#but everything else was a perfect 15 which is cool

[artificer-dice]

It's so glassy!

3 makes a success! This one took a bit longer since it took two tries but it worked!

[inkskinned]

she says he won't let her get a dog, which is fine, because they're in an apartment, and that's the kind of thing people say about their partners. he won't let me get a dog. and you're at a dinner party and you tilt your head a little to the side just like that dog he won't let her get, because is this the thing that's going to upset you? you don't know every corner of their relationship, she could be joking, they could have had so many healthy conversations about the dog, right, and maybe she's not letting herself get the dog because of money and time and whatever. but, like, she did say let

and she wants to move away from his hometown and he wants to stay and then he tells you with a wink and a conspiratorial stage whisper don't worry i'll convince her and she laughs about it - so clearly this is something they laugh about. but you do just stand there and stare at him like what the fuck, man. you can't say what you want to say which is why do you get the final say on everything because they're both obviously aware of the other person's stance on this and have obviously had private conversations about it and what are you going to do about it except make a scene and then he'll be mad at you and call you one of those bitches behind your back and she'll cut you off, which is a loss that doesn't feel worth it just because he makes you a little skeeved out every 3rd comment

and they both agree he just isn't the type to get flowers which is fine because everyone shows love differently, and are you really gonna judge someone based on their sense of individual relationship responsibility? maybe he's constantly cleaning her car and writing her poems and making her furniture or something. maybe she doesn't even like flowers and this is perfect, actually. and no you couldn't date him, obviously, ew; but like, she tells you she's happy. you almost send her a tiktok that says don't be 25 and the cool girl that doesn't need anything, you'll hate not getting flowers at 30, but that's like, starting drama & you shouldn't start drama needlessly.

and you're a little older than her but not so much older you can pull the whole trust me on this one babe thing and besides that wouldn't have worked anyway (when does it ever) and besides you have trauma so you and your therapist both agree that you're always looking for a problem even when there isn't one. and you tell yourself that just because you see them for 15 minutes every month does not mean you can identify every single red flag based on a single shitty half-joking(?) comment

and besides, what are you going to do? she says i actually wanted another stand mixer but thankfully he stops me when i'm about to spend too much money and you're standing there like are you okay? is this normal? is this just something people say? and again - what are you going to do?

to your therapist you try to language it - it's not, like, any of my business. but sometimes, doesn't it feel like - you should do something. there's got to be something, right? you've tried dropping little hints but they sail right through and you've tried having a single serious conversation and she got upset because why does it matter to you, yes it's different but we're happy, it doesn't need to make sense to you and you're like. really unwilling to push a boundary about it anymore; because the truth is that you know logically it shouldn't matter to you, as long as both parties are happy.

and besides, you've been wrong before. it's just... like, every time you see them both, something else happens, some kind of shiver down your spine like do you even hear each other when you talk. it's their strange, bickering orbit. just the way he's on his phone through dinner or watching sports instead of helping in the kitchen or, fuck, another one of these little throwaway comments he makes about we'll see about that, babe. she laughs when he calls her passions stupid shit and meanwhile she gets him tickets to see the knicks and he tells you well at least she's smart about something and still! it's none of your business.

you say get the dog anyway and she laughs. like, this is is you being funny. and not you saying - no really. get the dog. get the dog and get out of here. pack up and start running.

[melminli]

Cold Coffee

pairing: young coriolanus snow x fem. reader

summery - you liked working, and someone else liked you working for them.

word count: 2k+

contains: young president coryo, crack, fluff, secretary reader, coryo being lovesick and shy

You had a routine. A routine that you strictly followed every day and it started with your alarm clock waking you up at 5 o'clock in the morning. The first thing you did was get up and go to the bathroom to wash the sleep off your face, otherwise you couldn't get anything done. After you had finished everything else concerning your hygiene, you continued with your outfit of the day.

You liked to play around a bit when it came to your fashion choices. After all, you were living in the Capitol. Your job still demanded a certain formality and professionalism, which is why you were perhaps not as free in your choice as others, but that wasn't a problem for you. You always managed to find something elegant to wear since you had all kinds of clothing in different colors and fabrics that were perfect for combining with various other items. Whether vests, suit jackets, skirts, trousers or everything all together, it was entirely up to your mood. (Even though combining everything together was something you hadn't done since your school days at the academy.).

Then the last thing left missing was your hair and maybe some make-up, before you could step out of the house with your pre-packed bag. After a 15-minute drive in your car, you would arrive a few minutes early and were able to go about your duties as planned until it was time to leave at around 4 pm (if you were lucky).

You've been doing this every day for three years. Every day. That may sound exhausting (because it is), but you were also kind of happy about it since missing work would just mean that you had more to do on the following one. You rarely got sick, but when you did it was usually nothing serious so you came to work anyway. On the two rare occasions when you were really seriously ill, you were once off work and once you were lucky (or unlucky) that it was at the time of several public holidays. So yes, you haven't missed a single day of work - until today.

Your alarm clock died in the middle of the night.

"...huh - what's happening?" You asked, slightly drowsy, and it felt like you'd been asleep for far too long, a suspicious amount of long. Your eyes glanced at the clock on your wall, and you had to concentrate to keep the image from blurring. "...It's a quarter past seven." You finally realized, before widening your eyes and jumping out of bed. "It's a quarter past seven! I'm going to be late!"

In your stress to get ready quickly, you decided to get dressed first and quickly picked something out before scurrying to the bathroom to get ready. That was your mistake because while being a bit too hectic when brushing your teeth, you were clumsy enough to get toothpaste on your shirt. "No, no, no - ugh. I can't believe this." You whined and hurried so you could change again.

Hair? fine, make-up? Fuck it - okay, just go out and get in the car. At this point, you were already a whole hour late. When you arrived at the place where your car was supposed to be and couldn't see it, you started to panic and it didn't stop when you realized why. It's in the repair shop! Why, does this have to happen to me?!

"Okay, let's calm down for a minute." You said to yourself and took a deep breath of the cold morning air. It was quiet, only the chirping of the birds could be heard, it was still early in the morning. "That's just the way it is now. I'll just let someone know I'll be late and - " You said and took out your phone, only to realize that it was dead. This all was probably due to a power cut in the night, which also explained why your alarm clock wasn't working this morning. " - alright, I won't do that then. It's cool. Everything's cool."

Your day was off to a pretty bad start already. It would take you at least half an hour to get to work with the train, and you'd have to wait another half an hour since the last one left five minutes ago according to your watch. Yes, the morning commute wasn't exactly popular in the Capitol - the people here usually preferred to sleep in.

"You know what? I'm just going to treat myself to my favorite drink in my favorite café. I really can't do this right now." You finally decide and set off a little more relaxed. "I would argue that I don't get paid enough for this, but I actually get paid pretty well." You admitted but didn't care any more than to laugh about it.

Of course, no one would assume that the secretary to the president of Panem would get a bad wage.

Hm. Coriolanus looked at his watch again. His eyes had been darting there strangely often since this morning. Well, he didn't see you at all today, and normally you would greet him on the way to his office, and he would greet you back. After a while, you would come through the door and ask if he wanted coffee while you were already carrying it to him in your hand. This was followed by a little summary from you about what appointments he had today, who he was meeting and so on - it's not that important, the point is that he hasn't seen you yet and he didn't know why.

He got up from his seat and opened the door of his office to look out, but like before, you weren't sitting in your seat at the reception desk.

He then decided to look for his nearest employee. "Excuse me, Mr. Pox. I hope I'm not interrupting anything. " He announced his presence as he knocked lightly on the open door with his knuckles.

The man immediately stood up slightly nervously in order to appear respectful. He was older than Coriolanus, but he also wasn't the president. "You're not interrupting anything, sir! How can I help you?" He asked, a little confused. Oh no, he never asks me anything personally, I hope it's nothing serious. I'm not in trouble, am I?

Coriolanus reassured him as he subtly asked his question. "Well, I was just wondering where my secretary was. You wouldn't happen to know anything about her whereabouts?" He said, thinking it was a little stupid of him for not wanting to appear conspicuous. She works for me. I have the right to know where she is. This is not in any way inappropriate.

Pox was relieved when it turned out that this wasn't about him, but immediately felt a little guilty because you seemed to be in trouble. You were his nicest colleague, he liked you a lot. But I can't just lie to the president either. He's literally the president! He'll certainly find out if I do. "No, sir. Unfortunately not, she didn't tell me anything." He replied and just watched as the man in front of him hummed absently, which is why he quickly added. "Maybe she's just late?"

If that were the case, you'd already be three hours late. That was not like you, and Coriolanus began to subconsciously worry a little. She would let me know if she was going to be late. He thought to himself until he realized that you had never been late before, so he couldn't be too sure of his theory. Because that was what it was - just a theory. "Hm. All right, thanks for your time, see you then." He said goodbye to Pox and decided to go back to his office.

There wasn't really anything else he could do - well, except maybe call you. He stopped his steps for a moment at the thought. That feels wrong. Usually, you were the one who called him regularly or barged into his office so he didn't really have to. Well, sometimes he wanted to, but he doubted you would appreciate it if he contacted you after your working hours. He sometimes wished that his thoughts of you would end with your departure, but he hadn't really been successful yet, and for god's sake, he didn't know why. Well, I do - but it's complicated. She's my secretary and this isn't a stupid rom com.

He saw you all day. That is enough. It should be enough. It wasn't like he was looking forward to monday or anything since you started working for him - well, he was, but that was because of other things, for sure. It could be because of other things, he could find joy in other things.

"Oh, Mr. Snow. There you are." Your voice surprised him as he opened the door to his own office and was greated with your face in front of his. "I wanted to talk to you, but then you weren't here. I'm sorry I got in without your permission." You apologized sincerely and took a step to the side so he could enter.

"It's all good. You don't need to apologize." Coriolanus said calmly and sat down in his seat, subtly watching you move in front of his desk. "What is it?" He asked, appearing unaffected - as if he hadn't been thinking about you and what you were doing since this morning.

You looked slightly confused. "Well, I'm three hours late for work." You announced, sure that he would have noticed. "I know this can't be excused, and I'll get straight to work to make up for it, I promise. It's just that my car has a few issues and, well..." You assured him and placed a paper cup on his table. "I know I usually bring you coffee, and this is not the expensive one from here, but from my favorite café around the corner, but well..." You started rambling a bit and were a little more talkative than usual, which didn't go unnoticed. "...It also got cold on the way, and I spilled half of it because someone ran into me on the train." You added when you noticed how his gaze shifted to the stain at your side.

"Sounds like you had a pretty exciting morning. It's all right, don't worry, I'll turn a blind eye since it's the first time." Coriolanus replied with his slightly charming smile. You usually told him so little about your personal life that he unconsciously began to appreciate the little things he got to hear from you.

Like no, he didn't want to hear another stupid story about Mr. Aliose and his fucking hamsters. He almost felt sorry for the guys patheticness, maybe he could live a happier life if he put more effort into finding a wife than getting his pet to do a roll. Or from his other employees who tried to entertain him with uninteresting personal stories he didn't care about - because he didn't care about them.

And the one person he did actually want to hear from, kept their personal and work life very separate. He hated that it wasn't the other way around.

You nodded. "You don't even know. I don't expect you to drink this, by the way. As a matter of fact, I'll make you another one right now. It's just that - I worked really hard to get this to you, and it felt wrong to just throw it in the trash in the end." You let that bit out before returning to your professional self. "I just wanted that at least one thing would go right today."

Stay cool, Coriolanus. Don't freak out, and also, stop romanticizing this. "It's all good. I'm honored that you thought of me." He said, hoping he sounded natural.

A smile graced your face. "Of course, Mr. Snow. I'll be right back." You promised him as you stepped out of his office and made your way to the coffee machine.

As soon as the door closed behind you, Coriolanus let out the breath he had been holding. His hand reached for the coffee cup and turned it in his hand only to discover a small note on it. "For my boss and the boss of Panem :)" He read out loud and smiled as his thumb ran over the drawing of the snowflake. He couldn't help but take the little gesture to heart. "That's so sweet."

I should send out a car to pick her up tomorrow - for business reasons, of course.

[pangur-and-grim]

something I’ve learned from querying: everything has a million subcategories, and it is crucial to actually learn then.

like when I first started, I thought an agent listing ‘speculative fiction’ in their interests was enough to give me a shot! but now it’s like ok. but does that actually mean fantasy (as opposed to science fiction or surrealism)? and if it does, is it constrained to one of the following:

high fantasy

low fantasy

grounded fantasy 

magical realism

etc.

and if fate is smiling on me and it is high fantasy, what sort do they like? because mine starts as a medieval George R R Martin clone before morphing into a post-apocalyptic sci fi, so they have to simultaneously be alright with a) cliched shit and b) experimental weird shit.

and say everything aligns, and that genre works for them - even then, they often accept it only in one or two age categories. there’s mg, ya, na (middle grade, young adult, new adult) and adult. mine is adult, which is a huge strike against it given the genre. 

AND THEN! AND THEN! say everything else is perfect. they love high fantasy with elves and unicorns, they want it for adults, they’re cool with genre bending, but in their profile is a phrase I’ve learned to dread: “HEA (which stands for happily every after) required”. I love my little book, but it is dark and full of terrible people.

and then I also have to hope that they’re into queer romance, on top of everything else! it’s a hard process.

currently I have 45 queries sent, 15 rejections, and 30 unknowns, and I think a good portion of those rejections are because I didn’t initially understand that ‘accepts speculative fiction’ shouldn’t be taken literally.

[amhrosina]

The Artist and the Sea (Namor x f!Reader)

MASTERLIST // JOIN MY TAGLIST

Requests are open - slowing working my way through them!

Part 2

A/N: Hello Nonnie! Thank you for requesting! It inspired me, and I couldn’t not write it as soon as I saw it. Also, let's pretend we can't see the spears being pointed at Namor in this gif lol. (Again, if any of the Yucatec Maya to English translations are off, please let me know!)

Request: tbh it's my first time requesting something regarding the marvel fandom but can i request a namor x fem reader where they meet at the beach when the reader is painting the landscape of the ocean? if you don't understand or don't want to write this, it's okay <333

Summary: You meet a stranger on the beach who takes an interest in your paintings, which somehow puts you in the position of painting the King of Talokan’s portrait. 

(Warnings: not a lot?, the kisses gets a little steamy, Namor is a little touch starved, WING TOUCHING!!!!!, no smut (nonnie didn’t specify and I didn’t want to deliver hardcore smut to someone who didn’t want it lol), reader doesn’t speak Namor’s language but loves the nicknames anyways, I think that’s it???) 

Translations:  

ki'ichpam artista – beautiful artist 

pétalo – petal 

ch'ujuk ch'úupalo' – sweet girl 

princesa – princess

The light reflecting off the ocean was a blinding blue, and you had been trying to blend your paint together to mimic the color for 15 minutes already. You grunted with displeasure as your paintbrush stained three shades too dark. Today was a day for painting. The wind wasn’t blowing too hard, the weather was the perfect mix of cool, but not too cold, and the tides were relatively consistent. When you’d walked out onto your back porch earlier this morning and laid your eyes on the little slice of the beach you owned, it almost felt like an invitation.  

Now, you were regretting your decision to lug all of your paint supplies out of your tiny studio and down the beach. You rolled your eyes, tossing the palette down onto the old blanket you used to keep any stray paint from spilling onto the beach. You dipped a clean brush into the tan color you had mixed earlier and began working on creating the right texture for the sand.  

The beach was mostly empty today, but even during tourist season, there wasn’t much foot traffic this far down the beach. Your grandmother’s house was a small, but cozy cabin-like home, nestled in a small cove that only locals knew about. You had spent many summers here, tucked away in your little slice of heaven, painting anything and everything you saw. When your grandmother had passed away, the deed of the house was transferred to you, and suddenly you were a homeowner.  

You had transformed the inside after moving in, turning the office into an art studio, and transforming the bedroom into a library. Your bedroom, if you could call it that, was actually the living room with tapestries hung up as makeshift walls. You didn’t mind, and neither did anyone else. Or they wouldn’t, you thought, if anyone happened to come by.  

You sat back on your stool, looking between the sand around you and your canvas. The texture was coming along nicely, and you grinned at your work. Landscapes had never been your forte – most of your commissions were oil portraits – but you had been working on expanding your skills over the last few months.  

“You are an artist?”  

An unfamiliar voice startled you from your concentration, and you furrowed your brow at the intrusion. You weren’t one to hog the beach, but you’re clearly a busy woman that didn’t want to be bothered. You leaned around the canvas, intent on staying silent and ignoring the man, but did a double take when you made eye contact with the man.  

He was undoubtably beautiful, and definitely not a local. His body was adorned with beautifully carved artifacts draping across his chest and shoulders, and the only actual article of clothing he wore was a pair of green shorts. You glanced down at the light flutter at his ankles, which had small wings sprouting from the sides of them. You brought your eyes back up, not wanting him to catch you staring, but the stranger hadn’t taken his eyes off you since you’d acknowledged him.  

“I’m a...what?” You asked, blinking. You’d been so distracted by his sudden appearance that you’d forgotten the question he’d asked.  

“You are an,” he nodded to the canvas in front of you, “artist. Yes?”  

