, and second, that uninhibited, emotional side I have to my identity as a Canadian.  The thing with big cities in my experience is that relaxed feeling is harder to come buy and even in the busiest of cities I find the environment, or the vibes at chapters more relaxing, like in Toronto, which I have been to on some occasions. But more so in my smaller city of London. Since I was young, I get a warm feeling from going to Chapters. Originally with my mother, as a youth we would spend time there. Back then there were couches, bean bag chairs and chairs, as they promoted and wanted people to spend a lot of time sitting and reading and of course, purchasing. Then, with the Starbucks that are inside it became busier and more of a hangout. As I got older and the city grew, with the rampage of students, popularity of Starbucks and purchase by Indigo, I noticed the private spaces, couchies and beanies had mostly disappeared. Now, there is a large shared table with plugs and a few chairs scattered throughout the store. The Starbucks everyday is full and mostly with students, so is the table in the store. But there are still people who relax with a book and a coffee or tea, reading groups and so on. As mentioned above, part of the Canadian-ness I guess I feel is do to the community and people friendly experience that is very much a representation of Canada, who in my view are a friendly people. In my experience, in other countries like USA and Europe people keep more to themselves and are less excited about a random chat with someone.

 I love reading and am a writer and Chapters is a place for me to go when I am feeling “artsy” I will wear my big heavy wool cardigan (hand made in Ireland) 😊and my wool flat cap (from the UK,) have a decaf or tea and read or write. I guess the sense of being a cultural hub for my city is how I feel about Chapters. With the hand-picked books, book clubs and so on, it’s kind of like a library to me, except its more up to date. But as I got older and peered deeper into Chapters, and in this current social climate, I feel more comfortable with it. Now back to the two sides. The Canadian identity part, from my own cultural standpoint, Chapters and Indigo are Canadian made. You knew I was going to say that… The Canadian CEO hand picks many books and showcases us things from a more Canadian spotlight or outlook if you should say. Indigo has stood up for the values of democracy and peace by taking stances on some political issues like women’s rights, public safety and so on. The music they play, as I now know, (because I asked,) is from a purely Canadian company and plays international and Canadian music, which I will discuss later. 

A point made from a Canadian communications research approach takes the position that; “The central unit of knowledge is society rather than the individual.”  Now, if I could push for this point with Chapters and how its programs and media outreach indicate a Chapters communications system which is being representative, or trying to be representative of its key asset, the Canadian consumer, or the collective of Canadian society. Of course, not all Canadians think the same, but culturally there is a suggestion of core Canadian values along within some of its programs; although public libraries are larger, more dispersed…. but they are government entities and… well there is a sense of community…lots of social activities… but in my experience the library doesn’t have the most recent books. 😊 I also like the idea of meeting authors at book signings, and events reading clubs, like the upcoming Canada Day event. Some other events are “Open Panels” with authors in many fields and, yes!! Literary agents!! Others are labeled “In Conversation” where you can chat with a ride range of authors from a world of topics, from fiction to political or social causes. Libraries don’t usually take on socially responsible causes, which is a point I am trying to make here. There is an Ontario and possibly Canadian problem with under funding of social institutions like libraries and as we see on the indigo website with public schools and is another cause Chapters has taken up. (The love of Reading Foundation and Adopt a School) https://www.chapters.indigo.ca/en-ca/lorfaq/ Some other causes which are important to me as a Canadian, which allow me to support Chapters are; Chapters not selling books by that evil German leader, also the CEO has represented Canadian values in her stance of oppression of women in the middle east, and gun safety among others things.

Which brings me to the second part, my favourite part, my passion! Its fun and easy (dumb) just to be proud of anything that says “Canada.” Canadian nationalism has become a tool as well for big interests like commercial and institutional. But a big part of being Canadian is that we are not just a line up of things that say Canada, we are a crochet of values that come together in our acceptance of growth and new experience, and not just a closed ancient tradition which the government is spending millions on to preserve because they fear the new world. Canadian identity, (as much as people try for it to be,) is not a nationalistic propaganda tool, it’s a feature and pinnacle of ours and of world civilization. The commies used to say nationalism is the enemy of the  nation, as they propagated nationalism.

Canadianness is also about one world love and multiculturalism, embracing the experiences and the wealth of knowledge, culture and traditions that we have around the world, which are represented by millions of Canadians.  The Chapters’ customer experience and curated Stingray music does well to my Canadian-ness by not* nationalizing my identity or conforming me to a portrayal of who I am, but rather lets me express myself in all ways human… That being music and arts and media from around the world, and from our diverse Canadian social landscape. That’s why I love Canada! Because being yourself is not being a codified Canadian, or person with only a specific set of so called cultural traits, but rather being a person whose cultural persona is always growing and developing and taking in life and turning it into something that is very much ideally, exemplary and proudly Canadian. For example, a person who likes hockey and hockey only maybe the stereotypical Canadian, but a person who enjoys competitive sports, the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat, and shares his Canadian-ness and cultural identity to other smaller parts of Canadian sport, like soccer or basketball, (in the bigger picture, smaller parts of our national identity) that is what being Canadian is about, bringing the love of the world!!

I really love the Stingray app because its Canadian like Indigo is Canadian, and our values are represented in the media and books to a certain extent, but more subtly, or not over done; but also, we are not closed like other cultures who are so fixated on their ways, whether in defense of any sort of change, or sticking to their so called tried and true traditions. World cultures took centuries to develop, and are closely related to many other cultures, why should they stop growing now? Because of a few stubborn ideals? I think not! Canadians are growing, (maybe because we are a young country) and making a culture which is like no other. People adapt to take on Canadian traits and as Canadians, we can collect and grow our flowers of youthful bountifulness of positivity and optimism, becoming a nation of healthy and happy people who want to flourish as a growing world culture and role-model.

[verndoodles-blog]

What exactly is your hobby? Is it beauty?

A great hobby tip if you are into video games would be to believe about starting a collection.  It really is exciting to appear at an enormous collection of video games, as opposed to promoting them as soon as you beat them.  Some games will appreciate in value also so you will have yourself a great investment.

An incredible hobby to possess is paintball.  It may be really enjoyable to go out into an open paintball field and have a strategic battle along with your loved ones and buddies.  All you should do is buy the appropriate gear, for example a decent paintball gun and also the proper clothing.

In case you usually are not probably the most creative form of person, but you would like a brand new hobby, take into consideration trying out counted cross-stitch. Within this piece of needlework, you merely comply with a pre-printed graph where each square consists of a symbol that relates to a certain colour of thread. Stick to the graph completely along with a attractive image is the finish result.

Use your favorite hobby to balance the load within your life. When we do practically nothing but function, either in the workplace, about the property, or with young children, we deprive ourselves of necessary relaxation and creativity. Set aside time each week for the duration of which it is possible to partake of the favored hobby, as well as the rest of your obligations will really feel less burdensome. 

A very good hobby that quite a few individuals have is reading.  Reading is astounding for the reason that it can transport you into one more globe.  You can also just about read just about anywhere, provided that it really is quiet.  You will find lots of distinct genres too so you are going to be sure to discover one thing that you'll like.

Never limit your hobbies to what you have explored previously. At times you should push yourself in new directions, and hobbies are great for performing just that. The truth is, try a thing out which you would have by no means regarded ahead of. You may be shocked at how enjoyable a brand new hobby can be. 

You could make an effort to make music for a hobby. You are going to just really need to determine what type of instrument you'd prefer to play. After that all you might want to do is train with a person else, or train with videos and books. Start slow and work at it whenever you can and you'll be exactly where you wish to be in no time!

Reading can be a entertaining hobby that anybody can take up. It is an low-cost hobby too, due to the fact you could pay a visit to your neighborhood library and borrow books totally free. You are able to also purchase books at discounted prices at yard sales and book swaps. A exciting solution to share your really like of books would be to join or start off a book club. 

Concentrate on your thrilling new hobby to help relieve stress. If you are capable to give your complete consideration to an activity you definitely delight in, it will be less difficult for you personally to neglect about these points in your life that happen to be causing you pressure. Pick a hobby that exploits your talents and skills even though nonetheless presenting a challenge.

Really feel attractive with: conquista

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Street Fighter 2 is one of the only games that truly deserve to be called "genre-defining" -- today, 25 years after SF2's release, we can see that practically every fighting game out there has adopted its core game design principles as industry-standard gospel, with only a few tweaks here and there to stand out from the crowd.

If you're the average consumer or dev, or even if you're an experienced fighting game competitor, you probably aren't all that familiar with all the games that have tried to make major changes to the fighting game template.

So, in celebration of SF2's 25th anniversary, I'm going to walk through some of the fascinating deviations and beautiful experiments that fighting game devs took to try and change SF2's fighting game formula. Studying these games may inspire you in your own designs, or may suggest ways to tinker with the paradigm you're currently wokring within.