“Yes.” You nodded, standing from your stool. “But I am not very good at landscapes.”  

He walked around you, facing the canvas and looking over it with a prompt shake of his head.  

“This is beautiful. You are very good.”  

“Oh.” You mumbled, ringing your hands together. “Thanks.”  

You could feel your cheeks heating at his compliment, and you didn’t want to know why his compliments were getting such a rise out of you. This man was a complete stranger, and his opinions on your art should not have gotten that reaction out of you.  

“You are not reacting to me the way I thought you would.”  

You stared at your half-finished canvas harder, refusing to look in his eyes again, as you mulled over his statement. Yes, this was definitely the strangest encounter you’d ever experienced, but you lived in a universe where Avengers seemed to be popping up in every city, so the idea of a man from the sea appearing on your beach wasn’t as farfetched as it sounded. He was clearly a powerful being, but you weren’t afraid of him, or his power for that matter.  

“How did you think I would react?” You finally asked, peeking at him in your peripheral.  

“I am not sure. This is my first time approaching a surface dweller like this.”  

“Surface dweller?” You scoffed, finally meeting his gaze.  

He had a small smile on his face. “You dwell...amongst the surface. Do you not?”  

“I’m assuming you dwell amongst something else?” Your eyes flicked towards the sea and then back at him. 

“You assume correctly.” He dipped his head in a nod, adjusting his stance to face you. “I am Namor.”  

You tested the name on your tongue, repeating it under your breath. Your gaze ran across his broad chest, trying to gauge the colors of paint you would mix to paint the golden-brown hues of his skin. 

“Can I paint you, Namor?”  

The words were out of your mouth before you could stop yourself. He was just so pretty, and the artist in you couldn’t deny how beautiful the painting would turn out.  

“You want to paint me?” He furrowed his brows, but the grin on his face grew slightly.  

“Yes,” you responded quickly, nodding your head with vigor, “I would like to paint you.”  

He was silent for a few moments, before shrugging his shoulders in a very human motion. “Okay, ki'ichpam artista. You may paint me.”  

- 

Your portrait of Namor would take you a few weeks, maybe even a month to complete. You wanted to highlight his strength and the unbridled power he possessed, but you also wanted to emphasize his beauty. Namor would have to visit you many times for you to get every detail just right, and the thought of that sent an excited flurry of butterflies through your stomach. You thought about taking a photo of him, to speed the process along, but quickly decided against it. It’s not every day that a girl gets to sit with a God, let alone paint one. 

The first visit was mostly a sketch session, and you spent the vast majority of the time studying Namor’s features, sketching a few lines, and then erratically erasing different areas of the canvas. Namor sat patiently, watching you mumble under your breath as you captured the angles of his face. He wasn’t used to being studied so closely but being under your careful eye didn’t make him uncomfortable.  

“Why did you become an artist?” Namor asked as you looked between your canvas and his face.  

“Because I love art.” You murmured, squinting at the line you’d just drawn. 

Namor smiled, and you ignored the fluttery feeling in your chest.  

“I know that pétalo. I meant, why do you love art?” 

You glanced up at him, studying the way his lips curled when he smiled. You began sketching again before you answered him.  

“Art brings people together, you know? That’s super cliché, but I guess it’s true.” You shrugged. “Languages are complex. They cause confusion and barrier us from other cultures. But art is a form of communication that doesn’t have those boundaries. Everyone can look at a painting and understand it at its very core, even if they interpret it differently.”  

Namor nodded, leaning back on his hands in the sand. You had a sneaky feeling that not many people got to see Namor in this relaxed state and took a mental picture of it so you could sketch it later.  

“You have a very pretty way of saying things pétalo.”  

You blushed, focusing on the angle of his pointed ears on your canvas.  

- 

It wasn’t until your third session with Namor that he began opening up about his home in Talokan. He told you about his people, and how most of the world didn’t know of their existence due to his vigorous efforts to protect them. You had an overwhelming sense that Namor’s pride lay in the ruling of his people, and that he would do anything to protect them.  

While he described his homelands to you, you snuck another peek at his ankles. You’d have to ask him for a closer look eventually. The only way you could do them justice in your painting was by touching them, but you didn’t know how to ask. 

“You can...touch them, if you need to, pétalo.” 

You looked up, stiffening with guilt. You didn’t know what to say to that.  

“You cannot hurt me. I promise.” He nudged his foot out, urging you to touch them. 

You nodded slowly, softly setting your paintbrush down and standing from your seat. You kneeled down beside him, leaving a trail of featherlight touches along the inside of one of the wings. The texture was unlike anything you’d ever felt before, and you couldn’t help the second stroke you left across the back of the wing.  

Namor inhaled sharply and you pulled your hand away, looking up at him with concern.  

“Did I hurt you?” you asked, squeezing your hands together. 

“No, ch'ujuk ch'úupalo'. They are very...sensitive.”  

“Oh. Oh.” You stood up, swiftly turning to walk back towards your canvas, when his hand lightly wrapped around your wrist, stopping you.  

“It’s okay, pétalo. No one has touched them in many years. It was a feeling I had forgotten, that’s all.” His eyes shone bright with ease, and the soft smile on his lips was comforting.  

You nodded, returning his smile. You noticed that he hadn’t let go of your wrist, even though it was clear you weren’t moving away from him anytime soon.  

“Were you born with them?” You asked, looking up at his tall frame.  

“Yes. And these, too.” He pointed at his ears, and you couldn’t help it when you reached forward, running a fingertip along their edge.  

“Beautiful.” You murmured under your breath, leaning in to get a closer look. Everything about him was beautiful, and you were finding it harder and harder to breathe when you were this close to him. 

Namor stumbled back, facing the ocean with such speed that you stumbled forward in his absence.  

“I must go. Something is not right at home. I am sorry to leave so quickly. It was just getting good. I will see you again, next week, pétalo.” 

You watched him walk back into the water, washing away with the tide, and just like that, he was gone.  

- 

The fourth session you were supposed to have with Namor was nearly ruined by a terrible storm brewing on the coast. You’d startled awake to the loud clap of thunder and watched through your window as the ocean violently responded. The rain came soon after, and just as you convinced yourself you wouldn’t be seeing Namor today, his powerful body trudged out of the water and onto the beach.  

You met him at your front door, ushering him inside as the storm raged above his head. He stood in your foyer/living room/bedroom and looked around. You froze with the realization that this was the first time he had entered your house. It was strange, you thought, seeing someone so ethereal surrounded by the familiar, but common, walls of your home. You hadn’t done the dishes the night before, and your bed was unmade, but his attention had been snagged by the light coming from your makeshift studio.  

“In here, then?” He pointed, gaze returning to you. 

“Yeah. I’ll be in there in a minute. I just have to get my sketches.”  

As soon as he rounded the corner, you bolted forward, straightening the covers on your messy bed and throwing dirty laundry into a pile in the corner. You ran your fingers through your hair, and finally joined him in the room a few moments later.  

He was hunched over, looking at the dozens of sketches you’d drawn of him. You face palmed and internally groaned as you realized that you hadn’t put them away before inviting him inside. This was an embarrassing secret, to say the least, but you couldn’t stop drawing him. Every time he sent you a new look or moved his body in a way that captured your attention, the urge to draw it in your sketchbook wouldn’t leave your mind until you finally gave in and sketched it out.  

“You are very talented, ch'ujuk ch'úupalo'.” he said, standing to his full height. 

“Thanks.” You mumbled through your hands, trying to hide the fact that you were blushing, again. You shifted your focus to the painting, which was nearing its completion. “I’m almost done with the painting. I think after today I’ll just have to do minor touchups.” 

“That is...wonderful, pétalo.” He plopped into one of the chairs you had set up around the room. You moved toward him and reached your hands out, intending to turn his head the way you needed it to finish the painting, but you hesitated. Your arms were frozen, stretched out in front of you as you met his heated gaze.  

He shifted forward, keeping his gaze on you as he slowly leaned into your outstretched palms. Your hands curled into hair, and he shuttered, eyes closing as he forcefully pushed his head further into your hold. You tried to ignore the butterflies his slight movement had spurred in your stomach, but the soft groan he let out as you ran your fingers through his hair ruined any chance you had of controlling your blood pressure. 

“It has been...a very long time since I’ve been touched so gently, princesa.” 

You swallowed, unsure what to do next, but he was quick to hoist you into his lap. You traced his jaw and couldn’t help but glance at his lips as you met his gaze. He wrapped his arms around your waist and tugged you closer to his body.  

“I did not mean to fall for you so entirely, ch'ujuk ch'úupalo', but you have not left my mind since I saw you painting on the beach.” 

His voice was soft, but his hands tightened around your waist as he spoke. He had to physically restrain himself from pulling your lips down to meet his. But he would wait, a lifetime if he had to, for a sign of consent from you before crushing his lips against yours.  

“I finished the painting last night.” You revealed, choking out a laugh. “I just wanted one more day with you before you left.”  

Namor let out a deep laugh, throwing his head back against the back of his chair. “What were you planning on doing all day, princesa?” 

You groaned, resting your forehead on his shoulder. “I was going to pretend to paint for a few hours before showing it to you.”  

“If you wanted to spend more time with me, princesa, you only had to ask.” Namor was grinning wide, running his fingers along the curve of your waist.  

“Don’t you have important kingly things to attend to?”  

“Yes, but nothing that can’t be rearranged, ch'ujuk ch'úupalo'. You are also important to me.” 

You smiled, cradling his face between your hands. His expression turned molten as you leaned into him, parting your lips in anticipation. He cupped the back of your head, pulling you the rest of the way down to meet his lips. The kiss was both sweet and lustful. His tongue dominated yours, begging for more as he ran his hands over your waist.  

He pulled away from you abruptly, squeezing your waist. You were about to crawl off of his lap and begin profusely apologizing to him, but his words stopped you.  

“You said you finished the painting. Can I see it?”  

“Of course.” You jumped off of his lap and ran to the closet you’d hidden it in, suddenly excited to reveal it to him. You’d been keeping it a secret until it was finished, and to say you were eager to hear his thoughts on it was an understatement.  

You set it on your canvas stand and stepped back, allowing him to fully see the painting. It had come out better than you’d hoped, and you’d known by the time you were halfway finished that it would be your best portrait yet.  

He leaned in, marking the tiny details you’d spent hours polishing, and smiled.  

“Ch'ujuk ch'úupalo', I have seen many paintings of me over the years, but none come close to this. You are so talented, princesa.”  

“Do you really like it?” You asked, clutching your hands into your chest.  

“I love it, my ki'ichpam artista. If I could take it with me and hang it for all my people to see, I would.” 

“Really?” You squeaked, trying not to tear up at his declaration.  

“Do you like it?” He asked, raising an eyebrow at you. 

“I think it’s my favorite painting I’ve ever done.” You breathed, glancing at it. 

“You should keep it, ch'ujuk ch'úupalo'. Hang it in your home as a reminder of me, for when I have to attend to those kingly duties.”  

You thought it over for a moment, and then smiled. “Okay.”  

Parting with that painting was something you’d been dreading since you’d started it, along with the idea of not seeing Namor on a regular basis, but he’d just relieved your doubts in one sentence. You got to keep the painting and you’d be seeing him again. 

“Okay.” He repeated, pulling at your waist until you were situated in front of him. He leaned down, planting a soft kiss on your lips, and you finally gave into those damned butterflies, wrapping your arms around his neck and pulling him in for another kiss. 

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[hanbindans]

zb1 as boyfriends!!

word count: 2.8k (only ca 350 for each) a/n: requested!! I wrote them in bulletpoint form in an attempt to keep a structure, but I do apologize if it's in-cohesive because my brain is still in finals mode (cries). I also apologize if you think my use of emojis is too much but it just makes sense. Hanbin stans who hate coffee just pretend you don't for this 1 post <33 thanks

jiwoong

You guys. Jiwoong is THE boyfriend. He knows all the in's and out's of boyfriending™ at this point. Will not disappoint.

He might fall in love a liiittle before you, but honestly it would be pretty mutual from the beginning. I think he would have to meet someone with the mindset that it would lead to a relationship (probably doesn't go from being friends to dating) so if he meets you and likes you he would make it known :)

Pretends to like dates in the beginning; going out to have nice dinners, going on late night walks in the city, visiting animal cafés, anything that gives you a chance to talk a lot and really get to know each other.

When he knows he's got you he will prefer at-home dates though because going out is a little too much effort and he'd rather just chill on his couch <333 If you still want to go out for dates though he would of course compromise!!!

Speaking of which- he's so good at communicating and making sure you're both happy, in the relationship and otherwise. Kind of loves when you come to him for advice or admit when you're struggling with something because he sees that as a big sign of trust.

"hey I bet you can't get me a bag of chips from the convenience store in 15 minutes" and you speed to the convenience store because you're a fool in love <3

I don't think he is super lovey dovey- he's more about the casual displays of affection. A "hey, you look really nice today" when he can tell you made an extra effort. A packed lunch waiting for you in the fridge when he knows you're going to have a busy day. Of course he lets you know he loves you, just not every second of every day.

In general he is a very chill, low maintenance boyfriend who is secure in your relationship. Is mature enough to communicate and compromise with you whenever you disagree on something (which is very sexy of him 🤌 we love).

zhang hao

Oh you're totally the one who falls in love first. He has insane rizz- like you're going to be crushing on him for a good few months before he develops feelings back.

Once he does though he's allllll yours. Looks at you with full on heart eyes and giggles at everything you say but is cool about it if that makes sense?? Like he acts unaffected and tries to be the cool and sophisticated boyfriend but it's painfully obvious he's totally head-over-heels in love.

He is 1. a busy man, and 2. an introvert, so his favourite type of dates are in calm and not-so busy places where you can just wind down and spend time together, like small cafés or going for long strolls in nature and just talking. He would also love to just stay at home as you both do your own things, just vibing in peace and being productive.

Will nag at you for every little thing but it's out of love. It's always "babe a granola bar isn't a meal 😒" and "I can't believe you never remember to apply sunscreen!!" but it's not to be annoying he just cares about you (and most of the time he's right).

Brings you cut fruits to snack on when you're busy doing something <3

One thing about Zhang Hao is that he IS a great boyfriend, but he will remind you himself through small comments. "Am I not the best boyfriend... Where else could you find a boyfriend like me... You're so lucky to have the handsomest boyfriend...." He loves you so much and he doesn't want you to find another boyfriend so he is pitching himself so you don't go away <3

The most caring boyfriend who will look after you and make you feel so so loved. Life is exhausting sometimes but this relationship is the perfect safe space for the both of you to relax and be unapologetically yourselves.

hanbin

I don't know if this is an unpopular opinion but I think he would fall in love first!! He's a soft boi at heart, when he meets someone he likes he falls hard and FAST. Luckily for him you fall back though because duh he's Sung Hanbin.

COOKING AND BAKING DATES OF COURSE!!!!!! He will seduce you by cooking your favourite homemade dishes and making you the best cup of coffee you've ever had. Also learns how to make bread so he can lure you into being his partner forever and ever 😈

If you were up for it, I think he would love to take you out dancing. He will teach you if you want and are worried about embarrassing yourself, he just wants you to go out and have fun together!! Probably knows all the good spots and will take you out on the occasional Friday night 🕺🕺

We know this man stays busy, so he might not have that much free time to spend with you... That being said you have his undivided attention whenever he does see you. You have something to say?? All other conversations are unimportant. You're going into another room?? He won't follow you around but he IS counting the seconds until you come back.

If you compliment him on pretty much anything he is an emotional wreck the rest of the day. Wuws his praise, especially from you <3333

Kind of his favourite thing to do is to sit down with you after a long week, have some snacks and some nice drinks ready, and you just rant to each other about work/school/people or whatever. Sometimes you just need to complain to someone you confide in, ya know?? And he needs to know who your enemies are because they are his enemies too.

He just likes you a LOT and wants to involve you in all his favourite things. Hanbin loves life and having fun- and he wants you to have fun too!! You are his most beloved person ever and he shows that by making you a part of his life in all the ways he can.

matthew

There's not a single alternate universe where a relationship with Matthew wouldn't start as friends to lovers. I'm sorry it just works too well with him. You start falling for each other at around the same time, but he's probably the first one to confess. You're both just two fools extremely in love <3

Absolute date master but it's completely unintentional?? Idk, I think he would plan really cute date like picnics in the park or at-home movie nights with dinner. He just has a knack for dates that make you feel like the main character in a movie.

He has one (1) mission and it is to devastate you all the time. Prepare to receive cute texts for no reason, matching jewellery, and for him to ask to take couple pics that he can use as his phone background 🥲

Will teach you his choreographies. Even if it's only two easy steps. Doesn't matter if you are a dancer or not. His baby will be able to dance to his songs!!!

You know how he wants to be the hot Canadian oppa or whatever? Your partner privilege is that you're the only one allowed to tell him he's cute. Like he loves when you giggle and ruffle his hair and kiss his cheeks but that's only because he loves you. If Gyubin tried that shit on Matthew he would be on the floor in a chokehold. Use this privilege wisely.

When it's just the two of you he literally can't keep his hands off of you. Wraps his arms around you so you have no choice but to lie down on the couch and let him hold you and press kisses all over your face. He just likes his cuddles.