I'm going to try to avoid the other well-known franchises (if you know Street Fighter, you probably also know Mortal Kombat and Tekken) and focus on the weird stuff... for education's sake!

A quick note about me: I've written a (free) book that teaches fighting game fundamentals using Street Fighter, as well as educational fighting game streams and videos, and I'm the community manager for a free-to-play PC fighting game currently in public technical alpha called Rising Thunder. You might also like my previous Gamasutra article, Street Fighter for Designers: Top 8 Lessons from Evo 2015.

Asuka 120% Burning Fest (Fill-in Cafe, 1994): Clash system and simplified inputs

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SF2 may have set the foundations for the 2D fighter genre, but there are several notable games that have poked and prodded at some of the genre's conventions while keeping a similar format.

Shoutouts to ex-Game Developer magazine editor-in-chief Brandon Sheffield for introducing me to Asuka 120% Burning Fest, a Japanese 2D fighter from the post-SF2 boom. Not only did it swap the standard martial-artists-from-around-the-world fighter cast with high school girls representing their various club activities (including the chemistry and biology clubs), but it also made two notable system changes. 

One was the "clash system": in SF2, if two attacks collide simultaneously, both players take damage and go into hitstun, but in Asuka 120%, both characters will just go on into the next hit-phase of the move. The second was a significantly simplified input system -- pretty much everyone has the same special move codes, meaning that if you could perform one character's moves, you could perform all of them.

Combined, both systems made for a fascinating permutation of the SF2 standard. With the clash system, the number of hits in a move are relevant for determining who wins a clash -- and since the window to cancel a move into another move is fairly lax, players can clash across entire combo routes before one of them wins out and takes damage. All told, Asuka 120% does a lot with these relatively simple system tweaks to make a traditional 2D fighting game more accessible and less intimidating without feeling like a lesser SF2. The developers of Asuka 120% Burning Fest eventually went to Treasure, where they reused some of the core concepts in their fighting games.

Weaponlord (Visual Concepts, 1995): An online fighting game in '95

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Others have done good work unearthing Weaponlord's history as an interesting-but-ill-timed attempt by early American fighting game devs to challenge SF2's success, so if you want to know the whole story, check out the GameSpy interview with James Goddard and Dave Winstead, GameSpot's Forging Weaponlord, and the Hardcore Gaming 101 writeup.

From a modern game design perspective, the most notable contribution Weaponlord made to fighting games the active defense system called the "thrust block" -- a versatile parry that served as a high-risk, high-reward defensive option. This a relatively new innovation for the time, but more interesting to contemporary devs is this tidbit from the GameSpot interview with James Goddard, where he mentions that the thrust block was designed with zero-frame startup specifically as a concession to online play via the XBAND dialup peripheral.

That's right: A Super Nintendo game in 1995 was designed around internet play. Personally, as someone currently working on a fighting game built around online multiplayer over broadband, I can't imagine designing a 2D fighting game for ~250ms travel times, yet there they were, handling sync timing and tweaking frame data to make the game playable over a modem. Perhaps it shouldn't be a surprise that Goddard is currently design director on Killer Instinct for Microsoft, a game which has been lauded in core fighting game circles for having better-than-average netcode.

Marvel vs. Capcom 2: New Age of Heroes (Capcom, 2000): The best team fighter

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Capcom had found plenty of success doing crossover fighting games during the late '90s, as their concurrent work on Street Fighter Alpha, Darkstalkers, and various licensed Marvel fighting games gave them plenty of readily reusable assets to keep the games coming. This peaked with Marvel vs. Capcom 2: New Age of Heroes, a three-on-three tag match slugfest so chaotic that even genre veterans could barely parse what is happening on screen at any given time.

Capcom's earlier crossover games (X-Men vs. Street Fighter, Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter, and Marvel vs. Capcom) had treated tag-team two-on-twos much like a similar pro wrestling match: You had one character on the field responding to your controls, and certain moves would allow you to tag them in, summon them for a brief assist attack, or perform a joint hyper combo together. MvC2 largely kept the same basic structure, but the addition of a third team member shifted the emphasis toward developing teams that synergized effectively between the three.

The ideal MvC2 team must take into account how well any given character can use the other two assists; how much super meter the team needs to build for each character to do its job, and how long it'll take to generate that meter before the opponent does; how well the team can recover from opponent-inflicted forced tag-outs (called "snapbacks"); and several other factors before even considering how effective the player is at controlling any of their characters individually.

It's a strange testament to MvC2's design that even though competitive play revolves around roughly 1/5th of the 56-character cast, the dozens of permutations available with just those characters are enough to have kept the game interesting for over a decade. The net effect is that MvC2, by virtue of its three-on-three format, has gotten the closest out of any fighting game to a compelling competitive 'build-your-own-character' mode.

Guilty Gear (Arc System Works, 1998): The 2D fighter for people who love 2D fighters

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As Guilty Gear is still very much alive and kicking, I'll keep this brief. With GG and its sister series BlazBlue, Arc System Works has forgotten more about traditional 2D fighting games than most studios will ever begin to explore. Each GG character is practically its own fighting game at this point, often with resources and mechanics that exist only for that specific character -- and they're bound together by a set of core shared systems and mechanics that would be enough to populate five Street Fighters. If you're ever trying to design a character for pretty much anything, it's worth your time to dig through the GG library, because ASW probably did something like that way before you did.

Highlights include: Bridget, a young boy dressed as a nun who fights with a yo-yo that must be carefully placed and moved across the screen; Zato-1, a blind assassin who fights by summoning his shadow (which responds to the player's joystick inputs and button releases, meaning the player must simultaneously handle two characters with one controller, and time their button presses and releases appropriately); Venom, another assassin who lays pool balls across the screen to create intricate setups off their chain collisions; and most recently, Jack-O, whose minion-summoning mechanics draw more from a MOBA than a fighting game.

Bushido Blade (Light Weight, 1997): Real-enough samurai duels

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One frequent criticism of traditional fighting games is that they don't look or feel like a real fight does, leading a handful of developers to build games aiming for a more realistic experience without getting into the sporty nature of a Fight Night or UFC game.

When I put the call out on Twitter for suggestions for this list, Bushido Blade was hands-down the most frequent response. Instead of street fighting, Bushido Blade aimed to recreate the thrill of a samurai duel by breaking out from the 2D plane into free-roaming 3D environments and designing a realistic damage system; you could block or parry, but if you ate a clean hit it was either going to injure a limb or kill you outright.

When most fighting games were going for more systems, more characters, more stylized graphics, more combos, and generally digging itself deeper in a hole of genre esoterica, Bushido Blade felt simple and clean. Interestingly enough, its legacy is best felt not in any major triple-A fighting game, but in indie games Nidhogg and Divekick.

Fighters Destiny (Genki, 1998): Point-sparring in a fighting game

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Of all the core design elements to mess with, Fighters Destiny arguably picked the most-core element to change. Rather than determine a victor using health bars, Fighters Destiny implemented a point system inspired somewhat by competitive karate, where players would fight until one scored a point by inflicting a ring out, knockdown, or other specific conditions, at which point the action would reset and the fight would resume.

Fighters Destiny certainly didn't leave any lasting impacts on the genre overall, but it's certainly an experiment worth considering further. Contemporary fighting games built around life meters and the best-two-of-three rounds system make it easy to snowball early advantages into a victory, because players have to earn a mid-round reset by doing something to get the opponent off their back and into a neutral state, at which point the defending player is forced to play aggressively and make bigger bets to win the round from a life deficit. With the point sparring model, you get to emphasize the players' jousting for superiority from a neutral state over their ability to snowball a small advantage into a bigger one, leading to more exciting matches for competitors and spectators alike.

Buriki One: World Grapple Tournament '99 in Tokyo (SNK, 1999): 2D MMA

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Buriki One is a curious one. Where SNK's core lay in their 2D fighter pantheon (King of Fighters and Fatal Fury, among others), Buriki One was an attempt to tie the outlandish characters of a typical fighting game into a game that felt more like Pride, the Japanese mixed martial arts event promotion that swept the country in the late '90s and early 2000s. (Ryo Sakazaki from Art of Fighting actually shows up as a playable character!)

What we end up with in Buriki One is a game that looks like a sports-fighting game, like any pro wrestling, boxing, or MMA game, but plays on a 2D plane. Part of this change entailed swapping the attack controls to the joystick (up for a heavy, slow attack, down for a quick, light attack, and toward for a medium attack) and the movement controls to two buttons that move your fighter left or right.

Given the realistic setting, this actually makes a certain amount of sense, especially if you think of Buriki One as an attempt to convert Pride fans to fighting games. If your goal is to simplify a core fighting game experience, it makes sense to try focusing less on the importance of positioning in a 2D plane, which is often hard for new players to learn and understand, and more on interactions between the different attacks.