Overall a very loving boyfriend who lives to let you know how special you are. You deserve to be treated like a k-drama main character- so he ends up doing all the cliché, cute and romantic things for you that he never imagined himself enjoying before- but now has a special person to do them with <3

taerae

You both start liking each other around the same time. He's a pretty social guy and just very easy to like, so I feel like you would become close pretty fast, and he would confess that he likes you pretty quickly too.

As great as he is to spend time with and talk to- he sucks at the whole dating thing. He does really like you and wants to spend time with you almost always, he just doesn't like the logistics of arranging a date. What do you mean they don't show that movie next Friday?? What do you mean we have to decide where to have dinner?? Please just tell him where you want to go and he will happily go there with you. He just doesn't want to do the whole planning bit.

Sitting together in his bedroom as he strums on his guitar and you do something else.

Very cheesy boyfriend but it's so cute <3 Tooth-rottingly sweet texts and compliments for absolutely no reason, thoughtful birthday gifts, randomly getting you flowers, the works.

He could be the mature, calm, chill boyfriend..... but why would he want to?? Much more fun being your kind of insane boyfriend who acts like the calm and chill boyfriend in front of other people. Like sometimes he has Einstein level thoughts. Sometimes he lies to you that there is a dog behind you just for shits and giggles.

I think he has a pretty high EQ and he would give great comfort and advice if you needed it. Always there for you if you need to rant about your day and that annoying person you don't like, or if you have a problem that he has to help you solve. Empathises really well and never judges you for your honest thoughts.

Taerae really is just a great guy to begin with, but when he's in a relationship with you he is the nicest, most fun and supportive boyfriend . Always willing to go the extra mile for you and make you feel like the most loved person in the world :)

ricky

Hmmm.... I mean there's a much bigger chance that you fall in love first than the other way around. That being said: he's absolutely whipped when he does start liking you back. Like. Gyubin would make fun of him because he literally can't focus on anything else when you're around. So in the end you're both fools in love <3

Oh the dates are going to be top tier. Your wish is his command and the budget is LARGE, so pretty much wherever you want to go or whatever you want to do, he will make it happen. But I think he has a soft spot for museums, art galleries, basically anything "cultural". Or just walking around the city at night and seeing what's open.

Wants to engage in your hobbies!! He will ask a million questions about your interests (sports, music, cinema, drawing, whatever you're passionate about) so he can see you nerd out and maybe understand you a little better. He will also be SO SO SO happy if you're willing to engage in his interests and watch his favourite shows with him because THAT is true love <33

Tbh he's not always great at clearly expressing or asking for affection- but the one thing he would actually ask for is head massages. After a long day, he just can't resist the temptation of spacing out while you run your hands through his hair. He is still too embarrassed to ask for it with his words though, so he just gets all quiet and leans his head onto you and hopes you get the hint (you do).

He also wants to share everything. Mostly shirts, hoodies, jackets- sometimes jewellery. Be careful because while this does mean you can borrow his stuff, he will also borrow yours. Hide your shit if there's something you want to keep to yourself.

He is trying to be the cool, sophisticated boyfriend- but he's just a big softie at the end of the day!! He secretly loves all the cute coupley things like fancy dates and matching necklaces, and he loves to surprise you and watch your eyes go all wide in awe. Really just wants to walk around and be in love all day <3

gyubin

Friends to lovers where you meet through mutual friends and are in the same friend group for a while, silently crushing on each other until one of your other friends gets sick of the tension and tells both of you that you like each other.

Dates are very spontaneous but always fun!! If he has to run errands or go somewhere he will force you to come with him to keep him company. In return he says something to make you laugh approx. every 4 minutes to keep you entertained.

Oh when I say that he is attached to you at the hip... He can't go a full day without talking to you- either by text, on the phone, or face to face. Even when he is with you he HAS to be touching you pretty much all the time- holding your hand and playing with your fingers. If you ask him to tone it down in public he will... Begrudgingly..... Actually physically holding himself back from grabbing your hand.

His one mission every day is to make you laugh at least once. Has a folder of memes saved on his phone that he updates regularly so he can send you something every day.

Prepare to share all your drinks and food for the rest of your life. You got a smoothie?? He's taking the first sip "tO mAkE sUrE iT's nOt pOiSonEd" (you get to try his smoothie too don't worry).

Other than the fact that he needs to be next to you all the time?? He's pretty low maintenance!! Is perfectly fine with spending a whole weekend rotting away in his bedroom, cuddling up to you and scrolling through tiktok as you show each other funny videos that pop up on your fyp's.

In general I see him as being a very fun and loving boyfriend. You are kind of just besties who kiss, ya know? He genuinely likes spending time with you doing whatever- you're the funniest, kindest, best person he knows- and he lets you know by sending "ily" texts at least twice a day and holding your hand everywhere you go <3

gunwook

Oh he has the world's biggest crush on you for a while before you ask him out (yes you need to ask first he's too scared <3). I'm talking "doodling your name in his notebook with hearts next to it" levels of crush. Loses his mind when you ask him out like YOU LIKE HIM BACK???? Crazy.

A very sweet and polite young man to begin with (lucky you!!), but it's going to be 10x more intense with the person he likes. Prepare yourself to be treated like you saved the world 3 times, ended world poverty, hung the stars in the sky, etc.

He's still pretty young and gets too attached too fast so initially he's very scared to mess things up. Googles 'date ideas' to come up with stuff to do and watches K-dramas to learn how to boyfriend (he has NO idea what he's doing. send help. but it's very cute). With time he becomes more chill though.

Think classic dates in the beginning; watching a movie at the cinema, going to a café, stuff like that. When he gets more comfortable it's more like chilling in his bedroom as you binge watch a netflix show or cuddle and scroll through social media in comfortable silence.

A little dramatic sometimes: he gets super excited over all your small achievements and exaggerates when he tells you how TERRIBLE and AWFUL his day was. Also needs reassurance every once in a while that you really do like him back because he gets in his own head too much. Kind of a drama queen but in the best way.

Wayyy too shy to initiate pretty much ANY type of physical affection so he hopes you will just initiate instead and hold his hand. Ya boy is trying to play it cool but is also a little ~insecure~ so he is in a constant dilemma between holding your hand versus not holding your hand. WHAT IF HE DOESN'T HOLD YOUR HAND AND THEN YOU BREAK UP WITH HIM????? He is distressed 24/7.

Overall- very sweet and shy and confused but he WILL try his best to be the bf you deserve!! He's still working on exactly how to do that but rest assured: he does love you to bits and wants more than anything to make you smile every day 🥲 Best boy.

[theminecraftbee]

second’s slightly arbitrary guide to vault hunters knowledge unlocks

so, one of the main questions I see new vault hunters players have is “which mods should I unlock in what order?” unlike skills or even, if expensively, expertises, mod unlocks in vault hunters are completely irreversible, which means they can be kind of intimidating for new players. so here’s my (somewhat arbitrary) guide to what to unlock! keep in mind I’m not a “top player” or anything, so these might not be the PERFECT meta picks, just a guide for new guys.

also if your question is “but I have one knowledge star and am like level 5 what do I unlock NOW”, the answer is probably vault compasses if you’re getting lost, either stack upgrades or double pouches if you’re having inventory management issues (depending on whether “numerous stacks of common items” or “many types of items” is currently your larger problem), or storage drawers if overworld storage is giving you nightmares.

additionally, my biggest unlocking mods advice is to check how much the thing you want to do costs in materials before unlocking it. nothing sucks more than unlocking a cool mod and only realizing you need an echo pog to interact with it and you’re only level 15 afterwards, after all!

anyway let’s go, general guide beneath the cut.

STORAGE MODS

these mods give you the first three without price increases before they start getting more expensive, which is useful, since people almost always combine more than one solution. even after they start getting more expensive, it’s only +1, so this is a category you should get the thing you want or need in when you want it without worrying about it locking you out of other options later.

Storage Drawers are the backbone to basically everyone’s storage system. they work fairly simply: each drawer can store a certain number of stacks of a single item. add upgrades to increase the number of stacks or make the drawers automatically void excess. if they are connected by other drawers or trim to a drawer controller, you can double-click the controller to move everything in your inventory that goes into a drawer to one of them, and that controller acts as a port for other storage interacting with it. because they can store an absurd quantity of items, are way cheaper than basically every other storage option, and are useful right up to the late game, these are by far and away the most common first storage option. I can’t recommend them enough. even early game before you can afford a controller they clean up your inventory SIGNIFICANTLY with the number of stacks they can hold.

Colossal Chests are a trap earlygame. unlike regular chests, you can’t use quark’s sorting or searching functions, which means they’re effectively the “hiding it under the bed” solution to chest monsters. however, mid-game once you actually have another storage mod, these become fantastic, since they’re much cheaper and use much more common materials than storage disks and capable of storing large amounts of items. the largest one you can make in vault hunters is 5x5 for the record. a lot of people like using this with ssn to help reduce lag.

Simple Storage Network is… controversial. it’s the cheapest early way to make a searchable storage network, but it gets very laggy the more chests you attach to it, and many of a storage system’s most useful functions are no longer possible to craft in vault hunters because of it. also, it eats items with NBT data, so never store crystals, jewels, gear, or similar things in it. my general recommendation is to do whatever you want in singleplayer (although if you want a crafting interface you’ll need to upgrade out of this eventually), but in multiplayer only use it if you’re using colossal chests or something else that prevents you from having to make massive silos of chests, and save your server the headache. it’s only one knowledge point, though, and it’s much cheaper generally than the digital options, so I totally understand why people go for it, and it can super be worth it early game when you just need to be able to search your inventory! just be aware of the caveats.

Applied Energistics 2 is one of your two main digital storage options. digital storage should be your end goal with a storage system! it is the more complex of the two. my understanding is that it’s cheaper if you know what you’re doing, as well as more powerful, but that it’s notoriously a beast for people who don’t know it to try to understand. if you don’t have good spacial reasoning skills maybe stay clear, but if you do and you like a more involved storage approach, go with this. also, be aware you’ll need something that can produce power in order to use this mod. (ae2 comes with power generation on its own, but I don’t remember if you can craft that in vault hunters or not.)

Refined Storage is the other of your two main digital storage options. digital storage should be your end goal with a storage system! compared to ae2, refined storage is fairly straightforward, but it’s slightly more expensive and a bit less powerful at its highest levels. it is the one I recommend to most people, though, just because “straightforward” is really valuable if you don’t want everything to be a puzzle. also, be aware that you’ll need a mod that can produce power to use this mod.

Mekanism QIO is a third digital storage option you can only use with Mekanism unlocked. my understanding is that it’s quite powerful, although it does not work with altar automation. most people won’t use this on account of mekanism being a pre-requisite and mekanism being fairly late-game, but if you want to use it, it’s almost certainly just as good of an option as the rest!

LOOTING MODS

the majority of these are pouch upgrades, but this also contains bulk soul dust recycling and the vault junk controller. these mods get more expensive by two points for every one you get, so the order does matter somewhat; remember for each mod in this category you get that is not “a bigger pouch”, the slightly further away bigger pouches get, and for each bigger pouch you get, the further away other inventory management gets. so it’s a balance for when you get what! that said, most players end up unlocking basically everything in this category eventually, because it’s all quite useful, and even at maximum price it doesn’t get as expensive as the production mods or big mods or big toys get. unlock things as you need them in this category. I tend to unlock things in this category whenever I have the knowledge stars to unlock it and nothing else I want to save up for at that exact moment!

Bigger Pouches are the vast majority of the unlocks here (being double pouches, belts, small backpacks, and large backpacks). they’re prerequisites for each other, so you have to unlock them one by one. normally, I unlock them when the pouches I have aren’t cutting it. that said you could just as easily get by with a small army of smaller pouches, you just won’t be able to fit as many upgrades! so this is a mileage may vary thing.

Stack Upgrades are the most useful pouch upgrades, and should be the first ones you buy. these are multiplicative by each other—two tier 2 stack upgrades in the same pouch don’t add 8x the number of stacks a single slot can hold, but 16x! these also mean pouches with a lot of stack upgrades can be a poor man’s storage drawers in a pinch. you will need these, get them before you upgrade past double pouches.

Refill Upgrades are one of the two QOL pouch upgrades. you can save this until late, but the ability to automatically always have a stack of an item (or, well, up to nine items!) in your hotbar is extremely handy for things like marking blocks, kiwis, and food, and helps save hotbar space and time managing inventory. I personally find this more useful than the feeder upgrade but that’s a preference thing.

Feeder Upgrades do one thing only: automatically have you eat a food (which can be controlled with a whitelist/blacklist) from the pouch it’s installed in when your hunger goes down. this seems sort of arbitrary in vaults since hunger doesn’t heal your health but it’s actually really nice and once you get used to it you’ll be so sad whenever you don’t have it. set the food it feeds you to vault sweets and literally never have to worry about your hunger bar again. this is normally either the last pouch upgrade I get or second-to-last (before big backpacks) but I could totally justify getting it way sooner.

Junk Controller is… interesting. it sometimes doesn’t play nice with pickup upgrades and pouches, although I think that’s fixes at this point. it automatically voids items you pick up in the vault that are on its list of controlled items. it’s capable of handling WAY more than a void upgrade can, but honestly I find the advanced void upgrade can do everything I need it to when it comes to voiding vault items, and the junk controller is pretty expensive. however, if you’d prefer not to have to use void upgrades and to never have to deal with vault junk again, I could see this being the thing for you!

Soul Harvester is pure QOL. it is so much faster than and so much more efficient than the soul diffuser that I recommend everyone get it at SOME POINT, if only to make processing things into soul dust more efficient, but if you don’t do much recycling it’s probably not very useful for you.

POWER MODS

this is the first category on the list that makes other mods in the category enough more expensive that the order you unlock in, and whether you unlock at all, matters, at +6 per mod. you will also almost inevitably need at least one of these no matter what you do. as such, this category can be overwhelming for people. luckily it has an answer! the answer is powah. you should get powah. yes I know it’s the most expensive one and means you’ll have to wait longer but you’ll thank me later.

Iron Generators are sort of a trap. they’re cheap at low levels and good for early game, but the cost for higher-level power generation is very high compared to how much power they make, they burn fuel whether something is currently drawing power or not, they don’t come with any kind of cables so you’ll need a handling mod to move the power or to place them directly next to the things they need to power, they can’t charge items like the mining gadget or the building gadget, and they make everything else in the category more expensive. however with all of that said: if all you’re doing is powering an RS system, then yeah, you’re probably fine to just use these forever and buying these as the cheap option is probably fine.

Powah is the most versatile of the options here and comes with literally everything you need to make a decent self-sustaining power grid. the best generators for most people are the solar panels, which only require direct sunlight, and thermo generators, which provide power as long as they’re above a heat source and provided water. a supplementaries sink (which doesn’t require a mod unlock) or a thermal expansion aqueous accumulator (which does) can do that job easily. additionally, batteries are really useful for various gadgets, the ender network lets you move power remotely, and it can charge items inside its energy cells. the main downside to this mod is that it’s a royal pain in the ass to actually CRAFT any of this; while most of the individual ingredients aren’t that expensive, there are normally many steps to any higher level craft and the base ingredients add up. luckily, mod boxes are really good with this mod, and you can normally get a decent system running from almost only those.

Flux Networks are vault hunters’s best option for storing and moving power around. this mod doesn’t come with power generation options on its own, but it’s the most powerful for transferring power around by far. a good purchase in tandem with another mod.

Botania Flux Fields allows you to turn botania mana into power. it doesn’t come with any cables, so you’ll need a handling mod to move the power around, but as several botania mana flowers can be made self-sustaining, this is probably an interesting option if you already have botania before you need any power.

Thermal Dynamos are like if iron generators were actually good. they require constant fuel like an iron generator, but they have a much wider variety of things they can burn and actually produce meaningful power. they require thermal expansion to unlock, though, so I’ve never used them by virtue of the fact that by the time I have thermal expansion, I almost always also have powah. they also don’t come with cables.

Mekanism Generators are the best solution for producing very large amounts of power. the mekanism reactor is more than the vast majority of players will ever need, but if you’re getting deep enough into mekanism that you need a nuclear reactor’s level of power generation, you should accept no substitute. once again though for most people a large powah setup will normally cover your needs, this is, quite literally, the nuclear option.

HANDLING MODS

these mods don’t do much on their own, but they make handling output from other mods much easier. they make each other somewhat significantly more expensive, but tend to be overall cheaper than power mods, so even with that +5 knowledge points required for each new mod in the category, it’s not normally hard to get more than one. these are a very “get them as you need and/or want them” category, but you’ll almost always find yourself wanting at least one, if not more, to get things done.

Modular Routers are probably the best mod in this category. they do just about everything, able to wirelessly transfer items, fluids, or power, sure, but also able to activate things like a player, automatically kill mobs, vacuum items (or experience!) from the ground, and probably more. a common sight in many vault hunters bases are the signature laser beams of routers shooting things around. they can be a little complicated to understand at first and I highly recommend watching someone like iskall use them when you’re starting out, but once you understand them you will soon learn to love them. they work by creating a router, then placing “modules” in that router that tell it what to do. you can also add upgrades to the routers! this is my biggest recommended handling mod; if you only get one, this is the one that can do most everything anything else in this category can.