Virtua Fighter (Sega, 1993): Welcome to the third dimension...kind of    

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Bringing fighting games to the third dimension is not a trivial task, particularly because the established genre conventions call for the arcade-standard eight-way joystick and buttons to be used for both inputting move codes and navigating space. Once you've solved those problems, though, you still kind of need to figure out how to use the third dimension to, well, add depth to the actual fighting experience.

Sega's Virtua Fighter was the first fighting game to try 3D -- though when it comes to the actual gameplay, the devs kept it to fighting in a 2D plane until Virtua Fighter 3 introduced the sidestep mechanic to the series. VF's biggest contribution to the genre was arguably designing movesets around three buttons (punch, kick, and block) and a simpler set of motions -- usually combinations of single-direction inputs and button presses, often used in preset chains.

This made learning a character's moveset less about complicated joystick execution and more about memorizing a wider set of context-specific moves, which later turned out to be useful for freeing up the joystick so players could use it to more easily navigate a 3D space. Also, Virtua Fighter added ring-outs as another win condition; knocking your opponent off the platform immediately wins you the round.

Battle Arena Toshinden (Tamsoft, 1995): Sidestepping

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Battle Arena Toshinden was another one of the early 3D fighting games -- and that's usually the main thing people remember it for. However, it is generally recognized as the first fighting game to work in all three dimensions via the sidestep mechanic, where players can use the L and R shoulder buttons to dodge projectiles without sacrificing position. Most 3D fighting games now use different permutations of a sidestep, though DreamFactory's Tobal No. 1 was notable for using more of a free-roam style navigation system.

Soul Calibur (Namco, 1999): Full movement with eight-way run

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Namco had made a splash in 3D fighting games with both Tekken and Soul Edge, but the difference between the two games was mostly thematic (contemporary martial arts vs. fantasy weapon fighting) until its sequel Soul Calibur. Soul Calibur was arguably one of the first games to truly embrace all three dimensions; in addition to the simple sidestep, many attacks often included Z-axis movement as part of the animation, and players could actually shift into an eight-way-run movement stance that gave you access to a different subset of moves. The end result was that Soul Calibur felt like an excellent compromise between the samurai fantasy of Bushido Blade's free-roaming duels and a traditional fighting game.

Cyber Troopers Virtual-On (Sega, 1995): Mobility in sustained projectile fights

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When we look back at the fighting game canon, one thing stands out about SF2 and its numerous sequels: Projectile attacks are very, very important. Indeed, most of the subsequent Street Fighter series are largely defined by the systems they implement in order to avoid non-stop douken-fests. However, many later games decided to double down on projectiles, space control, and precision movement as the focal point of a one-on-one duel while feeling closer in spirit to a classic fighting game than, say, a first-person shooter.

At first glance, Virtual-On doesn't look like it has much in common with a classic fighting game; yes, it is one-on-one and uses health meters, but it's about robots dashing around in an arena blowing each other up, not people punching each other in the face. Spend some time with any of the Virtual-On games, though, and you'll find that it fits in far better with fighting games than any other genre. It doesn't emphasize aiming or weapon selection enough to feel like a shooter, nor is it about tactical positioning and attrition like a typical mech or tank sim.

Instead, the game is about attacking to force your opponent to dodge by dashing or jumping, then punishing your opponent for dashing or jumping while they're trying to counter attack and force you to move. When it comes down to it, Virtual-On is basically the Ryu fireball/Dragon Punch trap expanded into a 3D robot dueling game.

Touhou Suimusou: Immaterial and Missing Power (Tasogare Frontier / Team Shanghai Alice, 2004): Bullet hell 2D fighter

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In 2004, Japanese doujin devs took bullet hell series Touhou into 2D fighter-land with Touhou Suimusou: Immaterial and Missing Power (commonly abbreviated as IaMP). While the game appears to resemble any other anime-styled fighting game, it's actually built largely around projectile attacks (hence the bullet hell roots) and the "graze" mechanic, where most projectiles can be dashed through -- meaning that the traditional attack-block-throw triangle in fighting games is instead largely replaced by ranged attacks, mobility, and physical attacks.

Senko no Ronde (G.rev, 2005): Even more bullet-hell than IaMP

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If IaMP and Virtual-On gently push projectile combat to the center of the game, Senko no Ronde goes full-on bullet hell, complete with a change in perspective to a flat top-down 2D plane and the ability to temporarily transform your robot fighter into a giant boss form. The combat mechanics draw from a similar pool as Virtual-On, as well -- it's largely about using projectiles to force movement to open up more opportunities for damage.