Pipez are simple: they’re fairly cheap pipes that move items, fluids, power, or gasses from one place to another. this is the quick and cheap option for handling, and are often the most intuitive. the downside is that you physically need to lay the pipes between places, so they take up a lot of space. fun bonus fact: at a certain level of power draw, a power pipe with an advanced pipe upgrade will be MUCH cheaper for rate of power transfer than using powah cables. I learned this the hard way. in general these are fast, minimally laggy, and surprisingly useful, especially for fluids (or gasses if you’re using mekanism).

XNet is presumably powerful but I don’t know anyone who uses it on account of it also being kind of complicated. my understanding is that if you have any kind of item/energy/etc transfer that you want to apply interesting logic to, this is your solution, so it’s probably nice as the “brain” of your base. I can’t say much else because I don’t use it though.

Dark Utilities is a small but handy mod. its biggest draw are its plates, which are items that can be placed like a carpet that do things to entities that step on them. most notable are the vector plates, which push a mob in the direction they point and the various damage plates, including a non-lethal damage plate that’s great for exp farms or the player damage plate, which makes mob drops fully AFK-able. also not to be discounted are a few redstone odds and ends (including a randomizer) and special blocks that only certain types of entities can pass through (great for filtering in farms). this mod is almost always recommended in tandem with ispawners, but can be useful in all kinds of farms outside of that too.

Iron Furnaces are basically a fancy QOL mod: they let you make really absurdly fast furnaces, including ones that are powered by power instead of fuel. they’re almost surprisingly useful though; a fast furnace can save you a whole lot of time!

Automatic Genius is—well, if you’re at the point of unlocking automatic genius, you probably already know, to be honest. it’s auto-crafting, it’s useful, it practically has the entire game as prerequisites so. there’s that.

BIG MODS

this category is one of the ones that gets to people, because it’s one of the +12 categories. whenever you pick a mod in this category, make sure it’s one you want, because the next one will be very expensive! chances are if you’re a modded player, you already have an opinion about which of these four is the most useful to you, but if you aren’t, I’ll attempt to give some tips.

Thermal Expansion is probably the easiest of the four for a new player to understand. it requires power generation, but most of this mod works by simply building a machine, which then does that machine’s one thing. (for example, the redstone furnace, which cooks things using redstone, or the pulverizer, which crushes things.) I personally really like thermal; it’s extremely straightforward and compact and decently powerful as an earlygame option. it also sort of has ore doubling; you can pulverize raw chromatic iron to make two raw chromatic iron dust, which can then be smelted to two ingots, but for other ores the ratios are a bit messier and often comes out to “just use fortune and a normal furnace unless you need the secondary products”. still, very useful as a mod!

Create is a mod you probably already know; it’s taken the world by storm, after all. building create contraptions is fun and more intuitive than redstone and routing power to a lot of people, and it has a number of very useful tools, such as the crushing wheel and its ability to ore double, the various ways you can convert items using fans, and one of the very few ways to automatically farm trees in vault hunters. the main downside of create is that it’s deceptively expensive in larimar and chromatic iron and that it can’t produce power. also, in my experience, create is the laggiest of the big mods, although your mileage may vary on that front.

Botania is a magic mod that’s secretly actually a tech mod. it doesn’t require power, instead using its own power called mana, and can be used to do a large number of useful things, including farming trees, making cobwebs and other rare and hard to make altar ingredients, and making some very pretty decorative blocks. personally, I always had trouble wrapping my head around botania for some reason, which is silly since I’ve somewhat figured out mekanism, an objectively more complicated mod. of the four big mods, botania definitely helps you get the most hard-to-get and unique blocks, but it’s the only one that doesn’t have any kind of ore doubling.

Mekanism can get you as much as quintupling your ores, has a number of fairly high-powered machines, but is also really complicated in a lot of places and requires an entire power grid to use effectively. also, the mek suit isn’t in vault hunters, if you wanted that. I love mekanism I think it’s very fun also you should NOT get this as your first big mod unless you have so many resources to spare. make this your second one at the very least, it’s VERY late-game, but enjoy it when you do.

UTILITY MODS

unlike the last several categories, these don’t make each other more expensive ever! instead, these are all mostly small but useful mods that don’t fit in another category. whenever you want one of these go ahead and buy it, there’s no reason not to and it won’t make anything else more expensive!

Vault Compasses is one of the most useful mods in the game. all it adds is a vault compass, which is a compass that always points back to the entrance of the vault. you can also hold down shift+right click to set it to point to a new point in the vault, such as a loadstone in an elixir vault or the last monolith in a defeat the guardians vault. it costs four netherite ingots, which is a lot in the early game when most people get this, but it’s VERY WORTH IT. you’ll never be lost again!

Elevators create a special block that, when above or below each other, let you jump to teleport up to an elevator above you or crouch to an elevator below you. they’re very useful in bases with verticality; I like to use them to hide a lot of my storage and mechanisms in a basement that’s invisible from the main build, lol, but they’re handy for any kind of similar thing. pro tip: you can disguise them as any block by right-clicking them with that block!

Trash Cans are what they sound like: a special block that permanently destroys what you put in them. they can have a whitelist/blacklist, and you can pipe or hopper items into them. they’re handy for things like getting rid of unwanted armor from mob farms or other junk items that would otherwise clog up your handling.

Waystones allow you to teleport to pre-determined locations; a waystone lets you interact with it to teleport to any other waystone you’ve found, if you have the mod unlocked, and the teleport pads teleport you to a specific other pad. they’re just extremely handy for getting around a server, and on my friends’ server we just give everyone a knowledge star to unlock these on day one so we can get to each other’s bases easier.

Torch Master gives you several tools for preventing mob spawning. there are ways to prevent both passive and hostile mobs from spawning, and to place large amounts of light. the mega torch has a pretty wide radius too, so it’s fairly easy to cover your whole base.

Altar Automation is the only prohibitively expensive utility mod; this is meant for use lategame. it can be bound to either an ae2 or rs controller, and then will automatically take items from that storage system to complete the altar for you, leaving your only job to hit the button and get the crystal. it’s very handy, but also deliberately meant for buying after you’ve mostly already got all the other mods you want.

BIG TOYS

all of these mods are fancy QOL mods. they all require power, so don’t get one before you have a power source! additionally, only building gadgets come with a way to charge, so make sure you either have batteries or a way to charge before getting these. at +12, this is once again a category where order matters. however, since they’re all QOL, it’s a less massively consequential choice than your choice of production or big mods. go with the one that vibes with you most.

Building Gadgets are tools to help you place blocks, copy/paste structures, swap blocks, and delete blocks. they’re held in your inventory but require power, which means they either need to be charged or you need to have a battery. luckily, they come with the enercell for charging. I can’t express enough HOW MUCH EASIER these make building large structures; the base building gadget alone speeds up building massively. I highly recommend these on any skyblock world just for sheer ease of building platforms, but also anyone who likes Big Buildings should probably consider them.

Weirding Gadgets are chunk loaders. they require power. not much else to explain other than the obvious “be careful on servers when you are leaving your farms loaded please”, I think.

Mining Gadgets is a mod that gives you a cool laser to mine blocks with. I love my mining gadget, it’s very fun, but fully upgrading a mining gadget is very expensive in chromatic steel (and in echo for the magnet and void upgrades) and a very, very solid argument can be made that the only advantage this thing has over a hammer is that it has a long range, the ability to automatically place lights, and the ability to stop liquids in their track. meanwhile, it has the very large disadvantage of requiring being charged with power, costing a lot to get upgraded, and not being able to mine more than a 3x3. it’s up to you if any of those benefits sound like they beat a hammer to you and you decide to get it.

Digital Miner is a mekanism device that automatically mines out everything in an area for you (rather like an old-school quarry). just place it in a location, give it power, and let it run! like most mekanism devices, this thing requires a lot of power, and it is, once again, arguably slower and more expensive than a hammer. however, it’s also fully automatic and requires no effort on your part to get a LOT of resources, so it can be very worth it for those who do not enjoy mining themselves!

PRODUCTION MODS

arguably even more consequential than the big mods you choose are the production mods. which production mod you go with will decide on a multiplayer server what is your “thing” and what requires trading; on singleplayer it will decide which altars will be easy for you and which will be hard. there’s also no right choice here (although I’d argue there are two wrong ones). at +12, it’ll be a bit until you unlock your second one, so choose wisely!

SNAD is a trap. it vastly speeds up the growth of things that can grow on sand but it’s just not worth the +12 to everything else for that alone—and that really is all you get. don’t get it.

Easy Piglins are less of a trap but still a trap. they allow you to put piglins in special boxes for trading, as well as make automatic traders. however they don’t really do anything that picking up a piglin, putting it in a hole near your portal, and throwing gold at it manually doesn’t do, so for the +12 to everything else, for my money, this one isn’t worth it.

Easy Villagers by contrast is worth it. while the ability to pick up villagers and easily re-roll trades doesn’t require unlocking this, the various villager blocks this mod unlocks are very handy for doing trades much easier. it also comes with one-block breeders, iron farms, and crop farms, and the ability to automate any of them, including the villager trades. personally I tend to find villager trades aren’t my main alter bottleneck, so I go for this last, but someone else may disagree with me on it, and honestly I don’t blame them. a solid choice.

Cagerium is one of the two mob farming options. cagerium works by creating terrariums for passive mobs, mob cages for hostile mobs, or a binding plate for boss mobs, and then putting spawn eggs you get from the vault in them. it then outputs that mob’s drops into a chest below, passively. you can put up to four eggs in a cage to make it faster, but you need a skeleton key to swap out what’s in a cage. also, it’s slow compared to ispanwers. however, it’s cheaper early game, doesn’t require building a farm, and is better at a few edge-case mobs (namely, boss mobs like the wither or ender dragon if you get one of those eggs and shulkers, because shulkers are a nightmare).

iSpawners is the other mob farming option. this lets you create an expensive item called a survival spawner that works like a regular vanilla mob spawner, only you can pick it up and move it, it’s much faster, you can swap what egg is in it whenever, and it is active in a much larger radius of the player. ispawners are more reusable and much faster at producing drops than cagerium, but they require infrastructure like a farm to be built around the survival spawner to be effective, and while the survival spawner is a one-time craft it’s a VERY VERY expensive one. which of the two you prefer is a matter of preference.

Botony Pots are one of the two plant-growing options. this mod lets you make pots that automatically grow plants over time, including plenty that can’t be farmed normally, such as spore blossoms or small dripleaf. the hopper botony pot has been made more expensive than it used to be, so it’s at parity or more expensive than swapping things out of a phytogenic insulator to have a lot of them, but for passively farming plants, botony pots are still king. the one plant it can’t do is any of the trees, however, so you will still need a solution for that.

Phytogenic Insulators require thermal expansion and power, and are your other plant farming option. they’re rather expensive, but they can be freely swapped through, can produce things like trees that botony pots can’t, and are much faster than botony pots (especially when maximally upgraded). like with ispawners and cagerium, this is a matter of preference for which you pick, but you’ll probably only need one of the two.

ALCHEMY MODS

these, thankfully, don’t require any strategy or explanation; you can only go one at a time, and each unlocked mod is a new upgrade to your existing vault potion (or vial to start with). each upgrade heals more health and has a stronger chosen effect. that said, no matter how high you upgrade, you always have the same number of charges. take these when you start needing that extra health!

and that’s everything! hopefully this is helpful for new players playing along with the hermits! happy vaulting!

[frierengf]

how will i know -- choso x reader

— you get dumped. its awful and it fucking hurts. you do your best to pick up the pieces of your heart on your own, but find that the trail of tiny red hot shards lead somewhere you wouldn’t expect.

wc : 9 065 [chp1 + epilouge] | ao3 [tags & notes]

-- chp1

”Can you just fuck off already?” The words have been ringing through your head since last night, echoing and repeating, ad infinitum. It’s exhausting. You barely slept a wink, and you’re sure your eyes are both puffy and dark. You couldn’t find it in yourself to go to your classes, having stayed in your bed for most of the day. Your phone is laying next to you, screen open on your unread texts to him, music playing quietly. A small ping interrupts the music, and you sluggishly reach for your phone, holding it to your face. — From : Choso :-) <- Hey, just so you know, Yuuji is coming over later! Is there anything you want me to get from the grocery store? To : Choso :-) -> ah cool -> some ice cream maybe? chocolate if they have it, but any kind is fine. a bottle of coke too please :] i think were almost out of garlic but i can get actual groceries some time later this week From : Choso :-) <;- Okay! I’ll be home in about an hour :-) — It was in fact, not ah cool. While you’ve lived with Choso for almost a year now, and you’ve met his younger brother Yuuji a handful of times, you’d rather die than be seen by either of them in your current state. It’s not that your room is messy, because it isn’t. Almost everything is as you left it when you went out to see him yesterday, except your purse hanging off your desk chair. Besides, you seriously doubt Choso or Yuuji would even see your room, so it’s more yourself that you’re worried about. You feel… disgusting? Like a mess? Revolting? Any adjective with a negative connotation, really. In reality, you probably look fine. Decent. Acceptable. But in your twisted illusion, you can feel the words you vomited out sticking to your body, the tears you shed ingrained into your cheeks, the burning oil of his words spilled on you, tainting your entire existance. It’s not that deep, the snarky voice in your head comments. It was just a lame college relationship, and it was bound to end sooner or later. But it wasn’t just a lame college relationship. You’d been together for three years. Even if he didn’t love you, or even like you anymore, aren’t you owed more than filth, thrown in your face? You sit on your bed, frozen in thought, playing with your bracelet. It feels cold between your finger tips, and you sigh. You need to shower, brush your teeth, remove your makeup, put on normal clothes. Maybe make your bed and do the dishes for good measure. Standing up, you shed your clothes from last night, and grab a towel from your closet. Shower first, everything else later. As you stand at the edge of the shower, waiting for the water to heat up, you plan the coming hour in your head. You have approximatively 50 minutes until Choso is home, and probably an extra 20 until Yuuji arrives. Shower for 30, plenty of time to wallow in self pity, and actually clean yourself up. 2 minutes to brush your teeth, 10 to do an indepth facial cleanse. 8 minutes to pick an outfit that says I am fine. 20 minutes to help Choso unpack groceries, and then do the dishes like the helpful roommate you are. After that, you can retreat to your room to do whatever you want. A perfect plan. After the water has heated up, you stand under the spray, cleansing yourself. You’d like to think you don’t know why you have this inane need to seem well put together in front of your roommate and his 15 year old brother, both of which you’re probably never going to see again after college, but in reality, you know the cause down to a T. It’s an awful habit, there’s no denying it. You’re unsure where it stems from, all you know is that you don’t like it. Self worth is hard to have and even harder to find, you think. So, you simply seek it from wherever possible. Validation, affirmation, appreciation. From your mom, your sisters, your teachers, your friends, strangers on the strees, or even the afformentioned roommate and his brother. It definetly doesn’t help to have been dumped the night before, but alas, there doesn’t seem to be anything you can do about that.

Walking away with a scoff, leaving you to pay for the drinks, ignoring your calls and texts. He doesn’t seem to want anything to do with you anymore. It fucking hurts, of course it does, but what are you supposed to do about it? It’s not like he will appear out of the blue and give you actual closure, so all you can do is try to move on yourself. As you step out of the shower, you wipe the steam off of the mirror. You feel clean. Or at least cleaner. While you brush your teeth, you glance at the small clock that’s standing on the shelf by the door. 5 minutes ahead of schedule. You nod at yourself in the fogged up mirror. I can do this. Can you? I can. I’ve been through worse. Have you? You spit. Spit out the toothpaste, spit at the snide voice in your head, spit at the image of him. You have been through worse, and as cliché and corny as it sounds, you are a strong, independant woman. You wash your face. Cleanse the tears, cleanse the touches, caresses and kisses he had given you, before throwing it all back at you, like both you and the affection he had once shown you was dirt, not even worthy of being stepped on. You resent him. Despise him. It’s unfair, you think, as you walk back to your room. How come he gets to keep living normally, while you don’t? How come you have to crawl through hell and back, and he gets to swagger off into the night, never to be seen again? It’s unhealthy, you think, you know. The smothering, the pushing down of your emotions, the twisted mess of sadness turning into rage. It’s bound to come back and bite you in the ass. You flick through your closet. A tank top and jeans. Normal. Fine. You pull on your clothes, before standing in front of your mirror. Acceptable. Charming maybe? Friendly. Normal girl, who didn’t go through the second worst heartbreak of her life last night. Meeting your own gaze in the mirror, you frown. You think Choso might know what happened last night. He wasn’t friendly with him exactly, but they’d met about as many times as you’ve met Yuuji. He most likely did not text your roommate that you’d just gotten dumped, but Choso knew of his existance. Your shoes have been in the entryway since you came home last night, but even if he didn’t notice that, it’s an undeniable fact that he heard you sobbing as you came home, sobbing as you laid in bed, and sobbing as he left for class.

You know Choso heard you, because you’ve heard him. Talking to himself while he works on his art projects, the muted voices from a show or movie, discussions with friends. You’ve heard it all, and your crying was definetly louder than all of those, probably combined. Besides, if your roommate leaves home, dressed up and excited to meet her boyfriend, and comes home later, hysterically sobbing and alone, what else could’ve happened? If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it probably is a duck. Duck in question being a miserable and heartbroken 20-something. Your frown has grown in to a scowl. Angry, bitter, hurt. Because you are. As much as you try to convince yourself that you’re fine, you’re not. As much as you want to move on right away, quicker than he can, you can’t. The apartment door opens, and you startle slightly. ”I’m home.” Chosos voice almost echoes through the silent apartment, and you rush out to the common area. ”Welcome home.” His gaze flicks up to you, and you smile slightly, nearly breathless. ”Hi,” he says, breaking eye contact to focus on untying his shoes. ”Hey,” you reply, eyes still focused on him. ”Thanks for getting groceries. I’ll put them away. I can do the dishes too.” Choso looks back up at you from the small bench he’s sitting on. He’s frowning, just slightly. ”Are you okay?” Your eyes widen, and you let out a tense laugh. ”Of course I am! Why wouldn’t I be?” His frown grows, almost turning… pitiful? Compassionate? You don’t know. ”It’s okay if you don’t want to talk about it, especially with me, but pretending everything is fine won’t do you any good.” You flinch. Read like a book. ”Well, sitting around in my room and crying won’t do me any good either,” you mutter, reaching for the bag. You hear him sigh. ”It might. Good release of emotion and all that.” ”I don’t know if you heard, but I did plenty of emotion releasing last night. I think I’ve probably dried up for the coming year, so.” You walk in to the kitchen, starting to unpack the bag onto the counter. Choso trails after you. ”I heard. I’m sorry for not coming to check on you, wasn’t sure if you’d want me to.” ”It’s fine,” you say, putting the groceries away. ”Probably for the best. Would’ve been a real pain in your ass.” ”I wouldn’t have minded,” Choso mumbles from where he’s leaning against the counter.

You look at him. Try to read him like he read you. He looks earnest. Truthful. Caring. His gaze is warm, but it still makes you shiver. It’s not that he’s making you uncomfortable. If anything, he’s making you too comfortable. You’re not blind. Choso is handsome. Silky dark hair, deep brown eyes that seem to shine violet when the sun hits them just so, charming scar across his nose. Tall, strong, and kind. He’s entrancing, and it makes a clump settle in your throat. He had never liked Choso, but you’d always just assumed it was a childlike jealousy, born from having his girlfriend live with another man. Maybe it was more than that. You feel too comfortable, too soon. It’s staggering. You turn your head, staring out at the small balcony, and the city that lies beyond. ”I… it’s,” you sigh. ”It’s complicated Choso. There are too many emotions and-” ”I know.” ”I don’t want to be a bother to you. I can barely handle it so-” ”Then let me help you.” You look back at him. His eyebrows are furrowed. He looks sad. Sad because you are, not because he feels what you feel. You try to swallow the ever-growing lump in your throat. ”Let me help you,” he repeats. ”Just because it’s hard, or complicated, doesn’t mean you aren’t allowed to rely on other people.” ”It’s embarrassing,” you mutter, forcing the words from your throat. ”All of it. The way it happened, the way I reacted, the way I hadn’t noticed anything going wrong.” You blink away the tears that are gathering in your eyes. ”I don’t want your help, because I’m fucking humiliated Choso. It’s something I should get over on my own.” You see his throat bob up and down as he swallows, taking in your words. You tense, turning to the kitchen sink. ”I’ll do the dishes, then I’ll stay in my room so you and Yuuji can do whatever.” ”Okay.” You wait for the water to get hot. He isn’t leaving. You swallow. A stray tear runs down your cheek. ”I’m sorry,” you mumble, barely audible over the running water. ”You don’t have to be,” he says as he walks past you, patting your arm. ”Still.”

=========

It’s late. Early? You don’t know. The darkness outside your window has been replaced by a dull, grey light, and you haven’t slept. You haven’t really tried either. The exhaustion and sadness roots down into your very bones, so you don’t see a point in sleeping to get rid of it. You curl in to your sheets. A warmth covers you, but it’s not the kind of warmth you want, the kind you crave. Your phone pings and you pull it towards you, squinting at the screen. It’s 5 o’clock, and you have a text notification. — From : Choso :-) <- Are you going to class today? To : Choso :-) -> idk -> i should but -> eh From : Choso :-)<- Do you wanna join me for breakfast now then? I made enough for either a lunchbox or for now — You let out a breath, dropping your phone back to the mattress. You look up at the ceiling. You think you’ve seen it more than anything or anyone else this week. You get up. The floor is cold when you place your feet down. The air is cold when you pull on a pair of sweatpants and a hoodie. Chosos gaze is warm when he meets your eyes from the dinnertable. ”G’morning,” you mumble. ”Morning,” he says. You sit down opposite him, and he pushes a bowl of chazuke towards you. ”Thanks,” you say. He hums.

You fill up your spoon. Rice, tea, fish. Warmth. Still the wrong kind, but better than the selfmade one of your bed.

”Why’re you up so early?” you ask, muffled by the food in your mouth. He’s seen you do worse, you think. ”Have to be at the studio all day today. Working on an exam piece,” he replies, mumbled around the rim of his tea cup. You hum.

It’s not awkward, it’s just kind of tense. You’re unsure on how to fix it. You don’t think Choso and you are friends exactly. Maybe just good roommates.

He makes dinner, you do the dishes. He’s busy working on a project, you bring him food and snacks at his desk. You get dumped, and he does his absolute best to do whatever he can for you.

Whatever you allow him to do for you.

Which hasn’t exactly been a lot. It’s not like he hasn’t offered. He has, and maybe that’s the problem. It makes you feel weird. A nervous clump in your chest. Stinging your eyes. A tiny spark of warmth in your heart, that you don’t want to permit yourself to think about.

It’s too early, too soon, and he’s too kind, too caring. It scares you. You feel guilty. It’s only been a bit more than a week since he broke up with you.

You want to move on, but it feels wrong. You don’t know why. You don’t want to move on, but that feels wrong too. It’s not like he waited to move on. Your younger sister had told you when you spoke over the phone the other day.

Making out with someone at a party, going home with them, eating lunch with them the following day. Not exactly the actions of someone who feels wrong or guilty.

Maybe you feel guilty because of the circumstances. Maybe it feels like you’d be proving him right. He hadn’t said anything about your relationship with Choso during his tangent, but you feel like you could tell he wanted to.

You scrape up the last of your bowl of chazuke, before pushing it away and resting against the table. You look up at him. His hair is down, held back by a hairband, and you think it makes your heart flutter. You look away, scolding yourself.

”Can I come with you to the studio today?” you ask, and he hums. ”If you want to, yeah,” he says, and you curse him for sounding so warm. You sigh.

”You’re too nice to me Choso.” ”I’m not.”

You stay quiet. You don’t want to argue, and you know he isn’t going to change his mind.

”Are you driving?” ”Was planning to. Traffic shouldn’t be too bad, so.” ”Okay.” ”I was gonna leave in just a bit? If that works for you.” ”Sounds good.”

You look at him again. He looks at you. You don’t know if he ever looked away. It makes a sickly warmth spread through your body, and you don’t know what to do about it. You get up and gather the dishes on the table in to a neat little pile, and carry it to the kitchen sink. Choso stays at the table, but you think you feel his gaze sticking to you, following you. ”I’ll do them when we get home,” you say. ”Okay,” he replies. You turn to look at him. He’s smiling at you, slight but warm, and you think you feel a slight heat rise to your cheeks. ”I’ll get my stuff and then we can leave,” he says as he stands up, before walking to his room. ”Okay,” you reply, following him with your gaze until he’s out of sight. You go back to your own room and change your sweatpants to a pair of jeans, and your hoodie for a t-shirt and flannel. You throw your laptop and notebook into a bag, just in case you find the motivation catch up on your work during the day. A knock. ”You ready?” he calls out, and you meet the gaze of the girl in the mirror. She doesn’t really look like you. Or maybe she does. You don’t really remember, if you’re being honest. She looks normal and you feel like you don’t. ”Yeah,” you reply as you break the eye contact you had with the mirror. Choso is already in the entryway by the time you leave your room, sitting on the bench and pulling on his shoes. You look at him for a bit. He’s hunched over, tying his shoes, and it makes his hair fall down to cover his face from your eyes. Parts of him peek through the silky curtain. His nose, his eyes, his lips. A spark lights up in your chest, but you trample it down as soon as it appears. You can’t. Shouldn’t. Not yet. You slip your feet into a pair of sandals. Choso looks up at you. You look down at him. ”Forecast said it was gonna rain.” ”Just park close to the entrance then.”

He chuckles. The spark you’re pressing down turns to an ember. You try to press it down further. You don’t know if it’s working. The car ride is quiet. Morning news prattle lightly on the radio. Choso drives and you sit next to him. You rest your head against the window. There isn’t much to talk about. You haven’t left the apartment for more than 5 minutes a day the past week, and Choso has been working on his project that he’s been deliberately vauge about since he started it a month ago. The morning news transition into an old rock station. You reach over and turn it up, just a bit. Choso lets out a short hum, tapping his fingers against the wheel. Neither of you speak. There’s no need to. Choso pulls up to the university parking lot, taking the spot closest to the gates, just like you asked him to. You snort, and you think you see a small smile grow on his face. You don’t realize that this was the first time you’d laughed since everything happened. The two of you reach the art departments studio building just as rain starts to fall. He walks to his shared studio and you follow behind. He shows you to his desk and workspace before pulling out the desk chair and urging you to sit down. The stupid ember in your heart keeps sparkling, no matter what you do. You sit down, hoping that Choso can’t tell how quickly you’re falling. As you pull out your phone you hear the studio door open and close before the sound of footsteps stop near where you sit. ”Who’s this?” You look up at the source of the voice, and instantly regret it. A man stands above you with sickening grin on his face. You think you recognize him, though only from rumours around campus. He smiles down at you, and a shiver runs down your spine. ”My roommate,” Choso says from his workspace behind you, and the mans grin widens. You tense. ”Brought her here as a model, did you? Maybe we can share!” The undertone of his voice makes bile rise in your throat. Dehumanizing, like you’re nothing but filth, only worthy of being used, never worthy of being loved. It sounds like *him*, and it makes your eyes sting. You clench your jaw and swallow, trying to think of something, anything, to say. ”She’s kind of been having a shit time, so I brought her here ’cuz she wanted to come. You being a piece of shit and pestering her for no reason sure isn’t helping. Leave her alone.” ”Aw come on Choso, take a chill pill buddy!”

The smile on his face as he speaks is almost nauseating, and you curl in to yourself, doing anything you can to gain an illusion of being out of his sight. ”Are you fucking incapable of listening to people or something? Fuck off.” ”Woah, alright! Take it easy. All yours man.” The man turns around and swaggers out of the studio, and you’re unsure if he even is in the same class as Choso. ”Sorry about him. Loser who only comes to the studio once every month to be annoying,” Choso mumbles as he leans down to grab his materials from his bag ”Oh. Uh… yeah. No need to be sorry,” you reply quietly. He’s close. If he turned his head towards you, you’d be close enough to count his eyelashes. Your stupid, stupid heart is still relentlessly aflame. You can smell his aggrevating eucalyptus shampoo from the bottle that falls down every time you shower. You can see the scrunched tip of his nose as he mutters to himself, digging deeper into his bag in search for something. You can feel his proximity to you. His body heat, his knee bumping against your shin, his presence. It’s overwhelming. And then it’s gone, just like that. Choso stands up and walks back to his workspace and you turn to lay down on his desk, trying to calm your flickering heart. The day continues. At one point you doze off, head resting against the half empty pages of your notebook. You startle awake when Choso places a soda bottle and a bag of chips near your head. ”Lunch,” he says before taking a bite of a protein bar. You hum and stretch in your seat. ”Thanks. Any equally fantastical dinner plans?” you ask, joking. You don’t need him to buy you dinner. ”Might get something from the cafeteria before we leave if that’s cool with you?” ”Oh. Sure,” you reply. He’s buying you dinner. Why is he buying me dinner? Choso gets back to his work, and you attempt to do the same. It makes your flaming little heart burn in a way that stings, the way he so easily, so nonchalantly, takes care of you in a way that makes you fall more and more every single time. It reminds you of him, at the very start of it all, back in your tiny countryside high school. Kindness that is shown in a way that makes you feel special. Kindness that is shown in a way that makes you feel loved. You don’t really get any work done at all. Choso buys you dinner. Because of course he does. It’s nothing fancy at all, just a bowl of gyudon, but he still bought dinner for you. The question of why still bounces around in your head, but you ignore it. The gyudon is good. Maybe you should eat at the cafeteria more often.

It’s a rather quick and quiet affair, dinner. The two of you eat in silence, enjoying but not savouring. It’s late after all. The road is dark and empty as Choso drives the two of you home. A soft jazz tune is playing quietly on the radio, and you pick at your nails. ”You know you don’t have to do,” — you wave your hands in front of you — ”all this, right?” ”This?” Choso questions, mimicking your hand movements slightly above the steering wheel. You clench your jaw. ”Bringing me to your studio ’cuz it’s the first time I’ve been outside in a week. Buying and cooking food for me. Defending me from your weirdo classmates. I don’t know. You don’t have to be so kind to me Choso.” ”I know I don’t have to. I want to.” His answer makes you sigh, and you turn to look out of the window. A slight drizzle has covered the city and you can’t really see further than a meter outside of the car, but you welcome the simulated feeling of isolation and calm. ”I don’t understand why,” you mumble. ”I don’t get it and it makes me feel weird.” ”Good weird or bad weird?” ”I don’t know. Both?” You pause. ”I’m sorry.” ”You don’t have to be. I’m sorry too.” You see his reflection in the car window. A small confounded frown has taken over his face, and you cringe. At yourself. At how this is exactly what you were worried was going to happen, but you let it happen anyways. ”I care about you. I don’t know exactly what happened but I know that for you to react how you did, it had to be awful. No one deserves that.” His words make your lips tremble, and you turn to look at him. He meets your gaze, if only for a second, before looking back at the road. ”It just pisses me off. You deserve someone who takes care of you, and if that asshole isn’t gonna do it, why don’t I?” You flinch. Flinch at the mention of him, flinch at the way the ember in your chest bursts into a raging bonfire. You flinch at the way Choso says it so nonchalantly, as if he doesn’t realize the way it makes you feel. ”You uh… want to take care of me?” you ask hesitantly. ”Yeah,” he says, as if it’s the easiest question in the world. ”Oh,” you breathe out. ”Yeah,” he repeats.

You look at him again. Try to read him again. He looks sure. Calm. Decisive. Your heart flutters, and you swallow. ”Take care of me how?” you ask quietly, almost scared of hearing the answer. ”Any way you’ll let me,” he says softly, and you frown. ”No, Choso. Don’t… don’t be like that. Please. Just tell me for real.” His throat bobs, and he tenses up. The city lights illuminate his face, blue and orange shining across his cheeks. ”I know you’re just trying to be careful, but it’s unfair Choso. I can’t read your mind. Just be honest with me, please.” ”I meant what I said. However you let me,” he forces out. You sigh. ”Choso,” you mutter. His knuckles whiten against the steering wheel. The car stops abruptly, and you startle, looking out of the window. You’re in your apartment buildings parking garage, and before you can even turn back to look at him again, you hear the car door slam shut. You look to the driver seat. Empty, keys still in the ignition. You look to the back seat. Both yours and Chosos bag rest in the middle, against each other. You grumble to yourself before grabbing the bags and the keys, getting out and locking the car behind you. As you walk in to the stairwell, you hear his footsteps a few floors above you. ”You forgot your bag dumbass!” you yell, and the footsteps stop. As you start walking up, you hear him come down to meet you. He’s standing at the top of the stairs. You look up at him. His eyes are wide, expression unsure. You walk up and past him, slamming his bag into his chest. ”Don’t be a fucking asshole Choso. It’s embarrassing. For both of us.” He sputters, and you keep walking. He follows, two steps at a time, before he catches up to you and grabs your arm. You stop. ”I’m sorry,” he says. ”Okay,” you reply. You pull your arm from his grip. He lets go. ”I’m sorry,” he says again. ”Okay,” you reply again. You keep walking. He follows. He stands behind you as you unlock the door. He sits down on the bench as you slip off your sandals. ”Good night,” you say. He doesn’t reply.

=========

You go to class the next day. If only to make it easier to avoid Choso. A childish solution, you’re sure, but it feels warranted. It might not have been awkward before, but it most definetly is now. You sit on the bus, going home, cramped between the window and an older woman with a kid in her lap. Your text notification sounds out through your headphones, and you shuffle your phone out of your bag, doing your best to not disturb anyone around you. — From : Choso :-) &lt;- Are you home? — You purse your lips and frown down at the screen. Frown at the stupid little emoji he put there on his own as he entered his number into your contact list. Frown at his bluntness. Frown at how the bonfire inside you is still raging, despite Chosos behaviour last night. — To : Choso :-) -> on the bus -> home in maybe 15 From : Choso :-) <- Okay <- Can you let Yuuji in when you’re home? He was going to come over but something came up and I have to stay late at the studio. To : Choso :-) -> okay will do — You debate adding an emoji of some kind, but ultimately decide against it, before shoving your phone back into your bag. If Choso is going to be weird and awkward, you might as well do the same. A small tap on your shoulder pulls you from your thoughts, and you turn to the woman next to you, plucking your headphone from your ear. ”Hm?” She smiles, warm and knowing. You raise your eyebrows. ”It’s better to talk about it, you know?” she says. Your eyes widen. ”Excuse me?” ”Your boyfriend! Fights never get resolved by being ignored.” You sputter. ”He’s not- It’s- We aren’t fighting. And he’s my roommate, not my boyfriend,” you grumble. The lady just laughs. ”All right, all right. My point still stands,” she says, before putting the child in her lap down on their feet and standing up herself. ”You need to be honest with yourself too, young girl.”