It's worth noting that lots of other games have played in this space, to varying degrees: Taito's Psychic Force, Sunsoft's Astra Superstars, the Dragon Ball Z games by Dimps, and the Naruto: Clash of Ninja games by Eighting are some of the more notable examples.

Yuu Yuu Hakusho: Makyou Touitsusen (Treasure, 1994): Four players, two layers

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One-on-one is great, but what happens when we try to add more players to the party? These games open up the action to more players, which introduces control challenges, since you no longer can rely on the opponent-relative movement scheme that traditional fighting games use.

Yuu Yuu Hakusho: Makyou Touitsusen was another one of those Treasure games that was way better than anyone ever expects from licensed anime games -- unfortunately, since Yuu Yuu Hakusho didn't have a whole lot of clout in the U.S. at the time, we never got it here. The game was built around two-to-four-player combat, which they pulled off by borrowing Fatal Fury's two-layer stage design -- players can hop between a foreground plane and a background plane. Of course, this gets a bit tricky if you're working in the SF2 template.

Since Yuu Yuu Hakusho was designed for the Genesis, Treasure had to build a compelling fighting game around a three-button controller (which was more than Capcom was able to do; the Street Fighter II: Championship Edition release on the Genesis was meant to use a special six-button controller, and if you had a three-button controller you had to press the Start button to alternate between punches and kicks). They started by opening up the movement system so you could freely look in either direction, and simplified the input codes to only use down and forward in special moves, meaning that players didn't have to worry about facing the wrong direction in the process of executing a special move. Also, the three buttons were mapped to Light Attack, Heavy Attack, and Guard -- after all, SF2's hold-back-to-block system doesn't really make sense if you have an opponent on both sides of you.

The end result is a game that feels much better than you'd expect a four-player SF2 to feel. Fortunately, it wasn't just a one-off; the core design work was later recalled in Treasure's Bleach DS games, which are also excellent and worth checking out.

Super Smash Brothers (HAL Laboratory, 1999): A platforming fighting game

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In 2016, Super Smash Bros. Melee and Super Smash Bros. for Wii U tournaments are routinely topping the Twitch stream charts, so it can be easy to forget that Smash's status as a fighting game was contested for a long, long time. After all, changing the static 2D box arena out for levels that feel more like the original Mario Bros. and losing the health bars for the damage percentage mechanic essentially pull out two design elements so core to fighting games most players never even thought to question them.

It's fair to say that the standard four-player party mode, with items aplenty and stages that kill you rather often, don't really feel consistent or rigorous enough to encourage players to play it competitively. That's why the truly defining innovation in Smash isn't the levels, or the movement, or the simplified controls -- it's the way the team created a play space that is rich enough to sustain both party play and serious competition, and made the options available for the players to determine for themselves what they want out of it. Honestly, Smash wasn't a fighting game until the players made it a fighting game.

Power Stone (Capcom, 1999): Like Smash in 3D

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I'd be remiss in including Smash in this list and not also giving Capcom's Power Stone a shoutout; it was another party fighting game with items, engaging levels, and simplified inputs, but unlike Smash, it featured a free-roaming 3D arena. While it's certainly fun to hop around the various levels beating up your buddies, the tradeoff to free-roaming 3D in a party fighter is that the devs relied on a rather high level of auto-targeting in the attacks, which kind of diluted the player's feeling of mastery after a certain point.

Rakugaki Showtime (Treasure, 1999): If dodgeball was a fighting game

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Shoutouts to Ian Adams for pointing me in the direction of an interesting, obscure contender for the party fighter throne: Rakugaki Showtime, by Treasure. Like Power Stone, it takes place in an open 3D arena, but the combat is built more around projectiles, leading to a game that feels like dodgeball without the center dividing line. Play it to admire the scribbly, sketchy aesthetic and see how Treasure used targeting lines to visualize aiming projectiles in a 3D space.

***

Patrick Miller is a writer, fighter, and community manager for Rising Thunder. You can find him on Twitter, Facebook, Twitch, and YouTube. Or just sign up for his monthly mailing list.

Special thanks to Brandon Sheffield, Ian Adams, Andres Velasco y Coll, Bellreisa, Chris Pruett, Luis Garcia, and everyone else who suggested not-SF2 fighting games. Also, shoutouts to the poverty FGC for keeping this knowledge alive and kicking.