Her parting words are soft, and you sink into your seat as she walks away.

As you tredge up the final steps to your apartment you spot Yuuji sitting by the door. You cringe. It’s definetly been over a year since the floors were cleaned. And you’ve also never been any semblance of alone with Yuuji. You don’t really know how to deal with teenage boys.

You take off your headphones as you walk up to him. Yuuji looks up at the sound of approaching footsteps and shoots up to stand as he realizes it’s you.

You stare at each other for a few seconds.

”Hi,” you say. ”Hey!” he exclaims. ”Uh, Choso told you what’s up right?”

You almost laugh. Because he did, but he also very much didn’t.

”Yeah,” is what you end up saying. You don’t need to vent about your issues to someone who views the person you’re having issues with as the best brother in the world.

”Cool,” Yuuji says, and silence takes over again. You fiddle with the strap of your bag and Yuuji scuffs his shoes against the floor.

”Do you- Um, we can go to the store. If you want anything to eat, or something. While you wait,” you say.

How the hell do you even talk to people? ”Oh! Uh, I don’t have any money though.” ”I’ll pay.” ”Ah okay then!”

You nod and Yuuji smiles. You try to smile back but it feels tense and weird. You hope he doesn’t question it.

”There’s a corner store just a minute away, they have snacks and food and stuff. We…”

You pause. We. As if you and Choso are a unit. A pair. A couple.

”There is some stuff at home but I don’t mind treating you to whatever,” you say. ”Cool,” he says again.

You nod, and start walking back down the stairs. Yuuji follows behind. You clench the strap of your bag tightly the entire walk.

Why are you doing this? You could’ve easily just let him in and then retreated to your own room and left him to watch TV or hang out in Chosos room.

You’re not friends with Yuuji. Barely even aquaintainces, and definetly not ”bring him to the corner store” close. You feel dumb. Weird.

As the two of you walk into the store, Yuuji speaks up.

”Y’got a spending limit? ”Uh. Don’t get more than you’d pay for with your own money, I guess?” you reply. ”Sweet!”

He takes off between the aisles, and you wonder if you’ve made a mistake. You follow behind, meandering around the store. After a minute or two Yuuji appears before you, a ramen cup, a bag of chips and a bottle of soda in his hands. ”Is this okay?” he asks. ”Yeah. I’ll grab something too, hold on.” You walk to the refrigerators and pick out an onigiri and a soda bottle. ”Y’didn’t eat lunch?” Yuuji asks, hovering over your shoulder. ”Uh. I did, just didn’t want you to feel awkward. Or whatever,” you mumble as you turn to walk to the register. ”Oh, cool.” The two of you put down your stuff on the register desk and you give a small smile to the cashier. Yuuji stands behind you, looking around at the stuff behind the register. ”What a nice sister you have!” the cashier says to Yuuji as you tap your card against the reader. Twice in a day now. That you’ve been mistaken for having some actual connection to Choso. It didn’t use to happen this often did it? Do you carry yourself differently after all that’s happened? ”Ah, she’s just my brothers roommate,” Yuuji replies. You huff out a quiet laugh. Yeah. Just Chosos roommate. The cashier hums. You think you see a knowing glint in his eyes. You sink into the collar of your jacket as you grab your things, before moving to the eating area of the store. As Yuuji heats up his cup noodles, you get started on your onigiri. You had actually forgone lunch, solely because you know that Choso often eats in the campus cafeteria. Once again, childish, and once again, would be weird to mention to your current company. ”Just didn’t want you to feel awkward.” A lame excuse if there ever was one, but you trust that Yuuji and yourself aren’t close enough for him to question you. The two of you eat. You attempt some smalltalk. You ask him about school. Yuuji tells you about his exams and exchange events. You nod along. He asks you about school. You tell him about your major. He seems interested, but you can’t really tell if he’s just trying to be polite. The two of you leave the store and begin the short walk back. ”You’re smart right?”

The question comes almost out of nowhere and you stop in your tracks before turning to look at Yuuji. ”Uh, I guess?” you say. You don’t know what Yuuji classifies as smart. ”Okay so like, if I do my homework while waiting for Choso would you help me if I get stuck?” he asks, if only slightly awkwardly. ”Oh. Uh, yeah sure. Can’t promise I’ll be that helpful but I can try.” When you get home the two of you sit down at the dinner table, you with your laptop and Yuuji with his schoolbooks. He asks you a question now and then, and you help to the best of your ability. Occasionally you read him a passage of your essay to see if it flows how you hope it does, and he laughs at how little he understands. You smile, just slightly. Yuuji is nice. Choso comes home eventually. The rusty orange of the sunset shines through the balcony windows. Yuuji springs up from his seat and hugs his brother before heading to the couch and turning on the TV. Choso is about to go over to join him before he stops and turns to you. ”Thanks, for uh,” Choso says, gesturing behind him at Yuuji who’s busy setting up the video game they’re going to play, ”keeping him company.” ”Yeah, no problem,” you reply. ”He’s a good kid.” Something takes over Chosos face when the words leave your lips. You’re still not great at reading him. Sentimentality maybe? Melancholy? Satisfaction or pride? Maybe all of them at the same time. ”Yeah. He is.”

=========

It’s been a week. Things are more or less back to normal. Whatever normal means. The cool wind plays across your face as you look down at the street below. Choso joined you on the balcony about five minutes ago. Something in your head tells you he wants to say something. Something important. So you stay silent. You haven’t looked at him since he opened the door and quietly asked if it was okay for him to be here. You had turned your gaze back to the city before nodding. You feel him next to you, prescence overwhelming, your arms touching, just slightly. You interlock your own fingers, picking at your nails. You hear him swallow, preparing to speak, and you lean your head further over the railing. ”I think I fell in love with you before you even moved in here,” Choso says. You swallow and chew on your lip, still unable to raise your gaze from your own entwined hands. ”I saw you. At the party after the opening week. You… um, you were with him, but I just… couldn’t tear my eyes off of you. You looked so pretty and so happy and I just couldn’t stop staring at you. Was surprised neither of you noticed.” You finally look at him. He’s leaning his back against the balcony railing, face tilted up against the stars. Chosos ears are red and it makes heat rise to your cheeks. You look back down at the city streets below. ”He went off to get new drinks or something and,” he swallows. ”You looked at me. And then you smiled. I don’t even think it was for more than a second, but you looked me in the eyes and smiled.” You feel his gaze shift to you. ”I think I’ve been in love with you since then.” You look at him. The stars are reflecting in his eyes. You almost feel nauseous from the intense affection in your chest. ”That’s like a year and a half ago Choso,” you mumble. ”Yeah.” You let out a breath before turning back to the city. ”Um, I don’t mind covering rent for a month or two,” he mutters. You look up at him again. ”If you wanna move out, I mean. I get it. It’s weird and creepy of me to even have accepted you as a roommate, let alone having liked you like this for so long, so really, I understand if you-” You grab his hand. Choso looks at you. His eyes are wide and his cheeks are red and he looks so nervous and so endearing and so pretty. ”I like you, Choso.” You blink. His mouth is opening and closing, trying to find words, as the blush spreads across his face. ”Oh.” ”Yeah,” you say, tilting your head. ”Like me? Or just like me?” ”I like you.” ”Oh.”

You let go of his hand before pressing your palm against his, interlocking your fingers. He squeezes your hand. You smile and squeeze back.

=========

Choso isn’t your boyfriend. You aren’t Chosos girlfriend. Too soon you’d said. I’ve been waiting a year and a half, what’s a bit longer Choso had replied. But still, something in the air has undoubtedly shifted. One day you come home from class just as Choso leaves the bathroom after his shower. He’s fully dressed, just some sweatpants and a T-shirt, yet you can’t help but stare. Eventually your eyes meet his and he gives you a small grin as he dries his hair. You look away, face as hot as your burning heart. One night you leave your room to get a glass of water before bed. Choso is sitting on the couch, playing a video game on low volume. As you open your door his eyes flick to yours and then down to your legs. Your bare legs. His eyes snap back up to yours and then quickly move back to the television as a blush spreads across his cheeks. You huff out a small laugh as you walk past him to the kitchen. After you finish your glass of water and go to head back to your room you instead take a seat on the armrest of the couch, next to where Choso is sitting. He looks up at you and you smile before reaching and running your hand through his hair. So many unspoken words shine in his eyes and your smile grows shy. You lean down quickly and press a short kiss to the corner of his mouth with a whispered ”g’night.” As you stand up Choso lightly grabs the hand you’re pulling out of his hair before softly kissing the inside of your wrist. Heat rises to your cheeks as your eyes meet his once again. Choso repeats your simple sentiment and you give him a nod before returning to your bedroom. You barely sleep that night, spending multiple hours rubbing the spot he’d kissed as you imagine how his lips would feel against yours. One afternoon the two of you are grocery shopping together, huddled closely together, inspecting the produce. You see an older woman steal a glance at you before tapping her husbands shoulder and gesturing to Choso and yourself. ”Remember when we were that young?” she asks him. He laughs. ”Of course I do.” You glance up at Choso and find his ears are as red as the bell pepper you’re holding in your hand.

One evening you and Choso are on the way home from going out with a few friends when you tell him you’re going to pop in to the convenience store really quick, and he tells you that he’ll wait for you outside. When you leave the store you find Choso outside, talking to a girl. As you approach, her eyes widen before she falls into a short bow and takes off. ”Never took you for a womanizer Choso,” you joke, taking a bite of pocky before offering the stick to him. ”She wasn’t hitting on me,” he mumbles as he chews. You snort. ”Sure she wasn’t.” You grab his hand and the two of you start walking home. ”No, really. I don’t think I’ve ever been hit on,” he muses, rubbing his thumb along your fingers. ”I find that hard to believe,” you say, bumping against him, teasing. ”What do you mean?” he asks simply. You flush. ”Well… you know. You’re handsome,” you mutter. ”Oh.” You’re not sure if the response of simply gripping your hand tighter and burrowing into the collar of his jacket, muttering something you can’t make out is because he was in fact unaware of his own attractiveness or the fact that it was you who said the words. One day you text Choso. He replies straight away, even though you know he’s in class. — To : Choso :-) -> do u have plans today? From : Choso :-) <- Just my classes <- Was there anything you had on your mind? To : Choso :-) -> wanna go out? -> like on a date i mean -> we can stay in too if youd rather do thay -> that -> i just thought we cpuld talk maybe -> could -> so yeah -> lmk —

As soon as you press send on the final message you throw your phone down on the bed next to you and bury your face in your pillow. You don’t dare look at the screen. You stare at a tiny hole in the wall. Minutes pass. He’s in class you rationalize. Choso slams his phone down on the table as soon as he sees the word ”date” in your texts. As he sinks down in his chair he puts his face in his hands, feeling the blush spread from the tip of his nose all the way to his ears. His seatmate throws a questioning glance his way and the professor keeps talking but all he can think about is you. — From : Choso :-) <- Yeha sounds good! <- Yeah* <- My class is over in an hour if you want to meet up somewhere near campus? Otherwise I can come pick you up at home :-) To : Choso :-) -> does the park by campus sound ok? -> ill come meet u at the gates if thats fine From : Choso :-) <;- That’s fine! <- I can’t wait :-) To : Choso :-) -> me neither <3 — After sending the message you spring off your bed and hurry into the shower. You do your best to be as quick but also as thorough as possible. As you stand in front of your closet, wrapped in your towel, a thought pops in to your head. I want to look pretty. A thought you haven’t had since that one fateful meeting with him. You don’t want to call it a date. It hardly qualified as one anyways. I want to look pretty for Choso.

The simple specification makes heat rise to your cheeks. It feels easy, the soft, almost innocent affection you feel for Choso. You don’t dare think of what you feel as love, not yet, and you definetly don’t dare to say it out loud. However, despite the softness and the innocence, there is another aspect to your affection. A decidedly less soft and innocent aspect. You hesitate to call it something as simple as attraction, but can’t imagine calling it something as loaded as lust. Alas, something inside you yearns to look pretty enough that he won’t be able to take his hands off you. Something inside you yearns to look pretty enough that he’ll fall speechless the second your eyes meet. Something inside you yearns to look pretty enough that Choso will be yours, forevermore. You talk to your older sister on the phone while you do your makeup. She teases you relentlessly as you beg her for advice but you can hear the loving smile in her voice. For the entire busride you bounce your knee and pick at your nails. Your mind is running at the speed of light and you can’t seem to stop it, no matter how hard you try. Will you be my girlfriend? Can you be my girlfriend? Do you want to be my girlfriend? You try to imagine how he’ll phrase the inevitable question. A different scenario pops into your head. Please be my boyfriend, won’t you? Heat rises to your cheeks and you sink down into your seat. Be my girlfriend, yeah? He had charmed you at the time, you can’t deny that. The nonchalant words mixed with the slight eagerness in his eyes. But Choso won’t do that. As conceited as it makes you sound, you know that he won’t. He’s been waiting for you for too long, he would never be so careless about it. He meets you at the bus station, breathing heavily, sweat gathering at his brow. You glance at the small clock on your wrist. His class ended just a minute ago. You crack a smile as his eyes meet yours. ”I wouldn’t have minded waiting y’know,” you tell him as the two of you begin the short walk to the nearby park. ”Still,” Choso says as his breathing calms down. ”I never wanna make you wait.” "Unfair," you say, bumping your arm against his. "I've made you wait plenty of times." "Hm, well. Call it a special privilege." He doesn't elaborate on if the privilege is his or yours.

The park is quiet, a calm wind playing through the trees. You and Choso walk around for a bit, talking about nothing and everything. His class, your upcoming presentation, Yuujis exams. Groceries, favourite foods, pastries. Eventually the two of you sit down on a small bench under a willow tree, facing a pond. A family of ducks float across the surface, maneuvering between lilypads and reeds. Both of you know what you came here to do, but neither of you seem to know exactly how to do it. A few minutes pass in silence, broken by Chosos hand coming down to rest over yours. You look up from the pond and meet his eyes. Nervous and wide, yet more sure than you’ve ever seen them. Deep pools of dark brown with a tiny hint of a moody violet. ”Can I be your boyfriend?” Oh. Oh. You can’t find the words, so you just nod. So kind, so gentle, so humble. Not asking, not offering, not demanding. A simple request, one that you’d fulfil time and time again, through eons and lifetimes. You love him. I love him. ”I love you,” you mumble. Chosos cheeks bloom into a glowing red, and you feel the tips of your ears heat up similarly. You’re Chosos girlfriend. Choso is your boyfriend.

-- epilouge

It’s hot out. The cicada song and sunshine overwhelms your senses, but Chosos warm hand in your cold one grounds you as you walk up to your childhood home among the rice fields. You don’t hate the countryside, not at all. You just don’t think you were particularly made for it, at least not with how you live your life right now. Your sisters meet you on the porch, Namie, your older sister living at the house halftime and your younger sister Rei having left as soon as her classes ended and she was on break, two days before you and four days before Choso. Rei and Choso exchange waves and small greetings, having met a handful of times before back in the city. As you introduce him to Namie, Choso falls into a deep bow and quietly promises that he’ll take care of you. Your sisters just laugh, but both yours and Chosos cheeks are as warm as the searing summer sun. Your mother and her husband are still on a business trip, their promised arrival being a week after yours. Choso had been relieved when you told him he wouldn’t be meeting your entire family at the same time. Chilled glasses of ice tea sit on a tray in the living room, freshly poured by your grandfather as the four of you take your seats. He spends the better half of an hour interrogating your boyfriend while you rest on the engawa with your sisters. It’s nice to be home. Even if anywhere you are with Choso is home, you feel like bringing him here shows him how he makes you feel. His eyes meet yours through the open sliding doors and you hope and pray he understands how much it means to you that he’s here and he’s yours. A sliver of a grin grows on his face and you let out a content sigh. Dinner is short and sweet, most of the evening instead being spent on drinks and board games. Choso wins the first round and your grandfather mutters beginners luck under his breath, but you can see the small smile on his face. Namie retreats to her room after five rounds, your grandfather after seven and Rie after eight.

You and Choso stay downstairs for a while, just sitting in silence. As much as you love to speak with him, you also love how you never need to. The wind chimes play a soft melody as you stand up and pull Choso up from his seat, guiding him to your room. He gets into bed before you, half covered by the sheets. His eyes never leave you as you get undressed, and as soon as you step closer to the bed he pulls you down on top of him, brushing his lips against yours. You can taste the lemon sake you drank earlier mixed with the subtle mint of his toothpaste and grapefruit of your lip balm. He lets go of you after just a second or two, and you sink down against him. ”Can’t believe you’re trying to seduce me in my childhood bedroom,” you whisper against the crook of his neck. He hums. ”Is it working?” You laugh quietly before pressing a short kiss to his lips. ”Maybe. Pervert.” Neither you nor Choso are particularly affectionate with your words. You know he loves you and he knows you love him. But the words are rarely spoken out loud. The last time you told him was after he asked to be your boyfriend and the last time he told you was nearly three months after that, when the two of you had gone out on Christmas Eve. However, this seemingly normal summer night, quiet and warm, evidently brings out waves upon waves of whispered confessions as your bodies move against each other, skin to skin and heart to heart. It’s hot, almost boiling. The sweltering summer air blowing through your open window, Choso holding you tightly to his chest and the feeling of his body heat against your sticky skin. You’d noticed it after just a week of actual dating. Choso always runs hot. You run your hands through his hair as you grind down against him. He looks up at you before leaning up and kissing you. His lips are slightly chapped and burning, marking yours with an almost frantic obsession. ”I’m,” you gasp. ”I’m so fucking in love with you.” The words are mumbled against his lips, like a secret only the two of you are privy to. ”M-me too,” Choso murmurs, trailing off into a quiet whimper. ”I love you so much.” Between the whispers and pants, you hear the muted sound of crickets outside. ”Never wanna leave you,” he says softly. ”Me neither,” you answer, not even having to think about it.

[sanityshorror]

I know Killian is protective of children, but is he the only member of the Hellcrew who is? (I'm sorry if this has been answered at some point, I'm new here. All I know is that Julius hates kids, Seamus doesn't care, Lucien... *gestures vaguely*, most of the group hates Lucien, and Seraphina won't kill anyone younger than 18)

Killian is protective of young kids yeah but he's kinda an ass to teenagers lol. Not like in a way where he's going to intentionally harm them but he'll go back and forth bickering, and if a teenager tries him he will knock them on their ass and tell them they learned the hard way. 😭 Just because Killian is protective of young children and never targets anyone under 18, that isn't to say Killian is good with kids. He has no idea what the hell he's doing and not even close to father material.

Shockingly...Cian is really the only one in Hellcrew that is actually really good with children and was also a wonderful father at that. He had a... Very much less than ideal upbringing. Traumatic childhood in Ireland, then his adolescence was spent being raised by Killian so... It manifested for Cian in a way where he became very dead set on being the father to his children that he wished could have raised him from birth. I'm not saying he actually ever was this perfect father, not by a long shot and like every single parent, he has his faults and fuck ups. But ultimately he was a good father, and he really enjoyed every second of raising his kids. Cian had all his children when he was a human, causing them to all be mortal, so once he became immortal it was difficult for him to come to terms with watching them all grow old and die - meanwhile he's 31 and never aging another day. There are a few reasons why Cian is extremely unlikely to ever have children again and why it's unrealistic - including Dev having no interest in being a father. But yeah, Cian is the only one I can safely say that if you leave a baby or child alone with, the biggest risk you run is him deciding "this is my kid now." 😭

Neither Sullivan nor Octavian hate kids but...

Sullivan is kinda grossed out and annoyed by babies and kids (example: "ewwww, it's pooping!!!" "Ewwww, why are it's hands all sticky and grimey?!!?!" "Ugh, WHY WON'T IT SHUT UP???!!!"). They had younger siblings, all of which were quite a bit younger than they were. Sullivan was jealous of their siblings taking away all of their mother's attention from them (Sullivan and their mother were extremely close) and did not enjoy being made to help (Sullivan was 13 and 15 years old when their two younger siblings were born).

Octavian raised his 3 siblings and honestly it took everything out of him. Not to mention he's still very immature mentally and not at all responsible, and he's extremely impulsive with horrid judgement. He's also not particularly good with kids and is a horrific influence without intending to be. Octavian is much more of a 'cool uncle' type of person lol. I can see Octavian having the random impulse to adopt a kid but thankfully Sullivan has more than enough brain cells to stop Octavian from following through with his 3am plan formed purely by mania and cocaine. 😭

Everyone else is just an absolute big fat N O P E.

[enchxanting]

our love is god [ethan landry] pt. 4

read part 3 here || all parts

pairing: ethan landry x reader

warnings: implied sexual content/loss of virginity. no explicit language but it's clear what's happening (all characters are 18+). also lots of making out

a/n: okayyyy first time writing anything like this so i hope it's good. i debated making it more or less explicit for a really long time and landed somewhere in the middle. also if you want to be added to the taglist please leave me a reply and i'll put you on the list :)

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

As cute as he may be, Ethan is a terrible driver.

I can’t figure it out. He’s usually so apprehensive, but as soon as I tell him my address, he’s going 15 over the limit, knuckles tight against the wheel.

“Um, do you need directions?” I ask.

“No.” He notices my puzzled expression, so he clarifies. “We actually used to live here, when I was way younger. I’m pretty sure I know where you are.”

As we start to weave through the backstreets of the suburbs, he looks over at me with a nervous glint in his eye. “So, um, are your parents home? Will they be mad that you’re getting home so late?”

“They’re out of town. A wedding for a college friend or something. Chad wanted us to throw a party, but Sam would have flipped, so it’s just me.”

“Shame, you seem like such a party person,” he teases, and I roll my eyes at him, a slight blush creeping on my face.

He finally turns into my driveway, which is good because I’m starting to get seasick. Stepping out of the car, I fumble for my keys before realizing I left the door open this morning. I’d usually panic about this sort of thing, but I’m distracted by the feeling of Ethan’s presence behind me.

Pushing open the door and flipping on the lights, I lead him into the kitchen. For some reason, I’m really, really fucking nervous to be alone with him. “Uh, do you want any water?”

“Yeah, sure,” he says, sitting down at the table.

I grab two glasses from the shelf and fill them with water, sliding one across the table. “Thanks,” he smiles. “Um, I’m sorry about everything that happened tonight. That guy was a creep and you did the right thing, obviously, but what Tara said was really not cool.

I stare into the glass. “It’s okay. She was really drunk or whatever. I can apologize to her tomorrow morning.”

Ethan frowns. “Well, sure, but it’s not really your fault, right? You were looking out for her.”

“She wasn’t actually mad about the guy, I don’t think. She got into an argument earlier with her sister and I tried to step in, so she was super pissed at me already. I think she was looking for a fight.”

“Does she do that a lot? Look for a fight, I mean?”

“I don’t know,” I sigh. “She drives me crazy, and sometimes I want to kill her, but she’s my best friend.”

Ethan looks like he wants to say something, but stays quiet. Now’s probably a better time than any to pivot away from Tara and the chaos of the night.

“So,” I say, “any long-distance partner from any of your previous high schools?”

He laughs. “Uh, no. I’ve actually never… had a girlfriend or anything.”

“You’ve got to be kidding. You’re just so–” 

I stop myself before I finish that sentence. He raises an eyebrow at me. “What, Y/N? So what?”

“Cute,” I mumble. “Really, really cute.”

Ethan grins. “Oh, really cute, huh?”

“Shut up,” I say. “Yeah.”

I suddenly notice how little distance there is between us. I look up nervously to meet his gaze. Jesus, he’s tall.

“I think so, too,” he says.

I give him a quizzical look. “You think you’re cute?”

“Wait. Shit. No. Not what I meant– you. I think you’re cute, too. You are.” I giggle softly, and he blushes. “Can I kiss you?” he asks.

My stomach turns. My butterflies are nearly unbearable, but I nod. “Yes. Please.”

Ethan leans in, and I meet him halfway, pressing my lips against his. My heart is pounding, but the kiss feels so perfect that I forget about everything else.

We break apart and his eyes are wide with apprehension. “Was that okay?”

In reply, I wrap my arms around his neck and kiss him again, deeper this time. He relaxes into it, wrapping his arms around my waist and pulling me in. We kiss like that, leaning against the kitchen table, until I pull back. “Can we go upstairs? Uh, my mom sometimes keeps a camera down here.”

“Sure, lead the way,” he says, slightly out of breath.

It takes everything in me not to run up the stairs, but I take him by the hand and lead him to my room. There are books and half-finished forgeries strewn across the various surfaces, plus a laundry basket of clothes I have to put away, and I kick myself for not taking the time to clean up this morning. 

Ethan doesn’t seem to mind, though. When I turn to him, he’s only looking at me. He reaches to cup the side of my face, studying it for a moment before kissing me again. I stumble back onto my bed and he follows suit. His hand reaches for my hip and I gasp softly when he touches a little bit of exposed skin on my thigh

“Oh, shit, sorry,” he says.

“No, no please– it’s okay.” I grab his hand, placing it back on my leg. “I liked it.”

He smiles slightly, eyes darkening. As he leans in to kiss me, his hand snakes up my leg, resting at the crook of my thigh. I follow suit, running my hand down his chest. 

The undershirt I have on was great for modesty, but I’m suddenly overheating. “Hey, um, do you mind if I take this shirt off? It’s literally a hundred degrees right now.”

His eyes widen slightly, but he grins. “Well, I don’t have a problem with that…”

I blush and he laughs, but I slip the straps of the dress off my shoulders and pull the shirt over my head, exposing my collarbone and a not-insignificant amount of cleavage. Even though I’m technically covered, I feel naked underneath his gaze.

“You’re beautiful,” he says. “You know that?”

My breath catches, but his compliment fills me with some type of courage. I lean over and kiss him, harder than before. He makes a muffled noise, clearly caught off guard by my sudden boldness, but wraps his hand around the back of my neck. I find the hem of his shirt and pull away just enough to ask, “Can we take this off?”

Ethan nods profusely and pulls his blue polo over his head, and I swear to god: I am the luckiest girl alive. I notice for the first time how defined his arms are, and then I’m distracted by the abs he somehow had time to curate between cross-country moves. “Fuck, Ethan, you’re gorgeous.”

Under normal circumstances, I would be embarrassed to speak this plainly, but I’m too into this to care. He responds by leaning us both back on the bed until he’s basically on top of me, kissing me deeply and firmly. I’m suddenly kissing his neck and it’s like I’m not me anymore because I never do this, but fuck, he is so attractive and he wants me too. I don’t know how long we keep making out this way, but it’s a long time before he pulls back suddenly. “What’s wrong?” I ask.

He looks away, avoiding my gaze. “I, um… I just want you to know that I haven’t… done anything like this before.”

My cheeks go red. “Ethan, I haven’t either. We don’t have to do anything you don’t want.”

“That’s the thing, though,” he says, running his hand through his hair. “I… I want to. I want you.” He pauses. “If that’s okay?”

A feeling of panic surges in my chest, but I push it down. I think about the box of condoms that Mom bought me when I turned 18, “just in case,” and the time Mindy told me about her first time with Anika, and even the way I felt when Tara left me alone earlier tonight– I know that this is what I want. 

“I want to, too. Are you sure?”

He smiles. “I’m sure.”

We lay back in my bed and he’s pulling the straps of my dress off, kissing over the newly exposed skin. He kisses down my neck and chest, and I take the time to do the same. I want to make this moment last before he asks me one more time if I’m ready.

I am. 

I don’t have a moment to second-guess myself before he’s holding me, and we’re suddenly close, so, so close, and we stay that way until we fall asleep, nestled in each other’s arms.

taglist: @miawastakens

[nightgoodomens]

How did you predict that ??! It is awesome but omg . Like honestly he is trying so hard to get her out there I do feel it is abit late tho.

More asks and answers below:

Because they went very basic obvious PR. If something feels forced, on purpose, not organic, not usual; if it stinks, it stinks for a reason.

It started with him making a point to mention her during his BAFTAs interviews to ensure they write her name down.

Constant mentions from a man who always avoided talking about her are always suspicious.

But hey maybe I’m too cynical?

Then with every article underlining she’s an ACTOR. Which was a stretch anyway and frankly no media would care to mention her if he didn’t tell them to.

But hey maybe I’m too cynical?

Then bang we wake up in the morning of BAFTAs with every trash magazine writing articles about her suddenly about some old stuff so they were told to do so because they had zero reason to do that themselves. They had zero reason to care about her when she hasn’t done anything new so they had to bring up really old stories and focus purely on her even though it was David’s day. So they were paid to do so.

But hey maybe I’m too cynical?

But then bang again we are suddenly getting a whole over-acted show. Oh my godddd you look amaaaazing he made such an amazed face right in front of the main camera where they decided to meet. What a coincidence! Click📸. Ohhh time for a huge PDA kiss in front of all these cameras! Click📸. Oh now you give me a long loved look and now I do that in return! Click📸. My goodness like in a perfect movie with actors… oh.

And then ok we are done, where’s Michael?

David has worked his ass off to give her everything he could, even getting Michael to give her a role, now it’s up to her to do something with it. He will probably try to push her wherever possible, but we will need to see if suddenly after all these years she became an actress that people want because of her skills not famous surnames. Surnames only get you so far.

If she’s still the same, he can dance on his head and it won’t work. Sure Neil is his buddy was loves a nepo show, and Michael loves David, so he did it for him (he did make her watch an intimate moment between men though lmao), but how many more people will take her on just because David is pretty?

Oh I wonder what suddenly made him so desperate and motivated to find her a job after years of failures… so he’d be more free… I wonder if it starts with M and ends with L.

Honestly I was laughing when people were all “this is true love!” no babes this is business. The most blatant of businesses.

I doubt she suddenly became a good actress so I wonder if they will try something else with her. I just wish DT got a break and in result us.

I think things are a little different now and so might be his priories. I hope the agent won’t keep on using him to promote her. Even more than already.

Yeah I cross my fingers for GO to be nepo free but…

No wonder he’s so tiny, dude is exhausted from everyone hanging on him. He tried so many freaking times with GT, I just hope that agent finds her something that isn’t just hanging on him.

He is a shover 😂

If she actually wanted a job then she’d have found something she’s actually good at years ago. But she wants the “cool” job and doesn’t want to admit she just isn’t that good. When you are privileged, you can spend 15 years having your man try to make you an actress. Normal people go “damn I’m shit at this and I need to pay bills so let’s find something else”.

Aw thank you for writing in and don’t worry!

I’m not 100% sure yet.

I could see AL/MS break up but not GT/DT but now I have a slight itching (after seeing that the PR show was indeed to get GT a job) whether… well…

We have such an extreme push to make GT and AL independent or at least slightly less dependent on the dudes and it’s clearly a whole plan that they have put into motion. Why such sudden need? Especially since soft launching MS/DT at the same time?

I definitely won’t say oh yeah sure there is a separation coming. But I’m also not saying “no way!!!” anymore.

If a separation will come then on beautiful (££) terms though.

[storiesbyjes2g]

What I've been up to...

So if you remember, I've been quite busy over the past 3 months because of a class I was taking. I promised to show you some of my work, so here are a few of my favorite assignments!

(lots'o pictures and video under the cut)

I took a 3D animation boot camp, and naturally before we started animating we had to learn how to model. The program we learned was Cinema 4D. I know a lot of you have learned Blender, and your first project was making a donut. Well...we had to make a freakin' ramen shop...with the ramen! 😂 I added the textures later once I discovered there was a library, but I didn't quite know how to edit them at the time, so they're not the best choice, but hey. I learned something.

I forgot to grab the pic of the ramen close up. Oh well. All of this was made with basic shapes. Nothing fancy. That comes next.

Next, we learned different modeling methods. The method used in this next pic is called volume modeling. Always sims on the brain lol.

After we got our feet wet with modeling, we moved into materials and "lights, camera, action," which was half the reason I wanted to take the class. I still haven't gotten the hang of lighting, but it's really hard period and will take a while to master. Materials are basically the colors and textures you apply on an object. I didn't make these headphones, but I did make the leather and fabric texture.

You will see these headphones again and again because I could not leave them alone lol.

Before we began the animation portion, we learned one last method of modeling. I won't bore you with the details, but basically taking one element and cloning it a bunch of times until you have something else. For example, we only received one piece of each skyscraper. The buildings were whole, but we only received one of each. We used this cloning method to make an entire city block out of just a few things.

Finally, we got into animating. There two other assignments before this that I did terribly on and I'll never show them to another living soul, especially since animation is part of my job LOL, but I'll show you the animated version of this city. The still image was actually made after the video based on some feedback I got. That's why things look different.

Not my best animation work, but whatever. Still learning!

Alright, by this point we're nearing the finish line. There were some other assignments about composition and what not, but for the most part it was all about animation from here on out. This next one was my favorite one. It was basically putting everything we learned so far (minus modeling) into practice. We had to take any previous project and make a 15 sec commercial/product showcase. You know I had to pick up those headphones! (sound on!!)

I love timing videos to music. It's like the best part!

The next assignment was about camera movements and editing the video in After Effects. I don't have the before pic, but imagine this clip being brighter, a lot less vibrant, and having a cool tone at the beginning.

And finally! The ultimate test! That was the actual name of the project lol. Bring it all together and make something great. I modeled every single thing you see (though not very well LOL. gotta practice!) and created all the materials except the picnic table. It's in no way perfect and I plan to go back and make many edits, but I did it y'all! I've been working on this little by little for the past 3 weeks. Enjoy! (sound on!)

[alexwritingspot]

Assuming I read that right and you want to know our OCs, here we go...

Name: Milread "Millie" Leith

Age: Physically 15, Chronologically 113 (she was on the Titanic, fought a sea monster, got frozen Captain America style, thaws out in the modern day)

Godly parent: Neptune

Nationality: Scottish

Something you like/dislike: (curious about this one, do you mean what *I* (dis)like or the character (dis)likes?)

:-)

A/n: Yep darling, that was what I intended! BTW your character’s concept is so cool?? Like- I love it.

Headcanons

꧂ When Millie first was introduced to the wolf goddess was totally weirded out. Was an animal talking to her? Next thing she knew she had to find this camp or whatever.

꧂ She was really confused at first. This was America, but she remembered the ship sinking, and fighting that strange creature…

꧂ During her journey to find camp Jupiter she found really strange how almost every girl wore jeans or trousers so freely. Why weren’t men criticising them?

꧂ Once she arrived at camp Jupiter, almost losing her life to some different monsters, she found out it wasn’t 1912 anymore. She thought it was a big joke until someone explained to her that it was now 2024. ꧂ She immediately clicked with Jason and Reyna

꧂ First time that she tried a smoothie in New Rome she was kinda of amazed. Like- humanity had invented lot of stuff? (No one had still told her about phones)

꧂ Neptune recognised her when she first won the War game and she was kinda of disappointed. Wasn’t Neptune a not so popular god between Romans?

꧂ Quickly got over her disappointment when she found out she had powers.

꧂ Like, they were so cool?? 100% questioned herself if she should eat fish or not. Did that imply that she was eating her “people”….?

꧂ Totally was worried when Jason disappeared. People don’t just disappear, right?

꧂ Wasn’t that much of a surprise that there was another camp for demigods. Much more surprising was that at Camp Half-blood there weren’t demigods of 2 generations.

꧂ Wanted to help the 7 in their mission but ended up helping Reyna instead by taking her position momentarily.

꧂ Totally relieved once the war ended and Gaea was defeated.

꧂ Got along well with demigods from Camp Half-blood, I mean- who cares if they’re Greek??

꧂ She helped Jason with his projects before… ya know.

꧂ People at camp Jupiter thought that Millie was really cool. This girl not only was Roman and she had mastered fighting skills and formations, she also could control the sea

꧂ Found Percy annoying in the start, he was like an annoying little brother (which he technically was) but they eventually developed the best sister-brother bond.

꧂ They have matching bracelets and no one can tell me anything else. They are like those cheap strings bracelets that you buy on the beach, and they are just perfect.

꧂ It took her some times to keep up with modern times, but she eventually managed to get everything (She totally loved that girls could wear trousers)

——————————————————————————-

a/n pt 2: Hope this was what you were looking for! Thanks for requesting lovely 🧡

[freesia-writes]

*SLAMS DOWN PROMPT LIST * 15 with Wrecker. 15 WITH WRECKER!!! PLEASE *falls down on my knees* PLEASE!!

Also hi there^^ super awesome and congratulating for this follower milestone. You're pretty cool and I'm looking towards seing your future stuff. Much love and have a lovely day:)

I am HERE for this kind of energy. And wrote this after a wee bit o’the old THC, so I hope it matches the energy, because I was cracking up writing it.. ;) This was SO FUN, because I think Wrecker and I relate on this point, LOL. And it’s just the perfect line for him. Alrighty, here goes!

Wrecker x GN!Reader - “I'm awful at pillow talk… so uhh… can I get you some food?"

Word Count: 700ish (I’m sorry, you can return it for a replacement within 30 days) 

Content: Minors prolly DNI; pretty clear reference to just-finished sex, sensual eating, kissin… 

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

You collapsed onto Wrecker’s chest, bodies slick with sweat from some supreme lovemaking, and slowly rolled off to the side as you both got rearranged. Flopping onto your back and pushing your hair out of your face, you let out a low whistle, earning a throaty chuckle from the massively beaming man next to you. How you got here, you couldn’t even fathom, but the path leading to your tryst had been full of joy, laughter, delight, and connection. Yet it still held that sheepishness of novelty, the precarious early stages where everything was yet to be discovered, and was slowly revealed as intimacy grew. 

ANYWAY.

You basked in the glow of your evening together, smirking after a quick glance at the chrono revealed it was still fairly early. You’d only made it through the first part of your date -- dinner but no dessert -- before you found yourselves eagerly and delightedly tearing off each other’s clothes, barely making it back to your apartment before diving into the tumultuous ocean of desire you’d built up toward each other. And now, reveling in the descent, you watched him sit up onto an elbow, leaning to face you. He regarded you for a moment, with those large puppy dog eyes that made your knees weak, and studied your face with the seeming intent of saying something profound. You lost yourself in his gaze, so taken in by the softness within such an intimidating specimen, and wondered what could be so meaningful for him to put such thought into. 

“I'm awful at pillow talk… so uhh… can I get you some food?"

You laughed, simultaneously surprised and yet not at all surprised, as if there were nothing else in the world he could have replied with that would be as perfect as that. He grinned, clearly pleased with himself, and gave your cheek a gentle pinch, rolling to get out of bed. “I knew you had good taste!” he called as he snapped the waistband of his boxers and trundled for the kitchen. 

Wrecker’s return, after a bit of banging and beeping in the kitchen (not that kind, you ol devil you), heralded the fruits of his labor: two large plates heaping with the most luscious warm cinnamon roll you’d ever laid eyes on. He flopped onto the bed next to you, keeping the plates perfectly stable, and nestled up against you, sitting tall against the headrest. One plate was passed into your hands, and you stared down at the gooey piles of cream cheese frosting nestled amongst the folds of warm, fluffy cinnamon bread. The smell was intoxicating, making your mouth water, and you watched with surprise as Wrecker dove into his with a bare hand, going right for the center. Talk about a zest for life. He scooped it out with a few fingers (hot), and you watched him slowly raise it to your mouth, which you weren’t expecting. With a boyish face of gleeful anticipation, he watched you bite it out of his hand. You made sure to drag your lips along a few fingers, further brightening his expression, and felt like this day could absolutely not get any better. 

The two of you slowly fed each other cinnamon rolls, breaking off chunks to scoop up some icing and gently place in each other’s mouths. It felt wildly intimate, yet also as comfortable, fun, and natural as could be. The delicious bites were punctuated with quiet conversation, and when your plates were both cleared, Wrecker pushed them off to the side, one going too far and falling to the ground with a loud clatter. He grinned and shrugged, rolling back to take you in his arms and press a sweet kiss against your lips that tasted of frosting. He was so warm and musky, so broad and soft, you wanted to drown yourself in your senses and never forget the feeling of the moment. Nestling your face against his chest, which radiated heat and serenaded you with his steady heartbeat, you took a deep breath, letting it out in a sigh of deep contentment.

Would you like more information on becoming a certified Wrecker Girlie (tm)? Look no further than this convenient PSA by @wreckers-wife

[kanohirren]

How to Make Grian in DnD

Welcome to my first guide on making Life SMP members into DnD 5e characters!

I’ll go level by level and explain the reasoning behind my decisions and how I think it fits them in character. This build assumes starting at level 8 but includes notes on differences if you start at level 1 and progress to 8. Keep in mind that this isn’t intended as a guide on how to play dnd, just how to build this character. I also don't explain every feature but I may briefly touch on it and explain my reasoning for taking it.

Class: Fighter 6 (Eldritch Knight)/Cleric 2 (War Domain)

Race: Aarakocra* (can be humanised)

Base Ability Scores: (uses Tasha's Cauldron of Everything rule that allows for reallocating racial stat bonuses)

Str 10 (+0)

Dex 15 (+2) +2 from race = 17 (+3)

Con 13 (+1) +1 from race = 14 (+2)

Int 10 (+0)

Wis 13 (+1)

Cha 12 (+1)

Background: Courtier

Grian is a well-rounded character with no clear weaknesses but a couple of fields he excels at. He’s good at almost all aspects of the game whether it be combat, social interactions or even just survival. I gave him the Fighter/Cleric multiclass because I felt like it would be an interesting build and made him a dexterity-based fighter because Aarakocra cant fly with any armour other than light armour.

Before moving on to classes, let’s go over the race and background features.

Aarakocra race*:

Flight**: Flying speed equal to walk speed, only works with light or no armour.

Talons: Your unarmed attacks do more damage. Not super good because this is a dex build.

Wind Caller: At lvl 3 you can cast Gust of Wind. A cool spell, find some fun situations to use it in.

*The Aarakocra version used here is the nerfed version from “Mordekainnen Presents: Monsters of the Multiverse”.

**If having a flying speed is a problem, a compromise I usually default to is only letting flying speed let you move vertically during your turn, but you cannot end your turn in mid-air or you fall.

Courtier background:

Skill Proficiencies: Insight, Persuasion

Court Functionary: You are good at hearing things about important people, as you are one of them. Perfect for if you want to start wars.

At 1st lvl, we start with a level in Fighter. This grants us:

Proficiency in heavy, medium, and light armour, shields

Proficiency in simple and martial weapons

Proficiency in Strength and Constitution saving throws.

Skill Proficiencies: Take Survival and Athletics.

Fighting Style: Choose Duelling if you want to use a sword mostly. Archery is fine too if you want to use a bow.

Second Wind: Bonus action healing. Nice to have.

As a dex build, Grian will be using light armour and finesse or ranged weapons mostly. Ideal weapon would be a rapier and a longbow. The Courtier background involves knowing what’s happening amongst a group of interest, much like how Grian is involved with many major Minecrafters

At 2nd lvl, we take a second level in Fighter, which grants us:

Action Surge: Have a second action in one round once per short rest. Good early for having another attack and scales very well.

At 3rd lvl, we take a third level in Fighter, which grants us:

Subclass: Eldritch Knight

Eldritch Knight grants:

Weapon Bond: Find a shiny weapon? It’s yours now and no one else can have it!

Two Cantrips: Mage Hand (lots of trickery you can do with this) and Blade Ward (in case taking damage is inevitable)

Three 1st lvl spells: Magic Missile (just in case), Shield (good defensive spell) and Fog Cloud (cause lots of chaos and confusion)

As Grian’s Intelligence stat hasn’t been prioritised, I chose spells that don’t involve any rolls so that it’s not really a problem. He’ll get more chaotic use out of the cleric spells that we get later.

At 4th lvl, we take a fourth level in Fighter, which grants us:

Ability Score Improvement OR Feat. Take the Ability Score Improvement and +1 your Dex up to 18 (+4) and your Wisdom up to 14 (+2).

One more spell: Take Tenser’s Floating disk (Take people’s doors and stack them on the disk and then run away without being weighed down)

The dex is always important, improves your stealth so you’re less likely to be caught placing tnt and the wisdom helps your perception but more importantly helps after becoming a cleric.

At 5th lvl, we take a fifth level in Fighter, which grants us:

Extra Attack: More damage output!

With this fifth level in Fighter, we hit the important damage power spike. Now we can get to the more chaotic side of Grian.

At 6th lvl, we multiclass into Cleric, which grants us:

Three Cantrips: Take Guidance (good spell), Thaumaturgy (fun spell) and Spare the Dying (mainly for Scar)

1st lvl spells: As a prepared caster, Clerics can swap out their spells after a long rest. My suggested default spells are: Bless, Sanctuary and Ceremony (get that marriage buff).

Subclass: War Domain

War Domain grants:

Extra Prepared Spells: Divine Favor and Shield of Faith

Bonus Proficiencies: Martial Weapons and Heavy Armour. Both redundant because we started Fighter.

War Priest: Another attack as a bonus action with number of uses scaling with Wisdom. Goes well with being a fighter.

Ready to start a war? Cleric and this subclass especially makes Grian extra ready to start a war and fight his way to victory. As a Cleric, Grian of course worships the mighty Boatem Pole!

At 7th lvl, we take a second level in Cleric, which grants us:

Channel Divinity: Turn Undead. Good for all the zombies and skeletons that keep spawning around you.

Channel Divinity: Guided Strike. Give yourself a +10 to an attack roll once per long rest. Really good if you just desperately need to land a hit.

One more prepared spell: Command (Need a war started? Just point at a button and tell someone else to “Press”!)

At 8th lvl, we take a sixth level in Fighter, which grants us:

Ability Score Improvement OR Feat: Take the ASI to bring your dex from 18 (+4) to 20 (+5)

Maxed out dex is good. Alternatively, you could bump your wisdom up to 16 instead if you want stronger spells.

Summary:

Final stats:

Str 10 (+0)

Dex 20 (+5)

Con 14 (+2)

Int 10 (+0)

Wis 14 (+2)

Cha 12 (+1)

Two Attacks as an action, a third as a bonus action (limited uses)

Rapier (if Duelling was chosen): +5 (dex) +3 (prof. bonus) = +8 to hit. 1d8 + 5 (dex) + 2 (duelling) piercing dmg.

Longbow (if Archery was chosen): +5 (dex) +3 (prof. bonus) +2 (archery) = +10 to hit. 1d8 + 5 piercing.

And that’s it for Grian! I hope this build captures the chaotic nature of Grian while also maintaining his prowess a just about everything. If you have any feedback or questions, I’d love to read them! ^^

Next will be Scar!

[umlewis]

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lewis hamilton is interviewed ahead of the miami grand prix [part 2] - may 3, 2023 (transcription under the cut)

Interviewer: "Yeah, sounds cool. Back to what you were saying earlier about getting in an F1 car; there's nothing quite like it. You have done some pretty cool things. You've been in a fighter chair. Has anything ever come close to that feeling of being in a car? Can anything come close to it?" Lewis: "I'm sure there will be... I think you can always... It's all about mindset, right? I mean, when I'm skydiving, you can get close to the excitement run that you get, but, for me, because it's what I do, racing a car, there's something I'm able to do in the car that I've not been able to tap in, in anything else. I'm not as good at anything else as I am at the connection I have with the wheels and the engine, and so no, I don't think there's anything that matches that. But all these other little things I do fill in the gaps. We're not racing every day, right, so in the winter break, when I'm surfing, yeah, it's perfect. It's just enough. It's not too hardcore for me, unless I get on the crazy big waves. Skydiving... Yeah. I like trying everything." Interviewer: "This is a stupid question, but can you explain why you're so good in a car? You've tried all these other things. You're good at it, but you're not exceptional at it. You're not, like, the number one in the world. Can you explain what it is about you and four wheels, steering wheel, two pedals, that just clicks so well?" Lewis: "It's hard for, I think, anybody that's good at something to explain... There's the innate ability, naturally, that I was definitely born with the ability. I think it's how you perceive things, and your depth perception. It's how your mind's able to compute... Like, I'm not great in a classroom. I can't sit in a meeting and come up with... I'm not great at maths. I can't solve the greatest equations. I can't draw amazing art. But when I'm in the car, that's like my paintbrush, and it just flows out of me, I think. It's always meant to be. That's what I was supposed to do. And there's something, when you're at the edge, when you're close to a hundred percent, just over a hundred percent capacity within the car, the way the brain's function... Everything quiets down and you're in a realm that... I mean, you feel like you're on your own in that realm, but it feels like it transcends you to some other part of the universe for a second, you know? It's a really, really strange experience, but pretty powerful." Interviewer: "Sounds a little bit like what Ayrton Senna used to say about that out-of-body experience: all of a sudden, a lap around Monaco, he's seeing it from almost a different perspective than..." Lewis: "Yeah, well, a quote that I really love is that we're not humans having a spiritual experience. We're spirits having a human experience. And so yeah, just thinking how big the universe is and just... We're all shining stars and I think, for me, I'm just trying to be the best I can be with what I have. This is what I was meant to do, this is what I was born to do, and it won't last forever. There's gonna be lots of young, up-and-coming bright stars. I love seeing these kids here 'cause I'm so excited about their future, about what they could do. And I love that [unintelligible] is giving them an opportunity to get into STEM, which they may have not known that that was important for them, and what that could lead to in 15, 20 years' time, what they'll next be doing. They'll be the next leaders, hopefully, whether it's government, game changers. Maybe they'll be working at an event like this, which is even more diverse, and encouraging an even bigger audience of young kids to have a better education." Interviewer: "Yeah, I hope so. One last question on Miami: I remember, I think it was around 2017, first race of the season, Liberty had just taken over the sport, and you were asked where would you like to race anywhere in the world. You said Miami, Daniel Ricciardo said Las Vegas, and here we are. How cool is that?" Lewis: "Yeah. I mean, I've been shouting about having a race in Miami, and the next one I've been talking about is South Africa, and that's what I'm pushing for in the background, so hpoefully you'll see that come to light soon, as well. And that's a real big dream for me. To have raced in South Africa, and in Africa, during my career is a huge, huge dream for me. So I know we have a big following out there-or I have a big following out there-and I know a lot of people are into Formula 1 out there, so... And that would be amazing, because when we go... The work we're doing here with IWC and [unintelligible] dreams, just imagine what we could be doing when we're in South Africa, and the work that needs to be done there, and also just highlighting just how beautiful that continent is, so I'll be pushing for that." Interviewer: "Is that something you're talking with Stefano and trying to help out?" Lewis: "I'm pushing as hard as I can in the background. I've gone high up to make sure we have that race happen." Interviewer: "I quite hope it happens. Alright, well, thank you very much, Lewis. Good talk." Lewis: "Thank you." Interviewer: "Cheers." Lewis: "Cheers."